mammoth // building nothing out of something
September 22, 2009 – 9:04 am

light rail in phoenix

An article in the NYTimes on the successful first half-year of light rail in Phoenix makes note of an interesting point: only a small minority of users (27 percent) are commuters, which inverts the typical use pattern (60 percent of transit users nationwide are commuters).  Despite that low use by commuters, the system has exceeded its project ridership and contributed to an improved “image and perception of Phoenix’s downtown”.  Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really explore why Phoenix has developed this inverted use pattern, and I haven’t been able to locate the study the story is based on.

[via Infrastructurist]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 21, 2009 – 3:38 pm

hadid in glasgow

Entschwindet und Vergeht penned a thoughtful and clever critique of Hadid’s Museum of Transport (in Glasgow) a bit over a month ago:

I’ve already discussed ZHA a number of times here, often in regards to unwittingly interesting things that they’ve done, such as the accidental brutalism of LF1 and the Wolfsburg museum (which I shall only even consider visiting once it has become seriously rotten) and I suppose that this counts as a continuation of the series. The more I think about it though, the more I consider just how truly ridiculous an architectural practice they are, the more I’m beginning to think that she, Patrick and all the rest of them are geniuses after all, just not at all in the way that they would like to think that they are. ZHA are conceptual architects, not because their ideas are particularly intelligent (bet you can’t wait to have PS tell us what it’s all about), but because their over-attachment to a certain architectural ideology leads to results that are so ludicrous that they tell you far more about the world in which they appear than a more serious, successful piece of architecture could. Like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, the success of their blatant shit-ness speaks volumes about the state of their field, its ideologies and economies.

Owen Hatherly’s comment is (unsurprisingly) particularly perceptive:

“…it’s the sheer expanse of the gulf between shape-maker and engineer in Zaha’s work that is so interesting here, and how it conflicts wildly with the modernist ideology to which they pay at least lip service. Stylists who present themselves in one form or another as stylists is one thing, stylists who present themselves as parametricist technocrats is quite another. There is, in Parametricism, as Murphy has said in conversation, a sort of Hegelian will-to-form which constantly tries to deny that what they do is a merely stylistic choice, but rather some sort of expression of the technological-historical weltgeist. This makes it ripe for mocking and poking at, but at least it says (well, not quite straightforwardly) what other architects are thinking – that their work isn’t just arbitrary stylism and dressing-up but *serious stuff*.”

Which is roughly the same thing I find so very frustrating about the AA-incarnation of landscape urbanism, though expressed in different terms…

[via lewism, slowly]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 15, 2009 – 12:00 pm

footnote to dialogue

Talking about “an expanded notion of context”, as Stephen does below, reminds me that there’s a book from a few years ago, Site Matters, which explores the impact of that expansion (though it uses the term ‘site’ rather than ‘context’), in relationship to both landscape and architecture, in a number of very interesting ways.  I remember particularly enjoying Andrea Kahn’s “Defining Urban Sites” and Kristina Hill’s “Shifting Sites”, though its been a while since I read it.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Comments Off on footnote to dialogue | Permalink
September 15, 2009 – 8:11 am

pruned on under spaces

Pruned’s recent series Under Spaces (part one, part two, part three) is very good — I’m particularly enamored with Hans Herrmann’s Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project from Clemson University, which inserts an urban park beneath Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction“, mostly because I think the notion that the space of the park would be continually redefined by “shifting vegetation.. a carefully maintained program of plantings” is pregnant with possibility, the landscape equivalent of a building whose doors are in different places everytime you return to it, brought to life by a staff of surrealist gardeners.

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September 14, 2009 – 11:48 pm

dialogue: finance, context, scale, and intervention

In a recent back and forth between myself (Stephen) and Rory Hyde in the comments of On Finance, Rory noted:

To zoom out even further, are we just talking about ‘context’? To understand the context in architecture normally means literally to understand the site context – the two terms are used interchangeably – but as all of these other factors are now just as unavoidable as the site, they therefore warrant their own techniques (even personal styles) for dealing with them.

