#More of This, Please

When I think of national park pavilions, I usually picture something like this:

A roof over your head, some rustic detailing, and some tables to sit at and picnic. That’s nice, but here’s what they build over in Norway:

So. Cool. I would love to chill in here for a while during a hike.

What prevents us from doing projects like this? Not a thing. We just have to have people that appreciate design making the decisions.

More here.

#Mapping the Twitters

Twitter heat map of NYC

The people over at Trendsmap are really into mapping Twitter data. So, they’ve put together a series of visualizations for geo-tagged tweets from several cities around the world. It’s pretty interesting to see how clearly the infrastructure of the city comes out of this data, especially the streets (apparently a lot of people tweet while driving. Dexter McCluster says no.).

In this heatmap of Amsterdam, it becomes really clear how polycentric the city is, as well how distinct the major rail routes are (I’m assuming you can’t really tweet while riding a bike).

What’s really interesting is when you start zooming in. This is Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta.

I wonder what this could tell us about urban design and planning? Could we see where people tend to congregate and know how better to allocate resources? Could you somehow filter the data to know when people are complaining about how crappy that part of the city is, or how wonderful they think it is? Could you discover previously unknown spots that might be candidates for intervention? It’s a bit Big Brother, I know, but it could still be useful information. No one has to geo-tag their tweets, anyway. It’s kind of dumb. But it makes for cool maps.

#The Sequence

Constructed in Brussels, Belgium by artist Arne Quinze, “The Sequence” is made of nothing but orange-painted pieces of wood. It winds through a street in the Belgium capital, serving as a connectiong between the Flemish Parliament and the House of Flemish Representatives.

It’s amazing to me how light and heavy it feels at the same time, like it’s calmly floating over the street but could crush you at any time. I’m a fan.

#Amorphous Wood

Have a couple more blobby wood structures to post. I really like these projects, because I feel like they point to an interesting direction for architecture: they combine the clean aesthetic of modernism with more natural, captivating shapes, and they use natural materials to accomplish it.

The first is a “polymorphic bench” that students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation designed and built for under $1,000. Users can bend and move it around as they see fit. Very cool idea.

The second is a temporary installation in Kobe, Japan called Crater Lake. Designed by 24d STUDIO, it incorporates spaces for all forms of free play, and is customizable as well (the seating stools are movable). Too bad it’s temporary! I would love to see more projects like this become permanent.

#Suburban Nation, Ch. 6: Wherein the Developer is a Tragic Figure

You know them. The Tragic Figures, the hapless characters that meets their end from a string of circumstances they did not initiate. They would do the right thing, if only fate would allow it.

In Chapter 6 of Duany’s Suburban Nation, developers are the tragic figure. Once respected, an insidious mix of onerous government regulations, tricky marketers, and narrow-minded bankers did them in. Once the builders of mixed-use hopes and dreams, they are now the farm-eaters, forced to stamp out dead, inedible housing units across land that once brought us sustenance.

It’s an odd tone to take in a book about the terrible ills of suburbia, and it’s one that holds weight, albeit in limited ways. Developers are not landscape architects or community planners; they’re businessmen. The smart ones will recognize that cultivating community is important to their bottom line. The hacks will follow market trends and do what Builder magazine says they should. There are a lot more hacks.

But I did find it strange that Duany spent the whole chapter detailing why developers aren’t really to blame, then doing a turnabout at the end and praising developers they think are doing it right. People like Robert Davis and Joe Alfandre do deserve praise, but mostly because they disprove the whole notion that developers aren’t to blame. Those guys managed to do it, somehow. Why can’t the others?

Municipal regulations and marketers are huge influences on what gets built; I’m not denying that. But at one point in time, people gave a crap. They took pride in what they did, and customers in return appreciated the good work and kept them in business. Now, most people don’t give a crap either, so they buy a house that sprouted up in treeless field somewhere, tended to maturity by a flock of illegal immigrants and then passed along with the expectation that this crap will bloom into their children’s college fund. It’s ridiculous, and the developers are fully implicated in it. They passed along an inferior product in the name of “making a living,” because building something worthwhile might mean they couldn’t get a new F-250 every year.

All these regulations got passed because no one made a compelling case to resist them, even though compelling cases existed. Parking minimums got passed, developers raised their prices to keep the same margins, clients that couldn’t pay got weeded out, and bankers only gave money to projects that gave quantifiable results. So huge parking lots got built, developers still made money, local corner stores gave way to Walgreens, and bankers got their returns.

I say amen to the statement on page 111, that “to think of the individual house (/building/project) as the ultimate outcome of the builder’s craft robs that craft of its broader significance.” Doing what we thought was best for the individual is bringing the whole thing down, making what was best for the individual not the best at all.

Thankfully, more and more projects are being built that will serve as precedents for other projects like them. I think it’s been substantially disproven that the model of suburbia is a profitable and desirable one to follow, for developers, banks, and municipalities. But if you’re going to praise a new generation of developers for pushing through and changing the game, you need to give equal blame to the ones that made a change necessary.

#The Important Difference Between a Road and a Street

Chuck Marohn is the director of the non-profit group Strong Towns, a group focused on what they call the root of America’s systemic problems: our land use patterns. What separates them from a lot of the smart growth crowd is that they come at the problem from a business perspective, making the financial argument that many urbanist groups struggle with.

“Our problem was not, and is not, a lack of growth; Our problem is sixty years of unproductive growth,” said Marohn. “The American pattern of development does not create real wealth; it creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.” The headline on their website states that “Our desire for independence has made us dependent. On automobiles. On cheap energy. On transfer payments between governments. On debt. Our expectation of plenty, and our expectation to pay only a portion of the full cost of growth, has led to a scarcity of resources. Our approach to land use now constrains us, growing our financial commitments at an alarming rate. It threatens real American prosperity with long-term economic stagnation and decline.”

I think this is a great way to approach the problem, and one that decision-makers will actually listen to. Take a look at Marohn’s TED talk, then go check out their recently-released report here.