The Revitalist

In Philadelphia, Walnut Street Capital, a development company, has commissioned Kohn Pedersen Fox architects to build the Center City Tower, what could be the tallest building in America and the second tallest in the world. Amidst fierce competition, cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong threaten to strip Philadelphia of this title though. Currently, Dubai is building a structure which will surpass even Taipei’s 1,670 ft. tower--the tallest in the world.

In the new modernist equation, height seems to equal strength, solidarity, fortitude—everything that symbolizes power. As China tries to compete on the world stage, their buildings are becoming taller and more eye-catching, be it good or bad. Everywhere, cities are crawling up into the sky and claiming “unlimited” vertical real estate.

Still, Philadelphia may have one claim to fame. Their 1,500 ft tower will attempt LEED Gold Certification. With gardens on two floors, this megalith may be somewhat livable. The structure will house offices, retail space, and a hotel.

It seems like the question of whether a particular structure is worth preserving will always be addressed as the thirty-year mark approaches and it becomes eligible for the lists. Though some buildings are recognized as being eligible for and needing preservation even prior to this milestone, many buildings are not even considered until many years later.

Post-war structures face quite a bit of opposition as many of them are not viewed in a pleasurable light by the general public. Perhaps the reason for this distaste relates to our relatively calm current state—contrasting the origin of Brutalist design in period when society found the appearance of defensive strength and fortitude beautiful and comforting. The head of the Columbia University preservation department provided this as an argument for the preservation of Boston’s City Hall in his keynote address at the Campus Heritage Symposium in Boston in October 2007.

The United States is about to open up their embassy in Berlin—a project highly contested by the Germans for several reasons. First and foremost is the controversial site, but the Germans are offended greatly by the way the new US embassy on the Pariser Platz engages or refuses to engage in dialogue with the Brandenburg Gate and other important historic German buildings surrounding the site. It comes as a slap in the face for the US Embassy building to “fold its arms” against Germany though the US refutes this interpretation of its intention.

Brutalist buildings were accepted during their period and many even loved for a short amount of time. Now, it seems the US is responding to bombings at the Kenya and Tanzania embassies and the September 11 attacks (follow this link to read about new guidelines which were considered during the building of the German Embassy), so its defensive stance is not without reason from an American standpoint. Still, the building was not built on American soil, so the German interpretation has validity as they are the people directly affected by the solid placement of the US embassy.
Ironically, the US has now erected a wall which stands against the same site where Reagan declared to Gorbachev, “tear down this wall”.

This past week's Smart City Radio program talked with Sustainable Urbanism author Doug Farr. He notes that urbanism is inherently more sustainable than other settlement patterns. But in order to address the 21st century's demands for more green, efficient, sustainable lifestyles, we are going to need something more than classic urbanism. He argues for more than just green buildings stuck into existing cities, but also a renewed focus on walkability, high performance infrastructure, and other interesting topics.

I know Bostonians will wish they had a service like this one: Residents of Howard County, MD can track the progress of snow plows online (via Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space). Howard County is just west of Baltimore. The snow plows and salt/sand trucks were already equipped with gps tracking devices. Now, the county has made their location available on a website (the snowplow tracker) that overlays the streets with the plow information. The web is a wonderful thing.

The Charles River Conservancy has proposed Sunday morning closures of Storrow Drive westbound so that bikes, rollerblades and runners can use the roadway (via Planning Liveable Communities). The five-mile stretch would be closed to cars only on Sunday mornings from April to November, 7:30 to 10:30 am. There is a similar closure of a two-mile stretch of Memorial Drive on the opposite side of the river, but that is interrupted by car access to the bridges. The Storrow section runs underneath the bridges, so it could be an uninterrupted path. The article cites excited comments from pedestrian and bike organizations and much more lukewarm comments from the Department of Conservation and Recreation, who would be responsible for oversight. But the CRC argues that if Mayor Menino is really serious about his biking enthusiasm, he ought to support this idea; no comment from the Mayor's office.

