The Biophilic Cities Project and the Urban Imagination

From the point of view of the citizen, wilderness, however beautifully it is ordered in an ecological sense, represents   

a chaotic and destructive force. It is the job of the city to organize and channel the forces of nature into patterns that 

support the art of living together.

NEWS: The Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture is a multiyear initiative engaging cities across the globe. From Oct. 17 to 20, 2013, it hosted the launch of a “Biophilic Cities Peer Network” to advance the theory and practice of planning for cities that contain abundant nature. Biophilic cities care about, seek to protect, restore and grow nature, and strive to foster deep connections and daily contact with the natural world, said Tim Beatly, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning and a self-described “biophilic urbanist.”

Professor Beatly is seen here in a natural setting. Courtesy of UVAToday

When asked “What is a biophilic city?” Tim Beatly, Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and a founder of the Biophilic Cities Project responds that “perhaps the simplest answer is that it is a city that puts nature first in its design, planning and management: it recognizes the essential need for human contact with nature as well as the many environmental and economic values provided by nature and natural systems."

Urbanismo prides itself on putting the city itself first when it comes to design, planning and management, but we understand about the innate human requirements that are met by parks, gardens, and forests. We have written previously on Richmond’s “great, wet, Central Park.” And we have charted, in Tyler Potterfield’s Nonesuch Place: A History of the Richmond Landscape, the growth of a city-wide park system. Richmond’s “urban forest” sprang directly from municipal determination to make the benefits of public landscapes and street foliage available to the citizens from the earliest days. 

Residents of the town and city of Richmond have enjoyed open access to natural settings for recreation and work since its founding in the 1730s. William Byrd’s original plat provided common land along the river and Shockoe Creek for activities like walking, fishing, and washing laundry. Richmonders later set aside public squares, planted trees, and made both private and public gardens in which they strolled, to played, and found a respite from the heat and summer sun. Mostly, however, they attempted, in an inevitably flawed way, to provide an approximation of “the good life” for themselves. Over time, the settlement at the falls of the James developed markets, court and education systems, extensive parks, and a great tradition of public and private architecture. The perennial city as the site of civil life materialized, in spite of inherent challenges, along the unpredictable, untamable James River.  

The hopeful arguments underlying the marketing of Biophilia as a new kind of urbanism are based in a popular idea-- that there is a deep psychological connection between humans and natural processes-- posited by biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson. The Biophilic Cities Project merges this idea with a utilitarian goal of increasing contentment and productivity and an up-to-date foreboding about the future. According to Tim Beatly, Biophilic cities may be “partly defined by the qualities and biodiversity present and designed into urban life, but also the many activities and lifestyle choices and patterns, the many opportunities residents have to learn about and be engaged directly in nature, and the local institutions and commitments expressed, for instance, in local government budgets and policies.” 

The Biophilic Cities vision, as articulated on the official website, consists of a series of concepts grounded in the Green and Sustainability movements. Many of these appear to be self-evident, even banal. Residents of Biophilic cities “feel a deep affinity with the unique flora, fauna and fungi found there.” People “are happier, more relaxed, and more productive, in the presence of nature.” Not only is it true that a “near-constant ability to see and experience nature is an important antidote to the stresses of modern life,” but the experience of nature in the city may “supply the essential background and building blocks for creativity, imagination, and artistic expression.” 

Biophilic architects assert with confidence that "the benefits of natural daylight and ventilation have been proven to improve productivity and reduce sick days in office workers." 

The project anticipates that things may turn unpleasant in the coming years, perhaps as resources grow scarce. Biophilic gardens and natural features will, however, “help to make cities and urban residents more resilient in the face of a host of likely pressures and shocks” to come in the future.

The project to build a Biophilic City may seem, at first, like an attempt to recover some of the architectural and social features that have gone missing from urban landscapes over the past fifty years. A loss of intensity in public life can be seen to have a close relationship with ongoing developments in technology. These included mass transit systems, which, by the 1890s, enabled workers to live outside the city center in new streetcar suburbs. The changes were extended by newer transformative technologies like the automobile and air conditioning. Over time, the schools, commercial centers, office buildings, and manufactories that were not relocated to the outskirts of the city were sealed off from direct exposure to natural forces. 

The public square, once the focus of political, commercial, and social interaction, has been depopulated. New building materials and technologies have made possible the nearly complete industrialization of the architectural and building professions, even as much of the population has moved into the “leafy” suburbs. In fact, the move to semi-forested suburbs like those around most American cities may represent Wilson’s biophilic urge at its peak.  It is possible that the Biophilic movement will even lead us toward a merging of suburb and city center-- a hybridizing process which we might be tempted to call “surbanism.”     

The Biophilic use of the word nature seems to us to suffer from a lack of clarity. There are several definitions of nature that range from “everything there is and how it works” to “everything there is except man and all his works.” The second definition sets the city apart from natural things, giving it a license to control and exploit the world. Bringing nature into the city would then be introducing a kind of anti-matter into the streets and squares of the city, unable to engage with the civilization they channel and support.

On the other hand, if the city is itself natural, the nonhuman elements of nature that are incorporated into the urban fabric would “naturally” participate in the city’s project of perfecting the life of its inhabitants. In other words, trees and water and animals, including wildlife, would take their place in the urban order, along with public art, rotary clubs, civic buildings, squares, and streets. 

