'Machine as the Garden' & the future of development

The Spring/Summer Harvard Design Magazine's main theme is non-formal cities, a hot topic and certainly a rich one - but the there is an an exciting counterpoint to this issue. Nathalie Beauvais, examines an exceptionally 'formal' planned city (well, campus extension): Harvard's Allston Campus. And her article is, mercifully, free. 

She asserts elegantly that the environmental "performance targets... can be read like source code... [and] will direct the forms of the built environment", facades will perform as permeable, reactive skins, and an entire ecosystem of solar panels, geothermal wells, bioswales and their compatriots will increase efficiency and protect the Charles river. The article explains much better than I can (links will remain valid until the issue is archived, I'm guessing).

Frequently the sheer scale of contemporary development seems overwhelming, homogeneous, a dehumanizing beast to attach stone veneer to or rally against at town meeting. What is so exciting about this article and the idea of the working landscape is that entire neighborhoods are being thought of as systems and structures; that scale is being used to enable harmonious diversity and increase sustainability rather than threaten these things.

Shared Spaces: harnessing the civility of people

A recent article in the Boston Globe Magazine suggests "Boston drivers are bad, but Boston pedestrians might be worse", presumably because they break traffic rules. But what if the rules are the problem? Because of the questionable habits of both parties, many streets in Boston exist in a de facto state of Shared Space, the slowly & steadily growing idea of Dutch planner Hans Monderman. It seems we are edging toward the recognition that the urban street is an altogether unique creature.

The idea is that all our fussing and stoplights and walklights and orchestration for safety is making our streets less safe. Drivers and pedestrians believe if they obey, everything will be fine. People stop thinking. Shared Space advocates the removal of curbs, signs, lights, etc. and letting people figure it out for themselves. Calling on common sense and cooperation, it harnesses the civility of people rather than letting it atrophy. Apparently it actually does reduce accidents, and reportedly reduces congestion due to increased efficiency.

The aesthetic value of clearing the clutter is promising as well, in addition to the promise of freeing urban life from the four foot strip of concrete mashed against building facades.

It's had success in the Dutch town of Drachten and in Germany.

The discussion brings the larger political implications of urban design tantalizingly close to the surface, but that's a post for another day.

"We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour, ...The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles." ^[4]
- Hans Monderman

nations, people, networks and hererarchy

Arata Isozaki was in town last week, complements of both Harvard's GSD and MIT's SA+P. I thought it was interesting how his work touches the idea of heterarchies. From his proposal for a floating Olympic network host hosted by all Asian nations together, to his non-directional performance space in the Akiyoshidai International Arts Village conceived of with Italian composer Luigi Nono in which there is no one central composer, to his Kashi Plan for an offshore capital island that grants no group favor, each work is influenced by confederation, willful union of equals, by heterarchies.

When he compares his non-hierarchical theater to traditional 19th century models, he highlights the centralized authority of the conductor, and the position of the royal box. The Akiyosidai performance space (1) has no central node, no axis implying a power structure. It is to be filled collaboratively, with musicians dispersed in the audience so that everyone is close to the music.

The traditional, 19th century social unit was prescribed by the distance feet (ours or horses') could take us. Now our networks are flung across continents and the globe. The 20th century has proven that the social structure of foot traffic is not entirely appropriate for modern scale. Maybe our new scale of activity requires a new format for interaction.