Part II

• the origins of modern planning• Frederick Law Olmsted in NY and Chicago• Haussmann in Paris

• a case study of modern planning: NYC

• the New Urbanism

• "the smart code"

• Seaside, Florida

Urban planning An essentially modern

discipline.

Considering various needs and activities and organizing them into thoughtful, pleasing shape.• services• circulation• structures• open space

The application of design principles to the city space.

The city—a complex, lively and changing space—laid out on a two-dimensionalsheet of paper.

Central Park, Frederick Law OLMSTED and Calvert VAUX, 1858, completed 1873

aerial photograph, Manhattan, NYC

Chicago Parks

The west park system of Chicago was established in 1869.

Douglas, Garfield, and Humboldt parks and their connecting boulevards were laid out by architect William LeBaron Jenney in 1871.

At Garfield, originally known as Central Park, Jenney’s plan was built-out slowly over the next three decades:

• east lagoon, • suspension bridge• small conservatory• Victorian bandstand• horse racing track

William LeBaron JENNEY, Garfield Park Suspension Bridge

William LeBaron JENNEY, Humboldt Park, 1870-1906

William LeBaron JENNEY, Humboldt Park, 1870-1906

Paris

Paris, before urban planning

Charles MARVILLE,Rue des Trois Canettes1865-8

"medieval" Paris

streets are:

• narrow and winding• doesn't permit traffic • doesn't permit troop movement• easily barricaded

• paved with cobblestones

• open sewer• unsanitary• unhealthy

• poor inhabitants not necessarily friendly to Napoleon III

from Le Vieux Paris by Louis Blanc in Paris-guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, Librairie Internationale, 1867.

“The time has come to clean up the insalubrious streets and create more wide-open spaces! The time has come to let the sun stream into the shady districts, to give Paris the lungs to breathe as it should; not for reasons of trend or fashion, but for the sake of hygiene and progress! Yet wherever the interests of public health, wherever the inevitable growth of civilization do not require Parisian dignitaries to display their relentless determination, mercy for the old streets of Paris! Mercy for the visible vestiges of the past that the present is so intent on destroying in every way...! Mercy! If only for a few warts and stains beloved of Montaigne!”

Under Napoleon III

• Haussmann undertook what many consider the first modern urban works project, demolishing many existing neighborhoods to make way for grand boulevards and parks.

• He installed a sewer system.

• Gas lighting was placed in major public places.

• He hired photographers to document the medieval streets he was plowing under.

Charles Marville

In 1862 Marville became the official photographer for the city of Paris.

His job: to document the city, both the quarters marked for destruction and the grand boulevards that replaced them.

Although his charge was to show that the existing urban fabric was "not worth saving," many drew the opposite conclusion from the archive he created.

The entire body of his work burned in the destruction of the Hôtel de Ville during the Commune. Fortunately Marville had carefully stored his negatives and was able to replace the prints.

Charles Marville,Rue Maître Albert,Paris, 1852

Charles Marville,Passage du Dragon,Paris, 1858

Camille PISSARRO, Boulevard Montmartre, 1897, 29.1 × 36.5 in

Gustave CAILLEBOTTE, Traffic Island in the Boulevard Haussmann

Charles Garnier, Paris Opera, built from 1860 to 1875

Marville, L’Avenue de l’Opera

razing the Butte des Moulins during construction of the Paris Opera house

Camille Pissarro, Avenue de L’Opera, 1898

grand cultural institutions, then and now

Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

Unidentified photographer [Barricade on Rue de la Roquette, Paris] 18 March 1871, Cabinet card 

Unidentified photographer[Barricades during the Paris Commune] 1871  © Det Kongelige Bibliotek

Maximilien LUCE, A Street in Paris, May 1871, 1903-6, Musée d’Orsayoil on canvas, w2250 x h1510 cm, © RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

asphalt

most roads today are surfaced with asphalt (byproduct of crude oil processing). leftovers are made into asphalt cement for pavement.

1824 asphalt block first used on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

modern road asphalt used in Battery Park and on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1872 and on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., in 1877.

Vincent VAN GOGH, Outskirts of Paris near Montmartre, 1886

Urban planning, NY style

“I’d like to see the planner who can remove a ghetto without displacing some people, just like I’d like to see the chef who can make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”

—Robert Moses, New York City planner and nemesis of Jane Jacobs

“creative destruction”Joseph Schumpeter

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

Robert Moses,with the map ofthe Five Boroughsof New York Citybehind him

Robert Moses (1888-1981)• a variety of unelected roles in New York State and

New York City

• built parkways, beaches and bridges in and around New York in the 1930s, using New Deal funds

• postwar period, attention turned to expressways; he built a number of them but failed to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway

Moses projects

• parkways: Northern State, Southern State, Wantaugh Parkway, Meadowbrook Parkway

• beaches: Jones Beach

• pools: throughout the five boroughs

• bridges: Triborough Bridge, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano–Narrows bridges.

• expressways: I-278 (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Staten Island Expressway), Cross-Bronx Expressway,

• developed Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, and contributed to the United Nations headquarters.

