City Comforts, the blog

A note on John Massengale's comment, prior post

Massengale asks a good question.

No, I do not necessarily agree with Don Padelford's idea that (paraphrased) "the Living Room is Seattle's great interior public space." He may well be correct. Then again...But honestly, at this point I have no opinion of the inside of the building as I haven't been there.

You know my very negative opinion of the sidewalk-level exterior, at least based on review of plans and model. You know my indifference to the Library as a large object, a Very Large Scale Sculpture. You know my feeling of revulsion and contempt for the giddy hero-worship which accompanies this object and its black-garbed starchitect of obscure words.

But I like to think of myself as ruthlessly rigorous. I haven't been inside the Library (nor did I ever study the plans) so I cannot possibly have an opinion. Yet.

But one related memory: the very first article about the design -- now some 4 years ago -- quoted the City Librarian, an otherwise charming and obviously astute woman named Deborah Jacobs, as lauding the library as having "natural light-filled reading rooms." (That's a quote from memory, to be scrupulous.) My bs-detector went off and that very statement got me interested in the library design. As one who has read many hundreds, maybe even thousands, of books from cover-to-cover, I can tell you that the last thing that a reader wants is a room which is in direct sun-light. The very idea is preposterous. Perhaps the glass used for the Library is of a type which softens and filters harsh natural light and so all is well. But bright sunlight -- as Ms. Jacobs offered as a positive -- seems to me to be a bizzare and inappropriate way to illuminate a printed page.

UPDATE: Btw, one dynamic which should not be overlooked in analyzing a building and how it contributes to the city is GIGO: "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

What that means in terms of a building is that if The Client is not clear and enlightened in explaining The Program to The Architect, then it's not fair to lay all blame on The Architect.

Now I have had enough experiences with professionals to suggest that it is extremely irksome and aggravating to run inro a problem and the response from The Professional is "Well, you didn't ask me to look at that issue." Of course, they are the Pros and are supposed to be able to anticipate the issues and to indform the client; after all, that's why they have the license and get the big bucks. So, while Rem Koolhaas can't escape entirely (should he need to escaoe) from designing an anti-urban structure, you also have to lay off some responsibilty on The Client. I mean, they are not potted plants, just sitting there on the window sill.

Rem’s House: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly.

Let’s start with the good. When you enter the main public space, which is dubbed the “Living Room,” from 5th Avenue, you realize, with something of a shock, that Seattle has never really had much of an adequate indoor public space before. And this is a very nice one. Yes, there are the sports stadia, but they are of course event-driven and they’re not free to the user. Likewise with Benroya or McCaw halls. We have the Seattle Center Arena, but that is mostly for the young, the old, and the passing-through. It’s not a space you would normally think of hanging out in. We have various private spaces – my favorite is the garden room in the Four Seasons – but they are private and someone may ask you to leave.  The downtown Seattle Art Museum could have provided a public living space, but it doesn’t. So the new library’s Living Room is it. And it’s well done. Another good item is the book spiral. When you experience it, it becomes a kind of no-brainer. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? It’s useful now and will become more so as the library’s collection grows.  It’s hard to imagine other new libraries not copying this innovation. -- There are also lots of little things that Rem (or somebody) got right. Lots of computers. Translucent books shelves. Glassed elevator shafts (although you can’t see out from the elevators which is a shame). Exposed book conveyors. Cool rugs. Etc. 

