Saturday, December 11, 2010

American Denovation

"Denovation" - that's my catchy title for what the U.S. is engaged in right now. Our policy has become worse than the status quo, because we are actively engaged in setting back progress. Yes, we are in a terrible economic situation - but we'd rather butter everyone up by continuing a healthy tax cut than make meaningful policy decisions. We should find money by eliminating waste, scaling back entitlements and reforming tax policies that promote gaming the system. The last thing we need is disinvestment in our futures.

Case in point #1: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's single-handed defeat of years of planning for the "ARC Tunnel", which would have doubled train access from New Jersey and points south and west to Penn Station in Manhattan. Christie's initial point was noble - the Feds needed to prevent this project from becoming another eternal, bloated boondoggle, the bill for which would be on New Jersey's tab. He could have turned this into an example of holding the federal government accountable (gasp) for its numbers, but instead, he engaged in political grandstand and rejected the project altogether. What could be worse for the future growth of a region dependent upon transit?

Denovation goes further - we all hate paying a lot for gas, but higher gas prices help stimulate efficiency, from the design of vehicles all the way down to simple daily habits like trip chaining. Where is our federal government on this issue? The federal excise tax on gas, as it's called, has been virtually stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon since, wait for it, October 1993. This is despite the fact that, during that 17+ year span, the Consumer Price Index is up about 45-50%. Even if we raised the tax to 27.6 cents today, we would effectively have the same gas tax as we did in 1993.

There is no better evidence of our denovation than the world outside us. While we fret about investing in new infrastructure, China's trains are breaking records left and right and they plan to have over 8000 miles of track on the ground by 2012. Our other neighbors in Europe are coming up with ingenious ways to harness energy, while here, innovation in renewable energy is consistently on the chopping block.

What gives? Is it our representatives who are more concerned with getting reelected than with making the hard decisions we need? Is it cronyism and the almighty dollar that put corporate lobbyists and special interest groups ahead of the good of the nation? Are we too proud to look outside our borders for solutions? Do we all really love our cars to death?

Saturday, June 12, 2010

FLW and Form-Based Codes

On Wednesday night, I attended the “East End Planning Conference” in downtown Riverhead, New York, which was jointly sponsored by AIA Peconic (Eastern Long Island) and APA New York. The series of presentations and discussions gave a good look at how form-based codes, Smart Growth, and traditional urbanism are growing here on Long Island, the “birthplace of suburbia”.


Though short, the conference did an excellent job of tying together the many strands of what makes traditional planning and urbanism tick. It moved from the broad to the fine, starting with talks on regional comprehensive plans, then moving to village master plans and community efforts, and culminating with a discussion of architectural and urban guidelines, form-based coding, and what has worked so far in the region. As a lifelong Long Islander, it was exciting for me to finally see all this work being done here, particularly in light of the ardent NIMBYism that tends to permeate this place.


The part of the night that most engaged me came near the end, when much of the audience had headed home. A group of planners and urban designers gave a nice synopsis of the form-based codes and graphic design guidelines they had already produced on Long Island. They discussed how these codes tended to “nudge” designers and builders in the right directions rather than dictate style; they even contrasted the local codes they produced against pattern books, which give far more detail about architectural language. Long Island is largely auto-oriented and full of crumbly old ‘60s and ‘70s sprawl, so the goal is to make its urban form better without quibbling over style.


After these presentations, an older local architect jumped up and gave what I would best describe as a stump speech for starchitecture. He declared that “architecture is poetry” (a nice sentiment I think we can all buy) and then went into a tirade about how form-based codes as presented would entirely stifle the creativity of architects. He said that poetry was impossible under codes like these. To prove his point, he invoked Frank Lloyd Wright, rhetorically asking whether any of his works would have been possible under a form-based code. His words were met with stifled applause from about half of the audience, most of whom were older architects like himself. The presenters gave a well-reasoned response about how their projects were more about building density and public space while allowing stylistic freedom, but it was clear the poets in the audience were not impressed.


