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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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With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It's Smart to Be Dense - WSJ.com

Have had this article open in a browser tab for days now -- time to bookmark. Along with posts by CEOs for Cities, or Richard Florida, this article too points to the effect that gasoline prices are having on suburban housing, and on the "sudden" desirability of urban living. (Well, I say "sudden" because I've *NEVER* understood why anyone would want to live in suburbs instead of living in cities/ densely packed neighbourhoods where you just have to walk a block or two, or less, to find social activity...) From the article, QUOTE: "Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did," predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent. (...) Even though the area's housing market has been wracked by price drops of 25% in the last year and one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, Mr. Friedman says he already has sold nine of 28 town houses near downtown that he recently completed, and three more are under contract, "which is not bad considering the dismal state of the Sacramento real-estate market." Mr. Morris, the developer, says the housing downturn is hurting the places that have the "dumbest growth. Smart growth works when the rest of it doesn't." UNQUOTE

Tags: smartgrowth, wsj_opinion, urbanplanning, cities, suburbia, gasoline, cost_of_living on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromonline.wsj.com

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Looming Debate, by Veronique Vienne (Metropolis Magazine)

Interesting article (with some inaccuracies, too), focused chiefly on Bertrand Delanoe, the "Situationist"-inspired left-leaning, assassination attempt survivor and openly gay mayor of Paris, who gets blind-sided by Nikolas Sarkozy, the pro-business president of France, who wants Paris to be a bit more get-go-ish. Delanoe is on the side of the human-scale advocates who want to preserve its "charms," whereas Sarkozy doesn't mind a tall building or two. The article is interesting because it's one of the clearest outlines I've seen so far on making political linkages between certain attitudes toward modernization and height in Paris, vs preservation (and rejuvenation) of what that city's status quo as well as historical "essence" (at least mid-19th century onward) is.

Tags: paris, metropolis_magazine, high_rise, urbanism, urbanplanning, bertrand_delanoe on 2008-07-09 -All Annotations (8) -About

more fromwww.metropolismag.com

One of Delanoë’s priorities has been to blur the line separating affluent Parisians from their often less privileged neighbors. In the last decades, Paris has steadily lost its working-class residents, who migrate to poorer bedroom communities beyond the city limits—a trend Delanoë wants to stop.
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- Well, good luck. You can "want" to stop something like that, but that won't make the inner Paris more affordable or make land values drop.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:03:45
Whether it will work remains to be seen, but this solution is a typical Delanoë move. The former head of a PR agency, the mayor likes projects that “speak”—those that tell a good story and make his political intentions clear.
“He is clever, even mischievous. In this town, it’s the only way to be innovative while respecting the fetters of tradition.”
promote small punctual interventions that improve the quality of life of Parisians. He is less supportive of projects that flaunt the vitality of corporations and financial institutions eager to pitch towering office buildings inside Paris
For tall structures to be erected, Delanoë would have to change existing regulations that cap the height of buildings at 82 feet in the center of Paris
Delanoë would rather spend taxpayers’ money improving the urban experience than sweetening deals to attract big investment.
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- again, it's a question of affordability, non? If you can afford to do that as a city, great. if you're not Paris, maybe you can't afford it, though...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:06:17
He knows that living well is the most effective business incentive and the reason everyone wants to come to Paris.
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- Isn't that sort of like making a place into a resort community for the well-off? Isn't that what's happening (or in danger of happening) with Vancouver, and even with Victoria?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:07:07
The capital can no longer afford to be a museum of its glorious past. It needs to jump over the beltway, reach out to the suburbs, and become the center of the metropolis that encircles it.
But under the pretext of helping him achieve this goal, Delanoë’s political opponents are launching a campaign, spearheaded by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to create a new administrative chain of command to supervise the economic development of a new urban entity that would incorporate the capital and its suburbs, an area whose outer boundaries are still to be determined but that has already been named Grand Paris. In the wrong hands, this proposal might be used to undermine Delanoë’s authority. And, indeed, recently reelected by a landslide vote that reaffirmed the left-leaning preferences of the historically defiant Parisians, the mayor has many enemies in the pro-business Sarkozy government.
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- - sounds familiar...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:08:10
The question of Paris and its suburbs is linked to that of building heights because it is at the frontier between these two worlds that city planners propose to challenge the traditional size limits and build skyscrapers.
Tall buildings are anathema here for many reasons. The City of Light is built atop a city of shadows. Paris is laid over a subterranean limestone quarry, its huge system of ancient tunnels weakening the ground. Its low-rise skyline is the product of geological circumstances. But there is another reality—a political one—that has shaped the way the city looks: Parisians don’t like authority. They’re an unruly bunch, known to tear down or burn symbols of oppression. In fact, the architectural form that is most typically Parisian is not the mansard roofline or the Haussmann facade but the barricade. A low structure, usually made of a pile of cobblestones and pieces of trash from construction sites, it has been the type of edifice local residents choose most often to express their political views. Tall buildings in Paris? You must be kidding! To Parisians it would be an open invitation to dissent.



But Lion, like so many French architects, would like to see Paris compete in terms of contemporary architecture with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, and London. He says he enjoys working with clients in cities that are much more dynamic, much more creative—and much more polluted—than Paris, adding, “Yet at the same time, I can’t wait to fly back home where I can walk wherever I want and breathe freely. It’s not just the nice streets and the clean air I crave; it’s the democracy.” As annoying as it is, a convoluted “democratic” process safeguards the public good in Paris, he says. Indeed, in an unprecedented move, Delanoë has imposed on private developers the same time-consuming competition-and-jury review procedure foisted on public projects. “Things are so stagnant in this administratively driven city,” Lion says about this design-by-committee method, “but even I’m grateful for all the resistance. In Paris I feel there is hope for the human race. But they do get on my nerves!”
“We want folks to apprehend Paris in another mode, in a less goal-oriented fashion,” Girard says, referring to the Situationist doctrine of the 1960s, a left-wing movement that advocated deliberate “disorientation” as a cure for conspicuous-consumption boredom.
a generation influenced by the ideology of that time. His vision of Paris stems from a culture of dissent that condemned the constant hype required to sell consumer goods and products.
“We’re here to do a city, not a collection of objects. A collection of objects never amounts to a city. Look at New York. There’s an array of amazing buildings there, but look at the poor quality of the public space! In contrast, compare this with the quality of the streetscape in Paris.”
This antispectacular stance is a Delanoë trademark.
The elegant translucent canopy that will spread its wings over Les Halles’s commercial center is indeed an unobtrusive structure, not the grand architectural gesture likely to appeal to Parisians who would like to see the city demonstrate the vitality of its financial community with truly dramatic buildings.
Dominique Alba, director of the Paris Arsenal museum and the authority on contemporary architecture, bristles every time someone calls her hometown a museum city. “The architectural heritage of Paris is so rich, it swallows the most novel urban forms,” she explains. “There are plenty of exciting new buildings around, but they do not stick out.”
Mercifully few and far between inside Paris, the tall apartment buildings and office towers that “stick out” were built in the 1970s in accordance with poorly understood Le Corbusier design principles.

Generative methods in urban design: a progress assessment, by Michael W. Mehaffy - Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability

Have only skimmed this so far, but worth going over in detail. Mehaffy focuses on Christopher Alexander's 1987 work, A New Theory of Urban Design, which was inspired by Jane Jacobs's 1961 work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. Some of Alexander's ideas have been incorporated by the New Urbanists, and Mehaffy's article traces their "setbacks and shortcomings, and significant opportunities still remaining."

Tags: urbanism, placemaking, christopher_alexander, jjacobs, urbanplanning on 2008-06-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.informaworld.com

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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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"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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"Star Cities: The World's Best-Known Architects are Turning to Planning" by Joan Ockman - Architect Online

"Joan Ockman asks: Is a new form of urbanism emerging?" "THE MID-TO LATE ‘90S saw the realization of several colossal redevelopment projects in which superstar architects were called upon to supply window dressing for the transformation of dysfunctional urban districts into tourist and consumer meccas, from Times Square in Manhattan to Potsdam Square in Berlin. But it was the triumphal opening of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in late 1997 that appeared, to architects, nothing short of a miracle. Gehry not only delivered a more optimistic, less intellectualized, and visually ravishing vision of architecture's potential and one, moreover, that innovatively integrated but was not entirely determined by new technologies; against all odds, he showed that it was possible to regenerate an entire city with nothing more nor less than a single, singular building." This is an important article that has some specific relevance also for my concerns around the praxis of a local architect here in Victoria who thinks he can "envision" a certain kind of urbanism (low-rise) for this city. Should an architect be an urban planner? Can s/he be good at both? Ockham's article suggests it ain't necessarily so.

Tags: architecture, bilbao_effect, joan_ockman, starchitecture, urbanplanning on 2008-03-30 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.architectmagazine.com

The first glimmer of real consciousness among architects concerning the inevitability of a new scale of architectural operations came in the early 1990s, when Rem Koolhaas, caused to rethink his worldview by his commission to design a new city center for Lille, France—an assignment that entailed a massive and apparently traumatic (for him) expansion of his previously modest-sized practice—came to reflect on “the problem of bigness.” Koolhaas shrewdly grasped that the global reorganization, expansion, and consolidation of late 20th century capital implied the emergence of a commensurate form of architecture. He envisaged an architecture of bigness more akin to the complexity and unscriptedness of the city, however, than to Architecture with a capital “A.” Bigness, as Koolhaas theorized in his book S,M,L,XL, required a giving up of “architecture's compulsive need to decide and determine” and a “surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others.” However much of a historical symptom, or pragmatic rationalization, this theory was in itself (especially in the case of a personality as controlling as Koolhaas), there is no doubt that it created an irreconcilable contradiction for architects: between design and nondesign; form and formlessness; heroic monumentality and sheer, dumb size.
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- - scalability matters, and has an effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:00:19
“the disconnect between Bilbao the brand and Bilbao the city” remains palpable. Moreover, a surfeit of “icon buildings,” however creative and well-designed, especially in cities that have little else visually to recommend them, runs the risk of engendering architectural cacophony and ennui. In the case of Rotterdam, a Dutch city that has become a veritable architectural theme park with prominent contributions by Foster, Helmut Jahn, Renzo Piano, Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, and others, the skyline from certain viewpoints takes on the quality of a surrealist montage. If the icon derives both its logic and its energy from its uniqueness and difference from its surroundings, then its proliferation can only cancel the effect.
In this context, the current trend toward rebranding celebrity architects as planners appears as both an evolution of the Bilbao effect, expanded to a new scale, and also a departure from it.
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- - oh gawd, "rebranding celebrity [sic] architects as planners"... shades of local small-pond "celeb" FdA, who thinks he can pontificate on planning Victoria BC as a lowrise European capital... That's where it must come from! Holy cow, it's the Rem-effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:04:41
Yet perhaps the fundamental question remains what the relationship really is between architecture and urban planning. Are these two disciplines—one traditionally focused on the object and the other on the fabric—part of a continuum, or are they, in fact, opposites? Apart from the different skill sets they require, do they also involve different mindsets? In the last century, most of the acknowledged “masters,” from Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Kahn, and Philip Johnson, aspired to wear both hats, although only in a handful of exceptional cases did these architects succeed in realizing their largest schemes, and then not without contradiction. Gehry's dilemma of foreground versus background buildings is not a new problem for the architect, nor can it be dismissed so easily.
The extrapolation of the logic of the circumscribed object-building to the scale of the city has tended to produce the totalizing effect of the “continuous monument”—Niemeyer in Brasilia—while the absorption of the primarily symbolic and representational building into the larger urban order threatened to dilute its impact. As the critic Alan Colquhoun pointed out apropos of the irreconcilable difference between Le Corbusier's architecture and urbanism of the 1920s, the “Corbusian city seems to lack any strategy by which representational buildings could continue to exist”; the “very qualities of discreteness, difference, and lack of continuity that would make it possible for his buildings to fulfill their larger signifying ambitions” are compromised once they are turned into “a fragment of urban tissue.” Similarly, if Mies' Seagram Building and Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House changed the direction of architecture in the 1950s, they are still best appreciated against the backdrop of the more banal buildings on Park Avenue by the developer firm of Emery Roth, which, as Ada Louise Huxtable once observed, was ultimately responsible for changing the face of Manhattan.
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- - think this through to its logical conclusions and you might ...well, conclude, that we're in deep dung...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:07:26
THE DISCIPLINE OF URBAN DESIGN that emerged in the 1960s was, as already suggested, a reaction to the hubris of modernist master planning, yet the New Urbanism's pedestrian-scaled townscapes punctuated by static civic monuments have hardly been less doctrinaire in their imposition of an overall formal order (notwithstanding the rhetoric of community and pluralism dissembling their basic strategy of standardized diversity). In contrast, the recent urbanism is computer-driven and emphasizes fluid connectivities, organic or self-organizing urban processes, and network thinking. (For a thoughtful overview of the field, see David Grahame Shane's recent book, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory.) In the hands—or on the screens—of many of the vanguard designers today, the urban aesthetic tends to be characterized by topologically distorted surfaces, giant landforms inspired by 1960s and ‘70s earth art, the literalization of map vectors, and the like. Yet for all the new formal and technological sophistication, the aphasia between architecture and urbanism remains unresolved. In the case of Peter Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for example, a 173-acre project whose first phase is under construction, it's all or nothing: Rather than the antiformalism of Koolhaas, everything urban has become architecture.
If all these issues raise profound questions for both public policy and the culture of architecture, there is, finally, the matter of the desirability of having a single architect put his or her stamp on such a wide swath of our everyday landscape. Roland Barthes wrote of the Eiffel Tower that the only way to get away from its dominating presence in Paris was to be on top of it looking out. If not just the museum and the office tower but also the corner grocery and the street lamp are designed by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, will we become true prisoners of architecture?