The bad. These are all the smaller design items that could have been done better, and in fact can be changed as time goes by, some with very little money or effort.   The children’s section doesn’t have any comfortable couches or cushions for the kids to lounge around on. Likewise, the low-headroom space next to the slanting walls in the Living Room could have been utilized as adult lounging space rather than being fenced off (it doesn’t say “do not enter” but that’s the psychological message). The lemon-yellow escalators will likely get old in a hurry. The floor in the Living Room is white wood, which was trashed within hours of the library’s opening. The bathrooms (or at least the men’s) have lime-green floors, ceilings and walls and make you feel kind of sick as soon as you enter them (maybe that’s the purpose?).  The acoustics in the Auditorium, which is open to the Living Room, are just abominable and bleed noise into that space.  I’m not sure when parking-garage sheik entered our design esthetic, but the Living Room features a 10-story, unadorned concrete elevator shaft. In an earlier day this would be marble. Concrete that is tinted and polished can look quite nice, and in a latter day, faced with budget constraints, the marble could have been downgraded to that treatment. Of course other ideas such as a soaring water-fall are easily imaginable (which would also deal with some of the noise coming from the Auditorium). 

Then there is The Ugly. These are serious design flaws. In my mind there are two, a missed opportunity and a major circulation problem. The missed opportunity is the 4th Avenue entrance, which is the main entrance for most people. The ceiling is low. The pillars are concrete. It’s shabby. The low ceiling height is a result of cramming the book-sorting-floor between the 4th and 5th Avenue levels. Although the Living Room is spectacular, entering it from 4th Avenue is sort of like entering your living room at home from a trashed-out garage. This is a strange flaw because there were some pretty easy solutions at hand to rectify it. The easiest would have been to bring the shell of the building straight down to the ground on 4th (I wonder if this was rejected with a command from Rem: “No right angles”) and/or moving the sorting floor somewhere else.  Alternately the up-escalator, which currently gives one the birth-canal experience one gets from going up the long escalator at SeaTac’s south satellite terminal, could have been placed on the outside of the building, entering the Living Room through the 4th Avenue overhang. Either way one would be arriving with some presence rather than, metaphorically speaking, skulking past the trash cans in the alley. -- The second design flaw concerns the connection between the Book Spiral and the “Mixing Chamber,” ie what in an earlier day was the card-catalogue and information section. Or rather the lack of such connection. You can take an up-escalator from the Mixing Chamber, and you can take stairs down from the top of the library where there is a reading room to the bottom-most floor of the Book Spiral, but then ….but then…”Hey, how do I get out of here?”  There is no down-escalator and no stairs from anywhere in the Book Spiral to the Mixing Chamber. If the elevator are running slow, well too bad. The only other alternative, which was opened up for the library opening, is an emergency stairwell (“Alarm Will Sound”). This flunks a fundamental tenet of architecture 101: you have to be able to get from here to there. It is particularly hard to understand when the downtown Seattle Art Museum, which uses fire stairs as the main circulator between floors, suffers from a similar shortcoming. Can’t we learn from our mistakes?

The crucial question was asked me by my 15-year-old son: Would you rather keep the library or take back the money it cost to build? Well, I’ll keep it (not that I have any choice of course). Even the Ugly design flaws are correctable (put in some new escalators), albeit at a considerable post-construction “remodeling” cost. While it seems a shame that a fair amount of the $165 million construction tab (three times the cost of Vancouver’s new library) was probably runthrough to eradicate right angles from the building and create a design that Darth Vader would approve of, at least Seattle now has a gracious public Living Room. It’s about time.

-- Guest Post by Donald F. Padelford

I haven't been back for my first visit to the Koolhaas Library

Several years ago, while the new Seattle Public Library was still in the design stage, I wrote an article about it for the Seattle Times.

(The editors gave me the entire front page of the "Op-Ed" section; now I notice that the article has been entirely removed from the Times archives. These days I cannot imagine that they would even print my letter, so giddy are they, like so many Seattleites, about our latest attempt to be a big city.)

While writing the article I spent a lot of time thinking about the design and "walking around the building" in my mind and so for the last 3-4 years I have felt that I had already been there.

My focus in the article was on the building as a piece of urbanism --- not as a piece of architecture. (And for what it is worth, "architecture" slightly bores me; I am not what one would call an "architecture buff" standing in front of some famous work in awe of the genius of its designer: I like cities, not Very Large Scale Sculpture.) I analyzed the Koolhaas proposal in terms of The Three Rules of Urban Design. I found his Koolhaas work wanting and an unsuccessful design.

