Blog | the Original Green | Steve Mouzon

Uninhabitable High-Rises

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:43:46 -0400

My tweet-cast of Léon Krier's address to the Congress for the New Urbanism Saturday morning created a small firestorm for a while on Twitter characterized by @nlamontagne's "Low-rise fetishism is bad for cities" and @BLAH_CITY's iconic "...my coffin will be "human scale"! All else is architecture..." Never mind that the real fetish here is the Skyscraper Fetish. In any case, here are several thoughts for the skyscraper apologists:

Sustainability may be defined as "keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future." That uncertain future is very unlikely to include cheap energy at levels we know today. At unaffordable energy price levels, what fails to work in high rises?

1. Wind speed increases with distance from the ground. A gentle breeze on the ground translates to something closer to a gale higher up. Open two windows for cross-ventilation on the forty-second floor, and all your papers may get blown out into the street. That increased wind speed, when combined with rain, plays havoc with weatherstripping in operable windows. Operable windows in high-rise offices therefore have serious issues. But on a hot day without cheap fossil fuel, inoperable curtain walls have an even bigger problem: without the ability to cross-ventilate, the building may literally be uninhabitable because without a way to dump excess heat, interior temperatures would soon become even hotter than outdoors.

Sprawl Recovery - A 12-Step Program

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:00:46 -0500

Levittown, New York was the birthplace of postwar sprawl

America has descended far into the strong darkness of sprawl addiction, and while much of the future lies shrouded in more uncertainty than usual, one fact shines clear: we can no longer afford to sprawl. Cities can't afford to service sprawl's low-density pattern that consumes huge chunks of land and demands more infrastructure investment per unit served. Citizens soon won't be able to afford to live in sprawl's furthest outposts as gas edges closer to $5/gallon. How much sprawl will be uninhabitable on a median salary when gas gets to $10/gallon? And again at $20/gallon? Gas is 20 times higher than it was when I was a kid, and I'm not old. $20/gallon is less than 5 times higher than gas I bought yesterday, so it's not a matter of if, but of when.

for homeowners, sprawl began with the dream of a house in the

country...

Sprawl became an addiction in the same way most addictions start: by providing a huge rush of perceived benefits early on. It became the biggest money-making machine ever known to humanity, and you didn't really even need to think very much in order to participate because of its reductive simplicity. Zoning ordinances, financing mechanisms, and appraisal standards all conspired to grease the skids for the developers of sprawl, with an unspoken side-effect: every other way of building became intolerably laborious by comparison.

The Ecological Dividend

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 08:00:46 -0500

Schooner Bay house looking out to sea across preserved coastal landscape

Many New Urbanist places have for years sat more lightly on the land than most conventional developments. Several xeriscaping principles date all the way back to the beginning of Seaside, which was designed by DPZ and launched the entire New Urbanism movement. But Robert Davis, Town Founder of Seaside, didn’t mandate native species primarily for high-minded ideals, but rather to save the cost of an irrigation system.

This tradition has continued to this day in the work of many New Urbanists. For example, the Waters was re-planned after having originally been designed by others in a sprawling pattern. The original plan called for bulldozing a hill at the south end of what we redesigned as the Lucas Point hamlet. I told the Town Founder “let me save you the money of moving all that dirt; we’ll leave the hill, put a chapel on top, and line a street up with it to let the chapel terminate the vista.” Today, Chapel Hill is the most memorable view at the Waters, but the rationale for doing it that way was purely economic.

Cheapways [Costs of Sprawl Series]

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:00:46 -0500

once a New Orleans neighborhood, now the dark underbelly of a Cheapway

The Cheapway is "the thoroughfare formerly known as the Freeway." The Freeway, of course, was originally designed to run freely in the countryside, carrying people quickly between cities and towns. But when it entered the city, the Freeway metastasized into its evil twin: the Cheapway.

nothing much grows next to a Cheapway except warehouses, seedy
bars, strip joints, and weeds

It is so named because it has likely destroyed over a trillion of dollars of real estate value around it in the US and drains municipal coffers across the country of billions in property taxes and sales tax revenues. As a matter of fact, most Cheapways destroy substantially more real estate value than the several-million-per-mile that it costs to construct them.

Cheapways were originally built to allow people to move to sprawling suburbs but work in the city. City-dwellers don't need them to get to their jobs downtown, of course, because they're living there already. So make no mistake: Cheapways weren't built for the city, but for the sprawling suburbs.