Planetizen's Best of the Worst in Planning for 2007 recaps some this past year's most ridiculous planning decisions: the latest in eco-friendly burials (no gravestones, just gps coordinates!), public loudspeakers so that government employees monitoring cameras can scold you for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk, and $90,000 spent in court over the difference between "sandy" and "creamy yellow."

The Planetizen Podcast lists the top planning issues of 2007: transportation and resource scarcity (e.g. water) were top of the list.

The National Trust's blog PreservationNation looks at the Best and Worst of 2007 in preservation: bests included celebrities using their star power to raise money for preservation issues and the public opening of Philip Johnson's Glass House; worsts included the loss of several mid-century modern structures and the city of Buffalo's Five In Five plan to demo 5,000 buildings in five years. The Paschal House here in Raleigh got a mention as a worst. The gorgeous, landmark, mid-century house has been languishing on the market and is in danger of being the latest teardown.

Tour Montparnasse , the tall brown building in
the background, towers over Paris' low height
boulevards. Photo taken from Eiffel Tower.The Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is running for re-election and is pushing again an old idea of his: removing the height restrictions on new buildings in Paris. The restrictions were put in place in the 1970's after the 59-story Tour Montparnasse was built and largely reviled by the public. Currently new buildings are limited to 37 meters in most areas and 18 meters in some select neighborhoods. While this preserves Paris's 19th century scale and the lovely long views of those Haussmann boulevards, the mayor is concerned that the limits are keeping Paris from the 21st century. He wants to see tall, mixed-use buildings that will create more housing and commercial space for struggling areas of the city.

He even went so far as to have several architectural firms draw plans of a few buildings, all taller than the 37m limit, like the "Phare" (see below) designed by Thom Mayne to be part of La Defense.

The swooping Phare tower (center) is a very au courant design reminiscent of London's "gherkin."

Sir Norman Foster's tower at 30 St Mary Axe, aka "The Gherkin."

Now that we have just finished the major shopping season of the year (perhaps some of you are still plumbing the depths of the after-Christmas sales), it seems like a good time to reflect on the good, old American shopping mall. The Economist has a rather chatty history of the mall's birth, death and rebirth as a "lifestyle center" (via Planetizen). The mall helped to shape the culture of the suburbs, which has defined more than one generation of Americans. But as traditional indoor malls decline and open air lifestyle centers replace them (as happened right around the corner from me at North Hills in Raleigh), don't you wonder how the suburban experience overall will change? Will it change at all? The lifestyle center crowd would, I think, like to argue that their creations offer a more "authentic" urban experience, but that's a whole other conversation. Think back over your holiday shopping experience, was it very different shopping in at an outdoor mall versus an indoor one?

A recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle elaborates on a recent discussion: density (and affordability) of housing v. green space and low-rise neighborhoods (via Planetizen). Now, the President and CEO of the Home Builders Association of Northern California is hardly an unbiased observer of the situation, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't make a good point. His point is that if Bay Area environmental groups are going to insist on putting more land into conservation, then housing prices are going to continue to go up. It's a classic case of demand increasing faster than supply. This is not to say that environmental activists don't also have a point about preserving greenspace for future generations and livable communities. But there is a conversation here that we need to have. Our kids are going to have to live somewhere when they grow up; and cities like San Fran, which is amongst the most desirable and expensive in the country, are going to need to provide more housing at more affordable rates to meet the demand. Where is it going to go? Density is an obvious answer, but we need to talk about priorities and what kinds of cities/neighborhoods we want to build for the future.

In the wake of this past year's exhibitions on Robert Moses, the Municipal Art Society of New York has put on an exhibition entitled Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, which in turn prompted this musing by Andrew Blum (via CEOs for Cities). Blum is very eloquent about the dilemma that he sees facing our big cities: how to resolve the conflict between the desire for Jacobsian neighborhoods and the push for greater density. He writes,

We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density.

We can resist the extremes of modernism and all its failures; but that does not free us from facing up to the same challenges and inequities that modernism sought to rectify. I don’t know that Jane Jacobs fully accepted this. 

Read the whole article—it will give you something to ponder this weekend.