PUBLIC ART AND COMMUNITY MEMORY: RICHMOND'S MAGGIE LENA WALKER

In the following essay, we will attempt to trace the history and character of monument-making in Richmond and how it might affect the proposed memorial to Maggie L. Walker, one of the city's great pathfinders. 

Urbanismo attended a public meeting on April 5 at the historic Third Street Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was presented by the City of Richmond’s Public Art Commission.  Two separate meetings were scheduled, each intended “to provide input on commemorative public art in Jackson Ward honoring the life and accomplishments of Maggie L. Walker.”  About thirty people attended the second meeting, held on a Saturday morning. 

Maggie Walker’s memorial will enrich the city’s collection of monuments, but only if it is designed to support and transform the larger civic realm. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, traditional monuments embody “a single powerful idea in a single emphatic form, in colossal scale and in permanent materials.” Even more important, monuments are effective to the degree that they are “made to serve civic life.” As understood in Richmond and in the cities of the past from which it took its pattern, monuments assist in ordering the city, making legible its structure and origins, both literally and figuratively. Traditionally, a city without appropriate monuments could make no claim to be a place of civility or a center of virtuous political life. While the term “monument” is frequently applied to significant works of public architecture, here we are referring to amenities at the urban scale which have as their principal role the orientation of the citizen in both time and space.

Installation of the equestrian statue of Washington in 1858.

The Maggie L. Walker memorial can be placed within the category of monument typically identified as “public art.” Provision of public art, mandated in certain situations by city authorities, can prove to be a source of controversy in a republic with a weak sense of common purpose. The history of most of the public sculpture in Richmond since the mid-nineteenth century shows that the conflicting expectations of those with an interest in the work of art often leads to political difficulties in its realization. It also shows that citizen groups working together can, in spite of inevitable conflict, produce work that positively reinforces local civic life and organizational patterns. Richmond’s Public Art Commission has recognized the inevitably local character of public art with this statement: “Great cities of the world inspire, uplift, instruct and heal with their particular brand of great art [our italics].” This local character results, not only from regional materials and shared traditions of artistic expression, but from the way that the community has, over time, incorporated memory into its urban fabric. The Richmond tradition of outdoor public statuary began with a monument to Virginia’s role in the nation’s founding, first proposed in 1817. After years of inaction, a committee of citizens proposed a competition for the monument, which was held in 1849. The popular and successful monument was not only a tribute to George Washington as military and political leader, but an elaborate allegory linking Virginia with the national polity. 

Among the most recent monuments to participate in the tradition is the effective and powerful Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Capitol Square. The monument, completed by artist Stanley Bleifeld in 2008, depicts eighteen figures, some historical and some representative, placed on four sides of a stone plinth and telling the story of the long struggle for equality. The sculptural ensemble avoids the sentimentality that characterizes some of the sculptor's work in other cities and takes a place among the very best monuments of recent decades. 

Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, Capitol Square, Richmond, 2008

Partly as a result of its mid-nineteenth-century role as “national capitol,” Richmond acquired an extensive and more urbane collection of public art, surpassing other state capitals of comparable size. The armature of memorial statuary extending along Monument Avenue from the old city into the projected suburbs to the west was the serendipitous result, not of public planning, but of the intentions of the Allen family, who wished to enhance the value of their property for development. These sculptures, most of which were privately organized and subscribed, vary widely in the degree to which they match memory with fact. Since that time, a wide variety of public art has been added across the city, but the city remains characterized by its collection of heroic outdoor statuary. Some are undeniably successful, but one or two of them cross the line into what James Branch Cabell, in dismissing the public art at Jamestown, described as “a collection of serio-comic sculpture” [Cabell, Let Me Lie, 51].

Maggie Lena Walker occupies an outstanding place in the list of great Virginians. As a child of former slaves, she showed a path forward in business and education among Richmond’s black population. She played an important national role based in her energy, political wisdom, and organizational powers. She promoted high standards for self reliance and education within the Richmond community. As the gifted leader of the influential Independent Order of St. Luke, she broke new ground as a black woman when she founded and managed the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Mrs. Walker is regarded today as one of the most important leaders in post-War Virginia and the nation. A high school is named for her and her house is maintained by the National Park Service as a national historic landmark dedicated to her achievements. At one time a small motion picture theater (incorporated into today's Virginia Rep on Broad Street) was renamed after her.

