Blog | the Original Green | Steve Mouzon

Skeuomorphism - How Steve Jobs Hit What Walter Gropius Missed - But Now, Is Apple Throwing Its Soul Away?

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:50:46 -0600

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How has Apple seduced millions while Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus left those same millions cold? Steve Jobs' passion for simplicity was legendary, and his esteem of minimalist Bauhaus design was immense, but Apple products are loved by masses around the world, while the Bauhaus is loved only by design geeks. What's the difference?

Simply put, Steve knew the difference between body and spirit, and Gropius didn't. Hardware is the body of a computer, while software (and more precisely, the user interface) is the spirit. There's no dispute that a body (whether human or machine) should be as lean as possible… but no leaner. In other words, low body fat but no anorexia. I remember the first time I held an iPod… its design seemed impossibly lean, but after less than a minute of turning the wheel and pushing the button, the question was "what else do you need?" So minimalist design is an indisputable virtue of hardware design.

Minimalism was a religion to Gropius; a creed to be applied to everything from buildings to typography. To Steve, it was a powerful tool to be used everywhere it makes sense. What Steve implicitly knew that Gropius and most minimalists since him have completely missed is the fact that a minimal spirit is rarely a lovable spirit.

Are Cities Organisms or Machines?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:05:46 -0600

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Nature has countless good lessons on how to sustain cities and towns… if only we would listen. Chuck Marohn's excellent Strong Towns post this morning flatly states that cities are organisms, not machines. I agree that it's more instructive to think of them that way. And that got me thinking about the fundamentally flawed things we do to (mis)manage them. Chuck traces the core disconnect to the transition from building, maintaining, and operating our towns and cities to paying others to do so.

Depending on the level of development in the area, it was only a century or two ago that the townspeople built and maintained the town. In my family, "house-raisings" were common occurrences, even in recent decades. My own house was built with much help from family and friends. But when we became wealthy enough, it seemed simpler to hire all the work done by someone else and spend all our productive time working on whatever our specialty was.

What we lost in that exchange is only now becoming clear: when we become experts in one thing and turn all other parts of our lives over to people who are experts in other things, we no longer have the authority to speak up when things get out of balance. And so the specialists get more and more efficient at doing their narrowly-defined tasks in near-ignorance of anything else. So we get arterial thoroughfares that are really efficient at moving cars, but nobody wants to live anywhere near them. We get volume builders that are really efficient at throwing up countless little vinyl boxes that cannot possibly be loved. And the whole mechanism of sprawl was one of the most efficient machines ever invented, but its excesses have literally become "cancer of the city." The good news is that there is a cure.

Four Unexpected Green Game-Changers for Earth Day

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:38:46 -0600

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The best green measures are the ones almost nobody's talking about. If you're sick of hearing the same green building talk today on Earth Day, it could be because Gizmo Green is the only thing being discussed in most circles. Better equipment and better materials can never achieve sustainability for us because our consumption is increasing faster than the engineers can increase efficiency. Here are four unmentioned things that can do far more good than good engineering:

Drive Only on Special Occasions

The carbon footprint of your house isn't really meaningful until you achieve a good carbon footprint on all the things you do outside your house. Put another way, you could have a zero-energy house, but if you have to drive to work, drive to school, drive to shopping, drive to recreation, and drive to pretty much everything else as well, then you're not really achieving anything significant. So live near work to begin with, and then make sure you can walk to the grocery along paths with great walk appeal. If you can do these two things, then you can probably walk or bike to many other daily needs as well. And then what you do inside your home can be meaningfully green. Why would you want to spend a lot of money on green gizmos and then discover it's not meaningful?

The End of Architecture as We Knew It

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:47:46 -0600

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Architecture has changed irreparably in the past decade, but those who know how to adapt just might find themselves in a far better place in a few years. It has now been 8 years since construction peaked in 2005, nearly 6 years since the subprime meltdown, and close to 5 years since the big meltdown that really kicked off the Great Recession.

The End of Experienced Employees

Today, it appears that construction is finally beginning to pick back up, but it's too late for architecture as we knew it. More than half of the people working in architectural offices in 2005 aren't there anymore. Some are still unemployed, some have gone in business for themselves, but many have left the profession. And when people leave architecture, they rarely come back for three reasons: an architecture degree prepares you to do so many other things, it's such a stressful profession, and the pay is usually significantly lower than other professions like law and medicine. So if you're a firm owner, your former employees are likely either gone for good, or have started their own firms and are competing with you for work. So you can't simply gear back up with the same experienced people you once had.

Why Patient and Sustainable Neighborhood-Building is So Hard Today

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:18:46 -0600

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The impatience of the development industry and its municipal regulators clearly contributed to the Meltdown, and a case could be made that impatience was actually the prime culprit. Developing impatiently means building large swaths of similar product efficiently and quickly. The public and private sectors each need to learn some lessons from the ways most great old places developed because those ways are far more sustainable and require a lot less debt, as we discussed recently. Here are the forces at work today that prevent us from building patient and sustainable places today:

Market Surveys

delightful… but there are no "sweet spot

houses" in this picture

Bankers usually require developers to provide market surveys showing that there is a need for the developments they're proposing. Typical market survey firms do what seems like the logical thing and look both at what has sold in the past and also at economic forecasts for the market in question. But there are two serious flaws in the system: First, this "rear view mirror approach" will almost always predict some combination of the previous best-sellers. It is incapable of predicting what people would prefer if they were given a choice. So they usually call for small variations on the "sweet spot house." The second problem is that if a survey calls for 500 new houses in the market, 5 developers might take that same survey to 5 different banks and get approved to build 5 x 500 = 2,500 houses. So market surveys can be wildly deceptive, and they are a major force for homogenizing new housing offerings.

The Decline of Patient Place-Making

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:18:46 -0600

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Patient development was once the normal American way to build, as it was in other parts of the world as well, but patient place-making began to seriously erode about a century ago and is almost unheard-of today because of several seemingly disconnected factors. But before we get to those, here's the thumbnail sketch of patient urbanism:

• Patient urbanism doesn't have to build the climax condition of a place from the beginning, but can start with small temporary structures and move or improve them over time.

• Patient urbanism can do the same with infrastructure, starting with gravel roads that eventually might morph all the way to paved Main Streets.

• Patient urbanism works in small increments, doing a good job with each little piece before moving on to the next instead of trying to do it all at once.

patient urbanism

• Because patient urbanism is good with little pieces, it's good at infill development as well.

Patient urbanism was once the default American way to build (as it was in other parts of the world as well) but it's really rare today because of these factors, which I've arranged in roughly chronological order of when they began:

Telling a New Story About Living Traditions

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 05:55:46 -0700

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The heartbeat of a living tradition is four simple words: "we do this because…" If you put every pattern in a language of architecture in these terms, it opens up the "why" of each pattern, allowing everyone to think again. Modernists have long chafed at architectural pattern books, objecting that "they don't allow invention," but with "we do this because…" everyone can invent all they like, so long as it's within a set of agreed-upon principles.

For years, I referred to these four words as the "transmission device" of living traditions. Recently, Kaid Benfield told me that this term "takes something warm and personal and makes it cold and technical-sounding." And he's exactly right. For the last couple months, I've been looking for an alternative. I stumbled across a great candidate just the other day: "we do this because…" is the heartbeat of living traditions, as noted above. What do you think?

It might sound a bit sappy at first glance, but please consider that it's fairly correct organically. The beating heart moves life-sustaining blood through the body, keeping it alive. "We do this because…" moves principles, which are the lifeblood of any living tradition, to all participants in that tradition. Without knowing why, a tradition is dead… it's just your father's way of doing things. But if we all know why we do what we do, we're free to adapt to new conditions. And when an entire culture knows why, you just might have millions of minds thinking of better ways of building.

Patient Urbanism - Build Neighborhoods Without High Debt

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 04:24:46 -0700

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Building neighborhoods patiently requires far less debt for infrastructure and results in places that are more interesting than those that are built all at once. This was once the way we built everywhere, but it is now illegal all over. Why? Because cities insist on "seeing the end from the beginning," meaning that they want the developer to begin by building the final condition of the neighborhood. In human terms, it would be like deciding that we can no longer tolerate giving birth to a child that grows into an adult; we will only allow giving birth to an adult… an incredibly painful proposition that simply doesn't work.

one of Seaside's food trailers that's still in its original place

Go to any great city or town that has been there for at least a couple centuries, and the buildings that make up the historic center are highly unlikely to be the ones that were originally built there. At the beginning, the buildings may have been little more than shacks that were replaced or transformed a few decades later into proper wood-frame buildings. A generation or two later, those detached buildings were likely replaced with the larger (and often attached) buildings we see today.

