The Good Kind: The Cambridge Public Library

by John Massengale Posted on January 3, 2015

Cambridge Public LIbrary Rawn
IT WAS A PLEASANT SURPRISE to stumble on the Cambridge Public Library addition by Bill Rawn while staying in a B&B across the street.

Interesting that when you search online for photographs showing the addition and its relationship to the old Richardsonian library by Henry van Brunt (an excellent building in itself, restored by Ann Beha), all the architectural photographers have carefully separated the two, as though the other didn’t exist.

Below is another library by Rawn: Aalto meets the GSD. When Rawn first opened his office, he was one of the subject’s in Tracy Kidder’s House.
Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Current, Good Kind, New England | Comments Off on The Good Kind: The Cambridge Public Library

Happy New Year

by John Massengale Posted on December 31, 2014

Here in New York, there are many things happening as 2014 comes to a close. For the last few weeks the streets have been full of demonstrators marching under the banner of Black Lives Matter. The terrible and tragic shooting of two policeman may have ended that, but if so, something else will rise up. Like the Occupy Wall Street marches, Black Lives Matter is a call for change and a call to be heard. It brings back a turn of phrase by President Obama that resonated with many but that still awaits full expression: We are the change we have been waiting for.

The people are coming together on streets that are changing too. Vision Zero, the call for zero traffic deaths in New York City, is just part of a change in how we see what urban designers call the public realm. For more than half a century, Departments of Transportation have taken most of the public realm for the use of machines rather than people. But there is a growing consensus that it should be reclaimed for city living. Vision Zero enabled our new city-wide 25 mile per hour speed limit, but that is probably just a step on the road to 20 miles per hour (and even slower in some places). Slower is both safer and better for city life.

When cars go 20 miles per hour or less on city streets, traffic deaths plummet and public life soars. No longer do we have to shape the streets for the safety of cars, a process that includes getting people out of the way of the automobiles. Instead, we can make them places where people want to be. Design public spaces where pedestrians are safe and comfortable, and you have streets that can be safely used by cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. They are also streets where drivers will want to get out of their cars and walk.

Under Mayor Bloomberg, the New York City DOT accomplished groundbreaking and important work that began a transformation of our city streets. Under Mayor De Blasio, we will go to the next step. Here’s to 2015 and change we can believe in.

Posted in Bicycle, Pedestrian, Personal, Slow Streets, Street Design, Urbanism | Comments Off on Happy New Year

What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!

by John Massengale Posted on December 29, 2014

WhatWeWant
Funny that this is the first image that came up when I Googled “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!” “Funny,” because I’m writing about the AIA’s response to the common-sense proposal by Steve Bingler and Martin Pedersen in the New York Times Op-Ed “How to Rebuild Architecture,” and the only response I’ve seen so far is Aaron Betsky’s in Architect magazine, in which he writes in the first paragraph “With an ‘architecture critic‘ who has basically given up on reviewing the designed environment in favor of bizarre forays into fields such as so-called ‘evidence-based design,’ the Times has now for the second time in several months given its editorial page over to a piece on architecture that is so pointless and riddled with clichés as to beggar comprehension.”

I’ll get back to that, but first I’d like to talk about the lack of response so far from the AIA, and even the lack of comment from the magazine’s editor on this petulant attack in the magazine on the New York Times and its critic. Architect is the official magazine of the American Institute of Architects, and Betsky is a Contributing Editor of the magazine whose monthly columns come with a footer that says, “His views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.”

As I’ve said, I thought the op-ed in the Times was both excellent and insightful, and I believe even the majority of architects might agree. Since the AIA is our leading professional organization, why has it published this extreme attack (“ballistic” and “incoherent” were how the former architecture critic of the Providence Journal characterized it) without even a short editor’s comment? If I were the President of the AIA, I would worry that the organization’s reputation would be tainted by it. Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Classical, Culture, Current, Education, Good Kind, New Urbanism, Pedestrian, Urbanism | Comments Off on What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!

Separated At Birth: One Santa Fe & One Western Avenue

by John Massengale Posted on December 22, 2014

One Santa Fe One Western
ONE’S IN the Los Angeles Arts District, the other’s at Harvard Business School. In addition to the 40-ton Swords of Damocles overhead, they share little human scale* and little to even show that humans live there. The critics love both, but they seem to me to epitomize architecture that’s esoteric and out of touch.

The student editors at the Harvard Crimson ran a story called “Snap, Yo’ Momma’s Uglier than One Western Avenue.” The opening line said, “The decades-long debate over whether Mather House or the Leverett House towers holds the dubious distinction of being the ugliest residence on campus may have just been settled once and for all—thanks to the opening of One Western Avenue, Harvard’s newest, and perhaps most hideous, graduate school housing unit.”

Also in the Crimson:

The Boston Herald calls the design “risk-taking.” The Boston Globe calls it “aggressively dull, blocky, and abstract” with nothing to indicate the “joy of human habitation.” The New York Times calls it a “distinctive example of progressive contextualism.” [SAY WHAT?] Anupam Mishra, a second-year HBS student, calls it “the ugliest thing since Canaday.”

In the background of the Western Ave photo, you can see two of the towers at Peabody Terrace, housing for Harvard graduate students designed by Jose Luis Sert, former Dean of the university’s Graduate School of Design. People have called it the ugliest building in Cambridge for years. Twenty years earlier that title was held by the Harvard Graduate Center, designed by the former Chair of the architecture department at the GSD, Walter Gropius.

It’s surprising how badly Harvard and the GSD take care of Harvard’s graduate students, considering how much the university depends on its graduates, who donate about $2 million per day. Former Harvard President Larry Summers reportedly disliked the GSD for many reasons, including the fact that One Western Avenue is so ugly that Harvard couldn’t persuade a donor to put his or her name on the building.

