The Failed Project of Civilization

Contributed by Patrick Webb
of Real Finishes

This essay is really addressing ethical questions pertaining to the built environment, that's to say how society might organize itself architecturally: How ought we to live? What models help us best to flourish as human beings?

I observe that for many that question has been put to rest. The city is the best model for human flourishing and all energies should be directed to refining it. I don't take the aforementioned position as a given and contend that there may very well be value in revisiting the few basic structures of societal self organization, some ancient, others more recent. Brace yourself for the anecdotes, here they come!

The Ascetic - either the hermit or perhaps the solitary frontiersman who lives in near isolation, living off the land so to speak. The monastery creates a brotherhood of ascetics who though sharing certain tasks in common, reserve much time for isolation and quiet contemplation.

A pilgrimage to the Sea of Galilee during my Aliyah

Alright, where to begin? Well, not at the beginning but in my twenties. For 7 years I took a vow of poverty and lived as an ascetic, my daily concerns being studies of linguistics, ethics and aesthetics. Particularly the latter being my personal interest, I could be rightly called an aesthetic ascetic as it were. As a young man I was relieved of the pressures of raising a family, acquiring debt, managing property, climbing a corporate ladder, building a business or otherwise establishing my turf in a commercial enterprise. Yes, there were rules and obligations; however, my experience of the monastic was that this conformist aspect of the life was light, just enough for cohesion of the brethren. I've never since had as much time to simply think and personally develop. As I'm always pressed to answer: how did you not have sex for 7 years? Don't know, couldn't do it now. Likewise reintegrating into the so-called "real" world of civilization was a bitch.

The Tribe - Nomadic by nature not 'cause they hate cha. Hunter gatherers and foragers are the oldest form of society and continue to persist, though to an ever shrinking degree, to the present day.

Civilization hates the tribe, plain and simple. As is well recorded, Europeans flooded the planet from the 15th thru 18th centuries, conducting an unrelenting pogrom of improvement. They encountered pre-existing cultures along the way: Islam, Incas, Chinese, Indian, etc. They didn't care for them much with their pagan and primitive ways but at least they could respect them at some level as proto-civilized, they had cities and rules of law after all. However, when they reached Africa, North America and Australia were they in for a shock: bloody tribes! These people lived and died leaving virtually no mark on the land. The human being living as an animal, how unbecoming. For the enlightened adherents of Cogito Ergo Sum, this just did not compute.

I was born in Manhattan, the heart of arguably the world's first megaregion stretching from Boston down to Washington DC. Nevertheless, I spent my summers at my family's property in Jamaica, W.I. Millbank was a little place deep in the tropical rain forest at the end of the road leading up from Kingston into the Blue Mountains. No phone, no electricity, no plumbing, no problem man. It was a village but retaining many characteristics of tribal life. One bathed in the river, cast nets for fish, caught rock shrimps too, foraged for produce and game in the bush as well as for medicinal leaves and roots. The local folk would go off into the jungle for days on end. Little use for money. No law, no codes and consequently no criminals. Your only responsibilities were to one another, simple and free. That way of life is over, like a fading dream. The 4G service there is better than Charleston. Millbank has been transformed into a distant, impoverished outpost of a civilization upon which its denizens now passively depend.

The Village - A sedentary development of the tribe. Familial groups who stay put by establishing agricultural and husbandry practices.

I recently returned from a traditional plasterer's gathering in the village of Llangors, Wales. Flying over the Welsh countryside en route to landing in Cardiff one can't help but notice the lovely plots of land set aside for cultivation and grazing, interspersed with forest as well as small villages connected by country lanes. Not at all unlike a neural network, you get the palpable feeling the fabric of this society is quite literally sentient and very much a thriving living organism.

Llangorse Lake

Hundisburg, Saxony-Anhalt

Similarly, I had the experience last summer of working in Hundisburg, literally "village of the hound", in the middle of nowhere Germany. Hundisburg was situated in a similar pattern of concentrated village development with adjoining agricultural lands and forest that had slowly accreted over millennia. As these villages would grow to a state of maturity, they would divide like a cell and form a new largely self sufficient familial group at a distance away no more than a two hour walk. And so around Hundisburg you have in a radial fan: Ackendorf, Rottmersleben, Nordgermersleben, Bebertal and Süplingen each with its own distinctive, if related character, culture and history. Modernity has pressed upon them all, imposing for good or ill the legal and transportation infrastructure of contemporary life. Nevertheless, I admired the persistence of the locals to live off the land, eat from their gardens and with the seasons, continue to make their own building materials then build according to their traditions, refuse credit cards and avoid even cash when possible in lieu of barter. For the kids, the next generation being English speakers as beneficiaries of a standardized education courtesy of the E.U., these are just nostalgic fetishes of their cute but backwards parents. They're all European now.

