In these three columns for Architect—the magazine of the American Institute of Architects —Witold Rybczynski examines significant building projects in Boston, Seattle, and Poundbury, England (“the town that Prince Charles built”). As the National Magazine Award judges said, “Rybczynski’s writing is engaging for both veteran architects and those who merely live and work in the buildings they design.” Born in Scotland and raised in England and Canada, Rybczynski has taught at McGill and the University of Pennsylvania; written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Slate; and is the author of several books, including Home: A Short History of an Idea and, most recently, How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit. “Oh, and by the way,” his website explains, “it’s pronounced Vee-told Rib-chin-ski.”
Overexposed
I recently visited two civic buildings in Seattle that are now almost a decade old: Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA, and City Hall, designed by Peter Q. Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Why bother to write about these buildings now? When the library opened in 2004, the New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp called it “the most exciting building it has been my honor to review.” City Hall, just a few blocks away, earned no such acclaim when it opened the following year, and to this day it remains a well-kept secret.
Has the library lived up to its initial fanfare? And has a very good building in City Hall been overshadowed by its more celebrated neighbor? I came to find answers to those questions, believing that it’s best to judge buildings in the fullness of time, when the rough edges have been worn smooth and it’s possible to assess the durability—aesthetic as well as physical—of the design.
This flies in the face of our current obsession with the new-new thing. The mere announcement of a competition short list is “news.” Buildings are given the thumbs-up—or -down—on opening day, prior to being put into use. Projects are rated “green” irrespective of actual performance. And design awards are bestowed on buildings even before they are built. Pause to consider how unusual that is—as if Oscars were awarded for unfilmed screenplays or the Pulitzers included a category called Best Book Proposal.
The architects for the library and City Hall were both selected in the summer of 1999. Library administrators narrowed a field of twenty-nine contestants to five—a balanced mix of two big names, two tyros, and an established regional firm. The process got off to a rocky start when the big names—Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli—dissatisfied with the selection process, withdrew and, following a lackluster presentation, Portland-based Zimmer Gunsul Frasca was eliminated.
That left the tyros. Both in their fifties, neither Steven Holl nor Rem Koolhaas had a large portfolio of built work, although both were favorites of what a Seattle journalist called “the black-turtleneck crowd.” Following three days of well-attended public presentations, Koolhaas got the nod. The iconoclastic Dutchman did not disappoint, producing a design consisting of superimposed platforms in a huge prism-shaped greenhouse. The unusual “uniting of hip with pragmatic” as Architectural Record put it, was an immediate sensation.
The city hall project was overshadowed from the start. Public wrangling between Mayor Paul Schell and some members of the city council delayed the architect-selection process, and when the short list was announced, it seemed an anticlimax after the exciting head-to-head competition between Holl and Koolhaas. The closest on the list to a firebrand was Antoine Predock, an architectural maverick with a flamboyant style that was popular in the Southwest, although it seemed an odd fit for Seattle. John and Patricia Patkau were less well known but, being based in nearby Vancouver, British Columbia, were almost local.
The sleeper was Peter Bohlin. A seasoned practitioner like Predock, he was best known for exquisitely detailed houses, including a sprawling estate for Bill Gates on Lake Washington. The Seattle Times, which had called Koolhaas and Holl “sexy, jet-setting, international designers about whom civic boosters dream and major magazines write,” referred to Bohlin’s public presentation as “subdued”—which is also a pretty good description of his architecture.
The wrangling between the mayor and the council continued even after Bohlin was selected, which cast a pall over the project. Whereas the opening of the library was extensively covered by the world’s media, led by Muschamp’s rave review, City Hall was ignored. My search of the Avery Index did not turn up a single review of City Hall by the major architectural press, only a brief news clip in Architectural Record that referred to the proposed design as “transparent and pragmatic,” which seems a step down from “hip and pragmatic.”
That wasn’t how the mayor saw it; Bohlin’s unaffected approach is exactly what attracted him. Schell, who had served as dean of the University of Washington’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning, followed architecture and was familiar with Bohlin’s work. “I knew the Gates house as well as a recent building at the University of Washington, so I had a good feel for what Bohlin would bring to the table,” he told me. “You really want someone who is a little old shoe, and will last on the shelf.”
