Lux et Veritas

Who Minds The Store?

Monday, February 25, 2008

The recent sub-prime meltdown got me thinking about this question more forcefully than I have in the past. If anyone with a calculator could have taken a look at the risks at the outset of this madness, they would have discovered that the mortgagees could not pay their mortgages when their balloon mortgages' interest rate doubled. Or, further, did anyone consider that because a lot of the buyers had marginal incomes and insecure jobs, loosing their jobs or taking on more debt to live that lifestyle for sure would help them to lose their homes? Where was the fed in all this? Did they not study the data or read the tea leaves that this momentum toward failure produced?

How this event got me thinking more directly about "minding the store" relates to planning and urban design was a reference one of the trad-arch subscribers provided to an article in "City". The  article presumably a critique of a new Bob Stern building ended up at as rant against modernism, other buildings nearby designed by decon starchitects. What the article should have been about is the state of urban design in New York City. The article mentions a question Vincent Scully put about a whole street of Gugenheim Museums; and what would be the effect. Is there anyone at the New York City Planning Commission that reviews and approves building permits for new development who has some guideline, let's say an urban design, by which to judge appropriateness? Or, to make my question easier, does the reviewer ever think about whether the new development adds to or detracts from the city's fabric, near and far?

How could New York have gotten itself to draw up a comprehensive 3D land use/urban design plan? In a city that is so dense and filled with many different urban design models and architectural styles that do or do not contribute to the city's fabric, for want of a better and less pompous word, there are a lot of starting points for such a plan. Let's take three good and one very bad model as a starting point: Rockefeller Center, the Mies Tower and plaza, Lever House's urban garden as the good ones.  And a real bad one: Lincoln Center. To these let's throw in the continuous and connected fabric of open spaces in Rome. Simply, an urban design plan for Manhattan emerges from decisions about how a fabric of a public realm, open spaces and streets and all of the stuff in the public right-of-way, is realized. Further, what type of massing of buildings with specific uses is appropriate to not only enclose but make active the public realm?

Of course, this plan has to be flexible to encounter changes of all sorts in building styles and specific needs for vertical and horizontal spaces. How they would enhance or detract from this urban design is the job of the New York City Planning Commission planners.

An example of what I am talking about is the plan for Battery Park City. You may not like the plan or the architecture, but a great deal of oversight was in place to monitor it. There was a whole approval process for all built things. And adjustments to the plan were made, to take into consideration different and/or better ideas. If there had been a form based code in place, that much more would have been added to the strength of "minding the store".

Yes, Battery Park City was a giant real estate development effort. And the participants, including the City, had the financial resources to provide oversight. Perhaps it was impossible to overcome the emotional upheaval that gave way in preparing a plan for Ground Zero, but the same care could have been applied there.

"Minding the store" is a pretty boring thing to do day-after-day. And most planners, not trained in urban design or 3D land use planning, and too many architects, who think they are urban designers. are not really good candidates for this job. But somebody's got to do it; or we get the kind of ranting I described above, which is absolutely useless after the fact. And, moreover, ranting does not make a plan.

Of course, the architecture and planning schools have got to produce these kinds of professionals. And they have to be politically directed to do this kind of work. Examples: The Philadelphia Planning Commission in the Ed Bacon days had a staff devoted to not only reviewing plans for the center city and preparing a concept for it. They also spent a lot of time platting vacant land and areas outside Center City for new development. The Boston Redevelopment Authority in the Ed Logue/Mayor White days had a similar staff, though they concentrated on those projects under development and left the rest of the designated urban renewal projects without the same kind of attention paid by the planners in Philadelphia.

I have read many stories on the various city planning lists to which I subscribe that amount to: "How could they approve............fill in the blanks. Perhaps these jurisdictions had some sort of "general plan" that is so general, almost anything is ok. Of course they had Euclidian zoning to enforce these generalities. Let's imagine that they got smart and hired DPZ, as an example. There would have been charrettes and workshops and a final vision would have been born. But when they leave town, whose left to make sure the vision or plan is implemented? Yes, any so-called "town architect" would be helpful, but there has to be an undestanding of what that kind of oversight means; and there has to be active support. Or, maybe it's not an architect, perhaps a firm hired on a retainer to provide those kinds of services.

What this post is all about is you get financial meldown and awful buildings, if there is no plan and risk analysis and noone to "mind the store". 

Dressing Appropriately and Observation

Friday, February 22, 2008

Have you noticed how badly Americans dress? This in contrast to the vast fashion industry in the US. Is it only the very rich or the quirky who buy and wear this stuff? What happened to looking pretty and handsome? Or, is that "so then" that it is offense to dress well? This blog entry is not just about the disappearance of appropriate dress. It is about how we see ourselves and how we see things in general, i.e. the talent to observe.

In the "good old days", women wore dresses or elegant slacks with appropriate shoes that hopefully didn't hurt their feet, and the men wore ties and jackets or suits. This mode of dress was then taken to extremes. IBM insisted that the men wore only white, button down shirts, a striped tie, and a grey or blue suit that could have pinstripes. The women could not look sexy or provocative; and the men could not "stick out" by wearing loud patterns and brown. Woman looked in the mirror a lot to see if their makeup and hair were perfect; and the men sneaked looks in store windows and used their reflection ostensibly to fix their ties and pat down their hair to prevent fly-away.

There was elegance and appropriatness in the architecture and graphic design by well known designers. You had Mies and SOM and some of the risk taking architects like Saarinen. But you also had Paul Rand who set the standard for classic graphic design. These professionals were held in very high regard. The suburbs were rather bland, but not cheap looking yet, though we had blander Levvittown; and the shopping centers were fewer, no less ugly, but smaller. Main street and leafy grided local streets were still in high demand, but curvilinear streets and culs de sac were coming in practice. In sum, people looked at themselves and each other and the special parts of the built world around them. They were models that were emulated.

Now Americans laud the "casual". They also like new things, fads to play with. They look like they were about to dig in the garden, work on the car, or go to a golf game. And this description applies to lawyers who also have a dull grey suit and black shoes when there are client meetings. Traveling abroad you notice or can easily identify Americans: they wear jeans, awful sneakers, warm-up suits, and their hair looks like it was cut by a lawnmower. It used to be that the worst dressed group were the Russians and Eastern Europeans with their funny shoes and seeming always brown outerwear. It is not clear that Americans are looking at themselves or the built and non-built environment.

To make my point here, architectural and graphic design, also photography today bears a strong resemblance to the way Americans dress and observe each other and the world around them. More than ever architects want to build buildings that are so unique that they stand out from the crowd of the past they disdain. Is Louis Kahn turning over in his grave? To justify this weirdnes, which in some cases is also brilliant, they give out architect-speak about their position in the forefront of a new paradigm. Grafic design is either of the junk variety, though I think that is now passe, or very retro, back to the bad taste of the 50's. Paul Rand where are you. The photographers that are being pushed by the galleries are lauded for taking trees and posing some unwashed or weirdly dressed person in the foreground of some messy or dilapidated scene.

I look at this whole scene of bad, read ugly, dress and designer weirdnes and retro models being rehashed, and I say to myself, "25 years from now are we going to look at photographs of this time, and say stuff like, 'Did I dress like that, how ugly?', or 'Where did those weird, twisted, mishapen, leaning buildings come from?' I get the same feeling when I look at my family back in the twenties: Men wearing spats and winged collars; women in breast flatening dresses with coiled hair dos and strapped shoes that resemble "mary janes". And, of course, I say: "How could anyone look like that?"

This is a rather superficial and overly generalized comment on the present scene, but I just felt like writing about it. 

Confusion and Revisionism

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Today's New York Times Arts and Leisure Section provides credible evidence that its architectural critic the Great St. Nic and its front page article, "Rehabilitating Robert Moses" have done a great disservice to Times' readers and harm to the cause of urbanism. I am also led to the conclusion that the Times' claims - "all the news that's fit to rint" - these days has the ring of sensationalism.

St. Nic reports more than critiques and provides the least amount of understanding in connecton with Gehry's design for Grand Avenue, downtown LA. First of all the birds eye view of the hard model, serveral eye level photographs of the same, and an accompanying site plan seem totally unrelated to explain what the evolution of Gehry's design was and whatever point St. Nic is trying to make. The following is Nic's bow to contextualism and urbanism: "In an early version of the design, the two residential towers were set at the site's northeast and southwest cornerrs, visually framing the complex and anchoring it into the surrounding skyline." Further: "Over the last year, as Mr. Gehry struggled to contain rising construction estimates, his box-like forms became more static, lending the design a more formal symmetry. The proposed facades of the two towers....., which orginally included fractured planes of glass that gave the impression that they were coming apart at the seams, are also less dynamic, forming a polite backdrop to Disney Hall across the avenue."