The City - Something altogether different from the village. The city is characterized by strict hierarchies, rules of law, property rights and division of labors. Most towns share these characteristics and can be classified as small cities.

The city is a rather recent phenomenon among human society, perhaps dating back at the most some eight to nine thousand years. For sure villages go back much further. However, as I've been enlightened by a colleague who is writing a book on city planning, a city is most definitely not an overgrown village. Ancient cities weren't grown at all, rather they were manufactured whole cloth with religious, legal and economic infrastructure accompanied by a rationalized plan that is to say an urban layout.

Who made these first cities? The best I can tell, tyrants. The city is possible because of institutionalized systems of coercion, by force of violence enforcing a culture of subjugation, dependence and passivity maintained in successive generations by indoctrination of rule of law and respect for authority. In a word slavery.

Rebellious Slave, Michelangelo

Admittedly there have been these intractable problems from the inception of the city but the case is continually made that the city is a worthwhile project after all. Look how much culture it has brought humanity. You don't get opera in a tribe or Michelangelo in a village. The highest of highs, such pinnacles of human achievement. Inspiring values worth almost any sacrifice...but from whom?

Democratic Athens struggled with this question. By Athenian democracy I mean property owning males, about 10%. Women, foreigners and slaves, you know the folks who actually did all of the work didn't count because after all work is demeaning, subhuman. A group of the citizens felt democracy was all wrong, the enfranchisement of 10% was already too broad. The unlearned it gave voice to interfered with the realization of the ideal polis where the good, the just and the beautiful were recognized as three expressions of a single guiding universal ideal. The beautiful city is a just city. A just city is a good city. A good city is a beautiful city.

If you are committed to the city project as your model of human flourishing I guess it's perfection is perhaps a reasonable quest; you're committed after all and that's the nature of commitment. However, from someone like myself who makes no such commitment, it reeks of Romanticism. No not the 19th century aesthetic movement but hearkening all the way back to Classical Greece & Rome: Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. When has the West or anyone else for that matter ever produced anything even approaching a good, just and beautiful city? Athens? Rome? Paris? London? New York? It's a delusion, a fantasy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the ideals of the good, just and beautiful as among the guiding lights for human flourishing. I just observe that the city has never been the appropriate societal vehicle for such development, rather an impediment.

The Megaregion - The absorption of cities into huge swaths of development, forming blocs that are in fierce economic competition with one another in a single global market.

Cities were horrible places for most people. Running them required armies that acquired and policed slaves, serfs or similar peasant rabble; the only "volunteers" being the most vulnerable and desperate outside populations who, otherwise facing starvation, were compelled to prostitute themselves as "metics" or indentured servants. Unsurprisingly, the city was the minority form of societal organization. Up until as late as 1800 less than 3% of the world's population lived in cities, although it must be admitted that the outstretched influence of the city was already vigorously on the rise. Today, over half the world's population lives in cities, a startling 75% in the West. Who doesn't physically live in the city, lives according to the prescriptions of the larger megaregion.

Chicagoland

The megaregion is the metastasis of the city, spreading everywhere like cancer. It is militarily intolerant of any independent form of societal self organization. Totalizing, the megaregion reaches out into the most far flung reaches of desert, tundra  and jungle, to the most isolated tribe and village, "civilizing" them, excising conformity and dependence by rule of law.

When I was a child I had a vision for world unity. I thought how wonderful it will be when everyone has electricity, everyone has a car, everyone speaks English...everyone becomes the same because they're just like me! I think I can be forgiven for that; it was the thinking of an undeveloped, immature child. As humanity faces impending ecological crisis, the depletion economies and nihilistic behavior of the megaregions are stamping out remaining solutions embedded in thousands of years of accumulated tradition, culture and language, literally humanity's collective ability to think, in favor of an imposed universality. The fact that megaregions such as Toronto, Dubai and Peking are converging in the ways they look and function is not evidence of progress, it's evidence of tremendous loss resulting from infantile thinking.

So the questions arise: Is this state of affairs inevitable? Is this human evolution, progress toward some yet undetermined end? Who's to say for sure, maybe it is. I have my biases but I'm not insisting that the tribe and village are better than the city. Personally though, I don't like having all my "evolutionary" eggs placed in the megaregional basket without my consent. Just as we make room for national parks, protected species, there may be some wisdom in making a place for other forms of human society, uncivilized as they may be. Civilization can afford this and the price our species may have to pay for not doing so might be too much to bear.


