John Young Architect

Progressive Architecture, November, 1971, p. 130

Books

## Report on the revolution

### Across the Barricades

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]

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