My Comment on CityLab: “What’s the Matter With San Francisco?”

by John Massengale Posted on July 24, 2015

POSTSCRIPT: When the highest profits in a market like New York’s come from 1) converting affordable rental housing into housing for sale that buyers use for investment and speculation, and from 2) building housing for the rich and the super-rich, there is no logical reason to say deregulating the market will bring affordable housing.

In a market that does not have a sudden imbalance of wealth and a large new group of buyers, the libertarian supply and demand argument might apply. But when a tiny group of people who own half the wealth in the world suddenly focus on a market that is already booming without them, the traditional supply and demand is no longer the problem. Every year, more and more affordable rentals are removed from the market, while building costs and land prices become too high to create new affordable rentals without subsidies, regardless of demand.

IN RESPONSE TO:

“What’s the Matter With San Francisco?”
“The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed progressive politics.”

Gabriel Metcalf, Jul 23, 2015, 184 Comments

I wrote:

Like some other commenters here, I think there is a fatal flaw in this argument. I have to qualify that by saying that I’m not familiar with the current housing market in San Francisco, but I am familiar with the market in New York City, where I live, and London, where my brother lives.

The fatal flaw is in thinking that the market will build housing for the middle class and blue collar workers and families if government just gets out of the way. New York and London show a different history, and I suspect there are similar factors at play in San Francisco.

The problem in New York actually started not with global capitalism, which distorts the local market in “global cities,” but with the widespread conversion of rental apartments to condominiums and co-ops, which began back in the 1970s. At that time, when the New York market was weak, there was no price difference most of the time between rent-stabilized prices and market-rate prices (of course there were exceptions, created by people who had occupied rent controlled apartments for decades, but they were the exceptions).

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Wowie Zowie: The Other Kind

by John Massengale Posted on July 24, 2015
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BMW CSL: It looks like it will bite anyone who gets in the way.
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Zaha Hadid: “I don’t do nice little buildings.”
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Nike: Richness without order or harmony.

BEFORE the architecture world settled on “the Iconic building” as the best marketing term to sell shiny towers to the global super-rich, UK Deputy Prime Minister John Preston used to talk about “the Wow Factor” when talking about what London should build for the global market. Preston’s friend John Norquist—former Mayor of Milwaukee, former President of the Congress for New Urbanism, and the patron for a museum designed by Santiago Calatrava—says, “We forget how quickly ‘Wow’ can turn into ‘Bow Wow.”

A late entry, after the jump

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There are two types of architecture—Category I and Category II

by John Massengale Posted on July 21, 2015

I’VE TWEETED this post by Witold Rybczynski, and I’ve put it on FaceBook. But I don’t think it’s getting enough attention, so here it is again: Category I and Category II, by Witold Rybczynski:

You can divide residential architects into two categories: those who design for their clients, and those who design for their colleagues. When the work of Category I is published, it is in mass market magazines such as Architectural Digest and Elle Decor; the work of Category II appears in professional journals and architectural monographs.

More here.

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Vester Voldgade – Our Street of the Day / A Street Design Supplement*

by John Massengale Posted on July 19, 2015
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Vester Voldgade, Copenhagen. Looking north, across Ny Kongensgade.

VESTER VOLDGADE, KØBENHAVN (“West Rampart Street, Copenhagen”) is interesting both for its current condition and and its original state. It’s called “Voldgade” because like the boulevards of Paris, it was built where the old city wall stood (the French word “boulevard” comes from the word “bulwark”). As in Paris, allées were planted on the old ramparts, but in Copenhagen the result was different.

Parisian boulevards became tree-lined, symmetrical streets (planted in patterns composed of squares, the landscape architect Douglas Duany has pointed out). In an old photograph of a section of Vester Voldgade then called “Filosofgangen” (Philosopher Path), we can see that there was a street next to the tree-covered ramparts, with all the trees on the rampart side of the road in what looks like a naturalistic planting.

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Filosofgangen (Vester Voldgade). Looking north in 1880.

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“Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants”

by John Massengale Posted on July 6, 2015

IF TROMBONE SHORTY were an architect, his fellow architects would say his music is “nostalgic” and “pastiche,” because he draws so heavily on the musical traditions of New Orleans. Luckily for us, musicians are smarter than that. The White House loves him too—EVERYONE is very happy in the video above.
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The Good Kind – Bilbao

by John Massengale Posted on June 17, 2015

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I WENT TO BILBAO just to see the Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum. I’m glad I did. Gehry may be our greatest living architect, and the Guggenheim is the best of the 6 or 7 of the buildings designed by him that I’ve seen.

The museum is a wonderful example of a Modernist Civic Building. It is sited well, and everything that is best about it contrasts with the old city around it. That’s not necessary, and it would be bad for an ordinary building in the middle of an ordinary block, but Gehry made it all work in Bilbao.

One thing that struck me was that the people visiting the museum loved it. That’s worth a lot.

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The Good Kind – 150 Charles Street, Cook + Fox

by John Massengale Posted on June 17, 2015

150Charles

I’VE NOTICED this new building a few times from the Hudson River Greenway. It always gets an automatic, “Oh, that’s pretty good.” Other architects have told me they’ve had similar “blink” reactions.

Why? It’s well proportioned, it has pleasant massing, and the balance and play of glass and brick is interesting. It’s a good fabric building that doesn’t completely fade into the background or demand all the attention.

When you get a little closer, you find maisonettes on both side streets, and at the opposite end of the block a respectful attitude towards affordable housing that Jane Jacobs helped build.

I’m usually not a big fan of putting the bulk of the massing in the center of the block when there’s a broad avenue (or in this case the Hudson River), but Cook + Fox turned the zoning regulations into a handsome building. New York could use more like it.

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New Building for New Orleans

by John Massengale Posted on June 17, 2015

2400 St. Charles Elevation 6-16-2015 (reduced)

MANY ARCHITECTS will call this design “kitsch,” “pastiche,” or “nostalgic.” Pastiche means “an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period,” so it’s not really a criticism, although they mean it to be. For that matter, nostalgic means “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations“—happy associations seem like a good thing.

New Orleans is a great American city, with residents who love their jazz, old and new—the old is frequently called “New Orleans style”—and the French heritage of their food, which until the foodie revolution was hands down the best in America. More than any other Americans, perhaps, they love their old neighborhoods and the characteristic buildings that define those neighborhoods. New Orleanians will have no problem with this building.

You can also see that the architect drew the building with love. That’s always a good things. Buildings made with love will draw the most happy associations.

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Selling Snow To Eskimos Part II (BIG Photobombs Tribeca)

by John Massengale Posted on June 15, 2015

UPDATE: I rode a bike from Lafayette Street to the Hudson River today. At the beginning of the ride I looked up Broadway and saw the top of the Chrysler Building. At Fifth Avenue the Empire State Building came into view. Seeing those two towers was like seeing old friends.

At Seventh Avenue, One World Trade Center hove into view. It was an alien intruder, photobombing Greenwich Village. There is a place for glass buildings in New York, and Two World Trade Center will be the best of the bunch at Ground Zero, but the behemoths already built make so many parts of New York suffer from their monotonous bulk.

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A FRIEND WHO LIVES IN TRIBECA calls this “BIG Photobombs Tribeca.” Bjarke Ingels (the “BI” in “BIG”) calls it uniting “the streetscapes of Tribeca with the towers downtown.”

Since this is my second post in two days about this building, let me point out up front that I’m not saying BIG are bad architects. They’re obviously clever and frequently have interesting ideas. If this building were in Singapore or perhaps the Pudong section of Beijing, I might like it. I might even like it if it were part of Hudson Yards, but in the context of downtown New York, I think it’s an alien intruder.

The buildings in the front of the photo above have human scale, craft, and a simple beauty that comes from composition, rhythm, proportion, and ornament. The deep masonry walls have a play of light and shadow: the result is a firmness and solidity that effectively contain the space between the buildings and shape the street into a comfortable place to be. Together, the buildings make a public realm where we enjoy being and interacting.

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Why Is A Private Company Allowed To Close And Design Public Streets?

by John Massengale Posted on June 15, 2015

UPDATE: The good news is that this has been to the Community Boards, which endorsed the plan—I don’t know why I didn’t find that in my searches or calls around this morning. It is good that there is some public process, but I still don’t like ceding the public realm to the control of private developers.

There is a popular theory that the city has decided to spend most public improvement money in the outer boroughs and is actively taking the strategy of letting developers pay for changes in Manhattan. I understand that public spending has not been equitable, but I hope the second half of the sentence is not true, although since I tweeted this morning I’ve heard about a plaza design in Tribeca that may be paid for by a developer, there’s the extra tower height that came in return for the $220 million infrastructure fee collected from the developer of One Vanderbilt, and as I mentioned, the $125 million donation for Diller Park. It does seem like the public realm is for sale. Put them all together, along with the tax places and other subsidies at places like Billionaire Row, and it’s a disturbing trend.
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