Contributed by Patrick Webb
of Real Finishes

Book Review: Henry Howard – Louisiana's Architect

Contributed by Michael Rouchell 

founding member of the Louisiana Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art

The architecture scene in Antebellum Louisiana was dominated by three practitioners, James Gallier, James Dakin and one lesser known architect, Henry Howard. The Forward to the book by S. Frederick Starr describes why Henry Howard ended up being the lesser known architect. While Howard was a workaholic, working up to 18 and 20 hours per day, and working what is almost like two distinct architectural practices, one in the city and one in the country, Gallier was able to take time out to publish his autobiography and the book American Builder’s General Price Book and Estimator. Much has been written about Gallier, and James Dakin, who was from New York and apprenticed with Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, had his biography written by architectural historian Arthur Scully Jr.

This book is the long awaited biography of Henry Howard, and is intended to set the record straight on some works by Howard that, until now were thought to be by an unknown designer, or worse has been misattributed to Gallier. Jewell’s Crescent City Illustrated, which was published in 1873 to promote the city and its thriving businesses and industry during reconstruction, omitted Belle Grove Plantation among the list of works that Howard submitted. The original hand-written manuscript that Howard provided for Jewell’s Crescent City Illustrated was discovered by Victor McGee, the great-great-great grandson of Howard, in a large trunk in the attic of his mother’s family home of Seven Oaks Plantation in Westwego, along with other papers and files belonging to Howard. The manuscript was word-for-word what was published, except that Belle Grove was omitted from the list of Howard’s projects. Howard’s manuscript, in its hand-written form, is featured as an appendix in the book. 

Pontalba Plan by Gallier

For many years the Pontalba Buildings lining the up and down river sides of Jackson Square were attributed to James Gallier. The story goes that the Baroness Pontalba, after inheriting her father’s property and wealth, and after returning from France, hired Gallier to design and build the two large apartment buildings, but early into the project had a falling out with Gallier, hired another builder, and sought the advice of Howard. Howard was asked to provide a schematic design utilizing what foundations were already built, and rather than letting Howard take over, the baroness used Howard’s schematic design in combination with Gallier’s specification, but with Gallier’s name struck out. It is fair to say that the plan is by Gallier and the façade is by Howard. A drawing in the book of the proposed façade by Gallier looks nothing like what was built; the drawing does not indicate the three pediments that give the building it tripartition, and the Gallier’s dormers flanked with brackets were not built. Nonetheless, Gallier still attributed the work to himself, and so for a long time was thought to his.

Pontalba Buildings

The discovery of Howard’s files prompted Samuel Wilson to curate an exhibit of Howard’s work at the Tulane School of Architecture, and later in 1977, James Brantley would encouraged Victor McGee to write Howard’s biography, and then offer to collaborate with him on this book. Later, Brantley’s architectural photographer wife, Jan White Brantley would also contribute. Therefore, this book is the 4 decade-in-the-making work by the three, but would be finally completed after the death of McGee in 2007, and Jan White Brantley in 2008. 

This book chronicles the solo practice of Henry Howard, and later his brief partnership with Albert Diettel and Henry Thiberge. It begins with his upbringing in Ireland, apprenticeship with his father who is also an architect, his architectural influences located within Ireland at the time, his immigration to America via New York City where he became employed as a picture frame maker, his relocation to New Orleans where he became a carpenter, a stair builder, and eventually began his practice in architecture. The book also provides a detailed description of each project as they were commissioned and compares various projects to some of his earlier projects to demonstrate design characteristics and similarities. Some characteristics of Howard’s work included locating the stair within its own space off the main entrance hall, a later fascination with asymmetrical plan arrangements, and the location of the kitchen within the volume of the main house, which was thought to be a fire hazard at the time. The book also chronicles the prosperous times of the Antebellum Period, the interruption of the Civil War, and the struggle of resuming an architectural practice during Reconstruction. Changes in style occur during Howard’s practice, starting with the Greek revival and transitioning into the Italianate style.

Carrollton Courthouse circa 1895

The book also emphasizes Howard’s attention to detail, particularly with specification writing, and features a copy of one of the hand-written pages of Nottoway Plantation’s specifications in the Preface, as well as a comparative on Howard’s specification vs. others. 

