Brand Avenue

Seeing Is Believing

Trying to sell your model home? Forget aspiring actors. Throw away the plastic food. Why even bother when you can have the real thing?

The fragrance of sage-scented candles and sounds of jazz fill the air of a 2,600-square-foot house a block from the beach. Tiger-striped chairs flank tables crafted from exotic woods. Photos of a chubby baby hang on the walls. Whoever occupies 211 Windward Way, they seem to live the good life. 

Too good to be true, in fact. The house is owned by a builder, who hasn't been able to sell it for more than a year. And while someone really does live here, it's as part of an elaborate bit of stagecraft aimed at moving Southern California's echoing inventory of luxury vacant homes. This $1.2 million seaside pied-a-terre is occupied by Johnna Clavin, a 45-year-old Los Angeles event planner and decorator who has seen business slow. In exchange for giving the townhouse a stylishly lived-in look, she gets to stay there at a steep discount and stands to earn a bonus if the house sells fast. "This is the perfect scenario for the times that we're in," she says.

It's the logical evolution of home staging: living props, that actually live there. Life becomes theatre, which becomes sales technique. Amazing:

Ms. Clavin, and her furniture, beat out 46 applicants who auditioned for the homeowner role, says Quality First's owner, Mary Heineke. "I already know they can't afford the house," Ms. Heineke says. "I want to know if they can replicate a person who can afford that house."

Showhomes Management LLC, a franchise operation based in Nashville, has 350 "resident managers" living in homes for sale in 46 high-end markets, including in Florida, Arizona and Illinois. The company has seen revenues increase 88% since last year, says vice president Thomas Scott. Unoccupied staged houses aren't selling as well as those with people in them, he says, "because people can still tell they're vacant."

(Architects spend day upon day imagining how people will inhabit the spaces they design, and doesn't that make them especially perceptive potential "resident managers"? Just a thought.)

I believe this could be taken further still. I'd like to see a reality show with a battle between these resident managers as the premise; hire some folks and see whose sense of self and staging acumen closes the deal the fastest. In the meantime, we can follow them on Twitter (borrowing and twisting this premise), and ask ourselves whether we think their tweets--not just their thoughts about the home, but also their thoughts about the rhythms of their day-to-day, their hopes and fears, the ineffable stuff of (their) lives--resonate with us personally. I mean, when we bring real people and their stuff into the equation of selling a home, isn't the resulting set of impressions inevitably more complex and therefore more compelling? 

John Humphrey, 63, of Carlsbad, Calif., toured the property this month. He was taken in, imagining the owner as a wealthy "world traveler," using it as a second home. He thought the owner was "maybe a Fortune 1000 vice president...45 to early 50s." Told that the house was occupied by a woman who'd lived there less than a week, he was briefly flummoxed. "It reminds me of a movie," he said. But he didn't feel hoodwinked. "I'm impressed with somebody who can create that atmosphere," he said. "No question I'd live there if I can get something else unloaded here in a hurry." 

More than homeownership, architecture, furniture, or even marketing, it's our desires to step into the shoes of others that rise to the surface. Or if not to become them, it's a desire to at least be close to them, to know them personally, to join them in their enviable lifestyle. Heady stuff.

Kitsch Break

All, my apologies for the radio silence here recently. I am in the midst of planning a cross-country move this summer--to Providence, where my wife has landed a fantastic, exciting new job--and Brand Avenue has sat on the back burner while I investigate, both remotely and in person, typical moving-related things like housing and employment prospects. We are thrilled to be returning to New England--birthplace of this blog, whose scale and strongly defined character is definitely present in the content and approach of this site.

Posting over the next few weeks may be a bit sparse, as we rack up frequent flier miles running back and forth and try to get ourselves squared away, in a place that is, excitingly for us, both familiar and new. Therefore, along with my Delicious bookmarks, I'm enlisting Twitter as a way to bridge the content gap here, and I rescind my earlier statement about not understanding its utility. This essay takes care of the rest.

More on all that later; at some point I do intend to organize my thoughts about why Providence is a great city, and why I'm excited to be there. In the meantime, here's a video explaining why other people think so.

Right now, I'd just like to offer a bit of YouTube kitsch, a music video only tangentially related to issues of urbanism, the content of which was voted the "worst song ever" a couple of years back. I report, you decide.

And now, back to regularly scheduled programming...

London as Language

For fun, I'm re-reading David Mitchell's Ghostwritten these days. Those familiar with the book will know how the narrative voice shifts, in an engaging way, from character to character, across continents, and through time.

At one point the arc of the story arrives at Marco, resident of London, who muses about the city's Underground as he goes about his day. I'm excerpting it here, as a meditation on place, for how Marco views the personality of the different tube lines, and by extension London itself:

As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria Line, for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greenwich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The District and Circle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he's in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King's Cross or Paddington, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don't know the craftier short-cuts, it's as bad as how I imagine Tokyo....Docklands Light Railway, the nouveau riche neighbour, with its Prince Regent, West India Quay and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn't approve of such artyfartyness, and nor would his twin uncle, Bakerloo. Central, the middle-aged cousin, matter-of-fact, direct, no forking off or going the long way round. That's about it for the main lines, except the Metropolitan which is too boring to mention, except that it's a nice fuchsia colour and you take it to visit the dying.

Then you have the Oddball lines, like Shakespeare's Oddball plays. Pericles, Hammersmith and City, East Verona Line, Titus of Waterloo.


The Northern Line is black on the maps. It's the deepest. It has the most suicides, you're most likely to get mugged on it, and its art students are most likely to be future Bond Girls. There's something doom-laden about the Northern Line. Its station names: Morden, Brent Cross, Goodge Street, Archway, Elephant and Castle, the resurrected Mornington Crescent. It was closed for years, I remember imagining I was on a probe peering into the Titanic as the train passed through.

Yep, the Northern Line is the psycho of the family. Those bare-walled stations south of the Thames that can't attract advertisers. Not even stair-lift manufacturers will advertise in Kennington Tube Station. I've never been to Kennington but if I did I bet there'd be nothing but run-down fifties housing blocks, closed-down bingo halls and a used-car place where tatty plastic banners fluppetty-flup in the homeless wind. The sort of place where best-forgotten films starring British rock stars as working-class anti-heroes are set. There but for the grace of my credit cards go I.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Sounds Like Recession

Today, a pair of fascinating radio pieces focus on two different neighborhoods who share a common denominator of economic woe.

First, take a few minutes to tune into a superlative This American Life episode from a couple of weeks ago about the spiraling effects of speculative development and foreclosure on Rogers Park, Chicago--both inside the "luxury" condominium conversions themselves, and outside, throughout the neighborhood. The physical and economic effects of countless "sexy on the outside, crappy on the inside" renovations extend throughout the neighborhood. Listen.

Above, Clark Street in Rogers Park. (via)

Across the country in Los Angeles, an architect and "social designer" plans for wholescale societal transformation at the scale of the suburban cul-de-sac. NPR contributor Jennifer Sharpe investigates why Stephanie Smith believes the way out of the alienation and waste of the suburbs starts by rethinking the commune:

Ever since my next-door neighbor sent me hate mail, threatening to sue if I didn't cut down my eucalyptus tree, I've been having paranoid fantasies about how badly we'd do together in an apocalypse.

Stranded on a residential street in Santa Monica, Calif., where the neighbors hardly ever interact with each other, I realized we might all die as casualties of our own self absorption.

So when I heard about a social experiment urging people in Los Angeles cul-de-sacs to start communes together, I had to see if this strange suburban mutation could possibly survive.

Cue Smith, founder of Ecoshack, and the project simply called Wanna Start A Commune?, wherein neighbors pool resources for the common good:

From the WSAC manifesto:

Wanna Start a Commune? is a movement dedicated to bringing a communal lifestyle to the forefront of American culture.

A commune is defined simply as "a community where resources are shared." We think the commune idea deserves a much broader audience. Sure, many commune experiments failed. We say don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Let's learn and move forward. The commune is an idea too good to waste. Let's take this old idea and give it a new attitude.

The good news is that we're already turning towards each other more than ever before; for inspiration, for comfort, for help, for joy. It's a simple act to take that 'turning towards' and make it official. The act of starting a commune can be literal, or symbolic. Becoming more collective is the goal. Join with those around you and together decide how and where.

Listen.

Postscript

Today, a few noteworthy follow-ups and add-ons to earlier posts, and a bit of clerical work.

- A global search for authenticity arrives in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, as a German developer imagines today's favela as tomorrow's development coup de grace. Crazy, possibly; but who can argue with the view?

Rolf Glaser zips his motorbike up the twisting alleyways of Vidigal slum, past a bunch of cheerful, gun-packing drug traffickers, and emerges at a cliffside plateau next to some demolished shacks. This, the German developer says, could be Rio de Janeiro's next tourist hotspot.

"Can you imagine sitting up here on a terrace with a glass of wine?" he muses, motioning toward the sparkling azure Atlantic Ocean.

Many Brazilians, Glaser admits, think he is missing something by planning to turn one of the hundreds of Rio slums — whose names are synonymous with violence, drug-dealing and poverty — into a trendy new spot on the city's tourist map. Residents are often criminalized in people's minds purely by association with the shantytowns, or "favelas," which are often controlled by heavily armed drug gangs. But Glaser is one of a small, bold band of foreigners going where most Rio residents fear to tread, catering to tourists who want to see the "real" Rio beyond the Copacabana beach district and the Christ the Redeemer statue.

Vidigal played the backdrop in parts of City of God, after all. (Earlier.)

- In the very last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, an update on Starbucks. I find their struggles fascinating, for the civic role their outlets often play, as extensions of the street and guardian of "third places" worldwide; and for their strenuous attempts to create something in both product and experience (which ties to design at all scales, of course) that is at once both local and global, idiosyncratic and uniform.

Company CEO Howard Schultz:

"There's a myth out there," Schultz said. "The myth is that there is a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks."
He pointed out that half the beverages sold cost less than $3, and one-third cost less than $2. He also said that the company would defend its image on cost and on quality.

"We can't stay quiet," Schultz said. "Don't let anyone tell you that their coffee or that coffee is the same as Starbucks. It's not. We've been silent about these issues, and I can assure you that we're not going to be silent for too long." The company has been stepping up on traditional advertising and will likely continue to do so, marking a change in strategy from its historic communication with customers by word-of-mouth.

"The issue of perception has got to be addressed," Schultz said. "One of the things I recently read is that Starbucks Coffee Co. is not cool any more. I've been here 27 years, we have never set out to be cool. We don't want to be cool, we want to be relevant. We want to be trusted. We want to be valued."

(Earlier.)

- Outside Toronto, a new neighborhood "fails." New Urbanists, city officials, and residents point fingers and wag tongues.

More than 10 years ago, a charismatic Cuban American architect embarked on a bold plan to transform a plot of Ontario farmland into a bustling urban utopia, a place where dwellers would swap cars for walking shoes and enjoy a sense of urbanity in what would have otherwise been just another suburb.
Or so that was Andres Duany’s plan.

Instead, cars today zip up and down the narrow avenues and not a pedestrian, charming coffee shop, nor restaurant is in sight. It is a Tuesday afternoon, and two beauty salons are inexplicably closed for the day, a real estate office is locked with snow piled high outside its door, not a single child is playing in Mews Park, and the convenience store sees only a trickling of residents. Here and there a York Regional Transit bus rolls along, but public transportation to, from and within Cornell is far from comprehensive.

“The mindset was that people wanted a village feel, but what emerged was a sort of pseudo-village,” said Michael Spaziani, a Toronto architect who a decade ago helped create Cornell’s open-space master plan, adding that Cornell is so far nothing more than a “cuter form of sprawl.”

What's the matter? Duany believes the developers currently constructing Cornell--apparently free from the formal regulatory guidance that often accompanies the development of New Urbanist communities--are being careless. However, a couple of smart comments on the article at Planetizen point out that the relationship between the development and its greater context--at the edge of the metropolitan area, with few services nearby and no pre-existing fabric to connect to--is what's problematic:

1) This should come as a surprise to no one, least of all city planners. Since the mid 1990's many of us have decried the notion of "new urban" development in the greenfields. It is not urban and it certainly is not new. These developments (Duany, Calthorpe, etc...) are antithetical to the notion of urban planning. They are what they appear to be, a new style of suburb that does not produce quite as much environmental guilt in the new residents. In fact, they are more dangerous as a result....

2) Cornell's particular circumstances aside, New Urbanist practitioners should focus on retooling existing urban areas rather than trying to create them out of whole cloth. It should be no surprise that TND oases like Cornell and Celebration don't function as intended from inception because they are only a small feature of the large metropolitan desert that surrounds them. If the dominant metropolitan infrastructure dictates long car trips between single use areas of residence, employment, retail, and recreation, it will swamp whatever hoped-for effects a small pocket of TND development will bring. Moreover, the New Urbanist development's incongruity with its larger environment creates an inescapable feeling of inauthenticity, much like I experience when I visit a "town center"-style shopping mall....

That's not to say that Markham's leadership isn't trying to create something unique and sustainable as the city develops. In fact, the city is home to both Cornell and Cathedraltown, a New Urbanist community with another story, featured here earlier.

- As for the clerical work mentioned above: Brand Avenue has entered the world of Twitter, here, and in the right-hand column. Right now is a trial period--to be honest, I'm not convinced that Twitter actually does anything, and I'm rather partial to my Delicious bookmarks as a mode of networking. I'd enjoy being proven wrong, though. And hey, maybe it will help us all find new jobs?

Edifice Complex

The Sears Tower--the tallest building in the United States and once, the tallest in the world--is to be renamed for Willis Group Holdings, an insurance company that is its newest tenant. After the company moves into its offices in the tower this summer, the building will be known as the Willis Tower.

Understandably, the name change is controversial. Chicagoans wonder about the identity of the icon that has punctuated its skyline for nearly four decades:

Further, the group of investors that own the building are considering a paint job to give an updated look to the armature of a building that, admittedly, is more agressive than graceful. (below, via)

Left unexplained is how the makeover helps the building achieve a LEED rating, but one assumes that the paint job alone will reflect a lot of light, and therefore cut cooling costs:

Sources said the owners are considering an expensive paint job, recladding the tower in silver. Since its opening in 1973, Chicago's iconic tower and the nation's tallest building has been adorned in classic black.

A brighter look could draw fresh attention to the tower, which has struggled to hold tenants against newer generations of office buildings. Silver could figure into a broader effort to "rebrand" the building and highlight its advances in energy efficiency.

The owners...could seek what's known as a silver LEED rating, bestowed by a group that promotes environmental advances in buildings. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating is third best after gold and platinum, but nonetheless an achievement for a building that's 36 years old.

How do these plans impact Chicago's sense of itself? One columnist points out that a significant percentage of the city's set pieces have, in fact, been renamed over recent years. From baseball parks and golf courses to highways and department stores, the city has become something else than what it once was, at least in name. There's also the fact that Sears, the building's namesake original tenant, hasn't resided there in nearly 20 years.

How do you put a value on a name? How does one rectify the constantly changing nature of a city with sentimental and historic value?

(Thanks, B)

Commercial Value

Sure, I know that the age of iconic architecture might be over, but while catching up on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds blog I couldn't help but marvel at the following ad, part of one company's campaign surrounding a very familiar recent event:

It's starchitecture at the center of the economic juggernaut, as image-maker and vehicle for commerce. Also, as Gretchen Schneider points out:

...[I]t’s not even like this building has been around and beloved for generations — the commercial was aired during the stadium’s opening. The Bird’s Nest seems perfectly tuned to serve simultaneously as an abstract sculptural composition, a forward-looking statement, and a unique and recognizable icon for a nation desperately trying to rebrand itself.

(Related)

Along the Mother Road

Below, images of POPS 66 , a thoroughly modern gas station and soda fountain in Arcadia, Oklahoma. (via Architectural Record)

POPS 66 is prominently located along old US Route 66, and plays up that heritage with its agressive form:

This is the “mother road” of John Steinbeck’s Joads, and Woody Guthrie—two lanes, hundreds of small towns, and every imaginable sales gimmick to separate travelers from their money. Yet POPS isn’t meant to be kitschy or tongue-in-cheek, says architect Rand Elliott, who grew up on Route 66 and designed a museum to celebrate it in Clinton, Oklahoma. “It’s about the place and the landscape.”

It’s also about the romance of the road along with the innocent longing for fast cars, fast food, and a long cool drink that goes with it. POPS sells burgers, milk shakes, ice cream sundaes, and 700 kinds of soda, chosen as much for their bold colors and funky names (Brainwash, Dog Drool, Unknown Dread, and DOA) as for their taste. Its shelves are stocked with key rings, bottle openers, monogrammed golf balls, and other tacky souvenirs.

The high-octane combination of architecture and consumerism is paying off:

Soda is its most profitable item, followed by gas and food. In its fi rst year, POPS attracted more than 800,000 customers—remarkable for a tiny backwater town that’s miles from the nearest interstate. “It’s a phenomenon that I can’t explain,” says the architect. “It’s part architecture, part soda-pop memory, and part roadside attraction.”

Below, the display of wares becomes part of a fantastic, continually changing glazing system.

The gas station's programmable space extends outdoors--in back, a terrace with cafe seating is sheltered by the station's long sandstone side walls.That oversize canopy, standing out strongly against the horizon, is actually an unexpected civic gesture.

What Elliott has done is reimagine the gas station, a building type that is rarely designed well, without destroying its basic character or enduring romantic appeal. Instead of a scattering of utilitarian elements, POPS is three tightly integrated zones under one big roof.

The pump area, protected by the 110-foot steel cantilever, is mainly a work zone, with cars, motorcycles, and pickups zipping in and out. Yet it is also so spacious that families gather there on busy nights while waiting for a table. Occasionally, the gas pumps are even turned off for events such as car shows, live bands, and a farmer’s market—the gas station as community recreation center.

Inside, the restaurant and store form a more relaxed social scene, with a jukebox, a soda counter and booths, historic photos of Route 66, and 10,000 bottles of pop lining the walls and windows. At any time of day it is a blaze of color and refracted light, like the inside of a pinball machine without the bells and whistles.

Commerce and design merge at the facade. Looking out, through the soda bottles and past the gas pumps, one can consider Route 66's role as transportation route, historical relic, and cultural touchstone.

At night, the soda bottle in front lights up, at once both billboard and landmark.

More.

Bourgeois Bohemia, Minus Bourgeois

Nowadays it's a challenge to imagine the irrational exuberance that swept places like Los Angeles' Eagle Rock neighborhood several years ago. Emblematic of all the overlooked urban neighborhoods poised for transformation that this blog has long followed, Eagle Rock seemed to have, in plain view, all the raw ingredients for a seismic shift.

The suggestive tone of this 2007 NYTimes article demonstrates the euphoria of a moment that has definitely passed:

But as real estate prices have risen over the last five years, home buyers have been migrating east to discover a group of neighborhoods known collectively as Northeast Los Angeles, or NELA. They are enticed by Victorian homes dating back to the 1890s, Craftsman and Mission Revival homes from the turn of the 20th century and newly desirable midcentury homes, designed with an orientation toward the outdoors....

“The sunsets are absolutely spectacular,” said David Spancer, who with his wife, Apryl Lundsten, fell in love with a midcentury modern home that sits high in the hills of Eagle Rock. Their 2,100-square-foot house with three bedrooms and two and a half baths cost $495,000 in 2003. Built in 1966, the house still has much of its original detailing, as well as a built-in bar and stools, a barbecue and rotisserie, and a large old-fashioned Chambers refrigerator.

But the real treat is a 1,500-square-foot west-facing balcony that runs the length of the house, offering views from the Pacific Ocean to the Hollywood Hills on a clear day. “And most of my work is at Universal Studios, which is only a 20-minute drive,” Mr. Spancer said.

Fast forward to the anguish and lethargic pace of the present day. The NYTimes takes another look at Eagle Rock (above):

When Emily Cook, a screenwriter, bought a house four years ago in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood on the Northeast side of Los Angeles, she fantasized what the area might look like in a year or two, with cafes and boutiques replacing tattered old businesses. “It was like fantasy football,” said Ms. Cook, 38, who also sings in a band named Fonda.

A sad flower shop on the corner, she thought, could become a miniature Whole Foods. An upholstery store could be a gastropub where she and friends would grab a beer, and a neglected 1940s diner could become a retro spot for a quick meal.

But Ms. Cook has stopped fantasizing about what might be, and started worrying about what might shut down. The flower store has closed; no gourmet market is moving in. Lucy Finch, a vintage boutique, folded last month. That Yarn Store, a hangout for crochet-heads, didn’t survive a bad winter.

It sounds totally specious, but it's actually an interesting question: what happens to the Eagle Rocks (ie., the Northern Liberties, the Bucktowns, the Hoxtons) when the economics that supported them shift, again? I'll admit that I'm not old enough to remember any examples of "de-gentrification," or even if it was identified as such. In any event: what's next when hip is no longer economically viable?

It is easy to sniff at such urban affectations. But the downturn endangers more than precious shops; residents worry that as stores close, the fabric of a bohemian utopia — with its Jane Jacobs mix of commerce and public spiritedness — will also unravel.

The new residents brought prosperity and, the locals say, a little arrogance as well. “They sounded the trumpets and announced a vision of something like Silver Lake or Los Feliz,” said Bob de Velasco, who runs Commercial Printing Network, a copy shop. “But it’s not going to happen. Eagle Rock wasn’t meant to have that. Eagle Rock is an old-fashioned, atmospheric town.”

Indeed, in this downturn, Mr. de Velasco’s printing shop doesn’t seem to be hurting, nor is Tritch Hardware. The shops at risk are the ones playing the Decemberists in a continuous loop.

