Veritas et Venustas

Play Ball!

GAMES ON YES
Feb. 26 vs. Tampa Bay, 1:15
Feb. 28 vs. Minnesota, 1:15
March 3 vs. Team USA, 1:15
March 7 vs. Atlanta, 1:15
March 10 vs. Reds, 7:15
March 14 vs. Astros, 1:15
March 17 vs. Pirates, 7:15
March 19 vs. Blue Jays, 7:15
March 24 vs. Red Sox, 7:15
March 26 at Phillies, 1:05
April 3 vs. Cubs (from New York), 7:05
April 4 vs. Cubs (from New York), 1:05

MLB NETWORK
March 3 vs. Team USA, 1:15
March 22 at Tampa Bay, 1:05
April 3 vs. Cubs (from New York), 7:05

GAMES ON WCBS
Feb. 28 vs. Twins, 1:15
March 7 vs. Braves, 1:15
March 14 vs. Astros, 1:15
March 15 vs. Twins, 1:15
March 21 vs. Tigers, 1:15
March 24 vs. Red Sox, 7:15
March 27 vs. Reds, 7:15
March 29 vs. Pirates, 1:15
April 3 vs. Cubs (from New York), 7:05
April 4 vs. Cubs (from New York), 1:05

"Towards a Functional Classification Replacement (Part One)"

From PedShed.net:

Every field has its foundational working concepts and the field of traffic engineering is no exception. It has a concept called functional classification, which is the core, guiding idea underlying the roadway system of the United States and many other nations. Functional classification is the conceptual foundation of the auto-dependent built environments where most Americans live.

The primary vision of functional classification is moving more and more cars at faster and faster speeds. This has certain benefits, but also a wide range of disastrous consequences for the built environment and the people who live in it. Hundreds, possibly thousands of reform-minded transportation planners and engineers have determined that the roadway functional classification system should be replaced.

It should be replaced by guiding concepts that support a more efficient, safer, less-polluting transportation system – concepts that support a wider range of choices for neighborhood living and daily travel. What factors should be considered when formulating a sustainable transportation system? What proposals have already been made?

Continue reading at PedShed

New Urbanism for New Yorkers — Wednesday February 25 @ MCNY

CNU New York is now a full chapter in the Congress for the New Urbanism. Our first official event will be Wednesday's debate between CNU President John Norquist and RPA President Robert Yaro at the Museum of the City of New York. We hope you will be able to join us.

Sustainable urbanism is a convenient solution for many of the problems facing us today. We must move stimulus funding away new highway construction that subsidizes sprawl to low carbon patterns of living. Norquist will discuss some things we can do in New York at this crucial moment.

Organized By

CNU New York
RPA

Sponsors

MCNY
ICA&CA
APA NY
APA CT
APA NJ

Download PDF Please consider posting the flyer on bulletin boards at your offices and schools.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young man in search of a good fortune must eventually want to don the Pinstripes.

C.C. Sabathia introduces himself to the New York press on the first day of Spring Training. (from the LoHud Yankees Blog)

Encounters with Famous Architects (another comment from Design Observer)

In a post at Design Observer called The Kindness of Strangers, Jessica Helfland wrote about student encounters with leading graphic designers while she was in school. I responded with a comment about a similar experience when I was in architecture school.

In the following story, names are not changed to protect the innocent or guilty.

When I was a graduate architecture student at Penn, Lou Kahn was recently dead, Postmodernism was the fashion, and the faculty was very confused about what to teach us. On the other hand, the architecture school at Cornell (and its outposts at Columbia and Princeton), had a definite body of knowledge it was teaching, and I decided it would be good for me to take two Columbia summer school courses taught by Cornell acolytes to better understand what that was.

The first course was in Rome, and the second in Paris. In between, I traveled around for two weeks with the only other student who took both courses. Our first stop was Venice, where Duncan whispered on our first day, "Look, there's Peter Eisanman. Should I go speak to him?" (Duncan was a Columbia student who had charretted for Eisanman once.)

"You must be here for the Biennale," Eisanman said, talking about an architecture event about to take place that neither of us had heard of. "Meet me here tomorrow at the same time and I'll give you some tickets."

When we went back the next day, Eisanman had no tickets but Bob Stern was with him. "Meet me here tomorrow and I'll have the tickets for you," Eisanman said again.

The next day the same scene played out again. Stern waited for Eisanman to leave, reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of tickets. "If you're here for a few days, I can get you into lots of events," he said. "Just let me know." He also gave us tickets for two older students from Penn who were in Venice on a traveling fellowship from the school.

The first night, Stern generously included us all in the opening events, as well as a cocktail party afterwards, where it seemed that half the most famous architects in the world were standing around chatting. Stern kept us under his wing and introduced us to heroes like Denise Scott Brown.

After an event the next day, Stern invited us to dinner. The dinner was on an island and the boats coming back would arrive too late for the curfew at the hostel where the other two Penn friends were staying, so they had to choose between a free dinner and having a place to spend the night. They chose dinner.

We arrived at the address Stern gave us, where two gleaming Venetian motorboats were waiting to take us to dinner. Right after I boarded, Jim Stirling (a large man) sat down in the stern, the entire boat sloped sharply in his direction and off we went into the Venetian night, with San Marco glowing behind us.

To make a long story short, at dinner I sat between Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. I don't know who would have been more impressive to a student. At one point, Venturi said to me and one of my Penn friends, "If I were your age, the first thing I would do would be to go to Finland to visit the works of Alvar Aalto. He's been the greatest influence on my life."

Needless to say, the next day we went to the bookstore where we had first seen Eisanman, bought the small Praeger book that showed all the Aalto buildings and started planning our trip.

