Vishaan Chakrabarti. The Architecture Of Urbanity: Designing For Nature, Culture And Joy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
Reviewed by Dasha Kuletskaya
Can architects and other design professionals help tackle the global challenges humanity faces today? Can design be a tool to address climate change, rising inequality, and the spread of right-wing populism? Can architecture as a professional practice overcome the legitimacy crisis and avoid self-relegation to “the dustbin of the irrelevant”? Vishaan Chakrabarti’s new book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy sets an ambitious goal of providing answers to these highly relevant questions. But does the author succeed? In this reader’s opinion, not quite.
As the title suggests, the book argues that design professionals in the fields of architecture and urbanism should aspire to contribute to the “architecture of urbanity” or “connective design”.[1] “Urbanity” is understood by the author as “a community in which people from many different cultures and classes spatially interact”.[2] According to the author, to avoid being referred to as “the second oldest profession in the world” and “regain social relevance,” architects “cannot be the people who live off gentrifying luxury condominium developments, who bankrupt cities with budget-busting public monuments, who shrug when indentured servants die on building sites, who sexually harass or don’t pay employees, who blithely work for dictators and human rights abusers, and who visibly, recklessly and to the detriment of us all fiddle while Rome burns.”[3]
While this is certainly a very laudable, albeit somewhat naïve, position, it sets high expectations for the book, as readers hope to find suggestions for achieving these goals. On the next page, the author offers the first suggestion:
“It is time—once and for all—to exterminate the idea of starchitect, and from the ashes let the phoenix of a new definition of architectural excellence rise, one in which we act as thought leaders, one in which we act as the honorable, impactful professionals the world actually needs.”[4]
However, almost in the same breath, though in a different outlet, the author praises Norman Foster, one of the starchitects of the 2000s.[5] In fact, the architect is guilty of many architectural sins listed by Chakrabarti in the passage above, including building a brand-new techno-fixed city in a desert for “petro-dictators”—to use the author’s terminology.[6] Is this kind of hypocrisy not the exact reason for the tarnished reputation of architecture as a profession the author rightfully laments?
After reading the introduction, which is titled “The Excellence of Relevance” and contains the quoted passages, this reader was already tired of the author’s pompous rhetoric but still held out some hope for the remaining ten chapters, which are divided into two sections. In the first section, called “Despair,” the author provides a brief overview of the history of urbanization from the Neolithic till today, argues against the use of private automobiles in cities, claims that “dense, urbane, inner-cities are humankind’s greenest invention” in terms of reducing carbon footprint and addressing climate change, pleas for racial and class diversity as prerequisites for urbanity, and argues for a strong government and public sector—a vast amount of ground to cover in just about one hundred richly illustrated pages.
While there is no doubt that humanity currently faces multiple global challenges, including climate change and rising right-wing populism and inequality, it is less clear what solutions design professionals, and more specifically architects, can offer to tackle these issues. The author argues that architects should design inclusive and diverse urban spaces.[7] To argue this way suggests that racial and economic inclusivity is an urban design problem, which is hardly true. To offer just one example: Venice, a city praised by the author as an example of the “architecture of urbanity”, was, in fact, a heavily segregated city for two and a half centuries during its golden age.[8] This is not to suggest that racial and economic segregation do not manifest themselves spatially, that space cannot reinforce social processes, or that Venice is not a great city in terms of architecture and urban space. Rather, I argue for more caution and nuance in attributing overarching agency to design professions in shaping cities and societies. As regards segregation, it has been the dark side of urban development since the very beginning of cities, and to ignore this reality or suggest it can be resolved through design is dangerously naïve.[9]
