[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

In yesterday’s post, I expended several hundred words in a possibly-unnecessary exercise – intellectually demolishing the feasibility of architectural speculations, presented in the Boston Globe, that I believe even their proponents would concede are whimsical fantasies, never intended to exist beyond CAD/CAM screens and jpegs. 

They represent an effort to do something creative with a landscape marred by a prolonged slump in commercial building.

I tripped over that imprecision.  The landscape is marred, if indeed it is, because construction stiopped after it was started.  Had there in fact been a prolonged slump, then Filene’s will still be a department store.  Rather, Filene’s disappeared for a combination of two reasons: (1) a boom in property growth, with the resulting boom in real estate property values, and (2) the decline of the department store as a business model.  Filene’s became Macy’s, and Jordan’s became Macy’s, and Macy’s didn’t need two department stores across the street from one another. 

There is no telling when a building will rise again at the stalled Filene’s redevelopment, so the city’s architects are filling the void with a few ideas of their own:

In Part 1, taking the Globe at its word, I cherry-picked the most outlandish, the least practical.  But is architecture allowed to be completely impractical?  Only with the whimsical discretionary money of a plutocratic patron interested in creating new urban follies.  Yet, having disarmed us with an of-course-these-are-unserious disclaimer, the Globe in fact wants us to buy the product:

At stalled work sites, architects and planners are seeking to create forums for artistic expression and experimentation, transforming weed-strewn lots –

My hackles rise at cliches. 

Beware my hackles

Weeds are not strewn; they sprout.  Litter is strewn.  And when was the last time you went strewing, anyway?  Does ’strew’ have any conjuration other than a past passive?

In a word, “No.”

– into places where people could pause to enjoy intriguing urban scenery, or at least walk their dogs.

And not coincidentally, to create work for architects J.  Like this proposal, the first of several seeking respectability:

Filene’s design #8: Designer: Brad Koerner. Design firm: LAM Partners Inc. Koerner proposes draping the Filene’s site in enormous fabric that would serve as the canvas for supersize LED video screens. The screens could project any number of animations, such as a waterfall, or artists could be commissioned to produce animations that reflect the spirit of the Downtown Crossing area. Flood lights would accent the remaining portions of the structure.

“The idea is to breathe new life into these projects at a time when people would really appreciate it,’’ said Shauna Gillies-Smith, a landscape architect who proposed a medicinal garden for an empty site in the Longwood Medical Area.

Longwood design #2: Architect: Shauna Gillies-Smith. Design firm: Ground Inc. Gillies-Smith, a landscape architect, proposes to build a temporary medicinal garden at Longwood Center. Some of the plants Gilles-Smith proposes planting are: Echinacea, begonia, California poppy, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, nasturtium, and valerian.

“It’s about signaling a present and future commitment to the public realm.’’

While I doubt there would be much health or economic benefit from this use, it would be visually pleasing. 

While some submissions are whimsical, others propose straightforward improvements such as basic lighting improvements or graphics to upgrade dull construction fencing.

What these more modest designs have in common is appearance – covering up the urban surgery with an optical band-aid.  They also have in common acknowledgment of their transitory nature:

In Miami, officials are renting idled sites from developers for $1 a year and making temporary parks of them.

In Seattle, one developer of a stalled 15-story office building volunteered to build a fountain, benches, and landscaping, while another allowed local food vendors to set up at the proposed site of a hotel he hasn’t been able to build.

Filene’s design #7: Designer: Dave Waller. Design firm: Brickyard VFX. Waller proposes to use the empty Filene’s site to post vintage neon signs from New England’s history, featuring signs from old drive-ins, Howard Johnson’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts.

At Columbus Center, principals of Schweppie Lighting Design Inc. proposed covering a fence with panels that change color as people pass by. At Harvard, John Powell suggested covering the fence in a video screen with images of Allston’s past and renderings of how development could change it in the future.

There’s only one problem: money.

The fixes range in cost from $300,000 to $1.2 million.

Who will pay for it?  The architects are unanimous – someone else.

At the least, said Tim Love, a principal of design firm Utile Inc., developers have an obligation to see that stalled projects don’t become eyesores.

“Any landowner has a civic responsibility to make their property look attractive,’’ Love said.

Really?  Says who?

“If a homeowner has a weed-filled front yard or leaves trash out, they would face penalties in most municipalities.’’

Garbage is a health hazard.  Weeds aren’t.  Mr. Love’s hypothesis is wishful thinking.  Less wishful-thinking is to imagine the city might fund the beautification.

Boston officials are now mulling whether to install temporary dressings at several sites. The Boston Redevelopment Authority asked developer John B. Hynes III to cover the two half-demolished buildings on his Filene’s site with large screens.

Which they should – helps protect the remaining shell, costs little, improves appearance.

Hynes and city officials are considering whether to print graphics or other designs on the screens.

Talk is cheap. 

Talk, in fact, costs nothing.

The BRA is also consulting with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority about restoring the land at the Columbus Center site.

Columbus Center design #3: Architect: Simon Hare. Design firm: Placetailor Inc. Hare proposes to cast a nylon canopy over Columbus Center, to reconnect the community with the construction site and its possibilities. The canopy, to be spread across the Massachusetts Turnpike work site, would be supported by metal poles and braces that would lift it 30 feet over the highway.