Maggie L. Walker, plaster bust,
commissioned by the 
Independent Order of St. Luke in 1934 [NPS]

In spite of her many honors, Richmonders have noted for decades that there is no monument to Maggie L. Walker on the city’s streets, as there are dedicated to so many who opposed the improvements she championed (there is a monument to her in front of Maggie L. Walker High School, based on the plaster bust of 1934). In Richmond, a city of monuments, the most important memorials to heroic individuals typically take the form of statues. Supporters of recent efforts to realize a Walker memorial have usually referred to the monument as a statue, with the primary intention of the perpetuation of the memory of her personal achievement as a recognizable individual beyond the current era. Although one private organization's effort to put up a statue to Maggie Walker at the intersection of Broad and Adams streets was supported by City Council in 2010, the cause is now entirely in the hands of the official Public Art Commission using public funds mandated for art.

The meeting was organized and professionally led using a popular consensus building format designed to guide groups into “ownership” and to detach individuals from any conventional viewpoints, including those that favor lifelike, representational statuary, consistently presented to the participants as the “traditional” option among many equally significant kinds of public art. Members of the Richmond Public Art Commission made presentations, one on the process for obtaining a monument and one on the various ways in which it is possible to memorialize an individual. 

Anne Fletcher (Corporate Art Administrator at Capital One) explained that a figural or narrative monument was one choice among many that would be appropriate as a memorial to Maggie Walker, including gateways, gardens, plazas designed as integral sculpture installations, and non-representational “place-making” art that can even be whimsical. We were asked to keep our minds open on the form and location of the monument, relying instead on the artists who will be asked to submit proposals. Lisa Freiman, Director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Institute for Contemporary Art, had told the group at the previous meeting that "the best works of art are ones where we don't control the artist, rather we allow them to interpret the history into art." It became clear during the question and answer period that one of the tasks that the Commission had assigned itself was the creation of a much larger definition of “monument” than that held by some members of the community, including a few more vocal members of this audience. These individuals voiced their concern and expectations in the question and answer period about the way that decisions would be made about the location and appearance of the monument. 

Public meeting held at Sixth Mount Zion
Baptist Church on April 1, 2014 [Public Arts Commission]

The Public Art Commission is not alone in the manipulative use of the facilitated small-group meeting, nor is its minimizing of traditional statuary entirely unreasonable. Conflict can be divisive over location and content, as was witnessed in the execution of the Arthur Ashe Monument, which was privately promoted and funded. Figural sculpture can be, and often is, poorly executed. According to Michael J. Lewis, “monuments and memorials today are discursive, sentimental, addicted to narrative literalism, and asking to be judged on good intentions rather than visual coherence."  We sometimes seem, as a nation, to have lost the ability to imbue civic art with clear, serious, and appropriate meaning. Giving unlimited scope to the artist can work against the goals of the community in sponsoring a memorial. In the words of art historian James E. Young, "even as monuments continue to be commissioned and designed by governments and public agencies eager to assign memory and meaning to complicated events, artists increasingly plant in them the seeds of self-doubt and impermanence."  

The city has, in any case, embraced public art as an device for economic and cultural improvement and seeks every opportunity to minimize conflict by avoiding debate. From this point of view, the overlay of a Modernist understanding of public art over the diverse expectations of the community reduces the likelihood of badly conceived art by raising the level of the conversation from the merely local to the international.  

Skyrider, a suspended sculpture at Main Street Station 
sponsored under the city's public art funding program

In the case of this project, we were informed that professional artists from around the world will be asked make proposals which will be evaluated by the Public Art Commission and the monument's Site Selection Committee. In effect, the members of the commission, with the protection afforded by their professional facilitator, successfully uncoupled the critical faculties of their audience and imposed an approach to art and remembrance very different from the traditional concepts shared, not only within the larger community, but with heroic individuals like Maggie Walker herself. In the words of Douglas Dunlap, a member of the Commission, "It's a commemorative piece of art and the reason why we're not using the term "statue" is because at the end of the day, once we go through our site selection process and the community engagement process, what we've said is we want each person coming into the process to come in with an open mind" [RVA March 24, 2014].  