I think that’s right. ‘Context’ is probably a useful term around which we can catalyze discussions problematizing the relationship between architecture, financing, politics, marketing, culture.  Last week, Rob and I were talking a bit about how engaging these issues explicitly, during the design process, results in a different understanding of the design professions.  Here is a portion of it, heavily edited to make us sound smarter:

0Obviously this depends on one’s definition of ‘effective’ – I’d define it, casually, as an ability to effect certain changes, an ability to act as an agent.

Stephen: Is the effective architect of the future more than a vigilante lobbyist with a penchant for design?0 I’m reading The Infrastructural City right now, which provides an excellent mapping of the current infrastructural condition of LA, its historical development, and some of the consequences.  Considered against that background, and what we know about how cities develop, ‘designer’ seems a remarkably inefficient career choice, at least when acting in isolation.  Most of the urban projects we would love to see implemented sound a hell of a lot more plausible when pushed by a politician or lobbyist, with some solid PR backing. Can we say that agency isn’t attained through design solutions anymore?

This isn’t just about implementing Landscape Urbanist public works projects, but applies to virtually any work an architect wants to do – which is why architectural tactics (like those Rory and I were discussing above) which challenge typical design-focused boundaries by expanding our understanding of context are so interesting.

Rob: I’m not sure that it was ever any other way. What made Olmsted, for instance, such a formidable figure was that he operated in all these realms simultaneously — design, politics, logisitics, etc. In getting Central Park built (which was, of course, also much the work of his partner, Vaux, though Vaux is much less remembered), he dealt with a highly political competition jury, put pressure on politicans who opposed his vision through the press (such as an article in the Atlantic Monthly), and dealt with both design decisions and logistical problems (in his appointed role as superintendent), all of which is rather fascinatingly recounted in Witold Rybczynski’s biography of Olmsted. Being able to operate in so many realms at once, though, is obviously not something that very many people are going to be able (or want) to do.

Stephen:  Right.  Which reminds me of an interview (by Jesse Seegers and Jean Choi) with Marc Simmons, of facade consultancy FRONT, in a recent issue of Volume, Content Management (unfortunately not available online).  Simmons talks about creative financing measures undertaken to allow the sort of glass within the structural facade they and OMA felt the Seattle Public Library called for, which wasn’t afforded in the budget:

The Seattle Library […] was an unequivocally public project entirely funded by the raising of a public bond. They decided that the building would cost $160 billion [sic – I’m pretty sure he means million]. That’s how much they allocated, and that was what we had as a budget. Our desire to use metal mesh glass wasn’t possible within the budget, so Josh Prince-Ramus and Rem asked for permission to raise funds independently. The client would only provisionally approve that option based on proven support from the Seattle elite, and it’s an interesting idea that a donor can buy the quality of light in a building as opposed to putting his or her name on a room. They were paying for natural light, because otherwise the building would have had dark grey glass and been very different.

Rob: That’s an excellent example of how expanding the role of the architect into another realm (in that case, financing) can make a better project.  But no matter how much designers might like to, they can’t control every aspect of a project (and, I should note, Prince-Ramus/Koolhaas weren’t trying to — they made a small, carefully targeted intervention into one particular aspect of the project’s financing in order to obtain a specific architectural result).  A lot of historical accident goes into being a designer, too. I’m perfectly comfortable with that, in part because I’m fascinated by historical accidents.

1 Obvious examples would be groups like Estudio Teddy Cruz, Rural Studio, or Project M who find creative ways to produce socially-responsible architecture, and designers who are working at understanding how designers can play a role in the development of complex infrastructural systems and landscapes (such as Pierre Belanger, Lateral/Infranet Lab, or Jonathan Solomon), but I’d also include those like BLDGBLOG and Pruned who simply speculate about what might be architecture.

So while in one sense, yes, the role of the designer maybe should get bigger — in that very good work seems to be coming now and probably will continue to come from expanding the context of architecture1 —

Stephen: Or at least, operating on the context to prepare it to accept architecture (if we want to maintain a narrower, more precise definition of architecture).