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"Saint Brad" by Andrew Blum (Metropolis Magazine)

As I don't follow celebrity news, I had no idea that Brad Pitt is a "design junkie" or a pivotal mover-and-shaker in the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. (I barely know that Pitt and another actress -- Angelina Jolie? -- are linked/married/ or something... d'oh... ) Andrew Blum's article shines a good light (good as in "kind" and "illuminating") on Pitt's efforts, as embodied in the non-profit he started called "Make It Right" (MIR). And it does an excellent job educating me on the bizarre, yet potentially wonderful, nexus of pop culture/ money/ starchitecture momentum that Pitt has engineered. The list of star architects makes my jaw drop; Blum discusses their efforts, and doesn't hesitate to poiint out where some of them go wrong (and others get it right). As Blum puts it, "If Pitt can pull this off, he will have transformed a swath of the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood symbolic of everything rotten in America, into one of the world’s most design-intensive sustainable communities." The article is well-illustrated (Blum's blog doesn't have the illustrations, but this link to Metropolis Magazine does).

Tags: andrew_blum, architecture, brad_pitt, make_it_right_project, metropolis_magazine, new_orleans, rebuilding, urbanplanning on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.metropolismag.com

Pitt’s new nonprofit, Make It Right, wants to help them “get a house” by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. The catch was that they had to choose one of the sustainable designs by 13 different architects—an amazing list that included Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban, and Kieran Timberlake.
Are you bringing these architects here, I asked, because you enjoy working with them? “That’s one of the benefits certainly, but it’s not the driving factor.” So why do it? Why bring not just architects here but some of the world’s best? “I’ll tell you why,” Pitt said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. “Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice.