Behind the issue of what constitutes the right retail mix, though, there's a larger question about the body of ideas, that underpinned trends, that remade places like Eagle Rock. On the one hand, the construction of lifestyle, as per expensive, aspirational boutique shopping and home renovations, is awfully precious, and its cache lies somewhat in how inconvenient it can be. On the other hand, there is wisdom in an economic and planning focus on a local scale, and making sustainability--whatever it ultimately means--the goal.

So is this just a "natural" correction? Is a packaged experience of place--neighborhood as product--actually done for?

“The problem is this,” said D. J. Waldie, a historian of Southern California, “if we truly believed that patronizing these places enlivened our neighborhoods, why aren’t we there — eating the omelets or shopping at the boutique?”

“Those places are important — they dissolve some of the cruel anonymity of everyday life,” he said. “They’re part of the equation of making the local real to us. But they’re not the whole equation. They’re not enough.”

Mr. Waldie added: “I’ve got enough handmade soap. I don’t need anymore.”

Ain't that the truth.

Four More Years

Well, readers, George Washington's 276th birthday is upon us, as is Carnaval, and Purim is in just a couple of weeks. While unrelated, these things remind me that Brand Avenue turns four years old this week! So it's my time once again to thank you sincerely for your interest, your input, and your support of a project that I continue to enjoy.

Writing about place, space, and identity--a trio of thoroughly malleable concepts that, essentially, are what propelled me into architecture and urban planning, and continue to drive the content of this site--remains a valuable and gratifying exercise for me. I hope that you've enjoyed what you've seen here over the last year, and I am excited about the year to come.

A brief recap of the last year:

- In October, I attended the Creative Cities Summit in Detroit, and managed to post every day while I was there. It was fascinating, and I learned and saw a great deal.

(Above, the exterior of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit at night, with neon piece by Martin Creed over mural by Barry McGee. via)

One impression of the Summit that endures with me is the idea that "design" solutions to urban problems lie more in the creative allocation of financial, natural, and human resources, and less in any self-referential back-and-forth about architecture. But then I look around at news of collapsing economies and stimulus packages and wonder if this is, in fact, that thesis being brought to bear; or if the reality of it is that design and economics walk hand in hand, and that practitioners of both would benefit from knowing more about the other.

I hasten to add that, in retrospect, it was both eerie and poignant to hear these things pronounced in the bowels of the Renaissance Center, the overblown symbol of once-invincible General Motors, especially as time passes and economic woes permeate most everything.

- Focusing on the areas where economic forces that shape urban form are perhaps most powerfully visible--the suburbs--Brand Avenue virtually visited Buckeye, Arizona; the new shopping arcades of Glendale, California and Allen, Texas; and the big box retail rings of the postmodern metropolis. Each provided food for thought about the future of the urban edge and its ongoing, inevitable metamorphosis.

I'm reminded of something Renzo Piano said a few years ago in a Guardian interview, reacting to riots that shook the high-rise banlieues of Paris:

The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.

Above, "The Gardens of Gaithersburg," a plan by Daniel Rippeteau Architects that converts unused big box space to a "truck garden," wherein the parking lot becomes an orchard, and the indoor space is retooled for agricultural production. Another take, here.

- An ongoing exploration of the production of urban identity, both official and otherwise, yielded interesting results. Stretching from Houston to Belfast, Middlesbrough, Montreal, London, Curitiba, and Little Rock, examples of multidisciplinary efforts that merge marketing with architecture, preservation with economics, tourism with planning, art with transportation. Below, the book Houston: It's Worth It, the physical artifact of an unofficial marketing campaign of the same name.

- Also, I linked Brand Avenue to Streetsblog and the Sustainable Cities Collective. Check them out. Brand Avenue got a bit of press, too!

More to come soon--but in the meantime, please feel free to visit previous birthday lists. And a list of some personal favorite posts that reach back further. All book reviews from the last three years: here, here, and here. Timelapse city video posts, here and here.

Above: Liberty City, of Grand Theft Auto fame, in timelapse. Virtual urbanism, and the city as playground. File under New York City and branding.

Thanks again.

A Positive Development Strategy

San Francisco-based prefab architecture guru Michelle Kaufmann expands her vision of sustainability and order to an urban scale, seizing upon the awful economy and the collapse of the housing market to do so. Her white paper on the subject, Embracing Thoughtful, Walkable Neighborhoods, makes important connections between scale and several forms of sustainability:

The collapse of the housing market has more or less put a moratorium on the advance of our most unsustainable mode of developing new housing: suburban sprawl. With banks no longer offering easy credit and no one buying the new homes already flooding the market, there is little reason for developers to start building new ones....

We should take this opportunity to study the housing collapse and look at the lessons it offers on how and where we went wrong. Now is the perfect time to reexamine the qualities we value in our neighborhoods and hopefully shift our focus onto these qualities that are conducive to financial, environmental, and sociocultural sustainability. Doing so will be an important step toward choosing more viable development strategies for housing our growing population.

On her blog, Kaufmann highlights 10 American community developments, from North Carolina to California, that are attuned to what she calls the "10 Eco-Principles of Communities" (six of which are seen in the above image). These developments, a mix of adaptive reuse and greenfield development, generally hew to a warm, modern aesthetic and are thrifty when it comes to consuming energy and resources; but the wisdom of their design extends to a larger, community scale, with awareness of transportation issues and the strength of the social fabric. They borrow the best of New Urbanism's bent toward timelessness and sense of place, and overlay attention to pressing environmental and energy concerns.

For the communities in question, this attenuation to design at multiple scales, and concern for design issues that are external to the realm of the purely architectural, can help engender a sense of place and create a shared identity over time. Broadening the ethos that drives prefab design moves to an urban scale seems like a natural, intelligent progression. I've long appreciated Kaufmann's holistic, ethical approach to her office's work, as well as her awareness of its didactic strength, and I can't wait to see what kinds of projects could result. Perhaps something like these?

Also, implicit in any of today's prefab designers' approaches to their work is an innate awareness of marketing, which I appreciate. Expanding that inherent marketing focus toward a goal of increased economic diversity at an urban scale would be incredible and significant. More. (Via)

If you find that interesting, you might also check out Green Urbanism Down Under, a book currently on my shelf, detailing efforts to merge sustainability with urban design in Australia, full of valuable lessons for would-be designers elsewhere. Fascinating, wide-ranging reading, made all the more apropos by the country's particular environmental strains and current, disastrous weather woes.

Eponymous

It's an obvious question with a complicated answer: where is the rock that gave Little Rock, Arkansas its name? A visitor to the city might reasonably expect to stumble upon it while sightseeing, a revered local landmark, right?

Well...not really:

This capital city was named for a rock. That's clear. But ask a local to point out which rock exactly and you're likely to draw a blank stare. Once, people would have known: The city's namesake jutted into a crook of the Arkansas River from the steep south bank, creating a perfect landing spot for ferries and riverboats. But in 1872, huge chunks of the rock were blasted away to make room for a railroad bridge. The remnants soon disappeared from view, hidden by weeds and mud and, later, graffiti.

"It was never honored as it might have been," says Bill Worthen, director of the Historic Arkansas Museum....

Geologically, it's part of the Ouachita Mountain range, a chain of weirdly folded crags and peaks that stretch across west-central Arkansas. But it's the very last gasp of the Ouachitas -- "the toenail of the foothills," Mr. Worthen, the museum director, says. And its mottled gray-brown hue doesn't do much to distinguish it from the concrete and steel bridge piers all around.

"There it is," called out civic leader Dean Kumpuris, weaving his way around construction equipment to peer down at the jagged hunk. "That unfortunate little structure is the Little Rock," Dr. Kumpuris said. "Or what's left of it."

(Above: the Little Rock, past and present, via)

Kumpuris' crusade to improve the Little Rock riverfront and the adjoining River Market district has arrived at the Little Rock itself. A public-private coalition has provided money for the Little Rock's excavation, currently underway. A plaza will be built around it, featuring plaques that explain the city's history--and its relationship with the rock formation for which it is named. Proponents of the project expect a reincarnation of the Little Rock as city symbol and tourist attraction.

Some local people aren't so sure:

Even some locals who support the concept say the rock is unlikely to prove as big a draw as other nearby attractions such as the playground, where shrieking kids race through tunnels and slide down grassy slopes on cardboard sleds. "How often am I going to come and look at it?" asks Sylvia Duran, a 34-year-old registered nurse. But tourism officials have high hopes....

"I went to San Francisco and got my picture taken next to the Golden Gate Bridge. It'll be the same thing down here. You'll come and get your picture taken standing next to the Little Rock," predicts Charlie Oppedisano, who works in a souvenir shop downtown.

One wonders if the current story surrounding the Little Rock and its excavation--connecting issues of natural history and civic identity with planning and tourism--outshines that of the Little Rock's journey through obscurity; or if the effort to restore the Little Rock is really warranted. But maybe those are the exact reasons why the Little Rock and its plaza will succeed, and why Little Rock will celebrate a symbol of itself, both very old and totally new.

People will want to touch, climb, and be photographed with the Little Rock (and should be allowed to do so), regardless of how it looks. Whether its appearance is "authentic" or not is largely rendered moot by its maligned history; it will never look the way it did when French explorers first saw it in 1772, but neither do the surroundings. Instead, it can exist in a new context, illustrative as much of 2009 as any other time period.

The way it is recontextualized, in turn, could lend it a contemplative, meditative quality, even if it's also a little tongue-in-cheek. That's just fine. Think of how Waterfire transforms the downtown of Providence, RI; or how Paris Plages changes the banks of the Seine in the summer. Think of how people behave when visiting Millennium Park in Chicago, particularly "Cloud Gate" and its distortion of the city skyline (above); or how the London Eye functions as both tourist attraction and instrument for seeing.

Little Rock's Little Rock has the same potential.  People will marvel at how something as seemingly dull as a sandstone outcropping could come to possess such cultural significance, especially if the space around it is programmed well, with events that help re-establish it as the city's touchstone, both literally and figuratively.

Interstate Redux

I always pay attention to what Metropolis' Karrie Jacobs says, and her most recent column is especially good. It advocates a complete rethink of our Interstate highways, suggesting that we might look back one day and marvel about the days when these massive, sprawl-inducing, city-reorienting transportation corridors supported only one mode of transport:

...[I]t’s time for us to look at the interstate system not as an aging network of highways in need of repair or replacement but instead as we might look at a navigable river. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, of Portland, Oregon, a noted infrastructure advocate, says the system represents “a tremendous national untapped resource.” It encompasses a lot of land. Funds were appropriated at the outset for the purchase of two million acres; according to one estimate, the system actually takes up 40 acres per mile, or 1.87 million acres. But what if we could make those highways beautiful, not by removing bill­boards, as Lady Bird Johnson did in the 1960s, but by using the corridors for more than moving cars and trucks? What if we thought of them as the backbone of a new, more diverse 21st-century transportation system? “It’s time for a different vision, Blumenauer says. “And a principle for that is how we coax more out of existing resources.”

(Above, a couple of photos of Turcot Yards in Montreal, via a great blog about the area.)

One obvious idea would be to integrate highways with new rail lines running down their rights-of-way:

...Obviously, the interstate, with its generous rights-of-way, is a prime spot for new rail lines, both high-speed intercity trains and commuter rail. In the Bay Area, BART trains to outlying suburbs often run in the median strip. The same is true in Chicago and Blumenauer’s Portland. There are similar plans all over the country, including one for a Midwest system that would use high-speed trains and commuter rail to link major cities in nine states; and a scheme in Colorado to run high-speed rail along I-25 and I-70. The recently opened New Mexico Rail Runner connects Santa Fe and Albuquerque along an interstate corridor. It makes sense that rail would go where the people are, and over the last half century, people have settled along highways. But while there are many regional rail projects around the country, there is no national plan. As Shelley Poticha, president and CEO of Reconnecting America, a transit-advocacy group, points out, “One thing that would need to change is we would have to ask the federal government to think in an integrated, interdisciplinary way.” In layman’s terms: the highway planners and the rail planners would have to be in the same room.

The highway corridor of the future also lends itself to the integration of energy lines, particularly as our automobiles, and what powers them, changes:

Maybe the interstate system has a role to play in remaking our energy infrastructure. On RepowerAmerica.org, an offshoot of the Al Gore–inspired We Campaign, you can find the argument for building a “smart grid,” a new, unified national system for distributing electricity that would incorporate far-flung power sources, such as wind farms and individual rooftop solar arrays, and apportion them efficiently. It’s described as “[a]n interstate highway system for electricity.” I initially assumed that that was a metaphor, just as the Internet used to be thought of as the information superhighway. Then I read a bit further and came across this: “These power lines can be above ground, buried underground, under freeway medians—there are many options.”

Again, the real interstate is a network linking our population centers, and if a new grid needs to be built, it might make sense to piggyback on those well-defined corridors. The proposed smart grid presumes that we’ll soon have “a massive national fleet of clean plug-in cars.” Plug-in hybrids will be capable of two-way “vehicle to grid” exchanges. You’ll plug them in to charge them, but they will also store power that the grid can draw on dur­ing the day, when you’re not driving. A park-and-ride lot then becomes a de facto electrical substation. New rail lines will require electricity and could, if hybrid technology is put to work, conceivably generate electricity and participate in a novel give-and-take approach to power. Additionally, Blumenauer suggests “using the right-of-way for a solar array, which can allow the electrical needs of the highways to be self-­generating.” Now you would need the highway planners, rail planners, and energy planners sitting at the same table.

(Above, a few old, naive Pennsylvania Turnpike postcards, via Flickr.)

Version 2.0 of the highway cloverleaf--and zooming out in scale, the "edge city" around it--matures into an urban center. Soulless places like Schaumburg, Tysons Corner, and the world of Office Space (below) actually do have a future:

Anyone who has done any long-distance driving harbors deep ambivalence about these provisional places. Yes, they’re specifically designed to allow you to get off the highway, gas up, use the restroom, grab a burger, and continue onward with the fewest possible complications. Some of these interchanges have grown into what Joel Garreau called “edge cities”—dense, traffic-clogged jumbles of shopping centers, offices, and hotels. These asphalt landscapes now rep­resent planning ideas so discredited that even commercial developers don’t much care for them.

What I propose is that interchanges become hubs. Maybe you’re parking your hybrid, plugging it into the smart grid, and getting on a commuter train to go to work, or maybe you’re switching from a long-distance train to the local connector—or perhaps you’ve arrived by bicycle (have I mentioned bike lanes?). In any case, it might be nice if these interchanges were redeveloped to suit the needs of human beings rather than cars. Done right, these nonplaces could grow into neighborhoods, towns, or cities. And selling redevelopment rights at key interchanges might be a way of underwriting some of our sexy new infrastructure. “The right-of-way is extraordinarily valuable,” Blumenauer notes, “and being able to put the pieces together differently so that various modes and facilities play multiple roles is one of the most important discussions. It would be nice if it became the centerpiece of what the new administration and the next Congress do.”

