MOD 6

I am fascinated by the way cities evolve and grow.  I really enjoyed the lecture that delved into the positive growth patterns cities can take.  I am, however; constantly surprised by the poor choices made by cities or the delay it takes to begin implementing smarter growth techniques.  Creating transit along with a city as it grows seems like common sense yet few cities actually take that initiative.  Seattle, for example, has been fighting to create a efficient rapid transit system.  Recently they have been making strides catching up to cities like Portland and San Francisco.  The effects of good public transit are incredible.  Portland is one of the easiest cities to navigate, in large part due to its transit systems.  The entire city is accessible; not just the downtown.  

The traditional neighborhood design is very familiar to me as Moscow is a smaller scale version of this.  When Main Street was redesigned to allow for more pedestrian traffic it became the spine of the city.  Main street is home to local businesses and residences above the street level.  The surrounding areas are the more traditional one and two family homes with some smaller apartment buildings.  It is actually an amazing example of urbanism on an extremely small scale.

I think what excited me the most about urban growth moving forward were the ad hoc approach to design.  Communities taking it into their own hands to change their built environment.  It is important that these instances spread; the more people care about and understand the effects of their environment the richer the environment becomes.  I was reminded of the work of Tom Rankin with Tevereterno.  

Their goal is to bring life back to the Tiber river in Rome through temporary installations.  They have been doings so by creating a Piazza along the Tiber between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini.  One of the works that reminded me of both the Slow City and Urban Instillation was their project in 2010 called "Chance Encounters."  They placed 100 of red chairs in Piazza Tevere along the west side.  The chairs were not bolted down so users could arrange them in whatever configurations they wanted.  This small intervention allowed the space to be populated and for users to make it what they wanted it to be.   



Simple interventions call people to them as they open their eyes to the possibility of what a space can be.  The chair intervention lasted only a few days but it allowed the citizens of Rome to see what could be done along the Tiber; rather than leaving it abandoned and wasted.  That is the trick with great urban design interventions; taking under-utilized spaces in the midst of urban fabric and repairing them.  Bringing the life of a city to all corners of a city.  The power of mobilizing a community is undeniable.  If we as designers can inspire the greater population to take part in bettering their built environment our mission to create great urban spaces becomes achievable.

MOD 5

While not glamorous or exciting codes rule our profession.  There are book and books filled with rules guiding how we are allowed to design and build.  Often times in academia codes are seen as restrictions that hinder our designs but in reality they enforce a standard in our built environment.  Ideally codes would help keep the standard of building high while allowing creative designers to create good and interesting architecture.  This does sometimes occur and in many more cases codes and regulations enforce good urban design.

My personal favorite regulation/code is the Urban Growth Boundary which is famously employed by Portland.  This boundary helps to increase and maintain the density of downtown Portland.  The boundary line is drawn around downtown and requires that the area inside be densely developed before the boundary is made larger.  This simple regulation has helped to maintain the dense and walkable downtown and reduced parking which has promoted mass transit options.  This code does have restrictions but it's implications are immensely beneficial for the urban design of the city.

I am extremely interested in the sector of urban design and was very interested in the different styles of urban design explained in the lecture.  One of the examples I found interesting was the all-of-a-piece design.  This style seems to be fairly common as it is easier to achieve that a total design and is more flexible.  I have heard of Celebration before and was off put the first time I learned about it.



Perfectly matching homes and civic buildings all lining winding roads.  It creates a town with a cohesive visual style and makes an impact with a strong sense of place.  It also limits the freedom of those living in the community.  Home owners are part of very strict HOA's requiring all homes to be at the same standard and visual appeal.  Like Seaside, also in Florida, I see Celebration as a failure.  It seeks to emulate historically great urban design that was developed piece-by-piece but has not achieved the actual benefit of the urban design.  These designs fail to recognize the beauty of great urban design comes from the rich interaction and alterations that occur when citizens take control of their environment and adapt it to their needs.  These adaptations alter the "master plan" but create more human and personal spaces that people crave.

Mod 4

What struck me most about the lecture this week was the section focused on visual storytelling and thinking.  It is extremely important for designers to be able to effectively communicate graphically.  Throughout my classes I have seen this aspect of projects fall to the wayside; it's strange but the importance of clear visual communication is overlooked.  Great designs can shine through bad graphics but that forces the viewer to be educated in design rather than being able to see a great design framed in great graphics.  Good visuals create a democratic viewing experiences that allows for everyone to understand a project regardless of their education in design.  

