The East Wing and America’s Disposable Economy

An NBC News photo shows the East Wing demolition in process this week

Although a majority of Americans reportedly disapprove of this week’s demolition of the East Wing, exact disapproval follows largely partisan lines. The White House extension, first built in 1902, stood between the president and his long-sought “ballroom,” and approval of the new replacement largely tracks with personal support for the president. Less interesting than exact details to me, though, is the underlying beliefs exposed by the demolition.

I cannot help perceiving the president’s actions through my seven years in the construction industry. Unlike the president, who comes from the moneyed, white-collar end of property development, I worked the jobsites, cordless impact driver in hand, tape measure hanging off my belt. The president works with schematic drawings, models, and CAD renderings. For each of us, the other’s perspective is an abstraction, separate from our particular job.

To architects, contractors, and project managers, only the finished product matters. The process is as ephemeral as pixie dust. Management wants to complete construction on time and under budget; everything else serves that goal. Existing structures, built with outdated technology and, probably, with hand tools, are an impediment. To the property developer, historic preservation is a costly nuisance that impedes progress, while demolition is cost-efficient.

Historic preservation is, ultimately, an expression of sentimentality. The Democratic-aligned objection to the East Wing demolition has focused heavily on historic photographs taken among the picturesque colonnade, or memories of the officials—especially First Ladies—who conducted White House business in those offices. They revere the now-lost East Wing for the same reason you’d rather see the church where your parents were married be restored than razed.

But American economics doesn’t place dollar values on sentiment. The president ran all three of his campaigns on rhetoric of cost efficiency, profitability, and business acumen. The philosophy of shareholder value, which has dominated American economics since at least the 1970s, sees ordinary people not as moral agents, but as arbiters of price. Historic buildings are worth exactly as much as one can outbid the developer who’d rather flatten it.

The president with one of the hand-sized architectural models of his grandiose
monuments, which he loves waving around for journalists

My first construction industry job involved building a new city high school to replace the nearly seventy-year-old existing building. The city’s cost-benefit analysis deemed the existing building too expensive to save. This decision distressed many people who’d lived in town their entire lives, and had deep-seated formative memories associated with the existing building. But their feelings weren’t sufficient to absorb the tax bill necessary for costly restorations.

Many public and municipal buildings, including schools, government offices, and universities, still have exterior facades built from slab marble, sandstone, and other valuable materials worth preserving. But those are merely cosmetic. The rise of steel-frame architecture means that a small number of girders carry the building’s weight. Interiors are built from tin studs, gypsum drywall, and poured concrete, materials with a maximum life expectancy of about fifty years.

Commercial buildings and houses are even worse. Most such buildings constructed after the Eisenhower Administration need significant restoration after around thirty years, because cinder block masonry, OSB underfloors, and aluminum HVAC systems, will just rot. Several American suburbs, once desirable and exclusive, are now saddled with the blight of abandoned malls and big-box retail stores: too decrepit to use, too expensive to restore, and too dangerous to demolish.

Nor is this accidental. Since the Levittown building boom of the 1950s, architecture’s core principles, as a field, have shifted away from durability, onto cost reduction. The White House’s facade hasn’t been much amended since George Washington laid the cornerstone in 1793. My city’s former high school, by contrast, decayed so spectacularly that I broke pieces off the seventy-year-old face by kicking them with a steel-toed boot.

Our president claims the East Wing demolition became necessary after discussion with architects, but I don’t believe that. After seven years in the industry, I know that, to the bean counters who control modern design and construction, demolition is always the first choice. Unless government agencies or private conservationists step in to prevent it, contractors regard old buildings as a private cost, not a community asset.

To America’s capitalist class, everything is as disposable as an aluminum soda-pop can. People like our president measure buildings’ value not by their historic legacy, but by their cost efficiency. The East Wing was worth less, to him, than whatever supposed value he can extract from his extravagant “ballroom.” The same will apply, eventually, to your historic downtown, your local schools, or your house.

Nothing, anywhere, is safe from the bulldozers and grandiosity of America’s ruling class.

At Prayer in the Temple of Commerce

I needed, this weekend, to make a last-minute purchase at a big-box retailer. I won’t name names, because this isn’t about particular chains. However, after biking to the store, winded and tired, I stumbled into a sort of no-space. The air was climate-controlled, the aisles spacious and well-stocked. The floor was without feature, while the ceiling was so high that, like clouds, I couldn’t distinguish specific details; I could’ve been literally anywhere on the planet.

In the epilogue to Greg Grandin’s book The End of the Myth, Grandin mentions America’s collective outrage to discover, at the height of the Trump Administration’s “family separation” policy along the border, that many children, isolated in a nation where they don’t speak the language, got warehoused in a prison that used to be a WalMart. Officials didn’t even need to change the building much; they applied their brand, and voilà, it was a prison.

Like many Americans, I initially felt the intuitive gut-clench of fury upon learning children, children, were treated in this way. But, stepping into such an arcology of modern commerce this weekend, I realized: that’s who we are now as Americans. We live in a world of modularity and bigness, a culture that celebrates the vast and complete interchangeability of life’s corners. The total correspondence between WalMart and a prison isn’t a bug, it’s the system.

Visit any randomly selected big box retailer or enclosed shopping mall on Saturday afternoon. Notice how different age brackets respond. We adults often accept the necessity of these basilicas of commerce, and circulate constantly, eyes down and feet constantly in motion, interacting only with our designated in-group, not unlike prisoners in The Yard. However, children, not yet socialized to these environments, absolutely hate them, and often scream bloody murder, until they learn to accept fate.

Think about that difference. Children, still beholden to the first-order impulses that reflect human evolution, God’s creation, or whatever, want to run, play, meet new people, and build communities, as children do. Adults resign themselves to the environment, and go along to get along. Do stores and malls socialize adults into complicity with a system totally counter to evolutionary drives? Not by themselves, certainly, but they’re part of an elaborate system to accomplish this goal.

Shopping for hardware this weekend, I realized, the owners had successfully isolated me from the outside world. Was it sunny or gloomy out? If I hadn’t just been outside five minutes earlier, I couldn’t have told you. What about social conditions outside: rich or poor? Peaceful or violent? Who knows? I’ve visited big-box retailers from the West Coast to Kansas City, and once you’re inside, you could be on the moon for all you know.

Converting one store into a prison, thus, isn’t any big stretch. Industrious entrepreneurs have converted abandoned big box retailers into schools, public libraries, and suburban megachurches. Because ultimately, they all feed the same base impulse. Complete isolation made me believe I could assuage the emptiness inside by purchasing batteries, bananas, or tube socks. Change the interior layout of the building, and you can fill that emptiness with wisdom, salvation, or penance. It’s all modular anyway.

Because fundamentally, as humans, we know we’re missing something. Christians once tried to plug that absence with God’s love, while Buddhists encouraged us to disconnect from the material world and become pure spirit. Religion has retreated from the greater discussion of human experience, at least in our time, leaving a vacancy without any ready-made solution. Big box architecture accentuates this absence, then encourages us to assuage it with… well, with whatever they’re selling this week.

In one of philosophy’s most misused orphan quotes, Michel Foucault famously wrote: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The interchangeability of these buildings emphasizes, to Foucault, their identical purposes in social formation. They isolate individuals from their core evolutionary drives, and redirect them to whatever authorities consider admirable. One wonders why, writing as late as 1977, Foucault’s famous list didn’t include the already ubiquitous malls and K-Marts.

No wonder Siddhartha or Saint Anthony didn’t just abandon their lives while seeking transcendance, they abandoned built environment altogether. Because this isn’t an individual function. The entire social arcology serves to redirect humans to accept a power hierarchy that, if we could run and climb trees, we’d immediately realize is artificial. For all their faults, churches and temples encourage us to look up and aspire. Big box architecture forces us to look down, and comply.