Here is the article:

Koolhaas Library Design.pdf

The article's title was provided by the newspaper; I would have preferred something more to the point such as "Take it to the Edge, Mr. Koolhaas"...the idea being that Koolhaas is seen as such a cutting-edge, progressive, "innovative" architect but his design is really so suburban, hackneyed, conventional, unimaginative in the way it turns away from the sidewalk.

Anyway, I based my analysis on a study of the plans and a model. Here is a typical perspective:


(Click to enlarge.)

My conclusion as to the physical facts (i.e. was I reading the plans and model correctly?) were confirmed as accurate by a representative of the City Librarian.

I haven't been back to see the building yet; I wonder if my article had any impact on the design (I doubt it) and/or if my prognostication was even remotely accurate about the building's indifference to the pedestrian. I'll take a look in due course.

Btw, just to be super-clear --- I had no comment then (much less now) about the quality of the building's interior. It might be marvelous; it might be junk. I had & have no opinion.

My personal opinion of the piece as a Very Large Scale Sculpture is also irrelevant. I am mostly indifferent to it. "Eh" is my esential reaction, though I also find it showy and pretentious and striving, not to my taste. But the whole point of my article is that even so, had the architect paid attention to the way the building met the sidewalk, the design could have been a positive one.

A national unity government. Good.

I like the idea.

So does Hillary.

Don't miss her last line:

"These are unusual times," she said.

Theory is one thing

Practice is another:

A leading French architect said there was a growing culture of "speed and performance" in the allocation of prestige building projects, and warned against the pressure to use cutting edge techniques that had yet to be proved. "The (terminal) was like a performance, at the very outer limit of the material. Everything was calculated and taken into account. But in this outer limit all you need is a piece of metal in the wrong place or a bad lot of concrete -- no-one can protect himself against that," said Paul Chemetov.

Huh?

Iraq has an oil minister who is speaking out against what would appear to be the policy favored by the American occupiers? A Split in OPEC, as Saudis Talk of Pumping More

AMSTERDAM, May 23 - Saudi Arabia's promise to increase its oil output and its call for increased production quotas from OPEC is creating a rare public rift in the group, with one country contending that unrest in Iraq, not production levels, is a main cause of the high cost of crude oil.

Individual members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have begun to speak out against raising output, in response to a statement from the Saudis on Friday that they were willing to produce an additional 500,000 barrels of oil a day to help curtail prices, which have been above $40 a barrel. The Saudis, who are under intense pressure to add supplies, said that OPEC should increase production by more than two million barrels a day.

On Sunday, Venezuela joined Iraq in dismissing production levels as a main cause of high prices and instead attributed them in large part to the war in Iraq.

"The market is already sufficiently supplied with oil," Rafael Ramrez, the energy minister of Venezuela, told reporters during a conference here. Instead, he said, high taxes, particularly in the United States and Europe, and unrest in Iraq were responsible.

Venezuelan production was hard hit in 2002 by an attempted coup and late last year by the sabotage of some of its fields, Mr. Ramrez said. Now, he said, destabilizing factors are "happening in the Middle East, particularly Iraq."

His comments echoed those made Friday by Iraq's oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who said that many factors were contributing to the soaring oil prices besides OPEC production levels, including traders' speculation.(italics added)

The more I read about Iraq -- why we are there and what is happening now -- the more mystified I am. My image is that Iraq is a basket-case. But even without a formal government, Iraq has an oil minister? And one who is arguing against raising oil quotas? I don't know how that plays in terms of Iraq's interests, but I am fascinated that Iraq already has an oil ministry which appears to have an independent voice. If anyone has insight into the dynamics, I would be curious to learn.

The Turner Prize 2004

It’s May, and time for the British to rev up their annual debate on "What is Art?" also know as the Turner Prize. Finalists are Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell (a pair working as a team), Yinka Shonibare, Jeremy Deller, and Kutlug Ataman. Langland and Bell are noted for work that examines our relationship to architecture and interaction with the built environment. Worth a look is their Paddington Station Bridge.