So, how has the old shoe worn? The quartzite floors, limestone and titanium walls, fir and maple paneling, glass railings, and stainless steel everything else look much as they must have on opening day eight years ago, as I discovered on my recent tour of the building. The “stream” that crosses the city hall lobby, and cascades beside a grand exterior stair to the lowest part of the steeply sloping site forty feet below, fills the interior with a pleasant gurgling sound. The sky-lit lobby has been described as a public agora, and I watched people wandering in and out of it at will. No one was opening bags or asking for IDs. Elevator access is unrestricted. City Hall was designed in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 WTO protests, the so-called Battle of Seattle, as well as 9/11. What must have been a difficult decision—to create a transparent, welcoming building rather than a bunker—is now fully vindicated.
Bohlin’s design exhibits an old-fashioned sort of modernism, in which the plan explains itself as you move through it—the council chamber here, the offices over there. The structure is comprehensible, and care is lavished on construction. Bohlin belongs to the details-should-show-how-things-are-made school, but unlike Renzo Piano, he is a bit of a mannerist; planes slide by other planes, materials are layered upon each other, and odd junctions abound. This casual approach has been compared to that of Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, early Swedish modernists whom Bohlin admires, and it serves to humanize the architecture.
Good buildings don’t just fulfill existing functions, they suggest new ones. A large room designed for overflow crowds during council meetings has turned into a well-used public meeting space. The large plazas that step down the hill on the west side of the building, designed by landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, have become a favored locale with free lunchtime concerts and a weekly farmers market in the summer. At the recent historic same-sex marriage ceremony performed in City Hall, the couples descended the grand exterior stair amid cheers, flowers, and confetti. One area that has yet to find a use is an empty “multipurpose space” at the base of the building. A long ruby-red glass wall that casts an eerie glow and creates a spooky atmosphere on the interior, and on the exterior, struck me as a feeble effort to inject glam into the design.
I asked my City Hall guide why he thought the building had received so little attention in the media. “When City Hall opened, the emphasis was put on its green features,” he said, “which is not very sexy.” The building, which received a LEED Gold rating, claims a 24 percent reduction in energy use; although a projected solar array was never installed, there is a large green roof as well as a monster water tank in the basement. It’s true that reduction in storm-water runoff doesn’t stir the imagination, but I think it’s more than that. This low-key building, adjusted to its site and its surroundings, paying deference to the 2002 Justice Center across the street (designed by NBBJ), carefully stepping down the hill, and taking advantage of views of Elliott Bay, is the opposite of an icon. City Hall blends with its setting and does not photograph well, and I suspect that its subtle charms are appreciated only gradually, over time. This is slow architecture.
No one has ever described Rem Koolhaas as slow. The Seattle Central Library perches uncomfortably on its sloping site—no places for outdoor lunches here—although I suspect the awkwardness was intended. It’s that sort of building: startling, in-your-face, challenging conventions, a prickly presence amid the downtown skyscrapers (and very photogenic). The library looks like a giant piece of urban infrastructure, an impression heightened at night, when the crisscrossing trusses of the bridgelike structure are apparent inside the faceted, glowing lantern.
Although the glass skin appeared grimy the day I visited, on the whole the library doesn’t show its age—but for different reasons than City Hall. Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus had a smaller construction budget (less than $300 per square foot, compared to $363 per square foot for City Hall), and they opted to spend it on structure and space rather than on materials and detailing. The interior finishes are downright cheap: sheetrock; bare concrete; exposed, sprayed fireproofing; and an acoustic ceiling that looks like it’s made from old sleeping bags. As for elegant details, well, there aren’t any. This is a building where the reading room and the service basement are equally bare-bones.
This very roughness works to the building’s advantage, however. Like all big-city libraries, and perhaps more than most, the Seattle library is a hangout for the homeless and young down-towners—given Seattle’s grungy dress code, it can be hard to tell them apart. Yet everyone looks at home—the tough, no-frills interior neither patronizes nor intimidates.
Last year, the library had 2 million visitors, which is remarkable for a city the size of Seattle (the mighty New York Public Library had 2.3 million). The wear doesn’t show—there’s not much that you can do to a polished concrete floor, nylon carpeting, and galvanized-metal balustrades that resemble floor grates. The unusual, stainless steel floor tiles in the reading room are scratched up, but that only enhances their industrial chic, although I thought that the sulfurous chartreuse escalators and elevators were starting to show their age. One feature that has fallen victim to intensive use is the trendy upholstered foam furniture that I remember from a previous visit; it has been replaced by PVC seating that resembles Adirondack chairs. As I sat making notes, it struck me that while the vertiginous, Escher-like interior was as stimulating as ever, it could also be overwhelming, which was not particularly conducive to concentration. A little calm would not have been out of place.
