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2020

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 22:19:26 -0500

The Mystery of Mooresville (part 3)

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Once the Mystery of Mooresville was unlocked, we discovered there is great power in architecture with purpose, in fields as disparate as affordability and lovability. Here’s a quick look at how this works:

Affordability

Anytime I’d ever tried to get builders to “build different,” they always assign a “custom price” to patterns new to them, but a “standard price” to stuff they’ve done countless times. This is understandable. But it also means that the good stuff is always more expensive, even if built with less labor and fewer materials. But armed with the “we do this because…” of the architecture of this place, an amazing thing happens: builders eventually acquire a degree of shame over conventional stuff that made no sense there, along with an appreciation for what did, flipping the price equations, making the good stuff actually less expensive than the conventional stuff they no longer want to do. This doesn’t happen overnight, but once it does, building good stuff more affordably gets much easier.

Durability

Depending on the region, the “we do this because…” of the place may have a lot to do with the survivability of the architecture, like hurricane survival on the Caribbean Rim or earthquake survival in seismically active places like Antigua Guatemala. Put another way, architecture calibrated to a region tends to last longer than one-size-fits-all buildings.

Frugality

A big part of the “we do this because…” equation has to do with the regional climate. Architecture that doesn’t let you get comfortable in a place without great expense means you’re unlikely to stay for a long time, whereas a well-adapted architecture can allow the region to thrive. And comfortable shelter that conditions itself at least partially in natural ways is less expensive to operate.

Lovability

Regional appropriateness has always been one of the big mysteries to me. Here are my thoughts today, which are susceptible to change as I learn more: I suspect that people might be hardwired to resonate with buildings in harmony with their region because of a basic survival instinct. For most of human history, the place people chose to take shelter in a region they didn't know might have a lot to do with whether they survived until the morning. So I now believe we have a strong sense of architecture which is in harmony with where it’s built.

The Process

In the early days after the epiphany, I struggled with what the “we do this because…” process should be called. At first, I used “the transmission device of the vernacular mechanism” because I was trying to gain traction with the machine-based crowd, which I hoped to convert. That proved impossible, as they ignored all of it. Never mind that the term was a confusing mouthful. In any case, within a few years, I came back to a biological term instead of a mechanical term: a “living tradition” (more on that later).

A living tradition is a process that involves the people, not just the architects, hearkening back to Wanda’s long-ago incisive question about lovable architecture. And because it involves many minds, it produces the most modern architecture because with more people tinkering with or hacking a problem, more good ideas emerge. Indeed, a living tradition is the original crowd-sourcing.

What About Style?

Many people are more comfortable talking in terms of style because styles are known things, promoted by countless books, especially in the past two centuries. And there’s nothing wrong with style… so long as the styles are curated for the region. But a Cape Cod house looks as ridiculous in New Orleans as a Gulf Coast house does on Cape Cod, so curation is essential.

Building on Living Traditions

I wrote the Gulf Coast New Vernacular Book of Architecture in 2005, finishing it on the day after Thanksgiving, exactly a quarter-century after taking the Mystery of Mooresville home with me. We were deep into the Katrina recovery efforts by then, 3 months after the hurricane made landfall. I hoped the book might be useful in the Katrina recovery, but those in charge opted for a style-based pattern book instead.

Both living tradition and style-based pattern books go through a range of architecutral patterns having to do with walls & massing, doors & windows, porches & balconies, eaves & roofs, and attachments & sitework. There's a chapter for each style in a style-based book with only a couple pages in each of the five categories. A living tradition pattern book, on the other hand, is based on the best architecture of this region as it varies from rural to urban and from vernacular to classical (or plain to fancy, if you prefer). This means that in about the same number of pages as a style-based book, a living tradition book can have an entire chapter on walls & massing, another chapter for doors & windows, etc. Put another way, it’s a deep dive into the best architecture of here instead of just an overview of a selection of historical styles.

A Living Tradition
[Architecture of The Bahamas}

By mid-2006, nearly a year of pro bono work on the Katrina recovery had left us nearly broke, and we weren’t sure what might be next. And then, out of the blue, legendary Bahamian developer Orjan Lindroth showed up. He had heard of the yet-unpublished Gulf Coast book, likely from Andrés Duany, and thought it might be beneficial for his new town of Schooner Bay. Do a blog search near the top of this page for Orjan or Schooner Bay, and you’ll see just how much I’ve written about the man and the place.

We met in Coral Gables one July afternoon and I laid out the new pattern book proposition, and we spent several hours poring over every detail of the Gulf Coast book, which at that time I was still calling the “New Vernacular Book of Architecture,” as I hadn’t quite come up with the “Living Tradition” term yet. That would come in early May, 2007 during a late-night conversation with Mike Watkins while on a charrette in Fayetteville, Arkansas. But in any case, Orjan commissioned us to write what would become A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas].

I spent every available moment that fall completely rethinking every detail of the book, knowing that this one would likely be published widely in The Bahamas. Early the next spring, Orjan brought us over for an epic week-long photo safari to shoot all the best places remaining in The Bahamas. After processing the photos, I worked through the summer and fall, finally delivering the book in early December 2007 with massive help from Wanda and her sister Janna, who was working with us at the time. It won a CNU Charter Award the next year.

The Original Green

Soon after getting the book printed and in use in The Bahamas, I started trying to tell the story of the underlying principles as best I understood them at that time. I’ve always been a story-teller who loves to write, so when Nathan Norris introduced me to blogging, I quickly discovered it was a natural medium for working out ideas. The first post on this blog went live April 10, 2008. For the next two years, I blogged here frequently, working out what would become the Original Green book two years later. For those about to write, I found the blog comments immensely helpful. As a matter of fact, many of the best ideas in the book weren’t originally mine, but originated with comments from others. I wrote over a third of the content of the book as blog posts here, until I had to buckle down in early 2010 and do nothing but work on the book for a couple months to get it done.

Jumping two decades back in time to a month after the Mooresville Thanksgiving trip, I discovered Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language in the long-defunct Books as Seeds, a local indie bookstore. These two books profoundly influenced my thinking from that day forward, and helped me better understand some of the things I had seen in Mooresville the month before.

People often ask about the difference between A Pattern Language and the Living Tradition books. In a nutshell, Alexander’s Pattern Language is a foundation language, like Latin is to Western culture, whereas the Living Tradition books are calibrated to a region, like a regional dialect of a national language.

What I never realized until last year was the fact that Alexander had done the same thing I did: he wrote A Pattern Language first, which contains the particular patterns, then wrote The Timeless Way two years later, just as I did 3 decades later with my two books. Most people say “start with the principles and move to the particulars,” but for both of us, it seems that the deep dive into the particular patterns was necessary for each of us to see the underlying principles clearly.

The Second Edition

Orjan and I first met on a DPZ charrette in Nassau in February 2005. Orjan was one of the developers and I was by then a regular consultant on DPZ charrettes. We quickly discovered over dinner, possibly the very first night, that we had each long been curious about many of the same things having to do with sustainable architecture and urbanism. In particular, we each had a sense that, while neither of us were Einsteins, there was an underlying set of natural rules of sustainability, much like the unified field theory Einstein searched for over most of his career. That search bound us together in repeated collaborations until Orjan's untimely passing earlier this year.

We made bits of progress on the unified theory over the years, but when we decided in 2017 to publish the second edition of A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas], we dedicated ourselves to getting a clearer vision. This resulted in a complete rewrite of the first and last chapters of the book, including several advances such as the first substantive application of the Original Green Scorecard, meant to be a fast, friendly, and nearly free alternative to the LEED green rating system.

While there are mysteries remaining to unlock, the book made huge leaps forward on several counts which can be incapsulated this way: Truly sustainable architecture and urbanism must be built on a foundation of nature’s ways instead of the industrial paradigm. It’s much deeper than that, but that’s the first key to the unified theory.

Where To From Here?

Unlocking the Mystery of Mooresville opened many doors for Wanda and I, and numerous useful sets of ideas are already being built on Original Green foundations, which have spread far beyond just the two of us at this point, which was what we hoped for all along. It has long been our hope to build tools upon the Original Green foundations which may be useful to people we may never know, in places we may never go, both in our lifetimes and beyond our time. Please help us carry this on!

Previous: The Mystery of Mooresville (part 2)

~Steve Mouzon

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Nov 27, 2020

The Mystery of Mooresville (part 2)

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Less than a year after taking the three-question Mystery of Mooresville (urbanism, architecture, and process) back to college with me, Wanda asked me the most searching question of my career: “Why is it that you refuse to design anything anyone else I love would love?” “Do I?” “Of course you do!” “How do you know?” “Have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture?” “Our professors tell us we’re supposed to educate the client.” “Well, if you’d stop and listen to the people, they might actually educate you.”

I had no answer, but took it to heart. And while I did a fairly good job of designing stuff the professors liked, I soon realized that I had no idea how to design things non-architects would love. In fairness, not all professors were alike. Much of the faculty was made up of dedicated Miesians or Corbusians, but there were notable exceptions.

Key People

Marv Rosenman was key on the faculty, opening many doors of thought for the more curious ones of us, and was clearly more interested in our development than pushing a style agenda. More professors should be like Marv. Jack Wells opened our eyes to how much there was to learn about the long heritage of humane architecture in the first year. Bob Koester accelerated my thinking on how buildings condition themselves naturally, and brought me back in 2010 to lecture on the Original Green. David Hermansen in later years was a great curator of appreciation for humane architecture. And Dan Woodfin, a Pattern Language advocate, was invaluable in my thesis year, when a few things were finally beginning to come together for me. I owe them all. David Rau, Allan McGuire and Mark Fishero were chief of my fellow-travelers, questioning us all and opening doors some professors would prefer to remain tightly closed.

Searching for the Unknown

But upon graduation, my curiosity about designing what the people love overwhelmed my nearly non-existent abilities to actually do so. I remember trying to design a refined house for no particular client after graduation; I quickly developed a good plan, but had no idea how to properly compose a calm and dignified elevation. I left that drawing unfinished during several years of self-education, until I was finally able to complete it. During those years, I had no idea what I was searching for, where to find it, or if it even yet existed.

By about 1992, the doors to open thinking slammed shut as the Modernist hegemony returned in full force, with stories in the journals about the nascent New Urbanism and new traditional architecture slowing to a trickle, then drying up entirely. Working in the flyover hinterlands where architecture was more of a business than a passion for most, I completely lost contact with the architects and urbanists who had served as my compass. It seemed I was all alone.

Finding My People

Then one late September day in 1995, I got an invitation from some group I’d never heard of called the ICA promoting an event in Manhattan a few weeks later. Seems like they had an interest in humane architecture, so I quickly signed up. It didn’t take long once the symposium began that I had found my people! I was not alone!

That quickly led to a search for the urbanism side of the coin. All I had known up until then was Seaside, but it turns out that Andrés Duany & Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of DPZ (Seaside’s planners) and a group of likeminded revolutionaries had founded the Congress for the New Urbanism two years previous, in October 1993. Emboldened by these facts, I began promoting the New Urbanism to developers I’d been working with locally and by 1997 a local project had begun.

The Big Plan Break

There were two star traditional architects of the day who Southern Living had discovered, one of whom was originally slated to do most of the plans for this local traditional neighborhood, but his houses were all designed for lots that were wide and shallow, and his refusal to design anything for the slender and deep lots in the plan opened the door for me to start designing plans for the neighborhood.

Catalog of the Most-Loved Places

About 30 months later, a Friday afternoon debate with the Town Architect of the place led to a weekend-long photo safari across the region. Before Monday morning dawned, what later became known as the Catalog of the Most-Loved Places had begun. Today, it numbers over a hundred thousand images in neighborhoods and towns across the US and in Europe, catalogued by street address, and stands as one of the big steps in my self-education.

DPZ Changes Everything

Two years later, DPZ showed up in town to design the Village of Providence. I had an office of about a dozen people by then which could run itself for awhile, so I decided that since Andrés and Lizz had been my heroes since first seeing the plan of Seaside 21 years earlier, I should show up and volunteer a week. It turns out that in the New Urbanism, even the heroes welcome help from strangers so long as they show up with good ideas and hard work.

We hit it off almost instantly, and for the next several years, I did so many charrettes with DPZ that many thought I actually worked there. And a year after the Providence charrette, Andrés said “Steve, if you move to South Beach, I’ll get clients for you from all over the world who would never do business with an architect in a small southern town because they’d assume you’re no good. But if you live in South Beach, they’ll believe anything I tell them.”

It was an agonizing process, pulling up roots in the town where I was born at 43 years old and moving a thousand miles to a place where we felt like expats. But the 17 years we were there wrought an amazing transformation for us. At the rate I’d been burning myself out on 100-hour weeks in my original hometown, it’s unlikely I’d even be alive today. And by that time, I had found clear direction on two of the three questions in the Mystery of Mooresville: how to design and build places that are compact, mixed-use, and walkable (urbanism) and how to design buildings people love (architecture). But still the third question remained: what was the process that allowed the wisdom of building so well to be passed down to future generations that for so long weren’t even able to read?

The Great Epiphany

On July 19, 2004, less than a year afer we accepted Andrés’ invitation and “took our talents to South Beach” we began an architectural charrette with the Urban Guild which I co-founded with Nathan Norris in 2001 for a DPZ project in Madison, Mississippi for a place named after its ancient Native American name: Lost Rabbit. On the first morning of the charrette, the design team made a fateful decision not to base our work on a random collection of historical styles, but rather the best architecture of this place. At that time, this was revolutionary.

On the final night of the charrette, we had the customary celebratory dinner, then departed for our accommodations. The design team was staying at the Millsaps-Buie House in downtown Jackson (a B&B), and we were saying our goodbyes when someone asked Milton Grenfell, a Mississippi native, the pivotal question: “Milton, why are bell-cast eaves so popular in Mississippi?” <Before Milton’s response, a “bell-cast eave” has a bottom like a bell, which flares out to a shallower pitch before reaching the edge. Milton, carry on:> “We do this because in these parts, we have torrential rains, especially in hurricanes and their aftermath. And if your roof is too shallow in a hurricane, it’ll likely get sucked off, while if it’s too steep, it’ll likely get overturned. But at 8/12 to 9/12, it’s strong. But at those slopes, torrential rains will dig a trench in your yard. So the bell-cast eaves break the force of the water, sending it off the roof in more of a spray than a sheet.

It took a few moments for it to hit me… “wait, what did he just say??” “We do this because…. That’s it!! That’s what I’ve been looking for all these years!!” These four words are the key to unlocking the last question of the Mystery of Mooresville! If every pattern in a language of architecture can be expressed in these terms, then it’s clear how a living tradition can be passed down from generation to generation with nothing more than an oral tradition! This last turn of the key late on the evening of July 21, 2004 changed everything for me in the sixteen years between then and now.

This is the second post of three; the next will be tomorrow on the 40th anniversary of the origin of the Mystery of Mooresville telling the story of the benefits of unlocking the mystery.

Previous: The Mystery of Mooresville (part 1)

Next: The Mystery of Mooresville (part 3)

~Steve Mouzon

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Nov 26, 2020

The Mystery of Mooresville (part 1)

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Forty years ago on Thanksgiving Day, I never imagined that the ancient American over-eating ritual would change the course of my career in amazing ways. But waking up the next morning still in discomfort from the previous day’s gorging, we decided to go for a walk.

But where to walk? I grew up in sprawl, but remembered the tiny village of Mooresville, Alabama where Dad occasionally took us when I was a kid. Dad was a cabinet-maker regarded by builders across the region as Mr. Perfect, and while his work in the 60s generally adhered to the styles of the day because that’s what people wanted, he had great love for the places that had long endured and were filled with superbly-crafted architectural patterns rarely built then. So he would take us to places like Mooresville from time to time so we could just soak it all in.

By mid-morning that Friday, Wanda, Susan, Hazel, and a friend and I shook ourselves from the post-feast muddle and headed out to Mooresville to go for a walk. I was in the middle of my third year of architecture school at the time, Wanda and I had been married 17 months, Susan was in her first year of architecture school, and Hazel was toward the end of her pre-teen years.

In those days, Mooresville still had its general store and another shop or two; maybe one was a coffee shop or breakfast place? In any case, the two churches still stand, and the post office is still in operation. The other commercial buildings still stand as well, and I hope they may be occupied again someday. The Stagecoach Inn & Tavern, sadly, was in ruins 40 years ago but I’m told it has been restored recently.

The village is only 9 square blocks sitting peacefully among great trees only a stone’s throw from the interstate right-of-way to the north, and sloping down to its Tennessee River landing to the south. It served as the first state capitol for a few years after incorporating in 1818; I think the legislators met in the tavern. In more recent times, it was the primary filming location for Disney’s Tom & Huck in 1995.

Walking around town that day, nearly halfway through my 5 years of architecture school, I was struck by two things I thought weren’t possible then. Having grown up in sprawl, I’d never experienced a place as an adult that was so compact, mixed-use, and walkable. Seaside was still a few months from breaking ground at that time, so to my knowledge nothing like this had ever been built in our day. But why not? If our ancestors enjoyed life in places like this, what were far too many of us doing stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac? That day primed me for being an instant adherent to the New Urbanism when DPZ's plan of Seaside was published a few months later.

But the much longer-lasting questions were the architecture. Still embedded in the Dark Ages of Architecture, all that was built back then in flyover country like where I grew up was buildings like suburban tract houses, strip shopping centers and malls, and bronze glass box office buildings. The preservation movement had taken hold across the country by then and people were lovingly restoring houses and sometimes Main Street buildings downtown as the realization grew of what a downward trade the architecture of the Dark Ages had been in comparison to what it replaced. But how could we build lovable buildings again? What was the process? On that day, I had no clue.

Our architecture professors taught us that because we had recently acquired computers, the builders had bigger power tools, and the banks had more clever mortgages, we could build better than ever before. Quality was determined by the tools, in other words. But I was walking the streets of a place that day built by simple farmers and tradespeople with none of those tools, but both the urbanism and the architecture was clearly far superior to what was built in 1980. How did they do that in 1818, years before architects first set foot in Alabama? I did not know. But it was clear beyond debate that they had. What great wisdom did the people of the village possess to build better than 1980’s best and brightest? Again, I had no clue. It was a complete mystery.

But this wasn’t even the biggest mystery. One could imagine how an enlighted builder might come to town and build buildings people love for a time, but how was that wisdom passed down to the next generation? I was 20 years away from my first trip to Europe but was of course aware of the Italian hill towns, Cotswold hamlets, and villages in the South of France where the wisdom of building well had been passed down for centuries. What was the device? Go deep enough into European history, and most of the people were illiterate, so it couldn’t have been books. What was it?

I left Mooresville that day completely clueless, but I took this mystery of three questions (urbanism, architecture, and process) home with me and “fed and watered it,” if you will, hoping to unlock it someday, realizing I was much more likely to find something I was looking for than something I forgot.

This is the first post of three; the next will be tomorrow on Thanksgiving Day, and the wrap-up will be Friday on the 40th anniversary.

Next: The Mystery of Mooresville (part 2)

~Steve Mouzon

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Nov 25, 2020

Lovable Community Gardens

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Habersham’s community garden; everything else at Habersham is just gorgeous

Community gardens today are far too often the rattiest and most unkempt places in a neighborhood; anything worse would get cited by the city as a public nuisance. Part of the problem is the fact that vegetable gardens have long been considered utilitarian, something worthy of similar aesthetic attention as a laundry room or broom closet.

I don’t have images to show of what this post is promoting, because lovable community gardens have never been proposed before in the US that I’m aware of. But there’s no reason a community garden can’t be as beautiful as an ornamental garden; it’s just different plant materials. But in any case, this post looks at both garden design and garden culture to find ways that community gardens will be more broadly welcomed into the neighborhood, and treasured there. One more thing… if you’re on Twitter and like the thought in italics, click on the bird to tweet it… thanks, and enjoy!

Why This Now?

In last week’s post I said I’d soon be laying out strategies for community recovery from the economic wreckage of the pandemic and propose patterns for post-pandemic architecture and urbanism. So what’s up with this post? How does it fit in?
It’s not yet clear how many Americans will migrate from larger places to smaller ones in the wake of the pandemic, but steep declines in Manhattan rental rates indicate it’s likely to be a substantial number. And those who are either moving from larger to smaller places, or who are staying where they are and making their bedroom community their day-and-night community by working from home longterm are likely to discover that their opportunities for social interaction are more limited there. And with traditional hangouts like bars being really risky now to the point that many places have shut them down, smaller communities hoping to attract and retain people need to find social interaction alternatives which are much safer. Community gardens may be one of the best alternatives, and for several reasons:

1. Gardeners love to talk about their gardens. Few things other than puppies are more reliable conversation-starters than gardens, especially when you’re in the garden.

2. Gardening happens outdoors, where you’re close to 20 times less likely to get infected with the coronavirus than indoors. And because most people don’t garden in the rain, sunshine on the biggest gardening days is a virus-killing bonus.

3. Raising food yourself means you need that much less food from the grocery store. And while groceries tend to be doing a mostly good job with shopper safety, it’s safer yet to raise your own produce.

Getting Started

The biggest community garden challenge is coordinating all of the gardeners. But if you help them understand that they’re on a mission to do something never done before, but which could spread broadly and for which they may be remembered someday as pioneers, that may help. The first thing to remember in creating a community garden is the community. The ultimate goal is for the garden to pull the community together. At every step along the way, consider how the garden can bring the gardeners together, and also how it can help bring the neighbors who don’t plant and harvest there together as well.

Garden Layout

Design the garden as if it were an ornamental garden, then assign the allotments, which must not be all rectangular. It doesn’t have to look like a Renaissance garden; it might be inspired by an Art Nouveau pattern, for example. Just not a rectangular grid. No ornamental garden I’ve ever seen was laid out in a rectangular grid. That’s just boring. The very fact that most allotments aren’t rectangular helps the gardeners understand from the beginning that they’re embarking on something special and it calls for them to take more care with what they’re doing. With that foundation, follow these steps:

1. Lay out the primary network of places and paths. Some of these will be gathering places; others will be places flanked by utility structures like tool sheds, well houses, etc. The primary paths and places should be paved in brick or concrete pavers, set in sand.

2. Lay out the secondary network of paths, which are earthen foot paths between raised beds. Lay out paths and beds so that there are three sizes of beds: small, medium, and large.

3. Calibrate these sizes to what you think neighbors will be willing to tackle. The worst thing would be to make the beds too large, where they don’t properly maintain them. Have a common bed edge material.

Plant Materials

It’s not entirely necessary, but it’s best if each bed in the community garden has one vegetable. This will make the appearance of the garden visually striking. Combine this with the fact that many if not most bed shapes may be unique means the combination of shape & species will definitely be unique. And just because someone has a green thumb with okra doesn’t mean they know how to grow great jalapeños. The fact that every bed will have one vegetable means that your gardeners will need (with your help) to revive that age-old gardeners’ tradition of swapping. “Wanna swap some green beans for some of my kale?” An early step toward creating community.

Borders

Many outdoor elements can serve as garden edges, including fences, hedges, walls, arbors, porches, and building walls. And you can use different edges on different sides of the garden according to what is beyond the garden on that side. Incidentally, because some of these edges (like hedges) are more easily adaptable for width, it’s simpler to make each of your garden rooms well-proportioned than it is indoors because standard building materials tend to have a narrow choice of widths.

Plantings Near the Edge

If the garden’s edge is something solid (hedge or wall) put the shorter vegetable beds toward the center and the taller ones next to the wall. If the garden’s edge is open, (picket or wrought iron) do the opposite so the small material is at the edge. And no, there’s nothing edible in this image, but the main point of this post is to make community gardens that are lovable, so feel free to employ any principle of ornamental gardens to edible gardens.

Upper Levels

Be sure to include at least some second-level (arbor) gardens, if not even some third-level (fruit trees). Intensive gardening practices take into account the fact that not all light gets absorbed by the top plants, so more produce can be grown below. And in the case of an intensive arbor like this one, the complete shade makes a great place to sit and rest from your labors in the garden.

Wall Gardens

If you do build a garden wall, be sure that you train or espalier a wall garden upon it. If it faces the sun through enough of the day, why should it not be fruitful?

A Shady Place to Sit

European gardens frequently have two or three levels, with arbors and maybe trees. At the very least, have arbors on each end of your garden. Furnish arbors with seats so you can sit and enjoy the garden (more on this later).

A Sunny Place to Sit

Depending on the time of year, you might prefer to sit in the sun instead of the shade. Because the first word in “community garden” is “community,” it’s important to design the garden in such a way that they gardeners can get acquainted if they want to. And gardeners often want to. In this era of the pandemic, social interaction can be risky in many settings, but look how easy it is to maintain social distance between family groupings in a garden.

Garden Structures

The next step is to place your buildings, both utilitarian ones like tool sheds, potting sheds, and well houses plus sitting structures like the arbors just mentioned plus roofed sitting pavilions.

A Place for Solitude

Be sure to include a number of arbors and sitting pavilions for one person, and maybe a few for small groups, where people can sit and contemplate, looking out over this beautiful garden. Include “morning pavilions” and “evening pavilions” on each side, where one person can sit on the east side with the sunrise streaming over their shoulder as the mist rises off the garden, or on the west side at sunset, admiring the work of the day.

Water Channels

Do you need to channel rainwater to a rain pond? Water channels can run wherever in the garden they need to, but can be especially interesting along your garden paths where the running water is easiest to see. Water is always welcome in a garden design, and you might create a small fountain or two somewhere along the way.

Frog Pond

Consider designing your rain pond as a frog pond because frogs are excellent insect-fighters. Frog ponds have edges low enough a frog can leap out, have some plant cover, and footing like lily pads on which the frogs can sit.

Portals

The portals into your garden are important. People should feel they are entering into a special place. "Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on the earth.” ~ Dorothy Frances Gurney Not everyone feels so strongly about gardens as Ms. Gurney, but make your portals important anyway.

Evening Light

Might you light your garden, or at least part of it, for small evening events? Remember, this will be one of the most beautiful places in the neighborhood and if everyone does their jobs right, a wonderful place to gather.

Showers

How about outdoor showers? And a changing pavilion? Someone could bring clean clothes with them, then shower and change before going home so they come in fresh and depart clean, not stinky and dirty. And properly screened outdoor showers are delightful.

An Agricultural Aesthetic

Consider how to use the small elements of the garden artfully to create an “agricultural aesthetic.” These elements may include: sticks and twine, terra cotta pots, stones, gourds, vines, and branches. You might even have design competitions.

Agrarian Community Festivals

Much like ancient cultures, organize a series of seed-time and harvest celebrations. Make these on Saturdays, timed according to planting and harvest best practices, and organize them in such a way that they become a neighborhood cultural event. At the end of the day, a community garden isn’t just a garden for members of your community with green thumbs. Instead, it’s also a setting for creating culture and community among all your neighbors, whether or not they are gardeners themselves.

Wanda and I really hope this is useful, but what have we missed? What other things should community gardens cultivate?

~Steve Mouzon

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Aug 27, 2020

How Communities Can Recover & Grow Post-Pandemic

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Cities and towns across the US and abroad are in financial crisis due to the pandemic, and some of the income generators on which they depended in recent decades may be permanently broken, but there are certain fundamentals of community survival and growth which are likely to continue long past these years, as they have track records proven over centuries. This post lays out the basics of community solvency & growth, and several posts looking at post-pandemic urbanism will be based on these fundamental. Get these things right, and the recovery of your place will stand on proven foundations. These are the basic elements:

Community

A community is a hamlet, village, town, or city standing free in the landscape or with suburbs (the fifth community type) at the perimeter. A metropolis is made up of many communities contiguous with each other. A community is made up of neighborhoods, large civic spaces, and special districts.

Neighborhood

A neighborhood is the elemental building-block of urbanism. A neighborhood is a part of a community, but with the exception of the hamlet, a neighborhood does not make up the entire community. The majority of a city should be made up of neighborhoods, with special districts making up the remainder of the land area. A neighborhood contains at least three Transect zones, so there is a range of intensity in every neighborhood. A neighborhood also contains a mix of uses and is built compactly enough that neighbors can walk or bike to many if not most of their daily needs.

Large Civic Space

Most civic spaces are located within a neighborhood or special district, but civic spaces can occasionally be large enough that they form borders to the neighborhoods and districts around them. The Mall in Washington, DC is an unusually large example of a large civic space.

District

A district is a contiguous area within a town or more often a city that, by its intrinsic function, disposition, or configuration, cannot conform to one of the normative Transect zones or community types. Districts can be either warranted or unwarranted. Unwarranted districts are usually sprawl land uses such as shopping malls or oﬃce parks, and contain components that should instead be incorporated into neighborhoods. Warranted districts include universities, airports, hospitals, rail yards, cemeteries, industrial districts, etc.

Hamlet

A hamlet is a community composed of one neighborhood standing free in the landscape. To be truly sustainable, hamlets should have a “raison d’être,” or “reason for being” tied to the land or water around them: most commonly, they were farm hamlets, but might also be built for fishing or other resource-based activities like (occasionally) hunting. Today, the term is most often used as a romantic description of sprawl, but that’s not what I mean by the use of the term. Because of its size, the hamlet cannot support any businesses supported only by its residents, but it can support limited commercial if it’s good enough to draw people in from other hamlets and villages nearby.

Serenbe, in Georgia’s Chattahoochee Hills, has grown to four hamlets separated by nature preserve, but even when it was still a single hamlet, its foodie culture was already so strong that it drew people in from 10 miles around almost every day and all the way from Atlanta on the weekends to eat and shop there. The four hamlets today each have a specific focus: agriculture, the arts, health & wellness, and education. This highlights another necessity of sustainable hamlets: each should focus on one thing and invite people in from other hamlets to enjoy what you do well. Serenbe is arguably the best study of modern-day hamlets anywhere in America; it’s well worth your while to visit. As a matter of fact, Wanda and I would be happy to join you on the tour.

Village

A village is a community composed of more than one neighborhood, but with a clear primary economy focus, such as a fishing village. Whereas residents of a hamlet usually take their products to market elsewhere, the village develops a nascent market where people can come from elsewhere to purchase products derived from the economic focus of the village. The village also has enough residents to support a range of businesses supplying daily needs to residents, and also to those outside the village when the services are good enough, as in the Serenbe example. Hamlets can grow into villages by adding neighborhoods.

Today, a multitude of people who can work remotely are considering relocating from more urban places to villages, towns, and smaller cities, with their perceived safety of smaller circles of contacts. But by doing so, they will be moving from places of greater cultural opportunties to quieter places, so these communities will have to deal with the balance between retaining their small-town character and becoming more interesting places. At the scale of a village, attracting a cohort which works remotely inherently creates a second economic focus of the village: one served not by natural resources like their first focus, but by high-speed connectivity which lets this second focus of remote work thrive.

Town

A town is a community composed of several neighborhoods, and which is large enough to have developed more than one economic focus, although it still may be identified by its original focus, such as a textile town. The market of the town may have grown robust enough that it is now known as a market town instead, and its economic reach can pull in customers both from surrounding hamlets and villages. Or because a town is large enough to develop special districts, it may be known by the function of one of those districts, such as a university town. Villages grow into towns by adding neighborhoods, at least one additional economic focus and possibly a special district.
Towns should be able to add the economic focus of remote work more easily than villages, because towns have already diversified their economic bases. Because towns are naturally somewhat more diverse than villages, they may more easily welcome new arrivals than smaller communities.

City

A city is a community composed of many neighborhoods and several special districts, and which is large enough to have developed enough economic foci that it is no longer identified by any of them except in the most general terms, such as an industrial city or an economic center. Towns grow into cities by adding neighborhoods, special districts, and several new economic foci.
Cities have the greatest range of sizes, and small cities have special advantages when welcoming new arrivals from elsewhere within their region on two primary counts: they know how to do most of the things larger cities do, and they will feel most like home to those leaving larger cities. It is especially important to note that some of the most important urban thinkers (chiefly Leon Krier) have long made the case that cities can grow so large that they become fragile to many black swan events such as the pandemic. So if this indeed turns into a great migration, it could actually end up being healthy for some of the largest cities once the initial pain is over.

Suburb

A suburb is a community at the edge of a city. A suburb founded once the urb to which it is the sub-urb has become a city begins at least at the scale of a village because of the strength of the economic engine of the city. Hamlets around a village or town that grows into a city can either grow into village- or town-scale suburbs, or can be absorbed into the city. The motivation for suburb-founding can be varied, but is usually based on a desire to be diﬀerent from the city in some way, while still maintaining strong economic ties to the city. Those diﬀerences may be diﬀerences in management, economic foci, or a range of other motivations. Suburbs can be sustainable if composed of true neighborhoods as defined above and if connected to the city by a range of transportation choices primarily including various forms of transit.

In this election year, “suburb” is being used loosely and with no precision. Traditional suburbs can be some of the best places in the region to live and raise a family, with close-knit communities and thriving community institutions. Suburban sprawl, on the other hand, is a very different pattern of development and shares little with traditional suburbs other than the fact that both are outside the central city.

Suburban Sprawl

Suburbs built according to the patterns of sprawl and connected to the city primarily by automobiles are highly unsustainable and have arguably become America’s greatest challenge to economic health, environmental health, and public health. Suburban sprawl has the worst negative ROI of any settlement pattern in the history of the world. Charles Marohn of Strong Towns and Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 have been exposing the broken economic foundations of sprawl for over a decade. Transforming suburban sprawl to sustainable suburbs through extreme makeovers will be America’s most pressing place-making mission of the upcoming decades. Several colleagues have brilliant proposals for how to fix the insolvent patterns of sprawl, and Wanda and I are working on a version we call Sprawl Recovery. Whatever it’s called, it begins with a commitment to building no more suburban sprawl.

Post-pandemic, sprawling places have the worst prognosis for being able to host remote workers longterm. Many in the new remote work multitude commuted into the city from sprawling bedroom communities before the pandemic struck. They had many cultural opportunities after work before heading home for the night. But exiled day and night at the end of a cul-de-sac is a very different proposition that most will likely find intolerable long-term. These are the people most likely to be shopping for real estate in a traditional suburb nearby. For these sprawling places, an extreme makeover may take on urgency years ahead of when it would have without the pandemic. Fortunately, there is a path from sprawl to sustainable traditional suburbs.

~Steve Mouzon

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Aug 22, 2020

The Powerful Virtuous Cycles of Street Trees

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There are several powerful virtuous cycles of street trees that benefit so many parts of the built environment and the people who inhabit it in ways we may not have thought about until now. This post hopes to bring this multitude of benefits (some of which are life-changing) out into the daylight. And from 2020 onward, as we look for the healthy benefits of spending more time outdoors, no single element will play a larger role in helping us to do just that than street trees.

Direct Effects of Street Trees

Street trees affect us directly in several ways. These effects are arranged from the most local to the global.

Thermal Effects

Properly placed street trees shade the sidewalk. This can result in a reduction of 20° - 45° (all temperatures Fahrenheit in sidewalk temperature, according to Lance Hosey. Sidewalks store a lot of heat due to their mass and then radiate that heat to everything around them, especially including the people walking on them.

Street trees also shade the people walking on the sidewalk. Walking in the shade versus walking in the sun can easily make a perceived difference of 20° due to solar radiation on your skin.

Street trees transpire, meaning that they give off water vapor through evaporation of moisture from their leaves. The misting fans often found in warm climates like South Beach where we lived for 16 years cool people sitting at sidewalk cafes have a similar and more visible effect because you can see the mist whereas you can’t see the water vapor from the trees, even though it cools you almost as well. Evapotranspiration from trees can reduce temperatures around the trees by 2° - 9°, again according to Hosey. This compounds the cooling effect of shading.

Beauty

Street trees are usually considered beautiful by most people in town. And street trees are the only things we install on a streetscape that get bigger and more beautiful over time all on their own. But beauty isn’t the only way they appeal to our senses. “Street trees help you know when you are because of how they behave across the seasons.” ~ Victor Dover

Safety

Properly placed street trees (between sidewalk & travel lanes) physically protect people walking on the sidewalk because a car is likely to strike a tree before getting to someone walking. Trees near the street also encourage drivers to slow down because no sane driver wants to wrap their car around a tree, as the tree almost always wins. Street trees have been shown to be as effective against speeding as speed cameras, according to The Telegraph.

Increased Real Estate Value

Because street trees are beautiful, they raise the value of the real estate around them if properly selected. On mostly residential streets, their lowest limbs should be above head height; on mostly commercial streets, their lowest limbs should be above the sign band of the adjacent businesses. As to the value, one street tree on a block raises the value of every house on the block by $2,000 except the house where the street tree is located, the value of which is raised $7,000. If the street is lined with trees, the value of every house is raised by $22,000. This data is from Doug Kelbaugh. Dan Burden says that while the planting & 3-year maintenance cost of a relatively large-caliper street tree is probably $250 - $600, the lifetime benefits of that tree will be around $90,000. This means that street tree programs can be largely self-financing in all except poor neighborhoods because once people understand this, many will plant their own street trees to jump-start their home appreciation. Beyond the street, studies show home buyers & real estate agents assign 10%-23% of lot value to trees on the lot, according to Kaid Benfield.

Indicator of Places People Love

Because street trees are beautiful, they are good indicators of the most-loved parts of town, increasing not only the real estate value, but also the stature of the neighborhood. Recovery of a seriously disinvested place should begin early on with a street tree program because street trees change the perception of the place from a place where nothing is possible to a place where “you never know what good might happen here.” When I’m scouting a town I’m not familiar with for possibly shooting a volume for the Catalog of the Most-Loved Places, I drive a major street and look down the side streets looking for street trees. Almost without exception, places with lots of street trees are the most-loved neighborhoods in town. No other sign of a vibrant, lovable place can be seen from further away than a line of street trees. Test this yourself.

Crime Reduction

Street trees reduce crime. A recent Baltimore study showed that 10% more street trees = 12% less crime. Why this is so is no mystery. More street trees = stronger Walk Appeal = more people walking = more eyes on the street = less crime, as Jane Jacobs said 60 years ago.

Business Improvement

Street trees are good for business. Lining streets with street trees leading to a neighborhood center draws customers in to neighborhood businesses from surrounding neighborhoods by elevating Walk Appeal. Jeff Tumlin says that street trees are a critical economic development and sustainability investment. And they’re good for the economy of a neighborhood in general. According to Patrick Kennedy, Every street tree absorbs the first inch of stormwater. They can save billions in stormwater infrastructure across the city, allowing that money to be spent on things that benefit businesses. Or the money can be saved so that taxes can be reduced.

Global Effects

Trees are carbon champions. They continually inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, while humans and other animals do the opposite. They also sequester carbon within the tree as the tree grows. Plant enough trees, and they will actually absorb all carbon emitted by humans today. That number is currently 1.2 trillion trees. Unfortunately, humans are going the wrong direction by burning the Amazon and deforesting places around the world for more cattle farming. But planting street trees would at least be a start in the right direction. If there are 4 million miles of streets and roads in the US today (not counting Interstates) and street trees were planted 25 feet on center on either side of all of them, that would total almost 1.7 billion trees. That’s only a fraction of 1.2 trillion, but definitely a step in the right direction. Just. Quit. Destroying. What’s. Already. Growing!

Secondary Effects of Virtuous Cycles Induced by Street Trees

This is without doubt a partial list, and might even be just the tip of the iceberg.

Walk Appeal Superfood

The combined effect of shading the sidewalk, shading the humans, and evapotranspiration can transform a walk in hot weather (wearing anything other than beach attire) from something 10% of the people can tolerate to something 90% can tolerate, making street trees a Walk Appeal superfood. One young healthy street tree = the cooling power of 10 room-size air conditioners running 20 hours/day, according to Kaid Benfield. And Doug Kelbaugh says street trees have close to 16 times the cooling effect on the human environment as trees in a forest.

Urban Heat Island Reduction

For all the reasons already listed and because street trees also shade a lot of paving on the streets themselves, they are major contributors to reductions in urban heat islands. For anyone who might not know the term, “urban heat islands” describes the heating of air within cities to several degrees above that of the surrounding countryside. And according to Ed Mazria, each 10% increase in tree coverage in an urban context can reduce mid-day temp by 1.8°.

Sidewalk Cafe Enrichment

Street trees at sidewalk cafes make them more comfortable, thereby attracting more customers, which in turn increases the cafes’ chances of success which in turn builds the financial strength of their suppliers and provides a livelihood for their employees.

Adjacent Building Conditioning Reduction

Deciduous street trees on narrow streets shade windows of adjacent buildings, reducing cooling loads. And by being deciduous, they drop their leaves in autumn, allowing solar gain into the buildings during the colder months of the year.

Improved Perception of Surrounding Environment

Because street trees are beautiful, they improve the environment around them in many ways. For example, almost everyone loathes parking lots, but Victor Dover says that the greatest parking lot in the world is the Champs Élysées in Paris. And it works because of the street trees.

Increased Perception of Safety

Perception of safety is a strong component of Walk Appeal. The perception of protection from traffic afforded by street trees (see Safety above) combined with the perception of the neighborhood as a most-loved place due to the street trees has strong compounding effects in elevating Walk Appeal.

Improved Performance of Surrounding Environment

Street trees improve the local environment in several ways due to combinations of several of the direct effects noted above. Doug Kelbaugh says that street trees are like little urban hospitals. They beautify their surroundings, freshen and oxygenate the air, reduce aerial pollutants, provide cooling shade, retain soil, and detain & retain stormwater, among other benefits.

Improved Wellness of Body, Mind & Spirit

All these things raise a sense of wellness and wholeness in those who are there, which have beneficial side-effects on our wellness of body, wellness of mind and wellness of spirit. And there’s one very direct result of Walk Appeal that benefits all three types of wellness: Both folk wisdom and scientific studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between walking and both clarity of thought and peacefulness of mind, which also contributes to wellness of body by reducing blood pressure and pulse rate, and improving many other bodily metrics. But long before the studies, folk wisdom set a high value on “thinking on your feet.” Many agree. Steve Jobs famously developed some of his best ideas on long walks.

Improvement of Disinvested Places

Increases in real estate value as a result of street trees have beneficial side-effects across the board, but nowhere are these benefits more pronounced than in seriously disinvested places because greater value opens the doors for banks to provide the resources necessary for further improvements. But increases in value have a dark underbelly, which is gentrification with displacement. The old aphorism says “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but most of the time, a rising tide creates enough draft for the cruise ships, so the little boats have to leave. Increased value could be handled this way (and usually is) but doesn’t have to be. If the goal is changing lives rather than just changing structures & infrastructure, then transforming a barren street to a tree-lined street should be one of the first steps in turning a neighborhood around because they can lift the spirits of those who live there, helping things seem possible which seemed impossible on the barren street nobody cared for.

Reduction in crime due to more street trees has many benefits to any neighborhood, especially the most disinvested neighborhoods. Crime stifles normal social interactions, which are the seedbeds of community bonds, and saps the economic strength of a place, both due to fear of the public realm. Reduction in crime makes many things possible that seemed impossible beforehand.

Street Trees, Walk Appeal & Single-Crew Workplaces

Street trees set the stage for thriving single-crew workplaces because the workplaces are too small to survive without healthy foot traffic. Single-crew workplaces are rarely destination retailers. Walk Appeal and single-crew workplaces such as food carts have a strong symbiotic relationship. Few things feed Walk Appeal more than the combination of quick changes in view and other humans, and a line of food carts or shop sheds provides this in spades. And nothing feeds single-crew workplaces better than many people walking by.

Tertiary Effects & Beyond of Virtuous Cycles Induced by Street Trees

The tertiary effects of street trees might even be even more the tip of the iceberg than the secondary effects. I have for years been trying to figure out something Orjan Lindroth and I call the “unified field theory of sustainable community,” We’re no Einsteins, but similar to how Einstein’s unified field theory of natural forces (that he worked to discover to the end of his life) would have been able to express every force in terms of every other force, our hope is to be able to express every part of the built environment and the societies that inhabit it in terms of every other part. We were finally able to tell a lot of the story in the new edition of A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas] a couple years ago once we finally figured out that the operating system is composed of nature’s ways rather than industrial rules. But these virtuous cycles (especially the tertiary effects and beyond) do the best job of laying out the story of how it works that I’ve ever been able to tell. Or at least I think so. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Living In Season

Walk Appeal entices people to spend time outdoors, either attending to their daily needs or just for the pure joy of walking in a place with great appeal. In either case, time spent outdoors helps acclimate us to the local environment so that on all but the most extreme days of the year, it may be possible to throw the windows open instead of turning on the equipment, and there is no equipment so efficient as that which is off. This is a condition I call Living In Season. Wanda and I have proven this personally. Because we arrived in Miami in the fall of 2003, we spent our first months there in the “winter,” such as it is, and got acclimated to warmer weather slowly in the springtime. As a result, I can accurately say that in all of my 16 years living on Miami Beach, I have never been in the shade, in a breeze, and uncomfortable. Not once. But when people came to visit who lived in a perpetually refrigerated existence, they really suffered. Waves of sweat rolling off them. Meanwhile, I have many times worked in my studio on Miami Beach in July, with the windows open, the ceiling fan on, and the AC off. In the town where the basketball team is named “the Heat.” This isn’t theory; for us, it is practice.

Fine-Grained Web of Daily Needs

Single-crew workplaces fueled by street trees and their resultant Walk Appeal are the best tools for meeting a full range of daily needs in a neighborhood, especially a seriously disinvested one. There’s no need for a 40,000 square foot grocery; I have photos of a 16’ x 36’ single-crew grocery (one grocer) in Beaufort, South Carolina that opened in 1919 and has been in the family ever since. Without it, that neighborhood would have been a food desert. Put another way, if the smallest viable grocery is 40,000 square feet, everyone has to drive so all the neighbors in that neighborhood would be burdened with the cost of owning a car. Single-crew workplaces are a strong answer to the specter of automotive impoverishment.

Building Dreams Early

Single-crew workplaces have another remarkable property: they make it possible for people of more limited resources like women, the young, immigrants, and minorities (groups Lean Urbanism is working to benefit) to begin realizing their dreams years or decades before they could afford to go in business in a conventional ULI-approved brick-and-mortar location. If they ever could at any time in their lifetime. The self-determination of pursuing one’s dream was always the real American Dream, right up until it got hijacked by the real estate industry and rebranded as owning a house. Single-crew workplaces can set that straight again.

Obesity Reduction

Street trees reduce obesity by elevating Walk Appeal so people are enticed outdoors to walk instead of drive. Doug Kelbaugh puts it directly: “the more trees there are on a block, the less likely people living there are to be obese.” Walk Appeal has three prime benefits: elevating the environmental health, the economic health, and the public health of a place. While the first two benefit greatly from Walk Appeal, arguably the greatest beneficiary is public health, as Walk Appeal can add meaningful years to our lives. But we’ve known this dating back to Dr. Richard Jackson’s pioneering work over a decade ago.

Parking Reduction

When street-tree-fueled Walk Appeal is stronger, there is less need for parking at single-crew workplaces because they can be more finely distributed around the city and the neighborhood so that more people can walk to their daily needs. Reducing parking, especially off-street parking lots, has many benefits. A parking lot paved in asphalt is a huge heat sink, elevating the temperature of the microclimate around it. Parking lots located at the street frontage nearly kill Walk Appeal for two reasons: they are really boring and they are also repulsive. How many people do you know who say “I love parking lots?” They also prevent proper street enclosure on their side of the street. And whereas the travel lanes of streets with on-street parking double as parking aisles but parking lots must provide their own aisle, the asphalt required per car is essentially doubled once you count access drives, doubling the harmful heat island effects per car. Actually, I could go on for quite some time on the harmful effects of surface parking lots, but then I wouldn’t finish this post this evening.

Driving & Heat Island Reduction

More walking to daily needs means less driving, and there are more benefits to driving less to daily needs than just needing less parking. The heat of combustion from automobile engines exacerbates urban heat islands. Cities & towns where people drive more get hotter; cities & towns where people drive less stay cooler.

Air Conditioning & Heat Island Reduction

More severe heat islands raise the cooling load on buildings because the air around them is hotter. Unfortunately, air conditioning operates by expelling indoor heat to the outdoors. Stand next to a condensing unit to feel the effects. This is a clearly vicious cycle, because as the urban heat island gets more severe and necessitates more indoor cooling, the heat that is expelled makes outdoor air even hotter, requiring even more cooling. The net effect of the supercharged urban heat island is that people who could otherwise walk to their daily needs drive instead, because it’s just too hot to walk, and that additional auto exhaust further heats the air, reinforcing the vicious cycle. Under these conditions, Living in Season eventually becomes impossible. The first step in unwrapping this vicious spiral is more street trees, which with the many intertwined effects noted so far, can cool the city enough to restart the virtuous cycles.

The Enticement of Other Humans

I mentioned sidewalk cafes earlier. Nothing is more interesting to humans than other humans. That’s why it’s so interesting walking on a busy sidewalk. There is one thing more interesting than walking humans, and that’s humans sitting still in one place for some time. You might see a person walking by for a few seconds, whereas they might sit at a sidewalk cafe for hours. Sidewalk cafes are one of the silver bullets of urbanism, with too many befits that ripple out from them to describe here. Suffice it to say that if there is a thriving cafe scene in a neighborhood, many other good things are probably happening there as well.

Porches, Galleries, Balconies & Neighborliness

The second most interesting place for humans to sit is on porches, galleries, or balconies located in such a way that they can strike up a conversation with someone walking by who was theretofore a stranger. And as hokey as it sounds, it’s also true that those conversations can lead to relationships, which can then lead to people acting like neighbors again, rather than as the more common status as anonymous co-habitators of nearby real estate. But that only works if there are people walking by, which is highly dependent on Walk Appeal and the street trees that boost it so.

Local to Global Benefits

Let’s get back out here at the end to the global scale: Street trees elevate Walk Appeal which in turn reduces urban heat islands. All this conspires to make a community a more pleasant place to live where you can walk to your daily needs, become more fit and reach greater clarity of mind and peacefulness of spirit. And you can meet more neighbors and become as deeply invested in your community as you like, while seeing your neighbors pursue their dreams that would have been impossible elsewhere because of their single-crew workplaces in your neighborhood which by the way gives you more choices of services within walking distance. Or maybe you become one of them, pursuing your dreams as well.

But there’s more. All of these things conspire to help mitigate climate change, which millions view as civilization’s greatest threat. But maybe you don’t; there are millions from the US to Australia who share that view. If you share that view, just focus on the local things you enjoy about living this way in your neighborhood and your town. If living this way has global benefits far beyond your neighborhood or your town, we all win. All you have to do is start planting street trees and enjoy them and the many powerful virtuous cycles that spin out from them.

~Steve Mouzon

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Aug 15, 2020

What's Coming Back & What's Not

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After 9/11, Katrina, and the Great Recession, there were many proclamations of “never again;” I made some of them myself. As Laura Clemons has said repeatedly on her quest to get towns to rebuild better after a disaster “there are very few human urges stronger than the need to put things back the way they were.” What does everyone think are the top three most likely and top three least likely things to come back essentially the way they were once the pandemic is over? My top 3s:

Most Likely

The human urge to socialize is strong, so the things most likely to come back relatively unchanged all have something to do with our need for contact with other humans.

1. Third Places

Look what happened in Wisconsin after the state supreme court killed the safer at home order: everyone streamed to the bars with no social distancing, including at least one nurse who should have known better. The most important thing here is scale. I believe there will be a lot of people uncomfortable with being in a restaurant that seats 300 people, but feel much better in places with a couple dozen neighbors. This favors neighborhood Third Places over large chain restaurants. Establishments that pull in large numbers from a distance have a greater risk of seeding the crowd with someone from a hot zone.

2. Religious Gatherings

The only reason religious gatherings aren’t in the #1 position on this list is because not everyone attends them. But the passion here is probably higher than any of the others because when you combine the need to socialize with high stakes (heaven vs. hell, for example) religion in all its forms will be back almost exactly the way it was. I do wonder if one difference might be a new preference for worship in smaller groups? Even meeting in homes?

3. Fitness & Sports

Both ends of the athletic spectrum will come back largely unchanged both because of the social need to work out with others if you're one of the athletes, and also the social need to cheer on the home team if you're not. Spectator sports in large venues may well be one of the very few exceptions most people make in the year or two after the pandemic is over to stay away from large crowds, and that’s because of their love of the home team. After the Spanish Flue of 1918, many people stayed away from very large gatherings for the next few years.

Least Likely

To be clear, I’m not saying these things are unlikely to come back, but rather unlikely to come back as they were before. In other words, most likely to come back with big changes.

1. Offices

Offices won’t disappear, but we’re in a massive test run on why many companies don’t need nearly the space they have. There's no doubt many are already doing the math & figuring out this new way. And the ability of millions to work from home at least most of the time could be a huge impetus to jump-start Sprawl Recovery when those who once worked in the city every day begin to really suffer from Social Deficit Disorder in the blandness of sprawl. I’ll blog more about this soon, and link to it from here. Office landlords should be nervous.

2. Transit

Urbanists won’t be making this decision; millions of commuters will. There’s a chance the coming carpocalypse may push some back onto transit, but the percentage is uncertain. One big winner here is cycling and cycling facilities; one big loser is living a long distance from work because in some places, there’s a very real chance that if you leave at your normal departure time, you might not arrive until lunch at offices in cities heavily dependent upon transit. This is an existential time for transit, as much as it pains me to say that. I’ll blog more on some heretofore-unthinkable implications of this shortly.

3. Retail

Look for a dumbbell migration to both the super-big and online like Amazon & Apple & to the super-small single-crew workplaces where people from failed mid-sized companies will set up shop again doing what they already know how to do, but smaller. Most won’t want to go to work for the companies that killed their businesses and are much more likely to try to reconstitute at the smallest possible size and give it another go. And many existing single-crew workplaces that already put out great products are doing great now. Our son Sam runs Dinner Bell Barbeque, a food cart in Portland, so he’s by definition a carry-out establishment and has been doing great since the lockdown, after a very dark and rainy winter.

What Else?

As we navigate the new normal, what else do you see as most likely and least likely to come back the way it was? Help me out here, and I’ll post an updated list later with your items included… thanks in advance!

~Steve Mouzon

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May 20, 2020

The Original Green at 10

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Ten years ago today, the Original Green went on sale for the first time after a launch party at Books & Books on Lincoln Road in South Beach the night before. I’m not sure what it has meant to anyone else, but it changed so many things for Wanda and I. So much useful stuff has resulted from this one little book in the decade that followed, including most of the ideas on this site, which would never have gotten worked out otherwise. For anyone who has found Original Green ideas useful, we’d really love to hear from you!

If you prefer buying from an independent bookstore, my favorite bookstore in the world is Sundog Books in Seaside, Florida, and they have them in stock.

~Steve Mouzon

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May 8, 2020

The COVID Collapse of the Office Park

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Office parks are toast; if you’re a partner, director, investor, or trustee of one, start thinking now about how to redevelop your asset before it becomes a liability in the near future. Google “office park failing” and you’ll get million of results. The demise of the office park has been increasingly apparent for years, hastened by the Millennials’ distaste for boring suburban office parks; COVID19 is merely the coup de grâce. Here’s why:

The Brain-Dead Cool Factor

the new reality: Cool Factor or Bust

Millennials are legendary for picking a cool city, then finding a cool neighborhood in that city, then finding a job they can walk or bike to from where they live. Almost every office park fails every test for Cool Factor ever invented. If you want young talent, you absolutely cannot be in an office park less cool than the Apple Ring. Just forget about it. So how do you achieve a reasonable Cool Factor? Think back to when the Millennials were teens. Where did they go in your town? Almost everywhere, they congregated where there was some shred of urbanism; where the uses were mixed and the building types varied. Office parks are the antithesis on every count.

Efficiency Deficit Disorder

a bit of building, lots more parking
& lots of wasted space

Le Corbusier, dead for over a half-century, still haunts the American landscape with his “drive 30 miles to work” edict, and also haunts the architecture academy as their long-dead god. Corbusier famously called for the destruction of the best of Paris to be replaced with his trademark “towers in the park” in his wretched Plan Voisin. In American office parks, his towers in the park have become “mid-rises in the parking lot.” And they’re hideously inefficient. Take this example from a place I know well. This is a 100,000 square foot building filled with people doing meaningful biotech work. It sits on 18 acres of land. But look at how much more they could accomplish using just basic urbanism like the 50 foot “green depth” and interior parking courts!

the same land, reconfigured as city blocks

They would get their 100,000 square feet on the first floor, plus an additional 80,000 square feet of stuff like coffee shops, neighborhood groceries, pharmacies, and the basic necessities of life… all on the first floor! Then the two floors above that could be 360 1,000 square foot units, 720 500 square foot units, or whatever mix worked for the local market. Or they could get the entire 100,000 square feet on just a couple of the blocks using all three stories and have that much more mixed use on the street level. Either way, you’d be able to live, work, shop, eat, and walk home… all on the space currently wasted on today’s office park! Corbusier’s Curse on America is felt nowhere worse than the doomed office park. Let’s get to work fixing this mess! Why waste so much profit potential any longer? Make places that pay their own bills and keep on profiting!

The Infrastructure Burden

parking area exceeds building area
in sprawl because you must drive
everywhere for everything

Sprawling districts like office parks are not only inefficient in themselves, but impose a great infrastructure burden on the municipalities where they’re located roughly proportional to the inefficient land use within their borders. Charles Marohn of Strong Towns and Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 have been exposing the Ponzi scheme of sprawl for over a decade, showing how every city pre-COVID had a date at which it would go bankrupt due to its inability to continue to maintain the infrastructure in sprawl, which can easily have as much as 3-4 times the infrastructure per property as traditional urbanism. The pandemic may have compressed the bankruptcy timeframe for cities from decades or years to months or even weeks. This will be a question of survival for municipalities all over, and let’s be clear: office parks may have a lot of high-income white-collar occupants with political influence, but the development form puts them close to last in terms of tax revenue vs. infrastructure maintenance burden. In business terms, they’re “alligators,” and they will eat you.

Home Officing

working at home isn’t limited to indoors

The previous three problems are long-standing; this one is newer. Yes, New Urbanists have been advocating for live/work units and other forms of working from home for decades, and some of us have tried it, but it was not so pervasive a practice in the pre-quarantine days. Now, however, the millions lucky enough to still be employed and able to work from home are giving it a massive test run. And no, not everyone loves it. Those with small children are finding it especially challenging. But these are enormously eye-opening days for many companies, as they ask “what if we don’t really need this huge space with its huge rent?” Expect many of those companies to downscale post-COVID to varying degrees. Others will follow the PlaceMakers example, which has since the beginning operated with everyone in different cities. I look for those companies to provide stipends for the cost of the home office and childcare for those who need it. If these things happen, then office rents will soon be far more affordable. Couple that with the fact that lease delinquency is massive, and it’s obviously high time for all office building owners, whether in an office park or somewhere else, to start getting creative on what to do now.

Real Solutions

Galina Tachieva’s excellent book

Fifteen years ago, the common solution in most places to a failed land use type like office parks was decline and eventual abandonment. Fortunately, much work has been done in the intervening years on what is now known as Suburban Retrofit, Sprawl Repair, or Sprawl Recovery. There are now reams of techniques out there such as those found in the Sprawl Repair Manual and Retrofitting Suburbia. Other resources include Build a Better Burb, hosted by the Congress for the New Urbanism. And you can (and should) start small instead of huge demolish-and-rebuild plans. Begin the very first things tactically, then build in small increments because not many want to spend huge chunks of money at the moment.

Dinosaur or Chrysalis?

Dinosaurs are… well, you know, dead. Will the office park be remembered as a dinosaur or a chrysalis? The chrysalis is the intermediate form between a caterpillar and a butterfly. The dinosaur ran out of chances to transform, but it’s in the blood of the chrysalis. What is the office park? It depends on the leadership in each one. If they’re willing to transform on the scale of an extreme makeover, then it’s not actually that hard to do since office parks are made up of big chunks of mostly-empty land, meaning that many things are possible. And it has already been done; check out the Township at Colony Park, which began 20 years ago to build a robust mixed-use community in a couple pods of an office park. Mike Thompson can tell you more about it. So it comes down to this for the leadership: are you willing to grow up and become a city so you can pay your own way and attract young talent, or will you get stuck and die? It’s your choice.

~Steve Mouzon

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May 2, 2020

Earth Day at 50

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Never before in our lifetimes has the daily flood of urgent things been so firmly dammed up. Treasure these most surreal of days for their greatest gift: revealing the most important things that in the endless stream of everydays get obscured in the fog and the flow.

If these days do not change me, then the only thing I’ll carry forward is a lot of economic pain. But if they help me see more clearly the things that are most important and act upon them, the benefits that flow from that awakening can last a lifetime... and beyond.

This pandemic has caused too much death and pain not to cause good change. The worst thing we could do now is get back to normal. Let’s get to work soon building a new normal based on the important things revealed in these awe-full days. The worst thing to do now is shut my eyes.

And let’s face facts: what’s happening now is just nature being nature. We have built an industrial illusion that we have overcome nature, but nature tests every construct. And in this test, our financialized industrial system has been found wanting. In the words of the President of the United States on March 23 “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this.”

No kidding. Since the Sustaining Economy this county and every nation before it was founded on was discarded and replaced with the Consuming Economy a century ago, the lifeblood of the country was ever-increasing consumption, as measured each quarter by Wall Street. The Consuming Economy values things by how quickly they’re used up; the Sustaining Economy values things by how far they’re handed down. I’ve written about this in detail in the new edition of A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas].

But this Great Pause hasn’t been just unmitigated disaster for those of us still alive; it has also opened a window into a view of earth almost as profound as Earthrise, the first view of our home from space a half-century ago. Today it’s a view, however fleeting, of what earth would be like in just a few weeks if we quit spoiling it! Blue skies over Los Angeles, Beijing, and cities everywhere in between. Nature returning to places from which it had been exiled all over the world. Families spending time with each other, going for long walks or bike rides. People finally having time to think about the things that matter most.

Obviously, this all can’t last. The financialized industrial system is raring to come roaring back as soon as possible, hoping to get things back to normal. But can we make at least some of it last?

Think about what we’ve seen: cleaner skies and waters than we thought we’d ever see in our lifetimes even if all nations complied fully with all the agreements. They haven’t, and not by a long shot. So this is little short of a miracle that we’re seeing what we’re seeing now. What might we do to preserve some of this without completely wrecking economies around the world?

The next posts over the coming weeks will look at several aspects of how we build our homes, workplaces, towns, cities, and lives to consume a lot less but live a lot better. Better rather than more. Quality of life over standard of living. But for this one day, just cherish this miraculous view of something we never imagined we’d see, especially since it has come at such a great price to so many, almost 180,000 of whom have paid the ultimate price.

~Steve Mouzon

The COVID Collapse of the Office Park

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Apr 22, 2020

2019

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 22:19:26 -0500

Hard Lessons of Disasters & Recovery

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Images in this post without captions are from Hurricane Katrina, which is America’s closest experience to that of The Bahamas in Dorian. Even strong buildings such as this one were smashed by the unthinkable storm surge.

The wreckage of my parents’ shop is in the center of
this image, but is mangled beyond recognition.
Books from the school our sons attended were
found a hundred miles away in
Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I spent most of my life inland before moving to Miami Beach in 2003. Where I grew up, the main disaster threats were tornadoes, which are exceptionally violent, sudden, and focused. Within 60 seconds of the warning being issued for the Airport Road tornado November 15, 1989, close to a dozen people had already lost their lives. My parents had just moved out of their Airport Road shop into another one a mile away on that very day, or they would have been two more casualties in that first awful minute as their previous shop was reduced to rubble. Seconds later, it missed their house by less than a quarter mile, and missed our house by about the same distance ten miles later, raining debris down on both our homes. In between, it completely demolished our sons’ school. Wind speeds were estimated at well over 200 mph, but unlike a hurricane where there is time for air pressure to adjust, the sudden sickening air pressure drop in a tornado causes most buildings to be destroyed by exploding from internal pressure.

The first time I recall caring deeply about a place affected by a hurricane was Seaside, Florida in 1995’s Category 4 Hurricane Opal. It made landfall some distance west of Seaside in Pensacola, but was a huge storm, completely demolishing buildings 20 miles east of Seaside. But at Seaside, the only damage was the loss of the stairs at the dune crossovers. Hurricane experts called it the “Seaside Miracle” and studied it for months. They found two things that made all the difference between Seaside and its destroyed neighbors: while the neighbors built on the dunes, Seaside buildings stayed completely off the dunes and planted local dune plants well-adapted to strengthening the dunes. Also, Seaside built stronger buildings than its neighbors, sinking pilings deeper and generally exceeding building codes a bit instead of just barely meeting codes. Both these measures were done mainly by instinct at Seaside from its founding in 1980 until Opal, but have become resounding themes in buildings that have stood the test of storms in the quarter-century since.

Our first personal experience with a hurricane was Cat 3 Wilma in 2005, but that was two months after the one that forever changed our lives: Katrina. Andrés Duany and I came up with the idea of the Katrina Cottages on the Saturday after the hurricane. Originally conceived as “FEMA trailers with dignity,” they became so much more and have influenced so many things since. Three days before that, Wanda got the call from Michael Barranco that set in motion the Mississippi Renewal Forum. The Forum was the largest planning event in human history, with nearly 200 design professionals in one room of a Gulf Coast casino that survived less damaged than its neighbors. The scope of the Forum was broad, re-planning towns all along the Mississippi coast. As with Dorian, it was clear that Katrina was a storm that had been unthinkable until it actually occurred. Also like Dorian, it raised widespread agreement that the places that were reconstructed must be smarter, stronger, and safer than what was lost. This begins with the urban design, because building in a storm surge zone previously thought unthinkable invites future destruction because the one force of nature stronger than the strongest tornadoes is storm surge. As for the previously unthinkable Katrina, the equally powerful Hurricane Rita showed up on a less-populated stretch of the Louisiana coast just two weeks later.

Beachtown houses

To be clear, there are ways of building in a storm surge zone, but it cannot be with ordinary construction. I began serving as Town Architect at Beachtown, Galveston just before Katrina. Beachtown is built outside the 17 foot seawall of Galveston, which was built to that height after the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which remains the deadliest storm in US history. So we elevated the houses on concrete pilings along the beachfront and on wood pilings deeper into the town, reserving the ground level for parking, open verandahs, and swimming pools so the storm surge could blow through and do no damage to the living spaces above. But buildings elevated gracelessly on pilings make the place look like a “stilt city,” so we took great care to make the ground levels appealing. When Hurricane Ike made landfall on Galveston in 2008 with massive storm surges largely responsible for the 113 US deaths, Beachtown performed exactly as designed, with essentially no damage except for the planned blowout of breakaway elements at ground level. Like Seaside 13 years before, Beachtown’s performance was hailed as a miracle by many. Outside of storm surge zones, there are several other ways the design of the urban fabric can help buildings stand strong against the storm. But helping buildings stand strong is only part of the job of the new urban design because the goal shouldn’t be just to help heal the place, but to also help heal the people and their local way of life. Much more on this in a minute.

a new Bahamian home built according to the
principles of A Living Tradition

In the years between Katrina and Ike I was commissioned to write A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas] by Bahamian developer Orjan Lindroth, Town Founder of Schooner Bay. Ever since my first days working around the Caribbean Rim, I have marveled at how well-calibrated the traditional architecture here is to the regional conditions, climate, and culture on these beautiful shores also known for heat, humidity, and hurricanes. And the wisdom the architecture encapsulated was earned the hard way. In past centuries, if you were lucky enough to survive a storm but your house was unlucky enough not to, when you crawled out of its wreckage and saw a neighbor’s house still standing, you likely said “I’m gonna rebuild like that!” The book was meant to encapsulate that hard-won wisdom into a recipe for building sustainable and resilient buildings again today. After a disaster the magnitude of Dorian, we cannot afford to rebuild with anything less than patterns long proven to work.

the Red Cross house I toured

The 2017 hurricane season was the worst since the Katrina/Rita year of 2005. Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate were so severe that their names have been retired and will never be used again. Irma was the first for which we ever evacuated; on the day we left, it was headed straight for our home packing 185 mph winds. A year later, I was commissioned to study the effects of Irma and the FEMA response in the Florida keys. What I found was striking. Throughout most of the keys north of East Rockland, devastation ranged from serious to extreme. On Big Pine Key, hundreds of homes were lost, many with nothing left but the foundations. But on Cudjoe Key where Irma made landfall, most of the damage was to the landscape, not the buildings. A local resident said “we simply build better here than on most of the other keys.” And several of the patterns of stronger construction they employed were very similar to those in A Living Tradition. Further north, on Key Largo where the right-side destruction of Irma still lay thick all around, I toured one of the Red Cross houses built in the 1930s of construction similar to the original construction of Schooner Bay. There, the storm surge was still several feet high and blew out the first levels of structures all around. But the Red Cross house I studied had no apparent damage at all. And it contained even more long-proven patterns documented in A Living Tradition.

