REVIEWS

Book Review
— Justin Loucks

Finding our Elephant: Review of Ladders by Albert Pope exploring a theory of “blindness” in interpreting suburban form

In the ancient parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant”, six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and all come to different conclusion as to what the elephant is; a wall, a spear, a tree, a snake, a fan! In the words of John Godfrey Saxe,

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong!

The second edition of Ladders by Albert Pope is an urban parable of the same substance. Pope’s writing begins with an admission that we are blind to the city we actively build, rendering the city “invisible”. This urban blindness he writes, is a symptom of the poverty of theory, context, and historical precedent that would provide the tools we need to visualize and act upon the landscape1. There is certainly a great deal of discussion on our cities, but analogous to the blind men discovering the elephant, the complexity of the city makes it very difficult to fully comprehend the whole opposed to its respective parts. Ladders distinguishes itself from it’s contemporaries for its lucid investigation of the contemporary city.

Albert Pope does not provide a clear answer to address what the city we actively build will become. What Pope does answer is the question as to why the city is invisible.  The contemporary city is territorially vast but experientially small. No single individual witnesses the entire city. We live and travel within our closed urban loops. Rather than calling the city invisible, it may be more accurate to describe it as out of focus. The city is out of focus because of distraction, ubiquitous space, and speed.

In the preface, Pier Vittorio Aureli brings up an old adage by Ludwig Wittgenstein who remarked that one can build a theory simply by revising the meaning of words whose currency have made them too familiar. I concede personally that the baggage of words like suburbs, freeways, or feeder roads carry negative connotations due to the adverse implications to health, the environment, and sociability. These urban words come with a stigma because of their reference in academia to their role in former misguided urban design. It is stigmatized concepts that distract us from comprehending the city because we denounce, reject, and ignore these urban realities. The effect of this stigmatism has led to myopic conversations about the city we actively construct. It is our new neighbourhoods, at our urban frontiers, that need to be included in the conversation along with inner city retrofitting and growth. In Pope’s words, “The question here is not one of invention, but of the ability of lucid planning to reveal the logic of these extensive urban processes and move that logic toward progressive ends”2.

The author uses his hometown of Houston, Texas as a case study to substantiate his writing, but the book also provides an accurate comparison to Canadian Midwestern cities such as Calgary. All are car dependent, developed during periods of rapid growth, with burgeoning suburbs and exurbs. The urban grid, ancient enough to be referred to as an indigenous human invention, is no longer the predominant urban form of Calgary streets. It has now become strangled by the majority: circuitous enclaves of suburbs full of partitioned cul-de-sacs, bays, feeders and freeways. This new urban majority is a structure that Albert Pope conceptualizes as a “Ladder”. He describes it as, “a singular and exclusive route/root system that generates a fundamentally closed pattern of organization.”3 A route from the living room couch to the office desk.

The invention of segregated enclaves of living, also known as suburbs, has produced highly particular street patterns that constrict future developments and dislocate citizens. As Frank Lloyd Wright prophesied in 1932 in his publication Disappearing City, “We come, now, to the most important unit in the city, really the centre and the only centralization allowable. The individual home.”4 The homogenous distance we travel for simple domestic actions is extraordinary and we ignore most if not all of the journey in between. There is a schizophrenia in urban living akin to flipping through channels on a television. The city is a jarring set of periodic environments with the path to each destination arrived to in the hermetic comforts of privately owned vehicles. People travel great distances now to experience a small amount of the city. This paradox of greater urban mobility and speed without the increase in urban experience adds to the increasing loss of focus of the whole and instead produces habitual loops, jumping from the living room to the office desk and back, without experiencing the interstitial spaces fully.

Albert Pope investigates the post-war city by focusing on the temporal, spatial and universal qualities of western American territory at an abstract level great enough to enable a holistic dialogue about the city.  The contemporary city requires planners and urbanists to suspend biases and opinions and embrace an ambivalent thought process; holding contradictory views of thought and opposing academic principals and designs. We must wrestle with the merging of paradoxical, categorical boundaries: home and house, retreat and displacement, absence with content, etc.. Because cities embody the antiquated thoughts of yesterday, we are beholden to approach the prospective designs of the city with the realism of the existing condition.

The strongest insight that Ladders gives to the reader is to question the relationship between the disparate parts of the city. It teaches urbanists, planners, or anyone interested in the city to study our city by defining and then redefining the evolving constituent pieces. The author draws awareness to the emerging complexities and contradictions, and the reverberations of changing relationships between one urban form and another. Cities are amorphous and in a constant state of flux. When forms or technology impact a part of the system, the relationships of one component reverberate across the remainder. Pope doesn’t provide a clear answer to what the city we actively build will become, in part because the way in which to describe the city doesn’t lend itself to definitive statements. The city of the future, as always, will be required to be more adaptable and robust. It will need to be able to grow and decay, expand, and contract, and not be restricted by current categories of consciousness and policy that may eliminate the opportunity for serendipity and subversion.

Returning to the parable of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” city builders need to be conscious of their biases to enable them to perceive the greater nuances and form of cities. To add further dimension to the parable, to a mouse the elephant is a giant, to a tiger it is prey, and to a flea the elephant is it’s world entirely. Pope does well, like the sighted man, to emphasizes the holistic formal characteristics of the city, but it is important to recognize the multitude of qualities and perspective that the city simultaneously embodies. Like the elephant, the city is a great many things depending on who and how one perceives it. We must not only work to observe the whole city but also perceive the shifting qualities of the city to make the invisible visible.

References:

1 Pier Vittorio Aureli, introduction to Ladders by Albert Pope, 2nd ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), xxxviii

2 Albert Pope, Ladders. 2nd ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 225

3 Ibid, 61

4 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City. (New York: W.F. Payson, 1932) 80

Look for this title at The FOLD's local Recommend Shelf at Shelf Life Books in Calgary.

Justin Loucks is an Architect currently based in Toronto, Canada. He is interested in understanding what it means to live and build in a Canadian context, and how globalization, market economies, and digital technology are transforming territories.