The meeting continued with a tabulation, using an electronic button pad, of a series of tightly controlled questions designed to channel participants’ thoughts in directions away from the conventional. These questions concerning opinions were designed to elicit agreement with the Public Art Commission’s primary goals of producing “world-class” art works that will stimulate the city’s “community and economic development.” The questions helped transform the participants into supporters by the unswerving direction of their concerns. “On a scale of one to five should the memorial be more narrative or more poetic?” “Should the monument be more forceful or more subtle?” “Which aspects of Maggie Walker’s achievements should be emphasized?”  This was followed by a series of discussions held among groups divided and placed at small tables.

Maggie L. Walker, marble bust,
commissioned by local councils 
of the International Order of St. 
Luke in New York for the order's 
annual convention in 1925. This 
portrait sculpture touched Mrs. 
Walker deeply. She wrote in her
diary that "to live to be so 
honored is a joy inexpressible" 
[NPS]. 

This radically open-ended scenario was designed not to collect ideas, but to dispel alternate visions, generate consensus, and garner support. Members of the public, several of whom brought from their life experiences very clear ideas of the nature of a monument (specifically a statue representing the transcendent figure of Maggie Walker), were required to suspend their judgement of what constituted an appropriate monument. They were asked to concentrate, instead, on the meaning that they would like to see presented by the monument, whatever its form. When several people asked questions betraying conventional expectations, they were made to understand that their assumptions were simplistic, if only because they had been expressed outside of the Commission’s pre-established processes.    

One of the marks of the traditional city is a shared understanding among residents of the form and uses of urban features like architecture and public art, what Italian architectural theorist Gianfranco Caniggia has referred to in another context as “our common heritage of specific focussed knowledge.” Instead of this formerly shared understanding, he said, “we possess substantial uncertainty, masked in apparent freedom to do many different things or anything.” In the face of this radical uncertainty, planners and leaders turn to outside experts, who produce “highly personalized, scarcely interrelated objects.” While we, as a society, have largely rejected traditional academic artistic formulations, we have not lost the notion of the artist as a prophetic source set outside the shared values of a community. Caniggia understood the modern era to be a period of “crisis” in which traditional urban criteria are no longer available to decision makers, resulting in arbitrary cultural products that, by their poor fit, can cause sustained damage to the urban environment. 

The “crisis” in the local understanding of the role of public art means that those for whom it is intended are excluded from its production. The works that are realized appear as arbitrary consumer products disconnected from the ongoing dialog that characterizes civic life. Furthermore, the loss of a common language involving civic and artistic topics has been accelerated as bureaucracies adopt an opaque process (now quite widely used) to achieve the effect of a consensus that can be tabulated and manipulated to reduce discord and achieve visible results. 

Urban Scale Richmond takes as its focus the rediscovery of the rules, both explicit and implicit, that have guided the building of the city and give to its art and architecture a unique character. One way to achieve this result (and to reduce the diminution of local conventions and the disempowerment of citizens) is for planners to actively reconstruct the city’s operative patterns. The way in which monuments proceed from a nexus of community expectations is an important part of those patterns. By engaging critically with local issues,  it will be possible to confirm and stimulate healthy growth and change in the city. 

The way in which monuments are procured has an effect on the quality of their “fit,” although there is no consensus on the best way to control the process. Design competitions have been used since the eighteenth century to solve the interpretive disconnect between a monument’s promoters and the artist who must make it. The design control is exercised by means of a process of selection undertaken by representatives of the community from a roster of possible solutions. This remains the best means for achieving a critically successful monument, although history is littered with competition winners who later lost their position to political or financial pressure. The most complicated part of making a monument is in connecting it in some tangible way, not only with local tradition, but with the expectations of the various constituencies for which it is intended. This is only achieved through careful consideration of location, materials, scale, form, and viewer expectations. Urbanismo hopes for the best!

