Magic Captured

National Geographic Traveler has posted the Winners Gallery for its 2012 Reader Photo Contest.

Stunning subjects. Excellent compositions and technique. Extraordinary moments. Although the entire gallery is terrific, I am particularly drawn to Looking into Another World, Lost in Time - An Ancient Forest, and Bagan Bliss.

Don’t miss the other galleries of all the entries for a photographic treat.

The Narrative Arc

Speaking of John Gruber, I must say that the work he does at Daring Fireball has provided much of the inspiration for what I’m going for here. Obviously, our primary topics differ but the way he uses links with limited commentary to frame an editorial position is something I aspire to do successfully as well. There is a narrative arc to Daring Fireball that makes the sum much more than the individual parts.

Daring Fireball has just reached the 10 year milestone and Robinson Meyer, writing for The Atlantic, looks back at the first 10 years:

Gruber’s best when he’s writing about perfection, excellence and what it takes to achieve either. He can describe eight iPhone Twitter clients, or the software limitations of the iPad, and evince a common sense of aesthetic. His voice can be muscular and rigorous. The man’s clearly animated by a hatred of everything he knows to be BS.

Further in, Robinson quotes John:

There’s a certain pace and rhythm to what I’m going for [when I share links], a mix of the technical, the artful, the thoughtful, and the absurd. In the same way that I strive to achieve a certain voice in my prose, as a writer, I strive for a certain voice with regard to what I link to. No single item I post to the Linked List is all that important. It’s the mix, the gestalt of an entire day’s worth taken together, that matters to me.

This brilliantly summarizes my philosophy for what I’m doing with The Studio Stoop with one caveat - Daring Fireball is mostly editorial commentary but my intentions are somewhat more humble. I’m exploring and I appreciate the give and take as a learning experience. I’m also new to this type of writing, so I’m growing and developing my voice as a writer. I’m certainly not in the same league as John Gruber, but there is necessarily a difference between aspiration and reality. One day, maybe, I’ll have developed The Studio Stoop into something akin to Daring Fireball for the physical design world. For now, I can only concentrate on doing my best writing and providing an interesting and enlightening editorial voice for my site.

So what is my narrative arc here with The Studio Stoop? What is the single thread that ties everything together and creates a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts? I think my narrative arc is best summarized with the site’s subheading:

Front Porch Musings about Humanity in Design, Urbanism, Architecture, and the Arts

I link to and write about many disparate topics, but the thing that ties it all together in my mind is the search for humanity. There is certainly a celebration of excellence, perfection even, but only as it relates to the celebration of humanity. Everything I link to or write I try to put through the editorial filter of how it relates to the overall question of what it means to be human and how that effects our interactions with objects, buildings, places, and each other.

Pixel Perfect

John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, muses about the profound difference a retina display makes:

When I first started using the retina MacBook Pro, the whole thing felt fake, like I was using a demo version of Mac OS X ginned up in After Effects for shooting closeups of the screen for, say, an Apple commercial in which they didn’t want UI elements to look pixelated. Some degree of pixelation has always been part of my Mac experience.

…

And as summer has worn on and I’ve used the retina MacBook Pro more and more, my impression has been pulled inside out. Now, only the retina MacBook Pro feels real to me, and all my other Macs feel ersatz. Low-resolution approximations of the ideal that now sits before my eyes.

I haven’t had the pleasure of using the new retina MacBook Pro but I do know that the jump from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 was so profound I went and bought a retina iPad the day they were available. Our lives have become so screen centric and pixel density is one spec that truly makes a difference in the overall experience of a device. Once you have seen text rendered without blur and images so vibrant and crisp that they pop it is impossible to be satisfied with less.

The Eisenhower Memorial in Context

Paul Knight, writing for his blog, has some thoughts on the controversial Eisenhower Memorial:

After studying Frank Gehry’s design and the counter proposals from the National Civic Art Society, I noticed that something was missing–context. All the proposals had the architecture (for better or for worse) but most were missing the larger context of urbanism. Most of the designs simply rendered the memorial as a plaza for the Education Building. The last thing Washington, DC needs is another plaza.

