Critiquing "Sterilizing Development" in Historic Areas

Typical "patchwork" apartments in Richmond's historic center.

Urban advocates in Charlotte NC are taking a close look at the massive new multi-family apartment complexes that are transforming historic neighborhoods in a way that is becoming increasingly familiar here in Richmond. Is there a way to do new housing in city centers without damaging the fragile historic fabric of the small commercial and residential background buildings that provide the setting for the rich civic life, great cuisine, and commercial diversity that characterize Richmond's "bottom-up" revitalization in recent years? Is there a way to make new buildings that are more timeless in appearance and durable in materials, and that also respect the city's historic patterns of building?





Old Stone Row in Richmond's Shockoe Valley.



New apartment building in historic Jackson Ward.



Image:  Opponents of a new apartment complex at a recent Charlotte City  Council meeting credit: Ely Portillo, Charlotte Observer

In Charlotte a group of committed urbanists have organized "Civic by Design," a forum partnered with a wide array of cultural and design-related institutions, that intends "to elevate the quality of our region’s built environment and to promote public participation in the creation of a more beautiful and functional region for all." New Urbanist architect Tom Low, based in Charlotte, recently posted news of the forum on the traditional TradArch List.

The group has effectively defined the dense, cheap apartment blocks appearing in American cities as "sterilizing development." More than 10,400 units are under construction in Charlotte, with more than 10,300 planned. As in Richmond, many are four- or five-story mid-rise buildings being constructed in historic neighborhoods. These buildings are out of character with their surroundings in scale, materials, and proportion. Their designers attempt to mitigate their massiveness by applying a variety of exterior finishes in a seemingly patternless collage, often mixing brick, cement board, and corrugated metal. One prominent Richmond traditional architect has named this kind of form "RPQ, the Random Patchwork Quilt Style."

In Richmond, unlike in Charlotte, there has been little criticism of these new apartment blocks, perhaps because they are not yet as widespread and have not yet caused an extensive demolition of much-loved older buldings. The principal conversation in the past has been over the official design standards for new buildings in historic districts and the lack of external windows in a surprising number of rehabilitated lofts funded by historic preservation tax credits. 

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/biz-columns-blogs/development/article23919511.html#storylink=cpy

A forum at Charlotte's Levine Museum of the New South on June 9th defined the problem:

"Sterilizing development can be defined as new development that is too dense, too tall, too quick and diluting the funky character that makes our historic neighborhoods special.   These new designs are completely different in character and feel, quality, and style of bland, boring, beige, behemoth boxes all with the same look, the same standards, same floor plans.  This coarse grain approach is wiping out affordable housing and hole-in-the-wall neighborhood hang-outs, forcing people out and changing both the character and the social structure.  Developments with weak design and poor construction will not age well and quickly become passé, leaving neighborhoods to deal with the negative consequences in their wake.  Please join Civic By Design as we explore how development is sterilizing Charlotte."

The forum explored ways to change or mitigate the direction of development in Charlotte:

 

 

"1.  Review current design and redevelopment projects and their pros and cons for improving and harming neighborhoods and citizens — inclusive vs. elite, fine-grain vs. too coarse, durable vs. disposable?

2.  Determine what is key — can better civic design preserve elements of what is here now and allow for something new to come in and is it possible to control this? 

3.  Analyze the time and financial challenges developers along with the constraints and design teams must address and what options should be considered — the benefits and backlash of strong and time-consuming strict historic standards if imposed or are there other options?

4.  Explore ideas for a better and more civic design and development process as well as tools and techniques and how they can help —   where economics do not trump sentiment."

Civic by Design has come up with this alternate design for the kinds of bland, big-box developments that are overwhelming Charlotte's small-scale historic districts. This for an area around "Tommy's Pub," a much-loved landmark threatened with demolition.

Thanks to Tom Low on TradArch List.
 

Here are some pertinent links:

Plaza Midwood Residents Back Tommys Pub, oppose rezoning at council meeting.

 

Apartment developers are sterilizing Charlotte

Plaza Midwood Pleads with City Council to Stop Sterilizing Charlotte.

 

http://wfae.org/post/growth-and-development-charlotte-neighborhoods

 

The Urban Crisis

This summer urbanismo worked with an Italian architect, urbanist and student of the Muratori school of urban morphology. He recomended a book by his teacher, Gianfranco Caniggia. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology serves as a good introduction to the well established Muratorian tradition. As the year progresses we will continue to explore this intriguing way of looking at the city.

"To say that a discipline is in crisis may appear to be a negative judgment; in actual fact, a crisis is always synonymous with discomfort for those involved and for those who undergo it. However, there is no doubt that crisis arises whenever any structure whatsoever is ineffective, in the above mentioned way, in adapting to new, different needs. What makes that crisis positive is that it is an attempt to adapt and laboriously strike a new balance vis-à-vis a changed reality. The history of the crisis of composition can be, perhaps reductively, delineated in brief. A certain codification of the teaching of composition was in force at the time the first “universities of architecture” in Italy were formed, that is, between the 1920s and the 1930s. This codification soon proved to be inadequate, inasmuch as, in the following decade, innovative pressures were such that the system of formal rules derived from the academies had to be replaced with a generic promotion of the personal inventiveness of individual students, in a direct relationship with the individual lecturers. The Modern Movement had, therefore, entered into teaching the point of which was almost entirely the comprehensive desecration of the academic codifications, that is to say, almost entirely the negative opposition to previous formulations.

However, what did not change in the old academy was the concept of architect’s traditional role as constructors of exceptional products and creators of new forms in opposition to methods used to produce buildings before each was its own creative act. In this way, composition was taken to be a subject suited to developing individual creativity, in a specifically personalized way, to foster the heterogeneity of products and a vague inventiveness professing aestheticism. This formula is extraordinarily efficient in educating architects capable of serving a clientele (relatively important if public or private) and providing them with a consumer product deliberately in opposition to any context, to any existing building and to any civil continuity.

This didactic form spread to almost all teaching of architectural composition (except a few, worthwhile exceptions, first and foremost the redefinition of the subject according to a consistent dialectic based on the analysis of existing building and on the conceptual and ethical assumptions of mankind’s building activities as developed in Rome by Saverio Muratori) and it lasted until the late seventies, when the evident inadequacy of the pseudo-methodology to the changed social role of architects led to a series of attempts to interrelate better with the actual human environment.

Many of these attempts undoubtedly caused uncertainty in the aims and boundaries of the discipline. Faced with a lack of specific methodology, there was an overall attempt to link up with the actual environment from other specific disciplines such as economics, sociology, and psychology. Some forms of current teaching of architectural composition, including our own, derived from directly from or indirectly from Saverio Muratori’s thought, teaching and research, and took the role of the disciple to be completely the opposite."

Gianfanco Canniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, trans. Susan Jane Fraser. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology. Alinea, Florence: 2001. p. 32.