Return to the November 2007 Newsletter | Return to the NextGen Site Alice in Wonderland, Sasquatch, and Discernment in decision-making has always been a challenge for me, especially when opposing sides seem contradictory; so Scott Merrill’s topic at SNU of “How I make decisions in modern architecture” piqued my interest immediately. Ironically enough, Scott admitted to being conflicted even in how he wanted to approach such a subject. He spoke of his living with doubt and making decisions more often with hesitation than with conviction. As he began to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, I sat forward in my seat with a satisfied and eager look on my face, despite the chides about my nerd-dom that were soon to come from nearby co-workers. This was the theoretical discussion I had been waiting for. “The test of a first rate intellect is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind, and still retain the ability to function.” Ah...metaphysics, contradiction, impossibility... “There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “One can’t believe impossible things.” Scott spoke not only about professional contradictions such as practicing architecture in Florida while questioning whether development is appropriate in the state at all from a sustainability standpoint; but also more abstract contradictions dealing with the over-prediction of change and the dangers of the “disastrously glamorous imagination” which filters at least 50% of observations in order to reconcile contradictions. Scott stated, “Everyone wants to make everything have to do with optimism and pessimism, I think it seldom has to do with optimism and pessimism…So many issues have more to do with credulity and undue credulity and skepticism. Hype, which is a manufactured sense of optimism, is cynical and corrosive.” Our challenge is to learn how to hold contradictory ideas without letting the ‘disastrously glamorous imagination’ get away from us; how to determine credulity, and furthermore, I think young urbanists must decide between being realists or idealists. The age-old pattern follows that youth breeds idealism and experience breeds realism. So how does a generation ripe with the idealism of education and the theoretical world adapt to working in reality? Goals of projects often contradict planning principles; socially accepted norms, stereotypes, and economics tend to force projects in directions inconsistent with known truths about good urban form. Our challenge is to guard our idealism and infuse it into practices that have grown tired, even “New Urban” ones. But do we sacrifice a little idealism to achieve something less than ideal but better than the alternative? I think we have to be the critical idealists, not the always-optimistic cheerleaders for a revival of thought that still has a long way to go. At what point does optimism border the ‘hype’ that Scott warns so strongly against? Scott concluded by quoting Jacques Robertson, “Life is tragic, but sometimes you get to do some good,” which reminded me of my favorite quote by J.H. Kunstler in City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. He describes traditionalism as “dignifying the human condition, which is sublime, tragic, and fraught with beauty.” True to the theme, Scott also addressed sublimity and beauty with another contradiction, which I found to be the most profound comment made all weekend, “The unremarkable can be impressive, but it can’t be remarkable.” That is to say that for something unremarkable to be remarkable is a logical impossibility, but this is just semantics. I think we’ve all had moments where we are overcome by the sheer beauty of what I’ll call the ‘tertiary,’ the unremarkable, the fabric--of cities, neighborhoods, architecture, music, speech, movement, or human nature. Their existence makes it possible for the remarkable moments to stand out. If anything, in the traditional world, we value the ‘unremarkable’ fabric that exudes beauty more than any other architectural movement. In essence, Scott, Kunstler, and Robertson are expressing the same humanist world-view. The great urban warriors of the ‘first generation’ managed to work with great idealism in the real world. They managed to maintain enough cynicism to recognize great tragedy and enough sanguinity to come up with creative solutions. Scott said of the CNU, “…it’s always been resolved to engage unpromising material, and I don’t mean that to be the least bit unflattering, I mean it as a high complement.” How will we continue to protect this resolve? In conclusion, I’d like to revisit the memoir Scott told about Sasquatch hunting with his neighbor in rural southwest Ohio near Appalachia. His neighbor, someone who actually believed and feared the existence of Bigfoot, so much he brought along a gun “…told [me] in convincing detail that when we saw him, and I remember he said ‘when’ not ‘if,’ Bigfoot will be frightened if we look directly at him, and he warned me to look at him only out of the corner of my eyes," which made Scott’s captive audience chuckle. His point was that arguing by analogy is like looking at something out of the corner of your eye, but ironically enough, upon returning from the conference my project manager forwarded me an article about a Sasquatch sighting in rural Pennsylvania. This can only reinforce the fact that there are people out there who believe some crazy things, even impossible ones. Whether this is the sign of a great intellect, or a figment of a disastrously glamorous imagination is for you to decide. I think that as the challenges of the 21st century fly in the faces of true urbanists, we better start practicing as the Queen of Hearts instructed. So if you ever come to Pittsburgh, you may find me out in the woods with the crazies, trying to reconcile the contradiction of being both a cynic and an idealist who can still believe as many as six impossible things before my bowl of cheerios in the morning. ______________________________________ Megan O'Hara is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture and currently works at Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She can be reached at megan.ohara [at] urbandesignassociates [dot] com |