The details are not the details. They make the design.
Secure bicycle parking facility under Minami-Ikebukuro Park and near Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo.
It is of vital importance to identify our shared strengths and weaknesses on our bicycle urbanism journey, but also to pay heed to the various allies who are often, in fact, our antagonists. Traffic engineering is one, but so is architecture. To many people, this may seem odd. Isn’t architecture much the same as urban planning? Unfortunately, the divide is greater than it should be. The obsession with pretty buildings—inherent in architecture—all too often doesn’t extend to an understanding of the space around a building.
There I was, in Trondheim. Norway’s leading bicycle city for many years, despite climate and topography. Around 8 percent modal share. I was keynoting at a conference at the Clarion Hotel & Congress Trondheim. Built in 2012 with Space Group as the architects. I like the building. Beautifully designed, in my opinion. I spent a lot of time regarding the structure and the many details, both inside and out. And then I saw it. Outside the main entrance was a small bike rack with four spots. It wasn’t pretty, but it was being used. Imagine designing a spectacular building and then having someone slap a cheap bike rack next to the front entrance. The architect might be rather annoyed, although I think that they should instead kick themselves for forgetting bicycle parking at the entrance. It should have been designed into the big picture from the beginning. Instead, the architects now have at the main entrance a symbol for how they neglected transport facilities in their design.
Ivy (Hedera) has a great name in Danish—arkitektens trøst, or “the architect’s consolation.” Good Danish irony to describe how ivy can cover up bad architecture. In the case of this Trondheim hotel, the bike rack is the consolation and, unlike ivy, it also serves a practical purpose. It was placed there for a reason: people were parking their bikes there. You can see in the photo that more racks would be a good idea. I wandered around the building a bit, looking to see if the architects reluctantly threw in some bike parking somewhere else, but I couldn’t find any. All too often, architects seem so enamored with their big shiny thing that they forget the people who will be coming to and from the building. If this were Phoenix or some other city where the bicycle is still struggling to establish roots, fine. But this is a city with an 8 percent modal share for cycling, which only makes it more embarrassing.
Bike racks placed far from the popular destinations on Regnbuepladsen, Copenhagen. © Steven Achiam/GHB Landscape Architects
Hey, Danish projects can stumble, too, like the Inner Harbor Bridge. But also in more subtle ways that you don’t notice right away. In the redesign of Vartov Square (now renamed Regnbuepladsen, or Rainbow Square) next to City Hall in Copenhagen, a great public space was created as a part of total redesign of the entire Vester Voldgade street. The bike racks, however, were placed next to the cycle track and on the opposite side of the square from the destinations, including a popular café. I ride past this spot every weekday, and while some people do use the racks, many others just park their bikes with a kickstand closer to the buildings. Closer to where they actually want to be.
The architects seem to have thought that the obvious spot to park is next to the cycle track, but cyclists prefer to park closer to their destinations and always have. A building without bike parking designed into it from the beginning is unfinished architecture.
We’ve seen some classic magpie architecture from Norman Foster with his SkyCycle lark. We could hope it was a one-off, but alas, it seems to be a thing. Architectural competitions are great. A flurry of designs emerge from Photoshopland that allow you to gauge the current mood, trends, and ideas, but we can also see how so many architects are more interested in the structure than the function.
It’s a modern lifeline across a river in a world city, not a coffee cup.
One example was an open competition for a new bicycle and pedestrian bridge in London, across the Thames from Nine Elms to Pimlico, called the NEP Bridge competition. The competition brief stipulated that: “ … it must be inspiring, elegant, and functional in its design and perfect in its execution,” and it must also “provide a safe and attractive link for pedestrians and cyclists crossing the river, encouraging movement between the two banks.”
Looking through the many shortlisted designs through a bicycle urbanism filter was a bit depressing. Let’s just say that squiggletecture seems to be a new movement in architecture. Straight, logical lines to provide an easy trajectory for cyclists were thrown out the window on most of the renderings. Ramps seem to be popular.
What is a bridge? Isn’t it just a vital mobility link from one side of a body of water to another? Isn’t that really the baseline for every decent bridge in history? Look at a map of Paris or any other city with bridges. They are straight. From one shore to the other. Providing no-nonsense A-to-B access for the people using it.
Most of the designs for the NEP Bridge look like they were designed by people who don’t ride a bicycle in a city, let alone people who walk often. Most are designs for meandering tourists licking ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. People with nowhere to go and nowhere to be. They’re not designs for a city in constant motion and for citizens moving purposefully about. And consider the ramps … the ramps. Round and round we go, slowly descending to the river bank like a flower petal on a summer breeze. Perhaps ramps are a subliminal product of decades of carcentric planning. Is there a little voice embedded in the minds of designers and architects that says, “Hey … if you have to get up or down from an elevation, use a winding ramp. After all, that’s what they do in parking garages and on motorways.” Adobe Illustrator’s improved Draw a Curve function was apparently a big hit. Okay, bling your badass bridge all you want, just don’t force people to alter their urban trajectory because you learned a new trick in Illustrator.
Many designs in the competition just curve for no particular reason, with no regard for getting people where they want to go. Instead, there seems to be a distinct focus on increasing travel times by creating a mobility obstacle course.
A number of designs just discarded the idea of ramps altogether and rolled their dice on… stairs. A big, fancy, modern bridge across the river of a major world city, and you have to navigate stairs to get there. Although some designs featured elevators to further slow you down, and one chucked in escalators for bikes.
If you want to create a bicycle and pedestrian bridge in the first quarter of this new century, can we agree that stairs and elevators should not be your point of departure?
Architectural competitions can be exciting. The ones that combine architecture with urban space and/or transport, however, reveal a disconnect between architecture and the mobility needs of the citizens. The competition brief, above, should have been reworded: “ … it must be functional in its design, perfect in its execution, and also inspiring and elegant.” It’s a modern lifeline across a river in a world city, not a coffee cup.
Where many architects lack any real understanding of urban mobility and the role of the bicycle in our cities, developers seem to be lagging even farther behind. Fair enough, in many cities there is outdated legislation that forces developers to provide a certain number of parking spots to accompany new buildings. Also, to be fair, a number of developers I have spoken to would rather cut the number of parking spots and instead create extra units or retail space.
Change is slow in coming, but here is one bright star in the developer’s night. In Malmö, Sweden, just across The Sound (Øresund) from Copenhagen, Hauschild + Siegel Architects designed the OhBoy Bicycle House. It is an apartment building with 55 units as well as a hotel with 32 rooms. The building has exactly one car parking spot—the disabled parking spot required by Swedish law.
The entire building is designed for cycling residents. The doors and the elevators are wider than normal in order to accommodate cargo bikes. Residents can, in principle, roll their bikes into the building, up the elevator, and right into their apartments. Even right up to the fridge so they can transfer their groceries from the bike.
So brilliant—but also so incredibly simple. Hauschild + Siegel and the City of Malmö are ahead of the curve, but we will see more developments like this appearing in cities around the world. Designing for bicycles and for urban living.
A much-needed bike rack placed outside the front entrance of the Clarion Hotel & Congress Trondheim.
The OhBoy Bicycle House development in Malmö, Sweden. Car-free living in a modern city. © Hauschild + Siegel Architects