The Measure of Things

I saw a sign last week on a lovely two-lane back road in rural Virginia.  It said “school bus stop 800 feet.”  It was a warning, I assume:   Careful!  There’s a school bus stop in 800 feet!  My brother and I were traveling at 55miles per hour which meant, if my story-problem math is right, that we would be at that spot in less than 10 seconds. But no one does that sort of math in their head while driving--and it took me more than 10 seconds to do it here-- besides, despite the well-known relationship between space and time, that’s not really how we think of distance.   As we hurtled along I looked up the road which was rising and falling the way old pre-interstates do, and I wondered when we would reach that magic place 800 feet ahead.  I wanted to fix my eyes on that spot, but there were no blocks or familiar markers to help me.  That we saw that sign a few more times gave me the chance to keep gnawing on the question, perhaps a little too much. 

On a two-lane state road it is impossible to visualize 800 feet, particularly when one is in motion.  On a city street, however, it is easy to visualize 4 blocks. Where’s the school bus stop?  It’s about 2 ½ blocks.  In Old Town Alexandria, that would be about 800 feet: in the east-west direction Old Town’s blocks are about 290 feet, so 2 ½ times that is 725’.  With that level of specificity one could not only find the bus stop but have a pretty good sense of what the walk there would be like.  With a street address one could be more precise, but that level of information is sufficient for the situation.  Even though every city has its own dimension of block—Washington’s are significantly bigger and more diverse than Alexandria’s, while Portland, Oregon, is known for its diminutive 220’ blocks—the block itself is a familiar and meaningful unit of urban measure.  

Technology can measure things with great precision, greater precision than necessary in fact, resulting in a quality of inappropriate specificity that I call “misprecision.”  Misprecision is precision out of context, lengths and strengths with no reasonable reference to human experience.  A computer-modeled construction detail dimensioned to 1/64^th of an inch is misprecision, as are clocks that count 10ths of seconds and nutrition guidelines described in grams.  Misprecision also describes exhausted units of measure that have long ago lost their referents.  What possible meaning does “horsepower” have to anyone now? I can easily picture a team of horses pulling a chariot behind them, but in what way does such a quadriga (a rare opportunity to use that word!) help anyone understand how fast a motorboat might go?  800 horses under the hood of a sports car?  That metaphor is OBT, overtaken by technology.  

It’s not that measurement isn’t important, or that we shouldn’t embrace new tools and technologies for measuring.  Big Data brings all sorts of previously disaggregated information into precise sets that can be overlaid and correlated, letting us describe—measure—cities and neighborhoods in fascinating and no doubt misprecise ways.  The question, I suppose, for urbanists is how much do we need to know and in what form to make lovable cities?  How do we communicate those qualities to constituents?  Is it more helpful to say that within a 1000 foot radius one can find food, drink, and conversation or that I can find all that in 3 or 4 blocks in any direction? No one navigates the city on radii, and 1000 sounds like a lot.  But, 3 or 4 blocks?  Wow, that’s convenient!

Transparent Things

I admit it, I haven’t read it—an opening disclaimer I use far too often—but I’m intrigued by Neil MacGregors’s “objects” histories:  A History of the World in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World: a Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects. As I am always desperately seeking structure for my own writing, particularly when I presume to write about such an unwieldy and self-invented topic as Urbiphilia, I’m wondering if one can offer a portrait of a city or a place in a certain number of objects.  I would have to set up some rules of course--define object, for example—but it might be worth a try.  

We do read places that way, through objects, and the accumulation over time of a mental map of these objects is what defines any given city for each of us. These aren’t general objects, but specific ones, rooted in this particular city at this particular time; they are not concepts or classes of things, but percepts.  An object of unremarkable ordinariness all of a sudden shines through in a secular hierophany, saturated with the qualities of this place.  That’s why we buy souvenirs, or snatch little bits of place to take home in our pockets. From these we construct our memory palaces.

