We Also Need Democracy in Aesthetics

In a new book entitled BACKBONE: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared, author Karl Zinsmeister reports on middle Americans living all across the country, and why they want dramatic change in the direction of our country. He examines populism not just as a political impulse but also in the form of small-business activity, local acts of civil society, and community values. The book even explores why art and architecture are better when they respect ordinary people—which is the subject of the excerpt that follows.

BACKBONE Chapter 20:  An interview with Andres Duany

Yale-educated architect Andres Duany is a Cuban émigré, a popular author and lecturer, and the flamboyant leader of an influential movement to return American community design and home building to a New Traditionalism.

QUESTION: Could you describe your conversion from a fairly conventional modern architect and urban designer to something not very conventional?

DUANY: Well, that took place in about 1980. We were having great success as young architects building high-rises in Miami Beach, including the famous one with the big hole in it that was shown on “Miami Vice.” Then one day I went to a lecture by a fellow called Leon Krier, the man who designed the English model town of Poundbury for the Prince of Wales. Krier gave a powerful talk about traditional urbanism, and after a couple of weeks of real agony and crisis I realized I couldn’t go on designing these fashionable tall buildings, which were fascinating visually, but didn’t produce any healthy urban effect. They wouldn’t affect society in a positive way.

The prospect of instead creating traditional communities where our plans could actually make someone’s daily life better really excited me. Krier introduced me to the idea of looking at people first, and to the power of physical design to change the social life of a community. And so my wife and I left the firm and went off to do something very different.

QUESTION: You have written, “Where the users of buildings, or even passersby, have a voice, we know that the strong preference is for traditional architecture. Democracy leads inexorably to traditional styles.”

DUANY: That’s right. That’s a reality. I do believe there’s one aspect to modernism that is useful, though, and that is the fact that it’s critical of existing conditions. Modernism isn’t content with things as they are. Unfortunately, it’s an alienated criticism, full of distance and emotional separation—in contrast to earlier movements that aimed for constructive change. Where older varieties of reformism wanted to take what exists and try to improve it, modernism just wants to throw away the past—lock, stock, and barrel.

QUESTION: If the strength of modernism is its critical approach, then why aren’t we seeing any progress in the evolution of buildings? You yourself have written: “Travel to a city and ask any host to help you find a bad building erected prior to 1930, and you may well spend all day driving around in a vain search. Now look for a bad building erected after 1960. You will probably find one just by turning your head.” Why have we gone backwards in this area?

DUANY: The real problem is the impulse to be avant-garde, which severs our ties with the past. Avant-garde buildings can occasionally be quite beautiful. But the win/loss ratio is horrible, unacceptable. To get those very, very few successful, glorious, modernist buildings, you sacrifice an enormous percentage of failed buildings at every level, because each designer tries to reinvent the wheel instead of improving on established forms.

Traditionalists hold people’s hearts, but modernists command most of the intellectual territory. And traditionalists aren’t aggressive enough to capture new turf.

The avant-garde has built and built and built on the idea of the alienated artist. If you engage the reality of what people truly need in a building, you’ve “sold out.” If you haven’t fought bitterly with your client, you’ve failed as an architect. This is inscribed in the minds of students by academics who very often are themselves failures as practitioners.

The reality of this country is the American middle class, right? We have a very small upper class and a relatively small poorer class. But the avant-garde artists can’t engage with the middle class. They’re too busy trying to talk people out of “bourgeois” notions like comfort and convention and beauty—the very things that define any architecture for the middle class.

I have done a lot of public forums. I find that when you engage the community as a whole—the regular people—you find a lot of wisdom and enlightened self-interest. On the other hand, leaders of various disaffected minorities (usually self-appointed) often just create friction. They rabble-rouse to generate opposition, then offer to drop their resistance if you give them something.

QUESTION: You’ve complained that some poverty activists actually resist measures that reduce poverty.

DUANY: Oh yes. There are, for instance many, many places where what the town needs most desperately is what is now derisively called “gentrification.” When I study most inner cities I see poverty monocultures. The arrival of some higher-income residents is exactly what they need.

What smart urbanists want is to have a full range of society within neighborhoods. You need people who are CEOs, and people who are secretaries. You need school teachers, and you need somebody to deliver the pizza. Society doesn’t work unless there are all kinds of people around, in relatively close proximity. Any society that has only one income level is dysfunctional. And, by the way, the great thing about the American system is that everybody can actually aspire to rise to the level of “gentry.” We don’t have the generalized envy and resentment that you find in many other countries.

