In the early 2000’s, I attended a guided tour of the city of Berlin in Germany. It had only been a little more than a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the remnants of East Berlin then were still vivid. Our tour guide showed us the Eastern walls, which were still littered with bullet holes. Then he pointed to the “ugly” grey Fernsehturm, the Television Tower that looked like the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, and commented that it was probably used to spy on West Berlin during the Cold War. As I continued my travelling through Eastern Europe, I found their cities similar to that of East Germany – of raw concrete blocks that looked like “prisons with windows,” which, as I later learned, belong to a style of architecture called “béton brut”, or brutalism.
The further I went across the globe, I came to a realization that what we perceive as the ideal city – whose buildings are constructed in ornate and theatrical styles, whose boulevards are lined with shapely, measured, and symmetrical hedges that must have been preserved by the most architectural of gardeners – only reside in small pockets of Western Europe. To quote Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad: “We [Americans] distort a dozen sickly trees into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room, and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a faultless tunnel of foliage is formed. The arch is mathematically precise. The effect is then very fine.”
Surely other ideal cities must have had existed before the rise of Western Europe. But we know that such cities would have had long been destroyed if not because of the fall of civilizations, then at the hand of Mother Nature herself. Save for the rare few that still exhibit remnants of an impressive architecture, such as Villa Adriana which was constructed almost two millennia ago, most archaeological sites are piles of ruins that would take the average visitor a wealth of imagination to visualize what they may have looked like at their zenith. However, through the expert eyes, and no less important, expert imagination of archeologists, we can find where and when these cities would have lived. And among the most significant indicators for such places is the evidence of a well-managed water and sanitation system.
Constructed in 2600 BC, the city of Mohenjo-Daro on the banks of the Indus River is the most completely preserved city of the Bronze Age world. It had a brazen modernity, where most of the city consisted of brick-built houses with grid-like arrangement of streets, long boulevards, and a sophisticated drainage and sanitation system, which was made of terracotta sewage pipes. Private and public toilets and bathrooms were ubiquitous. The Upper Citadel, a raised civic center, also known as the Mound of the Great Bath, had a large sunken pool measuring roughly 40-feet long and over 6-feet deep, lined with brickwork and sealed with plaster and bitumen and entered on either side via steps with timber treads, all constructed to the finest architectural standards. Brick-made bathing floors and platforms also were a standard fixture in most dwellings of the Lower Town. Citizens seemed to be familiar with very specific notions of cleanliness, with daily ablutions apparently forming part of their domestic routine. The earliest records of the caste system with its hierarchical division of social functions, organized on an ascending scale of purity, actually came a millennium later.
In contrast, Paris, known as the City of Light, had only come into the light after Haussmann, who oversaw the city’s complete renovation. Before Haussmann, Paris lacked the luxury even of defective sewers. As late as the 19th century, the stairs and public passages of Parisian houses stank of urine. Water carriers sold water from the streets, but the poor would crowd around the standcock with domestic utensils to lay in a day’s supply, even scooping water out from the gutters. Faecal matters were stored in cesspools below the houses, or they were received into casks and carted away when full. The liquid contents of the cesspools were then emptied into the gutters. The Cholera epidemic of 1832 killed twenty thousand inhabitants. The city center was deserted by the rich as quickly as the new districts had space for them; its pervasive and loathsome odor drove away all but the most intrepid tourist.
Another indicator of a great city is the housing quality for its citizens, of which remarkable archeological evidence was found in Teotihuacán, an ancient Mesoamerican city in the Valley of Mexico. Established around 600 BCE, it grew into the largest metropolis in Mesoamerica by 350 CE. To build Teotihuacán, the channels of the rivers San Juan and San Lorenzo were diverted, tying them to the city’s orthogonal grid and transforming its marshy banks into solid foundations – a colossal feat of civil engineering, considering it was without the benefit of working animals or metal tools. It laid the basis for a grand architectural program which saw the erection of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The temple faced a sunken plaza that captured the floodwaters of the San Juan to form a seasonal lake, its waters lapping at painted carvings of plumed serpents and shells on the temple facade, making them glisten as rain began to fall in late spring.
Then, diverging from the expected trajectory of societal development, which would have continued with the construction of palaces and elite quarters, the city went on a remarkable tangent and began to build high-quality housing for nearly all of its population around 300 CE. For unknown reasons, the Temple of Feathered Serpent was desecrated and all new pyramid construction stopped permanently. Instead single-storey buildings were built, each equipped with integral drainage facilities and finely plastered floors and walls. Each family appeared to have a set of rooms within the larger apartment block, complete with private porticoes where light entered the otherwise windowless rooms. Some communal courtyards had pyramid-shaped shrines, suggesting this architectural form had taken on new and less exclusive roles within the city. Even the more modest apartments showed signs of a comfortable lifestyle, with a staple diet of corn tortillas, eggs, turkey, rabbit meat, and pulque, an alcoholic beverage fermented from agave. Citizens enjoyed a standard of living rarely achieved across a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history.
That the ideal city is rare to come by should make one ponder what it takes to build one. Undoubtedly it requires generational wealth, a population of cultivated knowledge and taste, and with a healthy sense of civic pride. In 1965, the clothing company VAN sent a filming crew to the American East coast, hoping to educate the Japanese public on Ivy style. Japan had then idolized the United States as a land of unbelievable riches and modern technology, but in New England, they saw families routinely renovating their houses’ interior while keeping the exterior design intact. At a time when Tokyo developers summarily leveled old wooden structures to build concrete apartment complexes, it struck a chord. Toshiyuki Kurosu, then head of VAN’s planning department, told Men’s Club, the quarterly publication for men’s fashion, “Japan is much older than America, but no one thinks about protecting the classic feel of a place. They just build everything modern, not thinking at all about whether there is a balance to the buildings around it.” Kurosu then awoke to what Kensuke Ishizu, the founder of VAN, always said: Ivy represented veneration for tradition, not just chasing the latest modern trend. Of this, I am reminded of a passage which John Adams, founding father of our nation, wrote to his wife Abigail, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
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