A Street by Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright has simultaneous reputations as perhaps the greatest architect the USA has ever produced and simultaneously its worst ever urban designer. American suburbia is often thought to be built at a density of about eight dwellings per acre. This can increase to about 20 acres per acre if a terraced-house (or row-house) typology is used. Frank Lloyd Wright, in his landmark urban design statement, Broadacre City, proposed that density should actually be set at one dwelling per acre. The disastrous effect this would have on walkable distances, mixture of uses and reduced car dependency can be imagined.

Imagine my surprise, therefore when I came across these buildings in Milwaukee, on my second visit to the USA. A cluster of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings built in close proximity, a street no less.

These buildings were commissioned in 1911 by Arthur Richards, a Milwaukee real estate developer, who developed, with Wright, an approach to housing known as the American System-Built Houses. The idea was to create housing off-site, prefabricated in factories, using timber-frame techniques, working to a two foot module. The house kit-of-parts could be delivered anywhere in the USA via  railroad. In reality, for various reasons, only twenty such homes were ever built.   

As an urbanist, Frank Lloyd Wright has been much mocked over the years. By way of  a corollary, the American academic Neil Levine has pointed out that Wright produced excellent designs for difficult very urban sites in cities as diverse as Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Madison and Baghdad.  

Still, who would have thought that Wright was capable of producing an urban design proposal as dense and sustainable as “the Street”?

Richard MacCormac: The City in Miniature

As a tribute to the late Richard MacCormac I thought I would post a few photos of his buildings in Oxford.

Jowett Walk, Balliol College. 

This is an example of his penchant for articulating a building as a series of towers.

The Garden Quadrangle, St John’s College.

This deeply historicist building was voted by the Oxford public as the best new building to be completed in Oxford in the last 75 years.

Kendrew Quadrangle, St John’s College.

An impeccably modernist building which reinterprets the quadrangle typology. It is a beautifully detailed building, mixing timber, steel and glass. It incorporates decoration distinctly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

I have to admit I am puzzled by Richard MacCormac’s nomination of Burrell’s Fields at Trinity College, Cambridge as his best project, a project I admittedly haven’t seen in the flesh. If I had to nominate my favourite  MacCormac project  I would probably choose   the Bowra building in Wadham College. This building introduced me to the idea that there was more to MaCormac in Oxford than the Sainsbury building at Worcester College.

The student rooms are distinctly articulated, either by L-shaped  plans  or bay windows into two zones. This meets the  dual purpose needs of these rooms: studies and bedrooms. They are expressed as a series of towers. Expressing such small rooms as individual towers conveys an impression like that of a metropolis. However, perhaps the most inspired space in this building, intriguingly lies at the heart of the structure.

What is this space? Is it an external corridor or an internal street? It is remarkable, the way in which something as simple as stairs  can express the edge condition of a building so forcefully.

This is an example of the building as city in miniature;  a concept many architects have aspired to but rarely achieved as successfully as here. It is indicative of the level of intelligence at which MacCormac practiced architecture. I suppose many gardeners have produced remarkable things but only a master can produce a bonsai.

It is always a little sad that when someone as rich as Lord Sainsbury wishes to gift a building to a university, he chooses somewhere already financially as well endowed as Oxford University. Wouldn’t be good if poorer universities were occasionally gifted outstanding buildings? Still, must focus on the bright side. Great architect and great guy.

Flickr Has Arrived

I have done what I have intended to do for some time; start uploading some of my large photo archive to Flickr.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit Copenhagen so this is my first set of photographs.

Cambridge’s Unique Green Belt

Cambridge has a unique green belt; unique in that it is actually embedded within the fabric of the city. It is possible ( well almost) to walk in a circular route through the city centre without straying from green land.

The sequence of spaces starts at the Fen’s Causeway which leads onto “The Backs”.

“The Backs” follow the route of the river Cam.

If you wish to vary this route, you can occasionally  venture into the city of Cambridge itself encountering streetscape of incredibly high quality.

The architecture and its detailing is  similarly astounding.

View from the Avenue, Trinity College.

St Giles Church at the intersection of Castle Street and Chesterton Lane.

Jesus Green.

Houses on Short Street.

Christ’s Pieces.

Parker’s Piece

Unlike Oxford, Cambridge’s  science park is not separated from the city by a strategic “green break”  but is located on the north of the city, within the boundary of the ring road.

It is perhaps for this reason that  a proposed satellite town, Northstowe, will be located five miles to the north-west  of Cambridge on a site between the villages of Oakington and Longstanton. This development is master-planned by Arups and it will be exciting to see how it turns out.

The British Garden City Movement: Hampstead Garden Suburb

When trying to describe a specifically British type of urban design, some people fall into the error of recommending the British Garden City Movement justifying their argument on the reason that suburbia, they say,  is basically what British people want. The British Garden City Movement was one of the most remarkable urban design movements this country has ever produced. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with suburbia.

In order to justify that statement, I have chosen to look at an example of the Garden City Movement from 1909, Hampstead Garden Suburb. It is true that the typology of the house with garden is still relevant. However, I would argue that there at least three basic ideas that distinguish a Garden City from conventional suburbia:

Firstly, although both contain houses with gardens, A Garden City will also contain places for work, education, worship, shopping etc. In short, although a Garden City will try to create quieter, residential areas, it will also try to embrace the principle of mixed-use. It is worth remembering that the Garden City movement took place at time before mass-car ownership ( although it did take place during the age of the railways; all of the original garden cities have railway stations at the centre i.e. Letchworth, Welwyn, Hampstead and Bedford Park.) Modern development which includes out-of-town shopping centres plus suburbia cannot be considered an equivalent because a genuine garden city would contain shops within walking distances of residential buildings.

Secondly, in order to maintain a balance between built-up space and green space, a balance vital for health  and happiness,  a Garden City can only be allowed to reach a certain size, at which point a new Garden City must be started elsewhere. The ideal size  is based on a module of a neighbourhood or pedestrian-shed. One such module is a village really; how many such modules can be allowed to accumulate before a new city must be founded? Ebenezaar Howard  considered that the population of a garden city should be 32,000. According to the Rogers-led Urban Task Force the number of people necessary to support a hub of local services is 7500. So according to Ebenezar Howard’s approach, a garden city will contain about 4 neighbourhoods or pedestrian sheds. The illustrations to “Garden Cities of tomorrow”  don’t seem to bear this out but these  were only meant to be diagramatic.

The third principle is green belts, which define the edge of the city, maintaining a proper relationship between town and country. Strong planning controls would be necessary to prevent people building on them. Ebenezer Howard’s original proposals  allowed various activities on the green belt such as convalescent homes and agriculture; he envisaged them as growing their own food. A public transport infrastructure was provided though these were the days before mass car ownership and its attendant congestion had become a real problem.

This vision was realised at Hampstead Garden Suburb and indeed a host of other lessons can be drawn from this example as well. If one was going to learn lessons from this, one might as well be honest and admit that the some of the original principals have  been eradicated. Features such as a green belt and finite size were part of the original design but  are no longer there. The relentless growth of London meant this satellite was absorbed into Greater London.

One key  quality has been conspicuously retained, that of a mixed-use neighbourhood. Within a walkable-scaled area you will find housing, shopping, education and places of worship. What other qualities have been achieved? As a way of answering that question, perhaps the best method would be to walk the reader through a sequence of spaces, starting with what was conceived as the gateway to the entire project, the following buildings at the North of the site, at the junction of Finchley Road and Bridge Lane/ Temple Fortune Lane.

One of the eternal rules of good urban design seems to be that density can be increased where there is access to good public transport. Strangely, this rule is broken here. The high density part of the development is placed at the opposite end to that where the tube station is, Golders Green tube station.  These buildings are consciously modelled on medieval examples but can be seen as exemplars of what is now taken as a commonplace of good urban design; mixed-use. These buildings contain shops at ground floor and flats above. One might contrast this with single storey shopping buildings, without a different use above, which might be taken as a leitmotiv of bad urban design. As well as a failure to adopt the mixed-use approach, another fault of this type of building is the lack of height and hence a failure to create a sense of enclosure in the external spaces.

Several types of external space have been created. The first might be taken as a busy road with activities for pedestrians at the bases of the buildings.

Quieter residential streets have been created.

One of the great types of space created in this example of the Garden City Movement, and indeed in most of them is the green set in the close. Here they vary:

From closes surrounded by large detached houses.

To those enclosed by smaller, it would seem terraced houses.

This type of housing is also found at the Central Square which forms the centre of the whole community. 

The main public  buildings here  are by Lutyens. Whilst many agree that neighbourhoods need a centre, opinions differ as to what this should consist of. Whilst some would like to see all types of communal buildings at the neighbourhood centre, others take a  different view. Some take the view that whilst communal buildings such as schools should be placed at the centre, shops should be placed on  arterial road on the neighbourhood periphery, where they can attract passing traffic. This does seem to be the approach taken at Hampstead where Henrietta Barnet, the client for the whole project,  took many of the strategic decisions. With true Victorian zeal, believed that alcoholic drinks were a form of wickedness. She would not allow pubs or even shops around the main town square. The result is  a square occupied by two churches and the Henrietta Barnett School for Girls.

This has recently been subject to an interesting extension by  Hopkins Architects.

Streets are aligned to frame the views of the main public buildings

Hampstead garden Suburb has lost its character as a village separate from London though part of its green belt was preserved as an extension to Hampstead Heath. It remains as  a good example of a neighbourhood. I would argue the generic neighbourhood has four qualities: mixed-use, pedestrian scale, access to public transport and public spaces of real quality. Hampstead Garden Suburb has these in spades.

( Thanks to HGS Trust for the map of Hampstead Garden Suburb and Simon Kennedy, architecturalphotographer, for the photo of the extension to Henrietta Barnett School © Simon Kennedy 2011).

Fleet, Hampshire and Charleston, South Carolina, USA

What have these two places got in common, you may ask?

One is a good example  of a street which acts as a people orientated space; in the other such spaces are all too rare. However, moves are being made to create that sort of space.

The centre of Fleet is dominated by its vast “High Street,” Fleet Road, which  stretches approximately 1 km from Fleet Railway Station towards Church Crookham. Along that entire distance, buildings are brought up to back of pavement. No one has to walk from the pavement, across a vast  car park to get to a building. 

 When car-based urban design began to take hold, many developers began to demand enormous car-parking spaces at the front of their buildings. These might have attracted passing motorists but essentially destroyed the street as an urban space. The plan below  showing  the centre of Fleet is instructive. The space of Fleet Road is defined by shopping. Car parks are provided but they are set back from the shopping street. Passageways connect the shopping to the car parks, ensuring the latter are visually repressed.

In recent decades, urban design has seemed focused on creating spaces entirely for cars not people. This is as true of Britain as it is in the USA. My last two images are from the City of Charleston, South Carolina where car based urbanism has produced what can only be described as wastelands, spaces devoid of any human or aesthetic quality.

 

This is what is  proposed as a replacement. Streets, framed by the architecture which surrounds them. As the plan in this example seems to indicate, the car parks, an inevitable accompaniment to any retail development , are tucked away to avoid visual  disruption. There also seems to be some housing, in walking distance of the shops. It  is implied that the site of the second series of photos is show in the first set  i.e. they are remodelling the spaces.

If the British Public demanded from their retailers high quality urban design instead of simply convenient car parking, then the quality of British urban design might improve.

Ask yourself what British spaces resemble the first  set of example from  Charleston, South Carolina. Then ask yourself why more spaces cannot be remodelled to resemble the second.