I wish I could call up Mr. Poet now because the morning after the conference, I woke up with a realization: most of Frank Lloyd Wright’s large body of work WOULD have been possible under a form-based code. I immediately thought about the Robie House, which most Americans would probably recognize as typical Wright. While it did re-interpret notions of horizontality and verticality and utilize new motifs in decoration, roof expression and floor plan, the Robie House works quite well with the urban language of old Hyde Park: it is two stories with a roof, it utilizes masonry construction and it has similar setbacks to the other buildings nearby. Although it has whole walls of windows, the fenestration is such that the scale and quality of each window matches nearby homes.


Wright’s Oak Park homes are similar; to the untrained eye, they could easily blend in with nearby late 19th and early 20th Century architect-designed or pattern book homes. They are not alien forms with fractured masses and random elements. In South Bend, the two Wright homes elegantly match the urban pattern of their streets. The DeRhodes House on West Washington Street (1906) sits among its neighbors respectfully, with the same height, scale, setback and materials as multiple nearby residences. The Usonian Herman T. Mossberg House (1948) is outside downtown in an early auto-oriented suburb. It sits far back and low from the street like other nearby homes. It is not an “in your face” rule-breaker, but the subtly unique work of a master.


Despite the age and experience of the architect who spoke, there seemed to be a flaw in his understanding of cities and urbanism. When he referred to Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing creativity being stifled, he was most likely thinking of his more iconic, fanciful buildings like the Guggenheim, Fallingwater or Taliesin West. The problem is that these are all object buildings, the Guggenheim an urban foreground building, and Fallingwater and Taliesin two rural villas in the landscape. Form-based codes are primarily concerned with the urban fabric, the everyday “background” buildings that make up the guts of the city.


The funny thing is that in traditional cities, object buildings were indeed distinguished from their neighbors, just as Wright did when he made a museum out of an inverted nautilus shell. Take the Guggenheim’s nearby neighbor, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While it is a Neoclassical masterpiece partially designed by McKim, Mead and White, it is also an object building, just like the Guggenheim. It is not part of a street wall, it has four exposed sides, it is of a different scale (in footprint and height) than the nearby fabric and it is one of precious few buildings in Manhattan that is set back from the street more than a few short feet. The Guggenheim shares many of these same qualities, showing once again that Wright understood the city. Of course, basilicas, castles, city halls, post offices, obelisks and other types of foreground buildings worldwide are architecturally distinct from the fabric around them.


The disconnect in today’s practice between the lessons of the city and what architects are producing reveals something about the state of the architecture profession. Most architects turn all of their projects into foreground buildings. They want style and flair (like The Nanny?), pizzazz and pop, regardless of what they are designing.


Most clients, especially homeowners, are seeking a comfortable, homey, and familiar place to live or work or shop, and not necessarily some avant-garde, never-before-seen creation born from the computer. The awful irony behind architect’s attempts to avoid guidelines and maintain a vaunted sense of “poetic” license is that the architect is fast becoming obsolete in everyday construction. After all, why spend extra money paying a designer when the tract home builder or floor plan book can give you a product closer to what you actually want?

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Playing Catch-Up

Sorry to all 7 or 8 of my loyal readers for an eternal absence (by blog standards, anyway) - I have just finished the busiest time I've had in my life since graduation last May. In the past five weeks, I moved out of home and into my own apartment (WalkScore is still 0, unfortunately), traveled to Providence, Upstate New York, and South Florida, was a groomsman in the wedding of two of my closest friends, and I have been tutoring math and SAT prep four days a week after work. I have also been working on an article for Living Urbanism, the next volume of which will be published sometime in July.

But with all that said, there is no excuse for letting my blog go for so long. I will be on the lookout for good articles and posts over the next few days and will hopefully come up with some ideas for posts of my own. For tonight, you can check out this enjoyable video that puts a new spin on "traffic".

Monday, March 8, 2010

Every Little Thing That We Do

A very local article I read this weekend reminded me of how every single time we build anything, it alters our landscape and has a cumulative, cascading effect far beyond what the eye can see. I know this is a simple observation, but it is so crucial that we cannot recognize it enough.