Looking at what I can make of the plans, I cannot see how the two towers frame the site, when the other forms look like they have been smashed up. Is he talking about context? I think not. And I cannot see how they anchor it to the surrounding skyline. If anything, the plan adds to the cacaphony of Disney Hall and the more stiff other buildings surrounding it. All of these contradictory words aside, and if Nic had just stuck to describing Gehry's evolving plan, some much better graphics showing the original, the altered plans, and a diagram about the impact of the evolution would have given the article the kind of clarity readers and the trained eye need.

If Gehry's plan is the beginning of a "new urbanism", I'm moving to the space station where at least form follows function.

Robin Pogrebin's front page article on the rehab of Robert Moses, unlike that smashed up thing I talked about earlier, is a very balanced piece of reporting. Moses' overwhelming crimes against urbanism, e.g. his destruction of neighborhoods and his rejection of more mass transit, are very well documented. This description, along with comments by Robert Caro who won the Pulitizer Price a while ago that documents his reign, balances the impact of the revisionism on this history by architectural historian Hilary Bannon.

To give her credit as a historian of the  facts, she acknowledges his "anti-democratic methods and indifference to community values". But her stated reason for the show leads us in another direction: "I wanted to investigate Moses' with this emphasis on physical form". She highlights and is impressed by the majesty and durability of things like Jones Beach, Kips Bay Towers, bridge designs, and so on.  Where her goals become twisted is when Mr. Finkelpearl of the Queens Museum says about the hosting of one of three exhibits on Moses: "This show is not about Moses, the guy. It's about what Moses did." To this distinction, Robert Caro violently disagrees.

The effect of both articles is the sowing of confusion. St. Nic with his excitement about new forms and unique concepts leads the reader and too many practicing architects, planners, and urban designers to believe and then to think this is the new paradigm.

New Is the new reality and truth, the past is boring and done for. Moses' rehab turns the public away from his very wrong, failed practices and gives the impression that he was a good guy, too. Again, because of the passage of time and the deadness that accompanies Caro's 30 year old book, Moses can be turned into someone else, not the anti-urbanist he really was.

Why Rome is an enduring model of Urbanism

Why Rome is an enduring model of urbanism

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

This photograph underlines some of the many reasons why Rome is Rome. Rome is more its classical architecture. It is its great diversity of its architecture. It is the many colors and the different building materials. But what really makes Rome's urbanism universal is the rhythm of projecting windows, arches, doorways, columns, and cornices that direct the eye along a building wall from one piazza to the next.

This is the fifth time that I have been in Rome. Like most photographers/city planners I was overwhelmed by the beauty, its historic sites of many millinea, the faultless food, the traffic, the dust and dirt, and the incessant noise of Vespas on every street and pedestrian way. My wife and I are wanderers with cameras walking endlessly and without a plan; and, of course, we missed some of the important things that not only make Rome unique but a universal model of urbanism applicable in any time and place. On our previous trip 4 years ago, on the last day of our time in Rome, we stumbled into the Piazza Colonna and followed the pedestrian paths from one piazza to another stopping to have lunch with a wedding party, ending up at the Tiber River. I wanted to see more of the parts of Rome hidden behind its major streets.

The following is a list of characteristics that I think summarizes Rome's urbanism. All of them, I strongly believe, are transferrable to cities in the United States.

Paving Stones: Most of the paving stones are approximately 4 inches square. They connect all buildings and "pull" Rome together. But is more than their connection. It is also the eye making the connection, because it follows not only the pattern and direction of the stones, but also the lines of mortar between them.

Parking on Paving Stones: So strong is the pattern of paving stones that even when a car is parked on them the eye does not perceive it as a parking lot.

 

 

 
When parking spaces are striped in a piazza, it becomes a parking lot.

 

 

 

As a comparison, though there are many cars parked in this piazza, it seems less of a parking lot than was the case in the previous photograph. Because there is still so much paved space without cars, the feeling of a piazza is maintained.

