I created a quick PDF presentation of some of the key concepts for my studio project. This includes a volumetric model of the building itself, as well as an illustration of passeggiata and continuous street wall.

Download the PDF (1.8mb, print and web quality).

Photo-stitched view of the site.

For this week’s media assignment, I used SketchUp to arrange rooms as defined by the program we received. The main level didn’t change much in any of the three schemes I created and I spent more time thinking of the arrangement of studios. Once I had three different studio layouts, I printed them and quickly outlined them freehand. These provided me with some quick and dirty plan/section/elevation diagrams that made more sense to me than a 3d jumble of boxes. I scanned in the sketches and added some color in photoshop to indicate where the studios were in plan and section.

When I was an urban studies student, I was always frustrated by statistics on urban areas. There were so many different ways to define a city’s borders — the city limits, the metropolitan statistical area, the region, etc. It’s very difficult to quantify an urban area or use numbers to define where a city starts and ends. A professor I once had told us a story about how they used to determine where a town’s borders were. City officials would simply look at the tracks leading in and out of people’s driveways around the edge of town. When most people’s tracks pointed away from the center of town, they assumed those people identified with another urban area.

This more human-scale assessment is related to the kind of thing Nico Larco writes about in “What is Urban?”. He doesn’t use thresholds for determining urbanity (ie: 1.56 people/acre), but defines dimensions like variety, public space (vs. community space) and memory. When one uses those dimensions to determine urbanity, it results in more human, common sense results. For instance, I grew up in a small town that geographers would consider rural. Based on Larco’s dimensions, the town is definitely urban. It’s still large enough that there are strangers, it has variety (different people, different building types), and so on. It’s a system of evaluation that just makes more sense.

I don’t think that defining urban areas using thresholds or numbers will ever disappear, but for designers, a more human approach may be more informative as we shape the urban landscape.

Density allows for public transit, like the Portland Streetcar.

Pioneer Courthouse Square during the 2006 World Cup

Parade in New York City

Rome has layers and layers of history.

It's not hard to imagine 8 million people living in New York City proper.

I grew up in what most people in the US would consider a small town; its population was less than 10,000 and it was 45 miles from a larger city. I never thought of my town this way, though, because the large area around it were pocked with tiny hamlets I couldn’t even believe had a name. To me, these were the true small towns. I always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. How strongly could you identify with a place not much larger than an intersection of county roads?

To be clear, whenever I use the term “city”, “town”, or “village”, I’m using them in the conversational sense; I’m not speaking in legal terms. I’m also not using town to refer to a township or subdivision of a county. I’m using town to mean a discrete collection of people and buildings large enough to have a name. I can’t tell if my definition is directing my thoughts or my definition comes from my analysis, but I often like to think of the minimum number of buildings and people it would take to constitute a town.

Proto-Towns

I’ve seen towns that, at least to me passing through, included only a gas station/convenience store, a bar, and a few homes. To me, this has to be the minimum. If you take away the houses, it’s just a couple of businesses taking advantage of the traffic increase associated with intersections. If you take away either the bar or the convenience store, it also feels almost coincidental to be near a few houses in the middle of nowhere.

As a resident of one of the houses in this smallest town, I’d bet you know all of your neighbors. With only maybe four or five other houses, it’s not a difficult thing to do. You probably also know the clerks at the gas station and bartender/wait staff in the bar pretty well, too. For some folks, that might be the only immediate community necessary. It’s a step up from living by yourself in the middle of nowhere, and when you want to see a friendly face, you can pop in the bar and chat.

I think a town that size might be better classified as a proto-town. While a makeshift community may exist (probably centered around the bar), I’m not sure if the bonds are strong enough for people there to really have any pride of place. I think a certain measure of civic pride is necessary for people to really view a place as “their town”.

Schools and Churches

If a place has an institution like a school or church, it deserves the label of “town”. Schools and churches are institutions that create community and a sense of pride within themselves, and it spills out into the greater community. Churches and schools also often have the name of their town in them, reinforcing the existence of the town and cementing the relationship between the institution and the community.

Wyatt, Indiana (but it could be anywhere in the Midwest) is a good example of a minimum town.

