Bethesda and Balzac

One puzzling thing about Bethesda Row, a short alley converted to a pedestrianized shopping street, is how much it recalls much older urban types.  It feels more like a nineteenth-century French passage than like an American main street or mall or marketplace.  The form of the street as well as the look of the buildings seems to roll back to a nostalgic past, when window-shopping first became an urban pastime and the streets of Paris became characters in the novels of Balzac.  It all seems quaint, albeit expensive.

Just down the street, the metro station built in the 1970s opens onto the requisite urban plaza with a fountain, surrounded by scaleless highrises with sealed strip windows and a concrete ‘arcade.’   Even when the plaza is full of people, it seems empty.  

Here’s my question: Why do we seem stuck between these two options? Nostalgia or modernistica? 

Of course we are not.  Clever architects are out there working to remake the city once again.  The challenge is to design buildings with character that make a street street worth walking.

Questions of Scale - Bethesda Row and Sunset Place

Bethesda Row on a rainy morning in winter

Indoor-outdoor dining

In Maryland during the holidays, Philip and I toured Bethesda Row on a rainy day with two developers from Federal Properties, which owns the project as well as a significant part of the commercial downtown.  Federal recently bought the Shops at Sunset Place, South Miami’s faltering mall, and will renovate the building to make it more urbane (good for us) and more profitable (good for them). They described the process of transforming Bethesda’s tatty suburban downtown into a thriving, walkable shopping/residential district centered on a metro stop of the Washington DC system.  South Miami holds a similar position with a commercial main street on the metro line, serving a large, well-heeled, suburban population.

The two developers spoke of how the design of the ground floor of the buildings of Bethesda Row establishes a human scale for the street, creating the ambiance of the place, which invites people to walk, and linger, and shop.  As good urbanists, they study questions of scale carefully and worked with their architects to be sure that the street felt right for pedestrians, shoppers, and residents in apartments above.  On narrow Bethesda Row, formerly an alley, Italian lights are strung overhead define the street as a public room, with doors and windows that open generously to create places for people.   The developers teach urbanism to their architects.

They criticized Sunset Place for its lack of scale.  OK.  But, in truth, it took me until I went back there yesterday to really understand what they meant.

Sunset Place is a stage set.  We know this already.  Its preposterously grand staircase overlooks a “street” decked out in Classical/Mannerist/Who Knows What? trim and leads to upper level walkways that cross the street on picturesque bridges.  It has plenty of architectural decoration.  The entire panorama, which unfolds as one walks, was designed to be seen from a certain distance like a set, not up close. Indeed, the scenery of Sunset Place looks best from the distance of an architectural drawing - an elevation - to be specific, which notoriously has little sense of material or joinery.  Inhabiting the mall, one feels like a figure added by the draughtsman to an architectural rendering.  Up close, the “details” of Sunset Place are ridiculous. 

That's what the developers meant by human scale: real details that do something useful and interesting, developed thoughtfully in real materials that reward the eye and the touch of the hand.  Good.

Now that they own Sunset Place, I look forward to seeing what the developers of Federal Properties will do with it.

Sunset Place, South Miami

Why the Bataclan Theatre?

The Bataclan theatre, where the worst of the Paris attacks was staged, is a nineteenth-century music hall embedded in a block facing Boulevard Voltaire in a dense, culturally-mixed neighborhood.    It couldn’t be more classically Parisian in design or in use.  Most of the façade is inhabited by Café Ba’ta,clan that offers patrons a sidewalk salon of wicker chairs and tables on the boulevard.  The theatre entry is modest, facing the street so the queue forms outside.

Why did ISIS choose that place, a low-rent music hall, among all the gilded theatres of Paris?  Some speculate that the owner’s support for Israel brought down the wrath of murderers. http://historybuff.com/paris-terror-attacks-killers-target-bataclan-theatre/.  Maybe.  Was it American heavy metal?  Or Parisian nightlife? Perhaps.

I’m struck by the cruel irony that the architectural openness of the Bataclan made it vulnerable, while the same openness is our best defense against intolerance.  The Bataclan (meaning the whole caboodle) embraces the city and makes the boulevard into a public space – not just a street.  Its café turns outward to welcome all those who drink and chat.  The theatre has two entrances that flank the café, but only one is used.  They lead up to a foyer that looks back over the street with tall French doors and a long balcony where concert-goers might perch at intermission, or go for air when the music gets too thick.  The façade is bright and decorative.  Originally it had a Chinese kick to the roof, just to make it exotic, and three circular windows at the top.   The historybuff has an early picture showing the chinoiserie inside and out.  The Bataclan embodies the best French tradition of  urban architecture, with joy, urbanity and good humor.

Perhaps that also offends those who would control us.   

