Chicago El Stories

So here's an interesting art project: Chicago El Stories is an installation at the Armitage Brown Line stop in Lincoln Park that pairs photos of seemingly unimportant sites around the city with audio files of peoples' memories and stories about the places. It's an interesting way of showing how the urban environment is littered with personal experiences, and how the city can be so many different things to so many people.

The Craig Hartman Interview - Part II

This is the second part of Where's interview with Craig W. Hartman of SOM San Francisco about the firm's Treasure Island redevelopment plan. You can find the first part HERE.


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Where: Thanks for bringing up the neighborhood context, because that's exactly what I wanted to talk about next; you've provided my segue for me. The SOM San Francisco site has a description of the Treasure Island (TI) project and it goes into some of the details [of this plan], and one of the terms that keeps popping up in that is "island life." I got a kick out of that, because there's this idea of island life and, traditionally, I think you kind of think of the Caribbean -- you've got the drink in one hand and you're laid out on the beach and there are palm trees. There is a very relaxed and social connotation to "island life"...I'm interested in how you're creating community on this little island, because it is separate from the main city. As much as it has been integrated through transit, it's going to be sort of off on its own in some ways. So how is community built, and how is that urban lifestyle cultivated through the way that the site is designed?

Craig Hartman: That is really the crux of the issue here, and an interesting question, because I don't think anyone can really know what the nature of social and cultural life will eventually be on the island. The idea is to understand the unique culture of San Francisco and to try to find a way to transplant that to this island. And yet the island is a place apart and it’s culture is obviously going to morph into something that has its own character. I think most people would agree that one of the qualities of San Francisco culture is a very strong spirit of inclusiveness. I think there is an ethos held by the majority of the people who live here that accepts different lifestyles, and that an ethos that really honors the public realm; maybe even to give preference to the public realm over private interests. And there is certainly an ethos here that values environmental stewardship.

The social and cultural life of the island will evolve in a way that reflects the values of those who live there. What we are trying to do is to make the place one that provides a very rich set of public spaces that are consciously designed to encourage this idea of social connection and, hopefully, social inclusiveness. There are some very basic, pragmatic things being done about diversity of housing types that will cater toward a wide variety of demographics: of young single people, of families, wealthy people and people who have low and middle incomes. The idea is to make this a mix of the sort one would find in a real city, not an artificial, gated community with a single monoculture.

So we're trying to find ways in the planning of this island and the design of its architecture to enhance those qualities. That's what we mean when we talk about an urban ecology. We need to consider how we [can be] good stewards of the natural environment, but at the same time, we also want to think about the anthropological quality of this place, and that has to do with the culture. So on Treasure Island we are trying to weave the two together into a holistic ecology that brings together the natural environment and human culture.

And yes, "island life" as you suggest, brings Margaritaville to mind, but the intent is to make an authentic place that recognizes its unique place at the beginning of the 21st Century and in the middle of San Francisco Bay.


W: One of the big principles behind public space right now that's really getting a lot of attention is the idea of deliberately designing for a mix of different uses, too. In addition to designing for a large variety of people, you want it to be spaces that are used at all times of the day and night. Are these pocket parks a way of trying to make this -- I don't want to say a 24-hour neighborhood, because that has it's own cheesy connotations -- but was there an attempt to create social spaces that kept this neighborhood going at all times of the day and night, essentially?

CH: Yes and a lot of this is going to be evolving over the long gestation period of the island’s development period. Right now we are marking the basic intentions. As for the design, some of these parcels of land will be developed by various different developers. There will be many different architects involved over time. So all of these ideas will be evolving. Right now, we're trying to set in place a very strong framework that encourages certain things to happen. In terms of the smaller neighborhoods, the idea is that there will be a provision for flexible community space that provides a place for people to come together for various informal activities. These could range from someone setting up a fruit stand on a Saturday morning to providing a place for community gatherings or a barbeque or smaller retail-oriented spaces. Basics like dry cleaners or a shoe shop or coffee shops will be provided within smaller spaces spread throughout the neighborhood parks. This is an experiment that will be tested over time, to see how much and what kind of life these parks should have.

The development will also incorporate retail and entertainment -- restaurants, cafes, boutiques along grocery and produce and other neighborhood serving retail – in concert with the historic buildings along the Marina side, which faces Yerba Buena Island. The intention is to allow the neighborhoods to be fairly quiet places in the evenings with just the right balance of life, while having the high activity entry zone on the southeast corner of the island where everyone, residents and visitors alike, arrive. One of the challenges of broad mixed use is that the developer’s analysis has shown that this island cannot support a significant amount of office space. Therefore, [the plan] is heavily weighted toward residential. There will be some professional office space, but not a lot. I am sure that as excitement builds when the project starts there will be more interest by cultural institutions as well.


W: Let's step in a slightly different direction and talk about the architecture of the buildings on the site. You said that this is going to be developed over a long period of time, probably by different developers with many different architects, so...are there architectural guidelines for what's going to be built, or is it kind of a "design as you will" attitude, or how is that being approached? Because there's definitely a pretty solid aesthetic to the renderings that have been produced so far. It's very modern, with the crystalline towers...

CH: I worked on a series of ideas which we translated into a drawing for an exhibition that Darrin Alfred of SFMOMA and Julie Kim curated for the AIA in September called Street Cred. It was a speculative rendering of one of the streets on TI that does convey ideas I hope will be carried through in the island’s architecture. The drawings illustrate buildings that have a very strong orientation to the street. I worked with Tom Leader on the environmental ideas and you'll notice that the landscape favors a kind of riparian aesthetic that's much wilder, or natural, than what you might think of as usual in more formal urban landscape architecture. It is my personal belief that the defining architectural aesthetics must have an authenticity which includes the issues we have been discussing regarding setting and place and especially recognizes its temporal setting – that is, the beginning of the 21st century and contemporaneous aesthetics. How specific the base developers and the master plan architect can be in terms of the aesthetics of the island is going to be something that will be evolving. From a personal point of view, I am not a great believer in rigid architectural guidelines. As an architect, I've often found them unnecessarily constraining. Often they rigidly define a singular set of ideas frozen at a point in time and don't allow for the kind of contemporary spontaneity that happens when things are built over years or decades.

The architecture of great cities has an organic quality that incrementally develops. So the goal here will be to find a way to encourage a kind of familial overlay but with it variety. The important thing is that all the work be ambitious architecture. To achieve that requires recruiting the best and most talented design architects to work on the various components over time. It should be a rigorous process. I hope I qualify for a piece of it….


W: So the renderings that exist now, where there are generic buildings for the low-rises for the most part, there are the high-rises as well, which certainly have a more distinct look to them -- the main tower is what I'm thinking of, really -- so are those designed to be built as they look here or are those just massing studies or examples of what could be.

CH: Well they are massing studies, but they are inspired by a set of ideas that are consistent with the overall island design. These renderings represent a very clear attitude about the relationship between architecture and the natural environment. The low-rise buildings are designed to shelter public space from the wind. The height and scale are related to the scale of the spaces they define. We are working on making very narrow streets to create a sense of intimate public space and maximize the potential for social interaction. Most of the people on the island, approximately 75%, will be housed in these lowrise homes.

The mid-rise buildings are the ones that are typically positioned at each of the neighborhood parks we discussed earlier. These small towers mark each neighborhood cluster on the skyline, providing an overall sense of identity and place. These towers are intentionally placed on the north and west sides of these parks to allow the maximum amount of sunlight in the public spaces while providing a wind buffer. And the shape of the towers themselves, if you look at the plan, is a lozenge shape or kind of a rounded trapezoidal footprint. It's like a sailboat, with the bow pointed into the wind. We are presenting the smallest face to the west to let the wind slip by the building with minimum disturbance. Tall buildings can create what we call a "sail effect," where the face of the building that is the leeward side tends to lower wind pressure and bring wind down into public spaces. We have positioned these buildings on the island to minimize any negative effects of wind at the pedestrian scale.

Finally, the tall buildings as shown in the drawing are shaped in a way that is meant to convey a very organic aesthetic. The intent is to create towers that might be more aligned with a cyprus or a redwood than with a machine-made object. We are able to do this because our computers today allow us to analyze structures in ways that are much more supple and nuanced than we ever could have fifteen or twenty years ago. Consequently, we are able to create what was shown on that rendering: the form of an exoskeleton that provides for the seismic bracing of a tall building while allowing for a great deal of glass around the perimeter so we can have as much light as possible inside the building.

The shapes of the buildings will be tested further. The intent is to develop a language that reinforces the basic tenets of the island plan. The aspiration should be for a level of authenticity that can serve as an example to inspire those architects who come after us rather than writing down a set of rules that they have to follow. The most critical issue is to achieve a uniformly high level of architectural excellence, not architectural uniformity. This comes back to the need to consistently select the best design architects – and the need for a mechanism or process to make sure that happens over the course of the island’s development. It should be a highly sought-after honor in the 21st century, as it was for example during the last half of the 20th in Columbus, Indiana, to be selected to design a building at Treasure Island.

W: So it's more of a general aesthetic design than the hard and fast architectural code that, actually, the suburbs get a lot of flak for.

CH: Exactly.


W: The one question I wanted to ask to wrap up would be that I read something about this having some level of approval from the city...is it the plan that was approved?

CH: The basic land concept was approved by the TI Development Authority and has been very well received by virtually all stake holders and the public. But the process continues….

W: Alright. So what is the general status of the project right now?

CH: The general status is that is the negotiation process with the Navy regarding the transfer of the land is continuing. But I understand it is coming to a final resolution, so we are now re-starting again our detailed planning studies to take it to the next stage.


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Thanks again to Craig for doing this interview. Where is looking forward to seeing this project break ground!!



Links:
The Craig Hartman Interview - Part I

Bending the Grid (SOM) (photo credits)

The Craig Hartman Interview - Part I

The following interview, in which SOM San Francisco design partner Craig W. Hartman, FAIA, discusses his firm's plan for the redevelopment of San Francisco's Treasure Island, was conducted in two parts. The first two questions asked by Where, as well as Mr. Hartman's first answer, have been copied directly from an email exchange. We then switched to a telephone conversation, which begins here with Mr. Hartman's second answer. The interview will be posted in two parts that do not correspond with the change in conversation methods, but rather split the text into two even halves.



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Where: As big-ticket and high-profile as SOM's proposal for the redevelopment Treasure Island (TI) is, it looks like it belongs on its site in the way that all great projects do; from what the renderings show, it's the kind of development that, when finished, could become a part of the city in a way that that makes one wonder what the place was like before the project was built. But what's most fascinating about TI is the fact that, even in a city with such incredibly rich architectural and cultural traditions, the site seems to have lacked traditional contextual cues. So what was the starting point for designing of this development?

Craig Hartman: The starting point wasn't a question of aesthetics – or even architecture. The question was what have we learned, collectively, about intelligent forms of human settlement that should be applied to this place? What are the possibilities when a community is developed as a singular idea as opposed to incremental growth? Can we conceive a holistic urban ecology that goes beyond sustainability – sustaining existing conditions - to be regenerative? Can we plant the seeds of an ecology that brings together stewardship of the natural environment, diversity (not only human but species diversity) along with social and cultural vitality and what kind of urban and architectural form would support these aims? In short, given the chance to start from tabla rasa, what might a 21st Century neighborhood representing the values of San Francisco look like?

The setting is an inversion of [what] might be typically thought of as urban context. The site itself is synthetic - a recycled manmade artifact in which the earth's topography is an artificial flat plane and the structures, for the most part, conceived as temporary shelter. The island was built contemporary with the Bay Bridge as a manmade extension of Yerba Buena Island. Some of Treasure Island's fill came from the tunnel cut through Yerba Buena. The island's first wave of architecture was the temporary fantasy created for the 1939 International Exposition and the second, also intended to have a short shelf life, consisted of the structures created to accommodate the Navy's occupation in World War II.

So the real "contextual" influence was the vast horizontal plane of the Bay, the City of San Francisco skyline to the south and the drama of the weather pattern sweeping through the throat of the Golden Gate and across the island on a daily basis. Wind, fog and sun are the determinants, along with the physical reality of the subsurface geology and the desire to create a place that is compact and walkable - highly accessible to mass transit, culture and urban amenities on one hand and a variety of open space on the other. To achieve this required an interweaving of low-rise and tall buildings, a variety of open space typology and a fine grain of streets and pedestrian pathways.


W: I know that "context" has become something of a dirty word...or at least a word that has sort of lost most of its meaning in architecture since no one can really seem to agree on what it means. This is lamentable, I think, since the concept itself has been forsaken for a semantic argument, and sometimes it feels like the whole idea of a buildings responding to the sites on which they're built gets waylaid in the process. At any rate, the strength of the TI plan is that it draws from its surroundings without trying to mimic them. One of the most interesting things about the plan is the way that the wind patterns were used to determine the organization of the buildings and the open space, and how the grid would be canted. (The architectural romantic in me loves the concept of a "city shaped by the wind"). I'm interested to know how the other intangible factors that you brought up -- sun, fog, geology, even the cultural values of San Francisco -- helped to define the physical environment in the project.

CH: I agree that context doesn't have a lot of currency in architectural discourse at the moment, and it's not really surprising because contextualism in the [1990s] got branded as a style, an architectural style, and it became a crutch, as these styles often do. Specifically in the case of contextualism, in my observation at least, it became a code word for a lukewarm architecture that tepidly reflected history rather than authentically addressing its place, and I think the outcome of that was that originality and innovation really took a backseat to timidity. So I agree with that point but I also would suggest that the work we're doing at Treasure Island is based upon context, but context that has a larger meaning and is more broadly considered. Context might be considered both as physical and cultural, and the physical landscape includes the natural as well as the built environment.

The other point that I would make before getting into the specifics of context for TI is that by now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, we've learned some lessons from the past about forms of building, the effects of consumption and the nature of human habitation. Buildings consume the majority of energy production and emit the majority of the carbon dioxide in the world - and the second [largest source of these things] is our cars and transportation. Add those two things together with sprawling, consumptive patterns of development and we get the environmental crisis that we have today. So clearly, if we address the questions of the way we settle and the way we move we can begin to address our major climate problems. All those things were part of the consideration of context for this island


W: You talked earlier about what you referred to as a "regenerative urbanism." How does TI take architecture that step from sustainability to actually being a regenerative urban place?

CH: Well that would be, perhaps, a hopeful term rather than an absolute metric. I think most environmentalists would say that it's very difficult to make an urban environment truly regenerative because "regenerative" would suggest that you're not sustaining merely current conditions but, through the work that is being produced, you've actually initiated a mending or healing of the environment. Treasure Island has been inhabited by the Navy since the early 1940’s. Their use of the island has been very pragmatic, based upon the most expedient and efficient operational pattern of the time. Militaries throughout history have not exactly been noted for their gentle use of the land. Like perhaps most of us, the Navy was not very mindful of consequences of certain material use, the way that rainwater runs off the island into the Bay and not really mindful of the energy that is consumed, because all of those resources were thought to be plentiful and... [Searches for the right word]

W: Self-replenishing.

CH: Exactly. And we now know that all of these things have a finite quality, or that they are part of a system that is recycled continuously. So what we tried to do here is to take this manmade island and bring it to a level that it had never achieved before. This includes naturally cleaning water that strikes the surface when it rains through bioswales in the earth, purifying it by a natural means. It also includes minimizing water that is consumed on the island, maximizing recycling of water that is used and being certain that all water that does make it back into the Bay is clean. [We are also] generating produce on the island with organic farms and in the process, making a place that supports a diversity of species that includes not only a healthy environment for humans but also supports the widest possible variety of others; birds, animals, reptiles and so forth. It's meant to be an incremental example of the way that we can coinhabit urban spaces with nature and with a wide and varied organic diversity – people, plants, animals. And this urbanistically, the goal is a vital human social and cultural diversity.


W: Im interested by the way that you talk about integrating the two halves of the [built environment] and the natural environment because there's a lot of public space on the island in your plan, and the density of the built areas is really high which allows -- I think -- more than half of the island to be left open, right?

CH: That's correct.

W: And I thought when I was reading about it initially that it was really interesting that nowadays [in] most developments the centerpiece will be a mall or a commercial district, and it's always retail, retail, retail, kind of like a drum beat. What I thought was really interesting about TI is that most of the public space is not really oriented toward commerce but more toward...natural settings. Was that something that was [done consciously]?

CH: That was absolutely a guiding principal when we got into this. We had the opportunity of coming into this project relatively late in the process in terms of the design. There had been a previous design for the island that was based upon a lower density [with] housing spread out across the island and a kind of greensward that wound through the middle. It wasn't meant to be suburban but I think that was the outcome. My colleagues and I at SOM were asked to join the team when an additional development entity was added to the team and after the project had gone through a lengthy public review process in which many issues had been raised. We joined an existing team that included SMWM, architects and planners and CMG, landscape architects along with an array of high level engineers including civil and Arup who focused on sustainable engineering and transportation strategies. Also added at that time were BCV architects who focus on retail and Hornberger Worstell who focus on hotels.

There are many stakeholders and interested parties whose opinions a perspectives must be considered in any San Francisco project, and especially one of this scale, prominence and importance. There are official agencies specifically set up to govern and critique the development, beginning with the Treasure Island Development Authority and the TI Citizen’s Advisory Board along with City Agencies such as the Planning Department and the Department of the Environment and various California State jurisdictional bodies. There are also advocacy groups and concerned citizens. A consistent concern shared by all was that the future of this island needed to be based upon sustainable urban principles. So pretty late in the process, only about a year ago, when we got involved with this we benefitted, really, from what had been a lot of critique -- very constructive critique, I think -- by the community, and that really helped. It gave us the ability to have some leverage in the process. The development team was very much aligned with these principles and wanted to make it happen.

Perhaps the most important concept we brought to this is the making of a very compact urban space focused on mass transit and aquatic mass transit -- the ferry. We repositioned...the ferry key on the west side [of the island], as close as possible to San Francisco’s Ferry Terminal as opposed to the back side, where it had been proposed. Then [we worked] to really densify or compact the housing through the selective use of tall buildings placed to focus density for social purposes or for ease of access to transit. This concept allowed us to have the great park.

The park is different from the parks of the 19th and 20th century, to a certain extent, in the sense that it has multiple uses and characteristics, from natural and wild to cultivated and urban and is not only recreational but also has pedagogical and productive elements. There is a structured recreational area, but structured recreation requires a lot of irrigation, so that is also compact and designed in a way that it can be multi-use. We also worked on making parts of the island productive – a 20 acre organic farm that visitors can actually walk through and experience as a “farm to table” pedagogic tool. Then vast amounts of [the green spaces] are simply wild lands that are shaped to allow natural systems to operate, like tidal pools that support a diversity of species types. So that was a guiding goal here: to minimize, as much as we possibly could, our ecological footprint, and maximize the environmental potential.


W: I thought it was really interesting that, in addition to there being a lot of it, it doesn't seem like the [green space is] just tacked on. It's worked all throughout the project and sort of integrated throughout the entire island, and I thought one of the most interesting ways that manifested itself is in the rotated grid and how the landscape is used as a buffer for the wind. That struck me as really interesting and I was wondering if you might talk more about that.

CH: That's a very good observation. This island is a beautiful setting -- an unbelievable setting -- so the views from the island are extraordinary. But it also suffers the brunt of all the major weather coming in from the Pacific, right through the Golden Gate passage. There are very powerful photos of the fog coming through that passage and sweeping across the Bay but you have to spend a lot of time on the island to really understand the effects of constant wind. It's a very uncomfortable feeling so at the very beginning the idea was to make this place habitable in a comfortable way and to look to nature and traditional agrarian techniques for ways creating calm and sheltering occupied spaces.

The first thought was to simply create the quality of sand dunes on the westerly side that would reflect the wind upward. We found that that does have an effect, but it's a fairly micro impact. And we are doing that - creating a shaped topography on the west side that creates localized calm areas. I think its very interesting, especially the way Kevin Congerland of CMG developed the idea as a clearly manmade geometry that operates as dunes and swales do in wild landscapes.
But in the urban areas, the neighborhoods, the technique we found most effective was to place the buildings themselves so that they sheltered the public spaces on the leeward side. Through work with RWDI, the wind consultants, we found that there is roughly a 15:1 relationship between the height of an object and the distance from that object that one could expect relative calm on the leeward side.

The first and most obvious fact is that the wind is coming from the west and the island is tilted upward to the north by approximately 32 degrees off of due north. So that creates this angle that you see as the main organizing structure in the island's grid plan. We have turned all of the major streets in that direction and have placed the buildings so that they are creating buffers along that edge. Borrowing from agrarian traditions in which wind rows – trees - are used to create sheltered areas to protect croplands which you see in our own country and also in Europe. We've simply taken this idea and extended it through the urban space to the open space as a wind buffer. So, on one hand, its nature and on the other, architecture, that does the work the work of creating calmed and sheltered public space. To further this concept, we staggered the streets in the other direction so that we're not creating wind channels.

This shifted, or bent grid, orients the principal public spaces and streets to the south, bringing the maximum amount of sunlight directly onto these spaces for the maximum hours of the day. That's a very important thing, to have sun in these spaces, because the wind and fog is so prevalent, resulting in cool temperatures most of the time. The fortuitous thing is that the 32 degree angle, directly to the south, also opens view corridors directly onto the city of San Francisco. It creates a really powerful connection between the island’s public spaces and San Francisco’s skyline.


W: So the view down those streets looks straight at the city, then. The view down the street would kind of frame San Francisco.

CH: That's correct. The angle frames the city, and brings high south sun on the island streets. Perhaps the other point worth mentioning is your comment about how the green space is woven through the urban, the wild and the organic, agrarian parts of the island. That was a very conscious idea, to create a purposeful set of varied and interwoven public spaces including an art park, urban spaces, organic farm and wild lands, all linked to the windrows. One of the most important for the social life of the island is a series of small urban parks we have cut into the neighborhoods. These are small -- approximately a half-block -- in size. With their scale and the placement, the intention is to create a social nucleus or focus for smaller-grained neighborhoods throughout the larger community. So the neighborhoods and the island’s social life become an integral part of the island’s environmental and ecological agenda.




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Tomorrow Where will feature Part II of this interview, in which we delve into the social and community aspects of the TI design, as well as the architecture. Don't miss it!

Links:
Bending the Grid (SOM) (photo credits)

Drifting Through the City, Literally: Soldiers in the Living Room (Guest Post by Mirabai Auer)

He said: 'this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, "Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!"
–Commander Kokhavi of the Paratrooper Brigade, Israeli Defense Forces

A number of architectural and urbanist theories, dealing with geo-psychology and the conceptualization of city space, are being taught in an unlikely place -- military academies. Their strangely adapted applications serve as a reminder that ideas do not flow narrowly from the "conceiver" to "intended-user", but are rather commodities in the world marketplace, available for mass consumption and arguably, manipulation.

Eyal Wiezman details this phenomenon in his piece, "The Art of War", in which he outlines the emergence of a new guerilla strategy utilized by the Israeli Defense Forces, referred to as infestation.  In an attack on the city of Nebulus in 2002, Israeli soldiers moved through the city, via a series of holes and tunnels.  More simply, their game of war was not fought visibly on the street; the effort was conducted almost entirely indoors.  The soldiers avoided alleys, streets, courtyards, and the like.  Indeed, the soldiers were 'walking through walls,' fighting from within the urban fabric, climbing through homes, abandoned warehouses, and shops.

All of the aforementioned places have historically been considered, to varying degrees, private. After all, most homeowners don't envision their living rooms as fertile grounds for battle, nor do they anticipate soldiers 'worming their way inside (their homes)' emerging from freshly drilled holes in their drywall. Yet, increasingly, military education is proposing that the city is in fact a borderless place, in which the boundaries and intended uses of space (both public and private) are fluid and dynamic, i.e. the living room is both a strategic location and a place for television-watching and snacking.  One woman recounts her personal experience in the attack: "Imagine it – you're sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they're after you, if they've come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else."

The shift in tactical thinking reflects the military's adoption of several key canons of architecture and philosophy, among them Situationism.  In the 1960's, Situationists advocated for the creative and critical re-examination of the urban landscape through such practices as dérive and détournement, which involves the adaptation of obsolete spaces for new, unintended uses.  These practices encourage the re-envisioning of how spaces are used and by whom.  

For example, a dérive, or drifting walk, is propelled by emotion and spontaneity; typologically, it is rather different from the often mechanical and repetitive walk to work (or store, school, etc.)  Situationists suggested that curiously and attentively traversing new pathways could be a catalytic exercise in the process imaging the built environment afresh, and set the stage for new social contexts.  These practices grew out of an increasing dissatisfaction with landscape of the capitalist city, which Situationists believed was designed in an overly prescriptive and dogmatic fashion, and was ultimately an expression of class relationships.  Arguably, if the capitalist city had strictly-defined rules of engagement, then the practices of dérive and détournement were intended to de-contextualize the overly-ordered city and enable citizens to think outside of the systematic box.

These concepts, through the traditional lenses of planning and urban studies, are oft presented as visionary, progressive, or artistic (after all, isn't the idea of détournement partially responsible for adaptive reuse of industrial space into lofts and studios?).  In fact, yesterday's Where post, Traversing Newark Avenue, is a rather classic example of dérive in which the author documents the physical and social nuances of a Jersey City street in photos, text, and sound.  
 
Ironically, the military's co-optation of the same ideas has been used to bolster already (arguably) bloated military power and to justify the rather undemocratic invasion of private space.  Yet, after all, aren't they simply envisioning a new use for the home?  And a new relationship between the dwellers and visitors (troops, in this case)?  The author Eyal notes: "In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism."

The manipulation of philosophy and theory does in fact occur religiously.  Yet, somehow in the academic world, ideas seem to grow in their own Petri dishes, undisturbed by realities.  These little glass plates of ideas are assumed to be tended by the few and carefully trained.  And yet, ideas like dérive exist in the muddied, multi-layered context of the city; "The Art of War" reinforces the common-sense notion that places are birthed from context and a multiplicity of vantage points and that urban theory is never purely applied -- it is always a working model.

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Big thanks to Mirabai Auer, an urban planning Masters' candidate at the University of Illinois-Chicago who works part-time as a GIS map maker.

Five Innovation Myths Applied to Urbanism

A recent CEOs for Cities post pointed out a great article by Dev Patnaik that outlined five common mistakes made by businesses looking to be innovators. All of them, in one way or another, dealt with the myth of the silver bullet, and the article made a clear and concise argument for the importance of institutional context and diversified methodology. The myths that Patnaik does away with are all important for urbanists to consider as cities work to position themselves as both innovative places and as incubators of economic and technological innovation. On top of that, responding to context (cities each have very different conditions, physically and economically) and diversification (urban problems are both numerous and intrinsically interconnected, and there is no one solution to anything) are particularly applicable. The following is a breakdown, in urbanism terminology, of Patnaik's ideas.

• Over-reliance on high-profile, "sexy" projects

The Guggenheim Bilbao made just as big a splash in the fields of urban planning and policy as it did in architecture. Now, it's a commonly-held belief that cities can build megaprojects that will catapult them into the international spotlight and trigger a surge of prosperity. In reality, even when such projects are independently successful they are never the silver bullet that was imagined. Chicago's Millennium Park, for example, is by all accounts a huge success as a public space and tourist attraction. Still, it was a financial fiasco, and the glamour and goodwill afforded the city by the park is now being squandered by the miserable failure of the city's transit system -- a battle in which the City of Chicago is too strapped to play any meaningful role. Big projects can be important to cities, but it's even more important to pay close attention to what trade-offs will need to be made in terms of basic services (transit ain't the only thing hurtin' in Chicago) in order to pull off a good piece of stunt urbanism. Millennium Park is an innovative piece of landscape architecture, but as an urban regenerator it's as archaic as they come.

• Unhealthy fascination with unique, charismatic civic leaders

Michael Bloomberg, Gavin Newsome, and Ken Livingstone all command a considerable amount of media attention for their efforts to improve their cities. This innovation red herring is especially potent in urbanism: everyone loves a superstar mayor. And while these mayors can teach us a lot, it is important to remember that the best and most innovative mayors from the past (Jaime Lerner is a prime example) were willing to take risks; that is to say that great mayors have often made names for themselves by bucking trends and trying new ideas that were responsive to their specific cities rather than following standard procedures being replicated, cut-and-paste style, in other cities.

• Misapplication of other cities' approaches

Building on the previous point, it is often assumed that because Idea X worked in City Y, it will be equally successful in City Z. This is absurd. Take, for instance, the public transportation system in Medellín. The city's 3.2 million inhabitants live in a long, narrow valley. While the central part of the city, located in the lowest and flattest part of the valley, is served by a standard subway system, the densely populated neighborhoods that climb up the western hillsides are served by the Metrocable, a cable-car line that has become very successful both as a transit line and -- to the delight of city officials -- a tourist attraction that has helped (along with other projects) to lower crime and improve the economic outlook for the neighborhood's poorer residents. The lesson to be learned here for other cities is that unconventional transit options can be worth the risk if they are properly tailored to the needs of the community. The misapplication of this lesson would be for a flat city to assume that building a cable car would be a good idea since it worked in Medellín. This is a relatively simple illustration, but you get the idea.

• Descent into a cycle of self-recrimination

Pittsburgh, the oddball city so dear to my own heart, is the poster child for this kind of thinking. Many Pittsburghers labor under the assumption that their city is suffering because it is unable to hold onto the talented young people who graduate from major universities in the area like the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. (In fact, Pittsburgh has an unusually high rate of retention of its young natives). Pittsburghers see Creative Class capitals like San Francisco and Austin attracting large numbers of young creative types and makes the assumption that it is not cool enough to compete. Untold energy is put into trying to make the city cooler and more attractive to young people. Meanwhile, the draconian tax system that discourages start-ups (the number that exist regardless of this fact is a testament to the city's unrealized potential) go unchanged because Pittsburgh fails to realize that music festivals and extensive bike paths aren't going to save the city. The Burgh was a global hub of commercial and technological innovation at the turn of the 19th century. To be successful today, all cities (Pittsburgh included) would do well to look back at their strongest points and learn how to replicate that kind of success.

• Resignation to superficial changes

Patnaik uses the example "Let's just paint the walls purple" to mock companies' shallow understanding of the funky interiors of creative business HQs -- most famously, the Googleplex. Cities have a long and storied history of believing in the power of cosmetic changes only to be let down by the results. A phenomenon that you might call Trinket Urbanism had a death grip on North American cities until relatively recently as every city rushed to have their version of one-off amenities built in other cities. Baltimore's Festival Harbor spawned a gazillion of those so-called "Festival Marketplaces." Arenas were all the rage throughout much of the 1990s. Making a city more attractive is certainly not a bad idea, but there is a dangerous perceived correlation between beautification and prosperity. Flowering medians do not a center of innovation make.

(Photo from Flickr user emsef. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Innovation Mistakes (CEOs for Cities)

Five Common Mistakes in Innovation (Business Week)

New City, Old Urbanism

Cities in the New World followed a relatively simple logic that involved gridded streets and a central public space. In both North and South America, the evidence of this development pattern is most readily apparent in smaller towns and cities, where grids remain regular and humanly scaled, and town squares and plazas mayores are alive and well. Urban development has largely erased or obscured the original layouts of larger cities on both continents, but the real difference between the impact that the form had can best be seen in how they build cities today.

In North America, for instance, the meandering suburban road, splintered with cul-de-sacs, has become the favored layout, while South American suburbs often maintain the urban grid, often extending the original further and further into the hinterland. Even more than the grid, though, the plaza mayor is encoded in the DNA of Latin American cities. Since the conquests of the Portuguese and the Spanish began reshaping the continent through colonization and subsequent urbanization, every settlement -- from the smallest of towns to enormous cities like Buenos Aires and São Paulo -- has been centered around one of these compact public spaces. So while contemporary North American towns and neighborhoods are usually built around retail clusters, when it is time to build a new city down South, the plaza mayor remains the central feature.