“In an age that denies universal values, there can also be no universal symbols, the kind that monuments once represented. The monument is a declaration of love and admiration attached to the higher purposes men hold in common...An age that has deflated its values and lost sight of its purposes will not procure convincing monuments.”              

                                       Lewis Mumford, 1949

Notes:
See Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei, Interpreting Basic Buildings and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism to trace the sources of some of these ideas.   The James E. Young quote is from “Memory/Monument” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff eds, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed. U Chicago P, 2010, 236. Michael J. Lewis addresses issues concerning monuments in “The Decline of American Monuments and Memorials,” Imprimis (41:4) April 2012]

STUDIOAMMONS: A PROPOSAL FOR THE REHABILITATION OF THE FIRST MARKET SQUARE

StudioAmmons submitted a proposal over a year ago for the redesign of the historic Seventeenth Street or First Market Square in Shockoe Bottom. The members of Urbanismo were closely involved in the preparation of the detailed plan for the redefinition of a great urban place.  We publish the proposal now in the hope that it will help to clarify widely-held concerns about the City’s recently published Ballpark plan. The baseball stadium was not part of the “First Market Square” proposal originally solicited by the city. We are convinced that the ballpark plan will negatively affect the quality of the Market Square and its neighborhood.

StudioAmmons’ proposal is intended to revitalize the First Market Square by ensuring that it will serve the city in multiple ways:

• as an active framework for urban life
• as an engaging and flexible public place
• as an attraction in its own right to increase tourist visitation to the neighborhood
• as a catalyst for the relocation of small business to the area, including artists, creative businesses, and restaurants 
• as an embodiment of the local ethos to ensure longterm vitality

The Public Square and the City

Planners have recognized the economic and cultural potential associated with healthy civic places. The reclamation of outdoor public places is increasingly emphasized by advocates of thriving and healthy American cities. Most city squares ceased to function in the latter part of the twentieth century as urban centers declined, traditional community activities slowed, and commercial functions moved to the suburbs. More importantly, the loss of public space for assembly, socializing, and reflection has resulted in an impoverishment of civic life. The failure of many large-scale rehabilitation projects to fully realize their part in the public realm results from an emphasis on economic development without consideration of the direct benefit public places can provide to the community as incubators of the civic good.

As stated in the Shockoe Economic Revitalization Strategy of 2011, a major goal of the new First Market Square should be “reinforcing Main Street Station’s position as an epicenter driving the culture, creativity and identity” of the Shockoe neighborhood. The market, by incorporating flexible programming, top-notch design values, and ‘round-the-clock scheduling, should be a catalyst for the success of the larger neighborhood. A fully functioning square could underline the kinds of urbane values conducive to the creative entrepreneurship that has already transformed the Shockoe area into a dynamic place to live and work.

Essential to the long-term success of any commercially-oriented public precinct, such as a market square, is its adaptability over time and under unpredictable economic conditions. Large static developments undertaken by direct public or private investment are particularly liable to loss of market share over time as the infrastructure deteriorates and the inflexibility of programming prevents them from adapting to changing circumstances. A highly structured project like the network of proposals associated with the Shockoe Bottom Baseball Stadium will actually undermine public values over its limited lifetime. The fine grain of the traditional city, in contrast, permits countless quick adaptations at each cumulative sign of cultural and economic change. Richmond’s First Market has survived two centuries of flooding and cyclical change by relying on this kind of nimble adaptation.

Sanborn Map of First Market Square, 1887. Main Street is at the left and Grace Street
to the right. The main Market Hall faced Main Street. The archway between 
segments of the Public Market is shown spanning Arch Alley midway 
between Main and Franklin streets. Note the narrowing of Market Square 
that occurs north of Franklin.  