Innovative Cities and Neighboring Life

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 37
Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

I'm of two minds about this book. I agree with everything urban designer Jeff Speck says about the social, physical, and environmental prices we pay for cities hostile to what he calls "the useful walk." I've seen the cultural and economic revitalization that has struck cities which implement his "Ten Steps of Walkability." I'd like to see his principles applied widely, reconnecting people to their neighbors and neighborhoods nationwide.

However, I have certain problems with his vision. They aren't completely dispositive, and are limited largely to one chapter, so future innovations will probably answer my doubts. However, my problems reflect the limitations Speck and his fellow big-city architects haven't acknowledged about their lofty goals, and they'll need resolved before Speck's "Walkable City" vision becomes widespread. Otherwise, they'll create new expenses further down the line.

Speck divides his spirited, informative, often funny book into two parts. The first is essentially a manifesto about why pedestrian-friendly urban cores matter. He points us toward a "general theory of walkability" and makes three concise, lucid points:

1. When people walk, they have opportunities to meet new people, see new places, and have new experiences; when people drive, they zoom past real life.
2. When people walk as a useful enterprise, they use their bodies productively; when people drive, they spend their most productive hours sitting down, and get fat.
3. When people walk, they don't contribute to environmental decay; when people drive, every little errand burns carbon.

Counter-arguments readily avail themselves, but Speck slaps them down quickly. The convenience cars provide doesn't offset the isolation, and resultant creative and industrial suppression, they create. Habitual drivers may exercise, but most don't, and in today's marathon commute culture, perhaps can't. And while cities are notorious hubs of carbon pollution, most carbon burned in urban cores gets burned by suburban commuters.

Speck's second, much longer part comprises ten clear steps that encourage pedestrianship. Some seem obvious. People will walk where there's something to see; where green spaces renew fresh air and provide convenient public meeting places; and where mixed uses put errands, gathering spaces, and residences close together. Readers will recognize these claims from Norman Rockwell paintings and Disneyland's Main Street USA.

Other recommendations seem counter-intuitive, until Speck explains his reasoning. While trees encourage walking, broad green spaces discourage it, by making walking monotonous and separating people widely from their destinations. How cities handle public parking makes remarkable degrees of difference. And monumental buildings designed by what Speck calls "starchitects" discourage community usage and "the useful walk."

I love everything Speck says so far. Where I live, in the Great Plains, I've watched how towns which adopt essentially suburban design paradigms see their cores wither and their economies starve. And I've seen how towns that follow Speck's principles flourish. My fellow prairie dwellers bemoan the "brain drain" and wonder how to keep populations robust and prosperous. Speck replies succinctly: be someplace people want to live.

My problem arises in Chapter Three, Speck's chapter on how high-density urbanism discourages environmental pollution. Speck draws heavily on David Owen's book Green Metropolis, which contends that dense usage minimizes carbon burned for climate control, transportation, and other ubiquitous uses. Owen and Speck insist that city design actively discourages flagrant carbon abuse, and I believe them. The evidence is robust.

But the Owen-Speck model excludes two kinds of pollution unique to high-density usage. Cities require constant massive infusions of food, which suppliers must truck in. Perhaps Speck and Owen don't realize how carbon-intensive American agriculture is today, but farms burn almost as much carbon as suburbs. Cities also produce vast quantities of sewage, which generally gets unloaded today by treating it with synthetic chemicals and dumping it into waterways.

Cities employing Speck's dense mixed-use paradigm must tackle sewage removal. And American society overall must reassess our carbon reliance in agriculture and other industries. We're producing more food—and frankly, more mineral extract, more manufactures, and more stuff generally—than we need, which requires constant carbon infusions. (Other authors have addressed this problem.) Dense cities will fix some of that problem, but other concerns remain.

The move away from walkable cities reflects an American fixation on bigness. Big houses with big lawns, big cars navigating big streets, big industry fueling big consumption, and naturally, banks too big to fail. Speck's human-scale urbanism principles should help relieve at least some big, destructive problems. While pedestrian-friendly downtowns are no panacea to relieve American gigantism, anyone who's window-shopped lately knows, it's a good place to start.