Dr. Lebron Lackey’s Mexico Beach “miracle house”

soon after Hurricane Michael

Three weeks before the Irma study trip began, Hurricane Michael slammed the Florida panhandle as only the fourth hurricane to ever make landfall in the US as a Cat 5. Aerial photos of Mexico Beach where the storm roared ashore showed near-complete devastation with one exception: there was one house that looked virtually untouched, while neighbors on all sides had been reduced to rubble. Three weeks later, I met with the Seaside Institute board and noted “FEMA Hacker” Laura Clemons to consider Institute disaster recovery initiatives. While there, we went to Mexico Beach to see what we might learn.

Most of the rest of Mexico Beach fared far worse
than these houses. Most were completely destroyed,
with their wreckage blown for miles.
Some of it was likely carried as far as Georgia.

Fortunately, Dr. Lebron Lackey, the co-owner of the “miracle house” was onsite, and gave us a tour and explained what he had done so that his house survived basically unscathed in fields of rubble. What he said was shocking. First, the overall massing and detailing of the house shared many pattens with those in A Living Tradition. Beyond that, he said that no part of the engineering of the house was custom in any way. Everything was straight off the shelf. What he did was to look at what the code required and then upsize everything one or two sizes. So if pilings were required to be 24’ deep, he made them 32’ deep, for example. This raised the cost of the structure about 20-25% but did not affect the cost of the finishes. This is a stunningly simple formula: Build according to A Living Tradition patterns to be naturally stronger, then upsize the code-required structural elements one or two sizes, and you may very well have a house that will emerge strong from a Cat 5 storm, and for not nearly as much additional cost as you might assume.

Beyond the obvious lessons above, there are several more we need to learn. I mentioned helping heal not only the places, but also helping heal the people and the local way of life. The four cornerstones of a resilient local way of life are education, economy, culture, and wellness. In the case of my sons’ school, the tornado damage was narrow enough that theirs was the only school destroyed, so they and their classmates could simply be bused to nearby schools. But for the widespread destruction at Marsh Harbour, the only solution is what is currently being done: move the students to other islands, primarily New Providence, where they can be educated in Nassau schools.

Most Bahamian fishing is done from smaller craft,
so it is easier to get them back in commission than
it would be for giant industrial-scale trawlers.

Getting the local economy going as quickly as possible after the storm isn’t usually even on the radar screen of disaster recovery organizations, and in many instances they actually work against local economic recovery. This never happens by ill intent, but rather because the focus is entirely on rebuilding physical infrastructure and buildings. At first, recovery of the local economy seems hopeless because there is no money left in the local economy. In destruction as widespread as at Marsh Harbour, banks are out of commission and most of the cash has literally been sucked out to sea or otherwise lost in the storm. But there are soon disaster workers onsite, and hard-working people get hungry, so start with the most essential thing: food. If rice and beans were imported before the storm, then send rice and beans as part of disaster aid. But if fishing was part of the local economy before, do not send fish because that may cripple the local fishing economy for years, or maybe even permanently if the fishermen have to move away and none take their place. Instead, send boat repairmen and fishing gear so the local fishermen can get back to work as soon as possible. Aid workers have dollars in their pockets, so feeding them is the first way to get money back into the local economy.

classic Bahamian single-crew workplace

Once local food producers have been helped to take the first steps back to production, quickly turn to getting other merchants and craftspeople back in business producing and selling things essential to recovery. Do this with single-crew workplaces, which are shops or workshops that can be run by one crew. For a grocery, that crew is a single grocer, for example. Set up the owner of the corner store before the storm as the person distributing necessities, including toiletries. Set up the owner of the coffee shop doing exactly what they did before, except in much smaller quarters and with more basic equipment that doesn’t need electricity. The coffee shop and others will obviously need tactically-deployed solar hot water. Everything you can do to get familiar faces going again in their familiar roles brings a small but essential thread of normalcy back to a shattered world, which stabilizes the emotional wellness of those who remain.

The flag means “we’re coming back."

Cultural recovery should begin right on the heels of the start of economic recovery, therefore much sooner than you might think. It begins with planting the flag. That one act says “this is our homeland, and we’re coming back.” In the new neighborhood center (more on this in a few days), set up a simple wooden platform on one side of the square. Part of the time, it will be used by people making announcements or conducting meetings, but during that one time per day (probably at dinnertime) when everyone in the neighborhood knows they can get a nourishing meal, reserve the platform for anyone remaining who can sing or play. Bring in traditional musical instruments, because the local ones were likely lost in the storm. Traditional local music, combined with traditional local food, begins to build more of those bonds of normalcy that helps shattered people begin to heal.

Everything charming and beloved about the
Hope Town we all knew will be lost if rebuilt
by big design/build firms.

PLEASE don’t let that happen!

Finally, when long-term rebuilding begins, remember that this is a crucial point at which a place can easily lose its soul (or essential character, or genius loci, however you want to think of it). Bring in big design/build corporations, and the focus will be entirely on building lots of housing and commercial space with great speed. Doing that guarantees that everything you once loved about the place will be lost, and what gets rebuild might as well be in Orlando, Atlanta, or Dallas. There will be enormous pressure to do this by well-meaning people who say “we need to recover as soon as we can.” But resist this with every fibre of your being, and every ounce of energy you have. If you want the place you rebuild to have any chance of being as beloved as the one you lost, do not go the big corporate route. Put Bahamian people to work building true Bahamian places using storm-strong Bahamian patterns of architecture and urbanism. Do these things, and you have a good chance of preserving the soul of the place. Neglect this, and the soul of the place will be lost.

~Steve Mouzon

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Oct 9, 2019

The Long Road Home for The Bahamas

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All images in this post are from Nightfall on the Coast, a photo-documentary I did of the conditions on the Mississippi Gulf Coast nearly a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina.

It is heartbreaking to see the suffering and devastation in The Bahamas as Dorian moves northward, and thoughts of those lonely rebuilding years ahead are even harder to bear for all of us who love The Bahamas. It’ll be lonely because after the first outpouring of emotion and assistance in the first weeks, the news cycle will move on to the next disaster and Bahamians and those who really love them will be left alone with the reconstruction. It must ever be so; that’s the way the news works, and since Katrina the US has averaged two federally declared disasters per week, so attention moves quickly. Here are some things we’ve learned beginning with Katrina that I deeply hope can be useful in the Bahamian rebuilding; at the end you’ll find the backstory of how these lessons were learned.

The Initial Shock

It is especially important for the leaders to take care of themselves and weather the initial shock of the devastation. The Katrina trauma was so great that one of the mayors on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a breakdown of some sort and simply disappeared. Months later, he was found living with relatives somewhere in Minnesota. Prime Minister Hubert Minnis looked brave and strong in the press conference Tuesday evening, but I hope he and the local officials can continue to take care of their own mental and emotional wellbeing because the people need them now like they’ve never needed them before.

Small Recovery Nodes

Recovery begins within days of first response, because those who have survived are not only injured and traumatized, but are very soon in need of water, food, and porta-potties, as we all know. When the recovery nodes are set up, make them smaller and more closely-spaced than you might think because in severely damaged places like Marsh Harbour, pretty much all of the vehicles damaged by wind and storm surge are total losses and the people are on foot for the foreseeable future. And because the footpaths are strewn with debris, they’re not able to walk as far as they would have before the storm. Spacing between nodes should be no more than a half-mile in all directions in cities, towns, and villages. Those nodes ideally should be located on a parking lot, which can be small because the nodes will be small. The parking lot can quickly be cleared of debris setting up a hard working surface of paving which is already designed to drain rainwater away.

Initial Shelter

Hard shelter is likely months or longer in the future because so much transportation infrastructure is broken at the beginning, and hard shelter or its components must be purchased and delivered or in most cases manufactured. After Katrina, it took us nearly six weeks to get the first inkling of what FEMA’s plans for FEMA trailers even looked like, and while they were able to deliver a few travel trailers early, the FEMA trailers that were manufactured after the storm didn’t even start getting delivered in quantity until early the next year. The fastest shelter deliverable at the beginning of recovery is likely to be tents. A tent dispensary should be located at each recovery node.

After Katrina, I saw people living in tents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast more than a year after they storm. The US had the advantage that people could just leave the disaster area in the wake of the storm and stay with relatives in other parts of the country. Expect some inter-island migration within The Bahamas, but migration to other nations is mostly limited to those with passports and the ability to travel overseas, especially given the current US immigration climate. So The Bahamas will be more burdened with sheltering its own than the Gulf Coast was after Katrina or later storms like Harvey.

Restarting Local Economies Early

Severe disasters like Dorian bring a jarring and immediate shutdown to local economies, which burdens the government because of the sudden end of tax revenues from the affected areas. From the beginning, employ local people to do the things they were doing before the storm. Let the local cooks and servers hand out packaged meals. Let the local outfitters hand out tents. But as soon as you can, bring in what I call “single-crew workplaces” which as the name implies are small enough that they can be run by one crew, and get them back in business where there is some tiny trickle of income to those who may have lost everything. As I wrote in the new edition of A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas] (commissioned by Nassau developer Orjan Lindroth), The Bahamas already builds some of the best single-crew workplaces on earth, so you know how to do this. These are small, simple shelters like what you see all along Bay Street on Harbour Island, for example. They can be quickly built in place, or if there are food carts available, they can be brought into the disaster area.

After Katrina, we saw a terrible vicious cycle. In several towns like Pass Christian and Waveland, all businesses were destroyed, so everyone who worked in town was out of work and almost everyone lost their homes. But the banks still wanted the mortgage payments. Unfortunately, most of the insurance claims weren’t paid until a year or two after the storm, and by the time the claims were paid, the people had gone bankrupt and so the banks got the settlements, not the people. Many residents had no choice but to leave town and try to start a new life somewhere else, bankrupted and penniless. Obviously, some parts of this story aren’t quite the same in The Bahamas, but the sooner you can get people back in business doing what they had been doing so they can generate at least a bit of income, the more likely they’ll be able to maintain a toehold in town and not be forced to leave.

A Better Home

In every disaster I’ve ever been involved with, the most powerful human urge is to put things back exactly the way they were before the storm. I’ve collaborated with Laura Clemons, the famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the table you’re on) FEMA Hacker on a number of disasters, and she has developed a system of working with communities to rebuild in a much better way by gaining access to a lot more FEMA funding than they would normally offer. Unfortunately, most places are so intent because of the basic human urge to go back home as soon as possible that they aren’t open-minded about building back better. While there’s no FEMA in The Bahamas, this overpowering urge to go back home again happens in disasters around the world. It will certainly happen in The Bahamas after Dorian.

Here’s why it’s such a bad idea: places like The Mudd and Pigeon Peas built on the lowest land will inevitably flood again someday in a much lower storm surge than Dorian’s, and be blown away again with lower wind speed and duration than occurred this time. It’s only a matter of time. I’ve walked through The Mudd, and the best quality of construction there was patterned after US tract housing of the 1960s, which meant that it contained none of the storm-strong wisdom of traditional Bahamian architecture. Any new buildings built this way will someday likely face the same fate. It’s unconscionable for the poorest of the poor to also have to bear the destruction of their homes in a hurricane. I fear that when the final toll of loss of life is known, The Mudd and Pigeon Peas will bear a seriously disproportionate share of the loss.

It’s not reasonable to think that the government will build everyone a house; that’s just not happening for many obvious reasons, including the fact that the coming months and years will see national finances unusually stressed because of Dorian. So what can be done to help people live in safer places, even while many of them have lost everything?

Andrés Duany and I came up with the idea of the Katrina Cottages on the Saturday after the hurricane. Originally conceived as “FEMA trailers with dignity,” they became much more than that, but the core idea was to start very small so you get a foothold on home again, with the idea of building back your full home incrementally over time as financial stability returned. Working with the Prince’s Foundation in Rose Town (next to Bob Marley's Trench Town in Kingston, Jamaica) I developed a “wet appliance” which was a reinforced concrete box containing a bathroom and with a simple kitchen attached to one side. The idea was that if an outside entity (the government or a charitable foundation of some sort) could at least bring in a wet appliance, people could from that core build a complete house in small increments over the years. The challenges in Marsh Harbour and Freeport aren’t the same as in Rose Town, but some combination of initial core from which people could at least achieve personal sanitation and food and then build in small increments could be useful.

One key: if our ancestors were lucky enough to survive a hurricane (mine were from near Charleston, South Carolina) but their house was unlucky enough not to, when they crawled out of the wreckage of their house and saw their neighbor’s house still standing, they said “I’m gonna rebuild like that.” It was hard-won wisdom. And to be clear, in The Bahamas, it was Bahamian wisdom. Yes, The Bahamas was a colony of England for a long time, but if you go to England, you’ll see that there’s little resemblance between homes there and homes here. Bahamian architecture arose primarily from these shores, not those. And it’s unusually well-adapted to surviving the storms that have forever been a part of this place.

If The Bahamas rebuilds using the wisdom hard-earned on these islands over time, then this great disaster can result in a renewal of the places and buildings that have made The Bahamas world-famous, and have long driven the economy. But if not, then Dorian will forever be remembered as a great tragedy that changed the nation for the worse. Either way, it’s a long way home. I just hope that long road leads to a better home.

~Steve Mouzon

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Sep 6, 2019

New Urbanists on One Way Streets

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This is Indianapolis… not the 500, but rather one of the city streets.

One-way streets are routinely reviled by New Urbanists for turning city thoroughfares into low-friction automobile raceways, but are they always horrible? I posted the following a week ago on Facebook while in New York City and got this following flood of insightful responses: "To all my #NewUrbanist colleagues who feel that one-way streets are terrible, why is Manhattan not a wretched, dysfunctional place?”

Belle Ducray if done with for thought one way streets are awesome (santa barbara ca for example has them down to an art)

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John Z Wetmore A lot more goes into what a street is than one-way vs. two-way. Compare the one-way street grid in downtown Portland, OR, with Salt Lake City. Narrow streets, small blocks, slow speeds. Often two-way streets are converted to one-way to create wide fast-moving automobile sewers, at great cost to the people living along them. See, for example, Lansing, MI, on the second interview. Episode 122

Michael Moule John Z Wetmore I’ve been saying this for years. I compared Portland’s downtown one way streets with Tampa’s. A world of difference; the biggest factor in that case is signal progression speed; block size and street width are fairly similar in those two cities.

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Daniel Ashworth Jr. It is context. There is a difference between the one-way narrow street in a tight gridded network and the one-way multi-lane couplet speedway in say, downtown Tuscaloosa, AL (but take your pick of any town with this).

Sean D. Sweat As a pedestrian, I love one-way streets. I think New Urbanists are wrong on this one.

Michael Kilcullen as a pedestrian, you should still look both ways before crossing a street, sometimes cars and bicyclists are going the wrong way. There is not much advantage from that point of view (pun!), insofar as one way or two way streets. I think, in general, one way streets tend to lead to higher road speeds, as drivers perceive that it is safer withiout risiking headon crashes… and higher auto speeds are worse for pedestrians. One-way streets are never about road traffic accessibiity to businesses and homes, unless they are in the middle median or block between one-way couplets. Everyone else, the one way street system actually makes one direction of traffic take a longer path and double back on itself, adds slightly to road congestion for half-blocks. One way streets are for throughput, to get more cars through, from one neighbourhood thru to another, one ways are not about accessibility to the buildings that are on oneway streets.

Sandy Sorlien New Urbanists don't ban them. As Daniel says, context, and as Jennifer says, make them narrow, and as John says, small blocks. They should be more or less alternating so you don't have to go too far to turn the other way, and so they are predictable. Newport RI is a problem because they have places you can hardly get to because too many streets go one way in the same direction. By the time you get to one that goes the direction you want, you're like, screw it, I'm going home.

Sean D. Sweat Sure, look both ways, whatever. But you're not playing frogger on a one-way street.

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Ryan Wozniak If the block lengths are super short, it matters far less (1-way vs 2-way). But, you are always pushing for the ideal... And I respect that. New Urbanism comes from a tradition of incremental improvements to the disappointing contexts in which we find ourselves.

Paul Westhelle Going to assume there are degrees of wretchedness... Midtown has subways that go both ways. And, more recently, bike lanes and increased walking space allow more 2-way movement, making things much less wretched. As for cars... those are for the ignorant tourists and the "bridge and tunnel" crowd. In southern parlance: bless their hearts.

David Moye inherent demand and legacy built environment overcomes a lot, also the density keeps cars slow, however, many would consider Manhattan to be wretched.

Matthew Petty 1. Lots of it is.
2. Enough people walking overcomes a lot of bad design.

Kirk Westphal Yes... plus there's (almost) always parallel parking on each side, generous sidewalk width, and to your point, such high densities that retail and restaurants thrive there despite the fast-ish moving cars. (This last point is helped by the fact that much of the historic fabric has been preserved = fine-grained storefronts.)

Erik Bootsma New York is the exception to many things that work everywhere else.

Kirk Westphal Can we even count how many times everyone outside of New York and Chicago have wanted a "Central Park" or "Millennium Park" in their low-density downtowns?

Kevin Klinkenberg Kirk Westphal Or now a High Line.

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Mark Schnell I think there are a few urban design "rules" that NYC gets away with breaking thanks to the high density and inherent walkability in the urban design. In a similar way, I don't think the High Line would work in most other places, because it works against street life to some degree. But I don't think the one-way streets are all that great in NYC. With a few exceptions, the big north/south avenues (particularly in Midtown) are not where the magic happens in NYC.

Nancy Bruning But today, as a pedestrian, you need to assume all NYC streets are two way since bikes often go in the wrong direction.

Nick Rolinski Nancy Bruning this is an important point. It’s very dangerous to step out into a one-way without checking both ways. Plenty of cars and other vehicles travel the wrong way every day in every city.

Jennifer Hurley Narrow, one-way streets that are part of a grid of one-way streets are not terrible. In fact, they can be great for peds because you only have to look one way to cross, and crossing mid block is much easier. Downtown Philly is a great example. Wide, one-way couplets designed to funnel lots of traffic quickly in and out of a downtown are terrible. Most one-way streets in the US are just too wide with too little traffic so they encourage speeding. I’m a NU heretic because I’ve been praising narrow one-way streets for years.

Sandy Sorlien Agree about Philly and other cities like it, of course. The key is a tight network with frequent opportunities to turn the other way. That's more important for car/bike/bus options than narrow/wide. You could have one narrow one-way couplet in and out of a small town or a downtown, i.e., a one-way Main Street, and it could kill your shopping district. Agree about the pedestrian crossing, narrow is good, yay for the jaywalking!

Nick Rolinski The SmartCode gives nice options for 1-way streets, and they can really help with street hierarchy. I don’t think all New Urbanists dislike them generally, but the one-way pairs which act as arterials in many American towns and cities tend to emphasize vehicular traffic in other ways too, which contribute to the bad rap. Also, Manhattan is different animal altogether.

Tim Wilson Three-ways>one-ways

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Haha

Janna Whitley I love narrow one-way streets, but for the life of me I can't only look one way. It always takes me a minute to remember which way I am supposed to look. 🙃

Cindy Van Empel Lemaire Because of the vibrant non-automobility and density!

Jeff Donnelly When I moved back to the City in 1964, the new (to me) one-ways clearly favored autos over other street users. Great for people who wanted to cut quickly from east t-west in Manhattan; terrible for those who once used neighborhood residential streets for play.

G.b. Arrington Downtown Portland is apparently “cursed” with a network of narrow one way streets on a grid of 200 x 200 foot blocks. The result is one of the most livable downtown’s in North America and no doubt beyond. Traffic speeds are set to have the walk signals change at the speed up walking on a street. The debate on one-way streets by New Urbanists needs to become much more nuanced. Problems are much more complex than planning dogma on what is good and what I’d bad.

Ian Manire Came here to suggest exactly this. Lived in downtown Portland for years and because of the small blocks and pedestrian-speed traffic, it was immensely walkable and human-oriented. I live between two one-way "thoroughfares" now in east-side Providence, RI and it's also lovely--becauee the streets are one-lane narrow road bed with naturally slowed automobile traffic. All about street scale and tighter grid-weave.

John Massengale G.b. Arrington At the same time, Portland’s public life would be better if 1) there were fewer cars, and 2) many of the one-way streets were then converted to two-way. Most of the one-way avenues in Manhattan that got the suburban-style road diets would be better as two-way streets with a lot less paint. Yes, the new avenues are better than what came before, because of the new bike lanes, but they are an interim step that will never get us to the Vision Zero goal of zero deaths, AND they induce demand. “C’mon In,” they say to suburban drivers, “Our streets are just like yours.” All street design is contextual. There is no such thing as Best For Everywhere. Eliza Harris Juliano

G.b. Arrington John Massengale you couldn’t be more wrong. Context is everything. Portland’s one way downtown streets are slow. Narrow. Safe and timed to be friendly to pedestrians as the first priority. Manhattans n/s streets are dangerous speedways in my experience. The two are sets of central city streets could not be more different.

G.b. Arrington John Massengale if you can improve on this by changing the direction of cars I'd be floored

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G.b. Arrington John Massengale or this

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G.b. Arrington John Massengale or this

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G.b. Arrington John Massengale or this - all one way streets within an environment that celebrates life at the scale of walking. Yes in many contexts one way streets are terrible. But the context such as street width, design speeds, signal timing and intersection spacing are all more important whether something is a one way or two way street. I first had this argument with Peter Calthorpe in the 1990's. time to get beyond the dogma and respect the context.

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John Massengale G.b. Arrington If people in Portland reduce car use — which is necessary for the future of the city – many streets will be better places with two-way streets. It’s a change from transportation to place. Very few Portland streets would not be better streets for people with fewer cars, less parking, and two-ways.

G.b. Arrington John Massengale come to downtown Portland, experience how the commitment to making streets wonderful public spaces has been practiced. Portland will never be NYC - but quoting from Bike Portland, "Portland’s auto ownership per capita has fallen. The percentage of Portland households that include more workers than automobiles hit another high in 2017: 24 percent, enough to account for about half the city’s net household growth since 2007." that said Portland like just about every other US city is seeing transit use decline, but not because if one-way streets.

Richard Stowe To the degree that New York is "not a wretched and dysfunctional place" in the context of street design is not due to perceived benefits of one-way streets, but instead largely attributable to the fact that off-street parking was not permitted in much of Manhattan until 1939. One-way streets are primarily vessels designed to accommodate taxis, Uber & buses. This observation is from the vantage point of frequently bicycling into Manhattan from Connecticut. Outside of Central Park, impervious surfaces (asphalt & concrete) dominate the streetscape. Moreover, due to the car-first design (which include one-ways) - little sensible investment has taken place with regard to intelligent design upgrades of MNR, NJ Transit, LIRR, and Amtrak commuter rail lines in the past century; ditto NYC Subways & PATH. p.s. Don't necessarily agree with your premise that "New York is not a wretched and dysfunctional place." Two examples quickly come to mind: the demolition of Pennsylvania Station (https://bit.ly/2LXOhl0) in 1963 & Bonwit Teller (https://bit.ly/2vQGDAG) building in 1980. The replacements are wretched and the builder in one instance many consider to be vile.

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Pennsylvania Station (New York City) - Wikipedia

Mike Lydon One of the great advantages of one-way networks in a pedestrian rich city is you only have to look one way before crossing the street, not two. This is why most New Yorkers step off the curb. We know we only have to peer around one lane of parked cars and then we can continuing walking, even if against the light. If we didn’t do this, pedestrian congestion would be even more intense than it already is in many parts of Manhattan.

Nancy Bruning Mike Lydon sorry, Mike, not anymore in Manhattan, where bikes too often go the wrong way. I have had one crash into me and many close calls so I now look both ways. 😢

John Massengale Nancy Bruning Correct. Especially with the 25 mph electric bikes.

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Ann Daigle Mike as a bicyclist I hate one way streets. Options. We need more options!

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Jon Seward There's plenty of wretchedness in NYC. Most streets are so narrow, that you'd lose half the parking, if you converted to two way. Maybe that's fine, but the transportation need still has to be accommodated. Some major cross streets are two way, and they're generally a nightmare. Some avenues might be improved by becoming two way. Might be worth some study.

Eliza Harris Juliano I actually had the same question because I used to live in Manhattan, so I've been thinking about it for a while. The density in Manhattan is so high that most people aren’t driving so aren’t affected by the redirects associated with one ways. Basically street life isn’t reliant on people driving in. In a smaller city many of the downtown visitors and residents are also drivers so creating a driving environment (direct trips, slow, legibility) that supports Urbanism is more important. The one ways are terrible for biking unless you’re a scofflaw (which is dangerous) or there are two way bike facilities. I used think New York City was pretty perfect (20 years ago) because my bar from suburbia was so low. Then as I watched the conversation from groups like Transportation Alternatives, I learned there was a lot of room for improvement particularly as it relates to safety. One way streets can encourage speeding which is of course a safety issue. In the more congested parts of NYC it’s probably not a big problem but late nights and on the edges it’s more likely to endanger pedestrians.

David Moye Think about the pedestrian plazas that have been created in the last 20 years, namely times square.

Eliza Harris Juliano Below is a link to a fact sheet we did for a recent project. The proposal includes a lot of other improvements too (bikeways, landscaping, bumpouts). We think a big win is having only one lane in each direction so you avoid any double (and triple) jeopardy situations for people at midblock crossings (i.e. if there's a median refuge, you only have to deal with one car and one direction at a time) and the slowest driver sets the speed because there's no passing. You can also add green medians where turn lanes aren't needed. In a situation where you are going from 4 or 5 lanes one way to 2 lanes in each direction the calculus might be a little different. We also have people doing crazy stuff intentionally driving the wrong way for short distances to avoid having to go the long way around. Maybe that doesn't happen in Manhattan. It's probably a function of irregular blocks and driveways and the overall lack of a complete grid. https://www.dropbox.com/.../216024_NQ-TwoWayComparison...

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Eliza Harris Juliano Backstory: ~ 2013 Ian Lockwood was trying to convince me that our Orlando streets needed to go to two-way. My immediate response was "I lived in NYC with one-way streets for five years and it was great." Over the intervening years he won me over and we recently led a project together to design the conversion a portion of downtown Orlando to two-way. I still think it's less critical in a place like Manhattan, but I see that there could be benefits if done well. The bigger problem in Manhattan is that in a city where more than half of people don't even own a car (76% in Manhattan) there is still too much street space devoted to cars no matter what direction they're going. (http://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/)

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How Car-Free is New York City? - Mobilizing the Region

Eliza Harris Juliano I'm thinking mainly of the Avenues. I haven't put much headtime on the side streets. Immediate problem might be bikes. In Paris they allow "wrong-way" bike travel on one-way streets but they also don't have on-street parking in those locations.

Andy Malone The one way avenues could very reasonably be converted. I don't think the conversion to two way on the streets makes sense unless you eliminate parking (which I'm not in favor of - I do think there's lots of opportunity for better parking pricing though).

John Massengale Andy Malone No one size fits all. We need to transition to fewer cars, including fewer parked cars.

Mike Huston I have a draft article about "urban mistakes" in Manhattan - one of which is the prevalence of one-way streets. But I try to turn it around and argue that they work well on mostly residential streets where ROW is limited. In these cases, ample sidewalks are more important than the vehicular lanes with two-way traffic. And even on commercial corridors, Manhattan storefronts are less dependent on auto exposure for business than typical Main Streets.

John Massengale Mike Huston No one size fits all. We need to transition to fewer cars, including fewer parked cars. Three-quarters if Manhattanites don’t own a car. We have to stop subsidize so much free parking. Eliza Harris Juliano

Mike Huston Agree! Lack of free parking is perhaps the factor for choosing alternate forms of transportation. Think of how many New Yorkers would own a car if they just had some place to park it.

Catherine Hartley This is a great discussion!

Ellen Humphreys One way streets work fine in NOLA.

Kurtis Hord In Louisville the one-way streets are mostly the legacy of white flight and hyper segregation. As wealthier residents moved further into the suburbs, they needed the former dense urban areas and historic neighborhoods to be "drive thru". The lights are all timed to provide commuters a way to get out of the city which became a no-man's land after 5pm. It seems like they work in larger density, but they served a specific a diabolical purpose which changed the neighborhoods they passed thru forever. proto-highways.

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Victor Brandon Dover In the Street Design book John Massengale and I carved out a nuanced position that supports one-way streets in occasional circumstances, and we included many examples. (That passage immediately attracted flames from various extremists and zealots among our pals, who like to use words like "Never.") I remain convinced that when there is a fine-grained web of streets, it's perfectly okay to choose to demote some segments to a less-trafficked status in the grid as narrow one-ways, with less pavement for #drivists, in order to achieve intimate, slow, pedestrian-dominated spaces, when the context is right. The same applies to occasional pedestrian-only high streets. Examples of both are illustrated in the book. (These professional prescriptions should come with labels, of course, reminding us "use only as directed" and "stick to the prescribed dosage.") What usually doesn't work out well? Wide one-way pairs within coarse networks of supersized blocks, devised only to speed up motorists, implemented throughout the whole neighborhood, along with the entire suite of pedestrian hostility tools and attempts to speed up suburbanites as they flee. (Richmond, Westphal once quipped, turned itself into "The City of No Left Turns," for example.)

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Mike Hathorne Victor - fantastic explanation and photos. Thank you for sharing.

Melissa Meyer Victor Brandon Dover, where is this?

Victor Brandon Dover Melissa Meyer, that's St. Augustine.

Melissa Meyer Victor Brandon Dover, I thought so! I love it there. Better cite the other pics you posted.

Victor Brandon Dover

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Steve Mouzon This is such an outstanding series of comments that I'm tempted to turn it into a blog post, with full credit to everyone involved, of course. If anyone objects, please let me know and I'll adjust accordingly. If a lot of people object, I won't do it. But it seems a shame to let all this wisdom just get buried in the timeline where it'll soon be almost impossible to find. Thoughts?

Daniel Ashworth Jr. Sounds good to me!

Frank Starkey I think Manhattan succeeds in spite of its block sizes and street detailing, not because of them.

Mike Hathorne I concur

John Massengale Frank Starkey Manhattan has LOTS of room for improvement. As I said, three quarters of us don’t own cars. We need to transition to more recognition of that. Our cars are killing us and the planet.

Kevin Klinkenberg John Massengale there’s a lot to love about New York and Manhattan, but yes, it generally is vastly overrated from an urban design standpoint. It just has such phenomenal, abundant human life and a legacy transit system to overcome many flaws. Compared to many foreign cities, basically any Dutch city for example, it’s livability falls short on many levels. The avenues are pretty awful streets by and large, though obviously getting better.

John Massengale Kevin Klinkenberg After Move NY comes Slow NY http://bit.ly/nytnycsts

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Opinion | There Are Better Ways to Get Around Town

John Massengale

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John Massengale Kevin Klinkenberg

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Lloyd Alter It is a wretched dysfunctional place because of the one way streets, the whole urban pattern of New York is dumb. They should never have made the avenues one way, it ruined the city.

https://www.treehugger.com/.../instead-whining-about...

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Instead of whining about people who walk and bike breaking the law, how about fixing the problem?

Lloyd Alter Look at John Massengale s photo here https://www.treehugger.com/.../how-cars-have-squeezed...

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How cars have squeezed pedestrians off the streets and made it almost impossible to walk

Rob Steuteville There is more than one factor that creates a good or bad city. NYC has so many things that are good going for it. The automobile orientation of the avenues is both a necessary compromise and also can be absorbed into the overall dense, mixed-use city.

Rob Steuteville I had an article on one-way streets last week that includes the following qualification: "Although one-way systems can sometimes work well—particularly if there is a dense network of narrow streets—mostly these conversions greatly damaged downtowns by killing off retail and turning city streets into, essentially, surface highways, Speck writes." So, here's another question: How many cities have one-way streets that are unnecessary, and how much damage do they do to those cities?

Kirk Westphal Rob Great article! I was just going to reply to a comment above, “Chances are if the one-way conversion happened after 1950, it’s a bad one.”

Rob Steuteville Here'a link the article: https://www.cnu.org/.../cities-benefit-one-way-two-way...

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Cities benefit from restoring two-way traffic

Rob Steuteville And here's one more question with regard to New York. If NY one-way avenues did not have short blocks, small curb return radii, wide sidewalks, buildings up to the street, mixed-use, high-density, interesting variety of architecture, etc., how well would those one-way streets work?

Erik Bootsma It's worth noting that Victor Brandon Dover's examples are all narrow pedestrian streets. NYs avenues are as Lloyd Alter points out essentially auto sewers. NY has good street life everywhere other than the avenues. Park Ave is really unpleasant and 6th is worse.

Bill De St. Aubin Cars don’t matter in New York

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Thoughts? Please join in!

~Steve Mouzon

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Jul 22, 2019

If You Had The Mic, What Would You Say?

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All photos in this post are from the 2012 May Day rally in London’s Trafalgar Square not because there’s any connection between that rally and the one happening there today or elsewhere around the world, but because a colleague from London asked the question that is the title of this post and these are the only rally photos I have from there. Paul, these shots are for you and your daughter.
Here’s my response:

I have some really bad news. Did you come here today to demand that those in power make massive changes so that we can all keep living our hugely wasteful current lifestyles? If so, that has no real chance of working. There are three main things against us:

First, the biggest carbon-producing and carbon-consuming nations will never all agree to meaningful change and stick to those goals for the decades it’ll take to make a real difference. Remember when the UK committed to making every building carbon neutral by 2016? Everyone felt great about it for a few years until the construction industry lobbied government and that goal quietly went away. It’s not what happens today that matters; it’s the patterns of behavior that extend for decades. Today, you’ll hear a lot of politicians say “kids, we heard you. We’re making changes. And they might… for now. But their track record of sticking with those decisions for decades is abysmal.

Second, the earth is at 7 billion people on the way to 9 billion in just a few decades. How do we consume less with a couple billion more people? And also with billions of people in developing countries demanding the same high-consumption lifestyles the developed countries have?
And third, consumption per person is still climbing in the biggest-consuming nations. So if you came here today to demand that someone else fix our problems, it’s likely not going to happen. If that’s all we do, we’re all screwed.

But that’s not all we can do. What we can do to make things better dwarfs what they could do… if it's even possible to force them to, and to keep it going for all those decades until you’re my age. But we humans have proven time and again that we can make big changes. So if you really want to do real, lasting good beginning today, start making these changes yourselves, and demand these things from your parents, teachers, and neighbors because these are people who will actually listen to each of you as individuals.

1. Make a living where you’re living. Your parents may say “that’s impossible,” but the idea of living far from where you work is a new one, and humans for almost all of human history did this. Your parents, teachers, and neighbors might say “but we can make our transit more efficient.” More efficient transit is good. Not needing transit is far better. Millennials have figured this out: they find a cool place in a cool city and get a job nearby, unlike their Baby Boomer parents, who too often insist on living wherever they like, even if it means work is far away.

2. Live where you can walk to the grocery store, and to the pharmacy because wherever you find a grocery or a pharmacy, you’ll likely find most of your other daily needs as well. Here in the UK, that’s easy in most places. In the US where I’m from, it’s impossible in most places… for now. So we have a lot of work to do to convert our suburban sprawl to places where you can live, learn, work, and play.

3. Consume less stuff. Far less stuff. For almost all of human history, things were valued by how far they were handed down. Now, they’re valued by how quickly they’re used up. This only started about a century ago, when corporations realized they could get us to buy more of their stuff if it wore out faster, increasing their bottom lines. And along the way, they discovered many other ways to get us to consume more… including consuming more food. Did you know there’s no place on earth where obesity has peaked yet? And that your kids may be the first generation on earth where the majority have diabetes? Our over-consumption literally is killing us, and killing our planet. And some things, like plastic water bottles, plastic straws, and plastic grocery bags should never again be consumed at all. Take the pledge with me that we’ll never use these things again. Say NO to the big corporations and start using things that last again, like all our ancestors did. Recycling is good, but reuse is far better. Look at what the Minimalists are doing… unburdening yourself from all the things you’ve been sold by the big corporations is a huge step toward freedom, and spending more time with the things that matter most.

4. Make small possible. The big corporations which have driven so much consumption don’t like competition, especially from many small people, some of whom will have really disruptive ideas. Working from home should be a basic human right… work with your community to overturn laws that prevent it. Also overturn laws against really small businesses outside the home, like single-crew workplaces. Make it as easy as possible for someone with a great idea and passion, but little else, to get started. Microbusinesses are far more likely to do business locally and make the local economy more resilient instead of shipping stuff halfway around the world like the big multinational corporations do. Someday soon (or maybe even today) you’ll be the ones with great ideas to get out there… work with your communities to make sure the big boys don’t stand in your way.

5. Make stuff yourself. The freshest food is the food you grow yourself. But even if you don’t have a green thumb, make sure there’s a farmer’s market in your neighborhood to support local agriculture. Local food does so many good things for us, our communities, and the earth that I could go on for hours about it… but I won’t. Grow or support local food and you’ll see. But it isn’t just food… make sure there’s a maker space in your community where people can learn how to make things again. Support local craft. Anything you need to buy that’s made locally with materials for the region has a far better effect on the environment than things shipped in from abroad.

Do these five things in your community and you’ll be making an impact you can count on, that you can see, and that you don’t have to wait on. And yes, insist on others making changes as well. We really do need more renewable energy sources, which is something none of us can do individually, but the best thing is to need less energy… and that’s something each of us can do. Yes, more efficient shipping is good, but it’s far better not to need to ship as much stuff in. So don’t quit demanding that governments and corporations change, as you’re doing today, but realize that the biggest changes, by far, that can be made to benefit the earth and our future in it are the changes we make ourselves, and in our communities. It isn’t even close.

~Steve Mouzon

Mar 15, 2019

A New Proposal for Preservation

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Grand Central Station - the one that got away (unlike Penn Station)

Origins

The core problem that led to the modern preservation movement had been building since early in the Great Decline (1925-1945) and boiled over midway through the Dark Ages of Architecture (1945-1980) with the destruction of Penn Station. That problem was the fact that a new building replacing an older building increasingly became a downward trade as the twin abilities to build lovably and durably faded from both design and construction. There were several reasons for this that could be the topic of another post, but the fact that the severity of the downward trades increased in these years is incontrovertible.

It was not always so. For most of human history, the new building was reliably better than the one it replaced, mirroring the rise of urbanism from shantytowns to great cities over time. There are paintings of Washington DC in its early years, with shacks lining dirt streets and pigs wallowing in mud puddles. So the downward trade was largely a new phenomenon, and people didn’t handle it very well until after the loss of Penn Station.

Esteemed architectural historian Vincent Scully once said in his lament for Penn Station “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” Today, there is a movement afoot to demolish the wretched Madison Square Garden and rebuild Penn Station. This proposal highlights two issues fundamental to the nature of the preservation movement: the problem of time, and the problem of quality.

The Problem of Time

scuttling into New York like a rat at the abomination commonly known as Madison Square Garden

Madison Square Garden is now 51 years old. But does it deserve protection just because it’s over 50 years old? There is a bit of truth to the 50 year threshold in that most people naturally tend to dislike what was built by their parents’ generation; it’s arguably part of the general rebellion of youth that’s likely nature’s way of making sure we let them go when it’s time to leave the nest. It’s the grandchildren who are the first generation to give their predecessors’ work a fair shake. But that should only make a building a candidate for protection; it should by no means be a guarantee. And that leads to the closely-intertwined second problem:

The Problem of Quality

Boston City Hall - a building only an architect could love

How do we judge what deserves protection and what does not? By evaluating those twin attributes of lovability and durability. If a building can’t be loved, it won’t last. If it can, it needs to be durable enough to carry that lovability long into an uncertain future. A building should be strong on both attributes to be a candidate. For example, protecting a building that is highly lovable but built only to last for a few years would represent an unfair burden on the building owners to maintain the unmaintainable. A building broadly regarded to have an unusually strong blend of these two should be a candidate even before the 50-year threshold.

It is very important that architects not be allowed to dominate the evaluation process. Sadly, architecture schools have indoctrinated their students for nearly a century to both design and appreciate the unlovable. Boston City Hall, for example, is still high-regarded by architects, even while Bostonians other than architects have reviled it since the beginning. It is crucial that the evaluation process generally represents the will of the people above the will of the architects.

Cool Factor

quickest eye test for cool factor: it’s where the people are

In the US, the predominant character of the place tends to be low, with only a few areas having a fabric of buildings that rise to the level of strong lovability and durability. These tend to be the places with the greatest “cool factor.” One good way to test for cool factor is to ask “where do the tourists go when they come to town to enjoy the town instead of a special event?” There are a few places where the general fabric of the city has strong cool factor, such as Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans in the South. Places with widespread cool factor tend to be national and even international destinations.

Evaluation System

The binary on/off switch of contributing/not contributing is far too blunt an instrument to properly evaluate the buildings of “cool factor districts,” or “historic districts,” if you prefer. I prefer “cool factor district” because the real core question isn’t “how old is it,” but “how good is it?” Until we can say “this is better than that,” we have no tools to end the downward trades. In the interest of this, I’d propose this more fine-grained evaluation system:

Historically Contributing

This classification is essentially identical to the current definition. The loss of these buildings would negatively affect the historic character of the block.

Architecturally Contributing

These buildings are architecturally important to the block with character defining mass and scale but undetermined historical importance. These structures are important building blocks of the whole and should be preserved as appropriate after careful consideration from the local authority.

Urbanistically Contributing

These buildings fit into their environment and meet the street in such a way as to contribute to the overall composition of the block, but their architecture is mediocre at best. They could be re-skinned or the rear of the buildings could be rebuilt.

Urban Fabric

Buildings that make up the urban fabric are the most numerous (hence “fabric”) in a district or neighborhood. Technically, in outstanding historic districts, much or all of the fabric buildings (relatively speaking) also contribute to the character of the district and should therefore be preserved because the tradition that once lived and begat these buildings produced a fabric of buildings that were at least urbanistically and usually architecturally contributing as well. But in places built during and after the Great Decline, the living traditions died and the industrial development system that took over left a fabric of buildings that were not even urbanistically contributing. So in these places, fabric buildings do not fall to the level of Regrettable, but should not be protected so that someday, they may give way to an upward trade to a building that is both urbanistically and architecturally contributing.

Regrettable

These buildings detract from the whole and could be demolished and rebuilt within the character of the cool factor district so long as they are replaced with buildings that are a significant upward trade both urbanistically and architecturally. An equal trade is not worth undertaking.

Someday...

Cabbagetown

In the end, the most important question should always be “is this an upward trade?” If not, the exchange should not take place. Recovering places like Cabbagetown built mostly before the modern industrial construction system fully took over after World War II have an urban fabric that is both urbanistically and architecturally contributing to the place, so upward trades there focus more on fixing up what the neighborhood already has, which should be a core upward trade in every recovering place: trading dilapidation for refreshing.

The hope for every place is that if the cool factor districts, even if very small at the present time, can be made to thrive and even flourish, they may even influence other parts of the town or city so that someday, much of the fabric of the place can build strong cool factor, transforming the place from one people want to leave into one where people want to come and visit for awhile. With many upward trades, this can happen. In fact, it’s the only way it ever happens in most places. So trade up.

~Steve Mouzon

PS: Build strong Walk Appeal on your streets and it will encourage more upward trades in the buildings lining the streets.

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Mar 12, 2019

2018

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:59:57 -0600

How Living Traditions Learn From Mistakes

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A living tradition is the best mistake-correction system ever developed in architecture by a large margin, and the reason why is simple math: a living tradition engages an entire society to varying degrees in the design of its buildings, activating everyone with four simple words: “we do this because…” When you empower many to think, you get many possible better ways of doing things. Think of it as crowd-sourcing architectural wisdom.

This is nowhere more obvious than on what I call the Caribbean Rim, where the climate, conditions, and culture are a gumbo of heat, humidity, and hurricanes seasoned withAfrican, English, French, and Spanish cultural influences. Here’s how it worked:

If you were fortunate enough to survive a hurricane in 1725, but your house was unfortunate enough not to, when you crawled out of the wreckage of your house and saw your neighbor’s house still standing, you undoubtedly would have said “I’m gonna rebuild like that! Simply put, the wisdom of living traditions was hard-won. It was a significant part of the act of survival.

Today, “tradition” has a bad rap in architectural circles. It is considered to be a set of handcuffs, restraining architects’ creativity. And depending on how you approach it, the architects may be exactly right.

Many traditionalists approach architecture as a test of taste. They regulate on the basis of “thou shalt do this because I have better taste than you.” “No you don’t!” “Yes I do!” Repeat endlessly. I have served as a Town Architect since the mid-1990s, doing somewhere close to 10,000 individual reviews during that time. I tried all the normal ways first… long enough to find how they failed. And then I came up with another method where I sit down face-to-face with the designer and builder and explain everything on a foundation of principles rather than taste. “We do this because…” And in all those years, I can count on one hand the number of times someone has left the room in substantial disagreement.

Simply put, principles are the friend of the architect, the builder, and the owner. Once the basic principles of how best to build in this place are established, everyone is free to thing, create, and develop the best solutions for them.

This is one of the core foundations of A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas]. I just finished the second edition, and the totally rewritten first and last chapters contain answers to questions I’ve had for years, if not decades. If you have the new edition or pick it up anytime soon, I’d really love to hear what you think about these new ideas!

~Steve Mouzon

One more thing… I’m delighted to be participating in a blogoff again! This one is ArchiTalks, organized by Lora Teagarden, and this week's topic is learning from mistakes. I’ll update the links tomorrow as more posts come online. Enjoy the reads!

Lee Calisti, AIA - Think Architect (@LeeCalisti)
some kind of mistake

Lora Teagarden - L² Design, LLC (@L2DesignLLC)
Learning from mistakes in architecture

Eric T. Faulkner - Rock Talk (@wishingrockhome)
Archi-scar - That Will Leave a Mark!

Michele Grace Hottel - Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
"Learning from Mistakes..."

Brian Paletz - The Emerging Architect (@bpaletz)
Forgotten Mistakes

Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
Are Architects Experts?

Keith Palma - Architect's Trace (@cogitatedesign)
A, B, C, D, E...

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Learning from Mistakes

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
Learning from mistakes

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The Water Will Come

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Sea level rise is considered a distant problem by millions today; either distant in years, distant in miles, or both, but they are greatly mistaken. I’ve just finished the book The Water Will Come, much of which is set in Miami Beach, where I live. For Wanda and I, the problem is here, and now. I remember the king tides in the fall of 2013, when I recorded South Beach at Sea Level, and I’ve worked with local leaders on ways we might adapt. And the decisions we make as a city today will determine whether we survive in the future, including decisions that allow us to preserve the character of this place that attracts people today from around the world.

Not every coastal town will survive. Actually, most will not. And the terms of retreat will have a great influence on whether the impact across America is orderly, or whether we descend into chaos, or whether it’s something in between. But make no mistake: when thousands, then soon millions of people begin to retreat from the places that cannot be saved, that great migration will affect all parts of this country, not just the coastlines.

I was a participant at the CNU Climate Summit in Alexandria last fall, and drew up a proposal for the real estate end game which is laid out below. The key point is that not every place is the same, and so what those places do to adapt will vary greatly.

Elevate & Harden

Miami Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive

Some places have enough money to adapt in place by raising and hardening. Miami Beach is likely to be one of them. I’ve been involved in the conversation there as noted above, so this is a report from the front lines, not just a guess.

Choice Criteria

The degree of sea level rise is uncertain, of course. City leaders in Miami Beach have aggregated sea level rise projections and are now adapting for their best guess of what would still work a century from now. The choice is a local choice, made by the city and not by larger entities.

Measures

Miami Beach is raising streets; the lowest streets that have had the worst sunny-day flooding are being raised as much as 42”. The elevation tapers to zero near the middle of the island where the natural grade is this much higher. Water and sewer lines are being raised and upgraded on streets that are rising, and the new storm sewers drain to huge underground detention tanks on the West side of the island, from which water is pumped out into the bay. Unfortunately, this leaves the buildings in a hole. Buildings are already flooding as storm drains inevitably clog. To date, the city has been able to plead with insurance to pay for the flooding, making the case that it was a rare event cause by an incomplete tank-and-pump system. It is not. Buildings inevitably will have to elevate. Short buildings can elevate easily; tall buildings can give up their second level and move their ground floor up a level. There may be a “sour spot” of maybe 4 or 5 to 12, 13, 14, or 15 stories where the buildings are too tall to elevate but for which it is not economically feasible to give up a floor. These at-risk buildings are often some of the iconic Art Deco buildings which are a huge source of tourism, and some local architects are salivating at the chance to destroy them and replace them with their own ego towers. If the architects succeed and do not respect the character of what they are replacing, it could be economically crippling to the city to go from being a world-class center of Art Deco to just another beach town with a random collection of architectural styles du jour.

Financing

We have no illusions that anyone is going to bail us out. Fortunately, the math is pretty simple, because insurance premiums decrease the higher buildings are elevated above BFE. With insurance rate trends now, the payback on elevation is probably a decade or less. The absolutely critical key is to get the insurance companies to lay out what the premiums will be at various levels of elevation so that people can make informed decisions. Without this, the entire process will fail.

Tools

Because there is financial incentive for elevating higher, pattern books are needed to deal with the private frontage conditions created by elevation. In all likelihood, buildings will elevate higher than streets, creating different conditions than exist today.

Precedent

Galveston elevated both streets and buildings to above the 17’ elevation of the new seawall after the hurricane that remains the deadliest in US history. Many buildings were wood frame, but some were masonry as well, including a large church building. Chicago elevated many blocks of urbanism near the river in the late 19th century because of flooding and disease. They raised both streets and buildings, creating “Underground Chicago,” which is largely used for parking today. Most often, they were elevated a block at a time to avoid the problem of party wall buildings. They were elevated with screw jacks operated by human labor to the beat of a drum to keep the progress equal all down the block. They usually did so without cracking a window pane anywhere in the block, and one landmark hotel was elevated while still being occupied by guests every night! Underground Atlanta did not elevate the buildings, but began by building a series of bridges at the second level which were later connected to form continuous streets. Shopfronts were moved to the new street level and the old street level space was first used for storage, then became an entertainment district complete with speakeasies during prohibition. It remains an entertainment district today, but is currently closed for renovations. Bay Village is a small Boston neighborhood at the southeast corner of Back Bay that began flooding badly when Back Bay was filled, as much of the Back Bay runoff flowed across Bay Village. Almost all of Bay Village is masonry bearing wall construction from the early 19th century and earlier. It was elevated 23'-26’ using manually-operated screw jacks in the mid-19th century, much like Chicago a few years later.

Individual to Receiving City via Insurance

Detroit, given up for dead for decades, could be a classic receiving city.

This may be the most commonly-used method. It will be the most gradual and orderly method, and will likely happen over a number of years in most places. At best, this method compensates homeowners a maximum of $250,000 by flood insurance plus whatever price they can get for their flooded home.

Choice Criteria

In the wake of repeated insurance rate hikes in places not wealthy enough to elevate & harden, individuals will realize that it’s simply too expensive for them to live in this place any longer, and will choose to move elsewhere. This will work best in the early years, when there are still buyers for the real estate being vacated, albeit at reduced rates. Later, when there are no more buyers for anything higher than just the land value, this may become more chaotic, especially once cities can no longer afford to service the flooding areas.

Measures

In order to walk away from their home, there needs to be a broadly-understood narrative that compares their cost of ownership all those years with the cost of renting. If someone can say “I would have spent more renting than what I spent owning,” then it makes it easier to walk away.

Financing

Even if they wait long enough that their property is widely recognized as being uninhabitable, there will likely be some uses for the land that gives it some value, so they may be able to sell it for something like a rice farm, which is expected to be flooded part of the year. The more likely transaction is to a developer looking to aggregate properties to the point they can elevate and harden the property for some use, whether resort or industrial. In short, they may be able to sell out at a steep loss, but leave with some cash in their pockets beyond the insurance proceeds.

Tools

There will likely be sites and apps aggregating cities looking to attract sea level rise refugees, and laying out their proposals. “Our deal is better than Detroit’s deal, and here’s why.” At the very least, the move itself should be covered. One aspect of the sites and apps is that they should tag trades and skills the places are looking for, so a grocer or a metalworker could decide where they’re most needed. Another essential tool will be the single-crew workplace, as the refugees are unlikely to be able to set up their new operations at the scale of their old. Single-crew workplaces can operate from tiny quarters such as food carts and retail shacks such as Perspicasity at Seaside, where those humble plywood boxes are so beloved that the Town Founders have been unable until now to remove them and replace them with something more substantial. Without single-crew workplaces, many refugees would not be able to set up in business again. Receiving cities must therefore have codes which allow single-crew workplaces in temporary quarters, at least in Receiving Zones. Many Katrina Cottage principles will be in play here, allowing people to regain a foothold in their new home with a tiny footprint which they can expand later.

Precedent

Seaside, Florida is the birthplace of the New Urbanism and also the best precedent in our time for a broad spectrum of temporary structures. Single-crew workplaces exist all across the developing world, especially along the Caribbean Rim.

Individual to Receiving City
via Government Order

Serious protests will likely lead to worse things in relocation by government order.

This may be a common method as well, but will be more disruptive than the methods above. See New Orleans ex-mayor Ray Nagin’s proposal to abandon the Lower 9th Ward, and the firestorm that ensued, prompting him to withdraw it 24 hours later. Telling people they cannot come back home is one of the most difficult things a politician will ever attempt.

Choice Criteria

This is a mandate by the city, the state, or the federal government. The individual property owner has no choice under this model.

Measures

The first measure is likely martial law, without which there could be a revolution, depending on how broadly the evacuations are ordered. If several cities in one region are evacuated, a revolution is likely; if statewide or broader, count on it. Beyond that, there must be a strong story-telling initiative of the renting-vs.-owning narrative described above.

Financing

The ordering entity must bring truckloads of cash, or the revolution may proceed anyway, even if it’s only ordered in a city or two. Of all methods, this will be the most expensive, and will likely get tied up in the courts for years as countless homeowners sue the government.

Tools

First, bring force because this method could get out of hand and quickly turn ugly. Beyond that, the government issuing the order needs to be actively promoting the story-telling and the relocation apps, and should probably be prepared to help the receiving cities with mobile structures for dwellings and single-crew workplaces in their new hometowns. The ordering entity should also be prepared to provide refugees with food for their journeys and some colder-weather clothing for the long term, as most migration will be northward.

Precedent

Antigua Guatemala (the old Guatemala City) was hit with an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, and a flood within about 15 minutes in 1773. The earthquake/eruption shattered the volcano's crater, which held a lake, hence the flood. The government deemed the city cursed and ordered everyone to leave for the current Guatemala City, under penalty of death. Some did not comply, of course, and hid in the ruins for decades, subsisting on avocados, hence their nickname “panza verde,” or “green bellies.” This will happen in our day as well.

Neighborhood to Receiving City
via Insurance

Tight-knit, low-lying, low-budget community

Some neighborhoods, because of their family and civic bonds, may elect to move together to a receiving city when their homes become uninsurable.

Choice Criteria

Neighborhood and family elders will make the decision to leave on economic issues centered on insurance price hikes.

Measures

This will be one of the most orderly evacuations and require the fewest imposed measures, because the decision to leave will have been made by the elders. The renting-vs.-owning storytelling will be a strong measure, imposed by the most trusted members of the neighborhood.

Financing

The financial model will be similar to that of Individual to Receiving City via Insurance: a combination of insurance proceeds and real estate sales at much-reduced prices. And to make matters better, community elders are likely to negotiate better deals with the receiving city than any individual could.

Tools

The tools should be largely the same as Individual to Receiving City via Insurance, with the immediately preceding caveat about the better negotiated deal.

Precedent

I don’t know of an entirely parallel precedent, but study the migration of entire rural communities from Kentucky to Ohio in the 1950s seeking work. My mother’s family was from rural eastern Kentucky and the entire immediate family moved to suburbs of Cleveland in this era (but without the help of insurance).

Neighborhood to Receiving City
via Government Order

This will be like Individual to Receiving City via Government Order, but much more orderly because the government entity will negotiate the departure with community elders, who will then persuade the community as a whole. Also, because the neighborhood will be moving largely intact, it will seem less disrupted in its new home than individuals would be moving alone. The downside is that because they are moving as a large group, that is likely to be disruptive to their new hometown unless it is a place like Detroit with large abandoned areas.

Individual to New Town
via Insurance or Government Order

DPZ CoDesign Bento Cabins

This method will invoke the most New Urbanist tools and techniques, and this may be more common than is generally assumed today. The standard narrative is that governments at all levels will be financially stressed by sea level rise refugees and will be less likely to fund the construction of new towns, but new towns in the US have only rarely been built by government anyway. They have almost always been built in this country by private town founders.

There is a very different dynamic in play with new towns versus receiving cities. A receiving city is one which has experienced failure of some sort in the past, and therefore has underinhabited areas available to receive sea level rise refugees. Detroit is the iconic receiving city. A new town, on the other hand, is emblematic of a fresh start. Some people are more drawn to places with long histories and established culture; others are drawn to places fresh and new, but with most of their cultural assets not yet built.

For most of American history, the inaugural condition of a new town was dirt streets lined with tents, until the people could build log cabins, sod huts, or some other humble dwelling to seriously get started with their new life. Fortunately, we’ve moved a bit beyond those early American starting point, and some really smart people are working on some cool alternatives. DPZ was one of the founders of the New Urbanism, and Andrés Duany and friends at DPZ have been spending most of the last couple years designing a series of mobile dwellings such as the Bento Cabins shown above which can easily be used to found a new town or to reinhabit parts of a receiving city.

Choice Criteria

An individual or family could choose to move to a new town over a receiving city for reasons as varied as they are. The only commonality I anticipate is that the appeal of a fresh start in a new place could make the move easier emotionally to those moving, so they may be less predisposed to be part of the uprising that will take place in many places evacuated by government order. The better the founding stories of the new towns, the easier the move may be. Governments ordering evacuations should take note, and do everything they can to help the new towns succeed. As a matter of fact, the success of the new towns may play as large a role as any in limiting violence due to sea level rise.

Measures

The strongest story-telling measures will come from the destination town, not the departure town. As with other migrations, the renting-versus-owning departure narrative must be strong, but that should be outweighed by the story of the new town, which can and should be powerful, in large part because the new place hasn’t screwed up anything yet.

Financing

Because this process works best with more financially solvent refugees, new arrivals are more likely to have significant assets than those of other migrations. This bodes well for the relative success of the new towns.

Tools

The apps and sites mentioned above will be helpful, but due to the scale of the new towns versus the much larger receiving cities, the appeals to certain trades, skills, and businesses can be more precise. “We need a grocer” is more impactful than “we need a few more grocers,” and more likely to get a grocer to move there.

Precedent

This is what happened in almost every US frontier town of the 19th Century. We’ve done this before; we can do it again. That was the westward expansion; this is the inward expansion.

Old Town to New Town

New town shops and dwellings that don’t start as mobile structures should still start small so as to not burden the financially stressed people moving there from their old town.

This method is rare, and requires the most work, as the governance of the new town must be set up in advance in the new place by the leaders of the old town, who must have agency in the new place.

Choice Criteria

The choice to move from an old oceanfront town to a new inland town is a decision made by the city leaders, who then persuade their citizens (or at least the great majority of them) to make the move with them.

Measures

The story-telling here must be heroic in order to succeed. Enticing individuals from coastal places all over to a new town is easy compared to the much taller task of persuading the great majority of the residents of a particular place to move to a new town somewhere else. But the benefits of maintaining cultural connections and supportive friendships is great, so this method should be encouraged.

Financing

Because the town moves largely intact, the business owners and employees largely retain their original roles in the new place.

Tools

Fewer of the tools above are needed here, because there is less disruption of connections. The grocer here will be the grocer there, for example. The big difference will be the fact that pretty much everyone will be impoverished by the move, and so lean urbanism tools like single-crew workplaces will be important to allow people to restart their lives, but at a smaller scale.

Precedent

I haven’t found confirmation yet, but I believe that Anderson, Indiana was founded by people from a Tennessee town which picked up en masse and migrated there.

~Steve Mouzon

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Planting Seeds of Better Design

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If you want to have the most sustainable healing impact on our damaged built environment, the architectural ideal of the lone genius isn’t the best way to go about it. If you have a choice between becoming that lone creative genius yourself and helping many others do better work, then by all means choose the latter.

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are the two highest icons of this approach in my experience. Once, they were partners in Arquitectonica, a high-profile Miami firm doing unusually good work that changed the face of South Florida and helped transform Miami from the decrepit victim of the Mariel boatlift into arguably the most glamorous city on this continent. Yet what they did post-Arquitectonica at their firm DPZ dwarfs their previous work because they learned this simple lesson: you can do far more good by helping many do better work than just by doing better work yourself. And so they opened doors for many and propelled them into realms they never could have previously imagined. Wanda and I are two such beneficiaries of their generosity.

But Andrés and Lizz would have never found us had we not found a way to move in this direction ourselves. It all began with the conversation with Wanda in a grocery store parking lot mentioned in the last post. From that point, I began thinking of things we could create once and distribute to many. The following are some of those tools and resources:

Stock House Plans

I had been taught that it is disgraceful to design anything without knowing the intricacies of the site. So designing a stock house plan must surely be akin to architectural malpractice. But at some point, I read where 97% or so of the homes built in the US are built from stock plans, not custom designs. If that is so, is it not our responsibility to try to help elevate the level of stock plan design? Wanda and I thought so, and looked into several outlets, eventually settling on Southern Living, the most reputable source of good stock design in the region, populated frequently by New Urbanist plans.

Our first design, Ash Lawn, was our homage to Jefferson’s Monticello and opened many doors for us in 1996. We continued to design new plans pro bono for a year or so, until we built a good enough body of work that people started seeking us out… and some of those plans ended up on the Plan of the Month page as well.

Town Architect

A Town Architect is someone who reviews other people’s designs in a neighborhood or town to ensure that all the buildings are neighborly, and that the vision of the place is carried on. The first place to use our plans was one I was able to steer in the direction of the New Urbanism, and it became the first TND (traditional neighborhood development) in town. They soon hired me to be the Town Architect there, and I continue to serve as Town Architect in several places. I quickly discovered that we can do far more good this way. Working as an architect myself, I can get one excellent design out per month if it’s small and simple and I do nothing else. But working as a Town Architect, I can help dozens of designs get better in a number of places. To me, the balance of benefits is not even in question.

Seven years into my Town Architect career, I had tried every method except the Resident Town Architect, in large part because I couldn’t afford to live in the places where I worked. Every method had flaws. But I kept tinkering with it until I came up with the method I use now, where I come once per month and sit across the table from the designer, builder, and owner (if it’s not being built speculatively) and lay out the principles of getting stuff right, not just the particulars of where they got stuff wrong. This has proved to be a huge boost to starting a new living tradition of architecture, which is the ultimate tool for planting seeds of better design. And it all works on the basis of “we do this because…"

Catalog of the Most-Loved Places

In the late 1990s, I had a debate with another Town Architect about a window detail, and he wasn’t persuaded. It was Friday afternoon, so I took off on a photo safari to get some pictures that might help. But somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that it might be useful to shoot every house in the neighborhood. When I returned home, I shot the downtown historic district throughout the weekend, and by Monday morning, the Catalog of the Most-Loved Places was underway. For several years, I just shot great places for my own benefit for some time, but then it occurred to me that others might find the images useful as well. When Andrés Duany came to town in 2002 to design the Village of Providence (where I have served as Town Architect almost ever since), the Catalog seemed to be one of the items with which he was most enamored, which led to a collabortion spanning almost two decades at this point.

Traditional Construction Details & Patterns

That first place to use our plans was nerve-wracking, due to a development partner who has long since gone elsewhere. The landowners were complete gentlemen. But the other guys were allowing all sorts of ostentatious stuff, and so I knew I had to do something to steer the place back to the original vision. I developed a collection of construction details to help steer the place, and in the interest of expanding the collection, I bought a set of details from McGraw-Hill. When I got it, my response was “our stuff is a lot better than this,” so I called them up and told them. Their acquisitions editor said “you can send me your stuff if you like, but I can’t guarantee I’ll ever look at it.” I FedExed it anyway, for morning delivery. At 10:10, she called and said “you weren’t kidding… this is great stuff. We’d like to publish you!”

And so they did, first digitally, then in a book of 1001 details that was as thick as War & Peace. A few years later, they published Traditional Construction Patterns, which remains a bestseller on Amazon to this day. Those books opened a secret door: we discovered that if you’re an author, you get all sorts of respect you never got before, even though you’re the same person you always were. Everyone should put their life’s work out there, where it can benefit others.

The New Urban Guild

Nathan Norris and I founded the Architects’ Guild in 2001, and he encouraged me to rebrand it myself as the New Urban Guild when concerns came up over the fact that not every architect is an architect in all states. The Guild approached the problem of better design from the supply side: if we designers working in the traditional neighborhoods of the New Urbanism could get together and share what we knew, we should get better at what we do, right? And it worked out that way; I’m a much better architect today as a result of working side-by-side with these rare talents.

Living Tradition Pattern Books

We began writing architectural pattern books starting nearly twenty years ago. Originally, they were all style-based, which meant they were based on a random collection of historical styles the developer thought would sell well. And while they did improve the quality of the architecture markedly, they had a big problem: If you use a style-based pattern book to replicate a historical style today, and use it again in fifty years, you’ll get the same result. But anyone with a copy of an architectural history book like Bannister Fletcher’s can easily see that architecture has always evolved over time, like a living thing. So that type of pattern book had no power to bring architecture back to life.

I worked on this dilemma for years, and discussed it with the top pattern book experts. Nobody had answers. But finally a fortuitous conversation unlocked a mystery I had carried with me since the day after Thanksgiving, 1980. Here’s the full story. The answer was quite simple, and bound up in just four words: “we do this because…” If every pattern in a pattern book begins by saying what to do, then explaining why, it gives everyone working on designs the license to think again, rather than just following a recipe. And so architecture can take on a life of its own again and spread, long after the pattern book author is gone.

But in order to be able to explain why we build the way we build here, you can’t use random styles. Instead, you have to tease out what is the most indigenous and sustainable architecture of the region, from rural to urban and from vernacular to classical. Only then does “we do this because…” have a chance at deep meaning.

Our most notable book to date is A Living Tradition [Architecture of The Bahamas], which won a charter award from the Congress for the New Urbanism just after its release a decade ago. I’m delighted that we finished the second edition earlier this year. The meat of the book (the patterns) have been freshened a bit, but the first and last chapters have been entirely rewritten, and are filled with things I’ve been trying to figure out for years. If you’re interested, here’s where you can find it on Amazon.

Thanks in advance for your interest in the book! And if you get one, please let me know what you think!

~Steve Mouzon

One more thing… I’m delighted to be participating in a blogoff again! This one is ArchiTalks, organized by Lora Teagarden, and this week's topic is designing for others. I’ll update the links tomorrow as more posts come online. Enjoy the reads!

Lee Calisti, AIA - Think Architect (@LeeCalisti)
designing for others – how hard could it be?

Michele Grace Hottel - Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
"designing for others"

Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
How To Design for Others

Keith Palma - Architect's Trace (@cogitatedesign)
Just say no

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Designing for Others

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
Designing for others

Anne Lebo - The Treehouse (@anneaganlebo)
Designing for people

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The Living Tradition of Harbour Island
Walk Appeal

A Strange Career Path

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An old-style selfie… the Photoshop version. And that’s Sally on the right, on the first day I met her when Wanda brought her home from North Carolina.

Most architects chart their own path, but Wanda has changed my career path on so many occasions that it’s almost more her story than it is mine. We got married after my first year in architecture school, and while it seems unthinkable judging from pictures of us like the one above, she already had advanced degrees (microbiology and bacteriology) before I graduated from high school… due in part to the fact that she was really smart and graduated early.

