The Architect's Lair

recent reads

- U.S. gas: So cheap it hurts - this right here is why Clinton lost my vote with this 'summer gas tax relief' baloney. I did the math: my family refills the tank once a week. A tank of gas is 12 gallons, times 18 cents a gallon is $2.16 per fill up or $8.64 a month. Figure four months of summer and that's just under $35. You know what? I would much rather have our $35 go to developing alternative energy and high efficiency transportation than actually giving it back. And compared to other countries, we are still so lucky at $4/gallon, we should be thankful, not complaining!

- Outdoor 'Living Rooms' Bring Touches of Cheer to Central Los Angeles - now this is a cool idea. It is something I would like to do as an art/architecture project around town - to build shelters and/or seating at bus stops. Could be a wonderful way to encourage our city to be colorful, funky, and beautiful. There are a number of hurdles - money is a big one, then volunteers, liability... but what a cool idea.

- Sprawl belies Oregon's rep for planning - this pretty much sums up my impression of the urban growth boundary. It seemed like the boundary was supposed to be a distinct line where a city ended and nature began, but in reality I just saw most cities sprawling as far out as the boundary would go first - and in some cases started at the boundary and filled in with very low development to the city. The actual built form has not changed in the suburbs of Portland, and that's the problem.

recently read (online)

• Maybe Only God Can Make a Tree, but Only People Can Put a Price on It - fascinating article on the value of trees in NYC. "Factoring in the costs associated with planting and upkeep, New York City’s street trees provide an annual benefit of about $122 million, according to the Parks Department. The study concludes that New York receives $5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on trees."
• New development will offer many energy-saving features - a development in Salem, OR that is (finally!) built how I think houses should be built. For starters: "Instead of felling most trees, the developers saved 80 percent of them -- then milled the rest for boards and put the sawdust on the community garden." Really the only bad thing is that it is such a narrow, and high, income level required to live there.
• Local Energy Generation System in England Draws Admirers - story of a city that is off the grid
• A stimulating tool to help children grow - the benefits of children playing outside, garden design

Jane Jacobs, Planning Icon, Has Passed

Urbanist and economic author Jane Jacobs died in Toronto this morning at the age of 89. Jacobs was the author of several books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. She was credited with one of the most forceful indictments of mid-century urban renewal in Death and Life, which is now a canonical work in discussing urban revitalization. Its emphasis on mixed uses, diversity, and density in cities are now axioms in much of contemporary urban planning.

Online interviews with Jacobs are available here, here, and here.

I'm sad to say that I've only read parts of Death and Life, and none of the rest of her work. Yet even from the chapters I read, I loved her writing style and where she was coming from. She loved cities, thoroughly and whole-heartedly, and wanted to protect them. It's a fight worth having.

Online Reading

A few articles of note lately:

• The Project for Public Spaces has released the top 12 public squares in the U.S. and Canada. Personally I would have put Rockefeller Plaza (NYC) and Pioneer Square (Portland) higher than Jackson Square (New Orleans). Jackson Square doesn't feel as enclosed as the other two, because the buildings are historic and low. I suspect that PPS put it first only because of the NOLA rebuilding issues. And hey, Detroit's new Campus Martius came in at number 4! I was surprised that Chicago's Millenium Park didn't have an entry though; I suppose it doesn't qualify because it is bounded by the lake, rather than buildings like a proper plaza. I still would have put it in over, say, Bryant Park. It's anouter PPS slant, I suppose - a full third of the entries are in NYC, while there are more diverse, well-done plazas elsewhere.
• CNNMoney.com's list of the top 10 fastest growing states - predictably, the West and the South. What I was surprised by were the particulars: Nevada and Arizona are growing the fastest (rather than California or Washington); top cities included Atlanta, Dallas, Jacksonville, Phoenix and Portland, Oregon, rather than San Francisco or Seattle.
• And my favorite, given the angst my town has been going through in contemplating *gasp* 10 story buildings: Planning Commission Embraces Height and Density! (link is to Google's cached copy of an Oakland Tribule article)

Oakland's Planning Commission is delighted to approve two residential highrises as the city continues enjoying its downtown revival under Mayor Jerry Brown.

"After years of low-rise residential construction, Oakland's push for higher density building downtown is finally paying off. A practically giddy Planning Commission last week approved plans for two 22-story apartment buildings — one at 11th and Jackson streets and the other at 23rd and Webster streets.

The commissioners gushed over the designs, but more than anything, over the height and the density of the projects." Just as significantly, the developers will "help with measures to improve pedestrian safety in the area," a big concern for the nearby Chinatown area.

They even have a Whole Foods going in downtown. Wouldn't we just love that! Now given, Oakland is slightly less than 4 times bigger than my town, but surely we could manage a couple of 10 story buildings around here. The fact that other cities can somehow manage to embrace, rather than deny, density for those who want it is amazing to me. Why can't we do the same??

Reading

A round-up of articles from several editions of the PlaNetizen weekly news:

- Hidden costs in wood burning. Fairly straight-forward idea, that burning wood is awfully polluting. Some interesting exerpts:

Some pellet stoves, which burn nuggets of dried wood, are back-ordered 90 days, says John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association.

In some communities, mostly in the West, 30% to 80% of the wintertime particle pollution is attributed to wood burning in the home, regional and federal agencies say.

Kapahee and other environmental officials don't worry much about new stoves, which boast either catalytic converters or combustion chambers designed to minimize soot. But a wood stove sold before stiffer regulations took effect in 1992 can emit as much pollution as seven diesel buses, says Guillermo Cole of the Allegheny County, Pa., Health Department.

Which makes me wonder: how much pollution comes from a coal plant for the amount of electricity we'd use in a space heater? and how does that compare with a natural gas furnace in terms of pollution? unfortunately, these deeper issues wouldn't be covered in a little Yahoo article like this.

- Materials Guy: the Architecture of Shigeru Ban. This quote says everything about his approach:

The idea of building with paper seems riddled with problems - it is flammable, vulnerable to water, weak and temporary, but Ban turns all these arguments upside down: "How long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it's very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary. And the strength of the material has nothing to do with the strength of the building. It depends on the structural design. Buildings made of concrete are easily destroyed by earthquakes, but paper-tube buildings can survive without damage." They are easily fireproofed and waterproofed, he continues, and they have significant advantages over other building materials in that they are cheap, environmentally friendly and easy to manufacture anywhere in the world.

'If a building is loved, it becomes permanent.' Very true. A well-made or historic building, if unloved, is often torn down. A cheap building like a Taco Bell isn't loved either, so it is torn down. It is the rare building that has been well-loved during its whole life, or has been brought back from the brink through copious amounts of money and hard work, that can go on with a life far longer than its materials might dictate.

- Tastemakers: Forbes picks for the Top Ten Influential Architects. No real surprises here, other than Rick Harlan Schneider. I've heard of him vaguely, but surely there are others more influential than he - if you want green architecture, look to William McDonough, who has built and written far more than Schneider. The thing that most amused me about this article though was that they used the icon of a man holding a T-square, and virtually none of the architects could design their buildings using a T-square - it's computers all the way now. The equivalent is like using an icon of a doctor with leeches to symbolize modern medicine. It just doesn't apply any more!

- Prefab Homes Get Fabulous: featuring a new trend of modern prefab houses, including ones sponsored by Dwell magazine and Ikea. Not terribly keen on the designs presented here generally, but prefab modern is an alluring idea.

- Speaking of Ikea... Portland gets an Ikea Wah! no fair. Not only does Portland get an Ikea before metro Detroit does, but the store is even near light rail and in a downtown location. Can you imagine the activity if there were an Ikea in Detroit proper, even on the relatively lame People Mover??

-  Want to save $3,150 in taxes? Buy a hybrid car. Beginning in January 2006, the federal gov't will offer up to $3,150 in taxes, depending on the emissions of the car. Plus with some cities offering free parking at meters, and other states offering unlimited access to HOV lanes, the reasons to not buy a hybrid are quickly running out. Now if only Michigan would offer a tax break for hybrids.... fat chance!

"I represent sprawl"

An article over at the Michigan Land Use Institute points out, with statistics, all of the reasons that Detroit is failing as a city. Most of these things I've heard before: the sprawl of the exurbs that takes the population away from established city centers, wasting money; the youth brain drain that led 100,000 young adults to leave the region (including my brother & sister into that one) during the 1990s; and how the population of the metro area has increased just 100,000 since 1970 despite the thousands of acres being eaten up by new housing projects every year.

However it was really this paragraph that took the cake:

The Republican-led House of Representatives, for instance, just elected 34-year-old Craig DeRoche to be its speaker. Mr. DeRoche, who once served on the city council in Novi, a Detroit suburb, and has all of two years of House experience under his belt, gave a foolish interview to The Detroit News soon after taking office earlier this year. In almost the same breath that Mr. DeRoche said he wanted to lower taxes and reduce government he also said that he wanted more government spending on new highways and was considering raising gasoline taxes to support auto-oriented growth. “I represent sprawl,” declared the new speaker.

Wow. The lack of understanding is just so profound. This is exactly what the Republicans accuse the Dems of doing: cut taxes one moment, and raise taxes the next. If he was my Rep, I'd be giving him a huge talking to via email.

Using the car pool lane - illegally

Carpool lanes are lanes on a highway specifically set aside for people who have more than one person in a vehicle, so that the highways can become less crowded as people share rides. These lanes are often less crowded than other lanes of the highway and consequently people will use any excuse they can to use the lane, even if they are driving alone. We don't have many carpool lanes on highways in the Midwest - Chicago is the only example I can think of - but there are a lot more out in California.

Now I shouldn't be surprised that people try to use the carpool lanes using dummies, but I am. A kickboxing dummy in this case, though the article also mentions people using everything from empty baby seats to mannequins. Is the $351 fine really worth getting to work or wherever a few minutes early? the arrogance of humanity continually amazes me.

New Orleans disaster

Ever since Katrina hit New Orleans and the surrounding area, I have been reading urban planning and architectural articles about what we should do now. What I'm worried will happen is that we'll put it all back, just the way it was, and set ourselves up for another disaster in the future. And so I was thinking of how to put all these articles together, and do some serious analysis on what to do.

I was beaten to the punch by someone who is much more qualified than I to do this: Jason Henderson, an Assistant Professor of Geography at San Francisco State University and a native of New Orleans. You can find his opinion article here, and I'll quote a few key passages:

The storm surges, overtopped and breached levees, and complete submergence of large swaths of greater New Orleans were predicted, modeled, and prophesied for decades. The usual political response was that we need to raise the levees higher and higher, build bigger, better pumps, and spend billions to accommodate the sprawl belt surrounding the city.

It really bugs me that people act so surprised by this. Everyone knew that the levees wouldn't hold in a storm, they have known for at least 30 years!

What this storm hit was largely American auto-centric sprawl that was largely below sea-level, wrapped by extensive levees, exposed to huge volumes of water, and sinking in the peat of the backswamps. This development pattern, and the resource extraction industries that supported it, created the conditions for this disaster to occur. This was not an act of God, nor a natural disaster -- this was a public policy disaster.

Exactly! we built ourselves into the hole, and now we have to deal with the aftermath.

Now I may not agree with how to reconstruct the NO area, with a regional gov't and a 50 cent tax on gasoline for the whole nation. We have to find some way to pay for it, I'm just not sure that charging gas and only gas is the way to do it. But this article made a of sense otherwise. A public policy disaster indeed.

Eminent Domain is no joke

*giggle*

Look, a planning funny!

(sound required for maximum humor)