The focus on Rem Koolhaas' use of graphics to tell the story of his designs was especially effective.  The Parc de la Villete design from OMA is so geometric and graphic in it's own right and in order to properly convey the intent of the design there was a huge responsibility to create graphics that could easily translate this complicated design to the masses.  In order to reach the client or average viewer who is not as educated about our respective fields we need to give them the clearest picture about what the design is.  

I especially liked the lecture's example of using before and after photos.  We are constantly bombarded with before and after photos promising a complete transformation; they are extremely effective at selling an idea.  These sorts of selling points can be dangerous however.  I have seen  it happen a lot in smaller cities like Moscow where there is a beautiful and populated after photo but it doesn't actually convey what can be built on budget.  Most recently the Gritman Medical Center and released a rendering of it's newest building; which is a steel box with stucco and brick plastered on, street trees lined the lot with families walking by.  It fails to recognize that there are no plans for street trees and the lot lined by the highway making it extremely unwalkable.  It sells a false idea.

The other aspect of graphics, aside from conveying designa and intent, is translating data into graphics.  Infographics have become extremely popular as a tool to quickly convey complicated information and data.  

MOD 3

In the lectures and readings this week there was a heavy focus on the understanding and benefits of  city.  One of the key figures in this area being Jane Jacobs.  While she never studied urban planning or architecture she did study people.  Jacobs was able to key into how the built environment affects people and the importance of creating and maintaining neighborhoods.  Jacobs raised awareness of these vital elements of urban design which were ignored by so many in the planning profession.  It is astonding to me that urban design wasn't considered in this high of regard until Jacobs, among others, brought it to light.  It is something that I think permeates into today's urban landscape immensely.  The importance of walkability and neighborhoods becoming more prominent with young professionals moving back to the city.   We are returning to the desire for great, rich urban design and we need to look to the work of Jacobs, Lynch and Alexander to push our urban city-scapes further.

With the lectures this week I couldn't help but tie together the work of Roland Barthes with Kevin Lynch and Christopher Alexander.  Lynch and Alexander both create a sort of system to understanding and creating built environments.  Alexander's most prominent work being Pattern Language; really delves into what individual elements create positive urban space, how they should be used and what makes them successful.  Whereas Lynch's work is about understanding a built environment and recognizing its key signifiers as a way of being able to "read" the city.  Barthes thoughts on language and the relationship of signs and signifiers is so easily translated to Lynch and Alexander's work.  The moment you begin to study the signs and elements of a city you can be dropped into a built environment and be able to “read” it.  Utilizing the elements identified of Lynch any city can be broken down and understood as a language.

From the lecture I become fascinated with Willian Whyte.  His work with The Street Life project investigated the dynamics of urbans spaces.  At the time he was working there had not been a great deal of study of modern urbans spaces in America.  Whyte took to New York to conduct his study of parks, plazas, and other informal gathering spaces; resulting in 16 plazas, 3 small parks and “a number of odds and ends.” 

Whyte was able to use his research to analyze why some spaces work and others don’t and what the implications of those differences were of the happiness of everyday life in a city.  Whyte was able to create a sort of “pattern language” for public spaces in the same way Alexander did for buildings.  I find this exploration so interesting because all too often in architecture site design isn’t designed.  It is an afterthought that is assumed to be populated rather than designed to encourage public use and gathering.  The plaza in front of the Seagram building is perfect evidence of this.  Its original design was a massive void separating the building from the street.  Its unrelenting exposure drove people away from it and it became barren.  After several iterations of designs it became obvious that part of the problem was a lack of attention to the relationship between the plaza and its host building.  It is so crucial that we as designers consider how every part of our site is being used and how it is affecting the larger whole of the urban fabric.

Module 2

It is difficult to say which approach to urban design is best between the three theories put forth in the lecture.  However I have a moral opposition to the Garden City movement and what it spawned in the form of suburbs.  The idea of having a semi-urban space in conjunction with semi-countryside green space is greedy.  Modern suburbs are rooted in garden cities, wanting to have your own plot of land and a family home.  Unfortunately suburbs have run rampant and destroyed thousands of acres of land which would take decades to return to land that can be farmed if we ever did try to reclaim it.  The desire for the American dream has destroyed land and promoted the car over the pedestrian.  

Modern environment design, however; has moved passed the garden city and focuses on actually helping cities grow more sustainably.  Recently cities have been bringing more green space into the city and trying to reestablish themselves as places where one can easily live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.  London, for example, has taken huge steps in making it a sustainable city; bringing in bike sharing programs, increasing the amount of green space, aiming to be the first ultra-low emissions city, etc. 

What really intrigued me from the beginning of this module was the lecture focusing on Urban Design Theories and Philosophy.  Architects are responsible for essentially designing the world we live in.  It is incredibly important that they understand the weight of that and have an understanding of how they can create better lives through the built environment.  I have always thought that all architects and even civil engineers should be required to take philosophy courses about place and the affect of the urban.

Bringing semiotics into urban design has always made complete sense to me.  While generally applied to language semiotics can have a huge impact on architecture.  Roland Barthes, who is well known for his study of semiotics, wrote extensively on how semiotics could be applied to other field including architecture.  In Semiology and the Urban Barthes explores how the city works as a language and how we speak the language of our city by living in it.  

“The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.” (Barthes, Semiology and the Urban).

When people truly embrace their city they are becoming readers of the city.  They learn how the grammar of the city works by learning all the smallest details.  To me good urban design encourages this sort of intense study of a city.  

Urban designers have to be aware of the language they are using when they design, how it fits into the context of what is existing and how their language will impact the way the city is read.  Every part of architecture; program, material, scale, has connotations ingrained in them and need to be chosen as carefully as every word of a novel.  

Just as with semiotics I don't think there can be an absolute when it comes to the rules of design.  No two cities work in the same way or have the same environment to react to.  You can't treat Rome the same way as Los Angeles.  All cities are unique and have a different life to them that cannot be predicted or forced into cooperation.  When you try to solve all problems with the same answer you end up with a much bigger problem.  Each city, every urban design has to be evaluated and approached in a unique way.  

Module 1

     My interest in urban design and theory comes from experiencing poor urban planning.  Urban planning lacks the finesse and structure of urban design.  Urban design is created in the intimate spaces every person experiences and the fabric that connects the city as a whole not from singular moments of design.  The importance of urban design has been on the rise in recent years as the focus of cities has shifted from the automobile onto pedestrians.  

     

     With the rise of sustainability and eco-friendly lifestyles more and more households are driving less and looking to alternative methods of transportation such as cycling, and mass transit.  This shift in values drastically changes the way cities are designed.  Instead of designing at the car scale things are shifting down to the human scale.  This allows for many of the traditional urban theory values of Jane Jacobs, David Lynch and Jeff Speck to be highlighted. 

     One city that highlights the changing urban landscape is London.  Under the leadership of mayor Boris Johnson London has gone through an environmental evolution.  Johnson's plan for London has included; taking small oddly shaped lots and turning them into pocket parks, encouraging more walking and cycling through the addition of more street trees, bike lanes and bike share systems.

      I have studied London for both Urban Theory and my Thesis Seminar and I view London as a prime example of urban design.  There are several major plazas that act as centers for urban life.  It has a medieval street grid at it's center running along the Thames allowing for easy wayfinding and walkability.  It is amazing to see such a historic city still on the forefront of design.  Their push to become more sustainable also provides a precedent for all other cities in the world.  

My study of London has been used to serve my own thesis project.  My thesis project is based in Pittsburgh, PA and involved the master planning of a lot which has been vacant since the demolition of a civic arena in 2012.

My strategy for the master plan was using the existing street grids surrounding my site and allowing them to overlap and collide on my site.  The site is located on the triangular peninsula of Pittsburgh just East of central Downtown and west of residential neighborhoods.  The plan breaks down the massive site into a grid that is similar to the residential grid.  I placed five nodes throughout the site one of which become a central park.  The competing grids converge around this central node/park.  The remaining four nodes are planned to be either areas in which circulation is slowed to allow for more pedestrian friendly areas, or where there will be a landmark public space.  

It has been extremely informative working at this massive scale before moving to the typical building scale.  It is easy to define architecture at the building scale and assuming that urban planning is a separate field due to its scale alone.  However urban design and architecture should always be thought of together.  Architecture without consideration for its urban fabric is irresponsible. Urban design has to be just that, design.  In my thesis I am hoping to allow the master plan to evolve as my building finds it's form and to allow the master plan to impact my own design.  

ABOUT ME

I graduated with my B.S. last spring at the University of Idaho and am currently in my last semester of my M.ARCH.  I am incredibly fascinated with urban theory and design.  Every chance I have to learn more about it I take; which is why I am in this class.  This semester I am also working on my thesis project which is an urban infill in Pittsburgh that is also focusing on economic development and am in the Furniture Construction class where I will be designing and building a chair.  I am really excited to work at such vastly different scales between all my classes from city scale down to the intimately human scale.

This year I am also the AIAS president for the UI chapter which has taught me a lot and allowed me to create new connections within the university and with firms.  I am beginning my job search for after I graduate, primarily looking in the Northwest.  At this point I want to work at a larger firm which will support me in getting my license and has a diversity in project types.  Immediately after I graduate I am planning to go to the UK as send off to college before I head into the work force.

CONTACT
Adriana De Giuli
degi0088@vandals.uidaho.edu