Piazzas: Lead to

shopping streets that both pedestrians and the occasional small, and sometimes large, cars share. These lead to:   

 

         .

other piazzas that have restaurants and shops in them.

Churches in street wall: They give a relief to the continuous shops. And they mark a special place just by the church architecture itself: the columns, color, and flat steps leading up to the entrance. More prevalent is a church with a piazza of some size in front of it.

St. Peter's Church is the most important church in Rome, the seat of the Vatacin and where the Pope, world leader of the Catholic Church, resides. To mark its importance is St. Peter's Square.The space, though very wide is within the peripheral vision of the observer and is contained by:

 

the Bernini Columns. If you stand on the outside of the columns you will see the same column on the other side of the square. This is the brilliance of the columns' symetrical siting.

Terminus of a street: At the end of most narrow, pedestrian streets is a terminus building. In this case it is a church. This terminus aids the observer in determining not only the length of the street, but also its end. In most cases, the terminus is a very interesting, different color, heavily articulated building.

Great and perfect squares: The Captoline Hill, designed by Michelangelo, is considered one of the most perfect squares in the world. It is the model for public squares, university quadrangles, and campus medical facilities.

Here is another view of the square. Note how the pattern in the paving stones directs the eye from one building to the other.

There many other examples of the urbanism of Rome. From my observations of the city over a period of 5 visits, I believe the urban design principles of Rome are one of the most important models of true urbansim. I disagree strongly with critics and design professionals that these are not transferrable to the United States and contemporary times. I have driven around Washington, DC since I returned and to the rural areas on the outskirts of Syracuse, NY; and I see all of the missed opportunities to arrange buildings and spaces that follow the urban design model and principles found in Rome. I do not subsribe that we can't do this. I do believe that reference to the principles of the urban design of Rome can provide inspiration to change the current model US cities and suburbs have persistently, and with great failure, followed over the last 50 years. However, it is not merely enough of following or being inspired by these principles. It is a case of truly understanding them and appreciating the result on the ground at the level of the observer and pedestrian.

Dr. Paul Farmer, Dr. Alexander, and Incrementalism

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

I strongly recommend that all of the New Urbanism listservs subscribers, my friends, all government bureaucracies, and well-meaning do-gooders read Mountains Beyond Mountains, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder. It is the story of Dr. Paul Farmer who took the Hippocratic Oath literally "to heal, not to harm". Farmer has spent his professional life mostly in Haiti and later in Peru and Russia, looking beyond mountains of ignorance, neglect, and bureaucratic rules to heal the sickest of the sick. He is a true hero, an exemplary man, a professional of professionals, obsessional, dedicated, inefficient by measures of cost and benefit, and aware that his limitations can and will be breached. Above all, he is a seeker of unseen solutions, a swashbuckling innovator, a healer, and an evolutionary thinker. He follows the same path of thinking, healing, and dedication to a "wholeness" that Christopher Alexander also treads.

Farmer's beliefs and practice are that healing each person heals everyone. When he arrived in Cange, Haiti, one of the remotest, poorest, and least healthy towns there, he found widespread suffering from diseases almost completely stamped out in rich countries and the proliferation of AIDS. He set up what became a modern hospital with Haitian doctors and health workers and with dedicated volunteers from the Harvard Medical School and the Boston hospital establishment. He enlisted the support of rich people wanting to give away their wealth for a real cause, from foundatons, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and the Haitian medical community. His goals beyond treating the patient and healing them and the community were first dedicated to eradicating common infection, malnutrition, unsanitary living conditions, and, later, to wiping out tuberculosis, and providing modern drugs to stem deaths from AIDS.

From the beginning to the present, Paul Farmer made and still makes "house calls" in addition to his hospital surgeries to a long line of sick patients. He deals with patients and not sickness. He wants to know the living conditions, the culture, of his patients - in this case voodo - and to monitor their course of drug treatment.

To reach his goal, Farmer walked mountains beyond moutains. He pursued drug companies to lower their prices of TB and AIDS drugs. He recognized multiple drug resistant Tuberculosis and that much of it was created not only by patients neglecting to take their drug regimen. By the medical establishment repeating the same course of treatment that failed to cure but also increased the drug resistant population. He instituted the use of "second line" TB drugs that eventually reduced the multiple drug resistant TB population not only in Cange, but also in Peru and a Siberian prison. Finally, Paul Farmer successfully convinced a good portion of the doubters to change their point of view on triage and effectiveness. Farmer made them understand that untreated sick people no matter where they live are the agents of increasing the sick population world wide.

