By design as well as by default, the language of modern architecture is alien to the traditional city. If one of the results of this language was the destruction of the city, then surely one of our principal tasks is the development of a language capable of its reconstruction. In fact, the current revival of interest in traditional cities and the search for an expanded architectural and urban vocabulary seem to represent a new sensibility common to several otherwise diverse groups of architects and urbanists. One obvious litmus test of this changing sensibility is a renewed interest in the street. Rationalized in the nineteenth century and banished by Le Corbusier and most of CIAM in the twentieth, the street is undergoing a revival that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. The following remarks should be sufficiently illustrative:

The street wears us out. And when all is said and done we have to admit it disgusts us.
Le Corbusier, 1929¹

The first thing to do is abolish the rue corridor with its rigid lines of buildings and its intermingling of traffic, pedestrians, and houses.
Sigfried Gideon, 1941²

Against all sense, the habit of aligning buildings on the streets is to persist, creating the present practices: alignment on the streets and enclosed courts and light wells, two forms entirely contrary to human well-being.
Le Corbusier, 1946³

The problem of re-identifying man with his environment…cannot be achieved by using historical forms of house-groupings, streets, squares, greens, etc., as the social reality they presented no longer exists.
Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, 1953⁴

The street and the square represent the only necessary model for the reconstruction of a PUBLIC REALM.
Leon Krier, 1978⁵

In other terms as well, traditional urban values are being rediscovered and examined. Indeed, it is the attitude toward the city that most clearly distinguishes the last quarter of the twentieth century from the preceding half of modernism. If anything is in a positive sense “postmodern,” it might be the city rather than architecture.

But architecture can never be separated from urbanism, and it is not surprising that the object building, the domino frame, and the free plan should be inadequate as sole instruments in the formation of the city. However, a return to purely traditional techniques (“Neo-Trad” or “B.C. Beaux-Arts”) is equally untenable. What might be proposed instead is a hybrid architecture for a hybrid city,  an architecture of traditional rooms as well as “modern” space, of facades as well as frames — an architecture that makes urban space as well as consumes it. If the reintroduction of enclosed urban space is the essence of the post-modern city, and if inclusion of both the present and the past is a desirable urban condition, then something similar should define the architecture that is to form this city.

Fortunately, we are now in possession of not one but two architectural and urban traditions — premodern and modern — and although they may conflict, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both traditions may on occasion be useful; they might be made to complement each other; and neither need necessarily be disposed of as obsolete cultural debris, nor nostalgically preserved as solution-by-default. Rather, they might be realigned and reexamined as mutually beneficial adjacencies.

In the premodern (would pre-Englightenment be more accurate?) tradition, the city is generally composed of a hierarchy of articulated spaces supported by a more or less continuous urban fabric or texture. Except for a very few important public buildings, space takes precedence over object. Streets and squares are sacrosant; and it is usually the solids, or buildings, that must absorb and accommodate any urban idiosyncrasies. The architectural analogy to this city is a series of discrete rooms articulated by thick, load-bearing walls. Primary spaces are rationalized, and if anything is left over or subordinate, it is absorbed by solid material or service elements. In the premodern city, the facade mediates between the public and private realms, providing both public closure and private symbol.

The modern city is the opposite of its ancestor in almost every respect. If the “solid city” of the past and its architecture embody a value system that requires determination from the outside in, then the “tower city” of modern architecture reveals a value system that specifies development from the inside out. This system favors rationalized and articulate solids instead of contiguous ones. As a result, the quantifiable aspects of buildings, such as the structure and service elements, are rationalized and expressed, while the habitable spaces are left over. This same condition is generally true on an urban level, where buildings are articulated as free objects in continuous and largely undifferentiated space. In the modern city, open space absorbs any urban idiosyncrasy; and, because the street has disappeared as an enclosed space, the facade functions only as private symbol.

Together these two traditions constitute a rich legacy, not a confusing obstacle. They are the conventions that allow invention, and need only will and the recognition of necessity to be activated. Here temper or disposition of mind is critical, for neither system is wholly acceptable. The city requires both public and private accommodation, and it is architecture that must mediate between the two related but not integrated realms. If the two realms are at odds with each other, so much the better; for necessity may then encourage will; and thus a particular state of mind — one which has the capacity to function without the assist of necessity or program — may escape the guilt of capriciousness and be reassured by having acted with social and civic responsibility.

Both the ideal and the circumstantial require acknowledgment, and if there is a gap or chasm between them, we need only remember that much of the most interesting seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French architecture was generated from just such a schism (aided of course by the occasional odd site). Le Corbusier may have been correct when he said that “many masterpieces of invention have been provoked by the restraints of the site,”6 but it is difficult to believe that the Hôtel de Beauvais is solely a product of the collision of Louis XIV with medieval Paris. Rather, it can be imagined that if such collisions did not occur, it might occasionally be useful to invent them. Certainly the last word has not yet been written about the relationship between form and function.

Le Corbusier understood when he defined “the special whim of the Parisian school” as “the practice (perhaps the love) of…problems.”7 That the built work of Ledoux is fundamentally more interesting than his theoretical work may be debated, but the built Ledoux is symptomatic of the peculiarly French predilection for dialectic — that is, for finding or posing a problem, often where none exists, in order to solve it with demonstrable virtuosity. In French plans one is somehow always aware of the existence of the problem, whereas in those of Palladio, one scarcely imagines a problem existed at all. Whatever the reason, French plans are unique, and changing urban sensibilities offer a convenient excuse (should one be needed) to look at them anew.

It might be useful to rearrange history a bit and shake out revised definitions of “old” and “new.” Comparing the projects of Le Corbusier and August Perret for the Palace of the Soviets competition offers reversed definitions. That Le Corbusier may be artistically better only heightens the architectural challenge in the search for the architecture of the cumulative city. James Stirling’s project for the Northrhine-Westphalia Art Museum competition in Düsseldorf (1975) provides an equally important pivot in the late twentieth century. Through its collage of ideas and its acknowledgment of the traditional urban elements of street and square, Stirling’s project confirms a revised agenda for architecture and the city.

In the search for the obliging solid and the assertive void, traditional plans of the nineteenth century take on renewed significance; and the extremely beautiful modern ones of Michel Roux-Spitz are tantalizingly stimulating to contemplate once free of the absolute dogma of modern architecture. One might, for example, look at the Garot plan and imagine it gently provoking an open site; one might look at a Roux-Spitz plan and fantasize about its analogous city; and as an example of a plan with allegiance to multiple masters, the Caffé Pedrocchi is more than a little suggestive of postmodern possibilities.8 It is almost the plan of both free and figural space — or is sufficiently close at least to allow us to imagine that a new space might just be possible.or example, had at least thirteen plans in nine years