Generous Urbanism - How to Build It

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:56:46 -0700

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The neighborhoods and subdivisions that make up our towns and cities can be very generous, but they can also be really stingy as well, and their generosity is a great barometer of their prosperity and a good prognosis of their long-term prospects. A typical subdivision is miserly, selfishly cutting up every scrap of available land for sale under the mistaken assumption that this will make more money for the developer, but this is a half-baked view even in the short term. Here's why:

apartments overlooking a plaza

You can give land back to a neighborhood in several good ways and one bad way. First the bad news: amorphous left-over "green space," especially when it's located behind the houses in a thoughtless manner, really does waste land because it creates so little value. Now the good news: if you design the open space as parks, greens, squares, plazas, and playgrounds, and if you put them in front of the houses rather than behind, you can create a great deal of value.

A long view across a space significantly wider than a street increases the real estate value of all buildings facing the long view, usually by 25% or more. Turn the fronts of the houses to the view with a street (or occasionally a walk) running between the houses and the view, and you carry that value up to two blocks deep into the adjacent urbanism because those people can walk to the long view as well.

Preserving Stories in the Land

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:04:46 -0700

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How is it possible to develop land that is "close to sacred" to the landowners and yet preserve both the beauty that has always existed in the land and also the family's stories that date back there almost a hundred years? I'm on a charrette this week in Niceville, Florida where we're contemplating that question. Niceville is bounded on the South by Rocky Bayou and on the North by Eglin Air Force Base. The 1,100 acres we're working on at the Northeast corner of town is the last large parcel of developable land in Niceville, which unlike almost the entire rest of the country, is experiencing substantial growth.

The Ruckel family's roots here go back to the 1920s, when James E. Plew, great-grandfather of today's landowners, moved to the area from Chicago. Plew was an inventor, with inventions to his credit ranging from the nose inhaler to the "banana seat" for bikes. He was also an aviator and friend of the Wright Brothers, and donated the original land for Eglin. His children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren have developed most of Niceville and Valparaiso out of what was once family land. The 1,100 acres has long been preserved as a family retreat for fishing, hunting, camping, and yes, aviation: there's a grass landing strip to the West. The recently deceased Walt Ruckel (Plew's grandson) painstakingly mapped out every detail of the land in a hand-drawn map we're using this week as we work with Marion and Steve, his daughter and son, to lay out new places here.

The Citadel Conundrum

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:37:46 -0700

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Right-wing and left-wing exploding brains just might be the result of a proposed development in northern Idaho: it's called The Citadel. Here's the proposed plan of the development:

Before we go any further, please note that except for exercising my right to vote, I care very little for politics and hope that nobody has any clue how I voted from the things I say and write. I haven't told anyone, not even my wife, how I voted in the last election.

So with that established, let's talk politics without getting political. The Citadel site says that "Marxists, Socialists, Liberals, and Establishment Republicans may find that living within our Citadel Community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles." A reasonable person might infer from this statement that the Citadel folks are likely pretty far to the right of the political spectrum, right?

But now let's look closer at the plan of the Citadel. What you see here is a place with defined boundaries, several neighborhoods, a town green and amphitheater, a town center, a factory on the edge, farmland all around the outer walls and a farmers' market just inside the main gate. In other words, it's a town. Except for the town walls and sometimes the farmland outside, these are components you'd find in any New Urbanist town.

What's Sustainability Got to Do with Business?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 06:45:46 -0700

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I made a startling discovery while working to finish New Media for Designers + Builders, which is my latest book: the virtues and ethics that underlie the construction of sustainable places and buildings and the virtues and ethics that I believe will underlie business in the age that is now dawning are exactly the same! How can this be? What can business-building possibly have to do with place-making? Let's look:

Virtues and Ethics

A virtue, for the purposes of this discussion, is something we aspire to be: Be patient. Be kind. Be hopeful. An ethic, on the other hand, is something we aspire to do. Treat people fairly. Recycle. Buy local. To be and to do. Virtues are within us; ethics are what we do with the people and things outside us.

The three prime virtues of business since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have been quality, speed, and economy. Or better, faster, cheaper, if you prefer. I believe we're now in a time of transition so great that even the prime ethics of business are changing. The new prime virtues, I'd suggest, appear to be patience, generosity, and connectedness.

Where I've Been

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:57:46 -0700

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I've taken my longest break from blogging in years for three awesome reasons: a new way to build, a new way to draw, and a new way to do business.

A New Way to Build

Hurricane Katrina changed everything. Andrés Duany and I came up with the idea of Katrina Cottages on the Saturday after the hurricane. On that day, we conceived of them as "FEMA trailers with dignity", but they've grown to be so much more. In the years since, we've built an entire toolbox of ways of building smaller and smarter from lessons learned from the Katrina Cottages, and they charmed people like we never anticipated.

Katrina accelerated another problem that exists through much of the US: moisture. Simply put, we build our houses so tight today that we need to put them on life support. Get one hole in the envelope and the whole thing starts molding, mildewing, and rotting. The time has come for the sheetrock-free house.

I'm joining with two close friends to found a company that puts these ideas together with other great ideas of how to build better. Our SmartDwellings will not only breathe and be smaller and smarter, but they'll condition themselves without outside power for much of the year. More soon on this new venture.

The Fall of the Waters

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:58:46 -0600

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The Waters story took a very dark turn this week, but that never would have happened without bad advice finally heeded several years ago. The Waters' original landowner was a timber man by trade, but after he bought the land on which the Waters sits, he said: "these trees are too beautiful; I can't cut them." So he decided to develop the land instead.

Having never developed before, he wisely decided to seek out expertise from those who had. And so he asked for recommendations and settled on a development expert from Atlanta who had loads of experience under his belt. They hired us to do the pattern book and then the land plan shortly thereafter.

From the beginning, there was a problem: we were advocating building a traditional neighborhood, whereas the development expert on the team was pushing the patterns of conventional sprawl development. So although he was a really good guy, there was always an underlying tension.

"…why should I buy here?
The Waters is just across the street…"

A Happy Story Turned Sad

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 05:29:46 -0600

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Two guys sticking with an idea can change a city, but one bad voice can ruin a neighborhood. Both these things happened at the Waters, which we talked about recently, and friends have asked me to tell more of the story. Here it is:

Nathan Norris and I were founding partners of PlaceMakers, and had been invited to the Waters to discuss the creation of an architectural pattern book. The land was studded with majestic oaks, and rolled up gently toward us from all directions.

The plan, however, had apparently been done by a conventional subdivision planner because there were "wet noodle streets" and cul de sacs slung indiscriminately across this beautiful piece of land. We were aghast when we saw it. PlaceMakers was very young at the time and needed the pattern book work, but we wanted to have no part in making better architecture in a standard subdivision.

We immediately told the development team that they were making a big mistake, and that the land plan was completely unworthy of the land. I had already served as Town Architect in other neighborhoods for most of a decade by then, and was hoping in the back of my mind that they would let me do for the land plan what I had done for many home designs: meet with the designers and help them do a radical makeover of the plan.

The Teddy Bear Principle

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 07:11:46 -0600

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Smaller buildings often tap into an unexpected source of lovability that just might be a basic survival mechanism for humans and other creatures as well. I call it the Teddy Bear Principle. Here's how it works: Baby bears are considered to be so cute that we give every American child a teddy bear before they're two weeks old. But the mother bear is so terrifying that nobody wants to get within two miles of her. How can this be?

me at three - obviously not

a mini-me of me today -

and like most of us, cuter

as a kid than as an adult

It's all about proportion. Claws and fangs get longer in proportion to the size of the bear's body as they mature, as you can see. The bear's body more than doubles in size, while its head doesn't get so much bigger. A cub's eyes appear larger on its face because while its head won't grow so much, its eyes are even closer to their adult size.

Humans and other creatures are similar. A young child can barely reach to the top of its head, while most adults can reach all the way over the top of their head to their ear on the other side. That's because our arms grow more than our head does from infancy to adulthood.