The image at the top of this post is an aerial photograph of the central area of Palmas, Brazil. Founded in 1989 after Brazil created the new state of Tocantins by separating the northern and southern territories of Goias, everything about this city is new. Still, as the aerial shows, the central feature of this rigidly-plotted micropolis (pop. 187,000) maintains the traditional form of the South American city, with an unrelenting grid and a visibly dominant central plaza that plays host to several important government offices.


It is, by all photographic accounts, a very green and spacious place. By all written accounts, it's also one of the most economically robust cities in the country at the moment. But cashflows and palm fronds aside, what earns Palmas its reputation as a modern-day Brasilia are its public buildings. Hubris is immediately visible in Palmas' architecture. The government house and administrative buildings spaced evenly across the massive plaza mayor are a delightful and at times shocking mix of modernist elegance and Las Vegas kitch. In short, the Brazilians have done it again: they've built a capital from scratch.

As an outside observer, it seems to me that Palmas might be the most Brazilian of Brazilian cities as this southern juggernaut enters the 21st century struggling to gain more than just a regional foothold in the global economic/power structure. After all, Palmas is a city that remains true to tradition while making it seem distinctly modern. The eccelctic plaza and broad, tree-lined avenues look fresh and exciting, even though they are variations on a theme started in the 1500s (or earlier, depending on how you look at it). The architecture and the sheer expansiveness of the place are daring and ambitious in and of themselves. Palmas is a city with something to prove, and a plan on how to do it.

Really...just look at it.



(Photos from Panoramio users jpncerrado, GILMAR QUEIROZ, Rodrigo Goncalves Luz, and Ronaldo Mitt. Don't forget -- clicking on the images takes you to the full-color originals.)


Links:
Palmas.org

Boom time in Brazil (BBC News)

Conveyer's Subjective Atlas of Jersey City

Josef Reyes, the publisher/editor of Conveyer, was kind enough to send me the latest copy of the zine that, in Reyes' words, "[attempts to articulate] Jersey City's 'sense of place' by documenting snatches of daily life in the city. The idea is that by examining how people experience the city on an everyday basis, we get a vivid picture of what the city really feels like."

Overall, Conveyer is a very thoughtful read, but my favorite part came right at the beginning; "A Subjective Atlas of Jersey City" is made up of four maps, hand drawn by individual JC residents, accompanied by photos of the places marked and explained on the maps. It's likely that this has been done somewhere before, but that hardly lessens the impact of the article. This simple mapping out of different peoples' experiences of the city, as disparate as they are, helps to form an idea of what it might be like to live in Jersey City.

Reading about urban design projects or shiny new buildings or traffic problems in cities scattered across the globe is easy enough to do; that is to say, there's no shortage. Nor do we lack stories on what it's like to visit these disparate places; if anything, there are too many stories about what it's like to be a rich tourist in a foreign city. But the stories that seem hard to come by are the ones that tell us what life is like, day to day, in a given place. What, we are left to wonder, are the places with these fabulous buildings, avenues, and metro stations really like for the people why actually use them?

In its mission to shed some light on this question for Jersey City, Conveyer succeeds most readily with the "Subjective Atlas." It's a really lovely collection, and it manages to convey (oops, a pun!) a great deal of meaning in a relatively short space. The places that the reader learns about through the maps become almost personal; the vicarious experience of the reading scratches the same itch as reality TV...yet it does so in a much more satisfying way. The maps are scripted, in their own way, but this is done by the person whose life we are peeking into, not for them.

Jeff Edwards' map depicts the neighborhood where he and his s.o. Amy were living in September of 2001. Edwards makes his own experience of the 9-11 attacks real by using the context of his former community to illustrate how he grappled with the effects of what happened that day. We learn about the place by learning about the people who live[d] there. The last marker on the map, at the bottom of the page, is an arrow pointing away from the neighborhood. "On the first anniversary of 9-11, [we] were working on a condo we had just bought. Our new neighborhood is this way. Sometimes we miss the old one." And I couldn't help but think, as I turned the page, that I kind of would, too.


Links:
Conveyer (Image credit)

WEEKEND READING: April 14-20, 2007

First item on today's Weekend Reading: I can be kind of absentminded sometimes. For example: forgetting that yesterday was Friday. There I sat in a wifi cafe in the Loop, waiting for friends, and trying to figure out what to blog about. Weekend Reading never even crossed my mind. Like I said: absentminded. So anyway, my apologies for the delay. And now:

Google Earth has added what they're calling a "Global Awareness Layer" that incudes features like An Atlas of Our Changing World (check out the Las Vegas overlays!) and the well-publicized interactive history of the Conflict in Darfur. This is a great example of how electronic mapping technology can be used to educate people about conflicts going on around the world--or in their own communities. Neighborhood action maps could be used to indicate dangerous areas in need of increased police presence, damaged or deteriorating infrastructure, empty lots and other community problems. This is considerably more small-scale than the Darfur map, but just consider the possibilities that tech like this has for empowering individual citizens. If you don't already have it, you can download Google Earth, free, HERE.

Speaking of Earth, tomorrow is Earth Day. Yay, Earth. (Image from www.msss.com)

And here's a link to a Wikipedia article about the "Triple bottom line" business philosophy. Sounds like a great way to incorporate the ideas of the market economy and the humane metropolis.

BLDGBLOG is, of course, one of the most delightfully cerebral blogs on the web. This week saw one of my favorite posts yet; focusing on an old interview with Paul Virilio, it draws a subtle parallel between Europe's post-WWII lanscape of fear and today's. The post is accompanied by haunting images of crumbling bunkers and, just in case you're not interested yet, includes this line: "War, in Virilio's formulation, was thus a kind of terrestrial reorganization – a reshaping of the Earth's surface; it was, among other things, landscape architecture pursued by other means." That's good stuff.