So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.”
Since when do movie stars have a better sense of architecture’s possibility than most architects? Post-Katrina New Orleans—like post-9/11 Ground Zero—was supposed to be a moment when architecture would prove its relevance. Instead, architects and planners came in like the cavalry, full of expert opinions about what New Orleans should look like and where it should (or more to the point, shouldn’t) be rebuilt. The result was that rather than providing houses, they seemed—in the name of good planning—to be taking them away.
Architecture has always had trouble connecting with the masses. There’s that famous, perhaps apocryphal, statistic—architects design two percent of American homes—and the bald fact of the contemporary American landscape, with its big-box stores, chain restaurants, and bland condominiums.
With Make It Right, Pitt—founding a new organization this time, not just being a spokesperson—has massively multiplied Global Green’s effort, setting an initial goal of building 150 houses. Architecturally, it’s equally ambitious, with 13 different designs offered for each homeowner to choose from. All were encourged to include sustainable features like solar panels and rainwater collectors, and they’ll be safe from future flooding—raised up off the ground, with escape hatches to the roof and waterproof safes for valuables. Whenever possible, they’ll use Cradle to Cradle–certified materials (although early talk of the houses themselves being certified hasn’t worked out).
If Pitt can pull this off, he will have transformed a swath of the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood symbolic of everything rotten in America, into one of the world’s most design-intensive sustainable communities. Modeling it after the Case Study Houses, Pitt wants Make It Right’s architecture program to raise the bar for “answering a new set of challenges,” as he puts it. “It can be such a proving ground for so many things. It’s ready for the next evolution. We can actually advance the discussion and practice of intelligent design—and I’m not talking about creationism.”
The list of 13 had been assembled by William McDonough + Partners and Graft, the L.A.-based firm that serves as something like Pitt’s in-house architecture wing.
“We didn’t want somebody who said, ‘I understand that the means of the homeowners are so modest that the design has to be modest,’” McDonough said. “We didn’t want modest designs—we didn’t ask for immodesty either.”
On the set of the new David Fincher movie in New Orleans last winter, Pitt found himself standing in front of a bright-pink canvas house, meant to be digitally replaced in postproduction with computer-generated images. He called Graft’s L.A. office with an idea: What if we filled a few blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward with these houses as a symbol of what’s still missing? They could pick up the roofs and scatter them around, as if by the storm, then reassemble them as donations for each house arrived. In the meantime, no one could look at these houses and think life here had returned to normal. McDonough, no stranger to big ideas himself, is in awe of Pitt’s sense of possibility: “Who thinks like that?”
Yet there’s the paradox: this isn’t only about the Lower Ninth. The media circus was the point. Make It Right may be about helping a handful of families get a house, but it’s also about calling attention to the Gulf Coast.
These 13 houses are meant not only to shelter but to communicate.
There were cringe-worthy moments when one architect or another slipped into the incomprehensible lingua franca of high design. Shigeru Ban—famed designer of elegant disaster shelters—sent a young guy from his New York office who gave a presentation so tone-deaf it would have embarrassed a first-year architecture student. Ban’s rendering, on display later in a shipping container turned into a gallery, didn’t help: on the house’s front porch was a white man in khakis.
“I don’t want any of the national people to leave here without learning at least one word of the local language,” Concordia’s Bingler said in his light Louisiana drawl during the press conference. “It’s called ‘Lagniappe.’ It means ‘a little something extra.’” (“For free!” the woman behind me shouted.) “The citizens of the Lower Ninth Ward have been accustomed to getting less than regular, so this is an opportunity to go beyond the normal. Not just the regular stuff—something a little bit extra on top of the regular stuff.”
The pitch was right on, but it highlighted the challenge of the situation: the people in the Lower Ninth Ward need perfect houses to come home to, but the ambition is also for these homes to be prototypes for the near future—and look good on the Today Show. “We’ve got the devil on one side and the deep blue sea on the other,” Bingler said later. “If we design for the community, we’re going to be in jeopardy of not pleasing our peers, but if we design for the architectural press, we’re going to be in jeopardy of not reaching the community.”
People found the design by MVRDV, from Rotterdam, offensive. It takes a shotgun house and breaks it in the middle, sending the ends up into the air to form a V. (The floors stay level.) It’s startling and original: “They really put forth an idea to think bold, to be grand in our ideas, not to be caged-in in any way,” Pitt said. But with a car parked underneath, the design looks like the aftermath of the storm, with houses tossed on top of cars. Winy Maas, principal at MVRDV, made no apologies. “People said, ‘Is this a joke?’ And we said, ‘No, it’s serious.’ Because it takes Katrina even more seriously and monumentalizes itself, and it shows that it was there.” No doubt, MVRDV knows how to design functional housing. They just didn’t think that was the point here. “People say, ‘Why would Brad want to do this?’” Maas said just before catching his flight back to the Netherlands. “It’s to address a wider perspective, isn’t it? And then maybe our design embodies that. Provocation is good because it pushes people. We need architectural Michael Moores.”
Add Sticky Note
- ...well, I don't think Maas is doing himself any favours by coming across as what looks like an arrogant design god. Why Katrina should be "monumentalized" in domestic architecture is beyond me.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-23 23:21:57
It’s hard to imagine that any of the residents will choose to build MVRDV’s house as their own. And if nobody chooses it, has it failed? At what? “If somebody designs a building that people don’t want to live in, then I would argue that it’s sculpture,” Bingler said. “And maybe that gets to the point about architecture’s role in the twenty-first century: Are we going to continue to create monuments to ourselves, or are we going to start listening? Are we going to develop a different kind of respect?”

Städtezerfall: München verschwindet

- interesting article on Munich's "caught in aspic/ amber" mentality of resisting modernism, as well as height, which relates to Social-Democrat long-time mayor Georg Kronawitter's argument that Munich must be small and surveyable, which the author argues contributed to rent inflation and exacerbated problems of affordability generally. Kronawitter also had this dimwit idea that no new buildings anywhere in Munich could exceed the Frauenkirche (99m) in height.

Tags: architecture, faz, georg_kronawitter, heritage, modernism, munich, urbanplanning on 2008-01-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Cities ramp up kid-friendly hospitality - USATODAY.com

Featuring many comments from CEOs for Cities's Carol Coletta, on the various strategies cities are being encouraged to use to make them more child-friendly.

Tags: amenities, ceos_for_cities, child_friendly, cities, neighbourhoods, urbanplanning on 2008-01-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Urban Mapping Gives Us Free Neighborhoods

The resurfacing (as in coming up, not getting paved over!) of neighbourhoods... Interesting comments thread, too, re. the "free" aspect. All for the US at this point, Canada seems out of the loop.

Tags: cities, mapping_apps, neighbourhoods, software, urbanplanning on 2008-01-10 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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4Expand

TheStar.com | Ideas | The vertical revolution takes root

Tags: architecture, christopher_hume, cities, skyscrapers, toronto, urbanism, urbanplanning on 2007-11-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Suddenly it seems Toronto has become Skyscraper City, Vertical Village, the high-rise capital of Canada.
Just yesterday, word came that Aura, a 75-storey, mixed-use condo tower, will be built at the corner of Yonge and Gerrard Sts.
Last week, it was One Bloor, an 80-storey tower at Bloor and Yonge.
The week before that, it was Donald Trump's 59-storey hotel-condo at Adelaide and Bay.
More than ever, it seems, the sky's the limit. But in fact, there's really nothing new about this reach for the stars. Since the days of our tiny-perfect former mayor David Crombie's 45-foot height bylaw, the city has come a long, long way.
But if you're talking about Bloor and Yonge, does it really make a difference if it's 70, 80 or 90 storeys tall? What matters is the pedestrian experience and the building's relationship with the street.
When Minto first proposed two towers – 52 and 48 storeys – for Yonge and Eglinton several years ago, the screams of outrage could be heard across North Toronto. Posters appeared in windows and former councillor Anne Johnston lost her seat to that nattering nabob of NIMBYism, Karen Stintz.
The same Stintz who has spent the last few years leading the fight against a six-storey condo on Avenue Rd. north of Lawrence. That's right, six storeys.
The reactionaries notwithstanding, Toronto is well on its way to becoming a high-rise haven. That much was spelled out in the city's new Official Plan, which identified the main arteries – the "avenues" – as the most appropriate location for growth. The idea was that by restricting development to built-up streets, established neighbourhoods could be preserved intact.
This all makes eminent sense; despite the strong anti-height feelings, the issue shouldn't be how to stop growth but how to control it.
In this respect, the genesis of Aura offers hope. It was vetted by a city-appointed design review panel that went through the proposal in detail and suggested major improvements. Everyone involved in the process – architects, developer and city planners – agrees the scheme is better now than it was when first presented.
Add to this the fact that the building will be constructed on the site of what's now a parking lot, that it will be connected to the subway and it's hard to argue against it.
Indeed, the real issue is not height, but design, which is to say, how a building relates to its surroundings, what it gives back to the city, and how it meets the street. The Minto towe