URBAN DESIGN
UPDATE
Newsletter of the Institute for Urban Design January/February 2007 Vol. 23 No. 1 LANCE BROWN WINS TOPAZ. SEES LARGE ROLE FOR URBAN DESIGN IN EDUCATION AND IN ARCHITECTURE.
Philadelphia
Ann Arbor
The year 2007 is an auspicious year for the field of urban design and for the career of Lance Jay Brown, ACSA Distinguished Professor at CUNY School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture. At the annual ACSA meeting in Philadelphia this coming March 8th-11th and later at the AIA National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio this coming May 3rd –5th, the sixty-four-year-old Brown is being honored with, the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. Brown is receiving the medallion, which is awarded jointly by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA,) at a time when the field of urban design is flourishing. Academic programs in urban design have multiplied in the last decade and former urban industrial areas throughout the country are being redeveloped as housing and parks. “What is significant about Brown’s selection for the Topaz is a recognition dawning in both the academy and in the field of the importance of urban design,” says Douglas Kelbaugh, Dean of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. “He represents the best in urban design—that balancing between foreground buildings and background buildings, the public sector and the private sector, the rich and the poor, and the permanent and the kinetic.” Brown has devoted a large part of his career to building bridges between the professional world and the academic world. He is also dedicated to getting architects to think more like urban designers. “Many schools of architecture have added urban design programs,” he says, “But it troubles me that in their architectural studios they {architecture schools} have yet to put an understanding of the urban context on par with an understanding of the architectural object.” As an educator Brown has his students address real social issues and confront real design problems in inner-city neighborhoods. He hosts forums on architecture and urban design at City College, which bring students together with politicians, community leaders, and members of the general public. He also has initiated innovative programs to bring the profession and the academic community together such as the Annual Deans Roundtable and Exhibition of Student Work held at the AIA New York Metropolitan Chapter’s Center for Architecture.
New Orleans
In addition to his academic work, Brown maintains a practice as an architect and a planner. “My ability to function in the world of education would not be nearly as successful without the ability to draw on the experience of making, ” he says. Brown’s projects range in scale and type from loft renovations to school additions to his work on some of the most significant urban design initiatives in New York and New Orleans. Several years ago, Brown played a major role in forming the New York New Housing Steering Committee, which is responsible for initiating the first juried competition in the city for a sustainable affordable housing development. The competition resulted in a 200unit green affordable housing project called Via Verde due to be built in the South Bronx. In New Orleans, Brown has worked on the AIA Regional and Urban Design Committee’s
2006 Rebuilding New Orleans Charrette where he proposed plans for the redesign of public housing super-blocks that would better connect them to the rest of the city. The thread that ties all of Brown’s seemingly disparate activities together is his dedication to civic design, says Robert Geddes, former Dean of the Princeton School of Architecture and a former Topaz Medallion winner. In the mid-1960s, Geddes hired Brown, who had just graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, for his first teaching job at Princeton. At Princeton, Brown helped run community design workshops and organized studies of strife-torn neighborhoods in Newark and Trenton. “Lance’s style is vibrant and open,” says Geddes, “He enjoys ideas and debates; he embodies the whole notion of engagement.” Brown’s ideas about urban design have had a significant impact upon the lives of many of his former students at City College, where he began teaching in1972. “Out of all the professors that I had at City College, Lance had the greatest influence on how I practice architecture today, “ says Owen Foote, an architect with New York City Economic Development Corporation and founder of the Gowanas Dredgers Canoe Club, which is devoted to converting the polluted Gowanas Canal in Brooklyn into a recreational waterway. Says Foote, “He taught us that the reason that we are architects is to make our city greater and more beautiful, rather than making monuments to ourselves as architects.” Frank Sciame, a prominent New York City-based developer who has won numerous civic awards, says that the lessons he learned from Brown at City College have had a profound effect on his business. “Maybe it is because of Lance that when we approach a development, we say that we have a silent partner—the community, which will be living with whatever it is that we develop.” The award of the Topaz Medallion to Lance Brown underlines that more architects are beginning to embrace the urban framework approach to planning that Brown has been advocating and practicing for decades. “The world is moving towards being 50 percent urbanized; architects have to be more aware that their canvas has changed,” he says. “It is no longer the ideal of the free-standing Palladian Villa---architecture must now address the urban environment with all of its challenges, complexities, and opportunities.” By Alex Ulam, who writes frequently for The Architect’s Newspaper. HONORS Boston
Portland
The Thomas Jefferson Award for Private Practice is going to Institute Fellow David Dixon of Goody Clancy, Boston. This AIA award highlights the design of architecturally distinguished public facilities. The award commends Dixon for advancing the public sector’s mission to create livable neighborhoods, vibrant civic spaces and vital main streets. An advocate of density, Dixon organized “Density Myth and Reality” in 2003. “Reinventing The Urban Village” in 2004 focused on neighborhood density. Currently he is writing a chapter called “Designing Neighborhoods” for a 150th Anniversary book. He is also at work in the French Quarter post-Katrina New Orleans. Fellow Donald J. Stastny has received the AIA Northwest and Pacific Region Medal of Honor, in part for creating a collaborative design process for both Oklahoma City and Flight 93 National Memorials. The StastnyBrun Architects mission statement applies directly to the man: Our mission is civic reconstruction through design of urban and rural constructs that are visionary, yet functionally and technically appropriate.” Portland’s Pioneer Square, designed by the firm in 1984 remains a classic model of urban design in North America. Among his ongoing work with Native American tribes, the Warm Spring Tribe Museum is best known. Currently, he is team leader for the Advisory Council of Experts which is completing a strategy for the redevelopment of Portland’s mid-town section. Stastny is also conducting a San Francisco Design and Development competition for a transbay transit terminal and tower competition, whose winners will be announced in August.
NEW YORK AND LONDON MOVING UP PROSPERITY LADDER On January 1 2007, The New York Times proclaimed an alignment of the stars that signal prosperity for New York City. The stars were the federal, state and city governments and their respective agencies, that, according to the story, had approved major infrastructure, affordable housing and bus shelter-advertising projects for New York. What was new was not only that these projects were approved and heralded an era of continued government and private sector investment in the city. The news was that the days of the ‘bull-dozer’ had been replaced by effective consultation and participation of local groups in these decisions. Much of this was attributed to the leadership of particular individuals – elected and appointed.
Sydney
LA Least Affordable
London Integrated Plans
New York City, London, and Sydney provide snap-shots of the health of their respective countries. Each contributes or detracts from the national prosperity. The global cities of today are far different from the global cities of the 1960s as portrayed by Peter Hall. National economies of China and India are in the assendancy. Competition for their share of national and international prosperity is mounting and visible in the physical fabric, building cranes and new structures within Shanghai and Bangladore, among other cities. The 3rd Annual International Housing Affordability Survey of Demographia produced its housing affordability results for 159 cities within the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. By constructing a ‘multiple median’ housing price to income indicator, it ranked cities with LA (1) least affordable, followed, surprisingly, by Sydney (7) which outranked both New York – New Jersey-CT-PA (18) and London – GLA (9). This could in part be explained by NJ-CT-PA being included as part of NY whereas, the exurbs of London were considered as a separate market. The response in Sydney NSW, was for each level of government to attribute the rising cost of housing compared with income to the actions of other levels of government. The Australian Commonwealth State structure and the State responsibility for yet another level of government. Local government does not assist in these matters. London – with the Mayor of London providing an integrated and strategic approach to both land-use planning, transport and infrastructure planning and development, would appear to have the best chance of achieving its prosperity objectives. London starts at least with an integrated and clearly articulated policy. It has the ‘top-cover’ of national policy in various planning guidance documents it also has a well developed model for private sector participation in infrastructure development, financing supported by HM Treasury and the respective government agencies responsible for the delivery of services and infrastructure. Leadership and alignment of different levels of government, each assuming shared responsibility for the prosperity of our cities and as such our nations, are fundamental to our ability to compete for a share of global prosperity. Planning must not operate in the mode of a restrictive trade practice. Its role is to ensure source of supply of land with necessary support infrastructure and services to reduce land, housing, retail and commercial prices and rental levels. Legislative and regulatory processes purpose is to ensure transparency while protecting the interests of ‘third parties’ and the environment at large. Transaction costs associated with convoluted processes that do not serve the public interest and contribute to time delays and high ‘transaction costs’ flow through to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Public and private investment can be harnessed in well specified and managed public/private partnership. New York has risen to the challenge and London is well advanced. Emerging cities of China and India are on a rapid rising curve. By Sonja Lyneham, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
BOOKS
No American city is being reported on today more than New Orleans. Since the approval of a new $14 billion plan was introduced January 29, the debate between citizens, political leaders and professional planners has ping-ponged. David Dixon, Goody Clancy, Boston, who is working both in the downtown and French Quarter, says that “New Orleans puts the issues facing American cities in a stark light.” • Amenity-rich downtowns contract with a more difficult future facing further-out neighborhoods that may lack both historic housing and walkable main streets. • Affordable housing that fits successfully in existing neighborhoods may be the greatest challenge facing American cities. The following recent publications provide insight into the developing New Orleans story. New Orleans: Strategies for a City in Soft Land. By Ila Berman, Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa, all of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This book documents a one-year investigation of New Orleans and its relation to the Lower Mississippi River Basin. Presented are alternate “readings” of New Orleans that allows for the unfolding of multiple relations between buildings and the continually changing river. Available late March. To order, phone: (504) 865-5389, Tulane University School of Architecture. $35.00. When the Levees Broke. Documentary Boxed Set. Directed by Spike Lee. 256 minutes. HBO Home Video. $29.98. This three-disk DVD brings home the story of Hurricane Katrina: devastation of the streets, terror of the stranded citizens, confusion of emergency workers and cynicism of Federal officials. Amazing film opens with arrival of storm in Crescent City and ends with fight to settle insurance claims for to rebuild housing. Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities. By Alex Marshall. Edited by David Emblidge. 268 pages. Color drawings, maps, photos. Carrell & Graf, N.Y. $29.95 This may be the first book ever to permit a reader to compare the underground workings of subways in Paris and New York, in earthquake-prone Mexico City and San Francisco, in archeology-rich Cairo and Rome. Meticulous research and clear organization will make the book a pleasure for lay readers as well as professionals. Marshall, a Senior Fellow at Regional Plan Association, brightens his text with a newspaperman’s curiosity and enthusiasm.
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