Is Farmer's model of healing a model for problem solving of all kinds? Is it posssible to take "little projects with big visions" and have big successes? Can theory outrun practice? The answer is yes. Can Farmer's model work without him, his dedicated staff, and his genius? The author Kidder feels that it cannot.

I tend to agree with Kidder. In order for a project of this kind, say the implementation of Smart Code and a New Urbanist Plan, a committed leader with the political savvy to negotiate with all of the major players; a dedicated staff to monitor both code enforcement and plan maintenance; and, finally, the cooperation of develoers and a zoning or planning commission are absolutely necessary. Though a very huge accomplishment, merely putting out an NU plan and having a Smart Code adopted by the zoning and/or planning commission will not guarantee long term positive results.

Also to consider is that once theory is put into practice, the practice becomes bureaucratized. Using the city planning example, it is overseen and managed by a planning staff, a zoning commission, building permitting, fine arts and historic preservation commissions, etc. Political and ideological conditions blossom. Intepretations of the new practice become personalized and often confused. The goal of the new practice often becomes lost; and the new practice is hardened awaiting a new theory. The "whole" becomes lost and the process of change ceases to be healing.

Unless....................................a Paul Farmer-like planner/administrator is on the scene to take care of the patient and heal the whole community.

Too Much, Too Soon, Too Ugly, Too Late

Monday, September 4, 2006

Finally, someone from the Washington Post staff got the balls to "tell it like it is". Read Phil Kennicot's article in the Style Section today. But very, very late, like most investigative reports that take the long view after the scope of the disaster becomes perfectly obvious. Washington's downtown Massachusetts Avenue is an architectural and urban design failure on the scale of Ocean City, MD, because DC has a great plan that should have provided a guideline to the planners and the phalanx of approvers but wasn't enough. Everyone cared too much about economic development and utilized the vaguest guidelines and employed what I call overinvolved disinterested oversight. The result is a street of slab apartments with overhanging balconies, self-contained life centers, some ground floor retail, and the feel of total impermanence reminiscent of Wilshire Boulevard in 1964, before Cesar Pelli and Gehry put some sophistication in architectural practice in LA.

Whereas L'Enfant's plan was bold and clear, today's planners are unsophisticated in urbanism and timid to truly, truly and aggressively monitor a strong vision. I know because I worked as a city planner and software development consultant to the city and, specifically, to the Office of Planning. To make my point, when I worked for the city's redevelopment agency, we had total control over the urban design and architectural result of development of urban renewal projects. We had a special architectural review board that had final say as to what went down on the ground. I'm not personally proud of some of the projects in Shaw and 14th St., but I am using this monitor model as a contrast to what went on in connection with the Mass Ave. scandal. I am also a veteran of the Ed Logue era of urban renewal in Boston in the very early 60s, where architectural plans that were inconsistent with the redevelopment agency's vision got rejected and the developer didn't get the land.

No such level of vision and plan implementation and oversight exists in DC. Everyone defers to "the powers that be", the developers' "know better about the market than anyone else", the Fine Arts Commission's hands-off- hands-on review and pickiness of details with little overall city vision, the National Capital Planning Commission's follow-the-leader role as the second Fine Arts Commission, Congress, and so on and so forth.

So, while all of the "good people" in the city wring their hands after reading Kennicot's article today, the truth is that they don't care enough to make the city's planners and politicians care enough to make a truly urban DC. That sounds like the "moral high ground", but in the end it's about the absence of the Ed Logues, Edmund Bacons, and all of the visionary planners and administrators of the 60s and 70s, who, egotistical as they were and wrong as some of their decisions were, knew what they wanted and made sure it happened. We're not talking about Baron Haussmann or Albert Speer or even the corrupt Robert Moses. It's just well-trained, urban sophisticated, visionary, and committed planners and politicians doing their job to maintain and preserve urbanism. And it aint here in DC and hasn't been here for at least 3 decades or more.