Rob: — in another sense, I’d like to see designer learn to be happier with smaller roles — more willing to accept that our work exists in a world of accidents outside our control, less determined to control not just the project but the space our projects operate in, because, as ego-boosting as it is to think that being (or being trained as) architects, or landscape architects, or whatever, gives us a peculiarly great understanding of things have value and what things don’t matter, that’s actually an insidious and dangerous way to start to think (though I don’t think architects are any more prone to that kind of thinking than any other set of specialists)2.

2 Which ties into the idea that Geoff Manaugh frequently repeats (hopefully I’m not mis-representing him): that the use of a building by a janitor, for instance, is every bit as interesting architecturally as the use of a building by a trained design critic.

Stephen: To clarify, I’m not arguing that a successful practice necessitates some meta-designer-lobbyist-financier simultaneously managing these intertwined, extraordinarily complex facets of the evolution of a city (or even a single work of architecture) to effect significant, sweeping change.  That modernism on steroids would certainly fail.  My concern is that the context of architecture in such a complex world does not render architects impotent; that we learn to operate in this networked condition.  This will probably involve targeted, incremental projects heavily rooted in an understanding of their existing context, similar to what I noted toward the end of this post.  Kazys Varnelis, in The Infrastuctural City, his online writing such as On Informality, and some studio courses, has studied complexity in advanced societies from the perspective of architect and urbanist.  A key point is that ‘informality’ is not the savior many believe it to be; that it’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing urban and societal conditions is matched by its inability to engage them in any substantial way.  Complexity overwhelms: “even if architects turn toward a radical humility, that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden complex systems somehow unravel themselves.  Just as rigidity was the failure point for fordism, complexity is the failure point for post-fordism.” It is simultaneously too humble and too ambitious.

Where does this leave us?  In The Infrastructural City, we see the immense complexity of Los Angeles mapped out before us – yet, to the chagrin of the informalists, we also see its ossification.   I think we need to go small.  Incrementality, while necessarily limited in scope at any single place, has a much greater potential for implementation than does the Landscape Urbanist’s Giant Plan; and provides ample opportunity for re-evaluation over time.  Varnelis calls for “an entirely new set of tools” for urban theory – we and others have argued that these tools must include financial and political tactics.  This is where an expanded notion of context becomes useful.  It’s ironic that Landscape Urbanism initially invested in massive public-works infrastructural projects, but that it’s greatest legacy might be seen in significantly smaller, reduced-scope projects.

Rob: I’m pretty sure that there’s actually no disappointment at all in small victories and incremental change — that their smallness and incrementality is not just a description of the kind of victory that they are, but essential to their positivity.

A rough outline for a narrative history of contemporary urbanism might go like this (note that I’m quite aware that this is vastly oversimplified, but sometimes oversimplification can be helpful, as long as its conscious):

3I’ve found landscape urbanism tremendously interesting, personally, but now I start to wonder if that isn’t because it offered a way to keep Making Giant Plans, even as it offered a critique of modernist planning that suggested that Making Giant Plans is the problem. (An example: Fresh Kills, which is nothing if not A Giant Plan. Actually, I have trouble naming a landscape urbanist project which is not essentially a Giant Plan). Making Giant Plans, though, is inherently appealing, which is why I have a hard time getting away from the desire to do it. An example: the only single-player computer games that really appeal to me have been those that offer the opportunity to remake worlds in both giant swathes and exacting detail — Civilization, SimCity, etc.

1. Architects and planners try to control too much — modernist urbanism, with Pruitt-Igoe as the obvious and notorious example of what that means, and Mike Davis’s Los Angeles or gated suburbia as less obvious but no less notorious examples.  Most everyone agrees that this is not positive.

2. The diagnosis is that urbanists didn’t sufficiently understand the complexity of the systems they were operating on.

3. One solution is offered by the Landscape Urbanists3: understand those systems better, accept that they contain some capacity for flux, emphasize process, time, horizontality, and ecology in the design process — but fundamentally (particularly in the case of AALU, which is admittedly a special case and somewhat distinct from the North American/Australian strands of Landscape Urbanism), still seek to affect goals at a very broad level within the city (seek fundamental change).

4. This is problematic, though, for reasons such as the inertia of the urban system or the impossibility of achieving adequate understanding of the forces acting on a given project within the timeframe available to the designer.

