Too Negative or Rightfully Critical?

BOTC has been called out for being too negative by Rockitecture, another Cleveland architecture blog via Florence. It seems that we may rough the quarterback up too much. BOTC disagrees.

I would argue that BOTC, Improvised Schema, and Design Rag are not being overly negative. Instead we are critically questioning much of the mediocre design and regressive atmosphere that fosters that design in our region. We are offering informed criticisms of projects that are otherwise praised by major media outlets or institutions that claim to be the intellectual stewards of the city.

The four above mentioned blogs, including Rockitecture, do serve a purpose. Steve Litt, who BOTC believes does fight the good fight by trying to advance architectural dialogue in the collective consciousness, is not educated as an architect, but rather in Art History. The many authors of the previously mentioned blogs are educated as architects and all currently practice. Because of our professional orientation and our training, we can offer something different to the discussion. And that is what we will continue to do.

Knowing several of the authors, BOTC is comfortable asserting that we all believe in strengthening the city though competent and potent design. However, if we see abominations of architecture or urban design being flung upon the masses under the banner of "contextualism" or "populism" or any other false contrivance, we will pounce and criticize. Bad design can inflict more damage on a city that just mere latent negativity.

Public Square Studio continues . . .

The Fall 2006 Gradaute Design Studio at Kent's State's CUDC is completing the initial precedent analysis and testings of precedental tactics on Public Square.

Please check their progress at the Public Square Studio blog.

Design proposals will begin to emerge over the next three weeks.

Public Square Speculations

The Fall Semester Kent State CUDC Graduate studio will be speculating about the future of Cleveland's Public Square.

The studio will be posting / blogging about their research and design work regularly throughout the fall. You can follow the work here.

Please stay appraised of emerging alternative renderings of Cleveland's most recognizable public space.

Cape May, New Jersey

BOTC took a little vacation time last week and visited Cape May, New Jersey, a Victorian beach town at the southern tip of state. We had an enjoyable time—the future Mrs. Doctor enjoyed the beaches, while I enjoyed the resort town landscape and geography.

Resort + vacation towns are “urban” anomalies, unlike the typical American urban or suburban conurbations. A town is in constant flux, shuffling new populations of tourists and vacationers every few days. A resort community may maintain, sustain, and promote an atmosphere. Animated public spaces possessing all the accruements of a pedestrian environment are filled with people day and night. Vehicular traffic is limited, as well as asphalt parking lots.

Cape May is no different. Tourists, like us, come in for a few days, become quasi-citizens use the city and beaches, and then leave. The town tries to maintain a Victorian aesthetic presence with many of its beautiful bed and breakfasts, cottages, and vacation homes (“Idustri-victorian” architect Frank Furness designed buildings in town). Houses are grouped tightly together on narrow tree-lined streets with flagstone sidewalks. The ocean-front avenue and the Washington Street Pedestrian Mall are engaging public spaces, full of people, activities, pleasant aromas, shading vegetation. Cape May is a pleasant place.

But why can we not transfer such conditions back to our everyday lives back in the suburbs of Cleveland? This is an old and tired question that always devolves into the typical clichéd answers, political disagreements, and arguments. I cannot assert any answers or new solutions myself.

Yet quick trips to these urban anomalies always refresh the inner-debate between desires for a new pleasant populist (sub)urbanism and a more aggressive, progressive, and density-driven urbanism.

It's freaking hot . . . .random thoughts

BOTC has been busy with other things in life, like studying for the architectural registration exam and trying to avoid heat stroke.

Books that BOTC is trying to find time to read:

Recombinant Urbansim
The Average American
American Green
Symbolic Essence (essays by William Jordy)
Society of the Spectacle

Maybe I will write a response to all this literature.

Here is link to cross-continental yard sales that will be happening in the near future.

The Browns new face masks are bad-ass.

New Orleans Metrostudio

I would encourage everyone to vote for BOTC's friend and classmate, Ken Gowland of Metrostudio, and his submission for the New Orleans Sustainable Design Competittion.

Ken and his family withstood Katrina's sacking of the city, the evacuation, and now is taking part in the vital re-building of the city.

A Delayed Campus-Making Tactic

How do you transform a loosely grouped ensemble of medical buildings into a "campus"?

Commandeer a major piece of city and federal infrastructure and transform the street, Euclid Avenue, into a organizational pedestrian spine. That is exactly what the Cleveland Clinic is studying and proposing.

The Clinic is a monster institution, possessing blocks and blocks of inner city Cleveland, abutting University Circle. The Clinic is the largest institution in the city and adds luster to the rusting hulk of this post-industrial region. To say the least, the hospital maintains a muscular presence.

Many were astounded by the brashness and scope of the plan, which would alter the urban landscape for over 20 city blocks. But this is in by no way a new tactic for institutions seeking to engender or further enhance the notion of "campus". Penn State turned a campus and State College Street into a Jefferson-inspired academic mall, a space now considered the main organizational element. Yale University has transformed New Haven streets into University campus walks, connecting Old Campus to Cross Campus and the Sterling Memorial Library. Case Western Reserve University has morphed alleys into student thoroughfares. And there are many other examples that escape me.

The scale of the endeavor is intriguing, as well as the retroactive urban design tactic that Peter Walker and the Clinic are employing. The deployment of a organizational element, a massive pedestrian mall, after over 90 years of campus development, overturns the normative methods of campus design. Instead of inducing the instant campus, the proposed plan suggests the acquisition of "campus" can be attained many decades after the planning and building begins.

Although the Clinic may be inciting a political firestorm, the methods and tactics that Peter Walker is employing are nonetheless interesting and deserve further critical scrutiny.

For more on the Clinic plan see Design Rag's take.

Thanks for the interest, now get out of the way

This week's Crain's Cleveland Business publishes a letter to the editor concerning the potential changes with Cleveland's Public Sqaure (subscription needed). The authors--Mayor Debbie Sutherland (Bay Village), Martin Sweeney (Cleveland City Council), Andrew Roth (Notre Dame College)--all members of the Leadership Cleveland Class of 2004, take credit for the original design visions for Public Square.

BOTC applauds their recognition of the restoration of Public Square as a transformative agent. However, while they advocate for more unified green space and the re-routing of Ontario and Superior, they botched everything else.

These potential decision and policy makers need to engage in an all encompassing design process that can flesh-out all possible solutions. A progressive vision can be quickly snuffed by mediocre design.

Blog on the City, Design Rag, and Improvised Schema are all searching for better ideas and will be posting notions periodically. See BOTC's recent ideas and parameters here and here.

The Arts Migration

In the past week, the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood, an inner-ring Cleveland suburb, announced it was studying a possible move to a booming and bustling "neighborhood", a lifestyle center in outer-ring Westlake, called Crocker Park.

Much consternation erupted from sectors of the Cleveland blogosphere. How could such a venerable institution leave Lakewood? How could an arts organization sell out to the evil developer? Fake urbanism is wrong and despicable! It is not a real city! And on and on.

Let's face it. American urbanism and/or suburbanism of our emerging century will not mirror the urbanism of the last century. These pockets of New Urbanist mixed use should not necessarily be viewed as something aberrational--these conurbations are the harbingers of future "urban" development and must be seriously considered. As populations become ever more mobile and less tethered to certain geographies, routines, and schedules, the normative understandings of "city" and "urbanism" become incrementally obsolete.

So why would not such an organization as the Beck Center want to be involved and ingratiated within the fabric of a potential urban core? The move of the Arts to the booming suburbs is not a phenomena occurring only in Northeast Ohio. This is a trend that Joel Kotkin has been writing about for many years now.

Progressivism + Design

As people continue to debate the future of Public Square and the public funding mechanisms that would need to be instigated to facilitate the re-design, I would like to direct people to some pertinent reading.

Thomas Hines, a professor of architectural history at UCLA, wrote Burnham of Chicago, a biography of Daniel Burham, father of the Cleveland Group Plan. One chapter, Chapter 8, discusses the intersection of Mayor Tom Johnson's Progressive politics and Daniel Burnham's passion for urban design and architecture.

We need to revisit the lessons of a century ago, understanding the potency of urban design as a resurrecting agent.

Blogging as Civic Responsibilty

Brewed Fresh Daily posted a question/thread the other day: Why do people blog? Should civic responsibility drive the interest + passion?

We have been blogging here recently about the abomination, the Public Square design proposal, that Paul Volpe + Ann Zoller sprung in the Plain Dealer a few weeks ago. And we have been continuously blogging in tandem with Design Rag and Improvised Schema about avenues to pursue alternative strategies. And we have been ruminating about the plight of the Huletts.

Our constant criticism is Civic Resonsibility, albeit in a self-interested manner, since we are all architects + designers. These forums are the rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that seems to plague cities like Cleveland. Our blogs hopefully enlighten the passer-by or informed citizen + decision-maker.