Jacobs' piece finds its echo in the Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin, who pronounces the end of the architectural icon, to be superceded by a focus on the design of infrastructure:

If nothing else, the economic constraints of the new era are likely to induce a new aesthetic austerity. After Art Deco and its fabulous riot of zigzagging, multicolored ornament, the few buildings that were constructed in the 1930s were noticeably simpler than their Jazz Age predecessors....

But the real issues transcend style. They are about whether the new infrastructure will help usher in a new set of urban growth patterns—dense neighborhoods where you can walk or bike to the corner store to buy a carton of milk—or whether new roads and bridges will simply reinforce suburban sprawl....

A new age is at hand, though the old one isn’t completely over, of course. Later this year, the end of the building boom will deliver the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, which will be America’s tallest building since the completion of Sears Tower in 1974. Also scheduled for completion this year: the Burj Dubai, which, at a jaw-dropping height of 2,600 feet, seems sure to remain the world’s tallest building for a while now that the rival Nakheel Tower has been put on hold.

Though behemoths such as these will dominate the headlines, the conversation already is shifting away from the “wow” buildings that have dominated architecture for the last dozen years. What matters now is whether Obama’s infrastructure investments can transform the American landscape as well as sow the seeds of economic recovery. Icon architecture is no longer the issue du jour. It’s sustainability—and survival.

More. Related.

Most Portlandian

A tongue-in-cheek, clever new ad (part of a series) plays with the geographical and cultural virtues of downtown Portland, Oregon.

(Spotted in this absurd article about New York City and buzz.)

Related: a Streetfilms video explores what makes Portland "most livable," below.

Mixed-Use Suburbs

In an excellent, provocative essay, Allison Arieff wonders what could become of the subdivision and the McMansion in the near future:

For a long time now I’ve been obsessed with suburban and exurban master-planned communities and how to make them better. (Me too.) But as the economy and the mortgage crisis just seem to get worse, and gas prices continue to plunge, the issues around housing have changed dramatically. The problem now isn’t really how to better design homes and communities, but rather what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we’re left with.

While there is extensive precedent for how to rehabilitate old, urban, buildings and neighborhoods, the regeneration and transformation of the suburbs of the late 20th century is uncharted territory. For example, what will happen to the Martha Stewart subdivisions of North Carolina, when no one wants them anymore? Or that of Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light"?

Cue David Byrne singing an updated version of "Life During Wartime": Heard about about Orange County? Heard about Phoenix? Heard about Alpharetta, GA?

In urban areas, there’s rich precedent for the transformation or reuse of abandoned lots or buildings. Vacant lots have been converted into pocket parks, community gardens and pop-up stores (or they remain vacant, anxiously awaiting recovery and subsequent conversion into high-end office space condos). Old homes get divided into apartments, old factories into lofts, old warehouses into retail....

But similar transformation within the carefully delineated form of a subdivision is not so simple. These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change.

So what to do with the abandoned houses, the houses that were never completed or the land that was razed for building and now sits empty?

You may notice that the title of Arieff's piece is a bit of a misnomer. She doesn't frame the argument in terms of "saving" the suburbs: it's about their evolution, not their preservation.

Read the rest.

Lemonade from Lemons

The collected articles in the most recent newsletter of the Project for Public Spaces do a beautiful job of showing how the physical, social, and cultural import of placemaking could help point the way out of the proverbial economic wilderness. From "How Your Community Can Thrive--Even In Tough Times," by Philip Myrick:

Placemaking is central to many of the powerful trends shaping the world today.  The stumbling global economy, a vulnerable energy supply, and loss of confidence in far-flung markets are balanced by an upsurge of interest in things local: producing local food; promoting local businesses; preserving local character; protecting local open space and public places; finding meaningful ways to belong to a local community.

....A [Michigan State University] Land Policy Institute study shows that half of total economic losses stemming from drops in population are caused by a loss of service jobs and income. That means when people move they take a piece of the economy with them. This represents a vast change that cities, towns and regions need to recognize.  In the past, a vital local economy was based on attracting large companies by offering inexpensive locations and a cheap labor force.  The qualities of a particular place mattered little, and people migrated to where the jobs were. Moreover, much of that economic growth was based on cheap oil, which encouraged people’s work, homes and shopping destinations to be spread far apart.  That’s all changed, and now communities with lively destinations that are easily reached by walking and transit gain distinct advantages.

....[Land Policy Institute Director Soji] Adelaja notes that regions that will prosper are those with strategies that make the most of their assets.  His definition of Placemaking is “the use of strategic assets, talent attractors and sustainable growth levers to create attractive and sustainable high energy, high amenity, high impact, high income communities that can succeed in the New Economy.” Cities and regions that thrive in the 21st Century will be differentiated by their lively neighborhoods and business districts, cultural and recreational attractions, great sense of place, protected natural areas, and deep pride in local character, products and foods.  They will achieve this through and open collaborative process with their citizens. In a down economy, it is tempting to cut back on these planning ideas, thinking that they are frivolous.  But disregarding these principles in the name of saving money can create a downward spiral that causes a local economy to lose its competitive edge.

(Above, the Farmer's Market in Ann Arbor, MI, via)

Jay Walljasper, a senior fellow of the Project for Public Spaces, waxes poetic (with specific examples), providing further insight about localism and the perils of scale, in a Planetizen essay.

The biggest reason this place is central to solving 21st century challenges is that it remains a lively, intact neighborhood -- which is the level of social organization most effective for fixing problems and pursuing opportunities. For a hundred years, however, we've been told that large problems need to be addressed with large-scale plans. And over and over, from Soviet bureaucracy to L.A. freeways to the Cabrini Green housing project, that notion has turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

The mounting crises today call for a shift in thinking. To engage people, long-term, in addressing the pressing issues of the day, they must see results where they live. Humans are by nature villagers -- that's how we lived for many centuries, and it's the way most people still feel comfortable operating today. The neighborhood is simply the modern version of the village.

When people sit around a kitchen table with friends and neighbors to make improvements in their community, a kind of alchemy arises -- their enthusiasm turns into something valuable. Drawing on local wisdom and shared personal bonds, they devise innovations no outside expert would ever conceive. And when they roll up their sleeves to put these ideas into action, results happen more quickly and smoothly than plans promoted by business, government or outside activists.

Meanwhil, embedded in the vision of "lively" neighborhoods with strong "sense of place," vibrant "cultural and recreational attractions," and "deep pride" in all things local is an elusive idea: that of fun. Underpinning all of it is a desire for a solid economic foundation, particularly now. A report by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia analyzes the impact of "fun" on urban growth and vitality:

In a paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, economists Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz looked at 150 metropolitan areas around the United States and found hat those rich in what they called "consumption amenities" - the things that make a city delightful, such as parks, historic sites, museums, and beaches - "disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation."

In other words, urban growth and prosperity have less to do with transportation links and industrial infrastructure than the patterns that govern behavior at a social mixer: Beautiful and charming cities draw a crowd, while the featureless and unattractive wilt like wallflowers.