But in any case, Wanda would entertain herself in the evenings by coming down to the studio where we were all slaving away on our projects, and got intimately acquainted with what an architecture education was all about. She showed up at all my juries that occurred when she was off work, and eventually asked me this question: “In all branches of biology, and indeed of all science, there are standards to which ideas must measure up, otherwise they are discounted. At their core is the scientific method. Buy you guys in your juries do better or worse seemingly based solely on who is the best debater. Why is that? Is there no standard in architecture by which you can say ‘this is better than that?’”

I had no answer. Nor did my professors. They all talked about genius, creativity, and freedom of expression, but only once in my academic career did I have any conversations with a professor who even hinted at anything that could be considered standards of goodness in the built environment. That professor was Dan Woodfin, who just retired from Ball State this year. He was my thesis advisor and a big advocate of pattern languages. I was fortunate to meet the author of the idea, Christopher Alexander, briefly many years later just after creating his Athena Medal graphic from a bronze casting at the Congress for the New Urbanism. I remain good friends with one of his close colleagues, Michael Mehaffy, to this day. The idea of languages of patterns have been invaluable to me throughout my career, and lies at the foundation of the idea of living traditions.

But back to Wanda. On the day after Thanksgiving 1980 she and I were at my parent’s home in Huntsville, Alabama. We had eaten too much the day before, so she and I, along with my sister Susan and her boyfriend at the time, ventured out to Mooresville, Alabama to walk off some turkey because Huntsville was completely unwalkable in those years. I’ve told this story several times on this blog, most recently here, but I’ve told it as my questions to myself. In reality, Wanda was asking several of the questions as I recall it now. “Steve, your professors tell you you’re the greatest generation of architects ever because you have computers and your builders have bigger power tools, but how could these simple farmers and tradespeople have built a better town in 1818 than the best of you can today? I had no answer. But I took the mystery home with me, feeding it and watering it until the answer opened up almost a quarter-century later.

A year after that Thanksgiving, we were lying in bed about to go to sleep when she asked me a question that again rocked my career: “Why is it that you refuse to design anything that anyone else I love would love?” “Do I?” “Of course!” “How do you know?” “Have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture?” “No, our professors tell us that we should educate our clients!” “Well, if you’d listen to some of them, you might actually learn something!” And so that began a decades-long quest to try to figure out what non-architects actually love, and why. Along the way, I discovered that lovability is actually the first foundation of sustainable architecture. If it can’t be loved, it won’t last.

I could go on for hours with all the ways Wanda has redirected my career path, but this post would be far too long. Here’s just one more: We were standing in the parking lot of a grocery store in the late 1990s when she said “in the medical profession, I see many doctors who live lavish lifestyles, but when they retire, they have nothing left to sell because the only thing they ever had to sell was their time. And if they keep up that lifestyle, they very quickly come to poverty. You could do the same. You should instead think of creating tools useful to many people which you can build once and sell many times. And over the two decades since, that is exactly what we have done. At our core, we are now tool-makers, hoping to build things that will benefit many people we will never meet, in places we may never go, both during our lifetimes and beyond our time. That’s our hope, and we’re sticking to it.

~Steve Mouzon

One more thing… I’m delighted to be participating in a blogoff again! This one is ArchiTalks, organized by Lora Teagarden, and this week's topic is career path. I’ll update the links tomorrow as more posts come online. Enjoy the reads!

Jeff Echols - Architect Of The Internet (@Jeff_Echols)
Well, How Did I Get Here (Again)

Lee Calisti, AIA - Think Architect (@LeeCalisti)
a paved but winding career path

Eric T. Faulkner - Rock Talk (@wishingrockhome)
Career - The News Knows

Michele Grace Hottel - Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
#architalks 41 "Career Path"

Brian Paletz - The Emerging Architect (@bpaletz)
A Winding Path

Drew Paul Bell - Drew Paul Bell (@DrewPaulBell)
Career Path

Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
Career Path of an Architect (And Beyond)

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Career Path(s)

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
Career Path

Actually, there’s another “one more thing” … Walk Appeal is the book Wanda and I are working on now. Please feel free to subscribe for updates!

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A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas]
Catalog of the Most-Loved Places
Friends of the Residency
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Mouzon Images
My Traditional Neighborhood Home
New Media for Designers + Builders
Original Green
Outdoor Room Design
Sprawl Recovery
The Living Tradition of Harbour Island
Walk Appeal

Fathers Day for Architects - The Empty Seat

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I suspect most of my colleagues writing in this blogoff will have really happy, uplifting things to say about Fathers Day and architecture, but I have a different, darker view… but also a way to change it for the better, at the end. See the empty seat in this long-ago photo? That was mine. But I bailed out of our family vacation at the last minute because I had too many pressing deadlines, so Wanda took Sam and David anyway, leaving me to satisfy my clients’ demands. Simply put, this profession can eat you up, and leave you with many regrets.

The architect I worked for after graduation lamented that he felt badly about the fact that he worked so hard in the early years of his career. “I feel like I never got to know my daughter,” he said repeatedly. But when the deadlines came, he pushed us all just as hard, and the fact that we had been conditioned to long hours in school with all the all-nighters meant that it was far too easy to fall into the trap of 80-hour weeks when the deadlines came. And when I opened my own firm in 1991, 80-hour weeks became my new normal, as that’s what I averaged over the course of each early year. Eventually, that grew to a 90-hour average about the time this photo was taken, and the last three years I kept timesheets I was averaging over a hundred hours per week. So in those years, I was pretty much an absentee father, and nothing will ever give me those years back with my kids.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Answers could range from the culture of the profession to the pressure we feel due to under-valuing of the profession to many other things, but I believe there’s also a dark underlying motivation nobody talks about: the necessity of uniqueness. For most of history, the high standard in architecture was excellence. But beginning in the late 1920s to early 1930s, that standard was displaced by a new high standard of uniqueness. If you wanted to be significant, you must be unique. I believe this was driven in part by the ascendency of Modernism and its love of the new, but also by the rise of the modern architectural press, which was seeking novel things to publish, not just the same old stuff from last year.

The necessity of uniqueness is welcomed by the rare geniuses who are able to crank out excellent unique things in a steady stream. But it’s a recipe for failure for everyone else. Unfortunately, almost all academies base their teaching on the premise that they will educate the next Frank Gehry. So what actually happens in school is a curious dance of deception. A normal student usually did their best work when they were ripping off something a master had done. And because of the necessity of uniqueness, there was a vast store of published work to choose from. I remember the game. Whenever someone did something particularly well-executed, we all set about on a frantic search to find the original in recent magazines from which it had been plagiarized, all while the student was asserting it was a unique creation.

There was one guy who was different; he made no mistake that he was a huge fan of Richard Meier, and ripped him off regularly. One Sunday afternoon, I remember him coming into the studio and laughing at us all… “you bunch of fools! You’ve been slaving away all weekend, haven’t you? And you’ll probably pull an all-nighter tonight to get done for the jury tomorrow, won’t you? Watch what I do!” And he sat down and in about 4 hours had produces a competent Meier ripoff. And got an A the next day. Because speaking in a known language is immeasurably easier than trying to create your own new language. Every. Single. Time.

I believe that if we want to take our family lives back, and actually be good parents as architects, we really must discard this ridiculous necessity of uniqueness the profession has been burdened with for nearly a century. Children of future generations of architects will thank us for making this break from the recent past.

The wisest and most effective way to do this is to seek out the most sustainable architecture of your region and begin working in that language of architecture. Much of it was probably worked out by the old folks before the Thermostat Age, so this is not something you’ll have to completely invent yourself. But if you learn why they did what they did, then you’ll be able to follow those principles to update the architecture, because some of today’s needs didn’t exist several generations ago. So architecture can take on a life of its own and live again, evolving to be the most current architecture of the day, but based on principles instead of just raw novelty.

Wanda and I have dedicated ourselves in recent years to building tools that help others do better work rather than pushing to do more design ourselves. When you work within known languages of architecture, it is easy to build tools many others can use because we use the same “words,” or patterns, of the language. For example, we’re about to publish a broad and deep collection of SketchUp components for southeastern US languages of architecture, and another for the architecture of the Bahamas. I’ll blog on that when it goes live.

In a world where the sharing economy is so strong in so many other realms, why should architects not be allowed to share? Let’s give up this harmful necessity of uniqueness that has caused so much neglect of our families for so long, and speak in known architectural languages. The public realm will benefit greatly but the greatest beneficiaries will be our children.

~Steve Mouzon

This is a Blogoff by some of the same characters who bring you #ArchiTalks each month. My colleagues’ posts are here:

Jeremiah Russell, AIA - ROGUE Architecture (@rogue_architect)
Happy Fathers Day #archidads

Eric T. Faulkner - Rock Talk (@wishingrockhome)
The Dad -- The Architect

Brian Paletz - The Emerging Architect (@bpaletz)
#Archidad - A modern approach

Rusty Long - Rusty Long, Architect (@rustylong)
Life as an Archidad

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Being ArchiDad

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
ArchiDad

Larry Lucas - Lucas Sustainable, PLLC (@LarryLucasArch)
A Daddy Architects Work Life Blur and My Escape

Jared W. Smith - Architect OWL (@ArchitectOWL)
ArchiDad on Father's Day

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A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas]
Catalog of the Most-Loved Places
Friends of the Residency
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My Traditional Neighborhood Home
New Media for Designers + Builders
Original Green
Outdoor Room Design
Sprawl Recovery
The Living Tradition of Harbour Island
Walk Appeal

Starting Wrong - The Amazon Mistake

search the Original Green Blog

The 20 cities that are finalists for Amazon's HQ2 are starting out with a classic error of 20th Century thinking, and it is a mistake with colossal implications which may reverberate in the winning losing city for decades. It’ll be the “winning losing” city because while it will win the competition, it will be at risk of losses bigger than the win because winning a single big prize like HQ2 dims focus on the many small but fundamental things cities need to do in order to prosper in the 21st Century. If cities don’t get the small things right, One Big Thing like HQ2 won’t save them. If they do get the small things right, they may eventually have some home-grown Big Things no matter where HQ2 goes.

238 cities originally pursued HQ2, and there will be one winner among the 20 cities on the shortlist. Several cities on the list are already coughing up multi-billion dollar incentive package proposals for Amazon, which is racing Apple and Google to be the first trillion-dollar company. So chances are good that no matter how much inducement money (or corporate welfare, if you prefer) the winning losing city forks over to Amazon, the relative cost to the city of those billions will be greater than the relative benefit to Amazon. There’s a cause founded last week by Richard Florida that asks competing cities to support a non-aggression pact. Nearly a hundred high-profile urbanists are signatories to the cause, and I’ve signed the petition on change.org because this is a right first step.

But the real questions (especially for the other 237 cities) are these: how have we become such suckers for pursuing the One Big Thing we’re very unlikely to get, and what should we be doing instead? We’ve been sold on the efficiency of bigness since at least the 1920s, captivated by the marketing slogan “we’re growing bigger to serve you better.” But somewhere along the way, we haven’t just made it easier for big things; we’ve actually exterminated most small things. In agriculture, that came in 1971 when Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz began bellowing “get big or get out!”

Starting Small

What is the starting point of building a stronger city or town that we’re more likely to sustain long into an uncertain future? Anyone familiar with the Original Green knows there are four foundations of sustainable places: they must be nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. These are physical characteristics. But the societies that inhabit them must also embody certain foundation characteristics if they hope to be able to keep inhabiting those places long into that uncertain future. Two of those characteristics are a good education system and a strong middle class. Improving the education system and a growing middle class are two really big things, but the starting points are small things, most of which cost only tiny fractions of the sacrifice of luring One Big Thing.

Spending Small But Leading Large

Amazon’s 237 losers shouldn’t just slink off and lick their wounds and then forget about it. Instead, they should use the experience as an opportunity to ask this question: “Are there things we can do that cost a lot less than landing Amazon, but that will have better long-term benefits?” As unthinkable as that sounds with the Titanic focus on the One Big Thing, the answer is probably “yes” for most of them. But here's a crucial caveat: All measures described here, while inexpensive enough to risk occasionally sounding silly, can only work if they have a serious champion in your town. Otherwise, the inertia of the status quo will ensure that none of them happen. So find that group or that person who’s willing to stand up to business as usual, and is strong enough to stand up to one or more of your city department heads, otherwise you’re wasting your time. There are two types of people in the world: those who can tell you why something can’t be done, and those who get stuff done. The latter type is harder to find, but you must have at least one of them. Here’s what they need to work on:

Education

Good schools are essential to towns that can be sustained long into an uncertain future. Unfortunately, quality of education is not a problem solved by simply by throwing more money at it. Studies have repeatedly shown that there is not a strong correlation between education spending and high achievement. Outliers abound. Techniques suggested here focus on what has been the hardest nut to crack with education: fostering a culture where education is valued more highly, and which gives kids hope.

Economics

Few characteristics of a society are stronger indicators of long-term stability than a robust middle class. But unlike the recent past when many families remained in the middle class for generations, it is now a more tranient status in the US and abroad. There are faster paths to wealth today than ever before, and disruptive events such as the Great Recession move millions quickly down and out of the middle class. Rebuilding the middle class is now, more than ever, a continuous challenge. The middle class is built from the bottom up, not the top down, as those who were once wealthy tend to find their own way back to wealth more easily the second time. At its core, middle-class-building starts with the small, the young, and the disadvantaged. Help those among them who want to start their own businesses, and they will in time hire others who would rather collect paychecks than write them. And those local businesses will help both owners and employees get into the ranks of the middle class.

The Settings

Cities do not need to build a lot of new things to help fuel the middle class. Chances are, they already have many assets sitting unused all over town. Adopt a policy of No Fallow Land that states that every unused piece of city property is a potential setting for initiatives to help citizens join the middle class by starting new stuff. A vacant lot can be a community garden. An under-used parking lot can become a food cart pod. Empty buildings can be used like this:

Open Maker Spaces

Identify neighborhoods most in need of recovery and open a maker space in each of them because time and again, they have become morning’s first light of recovery in a struggling neighborhood, and the first hint that place can be cool again. After that, continue with more stable neighborhoods. A maker space needs little more than wide-open space, a (mostly) leak-free roof, electricity, and running water. It is here that people come to re-learn the lost arts and crafts of making stuff. They also teach other makers what they’ve learned, so it’s half-laboratory and half-school.

What they learn varies as much as their locations; a maker space in the Bahamas probably shelters those relearning something about living in a nautical nation, while one in Boston might focus more on technology. Or not. It all depends on the interests of those using them.

Be sure to put maker spaces on the field trip schedule for local schools. Not only is it interesting for kids to see what the makers are doing, but there’s a pretty good chance that some of the kids might actually know more about some of the tech things than the makers, and be able to help them out… and maybe even come back after school.

Allow Temporary Single-Crew Shops

Single-crew workplaces that are temporary or even mobile allow people to open their own businesses years or even decades before they could have afforded a bricks-and-mortar store… if ever. Put another way, raise the initial threshold to brick-and-mortar stores, and most people will never get started and the middle class will not thrive like it could have. Temporary single-crew workplaces run from the most ephemeral farmers market tents to food carts and shop sheds. In every case, they can be moved to another location whenever the town has a higher or better use for the land on which they’re sitting.

Build Craft Workshops

Once someone has figured out how to do something useful, they need a more established place to do it longterm. When someone first moves out of a maker space into their own workshop, their needs are small. They probably need only enough space for one person to work, plus space to store their tools. Locate workshops on the borders of public spaces (plazas and sqares are best) for three reasons: it will make those civic spaces more interesting while helping create enclosure, drawing more people, and some of those people will become customers of the craftspeople. The third reason might be the most important: by being highly visible in a public place, kids are likely to see them working while coming home from school, and some of them might be inspired to try their hand at a craft someday.

Start Coworking Spaces

Of the places to work, coworking spaces are the most expensive because they’re built just like a regular office. Their economy comes from the fact that each person uses only a very small part of the building.

Reopen the Old School

Legendary Bahamian craftsman
Joseph Saunders will soon be 91.

Some old skills will never be needed again in most places. Saddle repair, for example, is a craft once found in every town, but now likely to be kept alive only in places where lots of people still ride horses. But there are many skills we’re now realizing we’d like to have back. Unfortunately, the last people to know how to do them are now aged or dying. Find an old abandoned school or similar structure (church building? office?) and gather the old craftspeople there to teach the young who want those abilities back again.

The Deal

Remember, the original idea was “take a small fraction of the money you would have spent on corporate welfare and spend it this way instead…” in order to strengthen education and the middle class. The greatest help for a new business should come at the beginning, then taper off as new arrivals to the middle class can stand on their own. So rent charged at these workplaces should be free to begin with for a certain number of months, then transition to a percentage rent, where the city gets a percentage of each person’s gross monthly income. Once they graduate from being a single-crew workplace of one businessperson and maybe one helper, then they should be able to pay regular rent to a normal private-sector landlord.

Making Making Cool Again
(and Learning, Too)

Being a craftsperson was once a high calling, but by the time I was in high school in the 1970s, classmates who spent their afternoons at the local vocational-technical school were known as “the VoTech losers.” Now, education of any kind is held in low regard in much of society. “It’s not cool to be smart” is sadly far too common, but easy to understand. Since the mid-19th Century, education in most industrialized nations was designed to produce graduates who were normal and obedient, so they could become good factory workers. How is it possible to be less cool than that?? So learning things and making things both need an image revival in most places today. Here are some low-budget ideas to try:

Idea Fairs for Kids

Carve a little time out of the curriculum, probably on Friday afternoon, and start an idea fair in every grade of schools. Disruptive ideas are cool today, so frame it like “here’s how I’m gonna change this town,” to “here’s how I’m gonna change the world.” Give prizes. Make it the highlight of the month, or maybe even do them every week.

Idea Fairs for Adults

Maker spaces are good places for neighborhood cultural events, so hold idea fairs there where makers can pitch their ideas to local businesses and investors. Saturdays might be a good time so as to not interfere with the workweek. And the Saturday idea fairs wouldn’t just attract people who might bring a contract with them. Look at Kickstarter’s traffic and it’s clear that many people consider looking at cool new ideas a form of entertainment.

Movie Night

Hold regular “movies on the green” screening films focused on kids with great ideas. Pay It Forward should be the anthem film, shown at least a couple times per year. Make this a real neighborhood cultural event, and a family night. Friday night right after the idea fair at school could be a perfect time. Do it as leanly as possible. You don’t need a big screen, for example; just a white-painted wall on the side of a building.

The Idea Board

Set up a blackboard, whiteboard, or some other waterproof board in a public place like a park, installed at a height so most third-grade kids can reach the top of the board. Divide it into rectangles. You may have seen these before; they’re often framed as “things I want to do before I die,” “things I’d like to see built here,” etc. Do this one as “here’s my big idea; help me out with it” and leave a lot of chalk.

Helpful Infrastructure

There are some things that can be done to the city itself to help make it a more education- and growth-friendly place for children and adults alike.

Gigabit Internet

Cities around the US are realizing that if they bring gigabit internet to town, the internet will bring bandwidth-heavy businesses to town. Even small towns such as Geraldine, Alabama have brought gigabit to town to attract businesses. There’s no debate anywhere as to whether it’s worth the expense, and gigabit is a huge benefit to education as well. On a personal note, Geraldine was the last place in Alabama where members of my extended family were served by outdoor plumbing, and that was as late as 1978. Outhouses to gigabit in 40 years!

Pink Zones

The Pink Zone is an innovative idea from the Lean Urbanism initiative. It’s a place where the red tape isn’t eliminated entirely, but is made a little bit lighter so the small, the young, and the disadvantaged can get started easier. In other words, it doesn’t create a favela zone, but it does allow more freedom than the fully-regulated remainder of town. And a Pink Zone doesn’t cost money; it saves, because it can be administered lightly.

Walk Appeal

Swapping great ideas shouldn’t only happen at idea fairs, movie nights, and other special occasions and destinations. Smart cultures and entrepreneurial cultures work best when there are many opportunities for chance meetings between people working to figure stuff out. And that begins with getting people out, because you never accidentally bump into someone if everyone stays inside. Places with great Walk Appeal get far more people outdoors than auto-dominated places that are unfriendly to walking, so do everything you can to boost Walk Appeal all over town. Many of these measures cost little, and quite a number of them are in the financial best interest of landowners to do at their own expense, costing the city nothing. Wanda and I are writing the Walk Appeal book; if you’re interested, you can subscribe to updates below.

Third Places

Your First Place is home. Your Second Place is work. Your Third Place is where you go to hang out, “where everybody knows your name,” as the old Cheers tagline went. Third Places can be pubs, coffee shops, or any other place where you can buy something and hang out for as long as you like (maybe with your laptop because they have wifi). Third Places can be like chameleons, morphing from coffee shop in the morning to rum bar at night, like the Rum & Bean. Third Places have been hotspots of thinking throughout history, from the forum in ancient cities to the coffee shops largely responsible for the European Enlightenment. A city or town should not actually build any Third Places; just encourage them, and make it easy for them to open for business.

Infrastructure ROI

For over a century, Americans have built infrastructure with no thought for the Return on Investment, or ROI. If a traffic study says we need it, we’ve gotta build it. Today, most American cities are loaded with infrastructure they cannot maintain, and it threatens to bankrupt thousands of cities and towns. Joe Minicozzi and Chuck Marohn have been sounding the alarm for years; it’s high time we listen, because if we keep building infrastructure that doesn’t make a profit for the city, we won’t be able to afford the other things on this list, much less the One Big Thing.

~Steve Mouzon

One more thing… I’m delighted to be participating in a blogoff again! This one is ArchiTalks, organized by Lora Teagarden, and this week's topic is starting a design. I’ve altered it a bit for this post to include things beyond a single design… this one is more like laying a good foundation for an entire city. I’ll update the links tomorrow as more posts come online. Enjoy the reads!

Matthew Stanfield - FiELD9: architecture (@FiELD9arch)
Slow Down. Hold Still.

Lee Calisti, AIA - Think Architect (@LeeCalisti)
where do we start?

Lora Teagarden - L² Design, LLC (@L2DesignLLC)
How to Start a Design

Jeremiah Russell, AIA - ROGUE Architecture (@rogue_architect)
Starting a Design: #Architalks

Eric T. Faulkner - Rock Talk (@wishingrockhome)
On Your Mark, Get Set -- Start a Design!

Michele Grace Hottel - Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
Starting Design

Meghana Joshi - IRA Consultants, LLC (@MeghanaIRA)
Architalks #35: Starting a Design

Brian Paletz - The Emerging Architect (@bpaletz)
Where do we begin?

Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
Where do you start when designing a new home?

Keith Palma - Architect's Trace (@cogitatedesign)
do-re-mi- Design

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
First Thing's First

Tim Ung - Journey of an Architect (@timothy_ung)
5 Tips for Starting an Architecture Project

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
How it all begins...

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A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas]
Catalog of the Most-Loved Places
Friends of the Residency
Mouzon Design plan books
Mouzon Images
My Traditional Neighborhood Home
New Media for Designers + Builders
Original Green
Outdoor Room Design
Sprawl Recovery
The Living Tradition of Harbour Island
Walk Appeal

The Twelve Steps of Sprawl Recovery

search the Original Green Blog

The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl.

Sprawl's Two Enablers

Sprawl development is, at its foundation, an industrial system, developed in the 1940s on the shiny and new mentality of the assembly line. The first enablers of sprawl are the core manufacturing systems that produces the subdivisions, strip malls, office parks, mega-stores, mega-churches, and mega-schools, and the mega-highways necessary to serve them all. The second enabler is the collection of support industries built around the core of sprawl: market surveys, zoning, infrastructure engineering, design, and their sprawl based standards, codes, and regulations, development lending and sprawl-based development practices, appraisals and home mortgages and mortgage bundling, “site-adapt” cookie-cutter building design, square-feet-bells-and-whistles real estate sales, plus all of the financial, design, development, and sales industry organizations, and the shelter publications and shows to support this behemoth. Because the parts were industrially designed to interact seamlessly with each other, and preclude any other way of building, it looked like an immovable rock for decades. Until the cracks in the infrastructure began to show.

The Three Interventions

Three immense waves are now crashing against the monolith of sprawl, and promise to intervene in our current path to national, state, and local bankruptcy. The first is the relations between workplace and workers. The generation of workers who would follow a job across the country or even abroad is now retiring. Millennials turn the job hunt on its head, seeking first a cool city or town, then the coolest neighborhood in that town, then a job they like in that neighborhood. Cool Factor, on display in this image, is now what drives employment. And there is no place in America more devoid of Cool Factor than an office park, and a subdivision is close behind. Today’s slide is just the beginning of a precipitous drop in demand for boring places to work and live.

The second great wave is also generationally-based, but more mathematical than the preferences for places with Cool Factor. For all of our lifetimes until just a few years ago, there have been net purchasers in the US housing market. Now, for the rest of most of our lives, there will be more sellers than purchasers. For a half-century, we’ve been assured that home prices will rise. Now, for houses located in ordinary subdivisions, the prognosis is very poor: falling real estate values as far as the eye can see. There is a solution: sprawling places that elect for an extreme makeover into vibrant and sustainable places can actually run against the tide and increase their values. But those which stay the current course cannot resist the value decline with any amount of wishful or “magical" thinking.

The third wave is eqally inexorable: the failure of sprawl infrastructure. But this one is pure math and has nothing to do with Boomers, Millennials, or any other generation. Get to know two names really well: Joe Minicozzi and Chuck Marohn. They’re very different in so many ways: from different parts of the country, from different sides of the political spectrum, one a lone wolf and the other the founder of a movement with a small army and annual gatherings, but they are highly aligned as the two prophets of the end of sprawl. They show (in two very different ways, as you may have guessed by now) how that sprawl is a huge Ponzi scheme, and how it will collapse on the weight of its own infrastructure maintenance. “Do the math,” as Joe says… it shows a terrifying calculation no city wants to see: there is a date at which every city in the US with a lot of sprawl will go bankrupt because of the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. It’s not a question of if, but of when. And that date can be calculated.

So make no mistake: Sprawl is an American addiction, and we must break it or it will break us. Cities cannot afford to maintain the sprawl developers have built, and the infrastructure bills are beginning to come due in greater quantities than ever. For sprawl, it's recover or die. Do the math. Look it up.

The Twelve Steps

There is a 12-step sprawl recovery program that can transform the subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks of post-WWII sprawl into sustainable neighborhoods... IF the people living there want that extreme makeover. But they have to want it & be committed to the transformation. Without the commitment, they won’t be able to break the addiction. The 12-step sprawl recovery program can never be forced upon anyone. People have to be committed to transforming the sprawl around them into sustainable places. The benefits are many, including the fact that those places will live much longer. The alternative is bleak; there are ghost towns around the world for a reason.

Step 1: Civic Space

The first step of sprawl recovery is to create at least one neighborhood civic space, which can be a plaza (for the most urban places), a square (as shown here), a green, or a park. What's important is to do it at the beginning. If you wait, it'll be too expensive later on because property values will likely rise as the neighborhood recovers. A centrally located vacant lot can work as the neighborhood square & it adds enough value to nearby lots to pay for it. An abandoned lot works best, although one with a foreclosed building can work as well.

Squares are often the size of an entire city block, like Jackson Square in New Orleans, but a neighborhood center civic space doesn’t have to be anywhere near that large. This plaza in chicago is only 75 feet wide; I stepped it off to be sure. Incidentally, that’s about the width of some neighboring buildings, so it’s possible that this plaza was once a vacant lot before being converted into the civic space we see today.

Step 2: Thoroughfare Recovery

The second step of sprawl recovery is beginning to recover the thoroughfares so that they have enough Walk Appeal that people feel just as comfortable walking and biking there as they do driving there, like they do in this picture. Part of the job involves slowing the cars down by putting the streets on a "street diet" and adding on-street parking. Another part is redesigning the sidewalks, planting beds, and street furnishing zones to entice people to come out and walk on their neighborhood streets. A third part is inserting rear lanes and service alleys to get the messy stuff off the front streets, and the means of getting property owners to give up the back 10’ to 15’ of their lots and be happy about it will be the subject of an entire future blog post.

Multi-modal transport is very important at this step, especially the self-propelled modes of walking and biking. Get these right and Walk Appeal flourishes and many good things happen. Get them wrong, and you're stuck with the auto-dominated place you have now, where people spend more quality time with their steering wheels than with their families. There's an added benefit to the self-propelled means of getting around: neighbors will get more exercise, stay healthier, and actually be happier, which is a proven benefit of getting out and getting around on your own power.

Step 3: Accessory Dwelling Units

This step adds accessory dwelling units like the apartment over this garage in order to add neighbors to the neighborhood because subdivisions in sprawl rarely have anywhere near enough neighbors to support neighborhood businesses. Some people worry that "those people won't be just like us," but a variety of people make a place more interesting, and you have control over who you rent your accessory unit to; it's not like anyone is putting up high-rise apartment blocks next door. And your tenant might even be your own kid, who has just graduated from college. Also, some cities and states are now passing laws legalizing accessory dwelling units (also called ADUs or “granny flats”) because while they’ve been used all over American and around the world for all of human history until recently, they’ve been illegal in the US since roughly the end of World War II. So if you’re living in a place that is now making them legal again, you’re one step ahead.

Step 4: Gifts to the Street

Encouraging neighbors to give "gifts to the street" is the next step. Gifts can delight people (like a beautiful frontage garden), entertain them (like a great storefront), refresh them (like a street fountain or even a sidewalk café), shelter them (like an awning or gallery), direct them (like a goal in the middle distance), inform them (like a clock or sundial), help them remember (like a memorial), or simply give them a place to rest. Whatever each gift may give to the street, there's no doubt that the collection of gifts will make the street a much more interesting place to walk.

Step 5: Lovable Edible Gardens

The next step of sprawl recovery is encouraging lovable edible gardens throughout the neighborhood, and also establishing a farmers market for those who don't want to raise a garden themselves. Fresh local food does much good for a neighborhood… so much so that these benefits will occupy an entire future post. It’s also really important that the edible gardens be treated with every bit as much care as ornamental gardens. Today, most vegetable gardens are treated with similar aesthetic respect to a utility room. For most people, that means “not much." As a result, many cities ban vegetable gardens in front yards because they can be eyesores. Recovering neighborhoods need to learn how to do edible gardens beautifully again, as our ancestors once did.

Step 6: Places to Eat

Restaurants tend to be risk-oblivious, so they should be the first business type introduced to your recovering neighborhood (probably around the neighborhood square) as Step 6 of sprawl recovery. Small restaurants fit well in existing houses like the one shown here. But be careful where you put them, especially at the beginning. Quiet restaurants can fit well on most street corners because they close earlier and don't disturb the neighbors, but those with a younger clientele or that serve alcohol should be limited to around the neighborhood square, and should only be added later, once the neighborhood has a strong track record of beloved establishments.

Step 7: Bed & Breakfast

Add a bed & breakfast at Step 7 so subsequent houses aren't burdened with needing a guest suite and can therefore be smaller if desired. Before the Meltdown in 2008, a guest suite in many suburban houses included a bath and often even a walk-in closet, frequently tipping the scales at 250 square feet or more. At $200 per square foot, the necessity of having a guest bedroom inflated the mortgage by $50,000 or more. The mortgage savings can more than pay for putting your guests up at the B&B.

Step 8: Cottages

By this time, your recovering neighborhood is ready for Step 8 of sprawl recovery, which is the construction of small cottages throughout the neighborhood so you can invite more neighbors to live there and help support the growing collection of neighborhood businesses. Because they're small, cottages can slip into many underused parts of a neighborhood, including along rear lanes or in cottage courts carved into the middle of a block. Having smaller homes in the neighborhood expands the affordability range, allowing young adults to live just down the street from their parents for the first time in nearly a century.

Step 9: Live/Work Units

Step 9 is construction of live/work units so you can open a small business and live above the shop. America was built by people living over the shop; live/work units were only banned after World War II, when planners decided to segregate homes not only from factories, but from everything else as well. Recent decades have seen countless corporate job losses, and many of those people have gone in business for themselves. Now, just as it was when the US was founded, there is no better place to cultivate your own business than in a live/work unit.

Step 10: Neighborhood Market

Your neighborhood should be mature enough in its recovery by this point that you're ready for Step 10, which is a dedicated neighborhood market. This one has apartments above, but the owner may live elsewhere in the neighborhood. One really important note about neighborhood markets: retail experts may tell you that they need to be at least 40,000 square feet to be successful, and this is true in sprawl, where they're often much larger. But in a walkable neighborhood, they can be much smaller. There are even single-crew groceries of less than 1,000 square feet, and a grocery of 5,000 square feet can stock everything in a convenience store, plus healthy food as well.

Step 11: Dedicated Office & Retail

This step of sprawl recovery is the construction of dedicated office and retail space. On quiet streets, it might be just a small home office for one person built tight up to the sidewalk; larger establishments fit better around the neighborhood square. Look at old town centers, and you'll see that some of these shops and offices are quite small, and are built in the front yards of homes near the town center. In other cases, homeowners eventually redeveloped their homes as dedicated office and retail, like the shops shown here.

Step 12: Civic Buildings

The final step is the addition of civic buildings, if you haven't added them already. A meeting hall, wedding chapel, or place of worship are all candidate civic building types; your neighborhood's needs may be different, so build the ones you need. Civic buildings in the US often sit on a square or plaza, but while that's nice, it's not necessary. Most of them do need space for a crowd to spill out in front, so setting them back from the street is one way to do this. Another is to place them in a location where the streets swells out, creating a small civic space that might be as simple as an extra-wide sidewalk.

We realize that an extreme makeover of your neighborhood sounds like a scary thing. It is because it's a big change. But it's the kind of change that can transforms ordinary subdivisions and strip centers into a vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods that can join the ranks of the Most-Loved Places someday. Good luck, and let’s talk about the challenges and techniques of making this happen!

~Steve Mouzon

Wanda and I are writing a book on Sprawl Recovery and you can subscribe to updates below, which is good, but what’s even better is to join in the discussion so we can all work these things out in the open. Nobody’s under any illusions that this will be easy, but sprawl recovery is likely the most important challenge America has ever faced because sprawl has grown so large.

One more thing… I’m delighted to be participating in a blogoff again! This one is ArchiTalks, organized by Lora Teagarden, and the topic is renewal. It’s clear to me that renewal of the health of our cities after the long addiction of sprawl is of paramount importance. I’ll update the links tomorrow as more posts come online. Enjoy the reads!

Lee Calisti, AIA - Think Architect (@LeeCalisti)
get out of town renewal

Lora Teagarden - L² Design, LLC (@L2DesignLLC)
Goal Renewal

Jeremiah Russell, AIA - ROGUE Architecture (@rogue_architect)
renewal: #architalks

Eric T. Faulkner - Rock Talk (@wishingrockhome)
Renewal - Re-Ranch

Stephen Ramos - BUILDINGS ARE COOL (@BuildingsRCool)
No guts, no glory!

Brian Paletz - The Emerging Architect (@bpaletz)
Renewal

Michael LaValley - Evolving Architect (@archivalley)
working towards my site re-launch. next time! cheers

Jeffrey Pelletier - Board & Vellum (@boardandvellum)
5 Tips for Harnessing Renewal to Advance Your Goals

Jim Mehaffey - Yeoman Architect (@jamesmehaffey)
Renewal (at Each Beginning)

Tim Ung - Journey of an Architect (@timothy_ung)
Break Routines

Mark Stephens - Mark Stephens Architects (@architectmark)
Opting out on this one

Larry Lucas - Lucas Sustainable, PLLC (@LarryLucasArch)
Renewal is Valuable for Heart and Hometown

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2017

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 22:59:57 -0600

The Sad Saga of Schooner Bay, and How It Might End Well for the Bahamas

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The foreign investor at Schooner Bay recently took the unthinkable measure of evicting the local organic farmer from Crown land that doesn’t even belong to Schooner Bay; who else do you know who is against healthy local food? But while the farm and the story surrounding it is highly regrettable, it’s not the biggest story here. Instead, the core issue is the question of how the Bahamas and also the entire Caribbean should be developing new places and healing old ones. But before that, here are some really important things to know about Schooner Bay:

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, partners in business and in life, are the founding partners of DPZ and are widely regarded as the best planners alive on earth today. They are also co-founders of a worldwide movement known as the New Urbanism that seeks to build places that are compact, mixed-use, walkable, and sustainable, like our old towns and cities originally were. Andrés designed Schooner Bay with partner-in-charge Galina Tachieva and senior project manager Xavier Iglesias and an all-star supporting cast (plus me).

Many of you know me, but for Bahamians I may not have met yet, I’m the author of the book A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas], which was born out of my long love affair with Bahamian architecture; I’m now completing the second edition, which should be out by Easter. I have worked as a consultant with DPZ on countless projects over the past fifteen years, but of all those new towns and neighborhoods, I have long regarded three as the very most important: Southlands in Canada, Sky in the US, and Schooner Bay. The reasons for Schooner Bay’s inclusion in the top three are many, only a few of which I’ll mention here.

A Bahamian Town

Schooner Bay in happier days

When Canadian, US, or British developers or those further abroad think of developing in the Bahamas, their default model is the resort, but the Bahamas and the Caribbean are littered with the bones of dead resorts. Few resorts last even 50 years, and some fail much sooner, but Bahamian and Caribbean towns, on the other hand, usually last for centuries. DPZ designed Schooner Bay to be a Bahamian town where some of the houses are occupied by people on vacation, like Dunmore Town on Harbour Island, but where all of the businesses are run by Bahamians and many of the homes are occupied by Bahamians.

A Sustainable Town

Schooner Bay’s lush & carefully
planted dune, an important part of
resilience of the town in a storm.

Schooner Bay is designed to do so many things sustainably that this blog post couldn’t possibly describe them all, but it’s an important enough story that I’ve been blogging about it for years: The Schooner Bay Miracle tells why the place survived Hurricane Irene with hardly a scratch because of its hurricane-strong design. The Ecological Dividend lays out many benefits that accrue with time. Unfortunately, most developers do not practice patient place-making, and miss almost all of these benefits because almost everything in accepted development practice today stacks the deck against patience. All readers of this blog know that the first foundation of a sustainable place is that it must be a nourishable place, and Schooner Bay was designed to do ocean and farm to table as well as any place… at least until the foreign investor cut off the water to the farm last month. Today, there is a great rebuilding challenge in the southern Bahamas and all around the Caribbean, and the region sorely needs a great model, which is something Schooner Bay could have been and still can be.

A Diverse Town

Schooner Bay, a place designed for all Bahamians.

Most places built today have a very narrow range of home values, and are terribly boring as a result. Great New Urbanist places aspire to a range of values of at least 5:1 and sometimes as much as 15:1. Schooner Bay was designed to have an amazing value range of 40:1, which would make it much like Harbour Island, where Bahamians of all walks of life and foreign billionaires live just around the corner from each other. This makes a place not only far more interesting because of its diversity, but also far more resilient because neighbors can pull together after a storm much better if they have a great diversity of skills and resources. Harbour Island is a world-class model of how existing places can do this; Schooner Bay could be a world-class example of how new places could do this as well.

Bahamian Scale

This may sound superficial at first, but please hear me out: one of the great architecture mistakes foreign developers make in the Bahamas is building both homes and businesses to the scale of Dallas, Atlanta, or Orlando. In doing so, they make places that are totally out of scale with the Bahamas, and feel foreign and imported. People don’t come from Dallas to the Bahamas to experience a place that feels just like Dallas; they come for the Bahamas. A nation such as the Bahamas where tourism is the biggest industry should be very careful that both homes and businesses are built to Bahamian scale, like Schooner Bay was explicitly designed to be. Otherwise, visitors may decide to stay home next year.

A Town at the Crossroads

Four years ago, Schooner Bay's foreign investor David Huber terminated the role of Bahamian Town Founder Orjan Lindroth at Schooner Bay, as I later described in Schooner Bay at the Crossroads. I might have met Mr. Huber a time or two years ago although I don’t recall for sure, but certainly can’t say that I really know the man or his explicit motives. Some motives, however, are fairly apparent and all of them appear to go back to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Schooner Bay was meant to be. Mr. Huber, an American tech and communications entrepreneur with a checquered track record according to the Washington Post, clearly thinks Schooner Bay should be a resort, whereas it was designed to be a town instead. Every move Huber has made makes some sense for a resort, but are senseless for a town.

The good news is that very little damage has been done to the town plan in the past four years because only one building has been started in that time, and it wasn’t even completed when I was there mid-summer. All other changes are small and easily reversible. And for the good of everyone involved, it is time for that reversal to begin.

For Mr. Huber, I can’t imagine how much money he has lost with the place lying stagnant for four years, but that sum is likely dwarfed by his lost opportunity cost of time spent on a faraway real estate venture which is obviously not his passion, nor his expertise. I don’t see how Schooner Bay could be anything more than a distraction to him. I can’t imagine anyone on earth who would be more relieved for a transfer of ownership at Schooner Bay than Mr. Huber.

The homeowners and business owners at Schooner Bay would likely be almost as happy, as their investments that have lain dormant for these four years could spring back to life again as townbuilding begins anew. And there would be many benfits for neighbors around south Abaco as Schooner Bay grows into the town it was always meant to be, beginning with bringing the farm back to the Crown land, so south Abaco could benefit from having a local source of fresh food again.

The biggest beneficiary, however, would be the Bahamas as a nation. As Schooner Bay fully became what it was always meant to be, a shining village on the harbour serving as a world-class model of building sustainably in the tropics and sub-tropics, many would come from around the world to see the principles and practices of building sustainably laid out so clearly in one place. And the Bahamas could take on the mantle of underpinning and nurturing world-class models of sustainability at a time they are so sorely needed.

It is high time to get back to the tough but noble work of town-building at Schooner Bay. Everyone involved needs for this to happen. Soon.

~Steve Mouzon

PS: Here’s Andrés Duany’s poetic take on the earth, air, fire, and water of Schooner Bay.

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Red Friday

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photo by Charles Marohn, used with permission

Is this the beginning of the Fall of Sprawl? I was really struck by all the pictures on Twitter last night of half-empty shopping center parking lots yesterday, on Black Friday, which is the day American retailers finally get in the black (make a profit) for the first time of the year. But not yesterday. The final returns aren’t in yet, but when they are, there’s little doubt that most retailers will still be firmly in the red, many with little hope of turning a profit at all this year, making this the first Red Friday in America. The crash might come more quickly than anyone ever thought. Here are a few thoughts as to why:

Millennials Shopping

photo by Jon-Mark Patterson, used with permission

Millennials are notorious for not wanting to work in office parks. Many of them choose a cool city first, then a cool place in that city, then a job in that cool place. If they can't stand working in sprawl office buildings, then why would they want to shop in sprawl shopping centers? It's no secret that big retailers have been failing for several years, and what city isn’t littered with dead or dying malls? If yesterday really turns out to be the first Red Friday of our lifetimes, that could turn the stream of big retailer bankruptcies into a flood next year, because of the prospect of Red Fridays year after year.

Shopping & Sleeping

photo by Monte Anderson, used with permission

If you suddenly can’t shop in sprawl because there isn’t much left in a year or two, do you really want to sleep in that subdivision masquerading as a "bedroom community?” Remember the retail left in the inner cities in the 1970s once most shopping moved out to the sprawling new suburbs? It was mostly a collection of liquor stores, tattoo parlors, and cheap groceries with little more than unhealthy foods and cigarettes. It’s entirely possible that a similar thing could happen soon in much of sprawl if the shopping implodes. Who would want to live there then? Was today the beginning of the end of sprawl?

Traditional American Downtowns

On the bright side, retail in the USA has been an anomaly since World War II. European nations typically have 1 to 3 square feet of retail per person. It's now 41.6 square feet in the USA, although it was only a much smaller anomaly of 4 square feet per person here as late as 1960. And almost anyone who has ever been to Europe would agree that most of their urbanism is far more charming and vibrant than almost all of our sprawl. So getting rid of the seas of parking around the malls and replacing them with vibrant town centers that people might actually travel to for vacation (like they do to Europe) would be good, right? And to be clear, nobody in the history of the world ever decided to come to town on vacation because of the Walmart.

photo by Charles Marohn, used with permission

And lest this sound too Europe-centric, consider this: before sprawl began in earnest after World War II, no American town center contained more than about 17% retail, according to Kennedy Smith, who was the director of the National Main Street Center for years. The rest of it consisted of offices, workshops, restaurants, apartments, and other uses. So if sprawl and its retail collapses next year, it's really just taking us back to the classic American towns we loved so much. And the most of America which destroyed their most-loved places by trying to transform it into sprawl from 1945 through 1980 now cherishes their memories so much that the do the next-best thing by spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to visit Main Street USA in Disney’s theme parks.

A Brighter Suburban Day

It’s entirely possible that many sprawling places will become ghost towns when they can no longer afford to keep up their infrastructure, as Charles Marohn and Joe Minicozzi have been saying for years. Fortunately, New Urbanists led by Galina Tachieva, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and June Williamson have responded to the alarm bells rung by Charles and Joe by crafting a suite of solutions now known as Sprawl Retrofit that can help transform forward-looking spawling suburbs with courage and political will into vibrant and sustainable places with high Walk Appeal and a diverse collection of local businesses to serve them. Because make no mistake: for at least two years, people have been turning to small local businesses instead of national chain stores. The Congress for the New Urbanism, which usually encourages its members to lead new initiatives, felt that this issue was so important that they took the unusual step of taking the Build a Better Burb initiative under their wing in recognition of the fact that retrofitting sprawl is now the biggest place-making challenge in American history. We simply cannot afford to fail.

~Steve Mouzon

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Why Coastal Towns Must Thrive Now to Survive Later

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The age of the sleepy little low-lying coastal town is ending. If a town with streets close to sea level hopes to survive into the distant future, it must plan to thrive in the near future. Anything less makes it a candidate for being a future ghost town. Here’s why:

The image above is my adopted hometown of South Beach, which is only about a third of the City of Miami Beach. For the first few years after Wanda and I moved to Miami Beach fourteen years ago, “sunny-day flooding” was a term we never heard, nor did we ever see the phenomenon.

But beginning somewhere around 2009, we began to notice occasional puddles along streets on the lowest (Western) side of the island on days when there had been no rain. And by the time of the autumn King Tides of 2013, West Avenue was as deep as 18” in seawater. Google “octopus in parking garage” for an idea of what it was like. Here’s a video I shot on the worst night, when the waters of Biscayne Bay were literally higher than the streets.

Adapting to Sea Level Rise

11th Street being raised

Since that time, Miami Beach has begun a long-planned raising of the lowest streets, coupled with installing giant pumps and underground storage tanks. The blue streets above are 4.5 feet or more above a normal high tide, and should be dry for at least a century, depending on which scientists’ projections of sea level rise you use. The red streets above are less than 4.5 feet above a normal high tide, and need to be raised. The green streets have already been raised, although raising creates challenges as well.

Why have so few streets been raised? Because Miami Beach ran out of money to raise them. Obviously, many millions more need to be spent on raising streets, and that’s just South Beach. The rest of Miami Beach will roughly triple the expenditure. And we’re likely going to have to come up with most or all of it ourselves; we’re not counting on anyone to come in with a huge pot of money and save us.

Where will the money come from? Simply put, the city must thrive. We need to be doing everything we can now to transform sleepy neighborhood centers into vibrant places people want to come to, especially on the weekend, surrounded by interesting neighborhoods with neighbors who support the centers as well. Vibrant places generate far more tax revenue than sleepy places, and without that tax revenue, we simply won’t get all the streets raised in time. There are several ways of helping the city thrive. This post looks at characteristics of thriving town centers. Next, we’ll look at characteristics of neighborhoods surrounding those thriving town centers.

Thriving Town Centers

The most flourishing town centers on earth share a number of characteristics, and these should be patterns for coastal towns as their centers ramp up into economic engines that can help sustain them as sea levels rise.

Town Character

South Beach is “The 21 Most Exciting Blocks on Planet Earth.” New York City is “The City That Never Sleeps.” Seaside, Florida is “Capital of the Design Coast.” Unless your coastal town’s name is Palm Beach, you probably don’t have enough money in town to adapt to sea level rise without attracting visitors willing to come and spend money with you. If you want to live somewhere on the ocean and don’t want visitors, make sure it’s somewhere 25 or 30 feet above sea level so you don’t have to worry about adaptation anytime soon. Otherwise, figure out how to attract a lot of tourists willing to spend more than cruise ship passengers, who will not keep your town alive. To attract enough visitors who spend well, your town needs to be known for something. You won’t do well enough with visitors who just randomly happen upon your town along the highway; you should have a character of place that people want to experience.

Inexplicably, there’s a growing movement in South Beach to change the town character from The 21 Most Exciting Blocks on Planet Earth back into the sleepy little ethnic retirement community it was in the 1960s and 1970s. NIMBYs in nearly every neighborhood association are trying to get rid of the visitors, and cannot tolerate any noise at night. We will not survive very many decades into the era of sea level rise if these NIMBYs succeed. (NIMBY means Not In My Back Yard. The NIMBY’s big brother on steroids is the BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. Both are deadly to thriving towns.)

Arteries, Not Arterials

Vibrant Bay Streets, Main Streets, or High Streets are like arteries in a living creature, pumping the lifeblood of commerce and culture: people who are mostly on foot, enjoying all the things that line the street. But don’t confuse arteries with arterials. In the world of traffic engineers, arterials are the biggest and fastest automobile thoroughfares in town, and they are highly corrosive to all good things within a block or two in either direction. Instead of the sidewalk cafés and small-scale shops of Bay Street, arterials are usually lined with muffler shops, convenience stores, and drive-through fast food joints. Avoid these like the plague if you want a place that will thrive enough to pay the sea level adaptation bills.

people rarely walk between
fast-moving traffic & parking lots

Sadly, Miami Beach completely blew this on Alton Road, which could have been a great urban avenue lined with eating, drinking, and shopping establishments and thronged by people, like some of the other main streets of South Beach. And Alton is this way, for about a block south of Lincoln Road, but beyond that, it’s the same mind-numbing parking-lot-in-front-of-strip-center of suburban sprawl, with cars screaming by just beyond the sidewalk. The Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association staged an heroic battle with the Florida DOT for years to make sure their Alton Road rebuilding project increased Walk Appeal. And it looked like they had achieved a hard-won victory with the design until the DOT did a design switch at the last moment, inexplicably aided by City Hall. Until Alton is re-coded and rebuilt as a much slower avenue rather than the arterial automobile sewer it is now, Alton will contribute nothing to the vibrant character needed to help us pay for adaptation. Come and see it, then go home and do the opposite.

Building Character, Not FAR

Floor Area Ratio (FAR) is a planning standard commonly used by NIMBYs to oppose a project because they’ve forgotten what really matters. The most important thing is not FAR (usable interior square footage divided by site area), but the character of the buildings and how they support or corrode the streetscape. Every NIMBY wants to reduce FAR in order to build as little as possible on every site because the core assumption is that whatever the developer builds will be bad, so let’s at least limit it so we have less bad stuff.

The building in the photo above has an FAR of about 0.20, so the NIMBYs should love it. Never mind that it’s a completely banal and boring strip center… even though it was designed by the most celebrated Mid-Century Modern architect: Mies van der Rohe. This highlights the fact that the real problem arguably isn’t the developers so much as it is the architects. The refusal of my profession to design lovable buildings has spawned more NIMBYs than anything else in the past half-century. In this, the NIMBYs are not wrong.

Española Way in Miami Beach, on the other hand, has an FAR of just over 2.0 on several of its blocks. That’s ten times as much FAR as Mies’ strip center, and the architecture isn’t anything special. So using the NIMBY standard it must be ten times as bad, right? Have a look at these two images; which would you rather have as a neighbor?

FAR is an incredibly blunt instrument. Building character is what really matters. Some of the best urbanism in the world has an FAR of 3-5, as does some of the most hideous. The only definitive thing FAR tells us is whether a place has enough intensity to be a thriving neighborhood center or town center if the architectural character is good. Española Way’s FAR is enough for a neighborhood center frequented mainly by locals. For a great town center that will pull visitors in from elsewhere, you really need to get into the 3-5 range of great urbanism. Otherwise you simply don’t have enough stuff there to entice someone to travel to your center and spend money in your town.

Miami Beach is considering a measure in next week’s election to increase the FAR of an area Dover-Kohl has planned to become the town center of North Miami Beach. This should be a no-brainer for anyone interested in the long-term survival of Miami Beach. Unfortunately, the measure is receiving the normal complaints of “it will increase traffic,” but the complainers should look at South Beach. We have enough density here that over 40% of residents don’t even own a car because you need one so infrequently. Increase the density of the North Beach town center enough, and you’ll almost certainly see the same effect there. And it will help Miami Beach survive long into an uncertain future.

One more thing: these principles hold true in new places as well as old. With so many parts of the Caribbean Rim facing a huge rebuilding challenge after this year’s devastating hurricanes, these things should be considered there as well if the rebuilt places hope to survive long into that same uncertain future.

~Steve Mouzon

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The Great Caribbean Rim Rebuilding Challenge

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The Caribbean rim includes not only the northeastern and northwestern boundaries of the Caribbean, but also the “echo rim” of the Bahamas, the US Gulf Coast, and the Mexican Gulf Coast because all of these areas have heat, humidity, and hurricanes, and all have a heritage that is a gumbo of African, English, French, Native American, and Spanish cultures. The northern shore of South America is excluded because it is very rarely hit by hurricanes.

2017 approximate storm damage through early October shown as orange (serious) and red (severe).

As Caribbean Rim nations move from emergency relief to disaster recovery mode in the coming weeks and months, strong consideration should be given to the ways in which places should be rebuilt, both at the scale of towns and of buildings. This, the worst hurricane season in twelve years, has caused too much pain for too many people for everyone to go back to the ways things were before. The Caribbean Rim has had severe storms for all of recorded history, but many of the lessons our ancestors learned the hard way have been lost over the past century, as we moved from building in harmony with nature to trying to engineer our way out of severe weather problems.

Sustainable Towns

Sustainability begins at the scale of urbanism, because it makes no sense to talk about sustainable buildings until the place itself is sustainable. The lone surviving building in an uninhabited town isn’t a very good place to be.

Storm Surge

The first question to ask is “should we be building at all in this place?” This is especially difficult in a once-inhabited place that has been severely damaged, because it’s so hard to tell someone they can’t come home again. But the fact of the matter is that storm surge is one of the most destructive forces in nature, which building structures are almost powerless to resist. Strong storm surge almost always reduces buildings to piles of rubble, and usually kills more people than wind in a hurricane.

The good news is that storm surge risk is no longer a mystery, as we now have a good understanding of how the forces of nature and undersea topography affect the risk in any given place. Often, safer places are on higher ground within sight of surge-prone areas. Sometimes, it may be necessary to move a settlement a few miles away, but in no case should people return to places known to be at high surge risk.

Dunescape

A healthy dunescape is the first line of defense against a storm. Sadly, developers forgot that fact for decades and built right on the dunes in many places. When Hurricane Opal slammed the Florida Panhandle in 1995, many buildings in the vicinity Seaside, Florida were completely demolished, whereas Seaside was virtually untouched. Hurricane experts came to study what happened, and dubbed it the “Seaside Miracle.” The secret? Yes, the buildings at Seaside were built to stronger standards, but more than anything else, Seaside stepped back from and protected the dunes, unlike many of its neighbors. Hurricane Ivan hit further west in 2004, but still, buildings east of Seaside sitting on the dunes were destroyed while Seaside again experienced almost no damage.

Stepping back and not building on the dunes is only the first step, however. To sustain the dunes, it’s essential that they become diverse biomes instead of monocultures of single plants. Invasive species such as scaevola (sea lettuce) and casuarina (Australian she-pine) take over dunes and then destroy them. The best and most sustainable dunes have about twelve species of well-adapted plants, from grasses and ground cover to palm trees.

Agriculture

Until the mid-20th Century, most Caribbean Rim towns were fed from the fields and waters nearby. Now, most places on the Caribbean Rim and elsewhere are fed from thousands of miles away, and the shutdown of a single port facility such as the one in San Juan, Puerto Rico can result in food and other urgently-needed supplies not reaching those who need it most. Yes, a hurricane will damage the local crops, but if people have a choice between walking out into the fields and picking and eating what’s left of a crop today, or waiting for a ship to come in and get offloaded days (or longer) from now, which is more survivable?

Compact Towns

The benefits of compactness run far beyond the scope of this post, but some of the most obvious are as follows:

• Compact towns place buildings closer together, where each building helps shield its neighbor against hurricane winds.

• Buildings that are attached such as in downtown Nassau, Havana, and pretty much any Spanish colonial town are substantially stronger than buildings standing alone.

• Town centers with many attached buildings really should be built of masonry to resist fire spread, and masonry buildings are inherently stronger against the wind than framed buildings.

• Compact towns get electricity back quicker. We evacuated for Irma, and from the time we were allowed back onto Miami Beach until we got our power back was less than 24 hours. Last week, Wanda and I were in west central Florida near Apopka, and there were still many power lines down. This must ever be so, as utilities naturally try to get power back to the greatest number of customers as soon as possible, and that naturally happens where customers are closer together.

• Streets are walkable before they’re driveable. You can clamber over a downed tree on foot, but not in a car. If the town is compact enough, you can get to more necessary things sooner, by hours or more likely days.

• Fuel supplies in catestrophically-damaged places may be cut off for weeks, if not longer. Vehicles that survive the storm are of little use so long as they are out of gas. People in walkable places fare much better.

Small Local Businesses

Town economies built mostly on small local businesses tend to be more resilient than those filled with multinational chain operations for reasons we’ll explore in more detail in a later post, but some of the biggest reasons are:

• A local businessperson is far more motivated to get back in business because their livelihood depends on it, whereas to a multinational corporation, their location in town is just one of many around the globe.

• Decisions about whether and how to reopen a chain operation must be run up the chain of command to at least the regional level, which on the Caribbean Rim might be someone in another nation. Local businesses, on the other hand, need only find the basics like drinking water and fuel before they can start selling whatever is left of their stock of products.

• Chain stores tend to be larger, fueled by international business size standards and the myth that bigger is always better, whereas many local businesses on the Caribbean Rim are single-crew workplaces. Smaller operations have fewer employees (if any) and fewer moving parts necessary to get back in operation.

Local Leadership and Culture

This will be the topic of an entire upcoming post, but should be mentioned here as well. A town led by local leaders and guided by local culture is far more sustainable than a resort managed by an offshore corporation. The Caribbean Rim is littered with the bones of failed resorts, with hurricane damage being the most frequent cause of their demise. The outnumber Caribbean Rim ghost towns, even though people have been builiding towns for centuries longer than they have been building resorts.

Sustainable Buildings

Once a town is planned or replanned sustainably, it’s time to consider how to build or rebuild the buildings. A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] is a detailed pattern book showing how to build sustainably in the Bahamas, and most of the lessons from that book are useful around the Caribbean Rim.

Beloved Buildings

Almost everyone wants to put things back the way they were after a disaster. Their new home should look and feel like their old home. Unfortunately, many in my profession (architecture) want to remake the new world into something very different. This rarely succeeds, and even when it does due to a major source of outside funding (such as the Make It Right houses in New Orleans) it does not spread to surrounding neighborhoods simply because it doesn’t feel like home… it feels like something foreign. New buildings in Puerto Rico should not feel like they’re from Atlanta; they should feel Puerto Rican. New buildings in Barbuda (if the island is rebuilt) should not feel like they’re from Orlando; they should feel Barbudian. Not only do they help people recover emotionally from their losses, but they are more likely to be cared for and restored long into an uncertain future.

Buildings That Endure

Hurricane Design is a post that lays out several strategies for stacking the deck in your favor with building design. Here’s a quick summary of the top ten strategies:

• Build hip roofs on all but the smallest or strongest buildings to be wind-strong so each side supports its neighbors.

• Pitch wind-strong roofs 8/12 to 9/12 because this is steep enough to resist uplift but shallow enough to resist overturning.

• Overhang wind-strong eaves less than you would inland eaves so there’s less for hurricane winds to grab.

• When long eaves are necessary in the tropics, design them to blow off, leaving the main roof intact.

• Long eaves on wind-strong buildings can be supported by heavy brackets.

• Properly-attached metal roofing is the best material for a hurricane zone.

• Shutter windows in some way so that most if not all of the opening is protected with the shutters.

• Choose carefully between wood walls and masonry walls in a hurricane zone; each has its strengths.

• Build above the floods in a hurricane zone so the storm surge does little or no damage.

• If piers are masonry build them thick, or if wood, drive them deep so that they resist storm surges.

Kernel Cottages

Andrés Duany and I came up with the idea for the Katrina Cottages in 2005, on the Saturday after the hurricane. The original idea was to design “FEMA trailers with dignity,” but we quickly realized that with the money FEMA was spending to manufacture, install, commission, maintain, decommission, haul away, and dispose the FEMA trailers, we could design cottages worthy of being there for a hundred years, not just the FEMA-mandated 18 months. This would allow people to get a foothold back on their property, building on later to create a larger house.

Or at least that’s what we said. In reality, the cottages didn’t expand very well. Because the cottages were so small (several under 500 square feet) the exterior walls quickly got gobbled up with cabinets, closets, bathrooms, and the like so that it was difficult to find a place to add on. I designed the first Kernel Cottage the next summer; the very first design move was to put four “grow zones” in the plan, from which the cottage could expand. Disaster recovery housing that is mobile need not do this, but cottages meant to stay should definitely incorporate easy expansion.

Frugality

shelves built into a wall for storage - opening up
wall cavity also allows air circulation, reducing
mold & mildew

People recovering from a disaster are usually stretched to the limit (or beyond) financially. Why spend a lot of money conditioning a house if it can condition itself on all but the most extreme days of the year? An upcoming post will lay out several self-conditioning strategies. And self-cooling isn’t the only way to be frugal; you can be frugal with interior space as well, so that a cottage is smart enough that it lives bigger than its footprint. The New Urban Guild calls these SmartDwellings, and these are some strategies for implementing them. The image on that page shows an elaborate 1,200 square foot SmartDwelling, but the frugality techniques can just as easily be used on smaller Kernel Cottages as well. As a matter of fact, that’s where several of the techniques were first developed. We’ll dive into a number of frugality patterns in a later post.

Please Help!

This and the next several posts are things I’m writing for the second edition of A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas], which I hope and believe will be useful around the Caribbean Rim. The Original Green is a far better book because of many great comments I got from readers of this blog as I was writing it. Please help make this second edition a better book as well by posting your insights here… it could benefit so many people whose lives have been so disrupted! Thanks in advance!

~Steve Mouzon

PS: I made a mistake and lost all the original comments… here they are, copied in manually:

Orjan Lindroth · Nassau, New Providence

very much to the point an addresses issues we need to disucss, make aware and also practices we need to implement.

Oct 12, 2017 2:12pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Thanks, Orjan, and you're right, of course.

Oct 13, 2017 4:41pm

Bob Theis · UC Berkeley

Steve, you might add the suggestion of a rainwater cistern to increase resiliency. It should be part of a circulating system, because still water goes skanky. The most beautiful version I've seen is in Bali, where there's an open concrete tank adjacent to the ( open air ) bathrooms, from which you ladle out water for your 'shower'. ( The design challenge is Westerners who mistake the cistern for a tub )

Oct 13, 2017 12:23pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Excellent on all counts, Bob... thanks! You describe it beautifully. I've never been to Bali (although Wanda has had it on our bucket list for years) so the best ones I've seen are in Bermuda, where the cisterns are a really expressive part of the architecture.

Oct 13, 2017 4:40pm

Kathy Gabriel · UWI St. Augustine

Implemntation of good ideas is always key ...

Oct 14, 2017 9:34am

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The New Starting Point for Retail

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Dinner Bell Barbecue on opening day

Burdening most new Main Streets with building the “climax condition” of 3-5 story buildings in the beginning is a poor choice in all but the most robust places, but going back to 1-story masonry buildings isn’t enough; the new starting point for retail should be the food cart. I recently returned from the NTBA Spring Roundtable, where there was great discussion on many things, including the future of retail. The single-crew workplace is the new high standard.

single-crew grocery in Beaufort, South Carolina
serves a neighborhood that would otherwise have
been a food desert

For a grocery, it’s one grocer in 500-800 square feet selling just the basic commodities like tomatoes, cabbage, spinach, one type of hot sauce, one brand of mustard, etc. For a restaurant, it’s one cook and one server. For the smallest possible B&B, it’s one person who’s clerk, cook, and housekeeper for four rooms. For the next size up, it’s one housekeeper for eight rooms and one clerk/cook. For a bar, it’s one bartender. For a coffee shop, it’s one barista. For a barber shop, it’s one barber.

Seaside’s iconic post office at the

heart of Central Square

We’ve seen great examples for years, like at Seaside, Florida, but keep getting charmed by the retail experts who base their projections on standard sprawl paradigms. Their arguments are compelling: “If you want to compete, these are things the market expects.” And they’re exactly right if you’re hoping to attract national retailers like Applebee's, Walmart, Bass Pro Shops, TGI Fridays, Walgreen, Best Buy, McDonald's, Publix, and the like. The problem is that if you want to compete in that arena, you’re committed to sinking millions into your infrastructure before seeing a dollar of return. Since 2008, that hasn’t been a very good approach for most of us. New retail centers would do well to compete in a very different arena.

Here’s another side of the problem with sprawl expectations: if you listen to the retail experts, you can’t even build a corner store until you have 600 rooftops. Seaside would never have achieved that because there will never be that many houses there, yet Seaside has become a thriving regional center. There are two secrets: Appeal to customers beyond your own rooftops, and start impossibly small with your shops, like Seaside did. A single-crew workplace makes many things possible today which are impossible until decades later using the retail experts’ standards.

Dinner Bell Barbecue the night before opening
for the first time

Our son Sam started Dinner Bell Barbecue recently in Portland, Oregon for amazingly less than you could ever start a bricks-and-mortar store. A conventional restaurant is at least an order of magnitude higher; usually much more. I’ve seen $100K vent hoods in my previous life as a small-town architect, so it’s really easy to spend a million dollars (in 1990s money) to start a restaurant.

In Sam's food cart pod, all of the food carts share a single toilet facility, and all utilities except electrical (which is overhead) gets piped around underneath the food carts. No, it’s not the most convenient, but yes, it’s highly frugal. This model is the future of inaugural retail in most places. If you’re going to CNU in Seattle, consider a side-trip to Portland to see this. It’s amazingly Lean. And food carts contribute substantially to Walk Appeal because your view changes every 10 feet or less, and often in very interesting and colorful ways.

Andrés Duany has been saying for several years that we need to scale back the inaugural condition of town centers, and Seaside’s Perspicasity and the Airstream shops courtesy of Daryl Davis have painted the picture of the future of retail for years. Why are we so slow to catch up?

~Steve Mouzon

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How Fire Chiefs & Traffic Engineers Make Places Less Safe

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All images in this post are from Celebration, Florida where scenes like this could soon look very different if the deputy fire chief and traffic engineer get their way.

Of all the urbanism specialists with tunnel vision, fire chiefs, fire marshals, and traffic engineers are probably the most dangerous. And by “dangerous,” I don’t just mean that they’re a threat to good urbanism; they also get people killed, which is exactly the opposite of what they are commissioned to do. A classic example of their silo thinking is playing out right now in Celebration, Florida, where the proposed measures of eliminating on-street parking spaces and eliminating street trees will almost certainly leave Celebration a less safe place than it is today.

Let’s look at things from both a common-sense perspective and a data-driven perspective. Getting rid of street trees does some really bad things for safety: First, it eliminates the first line of defense for those who are walking or biking on the sidewalk (when the streets are too dangerous for biking). A car crashing into a tree at 35 miles per hour will deploy the airbags, but the driver and passengers will likely walk away with little more than bruises. But a car traveling 35 miles per hour that crashes into someone who is biking or walking will likely kill them. Higher speed = more deaths and injuries.

Two groups injured and killed
most often are the young
(because they’re small) and the

elderly (because they’re fragile).

People adjust their driving according to the conditions around them. On a tree-lined street, people tend to drive slower because they don’t want to hit a tree if they lose control of their car and run off the road. Lower speed = fewer deaths and injuries.

There’s another problem with removing street trees: They make a huge difference between walking and driving in places that are hot in the summer (like Orlando). A canopy of street trees not only eliminates the strong radiant heat of the sun with its shade, but also cools you even further with the trees’ respiration, which has a similar effect to a cool mist. With a cooling canopy of street trees, most people walk well up into the 90s. With a hot sun beaming down, those same people rarely walk, even in the low 80s. But there’s another problem: humans get conditioned to everyday behavior, so when treeless streets condition them not to walk on moderately hot days, driving becomes their norm. And when you increase driving, you increase crashes and traffic deaths.

There are even more reasons not to eliminate street trees, but that’s another story for another day, because it doesn’t involve safety. On-street parking is equally essential to safety, and for even more reasons. As a matter of fact, on-street parking and street trees top the list of things cities should increase on streets if they’re interested in increasing the safety of their citizens. To be clear, the prime benefit of these two elements is getting people out of their cars because they prefer to walk to their daily needs. The two extremes are places where everyone drives (suburban sprawl) and places where everyone walks (European towns and villages). Where everyone drives, there are huge numbers of deaths per year because of crashes. In most places where everyone walks, nobody has ever died due to running into someone else.

Imagine this scene with all the trees cut down &
cars driving a lot faster.

Walking to daily needs is therefore the safe ideal; it’s stunning that the deputy fire chief and traffic engineer seeking to ruin Celebration don’t realize this. Here are the minutes of a recent meeting that illustrate their blindness to these facts. Note also how the officials talk out of both sides of their mouths. At one point, it sounds like they only want to remove one parking space closest to the end of each block, but when pushed, there are actually several entire streets where they want to remove all on-street parking.

This kind of double-speak is often found at the Department of Transportation. When the Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association was fighting the Florida DOT over the safety and character of Alton Road, the DOT finally agreed to put a landscaped median in the middle of Alton. But just before construction began, they released their final drawings showing that the “median” was actually two half-block-long turn lanes with one ridiculous palm tree in the middle of the block, where the turn lanes switched from one side to the other! In good DOT fashion, it was a classic case of “too soon to know” switching instantly to “too late to change.” I’m an optimist on most things, but I fear this tactic may be used to wreck Celebration.

shady Celebration sidewalk

On-street parking does several good things, and its alternative (on-site parking lots) does nothing good. Google “sea of parking.” Are any of the hits positive? Of course not; a sea of parking is dreadful on all counts. Beyond the obvious ugliness, they heat the microclimate by absorbing solar radiation and heating the air above them. Heating the microclimate makes walking uncomfortable and so people drive, even if the parking lot is out of sight. More driving = more crashes and more deaths and injuries.

“But what about on-street parking,” you might ask? “That’s paving, too.” Yes, it is, but it’s a lot less paving. Parking lots need travel lanes between the parking spaces. A 65’ wide perpendicular parking bay has two 18’ parking spaces and a 29’ travel lane. On-street parking needs no extra travel lane because the street itself is the travel lane. So off-street parking requires almost twice as much asphalt and destroys almost twice as much green space as on-street parking, heating the microclimate almost twice as much, discouraging walking and encouraging driving. More driving = more crashes and more deaths and injuries.

If parking lots were all put in the middle of the block, it would do less damage to the urbanism because it wouldn’t be visible from the street. Unfortunately, parking is far too often put in front of the building, just behind the sidewalk. If the street is heavily traveled, this creates the dreadful W0 Walk Appeal condition where people simply do not walk unless their car breaks down. Parking lots in front kill walking and increase driving. More driving = more crashes and more deaths and injuries.

Celebration sidewalk cafe protected by street trees

On-street parking makes sidewalk cafes possible. It would be insane to have lunch sitting at a table where cars were zipping by at an almost-certain-death 35 miles per hour just a foot from your elbow. But with cars parked alongside the street, moving traffic is much less of a threat. Sidewalk cafes are both the highest indicator and the highest single stimulus of Walk Appeal, which is the best indicator of places where people walk more and drive less. To make a place safe, we need more of them. I haven’t done the research yet (that’s for a later post), but there’s a strong likelihood that places with many sidewalk cafes have fewer deaths by automobile per capita than those with none. Less driving = fewer deaths by automobile.

Walk Appeal is the strongest indicator of the likelihood of success of neighborhood businesses in walkable places. When businesses succeed in walkable places, more neighbors patronize them on foot and people drive less. Less driving = fewer deaths by automobile.

Without street trees, asphalt on the
street on the left would be soaking
up heat all day long, and therefore

heating up everything around it.

Similar to street trees but even more powerful, on-street parking (especially diagonal parking) reduces driving speed. The possibility of a parallel-parked car opening a door in front of you subconsciously slows you down; the possibility of a diagonally-parked car backing out in front of you does so even more effectively because that would be a worse crash than just knocking someone’s doors off. If a car strikes you traveling 20 miles per hour, you’ll likely suffer some bumps and bruises and maybe a broken bone or two; if a car strikes you traveling 40 miles per hour, I hope you have your things in order, because your family and friends will be burying or cremating you in a few days. The US DOT is the source of this information (scroll down to the Vehicle Impact Speed vs. Pedestrian Injury chart). Lower speed = fewer deaths and injuries.

It is insane that most traffic engineers don’t understand this! And their prejudice against safer design is cooked right into their standards: the AASHTO Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (the "Green Book,” which is the bible of traffic engineering), uses the Level of Service (LOS) system where streets are rated from A to F with A being best and F being worst, like grades in school. Here’s the problem: LOS A is the free flow of traffic at the highest speeds (most deadly), while LOS F is a slow-moving traffic jam (safest). Speed kills… especially if you’re walking or biking. Higher speed is OK if you’re driving on an expressway through the countryside, but it’s decidedly not OK if you’re driving in a city or town. To be blunt, the Green Book standards have probably killed hundreds of thousands of people in towns and cities. It’s deadly. Put a less dramatic way, the Green Book is great for highways in the country, but not for in-town streets. For that, you need Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, a design manual jointly created by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Sadly, many traffic engineers have apparently never heard of it, even though it reduces deaths and injuries in town, while the Green Book increases deaths and injuries in town by speeding up traffic. Higher speed = more deaths and injuries.

The deputy fire chief never actually said “cut the trees
down.” He just said to remove them. But there’s
no way you could move trees like these with

any chance of them surviving.

This brings up another problem: eliminating on-street parking makes wider travel lanes. Of all the factors affecting travel speed, there is none more reliably calibrated than lane width. People behave differently in different settings. 9-foot travel lanes induce all but the idiots to drive no more than about 20 miles per hour. It’s important to note that you can never design for the idiots, because there’s no way to predict what someone will do when they’re in an irrational state of mind. On 10-foot travel lanes, people tend to drive 20-30 miles per hour. 11-foot travel lanes should only be used on the highest-speed thoroughfares in town, where there is good protection (like high levels of on-street parking) for people walking. 12-foot travel lanes are Interstate lanes, and we all know how fast people drive on the Interstate. In town, 12-foot travel lanes should be called “death lanes.” Higher speed = more deaths and injuries.

Now, let’s look at some numbers. And this is just the first in a data-driven series of posts. It looks broadly at nationwide numbers for general trends. Later, we’ll compare urban form: cities with tight-knit traditional urbanism versus cities built mostly of sprawl. From a fire perspective, one would think that the USA, built mostly of modern buildings on broad streets where large fire trucks can turn easily and where most buildings are built to modern fire codes, would perform far better than European countries, which are burdened with medieval urbanism, with narrow, cranky streets and small-pipe water. Here are the recent facts, all from 2007 (the last year for which I was able to get data for all these nations):

Celebration's post office is one of
many walkable destinations. If

walkability is damaged and more
people drive, there’s probably not
enough parking for them all.

Fire deaths per million citizens:

USA: 12.4

France: 9.8

UK: 7.6

Spain: 5.2

Italy: 4.2

So US fire deaths are over 20% higher than the highest of the Western European countries selected and almost triple the deaths in Italy. I wasn’t cherry-picking; I chose the most populous countries in Europe nearest the US. Germany, for example, is substantially lower than Italy.

So the wealthiest country in the sample with the most modern buildings performed worst on fire deaths? Meanwhile, the other countries have buildings hundreds of years older, serviced by cobbled-together electricity and built on streets so narrow that many of them would be considered alleys in the US performed substantially better? How can this be? I’ll post later on the details of fire risk and urban form, but unless the Europeans are fantastically smarter than Americans and have much better reaction time, how else do you explain this huge discrepancy other than as a product of urban form? I suspect the primary cause of this difference that is costing over a thousand American lives per year is the difference in urban form.

It only makes sense that places requiring four times as many miles of streets per person (or more) would be harder to protect, even if the streets are wider and allow faster fire truck travel. If that’s the case, fire departments should be celebrating places with traditional urbanism like Celebration, and bending over backwards to support that urban form (including buying smaller fire trucks) because it makes them look better by being substantially safer. Instead, they’re punishing traditional urbanism and trying to damage it enough to bring it back to the unsafe standards of American sprawl.

It gets worse. Let’s look at those same five nations through the lens of death by automobile. If traffic engineers touting Level of Service standards were to be believed, the US should be the safest nation because more of our thoroughfares have been built to these modern standards. Meanwhile, Europe with its narrow, cranky streets should be really unsafe. Here are the facts, all from 2014 or 2015:

Every comfortable destination that becomes
uncomfortable by cutting the trees down becomes
one more reason not to get out & walk.

Things like this park bench help build a stronger
culture of walking in the community.

Deaths by automobile per million citizens:

USA: 119.7

Italy: 55

France: 52

Spain: 36

UK: 28

So the US, purportedly the safest nation according to accepted standards, is actually the worst in this sample, and by a large margin! The most unsafe nation in the sample other than the US is Italy, where it’s standard practice to pass a car on a highway approaching a hilltop beyond which you cannot see, and Italy is more than twice as safe as the US. The safest country in the sample is the UK, which is more than four times as safe! If you average the non-US nations (42.75 deaths/million) and take the difference between that and the US multiplied by our population, then the logical conclusion is that our traffic engineering standards are killing about 23,000 people per year in the US! As with fire standards, traffic engineers should be embracing traditional urbanism with open arms because it saves so many lives per year!

On the divide between traffic safety and fire safety, consider this: if you only count deaths by automobile of people walking and people cycling, that’s 19.4 per million in the US, which is almost 50% more than the egregious 12.4 per million deaths by fire in the US each year. To be really blunt, if every fire department in the US closed up shop and dedicated themselves to reducing deaths of people walking and biking to zero, 2,100 lives would be saved in the US every year. Over my lifetime of 57 years, 119,700 people we’ve buried or cremated would have lived instead, with not a single fire station open in the US. To be clear, I’m not advocating for that. What I am advocating for is for fire chiefs and fire marshals to open their eyes and realize that when they do something in the interest of fire safety that damages walking and biking safety, they’re likely killing people!

Look, I understand that neither the deputy fire chief nor traffic engineer overseeing Celebration are evil people, intent on killing their neighbors. And I hope both of them are reading this. It’s likely that you guys got into your lines of work at least in part because you’re interested in helping people, and making them safer. But the standards of your specialties, because they focus so tightly on just a few specialized metrics like LOS are actually killing and maiming people, destroying families, and causing uncounted grief. Your ideals are not wrong; your ideals are good. It’s your standards that are egregiously wrong, and causing much suffering. Do the right thing, and reconsider your standards. Let Celebration live, and may each of you stand as change-makers against unsafe regulations. Make places safer in real life, not in your tiny silos. The time is now.

~Steve Mouzon

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Walk Appeal

Great Storefronts

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It may come as a surprise, but few things in walkable places are stronger predictors of the vitality of a town or neighborhood center than the quality of its storefronts. Centers in the US normally gather around a Main Street or square. European centers often gather around a plaza, place, piazza, High Street or (again) a square. But whatever it’s called and however it is shaped, the life of the center is fueled more by the quality of its storefronts than by any other factor. Auto-dominated commercial strips, by contrast, are fueled most by two things: their tall pylon signs, and tall architectural elements such as towers at the corners of mid-box buildings which are designed to attract attention quickly from motorists speeding by. Big-box buildings, of course, are their own massive billboards. But back to walkable places...

Go into any neighborhood and walk down a primarily residential street, and you’ll likely find relatively few people walking, even if it’s after work. But good neighborhood centers are often thronged with neighbors after work. A few of the people on the residential streets are walking to a neighbor’s house, but most of them are walking to the neighborhood center. The primary job of the residential street is to collect them and to entertain them enough along the way that they don’t get bored before arriving at the neighborhood center.

Think of the primarily residential streets as the opening act to the main event that is the town or neighborhood center. Streets leading to the center should have enough Walk Appeal to be interesting so that people keep walking; the center itself should be positively entertaining in order to entice enough people that it becomes a vibrant place.

Entertainment begins at the storefront, and the reason why is primarily geometry. As you walk along the sidewalk, the views that change most quickly are those into the storefronts beside you. Every five to eight seconds, you can walk past another shop, with its unique selection of wares on display. Entertainment is the opposite of monotony, and changing the view frequently is essential to avoiding monotony. All of the places shown in this post are in metropolitan areas that have districts built of larger buildings, but fewer people walk there except at starting time and quitting time of the offices because large office buildings are much less interesting because it can take a minute or more to walk by some of them.

People don’t come to the center solely for an entertaining walk, of course; they usually have a reason to visit one or more of the shops. So uses do matter, and the the more frequently-visited businesses like a grocery or a third place (coffee shop, bistro, cafe, pub, or restaurant where you can bring your laptop or tablet and hang out for awhile) draw people more frequently than a shoe store, for example. The difference is that if the walk is boring or the storefronts in the center are boring, they’re more likely to drive to the shop from which they need something, pick up the item, and drive back home whereas with great Walk Appeal fueled by great storefronts, they’re more likely to walk and then stay awhile once they get there, benefitting more businesses.

We’ve already talked about frontages in general; now let’s look in detail at the storefronts that line those frontages. And fortunately, there are a few simple steps for making them enticing. Storefronts are made up of up to five parts. Three are essential and two are optional. The building face is essential, and includes the windows, doors, doorways and other architectural elements. The interior display is essential as well, as a storefront where you can’t see what is being sold is pointless. Signage is also essential. Many storefronts have some sort of shelter, such as an awning, gallery, colonnade, or arcade. Some storefronts include exterior seating for food or drink service establishments. We’ll look at the essential elements of a storefront that occur on the sidewalk level in this post. The following are rules of thumb for each:

Building Face

Windows & Transoms

Storefront windows should be single-lite clear glass to best display the wares inside. Divided lites may be used only when the items for sale are substantially smaller than the panes, so you can get an unobstructed view of things in the window. Storefront windows may run the entire height of the glazing, or may be capped with transoms. Transoms may have divided lites because the muntins diffuse light coming into the shop, bathing things within the shop in a softer light.

Glass Percentage

The best storefronts are 65% to 75% glass at eye level. Less glass is boring, because you can see less of the interior. More glass is also boring, but for a different reason: the closer you get to the 100% glass of a butt-glazed curtain wall, the less interesting the wall becomes because more and more architectural elements like piers, pilasters, casings, and sashes must be removed. And when walking down the sidewalk beside the curtain wall, you’ll notice that glass becomes more reflective when viewed from a steeper angle. The glass that’s 30 feet ahead of you essentially becomes a mirror, so you can’t see inside.

Window Sill Height

Storefront window sills should never be higher than 29 inches, which is table-top height in a restaurant. Higher sills restrict your view into the store. But glass should never run all the way to the sidewalk, either, because the lowest few inches of the wall take a lot of abuse. A sill constructed of something tougher than glass should be a minimum of 6 inches tall. Sill heights should vary from store to store because that is more interesting than holding all of the sills at the same height.

Window Head Height

Window heads should be no lower than 8 feet above the floor, although they can be much taller, running all the way to the bottom of the storefront beam if desired.

Storefront Doorways

Doors in commercial buildings are usually required to open outward by fire codes, but if the door is located at the edge of the sidewalk, someone walking quickly by on the sidewalk can be seriously injured by a door unexpectedly opening. This happened to a friend of mine; the end of the door caught him square in the forehead, splitting it open. I had to take him to the emergency room to get stitched up. So always set storefront doors back at least three feet deep into a doorway. The doorway sides can be either square or splayed display windows. A doorway isn’t just a safety device, however; it’s the best display space in the shop because it’s where people are slowing down to go inside, so they see the wares better. It’s also a good place to stand temporarily in the event of a rain shower.

Storefront Doors

A storefront door should be mostly glass, and may be either a single lite or have divided lites of any pattern, because it does not have to provide a clear view to merchandise just behind it, as that floor space is used for walking, not for display. Storefront doors may be single or double, and should be distinguished from the windows in some way in order to be immediately visible to people walking by. Paint color is a common method.

Storefront Beam

The storefront beam holds up the wall above, and the span between visible supports is fairly long: at least 10 feet; often 16 to 24 feet or even more, so the beam needs to be deep enough that it’s obviously strong enough to carry the load. The storefront beam may be a visible steel beam, or better yet a steel beam built up with plates, angles, and rivets, which is more interesting. Or it may be clad with stone, terra-cotta, or other finishes.

End Piers

The end piers occur at the ends of the shops (and occasionally in between) and visually support the storefront beam. End piers may either be shared between two neighboring shops, or each shop may have its own end pier that abuts its neighbor’s end pier such as these storefronts (which also have intermediate piers as well). The decision of whether to use shared piers or individual piers is usually made on a block-by-block basis and is based on whether the developer is building several shops at once (where shared piers work) or whether each lot is individually built out (so that individual piers are required).

Interior Display

This element should be obvious, but in today’s retail climate, it needs some explanation. Retailers should turn their wares toward the windows where everyone in the neighborhood will see them, instead of inward where only those who are already inside their shop might see them. This should be Marketing 101. But retailers complain that “my store is designed to put shelves on the outer walls, so that all the aisles are double-loaded.” This is easily fixed by simply flipping aisle and shelving. Rippled across the store, this creates the same efficiency, but with the outer aisles getting many times the exposure through the storefront windows.

What they choose to display on those outer aisles is important. In my neighborhood, there is a grocery store which did the right thing and put windows all along the side of their store. But then they chose to display stuff like diapers in those shelves. One aisle away is their wine department. Imagine how much better they would do if they turned more enticing products like that toward the sidewalk instead of diapers!

Signage

I’ve written a Sign Code for Walkable Places, the essence of which is this: Signs for places where people walk should be scaled to the person walking by close to the storefront, not the automobile speeding by a hundred feet or more from the storefront. This means that you’re permitted more types of signs: blade signs, band signs, window signs, etc., all on the same storefront. The problem with signs in auto-dominated places is that they must be very large to be seen and read before you zip by in your car. So it’s essential to limit the area of the signs in auto-dominated places, and also the number of them. Signs in walkable places can be much smaller, because you see them from short distances. As a result, they generally don’t need size limitations, or limits on sign types. And their variety makes a place more interesting.

~Steve Mouzon

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Preserving Architectural Character in Places Threatened by Sea Level Rise

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Preservation is a losing battle, and nowhere is this more obvious than in South Beach. Eventually, every building ever built will be lost, so preservation needs to be understood as the act of extending the lives of places and buildings we love the most, not the act of preserving them forever. Every thriving place has development pressure that seeks to replace old buildings with new ones that are substantially larger. Anyone who lives in Miami Beach and who wants to visualize development pressure can simply walk outside, look around, and count the cranes that dot the skyline. Preservationists have gotten relatively good at fighting back against development pressure, at least for the best historic buildings, but the pressure is there.

Sunny-Day Flooding

Here on South Beach, we have another threat to the character of our architecture, and it’s not yet clear if this threat can be opposed, at least for some of our buildings. That threat is sea level rise. When Wanda and I first moved here almost 14 years ago, “tidal flooding,” and “sunny-day flooding” were terms we didn’t hear for several years. Tidal flooding wasn’t a thing until 2009 or so. But by 2013, we were having nights like this on an accelerating basis, when the sea level was simply higher than the streets, with seawater spilling into the streets. Inland people debate sea level rise, but not South Beach residents because we have seen it with our own eyes.

Even before the October 2013 flood occurred, the city had undertaken a massive infrastructure project consisting of improved storm drainage, huge underground storage tanks, and massive pumps to pump the water back out into the ocean before it gets to street level, putting us in the same boat as New Orleans: cities with streets that are at least sometimes below sea level. And those pumps work almost all the time, but when they failed after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans flooded and thousands of buildings were lost. So far, the South Beach pumps have not failed, and we have had no further street flooding. But we inevitably will at some point.

Raising Streets

And so the city is now raising the streets. Land is highest on the Atlantic side, sloping down to the lowest point on the bay side. Streets are being raised about 3.5 feet on the bay side, which is the existing grade near the middle of the island.

Unfortunately, the city is not raising the buildings. I predicted last year that this approach would cause rain-driven flooding problems, and this has already happened. Here’s why: when the streets are raised but the buildings are not, those buildings may be 3 feet or more below the sidewalk. In a rainstorm, if debris like cardboard clogs the newly-installed storm drains in front of a building, or if mulch washes out of a planting bed to clog the drains, the lower area at the front of the building effectively becomes a swimming pool, and in many cases the only place for the water to run is into the building. The pumps might fail only once ever few decades; this flooding could happen repeatedly; whenever there’s a big storm. The city worked with the insurance companies on the first floods in Sunset Harbor, but the insurance companies will quickly tire of the same story each time floods occur. At some point, the buildings must be raised because they will otherwise become uninsurable. These are discussions we need to be having now. The longer we wait to start talking about how to raise the buildings, the more painful and urgent the process will be. The new administration should make this a high priority, as we cannot avoid this problem indefinitely.

Raising Buildings

Galveston house before and after
being raised

We’ve done this before, and with masonry buildings, not just wood-framed houses. And we should be doing this now on South Beach, as our ancestors did in these two examples: Bay Village in Boston was raised in the 19th century after the Back Bay was filled in. Some areas were raised up to 18 feet, although some of the building main levels became basements. After the Galveston hurricane of 1900 (the deadliest natural disaster in US history) the entire city was raised up to 17 feet, which is the current seawall elevation. So there’s no doubt that we can raise 1- and 2-story buildings.

There’s also no doubt that we cannot raise skyscrapers. For tall buildings, the best solution will probably be to demolish the second level and move the first level upward, leaving upper levels unchanged. The problem is the “Sour Spot” between the 1-2 story buildings (or maybe 3) and the high-rises. Sour Spot buildings that are too tall to raise but too short to modify are likely to be lost. It’s simply an economic reality. With sea level rise happening across the country and around the world, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to bail us out because this is not a localized disaster like a hurricane. We’re on our own on this.

Walk down Ocean Drive, and you’ll see that some of the most memorable examples of South Beach architecture are in the Sour Spot and likely to be lost because they’re too tall to raise but too short to move the first floor upward. Ocean Drive Sour Spot buildings won’t be the first ones lost, as they’re sitting on higher ground; that’ll happen further back in the Art Deco District at the beginning. But no reasonable models today project a future where seas don’t continue to rise to and beyond Ocean Drive at some point.

The Replacements

replacements built in wealthy times… a random
collection of styles that just happened to be

popular at the times they were designed

When this happens… and there is little doubt but that it will… what will replace these long-loved buildings that form the core of the character of South Beach? If we do nothing to direct the character of the architecture, those replacements will almost certainly be a random collection of “styles du jour” that occur at the times at which they will be built. In short, we’ll morph over time into urbanism no different from any other urban beach city in the US, without the strong character Miami Beach has today that leaves little doubt in any visitor’s mind precisely where on earth they are.

replacements built in frugal times

It is rare for a city to have strong architectural character, and it helps create far greater value than exists in more ordinary places. And that strong character draws millions of people to travel from around the world to visit Miami Beach every year. Will that continue once that character is eroded beyond recognition? Sure, the Post Office will be preserved, along with a few other Art Deco monuments, but what city that was thriving from 1920-1945 doesn’t have a few Art Deco monuments? Once the Sour Spot buildings are replaced by random architecture, we will clearly lose great real estate value and great annual revenues to local businesses.

Coding for Character

Architect Trigger Warning: I’m about to trigger some foul emotions in the architectural community. There is a solution, and that is to code for character. This means that leaders in the city must make the choice to build future buildings that become part of a new living tradition of Art Deco architecture. If Art Deco is what people love, why not build more of it? Most architects will fight this furiously, kicking and screaming all the way. Their battle cry is “architecture must be of its time!” The fact of the matter is that there is a strong track record of cities coding for a particular character, and it usually creates great value.

In some cases, coding for character takes the form of an "extreme makeover” such as when Santa Fe chose about 1910 to transform from a town of Victorian cottages to the adobe city it is today. Santa Barbara chose a makeover to Spanish Colonial Revival about ten years later. South Beach, as we all know, adopted Art Deco shortly thereafter. In other cases, places like the French Quarter in New Orleans and Charleston have chosen to code for character in order to preserve their existing character. In every case, strong character has created strong value.

Design Leadership

Who should lead this initiative to ensure preservation of the character of Miami Beach into the future? It’s not set in stone. Here, the Art Deco character was established by a community of architects such as Lawrence Murray Dixon. Architects also led the Santa Barbara transformation. Architect-driven initiatives do not have to be large at the beginning. Just a few like-minded designers can band together to get it started. The Sarasota School of the 1950s is another model where there was not a code per se, but rather a collection of architects agreeing to pursue similar architecture. The code, however, is stronger.

Civic Leadership

The initiative to preserve character can also be led by civic leaders. Mayor Joe Riley in Charleston is a great example of the “strong mayor” model. Leadership can also come from someone on the Commission that adopts the initiative as their own. The Chamber of Commerce can lead as well, as they did in Santa Fe. The bottom line is that there are many people who can step up to the plate and get the initiative rolling to preserve the character of Miami Beach. Who will it be?

~Steve Mouzon

Hypocrisy and the CorbMiesian Revival

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Modernism’s core hypocrisy can take down some really good guys. Richard Campanella is apparently one of them. By all accounts, including from my close friend Ann Daigle, he is well-loved and highly respected in Louisiana and beyond. I’ve read a number of his pieces, and they’re very professional, well-researched, and even-handed, except when it comes to one core point: the continuation of a much-loved character of architecture at a later time, once it has fallen out of favor. The problem isn’t whether it’s OK to revive an old style, but for which characters of architecture it is permitted and for which it is forbidden, and why there should be a difference. To be frank, Greek Revival and Colonial Revival are reprehensible to most architects today, while CorbMiesian Revival and Brutalist Revival are the hottest things going. I’ve illustrated this post with CorbMiesian Revival examples from South of 5th on South Beach (my adopted hometown), and 1111 Lincoln Road, which may be the best example built to date of Brutalist Revival.

In short, if it’s Modernist, you’re a hero for bringing it back. If it’s not Modernist, you should be banned from the company of thoughtful architects. Hypocrisy incarnate. Let’s look at how Richard unfortunately falls prey in his post New Orleans' historical revival architecture: A look to the past for inspiration? Or solace?

But this late-20th century brand of historical revival was different. It was more emphatically neotraditionalist -- that is, purely pastiche, lacking an underlying philosophy and seemingly motivated mostly by nostalgia.

Campanella acknowledged prior revivals of Greek and Roman architecture in New Orleans, but he’s clearly put off by recent traditional architecture. I can’t read his mind, but this seems perilously close to disrespecting it because it’s a present-day threat to Modernism. In his meticulously-researched piece on post-Katrina architecture, he shows how New Orleans residents have chosen traditional characters of architecture <even if poorly executed> over Modernist characters of architecture <even if superbly executed by nationally-known masters> by a margin of 14 to 1. <These are my insertions not found in his piece.> Why would people choose mediocre traditional buildings over masterworks of Modernism? More on this later. And if you haven’t noticed already, “pastiche” and “nostalgia” are insults thrown around regularly by Modernists at those who have not joined their clique. To be clear, I consider Campanella to be an unfortunate bystander who took up these terms from his architect friends, because according to his CV he didn’t go through architecture school.

For families in the market to build a new house, pattern books increasingly featured historical designs, making their selection convenient, and builders streamlined their construction, which lowered their costs. Historical revival became de rigueur in both old neighborhoods and new subdivisions, and features like faux Creole hipped roofs and Victorian turrets started popping up region-wide.

When have pattern books ever not featured traditonal designs? Traditional designs are those which have been proven to work. Most people like proven things. Only a few (including me) are willing to take risks to explore new stuff. Calling them “historical” rather than “traditional” is an attempt to relegate them to the past. If people living today choose them fourteen to one, what’s historical about that? That’s a contemporary and present-day fact.

Also, what is a “faux Creole hipped roof?” Richard, you’re a great researcher, so you surely should know what a Creole roof accomplishes. A hipped roof is one where each plane of the roof supports their neighboring planes, which is inherently stronger in a hurricane. Creole roofs often have a slope in the 8:12 to 9:12 range, which hurricane experts today tell us are in the sweet spot of being too low to easily fail in overturning and too high to easily fail in uplift during a hurricane. One exception is the Creole cottage, which may be up to 12:12 because there is living space within the roof, and those upstairs walls reinforce the roof. Meanwhile, the trademark flat roofs of both Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, grandfathers of today’s CorbMiesian Revival, have the absolute worst failure rates in uplift stress.

The “bell-cast eave” that often occurs at the permiter of the building in many Creole hipped roofs? It unlocked the mystery of living traditions because of its utilitarian purpose: torrential rains coming off a steep roof would dig a trench in the yard, whereas rains broken by a shallower eave come off in more of a spray than a sheet of water. Simply put, there’s nothing faux about a Creole hipped roof. It’s a roof shape proven over centuries to perform very well in the region. One of the great Modernist conceits is that “nothing that came before us is worthy of us.” I think that’s a Wright quote but can’t find it at the moment. In any case, the pell-mell rush to discard anything old also turns out to discard anything proven. Is that what we really want?

Contemporary designs, meanwhile, usually entailed commissioning an architect, which might slow the process and raise the price, while possibly limiting the home's future curb appeal to only those who liked modern architecture.

Agreed on all points. And because your own research shows that those who like Modernist architecture are roughly 1 in 15 (1 to 14), who in their right mind that didn’t like Modernist architecture would choose to build something so hamstrung in the market?

Neotraditionism won further ground when the New Urbanism movement, which sought to recapture the intimacy and walkability of pre-automobile neighborhoods, extended the retro aesthetic to entire developments and fortified it with a social policy argument.

Let’s be clear. The New Urbanism has always researched the things that people love most from the beginning, and began doing so at a time that nobody cared to even ask the question “what do the people love?” New Urbanists then had the audacity to actually build lovable homes and businesses. The Modernists will never forgive them for that, because it lays bare the greatest failing of Modernism: their core precept (the necessity of uniqueness) necessitates unlovable architecture almost all the time because they’re required to dispose of every characteristic of buildings that has ever been proven lovable in human history. Yes, there is the one-in-a-million Eiffel Tower which becomes deeply loved by a people and even by the world. But for each of those, there are countless tons of dreck put up that people get rid of as soon as possible. If it can’t be loved, it won’t last.

1111 Lincoln Road, arguably

the best Brutalist Revival
building built so far in the US.

And this gets back to one of the foundations of this Modernist hypocrisy: the assumption that the architects know and the people don’t. This “retro” slur that Campanella unfortunately uses is common as well… another way to consign anything non-Modernist to the past, and banned from ever being built again. But the people know how to value what they love most, and have no problem at all signing earnest money checks for more-loved characters of architecture (even if poorly executed) over fabulously-executed examples of unlovable architecture. The proper contrast isn’t retro vs. Modernist, but lovable vs. unlovable.

The rebuilding after the Katrina deluge of 2005 formed an experiment of sorts in which the architectural tastes of thousands of New Orleans families might be further revealed. With such bad memories behind them, would families opt for a refreshing contemporary look?

Richard, look at your own work! All signs, as you noted, pointed toward a break from tradition, for something new! But your own research painstakingly shows that this was not the case, by a margin of 14 to 1! Why is that so? If all the signs point to one conclusion yet the evidence points overwhelmingly to a very different reality, does that not suggest that our foundation assumptions are very seriously wrong?

With various levels of flood risk at play, would they opt for sustainability?

What is sustainability? Is it Gizmo Green? Something you can buy from Home Depot? Or is it building things that can be sustained in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future? If the latter, then it’s essential to know the people, the things that they love, and why. If it can’t be loved, it won’t last. Architects really must develop enough humility to earnestly listen to regular people if they are to have any hope of actually accomplishing this.

We may conclude that, for better or worse, most folks wanted the new New Orleans to look like "olde" New Orleans -- despite that, from the 1720s to the 1970s, local society had a completely different sensibility, importing new ideas and experimenting with the latest design thinking, as if to say "we are confident about the future." Only when that confidence nose-dived in the late 20th century did the architectural eyes of the average New Orleanian turn backward.

Richard, you’re asking the wrong question here, and coming to the wrong conclusion. It’s not “olde” versus new, historic versus modern, or any similar chronological divides. Rather, when people’s lives are severely disrupted, it’s a known fact that they turn to things that are known to work. It’s absolutely no surprise that the people of New Orleans chose what has been proven in the region to work for centuries versus the hodgepodge collection of Modernist styles du jour. Why is this even in question?

~Steve Mouzon

PS: I’m speaking in New Orleans at the CityBuilding Exchange March 8-10. We’re arriving early. I’d be delighted to buy you a coffee or whatever else you’d like to drink and talk about these things if you’re interested. Ann speaks very highly of you.

Want Some Walk Appeal With Your Tacos?

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Restaurants in places with good Walk Appeal are inherently less fattening than unwalkable ones because meals come with embedded exercise. I just walked to my favorite restaurant and back, and burned 113 calories. That might not seem like a lot, but 113 calories each day for a year is enough to lose almost 12 pounds, which is why people who live in places with good Walk Appeal are thinner.

Groceries

We don’t eat out every day, of course, but we do walk to the grocery store pretty much every day. Whole Foods is 60 calories away; it’s where we shop most often. Publix is 93 calories away; we shop there as well. Walgreens is 56 calories away.

We rarely buy more than one day’s worth of food; often only one meal’s worth. There’s no doubt we eat fresher and therefore more nutritious food by doing this rather than by driving an SUV to the grocery and stocking up on a week’s worth of food. Some people from unwalkable places are shocked to find that we walk over a mile round trip to shop at Publix. “How can you lug all your groceries the half-mile home?” The fact is, when you’re buying only a meal or two at a time, there are never so many groceries that they don’t fit in my single reusable bag.

Drinking Establishments

If you’d like some beer with your tacos, Walk Appeal might actually save your life someday. Almost everyone who visits this neighborhood pub walks there. If they have too much to drink, they stumble home, and the worst thing likely to happen to them is to stagger and fall, and bump their head. Contrast that with people who visit a bar in sprawl. Because it’s surrounded with bad-to-hideous Walk Appeal, everyone drives there. And if there’s no designated driver, those who’ve had too much to drink will far too often get behind the wheel anyway, endangering their own life and the lives of everyone else along their route.

I’m of the opinion that cities should strongly consider the Walk Appeal surrounding an establishment trying to get a liquor license. Granting a license to a bar on the highway guarantees that some people will be drinking and driving.

Sidewalk Cafes

Eating and drinking establishments don’t just benefit from good Walk Appeal; they can actually contribute to it as well. I did an entire blog post on this earlier, but it bears repeating: nothing makes a stronger contribution to Walk Appeal than a sidewalk cafe. That’s because the most interesting thing to someone walking is seeing other people. And while you might see someone for a moment on a sidewalk, they are likely to be sitting at the cafe eating and drinking for an hour or more. Or if you’re in Paris, they might be there all day.

~Steve Mouzon

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2016

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 22:59:57 -0600

Street Tree Design

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Street trees are essential for strong Walk Appeal almost anywhere in the US, which makes them a fundamental part of the public frontage, which extends from the property line to the edge of the street. We’ll talk about other public frontage parts later, but street trees are so important that they warrant their own discussion. Two things will be apparent when we look at street trees and other public frontage parts: First, none of this is rocket science; simple rules of thumb cover most of these parts. On the other hand, it’s shocking how often a city, a Department of Transportation, or a developer gets them wrong… so do what you can to get people informed in your city or town.

Why Should We Plant Street Trees?

There are many reasons to plant street trees (most of which will be in a later post), but the two most obvious ones are closely intertwined: Walk Appeal and sustainability. In most of the US, a street without trees is a street where people rarely walk, and therefore almost always drive. This is bad for our towns, our wallets, and our waistlines.

Street Tree Types

If you’re not in a US state with a Canadian border, you really need street trees to shade the sidewalk. And if you’re North of New Orleans, those street trees should be be deciduous so they drop their leaves in winter so you can walk in the relative warmth of a winter sun. From New Orleans southward, shade is helpful throughout the year because it can be warm throughout most days of the year.

The type of street tree varies according to where you are in town. Along a Main Street, trees should be taller and more vertically-proportioned, so that when they’re mature, their lowest branches are 12-16 feet above the sidewalk so they don’t block business signs. Also, Main Street buildings typically pull right up to the street, so trees that are more vertically-proportioned don’t grow so hard up against the upper levels of the Main Street buildings. On a primarily residential street, the trees can be lower and spread more broadly because the buildings (mostly houses) are set further back from the street. The lowest branches only need to be a bit above the head height of a tall person.

Street Tree Spacing

Street trees should be planted roughly every 15-30 feet along a Main Street and every 25-50 feet along a primarily residential street. Start by planting a street tree at every property line. If the Main Street shops are really narrow (less than 15 feet wide) plant the trees on every other property line. If they’re really wide (more than 30 feet wide), plant the trees every 20 feet or so, but don’t plant them in front of the shops’ front doors. If you do, some shop-owners will sneak out at night and poison the trees.

Alton Road street tree not yet

poisoned by the shop-owner

The Florida DOT had no clue about this basic rule when they rebuilt Alton Road on South Beach, so this is exactly what happened again and again. It’s a lose-lose deal for the business owners, because while killing the trees keeps their signs more visible, the sunburned sidewalks are not a place most people want to walk for most of the year. That’s why Alton Road today is by far the least-walked commercial street on South Beach. And this is in a place where 45% of the people don’t even own a car (because they don’t need them) and most of the tourists don’t rent cars as well. In other words, the Florida DOT through their ignorance killed a lot of real estate value on Alton Road. And yes, Alton has several glaring flaws that will take a lot of work to fix, but the street trees could have been done correctly, and at no additional cost.

Residential street trees planted every 25-50 feet along a street require only one tree on every property line on most residential streets in traditional neighborhoods. If the street is populated with narrow townhouses, it may require only one tree on every other property line whereas parts of the neighborhood with large lots (more than 50 feet wide) require two trees per lot.

Planting Street Trees

Trees should be planted either in swales (on primarily residentail streets) or in tree wells (on Main Streets). Do not listen to “urban foresters,” who insist that trees must be planted in landscape beds large enough for their mature drip lines. Their grand lie is legendary… if what they said were true, canopy streets like Meridian Avenue on South Beach would be impossible. They are terribly wrong about this, and need to be called out on it. These are street trees, after all, not forest trees. Primarily residential streets may have swales up to 5 feet wide and of indefinite length, whereas primarily commercial streets may have tree wells 5 feet square or smaller.

YES, “urban foresters” can specify trees that are unsuitable as street trees and will die on an urban street. Yes, they can specify planting conditions that will cause their self-fulfilling prophecies to occur. But hopefully, you live in a town where at least one good landscape architect knows which tree to plant and how to plant it so that it thrives for centuries. Go to Charleston, South Carolina… this isn’t just possible, but is commonplace.

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Adam Old · Director of Communications at TransitAlliance.Miami

has that Charleston street been paved with asphalt for centuries, or is it possible that it is a new material? I have seen huge grand old oak trees dropping whole limbs when the ground below them was asphalted.

Jan 6, 2017 8:19pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Adam, it has been paved since I was young... the first time I was ever on that street was in 1983, when I was right out of college. I'm sure it was cobblestones at some point, but the asphalt is not recent.

Jan 12, 2017 7:12am

558+

Why Walk Appeal?

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Do we want a cup of coffee that is merely drinkable? A meal that is just edible? A book that is only readable? Of course not! We want things that are aromatic, delicious, and engaging! So why should we settle for places that are merely walkable? Why not places where we love to walk?

35 years ago, walkability was a high and noble goal because the default settings of city-building created such hideously unwalkable places. But thanks in large part to the New Urbanism, we have learned how to build walkable places again. Walkability is now commonplace in places that adhere to New Urbanist principles. Today, we need a higher standard.

A place with strong Walk Appeal is one where it’s appealing to walk, not one where we’re merely able to walk. And Walk Appeal is one of the strongest indicators of the economic health, environmental health, and public health of a place.

Healthy Walk Appeal drives the prosperity of neighborhood businesses, and can even make the difference between failure, surviving, and thriving. And those neighborhood businesses have many benefits for the neighborhood, including eliminating food deserts, allowing people to make a living where they’re living, letting people walk to daily needs, and keeping the neighborhood safer because there are more eyes on the street.

Good Walk Appeal benefits the environment in several ways, especially including these two: It’s obvious that every trip on foot or on a bike burns fat instead of gas, keeping us healthier and wealthier, and keeping the air cleaner. What’s not so obvious is that when we spend time outdoors, we get acclimated to the local environment so that when we return indoors we may be able to throw the windows open and leave the air conditioner off. And there is no equipment so efficient as that which is off.

The greatest benefit of strong Walk Appeal, however, is what it does to our bodies. Places where people walk 10,000 steps per day as part of their daily activities have been proven to be healthier than those where people walk less, all other things being equal. Our obesity epidemic has ballooned as our walking has dwindled, and it brings many life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.

Finding a characteristic of the built environment that has such a powerful influence for good in making us healthier, or making our environment healthier, or making our neighborhoods healthier is wonderful. Finding a characteristic that does all three is far better. Walk Appeal is that characteristic, and it’s time to start improving it all across America.

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Steve Dombek · Saint Petersburg, Florida

Steve, a little while back I tried introducing the idea that nearly all American streets are "One-Sided" places (even our good Main Streets), whereas the most beloved streets around the world are often "Two-Sided" places. It's a concept that's more easily illustrated with a few examples (make sure to play the GIF):
https://mobile.twitter.com/Stev.../status/658686569709105152
What makes a street into a Two-Sided place? I think it needs at least three things: (1) people-scaled amenities on both sides (e.g. shops, housing, parks) with minimal dead space, (2) a center "thoroughfare" that's either pedestrianized or very slow-moving shared space (people need to be able to walk down the middle and cross side-to-side with ease), and (3) a width that's narrow enough to create a sense of unified space. Most American streets are too wide for that last point and would need a median treatment of some kind -- imagine adding a strip of park space down the center, or a row of small market stands or food carts.

Dec 14, 2016 7:14am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Several good ideas here, Steve... thanks! Street width is definitely a battle we fight in the US. At best, an American Main Street is likely to have a 1:3 enclosure ratio unless buildings are 3 stories or taller. I like what we've done on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, where there are multiple crosswalks in the median to encourage people to cross mid-block.

Jan 12, 2017 7:16am

451+

City of Hope

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Detroit has lost all that it’s going to lose. The city has clearly turned the corner. If you didn’t get those ruin porn shots you wanted, it’s far too late now; the ruined mansions in Brush Park have either been demolished if they were too far gone, or are now being renovated. New construction seems to be everywhere.

But the most amazing thing about Detroit isn’t the buildings, but the people. Wanda and I were there in June for the Congress for the New Urbanism, and we stayed an extra day so we could walk around and see more of the city. We probably walked almost ten miles that day, and the most striking thing to see was the number of friendly people. We’re originally from the deep South, which is the region that takes great pride in the friendliness of its people, but I’ve never seen such a high proportion of friendly people in Atlanta or Charlotte.

I was first in Detroit in 1979, and it was a very different place back then. I was on a student tour of Montreal and Toronto led by our architecture professors, and Detroit was so scary at the time that we didn’t even stop, but drove straight to the border as quickly as we could. Detroit’s decline began in the 1950s, and by 1979, it was in full swing and hopelessness ran deep. And yes, I know the crime rate is still far too high, but the faces of the people make it clear that change is coming.

And no, this is not about race; it’s about hope. Insofar as I can tell, the racial mix doesn’t seem to have changed much, but the change in hope is stunning. The only race-based distinction I noticed was this: of all the people that struck up conversations with us that day, every single one was a Black person.

How did this come about? I’m no expert on what finally flipped the switch from hopelessness to hope for all those Detroit citizens, but it’s clear what didn’t do it. Big, gleaming mega-projects like the Renaissance Center can actually create the opposite of a renaissance because they suck vitality off the street for many blocks around. And big corporate fortresses like this can actually increase fear, as people get accustomed to making the dash from home to office parking structure in their cars as quickly as possible instead of seeing their fellow-citizens each day on the sidewalk. If you want to build a vibrant city, put many front doors on the street, and put as many offices as close to those front doors as you can. The “city within a city” model of the Renaissance Center is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Detroit’s real renaissance is now happening in many small places, not the few big ones. Walk around Brush Park, Lower Woodward, and Midtown, and you’ll find all sorts of cool stuff popping up. I can’t help but believe that a lot of the innovation is happening because the city has been so cash-strapped for the last decade that it hasn’t been able to regulate things like cities usually do. So the Millennials have just moved in, taken over buildings, and started all sorts of ventures without asking permission. The scene in the photo below is being repeated all over the city. Yes, it’s a bit like the Wild West, but we once built a nation that way.

Cities in decline looking to revitalize themselves should go to Detroit and see for themselves what is going on. And then they need to ask this question: Rather than sliding to the depths of hopelessness that Detroit reached, where it was unable to regulate in a normal way and had to cease serving large swaths of the city, should we not skip the most hopeless years and lighten the burden of regulation now, so the vitality and inventiveness can get going?

There’s a Lean Urbanism movement brewing; it actually kicked off in Detroit in October, 2013. One of the central things they’re looking to establish is Pink Zones, so named because they are places where the red tape is lightened. Pink Zones aren’t totally the Wild West, but they “make small possible.” Here’s more about what Lean means.

Mark Nickita is an expert on Detroit on many counts. Here’s what he wrote about Lean Urbanism in Detroit. Several years ago, he said “Detroit is a tale of two cities, one of great hope and another of great despair, according to which streets you drive down.” Now, the hope is much easier to find. I hope the city leadership realizes the things that have tipped the balance, and continues to let the vitality and innovation flow.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · University of Miami

Excellent article! I ask this question. "Are regulations going to be the downfall of this country? We are so over regulated that no one can even THINK anymore!" Lean Urbanism is truly the answer for our future!

Nov 14, 2016 1:35pm

168+

2015

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 22:59:57 -0600

Liner Buildings - How to Get Great Streets Years in Advance

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liner buildings on either side of the Pulteney Bridge in Bath, England are only 10’ deep

There's nothing that jump-starts a place people will love to walk like liner buildings. It doesn't matter whether you're helping a place recover from sprawl or building a new neighborhood center; liner buildings get far more bang for the buck and make things possible today that would be completely impossible until years in the future using conventional mixed-use building types.

Liner buildings are very thin buildings that line the edge of a street, plaza, square, or other public space. They can be as little as 8-10 feet deep for retail uses and 12-14 feet deep if they include residential uses. They may be a single story high, or they may be several stories tall. Liner buildings have several key advantages over other building types:

Spatial Enclosure

Shops lining Ponte Vecchio in
Florence are likely the world’s most
famous liner buildings

One of the top requirements of a great place is “spatial enclosure,” which is design-speak for “feels more like a room than a highway.” No building type encloses more space for less dollars than a liner building. Yes, you can enclose a space with a freestanding wall, but walls are usually much less interesting than buildings because buildings have people, windows, and other interesting things.

Storefront-Floor Area Ratio

A liner building with retail on the street level displays the shop’s wares more effectively than any other shop. The reason is simple: if two shops each have storefront windows across their entire street frontage and one (the liner building) is ten feet deep and the other one (the conventional Main Street shop) is a hundred feet deep, then the liner building has ten times as much storefront per square foot of floor space as the conventional shop. Simply put, there is no other configuration of store that displays more of the store’s goods to people walking by.

Single-Crew Workplaces

The Single-Crew Workplace is a place of business small enough to be run by a single crew. For a retail shop, that’s one shopkeeper. For a restaurant, it’s a cook and a server. For a barber or hairstylist, that’s a single person. For a B&B, that could either be one inkeeper/cook and one housekeeper for an 8-room B&B, or a single person that does everything for a 4-room B&B. For a bar, that’s one bartender. For a grocery store, that’s a single grocer.

grocery so small it can be run by 1 grocer - more

in an upcoming post

Mixed-use buildings have a problem today: the retail experts who set impossibly high thresholds for supporting them. For example, the accepted wisdom is that you need 500 “rooftops” (that’s retail-speak for homes) to support a single corner store. If a neighborhood is building 50 homes per year, it would be a decade before that neighborhood could support just that first corner store. And that grocery store? Not too long ago, a 10,000 square foot neighborhood grocery store was common, but today 40,000 is considered the minimum size, and that requires a catchment area much bigger than a neighborhood. But I’ll blog soon about something quite the opposite: that single-grocer store which is considered completely impossible today. Here’s the bottom line: single-crew workplaces make all sorts of neighborhood businesses possible today that would be completely impossible using bigger-box standards, and no building type is so perfectly suited to single-crew workplaces as the liner building.

Front, Back, and Side

Liner buildings are used most commonly today to enclose a public space, shielding it from something less desirable behind such as a parking deck or parking lot. I would even go so far as to say that every parking deck built from this point forward should be buffered from streets or squares by liner buildings. Why build any buildings that degrade the public realm? And the fact that the part that makes them palatable from the street also earns rent is a bonus. This building looks like a 5-story office building from the street, but it’s really a 7-story parking deck with an 18 foot office liner and 12 foot gallery on the street. But lining a parking deck is only one of the uses of a liner building. What’s behind the liner building doesn’t have to be something undesirable… enclosing the public space is worthwhile even if there’s nature behind.

The reverse can also be true. The liner building can be used to protect a quiet courtyard area from the noise of a busy street. A cloister is a classic ancient liner building type used for this purpose for centuries. Here’s a three-story classical stone liner building that’s nearly a block long which shields a courtyard inside the block from a mundane street.

There’s a third type of liner building that’s less common: the “end cap liner.” An end cap liner building is a thin building built on the end of a block of attached mixed-use buildings.

Main Street buildings typically have blank side walls because they are attached to their neighbors on either side. Far too often, Main Street designers and builders forgot that the end buildings on Main Street blocks can have storefronts and windows above, and built them with blank walls like their neighbors. These blank walls fronting onto the side streets have a terrible effect on Walk Appeal, significantly reducing the number of customers who will walk down those side streets to get to the shops. This little modern metal end cap liner building transforms (with the help of the billboard above) a really boring blank side of its brick neighbor into a corner everyone wants to turn, increasing the prospects for success of every merchant on that street.

Fitting into Parking Lots

One of the first steps in sprawl recovery is reclaiming the frontages, and liner buildings are a key tool, especially in or near neighborhood centers. In many cases, they’ll be reclaiming space from parking lots because surface parking is one of the greatest blights of sprawl. Interestingly, a bay of parking is typically 18 feet deep, which is perfect for a liner building. Build a sidewalk on the inner 3 feet of the parking space (toward the rest of the parking lot) and build the liner building on the remaining 15 feet. This is wide enough for apartments or condominium units above, even if the parking lot ran right to the property line. If not, then you have even more space to work with. And yes, once the place has reached enough intensity that not everyone needs to drive, those parking lots can be cannibalized for building expansion.

Daylight & Ventilation

Because liner buildings are unusually thin, they are almost always one room deep. They are therefore no-brainers to daylight and cross-ventilate, meaning that they’re much easier to condition naturally for most of the year than conventional Main Street buildings. It is widely known that the most beautiful light in a room is achieved with daylight on two or three sides of the room, yet designers and builders struggle to achieve this on most buildings. Not so with liner buildings… there, it’s the easiest thing to do.

What else should we be discussing on liner buildings? Have you noticed any in your neighborhood, or nearby? What other uses and types of liner buildings should we be talking about? I have a few in mind, but am curious what you think?

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Roland Beinert · University of Idaho

An added bonus of having liner buildings in hot climates is that they shade the sidewalk at least part of the day. The shade on a street lined with buildings is much more consistant than on a street shaded only by street trees. Trees can die and are sometimes never replaced by cities. Trees also take time to grow.
Here in Los Angeles, a lot of sidewalks are lined with parking lots on one side and palm trees on the other (assuming there are any trees), and I get fried by the heat and blinded by the glare. On some streets, the only shade is from the lamp posts. The few streets with liner buildings are a welcome relief.

Oct 8, 2015 9:22am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Agreed, Roland. Parking lots lining a sidewalk are urbanism poison. Kills walkability quickly.

Jan 12, 2017 7:17am

Andrew Watt · Creative at Watermountain Studios

Delightful.

I've been thinking about architectural design of late, and coming back to your blog to read a few articles here and there. This piece about liner buildings is helping to inspire a project I'm working on with our Spanish teachers, to help think about designing buildings for various central American countries. The idea of creating walkable, livable spaces, especially in poor neighborhoods, will resonate with many of those students.

One thing you haven't discussed is how to retrofit existing structures like parking garages to have liner buildings within them. That would be a good thing to hear about.

Nov 17, 2015 5:37am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Good point, Andrew... thanks! I'll do that. There are some techniques, beginning with the fact that the outer bay of parking is 18' wide... a great width for a liner building. As for tropical urbanism, I discovered in Havana that when the grid is diagonal rather than east-west, north-south, and the buildings are fairly tall, the streets are shady pretty much all the time.

Jan 12, 2017 7:20am

Thomas Leatherwood · Principal/Owner at Thomas Leatherwood Associates

Steve. I'm promoting small liner buildings as part of redevelopment in a couple of places here in Santa Fe. A big issue for small cafes with cook and server is the requirement of a commercial kitchen. How do these small cafes work with those high front end costs? Is there an alternative scenario?

23 hrs

1,058+

Sidewalk Cafes - Silver Bullets of Walkable Places

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The most important thing about building a place with high Walk Appeal isn’t anything we build, nor is it about walking. Of all the factors that entice us to walk in a place, the strongest one is likely the presence of other people. When someone walks along a street, they’re there for a moment, and then they’re gone. But when they sit down to a meal, they might be there for an hour or more. Because of this, the sidewalk cafe is the single most powerful tool we can use to enhance people’s desire to walk in a place.

Interestingly, the sidewalk cafe is both cause and effect of places we want to walk. It never occurs in unwalkable places, and its chance of thriving increases as the place becomes more appealing. Because it is fueled by the appeal it creates, the sidewalk cafe can be considered the “turbo-charger of walking.” Here are some sidewalk cafe design considerations:

Traffic Speed

The slower the traffic speed, the easier it is to do a good sidewalk cafe. The ideal traffic speed is walking speed… whether it is cars driving or people walking. Ocean Drive on South Beach regularly sees cars traveling at walking speed, and it has the most thriving sidewalk cafe scene in all of South Beach. As travel speed increases, protective measures to assure the safety of those dining must increase as well. Top speed for a thoroughfare adjacent to a good sidewalk cafe is 35-40 miles per hour, because nobody wants to have lunch alongside an expressway. Protective measures include the following:

Bollards

The bolllard is the first line of defense against moving vehicles. A simple thin metal bollard such as the one shown here provides protection against cars traveling between walking speed and running speed (about 15 miles per hour). Above that, the bollards need to get heavier and closer together in order to make the patrons feel safe.

Please note that there are two factors in play here: actual physical safety, and the perception of safety. It is not enough to provide actual physical safety; the patrons must feel safe as well, otherwise they won’t eat there.

Bollards can take many forms beyond the simple metal pipe bollard shown here. They can be made of iron, and cast into countless ornamental forms. Concrete bollards are necessarily heavier than thin pipes, and are often chosen for faster vehicular speeds, but bollards can be made of stone as well. For added protection, a heavy chain can be attached to the tops of a row of bollards.

Planters

Tactical Urbanism has popularized the use of planters as protective measures. Planters have several benefits. First, a planter can be really big and heavy without looking as clunky as some concrete bollards. And the plants planted within them can provide blooms, enclosure, and even shade if the planters contain trees.

On-Street Parking

Parked cars provide the greatest degree of protection, and should therefore be used along higher-speed thoroughfares. Actually, there are many benefits of on-street parking, so it can be paired with sidewalk cafes anywhere cars are still necessary… in other words, almost anywhere in the US. Above speeds where cars and bikes can ride comfortably together (about 25 miles per hour) on-street parking becomes the protective method of choice.

Parking may be either parallel or diagonal, and there are benefits of each. On the one hand, a traveling car striking a parallel-parked car is less likely to push the parked car onto the sidewalk because it will most likely be a glancing blow. On the other hand, most drivers slow down on streets with diagonally-parked cars because of the risk of someone backing out into traffic without seeing them at first. Also, diagonally parked cars put about eighteen feet of metal between the travel lanes and the sidewalk, whereas parallel parked cars are no more than eight feet wide.

We’ll revisit sidewalk cafes soon, because there are several other factors important to their success beyond protective measures for vehicular traffic. We’ll talk about comfort issues like shade and rain protection, breezes, and warmth on a cold day. We’ll also look at servicing and walking path issues. What am I missing? What other sidewalk cafe issues should we be talking about?

~Steve Mouzon

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Cascia Luther Talbert · Retail Merchandiser at Sas Retail Service

I wanted to let you know that I am a huge fan of your blog and you are listed on my site as one of the best 100 Eco-Friendly Blogs. I would be honored if you could share the post with your readers and fans. http://healthymomsmagazine.net/.../100-top-eco-friendly...

Sep 15, 2016 1:27pm

866+

Walk Appeal and Public Health

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The Surgeon General’s Step It Up campaign kicked off last week with a call for more walkable communities, and that once would have been the proper thing to seek, but no longer. For decades, most places in America were so unwalkable that urbanists had to fight to build walkable places, but it turns out that “walkable” is a really low standard. Do you want food that is merely edible? Will you pay for a book that is only readable? How about a cup of coffee that is just drinkable? What we need isn’t places that are solely walkable, but rather places with Walk Appeal.

The core idea of Walk Appeal is that people walk longest and most often in places that entice them, but rarely walk just because they’re told they ought to. Some Walk Appeal factors are measurable, while others are immeasurable, and it has long been clear that Walk Appeal is the best predictor of the viability of neighborhood businesses, whether they be single establishments or incubators like maker spaces. And creating walkspaces around buildings with high Walk Appeal has more sustainability benefits than almost anything else you can do because it helps people live in season. But arguably the greatest benefit of boosting Walk Appeal is the effect it has on public health.

The Surgeon General has reams of studies on the benefits of walking, as did the Surgeons General of several preceding administrations. Susan Henderson put up a nice piece this morning that gathers several of those resources into one post. And I have huge personal experience of the benefits of Walk Appeal, having lost 60 pounds by moving to South Beach.

Wanda and I are working on the Walk Appeal book now. Other than the things outlined above, what all should we be thinking about? Do you know good resources we might not be aware of? Commenters on this blog made the Original Green book far better… as a matter of fact, most of the good ideas in the book started with comments on the blog. So please help us out again... the idea of Walk Appeal deserves a book as good as we all can make it!

~Steve Mouzon

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Walk Appeal

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Legacy Comments

Jeffrey Jakucyk · University of Cincinnati

Nathan Lewis doesn't specifically mention walk appeal as far as I know, but his writings on the subject of traditional cities or cities for people are invaluable to the discussion, in my opinion anyway. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/arc.../tradcityarchive.html

Sep 16, 2015 10:12am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Thanks, Jeffrey! I was unaware of this work. Gotta dig into it...

Sep 20, 2015 3:33pm

Dean Bowden · Huntsville, Alabama

Random thoughts from places I love to walk: building heights scaled to visible depth (shorter buildings for narrow walking paths and taller buildings for open plazas); planned spaces for the nominal weather (western buildings provide afternoon shade, awnings for hot sunny places); and usually an interesting mix of businesses so people can spend time and slow down (like you already mentioned, walking solely for health is a limited attraction).

Sep 20, 2015 4:16pm

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · University of Miami

Walk appeal is the foundation of any successful sustainable place!!

Sep 27, 2015 6:11pm

559+

What Was Gained in the Katrina Cottage Loss?

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All images on this post not depicting Katrina Cottages are from my upcoming book Nightfall on the Coast, which is a look back at the impacts of Katrina’s devastation ten years later.

Katrina Cottages were once the shining star of the New Urbanists’ work on the Gulf Coast after the storm, but they seem little more than a distant memory today. Much has been written about their failure, but that’s not the whole story. They live on today in unexpected ways.

The Katrina Cottage roller coaster began ten years ago right now, with the monster storm making landfall near the Mississippi/Louisiana border. I was on the road for several days before and after landfall, and came home thoroughly exhausted and emotionally drained from watching those events unfold that week in one of my favorite parts of the world. Wanda greeted me at the office door the evening of September 1 and said “you must call Michael Barranco right now. It’s urgent.”

Michael said “Steve, we’re assembling a Governor’s Commission to figure out how to rebuild the Mississippi coast, and we’d like you to come and speak to us about rebuilding according to the principles of the New Urbanism.” I said “That’s far too big a job for me; let me call Andrés Duany.” The next morning, I went to DPZ and met Andrés, and he said “that’s too big for me as well; we need to call in the entire Congress for the New Urbanism.” And so he picked up the phone and called CNU CEO John Norquist, setting in motion what became the largest planning event in human history, otherwise known as the Mississippi Renewal Forum.

I returned to DPZ the next day, and Andrés and I spent that Saturday afternoon laying out the next steps. He said that some of the emergency housing installed in Homestead after Hurricane Andrew had been removed just one year before Katrina. “Some children started first grade and graduated from high school living in the same FEMA trailer. We really must do better than that.” So our first conception of the Katrina Cottages was “FEMA trailers with dignity.”

It didn’t take long for that mission to grow. Early numbers suggested that a quarter-million homes had been lost in New Orleans alone. The New Orleans construction industry had been building roughly 1,000 homes per year before the storm, and at that rate, it would take 250 years to rebuild. Clearly, we had to be able to deliver housing through every means available: conventional construction, panelized houses, modular houses, and manufactured houses.

It also became clear that the FEMA trailers were more expensive than they seemed. Although FEMA wasn’t forthcoming with the numbers, the evidence we could gather suggested that the entire cost of manufacturing, commissioning, decommissioning, and disposal could be $50,000 to $70,000. If the Katrina Cottages fulfilled the first mission of having dignity, why couldn’t they be permanent as well? Weren’t we being good stewards of the government’s money if we could use that money to build cottages that would last for a hundred years, not just 18 months like a FEMA trailer?

I designed the first Katrina Cottage, then used it to illustrate the principles of the cottages in a call for designs to the members of the New Urban Guild. Designs began to pour in almost immediately. Thus began several years of pro bono work by Guild member on the cottages and other aspects of Katrina recovery. Six weeks after the storm, Guild members made up most of the architecture team, and filled slots on several planning teams as well, as nearly two hundred architects and planners gathered in a Biloxi casino to craft rebuilding plans at the Mississippi Renewal Forum.

My sister Susan Henderson led the architecture team; my role at the Forum was to manage FEMA, but it was almost hand-to-hand combat because they weren’t budging from their policy of only installing temporary housing. They said “if you want us to do something permanent, you’ll have to get an Act of Congress!” My response was “if that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll do!” And so we did. Congress approved almost a half-billion dollars for the cottages, initially with instructions that they could remain permanently. But in the end, FEMA did what they always do, and pulled them out and auctioned them off.

During the Forum, architecture team member Marianne Cusato was one of several people designing cottages, and Ben Brown gave one of her designs to a newspaper reporter. In the ensuing stories, Marianne’s design got a lot of good responses. In early December, we had a stroke of excellent luck: one of the outdoor exhibition slots at the upcoming International Builders Show in Orlando opened up, and the promoters wondered if we might get a Katrina Cottage built in time. I debated whether to have Marianne or Eric Moser design the cottage. Eric had been published many times in Southern Living over the years, and was considered a star by millions of readers, but Marianne’s cottage had gotten a lot of good press since the Forum, so I asked her to do the design. The little yellow cottage stole the show at the IBS. Later, it won the People’s Choice Award at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. I credit the cottages and in particular Marianne’s design with helping to turbo-charge the Tiny House movement, which had been largely unnoticed beforehand.

I published Emergency House Plans in early 2006; the designs were done by over a dozen Guild architects. But there was a problem with every cottage in the book. Because space was so precious in tiny cottages, the exterior walls quickly got gobbled up with baths, closets, and kitchen cabinets. In other words, things that are hard to move. So none of the first generation of cottages expanded very easily. And that’s a problem because someone is far more likely to buy or build a tiny cottage if it were obvious how it might grow than if it’s not, so the inability to grow easily was stifling the cottages. And that held back our idea that the cottages could be the first toe-hold back onto your lot, from which you could expand into a larger house later on.

I had the original idea for the next generation of cottages that could expand easily at the Forum, but was so busy doing battle with FEMA that I didn’t have time to develop it beyond just a quick sketch. I called the idea the Kernel Cottage, because it could sprout and grow from several places, like a kernel of grain. Its development had to wait until the summer of 2006, when Ben Brown asked me to design three Katrina Cottages for USA Weekend, which was USA Today’s weekend edition at the time. I did a vernacular, a mid-range, and a classical design, and USA Weekend published them and conducted a poll. The classical version won in a landslide. USA Today was trying to help jump-start the manufacturing of the cottages, so they asked us to find a manufacturer who would produce the winning design in a factory and bring it to Washington DC, making it the first cottage to venture outside the Gulf Coast. It was slated to be donated to a needy resident of Silver Spring, Maryland.

The effort to get the cottage built correctly was herculean; I even spent nights in the factory because nothing we were doing was “normal,” and the workers were working around the clock. Finally, the cottage shipped, and was put on display for several months in Silver Spring. It was during this time that I met Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and his family, who had a keen interest in helping promote the cottages. He later wrote the Foreword to the Original Green book. Unfortunately, this part of the story has a dark ending: after several months on display and after having gotten lots of great press, the manufacturer had an egregious ethical lapse and reneged on their promise to donate the cottage, and towed it away instead. I still wonder where that little cottage ended up.

phantom piers of destroyed house
stand vigil in the gathering
Gulf Coast darkness

The Act of Congress wasn’t working out so well, either, and much of it was our fault. To be blunt, we mis-managed the cottage initiative because we weren’t all on the same page, and the people managing Mississippi’s allocation of several hundred million dollars finally got tired of our infighting and decided to go their own way. The Mississippi Cottages bore many similarities to our designs, but we could have helped improve them had we handled it better. And the cottages always had one fundamental problem: so long as they resembled mobile homes, they were susceptible to the strong rejection of mobile homes that most communities exhibit. Like I told the mobile home manufacturers every time I spoke at their conventions, “it’s not good enough to produce homes as good as site-built homes. Your homes have to be substantially better. So much better, in fact, that instead of signing an ordinance banning your homes from town, the mayor is signing a check to buy one of your cottages.”

To date, we simply haven’t gotten there with any home produced on an assembly line. For a year or so after those heady days surrounding the Forum, I had high hopes that we would change the American home manufacturing industry, but it was never that simple. In the words of one CEO in the early autumn of 2008: “Steve, I can’t just start manufacturing these cottages in my existing factories. They are so different from what we build now that they not only require a different set of construction materials, but they also will require a different set of employees. We have a current culture of building mobile homes, not manufacturing architecture. And so we’ll need entirely new factories, with an entirely new workforce that has a different culture of building. That’s an investment of millions of dollars.” And in retrospect, he was right, as we were descending into the winter of the Meltdown, and the ensuing Great Recession.

By the time 2009 dawned, it seemed that all was lost. Not only were the Katrina Cottages looking all but impossible to produce, but the planning efforts on the Coast were meeting resistance as well. It seemed as if inertia might finally win out. I learned that year that even the name of the cottages was a mistake. Southerners are often much too polite for their own good, so it’s no mystery that it took four years for a New Orleans citizen to finally tell me “Steve, you made a huge mistake. ‘Katrina Cottages’ are ‘Losing Everything I Ever Owned Cottages,’ or ‘The End of My Life as I Knew It Cottages.’ How could you guys possibly name them that?”

