viz. - urban planning

Small-Government Urban Planning Sometimes Negates Itself

Jay Voss — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 04:15:13 +0000

(Image Credit: dfwfoodtrucks.com)

There’s no doubting that Austin’s a great example of urban sprawl. Anyone who’s driven up Burnet Road on a shopping expedition, or down South Lamar looking for a romantic Saturday night dinner, has probably wondered at some point: Why can’t these things just be closer to where I live? Fortunately, I don’t think this question is born out of narcissism. Things are far apart in Austin. And given the town’s expanding population, they feel as though they’re getting farther and farther apart, with all the increased traffic and whatnot. Over the decades, this city has grown and expanded without any apparent civic regard for urban planning. Which makes the Capital Building a really interesting monument. The roads leading to the Texas State Capital are reminiscent of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s planning of Washington, D.C., and they convey a confidence in American governance that would make Governor Rick Perry blush. Either that or the eyes of Texas are upon us.

The image at the top of this post always makes for a great drive when one’s headed north on Congress Avenue. It’s certainly a statement. As you progress, the Texas State Capital Building stairs you down with equal measures of confidence and invitation. There’s no obnoxious pride from this angle. There’s no celebration of the fact that the building is 33 feet taller than the United States Capital Building in Washington, D.C. Only Dostoevsky’s Underground Man could look at the way the Texas State Capital is set and feel spite or cynicism. It’s all absolutely gorgeous and inspiring, though I’m not really sure I can articulate precisely what it inspires. Maybe it’s meant to inspire a feeling of Texas pride, I don’t know. In any case, you certainly don’t need to have any Texas pride in order to appreciate the front of this building from a mile away due south. When viewed from the north, however, things start to get fuzzy.

(Image Credit: codinacrossamerica.com)

If you stand in front of the University of Texas tower and look south, it’ll appear that you’re also at the end of another avenue leading directly to the Texas State Capital. But you’re not. It’s all a brilliant illusion. The University of Texas is set at an angle to the state capital, but since all you can really see from campus is the rotunda, it appears as if the two institutions are square. Of course, it doesn’t really matter if the two buildings are in fact squared up with one another. Important governmental buildings across our country (and across the world, going back to the Roman forum) have never been flush. But deep down, I suspect that there’s some ancient human impulse that wants our important governing institutions to appear orderly and well thought-out.

(Image Credit: Google Maps)

It’s the best political ad in history: the democratic forum that appears orderly within and without. Can we take pleasure in these proportions and still be good citizens? I don’t know. The Texas State Capital, after all, isn’t the tallest building in Austin when viewed from far away.

Shoal Creek: Perhaps As Resourceful As Urban Planning Gets

Jay Voss — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 15:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

The park that stretches along Austin’s Shoal Creek is pretty amazing when you think about it. Starting near Lady Bird Lake downtown, the trails and bikeways wind all the way up towards 38^th street. By my approximated Google Maps calculation, that’s nearly three and a half miles of gravel path, all of which feeds into the much longer Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail (discussed in my last post). Like the trails around Lady Bird Lake, in good weather the parkland around Shoal Creek is routinely flooded with Austinites seeking exercise and a break from concrete and metal. Joggers, walkers, and “mountain” bikers all frequent the trail. Around about 25^th Street there is a leash free area for pets. At Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard there are three beach volleyball courts. Just north of 15^th Street there’s an extensive playground and more volleyball courts. On the surface of things, there’s nothing exceptional about these recreation areas. Most communities throughout the United States provide their residents with public recreation. Indeed, community owned recreation areas have probably been a part of human settlements for longer than we can imagine. What I think is unique about Austin’s Shoal Creek and the surrounding environs is the extent to which the park consciously embodies a natural environment that challenges the skyscrapers in the distance.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

Based upon the photographs throughout this post, one would be forgiven for thinking that Shoal Creek is out in the countryside. I imagine that anyone who has spent any time in this park has wondered for a brief moment what happened to the city. This is only an illusion, of course – the roar of car engines is never far away, and probably often snaps daydreaming joggers right back to attention. Nevertheless, I think it’s an important illusion. For kicks I’d suggest that it’s really quite brilliant landscape design given that 95% of pedestrians and cyclists are listening to music anyways. But alas, I think the area was developed long before Steve Jobs. More to the point, I think it’s remarkable that Austin, and burgeoning urban space, has left such a central, giant swath of nature untouched.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

To some extent, the apparent seclusion and scenery shouldn’t be that surprising, and we can’t overdo the accolades. I can’t imagine any other way this sliver of town could have been developed. For all intents and purposes, the entire midtown stretch of creek bed basically forms a valley, with several limestone cliffs rising above the waterway as it makes its way towards Lady Bird Lake. The creek also functions as a spillway for the surrounding residential areas, which is really a basic necessity for a large group of homes. Try to run on the Shoal Creek trails during a massive rainstorm and each of the creek crossings will be flooded over with runoff. Nonetheless, utility and pragmatism aside, it’s really amazing to see that the city of Austin has used this creek as an opportunity to offer themselves a semi-natural workout zone.

Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike: A Lasting Anchor for Austin

Jay Voss — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

If we’re to think about landscapes in Austin, it only makes sense to start with something in the very heart of the city. What immediately comes to mind, of course, is the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. This jogging path encompasses over 10 miles of mostly flat jogging track that weaves its way around and over Lady Bird Lake. It has proved to be an enormously popular place for Austinites to escape their concrete jungle. Go down to the area for an evening workout in the warmer months, and the trail will be so packed with joggers and walkers you’d wish you’d braved the midday heat. I’ve long thought all this activity around the lake to be one of the more inspiring aspects of living in Austin. There aren’t really any other cities that I can think of that offer up swaths of seemingly undeveloped land for outdoor recreation. Sure, there’s that stretch along Lake Michigan in Chicago, or along the quays in Paris, but nothing quite compares. The architectural thinking behind the Austin trail is completely focused on getting Austinites out and about, and given that the city is otherwise obsessed with finding all sorts of comfort via technological progress, I think the hike and bike trail is really admirable.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

What we now call Lady Bird Lake first started taking shape in 1939, when the Tom Miller Dam was constructed on the Colorado River. This dam was primarily built to provide hydroelectric power for the surrounding area. In 1960, the Longhorn Dam was built east of Austin, and this created what would eventually be called Lady Bird Lake. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the lake was created for two reasons: that the Holly Street Power Plant might have a cooling pond, and that the city might have a new recreational space. By 1970, the lake had become polluted, and its shores covered with weeds. It was then that Mayor Roy Butler teamed up with Lady Bird Johnson to establish the Town Lake Beautification Committee, which worked to transform the lake into a non-polluted recreation area and install the hike and bike trails that are the subject of this post. This makes the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail one of the oldest tracks of its kind in the United States.

(Image Credit: austin360.com)

It’s amazing to think that one of the more modern architectural facets of Austin is really 40 years old. I’ve talked to landscape architects from Oregon to Georgia, and several of them have at least one project like this on their docket. From a civic planning standpoint, these trails make a lot of sense. They work to keep intensely urban areas vibrant and youthful, and they encourage healthy lifestyles for citizens (which encouragement has a number of economic incentives). Visiting Town Lake and its adjacent outdoor recreation, you could of course complain how insanely artificial the entire landscape is from a BBC Planet Earth perspective. The “lake” might be said to look more like a stereotypical river, and there’s no telling if the surrounding vegetation was really that lush before the Colorado River flooded its banks.

But I say, at the end of the day, Lady Bird Lake and its surrounding area are just as invasive as the gardens at Villa Farnese and Versailles. I suppose that comparison doesn’t justify the environmental alteration that is Lady Bird Lake, but it sure does remind us that the new landscape is much more satisfying than all the glass and steel that sits behind it.

Can We Measure the Expansion of a City by Its Landscaping?

Jay Voss — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 22:03:01 +0000

(Image Credit: KXAN Austin)

It’s great to be back on viz. after a semester away. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the most noticeable thing in Austin upon my return is the city’s insane rate of expansion. When one moves about town and looks at buildings, every few blocks or so there’s a new set of high rise apartments (or whatever) going in. Nowhere are the roads being widened to account for the new residents. Rush hour is literally a bunch of metallic, CO2-emitting rivers, and all this negates (at least for me) most pretences Austin makes towards modernity. I heard somewhere that 20,000 people are moving to Austin each month, although I have no idea if that’s really the case – the statistic can make one feel like they live cattle market. But to be fair, most up-and-coming cities can have that feel. Traffic rant aside, if Austin’s powers at be aren’t adjusting roadways to account for new residents, I wonder how smaller entities (such as neighborhoods, private residents, and institutions) are altering their own urban environments to account for the change. In some cases, perhaps, maybe a few brilliant environments that were designed 20 years ago are still healthy, despite all the change. In other cases, perhaps the city is designing new parks and gardens to address future public needs. I am going to try and dedicate all my viz. posts for the coming semester to landscape design in Austin. It might prove valuable, as I’m not sure these things are being catalogued anywhere else.