The ramped, spiraling bookstacks were widely heralded when the building opened, although none of the librarians I spoke to could think of a single library that has recently adopted this unusual feature, which now seems more like a gimmick than a real innovation. But there is no doubt that the striking, faceted glass building is a hit with the public. And not just library-goers; a quarter of the visitors are tourists, for the library has joined Pike Place Market and the Space Needle as one of Seattle’s must-see sights. Although the librarians who showed me around boasted of their building’s popularity, it’s unclear that the experience of using a public library is actually enhanced when it doubles as a tourist attraction.
What difference does a decade make? Both buildings can now be appreciated in the fuller context of their architects’ subsequent work. Koolhaas’s hard-nosed interior takes its place with the Porto concert hall and Milstein Hall at Cornell, and his pursuit of eye-catching building forms has continued with the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. Bohlin’s self-styled “soft modernism” has found further expression in several campus buildings, a federal courthouse, and a studio for Pixar, although he has also produced unexpectedly iconic designs for Apple stores in New York and Shanghai.
In many ways, the library and City Hall represent two different faces of modernism. Koolhaas’s design is a freely structured, contemporary version of a civic monument, a modern counterpart to Carrère & Hastings’s New York Public Library. Much like that landmark, the Seattle library is a building of its time—although of a different time. It’s rough and chic, glamorously gritty, and fashionably unconcerned with hierarchies and traditional architectural virtues.
Bohlin’s City Hall is different; it doesn’t put on airs. After spending a day in the building my chief impression was of craftsmanship, unruffled calm, and an even-handed sense of balance—a veritable civics lesson in glass, maple, and natural light. In a culture that is intrigued by novelty and glamour, it is perhaps inevitable that chic would trump craft. But given several more decades, I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t discount the staying power of well-made old shoes.
Radical Revival
Although Americans regularly pay lip service to the value of diversity, the truth is that people of different incomes generally choose—for a variety of reasons—to live apart. Nevertheless, since 1992, the federal government has spent more than $5 billion to encourage the rich and poor to live side by side. The so-called Hope VI program has awarded several hundred block grants to scores of cities around the country to replace the barracklike public housing projects of the 1950s with a blend of subsidized and market housing.
Replacing the projects, which concentrate the poor in isolated enclaves, with mixed-income neighborhoods certainly sounds like a great idea. But what does it take to make a successful socially engineered community that departs so radically from the American mainstream? The model for the Hope VI program was a pioneering housing experiment in Boston called Harbor Point, the nation’s first attempt to transform a large dysfunctional federal public housing project into a mixed-income planned community. Now twenty-five years old, Harbor Point, perhaps more than other projects, can help answer that difficult question.
Harbor Point occupies fifty acres on Columbia Point, a peninsula jutting into Dorchester Bay, just south of downtown Boston. Today, Columbia Point is best known for I. M. Pei’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, but for three decades it was the site of the city’s largest—and most notorious—public housing project. In 1954, M. A. Dyer, a local firm, designed twenty-seven nearly identical three- and seven-story apartment buildings, deployed on super-blocks à la Ville Radieuse. The architecture followed the no-frills style of public housing of that era: utilitarian, flat-roof boxes. Although the project functioned reasonably well at first, by the 1970s, thanks to the absence of screening, lax management, and general neglect, it had become a no-man’s land of crack houses, street crime, and lawlessness. By 1979, things were so bad that three-quarters of the 1,504 housing units were boarded up and vacant. In 1980, the Boston Housing Authority, which had been successfully sued for dereliction by the remaining tenants, was placed in receivership.
Two years later, the city of Boston did something unexpected. With federal approval, it leased the whole project to a real estate developer to rebuild as a privately managed residential community. Two-thirds of the new units would be market rate, but the remainder would be subsidized social housing. Simply put, the idea was that the former would cross-subsidize—and stabilize—the latter. This was, in many ways, a desperate gamble: Blending public housing into a commercial development had never been tried before on this scale; in addition, it was unclear if middle-class tenants would want to live in an isolated site in a distinctly unfashionable part of the city. On the other hand, the waterfront location was attractive and only ten minutes from downtown on the T.
Harbor Point is the brainchild of a developer named Joe Corcoran, who founded Corcoran Jennison Companies in 1971. As Jane Roessner recounts in A Decent Place to Live, a history of the project published in 2000, it was Corcoran who first approached the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with the idea of turning Columbia Point public housing into a mixed-income community. The son of Irish immigrants, Corcoran had grown up in Dorchester, attended Boston College High School at Columbia Point, and watched the construction—and eventual decay—of the public housing project there. “I hated public housing,” he told me when we met in his Columbia Point office. “Warehousing low-income families all in one place was a formula for social disaster.”
He and his partners, Joe Mullins and Gary Jennison, developed an unusual solution for integrating public housing into a market-oriented residential community: They made the public housing tenants partners in the project. Corcoran admits that there were practical advantages to this arrangement. “When you show up at a meeting with a group of poor people on your side, it’s hard for the politicians to turn you down,” he says. But more important, sharing responsibility was a way of ensuring the continued success of a mixed-income community.
The unprecedented tenant control that Corcoran advocates includes full and equal partnership during the design phase—both sides must agree on all decisions—active participation in day-to-day management, as well as a stake in the financial success of the development. “The tenants’ council gets 10 percent of the cash flow to finance its operations,” he says.
The council has twelve elected members, seven from the subsidized tenants and five from the market tenants—the disparity reflecting that subsidized tenants tend to be long-time residents (eight years on average at Harbor Point), compared to market tenants (less than two years). Every month, representatives from the council and from the developer meet to discuss ongoing problems such as tenant complaints, maintenance issues, and evictions. “After our experience, we won’t do a mixed-income project unless the tenants are partners,” Corcoran says.
Corcoran Jennison today owns and manages more than 24,000 residential units, mostly affordable and mixed-income rentals. Like all of the company’s properties, Harbor Point has rules of behavior: no pets, no repairing or washing cars on site, no consumption of alcoholic beverages in public areas, no loud noises after eleven p.m., and so on. In addition, car access is restricted to residents and guests (while the streets are publicly owned, they are maintained—and patrolled—privately). “We are able to relax some rules as the property matures, and in other properties we make them more strict as the resident population evolves,” says Miles Byrne, who managed Harbor Point for seven years. “There is so much distrust in the early years of any mixed-income community, in large part because we inherit a resident population that has only known the public housing universe, where promises were broken, properties were neglected, and decisions were reached without resident input.”
Corcoran Jennison is strict about enforcement, but Byrne emphasizes that, in the case of subsidized tenants, eviction is a last resort. “Guns and drugs are the third rail, but on everything else, we—the developer and the council—try to make it work. After all, subsidized tenants have many fewer housing options than market tenants.” He emphasizes that managing low-income housing is more demanding than managing simple market housing and that many municipal housing bureaucracies are bad at it. “They’re not very entrepreneurial,” he says. “And they often develop an adversarial relationship with their tenants.”
Sound management and tenant control are crucial, but urban design is important, too. The plan for Harbor Point was the work of the late Joan E. Goody of Boston-based Goody, Clancy & Associates. She sympathized with the demands of the public housing occupants. “They wanted to live in a ‘normal’ neighborhood,” she wrote in a 1993 article in Places magazine, “one that didn’t look or work like a project, one that felt safe for walking around and letting their children out to play.”
To achieve normality, the Ville Radieuse plan was converted into a street grid with sidewalks, on-street parking, and no culde-sacs. Seventeen of the original buildings were replaced by new five-, six-, and seven-story brick apartment blocks oriented to the street; the rest of the structures were renovated and given pitched roofs and bay windows. Among the apartment buildings, Goody placed groups of two- and three-story townhouses—modest, New England–style buildings of painted clapboard with stoops and picket fences. All the ground floor apartments were given their own front doors—a simple feature “that nurtures pride and identity,” as the architecture critic of the Boston Globe, Robert Campbell, wrote in a 1990 article.
Although this sounds a lot like what would later become known as New Urbanism, the first designs for Harbor Point predate Seaside and call for none of the decorative charm of that seminal project; this is New Urbanism on a diet. In any case, Goody, a Harvard-trained modernist, did not consider herself a New Urbanist. “Joan was a humanist rather than a traditionalist,” says David Dixon, FAIA, principal in charge of urban design at Goody Clancy. “She was more interested in how people live today than in how they wanted to live in the past. That’s why she looked to nearby Boston neighborhoods such as Dorchester, rather than to old New England towns.”
In his 1990 article, Campbell concluded that “Harbor Point will flourish if it begins to grow at its edges and mesh with its surroundings.” The ten lanes of Interstate 93 are a formidable barrier between the site and the rest of Dorchester, but the immediate surroundings are being filled in, and Harbor Point itself is flourishing. There are two schools and a church across the street, the adjacent University of Massachusetts campus has expanded, and the projected Edward M. Kennedy Institute, next to the JFK Library, is in the works. Corcoran Jennison has built an apartment building, an office building, and a hotel next to the housing development, and although its plans for a new residential community were scotched by the recession—the university acquired the land—a $60 million apartment complex is on the boards for another neighboring site.
On a recent warm and sunny day in June, I walked over to Harbor Point from the nearby MBTA station and discovered a surprising number of people on the street. “Surprising” because a typical planned community of nine-to-five white-collar workers is usually empty at noon on a weekday. Since many of the subsidized tenants at Harbor Point work at nontraditional jobs—night-shift cleaners, taxi drivers, security guards—they are around during the day. Another result of the mixed-income community is greater heterogeneity. There are mothers with strollers (a third of the subsidized residents are children), and elderly bench sitters from the seniors’ residence. A large number of the market tenants at Harbor Point are college students, and while there are fewer of them today than when regular classes are in session, they are a presence, too.
Harbor Point is a walkable community: The buildings are close to the sidewalks and the mature trees offer plenty of shade. It’s leafy green, but at thirty units per acre, the impression is urban. Goody, whose sensible, low-key architecture has stood the test of time, oriented the streets so that they terminate in views of either the harbor or the Boston skyline. Along the water’s edge is a public promenade with a spectacular vista of downtown across the bay. The other major landscape feature of Harbor Point is a 1,000-foot-long mall modeled on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. This kind of mimicry doesn’t always work—many neotraditional developments have “boulevards” weakly defined by single-family houses—but here the apartment buildings, barely visible behind a line of street trees, are exactly the right scale for the long green space.
The base of one of the apartment buildings facing the mall houses a small commercial strip containing a convenience store, dry cleaner, hair salon, daycare center, and Fiskie’s Café, whose tables and chairs spill out onto the sidewalk. I ordered a Buffalo chicken wrap at the café for lunch. At the table next to me, three East Asian kids were having a snack; another table was occupied by a group of Hispanic men.
Harbor Point is as ethnically diverse as Boston itself. Although the one-to-two ratio between subsidized and market units remains, the last twenty-five years have seen changes in the population. The majority of the subsidized residents today are Hispanics, rather than African Americans as in the past; family size has dropped, leading Corcoran Jennison to convert some of the four- and five-bedroom apartments into smaller units. Less than half of the market tenants are white, and there is a large Asian population. There are also more college students sharing apartments, as well as retirees and young professionals.
“We attract out-of-towners who like coming here because of the racial mix,” Corcoran told me. In a Yelp review, a University of Massachusetts student from the Bay Area who identified herself as Katy H. wrote that she enjoyed her year living in Harbor Point: “Lots of residents were students, but in addition to that, there were families, single adults, elderly couples, you name it—they lived here.” She added, “If you consider yourself to be close-minded or intolerant of different cultures and people—this is NOT the neighborhood for you.”
Most of the Yelp reviewers seemed unaware that many of their neighbors were low-income families. This is not surprising, since the units occupied by subsidized tenants are indistinguishable from the rest, inside and out. But reading between the lines, I sense occasional tensions: complaints about scratched cars, noisy parties, teenagers acting up. This might dismay social activists who imagine mixed-income housing to be some sort of happy melting pot. On the other hand, the market rents that Corcoran Jennison is able to charge (a one-bedroom apartment is currently about $2,400 a month, up from $800 fifteen years ago) and the satisfaction expressed by most of the Yelp reviewers lays to rest skeptics’ fears that rich and poor can’t live together. At Harbor Point, the two groups share amenities, exercise in the same fitness center, swim in the same pool, shop in the same convenience store, serve as building captains, and deliberate together on the tenants’ council. Given the disparity among different income groups today, a degree of social distance would hardly be surprising. But with American society economically polarized as never before, creating an environment in which rich and poor live amicably side by side is no mean accomplishment.
