Daniel Herriges has an interesting question over at Strong Towns:
Are tall buildings that tower above their surroundings inappropriate?
I’ve talked with people whose answer to that is “Yes, obviously,” but when pressed, no one has ever given me an explanation that doesn’t reduce to, “I just don’t like it.”
Maybe that summary is a little slanted, but it’s an easy conversation to imagine. For Herriges, this gut reaction presents a problem:
Unfortunately, the vague notion of “incompatibility” has even made it into many city codes and planning documents, where it functions as a catch-all justification for any advocate or elected official to object to a proposal they personally dislike. This trend is harmful to our ability to talk about urban form, urban design, and development regulation in constructive ways. When we frame the debate around “compatibility” or “scale,” it quickly drags the whole thing into culture-war territory.
This is fascinating to think about, for all kinds of reasons. Herriges goes on to talk about the use of “garbage language,” the importance of human scale and function over form, the primacy of horizontal over vertical dimensions—it’s well worth the read. And as far as I can tell, I agree with him.
And yet . . .
While I don’t have any specific objections, I also still agree with Czesław Miłosz (emphasis mine):
In a landscape that is nearly totally urban, just by the freeway, a pond, rushes, a wild duck, small trees. Those who pass on the road feel at that sight a kind of relief, though they would not be able to name it.
It seems clear to me that Herriges certainly has a place for this scene, and for the human emotion behind it—but not for the nameless cause. Miłosz may not have been talking about scale, but the feeling (pardon the garbage language) seems valid, even though the way it’s described here, and the way it is usually felt in the moment, doesn’t defend itself against Herriges’s argument. Still, it seems right to me; and I think it’s right that this sort of intuition be considered, and maybe it should even make it into some city codes and planning documents.
None of that is to say that garbage language doesn’t exist, but it may just mean that some of our conversations have a problem. And though I’m not a city planner, it’s a very human problem that I’m very okay with.