Another unfortunate example of the author’s superficial argumentation is the suggestion that prefabricated cross-laminated timber could remedy the building industry’s impact on climate change.[10] While there is consensus that timber can help reduce carbon emissions in the building industry, implementing it as the primary material for urban housing construction on a global scale presents significant challenges that the author does not even mention. These challenges include timber supply and demand imbalances between the northern and southern hemispheres; long-term carbon dynamics of reforestation; constraints of existing urban environments; significant regulatory challenges, especially regarding seismic and fire safety; immense land use changes required to accommodate the artificial forests for engineering wood production, posing significant risks for biodiversity and food security; and, finally, the unclear future of the timber buildings when they reach the end of their life, i.e., delayed emissions and need for circular solutions. In short, the author suggests a seemingly simple answer to a problem for which, unfortunately, there are no simple solutions. To an academic reader, this suggestion comes across as another example of “well-intended” greenwashing that the author himself rightfully complains about.[11]
The second section of the book is titled “Hope.” Chapter 6, “Here! Here!”, is described by the author as the “palette cleanser.” This chapter is, in fact, a pleasure to look at—as it primarily features images of notable architectural and urban designs from across all continents, spanning from the 14th to the 21st century, beautifully redrawn by the graphic design firm Pentagram. However, many of these examples are heavily gentrified and overused by tourism, as for example Place de Vosges in Paris or OZ Voorburgwal in Amsterdam or constructed from the beginning as a “ ‘high class’ neighborhood,” as in the case of the Barbican Estate in London.[12] The reader is left wondering why Chakrabarti selected these designs to support his claim that “the architecture of urbanity” has the capacity to connect people across different economic and racial backgrounds, while they clearly prove the opposite. The designs presented in this chapter are undoubtedly strong in terms of architectural quality, yet like all architectural designs, they remain vulnerable to issues such as gentrification, segregation, and financialization.
The next chapter presents selected “luminaries who are blazing a path towards the architecture of urbanity in the present”, i.e., contemporary architects that, according to the author, have high moral standing and social impact.[13] These architects are presented in contrast to other firms that “seem content to take almost any commission that comes their way” and “blithely draw up execution chambers and exposed stainless-steel toilets in jail cells”—as if the malfunctions of penal systems were merely a design problem.[14] These “socially minded” architects include recent winners of the Pritzker Prize and the Aga Khan Award, as well as other prominent figures of contemporary architecture—one could argue, a new, morally approved breed of starchitects.[15] This chapter ends with a “kind of Hippocratic oath for the design community” and sets the stage for the third last chapter of the book, “The Tau of Pau,” dedicated to the practical work of the author.[16]
As a former practicing architect who converted to academia, I firmly believe that an architect’s practical work should speak for itself and I was eager to explore the author’s design work. The latter consists of two finished projects (InterOculus Pavilion in Columbus, Indiana and The Refinery at Domino in Williamsburg, Brooklyn), three projects currently under construction (JFK Towers at Schuylkill Yards in Philadelphia, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, and F4 Airport Traffic Control Towers, which will be built at an initial set of 31 candidate airports across the USA), and multiple studies and unrealized proposals (including the design for the redevelopment of Penn Station in New York). The designs are of excellent architectural quality, and studying the plans is a pleasure, though the book’s format fails to do justice to these beautiful drawings.
On the level of the individual commissions, the design solutions of PAU are highly original and embedded in local contexts. However, this reader was left with two burning questions. First, why are these projects presented as “architecture of urbanity”? For instance, F4 Airport Traffic Control Towers are restricted objects, inaccessible to the public. It is unclear how they enable “people from many different cultures and classes [to] spatially interact,” unless the author is referring to the act of flying itself—an activity that is far from ideal in terms of its environmental impact.
Second, can the underlying economic model of PAU be replicated? The author discloses that PAU’s first built design was commissioned eight years after the firm was founded.[17] How can an office sustain itself and pay employees adequately without ongoing projects for nearly a decade? Such a business model would necessitate additional capital to support the office during its early years. Ambitious architecture firms often rely on sources like family money (e.g., Zaha Hadid) or academic positions to cross-finance their practice until securing their first major commission. This critical issue is seldom discussed publicly, yet it is vital for the office’s ability to selectively accept or decline commissions. Given that the author also speaks to the next generation of architects, it would only be fair to openly address this fundamental issue that defines architects’ autonomy.
To conclude, The Architecture of Urbanity features many high-quality architectural designs and is generously and beautifully illustrated by the graphic design firm Pentagram, which makes it visually appealing and easy to read. However, the solutions proposed by the author for enhancing the societal relevance of architecture as a profession are overly simplistic and primarily framed from a US perspective. Although the questions of architecture’s relevance, autonomy, and dependency are often discussed, the book fails to acknowledge the existing literature on the issue.[18] Nor does it offer a nuanced and honest discussion of the strategies available to design professionals for emancipating themselves within the context of the real estate industry—identifying such strategies would be essential for enabling architects’ agency in the spirit of the “architecture of urbanity.”
Dasha Kuletskaya is an architect and an architectural history and theory scholar focusing on the interconnection of architecture and economy in the context of contemporary capitalism. She obtained her PhD with distinction from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) with an analysis of how commodification and financialization of land and housing have been unfolding in Minsk and Warsaw since 1989. She is currently working on a project exploring the social construction of economic value through architecture. Her work was published in Architectural Theory Review, Architectural Histories, and Housing, Theory and Society and awarded multiple prizes, including Best Paper by an Early Career Scholar Award from the European Architectural History Network and Princeton | Places Urban Imagination Prize.
Featured image (at top): Miracle of the Holy Cross at Rialto circa 1496. Painting by Vittore Carpaccio (1465–1526), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Vishaan Chakrabarti. The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024, 117.
[2] Ibid., 228.
[3] Ibid., 15.
[4] Ibid., 16.
[5] In the video “Building the Future – Vishaan Chakrabarti | Oral History Programme” released by the Norman Foster Foundation on YouTube on July 19, 2024.
[6] Chakrabarti, The Architecture of Urbanity, 77.
[7] Ibid., 14.
[8] Ibid., 46-47. Samuel D. Gruber. 2017. “Venice: A Culture of Enclosure, a Culture of Control: The Creation of the Ghetto in the Context of the Early Cinquecento City.” In: Wendy Z. Goldman, Joe William Trotter, Jr. (eds.). The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present, London: Routledge, 2017, 74-90.
[9] Carl H. Nightingale. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[10] Charkrabarti, The Architecture of Urbanity,109, 203, also TED Talk by Vishaan Chakrabarti from October 2021.
[11] Verena Göswein, Jay Arehart, Francesco Pittau, Francesco Pomponi, Stephen Lamb, Edwin Zea Escamilla, Fausto Freire, José D Silvestre, and Guillaume Habert. 2022. “Wood in Buildings: The Right Answer to the Wrong Question.” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. Michael T. Ter-Mikaelian, Stephen J. Colombo, and Jiaxin Chen. 2013. “Effects of Harvesting on Spatial and Temporal Diversity of Carbon Stocks in a Boreal Forest Landscape.” Ecology and Evolution 3 (11), 3738-3750. Luis Orozco, Anna Krtschil, Hans Jakob Wagner, Simon Bechert, Felix Amtsberg, Jan Knippers, and Achim Menges. 2023. “Co-Design Methods for Non-Standard Multi-Storey Timber Buildings.” Sustainability 15 (23). Marcelo González-Retamal, Eric Forcael, Gerardo Saelzer-Fuica, and Mauricio Vargas-Mosqueda. 2022. “From Trees to Skyscrapers: Holistic Review of the Advances and Limitations of Multi-Storey Timber Buildings.” Buildings 12 (8). Abhijeet Mishra, Florian Humpenöder, Galina Churkina, Christopher P. O. Reyer, Felicitas Beier, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Hermann Lotze-Campen, and Alexander Popp. 2022. “Land Use Change and Carbon Emissions of a Transformation to Timber Cities.” Nature Communications 13 (1), 4889. Chakrabarti, The Architecture of Urbanity, 159.
[12] Logan Nash. 2013. “Middle-Class Castle: Constructing Gentrification at London’s Barbican Estate.” Journal of Urban History 39 (5), 909-932.
[13] Chakrabarti, The Architecture of Urbanity, 155.
[14] Ibid., 157.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 175.
[17] Ibid., 184.
[18] Robert Gutman. 1988. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Jeremy Till. 2009. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Reiner de Graaf. 2017. Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Flora Samuel. 2018. Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects. London: Routledge.