But “gentrification”—attracting the middle class back to poor areas—is sometimes resisted by certain local activists. Why? Because it threatens to break up their political coalitions, and their base of power. When I first ran across this I was just amazed. I was so naive. Why wouldn’t this poor area want middle-class people moving in? I mean, you need the tax base. Now, I see selfish local bosses as the source of the resistance.

QUESTION: Is it possible today, while building coalitions to improve how cities function, to have honest discussions about subjects like race?

DUANY: Yes. My family is from Cuba, and one of the things that hit me as I began debating these subjects is that you can’t get arrested and put in jail in this country for what you say. You know, historically, this is astounding. I’m very comfortable in taking the lead in prickly issues, and what I find is that when hard realities are first stated, people are aghast and silent. Then they come out of the woodwork and say things like, “It was time for somebody to finally admit that.” The dangerous thing about political correctness is that it introduces fear of one’s personal beliefs. That is completely un-American. When you stop feeling free to say things, that’s the beginning of a collapse of democracy.

QUESTION: Is it fair to say that Duany’s Principle Number One insists that any solver of social problems should start with what has evolved through history and tradition, aiming to improve on that, rather than starting over with a blank sheet of paper?

DUANY: I’m very suspicious of invention. We’d better be at least a little suspicious of anything brand new, of sharp breaks with the evolved past, because on the scale on which we urban designers work—which is the very fabric of a city—failure can be cataclysmic. When a community plan fails, it’s essentially permanent. It can harm thousands of people over generations. So you have to be very conservative in community design. There are very good historical reasons to be skeptical.

QUESTION: Isn’t that same thing true in politics? If you dream up a utopian society and force it on people through the power of the state, you can hurt millions of people.

DUANY: Millions of people, yeah. In some ways, though, bad urbanism is even more permanent than a blundering socialist state. For one thing, it tends to last longer. You can get rid of a dictator in a few years, but when you pour concrete….

Europe has found it incredibly difficult to get rid of modernist housing that was built in the 1960s. The projects on the outskirts of Amsterdam are a disaster, and yet they can’t really dump them. The investment is too big.

QUESTION: Soon they’ll have “historic” status, and then it will be impossible to ever knock ’em down!

DUANY: Seriously, that’s what the modernists are trying to do. They’re very clever. What is very interesting about the Left is its polemical agility. I really envy that. I admire it. People on the Left just leap in. They’re incredibly aggressive. Even when the results are completely dysfunctional, they remain strong advocates and defenders.

This may be a good place for us to clarify the terms “modernist” and “traditionalist.” I actually consider myself a neo-traditionalist. Neo-traditionalism is more than just an attempt to revive something that has lapsed. It’s a juncture between the new and the traditional. A neo-traditionalist will buy an old house and put in a brand new kitchen and a brand new bathroom. Because the house is best when it has old beauty and craftsmanship, but a 1920s kitchen is no great triumph. So what I try to achieve is a wise combination. The ability to reconcile things is very important.

What we’re actually trying to do is take the stuff that is already being built out there anyway—the houses, the subdivisions, the town homes, the garden apartment clusters, the office parks, the shopping centers—and unify it into towns. The material is being laid out, it’s just not assembled properly. It’s disaggregated. What we do is to aggregate elements into functioning communities, and public tastes and the market are behind us.

Good design isn’t just about looking good, it has to function well in real life. I like to see how children fare in our towns like Seaside in Florida and Kentlands in Maryland. You can just let your child loose there, because we’ve created walkable streets. Children love the freedom of being able to get around a large and complex and interesting place on their own little feet.

QUESTION: You seem to be trying to reconcile the natural with the man-made, the efficient with the pleasurable, the rural with the urban. Aren’t neighborhoods that mix rural and urban virtues the ideal of the American public?

DUANY: They’re the American ideal. Although, more and more, there are many American ideals. There are some people who want to live downtown where the action is. They wanna live in a loft. Others like row houses. Others need single-family houses. Yet others seek space in the country. I insist that all of these should be available.

One problem is that fanatics like the rabid environmentalists only recognize one or two of these options as legitimate. Environmentalists want to green everything. Environmental law at this moment prevents the construction of authentic urbanism. You couldn’t build any great traditional city today if you apply the environmental laws on open space, separate uses, and so forth. One of the things I’m trying to do is to get environmentalists to accept that Americans have a right to the full range of habitats, from country living to high-density urbanism, and that the laws must be different in every type of environment. But environmentalists are so arrogant they won’t even engage in this conversation.

