Monday Links

A lot of stuff to get thru, so right to it. First, some Dallas content:

DMN editorial: Urgent blitz Needed for Southwest Center Mall:

But so far, no long-term plan has emerged. No public investment has been made. No vision for the property has been sketched.

The Urban Land Institute wisely suggested creating a tax-increment-financing district to spur redevelopment and offered ideas for transforming the mall into a mixed-use village that would draw people to shop, eat, work and live.

A couple of problems here. First, is the fact that we're dealing with a dead mall. There are three variant directions to go with Dead Malls: 1) Infill the surface parking lots with garages and density while sparing/renovating the mall in roughly its current form. 2) Break down parts of the mall to create an outdoor complement to the indoor component, or 3) scrape it entirely and reposition/reenvision what the site should be within its larger context.

I'm afraid the ULI went with the most generic solution possible; one that I don't believe is a reality given its location (not so much being in South Dallas, as being disconnected from real transit opportunities). Conventional planner's reflexive answer for all sites: "Mixed-Use!"

A better solution would be one that follows a larger vision and gives the site a purpose. If we were real about transforming our City into a world class City, we would be systematically removing all the freeways entering the City from the outer 635/20 loop and converting them to more location specific and redevelopment friendly boulevards.


This location at 20 and 67, with an airport and freight rail w/in a mile, would be at the ideal spot for a distribution center for inter-metro shipping for intra-DFW/Dallas delivery with 67 inside of the loop being repositioned as a context-sensitive "complete street."

The fundamental problem w/ highways within Cities is that they are like drain pipes that gather rain from a storm into a single point and release all of that water into streams that can't handle it, eroding the ecosystem. Freeways (for macro-connections) entering Cities (micro-destinations) unloads too many cars at single exits, thus "eroding" the urban fabric.
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Dallas fashion at the Sartorialist. Sadly, compare the cities providing the backdrops.
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Similar look in the mirror provided by others, first a tweet from Urbanophile:

"Dallas is the epicenter of the generic," quoting Rem Koolhaas. Then, his (Aaron Renn) take on Dallas from a 2007 visit:

Given the size and affluence of the metro area, and the good things I know from talking to others that it has, I was very surprised to see the poor face it presents to people attending conventions there. This is the only time many people will ever see the city. It’s the first and last impression many folks will ever have of Dallas.

On the plus side, the road geek in me loves the freeways in Texas. They’ve got very wide highways and impressive interchanges. As I flew under a four level stack heading back to the airport, it really drove home to me how unambitious the plans of INDOT and other midwestern transportation agencies are. They’d be well served to hire some people from Texas who have actual experience in big city road building to design and run their major urban projects.

No offense to this dude, but jumpin jeezus on a dino, if he doesn't get the direct correlation b/w highways and "cities that suck" then anybody that pays for his consultation is doing themselves a disservice. I expand in a tweet, as limited by 140 characters:

Methinks baby boomers have inherent bias to freeways bc growing up in 50s 60s highways were billed w all things progress

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Excellent article by Richard Florida at What Matters on innovation and density that parallels many points I've made in the past:

There is a deeper, more fundamental reason, rooted in economics. Increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in the means metros in order to realize their full economic value. The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth. Places that bring together diverse talent accelerate the local rate of economic evolution. When large numbers of entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, designers, and other smart, creative people are constantly bumping into one another inside and outside of work, business ideas are formed, sharpened, executed, and—if successful—expanded. The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes. It is the multiplier effect of the clustering force at work.

Point, distilled to 120 proof: Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum.
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Other brief links:

Cohousing catching on in the PacNW. I discuss some ideas about high/mid-rise cohousing here.

CNET on the prob of plug-in cars. Answer: 1) they still take energy AND 2) they still require extensive infrastructure that rips apart economic and social bonds. Any attempts at maintaining a car industry at its current bloat is a waste of time and money. Worthless Endeavor.

NYT on the rise in going CarFree.

Vancouver plans on being greenest city by 2020. What happens when we no longer have catchy dates to peg our plans to like 20/20?

Oh Starchitects, How You Just Don't Get It.

First of all, haven't we been over this? Who has the money anymore to build these frivolous monuments to excess? Second, those of us in the real world are trying to make sustainability more attainable, more common, and most importantly, CHEAPER. Just yesterday, we posted about the sustainable nature of slums.