Carrollton Courthouse

Color photographs by Robert and Jan White Brantley are featured for all extant works, along with numerous vintage photographs. In addition drawings, lithographs, watercolors, and other illustrations are provided, particularly where there are no known photographs for such works as Windsor Plantation, which was left in ruins by a fire in 1890. The vintage photographs are helpful because they show subtle changes to buildings that have been made over time. For example, a photograph of the Carrollton Courthouse taken in 1895 shows the original front entrance, and shows that all the windows once had pediments over them. Perhaps some preservation sensitive developer will purchase this currently unprotected landmark, replace the Victorian front door with something matching the original, and restore all the missing pediments.

Indian Camp Plantation 1917

A current photograph of Indian Camp Plantation shows that original wings are missing their parapets when compared to a vintage photo taken in 1917, and perhaps most significant is the John T. Moore house in the Lower Garden District now has two story front porch, whereas the vintage photograph shows a small cantilevered balcony at the second floor only. 

Indian Camp Plantation

Finally, at the back of the book is a catalog of all works arranged by the year they were built, and includes the owner’s name, the name of the architect (Howard by himself or with one of his later partners, Albert Diettel or Henry Thiberge), the builder if known, documentation of its attribution to Howard, and has a cross reference to the pages in the book where the building is more fully discussed. The catalog also has brief description of each project, thumbnail photographs if it is still extant, and drawings, watercolors, lithographs or other illustrations if found for those that no longer remain. Still, there are a number of Howard’s works that have not survived, and have no surviving photographs, drawings or documentation as to what they look like. 

This book is a must-have for anyone who is interested in Louisiana’s historic architecture and plantation houses in particular. It is also ideal for anyone who has an interest in classical architecture and its practical application in Louisiana’s setting. 

Contributed by Michael Rouchell 

founding member of the Louisiana Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art

“Living Structure" or Nature?

Contributed by Carroll William Westfall 

Professor Emeritus 

School of Architecture 

University of Notre Dame

“A traditional Batak house,

Sumatra, Indonesia. (Wikipedia),”

included in “Alexander’s Classical Tent,”

David Brusssat’s blog, “Architecture Here and There.”

I missed (or forgot) reading Christopher Alexander’s “An open letter to classicist and traditional architects” back on August 9, 2002, on the Tradarch list and reposted there by Bin Jiang on October 23rd: 

Our New Architecture And The Many World Cultures

Alexander is certainly right when he states, “If we hold too narrowly to the pure historical classicist forms, we run a very severe danger that this could be perceived as an elitist game, not relevant to seven eighths of the people on Earth, and possibly colonialist in its meaning if not its intent.”

And he reminds us, “The issue is, it seems to me, that we must renew our attention to forms that have life, and like nature, originate from life and joyfully celebrate life.”

But his writing here and elsewhere does not note that architecture serves human nature’s aspiration to enjoy justice. This fundamental principle that binds individuals into a society is missing from what he writes about the “living structure” that he posits as the basis of both nature and architecture. His position appeals to architects who accept the same modern empiricist approach to (small n) nature that neglected or disdains Nature that encompasses human nature. This limitation is revealed in Modernism’s embrace of technology as a means to achieve undefined ends and its exclusion of architecture as the means a people use to serve and express the highest end their society seeks, which is justice. Every society has a different means of serving its aspiration for justice, which we can understand as the fulfillment of the human nature of each person. Ours means has a career within the constantly revised tradition that began with Greeks, Hebrews, and Latins.

I have not found in Alexander’s work a recognition that every mature society has a best (i.e., classical) form for the justice that its civil or religious order (united or separate) seeks and that its classical (i.e., its best appropriate) architecture serves and expresses. Those whom he calls “classicist” architects honor style, not architecture. Imposing “classicist” architecture would be an act of cultural imperialism, and so would be (and have been) imposing Christianity, Latin, Greek, or English, or his “living structure,” which is agnostic relative to the society’s means of seeking justice. 

The aspiration of every individual to live nobly and well is more than congruence with “that living structure, and the deep nature of what it is,” that he argues “must be produced,” arguing that “that is what ought to guide us and lead us on.” I would rather think that more important in every society are the millennial traditions and revisions that have guided its quest for justice, that is, the adaptation, more successfully done in some societies and eras than in others, of the principles that produce the beauty in architecture that is the visible counterpart to justice.

Thomas Jefferson, Poplar Forest, Bedford County, Virginia (Photo C.W. Westfall)

  

Contributed by Carroll William Westfall 

Professor Emeritus 

School of Architecture 

University of Notre Dame