“There’s not a lack of ideas being batted around,’’ said Kairos Shen, the BRA’s chief planner.

Ideas are cheap too.

Slightly more than four (!!) years ago, I posted about the Fan Pier’s empty site in the Curse Of Too Much Value; my point being that a well-located site that has already had substantial investment will not be redeveloped into a lower-value use.  Being cursed with so much value and sunk cost – financial and emotional – to be recouped, it

 “The problem is, how do you implement them? The reason these installations seldom get off the ground is there is no money to pay for them.’’

Ay, there’s the rub.

In most cases, the burden of paying for temporary installations falls on the developer. Builders already don’t have the money restart construction, so they are reluctant to find and spend as much as $1 million for aesthetic improvements.

You think not?

Change this planet as we know it!

“I’m not averse to landscaping and creating something unique, but by the time you take down the fencing and mobilize to do the work, we hopefully will be ready to proceed with our development,’’ said Tom Alperin, chief executive of National Development, which stopped construction last fall on the Longwood biotech lab.

That’s the second practicality: time.  Developers with stalled properties want to get them moving.  Anything established on the site merely means something to be dismantled later, at a cost of time.

Alperin said it would be too much work to accommodate [the Globe's] proposals in the time frame he’s working with. He said he hopes to resume construction within 18 months.

However, if somebody paid him to put in the public amenities, that would be a different story.

Some architects and designers urged the city to consider new regulations to help pay for art installations. Josh Barandon, chief executive of Squared Design LLC of Los Angeles, said the city should consider levying a penalty on developers who leave their sites dormant for prolonged periods.

Trust an Angeleno to recommend something for a Bostonian to do!

You, Kev, we’ve got a good idea for you

“In our opinion, such a penalty is both logical and feasible, especially in light of the current situation at Downtown Crossing,’’ said Barandon –

How thoughtful of him to offer his opinion that one third party (the city) should tax another third party (the developer) to pay for something his firm would be paid to create.

– whose firm collaborated with Howeler + Yoon of Boston to create a vertical garden at Filene’s to grow algae for the production of alternative fuel.

Oh, that’s sensible!

Love, the principal of Utile, said the city could require developers to buy insurance that would pay for aesthetic improvements in case financial problems forced them to stop construction.

I doubt such insurance exists now.  Still, if there were a market, somebody would write the coverage.  But why would a developer want to buy that insurance? 

“If developers want to play in this city and take risks, one of the risks they have to mitigate is the chance that the economy might collapse between permitting and construction,’’ he said.

Yes, that’ll certainly revive the economy and make Boston more business-friendly.

 “To financially penalize developers trying to hold onto their projects is ludicrous at a time like this,’’ said David Begelfer, chief executive of NAIOP Massachusetts, a commercial real estate trade group. “We have a unique circumstance in the financial markets. If you try to put in place regulations because of that, it could have unintended consequences for future growth.’’

That’s ludicrous!

Hynes, the Filene’s developer, doesn’t know when he’ll be able to resume construction. In the meantime, as he prepares screens to protect the two buildings on the site this winter, Hynes said he is willing to consider incorporating art but is more focused on the functional than the fanciful.

“Priority one is to protect the structure of the buildings, and priority two is the aesthetics,’’ he said.

Remarkably rational.

“We’re not predisposed to anything, but the hope for us is that whatever we end up doing, the emphasis is on temporary.’’

There’s the third obstacle: risk of losing development rights.  Install anything, anywhere, and someone will decide it should be preserved as a permanent use – then all your value is lost.  If the site is ugly, everyone will want you to get on with the business of developing it.

Beauty, to a developer, is a clear path to building.  And for that, an ugly lot is better.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder

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By: David A. Smith

“So this unemployed architect walks into a bar and says, ‘our erections can last for years’.” 

Okay, maybe not precisely that cheesily, but something similarly whimsical had to have been in the minds of Boston Globe editors when they sent out an offer to under-employed architects, What would you do to beautify under-developed property? 

We asked designers to suggest ways to spruce up stalled building projects around the city.

Given this, what’s a CAS-CAM designer to do but crank up the fantasies?  As the Globe’s introduction said:

The ideas are not restrained by considerations of practicality or cost, and they are not meant to be.

Some are reality-based, some float in the Empyrean realms unfettered by the necessity for practicality, like these two:

Filene’s design #1: Design firms: Howeler + Yoon Architecture and Squared Design. The team proposes to build a vertical algae-powered bioreactor on the Filene’s site.  The structure would be composed of prefabricated modules, or “eco-pods,” containing materials to manufacture biofuels. The eco-pods would allow scientists to test algae species and methods of fuel extraction. The fuel produced by the algae would power robotic arms that could reconfigure the pods to enhance growing conditions.

Reason staggers at the impracticalities of this one. 

Why put eco-pods, whatever they are, in stacks that are on the one hand physically inaccessible – so that anything good derived has to be lifted out by antiseptic arachnid arms – and on the other hand in a high-people-traffic area, so that anything bad can infect the maximum number of zombies right away?

Rule Number 2: Double Tap

Why take really valuable downtown land – it may be idle but it’s not valueless – and use it for something that could be placed anywhere?  Shades of Charles V and the Mezquita of Cordoba.

Operator!  Give me the number for 9-1-1!