From the point of view of the citizen, wilderness, however beautifully it is ordered in an ecological sense, represents a chaotic and destructive force. It is the job of the city to organize and channel the forces of nature into patterns that support the art of living together. For instance, we are sure that urban parks, in order to be useful and used, are best planned as responses to essentially urban activities. 

Stephanie Pincetl, Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities, which studies the “urban metabolism” of “human created ecosystem[s]” like Los Angeles, is onto something when she says: 

Nature surrounds us everywhere in the city, we live in the midst of it all the time, but are not even aware of it. Buildings are made from concrete, made with aggregate and water. Roads are asphalt, from fossil fuel. The resources that we build with and make all our daily items with are sourced from nature. When we begin to be more aware of that, it helps us understand the fundamental materiality of cities and how much they are made from nature, far flung, perhaps, and remanufactured, but nature nonetheless. That kind of awareness can better inform our decisions about building materials, their energy intensivity -- or how much energy is embedded in the things we make -- and how the built environment is both the product of transformed nature and then transforms nature where we build.

As we have written elsewhere, “nature includes not only the natural objects around us, such as plants, animals and rocks, but the system of principles by which things can be explained according to reason and which were true prior to their discovery. More importantly, nature provides the mark against which rational judgment is made possible, the moral order which allows us to state confidently that democracy is the best form of government because it has as its goal the good of every citizen, and the goal of all our efforts as human beings.”   

Any failure in our relationship with the natural world is a failure, not of access, but of imagination. City dwellers will recognize that Richmond’s problems do not stem at all from lack of access to the river. We already drink from it, drive over it, and keep its powerful image in our imaginations, where rivers and other similarly potent forces of nature do their most effective work. In fact, the heart of the city is most certainly not the James River: real wilderness has only a small place in the city’s necessary order. Our life as citizens- practicing politics- the great art of living together- is at the heart of the city.  

Neglecting our urban life and its finely crafted architectural setting, we have somehow abandoned a shared understanding of what it takes to build and maintain a good city. Our sidewalks have been depopulated, the prosperity that serves the civic good has fled, and our schools seem unable to fully reform themselves. Richmond’s fragile urban connective tissues should be of more immediate interest.

In the end, we devoutly disagree with the goals of the Biophilic Cities Project, simply because the project fails to engage with the most pressing questions posed by our city(s). Its set of proposals, presented as an alternative to traditional urbanism, constitutes an end-run around the existential crisis which afflicts the city.

Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Krier

Dear Malcolm,

All traditional architecture is not necessarily classical. The classic is the very best of a tradition. Jefferson's Capitol would be an example of a classical building because it not only hearkens back to former classical buildings, but has itself become a classic. It is so because in it Jefferson took a previous example, namely the ancient Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and made it thoroughly modern for the new seat of provincial government in Virginia. In this example lies part of the answer to your question about the practical uses for classical architecture in the modern world. 

Classicism is not un-modern. One of my professors in fact describes classicism as the "other modern." Modernism, the ideology that has held architecture around the world in a death grip since the 1920's, was based in the denial of all previous models and sought to replace them with the paradigm of the machine. The "international style" is a good example of such a mentality based in the desire for a new, unsullied architecture, fitting form to function. All but a few anachronistic modernists have long since left the machine slogan behind, however its influence can still be seen in even the tamest new construction. 

Traditional architecture, on the other hand, seeks to work with and continue local traditions, to render the urban order of the city more intelligible, and to tell the user and passer-by about itself through its form. Part of this process involves the adaptation of the way things have been done in the past to suit current needs. In other words, it does what buildings have always done until roughly eighty years ago. In opposition to many modernist buildings which are often either completely inexplicable to anyone but their designer, or hideous blights on the land, (and more often both) the traditional building seeks to be a good neighbor. Being a good neighbor entails a willingness to have a dialogue with one's surroundings, not to be offensive, to understand one's place in the order of the city, and most importantly to contribute to the public good. This means that in a Western city such as Richmond, the provincial capitol will be the most important building, traditionally ornamented with a fully expressed order, etc., all at an appropriate scale. Lesser buildings take their cue from this and are ornamented in a way that tells the story of the city. Classical buildings like the State Capitol are the best of these good neighbors.   

So, perhaps another question might be "what are the practical uses of an architecture that refuses to look to the past and continues to build indefensible, un-neighborly buildings?" Of course I have made this seem very cut-and-dry. There are many current architects who seek to use the modernist language in a communal, legible way, with varying degrees of success. I would argue, however, that such efforts are inherently futile. 

I am not sure what exactly you mean by the resources and processes originally used, but your question does raise an interesting question: how do we recover the skills and traditions of a building craft ignored for the last half century? One of the main difficulties with such an undertaking is the difficulty of mastering many of the required skills of the traditional architect and builder. Many of these traditions have been protected or rediscovered in the preservation field. There are several institutions around the world, my school among them, which seek to continue and spread the skills and traditions of the last 2700 years.

