Cities for Living

Roger Scruton, writing for City Journal, has an interesting piece exploring the philosophies of Leon Krier.

First up, Krier’s take on the question of modern vs traditional:

Modernist forms have been imposed upon us by people in the grip of ideology. They derive no human significance from the materials that compose them, from the labor that produced them, or from the function that they fulfill, and their monumental quality is faked.

[…]

This failure to provide a readable vocabulary is not a trivial defect of modernist styles: it is the reason why modernist buildings fail to harmonize with their neighbors. In architecture, as in music, harmony is a relation among independently meaningful parts, an achievement of order from elements that create and respond to valency. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines—lines that may come to an end but that achieve no closure.

I think this second paragraph had two good points. First, I think it is true that modern architecture lacks a cohesive vocabulary and consistency is the first requirement for a readable and coherent language. Secondly, I think that the analogy to music is a good one. Too few architects look to create harmony.

And then he moves on to cities:

Krier’s solution is to replace the “downtown plus suburbs” system with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centers, with their own public spaces, public buildings, and places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is “ours” rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s. The towns will create a collection of somewheres instead of an ever-expanding nowhere. This solution has a precedent: the city of London grew next to the city of Westminster in friendly competition, and the residential areas of Chelsea, Kensington, Bloomsbury, and Whitechapel arose as autonomous villages rather than as spillovers from the existing centers.

[…]

The plan should conform to Krier’s “ten-minute rule,” meaning that it should be possible for any resident to walk within ten minutes to the places that are the real reason for his living among strangers. The rule is not as demanding as Americans might think: Paris, Rome, Florence, Madrid, London, and Edinburgh all conform to it, as would the American suburbs if they grew as Krier suggests—as separate centers in a “polypolis,” so that people could work, shop, relax, and worship in places close to home. Good urban planning does not mean creating distance between people in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ocean-to-ocean suburbs, but bringing people together in ways that enhance their enjoyment of the place where they communally are.

I like the concept of a polypolis. The original “suburbs” were fully functioning little towns anchored by a station for catching the train to the city. The concept of multiple “towns” within the city infers that each town has a center and an edge. This combined with the 5–10 minute walk radius creates a much different pattern than typical suburbia. The important thing is to still develop a hierarchy within the city as the city as a whole should still have a discernible center.

Multi-Generational

Sarah Goodyear, writing for The Atlantic Cities, on the beauty of multigenerational communities:

A city that is filled with children is a happier, more lively place than one that isn’t. More than that, it’s a place that is clearly headed toward the future, not stagnating in the past. A city that can keep its children engaged and stimulated is building a resource that will pay off big-time in years to come.

[…]

The segregation of generations goes deeper than just the swaddling of children in a cocoon of safety, though. In a society obsessed with aging, too often the generations are kept apart by prejudice and stereotypes. Young people are scared of getting old. Old people are scared of being inconvenienced. […] Outside the city, many gated communities geared toward retirees won’t sell to anyone younger than 50, or 55, or 60. Presumably even a rowdy 45-year-old could upset the equilibrium.

It’s a really brilliant piece by Sarah on the importance of diversity in community. In the name of simplicity we create such homogeneity. We separate by use, affluence, culture, age, and all other sorts of criteria and it’s working against creating vibrant, livable communities. Life isn’t simple and clean. It is complex and multifaceted. Our communities should reflect that and allow for the casual interactions and intermingling that provides such richness to our lives.

Getting Gouged

Stephen Smith, reporting for Bloomberg, on the dismal return on investment Americans get out if transit projects:

American taxpayers will shell out many times what their counterparts in developed cities in Europe and Asia would pay. In the case of the Second Avenue line and other new rail infrastructure in New York City, they may have to pay five times as much.

[…]

The French rail operator SNCF told the California High- Speed Rail Authority that it could cut $30 billion off the project’s $68 billion estimated price tag. San Francisco can barely build underground light rail for the price that Tokyo pays for high-capacity subways. Los Angeles’s planned subway to the sea will be a bit cheaper, but is still very expensive considering the area’s lack of density.

The important takeaway is not that we shouldn’t invest in transit. The takeaway is that we should invest smarter and require accountability. If SNCF can save Californians $30 billion, why aren’t we getting that deal? While this article is about mass transit, it’s not unreasonable to assume that road projects are beset by the same gouging. This should be unacceptable.