Here is Curbed presenting Stephen Holl's new whatever complex in Shenzhen. HT: my friend Mike in KC, a landscape architect who specializes in green roofs, who added accurately:

A blending of greenwash and Corbusier. This is not a good direction.

But, this is the only way the self-absorbed dinosaur architects representing all that just failed know. And my firm can be part of the problem as well. Check out our website: nothing but flashy, hard to build object buildings. There is nothing more complicated ingrained into the DNA of these places than trying to be different. That is it. They are the opposite of timeless. They are fashion. And, fashions go out of style. Place IS timeless.

And the sycophants of these new, shiny objects are no better than the high schooler wearing a hat with a pot leaf on it or the college kid away from his parents for the first time that keeps all the liquor bottles of peach schnapps and boone's farm that they finally finished and probably spent the rest of the evening praying to the porcelain Gawd. It is not cool. Get over it. It is juvenile.

There is no goal other than appealing to other architects. Other members of the cult. These are NOT our clients. Our clients are people. Our clients are cities. Our mission should be creating a better world to live and exist in. I fail to see how this is progress.

I was struck yesterday on a client tour of Addison Circle and Legacy Town Center, the moment the lay individuals "got it" when one said, "it's amazing how many things you don't know consciously when you're in a place like this, but you know they're there."

It is good to see the majority of people get it. In the comment section:

steven 'hole' just keeps getting worse.

the other building that rem did, and that holl did, as well as most of the new garbage built in china nowadays, should have burned with that fire last week

the chinese motto: if it doesn't suck, we won't do it

Towers-in-the-Park. Hello 1961. Jane Jacobs, never heard of her.

urban planning travesty

Assuming the sun can get through Chinese smog. [ed: LOL]

This is hideous. In the pretentiousness / ugliness stakes, Steven Holl is now giving long-time front-runners like Libeskind and Eisenman a run for their money. [amen]

Believe what you want. Be as optimistic as you like. What should we care if you want to go around fooling yourself that this is anything other than bullshit. It's your life to waste as you please.

Heavy, severe, anti-social, anti-human, scaleless, leaden, joyless, drab, prison-like, ..... these are the words that come to mind when I see this project.

And in their quasi-intellectual pretensions, these are the same words Holl's deluded staff of poseurs will try to say are the project's virtues. - Yes, I forgot cold, inhuman formalism has always been the stuff of great architecture ... right? [ed: This commenter gets my point that this is phony intellectualism. Their language makes no sense if you really break it down. There is no real depth to this other than being different.]

China seems to becoming the dumping ground for these pseudo-theoretical piss artists like Holl and Libeskind. They get suckered into buying ideas that failed in the US. - On the plus side, at least their crap doesn't get built here any more.

Also, when helping a friend search for a new TV, I was also struck by how the customer comments were far more helpful than the consumer reports or site editor's comments. Despite their expertise, there was a sense of uneasiness that it could easily be corrupted or bought off by a product manufacturer; that you could no longer trust their information.

We are leaving a place of mass centralization and control by the few, to a much more democratic and meritocratic place, where companies no longer compete against others, but cooperate and conspire against the customer.

This process is the crowdsourcing of knowledge, experience, and information. This is a good thing.

Arch Record on ToonTown

I mean the Arts District (link):

But Cloepfil (ed. note: the architect of Booker T. Washington High School) says it might be misguided to expect Jane Jacobs-style urbanism to sprout in north Texas, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Dallas might have to accept the arts district as a successful destination, not a way of life. "I'm trying to be a realist to other urban types," he says. "I do think there are other models of urban success that we may not want to believe are successful."

"Other models of urban success," huh? LOL. I guess anything can be a success depending upon what the goals are. If the goal is a vibrant place, it sure as he11 has not and will not achieve it on its current course. I can't decide if he is being glib with the intended (or unintended?) backhanded compliment to Dallas or not...

Bird's Nest to Hatch Western Consumerist Wonderland

Will anybody ever learn? From the LaTimes.

"They wanted to build 'the world's biggest this' and 'the world's biggest that,' but these buildings have almost zero long-term economic benefit," economist Huang said.

Moreover, the makeover of Beijing for the Olympics led to an estimated 1.5 million residents being evicted from their homes, according to the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions.