This article was originally published on Common Edge.
It has been a bull market for downbeat urban reporting since the pandemic arrived in town. And it isn’t hard to see why. In 2020, central U.S. cities went from “comeback” success stories to ghost towns; transit lost nearly all ridership; tens of thousands of stores and restaurants shuttered; and many of the affluent decamped to the suburbs and distant Zoom towns.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The phrase “Demography is destiny” is repeated more than once in Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World (Island Press). This new book by noted urban researcher Alan Mallach tackles, in meticulous and fascinating detail, the “wicked problem” of shrinking cities in the U.S. and across the globe. But it’s not only our cities that are shrinking—the countries that contain them are, too. I spoke with Mallach about the imperative of planning for this new demographic reality.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
A simple walk in the park will relax even the most tightly wound individual. But what about the places where people spend far more of their time, such as schools, office buildings, and hospitals? What role can design play in incorporating nature into those environments? And at what additional cost? Bill Browning has published a book—The Economics of Biophilia: Why Designing With Nature in Mind Makes Financial Sense, 2nd Edition (written with Catie Ryan and Dakota Walker)—arguing that the cost of bringing nature into building projects isn’t prohibitive but additive. An environmental strategist with a long history in green building, Browning is one of the founding partners (with architects Bob Fox and Rick Cook) of the sustainable design consultancy Terrapin Bright Green. Recently I talked with Browning about biophilic design—and, because he was a founding member of the U.S. Green Building Council’s board of directors, about the strengths and shortcomings of the LEED rating system.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
By the time I was 17 years old, I had moved 11 times. Because of my own experience relocating from one place to another, I’ve spent the better part of the last several decades focused on making sure that everyone has a place to call home, that everyone enjoys the human right to housing. But it was not until my time at Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit focused on community development and affordable housing, that I realized the methods and materials we employ to realize that human right matter.
This article was originally published on Common Edge. If you’ve been in the profession of architecture long enough, you come to know a certain rarified subset of fellow professionals: Those who call themselves “architects,” who have a degree, and who may even be licensed and members of the AIA, but who do not practice architecture. They simply like being an “architect.”
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
For the past three decades, YIMBYs and NIMBYs have been fighting pitched battles across the U.S. for the heart and soul of future development, but the housing crisis has only grown worse, especially since the crash of 2008, which changed so many things on the supply side.
This was followed a dozen years later by 2020, the strangest year of our lifetimes, which made those supply-side challenges even more pronounced. The roots of the problem, however, go back further than that, with mistakes made as long as 75 years ago now being repeated by completely new generations. Failure to understand those errors—and even why they are errors and not good practice—will perpetuate and exacerbate today’s crisis into future generations.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Auction houses, secondhand furniture stores, and realtors make small fortunes from a nomenclature that, despite the fuzziness surrounding its indeterminate span and whether everything made during its indefinite duration ought to be stamped with the same label, continues to demand attention. Years from now, serious collectors of architectural magazines may search for that single issue of the 21st century magazine Dwell, absent a major spread of a house designed in the midcentury modern (MCM) manner or a restoration of a building from that era. MCM is the very blood that pulses through the publication’s arteries, promulgating a view of a squeaky-clean and well-lighted lives lived almost invariably by (often childless) ectomorphic couples, blissfully happy under a flat roof with floor-to-ceiling windows affording fine views of distant landscapes best enjoyed behind insulated glass in an ambient temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit. But what are we to make of this term, this period—some even call it a “movement”—so well-known globally it goes by initials?
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Origin myths,” “founding myths,” and “creation legends” provide a way for us to see into and imagine the distant past in metaphorical, poetic, and compelling ways. The oldest origin myths help us understand how a people or a place (such as the universe) were believed to have come into existence. Anthropologists describe these as creation myths or “cosmogonic” myths. They might explain how the world came to be. For example, Native North American peoples such as the Cherokee, Ojibwe, and Aztecs share an origin myth that land was first created on top of a great ocean. One of the most common Western origin myths is the creation of Adam and Eve. But founding stories exist for all kinds of social conditions, historical customs, and objects, as well as places—think of the myth of the brothers Romulus and Remus, suckled as babies by a wolf, who survive to found the city of Rome (after Romulus got rid of his brother).
