Jane Jacobs was not, as New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff makes her out to be in the April 30 edition of his paper, an eccentric elderly aunt whose once revolutionary take on the nature of things had not really stood the test of time and thus need no longer be humored in the wake of her death a few days earlier.
Rather, Jacobs was precisely what Ouroussoff and his immediate predecessor at the Times, Herbert Muschamp, is not: a great architecture critic.
Ouroussoff and Muschamp are certainly fine writers when it comes to architectural subjects. Each has a discerning eye, and a working knowledge of the relevant personalities and artistic developments. But when Jacobs published her revolutionary book The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, and then stopped Robert Moses from piercing historic and vibrant lower Manhattan with an east-west highway a few years later, she was doing what great architecture critics do: speaking truth to power.
According to Ouroussoff, Jacob’s death at age 89 is sad but “may also give us permission to move on, to let go of the obsessive belief that Ms. Jacobs held the answer to every evil that faces the contemporary city.”
Here is how the Times critic goes on to assess Jane Jacobs, in terms that echo the current conventional wisdom (to employ a phrase coined by J.K. Galbraith, who also died this past week) in the architectural establishment about her work:
“An urban flâneur of the first order, she reminded us that cities could only be fully understood with our eyes, feet and ears — not from the distant abstraction of architectural drawings.
“But the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation's dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification.”
It isn’t fair to blame Jane Jacobs for the process by which those of the Robert Moses stratum co-opted her insights and started turning historic neighborhoods into theme parks instead of bulldozing them.
Ourousoff justifiably hates the New Urbanists and other purveyors of quaintification, rightly pointing out that the recent disaster in New Orleans lays bare the absurdity of sweeping urban problems under a historicist rug. “The answer to such superficiality,” according to the Times critic, “is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure — roads, parks, bridges — that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.”
Wrong!
The duality is false. Jacobs was not on quest to bring down those who would create infrastructure – a process that sometimes requires the energetic assertion of eminent domain. She was campaigning against authoritarianism, greed and expediency. Her post Death and Life career, including exile in Toronto as the result of not wanting her sons to die in Vietnam, makes this clear.
The kindred spirits of Robert Moses are not the people who are struggling mightily these days to restore our dessicated public sphere. His kindred spirits were contemporaries like Josef Stalin. A case in point comes up in a recent article by Peter Finn in the Washington Post.
Finn writes about efforts in Moscow to restore a crumbling, 1930s apartment building that stands not far from the U.S. embassy in the Russian capital. It is the work of Moisei Ginzburg, an important architect from the poignantly brief Constructivist era in Soviet architecture.
Constructivism was an architecture of idealism, created by designers who really believed that the Russian revolution was a great leap of progress. The building is known as the Narkomfin Dom Kommuna – communal housing for Finance Ministry employees.
According to Finn, the Narkomfin “had a major influence on the direction of modernist and constructivist architecture. . . . Sitting on rows of columns, the Narkomfin’s 52 apartments had built-in furniture . . . . A skywalk connected the main block to an adjacent community house with a large glass frontage. Inside were a communal library, kindergarten, fitness center, kitchen and dining room.
“Besides the annex, the shared facilities included a second-floor open terrace and a roof garden with a solarium. The corridors were built especially wide to encourage social discourse as if on a city street. And outside, Ginzburg imagined meandering paths among the trees and greenery.”
Unfortunately, Finn writes, soon after Ginzburg’s great achievement constructivist architecture “feel out of favor with the rise of Stalin.” What an understatement. In reality, Stalin banished the movement and its purveyors in one fell swoop, declaring modernism to be decadent and ordering all new buildings to be created in the bombastic idiom we now know as Stalinesque Gothic.
That style, of course, has much in common with what Albert Speer created for Nazi Germany. And its direct counterpart in the U.S. is the kind of know-it-all, bulldozer-happy, self-glorifying superhighway-building view of urbanism foisted on New York City by Stalin’s contemporary Robert Moses.
At the superficial level, one could easily conclude that Ginzberg’s architecture was an effort at the kind of social engineering that Jane Jacobs would have hated. But in reality they are kindred spirits; Ginzberg was seeking to create precisely what Jacobs was struggling to preserve: places for human habitation that dignify, empower and delight. Conversely, when Stalin obliterated the whole Constructivist movement by fiat, he might as well have been Robert Moses blasting an obscene swath through the heart of the Bronx to create the Cross-Bronx Expressway.
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