But that’s when the cottages began to spawn new life. The New Urban Guild held a summit at DPZ’s office in Miami in January 2009 intent on launching Project:SmartDwelling, which sought to reinvent the American home at half the size and 60% of the cost of a typical American home by building radically smaller and smarter. In the years since, nearly every one of the SmartDwelling techniques turned out to be lessons we learned by figuring out the Katrina Cottages.

Shortly afterward, Lizz Plater-Zyberk did a characteristically generous thing for which she and Andrés are legendary: she called me and said that the Wall Street Journal was doing a Green House of the Future story for which they had asked DPZ to design a house. Because she knew I was writing the Original Green book, she said she would prefer for me to design the house. The article was published April 27, exposing SmartDwellings to a broad audience for the first time.

But it hasn’t yet gotten built. And for the next few years, SmartDwellings went dark, existing only as a great idea that had not yet been realized, as Guild members struggled through the Great Recession like most other architects. That began to change May 12, 2012. On the last night of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Palm Beach, I told my friends Eric Moser and Julie Sanford “if we don’t do anything radical, the SmartDwellings may forever remain nothing but talk and drawings. If we’re committed to seeing them implemented, we need to create a design firm dedicated to the implementation of these ideals. We founded Studio Sky shortly thereafter, and today, there are hundreds of SmartDwelling rising on distant shores. I hope some of ours get built in the US sometime soon. Not only that, but there’s now a high-quality manufacturer gearing up to roll SmartDwellings off the assembly line. I’ll have much more to say about that just as soon as the production goes live. After all these years of thinking all that effort was lost, it seems like it’s finally happening.

I know other Guild members have been working on SmartDwellings as well, but don’t yet know the details, other than Bruce Tolar’s heroic Cottage Square in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. For so long, nobody has had budgets for travel, and now that we’re busy again, nobody has time for travel. But we really do need to get together and compare notes at another summit. Anyone interested in listening in when we do?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

Steve, my take is that the Katrina Cottage was a successful national symbol for dignified, Lean public housing - and that is a very, very good thing. The execution of the idea, in a state where inequity prevails and in a nation not quite ready for inexpensive and Lean (pre-recession!), was less successful. No matter how many worked hard to manage the culture, the mobile home industry cannot be changed. Marianne's idea and push for the Lowe's Kat Cottage distribution model was the most brilliant idea of all, and would have been much more successful had the market been ready and if others had been on board to make it the default. I also think that if SmartDwellings had been built in Mississippi and especially in New Orleans (rather than Make It Right) the lesson abotu sustainable architecture would have gained huge national success. Bottom line, everything you write about, and all the people involved, were really before their time...but the lessons remain!

Aug 30, 2015 6:48am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Ann, the Katrina Cottage name played very well on the national stage, just not locally to those whose lives were turned upside down. At least that's what they told me. As for the mobile home industry, you've known me long enough to know that I never say never! As a matter of fact, I'm really excited about the company that's gearing up right now to produce them. That's not what they manufactured before... their previous products were very high-precision, high-quality. But that's all it takes is getting it right in one place; Seaside taught us that, didn't it?

Aug 31, 2015 6:23am

1,066+

Things We Do for Places We Love

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The love debate continues unabated on several private listservs inhabited by some of the best and brightest architects and planners, but they’re making some fundamental errors. Some confuse “cuddly” and “cute” with “lovable,” for example. Neither buildings nor towns are often cuddly or cute. Those terms are usually reserved for small furry things. Maybe a Katrina Cottage or hobbit house might be cuddly or cute, but very little else. Lovable? That’s a very different matter.

For love of freedom, people rise up and throw off tyranny, even at the cost of everything they’ve worked for until that moment, and even at the cost of life itself. From the crucible of this sacrifice, nations are born or reborn.

For love of a country, young men and women get up and march, and lay their lives in the breach, risking maiming or death.

For love of a region, people forego many self-interests to say “that’s my homeland.” "American by birth; Southern by the grace of God” is but one example.

For love of a city, activists take hazardous stands and spend countless hours to stir the populace to make the better choice.

For love of a town, those with resources put them at risk because of the dream of the city that will someday emerge as a result of their risk.

For love of a neighborhood, citizens band together and spend countless hours to make their neighborhoods clean and safe.

For love of a building, people chain themselves to long-loved structures and stare down the bulldozers that threaten them.

These are things we all should know implicitly… they should be part of our DNA. How many New Urbanists have never said “I love this city?” How many times has the phrase “I love my country” been voiced, just in the USA? A hundred billion times? Maybe a trillion times in American history? Surely those words have been uttered many trillions of times in many languages around the globe in human history. A building, a neighborhood, a town, a city, a region, or a nation, are not things too big to love.

It is high time to end the architectural conceit that lovability is somehow beneath us and realize that this is a powerful tool… possibly the most powerful tool… in doing the good things we are trying to accomplish. That which cannot be loved will not last. Let’s build things that last. If not, then why do we build?

~Steve Mouzon

242+

Lovability Gains Momentum

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A prominent architect whose work I love and respect told me recently that the term “lovable” has “a... problem with pragmatists” that can’t be resolved. He also said “you’re the only architect I know who can say 'lovable architecture' with a straight face.” And so it has been, ever since I started shooting for the Catalog of the Most-Loved Places in the 1990s… time and again, it’s been obvious that architects find it impossible to use the word “lovable." This became more obvious in 2004, when lovability was proposed as an essential element of a living tradition, and intensified in 2007 with the proposal that lovability was the first essential characteristic of sustainable buildings.

Fortunately, that is increasingly not the case with people other than architects. Lloyd Alter alerted me recently to an article in Policy Innovations entitled "What Makes a City Great? It's not the Liveability but the Loveability.” The very next day, Kaid Benfield’s How to Make Smart Growth More Lovable and Sustainable appeared on the Huffington Post. Kaid’s article specifically referenced the Original Green, and I really appreciate that. The Policy Innovations piece, which was an interview of Ethan Kent, did not, but in some ways that’s more important because it means the idea is entering the general lexicon unfettered by an association with any one book, site, or person.

Let’s dig further into the pragmatic architects’ problem with lovability by looking at a completely different field. I recently saw this story on Bloomberg Business about the computer programming industry.

One would think that computer programmers would be about as pragmatic as they come, right? But they voted Apple’s new Swift programming language as “the most-loved language” in a survey of over 26,000 developers by Stack Overflow. Hard to find a more pragmatic publication than Stack Overflow. So how can programmers tap into the idea of lovability but pragmatic architects aren’t allowed to? Yes, the programmers also have their religious wars, as the Bloomberg article documents. But something, somehow, opens that door to pragmatic programmers whereas it is slammed shut to pragmatic architects. Why? What’s the difference?

My inquiry into lovable architecture began in a way I never planned. Wanda and I married in 1979, after my first year in architecture school. One evening in Third Year, she asked me “why do you refuse to design buildings that anyone else I love would love?” “Do I?” “Of course you do!” “How do you know they wouldn’t love what I design?” “Have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture?” “No, our professors tell us that we should educate the clients.” “Well, if you’d ever stop and listen to them, you might learn what they actually love.”

The point to this story of the origin of my use of the term “lovable” is that the term requires something many architects are completely incapable of demonstrating: humility. Listening to the untrained requires humility. The New Urbanism did this early on… Robert Davis’ legendary road trips across the South learning what the people love is but one example. And that’s the core reason, I believe, why so many in the academy hate us so: because we have the audacity to have enough humility to actually listen to the people. We really don’t need to lose that virtue.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Christopher John Sparks · Sahuarita High School

Can you hear me applauding, Steve? Excellent article!

Jul 2, 2015 5:11am

Doug Lucia Juliana Lane · Architect at The Lane Group Inc.

Oh my "Modern Architecture" is salvation professors are failing you now Steve Mouzon but I love it. Thanks.

Jul 2, 2015 7:45am

Edward J. Shannon, Architect

Another Great article Steve! I concur 100%

Jul 2, 2015 10:59am

Steven Semes

Steve, this is such an important discussion. It reminds me of the saying of John Brinkerhof Jackson years ago in an interview. He said, "You can't change something unless you first love it. If you try to change it without loving it, you will only destroy it." This is the other side of the "lovability" coin. Not only do we need lovable places, but we need to defend them against those who would like to make them unlovable by changing them without having first loved them. This is an ethical imperative as much as an aesthetic one. Keep moving forward!

Jul 3, 2015 2:40am

328+

One Little Book - Five Short Years

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beginning the book tour

I always hoped it would turn out something like this, although it was never clear from the beginning whether it would even work at all, and the stakes could not have been higher in the depths of the Great Recession. Last night marked the fifth anniversary of the release of the Original Green book. We had mortgaged everything possible to get it printed, and there was no Plan B.

The ideas at the foundation of the Original Green actually date back 35 years now, and the first presentation of those ideas was at West Coast Green in San Francisco in September ’06 and this blog began in April ’08. But the book was a watershed moment. Here are some things it might have helped to influence, and other things it clearly spawned by virtue of looking at sustainability through different and more holistic lenses:

Nourishable Places

The Original Green’s proposition that you should be able to look out onto the fields and the waters from which much of your food comes is part of a long-running call for local food dating back continuously to at least the 1960s. Before refrigerated trucking, it was simply a fact of life and not even discussed much back then, because talking about the importance of local food was much like talking about the importance of local air. What’s notable is that I don’t recall tightly-embedded agriculture being proposed as the first essential element of sustainable places a decade ago. And regardless of how it came about, it was gratifying to have local agriculture as the focus of CNU 19 in Madison, and to see the rise of Agrarian Urbanism.

Lovable Buildings

Think back several years… how often did you hear lovability proposed as the most essentail element of sustainable buildings? “Lovable” has until recently been considered to be beneath serious discourse on either sustainability or architecture. Now, it has clearly entered the lexicon of both discussions. I’m also delighted that people are now talking about lovable places as well. I don’t recall for sure where lovability made the leap from places to buildings… it might have been Mike Watkins’ idea… but lovable places are clearly a useful construct, and deserve further development.

LEED & Gizmo Green

A clear proposition for true sustainability also brings into focus those things that claim to be sustainable, but aren’t. Gizmo Green is the proposition that with better equipment and better materials, we can achieve sustainability, but this misses most of what real sustainability is all about. 1 Bryant Park is a skyscraper that consumes massive resources, but is LEED Platinum. The reality is that skyscrapers in general have huge sustainability problems. And when people claim their parking garages are green, you know things have gone nuts. While the USGBC has done some good things over the years, its LEED system is a fair target because of its bloated Gizmo Green approach. And Gizmo Green infests the curriculae of most schools of architecture today, fitting students with Net-Zero blinders that shut out the view of real sustainability.

Preservation

The Original Green calls for a common-sense, plain-spoken definition of sustainability: “keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future.” The core act of sustaining is preserving. That which cannot be preserved will no longer be there to be sustained. But there’s a deeper problem to preservation today: are we merely preserving artifacts we love, or are we also preserving or reawakening those living traditions that created those artifacts to begin with, so that more of them can be created? Living traditions were the operating systems of true sustainability. Preservationists must also consider the unthinkable: when is a tear-down the more sustainable choice? If not, what are the ground rules for saving a building from demolition, and how can you assemble a cause to preserve the building?

Sprawl & Recovery

Sustainable places are possible only if they’re freed from the costs of sprawl. The need for speed burdens sprawling places with great inefficiencies, and the character of speedy thoroughfares cheapens the land around them precipitously. This impoverishes us both directly and indirectly. Fortunately, a number of colleagues are working on ways to retrofit or repair sprawl. The Original Green prescription is a 12-step program of Sprawl Recovery because sprawl really has been an addiction for reasons documented so thoroughly on StrongTowns. Sprawl Recovery is built on three foundations: The Transect gives predictability to sprawl’s extreme makeover. The Sky Method was developed as a radical new way of developing land but works equally well in redeveloping sprawl. And Walk Appeal is important enough to warrant its own paragraph:

Walk Appeal

It’s possible that Walk Appeal might be the most useful tool the Original Green has spawned to date. Walkability was a worthy goal 30 years ago when so many places were completely unwalkable, but it’s a low standard today. Do you want food that’s merely edible? Or a book that’s merely readable? Today, we need to transition to places people love to walk, not places where they are merely able to walk. Walk Appeal is the product of several factors. Some of them can be measured, and therefore coded. Others are immeasurable, but nonetheless play into whether people want to walk there or not. But in any case, the impact of Walk Appeal is very real, and is key to the viability of neighborhood businesses, making the difference betwen thriving and failing. It may even turn out to be a secret weapon for the best maker spaces.

The Luxury of Small

The Original Green calls for better instead of bigger, and as we learned during the Katrina Cottages initiative a decade ago, small cottages can be really endearing. The reason why has finally become clear, and it turns out it may actually be a biological survival mechanism: the Teddy Bear Principle. To build smaller, it is necessary to build smarter as well because nobody wants to simply have their life put in a vise. It has even influenced my own life, as Wanda and I combined our home and office into 747 square feet just over a year ago.

There are allied ideals: Sitting lightly on the land can save millions, and is based on the idea of “digging as if you only had a shovel.” Lean Urbanism is an important new initiative now brewing, and co-founder Andrés Duany regularly cites the Original Green as an influence.

There’s more, of course… and more on the way. I can’t wait to get the Original Green Scorecard built and running as a fast, friendly, and free alternative to LEED, for example. And to get the first Sky Method SmartCode in place. So if you don’t already have one, but want to see the foundation these ideas are based upon, pick up a copy and have a look. It’s an easy read with lots of pictures. As you know, I almost never ask you to buy something, but I think you may enjoy it. And please let me know what you think!

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Lloyd Alter · Contributor at Corporate Knights

And a wonderful book it still is. Congratulations.

May 9, 2015 5:49am

Hazel Borys

Steve, great work! Congratulations and thank you for changing the way so many of us think about resilience.

May 9, 2015 1:39pm

173+

Schooner Bay at the Crossroads

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No new town being built today embodies Original Green sustainability principles more explicitly than Schooner Bay in the Bahamas, but the town stands at the crossroads today, and could go in either direction. Town Founder Orjan Lindroth has set an heroic slate of things in motion that goes far beyond normal place-making goals, but this fabulous foundation required such effort to complete that investors have grown impatient and it is now possible that ordinary things could be built on that extraordinary foundation.

The Ecological Dividend post described many of the assets built into Schooner Bay that will yield log-term benefits, and The Schooner Bay Miracle tells the story of how some of those principles and techniques allowed the town to emerge virtually unscathed from the wrath of Hurricane Irene at her strongest point.

Patient place-making was once the way that great places were built, but it declined as development morphed into something more akin to industrialization than town building, with every system geared to crank out as many units as quickly as possible. Never mind that building patiently is precisely how to make the greatest profit over the life of the project.

Seaside, Florida is the best example in part because it has been there the longest. If you talk to Seaside’s Town Founder, Robert Davis, he’ll tell you that he made more money on the last 5% of the lots he sold than the first 95%. This never could have happened had Robert blown Seaside out in the normal 3-5 years. Instead, he took 30 years and was able to retire a wealthy man on just the profits of one development rather than risking everything every few years on a new development. Schooner Bay could do precisely the same thing Seaside did, if the investors rediscovered the patience of townbuilders.

The worst thing they could possibly do now is ditch all of the effort and time that went into the original vision of Schooner Bay and sell the lots using the normal marketing fluff with which island properties are too often sold. Do this, and they will be competing on bells and whistles, and on cost per square foot. In other words, the lowest common denominators.

Does that sound like the best way of moving out of the shadows of the Great Recession, which has been the worst seven years for real estate than almost anyone alive today has ever seen? Or would it be a better idea to move beyond those dark years to better days ahead buoyed by great and sustainable ideals lots of people can get behind, and accompanied by arguably the best planners on earth, and numerous other nationally- and internationally-known creatives who have worked with Schooner Bay through the years?

The Bahamas and the Caribbean beyond are littered with half-finished projects sold on the lowest common denominator. Schooner Bay is based on the only model ever proven to work in the islands: true sustainable town-building. This is how Dunmore Town on Harbour Island was built. And Hope Town. And Green Turtle Cay. And Man of War. The places people have loved the longest and valued the most were all built as real towns, not housing built on the industrial model and sold with glossy marketing. In real towns, people come because of the town, and then buy a cottage. Places where people only come for the lowest common denominators of the housing aren’t towns at all, nor are they resilient in the long term. Schooner Bay could suffer that fate. But it doesn’t have to suffer that fate.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I almost never go to bat for a new town, but there is too much at stake here to remain silent. I spoke two weeks ago at the World Congress of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture, and Urbanism (INTBAU). My presentation, which you can read in its entirety here, lays out how Schooner Bay has been the starting point of so many advances in sustainable building practices along the Caribbean Rim. After the presentation, Prince Charles held a reception for the speakers and select attendees at St. James Palace where I had the honor of telling him a little about our work there, and why places like Schooner Bay are so important in spreading sustainable practices.

What can we do now? Please spread this story to anyone on your networks who might be interested. Then go there. Relax for a few days at the Sandpiper Inn or the Black Fly Lodge, and have a look around. I’ll be doing the same myself soon, then I’ll post the Unofficial Guide to Schooner Bay Secrets. It’ll point you to many of the really cool green things that wouldn’t be on a real estate agent’s tour, but which you should see. Yes, you really should see this place.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Mirja Nordalm Zeilstra

so true!

Mar 10, 2015 10:28am

Luiz Cunha · FGV

I agree 100% w/ Steve , I had a chance to work as international sales director ( 81 days early 2014 ). Being in real estae bisiness for decades , trust me : there´s no place like Schooner Bay . It`s magic , cut out for simple / special people.Whenever customers inderstand the beauty of SB , all homes will be sold !
Luiz Cunha - Brasil

Mar 28, 2015 1:36pm

Luiz Cunha · FGV

Another comment about Schooner Bay : go there , visit and feel the atmosphere . Real Estate wise , SB is a healthy choice , I miss every single day working over there .
Luiz Cunha - Brasil

Mar 28, 2015 1:41pm

Wendie Bishop · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sandpiper, Black Fly Lodge as well as rental homes are available to spend sometime and get a true feel for the beauty of this magical spot. Should you be interested in a rental home give me a call ours cottage on the island "Over Yonder" is available for rentals 1 242 577-9910.

Mar 30, 2015 1:14pm

338+

Washington Avenue's Walk Appeal Diagnosis and How to Heal the Frontages

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click to see larger image - be sure to zoom in where you can scroll around - North is to the right

Here’s a great illustration of how frontages are the arteries of value in a city like we were discussing yesterday. Washington Avenue on South Beach is the color-coded street running left-to-right in the image above. When you walk down Washington, it’s clear that the bones are good, but the shops that aren’t vacant are typically t-shirt shops, tattoo parlors, greasy spoon lunch counters, liquor stores, smoke shops, sex shops, and a collection of clubs, bars, and bona fide dives. There’s enough concern in Miami Beach about Washington that the city has commissioned a study of how to improve it. Before we go any further, let me be exceptionally clear about my role here: I’m a citizen blogger who happens to live just inside the top of the map above, near the center, and my only interest is in putting out ideas that might help make my town a better place. The people actually doing the work are fully capable; I’m just hoping to put a bug or two in their ears, as we used to say back when I lived in the deep South. With that clear, let’s look at some things that should be considered:

Coding Existing Walk Appeal

The seven standards of Walk Appeal: W6 Great Street, W5 Main Street, W4 Neighborhood Street, W3 Sub-Urban Street, W2 Subdivision Street, W1 Parking Lot, W0 Unwalkable.

I’ve coded Washington and its crossing streets for its existing Walk Appeal. As discussed yesterday, Walk Appeal has measurable metrics, immeasurable characteristics, and these work together to have a great impact on a neighborhood business’ failure, survival, or success. That’s because people walk further when there’s greater Walk Appeal. You’ll find people walking 2 miles or more instead of driving on W6 Great Streets because it’s so enjoyable. On a good W5 Main Street, they often walk ¾ mile or so. W4 Neighborhood Streets is where people actually walk that ¼ mile instead of driving that the planners talk about. On W3 Sub-Urban Streets, the distance drops to a tenth of a mile, and on a W2 Subdivision Street, it’s down to about 250 feet. In a W1 Parking Lot condition, good luck getting anyone (including you and I) to walk more than a hundred feet if we don’t absolutely have to, because the experience is dreadful. And in W0 Unwalkable conditions like a sidewalk between a busy arterial and a parking lot, the only people you’ll find walking are those whose cars have broken down.

Analyzing Walk Appeal

You don’t need a specialist to tell you where to find Walk Appeal… just walk out and observe where the people are.

Places with low Walk Appeal usually attract fewer people; places where it’s higher attract more. Knowing why it works that way is eye-opening, as we’ll see shortly. And businesses reach out into surrounding neighborhoods for customers only as far as the Walk Appeal of the connecting streets allow.

Along Washington Avenue

You can’t properly judge Walk Appeal from one side of a street. Walk both sides, because Walk Appeal is largely influenced by things close by.

Looking at the map at the top of this page (click it and zoom in for a better view), it’s apparent that the East (beachward) side of Washington has fairly consistent Main Street character. Admittedly, several blocks reach that standard, but just barely. The other side of the street, however, is much spottier, with the longest stretch of the lowest rating being at the school just south of Española Way. Fortunately, there is no place on or near Washington Avenue that sinks to the level of a W0 Unwalkable place, even though some relatively short stretches approach that level. And the only places that rise to the level of a W6 Great Street are not on Washington at all, but are the crossing streets of Española Way and Lincoln Road.

Washington's Crossing Streets

one of Washington’s side streets

Businesses can fail on Main Streets if the crossing streets' Walk Appeal isn’t strong enough to pull the customers in.

If Washington Avenue is to have any hope of serious improvement, the first thing to fix isn’t Washington, but rather the crossing streets. There are thousands of hotel rooms on Collins, running parallel to Washington just one block over, and thousands more on Ocean Drive just beyond that, yet few of those people get to Washington because the Walk Appeal of the crossing streets is mediocre at best and almost unwalkable in places. The only two connections Eastward from Washington with great Walk Appeal are Española Way and Lincoln Road.

It’s just as important walking inland as well. I’ve been told that almost half of South Beach residents do not own a car, so if Washington hopes to attract them as customers, Walk Appeal needs to be improved walking Westward as well.

The Tough Demographic Factor

Walk Appeal isn’t for everyone. Some people actually gravitate to places with low Walk Appeal.

This is a tough discussion to have, because some may consider it offensive, but it’s essential to talk about this if we want to change the character of Washington Avenue. We’ve all noticed how teen goths, punks, and the like tend to hang out in places their parents would never go. And it’s not just kids, either… the rougher side of the Bike Week crowd feels perfectly at home in tough places with little or no Walk Appeal. Think about all those crossing streets with low Walk Appeal that don’t entice the average tourist to walk to Washington. They’re perfect streets for the tougher crowd. So is it any wonder that the majority of people who make it through this filter of low Walk Appeal streets to Washington are the customers of the seedy shops that populate the street? Washington is only a block away from some of the biggest fashion names on Collins, but will never entice those people to shop on Washington until the crossing streets change dramatically.

Improving Walk Appeal

Improving Walk Appeal is neither art nor rocket science. Most measures are as simple as third grade geometry.

The four things below are all measurable. We’ll look at only a few examples of how to implement them on Washington, but it should be easy to imagine other places along the street where these principles would work as well.

Liner Buildings

How much better would both the
school & street like it if this were
shops with apartments above?

No building makes a greater Walk Appeal impact for fewer dollars than a well-placed liner building.

Washington liner buildings should have retail on the first level with stairs interspersed that rise up to serve two living units each on the levels above. I’m familiar with many good thin house designs from the years working on the Katrina Cottages initiative.

Every parking lot on Washington should be lined with liner buildings, which need not be more than 18 feet deep. They can be as thin as 14 feet, however, or possibly even 12 feet. The worst frontages on Washington are all parking lots, but the longest bad frontage is at the school. Simply put, the school doesn’t want to be on Washington. Its tall metal fence is built of cheap aluminum tubes, with crude spear-tips curving out to the street, almost like a prison fence, except turned the other way to keep people out, not in.

If the school board sold the outer 12 to 18 feet of its property for a liner building, that liner building would serve as a completely secure wall, and Washington would get a very interesting block of shops on the street with customers living above. For that matter, it’s possible that the school board could keep the property and develop it themselves, if that’s legal.

Building Height

Española Way: 1:1 proportion with only 2-story
buildings because street is so narrow

Buildings along a street should be tall enough to enclose the street space as an outdoor room.

Ever hear anyone say “I’m too short for my width?” Washington has that problem as well. Most buildings along Washington are 1-story, with a few taller buildings sprinkled in. But it is about a hundred feet wide, building face to building face. The world’s greatest streets (make that W6 Great Streets) typically have street enclosure ratios close to 1:1, meaning that the buildings are as tall as the spaces between them. That’s tough to do in the US, where our streets are wider than most European streets. American Main Streets are doing well if they achieve a 1:3 proportion, and below 1:6 (like most of Washington), there isn’t enough enclosure to make the street feel like an outdoor room. So Washington definitely needs to grow taller. How much taller? The best urbanism in the world is usually 3-5 stories tall. Leon Krier says 3 stories for a number of good reasons; Christopher Alexander says 4 stories for other good reasons. Paris says 5 stories (often with an attic tucked above). Because Parisians love South Beach already, I’d suggest that we make them feel even more comfortable, and allow Washington to grow up to 5 stories tall, with any vertical addition taking a building up to at least 3 stories in height.

Storefronts

You don’t have to spend a lot of
money to get the basics right.

Getting the storefront right is a building's most important Walk Appeal role at the scale of details.

Measured walking along the sidewalk, glass should occupy no less than 60% of the wall at eye level, and ideally closer to 70%. The sill should be no less than 6 inches from the ground, and no higher than 30 inches. And the top of the glass should not be less than 8 feet from the sidewalk. People walking by can therefore see enough of the interior of the shops that it’s entertaining. But that’s only the beginning.

It’s really boring to walk past lots of the same stuff. This applies to both the stuff in the stores and the architecture of the exterior. So ideally, the shops should be narrow enough that your view changes ever 4 to 8 paces. That pretty much describes the shops on the East side of Washington as they exist today. So keep them that way. Any building height that is added should not change the storefronts, nor the width of the shops because what is there already are the bones of an awesome avenue of storefronts.

Sidewalk Cafés

There is no greater barometer of vitality than sidewalk cafés, and no greater Walk Appeal role for the sidewalk.

Sidewalk cafés do great where traffic is very slow, or there is on-street parking to protect the patrons. Washington Avenue has both. Sidewalk cafés achieve close to silver bullet Walk Appeal status because humans are social creatures, and we love seeing other humans. Streets with thriving café scenes are almost guaranteed to get pegged as “vibrant” by everyone, and become many people’s favorite places over time. Today, the city tightly regulates sidewalk cafés, reportedly charging establishments a fee for every seat on the street. City Hall would come out ahead by stacks of cash if they allowed seats for free, because their other tax revenues would increase substantially not only from the eating establishments, but because the higher Walk Appeal would draw people to the other shops as well.

Obviously, the task at hand is greater than the scope of a single blog post, but if Miami Beach gets these things right, they will be well on the way to a fabulous Washington transformation. And I hope this illustrates how powerful a transformative tool Walk Appeal can be. What do you think?

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

I never saw this coming! This Washington Avenue Walk Appeal diagnosis highlighted the fact that Washington's main problem isn't actually on Washington, but on the crossing streets, which are filtering out the customers Washington wants. The post also includes some Walk Appeal nomenclature advances.

Jan 20, 2015 1:58pm

Jeff Donnelly · Miami Beach, Florida

Hard to imagine a proposal with less attention to the historic designation of both sides of Washing ton Avenue.

Jan 21, 2015 9:58am

528+

Frontages - A City's Smallest Part, But Greatest Key to Value

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They’re the thinnest and smallest of a city’s elemental parts, but “frontages,” a geeky planning word for the space between the front windows and doors of a building and a civic space or thoroughfare, do more to create or kill value in most cities than any other part of the city. Rarely more than a couple dozen feet deep, and often as thin as a few inches, the total acreage of frontages in a traditionally-planned town is less than that of thoroughfares, and is tiny compared to civic spaces and building lots, which are the other three elemental parts. Yet they make the greatest difference in the vitality and sustainability of the city.

Along a thoroughfare, the frontage is divided into the public frontage, which is located on the thoroughfare’s right-of-way (including sidewalks and usually street trees) and the private frontage, which is the part of the building lot between the property line and the front windows and doors of the building. When buildings front directly onto civic spaces (such as plazas), however, the frontage is simply the thickness of the front wall and cornice of the building. The frontage isn’t very tall, either; the part that drives vitality and value extends no more than three stories high.

Walk Appeal

Healthy frontages create value by building high

Walk Appeal; unhealthy ones do not.

Walk Appeal is that characteristic of a path which entices people to keep on walking, sometimes for miles, rather than stopping short. Enhancing Walk Appeal is a frontage’s primary job. A decade or two ago, achieving high Walk Appeal was considered an art form, but now we know it’s simpler than that. Much of it is simply geometry, and is therefore measurable. Other characteristics of Walk Appeal are immeasurable, but are equally real. And the impact of

Walk Appeal can be startling, meaning the difference between failure, survival, or thriving to neighborhood businesses. One other thing… as this image illustrates, places with great Walk Appeal typically have strong Bike Appeal as well, and allow each mode of transportation to coexist and thrive. Basically, Walk Appeal is a good indicator of a friendly place for all sorts of self-propelled transportation.

Thin Frontages

Parks are great and necessary places in a city, but you
can’t build a city out of nothing but parks

nor can they provide places to live, work or shop.

Thinner frontages create more sustainable urbanism and enhance Walk Appeal.

When buildings are placed closer to civic spaces or thoroughfares, several benefits accrue. But one word of warning: pulling buildings to the street brings screams of protests from the Landscape Urbanists, such as I witnessed at CNU19 in Madison, Wisconsin when Charles Waldheim proclaimed “whenever you insist on pulling buildings to the street, you lose!” I asked “you lose what?” several times, but he turned away and never responded. Waldheim and his colleagues want the freedom to place architecture wherever they want it in the landscape. They are masters at beautiful parks, but this is no way to build a sustainable city. He repeatedly cited Detroit’s Lafayette Park as a sterling example, but when we visited a year ago during the first Lean summit, nobody was there. Literally, there was not a single person on the streets other than us. It was beautiful, if you like Miesian architecture in a garden, but had very low Walk Appeal, as was evident because nobody was walking. But if you’re more interested in building sustainable urbanism, here are some of the benefits of thinner frontages:

Nourishability

Thinner frontages set the stage for more nourishable places by leaving more space in the rear.

Someday, we’ll build an agricultural aesthetic people other than gardeners will love. When that happens, we’ll be able to plant edible frontage gardens. Until then, edible gardening that enhance the nourishability of a place will likely be restricted by many cities to outdoor rooms hidden from public view. So the closer a building is to the front of the lot, the more room there is on all but the most urban lots for edible gardens behind the frontage.

Accessibility

Buildings closer to the sidewalk are more interesting to walk past than those further away, enhancing Walk Appeal.

Like Nourishability, this accessibility benefit is no more complex than third grade geometry. Walking close to a building is more interesting than walking further away for at least two reasons: your view changes more quickly, and you’re able to see more details of the building. Additionally, you may be close enough to speak with someone on the edge of the building. Making a walk substantially more interesting may make the difference between someone walking and driving, giving them more choices of means of access.

Serviceability

Why put any buffer between people on the sidewalk and businesses hoping to serve them?

The worst offenders are shopping malls surrounded by seas of parking, and they’re dying across the country. Second worst are strip commercial buildings with parking lots in front. When is the last time you’ve walked to a strip commercial establishment? A sustainable place must be serviceable, so that you can walk to the daily services of life in your neighborhood, and that works best when commercial or mixed-use buildings are pulled right up to the sidewalk, with nothing screening storefronts or signs from people walking by.

Securability

Eyes on the street translate directly
into people on the street at night,
a strong sign of a secure place.

We’ve known since Jane Jacobs that “eyes on the street” make it more secure. Be sure they’re close enough.

Again, this is third grade geometry. The closer people are to the street, the better they can see and help supervise what happens there.

Adaptability

Thinner frontages allow buildings to be adapted to more uses over time.

Buildings pulled closer to a thoroughfare or civic space can be used for more things over time than those further back. Consider the two extremes: buildings built directly on the sidewalk can be almost anything: civic, retail, offices, residential (townhomes), lodging, industrial, or even storage in those inevitable low points all urbanism faces at some points in the future. At the other extreme, a building located at the end of a five-mile driveway is likely to be one of two things: either a very wealthy person’s estate home, or the chemical plant so located that it can blow up and not kill everyone in town. When buildings are adaptable to more uses over time, they usually last longer.

I could go on, as properly designed frontages can influence the lovability and frugality of buildings as well, but you get the picture. Just as a rudder can steer a ship many times its size, nothing steers the prosperity of a town or city like well-designed frontages. Simply put, they are the arteries of urbanism.

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Just as CNU was ending several years ago in Palm Beach, I believe, someone stopped me and said something cryptic: “I’m convinced that frontages are the lifeblood of the city, and chiefly responsible for its value.” It has taken me this long to get my mind wrapped around that statement, but I believe they’re right. Here’s how frontages the smallest of the four elemental parts of a city, act like the arteries of value.

Jan 19, 2015 12:52pm

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · University of Miami

If you find this an interesting concept you may like to hear more as Steve Mouzon debates the use of Form Based Code to create urban street frontages tomorrow evening at 6 PM at the MB Golf Club on Alton Road.

Jan 19, 2015 4:06pm

Lisa Welch · Planner at City of Syracuse Office of Zoning Administration

And, perhaps most importantly, they are economical. They provide multiple independent players access to public investments (the street) and to the market (also the street), and they provide the most important element for retail, visibility.

Jan 19, 2015 7:06pm

Kenny Craft · Director of Design at South Main Development, Inc.

Great kernels of wisdom Steve. I'd add that the impact of the frontages work hand in hand with the quality of the public realm. What are the materials, surfaces, and disposition of that space between the building and the street, and really the details of the street itself can seriously make or break the viability and walkability of the frontages. Too many developers spend disproportionately too little (attention & money) on the Public Realm...

Jan 20, 2015 2:42am

Jay Brewster · Director of Horticulture at The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

Placing structures and building close to the sidewalk or street works well as long as there is some space for landscapig, planters, benches, dining, gathering, bike parking, and adequate, pedestrian safety.
Every space is different and needs to be designed for the site and use restrictions and opportunities,

Jan 20, 2015 10:24am

Jay Brewster · Director of Horticulture at The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

Larger green spaces in the rear, side or roof of buildings offer unlimited possibilities for a different type of community gathering and even attractive parking alternatives.

Jan 20, 2015 10:26am

735+

2014

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 22:59:57 -0600

Dispatches from Dawn in the USA

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Ben Franklin was a Twitter master a quarter-millennium before the medium, as I wrote in the Foreword to Mark Major’s excellent new book Poor Richard, ANOTHER Almanac for Architects and Planners, but Franklin was also more skilled at describing true Original Green sustainability than anyone alive today. What follows are some of my favorite nuggets of Poor Richard wisdom. Read them, then ask yourself “does this help keep things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future?” More often than not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

Here’s another question to ask yourself as you read these: “is this bit of Franklin wisdom more about consuming things or sustaining things?” Or, “is this more about using stuff up or handing stuff down?” And one more: “how many of these have been sticky enough to come down in some form to our day? Here’s Ben, in chronological order:

Hunger never saw bad bread.

The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one.

He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas.

Without justice, courage is weak.

All things are easy to Industry; all things difficult to Sloth.

Fools multiply folly.

Hope of gain, lessens pain.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Humility makes great men twice honorable.

Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.

What's given shines, what's received is rusty.

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

To be humble to Superiors is Duty, to Equals Courtesy, to Inferiors Nobleness.

God helps them that help themselves.

Don't throw stones at your neighbors, if your own windows are glass.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

I saw few die of Hunger, of Eating 100,000.

He that would live in peace & at ease, must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.

He that can compose himself, is wiser than he that composes books.

Well done is better than well said.

The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise.

The noblest question in the world is: What Good may I do in it?

Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.

Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.

The ancients tell us what is best, but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence.

Time is an herb that cures all Diseases.

Wish a miser long life, and you wish him no good.

Drive thy business; let not that drive thee.

Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.

He that falls in love with himself, will have no Rivals.

Let thy Discontents be Secrets.

Promises may get thee friends, but Nonperformance will turn them into enemies.

When befriended, remember it: when you befriend, forget it.

Be always ashamed to catch yourself idle.

If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.

There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit.

He that sows thorns, should not go barefoot.

Death takes no bribes.

If you'd lose a troublesome Visitor, lend him Money.

A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a Gallon of Vinegar.

Give me yesterday's Bread, this Day's Flesh, and last Year's Cider.

God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees.

Keep thou from the Opportunity, and God will keep thee from the Sin.

He who multiplies Riches multiplies Cares.

A true Friend is the best Possession.

Beware of little Expenses; a small Leak will sink a great Ship.

He's a Fool that cannot conceal his Wisdom.

No gains without pains.

'Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

An ounce of wit that is bought, is worth a pound that is taught.

A quarrelsome Man has no good Neighbors.

It's the easiest Thing in the World for a Man to deceive himself.

Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.

Dost thou love Life? then do not squander Time; for that's the Stuff Life is made of.

A good Example is the best sermon.

He that won't be counseled, can't be helped.

Write Injuries in Dust, Benefits in Marble.

A slip of the foot you may soon recover; but a slip of the Tongue you may never get over.

Lost Time is never found again.

Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely.

He is not well-bred, that cannot bear Ill-Breeding in others.

Wise Men learn by other's harms; Fools by their own.

Content makes poor men rich; Discontent makes rich men poor.

Drink does not drown Care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster.

The wise Man draws more Advantage from his Enemies, than the Fool from his Friends.

All would live long, but none would be old.

He is Governor that governs his Passions, and he a Servant that serves them.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

Little Strokes, Fell great Oaks.

What signifies knowing the Names, if you know not the Natures of Things.

'Tis easier to suppress the first Desire, than to satisfy all that follow it.

Not to oversee Workmen, is to leave them your Purse open.

Cunning proceeds from Want of Capacity.

The Proud hate Pride – in others.

For want of a Nail the Shoe is lost; for want of a Shoe, the Horse is lost; for want of a Horse the Rider is lost.

Hold your Council before Dinner; the full Belly hates Thinking as well as Acting.

Ceremony is not Civility; nor Civility Ceremony.

If Man could have Half his Wishes, he would double his Troubles.

Success has ruined many a Man.

Many have quarreled about Religion, that never practiced it.

Haste makes Waste.

Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.

When out of Favor, none know thee; when in, thou dost not know thyself.

You may give a Man an Office, but you cannot give him Discretion.

Speak little, do much.

Think of three Things: whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.

There was never a good Knife made of bad Steel.

Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.

Love, and be loved.

One To-day is worth two To-morrows.

Work as if you were to live 100 years, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

Never leave that till to-morrow which you can do to-day.

It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

There will be sleeping enough in the Grave.

Silence is not always a Sign of Wisdom, but Babbling is ever a Mark of Folly.

Contentment is the Philosopher's Stone, that turns all it touches into Gold.

He that's content, hath enough; He that complains, has too much.

Hope you enjoyed these!

~Steve Mouzon

165+

Greenwash… err… Greenbuild 2014

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I’m at Greenbuild in New Orleans. A walk through the exhibits reveals a lot of manufacturers trying to prove that what they’ve always sold is green. That’s the definition of greenwashing. On the other hand, there is some really clever stuff here as well. I’ll be blogging about both on my Useful Stuff blog today and tomorrow because it’s better suited to quick, short posts with images than this blog. Check it out!

~Steve Mouzon

177+

Can Minimalism be Lovable?

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There’s a strongly-held view in some architectural camps that minimalist design is unlovable, but I believe that’s a misconception based on the famously-sterile architecture of the 1970s. I even railed in last week’s post against the dangers of pursuing minimalist design so hard that we get rid of essential things. So let’s take a look at ways clean design can achieve lovability.

General Principles

Love and Respect

It’s hard for design to be lovable and therefore sustainable if it’s not respectful of its setting.

Wanda and I moved to Miami eleven years ago, buying a unit at The Dixon, a noted Art Deco landmark in the heart of South Beach. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I’m a long-time advocate of lovability as the first foundation of sustainable buildings because if a building can’t be loved, it won’t last, because we'll find some excuse to rid ourselves of the unlovable. But I’m also a huge advocate for contextual design that respects its surroundings, so it was a foregone conclusion that our renovated condo would not look like something we might have done in another setting. Instead, it became an intriguing exploration of a new part of the character of lovability.

Essential Things

The high standard of great minimalism is losing no essential thing while keeping no unnecessary thing.

Our bedroom is the simplest room I have ever designed, and I thought for a long time about what was really needed. A tent is exotic yet peaceful to me. The bedroom was almost perfectly square to begin with, so I began by encircling the room with a curtain that is precisely an eleven foot square.

The curtain runs across everything… windows, closets, yes, even the door. Come into the room and close the curtain and it’s very much like being in a tent. It’s also very quiet because the fabric absorbs so much sound. Andrés Duany said “this room feels better than any room I’ve been in for a long time for reasons I can’t quite describe.

The huge white ceiling fan indulges a bit of fancy with a nod to our island home: each blade’s spine is a fishing rod stretching sail cloth into a blade. The bed is a white leather platform bed with a white down comforter. There are only two other things in the room (other than us): two little floor lamps of a perfect height for reading in bed.

Other than that, what is really necessary? And editing all those other normal bedroom artifacts out creates a couple’s retreat so immersed with and peace and calm that it borders on the sublime.

A Chef's Kitchen

Visual simplicity in a kitchen hides all the tools from view. Far better to see everything, so cooking is simple.

Our kitchen is a very different room from our bedroom. It abandons the visual simplicity of the bedroom so that it can achieve simplicity of use. Our son Sam, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, calls this a “chef’s kitchen,” the opposite of which is a “show kitchen.”

A chef’s kitchen creates a different sort of lovability. By being quirky, engaging and warm, it invites others to join in and cook together, like Wanda is doing with her sister Janna here. Several types of lovability are delivered by the design itself, but in this case, the design merely sets the stage for people to have experiences they will recall in pleasant memories.

Detailed Principles

Things that Curve

No part of the body is without curve. We resonate with design that reflects curving human form in some way.

These shelves are soapstone slabs, cut in a gentle mirrored S-curve (or reflected cyma, if you prefer) to honor the Art Deco heritage of the building, as that language of architecture was well-stocked with repeated ribs of various shapes used for many purposes.

Most consruction materials and components are straight, from wood studs to concrete block to sheets of metal roofing. Curves, therefore, are usually quite expensive to achieve. A space composed only of curves would be so exotic that it might even seem psychedelic, as you might recall if you’ve ever seen any of the 1960s architecture that tried to do precisely that. So use curves sparingly, but don’t forget about them because well-designed things that remind us of our own form usually get points for lovability.

Things that Grow

Places that welcome living things, plant or animal, tend to be more lovable than those too polished to be bothered.

We’ve all seen rooms so visually sophisticated, whether classical or modern, that it seems as if any intrusion might degrade them. “Too perfect to live in” is a description I’ve heard countless times for places like this.

Because minimalism falls off this cliff faster than classicism, it’s really important for a minimalist space to be imperfect enough to accept various life forms. And a minimalist room arguably benefits most, because these two palm fronds arguably make a bigger impact in a room like this than they would in one already chock-full of decorative embellishments. Bringing the outdoors in can be a responsible thing as well… Wanda almost always salvages greenery that was trimmed or pruned away, giving it a few more days of life indoors as it delights us in exchange.

Quirky Things

Lovable places frequently are built with at least one thing that brings you up short and makes you chuckle.

The most chuckle-worthy thing in our condo is probably the door casing. For reasons that are a story for another day, I needed the casing to sit very flat against the wall. And I wanted to honor the metal detailing found throughout our Art Deco building in some way. I was walking through one of those great old lumberyards in Miami one day… Shell Lumber, if you know the area. I was looking for something else, but then a piece of flashing caught my eye. It was precisely the right width, and quarter-inch drip crimp not only would hold the free-floating edge straight along its length, but it was a near-perfect metaphor for the edge band often found on classical wood casing. Delighted, I purchased my galvanized-roof-flashing-turned-door-casing and headed back to the condo, where my trim carpenter thought for a moment that I had completely lost my mind… but who still to this day occasionally brings people here to show them his most unusual casing job ever!

Head to Foot

Lovable design reflects the vertical arrangement of the human body, which has a top, a middle, and a bottom.

Most often, reflection of the body from head to foot is thought of as a head, body, and foot, like the capital, shaft, and base of a classical column. But there are other ways of reflecting us as well.

This room, for example, divides between middle and bottom at the waist, marked by a black soapstone belt. The tile wainscot reflects the legs and the black soapstone base (not visible here) reflects the feet, while the mirror and painted wall above the belt reflect the body and the painted coffer reflects the head. It’s a bit of a high waist, but that’s because I needed to align the band with the window sills beyond, as you can see from their reflection in the mirror.

Reflecting Our Faces

We resonate with things that reflect us, including the form of the human face.

It’s not essential for a design to have an abstracted face in order for the design to be lovable, but when you can make that happen, people almost invariably smile. Of all the ways of reflecting the human body, the reflection of our faces reaches us most deeply.

If you’re interested, I’ve posted a portfolio of images of our condo, including these and some other images, on the Studio Sky site. Studio Sky, in case you don’t know, is a design firm I run with two great friends, Eric Moser and Julia Sanford. Our goal is to build places and buildings that are highly sustainable according to Original Green and related ideals. I’m building a really interesting Original Green section on Studio Sky, where I step through each of the foundations of the Original Green, all the way to frugal buildings, illustrating each principle with a collection of patterns, some of which might not have occurred to you yet. You’ll find some of the examples from this post on the lovable buildings page, along with several others. I hope you find these Studio Sky pages useful… please keep coming back, as I’m adding stuff all the time.

If you’re interested, I’m doing a New Media workshop in Celebration, Florida November 8.

Leading with principles that anyone can use for free instead of the normal sales pitch makes Studio Sky’s site a bit unique among designers and builders, but I believe this will be the future of designers’ and builders’ websites. If you’re interested in what the future may hold for us, I’m doing a New Media workshop for designers and builders November 8 in Celebration, Florida. Hope to see you there!

As for this post, it has just touched the tip of the lovability iceberg. Have you had enough, or would you come back for more? I’d be happy to do a series of posts on lovability if anyone’s interested… just leave a note below… thanks!

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · University of Miami

Very clear and well put! Cold sterile interiors cannot achieve the pure delight of a space that is simple but organic!

Oct 20, 2014 5:51pm

Terry E. Kearns · Georgia Tech

Bravo. That was a lovable post and a first class selfie.

Oct 20, 2014 5:57pm

Sandy Sorlien · Works at Fairmount Water Works

You have proven that minimalism can be lovable! By the way, did you know there's a study showing that kids learn better in uncluttered classrooms.

Oct 21, 2014 7:02am

Bronwyn Boltwood · Ottawa, Ontario

This is something that Ikea is very good at in their marketing material -- making a space look attractive yet lived-in. They look like they contain actual possessions, not just staging accessories or clutter.

Too many spaces are still very sterile -- there was even an article comparing modern office interiors to natural environments, which concluded that messy offices were better because at least there was more stimulation than the sensory deprivation chamber that is a minimalist office. Don't ask me why, but they didn't even ask the question of "how else can we improve office interiors?"

Oct 21, 2014 7:18am

401+

Simplicity, Minimalism, and Bandwidth

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a simple pleasure or visually fussy?

Simplicity isn't so simple, but simplicity done right can create some of the most lovable experiences and things… and the things we love the most are usually the things we sustain the longest. The problem is that there are several types of simplicity, including at least one charlatan close to the end that's not nearly so simple as it appears.

The Bandwidth Pendulum and the Victorian Revival

Conjuring simplicity with images of a simpler time works for a while, but doesn’t ease our bandwidth demands.

The architectural establishment won't acknowledge it, but a Victorian Revival has fluorished for the past three decades in the US, arguably getting into full swing at Seaside. How is it possible that people have embraced things that high-style designers might tag as "fussy" or "frilly" during precisely those decades when our bandwidth has been increasingly sapped away by the 24/7 connectivity of the digital era? I believe the Victorian Revival sprang from a desire to strip away our modern burdens of time demands and complexities and invoke the perceived simplicity of an earlier time. But pendulums always swing back, and while things that recall images of a simpler time can transport us out of the digital torrent for a while, we need a deeper simplicity now, as time demands wash ever deeper over us. Let’s consider several ways of achieving more deeply-rooted simplicity.

Simple to Use

The life expectancy of a tool is inversely proportional to the thickness of its manual.

The best tools need no manuals at all, because their uses are self-evident. And the things that are simplest to use actually lend themselves to much inventiveness of purpose because it’s easy to imagine other things they could be used for that their original designer may never have envisioned.

Simple Pleasures

a Tuscan market, just around the corner

from where the bean soup was served

A simple pleasure is more easily repeated than one that depends on a complex set of conditions.

The caption of this post’s title image asks an important question: Is that bowl of Tuscan bean soup sitting on a checkered tablecloth somewhere in Tuscany simple or not? Visually, there are a lot of things going on, from the texture of the soup itself to the knotty fabric of the tablecloth. So designers might consider the image to be visually complex, but almost everyone else would consider the experience of eating a bowl of Tuscan bean soup in Tuscany to be one of life’s simple pleasures.

And as such, it’s something you can have any time you’re in Tuscany… or any time at all, if you know how to cook. And that’s the great pleasure of simple pleasures: they’re so accessible to us because they come so easily, and many of them can be repeated for a lifetime.

Working Simply

Wanda and I have taken “in-house work” to its logical

extreme, working from home (and learning live/work lessons)

Outsourcing work might be more efficient, but things done in-house are less susceptible to disruption.

Take the IT department, for example. It’s good to have a good IT department. But it’s better to work with systems that are simple enough that you don’t need an IT department. That’s why Apple has fans, while all the other computer companies merely have customers. Those other companies make consultants more powerful; Apple makes me more powerful by making power simpler.

Simply Authentic

cracks are a sure sign that this is a

solid timber column

Imperfections are signs of depth - only thin veneers can be perfect, and that perfection doesn’t last.

Veneers had a long and illustrious history… until recently. For centuries, people overlaid structures built of strong but crude materials with thin layers of costly materials with the intent of making buildings more noble. Today, our motive has changed: we're no longer seeking to make buildings more noble, but to make them maintenance-free. So now we coat building elements with thin layers of cheap materials like vinyl or aluminum in hopes that we will no longer have to care for the building. But because they're cheap and thin, today's veneers can only hide the imperfections of the base material for so long. And when they fail, they do so hideously. Because we've seen far too many cheap veneers come apart at the seams, there is now a budding desire for building with real materials. A timber column, even with its cracks, is better than a structural column encased with a flimsy wrap of other materials. Those cracks in the timber column show that this is the real thing: a building element with depth, and that won't suddenly come apart one day.

Natural Economy

nature reclaiming a place

Nature’s accountant balances all of the books.

Nature is incredibly complex at the microscopic level, but everything balances out. One creature’s waste is another one’s food, as we’ve known for a long time. And even when humans put things far out of balance at one moment in time, nature finds ways of achieving a new balance. Consider how quickly an abandoned place is reclaimed once the people leave. This simplicity of everything balancing out even though the individual workings of nature might involve very complex chemistry or physics is a high standard we cannot really even aspire to yet. The best way to invoke the simplicity of natural economy is simply to plant stuff and feed things, and let nature do its work. We can’t yet manufacture tomatoes, but we can grow them.

Elemental Things

a pool as a simple circle

Elemental forms can be very efficient carriers of information when they ask less of us to unlock their story.

This round pool, for example, is recognizable as such in fractions of a second whereas a more complex water body might require some investigation to see if it’s a stream or a pond. Even if we don’t consciously ask ourself that question, our mind is still burdened with having to recognize the complex shape. The whole world cannot be composed of elemental shapes, of course. But things that can be simply shaped while at the same time being understandable are a welcome relief in our increasingly complex world. In the end, the goal should be to achieve a healthy balance between simplicity and complexity, so the more we’re bombarded with more and more information, the more we appreciate elemental but understandable things.

The Minimalism Hazard

this pavilion is quite beautiful to the trained eye, but

accomplishes little more than a couple umbrellas would do

"Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” ~Einstein

Minimalism seems at first like the ultimate simplicity, removing every non-essential thing until we're left with the real essence of whatever we're designing. Unfortunately, many architects ignore Einstein's dictum and begin removing essentials. They eliminate the visible roof entirely, for example, leaving the owner with leaky flat roofs in wet climates. They try to reduce the top of the wall to a single line, but then can't properly flash the parapet. Unlike the iPod, which kept all the essentials but got rid of everything else, much architecture today gets rid of essentials as well in the name of style, and then suffers for it.

Choosing Simplicity

Don’t confuse the path to simplicity with a simple or easy path, as it requires many choices, and editing things out.

Which sorts of simplicity should we choose? Everyone will likely have their own mix, but I’d suggest that any choice that removes clutter and allows us to focus on the most important things is probably a good choice. What do you think?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

DelMario Liddell · Wiesbaden, Germany

Great insightful read. It's a challenge to be efficient

Oct 14, 2014 1:48pm

Perry Sponseller · Memphis, Tennessee

Spot on with the Minimalism Hazard. Quite to the point.

Oct 27, 2014 5:26am

Perry Sponseller · Memphis, Tennessee

Was hopping to find a recipe for that wonderful bowl of beans.

Oct 27, 2014 5:27am

495+

Steve Jobs and the Living Tradition Conundrum

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Yesterday was the third anniversary of the loss of Steve Jobs, and to this day, most people completely miss his biggest contribution: the enabling of new living traditions where there had been none before. Much like the way Gizmo Green dominates green building conversations, almost all stories about Steve focus on the technical side of his brilliance. But if you go back and read what he actually said, it’s clear that one of his core motivations was to allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

There’s an apparent disconnect between what Steve did and what a few of us are trying to do for sustainability that actually isn’t a disconnect at all. Steve built powerful tools without knowing everything that people would do with them. He had some ideas, to be sure, but there’s no doubt that he took delight in people coming up with uses he never considered. He famously said that a Mac is a “bicycle for your brain,” because bicycles transform humans from one of the most inefficient species at travel to one more efficient than all but a few species such as condors. Steve didn’t need to know where you would go with your bike in order to design the bicycle/Mac… he just needed to design it to make you more effective.

The Original Green is sustainability built upon an operating system of living traditions, and it’s what kept humanity alive for almost all of human history. We’re at a strange and rare point in history where the living traditions for building sustainable places and buildings have died almost everywhere on earth, beginning in the early 20th Century. And so there is much confusion about the nature of living traditions, and whether they can even exist at all today.

News flash… they can and do exist. The blogosphere is a vibrant living tradition that sprang up in just the last decade, with millions participating and hundreds of millions (or more) reading their work. So there’s no doubt they work well today, even if architecture and urbanism aren’t reaping their benefits yet.

Part of the resistance in architecture stems from rejection of things before our time because of the need to do transgressional work. This prejudices architecture against things that have long been proven to work, which is where new living traditions probably need to begin. The other part is a misunderstanding of how the process works because most of us have never seen them work in architecture or urbanism. The illustration above shows how it works.

The worker in the illustration is like the Original Green itself… the intelligence behind sustainable places and buildings. Living traditions are similar to the tool (or operating system) wielded by the worker. The products created are the built artifacts of places and buildings.

If you’re interested, I’m doing a New Media workshop in Celebration, Florida November 8.

Problem is, architects tend to confuse the artifacts with the worker. An intelligent worker can build different things tomorrow from what is built today. Just because we begin with artifacts long proven to work doesn’t mean we won’t be producing better artifacts tomorrow. As a matter of fact, a living tradition is always learning because the heartbeat of a living tradition is four simple words: “we do this because…” Basing design on principles in this way, rather than style, means that everyone is allowed to think again, and that what we build tomorrow has the hope of being better than what we build today.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Chris Rogers · Birmingham, Alabama

The term I use to describe a building or place that is flexible enough to be used for possibilities other than those explicitly designed is "affordance". Great examples would be digital graffiti at Alys Beach, or the gravel parking lot at Seaside's Motor Court Inn hosting a wedding reception.

Oct 8, 2014 11:22am

248+

Fitness Alfresco and the Money Problem

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We’ve grown so dependent on our gizmos that we often forget about the natural ways of doing things… ways that are often just as effective and usually a lot less costly than the mechanically-driven methods. Take fitness, for example. How many Americans get in their cars and drive to the gym where they work out on the equipment, then drive back home again, spending $100 or more per month by the time you count the memberships, the gas, the wear and tear on the cars, and the value of the commuting time? And how many more people sign up for memberships but quickly quit going, while the membership fees keep draining from their checking accounts?

My friend Nancy Bruning was the editor of the Original Green, and she’s also a prolific author, with one of her latest being 101 Things to Do on a Park Bench, which lays out the idea she calls Fitness Alfresco. Nancy shows you some of those moves throughout this post.

But there’s a problem shared by both Fitness Alfresco and the Original Green: there’s not much money in it. Americans spend billions of dollars per year with the fitness industry, and that’s almost certainly dwarfed by the building equipment and control industries. Meanwhile, Fitness Alfresco costs you nothing but time and some comfortable clothing. So how can Fitness Alfresco spread beyond the circle of Nancy’s influence if there’s no big money to drive it?

I’ve been asking myself the same thing about the Original Green. I’m unlikely to find big equipment manufacturers as sponsors or advertisers because I advocate for doing things that require less equipment. And I repeatedly make the case that the things with the greatest impacts are not the measures that make our buildings smarter, but the ones that make us smarter. So where’s the corporate sponsorship future in that? Is the Original Green just a book and a website, destined to die when I run out of passion or run out of time?

I watched a fascinating conversation with two friends on Facebook recently spurred by this story on the happiest cities in the US. One friend is strongly conservative (as is the article) and the other is reliably progressive, but they came to a surprising agreement via this train of thought:

The happiest cities aren’t where you think they should be, and for the most part represent places considered to be “backwards.” But why is that? Places where people know how to do for themselves, raise their own food, etc., should be considered the most sustainable. And they’re demonstrably happier.

Why, then, should they be cast in a negative light? Is it possible that it’s precisely because they are more sustainable? Meaning that they consume less? Specifically, they spend less on consumer goods? And so it’s therefore in the interest of the vast American Media-Advertising Complex to portray them negatively? Both my friends came to this conclusion from markedly different places on the political spectrum.

So what hope is there for those who advocate consuming less? A decade ago, there wasn’t much hope because we all got our information from the top down, and that information was all sponsored by big corporations with many things to sell you. Now, however, we have learned how to bypass the corporate megaphones and speak directly to each other via a growing choice of New Media such as blogging, Twitter, online communities such as Facebook, and more.

New Media for Designers + Builders describes this revolution in detail, and it’s a revolution I believe will bring as much change as the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. Those New Media are therefore where the hope lies for real sustainability.

If you’re interested, I’m doing a New Media workshop in Celebration, Florida November 8.

It’s not just theory, either… there are those out there who are showing us how to get it done. One of my real heroes is Chuck Marohn, who went from being completely unknown a few years ago to being the leader of the Strong Towns movement today… a movement that just held their first national gathering a few weeks ago. Chuck’s message to cities and towns is precisely an Original Green message about spending less, but getting more. Strong Towns could not have existed in 1994, but today, it’s beginning to change America.

So that’s my take on it… but am I missing something? This is a “half-baked post,” with several ideas I’ve been thinking on for some time, but I’m not at all sure that I’ve got it all right. What do you think?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Nancy Bruning, Charles Marohn, C Fenno Hoffman, Michael Loring Waller, have a look... I'm talking about you guys here.

Sep 29, 2014 9:40am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Nancy, I can't so easily talk about fitness alfresco without doing it myself, right? So I found an app called the 7 Minute Workout where everything is done either on the ground or on a park bench. And it's a brutal 7 minutes! I'm now doing that Monday-Wednesday-Friday between my running days Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. Here's the link: http://bit.ly/1tPsMPM

Oct 11, 2014 2:24pm

Old School New Body

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

Aug 26, 2015 5:08am

316+

CNU 22 Atypical Building Types

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All photos on this and subsequent CNU22 session posts are from Buffalo,

but aren’t necessarily related directly to the post.

The following are tweet-casts of the Atypical Building Types session at CNU22 in Buffalo last week. I’ve edited the tweets lightly whenever I remembered something else the speaker said.

David Kim

Mayfair Lane, Buffalo’s most valuable building type.
Nothing else comes close. Read more on this post.

• Simple, flexible, & replicable: those are our new flex-building ideals.

• We want to be able to aggregate buildings in small increments because that’s what makes financing work in today’s market.

• The keys to making incremental buildings work are paying attention to fronts, backs, & shared courtyards.

• The most adaptable buildings are a designed on a single chassis that allows many buildouts over time.

Murphy Antoine

This tiny cottage is likely Buffalo’s

2nd most valuable real estate per
acre, showing once again that small
≠ shack. Even so, getting small
types built is tough in some places.

• I'll talk about Baldwin Park and several types we use that have good vertical mix.

• We're all about getting stuff implemented, not just being theoretical.

• Building type choice is one of the most important, if not the single most important, decision we ever make in place-making.

• New types need to be "better than market" to really show the success of the type, otherwise nobody will take a chance on building them if they’re not more compelling.

• “Individual entry stacked flats” is a term we use for units that are similar to a mansion apartment… so long as it’s the type of mansion apartment that has only one front door.

• Individual entry stacked flats are a great way of integrating 1 bedroom units into an existing larger-home context because it doesn’t seem like you’re building out of character with the neighborhood.

• Individual entry stacked flats can look just like townhouses when they’re attached.

• Individual entry stacked flats bulk out to fit in a street full of larger row houses.

• Multi-entry stacked flats are great corner units because they can have entries on each frontage.

• Flex units can attune well to the market because of their adaptability to today's market.

• Flex units are designed to easily morph from their inaugural residential condition to retail when the time is right.

• The first level of a flex building should be a 1-story flat because that's what converts to retail later on.

• The podium building is most far-reaching & evolving type in our toolbox today. It mixes construction types, pushing wood to its limits in the code.

• CNU should take a lot of credit with the push for podium buildings, which let us build 5-6 story buildings.

• A podium building is typically concrete on the main level, with a 4-level wood building above.

• SuperWood buildings are a new type of podium building composed of 5 stories of wood construction (type 3A) on a concrete podium with upgraded fire rating on all exterior walls.

• SuperWood buildings can put bigger box retail in the concrete base.

• The concrete first level of podium buildings can be extra-tall for large tenants who need tall ceilings.

• Viewed from downhill, our new SuperWood building is an amazing thing to see, with a tall main level and two lower parking decks. All told, it looks like 9-story mostly-wood building!

Eric Moser

This isn’t one of Julie’s Edge Dwellers, but it’s
as small as some of them.

• Let's look at Julie Sanford's Edge Dwellers.

• In America, we've created construction where we can't live in buildings without outside air.

• There are many international sources of design inspiration for these case study houses.

• Edge dwellers are designed to produce more energy than they use.

• All of these case study houses are meant to be built of locally available materials.

• The tent dweller is a model of disengagement with the land, hovering lightly above it.

• The eco-dweller admits natural light & amplifies breezes, and is meant to live off the grid.

• Eco-dwellers are raised on piers, treading very lightly on the land, preserving existing drainage patterns.

• Our Belize project aims to reinvigorate local traditions of hardwood construction.

• These Belize cottages have no insulation in exterior walls, and are built without highly skilled labor.

• The Belize cottages reduce the number of layers we typically build in a building. What you see is what you get: studs, sheathing, and siding.

• We want to build a much smaller conditioned core of the building.

Steve Maun

When financing is tougher to get,

it should be easier to get a loan on

small cottages than McMansions.

• After the meltdown, the lenders weren't there any more, so builders could no longer build spec houses. In some ways, this was a good thing.

• The problem is, you can't get the pace of construction to sustain a project without the financing of individual buildings.

• One of the greatest puzzles to American construction today is how to increase the capacity of building without the financing we once had.

• We are now looking at modular construction to boost our capacity.

• Modular is not less expensive than good stick construction - it's about the same. The bonus is speed.

• We're doing Marianne Cusato modular designs by Clayton Homes.

• One really interesting thing about modular is that it fits great on the tiny lots of old towns because the modules have to be small enough to travel down the highway.

• Going from the staging area to the building site in an existing town with a modular house can be an adventure. We have a special subcontractor for that.

• “Lift off” is that moment when your heart's in your throat with a modular house in the air and destined to go between two existing houses.

• The smallest cottages have porches built with the house in the factory. Larger houses have site-built porches.

Robert Orr

Buffalo’s old streets are filled with building types
that aren’t typical today.

• This presentation is mainly about the building types I'm not allowed to build.

• My idea for this new type began with English leasehold from the Middle Ages.

• Today, the threshold of an urban development is to have a pro forma that's better than surface parking.

• Here’s the core question: How do you get the price down so low you don't need a public-private partnership for an urban infill?

• You can get tremendous variation along a street just by making the boxes a little larger or smaller than the ones next door.

• Our tiny incremental $300,000 building in New Haven has 6 tiny units & flex space on street… and still, the landowner elected to keep his surface parking!

Andrew Frey

• My day job is to work for a luxury apartment developer. At night, I do townhousecenter.org.

• T4 didn't really exist before Miami21. It now applies to about 1,000 acres in the city.

• If we can figure out T4 in Miami, we can build quite a lot of it as successional upzoning occurs.

• We designed a 25' wide row house type to fit two abreast on Miami’s typical 50’ lots.

• Our Miami townhouse type doesn't have parking. Miami21 requires 1.5 spaces/unit, which is a problem.

• We're working on an exemption to off-street parking for small buildings near transit in Miami.

Steve Mouzon

I will write up my presentation and post it sometime soon.

Panel Discussion

• Roughly ⅔ of the buildings once existing in New England have been torn down.

• It is interesting that parking is considered part of the burden of the lot rather than part of transport system.

• Someone should initiate a parking credit for blocks with Zipcars.

• The key to the best new building types is funding that doesn't require Wall Street.

• The biggest problems with live-works are fire codes & finance.

• CNU is working with the FHA to get the allowable percentage of work area in live/works increased.

• Working at home should be a basic human right.

~Steve Mouzon

278+

Agrarian Urbanism and the Mormon Block

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Plans can be poetic on several levels, from simple sensual beauty to deeply embedded meaning. Great planners create profound poetry in their best plans, and while this doesn’t rise to those levels, I feel it is some of my best work. Here’s what it means:

Pienza, Italy superimposed on green rectangle the size
of a Mormon Block to illustrate just how big they are

CNU kicked off last year in Salt Lake City with a competition to redesign the Mormon Block. Salt Lake City is built of these mammoth blocks, measuring 660 feet on a side and containing exactly 10 acres. What do you do with blocks that big? Because the Original Green’s ideas on Nourishable Places had an early influence on Agrarian Urbanism, I was asked to lead a session on Agrarian Urbanism and the Mormon Block. My competition entry on Wednesday served as the basis for my presentation on Saturday.

The idea of putting a garden in the city has potential story lines that trace back thousands of years. In the Judaeo-Christian heritage, paradise at the beginning of the world was a garden and at world’s end, it will be a city. Many of the most beautiful places on earth not yet ruined by sprawl put these two ideals together, allowing you to look directly from the city out into the countryside, such as this view from High Street in Broadway, one of the most beautiful towns in England's Cotswold hills.

It is just as poetic to see the town in the distance from the countryside, so long as the town is small enough to perceive all at once, like Chipping Camden is as seen from this meadow. The trick to building a garden inside a Mormon Block is that there’s no way you’ll feel like you’re out in the countryside because you simply cannot get that far from the urbanism all around the edge of the block. And while a small patch of garden embedded in urbanism can be profound in the hand of a master, it’s easier to make an impact by pulling off the feeling of moving from city to garden in a short distance.

