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A design-savvy city defined, by Knute Berger (Crosscut Seattle)

For future reference: Berger's article about a report by architectural firm RMJM, which identifies America's top 10 best-designed cities. His article focuses on the aspect of heritage preservation, which factors into RMJM's weighting and criteria, and he notes that Portland seems to beat out Seattle. From there, Berger segues into whether or not (or to what extent) citizens are "pleased with their urban architecture," and observes that only LA residents are "less happy with their city" than Seattlites. (I'm not sure how he manages the leap from heritage preservation to 'being pleased" by contemporary/new architecture, but there you have it.) Anyway, the really useful thing about this article is that Berger lists the 7 categories RMJM used to answer the question, "what makes a design-savvy city?", and also summarizes each aspect (with commentary of his own, in italics). All in all, the list makes a great framework for thinking about urban design.

Tags: urban_design, urbanplanning, seattle, crosscut, knute_berger, heritage, preservation, designsavvy on 2008-07-19 -All Annotations (4) -About

more fromwww.crosscut.com

Public transit and urban infrastructure: Public transit systems can't stand still, even in mature transit cities like Boston and New York.
Portland was off the charts in transportation favorability, rating a higher approval than any of the top 10 cities at 79 percent.
Sustainable design: It's important to make things greener and some cities, like Seattle, have ambitious greenhouse goals, but the report found that in the top-10 designed American cities, only 45 percent of people surveyed were even aware of their city's sustainable initiatives. Those numbers were higher in Seattle (59 percent) and Portland (64 percent).
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- - if residents aren't aware of it, that indicates that city planners (staff) aren't articulating it clearly enough for the elected politicians to convey the message to residents/ voters. It's a failure of leadership on both sides.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-19 16:22:58
Art and design education: "Creative schools, especially at a university level, spawn creative businesses and endeavors and, in turn, elevate design sensibilities in their local communities," the report maintains. Boston, with top architectural programs at Harvard and MIT, is an exemplar. The gist: Break the barriers down between city and classroom.
Innovative architecture: The report says the "Bilbao effect," where one stunning building can put a city on the map, actually dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Parthenon was the first Guggenheim. World's fairs and the Olympic games are occasions for creating legacy structures which act as statements "of investment in a city, demonstrating commitment to the future and driving up tourism."
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- - in his aside, Berger asks, "How do we overcome our tradition of hiring great architects to do mediocre work (Frank Gehry's EMP, Robert Venturi's SAM). Do the ephemeral Rem Koolhaas library or Olympic Sculpture Park get us off the hook? Or should we be satisfied that the Space Needle will make a great ruin one day?"
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-19 16:25:13
Creative community: Great cities, it seems, are filled with idea people, the creative class who, if they are not lucky to be architects are perhaps their social and creative equals. San Francisco is cited as being "one of the most well-known havens of the creative economy."
(Great cities, in other words, need to have a high tolerance for over-educated trustafarians and a capacity for vigorous self-regard.)
Art, galleries, theater spaces, and museums: All the places where the creative class does its business are important, but so is bringing art to the masses. The study points to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's public art initiative, timed to coincide with the 2008 Democratic National Convention there in August and featuring, according to a press release, "10 site-specific art installations catalyzing public discourse in neighborhoods" throughout the city. "Catalyzing discourse" is always good for bonus points in a "savvy city" competition.
Preserving historic buildings: The report says, "How a city treats the past says a lot about its values for the future. And anecdotal evidence suggests that cities that take care of their old landmarks are likely to embrace new ones." In addition, the study encourages sustainability through preservation by touting an effort in Boston to "revitalize the existing City Hall in Government Center as opposed to relocating it to the South Boston waterfront, claiming adaptive reuse would provide more environmental benefits than building a new sustainability designed building."

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architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

Tags: varnelis.net, futurismo, architecture, urban_design, portals on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (10) -About

more fromvarnelis.net

Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
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- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:37:38
Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
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- "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:41:44
The iPhone
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- - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:43:09
Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
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- Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
  Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
  
  Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:49:37
For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.

Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
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- The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:54:16
AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.

Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.

Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

Closing on Broadway - Two Traffic Lanes - NYTimes.com

Article about the "Broadway Boulevard" project, which will take some of current automobile lanes and turn them into public seating/ parks and bike paths. The project stresses the importance of wresting public space back from cars, for public/ pedestrian/ non-vehicular use. QUOTE: “Broadway is not famous because there are a gazillion cars going through it,” she said. “We’re trying to have the public space match the name.” UNQUOTE

Tags: nyt, nyc, broadway, traffi_calming, public_space, urban_parks, urban_design on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

Urban Research: Shibuya vs. Marunouchi - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

Written by Ryoko (translated by Kevin McGue): An absolutely fascinating article in PingMag on how Shibuya (a hip, youth-oriented area) and Marunouchi (a more upscale and dignified area) are designed differently. While those sorts of differences are things we think we expect to recognize and anticipate, it's very effective to have them laid out and itemized so clearly. Ryoko's analysis starts with how the train stations for each district are designed differently, and how they therefore signal different trends and intentions. From there, the piece moves to "towns," that is the districts themselves, paying particular attention to outdoor/ public advertising and streetscapes, and architecture; then, a comparison of how greenery and public seating arrangements are used (or are absent); next, it's the streets themselves, this time with a focus on layout and grade (interestingly, Shibuya slopes and has many changes in grade, as well as narrower streets, while more sedate Marunouchi is level and has wider streets); finally, the author looks at products: what's for sale, particularly in terms of publications/ magazines.

Tags: pingmag, shibuya, marunouchi, urban_design, cities, tokyo, districts, conscientious_design on 2008-06-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompingmag.jp

eGoodman

This is the portal page of Elizabeth Goodman, one of the "explorers" mentioned by Nat Torkington in his O'Reilly Radar article, "Ghandi on Ubicomp."

Tags: egoodman, ubicom, urban_design, ubiquitous on 2008-05-15 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.confectious.net

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City needs to put its foot down, by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

This article, linked to the other Apr.26 piece in terms of theme and championing the idea that sidewalks (& therefore pedestrians) are key to a good urban fabric, tackles the question of planning & design. Too much is individual project driven, vs. falling into place as part of an overall sense of what the city should be.

Tags: thestar, pedestrians, infrastructure, toronto, urban_design, christopher_hume on 2008-05-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

A
rchitecture is important, but planning is crucial. Though Toronto's known for second-rate design, our real problem is poor planning. Throughout the city there are examples, painful examples, of the lack of intelligent planning. The result is not just visual chaos, but a clear feeling that nothing adds up, that nothing makes sense, that the city consists of a growing number of disjointed projects.
insist on certain basic elements that will eventually allow a number of unrelated developments to be transformed into a genuine neighbourhood? And why doesn't the city do what's necessary to give the pedestrian a fighting chance? As it stands, the residents of these new condos are at the mercy of (usually bad) drivers more focused on their cellphones than pedestrians. They block the crosswalks, drive too fast and generally treat walkers with utter contempt. Given that Lake Shore Blvd. has six lanes and Fleet two, pedestrians must take their lives into their hands just to cross the street. This isn't just suburban; it's dangerous, dumb and no way to build a city. It also reveals the hollowness of a community that loves to congratulate itself on its creativity, and its innovative spirit. When it comes down to making choices between cars and people, we invariably choose cars. This is outdated and marks us for the civic dinosaur that we are.
Lake Shore must be narrowed and new buildings designed to have a relationship with streets with adequate sidewalks and connections beyond. Right now, unless you're a resident, there's no reason to be here. And the south side of Lake Shore, with green space and of course the lake, is almost completely unreachable from the north side of Lake Shore. The result isn't a city but a series of enclaves cut off from one another and everything else by highways. Fleet St. isn't just a missed opportunity; it's a disaster in the making.

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In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

Tags: sightline_daily, seattle, urban_design, urbanplanning, cars, parking, architecture on 2008-05-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromdaily.sightline.org

Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
because the garages are small and the driveways are tight, the residents who have cars often end up parking on the street anyway. All this puts city planners in a lose-lose situation.
One obvious solution would be to strip out the parking requirements, which would revolutionize the design possibilities. But so far, the city's modest attempts to remove minimum parking mandates in a few urban areas have been greeted with howls of protest from angry mobs wielding pitchforks and torches.
Contrary to the screeching of some neighborhood activists, the reason that townhouses are sprouting up everywhere is not because developers are part of a notorious cabal dedicated to ruining Seattle's aesthetics. No, the reason is because people want to buy them.
Not only are single-family homes about 25 percent more expensive, on average, but the single-family homes are more often older, requiring expensive fixes and upkeep. (Believe me, I know). Meanwhile the townhouses are sparkling new, very energy efficient, and often within walking distance of services and transit. As a result, the true price differential is much greater than the sale prices suggest.
But now there's a push to subject townhouses to more extensive permitting, increased design scrutiny, and more neighborhood input. And while those may or may not be wise public policy decisions, they are precisely the sort of regulations that -- bit by bit -- increase the price of housing.
Another possibility is simply to downzone neighborhoods, so that it's illegal to build townhouses. But that kind of supply-side restriction -- already common throughout much of Seattle's land-base -- is likely one big contributing factor to unaffordable housing.
minimum parking requirements -- the ones that foul up townhouse design -- they may also make the townhouses more expensive. In fact, it's been estimated that parking requirements can add tens of thousands to the price of a condo, and it's fair to think that a similar price hit happens with townhouses.
And free parking is ugly too.

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The new oases | Economist.com

"Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic" - Economist, April 10/08: interesting article about unmooring and how that's reflected in architectural trends, too. Sent this article in its entirety to my email archive, since I can't seem to use Diigo for highlighting. Key excerpt: QUOTE: The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. UNQUOTE Other key idea: how this turns the "third places" critique on its head, too.

Tags: the_economist, urban_design, workspaces, mobile_city, nomadism, mobility, third_places on 2008-04-20 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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FRANK GEHRY, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT's computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building's most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre's design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.

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"Don't be dense" by Zev Yaroslavsky - Los Angeles Times

"The debate about the availability of housing in Los Angeles and the city's development policies has been testy but long overdue." An interesting article by Yaroslavsky that initially makes the reader think that he's advocating a sort of nimby-istic "pulling up the drawbridges" mentality, but if the reader perserveres to read the entire piece, it seems his suggestions are really LA-specific. They're not necessarily in conflict with infill development; development around transit routes & hubs; and creation of density in areas that really need it (in our case, downtown). He does bring in late 80s experiences, however, which make you wonder if things haven't irrevocably moved beyond thel contexts he's referencing.

Tags: urbanplanning, urban_design, density, los_angeles, neighbourhoods, nimbyism, smartgrowth, eco_density, affordable_housing on 2008-04-14 -All Annotations (8) -About

more fromwww.latimes.com

The debate about the availability of housing in Los Angeles and the city's development policies has been testy but long overdue.
Fueling public outrage over growth policies that would significantly increase density are well-grounded fears that, in the clash between overdevelopment and neighborhood preservation, the developers will prevail.
Urged on by some elected officials, city planners have decided that the "smart" and "elegant" way to grow the city's housing stock is to double the allowable size of new buildings,bust through established height limits and reduce parking-space requirements -- effectively rolling back more than two decades of neighborhood-protection laws.

There is nothing smart or elegant about such growth. On the contrary. It's development run amok and with an utter disregard for how it affects the livability of the city's neighborhoods. Should these efforts -- the city's version of a state law encouraging greater density; ad hoc zoning changes to double the size of residential development on commercial property to facilitate more density; widespread approval of zoning variances for parking, height and property-line setbacks -- succeed, they will irreparably harm some of our most cherished neighborhoods and diminish our traditional sense of place.
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- - at first blush, this reads like possible nimbyism, but when Y. gets into the nuts & bolts of zoning policies as they relate specifically to his place, Los Angeles, his stance can be seen as well-differentiated, modulated urbanism. However, I could see how this opening volley could become a rallying cry for change-resistant neighbourhoods and neighbours everywhere, too...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-14 04:56:43
* Can more housing be built without destroying neighborhoods?

Absolutely. Housing development should be encouraged on the thousands of properties throughout the city that have sufficient lot size and depth relative to surrounding neighborhoods. Such properties can accommodate well-designed, denser and even taller buildings without the collateral damage of traffic congestion, loss of privacy and other community effectsoften associated with such development. In some cases, these projects would even enhance commercial thoroughfares -- such as the Figueroa corridor near USC -- that are in desperate need of revitalization. At short, larger housing projects should be built where they fit.
* Where can this housing be built?

It belongs in the city's many employment and residential centers -- downtown, Hollywood, Wilshire Center, Harbor Gateway, Warner Center and the Van Nuys Civic Center. These and similar areas can absorb more housing under current zoning laws. In Century City, for instance, developers are converting traffic-generating commercial buildings to residential uses, resulting in more housing and a net reduction in peak-hour traffic.
Housing should also be built around subway, bus and light-rail stations. Many of these transit stops -- Warner Center, where the Orange Line busway ends in Woodland Hills, is one -- are already employment magnets, and they would be appropriate sites for additional housing as well. But it makes no sense to reflexively boost residential density and building size along every Metro Rapid bus route, as the city's version of the state's density-bonus law allows, when the streets that the buses travel often cross low-density, pedestrian-friendly commercial districts serving some of the city's most charming neighborhoods. The city should be guided by one principle: The scale of development should be informed by the character of its surrounding neighborhood. The one-size-fits-all approach embodied in the density-bonus law and the indiscriminate approval of denser residential housing on commercial property is not an appropriate growth strategy for Los Angeles.
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- "The scale of development should be guided... informed by the character of its surrounding neighborhood." --> well, that's *tricky* insofar as it can result in a drawbridge or stand-off. At what point do you say, "the character has to change"? And at what point do you say, "the character *deserves* protection"? Why should it? Who determines that?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-14 05:01:20
* What can the city do to provide more affordable housing?

It can require developers as a matter of city policy to set aside a certain percentage of units in new buildings for people with low-to-moderate incomes. L.A. doesn't need to offer development bonuses allowing taller and bigger buildings to achieve this.
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- ? really
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-14 05:02:42
The city also owns a considerable amount of underutilized real estate on which affordable housing could be built. As a council member, I pioneered the creation of several housing developments above city-owned parking lots that were 100% affordable, a policy that should be applied more widely. The county has also made surplus property available to nonprofit developers to build affordable family and senior housing. The office building formerly housing the Department of Public Social Services, at Pico Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West Los Angeles, is one example.
It's noteworthy that a major contributing factor to the loss of our affordable housing stock is the demolition and conversion of apartments to make way for condominiums and other luxury housing. Accommodating renters displaced by such developments must be one of the city's top housing priorities.
The burgeoning neighborhood rebellion we are witnessing throughout the city is the predictable consequence of an increasingly insular and exclusionary planning process.
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- It could also be the result of a vociferous resistance to change.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-14 05:04:06

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Edmonton: Daunting task for crap detectors

"Design watchdogs have a lot on their plate" -- The Edmonton Journal's Todd Babaniak weighs in on the all-volunteer Edmonton Design Committee's effect so far on urban design in that city, and concludes that it's too bad they couldn't have gotten started in 1990 already.

Tags: edmonton, todd_babiak, urban_design on 2008-03-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.canada.com

There is a certain elegance about architectural terminology. Gothic, Bauhaus, Brutalist, Spanish Colonial Revivalist, Richardsonian Romanesque. The recent Capital Modern exhibit at the Art Gallery of Alberta, featuring Edmonton architecture from 1940 to 1969, was a revealing and even thrilling look at the beauty we don't often notice in our city. Yet one architectural term -- coined by Mayor Stephen Mandel -- supersedes all others.
In his first state of the city address, in April 2005, Mandel said, "The time has passed when square boxes with minimal features and lame landscaping are acceptable. Our tolerance for crap is now zero."
Crap.
On Tuesday, three years since Mandel spoke those words, the Edmonton Design Committee (EDC) presented its second annual report to city council. Of 108 applications last year, including helpful pre-assessments, the committee supported (or supported with conditions) 37 applications. They denied almost as many. The EDC is a volunteer coalition of experts, from private industry, from the public sector, and from the city at large, with no real power to stop a project. But no projects were approved by the city of Edmonton development office that were not supported by the EDC. Any square boxes with minimal features and lame landscaping going up today were initiated before the EDC.
Or they're outside the EDC's mandate.
Until recently, the extremely busy committee only looked at projects downtown. Now, their sphere of influence has expanded to include commercial areas of Old Strathcona and the near south side, between 109th and 99th Streets, all the way down to Argyll Road, along with the Gateway Boulevard and Calgary Trail corridor, and everything else council or the city manager feels is important.
"It's exciting, to get a look at what could be coming in the next few years, all the potential changes to the Edmonton skyline," Shafraaz Kaba, an architect, writer and vice-chair of the committee, said in the Three Bananas Cafe on Sir Winston Churchill Square, ground zero of Edmonton's urban renewal.
"I get a glimpse of what this city can be and what it should be. Hopefully, we're having a deep influence on the urban fabric of the city, in terms of walkability, density, environmental sustainability, public art."
The Principles of Urban Design set out by the committee, and available on the city of Edmonton website, are a truly inspiring read. It's easy to see why Kaba and his 10 accomplished peers on the committee sacrifice 20 hours a month, for free, to improve and enhance Edmonton and the lives of its citizens.
"It's sort of your public obligation to help improve your city," said Kaba. "But I do find the meetings quite frustrating. We see some very, very crappy projects, and some developers are still causing a fuss, wan-ting to get by on the old standard."
Don't developers read the Principles of Urban Design before they make their submissions to the EDC?
"They should," said Jeff Price, director of permitting and licensing at the City of Edmonton. "But not all of them do."
Broadly, the principles set forth by the EDC are designed to discourage the sort of development that has thrived in Edmonton over the last 30 years -- cheap, boxy, car-oriented, low-density, sprawling into the forests and fields instead of filling-in underutilized land closer to the core; and in the core, Edmonton's most resonant and historic neighbourhoods, equally cheap and ugly buildings with street-level parking lots instead of inviting retail.
The tragedy of reading the EDC's Principles of Urban Design is in imagining what the city would look and feel like today if the EDC were initiated and empowered in 1990.
"Not all development is good development," said Price. "That represents a cultural shift here, to demand the highest level of excellence in urban design."
It's a cultural change that was broadly supported by city council on Tuesday. If anything, council wanted the EDC to look at more projects, like transit-oriented developments. There is a new recognition in Edmonton -- by citizens, by governments and by a growing number of developers -- that good urban design is worth the extra thought, the collaboration, even the extra money.
"It might cost a bit more, but you get so much more out of it," said Price. "It's better for the developer, for the city, for the community, for tenants. Everyone wants to be associated with a better project."
The EDC had a hand in improving the Sobey's building going up on Jasper at 104th, on Enterprise Square, even on the Art Gallery of Alberta. Kaba is quite excited about the Ukrainian Canadian Archives & Museum of Alberta, an historic preservation and enhancement of the Lodge Hotel on East Jasper Avenue by HIP Architects and David Murray Architects.
"It'll help kick off the Quarters redevelopment," said Kaba. "It'll have a huge impact on an area that really needs a landmark project."
A number of landmark projects are in the works and, as long as Edmonton has the political will, we'll see less and less crap. The architectural terminology will soon shift, with the city's design culture.
tbabiak@thejournal.canwest.com

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» The Hidden Jewel of Hull • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

Interview with Marc Dube, "owner of most of the parking lots in downtown Hull." Parking lots are lucrative, as Dube's start in the business illustrates: "In the mid 1980s, Dubé and two others planned to open a restaurant in downtown Hull. The financing fell through after they had already signed the lease on a building. Dubé realized an alternate source of income: he could demolish the building and put in a parking lot. Since his partners weren’t interested, he began the business on his own." Read on from there.

Tags: spacing.ca, surface_parking_lots, toronto, urban_design, urban_renewal on 2008-02-20 -All Annotations (4) -About

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As he explained it: “We were three waiters that were supposed to renovate an old building into a restaurant…It was some kind of a deviation from the original idea.” Needless to say, his deviation was a success:

