ROBIN HUEPPE The absence of a contemporary urban project has permeated our previous conversations; you argue that designers today have been unable to specify the characteristics and qualities that would define a viable urbanism apart from pointing to existing cities. What do you mean by an urban project, and if it is lacking today, why do we need it?

ALBERT POPE Many architects believe that the city will be okay if we just continue to design good buildings. These buildings could and should be environmentally responsible, technologically advanced, contextually integrated, affordable, and accessible, but that is not enough to safeguard the viability of the city. We routinely assume that if the individual components of any complex object are well-made, a greater outcome will always be achieved. Such faith in the components has been validated by urban history, such as when, in the 19th century, certain typological constraints produced an architecture that was capable of constituting a greater urban whole.

Beginning with the cycle of suburban development that followed the Second World War, this greater urban awareness faded from the architectural imagination. Under a suburban dispensation, it doesn't matter how good we make the architectural parts; there can be no cumulative effect. Until we devise some sort of lexicon upon which we can leverage a collective advantage, a coherent urban aggregation will not emerge. For the last 75 years, the absence of this collective advantage has been largely overlooked — an ignorance we can no longer afford. Given the magnitude of our environmental problems, the need for an urban whole that exceeds the value of its independent parts has become increasingly clear.

To continue to argue that the production of brilliant buildings is all that architects need to concern themselves with undermines our collective prerogatives. The more we emphasise the isolated part, the less consequential the aggregate effects become. Instead of relying solely on the qualities of individually designed parts, it is time to enlist those parts in a larger urban project. A project for the city recognises the importance of the increased value of individual buildings, adding up to a sum that is commensurate with the challenges we face.

RH One recent wave of building ‘urban wholes’ began with modernist urbanism and lasted until the postmodern turn of the mid-seventies. How would your approach differ from the projects of modernist urbanism?

AP We think modern urbanism failed, but in fact, it has been incredibly successful in contributing to the urbanism of the Great Acceleration. The decentralisation of urban organisation, the dissipation of urban density, the subsequent integration of urban and natural systems, and a prevalence of spine-based — rather than grid-based — urban infrastructures are all components first introduced by modern urbanism that characterise most cities today. For both good and ill, the modern urban project anticipated much of what we have built in the last 75 years. But it was only partially implemented, and for very good reason. It's not news that modern urbanism was flawed, but these flaws do not call for its complete rejection. Over the twentieth century, it created a discourse to deal with both its failures and successes

The places — where contemporary urban development deviated from the modern models — are valuable signposts, because they offer an opportunity to revise and refine the modern urban project. As the Great Acceleration kicked in, the incomplete adoption of modern urbanism failed to add up to a coherent urban environment. It failed to provide density, affordability, and to accommodate a genuine collective existence, delivering instead a substandard or sub-urban outcome. But these failures can provide the grounds for improvement. We need experimentation and discourse if we are to parse modern urbanism in light of its successes and failures. I believe that this parsing is how we construct a viable project for the city today.

RH Some of these failures seem to lie in the modernist approach to master planning and constructing "coherent" wholes — the very properties you are celebrating. In many instances of modern urbanism, there was no adaptability to account for inevitable changes in how we live and think. How could modernism give us the capacity to plan or design something that we can never fully realise and simultaneously remains open for change?

AP As you say, in some instances, there was no openness and adaptability, but not in all instances, and not in the most thoughtful projects. Again, compositional master planning is only a part of modern urbanism. Other, smarter approaches insisted on urban aggregation rather than on urban composition, modernists who dealt with urbanism not as master planning but as an aggregation of building components over time. Ludwig Hilberseimer and Lúcio Costa are the most prominent examples.

But the issue of composition over aggregation suggests another way to think of the modern urban project as an experimental ethos that pervades the modern urban "laboratory." If you look at the difference between the first and second generation of modernists (roughly between CIAM and Team 10), there was a critical recognition of success and failure, with the ambition to improve over time. Thanks to recent scholarship, this legacy is now more available than it was in the seventies when it was systematically preempted by the postmodern "polemic."

Although the modern legacy remains problematic, you could look at its progress like any experiment: you fail, learn something, try again, fail again — but you always fail better. It is necessary to see the modern project this way because its problems are still with us today. For example, modern urbanism took up the problems of mass production and consumption as they impact natural and urban landscapes. These are suburban problems that didn't exist in the historical city, and they have only grown since. If you are trying to construct a viable urban project, it has to be grounded in such problems, including previous attempts to solve them.

RH Do you see any architects who are engaging with the modernist experiment today?

