Timothy Makower
Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale
Wiley, 2014
215 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-118-73772-9
In an era characterized equally by short attention spans and outsized real-estate developments, from Dubai to Shenyang to New York – both spurred on and stripped of intimacy by the ubiquity of digital devices – a concise, small-format physical book that heralds the pleasures of understanding, occupying, and yes, touching the built world seems to be just what is needed.
In Touching the City, Timothy Makower, a British architect who founded Makower Architects in 2012 after 25 years with Allies and Morrison, leads the reader through seven digestible and occasionally eloquent chapters on scale and how it is manipulated through the lenses of size, movement, edges, that architects’ favorite “grain,” and surfaces. Although clearly indebted to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (which Makower cites frequently) and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, it is much less proscriptive than the former and less intimidating than the latter, though it delivers insights that will be very familiar to most first-year architecture students. The Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier’s “Modulor” get their due as well.
Skyscrapers get a fairer treatment than one might expect. Though Renzon Piano’s Shard is pilloried for its lack of patina, and the spindly legs holding up its streetside overhangs, Jean Nouvel’s Burj Doha and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ Leadenhall Building are celebrated for their variations in texture and their muscularity, within and without. If a building is appreciable at more than one scale, in Makower’s estimation, it passes muster.
Although it’s presented as a “primer,” the relative concision and lack of dogma within might rightly earn a place for Touching the City on professionals’ shelves, since they are the ones who are implementing Brobingnagian, alienating and paranoid projects the world over, which to say the least, do not invite exploration by foot or fingertip. For those who have forgotten the fundamentals in practice, it’s good get a gentle nudge from a source that does not seem overly academic.
It’s hard to say where Touching the City would fall in the realm of academic publishing, however, since it commits the cardinal sin of using first person and referring many times to the author’s own projects. On the one hand, many of Allies and Morrison’s projects, in this book, located largely in London and Doha, are fine works of urbanism are relevant to the discussion – and shouldn’t one write what one knows? On the other, unfavorably comparing other contemporaries’ work to those of Makower’s recent alma mater seems an amateur move. Why couldn’t the scholarship stand on its own using more neutral examples?