4 An alternate (and, in my opinion, scary) path would be the alignment of architecture and autocracy, for reasons similar to those Tom Friedman gave in his op-ed pining for an American autocracy — the authority to get. things. done.

5. One possible solution, then4: hack small things, instigate small changes and watch them develop. Alter your tactics or continue to implement, as you see results unfold.  Maybe this even suggests that the study of landscape/architecture ought to be re-understood — as an inculcation into a way of thinking with a very broad and loosely-defined set of applications, rather than apprenticeship in a particular set of skills (and, yes, I’m aware that there’s a potential conflict between asserting that designers don’t have a “peculiarly great understanding” and that greatest value of a design education might be the development of a way of thinking, but I think the two can be reconciled).

By Stephen | Posted in dialogue, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7) | Permalink
September 11, 2009 – 11:26 am

ryan avent on robert moses

Ryan Avent has a very interesting post at streetsblog on the problems with the rehabilitation of Robert Moses, who is appealing urbanists for roughly the same reason that Thomas Friedman is pining for autocracy.  The link Avent provides to a study which concludes that “one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent” is particularly interesting, as I don’t think I’ve seen a quantitiative analysis of that effect before.

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September 10, 2009 – 1:41 pm

class, inequality, social media, and the public sphere

A fascinating talk by Danah Boyd, transcribed at alternet, first presenting the evidence of class divisions in social media, and then addressing what the implications of that presence are:

How many of you currently use Facebook? [90 percent-plus of the audience raises their hands.] How many of you currently use MySpace? [A few lone figures raise their hands.] Look around.

Two weeks ago, comScore released numbers showing that Facebook and MySpace were neck-and-neck in terms of unique user visits in the U.S. The meta-narrative was that Facebook was winning in the States, and that MySpace was dying.

I would argue that the numbers can be read differently. The numbers show that MySpace has neither grown nor faded in the last year, while Facebook has expanded rapidly and has finally reached the same size.

Of course, this is not to say that Facebook isn’t doing tremendously. In a business environment where monetization is shaky, the only definition of success is “growth.” Given that, it’s reasonable to see Facebook as more successful than MySpace this year.

But we still need to account for the fact that as many people visit MySpace as Facebook and that, as exemplified by the people in this room, that’s not because there’s a complete overlap of users. Even if you think that Facebook is winning the game, we need to account for the fact that 70 million people in the U.S. visited MySpace. That’s not small potatoes.

…

So why am I telling you that Facebook and MySpace are divided by race, class, education and other factors? Because it matters. And we need to talk about and address the implications of this divides.

First off, when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, and they do not communicate with one another. This can and does breed intolerance.

Sociologists are obsessed with homophily because of the social and economic implications for such divisions. If you don’t know people who are different than you, you don’t trust them…

All this said, people are already divided, and we accept that people from different backgrounds inhabit different environments. We cannot expect technology to automatically integrate people and generate cultural harmony…

But here’s the main issue with social divisions. We can accept when people choose to connect to people who are like them and not friend different others. But can we accept when institutions and services only support a portion of the network? When politicians only address half of their constituency? When educators and policy makers engage with people only through the tools of the privileged? [emphasis mine]

When we start leveraging technology to meet specific goals, we may reinforce the divisions that we’re trying to address.

Given the increasing currency of the notion that social media (or, more expansively, “various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems”) are restructuring the city, this is an issue that urbanists ought to be paying close attention to, even while looking to encourage (rightly) the growth of informational systems that augment our experience of the city, as the obvious threat here is that an informational infrastructure might augment the city in harmful as well as helpful ways while, through its ubiquity and presumed neutrality, never revealing that it does so.

(If you only read the portion of the Boyd’s talk that I’ve quoted, you’re missing a lot.)

[via The League of Ordinary Gentlemen]

By rholmes | Posted in readings, technology, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
September 7, 2009 – 10:45 am

a pair of landfills

The New York Times had a nice article yesterday on a pair of Brooklyn landfills that are, with generous assistance from John McLaughlin, from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, and landscape architect Leslie Sauer (of Andropogon), developing functional, self-regulating artificial ecologies:

In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill with a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000 trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of nature preserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York City long ago…  Once the plants take hold, nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates.  In some areas that turned out to be damper than had been foreseen, sassafras and black oak, which prefer dry soil, are not doing as well as expected, but other plants should prosper, Mr. McLaughlin said… Birds including ospreys, egrets and snowy owls are spotted and counted at the former landfills.

