Architecture and Democracy
by Donald McKay
September 21, 2022
The question of architecture and democracy at this moment seems to both recognize the current threat to American democracy and to suggest that architecture can somehow address this threat. A professor was fond of telling our class that architecture is a positive act because it is concerned with creation. But even in my most Howard Roarkian moods, I cannot see how architecture can affect the substantial political challenges we face. History holds little to suggest that architects have the power some assume to affect social or political change—other forces ultimately determine architecture’s relation to politics and social change.
Through centuries of development, Classicism acquired a brand of universal authority that was leveraged for good and bad. New nations including the U.S. adopted Classicism for civic architecture to appropriate a sense of legitimacy they aspired to but had yet to earn. In the U.S. this stylistic appropriation resulted in some of our most revered monuments. It also resulted in many poor suburban Village Halls that lack the integrity of the classical architecture they mimic.
Albert Speer and Nazi Germany appropriated Classicism for similar reasons and in doing so turned a historically positive view of Classicism on its head. For many architects of the generation that followed, Classicism was permanently tarnished by its association with Naziism and was to be avoided at all costs. Some, recognizing that meaning in architecture risked unintended, possibly malicious, appropriation never contemplated by those who create it, sought to create “objective” architecture immune from sentiment and emotion, a difficult if not impossible ambition given architecture’s public nature.
Architecture became a tool that helped establish national identities for young Nordic countries that sought to be taken seriously by their established continental neighbors. Civic buildings in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen eschewed orthodox classicism in favor of new architectural languages born of a mix of local building traditions and progressive ideals. At the time, these buildings were recognized as positive representations of an aspirational nationalism. A generation later, nationalism took on a more ominous tenor because of the rise of authoritarian regimes that leveraged nationalistic ideas to promote reactionary social and political agendas. As a result, some reconsidered early civic Nordic architecture as the naïve, romantic expressions of immature nations.
This did not mean that Nordic countries abandoned the idea that architecture should represent progressive social ideals. A respected Finnish architect and educator told me that his generation of architects was highly critical of Alvar Aalto because his work was too personally expressive to represent Finland’s egalitarian ideals. They were instead inspired by orthodox Modernism’s gridded structures and facades as a more favorable representation of egalitarianism until the concentration of such buildings in urban areas created soul-killing environments that caused the same architects to reconsider and embrace Aalto’s work as a more relevant representation of the humanistic ideals that Finns aspired to.
These examples illustrate how meaning assigned to architecture changes over time. This dynamic, this lack of control over the meaning of architecture can frustrate designers seeking to originate enduring meaning through their design. Orthodox Modernism made heroes of selected architects and seemed to show that it was possible. But failures in public housing design and urban planning called attention to the limitations of design for enacting social and political change. Ego in architecture dies a hard death and the late twentieth century saw the rise of “starchitecture” as a new form of universal design in which hiring Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, or another recognized starchitect promised financial success and fame for your organization or city. Like the way young nations once used the endowed authority of Classicism, the Beijing Olympics leveraged a similar authority that had accrued to starchitecture to reinforce a political narrative that saw its games as a coming out party for an emerging world power.
Perhaps starchitecture was the last gasp of an architect as celebrity mental orientation that has been with us since the first Modernist heroes were identified more than a century ago. Climate change has become the undeniable challenge of our time for architecture to address. It has changed the way that new architecture is measured as can be seen in the adoption of design awards criteria that prioritize sustainable design strategies. Addressing climate change may coincidentally realize the type of objective and universal architecture sought by earlier generations of architects for reasons entirely different from those that prompted past calls for it.
The increased importance of sustainable design metrics does not mean that more traditional architectural design appraisals have become irrelevant. Lost in the focus on sustainable design metrics is the value of simply designing good buildings that people like, buildings that we want to care for and preserve because of exemplary architectural qualities that transcend time and location to touch something universal in the human condition—there may be no better sustainable design strategy than creating such buildings and we will need all effective strategies to meet the historic challenge posed by climate change.
In my experience, the way to create meaningful architecture is to do so from a personal perspective, ala Aalto. It is risky. Songwriting offers an analogy. The best songs, the ones that endure, are those written from a personal, often deeply personal, perspective. This may seem counterintuitive, that songs written from a personal perspective would be less likely to resonate universally. But the opposite is true. Well-crafted songs written from a personal perspective touch something fundamental to the human condition, something universal, and that is what it makes them meaningful and enduring.
The risk in this approach is that it results in something sentimental that, by definition, cannot be universally meaningful. Music is filled with such examples and so is architecture. The difference between creating something sentimental and something enduringly meaningful is the craft—crating something meaningful requires effort and a commitment to deeper thinking that is rare. So, for every Alvar Aalto or John Prine there are many who cannot rise above sentimental either for lack of talent or effort.
Many who practice architecture will caution against such an approach and there is enough poor architecture to suggest we should consider this caution. But it is unfortunate if such caution inadvertently stifles the best of what we are capable of. Perhaps more than ever, it matters to create architecture that is not only sustainable in metric terms, but in the universal terms to which all art aspires.
The climate crisis, like most everything, has become politicized and so architecture has by association because the architectural profession has prioritized addressing climate change. Our current national divide places climate change on the same side as the threat to our democracy—if you believe in the climate change threat, you are likely to believe our democracy is under threat. A correspondence between architecture and politics may be as real now as it has ever been. If we are honest about the capacity for architecture to address social and political change, then addressing climate change meaningfully may be the best way for architecture to support the ideals of democracy.
As our profession continues to address climate change, I hope that we will prioritize the substantial value of creating architecture that resonates and attracts preservation. And that we will overcome our caution about letting emotion creep into the design process because that emotion is often what shines through to create our most enduringly meaningful work.