Our Urban Environment
Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
A collection of villages
Illa de la Discòrdia
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Names vs. The Nothing
This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
The linear city
The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors.
As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city would become ever longer, without growing wider.
A dialogue between homogeneity and exception
All cities can be described as a dialogue between homogeneity and exception, and each strikes a particular balance that is at the core of its character.
Ground displaced upward
Imagine that our rooftops were parkland, that the area of ground occupied by buildings was, in effect, simply displaced upward. Imagine that the city enacted legislation requiring that the equivalent of 100 percent of the surface area of New York were to be green. A 100 percent requirement would not simply oblige green roofs. It would also demand that compensatory greenery be added to make up for such ungreenable areas as roadways, runways, and other unplantable places. Perhaps the requirement would be satisfied with road narrowings, cantilevered gardens, or green floors in buildings (utilities on the order of the mechanical floors that occur in almost all tall buildings).
Same name in the same basket
Does a concert hall ask to be next to an opera house? Can the two feed on one another? Will anybody ever visit them both, gluttonously, in a single evening, or even buy tickets from one after going to a performance in the other?
In Vienna, London, Paris, each of the performing arts has found its own place, because all are not mixed randomly. The only reason that these functions have all been brought together in Lincoln Center is that the concept of performing art links them to one another. The organization is born of the mania every simple-minded person has for putting things with the same name into the same basket.
A city cannot be a work of art
There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
The kind of problem a city is
Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.
The history of modern thought about cities is unfortunately very different from the history of modern thought about the life sciences. The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus.
These loose notes
These loose notes are one possible description of our city. A city that, as in Constantin Cavafy's poem The City, is and always will be the same, in the same city again.
Strands of life
For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot, and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.
Natural and artificial cities
I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been spontaneously created by designers and planners artificial cities. Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, and Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh, and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities.
Tree, leaf, house, city
"Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house. A city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city."
— Aldo van Eyck
To become completely lost
To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being. The very word "lost" in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty; it carries overtones of utter disaster.
Junctions
The junction, or place of a break in transportation, has compelling importance for the city observer. Because decisions must be made at junctions, people heighten their attention at such place and perceive elements with more than normal clarity. This tendency was confirmed so repeatedly that elements located at junctions may automatically be assumed to derive special prominence from their location.
A certain plasticity
There are dangers in a highly specialized visible form; there is a need for a certain plasticity in the perceptual environment. If there is only one dominant path to a destination, a few sacred focal points, or an ironclad set of rigidly separated regions, then there is only one way to image the city without considerable strain. This one may suit neither the needs of all people, nor even the needs of one person as they vary from time to time. An unusual trip becomes awkward or dangerous; interpersonal relations may tend to compartmentalize themselves; the scene becomes monotonous or restrictive.
A metropolis for hydrocarbons
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
Roads to nowhere
Among real-estate developers, straight lines and right angles went out of fashion sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. If you look at a town or a residential neighborhood laid out since then, you are more likely to find sinuous, serpentine roads—whether or not the topography offers any excuse for such curves. Many of these roads go nowhere: they are loops that bring you back to where you started, or they are cul-de-sacs. Making it easy to find your way through the network of streets is obviously not a high priority. This is an interesting development in urban geography: having redesigned the city to accommodate the automobile, we now search for ways to discourage people from driving on the streets.
Dead cities
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
NYLA
"See, what I've always liked about Los Angeles is that it's one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn't have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and gain. That's why it's such a great place to do art and to build your ideas about culture. In New York, it's like an echo chamber: its overwhelming sense of itself, of its past and its present and its mission, becomes utterly restricting."
Tokyo
20 Minutes in Manhattan
A Book by Michael SorkinThe Death and Life of Great American Cities
A Book by Jane JacobsA City Is Not a Tree
An Essay by Christopher Alexander- Strands of life
- Impending destruction
- The right overlap
- The difficulty of designing complexity
- Political chains of influence
The Image of the City
A Book by Kevin Lynch- To become completely lost
- Apparency
- On the edge of something else
- Nothing there, after all
- Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
Soft City
A Book by David SimDesign of Cities
A Book by Edmund BaconA Burglar's Guide to the City
A Book by Geoff ManaughSuburban Nation
A Book by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff SpeckAt Home: A Short History of Private Life
A Book by Bill BrysonUnderstanding Architecture
A Book by Robert McCarter & Juhani PallasmaaWhy I Walk
An Article by Chris ArnadeOn my first day I literally walk across the city, to the extent it can be done…The next day I do another cross town walk, but in a different direction, filling in the blanks from the prior day’s walk.
Then, over the next week(s), I walk between 10 to 20 miles per day, picking and choosing from what I have seen before, highlighting what I like, what I want to know more about, refining the path, till by the end of my trip, I have a daily route that is roughly the same.
While that is certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content.
Why buses represent democracy in action
A Talk by Enrique PeñalosaAn advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
Tilted Arc
An Artwork by Richard SerraIn the 1980s, Serra found himself in the center of a public controversy over his piece titled Tilted Arc. While it was the government that approached him to create the work for downtown Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, the unveiling of the piece in 1981 was met with sharp criticism. The monumental sculpture was said to disrupt rush hour and the pedestrians who had to cut through the plaza daily. To the dismay of art lovers, the 120-foot-long, 12-foot-tall Tilted Arc was ultimately disassembled in 1989.
Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
Towers in the Village
An Essay by Alfred TwuSince tall buildings have been around, there have been many ways they’ve fit into cities: towers in downtown, towers in the park, and most recently, towers on a whole-block development. Let’s look at a 4th way, the Tower in the Village.
Unlike the others, the Tower in the Village does not aim to be the center of attention. Instead, the upper floors are hidden behind a low front that fits in with the rest of the block. It faces a village green instead of a busy road.
Why highrise infill? Growing cities have two choices: 1) Redevelop a lot of sites to medium density, or 2) Redevelop a small number of sites to very high density. Highrise infill requires less demolition and can get more homes built faster.
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities
An Article by Matt WebbGiven there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?
Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but
neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.
The 99% Invisible City
A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt KohlstedtProposal to renovate a housing complex
A PhotographSimone and Lucien Kroll. Gennevilliers, France, 1990.
Cities and Ambition
An Essay by Paul GrahamCityspace series
A Gallery by Emily GarfieldPrimary series for imaginary map drawings, spanning 2008-present and using various materials and techniques.
Psychogeography
A Definition by Guy DebordPsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as:
- "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
- "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life."
- "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."
Title Cities
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxA book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.
Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.
Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.
Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42º N Latitude
A Book by Michael SorkinLocal Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design & The Nature of Cities
A Book by Nicholas de MonchauxLocal Code’s data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. The natures of these found parcels is as particular as the cities that house them — land under billboards in Los Angeles, dead-end alleys in San Francisco, city-owned vacant lots in New York City, and abandoned islands in the Venetian lagoon — but have in common an unrecognized potential as a social and ecological resource.
Urban Street Network Orientation
An Article by Geoff BoeingThis study measures the entropy (or disordered-ness) of street bearings in each street network, along with each city’s typical street segment length, average circuity, average node degree, and the network’s proportions of four-way intersections and dead-ends. It also develops a new indicator of orientation-order that quantifies how a city’s street network follows the geometric ordering logic of a single grid. These indicators, taken in concert, reveal the extent and nuance of the grid.
New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future
A Book by Tigran HaasAll the buildings in New York (that I've drawn so far)
The Design of Design
What's Wrong With This Model?
A ChapterDesign process models: A summary argument
- A formal design process model is needed, to help organize design work, to aid communication in and about projects, and for teaching.
- Having a visual, geometric representation of a design process model is crucial, for designers are spatial thinkers. They will most easily learn, think about, share, and talk in terms of a model with a clear geometric picture.
- The Rational Model of design occurs naturally to engineers.
- The linear, step-by-step Rational Model is highly misleading. It does not reflect what real designers do, or what the best design thinkers identify as the essence of the design process.
- The bad model matters. It has led to the too-early binding of requirements, leading in turn to bloated products and schedule/budget/performance disasters.
- The Rational Model has persisted in practice despite its inadequacies and plenty of cogent critiques. This is because of its seductive logical simplicity, and because builders and clients needs “contracts."
- Several alternative models have been proposed. I find Boehm’s Spiral Model the most promising. We need to keep developing it.
The spiral model
The spiral shape certainly suggests progress. It associates successive repetitions of the same activity. The geometric shape is easily understood and memorable. The model emphasizes prototyping, starting with user-interface prototypes and user testing long before an operational prototype is possible.
Since a development model is principally used by developers, I believe having it designer-centered is entirely appropriate. With Boehm and against Denning and Dragon, I advocate frequent but not continuous interaction with representative users, with successive prototypes as the vehicles.
I strongly believe that way forward is to embrace and develop the Spiral Model.
A grossly obese set of requirements
Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, it’s robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts. For in a classical Waterfall Model product process, requirements are set before design is begun.
The result, of course, is a grossly obese set of requirements, the union of many wish lists, assembled without constraints. Usually, the list is neither prioritized nor weighted. The social forces in the committee forbid the painful conflicts occasioned by even weighting, much less prioritizing.
Requirements proliferation
Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays. — Pahl and Beitz, Engineering Design
As Project Manager, I had to reject the requirements document as totally impractical, and have a quite small team of architects, marketers, and implementers extract the essence.
Requirements proliferation must be fought, by both birth control and infanticide.
The architectural contracting model
It is the necessity for contracts, whether within an organization or between organizations, that forces the too-early binding of goals, requirements, constraints. The pressure for a complete and agreed-upon set of requirements run into the hard fact, that it is essentially impossible to specify any complete and accurate set of requirements for any complex system except in iterative interaction with the design process.
How have the centuries-old building design disciplines handled this perplexity? Fundamentally, by a quite different contracting model.
- The client develops a program, not a specification, for the building.
- He contracts with an architect, usually on an hourly or percentage basis, for services, not for a specified product.
- The architect elicits from the client, the users, and other stakeholders a more complete program, which does not pretend to be a rigid contractable product specification.
- The architect does a conceptual design that approximates the reconciliation of program and the constraints of budget, schedule, and code. This serves as a first prototype, to be conceptually tested by the stakeholders.
- After iteration, the architect performs design development, often producing more detailed drawings, a 3-D scale model, mockups, and so on. After stakeholder iteration, the architect produces construction drawings and specifications.
- The client uses these drawings and specifications to enter into a fixed-price contract for the product.
Notice how this long-evolved model separates the contract for design from the contract for construction. Even when both are performed by the same organization, this separation clarifies many things.
The rational model of design
Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it.
The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community.
Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI.
In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design.
Design process models
Any systematization of the design process is a great step forward compared to "Let's just start coding, or building." It:
- Provides clear steps for planning a design project
- Furnishes clearly definable milestones
- Suggests project organization and staffing
- Helps communication within the design team
- Is readily teachable to novices, and tells novices facing their first design assignments where to begin.
The Rational Model in particular brings yet more advantages. The early explicit statement of goals, secondary desiderata, and constraints helps a team avoid wandering, and it breeds team unification on purposes. Planning the whole design process before starting coding or formal drawings avoids many troubles and much wasted effort. Casting the process as a systematic search of a design space broadens the horizon of the individual designers and lifts their eyes far beyond their previous personal experiences.
But the rational model is much too simplistic, even in Simon's richly developed version.
The dual ladder
The first task for growing designers, as opposed to managers, is to craft a proper career path for them, one whose compensation and sociological status reflect their true value to the creative enterprise. This is commonly called the dual ladder. It it easy to give corresponding salaries to corresponding rungs, but it requires strong proactive measures to give them equal prestige: equal offices, equal staff support, reverse-biased raises when duties change.
Why does the dual ladder need special attention? Perhaps because managers, being human, are inherently inclined to consider their own tasks more difficult and important than design and need to deliberately assess what makes creativity and innovation happen.
A platonic ideal
As the architecture design progressed, I observed what at first seemed quite strange. For the architecture team, the real System/360 was the Design Concept itself, a Platonic ideal computer. Those physical and electrical Model 50, Model 60, Model 70, and Model 90 things under construction out on the engineering floors were but Plato’s shadows of the real System/360. The real System/360’s most complete and faithful embodiment was not in silicon, copper, and steel, but in the prose and diagrams of IBM System/360 Principles of Operation, the programmer’s machine language manual.
I had a similar experience with the View/360 beach house. Its Design Concept came to be real long before any construction began. It persisted through many versions of drawings and cardboard models.
The design concept
Is there positive value to recognizing an invisible Design Concept as a real entity in design conversations? I think so.
First, great designs have conceptual integrity—unity, economy, clarity. They not only work, they delight, as Vitruvius first articulated. We use terms such as elegant, clean, beautiful to talk about bridges, sonatas, circuits, bicycles, computers, and iPhones. Recognizing the Design Concept as an entity helps us to seek its integrity in our own solo designs, to work together for it in team designs, and to teach it to our youth.
Second, talking frequently about the Design Concept as such vastly aids communication within a design team. Unity of concept is the goal; it is achieved only by much conversation.
Thus, moviemakers use storyboards to keep their design conversations focused on the Design Concept, rather than on implementation details.
The Idea
The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.
For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.
The boldest decisions
In retrospect, many of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.
Intuition and systems
Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies. How to weld intuition and systematic approach? How to grow as a designer? How to function in a design team?