City Comforts, the blog

"Jam tomorrow" but never Jam today

I am a firm believe that "in due course" the eBook will sweep away paper for most non-fiction books, and for magazines, newspapers etc etc. but I am bit tired of reading articles like Hi-tech tome takes on paperbacks when it seems always to be just around the corner. "Soon." Like Jam tomorrow.

For most non-fiction, the eBook, "supported" on line at a blog, will be a far superior product.

What's holding it up is the Ergo-eBook hardware: good-looking, well-built, a pleasure to hold and cheap. Please. Soon!

UPDATE: Why, you ask, does this guy keep talking about eBooks? This is a blog about cities not technology. Right? Yes right but wrong. The two are one; the future of cities will be very much influenced though not determined by technology.

But the better answer is simpler. I've been thinking a lot about books as a I blog. Specifically my book ands my blog. I see the convergence of two things: my work on a book --- titled City Comforts by odd coincidence --- and my work on this Blog. Though I've just finished the book, I think of things to add to it, like a simple glossary. (I keep learning new terms like "common man.") But you can't update paper on the fly but have to go through the whole tedious process of dealing with printing, distribution and so forth when all the readers really want is the information in a permanent and easily portable form.

My conjecture is that eBook technology will foster the emergence of what boils down to a new medium: the constantly-revised book. Like a periodical, newsletter etc it will be amenable to continual refreshment and updating; like a book, it will have permanence and the reader will have to pay. The publishing industry appears to be scared --- as well it should --- by the eBook; there is absolutely no justification for book prices as they are now except the the costs of printing and marketing. Take away all of the former (of course there will still be 'pre-press' costs of research, editing, composition, design, etc.) and a majority of the latter (there will still be distribution costs but dramatically lower) and what is happening to music distribution will soon happen to publishing. As an author, I welcome this change. But it will create enormous turmoil in the publishing sector.

The key, as I perceive it, is the hardware.

I'm curious to hear the right-wing spin on this one

The basic gist of this story from Forbes that notoriously soft-hearted bastion of PC-liberalism is Drive More, Exercise Less, Get Fat.

When cities spread out, so do waistlines and rear ends. For proof, you can visit Charleston, W.Va., or Fort Wayne, Ind.--the U.S. cities with the highest obesity rates, both with less than 3,000 people per square mile. Or you can refer to recent studies published in the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion.

I visited New Zealand a few years ago. I returned via Los Angeles, deplaned and was walking down the airport corridor when I simply started to laugh. Especially by comparison with New Zealanders, I felt as if I was walking through a world populated by people out of paintings by Botero.

Bathing in Bath: a new spa for the 21st century

Hugh Pearman writes about what seems (my opinion from a tiny screen image) to be a terrific piece of urban building in Bath, England designed by Nicholas Grimshaw.

I've been to Bath, once, and besides loving the place, and learning a lot about what a city could be like, my most vivid memory is that we couldn't take a bath there, even in our shabby and expensive little B&B. Looks like things will change.

Grimshaw is keenly aware that his firm is still seen by some as an edge-of-town, supershed kind of outfit. The new 20m Bath spa, supported by the Millennium Commision and bang in the middle of an official World Heritage Site, is his riposte to that. "If you're any good as an architect," he remarks in his diffident way, "you should be able to do a modern building in any situation. It would have been very easy to do a sham Georgian building. It would have walked through the planners."

I like this design out of pure personal whimsy but Bingo! and more importantly, because so far as urbanism is concerned the design appears to illustrate the idea that style doesn't matter so long as you follow the Three Rules which Grimshaw did in spades, if I read the photo in Pearman's article correctly.

I'd post the picture here but I don't have permission (yet?) so go follow the link above and see a bit of slinky traditionalism -- selfeffacing starchictecture, if you'll allow such a thing.

One quibble: The sidewalk is awfully stingy and its unfortunate that its strewn with bollards but of course I don't know all the site constraints.

One other mild complaint: I wish architectural/urban design journalists would include very simple site plans, elevations etc in their articles so that one can truly understand the dynamics of the building and how it works with the surroundsings. I feel uneasy assessing things based on, since all I see is a screen image, precious eye candy.