This is not about style, or even the expression of technology and “modern” construction techniques (which are the opposite of “artisanal”). Instead, it’s about esoteric architectural ideology separated by 10 years and 6,000 miles producing “original” but ridiculously similar buildings with little ambition or desire to make places where people want to be.

* Look at the people in the photograph of One Western Avenue. Like ants to the slaughter, they are sitting in a non-place that’s only slightly cozier than the parking lot at a mega-mall. One Santa Fe is a QUARTER MILE LONG—and yes, simple and boring does become more and more boring the more it’s repeated.

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Current, Education, New England, Separated at Birth, The Other Kind | Comments Off on Separated At Birth: One Santa Fe & One Western Avenue

The Good Kind: Lincoln Road Garage by Herzon & De Meuron

by John Massengale Posted on December 19, 2014

1111 Lincoln Road
I’M NOT SURE this building comes across well in photographs if you haven’t seen the real thing—but it’s one of my three favorite buildings in Miami, along with Vizcaya and the Biltmore (in the public spaces, including the pool). It’s a parking garage at the western end of Lincoln Road (one of my favorite Miami streets) that’s also used for public and private events.
Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Current, Good Kind, Urbanism | Comments Off on The Good Kind: Lincoln Road Garage by Herzon & De Meuron

Tip of the iceberg?

by John Massengale Posted on December 19, 2014

AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES by the architect Steven Bingler and the architecture critic Martin Pedersen calls attention to an important architectural problem that has been swept under the rug for quite a while now. Architecture is a public art—we all interact with architecture every day—but it’s become a frequently esoteric and self-referential art that the public doesn’t relate to very well. As Bingler and Pedersen say, “We’ve taught generations of architects to speak out as artists, but we haven’t taught them how to listen.” And, “We’re attempting to sell the public buildings and neighborhoods they don’t particularly want, in a language they don’t understand.”
Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Beauty, Classical, Culture, Current, Education, Good Kind, Urbanism | Comments Off on Tip of the iceberg?

All the streets illustrated in Street Design

by John Massengale Posted on December 15, 2014

AN ALPHABETICAL LIST of all the streets illustrated in Street Design. You can also download a sortable Excel list by clicking here.

Air Street. London, UK
Alta Vista Terrace, Chicago, IL
Arcade Santo Stefano, Bologna, IT
avenue d’Iena, Paris, FR
avenue de l’Opéra, Paris, FR
avenue Foch, Paris, FR
avenue Montaigne, Paris, FR
Aviles Street, St. Augustine, FL
Avinguda Diagonal, Barcelona, ES
Continue reading →

Posted in Beauty, New Urbanism, Street Design, Urbanism | Comments Off on All the streets illustrated in Street Design

VV Redux: Carl Jung Talks About Traffic Engineers

by John Massengale Posted on December 11, 2014

The psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote about everything, including traffic engineers:

All time-saving methods, to which alleviaton of traffic congestion and other conveniences belong, do not, paradoxically, save any time, but simply fill the time available in such a manner that one has no more time at all. The result of this is inevitable, breathless haste, superficiality and nervous fatigue with all the related symptoms like nervous hunger, impatience, irritability, distractedness etc…

I found this at a public transit blog. Also interesting is their most popular link, P.J. O’Rourke’s paean to the car in Give War A Chance (“…even if all these accusations are true, the automobile is still an improvement on its principal alternative, the pedestrian. Pedestrians are easily damaged. Try this test: Hit a pedestrian with a car. Now have the pedestrian hit the car back…. Which is in better shape?”).

Posted in Culture, Joke, Quote of the Day, Street Design, Urbanism, Veritas et Venustas | Comments Off on VV Redux: Carl Jung Talks About Traffic Engineers

Affordable Housing & The Boulevard of Death Followup

by John Massengale Posted on December 2, 2014

QB 1914

STREETSBLOG published this interesting image of a 1914 proposal for Queens Boulevard from the borough’s Chamber of Commerce. They also linked to a recent project for the Boulevard by a group called Planning Corps. I hadn’t seen either of these projects before (although I know one of the founders of Planning Corps, and saw some of their base data), but it’s good to know that in both 1914 and 100 years later multiple groups and public processes came up with similar ideas.

We know the ideas are enduring and popular.* So, can we build them now?

Second, there are differences in how we might build it today. The belief that perhaps Organized Motordom isn’t always right gains more and more supporters, along with still-evolving concepts like Slow Streets and Shared Space. The conceptual images we made for Transportation Alternatives show slow lanes along each side of the boulevard that are very different than the ones shown above—or what would have been done until recently. The distance from the buildings to the center traffic lanes are similar (maybe even identical), but the Chamber of Commerce image still gives more room to the cars and less to the pedestrians, while the new images show slow-speed side lanes that cars, cyclists, and pedestrians will share. Also different in the new design are three types of bike lanes and “green” bike lane that functions as a low-tech stormwater management system.

Continue reading →

Posted in Beauty, Bicycle, Current, New York, Street Design, Urbanism | Comments Off on Affordable Housing & The Boulevard of Death Followup

Slow Street of the Day

by John Massengale Posted on December 1, 2014

Via della Dogana Vecchia, Rome
Click on the image for larger version

HANS MONDERMAN AND SHARED SPACE are all the rage, but the Italians starting making slow streets in the late 1960s without naming them. Rome and Bologna don’t have all the traffic-calming bicycles that Amsterdam and Delft have, but the streets in the Centro Storico of Rome are still shared-space slow streets, with very few of the signs and markings that make drivers comfortable.

Posted in Beauty, Classical, Current, Good Kind, Pedestrian, Slow Street of the Day, Slow Streets, Street Design, Street of the Day, Urbanism | Comments Off on Slow Street of the Day