Brand Avenue

360 Degree Experience

To follow up on recent looks at the retail environments of both Starbucks and Nau, here's an article from BusinessWeek underlining the significance of "designing for the complete experience," and in effect demarcating fertile territory between architecture and marketing:

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company's DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

One need look no further than a NYT article from Wednesday's paper about the re-branding of the Le Méridien hotel chain (hotel design covered here earlier; travel being an obvious and rich place to look for "experience innovation") to see how this latter-day gesamtkunstwerk approach draws on broad, disparate cultural influences to become something in excess of architecture or event-planning:

A “cultural curator,” Jérôme Sans, founder of Paris’s exhibition space Palais de Tokyo, has been retained by the hotel to oversee a range of amenities, including creating programs with six institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Mr. Sans is also developing in-house amenities like business breakfast menus by the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten; specialty Illy coffee drinks; and a Méridien scent, LM01, by the French perfume company Le Labo.

What of the "cultural curator" role described above? Wouldn't it be interesting if architects and even planners did more of the same? Perhaps there's some poetry lost in the segregation of responsibilities.

In addition to perfume and coffee, the hotel chain has commissioned the composition of a "distinct sound" for its elevators, lobby and rooms. In lieu of a chocolate on the pillow at night, hotel staff leave a book of fairy tales instead.

“We’re trying to create a chic culture of discovery,” said Eva Ziegler, senior vice president for Le Méridien brand, “where the sophistication of art, architecture, and cuisine are available to travelers in a way that is subtle yet refined.”

As Sans points out in an article in the IHT from last fall, "Culture is not just deluxe. For once, companies understand that dealing with culture is a key issue, and it needn't be intimidating."

In other words, focusing on user experience, which naturally has cultural dimensions, is not additive to the design process. Big and little touches, such as the design of a hotel's key cards, are all part of a whole:

Key cards will be decorated with artwork, and the hotel hopes that people will collect them. Guests will also get separate cards with information about exhibits at nearby cultural institutions that are partners of Le Méridien.

Above, one of Le Méridien's new key card designs.

I mention these things because I think they're fascinating; but also because I think there's an interesting possible overlap for architects and even planners here. There is the odd architecture firm that already does things like event planning or brand identity, and plenty of architects design furniture, but how many do perfume, or oversee menu choices? Examples of broader and more (for lack of better terms) explicitly experiential approaches to design in the planning and architecture world seem quite rare. Maybe you know of some.

City as "Family Portrait"

TED ("Technology, Environment, Design") is a yearly exchange of ideas from influential thinkers and doers in many fields, and many participants' talks are available online, on TED's excellent website. One of the more germane to Brand Avenue is a presentation by Jaime Lerner, architect, planner, and well-known former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, touted as "the most innovative city in the world."

One of the more interesting points that Lerner makes in his presentation are that of the "metronization" of the Curitiba bus system; that is, the establishment of stations that are more akin to subway stations in their design and form, but serve the city's vaunted bus rapid transit (BRT) system instead. For their part, the buses also act more like trains, serving a greater capacity with increased length and larger door openings.

   

From an exhaustive NYTimes article last year about the city, an explanation from Lerner of how this unusual system came to be:

“We tried to understand, what is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every corner, we could do it with buses."...

In 1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. “With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.

The other role of the bus stations is that of design icon, which Lerner uses to demonstrate the need for urban "reference points," architectural pieces that help engender an identity for the modern city, and in turn create a sense of ownership for the city's residents.

Another issue is, a city is like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait even if we don't like the news of our uncle, because this portrait is you.

In other words, a place is made of people; and the sense of place and a community's sense of itself act reciprocally on each other.

Above, street furniture becomes civic symbol (via), part of what makes Curitiba unmistakably Curitiba. If it wasn't unusual in its appearance--if it didn't stand out from its surroundings, and wasn't clearly "readable" as a form--we probably wouldn't notice it. A simple, strong idea that offers significant justification for unconventional urban design approaches.

A Core Competence

Andrew Potter (whose tremendous book Rebel Sell I mention here repeatedly) interviews Carleton University professor and nation-branding expert Nicolas Papadopoulos about why "people trust Canadians, no matter whom you ask:" (via)

[Potter] So what are the keys to successful place branding at the national level?

[Papadopoulos] The few that do show signs of some success tend to be those who try to focus more on what we might call the "core competencies." In study after study after study that we have done in the last 25 years or so, and in practically every other study done by anybody else who has tried to measure the image of Canada, one thing comes out loud and clear -- and this is the image of trustworthiness. People trust Canadians, no matter whom you ask, no matter where. That is a core competence. When I say they trust us, we score at the top of any other nation anywhere.

Most interesting to me is the discussion about "core competences" versus attempting to graft some type of identity onto a place. Mainly, that the latter always falls short, much as a designer, planner, or marketer may wish otherwise:

[Papadopoulos] That goes back to something you said before: when they invented "Cool Britannia," nobody asked the Brits, "Do you feel cool?" It was some central unit that decided, "Gee, this is cool. Let's do it." There are so many others that have failed this way.

[Potter] That's interesting, because it strikes me that if you're trying to sell yourself or your country or your place to others on a certain brand proposition, you can't separate that out from how the people see themselves and understand their own identity. So to get back to Canada for a second, we like it when people say they see Canadians as friendly and trustworthy and what-have-you, but the flip side is Canada, the country that has an ongoing identity crisis.

Below: The Millennium Dome, perhaps one of the most widely-known architectural outcomes of of Tony Blair's Cool Brittania. (via)

Sidenote: Cool Britannia is coming back again.

(Much, much) earlier. Also, here, here, and here too, to name a few.

No Image At All

In a new multimedia campaign, the city of Houston showcases the city's virtues and idiosyncrasies according to celebrities who call the area home. Or as the NYTimes put it this week:

Yao Ming's Houston is not Beyonce Knowles' Houston, and not just because the 7-foot-6-inch Rockets star needs two more feet of head room. George and Barbara Bush's Houston is not George Foreman's Houston, either, nor Dr. Denton Cooley’s, nor A. J. Foyt’s....If this booming world center of energy traders, doctors and space scientists is hard to define, with a problem even worse than a negative image — no image at all — the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau has a remedy....(For Mr. Foyt, it was driving 200 m.p.h. on the 610 Loop — back when the traffic wasn’t so bad; for Dr. Cooley, it is his “full schedule of surgeries.” And Yao — well, Yao likes Yao Restaurant & Bar where, he says, “I know the owner.”)

The city's approach stems in part from its lack of distinct identity among American cities, despite being the country's fourth largest, just behind Chicago in population. This reputation for banality puts extra weight on the personal perspective:

Other cities and states have tried variations on “My Houston,” but this subtropical metropolis of 2.2 million people, the nation’s most sprawling city, spread over 630 square miles — large enough to encompass Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit — has a special burden: a reputation for banality, even ugliness.

The approach makes an interesting counterpoint to the Toronto Unlimited campaign, mentioned here several years ago, for a city attempting to use its nebulous global image to its advantage.

Two of the "My Houston" ads, featuring fashion designer Chloe Dao, formerly of Project Runway; and "art car" artist Mark Bradford, below.

Clashing with planners who tend to see Houston's explosive growth as ugly and unsustainable, futurist Joel Kotkin contends that the place is indeed vital, exciting, and full of possibility. It may not have the physical beauty or cache of San Francisco or Barcelona, but what it lacks in geographical interest, it makes up for with human capital and tolerance.

In an era when many other cities try to position themselves with trendier distinctions (as “smart growth” exemplars or as magnets for high-income households, for instance), Mayor Bill White, a Democrat, is happy for Houston to be known simply as an “opportunity city,” which is a pretty good description of what the place has been since its inception: a venue where people who work hard can get ahead....

The answer, I have come to understand as I have worked in Houston as a reporter and consultant, echoes something that the late Soichiro Honda once told me: “More important than gold and diamonds are people.” This critical resource, more than anything, accounts for Houston’s headlong drive toward becoming not only the leading city of Texas and the South, but also a player on the global scene: it is emerging as one of the world’s great cities....

Lauding Houston to urban planners is not much different than extolling red meat at a convention of vegans....Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important.

For contrast to the Convention and Visitors' Bureau high-gloss approach, look to a marketing campaign entitled "Houston. It's Worth It," produced by an independent advertising agency four years earlier. In the campaign, the details that usually inspire complaints about Houston--cockroaches, sprawl, humidity--are foregrounded in an ironic way, with a clean typeface. The idea behind the guerrilla campaign, developed by ttweak, is that the city's inconveniences are heavily outweighed by the its everyday attributes, optimistic atmosphere, lack of pretense, and personality:

"Houston. It's Worth It." was created believing that acknowledging the difficulties of living in Houston only makes the reasons why it's worth it more compelling. We can all reach a consensus on the relatively few complications of living in Houston; the reasons it's worth it, on the other hand, are as diverse and numerous as its citizens. "Houston. It's Worth It." is a conduit for those reasons.

The city's lack of definition, and a narrative that is necessarily fluid, ends up being incredibly productive. A great takeaway impression.

Below: a few images of Houston captured by the photoblog Phototainable, searching for personality of place.

As commenter #2099 in the "Houston. It's Worth It." guestbook says, screw conventional thinking: "we defy logic, but we still rock." And #2064: "I feel normal here. Maybe it is because I am imperfect, like this city."

Smartly, the "It's Worth It" folks have come out with a coffee-table book of photography juxtaposed with quotes from commenters like those above (many thanks, Randy!) and other clever schwag to accompany the campaign.

Starbucks Writ Large

Intrigued by the recent public fretting of Starbucks' corporate leadership (such as this enlightening 2007 email from CEO Howard Schultz) about the company's declining stock value and stagnant sales, I happened across this fascinating two-blog series of posts from two former company marketers, John Moore and Paul Williams, about what can be done to pump up the company's buzz.

Moore and Williams address Schultz's concerns regarding the loss of "romance and theatre" and sensory richness that long characterized the Starbucks experience for customers. Seeing as Starbucks has long promoted itself as a "third place" or community living room, it behooves an urbanist to pay attention. From Schultz:

For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocco machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista....The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage? Then we moved to store design. Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale and to make sure we had the ROI on sales to investment ratios that would satisfy the financial side of our business. However, one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee....While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers.

Schultz's problem is complicated: how does one introduce a sense of uniqueness into 13,000 stores while ensuring a uniform product? How can Starbucks cafes be both individualized enough to encourage customer loyalty and ownership, while upholding ubiquitous company-wide brand standards? Local and global?

Below: Starbucks in Melbourne; Tokyo; and Berlin (via).

Moore and Williams dissect the issues facing Starbucks into five interconnected elements: loss of "theatre;" loss of "coffee aroma;" loss of "store soul;" lack of merchandise focus; and loss of identity. In a time of big-box retail, clone towns and the like, it makes for excellent reading on the values of sameness and difference. The two produce an impressive amount of ideas for changes to everything from the brewing of espresso, to different product foci for different stores, to allowing "homemade" promotional materials, to new ways the company's local outlet can get involved in the goings-on of its immediate neighborhood--all in the service of customizing the experience of each store, while preserving the qualities that define the company's brand.

From Brand Autopsy, Moore's side of the series:

Starbucks is opening a minimum of six stores a day somewhere around the world. The company has mastered the build-out process of opening new stores fast and inexpensively....The Starbucks “Kit of Parts” approach is akin to children playing with paper dolls. You remember paper dolls, right? Armed with an outline of a person and pages full of plug ‘n play paper clothing cut-outs, a child could create numerous looks for a person or for a family of people. Starbucks took this same mindset to its store expansion process by designing a palette of plug ‘n play pieces which can fit any store size....These plug ‘n play design pieces include point of sale counters, condiment bars, wall art, merchandise wall bays, Frappuccino-prep stations, Espresso Machine stations, etc....But this "Kit of Parts" mentality is really an issue of control for Starbucks....Starbucks needs to continue giving more individual control to each and every Starbucks. Allow them to make more decisions at the store level....A homemade sign promoting a jazz trio performance will not detract from the strength of the Starbucks brand. The time has come for [Schultz] to invest in giving his stores more creative control. To counter the loss of store soul and to inject warm neighborhood feelings, [Schultz] needs to unleash the power of creativity at the store-level. He needs the soul of Starbucks to shine through decisions made at the level closest to the customer—the store. After all, that’s what Mom & Pop shops do.

Why is this important? For the architectural ramifications of Starbucks' re-branding and the future of the "third place," of course; but also for Moore's and Williams' careful consideration of how the customer experience is orchestrated, and how stores are differentiated. These are design issues analogous to architects (such as Anna Klingmann), planners (such as Jan Gehl) and real estate developers seeking to deliver buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities that provide the kind of variation, amenities, and "quality of life"--that complex combination of ubiquity and uniqueness--that people desire.

While writing the previous post, I ran across a point made by Andy Guy of the Michigan Land Use Institute, made during a 2006 walk through Grand Rapids, Michigan with a writer from Dwell, that seems appropriate here. What's good for Starbucks could be good for cities, ultimately:

We walk through downtown, with Monroe Avenue full of people, a warehouse district full of remodeled factories and lofts, and up on the hill a huge new medical complex under construction signaling Grand Rapids’ intent to attract health-industry jobs. “The way that we develop is essential to how we compete in the global marketplace,” Guy says. “If we just look like anyplace else, who’s going to want to live here?”

A high premium is placed on unique urban identity, then; and it seems more difference is always better. Witness starchitecture and the drive for recognizable icons; witness the global contest between cities for the best and the brightest, articulated through the lens of lifestyle and cultural accoutrements, compellingly articulated in Richard Florida's ongoing work.

As a counterpoint, consider Rem Koolhaas' plan for Waterfront City in Dubai, his vision of the "generic city" brought to life. It is a statement of global monoculture--saturated with global brands, I'm sure--to be wrought in 3D:

His argument was that in its profound sameness, the generic city was a more accurate reflection of contemporary urban reality than nostalgic visions of New York or Paris....Designed for one of the biggest developers in the United Arab Emirates, Nakheel, Mr. Koolhaas’s master plan for the proposed 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City in Dubai would simulate the density of Manhattan on an artificial island just off the Persian Gulf.

A mix of nondescript towers and occasional bold architectural statements, it would establish Dubai as a center of urban experimentation as well as one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises....The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

One wonders about the pratfalls of creating something so purposely generic, especially in light of reading about corporate giants attempting to reinvent themselves, and particularly when "generic" urban conditions already exist in so many places. Additionally specific environmental considerations, such as Dubai's forbidding climate, would seem to impact the concept. Nevertheless, if built Waterfront City would prove an immense work-in-progress in organization, repetition and differentiation at a grand scale. Ironically what would set it apart from other urban districts worldwide is its intentionally nondescript character.

A City on the Move

Narrated by then-Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh, a 1965 video touting the virtues of Detroit (both parts, below) is fascinating, not only for how dated and problematic it is.

Yes, it misses large parts of a story everyone knows; one about a city in steep decline, wracked by economic loss and racial strife. It predates the riots that tore the city apart two years later, and makes little mention of how the city's dependence on its automobile industry has and will continue to shape it, for better and worse. I am greatly simplifying here--you have to turn to the pages of Middlesex or Them to get a more qualitative, experiential sense of Detroit's modern rise and fall; and to sites like Detroitblog to understand the city's unreal physical fabric. You have to look to things like the Michigan Land Use Institute, Cool Cities, and Model D to get some hope for the area's future.

But, regardless of all that--regardless of the utterly ridiculous scene with the urban planners and their creepy yearning for greater "urban efficiency"--the film is an interesting historical relic, and provides a good jumping-off point to a discussion of urbanism, marketing, and urban planning. (Note that this was a video produced to lure the 1968 Summer Olympics to the city.)

Cavanaugh's dull monologue about the 1960s being Detroit's "finest hour" touches on cultural amenities more than you'd expect, covering fine dining, architecture, music, parks, libraries, and theatre, thereby obliquely implying the construction of a sophisticated lifestyle. In this way, minus the obviously deficient production values and uninspired delivery, the video is not so different from many videos, animations and renderings that cities, neighborhoods and development projects rely on nowadays to promote themselves and to transmit a sense of place. (Related: here, here, and here)

Naturally, one of the flip sides of comparing marketing materials of yore to those of the present is that some of today's will look naively ominous and even silly in hindsight just like the 1965 film does. Another pertinent lesson comes from Elizabeth Currid's recent, and excellent, book The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City: that the things usually left unmentioned in the conventional story of place (in this case, jazz, the Motown sound and electronic music immediately come to mind) are just as central to a city's sense of itself and its economic vitality as the large corporations and traditional cultural institutions. A strong, interwoven set of narratives is centrally important to capture and express, for any planner, designer, or developer trying to market an idea. Cavanaugh's triumphant, simplistic presentation of the city's amenities strikes the viewer as ignorant and outdated, but that's because it is.

Returning to the excellent Model D--who, in my estimation, inherently understand Currid's argument--check out their trove of videos, all of which explore Detroit, its people, businesses, places, and other uniquenesses in fresh ways.

A Means of Independence

Both Archidose and the Whereblog tagged this site in a meme about books, specifically regarding the contents of specific sentences following the fifth one on page 123 of the nearest book. For me, this is Ha Jin's most recent novel, A Free Life, a spare but powerful story of Chinese immigrants in the US of the 1990s that I purchased on a whim at a great little bookstore a couple of months ago.

Turning to page 123 of A Free Life produces dialogue translated from Chinese between the book's principal figure, the erstwhile academic Nan; Bao, the editor of a small, New York-based, Chinese-language literary journal; and Liu, an elderly scholar. I'm bending the rules a bit to include more than the allotted three sentences:

"Can you drive?"
"I just got my license."
"You're very brave," Nan put in. "I wouldn't dare to drive in New York!"
"I have to be able to drive, or else I'd feel as if I'm missing a limb. Also, as long as I live here, I'll have to make a living on my own. A driver's license is a means of independence. Once I can drive really well, I'll deliver food for a restaurant."
"You shouldn't do that. You have poor eyesight, don't you?" said Bao.
The old man laughed heartily. "Maybe I can deliver computer parts in the daytime. Anyway, driving a car on the highway gives me a feeling of freedom. What fun! What exhiliration! Do you want to see my car?"

Though I think saying that this passage reveals anything especially significant pertaining to this blog (or me, for that matter) is a bit of a stretch, I do appreciate that it highlights a craving for mobility, which certainly ties to issues of place and space. It's something I think is rather central to living in a city, and perhaps especially strong in a North American one. I also like how it coincides with the book's title, which in turn describes the protagonist's main goal: "a free life" is one that is almost by definition a mobile one, economically, socially, and physically.

Now, to pass the favor on and tag five more sites...

Space and Culture

Bricoleurbanism

Neighborhoods.org

Life Without Buildings

Off Brand

Year Three

As February gives way to March, Brand Avenue begins its third year online! A few highlights and/or personal favorites from the last year:

- Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio's use of storyboards to plan and explain the Phantom House, the energy-efficient home of the near future. The narrative integrates the vagaries of a normal day with the home's technologies and design cues, revealing the "how" and the "why" of the project in doing so. This reinforces the primacy of design for everyday living.