That might have seemed like a good idea in the late 1950s, but in less than a decade the Cheapway Consequence was becoming pretty obvious: pretty much everywhere they went in the city, decline and crime followed. This is so embedded in our culture that the underbelly of the Cheapway is second only to the parking deck as a setting for scary movie scenes.

The Speed Burden [Costs of Sprawl Series]

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:00:46 -0500

Left: Renaissance Florence, Italy - Right: Atlanta interchange (both at same scale)

The need for speed devours huge chunks of American cities and leaves the edges of the expressways worthless. Busy streets, for almost all of human history, created the greatest real estate value because they delivered customers and clients to the businesses operating there. This in turn cultivated the highest tax revenues in town, both from higher property taxes and from elevated sales taxes. But you can't set up shop on the side of an expressway. How can cities afford to spend so much to create thoroughfares with no adjoining property value?

Let's first look at the four basic problems with speed:

Curves

Increasing speed a little bit requires a big increase in the size of curves. At 20 miles per hour, any car can handle a curve with a 15 foot radius, so you'd think that tripling the speed would triple the radius, right? Wrong. At 60 miles per hour, curve radii are usually a few hundred feet, not the 45 feet you might guess.

Lane Width

Faster roads need wider lanes. An 8 foot lane can handle 20 mile per hour traffic, but at highway speeds, you need 12 foot lanes.

Why Love Matters

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:46 -0500

Wanda, with Buddy, in the side garden at the Dixon

Lovability, a concept deeply distrusted by architects of most stripes, is actually the gateway to sustainable architecture because if a building can't be loved, it will not last. And lovability is a better standard than beauty, as we shall see.

Why should love be the first threshold on the path to sustainable buildings? And why is lovability so important that it's also a major component of sustainable places? Many of my colleagues who are classicists have long insisted on beauty as the highest standard, whereas many of my colleagues who are Modernists have long disputed that stand, preferring grittier or more industrial aesthetics while claiming that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We'll never get agreement between these two groups on beauty. Both of these groups recoil, however, at a term so unprofessional as "lovable." "That's barely a step above 'cute,' or even worse, 'precious,'" they might say. But ask any non-architect, and they have no problem at all talking about lovable buildings and places, and they'd really like it if we were to design more of them.

New Urbanism for All?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:00:46 -0500

classic corner store in Key West

We New Urbanists have an important choice to make, because our current rhetoric don't square up with our metrics in some important ways. If you listen to our aspirations, we'll tell you that 2/3 of Americans prefer thriving neighborhoods that are compact, mixed-use, and walkable over sprawling suburban subdivisions, and we'll tell you that those people should all be able to live that way… once we build enough of those neighborhoods and repair enough sprawl. But our rules of thumb sometimes tell a different story.

Hazel Borys hosted a PlaceMaking@Work webinar in December with Bob Gibbs based on his new book, New Rules for Retail. The ensuing tweet chat is what started this whole Neighborhood Retail BlogOff. I haven't yet read Bob's book (it's on order) and I have high regard for him on many counts, but one of Bob's rules of thumb is that it requires 1,000 homes to support a single corner store, and more than that to support anything else. I responded by blogging that if that's so, then any neighborhood with less than 1,000 homes would have no hope of any mixed-use, and could therefore not ever be more than a residential subdivision.

Chip Kaufman Guest Post - Neighborhood Retail

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:30:46 -0500

Seaside, Florida's Central Square

Steve,

You refer to the '1,000 rooftop' minimum for neighbourhood retail. I expect, by the way, that you were just wanting to position that rule of thumb as a rule which, in isolation, might risk limiting of 'hope' and the will to risk and build. And you've used Seaside as a case study, and so will I. By the way, anything I say here should pass a self-evident common sense test by any of you reading this.

Seaside manifests four additional 'rules of thumb', which in my opinion should generally be included with the first about minimum rooftops within a neighbourhood. (By the way, the minimum perceived in Oz here is 800 or so, but in combination with what I'm about to say.)

First Additional Rule of Thumb: Through Traffic

Highway 30-A running through Seaside

Seaside has 'through traffic' as well as 'to traffic' passing right beside its retail centre. This obviously increases passing retail activity beyond the number of rooftops within its walking catchment (which is only about half what it could be because half its catchment is the sea).

The Agricultural Aesthetic

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:46 -0500

Partly edible and mostly beautiful… the Children's Museum rooftop garden in Madison, Wisconsin

Most vegetable gardens look utilitarian at best, but more often they're likely to be downright messy, often even ugly… and this is a big problem. Here's why: Most places in the US cannot nourish their inhabitants from nearby fields and waters because we've sprawled cheek-to-jowl across the landscape in such a way that dedicated farmlands are often miles away. So without a lot of building demolition, the best hope for becoming Nourishable rests in embedding edible gardens within the urban fabric of the neighborhoods.

most people think vegetable gardens are about as lovable as a

laundry room: a "utility garden," if you will, meant for nothing

more than raising things to eat

If those edible gardens were lovable, they would be easy to embed because many people would want them. But if they're unlovable, then they're not so much of a good neighbor, and more likely to be shunned or outright banned, like this Oak Park, Michigan garden. To be fair, the Oak Park garden isn't downright ugly… but it's not beautiful, either, and that's just enough to bring out the opposition.

The Necessity of Hope

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:57:46 -0500

The first prerequisite of community-building is hope because people without hope will not build. This fundamental rule of building applies from the scale of building personal relationships to the scale of building a nation.

We face a challenge in the US, the likes of which nobody born since the Great Depression has ever seen. Nearly everything we have built since the end of World War II was built according to the pattern of sprawl, where you separate everything from everything else and connect them all with highways so that we drive everywhere to get anywhere. This cannot continue… the costs of sprawl will soon become too great to bear. Already, our auto-dependent lifestyles are making us poor.

The core problem with sprawl is that we have built so much of it. Most of us live there now, so we can't just all walk away as fuel prices rise. The building of sprawl created much of the wealth of our nation for the past 66 years… the abandonment of such a mammoth investment would surely ruin us all.

Transgressionalism*

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:57:46 -0500

High architecture and the arts have each mutated from Modernism into something dark and disturbing. Metastasizing unchecked, it is Kryptonite to our hopes for a sustainable future. How did we get here?

When Modernism Was Actually Modern

inspired by Mies

Early Modernism was born with an underlying necessity of uniqueness. In other words, if you want to be significant, your work must be unique. Previously, architecture was judged first by the standard of "how good is it?" Modernism changed the prime standard to "how new is it?" Because of this new standard, traditional work, no matter how good, had no chance of being considered. Only after passing the standard of newness was architecture then evaluated by the old standard of "how good is it?"

The necessity of uniqueness clearly fueled a lot of creativity and inventiveness in the early years, but it was largely rational invention. Early Modernists were able to be both modern and sensible. Look at how Wright, Mies, Gropius, Corbu, Loos, and others carried weight down through a building to the ground, for example. Normally, it made perfect sense. Regardless of whether or not you liked the sleek, spare expression, you could understand how the architecture worked, and why. These were the heroic years of Modernism.

God is in the Details

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:57:46 -0500

The Buildings We Love are the Ones With Ornament

Guest post by Alvin Holm

Ornament is an act of love – or at least a token of esteem. We embellish what we revere. We adorn that which we love. We do not decorate the hero, returning from the wars, to make him pretty – we decorate him to pay him honor. Ornament is deep stuff, greatly misunderstood in recent years.

The reason that we see so little ornament in buildings of our modern culture is that we do not love them. Or perhaps we do not love them because they are unlovely, unadorned. Nor do we think it’s nice to love them – that is, to have a visceral, sentimental, soulful relationship to them – because they are after all products of our intellect, rationally conceived, cost-effective, piously functional, sleek, sensible and cool.

But recently <note from Steve: this was written in 1996, about a conference in the fall of 1995> I participated in a heavily attended two-day conference in New York on ornament in classical architecture, and that can only mean that things are changing fast.

The Charlottetown Challenge

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:30:46 -0500

We sorely need a forward-looking town and its surrounding region to step up and remake themselves as a world-class model of true sustainability from the level of the region to the level of the building. I've just returned from Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island in Canada, and have high hopes that the citizens there just might transform themselves into just such a place.

A few other places are making promising noises, such as Oberlin, Ohio and Greensburg, Kansas. But while the people behind them are completely well-intentioned, most of those noises are predictably about Gizmo Green measures, which are based on the premise that we can achieve sustainability with nothing more than better equipment and better materials. The reason that's predictable is because Gizmo Green dominates sustainability discussions to such a degree that most people don't realize there's anything else.

