American Architects and the City

194X–9/11: American Architects and the City, on view at MoMA through the end of the year, contains one of my hands down, all-time favorite Mies van der Rohe's drawings: Museum for a Small City (1941–43). A photo collage interior perspective, the piece depicts several artworks poised in Miesian universal space. The architecture is so skimpily drawn in that it disappears, leaving the sculptures and paintings to float like pieces of fruit cocktail in Jell-O.

Museum for a Small City was commissioned by Architectural Forum and published in May 1943. The magazine asked a group of 23 architects, Louis Kahn, and Charles Eames, to envision the new American City in "194X" (hence the title of the MoMA show). Van der Rohe's collage is ambitious in its reductiveness. The museum is stripped down to space, structure, and art. Published just after the US entered World War II, there's no room for any nostalgia, as made clear by the inclusion a photo-reproduction of Picasso's Guernica at the center of the composition.

That said, it's a bit awkward to begin a critique of a show that's positioned in relationship to World War II and the events of September 11 with a personal preference. It is like replacing the Picasso with Jeff Koon's Puppy. However, the resulting goofiness is intentional, a means to counter the feeling of detachment that hovers over the gallery. (A feeling only heightened by the ingratiating Talk to Me down the hall.) Using pieces from the MoMA's collection, the exhibition explores how several stalwart architects—such as Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, and Steven Holl—reckoned with the city as a subject over the past 70 years, through periods of development, urban renewal and crisis. However, in light of the kinds of the more participatory practices—community engagement, ubiquitous computing, and landscape urbanism—that have emerged in urban design in the last decade, the show, while beautiful, produces not reminiscence but a chill.

On view are rarely seen drawings and models. These are true gems from the archives, including a molded plastic model of Morphosis' scheme for a tower at Ground Zero gifted to the museum by late architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. It's shown alongside Guy Nordenson's structural scribbling of World Trade Center Tower 1, rendered in ballpoint pen on a page pulled from a yellow legal pad. The works underscore an embittered architectural ambivalence that's come to plague the design that's slowly rising from the downtown construction site.

Exponentially bigger than any 9/11 maquette, a large model of James Fitzgibbons' 1960 Bridge City (Bridge on 110th Street), New York inexplicably dominates the gallery. It's a doughnut (or a Jell-O ring mold, to continue that metaphor) made out of paper and string. With a nod to Constant Nieuwenhuys' New Babylon, but without that megastructure's Situationist socio-political positioning, Fitzgibbons' project proposes an efficient ring city elevated above a river. In a far corner is Kahn's drawing entitled Traffic Study from 1952. The architect's hand-drawn grid composed of arrows, hatchmarks, and dots has the elegance of an Anni Albers weaving, but actually is a diagram of proposed traffic-movements in Philadelphia. Kahn's notations symbolize on the ground driving conditions from automobile speed to parking garages. The drawing entices as it touches on the design profession's contemporary obsession with data, systems thinking, and infrastructure.

With few exceptions, the relationship of each work to "the city" (and by city we mostly mean New York City, although Philadelphia, Newark, New Canaan, and Chicago make brief appearances) is sketchy. In true urban renewal fashion, the urban fabric is a canvas for architectural occupation. Civic life—people, shops, buses, parks—is abstracted to the point of non-recognition. And while Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp's 1972 project, The City of the Captive Globe Project, New York, New York is included, don't count on anything delirious.
Mimi Zeiger