A stalled construction property is unquestionably an eyesore:

Stalled site: Filene’s redevelopment, Location: Downtown Crossing, Estimated cost: $700 million, Status: Construction halted in November 2008 (Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff Photo)

However, as we saw in temporary permanence, city dwellers rapidly become used to work-in-progress or chiuso per restauro signs, so the eye elides them from our memory – which makes the windblown and trash-accumulating site not an affront to our daily living but merely a civic embarrassment:

And I know about embarrassing institutions

Only a smidgen less absurd is this one:

Filene’s design #11: Designer: William Frese. Frese, who is a sculptor, proposes to turn the Filene’s site into an abstract apothecary chest, evoking the neighborhood’s history in the jewelry trade. The “jewels” and a jeweler’s hand tool would be placed throughout the site.

Seeing aside the charming-because-transparent self-interest of a sculptor proposing to turn a construction shell into a rack for macro-sculpture – and where would be get these sculptures, O wise one? – one has the sense that this contributor knows full well this is a fantasy.

Or to be more precise, an architectural folly, for which there is a long and rich tradition.  A folly is a small building with no practical purpose at all, placed into a landscape to provide physical piquancy.  Some are purely visual, placed to create a natural vista or strolling point in a large garden:

Stowe Rotunda

Others stand like monument to childhood:

Broadway Tower, Moreton-in-Marsh, Cotswolds

Many follies are consciously self-deprecating, like this monument to architecture from Auckland, New Zealand:

Former headquarters, Bank of Ozymandias

Most follies result from personal wealth and architectural penury, but some are products of personal obsession, like the Watts Towers of Sam Rodia:

Watts Towers

Rodia called his creation Nuestro Pueblo (’our town’) and as the Watts Tower Web site puts it, “when he was asked why he made the towers, he answered, ‘I wanted to do something big and I did it.’” 

Even follies require maintenance, though, which is why this one is beyond folly:

Filene’s design #2: Architect: Christopher Golden. Design firm: Carol R. Johnson Associates. Golden, a landscape architect, proposes to fill the void in Downtown Crossing with a waterfall and urban oasis. The waterfall would drop from the side of the Filene’s building and cascade into a swimming pool, which would be surrounded by a sandy beach. At night, lights and music would emanate from the core of the Filene’s building.

Any property owner knows that a swimming pool is a hole in the ground into which one pours money.  They cost money to build; cost money to operate; have ongoing maintenance problems; create liability risk; and more than likely, reduce your property’s value upon sale. 

Add to that the impossibility of keeping clean a public-use swimming pool in the middle of a bustling city, with all its attendant risks:

And a beach?  We can safely consign this one to the world of fantasy – a wonderful place to imagine or experience vicariously (the lure of travel writing), but not to visit on one’s own.

Then there’s this wishful exercise:

Filene’s design #6: Architect: Travis Ewen. Design firm: Carol R. Johnson Associates.  Ewen, a landscape architect, proposes to create an urban garden on the Filene’s site with wind turbines and solar panels to be supported by the existing buildings.

Setting aside the implausibility of cows wandering Washington Street, if we can’t place wind turbines in the relative isolation of Martha’s Vineyard, what makes one think that the NIMBYism will be any less potent in the middle of downtown Boston?

Moving from the realm of the infeasible to the charmingly useless, we have this:

Filene’s design #5: Architect: Cynthia Bubb. Bubb proposes a bike park on the Filene’s site, along with a large projection screen to show movies at night. Along the bike path, Bubb suggests wrapping the Filene’s construction site with a fence made of perforated aluminum, painted or imposed with a scene from a forest. The construction site itself would become an urban parking lot for bicycle commuters, with a large movie screen in front of the Burnham building for people to watch films at night. A grass berm at right would accommodate viewers and picnickers.

The problem here is not infeasible but inutility and scale – as in, there isn’t any.  The Filene’s site is maybe fifty yards across, making a bike path scarcely long enough even to start you rolling.  You could walk across the site faster than you could mount a bike, ride it, and dismount. 

Nor is shackling bicycles a good use.  I work within three hundred yards of the Filene’s shell, and while I see the occasional bicycle, there’s no indication anywhere that bike-racking is a pressing need. 

As for ‘large movie screen for people to watch films,’ when was the last time you or anybody you know gathered in a plaza, the Esplanade, the Boston Common, or another picnic grounds to watch a movie outdoors?  Drive-in movies are dead, and for good reasons.  If there’s a metaphor for the twenty-first century’s home entertainment options, it’s the home theater.

High-tech entertainment … circa 1955

The architect, in other words, has taken an empty site and overlaid on it a currently-fashionable idea (urban bikes) with a conveniently visual illusion (an outdoor movie screen).  It’s harmless but it’s pointless.

Shifting from downtown – prime retail, office, or residential land – to a clearly underused spot, we swing now to the Columbus Center area.  Back in the 1950’s, America and most of the developed world embarked on the Great Urban Highway Mistake, putting concrete ribbons over, around, and through most of our cities – and in traffic, pollution, and urban dysfunctionality we’ve been paying ever since. 

