Tuesday Linkages

The first article today is an interesting one from SmartPlanet about our cognitive maps and getting lost in buildings. They go on to blame architects who have incredibly advanced understanding of space in three-dimensions:

What they found:

• People navigate differently. Some use contextual clues — “Make a right at the stairwell” — and some use cardinal directions to find their way.
• Cognitive maps are prone to bias, and can distort reality. Culture and gender are factors.
• The design of a building exacerbates these effects, thanks to identical-looking corridors, short lines of sight and asymmetrical floor layouts.

The more difficult the building, the more a person must rely on their (imperfect, incomplete) cognitive map.

Take the award-winning Seattle Central Library: the first five levels of the library defy expectations and are all different — so different, in fact, that the outside walls don’t always line up. Sight lines could help ease the shock, but the library’s long escalators skip floors, making it difficult to see where they begin and end.

Interestingly, the researchers says that architects have such strong spatial skills — they make three-dimensional space from two-dimensional blueprints, of course — that they may fail at imagining their design from the perspective of someone with poor spatial skills.

What they are saying is that architects are increasingly pushing the limits of how to comprehend and think about space in 3-dimensions. You might call this innovation. You also might call this selfish. Are they the end user of this space? Often not. The end users typically don't appreciate the mental gymnastics it takes to make a Seattle Public Library or a Denver Art Museum. Dummies. They deserve the vertigo.

I cite these two buildings specifically because I have visited the Seattle Public Library. It was loud and uncomfortable, exactly what you want from a reading room. I'm not typically afraid of heights or have trouble intuiting spatial relationships and suggested pathways. I felt like this building was going to collapse and I wanted out of it as quickly as possible. As for the DAM, many people have left claiming feelings of nausea. One can't say if it was the odd angles of the buildings spaces and corridors, canted for Libeskind's self-gratification or the art within.

Contrast this with the architects and designers in Renaissance times that wanted to understand human proportion, scale, and awareness of space. The designs reflect it.

Design for people. Not other architects or Architectural Record.

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In what might as well be called Pravda, an online journal called "Gensler On" interviews, you guessed it, a Gensler principal about Gensler type of projects, big ones. In this case, it comes off as some sort of cheerleading for times of yore when money flowed like wine into skyscrapers that remarkably no one moved into and banks were healthy and raking in cash and not failing all over the world because of faulty supply driven investments. Run-on, I does it.

The actual article is called, Can Super Tall Buildings Be Green?, which could make for a perfectly fine article if you wanted to argue something beyond "tall is dense" and "tall is aspirational." I'd quote it, but there is really nothing of substance there and I find it hard to believe this was written in this century let alone this decade rather than 1995 or 2005, which the rationale mirrors.

First, tall is dense, yes. But tall can be another form of sprawl. By sending people further up into the sky, that creates demand for services to follow them upward. For example, a 100-story tower will have cafes or coffee shops or "sky gardens" and different things every 20-floors or so. Amazing, we like things close to us.

He undermines his own argument suggesting super tall is necessary for street life and that he's from NYC. The best parts of NYC and Vancouver are not the skyscrapers. It is the street life between the smaller buildings, that don't dominate the sunlight, necessary for actual street life and just plain life, such as trees.

Second, the tall is aspirational argument is another form of quantitative growth that got us into this economic morass. Quantitative growth took on two forms of real estate, outward growth (sprawl - Vegas, Phoenix) and upward growth (Miami Condo towers, Dubai), or even the rare outward and upward like Chinese pop-up cities. All of which are supply-side. There was little to no real demand, which is why they 1) attracted speculation and 2) are now empty.

Furthermore, the entire market was rather nefarious, not just because of the banks handiwork, but because of all of the corrupt 3rd world money finding its way into American, London, Indian, and Chinese real estate. Dirty money and imaginary money is no way to run an economy or build a city.

Your architecture firm, staffed and structured to work on these kinds of projects, has a very short future in its current iteration. I've never thought of Gensler as thought leaders on cities, ever, but that won't stop them from telling you they are and cheerleading for a return to the boom decade of the noughties.

Some day banks will wisen up and start investing only in projects that improve quality of place and are based in real, demand-driven fundamentals. It is in their financial interest to do so.

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To end on two happy notes, we'll shift to places focused on qualitative growth, or the improvement of their cities:

The Irish Times visits Freiburg, Germany looking for lessons:

Prof Kevin Leyden, an American now based at NUI Galway’s Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, was struck by how hard Freiburg has “worked and planned to be energy-efficient and carbon-conscious as well as creating real neighbourhoods with a sense of place. There is also a commitment to green space, playgrounds and local shops”. Dr Daseking, who has been Freiburg’s chief planner for 27 years, said the “breaking point” came in the early 1980s when the city council decided that big shopping malls on the outskirts would be “zoned out”. As a result, smaller shops had the chance to survive and “people get their daily requirements by walking or cycling, not driving”.

One of the stupid things Dublin did, and Freiburg didn’t do, was to get rid of its trams.

As a result, the city’s tramlines - running from north to south and east to west, with the main station as the network’s hub - were extended to serve new “fingers” of development stretching out in all four directions - including new suburbs like Vauban and Riesefeld.

Housing is socially mixed, with rich and poor living in close proximity, on remarkably quiet streets devoid of through-traffic. Children play in green areas or quite safely on the streets. “By building like this, you can influence the use of cars,” Dr Daseking said. “Freiburg has only 440 cars per 1,000 in population, but in Vauban it’s only 85 per 1,000”.