If you would like to know more about traditional and classical architecture and urbanism I would recommend the book, Architecture: Choice or Fate, by Leon Krier. It is a great place to start understanding classicism in a modernist world.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best, 

Richard

A Proposal for 17th Street Market

 

 Proposed market and square between Main and Broad Streets with Main Street Station on the left

This proposal for the Market at 17th Street is taken from a master's thesis presented in the spring of last year at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture with the title, "Politics and Commerce: The Architectural Rhetoric of the Market Hall." The renderings are watercolor washes hand drafted on 90lb Arches.

To see a more recent proposal for the Market at Seventeenth Street in the context of the Shockoe Ballpark Controversy, please visit this recent post.

Please click on the images to zoom in (to zoom in even more right click and select "view image").

Aerial photograph showing the existing conditions of Shockoe Bottom and the 17th Street Market

THESIS

Following the theories of urban form developed by Carroll William Westfall and Saverio Muratori and his students, including Gianfranco Cannigia and Mario Gallerati, I propose to provide a new market set alongside an architecturally unified square in order to reassert the significance in Richmond of architecture at the urban scale in furthering the civic life and to function as a rhetorical tool to civilize the commercial activities of the market within the higher and more important political framework of the city.

View of the proposed Main Street facade looking up 17th Street

INTRODUCTION

Artists and architects, in the tradition of Socrates, have always questioned accepted truths and sought to translate them into the language of their own time. The process of allowing our judgment to be informed through the comparison of the way things are with the way things should be is the basis of successful design. Many of the accepted truths that dominated the urban and architectural discourse over the last seventy years have lost their force. It is increasingly clear that a different approach to our world and the way we live is unavoidable. But how do we determine what we should do? The pattern for thriving, beautiful cities is to be found in the long history of trial and error, of genius and imitation stretching beyond written record, but preserved in our building traditions. To operate traditionally is not concerned with preserving a specific programme or way of thinking, but with ensuring that our future is the best it can possibly be.

Insofar as nature is composed of stable, unchanging classes of things, including those of human activity, architecture is capable of clarifying the structure of the city. Through the judicious use of the orders, the depiction of famous narratives of the city, and its overall suitability, architecture provides a comprehensible framework conducive to the pursuit of the good life. Architecture thus functions rhetorically by embodying and explaining the order of the city through the imitation of nature.

In the Western city, with economic freedom connected with urban life, the market and the polity are architecturally linked and the market hall is the heart or center of the city. In republican polities it is has often been in the market building that architecture most prominently holds up the ideal of the good life lived in community. In order to make that order more visible, the civility which the market reinforces can be extended through the city’s neighborhoods by means of a series subsidiary markets deriving their form from the central building. By this means, the architecture of commerce can effectively embody the struggle between what is and what ought to be.

Nolli plan of 17th Street Market and surrounding area (proposed buildings are shown in brown)

PROJECT OVERVIEW

ARCHITECTURAL SCALES
The students of Saverio Muratori work within the understanding that cities and buildings are composed of a number of scales and that to be successful each part must engage its appropriate station in the hierarchy of the city or state. The Muratori approach is interested not only in individual buildings, but in the concept of the formal square, and on a larger scale, the forms of cities. This approach is based on the idea of a system of architectural scales which can be described or “read” using “synoptic tables” that compare traditional building similarities and differences from the scale of entire regions down to the scale of window treatment.

Section showing the proposed market in its context on Main Street, a model subsidiary or neighborhood market, and a proposed public fountain

The different architectural scales of the city embody the order of communal life which has the common good as its end. These various scales are hierarchically important according to the degree to which they deal with the public realm. More directly, parts of the city on the architectural, or building scale are subordinate to the urban scale, or “urban ensemble” in the words of Carroll William Westfall. Significant events in the urban scale might include civic places such as law courts, libraries, markets and baths. These places are more important than private buildings, but in turn subordinate to the larger, more public building which is the city. The various scales are represented by their use of similar components. Without similarity between these scales comparison between them would be impossible, and yet without difference their location in a higher order would be equally unintelligible.

Historically, the First Market in Richmond was the central public building in the life of the city, linking private interest and public good. Since its non-commercial functions and most of its market functions have been dispersed to other city institutions, the market’s dissolution can be seen as a major civic loss: of the face-to-face relationship of buyer and seller, the linkage of public and private life, and the elevation of civic discourse made possible by the rhetoric of good architecture.

TYPOLOGY
European (and by extension) American markets and market halls are formally linked to the stoa, forum, basilica, loggia, exchange, and bourse. Like their ancient models, they provide a covered place to transact business within an ordered framework. Thus, the arcades of the 1794 Market Hall at Richmond are related to a long tradition of civic architecture. Markets are almost always associated with extended arcades for both practical and symbolic reasons. Examples of arcades at hand include courthouses and the Williamsburg Capitol. The compass-headed window or door opening was generally reserved for public buildings. The Virginia examples had their models in England. The arcaded piazzas found at the Williamsburg Capitol and incorporated into courthouses in neighboring counties have their roots in English market halls and the courtyards of mercantile structures in London, Oxbridge colleges, and local buildings such as almshouses built in the seventeenth century. For more on the Richmond market please read our earlier post.