Schools and churches also create large, regular gatherings. Every school day parents, children, and teachers descend upon the school building, and that activity give the town a pulse. Churches and synagogues fulfill that purpose on the weekends. This routine traffic is much different than the scattered traffic of a proto-town. In a proto-town, almost all movement is independent. A trip to the convenience store is never a scheduled activity, and while a bar may have regulars, it never has the same rhythm.

Raison d’être

While I think I outlined some of the places necessary for people to feel like they are in a town, I think a true town needs larger purpose than simply an intersection of county roads or the cheap land where the baptists could put their church. Most of the time, a town’s raison d’être comes from an industry. It’s not hard to understand why a town would spring up next to a factory. People want to live close to where they work to reduce commutes. Other businesses want to be near where there are people every day. Churches want to be close to congregation members. And so on. If a place produces something, it’s very likely that it is a town.

A town’s reason for being might also come from location (which can then inform which industry might work there). If there is a spot of land adjacent to white sand beaches, groves of palm trees, and warm breezes, a town may serve the purpose of supporting a tourist industry. A town may also spring up next to a mountain rich in minerals ripe for mining.

I think many of these smallest towns are “company towns” in the sense that there is one primary employer. In my area of Wisconsin, that could mean the place where the farmer’s cooperative is, or where the grain elevator is located. The company those cases is farming, but it’s still a town dedicated to one industry. If you add to the industry a bar, gas station, and a school and/or church, and I think it’s safe to say that you have the nucleus for a very small but functional town. It’s a core that could eventually expand to include a small grocery store, salon/barber shop, bank, post office, and other services residents demand. Even without these additions, these smallest towns produce something needed in the marketplace and support a community that identifies themselves as residents. Not bad for a few buildings on an intersection.

The task for this term was to design a community center/hostel/pub for fishermen in Newport, Oregon’s largest commercial fishermen’s port. The site was located directly across the street from the dock, so this was to be a center of activity for fishermen and their families. Accommodating their needs proved tricky; we needed to create spaces for retail, offices, laundry, gear storage, chapel, meeting space, game room, living space, etc. And to make the task even more difficult, we had a steeply sloping site.

With all the complexity, I tried to simplify where I could. I positioned most of the building on the front part of the site where the ground was flat. This also helped the building engage the street front and continue the fabric of Bay Boulevard. Instead of expressing every different space in the façade and shape of the building, I made the building a simple “L” shape and positioned important spaces at the elbow of the L. I liked picking a simple shape and using its inherent hierarchy.

My reviewers were helpful, especially with giving me ideas for the front façade. They appreciated that I tried to create an orderly system and then break it at key places (the entrance, at the elbow of the L), but they thought I could’ve went even further. I agree, the façade is okay, but boring. I’m still playing it safe because I’m new to this and just trying not to screw up (design-wise). I hope that will change next term.

Final model

Building construction model of my chapel

Section/perspective of my chapel

Sections (I need to scan these)

My desk during this term

My wife and I often forget something when we make our weekly grocery shopping trip, and usually don’t realize it until we’re halfway through a recipe. Several times, we’ve forgotten more than one ingredient, but only realized the second (and even third) missing ingredient after we went out and purchased the previous ingredient.

I’m revealing this rather embarrassing tendency because I have a feeling we’re not the only people who forget eggs, milk, sugar, and other common ingredients. What might be different, though, is that for the last few places we’ve lived, we have been within a couple of blocks of a corner store. Each trip (while embarrassing when checking out with the same clerk) was fast and easy. We didn’t have to drive anywhere, either. Corner stores have been a livesaver, and I can’t imagine living far from one again.

Besides the obvious convenience, corner stores have secondary benefits. The corner store we live less than a block from now (pictured) serves as a landmark for our little micro-neighborhood. It’s where the bus stop is. The sidewalk in front of the store has benches and people are often sitting there. It’s well-lit, which is important because it’s open until midnight. It’s a little beacon of community on a street with small houses and apartment buildings.

