At its worst, the design city phenomenon is a handmaiden to the current real estate boom in which everything is aestheticized to achieve what developers think of as highest and best use. So in New York, for example, major commercial development schemes now trumpet names like Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, and Philippe Starck. And there is also pressure to make every square foot of the city into usable space: no neighborhood, no tract, no bit of disused infrastructure can be allowed to simply endure. Take the High Line, the abandoned elevated freight rail track that snakes along Manhattan's far West Side, which is being transformed into an architectural spectacle by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The new High Line will be a technologically advanced meadow, a fine addition to the West Side and a must-see attraction for design tourists. But it's a shame that in the design city a striking ruin cannot just exist.
Montreal's design commissioner, Marie-Josée Lacroix, who organized the symposium, says New Design Cities was inspired by "the need to learn from other cities, to meet with people who are design advocates, who share the belief that design quality is a key element of a sustainable city." The best way to understand what Lacroix means by design city is to look at her most visible undertaking, an annual competition called Commerce Design Montreal. Every year, dozens of ordinary businesses—restaurants and boutiques, banks and laundromats—compete for awards. Since the competition's inception, in 1995, Montreal's shopkeepers have been encouraged to consciously use design in their places of business to gain public acclaim. In fact, the first event on the New Design Cities schedule is Commerce Design Montreal's awards ceremony. After much solemn speechifying by a whole raft of officials, the 2004 People's Choice award is handed to the designers of a sleek new supermarket, the Adonis.
In my room at the Gault (a 2003 Commerce Design winner) I come across evidence of how Lacroix's efforts have influenced the city. On my bedside table is a little booklet published by a nearby Scandinavian boutique called Want Stil. The cover of the booklet shows a print of Habitat, the revolutionary modular housing project that architect Moshe Safdie designed for Expo '67. The guide directs me to places in the neighborhood that someone staying at the Gault might like, businesses chosen for their aesthetic sensibilities. Besides Want Stil itself, with its carefully curated assortment of clothing and artifacts, I can choose among a housewares store, Espace Pepin ("like walking into a fashionable loft"), an optician specializing in glasses with severe frames, or any number of restaurants, such as Ristorante Brontë and Olive & Gourmando. I follow the Want Stil map to Olive, where my fellow diners seem uniformly attractive. I feel as if I've walked into a page from Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class, in which cities are rejuvenated by energetic hipsters.
At the symposium's close, I drift into a cocktail party in another Commerce Design winner, the Cluny Artbar. Built into a corner of the Darling Foundry, an old industrial building that has been turned into a gallery, Cluny is so perfectly to my taste that it's a little frightening. Designed by Jeremiah Gendron and Patrick Meausette, it has a high ceiling of unadorned concrete, tables made from recycled bowling alley flooring, huge metal-framed windows, and raw-looking brick walls.
Cluny is located south of downtown Montreal, in a neighborhood that is just now being reclaimed as a high-tech, start-up loft district. In another city—San Francisco, for instance—this transformation would have happened 5 or 10 years ago and the whole area would already be designer-perfect. But this building, in all its industrial chic, is typical of how things look and feel early in the cycle. I go back the next day, and the area is pretty much deserted.
Thackara, meanwhile, has returned to his willfully underdesigned house in a small town near Montpellier, France. In a phone conversation he tells me that his current fascination is a new anti-design movement out of Brussels advocating vrijplaatsen, or free zones. "It's about this thing that's happening in Europe now, this exact phenomenon of overdesigned cities, of me-too design concepts where everything is made perfect and beautiful and chic but therefore loses its vitality," he says. The idea is that certain neglected parts of cities should be saved in perpetuity from development: "There's a very serious attempt to say we should protect areas from design so the cultural equivalent of wild mushrooms can grow." In other words, now that the concept of the design city is pervasive enough to merit its own international symposium, it's time for the next thing: the new anti-design city.
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