Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/ en-us Design Observer Group 2011-07-02T15:49:15-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 Ralph Muldrow http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2011-07-02T15:49:15-05:00
Also in response to the saber rattling of the proponents of New Urbanism above: I agree that questions of urbanism need to be disentangled from architectural language. John Hooker will be interested to know that my firm designs both "contemporary" and "traditional-looking" multifamily housing depending on the specific neighborhood context and target market. Our loft-style projects tend to be in former industrial areas, for example. Our infill projects in existing residential neighborhoods are designed to look retroactively inevitable.

Our real point of difference may be our respective opinions about the variety of buildings that make up the existing city. I strongly believe that any building constructed of quality materials is worth preserving and rehabilitating - even the mid-century modernist buildings that populate the cities of the Northeast. I suspect that many proponents of New Urbanism would prefer to wish away the messy heterogeneity of the contemporary city for a more consistent model of urbanism. Your paradigms and techniques are spot-on but your absolutism is a bore (with apologies to Venturi) and tends toward an inflexible strategy of engagement with the diverse voices of existing urban neighborhoods. ]]> Tim Love http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-29T12:32:44-05:00
only two points, one of which is perhaps only semantic. It seems instead of "paper architecture" you could have referred to the trend of the last decade as "digital architecture". The connection is clear in your essay, just is bit of word play that would drive home the difference in the production and subsequent publication between the speculative architecture of two eras.

second, i don't landscape urbanists ignore the fundamental role of the building. They tend to ignore the fundamental role of space, of which buildings are only one type. Landscape spaces also do not figure prominently in their proposals, but rather vectors, patterns, forces, etc. I imagine that will change as they actually win commissions (which the prominent ones have begun doing in the last 5 years) and start figuring that part out. And just for the record, i like what the LU's bring to the table, it's just not the apex of human thought, as some might have you believe.

Nor is new urbanism (zing!). kidding. they have great points also.]]> faslanyc http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-22T20:23:04-05:00
The experience of chaos discredits Everyday Urbanism. The conceptually hoary, expensive and dysfunctional megastructure almost never survives contact with reality. (Architecture Research Office’s_ City of the Future_ is Yona Friedman’s _La Ville Spatiale,_ wetted and pre-discredited by Harvard’s One Western Avenue.) Landscape Urbanism’s overarching green order offers exciting possibilities for multilevel, fluid spaces. Unfortunately, each of the infrastructural surfaces of Landscape Urbanism is idiosyncratic, and usually unjustified even by transitory excitement. And probably only Dubai can afford gratuitous carapaces, screens, wraps, and manipulated ground surfaces.

We need an urbanism that balances architects’ creativity with order—and that offers vibrancy, privacy, and Sunday strolls unmolested by flying ground planes. The search immediately turns up New Urbanism. While most other “isms” die by the post-occupancy evaluation, _omnivorous_ New Urbanism lives by it. Don’t worry that it will not absorb good ideas. Worry that it will.

That is why I am a card-carrying (when I can find it) New Urbanist.
]]> Bruce F. Donnelly http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-22T11:17:59-05:00 I hope more of us will be proactively writing about it, presenting case studies, inviting speakers on the subject, challenging LU to do it well, ultimately framing it in the reality of what we do want/like? The writing right now reminds me of the early academic writers of New Urbanism a quarter century ago. I think this is more exciting than problematic. I bet many others do too. ]]> Thomas E. low http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-22T11:02:22-05:00
From my experience, physical urban design started dropping from the curriculum 50 years ago, not 20, when land use zoning and policy planning rose to promenance to address social and economic issues. Planning became more public administration than design - except for the success of civil engineers in creating inhumane open space.

Mr. Love has an unfortunate habit of referring to all spaces between urban and perhaps suburban buildings as simply "open space'. Once upon a time, civic spaces were actual places like farms, gardens, parks, plazas, courts, playgrounds, avenues, boulevards and the other 90% of vacant land popularly known for the past 80 years as arterials and parking lots devoted to solely cars.

Finally, his contempt for "New Urbanism" repeats history.

He writes parenthetically, "While New Urbanism offers an impressively overarching framework, its proponents are openly hostile to contemporary modes of architectural expression, making the entire approach off-limits to serious discourse."

I imagine I could find this criticism of Modernism from an critical essay in the 1920s:

"While the International Style offers an impressively overarching framework, its proponents are openly hostile to traditional and classical modes of architectural expression and civic art, making the entire approach off-limits to serious discourse."

]]> John Hooker http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-21T18:37:34-05:00
PS: anyone who thinks of the New Urbanism as limited to traditional architecture misunderstands both the principles and the practice that draw from a diversity of styles and forms, but always respectful of the context.]]> Steve Coyle, AIA LEED http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-21T17:43:25-05:00 The author is strongly implying that New Urbanism does not engage ecological and environmental issues. This is simply not the case. Just as NU is a "comprehensive practice-model" for integrating architecture into the city, it is equally a practice-model for integrating landscape into the city (not to mention the region). The organizing framework of New Urbanist zoning/design codes is the (locally calibrated) rural-to-urban transect, a context-based approach that protects urban character from the threat of one-size-fits-all ruralization of the city arising from conventional stormwater regulations and random acts of biophilia. The non-profit Center for Transect Studies http://www.transect.org/ provides open source downloads of numerous transect-based modules from Landscape to Riparian Buffers to Natural Drainage to Light Imprint. These techniques allow us to bring nature into the city and manage stormwater in ways that do not (1) create suburban setbacks that would cause a creeping sprawl effect, compromise retail, interrupt street connectivity, and dissolve the spatial enclosure of the "outdoor room"; (2) require stormwater to be managed onsite which again creates anti-urban setbacks or (3) remove people from the activity centers of the street and square by luring them to rooftop gardens and meandering creekbeds. The latter have their place, to be sure, but if they degrade the very walkability that already makes compact development so environmentally responsible, then they will have done more harm than good. ]]> Sandy Sorlien http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-21T15:57:31-05:00 Emily Talen http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-21T15:02:26-05:00 ]]> Canada Flowers http://places.designobserver.com/feature/paper-architecture-emerging-urbanism/12684/#comments 2010-04-18T02:24:14-05:00