| |
Comment on this article
Designing the Future
Despite the sad state of American cities, Fred Koetter remains a dedicated fan of downtowns and the corner store. As an advocate of “neotraditional planning,” the new dean of the School of Architecture is betting on an urban comeback.
December 1992
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Mark Alden Branch ’86 is a senior editor of Progressive Architecture magazine.
Fred Koetter is a creature of the
city. It shows in his urbane wardrobe, in his conversation, and in his
life-style. (How many fiftyish professionals can say they’ve never lived in a
suburb?) But most of all, it shows in his work. Koetter, who takes over as dean
of the School of Architecture in January, runs a Boston architectural firm
that, more than most, specializes in the shaping of the city. Koetter, Kim
& Associates, which Koetter founded three years ago with his wife, Susie
Kim, is responsible for urban plans in places as diverse as Chattanooga,
Tennessee, Asbury Park, New Jersey, and, most recently, London.
Koetter comes to Yale at a time when
cities might seem irrelevant. As of the 1990 census, more than half of all
Americans are living in suburban areas, and more people are working in suburbs,
too. Innovations such as fax machines, overnight mail, and modems (not to
mention virtual reality) are making possible a world where, some say, the
physical proximity afforded by the city is no longer essential. Americans can
feel free to indulge their appetite for sprawl.
But Koetter, along with many other
young architects, disagrees. First, he says, there are environmental problems
with spreading ourselves out. Besides using more and more land, suburbanization
eats up fossil fuels by requiring people to rely on automobiles. “When
researchers at MIT tried to create models of environmentally effective
settlement patterns,” Koetter says, “the results looked almost medieval.” More
important, he argues, “the isolation of suburbia results in even greater human
and social damage.”
In his zeal for what is variously
called postmodern planning, neo-traditional planning, or sustainable design,
Koetter is part of a movement that is gaining considerable momentum among both
academics and practitioners across the country. Architects such as Andres Duany
and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami (both ’74MArch) are leading the charge for
a new urbanism based on lively streets, mixed commercial and residential uses,
and the predominance of the pedestrian. “In some ways,” says Koetter, “it all
comes down to being able to walk to the store.”
Considering Koetter’s career-long
interest in the city, it is a bit of a surprise to learn that he grew up in
less-than-metropolitan Great Falls, Montana. He traces his career ambitions
back to early elementary school, where he took up painting with the
encouragement of teachers from an Ursuline nunnery. By the time he got to
college, he had begun to consider architecture as a creative pursuit. After a
year at Montana State University, he transferred to the architecture program at
the University of Oregon.
In 1964, after graduating from
Oregon and working briefly in Seattle, Koetter was on his way to Europe when he
stopped in Ithaca, New York, to see a friend. The visit was fateful; he would
remain in Ithaca until 1976, earning a master’s degree at Cornell and remaining
to teach there.
Two years before Koetter enrolled at
Cornell, a British educator and theorist named Colin Rowe had arrived there to
start the country’s first studio in urban design. Rowe’s ideas about
architecture and urbanism would influence not only graduates of Cornell but
architects and students around the country. While Rowe’s detailed mathematical
analyses of the work of such Modernist architects as Le Corbusier helped spur a
revival of 1920s Modern architecture, it was his critique of urbanism that was
most influential. That critique is embodied in the book Collage City (MIT Press, 1979), which he
co-wrote with Fred Koetter.
Collage City is a difficult book to read, but
its premise is fairly simple: that Modern architecture and planning have done
great damage to the city by inverting the traditional urban relationship
between solids (buildings) and voids (streets and open space). Where medieval
and Renaissance cities treated open space as something to be shaped, Modernists
tended to place object-like buildings in fields of unarticulated open space.
(For a useful local example, consider the contrast between James Gamble
Rogers’s residential colleges—which sit up against the street and wrap around interior
courtyards—and Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library, which sits in a field of
granite on Hewitt Quadrangle.)
Koetter and Rowe proposed that
cities could be improved through the “collaging” of shaped, figural open space
into the fabric of a city. Their analytical tool of choice was the
figure-ground diagram, a map showing buildings in black and open spaces in
white, so that the nature of their relationship can be studied. The
figure-ground diagram is now an essential part of what is called postmodern urban
design.
After his stint at Cornell, Koetter
came to New Haven as an associate professor at the School of Architecture. At
Yale, he was further influenced by the lectures of architectural historian
Vincent Scully and those of Karsten Harries, who teaches a course on philosophy
and architecture. “I was attending classes as much as I was teaching,” Koetter
says. “There was a real synthesis among disciplines, which was very important
to me. Architecture can’t be isolated from other disciplines.”
Koetter taught at Yale from 1975 to
1978, and then moved on to a professorship at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design, where he has taught ever since. Shortly after arriving at Harvard, he
set up a firm (he had not practiced while at Yale) that combined small-scale architectural
work with grant-funded urban-design research projects. These theoretical
projects evolved into an urban design practice that put his ideas to the test.
