Step by Step

It’s 10AM and according to my helpful smartphone app I’ve already walked 4367 steps. The app also tells me that 4367 steps equals 2.08 miles. This app comes, unrequested and free, with the new operating system of my iPhone and lets me obsess over all sorts of personal health issues that my steam-punk Razr couldn’t imagine…if a phone can imagine at all.  I’ve written before here about the gap between metrics and perception of things like distance, so I’m happy that my phone is smart enough to convert my steps into miles.  Who really measures distance in steps?  Would you ever give directions in steps? "Just go about 1500 steps, turn right and after 3412 steps you'll be there."   

I had a hunch, based on graphic distances on actual maps, that I typically walked about 2+ miles per day just getting to and from school.  My phone gives me more nuanced and provocative data…and some real surprises.  On Monday I walked over 12,000 steps; yesterday only in the upper 9000s.  Both were WAAC days, meaning that I had the same commute. Why the difference?  Well, Monday is a studio day and Tuesday is a seminar day, and that means that on Monday I walked up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, and even back and forth between 601 and 1001 Prince a few times. Tuesday I was mostly stationary lecturing, although I made a few 601/1001 trips.  This got me thinking, of course, about technology, efficiency, pedagogy, public health and urban design. 

At the WAAC we organize studio completely differently from other schools: studio is an identity rather than a geographic location. My students—and they’re not really mine at all as we always team teach—do not all sit in one room side by side; they occupy desks on every floor of both of our buildings.  To give a desk crit to any one of them I have to walk to find them.  There are many practical and pedagogical reasons for that: it disrupts the hegemony of program, dissolves the autocracy of the studio critic, and it guarantees mixing with other design disciplines and levels.  There are downsides which are in fact simply the dark side of each of the above reasons, but I hadn’t really thought that one of the benefits was fitness.  Turns out we’ve inadvertently provided an active design workplace.  One could argue, and more than one has argued, it certainly isn’t the most efficient way to organize students. That’s only true, however, from an industrial era definition of efficiency.  We don’t subscribe to Taylorist principles within design studio, so why would we want it to be organized like a Frankfurt kitchen, where the studio critic can move from student to student with maximum efficiency and minimum exertion? 

Technology and efficiency are tightly intertwined.  As Carl Mitcham says, all technological innovations arise from efforts to save effort.  Interpreted narrowly and applied uncritically to more complex systems—such as educational institutions and cities—the pursuit of technological efficiency can have strangely inefficient consequences.  It may seem like I have a comically inefficient workday, adding 2-3 extra miles of walking just to do my job, it is just a different kind of efficiency.  If I drove to work, which would be faster—such a 20^th century definition of efficiency—and could see all my students in one room Frankfurt kitchen-style, then I’d have to set aside some chunk of time to get 5 miles of walking or running into my day. How inefficient is that?

In the Intelligent Cities project we explored the complex and sometimes invisible way that new information and communication technologies, like smartphones, are changing our cities.  Even as I carry around with me the most sophisticated efforts to save effort—hey, Siri—it does seem that we are in the process of redefining efficiency in the same way that chaos theory redefined order.  Inefficiencies can be remarkably efficient if seen from the correct perspective. 

Of Blind Bridges and Poor Doors

About 10 years ago I attended a surprisingly fractious conference of North American architecture academics in Mexico City.  Much to the frustration of the US and Canadians, none of the presentations of local work was addressing the issues that we had come to learn about: the proliferation of informal settlements, water quality and alternative energy, the social and environmental consequences of the proposed new airport.  We wanted to hear about all the architecture and design issues that made Mexico such a complex and fantastic place, geographically so close to us yet so different.  Instead, all the work presented seemed like it could have been in Santa Monica.  Nothing against that idyllic city, but we could have gone to LA to see that. 

At one point a young architect was presenting a housing project his firm had just completed, a complex of mid-rise residential towers connected by glassy pedestrian bridges.  I was already working up a question about heat gain in those greenhouses when someone asked a question about something else in the photo: beneath the glass bridge was another identical bridge but with completely solid walls.  “What’s that?” He probably expected an answer about ducts, pipes and such interstitial things.  But no:  “The blind bridge is for the servants.” That was the phrase he used, the blind bridge. A wave of class-conscious discomfort settled over the audience as we digested first the naked architectural segregation and marginalization of a group of people, and then the unexpectedly casual answer to the question, free of any global north guilt. The bridge was “blind,” probably because that was a handy translation for a bridge that has no view, but the blindness was also a metaphor for the designed invisibility of the service class.

