¡ AMERICA NEEDS YOUR VOTE !

UPDATE: THE REBURBIA COMPETITION ENTRY by my friend and brilliant colleague Galina Tahchieva has taken the lead in the voting, but at one point today she was only three votes ahead of the Tower in the Parking Lot / Moshe Safdie rip-off, and the vote goes on all week. My comment from the site is below.

PS: There is only one vote per IP address, which means if one person at the office votes, others may not be able to. They can still vote at home, however.

Vote for Galina Tahchieva's entry in the Reburbia competition. Stop the disastrous rebirth of the anti-urban Tower in the Parking Lot. http://bit.ly/reburb

To see Galina's entry, click here. To vote, click on the arrow that lists the number of votes near the upper right corner of the entry page.

My later comment from the site:

One thing suburbia needs is to lose its dependence on the car. That means more walkability. And that means making places where people want to walk. There are many places in suburbia where proximity allows walking, but the unpleasantness of walking along the strip, for example, means that no one wants there.

Place making is about making places where people feel comfortable. Those places are the spaces between the buildings, like Main Street. This project is about making an object. There is nothing about this project that makes shaping exterior spaces where people want to be.

It obviously owes a big debt to Moshe Safdie’s Expo Habitat in Montreal. it also owes a big debt to Le Corbusier’s Tower in the Park plan to tear down central Paris. That in turn was the model for housing projects all over America that have been social disasters. Many have now been torn down.

These would not be towers in parks, but towers in parking lots, because they are single-use, isolated housing that brings greater density but doesn’t establish a relationship to shopping, jobs and transportation. It would continue the suburban pattern of one car per bedroom, and all those cars have to be parked. They require as many square feet of paving as there are square feet in the building itself.

Last but not least, it’s safe to say that 99% of the people who like this are architects or architecture students. You reform the physical environment by making places where people want to be, not by making esoteric images attractive to only a small part of the population.