A good night at the Ba'ta,clan Café

Lincoln Road Oval Redesign: Kids and Parakeets

The Lincoln Road Oval (at Euclid Ave) is a Miami parterre covered in an astroturf carpet where kids romp and parakeets chatter overhead, even Discoman is there.
Here's a link to a video:  Listen for Parakeets

James Corner and Field Operations have proposed a new design to renovate Lincoln Road including changes to the oval.  Back in the summer, they proposed turning the oval into a fountain. Here's a link.   A number of people including me spoke with the designers about how popular the oval has always been as public space.  In particular we told them that about the children who love to race around and do their tricks on the astroturf where everyone can see them.   I also spoke of the parakeets that nest in the date palms surrounding the oval.

In late September Field Operations presented a revised scheme showing a play area for children backed by a much smaller fountain.  Better.  They listened.  Another link. 

However Lapidus, the master of designing spaces for people watching, still has some lessons to teach.  His oval is raised up about two feet higher than the pavement like a stage that is facing outward to Lincoln Road.  Someone on the oval can see whatever else is going on and can be seen by everyone passing by.  This is a thrill for kids who are suddenly at eye level with adults.  It also works for teenagers who like to lounge or picnic on the oval in a position where they can sit and still be at eye level with passersby.  The height makes adults sit down, usually on the rim with their feet on the steps.  Public space as an equalizer.  Sitting, they look outward toward passersby or turn around to watch their kids, sitting sideways on the rim.  This double view knits the space together, looking out and looking in, and it makes kids happier to play when they are watched only casually.

And parakeets chatter overhead.  They are the other residents who need to be considered.  Monk parakeets are the only parrots that nest communally.  They chose the grove of date palms for specific reasons: they can be together but spread among several trees; they are safe from ground predators; they are high enough to watch out for hawks; they are close to a ready food supply, the palm nuts, berries, and bird feeders of South Beach gardens.

I'm sure we can learn to design for all the animals, including kids and birds.



  

Old Ivy

Sunset Place about a year ago. 

The management at Sunset Place shopping mall in South Miami recently removed a creeping fig from the walls facing Route 1.  This kind of fig is an aggressive vine that can swallow up whole buildings in a season, but nevertheless I am sorry to lose that bit of subversive green.  The newly, sadly clean walls make me miss the romance of ivy-covered halls, which runs so deep in the academic tradition that only the most venerable schools bear the name.  Most of the League has long since banished the Ivy, but retains the hoary memory of a picturesque ancestry in the architecture.  The older buildings often have a rough surface that already suggests overgrowth, perhaps in overloaded detail, perhaps in the gnarliness of stone or the mottledness of brick.  In imagination, this roughness retains a natural condition, as if the building were only slightly removed from its origins in the rock and mud below it.  When ivy (or creeping fig) grows, it carries living part of the earth up the walls as if to reclaim them.  Building maintenance supervisors fight back with keen eye and sharp blade.  To let plants advance unchecked suggests an exquisite negligence or perhaps tolerance that remains part of the collegiate imagination.  Deep in ivy-covered walls, perhaps scholars like St Jerome in his study have more on their minds than pruning, and perhaps willingly make room in their world for other living things. In the presence of big thoughts, clean buildings seem rather shallow, and all the pruning and trimming obsessive, even violent.  When you think about it, a smooth surface doesn’t offer much to think about and requires a lot of repetitive work to keep it that way.

Stones and Trees

Dia Art Foundation planted trees in New York as part
of Beuys exhibition (http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/51/1295)

Recently the best architects, such as Herzog and deMeuron integrate plants into their buildings, for example the green wall by Patrick Blanc at Caixa Forum in Madrid, and the proposed hanging garden for the new Miami Art Museum.  Jean Nouvel included a similar green wall at the new Musée de Quai Branly in Paris.  These vertical gardens are works of art that require intense irrigation and maintenance because the plants must survive separated from the rich and complex dirt that supports most gardens.  Like hothouse flowers, they grow and change, yet not so much that they challenge the architecture.

Artist Joseph Beuys was a friend and mentor of Jacques Herzog and Pierre deMeuron.  Beuys argued that art could make real change in the world. In 1982, he undertook planting 7000 oak trees along the streets of Dusseldorf, each with a basalt stele planted next to it.  The trees grew, offering shade and life to otherwise barren streets, the stones weathered, sometimes supporting some small mosses and lichens.   As the trees grew larger every year in their cloaks of changing leaves, the life they supported on the street and in their branches also grows, while the stones seem to become smaller and less significant.  Beuys wrote,  “So now we have six- and seven-year-old oaks, and the stone dominates them. In a few years' time, stone and tree will be in balance, and in twenty to thirty years' time we may see that gradually, the stone has become an adjunct at the foot of the oak or whatever tree it may be.” (http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/51/1295). 

Are architects daring enough to risk bringing vigorous life into the midst of buildings, knowing that their stones will diminish in significance as life takes over? And are they then willing to have their weathered buildings stand even after the oak has lived its life and rotted, perhaps to feed another tree.  What significance then is the basalt, like a gravestone? 

Architecture for people on Lincoln Road (or not)

Here's a link to a video of me talking about Morris Lapidus' follies on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and other projects there.  It's about 6 minutes long.
http://youtu.be/QMkOsrf3LNg