Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin Davidson

253,319 views ・ 2017-07-11

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00:12
Imagine that when you walked in here this evening,
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you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same:
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ageless, raceless,
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generically good-looking.
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That person sitting right next to you
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might have the most idiosyncratic inner life,
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but you don't have a clue
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because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time.
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That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities,
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only it applies to buildings, not people.
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Cities are full of roughness and shadow,
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texture and color.
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You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character
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in apartment buildings in Riga
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and Yemen,
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social housing in Vienna,
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Hopi villages in Arizona,
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brownstones in New York,
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wooden houses in San Francisco.
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These aren't palaces or cathedrals.
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These are just ordinary residences
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expressing the ordinary splendor of cities.
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And the reason they're like that is that the need for shelter
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is so bound up with the human desire for beauty.
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Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city.
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Right? Streets that you can read
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by running your fingers over brick and stone.
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But that's getting harder to do,
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because cities are becoming smooth.
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New downtowns sprout towers
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that are almost always made of concrete and steel
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and covered in glass.
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You can look at skylines all over the world --
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Houston,
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Guangzhou,
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Frankfurt --
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and you see the same army of high-gloss robots
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marching over the horizon.
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Now, just think of everything we lose
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when architects stop using the full range of available materials.
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When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone
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and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick
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and wattle and plaster,
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we simplify architecture
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and we impoverish cities.
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It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines
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down to airline food.
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(Laughter)
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Chicken or pasta?
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But worse still,
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assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow
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suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living.
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Right? Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants,
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but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us,
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those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings.
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And we expect to do so for free.
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Shiny towers are an invasive species
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and they are choking our cities and killing off public space.
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We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup,
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a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete.
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But just because a facade is superficial
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doesn't mean it's not also deep.
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Let me give you an example
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of how a city's surfaces affect the way we live in it.
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When I visited Salamanca in Spain,
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I gravitated to the Plaza Mayor
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at all hours of the day.
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Early in the morning, sunlight rakes the facades,
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sharpening shadows,
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and at night, lamplight segments the buildings
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into hundreds of distinct areas,
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balconies and windows and arcades,
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each one a separate pocket of visual activity.
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That detail and depth, that glamour
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gives the plaza a theatrical quality.
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It becomes a stage where the generations can meet.
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You have teenagers sprawling on the pavers,
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seniors monopolizing the benches,
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and real life starts to look like an opera set.
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The curtain goes up on Salamanca.
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So just because I'm talking about the exteriors of buildings,
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not form, not function, not structure,
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even so those surfaces give texture to our lives,
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because buildings create the spaces around them,
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and those spaces can draw people in
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or push them away.
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And the difference often has to do with the quality of those exteriors.
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So one contemporary equivalent of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca
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is the Place de la DΓ©fense in Paris,
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a windswept, glass-walled open space
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that office workers hurry through
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on the way from the metro to their cubicles
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but otherwise spend as little time in as possible.
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In the early 1980s, the architect Philip Johnson
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tried to recreate a gracious European plaza in Pittsburgh.
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This is PPG Place,
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a half acre of open space encircled by commercial buildings
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made of mirrored glass.
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And he ornamented those buildings with metal trim and bays
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and Gothic turrets
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which really pop on the skyline.
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But at ground level,
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the plaza feels like a black glass cage.
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I mean, sure, in summertime
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kids are running back and forth through the fountain
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and there's ice-skating in the winter,
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but it lacks the informality of a leisurely hangout.
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It's just not the sort of place you really want to just hang out and chat.
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Public spaces thrive or fail for many different reasons.
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Architecture is only one,
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but it's an important one.
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Some recent plazas
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like Federation Square in Melbourne
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or Superkilen in Copenhagen
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succeed because they combine old and new,
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rough and smooth,
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neutral and bright colors,
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and because they don't rely excessively on glass.
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Now, I'm not against glass.
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It's an ancient and versatile material.
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It's easy to manufacture and transport
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and install and replace
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and clean.
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It comes in everything from enormous, ultraclear sheets
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to translucent bricks.