I would suggest some reading that may further enhance the understanding of the power/potency/agility of bloggers + blogs:

Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit
Blog by Hugh Hewitt

Although is seems most of the Cleveland bloggers tilt, um, left, the libertarian Reynolds and conservative Hewitt offer insight into how the further democritization of information and access is altering the balance between the slower print + broadcast media instituions and passionate and sage bloggers in their pajamas.

Last week's issue of The New Republic delves into blogosphere, also.

The Plain Dealer + the Huletts

Like it or not, for us in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer sets the rhetorical agenda each day for the rest of the regional media and even for the bloggers. Today is no different.

The PD editors take a stand against the relocation and preservation of the Hulett ore loaders. I agree that wholly re-erecting these behemoths is probably untenable in the sites that decision-makers have suggested. But again, we need to think beyond the normative. Instead of describing where they cannot go, list locations where can they go--whether near or far. How can the pieces be disseminated? Can they be placed in areas away from the lake? What happens if the Huletts are re-erected in a foreign context, like the London Bridge which was re-built in Arizona? Maybe all these questions have been asked, but they have not been thoroughly answered in a public manner

We here at BOTC have our own idea, which is posted below.

Huletts on Public Square

Cleveland's favorite dormant industrial relics ,the Hulett ore loaders (picutred here) are going to be drawn, quartered, and spread around Cleveland. Read the PD article here.

This may be a crazy idea, but why don't we plop one, or at least parts of the rustbelt behemoths down on Public Square? Public Square needs to be re-constituted, as has been discussed in the PD, Blog on the City, and Improvised Schema. Yet the character of this re-constitution is by no means resolved.

A possible solution for Public Square would involve transforming the square into a monumental dumping ground, creating a indexical menagerie of regional history. Imagine Public Square, which already hosts the Soldiers' + Sailors' monument (which thoroughly documents Cuyahoga County's participation in the Civil War), also hosting an immense Hulett, a machine that fueled Cleveland's industrial economy for a healthy part of the 20th century, allowing for cross-era narrative. But also imagine in the future decades other remnants of important artifacts filling the space: pieces of NASA space vehicles that are currently being developed at Glenn Research, a toothbrush light tower from Jacobs Field, prototype wind-turbine technology developed in Cleveland, etc.

Many possibilities exist out there. We just have to be willing to explore them. Creativity can solve several problems with one answer.

More on Public Square

Roldo Bartimole writes about the Public Square proposal here.

Roldo hates the plan--but it has to do with public financing and the evils of business self-interests and Dick Jacobs. Yawn. Different subject, same old playbook. No new ideas. Just regurgitating the same pseudo-populist diatribes.

While BOTC despises the proposed design, we do endorse the idea of rejuvenating Public Square. We do not like what Paul Volpe and Ann Zoller created, but we applaud their interest in reviving Public Square.

To paraphrase Daniel Burnham, we need plans to stir men's souls. The collective soul will be stirred by progressive design speculation concerned with how spaces like Public Square, the Mall, and the Lakefront will subsist through the 21st century.

These spaces are each proverbial canaries in the Greater Cleveland mineshaft. If they fail, or continue to fail and deteriorate as they are presently constituted, Roldo will really have something to write about. But he will be happy since Dick Jacobs will be losing money.

Thinking beyond the Square

Cleveland gets this: ugh.

Let's think about other ways:
wow.
nice.
interesting.

But the Plain Dealer describes the propsed plan as "thoughtful."

The proposal is as thoughtful as a second-year architecture school student project.

But at least the PD is looking for an open flow of ideas--let's hope the proposed plan is merely a departure point, not the final destination.

Where is the design outrage?

It has been several days since the Plain Dealer published an asinine proposal for the re-design of Public Square. Accept for a few vociferous protests from Blog on the City and Improvised Schema, the Cleveland blogosphere has been disturbingly quiet and rather unconcerned.

The relative silence from Northeast Ohio’s digitally enlightened again supports my perception of Cleveland as a lower-tier design city, incapable deciphering what constitutes good design and awful design. The lack of indignation further reinforces Steve Litt’s assessment of Cleveland’s design culture (see posts below).

We can wait no longer . . .

Steve Litt reviews the interviews for the Cuyahoga County Adminstration Complex.

One commissioner reveals that the project will not move quickly because they have not figured out how to fund the project. Huh?

Indecision is killing this city and county.

Public Square is Dead! Long Live Public Sqaure!

