Happy PARK(ing) Day!

Happy PARK(ing) Day everyone!  Go out and claw a piece of public space out of the steel clenches of an automobile!

Landscape students from the WAAC setting up their space

From my window at the WAAC I can see a few of  our intrepid landscape students setting up their “PARK-opoly” game in two parking spaces on South St. Asaph Street.  They’ve already weathered some predictable snide asides from the NFA—the No Fun Allowed—types.  “Children can’t play in the street!” “You know, parking is really valuable here.”  Oh boy. 

The Washington Post Magazine just ran a series of articles last Sunday looking at the future of Washington (which is looking so bright, I’m already wearing my shades) and one of them focused on the care and board of these ubiquitous metal beasts.  Harriet Tregoning, the city’s world-class planner, said “Five to 10 years ago, if some aliens had taken a picture from space they would think our city was inhabited by steel creatures with gushy insides. Creatures that slept most of the time.”

PARK(ing) Day is a clever way to open our eyes to all the other things we could do with the roughly 200 square feet that we’ve just handed over to these beasts and their servants.  Danish urbanist Jan Gehl tells a great story of how Copenhagen gradually wrestled its streets from automobile hegemony by subversively taking away a few spaces every night.  Alexandria and the District have already bulbed out sidewalks at intersections; the District has usurped some parking spaces for Capital Bikeshare docks.  The possible next steps are being constructed all over the world today, and there are probably a few right near where you work.

Henri Lefebvre wrote in the late 1960’s about the “right to the city,” the right of all people, not only those with capital or power, to be present and visible in the city.  His is a forecful, if difficult to read, argument for fighting for the public in public space.  His theories underlined the recent Occupy movement, with their resistance to the excessive power of global capital to shape our cities.  But we’ve sat passively by, in the passenger seat so to speak, for decades and put the convenience of car and driver above all else in urban planning and policy.  Our cities long ago lost the fine grain that comes from the height and pace of a walking person.  No more is the human as measure of all things; now it's the SUV. But, as Tregoning makes beautifully clear, there’s absolutely no reason why it should always be so.

So, if you walk by a new little café, garden, or play space, stop and enjoy it. See how good it feels to occupy that space.  You have a right to it.

1001+601 =?

1001 + 601 = 1602? No, it equals one, the new full WAAC. After having  spent the last 20-something years in one little Baltic birch gridded room after another in 1001 Prince I have moved to a new office on the south side of the second floor of 601 Prince.  It’s a big move for me, and a bigger one for the WAAC.

 It’s arguably the biggest leap in growth and complexity the WAAC has taken since 1991 when my hiring as a lowly Assistant Professor coincided with the purchase of 1001. That year we moved out of our upstairs digs at 101 N. Columbus at the corner of King Street, where the retail below us had changed over the years from People’s Drugs to CVS and finally to Bertucci’s.  From one perspective, we just added a zero to our address; from another, we multiplied our complexity with a graduate program and more consortium students.  For those of us who had been students in the upstairs space, with its windows over the bustling main street of Alexandria, it felt a little like moving to the suburbs, to the residential precinct of Prince Street far, far, away from the hustle and bustle of town.  One block makes such a difference! 

Now we’ve added a substantial building to the campus, a 19^th century former church, that had been renovated and occupied by the venerable landscape firm EDAW until the firm was devoured by the insatiable AECOM.  Abandoned by EDAW and coveted by the WAAC, the quirky building sat empty for a few years until the VT Foundation finally bought it.  So here we go, once more into the great unknown of how place, distance, architecture, and the city influence our habits, institutions, and behaviors.  We, as design faculty and professional architects, are quick to defend architecture’s significance in life—it matters, we insist.  It changes lives.  Funny, it gets a little unsettling when it’s your life getting changed.  And frankly, as professionals we’re never sure exactly how architecture changes lives or in exactly what way it matters.  We’re about to find out.

I’ve been using the metaphor of mitosis to frame this transformation: the WAAC had to divide and increase in complexity rather than just grow as a big single-cell organism.  But I think it’s more of a “Marcel Breuer meets Leon Battista Alberti” story.  That’s more architectural anyway.  Breuer designed a series of what he called “binuclear” houses in his long and wonderful career.  This was a truly original residential type:  he would split the program into two equal yet different wings and connect them with an entry/breezeway. Sometimes the split was between adults and children, sometimes between public and private, but it could work just as well for loud and quiet, dark and light, and so on.  Like any fertile parti, the binuclear type is open to interpretation as long as the fundamental elements are strong.

The WAAC is developing a binuclear campus and the breezeway is 4 blocks of Prince Street. The connection/division is the city itself, 4 blocks that WAAC feet will engrave over the years even as the absent-minded users of the city stroll and cross unaware.  Our paths around 1001 have become ruts.  Our worlds can become very small if we let them, and My Old Town had effectively shrunk to the few blocks around 1001 that provide coffee  and several different lunch typologies--quick, slow, and very slow—with an occasional stretch to the post office.  It’s easy to forget that I work in one of the most beautiful embodiments of the best in American urbanism.  Now I get to enroll 4 blocks of Prince Street into my WAAC world and rediscover the changing color of different trees, new puddles, sounds and smells. 

The city, Alberti tells us, is a big house and the house a small city.  Our new WAAC campus is a big binuclear house and the binuclear house is a small city.  Breuer designed the two wings of the house to serve the functions desired, and tuned the connection between them.  We, on the other hand, found our nuclei, and joined them through ownership, thus summoning the connection into existence.  We’re hermit crabs, resourcefully crawling into shells abandoned by others and then enjoying the task of constructing a home for ourselves.  It’s taken over 20 years of creative destruction and construction to get 1001 to its current state of exquisite incompletion.  601 has quite a few decades of work in its future, despite—or because of-- the work being done right now by the professional contractor hired by the VT Foundation. There’s something oddly reassuring about that--to me at least, can’t speak for anyone else—because it means that there is still room for reflection and change, for students next year, and the year after that, to participate in the constant construction of the WAAC.  The WAAC that each of us entered is never exactly the WAAC that we leave.  It’s always changing, but stays itself.