View from market towards the old Loving's Produce building showing the proposed public square

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW MARKET AT SEVENTEENTH STREET

The 17th Street Farmers’ Market is operated and maintained in perpetuity as a public market where locally-grown and locally-made goods are sold directly by their producers. Independent local food producers, artisans, and crafts people are encouraged and promoted.
                      Current Market Mission Statement

Cities are places where people come together to pursue a common good which can only be achieved in communal life. Architecture serves this public good—politics is more important than architecture. The public realm is more important than the private realm. In order for the city’s prosperity to contribute to the common good, the market must be civilized. A market is not a city. A market serves private goods, but the city requires both public and private goods.

The current 17th Street Market sheds

The current market, consisting of a series of lightweight open sheds, serves as an anchor for community life by providing a setting for cultural and civic activities that complement the market and its location in downtown Richmond, but it does not succeed in the larger goal of reintroducing an armature of civic architecture into the marketplace. The intention of this thesis project is to reunite the old and new sections of Richmond, Virginia, to architectonically recover the commercial and civic life of the city by embodying its order.

The project will consist of a produce market and common hall for civic and cultural purposes and a resale market linked by a piazza that would serve the multiple purposes of deliveries, public entertainment, and strolling. The current night-time activities around the market will be accommodated within the market hall and piazza. The open areas will provide room for the crowds of revelers and an ordered context for the common life.

In order to effectively recapture the significance and civic value of the First Market to the city, the building will participate in the formal, poetic and material architectural traditions of the city. It will take into account the various scales of the city: the scale of building components, the architectural scale, and the urban scale. It is intended that this be the main public market for the city, but that there should be other subsidiary markets on the neighborhood scale. These smaller markets would be built as diluted versions of the First Market, reinforcing and explaining the order of the city, much as traditional libraries and post offices reveal through their scales the meaningful hierarchy of the city.

BUILDING PROGRAM

The principal First Market structure will consist of two parts: a South Market which will include a mixed public market on the first floor and a civic hall on the floor above and a North Market housing an open produce market on the first floor and city offices above. Permanent stall holders will be housed in an enclosed and secure accessible area in the South Market provided with garage-type doors opening to an exterior colonnade and connections for food storage and preparation. The narrower, northern portion of the market hall will open to the exterior through arcades and will house regular fruit and vegetable sellers like those now operating on a daily basis in the market.

Ground floor plan and elevation of the proposed market (the Main Street facade is toward the right).

The second floor of the North Market section will contain a large meeting room, smaller meeting rooms, a catering kitchen, toilets, and the offices of the Richmond City Board of Architectural Review. The existing mid-block alley will cross through a hyphen linking the two parts of the building at mid-point and containing the main stair, elevator, and public toilets.

Second floor plan and section through the proposed market

The First Market will provide a setting for the benefit of civic life. The renewed district will serve multiple purposes, including:

(1) a semi-weekly farmers’ market. Market stalls will be housed in an adjoining arcade. The adjoining square will provide access, parking for farmers’ vehicles, and additional movable market stalls.

(2) an area for festivals, performances, and public gatherings. Access will be re-opened along Franklin Street under the Main Street Station Shed to the important sites along the Richmond Slave Trail.

(3) a unifying center for a renewed market district, including a hotel fronting on the square, and new commercial/residential units based on the traditional basic building type of the city.

The elongated series of market buildings will respect the historic land divisions and take advantage of existing street paving and edging. They will occupy the same ground as the historic market. The new structures will recall the architectural forms of preceding market halls on the same site and of versions of the building type over time. They will exhibit architectural diminution as the structures move away from the principal street.

Section through the historic market site cut along Shockoe Creek looking East

The square functions on the urban scale as a public room for the entire city. Like the Civic Hall above the market, it is treated with appropriate festive and ceremonial ornament. Historic Crane Street, currently barren, has become the focus of a new residential and cultural area off Broad Street. It will be possible to walk from the streetcar stop in front of the proposed cinema on the south side of Broad along a colonnade on the west side of Crane, to the covered walk around the new civic square.

Crane Street connects the square and market with Broad Street and the proposed theater, based on the Latrobe's unrealized design for a theater in the center of Broad on Council Chamber Hill.

The sculptural program celebrates the several myths of Richmond’s founding. The proposed houses along the west side of the square are modeled on the 1809 row of houses with a giant Doric order built by the Carrington brothers on Broad Street. Other basic row houses are proposed along Seventeenth Street and Crane Street.

The west side of the square refers to Carrington Row for an overtly ordered row house precedent 

The South Market is supported on a brick arcade with applied Doric pilasters that refer to the colonnade of the former market. The upper story features an implied Ionic arcade with fully realized pilasters on the principal, Main Street, facade. The Main Street frontage contains a wide loggia for public use, joining other important brick public buildings along Main Street that feature arcaded elevations. The central tower that connects the south and north sections is modeled on the incomplete tower at the rear of Richmond’s Monumental Church. The open interior spans historic Arch Alley and connects the new commercial development between the market and the train station with the Market Hall.

The central tower connects the two market buildings and spans historic Arch Alley

The second floor of the South Market contains a multipurpose civic hall ornamented with Corinthian columns. A vaulted gallery fronts on Main Street. The second floor of the North Market contains offices for the city’s Board of Architectural Review and a hearing room fronting on Franklin Street above the loggia of the 24-hour coffee shop. Representation of this aspect of city government is particularly important in reinforcing the civilizing function of political life.

The market buildings are designed using load-bearing composite masonry walls, made of lime-based masonry blocks, faced with hand-made brick. It is roofed with slate and the eighteen-foot-tall ground floor is heated with in-floor radiant piping and is naturally ventilated using roll-up doors and large ceiling fans.

 Axonometric rendering showing the load-bearing composite masonry walls

The square is treated with a large, diluted Doric pilaster order. The strip pilasters are flanked by a Tuscan suborder that alternately supports trabeated and arcuated openings. The unitary architectural treatment of the entire square is articulated to permit the uses of the interior rooms to speak on the exterior. It is derived from Roman Baroque examples and motifs, such as those found at the Sapienza and Piazza Santa Maria della Pace in Rome.

 

Sections through the proposed public square

The integration of the shops and residential accommodations across the west side is based on Richmond precedent. The farmers’ market north of Franklin Street is supported on brick columns with stone trim. A hotel located at the north end of the square extends into the second floor of the market. A large loggia in front of the hotel can be used as a restaurant. A triple entrance on the square’s south side rationalizes the irregular historic street layout in the area.

 Detail of the public square between Franklin and Grace Streets

The market complex includes the following amenities:

(1) Secondary loggia on Franklin Street containing Coffee House
(2) Two-story Market Hall between Main Street and Franklin which includes a wide loggia on Main Street, permanent stands for goods, and a colonnade for vendors.
(3) Central tower with an archway at the alley crossing and ceremonial second-
floor access.
(4) A headhouse for the Farmer’s Market north of Franklin Street surmounted by a cupola for a bell and incorporating the police station and public toilets.
(5) Resale market in the former Loving’s Produce Building off the square.
(6) Formal square between Franklin and Grace for events and farmers’
market.
(7) One-story enclosed market between Franklin and Grace for resale market.

The new First Market complex described in this thesis serves to recapture the significance and civic value of commerce to the city. The building will participate in the formal and material traditions of the city. It participates in the various scales of the city: the building component scale, the architectural scale, and the urban scale, reinforcing and explaining the order of the city.

 The Main Street facade

Reorganizing the Modern City: The Case of Detroit

The following text and accompanying images were composed in Genoa during the summer of 2009 as a submission by Gallarati Architetti to the ResilientCity Competition for the renewal of Detroit, Michigan. Urbanismo had the good fortune to work with Gallarati Architetti on the project in the fascinating Ligurian port city. In the process we were able to learn and apply the teachings of Italian urban morphologist, Saverio Muratori and his concept of urban scale architecture to the continental grid. Special thanks to Mario and Giacomo Gallarati for permission to use these documents. Please click on the images for more detail.

The town in the past was characterized by a high degree of organic unity, deeply rooted in its slow process of formation and transformation, by successive stratifications, strictly connected with the orthographic structure of the place, the network of roads over its territory and the systems of landed property distribution.


To each settlement corresponded a pertinent territory, so structured as to thin away in proceeding from the centre to the periphery where it met the border-line of other settlements. As a consequence, the territorial body consisted of different scale sub-organisms, each having its own centre and its own periphery.


The modern city, the fruit of successive expansions of the original settlements occupying a "nodal" position in the territory, grows at first by saturating its own original territory and then by acquiring areas belonging to other elementary organisms, originally endowed with an autonomous structure, to end by conglobating them totally within its undifferentiated peripheries.


Both in the presence of spontaneous growths and in the case of planned growths, the new urban structure tends to extend itself like a uniform net over a great variety of different local realities, each having its own shape and its own functional balance.
 Planning the modern city anew means, first of all, becoming conscious of the growing complexity of the territory that the town embraces in one urban "continuum", through the acknowledgement of the relations and the successive degrees of hierarchy between the elements which form - on different scales - the structure of the city.



Sheet One: The Urban Organism

Reading of the Urban Organism

The first level of reading considers the organization of the different sectors of the city with reference to the system of its road-axes and particularly to the different roles they have in the formation and development of its urban fabric. In Detroit we can recognize a double-scale system. One scale is linked to the larger city, and originates from the City’s earliest plan (represented in blue), and another is based on the organization of the land division. This second system is made up of several single districts each characterized by its own structure. We have considered only that part of Detroit which maintains its original orientation towards the river in contrast with the surrounding areas which correspond to the American continental grid. Within this larger city organism we have individuated up to fifteen smaller organisms each with its own center and borders, thus forming its own district. One of these districts maintains the role of city center corresponding to the original planned center of Detroit. The others are located along main axes often at their crossings (represented in red). 
 


Proposal of a Multi-Nucleus City


Our proposal tries to outline a criterion by which to transform the city into several smaller self-sufficient nuclei. Each of these nuclei should be composed of a unified tissue organized by a hierarchy of axes. As a basis for each nucleus we determined which axes served as the primary connection between neighborhoods and the tissues that seem to be organized by the same axes. Between these central nuclei we converted peripheral tissue into green areas for sustainable use. In short, the city will be composed of several smaller autonomous districts, each with a central built tissue (with a concentrated population of approximately 25,000), and surrounded by areas destined for mixed agricultural use and sustainable forestry.



Sheet Two: The District Organism

A Proposal for The Durfee District

Within the example district of Durfee the urban nucleus will maintain the original order of the axial system that determined the layout of the urban tissue. The surrounding tissue, transformed into green land, will be divided into public parks, agricultural land and facilities for municipal services.

As in other districts, starting from a main road-axis, or matrix route, the setting evolves along planned building routes, orthogonal to the matrix route along which the building fabric evolves.

In our proposal the presence of a second main street parallel to the matrix route suggested the introduction of similar residential tissues as areas of higher density into other sectors. In relating to the existing industrial structures to the north and the sports facility to the south, our proposal accentuates the possible public function of the area along the southern matrix route and destines the remaining western areas to agricultural use, while the eastern areas will be taken up by forest and wetlands. 



Sheet Three: The Building Tissue

Reading the Building Fabric

Analogous to the general setting of the network of streets we have already seen, the study of the organization of the building fabric starts from the observation of the preexistent realities, from which we have tried to draw some general rules. 


a) Commercial lots are wider than residential lots and form autonomous strips along the main routes.
b) Most of the commercial activities concentrate along the main or peripheral axes.
c) Most residential tissues are organized by planned building routes, between which run alleys. Average lots facing these routes range from 120-130 feet by 30-35 feet.
d) Some of these planned building routes gain importance from their continuation outside the district. e) In some cases there are high-density residential lots which shift their orientation towards significant vertical axes.
f) Within the tissue there are areas of varying degrees of vacancy.

Our Proposal

Following the above guidelines we have completed the commercial tissues along main and peripheral axes, and differentiated two types of residential tissue. Along significant planned building routes and some existing or new vertical routes we have organized contiguous, high-density building tissue, while the remaining tissue will maintain its current character. High-density buildings will reach four floors. At the intersection of these main routes new squares will be created, also taking into account some currently vacant areas. Similarly, at a larger scale, a new great public square could be created on the site of present parking lots at the intersection of the matrix routes. Taller buildings could be realized around this main square and destined for administrative or institutional use.

An American Search for Urban Unity: Alexandria Louisiana- Part Two

A previous post detailed the planning and antebellum growth of the city of Alexandria, Louisiana. By the 1850s the prosperous city took part in a new national emphasis on the heritage of democracy among the Greeks. The new buildings were part of the confident building of civic buildings utilizing details and forms associated with the Greek Revival movement. The story continues with the conclusion of the Civil War:

The war ended in almost complete catastrophe for the town. Most of the antebellum public buildings, along with the rest of the town, were burned during the retreat of Union troops in 1864. The two decades following the war were lean, and a new, plain, courthouse was not provided until 1873. In the words of a recent historian of the city: Cloaked in an atmosphere of lethargy and defeatism, the town was not drained, and it had no waterworks or sewer system. Livestock roamed at large on the unpaved and largely unlit streets, which were obstructed by numerous ditches and not clearly designated by signs. There were no banks, and concerns vital to regional agriculture—such as cotton compresses, oil mills, and machine shops—were nonexistent. However, Alexandria’s location in the middle of Louisiana and the rich timber resources surrounding it had enabled it to attract two railroads [Spletstoser, Fredrick Marcel. Talk of the Town: The Rise of Alexandria, Louisiana and the “Daily Town Talk”. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005]. The population had risen to 1,800 by 1880.

The post-war depression eventually came to end as new mercantile and industrial capital entered the region. The increasing success of the region’s agriculture and a timber boom in the early twentieth century led to an almost complete remaking of the town. New commercial buildings appeared along the city streets and spread back three blocks from the river to form a dense downtown commercial district. While many of the buildings were modest, traditional commercial structures with a narrow plan and an unadorned front, owners of some new structures added classical details on the lower and upper stories, often in pressed or cast metal, to add dignity to the structure and a positive contribution to the streetscape.

Rapides Opera House

Among these new buildings was a splendid new theater, unfortunately demolished in the late twentieth century. According to the National Register nomination, The Rapides Opera House is a brick 3 story building set in the old central business district of Alexandria. It has floor seating (seats replaced) and one balcony (original seats), which makes for a total seating capacity of approximately 800. Built of brick and steel, the building has a type of exterior articulation which was common to many of Alexandria’s grander commercial buildings at the turn-of-the-century. Features include Romanesque sets of round arch windows with continuous label molds, Doric pilasters, and brick rustication above and below the second story [National Register form].

The buildings gradually formed a continuous wall along both sides of the central streets. Third Street, which had replaced the river as the principal route through the locality, increasingly became the chief commercial avenue. The downtown grew to include, as did most American cities, a tightly organized but flexible set of lots. A lack of planned alleys in the original design, which permitted an initial flexibility in building placement, led to a structure of dense blocks with courtyards and passageways provided as needed. The buildings tended to face the numbered east-west streets.

Churches, most of which made use of Gothic Revival decorative forms, were located off the original plat. The first church was a Catholic chapel. In 1832, by which time the parish was known as St. Francis Xavier, the church was rebuilt on a new site east of the main part of the city, at which time it was the only religious structure in the town. The church relocated to its current site west of the central city in 1897. In 1910 it was elevated to cathedral status. Emmanuel Baptist Church moved to the city from nearby Pineville in 1897. The first St. James Episcopal Church was built in the antebellum era and burned in 1864. The parish relocated to its present site east of the downtown area in 1874. The present building was built in 1926.