Follow along as "J" and "M" go about their day:

As M's car comes within five miles of the house, the Home on the Go unit triggers the DomestiSleep and RapidCool systems to awaken the house and begin to cool it down. M walks inside, throws off his jacket, and prepares a martini. Realizing he has forgotten to pick up the chilies and the turmeric, M leaves J a message and rushes out, overriding the DomestiSleep system.

Long story short: fiction writers and architects ought to team up more often (like this! wow!). All would benefit.

- Those who would brand hotel chains (through the selection of everything from sheets to showerheads) are faced with a fascinating challenge, as explored in August:

Since 2005, some 31 (hotel) brands have been announced, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than at anytime since 1988-89, when 27 were introduced. And with this increased competition, identifying market segments and customer preferences has become essential to creating customer loyalty -- which is where the showerhead, among other details, becomes crucial....Competition...has taken the art and science of hotel branding to a new level. Enormous resources are being poured into researching and designing hotel rooms, lobbies, amenities and services -- all intended to inspire brand loyalty by creating what hoteliers hope will be a distinctive experience for guests.

The hotel's design touches work in concert to respond to broader trends in shelter, thus framing a unique experience that a traditional hotel cannot. Guests can live among the trappings of loft living, if only for a night or two. (Below, the guest "lofts" of the Nylo chain. More here.)

- I reviewed a few good books this past fall, and there will definitely be more in the coming months. For the time being though, I'm looking forward to digging into this and this soon.

- What does a city really feel like? Explore through the highly personal lenses of timelapse photography. How does music impact the image of place? What does your town sound like? (Below, Vancouver, rather beautifully.)

I would expect as many of us know firsthand the sensation of walking around town with headphones in, we realize we have some ideas about how these things can go together. Am I right?

- Several posts in this last year gravitated toward the frontier between retail strategy and urbanism, from one concerning the outdoor apparel store Nau to a few exploring the configuration of main streets and public spaces, in terms of traffic, retail offerings, and form. We looked at the design of a new plaza in San Francisco, with event programming and retail outlets chosen to compliment each other; and a new boulevard in suburban Madrid, with ingenious "air trees" growing in its middle.

For fun, here's a few more things to consider, that I just haven't gotten the chance to mention:

- Speaking of boulevards, Boston's Big Dig, the complex, decade-long transformation of a 3.5-mile swath through the downtown of one of America's most storied cities, is now officially finished. Where an interstate highway once stood is now the Rose Kennedy Greenway. So now what? (Photos via Flickr.)

- The brilliant City of Sound posted a fascinating piece recently about technology in the street of the near future, what's visible and what isn't. Perhaps the Phantom House will be built nearby:

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture. Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?...

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Read on.

- And finally, at the intersection of landscape architecture, humor, cultural identity, iconography, and massive infrastructural undertaking, there is the semi-serious proposal for a new island off the coast of Holland, just one of so many enormous building schemes being dreamt up worldwide nowadays. It's hard to believe that a 50 km-long, tulip-shaped landform is what's necessary to solve a nation's problems, but that's exactly the premise.

Again, many thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch.

Hey, Big Schlepper

Several recent articles point to the growth of the boutique outdoor clothing chain Nau as evidence of something more than a unique marketing strategy. In particular, a great piece by Alex Steffen of Worldchanging describes how the company's way of selling could alter consumer habits:

I'm really intrigued by NAU's new retail model, where you go in, try clothes on, check out their look and feel, and then order them for delivery to your home (you can buy them and carry them home yourself, but you pay a premium). The main advantage for you is that you don't have to schlepp (meaning you don't need to be driving to shop there); the main advantages for NAU are that they can carry more items in a smaller space (because they don't need to stock multiples of every item in each color and size) and distributing clothes through a central warehouse is more efficient. The storefront, in effect, becomes a "webfront" -- a physical trial space for online shopping.

Through altering how goods end up in the hands of consumers, the "webfront" concept could also impact urban and architectural form down the line, Steffen explains. It's a conflation of mass environmental awareness, ubiquitous home delivery, savvy store design, and the ascendance of e-commerce.

Is it greener to shop on foot or online and then have the stuff delivered? Well, surprisingly (at least to me) the answer is generally yes. Sometimes it's much greener. The ecological cost of driving a number of online purchases in one truck (a truck, I might note, that is increasingly likely to itself be more efficient than some US cars) on a pre-set route (programmed to also be highly-efficient) is a small fraction of the ecological cost of driving to and from the store to get them yourself. Even when shopping in person, if not having to drag your loot home means you can get to the shop without driving, delivery is still more efficient, I'm told.

And just like that, the exurban rings of big-box "power centers" and "category killers" familar to residents of so many metropolitan areas teeter on the edge of obsolesence. Or they could, eventually.

