Don't it always seem to go...?

Don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone. Right as usual, Joni. The "it" that's gone in this case is the public realm, with the public in it. A paradise in its own way, even if it is in fact often paved. Love of cities in the time of Covid-19 is problematic. It even feels inappropriate (self-serving, off-key, tone deaf...insert your own adjective) to ruminate on civic health as distinct from public health.

Before--yes, we can now speak of a before and an after--I had a little notebook filled with half-baked ideas for blog posts. They were stranded in the notebook, half-baked, because I had failed to maintain the dam that held back just enough of my administrative tasks to keep my productive writing wetlands from being drowned. Failure to maintain may be a theme here. One post, on what the rules of improv have to do with good urban space, is a bit more than half-baked; it's actually browning nicely, if still soft in the middle. Yet it seems too chipper and shallow to post right now.

What is it that's gone that we didn't know we got 'til now? Sharing the spectacle of sport. Gathering to protest an injustice. Marching. Occupying. Assembling to redress a grievance. Worshiping someone or something. Live music--playing it and listening. Seeing coffee shop regulars, and the other familiar strangers who speckle our lived space. Being alone in a crowd. Watching people. Eavesdropping. The world of together, of transit, of third places, and parks, of plazas and piazzas. We're missing the city floor.

Residential buildings in US cities often don’t have the fringe of balconies that characterize housing in Italy or Spain, and we tend to draw a sharper line between public and private. We have seen the isolated in those countries engage with one another in applause and song, several floors above the street, but still in the manner of the street. It's as if the social space of the piazza, flat as a sheet of paper, crinkled up until it invaded the previously private air between homes. In dense cities people have to practice the fine art of a disattenuation, which is being in a position to see what someone is doing nearby but pretending, politely, not to--think of elevator cab or subway platform behavior. But now, with the possibility to assemble, to be part of a civic body, denied at ground level, the desire has no where to go but up. In time, that air will float slowly back to the ground, as one by one we congeal back into a public. Will we remember what we got when it was gone?

Cities from Scratch

Paolo Soleri would have been 100 years old today. He was born, appropriately, on the solstice in 1919 in Turin, Italy. He died at 93, probably still speaking in the future tense as he had his entire professional life, never giving up on the brave new world he was going to make. 

He was 87, lean and weathered, when I met him at Arcosanti to look through the archives for drawings and models for an exhibition that didn’t happen—hasn’t yet happened. I had interviewed him earlier, when he came to Washington to receive the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for lifetime achievement. As I remember it, Laura Bush would be giving him the award but Paolo was so angry and disgusted by the Bush administration that when she handed it to him he was going to hand her a several-pages long diatribe on the wreckage her husband had made of the country. How does one respond to a desert prophet with such a plan? One can picture Laura Bush’s frozen smile, as she looked into his piercing ungrateful eyes. If only he were still with us…

It takes a certain ferocity to decide to build a new world in the desert outside of Phoenix, and Soleri was uncompromising. Soleri’s cities, his “arcologies” are radical reorganizations of space and society, because you can’t really have one without the other. When architects and urban designers talk about “form” and “order” they are referring to physical elements and spatial arrangements. The very same terms, though, have currency in political discourse, in what James Scott calls “statecraft,” and it is in the deployment of such terms that the city, as both a physical place and a political entity, comes into being.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making cities from scratch as I read Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, chase the ghost of Francis Nicholson--serial royal governor and purported city-shaper of Williamsburg and Annapolis—and reflect on Soleri’s efforts. It’s easy to dismiss Arcosanti as so much windmill tilting, itself a metaphor with a renewable energy twist, and to dismiss the idea that novel architectural forms like cast concrete apses would be sufficient to effect the revolution. It’s also easy to forget how long city-making takes and how rare are the true cities from scratch. Yet, the irascible Nicholson sketched the outlines of new royal capital cities as part of his job to keep the colonists in line. The bones of those two cities were sufficiently compelling that they ended up embedded in the plan for Washington, a city most definitely not designed for obedient colonists.

How many modes must a...

How many modes must a--clever start, but the finish is doesn't hold up--a woman employ to get around the Blue/Yellow line shutdown?  Dylan never would have written that line, but I can't help myself, which is why he is who he is, and I am who I am.

My answer yesterday was six (not 42). True, all the modes were not shutdown related, but the shutdown does put one's mind in a place where, if one can stop cursing the deferred maintenance demons, it can shake off old habits and be liberated to explore the full spectrum of transit options. Public transit options that is. That's where the fun is.

I always begin my work day walking (mode #1) down Connecticut Avenue,  past the hotels stuffed with school groups and lanyarded conventioneers, boarding buses or escaping the chill of meeting rooms. I continue past the bagel place and onto the coffee block, where an independent shop sits defiantly and successfully right next to Starbucks, a ethnographer's research project waiting to happen. I greet the smiling homeless man--"have a good day" he always says--pass the Washington Post Express hawker (I have home delivery) and descend to the Red Line. (mode #2) I get into my commuting zone then--I stand in the same place on the platform to board the same car through the same door to get to the same destination. I origami my Post into a compact subway fold and read until it's time to change to Yellow at Gallery Place, and settle in for the ride to Old Town.

Not anymore: now I have to remind myself to walk to a different place on the platform because at the summer's end-of-the-line National Airport, as I learned after a few absent-minded misses, the efficient path to the shutdown shuttle is different from my preferred exit at King Street. No more same places.

The shutdown shuttle bus (mode #3) slowly lumbers out of the airport road skein and begins a surprisingly pleasant ride down the GW Parkway. I'm torn now, between finishing the front page section of the Post and looking out the window. It's a dilemma: if I don't finish the newspaper, I am less informed; on the other hand, if I put down the paper, I free myself from the incessant chatter and benefit from a biophilia hit of green scenery. 

This shuttle actually stops at Washington and King Streets,  so it is more convenient to me then arriving at the King Street Metro Station. Now I have a new morning walk, westward on King Street, rather than eastward on Prince, where I see different people and different things. Not the blocks of rowhouse domesticity, with just brick and a single pane of drooping old glass between their interiors and the public realm; not the half-friendly couple--she always smiles; he never does--nor the woman who always wears bold colors; not the pseudo-Stevie Nicks always dressed more dramatically than morning demands. On King Street instead there's the early morning bustle of deliveries and the pre-opening rituals of small businesses.

Modes #4 and #5 came with a morning meeting--I was a passenger in a car, yes, a car, to get to the meeting. I had planned ahead, though, and brought my bike helmet so I could bikeshare back to school. I learned two things: one, there's Potomac Yards bike trail, which could end up full of riders in maroon and orange speeding between VT's new campus and our old one; two, I am definitely out of biking shape.

My day ended walking--repeat modes don't count in the mode total--back down King Street but this time passing Washington and walking all the way to the river to catch the water taxi (mode #6) to the Wharf.  This was my second time using the water taxi and I've considered getting the special shutdown commuter season pass, but it's not the most efficient way to commute unless you live and work close to the respective waterfronts. It certainly is the most enjoyable, though. Arriving at the Wharf, to crowds of concert goers, taxi passengers, drinkers, diners, and residents, it strains my memory to see what the waterfront was just a few years ago. Where did all the people come from? Were they hiding somewhere? It's easy to criticize the Wharf (Actually, it's easy to criticize, period; I do it for sport) for a variety of development sins, but it's far more interesting to reflect on what is done well. I'll save that for another post...

Car owners are probably making very different choices to get through the shutdown. They're hunkering down in their air-conditioned private steel cocoons, cursing their peers for making the same decision, griping about Metro's inability to keep itself in shape and voting down, every chance they get, funding to keep it in shape. In this way, the cracks between public and private space widen and deepen; the myth we tell ourselves--e pluribus unam--gradually devolves to e pluribus duo: out of many, two--us and them. Where is this going?

This is my first post in years (I did withdraw from blogging to write an actual book) and it is my first step to return to writing about the city, about public space in particular and its many flavors, sweet and savory, with the goal of testing ideas and topics for the next book, which will be on what I'm currently calling First Amendment space.  So it begins.

“…I think we’ll do out to dinner or something.”

“So, how did the interview go?”

“Great, really great…”

That’s all I heard, just that fragment of gentle chatter, because I glided down the Q Street escalator out of earshot.

Michael—I know his name because he wears it on his shirt, beneath the safety-yellow vest –hands out the Post Express every morning at the Metro entrance. As one of the last remaining home delivery subscribers, I carry my paper with me and rarely take one from him, but we always greet each other with a “good morning” or some comment about the weather.  Michael is one of my stranger friends, or more accurately he is a stranger-friend.  (I do have some strange friends, but in this case stranger is a noun and not an adjective.) He was chatting with a young woman at the top of the Metro entrance, and it was clearly a follow-up to a previous conversation.  She had told him about an interview; he remembered to ask about it.  It went great! There's a dinner she's mulling with someone. They probably chat on this spot regularly, perhaps accompanied by a hand-off of free news.

He falls into a category similar to the “familiar stranger,” a relationship first described in 1972 by a psychologist named Stanley Milgram. A research project devoted to this subject at UC Berkeley describes this relationship as so predictable that we notice if our familiar strangers are not where they are supposed to be. Michael went on vacation for two weeks in August and he made sure to tell his regulars.  He knew they would notice his absence. But  Milgram’s familiar stranger is slightly different; it's someone we see regularly but with whom we do not interact.

That’s not the relationship I have with Michael. We do interact, as he interacts with all the Q Street regulars, like the woman with the successful interview. I have a lot of stranger-friends, some closer than others.  The thin woman with the tiny dog.  The shopkeeper at the corner.   He's a close stranger-friend.  I owed him 9 cents for about a week after dumping all my spare change out on the counter to pay for a half-gallon of milk.  He knew I was good for it because I’m a regular.  I’m his stranger-friend. 

My Old Town Alexandria neighborhood is full of stranger-friends, and some familiar strangers.  Sometimes they come in pairs, one of each.  At least three times a week I pass a couple—and I do notice when it’s only one of them—heading to west on Prince Street in the mornings when I’m walking east.  He never nods or smiles at me but she always does.  Sometimes when I see her walking alone I’m tempted to ask, what’s with him?  But that would be a breach of stranger-friend protocol.

The city is constructed on these fine-grained relationships.  They take place on the sidewalks, at the thresholds, on the bus.  More than taking place, though, they actually make place.  Stranger-friendships can only happen in the public realm, a crucial ingredient for a healthy and lovable city. Like the inhabitants of Erisilia, one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, we are all connected by a network of strings of varying density and strength.

An Urbiphile at the Beach

It’s 5pm and people are packing up their bags, putting on their shoes and tugging over-stimulated little ones away from the shoreline after a fun day at the beach.  Noise follows them down the ramp and out as they walk west straight into the sun. The visitors leave and a tangible sense of emptiness remains as the staff tidies the skew chairs and tables. 

 

I have a unique perspective on this familiar summer scene: from the 4^th floor of the National Building Museum I can look down on The Beach. I appreciate that even the sun cooperates in this surreal fiction, this constructed metaphor, that has taken over two thirds of the Museum’s Great Hall. There are few things as entertaining as humans at play, whether in a city or at a metaphorical beach, and I will get this view all summer until Labor Day.

Last summer when we had The BIG MAZE I didn’t gaze down at it, as clever and lovely as it was, and long for a chance to be in it in the early morning or after hours when everyone was gone.  I do, however, find myself feeling that way about The Beach, the simultaneously serene and comical installation designed by Snarkitecture for the Museum this summer. 

The metaphor works, right down to the mirror at the horizon.  The joy of a metaphor is in teetering on the ridge between is and is not. This is/is not a beach. It’s a Beach. A “beach.”  It’s only been open since July 1, but already the sustain pedal of metaphor is pressed to the floor:  people sit at the shoreline or on the pier with just their feet “in”; they say “let’s go in” or “it’s time to come out.” The sound of the balls is eerily close to the sound of waves.  We are deeply attracted to edges, especially the water’s edge, where we either hesitate in fear or jump in.  

There’s humor in it of course—it’s wildly hilarious fun in there-- but beneath is a current of contemplation and, if you let your mind go there, provocation.  We are charmed by this pale translucent ocean of plastic but should be sobered by the thought of real plastic in the real ocean.  We are reassured by the fact that this ocean is only waist deep, but can feel a little terror of metaphorical drowning. Just outside of the Beach the exhibition Designing for Disaster shows us the real thing, and it’s neither charming nor reassuring.   

Beistegui roof terrace, 1930

There’s a nest of spatial reversals at play, where outsides are in and insides out.  I’ve always been fascinated by places that play with those relationships—orangeries, like the one at Dumbarton Oaks, where living nature entwines the architecture; botanical gardens, where entire ecosystems are stuffed into glass; the surreal living Le Corbusier did in 1930 at the Beistegui Apartment in Paris.  The Beach is an outside that’s inside a box inside a cavernous architectural space that feels like outside. 

The Beach is intentionally, relentlessly artificial, but our emotions and reactions are real, as if we are in an immersive replay of the film Ex Machina.  Am I over-thinking this? Well, that is in my nature, but these thoughts are immanent in the work, available to anyone who takes time to see past the surface spectacle and disarming kid-friendly playground quality.  So, come on in, the water’s great…

Ode to a Cafe Chair

Carl Sagan once said that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  I wasn't familiar with that quote, but one of my students paraphrased it recently in a discussion of world-making and the quest for purity and authenticity.  She misattributed it to the late great Douglas Adams--who knew a thing or two about hitchhiking through made-from-scratch universes--and thought it was about bread not apple pies, which I like better.  Bread, we need that.  Apple pies, not so much. 