I set out, therefore, to try to move from the city to the garden in ten paces. It’s not as difficult as it sounds… it happens all the time in villages like St. Alban’s in England shown here. And then it occurred to me: maybe, if I could pull a few planning tricks, it might be possible not just to move from city to garden in ten paces, but actually move from city to what felt like country in ten paces. So I set out to try to figure out how to do it.

One obvious solution is to make sure that there are turns in the road. This country road winds for miles through England’s Dartmoor National Forest, but you can never see more than a few dozen yards ahead of you because the path is constantly twisting and turning along the contours of the land as it searches out the more level tracks through the landscape.

Hedgerows are another useful technique for controlling the view, and because England is famous for them, here’s yet another British image. A hedgerow is tall and thick, creating a view wall so that you cannot see into the adjacent field. Hedgerows can also be edible, planted with fruit or berry bushes. And while bedding crops often grow at more than arm’s length, edible hedgerow plants bring the fruit right up to your face if you’re walking along the edge of the path.

Street width isn’t often discussed as a technique for making the way seem longer, but it can be highly effective. It’s simple proportion: moving 300 feet along a street that’s ten feet wide seems like a much longer distance than traveling an equal distance on a boulevard that’s 200 feet from building face to building face. Take this simple test: Look at the second image above, then imagine walking from one end of Pienza to the other, then imagine walking one block in Salt Lake City. Which seems like a greater distance? So the path should clearly be narrow.

It’s not possible to completely hide the buildings at the street from within the garden, but it is possible to clothe the insides of the buildings with green. New Orleans does a fabulous job of this, adorning buildings with galleries that are practically begging you to hang a lush garden of potted plants, such as the one that is shown in this image.

So here’s how the idea developed: The first move was to decide that there should be something special in the middle, which is where you’re furthest from the city. Working edible gardens need a place for the work of the harvest, and the time of harvest has been an occasion for festivals throughout human history, so it seemed appropriate to put the place of the harvest at the center of the block. And because the block is square and urban, a harvest place that is round and green seemed to be the perfect counterpoint on several levels.

That mammoth block size was the very next thing that had to be addressed. Portland is famous for its walkability in part because of its very small block size, where block faces are around 195 feet per side. Dividing the Mormon Block in thirds creates sub-blocks with similar block face dimensions once you take out the width of the sub-block passages. And in order to create the best walkability, there should be corner entries as well, which create iconic flatiron buildings. All told, this scheme creates twelve gateways into the garden: four at the corners and two along each side.

So the basic scheme was set: enter through the city walls at the twelve gateways and proceed along narrow, curving, hedged pathways through the garden to the place of the harvest. Here’s the basic idea of one of those pathways. But should they just curve in one direction, like giant turbine blades? Doing this would give you no choices along the way from the city streets to the center of the garden, making each path pretty much identical. Once you’ve walked one, you’ve pretty much walked them all. So I decided there should be intersections along the way. But how, and how many?

Intersections are easy if you run the pathways both to the right hand side and to the left. How much should they curve? Curve too little, and it’s pretty much a straight shot to the center. Curve too much, and each of the plots of the garden becomes tiny as the block is eaten up with too much roadway. A perfect balance seemed to be to lay out the pathways for seven intersections between the city sidewalks and the place of the harvest. At each of the seven intersections, you could turn right, or left, going further out or further in. And so your path from each of the twelve gates to the place of the harvest could take innumerable paths as you selected your way through the seven circles of choices.

So that’s how the paths laid out. You’ll also notice a few more things: The twelve cottages scattered around the outer edges of the garden house the gardeners. Bio-intensive gardens this big would be full-time work for these twenty-four people (with maybe some occasional help from their children.) Just outside their cottages, at the outer circle, is the orchard border that further frames the green circle of the garden. And the innermost circle of sunburst-shaped buildings are the sheds where the tools of the garden and the tools of the harvest are stored.

There are other stories here as well, but I’ve gone on long enough. What do you see?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Judy L. Hayward · Executive Director at Historic Windsor, Inc.

Steve, this is a great idea and so well written. Thank you.

May 27, 2014 9:00am

Keith Covington · Nashville, Tennessee

Neat solution, Steve!

May 27, 2014 11:01am

Jason Dunham · Birmingham, Alabama

Steve, I love this design because of the beauty and embedded meaning, but also the functionality. I don't know if you've considered or were influenced by Mormon doctrine or not but there are some interesting relationships revealed in your description.

Jun 18, 2014 6:07pm

Tod Robbins · Saratoga Springs, Utah

Steve,

Thanks for running us through your process. The finished design is really beautiful and functional. I recently read "Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture and City Planning" (http://www.amazon.com/Nineteenth-Century.../dp/0195075056) by C. Mark Hamilton. It's a great overview of the "City of Zion" or "Zion Plat" urban design and Mormon structures. Anyhow, give it a read if you haven't already.

Thanks again!

Jul 13, 2014 8:03pm

Søren Simonsen · Founder at Impact Hub Salt Lake

I don't know if the Mormon Block needs re-inventing. If you understand the original idea, it's pretty awesome in its original form. But the ideas presented here are fantastic.

Jul 13, 2014 8:12pm

843+

What I Learned by Moving My Office Home

search the Original Green Blog

view from kitchen: my office takes up about 6 feet at the right end of our living room that we didn’t use so much, and is partitioned off by bookshelves
- most of the living room is out of view to the left - and yes, the kitchen is a “chef’s kitchen,” meant to be messy with everything open to view - and use

I dreaded the idea of moving my office worse than a root canal, but it might turn out to be one of the leanest, greenest, and all-around best things we’ve done in a very long time. At first, we didn’t even consider moving home because we simply have too much stuff. We were in a 1,500 square foot office a few blocks away from our 747 square foot condo; how is it possible to condense every three square feet into one? But late one October evening, I asked Wanda “do you think we should consider the unthinkable?” And so it began.

my outdoor drawing room

Moving your office to an equal or larger space is easy: you just call the movers and then spend a day or two getting set up to work again. But combining 1,500 square feet of work space and 747 square feet of living space into 747 square feet of live/work space is much more difficult because you have to look at every single thing and say “do I really need this?” It’s an intense exercise in getting lean with living and working. We spent almost the entire month of January doing exactly that, and the three months since sorting it all out. Here are some things I learned, organized by simple rules of thumb… and you can click on the bird to tweet a rule of thumb if you like.

Cleanse

this clever cabinet is less than 2 feet wide
and stores all the office supplies we really

needed to keep

Get lean by ditching flab, which is anything I don’t need today.

We keep far too much stuff because we might need it someday, just as our body does with fat… storing calories because we might someday need them. When we moved, we gave loads of furniture, office supplies, and the like to MakeShop Miami, the maker group I wrote about here. They can use it today, while I only might need it someday.

Sentimentality is a hard master, forcing me to carry a heavy load just to see it again someday.

Take pictures. Good ones. They take up no space at all in your place, especially if you store them somewhere in the cloud. I had several architectural models I’d kept since school. At this point, they looked like models of ruins because the models were ruined. I also got rid of a lot of drawings from school, saving only my best work. I keep all my professional drawings, of course, but the idea that anyone would want to see my lesser work from school just doesn’t make sense.

Lean by lack is poverty, but lean by choice is highly treasured.

No diet is pleasant at the moment, but the leanness that comes afterward can be great fun. Getting lean has caused a massive 4-month hit to my productivity, but it promises to pay off for years to come.

here’s where I draw indoors...

Work somewhere too small to clutter.

I once thought a space large enough to clutter was a luxury but it’s really a burden. Here’s a huge point about the images in this post: Nothing was prepped for the shoot. All “straightening up” took 30 seconds or less. This is how we work. We can’t afford not to. And it saves a ton of time cleaning up every few months and searching for stuff every day in between.

Label stuff crisply and neatly. The smaller the space, the cleaner it needs to feel.

You can get away with hand-scrawled labels in a big office, but a small office needs to feel more composed. And where would you rather be working anyway: somewhere really sloppy, or somewhere that raises your spirits? When space is small it is more important to surround yourself with things that lift your spirits.

… and I can flip the red chair around and work on my computer
… all in just under 50 square feet

Shred with text left-to-right so ribbons of paper include only a digit or two of an account number.

I had every check I’d ever written, all the way back to when Wanda and I got married when I was just 19. Why? Because I’d never taken the time to recycle them. The IRS says you have to keep 7 years of records, but I kept everything back to when we moved to Florida, 11 years ago. I kept tax returns older than that… or at least the ones we had. We had three back-to-back floods in our office several years ago during a rooftop construction project, and they destroyed tons of drawings and company records, so what we have is really spotty. But in any case, don’t just recycle it. Identity thieves might be able to do something even if the record is really old, so make sure you shred everything before recycling.

Never lay junk mail anywhere except in the recycle bin… next, get on the National Do Not Mail List.

In a small space, you can’t afford to handle stuff twice… especially if it’s something you’re not planning to keep. So go straight to the recycle bin when you check your mail.

Focus

use curtains to reveal workspaces only

when you want to

Have an invisible inbox. A massive stack of stuff to do is demoralizing.

See the white cabinet just to the right of my red chair in the image above? It’s an Ikea shoe cabinet, but it makes an awesome inbox. I can pivot it open, drop stuff in, and let it close… and it stays out of sight until I’m ready to work on it.

Keep things you use each day close around, but store further away what you use less often.

People say storage units are a sign of hoarding, and an indicator of not getting rid of enough stuff. Quite the opposite is true if you’re moving your office home. We have three workplaces: the stuff we need every day is in our two tiny workspaces at home. The stuff we need weekly is in a small storage unit a bike ride from home. The stuff we need monthly or less is in a larger but less expensive (per square foot) storage unit on the mainland. All three places are set up for work. Without the two storage units, working from home would be impossible for me.

sound control is a necessary part of focus in
a small shared space

Rinse junk mail instead of scrubbing. Don’t fear the inbox.

Ever notice how something you could have merely rinsed right after you used it takes some real scrubbing if you let it get hard and crusty? Junk mail is that way. It’s more important in a small space to not feel the walls closing in around me… including the digital walls of stacks of email. So every morning, I delete all the spam that my spam-catcher doesn’t catch, plus all the emails that aren’t exactly spam, but which I have no intention of ever answering. This leaves me with a small fraction of what greeted me when I first sat down, making it more likely that I’ll actually look at what’s left… and then respond to it.

Simplify

bookshelves double as great partitions...

The first act of simplification is discovering which things can do double-duty… or more.

Start with your furnishings, such as these bookshelves which are actually doing triple-duty.

Next, consider your equipment. Do you really need all of it? We’re now down to just two computers: Wanda’s laptop and mine.

Then think about your digital business. Dropbox doubles as a cloud server and a backup system for me, for example. But it’s expensive, so I’m storing several terabytes of files that don’t often change on a WD My Cloud server I can access from anywhere on earth. Before saving stuff there, however, I’m organizing it all. It’s something I should have done years ago, but I’m using the move home as the reason to finally get it done.

My digital setup is an entire post’s worth of material. I’ll put that post up soon on Useful Stuff. The essence, however, is this: when you work in a small space, your biggest enemy is clutter. Both physical and digital. So you need to spend an unusual amount of time simplifying things in the beginning. You’ll thank yourself countless times from that point forward.

… and don’t forget the space behind the books, which is a

whole other set of shelves, waiting to be used from the inside

Small equipment can go many places that are impossible for larger equipment.

We’re down to just one letter-size scanner, which sits snugly on the end of my desk. Our old printer was a beast, but our new one sits neatly on top of my drawing files.

Take advantage of the space under a desk that's over and around your feet.

Wanda stores copy paper on a shelf above her feet, and Buddy, Tanner, and Sally make a bed around her feet. I store stuff to either side of my feet because why should all that space be wasted?

Breathe

working from home doesn’t just mean

working inside your home

Work in a garden room whenever possible. It’s a luxury most people never get to enjoy.

I work outdoors whenever the weather is good for several reasons. It’s a change of scenery. It’s a great pleasure. On a good day, the light is excellent. It’s easier to focus if Wanda is on the phone indoors. And it gets me acclimated to the local environment so I can live in season, often not needing to turn on the air conditioning when I return indoors. I’m working inside right now, for example, with only the breeze of the ceiling fan needed for comfort.

What It Means

There are obviously many lessons here, and I’ve just touched on some of them briefly. Is there anything you want to know more about? If so, I can blog about it in greater detail… or we could just talk about it here. What makes the most sense to you? And what do you wonder the most about, if you don’t already work from home?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Chad Cooper · Self-employed at Chad Cooper :: Architecture & New Urbanism

Yes... post more details.

May 5, 2014 2:35pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

OK, I've finally finished this post! Lots of lessons learned from moving my office home. Have a look and let me know what I've missed... thanks!

May 6, 2014 10:11am

Joseph Readdy · Washington State University

Steve: Your writing echoes the experience – it's brief, but elegant…

May 6, 2014 11:31am

Mary Elizabeth

The thing that I miss most about working from home is the luxury of being able to cook really good meals. I would routinely start a meal early, go back to work, and then finish the meal. It broke up the work day for me and gave me very valuable time for reflection about the current project. The only drawback was the very real need to deliberately take occasional days off--quite easy to skip!

May 6, 2014 12:06pm

Nancy Bruning · Author, Founder and CEO at Nancy Bruning's Nancercize

Great post, Steve. It's surprising what we can do without.

May 6, 2014 12:38pm

Sarah Lewis · Senior Planner at City of Somerville (Official)

WOW, Steve! Your writing is always on point but this is so true to home that I have to comment and say thank you for a wonderful, concise list . . . I have "room" to improve my space!

May 6, 2014 3:23pm

Laurence Qamar · Principal (school) at Laurence Qamar, Architecture & Town Planning

Steve,
I could not agree with you more. I have had my business in a small room in our house since 2002 when started my small firm. I am working throughout the NW region from this small space. Meanwhile, I have been here each day (that I am not traveling) to greet our son when he comes home from school. He understands what I do at work, and sometimes joins be in my office to do drawings of his own. And when it's time to meet with colleagues, our dining room turns into a great working conference room. Grade A office buildings are overrated. Live/work is where it's at. Thank you for giving increased credibility and dignity to a traditional working and living model.

May 6, 2014 9:47pm

Jim Kumon · Executive Director at Incremental Development Alliance

Look forward to sharing the spaces I've modified or created indoors/outdoors here in the last 12 months here in MPLS.

May 7, 2014 9:45am

Chad Cooper · Self-employed at Chad Cooper :: Architecture & New Urbanism

interested in reading more about your file organization/storage

May 7, 2014 8:15pm

Kevin Klinkenberg · Executive Director at Savannah Development and Renewal Authority

Your Email comments are spot on, as are dealing with the awfulness of clutter that we just let fill up our lives for no good reason, really. Another thing I'm finding helpful to "lean" things up is only checking email twice per day. My goal is to get it down to three or four times per week. The 4 hour workweek book has a lot of great thoughts on this that you might enjoy.

May 9, 2014 11:20am

Spencer Howard

How do you organize your books? I see labels on the spines. Library of Congress numbers or your own system?

May 13, 2014 10:20am

Zach Borders · CEO / Director of Planning + Design at Civic ArtWorks

Steve - Excellent as always. Related to "Breathe" - do you have any thoughts regarding a portable studio for those of us that like to take our work with us on adventures through a city / neighborhood from time-to-time? Does the packing list for a charrette trip = the packing list for a day trip to a new coffee shop in a new, unexplored neighborhood? How do the sketch pad and the laptop / tablet co-habitate . . . or do they? How does the backpack become a mobile version / extension of what you described above? Thanks!

May 15, 2014 1:50pm

1,145+

Earth Day 2014 - Lean is the New Green

search the Original Green Blog

Earth Day began in 1970 with a mission to steer the passions of the day into environmental protection, but things are afoot today that may finally help channel the environmental movement into its real mission: building a better future. American rivers were ablaze in 1970, and industrial cities lived under a perpetual pall belching continuously from its smokestacks. I grew up a hundred miles away from one of them, and one of our playground insults was “you stink like Birmingham.”

Recovering our skies, our waters, and our lands from the ravages of industry’s degradations was the essential first step… no doubt about it. But just as an alcoholic’s eventual goal shouldn’t just be to get sober but to live a better life, our goal as earth’s residents shouldn’t just be to clean up our messes, but to build better places.

Some people have been working on this for a long time. The New Urbanists, for example, started working out ways of building more sustainable places as far back as 1980. More recently, a number of them have taken on the mammoth problem of recovery from the addiction of sprawl.

The engine of sprawl was fueled by the 20th Century’s energy glut and the mirage of perpetual expansion, making it a bloated target for anyone interested in building more sustainably. But sustainability’s allies have also become part of the problem. The LEED rating system, for example, was created with the very best of intentions, but it has also become so flabby that there are now calls for a lean alternative. And place-making regulation at all levels of government, environmental or otherwise, has become not just a thicket, but a complete unnavigable hairball of regulatory centipedes. Conjures up some disgusting images, right?

It’s time to come lean. Fortunately, there’s a small crack team already working on that. The Lean Initiative doesn’t advocate for a complete free-for-all, but rather for “pink tape” instead of red tape… in other words, lightening the load so that more of us can get meaningful stuff done. The Lean Initiative is built on seven Foundations. Here’s a quick look at some of the lean things some of us have been building upon them:

Lean Building

• Condition people first, so they can throw the windows open and “live in season” most of the year. Tweet

• Build outdoor rooms, not lawns, to entice people outdoors where they acclimate to the local environment. Tweet

• Outdoor rooms are a fraction the $ of indoor rooms, so save a little indoor living space & outdoor rooms are free. Tweet

• No equipment is so efficient as the machine that is off. Tweet

• Small is the new luxury. Bigger is lower quality, smaller is higher quality for the same $. Tweet

• Why waste the space in the walls? Hundreds of square feet are lost in spaces you never see. Tweet

• Build armoires instead of closets for your clothes. They’ll save $, floor space, and look better, too. Tweet

Lean Development

• Building a mature city on Day One is as insane as giving birth to an adult. Build infant villages and let them grow. Tweet

• Development speed is the enemy of value. Any place worth building well is worth building slowly. Apologies to Mae West. Tweet

• When you build, be generous with parks, greens, squares, and plazas and they will pay you back several times over. Tweet

• Build like you have only a wheelbarrow, not a bulldozer. You’ll save lots of trees and character in your place. Tweet

• Build high Walk Appeal in your streets so that your neighborhood businesses flourish. Tweet

• Single-crew workplaces make many business possible in your neighborhood today that would be impossible larger. Tweet

• Build places where you can make a living where you’re living, and walk to the grocery. Tweet

Lean Business

• Working at home should be a basic human right. If it were harmful, humanity would have perished centuries ago. Tweet

• Welcome the Makers into every struggling neighborhood. They’re morning’s first light to a recovering place. Tweet

• Name a place for what you want there. “Printer’s Row” or whatever. Names attract, and also direct. Tweet

• Do business with agreements that don’t require a lawyer to tell you what you agreed to. Tweet

• Jane Jacobs was right: new ideas come from old buildings. Businesses start best in cheaper places with lower burdens. Tweet

• Don’t advertise. Spam has vaccinated us against ads. Be the marketing you want people to see. Apologies to Ghandi. Tweet

• The old business virtues: better, faster, cheaper. The new business virtues: patience, generosity, connectedness. Tweet

Lean Green

• Gizmo Green: delusion that we can achieve sustainability with better equipment & materials, both of which cost more $. Tweet

• Encourage green building in ways that are fast, friendly, and free. All of which LEED is not. Tweet

• To thrive long after fossil fuels, we should learn from before them. Carbon is a temporary & misleading measure. Tweet

• Amperage increases a machine’s power; leverage increases our power, and works even when machine power fails. Tweet

• Sustainability begins with the place, not the building. Without sustainable places, “green buildings” are meaningless. Tweet

• Sustainable places: nourishable, accessible, serviceable, securable. Green buildings: lovable, durable, adaptable, frugal. Tweet

• Sustainability isn’t something we buy, it’s something we become. Changes we make dwarf changes the R&D department makes. Tweet

Lean Regulation

• Begin every rule “we do this because…” so the people know why, not just what. Consent of the governed arises from why. Tweet

• Whenever possible, set up things that regulate themselves, not requiring lots of external energy to run smoothly. Tweet

• Don’t grow regulatory “scar tissue” the first time something unpredicted goes wrong. (Thanks, Jason Fried!) Tweet

• A building for 2 people should not be regulated like a building for 2,000. In a lean world, regulation follows risk. Tweet

• Free gardens & small farms from industrial food chain regulation. They feed neighbors, not millions of strangers. Tweet

• Those making regulations should be affected by them. We have no right to burden others with loads we do not bear. Tweet

• Regulations must be regional. Green building standards on Cape Cod look ridiculous on the Gulf Coast, and vice versa. Tweet

Lean Infrastructure

• Generate services as locally as possible. You can borrow from your neighbors if the outage doesn’t affect them. Tweet

• Make beautiful sights and sounds with the rain, then get it back into the ground as soon as possible. Tweet

• Trading lane width for sidewalk width is one of the best infrastructure exchanges, and full of virtues. Tweet

• No sign of a vibrant, lovable place can be seen from further down the street than a line of street trees. Tweet

• Put parking on streets, on alleys, or in garages. Few things are more corrosive to cities than surface parking lots. Tweet

• Nothing reduces infrastructure as broadly and as much as doing business in your own neighborhood. Tweet

• Dispense with the gym. You can get fully fit working out on a park bench, which should be lean infrastructure's icon. Tweet

Lean Education

• Tell the children why, not just what. With what, you only pass or fail. With why, you can figure stuff out. Tweet

• Today’s kids will spend most of their lives on stuff that doesn’t exist yet. They must learn how to figure stuff out. Tweet

• Embed the greatest wisdom within that which can be loved, so that it may spread broadly. Tweet

• Lessons learned from things nearby stick with us easier than those from things we cannot see. Tweet

• Put homework on blogs, so each student’s work is visible to the world, and commenters help them get it right. Tweet

• Build places that put old and young together because the old are those with the most wisdom and the time to teach it. Tweet

• Combine proverbs with hyperlinks so the idea sticks with you and directs you. This might be education’s future. Tweet

That’s a lot of stuff… what are your thoughts? What parts of this make sense?

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Here are my Earth Day reflections... in my opinion, the Lean Initiative may become really important in taking another step beyond recovery and toward building more sustainable places. Recovery, after all, is just about getting our heads above water again. Sooner or later, it's time to get out of the water and up onto solid ground. And that's a lot easier to do without thickets of regulation that were once well-meaning, but are now a great burden.

Apr 22, 2014 4:36pm

Sandy Sorlien · Works at Fairmount Water Works

Wonderful tweets, Steve! Lots of food for thought. Happy Earth Day.

Apr 22, 2014 6:11pm

Christian Wagley · Principal at Sustainable Town Concepts

Steve Mouzon is always so eloquent....Follow the traditional, the simple, the human scale, that which nourishes us, and you will find the greenest way of living--the Original Green.

Apr 23, 2014 10:04am

Lisa Welch · Planner at City of Syracuse Office of Zoning Administration

Thanks Steve!

Apr 23, 2014 11:26am

Lisa Welch · Planner at City of Syracuse Office of Zoning Administration

Lean Regulation... I work with regulations everyday and the items below resonate... I will endeavor to keep these in mind as we move forward into the brave new world of not zoning.

• Begin every rule “we do this because…” so the people know why, not just what. Consent of the governed arises from why. (I always try to do this and fellow planners can get a little miffed.)

• Whenever possible, set up things that regulate themselves, not requiring lots of external energy to run smoothly. (We have intelligible complexity in our regs. Keep it simple.)

• Don’t grow regulatory “scar tissue” the first time something unpredicted goes wrong. (Thanks, Jason Fried!) (Our scar tissue is really ugly and makes things hyper complex.)

• A building for 2 people should not be regulated like a building for 2,000. In a lean world, regulation follows risk. (We make the little guys work way too hard.)

Apr 23, 2014 11:49am

Mary Brewster · Rhode Island School of Design

Where are these beautiful pictures from? They really underscore your points!

Apr 24, 2014 9:37pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Mary, I just realized I never answered your question... the images in this post are from Hawaii's Big Island, just off the north shore.

January 18, 2017 10:00am

632+

2013

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 22:59:57 -0600

Andrés Duany in California

search the Original Green Blog

The awesome quote machine otherwise known as Andrés Duany just did a charrette in California, and I tweet-casted several of his presentations and conversations. It's a private project, but because so much of what he says is about principles rather than particulars, it wasn't so hard to filter out the things that were project-specific and possibly undisclosed publicly at this point. Here are the tweets:

• The environmental ideal worldwide is humans behaving well with nature except in the US, where it's the absence of humans in nature. This is because popular US environmentalism began with the national parks program.

• If you only address objections, you always lose. You must shift discussion to a larger ideal that also solves the objection. <this one got a ton of re-tweets>

• The hippies of the '60s won't be content with retirement institutions. They need cool town centers where they can kick back.

• <my comment> Andrés explains the rationale of a charrette, purportedly for client, but it's of great value to design team as well for two reasons: it's good to be reminded what's important about what you're doing, and because he's always re-stating things different rather than just parroting a tired old line, I always get something new.

• You cannot choose whether to have traffic congestion, only the # of lanes. Do you want 2, 4, 6, or 8 lanes of congestion? <this one also got a ton of re-tweets>

• Most transportation engineers only know how to add trips, but mixed-use places diminish trips. The engineers need to learn subtraction… it's a useful mathematical tool.

• <overheard from an environmental regulator at the charrette> "You can't build a road where the road is because the wheel ruts are now habitat to the shrimp." My question is probably obvious: "so what happens to the shrimp when a vehicle drives down those existing wheel ruts?"

• Always point out problems with your design before your opponents do. At the very least they concede you're honest.

• <from Howard Blackson upon seeing a building in the San Diego harbor with a sawtooth roof as if it had solar panels (but it doesn't)> "People pay a premium in California for fauxstainable architecture. <Awesome term, Howard… thanks so much!>

• The world has had a traffic problem since Pompeii. Build a lane and it fills up.

• In most places in California, if you don't drive, you die. Literally. Driving is essential to remaining alive. But we can build places here where that's not true.

• Downtown San Diego has the highest density in the region but the least congestion because of connectivity. People think that more density means more congestion but that simply is not true.

• People say "we will reduce traffic by clipping grids" but that's exactly backward. The more you connect the less you congest. <this one got a lot of re-tweets as well>

• The lousiest conceivable plan is one that reduces units and occupies more of the land.

• A smaller human footprint makes retail work much better because more people are within walking distance of Main Street.

• Some of the most-loved towns in Italy occupy less than 50 acres. You can't even build a shopping center that small in the US.

• I have a dream that there will someday be a healthy balance between the rights of humans and the rights of the rest of nature.

• The only reason to build on a hill in our day is to get the view. So why are lots and houses so deep, where only back rooms get views? We saw houses where you had to march through four or five rooms to get to the back room, where you could finally find the view.

• Houses on hillsides that are thin down the slope but long down the street sit lightly on the land. This is exactly the opposite of the types of houses we've designed within the New Urbanism for over thirty years, but it's what you need if you want to build a hill town because most of the town is built on hillsides, not the hilltop.

• As a general rule, the more you spend on infrastructure and development regulations the worse the places are that get built.

• The most wonderful places are the ones we're not allowed to do anymore.

• Recreation centers are usually mega-structures, and are so 20th centuries. But if you take them apart into individual buildings, then their parts can be used to help build a town center.

• Water doesn't mind running a mile in a pipe, especially if it's for a good cause like a great town center.

• There's a great fear of townhouses in California because most townhouses here don't have towns. But if you build them in towns, they can be fabulous.

• People think 6-plex apartments are horrible. They can be, if you design them conventionally where there's only light on one side of each unit. But if you design them so that each apartment gets light from three sides, they can be fabulous.

• People who clip roads are those who want traffic congestion. You can't cul-de-sac your way out of congestion. <here's another one with lots of re-tweets>

• Standard-issue collectors are begging for more traffic, but a winding road through several hamlets won't be crowded because it takes a long time to stop at all those little hamlet squares and through the neighborhoods.

• America needs many more 1-bedroom houses.

• You don't have to rotate the entire house because the solar panels don't usually need to be much larger than the garage. So just rotate the garage, but let the house follow the land.

• Long thin houses cross-ventilate and daylight beautifully.

• Garages are very useful things, not only for catching the sun but also for blocking your neighbor's view of your back yard.

• Unlike developer ranchers which are horrible, the original Cliff May ranch houses were fabulous.

• Idea houses don't usually rise above the level of decorator ideas. What matters now is leaner Original Green living. We need an idea house with Original Green ideas. <no, I didn't editorialize… that's what he said>

• You don't reduce traffic with lower density and larger lots because everyone has to drive everywhere.

• This isn't the old environmentalism where the granola broke your teeth, or where you got splinters from all the rough wood. Lean urbanism is smarter than that.

• Great urbanism takes pressure off the houses, allowing them to be calmer.

• The only parking break we ask for is to count the parking that's on the street.

• The bad thing about great urbanism is that it takes about 10 years to really get there. It doesn't get built overnight.

• It's easier to get people out of their cars if it's a bit of a pain to get in your car. Production-built houses actually give the cars a room to stay in within the house, almost like bedrooms for children.

• Great places have a wider range of unit sizes, but a smaller range of architectural style. The reason builders have to use several styles is because their houses are so similar.

• Alys Beach is so beautiful precisely because the architecture is so harmonious.

• If you have flexible guidelines like in Britain rather than codes, everything about the development process is negotiation and it takes longer. You're also subject to the whims of the regulator. When you enter a meeting, you need to come in stooped over, like a supplicant. But at the end of the day, the regulator of a guideline can't actually turn you down… they can only make the process last much longer.

• Urbanism adds the greatest value when the site is poor. When the site is an awesome piece of land, urbanism doesn't add as much value.

• When I was young I could do great things because there was no bureaucracy in many places. The young people today have never known this great freedom.

• The dinosaurs of the CNU work to resolve the world's problems from the top down. I want to institutionalize the bypasses around the dinosaur codes. I do this by daylighting the mitigating language of codes. These are the secret keys that let you do good things when the code itself appears to ban what's good. These keys act as patches.

• "This is the problem. This is the patch. And this is the attack on the patch." We need to have this entire conversation.

• City administrators must take away the bureaucrats' liability if they hope to move sensible things forward because every bureaucrat is afraid of being held liable for what they allow.

• <from Bill Fulton> Urbanists are just people who don't want to go home.

• <also from Bill Fulton> If the process were easy, consultants' income would plummet. This is the hidden driver of red tape… it supports many consulting jobs.

• The point of having a meeting in the US is to get stuff done; in Latin America, the point is to have a great meeting.

• The American Dream is not just the cabin in the woods, it's being your own boss. It's the live-work unit, not the McMansion.

~Steve Mouzon

What Does "Lean" Mean?

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"Lean Urbanism" is a new term that attempts to make sense of how we should be building sustainable places today, but the term "lean" runs the risk of getting described in very non-lean ways. So what does "lean" really mean? There's a #LeanMeans hashtag on Twitter where you can join the ongoing discussion. In the meantime, here's my take on what "lean" means:

Communication

Lean means communicating leanly, so your message travels far without you having to carry it to all those places yourself.

Lean means having lean diagrams that are quickly comprehensible.

Lean means aspiring to self-evident terms such as “buron” which to the public at large obviously means “bureaucratic moron” no matter what the inner circle says it means.

Conquering Complexity

Lean means embedding wisdom in simple words that test complex systems with plain-spoken questions, such as…

Lean means living where you can walk to the grocery. Because we know that if there's a grocery there, it's highly likely that there are other daily necessities there as well. But we don't need to ask about each necessity; we merely need to know if there's a grocery there. And it doesn't have to be the big mega-stores, either. There are four groceries within two blocks of my office. All are tiny, and carry just commodities like cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, etc. plus one or two brands of things like hot sauce, rather than dozens. But we eat many meals bought entirely from these grocery stores.

Lean means making a living where you're living. If you do this, then you avoid commuting and many other related burdens, but we don't have to discuss those burdens if you make a living where you're living. Again, it's a simple test that probes many attached complexities without having to discuss the complexities… which is also very lean because it doesn't tax your bandwidth, either!

Lean means using things with double-duty, triple-duty or more, not redundant things. This general principle covers so many things in life.

Self-Reliance

Lean is what people do when they realize that help definitely is not on the way!

Lean means doing more things for yourself when you have more time than money.

Lean means less of clients hiring expensive experts to do things for them.

On the other hand, lean means more of coaches helping people do more for themselves. So if you were one of those expensive experts in the old days, you should be re-making yourself as more of a coach today.

Lean means not needing to lawyer up to get the job done.

Lean means not needing gifts from governments to get the job done.

Lean means decisions should be made by those affected by those decisions, not a larger group. The inner circle talks a lot about "subsidiarity." But that's for the 1% of America who know what subsidiarity means.

Prediction

Lean means not needing to see the end from the beginning ...because this is a task humans are spectacularly bad at.

As this principle applies to the development of sustainable places, lean means not needing to build the climax condition at the beginning. Cities never sprang like today's Manhattan from green fields or forests. They began humbly, then matured over time. See the Sky Method for my best take on how to accomplish natural growth today. And I'll soon be illustrating how the Sky Method can be used to recover from the addiction of sprawl.

Scale

Lean means many things are possible at small scales that are impossible at large scales.

Lean means building single-crew workplaces at the beginning …because you can get many tiny businesses started when there are only a few customers, whereas if you wait until there are enough customers to build the super-center, you might be building it for your kids or grandkids. And the tiny shops make for far better Walk Appeal than the super-center. So get services today that create a better environment, rather than maybe waiting decades for places that aren't nearly so good.

Lean means measuring impacts across the scale of time. Something with a high initial impact that lasts for a thousand years is much better than something with less initial impact that gets torn down in a decade.

Regulations

Lean means not growing regulatory "scar tissue" the first time something unpredicted goes wrong. It might be decades before it goes wrong again. Do we really need a law against it?

Lean means that a tiny house inhabitable by one person shouldn't be regulated like a building inhabited by thousands.

Lean means that a food truck that feeds a few dozen people a day shouldn’t be regulated like an egg factory that produces 80% of the eggs eaten in the USA.

Lean means setting up self-regulating systems instead of systems that require lots of energy perpetually.

Buildings & Land

Lean means conditioning the people first, so they can cut off the equipment most days of the year and “live in season.”

We can do this by building outdoor rooms, not lawns, to entice people outdoors so that conditioned space can be smaller. In most places, great outdoor rooms can be built for about 1/5 the cost of interior space. So if the outdoor rooms are good enough to serve well enough as living space that you need 20% less indoor space, then the savings on indoor space can pay for the entire cost of the outdoor rooms.

Lean means using every possible cubic inch of space, even the space within the walls. We do this by eliminating drywall and carving into interior walls so that almost all interior walls become shelving units. All of these ideals and more are bound up in Project:SmartDwelling.

New Virtues & Ethics

Lean means adopting new virtues and ethics, not holding onto the old ones that lead to obesity. For 250 years, the prime virtues of business have been "better, faster, cheaper," and the measuring-stick has been the Consuming Economy, which values things by how quickly they're used up. I believe we're entering an age where the three prime virtues of business will become patience, generosity, and connectedness, and where the barometer will be the Sustaining Economy that guided economic activity for almost all of human history, and which values things by how far they're handed down, not how quickly they're used up.

These new virtues may lead us back to some very old ethics: Waste Not. Want Not. Source Closely. Nurture Wellness. And maybe others as well: "a stitch in time saves nine," "a penny saved is a penny earned," "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," and lots of other solid wisdom upon which this country and others were built that we've let slip in recent decades.

What are we missing here? What does Lean mean to you?

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

Lean means graceful, common sense living. It means maximizing resources - or more simply, making the most of what you have. "Buronics" invades our lives - it exists in government, in corporate capitalism, in community NIMBYism and most profoundly in the media where it invades everyday life. Lean would capture the lost, wasted capital of communities - our natural, social, economic and built assets. Being Lean professionally means leaning how to be more effective with human resources and project management.

Oct 14, 2013 10:09am

Lisa Engstrom Nisenson · Co-Founder/CEO at GreaterPlaces

Great line: "Lean means not growing regulatory "scar tissue" the first time something unpredicted goes wrong."

Nov 4, 2013 8:41am

Nancy Bruning · Author, Founder and CEO at Nancy Bruning's Nancercize

Let's extend your idea of "generosity and connectedness" in business to every aspect in life: Lean means leaning on our own capabilities and leaning on each other when that's what's needed.

Nov 15, 2016 10:47pm

2,150+

Lean Conversations in Detroit - Saturday, October 12

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photos are from Richmond neighborhoods, not Detroit, because I was too busy with the conference to photograph while I was there

The Lean Council of the CNU took place over the weekend of October 12-13, 2013 in Detroit. These are the first day's proceedings. Text <like this> is my commentary.

• Rip Rapson leads off the morning telling a fascinating story of private-sector-funded transit system being built in Detroit.

• <I still say that the broad understanding of "buron" will be "bureaucratic moron.">

• Rip: There has always been great vibrancy in the Detroit cultural scene.

• Rip: The Kresge foundation can't run all the things we're starting in the long run; our role is to get them going.

• Rip: Philanthropy serves well as a table-setter. Philanthropy can also serve as the seller of a great project.

• Rip: 30 people don't change the world.

• <They may not finish the job, but they can certainly start it!>

• Rip: Arts & culture are crying out for Lean! Opportunities are endless.

• Rip: Maker spaces thrive in a Lean environment. We need more of them!

• Rip: 1. Nestle Lean with intensely local community. 2. Integrate the arts. 3. Adapt our physical heritage. 4. Leverage creative potential that's already there. 5. Recover natural resources. 6. Adapt to climate change. 8. Acknowledge interdependence of urban systems. <I missed Rip's #7. Did anyone else get it? If so, please leave a comment below.>

• Anonymous: The Health Department is Killing Me!!

• <Scale is the best determinant of Lean. Where mega-projects are impossible, single-crew workplaces can still thrive.>

• <Lean is what people do when they realize that help definitely is not on the way!>

• Hank Dittmar: Millennials, immigrants, and small businesses are the biggest Lean market segments.

• Hank: We will act as coaches more than experts to foster a Lean future.

• Andrés Duany: I have been trying to unpack Lean so that we can all work on it in parallel.

• Andrés: I think it is very early in Lean. We are still piling things into the soup.

• Andrés: Phil Bess has a great quote which I believe characterizes what we are doing: "Twirling… twirling… twirling toward freedom."

• Andrés: It is very important that Lean not overlap either CNU or Tactical Urbanism. Lean should be the seam between.

• Andrés: If you don't want it repeated, don't say it because it will enter the collective conversation quickly.

• Andrés: One of the things that must be broken to achieve Lean is old thinking.

• Andrés: The 21st Century actually started in 2008. 2000-2007 were the last years of the 20th.

• Andrés: The 3 Great Crises of 2008 were the broad recognition of Climate Change and Peak Oil, and the real estate bubble. These things did not have to happen all at once. But they did.

• Andrés: It is a common misconception that our society is based on energy. Our society isn't based on energy, but on cheap energy.

• Andrés: The real estate bubble revealed problems that began years earlier.

• Andrés: The Continental Disadvantage: America's sprawl pattern is more difficult to fix than Europe's because they've built compactly for almost all of their history whereas much of the US is sprawl.

• Andrés: 3 Overlaid Crises of 2008 are all caused by suburban sprawl.

• Andrés: The Great Pall is in danger of occurring when it finally sinks in with the public at large that the things we've enjoyed since WWII aren't coming back the way they were. But the Great Pall is something we cannot allow, because people will give up. So we must be able to show them better things to go on to, rather than waiting for what will never come back again.

• Andrés: Worldwide mitigation becomes regional adaptation in Lean.

• Andrés: Regional adaptation. Local self-sufficiency. Many small projects. All three of these are components of Lean.

• Andrés: The focus on the present has been a distortion field, and so has the focus on the too-distant future. We need to be solving things for the middle distance, before the silver bullets of some far-distant future emerge. It may be easy then, but we can't just wait for the easy.

• Andrés: Global economy gives way to local self-sufficiency in Lean.

• Andrés: In a Lean future, there will be few large projects, but many small projects.

• Andrés: The real estate bubble revealed a permanent impoverishment that is likely to be with us for a few generations. Governments can no longer do what they once could.

• Andrés: We absolutely will find new oil & new energy sources, but they aren't cheap anymore.

• Andrés: If you only pay attention to the present, you cannot have many ideas that are compelling.

• Andrés: Anywhere built on low land is a future slum because insurance will get withdrawn years before anything gets wet. The insurance companies are already pulling out of the lowest-lying areas because of flooding that hadn't even happened yet. The revocation of insurance is years, or maybe even decades, closer than the actual floods.

• Andrés: Let CNU be in charge of the long vision and the large scale, Tactical Urbanism can handle the smallest-scale issues, and Lean Urbanism can handle the seam in between.

• Robert Orr: "Climate Change & Risk", was the scariest conference I ever attended.

• Douglas Duany: Adaptation is the only answer.

• Doug Kelbaugh: If you don't attend to the long-range stuff, you won't be able to adapt to the near-term stuff.

• Karja Hansen: Projections have to do with averages, and with politics.

• Sandy Sorlien: We should focus on adaptation that also mitigates.

• Andrés: What happens with the depression that occurs when people say "whoa… it's hopeless!"

• Hank: I'm no Al Gore, but I know Al Gore, and a big mistake he made was not allowing any discussion of adaptation.

• Doug: Adaptation and mitigation are both essential to climate change.

• Andrés: Our diminished circumstances call for a return to common sense.

• Andrés: At the beginning, there is ignorance, then avoidance, then alleviation, then reform.

• Andrés: Lean operates at the scale of the household, block, and neighborhood, but not city, region, state, or nation.

• Andrés: These are the important Lean dates: 1874, 1924, 1984, and 2014.

• Andrés: The last quarter of the 19th century should be very interesting to Lean, and the Mormons were America's stars. Do you have any idea how many towns they founded during this time? During the last quarter of the 19th century, people with no computers or electricity got amazing things done.

• Robert: What you're proposing is much like a garage-cleaning: taking everything out and throwing away what you don't need.

• Andrés: The codes were very light in 1874 in the US because the risks imposed by any single building were small.

• Andrés: The New Urbanism was largely based on things built in the 1920s. Lean should be based more on 1874.

• Andrés: In the absence of regulation, the Town Founder and planners of Seaside found no impediments to building. What we owe the 30-year-olds is a permitting environment like the one we found at the founding of Seaside. 30-year-olds with the same skill sets that designed Seaside are doing little more than chair-bombing today. We owe them the ability to do what we did.

• Andrés: You can't fix 2014 Detroit with 2008 tools.

• Andrés: We've forgotten the original ways of doing things; even the New Urbanists conceive New Urbanism as the only way of doing things.

• Andrés: We're drawing high rises today, in a time when millions of people are barely avoiding shacks.

• Andrés: You can't think anything like 1990 if you want to fix Detroit.

• Andrés: Mizner Park should now look very archaic, like something out of prehistory. We should look at Mizner Park and say "isn't that quaint?" It was a good time, but it's over… you have to be more wily now.

• Andrés: The Original Green is actually the normative human condition. Recent times are the anomalies.

• Andrés: There is nothing dishonorable about 1874, 1924, or 1984... it's just not now.

• Andrés: The $100 million project is still viable. it's the middle that's falling out.

• Andrés: The first phase of Lean is created by the Risk Oblivious, who are the Bohemians. The Bohemians didn't get loans or permits, but have created value for 150 years.

• Andrés: The second phase of Lean is built by risk-aware developers like Tony Goldman.

• Andrés: The third phase is when the risk-averse (like dentists from New Jersey) move in and spoil the Cool Factor. When the risk-averse move in, the risk-oblivious leave.

• Andrés: It is absolutely crucial for Lean to allow the Bohemians to act.

• Andrés: When the Cool Factor fades, the value eventually fades as well, resulting in collapse and re-emergence of Bohemians.

• Andrés: The Cutting Tools of Lean are Subsidiarity, the Transect, Succession, and the Charter.

• Andrés: The ethics of Lean are the ethics of the Charter of the New Urbanism.

• Andrés: "Lean Alignment" may be a better term than "Lean Team"… we're aligned, but often work independently.

• Andrés: The glacier of regulation is receding from Detroit, and opening things up to happen.

• Sara Hines: Buildings in 19th century camp communities like Chautauqua were essentially "tents made solid."

• Sara: Neshoba County Fairgrounds is unique in that it's built around the county fair, not church-sponsored.

• Sara: Almost all camp buildings were handmade, and self-built. The scale of camp cottages were often tiny.

• Sara: The Park Model of manufactured house is up to 500 SF and avoids most regulations imposed on HUD Code trailers.

• Sara: Dan Camp has done a great job building Lean housing in the Cotton District.

• Sara: Boats can be great Lean housing.

~Steve Mouzon

205+

Medians on Main Street

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Medians are a terrible idea on Main Street because they don't let you turn into a business across the street, right? Not so fast… It turns out that the best Main Streets are those with parking continuous along the street, wide sidewalks to accomodate vibrant street life, and no parking lot entrances. If there are parking lots, they should be in the middle of the block, accessible from the alley. As we discussed in the Walk Appeal series, the worst thing you could possibly do is to put a parking lot right behind the sidewalk. Even a driveway to a parking lot in the middle of the block is a tremendous disruption to walking because it's a place you could get run over by a car entering the street with limited sight distance if you're walking down the sidewalk.

We talked about the Alton Road battle on South Beach recently, and amazingly, the DOT ended up agreeing in the end to do what the Flamingo Park neighborhood asked for. But now there are special interests weighing in, many of whom never showed up at the years of meetings while the design was being hammered out, and they threaten to wreck the entire agreement. One is a small but loud bike lobby, but that's a story for another day. Let's talk instead about the anti-median guys.

The final DOT design was largely patterned from lessons learned on Washington Avenue, which is just a few blocks away and pictured above. It is a vibrant commercial street, with street life that most of Alton Road could only dream of. The tree-filled median does several good things, including slowing down the heavy traffic, shading and therefore cooling the street, creating street proportions that are more than twice as good, providing a place of refuge in the middle to people crossing the street, and inserting lush planting material in what would otherwise be a broad river of asphalt. Medians enhance Walk Appeal, which is the best predictor of survival and success of neighborhood businesses. And Walk Appeal is what creates scenes like this, with sidewalks filled with people out enjoying the day (and who are likely shopping in the stores along the way). All of this means that the new Alton Road design is much better than what currently exists.

Today, much of Alton Road is downright scary. The lanes are much too wide and fast, so you're taking your life in your own hands if you try to get across. The new design, while unfortunately leaving the design speed too high, will nonetheless markedly improve the likelihood that you can walk or bike on the new Alton Road and return home unscathed. And for a place like South Beach where almost half of the residents don't even own a car (because the rest of South Beach is so walkable) that's a really big deal.

This is also a tale of two Alton Roads. The North end was built mostly according to the old South Beach pattern with buildings pulled right up to the sidewalk like they do on good Main Streets. I call this "Good Alton." It is here that you can find people on the streets, out enjoying themselves much as they do on Washington, even if there are somewhat fewer of them. Most of the buildings along Good Alton don't need major surgery, but rather a nip or a tuck here or there. The streetscape is similar, with relatively wide sidewalks and palm trees along the street, sheltering the sidewalks to the point that you'll find street cafes scattered along the way. Because Good Alton is as healthy as it is, it's the part of Alton Road where it's most important to keep the details good and really get stuff right. There is a group of merchants on Good Alton who are opposing the median. They're in the building with the parking lot out front that you see here:

They have a curb cut on Alton, but as you can see, it lines up almost perfectly with 15th Terrace. And they're on a really long block that's over twice as long as Portland's great blocks, so there really should be a break in the median at 15th Terrace, treating this like the two blocks it is on the West side rather than the one block it is on the East side. Eventually, if the city enacts a SmartCode, the building owner(s) will have the incentive to do a more profitable building that pulls right up to the sidewalk rather than having the regrettable parking lot in front. But for now, break the median there and don't lose the Walk Appeal of the new streetscape.

Further South, the situation on much of Alton is bleak. Parking lots to the left and right, curb cuts all along the way, and a flyover that dumps out right down the middle make "Bad Alton" a place where you rarely see anyone walking. Landowners just north of 5th Street represent the bulk of the opposition to the median, I'm told. But without a SmartCode and a lot of major surgery, there's little hope that the last couple blocks of Alton north of 5th are going to be places anyone wants to be anyway, so eliminating the median there won't hurt anyone since nobody's there.

Just don't screw up all of Alton Road because of one stretch that doesn't matter today and another single instance where the median should be broken anyway. Let's get the bulk of Alton right… not only for the neighbors, but for all of South Beach!

~Steve Mouzon

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Original Green
Outdoor Room Design
Walk Appeal

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680+

Where's the Edge of the Neighborhood?

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People have been confused about neighborhood centers and edges for decades, and that confusion leads to bad decisions. "Neighborhood center" and especially "town center" are broadly used to mean commercial centers. At the beginning, when a hamlet composed of a single neighborhood in the landscape is built (like the one shown on the left), the commercial center that springs up at the crossroads around which the hamlet is constructed is the center of the neighborhood of which the hamlet is composed.

commercial center, not neighborhood center

But when the hamlet grows into a village (like the one shown on the right), it reorganizes itself into multiple neighborhoods that are bounded by the main streets leading to the village center. From that point forward, as the village grows to a town and then to a city, each neighborhood has civic spaces and uses (like parks, religious buildings, and the like) at their centers and commercial uses at their corners. Confusing neighborhood centers with neighborhood corners sets a series of errors in motion:

The Single Circle Fallacy

neighborhood streets should be calmer than
commercial streets

The core error is our simplistic view of the 1/4 mile radius that most people choose to walk instead of drive. Actually, the 1/4 mile radius itself is a fallacy, as we discussed in Walk Appeal… but that's another story. Whether the walking radius is fixed at 1/4 mile or a variable, I propose two overlapping layers of circles, which combine to weave the city together. The first layer is the neighborhood, which is bounded by the busiest thoroughfares, not centered on them. If you doubt that, talk to any mother of a small child. The child is inevitably forbidden to cross the busy thoroughfares, but is given free rein over larger areas of the neighborhood within as they grow. To ignore this fact is to miss something that is fundamentally understood by hundreds of millions of non-planners.

Double Circles

South Beach's Washington Avenue

is a good commercial thoroughfare

So what's the other layer? The second layer of 1/4 mile radii offsets 1/2 neighborhood in each direction to center on the retail at the intersections of the busiest thoroughfares. In other words, each quarter of a neighborhood probably shops at different corners of the neighborhood. In doing so, they meet people from quarters of neighboring neighborhoods. Those people, in turn, know others from their neighborhood centers, who know others from their retail intersections... weaving a web of relationships clear across the city.

The Ghetto Mistake

The "commercial center as neighborhood center" mistake is actually the prescription for a ghetto. There, a neighborhood is self-contained with little reason to enter or leave. The history of ghettos is spotty at best, of course. I maintain that the two-layer model is actually much more similar to the way that most traditional American towns once worked, and should be the strongly preferred model for a legion of reasons.

The Transect of Risk

Alton Road is far too risky and should be calmed.

Unthinkably, the Florida DOT is
redesigning it with a 40 MPH

design speed, where this guy would stand
a 90% chance of dying

if hit by a car!

Does this mean that the arterial can be left uncivilized? Not at all. I agree that context-sensitive arterials are the preferred model. But even if thoroughly civilized, let's face the fact that the risk to a pedestrian on an arterial will always be somewhat more than their risk on an alley or lane. Is it not possible to see the city as an ocean of waves of risk, undulating between higher risk and lower risk? Must we force everything to the same level of risk? Isn't that exceptionally boring? What I'm really talking about here is a transect of risk, which ought to be a natural part of life. Let's just make sure that the waves peak at an acceptable level.

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

Steve, I remember when we discovered this. Both this and the Walk Appeal posts are excellent. I do have one quibble... The "general" 1/4 Mile walking radius is a real factor and is evident in neighborhoods everywhere (and this is key) that were developed pre-auto dominance and according to human physical limitations of time and space and within their context. That's primarly why the "overlap" is so effective, as it increases daily opportunities. Of course people will walk further if the walk is nice. However, if one had no other option but to walk, it would be as routine as hopping in a car. Those who have spent lots of time in a walkable environments know that despite the pleasure factor, distance to daily needs (which equals time) is a real determining factor giving schedules of everyday life.

Jun 27, 2013 12:13pm

Dan Bartman · Senior Planner at City of Somerville (Official)

I'd like to see these concepts diagramed over real places.

Jun 29, 2013 9:44am

Nicolas Derome

In Tokyo and much of Japan, much of the commerce is on narrow streets near rapid transit stations. http://goo.gl/maps/5xX13

Sometimes more bustling neighbourhoods can support retail on all the arterials plus more minor streets in American style cities too.
http://goo.gl/maps/rTiaa

I think this could become relatively common in American cities with a sufficient degree of revitalization/intensification. For instance, Philadelphia's core has few arterial roads so much of the retail could be on smaller streets, as is already somewhat the case for South Street or 9th street.

Low risk commercial streets are common in many Europe city centres, and even beyond them sometimes.
http://goo.gl/maps/Wvw1D
http://goo.gl/maps/46DpI

I agree that what you describe is true for most American inner cities though. I think retail should generally be near transit, and surface transit should usually go in more or less straight lines, so usually along long streets that because of their length also end up being arterials for cars. At that point, it makes sense to place amenities for children like schools and playgrounds away from the arterials (one thing Canadian planning has gotten right, even post-WWII). http://goo.gl/maps/zIMzB

If there's already retail on these arterials though, additional retail needed to support intensification could go on smaller low risk streets. Here in Toronto, examples would be Argyle, Robinson, Niagara, Logan, Wallace, Sorauren, Hillcrest and Northland.

Oct 24, 2013 4:54pm

588+

The Flamingo Park Neighborhood's Valiant Struggle Against the Florida DOT

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This started out as just another shameful story of a Department of Transportation ramming their over-engineered highway through a neighborhood, but the Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association just might be turning the tables on them in South Beach. Alton Road, on the West side of Miami Beach, is the battleground.

The Florida DOT decided to "improve" Alton Road, already the least walking- and bike-friendly thoroughfare on South Beach so that it can carry even more cars, and that they could travel faster. The design speed will be 40 miles/hour, but two of the lanes are wider than Interstate lanes, so you know how people will drive. And at 40 miles per hour, your changes of surviving if you're walking and get hit by a car are about 10%. The design speed of 30 miles per hour that the neighborhood is asking for reduces your chance of getting killed to about 50%. Which would you prefer?

this seating would never exist without parked cars

The DOT is removing about 40% of the on-street parking. Problem is, on-street parking is what makes sidewalk cafes possible because you'd be insane to sit right next to speeding traffic without parked cars to protect you. And every car parked on the street is worth roughly $250,000 in sales each year to the merchants on that street. Force parking off the street, and bad things happen. If it's behind the building, it's a big heat island and you have to provide not only the parking spaces, but also the aisles in between, so it takes nearly twice as much asphalt. Move it to the side of the building and things get worse because now you have gaps in the urbanism, which is ugly and boring. Move it to the front of the building for the worst possible condition because a sidewalk running between a speedy thoroughfare completely kills Walk Appeal, meaning that almost nobody will walk there.

This isn't just theory… we now know both the measurable things and the ones that can't be measured which encourage or discourage walking. And walkability is the biggest single predictor of the chance of success and risk of failure of neighborhood businesses.

cafe seating nestles into recesses
at every opportunity to get further
from the speeding cars

Walk Appeal is an even bigger problem than normal on Alton Road because almost half of South Beach residents don't own a car. They don't need them because South Beach is so walkable. So if you make Alton Road unfriendly to walkers and cyclists, you're cutting out almost half of the customers to Alton Road's businesses. For most businesses, losing almost half of your customers is the equivalent of a death warrant.

The Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association, and the Alton Road Reconstruction Coalition it spawned have been fighting the DOT's auto-dominant design every step of the way, and not just as NIMBYs. Some really serious New Urbanist planners live on South Beach. Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the New Urbanism, have a condo there as well. The New Urbanists have therefore put out many excellent design counter-proposals along the way. The designers include Matt Lambert, Jason King, and Pam Stacy, all partners or employees at two of the most famous planning firms in the world: DPZ and Dover-Kohl. My wife Wanda is one of the core group of neighbors leading the charge, which also includes the designers plus Aaron Sugarman, Ben Batchelder, Ken Bereski, Mark Needle, Ron Starkman, and Tammy Tibbles, under the leadership of longtime neighborhood activist Denis Russ. Others have weighed in as well, such as nationally-known cycling expert Mike Lydon and blogger Kaid Benfield on Atlantic Cities, saying "this is what a Complete Streets campaign should look like."

underground drainage work to fix frequent flooding
will take a year, giving the Coalition time to see that
wrongs get righted

But even with all of the excellent counter-proposals, the DOT did what the DOT always does: they rammed their design down the throats of the neighborhood, and in a particularly nefarious way that was downright dishonest: The DOT showed several options, and after literally years of negotiation with Flamingo Park, both sides (plus the city of Miami Beach) agreed on what is known as the "locally-approved option." But when they signed the contract to begin construction a couple months ago, it was with a design that nobody had even seen. And that design was worse than any of the options that they had shown. That's downright fraudulent and disgraceful.

So it seemed that all was lost. But Tammy just wouldn't let it go. She did a lot of research, and then put together a very effective case that the Bait-And-Switch the DOT pulled simply isn't right, and finally got the City Commission's ear. The stakes weren't as big as all of East Village, but this story is bracingly similar to Jane Jacobs' legendary fight against Robert Moses in the 1960s.

Alton Road has teetered on the edge
for as long as I've lived in Miami
Beach - if it loses any more Walk
Appeal, it may find itself entirely
given over to liquor stores,

thrift shops & auto repair garages

Now, the design of Alton Road is back in play. Part of the job is reworking the storm drainage, so it will be 2015 before the street-level work is done. The Miami Beach City Commission is holding hearings, and appears firmly on the side of the Coalition, with one commissioner noting that "the Commission should prepare for litigation if necessary."

So join the fight! This campaign just might set the pattern for other victories over tyrannical DOT's elsewhere. America was founded to put down tyranny, but DOTs across America act with complete impunity. The time has come for this to end. They can build highways in the country if they like because that's where highways belong, but when a state route enters town, it needs to behave in civilized fashion. For far too long, we've paid a price now totaling over a trillion dollars by letting highways ruin our cities and towns by being too big and fast. When they come into town, they should act like boulevards, avenues, and main streets, not country highways.

We need your help… please join us! Please sign the petition. Facebook it. Tweet it. Here's the Facebook page… please like it. Please follow their new Twitter stream. Please blog about it. Please tweet the blog posts. Matter of fact, I've started an Alton Road BlogOff, so let me know when you blog and I'll put it there. Right now is the crucial time, so please act!

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

The Alton Road Reconstruction Coalition always faced an uphill battle against the Florida DOT in the redesign of Alton Road in South Beach (Miami Beach), but Tammy Tibbles, a modern-day Jane Jacobs, pulled off the impossible after the DOT did a disgraceful and dishonest last-minute bait-and-switch to a much worse design that nobody had ever seen... and then immediately put the job under contract. Even though construction is ongoing, Tammy actually managed to get the street-level design back on the table! But she and the Alton Road Reconstruction Coalition need your help. Read about it here.

Can you help by talking about it somewhere? (Facebook, blog, twitter, etc.) We need precedents for how to stop bad DOT design in our day.

Jun 10, 2013 3:25pm

Tony Castaneira · Director of Sales & Marketing at RaceWatches.com

Build More roads. Widen the lanes. I have no sympathy for those who willingly lives on a major thoroughfare. You are like the jerks who move next to an airport then complain about the noise.

Jun 10, 2013 4:39pm

Alton Road Reconstruction Coalition

Steve, thank you for shining a spotlight on our quest. We'd like to mention several people that have been instrumental in the Coalition: Michael Grieco.
David Hundley
Jeff Donnelly
Also, we have received tremendous support for Representative David Richardson and Senator Gwen Margolis. The City of Miami Beach Commission has recently joined us, after they discovered that the $11 MM they agreed to spend to move the bike lanes to West Ave (a safer place for cyclists) did not regain sidewalk space or recover lost parking spaces, nor has FDOT actually created a safer condition for cyclists.
The quest continues.
ARRC

un 13, 2013 10:03pm

822+

Ocean and Farm to Table at Schooner Bay

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Schooner Bay is a new DPZ-designed town in the Bahamas where you can look out onto the fields and onto the waters from which much of your food comes. It is a real fishing village, with a boat that goes out in the morning to catch the evening meals at the Black Fly Lodge. As the town grows, there will be more fishing boats. You enter town skirting the edge of Lightbourn Farm, which produces organic fare that feeds more than the town's inhabitants. Delivering food from the surrounding land and waters assures that Schooner Bay will remain a nourishable place. And these are two of the many things that Schooner Bay is doing to become the most complete Original Green place built in our time.

I was at Schooner Bay recently with my friends and colleagues Eric Moser and Julie Sanford, and we ate at Black Fly on Friday night. If you choose to eat indoors, the kitchen and the dining room are completely open to each other, so it's like eating at the "chef's table" inside the kitchen of a fine restaurant. But this was the Bahamas in late spring, so we ate out on the verandah instead. Black Fly caters to fishermen looking for the blazing-fast bonefish that populate nearby waters. That night, there was one fisherman at the lodge with no other plans, so we invited him to have dinner with us, along with Clint Kemp, Black Fly's general manager. The meal was nothing short of exquisite; the best I've experienced in a very long time. The fish had been caught just a few hours before, and the rest of the meal (except the wine) came from the organic farm. And chef Devon Roker's culinary craftsmanship is of the highest order.

The farm is a fascinating place, with about half of it devoted to a type of vertical farming I hadn't seen before. Row after row of poles are strung like a string of beads with lightweight pots, and then topped with irrigation hoses. The space between the rows is covered with landscape fabric to eliminate weed growth. This biointensive trick allows Lightbourn to raise far more produce than would be possible if it all grew on the ground. It's a hybrid hydroponic system, with water and nutrients delivered through the hoses to drip down through each pot, but the pots contain soil, not just water. So it's the best of both worlds, in my opinion: preserving the complexity of interactions (many of which we don't yet fully understand) that occur with roots in soil while retaining the effectiveness of hydroponics.

Until recently, Lightbourn Farm grew only vegetables. They are now beginning to branch out, as you can see from the free-range chicken I found exploring one of the Lightbourn buildings.

There are many more great stories to tell about Schooner Bay, and I'll be posting some of them over the next days and weeks. But for starters, check out The Schooner Bay Miracle, which chronicles the shocking lack of damage after the eye of Hurricane Irene hit Schooner Bay at her strongest point, with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. Also, have a look at The Ecological Dividend, which lays out the millions of dollars of benefits that are accruing by building this town in an Original Green way. Be sure to check out Mainsheet as well… it's Schooner Bay's excellent quarterly publication that's mainly cultural reporting and articles on ideals of community-building. And then, do yourself a favor and make a reservation for one of the cottages… you really need to see this place.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Have a look at this post about a new town in the Bahamas that's raising enough food to feed more than just the townspeople. It's also turning into a great place for a summer getaway, IMO... I'm hoping to go back in July.

Jun 7, 2013 6:25pm

Michael David Rouchell · Architect at Williams Architects

Rouse's Grocery Store in New Orleans has a hydroponic garden on the roof of the downtown Baronne Street store which was originally was a automobile dealership that was converted into a grocery store last year. The hydroponic rooftop garden grows herbs that are used in prepared meals sold in the store.

Jun 7, 2013 6:31pm

900+

CNU21 Closing Plenary

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Chuck Marohn keynoted the closing plenary of CNU21 in Salt Lake City. The following are his comments:

• Industrial park infrastructure is almost always a horrible investment because of subsidies of industries.

• It is beyond our ability to fathom the magnitude of our public debt.

• We have transformed ourselves from an economy based on savings and work to an economy based on debt accumulation.

• The mechanisms of growth we have become accustomed to are waning.

• Local governments are going to be forced to absorb the local costs of the current development pattern.

• The current pattern of development cannot be maintained without large tax increases and/or large cuts in services.

• The suburban pattern has built-in and fundamental insolvency.

• The old cities were financially resilient. If not, they would have gone away.

• Pre-sprawl development is the culmination of thousands of years of experience in development of the human environment.

• Pre-sprawl, everyone knew how to build great places. If you doubt this, look at old pictures of ordinary towns. The best we build today is scarcely as good as what everyone built everywhere before sprawl. My own hometown was fabulous by today's standards, but we largely demolished it.

• Every city today has miles and miles of streets with negative return on investment.

• We need to relentlessly prove New Urbanism as a high return public investment.

• We're missing the bazooka in our argument: the ROI of New Urbanism versus sprawl.

• The tax base of the worst historic traditional development pattern overvalues the best of the shiny and new solely because of the pattern of development. We illustrated this by looking at the ROI of a ratty section of traditional commercial versus new sprawl development just down the street.

• The auto-oriented pattern is very fragile, with limited upside and huge downside. Traditional development patterns are opposite. That's why the traditional patterns of development could be sustained so long, and why sprawl might very well bankrupt us.

• If our cities are going broke, doesn't it make sense to use the traditional pattern that, even at its worst, out-performs the best of sprawl?

• We need to champion an incremental approach to development.

• "Build it and they will come" is a brilliant plot for a movie, but it is a horrible development strategy.

• Our ancestors always built incrementally; it's only recently that we've started trying to build the end from the beginning.

• When an incremental project fails, the entire place doesn't collapse because the project is only a small part of the entire place, and therefore easy to fix.

• The way we got wealthy as a country was by building incrementally over time.

• I don't care if you like to play dice or cards, but it's still gambling to "build it and they will come."

• We need to put an end to top-down planning.

• Innovation from the top down is orderly and dumb. innovation from the bottom up is chaotic but smart.

• Replacing dumb with smart means replacing orderly with chaotic.

• As New Urbanists, we have to resist the trend to become more top-down.

• Memphis has done everything the professionals told them to do, but their wealth and prosperity has remained elusive.

• Orderly but dumb gets you downtown Memphis.

• A lot of chaotic but smart projects will fail, or be messy, but we must embrace it because overall, it's what works.

• It's not about well-informed or not. It's systemic. The "orderly but dumb" guys are the ones who are educated.

• Many minds thinking, even if uneducated in planning, will inevitably get better results than a few administrators. It's the Internet versus a mainframe. Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica.

~Steve Mouzon

68+

CNU21 Saturday Sessions

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Agrarian Urbanism and the Mormon Block

I had the pleasure of doing this session with Susan Finlayson of Wasatch Community Gardens and Sharon Leopardi of BUG Farms, both of Salt Lake City. Here's my tweet-cast of their comments:

• Susan: A community garden is a place, an activity, and an idea.

• Susan: A community garden is 10% garden and 90% community.

• Susan: At the heart of every community garden is an engaged community.

• Susan: To engage the garden's community you need a community organizer.

• Susan: We have workshops through the year on gardening and cooking.

• Sharon: I never grew food or even liked vegetables growing up.

• Sharon: I came to realize that the food industry is one of our biggest problems, and that gardening is a great way to help.

• Sharon: SPIT farming: Small Plot Intensive Farming

• Sharon: One of the most interesting things is knocking on people's doors and saying "hey, can I use your yard for a garden?"

• Sharon: My starting capital was $5,000 from my parents.

• Sharon: When I started, I didn't have a single day off from May to October.

• Sharon: My first year I had 1/8 acre. My second year we upped it to 3/4 acre and I hired 3 people to help me.

• Sharon: Growing vegetables is great but it's hard to make money. I'm looking at expanding into prepared foods as well.

• Sharon: Most of our planting is direct-seeded; all of our planting is in raised beds with closely-spaced plants.

I later blogged my part in the session here.

CNU Open Source

Mike Lydon: Tactical Urbanism: 4 people with shopping carts cross street w/signs: 1-problem 2-what if? 3-rendering 4-if you like, honk

Chuck Marohn: Topic - How to stop soothing the conscience of the privileged and start learning from the public

Chuck: infrastructure projects create lots of support because of jobs, local consultants, etc.