What follows is a well considered and compelling urban design thesis for how the memorial site should be treated and how the memorial provides an opportunity to fundamentally improve the urban experience of the whole neighborhood.

Feeding Hungry Children is not Allowed

Claudia Gomez, reporting for the Philadelphia Fox affiliate, provides a great example of the failure of zoning:

Every day at lunchtime, the kids in this neighborhood can get a healthy meal for free. In a township where the per capita income hovers around $19,000 a year, that’s no small gift. Angela Prattis makes it possible.

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The township says Prattis is in violation of zoning codes. She lives in a residential zone where handing out food to children is not allowed.

Euclidian Zoning is to blame for many of the issues facing our neighborhoods but this is a whole new level of crazy!

The Cost of Sprawl

William Fulton, writing for CNN, explores the impact sprawl has on the financial resiliency of towns:

The cost is enormous. One study in Charlotte, North Carolina, found that a fire station in a low-density neighborhood serves one-quarter the number of households and at four times the cost of an otherwise identical fire station in a less spread out neighborhood. That sort of inefficiency adds up and multiplies as you take into account the hundreds of services cities must provide. What seems cheap on the one hand isn’t always when you look at it over the long haul.

The initial cost of expansion is covered by the new development. The next lifecycle is covered by additional growth. But what happens when a lifecycle is up and there isn’t more growth to cover expenses? You wind up with a lot of obligations for maintenance and repair with no means to pay for them. This is where many towns are now. We have overburdened our communities with obligations that just aren’t sustainable.

See Strong Towns for additional insight into how we can make our towns resilient.

Andres Duany on Classicism

Andres Duany, on classicism:

It’s also a system that guarantees a certain base below which you don’t fall. It’s capable of great things but it also prevents you from falling. Nothing else can say that. Modernism never provides a bottom…

The problem with modernism isn’t that it is incapable of greatness. The problem is that modernism relies on genius. There are two problems with a reliance on genius. First, there are bound to be quite a few practitioners that fall short of genius. Secondly, as I mentioned in my previous piece, Citizen Buildings, most buildings shouldn’t have genius as a primary goal. They do, however, have a minimum level of quality.

The Credible Typeface

Errol Morris, writing for the New York Times, contemplates the effects of typefaces on perceived credibility:

The conscious awareness of Comic Sans promotes — at least among some people — contempt and summary dismissal. But is there a font that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.

It is Baskerville.

Intriguing.

via Daring Fireball

Americans Don't Walk Enough

Reuters reports on a CDC study of walking:

More American adults are walking regularly but less than half of them exercise enough to improve their health, according to a federal study released on Tuesday.

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The agency recommends at least 150 minutes per week of aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking, which can lower the risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression and some forms of cancer.

“Physical activity is the wonder drug,” CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden told reporters. “It makes you healthier and happier. More Americans are making a great first step in getting more physical activity.”

150 minutes a week equals just over 20 minutes a day. This is why Walk Appeal matters.

The CDC’s recommendations for how to fix this problem are a little off though:

It recommends adding more walking trails and street lights to encourage walking, along with speed bumps and other techniques to slow traffic. The CDC also encourages agreements between local governments and schools to allow community members to use tracks after school hours.

The CDC is looking at walking as an exercise activity when they should be recommending strategies that incorporate walking as a lifestyle activity. The only way to get more people walking is to integrate it into daily life. As long as walking is just exercise that needs to crammed into a busy day it will only be the very motivated who do it. Trails are good. Speed bumps aren’t so good. But the best strategy would be creating compact, walkable neighborhoods that have both high Walk Appeal and services to walk to.

Citizen Buildings

I have previously mentioned several times the concept of a background building. This is a concept that was first introduced to me in my architecture program at Andrews University and is an idea that is crucial to understanding how a building should relate to the public realm. I thought it would be appropriate to explore the idea further as I believe it is fundamental to crafting great places and it explains the successes and failures that we see today.

The Background

The fundamental concept of background buildings is the idea that the majority of the structures that make up a place exist to fulfill a functional need and provide definition to the public realm. These buildings are usually private and they accommodate the regular functions of day to day life. The activities in these buildings aren’t particularly noble or remarkable - these are buildings for everyday life. These are “background buildings” as they form the background of our lives. In contrast to background buildings, a very small minority of our structures are deemed to have some cultural significance. These buildings, such as civic buildings, churches, memorials, and other prominent buildings, convey a sense of pride and importance and are therefore “foreground buildings”.

Most buildings should be background buildings. A select few should be foreground buildings. The responsibilities and characteristics of background and foreground buildings are quite different. Background buildings should fade to back while foreground buildings should be prominently featured. Background buildings should acknowledge context and try to enhance the fabric rather than draw attention to themselves. Foreground buildings should stand out to acknowledge the increased significance of their use. Background buildings should define the public realm (street or plaza edge) in a respectful and appropriate manner. Foreground buildings can take some liberties in how they interact with the public realm.

As I suggested in my previous post, Monument Valley, it is difficult for the architectural elite (or most architects for that matter) to grasp that their creation is part of a greater whole rather than a piece of unique art. Why is this difficult? I think there are many reasons. Ego is definitely involved. I think training is another reason. Very few architectural schools focus on making ordinary buildings great in a respectful and appropriate way. Another reason could be the way the concept is framed. Most people don’t want to see their hard work fade into the background although, in truth, their creating great background buildings is a noble endeavor that takes a lot of skill. I think the concept is sound - we just need to find a better way to express it. To that end, I propose we apply the notion of citizenship to buildings.

Citizen Buildings

We must think of the urban fabric as a unified whole - like a tapestry of individual threads. While there are varying degrees of consistency within the individual threads of beautiful tapestries, there has to be something that ties it together. Every thread plays a role to enhance the overall effect and most threads play a rather modest role.

This is very much like civilization itself. We all have roles to play in society. Most of us have relatively modest roles but we all do our best to leave a positive mark on the world. It is no dishonor to be described as an honest and decent citizen.

This is the role most buildings play in our lives. The functions accommodated by most buildings are the relatively modest activities of daily life. Just like a human society, an urban environment is made up of mostly citizens with a few prominent leaders.

Yet it seems like few architects are willing to let their buildings play the citizen role. When everyone is yelling “look at me” all you get is a cacophony of chaos. When buildings do this you get a disjointed and unpleasant public realm that fails to create a vibrant and active community. However, when we think about the urban fabric as a unified whole, individual buildings take on a different meaning - a different purpose. Rather than being objects in space, buildings become objects creating Place. The focus is not on being unique and different but on fulfilling the citizen role of contributing to the greater good.

This is not to say that the quality of citizen buildings does not matter. Quite the contrary, the quality of the citizen buildings is extremely important in crafting the great human environments that we love and thrive in. However, the focus is not on the uniqueness and “high design” of building but on appropriate contextual response to the cultural, environmental, and social heritage of the place. This is very much about the quality of the details.

This is why cities such as Paris can be great even though their urban fabric is composed of a very narrow range of variation. In fact in the Haussmann era, the facades of regular buildings were very prescriptively designed. Rather than making the city monotonous, these quintessential Parisian buildings define the quality of the city. Paris succeeds in this, in part, because the citizen buildings are typically of such exceptional quality. However, when you think about it, most of the great cities of the world are made up of an urban fabric of compatible and similar citizen buildings.

From Background to Citizen

The concept of background buildings is so important in making great Places yet it is a relatively unknown concept. Unfortunately the terminology might seem off putting to newcomers to this idea. It takes great humility to craft a magnificent background building. It feels less deferential to make a great citizen building. For this reason and for the great subtle nuance in the analogy I believe that considering buildings as citizens makes a lot of sense.