What is most interesting about the 2004 group is that all of these artists are producing work with a deep connection to current social issues.

I also find it charming that almost article in the press includes the bookmakers odds on each finalists chances of winning. Can you imagine Americans betting on the outcome of an art museum award? The odds, btw, as reported in the Guardian, are currently Langlands and Bell 7/2, Deller 7/4, Ataman 3/1, and Shonibare 5/2. You can also join the fray, courtesy of the BBC.

---Tommer Peterson

I don't think so.

That Brutal Joint's Response to Salingaros's Response

We have to live with the laws of physics, too; that doesn't mean we should all be conversant in string theory. We listen to music, but we're not all expected to perform Schenkerian analysis. It is wrong to suggest that just because everyone uses buildings, architectural theory should be dumbed-down to the level of those who have had no architectural instruction.

By the same logic we should do away with voting and leave politics to political scientists. No.

UPDATE: Contrary, I don't think we in fact let cede politics to politicians. And anyway, there is -- thank god and the founding fathers -- no specvvial qualifications for being a politician except convincing at least a plurality of one's fellow citizens. The very notion that we should leave discussions of urban form to architects is odd. One could argue -- just as wrongly -- that urban form should be left to real estate developers.

Is there really any doubt? Or is posing it as a question simply a bureaucratic device?

Design codes index

The deputy prime minister, John Prescott, has launched a project to test controversial design codes inspired by Poundbury in Dorset, and Seaside in Florida ...

The six projects will test whether codes can help improve the poor quality of new housing, in a range of different settings from sensitive countryside sites to declining urban areas and sprawling military estates.

BTW: I did not mean to disparage "bureaucratic" devices; perhaps I should have said "politic" method or "diplomatic" approach.

World Bank president urges "radical shift"

The gist, as I understand it, is simply that human rights is good business.

This strikes me as an extraordinarily positive motion, long overdue but also better late than never,which should be supported by all, including and especially George W. Bush.

Write to your congress-personnel.

UPDATE: Crooked Timber offers another perspective under the title: Ideas which look sensible but aren't

Where's the beef?

Peter Lindberg links to this bit of puffery .

MY bs-detector goes off at a high-pitch whenever I hear someone say that

[a] genuinely new way of thinking about the world cannot arise from sustainable design thinking or from any other design idea. Sustainable architecture , like all the other innovative design movements, has merely made a small side step which allows the far deeper non-living processes of contemporary development to continue. All that happens when these world-changing ideas are attempted within the existing paradigm, is that nothing really changes. That is because it is not the designs, but the processes, which must first change, and until that happens no significant change will occur.

Now Christopher Alexander is (or at least was) one of my culture-heroes. City Comforts is clearly and gratefully inspired by and even derivative of Alexander's Pattern Language; and I am always willing to listen to what he has to say. But I am, at the outset, leery of people who say that one thing cannot happen until something else happens. And that something else is usually of such momentous gravity (e.g. people become "morally better") that the whole thing ends up as an excuse for no action whatsoever. For example, suppose a socialist had said in 1953 that no progress could be made in racial relations in the USA until socialism happened. Well, that would have been a good excuse to do nothing, or to work on solutions so global that they would require "revolution."

Well, what I learned -- not perhaps what he meant to teach -- from Alexander's Pattern Language is that a better world is made of lots of little pieces and that's it's more to the point to satisfice than to optimize. Perhaps that's why Alexander is doing a second book? Too many people missed the point. Of course I really didn't miss the point; I just ignored the strictures (e.g. high-rise living is bad for the mental health -- see page 114 on "Four-Story Limit") which I thought from my own experience to be silly and focussed on the brilliance. Alas. He found me out.

Now none of the above goes to the book per se; I haven't read it and Alexander's claims discourage me. Will I read the book? Oh I imagine in due course that I will at least glance at it, though I'd prefer to let others read it first and encourage me with genuine and specific enthusiasm.

But maybe I am a small-c "conservative" and it makes me nervous when I hear someone, anyone, trumpeting "big changes."

Just say "no."

Witold Rybczynski asks (rhetorically):

But isn't good urban design about originality, innovation, and personal invention?

The answer, of course, is "no."

There is nothing wrong with the qualities of "originality, innovation, and personal invention" -- they are essential in many realms of human endeavor -- but they are largely irrelevant to creating a comfortable city. As Bob Dylan put it, "To live outside the law you must be honest." (I use "honesty" here in the sense that one must be able to look at one's own acts in the light of the larger social goals within which one operates and judge one's actions without blinkers.)

The irreducible essence of city-ness

This animated sketch shows what I believe to be the irreducible & essence of "city-ness." The relationship between street and building and parking lot determines our feelings about a place. All else is refinement and epilogue.

Click image to enlarge. (And don't be alarmed if it loads slowly.)

(If anyone has photos which would illustrate these two conditions -- and I ask not because I can't find some good ones literally a block from my own office but because it would be nice to see what others see -- I will happily send a copy of City Comforts for each and any photo I use. Please contact me at david-at-citycomforts.com)

UPDATE: John Massengale's comments are good ones. My goal in creating this sketch -- and btw where are the photos? two books for each photo?:) -- was to have an easily-understood tool to set forth the basic pitch. So I am all ears for suggestions on how to get across the idea. The Three Rules set it forth in words and the accompanying sketches on the back cover of City Comforts do it fairly well. But I thought it would be fun to use the web's capabilities -- principally the morphing power -- to show the profound transformative (or destructive) power of such a simple thing as where to put the parking. I still think it's a good idea, notwithstanding John's points. (His comment about a German rule is intriguing and is definitely something I'd like to see.)

WTC Update

For two years I have been telling people that, all the fancy graphic presentations and architects' models notwithstanding, we really have no idea of what eventually will emerge on the World Trade Center site. Things became all the more uncertain this last week when a federal jury denied Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the property, his request for a double insurance payout. The whole grand project, based on the original design of Studio Daniel Libeskind, was predicated on the higher payout. Here's a good piece by Julia Vitullo-Martin from the Wall Street Journal (via Two Blowhards). Vitullo-Martin writes:

the World Trade Center had never been the monument to capitalism the terrorists believed it to be. Rather, it was the product of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's peculiar brand of government gigantism--immense office towers built on private land acquired under eminent domain, exempted from city building codes, and freed from all taxes to compete with the private sector.

The grand project has struck me all along as a potential boondoggle on the scale of, well, the World Trade Center itself. I have thought, and think, that we should let lower Manhattan seek its own level. The area is rebounding commercially as it is. It's not where it was in 2001 prior to the attacks, but it's well ahead of where it was a few years before that. The residential market down there has not only rebounded, but seems to me to be stronger than ever.

The jury decision may prove to be a blessing for lower Manhattan.

--Guest posted by Francis Morrone

Reviews of "Dark Age Ahead"

The early reviews of Jane Jacobs's "Dark Age Ahead" are coming in. Here is John King (via John Massengale) in the SF Chronicle. And here is Francis Fukuyama in Wired.

Fukuyama does not think much of the new book. But he writes:

In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I continue to assign to my students), Jacobs pointed out that public safety in urban neighborhoods like the North End of Boston was not a function of a heavy police presence but of "eyes on the street" - adults who enforced community norms on young people before they got to the point of committing crimes. Thus was borne the concept of social capital: the notion that social connectedness through norms and networks constitutes an invisible but critical asset. She inspired a generation of urban planners to reverse suburbanization and revitalize downtown areas, as well as the New Urbanism architectural movement, designed to strengthen community.

I myself am going to be reviewing the new book, which I haven't read yet, and can't wait to read, but have been delayed in reading because the copy sent to me by my newspaper seems to have got lost in the mail.

--Guest posted by Francis Morrone