Pennsylvania Avenue and Fountain Avenue Landfills, via Bing Maps.

The restoration required re-thinking the standard procedure for capping and planting landfills:

During that era… the piles were “capped” with a layer of clay and plastic to keep water out, and covered with a few inches of soil. The usual practice was to plant grass and mow it as if it were a big lawn…

While working as a consultant for Fresh Kills, a former city garbage dump on Staten Island, [Sauer] surveyed the fate of other closed landfills. “We could not find one landfill that was being maintained,” she said. Instead of a manicured lawn, the landfill grass inevitably turned into “a weedy junk pile,” she said.

Three feet of soil on top of the landfill cap would hold more moisture, Ms. Sauer surmised, allowing a wider array of plants to grow. Even trees. The common wisdom was never to put trees on a landfill because the roots would push down and puncture the cap.

But in her surveys, Ms. Sauer found that trees inevitably started growing on top of landfills anyway, and that roots typically spread out in a wide but fairly shallow pattern. The network of roots would also do a better job of holding the soil together against erosion than plain grass, and the result might be a sustainable ecology instead of a monotonous grassy hill that required continuous lawn care.

A radio report from WNYC provides further insight, describing McLaughlin’s planting scheme and process:

… he’s painstakingly mimicking what he’s learned from other coastal forests. He’s analyzed each load of dirt, down to the macro and micronutrients. He’s got each tree and shrub barcoded, with information like what nursery they came from, and when they were planted. He’s studied each species’ ratio in the wild, and his planting is guided by a computer-generated design plan and a global position system.

Which implies that the landscape evolving on these landfills may be clean, and may be healthy, but it is not at all natural (in the sense of “without us”) — rather, it is an augmented, cybernetic landscape, held together by the messy interaction of natural processes and digital crutches.  Which is a rather compelling vision of the future.

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September 6, 2009 – 1:17 pm

wpa 2.0

Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced.

“Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020”

The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by the underwater emissions of cars in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, converting the Salton Sea from agricultural wastewater dumping ground to a hybrid of recreational uses, economically valuable micro-infrastructures, and artificially enhanced ecologies (that proposal is by Lateral/Infranet Lab), reconfiguring the US-Mexico border wall in thirty different ways, opening the Los Angeles waterworks as a series of public spaces activated by the presence of water, resettling climate-change refugees in the post-industrial landscapes of the Rust Belt, and reclaiming the discarded “unaccepted streets” of San Francisco as public parks.  My first impression is that the winners (generally) have found an excellent balance between offering believable proposals and transformative proposals, which is right where you’d like to see the winners of competitions situated.

The winners, jury, and “national policymakers” will be discussing the projects on Nov. 16 at an unannounced (as far as I can tell) location in DC.

Edit: Stephen informs me that the location will be the National Building Museum.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
September 1, 2009 – 11:59 am

so long, where

Sorry to see Where reach its end, both because Brendan Crain is a fantastic blogger and because I think the group-blog format is one with a lot of potential, particularly to stir positive and useful debate.  Its hard to believe that Where is only two-and-half years old.  Fortunately Mario Ballestros is still blogging at Mañanarama and Peter Sigrist and Katia Savchuk (with numerous collaborators) have launched another collaborative urbanism blog, Polis.

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August 26, 2009 – 2:13 pm

wunderkammer on the high line

Wunderkammer has a nice piece by Ned Shalanski on the High Line, which approaches the High Line from a rather different perspective than the one I’ve tended to bring to it (bemoaning the loss of the landscape that had developed over time, etc.).  A couple of nice observations, about the High Line as the product of highly concentrated wealth (which produces some interesting irony, as Shalanski notes) and the High Line as a platform for the urban voyeur, both torn from their context (you’ll have to read the whole piece to see how they’re related):

“How can you too become a destination for popular outdoor activity? For starters, as the High Line Park saga has shown, the backing of a dedicated group of community members is paramount. Celebrities help too. Also, you’ll need 86.2 million dollars, which was the final tab for High Line Park’s phase one, and you can count on another half million per year per acre in maintenance fees. Already, you can see that low-income neighborhoods hardly stand a chance. The High Line Park model for landscape-based urban development is driven by local wealth as much as robust community values.”