I have a chunk of white stone, kicked loose from the beautiful mosaic pavement of the Rua Augusta in Lisbon.  It conjures memories: of three weeks in summer 2002 with a diverse and somewhat fractious group of students and faculty; of all the difficulties that encrusted that particular program; of the taste of vinho verde and olives; of heat and blinding sun, and my mental map of the city.  Because I’m an architect, I also attend to the stone itself, the material reality of that street.  It isn't only a device or instrument of memory, it is a thing itself.  There are streets and plazas all over the world made of such small pieces of stone. Each one was hewn, chosen, cradled, and placed by someone on his knees with the sun on his back. In many the fan shaped pattern still telegraphs the radius of reach of one individual, a beautiful result of the effort to save effort.  It doesn’t seem right to call these surfaces “pavements;” let’s save that word for viscous liquids spread by heavy equipment. These are floors. Wherever and whenever they were first laid, whether the Piazza San Marco, the Rua Augusta, the synapse between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery, the bricks of Old Town Alexandria, these floors tell a remarkably complex story of power, social hierarchy, value, and desire.  

Nabakov, in Transparent Things, warns us not to treat objects like this:  “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention my lead us to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment.  Transparent things, through which the past shines!”  Well, Vlad, I’m not a novice; I’m a trained professional on closed track and the sinking is voluntary.  If one is in the business of designing the future, we depend on the transparency of things to understand what we value.

The Geography of Bureaucracy

photo courtesy of Dave Shove-Brown

The playground at Lincoln Park is locked shut.  Barriers warn cyclists off the Capital Crescent Trail. The GW memorial trail, the Anacostia River walk, the C&O Canal path are all closed due to the government shutdown.  Monuments and memorials, designed to be literally and metaphorically open, are jury-rigged with bike racks to prevent us the people from experiencing the better angels of our history. (Why is it always bike racks?  What giant warehouse do the overlords haul them out of?  Can’t we use them for their intended purpose?) For us urbanists this is a rare—please, let it remain rare—exposure of the myriad invisible jurisdictional boundaries that shape the experiential landscape.  We get to see the true nature of the geography of bureaucracy. Oh joy.

Most discussions about the construction and livability of cities centers on the problematic of public and private space.  We weigh in on the differences among the Occupy encampments in POPS—privately owned public spaces-- versus true public space.  We worry about pseudo-public spaces such as shopping malls and privatized streets.  We look for and celebrate alternatives in “third places” and DIY urbanism.  We assert our right to the city. The bright line we thought we saw between public and private has prevented our seeing the lines within public space.  Now the prism of the federal lockout has refracted the monolithic public into a spectrum of different publics and it’s an unsettling sight.   There’s city public and there’s federal public.  Even city public cowers under the shadow of federal public; we citizens of the District of Columbia don’t even have voting voice in this lockout.  Connections are severed, paths blocked, daily rituals upended. Our powerlessness is exposed.

The very fabric of the city, uniquely woven from Cartesian grid and cross-cutting diagonals knotted at green circles and squares, tells its story of bureaucratic layers.  In the abstract, places like Lincoln Park and Dupont Circle are nodes, intermittent points where the two street systems of the city join. In reality, each is a neighborhood center and beloved public place. They appear to be city parks, but they're not.  Few of the city's defining green spaces actually belong to the city and its citizens.  We just get to use them when the Park Service says we can. De jure, they are federal spaces; de facto, they are city places.  

The change in words is intentional:  space is abstract, but place is real. Our public landscapes are inextricably woven together, not only at the custodial level of whose trash cans are next to whose benches, or the managerial level of what behavior is and is not allowed, but truly at the quotidian level of our everyday lives. Like the inhabitants of one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, our buildings and places are strung together with different strings according to the character of our relationships:  one string connects a family to its playground, the parents to the workplace, the child to her friend’s house, and so on.  We only notice that web when some of the strings get cut.

Ideology is the apprehension of reality at a distance. (I’m not sure who said that; it may have been the Italian architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri. I should track it down, but scholarship is the first casualty of blogging.) That distance makes decision-making so much easier, because one can’t really see the fine-grained consequences. The ideologues can pat themselves on the back for passing their own self-defined purity tests; meanwhile reality itself is remarkably indifferent. Architects and planners have learned over the years that attempts to design and implement ideal cities inevitably fail because reality will always win.  Remember that the word “utopia” really means “no place.”  All building, all place-making is political in that it has to involve compromise.  I tell my students that all space is political; now I see that all politics is spatial.

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.