Place, Form, and Meaning

As we have explored in detail in this post, the proposed First Market Square represents the sixth intervention at the site of Richmond’s historic city market. From its earliest days on the bank of Shockoe Creek, the City Market has been an accretionary, transformative place, changing its character with the changing shape of the city. The Market Square was originally placed on the edge of the settlement. One contemporary remembered the “green pasture” of the town's Common, which extended from the Market House down to Shockoe Creek. Eventually the area around the market was lined with shops and it took on a more enclosed form. Like its predecessors in Europe, Richmond's First Market Square embeds centuries of change and growth, although over time it assumed the form of a conventional enclosed square. In fact, American public places like First Market Square have traditionally embodied the kinds of urbane social and economic values that we usually associate with European plazas. 

The market, which began in the half-block between Main Street and Arch (Walnut) Alley, was extended over time as far as Grace Street, two blocks to the north. In this it showed similarities to markets which extend along the center of widened streets such as those in Charleston and Philadelphia. The First Market buildings, as they were extended along this armature, embodied their functions in a hierarchical manner, diminishing in scale and elaboration as the shopper moved away from Main Street, from a butchers' hall to an open produce shed, and so on to ranks of pushcarts filled with farm products. The Market Square was eventually surrounded by brick buildings housing grocers and butchers' shops. As time passed, the dynamic nature of the market, changing in response to shifting economic forces, resulted in a gradual replacement of most of the early shops with a layered mixture of commercial buildings of every period and style. 

Guiding Ideas

The Urban Scale


Urban Scale Architecture is design at the level of the city at large. Design at this scale gives form and direction to the urban fabric. It supports the importance of living in community. 

Saverio Muratori and his school, including Mario Gallerati, have explored the meaning of “architettura a scala urbana.” According to this approach to urban morphology, fully developed cities operate on four scales, the territorial, the urban, the aggregate, and the building. Architecture at the urban scale is manifested in at least three ways: (1) by the provision of specialized buildings to serve the civic life, (2) by the placement of these buildings in relation to each other on a scale larger than that of the urban fabric, and (3) by a deliberate overlay of serial, rhythmic design to unify the urban tissue.  

According to urban historian Carroll William Westfall, design at the urban scale serves the city by underlining a hierarchy in which the civic life takes precedence over the private. It is the elements of design at the urban scale that make cities not only meaningful but legible, even after centuries of alterations and more recent decades of forgetfulness and crisis.  The most important public places receive the highest levels of ornament and the most thorough treatment. Public architecture can make sense of the city for its users by clarifying the political, social, commercial, and civic order by which the inhabitants strive together to live the best life.

A Market Square

Richmond’s redesigned First Market Square, without its current central market structure, will be transformed into an urban form at once new and familiar. The building walls that define the square will become more obviously the boundaries of a great urban room, and the central area will be less clearly defined. The square will be more clearly rectangular and the missing building fabric at the north end will be more obvious. The greater width of Seventeenth Street along the eastern side will make it harder to unify the space.

The City has made it clear that the new First Market Square will function in a dual role: civic space and market space. This double role is informed by a further requirement that the square serve as an attractor for tourism and the arts. The civic function will be accommodated by a provision of an open area for larger gatherings and festivals, as well as a potential for subdivision at times for use by outdoor cafes, small groups, and individuals.

Looking south along the market stalls flanked by planted margins and shaded by trees.

A Market

The square will function as a market at specified times each week. A miniature street grid of temporary canopies will be set up either in the main plaza or in a subsection reserved for more diverse activities. It is also probably desirable to provide for the regular stall holders who are at the market on most days. To provide for a year-round market and close off the north end of the square, StudioAmmons suggests placing a new Market Hall on the original part of the square that extends north of Franklin Street to Grace Street, now a city-owned parking lot, but once part of the market square.

One of the key characteristics of the historic First Market was the way its form changed and diminished as it proceeded to the north. The site retains clues indicating the value to designers of reasserting the progressive nature of movement through the square. The crossing point of Arch (or Walnut) Alley, the cobblestone alley that bisects the Market Square at mid-point, served as a telling division for the first architectural transformation from a two-story to a one-story market building. The extraordinary bell tower arch that spanned the alley and gave it its name provides a built-in opportunity for place-making that is built into the site.