I think a corner store can be more than just an independent store. Two of the corner stores we’ve lived next to have been Walgreens. One was a Trader Joe’s. The one we live next to now doubles as an organic grocery store. I get the sense that many true, independent corner stores have been overtaken by chain drug stores, convenience stores, and larger grocery stores. The ones that do remain have found a niche, like organic groceries. Even though we love the charm of our local, independent, organic store, we used to live directly across the street from a Walgreens and loved it, too. I could go to the store, grab something, and be back in less than five minutes. It still seemed to serve as a lively place in our immediate area.

My corner store

Right next to the Walgreens we lived across from was a local branch library. The library served a larger area than the Walgreens, but was yet another center to our community. Libraries are good neutral spaces; people from every walk of life use them. Libraries are probably my favorite type of civic building, and I miss being so close to one now.

It seems to me that local libraries and corner stores really add something to a neighborhood. They create gathering places that serve everyone. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I think cafés probably serve a similar function, too. Cafés are useful places for people to meet, and most cafés see quite a bit of traffic throughout the day. They are centers of activity, like corner stores and libraries. I think there could be arguments made for other types of establishments like these that serve a large number of people and fit into a neighborhood setting (ice cream parlor? hair dresser? diner?) but those three stick out for me as big ones.

I’m not sure what to do with this observation about these establishments, except to suggest that city governments and planners be aware that these places really make a neighborhood. Cities should occasionally allow the conversion of residential lots into commercial ones for the purpose of establishing corner stores and cafés. Most of the customers will arrive from nearby, so traffic wouldn’t increase significantly. Most of the time these places are located on one of the busier roads in the area, anyway.

I have some time off between my summer and fall terms, so I started reading a classic in the urban studies/architecture field, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander. I was drawn to the book because Alexander had previously written The Oregon Experiment about community planning at the University of Oregon, where I attend school. Several members of the architecture faculty are fans of his, too, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have some familiarity.

I’ve only read through pattern 20 out of 253, so I don’t yet have an overall view of the book, but I have been stopping to think after just about each of the patterns so far. Many of my thoughts center around one theme: Christopher Alexander’s view of cities is shaped by the 1970s. This is a really obvious statement, since the book was published in 1977. But so much has changed in urban America since the 1970s that many of his patterns that deal with cities seems dated.

Now, I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, so I don’t have first-hand evidence for what it was like, but I get the sense that America’s cities were in a state of upheaval. If you look at the time period from 1960 to the mid-1970s, cities in the US were dealing with race riots, urban renewal, high crime, and suburbanization. “White flight” was in full swing as the white middle class bought homes in the suburbs and left the urban core while the urbanization of blacks in America continued.

It was in this environment that Christopher Alexander was writing A Pattern Language and I give him credit for not being more pessimistic about cities. In fact, he rails against the suburbs, stating bluntly:

The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

His preference for human habitation is to spread the population throughout a region in small communities, with only a few larger cities. Furthermore, he thinks it’s best to split urban cores into smaller, more accessible cores.

I can’t help but think that some of his prejudice against large cities comes from the fact that urban cores in the 60s and 70s were nothing like they are today (maybe not all cities, but many). If he saw New York City (for example) in 2009, I don’t think he’d believe it was the same city. New York City of the 60s and 70s saw a blackout, garbage strike, transit strike, Stonewall Riots, and economic stagnation. Nearly a million people left the city during that period. If America’s flagship city was facing what must have seemed like irreversible decline, I’d also be suggesting that we all move to small towns in the countryside!

Alexander doesn’t explicitly say that the sorry state of cities in the 70s is why he recommends spreading people out. Instead, he offers up two fairly weak reasons for why people shouldn’t be living in cities. He thought that the migration to cities is unnatural and unsustainable (he was looking across 100 years, not 10 or 20). People are not meant to live far away from nature. Furthermore, if everyone moves to the city, nobody will be left to take care of the countryside. I find both of these arguments against urban living somewhat ridiculous, looking at it in 2009. Unless you’re living in a city with over 10 million in the metro area, like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, it’s hard to feel like you’re living in an urban prison with no escape to nature. Sure, you may not have your own garden, but it’s hardly unnatural to be living that way.

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