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
What we build can be metaphoric—often intentionally, sometimes subliminally. But architecture is seldom the intentional commentary of architects, crafting symbolism; more often it is a direct reflection of its time and the culture that made it.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Recently I traveled to Ljubljana, Slovenia, in search of the religious architecture of the celebrated (but largely unknown in the U.S.) Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957). I write a lot about the architecture of spirituality, and I was curious about Plečnik’s churches and chapels—what the architect’s idiosyncratic form of classicism said about faith in a Modern age. What I didn’t expect to find was the universal nature of Plečnik’s work as an urbanist: a re-maker of the Slovenian capital that holds lessons for us today.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
It has been about 200 years since the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris created an academic discipline—and thus the profession—of architecture. The central role of the architect as the defining agent of creation transcended the Master Builder, a role that defined those who designed buildings not as experts or celebrities but as stewards of building traditions.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
There are three primary settings in which lower-density urbanism can be useful, and where conditions favored by YIMBYs are weak or nonexistent: as a replacement for what is currently slated to be built out as sprawl, as a recovery process for existing sprawl, and in small towns that are growing. Giving up on these settings forces all development intended to combat the housing crisis into urban settings, ideally near transit, where land is much more expensive to acquire and to develop. It also allows the sprawl machine to roll on unimpeded.The best vehicle for implementing principles illustrated here at the scale of a neighborhood, hamlet, or village is not a major production builder, as these principles violate almost all of their conventional industrial practices. Instead, look to the record of stronger New Urbanist developers who are no strangers to doing things considered unconventional by the Industrial Development Complex in the interest of better places with stronger lifetime returns.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Recently, I resolved that I wasn’t going to be drawn into the silly posturing about how ChatGPT would take the jobs of every experienced architect on earth before 2030, but an intelligent post on this website by Geethanjali Raman and Mohik Acharya broke that resolve. What isn’t being stressed is that algorithms that sample internet-based information are only as good as the quality of that information. Architectural history suggests that all new things have a shelf life, quickly fading from view after being hyped. Only the best will persist after a lengthy period of evaluation and criticism. Any new architecture widely praised and available since the rise of the internet is likely to be untested by time and thus not worth using as a benchmark. And let’s face it: Some of the worst buildings ever designed by humans are out there in cyberspace, crowding out better ones that haven’t yet been digitized.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
One of the principles of comedy is that you “punch up.” If you have to make fun of someone or something, make sure it’s more prominent than you, and deserving. You can’t get much higher than Santa Clara, California, and you can’t get much more deserving. Santa Clara is, arguably, the city at the heart of Silicon Valley, a globally famous urban region that is so ill-defined as to deny its own existence. Those ranch houses and corporate headquarters represent a distinctly 21st-century brand of power. And a distinctly 20th-century brand of urbanism.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
How did we end up building an environment where the private car is often treated better than many of our fellow human beings? In the U.S., the center of car culture, parking is expected to be convenient, available, and free, writes Henry Grabar in his engaging and entertaining new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin Press). Parking consumes vast amounts of land; in Los Angeles County, for example, it totals about 200 square miles. In New York City alone, there are 3 million curb parking spaces (not counting parking garages), which account for 6% of the city’s area—the equivalent of 13 Central Parks! Grabar asks: What better use could we make of this space? A 2021 study revealed that if New York reclaimed just a quarter of the street space allotted to cars, the following could be created: 500 miles of bus lanes; 40 miles of busways; 38 million square feet of community space; 1,000 miles of open streets; 3 million square feet of new pedestrian space; and 5.4 million additional square feet for restaurants, businesses, and cultural institutions.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
It’s here! The 21st-century digital renaissance has just churned out its latest debutante, and its swanky, sensational entrance has sent the world into an awed hysteria. Now sashaying effortlessly into the discipline of architecture, glittering with the promise of being immaculate, revolutionary, and invincible: ChatGPT. OpenAI’s latest chatbot has been received with a frenzied reception that feels all too familiar, almost a déjà vu of sorts. The reason is this: Every time any technological innovation so much as peeks over the horizon of architecture, it is immediately shoved under a blinding spotlight and touted as the “next big thing.” Even before it has been understood, absorbed, or ratified, the idea has already garnered a horde of those who vouch for it, and an even bigger horde of those who don’t. Today, as everyone buckles up to be swept into the deluge of a new breakthrough, we turn an introspective gaze, unpacking where technology has led us, and what more lies in store.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
As its full title somewhat implies, Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s new book, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (University of Chicago Press), tells the whole grisly story of how, in less than a century, the U.S. changed from a rail-connected nation of cities and towns to a sprawling network of increasingly congested roads. A historian and a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, Bloom rejects the sort of conspiracy-driven narratives around transit’s demise and comes to an uneasy conclusion: America essentially chose the car for a variety of reasons, only one of which was automobile company collusion. I talked with Bloom about why transit in the U.S. collapsed, why it turned out differently in European cities, and the hopes for a transit renaissance.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
When San Francisco’s MUNI spent big money on a “central subway” to Chinatown, I was doubtful. One recent Saturday, though, I revived the gallery-hopping I did before the pandemic, taking the train from Berkeley into the city, walking to one gallery near Embarcadero Station, then taking a tram past the ballpark to the CalTrain Station, where I switched to another tram to head south to Minnesota Street’s Dogpatch cluster of galleries and artists’ studios.