Open to Traffic

It is essential to the square that it retain its historic articulation into both traffic and marketplace zones. Historic curbs and spallstone paving enhance its definition as an historic part of the city. Pedestrianization does not reinforce commercial success. Vehicles (both cars and delivery trucks) and people are part of the urban environment and can be integrated into the square in ways that promote a sense of safety and a necessary level of activity. It will be important to come up with strategies to integrate traffic, parking, and foot traffic with the special activities characteristic of this public square. This can be done by prohibiting vehicular traffic at certain times of the day and week while retaining the minimal differentiation of street, sidewalk, and plaza paving.

Street Lighting

Streetlighting will be completely redesigned based on what has proved effective in other successful plazas. Richmond historic precedent should be followed as closely as possible to avoid the generic quality typical of many urban projects. This would indicate small, pedestrian-scaled streetlights augmented by gaslight-style lanterns attached to buildings at corners and along the sidewalks to add warmth and character. Moonlighting, used in New York’s Bryant Park, could be employed to create an attractive wash of light over the central portion of the square. 

Furniture

Permanent furniture should be avoided as limiting flexibility, and instead temporary furniture, including market stalls, seats, tables, planters, and cafe dividers, should be used wherever possible. Low steps, placed so as to avoid serving as barriers to mobility, provide effective seating for visitors.

A Fountain and a Bell

The city's first public fountain, piped from a spring on Libbie Hill, stood in the Market Square. Like the fountains in many historic European markets, a new fountain should probably be placed off-center to permit flexible use of the square and to enhance the perspective of views from the fountain. The basin should be raised on a stepped base to enhance seating. The market bell, which survives in the current market shed, marked opening and closing times and raised the alarm in case of a fire or other emergency. The market bell should be suitably housed in the marketplace and should once again sound the hours.

Overview of the Design

The analysis of the form and history of First Market Square suggests several design ideas capable of a range of alternative expressions: 

(1) First of all, the urban ensemble might mimic the progressive formal transformations that were experienced by the historic visitor in moving from south to north. This shading of form could be implemented in a number of ways:

• a central circulation spine could recall the market aisle that ran for nearly two blocks. 

• the half of the square south of Arch Alley could be kept clear of permanent structures and plantings for the purpose of concerts and other gatherings

• the northern half of the square could be provided with plantings, providing diffused shade as well as stormwater management. 

(2) Squares from the time of the Renaissance have often gained aesthetic depth and clarity of purpose from internal subdivisions. The loggia form, with its capacity of openness and shelter from the weather, has been associated with markets, including Richmond's First Market, since ancient times. An arcaded structure (loggia) at the central point would not only recall the former archway, but would serve as an engaging market-themed focal point to attract the attention of passers-by. 

Such a structure would, at the same time: 

• form a gateway to a temporary enfilade of market tents 

• make a crossing point for the alley 

• serve as a platform for overlooking or lighting the square

• creates an opportunity to apply a different character to the northern and southern halves of the square without losing a sense of the whole. 

• provide shelter during bad weather 

• serve as an event backdrop

(3) It is important to emphasize that the buildings, not the streets, form the edge of the square. This can be emphasized by blending the paving materials so that the textures and colors minimize the difference between the streets and the central part of the square. For instance, the central area could be paved in granite spallstone in a contrasting pattern, while the brick paving of the sidewalks would be maintained to form a outside border. In the same way, placing most of the streetlights and other furniture along the sidewalks, rather than in the center, will visually confirm the full width of the square. Finally, widening the sidewalk on the east side of the square by 10–12 feet would diminish the apparent width of that street and provide space for outdoor cafes without sacrificing a lane of parking, a key to the success of small businesses around the square.

(4) The essence of a traditional square or piazza is its sense of enclosure, forming what some historians of the city refer to as an “urban room.” Most American squares fail in this regard because they are too large or too open at the corners. The vacancy at the north end of First Market Square will become much more apparent once the existing market shed is removed. This “leaky” north end will make it difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill the promise of the square as an “urban room.” This would be an excellent place to put a new public building. 