 

Above, a prototypical rendering of a dressed-down Nau boutique (via), where the minimal, monochromatic finishes envelop the shopper in the brand experience. The design of the webfront presents a physical manifestation of the company's values and is as such a way of selling "sustainability":

And its retail spaces are defined by features such as the stump-like stools made of reclaimed timber in the dressing rooms. Its clothes feature custom-made environmentally friendly fabrics and non-toxic dyes. (The company employs third-party labs to make sure its fabrics and contract manufacturers adhere to Nau's strict environmental and labor standards.) Nau's polyester-based clothes are recyclable: You will be able to turn them in at a nearby store when they're no longer wanted. The rest of its garments, made of cashmere or merino wool or organic cotton, are designed to be biodegradable.

More subtly, the clothing's color palette—think chocolate, charcoal, olive, and sea—doesn't change much from season to season, and the modern, elegant cuts are designed to go from the mountain to a hip café. The idea is to reduce the amount of clothing a person needs. It's about "being smart about how you consume. We're trying to create new, cool, timeless classics that wouldn't go out of style quickly," says Mark Galbraith, the company's vice-president of product design, whose team is working almost non-stop in a large open space at the rear of Nau's warehouse-like office, just beyond the sea of cubicles.

Londoners can experience something analogous at Oki-Ni, where in-store purchase isn't even offered (all purchases are made from network consoles in the shop after the customer has made their selections).

What happens to big-box retail (and by extension so much of suburbia), when the need to schlep is taken out of the equation? How does changing the experience of shopping change the experience of place? Does reducing potential reliance on the automobile outweigh the appeal of the instant gratification of loading up the car with big-box purchases? You'll note that such a retail philosophy is the opposite of IKEA's, whose low prices have always been at least partially predicated on the fact that you, the consumer, have to schlep everything home and assemble it all yourself. Steffen notes how consumer habits and a rising interest in the public realm dovetail so neatly into concern for the environment:

And, of course, more and more people are putting a premium on the experience of community shopping. Think about the exploding number of farmer's markets. Think about the newly resurgent neighborhood main streets in upscale compact neighborhoods. People like walking around in their neighborhoods and buying things from people with whom they have a connection.

And with increased home delivery services, the architecture of the home itself adjusts, with the addition of a "shop and drop," a "password-protected area built into a house or garden, much like the coal bunkers of yore." There's a great design problem for the consumer society of the near future.

It occurs to me that the reduced square footages needed by a webfront retail endeavor could make it easier and cheaper to place retail in spaces that larger chains shy away from--older shopping streets with small storefronts, for example. This could be good news not only for the company looking to locate new retail outlets, but also for neighborhoods and cities that have retail spaces available but do not have the traffic to support large stores. (Could this be applicable to grocery stores?)

Welcome to Paradise

The English city of Liverpool is similar to other cities worldwide trying to revamp themselves through large-scale urban transformations, yet it stands out for the organizational intricacy of its effort. As construction crews close in on the completion of a regeneration scheme for central Liverpool dubbed the "Paradise Project," it's worth highlighting just how complex of an undertaking it really is: comprised of six distinct districts, covering 42 acres and running at a cost of £1B, with a multi-use mix of retail shops, department stores, office complexes, a new bus station, a new park, and several hundred residential units:

The Paradise Project is crucial to the successful regeneration of Liverpool’s city centre, which has lost retail traffic to other regional cities and out-of-town malls. “One way to fight back was to create as much variety, choice and surprise as possible,” says Holmes. Rather than keeping things simple and employing one architect to design a straightforward mall, he opted to introduce variety and surprise by constructing 40 buildings, including shops, apartments and offices, and appointing a squad of 22 architectural practices (!) to design them.

Below: The Paradise Project before, during, and after (via). The masterplan for the area has been developed by Pelli Clarke Pelli.

All of this construction will conclude during Liverpool's year in the sun as the 2008 European Capital of Culture, and is welcome development in a city that has lost 40% of its jobs in 40 years and whose population continues on a downward slide.

The project is unified around two grand gestures working together: an "ellipse against the ground" forming a new edge to the area's existing Chavasse Park; and an "ellipse against the sky" formed by building rooflines above, as they meet the horizon. A variety of covered and open-air shopping arcades, commercial spaces, hotels, and housing then radiate into nearby streets.

Below: Chavasse Park and a new "restaurant terrace" overlooking it.

When finished, the Paradise Project name will be superceded by "Liverpool ONE."

 

What are the first two rules? It seems unlikely to me that the public would embrace a singular identity for such a large area, and that such an effort would run counter to the heterogeneity the design team is trying to engineer in the area. But I suppose time will tell.

Meanwhile, there is disagreement about whether such grand gestures can provide that varied sense of urbanity ("variety and surprise") that is characteristic of the city's older fabric. An interview in Building with local architect and former head of the Liverpool Polytechnic School of Architecture, Ken Martin, believes that while the rash of current construction in Liverpool is exciting, the Paradise scheme isn't, necessarily:

He is also sceptical about the “avalanche of building” at the Paradise Street shopping quarter. “My plea is for smaller schemes and for improvements to the public realm,” he says. “That’s because large developments tend to be static and the best cities evolve continuously. Small developments are part of Liverpool’s vitality.”...

