After the City

After the City

Lars Lerup , MIT Press 2000.

Lars Lerup writes from experience in place. His little known paper on the "goodness of public space", Environmental and Behavioural Congruence....(Ekistics 204, Nov. 1972,) he wrote from observations made during his lunchbreaks in central Stockholm; his first major book, Building the Unfinished (Sage, 1977, out of print) is grounded, rooted, in his lodgings with Mrs Ivy in Berkeley and his walks on the Swedish coast, established him as an important humanistic writer on architecture. At Berkeley he taught a course "People and the Environment". In his projects published in the 1980's he explored the dimensions of meaning in ordinary suburban houses.

In 1993 he moved to Houston, elevated to Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Professor of Architecture and Dean at Rice University and to the 28th floor. This book is the result, an exploration, a meditation on making sense of life in the ever expanding suburban metropolis, with only a quarter the population density of Los Angeles.

Lerup's existential rigour prevents this from being yet another New Urbanist attack on the disorder of the contemporary city on the one hand, or another celebration of our arrival, nearly forty years after Melvin Webber's prescient article, at the digital non place urban realm on the other. Instead After the City builds slowly from an oblique portfolio of images and brief comments, through discussion of a few key sources - including Robert Smithson and J.B. Jackson, and analysis of some key projects - Donald Judd's Chianti Foundation at Marfa, Texas, "simple spaces, the visible affection for the vernacular, the subtle corrections to the given", and Renzo Piano's pavilions for the Menil Foundation and the Cy Twombly Gallery - to unravel the order of the seeming disorder of the newly emerging megashapes.

The key to Lerup's understanding of this new flickering, shifting, fluctuating essentially fluid non-form are the ideas of "stim" :-briefly existing points in time and space of intensity, interaction and interest - a zydeco dance, a garage that specialises in imported cars, a family dinner, a high art reception: serviced and anchored by technology and machines, like lights drawing moths out of the darkness of the city; and movement, "a dance, a swarming motorised prowess celebrating a new Apollo". Lerup's psychological map of all this is a version of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass.

But the views from the 28th floor or from the oscillations of the freeway are only glimpses, fragments for critical reflection, and there is none of the extended empathetic analysis of real life that characterised Lerup's earlier work. Too much of After the City is either rounding up the usual architectural suspects and reassembling the critical theory Hall of Fame, or describing, again, unbuilt projects. How much more vivid and effective this book would have been if it had been infused with the anthropological quotidianism of Everyday Urbanism (Chase, J. Crawford, M. and Kaliski, J. (eds), The Montacelli Press, 1999, New York, and a few of its stories of street vendors, garage sales and latino hair braiding had replaced pages of art gallery installation architecture. #

(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 76, October 2000 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission)