Sprawl Repair

Galina Tachieva, writing for TCC News:

The only reasonable option is to repair sprawl—-to deal with it straight on, by finding ways to reuse and reorganize as much of it as possible into complete, livable, robust communities. Pragmatism calls for repair through redevelopment into viable human-scale settlements—-places that are walkable, with mixes of uses and transportation options. Realistically, portions of sprawl are likely to remain in their current state, while others may devolve, reverting to agriculture or nature.

I’m about halfway through Galina’s Sprawl Repair Manual and she presents a compelling case for how and why sprawl should be morphed into diverse, livable communities. This article was a great summary of that idea.

Sensory Urbanism - Crafting Places to Delight

Steve Mouzon has started a fascinating discussion of his proposal for a new metric of walkability, Walk Appeal. I summed up the conversation previously, but I wanted to take a moment to expound on some of the thoughts I have been having on this topic.

A lot of the previous discussion has focused on what I would classify as sensory criteria - strategies to delight the senses. I wanted to explore this a little further to try and develop a theory of Sensory Urbanism. Since others have done a good job covering various strategies for providing a place with visual delight, I won’t try to discuss specifics. My goal with this post is to provide a broader, more macro level view of these concepts and try to tie everything together.

Delightful Sights

If the overall theme of Walk Appeal is delight then the foremost factor in creating the appeal is visual . Clearly, the primary sensory experience of place is visual. A place is primarily defined by what we see. Visual delight is what Steve Mouzon is exploring in 5 of his 6 initial criteria for making places with high Walk Appeal:

• View Changes


• Street Enclosure


• Window of View


• Goals in the Middle Distance


• Turning the Corner

Likewise, visual delight makes a strong showing in Steve Mouzon’s follow up on immeasurable factors with 3 out of 6:

• Lovable Things Along the Way


• Magic of the City


• Nature

Kevin Klinkenberg sums it up with one word: Beauty.

I think these are all different aspects of the same thing - visual delight. What we see has a huge impact on our perception of a place. Concepts such as enclosure, views, repetition, and variation are strategies to ensure a place has visual impact.

I think it is important to remember the difference between the goal (visual delight) and the strategy (for example, street enclosure). The goal is the standard by which a place and a strategy are judged while the strategy is an implementation detail of the goal. One of the things that has already been mentioned by Kaid Benfield is the idea that we don’t want to get too caught up in the specific formulas for visual delight (like the 70% glazing requirement at street level). I agree - we don’t want to get so caught up in the formula that we forget the overarching goal. However, the formulas and rules of thumb are enlightening as proven strategies to achieve that goal. If we keep the goal foremost in our mind, we can continue to effectively use the accumulated knowledge of the industry to help achieve the goal while also continually evaluating whether these strategies actually help accomplish our intentions or not. It really is a scale issue. We have to remember the big picture while we are working out the minute details. My goal here is to add clarity to the big picture.

Much of the conversation so far has been very focused on the visual aspect of Walk Appeal. This is appropriate as it is the most important factor. However, I’d like to expand the criteria to encompass the full spectrum of sensory experience. Delighting one sense is good. But delighting many senses is even better.

Delightful Sounds

I believe that the secondary sensory experience of place is auditory. While not quite as prominent as the visual, sound is an integral part of the experience of place. The auditory experience can be quite negative or quite positive. Our first goal should be to mitigate the negative. This can mean trying to mask the overwhelming sounds of traffic or muffling the noise of construction. Once we have dealt with the negative sounds, we can focus on creating sounds that delight. Moving water is a universally compelling sound but there are other sounds that make a place delightful. Church bells, wind chimes, the sounds of human interaction, and street music are just some of the sounds that can make the experience of a place that much more delightful and unique.

Delightful Smells

Third on the list is the experience of smell. Smell can be a strong factor, both negatively and positively. A place that smells of sewer all the time will have extremely low Walk Appeal regardless of how it scores in the other senses. But there are positive smells as well. The sweet aroma from blooming flowers or the delicious smell of food cooking can be quite compelling. As with sounds, we need to ensure that negative odors are adequately mitigated first and then we can focus on how to imbue a place with the types of smells that delight.

Delightful Touch

Fourth is the experience of feel. Architects tend to be quite tactile. We like to touch and feel materials. Go to any product presentation and see if the architects can keep their hands off the samples to see what I mean. While architects might tend towards the tactile, I believe that touch can be a powerful factor for everyone. We interact with places through touch in a wide variety of ways. Some materials just call out to be touched. Other times we are interacting with the place in a functional way - grabbing hand rails, sitting on benches, opening doors, etc.

We can address the tactile experience in various ways. First I would suggest we make all necessary tactile interactions as delightful as possible. This means making things comfortable. While we should always provide places to sit and rest, those places should also be comfortable. Railings, door knobs, walk buttons, and other elements we interact with physically should be selected with thought to their tactile delight. Second, I would suggest that using materials that are delightful to touch is a great way to increase the sensory experience of place. These materials should be placed at the human level to encourage reaching out a touching them. This seems especially effective with natural materials that have a lot of texture.

The sense of feel also encompasses thermal comfort. This is extremely important (perhaps more than smell) as places that are too hot or too cold are vastly less walkable than places where you can feel comfortable. This is a very climate sensitive criteria and the design of our public spaces needs to be calibrated to the local climate. In hot climates, providing shade and encouraging air movement helps mitigate thermal discomfort. In cool climates, providing access to the warming sun will be a vital strategy. Beyond just accommodating thermal conditions, we should look to address other climate conditions as well. For example, in places that receive a lot of rain we can focus on providing shelter through various strategies such as arcades or awnings.

Delightful Tastes

Finally, does taste have an impact on our experience of place? This is perhaps the weakest sensory experience of place, but I believe it is still important. Think about travel for a moment. Have you really experienced a place if you haven’t tasted its food? Can you visit Rome without associating it with gelato? Have you really experienced Paris if you haven’t had a baguette or a pastry? While taste might not be a primary factor in experiencing place on a micro level it is definitely tied up with the idea of place at a macro, cultural level.

Crafting Places to Delight

I believe that a big part of Walk Appeal is Sensory Urbanism. Crafting places that delight the senses is a sure way to increase Walk Appeal. The more senses that we can address through design, the better appeal a place will have. There are other factors as well such as a perception of safety (informed by sensory data but really psychological in nature) or human activity (social or task oriented in nature) but crafting places that delight the senses is the first and most important strategy for creating Walk Appeal.

Walk Appeal

Steve Mouzon has started a great discussion about the role of design in walkability. Walkability is, in my opinion, the most important factor in crafting great human places. There are other factors in making great neighborhoods, towns, and cities, but walkability must come first. Where walkability leads, the others will follow.

Steve began the discussion with his initial post, Walk Appeal, on his Original Green blog. This initial post focused on the idea that the distances people are willing to walk are directly proportional to a new metric Steve has dubbed “Walk Appeal”:

Walk Appeal promises to be a major new tool for understanding and building walkable places, and it explains several things that were heretofore either contradictory or mysterious. It begins with the assertion that the quarter-mile radius (or 5-minute walk,) which has been held up for a century as the distance Americans will walk before driving, is actually a myth

In this post, Steve looked at 7 different environments from world class city to suburban arterial with their associated walk distance assumptions. I would be interested in seeing data supporting Steve’s assumptions, but overall they seemed reasonable.

As an interesting comparison, I measured my local suburban mall and determined that the distance from anchor to anchor is slightly less than a quarter mile. This is a two story mall, so a patron who walked from their parking spot at one end throughout the mall could conceivably walk a total of over a half mile (1/4 mile per floor) and maybe up to a mile (1/4 mile per floor both ways). Of course browsing within individual stores would add to that total. Nobody complains about the idea of walking the mall, partly because the main corridor of the wall is designed to mimic a walkable urban street with lots window displays, small storefronts with lots of variety, and good spatial enclosure. Thus we have an example from current suburbia of a place where people are willing to walk more than a quarter mile.

Steve followed up with an additional post, Walk Appeal Measurables, where he explored the measurable factors that make great walkable environments. He listed six factors, some of which aren’t exactly empirically measurable but still can be evaluated somewhat objectively:

• View Changes


• Street Enclosure


• Window of View


• Shelter


• Goals in the Middle Distance


• Turning the Corner

Kaid Benfield has a response on his blog where he explores the idea some more. He adds some additional criteria:

• Purpose


• Safety


• Convenience and Time


• Nature


• Alternatives


• Environmental Intensity

Kaid provides a good counterpoint to the professional architect/urban designer viewpoint and makes some good points. The variation in Walk Appeal by time of day is a particularly salient point.

I also liked his perspective in the second to last paragraph:

What I like best about the concept of walk appeal is the suggestion that a comfortable or pleasant walking distance is highly variable, and that part of the reason we choose to drive even short distances sometimes is that the experience of walking to them is so horrible. Steve has provided some useful new vocabulary and an interesting new frame through which we can evaluate streets and neighborhoods.

Steve’s third post, Walk Appeal Immeasurables, follows up with six additional factors that are hard to evaluate objectively but are still critical to making great human places:

• People on the Street


• Lovable Things Along the Way


• Magic of the City


• Safety


• Nature


• Sound

Some of these were in response to Kaid Benfield’s post that I mentioned above. I think a lot of these factors can be summed up in one word: Delight. Making places delightful is about crafting a positive sensory experience. Lovable things, magic, nature, sound, beauty - these are all tied up in delighting the senses. I’ll explore this idea further in a future post.

Kevin Klinkenberg also weighs in with his thoughts including four additional criteria:

• Beauty


• Public Space/Parks


• Walking is the Easy Thing to Do


• The Importance of Destinations and Embracing the Muddle

He prefaced those criteria with this:

Since coming to Savannah I’ve had the pleasure of observing how my own behavior has changed, simply by living in this place. Where once I rarely went beyond a 10 minute walk, I now routinely walk 20–30 minutes for the same kinds of destinations. The 5 minute walk radius that we cherish so much in New Urbanism has in fact become meaningless for me. If I limited myself to that 5 minute distance, it would eliminate nearly all of the places that I visit daily – the park, the coffee shops, the bars/restaurants, the grocery store, etc.

Kevin is fortunate to live in the supremely walkable city of Savannah but I think his experience is enlightening.

The whole conversation is captured at Urbanism Blogoffs so check there for more updates as the conversation continues. I found the whole series fascinating and an important discussion. The rule of thumb 5 minute walk is limiting and ignores the power of place. It is great to see the conventional wisdom questioned in a way that can only bring a better understanding of what makes places great for humans. I hope to add some additional perspective to the conversation, but for now I thought these posts provide some great insight and wanted to share them.

Los Angeles Narrow Streets

Mas Context reports on a series of studies done by David Yoon where he digitally narrows the streets of Los Angeles. It’s an interesting look at how the width of the street has a dramatic effect on the feel of the street.

Photos of the Opening Ceremonies

The Atlantic has a great collection of photos from the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

The Brash Attack of The Hive

Kerry Flint, writing for Yatzer, reports on the Hive Apartment in Melbourne, Australia. This is a strange, unique residence inspired by hip hop and graffiti. I could be quite critical, but let’s let Kerry guide us through:

Arrows, swooshes and drips have been strikingly incorporated into the brick shell to create a new permanent urban art statement that shakes rather than caresses you upon first sight, like loud hip hop from a boombox.

Translation: This building is not a good neighbor.

Traditional, subtle and pretty this is not; the building has a strong futuristic sci-fi presence with graffiti relief panels making up the external structure, spelling HIVE in ‘wild style’ by Prowla.

Translation: This building is not pleasing to the eye.

Punctuation and the rebellious shapes of the lettering also provide influxes of natural light, exciting viewing platforms and interesting shapes that jut out brashly and attack the eye; encouraging intrigue and a desire to continue to admire this building’s multiple angles.

Translation: This building is not friendly or inviting. In fact it is aggressively provoking. [1]

This is not an offhand modern stylistic whimsy, instead it’s solid and has been built to withstand the test of time; a definite case of substance over style in fact.

Translation: This building is ugly but it’s going to be hard to demolish.

Situated in an exclusive inner city residential suburb this building epitomizes urban rebellion and youthfulness. Belling has thrown caution to the wind creating a building that stands out rather than merely blending into the more conservative architecture in the area.

Translation: Again, this building is not a good neighbor.

I could critique the lack of a human scaled street presence. I could discuss the over-scaled graphic elements and lack of a well composed architectural elevation. I could be quite critical but I think the point has been made. Even the write up struggled to be complimentary.

This building illustrates the fundamental divide between viewing a building as an object in space and viewing a building as a part of a greater whole. This building rejects its duty to be a good neighbor and improve the quality of the neighborhood. Instead it focuses on bringing attention to itself by deliberately eschewing the character of the neighborhood for a rebellious and aggressive aesthetic. As I discussed in Monument Valley - The Failure of the Starchitects, a background building’s first responsibility is to enhance its neighborhood. This building fails that test.

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1. I think I’ll start a series on the aggressive language of modern architecture. So far we’ve had shakes, jut out brashly, and attack and we are only a few sentences in!  ↩

   
   

Public Places: The River of Life

Jay Walljasper, writing for Shareable, has a post exploring the viral importance of public spaces:

The decline of public places represents a loss far deeper than simple nostalgia for the quiet, comfortable ways of the past. “The street, the square, the park, the market, the playground are the river of life,” explains Kathleen Madden, one of the directors of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, which works with citizens around the world to improve their communities.

I like the analogy. Great public spaces are vital to the health and viability of great towns. They are the places for public discourse. They are the places for relaxation and friendship. They are the places for building community.

Creating great public spaces is a craft. It is certainly more than just making a space beautiful. The article closes with Jan Gehl’s 12 steps to great public spaces:

12 Steps to a Great Public Space

1. Protection from traffic


2. Protection from crime


3. Protection from the elements


4. A place to walk


5. A place to stop and stand


6. A place to sit


7. Things to see


8. Opportunities for conversations


9. Opportunities for play


10. Human-scale


11. Opportunities to enjoy good weather


12. Aesthetic quality

There was a lot of good material in the article including case studies supporting the main thesis. Give it a look.

Learning from Le Plessis-Robinson

Charles Siegel, writing for Planetizen, has a great article detailing the dramatic transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson, a small town just outside of Paris. It ends with this gem:

The history of Le Plessis-Robinson teaches us that nothing is as outdated as yesterday’s avant-garde. Its functionalist housing projects were cutting edge from the 1920s through the mid-century, and now we want to tear them down. In fifty years, today’s avant-gardist architecture will look just as outdated and even more grotesque; but traditional architecture and urbanism, designed at a human scale that has passed the test of time, will look as perennially attractive as ever.

Mr. Siegel provides a compelling argument supporting the importance of good architecture in a good urban environment. Great human places support thriving local economies.

See also my post, Monument Valley - the Failure of the Starchitects:

The architectural elite, it seems, have no concept of a background building - a building whose primary purpose is to elegantly provide for the needs of its occupants and to be an upstanding “citizen” of the urban environment…

A Hand Made Home

The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association relays the charming story of Bernard Maybeck’s first house as told by his first client, Charles Keeler:

Mr. Maybeck told me that when I was ready to build a home there, he would like to design it. He told me that he would make no charge for his services as he was interested in me and wanted to see me in a home that suited my personality.

“But I have no idea of building,” I explained. “I bought a lot only as an investment.” “Well,” he persisted, “You may change your mind. If you do, let me know. I want to design a home for you.” Mr. Maybeck is a very persistent man, and in his quiet fashion generally managed to have his own way. But this time fate seemed to have intervened. In 1893 I married Louise Bunnel of San Francisco.

Beijing Olympics: Then and Now

In addition to my previously linked stories (1 & 2) regarding the dismal state of the once lauded buildings of the Beijing Olympics, Yahoo has put together a before and after gallery showing various 2008 Beijing Olympic venues.

With the London Olympics right around the corner, I think it makes sense to reflect on how the previous summer Olympics venues have fared in the four years since their premier showing. Time has not been kind to these buildings, yet four years ago we were told during Olympic coverage that these were among the greatest structures modern architecture had conjured up. I distinctly remember a lot of press about these buildings, particularly the Bird’s Nest Stadium and the Water Cube as they became icons of the events held inside. Somehow, the summer Olympics has become a showcase for modern architecture and modern architects have responded with iconic structures that have failed to remain useful beyond the few weeks of the games. It is the responsibility of all involved, the architect, the master planner, the Olympic organization, and the host city, to create a system that provides exceptional venues for the Olympic games AND provides a useful benefit to the community beyond the Olympic games. In Beijing, that effort failed. I only hope that London can fare better.

In the coming weeks we will inevitably hear about the new jewels of modern Olympic architecture as the London venues become synonymous with the events they house. As we focus on the new, we should remember the fate of the old. We should hope that London has done a better job of integrating the Olympic venues into the fabric of the city in a way that will bring lasting value to the city and prove useful beyond the Olympic games.