Brand Avenue

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?