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.
