"Live" with Witold Rybczynski

An architect by training, Witold Rybczynski is one of America's most accessible and thoughtful critics of the built world. He writes with grace and common sense on subjects ranging from city life to technology to house design. He even produced a lively book on the history of the screwdriver and the screw.

Though Rybczynski's wisdom extends far beyond mere academic knowledge, he is a prominent scholar and professor in the architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves on the faculty at the Wharton School of Business, where he is Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and Professor of Real Estate.

The books written by this immigrant of Polish parentage range from his award-winning biography of Frederick Law Olmstead, A Clearing in the Distance, and his study of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, The Perfect House, to (among many others) Waiting for the Weekend, and Home: A Short History of an Idea.

Witold Rybczynski was interviewed for TAE in Philadelphia by art and architecture critic Catesby Leigh.

TAE: Tell us a little about your upbringing and how you became interested in architecture and urban design.

RYBCZYNSKI: I was born in Edinburgh. My parents were both Polish, and in the Polish Army--which in 1939 was regrouped in Scotland. In 1953 they immigrated to Canada, and I grew up and went to high school and college in Montreal. We lived in a small town outside the city where my father worked; he was an engineer. Engineering didn't really attract me very much. Architecture seemed like a kind of compromise; it was a profession, so my parents would be happy, and at the same time it seemed kind of creative compared to engineering.

TAE: There's a very strong interest in history in your work. Is there any one historical setting that you would say has been most conducive to the flourishing of social life?

RYBCZYNSKI: The great period for cities and towns was probably the late Middle Ages, when urban places were rather small. All the art and literature that we admire of that period comes from these little places. Florence was tiny, but it produced an enormous outpouring. It has to do partly with the scale of these places, and with their independence. They were essentially city-states, so they were self-governing entities. Later the city gets much bigger, but it is subsumed into the nation state and really loses that sense of making decisions on its own.

TAE: You've pointed out that sprawl is and always has been inherent in urbanization, and has occurred everywhere throughout history. Should it concern us today?

RYBCZYNSKI: Sprawl has got good and bad sides, but it's what we've chosen as a people. It suits us, I think. If you're going to have an entrepreneurial, free enterprise society, you've got to leave a lot of room for all that enterprise to take place. And you're probably not going to put the decisionmaking in one planner's hands; that's illogical in a society like ours. So you're going to have this very diffused kind of urbanization, where there's a lot of room for individual initiative. Different cities from the past come out of a different social order.

TAE: Is sprawl a trend beyond the U.S.?

RYBCZYNSKI: Suburbanization of the modern sort is in fact a British invention, not American. And sprawl is a fact of life all over the globe. With very few exceptions, people everywhere like the idea of having a house, having a garden, having a little space, some privacy. Those things turn out to be almost universal.

My early architectural work took me to Africa and Latin America. In Africa you find that the cities are made up of agglomerations of single-family houses just like an American city. There's a business center, but people live in homes, and of course they tend to have animals and grow their own food, so their lots are bigger. It's a very low-density, spread out city. And the traditional Chinese city was also a city of houses--the courtyard house. Likewise in Latin America. So the idea that a city has to be taller buildings, a sort of Paris or Berlin, is a choice that certain people have made. But the majority of humans have tended to choose the individual house as the building block of the urban area.

TAE: What do you say to the suburbanite who finds his or her life excoriated in the media as unecological and socially dysfunctional?

RYBCZYNSKI: It's like my friends who criticize Wal-Mart; on the one side is their criticism of Wal-Mart, on the other side is the company's many billions of dollars in sales. It's the largest employer in the United States. Researchers have estimated that Wal-Mart has raised the living standard of the middle class anywhere from 8 to 10 percent. Those are powerful things to put against the criticism, and those are what people see. So in a sense the criticism is almost beside the point. We've made those decisions.

TAE: Must efficient retailers like Wal-Mart offer cheap architecture and urban design, or are aesthetic improvements possible?

RYBCZYNSKI: If you think about the layout of a Big Box store, the big box is on the end, then there's a parking lot, and there has to be a great deal of visibility so that you can see that the store is there and also see where you can park. You can't clutter up the parking lot with trees, because that'll block the stores. So you end up with a pretty ugly environment. You're also trying to keep money in the consumer's pocket, so no-frills architecture is used. It's not only functionally necessary, it may even be a good thing because it sends the message to the consumer that they're not wasting money on marble and chrome or those things that you see in a shopping mall.

Having said that, I wonder if it's either/or, because the other kind of shopping environment that's become popular are centers, particularly in the south, where you have a kind of main street with shops on the ground level and apartments above, lots of public spaces, open air--not enclosed like a shopping mall. Those places are based on quality, offering street life with arcades and fountains. People go there for an outing rather than for the convenience or the price of shopping. It seems to me there's no reason we can't have both, in different places.

TAE: What is your view of the New Urbanist movement and its effort to restore the traditional pedestrian scale of historic communities in new suburban and urban development?

RYBCZYNSKI: Well, first of all one has to say they're the only game in town. Most architects have essentially abandoned any attempt to shape a broader environment--they're creating very exciting buildings, and architecture's probably more in the public eye today than 25 years ago, but it's very much about signature designers and individual flamboyance. New Urbanists are the only group of architects who have looked at the broader physical environment. I think they deserve enormous credit for that. And I'm certainly sympathetic to their focus on pedestrians versus automobiles, on studying older cities and trying to understand why they're successful, and how these things can be adapted to contemporary life.

I think they're sometimes too doctrinaire, almost religious in their inflexible dogma. Some of that I think has to do with having a movement. You have to be very strong in the way you express yourself, and if you start compromising all over the place, pretty soon you don't have a movement any more. They at least have an idea of what the city should be, and most city planners don't.

TAE: The New Urbanists are waxing indignant over sprawl, and we hear a good deal of gloating over fat people, McMansions, energy hogs, plastic, and so forth.

RYBCZYNSKI: This may be interfering with their ability to connect with mainstream America, although two of the most successful movements in the last century have been the environmental movement and the historic preservation movement, and New Urbanists have tried to form links with both. I don't think they're easy links. The environmental movement has been essentially anti-development, and the New Urbanists, whatever else they are, are about development, and building more stuff. So there's a real contradiction between the criticism of sprawl and wanting to build. There's a lot of New Urbanism that is part of sprawl. Celebration, Florida, is a nice place, but it's also part of the general sprawl around Orlando. Kentlands in Montgomery County, Maryland is part of the spread of the city farther out. These places first require using automobiles, and only then are about creating attractive places to walk. In any case, New Urbanist developments are not having a huge impact on how much sprawl there is.

TAE: Do you see denser living becoming a national trend?

RYBCZYNSKI: It's happening. It's happening because development has become more difficult, particularly in the Northeast and California. When development is difficult and land becomes increasingly expensive, naturally your lots get smaller and smaller, because people just can't afford more.

TAE: Statistics show that only a small percentage of our national territory has been developed, yet land is becoming expensive. How is that?

RYBCZYNSKI: I've been studying this in Pennsylvania, where it takes about four years to get permits for a project. In Texas it takes about four months. And that's roughly the comparison. Because it's so difficult (if possible at all) to get building permits in places like New Jersey or southeast Pennsylvania, while population and demand are growing, the result is that the few things which are permitted become extremely valuable. So when we say the land is more expensive, it's not because of some sort of physical reason. It's simply that less land is being made available for building, and so what there is costs more. And that's what pushes up the price of housing. It's not the cost of construction; it's not primarily about demand, it's mainly about supply.

TAE: Might a hybrid suburban environment be the way of the future? Denser subdivisions combined with entertainment centers that offer some of the function of traditional main streets?