Stalled site: Columbus Center. Location: Between Arlington and Clarendon streets over the Massachusetts Turnpike. Estimated cost: $800 million. Status: Construction was stopped more than a year ago as developers search for funds to resume the development. Meanwhile, the state has said it will pay to undo construction work at the site, which has been the subject of many neighborhood complaints. (Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff Photo)

Count me among those who would love to see established ugly necessities like the Massachusetts Turnpike covered over, Big-Dig-style, both to hideaway the arterials and to create valuable walkable new-urbanist land.  Such land costs money – the curse of too much value – and hence construction starts only in the boomiest of booms, and stalls in the breathiest of downturns.  It would be nice to have the site developed, but in the meantime, can we really imagine something like this?

Columbus Center design #1: Architect: Chris Reed. Design firm: Stoss Landscape Urbanism. Reed proposes suspending an energy-producing public garden from latticework over the Massachusetts Turnpike at Columbus Center. The latticework supports a field of microturbines that harness wind created by passing vehicles; it also supports walkways connecting the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods.

With this conception, we find ourselves back in the land of gravity-defying phantasms.  It’s a lovely visual – one can imagine the Disney bluebirds chirping – but ‘energy producing public garden’?  In downtown Boston?  ‘Wind created by passing vehicles’?  As if that would flow in a harnessable direction instead of simply swirling, as it now does.  (If one wanted to harness vehicular wind effects, the place for turbines would be at tunnel entrances and exits, but in fact fans are placed into those tunnels precisely because vehicles merely displace air, they create no steady breeze.)

Then there’s this mixture of the inexpensive and the unhygienic:

Filene’s design #3: Design firm: Utile Inc. Utile Inc., an urban planning firm, proposes to install crisscrossing boardwalks across the Filene’s site that would provide new shortcuts through Downtown Crossing. Below the boardwalk would be a manicured pasture fit for sheep and other livestock that used to roam the nearby Boston Common.

Nothing wrong with crisscrossing boardwalks except the legal risks.  I cannot imagine that the site’s insurers would be comfortable with pedestrians walking in proximity to an unreinforced building shell.  But sheep grazing underneath?  Why?  For their manure?

They’ll work in downtown Boston!

By now readers may be wondering why I’ve double-pumped so many shotgun shells into these helpless barrel-bound fish.  The reason is simple – these designs were offered, if not by their architects then by the Globe, as physically doable.  Somebody thought they could in fact be built, and inviting a referendum on them:

Boston’s stalled construction sites — from the site of the former Filene’s building to Harvard’s stalled science center in Allston — have become eyesores dotting the city’s landscape. The Globe’s Casey Ross asked some local artists and architects to reimagine these stalled projects and come up with ideas to make them part of the city’s culture again. Click through for a variety of renderings and ideas, and vote on which Filene’s site design and which design among the other stalled projects you like the most.

Then, submit your own rendering of your designs for one of Boston’s stalled sites.

There is, of course, a serious point to all this folly.

No, really, we’re about to become serious

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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In Part 1 of our tour of 15 housing projects from hell, via the passionate posters at the funky Web site Oobject, we indicted the architects, led by Le Corbusier, for throwing up concrete stack after stack of monoliths. 

Can you too be an urban planner?

Just try these plans and specs

Yet we also have to fault Le Corbusier’s other weakness, their love of homogeneity and enforced order.  There’s something ominous in Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation – the habitation unit, even the name echoes THX 1138 – actually being built not in Paris but in Berlin:

Somehow, it just goes there, doesn’t it?

Because markets are messy, if you really want people to live in monoliths, you need a monolithic government, and it seems to me no surprise that Le Corbusier – for that matter, many urban planners and theorists of the ilk of Lewis Mumford  – gravitate toward strongly authoritarian governments who can use the power of eminent domain to level neighborhoods and erect nicely gridded towers:

5. Housing and Development Board Project, Singapore

Looks like early Pruitt-Igoe, doesn’t it?

Singapore’s housing projects represent where European modernism was in the 50s – still hopeful and still better than a low rise slum. Clearly, however, one day these will be terribly vertical slums.

Actually, it may not be, for two reasons, one visible and one invisible.

Visible.  That’s public transportation running alongside the property.  When people walk from their homes to transport, they become pedestrians and active residents – what Jane Jacobs called eyes on the street.  They become, in a word, neighbors.

Invisible.  Singapore’s rich.  The housing will be mixed-income or better.  The city can afford infrastructure and law enforcement. 

I think the authors are wrong.  This housing will do just fine.

6. Hotel Iveria, Georgia

Hive or Borg cube?

Although this is a hotel converted to housing it demonstrates perfectly how people will do anything to individualize an oppressive modernist space with no identity.

Except, folks, that I’m pretty confident the individualization was planned and permitted.  Primates mark our territory; we personalize our space.  Fear of modern anonymity is why we find so frightening the Borg cube.

Will you be assimilated?

7. Badly Built Student Housing, Poland

Where’s the superintendent?

The origins of modernism were a reaction by the elite that the masses could afford decorative styles. The Barcelona Pavilion was built with expensive Onyx, Travertine and Stainless Steel. Modernism for the masses had neither the luxury of decoration or materials. This unbelievably badly built student housing block in Poland demonstrates the point perfectly.

True enough – I certainly will not quarrel with criticizing shoddy construction or second-rate materials on the mistaken theory that ‘those’ people‘ don’t need anything better – but to me the cause is simpler.  This property was not maintained.  And why not?  Lack of funding.  Communism never solved the problem of maintenance, which is why it lasted little longer than the lifespan of its first-generation oligarchs and their labor-conscripted edifices.  When they died, their buildings died with them. 

8. Coney Island Housing Projects

Coney Island

The Soviet style blocks with predominantly Russian inhabitants face away from the sea front.

Okay, I get it – but when it was built, the property housed Irish and Italians and Puerto Ricans.

There is architecture which ignores its context in the extreme, a sad situation at best and a crime when by the sea.

Calling this a crime dumbs down criminality into meaninglessness.  Further, to indict the property because it doesn’t maximize the sea views ignores the great location, something the poor are all too often denied.  Nor is it apparent that the sea is ignored, since by orienting the building this way, two long sides and one short one have views of the beach, leaving only one short side to face landward. 

Criticizing this property is an absurd over-reach.

9. Hong Kong Owner Occupied Housing Blocks

Wondering about the World Inside?

Anyone who has been to Hong Kong will have been, stunned, depressed to see these anonymous gigantic housing blocks.

Until you get inside, which are explosions of life.

The amazing thing is that these are owner-occupied rather than social housing.

Density, Oobjects authors, density.  If we want to live in tightly constrained urban environment, we must go up, and in going up, we create a sameness of some exteriors.  Yet no one would call Midtown Manhattan or the Upper East Side co-ops a dreary gray jungle, not once you’ve made it past the doormen into the flats and penthouses.

10. Red Road Flats, Glasgow

Ever seen Trainspotting?

The tenements of Glasgow epitomized urban squalor and modernism was a chance to scrub the dirt of Glasgow clean.

Scrubbing destroys the urban cryptobiotica – the people and businesses and culture that populate and hold together slums, and that in my view eventually grow them into communities.

“Choose life”

The crime is not so much in the building of new but in the tearing down of what is, and then its transplantation, as if pureed into undifferentiated gray goo, into an underfunded high-rise:

With broken elevators and desolate stairways, the view over the nearby Scottish countryside is as cruel as Marin from Alcatraz. Nothing quite shows the insanity of this scheme than the green surrounding it.

Again, as with Pruitt-Igoe, the fault is less in the building and in the under-maintenance, and for that we must blame not the architects (this time) but the government.

Speaking of government, what happens when the workers control the means of production?

11. Workers Housing Ukraine

Hey, are those real trees, or fake trees?

This image is from a postcard, proudly displaying the neat rows of workers houses as tidy and democratic.

Actually, not democratic at all.  Le Corbusier and his friends disliked democracy; at best they wrinkled their aquiline noses at the inefficiency and foolishness of the mob, at worst they wanted to lift from the masses the necessity for having to make decision – by making those decisions for them.  Autocratic, not democratic, is what those towers signify.

Everyone knows how these spaces deteriorate, with no sense of ownership or place.

Sorry gentlemen, if all you can produce is a half-century-old postcard that in fact shows the opposite of what you’re claiming it is, this indictment is thrown out of court for lack of evidence.

And take your pixels with you!

12. Tulou affordable housing project in China

Can you say, parking garage?

An innovative structure and a break from the mold, but nevertheless an arrogant architectural one-liner as a repository for people, that is reminiscent of a giant washing machine.

Aside from having a visceral reaction that this is a parking garage suitable for cars to spiral up and down, not a housing property, I have throughout my career have had terrible, absolutely terrible, results from enclosed-courtyard buildings.  The central space always becomes a performance arena, a convenient illegal open-air market, a redoubt for crime – everything but the happy safe playground the architects envisioned.  Interior courtyards work in places, like the Pentagon, where access is limited to people who have a long-term commitment and where the managers can enforce behavioral codes and keep the space clean and maintained.  In my experience, they fail in apartment blocks.

A Chinese architectural laundry.

You making fun of me?

I didn’t write that, they did!

13. Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, Vienna

Skateboard ramps or jet noise baffles?  You decide!

This Vienna housing estate is often commended, with its terraced gardens that swoop to earth and Logan’s Run appearance. Ultimately, however, it entirely ignores the architecture of a city which gave birth to a sensible approach to modernism. The result is a blot on the landscape.

Everybody’s a critic.  Sorry, I can’t agree with this one; it blends into and rises above the human-style walkable streetscape, and it undoubtedly achieves much higher density than could be accomplished without going up. 

Finally, we will finish with two extremes:

14. Corbusier’s Criminally Insane Plan Voisin

Plan Voisin, Paris: thank God the architects weren’t in charge

The most grandiose of visions:

Jeanneret proposed razing the organic street pattern of the entire Marais district in Paris and replacing it with a half baked neo-fascist masterplan, the product of excessive ego.

It’s clearly the most Fascist, in the sense of binding together people at the expense of their individuality, in the manner of the original Roman fasces (from which the name Fascist derives), a bundle of sticks tied together into a club that holds and wields an ax.

Maybe you can be one of us?  The fasces

The fact that he was deadly serious almost entirely negates the undoubted talents that he possessed.

Fortunately, the fact that Plan Voisin never remotely got started is some small consolation, although as we’ve seen, it was echoed in Cabrini-Green and in similar public-housing urban renewal projects around the world, some few of which still have yet to be demolished.

And now, the piece de resistance, the most petty:

15. Glenkerry House, London

Want to live in the concrete ivory tower?

The architect of this housing scheme, Erno Goldfinger, is one of Britain’s most celebrated modernists and the model [vengeful namesake – Ed.] for a James Bond villain, having lived opposite Ian Fleming, who hated him.