Smaller & Smarter

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 04:09:46 -0600

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There are likely countless details to building smaller and smarter, but only a few game-changing principles that reduce size across the board. These key principles unlock size reductions that wouldn't happen otherwise. This is more important than ever today because nobody is saying "money is no object" anymore. Every client has real choices to make, and at the core, they all come down to this: Do you want it bigger, or better? Make it bigger and the quality goes down. Make it better and it must be smaller.

Expandability

Katrina Cottage VIII floor plan

The biggest impediment to building smaller and smarter is the lack of a clear expansion path. People fell in love with the Katrina Cottages, but the first generation of designs didn't expand very well because exterior walls were so quickly eaten up with closets, baths, and cabinets. The very first design move in a smaller and smarter design should be to locate the Grow Zones so that homeowners see clearly how they could expand if their needs change.

Sitting Lightly on the Land

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 05:00:46 -0600

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Civil engineers are spending countless millions of dollars and clear-cutting untold trees needlessly because they have forgotten one essential point of sustainable design: Roads and other infrastructure should sit very lightly on the land.

here's what a mass-graded site can look like

Left to their own devices, engineers will usually "mass-grade" a site, which means that they first cut every tree on the site. Next, they remove all of the topsoil, piling it in a huge mound somewhere. Next, they move many truckloads of dirt around all over the site, cutting some areas and filling other areas by a dozen feet or more on some sites. After they've put the storm sewers and other utilities in, they pave the roads and spread all the topsoil back out over the land. During this entire process, they must install erosion control all over to keep the soil from washing away. They go to all this expense in order to make the streets less humpy, so you're able to drive faster.

another view of how things look more natural when a neighborhood
sits more lightly on the land

See the top picture? That's at a place called the Waters that I planned while I was a partner with PlaceMakers a decade ago. I had to fight tooth-and-nail with the engineer for weeks on end so he would sit the streets more lightly on the land. Engineering "best practices" say that you should fill in the dips and cut down the high spots along streets so that you have greater "sight distance." But wait… that's a stop sign at the intersection in the top picture. Once you get there, you can see further. You don't need to see all the way to the end of the road from the point where I took this picture. Fortunately, the civil engineer at the Waters was a good guy, and I was able to convert him to sitting more lightly.

Preservation's Big Unspoken Choice

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 05:09:46 -0600

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Preservation's current identity crisis is a result of the fact that we have not yet figured out what it is that we're preserving. This crisis began with some preservationists' infatuation with Brutalism. This is monumentally ironic, because it was the destruction of lovable historic buildings in the Brutalist era that gave birth to the modern-day preservation movement. Now, we're advocating for the preservation of precisely the sorts of things that disgusted us so badly that we banded together in the beginning!* Is our mission to preserve lovable buildings, or simply to preserve everything from the lovable to the detestable so long as they are iconic examples of their breeds? Put another way, are we as preservationists trying to be curators of style, from the resonant to the ridiculous, or are we instead more interested in making our cities and towns better places to live?

As for Brutalism in particular, that the style was aptly named. The brutality of its forms and its surfaces is unparalleled in the history of human construction. Don't we have too much brutality around us already? Why preserve more of it? I'd rather live in a place populated with civil buildings, not brutal buildings, wouldn't you?

Fried-Egg Cities?

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:38:46 -0600

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There's a fundamental misconception about the way cities should be built that, when enacted, deprives urbanism of much of its richness. If you zoom way out on a city, like this image of Philadelphia, it can look like a fried egg, with a big "egg yolk" of tall buildings at the urban core thinning out to an "egg white" of urbanism that is only a story or two tall at the edges. At this distant view, it looks like a fairly smooth transition, and in fact, this is largely the way cities have been zoned for the past several decades: large swaths of high density surrounded by larger medium density zones giving way to even larger lower density zones. Great urbanism, on the other hand, is much more fine-grained than that, so that wherever you are in a traditional city, there's urbanism just around the corner or down the street that's decidedly different from what you're seeing at any given moment.

a great Philadelphia street, but even as good

as it is, miles and miles would get boring

Coding entire neighborhoods to a single context like we've done in recent decades is a bad idea on several counts. For starters, it's a prescription for boredom, whether that context is equal to Main Street or a suburban residential street. If that context rolls on for neighborhood after neighborhood like it does in the subdivisions of sprawl, then this means that you're unlikely to walk anywhere that doesn't look like where you live.