(Image Credit: Wikipedia)

First, a bit of landscape design history is in order. This will give my future descriptions of Austin some context, while also help us to gauge the quality of what’s being done around town. Humans have, in some way or another, been reshaping their surrounding natural environments for a very long time. Theories abound about whether or not Native Americans employed fire to clear prairie and alter forest growth. There is archeological record for controlled burnings in many areas inhabited by Native Americans, and academics debate about whether these fires were created by man or lightening. More concretely, there is amazing evidence of conscious human alteration on Easter Island, in the Pacific Ocean, where the cryptic moai statues dot the landscape. I say “cryptic” because it’s commonly agreed that the creation of the statues on the island lead to rapid and complete deforestation – a very big transformation for inhabitants of a remote island. Every single last tree on Easter Island was cut down by the Rapa Nui people and used, it is believed, to help transport new moai statues all over the island. In each of these brief examples, it’s rather obvious that landscaping practices in these locations are cultural emanations of the native populations. The Native American clearings, if they were indeed caused by humans and not lightening, might have had some practical application. If not, they were most surely part of some spiritual event. As far as Easter Island is concerned, the Rapa Nui peoples went to great lengths to dot their island with moai statues, both transforming the landscape by the statues’ addition and the trees’ rapid removal. Current anthropology holds that the moai statues were symbols of authority and power.

(Image Credit: gardensinitaly.net)

In the European tradition, pretty much all landscape design is either an elaboration or refutation of Aristotle’s thinking. Aristotle’s view of the natural world was basically that cognitive intelligence was the zenith of biological development. As such, plants were on the bottom of things and humans were on top. In the Renaissance therefore, when Classical thinking was once again in fashion, wealthy Europeans influenced by Aristotle sought to make natural environments “more beautiful” than they were naturally. This was done by subjecting groupings of plants to fit within the boundaries of planned order and proportion. So between 1550 and 1600 (sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age of gardening”) there was a massive explosion of landscape design in wealthy Italy, all of it built by cardinals vying for the papacy. We are all familiar with the white smoke bit whenever a pope dies, and how the College of Cardinals gets together to elect a successor. These days much of the rhetoric that surrounds that election has to do with spirituality and the like, but in Renaissance Italy, the cardinals tended to elect those who were most influential, wealthy, and cultured. One of the most reliable ways the college could measure the extent of these attributes in perspective candidates was through their gardens. Gardens in Renaissance Italy, after all, were one went to be seen and admired, and the wealthy owners of these gardens took delight in having others want to be in their garden. And so through all of this you get gardens such as those at Villa Farnese just north of Rome, pictured above.

(Image Credit: Wikipedia)

France subsequently experienced its own amazing period of garden design in the seventeenth century, when wealthy French aristocrats wanted to display their own personal wealth and culture in the fashionable ways of Renaissance Italy. Amongst a number of architects and gardeners who were designing new landscapes in seventeenth-century France, the most important was a man named André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre, for example, had the brilliant idea to align western Paris along the Champs de Elysee, a novelty that almost every visitor to Paris appreciates, even if they know nothing of architectural history. Above you can see a seventeenth-century engraving for the gardens at Château de Chantilly, one of Le Nôtre’s later projects. The English would take all this one step further, and design gardens meant to seem as if they were completely natural emanations. Of course they weren’t “natural” – they were carefully contemplated series of plantings. But, they reflected an emerging aesthetic sense that privileged inspiration from nature over inspiration from proportion and rationality. Below you can find a photograph of the garden at Rousham, designed by William Kent in the mid-eighteenth century. It is, perhaps, the most successful eighteenth-century English landscape garden.

(Image Credit: rousham.org)

I’m already nearly 500 words over my target length. In closing, then, I’ll end by saying that over the coming semester, I will attempt consider landscapes throughout Austin through the full lens of landscape design history. Some will conform, others no doubt won’t, and I’ll consider the implications of all these variations. At the fore will be a preoccupation with the extent to which horticultural work in and around the city makes rhetoric gestures, and the extent to which those gestures are conscious of Austin’s ongoing transformation.

Bel Geddes, Brasilia, and Cities from the Air

Calliope — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:17:25 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner #4 rendering, ca. 1929-1932

Touring the Harry Ransom Center's Norman Bel Geddes exhibit a few weeks ago, my fellow viz. staffers and I were struck by how many of the designer's projects never made it past the drawing board. Bel Geddes' sketches of giant, amphibious aircrafts (see "Airliner #4" above) are prime examples of the far-fetched schemes his studio was hatching in the 30s alongside commercially viable designs, like this handsome pair of seltzer bottles featured in an earlier post. But, as other viz. contributers this week have remarked, articulating what is not and will never be seems like an inevitable part of a theorizing and designing the future. It certainly makes strolling through the Ransom Center's "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit feel like a trip into a delightful, hybrid world of fiction and history.