Chuck: the public learns of infrastructure projects at the end of the process. we should start with the public

Chuck: if infrastructure project options are ever shown to the public, they are usually Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest

Michael Mehaffy: Topic - Urban Acupuncture

Michael: great cities are always undergoing transformations that are making them better

Michael: the ability for cities to continually adapt makes them resilient

Michael: great cities are always undergoing transformations that heal and improve them

Michael: top-down and bottom-up in place-making should not be either/or. we need systems capable of being both

Michael: "We need a web way of thinking" - Jane Jacobs

Paul Crabtree: current Saudi water systems run long distances. our proposed system for city expansion is neighborhood-based treatment

Paul: our streets harvest all the rainwater that falls in the community into a French drain in the median

Paul: the French drain was co-located in the trench already being dug for the wastewater line

Paul: our system reduced existing runoff by 75%, while typical practices double or triple undeveloped land runoff

Howard Blackson: Topic - The Decision District

Howard: Decision Districts are one lot deep along two sides of a street

Howard: how do you do standards for an entire cities that allow for the setup of Decision Districts?

Bruce Donnelly: Topic - Urban Tissue and Subsidiarity

Bruce: the idea of subsidiarity came originally from Catholicism

Bruce: Urban tissue formation: 1-connection centers, 2-develop back land, 3-connect backs to make blocks

Bruce: Whose responsibility is it to connect the backs?

Bruce: front street is mainly a public responsibility

Bruce: it is a spiritual responsibility to connect the backs, weaving our cities together

Bruce: Step 4 of urban tissue formation is breaking through the grid as needed

Mark Nickita: the primary city works best if it is well-tied to the metro area

Mark: I'm from the Rust Belt, which is horribly positioned branding-wise with the Sun Belt

Mark: we're re-branding the Rust Belt as the Lake Belt

Mark: water is a significant part of all Lake Belt activities

Mark: you've gotta identify what you have before you can brand and leverage what you have

Mark: the Lake Belt is a network of 50 million people

Mark: old corridors that have been abandoned to rot can be reborn as something new and interesting

Mark: embrace your four seasons. if winters are cold, celebrate with winter festivals

Mark: they're not remaking Buffalo as it was before; they're remaking it as a new place

~Steve Mouzon

56+

CNU21 Friday Afternoon

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The New Economy of Sharing

This session practiced what it preached, as it was a swap-fest of sharing ideas. Participants included Eliza Harris, Jen Krouse, Dhiru Thadani, Robert Orr, & Ann Daigle.

• Eliza: Gigwalk is a good site where you can hire people for micro-pay to do micro tasks locally.

• Eliza: oDesk is good for job-sharing graphic design.

• Eliza: TaskRabbit deals with high-level tasks like graphic design, and also grocery shopping, donation pickup, etc.

• Jen: Couch-surfing is a new type of sharing that really is just good old-fashioned hospitality. Couch-surfing is highly dependent on trust. Couch-surfing runs your credit card for verification & there are reviews. You organize your couch-surfing stay through a social network similar to AirB&B.

• Dhiru: We are born to share our ideas and observations.

• Dhiru: Successful Kickstarter campaigns show people what they receive when they pledge.

• Dhiru: Some people have raised more than 10,000 times more than what they asked for on Kickstarter.

• Robert: Our co-working space hosted a hack-a-thon, we have group website critiques, charrettes, a distinguished speaker series.

• Robert: Our co-working hosts Yale Tory Party for their debates, and "cocktails in the cinema" where we serve what the stars drink.

• Ann: There are a tremendous number of sharing events in New Orleans now that are creating great energy.

• Ann: Edible Enterprises provides culinary entrepreneurs with all the tools needed to make & market Louisiana food products.

• Ann: Cafe Reconcile began by getting kids off the street and off drugs and into the kitchen to learn to cook.

• Ann: Hollygrove Farms & Market is a New Orleans CSA. It's an experimental farm in the city.

Tactical Urbanism

I was session-surfing late Friday afternoon and happened into a Tactical Urbanism session that was half-over, and wished later that I'd been there all along. Also, later Tactical Urbanism references by Chuck Marohn in the closing plenary prompted this angry exchange on Twitter. In any case, here's what happened once I got to the session:

• Tactical Urbanism is not about the chair-bomb… it's about the community of activists the chair-bomb creates - Aaron Naparstek

• The session's funniest content: the "honku"… like a haiku, but about not honking, posted on phone poles, etc.

• "how do you not get arrested doing these things?" - audience question

• don't go to affluent neighborhoods to do tactical urbanism. go to a bad part of town where nobody cares; you'll make life better.

CNU21 Unsanctioned

• The MOOC, by Sebastian Thrun is the next big thing in education - Mike Krusse

• True urbanism has intrinsically better and worse units, creating durable diversity - Andrés Duany

• Classical buildings don't necessarily need straight streets - Douglas Duany

• You can't code until you imagine the city - Douglas Duany

Original Green - Hope for Architecture

Friday evening, I teamed up with Clay Chapman to do a presentation on the theory and practice of the Original Green at CNU21 Unsanctioned. But rather than telling you about it, you could simply watch the video here.

~Steve Mouzon

59+

2012

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:59:57 -0600

Where I've Been

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my library at the office

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.

A New Way to Draw

Our SmartDwellings are such a departure from normal ways of building that they actually changed the way we draw. Architectural drawings have changed radically since the 1970s on the production side as we moved from hand drawing and blueline machines to CAD and plotting. But they've scarcely changed at all in terms of the user experience. We asked ourselves "what happens if we do a radical upgrade to the user experience?" And so that's what we're doing. We'll roll out the new system at the University of Miami School of Architecture soon. Stay tuned.