Brand Avenue featured a rather lovely essay on architectural context in the urban environment, using a striking City Hall extention in Cork as a sort of case study for how to properly insert modern architecture into an area not rich in the style.

I love benches. Theirs is probably the most egregious absence in American cityscapes. No matter where you go, there's nowhere to sit and relax or people watch...hell, most bus stops in the cities I've visited are bench-free. Here in Chicago, L platforms with more than one or two benches are a rarity. This article from Treehugger brings to our attention "guerilla benchers" in London, who do...well, after the intro there, probably exactly what you think they do. Now if we could just get those guys to start doing "installations" across the pond...

Everyone's favorite random links blog, Growabrain, features a post today entitled Architects in film. There are plenty of architecture/planning-related links to help you justify taking a lazy afternoon, including Mark Luthringer’s fascinating Ridgemont Typologies e-xhibit.

And finally, a short'n'sweet op-ed from the International Herald-Tribune about the important role that cities will be playing in the coming push to create a sustainable global community. Check that out here.

The Rundown

So a few days of slacking and travel have added up to me being a bit behind on my e-reading and blogging. To remedy this situation, today's post will be a few bite-sized nuggets of info and links to a number of unconnected articles.

First item: I've heard about the Memphis riverfront redevelopment that the guys over at Project for Public Spaces are working on...several times, actually. And forgive me for criticizing a technically good project, but the whole thing just seems really tired. Like, "fountains, playgrounds, street vendors" is kind of...just...bleh. It's the same old stuff, rearranged on a new lot. It seems like the banks of the Mississipi deserve something more innovative. Perhaps an experiential playground like Chicago's Millennium Park?

Perhaps I'm just antsy after reading Josh Stephens' most recent post over at Interchange, the Planetizen blog. Stephens talks about a survey by Mercer Consulting in which the US's cities faired quite poorly in terms of quality of life, with none of our many, many cities breaking the top 25. I'm always very wary of rankings and statistics, but as Stephens points out, it's not the rankings but the fact "that hundreds of millions of Americans live, grow up, and toil in places that are less clean, less safe, less pleasant, less sociable, and less inspiring than counterparts around the globe" that's really disturbing.

Interchange has been lively lately, and another great post comes from Lance Freeman. Freeman saved me the trouble of writing a post I was planning for this coming week on congestion pricing by saying exactly what I was going to say (and he did a better job than I probably would have.) The argument: congestion pricing is bad for poor people. Go read it.

John over at A Daily Dose of Architecture has started a cool new thingy where he'll be quoting relevant pieces from his personal readings on architecture, urbanism, and the like. The first features this kind of amazing excerpt from Bill McKibbin's The Age of Missing Information about the role of the natural landscape as context for buildings and communities.

Finally, a quick shout-out for what I think is one of the best urbanism sites on the web. CEOs For Cities is a very cool organization whose membership list includes some very important people. Everything they do is fascinating, and the blog is a great read. Bookmark it, add it to your RSS, or do whatever it is that you crazy kids do these days. Just keep it on your radar. (I'm sure they'll be popping up again in this blog.) There are two recent posts on gentrification and urban immigration that are more than worth the time it takes to read them.


Links:
Ideas for riverfront flow at workshop (commercialappeal.com)

So Many Cities, So Much Mediocrity (Interchange)

The equity considerations of Congestion Pricing (Interchange)

Literary Dose #1 (Daily Dose of Architecture)

CEOs for Cities Blog

The Chicago Spire In (Or Rather, Out Of) Context

The embarassing mega-antennea is gone. Thank God.

Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has a new article on the re-designed supertall skyscraper proposed for the city's downtown waterfront. Kamin's assesment of the building is mixed: while he praises the its inspiring silhouette for breaking "the flat-topped precedent of Sears Tower and Chicago's other 20th Century giants," he argues that the Spire still has a ways to go.

I have to agree, though I doubt that it will ever become what it should be. As Kamin's multimedia presentation (which accompanies the article) notes, Calatrava stated in a recent presentation that the form of the Chicago Spire is based on a snail's shell. What, exactly, does this have to do with downtown Chicago? You'd be hard-pressed to find a person who'd deny the abundance of potential contextual cues that could be taken from a site like the one that the Spire is proposed for. Chicago has a legendary architectural tradition...and perhaps this is why the (I'll admit, much improved) re-design of the Spire still doesn't feel right: there's no Chicago in it.

My main complaint about most of Calatrava's recent buildings is that, while many are fascinating in terms of their innovative engineering and daring form, they almost never feel like they belong where they are proposed. The starchitect's designs (like those of most contemporary starchitects) feel as if they started as ideas in their creators' heads, and were then superimposed onto a site to which they were not at all connected, purely for the purpose of making a bold personal -- not architectural -- statement. The Spire feels like a very tall, very shiny emblem for the greatness of Santiago Calatrava, not of Chicago.

And seeing as how Chicago is the birthplace of the skyscraper, this seems especially inappropriate.


EDIT (3/28/2007 - 6:22 PM): I forgot to mention -- I do love the amount of public discussion that this project is generating. Whenever the public gets interested in architecture, someone's doing something right. It's just not always the architect of the subject matter.


Links:
Calatrava Unveils Towers Latest Twist (Chicago Tribune)

The Chicago Spire