Category: General

Traditional Architectural & Traditional Urban Form

London RailwayLondon Railway, originally uploaded by plemeljr

I know I slightly admonished David in my last post, but he makes a perfect insight about the difference between traditional architecture from traditional urban form:

Charles has also caused himself undue problems of intellectual substance by not separating traditional architecture from traditional urban form. They are two distinct matters and the issues are conflated to nobody’s benefit, least of all Prince Charles’ effectiveness. Too many react viscerally from the idea that London must be a classical city and yet many of those same people also favor walkable urbanism.
Had anyone of a number of people — Lord Rogers, the Prince, the Candy’s, the Qataris — had presence of mind to split the difference, there might have been no lawsuit. What I mean is that the essential problem to vast majority of people was that Lord Rogers’ plan was not so much as modernist building facade as modernist, suburban, street-separating urban form. Had Rogers been able to imagine a traditional Georgian neighborhood but using a modernist vocabulary of building elements — more glass, harder edges — he would have been able to create a traditional walkable urbanism using modern hard-edge style. Some say that would have been impossible but I suggest that it’s quite wrong. I’ve just been visiting the Olympic Village in Vancouver BC and it offers a fine example of how to real walkable urbanism with nary a Doric column in site. “Splitting the difference” could have allowed (and still could) to offer the architectural form which the Cnady’s and Lord Rogers seem to desire along with Prince Charles’ (and he is correct in substance) that Chelsea Barrack must fit into traditional walkable London.

I don’t think this is splitting the difference at all. You can be contemporary (or modern) in your buildings but follow traditional usage patterns and make a building which is truly relevant to our present and context; yet draw on hundreds of years of established urban understanding. Just look at Corbusier’s church in Firminy, which was built 40 years after his death.
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photo by Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Of Course Governmental Regulations Create & Reinforce Suburban Land Use

Everyone is talking about Ellen Dunham-Jones’ TED talk on Retrofitting Suburbia:
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
By the way David Sucher gets it exactly wrong here taking Big Media Matt to task:

Odd. Nowhere does Dunham-Jones argue against “legal impediments to this kind of adaptation.” She doesn’t address the subject at all and in fact her whole presentation is based on her research into purely free-market adaptations.
Of course as they says, if you are a carpenter, the solution to every problem is a hammer. Perhaps for Yglesias the solution to every problem is government intervention.

Yglesias is fundamentally correct: current governmental restrictions on land use, which started in a just manner to protect citizens, now make it virtually impossible to create walkable urbanism in existing cities. I wrote about this concerning my hometown of Westerville, Ohio:

Not only is Uptown Westerville denser, but also is universally loved and desired throughout Westerville. It is where you went on first dates, where you got ice cream, where you went to buy cute gifts for your mom on Mother’s Day. But for some reason Westerville restricts this type of development, when it should expanded.

Not only do people love walkable urbanism, but developers are building twisted facsimiles of downtowns – which are really just outdoor malls – and making huge amounts of money. Just look at Easton Town Center which is less than 15 minutes away from Westerville:


The solution is to change the zoning rules to allow higher density building. That might be what David is talking about government intervention, but to me, it seems that allowing people the freedom to build a bit denser lessens David’s horrible government intervention.