Conservation with the Walt Whitman of Architecture: The Origin of Urban Design: Critical Conversation with Jan Wampler (original) (raw)

2009, Art4D: Journal of Art and Design

Published in Art4D: Journal of Art and Design 156 (2009). In the last two decades of the field of architecture and urban design, there is no name that is more dominant than Jan Wampler, an internationally renowned architect who has been recognized around the world for his work in over twenty countries. However, we know him more as 'Professor Jan Wampler,' a full professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for his inspiration to generations of architects. Professor Wampler is one of the pioneers, who established the groundwork of urban design education and developed its distinctive approach by ways of the practicality rather than theory. He is interested in the 'spirit' of community – as for him is the internal system of people's interaction that is important, not the fancy façade which can turn cliché after the excitement of the trend dies down. In response to Professor Wampler recent exhibition of his work of the last twenty five years at MIT entitled Open Strings for e-Search on the Journey, acclaimed architectural critic Robert Campbell referred to him as " The Walt Whitman of Architects " : a man without whom no one cannot really understand architecture – without his theory of space and community, through which Professor Wampler expresses the essence of architecture in the realms of ever-advancing civilization. Despite my training as an architect, historian and cultural theorist, I never had the pleasure to comprehend architecture/urban design more than a practice of form and space making to please the eyes aesthetically. Amidst all the fancy forms seen in magazines and cliché catalogs, with which all trained architects seem to have to inevitably immerse themselves, there was a teacher who taught me the 'other' way of looking at the architecture by ways of the architects' responsibility. Professor Jan Wampler, whom I met for the first time a few years ago when I took his oversea studio in Beijing during my time as a graduate student at MIT is the said teacher. Perhaps he saw the desperation, lack of enthusiasm, and doubt in my thinking about architecture at the time. One day, despite his exhaustion from a long compulsory critic sessions in Beijing, Professor Wampler sat with me for hours talking to me and asking a series of interesting questions about the appropriate realm of sense in which architects should conceive as architecture/urban design today: Most of the questions he asked had the answers within the ethical logic of the questions themselves, but prior meeting him I just did not have any clue how to put them to words – or maybe I was just trying to avoid answering them due to my personal egotism. " Who are we – architects – building for? " Hours passed and he left while I was still sitting in a small studio space at Tsing-hua University beginning to crystallize, and 'feeling,' some compelling determinations for urban design and architecture, a dynamic duo that can seamlessly weave together multiple ideas touching on global politics, urbanization issues and our roles as shapers and drivers of urban form. Professor Jan Wampler pointed out that by shapers and drivers of urban form, we – again, architects – are referring to all people that affect the physical world, not just architects ourselves. The most pressing problem in our field today concerns the designer's self-interest versus the client's wishes (and even versus the public good). Just who are urban designers and architects building for? For people? For money? Or their own dream of individualism? The answer should be clear to everyone. No architect could build for themselves; we are building for the clients, who are the people to have to benefit the most from the environment that we are poised to create through the orchestration of community, function and aesthetic in space. I was not sure if I was correct but at least I knew I had been guided to walk in the right direction. As a student of Critical Architecture and Modernism, I was not in a position to have a radical standpoint against architecture of grandiose form or designs of great philosophical construct. However, I did agree deep down that architecture must not stand against people who are actually the 'real' clients: It is in the realms of urbanism, community, and public space that architecture operates. The next day Professor Jan Wampler came to me again and left me a few words to think about. The appropriate way to move toward, then, is the understanding derived from architectural and urban history as well as vernacular form of community that together give " clues " to conceptualizing space. That is to say, we do not have to take one route or the other; in fact, high quality, sophisticated urban design and architecture can be elegant in both social and formal roles. Like music, to which Professor Jan Wampler also refers when he embarks on an urban design project, if architects can see the seven notes more as a framework from which great buildings are composed, I am convinced that – as shapers of physical form – our role within society can be better clarified.