…

“High Line Park is a novel upgrade of this sort. More than a chic strolling promenade, it is a captivating, one-of-a-kind amalgamation incorporating some of the most articulated culture New York City has to offer. Along their stroll, High Line Park flâneurs take in the sights of Chelsea’s fashionable restaurants, contemporary galleries, and high-end boutique stores. Using the sidewalk to engage Chelsea’s street culture is so last year. Being elevated above the action, visitors are one more step removed from the city, effectively squaring the flâneur experience. Not just neighborhood amenities but now street culture itself is an object to be admired. In this way, High Line Park is an urban theme ride, a slow speed tram made from a masterfully fashioned landscape which quietly weaves its way through museum neighborhoods.”

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August 24, 2009 – 1:37 pm

rory hyde on unsolicited architecture

Rory Hyde (who is working for Volume) comments on the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” from Volume 14, which Stephen and I have both tangentially touched on in the past:

[T]he role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project… is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions of a walking city may have addressed a social need – for free and undetermined public event space – without financing or marketing, it comes across as entertainment. Which is of course, what it was intended to be, to the extent that it was even presented in comic book form. Which is also not to say that entertainment cannot inspire a real project, but that the strength of the unsolicited rests in its very tangible potential to be pursued through to realisation with the right political, financial and public support in place.

Read the rest of the (excellent) post, which includes several examples of unsolicited architecture.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, finance, the-expanded-field | Tagged | Comments (3) | Permalink
August 19, 2009 – 7:44 am

tree cultivation in the sahel

Farmers in the Sahel are combating desertification with trees — but by cultivating them, not planting them:

Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum, Sawadogo is also growing trees. And the trees, he says, work wonders.  The temperature here is very different than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves, it’s cooler.  That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees’ roots also help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility, so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood.

Sawadogo, I should emphasize, is not planting these trees, like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive, and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts, often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

False color image of Sahel tree cultivation in southern Niger, from a presentation by Chris Reij.

The shallow pits known as tassa or zai, which nurture seedlings and encourage forestation.

Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa, but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments seized trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali and neighboring Niger.

Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the region for thirty years, says farmers in Niger alone have grown an estimated 200 million trees.  “This is probably the largest environmental transformation in the Sahel, if not in Africa. There are fifteen to twenty times more trees than there were in 1975, which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.”

More on tree cultivation in the Sahel from Reij here and on the Sahel Regreening Initiative here.

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August 18, 2009 – 11:35 am

smudge clui tour

Highly recommend reading Smudge’s account of a CLUI tour of nuclear New Mexico, if you missed BLDGBLOG and Pruned‘s recommendations (which seems unlikely, because I don’t know why anyone would be reading mammoth but not that pair):

“This sense of the technological sublime in New Mexico runs from the earthships of Taos to the test tracks of Holloman; from the Virgin Gallactic tourist spaceports of Upham, to the alien crash sites of Roswell;. . . from the Very Large Array to the very large pointy spikes of Lightning Field; … from the hollow nuclear chambers of the Manzano Mountains to the electromagnetic pulse test trestles of Kirtland. This land was made by you and me.” [Matt Coolidge of CLUI, as quoted by Smudge]

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August 17, 2009 – 4:26 pm

t-tree

Trying to figure out what the meaning of the apparent popularity of the “T-Tree” reburbia entry is.  It is currently right behind the New Urbanist submission “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”, both of which have over twice as many votes as any of the other finalists.  “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”‘s popularity doesn’t surprise me, as it is the only (a) New Urbanist and (b) traditionalist submission amongst the finalists and both of those -isms have huge constituencies.  I don’t think its explained by the reference to Habitat 67, as I don’t think Safdie’s posse is that big.  Maybe its the duck-like concept (building = tree, windows = leaves, etc.)?  Or the omission of cars, parking lots, and roads?  Can anyone help me?

