A city is a large house and a house, a small city, says the
ever quotable Leon Battista Alberti, whom I have quoted before here. Like all the pithy architecture quotes
about form and function and less and more and the ontological aspirations of
bricks, this one lands with an authoritative yet unenlightening
thud because we never get to the follow up: in what ways are city and house
alike? are they alike in any meaningful way? And, where does such a comparison get us?
I’ve always preferred to think of it as a
sociological/administrative metaphor rather than a spatial one. In that way, it opens a way of thinking about the
complexities of running a city--the shared yet distinct interests of different populations; the judicious stewardship of resources; the need for a clear
decision-making hierarchy. Although there certainly is mapping of functions and there are metaphorical urban living rooms, it’s not really the form or structure of house and city that are similar, so much as the
city as a collective body and the house as household.
For a metaphor to serve its intended didactic purpose the
listener has to have sufficient familiarity with one of the terms to
cast the bright light of understanding on the other term and generate the big epiphany we all crave. The city, you see, is quite like a house; and of course, you know about
the house. Take what you know about the
house and contemplate the city. Now, see
how that understanding of the city bounces new light on your prior
understanding of the house? What makes a
metaphor powerful, though, is when the comparison strains familiarity, when the
metaphier and the metaphrand produce a new way of understanding.
Put a group of architecture students in a room and run that
metaphor by them and it oddly may not work so well. What they know best--and what we all knew at that
age--isn't house and city really, it's the campus, that magical mystery mesocosm between house and city, and
between the intimate protections of childhood and the big city. The very knowledge
of house, of household, that they
need to pry open the metaphor is pretty thin: they are a few years removed from
the houses of their youths, which were administered and stewarded by others. They—and this is a generalization of course—manage only their own resources; their control over their social space is transient and contingent. They borrow, share, rent, move. Liberated by technology from the tether of the land-line, their personal area codes indicate only where they lived when they reached communications maturity, not where they are.
 | |
| temporary political place-making in Oaxaca, MX, photo by Douglas Palladino |
The monolithic words “city” and “house” aren’t
sufficiently exercised to be sufficient anymore. It can’t compete with Alberti in succinctness, but for the
Millennials an urban campus is a great shared apartment; a
shared apartment, a miniature urban campus, where "campus" rings closer to its original meaning of a field, a temporary making of place surrounded by something else. And,
maybe the terms "house" and "city" have become stale to us all.
There is a line of thinking in urban theory that says the contemporary city
is unknowable; that the beloved formal clarity and legibility of the traditional
city persists only in precincts for nostalgic consumption. Perhaps the house is equally unknowable, in
which case the metaphor holds, just not in the way it is usually deployed.
No comments:
Post a Comment