RYBCZYNSKI: Certainly right now it seems like that. The model which most Americans find very attractive is that of the small town. It's part of American culture; it's in movies, it's in books. But beyond the houses themselves, that turns out to be very, very difficult to actually create. Because of the way we shop and work now, we don't have little pharmacies and stores except on Garrison Keillor's radio show. It's almost impossible to deliver on that promise of an integrated traditional town. The economic environment and so on really militates against it.

TAE: How much hope do you have for the revival of New Orleans?

RYBCZYNSKI: It'll be a very different city. It'll be much smaller. I think the tourism and such will revive. If the historic network had not been preserved that would be very different. But eventually the convention center will get rebuilt, and people will still go there. There's nothing quite like New Orleans from the tourist's point of view. On the other hand, I think that they've lost a lot of employment that's not going to come back, because there are safer places than that particular city.

TAE: That's not a very bright prognosis, because tourism is a low-paying business.

RYBCZYNSKI: True. But New Orleans is actually much more like a rust belt city than a sunbelt city. It's a bit like Camden, New Jersey. If Camden burned down, would it be rebuilt? Maybe, but it wouldn't be the old Camden. While cities grow very quickly, they decline slowly. The big reason is real estate; people with all their savings in real estate are stuck there, so you sort of tough it out. But if something comes along that cuts the cord, a decline can leap to the next stage. What should've taken decades suddenly happens in a week. And that's, I think, what really happened in New Orleans. This very gradual decline has been cruelly accelerated. Half the low-income people in New Orleans were tenants--a very high number. The landlords can't afford to rebuild houses for those tenants. If they rebuild, it's going to have to be for somebody with a lot more money, because rebuilding a house costs more than it's worth right now. That's a quandary I don't see any solution to.

TAE: Let's shift to Manhattan and Ground Zero. Things seem to be going badly both for the 9/11 memorial and the rebuilding of office buildings.

RYBCZYNSKI: The World Trade Center towers were always an iffy proposition from a real estate point of view, so when they were destroyed, in a free enterprise world, they'd never have been replaced. There's no reason to replace them. Nobody's erecting office buildings there anymore, because nobody needs offices. The public had unreasonable expectations about the whole thing. There was a natural sense that, they knocked it down, so we should put it back up. But, logically, the city should be doing other things on that site.

TAE: What do you think of the design of the memorial?

RYBCZYNSKI: It seems to me it doesn't address anything specifically enough--it's too abstract, too minimalist. A big square pool of water just doesn't mean anything. So I was disappointed in the design.

TAE: Is traditional or classical architecture making a comeback?

RYBCZYNSKI: I have many architect friends who are classicists, or at least traditionalists, and I recently wrote the introduction to Robert A. M. Stern's book, Houses and Gardens. Traditional styles will remain dominant in residential construction, as they always have been. I think that they will also continue to grow in popularity in other places, especially on college campuses, which embraced modernism in the 1960s and are now stuck with some clumsy white elephants.

However, it seems unlikely that classicism will be embraced afresh by schools of architecture. Stern suggests that what he calls modern classicism will replace modernism. I don't think so. Modernism appears to have a monopoly on high-profile commissions such as museums, concert halls, and skyscrapers. There is definitely a resurgence of interest in classical architecture, but it's such a tiny movement. Sort of like baroque music played on authentic instruments--which I also like, but it's not the future of music.

It's hard to create a new architecture based on old architecture because the tendency to copy and to fall back on old solutions is so strong. It's like people who play ersatz Bach. You can sort of make it sound like Bach, but it's not really Bach. There are very few architects who are good enough to pull it off. Their designs aren't bad, but it's not exciting; it's a replay of something. To take old things and make them fresh is actually very, very difficult.

Besides, today's not-very-classical, flamboyant modern architecture reflects the times. We live in a culture where the media are dominant and where a building's image has to communicate very quickly to people. So a building image that's very simple and dramatic will communicate more quickly than something that is subtle and takes a long time to understand, or maybe isn't dramatic at all. So the media and society work against classicism.

TAE: Tell us what you do on a day-to-day basis at the Wharton School.

RYBCZYNSKI: I teach a class there called Design and Development, on the role that design plays in buildings and communities. The notion is to introduce students who are primarily taking courses in real estate and finance and law to the physical part of constructing places. I also co-edit the Wharton Real Estate Review, an academic journal. It's had a big influence on me, because my academic career in the past usually put me in contact with other architects. Architects and city planners tend to be idealistic about the city; they're trying to understand what the city should be rather than what it is. And once they intellectually discover what they think it should be, they want to convince the rest of us that that's a good idea.

Economists, of course, are very different; they're just trying to understand the city. My economics-oriented friends who are doing research on the city are not trying to reshape it; they're just trying to understand what's going on. That's had an influence on me. It's made me less eager to jump in with solutions, and also more cognizant that in an economic system such as ours, what ordinary people want is very important. It may or may not be good for them; it may or may not be the best thing, or the most efficient thing. But if it's what they want, that counts an awful lot in an entrepreneurial economy such as ours.

TAE: Are there limits to architecture's ability to transform society? Do we expect too much from it?

RYBCZYNSKI: I think architecture does transform us, but not in very fundamental ways; architecture isn't very good at that. I could decide that, say, the whole family should really sleep all in one room--that this would somehow be a good idea. I can design houses like that, but that will not transform anybody if it's not what they want. People are much too resilient and stubborn. Occupants will find ways of changing the house; they'll build partitions. Or, more often, if people don't like what architects have proposed, nine times out of ten it just won't get built, because the client will say, no, I'm not interested.

I think the public really overestimates the power of the architect. Even a famous architect has to deal with the reality that the client is paying the bill and has demands. Most architects of course try to meet those demands, but the notion that you can impose your will is mistaken. It's hard to think of situations where that has happened, except unfortunately in public housing, which is the one area where the client has nothing to say and the bureaucrat does. We all know how disastrous that has been.

TAE: College students these days seem to be increasingly skeptical about the utopian notions of their Baby-Boomer professors--with the remarkable exception of almost every architecture school. Why are architecture students alone still in a sort of heroic/romantic time warp from the 1930-1960s, where they believe they're going to be Promethean remakers of the world?

RYBCZYNSKI: Today's architecture schools allow you to indulge yourself. That's interesting, because you are exploring your own creativity. It's seductive. The frustration only comes later.

If you went and looked at what architecture students at places like Penn do in school, you'd think it was from the moon or something. They're not the sort of buildings you see being built most places.

The popularity of architecture has always been a puzzle. Even when the economy slows down, it doesn't seem to affect the enrollment and interest of students in architecture. In some ways there is nothing as exciting as seeing a building go up that you designed. You imagine it, and then it's built.

Especially today. I used to inspect buildings as a young architect, and there were only other young architects visiting--all these students with their cameras and sketchbooks. Now you have crowds of people going to see certain buildings. They really are popular, part of a big cultural movement. That has a huge effect in architecture schools. Even though very few architects ever actually achieve stardom, those who do have tremendous prominence. It's like if you're teaching acting--you look to stars in Hollywood or Broadway. Even though there aren't many of them, they have a big impact in the profession. It does distort architecture, no question about it.

TAE: What are the origins of America's love for do-it-yourself, old-house rehab?

RYBCZYNSKI: It's that old Victorian self-improvement ethos, where working people would teach themselves languages, and there were individual study institutes, and self-help books. I had a friend in Mexico who was publishing a series of do-it-yourself magazines for Mexicans, and he told me there was no tradition of this in Latin culture at all, that this idea of a person reading about something and then going out and doing it came entirely from English-speaking cultures.

Americans have taken it up with enthusiasm, and it really differentiates us. In Canada you'll find the same thing, but much less so in France or Germany or Italy. There, you hire somebody. If you're a gentleman you don't get your hands dirty. European CEOs don't build furniture as a hobby.