That’s nothing new in the history of building and any honest American architect in the audience knew that.  Our cities and buildings present, to use the medical term, our social roles and cultural values, if we choose to see them that way.  They are literally built into our world: a geography of servitude, a topography of power.  Consider the impeccably preserved town of Williamsburg, with its fine-grained relationships of main building to out-buildings; kitchens and storage buildings are stretched out to the edges of the property, shaping gardens and courtyards between.  Why are things that way? While it’s true that the Tidewater heat and the risk of fire argue for a pragmatic location of a kitchen a healthy distance from the main house, it’s also true that if you yourself had to make that walk several times a day you’d think of a different solution.  No, it’s slave space, no matter how charming it now appears to us.  The back stairs of 19^th and early 20^th century rowhouses which now provide delightful secret passages for children or privacy for houseguests were for the silent and discreet servants of the household.  The swinging door between kitchen and dining room was a clever mechanical solution to the problem of an unreliable maid or housewife to keep the service space of the kitchen invisible. We don’t need sci-fi cloaking devices: we can design invisibility; we can make people disappear.

Over the last century we’ve managed to eliminate all sorts of spatial segregations in our buildings and cities, with more than a little assistance from the judicial system, recognizing that separateness and equality are inherently not compatible, not for race, gender or disability.  Everyone is entitled to use the same door. Yet, we’ll permit the demotion of equality and allow separation when the servitude is voluntary, because it is, ostensibly, an economic relationship based on an exchange of services for compensation.  We don’t think twice about back doors and alleys for the folks that clean our buildings and mow our lawns, even if we may start to get queasy about blind bridges.  Something about the blatant separateness and designed invisibility feels a step too far. Who is made blind with this bridge?

It’s true that the relationship between serving and served is one of the fundamental first principals of design; we just don’t usually think of it as sorting out people.  That’s part of why the so-called “poor door” in the NYC residential tower has prompted such an overflow of unfocused indignation.  It feels wrong, but no one can really say why, not even the people who would trade their dignity for an apartment there.  It’s the wickedest of problems, but part of it lies in this history of servitude:  deploying an architectural solution conventionally use for the separation of service persons to segregate equals, neighbors in fact, who simply happen to earn different amounts of money.  The teachers, firefighters, and architects who come in through the “poor door” are walking a servant’s path.  Is this the best we can do as architects, owners, and policy-makers?  

On Emptiness and Vacancy

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a place being vacant and being empty.  Thanks to an interesting conversation with a colleague on the landscape architecture faculty in Blacksburg, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that there’s no such thing as an empty place, an empty site. There are only momentarily vacant sites. 

My doubts about the existence of emptiness have been brewing for a while.  As a studio professor, I sometimes write a project brief framed as a program in search of a site, so I send students off to find sites.  They know what type of building they’ll be designing but not where.  I want them to look for a space in search of a building, something that will make a space into a place. I have sent many students off through the streets of Old Town or parts of Washington with the charge to find an "empty" site. Without fail, there’s always at least one who challenges the conventional definition of empty.  One year a student found an existing rowhouse that had been gutted by fire and made the persuasive argument that the site was “as if” empty. Another found a building that was dwarfed by its blockmates and was therefore marked for more mass.  If a building is doomed to be redeveloped does that make its site de facto empty? Or just latently vacant?

Occasionally, but often enough to indicate a problem, I will see an architecture student come back from a site search saying they have found a perfect site—there's  "nothing" on it, it's wooded, sloping to a creek, for example—They’ll show it to me on Google Earth, and I have to tell them, that’s not empty, that’s Rock Creek Park; it’s a national park, you know, like Yosemite.  And it is so not empty....not even vacant.  It’s not a good thing for professional collaboration that architects occasionally see landscapes as empty.  (Interestingly, I’ve never had a landscape student choose a site with a building on it and claim it’s empty because it has no trees.)

Sometimes I’ve proposed sites that had buildings on them, buildings that I knew would be demolished if development patterns continued.  So we pretend in those circumstances that the site is empty, spinning narratives to justify our dismissal of a building standing irrefutably before us, burned, undersized, or unfashionable. While all of us in the magic circle of studio know that erasing the footprint from a drawing or deleting it from the digital documents doesn’t actually obliterate the real building, like it would in some Twilight Zone plot, it’s still very hard to imagine a building gone. The older the building the harder it is. There's nothing like a look at Sanborn maps to fill places that might have looked empty--here was a blacksmith, and a stable--and soon there's a pile of stories and memories occupying Lot 347.  Momentarily vacant, but not empty. 

To name a place empty is to devalue what’s there, to pass over it without seeing it.  I suppose I habitually devalue exchange-value when I let students choose parking lots as empty sites. To some, a parking lot isn't empty; it's full of cars and money.   The historic preservation movement was a sustained effort to recalibrate a systematic devaluing of old things, refuting once and for all that a site with an old building could be considered empty.  