A New Way to Do Business

The ways we do business as designers and builders are now broken, and I believe we are now in a true paradigm shift as great as the Industrial Revolution. Even the three prime virtues of business (better-faster-cheaper) are fading as we move from the Era of the Company to the Age of the Idea. I'm on the brink of finishing a new book: New Media for Designers + Builders that lays out how we need to be thinking and what we need to be doing if we hope to thrive. Even the book is a bit revolutionary on at least two counts, doing things that e-books should have done for some time, but haven't.

~~~

Any one of these tasks could have been almost all-encompassing. Trying to do them all at once has been completely so, as I've done little else for six months. But since each is close to done, I'll start blogging again soon. The next post will be fun: "How Steve Jobs Hit What Gropius Missed". One other note: I just got word today that Kaid Benfield gave a citation to an Original Green initiative: His Best of 2012 in Green Community Solutions post today tags Walk Appeal as the Best Expansion of the Green City Vocabulary. Thanks so much, Kaid!

~Steve Mouzon

PS: I'll get to the Steve Jobs/Walter Gropius post soon, but there are other things we need to talk about now.

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Legacy Comments

Lloyd Alter · Contributor at Corporate Knights

I wondered what was going on with Steve Mouzon - he explains.

Dec 31, 2012 11:51am

Tom Hoch

Great to hear....I eagerly await...happy New Year!

Dec 31, 2012 3:28pm

Roland Beinert · University of Idaho

Auugh! Not ANOTHER new way to draw! First I learned hand drawing and drafting, but all the employers wanted CAD. So I learned CAD, but then all the employers wanted sketchup. So I learned sketchup, but all the employers wanted Rhino. I'm trying to learn Rhino now. You killing me here, Steve:)

Jan 1, 2013 11:00am

451+

The Fall of the Waters

search the Original Green Blog

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…"

After several years, and in spite of the success of the Waters, the development expert finally prevailed and convinced the landowner that "this New Urbanism stuff is OK, but lots of people want sprawl as well." So he persuaded the landowner to buy land across the street from the Waters and do a sprawl subdivision, complete with "wet noodle" cul-de-sacs, front-loaded lots, and nothing except houses. They called it Waterscapes. They. Never. Sold. One. Single. Lot. People would look at it, then say "why should I buy here? The Waters is just across the street." The land and infrastructure costs of Waterscapes hit the Waters landowner at the worst possible time (the Meltdown) and ended up taking him under. And let's be clear: the Waters did not fail because of the Waters, but because of Waterscapes. Between the subprime meltdown in 2007 and the big Meltdown in October 2008, the Waters was actually the great success story of the region. Most conventional developments were already shut down by then, but really great planners about to design in the Montgomery region were coming to the Waters to study what was done there.

…what is more dangerous than good guys with bad ideas?

The failure was really sad, because the original landowner is a really great guy, but for the couple hundred homeowners at the Waters, the sadness had only just begun. The remaining property was bought by a Birmingham development company that appears to know nothing about traditional neighborhoods, nor do they appear to want to learn the principles that helped the Waters generate 25 times the developed land value of the land all around it. Some of my developer colleagues in Alabama know them, and assert that they (like the original development expert) are really good guys. Which begs the question: what is more dangerous than good guys with bad ideas? It's much harder for most people to challenge a good guy than it is to challenge a slimeball.

…a complete betrayal of civic trust…

The new owners soon let the architectural quality standards begin to slip, which was not a big surprise. But it is fundamentally changing the character of the Waters in a bad way. People have built their homes at the Waters precisely because the architecture was better… and now that is slipping away.

What came recently, however was completely and unthinkably shocking. They have rammed through what can only be described as a complete betrayal of civic trust: they are taking Crescent Park and dividing it up for lakefront lots! From the first day I drew Crescent Park a decade ago, it was always intended to be not only the great civic park space of Lucas Point, but indeed, the center of all the hamlets of the Waters. It has always been shown on all drawings, the Waters website, etc., as a park.

To now divide that up for private lots… that's something so unthinkable it never entered my mind. And that fundamentally changes the character of the Waters as well. All because the developer has ignored the things that are known to work in traditional neighborhoods, treating the Waters instead like just another sprawl subdivision. They say on their website that they "view The Waters as the “crown jewel” of the investment group’s real estate assets". If so, then why aren't they interested in learning how the Waters got so good, and why it's so different from a regular subdivision?

…garages… mooning Lucas Point…

Beyond that, the ineptness of execution of the demise of Crescent Park is stunning. The center of Crescent Park was meant for an obelisk or other element that could be seen from distant hamlets, so I naturally lined an important street up with it. But because the lots front to the lake, that means that the view at the end of the street isn't a civic monument, but rather the back ends of the garages, which are effectively mooning Lucas Point! One of the basics of competent planning is getting fronts and backs of buildings arranged properly on the land. Not doing so reminds me of an old Southern adage that comes in several similar versions, the sanitized version of which is about "not knowing head from tail."

…the first pattern book with no patterns…

In the process, and to close the iron fist even tighter around future development of the Waters, the new developers informed the neighbors that they had gutted the pattern book last week, leaving it with little more than pretty pictures. It may well be the first pattern book with no patterns! So the decline in the quality of architecture is almost certain to continue. And in this week's meeting before the Town of Pike Road Planning Commission, they also demonstrated that they were going to disregard the SmartCode! The Planning Commission, calling it a "very complicated issue" nonetheless approved the developers' request to take the park. You can read all about it here.

… will they be able to muster themselves to the very difficult task of fighting for the dream of the Waters they believed in at the beginning?

Now comes the hard part: Southerners are for the most part friendly people, not given to public confrontations. The Waters neighbors have created a Neighbors United for the Waters group on Facebook, so that's a start. But will they be able to muster themselves to the very difficult task of fighting for the dream of the Waters they believed in at the beginning? Or will this place that once had so many great stories to tell be reduced to nothing more than just another subdivision by a bunch of reputed good guys with a bad idea? You really should stop by their Facebook page and offer a word or two of encouragement for the battle that's ahead for the neighbors at the Waters.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Jack Horner · The University of Mississippi - Ole Miss

We miss you, Steve, along with the leadership of Dale, Ed, Rusty, and Nathan - all quality people.

Oct 12, 2012 12:30pm

George Matthew Linkert IV · Program Coordinator at Sojourn Adult Day Services

Just when you think you are taking a step forward, you take a step back. Thanks for sharing your story.

Oct 12, 2012 12:45pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Here's the sad and even shocking part of the story. Everyone who sees this really should stop by the Neighbors United for the Waters page to encourage them for what's ahead! Here's the link: http://www.facebook.com/groups/224440590903890.

Oct 12, 2012 1:05pm

Rusty Daniel · Principal (school) at SDS Property Group, LLC

Steve, your thesis on the fall of The Waters is just as wrong as those that don't know the first thing about The Waters. Waterscapes, while a failure, did not bring down The Waters. There were two primary reasons:
1. The failure of Colonial Bank, which wiped out the liquidity of the owner; and.
2. The development of Welch Cove 1 year ahead of the collapse.
And by the way, the "Atlanta Developer" was not the decision maker on Waterscapes.

Oct 12, 2012 2:06pm

Nathan Norris · Works at Downtown Lafayette

Not all mistakes are created equal. The former owner of the Waters made a mistake regarding timing of infrastructure/leveraging that could not be corrected once Colonial Bank failed. That was a mistake that did not directly compromise the character of the community. What it did was cause the bulk of the lots at the Waters to be sold to a new owner. The three most recent mistakes by the new developer are substantially worse mistakes because they directly undermine the character and quality of life at the Waters. First, they have abandoned the planning principles by removing Crescent Park in favor of private lots (for the reasons you stated). This was the only large flat area with a panoramic view of the county's largest lake. Second, they have abandoned the architectural principles as you stated. Third, by not being transparent or sensitive to the neighbors concerns they have caused neighbors, the development's most valuable sales referral machine, to stop referring friends.

Oct 12, 2012 2:35pm

Kenny Craft · Director of Design at South Main Development, Inc.

Very sad story. It's been several years since I visited the Waters, but I've always considered it an exemplary project... Nothing worse than a Developer compromising a project with such a strong start! I hope the bad press and sentiment will sink in and convince the new Developer that they are making bad choices...!

Oct 13, 2012 4:12pm

775+

A Happy Story Turned Sad

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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 Waters team took us on a tour of the land, asking our recommendations on several issues. As described earlier, the landowner pointed to a hill and said "where would you put all this dirt? The other planner said it won't work with his plan." I said "you mean the hill?" "Yes." "Leave the hill exactly where it is," I replied. "Line a street up with it, and build a chapel on the hill. We'll call it Chapel Hill." And so we did, as you can see in the top picture.

I was also very concerned about a century-old fencerow of towering oak trees, which the conventional plan basically ignored. Most of them surely would be lost. I recommended instead that they celebrate the fencerow by making it the center of the grand avenue leading into town, making it look as if the avenue had been there as long as the trees.

The landowner had apparently been having second thoughts about the plan for some time because, to our great surprise, he hired us to redesign the Waters. We held the design charrette ten years ago this week.

While the previous plan sprawled 800 or so homes indiscriminately across the land, our design built almost 2,500 homes in eight compact hamlets, preserving most of the land as either lakes or farm fields. Prior to the Waters, subdivisions in the area had been selling 2-acre lots for $40,000 for a developed land value of $20,000/acre. Within hamlets at the Waters, the developed land value immediately rose to $500,000/acre, a staggering 25 times higher.

The town of Pike Road, Alabama, incorporated shortly thereafter. They were so impressed with the Waters that they spent 2/3 of their founding bank account to hire PlaceMakers to do a SmartCode for the newborn town because places like the Waters thrive under a SmartCode, but are illegal on many counts under conventional zoning. And because Pike Road did a SmartCode, the Waters agreed to be annexed into Pike Road.

The city of Montgomery saw the town of Pike Road sitting squarely in Montgomery's growth corridor, and realized that with a SmartCode that encouraged developments like the Waters, Pike Road was likely to draw several years' worth of development out of Montgomery because by this time, the Waters had begun its first neighborhood center and a number of businesses were very interested in relocating. So Montgomery's forward-looking civic leaders banded together to bring the SmartCode to town. Dover-Kohl did the plan for downtown, and Montgomery, through the heroic efforts of many (especially including Planning Director Ken Groves,) became the largest city in the world with a SmartCode… a distinction they held until Miami21, by DPZ, was enacted a couple years later.

All of this began,* of course, because two guys just couldn't shut up about improving a plan on one single Dog Day in 2002. We were simply focused on trying to get the planner to improve the plan… we couldn't have even imagined the chain of events that would follow. So don't ever give up… you never know where today's efforts may someday lead.

That's the happy story… I'll tell you the sad part in the next post.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Debbie Dobbs Burlingame · Mississippi State University

Educational Steve. I learned things I never knew about the Waters. I'll stay tuned for...the rest of the story. Good day!

Oct 12, 2012 12:09pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Here's a cautionary tale for a Friday afternoon... this first part tells the story of what can happen if you have hope of making things better. Ask Ann Daigle, Wanda Mouzon, Nathan Norris, and others, who were there from the beginning.

Oct 12, 2012 1:03pm

Mark DeBacker · Major Project Architect at County of Sonoma

Looking (nervously) forward to Part II.

Oct 12, 2012 10:13pm

958+

The Teddy Bear Principle

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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.

Andrés Duany helping set up the Katrina Cottage
exhibit at the IBS

Public response to the first Katrina Cottages was so strong that it shocked me. I was one of a dozen or so New Urbanists who manned the Katrina Cottage at the International Builders Show in January 2006. People were falling all over themselves to express how much they loved the little cottage. Later prototypes got the same response. For over a year, I was at a loss to explain why so many people acted the way they did about this little cottage.

Katrina Cottage VIII on temporary display near
Washington DC

I finally realized that it was the Teddy Bear Principle at work. When you make a house substantially smaller, not everything shrinks equally. The windows, for example, can only get so small before they fail to meet building codes. Windows are the eyes of a building, and so windows proportioned larger to the face of the building take on the same infant proportions as cubs, babies, fawns, puppies, and kittens.

These small creatures are often characterized with terms that make architects cringe: "adorable," "precious," "cute," "darling," etc. But it's precisely this outpouring of gut emotion that I believe plays a role in keeping our respective species alive. If the little ones weren't so lovable, then what might we do with them when they're screaming their heads off at three in the morning? Because they are so lovable most of the time, we suffer the sleepless nights for them, and life goes on. As it does for the other creatures as well.

This is important because when we build smaller and smarter, all sorts of virtuous cycles kick in to help us build more frugally. Cross ventilation and daylighting, for example, come naturally in tiny buildings that are only one room deep, whereas they require increasing doses of cleverness as the building gets larger. Compound frugal patterns like these with the fact that you're conditioning a lot less space, and you're saving even more.

The great thing about the Teddy Bear Principle is that if you know about it, you don't have to sell the idea of building smaller and smarter on cost savings alone. If you follow Teddy Bear Principle rules of proportion, then your designs will be much more lovable as well.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

I discovered the Teddy Bear Principle while trying to figure out why people love Katrina Cottages so much. But the Teddy Bear Principle doesn't just explain how to design smaller cottages better... I think it's actually a much deeper phenomenon that keeps life going by creating strong bonds between the adults and the little ones.

Sep 10, 2012 9:15am

marcszar

Intriguing points, but there also are non-teddy bear spaces/places that people seem to love too. (If someone wanted to demo Grand Central today, people would throw a fit!)
It seems that large spaces, if properly proportioned and detailed, can also be comforting in a different way: I've never heard anyone call GCT "cute" or "adorable," but I've heard "spiritually uplifting" and "ennobling" and "empowering."
But yeah, I'd definitely agree that intimate spaces/places (and objects) stir something in us - "Oh, look at that weeny.."
I guess the mystery is why so many people fell for the cavernous, poorly-proportioned McMansions with their drafty, banal "great halls" and other oversized, alienating spaces?

Sep 10, 2012 10:38am

Doris Sussman Goldstein · Works at Doris S. Goldstein, Planning Consultant

In my hodgepodge neighborhood--which ranges from riverfront mansions to small cinder block homes--someone fixed up an old cottage that sat at the front of their property, in front of their much larger home on the river. As I walked by with friends, they invariably commented on how appealing the cottage was and how they would enjoy living in the renovated cottage--even though it was a quarter of the size of the homes they actually lived in.
I believe it appealed to them because it promised a simpler lifestyle: that if they lived in this smaller, cozier space, their lives would be stripped of much of its complexity, and they would be happier as a result. Perhaps it also reminded them of their younger days, before they had all the possessions that accompany middle-aged life.
I do think that you are right about the proportions of the Katrina Cottage, particularly how the (relatively) over-sized windows and porch add to their appeal. But I also think that the purity of its form allows people to project onto the cottage a wish for calm and tranquility accompanying the simpler life they imagine they would have there.

Sep 11, 2012 2:02pm

Liesl Schick · Processing at Cromaine District Library

We stayed in a cabin recently that was 13 x 29 feet. The bedroom had a queen size bunk bed in the middle and a twin size bunk along one wall so that all six of us slept in one room. Our kids ages are 15, 12, 10, and 7. The kids most memorable experience and what they are still talking about 2 months later? Sleeping all together in the same room. They loved it and still say that was their favorite part and why can't we do that all time?

Sep 29, 2012 6:44am

1,968+

Smaller & Smarter

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This article was first published in Period Homes March 2012.

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.

Double Duty

McMansions might have three or four places to eat. NASA calls that redundancy. If you're on the way to the moon and one system fails, your life depends on having a backup. But houses don't go to the moon. Early American homes did the opposite, with single elements doing many jobs. The "keeping room," for example, was where all the housekeeping was done. Anything that didn't happen in the bedroom or the outhouse happened in the keeping room.

Light on More Sides

Smaller rooms can be more delightful than larger rooms if there are windows on more than one side. Bedrooms can be extraordinarily small, for example, with windows on three sides.

Outdoor Rooms

Excellent outdoor rooms can be built and furnished for a fraction of the cost of interior space, and when you entice people outdoors, they get acclimated to the local environment and don't need as much conditioning when they return indoors, slashing their utility bill. They also need less indoor living space if they have outdoor rooms they can use for several months of the year.

Light Wings

Don't just build a smaller footprint, but build an especially thin footprint so the house is only one room deep wherever possible except in the northernmost states, where the plan should be more compact to conserve heat. The thinner plan will be longer, and can better help to enclose the outdoor rooms.

Walk to the Grocery

If you live close to the grocery, you're probably living close to other necessities of life as well. And if the street in between is walkable enough, then you'll likely enjoy the fresher produce so much that you soon find yourself buying groceries by the meal, rather than by the week. That will lead to walking to buy other necessities in smaller quantities as well, so you'll need less storage space throughout your house.

Bed and Breakfast Benefits

Do everything you can to see that a bed and breakfast opens near you. If so, you'll save tens of thousands by not building the guest suite which will save enough on your mortgage to pay your guests' bill at the inn if you want to.

Silver Bullets

If we hope to build radically smaller and smarter, where a client would choose to live in half the space because they like it better than the bigger, less intelligent house, then we need a few silver bullets that save far more than half the footage. For example, consider which seats fill up first at restaurants. It's the booths, right? A comfortable booth for six people can easily be designed in 36 sq.ft. or less. Seat those same six people in a dining room with adequate space to serve around them, and it takes about 180 sq.ft. Why not give people what they'd really prefer in a fifth of the space? And in the spirit of doing double duty, the booth can double both as a light-duty home office and as a homework station with just the addition of appropriate receptacles.

Children's Realm

The bed alcove is a special type of silver bullet because it has an extra benefit: it allows the sleeping enclosure to be curtained off at night. This means you can cut the thermostat down ridiculously low on winter nights, and your body heat will likely keep your alcove warm. The master bed alcove might open into a larger bedroom, but it's possible to put all the children's bed alcoves around a single "children's realm," which saves a lot of footage versus individual bedrooms and baths. Because privacy is achieved with each alcove's curtains (wardrobes are built into each alcove) the children's realm doesn't need a door, and the computer can be located at a table where parents can see where their kids are surfing.

Compartmentalized Baths

Build baths with compartments for the toilet and shower, so that more than one person can use them at a time. A single properly-designed compartmentalized bath can serve the entire children's realm, whereas you'd likely need another bath if one kid can lock the door and keep the others out. Compartmentalization works great for the parents' bath as well, because there are some things that shouldn't be shared.

Furniture vs. Closets

Ever notice how early American homes often had much cleaner floor plans than today's homes? If you study them carefully, you'll notice it's because they weren't burdened with today's assortment of clothing and utility closets. Instead, clothes were stored in furniture such as armoires, dressers, and chests of drawers. This allowed the rooms to be much cleaner, and the inside and outside walls to each be better composed. This also allowed rooms to be repurposed over the years as household needs changed. What once was a bedroom could become a study, for example, simply by changing out the furniture.

Armoire Advantages

There are other advantages to furnishing instead of closeting: By the time you frame the wall for a wall closet, install the sheetrock, the door frame, the door, the hardware, and the door casing and baseboard, and then paint it all (except the hardware, of course) you've spent enough money to build an armoire that stores every bit as much as the plain sheetrock closet, and looks much better. And the walls of the armoire can be as thin as ¾ inch instead of the 4-¾ inch sheetrock walls (assuming ⅞ inch sheetrock.) So you're saving 4 inches of floor space at every wall. Add that up across a house and it's a notable difference. But those aren't all the advantages. There is no need for the armoires to be taller than eight feet, while the ceiling might be nine feet, ten feet, or higher. So your perception is that the room is larger when it's furnished with armoires rather than gummed up with closets that run all the way to the ceiling. Need the equivalent of a walk-in closet? No problem… just design two facing armoires.

Don't Waste an Inch

The attitude of recovering every cubic inch possible leads to a plethora of patterns, including Booth Seat Shelves, Kitchen Corners, the One-Item Deep Pantry, Box Spring Drawers, Under-Bed Baskets, the Book Bench, the Reach-In Closet (where you still have closets), and several things you can do under the stairs.

Open Walls

The most radical result of the "don't waste an inch" attitude is to open the interior walls where possible. Use wood boards instead of sheetrock on one side, then leave the finish off the other side and build shelves between the studs so that every interior wall becomes a shelving unit. Boarded walls are much more interesting than sheetrock, and allow the attachment of shelves, pegs, hooks and even fixtures and appliances at any point, stud or not. Eric Moser began this train of thought in 2001 with the Idea House at Habersham. I did my first open-wall design with Katrina Cottage VIII. We now do this on all our new designs; it's incredibly charming and radically space-saving because you can store so much stuff in the walls.

I'll blog soon about several benefits of building smaller and smarter. The Teddy Bear Principle shows how smaller buildings can be more lovable. Because they're smaller, it's easier to make them more durable because you don't need as many materials and can therefore afford to use better stuff. Buildings that are both smaller and smarter are also more adaptable in several ways. And there are many virtuous cycles that kick in with smaller buildings that make them more frugal as well.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Sep 7, 2012 5:55am

Dawn Claus

Good ideas to keep in mind. I'm excited to learn more about the "Teddy Bear principle." As the house cook, I'm still not sure about the keeping room. I have never been interested in having my kitchen, as one of the first things I see when I come home. What are your thoughts Steve?

Sep 8, 2012 5:55am

Christopher M. Pizzi · Associate at Hart Howerton

Steve, the Katrina VIII Kernal Cottage plan is excellent. It has an abrupt utilitarian quality that reminds us that every square foot counts, where comfort is redefined as necessity. And even a figural space and thick-wall zones that would make Steven Kent Peterson and Mike Dennis proud!

Sep 9, 2012 10:43pm

Liesl Schick · Processing at Cromaine District Library

I love this! We have been looking at your Tiny big giant ( don't remember if that is the name) to build for our family of 6 and 60 pound dog. A lot of these ideas could be put to use in that home. How would be compartmentalize that bath?

Sep 29, 2012 6:38am

Kenny Craft · Director of Design at South Main Development, Inc.

Steve - Just finally read your Smaller & Smarter article. Really great concepts, masterfully presented! I wanted to ask..., have you had success convincing an Appraiser to "count" an Armoire as as "closet" in terms of "officially" qualifying it as a bedroom in an appraisal? I have attempted to advocate for this strategy before (makes total sense), but..., unfortunately the appraisal/financing "system" in this country doesn't appear to have the flexibility for great ideas like this, no matter how rational... Maybe if there were some "success stories" with specific Appraisers/Lenders, these could be used as case studies to help transform the industry.

Oct 10, 2012 8:35am

7,294+

Sitting Lightly on the Land

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Avenue of the Oaks at the Waters

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.

One of the benefits was the fact that by not cutting and filling so much, we were able to preserve the majestic oaks along this avenue leading in to town. The trees grew up along a fence that had been built a century ago, and by saving them, it appears that the avenue might have been there that long as well. With normal engineering practices, they would have all been cut.

Here's another example at the Waters. When Nathan Norris and I first met the landowner, the land had already been planned by a conventional planner, but the landowner was having second thoughts about the plan. He pointed to a hill and said "where would you put all this dirt? The other planner said it won't work with his plan." I said "you mean the hill?" "Yes." "Leave the hill exactly where it is," I replied. "Line a street up with it, and build a chapel on the hill. We'll call it Chapel Hill." And so we did, as you can see.

existing grading plan

I'm working right now with the Town Founder of one of the places where I'm Town Architect. He's about to build the next neighborhood in his town. The drawing above shows how the engineer has graded the first part of the new neighborhood. I'm not sure how accustomed you are to reading grading plans, but this land is mass-graded, so they'll have to cut every tree on the site and move many truckloads of dirt. Much of the land will be either cut or filled by 5-10 feet, and the really steep stuff on the right side will be filled by substantially more than that… think about fill taller than a two-story building in places!

new grading plan

Here's an alternative grading plan I did yesterday. My contours are all in red, so as you can see, most of the site is left untouched. The greatest amount of cut or fill on the alternative plan is four feet, but many areas that I've disturbed have less than a foot of cut or fill.

Taking this approach will likely save the Town Founder (and therefore the lot purchasers) over $300,000, and this is just one phase of one neighborhood of one new town. And the Town Founder gets to sell wooded lots instead of raw dirt. And the streets will cause people to drive slower, making them safer, especially for the kids and the old folks who walk there. Which would you rather have?

For almost all of human history, sitting lightly on the land was the only choice for most of us because moving dirt around was really hard work when you did it by shovel and wheelbarrow. Diesel-powered heavy equipment has given us the ability to push countless tons of dirt across the land, but should we do things just because we can?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Civil engineers could save millions in each new neighborhood and avoid the loss of countless trees by respecting existing topography... why won't they?

Aug 27, 2012 5:03am

Patrick Pinnell · Owner and Principal at Patrick L. Pinnell AIA / Architecture & Town Planning LLC

Very nice post, Steve, and I could not agree more. You can always feel it when land has been homogenized. I once helped the neighbors stop a new golf course the designer of which claimed to be "respecting the old New England landscape" despite proposing to move a million cubic yards of soil.

Aug 27, 2012 5:33am

Gil Lopez · Green Worker Cooperatives

I remember learning about grading in University. It was a two prong approach. How the engineers would do it and how a good landscape architect would do it. It's a shame more LAs aren't out there sending the engineers packing on this one.

Aug 27, 2012 6:03am

Denny Daikeler · Author and Speaker at Interior Design Workshops

I think the thing that bothers me the most is the value involved. Caring saves trees, creates better topography, more appropriate streets, dollar and beauty. What are we missing here. Hopefully there is goiNg to be that moment when everyone SEES the truth and moves to better choiceS. IT'S TIME.

Aug 27, 2012 2:34pm

Denny Daikeler · Author and Speaker at Interior Design Workshops

WHAT I WOULD BEG IS ALL OF US WANTING TO MAKE BETTER CHOICES, AND ALLOWING THE "TIME" TO DO SO.

Aug 27, 2012 2:36pm

Larry Hanrahan

If developers are willing to reduce density to save trees (e.g., lose a couple of lots where a tree exists; cluster units where there are no trees); if volume builders can spend a few thousand extra per slab not to "pad" a site to preserve a tree next to the house; if regulators would allow a lower design speed on a road; and if attorneys wouldn't sue me when a wreck occurs on a "substandard" road, this civil engineer could wag the dog.
In the Waters photo above, the Avenue of the Oaks takes up a lot of real estate, and amounts to a "single loaded" street. Beautiful and desirable, and I'd love to do something like that. I've worked with very few developers who would sacrifice a number of lots to plan that. The ones that do, "get it". To suggest that a civil engineer is dictating the layout, though, is simplistic. In our situation, we are given a layout, or told to maximize the number of lots; with these constraints (physical, economic, development scheduling, regulatory), it's difficult to do anything creative with grading. If we all had the luxury of more time in the planning stage of a project, better designs that live lightly on the land would result.
Oh, if I truly had the ability to call the shots, as this article suggests...

Aug 28, 2012 6:45am

Rod Ballard · Franklin, Tennessee

Great article. Speaking of the Waters, looks like the Crescent "Point" is going to be platted for residential construction.

Sep 1, 2012 9:50pm

Roland Beinert · University of Idaho

Great post, Steve. I think respecting the topography also helps bring about a greater sense of place.
And isn't a little bit of uncertainty for drivers is a good thing, anyway. It keeps them on their toes, and when your driving a several ton vehicle at high speeds, especially through a residential neighborhood, you should be paying attention. Isn't that the idea behind the dutch woonerf and the work of designers like Hans Monderman?

Sep 4, 2012 12:48pm

Mihir J Soneji · Divan Ballubhai School

Looks great. Currently, I am designing sub division. I am agree on intersection concept. However, your lots need to be graded to have sustainable drainage system MIHIR J SONEJI email: mihir.soneji@rmit.edu.au

Feb 20, 2014 10:12pm

1,270+

Preservation's Big Unspoken Choice

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garden side of Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana, where I'm working this week as an instructor at the Culture of Building Summer Program, sponsored by the Prince's Foundation for Building Community

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?

These questions, however, gloss over the deeper underlying question that nobody seems to be considering: Which is best, to preserve the artifacts created by a tradition, or to preserve the tradition itself? I just had breakfast with John Anderson, who put it this way: "If I want to preserve this dish, I've got to encase it in amber or something, and then it's not good eatin'. But if I preserve the culinary tradition that created this dish, then that tradition may produce a nearly endless supply of dishes like this."

We know how to preserve artifacts, and have gotten pretty good at it. It can be time-consuming and expensive, to be sure, but it's not impossible. And if the tradition that produced that artifact is now dead, then we're unlikely to get any "more where that came from." So if we love that artifact, then our only choice is to preserve it.

But what about preserving a tradition? If it is a living tradition, then we have two choices: We can either preserve it in its current state, or we can preserve its life. To preserve a living thing in its current state, you have to kill it. If you would have wanted to preserve me as I was at seven years old, for example, you would have had to kill me and then embalm me because I have now transformed into someone quite different from the person I was at seven.

You kill a living tradition by formalizing it into a style, writing up the rules of the style as of today, publishing a pattern book for that style, and then enforcing conformance to the pattern book. Forevermore, if you build in that style, you follow those rules. So a building built by those rules today and one built by those rules a century from now might look indistinguishable from each other.

Preserving the life of the tradition is a very different thing. Living things evolve throughout their lives, from infancy to puberty to adulthood to old age. And it's not clear quite what sort of adult an infant might grow into. We are learning how to help traditions live again, I believe. I'll blog soon about how we're doing this in the Bahamas.

Historic districts preserve traditions in their current state by killing them. As a matter of fact, historic districts should be thought of as "architectural formaldehyde". If the traditions that created the buildings in that district have died, then that's the best we can do today. But that's not the highest standard, which would be to foster a new living tradition that picks up where the dead traditions left off. New living traditions, therefore, should be the highest goal of the preservation movement, and it's high time for this aspiration to enter the preservation discourse.

~Steve Mouzon

PS: The next part of this story will address the Venice Charter and the Secretary of the Interior's standards, but if you want to get a head-start on that discussion, check out Steve Semes' work, which is the most clear-headed discussion I'm aware of on these issues.

* I was only a toddler when the modern-day preservation movement began in the US; I am therefore speaking broadly of preservationists of all generations from then until now.

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Preservation's current identity crisis is defined by this choice: do we preserve buildings because they're lovable, like at the beginning of the preservation movement, or just because they're old? But the big unspoken choice is this: is it better to preserve artifacts or the traditions that created them?

Aug 24, 2012 8:44am

James Anderson Crouch

Mr. Anderson's culinary comparison is a false equivalency and I strongly disagree with your description of historic districts as "architectural formaldehyde." While some historic district commissions like the Vieux Carre Commission and those in Charleston may seem draconian, their main purpose has been to stem ill-considered development and wholesale demolition; if not for the VCC, the French Quarter would be a series of parking lots servicing Bourbon St, with a few "preserved" blocks of facades camouflaging uniform hotel blocks. There is great value in the tout ensemble, which is why the historic districts in New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are so valued/loved.
Yes, we need to preserve/recover the traditions that built cities like New Orleans and Charleston (and Boston and Richmond). It's not an either/or proposition. I look forward to your essay on SOI Standards - I suspect we share many of the same views.

Aug 24, 2012 12:43pm

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

Obviously we need both. We must save the lovable to prove that the building traditions themselves are worthy. The artifacts of traditions are just as dear because they were made with love (or they would have never become traditions). To throw a beautiful building away is tantamount to thumbing one's nose at the person who made it; to ignore a beautiful and humanely constructed district is to snub thousands of ancestors who toiled to give society a complete model - a "pattern book"- of most-loved traditions. We should save building traditions for the same reason we save districts. What Steve is asking is whether we should save buildings that are unlovable. If the old building is not loved, and if worse it deters from more lovable buildings around it like a bad apple in a basket, (this test of two) there is reason to replace it.

Aug 25, 2012 3:56am

Tony Garcia

I think the best argument for preservation is that it provides a living example of tradition. To evolve traditional architecture - to adapt it to our current context - we need to use what exists as a starting point. If we have no starting point, then what results is disconnected and only a hint of what it should be. You nailed it here: "which would be to foster a new living tradition that picks up where the dead traditions left off. New living traditions, therefore, should be the highest goal of the preservation movement, and it's high time for this aspiration to enter the preservation discourse."

Aug 25, 2012 7:09am

marcszar

Really interesting post! But how exactly do you start a new living tradition (and keep it alive and evolving)? I would argue that preservation emerged precisely *because* we subconsciously realized that we no longer knew how to create, nourish, and evolve new living traditions for the built environment. Thus the desperate rush to save the products of dead traditions in the hope that maybe they'd spur us to establish new traditions. But, as you noted, it hasn't really worked...
As for the preservation movement's foray into preserving the boondoggles of the postwar era, well, I think that's partly a symptom of bureaucratization and institutionalization. If your professional livelihood depends on saving buildings, well then you have to find a continuous stream of them to save every year! And once you run out of the prewar stuff, you have no choice but to move on to the postwar junk.
Immediately after the demo of Penn Station, preservation was very much an informal bottom-up movement led by a very focused desire to save what was almost universally regarded as beautiful or historically significant. Fast forward several decades and preservation has bloated into a highly-formal institution - complete with inane paperwork and questionable procedures - preoccupied with the curatorization of the built environment: Treating neighborhoods like time-stamped museum exhibits in which you have to save a little bit of something from every era so you can create a static catalog of history. It's also forbidden to play off/evolve/develop/enhance the motifs of previous eras if you want to do some infill in a historic area because that's supposedly an affront to the "honesty" of the museum exhibit and to "the spirit of our time." (Whatever happened to the more important "spirit of our place?" But I digress. ;-) While there might be some merit in the curatorial approach in limited scenarios, to me preservation no longer has the focused-but-restrained 'save Beauty' approach of the immediate post-Penn Station era.
It should also be mentioned that much of the push to preserve postwar buildings is being led by academics, artists, and other intellectuals who might be totally detached from the deficiencies of a Brutalist bunker because they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis:
http://observatory.designobserver.com/.../the-war.../34278/
If all you have to do is appreciate these ghastly Brutalist buildings as starkly-elegant sculptural objects in photos and movies, then you may have a hard time understanding why the public hates them!
While there was some involvement of architects, academics, and artists in the earliest preservation movements, it seems to me that over the decades the upper layers of the movement have been influenced by the abstract dogmas of academia (another symptom of institutionalization). Thus today you see two layers of preservation at work: You get the bottom-up people in a small town that want to save the 1880s bank on their Main Street, and you also get the academic figures that want to save the physical ideological stunts that support their 1960s worldviews (as the above link reveals). Note how they often argue that the public has to be "conditioned" and "educated" to save something that's widely considered to be ugly. Did this "conditioning" have to be done to save Grand Central? Or countless other richly-textured, richly-patterned prewar buildings? Nope, people responded emotionally to those buildings/places and palpably *loved* them (which gets to your points on lovability); they didn't have to be "educated" to appreciate some stark slab that would repel them emotionally. The 'lovability' factor might even be neurological:
://www.psychologytoday.com/.../unhappy-hipsters-does...
Finally, I have to question this bit:
"You kill a living tradition by formalizing it into a style, writing up the rules of the style as of today, publishing a pattern book for that style, and then enforcing conformance to the pattern book."
There have been pattern books and pattern collections for centuries, and they didn't seem to hamper the evolution of building traditions at all. There also continue to be pattern collections for other professions (like computer science) online, and that hasn't killed any traditions in those professions (rather, they sustain them). I would argue it's the way contemporary architects and urbanists are *using* pattern books that's at fault, rather than the pattern books themselves. (Of course, those architects of the 'starchitecture' variety are not even interested in maintaining traditions or patterns (apropos to your recent post on the space program vs. architectural fashion), so you can't maintain and develop a tradition if your worldview is predicated on the notion that existing traditions have to be constantly spurned and destroyed; i.e. perpetual revolution.)
I think from roughly WWI-WWII we lost true 'design' (the enhancement/refinement of tradition) in many of the professions responsible for our built environment because we converted those professions into hyperspecialized technocratic bureaucracies. People learned to copy solutions out of abstract technical manuals. The civic arts and urban design professions, for example, were transformed into a new 'urban planning' profession obsessed with abstract statistical models. Reductive traffic engineering rose to supplant integral City Beautiful street design. Whether it was the AASHTO Green Book, the IBC, or Architectural Graphic Standards, the postwar message to the (former) designer was clear: don't design, just copy the template out of the book and you can't go wrong. Then you'll breeze through the convoluted, technocratic permitting process. I think we're still stuck in the same approach when we use pattern books: just copy the template out of the book, make tweaks only if you have to conform to a need that varies from the situation in the book, and build it. Thus you get... the McMansion!
Contrast this with the way we used to use pattern books like Samuel Sloan's Model Architect. While there was lots of technical information in these books too, they read more like graphic novels than technical manuals. So because of the way they were presented and illustrated, you could tell that the authors intended the books to serve as loose idea generators rather than strict copy-and-paste manuals. And that's exactly what we used to do: Although some copying and pasting occurred (increasingly driven by the Industrial Revolution's demand for vast worker housing tracts), a lot of the time the books were only used as basic inspiration generators to create new buildings that were vastly different from the buildings in the pattern books. In fact, some books (or large portions of them) didn't even feature complete ready-to-build buildings: they illustrated sets of nested patterns which you were expected to modify, combine, and develop to create your own unique buildings:
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/gothic/11.jpg
This, IMO, is one thing that kept building traditions alive and evolving. There were no one-size-fits-all solutions (which are unfortunately present even in a lot of contemporary NU pattern books), rather there were a lot of fractal, incomplete building patterns which you worked with to create an infinite variety of new patterns. I'm not sure we're even capable of *seeing* this way anymore thanks to the 20th century's lingering "copy the template from the manual" approach.
Sorry for rambling. :-)

Aug 26, 2012 1:22pm

marcszar

I forgot to add that I'm not sure I share Steve's optimism that "we are learning how to help traditions live again, I believe." Take LEED, for example: rather than fostering the kind of integral thinking that was common before the "Thermostat Age," it only seems to have induced an arbitrary checklist mentality. LEED's just another rote, abstract technical manual, in other words, rather than a true "best practice" transmitted through tradition. Thus we get isolated office parks with bike racks (which no one will ever use), "green" parking garages built with reused materials, solar panels and green roofs atop big box stores, and so on.
Because these fiascoes rely on a bunch of disparate, checklisted, manual-extracted "green" criteria, they're not really green in any integral way. Rather than fostering a true tradition of sustainability, the professions responsible for the built environment merely continue slathering on layers of rote codes. Some of this is probably due to the smoke-blowing PR nature of contemporary business, but much of it is probably due to the lingering 20th century notion that you have to follow quantification-based templates to get something "good."

Aug 26, 2012 1:54pm

Steven Semes

Steve, Thanks for the mention. I look forward to reading your next post on this topic. I like to think that the ideal historic district would be like a natural preserve where we protect an ecosystem--say a wetland, a rainforest, or a garden--by keeping it alive so that it can continue to change and grow in ways that do not destory it. That's why I think the word "conservation" is better--it's about keeping something alive. And the "something" is not just a collection of buildings, its the "capacity to build" that brought about that environment. True conservation preserves not buildings but building cultures. You are all over this with your "living tradition" writings and books. This is the new wave in preservation thinking, so keep going in this direction and we'll get where we want to be.

Aug 30, 2012 4:20pm

1,112+

Fried-Egg Cities?

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Philadelphia, edge to center

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.

Why is this a problem? Because if where you live is primarily residential context (in other words, if you're not living in an apartment over Main Street,) then it means that you're unlikely to be able to walk to all your daily needs. This forces you back into the old sprawl burden of having to drive everywhere… even if the streets and buildings are generally well-designed. In other words, too much of a good thing is actually a bad thing.

The Increment of Planning

So if the neighborhood isn't the right increment of planning, then what is? The block? No, the block is also too large. Some blocks might all be coded to the same context, particularly if it's the general neighborhood context, But most blocks in sustainable places are likely to contain more than one context zone. It turns out that the fundamental increment of sustainable planning is actually the lot.

Some planners go nuts when you say that, because they're accustomed to seeing a nice, neat Euclidean zoning map of an entire city whereas zoning with individual lots as the basic increment gets so fine-grained that you can't even see all the breaks when looking at an entire city map… they're just too small unless it's a mammoth map. This doesn't mean that each lot is randomly zoned (planners call that "spot zoning".) Rather, it means that when you change contexts, you do so most often at property lines rather than at streets or at the edges of neighborhoods.

Context Zone Breaks

Here are four good rules of thumb for breaks between different context zones:

1. Change from one context zone to another in the middle of the block, not at a street. You usually want the front of a building to be looking across the street to a building of similar context. So the end of a Main Street, for example, should not be at a cross street, but one (or maybe two) lots beyond that cross street.

one of my favorite examples of a break in context in
the middle of a block: this Key West street has a Main
Street shop on the corner to the right and cottages
like the one on the left down the rest of the

street, like in countless traditional towns everywhere

2. Make context breaks most frequently "with the grain" of the block. In other words, the break occurs between back lot lines, or at the alley or rear lane in the middle of the block.

3. Breaks can also be "across the grain" of the block, like this picture. Here, the break occurs at the side lot lines.

Here's the town of Pienza, Italy, which I've used several times to illustrate various ideas on this blog. The old city, which is the compact part, is only 11 acres. The two images which follow overlay the context zones of the Transect, or T-Zones, as they are known to Transect experts.

Pienza, Italy is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

T-Zones overlaid on Pienza satellite photo

Pienza T-Zones: burgundy is Civic, darkest lavender is Urban Core (T6,) lightest lavender is Sub-Urban (T3,) green is Rural (T2.)

Two Important Points on Time

1. Pienza was built over a period of roughly two thousand years.
2. The Transect wasn't even invented as a planning device until centuries after most of Pienza was built.

Basic Needs

Pienza's Transect, and that of countless other places built sustainably over the millennia derived not from some grand plan of city planners. Indeed, most such towns had no planners at all. They were merely built by the townspeople using good rules of thumb. So how did their Transects come about? They were common-sense responses to some very basic needs:

neighborhood markets like this one
in Pienza can (and should) be small
if they're serving fresher food to
mostly walking customers (here's a

neighborhood grocery near
my office)

1. People need to be able to walk to work, if they're not working at home. This means that home and work need to be near each other.

2. People need to be able to walk to their daily necessities, like groceries and such. But if you scatter shops all over the neighborhood, that makes it more of a chore to shop. So it makes sense to have most of the shops relatively close together, like along a High Street or a Main Street.
3. People need to be able to walk to their civic buildings, so they can participate in the life of the town.
4. Towns shouldn't spread too far because streets and other infrastructure are expensive, so the Sub-Urban parts of town, because the are least compact, should be fairly small so as to not waste infrastructure. As a matter of fact, most of Pienza's Sub-Urban parts were built in the last century or so, after the advent of automobiles and cheaper streets. You can see that the Sub-Urban parts in the old city are really small.

5. Compact towns and neighborhoods are more secure not only because you have a smaller perimeter, but also because more compact urbanism can put more eyes on the street.
6. Towns (and even cities) need to be surrounded by the countryside that feeds them because if you can't eat there, you can't live there.

The Transect and the Original Green

Pienza's historic Sub-Urban areas are a small
fraction of the town

Sounds familiar? If you've been to this site before, I'm sure it does. These simple needs that led to countless sustainable places built over the centuries are the needs for Nourishable Places, Accessible Places, Serviceable Places, and Securable Places. In other words, the conditions that created the Transect around the world are the same conditions that the Original Green works to organize, just in a different way. You might say that the Transect and the Original Green are really just two different views of the same thing: how to build sustainable places, which are places that you can keep going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future. Here's where people get confused:

Pienza's Urban Core at night

There are certain characteristics of built environments (described above) that have been sustained in a healthy way for centuries that we can observe again and again in place after place around the world. Without these characteristics, humans have yet to build places that are truly sustainably... in most cases, places without these characteristics are hideously unsustainable, with sprawl as Exhibit #1. So it is fair, IMO, to consider these characteristics "essential."

A century ago, the ecological transect was invented as a management tool for the built environment. Less than twenty years ago, it became clear that this tool could be extended into the built environment in a way that explains those essential characteristics of sustainable places, and that also can form a guide to building new places that are also sustainable. This is known as the rural-urban Transect. The Original Green is even newer than that: Although its roots go back to the day after Thanksgiving, 1980, it was not formally assembled as an idea until less than a decade ago.

Ancient Things That Work and New Tools

The problem comes when the distinction isn't made between old and proven ideas and new tools for implementing those ideas, either by those who promote the new tools like the Transect or the Original Green, or by those who respond to what they say. Both the Transect and the Original Green are idea that are clearly new and open to refinement… matter of fact, they are regularly being refined. But the essential characteristics of built environments that they attempt to make sense of have a successful track record stretching back a few thousand years, and assailing those characteristics, especially when there has never been a successful alternative but many hideous failures, doesn't seem to be a profitable way of spending time.

~Steve Mouzon

Other Sprawl Recovery posts on the Original Green Blog:

Sprawl Repair - A 12-Step Program

Walk Appeal

Walk Appeal Measurables

Walk Appeal Immeasurables

Walk Appeal Impact

The Sky Method

The Transect

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Misunderstandings about the Transect trip up a lot of people who otherwise might find it a really useful tool. This post tackles a number of issues, including:
• Increments of Zoning: why the fundamental increment of Transect zoning should be the lot, not the block or the neighborhood.
• Context Breaks: rules of thumb.
• Transects over time: Pienza as a two-thousand-year example.
• Basic Needs: how Transects originated.
• Two-Headed Monster: how people get tripped up by confusing the tool with the characteristics it attempts to organize.

Aug 22, 2012 10:37am

Jeffrey Jakucyk · University of Cincinnati

The idea that development (context breaks) should be relatively symmetrical about the street is a very important one, and one that gets very little attention. You can see the problems when this doesn't happen in the 2nd and 3rd generation suburbs and exurbs. In these places the main arterial streets are the boundaries of development, not the organizing spine, as they were in urban areas and the early suburbs.
So instead of a main street, commercial strip, or what most non-planners consider a coherent block, you end up with disparate uses on either side of the street, and in the case of residential development it's usually backing up to the arterial with a high fence or wall. This sort of fragmentation only further hurts the public realm and makes it an even more unpleasant place to be in.
It seems to be the final outcome of the dendritic, hierarchical street layout and pod development. It's interesting though that it's not something inherent to all suburbs, and only seems to have come about in earnest in the 1970s and 80s. I'd say it's also a lot more prevalent in the west and south where grotesquely huge arterial streets are built from scratch rather than through the widening of an existing road that had some lower intensity development adjacent to it already. It would be interesting to study these sorts of changes to the suburban pattern of development over time.

Aug 22, 2012 11:19am

Form-Based SmartCode

Helpful application pointers on Transect use by Steve Mouzon. Beautifully illustrated with photographs, as usual.

Sep 13, 2012 12:23pm

1,193+

Economy of Scale vs. Economy of Means

search the Original Green Blog

Pienza, Italy eastern gate - all images in this post are from Pienza

Guest Post by Frank Starkey

Note from Steve: Frank is the Town Founder of Longleaf, a new town in Pasco County, Florida. Frank and I were on the Seaside Pienza Institute trip to Pienza last fall, and over dinner one night, Frank laid out the compelling argument below. Since then, he has been kind enough to write it up for this post.

Through the process of developing Longleaf we were regularly taken to the financial whipping post when factors beyond our control didn’t go as expected. I believe the reason the project was so vulnerable lay in an economic principal we pursued, the Economy of Scale (EoS).

Modern development practice is predicated on mass-production models, which are based largely on EoS. The cost to manufacture a widget goes down when you make a large number of them because your costs are spread out among more “units.” Cheaper by the dozen; cheaper still by the million. And if your costs go down, profits can be assumed to go up, all things being equal. It’s a self-evident and unassailable economic principle, right? But there are limits to its application, particularly in the speculative and complex world of real estate development.

At Longleaf this principle told us that developing 200 lots at a time would mean lower per-unit costs for building those lots, and that building a 3-story mixed-use building would cost less per square foot than a 2-story one (much less a single-story, which was considered anti-urban in those earlier days of New Urbanism.) However, pursuing these lower per-unit costs we took on much higher total cost, which had to be financed. That meant we had to sell those “units” at a pretty fast clip or the debt service would not only eat up the economies we had eked out, but it could also eat up ALL our profits, and eventually us! Economy of Scale was a deal with the devil known as debt.

Being indentured to so much debt created a cascade of pressures that compromised better place-making: suppressing prices and appreciation, bending on architectural standards, overlooking key details in executing the public realm. It also consumed resources and attention we could have put to better use making a more beautiful and vital place, like fostering the civic realm or building more retail. (This isn’t to suggest Longleaf is a failure: quite the contrary, and its success as a place is a testament to the power of good urban design, in spite of things we could have done differently or better.)

Houses aren’t widgets; development is not manufacturing; a town is not a factory. Human settlements are more like ecosystems, subject to the complexities of human nature at every scale: individuals, families, social groups, economic production and consumption, civic life, fashion, politics and governance – these are all endlessly varied and dynamic. What’s more, the physical context of “real estate” is, by definition, unique to each location. The internal and external forces that shape our built environments are in every way contrary to the purity of the assembly line. Mass-production development would be well suited to creating beehives, perhaps, but it is a poor tool for creating human habitats.

OK, so if scale (and its attendant repetitiveness) is the problem, how does one argue with “economy,” particularly these days? I struggled a long time to figure out how we might build economically, without falling into the trap of the Economy of Scale. Following clues from how Robert and Daryl Davis developed Seaside, and looking at how traditional towns and cities came to be, I discovered that the underlying economic principle of authentic urbanism is the Economy of Means (EoM). In the days before massive capitalization and long-term debt, cities were built one building at a time. Likewise, in the days before mass-production, buildings were essentially built by hand. So, at a fundamental level, traditional cities were built by hand, or rather, LOTS of hands. And when you make something by hand, you naturally employ the Economy of Means.

Everyone who has made something by hand understands and employs EoM intuitively. To the craftsperson it doesn’t make sense to purchase extra material, only to throw it away. It makes sense to build something that uses material and performs its function with the greatest efficiency. It doesn’t make sense to construct something flimsy, only to have it break in short order; you want it to last. And, since it’s going to last and serve as a reflection of its maker, it makes sense to make something beautifully, incorporating timeless principles of proportion, elegance, and appropriate embellishment. Finally, when you work by hand, you want to share knowledge with others doing the same thing, to make it easier on yourself.

When many individuals employ EoM, a rich variety of techniques develops. So does a progressive, “living” tradition, as folks share knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. Innovation, Adaptation, Variety, Tradition and Progress grow naturally out of EoM building, whereas EoS manufacturing stifles all of these. Cities built on EoM function in richly complex ways and as a result are enormously adaptive and resilient. Those manufactured with EoS are dead on arrival.

The best-loved buildings and places we urbanists admire embody EoM, and it’s no accident they have proved to be durable, both physically and in people’s affections. This is instructive for those of us involved in the project of buildings and places, for whom a revived understanding of EoM will be especially useful in the new economic realities.

Leave EoS to the widget manufacturers.

~Frank Starkey

Legacy Comments

bfdonnelly

Very important ideas, but only half of the equation. When the cost of capital exceeds EOS savings, it's rational to shift to economy of means AND incremental improvement. Specifically, when the time-value-of-money doesn't pencil out, it makes sense to save the money and apply it to the next incremental improvement, such as an addition.

Aug 16, 2012 2:22pm

Pia Kealey · University of Notre Dame

A good post and a great distinction. On another level, I would add that with its monetary and production focus, EoS tends to rob its products of life-affirming qualities. So in the 'we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us' context, essential but immeasurable things can easily be lost.

Aug 17, 2012 1:38pm

Cliffton Chandler

I completely agree that an "Economy of Means" is both economically rational and psychologically appealing--since we intuitively grasp individuality through recognition of nuance. I do want to add that architectural "Economy of Scale" has one very important purpose. One that is difficult to keep in mind because it is so rarely in evidence in the current global culture--that purpose being; the manufacture and implementation of rapid deployment architectural solutions to the problem set created by catastrophic natural disasters.
So while I recognize that the "benefits" of EoS architecture are a...See More

Aug 19, 2012 1:01pm

Josh J. Stewart

Excellent article by Frank Starkey. Outstanding comment Cliffton. Thank you for making me aware of it. True story - there were a few times when Frank would babysit for me. My Mom said I would throw a fit over being given a female babysitter. A guy I was ok with. I'm sure I. hhad good reasons, whatever a six or seven year gold's reasons are. Anyway, even that young as Frank would have been a teenager, he showed an amazing talent for architecture. How? We'd go outside, and Frank would build these remarkably accurate, detailed, model houses and buildings - out of clay we dug up from the ground. I would love it when the sun came out and baked those model structures. Making them stronger. We don't have much of any clay in Florida. We found some on the island where my parents built their house. I'm serious. Frank built things almost 30 years ago, from nothing but clay, I've never forgotten. - Josh J. Stewart

Aug 19, 2012 4:30pm

3,984+

The Transect

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rural-urban Transect illustration by Center for Applied Transect Studies

Many of my good friends and colleagues who are Transect aficionados sometimes get so deep into the details of this very useful idea that they lose the general public, so this post describes "the Transect for the rest of us." This is essential because the Transect, along with Walk Appeal and the Sky Method, is a game-changer of Sprawl Recovery and must therefore be able to be understood broadly, not just by the planning geeks. So here's how it works:

natural transect illustration (above) and American Transect (below) both by James Wassell

Beginnings

The Transect was invented about a century ago as a management tool for the natural environment. The basic idea is pretty simple: zones of the natural transect, from ocean to beach to dune, etc., each have their own rules. Certain creatures live in one that don't live in others. A fish wouldn't last long on the beach, for example. Nor would a palmetto survive very long planted in the ocean. Different natural conditions exist in each zone as well. Sand in the ocean is always covered by water, sand on the beach is sometimes covered, and sand on the dunes is only covered by water in a hurricane, for example.

Recent Years

Landscape architect Douglas Duany took his brother Andrés out into the surf of South Beach in the late 1990s. As they walked up out of the water onto the beach, then across the dunes, and then into town, Douglas asked "why can't the Transect be extended into the city and used to manage the built environment as well?" Andrés, an architect and town planner and one of the founders of the New Urbanism, embraced the idea, and the "rural-to-urban Transect" was born.

A bit over a decade later, the Transect is in the process of transforming American cities. For most of a century, city planning was based on what is known as "Euclidean zoning" because it started in Euclid, Ohio. The essence of Euclidean zoning is that it separates things: you live in a subdivision where there's nothing but houses, go to work in an office park where there's nothing but offices if you're a white-collar worker or in an industrial district where there's nothing but factories and warehouses if you're a blue-collar worker, and you shop in strip centers and shopping malls. And you have to drive to get from one to another.

Changing the Rules

Andrés realized that until we changed the rules of zoning, we'd keep getting sprawl almost all the time because sprawl is the natural product of Euclidean zoning. So he built the SmartCode on the operating system of the Transect to be an antidote to sprawl. And then he opened it up where anyone who wanted to participate could help develop the SmartCode. Two years ago, the US reached a tipping point where 40 million Americans were living in cities that had adopted New Urbanist form-based codes such as the SmartCode. Today, dozens of planners use the SmartCode or other Transect-based codes.

Let's take a peek under the hood and see how it works. The Transect organizes the built environment into 6 zones from T-1 (which is most rural) to T-6 (which is most urban.) These are the details:

T-1 Natural

The Natural zone includes all lands that have been permanently protected from development. This includes

national parks, state parks and most land trust lands. Here, in the wilderness, nature trumps mankind every time. This is actually a place that is just a bit dangerous to humans because something could bite you or even eat you, for example. The only buildings you’re likely to find here are forest rangers’ cottages or campground structures. This is the quietest place you can find (except in a thunderstorm or a buffalo stampede), and it’s the place where the stars shine the brightest.

T-2 Rural

The Rural zone includes lands that are not currently slated for development, but that have not been permanently protected, either. Most of the Rural Zone in the eastern United States is farmland and countryside. This zone isn’t quite as dangerous, but stay out of the fence where the bulls live. Man begins to shape this zone, but he uses natural or rustic materials to do it, like the lonely lines of barbed wire strung along cedar posts at the edge of a field. You may hear a distant tractor plowing the fields by day. The blips of the fireflies over the fresh-mown fields are still the most numerous lights, but you may occasionally see a light in the window of a farmhouse as you go by, at least until bedtime.

T-3 Sub-Urban

The Sub-Urban zone isn’t exactly the ‘burbs. It’s close, to be sure, but it doesn’t include some things like the big box retail that you might instead find in a highway business district. The Sub-Urban zone is most similar to the areas at the outskirts of town where the town grid begins to give way to nature. Here, lots are usually larger, streets begin to curve with the contour of the land, and fences, if you have them, look more like their country cousins around the homestead. Streetlights and sidewalks begin to occur in this Zone, but only on the busiest streets. Natural features such as streams still trump things built by humans, in part because of the cost of modifying things so large.

T-4 General Urban

The General Urban zone is the place that settlements finally start coalescing into strongly identifiable neighborhoods, each with their own center that you can walk to in five minutes or less. This is the place where the houses pull up close enough to the street that you can sit on your porch and talk to your neighbor leaning over your fence with the latest news. And this is the place that kids love after having been held hostage at the end of a cul-de-sac for the past half-century by anyone with a drivers’ license. Here, the neighborhood is compact enough that they can safely walk down tree-lined sidewalks to the ice cream store down on the corner, and return home before they finish the cone.

T-5 Urban Center

The Urban Center zone is Main Street America. There was always a good selection of apartments over the street itself, and over the square. Young couples just getting started would often live in an apartment over Main Street, but they weren’t alone. The Main Street neighborhood was as diverse as any, including merchants living over their shops and old folks who didn’t want to have to saddle up to get to all the necessities. You could see lights on in the windows over the square every evening, and could hear parents calling their kids to come in and do their homework long after the old folks out in front of the general store had folded up their checkerboard and laptops, and gone home for the day.

T-6 Urban Core

The Urban Core zone only occurs in cities. It is the brightest, noisiest, most exciting part of the city, with the city’s tallest buildings, busiest streets, and most variety. It’s the place where you should find one-of-a-kind functions like City Hall, but it’s also the place with all the galleries and the biggest selection of restaurants. The Urban Core is the place where mankind trumps nature; it’s where the only trees are lined up in planters beside the street, and where the river running through town is contained in grand stone embankments. The Urban Core is so intriguing that thousands or even millions stay there for months on end, leaving nature in the wilderness to grow in peace.

~Steve Mouzon

Other Walk Appeal posts on the Original Green Blog:

Sprawl Repair - A 12-Step Program

Walk Appeal

Walk Appeal Measurables

Walk Appeal Immeasurables

Walk Appeal Impact

The Sky Method

The Transect (this post)

Fried-Egg Cities?

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Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Here's the third game-changer of Sprawl Recovery: the Transect. And it's told in a very plain-spoken way, with almost none of the technocratic stuff that only a code geek could love.

Aug 13, 2012 7:09am

Sandy Sorlien · Works at Fairmount Water Works

Steve, the Preserve and Reserve designations are used only in the Sector system for O-1 and O-2, not in the T-zones. (In early Transect diagrams, they were, but it changed around 2004 or 2005.) An example that helps explain this is the historic town of Harpers Ferry, a preserved National Park. In the Sector system (SmartCode Article 2), it would be set aside as O-1 Preserved Sector. However, its physical character is definitely not T-2 Rural. Once we separated those concepts in the SmartCode, it made things clearer for planning, and encouraged a regional strategy.
The Transect is explained in fairly non-geeky terms at CATS here:
http://transect.org/transect.html

Aug 13, 2012 8:40am

Phill Tabb · Works at Registered Architect

In my research of English villages in the mid-1980s, I came across the Thorburn transect, which was an urban-rural transect published in 1971.

Oct 11, 2012 7:27pm

2,763+

2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:59:57 -0600

The Necessity of Hope

search the Original Green Blog

The first prerequisite of community-building is hope because people without hope will not build. This fundamental rule of building applies from the scale of building personal relationships to the scale of building a nation.

We face a challenge in the US, the likes of which nobody born since the Great Depression has ever seen. Nearly everything we have built since the end of World War II was built according to the pattern of sprawl, where you separate everything from everything else and connect them all with highways so that we drive everywhere to get anywhere. This cannot continue… the costs of sprawl will soon become too great to bear. Already, our auto-dependent lifestyles are making us poor.

The core problem with sprawl is that we have built so much of it. Most of us live there now, so we can't just all walk away as fuel prices rise. The building of sprawl created much of the wealth of our nation for the past 66 years… the abandonment of such a mammoth investment would surely ruin us all.

So what do we do? We must find a way to recover from this addiction to auto-dependent lifestyles, and transform the subdivisions, strip malls, office parks, and industrial parks we have built into places that can be sustained in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future.

This blog will soon launch a 12-Step Program for Sprawl Recovery, but before we get started with that, let's think about the prerequisite of hope. Because without hope, we will not change. Today, some really smart people (whom I respect very highly for other reasons, by the way) have put together guidelines and rules of thumb which poison the transition from sprawl to sustainable places because they make it appear that most places have no hope of succeeding with their transformation.

The classic example of a poison guideline is the "corner store requirement." The best experts say that you can't even support a corner store with less than 1,000 homes… and for pretty much every other type of retail establishment, you need even more "rooftops."

Seaside would never have even built Modica Market
had they followed conventional retail wisdom.

What percentage of New Urbanist neighborhoods have been planned with 1,000 people within walking distance of the corner store? A tiny fraction… definitely less than 10%. Seaside, Florida, the first New Urbanist town, has less than 2/3 that many homes. So had these places followed the best experts' advice, roughly 90% of them (those with less than 1,000 homes per neighborhood) would have never even built the corner store. Seaside and all those other places would have been little more than pretty subdivisions with alleys and sidewalks. Following the best advice would have completely gutted the New Urbanism movement.

If the market wouldn't have worked, all the other
retail, like the bookstore and record store, would

have been doubly impossible.

But what happened instead? Robert and Daryl Davis, the Town Founders of Seaside, were not burdened with that expert advice because there was no advice in 1980 on how to build a town… only on how to build a subdivision. So they set out, with planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, to figure it out. From then until now, they have created a legend.

Seaside's post office on
Central Square

Today, Seaside is a regional center for the coolest shops, restaurants, night spots, bookstores, and yes, a corner grocery. Daryl, who took the reins of business development at Seaside, did not know that what she was setting out to do was supposedly impossible. As a result, she has nurtured literally hundreds of businesses to life. Some have failed, of course, but some have also spawned multiple establishments across the region. None of this would have happened had Daryl been poisoned with the idea that you can't even support a single corner store without 1,000 homes.

The problem with these guidelines is that they are all built on the assumption of the continuation of sprawl. In other words, what can you build when there's thriving sprawl all around you, sucking customers away to malls, strip centers, and office parks? That was a fair proposition until the Meltdown, because until then, true neighborhoods were a tiny anomaly in the enormous American development machine. And if you were trying to do business completely embedded in that paradigm, it probably was a good idea to follow the rules.

Roly Poly was founded at Seaside, but has now
spread across the Southeast, including to my
old hometown.

But there have always been other ways of doing business and building places. There's more than one dial to turn, in other words. If you don't have 1,000 homes in your neighborhood, there are many other ways to make businesses work. For example, are you actually embedded in sprawl, or do you out in the country with a captive audience of neighbors that are more likely to do business with your corner store because everything else is too far away? If you're remote, you can make it on far less than 1,000 homes.

Do you have unusually cool shops, like Daryl is expert at creating? Are you the only nearby place that sells the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal? Does your corner store have the best espresso for miles around? How about the ice cream shop… can you build your own sundae? Does your grocer actually know you, and will she order the peach salsa you request, trusting that if you like it, others might do so as well?

Seaside's Perspicasity market, another group
of businesses that would have been considered
impossible using today's best retail advice

All these things and many more are factors that make businesses work, when all the normal business models say they have no hope. That's because the business models are based on averages. But if you want to build a great place, you should probably be anything but average.

The same rule of thumb applies to sprawl recovery as well. If your neighborhood wants to transform itself to avoid sprawl's inevitable continuing slide in real estate values for decades to come, then your neighborhood needs to transform itself into something remarkable. Shooting for average doesn't create hope… working to be remarkable usually does. So be remarkable.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: This is the first in what promises to be an extended Blogoff on the viability of neighborhood retail. As other blog posts respond to this one, I'll list their links below.

Friday Frontage: Spaced In, Street Trip, Sandy Sorlien

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Remember when I was talking about BlogOffs last week? Well, this is my first volley in the BlogOff about neighborhood businesses. What do you think?

Dec 22, 2011 3:33pm

Veronika Miller · CEO & Founder at Modenus - The Design Directory

Very interesting post Steve, thank you for offering to host this topic in more detail. I look forward to your thoughts on solutions sprawl as this has not, and continues to, impact us economically but also culturally. The two may even be more deeply linked than we expect. By that I mean that while we see a reduction in sprawl through the attempt at building New Urbanist neighborhoods, I also think that these places require not only population density but also a cultural re-think in order to succeed.
My fear is always that because we have so much space we will never quite learn our lesson and as soon as things "get better ie in the eyes of many back, to the way they were" we'll be tempted to keep on sprawling when the real answer seems to be to carefully fill in the gaps between concentrated areas with intelligently designed communities.
Can't wait to join the conversation.

Dec 22, 2011 4:57pm

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · Project Manager/Designer at Mouzon Design

Great examples! I look forward to the 12 steps!

Dec 22, 2011 6:00pm

Virginia Fitzpatrick · Bon vivant at Retired

6 k people live in my township -Stanwood -surrounded by farm fields. We must drive an hour South on I-5 to reach Seattle. I live "uptown" in a 4 story -54 unit - Condo. It seems almost everything is across the street - medical, dental, grocery, cinema, ACE hardware etc. Problem is the battery on my used Prius kept dying until the dealership said I had to drive the Prius at least twice a week. Since the local farms deliver fresh produce every other Friday (which I order over the internet) I often only drive the Car to the food Co-op in the next town 20 miles away every other week.
There is a nice sidewalk on which we can walk the mile over the hill from uptown to downtown in which all sorts of funky businesses and restaurants are located. Most teens here are rather skinny because they walk everywhere from their centrally located high school. It is only 3 miles from one end to the other end of town. At age 67 I have walked the whole distance and back.
There is only one hurdle with such condensed living - noise. I enjoy the shouts from the school yard next door and the train whistle a quarter mile away. Some of those trains will take me to Seattle so I don't have to battle the trucks and traffic on I-5. The kids and train sounds are only sporadic. The other noises can be mitigated by good manners and spending on some technology and materials. The most annoying is the H-Vacs on the roofs of the grocery store and local factory. I read these can be dampened. As for good manners - don't blast your car stereo and honk your horn unless really warranted. My neighbor below said the base on my stereo was disturbing her. I invited her in and said "let us be scientific". I turned on my Stereo and set the column at "42" which was loud enough for me and asked her to go down to her condo unit and call me to let me know it that was too loud. She was happy with that volume setting. Truth is "You Tube" videos come on at different degrees of loudness and I was not near my control to turn it down. I was busy doing something else. Now I know to be on my guard so my neighbors can enjoy peace and quiet.

Dec 23, 2011 12:04am

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

Steve, we are all for enabling walkability, which means enabling walkable business!
The bottom line is not about whether or not urban form denies business success (although of course it can inhibit or support it). It's a question of good management - which includes everything from selecting one's location to finances and accounting to growth expectations to customer service.
There are dozens of articles and classes taught at small business development centers, but this list incapsulates the major reasons almost half of all business startups fail within two years (which can be examined in the context of walkability and sustainability):
http://www.sba.gov/.../what-are-major-reasons-small...
I think retrofit offers a great opportunity for small startups that I would call "upstarts" because if they're smart, they can (and do) make it against all odds. Small business has many advantages over larger, more cumbersome companies. Neighborhood serving commercial is highly underrated in America. Witness where it works, for instance, in New Orleans where we have a very high rate of locally owned, successful small business imbedded in almost every neighborhood.
I'm sure you'll address one impediment, which are zoning, building and other codes that make small business development difficult if not impossible. A SmartCode that allows small scale retail at corner nodes within neighborhoods is a great first start, as are loosened rules concerning home business.
Keep up the great work, friend!
Ann

Dec 26, 2011 1:58pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

FWIW, in addition to Sandy Sorlien's initial post above, Hazel Borys has done a BlogOff at http://bit.ly/xwDVq3, Sandy has done another BlogOff at http://bit.ly/yzVOxa and Patrick Kennedy has just posted one at http://bit.ly/xDWWgP. Please join the dialogue! FWIW, here's the way we're doing the BlogOff: http://bit.ly/uO52bn.

Jan 5, 2012 2:52pm

1,547+

Transgressionalism*

search the Original Green Blog

High architecture and the arts have each mutated from Modernism into something dark and disturbing. Metastasizing unchecked, it is Kryptonite to our hopes for a sustainable future. How did we get here?

When Modernism Was Actually Modern

inspired by Mies

Early Modernism was born with an underlying necessity of uniqueness. In other words, if you want to be significant, your work must be unique. Previously, architecture was judged first by the standard of "how good is it?" Modernism changed the prime standard to "how new is it?" Because of this new standard, traditional work, no matter how good, had no chance of being considered. Only after passing the standard of newness was architecture then evaluated by the old standard of "how good is it?"

The necessity of uniqueness clearly fueled a lot of creativity and inventiveness in the early years, but it was largely rational invention. Early Modernists were able to be both modern and sensible. Look at how Wright, Mies, Gropius, Corbu, Loos, and others carried weight down through a building to the ground, for example. Normally, it made perfect sense. Regardless of whether or not you liked the sleek, spare expression, you could understand how the architecture worked, and why. These were the heroic years of Modernism.

The Lost Generation

Rudolph's Brutalist masterpiece
at Yale

The Achilles Heel of the necessity of uniqueness became apparent only very slowly in the decades after World War II. The early Modernists had plumbed most of the depths of rational Modernism before the War. Afterward, it became increasingly difficult to develop an architectural expression that was both unique and sensible. Architects slowly and painfully woke up to the gnawing question of "what do we do now?" It must have been something akin to a long hangover, after the decades-long party that was the optimistic and heady early days of Modernism.

This period, sometimes known as the Dark Ages of Architecture, arguably produced some of the most soulless, sterile, and depressing buildings humanity has ever known. It signature style was Brutalism, which certainly lived up to its name. The larger cultural malaise of the 1970s was hauntingly parallel to the listlessness of Modernism, which had clearly lost its way.

The Rebels

1980 was a turning point. At the time, there was great boiling discontent with the Lost Generation; it was obvious that change was coming. For a short time in the late 1970s, the rebels had all inhabited the same camp. Stern, Graves, Mayne and Gehry were all mentioned in the same breath. But the divide wasn't long in coming. Half of the rebels went back to the original precept of Modernism (be unique) even though it meant that they had to be irrational. The Irrationalists went on to become most of today's Starchitects. The Rationalists, on the other hand, became either New Urbanists or New Traditionalists, or most likely both.

Transgressing

Katrina victim in new house with roof sitting askew
like her old house that was ruined by the storm.
How unkind is that?

There are countless ways of being irrational, many of which are relatively harmless. The Irrationalists, however, chose a particularly poisonous way: To be transgressional is to intentionally transgress common wisdom or practice. This disturbs or appalls many people. So if you want to be really efficient with your transgressions, why not cut right to the chase and simply do work that most find disturbing and shocking?

Artists today are considered "mere illustrators" if they don't challenge our core beliefs. Planners who design places that feel like home to most are derided as "purveyors of kitsch." Architects that design buildings non-architects can love are scorned as "soppy sentimentalists."

No, that porch roof didn't collapse in Katrina…

it was designed that way!

While Modernism may have startled many a century ago, that was never the point in the early years. Quite the contrary: Read the early masters and it becomes clear that they expected the working class to welcome them with open arms. The fact that most people turned away is beside the point. Modernism never intended to shock, appall, or disgust people. Instead, it intended to save them from their squalid, oppressed settings. Today's work isn't Modernism at all. It's ~~Transgressionalism~~ Transgressionism*.

The Anti-Greens

Returning residents of the Lower 9th Ward must
be asking… did the levees break AGAIN?

~~Transgressionalism~~ Transgressionism* is the complete antithesis to sustainability for several reasons: First, we can only achieve sustainability by engaging everyone because our consumption is increasing faster than the engineers' ability to mitigate with increased efficiency. You don't change most people's hearts about the way they're living by insulting or traumatizing them.

Next, if we're going to share the wisdom of green building broadly, the worst possible thing we could do is to require the architects to make those buildings unique because when uniqueness is the highest standard, we're not allowed to share wisdom. That would be considered plagiarism.

Gehry's Millennium Park amphitheater, now criticized for

resembling his Bilbao Guggenheim museum

Interestingly, the early Modernists' uniqueness was only a shadow of things to come. Mies had his own personal language of architecture. Corbu had at least two. Wright developed three or four languages during his career, depending on how finely you want to parse his work. It might seem incredible, but the favorite starchitects of the recent past such as Gehry, Calatrava and Libeskind are now ridiculed for "self-plagiarism." In other words, their current buildings look a bit like their last buildings. Unbelievable! Today, the high standard of greatness is apparently held by Zaha Hadid, who is known for inventing a completely new architectural language for each building.

Another important thing: because ~~Transgressionalism's~~ Transgressionism's* first move is to discard common wisdom, it naturally disposes of everything that has been proven over centuries of building in a region. All out the window. If it's known to work, we can't possibly use it. That would be sappy sentimental plagiarism. ~~Transgressionalists~~ Transgressionists* sometimes try to cloak themselves in science, but any true scientist would be completely appalled at this sorry state of affairs.

The Wall of Terminal Weirdness

~~Transgressionalism~~ Transgressionism* is facing an impending cataclysm, but most are currently oblivious to the inevitable collapse. Today, if you want to be significant, you have to out-weird Zaha. But to be significant in 5 years, you've got to out-weird the architect that out-weirded Zaha. This death spiral of Transgressionalism will eventually reach the Wall of Terminal Weirdness, where things cannot get any stranger. Let's hope it happens soon, so we can get on with the business of remaking our world in a sustainable way.

~Steve Mouzon

*Ann Daigle pointed out in a listserv discussion that the simpler "Transgressionism" was a better term than "Transgressionalism." I agree, and have changed all of the instances except the title of the post, since that might upset the search engines.

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Please have a look at this one... it proposes a provocative new way of looking at Modernism that sheds a lot of light on recent developments. I'd really appreciate hearing everyone's thoughts on this... please comment away!

Dec 6, 2011 5:40pm

John Reagan · Partner at Reagan Purcell Architects

Steve, thanks for the clarity.

Dec 6, 2011 5:58pm

Ann Daigle · Works at CityBuilding Exchange

It will stick: the new modernism is Transgressionalism. I would suggest that architecture lost its way when it began experimenting with the limits of engineering (rather than beauty) and architects stopped stamping their own buildings. Now that anything seems possible physically, what is possible emotionally? Like most of the media culture around it, architecture's goal (for some) is to transgress. Thank you for this brilliant definition, Steve!

Dec 6, 2011 6:17pm

Michael David Rouchell · Architect at Williams Architects

I think the term "Narcisism" best describes the current trend in modern architecture. It's buildings that are all about themselves, and unable to coexist with other buildings in an urban context. Besides uniqueness, modernists were discouraged from designing anythin other than iconic structures.

Dec 6, 2011 6:20pm

Sam Lima · Graduate Architect at Kil Architecture & Planning

Great post Steve! Your explanation of, and nomenclature for, mainstream contemporary architecture is spot on. It is obviously counterproductive to keep chasing both the next unprecedented design innovation while at the same time attempting to refine a sustainable system of architecture.

Dec 6, 2011 6:31pm

David Greusel · Principal Architect at Convergence Design

Vigorous agreement...because architecture lies so near to the Art world, architecture's gatekeepers view transgression as a virtue. Unfortunately, unlike Art, buildings have to stand up and keep the rain out, which isn't a good brief for transgression.

Dec 6, 2011 7:04pm

Hazel Borys · Managing Principal at PlaceMakers

Very interesting ideas, Steve, many of which I agree with. Particularly on the context-sensitive green building and urbanism fronts -- clearly what we've been doing there in the last 50 years is untenable. However, I'm going to have to argue with some key points, including: "Artists today are considered 'mere illustrators' if they don't challenge our core beliefs." While many artists may challenge us to think more broadly, I'd say most are looking to resonate with our deepest beliefs. They're looking for the reverberation that comes with striking a chord. At the extreme end of that spectrum, if you look at perhaps the greatest illustrator of our age, Norman Rockwell, he's being re-embraced as someone who does precisely that: http://www.vanityfair.com/.../2009/11/norman-rockwell-200911 And his traveling shows this year and next are a testament to that. More next weekend in Oberlin! Thanks for writing!

Dec 6, 2011 7:50pm

Scott Botel-Barnard · Works at Scott Botel-Barnard, Architect

Thanks Steve. Sadly this is not a mere style that will go away. It is an "ism", a belief system. Neophytes are taught what is true, rejecting the "old religion". Once they were going to save the world. Giving up on that, you challenge, you question, you provoke, you get weird.

Dec 6, 2011 8:07pm

Benjamin Glunz · CEO at Anguleris Technologies

Thank you for articulating this in such a clear, straight forward way Steve!

Dec 6, 2011 9:55pm

Richard Bono · Owl Valley Studio at Richard J. Bono, Architect

The comment: "That's different.", is considered by many designers to be the goal of design....a virtue. Differentness and originality have been the sine qua non of art and architecture. Romain Gary's "individual masterpiece" becomes the standard.
But think for a minute, how this meshes against, that other imperative of our age. This is the industrial imperative of mass production where everything is expressed in SAMENESS. Like Charlie Chaplin stuck in the machinery of modern culture, humanity loses his individuality, trapped in the require of the large industrial or even post industrial organization.
It strikes me that the more modern man has felt powerless in the sameness of modern life, the more he or she will demand his of her individuality. This has become the Sisyphean bargain.
To break this pattern, will take a new cultural idea. The miasma of modern life...the growth forever imperative of modern economics.....in my opinion needs to be transformed into a more beneficial paradigm.
I suggest that the idea stewardship is the most complete answer to the impasse. Yes, beauty many be a part of this, but beauty is a possible and hoped for result, not the underlying conceptual framework. I propose that stewardship will be the central driver of a sustainable urban and rural culture.

Dec 7, 2011 8:33am

Sandy Sorlien · Works at Fairmount Water Works

Steve, good pictures of the New Orleans "displacements". The architects should be jailed for civic abuse.

Dec 7, 2011 9:06am

Nancy Bruning · Author, Founder and CEO at Nancy Bruning's Nancercize

Steve, This is a really interesting observation. It seems to me it crosses over to many fields, including my own. Almost daily there's a new exercise or diet program touting ever more ridiculous equipment--things to pull, lift, toss, etc.; food to eat, or not, to excess. Why are we wasting resources on health clubs and fitness gizmos when we have all we need, for most of the time, right outside our doors?

Dec 11, 2011 11:39am

Geoffrey Jason Hall · Ottawa, Ontario

Steve, I think this is one of your best posts, and provides the kind of clarity to this argument, which I think people like James Kunstler have been trying to articulate for some time. Well done!

Dec 21, 2011 8:10pm

Commodore Bob · Works at Commodore Bob's Yacht Club

http://www.witoldrybczynski.com/architecture/too-many-words/
A similar elaboration of Transgressivism, possibly helpful. What do you think?

May 6, 2014 1:06pm

Duncan McRoberts · Owner at Duncan McRoberts Associates, LLC

steve, I like the sentence about Transgressionists cloaking themselves in science - and for those who are using a high tech pseudo scientific meta language - you're right - true science would gawk at this...since true science would point to the enduringness found in cities of stone

Jan 2, 2015 4:07pm

1,263+

God is in the Details

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Guest post by Alvin Holm

The Buildings We Love are the Ones With Ornament

Ornament is an act of love – or at least a token of esteem. We embellish what we revere. We adorn that which we love. We do not decorate the hero, returning from the wars, to make him pretty – we decorate him to pay him honor. Ornament is deep stuff, greatly misunderstood in recent years.

The reason that we see so little ornament in buildings of our modern culture is that we do not love them. Or perhaps we do not love them because they are unlovely, unadorned. Nor do we think it’s nice to love them – that is, to have a visceral, sentimental, soulful relationship to them – because they are after all products of our intellect, rationally conceived, cost-effective, piously functional, sleek, sensible and cool.

But recently <note from Steve: this was written in 1996, about a conference in the fall of 1995> I participated in a heavily attended two-day conference in New York on ornament in classical architecture, and that can only mean that things are changing fast.

I can no more fully understand the return of the classical – with its standard elements of columns, capitals, pediments, entablatures, and an assortment of ornamental motifs like leaves, rosettes, and garlands – than I could comprehend the loss of it. But I believe that it accompanies what Deepak Chopra has called “the final cataclysmic overthrow of the myth of materialism.” I assure you this is happening, and a larger, older, richer paradigm is taking the stage. (And the new science is on our side this time. More on that later.)

Ornament does many things for the article it graces. It may lighten or give weight, it may reveal or disguise, it may suggest usage or mystify. Ornament gives value and imparts meaning. These are all worthy roles, but it is important to remember that primary relationship between the maker and the artifact and the ornament as a badge of honor and affection.

There is a large and growing school of psychology that deals now with issues of the soul. James Hillman and Robert Sardello, for instance, would agree that ornament in this sense is good for the soul of the maker as well as for the soul of the user or the viewer, to say nothing of the soul of the artifact itself. When the moderns stripped ornament away, much of the soul in architecture was lost. And with it went the soul of our cities.

James Gleick in his popular book on chaos theory writes that to Benoit Mandelbrot, a contemporary mathematician whose concepts are affecting many fields, “the epitome of the Euclidean sensibility outside mathematics was the architecture of the Bauhaus…spare, orderly linear, reductionist, geometrical.” To Mandelbrot and his followers, the failure of modernism is clear: Simple geometric shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

“A geometrical shape has a scale,” Gleick writes, “a characteristic size. To Mandelbrot, art that satisfies lacks scale…A Beaux Arts paragon like the Paris Opera has no scale because it has every scale. An observer seeing the building from any distance finds some detail that draws the eye. The composition changes as one approaches and new elements of the structure come into play.” So here we have New Science in praise of the old Beaux Arts.

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-centrury mystic, a nun, a writer, painter, and composer of beautiful music. In a poem about creativity she wrote:

As the creator loves his creation

So the creation loves the creator,

Creation, of course, was fashioned to be adorned,

To be showered, to be gifted with the love of the creator.

The entire world has been embraced by this kiss.

This affectionate reciprocity of which she writes is largely missing from our designed environment today. Ornament is that kiss of the maker that marks the artifact for its own sake and then for the sake of the user.

Architecture begins as a ritual of celebration and must continue again in that spirit if we are to enter the 21st century with honor and grace. This is a bone-deep truth that is today again rising to the surface. A surface we may now embellish to our hearts’ content.

~Alvin Holm

Alvin Holm is a Philadelphia architect practicing in the classical tradition.

Note from Steve to Al:

I was in the audience on the South side of Manhattan's Washington Square that day, and your address changed my career. Previously it seemed that the only architects who cared for such things were just a few authors, but here was a practicing architect that could articulate things I could only feel at the time. Al, you laid out the ways that architecture could take on an ennobling role with clarity I had not heard theretofore, and with humility rare in our profession. You literally changed my direction, and I thank you for it now. You continue to be an inspiration unto this day.

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Alvin Holm's New York lecture in 1995 changed the direction of my career. Read his Original Green guest post, where he summarizes the lecture. Really thought-provoking stuff, IMO.

Dec 1, 2011 8:59am

Jo-Anne Peck · Co Owner at Historic Shed

I like the concept of a building offering different, but equally desirable levels of composition, detail, and ornament from varying distances. Many contemporary buildings lose any and all interest (if they have any) as you get closer to them.

Dec 1, 2011 9:10am

Bill Dawers · Editor at Hissing lawns

I wonder sometimes if design methods and models contribute to the sterility of so many modern facades. When architecture students are creating their scale models and working on designs on a computer screen, it's pretty much impossible to design intricate ornamentation as a core of the project. Ornamentation then becomes merely an add-on -- and an expensive one at that.

Dec 4, 2011 10:57pm

John David Bray Jr · Atlanta, Georgia

I agree with all this.

Dec 5, 2011 7:29am

Andrew Watt · Creative at Watermountain Studios

I have to say, the beauty of ornament lies in the role that so many people have to play. In an unornamented building, the architect is the only player in the game... in an ornamented building, the bricklayers and the masons and the woodcarvers and the tin ceiling makers all have important dimensions to add to the final construction. That makes the final work more loved — because more people have loved it into being.

Dec 6, 2011 10:30pm

1,547+

The Charlottetown Challenge

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We sorely need a forward-looking town and its surrounding region to step up and remake themselves as a world-class model of true sustainability from the level of the region to the level of the building. I've just returned from Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island in Canada, and have high hopes that the citizens there just might transform themselves into just such a place.

A few other places are making promising noises, such as Oberlin, Ohio and Greensburg, Kansas. But while the people behind them are completely well-intentioned, most of those noises are predictably about Gizmo Green measures, which are based on the premise that we can achieve sustainability with nothing more than better equipment and better materials. The reason that's predictable is because Gizmo Green dominates sustainability discussions to such a degree that most people don't realize there's anything else.

Charlottetown side street

But there is. And Gizmo Green will soon be exposed for what it really is: only a very small part of the formula for real sustainability. Here's why: We are seeing a massive population migration in many developing countries from low-impact agrarian settings into the city. We need approximately 1 car per citizen in the US. If the two most populous countries, China and India, do over twice as well as the US in their need for cars in the city, there will be over a billion cars on the road just in those two countries in a few years that don't even exist today! It doesn't matter what you think of of the reality of Peak Oil because this is Economics 101: supply and demand. Even if world oil supply keeps increasing at the same rate as it has over the past ten years, demand will quickly outstrip supply and prices will skyrocket. The recent flirtation with $5/gallon is only a prelude. Expect $20/gallon and beyond not so many years from now.

bright end to a dark day?

The speed with which this will happen is impossible to predict, but if it happens quickly enough, people will be unprepared. Many who live furthest from work will discover that they simply can't afford to live there anymore. This already happened in pockets of the US when gas first reached $5/gallon in 2008. But at $10, and then $20/gallon, many more of us will find our very livelihoods at stake. Sit down today and chart out your Web of Daily Life. Then ask youself how many parts of that web would be clipped at $10, then at $20/gallon. Could you afford to drive to work? To the grocery? Jane Jacobs and Jim Kunstler could be right… we could be in for dark days ahead.

When times are dark, people can fall off the edge into all sorts of Kunstlerian terror if they have no hope. But if there's something that gives them hope, then they can stay the course to a better future even if it's clear there is much work to be done. This is why it is so crucial to have at least one town and its surrounding region as a shining example of how to remake a place in highly sustainable fashion.

Seaside's post office

Seaside, Florida is a single little town built on just 60 acres of Florida Panhandle scrub oak and sand. Before Seaside, the only thing on the "Redneck Riviera" were condos on the beach, with T-shirt shops, gas stations, and liquor stores on the landward side of the highway. Land north of there was essentially worthless. Seaside began with a most audacious proposition expressed in the first marketing slogan: "Come Build a Town With Us." I remember seeing those billboards for the first time and being stirred nearly to my core. "Nobody builds towns today," I thought. But they did.

Here's what else they did: Because Seaside was a vacation town rather than a first-home community, it was able to spread its revolutionary thinking broadly. People came and hung their car keys on the hook on the wall. After several days of not needing to drive anywhere, they said "I really want to live like this." So some of them went back home and worked to build neighborhoods in their hometowns that were compact, mixed-use, and walkable. Because of the single great model of Seaside, a movement was born. They call it the New Urbanism. Today, there are thousands of New Urbanist neighborhoods, hamlets, villages, and towns around the world. But it all began with the single great model town of Seaside.

Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

How does a great model emerge? Several things must happen. First, it must be located somewhere that people want to travel on vacation. Boise might be the most sustainable place in the world, but only those who are living there are traveling there on business will ever see it because Boise isn't your normal vacation spot. Because sustainability is something we must spread broadly, we need as many eyes as possible on the great model place. So it really must pass the Tourist Test. Places like this are most effective when surrounded by great natural beauty, like high on a picturesque mountain or by the sea shore.

Charlottetown corner

The next requirement is that the place must be small enough to be easily perceived. You really need to be able to drive around not only the town, but the entire surrounding region, in a day or less. New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe did an excellent plan for the Salt Lake City region several years ago. It won a number of awards. But the only way you can see the whole thing in a day is from a satellite, or from the moon. That doesn't work as a great model because the great majority of people can't comprehend it.

Seaside is a great model of a single town, and also a single neighborhood, but it's not the center of a sustainable region. And even if it were, the edges bleed out into southern Alabama and southwest Georgia in not so much as a whimper. You really need a place that is bounded decisively by natural features. Prince Edward Island in Canada meets all these requirements. As does Beaufort, South Carolina and its surrounding county, bounded by creeks, wetlands, and river.

Sir John A. MacDonald, the first Prime Minister
of Canada, immortalized in bronze. He headed up
the meetings in Charlottetown that led to the
eventual formation of Canada. It's not unusual to see

both citizens and visitors sitting down to

have a conversation with him.

The place also needs to have a great story to tell. Because the new story of their sustainability makeover needs to be built on a foundation of older stories that resonate broadly with those who visit. Why? Because if the model is to give us hope, we need to feel that these are townspeople who are like us in at least a few important ways. If they seem superhuman, it's easy to think "we could never do that." Plus, if the town has no interesting stories, would you really be interested in vacationing there in the first place?

This is really important, because most people must be enticed to the place without knowing the full sustainability story because while some people are eco-tourists, the majority of people don't vacation in a place solely because it's green.

Charlottetown church building

Charlottetown and its surround region (Prince Edward Island,) unlike 95% of North American places, meets all of the requriements. It's small enough to be perceived without a ticket on the space shuttle. People from all over the region (and beyond) come there to vacation in summertime. It has an excellent town core. It has great stories to tell, starting with being the site of Canada's initial confederation. It has great sustainability stories to tell from our time as well, although those haven't been finished yet. It has a fascinating culture of creatives that form an arts community far stronger than the town's population might suggest.

I spoke in Beaufort last fall and threw down the sustainability gauntlet: "There will be a town and surrounding region someday which will choose to be a world-class model of true sustainability. That's not in question. The only question is this: will it be Beaufort?" I ask Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island the same question today: "Will it be you?" We need you. Few towns were founded in regions where they could even dream of doing this. But you were. You could hold to the status quo and miss it entirely. Or you could be the shining example by the sea. Will you answer the call? We need you!

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Somebody's gotta step up. Somewhere, a city needs to team with their surrounding region to create a shining model of true sustainability that goes far beyond Gizmo Green. Here's my challenge to Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, which mirrored a similar gauntlet thrown down to Beaufort last fall. Who's going to step up?

Nov 28, 2011 9:24pm

Michael David Rouchell · Architect at Williams Architects

A large event or a festival would help destinations, such as Boise, that are not normal vacation spots to draw more tourists.

Nov 29, 2011 3:16pm

Andrew Watt · Creative at Watermountain Studios

As a kid, I passed through Charlottetown on a bike trip across eastern Canada. I thought it was amazing then, but I'd forgotten it. Thanks for reminding me, and thanks for reminding me why I love Middletown, CT.

Dec 6, 2011 10:31pm

Hazel Borys · Managing Principal at PlaceMakers

Not sure how I missed this post. Thanks, Steve, for the critical points, and beautiful photos of Charlottetown, PEI.

Mar 19, 2012 10:57am

713+

The Bed & Breakfast Bonus

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Few realize that a neighborhood bed & breakfast can be an extraordinary money machine for its surrounding neighborhood. With the McMansion Era grinding to a sickening halt post-Meltdown, most people are looking for new ways to make every dollar count. Consider the heret0f0re-required guest room: if you build a guest suit complete with bedroom, bath, and closet, you'll be hard-pressed to design it to pre-Meltdown suburban standards in less than 250 square feet. Construction costs for well-built homes are approaching or have exceeded $200 per square foot in many parts of the country. That means the guest suite may add up to $50,000 or more to the cost of the home!

Think back for a moment - how many nights has someone slept in your guest room this year? Probably not so many, if you are like most of us. Today, how can we tolerate throwing away $50,000 on something that is rarely used? Most of us can't.

That's where the bed & breakfast comes in: if there were a bed & breakfast in your neighborhood center, you'd have no need for a guest room, would you? Guests staying a 2-3 block walk away would still feel close to you, but more independent, and they likely feel like they aren't burdening you… so they might even come visit you more often. And you would likely feel less intruded upon, so you would welcome those more frequent visits.

You might even offer to pay for their nights at the bed & breakfast. If so, you would almost certainly save a lot of money over building the guest room. Financing that $50,000, plus paying property taxes and insurance would definitely run $500 per month or more in most places. That means you would have to have a large number of visitors each year to pay more for the bed & breakfast than for the guest room… assuming you're paying to put them up in the first place. Most people who do would save thousands per year… quite a bonus!

Think for a moment of the cumulative bonus: A neighborhood of 1,000 homes, for example, would save $50 million in construction costs on those homes! There are few other things a neighborhood can do to save so much money.

But what about existing places? As we work to repair sprawl by gradually transforming sprawling subdivisions into sustainable neighborhoods that are compact, mixed-use, and walkable, there will be several opportunities:

1. We'll be adding businesses where today there are nothing but houses. Normally, we should look first for the fabric in the subdivision that most needs to be healed - maybe where there are a few vacant lots. It is here that a bed & breakfast would fit in most easily.

2. Making sprawl sustainable also means making the existing fabric more compact. We do this by allowing the existing homeowners to build accessory units on their lots and rent them, or actually subdivide their lots and sell the new units. In 60 years of home-owning, you're likely to have kids at home for only about 1/3 of that time… if you ever have kids in the first place. So roughly 2/3 of the homeowning public would be fine with only one bedroom if there were a B&B nearby. This means the existing homeowners might be able to build more than one accessory structure if their lot size allowed, making more money.

3. Once the B&B starts operating, homeowners in the existing larger homes are freed up to use their guest suites for something else if they like. A home office is one obvious use for that suite, and you likely can think of others as well.

We'll talk more about other businesses that should be added to help transform sprawling subdivisions into neighborhoods, and also how to go about sprawl repair in ways where everyone benefits. But for now, what's not to love about a neighborhood B&B?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

A bed & breakfast in each neighborhood center can save tens of millions in construction costs of neighborhood homes by eliminating guest rooms... what do you think?

Nov 17, 2011 8:24pm

Nancy Bruning · Author, Founder and CEO at Nancy Bruning's Nancercize

And it prevents that fishy smell...

Nov 17, 2011 8:27pm

Kathleen Madeiros de Monicault · Works at Self-Employed

Urbanites can support this, we like using" Airbnb" to rent space for guests.

Nov 17, 2011 8:58pm

R John Anderson · Principal at Anderson|Kim A+UD

I think hotels are great for eliminating the guest room. I like the idea of small Inns that don't have to be part of the Hilton/Hampton reservation system, but the economics are tough. I'd love to see homeowners have a lot of flexibility with what they can do in their own building. I don't care for B&B's myself. They are that awkward zone in between a nice anonymous hotel and staying as a house guest with people you actually know. and I don't care for egg bake after staying for 4 days in a B&B on Bainbridge Island a couple years back.

Nov 17, 2011 11:46pm

Terry E. Mitchell · President (title) at Momark Development LLC

My downtown urban project did something of the sort... We have four guest suites that serve 167 residences. good idea.

Nov 18, 2011 1:03am

384+

SmartDwelling I - Breeze Chimneys

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There's much more to SmartDwelling I than the things I wrote about two years ago when it was published in the Wall Street Journal's Green House of the Future story. Really cool stuff is afoot with Project:SmartDwelling, so this will be the first of several new posts looking at SmartDwelling elements.

SmartDwelling I with the two breeze chimneys at the top

top view of Breeze Chimney

There are two Breeze Chimneys on SmartDwelling I, which was designed for the US Gulf Coast region. Because it's a land by the sea, I decided to use seafaring materials for the Breeze Chimneys. As we'll see in a moment, Breeze Chimneys in other parts of the country could be made out of other materials like sheet metal. The framework is built of small spars, like those which frame sails on sailboats. The spars could either be made of wood or fiberglass. The shroud is sail cloth stretched over the spars. This assembly is attached to a ring at the top of the chimney that rotates freely. Here's how it works:

section through Breeze Chimney showing air flow

The Breeze Chimney is designed to turn into the wind, like a weathervane. The open end of the Breeze Chimney is always leeward as a result. There's a phenomenon in physics known as the Venturi Effect, and it works like this: air moving past an opening tends to pull gases or liquids out of the opening. If you're old enough to remember cars before fuel injection, then it was the Venturi Effect that made the carburetors work.

Breeze chimneys behave the same way. They have another thing working for them as well: the Thermal Chimney Effect. Because hot air rises when given the opportunity, hot air in a tube like a chimney flue will rise out of the tube, pulling other air in behind it from the room below. To start a breeze chimney, all you need to do is to open a window somewhere in the house.

Pulling in air almost as warm as the air exhausted by the Breeze Chimney wouldn't do much good, so you need to find a window around the house or shop where the air is coolest.

The best place would be under a grove of trees or big shrubs. Not only do the leaves shade the area around the window, but they also cool the air even further by giving off water vapor. It can easily be 10-15 degrees cooler under a shady grove or in a thicket.

A louvered verandah like the ones found throughout the Bahamas would be good because the louvers prevent the sun from getting into the porch and warming it up. A porch on the shady side of the house would work equally well.

A breeze chimney works best in late afternoon or early evening, when the air has cooled a bit from the heat of the day. Porches on the eastern side of the building would be coolest at this time of day. There's no reason you have to use the same window, however… you could experiment to see what works best for you. But in any case, it's the act of opening the window that starts the Breeze Chimney's operation because without replacement air pulling into the house, the Breeze Chimney can't pull air out. So think of it as an attic fan that doesn't require any electricity.

side view of breeze chimney

What about storms? Wouldn't the sail cloth tear in high winds, flooding the house? Clearly, there needs to be some way of shutting the Breeze Chimney in a storm, or when you're going to be away from home for awhile. See the heavy black line on the right side of this drawing? It's meant to represent a spring metal arc that holds the spars up. There would be two cords coming down the chimney. Pull one of the cords, and that pulls the spring metal arc over to the left, collapsing the shroud. Pull the other one, and it pops back up. I haven't yet built a Breeze Chimney, so I'm sure it would require a bit of tinkering, but that's the general idea of how it should work.

SmartDwelling II

The house above was designed for a competition we never expected to win. It was intended as a critique of the Gizmo Green competition program and, just as I expected, the jurors didn't view it very kindly. I'll blog more about it later… my point of showing it here is to illustrate how differently Breeze Chimneys can be designed.

This house was designed for Dallas. A century ago, you could find pivoting sheet metal roof vents all over the Midwest and Southwest. So I designed this Breeze Chimney to be built of the same material. There are only two differences between this Breeze Chimney and the old pivoting roof vents. First, it's a good bit larger than the old ones so it can ventilate the whole house. Second, the old pivoting roof vents usually vented the attic. In this design, there's a chimney (concealed by the roof) that connects the cap to the living spaces below.

~Steve Mouzon

The Schooner Bay Miracle

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Score one for Schooner Bay! The eye of Hurricane Irene came right across DPZ's new town of Schooner Bay in the Bahamas late last week, and except for a few outdoor ceiling fans, the buildings sustained no damage at all. Sustained winds were 125 miles per hour, with gusts up to 130. This is all the more remarkable because of the way Schooner Bay is being built… it's following patterns of ancient wisdom that are illegal in every hurricane zone in the United States.

Years ago, when Seaside was hit by its first hurricane (Opal) and sustainaed almost no damage, hurricane experts called it the "Seaside Miracle," and studied it for several years thereafter. Opal's winds were probably 100 miles per hour at Seaside. It'll be obvious shortly why, beyond just Irene's higher wind speed, this should be considered the Schooner Bay Miracle and studied as well.

All of the photos in this blog post were taken by Schooner Bay staff less than 24 hours after the hurricane passed through. You can still see Irene's angry waves breaking against the ironshore in the image above.

For a bit of perspective, Irene brought great devastation to other parts of the Bahamas, including this image taken just a few miles away from Schooner Bay at Elbow Cay. As you can see, two of the houses have been completely destroyed and washed out to sea. The cause of destruction here was due to a very common error of oceanfront construction: building on the dunes. Schooner Bay took a completely different approach, heavily planting the first dune with native dune vegetation to strengthen it, then building a secondary dune with material dredged from the harbor. No houses have been built above this second dune yet, but it wouldn't have mattered, because the second dune was completely untouched by Irene. The seawall at the harbour handled the storm surge in textbook fashion with no damage whatsoever.

Schooner Bay's architecture is an important part of the story as well, as much for what they're not doing as for what they are doing.

What's the first thing you think of when people talk about hurricane construction? Probably the Miami-Dade hurricane code windows, right? Guess what? Schooner Bay isn't using them. Quite the opposite: because of high Bahamian import duties, they're making all their own windows onsite!

So how did these homemade windows manage to withstand Irene's fury with not one broken pane? The same way homemade Bahamian windows have withstood countless storms before her for centuries: the homeowners simply shut their shutters. Schooner Bay shutters are typically solid instead of louvered, so they can take a serious lick from wind-borne debris, protecting the windows behind them, which remain untouched by the storm.

Schooner Bay houses with the outer bands of
Hurricane Irene receding to the north, headed for

the US mid-Atlantic shore

The windows are only the beginning. All houses built to date at Schooner Bay have been built of poured concrete. You can see several under construction in this photo, most with the concrete structure still exposed because the stucco work hasn't been done yet. Reinforced concrete is quite simply the strongest way to build. And many buildings in the Bahamas have been built of concrete or masonry for a very long time, for this same reason. But there are wood cottages in the Bahamas as well that have survived countless storms, so Town Founder Orjan Lindroth is looking into the best ways of building strong wood cottages to complement the predominant concrete construction.

Take a look at the roofs in the image above. See how most of them are hipped, and how they're built at a simlar pitch? Hurricane experts now tell us that hips are the strongest roof forms because each roof plane supports its neighbors. And pitches between 8:12 and 9:12 strike a balance between shallower roofs that fail in uplift and steeper roofs that fail in overturning. Gables are permitted, but only where the house is built of concrete or the roof span is very short.

It's interesting to note that Bahamians knew all these things long before "hurricane experts" ever existed. Their system was very simple: when you crawl out of a house that's been destroyed and see your neighbor's house that's still standing, you say "I'm going to rebuild like that!" And so the best ways of building emerge naturally in a place from centuries of testing into something I call a "living tradition."

Well before construction began at Schooner Bay, Orjan commissioned a new kind of pattern book to guide the architecture. Until then, pattern books had focused on random collections of historical styles. In short, they were necessarily more about fashion than function. But A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] begins each pattern by telling homeowners and builders not only what to do, but also "We do this because…" In doing so, it opens up the rationale behind each pattern, allowing everyone to think again… and allowing architecture to live again. And crafting an entire language of architecture around what works best for this people, and in this place, creates an architecture with far more meaning than mere style and fashion, and one imprinted indelibly with the region of the world it inhabits.

The benefits of living traditions are legion. For example, many of the construction workers at Schooner Bay were fishermen just one year ago. But because they weren't just told what to do but also why to do it ("We do this because…") they caught on quickly and now perform better than many long-time construction workers that would have to have been untrained and then retrained in this new living tradition.

All of this sounded like really cool (possibly even Utopian) theory: building a highly sustainable place with fishermen based on ancient wisdom; using homemade windows in a hurricane zone. But now, the theory has passed the test of a strong Category 3 storm. What can be more sustainable than keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future? This is real sustainability.

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Keith H Carter · Owner at Self-Employed

Great info and changes need to be made to codes accordingly!

Sep 1, 2011 3:08pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Check out this post on the Schooner Bay Miracle, about the new town of Schooner Bay in the Bahamas that took the worst Hurricane Irene had to offer with essentially no damage. And they did it using construction methods that would have been completely illegal in US hurricane zones: no houses on stilts, no hurricane windows, etc. We really need to reconsider how we build.

Sep 1, 2011 4:39pm

Christopher John Sparks · Proposal Manager at TENICA and Associates LLC

Another great article, Steve. Keep 'em coming!

Sep 1, 2011 9:33pm

Sunny Elmore Tucker · Harrisburg High School

Oh my gosh. I knew Fred when I was a kid. A wonderful man! Small world.

Sep 1, 2011 10:45pm

John Olson · Director of Urban Design & Landscape at Altitude Land Consultants, Inc

Fantastic as always Steve! Designing to the climate & context of the place should be the top priority. Glad to hear new urbanism is proving its architecture durability at Schooner Bay.

Sep 2, 2011 9:03am

Hazel Borys · Managing Principal at PlaceMakers

Learning from wisdom that works -- old and new -- is sustainability. The green wash will wash away.

Sep 2, 2011 4:39pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Here's Schooner Bay's account of Hurricane Irene:
http://schoonerbaybahamas.com/pdf/SEP2011.pdf
By failing to damage any of the buildings even as the eye passed over Schooner Bay at its strongest, Irene vindicated the Original Green principles at the backbone of this new town.

Sep 15, 2011 11:42am

2,430+

Retirement vs. the Pursuit of Meaning

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The idea of retirement is undergoing its biggest change since the modern-day version was invented by Germany's Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in 1883, and today's revision has profound implications for the shape of towns, villages, and neighborhoods. Retirement, for more than a century, has been advertised as a time to play… catch up on your golf game, or give tennis a try. Go for long walks in the countryside with your sweetie. We all know the drill, and it was very enticing. But there was a dark side nobody wanted to talk about. But first, let's look at how we got there…

The Era of the Company

Work was radically redefined at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Previously, most who had escaped servitude or slavery engaged in crafts or trades plied most often from their home or workshop. If they were successful, they might employ a few others who worked for them for wages, but the modern-day model of most of the workforce being employed by business or government is only about two hundred years old. During this Era of the Company, the corporation was the centerpiece of the economic lives of most of us. The virtues of this era were quality, speed, and economy… or "better, faster, cheaper," if you prefer. And two-thirds of that formula (faster and cheaper) was most often accomplished directly on the backs of the workers.

The result was a workplace that wasn't expected to be enjoyable, and it certainly wasn't anything approaching fun. If you're a farmer scraping out an existence on your own piece of land, then you do what you have to do in order to survive. But if you're working for The Man, then it's much easier to externalize the grind of working, and to get very unhappy about it. Roughly a century of labor wars ensued, until The Man finally wised up and realized that workers were much more docile when they received regular doses of play to go along with all that work. Today, the weekend is conceived as a time of play that compensates us for the workweek.

The Long Play at the End of the Day

It's easy to see how business and government came to conceive of retirement as a really long weekend: If we endure the workweek to get to the weekend, then maybe we'll endure a tiresome career for the promise of playing for the rest of their lives. It worked quite well… until now. But the sad reality is that the Long Play isn't usually so long for most of us, giving way to the dark days when, in those ancient words, "… I have no pleasure in them…" The unspoken dark side we all eventually discover is that the Long Play is just a sugar-coated prelude to death.

The End of an Era

The Era of the Company is jerking unsteadily to a halt today. The company as a vehicle for doing business won't end, of course, but companies are not going to be nearly so central to our lives as they have been. If you doubt that, try striking up a conversation with someone about your company (whether you're employee or management.) Chances are, they'll listen for all of three seconds. This is because we've all been vaccinated by spam, and have learned to hit the Delete key with lightning speed and to tune out anything that sounds remotely like a commercial. As a result, advertising simply doesn't work anymore.

The Age of the Idea

The sunset of the Era of the Company is occurring just as the Age of the Idea is dawning. While nobody wants to hear about your company anymore, they'll listen for hours if you've got a great idea. This may well be the biggest change in how we work that we've seen in the two hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Even the virtues of business are changing, from quality, speed, and economy to patience, generosity, and connectedness.

It should come as no surprise that this massive change will likely have a huge impact on the idea of retirement. While the full transformation isn't clear yet, it appears that we just might be dispensing with the illusion of playing "happily ever after" and replacing it with something more substantial.

The Search for Significance

Baby Boomers have just begun reaching 65, and will continue to do so for the next couple decades. This largest-ever generation that brought us Woodstock, the Summer of Love, and "agonizing reappraisal" was never content with just following the rules and punching the clock. And as they navigate further down the middle passage of life they, more than others that came before them, are looking for meaning in the time that remains. And that remaining time is likely to be significantly longer and spent in generally better health than either their parents or grandparents experienced. Second and even third careers will be a reality for millions of Boomers. Many realize that their first career might have been long on income but short on meaning, and vow to not make that mistake again. The pursuit of significance is likely to be top priority for them in the new work that they choose, even if their nest eggs have been badly battered by the Meltdown. Rather than retirement's prelude to death, these second and third careers are a continuation of life. Actually, they're more than that; they represent opportunities to be more alive than many Boomers ever were in their first careers. This time, they're determined to leave a legacy as they find deeper meaning in their new work.

Setting the Stage for Significance

Corporate office parks in the suburbs may have been the backdrops for countless first careers, but they will be abandoned to cries of "never again!" by almost all Boomers who once worked there because settings for unfulfilling experiences are seldom tolerated when seeking for the opposite. Instead, they will be looking for places that foster their search for significance rather than impede it.

Meaningful work depends on a number of things to which the setting can contribute. While some people are fortunate enough to know exactly what sort of work they may find meaningful, others must begin with a period of learning, and anyone pursuing significance overlays learning and work to some degree. Sometimes learning is structured, like going back to school. Other times, we simply learn things from the places we inhabit or the where we travel. In almost every case, however, meaningful work is likely to be more creative than the daily grind of the first career. Why choose something more mind-numbing than your first career instead of retirement? Most don't. They join the Creative Class instead. We'll take a look at various types of meaning these Boomers might be pursuing in greater detail in a subsequent post. But for now, let's consider the general characteristics of places that might best foster those second and third careers:

Vibrant walkable places where you can walk to many things are far better at stimulating creativity than the blandness of an office park. Because almost all second careers are more creative than the first, places like this with a large "cool factor" have a huge leg up on those that don't. Meaning found in unplanned ways is most fertile in places where people can get out and walk around on a whim, running into people, sights, or situations they didn't expect. Trips by car aren't usually quite so spontaneous. Leaving a legacy by purveying meaning to others can occur in many settings, but that meaning is more likely to spread broadly and unpredictably when the purveyor of meaning works in an accessible place like a storefront rather than being tucked away in an institution lost somewhere in sprawl. Connections between people responsible for so much of the transfer of meaning simply are more likely and vibrant in places that foster the connection of people. Sprawl, in contrast, wraps us in a couple thousand pounds of steel and glass known as the car, making the most common interactions on the highway the shouting that accompanies road rage. Which type of place would you prefer to work on that day when you finally have a choice?

~Steve Mouzon

Legacy Comments

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

Check out my latest Original Green blog posts. It raises a number of questions about what you want to do once your first career is over.

Aug 17, 2011 4:25pm

Grant Humphreys · The Town Founder at Carlton Landing

Love the article Steve. Good insight and very fitting for Carlton Landing. I reposted onto my Facebook.

Aug 17, 2011 10:16pm

David High · Works at National Security Administration

Recently I've been thinking about how unquestioningly HR folks use the term "work-life balance". The term seems to imply that you don't have "life" when you are are at "work". I like your suggestion that we should be alive while at work!

Aug 17, 2011 10:20pm

Hazel Borys · Managing Principal at PlaceMakers

Well said, Steve!

Aug 18, 2011 11:44am

Robie J. Wood, Architect

Very interesting take. I'll be forwarding this to my parents.

Aug 18, 2011 12:03pm

Wanda Whitley Mouzon · Project Manager/Designer at Mouzon Design

Very insightful Steve! You really have this "nailed" I believe. Being a Baby Boomer myself, I can so relate to this! Going back to school after the age of 50; seeking something more creative to do; appreciating more and more the dynamic community that we live in, South Beach. And what is cool is that I feel very invigorated by the thought of honing skills in creative areas to like painting, drawing and design. This is a great time in life really!

Aug 18, 2011 12:33pm

Kaid Benfield · Senior Counsel for Environmental Strategies at PlaceMakers

Great post, Steve.

Aug 18, 2011 2:44pm

Chris Bradshaw · Oberlin College

Very sage insights, Steve.
I am into my 16th year of the 'second career.' Very satisfying. The point isn't whether we look to the weekend or 'retirement' for our reward, but that the work itself integrates the satisfaction and meaning as we go along. When we are older, there is no time for 'delayed gratification.'
Success in one's second career depends in part on starting it as a hobby before the first career ends.
Chris Bradshaw, Ottawa.
former leader, Green Party of Canada (part of second career).

Aug 19, 2011 10:42am

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

I just put up The Schooner Bay Miracle, about the new town of Schooner Bay in the Bahamas that took the worst Hurricane Irene had to offer with essentially no damage. And they did it using construction methods that would have been completely illegal in US hurricane zones: no houses on stilts, no hurricane windows, etc. We really need to reconsider how we build. Here's the link:
http://www.originalgreen.org/.../the-schooner-bay-miracle...
Here's the Schooner Bay Abaco Bahamas page as well.

Sep 1, 2011 4:38pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

A post from Nancy Bruning for whom this comments module wasn't working recently:

Such a timely post, Steve! As a boomer, I feel I have come up with a particularly elegant solution, if I do say so myself. About 10 years ago, as a writer of 25 books on health and wellness, the irony of spending most of my time sitting at a computer did not escape me. I became a certified personal trainer, which fixed the sedentary, isolation problem. This eventually morphed into designing and conducting outdoor fitness classes in urban parks. We walk, or jog, and use nothing but our bodyweight, gravity, and the park furniture and features to perform stretching and strengthening exercises. I call it "Nancercize" and it's very Original Green in thinking, eh? Now, I'm training others to lead Nancercize groups, which anyone can do, with the proper training! I love helping others get just the right kind and amount of exercise while getting exercise myself--and getting paid to do it! For some ideas, check out my video, "101 Things to Do on a Park Bench" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNBUWXQuCfI.

Jan 30, 2012 6:54am

Boyd Lemon · Works at Freelance Writer

You are so right. I re-invented myself as a writer when I retired and now have 4 books on Amazon and other sites and another to be published this Spring on, of all subjects, retirement. My other passion is travel. I am having the time of my life in retirement, but it is something that needs planning (not just financial, but emotional too) and a slowing of the mind to adjust to not having a full time job to support yourself and family.
Boyd Lemon-Author of “Eat, Walk, Write: An American Senior’s Year of Adventure in Paris and Tuscany,” and "Digging Deep: A Writer Uncovers His Marriages," the author’s journey to understand his role in the destruction of his three marriages. Information and excerpts: http://www.BoydLemon-Writer.com.

Feb 1, 2012 10:16am

Geoffrey Heard · University of Papua New Guinea

Excellent Steve. Lovely writing and a very pleasant site space too. How about these thoughts: http://pngtimetraveller.blogspot.com/.../what-does...

Jan 2, 2017 5:52pm

1,053+

The Importance of On-Street Parking

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On-street parking is important to good urbanism on many counts. Let's have a look at some of the most important reasons why it's essential:

Commercial Parking Lots

Would you be caught dead

on this sidewalk?

If people can't park on-street, then off-street parking lots are essential in all but the most highly walkable places where cars are unnecessary (think Manhattan.) Surface parking lots do lots of damage. First, if they are built in front of a building, then they pretty much guarantee that nobody will ever walk on the sidewalk that runs between the parking lot and the street. Pedestrians aren't stupid… you'd be taking your life in your own hands by walking in a place like this because you have no protection from cars zipping by just a few feet away from you.

The second-worst place for a parking lot is beside the building because this creates a big gap in the urbanism. This condition is known as a "snaggletooth streetscape." One of its worst features is that it interrupts the continuity of the street face, making the place seem incomplete, or decaying. Another really bad feature is the fact that it bores the pedestrians, because when they're walking beside it, they get a steady view of cars that doesn't change very quickly. Unlike a parking lot in front, which completely kills pedestrianism in only one block, parking lots beside buildings only injure it, and the extent of the injury to walkability depends on how big the gaps between buildings are.

The third place for a parking lot is behind the building. This isn't as bad as the other two places, but it has problems as well. If everyone parks in back, then it seems logical to the building owner to put the front door in the back. This not only creates a weird and confused floor plan, but it also means the building is less likely to pay the proper attention to the street, usually resulting in boring the pedestrians. And all parking lots have the unfortunate distinctions of being really bad heat sinks, and of creating lots of stormwater with all that impervious asphalt or concrete.

Residential Parking

There's almost as much driveway as there is

front yard in this subdivision.

Subdivisions that ban on-street parking force the paving of much of the lot because you've gotta have enough parking places for all of your family plus all of your guests… at your biggest party or other gathering of the year. Many builders will build a double-wide driveway all the way to the front facing garage of their "snout houses" so visitors can park on all that extra paving. This has all of the environmental problems that parking lots do: double-wide driveways are big heat sinks with lots of stormwater runoff. Big heat sinks aren't just environmental problems; they hurt walking as well. By heating up the micro-environment around them, they make it more uncomfortable to walk in their vicinity. And if driveway crossings take up a big percentage of the length of the sidewalk, then much of a walk along that sidewalk is spent subconsciously aware that cars might back out of the driveways and hit you. When fear arrives, pedestrians depart.

Parking Decks

Here's a parking deck next to a sidewalk. See any

pedestrians there? Of course not. Who would want

to walk in such a dreadful place unless their car

broke down there or something?

A parking deck next to a sidewalk creates a terrible pedestrian environment, as you can clearly see here. First, it's the most boring thing possible to walk beside, and most of the time, it's terminally ugly because people don't generally lavish a lot of money on a parking deck.

Bore the pedestrians, and they won't walk there. Build ugly buildings, and they'll abandon your sidewalk as well.

But that's not the worst of it. Parking decks are broadly perceived as being scary places. How many movies have you seen where the ax murderer waits in a dark corner of the parking deck for his next victim? The only thing worse for pedestrians than boredom and ugliness are danger and fear. So put a parking deck right beside those sidewalks where you never, ever, ever want pedestrians to walk.

Liner Buildings

This liner building is in Bath, England. It is less than

12 feet thick &it has some of the coolest shops in town.

It is possible to fix parking decks by building what is known as a "liner building" between them and every adjacent sidewalk. A liner building is a thin building that "lines" the parking deck's outer edges. You see the storefronts of the liner building's shops at the first level and you see the windows of the offices or apartments above. It looks like any perfectly normal downtown building… it just happens to not be very thick, and to have a parking deck behind it. Liner buildings are hardly ever more than 30 feet thick. 18 feet is a good thickness because that's often the depth of a parking space. But they can be even thinner, like the one shown above.

The Pedestrian Shield

Thriving sidewalk cafe scenes depend on on-street

parking for protection.

Clearly, forcing cars off the street has lots of negative consequences. But on-street parking isn't just a car storage device. There are other benefits as well. Remember what we said earlier about "when fear arrives, pedestrians depart"? One major source of fear is the possibility that a car might run off the street and hit you. On-street parking alleviates this fear, because each of those park cars acts as a shield of several thousand pounds of metal between you and the moving traffic. People don't consciously realize this all the time, but you've never seen a sidewalk cafe next to the expressway, have you?

Thriving Retail

Retail expert Bob Gibbs says that every on-street parking space in a thriving retail district is worth $250,000 in sales to the nearby merchants on that street. People will walk much further along an interesting Main Street to get from their parking space to the store they're going to than they will walk from a parking lot. I blogged about Pedestrian Propulsion a couple years ago; that post explains why this is so. Simply put, if you want to kill the businesses along a thriving commercial street, just remove the on-street parking. Works every time.

~Steve Mouzon

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Legacy Comments

Michael David Rouchell · Architect at Williams Architects

Rather than a liner buildings to mask parking decks, all that is necessary is a speed ramp to get cars to an upper level. That allows for the entire ground floor to be commercial space. The building's facade has to be presentable above the first floor, which may mean treating the upper openings as closed louvered shutters. There are a number of parking decks in the French Quarter that are done this way.

Aug 4, 2011 6:16pm

Bill Dawers · Editor at Hissing lawns

This is a wonderful post. Many urbanist allies of mine do not seem to understand these points -- they see any accommodation for cars and drivers as a threat to urbanism rather than an integral part of it.
I approached a few of these issues on my blog a few weeks ago, with lots of pictures of Savannah's streets: http://www.billdawers.com/.../guide-downtown-savannah.../.

Aug 4, 2011 7:09pm

Adam Jeselnick · Owner at Adam Jeselnick Architect

Great post! We live in Carmel, CA where on-street parking is limited to 2 hours (but free) in the commercial district. What are your thoughts on free vs paid parking and the impact on Retail and restaurants?

Aug 4, 2011 8:33pm

Jake Linsley · Rock & Roll High School

great article

Aug 5, 2011 4:22pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

One thing just occurred to me that I should have put in the original post - on-street parking is also a great traffic calming device. All but the idiots slow down when there's parking on the street. Maybe I'll do another post about the best natural traffic calming devices (NOT additive ones like speed humps, but rather the integral parts of street design that slow traffic.) what do you think?

Aug 6, 2011 9:29am

bettybarcode

Your insight about outdoor cafes avoiding expressways is great. Chain restaurants have noticed the popularity of outdoor eating. So they put tables out on a deck or under a canopy--overlooking the parking lot and dumpster, because there is no sidewalk and no one wants to dine by the highway. It'd be funny if it weren't pathetic. Score one for good urbanism!

Aug 6, 2011 10:05am

Ken Firestone · Works at Self Employed (Business)

Parking and traffic calming. If you allow parking only on one side of the street, alternate the parking side every few car lengths. I actually saw this work once when a truck parked illegally on the no parking side of my street, opposite some empty spaces. It slowed traffic more than the numerous speed bumps do.

Aug 6, 2011 10:14am

C Fenno Hoffman · Principal at Fenno Hoffman Architects, PC

More advantages of on-street parking. 1. the spots function as "teaser" parking, meaning drivers will attempt to find a free spot close to their destination, before going into a garage. Without that possibiity, that tease, they might avoid the area entirely (short term parking times keep this tease real and prevent employees from hogging all the closest spots) and 2. slow moving traffic, cruising for parking, makes mid block crossing safer and adds eyes on the street, from the street. It's funny how the sport of hunting for a close spot, the gamble and luck of it, is part of the fun of visiting a popular place. Easy parking, say at a shopping mall is dull by comparison. It's notable however, that the the sport of parking works much better in entertainment districts than in places where we do daily errands.

Aug 6, 2011 3:10pm

Scott Ulrich · Columbus, Ohio

While I agree with most of this post, do you think the statement "Simply put, if you want to kill the businesses along a thriving commercial street, just remove the on-street parking" will be used by anti-transit folks? Because it's the exact argument being used to fight proposed or existing bus stops along the prime downtown commercial corridor in Columbus, Ohio -- the kind of corridor that needs transit.
I just think that as advocates for good urbanism, discussing on-street parking in absolute terms without considering on-street transit seems dangerous. Particularly that $250,000 number -- I can just imagine a business owner demanding compensation for lost parking spaces to a bus stop!

Aug 6, 2011 9:40pm

Hazel Borys · Managing Principal at PlaceMakers

Still enjoying this post, Steve, about the Importance of Parking.

Aug 8, 2011 3:21pm

Steve Mouzon · Board Member at Sky Institute for the Future

check out the latest Original Green post that just went up last night:
http://www.originalgreen.org/.../retirement-vs-the...

Aug 18, 2011 9:02am

Imagine Regina

Dealing with Parking Fatigue in downtown Regina where some streets are noted for their abundance of parking lots.... and not much else.
"This condition is known as a "snaggletooth streetscape." One of its worst features is that it interrupts the continuity of the street face, making the place seem incomplete, or decaying. Another really bad feature is the fact that it bores the pedestrians, because when they're walking beside it, they get a steady view of cars that doesn't change very quickly."

Aug 13, 2012 5:25pm

doobs_keebler

I know this is an old post, so hopefully you'll see this - When you don't have enough space for bike lanes, and car traffic volume is too high/fast for bikers to feel comfortable riding on shared lanes - what do you do?
here's an example of a particularly treacherous stretch of road:
https://www.google.com/.../data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sKgmIm...
cars will often tailgate and honk at bikers through here - and/or will pass dangerously close. while there is actually a segregated bike path about 1/4 to the east (sw corridor path), this is the most direct route between points south and the emerald necklace path or the main business district in Jamaica Plain. You can't just throw up speed limit signs.
btw - cars regularly run off the road/speed through here.

Aug 4, 2014 5:27pm

Paolo E. Zancanaro

The Select Board of beautiful coastal community of Wiscasset, Maine is in the process of eliminating street parking along the entire thriving Main St shopping district. It will kill businesses!

Aug 14, 2016 9:53pm

7,080+

the Chael-Dover Cottage - What the Original Green Looks Like

The Chael-Dover Cottage shows how interesting things get when theory turns into practice... and when “how they once built green” turns into “how I can build green today.” You can find so many Original Green ideas applied here that I quit counting after awhile.

Maricé Chael is an architect and a principal of Chael Cooper. She’s also a member of the New Urban Guild. Her husband, Victor Dover, is a principal of the New Urbanist planning firm Dover-Kohl, and a longtime sustainability leader on many fronts, including being at the forefront of the effort to create LEED-ND. It’s unlikely that anything on this blog or in the Original Green book had any influence over the design of their cottage because Maricé and Victor have known these things long before the book or the blog were published, but that’s immaterial. What matters is how well their cottage illustrates Original Green ideas.

garden compost station

And it isn’t just one idea at a time, either... everywhere you turn, this cottage is doing several things at once. Every room has at least two uses, for example. The image at the top of this post is a classic example we sorely need today: lovability and nourishability in the same plot of ground. Here’s the test this garden passes: is your edible garden lovable enough that you furnish it with benches and chairs, so that you can sit and look at it? Most vegetable gardens are treated as utility plots, meant to be productive but not attractive. But Maricé is planting a primarily edible landscape in her front yard that’s long on romance... even the compost station tucked away in a corner has a rustic charm about it (see above.)

The cottage itself isn’t new. The historic marker by the front window shows it was built in the 1920s. Because reuse is far better than recycling, Maricé and Victor kept the original cottage, modifying it only as needed, and added a 17’ addition to the rear. Far too many “green” buildings today are completely new buildings, sitting on the demolition of an earlier building.

The roof was in serious need of replacement, so Maricé opted for synthetic slate made of recycled materials (including diaper liners... thrown away after one use in their first life, but used for many years in their second life.)

What’s missing on the roof? Right... where are the solar panels? It turns out that they aren’t missing... they’re just really well hidden. Pretty much the only place you can see them is from the master bath window on the second level. It’s a great example of making things invisible if they can’t be made lovable, as SmartDwelling I illustrated.

Going inside, it’s hard to miss all the reused things, from furniture (including this piece) to doors to windows like the one in the gable to flooring to fixtures. And it’s really cool to hear the stories Maricé and Victor tell about where each piece came from. “Building materials with stories to tell”... that’s so much more interesting than “I got it at Lowe’s” (or wherever.)

This transom is one of those reused components. It’s also a really great idea we’ve forgotten about in recent years. It’s a ventilating transom (see the chains on each side, and also the latch at the top?) It has two purposes: it passes light from one room to the next while preserving visual privacy, and it also allows for ventilation with visual privacy as well. For buildings more than one room deep, they’re the best way yet developed of getting both.

I mentioned earlier that every room has at least two uses. The living room is also the office, for example. McMansions have redundancy... four or five places to eat, for example. Original Green houses, on the other hand, have rooms and elements that have many uses. Even the top landing of the stairwell shown here doubles as a study. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

Here’s another way of getting more uses out of things: Maricé has carved into walls all over the cottage, using the space for storage. Why waste hollow places in the wall? She didn’t. You can’t do that on exterior walls because of the necessity of insulation, but every other wall in a house should be considered fair game. It’s amazing how much stuff you can store if you think this way.

Here’s another one, just for fun... this one is in the kitchen, set into the wall joining the original cottage to the new addition. And speaking of fun, it’s clear that while these sorts of details are frugal with space, storing more in less, they also contribute mightily to the delight of visiting or living here. In other words, they start out being frugal and end up being lovable.

library nook

One more thing about the interior before we step back outside... if you’re seriously interested in being frugal with space, then you need to discard a lot of space planning conventions. See this chair in a reading nook in the library/dining room? There’s nowhere near 80” of ceiling height there. Matter of fact, I can’t even walk into the nook without hitting my head on the storage above. But why do I need to walk into the nook? I don’t. Anyone sitting on the chair naturally bends to sit in such a way that you don’t come anywhere near hitting your head. But if you followed normal space planning rules, you would have entirely missed out on the extra storage.

Let’s have a quick look around the rest of the outdoor rooms before leaving. A lap pool is tucked snugly into the rear garden room, which is surrounded by a wall of green... some of it edible... and all of it made up of native or well-adapted species that don’t need artificial irrigation.

When you plant this way, it’s possible to collect all the irrigation water you need, as Maricé has done, and to distribute it more efficiently than just spraying all over. Rain chains carry the water from gutters down to a rain barrel at each corner of the cottage. Kentucky Bourbon, by law, must be aged in new white oak barrels. After one use, they are discarded. But they make great rain barrels, as you can clearly see.

stone wall built from
pool excavation

The pool has a great story as well: a lot of rock had to be excavated to make room for the pool. Normal practice would have been to burn gas to haul it off to the landfill. Instead, Victor took a local fellow who was “pretty unsteady on his bicycle because of substance issues” and worked with him to build a stone frontage wall with the rock from the pool. The guy learned the skill well, and now builds frontage walls for others in the neighborhood, earning enough money to bring a bit of stability to his life. Like so many other things about this cottage, that’s such a great story of healing and reusing the things we have... don’t you think?

~Steve Mouzon

PS: GreenBuildingAdvisor.com did a great story on the Chael-Dover Cottage with lots of technical details... please check it out It’s excellent information.

PPS: Click on any of the images above for high-res versions on my zenfolio site.

Legacy Comments:

Thursday, May 26, 2011 - 05:52 AM

cookie

Sure nice to see people living the space.
Thanks as always Steve.

+780+

Blog | the Original Green | Steve Mouzon

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