And the ten most walkable cities from Frommers via the Infrastructurist:

1. Florence

2. Paris

3. Dubrovnik

4. New York City

5. Vancouver

6. Munich

7. Edinburgh

8. Boston

9. Melbourne

10. Sydney

Since it is from Frommers, guessing it is geared to bigger, more tourist destinations. The key to walkability is proximity, density of network (moreso than density of people), which means density of movement corridors, the type of movement corridors that allow for density of networks (grids vs. dendritic highway/arterial), and quality of spaces (streets, sidewalks, plazas, public spaces).

Piling on the Arts District

Truly, my only intent is to improve it and to do so by increasing awareness of the mistakes that have been made. So, with that said, in defense of my critique thus far of the Dallas Arts District, found here and here. Oh, and here and here. Without further ado, here is Alex Marshall in How Cities Work, Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken:

It (ed: San Jose in this context) is an example of what David Barringer, in an article entitled "The New Urban Gamble" (ed: Not as in CNU "New Urban," but more like "New" as in nuevo) in The American Prospect, called "THE CARNIVAL STRATEGY" (my caps).

Cities build a performing arts center, an aquarium, and a sports stadium and hope that the crowds will materialize to fill in the rest of the city. I am extremely dubious about this strategy. Things like art museums and aquariums are great as the capstones to successful places, as amenities and accessories. But trying to make them an economic foundation is to confuse the role of the foundation of a building with that of a decorative window on it.

A museum can be a great reward for a successful region, as can central libraries and other public works. But, even if the crowds appear, they will not replace or even draw the people or businesses that make a center city truly a place.

How many things did he list here that downtown Dallas has: central library, museums, aquarium, sports stadiums, etc. The key here is that American Airlines with as busy as it is, has not saved Victory, or as I like to call it the Potemkin Village. There were just too many mistakes to overcome.

He also goes on to discuss that without successful retail a downtown does not truly function as a center of commerce as it should. It becomes a side act, a novelty. Well, Dallas lost most of its retail despite the Neiman Marcus flagship's stubborness/loyalty.

Retail in still vital downtowns are vestiges, it survived. Dallas is otherwise, and with our knowledge today, retail and commerce follow people. Downtown needs residents and to do so, downtown must be as livable as possible. Things that prevent livability have been discussed ad nauseum on this blog, just do a search.

The other thing preventing livability in downtown AND retail from working is the lack of neighborhood serving transit, ie modern streetcars or trams linking downtown with Oak Cliff as well as near east Dallas, Greenville, and Lakewood. There are healthy neighborhoods there to be served as well as areas in need of revite. New streetcar would mean an incentive for rebuilding bombed out areas such as along Ross and Live Oak, as well as the Zang triangle.

Furthermore, for the stable neighborhoods it means an easy commute into downtown that is potentially preferable, or at least an offer of choice, rather than dealing with traffic and running up to CityPlace or North Park Mall. The key is choice.

Architects, Cities, Countries, et al. Missing the Point

Look Ma. It's so green, you don't even have to go outside...because the air is too umm visible to breathe!

TreeHugger on the wonderful world of "green" buildings in China:

Let's go thru a sampling of the slideshow, shall we:


I see London. I see France. I see a tower, a park...oh, it's a tower in a park. How has that worked?



And here we have Stephen Holl doing what he does best. Hideous effing buildings.




And here is a drive-in movie theater.



And getting the scale of space all wrong. Unless Godzilla and Space Godzilla choose to move their young family across the East Sea for the better schools.

On the Arts District and the Place Architecture is Leaving.

The Foster + Partners bldg is truly gorgeous. You could tell it would be from the very first renderings years ago. The OMA/Prince Ramus Borg Space Ship ...not so much.

[Imagery from nthomas7627's flickr photostream]




[A new analogy. Ready to capture hundreds of patrons of the arts.]

Unfortunately, for the Winspear, like many "object buildings" it needs a frame. We can frame it with our camera lens and it looks great, but ultimately a building is not intended to be experienced on a sheet of paper. I don't mean to be derisive about this building, but ultimately without the urban fabric to "frame" it, it is not an environment, merely an object.

This is the heart of the problem with architecture currently, which is really just residual from the 20th century and dying thankfully. A building has to know its surroundings. It can't exist in a vacuum. The Foster design understood this, which is why one can visualize it set within a more vibrant district lined with "background buildings." It is both dramatic and subtle, iconic yet with humility. The pseudo-Koolhaas/ultimately-Ramus building did not, which is why it looks like it is landing from outer space.

Rather than let it stand out against a foil of standard urbanity, the problem is exacerbated with other sculpture, crying babies screaming for attention. The arts district in its current bastardized form is incoherent b/c rather than stand out, it merely stands.

A singular building is a post card. A true urban environment is drama. We need to start working on making more movies.

Of Knowing the Path and Walking the Path

WorldChanging takes on Obama's choice for Transpo Secretary, that is considerably less optimistic (and probably more accurate) than mine:

This one-time wave of funding will do one of two things: it will further entrench a broken system, or it will begin to build a new and better one. In the next six years, we'll either dump hundreds of billions of dollars into highways, roads and bridges or we'll begin to revitalize our communities and transform our economy. Sprawl or urban renaissance? That's ultimately the choice we have.

Boston.com: The End of Bilbao Decade.

All that fever now feels passe. Architecture students, I'm told, are more interested in so-called "green architecture," work that responds to the global crisis of climate and resources, than they are in artistic shape-making. They're interested in urbanism, in the ways buildings gather to shape streets and neighborhoods and public spaces. They research new materials and methods of construction. Increasingly, they're collaborating with students in other fields, instead of hoping to produce a private ego trip.

I'm not sure who "told" the author this, but if it is more than mere speculation, I am imbued by the generation of Millennial architects that "get it."

And lastly, I rather enjoyed this critique of the notorious front-runner, Thomas Friedman.