Charlottetown side street

But there is. And Gizmo Green will soon be exposed for what it really is: only a very small part of the formula for real sustainability. Here's why: We are seeing a massive population migration in many developing countries from low-impact agrarian settings into the city. We need approximately 1 car per citizen in the US. If the two most populous countries, China and India, do over twice as well as the US in their need for cars in the city, there will be over a billion cars on the road just in those two countries in a few years that don't even exist today! It doesn't matter what you think of of the reality of Peak Oil because this is Economics 101: supply and demand. Even if world oil supply keeps increasing at the same rate as it has over the past ten years, demand will quickly outstrip supply and prices will skyrocket. The recent flirtation with $5/gallon is only a prelude. Expect $20/gallon and beyond not so many years from now.

The Bed & Breakfast Bonus

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 08:00:46 -0500

Few realize that a neighborhood bed & breakfast can be an extraordinary money machine for its surrounding neighborhood. With the McMansion Era grinding to a sickening halt post-Meltdown, most people are looking for new ways to make every dollar count. Consider the heret0f0re-required guest room: if you build a guest suit complete with bedroom, bath, and closet, you'll be hard-pressed to design it to pre-Meltdown suburban standards in less than 250 square feet. Construction costs for well-built homes are approaching or have exceeded $200 per square foot in many parts of the country. That means the guest suite may add up to $50,000 or more to the cost of the home!

Think back for a moment - how many nights has someone slept in your guest room this year? Probably not so many, if you are like most of us. Today, how can we tolerate throwing away $50,000 on something that is rarely used? Most of us can't.

That's where the bed & breakfast comes in: if there were a bed & breakfast in your neighborhood center, you'd have no need for a guest room, would you? Guests staying a 2-3 block walk away would still feel close to you, but more independent, and they likely feel like they aren't burdening you… so they might even come visit you more often. And you would likely feel less intruded upon, so you would welcome those more frequent visits.

SmartDwelling I - Breeze Chimneys

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:00:46 -0400

There's much more to SmartDwelling I than the things I wrote about two years ago when it was published in the Wall Street Journal's Green House of the Future story. Really cool stuff is afoot with Project:SmartDwelling, so this will be the first of several new posts looking at SmartDwelling elements.

SmartDwelling I with the two breeze chimneys at the top

top view of Breeze Chimney

There are two Breeze Chimneys on SmartDwelling I, which was designed for the US Gulf Coast region. Because it's a land by the sea, I decided to use seafaring materials for the Breeze Chimneys. As we'll see in a moment, Breeze Chimneys in other parts of the country could be made out of other materials like sheet metal. The framework is built of small spars, like those which frame sails on sailboats. The spars could either be made of wood or fiberglass. The shroud is sail cloth stretched over the spars. This assembly is attached to a ring at the top of the chimney that rotates freely. Here's how it works:

section through Breeze Chimney showing air flow

The Breeze Chimney is designed to turn into the wind, like a weathervane. The open end of the Breeze Chimney is always leeward as a result. There's a phenomenon in physics known as the Venturi Effect, and it works like this: air moving past an opening tends to pull gases or liquids out of the opening. If you're old enough to remember cars before fuel injection, then it was the Venturi Effect that made the carburetors work.

The Schooner Bay Miracle

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:57:46 -0400

Score one for Schooner Bay! The eye of Hurricane Irene came right across DPZ's new town of Schooner Bay in the Bahamas late last week, and except for a few outdoor ceiling fans, the buildings sustained no damage at all. Sustained winds were 125 miles per hour, with gusts up to 130. This is all the more remarkable because of the way Schooner Bay is being built… it's following patterns of ancient wisdom that are illegal in every hurricane zone in the United States.

Years ago, when Seaside was hit by its first hurricane (Opal) and sustainaed almost no damage, hurricane experts called it the "Seaside Miracle," and studied it for several years thereafter. Opal's winds were probably 100 miles per hour at Seaside. It'll be obvious shortly why, beyond just Irene's higher wind speed, this should be considered the Schooner Bay Miracle and studied as well.

All of the photos in this blog post were taken by Schooner Bay staff less than 24 hours after the hurricane passed through. You can still see Irene's angry waves breaking against the ironshore in the image above.