See Also:
The New American Urbanism

The New American Urbanism

Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, & Oliver Gillham, Urban Design for an Urban Century: Shaping More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient Cities

The years from 1950 to 2000 saw massive increases in America’s suburban infrastructure. While our inner cities withered from neglect, anyone who could afford to leave, fled to spacious towns, many hastily erected, where every house had large lawns, and zoning regulations separated housing, work, and commerce. Americans embraced the Levittown model, aided by cheap petroleum and generous government assistance.

But in 2010, for the first time since the Depression, America’s largest cities grew. They outgrew an infrastructure unprepared to handle them, and they grew faster than urban designers had any plans for. For the first time in three generations, Americans want the urban life, and will accept close quarters to achieve it. But America’s urban leaders need to design cities amenable to young, upwardly mobile residents, a semi-lost skill.

Suburbanism, this book asserts, has always been an essentially American phenomenon. Where European and Canadian cities built compactly after World War II, and poorer countries never had resources for car-dependent suburbanism, America embraced spacious postwar utopian ideas regarding space use. That’s why Americans burn nearly a quarter of Earth’s petroleum: because without it, our diffuse cities, with their single-use neighborhoods and looping street layouts, are just too damn big.

Early on, this book quotes Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, whose influence primarily echoed in America, and who championed spacious semi-urbanism’s “towers in a park” model, on why people hate built-up urban streets: “Our hearts are always oppressed by the constriction of its enclosing walls.” But fifty years of history have disproved this claim. Close-build urban streets give public life definition. Shapeless suburbanism alienates people, turning every household into a fortress.

But the Millennial Generation has rejected this suburban pattern. Propelling themselves around cul-de-sacs in hermetically sealed, carbon-burning cars has lost its appeal. Educated young Americans want to live in neighborhoods where home, work, commerce, and recreation co-exist within a few minutes’ walk. And cities which provide this quality of life have unique ability to attract and retain young innovators and knowledge industry workers. Briefly put, young Americans want city life.

Our authors note that a substantial shift in perception happened around 2008: the number of people signing massive suburban mortgages dropped off, while urban downtowns began a measurable resurgence. Owning land matters less than owning opportunity. They avoid assigning reasons, but the conclusion seems inescapable: when housing markets tanked, Americans decided tying their net worth to housing values was foolish. Essentially, the banks torpedoed a half-century of rambling suburban sprawl.

Those communities which build spaces where people want to live, will see economic growth, cultural abundance, and environmental healing in coming years. Those which don’t, won’t. This means rehabilitating existing urban cores, building new cores where none previously existed, and keeping fingers on society’s pulse. Our authors quote the designers behind recent renovations in Pittsburg: “Strengthening and protecting physical characteristics that support identity should be an integral purpose of zoning.”

This move inward will create significant dislocations very soon. Our authors quote statistics that urban neighborhoods will face a shortfall of sixteen million housing units by 2030. New demand will boost prices, driving “urban poor” into suburbs, where housing prices are already collapsing. This reverse ghetto-ism will lock American poor into car-dependent poverty. Unless governments, private developers, and voters act soon, we’ll see a radical realignment of American poverty.

But we have an opportunity, unseen since the Eisenhower years, to realign American society. Our authors provide examples, lushly illustrated, of cities which have rebuilt for pedestrians and mass transit. Former commuter towns have narrowed roads, inserted streetcars, and become desirable destinations. This book offers practical primers on how public-private partnerships, activists, and preservationists are actively reshaping American cities into places people really want to live, right now.

This book isn’t for everybody. Its squarish, two-column format and $85 MSRP reflect that it was written as a textbook. People encountering urban design principles and the necessities of public space use for the first time will find this book intimidating. For those readers, I recommend Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, which this book quotes approvingly. It recasts these authors’ admittedly dense principles in plain English for non-specialists and neophytes.

But for readers already familiar with the debate, this text provides up-to-date statistics, lavishly illustrated examples, and a thorough explication not just of how we could address these problems, but how some cities already have. Architecture students, city councils, and public advocates should familiarize themselves with this book. It provides important keys to building environmentally secure, economically stable cities where people actually want to live.

