Why s*** happens! -- UVA professor -- "Tying in aesthetics with urban planning is a recipe for disaster."

Looking towards the Urban Renewal era project Delta Towers, from the north side of the 1300 block of H Street NE, Washington, DC. Photo by Inked78.

Your tax and other dollars at work, 721-727 H Street NE, Washington, DC.

The Pentacle Apartments on the 1500 block of Benning Road NE replaced the "Trinidad" Trolley Barn.

Trolley Car Barn, Benning Road, Washington, DC. HABS photo, Library of Congress.

Mass production rowhouses in Columbia Heights, Washington, DC. Washington Post photo by Michel du Cille.

According to the story "ARCHITECTURE- Gulf Coast rebuild: Form should follow function," UVA architecture professor John Quale clearly believes that quality design has no economic value. Why he would think that, given the failure of urban renewal, and the clear success of historic preservation-based urban revitalization strategies (see for example Cities: Back from the Edge; Changing Places, and New York: Profiting Through Preservation, among others) is beyond me.

I certainly don't think he should be allowed to teach impressionable students.

Rendering, modular apartments designed by University of Virginia architecture students.

This is the pinnacle of design quality Quale is shooting for in the destroyed Gulf Coast. How does this rendering look any different from the urban renewal-era Pentacle Apartments on Benning Road?
John Quale. Photo by Dan Addison. "I know better."

From the article:

"Habitat told us that people don't want these contemporary designs," says Quale, "but I think they do." The project in Fifeville proved that. Still, Quale thinks that architectural solutions should have their limits when its comes to the larger task of rebuilding the area. For example, he is critical of those pushing an aesthetic agenda on the people of Mississippi, of turning the devastated areas into an experiment in new urbanism.

He singles out new urbanism co-founder Andres Duany, whose firm Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has asked to coordinate the rebuilding of 11 Gulf Coast towns. Indeed, a press release on Duany's website describes a taskforce of 100 New Urbanists descending on the Mississippi coast to improve Mississippi built landscape and revamp building and development codes.

"They're trying to impose this new design on Mississippi," says Quale, instead of letting people decide what they want. "Tying in aesthetics with urban planning is a recipe for disaster."

For a better perspective on quality design and architecture, I always recommend the speech by Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, South Carolina.

And for those of us looking for graduate programs in urban planning and/or architecture, maybe UVA isn't the place to go...

S*** happens for a reason. It isn't some organic inchoate event.

This, from the Creative Clusters e-newsletter from the UK, is about a different aspect of design, but I think the idea of value deriving from quality design is extendable...

Transforming UK Small Business By Design

The Cox Review of Creativity in Business, commissioned by UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, a parallel study on design by the DTI, and Yorkshire and Humberside's Design Works project have shown how design can transform small businesses.In 2007 the Design Council launches Dott - Designs of the Time, a 10 year programme to support and encourage design as central to the future economic and social success of the UK, with Dott 07 in North East England.

In what other ways can the specialist knowledge and skills found within creative sector be mainstreamed through the economy?

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking