Travels with my iPhone
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We used to make the countryside more beautiful, but now that we’re richer than ever we rarely do
Technology can supply some of our favorite and most-loved things, but most of the time, we use it in a way that inadequately expresses human experience and aspirations.
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Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Current, Good Kind, The Other Kind, Urbanism
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Turn Lanes Are Anti-Pedestrian & Therefore Anti-Urban
A NEW YORK CITY MTA Bus almost ran me over this morning as I WALKED my bike in a crosswalk with a green light. Before he almost ran me over the driver honked at me, loudly, to tell me to get out of his way. And, I repeat, I was walking in a crosswalk, with the walk light.
That’s what turn lanes and turn lights do. They give drivers the idea that they have a right to turn, without people getting in their way. And green turn lights and boldly marked turn lanes encourage drivers to go quickly and “take the lane,” because they are clearly in an environment set up for cars—just like in the suburbs. The bus was going at least 35 miles per hour, and so was a long stream of traffic behind him. If the bus had hit me while going 35 miles per hour, I would have almost certainly been dead. While walking with the light in a crosswalk, on an island where three-quarters of the people don’t own cars.
Earlier this morning, I was at the corner of Broadway and 56th Street and watched while pedestrians going both ways (across Broadway or crossing 56th Street) all had to wait after the turn light went green, giving drivers the go-ahead to turn left onto 56th Street. That should never happen in Manhattan.
FACT: There is an inverse relationship between a traffic engineer’s or DOT’s Level of Service (LOS) and the degree of walkability. That’s why in our petition to the US DOT we proposed a Walkable Index Number (WIN) for towns and cities instead of an auto-based Level of Service. WIN versus LOS equals walkability versus drivability.
Residents of Manhattan deserve better. So do all the tourists walking around the city. The only way Mayor DeBlasio’s Vision Zero pledge to reduce traffic fatalities in New York to zero will work will be to level the playing field and stop giving so much of the “space between the buildings” to the small number of people who drive in New York. Even the planet would be improved if we got over the idea that everyone has a God-given right to ignore the best transit system in America and drive into the city.
Posted in Bicycle, Culture, Current, New York, Pedestrian, Street Design, Urbanism
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“Buildings endure. Fashion rarely does.” (comment at the Design Observer)
THIS IS WORTH REPOSTING because it was through this post that I met my friend Robert LaValva, who founded and runs the New Amsterdam Market. I made the following comment at Design Observer in response to a post on the South Street Seaport that brought up the usual Disney comment (= Not Modernist). The Seaport is at the end of Fulton Street, a short walk from my office at the time:
MY OFFICE is at the corner of Fulton and Nassau streets. Sometimes at lunch I’ll walk over to the river and either on my way back or on my way to the river I’ll usually walk down Fulton. Each time, I’m struck by what a disaster Robert Moses’s urban removal on both sides of the Brooklyn Bridge was. It’s an enormous hole in a fabulous part of the city. Most of the massive postwar buildings from Water Street to the FDR Drive are almost as bad for the city.
The fact that you have to cross an architectural DMZ to get to the Seaport increases the Disney factor when you get there. But the difference between the poor urbanism of the Seaport and the bad urbanism of Mosesland and the buildings along Water Street is that the Seaport can get better over time, while the buildings in the urban removal section never will.
Urbanism always has to take time into account. You don’t like the stores and restaurants that are in the old seaport buildings this month? Wait a few years and they’ll be gone, replaced by something else. That’s true now more than ever, because the period of unprecedented spending we’ve been going through is over.
Posted in Architecture, Culture, Current, New York, Street Design, Urbanism
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Street Design in Salon
How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back)
Two quotes from the article by Henry Grabar:
John Massengale and I are standing in the middle of 1st Avenue at East 4th Street, in New York’s East Village, and he does not like the feng shui. He points to the thick, white lines in the roadway, directing drivers toward a left turn. “Automobile-scale striping,” he notes. “It’s telling you: ‘This is not a place for you.’”
Part instruction manual, part history, part manifesto, the book argues that it is the street, more than anything, that shapes the city. In traveling to cities around the world and interviewing residents, pedestrians and businesspeople, Dover and Massengale found a remarkable degree of agreement about which streets are nice and which are not. “If there is so much consensus on what makes a good street,” they ask, “then why are we still building so many bad and ugly ones?”
Posted in New Urbanism, New York, Street Design, Urbanism
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Vision Zero in New England
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Notes on New York Old & New
WE FREQUENTLY READ that New York is incomparably better today than 40 years ago. Yes and no. Crime is down, but buildings are up—to the degree that too much of a good thing is bad.
Fifty-seventh Street will soon have not only the tallest residential building in the world, but six others almost as tall are under construction or approved along the broad byway. They will make the street less pleasant to walk on, they look silly on the skyline, and they will make Central Park colder in the winter. The largest playground in the park will be up to 20 degrees colder at times because of the new buildings.
New Yorkers are finally catching on that these apartments mainly sell to foreign plutocrats for use as pied-a-terres and investment vehicles. Despite the wealth of the owners and the price of the apartments, they won’t produce much long-term economic benefit for the city, even though these towering symbols of conspicuous consumption will permanently diminish the view from the park and the experience of using the park.
Approximately 25 years ago, Jacqueline Onassis and the Municipal Art Society successfully led a campaign to cut down much shorter towers. Post-Bloomberg, the Real Estate Board of New York has more power than ever, and the MAS is frequently the cheerleader for projects they would have opposed when Kent Barwick was in charge. And we haven’t even talked about culture yet.
The owners of 31 West 57th Street have told Rizzoli that they plan to tear down the 1920s limestone building. There are already more places on 57th Street to buy $40 million condos than books. Soon there will be more towers and no bookstore.
Steinway Hall, the 88-year-old building down the block and across the street from Carnegie Hall where generations of famous and not-so-famous pianists have tried out pianos, was sold last year. So now there are more $40 million condos for sale than pianos too. The underground tunnel that connected Carnegie Hall to the piano showroom, allowing visiting pianists to walk over and select a Steinway for their concert has undoubtedly been locked. Carnegie Hall long ago kicked the artists out of the studios above the hall that had been there for decades so they could build their own tower.
Culture suffers. Non-resident plutocrats in towering fortresses are not a good trade for music and books. These visiting billionaires don’t create art, and it’s not even clear that they consume it. Conspicuous consumption versus the consumption and creation of art is one of the ways that New York is worse off today.
Maybe it’s darkest before the dawn. I read this quote today:
The new emerging paradigm is premised on a fundamentally different ethos, in which we see ourselves not as disconnected, competing units fixated on maximising consumerist conquest over one another; but as interdependent members of a single human family. Our economies, rather than being assumed to exist in a vacuum of unlimited material expansion, are seen as embedded in wider society, such that economic activity for its own sake is recognised as the pathology that it is. Instead, economic enterprise becomes aligned with the deeper values that make us human – values like meeting our basic needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, sharing and giving: the values which psychologists say contribute to well-being and happiness, far more than mere money and things. And in turn, our societies are seen not as autonomous entities to which the whole of the planet must be ruthlessly subjugated, but rather as inherently embedded in the natural environment.
Nafeez Ahmed, The global Transition tipping point has arrived– vive la révolution, The Guardian
Sounds like a good place for artists.
Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Current, Music, New York, Pedestrian, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas
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An Oldie But Goodie—sung to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”
COLUMBIA ARCHITECTURE PROFESSOR and architectural historian Ken Frampton was once asked about “the cult of New Urbanism.” It’s “ersatz kitsch colonialism for the modern middle class”, he said. Faced with a statement like that, what can one do except write lyrics to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance?
The lyrics need the music to work — you can listen here.
We are the very model for the modern middle class is all,
They like their buildings regional, traditional or classical,
And that can mean that we might draw facades a bit symmetrical,
But that’s just what the people want, and no it’s not fanatical.These creeps in academia should go on a sabbatical,
Until they learn the fallacy of public art too radical.
With architects like Frampton though, who want to be rhetorical,
New Urbanists just want to ask, Oh must be you didactical?So Ken if you think what you say is clever and so apropos,
Then you should know the thoughts you sew are from a long, long time ago.
We do not want to be too rude, and certainly not crassly crude,
But oh we would be delirious, if you could be less serious,
And from your thoughts just let us go.We have the best developers, we quote the towns historical,
From Charleston to Santa Fe, in order categorical.
We’re very well acquainted too with all things architectural,
We understand the orders well, and make them all grammatical.For our plans we need to know the buildings typological,
At other times we like to make a building prototypical,
So if you want to criticize, just kindly up open your eyes,
We are the very model for the modern middle class is all!
A bonus song, after the jump—
“Me and Andy Duany”
Posted in Architecture, Classical, Culture, Joke, Music, New Urbanism, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas
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You Thought Architects Designed Perfect Chairs? (Good, Better, Best)
THIS EXCERPT from an old post at Veritas & Venustas comments on some of the same issues that Witold Rybczinski just wrote about in a post and a Tweet:
Good, Better, Best
(originally published February 2004)
.. The concept is a way of grading things qualitatively, as Good, Better or Best. I first heard of Good, Better, Best when I owned a store called America’s Best Traditional Designers and Craftsmen. From my architecture practice, I knew a number of craftsmen who made wonderful traditional furniture, windows and paneling, and other types of cabinetry and woodwork. I also knew how difficult it was to find these woodworkers — who usually worked out in rural workshops — and how much more exposure greatly inferior craftsmen had. So I started a store to sell their work.
Once I was selling 18th-century-style American furniture, I had to learn more about it, and I learned all sorts of things I never heard about in architecture school. That included the secrets of traditional finishes, the qualities of various woods, how traditional joinery differed from contemporary practice, and knowledge of how construction details varied from region to region.
I went to museums and looked at the best American furniture collections, which trained my eye to see subtleties I hadn’t noticed before then. And I found lessons that applied to the design of architecture and urbanism.
The dimensions of the 18th-century chair embodied hundreds of years of experimentation. By 1700, chair makers had discovered the proper angle for the back, the perfect height for the seat, and the ideal depth for a cushion that would support the leg without cutting off the flow of blood behind the knee.
Chair makers perfected the form for the comfort of the human body and then used that form to make supremely beautiful art from functional objects. Sheraton chairs, Chippendale chairs and Hepplewhite chairs all had the same basic dimensions, and yet they looked very different because both their forms and their elaboration were very different.
The chair makers knew where to put their energies in making those elaborations. All the best chairs had several carvers working on them: The best carver would work on the top rail, the next best would work on the carving around the seat, and the apprentices would carve the feet. Not because the feet were less important than the top rails, but because they were farther away from the eyes of the beholders.
In 1951, the leading dealer of 18-century American furniture wrote an interesting article for Antiques magazine in which he ranked many pieces of antique American furniture as Good, Better or Best, and showed how to make those judgments. He later turned that into a book of the same name, which became one of the most influential books in the world of antiques.
The criteria for the judgments were simple: 1) design and proportion, 2) construction and detail, and 3) materials and finishes.
There are some obvious comparisons with the Modernist principles of architecture and urbanism, which swept away traditional design. Even though they invented “the science of Ergonomics,” many of the Modernist designers who made furniture only paid lip service to the functional paradigms for the comfort of people sitting in their chairs.
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Vision Zero in New York City
On March 14, 2014, John Massengale and Victor Dover spoke at the Regional Plan Association to a roundtable group interested in the topic of Vision Zero in New York City.
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The Shard Is The New Freeway
The Shard, Dubai-on-Thames, Great Britain. Renzo Piano, 2003-2011. The tallest building in the EU.
IN THE 20TH CENTURY, experts told cities across the country they needed in-city highways to successfully compete with modern metropolises. In the 21st century, “iconic towers” like the Shard are the new freeways. “Paris lost 170,000 jobs to Lyon,” they whisper (suggesting somehow that Cleveland or Orlando might become the new financial capital of North America). “Your city will lose out in the global marketplace unless you build shiny, new mega-towers like Shanghai and Dubai.”
Now, we’re tearing down some of those old freeways, and we wish we could afford to tear down more of them. Pulling down 100-story towers will be even more expensive and difficult. We could save ourselves a lot of bad urbanism and future expense if we simply don’t build them.
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“Money is the McMansion that falls apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries.”
Street Design in the Berkshire Record
The Berkshire Record only puts their front page online, so here is a copy of their recent article about the two streets in Great Barrington, Massachusetts that are discussed in Street Design. Click on either of the images below to see larger, more legible versions.
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Happy City
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Vision Zero Changes Everything
These two photos of Lexington Avenue at 89th Street show that one-hundred years ago the sidewalks of Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were two to three times as wide they are now. The photo on the bottom was taken in 1912 to document the construction of the East Side IRT subway under the avenue (the sidewalks have wooden planks because the construction wasn’t finished when the photo was taken). I took the photo on the top two years ago, showing that the buildings lost their stoops and large light wells when more and wider traffic lanes were added to Lexington Avenue in the 1950s.
Posted in Current, New Urbanism, New York, Pedestrian, Slow Streets, Street Design, Urbanism
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Old New York
Two types of architecture: good architecture, and the other kind
THE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC for New York magazine wrote about the work of Robert A.M. Stern in an article entitled Unfashionably Fashionable. I commented:
“There are two kinds of music,” Duke Ellington famously said. “Good music, and the other kind.”
When I had Bob Stern as a teacher, the architectural academy and the architectural establishment were equally open-minded. Bob Stern, Peter Eisenman, Léon Krier, Michael Graves, Richard Meier and many others formed a disparate and friendly group that agreed with Duke Ellington, accepting many things (and each other), as long as they were good.
Today, we have ideologues controlling much of “the discourse” in the academy and the establishment. In musical terms, they are saying that everyone must work in the tradition of Philip Glass: Classical music, Hip Hop, bebop, jazz, folk, rock, indie rock, pop…are all verboten. They’re more close minded than the Tea Party.
Is this about to change? Things like the New York article or one in the magazine of the American Institute of Architects by Aaron Betsky in which Betsky calls the traditional work of former Stern employee Tom Kligerman “breathtaking in its sophistication and beauty,” suggest that maybe they are. The magazine has probably never published Kligerman’s work, and has certainly never praised it before.
Worth noting: like most people other than architects, the readers of New York are not ideological about traditional or modern design. You particularly see this in New York in the hangouts of the young and the hip, where you find traditional design, modern design, and places that comfortably combine both. Craftsmanship and natural materials, both conspicuously missing in the work of most Starchitects and New York’s gleaming tall towers, have been strong trends for years.
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