Tag Archives: urban fabric

Innovative re-use along the low road

Screencap from Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors

Assorted (and tangentially related) links:

1. Stephen Smith also digs into Eric Colbert (see my previous post here):

I’m not sure I agree with her parenthetical about DC’s “historic fabric” being “so strong already” – in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a newer city on the Northeast Corridor than Washington – but she’s definitely right that that’s what Washingtonians, even the not-so-native ones, think of their city. Of-right development – that is, building within the zoning code in a way that does not trigger a subjective review – is on the wane everywhere in America, but in DC it’s even rarer, and therefore personal relationships like the ones Eric Colbert has (“an ANC 2B commissioner, who had worked with Colbert on previous projects, introduced him with affection”) are even more important than usual when compared to good design.

A few points. A) I’m not sure why Stephen associates the strength of a city’s fabric with age – DC’s fabric has the advantage of being largely intact.  B) Stephen more explicitly states the same thesis – that Colbert’s architecture is ‘boring,’ and boring is, by association, bad design.  I would disagree that fabric is boring – on the contrary, fabric is essential. C) It’s a mistake to conflate the countable and objective measures of development (square footage, height, density, etc) with more subjective measures like ‘good design.’  Stephen conflates two key elements here – development by right, and design by right. The regulatory structures and processes that govern both are quite different.

2. Cities are all about context. Atlantic Cities discusses a review of San Francisco by John King, from iconic buildings to more mundane (boring?) elements of the urban fabric.

3. Mammoth links to another Atlantic piece, discussing “Low Road” buildings and their importance in urban economics, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Being on the low road isn’t exactly the same as being a part of the fabric – the price point and the prominence don’t always correlate – but the concept is somewhat similar.  These spaces are easy to adapt and reuse. Not just easy, but cheap.

4. Where Stewart Brand discusses the space of innovation, Ryan Avent has another (follow-up) piece on the geography of innovation:

I think that the authors have basically gotten the state of innovation right: we are approaching a critical point at which impressive progress in information technology becomes explosive progress. And I think that the authors are right that the extent to which we are able to take advantage of these technological developments will hinge on how successful America’s tinkerers are at experimenting with new business models and turning them into new businesses. But I also think that there is a critical geographic component to that process of experimentation and entrepreneurship and, as I wrote in my book, I think we are systematically constraining the operation of that component.

High housing costs constitute a substantial regulatory tax burden on residence in many high productivity areas. These are the places where the tinkerers are having their ongoing innovative conversation. But if the tinkerers are driven away, the conversation loses depth and breadth, and we lose many of the combinations that might go on to be the next big company — the next big employer. That, to me, is a very worrying idea.

5. When considering both the versatility of space as well as the institutional and infrastructural momentum (as well as touching on the importance of information technology), Mammoth also links to a short documentary of the infrastructure of the internet: Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors:

 

Scale, urban design, and architecture

CC image from MV Jantzen

Last week’s City Paper cover story, a profile of DC architect Eric Colbert by Lydia DePillis, contains several jabs at Colbert’s not-so-daring designs:

You may not remember precisely what they look like, though. They form a background blur in neighborhoods where much of Colbert’s work is clustered, blending together quietly in the mind of people walking down the street—just the way the neighbors, developers, and bankers intended.

Throughout the article, there’s an undercurrent of disappointment about this blending in that Colbert accomplishes, as if the lack of a bold design is the sign of a bad design.  What’s missing in this conception, however, is the difference in scale between architecture and urban design, between the scale of a building and the scale of a city.

Colbert is now a major influence on entire neighborhoods, not just individual blocks. Nowhere is this truer than greater 14th Street, where Elinor Bacon had accorded him the status of the Creator. But unlike his more imperialistic architectural predecessors, who knew they’d get to design large chunks of the city at once (and often had their own money in the deal), Colbert doesn’t think about leaving an imprint on the built environments he’s played a huge part in shaping.

“You know, it’s hard, because each project comes to us individually, with a different client, a different set of neighbors,” he says, when I ask whether he thinks about molding a place like 14th and U. “We really look at the block. It never occurred to me that we would be doing four projects on 14th Street, with potentially two more in the wings. So it wasn’t possible to know in advance, and say, ‘This is how I’m going to shape 14th Street.”

“Not that I would want to be that controlling,” he adds.