QUESTION: A strength of your movement, though, is that the traditional small towns and close-knit neighborhoods that you champion appeal to a broad swath of people. When Gallup asks Americans where they’d most like to live, only 13 percent say a city. The largest number by far, 37 percent, say they want to live in a small town, while 25 percent say the suburbs. Aren’t these preferences a fact that planners and regulators ought to work with, instead of endlessly railing against the single-family house and yard and car?

DUANY: Yes. I was in Peoria, Illinois all last week, leading a town design brainstorming session. It’s different from the coasts. It’s fascinating.

Small-town living is popular everywhere, but the way you present it has to vary. For example, in the Midwest you talk about traditional community values. On the East Coast you talk in terms of convenience—this way of living is so much better for your kid, it will free you from being a soccer mom imprisoned in your vehicle.

One of the things we had to do in Peoria was to beat back the “greening” of the waterfront. The city’s waterfront was once industrial, and we want to urbanize it. If you want to keep your young people, we said, let’s build lofts on that waterfront.

But environmentalists were saying “let’s have a park.” I pointed out that the Illinois River is thick with parks for a hundred miles in each direction. This is downtown Peoria, and this half mile of waterfront should not be green but should be given over to humans. Humans have rights to the river, too. What do you mean humans have rights to the river? Shouldn’t it be green? No, I said, let’s use this bit for humans and leave the other hundred miles for muskrats.

I study the environmental movement very hard, because I admire its ability to prevail. Environmentalists do two things well that are very important. One is they have a standardized vocabulary all over the country. Their second strength is that their presentation is always technocratic or pseudo-scientific. People agree in hushed tones that, of course, we must get the “scientists” involved. You have to answer this with a technocratic presentation of your own.

QUESTION: One of your articles warns that green ideologues “cannot believe that the work of humans has the capacity to be part of nature.” It needs to be pointed out that people aren’t a kind of pollution.

DUANY: Yes, there are two interpretations of nature. One places humanity apart from nature. The other says that humans are part of the natural order. Environmentalists favor the first definition, and that’s the source of many problems. I believe humans have rights to habitats that are paved over. Humans have rights to places like London and New York.

Because most humans like to live in relatively high density, they actually end up leaving most of nature alone. Not because some regulator forbids people from building a house where they want—preventing people from going where they want will never hold in a free society. Mandated urban boundaries will never hold, because Americans have rights, including a right to the pursuit of happiness. It’s actually market drive—wanting to live near services instead of in the woods—that brings people to cities. Since Americans have a right to live wherever they please, if we want to keep them out of the wheat fields we’re going to have to make cities so attractive that people don’t want to leave.

In any case, contrary to environmentalist claims and common perceptions, America is not running out of land. You could give every single American household one full acre of land, and it would only consume 4 percent of the acreage in the continental U.S. Four percent. And that doesn’t include Alaska.

QUESTION: You have lots of contact with the academic world. Your wife is a college dean. Let’s turn to campus life for a minute. A couple of years ago I got an e-mail message from you in which you argued that when Marxist intellectuals realized they weren’t getting any traction with the so-called “working class,” they decided to congregate in universities instead. There, they churned out a Marxism that was less economic and more cultural and social. It remained their aim to undermine Western cultural traditions, just in a different way. Is that what we witnessed over the last century in fields like art and architecture?

DUANY: I think so. In all branches of academia, it’s now the so-called “critical method”—which is Marxist jargon—that dominates. The overall aim is indeed to undermine middle-class society. It’s very clever, very effective.

QUESTION: You and your wife were students at Princeton and Yale during the ’60s and ’70s when these seeds of radicalism were first sprouting. What was your reaction to the agitations on college campuses during that time?

DUANY: Well, this is another example of cleverness on the Left—it was all made to be fun. Many of the protests were just one big party. There was a strong festival aspect to what was going on.

I think fun is very important. Though we as a nation have an important Calvinist streak, the idea that you have to suffer to do well has very little traction in the United States. That’s why I speak of the pleasure of walkable communities, of not being forced to drive a car, instead of thundering about internal combustion engines. When we speak of an environmentally sensitive house we speak of the comfort of cross ventilation. We don’t insist you have to scrimp on energy.

That comes partly from lessons we learned in the ’60s about how to build a mass movement. Most people then started out thinking “the cause” was a lot of fun. Later, of course, radicalism became Calvinist. Now you can’t drink coffee without getting a harangue.

—Excerpted from BACKBONE: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared by Karl Zinsmeister, former White House chief domestic policy adviser and author of many books.