The Ultimate Corner Office

Ryan Bradley, writing for CNN Money/Fortune:

From 1,200 feet the city sounds like a dull drone. Tom Gordon leans out in his seat and stares down, like a fisherman attempting to glimpse his bait. He’s looking at the bundle of steel far below. Gordon operates a slide crane on the 91st story – though, as the name suggests, the crane slides up as the tower gets built. The building topped out last week, so in a few months Gordon’s crane will come down, piece by piece, carried by another crane on the roof. For now, his operating cabin in the slide crane on the north face of 1 World Trade is the ultimate corner office.

Strip Mall vs Boulevard

Geoff Dyer, writing for Placeshakers, has a great piece examining the subtle but important difference between a strip mall lined arterial and a multi-way boulevard:

This realization occurred to me a while back as I wound myself mindlessly through a dysfunctional arterial corridor lined with strip malls, pondering how I might transform it into a multi-way boulevard paradise. Given the basic ingredients of these two roadways, their differences are really quite subtle on the surface, but their outcome is strikingly different. So what’s up? The reality is, if you take all the basic ingredients of the roadway itself, there are many similarities between the two. You’ve got fast moving lanes in the center. You have a landscaped area at the edge, maybe with or without a sidewalk but definitely with curbs, you’ve got a slower traffic lane near the buildings, and then you have parking. So what is the leap between a strip mall on an arterial and a commercial building on the boulevard?

[…]

While both the arterial and the multi-way boulevard handle lots of traffic, give stores parking in front, and serve as regional commercial corridors, the subtle difference of a connected high-quality pedestrian realm versus the disconnected individual access of a strip mall actually ends up producing a very striking contrast.

This is a really great analysis by Geoff - I hadn’t thought about how similar the two corridor types were until this post. It really goes to show that great design (and appropriate typology) can make the sum so much more than the parts.

The Tyranny of Modernism

Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos A. Salingaros, writing for New English Review, provide a brilliantly eloquent dismantling of the very essence of modernism across all of the arts:

We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism. The modernist aesthetic, which dominates our age, takes a variety of forms in the respective arts — in architecture, a lack of scale and ornamentation combined with the overwhelming deployment of materials like glass, steel, and brutalist concrete; in the plastic arts, a rejection of natural forms mixed with an unmistakable tendency towards the repulsive or meretricious; in literature, non-linear narrative, esoteric imagery, and an almost perfect lack of poetic form and diction. Yet common now to the practice of all these arts are certain primal impulses which may be said to form the core of the modernist aesthetic — a hostility and defiance towards all traditional standards of excellence, discovered over millennia of craftsmanship and reflection; a notion of the artist’s freedom as absolute, and entirely divorced from the ends of his art; and, as Roger Scruton has so clearly demonstrated, a refusal to apply the category of beauty to either the creation or the estimation of artwork. Standing behind this aesthetic is an ideology supported by nearly the entire institutional structure of the Western world — the universities, the publishing houses, the galleries, the journals, the prize committees, the zoning boards. Books that evince a fidelity to modernist principles are the ones that get published. Buildings that conform to the brutal codes of modernism and its derivatives are the ones that get built. Whatever creative efforts spring from other sources of inspiration other than modernist aggression are invariably ignored and dismissed as something antiquated or reactionary. This is the great totalitarian system of our times — the dictatorship of modernism.

Included in this scathing critique of modernism in all its forms are some particularly harsh words for architecture:

To the contrary, modern art betrays a pursuit not of harmony, but of domination — domination of nature, of language, of one’s fellow man. The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis defined by gravity, or the “brutalist” exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces — a violence against the tactile environment, often falsely excused as being “honest” rather than a sadistic architectural expression. The “milder” forms of this violence are represented in minimalist environments devoid of all signs of life: totally blank walls, windowless façades, curtain glass walls, buildings as cubes of glass, buildings as cubes of smooth concrete, etc. Indeed, the subtlety that earlier attempted to camouflage this intrinsic violence has finally been abandoned, and buildings are now built as if blown apart, dismembered, and their forms melted.

I thought this section laying bare the elitism of the arts was particularly salient:

The public is normally revolted by such artistic violence, which is why its propagandists call out constantly and hysterically for more “education,” by which they mean brainwashing, intended to bully ordinary people into accepting these perversions. Indeed, the modernists’ almost complete take-over of the schools has been the single most important factor in the triumph of their style; witness the architecture schools, where only a handful of programs in the entire world dare to teach design on traditional principles. Modernism’s project of domination, control, and destruction has naturally attracted persons who crave power, and who master all the techniques for achieving power and dominance over others. It should be no wonder, therefore, that a dominant elite producing and promoting an art of hatred controls the market today. A “new normal” has been imposed, according to which the most unnatural — or rather, anti-natural — of styles has been exalted. What is worse, the classical styles have been represented as aberrant; the pursuit of beauty or harmony has become the gravest crime an artist could commit. Poets who attempt to write in structured form are attacked as “fascists.” Architects who employ the design vocabulary of pre-modern traditions are dismissed as “reactionaries.” The propaganda machine of modernism has been so successful that we now witness the complete inversion of artistic standards.