Even the more “imperialistic” predecessors DePillis mentions (Harry Wardman, for example*) weren’t really ‘shaping’ their areas of the city so much as they were styling it.  The shape of the city is a product of urban design and the way that the buildings frame public spaces, as opposed to architecture that operates at a smaller scale.  In unpacking Colbert’s appeal, DePillis hints at the real forces shaping that design:

In Washington, where knowing local zoning codes and historic districts saves time and angst, hiring an architect remains a model of shopping locally. With the exception of Georgetown-based Eastbanc and local heavyweight JBG, who are willing to spend a bit more on a name-brand architect from out of town, most developers have a stable of local architects and rotate through them. “It’s a small town feel to it, and nobody likes outsiders,” says Four Points Development’s Stan Voudrie, who retained Colbert for his Progression Place project in Shaw. “D.C.’s a little bit of a closed loop.”

What’s Colbert’s competitive advantage? In large part, it’s that Colbert isn’t just an architect. He’s a development partner through all stages of a project, from conception to interior design to city review processes to working with contractors through the mundane details of construction—which a snootier designer might consider beneath him.

Emphasis mine.  In short, the codes shape the built form of the city, if not the architectural style of the individual buildings.  Building a narrative about an individual’s style and his ability to shape the city accordingly is enticing, but the more important forces are legal ones. Now, whether those codes are shaping the city as intended or not is another question.

The other question is if bold architecture is wanted. Every city needs the kind of urban fabric that provides the bulk of the buildings but tends to blend into the surrounding context (more often, it is the surrounding context). That Colbert aims to contribute to this shouldn’t be a negative. Jahn Gehl has repeatedly noted how Dubai’s emphasis on monumental architecture with no surrounding context (“birdshit architecture“) fails to create a sense of place.  If every building tries to be unique, then none of them are.

*I’ve been meaning to link to this map from Park View DC, showing the development of various tracts of land over time in Park View. The key takeaway is that almost all of our cherished residential neighborhoods were once created via for-real estate development. Too often, NIMBY attitudes seem to denigrate developers, but this is merely the process of city building in action.  These old rowhouses are no different, they’ve just aged over time.

Plenty of Parking

DCist takes note of a great photo of the Mt. Vernon Square area from 1992, looking south towards the Portrait Gallery and what’s now the Verizon Center:

It’s amazing to realize how much the area has changed over the past 15-20 years.  Looking back at the historical images available from Google Earth, you can piece together the evolution of the area over the years.  Google Earth’s imagery isn’t universally available over time, so there are some rather big gaps between some aerial sets.

North is to the left in all the images.

1949:

MVS-1949

Note the fine grain of the urban fabric, almost all of the buildings occupy narrow lots with zero setback from the property line – and there are virtually no vacant lots.  You can see the beginnings of site clearance at the top if the image for the enormous Government Accountability Office building.  That structure would be dedicated in 1951.

1988:

MVS-1988

In 1988, things have changed a great deal.  Obviously, lots of surface parking lots here.  Though the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station opened in 1976 with the first operable segment of the Red line, the North-South connection along the Green-Yellow lines wasn’t yet open when this picture was taken.  The Mount Vernon Sq, Shaw-Howard, and U St stations all opened in 1991, just prior to the taking of the opening photograph in this post.

1999:

MVS-1999

In 1999, the (now) Verizon Center has been open for business for about a year and a half.  Site preparation is well underway for the new convention center, but there are still some significant parcels in key downtown locations occupied with vacant lots or surface parking.

2004:

MVS-2004

Gallery Place is taking shape, the new convention center is done, and other vacant lots fill in.  Still some significant vacant lots to the North of Mass Ave.

2009:

MVS-2009

The old convention center has been removed, just about all of the once vacant lots in old downtown (i.e. the right side of this image) are filled in, and stuff to the north of Mass Ave is beginning to see some real development. There’s a little error in image stitching between L and M streets, with the aerials to the right taking a slightly more oblique angle, showing the heights of the buildings in Old Downtown.

Watching this section of DC devolve and then redevelop shows some clear trends.  The newer buildings are all much bigger than their predecessors – both in terms of heights and footprint.  The fine-grained urban fabric of the 1949 image is largely gone from the downtown portions of the images, aside from a few stretches where the original facades have been retained behind newer developments or a few blocks in Chinatown, where the finer grained structures remain.

The interesting thing to note is how much of Downtown DC turned first to surface parking before redeveloping back into urban forms.  This intermediate, destructive step prevents preserving that kind of fine grained urbanism.  Nevertheless, the redevelopment of the area is a rousing success, showing the versatility of the traditional city grid – particularly when reinforced with urban rail transit.

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington