12.

Design Matters, but It Can Be Messy

Contemplating design (drawing courtesy of Dhiru Thadani)

This essay was co-authored in 2011 with my friend and frequent writing collaborator, Lee Epstein. (Lee is an attorney and land use planner working for environmental responsibility in the mid-Atlantic region.) As I recall, it was Lee’s idea to write about design: Does the architectural character of a building, or streetscape, really matter to a place’s sustainability if its performance on emissions and resource use are good? The easy answer would be no. But we think it’s more complicated.

As I have discussed in other chapters of this book, many people who live in places undergoing change—and that includes most of us—are fearful of what change may bring. That is true even (some would say especially) if those changes are labeled as “smart growth.” This is immensely understandable, particularly given some of the demolition and building that we have witnessed in our neighborhoods over the past few decades. For example, four years ago, Michael Rosen wrote in the New York City neighborhood paper The Villager:

“One by one these [new large buildings] and many other instances pile up and by their height and weight crush the character that makes this place our home. Our diverse ethnicities and income levels, our extraordinary range of interests become mostly homogenized in a relatively rich way. The crucible of our diversity, doubt, dissent and creativity is tied in direct ways to the walkup height of most of our buildings, to affordable rents, to slow streets and the possibility of gathering places and dialogue—neighborhood coffee- and teahouses, local bars, community gardens and their casitas, affordable storefronts and miraculous community centers.”

We do not know Rosen’s East Village neighborhood or circumstances. But his concerns seem those of a thoughtful resident, not a knee-jerk opponent to all change. The things he believes are threatened by development are the very things that most smart growth and urbanist advocates espouse.

Here’s another quote, this one commenting more specifically on building design. Writing in The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger described part of an ongoing (and somewhat iconoclastic) revitalization of a faded industrial district in Culver City, California. The project is all about showy, avant-garde design:

“[Architect Eric Owen] Moss’s buildings…may have demonstrated his earnest, if relentless determination to probe different kinds of materials, spaces, and shapes, but I found it hard to avoid the impression that the main point of a design like The Box—a distorted cube of dark metal on legs that Moss plopped on top of another building—was to make sure that you knew that an architect had been there.”

“The Box,” Culver City, California (photo courtesy of Marc Teer)

Here is yet another, particularly telling passage from the same article:

“The Hayden Tract is as car-dependent as the rest of the city and just as lacking in meaningful outdoor public space in which to enjoy its benign climate. On my last visit, I didn’t see anyone walking along the street from building to building, save for a handful of architectural tourists. In one part of the project, five of Moss’s buildings face one another across an open space. It’s a grand gesture—sharply slanted glass facades and irregular glass canopies define the edges of the space—and a perfect opportunity for a modernist rethinking of a traditional piazza. Instead, it’s filled with parking spots.”

Again, it’s a neighborhood that we don’t know personally, and perhaps it will eventually evolve into the arty contemporary quarter that its designers apparently envision. Some of the architecture that appears online is appealing, though the examples published with Goldberger’s article are way too in-your-face with iconoclasm to suit most tastes. But, individual buildings aside, right now the district appears to be a long way from a “neighborhood” in any conventional sense of the word. The best one can say is that maybe it’s a work in progress that, for the time being, misses an opportunity to create a cohesive community.

It is not debatable that revitalization is critical to sustainability. But it has to be high-quality revitalization, not just a bunch of concrete boxes or high-rises gobbling up a streetscape that was once more invitingly scaled, and not disjointed buildings drawing attention to themselves without relating well to each other and the whole, either. We must be careful what we wish for.

There has been too much mediocrity in the name of smart growth and urbanism, spiced with not a little greed. This is unfortunate, because the character of what we build matters: we who believe that the health of the planet depends on more sustainable development must sell our product, before planning commissions and neighborhood review boards all across the country. If our product isn’t more appealing than the alternative—and we don’t mean just in the regional or abstract sense but in the local, right-in-this-spot sense—we won’t have enough (and maybe don’t deserve enough) takers to make our proposition work. We need to advocate the quality of smart growth as avidly as we advocate its quantity.

We have been chipping away at these concepts in our previous writing, in articles with such titles as “Architecture matters,” and “Does beauty matter? Should it?”

We think it does, quite possibly a lot. But it sure is messy, because (at least in our opinion) quality and beauty in design don’t lend themselves easily to objective measures. We can measure things like transit boardings, impervious surface per capita, vehicle miles traveled, and people accommodated per unit of land. That’s what leads us to advocate neighborhood density, transit access, mixed uses, and all the other components of “smart growth” or urbanism, be it of the “new” or old variety.

Oak Terrace Preserve, North Charleston, South Carolina (photo courtesy of North Charleston)

But it’s harder to measure what we lose if we can’t build enough smart growth to make a difference because what we’re offering creates a less appealing place than what was there before.