Joseph Bentley and E.W. Zimmermann arrived in the area about 1892, originally hailing from Pennsylvania. Bentley, in particular, proved to be a major power in the redevelopment and growth of Alexandria. The men founded the Zimmerman Lumber Company and the Enterprise Lumber Company, businesses that eventually controlled tens of thousands of acres of virgin pine forest in the region. In 1903, a huge sawmill was built near town by Enterprise Lumber. Bentley provided strong economic and aesthetic leadership as the town grew. He materially assisted in setting architectural standards and improving the urban form. Architects were summoned from New Orleans and other regional cities to assist in implementing an expansive vision for the town’s future.

In the first decades of the century, a series of important new structures were added to the city, as part of a consistent architectural and urban project to complete and perfect it as both a destination and a place to live. The era was one in which architectural and general education prepared citizens to expect a substantial expenditure on public and institutional buildings such as post offices, government buildings, churches, lodges, and schools and the important commercial buildings, such as hotels and theaters, which served a significant role in the life of a community. The effect of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on American urban planning was considerable. The movement known as the American Renaissance invigorated American planning and resulted in a full-blown and self-confident kind of classical architectural expression.

In the new American Renaissance, as in previous periods of classical expression, the elements of architectural expression were used to augment and express the community’s political order. Much of the large-scale form and detailing was based in architectural pattern books, but by the early twentieth century classically trained professional architects were available throughout the nation. As was the case throughout American architectural practice, architectural elements were often applied without close regard for their historical basis. Designers regarded the value of the ability of architectural forms to express the community’s structure as more important that any historical reference. The three basic classical orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, were present in their full variety, in their Roman and Greek forms. The hierarchy of the orders as understood in the western tradition was used to emphasize the city’s internal order. In contrast, religious buildings in the city utilized details and forms ultimately derived from European Gothic sources. This change from the traditional American provision of related classical forms for all public buildings suggests that the religious component of civic life was increasingly distinguished from its political and commercial elements.

Rapides Parish Courthouse, 1904. Corinthian

A new H-shaped courthouse was built in 1904 on the historic courthouse square. The Classical Revival-style structure utilized, as was appropriate for the most important government structure in the city, pilasters of the most elaborate of the three basic orders of architecture, the Corinthian.

Hotel Bentley, 1907. George R. Mann, architect.

Alexandria City Hall. Ionic with dome.

An important group of buildings of similar style, color, and materials were constructed in 1907, giving a consistent tone and feel to the growing city and radically improving its civic image. The most important new buildings were the Hotel Bentley and the new City Hall. The structures were apparently both built by the F. B. Hull Construction Company of Jackson, Mississippi. The company moved to Alexandria in 1907 for the time needed to construct several major buildings. The Hotel Bentley and the new City Hall were located in dramatic relation to one another with an eye to improved civic amenities. The City Hall was built in the center of a square towards the western end of the downtown section. With its four facades and central dome it provided a powerful center to a green urban park.

Three sides of the square were filled with conventional commercial buildings, but the entire west side was filled with the enormous bulk of the Hotel Bentley. In the words of the National Register nomination: “The Bentley Hotel stands as probably the only major commercial example of the turn-of-the-century Renaissance Revival architecture and of Beaux Arts axial spatial planning in central Louisiana. It shows a remarkable degree of high style sophistication for the area and for a time when commercial architecture was largely a matter of applying conventional detail to a conventional shell.” The architect was George R. Mann of Little Rock, Arkansas. The cost of construction was $750,000, including the furnishings.

Both buildings were built of matching cream-colored brick with stone trim and both featured corresponding Ionic columns. The City Hall had four matching porticoes and the hotel was provided with a dramatic, long, deep-shadowed colonnade between two projecting wings. The Ionic order, the second most elaborate of the classical orders, was probably selected as appropriate for such important secondary structures in the city’s expanding urban fabric. A Confederate monument occupied one corner of the square.

Rapides Bank Building, 1898, façade added, 1914. Tuscan/Doric.

First National Bank. 1919, Emile Weil, Architect.

In 1911 Joseph Bentley became president of the First National Bank and in 1919 the bank built the town’s first skyscraper, a ten-story bank building near the southeast corner of the square. The bank tower was also classically detailed with Ionic pilasters and built of buff brick with stone trim. In addition, the most classically correct building in the downtown area resulted from a refacing of the 1898 Rapides Bank in 1914 with an elegant Doric façade melded to the paired arches of the original building. As the National Register nomination explains: “Of Alexandria's somewhat depleted stock of turn-of-the-century commercial buildings, most depend upon an unstudied accumulation of brick pilasters, brick arches, and corbel tables for their articulation. The Rapides Bank has considerably more pretension than this. It has a fully developed classical facade with four colossal . . . columns, an entablature and balustrade which are more or less correctly proportioned. Moreover, with the one exception, which is the enormous Bentley Hotel, the Rapides Bank is the most classically refined and pretentious commercial building in Alexandria.

The Alexandria Public Library, 1907. Crosby and Henkel, architects. Greek Doric

Another significant building dating from 1907 is the Alexandria Public Library. Funded with matching money from Andrew Carnegie, the new library is classical in style. It utilizes massive Doric pilasters (antae) to support a complex entablature and features Greek-inspired details. Like the other public buildings from this period, it is built of buff-colored brick. Interestingly, the library was placed away from the downtown on the square originally intended for literary and cultural purposes, but held by the city and used for a courthouse and jail at the time. Doric, used for the banks and the library, was the plainest and most economical to build of the three classical orders and indicated the buildings’ more modest stature within the city’s hierarchy of buildings.

