woven hand::ain't no sunshine

Woven Hand::Ain't No Sunshine (cover)

alec soth::sleeping by the mississippi

Via we make money not art, this collection of photographs, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, caught my eye:

[images from soth's website]

More:
::Watch an interview with Alec Soth by Minnesota Public Radio
::No post related to the Mississippi is complete without a link to (a) Pruned's series "Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River" and (b) the 1944 Fisk report by the same name to which the Pruned series refers.

big box urbanism

[this is a guestpost by stephen becker, to some degree in response to my post from a few days ago "big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail". thanks, stephen. if you enjoy it, encourage him to get his own blog in the comments.]

It's hard for the architectural community to resist creeping schadenfreude regarding the collapse of so many big box stores, and I think that tone spills into discussions of how these behemoths may be appropriated by, and reconfigured towards, a post-suburban environment. Thus, most competitions and research projects (at least the ones with which I am familiar) deal with developing new programs for old boxes. Currently, these corridors are governed by very strict, banal, homogenous patterns of components and use. Without acting as an apologist for the often abysmal architecture and planning present in typical exurban retail developments, I think it's worth taking some time to discuss why the economic retail model found in most big box stores (as opposed to its usual architectural manifestation) doesn't have to be in contention with a positive urbanism.

This sort of investigation, which focuses on yet-to-be-built retail centers, is at least as important as investigation of out-of-work boxes. Big box retail corridors are still popular, successful, and increasing in number - especially outside of the United States. Beyond the reality of their still-primary position in much of exurban America, there is a persuasive argument for their increased inclusion in dense, urban environments as well, as was noted yesterday by Matt Yglesias:

"As far as this issue goes, I think urbanists ought to wholeheartedly embrace "big box" chain stores. When there's a problem with an urban-situated big box store, which there often is, it's because (like the Home Depot near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station) the site has been laid out in a way that's inappropriate for an urban environment. But such inappropriate structures are hardly unique to big box retailers (the CVS at 7th and Florida has a strongly suburbanist design quality) or to national chains. What's more, these problems are often caused by misguided regulations (which of course should be fixed, but are not the fault of the big box chains) or else relate to a general lack of experience financing and constructing stores in an urban environment.

But you can make a physical structure, like DC USA in Columbia Heights, that works in an urban environment. And it would work even better if it didn't have so much shopping.

But the bottom line is that successful chains are successful because they're good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price. If you want people to live and shop in cities, you need to open the cities to the firms that are good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price."

Echoing Yglesias' argument, there is a serious need for architects to (pardon the pun) think outside of the box - though I would go further, and contend that the box is ill-suited for not only urban situations, but suburban conditions as well. Its failing is less a function of some inefficiency at exchanging goods, than it is a colossal missed opportunity to create a vibrant public space.

Koolhaas and the Harvard Project on the City published a study in Mutations arguing shopping is the last mode of public interaction:

"Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has been able to colonize - even replace - almost every aspect of urban life. Historical town centers. Suburbs, streets, and now train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the internet, and even the military, are increasingly shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. Churches are mimicking shopping malls to attract followers. Airports have become wildly popular by converting travelers into customers. Museums are turning to shopping to survive. The traditional European city once tried to resist shopping, but is now a vehicle for American-style consumerism. "High" architects disdain the world of retailing yet use shopping configurations to design museums and universities. Ailing cities are revitalized by being planned more like malls."

The challenge, then, is to take advantage of the popularity of the big box in such a way as to minimize the manifold problems caused by big box developments, issues like water runoff, asphalt heat sinks, energy use, etc; while fostering engaging, flexible public arenas. The Flip-A-Strip competition cited by Rob in his earlier post is a good example of movement in this direction.

Another study that examines the potential for the re-imagination of the big box is 'Flatspace' (published here and here), by Lateral Architecture:

Lateral Architecture, from their website.

