After the Planners

...You have nothing to lose but your chains! Robert Goodman offers an fast reading and provacative critique of the architecture and urban planning professions. According to Goodman, the basic problem is the capitalist system, which the criticized professions serve while being bought off. To cover up from others and themselves their true role, they have developed an elaborate aesthetic language and dance in which buildings are for looking at, not using, because if we focused on the effects of professional designs, we would see how they are used to impose on the powerless. Fascinating for the number of current ideas in good currency that were already underway in the early 70s (privatization, outsourcing, performance contracting, and so on), hilarious in puncturing the pretensions of the architecture profession (such as what used to be Pan Am tower on top of Grand Central Station), this book is well worth reading, even if you aren't ready to toss capitalism into the dustbin of history.

I purchased "After the Planners" from a second-hand bookshop in Tasmania, Australia, and wasn't expecting much. To my surprise, Goodman's sustained criticism of planning, architecture, government and the construction industry, is not only still relevant, but perhaps more so today than it was in 1972. The book is made all the more entertaining by the inclusion of quotes and images from post-war advertisements, trade journals, and newspapers. These excerpts reflect such an unrepentant progressivism that it is at once embarrassing, depressing, and laughable. The description of the highway construction industry is a real highlight. This includes gems like the "Official Prayer of the American Road Builders' Association", "Asphalt's Magic Circle", and the following quote from the chairman of Yale's School of Architecture: "the freeways could be the real monuments of the future, the places set aside for special celebration by people able to experience space and light and motion and relationships to other people and things at a speed that so far only this century has allowed". The fundamental theme of "After the Planners" is the notion that planning and architecture are not ends in themselves, but instead exist to meet the needs of real people. Huge-scale urban construction projects, invariably serve to trivialise the importance of the individual in the urban landscape. I strongly encourage those interested in the history of urban environmental form to track this book down.