Cleveland’s Public Square is an empty vessel. It no longer functions as the community space that Moses Cleaveland and the boys designed back in the early 19th Century. Sure, the square has hosted some important events, like Lincoln’s funeral procession, the filming of A Christmas Story, and some very Cleveland-like events, like the celebration that followed the Indians losing the 1997 World Series. And the Soldiers’ + Sailors’ monument is a very uniquely American structure, monument, and interpretive piece, unlike any other non-battlefield monument in the country. Yet in most part, Public Square has seen its better days.

Public Square and the Mall, the spatial progeny of the Burnham’s Group Plan, are flaccid relics of past urban design models. At one time each space constituted the democratic and green lungs of a thriving, dirty, and pulsing industrial city. No longer, though. Each space is devoid of relative meaning, use, function, or future. These organizing voids are merely vestiges of past planning strategies that no longer unite. We must either re-use these spaces intelligently, provocatively, or hand them over to private interests to be ruthlessly in-filled.

Let’s say we are forward thinking citizens, tired of the defeatism of the baby-boomer politicians of this one-party town who do not have to compete for votes with ideas. How should we approach the re-design or re-constitution of such deteriorating, yet historically important, and potentially instigating spaces?

Forget nostalgia. The 1950’s are gone, as well as Higbee’s, May Company, and the entire socio-economic climate that seeps from Dick Feagler’s black and white photographs.

Forget history. We do not need interpretive panels explaining what occurred in 1814 at this spot to alter Ohio history. We should keep the Soldiers’ + Sailors’ Monument, though--it is uniquely Cleveland and can anchor the whirlwind of urban change that can potentially occur. Everything else in the other quadrants can go. Small crowds gather for Downtown Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day ceremonies—many attend ceremonies in the suburbs.

Forget ceremony and tradition. The most tangible taste of ceremony that still inflects the square would be the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The Columbus Day parade has even left Downtown, scadaddling for the friendly confines of Little Italy.

Maintain the perimeter. Like many European public spaces which have been re-born again and again, the bounding periphery of the spaces have maintained their integrity while churning within over the centuries.

Re-think the circulation. Close down Superior, Ontario, or both, or recalibrate the flow of circulation through and around the square. How could parking be achieved in an alternative manner. How can RTA service or not service the area?

Engage technology. Wi-fi clouds, Ipods, nanotechnologies, smart advertising technologies, infinite accessibility and connectivity are evolving the constitution of our shared public spaces. Could a public space be automatically personalized by your presence?

Provide Protest Space. Where could a good protest occur? The closest event that resembled a protest was John Kerry’s election concert on the Mall. Pro-Choice and Pro-Life counter demonstrations would surely charge-up and enliven the commons.

Embed Flexibility. As society evolves at an ever-quickening pace with technological innovation, Public Square needs to be able to change as quickly. Accepting temporality and an ephemeral character may compose the proper concoction to assure lasting reliance and relevance.

Encourage Ad-hocism.

And we could continue on.

But first and foremost, we cannot let the saccharin, one-off, life-style center skin-deep post-modernism + weak contextualism of the Plain Dealer scheme define and lead-off our collective regional future. We are better than the vision of the presented Plain Dealer scheme--if we do not recognize and reject this utter shallowness, we are not worthy to call ourselves competent architects + urban designers.

Bad Public Square! Bad Public Square!

ugh.

Just because some local architects say they are urban designers, does not mean they actually are urban designers. Rendering yourself as a contextualist does not offer a liscense to cogently design seminal Cleveland urban spaces.

A perfect example is the proposed scheme for a new Public Sqaure presented in the Plain Dealer on Sunday. It is awful, suburban, tacky, and tinged with sugary nostalgia. It is everything that Millenium Park in Chicago is not. The proposed scheme actually makes Cleveland dumber. It pushes Cleveland architectural thinking backwards a decade.

God, deliver us from such flaccid design philosohpies that cripple this region!

Similar sentiments at Improvised Schema.

More later.

Cleveland design being discussed . . .

Two letters to the editor appeared in today's Plain Dealer in response to Steve Litt's commentary of last week. Read them here.

It is good to see design debate get a little testy.

I encourage the Plain Dealer to become an advocate for better urban and architectural design. As the only newspaper of consequence in the region, the Plain Dealer and its editors should pressure local decision-makers to make the correct design decisions that will benefit the city and region for generations to come.

Many major projects are going to tranform downtown Cleveland in the next half-decade. An enlightened voice should guide public opinion.