So, what did it take to make Harbor Point a success? A visionary and committed developer + a responsive architect + the active participation of low-income residents + an experienced property-management team. Not a simple formula. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill: It could be said that Harbor Point is the least likely model for public housing, except for all the others that have been tried.
Behind the Façade
Poundbury is “the town that Prince Charles built.” Not surprisingly, given his royal highness’s vocal campaign against modern architecture, British critics have been merciless in their ridicule of Poundbury’s perceived shortcomings. “An embarrassing anachronism as the new century dawns,” wrote Hugh Aldersey-Williams in the New Statesman in 1999, when the project was still in its infancy. More recently, writing in the Observer, Stephen Bayley found Poundbury “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,” and Andy Spain, blogging on ArchDaily, characterized it as “an over sanitised middle-class ghetto that has a whiff of resignation that there is nothing positive to live for so we must retreat to the past.” Snide judgments made on the basis of seemingly fleeting visits.
What’s the town really like? I spent six days there in September, frequenting its eateries, wandering its streets, and generally trying to experience the place as a resident might. Construction started twenty years ago, and while two decades is a short time in the life of a town, it’s long enough for the newness to start to rub off. As I discovered, there is a lot more to Poundbury than meets the modernist critic’s jaundiced eye. The place is neither anachronistic nor utopian nor elitist. Nor is it a middle-class ghetto. In fact, Poundbury embodies social, economic, and planning innovations that can only be called radical.
What struck me first was the unusual layout, a rabbit warren of dog-legged streets and crooked lanes, interspersed with many small squares—none of them actually square. Although confusing at first, after a day or two it’s easy enough to find one’s way around—much like navigating the center of a medieval town. Instead of a main street, shops, cafés, and a pub are scattered here and there. I had a beer at The Poet Laureate, which is named in honor of Ted Hughes. The outdoor tables spill out onto a square dominated by a market hall with fat columns shaped like milk bottles.
This particular village square is part of the first phase of Poundbury’s construction, which was completed in 2001. The scale becomes larger and denser in the newer sections, which have rows of terrace houses, small apartment buildings, and office blocks. Poundbury is built on a hill, and the highest spot is occupied by Queen Mother Square, named in honor of the prince’s grandmother. The partially complete plaza is lined by four- and five-story office and residential buildings, and will soon have a 120-foot-tall campanile-like tower. But the impression of a small market town is maintained in the higgledy-piggledy street layout and in the resolutely traditional—that is to say, not-modernist—architecture.
The bright blue electric bus that swings by the square, on the other hand, is very modern indeed. POUNDBURY VIA TOWN CENTRE reads its destination board, a reminder that Poundbury is not a stand-alone community—this is not Celebration or Seaside—but an extension of Dorchester, a small county town of 20,000, set among the gently rolling hills of Dorset in southwest England.
For Dorchester residents, Poundbury is a new appendage on the edge of town, but for designers it is a demonstration of Prince Charles’s ideas about architecture, which he first detailed in a 1988 BBC documentary, A Vision of Britain. That film, which was followed by a book of the same name, came four years after he had delivered the first of his antimodernist broadsides, characterizing a proposed extension to London’s National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” In his book, Charles threw down the gauntlet: “We can build new developments which echo the familiar, attractive features of our regional vernacular styles,” he wrote. “There are architects who can design with sensitivity and imagination so that people can live in more pleasant surroundings.” Whence Poundbury.
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How did the heir apparent become a real estate developer? You can blame Edward III. In the fourteenth century, the king established the Duchy of Cornwall, a land trust to benefit his eldest son, Edward, known as the Black Prince. The king cannily prevented the prince and his successors from touching the capital, and over the centuries the duchy has done well, with a current worth of more than $1 billion. In 1987, Dorchester’s local planning authority determined that the only open land that could accommodate the future growth needs of the town was 400 acres belonging to the duchy. Under ordinary circumstances, as it had done in the past, the duchy would have sold the land to be developed in a conventional manner. But because Charles, the twenty-fourth duke of Cornwall, had such an interest in urbanism, with the town’s consent, the duchy took a more active role.
In 1988, after several false starts, Charles appointed the urban theorist and planner Léon Krier to prepare a master plan for an “urban village,” a dense (fifteen to twenty dwellings per acre, instead of the usual ten to twelve), walkable, sustainable model for suburban development. Following a public consultation process, the local planning authority approved the concept, and five years later construction began.
The work is being carried out by a variety of regional builders working with local and London-based architects, each of whom has been given a restricted number of dwellings in any one contract to promote architectural variety. Peterjohn Smyth was the coordinating architect for the project’s first phase, and Ben Pentreath is managing the current phase. Architecturally, there is nothing here that would be out of place in the prewar center of any provincial British town: Brick and stucco boxes with slate or clay-tile roofs and occasional flint panels, a scattering of Georgian and Regency revival townhouses, the occasional larger classical pile, and many buildings that are what one can only call “generic traditional.”
The market hall with the milk bottle columns was designed by the prominent classicist John Simpson; the office blocks on Queen Mother Square are the work of Quinlan and Francis Terry; and an Arts & Crafts nursing home is designed by James Gorst. I liked Simpson’s market hall; and the Terrys’ classical office building, while a little standoffish, has a marvelous cupola. On the other hand, the fire station struck me as particularly heavy-handed; Mey House, designed by Barbara Weiss Architects, is altogether too self-important for an office building; and some of the larger residences veer dangerously close to McMansion territory.
Of course, the last is a relative judgment: The largest house at Poundbury is smaller than the median size of new houses in America (2,400 square feet), and an upscale Georgian revival terrace house in Woodlands Crescent squeezes four bedrooms into only 1,400 square feet. This particular crescent of thirty-eight virtually identical houses, designed by Pentreath, merely hints at its eighteenth-century roots and seems to me to strike exactly the right architectural note.
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Despite the picturesque street layout, Krier’s approach is not simply scenographic: It embodies the theories of the nineteenth-century Viennese architect and planner Camillo Sitte. Sitte believed that the old cities that people admired were not happy accidents but were in fact designed according to principles no less specific than in the other arts. In Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889), translated into English as The Art of Building Cities, Sitte provided a detailed urban design analysis of streets and squares in old Italian and northern European cities. “Modern city planning completely reverses the proper relationship between built-up area and open space,” Sitte wrote. “In former times the open spaces—streets and plazas—were designed to have an enclosed character for a definite effect. Today we normally begin by parcelling out building sites, and whatever is left over is turned into streets and plazas.”
Poundbury’s Sitte-esqe roots are visible in its compact plan. Only 250 of the 400 acres are to be urbanized; the unbuilt space is concentrated at the edges, a green swathe of playing fields, allotment gardens, and pastures with grazing sheep. Krier has learned another lesson from Sitte: the value of accidental events. “We set up rigid systems, and then grow fearful of deviating from them by as much as a hair’s breadth,” Sitte wrote, bemoaning that city planning had become a branch of engineering in which formulaic solutions were rigorously applied. For Sitte—and Krier—planning is an art, and in art rules may be broken.
For example, in Poundbury, buildings generally come up to the sidewalk, but some have projecting stoops. Occasionally there are planting beds between the building and the sidewalk; sometimes a narrow garden, occasionally a deep garden. In a few cases, a building projects over the sidewalk to form an arcade. Simon Conibear, Poundbury’s development manager, characterized Krier’s planning to me as “80 percent harmony and 20 percent discord.”
In Poundbury, the layout of the buildings predetermines the road pattern, not vice versa. Roads are merely a way of getting around, not an armature within which buildings must tightly fit, as is the case with most planned communities. The first time I heard Krier lecture, many years ago, he talked mainly about parking. Krier’s point was that whereas the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and did not need to be reinvented—the great challenge for the modern city planner was how to accommodate the automobile.
This is as true in Britain as elsewhere: More than 77 percent of households currently own at least one car, and the ownership rate continues to increase. Krier’s solution is not to banish cars to the periphery or to separate them from pedestrians. In Poundbury, automobiles are everywhere: The interiors of the blocks have parking courts with open-air stalls, car ports, and garages; there is parallel and head-in street parking, and some of the apartment buildings integrate on-grade protected parking. But it didn’t feel as if the cars had taken over. For example, although several cars were parked in front of The Poet Laureate, the little square didn’t resemble a parking lot. There were no white lines, no signage—people parked willy-nilly, where they wanted. On Saturday night the square was full of cars, but on Monday morning it turned back into an empty plaza.
