Category: everyday urbanism

sustainability and authenticity, personified

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, housing, infill development, sustainability12 Comments

Mosler Lofts, Benjamin Benschneider photo, courtesy The Schuster Group
In an era when the term “sustainability” is increasingly cast as mere jargon, it is worth noting a sincere and authentic application of family, business and building which gives credence to the term.

Seattle entrepreneur, developer and philanthropist Mark Schuster’s Lofty Pursuits, published last September (Brown Books Publishing Group (2010)), is a must-read, for true believers and cynics alike, as a unique contribution to today’s dialogue about the sustainable city.

Schuster’s book focuses on family tradition and a related business ethic infused by his grandfather, George Mosler, and their embodiment not only in Schuster’s career, but in an award-winning downtown Seattle building, Mosler Lofts. In the spirit of Tracy Kidder’s 1999, House, the reader is left with a multi-disciplinary, emotional and technical experience of building creation, with multiple lessons learned.

Mosler Lofts was Seattle’s first LEED Silver-certified condominium, completed in 2008, and has won over 60 awards at the local, regional and national levels. The story of the building’s challenges—from concept stage through financing and construction— could have been the book’s sole story-line, complete with notable detours such as overcoming cracked foundations on adjacent property.

Yet the inspirational—and, more commendable—aspect of Schuster’s storytelling shows how the initiatives of his development team towards achieving green construction and LEED criteria merged with something far more universal: family values and giving back to the community with the future in mind. Given Schuster’s long resume of community service and social responsibility, his sustainable outlook evokes an authenticity which defies easy challenge.

Lessons learned? Countless family memories, reflections from self-education and business start-ups, on the job CEO and community service learning as well as the richness of a collaborative, team environment. Schuster is frank and self-critical throughout, particularly amid the hard knocks of project delay and complexity, which is particularly key to the book’s holistic success.

While Schuster’s narrative is sometimes truly “lofty”—by including a personal 2005 visit with Israeli and Palestinian leaders amid the story of Mosler Loft’s early marketing–he cannot be faulted for irrelevance. He does not miss a beat with such stories—admirably evoking the practical virtues of voluntarism and mission in building sustainable community.

Although the book’s subtitle, “Repairing the World One Building at a Time” might seem overly incremental and short of comprehensive, Lofty Pursuits is a must-read for its complete, implemented example.

In the process of telling one building’s story, Schuster evokes a much larger community, without getting lost in overused jargon, or impracticalities of the intangible.

the angular convergence of an urban night: a postcard

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, postcards, urban abstractions, urban views2 Comments

In the angular city, water and light converge with the sky.

the new frontier of pothole urbanism?

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views4 Comments

Here’s an idea, not new, but worth repeating. Make those nasty, cordoned off potholes what they already are—untouchable neighborhood open space.

Potholes are a perennial, international urban topic, given their tendency to damage unsuspecting vehicles, threaten bicyclists, and impede all modes of traffic. We debate their origin (“did they really start in ancient Rome!?”), allow them a starring role in politics and feature their long repair time as prime examples of budget shortfalls and sponsored fixes here and abroad.

In large cities, repair times can lag. Ironically, because of their usual location firmly within the public domain, private sector or charitable attempts at repair are often deemed inappropriate by transportation officials.

In the interests of health and safety, if they are going to be unattended risks, why not mark them with style like Steve Wheen, London’s “pothole gardener“?

Indeed, make them monuments, green them up—or, more purposefully, fence them off—as yet another pocket of reclaimed guerrilla urbanism.

As the new traffic-calming “woonerfs”, such mini-parks might just accelerate some people’s desired evolution away from the car.

coloring the urban experience

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views17 Comments

Color does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.

–Pierre Bonnard, Painter and Printmaker

Consider the role color plays in an everyday urban experience, how and why.  No  matter that some aspects of color in the city are naturally occurring;  manipulation of color is well within the reach of most city dwellers, and is one of the most easily and affordably altered urban characteristics.

Here are ten observations.

Color:

  • Defines different facets of the natural environment and contrasts the natural and built environments.
  • Further differentiates elements of the built environment, such as building types or features.
  • Highlights people as well as places.
  • Is an indicator of commercial activity, and subliminally compels attention to vendors and merchandise.
  • Contrasts and defines messages on public and private signage announcing regulation, location and the opportunity for transaction.
  • Brightens rights of way and frames journeys across alleys, roadways and in various modes of transport.
  • Whether natural or artificial, can illuminate the urban night, and can provide a sense of safety in darkness.
  • Provides visual contrasts that stimulate the urban experience.
  • Can be particularly uplifting when enhanced by the sun, especially sky and water blues, vegetation greens and building-paint reds.
  • Can be used to awaken and inspire as part of a local improvement effort.

The following international images illustrate these observations, and, how in defining the urban experience, color is a major influence.

How can we marshal the potential of urban color while retaining a legally appropriate balance between public regulation of the private realm? I suggest this question is as important to cities—and far less discussed—than many other elements of today’s urban agenda.

[showtime]

For a recent provocative view of the role of color in architecture, see last year’s post by Ana Maria Manzo, here.  Click on each image for more detail.

“diagram no. 3” and more memories of the roots of urbanism

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, placemaking4 Comments

In the course of an 1848 speech, Benjamin Disraeli said that “a precedent embalms a principle”.

Today’s first myurbanist entry identified early principles of Roman “placemaking” as captured by Vitruvius.

This second entry recalls an intriguing diagram from almost two thousand years later which may have played a similar foundational role.

Writing in Green-Belt Cities in 1946, Frederic Osborn noted his candidate for the roots of a neighborhood focus in city planning— “precisely [within] the principles of development so lucidly expounded in” Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of Tomorrow “and exemplified in the two Garden Cities which Howard founded…”

“He reinvented the neighborhood unit idea, which is to be found in More’s Utopia, and is implied in our system of local-government wards, but had been forgotten by townsmen…”

Osborn no doubt refers to Howard’s proposal that “… it is an important part of the project that each ward, or one-sixth part of the city, should be in some sense a complete town by itself, and thus the school buildings might serve, in the earlier stages, not only as schools, but as places for religious worship, for concerts, for libraries, and for meetings of various kinds….”

'Diagram No. 3', the school-centered ward. The modern origin of neighborhood planning? From Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902

Here, Howard encapsulated much of the neighborhood unit and then-contemporary “community center” movement, foreshadowed Clarence Perry by some 20 years, and, in his “Diagram No. 3,” perceptively showed the school at the ward’s center, a railroad station at the ward’s corner, and industry separated at the periphery.

As noted before, the challenges of integration of neighborhood and the city are not new, and may forever live on.