A new market building, reminiscent of the old First Market Hall, could be added in a later phase. With an open first floor, it would meet flood control regulations by allowing water to flow through its arcades. A new First Market Hall would permit a more powerful connection with the form of the historic market, reinforcing the sense of place by firmly grounding the square in the local context.

Summary

The rehabilitation of First Market Square presented here is intended to be lively, flexible, engaging, and sustainable. In summary, we propose the following interventions:

• A wide, open plaza at the south half of the square which:

• permits complete flexibility
• houses movable furniture for cafes and visitor seating
• features a broad central area of smooth flagstone
• has aisles along the sides paved with spallstone to match the adjacent streets
• has a sunken area in front of the central loggia defining a projecting apron or stage

• Stone paving designed to reinforce the shape of the market as defined by the building walls on three sides, not by the curbing around the central plaza.

• A central arched element (loggia) which will:

• form a focal point when seen from the Main Street
• serve as a focus and crossing point for Arch (Walnut) Alley
• recall the archway that formerly spanned the alley midway along the market.
• provide a backdrop for concerts and other productions taking place in the square
• separate the square into hierarchical sections with distinct functions and shared forms
• be small enough not to interrupt the flow of the eye along the full length of the square
• use forms traditionally associated with markets
• recall the tripartite form of the Market Hall of 1794

• A widened sidewalk on the east side of the market will permit outdoor dining. 

• A green northern half, with a central walk flanked by plantings along the sides, which:

• is structured to contain temporary market stalls and other uses on specified days
• permits sustainable plantings to help control conventional water runoff
• accommodates shade trees along the sides as well as informal seating in the shade

• An off-center fountain south of the loggia which:
• recalls the historic early public water source at the market square
• provides a focal point for seating
• imparts the refreshing sound and sight of moving water

• An optional short market shed building extending north of the loggia which could provide a shaded area during the day for regular stall holders and shelter during rainy weather for visitors.

Digital and watercolor renderings by Bay Koulabdara and Richard Worsham 

for StudioAmmons, 2012-2013

Letter to a Professor

Caro Professore,

I have really appreciated your willingness to discuss the issue of what I will call uniformity in architecture, or perhaps more appropriately, urban scale architecture. Obviously this is a point of contention among architects and urbanists and I will need to be able to justify my position. As I understand it your argument is predicated on the belief that modern issues in urban design can only be addressed by a carefully composed variation in architectural and urban forms, rather than a single unified vision. Unity in this view is achieved not through uniformity, like an endlessly repeated theme, but through differentiation which provides for the individual “character” of a place. This now commonplace approach is founded in the work of Leon Krier.

I think we can both recognize a pattern in our discussions this semester; namely, the role of regularity and uniformity in architectural design and in urban planning. I am convinced that there is truth to what I am attempting to put into words and buildings. I can see it both in writing and traditional architecture and urbanism; it is my lack of eloquence that is doing it a disservice. This is something I have finally had to defend because it helps me explain how architecture integrates commerce into the civic realm. So, I will try to first do the best I can to describe in writing what I have been trying to say, and secondly, attempt to defend it.

Beginning with my conversations and work with Mario Gallarati, based on the Muratori school of urban design a year and a half ago, I began to be interested in the study of formal Renaissance squares. As a student of the Muratori school, Mario Gallarati has consistently worked 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. Given this understanding, it is not surprising that I am interested not only in individual buildings, but in the concept of the formal square, and on a larger scale, the form of cities. The Muratorian approach is based on this idea of an intelligible system of architectural scales. These urban scales 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. I began to read the few translations available on Muratori and his students. I tried to test it against the indubitable theory of my professor Carroll W. Westfall. So far I think them consonant in their essential ideas; the main difference being their focuses on theory and practice respectively, and the empirical approach of Muratori in contrast to Westfall’s reliance on rhetoric. Together they give me a compelling theory of architecture combined with an “operative system” of practice. I am afraid I am an inadequate evangelist of this theoretical combination and have barely scratched the surface of understanding either thinker, but I am enjoying making the best of what I have.

