URBAN DESIGN
UPDATE
Newsletter of the Institute for Urban Design July/August 2003 Vol. 19 No. 4 VILNIUS, RIGA AND TALLINN BURNISH MEDIEVAL CENTERS AND CONTINUE TO ADD HOTELS FOR AN ALREADY STRONG BALTIC TOURIST INDUSTRY Vilnius, population 580,000, went into a deep freeze in 1945 with Soviet occupation. With independence in 1991 it began to resume its centuries old position as a commercial and cultural crossroads between Paris and St. Petersburg. As it prepares now to enter the European Union, it is working furiously to restore dozens of Baroque churches, Gothic fortifications and classical university buildings – all within a U.N. designated Old Town World Heritage site. For American visitors the city astonishes with reminders of Lithuanian-New World connections. From the Republic Café one can gaze at the river which received the ashes of New York Fluxus artist George Maciunas before viewing his work at the Vilnius Museum of Modern Art. In cathedral square former New York sculptor Vytautas Kasuba has created a gigantic monument to Gidiminas, founder of Vilnius. The most evocative guidebook to these people and places is available from Lithuanian dissident poet, now Yale University professor, Tomas Venelova. Vilnius
The Old Town will continue to reaffirm itself as the cultural center of the city, but one of the brightest points of light in Vilnius now is Mayor Arturas Zuokas, who first made a name for himself as a journalist in the Balkans. Currently in his second term as Mayor, he is overseeing the reconstruction of Gediminas Square, center of the contemporary city. He has also spearheaded development of New City Center, a mixed-use development with United Colors of Beneton and McDonalds among retailers. A few steps away at New Europe Square, an enormous food store called Big Hanner, is going up. This is the largest supermarket chain in Lithuania and now opening supermarkets in Estonia and Poland. A&P and King Kullen move over. Maintaining high architectural standards for this new development and successfully blending it with the old center is top urban design challenge for this wonderful city.
Riga
Riga, to the North of Vilnius, has survived some 60 years of warfare and neglect. Baltic Germans, after 700 years, were called back to Germany at the outbreak of World War II. In 1941 the advancing Russian army entered the city and later the Russians shut down Riga’s shipping to Stockholm and other Baltic ports. Amazingly, Riga’s medieval center, survived. Today the Old Town’s 17 churches are a minestrone of Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque, with some buildings already repaired. The House of Blackheads, originally headquarters for a guild of unmarried merchants, has been reconstructed with ornamented roof and heraldic motifs on the façade. Adventurous architects and urban designers are being drawn back to Riga by a no longer secret treasure trove of some 600 art nouveau houses, built by wealthy shippers at the turn of the 19th century. Until Latvia became independent in 1991, these grand apartments had been turned into Soviet-style single-room apartments with communal kitchens and baths. Next to be renovated along Albert Street will be the art nouveau apartment building where lived the Oxford University philosopher Isaiah Berlin who left Riga for London as a boy after World War I. Riga’s port is now booming with commercial shipping and with ferryboats for Stockholm. Perhaps it will one day regain its title as the world’s greatest timber port.
Tallinn
Although the smallest of the three Baltic States, Estonia is considered the greatest economic success. On September 28, 1994 it became the first to declare independence since having been absorbed into the USSR in 1940. Today in Tallinn’s old upper town the Alexander Nevski cathedral sitting close by the Lutheran Toome Church, embody the mix of Russian and German culture that make the city distinctive. Into the medieval lower town sail ferries for Stockholm and Helsinki. Some 2.4 million Finnish tourists arrive each year, and this forms the base of a growing tourist industry. A number of organizations provide help for revitalization of these cities. The U.S. Baltic Foundation has helped establish democratic political parties and arranges cultural exchange including architect Gunnar Birkerts last year and this November Mayor Zuokas of Vilnius. The Baltic American Enterprise Fund was founded by Congress to encourage public and private investment. Since 1997 it has provided $107 million for mortgages to encourage housing renovation mostly in urban hubs of Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn.
NEW PROJECTS
St. Petersburg Burnishes Historic Center / Opens Rail Terminal / Plans Ring Road The birthday party for St. Petersburg, launched in June with President Putin’s summit for President George Bush and other leaders, will continue through the end of the year. Tourists daily gawk at Konstantinovsky Palace where the meeting was held and which now functions as a residence for President Putin.
St. Petersburg Plans for 21st Century
The palace, 1720-1750, is named for the son of Nicolas I, founder of the Russian Navy, and opens dramatically onto the Gulf of Finland. It is the largest of some 12 historic buildings to be renovated for the city’s 300th birthday. Peter the Great founded the imperial capital in 1703 as a naval stronghold and built first the Peter and Paul fortress on an island on the north side of the Neva River. Just a few miles away Peterhof, the summer “cottage” of Peter the Great, glitters like a Northern Versailles in the summer sun. A spiffy fleet of hydrofoils that can take visitors from Peterhof to a dock in front of the Hermitage is a reminder that this is the 21st century. At the Hermitage itself a newly refurbished gate off Alexander Place leads visitors into the main building. Just off the square, a newly renovated building now houses traveling exhibitions for the Hermitage. A 21st century counterpoint to the city’s neoclassical splendor will be Dominique Perrault’s black marble and glass Maryinsky Theatre, expected to be budgeted at $80 million and to be built from disused military warehouses. Perrault’s scheme replaces one by Eric Owen Moss, considered too controversial by some locals. A 58-station metro system, started in 1953, the year Stalin died, is key to transporting the city’s 4.5 million people. At least three new stations are cleared to be built when funds are available. Handsome Ladisk Train Station offers a new portal to Murmansk and other cities to the North. Next on the urban design agenda for St. Petersburg will be two new bridges to alleviate traffic on and off of Vasilyevaky Island, population 320,000, reports Oleg Kharchenko, chief architect for the city. He also envisions a new ring road around city to expedite auto traffic. His most daunting task, however, is to prepare a New General Plan, including laws to enforce it, by 2005, when the Forth General Plan – the last prepared under Soviet economic planners – comes to an end.
PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
Richard Marshall has left Harvard University where he was Director of the Urban Design Program, to join the San Francisco office of EDAW, with 900 employees, the world’s largest landscape architecture firm . . . Charles Waldheim, University of Illinois, will be teaching Marshall’s Harvard classes in the fall . . . Elizabeth Mosssop has become Director of the Landscape Architecture Program at Harvard, while Niall Kirkwood steps up to chair . . . Southampton, Easthampton – with Watermill, Bridgehampton and Sagaponick – represent a pinnacle of maintained village design in the United States. Now a 2 percent real estate transfer tax has made it possible for the Department of Land Management to develop a continuously growing inventory of preserved green space in Southampton and on the North Fork, in Southold, reports Ernest Hutton, who this July 23-25 ran a three-day charette to create guidelines for Noyac Road as a Linear Center along placid Noyac . . . Fellows Daniel Libeskind and Stanton Eckstut both served as panelists at AIA national convention of 3,500 architects last spring in San Diego.
Eckstut in July announced completion of evaluation of Lower Manhattan transportation and infrastructure plan for Port Authority and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation . . . Vaughan Davies, representing Ehrenkrantz, Eckstat, Los Angeles, has been going to San Diego frequently to consult on North Embarcadero plan . . . Gary Papers has been appointed manager of Architecture and Planning Centre City Development Corp., San Diego . . . James Lima has been selected as President of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corp., the new state/city entity to guide redevelopment of the island . . . Susan Chin, Assistant Commissioner Department of Cultural Affairs, will in January become first Vice President / President-elect of New York Chapter AIA.
EDUCATION CUNY Urban Planning
CUNY’s Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute in collaboration with the Hunter Department of Urban Affairs and Planning will offer this fall a new certificate in Real Estate and Urban Planning. Mark Strauss, Fox & Fowle, will be offering, as part of the program, an “Introduction to Design and Construction in New York.” Niall G. Kirkwood, the new chair for landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and an expert on remediation and reuse of contaminated industrial sites, is optimistic about the future of American cities. During the next 25 years, Kirkwood predicts, the urban cores will become more densely developed, and so will the exurban rings. At the same time, land will open up for parks. “You’d say it is impossible, looking at the urban grain of cities and proposing to bring large swathes of open land right into the city,” Kirkwood commented in a telephone interview during his summer break. “You’d say that cities are overbuilt. But there will be more and more development along the arteries—the rail lines and rivers—that feed the cities. Some sites in Chicago are already being turned into serious parkland, coming right into the city.”
Harvard Landscape Architecture
Educated at the University of Manchester in England and the University of Pennsylvania, Kirkwood was a senior associate at Hanna/Olin Landscape Architects from 1985 to 1992, the year he joined the GSD faculty. This July 1st he succeeded George Hargreaves as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. At Harvard, Kirkwood founded and directs the Center for Technology and Environment, a research entity dedicated to the improvement of postindustrial sites worldwide and to educating the bureaucrats and executives in charge of the sites about new uses and remediation techniques. The center’s current clients include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Beracha Foundation in Jerusalem. For the Atomic Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Kirkwood is heading research for the preservation of the Manhattan Project test and development site. And he is directing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ first digital inventory of brownfields. In general, Kirkwood cautions skepticism about brownfields data. “The way people define brownfields differs from region to region and from nation to nation,” he says. The Government Accounting Office, for instance, estimates that there are from 400,000 to 600,000 brownfield sites nationwide. Yet, “California’s estimate for the year 2000 was 119,000 sites—in California alone. The EPA’s terminology is quite loose; the numbers game gets very fuzzy very quickly.” In June of this year, the U.S. Conference of Mayors put brownfields remediation high on its agenda, asking Congress to appropriate $250 million annually to the EPA for assessment and cleanup of contaminated urban sites. Boston Mayor and Conference President Thomas Menino cited the stimulation of “hundreds of thousands of new jobs and potentially billions of dollars in new revenues.” That kind of funding is something that Kirkwood would endorse, for smaller cities like Somerville and for big cities. “Think about Philadelphia along the Delaware, southeast Chicago, Pittsburgh along the rivers, Boston around the airport,” he says. “That is where land is left to build on, brownfield sites that can be made into open space or developed for housing and cultural facilities. It is a very 19th-century idea.” By Allen Freeman, Landscape Architecture
BOOKS Books from Baltics
Baltic Capitals, 2nd: Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Kaliningrad. By Neil Taylor. Paperback 224 pages. Bradt Travel Guides, 2nd edition (August 2003). $18.95. By the Cambridge educated scholar and travel writer Neil Taylor, this book makes the tangled 20th century political developments in the Baltic countries understandable and connects them to specific monuments in each city. Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. By Modris Ecksteins. 288 pages. Houghton Miffin Co. $27.50 hardcover. $14.00 paperback. His exodus with his Lutheran pastor father from Latvia to Hamburg during the fire bombing that ended World War II particularizes the experiences of thousands of Baltic refugees. My Mother’s Sabbath Days. By Chaim Grade. 397 pages paperback. Shockin Books, New York City. $19.95. An elegy by the great Vilnius/New York writer to the city whose entire Jewish population of 60,000 was destroyed.
Landscape Urbanism
Modern Landscape. By Michael Spens. 240 pages illus. Phaidon, New York. $75.00. Can buildings adapt more harmoniously to the land around them? That is the question raised by Michael Spens, University of Dundee professor, in this beautifully illustrated new book. Fellows Bernard Tschumi, Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker and Daniel Libeskind are among some 32 designers whose work is shown. Among the projects that best illustrate how buildings can merge with landscape are Seattle Waterworks treatment plant by Angela Danadjieva and Yuma East Wetlands by Fred Phillips. Outstanding from Europe are Borneo Sporenburg housing, Amsterdam, by Aadrian Geuze and elevated train line converted to Linear Park in Paris. The illustrations indeed make the case for landscape urbanism as a landscape-dominant approach to design of 21st century cities. Landscrapers: Buidling With The Land. By Aaron Betsky. 192 pages. 290 color illus. Thames & Hudson, New York. $50.00 This survey presents some 50 projects which are built into the earth. Future Systems’ hillborrowing house in North Wales is most startling project. Hargreaves Associates, Michael Sorkin, Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid are among those represented.
NEW FELLOWS
Vaughan Davies, Principal, Ehrenkrntz Eckstut & Kuhn, Los Angeles, CA; Gary Papers, Manager of Architecture and Planning, Centre City Development Corporation, San Diego, CA.
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