SPECUALTING ON THE CBD.

The central Business District is one of the most distinctive and inevitable feature of the cities of our age. We should evolve proposals for humanizing the CBD.

The modern workplace, both factory and office, emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century. Life, for all parts of society, was transformed. Still today, during the week most of us spend more waking time at work than at home. Even with the advent of electronic methods of working, the pattern tends to continue in offices, and for those in manufacturing industry there is virtually no escape from the workplace on weekdays (though of course hours are shorter than they were two hundred years ago).

Transformations of former country areas made by the Promethean outbursts of the Industrial Revolution are notorious. Alterations to the urban fabric of cities are less often discussed. As late as the mid nineteenth century, many merchants lived over their shops and businesses. Cities were a mixture of dwellings, workplaces, and places for leisure, worship and congregation. Today, many of us look through rose-tinted spectacles at the cosy lamp-lit Dickensian vision that such a mixture conjures up, and welcome it when we come across echoes, electrified, cleaned up and made tolerable by modern medicine in the provincial towns of France and Italy.

The urban revolution

But in the great cities, matters started to change rapidly in the 1830s, while Dickens was still a young man. In the urban revolution, a new kind of building devoted entirely to business began to emerge, not only for individual firms, but let out as individual floors or rooms for several different companies. The speculative office block was born, at first in London, then Glasgow and Manchester, then the world. Big city life already began to be compartmentalized into office working areas (mixed to some extent with manufacture) and those for other activities. The tendency was greatly accelerated by the explosion of efficient transport in the later 1800s. Land in the business areas became more valuable, and particularly in those constrained by topography like Manhattan and Chicago's loop, buildings became higher and higher: Central Business Districts (CBDs) in embryo.

Now, every city with pretensions to being a business centre has to have a CBD dominated by speculative office blocks as tall as their developers and planners can make them. Frankfurt has made a Frankenstein Manhattan on Main to advertise its ambitions of being Europe's premier business centre. [1] Singapore has replaced almost all its traditional fabric with ever higher towers and lumbering business elephants. From a distance and on a good day, most CBDs can look wonderfully romantic: picturesque clusters of towers fingering the sky, glittering in the sunlight. But in inclement weather, in among the towers the down draughts captured by the tall buildings bucket wind and rain into your face as you scurry from office to underground, the streets are corridors of gloom, with nowhere to shelter in or escape to.

Mother of CBDs

Yet there is a good deal to be said for density. Curiously, Manhattan, mother of CBDs, has many lessons to teach about creating business districts and the buildings which form them. Although there are clear differences between different parts, functions are quite mixed, with domestic as well as business towers forming the sky-line; places for entertainment and congregation are intermingled. Perhaps most important of all, shops, eating places and bars are frequently to be found at street level in even the most built-up districts. As Jane Jacobs pointed out many years ago, [2] there is a real sense of life in Manhattan, generated by mix of functions and ownerships; it can sometimes seem rather like a twentieth-century version of a traditional European city made vertical, completely unlike Houston or Los Angeles with their much lower density and domination by cars. New York skyscrapers also offer that splendid invention, the semipublic lobby, which not only acts as a place of shelter hut also offers a variety of services and small shops to both people who work in the floors above and to passers-by.

Not many Manhattan commercial buildings are worth remembering in particular, for instance the Chrysler, and even the Trump -- if you have a taste for such things. Some are positively aggressively desperate to be memorable monuments to their developers, though it is difficult to find any quite as brutish as some of the '70s and '80s City of London towers, or so crass as the lower hulks at Canary Wharf.

Renzo Piano knows that his tower in Sydney (p44) has to be memorable, but it is far from aggressive. He has evolved an elegant, new form of skyscraper that responds specifically to its magnificent site and the sometimes difficult climate. It certainly makes a memorable figure among its mostly mediocre neighbours, and has strange echoes of a distinguished predecessor, the '50s Pirelli Tower in Milan by Gio Ponti (and others), which has always been held to be one of the very best European skyscrapers of its time.

Ideal twenty-first century city

Sydney has undoubtedly acquired a splendid addition. But in some ways, it seems strangely old fashioned. Compared to good modern German buildings like Foster's Frankfurt Commerzbank (AR July 1997), or Christoph Ingenhoven's RWE headquarters building in Essen (AR July 1997), both clumsier buildings, the tower itself seems strangely indifferent to environmental concerns, particularly as the architect's work has always been associated with greenness. (Piano's lower residential block with its deep winter gardens is quite another matter, and could surely help set an eco-friendly urban pattern.)

The new Rogers building in the City of London (p50) makes a similarly memorable figure, and offers a very welcome strategy for giving urban decency to the huge office masses which are generated by the collision between planning laws and the world market in capital, that often end up as lumpen hulks (one of which is next door). Carved in plan and section, the great volume is given human scale outside and in. Like Piano in Sydney, Rogers' Wood Street makes memorable places. But similarly, it is not particularly responsive to the new environmental concerns: control of the internal climate given to individuals, maximizing ambient forces, and multiple energy conservation measures.

Ken Yeang has been most radical in trying to green the skyscraper, [3] and though his specific prescriptions are usually tailored to tropical latitudes, his designs have lessons for other climates. But, significantly, his most radical schemes like the Singapore tower project with its mixed uses and elaborate vegetation (AR February 1999) remain on paper. One of the main reasons for this is surely the development and planning process. Ideally, CBDs would include more uses than business, would be environmentally responsible, and would have a three-dimensional lattice of spaces ranging from the fully public, to the completely private, with all sorts of nuances in between. Piano's glazed public space between the two elements of his composition (p44) is a fragment of this ideal tapestry, and of course the inclusion of the residential element of the scheme (required of the developer by the planners) is a another element of the ideal modern city. But the two blocks themselves are essentially private. Rogers' long en trance hall (p50) could have been a real contribution to the life of the city, rather like a Manhattan lobby (and it was apparently intended to be so at first). Management changes prevented the proposal.

Yet such small elements prompt speculation about what the ideal twenty-first century city centre might be like. At ground level, there would be a network of arcades, little squares (often glazed in northern parts), and lobbies, all serving what Richard MacCormac has called 'local transactions'. [4] Above, towers would separate from each other into private territories, either commercial or domestic, or preferably mixed a la Yeang. There would be a profusion of planting, and every city would be different, because its architecture would respond to local topography and climate. At the moment, all this is largely a dream, but it is not entirely beyond realization. Both architects and planners must have the courage to show the public (who in the end decide) how living in city centres can be improved if only we have the will -- how the mighty forces of bureaucracy and business can be chanelled into making inner cities which are palimpsests for decent, rich and varied human life not totally dominated by work. We need a new urban revolution to bring back the human characteristics of cities lost in the first one -- and we can achieve it.

(1.)Other parts of the city are quite pleasant though.

(2.)Jacobs, Jane (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House.

(3.) For instance in The Skyscraper, Bioclimatically Considered: a Design Primer, AR August 1997.

(4.) MacCormao put forward the theory of local and general transactions in AR March 1994. Local transactions are things you do at street Level: eating, shopping and so on. General transactions are to do with the whole economy.