Well, 22 years ago the parking industry was not known at all here – like it was in Montreal, Toronto, busier cities, Ottawa. And now everybody knows about this business; but before, nobody. It was like a hidden jewel. It was something that nobody knew at that point and I just had the opportunity to go into that industry. And now, everybody wants to, would love to have parking because it’s a low maintenance company. Like once you add your trees and your paving and your booth you just wait for your customer to come in. It’s a simple industry. It’s not a complicated industry. And the beauty of it is that you get revenues that pay for your land, and your land keeps taking value. So then in 10, 12 years it’s a retirement fund, pension plan.
Not every parking lot he opened did well. When asked if there are ever unsuccessful lots that people just don’t use, Dubé replied, “Yes, because some of them are too far from the activity. So if you have to walk five miles after you park your car, it’s not convenient. So the people at that point are going to go to plan B, which is the bus or the train.”
How did Dubé manage to build all of those parking lots without intervention from Hull residents, from the city, or from anyone else?
Dubé says his parking lot clients are “mostly government people, business people, industry surrounding the government people – like the fax, photocopiers reparation, things like that. At night restaurants, bars –that’s mostly the clientele”. Hull’s lots were not built for the neighbourhood – although local entrepreneurs and businesses feel they need parking in order to have customers.
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- Yikes, sounds like Victoria's m.o. from late-70s, into 80s and beyond, now thank heavens changing because of residential pressures.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-20 20:27:28
In Dubé’s eyes, parking lots are temporary spaces biding their time storing cars before being developed into condos. Parking lots are spaces that change; owners don’t necessarily conceive of them as permanent. Eventually someone turns them into something else.
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- - their silver lining, I guess (unless they displaced older heritage buildings, in which case, "no lining for you, bub'..."
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-20 20:28:43

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Genuflecting to the high rises by David Brewster (Crosscut - Seattle)

Crosscut's publisher, David Brewster, calls out the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times for their gushing endorsements of two major downtown Seattle development proposals (Fifth Ave. twin condo towers by Ishmael Leyva Architects and, also on Fifth Ave., the United Methodist Church block by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca). Brewster points to the curious alliance btw developers and eco-density champions, which is wearing a bit thin in Vancouver, acc. to an article by Frances Bula, which Brewster references (see http://tinyurl.com/333ehj ). In Vancouver, there's talk of putting density & height in formerly sacrosanct areas, like Gastown & Chinatown, too. Some interesting comments showing up in the comments board, too.

Tags: architecture, crosscut, development, downtown, eco_density, seattle, urban_design on 2008-02-14 -All Annotations (6) -About

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We get a shower of superlatives: $900 million, according to the New York financiers, 550 feet tall, 200 hotel rooms, and 400-500 condos.
But not to worry: These massive buildings will be "designed for neighborhood," meaning shops along the streetfront. The developers, with the engaging name of Hummingbird Advisors, are going to take a pretty dead block and "make it into a vital, vibrant pedestrian area." Of course, much of the lower level will be a blank wall concealing hotel ballrooms, but that's OK because the Monorail already blocks those views. (The architects' drawing artfully turns the Monorail into gossamer.)
The developer deserves credit for coming up with a scheme to save the old sanctuary (no uses have yet been found), but one wonders at the tradeoffs. A few years hence, if not already, we are going to wonder why downtown Seattle has become such a lightless, windswept, glassy canyonlands. But more vibrant? The office tower will be mighty quiet evenings and weekends. And the amenities of the new condo-hotel towers (open-air arboretum, lots of recreation space) may turn these abodes of "urban aspirationals" into self-contained zones.
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- I think Brewster is on to something in asking after the amenities. They have to be first-class and work well, especially if these aren't residential towers (and therefore dead after hours, as he points out).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-14 19:07:18
The reason for all this genuflecting is the alliance of environmentalists, enchanted by the density created; developers eager to cash in on Seattle's "underpriced" real estate market; low-income housing advocates, who get millions in mitigation payments from these luxury towers; and City Hall, salivating over the tax receipts.
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- ...interesting...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-14 19:07:44
But now there is some sign that the ecodensity coalition is beginning to feel some internal splits. A good illustration is Vancouver, B.C., where residents are grumbling that the amenities supposed to make all this density tolerable (libraries, transit, affordable apartments) are just not showing up.
We're tired of our city being raped, razed and regurgitated as just one more homogenized, condo-canyoned McCity stripped of our unique character, style and gritty working class charm.
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- Oh brother... this sounds familiar. Define "charm," please...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-14 19:09:13

Seattle.gov - Seattle Right-of-Way Improvement Manual - Latest Online Manual

Useful reference from City of Seattle re. street / urbanscape improvements, broken down in detailed format according to features (from "awnings" to "underground utilities").

Tags: planning, reference, seattle, street_scape, urban_design on 2008-01-17 -All Annotations (0) -About