Geddes' plans for airborne commercial and recreational spaces (the 451 passengers aboard the flying machine, above, would have access to a gymnasium and a full orchestra) interest me because they present a counterpoint to the "auto-centric America" with which Geddes' work is usually associated. It's likely that Geddes' designs influenced both American aviation and automotive systems, but for an untrained industrial designer like Geddes, the first of these frontiers must have seemed significantly more difficult to modernize, if only from an engineering standpoint. The challenge of hoisting into the air a full spectrum of modern amenities makes Geddes' airplanes look almost cartoonish. Yet, when we recall that the horizon of space travel was not so far off, Geddes' airliners look less dream-like than before.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (with tail fin), ca. 1933

Geddes' concepts for land vehicles, even, borrow design elements from the skies. Like a plane, this motor car is both winged and streamlined so as to travel swiftly down the chute-like highways that Geddes envisioned for cities of the future.

Moreover, several of Geddes' larger projects play with ideas of suspension and aerial perspective. The people entering the General Motors building (pictured below), which Geddes helped to design for the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, look as though they're levitating as they stream into the exhibit on a swirly staircase. The shape of the ramp reflects the free-flowing highway system that Geddes' Futurama exhibit proposed as a solution for urban congestion. (The Futurama exhibit was housed by the GM building, below.) It also mirrors the building's uppermost edge, the slope of which resembles the path of an airplane at lift off. The structure clearly employs the architectural metophor of slope to signify scientific progress, economic growth, and/or social mobility for commercial and nationalistic purposes.

Image Credit: thefrailestthing.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Bel Geddes' famed Futurama installation, the focal point of GM's "Highways and Horizons" World's Fair pavilion, required a mobile, aerial perspective to be fully absorbed by its spectators. Visitors were conveyed around the model on a track positioned above the miniature city. Because the onlookers studied the cityscape from the perspective of a plane, during a time when private flights were uncommon--and commercial aviation nonexistent--Geddes' exhibit must have been doubly displacing for its viewers. Glimpsing at an urban future that prized efficiency, utility, and mobility surely presented them with a unique experience. But apart from that, the shifting aerial vantage point that the ride simulated must have seemed marvelous and novel in itself, since it is unlikely that many of Futurama's spectators had ever hovered over any city--past, present, or future.

General Motors, Futurama Spectators, ca. 1939

Image Credit: Screenshot of Google Maps

I now want to hover over another modernist city--a real one that happens to be the capital of Brazil. In 1956, when the Brazilian President commissioned Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to build Brasília, the nation's new capital seat, the architects had already collaborated on another definitive modernist project: the award-winning Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. (As you will recall, this particular World's Fair was also the site of Bel Geddes' Futurama exhibit.) Beyond this instance of proximity between the designers' work, there are additional interesting parallels between Bel Geddes' vision and the mature designs of the Brazilian duo. The Brasília project, for instance, literalizes Bel Geddes' bird's-eye conception of the modern city by organizing the city's roads and structures in the shape of a plane (see the Google Maps image above). A decade-and-a-half after Bel Geddes used aerial perspective to show that cities could be planned and networked with well-designed infrastructure, Costa and Niemeyer memorialized the airplane--a symbol of transcendent viewpoint (?)--within the structure of a modern metropolis.

When you visit the "I Have Seen the Future" exhibit at the Ransom Center, as I hope you will, do not despair that the miniature buildings of the Futurama exhibit remained forever in the realm of fantasy, like the buildings of present-day Legoland. Brasília is a very real place that, at ground level, shares Bel Geddes' modernist aesthetics, and from the sky, pays tribute to a globalized present that indeed has been shaped by aviation.

Image Credit: uccla.net

The viewpoints expressed in this blog post are strictly those of viz., and do not in any way represent the opinions of The Harry Ransom Center.

Ethnic Cleansing in Brooklyn

John Jones — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:01:50 +0000

Jerome Krase at BrooklynSoc.org passed along a photo gallery comparing an artist’s rendering of the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn versus the mall itself.

As Dr. Krase puts it,

A New York Post “Exclusive” article by Rich Calder, ‘Mall Wonder,’ (5/21/07: 19) featured a digital rendering of how the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn will look after a $15 Million “facelift.” It looked odd to me, so I took some photos at the Mall the next day. Perhaps they meant “ethnic cleansing,” or what we used to refer to as “Negro Removal” when Urban Renewal was in vogue in the 1960s. FYI: Brooklyn has become a very hot real estate market in recent years and many of the areas which had essentially become part of “Black Brooklyn” from the 1970s onward are now ripe for picking. I walked down the Fulton Mall from beginning to end taking photos and the Person of Color to Person of No-color ratio was the reverse of the artist rendering from the article. One might also consider whether the rendering is advertising as opposed to Neo-Freudian slip.

Here’s a link to the entire gallery at BrooklynSoc.org.