Chakrabarti’s Vision Designs Connection Into Every Place
Can we solve the existential challenges we confront by designing communities for nature, culture, and joy, with the explicit aim of creating shared health and prosperity for every being on earth?”
Architect, professor, and author Vishaan Chakrabarti poses this sweeping – almost grandiose – question in the intro to his book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture and Joy.
The power of the book is Chakrabarti's rigor in grounding such a lofty ambition in a messy, ever-too-real world of people behaving as they do, as both designers and residents of the places we inhabit.
Chakrabarti has taught at Columbia and Cornell universities, held a deanship at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and was the director of planning in Manhattan post-9/11. His academic, professional, and lived experiences have convinced him that architecture is “connective design,” with the ability to create positive social friction in the service of three overarching goals: nature, culture, and joy. With this book, he challenges us to see architecture as more than the design of space, but as a way of seeing the spatial dimensions and relationships of people, of societies, and the way they co-exist—our “urbanity,” if you will.
The book is an inspiring read for the urban historian, design practitioner, and those just curious about the impact of architecture on how we experience our world. Its five chapters on “despair” and five on “hope” include a healthy dose of the history of our political economy and its impacts on urban design and community development.
While a lot of the book is a criticism of how we got to the isolated, fragmented, predictable places that dominate urban and suburban landscapes today, it also provides hope and a model for doing better. A chapter Chakrabarti calls a “palette cleanser” is full of photos and plan renderings that illustrate how places, small and large, are either designed for people or against them, and for the planet or against it. For the visual learners out there, this is gold.
Why Is This Important?
In our increasingly digitized world, we need human interaction and spaces that stimulate our senses.
We are at an inflection point in history, a crossroads where we can choose a different path that recognizes that the basic building blocks of our cities—streets, sidewalks, public spaces, buildings, and infrastructure—need not be the homogenizing, soul-crushing, mass-produced elements they became in the 20th century,” he writes.
We need places that hold our attention and imagination, and create memories and opportunities. This doesn’t have to mean more expense. But it does mean more intent.
When I led marketing for a large community developer with master-planned communities in 14 different states, I often challenged our teams to the “logo test.” If I could cover up the logo on an ad for one community and not be able to tell it apart from another community because of the same shopping list of expected amenities, stock photos, and adjectives strung together to promote what life would be like here, we failed. Imagine describing Barcelona and Tokyo to someone and using identical words or images. We would never do that, because the soul of each is so unique.
Says Chakrabarti, “If a design can be transported outside of its site and still make sense due only to its internal logic, we know we have failed.”
Barcelona will never look like Tokyo. But a lot of America looks the same.
Much of the last century’s development pattern in America has been suburbanization, and its separation of both land uses and people has created monocultures that are largely inaccessible and out of step with how the up-and-coming Gen Z wants to live. They have lower levels of car ownership, tend toward choosing smaller homes, and have a general concern about climate change and the cost not only of home purchase, but of ongoing operating expenses. The mismatch between what we continue to build and how people want to live today has me more worried than where interest rates are going, or whether housing demand will continue to increase while more people are renting by choice. We need more housing for sure, and wouldn’t it be great if it could respect nature, foster an equitable culture, and create more joy?
How Do We Get Back To It?
Here’s the hope part: Chakrabarti believes connective design provides the ability to re-knit the fragmented cultures of our ever-polarized world. And it starts with clear intent.
The conscious attempt of the designer to forge deeper physical bonds across society at every scale, whether it be the placement of a door, the creation of an arcade, the planning of public space, the place-based evolution of a skyline, or the development of materials that reflect local narratives, all in the service of creating connections across the fractious human condition we must re-knit,” he writes.
The design firm he founded, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU, pronounced “pow”), is as much a social impact firm as an architecture firm. In setting forth its purpose and mission, he coined the “TAU of PAU,” the firm’s “way” of practicing architecture that does more than design buildings that don’t fall, but also protects the health, safety, and well-being of the public.
Simply put, “Place Needs Connection” is both the firm’s motto and a design process:
Place: Climate. Context. Construction.
Back to my logo test again. Beyond each specific program and site, he challenges teams to dig like archeologists, find new public space where they can, research the history of a place, expand their view beyond just the box, and deploy a design language that resonates with that place and its people, through an expression of material, volume, color, and light in ways that could be both fresh and familiar.
Needs: City. Client. Community.
We are rarely starting from nothing in our place design work, so how might we focus on regionally responsive architecture and placekeeping vs. placemaking?
Urban design often yields retrograde results where lived urbanity is replaced by a chain store-driven, capitalism-driven simulacrum of a city,” he writes.
Regionally responsive architecture connects people to their existing places, communities, and cultures, and it doesn’t separate “placemaking” from the existing place. Barcelona isn’t Tokyo. Sacramento isn’t Austin.
Connection: Construction, the individual scale. Community, the urban scale. Climate on the global scale.
How do we forge human connections at the scale of the individual, the community, and the planet? That’s what we crave and what the planet needs.
Architecture should build an infrastructure of opportunity that expands urban affordability, fights global warming through what we do and don’t construct, creates a magnetic public realm that connects people across their differences, advances pluralistic cultural, educational, and social institutions, reimagines urban mobility without the private automobile, and collaborates with partners in the public, private, and nonprofit community sectors who share these aspirations,” declares Chakrabarti in the TAU of PAU section of the book.
The architecture of urbanity is social, cultural, and emotional, weaving together our material understanding of the world with its human narratives, toward a more equitable world that reflects the past as it lurches imperfectly forward, hopefully toward a world of respect for nature, local culture, and more joy.