The article is about the alewife, a type of herring that lives out in ocean waters but, like salmon, migrates to freshwater streams for spawning. The article talks about a lengthy project to build a rock ramp over a small five-foot dam in one of our local downtowns. The dam has prevented alewife from using that river to spawn (the Peconic) since Colonial times... yes, Colonial times.

You see, even before the Industrial Revolution, humans were having minor impacts on the species with whom they coexist. Of course, humans are like any other animal; they impact their ecosystem, occupy a certain niche, and affect their physical environment.

The problem is that now, our impacts have accumulated to huge levels, and they continue to escalate day by day. A dam or two in the 1800s has become ten or twenty dams today. A turnpike that divided a forest habitat in the 1920s has become four arterials, two superhighways, and three local roads criscrossing that habitat today. Even when we don't develop land for buildings, we are impacting the environment with the runoff from our roads, the fumes from our vehicles, the overfishing from our recreation, and the waste from our lives.

Every choice we make has an affect on dozens upon dozens of others in the world wide web of life. Yes, there are many consequences to driving the extra mile, adding the extra lane, and loweirng the thermostat another degree. We just have to convince people of the truth.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

"Complete Streets" in New York

Anyone who has tried to walk, run, bike, roller blade, take a bus, or use any form of transportation besides a good old gas guzzler knows that cars are king throughout 99.9% of our great country. Most roads are designed for high speeds, offer no sidewalks, crosswalks, or bike lanes, and frequently do not have protected bus stops. Ironic for a nation that many people claim is "free" and "mobile" - only if you have the ability to drive and finance your own vehicle.

The "complete streets" movement is just one factor of sustainable urban design, but it is a crucial one because it can be enacted incrementally, and it offers remediation for both urban and suburban streets. Essentially, the goal of a complete street is to accommodate multiple forms of transportation in the same cross-section. The elements can adjust by location, and might include sidewalks (narrower or wider), bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, bus bulbs, planting strips, on-street parking, and more.

Complete streets are, of course, visible all over Europe, especially in places like Paris and London and many of the German cities. There, street sections are not necessarily narrower, but there is less wide-open space for cars and more dedicated areas for parking, walking and biking. One particular element is "bulbing" or "necking down" - streets get narrower at intersections or at crosswalks to discourage speeding. Here in the States, streets tend to be of uniform wide width, and can feel like oceans of pavement for pedestrians trying to cross on foot.

Luckily, there is a National Complete Streets Coalition, which provides tons of information on complete streets legislation and projects. New York City recently released a stunning design manual for complete streets. This 250+ page tome offers dozens of alternatives and lots of images to show off the results. This photo I took shows an example of a completed street, Bleecker Street at Perry Street in Greenwich Village:
To me, this is almost picture-perfect urbanism. The variegated buildings, the street with dedicated bike lane (in bright green, all across NYC) and parking lane, the picturesque street trees, the busy stores and shops, the pedestrians... it exudes a feeling of good urban life.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

We're Blossoming!

I love this video about pedestrianizing Broadway in Times Square from Streetsblog. No, not for its sappy music or human-interesty feel. I love it because in it you can actually see the United States moving outside its comfort zone and experimenting with better urbanism. We are cautious and tentative, but we are also ready for something new.

The video shows off the project's initial success. It also reminds us that this one move took decades of advocacy, suffers much criticism from a few despite general public approval, and is still a heartbeat away from the chopping block. We knew reshaping our collective mentality would be difficult; Times Square, if it is allowed to remain and is improved over time, may finally become the archetype we need to bring better urbanism throughout the U.S.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The Devil is in the Distance

I spent part of the work day yesterday riding to Home Depot with an extremely nice contractor named Jose. Jose is laying tile at the place where I work and he needed to go pick up some more materials, so my boss sent me with the credit card. Jose is a middle-age Dominican man who has been living in the U.S. for over 20 years - his English is very good, and his three children all know English better than they know Spanish.