Emptiness is culturally constructed; it’s very different from vacancy, which connotes temporariness.  Buildings can be vacant, then filled, then vacant again...over and over.   Vacancy is material while emptiness is existential.  People and their stuff can move in and out, but they always leave trace elements behind in the form of memories.  In architecture, landscape, and especially urban design we have to remember that the clean slate is a myth:  all is palimpsest.

Speed, Space, and Scale

When conditions are right I walk at about 4 miles per hour.  By “conditions” I mean all the usual pedestrian variables: what I’m carrying, what’s falling on me, what I’m walking on, and what my feet are in. I slow down when things aren’t ideal, when it’s icy and I’m carrying lunch, my computer, and a change of shoes, or if I didn’t want to carry that change of shoes and I’m just doing my usual 2+ miles daily commute in heels.  Sometimes I’m faster, when I’m late, cold, or in speedy flats.  But the variation is pretty minor; no matter whether it’s 3 or 4 miles per hour I would argue that I experience an entirely different place than a driver or even a cyclist.  The place that we see and feel at a walking pace is not at all the same place as seen through a windshield and mediated by shock absorbers.  Although this might make Einstein cringe, I think there is a general theory of relativity that describes the urban environment and it can be stated thus:  Speed + Space = Scale.

I touched on this in my previous post (a very long 5 months ago, mea culpa) but that was a rant on how ill-matched our precise measurings are to our sense of distance.  Tell someone to walk two and a half blocks and they can figure it out; tell someone to walk 800’ and they’ll just look at you. Or, more likely, they’ll ask their portable digital navigation assistant to figure it out for them.  But talking as if space is purely measurable, whether in blocks or feet, only addresses the speed/scale relationship; it says very little about scale.  

roses at a portal to another dimension

 Scale is material. Wandering the richly detailed streets of Old Town Alexandria one can completely lose all sense of time.  Often when I’m leaving the King Street Metro stop visitors will ask me “how far is it to the waterfront?”  I used to tell them the metric truth:  “it’s a little over a mile, maybe a mile and a quarter.”  Then I would watch them settle in to wait for the free trolley.  Now I just smile and tell them the experienced truth: “just take that street and keep walking. It’ll take you about 20 minutes; you can’t miss it.”  And off they go.  What they discover of course is the haptic vividness of a 3-4 mile per hour environment.  Every step and railing, doorway and flower pot, offers something to enjoy and the brick sidewalks guarantee thoughtful walking. Time stretches and bends; you walk slowly but you don’t notice how far you’ve gone. When they, our typical visitor, return home to 35-mile-per-hour-land they’ll think that what made this place different was the “history”, the narrative of founding fathers, rebellions, and preservation.  They probably won’t think of speed and its relationship to space. 

Outer Asphaltia has its own speed/space relationship.  I had always puzzled over the part of Einstein’s theory that states that an exceptionally massive object can distort the adjacent fabric of space-time.  Then I went to a Walmart.  Although I will gladly walk miles through the streets of Alexandria or Washington, put me behind the wheel of a rental car and I’ll clench the steering wheel while I search for the closest possible parking spot so I can enter the gates of hell for a load of cheap crap.  And would anyone voluntarily walk from a Walmart to a neighboring Home Despot? No, because you’d be walking through void and distorted space-time, with no sign of human care or intelligence against which you could measure your progress.

cobbles and asphalt:  how fast is this place?

 It’s a problematic word, progress.  It’s spatial and temporal, and also heavily value-laden.  It’s progress that we can move so much more quickly than we did a century ago.  It is progress that our information can move even faster, liberated from attachment to us.  But it’s a fact of progress that speed disrespects the slow.  The very elements that make a walkable place—incremental materials, generous sidewalks, short blocks, tight turning radii, street trees, on-street parking, narrow driving lanes, and stop signs—send drivers into fits.  At 35 miles per hour a world of beauty is flying by, not only unseen but unvalued.  We’ve spent far too much time in the last 60years designing fast environments.    Maybe instead of focusing so obsessively on the style of new buildings and neighborhoods we should focus more on their speed:  how fast is this place?

“Today we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior urban civilization, and yet motion has become the most anxiety-laden of daily activities. The anxiety comes from the fact that we take unrestricted motion of the individual to be an absolute right.  The private motorcar is the logical instrument for exercising that right, and the effect on public space, especially the space of the urban street, is that the space becomes meaningless or even maddening unless it can be subordinated to free movement ... The technology of modern motion replaces being in the street with a desire to erase the constraints of geography.”

      Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man