Urban Spaces No. 5 Featuring Green Design Strategies

Edited by John Morris Dixon

Visual Reference Publications, 2008, 304 pp., $60 hardcover

This generously illustrated large-format book presents profiles of more than 160 developments, ranging from new town centers, to resorts, urban infill, and transit-oriented projects — most of them in the US, but a sizable number overseas, in places such as the booming cities of China. Though not limited to any one approach to design, the book includes many projects by new urbanist firms such as Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., Moule & Polyzoides, and Torti Gallas and Partners.
A two-page spread shows plans for Magnolia, a 125-acre project described as “the largest-ever planned development in Charleston (South Carolina) and the first major application of the city’s pioneering ‘gathering place district’ concept.” In outer districts of Charleston, says editor John Morris Dixon, the city government is encouraging New Urbanism in part through the application of ‘gathering place’ rules that reserve 10 percent of the area for public open spaces.
The firm of Hughes, Good, O’Leary & Ryan has laid out Magnolia with canals in the median park strips of some of its streets. “Buildings must be configured to maintain two-story-high street walls, with limited interruptions,” Dixon points out. “Park areas bordering the marshes along the Ashley River will be developed with gardens, boardwalks, and overlooks, along streams and bio-swales designed to treat storm water.”
Canals, bioswales, rooftop gardens, vine-covered trellises, tree-shaded streets, high-efficiency or operable windows, recycled paving, greenbelts, solar panels, and photovoltaic cells are among the “green” design aspects emphasized throughout this volume, which contains the work of 34 design firms. Four pages are devoted to a remarkable project in Santa Monica, California — Moule & Polyzoides’ Robert Redford Building for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is “100 percent powered from renewable sources with no carbon emissions.”
The book contains unexpected gems like the Lititz Watch Technicum, whose tall, tapered, stone building — barn-like yet contemporary — looks very much at home in Lititz, Pennsylvania, where stone barns have long been landmarks of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Michael Graves and Hammel Associates designed the building, and Derck & Edson Associates planned the overall project.
One of the most impressive urban collections in the book is a series of buildings that Akrom Moisan Architects has renovated or designed from scratch in the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon — 14 projects since 1996, many designated as “sustainable design.” These masonry buildings, mostly five to seven stories high, are not individual stand-outs, but they work well to form a coherent, appealing district. They provide “active edges and enclosure for the parks,” and have entrances and retail that relate well to Portland’s streetcar line, Dixon observes.
Some projects are not nearly so good. Among them: oddly shaped high-rises in Beijing that pay little attention to pedestrians; an outlet center near Seattle encircled by parking lots; and awkwardly proportioned “tuck-under avenue row houses” at Stapleton in Denver. China appears to be competing for (and winning) a Gold Medal for Garishness, but the book has its share of exaggerated object buildings in the US as well. I attribute the unevenness of the choices not to Dixon, an architectural editor with decades of experience, but to the selection process of Visual Reference Publications. Though participation is by invitation only, and publication is in cooperation with the Urban Land Institute, each firm in the book must pay a fee to receive 1,000 copies of its eight-page section. If firms weren’t paying to be showcased, the critical bar would be higher.