The tension in architecture over new urbanism

Is really about the difference between urban design versus constructing buildings. I wrote about this in the blog a week or two ago--The schism in architecture over places vs. "art-itechture"-- and David Sucher in his City Comforts blog has done the same. But John Massengale nails it way better than I did in a blog entry from Tuesday, "They're Afraid, They're Very Afraid,"

His piece takes off from the column by the always great Whitney Gould of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Her piece "After Hurricane Katrina, vision for rebuilding runs into a storm" discusses the hullabaloo that's made the New York Times, the LA Times and other newspapers--the outcry by architecture professors and architects about the primacy and visibility of new urbanists in reconstruction efforts in Mississippi in particular, but also in Louisiana. From the Gould piece:

What's got the critics riled up lately is the Congress for the New Urbanism's prescription for rebuilding the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast. The Chicago-based group founded in 1993 by former Milwaukee Mayor John O. Norquist, among others, advocates a return to old-fashioned, tightly knit patterns of urban development, with homes and offices within walking distance of each other, public transit nearby, and architecture based on time-honored principles of scale and proportion. Milwaukee is one of many cities where new urbanism has taken hold.

In October, Norquist's group organized a series of planning sessions in the region that resulted in "A Pattern Book for Gulf Coast Neighborhoods," a 72-page tool kit of rebuilding ideas that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal distributed at Home Depot stores and building supply outlets.

So what's not to like? "It's a one-size-fits-all approach to city design," Reed Kroloff, dean of the architecture school at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me in a phone interview. "Every city doesn't have to look like your grandmother's hometown. Where you have towns that were all but wiped away (by Hurricane Katrina), there's absolutely no reason to re-create the past. And in a city like New Orleans, where the patterns are already established, we don't need CNU to tell us how to rebuild. We know how to make a city. So go home, CNU."

What I like about new urbanism is the focus on scale, pedestrian-centricity, and fine-grained urban design. I complain about greenfield new urbanism, but the fact is that the new urbanists are the planners and architects that have led the "movement" to resurrect the principles of city-making rather than a continued focus on automobile-centric planning paradigms. This movement is undergirded by the work of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander.

Massengale, probably because he is an architect, gets to the point more directly than I was able to before:

THE ARCHITECTURAL ESTABLISHMENT is afraid they're losing their power. Trained to be ideological Modernists, they've had everything their way for fifty years. Their wishes overlapped with the cultures of the political and cultural establishments, and so important commissions, control of education and the support of the media all went the way they wanted....architecture schools and the avantgarde design exquisite objects for rich patrons and have no experience or tools above the scale of the building.

That's what this is about--City-building or what PPS calls "placemaking"-- as it says in the header of this blog, "A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic."

Despite what Mr. Kroloff says, it's pretty clear that over the last 40 years, the architecture profession has proven that designing "a city" is beyond the profession's capabilities. Downtown DC is a perfect example. There are a lot of people that work there, but because a handful of new super-buildings with a single entrance take up most of the blocks, activity on the street has been destroyed. (Which is one of the major difficulties that the Downtown Holiday Market test is facing at 11th and H Streets NW (I'll be covering for one of the vendors this weekend, so I'll get to experience this first-hand.)

It's not just about the building, but about the "block, neighborhood, and district" (New Urbanism); it's about "mixed primary uses, small blocks, density, and a large stock of old buildings" (Jacobs) ; it's about "paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks" (Kevin Lynch) .

When it's about placemaking, everything changes.

And the average architect gets flummoxed when connection and context becomes the "program."

Index Keywords: new-urbanism; urban-design