Progressive Architecture, November, 1971, p. 130
Books
by Richard Rosenkranz.
Philadelphia/New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1971.
291 pp. $6.95.
Although at first glance Richard Rosenkranz may seem to have written a screenplay
for a youth-in-revolt flick, what he has really done in Across the Barricades
is to provide a very readable account of the real revolution -- the one that
is going on in the thinking of a lot of people, young and old alike. It's
easy to imagine Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffmann and other young film stars
in the screen version Scene: Avery Hall, the architecture building at Columbia
University just as everybody is putting finishing touches on design projects.
The story: word comes that the administration is closing the school because
of a student strike. Everyone is told to go home. The students, angered,
keep the building open. Their anger slowly grows into an alliance with SDS
and black student factions that brought about the closing of the school.
There are meetings and discussions and demands and explanations and statements
and harangues. There are light moments and tender moments, you can almost
see generation gaps widening and narrowing. Mostly, however, there is tension:
will the university call the cops? Will the students leave peacefully or
will they resist? Will there be police brutality? The answer is yes, and
the climactic bust is the stuff movies are made of.
Hollywood, if they are still making movies there, might not get to the real
substance of the story. though, for what really happened at Columbia, at
least in the architectural school. seems unfilmable. The real strike, the
real and lasting revolution. took place in the heads of the students. and
it is that revolution that Richard Rosenkranz is concerned with: thoughts.
not actions.
Rosenkranz, who was doing research on a journalism fellowship at Columbia,
followed his reporter's instinct to Avery Hall. He was first impressed by
the people there, and even more impressed by the issues. The students at
Avery were for the most part graduate students, older than the strikers at
other campus buildings They weren t really revolutionaries: concerned, yes
-- many had made peace marches, been to Washington, protested peacefully
-- but not revolutionaries. They were,
Rosenkranz says, more serious and democratic than the rest, and "much more
than nihilists." The issues included the university gymnasium, which the
school was going ahead with in spite of strong objections from students and
the surrounding community; university expansion policies in general; defense
research and student-administration relations. He was so impressed that he
stayed on to become part of Avery Commune. He took notes, later tape recorded
recollections to recreate the mental mood of that April week back in 1968.
The issues, for the campus as a whole and for the students in Avery. were
political, not architectural. although the gym combined elements of both.
But there are no sharp lines between architectural and political problems
any more: ask anyone involved in urban planning. For the 80 students who
had at first been angered simply because their work had been interrupted,
it was a week of growing political awareness. And the importance of what
happened -- in their heads and on campus -- shows in the way students continued
after the strike. Some stayed in demonstration style politics, some moved
into advocacy design and planning, some finished their degree, some dropped
out of school. One group in particular -- students in architecture, planning,
law, journalism, sociology, history and other subjects -- got together to
form Urban Deadline, a nonprofit corporation that has taken on projects ranging
from slum repairs to playground design to a riverfront park in Paterson,
N.J.
There are times in the book when the students seem dead wrong, hopelessly
naive or just plain stubborn, and other times when their concern (which was
already there) and their political awareness (flourishing in the hothouse
climate of the strike) can be clearly seen. Taken all together, the thoughts
and recollections of these students offer some insight into something that
is happening throughout the architectural profession -- the politicizing
of architectural issues and the architecturalizing of political issues. [CP]