A typical Koetter, Kim urban-design
project involves the establishment of a plan for an undeveloped or reclaimed
parcel of land, usually owned by a developer or municipality, within an
existing city. The firm studies the area’s existing patterns—circulation
routes, surrounding buildings, land uses—and creates a plan for the
manipulation of open space. (Figure-ground diagrams of possible schemes for a
site fill the walls in Koetter’s Back Bay office.) The plan usually includes
guidelines that architects and developers must follow if they want to build
within the parcel. Frequently, the urban-design commissions lead to
architectural commissions for the firm. Koetter, Kim’s buildings attempt to set
the tone for these new neighborhoods, with an architectural language that tries
to capture the essence of traditional urban buildings without mimicking their
details.
In the past three years, Koetter,
Kim has done an increasing amount of work in London, including no fewer than
seven urban design studies for various parts of Canary Wharf, the riverside
commercial development fueled by Britain’s “Big Bang” stock market
deregulation. Koetter has recently been spending up to half his time in London,
a situation that he knows will have to change when he comes to Yale.
School of Architecture professor
Alexander Purves, who chaired the search committee for a new dean, says the
committee was looking for someone with “an inclusive attitude about
architecture” who would “maintain our pluralistic approach toward design.” He
also says the committee liked Koetter’s background in urban design, in part
because it means “he understands architecture as part of a group effort. That’s
not a bad quality for a dean.”
In keeping with recent tradition,
the search committee decided it wanted someone who was also actively involved
in practicing architecture, as opposed to a full-time academic, because, as
Purves says, “The bottom line around here is that architecture is building."
But Purves acknowledges the danger that a practicing architect will be “torn
between his practice and the school,” a problem that has faced past deans. Koetter
says he hopes to avoid that problem by moving his family and his practice to
New Haven. “It’s crazy to do it any other way,” he says (although the last
dean, Chicago architect Thomas Beeby, successfully shuttled back and forth for
five years between his practice and Yale).
Koetter begins his deanship at a
time of strength for the school, but for the profession of architecture, things
aren’t at all encouraging. The collapse of the developer-driven real-estate
boom of the 1980s has sent unemployment soaring among architects. The
statistics should give pause to anyone considering architecture as a career. In
1990, for example, there were almost as many entry-level jobs lost in the field
as there were new architecture graduates. (Yale graduates have nonetheless
fared well, says Purves, largely because of the school’s prestige and because
the graduates tend to go to work for small firms with institutional clients,
one of the market’s brighter spots.)
Worse than the current economic
situation, though, is the growing sense of alarm over the profession’s very
future. Architects worry that the image of the “high-design” architects of the
1980s, who are now seen as mere stylists, divorced from both the mechanics of
building and the concerns of society, has forever damaged the architect’s claim
to relevance.
Koetter lays some of the blame on
academia, where theorists have been mining literary criticism and philosophy
for ideas. (The French “deconstructionist” philosopher Jacques Derrida was all
the rage a few years ago; these days, the hot topics seem to be phenomenology
and Heidegger.) “Large areas of every major city in the world are collapsing,”
says Koetter. “The relationship between that fact and architectural discourse
today is not clear.”
At Yale, where concerns raised by
students tend to find their way into the curriculum, there has long been a
level of impatience with the kind of theory that is divorced from the realities
of architecture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the school’s First-Year
Building Program, a 27-year-old ritual in which first-year students design and
construct a building. As obvious as the idea might seem, it is one that remains
unique to Yale.
The tasks taken on by the first-year
builders have changed with the times. Some of the buildings of the activist
1960s were community centers and clinics in Appalachia. In the 1970s and ’80s,
there was an emphasis on simpler programs and more sculptural buildings:
outdoor stages, park pavilions. But for the past four years, the students
working with the national non-profit group Habitat for Humanity, have designed
and built houses in the underprivileged Hill and Newhallville sections of New
Haven. Koetter thinks this is a positive step: “The Habitat houses are
extremely hopeful things. There is a fair amount of interest at the school
these days in the architect’s social responsibility.”
Another issue that has been
attracting attention among students, and with which Koetter will have to deal,
is minority recruitment. Purves admits that the school is “going to have to
work harder” to find minority students, especially African-Americans, who are
drastically underrepresented in the profession as a whole. Last year,
third-year student J. C. Calderon organized a conference on “People of Color in
Architecture,” bringing some of these issues to the attention of the school and
the larger Yale community. Koetter, who was at Cornell when civil rights issues
boiled over into an armed takeover of the student center, says it is essential
that “the means be found” to attract minorities.
Koetter will also have to face a
variety of nuts-and-bolts issues as he begins his term as dean. Most prominent
among them are the financial ones. Although it shares many problems with the
other professional schools, the School of Architecture—like the schools of Art,
Divinity, Drama, and Music—rarely produces graduates who contribute the kind of
money generated by alumni in law, medicine, or business. The situation is
compounded by the especially hard times in the real estate industry.
Whatever the success of the School’s
fundraising efforts, a goodly portion of the results is certain to be used to
address its space woes. The building it shares with the School of Art has been
undersized almost since it was completed in 1963. The once-grand spaces
designed by Paul Rudolph have been grievously partitioned, and the entire
structure has grown increasingly shabby. The library is overcrowded and without
air conditioning, and as a result more and more of the collection has been
removed to other locations.
None of this seems overly daunting
to Koetter, who prefers to concentrate on the educational opportunities of his
new post. “After teaching at Yale,” he says, “I knew it was the one place I’d
consider taking this job.”
And, by the way, he and Ms. Kim are
shopping for houses. Suburban properties are emphatically not under
consideration.  |
|