From what I understand of Westfall and Muratori it seems that 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 more or less 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 (Muratori), or “urban ensembles” in the words of Westfall. Urban ensembles are members of the city, but are in turn, wholes composed of building members. Significant events in the urban scale might include civic places such as law courts, libraries, markets, theatres 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. Comparison is not the same thing as finding out where you are.

Building Scale
Buildings can appear related to each other only by virtue of their parts being obviously related to one another, or obviously different in a similar way. Westfall explains this as the “pattern of the assembly of the components” and gives the examples of basic compositional types: temples look like temples, houses look like houses, etc. because they are made of the same parts. Those parts, however, are never assimilated in the same way. Buildings also relate to one another according to the physical character of these components i.e., materials, ornament, size and level of finish. These scales operate by increasing in their level of realization as they reach higher importance in the public realm. The capitol or royal palace is the most fully ornamented and finished building in a state, the city hall the best dressed of all the parts of a republican city and so forth down to the most diluted branch post office or library. Within individual buildings many different activities can take place, however, every building, according to Westfall, is in some way a dwelling, whether it be of a god, a king or a pleb, and that specific purpose of the building is what drives its overall treatment. Different floors, wings, and rooms are realized according to their individual purpose, but on a subordinate scale within the context of the building.

Urban Scale
The urban scale works in exactly the same way. In a city the urban scale is almost always the most important. Occasionally, the territorial scale may override it (as in the Palazzo del Capitaniato in Vicenza, or the Virginia State Capitol), but they each require varying levels of a related treatment. More important streets such as those linking significant nodes in the city or territory are represented as such by their relative width, or because the buildings on their “pertinent strip” are collectively on a grander scale. The level of finish or ornament of a street is the degree to which it is treated in a related or unified way. Perhaps it is lined with arches, or the buildings facing it share the same cornice, etc. The most important public places, traditionally public squares, receive the highest levels of ornament and most thorough treatment in terms of their realization as single bodies made up of different parts. Traditional squares are often wrapped with arcades or colonnades that are made up of related components, the most important receiving the most unified treatment. The distinctness with which the various purposes of the buildings surrounding the street or square are represented is proportionate to their relative importance in the life of the city. The cathedral may remain entirely distinct in even the most formal European squares because of its complete dominance in the public life of the city. Conversely, commercial or industrial activities serving the private realm will almost always be entirely invisible.

These traits are common to almost every city in the Greco-Roman tradition to some level or another. Often, as in the case of S. Petronio in Bologna, an element of the city will remain unfinished. To say that the building is better as it is today is debatable, but to argue that the intention of the architect was to leave it half-finished is preposterous.

So too with the urban scale. The charm of Italian piazzas is often attributed to the informal character in which Goethe encountered them in the 19th century. This is the beauty of the relationship between contingent reality and an ideal. Perhaps a piazza embodies more of a city’s order through its un-realization. I certainly find them beautiful, livable places. Perhaps they are more beautiful in ruins or incompletion, but we would never have had even the failed attempt had someone not once striven for an “inevitable” solution, in the words of Professor David Mayernik.

I personally find the intentional design of picturesque urban forms and elements today known as “New Urbanism” to be at best arbitrary and at worst contrived. There will never, ever be a shortage of reasons that the most ideally visualized urban form or building will in the end have to submit its rigor to the contingencies of reality. Perhaps, repetition or uniformity may be repellent to individual taste. I, however, am attempting (how successfully remains to be seen) to form an argument based on reason, not taste. Such a hierarchy would, I feel, expand the possibility for true variety, not limit it. An alternate feeling that uniform urban or architectural forms are the product of autocratic forms of government falls into the same fallacy as the argument that ancient Greek architecture is the architecture of democracy.

To design a piazza that looks like an ancient agglomeration is to imitate symptoms of successful urbanism, but to miss the actual operative principle that makes it an enduring place. That operative principle, I am arguing, is the concept of urban scales of building which explicitly represent the order of the city according to a dilution of the unity of the whole.

Sincerly Yours,
Richard Worsham