We talked about a lot of different things during the fifteen minute ride to Home Depot, but one of the most surprising topics that came up was Jose's view on the urban planning in North Carolina. We were talking about how he spent 2008 in North Carolina doing work because there was not much work here on Long Island. He was going on about how much cheaper it is to rent and buy a house down South, but then he made a very astute observation:

"Everyone there [in North Carolina] tells you that where you have to go 'is close, it's very close'. But it's not close, they just mean that it takes a short time to get there. You always have to get on a highway and go 70 or 80 miles an hour to get to where you want to go. When I lived there it seemed like I spent $40 a day in gas for my work van because everything is so far apart. It's not like here."

Jose's comment is right on, and it reminded me once again that planning effects everyone, and that everyone actually grasps planning's effects on some level.

But Jose's observation also nails down a design flaw intrinsic to sprawl that has a cumulative effect on our lives: distance. When we design low-density, auto-oriented places with little regard for location efficiency, the distance a person must travel every day grows exponentially. Even if the time needed for travel stays the same (10 miles in Charlotte tends to take the same amount of time as 2 miles in Brooklyn), the mileage itself is the problem.

A phone interviewer asked me once what I thought was the biggest problem facing world societies with regard to the environment. My answer was that we will have to grapple with the sheer quantity of energy we consume and will continue to consume.

We in the developed world are extraordinary energy wasters at present, and the evidence is all around us: excessive packaging, wasted food, unnecessary lighting, buildings that act as sieves instead of as envelopes, lengthy commutes, the list goes on. Imagine a world where we continue on our present track toward more waste, more exurbs, and lower quality construction. Then imagine that for a few billion more people, and then imagine that some of our developing country friends are trying to jump on board with our ways.

Even if we find some miracle, clean, abundant energy source, the simple fact that our lifestyles require so much unnecessary energy is going to damn us. Acquisition, generation, and transmission will always have some costs (environmental, monetary, social, etc.); the hungrier we become for more energy, the more we will pay.

The answer to the problem is "waste not, want not". As a society, we have to understand that we cannot continue building our cities further and further out into the greenfields. The further we place ourselves from the necessary things in our lives, the bigger energy hogs we become. In essence, as Steve Mouzon pointed out in his Original Green blog, there is a bit of a fallacy behind efficiency as a panacea. More miles per gallon is a nice idea, but it will never solve the energy problem if we are all driving ten times as far to get where we are going.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Minimizing your Footprint

Check out this comical parking video from failblog.org.

Of course, this could only happen in Europe... in America our cars "need" luxurious two car garages with plenty of room to open both doors and still have enough space to keep the lawn equipment, Christmas decorations, and unwanted furniture along the sides.

I wouldn't advocate that we all have garages like this man, but his example shows just how compact we could really be if necessary. The question is: when will we Americans find the golden mean? Why is it that we are stuck on hyperdrive, demanding huge houses, huge bedrooms, huge garages, huge yards? When will we begin to emphasize quality over quantity?

Monday, January 4, 2010

Voila! Cities in Seconds!

One of the catchphrases I heard for the first time at CNU 17 in Denver was "instant urbanism". People used it constantly, especially in the NextGen discussions and presentations, and I think it is an important topic for us to mull over as urbanists if we step back from ourselves for a moment.

You can probably imagine what instant urbanism is even if you have never seen the phrase before. We have instant everything in the U.S.A. - instant coffee, instant oatmeal, instant internet, instant cosmetic surgeries, you name it. Instant urbanism is just like these notions - a development, neighborhood, or even city that pops up bewilderingly fast.

At Notre Dame for example, we now, rather suddenly, have our own "city" just south of campus. Within the span of three years, the site now known as Eddy Street Commons morphed from decrepit parking lots and homes to a vast construction site to, voila, an entire "Main Street" and multiple side streets of homes and businesses. Retrofitted malls, greenfield developments, and many other New Urbanist projects have sprung up over the past ten years at the same light-speed rate.

There is definitely an air of excitement among traditional urbanists about these places; here we have production builders who have suddenly "converted" away from sprawl, a public that really digs urban environments, and even serious attempts at good traditional architecture.

So what gives me pause? Once past the initial excitement over these places, I find them somewhat discomforting. Like everything else in our culture, buying ourselves brand new cities and applauding them as traditional feels like a cheap, fleeting, and disingenuous solution. It rings awfully close to adjustable-rate mortgages, derivative trading, Cash for Clunkers, and all the myriad other "quick fixes" that have come to characterize today's society.