Martin sums up [the Paradise Project] in the south of the city centre as “dynamic neo-baroque”. “Commercial retail architecture has got better over the years and Liverpool has avoided the disasters of early shopping centres,” he concedes. “But this is a leviathan scheme with big, bland forms pushed in and out. It’s slightly forced and reminds me of an expo. On the other hand, with all that glass it should be quite stylish at night.”

Below: a few additional views of the project, in front of the new Debenhams; along South John Street toward John Lewis; and with relationship to existing context at Peter's Lane. See a map of the area here.

Interaction and Choreography

In a moment where "interactivity" has become as ubiquitous and desirable as social networking and wi-fi, the design of an ambitious new public space in San Francisco expresses how ideas of interactivity can bear themselves out architecturally and urbanistically.

Physical connectivity, material contrast, and consumer choice come to the fore, along with event planning and even furniture design:

These clearings in the urban jungle point to what we can expect as the city grows; the best designs and spaces will be interactive in the way these plazas are, with new stores, arts and music venues and digital playgrounds. They are interactive in the simplest way - you walk through them. In addition, venues linked to them use technology to make it possible for visitors to personalize their experience, whether it is while looking at art or engaging with a history museum.

These plazas are not Disney-fied in the way of Belden Alley or other gentrified alleys in the city, which have French or Italian themes. Instead, the new spaces provide a smorgasbord that you can mix and match at will, just as you do when you go inside some of the buildings. Museum placards and curators' captions alone will not be the only voices you hear. You will hear artists' points of view, too.

Mint Plaza, formerly an alley in the SoMa neighborhood, surrounds the future home of the Museum of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Inside, the museum will offer a range of high-tech accoutrements that allow users to customize their visit:

Voice and motion triggers will be incorporated in the $90 million museum - not just to be au courant, Chadbourne explains, but because it will make the museum truly interactive. Computer chips embedded in walls and tabletops will enable people to summon information for their own versions of history, allowing them to chart the progress of their own ancestors from the time of the Gold Rush. For example, Italian Americans with roots in the city will be able to call up maps that show where Italian Americans lived in the city and find documents or photos provided by the California Historical Society that might even lead them to the first place their family lived. Because the museum will not be set up in a chronological fashion, self-guided podcasts will let visitors customize their visits.

Above: project renderings and plan (via). The plaza was designed by CMG Landscape Architects of San Francisco.

In the plaza itself, the space is ordered very simply by the placement of two "rain gardens" that capture and retain stormwater; a steel trellis along one edge; minimal overhead lighting; and small changes in elevation. Echoing the customizable experience of the museum inside are groups of movable orange chairs that stand in sharp contrast to an otherwise subdued material palette. (photos below via Flickr)

Around the edges of the plaza are a varied assortment of (no doubt carefully selected) cafes and retail spaces that spill into and animate the space (including the one you may have read about where you can get coffee from a $20k halogen-powered "siphon bar.") Soon a number of food carts will further enliven the plaza's peripheries.

A non-profit agency created specifically for Mint Plaza programs the space with a changing schedule of music, film, and theater events, thus acknowledging temporality by engineering a variety of ways for the plaza to be used and seen. This dimension is so important because it underscores the notion that the design of physical space, by itself, cannot offer any guarantees of a dynamic, well-liked public space. In other words, the choreography of the Mint Plaza experience exceeds architecture and urban design--extending to event planning and easy access to nearby spaces--and how these things "communicate" or interact with the plaza architecturally and through program.

Traveling Without Moving

New York City's Lower East Side--the storied, once forlorn corner of the city turned crossroads of cultural production and wellspring of "cool"--is now brought into extreme proximity via the virtual transportation capabilities of the Internet. Rather than visiting the neighborhood in person, imbibe the local ambience via the MMOPRG Virtual Lower East Side online instead.

The world of VLES...is an idealized, Smurf Village reduction of the real Lower East Side, and yet instantly recognizable to anyone who’s logged more hours at Pianos than he cares to admit or ducked out to Rosario’s Pizza for a late-night slice....

Like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, the computer-generated residents of VLES (which opened to the public last week) are free to walk a familiar gritty strip between Houston and Rivington Streets, befriend one another, watch music videos, hang out at rock shows, form their own bands and get into as much after-hours miscreancy as the Web site’s programmers will allow.

Instead of a site about the Lower East Side, the site aims to be the Lower East Side, or at least a 3D visualization of it. A NYTimes reporter and LES resident describes what it's like to move from his physical environment to its virtual parallel:

It began as a typical night on the Lower East Side. A few weeks ago a crowd of young urbanites gathered in the bowels of Cake Shop, the pastry cafe cum music club on Ludlow Street, to see a performance by an indie-rock band, the Virgins. A couple of minutes into the show the subterranean space was already packed to capacity and smelling of stale beer, so I left.

