The Status Quo of Optimization

Among all the "four letter words" the internet age has wrought, none may be as underhandedly ugly as "optimization." Among the obnoxious buzzwords pouring out of cubicle pools, it's far from the newest. But it reigns over every facet of today's corporate realm, public or private, as a positive way to maximize profits, but because it's so complicatedly metric-driven it's hard to explain the damage it does to the spirit of product development and design in a sentence or two. 

When I joined the ranks of information technology nerds in the late 1990s, the internet was the Wild West. It was also merely supplemental, like a telephone or answering machine. It didn't run our lives, it simply enhanced it. The first wave, you might say, of the Technological Revolution was rooted in this simplicity. The internet just made lives a little more convenient. Optimization wasn't central to development. Graphic designers designed interfaces and product experts made decisions based on experience. Today, let's call it the second wave, or post-boom, development is driven not by experts but optimization: algorithms that determine exactly what will sell the most units, and in many cases keep you engaged with a product as long as possible. 

We binge, and profits soar. 

The good ol' days

The problem, though, with optimization is that it doesn't build optimal products, only optimal profits. When you eschew designers and experts for algorithms and metrics, you're merely seeking to reach the largest audience. And the largest audience is squarely in the middle of the Bell Curve. It's average, the status quo, not good or bad but too boring to really note. Take Netflix, for example. The online streaming service put nearly all brick-and-mortar video stores out of business. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, just marketplace evolution brought by invention. But over the last year, in the name of optimization, Netflix's content has gone unarguably downhill. There are diamonds in the rough like Stranger Things and Arrested Development, but rather than pay for the rights to great movies, their catalog of full of oddball foreign films, found footage b-movies, and hoards of forgettable television shows that users will binge watch because nothing else is available. It's right to point out that Amazon owns the market for online movie rentals, but it's also true that Netflix abandoned its unique model for the status quo of optimization.

So what's this got to do with architecture and urban planning? Well, architecture, like everything else, has joined the optimization movement. The most notable examples in Philadelphia would be Toll Brothers and OCF Realty, where sturdy and unique buildings are demolished for cheap construction not built to last. Rather than convert landmarks like the Society Hill Playhouse, the Royal Theater, the Boyd, Frankford Chocolate Factory, and countless 19th Century row homes for a handsome return, profits are optimized by metrics dictating low-cost construction. Our modern culture has been so groomed to not only tolerate it, but desire sameness squarely within the status quo. 

Cheapness is in vogue. 

Built to last as long as a tax abatement

This has been going on in the suburbs for decades, one might even say since the suburbs were invented with Levittowns. Today, McMansions are the status quo of desirability, symbols of wealth and status that ironically fail to stand out among the crowds of sameness. It's as if the housing market's target audience wants to display a status symbol while blending in. Keeping Up With the Jones's is an exercise in futility when you're either afraid to stand out or live within your means. Urban centers used to be a reprieve from such pointless efforts, but the trend is tiptoeing back downtown. Once home to the opulent excess of the Gilded Age and Roaring 20s, each mansion more grand and storied than the last, followed by eight decades of artistic Bohemian diversity, cities are now full of cheap construction, canned design, and flash-in-the-pan businesses that will never survive long enough to become institutions. 

You'll re-think this investment the first time you need to replace that massive roof.

Architecture, too, suffers as much as the urban planning and business concepts, and not just in the cases of press-board row homes clad in plastic and metal panels paraded as some sort of "modernism." The most lauded skyscrapers pale in comparison to the landmark limestone towers of the early 20th Century, even some mid-century Brutalist examples. For well over twenty years, glass curtains have been the optimal status quo. Some critics and architects might argue that the use of blue glass is intended to allow the building's height to blend in with the sky. But that's a cop out, and unnecessary. Why would a company spend upwards of a billion dollars to build something that fails to make a statement? You wouldn't spend $5000 on a wedding dress that looks like every other dress in the crowd. The reality is, glass is the optimal alternative to stone and brick and the employment of a curtain is an affordably chic way to cut the cost of designing anything more dynamic. 

In places like New York and other skyscraper-heavy cities, there's little incentive to truly stand out when the most basic design is financially optimal. It's also not hard to stand out when the bar has been driven so low. 

Of course all of this may be coming to a head, and a lot of that has to do with the unrealistic profits demanded by optimization, especially within publicly traded companies. It also has to do with our unsustainable disposable society. When million dollar homes built by companies like Toll Brothers begin to fall apart, the market may begin demanding quality over excess. Everything from smartphones to cars are built to be discarded and planned obsolescence can't last forever. Likewise, there will come a point where there are simply no profits left to meet quarterly goals. 

This happened in some small part during the last Recession and on an unprecedented scale in the Great Depression. If history repeats itself, and given the election of a neo-Herbert Hoover, it is, the Technological Revolution will end very much like its Industrial counterpart in 1929. That's not bad, though. Like the late stages of the Industrial Revolution, optimization has come to replace innovation. We're not inventing anything but perpetual and exponential profits. 

Our society has become more financially polarized than any era since the Roaring 20s. The waste of our excess is unchecked. When the market inevitably collapses it may hit harder than it did in the 1930s, but we'll be forced to recon with our disposable society, economic polarization, and the fast-fashion way we attack architecture and corporate design in general. Quality and optimization can't go hand in hand, but quality can be forced by financial hardship where longevity becomes necessity. We might build smaller and live more simply, but we'll re-learn an appreciation for history and building things to last. We'll also be forced to reject optimization's cheap and boring status quo. The next Depression will be rough, but it will bring welcomed change. 

The economics of architecture and the anthropology of American style

Like art, the politics of an era play a strong roll in the elements of architectural style. America’s most iconic state buildings are inspired by the world’s classic Democratic civilizations. Our dedicated monuments honor our historic leaders in temples that saint them as gods.

As much as politics, the economy of an era has influenced our built world. Our Colonial beginnings are remembered in the quaint streets of Washington Square where small homes conservatively housed our Founding Fathers. Even Independence Hall and other 18th Century civic structures, while grand in theme, were subdued in pomp.

A hundred years later, the global Gilded Age driven by America’s Industrial Revolution reinvented architecture’s message. The wealth of the client was garishly displayed in the various styles of the Victorian era. Rich colors and textures were found in exotic woods. Expensive silks and leathers adorned the walls of even the more modest of homes, some of which can still be found in the West Philadelphia twins along Spruce Street.

The artchitectural detailing on Victorian homes along Spruce Street in West Philadelphia is representative of the economy of the era.

While the elements of Victorian era styles are anything but subdued, exaggerated elements can be found in the works of Frank Furness. A caricature of these styles, and perhaps one of the inspirations for the more refined Art Nuevo movement can be seen in Antonio Gaudi’s late 19th Century designs.

Frank Furness's Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

When any culture becomes excessively decadent, a rebellious counter culture is bound to surface. The idealistic youth of the early 20th Century rejected the saturated styles of the Victorian era with a number of artistic movements, namely with the soft, organic lines and lights pastels of Art Nuevo. To the modern eye the styles may not be very distinguishable, but artistically, Art Nuevo and various Victorian styles are symbolic opposites.

Perhaps the most dramatic comment on the excess of the Gilded Age would be International Style. Although not initially successful in the United States, it saw enormous popularity in countries eager to distinguish themselves from American capitalism.

One of the largest, early examples of International Style can be found in Philadelphia. In a twist of irony, the Pennsylvania Savings Fund Society employed a style intended to criticize capitalism to make the ultimate capitalistic statement. By stripping the skyscraper of any stylistic elements, the bank snubbed others who displayed their wealth and success with ornately adorned phalluses.

Philadelphia's PSFS Building is the world's first example of a skyscraper designed in International Style, a style that would prevail as the dominant skyscraper design for the rest of the century.

The Great Depression immediately followed the completion of the PSFS Building. It’s difficult to say if its style would have succeeded otherwise, but the failing economy motivated clients to reject the lush lines of a culture that led to the country’s demise. Likewise, the art community embraced this simplicity for political reasons.

A year later the Empire State Building opened. Its Art Deco style dominated America’s civic structures for decades and came to symbolize our rebirth. Art Deco train stations and post offices can be found across the country, many throughout Philadelphia. Ironically, along with International Style, Art Deco was dominantly employed to represent Communist and Socialist movements across Europe.

An Art Deco relief on Philadelphia's 9th and Market Post Office.

Although the elements in Art Deco were far simpler and cheaper than the preceding Victorian styles, it became clear that as buildings were to grow taller, the new economy would not afford the classic elements of style.

The success of the PSFS Building gave developers a unique opportunity. For the first time, an artistic movement was branded specifically for economic purposes. Art and architecture became commodities, not finely crafted luxuries. And the audience ate it up.

Philadelphia's early 20th Century skyline, thanks largely to the opulence of America's Gilded Age and the Industrial Revolution, was comprised of ornately adorned stone towers. The Great Depression forced developers to seek cheaper ways to build taller. The PSFS Building at the top center was the world's first skyscraper designed in International Style and would serve as the prototype for a century of affordable skyscraper construction.

Art critics tailored the process of interpretation to excuse limited design. Glass curtains were praised for their lack of presence, but those in the design community said nothing of the absent statement made by these unadorned walls. Like modern art, less meant more and we were stunned by the boldness of nothing. And in order for industrial cities to continue to rise, developers needed this trend to continue.

But a century later we continue to interpret meaningless art on behalf of our artists. International Style was invented to oppose capitalism, but its composite construction of cheap materials allowed it to become the ultimate capitalistic blindfold.

People continue to demand less and are willing to pay more for it. While skyscrapers were diluted in order to afford their height, the same practice has been applied to low level and residential architecture in the name of profit. Once architecture meant something in even the most humble of homes, but today’s wealthiest clients have become more concerned with prefabricated amenities than the aesthetic details of their environment.

Throughout the majority of the last century, very few styles have made a statement that wasn’t purely philosophical. A stagnant art scene can be measured anthropologically, and it’s no coincidence that the world’s most exciting experimental architecture can be found in emerging countries like India and China, and in the Middle East.

As the United States struggles to identify as the world’s Super Power, other countries are beginning to experience their own Victorian Gilded Age, which is evident in the skylines of Shanghai and Mumbai and the palaces of the United Arab Emirates.

Can La Ronda be Saved?

Benjamin Wohl of Palm Beach, FL has pledged the $300,000 needed to relocate Addison Mizner's 1929 La Ronda, to an adjacent lot. Unfortunately the owner's lawyer, Joseph C. Kuhls, has stated that no offers will be entertained and the demolition will proceed as scheduled. Another Philadelphia masterpiece wiped clean from the canvas.

Email the owner and his lawyer here at pbaskowsky@saul.com and jkuhls@dbyd.com.