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Rich is Right

The mixed use of Marina City combined working, recreation, shopping and living in the center of the city in a single complex of buildings for the first time in America. The nearest comparable development had been Rockefeller Center in New York wherein the Rockefeller group told me of their regrettable failure to include housing in their enormous mixed use complex. When we built Marina City we were compelled to fight and we fought successfully to revise the zoning code and the FHA regulations to permit the planing and financing of a mixed use project with housing. Today if we fail to build mixed use projects- if we fail to create neighborhoods in our city centers we recognize we are endangering the future life of our center cities.

Marina City was the project of the janitor's union. It was meant to bring exurbanites back into the city. It was meant to add new jobs, new life, even for the janitor's union. And it was mandatory for us to try for design development leading to a new humanism in city living.

Twenty five years later after further development of architectural forms in many varied activities - but all of them concerned with communities of people - we are again creating yet another model for urban living and working at River City.

This is not to say that we understand how to rejuvenate living in the city center. In the past 25 years we have confirmed that the shape of architecture can affect behavior and we have made many new designs which favorably support many important human activities in education and health care as well as in living.

We have learned how to combine many things that people need for the good life: In addition to security, there is a profound need for communication- not just communication by telephone or the written word, but by body language, by activity, by recognition, by joint effort and activity. We have recognized the constant need for support of health, of education, of new enterprise. River City will contain many of those options in living. Its 22 different apartment types will provide computerized education systems for children and adults; a health diagnostic center by Presbyterian-St. Luke Hospital, a 2-way television that not only connects with a variety of external programs but permits tenants to create and communicate their own programs. A Business and Technology Center will be an incubator for new businesses and new jobs.

Few of our modern buildings have followed the mainstream of the modern revolution in architecture begun two hundred years ago. If at all, then only to the extent they utilized industry and industrial production. They left out the humanism of the earlier architects of the 19th century. They left out health and hygiene and human differences. They left out the "idealization of the harshness of reality." The international stylists did not suspect they would be seen as rigid as classicists if they stuck rigidly to their experiments, or to any deterministic principle. They forgot that all men are created equal and different.

Our new interest in the individual rather than on the abstract society is part of the new architectural criticism. The architectural critic raising hell about the box and modern architecture is talking about the same thing as Jerry Falwell and his concept of salvation by the individual. Tom Wolfe is not talking about the architects but rather the society of their clients. He screams damnation about an architecture that designs for mere masses of "workmen." He means that architecture should celebrate the rich and successful individual. He rejects the materials of abstract industrialization and wants a return to a hedonism that today costs money and means the elite of individual success. From Bauhaus to Our House is the moral majority of architecture. Tom Wolfe is its Jerry Falwell.

Our perspective of 1985 permits a critical view of the Bauhaus teachings. We now can see what the 19th century revolutionary and idealistic governments lost in the early 20th century in their search for uniformity is similar to what the Bauhaus lost in its architecture. Abstract, mechanized, industrialized, without concern for humanism, both governments and the Bauhaus lost concern for society. Both have failed to shape a change in our human values. The serious consequences of that failure in our revolution we haven't yet recognized: the original humanistic targets, the original idealistic goals, the original concerns of the early 19th century, remain an incomplete process and an urgent need has emerged for continued development of the revolution. We have not fulfilled our promise to ourselves for democracy, for humanism, for using mechanization to give us a better life. These main targets for change in the human condition are still to be achieved. I doubt if they will be achieved by the sleazy glitz of post-modernism.

The art of architecture is in change. Architecture needs a face that can be recognized as commited to that change; a face to show that architecture is a social art in an industrial age, above all concerned with the individual. Architecture is not frozen music, as Goethe suggested, it is the body of humanism. Let us protect it.