Transport as Sport

Provocative posting on Transport as Sport ( at where else?) Transport Blog.

One glancing reaction:

One of the problems faced by public ---i.e. group --- transport is that it must compete with the car as fun. So mant of our sports (as opposed to games) involve movement through space: skiing, sailing, horesback riding, cycling, rollerblading, walking, white water rafting, flying, soaring --- the list is endless.

We love to be in motion, to see the landscape unfold before us, especially when we can personally direct the path. That's tough ---but I am not saying insurmountable -- competition for communal travel.

Some background on the I-670 Cap

The project architect, David Meleca, offers the following:

"I thought you might enjoy the inspiration for the architecture for the cap.

"It was the old Union Station (train station) in Columbus which was located within a stones throw from this project. It actually sat were the Peter Eisenman's convention center currently stands. The train station was designed by Daniel Burnham of Chicago and was torn down in 1978 duringColumbus's urban renewal days.

"A group of concerned citizens happened to save one of the arches from the original building and it has been erected next to our new NHL Hockey Arena. I actually went out and did scaled drawings of the remaining original pieces and used them for the proportion system on the Cap Project.

"Also, the project is now going to be officially known as The Cap."

How basic are visual preferences in landscape?

Via 2blowhards I learn of a very interesting paper by Denis Dutton on Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology with this fascinating excerpt on Environmental Preference:

...The idea of a pervasive Pleistocene taste in landscape received support from an unusual project undertaken by two Russian migr artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, in 1993. They hired a professional polling organization to conduct a broad survey of art preferences of people living in ten countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas (Wypijewski 1997). Blue turned out to be the favourite colour worldwide, with green in second place. Respondents expressed a liking for realistic representative paintings. Preferred elements included water, trees and other plants, human beings (with a preference for women and children, and also for historical figures, such as Jomo Kenyatta or Sun Yat-sen), and animals, especially large mammals, both wild and domestic. Using the statistical preferences as a guide, Komar and Melamid then produced a favourite painting for each country. Their intent was clearly ironic, as the painting humorously mixed completely incompatible elements "America's Most Wanted," as it was titled, presented a Hudson River School scene, with George Washington standing beside a lake in which a large hippo is bellowing. But there was also a serious side to the project; for the paintings, though created from the choices of different cultures, tended to share a remarkably similar set of preferences --- they looked like ordinary European landscape calendar art, both photographic and painted. In an attempt to explain this odd cross-cultural uniformity --- which had East Africans choosing the lush calendar scenes over landscapes they might be familiar with in their own daily lives --- Arthur Danto claimed that the Komar-Melamid paintings demonstrate the power of the international calendar industry to influence taste away from indigenous values and towards European conventions. While he admits that the Kenyans preferred scenes that looked more like upper New York State than like Kenya, the polling work also indicated that most Kenyans had calendars in their homes (Danto, in Wypijewski 1997). What this does not acknowledge is the question of why worldwide calendars have the same landscape themes---the very themes that evolutionary psychology would predict. The real question is "Why are calendars so uniform in their content worldwide?" a uniformity that includes other, non-landscape, objects of attention, such as babies, pretty girls, children, and animals. It is the calendar industry that has, by meeting market demands, discovered a Pleistocene taste in outdoor scenes.

Ah! The International Calendar Industry Conspiracy. Are we to take that idea seriously? On its face it appears absurd. Is there such a thing? Publishing is very much a nation/language-centered business; and calendars come out of the publishing industry. No? But Dutton, offers Danto's criticism with a seeming straight-face.

But more seriously, I wonder if such landscape prefences apply to urban landscapes?

The question also struck Tony Nelessen and quite a few years ago. He developed a technique of Visual Preference Surveys for use by Urban Planning agencies wishing to write ordinances to control Architecture. The conclusion? In North America, the preferences are marvelously bourgeois --- and with amazing similarity everywhere you go: the preponderance of the evidence from such surveys indicates that everyone says they want the conventional urban village/new urbanist/Three Rules sort of town.

More on Nelessen's work --- pro and con --- when I find some good links. I favor both his approach and the tastes reflected by the surveys; but I am sure that there is a loyal opposition to using the preferences of the common man to design zoning codes and I am curious to hear if he has anything useful to offer.

Facilitating the serendipitous encounter

Most human events, whether short- (e.g. conferences) or long-term (e.g. college), are designed simply to facilitate the serendipitous encounter and multiply their number.

Here is some good advice on how to Attend a Conference.

Where are the land use LAW blogs?

For most people that's not exactly front-and-center as an issue of great concern. In fact some might say "Thank goodness!" I do understand.

But there must be a few fanatics around in the land use, environmental, property rights law business who also blog. But I can't find them. I have checked the law links at Crooked Timber, The Volokh Conspiracy, The Buck Stops Here...browsed a good number of their links...and I can't find anyone who is covering that beat.

As, to my mind, land use and environmental law encapsulates some of the most interesting, intriguing and relevant areas of the law, I wonder why no one is blogging it? Rhetorical question of course but if I am wrong, which I hope is so, and someone out there is doing it, please let me know.

And in fact what's even more puzzling (because a bit more realistic,) I don't see law bloggers (cursory review I concede) addressing the subject at all. Too bad. I would think that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) as one instance at least would be getting some discussion. Of course, again, maybe I've simply missed it.

Or maybe the absence of law blogs rooted in the earth parallels the seeming obliviousness of political blogs to much sense that the blogopshere is actually and literally on a sphere.

Terry Teachout illustrates the point.

I wrote a few days ago that "judging by many comments, our interest in him [Frank Lloyd Wright] is as much about celebrity as architecture)." Perhaps I should have written is "more about celebrity than architecture."

Terry Teachout's art blog (an invaluable and daily read) illustrates my point. He notes the discussions about FLW on a few blogs. Rather than furthering the discussion on the essenece of the issue --- "What if anything did FLW actually contribute to architecture, city planning etc? --- Teachout repeats the conventional thinking that FLW was a "genius" but then gets on to the interesting stuff: anecdotes about FLW's personality.

He writes here:

Devoted blogwatchers will be aware that there's a major Frank Lloyd Wright-related wrangle currently taking place all over the blogosphere (go here to start picking up the threads, which lead far and wide). Me, I think Wright was a genius and I'd be perfectly happy to at least try living in one of his houses, even if the roof leaked, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to pal around with him. Here's my favorite Wright anecdote, from Meryle Secrest's biography:

One of Wright's many apprentices to study in that studio recalled that one day when he was buried underneath the Steinway making another of the innumerable attempts to restore its legs, he saw the master saunter into the room. Believing himself alone, Wright arranged three or four objects on the window ledge, then stood back admiringly. He walked over to the piano, still oblivious of the hidden observer, struck a few chords and pirouetted out of the room, singing to himself, "I am the greatest."

(Incidentally, I've seen a kinescope of an appearance Wright made on What's My Line? not long before his death. It's one of the more endearing examples of his rampant egomania.)

Not endearing at all but rather sad. So my preference is that we would leave the poor tortured man alone and in peace and simply consider the merits or demerits of his work without the use of conclusory terms such as "genius."

Architecture? or Uban Planning?

ACDouglas wrote a pregnant email:

"As you yourself pointed out, your opinions are concerned principally with urban planning -- with "site plans," as you put it -- not with architecture...urban planning ought NOT to be the business of architects. The business of architects is architecture -- i.e., individual buildings or group of buildings, project by project. The business of urban planning should be left to, well, urban planners who have no business messing about with matters of art. That's the business of architects."

Beguiling concept except when you get down to particulars. One minor particular is how/where do you the draw the line between architecture and urban planning?

For example, consider The Three Rules (and please do consider them, either in long form--a 500k PDF or short form--a 45k PDF)...well, are those Rules urban planning rules? or architectural ones? Of course I think that they are both. They operate as architecural constraints for a specific building in order to create a piece of urbanism.

So I question whether there is a reasonable, practical method to separate "architecture" from "urban planning" along the lines suggested above. No?

UPDATE: Murphs weighs in sensibly on Architecture vs. Urban Planning.