(above,  Waterfire on a summer evening in Providence, RI, via)

Spurred by an interest in the boom experienced by the archetypal hip cities of the 1990's--Seattle and Austin--the authors of the report, economists Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz, wondered why the vital signs of a host of other cities stayed flat, even while most could boast of cosmetic gains:

What puzzled the experts was why, if the "American central city generally did not 'come back' in the 1990s," as Carlino and Saiz wrote in their paper, "the 'beautiful city' within flourished."...

The economists searched for the variables that would play into the equation for vibrancy, paying particular close attention to physical beauty and the size of the local tourist industry:

More than others before them, Carlino and Saiz offered statistical support for the idea that environmental characteristics could be as important a draw to an area as the built environment....In their paper, Carlino and Saiz found a statistical correlation between the number of leisure visits to a metropolitan area and the growth of factors like population and housing values. They controlled to determine that the tourism itself wasn't causing the growth, and argue in their paper that people move to the cities for the same reason they visit as tourists. They also demonstrate that investment by local governments in such "recreational capital" - spending on parks, cultural institutions, sports facilities, and other public-private spaces - has succeeded in making cities like Charlotte and San Antonio more attractive to tourists. They compute that a 10 percent boost in such spending yields a 2.3 percent increase in leisure visits, and, if the correlation holds, will also increase growth.

It's interesting to set up this second study alongside the Project for Public Spaces' work: per PPS, a strong sense of local identity is an amenity, just as much as a new museum or a shopping venue. The question is what sustains growth in a city and its region over the long run--the flash of tourist-style comforts and spectacle, or a retrenchment into issues of locality and community. Perhaps dovetailing the two--harvesting the local, projecting it globally--is the way.

Agreement on what "amenity" means is needed, though. "Infrastructure," too, especially as regards federal funding in the near future for ailing local municipalities:

"Amenity is in the eye of the beholder," says Joel Kotkin, the author of "The City: A Global History." He has ridiculed amenity-driven development as an attempt to draw the "hipster set" with the "lure of 'coolness' " while ignoring basic city services. "To some a place with nice parks, low crime, good schools, and good jobs is paradise but boring for visitors."

While Carlino and Saiz both acknowledge it is intriguing to imagine federal dollars shifted from overpasses to skateparks, both caution that they have yet to measure the effects such a policy change could have.

"Even if we know that building a nice park or historical district could cause growth to go up a certain percentage, it still costs money," said Carlino. "Is it worth it?"

Neither Festival nor Marketplace

Is there something amiss with Boston's Faneuil Hall, Ben Thompson's 1976 project that originated the concept of the "festival marketplace"? After all, it just won an AIA award for having "stood the test of time:"

The award is called the Twenty-five Year Award. It goes to only one American building each year. The building must be at least 25 years old, and it must have "stood the test of time" in the words of the sponsor, the American Institute of Architects. In other words, it must have proved to be an architectural classic. I don't think any prize is more highly valued by architects.

The Marketplace is unlike most winners of this award in that it isn't a new building. The architect, the late Benjamin Thompson, conceived the idea. He renovated three blocks of old warehouses, built originally in 1826, into a new kind of shopping complex that he dubbed a "festival marketplace."

...In its press release, the American Institute of Architects sings of the Marketplace in very up-to-date language. It's called "a great model of vital environmental principles" and praised for "creating a high-density urban environment where people can work, shop, play, and enjoy life as pedestrians."

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Above, Faneuil Hall in context.

Boston Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell wonders if the festival is over, given not only the turnover in Faneuil Hall's retail mix, but also its changing relationship to the greater city. What was conceived as a creative re-purposing of historic buildings to house the public realm while bolstering local identity has awkwardly morphed into something else:

I can't help wondering whether what we're hearing in all this is the tolling bells of an era that is ending....[Faneuil Hall] opened back in the bicentennial year of 1976, in a very different era. Public life, street life, was moribund in Boston. So dead were the streets that few thought the Marketplace would succeed. Boston bankers refused to lend until Mayor Kevin White twisted their arms.

But the Marketplace was a huge and instant hit, drawing more visitors in its first year than Disneyland. It had arrived, it turned out, at exactly the right moment. A generation of people who had moved to the suburbs or grown up in them, and who tended to think of the city as dangerous and alien, found in the Marketplace a magic door into a cleaned-up, safe, dramatized version of city life. I called it "a halfway house for recovering suburbanites." People, it turned out, were starved for the experience of city life, even a slightly ersatz experience.

Ironically, its success may have spurred its demise. Its manipulation of what's local and historic enabled residents to see their surroundings in new ways. Elsewhere, other Thompson projects had the same effect:

After Boston, festival marketplaces popped up everywhere, most of them done by Thompson himself with his developer, James Rouse. American downtowns and waterfronts began to come back. But there's a hidden twist in this. Once Boston, or any other city, achieved a revival, it no longer needed its festival marketplace. With shops and bars and restaurants everywhere, as they are now here, the Marketplace ceases to be a unique destination. Today, Faneuil Hall Marketplace is largely a tourist mecca. Bostonians go elsewhere.

I can vouch for that. When I lived in Boston, I rarely went there.

Campbell touches on the possible preservation of Faneuil Hall and other sites like it across the country, such as South Street Seaport in New York. But he notes that any preservation--or even just a sympathetic renovation--is unlikely. The retail numbers don't look the same:

Many of the Marketplace stores are national chain outlets now, although these were banned in 1976. Nothing about these chains speaks of Boston, a value Thompson felt strongly about. The Marketplace was in part a victim of its own success, or you could say a victim of the economic ambitions of its owners. They charged higher rents that drove away the local merchants who once gave the place its character.

Is Faneuil Hall Marketplace ripe for another reinvention, just as it was reinvented in 1976? Will someone appear who is as timely and inventive as Ben Thompson? Is the festival marketplace concept now dead?

It would be interesting to brainstorm ways that places like Faneuil Hall could be reinvented, especially given a surge of interest in local craft and food markets nationwide, the popularity of online micro-retail alternatives like Etsy, and today's bleak economic climate (maybe not so dissimilar from the one that spawned the original concept). Perhaps future redesigns of the tired festival marketplace concept are less architectural and more economic. Maybe it becomes a set of webfronts. What do you think?

Get on the Bus

A team composed of Aston Martin car designers and Foster + Partners architects have won a competition to design the next generation of iconic, much-loved double-decker buses for London. (via)

Aston Martin and Foster + Partners share the first prize distinction with a proposal by Capoco Design, (below) a bus, truck, and coach company.

The website of sponsoring authority Transport for London describes Aston Martin and Foster + Partners' winning entry:

...The bus will reinvent a much-loved London icon for a new era and re-establish the city as a world leader in the design of public transport.

A symbol of place, the bus is also designed to navigate the dense and varied streets of London, employing innovative technologies to allow for greater manoeuvrability on tight corners. Increasing safety and visibility, screens in the cabin allow the driver to supervise CCTV images and both the layout and choice of warm lighting and wooden floors are conceived to foster a spirit of conviviality. The arrangement of the decks is driven by comfort and particular consideration is given to the selection of upholstery to create a ‘living room’ feel, especially in the saloon-like lower deck. The original Routemaster was introduced in 1956 and saw continuous service for almost forty years: the new bus for London is designed to adapt to changing technologies and serve the capital for the next forty years and beyond.

