Critiques of modernism

On a cold morning Dr. Arslan meets the class in the Nicollet Mall skyway, one of the enclosed bridges that link more than seventy blocks of downtown Minneapolis at the second floor. Outside, the street below is almost empty. 'The first skyway here opened in 1962,' she says. 'It was a brilliant answer to winter, and it was a modernist idea: separate people from cars, lift them into a controlled interior. But it took the shops, the cafés and the people off the street. Whether that was a gain or a loss is still argued about. Today I want you to walk the skyways and the sidewalks and decide who was right.' Wren counts the people she meets in the skyway. Callum goes down and counts the people on the sidewalk. When they compare notes, the question has become a theory: what is a street for?

By 1960, modernism had won. The glass office tower, the slab of apartments in open parkland and the expressway through the city had become the standard answers to the problems of the postwar world. Within a decade those answers were under attack from many directions at once: from residents whose neighborhoods had been cleared, from sociologists and journalists, from architects within the modern movement itself, and from a new generation of students. This lesson examines those critiques, because every later movement in this course grew from them.

The city of towers and the city of streets

The modernist city had a clear theory behind it. Le Corbusier's plans of the 1920s, the Athens Charter drawn up by the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in 1933 and published in 1943, and countless postwar plans divided the city into separate zones for living, working, recreation and circulation. Housing was to be set in towers or slabs surrounded by green space, open to sun and air. Traffic was to be separated from pedestrians. Old, crowded districts were to be cleared. In the United States the Housing Act of 1949 funded urban renewal, and in Canada federal and provincial programs did the same through the 1950s and 1960s. Regent Park in Toronto, begun in 1948, was the first large public housing project in Canada, built on cleared streets as a superblock of low and later high buildings.

The results were mixed. Many people gained warm, bright apartments with indoor plumbing for the first time. But clearance destroyed communities, businesses and buildings, and it fell hardest on poor and racialized neighborhoods. The new projects often lacked shops, workplaces and the ordinary life of streets. Large open spaces around towers were often empty and unsafe. By the 1960s it was clear that the modernist city, whatever its intentions, had produced places many people did not want to live in.

Jane Jacobs and the life of streets

The most influential critique came from a writer, not an architect. Jane Jacobs, an editor at Architectural Forum who lived in Greenwich Village in New York, published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. Its first sentence announced an attack on current city planning and rebuilding, and it delivered one. Jacobs argued that planners had studied cities from above and from theory, not from the sidewalk. She described the street life of her own neighborhood, Hudson Street, as a kind of ballet, in which shopkeepers, residents, children and strangers kept each other safe simply by being there. Her phrase for this was eyes on the street.

Jacobs proposed four conditions for a lively city district. It should have a mixture of primary uses, so that people are present at different times of day. Most blocks should be short, so that there are many corners and many routes. It should mix buildings of different ages and conditions, so that old, cheap space is available for new businesses and poorer residents. And it should have a sufficient density of people, including residents. Every one of these conditions contradicted the modernist plan, which separated uses, created superblocks, cleared old buildings and spread people thinly across open space.

Jacobs was also an activist. She helped stop Robert Moses's plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway through her neighborhood. In 1968 she moved to Toronto, where she joined the campaign against the Spadina Expressway, which would have cut through downtown neighborhoods. In 1971 the Ontario government canceled the downtown section. Her ideas shaped the mixed-use, street-oriented planning that many Canadian and American cities adopted from the 1970s onward, including the redevelopment of Regent Park itself from 2005, which reintroduced streets, shops and a mix of incomes.

Jacobs's critics have pointed out that her ideal neighborhood was itself changing. The qualities she praised, old buildings, mixed uses and street life, made Greenwich Village desirable, and rising rents later pushed out the working people who had given it life. Gentrification is, in part, a consequence of Jacobs's success. Others argue that her focus on the street underrated the problems of poverty and discrimination that clearance was meant, however badly, to address. Reading Jacobs well means holding both points at once.

Pruitt-Igoe and the death of modern architecture

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in Saint Louis, Missouri, became the most famous symbol of modernism's failure. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center in New York, it was completed in the mid-1950s: thirty-three eleven-story slabs containing about 2,870 apartments, set in open ground. The design included skip-stop elevators that stopped only on every third floor, with wide galleries meant to serve as streets in the air. Within a few years the project had high vacancy, crime and severe maintenance problems. Demolition began in 1972, and by 1976 all the buildings were gone.

In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Charles Jencks dated the death of modern architecture to the afternoon in July 1972 when the first blocks were demolished, and the photographs of collapsing slabs became one of the best-known images in architecture. The story was powerful, but historians have since shown that it was too simple. Pruitt-Igoe was underfunded from the start, its maintenance depended on rents from tenants too poor to pay them, the city's population was shrinking, and housing policy reinforced racial segregation. The design had faults, but the project failed mainly because of the policies around it. A documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), made this case to a wide audience.