I.M. Pei Builds the 20th Century

Jill Rubalcaba, I.M. Pei: Architect of Time, Place and Purpose

Ieoh Ming Pei was born into a Chinese society whose best days seemed behind it. Wracked with revolution, hectored by European capitalists, China appeared to be on its last legs. But Pei’s family stayed ahead of the violence by moving among a succession of Buddhist monasteries, ancestral meditation gardens, and modern urban developments. These ancient and new influences provided Pei’s first education in making buildings both useful and uplifting.

Jill Rubalcaba has a substantial résumé publishing history and historical fiction for middle grade readers. Her publisher is pushing this new biography of IM Pei for readers age twelve and up, but with its lavish illustrations and sweeping human landscapes, adults will find plenty to like as well. You could press it into your kids’ hands if they’re looking for a purpose to drive their lives, or you can display it as art in pride of place in your living room.

Like many Chinese in the years between the world wars, Pei’s family sent their oldest son to study in America. Architecture initially put him off, with its emphasis on rococo design frippery, but Pei happened to hit the field just as Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus pioneers revolutionized the discipline. Suddenly, instead of being the exclusive domain of rich sybarites, artful design promised to allow ordinary people the chance to live in beautiful spaces.

Unable to return to China when the Communists took over, Pei instead joined forces with a Manhattan land tycoon, designing low-cost housing for the post-war economic boom. Though “high art” architects looked down on this kind of work, it proved a valuable learning experience for Pei. He learned, because he had to, how to perform feats of remarkable engineering with scarce materials and less money. This would pay off when he graduated to more ambitious projects.

More than once in this book, Rubalcaba quotes Pei insisting that he has no specific “signature” as an architect. And there’s something to that, inasmuch as he doesn’t incorporate the same ornamentation into every design, like Le Corbusier’s elevated pylons or Maxwell Fry’s picture windows. But with his fondness for radiant natural light, glass architecture, and geometric minimalism, Pei most certainly has his own distinct, and influential, style.

Rubalcaba focuses on just a few of Pei’s buildings (notably not including perhaps his most famous design, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum). These range from well-known and iconic, like his glass Louvre pyramids and Hong Kong’s landmark Bank of China building, to less famous buildings, like Kyoto’s Miho Museum and Beijing’s low-rise Fragrant Hill hotel. Her descriptions of Pei’s ambitious process emphasize architecture as art, not “mere” system.

Importantly, Pei seems to relish challenges. Designs like the Kennedy Presidential Museum and Fragrant Hill were marred from the start by community opposition, bureaucratic intransigence, scarce resources, and budget shortfalls. But the skills Pei first cultivated building postwar housing on a shoestring paid off with interest. He designed elaborate workaround techniques that not only saved the project, but presaged today’s environmental design.

Jill Rubalcaba

And Pei proves important principles which current designers and artists could stand to emulate. He eschews pretentious ornamentation, keeping focus on simple geometric forms which enhance whatever work or leisure happens within their walls. His lack of ostentation breathed new life into the Louvre, which was decaying before his intervention. And his National Center for Atmospheric Research building, designed half a century ago, still looks innovative and new.

Rubalcaba fleshes out her fast-moving but detailed text with breathtaking illustrations. Pei’s preliminary pen sketches give way to detailed design drawings and models, photos of construction in process (Pei importantly appears on his sites, not just designing from some glass-enclosed Manhattan office), and comprehensive landscapes of his finished buildings. Rubalcaba emphasizes Pei’s architecture as doing and living, not art on paper.

She also does a remarkable job situating her subject in his life and times. As she states, Pei’s work is inseparable from the Buddhist gardens and minimalist Chinese design of his boyhood. Her photos document what remains of Pei’s ancestral China, and she incorporates numerous pictures from his life, including interactions with such luminaries as Paul Mellon, François Mitterrand, and Jackie Kennedy.

Rubalcaba dances along the border between children’s book and grown-up art folio, creating a product sure to please anyone who loves great design, fine photography, and contemporary history. She makes Pei come alive through his works, and his buildings come alive through him. This book is a pure pleasure to read, look at, or just to hold.