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New coatings make it change mood
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in the shifting light.
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In expensive cities like New York, it has the magical power
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of being able to multiply real estate values by allowing views,
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which is really the only commodity that developers have to offer
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to justify those surreal prices.
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In the middle of the 19th century,
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with the construction of the Crystal Palace in London,
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glass leapt to the top of the list of quintessentially modern substances.
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By the mid-20th century,
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it had come to dominate the downtowns of some American cities,
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largely through some really spectacular office buildings
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like Lever House in midtown Manhattan, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
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Eventually, the technology advanced to the point
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where architects could design structures so transparent
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they practically disappear.
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And along the way,
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glass became the default material of the high-rise city,
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and there's a very powerful reason for that.
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Because as the world's populations converge on cities,
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the least fortunate pack into jerry-built shantytowns.
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But hundreds of millions of people need apartments and places to work
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in ever-larger buildings,
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so it makes economic sense to put up towers
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and wrap them in cheap and practical curtain walls.
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But glass has a limited ability
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to be expressive.
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This is a section of wall framing a plaza
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in the pre-Hispanic city of Mitla, in southern Mexico.
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Those 2,000-year-old carvings
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make it clear that this was a place of high ritual significance.
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Today we look at those and we can see a historical and textural continuity
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between those carvings, the mountains all around
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and that church which is built on top of the ruins
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using stone plundered from the site.
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In nearby Oaxaca, even ordinary plaster buildings
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become canvasses for bright colors, political murals
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and sophisticated graphic arts.
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It's an intricate, communicative language
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that an epidemic of glass would simply wipe out.
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The good news is that architects and developers
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have begun to rediscover the joys of texture
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without backing away from modernity.
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Some find innovative uses for old materials like brick
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and terra-cotta.
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Others invent new products like the molded panels that SnΓΈhetta used
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to give the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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that crinkly, sculptural quality.
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The architect Stefano Boeri even created living facades.
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This is his Vertical Forest, a pair of apartment towers in Milan,
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whose most visible feature is greenery.
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And Boeri is designing a version of this for Nanjing in China.
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And imagine if green facades were as ubiquitous as glass ones
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how much cleaner the air in Chinese cities would become.
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But the truth is that these are mostly one-offs,
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boutique projects,
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not easily reproduced at a global scale.
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And that is the point.
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When you use materials that have a local significance,
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you prevent cities from all looking the same.
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Copper has a long history in New York --
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the Statue of Liberty,
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the crown of the Woolworth Building --
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but it fell out of fashion for a long time
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until SHoP Architects used it to cover the American Copper Building,
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a pair of twisting towers on the East River.
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It's not even finished
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and you can see the way sunset lights up that metallic facade,
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which will weather to green as it ages.
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Buildings can be like people.
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Their faces broadcast their experience.
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And that's an important point,
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because when glass ages,
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you just replace it,
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and the building looks pretty much the same way it did before
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until eventually it's demolished.
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Almost all other materials have the ability
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to absorb infusions of history and memory,
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and project it into the present.
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The firm Ennead
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clad the Utah Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City in copper and zinc,
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ores that have been mined in the area for 150 years
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and that also camouflage the building against the ochre hills
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so that you have a natural history museum
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that reflects the region's natural history.
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And when the Chinese Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu
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was building a history museum in Ningbo,
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he didn't just create a wrapper for the past,
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he built memory right into the walls
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by using brick and stones and shingles
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salvaged from villages that had been demolished.
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Now, architects can use glass
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in equally lyrical and inventive ways.
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Here in New York, two buildings,
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one by Jean Nouvel and this one by Frank Gehry
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face off across West 19th Street,
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and the play of reflections that they toss back and forth
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is like a symphony in light.
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But when a city defaults to glass
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as it grows,
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it becomes a hall of mirrors,
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disquieting and cold.
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After all, cities are places of concentrated variety
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where the world's cultures and languages and lifestyles
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come together and mingle.
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So rather than encase all that variety
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and diversity in buildings of crushing sameness,
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we should have an architecture that honors the full range of the urban experience.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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