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged | Comments (8) | Permalink
August 17, 2009 – 4:16 pm

google maps road trip

I heard this in the car on my return trip to Hartsfield Sunday and then Stephen brought it up again this afternoon, so I suppose I should mention it: two friends, one who lives in LA and one who lives in Richmond, VA, go on a cross-country road-trip using google maps.   Which wouldn’t be remarkable, except that they never leave their houses:

“We’ve ridden roller coasters, we took a tour of the Hoover Dam underneath, we saw the electrical rooms, we went on a helicopter ride in the Grand Canyon,” Baldes says.

“And a mule ride,” Horowitz adds.

At one point they “camped” at the Grand Canyon and went stargazing, coming up with new constellations throughout the night.

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August 13, 2009 – 3:12 pm

burn down the suburbs, and other comments on reburbia

Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it:

1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we were in producing an architectural proposal (which isn’t to say that we were disinterested in producing a proposal, and it’s entirely valid to judge the clarity, value, etc. of the proposal on architectural grounds alone).

2. We (architects, landscape architects, etc.) are not doing ourselves (or suburbia, or humanity, or the remainder of the world) any favors by pursuing an excessively antagonistic stance towards suburbia.

Exhibit A for “excessive antagonism”: “Let Them Burn”, one of the “notable entries” on the Reburbia site, which (really) proposes burning down the suburbs and dancing on the ashes.

As Nam mentions in the comments on Stephen’s post, the re-burbia competition’s phrasing and framing seems to imply a buy-in to the “the burbs are totally wasteland mentality”, which is as unfortunate as it is inaccurate (though, being familiar with some of the jurors from their other work, I’m sure that that mentality was not exclusive or controlling in the judging).

3. (We Don’t Have to Make Every Suburb a City)

(a) We aren’t going to be able to fix the suburbs by making them exactly like cities. While I love cities (and live in one, and couldn’t be happier with the kind of transportation flexibility offered by living two blocks from a Metro stop), I’m not the sort of person who needs to buy into a new vision for the suburbs in order for that vision to be realized. The sort of person we need to convince lives in the suburbs and loves the suburbs. This person isn’t a reluctant suburbanite, priced out of urban living by restrictive zoning or pushed out by crumbling school systems. Schemes that concentrate the suburbs along (mass) transportation arterials, imitate Le Corbusian glass-towers-in-a-park, or model new developments after historical town planning may appeal to the latter, but not the former (note in particular the comments on “Urban Sprawl Repair Kit”, which I suspect provide a typical window into the average suburbanite’s reaction). A new vision for the suburbs ought to begin with understanding what characteristics of the suburbs make them appealing to the suburbanite and then find ways to solve problems while retaining or even expanding upon those characteristics.

(b) Exhibit A for “making the suburbs like cities”: “Arterials for Living” (another notable entry), which is, at least architecturally, a likeable enough proposal (I’d rather live there than in, say, Chino Hills), but which exposes (unintentionally, I think) a bit of the dark and arrogant underbelly of the typical urbanist’s distaste for the suburbs when it slyly suggests “relocating” suburbanites to newly-built dense housing along boulevards and “razing” their existing housing.  While its possible that this would be a peacable and pleasant process, its much more likely that this sort of intensive dislocation would follow the pattern of most forced relocations and quickly devolve into a nightmarish scenario (the Suburban Resistance Army, et cetera).

(c) When we talk about adjusting transportation options, or zoning regulations, or whatever else we do to promote urban living, we’re not really talking about wiping out the suburbs.  We’re playing with percentages; and if we take as a given that the suburbs will continue to exist, we have to talk about how we can solve suburban problems without falling back onto urban solutions.

4. While I’d like to think that our entry at least outlined one sort of strategy for solving a problem (lack of density, for instance) while retaining and magnifying one of the characteristics that make the suburbs attractive (the availability of land), there are certainly many other strategies that might share this approach.  In fact, one of the entries published on the re-burbia site, “ParkUrbia”, shares this sort of approach.  The title of Philippe Barriere Collective‘s entry may give me another opportunity to complain about the excessive use of prefixes and suffixes in naming architectural projects, but I think ParkUrbia might be the smartest entry to the competition (at least, of the published entrants) — I can’t figure out how it didn’t merit a place among the finalists and am disappointed to not have the opportunity to vote for it.

