The Syntax of Cities by Peter F. Smith (review)

Books 253 being by the cultural programmes is also described, ironically challenging the businessmen’s grandiose ambitions in their own everyday terms of efficiencyand utility. Finally, Horowitz traces the appraisal of artists themselves before concluding her study with an assessment of the more general diffusion and emancipation of cultural activities through city life in the period preceding World War I. Despite the alternative views of the relationship of culture to society, the vital topics of Horowitz’s study remain the twin Beaux-Arts instruments by which the leaders of society in Chicago saw that city transformed into a resemblance of 16thcentury Florence-lhe White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition and, 16years later, Daniel Burnham’s City Plan. Yet, ofcourse, the paradox was that the patrons ofthese monumental projects, who, in a contemporary critic Montgomery Schuyler’s words were ‘willingto play the part of Maecenas to the fine arts. only they insist that they will not play it during business hours’, were, in fact. responsible for providing structures of lasting cultural impact precisely ‘during business hours’-in the steelframe skyscrapers of the Chicago Loop. This study hardly touches upon this fact, nor upon the equally startling one that this same society. at the same time, was harbouring and patronising in Chicago’s suburbs one of the world’s most original architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. It seems a strange omission that this phenomenon, explored by Colin Rowe in his well-known essay entitled Chicago Frame: Chicago’s Place in the Modern Movement, [Arch. Rev., p. 285 (Nov. 1956)] does not form a part of Horowitz’s book. Her list of Chicago patrons, for example, contains none of those businessmen who commissioned Wright to build them houses in Oak Park and River Forest. One of the few names that is familiar in this context, Harold F. McCormick, was indeed, through his eventual cancellation of Wright’s commission, responsible in the eyes of one of Wright’s biographers. G. C. Manson, for the destruction of the Chicago School. That this and similar ironies. which pervade the serious-minded attempts of the leadingcitizens of Chicago to acquire ‘cuiture’,are not explored in Horowitz’s study is surely a geat pity, since in other respects this is a thorough and valuable analysis of the patronage of the arts at a critically important time and place in the U.S.A. The Syntaxof Cities. Peter F. Smith. Hutchinson, London. 1977. 271 pp. illus. El 1.95. Reviewed by Roger Mason* This is a most unsatisfactory book, a maddening mixture of garbled psycho-medical research material interspersed with quotations from a plethora of authors-architects. scientists, writers. philosophers-with no indication of either the relevance or the validity of their work. Smith begins with a popularized account of current hypotheses and experiments relating to the structure and operation of the human brain and. in particular, its possible apparatus for aesthetic perception. One can only assume that he is qualified to judge the accuracy and significanceof the particular hypotheses he chooses to rely on. He then argues happily: ‘Since all meaning in the urban environment is conferred by the mind. it follows that any appreciation of urbanism in depth must involve further forays into psychology.’ But. although the later chapters of the book refer, with a good deal ofjargon, to most elements of townscape. one is given no convincing logical argument to justify the dubious application of any of these concepts to the design of present cities--’the maze factor’, ‘attenuated coupling’, ‘optimal mutation’, etc. ‘Aestheticsmay be liberated from the shackles of subjectivity and the stigma of intuition.’ This is a rallying cry. yet one is not told how it is to be carried out in practice. Smith’scritiques of the work of practising architects, justified as they may be, for example in the cases of Stirling and Leslie Martin. are as subjective as my own. To conclude my estimate of this pretentious and badly written book-how can ‘amoist eye’be ‘a visceralsideeffect’?Above all. it makes not the slightest progress towards theclaims of title and Preface. namely ‘to suggest a syntax for the design of cities’. *The Grange. Fenway. Steeple Aston. Oxfordshire. England. The Arts...