If you really want to begin with scratch you have to follow the line, the chain of refining, processing, and cultivating to its logical beginning, eschewing the packaged and the pre-mixed, pretty soon you’re thinking about growing wheat, then contemplating harvesting wild grasses to cross-breed, and before long you’re trying to make water from an oxygen atom and a couple of hydrogens. Even the simplest things in our world are apex achievements.

If you wish to design a nice little sidewalk café, you must first shape a city. With your effortless plop into a movable chair at a too-tiny table on the sidewalk, you sit atop a Jenga tower of cultural biases, public policies, zoning adjustments, permitting, mobility technologies, traffic engineering, power struggles over public space, NIMBY-ism, urban forestry, architectural decisions, and, ultimately, the industrial design, manufacture and distribution of that lightweight chair which you can scooch with one hand, while your café Americano is in the other, from the location in which you found it to the vastly preferable half inch to the north northwest, just so you can demonstrate your agency in this fringe of public space lapping at the shores of the private interior whence your coffee came.  All this so you can sit alone and among countless others, spectators and participants, in the great exercise of urban leisure.  

If this were real...

If this were real...That’s how I begin criticism when I’m at my students’ desks coaching them as they work to become architects. If this were real...It’s an invitation, a hand extended, to enter a possible world without ever leaving this one.  It cradles the comments to follow, and offers information that the student should know—indeed will need to know in the real world--but may not have to deploy at this point, because it’s not real…yet.

Emma’s project had a courtyard sunken about 6’ below sidewalk level. An awkward dimension if you imagine yourself either above or below, but it served many purposes in her project:  gave access to a Metro station, conveyed an archaeological narrative, and gave light and air to the lower levels of her museum.  She imagined that it would be a protected and quiet space in the city. I looked at her model and in an instant a series of scenarios passed in front of my eyes, just as if I were looking at a real place.  If this were real, I said to her, I would be concerned about the eddy of space at the Metro entrance; it feels unsafe, unsurveilled, in perpetual shadow, and hidden. I’m trying to get her to see what I see, to flash forward to an unintended future architectural failure:  abandoned space, closed cafe, vandalized concrete walls, vortices of trash and dry leaves in the dark, mildewed corners, flying in contradiction to everything that Emma fervidly wishes for her world.

She hasn't learned yet how to see the spectrum of possible worlds play out from a single arrangement of fictional walls, floors, and air, to bounce these possibilities, to reflect and referee them, off a mental archive of good and bad precedents, a taxonomy of  realistic assessments of human nature, municipal budgets, and the meager staffing capacities of non-profits. I see all that in the cardboard corner of a sunken cardboard space in a cardboard city. If this were real, Emma, you would be making a place doomed to a future completely counter to what you imagine.

Writers of fiction often talk about their characters as if they’re alive and not completely under the author’s control.  They say and do things the writer didn't completely intend; they steer the story off the well-planned course and wreck deadlines.  These characters remain safely within the book though, only as real as words. When an architect’s characters—the places, elements, and material—become real, develop agendas, and take a bad turn, they do these things in our world.

Design is as fiction, until it’s not.  That is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, whether you’re a student, an architect, or a future inhabitant of a place.  A lot can happen on the way to reality. Fiction allows the author to create worlds that could or could not, should or should not, exist.  But it’s rarely her intention to execute any of these speculations; a novel is not a set of instructions for making a world.

it could have been otherwise...

If this were real…That’s a subjunctive phrase.  The tip-off is, of course, the “were.” You’ll certainly hear people—not me, mind you--say “if this was real” because we English-speakers have become grammatically casual.  We don’t attend to how we choose our words, particularly in speech.  I stick to the subjunctive structure because I've been writing (but not yet publishing) about it as a mode of architectural drawing.  I've become quite partial to it; as an architect I appreciate the snug fit of the right construction to convey the sense of the sentiment. I’m a subjunkie.

If this were real…if I were you…If this were due tomorrow…These expressions liberate architectural criticism from the dull blade of the imperative.  Simply ordering my students to do or not do certain things-- don’t ever put a door there; never make entrances like that--is no way to cultivate learning or imagination.  And don’t even start with the future indicative…That won’t work.