Jones Beach seen from Wantaugh Parkway

“When I first looked at this project, I thought, "How the hell are we going to get across here?" It was probably one of the most challenging highway projects that had been constructed, or even conceived, up until that time. I dare say that only a man like Mr. Moses would have the audacity to believe that one could push (the expressway) from one end of the Bronx to the other.“ —Ernest Clark, design team

The "Cross Bronx" Expressway

Moses vs. Jacobs

The Cross-Bronx Expressway, today

demolition for the creation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway

the FDR Drive, East River Expressway

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)Has become a touchstone for planners and architects associated with the New Urbanism.

Jacobs, p. 8

“Specifically, in the case of planning for cities, it is clear that a large number of good and earnest people do care deeply about building and renewing. Despite some corruption, and considerable greed for the other man's vineyard, the intentions going into the messes we make are, on the whole, exemplary.”

Jacobs, p. 8

“Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what the saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.”

Her proposal:

Let’s study healthy streets and blocks and develop a set of principles they

share in common.

We can use those principles to guide new development.

Where would you rather live? Why?

Congress for the New UrbanismFounded in 1993 by a group of architects looking to codify the thought behind their previous work in creating long-lasting and better-performing neighborhoods.

Founders were: Peter Calthorpe, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides and Dan Solomon.

Charter for the New Urbanism first published in 1999.

The revitalization of urban places depends on safety and security. The design of streets and buildings should reinforce safe environments, but not at the expense of accessibility and openness.

In the contemporary metropolis, development must adequately accommodate automobiles. It should do so in ways that respect the pedestrian and the form of public space.

the street, revisited

NYC bike path

reconfigured intersection, NYC

“Curbana” under construction, June 2014

Streets and squares should be safe, comfortable, and interesting to the pedestrian. Properly configured, they encourage walking and enable neighbors to know each other and protect their communities.

Union Square, NYC

Architecture and landscape design should grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.

Assembly Hall, Champaign, IL

Guggenheim Museum, NYC, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry

Civic buildings and public gathering places require important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy. They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.

Urbana Free Library

Champaign Public Library

Urbana High School (1914)

Carle Park, Urbana, ILwith bronze sculpture of Lincoln

What does this building "say" to students and teachers about their roleand value in the larger society?

All buildings should provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of location, weather and time. Natural methods of heating and cooling can be more resource-efficient than mechanical systems.

Preservation and renewal of historic buildings, districts, and landscapes affirm the continuity and evolution of urban society.

“Smart Code” Duany Plater-Zyberkoriginally introduced 2003

“Smart Code” v. 9.2

Consider the most-loved towns of North America. They were either carefully planned, or they evolved as compact, mixed use places because of their geography and the limits of the transportation and economics of their time.

However, over the past sixty years, places have evolved in a completely different pattern. They have spread loosely along highways and haphazardly across the country- side, enabled by the widespread ownership of automobiles, by cheap petroleum and cheap land, and by generalized wealth.

Such patterns are enabled by zoning codes that separate dwellings from work- places, shops, and schools. These codes include design standards that favor the automobile over the pedestrian, and are unable to resist the homogenizing effects of globalization.

These practices have produced banal housing subdivisions, business parks, strip shopping, big box stores, enormous parking lots, and sadly gutted downtowns. They have caused the proliferation of drive-by eateries and billboards. They have made walking or cycling dangerous or unpleasant. They have made children, the elderly, and the poor utterly dependent on those who can drive, even for ordinary daily needs. They have caused the simultaneous destruction of both towns and open space -- the 20th century phenomenon known as sprawl.

The form of our built environment needs a 21st century correction. But in most places it is actually illegal to build in a traditional neighborhood pattern. The existing codes prevent it. In most places people do not have a choice between sprawl and traditional urbanism. Codes favor sprawl and isolated residential sub- divisions. It is not a level playing field.

• The SmartCode was created to deal with this problem at the point of decisive impact -- the intersection of law and design. It is a form-based code, meaning it envisions and encourages a certain physical outcome -- the form of the region, community, block, and/or building. Form-based codes are fundamentally different from conventional codes that are based primarily on use and statistics -- none of which envision or require any particular physical outcome.

• The SmartCode is a tool that guides the form of the built environment in order to create and protect development patterns that are compact, walkable, and mixed use. These traditional neighborhood patterns tend to be stimulating, safe, and ecologically sustainable. The SmartCode requires a mix of uses within walking distance of dwellings, so residents aren’t forced to drive everywhere. It supports a connected network to relieve traffic congestion. At the same time, it preserves open lands, as it operates at the scale of the region as well as the community.

So, what does New Urbanism look like?

Seaside, FL 1985

In 1978 after Robert Davis inherited an 80 acre plot of land in the Florida Panhandle. Robert and his wife Daryl set out to build a “livable” resort town in the “Redneck Riviera” and create a haven for those who missed the communities that were developed when cars were not the dominant form of transportation.

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife team from the prestigious architectural firm Arquitectonica. (They later formed their own firm, DPZ.) The four of them, along with European classicist and town planner Léon Krier, set out to design "the kind of place that had been overlooked in contemporary American town planning. The kind of community we all wish we could be from."

Seaside, Florida, 1982, Robert Davis, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Note the golfcart.

The Truman Show (1998), dir. Peter Weir

Was filmed in Seaside, Florida,which the director felt perfectlyexpressed the set of realitytelevision show.