Suburban Transformations
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, 192 pp., $40 hardcover
From the beginning days of the movement, there was a genuine desire on the part of several of the New Urbanism’s founders and other early members of CNU to bring Modernists and other proponents of the architectural avant-garde into the fold.
The thinking went like this: If you respect the large-scale issues of where the building sits on the lot, how it addresses the street and nearby buildings, and you make sure that there is adequate transparency between building and sidewalk (i.e., enough windows), then it shouldn’t matter that the front façade resembles a large knife blade that’s about to detach from the main structure and fall 60 feet to the sidewalk below. The greater problem is when the building fails to participate in the larger structure of the block and to continue the pattern set by nearby buildings.
Within the New Urbanism, public buildings enjoy a special status, and get a free pass when it comes to many of the rules. They’re allowed to exist as “object buildings,” possessing unique architecture and occupying important locations within the plan. Usually they are not subject to the form-based codes that shape the plan’s “background” buildings. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a good example. Its striking form terminates the view down one of Bilbao’s principal streets. Many New Urbanists recognize it as a building with an architecture that is “of our time” and also supportive of the “old urbanism “ that surrounds it.
Indeed, there are a few architects who have successfully straddled both worlds. Graham Gund’s National Association of Realtors Building is an edgy glass wedge of a building that also contributes to the urbanism of its surrounding Washington, DC, neighborhood. The building meets the property line along all of its three sides and includes ground-floor retail; its transparency helps it to visually engage adjacent streets and sidewalks.
A recently published book, Suburban Transformations, attempts the same blending, but with far less success. It’s a pity because many within the modernist architectural mainstream are becoming more open to approaches that encompass sustainability and the reclamation of existing urban and suburban areas. Unfortunately, Suburban Transformations seems unable to find and illuminate the common ground that could be the way into New Urbanism for such practitioners.
The book begins with several chapters that look at the process of change within urban settlements, citing examples such as the early development of Florence and Cologne. The author jumps quickly forward to condemn the state of current suburban development with its acknowledged problems of sprawl and loss of identity. In his capsule journey through the history of human settlement patterns,
Lukez dismisses the New Urbanism with a familiar but inaccurate critique: “Their designs engage in time-honored conventions of neighborhood, block, and street. Because of their attractiveness in branding and marketing, however, New Urbanist projects are often predictable and less likely to incorporate local idiosyncrasies and individual expression. Design solutions do not readily engage vibrant and contemporary architectural language and rely more on historical precedents — raising important cultural questions about our identity as a modern and evolving society … As currently formulated, New Urbanism alone cannot repair our suburbs and edge cities.”
Hazy theoretical foundations
As an alternative, Lukez recommends his own strategy, called the “Adaptive Design Process.” The following sentence suggests, somewhat cryptically, that the concept of time is central to the approach: “The active engagement of temporal factors, which is the purpose of the Adaptive Design Process, yields a more life-enhancing environment where the past and future are contained in the present.” From its hazy theoretical foundation, the book goes on to catalogue a series of “new spatial-temporal typologies,” with which one either “writes” or “erases” over an existing built context. Each act of writing or erasure — excision, etching, parceling, absorption, wrapping, and morphing among them — is described in detail and illustrated with a three-dimensional drawing.
In his explanation of the Adaptive Design Process, Lukez takes us through a complex series of steps with names like “premapping,” “mapping,” “cross mapping,” “editing,” “separation of lifecycle assemblies,” “evaluating site forces,” and “recalibration.” Even after multiple readings of the text describing each step, I had little sense of how his approach differs from conventional site analysis. Some other steps such as “assessing community values” and “taming parking” seemed more familiar, and tracked fully with my new urbanist sensibilities.
From this kit of parts and processes, Lukez takes us through five case studies of suburban transformation. The most extensive, at 20 pages, is a reuse proposal for a mall and adjacent office park in Burlington, Massachusetts, that, through a series of carefully documented steps, morphs into a composition of megastructures, one of which spans the adjacent Route 128 (illustrated on the book’s cover, see image on page 14).
The big moves include partial removal of a parking lot to daylight a creek and the construction of several new 2- to 3-story office and industrial buildings surrounded by earthen berms to quiet the freeway. Among the other components of the plan are: a new central street that the author says is “worthy of Paris”; a new hybrid building type combining “parking, retail and landscape” to be applied as needed in the event of a parking shortfall; and a “new public lawn much like the lawn designed by Thomas Jefferson for the University of Virginia.” The progression of steps leading to the final plan is documented in a series of small diagrammatic plans, which, while graphically compelling, are poorly explained. There is no full-size illustrative plan, and the two aerial perspectives at the end of the chapter have no callouts or other captions to explain what the reader is seeing. Sexy drawings yes, but little explanation of what’s actually happening on the ground.
Although this book is a truly impressive work of graphic and textual presentation, what most disturbs me is the author’s failure to make a convincing case for his approach, or even his heroic late-modernist aesthetic. Indeed, I’m left wondering how one could ever consider a composition of 300-foot-long glass-encased megastructures slung across an aging freeway to be a “life-enhancing environment.” The notion is particularly irksome in light of Lukez’s dismissal of the New Urbanism.
Students of architecture will surely be excited by the images and diagrams in this book, and may well want to imitate the pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-urban building forms that are depicted. But in so doing they would miss out on gaining an understanding of a much more compelling and straightforward arsenal of techniques — those of the New Urbanism — that offer far greater utility for achieving true suburban transformation.
-----------------
Peter Katz, principal of Trans/Form, is author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community.