The origin of NIMBYism?  Goldfinger’s imposition on Fleming’s Hampstead

Nancy and I have visited Goldfinger’s Notting Hill House (1-3 Willow Road), which is now owned by the National Trust.

His buildings are undoubtedly dramatic and sculptural, but when Architects brag about how many people want to live in the iconic Trellic Tower, this has more to do with the proximity of Notting Hill than an affection for bush-hammered concrete.

If you weren’t drawn by the location, would you want to live here?

Only a  brainless mannequin would question that

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Despite the title of this list, several of these housing projects were designed by some of the world’s most famous architects and lauded at the time. The undeniable squalor of 19th Century slums combined with modernism to produce and attempt to clean things up and create a crystalline utopia. The end result was often an anti-septic vision of hell, a place devoid of organic spaces and evolved social interaction.

Le Corbusier, nee Charles-Edouard Jenneret-Gris

Through this review of real and alleged atrocities against urban living will run themes of modern architecture and its most famous (and, alas, most influential) proponent Le Corbusier.  Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, like Madonna, Prince, and Le Notre he adopted a nom de guerre, Le Corbusier.  Thus reborn, he set out to remake the world of our inner lives by changing the world of our outer spaces.

Hazard a guess why he named himself ‘the nostril’?

In 1933, aboard a barge sailing from Marseilles to Athens, Le Corbusier and many fellow modernist architects convened and founded:

The Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) was enormously influential on the mid-century visions of urban planning, particularly at the level of dense multifamily housing.

If we design the buildings, ran the reasoning, why not design the whole city?

Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of “The Functional City”, which broadened CIAM’s scope from architecture into urban planning. Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by [1] strict functional segregation, and [2] the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals.

Although arrogant nonsense, it helped (grotesque thought) that the world was then distracted, first by a global depression that led to an infatuation with the ‘efficiency’ of Fascism (the Lewis Mumford vision) –

[Le Corbusier] drifted into a fascist-like philosophy and his and similar authoritarian architecture is often seen as the backdrop for fascist political thinking.

– and then by its bastard offspring a global war, leaving the intellectual field empty for Le Corbusier, who sat out the war from the comfortable perch of Switzerland:

Have we got our relative importance clear, common man?

These proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1942, when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily edited form as the “Athens Charter.”

It took thirty years before the New Urbanists, led by feisty squat cackling Jane Jacobs, were able to refute such arrogant nonsense with common sense, and in the meantime, Le Corbusier and his friends held sway, with postwar urban planners throwing up block after block of Brutalist high-rises that nobody actually wanted to live in.

Its principal feature is de-humanizing alienation. Vote for your worst.

1. Mass Housing in Ixtapaluca, Mexico

Ixtapaluca, Mexico

The problem with dull alienating social housing has nothing to do with modernism per se, but to do with mindless design. This scheme uses non-modernist styles but the result is terrifyingly soul-less like so many McMansion developments.

As someone who’s visited many slums throughout the global south, studied them extensively, and systematically, and worked on slum upgrading around the world, I disagree with this view.  Ixtapaluca has to be seen as embryo housing and the subdivision as a neighborhood in development no different from Levittown 1949 or Daly City 1965.  While I don’t like the monomania for housing rather than retail or commercial, come back in five years and see how many shops and work-at-home businesses have sprung up, how much home improvement has taken place, and how the subdivision has become part of the formal city.  The Oobject authors are wrong about this one.

2. Cabrini Green, a roach infested slum in a wealthy neighborhood, Chicago

Cabrini Green, Chicago: RIP

About Chicago’s Cabrini Green, however, neither I nor anybody else will ever have much good to say;

Badly designed, badly located, overly dense, excluded from the remaining city, it was built to shoebox ‘those’ people out of sight, out of mind, out of our city. 

Across the expressway, visible yet inaccessible**

Add to that management by the Chicago Housing Authority – for decades among the nation’s worst – and a financing structure that was and is a dependency trap.

At one point the garbage piled up the blocked chutes to the 15th floor and rat and roach infestations were common.

No different from the slums inside the Paris banlieuex, where l’horloge orange turned the city of light into a city of flames.

The thing that differentiated Cabrini Green from other failed projects, however, was its location in a relatively wealthy part of Chicago.

The authors are wrong to call Cabrini-Green’s neighborhood wealthy.  It wasn’t.  Forty years of increasing urbanization have improved the neighborhood, and that is always a good thing, but when Cabrini-Green was built, the neighborhood chosen, Chicago’s North Side (west of the expensive gold coast neighborhood)*, was in decline, so much that the University of Chicago built a little fortified village around itself, paying substantial private-security costs to protect the students from the hordes just over the expressway.

Isolated, underfunded, financially infeasible, Cabrini-Green was doomed to fail.

As, we will see, were so many other public housing properties.  Brutalist monolithic isolated communities and financial insolvency went together hand in hand.

Which dynamic completely explains the next celebrated implosion, perhaps the most famous failure of all:

3. Pruitt Igoe

Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis: RIP

For all its pretense at modernism, the fact that the Pruitt Igoe was built in two complexes, one for white people and one for black, speaks volumes of its primitive ideology.

