living light in a larger world
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the second (allegretto) movement, is on the CD player. I have played it on repeat for the entire day, as I did most of yesterday, transforming organic unity into meditative cycle, both pleasure and absurdity, absurd especially as the lighter last moments close and, laconic, the sonorous passage begins again. Witless repetition doesn't diminish the majesty of the piece, but it does lead me to reflect on a strange feature of our time – perfect beauty, on demand and always available.
As I listen, I work. I cover the dining room table with a roll of brown paper and bring bags of soil and sand up from the basement. I unearth trowels and chip pebbles from a frozen basket of fall-sifted stone with an adz I keep by the dining room fireplace (along with two spades, a garden fork, a wire basket of cast ironware bought in a barn in Pennsylvania, my gardening boots and two pair of my daughter's boots). All this is together with an enormous basket of plants cut from the garden, dried and "arranged" – a desiccated diary of the past year, clippings and flowers culled from every plant, and often at several moments in its annual cycle.
Today I transplant cuttings: Autumn Joy, the most monumental of the sedum family. Sedum grows for a long season in rocky locations. In more accommodating soil this perennial multiplies itself promiscuously, but in my stony garden I propagate it with care, working closely with tiny new plants, gently breaking them off the rotting finger-lengths of stem, cleaning them, dipping their root-ends in hormone, transferring them from water to sandy soil. These inchlings may grow to almost half my height.
The tiny flowers of Autumn Joy cluster in blossoms as big as my fist, one at the end of each long stem, dozens of them radiating from a single point to form rich, ragged, velvety domes, uncanny in their authority. Slowly, over the season, the colour changes from pale green to lace white to pink to red almost to purple and finally to deep red-brown, as the over-weighed stems give way in the cold, leaving the flowers to dry in the first snow. I took each of my cuttings from a stem at a different moment in its cycle. The white stage seems to have done best so far, but there are months to go before spring, and precociousness is no sign of long life.
Sitting in the southern sun of the dining room window, I have watched my anarchic garden through five seasons now. When I finish potting today, the window sill (already lined with gardener's handbooks and volumes of Nineteenth Century travel journals and trowels and shears and wooden balls and bits of window hardware, a ball of twine, a block of beeswax and the template for a machine part I once made) will be crowded too with clay pots. These plants will go into the garden in the spring. At least those that survive this experiment will go into the garden. And from the garden, I harvested last year's crop of dried blossoms to decorate my Christmas parcels – flowers, brown paper, beeswax, organdy ribbon, and twine. By close pruning I will make space for spring growth of the parent plant. Even if my experiment fails, I always have the parent plant. It is a stubborn plant.
And as I work I sort out this introduction. When I come to a satisfactory point, I wipe my hands, pour myself a tulip-sized cup of the last of last winter's jasmine tea, and, for a few minutes at a time, sit at the computer to write.
I WROTE THAT DESCRIPTION of my day thirteen years ago, preparing for my inaugural first-year class in design; I’ve quoted it at least twice since. These remarks, originally written to introduce a first year term in the winter of 2008, have grown over the last year as circumstances overtake my own earlier prognosis, a little like a blog that I find myself persistently revising.
As it happened, that term in 1995 turned out well. Probably luck. And, as it happens, the last one, in 2008, turned out well. Perhaps more luck. This essay, as it grows, has become a bit of a talisman.
It seems appropriate that the opening focused on domestic arrangements, savoring the day in December of 1995 spent alone in reflection, putting the details of a new term together. Today, instead of tea there is coffee – strong and milky – and at the end of the day I will probably have another coffee in place of the whiskey I now ration. Three summers ago – right at the end of summer – in anticipation of a collapse in value that took another year to come, I sold that house, and its garden. I camped out in a large, borrowed loft, three floors above half-a-dozen Yonge Street café’s and restaurants, for almost a year while I planned the renovations of the apartment I bought that fall. The apartment is part of a co-op, with a board made up of residents, elected to direct the management of the building and guide its fortunes. When the board members interviewed me to see if I would make the right kind of neighbour, one asked me if I was buying my apartment as a pied-a-terre. “No,” I said. “It will be more like a base camp.” I wondered then, and still do now, if I am not retiring from the class of dwellers, perhaps to join a class of other, more nomadic people, who live by the mobile telephone and the laptop, and don’t need much out of a home besides a mail drop, somewhere to leave the books, and a place to hang a hat.
DWELLING HAS ALWAYS BEEN HALF THE PROBLEM of architecture – that half that deals with the accommodation of the individual and the family in the midst of the polis or in the hostile countryside, with the representation of wealth, with the exploration of personal pleasure, and with the cultivation of the self. As a problem, dwelling explores the best and the worst of our selves – the nourishment of family (and its abuse), the curse of avarice and envy, the redemption of study and self-cultivation. It makes our identity. After land, it is usually the first signifier of family and clan and tribe. We can’t go home anymore; home is where they have to take you in when you’ve nowhere else to go; we come from broken homes; we speak of royal houses; we make a home for those we want to take care of; we give those things that matter to us (those persons too) a good home; we send things to a good home when we still love them but no longer make a place in our own lives for them. No home – homelessness – is a crucial state, a way of being without a full identity. Without a residence, a dwelling, at least an address, we cannot with ease vote. Home, domus, dwelling – it identifies us, to ourselves and to our society. It is both a possession and a tool; it may enhance our status even as it enhances our life.
Perhaps because dwelling has become so much a subject of the industry of discontent – that enterprise designed to both satisfy our desires in the marketplace and fuel fresh ones – or because with cunning and great effort, the marketplace has taken the problem of dwelling and forged a commodity of it, dwelling now authentically includes the inauthentic. That is, we have no hope of considering our homes distinct from the narratives composed in the marketplace to induce our envy. Envy comes in two forms: the first is the undue lust for those things not our own, combined with a discontent at the inequity represented by them; the other is the undue ambition to induce that feeling in others. Perhaps, of the two, the second is alone a wicked thing. We know that thing when we see appeals to our status. We cannot think of home naively, or re-consider it from first principles, unless those principles include the consideration of envy and status and alienation, and resale value, and the symbolic content of the places where we live.
Nevertheless, dwelling remains a subject we can approach optimistically – as an element of our liberation from care rather than a device to induce more anxiety – even if that optimism is now coloured by irony.
BUT THE TRANSFORMATION of our homes into a commodity in this culture is only half the irony.
I’ve lived much of my life in Toronto. My daughter boasts that – like an experienced cab driver – I know every shortcut in town. (This is an observation better made of London cab drivers, who DO seem to know every shortcut in town, than it is of many of Toronto’s cab drivers, who, on the whole, seem to be less than content with their trade.) I enjoy the reputation, but it is undeserved, except perhaps generally. The town has changed too much to be familiar to me in any particular place anymore. It is the nature of the metropolis – an environment with a short shelf life: buildings come with a ‘best before’ date stamped on the foundation. It comes home to me again and again as I watch buildings anywhere replaced wholesale by more buildings – usually, but not always, bigger buildings – but it is perhaps nowhere more mysterious or remarkable or touching to me than in the gentle, low-lying inner suburbs of North Toronto. There, small bungalows – made for a tight, slow-growing economy and a middle class that did not expect extravagance – built in the years immediately either side of the Second War, go down in twos and threes, replaced by houses that are in turn perhaps three times the size. The bungalows – not big, with only two bedrooms, a single bath, a tiny kitchen and an abbreviated L-shaped living/dining room combination, and usually with a frame garage behind (often reached by a common drive, and usually built by the owners or their hire, some time after purchasing the house) were of a particular type, just as the new buildings are. The difference is, the new houses not only have more rooms and larger rooms, they have more kinds or rooms. They make for a life where we are increasingly private from one-another, even in our own families.
And, as if this spatial promiscuity was not enough, these buildings also have a strange etymology, an unnatural provenance. It is as if a toy designer had been asked to re-interpret the renovated semi-detached house of Toronto, and to tuck a garage into the front while he was at it, so the house swells up and over that garage. Even though the houses are detached, they are so tall and so close together that they finally take the semi-detached form. This is a form with few redeeming features, and the building materials – bricks made in imitation of brick, pre-cast concrete elements made to look like stone cut and carved, wood factory-enameled to the consistency and finish of plastic, and plenty of plastics as well – leaves the audience for these buildings to consider a world imitating imitations. The windows, unlike those of the houses they replaced, and generally the houses of even the most prosperous of Toronto’s earlier burghers, are all – at least when they face the street – special: arched, bowed, bayed, column-embellished and ornamented, with strips of plastic fitted in the vacuum between the panes of glass that make the double-glazed window to imply leading. In this, they also appear toy-like, in the way that contemporary children’s toys have of concentrating on the remarkable, the fantastic, and almost never evoking the commonplace. As my youngest friends say: ‘shiny things’.
IT IS A TRUISM OF WESTERN SOCIETY: we… have… more. We have more than our parents and grandparents; we have more than other people in other places. “The suburban house is booming. The average size of a new one was 800 square feet in 1950, 1,500 in 1970, 2,190 in 1998.” So said the architectural historian Dolores Hayden, in her paper, written in 2000, and titled, “Model Houses for the Millions: The Making of the American Suburban Landscape, 1820-2000.” That was an increase of 275% in forty years, and if we went looking at America less than a decade later (in the months before the mortgage crisis) likely the figure would have been significantly higher.
More disconcerting perhaps is how much more we in the west have than much of the rest of the world. These days I have a simple measure:
If life… existence, the world… if it was just, or perhaps even explicable, that would be my share and the share all of us could have – one six-billionth – bearing in mind that there will be more and more of us soon, and our share will shrink. Life is not just, and I am likely as selfish as most, so I scale back slowly and certainly not slowly enough to slow what is coming. Only true shortage or collective compulsion will bring that about. According to the Harper’s Index of January 2008, 41% of the people in the world – about 2,460,000,000 people – live without access to a toilet or an outhouse, so I should probably say “shortage that WE cannot tolerate”. We certainly tolerate that shortage for others already.
There is less and less to go around and more and more of us clamoring for it. But as a society, we are at least beginning to take notice.
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.
We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.
That is from Al Gore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, perhaps the best comeback speech of the decade. When a former American presidential candidate admits that we are in trouble, and the Nobel Committee endorses this admission, I think we can accept the fact that we are in trouble.
What does this trouble mean to the practice of architecture? Hard to tell, except perhaps to remind ourselves that, apparently, if we all drove new cars, they would account for a very small amount of our carbon footprint – perhaps 2% – while, if we measured the carbon footprint of our shelters and our cities, we might (and I DON’T remember where I read these things) account for 40%. So it is that making do with less might matter, and, as North Americans, who consume (and hence pollute) more per capita than any other people, it might be worthwhile for us to start to get along with less soon.
According to the New York Times of December 19, 2007:
Legislation that will slowly but significantly change the cars Americans drive, the fuel they burn, the way they light their homes and the price they pay for food cleared the House on Tuesday by a large margin. President Bush said he would sign it on Wednesday.
And at the bottom of the article:
The auto industry, particularly American manufacturers that depend so heavily on truck and S.U.V. sales, had resisted the new efficiency standard but came to support it at the prodding of the automakers’ leading champion in Congress, Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan.
Chrysler’s president, James E. Press, said he welcomed the new legislation and hoped it would remain the single national standard that auto companies must meet.
“Now we get some better clarity where the road goes and how steep the hill to climb is going to be, and we’re going to have fun,” said Mr. Press, formerly Toyota’s top executive for North America. “We’re committed to meeting these standards and doing our part.”
By the next day, in a subsequent report to the Times, the mystery of all this newfound good conscience was cleared up.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.
The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday.
Nine months later, the US auto manufacturers – in spite of manufacturing some very fuel-efficient vehicles – have found themselves on the brink of collapse. It would be hard to say if the California rules would have brought that collapse on sooner, or instead, better-prepared the auto industry for what is now to come. I can only leave the answer to that to economists and historians of this frightening period. What is clear is that the same federal legislatures that soft-pedaled environmental controls a year ago, insinuating their buffering legislation between Detroit and the California rules, now – as a condition of the bail-out – belittle the same automotive executives they bowed to and rather shrilly call for the very reforms they delayed.
THERE WAS A DESIGN EXERCISE for the last part of 2008’s first year work that was, in as constructive a way as I could manage, a critique of some of the most obvious aspects of our problem with homes and the consumption of them. I introduced it with a long quotation from James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophe of the Twenty-First Century.
…Globalism as we have known it is in the process of ending. Its demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and probably by more intensive hand labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all the economic relationships among persons, nations, institutions, and things that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed during the Long Emergency. Life will become intensely and increasingly local… America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its national wealth in a living arrangement – suburban sprawl – that has no future. When media commentators cast about struggling to explain what has happened in our country economically, they uniformly overlook the colossal misinvestment that suburbia represents – a prodigious, unparalleled misallocation of resources. This is quite apart from its social, spiritual, and ecological deficiencies as an everyday environment. We constructed an armature for daily living that simply won’t work without liberal supplies of cheap oil, and very soon we will be without both the oil needed to run it and the wealth needed to replace it. Nor are we likely to come up with a miraculous energy replacement for oil that will allow us to run all this everyday infrastructure even remotely the same way… In any case, the tragic truth is that much of suburbia is unreformable. It does not lend itself to being retrofitted into the kind of mixed-use, smaller-scaled, more fine-grained walkable environments we will need to carry on daily life in the coming age of greatly reduced motoring… We’ll have to live in geographically more circumscribed surroundings. As the suburbs disintegrate, we will be lucky if we can reconstitute our existing traditional towns and cities brick by brick and street by street, painfully by hand. … WE will have access to far fewer, if any, modular building systems. Construction will be much more dependent on traditional masonry, carpentry, and other journeyman skills using simple, easily obtainable, regionally determined materials. Our building and zoning codes will be increasingly ignored. If we return to a human scale of building, there’s a good chance that our new urban quarters will be more humane, which is to say beautiful. The automobile era proved that people easily tolerated ugly, utilitarian buildings and horrible streetscapes as long as they were compensated by being able to quickly escape the vicinity in cars luxuriously appointed with the finest digital stereo sound, air conditioning, and cup holders for iced beverages. This will change radically. There will be far less motoring. The future will be much more about staying where you are than traveling incessantly from place to place, as we do now.
The storm of foreclosures out of the US was nothing more than distant thunder when that term began that January in 2008, and here in Canada, still distant to all but the attentive when the term ended that spring. The price of gasoline had not yet gone entirely feral – running wild, grotesquely high one month, frighteningly (for OPEC princes, here and abroad) flat-lined the next. The summer of residential distress, the September freefall, the failure (averted or not) of the largest investment banks – in fact, the end of that financial industry – and an enormous insurance company, the bailout debates, the stock values cut by half in a matter of weeks, the toxic stain of failure spreading from the financial economy (exotic instruments) to the real economy of solid things – mined and harvested, manufactured and shipped, bought and sold – all this was not yet in the cards, except to prescient students of the economy, among them the hedge fund managers who made the almost-inexplicable practice of short-selling into an almost-heroic act of resistance to an economy running over a cliff.
Short selling, naked short selling, options, derivative securities, exotics, Value at Risk...
Those of us who never deliberately participated in that economy – except once removed, in our pension funds and institutional endowments and our children’s university funds and in the (perhaps inflated) value of our homes – we had to work at understanding these financial concepts, as we watched the collective financial community (was ever a word so loosely used) standing on the trading floors of the world’s stock exchanges, gambling away our collective financial futures like drunken parents with a fist full of the rent money and a betting system, at the crap table at Harrah’s, trying desperately, somehow, to stop the freefall, to make up the losses in a magnificent decades-long Ponzi scheme.
Ponzi scheme. There’s a term I saw no-one use for the longest time. What has been happening is almost too big to be a Ponzi scheme. How could a Ponzi scheme threaten an economy? How could a Ponzi scheme go global?
I stood in front of a class that fall – the same people this homily was prepared for – and tried, as briefly as possible, (as unnecessary as it now seems, it wasn’t only then) to summarize the idea of a Ponzi scheme.
I told them to imagine I had a business investment for them. I asked them to imagine the investment was difficult to explain in detail, because it was very clever; it’s very mystery was the clue to its quality. They only had to know two things: it involved goods everyone needed and wanted, and it had a guaranteed, very generous return. Even after I took my commission, a commission both substantial and in light of the excellent earnings, undoubtedly justified, there would be plenty of money left for the investors. I asked them to imagine that I was offering the front row of the class a terrific investment opportunity, with a remarkable rate of return. If they enjoyed the returns, I’d welcome it if they told the second row about the investment opportunity, and I’d welcome it if they reinvested those returns for even greater rewards. Of course, the second row would invest, and of course most of the first row would re-invest. Those who didn’t reinvest and took their profit would be paid, not from any real appreciation on the original investment, which was founded on little if anything, but from monies invested by the second row and re-invested by the first. The profits-in-hand for those who did cash out would only encourage the confidence of the others in their reinvestments. The third row would fall in line behind the second, the forth behind the third, and so on. Reinvestment would continue at an apparently ever-increasing rate of return, and by degrees, each row would join in the pool of investors, at an ever-increasing cost, for of course, the investment was now seen, by virtue of its very desirability, as worth more. There was no need to investigate the underlying value, the basis for the investment. No one was buying for the value; they were buying for what they could realize on its sale in the future, a future that only looked rosier and rosier, forever. Early investors would remain the most satisfied; the reported gain on their investments would be, by the time the back row joined the pool, remarkable. Some of them might even sense, by then, that the pool had to continue growing to ensure their own profits, but in the face of the returns, they would suppress the significance of that observation.
When the pool of investors would reach its natural limit – the back wall of the classroom – the entire scheme could collapse. Three things would keep it going: persistent paper profits from a program of perpetual re-investment, the expansion of the scheme well beyond the bounds of the classroom, and a conspiracy of silence by those who understood the shaky underpinnings of the enterprise even as they took their profits. Three things would bring on the collapse of the scheme: an unexpected expense that would motivate substantial cash withdrawals well in excess of any real cash available, or the flight of the original perpetrators, or the exposure of fundamental flaws in the scheme by regulators or investigators or contrarian investors protecting their short positions.
And when a Ponzi scheme collapses, no more than a small portion of the apparent value of the investment can possibly be recovered. That is the nature of investments founded on smoke and mirrors. All Ponzi schemes, if they are realized, are investment bubbles, even if all investment bubbles are not necessarily Ponzi schemes. When the smoke clears, there is nothing there, because in fact, there never was.
In all its permutations, the sub-prime mortgage market seems to have been a Ponzi scheme. The foundations of the investments only grew less sound as time went on, and the gulf between investment value and true value grew. The general risk of failure increased as the base of investors grew, as bankers and brokers invented newer and less substantial investment instruments based on it. They were called derivative securities, made one-way-or-another by slicing up and repackaging mortgages, all the while depending on the sound mortgages (a dwindling part of the whole) to provide a pool large enough to dilute the sour mortgages, (an ever-growing part of the package.) By degrees, as the scheme looked farther and farther afield for more and more to invest in, more and more of it was junk, and much of that junk was rated, by virtue of some exotic act of transubstantiation, as an excellent investment. At the end of the ride, only a fraction of the value could ever be recovered. Like street drugs passed down the distribution chain, the strength of the original (increasingly dubious) investments had been stepped on at every link in the chain, from the original mortgages at one end (batched to disguise their shaky provenance and passed on like hot potatoes) to the most exotic derivatives, rated by then as AAA investments... pure, long term gold. Like any Ponzi scheme, the value of the product was wildly over-estimated, while oversight was circumvented, compromised, mystified, or simply bought off.
Governments involved in unpopular wars do their best to keep everyone on the domestic side fat and sassy; in the United States, at least, blowing the whistle on a scheme that kept so much afloat would have been unproductive, insecure, faintly unpatriotic. Instead of bridling this scheme, the American government did that thing that would guarantee a bubble and the consequent bursting, and also guarantee a big bubble: by keeping interest rates low for years and years it made too much money too available in a market where there wasn’t enough sound investment to absorb it. The entire interlocking scheme finally collapsed when foreclosures grew rapidly as the American economy contracted violently, in response to rising oil prices. When it was time to make a withdrawal, there wasn’t nearly enough cash to go around, not nearly enough by perhaps trillions of dollars, and the resulting shock spread so wide that around the world credit simply dried up, and the drought started to drive otherwise healthy enterprises into bankruptcy.
Every confidence man knows the rare success in a confidence game: after you’ve played it, you don’t have to leave town. This time, the investment banks had to leave town, but the crowd that harvested those obscene bonuses all those years the game was in play, they seem to be around still. It is perhaps enough justice to acknowledge that, as a result of this scandal, the government of the United States may actually change its nature somewhat in the coming years. (As I wrote in early December of 2008, watching unprecedented events in Canadian governance, watching civil disorder in Greece, reading about factory occupations in the rust belt of America and billions in automobile manufacturing bailouts, and seeing world currencies tilt, the sense that the changes may be global is a bit overwhelming.)
AND ON DECEMBER 12, the New York Times headlined a business story: “Now Accused of Fraud, Wall St. Wizard Had His Skeptics.”
For years, investors, rivals and regulators all wondered how Bernard L. Madoff worked his magic.
But on Friday, less than 24 hours after this prominent Wall Street figure was arrested on charges connected with what authorities portrayed as the biggest Ponzi scheme in financial history, hard questions began to be raised about whether Mr. Madoff acted alone and why his suspected con game was not uncovered sooner.
As investors from Palm Beach to New York to London counted their losses on Friday in what Mr. Madoff himself described as a $50 billion fraud, federal authorities took control of what remained of his firm and began to pore over its books.
We finally see the words, Ponzi scheme.
As regulation reasserts itself in the United States, we will see those words more often.
By the Nineteenth of December Paul Krugman, (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2008), in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, “The Madoff Economy,” finally pointed out the obvious: The economy of Wall Street financiers had been a Ponzi scheme gone viral, where even the cons had come to fool themselves, at least a little.
In a series of articles investigating the financial failure gathered under the general title The Reckoning, the Times also made it clear that the storm warnings had been issued early and often, and perhaps no-one was fooling himself. The presidential promise to broaden the base of home-ownership in an “Ownership Society” combined with a fundamental mistrust of regulation that went back to Reagan enabled the con. An executive remuneration system in the finance industry that obscenely rewarded short-term gamblers and stock inflators fueled the con. Enormous, corrupting campaign contributions, (and frankly, the undue respect given rich men, no matter what the source of that wealth) cloaked the con. When Armando Falcon, the civil servant charged with the oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, offered up a well-reasoned warning – in February, 2003 – that the financial mortgage giants were in danger of defaulting on debt, and triggering a “contagious illiquidity in the market” – a meltdown – the Whitehouse tried to fire him, and replace him with “a leader in the derivatives market.” When individual states (through consumer protection agencies) tried to control the predatory lending practices that enabled the sub-prime mortgage market to spread like a stain across the society, the Federal Government took them to court and won; the Supreme Court ruled that the states had no control over national banks. The ruling begs the question: Did the Federal Government then have that control?
FOR DECADES, economic historians will feed on the ugly story of the sub-prime mortgage scheme. They may even remark that, while it is in the nature of Wall street to blow itself up every decade or so, and the presence of too much money slopping around (along with too little regulation) makes for big bubbles, the scheme itself stood up and got around on two legs.
The first leg was a pervasive (and induced) discontent with home, a discontent that fed the appetite for more and more and bigger and bigger houses, and for home-ownership made easy, and for speculation that took advantage of that appetite. One of the distant early warnings of trouble to come was an apparently-unheeded federal study pointing out that the cost of home ownership in the United States was disproportionately greater than the cost of home rental, making the induced growth in that market untenable. Apparently, that was still the case in December 2008, even though US house prices dropped 18% in October: artificial inflation of values, serious overbuilding, and heedless speculation left home values with a long way to fall. And there actually is a book in the Dummies Series, Flipping Houses For Dummies. That might have been a clue too, if anyone was looking. At The University of Toronto, where I studied architecture in the early ‘seventies, Jim Lorimer was the professor in a course on Politics and Architecture. An authority on housing development, he taught that all land was subject to speculation, except one’s own home. When people forget that guideline, when they bet the rent money the way they did in the late 1980’s, I watch for another bubble bursting.
The other leg was cheap or (at least) affordable oil, to make the gasoline that made it possible to have large scale vehicles and large scale roads and large scale expressways and large scale low-density settlements that made it all seem somehow reasonable to keep trading up for bigger and bigger homes, farther and farther from jobs and stores (and, let’s face it, civilization) and to speculate that the trade in bigger and bigger would go on unabated.
Home and settlement were finally distorted – by the false economy of credit for cash and for energy, always trading on the future that was closing in fast – past what could sustain it. The appetite was easy to understand, even easy to induce. It was the subject of a confidence game played on Americans and Canadians (and ultimately on people everywhere who trusted to investment and equity in their homes for some aspect of their income, or their security in the future, or their livelihood), a game that said that there was always more of everything, including more of the clamor required to drown out dissenters.
The tragic consequence of this monstrous error is not simply a collapse in real estate value, or a hurricane of foreclosures, or a disastrous, economy-throttling contraction of credit.
What we lost (and it is not simply an American loss, it is our loss), was the sense that we live, not in a cocooned and wired isolation, but in communities, communities of people who can live well if they can recover some sense that a community is not simply a cluster or like-minded people – a church or temple, a syndicate of co-workers, a trade union, the people who subscribe to a particular political party, a facebook group – but something more consequent: people who share common issues, but without, perhaps a common opinion. Community is not simple, it is not a narcissistic association of like-and-like; it is a people joined, as much as anything else, by a common allegiance to the institutions that provide a way through their often difficult disagreements, people who trust that, with those institutions, their differences may be a source of strength rather than simply a source of discord.
Late last winter, working through the student design exercise that I had introduced with Kunstler’s long quotation, before we much heard of sub-prime mortgages, I had a desk-side conversation with one of my students, a bright, talented, sincere young man. I think he was exasperated with the limits my problem – the reconsideration of a scrap of new suburbia – had set for him. In his exasperation, he described the Kunstler excerpt as apocalyptic, imagining it signaled a dark endgame for civilization. I was surprised, probably because the picture Kunstler painted was not an ugly one (although he hints at the ugliness of the world’s worst conduct – political turbulence and military mischief). What he forecasts are smaller lives in a larger world, with more transparent industries, where we live closer to one another, build with artisans or for ourselves, depend less on others for the details of our lives and care more for ourselves, eat locally, make do, own less. He tells us our mobility will be circumscribed. All this might induce anxiety: who can imagine a globe without cheap airfares? Who wants to imagine a more labor-intensive future? Who can imagine an architecture built without the benefits of fine industrial products?
Just now, after the collapse of credit, the world Kunstler projects looks good, especially for the millions of Americans evicted from their homes, the millions of workers everywhere in the world without work, the pensioners looking at their dwindling savings, the families watching the equity they invested in their homes evaporate. If there is a problem with Kunstler’s world, it is that the picture is likely too optimistic. It recalls the time I grew up in, the two decades before 1968. I find little fault in that way of life, although in a number of important ways that world was no better, and often a good deal worst than this one. Who would willingly go back to polio, or apartheid, or corporal punishment or beach movies? But living small in a big world was how we did live, and if it is how we will live again, it will be much more complex than the ‘Fifties, with Google.
On December 15 of this year the Toronto Globe and Mail reported:
Faced first with high gas prices and now with a slowing economy, drivers can look to a thin silver lining on a gloomy 2008 – the number of people dying in car crashes has dropped sharply this year across North America.
Many of the largest Canadian police forces see the trend, most significantly in Ontario, where provincial police have seen deaths drop 30 per cent from the same time in 2007. Double-digit percentage drops have also been seen in British Columbia and Manitoba.
In the United States, drivers are on pace for the fewest road deaths since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House.
Soaring gas prices throughout much of the year caused people to drive more slowly and less often, resulting in fewer serious crashes, academics say.
“I would just say that the majority of [fatality] decline in the past few years has to be gas prices,” said David Grabowski, an associate professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School, who co-authored a recent study on the link between gas prices and deaths.
The American figure puts auto accident deaths on a par with 1964. Perhaps, what’s to come might after all be a bit of the ‘Fifties, with Google.
GROWING UP IN MY GENERATION, the question was, “What are you going to do?” Choices like nothing my parents truly imagined were available to me and the young men and women around me, and it would be up to us to make the right one; we wouldn’t likely get more. Decades later, as I remarked once to a friend who was dealing with his university-age children, the question had become, “Where are you going to do it?” That choice reminded us how small the world had become. Now, with the world crowding in on all sides, and just perhaps getting much bigger at the same time, the question might be, “Who will you do it with? Or perhaps... who will you do it for?”
They sat silent in the coal-black cave of vines. Ma said, “How’m I gonna know ‘bout you? They might kill ya an’ I wouldn’ know. They might hurt ya. How’m I gonna know?”
Tom Laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casey says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one –– an’ then –––”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where –– wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casey knowed, why, I’ll be in the ways guys yell when they’re mad an’ –– I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build –– why, I’ll be there.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
When he turned eighty in 2000, my father made perhaps the only speech he’d ever given to his family. It was short, and it consisted, besides the general and touching observation that he loved his wife and children and grandchildren, of a single specific observation: he and my mother grew up in western Canada during the depression, and came to maturity in a world war – a war in which he served from 1939 to 1945 – and often in unexpected ways, the hardships of those times had done much to form them both. That’s true. My parents grew up in harrowing times, and those times had their effect, perhaps in much the way their children and grandchildren grew up in good times, and that had it’s effect on us. My father never expressed any resentment about his history, and certainly he never hinted he felt he had been hard-done by. Whatever had happened had happened, in some way, to everyone around him. My mother is much the same, except that the consequences of those hardships are nearer the surface for her. One of the things she would speak of when we were younger was the young men of the depression, the older brothers of friends or young men from the neighbourhood, who would simply leave before sunrise, go on the road looking for work because there was none for them in Winnipeg. They would be there one day and gone the next, their departure unannounced and not much spoken of, as if the necessity for such departure was a family shame. I think she must have feared for her brothers, especially her oldest brother, who filled the role of defender in her life. Whatever the case, when I read Tom Joad’s promise to his mother, I think of her young men.
With the promise to his mother, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad vanishes from the story; after that the dénouement belongs to Ma Joad, and it is out of her family’s endurance that Steinbeck closes a story of courage in adversity, a story where people lean on others like themselves to find the support they won’t find in their society as a whole. The Great Depression left an extraordinary body of creative work – art – but among the most optimistic, if legendary, icons is the story of the Joad family.
Now, we have stepped across a threshold, into what seems to be the next great depression.
You are among those who have the responsibility for finding out how we will see this one honestly, and how we will endure this one, with dignity and with compassion.
THERE WAS AN EPILOGUE to that introduction of 1995, written on a then-unduly warm New Year’s Eve for students who were to begin their second term of study in January of 1996. I’m including it here now for the same reason I did then.
Two weeks later, the cuttings prosper. By midsummer, Autumn Joy may skirt my porch.