Retirement vs. the Pursuit of Meaning

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 23:11:46 -0400

The idea of retirement is undergoing its biggest change since the modern-day version was invented by Germany's Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in 1883, and today's revision has profound implications for the shape of towns, villages, and neighborhoods. Retirement, for more than a century, has been advertised as a time to play… catch up on your golf game, or give tennis a try. Go for long walks in the countryside with your sweetie. We all know the drill, and it was very enticing. But there was a dark side nobody wanted to talk about. But first, let's look at how we got there…

The Era of the Company

Work was radically redefined at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Previously, most who had escaped servitude or slavery engaged in crafts or trades plied most often from their home or workshop. If they were successful, they might employ a few others who worked for them for wages, but the modern-day model of most of the workforce being employed by business or government is only about two hundred years old. During this Era of the Company, the corporation was the centerpiece of the economic lives of most of us. The virtues of this era were quality, speed, and economy… or "better, faster, cheaper," if you prefer. And two-thirds of that formula (faster and cheaper) was most often accomplished directly on the backs of the workers.

The Importance of On-Street Parking

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:23:46 -0400

On-street parking is important to good urbanism on many counts. Let's have a look at some of the most important reasons why it's essential:

Commercial Parking Lots

Would you be caught dead on this sidewalk?

If people can't park on-street, then off-street parking lots are essential in all but the most highly walkable places where cars are unnecessary (think Manhattan.) Surface parking lots do lots of damage. First, if they are built in front of a building, then they pretty much guarantee that nobody will ever walk on the sidewalk that runs between the parking lot and the street. Pedestrians aren't stupid… you'd be taking your life in your own hands by walking in a place like this because you have no protection from cars zipping by just a few feet away from you.

The second-worst place for a parking lot is beside the building because this creates a big gap in the urbanism. This condition is known as a "snaggletooth streetscape." One of its worst features is that it interrupts the continuity of the street face, making the place seem incomplete, or decaying. Another really bad feature is the fact that it bores the pedestrians, because when they're walking beside it, they get a steady view of cars that doesn't change very quickly. Unlike a parking lot in front, which completely kills pedestrianism in only one block, parking lots beside buildings only injure it, and the extent of the injury to walkability depends on how big the gaps between buildings are.

the Chael-Dover Cottage - What the Original Green Looks Like

Thu, 05 May 2011 15:57:46 -0400

The Chael-Dover Cottage shows how interesting things get when theory turns into practice... and when “how they once built green” turns into “how I can build green today.” You can find so many Original Green ideas applied here that I quit counting after awhile.

Maricé Chael is an architect and a principal of Chael Cooper. She’s also a member of the New Urban Guild. Her husband, Victor Dover, is a principal of the New Urbanist planning firm Dover-Kohl, and a longtime sustainability leader on many fronts, including being at the forefront of the effort to create LEED-ND. It’s unlikely that anything on this blog or in the Original Green book had any influence over the design of their cottage because Maricé and Victor have known these things long before the book or the blog were published, but that’s immaterial. What matters is how well their cottage illustrates Original Green ideas.

garden compost station

And it isn’t just one idea at a time, either... everywhere you turn, this cottage is doing several things at once. Every room has at least two uses, for example. The image at the top of this post is a classic example we sorely need today: lovability and nourishability in the same plot of ground. Here’s the test this garden passes: is your edible garden lovable enough that you furnish it with benches and chairs, so that you can sit and look at it? Most vegetable gardens are treated as utility plots, meant to be productive but not attractive. But Maricé is planting a primarily edible landscape in her front yard that’s long on romance... even the compost station tucked away in a corner has a rustic charm about it (see above.)

The EPA and the Ultimate Betrayal

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:57:46 -0400

The greatest betrayal in human history happened almost 2,000 years ago last night. While nothing we can do would ever sink to the depths of Judas’ act of betrayal, he nonetheless set a standard that others have occasionally and ingloriously followed in the centuries since: betrayal of the very thing you supposedly loved, cherished, or were sworn to protect, such as parents that molest their own children, teachers who abuse their students, preachers who misuse those who have come to them for counsel and comfort, and police who commit crimes. Most recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has joined the infamous ranks of those who betray what they were sworn to protect. Ironically, this is all coming to light in the days leading up to Earth Day.

What is the EPA’s nefarious act? Their very reason for existence is to protect the environment, as their name clearly professes. Yet their Kansas City office has done the unthinkable: they are shamelessly abandoning their offices in a compact, mixed-use, and walkable location downtown, and moving miles out into the suburbs to a place that is completely unwalkable and auto-dependent. Others have written capably about the particulars of this move, including Kaid Benfield so I won’t repeat their points... please read them to satisfy yourself... Kaid’s rant is a must-read.