Lateral Architecture analyzed 'retail corridors', the urban conditions cropping up outside urban and suburban communities which are defined by "highways and paved planes...dominated by big boxes and retail power centers, conflating an ever-evolving consumer culture with public space." From their description, "The potential for design in flatspace is less about inserting a foreign program or form and more about positing that the system can recalibrate existing elements and agitate encounters of the public without altering its capitalist dependency on efficiency and geo-economics." The existing elements (which they termed filters) they recalibrated were program, parking and landscape; three proposals for each filter were developed.

Lateral Architecture, from Young Architects 7 (link above)

What is compelling about this project is that it investigated the logic of the systems as-is, looking at the relationship between the three filters according to how people interact with them. A litany of alternatives was then developed, each a proposition with the potential to reestablish the nature of the retail corridor and its role as commercial center and public space through a novel reconsideration of the nature of the existing elements.

Lateral Architecture, from their website.

A second point of interest regarding this investigation is that it demonstrates an application of what might be termed as 'infrastructural thinking' - that is, considering the ways in which systems not usually thought of as infrastructure - such as x - function in an essentially infrastructural way in the urban system. Two of the three filters, parking and landscape are infrastructure, and all three were considered infrastructurally, although this is not how Lateral Architecture framed their research. All three filters are private initiatives by corporations, typically considered only insofar as they may generate profits. These infrastructural filters combine to create a larger infrastructure which produces profits for these companies, and distributes goods to consumers. Even in the current big-box condition, they have effectively created public space. The Flatspace investigation demonstrates how a re-calibration of smaller infrastructures (the filters) might serve to increase public interaction and involvement. It takes advantage of an existing trend , and develops it according to an infrastructural analysis.

Obviously, similar studies situated in an urban condition would differ in several important ways; requiring the inclusion of housing, more restricted land use, having a built-in pedestrian population, etc. But, much like Lukez's work, it also hints at how the suburban and urban evolve toward each other - helping us to imagine a situation in which these retail corridors are no longer considered in isolation, but instead are absorbed into the logic of the [sub]urban condition. Instead of the evolution from city to mall Koolhaas observes, retail and city birth a third condition. The evolution of the big box store is no longer an isolated story, but merely a piece of the continuing emergence of the 21st century city. Some student work has begun to explode these novel urbanities, such as the following project by former Princeton M.arch student Christopher Leong:

"This thesis proposes a way to combine the typologies of the mat building and the tower-in-the-park in order to generate a new urban condition that embraces the logics of the dispersed city... By sampling different conditions (housing, shopping, office, agriculture, recreation, wetlands, etc.) within the region, remapping those conditions over a half mile square site, and then layering those patterns into a new inhabitable ground it is possible to create a more cohesive system of inhabitation."

image: Christopher Leong, Princeton University S.O.A. Masters Thesis spring 2006

If anything, more questions are raised by these kinds of projects than are answered: How do they come to be? Can zoning ever effect a development such as this, or must it be engendered by mega-developers? Does it need to be built all at once, creating island community systems linked together by larger, city-wide infrastructure, or does it spread like mold, internalizing existing infrastructures, to become a city itself? Does the home loan crisis present Wal-mart with a golden opportunity to buy up vast quantities of housing and suburban acreage, extending its monopoly beyond the things we bring into our homes, toward our homes and streets and cities as well?

the sea and cake::crossing line

The Sea and Cake::Crossing Line

New Sea and Cake album is out/nearly out (depending on your source); download the title track, "Car Alarm", here.

big box flip-a-strip and darwinian retail

[the former site of RPM Indoor Racing in Round Rock, Texas via Google Maps]

A couple nights ago All Things Considered had a feature on the recent work of Julia Christensen, who has been studying the re-use of big box stores for several years now, a project that has recently culminated the publishing of the book Big Box Reuse. The variety of uses she encounters is astounding:

"In Austin, Minn., Christensen went to a big box that had been renovated into a museum devoted to Spam, the canned meat. In Fayetteville, N.C., she went to a flea market that had once been a Kmart. And in Round Rock, Texas, a group of young entrepreneurs turned an abandoned Wal-Mart into an indoor racecar track. Christensen cites the racecar track for its imaginative use of such a large space -- but they couldn't keep up with the overhead costs and had to close down.

Christensen says cities have a huge incentive to find other uses for these buildings.

"Roads are widened. Stoplights put in. Entire bypasses might be created," she says. "So all of this invested infrastructure remains after the retailer leaves the building behind."

Which can make these sites good for repurposing. Take Lebanon, Mo. When a Kmart there went bankrupt, its building was left vacant for three years, and the area became depressed. So the community raised money to turn it into a new and bigger county library.

Cathy Dame, the library's director, says it took awhile for some people to adjust.

"Sometimes, honestly, it was easier to say, 'Remember where the shoe section was? That's our children's room," Dame says.

Since the structure was too big for just the library, they broke it up and now share it with a Route 66 museum and a cafe, among other things. And Dame says they are getting a lot of traffic, partly because it's easy to park."

Designers, naturally, have other ideas about what form reuse should take. One such vision is the work of Paul Lukez, in the Suburban Transformations projects:

[E-Mall Transformation, Paul Lukez Architecture]

Lukez collects several such projects in the book version of Suburban Transformations, which I recommend. In it, he lays out not merely an aesthetic vision, but a working methodology for implementing an incremental urbanism in suburbia, which happens to be one of my pet projects (hence the recommendation). Much of what Lukez suggests -- overlaying various site conditions to reveal synchronicities and disjuncts, for instance -- will seem like old news to landscape architects schooled in McHargian methodologies, but putting such methodologies to the service of an incremental urbanism seems new and useful to me (and even if it weren't new, it would still be useful).

Lukez more or less acknowledges this, suggesting that the value of his project is not that it is completely new and revolutionary, but that it presents a distillation of the most useful components of Smart Growth, environmental planning, and New Urbanism, while accepting (rather than ignoring or attempting to bypass) the elements of time and change. In the interests of not using up too much space on the screen here, I've only shown two snapshots in from the complex timeline of potential transformation Lukez sketches; an animation can be seen here which gives a much fuller impression of the importance of incrementality to Lukez's vision.

Another set of visions was recently collected in the "Flip-a-strip" competition (via Landscape+Urbanism). Susan Krane, former director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (which sponsered the competition), describes the competition's origins and aims:

"And so, when we at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art began to discuss the idea of initiating an architectural competition that might be national in scope and application yet have core local significance, it seemed most fitting to address a building type that impacts our public sense of place. Strip malls, ever in our peripheral vision, immediately came to mind. The choice purposefully ran contrary to Arizona's predominant recent reputation for high-style residential architecture. What could be farther toward the other end of the spectrum from luxurious mega-houses on desert hillsides than the strip mall in the flats? The everyday, work-a-day strip mall seemed so wanting of smart architectural attention, ripe and useful for reconsideration--in this community and in so many others across the country. This competition thus intended dually to take SMoCA's architectural exhibitions to the next stage and to highlight the keen social awareness and the broad capacity of a new generation of architects working here and in other regional centers of design excellence.

...

Working with an amazing community advisory committee of architects, planners, developers and urban entrepreneurs, we decided that Flip a Strip should address small, one-to-three-acre, mid-block strip plazas--the most abundant and most vulnerable parcels that lack the anchor tenants of larger sites and missed out on the attention-grabbing positioning of intersections. Most of these strip malls date from the 1960s and 1970s and still yield reliable cash flow for the landowners, regardless of vacancies or disrepair. They provide affordable spaces for small businesses and often service vibrant new-immigrant communities. One can easily find malls around town with exclusively Korean or Spanish signage. In addition, several strips of this scale here have been given facelifts on shoestring budgets by adventurous small-time entrepreneurs: they quickly have been adopted as hip gathering spots for those drawn to impressive, locally owned concerns such as an alternative record store, a homey coffee-shop hangout or an artisanal patisserie. Such grassroots, lifestyle-oriented enterprises demonstrate the potential across the Phoenix area, which has precious few "third spaces" and little street life. What more, Flip a Strip asks, could be possible with good architecture in the mix? How might discrete efforts at such "suburban villages" be knit together to alter not just one parcel of land but the look and feel of cities' prime corridors?"

The winning entry, Urban Battery, was designed by MOS:

[MOS::Urban Battery; competition images via bustler]

MOS describe their entry, which transforms by layering program upon program:

"In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a physical structure similar to a power station, vertical greenhouse, and a billboard, all rolled into one. It doesn't fit into the zoning chart. We believe that Scottsdale zoning is open enough to accommodate the programmatic innovation, even though this proposal is beyond the original intention of the competition. Urban Battery acts as an energy producer, filtering air, housing oxygen regenerating plants, providing bike paths, public gardens within the structure, and stores bioproducts. It also includes an additional building for community events that is attached at the base of the structure. This additional program could be for either teens or seniors dedicated to expanding activities from the neighborhood and accessible through a new bike and walking path, converting the alley into part of an urban infrastructure."

Other projects explore more commonly offered (but also potentially transformative) possibilites such as rooftop agriculture and the provision of community market space.

There is a wide distance, though, between the exuberant renderings of projects proposed by these architects and the actual reuse projects that Christensen explores in Big Box Reuse, such as this elementary school in Laramie, WY:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

or this future church in Pinellas Park, FL:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

Even the cheery constructions, such as the Spam museum, a Wal-Mart which has received a facade-lift, are quite banal:

[source: Big Box Reuse]

Perhaps these banal re-purposings will inevitably outnumber more creative and vibrant transformations; or perhaps it will simply take time and distance for better reuses to win out -- like this "70's slum block building" recently repurposed by Jonathan Segal Architect, in San Diego (via Archidose):

[source: Jonathan Segal Architect, via Archidose]

These discussions take on a new urgency now, as retailers are experiencing the pain of the current credit crash -- Linens 'n' Things, I hear, has already gone bankrupt, unable to find buyers for the vast majority of its properties, while Circuit City is shuttering a fifth of its stores. The future we and our exit towns face seems grim, with doors shuttered, parking lots cracked by stray grasses and Ailanthus altissima, windows blackened. All of this has assumed that this is bad (and obviously, in many ways, it is). But what if it is also necessary? What if this is how the exurban experiment dies? Or perhaps both scenarios are valid; perhaps the best structures will find reuse, whether beautiful like Lukez's proposals or merely utilitarian, like the elementary school in Wyoming, while those structures which never should have been built will wither, cast-off tributaries of a river of credit that no longer exists.

More:
::I discussed an Atlantic Monthly article about the abandonment of suburbia in the post "mommy, there's a crack house in our cul-de-sac".
::Another interesting item on All Things Considered which I discussed a couple months ago, involving a legal battle between billboards and trees.
::Visit bigboxreuse for a tour of various reused stores as well as a wiki for submitting and georeferencing new reuse projects.
::Julia Christensen also appears on NPR's On Point, discussing big box reuse. Various callers and other experts weigh in as well.
::MOS have posted a video of a prototype of the system for Urban Battery. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm sure its interesting.

crooked fingers::new drink for the old drunk

Crooked Fingers, New Drink for the Old Drunk

Crawdaddy has an interview with Eric Bachmann (Crooked Fingers=Eric Bachmann plus others) up; its fairly interesting (among other things, we learn that Bachmann recently tried running a Cuban sandwich cart -- instead of touring -- but it didn't work out for him). I don't know too much about Bachmann (other than what you learn from listening to his songs, which I have more less all of in one format or another), but I do know that he's the only person I've seen pull off smoking, drinking, playing guitar, and singing all at the same time. Newest Crooked Fingers album, Forfeit/Fortune, is out, but I haven't got it yet so I can't tell you much about it.

[Formatting note: entries in the various recurring features will no longer be named after the series, but by the content. Tags are now being added to all the serial entries; these are currently visible through the rss feeds, but will also be added to the entries and in a sidebar when I get the chance.]

michael van valkenburgh associates::passage to the lake

::Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Passage to the Lake (Stoneham, ME)

I don't really care for making decisions about who is the 'best' landscape architect, but I will say that the details produced by Van Valkenburgh's office are consistent and fine. This slab of concrete is a small, simple gesture, but it allows an intermittent stream to pass undisturbed under the path, maintaining the site's existing hydrological regimen.

More:
::Photos and project description at ASLA award site

security theater

Jeffery Goldberg recounts his efforts to test the utility of the TSA's security regime:

Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show--security theater is the term of art--I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness.

...at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, "That's a Hezbollah flag." She said, "Uh-huh." Not "Uh-huh, I've been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your behavior, and your last name, I've come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley-trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system," but "Uh-huh, I'm going on break, why are you talking to me?"

The conclusion - that almost all the security measures in place in American airports are a form of performance theater, aimed nearly exclusively at reassuring a nervous public -- is neither terribly surprising nor particularly comforting.

where relaunch

New design and relaunch at Where, which is becoming a group blog (add that to the list of excellent new group blogs launching recently -- its time for another bloglinks update, I think), featuring eleven writers from various cities around the globe. Also stoked that Athens is representing. Always good to see small cities involved in a larger discussion about urbanism.

just like honey

[ebisu, neighborhood in tokyo where "dancing trees, singing birds" is located -- if my googling skills haven't failed me]

Two projects in Tokyo (via Tokyo architecture blog what we do is secret) demonstrate contrasting approaches to the utilization of limited urban space, but both show how that limitation can become a strength.

The first is an outdoor shopping mall, Sarugaku, in the Daikanyama district, which accomodates six buildings and ten retailers on less than six thousand square feet; architect Akihisa Hirata does so by means of compression, allowing shops to sit atop one another and relying on shoppers and storefronts to fill an otherwise unadorned public space:

[images via Akihisa Hirata Architecture Office]

Balconies and projected walkways are accomodated by tapering the second floor of the buildings, drawing the public realm up from the street level into the air as well. I also appreciate the scale of the project, as well -- incremental additions are to be preferred to massive urban planning schemes, as a general rule, I think. Their spatial constraints frequently enable the architect to make bold gestures without being overbearing.

[dancing trees, singing birds; images via Metropolis]

The second is an apartment complex by Hiroshi Nakamura, of quite similar size (8290 square feet). The approach, though, is nearly entirely different -- rather than a clean, spare urban space activated by the buzz of shoppers and lit storefronts, the project -- which has the charming title "dancing trees, singing birds" -- is filled by mature trees and clinging vegetation, creating a space that seems worthy of the tag "magical urbanism". If it seems improbably that such a new project could have such wonderfully overgrown plantlife, that is because it is. Nakamura explains the unique approach his firm took to tree preservation:

"The site is located in the very central district of Tokyo surrounded by trees over 20m high. We felt that such greenery was a precious asset to a crowded city like Tokyo, and wanted to preserve this forest; to build with it rather than to build on it. We began the process by measuring the shape and the location of each and every tree with a laser pointer and created a three dimensional computer model from the collected information. Then we consulted a tree doctor and discussed how we could build without damaging the roots. The 'huts' were constructed according to the location of the branches, leaving enough room for the trees to sway in the case of tropical rainstorm. Towards the top of the building, we located small birdhouses echoing the shapes of the 'huts'."

While on the one hand this sort of delicate construction process is, at least for the time being, a luxury for the wealthy, it seems to me that it is the sort of luxury that might be worth paying for -- an architecture of conservation, rather than an architecture of consumption.

More:
Metropolis article on dancing trees, singing birds
I've written before on the virtue of compressed space in Tokyo (though that post dealt with compressed space in the context of a single family home).

the ball is round; the game is ninety minutes