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Why the excitement? Because of all the forces that affect cities, the interstate highway program, 90% financed by federal funds, has been the least controlled. And yet today, those wide concrete corridors play as vital a role in shaping cities as once was played by rivers. Undirected, highways smash and crash through whole neighborhoods, debouch a torrent of autos into already traffic-choked streets. Owings' team, which includes engineers, traffic and transit consultants as well as architects, intends to wield its power to direct Interstate 95's path through Baltimore as delicately as a surgeon's scalpel, avoiding historic areas, living organic communities and parks, while improving marginal areas. Only nine months along in a two-year study, the team has already recommended that the road bypass a stable Negro neighborhood, and is finding new possibilities for building schools over the highway.
The whole delicate operation has catapulted Owings' team into what he calls "the fifth dimension of planning—politics, the art of getting things done." The team works with local, state and federal governments, is bringing public officials together with homeowners, businessmen and minority groups. They form a giant new client. And they care what will happen to the highway as deeply as any client S.O.M. has ever served.
Lasting Investment. Politics represents a direction architects have traditionally been loath to take. But not for much longer. Says A.I.A. President George Kassabaum: "Architects cannot wait until the politician, the sociologist and the economist invite us into the picture. By then, too many of the important decisions have been made." Nat Owings heartily agrees. He knows from experience that once decisions have been built into concrete, they are there to stay. He also sees the architect as the only person trained to maintain the balance between those esthetic qualities that give grace to modern city living and the multiple commercial, cultural and humanitarian demands made on the organization of the city.
No visionary, but a practical organizer, Owings says: "The old cities can be reorganized more cheaply, more efficiently and more quickly than we can build new cities. We could double the population simply by better use of the existing area, and at the same time organize the chaos." As he observes, an aerial photograph of any major U.S. city makes it appear to be bombed out; vast areas are given over to empty plots and parking lots. These, plus railroad yards and even highways, would make ideal sites for future new towns within towns, of which projects such as San Francisco's Golden Gateway Center are only the earliest prototypes. Population will be dense, Owings admits, but city dwellers will get around more easily; traffic functions will be divided into layers, with pedestrians in the open air and rails and roads beneath them.