Calvary Baptist Church, Corinthian

Houses of worship, which often made use of Gothic Revival decorative forms, began to participate in the new classical consensus are located off the original plat. Calvary Baptist Church was founded in 1921 and was housed behind a wide Corinthian temple front built of beige brick. A second temple built in 1908 for the city’s Jewish population by Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim, featured beige brick, a central plan crowned with a tiled dome, and a highly ornamented projecting temple front. The architect combined Ionic columns with a Doric entablature featuring alternating triglyphs and disk-shaped ornaments called paterae. While the new civic architecture provided an irresistible pattern for new public buildings, the Baptist and Jewish congregations may have chosen classical rather than Gothic forms, in part, to de-emphasize the inherent challenges of these newer arrivals to the conventions of local culture.

Jewish Temple, 1908. Ionic

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the area along and adjoining Third Street had become a cohesive downtown with a varied and sophisticated building stock. Citizens centered their lives around the neat and colorful downtown. Department stores and specialty shops vied for business. The simple grid of the city, punctuated by the several green public squares, successfully borrowed the cosmopolitan air of the great Eastern and even European cities. Classically detailed cast-iron electric streetlights in some location gave a cohesion and elegance to the city in keeping with the “Great White Way,” a name for the brightly illuminated main streets installed in towns across the nation in the years after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Third Street looking North, 1920

Masonic Temple, 1927. Herman J. Duncan, architect.

Bolton High School, 1926. Favrot and Livaudais, Architects, New Orleans

The Masonic Building of 1927 and the classical façade of Bolton High School (1926) added to the complexity and dignity of local urban expression. The Masonic building is a delicate and almost Regency essay in Neo-classicism. According to the National Register nomination, “the high school “is Rapides Parish's largest and most imposing example of the neo-classical tendency of the early-twentieth century known as the ‘American Renaissance.' Exemplary features include the building's quiet lines, severe classicism, and five-part pavilion articulation. . . Bolton's local preeminence as an example of the "American Renaissance" is important for Rapides Parish. This style was regarded in its day as representing the maturity of American architecture. It was generally thought that American architecture was at last taking its place with the architecture of the older countries of the Western World. So, taken in this light, Bolton can be seen as the most urbane and sophisticated early-twentieth century building in the parish.”

U.S. Post Office

In the 1930s, a new US Post Office and Federal Courthouse was built using the popular Art Deco version of “Stripped Classicism,” emphasizing the respect afforded the increased role of the Federal government in regional affairs.

As the twentieth century progressed, Alexandria lost its position as a great regional trading center. The Southern economy lagged and the city saw few new buildings, certainly none of the caliber of the structures built during the confident years at the beginning of the century. As the automobile increasingly dominated thinking about transportation and development, the downtown area suffered from neglect and abandonment. From a high water mark at the middle of the century, when the city reached its apogee from an urban design perspective, it began to fall off rapidly. Classicism lost favor as measured against the new trends towards “modernistic” and “International style” architecture. Few buildings using the new architectural vocabulary reached the level of quality found among the earlier classical buildings, which now seemed hopelessly old-fashioned.

The present parish courthouse was built on a new location in 1940. The elegant 1904 courthouse was demolished in 1957 after years of neglect and the courthouse square purchased and built upon. In the 1960s, the elegantly detailed centrally planned city hall was demolished. The city government infilled the under-utilized but potentially urbane square on which it was sited with a large new city hall in the “Brutalist” style, executed in formed concrete.

City Hall with urban park to the east and Hotel Bentley beyond

The losses in the urban fabric during the second half of the twentieth century was immense. The city’s open squares were lost and there was no longer a vantage point from which to view the façade of the Bentley Hotel. A need for parking resulted in the demolition of many buildings and a resultant “snaggle-toothed” and incomplete streetscape. Front Street lost its character and all its historic buildings with the gradual enlargement of the levee along the water’s edge. The city lost a visual connection with the water. In 1969, no longer able to compete with newer alternatives on its original terms, the Bentley Hotel closed.

As soon as urban decay and demolition became apparent, in Alexandria and across the nation, city leaders began to search for solutions that would re-invigorate historic downtowns. What happened in Alexandria mirrors what went on in countless locations. The city commissioned a series of studies, master plans, and government-sponsored interventions, each based in current planning concepts that changed as the years passed. The Hotel Bentley underwent a series of renovations and opened and closed without any long-term success.

A new convention center, Holiday Inn motor hotel, and parking garage, all of indifferent design were built to reposition the downtown as a tourist and visitor destination. Like the new city hall, the convention center, connected by a pedestrian skyway to the Hotel Bentley, was placed without regard to the city’s grid or the historic urban layout. Traffic was redirected and some roads closed or built over. In more recent years, a new emphasis on parks and river access and a series of local festivals have been used to attempt a return of traffic and prosperity to the downtown area.

In spite of all this the city has largely failed to respond to the various surgical and prosthetic operations improvised by local and regional authorities. One reason is the obliteration of the architectural and urban amenities that made Alexandria a unique and appealing place.