CNU XIV

Washington, DC, Sunday, June 4, 2006

Congratulations to the organizers of the Providence Conference for the planning and execution of a truly excellent and well-run program. I not only enjoyed myself but learned something.

It was interesting to finally meet some of the subscribers on the listservs with whom I communicate frequently. It reminded me of finally seeing photographs of people I listened to on the radio during the 1940s. They were just different from what I had pictured in my minds eye.

CNU XIV was a contrast in extremes. There were the very practical sessions, e.g. pattern books, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the very theoretical and often hard to grasp, e.g. Unfoldings: The Building Blocks of Living Neighborhoods. Surprising was the Taskforce Summit where I was part of the group that discussed housing affordability. 

Ray Gindroz 's session on pattern books was notable for the suceess of pattern books. Surprising and appropriate was that all of the panel members, with the exception of Leon Krier, were developers. Though the theme was supposed to be about high density mixed-use development, for the most part it was about residential areas with some mixed uses near the center city. It was both surprising and comforting to learn the success in the use of pattern books by developers to guide their architects and, to a lesser extent, to be used in negotiations with the city and local interest groups. More vague is how pattern books can be used for in-fill, because it is hard to predict how a general massing plan can anticipate various architectural designs. Paul Ostergaard, Managing Principal of UDA, explained to me that the pattern book in these instances is mostly for "creating a certain kind of place" to which any architectural design should comply. More work on these in-fill pattern books will help to unearth just how a pattern book can shape infill in massing new development and to create sensible public spaces and special places.

Disappointing were Leon Krier's remarks on pattern books. They were a rambling of unorganized thoughts on peak oil, cars, the ignorance of government, the limited understanding of the public, the destructiveness of American mass culture that works against "good architecture" and new urbansim. At one point, Krier contended that "modernism", in contrast to new urbanism, had an easy time being accepted, to which one questioner reminded him was quite the opposite. Roy Gindroz did interrupt to ask Krier what he thought of pattern books, to which Krier responded of-handedly was "good"; and then he went back to his rambling discourse which continually used the word "ecology" in no context to which the real defintion of the word fits. After he finished his remarks, the audience but most importantly the panel members were curiously silent, which I would define as a mixture of embarrassment and dumboundedness. Here was an NU icon who turned out to be less than the "superman" I would have imagined from a radio program.

I stopped by only briefly on a session on the market for modernism in new urbanism. I left at the point where exhortation drummed out reason and rationality, and when slides of modernist contributions to the street scape were anything but a contributing factor. The facades were flat without depth or rhythm and the coloring resembling some child's building blocks. It is clear the style war was continuing without some thoughtful theory and examples of just how these "styles" can take their rightful places in a good place townscape. NU and the "modernists' have to stop the style wars to get on with the business of exploring the possibilities of both peace and a better product.

The audience for "Unfoldings" and Chris Alexander's presentation was surprisingly very large. Since Alexander never took the time to quickly go over the evolution of his work from patterns to unfoldings, it was difficult to understand just what he was talking about. For those who have not read any of his books, importantly "Patterns.....", my guess is that they may have been totally baffled. What Alexander thinks about how to approach building and townscape design revolutonizes the traditonal  hierarchical approach architects and town planners follow and reverses that traditional thinking to take into account organic evolution, pattern relationships between people of various cultures and building, and how these patterns "unfold" over time (change in complex ways much like the evolution of biological matter). Michael Mehaffy is leading his organization to translate this thinking into a body of new knowledge that planners and architects can use. Open as I think I am to new ways of thinking about these subjects, I had to admit that my mind struggles to understand and that I would be unwilling, at my stage in life, to undertake Michael's important work.

The surprise of the whole conference was the group discussion on affordable housing that took place at the Task Force Summit. After some limited remarks on subsidies, Phyllis Bleiweiss put forth the premise that this new initiative starts by assuming government intervention, including subsidies of all kinds, with private market participation and a whole set of tools for addressing the problem that she and the panel members agreed was a must for NU to work on. The panel concluded that since much of the available information already exists and many interest groups are involved in recommending new strategies, money and time CNU will provide will be devoted to hooking up with these different interest groups and working together to devise all of the "tools". This after months of harranguing on the need for subsidies by Emily Talen, David Brain, and myself with those on the list who "don't feel comfortable with government intervention and who also believe that too much money has already been spent and the results have been more slums, street crimes, and unplanned pregnancies by the very poor.