Beth Kapusta has taken a final proofread. (It helps, having an editor among my friends.) And now I tidy up the document, coordinate the dates, and look to the first days of class with my usual apprehension. For I have new lectures preparing, and this always alarms me.
I have one regret. Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command hasn't made it into the mix. It is too late to order it from the bookstore, the book is too long to transcribe, and in my copy the illustrations are too muddy to reproduce. I wrote my name and the date in the soft cover of that edition (cost: four-and-a-half 1970 dollars). I still practice that signature, torn off with more ease now, the rough spots smoothed away over twenty-five years. This volume is one of the first books in my adult library (sign of the scholarship I never achieve) and it was a classic when I bought it – first published 1948, the year I was born. It is lively, about practices and fashions all in place before I was. A German, Giedion wrote a mannered English as well as he could, leaving a book full of himself and his love of plain surfaces and rococo curves and American ingenuity, about the emotional resonance of things and the dignity of spaces, and about the devaluation of symbols. He is Grandfather, and I have watched his spiritual sons, (my spiritual fathers) run him into the ground, even as they pinched his best material. (Oedipal conduct this: kill the father, steal the kingdom.)
He was, perhaps, the best to sing the song of things and spaces and techniques modern, and of the intrinsic worth of it all. Lewis Mumford reversed himself on too many issues, and did not let the awful beauty shine through. Herbert Read, if faulted at all, seems preachy now, and Nicholas Pevsner too preoccupied with taste, and too willing to worship in the Church of Progress. Of all of them, Giedion kept his head best, even as he outraged good judgment and stitched his heart to his sleeve.
What would he say of the last half century? He would hold his criticism until he finished the tale. And then he would be firm and clear and like any good grandfather, probably forgiving as he puts those years in context, antidote for the nasty consequences of fifty years in the fast lane. He knew we all live in our lives; he could forgive some complicity. But still, he would work us back through the traces, in search of a few strong lines. And he would urge us to pick up those lines, those stories, to make us make sense of what we are doing now, both for others and for ourselves.
If you want to know what this term is about, look to it in Giedion.
And now the fire is dying and my neighbours hail the New Year. I will pour myself a whiskey and fetch my last cigar, and then I will go out to join them.
DM 31 / 12 / 1995
I SEEM TO BE IN THE HABIT of wrapping these things up on New Year’s Eve. In a few minutes I’ll watch my daughter leave for a party across the city. She was three when I wrote the first installment of this reflection; she’ll be seventeen soon. As a Christmas present to me this year, she wrote a comic and touching account of that house for me. Home is one of the things that makes us.
Architects work and study in their own times, and a clear understanding of the times – what’s happening, what’s possible – is, along with a sensible literacy about it all, what makes architecture possible. For me, in good times or bad, and especially in bad, we need architecture. It’s our way of telling each other that what happens day-to-day in the world matters, and if you take pains with it, then others might take pains with the world as well.
Now I’m done for this year. I’m going to pour a whiskey, put up my feet, and read again what she has to say about home.
TIME PASSES, and my habit of using the New Year’s Eve for reflection was spoiled this year, but the function goes on nevertheless. This year, in the inter-regnum between the end of 2010 and the roll-out of the new model, 2011, there is no great sign that there will be a sudden change for the better. Haiti is in misery, true unemployment in the US is likely over 15% with no great sign of dropping off, and the optimism that the Obama election insinuated into the years since has been tempered by the Tea Party, and what I can only read as the ongoing rise of American Fascism, in a plaid shirt. Toronto elected a Tea Party-manqué mayor, but there is some sign already that he may be more bluster than fight. We’ll see.
This season three things occur to me.
The first was George Orwell’s resolution to keep a journal, a resolution he made as war was declared between Britain and Germany. Whatever Orwell thought of the coming conflict (he made his middle-aged war-effort working as a propagandist/broadcaster for the BBC, where he found the model for the Ministry of Truth described in 1984) he was confident that truth would be rare, and the only thing that could be done was to keep an honest record for the future. Now, of course, we have Wiki-leaks and the story of Valerie Plame. It becomes, sometimes, a question of who outs who.
The second thing comes from Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher I’m finally working at coming to terms with, in part for his work on space – conceptual, natural, and social – and in part for his work on ordinariness, everyday life. Lefebvre (not alone, of course) makes a distinction between savoir and connaissance that is frankly political in nature, and worth pursuing, especially in light of his other critical observation, that in urbanisme, time is simply as important a scale as space. Both observations serve to generate theses for some time.
The last thing is simple enough: live life now like it is a time of war, because it is.