For starters, there is an air of phoniness about these places. They are uncomfortably similar to Main Street USA at Disney World, where the false fronts all back up to one large, flat-roofed warehouse building. In many cases, this is in fact true, as multiple facades actually mask one continuous building or a parking garage.

Secondly, there is a perennial scale issue. At Eddy Street Commons, practically every building is a full four stories tall, and worse, they all seem to line up at the same exact height because floor-to-floor heights are standardized across the project. The same was true at the redeveloped Belmar Mall in Denver.

Perhaps my main criticism of championing these New Urban projects is how they turn their backs on the places we already have. Eddy Street, for example, is a beautiful project, but a similarly sized investment for South Bend's struggling downtown would have down the city wonders and gotten a lot more bang for the buck. Why? Because for all its awfulness, South Bend is a place, and by place I mean it is a long-term, continuous, enduring physical location and human institution. Despite all of the urban erosion, the crime and other issues, and the bad attempts at urban renewal, the echoes of what South Bend was and what it can be in the future are still there, in the fabric of the city and in the fabric of the people.

And this brings me to perhaps my main point: the only way to reinvent ourselves with true sustainability at heart is to build from the places we already have, not to try and make new ones. The latter pursuit is what doomed every form of 20th-Century Utopianism, from Radburn and Le Corbusier right through suburban sprawl. In every case, the designer thought his vision of how cities should be was right and set off to build it from scratch, each time with little or no success. In every case, these projects were built outside struggling, dirty, never-quite-perfect cities that, lo and behold, continued to thrive and still remain the places where we want to live and visit.

So why think greenfield New Urbanism is the complete opposite? Why are the Habershams and I'Ons, the Stapletons and the Celebrations any different than Radburn? Sure, they are a thousand times more respectful of good urban design, of walkability and tradition, and of what people actually want. But the zeitgeist that drives them is eerily similar to every other failed planning movement: we can make place overnight, by design.

The biggest irony? I'd wager that in fifty years, we'll still be looking at the South Bends of the world as real places we want to improve, while the Celebrations slip into obsolescence and unimportance like their Utopian forerunners. Maybe there's a derivative I can trade based on the future success of our cities...

Even the Ivy League Doesn't Learn...

I was disappointed to read of a soon-to-be architectural monstrosity in New Haven. The Downtown New Haven blog reported on "Lord" Norman Foster's proposal for a new School of Management at Yale. My absolute favorite image (if you're looking for a reason to vomit):
This is the street frontage along Whitney Avenue, one of the most prominent arteries leading out of New Haven's core. How's that for good urbanism?? I guess Yale is trying to compensate for the fact that it dared to hire Robert Stern to design a traditional residential college over on Prospect Street. "Oh I'm sorry your lordship, we did not mean to offend."

This one's personal for me because my daily commute by foot for one whole summer took me past the very spot where this behemoth will soon loom. Whitney Avenue is a variegated corridor, a continuation of urban Church Street which forms the southeast side of the New Haven Green. As it moves north, Whitney becomes an avenue of stately homes, who have maintained their beauty, value, and grandeur despite decades of anti-urban interventions that have managed to insert themselves onto the street.

Perhaps the biggest crime about this new building is that it will be directly across from the eat-your-heart-out, jaw-droppingly beautiful Gothic-inspired Peabody Museum at Sachem and Whitney:

There are a whole lot of really good comments on the New Haven Independent's article about Foster's project. My favorite one brings up an excellent point about 20th Century buildings that I think the majority of laymen would understand:

"Have the enthusiasts of "shiny new" glass-and-steel architecture still not noticed that its only appeal is the fact of being shiny and new? That when modernist buildings are no longer new, they have nothing going for them? Concrete and steel do not age gracefully like brick and stone. They just start to look like an old appliance or a beat-up car."

To close, and to prove the point that brick-and-mortar buildings age gracefully, here are some of my personal shots of buildings up and down Whitney Avenue:

















Note of Interest: The last image, the purple mansion, is the home where George W. Bush was born.