THEORY OF UGLY AND ORDINARY
total design. Architects who demand evidence of process in the forms of individual buildings reject it in the form of the city, where it is arguably more defensible. Total design is the opposite of the incremental city that grows through the decisions of many : total design conceives a messianic role for the architect as corrector of the mess of urban sprawl ; it promotes a city dominated by pure architecture and maintained through “design review,” and supports today’s architecture of urban renewal and fine arts commission. The Boston City Hall and its urban complex are the archetype of enlightened urban renrwal. The profusion of symbolic forms, which recall the extravagances of the General Grant period, and the revival of the medieval piazza and its palazzo pubblica are in the end a bore. It is too architectural. A conventional loft would accommodate a bureaucracy better, perhaps with a blinking sign on top saying I AM A MONUMENT (Fig. 139).
However, no architecture is not the answer to too much architecture. The reaction of the antiarchitects of Architectural Design is perhaps as futile as the endless founding of irrelevant subtleties at the other extreme in the oyher magazines, through it is possibly less harmful only because it seldom gets built, plugged in, or inflated. The world science futurist metaphysic, the megastructuralist mystique, and the look-Mano-buildings environmental suits and pods are a repetition of the mistake of another generation. Their overdependence on a space-age, futurist, or science-fiction technology parallels the machine aestheticism of the 1920s and approaches its ultimate mannerism. They are, however, unlike the architecture of the 1920s, artistically a deadend and sociallty cop-out.
The megastructure has been promote by the elaborate journalism of groups such as Archigram who reject architecture but whose urban visions and mural-scale graphics go beyond the last, megalomaniac gasps of the late Beaux-Arts delineators. Unlike urban sprawl architecture, megastructures lend themselves to total design and to extremely beautiful models, significantly impressive in the boardrooms of cultural foundations or in the pages of Time magazine but unrelated to anything archievable or desirable in the present social or technical context. The occasionally witty exercise in Pop imagery of the megastructure visionaries are fine as an end in themselves, more literary than architectural in intent. They are a bore as architectural theory and ultimately, as well as immediately, unresponsive to the real and interesting problems now.
Meanwhile, every community and state is appointing its design review board to promote the architectural revolution of the last generation and corrupt its members through rule-by-man rather than rule-by-law procedures. “Total design” comes to mean “total control” as confident art commissioners who have learned what is right promote a deadening