I walked a few blocks to my apartment on Avenue A, turned on my computer, directed a small, pixelated representation of myself to enter a small, pixelated representation of Cake Shop, and rejoined the show. There were no imperious bouncers or foul odors to contend with, and no fluids of any kind expectorated on my shoes. Except for a slightly choppy video feed, it was by my standards a pretty successful evening on the town.

MTV, smartly interested in expanding its role as conduit between consumers and the music industry, developed the Virtual Lower East Side site to "leverage the cultural cachet" of the neighborhood, gambling on the idea that social networking of the future--the "future of music," even--will take place in 3D environments. Long a site of incredible possibility, the Lower East Side as retooled by MTV becomes the site of a new type of cultural production (not to mention consumer fantasy).

“It was a way for us to get back to our core virtues around music discovery and passion for new, underground subversive bands,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks’ music group and a 20-year veteran of the company.

And capitalize on them, obviously.

Game designers went to significant lengths to replicate the particular mix of cultural influences and physical form that inform the feel of the original:

Not every business and storefront is represented, but several landmarks are there, from the neon-lighted exterior of Katz’s Delicatessen (where I could press my digital nose against its salami-stocked windows, though I couldn’t go inside) to a fully explorable model of the club Max Fish, complete with a framed photograph of Julio Iglesias hanging above the bar, a “Pirates of the Caribbean” pinball machine and familiar messages scrawled on the bathroom wall.

To fill these knowingly grungy environs VLES’s creators turned to Judi Rosen, the fashion designer and proprietor of the downtown boutique the Good, the Bad & the Ugly, to photograph real-life denizens of the Lower East Side. Then they created a variety of avatars using her photographs for fashion reference. “You can’t just have generic skater boys,” Ms. Rosen said, “because there’s punk skaters, there’s hippie skaters, there’s graffiti skaters, there’s square skaters. All those little nuances mean a lot.”

But what does this portend for a sense of place? Can a virtual "place" ever approach the complexity of its physical counterpart? What is the real-world impact, if any, of virtual commodification? What happens when the Lower East Side no longer resembles the virtual version?

Moreover, what does it mean to make what was once the de facto province of very few become so instantly accessible to anyone? Is this what's next in "glocalization?"

For decades, the Lower East Side has derived its coolness from at least a veneer of danger and inaccessibility. Venturing there for the first time required risking the disapproval of the locals, whether they were the immigrants who once populated its tenements, the drug dealers who shouted from rooftops to warn of unfamiliar faces, or the bartenders and bouncers who didn’t recognize you as a regular. How can the area retain its mystery if anyone with a computer can experience some fraction of it?

“It takes something that was a neighborhood, and now it belongs to everybody else,” said Clayton Patterson, a photographer who has been shooting in downtown Manhattan for more than 25 years. “It’s the complete denial of your space, a complete theft of what it was that you lived in for years.”

Some longtime members of the community, however, said that VLES poses little risk to a district whose iconoclasm they feel faded away long ago. “The flavor’s already gone,” said Dick Manitoba, the frontman of the punk-rock group the Dictators and the owner of Manitoba’s, a bar on Avenue B. “The Second Avenue Deli’s a bank, the Fillmore East is a bank, and you’ve got to pass by 12 restaurants and coffee shops just to get to the couple of places that still have character.”

Ironically, the VLES is free from some of the more aggravating processes at play in the Lower East Side.

While VLES might be a fantasy of fetishized dirt and muck (to the point that its official logo is a big fat rat), it’s also a neighborhood without an impending sense of gentrification, exorbitant rents or luxury condominiums sprouting from every street. “It’s not an accurate representation,” Mr. Manitoba said, “but it could be a fun, entertaining thing, and if I guess if I lived in Nebraska, I would love to see it.”

(Related)

Local Color

While working on a project about the power of celebrity, Canadian product designer, teacher, and writer Todd Falkowsky encountered an intriguing question:

I asked myself whether there was something about, say, Cameron Diaz’s face we could apply to a cellphone or a car that would increase its appeal. I did something similar for the City of Toronto, trying to figure out whether it has a specific colour that could be used by Canadian firms, and it occurred to me that this could be done for all of Canada....

How do we approach and identify essential, commonly agreed upon qualities of place?

I began by taking scores of photographs and employed computer software to pull out the predominant colours of Ottawa and the provincial and territorial capitals. The exact process that worked in Toronto did not necessarily work elsewhere — there is also an intuitive element to it. For each city, I had to centre on what makes it unique, such as prominent landmarks or distinctive features of its built environment. As a result, regional differences emerge: the North tends to be very bright, the Maritimes aquatic, Ottawa pale.

The resulting paint chips--a distillation of each city's local landmarks, geography, and culture--are featured in this month's edition of The Walrus.

From my own travels a number of similarly evocative tones spring to mind--the cozy brick hues of