The lesson of Pruitt-Igoe for a designer is double. Architecture alone cannot solve, or cause, social problems that come from poverty and discrimination. But design still matters: long galleries without clear ownership, elevators that stop on few floors and open ground that no one controls can make a difficult situation worse. In Defensible Space (1972), the architect Oscar Newman argued that residents protect spaces they can see and feel responsible for, and that design can create such spaces. His work influenced housing and crime prevention for decades, though critics argue that it encouraged fortress-like design and surveillance.

Critiques from inside: Team 10

Modernism was also criticized by modern architects. At the ninth congress of CIAM, at Aix-en-Provence in 1953, a group of younger members challenged the Athens Charter's four functions. They became known as Team 10, after the tenth congress they were asked to organize, and they included Alison and Peter Smithson from Britain, Aldo van Eyck from the Netherlands, Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods in France, and Jaap Bakema. They argued that a city is not a set of functions but a pattern of human association: the house, the street, the district and the city. CIAM itself was dissolved in 1959.

Team 10's members did not reject modernism; they tried to humanize it. The Smithsons' Golden Lane competition entry of 1952 and their later Robin Hood Gardens in London (completed 1972) put wide access decks on slab buildings as streets in the air. Van Eyck's Amsterdam Orphanage (1955 to 1960) was a cluster of small domed units around courtyards, a building designed as a small city, and his hundreds of playgrounds in Amsterdam turned leftover spaces into places for children. Their ideas about identity, association and the in-between space between public and private influenced architects across the world.

Memory, typology and the city: Aldo Rossi

In Italy, Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966) attacked modernism from another angle. Rossi argued that the city is a collective artifact built up over time, and that its enduring elements, monuments and building types, carry its memory. A building type, such as the courtyard house, the arcaded street or the basilica, is not a function but a form that has persisted through many changes of use. Architects should therefore study and reuse types rather than invent new forms for every program. Rossi's own buildings, such as the San Cataldo Cemetery at Modena (designed 1971), used simple, repeated, almost archetypal forms: the cube, the cone, the long arcade.

Rossi's approach, often called neo-rationalism or the Tendenza, influenced a generation of European architects and the reconstruction of historic cities. In Collage City (1978), Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter made a related argument from the United States, proposing that the city be understood as a collage of fragments from different times rather than as a single utopian plan. Both texts encouraged architects to design in relation to the existing city instead of replacing it.

Radical alternatives: megastructures and capsules

Other critics went in the opposite direction, imagining cities more technological and more changeable than modernism had allowed. In London, the group Archigram, formed in 1961, published magazines full of drawings of Plug-in City, Walking City and Instant City, in which buildings were frameworks with replaceable parts, like consumer products. In Japan, the Metabolist group launched its manifesto at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, proposing cities that grew and changed like organisms. Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972) put prefabricated capsule rooms on two concrete cores; the capsules were meant to be replaced, but never were, and the building was demolished in 2022, with some capsules preserved. These projects were critiques of modernism's fixed, final plans, even when they used its technology.

# Comparing two site plans with the same number of homes.
site_area = 40000          # site area, m2 (4 ha)
homes = 600

plans = {
    "Towers in a park": {"footprint": 4 * 1200, "floors": 13, "street_frontage_with_doors": 120},
    "Perimeter blocks": {"footprint": 18000, "floors": 4, "street_frontage_with_doors": 1400},
}
for name, p in plans.items():
    coverage = p["footprint"] / site_area
    floor_area = p["footprint"] * p["floors"]
    print(f"{name}: coverage {coverage:.0%}, floor area {floor_area:,} m2, "
          f"{floor_area / homes:.0f} m2 per home, "
          f"{p['street_frontage_with_doors']} m of street frontage with doors")

Towers in a park: coverage 12%, floor area 62,400 m2, 104 m2 per home, 120 m of street frontage with doors
Perimeter blocks: coverage 45%, floor area 72,000 m2, 120 m2 per home, 1400 m of street frontage with doors

The numbers are illustrative, but they show something Jacobs understood without a calculator: towers in a park and perimeter blocks can house the same number of people on the same land. What differs is how much of the ground is street, how many front doors face it and therefore how many eyes watch it. Density alone does not make a lively place; the arrangement matters.

Exercise 2: walking the street

This exercise takes about three hours.

• Choose two streets in your city: one in an older, mixed district and one in a postwar development or office district.
• On each, walk one block at noon and again at six in the evening. Count the people, the doors and the shops, and note who is there.
• Draw a plan and a section of each block showing buildings, doors, sidewalks and parking.
• Deliverable: one page per street with drawings and counts, and one paragraph testing Jacobs's four conditions against what you saw.

Self-critique checklist

• Did I count, or did I guess?
• Have I recorded who was absent as well as who was present?
• Have I distinguished the effects of design from the effects of income, policy and location?
• Have I been fair to the postwar development, noting what it does well?