Regardless of that, though, what interests me about ParkUrbia at the moment is how it approaches the suburbs: not with destructive intent, not with the desire to re-make them in the image of an entirely different settlement pattern, but grabbing one of the characteristics that people love about the suburbs — the feeling of being in a park — and multiplying it.  While one might contend that Barriere has gone too far, that the point of the suburb is that it pairs the illusion of the park with the advantages of the city and that Barriere’s scheme produces such an inherently low density as to ruin the ability of the suburb to function as an amalgamation of park and city, I’d argue that there’s no need to see Barriere’s scheme as an exclusive future for the suburbs when it might function quite well (and beautifully) as one of many adjustments, perhaps ranging from something like Paul Lukez’s work at the densest to ParkUrbia at the most spread-out.

5. Since our scheme is about twenty percent tongue-in-cheek, I enjoying seeing that a number of the other schemes were, too, even if I could find other things to dislike about them.  A few of them weren’t but probably should have been.

By rholmes | Posted in the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
August 12, 2009 – 2:56 pm

mammoth suburban land infusions

Here is a little something Rob and I put together for the Re-burbia competition.  Our entry asks the questions: What if the challenge suburbs face is not that they over-consume land, but have too little? How could an infusion of new land simultaneously (and paradoxically) mitigate some of the issues caused by the under-utilization of existing land? We didn’t win; bummer.

Our polemical stance, in three short sentences [view large]

Diagrams explaining the both the reasoning behind and the architecture of the proposed new surfaces [view large]

Plan drawing of the potential distribution and characteristics of new surfaces [view large]

A typical view of a suburban parking lot overlaid with new surfaces [view large]

Looking down into a Chino Hills subdivision [view large]

People love living in suburbs. Urbanites often imagine them to be sterile cultural wastelands, but the suburbs host vibrant and diverse communities. While not everyone who dwells in a suburb does so out of love, many do.

Yet there are serious problems with the suburbs. They are energy inefficient, lack public space, and are often hostile to pedestrians. The root of these problems is that suburbs use too much land. The typically suggested solution to this problem remodels the suburbs after the city: building more buildings on smaller lots.

But if we want to imagine a suburban future that solves the many issues created by problematic land-use patterns, we ought to envision one that appeals to dwellers who love the suburbs.

The amount of land offered to each inhabitant is also one of the most cherished characteristics of suburbs. Rather than force suburbanites to use less land, why not make more land in the suburbs?

This new land-surface can be programmed indirectly through the modification of its properties, such as slope, support, perforation, and thickness. These inform a range of possible uses for the surface without strictly defining them, leaving room for the surface to be appropriated according to cultural and market forces. Further, the surface becomes a point of agency for counteracting the above noted land-use issues. By making more land, we can add more of what people love about the suburbs while (ironically) ameliorating problems created by wasting land.

By Stephen | Posted in landscape, speculative-architecture, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , | Comments (10) | Permalink
August 4, 2009 – 1:05 pm

the after/afterparty

The After/Afterparty is a Processing application (or series of applications) developed by David Lu in collaboration with Michael Meredith (of MOS), which uses the forms from MOS’s PS1 project (Afterparty) to explore how architects and software developers might work together, both through generative processes and crowd-sourcing applications.  The later, though described by Lu as a more primitive iteration of the software, seems at least as interesting as the former — Lu suggests that such programs might birth an architectural equivalent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  The After/Afterparty is featured in the most recent Vague Terrain, Biomorph.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , | Comments Off on the after/afterparty | Permalink
August 3, 2009 – 11:50 am

future suburbia

Worldchanging has a nice feature extrapolating the future of suburbia from current trends, which has long been one of Stephen and I’s favorite pastimes. Excited to see what further ideas for said future(s) may percolate out of the Reburbia design competition, which just concluded this past Friday (results should be posted within a week or so). In the meantime, I’m entertaining myself by browsing the “Housing Bubble” pool on flickr.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink