Monthly Archives: January 2011

Some for you, some for Mies – a defense of DC’s MLK Library

IMG_2103(Mies’ Chicago Federal Plaza, with Alexander Calder’s Flamingo sculpture.  A note about the lack of people in the plaza – this photo was taken with a temperature of about -5 degrees and a wind chill well below that.  Author’s photo)

Today, Lydia DePillis has a guest post from Kriston Capps offering a well-put defense of DC’s oft-maligned MLK Library, the sole work of Mies van der Rhoe in the city.  DePillis recently wrote about DCPL’s building boom and the modern taste it has.  Capps defends Mies’ design and chalks up the library’s deficiencies to poor maintenance of the building, but also falling victim to the larger social ills that often make the location undesirable.

But more than a renovation, even, the MLK Library needs city serves downtown to step up. It will never be an inviting place like Shaw or Tenleytown until the city does something to serve D.C.’s homeless population downtown. The library serves as a de facto shelter and has since before Armstrong v. District of Columbia Public Library. Mayor Williams was kidding himself to say that it was a lack of WiFi, and not an abundance of homeless men, keeping families away.

Design matters – but it can only do so much.

The MLK Library has always reminded me of the uniquely frustrating promise of the District. Here is the start of this soaring Mies skyscraper that stops before it starts, well short of the Seagram Building in New York or 860–880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. We get a Mies, but a Mies cut off at its knees. It’s a perfect architectural metaphor for the almost-urbanism that characterizes life in Washington.

Mies isn’t all skyscrapers, of course.  I’ve visited other low-slung libraries of his (on Chicago’s IIT campus) that work well.  I’d also argue that Mies’ other works do work well in “almost-urbanism” of places like Detroit’s Lafayette Park, or when given sufficient space to contrast against the predominant urban fabric as the Seagram Building or Chicago’s Federal Plaza do.  The MLK Library instead conforms to the city’s plan and fabric, with only the slight jog in G Street NW as it skirts the Portrait Gallery offering a chance to see the building from a distance.

It’s certainly not Mies’ best work, but the library isn’t the negative many make it out to be.  With some thoughtful renovations to care for the original design, it has potential to be a great public space once again – insofar as design alone can tackle the human challenges of the library’s primary users.

Different types of urban science

CC image from futureatlas.com

CC image from futureatlas.com

Jeff Wood’s handy mailing list on behalf of Re-connecting America pointed me towards this article from Urban Omnibus, disputing the broad conclusions from Geoffrey West’s work towards discovering a universal theory of cities.  Eric Peterson, the author, does not like the implications of West’s quantitative work and the implications of physical laws that might apply to cities:

Despite proposing to have radically reinvented the field in which architects and urbanists work, the article appears to have garnered little attention among commentators and blogs from within architecture and urbanism. Perhaps the article’s lack of substance explains professionals’ reluctance to engage with the implications of West’s work. Nonetheless, it is crucial for those of us interested in the serious study of urbanism to look closely at the article, if only because many of the assumptions it advances strike me as undermining an understanding of cities as complex and important things.

The charge that West’s work is somehow lacking in substance struck me as harsh and misguided.  The notion that there can be only one true understanding of how cities work misses the obvious difference between  West’s work and the more conventional urban studies that Peterson seems to prefer.  The difference appears to be a simple one, based on a misunderstanding of the kinds of universal rules West seeks to understand, as well as the fundamental difference between qualitative and quantitative observation.

Remembering that West is a physicist, Peterson’s charge that a universal theory of urbanism misses out on all of the complexity of a city represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what such a universal theory really means.  Just look at West’s field – physics – and you can easily see exceedingly complex movements that can all be understood by the basic laws of Newtonian mechanics.  A full understanding of motion, as we know it, is an exceedingly complex undertaking, yet Newton essentially boiled that complexity down to three basic laws of motion, which can easily be translated into simple maxims.  Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest; bodies in motion tend to stay in motion; for each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; etc.

These laws have limits to their validity, of course, but that does not discount the fact that complex systems can be understood via the basis of simple laws. This reduction isn’t something to be feared.

Peterson also seems to gloss over the mutually beneficial relationship between both qualitative and quantitative analysis.  He frames urbanism in a qualitative way and then implies that the quantification of urbanism not only has little to offer, but is indeed dangerous to our understanding of urban places:

Further, such an approach should be read as dangerous to all of us who see cities as phenomena formed at the collision of dynamic economic, historical, social, political and ecological forces.

This fear seems so misguided that I don’t even know where to begin.

Instead of recognizing cities as the products of these complex forces, the object of West’s study is purposefully contextless and unspecified. Describing how he applies his scientific principles to a specific city he’s studying, he says, “I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” West goes on to qualify this assertion by saying that, essentially, the differences between cities that we so often discuss are merely superficial, material ones, related to how a city functions rather than to each city’s unique history.

Even in areas of knowledge where we have a strong quantitative understanding of how things work, this knowledge has never derailed our searches for qualitative understanding as well – for context, for history, for social interactions.

Some of this confusion between the respective role for quantification and qualification stems from language.  Peterson notes early in his piece his disdain for West’s characterization of cities as “problems” to be solved.  Here, the word problem would have completely a different meaning to a mathematician and a physicist as compared to a ethnographer or an architect.  To the mathematician, a problem is not necessarily a social ill but a riddle to be solved, a question to be answered.

In the end, both approaches are crucial to our understanding of the places we live in.