The notion that the public needs to be educated on matters of aesthetics is elitist and offensive. Beauty is universal. To appreciate beauty is to be human.

Why does this matter? It is, after all, just the arts. If the whole of the arts are taken over by modernist elites, does it make a difference to the rest of us?

This is not about aesthetics but civilization itself. We are watching the increasingly rapid dissolution of civil society on all sides of us — the failure of our schools, a breakdown of the family, the degradation of language, the abandonment of polite manners, the rape of the environment, and the replacement of a stable economy with a torrent of dangerous speculation. We do not give sufficient consideration to how far the depravity of contemporary art may be implicated in this catastrophic decline. Nothing is so important to the spiritual and mental flourishing of a people as its art. The stories they tell, the buildings they inhabit, the public spaces in which they gather, the songs they sing, the fashioned images they gaze upon — these things shape their souls more permanently and effectively than anything else. We live in a time when the art all around us accustoms men to, and insinuates into their souls, the most erroneous and degrading ideas imaginable about themselves and their world. A humane society can hardly be expected to grow out of such an adverse cultural environment.

Whether you agree or disagree with the reach of their conclusion or the stance of the article, I think that the points made are valuable and deserve to be considered. Modernism is, by its very nature, antithetical to the preceding thousands of years of artistic tradition. Many modernists don’t themselves realize that the new tradition of modernism was born out of a rejection of the principles of the past. This is partly the point of my previous post, Of Time and Place where I posited that many who suggest that art should be “of today” have a fundamental misunderstanding of the birth of modernism. At least recognizing that the two traditions are at odds is a first step.

Zoning & HOA Insanity

Scott Doyon, writing for Placeshakers, on the ways zoning and HOA’s inhibit great places:

The answer, it seems, is rooted in the legacy of separated-use Euclidian zoning. Originally conceived to move noxious and dangerous activities away from where people live, it’s since mutated to now separate all of life’s daily activities — living, working, shopping, going to church, and educating our children — no matter how benign. Today, such policies have added up to countless places where two defining characteristics reign: simplicity and predictability.

[…]

Communities best positioned to thrive in an ever-changing world are those where governance is an exercise in balancing complexity. In contending with reality. That’s because, in the day-to-day life of a traditional city or town, people are forced to acknowledge and contend with others unlike themselves. It happens two people at a time as ideas are debated and alliances formed. It happens through a process of negotiation where diverse individuals concede their need for one another and explore equitable common ground from which to interact and collectively advance.

While there was an initial need for separating noxious uses from everyday life, Euclidian zoning has ceased to be useful and has, in actuality, become a hindrance to good places. I think Scott’s point about HOA’s extending that idea to an even more granular level is a good one. Diversity is the lifeblood of good places yet our current zoning and HOA practices are focused on simplicity and predictability at the expense of diversity and complexity.

The First Walk on the Moon

Danish photographer Hans Nyburg has stitched together an amazing 360 degree panoramic of the moon from Neil Armstrong’s perspective.

Just imagine walking on the moon. What an amazing experience.

Garden Hang Out

Paris-based designers Nicolas Barreau and Jules Charbonnet on their recent apartment garden idea:

‘‘Volet végétal’’ is a project that we thought for a Parisian design contest “Jardin Jardin” as an industrial product for people who are living in apartment deprived of gardens and balcony. Users have just to plug the structure on the outside of their windows. Horizontal position to enlarge a green view on the city land by trying to go further from the facade of the building and get more ornamental stand for plant. Vertical to create a shutter of light, a filter for green air and also for an easy garden upkeeping.

Great idea!

via Henry Grabar for The Atlantic Cities

People Keep Dying

Andria Simmons and Jeremiah McWilliams, reporting for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Statistics released last week by the Georgia Department of Transportation show the number of pedestrians struck and killed by motor vehicles in 2012 is on track to exceed last year’s total of 124 fatalities. As of mid-August, 82 pedestrians had been killed on area roads, compared with 63 at the same time last year.

Sarah Goodyear comments on this statistic for The Atlantic Cities:

And so it goes. Roads keep on getting wider and faster. Accommodations for pedestrians and wheelchair users and bicyclists remain marginalized. Because in much of the country, if you’re not a driver, you’re not really part of the official picture […]

Shocking.