Nan Ellin spoke to a full house Monday night on what makes the difference between a city that is boring and a city that “has a pulse.”
As part of the College of Architecture and Planning’s lecture series, Nan Ellin, associate professor at Arizona State University’s College of Architecture, spoke to a room packed with 80 students and architectural professionals.
“I have always been interested in what makes cities tick,” Ellin said.
The lecture was titled, “Slash City” and it paralleled the principles in Ellin’s new book of the same title.
According to Ellin, functional, “living,” cities employ “hybridity,” or the connection of many different functions in the same building or area.
An example she gave was a building that contained a movie theater, coffee shop, office complex and housing at the same time.
The term “Slash City” refers to the practice of combining various functions while preserving their individuality.
“Bring things together, but preserve the integrity of each one,” Ellin said. “Being slashy is good business.”
According to Ellin, “Our cities have become so segregated and pulled apart…”Functionally segregated, socially segregated.”
As a result, she says she feels that American cities are not as “alive” as many cities in Europe.
She advocates a reintegration of functions and social groups.
“Bring things back together, like a pre-industrial city,” Ellin said.
In order to discover the way cities work and to develop her current theories, Ellin studied postmodern urbanism and found that most of what was being designed was a reaction to fear.
Gated communities and surveillance cameras attest to Ellin that much of architectural design is motivated by fear.
“It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we began to see some proactive ways to plan our cities,” Ellin said.
Ellin has a doctorate degree from Columbia University and has studied urbanism in a variety of places, including France.
