Architectural Positions n the Public Sphere: The 2007 Delft Lecture Series [Dispatch]

Architectural Positions on the Public Sphere: The 2007 Delft Lecture Series Tom Avermaete and Hans Teerds Looking back on architectural theory over the past two decades, a narrative of profound loss appears with regard to the public sphere. As theoreticians lament what they consider to be a decline in its content and character, some have even been moved to use such dire phrases as “The End of Public Space” and “The Phantom Public Sphere.” 1 During this period, however, architectural practice has offered a much richer picture, as illustrated, for example, by work on the collective domain by Manuel de Sola-Morales in Barcelona, the Neotraditionalist public projects of Rob Krier, and the minimal public interventions in Euro- pean cities of Bernardo Secchi. In the end, one is left to ask: which view better captures the actual vicissitudes of the contemporary city? The rift between architectural theory and practice was a key subject of the 2007 Delft Lecture Series, which brought together scholars and practitioners such as de Sola-Morales, Leon Krier, Bernard Tschumi, Kengo Kuma, and Hans Kollhoff between February and May to debate the state of the public realm in cities across Europe. Its format paired a theoreti- cian with two practicing architects around the topics “Changing Defini- tions of Public and Private,” “Image Building and Public Space,” “The Temporalities of the Public Sphere,” “Monumentality and Public Repre- sentation,” “Alternating Programs and Practices,” and “The Perception of the Public.” 2 What emerged was the view that architects and urban designers need to take a more nuanced approach to the public realm—one that considers change in contemporary public life not as lamentable, but as offering a series of new challenges. The lecture series also emphasized how many recent public initiatives overlook the longue duree of public space—the traditional capacity of public build- ings to play a role in the collective memory of citizens, and of streets and squares to offer an enduring structure to the city. The Theoretical Debate For years one of the main expo- nents of the narrative of lost public space has been the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In his apocalyptic 1994 essay “The Generic City,” he claimed that cities were witnessing an “evacuation of the public realm.” He used this slogan to describe the pending transformation of the public sphere into a uniform space of traffic, implying that squares and streets, tra- ditional urban expressions of public life, would be increasingly reduced to infrastructural figures. If places still existed in the new urban world where public life could unfold, they would certainly not be streets. The street is dead.… Roads are only for cars. People (pedestrians) are led on rides (as in an amuse- ment park), on “promenades” that lift them off the ground, that subject them to a catalog of exag- gerated conditions—wind, heat, steepness, cold, interior, exterior, smells, fumes—in a sequence that is a grotesque caricature of life in the historic city. 3 In Koolhaas’s view, the traditional street, with its opportunity for chance encounters with the “other,” would be replaced by decks, bridges, tunnels and motorways reserved for specific urban audiences. If the flaneur still had a place in this future city, it would be in the highly planned and privately owned interior spaces of hotel lobbies and shopping malls. The underlying logic of these changes has been accurately described by Michael Sorkin, who has pointed to a strategy of “Disneyfication” that has increasingly been applied to cities. Whether in its master incarna- tion at the ersatz Main Street of Disneyland, in the phony historic festivity of a Rouse marketplace, or the gentrified architecture of the “Reborn” Lower East Side, this elaborate apparatus is at pains to assert its ties to the kind of city life it is in the process of obliterating. 4 Sorkin warned that even though the theme-park perspective was proving enormously effective in attracting tour- ists to historical cities, it might mean the end of diverse public life. After all, he wrote, “In the ‘public’ spaces of the theme park or the shopping mall, speech itself is restricted: there are no demonstrations in Disneyland. The effort to reclaim the city is the struggle for democracy itself.” 5 Sorkin appealed for “a return to a more authentic urbanity, a city based on physical proximity and free movement and a sense that the city is our best expres- sion of a desire for collectivity. As spatiality ebbs, so does intimacy.” 6 In the late 1990s the Belgian phi- losopher Lieven De Cauter further characterized developments in the public sphere with the expression “capsularization of life.” 7 He claimed that everyday life was increasingly unfolding in conditioned, private spaces of heterotopic character. Our everyday life can be described as a movement, using trans- port capsules, from one enclave or capsule, home for instance, to another, campus, office, airport, all- in-one hotel, mall, and so on. One might say that hyperindividualism Avermaete and Teerds / 2007 Delft Lecture Series