AP None of them willingly, although they cannot avoid it. Modern architecture is everywhere. Yet it's fair to say that modern architecture, shorn of its urbanism, is not modern; it may be more appropriately termed modernistic. The description is warranted because any discursive support for modern urbanism has disappeared. For sure, modernistic urbanism is built today through the global proliferation of Garden and Radiant City planning in North America and Asia, respectively. But its lineage is not acknowledged or theorised, and we ignore its innovations. Modern urbanism remains toxic, even today, fifty years after Charles Jenks famously declared its death. When designing Masdar, Norman Foster turned to the Mediterranean souk as an urban model. In Waterfront City, OMA built a faux Manhattan on an artificial island. Renzo Piano is fond of reproducing the urbanism of the 19th-century urban designer Camillo Sitte, in his design for the Daimlerplatz in Berlin. It seems like the higher the profile of the architect or the job, the more reluctant they are to engage modern urbanism, opting instead for historicist scenography.

Most architects do not receive the opportunity to reference a historical urban model. They must preoccupy themselves with making great architectural objects at the expense of future interrelationships. There are, of course, many interesting and emerging practices that explore and experiment with more participatory and sensitive approaches to urban design. But they remain trapped in older unexamined paradigms due to a lack of understanding of what they are, where they come from, and how they can improve without resorting to scenography. They disregard the possibility of the urban project that goes beyond the flawed paradigms of unstructured ground planes, single-use zoning, compositional master planning, and historicist scenography. They disregard the possibility of overcoming these mistakes because they have blocked the discourse that attempts to describe and respond to these problems. Today, we must ask whether architects are serious about creating a viable urban project. We say that we love cities and that cities are important yet, for lack of imagination, the parts we make do not add up to anything but parts.

RH The comprehensive governance required to engage the city in its totality was also a problem for modern urbanism. How can you design at the scale you're talking about?

AP By comprehensive governance, I believe you are referring to a top-down urban organisation. Of course, modern urbanism engaged with compositional master planning, but aggregation was also in play, even in Radiant City proposals, such as the super-quadra of Brasília. The urbanism of Ludwig Hilberseimer was an urbanism of bottom-up sub-unit aggregation, not top-down composition. The comprehensive agency you allude to has rarely worked urbanistically, even when driven by absolute authority; rather, when attempted, almost always gets swallowed up in an aggregate process.

Successful cities have always aggregated over time through a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes. We just spoke of a coherent aggregation of parts that are capable of adding up to a greater urban totality. This description of typological parts is the essence of a bottom-up urban aggregation. Typological parts are required to work together, but there is no final or finished form to which those parts are dedicated. The prescription of a final form is indeed top-down and is not a strain of the modern project that we want to sustain.

One of the advantages of attaching ourselves to the aggregate legacy of modern urbanism is that we have a general understanding of where it has gone right, where it has gone wrong, and how we might take it up as an experimental legacy. In that legacy are the components of an urban project. A wall-to-wall critique of modern urbanism in the 1970s fully discredited its legacy. The critique was, of course, the easy part; specifying an alternative approach is far more difficult. Those who offered the critique never offered a revival of traditional urbanism — the nineteenth-century urbanism of Alfonso de la Cerda, for example — as a viable alternative model for the future. Elsewhere, the second phase of Berlin's IBA (International Bauasutellung) of 1987 reintroduced the perimeter block to resurrect the last coherent moment of 19th-century urban organisation. But a 19th-century urban reconstruction simply didn't have the answers to 20th or 21st-century problems that modernism set out to solve, and thus could not constitute a viable path forward.

If we start from a modern legacy rather than a traditional one, we will find ourselves dealing with contemporary urban problems. While some aspects of this legacy are flawed, its motives are not. For example, the problem of mass political representation is not part of a traditional urban imagination, nor is the complex integration of non-human ecosystems and their human inhabitants. Modernism has put these problems on the table, and they have yet to be solved.

RH Ambitious goals such as affordable housing for the masses or reintegrating urban infrastructure and biosphere involve high investment risks and long payback periods. The 19th-century city was more developer-friendly and class-conscious, which might have partly contributed to its initial success and more recent revival. How would you reconcile the urban project you outlined with the predominant development logic of capital growth?

AP It is true that a strictly market-based capitalism does not commission the design work that is needed today. This is why urban design needs to exist in the academy and why it must argue for a degree of autonomy in order to be successful. It is also why driving the discourse of modern urbanism strictly through building projects is such a futile endeavour. Such a "show-me" mentality is how capital discredits the legitimate authority of design and maintains its iron-fisted grip on urban development. We have to stop collaborating with the impoverishment of our own discipline.

Let us agree here that we will not survive climate disruption without urban design. The inability of contemporary urbanism to take us into the future becomes more obvious each day, especially in the suburban development of the past seventy-five years. Yet we continue to invest in a low-density suburban infrastructure that has no future viability. If you think an unregulated market can build a city, look no further than the skyrocketing homeless numbers, absurd commuting times, and the outsized energy footprint of North American cities. There's no greater indictment of unregulated capitalism than the condition of our cities today. As designers, we are witnessing a growing awareness of these problems even as we lack the disciplinary framework needed to respond to them.

There are historical moments where political, economic, and cultural realities have turned on a dime, and they can again. Within a week of Pearl Harbor, the United States overturned its deep-seated isolationism and joined the Second World War. Just as quickly, it turned against the Vietnam War thirty years later. More recently, gay marriage was a flat-out impossibility, and then it wasn't. We're starting to see the same rapid response to climate change, where billions are spent on an energy transition that scarcely played a role in electoral politics eight years ago. There is, of course, political volatility in our response to the climate, and I think this volatility has already carried over into economics as we seriously question market orthodoxy.

New approaches to building a city will have to replace the old, and design disciplines should be ready for that. We should not limit ourselves to what the present dispensation allows us to do. Design is so much bigger than what it is allowed to do today. We can take a lesson from the people who got us into this mess about the need to be prepared. These are the words of the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman:

"Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." - [from the introduction to the 1982 edition of his Capitalism and Freedom.]

RH The inevitability of change and the imagination required to fill this vacuum creates an intriguing design agenda. Where do you see challenges in translating the project for the city into current design pedagogies?

AP The challenges to change exist in the ways that we think about design. Let's call it design epistemology. Epistemology is a fluid thing that constantly changes. Currently, we operate in an epistemological milieu that validates the unique, inventive, and isolated objects of design. And we identify these unique objects with their designers. This is as true in schools as it is in practice. Many of us ask the students in our design studios to only produce unique objects. The greater the difference between each individual project, the more successful the studio. If you're serious about building a city, however, you cannot pursue a pedagogy that exclusively validates isolated and unique objects.

As it turns out, there is a place in urbanism for the semi-isolated, unique, and inventive building; it is called a monument. Architects make monuments — exceptional buildings — but monuments only work if there is a typical form to foreground them. One of the biggest challenges in translating the project for the city into the current design pedagogy is the exclusive production of unique objects and a near-complete absence of typical or self-similar objects.

We know from the failure of the postmodern revival of traditional cities that types no longer possess their former authority. We can no longer depend on them to fulfil their historical role in producing typical forms that are capable of foregrounding exceptional buildings. Indeed, all we produce are exceptional buildings, and our design pedagogy verifies this. Our students are almost entirely tasked with the creation of spectacular foreground buildings that were once restricted to the rare and exceptional production of monuments. We cannot speak of urbanism by producing one icon and another icon and another icon and another icon. This does not produce a city.

The misery of architecture today is that the discipline has been robbed of its greatest contribution to society and its primary responsibility, the construction of the city. With ever more obeisance to capital's grip on urban construction, we try to deflect this misery through personal aggrandisement, an unquestioned faith in technological progress, and a program of endless criticism. These are all pedagogical silos that only serve to distract us from having lost the most valuable object of architectural design. The only response to this loss is a recovery of the urban project.

RH You argue for typical or self-similar objects over the relentless production of unique objects. Could you explain the connection between typology and self-similarity?

AP I use self-similarity to talk about what a typological lexicon used to produce but doesn't produce anymore. It's what design must now produce without a widely accepted set of urban types. The necessity for design to take over from failing building cultures and their typological forms is another problem that modern urbanism has put on the table.

Historically, typologies did not produce identical copies but a wide range of variations of a typical form. A generally accepted definition of a "type" is an abstract form that exists as a pure ideal. While types are not materially manifest, "models" based on those types exist as material objects in physical space. While there is only one typical form—a temple, for example—there are endless models based on that type. Self-similarity is a way to discuss producing typical forms open for variation and leveraging those variations toward urban objectives by design.

Typology should be seen as a collective methodology rather than individual authorship, aiming to replicate the functional essence of historical cities without mimicking their appearances. We must move away from creating isolated, unique objects and focus on integrating architectural solutions into a cohesive urban project, much like the typological patterns seen in pre-1950s American cities. Take a typical Brooklyn block of row houses. You'll have ten different row house types because ten developers were building out that same section of the urban grid simultaneously. But they're all based on a row house type, so they all make up a street wall when aggregated side-by-side. When matched by a similar aggregation across a void, they create a public street space. Block by block, these spaces eventually add up to make a continuous urban fabric. That is the kind of aggregate effect called self-similarity that we must imitate by design, not by deploying conventional urban types. Today, those conventions are all but gone.

The neo-rationalists that flourished in the seventies and eighties tried to address this with a revival of traditional typological forms. Yet, apart from a few isolated examples, they failed to reconstruct the traditional city. The problem was that traditional types could not handle contemporary problems, and an architect couldn't reinstate a typology once it had been systematically driven out of existence by a political economy that was no longer accepting of its constraints. Self-similarity is a pedagogical design objective that imitates the typological processes by which architectural parts add up to a greater urban whole. This objective will require a comprehensive epistemological shift. We don't just need different designs; we must think about design differently. We must expand our epistemological framework beyond the production of isolated, spectacular, distinctively authored architectural objects.

RH That would imply that self-similar objects are authorless, which resonates with recent calls against the architect as a single author of the building. How could you detach an architectural object from its authors, making it available to be appropriated to serve a greater urban objective?

AP Traditional typological aggregation was not authorless, nor was the design of self-similar objects. What is different in designing typical forms is that the resulting design does not represent the author. When students present in the studio, we ask them to convey their personal investment in the design outcome. In effect, we ask them to identify themselves with the objects they design, as if the design was an extension of the designer's ego. In order to formulate an effective urban project, we will have to shift this association from collective accomplishments over individual achievements, create a responsive urban environment rather than producing objects or stylistic choices, and urge design schools to anticipate and prepare for necessary paradigm shifts.

I believe that a viable urban project can inspire us to move beyond the gratification of our egos. There is no greater demonstration of the effectiveness of collective endeavour than the city itself. So much is pushing us in this direction. We will need viable social and political platforms capable of taking on the most pressing issues of the day—climate disruption, resource depletion, and species extinction. These platforms require physical urban spaces.

RH Why do you mention the requirement of physical spaces?

AP Viable public spaces are a catalyst because environmental decline is not a problem individuals can solve alone. We need to engage this world in order to engage its problems. While these simulations are plausible for artificial intelligence, they are not tolerable for embodied intelligence, at least not for long. At their worst, modern cities have increasingly devalued the importance of open, collective spaces. Their bottom line was to provide human housing with the greatest possible return on investment. The only viable urban environments we find today are the gentrified relics from the past, which only admit us as tourists. At times, the downgraded environments in which we actually live force us into some kind of electronic simulation just to survive its grotesque indifference.

Some theorists speculate that we have reached a point where our simulations have become indistinguishable from reality, and if we are inside a simulation, we have no way of knowing it. This idea is pretty sketchy because you can only ignore the physical world for so long before it begins to push back, forcing you out of whatever alternative world you might choose to inhabit. I am bored with the pronouncements that we live in a simulation and less interested in discovering whether or not this is true than in avoiding it at all costs.

Urban design programs often attempt to combine data-driven approaches with reviving traditional typologies, but relying solely on data can be misguided. Urban design is fundamentally about spatial embodied experiences. Traditional typologies may not always address modern demands, such as climate change and unique infrastructural needs. A more effective approach would involve using self-similar design principles that acknowledge historical functionality while adapting to contemporary urban challenges. Instead of fixed traditional typologies, a few rudimentary geometric operations can produce an expansive matrix of self-similar variations.

RH You argue that we need a shift in architectural and urban design pedagogy, away from isolated, unique objects and rigid master plans, toward methodologies that are capable of delivering a credible collective realm. How would you synthesise the recuperation of the modern urban project that you propose?

AP We have to address the limits of our outmoded epistemology. We can no longer simply say that the city will be okay if we have good architects making really good buildings. When we see necessary changes on the horizon, how do we prepare? When a change that once seemed impossible suddenly becomes possible and then inevitable, you want to have already plotted a productive route forward. Instead of making something up on the fly, we need to anticipate this paradigm shift toward collective accomplishment. Design schools need to anticipate the changes that will overtake their current pedagogy. In the end, I think this question will prevail: are you serious about building a city?

Bios

Albert Pope is the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice University. He teaches in the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs. Pope holds degrees from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and Princeton University, and taught at Yale University and SCI-Arc before coming to Rice. His design work has received numerous awards including national and regional awards by the American Institute of Architects. He is the recipient of numerous grants from a wide variety of funding agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation. He is the author of the book-length study of the postwar American City, Ladders (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015) and Inverse Utopia (Birkhauser, 2024). Pope has written and lectured extensively on the broad implications of climate disruption in light of the extraordinary demands soon to be placed on the built environment. He is the director of Present Future, a think-tank for urban design based in Houston Texas.

Robin V Hueppe is a Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS) at ETH Zürich, bringing a background in design, education, and writing to his research on the mass housing landscapes of Berlin. He holds degrees in architecture, urban design, and planning from Rice University and TU Berlin. Before joining ETH, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Houston. Hueppe has published in journals such as Pidgin, OASE, PLAT, trans, Room One Thousand, CoSMo, City, Culture & Society, and Paprika! His academic pursuits have been enriched by fellowships from Fulbright at UC Berkeley and DAAD at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, along with grants that supported studies at the Universidade de Lisboa, Tongji University, and the CCA in Montreal.