We both had Eurailpasses and arranged to meet in August at a university dorm outside Helsinki designed by Aalto that in the summer operates as a hostel. We visited virtually every Aalto building in Finland that could be reached by rail, and had discussions along the way about things like the Finnish stick style that had clearly influenced Venturi's Trubek and Wislocki houses. When Jim later worked for Venturi (I later worked for Stern), we discovered that Venturi had only been to Turku, where he had seen a single Aalto building before going back to Sweden.

But that's another story.

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Speaking at a Town Hall event in Ft. Meyers, Florida today, President Obama said,

"The days where we're just building sprawl forever — those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats — everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities."

(On C-Span, around 55:15, answering a question from a City Councilwoman. Also on the White House blog, at 1:07 PM.)

Here's a transcript from Citykin:

We have to target billions of dollars at infrastructure spending. And states all across the country are going through what Florida is going through. There was a study done by the American Association of Engineers… that might not be the exact title, but engineers from all across the country …. we get a D in infrastructure all across the country. We saw what happened in Minneapolis, where a bridge collapsed and resulted in tragedy. And not only do we need to rebuild our roads, bridges, ports, levees… our damns. But we also have to plan for the future. This the same example of turning crisis into opportunity. This should be a wake-up call for us.

You go to Shanghai, China right now… and they’ve got high-speed rail that puts our railroads to shame. They’ve got ports that are state of the art. Their airports, are… compared to the airports that we…you go through Beijing airport and you compare that to Miami Airport?

Now… now…look.. this is America. We've always had the best infrastructure. We were always willing to invest in the future. You know somebody… Governor Christ mentioned Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the Civil War, in the midst of all this danger and peril, what did he do? He helped move the Intercontinental Railroad. He helped to start land grant colleges. He understood that even when you are in the middle of crisis, you got to keep your eye on the future. So transportation, when it is not just fixing our old transportation systems, but it’s also imagining new transportation systems. That’s why I’d like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to… to invest in mass transit, because potentially that’s energy efficient. And I think a lot more people are open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The days where we’re just building sprawl forever… those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats… everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this kind of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation. That’ll make a big difference.

I've been critical, and still am critical, of the amount of money going to highway construction, which props up sprawl and a carbon-dependent way of life. But the Stimulus Bill has gotten better, and perhaps we're not giving Obama enough credit.

Hillary underestimated him and then got tough, but Obama won without much fuss or muss.

McCain underestimated him, then attacked, but Obama never took the bait and won going away.

With the stimulus bill, he's been smooth, and the bill get's better and will pass. He tells us the most important thing is to act quickly, so he's looking pretty good.

He's also looking good regarding Rush. Don't underestimate my man Obama.

"Buildings endure. Fashion rarely does." (comment at the Design Observer)

I made the following comment at Design Observer in response to a post on the South Street Seaport. The Seaport is at the end of Fulton Street, a short walk from my office.

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.

You think the cobblestones are a little hokey? They can be replaced. But the anti-urban housing from the 1960s on the on the other side of Pearl Street is full of people's homes, so those buildings will be a lot harder to change, particularly if they were ever turned into condos. The only way to fix Water Street is to replace most of the current buildings there.

Because of the factor of time, I have to disagree with one comment: "and not in any simulacrum of historic style. The new contextuality had to do with size and color, not with simplified cornice lines and repeated materials. The buildings (by Cook + Fox, architects of One Bryant Park) are handsome and the block feels solid, replete."

The new buildings are handsome, but the comment about "the simulacrum of historic style" is a cliche of Modernism that has caused a lot of harm to cities over the years.

In traditional architecture and urbanism, the first role of an urban building is to shape the public realm. In Modernism, the first role of a building can vary from being an interesting object, to being an expression of technology, to being a monument to the architect's genius, to being something cheap and big. Many Modern buildings do all four. All four frequently interfere with shaping the public realm and making an outdoor place where people want to be.

In New York, our traditions and the price of our real estate mean that most buildings come right up to the sidewalk, and that's the most obvious way to shape the public realm, which is essentially the space between the buildings. (But look at how the housing in Mosesland simultaneously erodes the public realm of the street and makes boring spaces within the block.)

Other cities are more likely to have problems with parking lots and wind-swept plazas sitting between the public realm and the object-buildings set back from the street, although New York's 1961 zoning did give height bonuses for plazas. On the whole, we've come to realize that most of those plazas were mistakes.

Once you've shaped the public realm, you come to the issue of what the building looks like. We've been through an ideological period when architects said that the only "real" expression of our time was Modernism.

At the time they said that, in the 2oth century, maybe they were right. But we're in the 21st century now, and it's increasingly obvious that we don't have to be Modern anymore. Today's New York Times has an article about a good new traditional USC film school building, designed by George Lucas. Princeton recently built a new Gothic college, because when they surveyed their students they found, like virtually every other university, that their students loved living in the traditional dorms and hated the Modern ones.

The new building was paid for by Meg Whitman, a young Princeton graduate who runs eBay. At the same time, the Trustees placated the university's architecture school — who trotted out all the ideological cliches about style — by allowing an octogenarian trustee to pay for a new science library designed by Frank Gehry.

Making good streets, neighborhoods and cities is not about style. Modernism has many great buildings, but its rate of return (the number of good buildings compared to the number of bad buildings) is poor, to say the least. On top of that, the number of great places — streets and neighborhoods — Modernism has made after a 150 years of trying is unacceptably low.

That's true even in New York, where we have some of best and most urban Modernism. Our examples show that good Modern building can enliven a traditional street, but that a street of Modern buildings is boring. If you disagree, show me an example that makes your case.

We need to get over the cliches about style. Buildings endure. Fashion rarely does.

Lewis Library, Princeton University