Though it rained during most of the conference, the sun came out at the CNU XIV Conference.

Another Perception of New Urbanism

Monday, March 6, 2006

This other percpetion of New Urbanism is by a black architect friend. I mention race here because it has a lot to do with how different life experiences see things. That would be true if I had heard it from various other ethnic, racial, and public interest groups. But I think it is worth listening to because NU needs to take a look at itself, to learn to know what additional development of its ideas and message is necessary to make its goals and protocols of practice more widely understood and accepted.

My friend said:

1. The movement is identified with one person, Andres. To my friend, he becomes perceived as a "cult" leader. He added that this is true of all other architecture, planning, and urban design movements. Movements themselves, he added, take on a "position" that immediately sets itself either apart from or superior to other movements, hence this kind of tribal competition.
2. He perceives NU as white and elitist. That is partly due to its apparent racial composition and the fact that NU takes no strong position of effective programs to fund "affordable housing" and produce a significant supply on a regular schedule, this among other prominent issues having to do with supporting and pushing for effective public transit subsidies, the true integration of the enivronment movement into NU, and so on.
3. The persistent argument about the best architectural style to accomplish urbanism is an unnecessary diversion from the implementation of its goals. and it sets up a disccusion that is way off understanding NU core goals.
4. Finally, he contends, too many of the built NU projects look the same: the New England green, a green mall, small town shopping streets, and a high density core that often is a key hole configuration. He feels that the solutions are more suburban in subject matter, rather than dense urban related. His point is that there are other urban design solutions that keep to NU principles but that are different for local different reasons. Finally,
5. There needs to be social impact analysis, that is, how the proposed urban design plan affects all income groups and cultural groups, in terms of housing, education, jobs, the provision of social-welfare and medical and social services, etc. He added, on my prompting, that impact analysis should also include fiscal and environmental impacts, particularly in the case of the Gulf Coast, such as the effects of annual and cumulative rising of water levels that may eventually engulf towns and cities in that belt. In conclusion, NU has become a club of like minded movement members to which other non-members and orginal founders are not included as equals.

Whether or not NU agrees with or takes strong objections to these observations and perceptions is irrelevant to the reality here that someone outside the movement, who truly supports its goals, practices, and standards, sees NU differently. And not necessarily altogether favorably. Since NU wants to have as many interests "under the tent", these observations shine the light on very specific changes NU should make give more than token lip service to considering and important relevance of other ideas and perceptions.

In fact, it cannot rest on its laurels and achievements gained so far. And it must expand its urban design ideas and give active support to government and private sector coalitions to actually carry out its goals.

On a personal note, I have persistently commented on many of the issues my friend has outlined so clearly. Any "movement" gets pretty clubbish after a while, if for no other reasons than a sense of arrogance sets in and divergent opinions are dismissed sometimes and sometimes not in a positive way. Further, a movement sets up competition with other competing "movements" where the debate is more one of which has the superior ideas and achievements, rather than a studied consideration of how those divergent ideas can be melded into a more inclusive and intelligent NU movement.

This is not a rock throwing effort on my part to distinguish myself as being someone with very strong (read competing) ideas. Rather it is to say that NU has to keep rethinking itself in measurable ways and expand its ideas by taking seriously the need to implement its goals on the ground for everyone of color, of different ethnic groups, of different incomes, and with different life experiences. This is not to recommend that NU becomes a political lobbying group. It is more like being practical and addressing just what specifically it takes to implement its goals on the ground and in terms of the people and interests it affects.

A melding of measuring social and other impacts with the kind of theoretical framework that Christopher Alexander has produced has the potential of strengthening NU and making its case to a wider audience, especially those who oppose it just because it may be a better idea that makes them feel less with their flimsy and self-referential goals and principles. These analytic approaches give NU designers a more complete picture of place and the people whose plans will affect them most directly.

I have enormous respect for my friend, his well-thought out ideas, and his goals that reach beyond his own ego and the need for personal accomplishment and recognition. He's talking about everyone and not just a well-intentioned and well-honed movement.

Enough Already, Ben Forgey

Monday, February 12, 2006

There he goes again! In his Sunday, February 12, 2006 Washington Post Cityscape column, Ben Forgey, entertains his readers with the latest decon architecture in Spain. And, at the same time, pays no attention to the wonderful Spanish cities where these new designs have been sited. This is not one of my rants at Mr. Forgey. It's more a case of highlighting some of silliness of these projects.

This is the Valleceron Chapel. My first reaction is that the building is upside down. My second reaction was that this is not Corbusier at Ronchamp.  Just to see what it might look like if the top were to be the bottom, take a look at the next image.

It doesn't look any less silly. But at least the building is no longer top-heavy and is also anchored to the ground.

This is a park under construction in Seville. I lost interest in the upper photo of what the pedestrian would experience under the canopy because the earlier description of an airport not shown as "biomorphic" seemed to apply here as well. I don't know what the word means specificially, in reference to architecture - I'm playing dumb here. In any case, if I don't understand both the word in this context, then I don't understand Forgey's understanding of the building.

I like a good joke as much as anyone. But these sillinesses cannot be classified as even a bad joke!

What does grab me in the lower photo above is that it reminds me of some of the tin roofs seen in less elite neighborhoods in Mexico. In this case, the wavy roof and graffiti-like pattern adorns an unfinished traditional building. In any case, it seems like bad joke of vernacular Spanish architecture.

Is Herbert Mauschamp Homophobic?

Sunday, January 8, 2006

This is certainly an appropriate question. In a two page article in today's NY Times Architecture column, Mauschamp waxes irrelevantly about the value of 2 Columbus Circle. According to Mauschamp, the value of Ed Stone's "weired" museum has mostly to do with the flowering of the gay community in New York and its attachment to it as a symbol of rebellion against the overpowering heterosexual community that looked down on it. Mauschamp asserts, perhaps by innuendo, that a combination of women and gay men are behind the movement to preserve what has always been in my earliest memories a "dog" of a building": a venetian palace built for a rich man with artistic appreciations that did not fit into the code which the Museum of Modern Art launched. My immediate free association brings to mind Saddam Hussein's preference in the architecture of the Arabian nights. Peggy Guggenheim's truly Venetian Palace of modern art is no less queer - a rich American woman as a Venetian wannabe - albeit with a more refined artistic sense. Mauschamp tries to connect weird, queer, and gayness to distinguish the value of the former Hartford Museum; but I would doubt he would judge Peggy's artistic pretensions in the same way. She was just queer but not gay.

As a sideline observation of the article, it is the usual philosophical, sociological, historic grabbag, and artistic allusions and coded phrases about other things that populate this windy far from analytic article on 2 Columbus Circle. Please tell me what Rudy Guiliani, the "ugly" (according to Mauschamp") late Penn Station, white flight, the secular historicism movement, and similar weak supports have to do with his argument that what certain groups of people cherish or use as a symbol of rebellion against their exclusion give architecture its meaning - value?

His seeming sociological and historic analysis and loud seeming homophobic interpretation of Stone's creation damn the building. That was its purpose from the beginning. In my limited view, this is exactly what criticism of art should never do. While all of the background Mauschamp creates is interesting in a sort of "off-the-wall" way, how much of it is an appraisal of Hartford's folly?

As I have written previously in this blog about Mauschamp, his publication in the New York Times, the "paper of record" does a great disservice to the education of the public in matters of archtecture controversey. If New Yorkers on both sides of the argument aren't already confused about whether or not to preserve this relic for its strangeness, as in the anthropomorphic restaurant architecture of the interior of Amereica, Mauschamp not only confuses matters but taints the discussion with not so veiled homophobia. I'm reminded of the current Administration's tactics to discredit its opponents with words like "disloyal", "anti-american", and "abettors of continued Iraqi violence".

The fact of the matter is that New Yorkers with a need to vent their anger at something other than the incredible stress and overload as citizens of the city is actually the source of the debate. It's winter now and the hot issues of avian flu, insecticides, organic food, and other matters of the summer, fall, and spring outdoors have faded away temporarily, and now preservation is the focus.

The Huntington Hartford Museum is no more or less an architectural dog than many other New York buildings. They don't deserve historic and preservation designation either. But Mauschamp's article and its twisted pronouncements wipe the debate slate clean, allowing judgments on its architectural merit to be made unhindered.