Poundbury may not have a “pedestrian zone,” but in a real sense the entire town is a pedestrian zone. It’s up to the drivers to adjust to the built realm, not vice versa, for Poundbury calms traffic with a vengeance. In fact, there have yet to be any accidents, Conibear told me. “The street layout is deliberately chaotic,” he said. “There are blind bends, no signage, not even stop signs. We also use the ‘seventy-meter event’ rule—that is, every seventy meters something happens to slow the cars down.”
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Poundbury is less than half-finished, with a current population of about 2,000 residents. Forty percent are retirees, typical for this area since southwest England is Britain’s Arizona. Flats and small houses sell for £100,000 to £200,000 ($160,000 to $320,000), while large freestanding houses command in excess of £500,000 ($800,000). These are high prices in a region where the median gross annual pay is £25,000 ($40,000).
Yet Poundbury is not a middle-class ghetto: more than a third of the dwellings qualify as affordable housing. The majority is social housing, owned by charitable trusts and rented to low-income tenants, but there is also shared-equity housing, which allows qualifying buyers to purchase a share in a home, even if they cannot afford a mortgage on the full market value. What is unusual in Poundbury is that the affordable housing is “pepper potted”—that is, scattered, and it is similar in appearance to its neighbors. It’s hard to get a complete picture of how well this works during a brief visit, although by all accounts, there is little social mixing between the two groups.
Another innovation at Poundbury is the embrace of mixed use, which is more extensive here than in most planned communities I’ve visited. Not only are the ground floors of many residential and office buildings devoted to commercial uses such as shops and cafés, there are medical clinics, professional offices for lawyers and accountants, garden centers, veterinarians, travel agents, and even a funeral home. There is also light industry: a large shed-like building at the bottom of a village green is a chocolate factory; a breakfast cereal manufacturing plant stands across the street from elegant townhouses; a low brick building with arched windows was until recently occupied by an electronics factory. The key to introducing industrial buildings on residential streets, says Conibear, is to make sure that they are built before the housing; residents accept a fait accompli, but they strongly resist the introduction of nonresidential uses after the fact. In all, Poundbury currently has an impressive 136 businesses generating 1,600 jobs—nearly one per resident.
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I asked my landlady what her neighbors thought about Poundbury. “Not everyone likes it,” she said. “Some people think it looks like a movie set.” Although Poundbury is a commercial project—the duchy is emphatically not a charity—the execution is of high quality: tight graphic control over signage, crunchy pea gravel instead of expanses of bare asphalt, granite blocks not paint stripes to denote parking stalls. Walking about town, I am also struck by what is missing: intrusive commercial signs, gimcrack construction, and the plastic vulgarity that pervades even the historic center of Dorchester. I suppose to some that makes it a movie set. But the allusion is surely also prompted by the revivalist styles of the architecture, the very thing that sets off the critics.
In an article in Building Design in which he excoriated the traditional appearance of the architecture, Crispin Kelly asked: “If Poundbury’s 1759 date stamp is not to our taste, do we have better pattern books of our own to promote to the punters … ?” I think the date stamp is more like 1940, but it’s a good question. What would be a modernist pattern book?
The stylistic free-for-all that has produced Dubai and Doha is surely not the answer. On the strength of 1920s-era neighborhoods I’ve seen in Oslo and Tel Aviv, I can almost imagine an International Style–revival Poundbury, although, as Los Angeles’s Getty Center decisively shows, white walls and pipe railings only get you so far. Individual modernist buildings have always looked good in the natural landscape—Fallingwater, the Glass House, the Sydney Opera House—or when surrounded by traditional buildings—think of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, Lloyd’s of London, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. But modernism has been notably deficient in creating an urban fabric. The modernist palette is simply too restricted—or perhaps not restricted enough. There is either too much repetition or too much variety, too much standardization or too little.
It seems to me that Poundbury could quite happily absorb a wider stylistic range, although neither Krier nor any of the architects I spoke to mentioned this possibility. But for the moment the imposition of an architectural code that favors tradition is understandable. The reason for “leaning on the past” is not nostalgia or lack of imagination but rather the recognition that the established vernacular offers the best chance for creating the nuanced variety and shadings of difference that produce a coherent urban environment and a recognizable sense of place.