Modernism in the City

The title of From A Cause To A Style refers to the trajectory of modernist architecture over the first half of the 20th century, as a movement to improve society through design quickly devolved into a litany of stylistic preferences imposed all over the world without regard to context or inhabitants’ needs and tastes. When modern architecture encountered the “American City” of the book’s subtitle, its reformist and revolutionary intentions failed most visibly: Architecture and city planning principles applied dogmatically to public housing and urban renewal megaprojects did little to improve the lives of city dwellers. The failure of the modernist project, as urban sociologist Nathan Glazer explains in the introduction to this volume of collected essays, has paralyzed thinking about design and cities, and still bears examination. Unfortunately, and rather confusingly, this is not the central focus of the essays, which he published in various places and guises between 1992 and the present. 

What does a sociologist have to offer on the subject of architecture, Glazer asks, humili-rhetorically? The answer, in the past, has been: a great deal! Sociologists have taught us much about how the built environment relates to our way of life and state of mind, whether they have been of the honorary or self-appointed variety, like Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, or the properly credentialed Herbert Gans. In the 1960s, studying and living in Boston’s West End—a working-class neighborhood slated for renewal—and Levittown, Gans turned upside down much of the conventional and professional wisdom on housing choice and preference. We need such insights today. Unfortunately, Glazer engages not in sociology but in criticism—and a “populist” criticism at that—rooted not in any direct observation of popular tastes but in the doctrinally anti-elitist stance of someone whose principal urban experiences seem to take place on the campus of Harvard University (where he is Professor Emeritus).

The book’s first section, “The Public Face of Architecture,” primarily discusses monuments and memorials. Glazer prefers figuration, historical reference, and Olmstedian landscapes. He dislikes modernist works, defined by Glazer as anything abstract produced since the early 1900s that, rather than embellishing society, seeks to take a critical, or even productive, role. The values espoused in the book’s second section, which focuses on New York City, are similar—old urban fabric is good, high-rise living pose hazards for families, and we should all aspire to live in cities with “gum free station floors” in artistically designed subway stations. Glazer revisits decades old controversies, and he seems not to have spent time in the city in ages, wondering, for instance, of the possibility of gentrification of East Harlem.

The final section promises to take up the social role of the design and planning professions. After modernism, what can designers do? What do we need from the built environment, and how can they better (and more aesthetically) provide it? Glazer’s criticisms of the past provide no new avenues for the future.