Actually, I wouldn’t condemn Pruitt-Igoe for that, because it was of its time, the mid-1950’s.  Many other properties before, and others for over a decade thereafter, were similarly segregated, and while the segregation was abhorrent, other properties nevertheless survived it, later being successfully integrated.  Their physical structures – like Columbia Point in Boston – were able to overcome a racist heritage even as America overcomes ours.

When the Pruitt Igoe was demolished, Charles Jencks declared it as the death of modernism.

Reports of modernism’s death, however, were greatly exaggerated.

“Shut up and write a line-o-type about losing money on new technology, okay?”

Pruitt-Igoe’s legendary both in architecture and in my own past, because I remember its demolition from my callow college days.  Unlike Cabrini-Green, it was not built-to-fail; rather, it was built in genuine hope of succeeding:

Does this look like a slum to you?

Pruitt-Igoe, 1956

Pruitt-Igoe died of social isolation – wrong side of the expressway, just like Cabrini-Green – income concentration, and the fundamentally flawed public housing dependency schema. 

Without maintenance money, anything can look like this: Pruitt-Igoe

A property that needed to go somewhere to die, in only 17 years, it went from completion to demolition.

We had to destroy the buildings to save the community

The demolition sequence itself features in the movie, Koyaanisqatsi.

While we’re on the subject of Paris, consider:

4. Aillaud Towers, Nanterre Paris

Are you trying to look like a termite mound?

Aillaud in Paris

For that matter, are you trying to look like public housing?

The word suburb, ‘banlieue’, conjures up something very different in France to the US. Burning cars and desolate tower blocks, rather than SUVs and low-rise strip malls.

As I’ve previously posted, European cities invert the normal US-style Greenfield development.  The poor are on the outside, looking in.

These superficially rather interesting looking towers are visible from Paris’ financial district, La Defense, and are a reminder of what lies outside of the Peripherique.

By now readers will have noticed the strong correlation.  When housing fails, it’s not just what was built, but where it was built.  What used to be the wrong side of the tracks, is now the wrong side of the expressway.

So we can’t blame just the architects; someone else is blameworthy as well.

[Continued on Monday, August 3, in Part 2.]

Ed – Thank you for pointing out the errors in this article, they have been amended:

* Corrected: Original said “Chicago’s North Side”.  

** Corrected: Image with the caption “Across the expressway, visible yet inaccessible” showed the now demolished Robert Taylor homes.

Note: We presume that photos from second-hand sources are accurate, but they’re not always …

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Who then speaks for buildings?  Every now and then, one can find such a pure, distilled advocate for the property, in an unlikely guise, as revealed in this little New York Times profile:

NO NONSENSE The austere office of Elliott Glass belies his position as the arbiter of co-op renovations at hundreds of apartment buildings that hire him.

ELLIOTT GLASS answers the door of his office dressed in cuff links and tie, an odd-seeming formality since he is alone in the five-room office suite. Yes, the sign on the office door at 200 Park Avenue says Glass & Glass Architects, but he has no partner. The other Glass, his father, died more than a decade ago.

He has no secretary or associates, no decorations on the wall. For that matter, his office has no Web site, e-mail address or even a computer — especially odd for a modern architect. Mr. Glass, who is 73, does have a telephone, but is rueful about it. He deals with co-ops, and “the shareholders can find you if you are listed,” he said sadly.

Virtually unique to New York City, co-ops are living clubs that can set any rules they wish – unlike condos where an owner has largely untrammeled right to rearrange his or her internal space, as spelled out in the condo documents.

But the austere, even stubborn, old-fashioned utilitarianism of his office belies his position in the New York real estate firmament. Thousands of Manhattan’s most elite co-op dwellers do not break a wall or move a sink without Mr. Glass’s approval.

Well, okay, in an emergency …

As we saw in De Soto’s dryer, plumbing and in-home laundry facilities are no small matter in high-rise apartments. 

Mr. Glass is perhaps the most prominent reviewing architect in the city. Hundreds of apartment buildings in New York — including many pricey and exclusive ones along Fifth and Park Avenues — retain him to review shareholder renovation plans before they can be approved.

 “You know the album cover for the original ‘My Fair Lady’?” asked Erika Belsey, whose firm, Belsey & Mahla Architects, specializes in high-end residential renovations. “Eliza’s the marionette, being manipulated by Henry Higgins, being manipulated by God? That’s Elliott Glass: he’s the god behind the co-op boards, controlling your renovation.”

In Hirschfeld’s drawing, God was Bernard Shaw, which would no doubt have pleased the old narcissist immensely

“When he says you can’t put your washing machine where you want it, forget your distinguished position as editor in chief, CEO or university president,” she continued. “You do what he says — no questions asked.”

Mr. Glass plays down his power, pointing out that ultimately the co-op boards requesting his services make the final decisions based on the reports he writes.

As the truly independent advisor – the Delphic oracle of zoning and building approval – Mr. Glass has a valuable position, one that a co-op board would be unlikely to over-rule.  He is truly disinterested, and hence cannot possibly be accused of having played internal building politics.

Does your ceiling meet code, Michelangelo?

But then, as he admits, they rarely disagree with his conclusions. That’s because he is extremely knowledgeable and accurate, said Paul Gottsegen, the director of property management at the Halstead Management Company, which oversees 80 buildings. “When challenged, I don’t think he has ever been wrong on interpretations of the building codes, which are byzantine.”

Evidently Mr. Glass is the Lord Palmerston – the only living person who can claim to understand a particular issue, however narrow – of NYC building codes.  That is valuable, and is achieved only by a lifetime’s careful study.

But code — while Mr. Glass’s strong suit — is not his only concern. He also considers the building’s best interest, a subject matter open to interpretation.  

For this, I admire him, because so few advocates think long term of the building’s physical ecosystem – its network of structural members, piping, electrical systems, and uses.  Like Tim Padfield, he’s an expert’s expert, and like the best experts, he always separates his technical from his editorial conclusions.

In his reports, Mr. Glass is careful to delineate which concern he is addressing.

While board members and managing agents come and go, Mr. Glass has been in business for decades. In his mind, and in his 60 black metal file cabinets, he has meticulously cataloged renovation histories.

He often knows more than residents do about their co-ops’ policies on arcane matters that become relevant only occasionally — say, whether they will allow stairways between combined apartments.

Beyond simply helping clients do tasks, experts (like Recap and AHI) provide two other types of value:

1. Cumulative expertise applied to each task.  Many are the tasks or problems we solve only once or twice in our lives.  These are natural magnets for expertise; someone who’s seen dozens and hundreds of variations of the problem confronting you will not only do it quicker, he’ll do it better and more surely.

I never forget a case I’ve handled

2.  Institutional memory.  Once you have accomplished that difficult task, you tend to forget all about it.  So do the other parties.  If a dispute later arises, or if a subsequent decision is required, you’re lost.  In several of the claims litigation matters with which I’ve been involved, Recap’s files have been a principal evidentiary source, simply because we have kept them, we know what is in them, and we can recover it upon request.

Steven Harris, the founding member of an architectural firm, estimates that he has worked on 25 apartments with Mr. Glass over the years.

“He is a kind of treasure in a kind of antediluvian way,” Mr. Harris said. “You can ask about the building; he remembers 30 years ago. With other building architects, there is no institutional history.”

I pride myself on being able to rattle off the facts about a complicated preservation transaction my company did fifteen years ago; aside from being a parlor trick, it reminds me that each deal was and remains unique.

It’s filed just over here

Mr. Glass sees all of his decisions as based in reason even when not based in building code.

Laws are devices to produce outcomes.  Construction codes are rules designed to protect the building.  It’s delightful to encounter someone else who thinks as we do that the ultimate goal is to protect the property’s health.

Take the current fad for stoves with pot-filler faucets, for example. He is against them. Not just because it seems silly to him that someone could not walk across a kitchen to fill a pot under a sink, but because a water faucet without a drain under it seems like an invitation for water damage.

Sometimes, his reasoning is broader. Mr. Glass is hesitant to allow people to expand bathrooms over other people’s bedrooms. The issue is not only building wet over dry, which could lead to a disastrous leak. He is also thinking about noise. “A leak happens once, and it is terrible,” he reasons, “but midnight flushing is for the rest of your life.”

As a long-time proponent of quiet enjoyment, I like that motto: Midnight flushing is the rest of your life.  Quiet

He adds, “Noise is the issue buildings receive complaints about the most.”

Noise is the second least blockable intrusion; only odor is worse. 

Patrons and architects routinely ask to move main gas lines, steam lines and water lines so that they can expand kitchens — a move allowed by code. Yet routinely they are denied by Mr. Glass and the buildings who employ him.

Again, Mr. Glass isn’t the ultimate arbiter, but his disinterested integrity makes him credible.  He is not turning you down because he thinks your taste atrocious or your decoration flamboyant; he is turning you down solely to protect the common asset, the property whose exoskeleton is essential to everyone’s well-being.

As it turns out, Mr. Glass was the reviewing architect for the co-op in the lawsuit in the late 1980s that set the precedent on this.

In Levandusky v. the One Fifth Avenue Apartment Corporation — a highly cited precedent in co-op litigation — the defendant claimed that he had the right to move a steam riser to expand his kitchen, and the building claimed the right to have a stop-work order to prevent the alteration.

The New York Court of Appeals eventually made the tenant move the pipe back, and the case has become cited because it legitimized a board’s right to act within the building without judicial interference.

If every tenant moved the risers, he observes, the systems would be far less efficient.

Defending the property, defending the common interest.  Admirable.

In the lawsuit, the defendant said that Mr. Glass had given him oral approval for the move. Mr. Glass, however, wants everyone to know that he gives oral approval for nothing.

“I stick my neck out for nobody”

Like Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, Mr. Glass understands the importance of a documentary record. 

All his recommendations are in reports, neatly and swiftly typed on his electric I.B.M. typewriter.

Like the buildings he defends, Mr. Glass is immovable, and would be unreachable if he could be:

I don’t take kindly to being leaned on

He is alone in the office and prefers it that way. Communications can be vexing. “If I had a computer,” he said, “they’d bombard me with e-mail.”  He means co-op shareholders.

“Just recently I got a call from a guy who was angry because he insisted a neighbor did the same amount of work and didn’t have to get approval.” he said. “But I looked it up and sure enough the neighbor had done a lot of work, but he hadn’t moved any walls so he didn’t need approval.”

Mr. Glass shakes his head.

So what did the angry guy do? “Nothing he could do,” Mr. Glass said. “When you are right, you are right.”

My kind of expert.

Sometimes you have to take it easy

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