This is emphatically not, by the way, an attack on “modernism.” Some traditionalist friends become apoplectic even at the mention of the word, because they believe so much bad architecture has been built in its name. (There are also plenty of critics on the opposite side, who get agitated by the phrase “new urbanism,” in part because of its sometimes-unyielding allegiance to traditional forms. Both groups harbor simplistic views of architectural style.)

For 15 years, NRDC’s Washington, DC office was in a very modern, slate-gray building designed by the well-known architects Pei Cobb. It was (and is) an asset to its downtown neighborhood as well as a well-functioning and aesthetically pleasing wokplace. We also love Berlin’s modernist Sony Center, designed by Helmut Jahn. Cesar Pelli’s design for DC’s National Airport is just about perfect, as is the Gare d’Avignon TGV by Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Jean-François Blassel. The issue of design quality is not so much a matter of style as one of scale, suitability to context, respect for nature, and perhaps variety.

But isn’t design a matter of art and taste, and isn’t it presumptuous at the least to impose some kind of artificial standards of taste upon the creative jumble that makes for a great urban experience?

Sony Center, Berlin (photo by F. Kaid Benfield)

Would thinking of design as an element of sustainable urbanism, for example, preclude the aluminum, deconstructionist swoops of a Frank Gehry project, or the clean line of a Rem Koolhaas building? Would it prohibit a particular style, or impose some artificial constraint upon the creative process? Would the graceful curve of New York’s Guggenheim Museum be limited or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, would the brutalist façade of the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC?

It is not easy, but design is part and parcel of built places, whether we acknowledge it or not. Design can heavily influence the success or failure of the pedestrian experience and, indeed, can even influence how well a place works from a sociological perspective, as in these contrasting examples:

• Increasing personal safety and security with ample windows and porches providing “eyes on the street,” or worsening it with long, blank walls;
• Enhancing the shopping experience with easy access, color and movement, or making it less enjoyable with barriers and a drab, uninviting façade;
• Contributing to a feeling of comfort, human interaction, and well-being with green parks and usable, human-scaled open space, or ignoring those characteristics in favor of windswept, characterless plazas;
• Making travel and mobility a pleasant part of the landscape, or forcing pedestrians across multiple lanes of fast-moving traffic or acres of pavement, and making cars the only means of access to office, business, and home.

Gare d’Avignon TGV, Avignon, France (photo by F. Kaid Benfield)

Acknowledging the role of design in urban sustainability does not mean micro-managing creativity. It does, however, mean that to truly qualify as smart and green, development cannot simply meet environmental performance goals. It must also be constructed at a pleasing scale, with the materials and building components that welcome people, to get along with its neighbors. New development doesn’t have to look just like adjacent development—diversity is good for architecture just as it is good for society and ecology—but it does usually need to be something other than a shocking “sculpture,” so unique and artistically precious as to shout: “Look at me. Look how different I am. I am art.”

Note the word “usually.” There may well be sites and particular uses where the function of having something so utterly different in that place makes perfect sense. Generally, such places and uses are set somewhat apart from the woof and warp of a city’s intimate neighborhoods or great streets: the Sydney Opera House, the Baltimore Inner Harbor’s National Aquarium, the Milwaukee Art Museum. But these functions and these special places surely can be accommodated in a coherent design philosophy.

In short, design must be addressed in smart people habitat. Not to do so is to ignore how the aesthetic side of the built environment so influences human experience, and how it affects human feeling and function alike. While articulating good design through local regulation may be difficult, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done—carefully, sensitively, and with an eye toward meeting human needs in the context of place and time.

More about Design

Making It Wrong in New Orleans

No big city in America has a local culture—architecture, food, language, music, you name it—stronger and more traditional than that of New Orleans. So why in the world did Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation choose iconoclastic architecture in rebuilding homes in the low-income Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina?

To an extent the photographs of the project alone tell the story. But here’s how my architect friend Victor Dover put it in a Facebook posting:

“This reflects the sad philosophy that architecture should express the violence, chaos, fragmentation and disorder ‘of our time’ (a damaged, damaging phrase, especially after Katrina). Instead, we should be establishing order that produces harmony and peace in human souls, and creating beauty that drowns out the threatening aspects of storm and culture, and seeking timelessness—and this will inevitably lead us to designs that are more genuinely resource-efficient and enduring.”

Make It Right houses under construction in 2007 (photo courtesy of Stephen A. Mouzon)

Good Neighbors? (Photo courtesy of Stephen A. Mouzon)

To be fair, whatever one thinks of the architecture, Pitt’s houses are all LEED-Platinum, and the fact that he and his charity have taken on the task of rebuilding is a very good thing. But this is a case where design does matter; and these designs look more about the ambitions of the Foundation and its architects than about the community they are serving.