From the judges' comments:

“We were impressed with the extent of background research and level of development in this entry by Aston Martin and Foster + Partners. The overall concept was meticulously and artistically presented and displayed. We particularly liked the overall styling package, especially the rear end, and heritage cues from the original Routemaster such as the use of wood flooring. Other innovations included a drive-by-wire system, solar panels built into the glass roof, and LED –based moving advertising displays.”

Thus the winning entries, place-specific in both aesthetic and technical ways, each play on the design cues that have made the Routemaster bus instantly recognizable as a symbol of London and England to a global audience.

Hector Serrano, Minarro Garcia, and Javier Esteban garnered second prize with "Welcome Back," a bus design notable for its compact design and the diagonal window emphasizing the rear stair.

 

From the entrants' project brief:

Welcome Back represents the evolution of the iconic Routemaster. An innovative vehicle combining the best of the past with the best of now. A unique bus tailored to London. A brand new London classic that retains the much appreciated friendly and warm feeling from the Routemaster. A compact bus for a compact city, the vehicle has a small wheelbase which means it can move easily around London’s narrow streets.

One of the most characteristic features is the diagonal window that celebrates London’s double decker buses by visually externalizing the stairs. To improve safety we have incorporated a lighting system into the floor of the rear entrance platform that informs passengers and vehicles when the bus is about to move. This is a truly sustainable vehicle using a Hybrid Diesel-electric Drive System. Its smaller size also means less weight so less fuel consumption is required and less exhaust emissions are produced.

After the winning designs are refined by bus manufacturers, the first prototypes of the new bus will appear by 2011. More.

Roadsworth Revisited

Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth, (earlier) was recently commissioned by a Montreal neighborhood association to help revitalize the area, known as Saint-Pierre (via):

Most people don’t venture into Saint-Pierre unless they live there, work there, or are truly lost. The neighbourhood is isolated between two railway lines and a highway; its main street, a segment of Saint-Jacques, doubles as a trucking route. But despite these challenges, this part of the Lachine borough is close to the city centre and is currently experiencing a boom in housing....

The artist developed a naval theme, which alludes to Saint-Pierre’s proximity to the Lachine Canal and the historic Saint-Pierre River. The naval rope the winds along the sidewalks of Saint-Jacques also symbolizes the ties between local residents that are the strength of the isolated community. The anchor points, which are painted on benches, garbage cans and flower boxes, symbolize people’s attachment to their neighbourhood.

Local businesses donated paint and supplied water and electricity for the project. The hope is that Roadsworth’s street art - the same stencil work that got him arrested for public mischief in 2004 - will make Saint-Jacques more attractive to pedestrians, encourage people to walk to local businesses, and create a unique local signature that residents can be proud of.

It's an interesting project, especially given Roadsworth's checkered past with his city. Once seen as vandalism, his work makes for an interesting addition to what's usually considered urban design.

A new documentary that explores Roadsworth's work debuted last month in Montreal. View the trailer:

As Gibson asks himself in the trailer, is he selling out? What's selling out, anyhow? Does questioning the role and form of public space equal selling out? Is engaging the public realm in a "legitimate" way selling out? Wish I could see the whole thing.

Building a Better Big Box

The Washington Post enlists the imaginations of several DC-area architects in envisioning the future of the "big box" retail spaces that we all know and loathe. What will happen when the anchor tenant moves on, goes under, or decides it needs an even bigger space? What about changing retail and transportation preferences?

The different solutions presented in the article approach big box retail space from a few angles--exploring the big box's integration into denser, urban form and reimagining its insides as space for agriculture and commerce.

Below, Christopher Leinberger and Daniel Rippeteau start with the ubiquitous parking lots that surround essentially every suburban big box store. Their solution: "build a town in the parking lot."

The vast acreage of big-box parking lots seems almost providentially proportioned to be turned into walkable city blocks, he says. What you have to do is lay these blocks out with parking garages at their core, and encrust those with an outer layer of shops and apartments on all sides. That makes one block. Put together a whole bunch of these blocks, with the shops and apartments facing each other across the newly defined streets, and you've got a chunk of city. As it happens, prefabricated parking deck trusses span about 60 feet. So let's say you make your parking deck a loaf 60 feet wide and 120 feet deep. If you face it on all sides with shops that are 50 feet deep, well, voilà -- you've got yourself a walkable city block, with just enough space left over for sidewalks, bike lanes and streets. Then you build apartments or offices over the shops.

What happens in the parking lots would have a ripple effect on the surrounding environment, too: Leinberger and Rippeteau suggest redesign of the fast-moving arterials and highways that typically service suburban retail to become latter-day versions of the classic 19th-century Parisian boulevards.

(Which reminds me of this photoessay from San Francisco Cityscape on the development of Octavia Boulevard, a "complete street" designed to supplant the Central Freeway, lost in the 1991 Loma Prieta earthquake. Think of the ugliest arterial road you can, look at that photoessay, and imagine how much sprawl could change.)

But what would happen inside the big box store itself? Roger K. Lewis, professor emeritus in the School of Architecture at the University of Maryland, suggests ways to convert a big box structure to housing by selectively opening some of its regular structural bays.

The exterior walls are not hard to punch windows into -- structurally, they're just steel uprights sometimes reinforced with diagonal struts. Then you punch skylights in over the interior walkways, and the apartments almost start laying themselves out. You add a balcony here, a second floor there, a sleeping loft over yonder, and you're looking at the niftiest affordable housing ever.

Conversely, the former site of so much globalized consumer activity could serve a new role as incubator of local food production.

Organic gardeners routinely lay down weed-suppressing black plastic into which they poke holes to plant their seeds. Asphalt is just like that, only a little thicker, observes Darrel Rippeteau, principal of Rippeteau Architects. So in the process of creating a truck garden (above), the parking lot becomes an orchard. Under the parking lot you find an elaborate network of drainage pipes -- if you think big-box owners want to see women in high heels slipping on ice, you are out of your mind. In its new incarnation, the system collects rainwater for irrigation. In fact, the water can be piped into the fire-suppression sprinkler system in the big box, which now serves as a monster mister. (You could also go hydroponic.) Much of the roof, of course, has become glass or translucent plastic. Those gigunda halogens make great grow lights. The concrete slab floor works as a heat sump. Major-league climate control comes with the package. Much of the produce is packed up in the back and shipped to farmers' markets. But you can also pick your own.

There's also possibility in the roof--either as a green roof, capable of small-scale agricultural production; or as a greenhouse roof, illuminating the vast floor space below. The proposal below from Esocoff & Associates uses the latter approach.

In her book, Big Box Reuse, artist and Oberlin College professor Julia Christensen explores the ramifications of big box conversions through a wide variety of recent examples, focusing on defunct KMart and WalMart properties nationwide. As she notes in the book's introduction:

By examining the reuse of these sites, we get a glimpse of what our future might look like as we continue to adapt these buildings into our everyday nonretail lives. We also cull a compelling portrait of this moment in the development of our built environment, which inevitably speaks of our culture, of our activities, of our lives. There is a cultural shift at hand, as groups such as schools and senior resource centers "supersize" and find big box buildings more and more useful for their own operation.

As the form of cities, bound up with environmental, social and economic concerns, appears to gain a more important role in a global discussion, Christensen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the design of the Western city of the near future. Like it or not, big box retail is a constituent part of our cities, and Christensen correctly points out that its re-invention offers just as much possibility as that of a defunct industrial loft building. It's the loft building of the present day, in fact. We know what to do with the former factory; but what about the urban fringe?