more press

FIU Magazine published a really nice article on tin box, including our critique of the project. In a nutshell, we don't think freestanding single-family houses are the best use for land, and we strongly advocate denser development. Great thanks to FIU Magazine for letting us get the word out.

And thanks, too, to Inspicio, which published our short pecha kucka presentation about the house over the summer.

detroit

Detroit has become a metonym for “urban decay,” a pejorative term that misleadingly implies that cities are primarily responsible for their own decline. As Detroit’s manufacturing economy has relocated (first to other states, then overseas) and its population has shrunk by half, the city fabric has suffered from neglect, abandonment, arson and poor redevelopment decisions. Meadows and parking lots have replaced too many buildings, leaving the city fabric as a patchwork quilt with pockets of vitality isolated by vast swaths of open space. So why is Detroit such a wonderful city?

day job, ultra grateful edition

I just got back from the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Detroit, where I had the extraordinarily great fortune to receive the society's Founders' Award. The award recognizes an article published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, which, in this case, was the essay I wrote on Italian colonial urban planning in Ethiopia. It was really humbling to listen to Marta Gutman, the jury chair, read the citation and realize that so many of the people in the room had taken the time to mentor, guide or nudge me in some important way over the last fifteen years. For someone who still sees himself as an architect learning how to write, and to think like a historian, the society's recognition means a lot.

The collegiality of the community of scholars is amazing, and also bears mentioning. Discourse, collaboration, mentorship and service are all essential parts of what drives the production of knowledge. It's a privilege to be a part of this world.

Boston

Flying home from a few days in Boston for the centennial ACSA Annual Meeting offers a chance to reflect on architecture and education. Boston is where Holly and I started studying architecture (at the Boston Architectural Center) and it’s clear that the city itself remains one of the most influential components of our intellectual formation. How so?

progress

The shell of the house is nearing completion. We needed to have several exterior wall panels remade, and they are being installed this week. The windows and doors should start going in Monday, and some bathroom fixture might start going in Tuesday.

In the meantime, here are some progress photos of the house. The view of the house from the park gives you a sense of how the color and scale of the building work with the vegetation and topography. This week's rain made the park especially lush (note the thick carpet of resurrection ferns on the limbs of the live oak to the right). We're eager to see the effect of planting the low roofs of the house with flowering plants and vines, though that part of the project will have to wait for at least a year.

We're also psyched about the transparency of the living/dining room. In this photo, you can see through that wing of the house, into the courtyard. And the courtyard is looking good, too...

day job, peer-reviewed edition

By sheer coincidence, two scholarly articles of mine are appearing in print at the same time. One is excerpted from a chapter on Italian fascist-era urban design in my forthcoming book, and is published in the January issue of Planning Perspectives. The other is an essay on urban design in Italy's East African colonies, which came out in the December issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. It's a real honor to print work in two journals I respect profoundly.

Above, an image of the Esposizione Universale di Roma from the exhibition "Metropole/Colony," which I'm curating with Jon Mogul of the Wolfsonian. It will open in the Wolfsonian's teaching gallery at the Frost Museum on FIU's main campus next month.

day job, Casablanca edition

I spent last week at the 5th African Perspectives Conference in Casablanca. The conference organizers included ArchiAfrika, whose 2007 conference in Kumasi, Ghana, gave me my first opportunity to discuss Italian colonial architecture and urbanism in a public forum. This conference focused on the issues confronting African mega-cities, which isn't yet a part of my research. However, I was able to present a poster outlining my ongoing work in the Horn of Africa (and which I've expanded into a forthcoming article), and I was honored to be invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on education (my presentation is linked here).

more bike lanes

bike lane, SW 72nd Street

Three reasons automobile drivers should love dedicated bicycle lanes:

bike lanes

Props to our local governments – the City of South Miami and Miami-Dade County – for continuing to build bike lanes and better sidewalks in the community. We have a long way to go, but the county’s efforts to provide bike lanes, shade and better pedestrian crossings are gradually improving our streetscape.

The recent improvements to 62nd Avenue are – hopefully – a harbinger of a better interventions to come. They show a good grasp of some important urban design practices:

look both ways

One reason Florida leads the nation in pedestrian fatalities may be our poorly designed roads. But the streets don't (fail to) work in isolation. This photo shows a planted median between a Dadeland office building and the parking lot that serves it. The problem stems from the building's relationship to its site. The building is symmetrical, with a central entry leading out to the sidewalk, even though everyone exiting that door needs to walk to the corner to cross the street. The building's entry sequence simply doesn't take the connection to the parking lot into account, and as a result, people were crossing the street in mid-block, right in front of the entry.

Medians with plantings like this are popping up all over South Florida. They frequently use dense hedges as a kind of green fencing, which is a decent way to discourage people from jaywalking on roads like US 1. The palm trees are a real missed opportunity, though. As friend of tin box Gray Read points out, palms provide almost no shade, which is the amenity most needed by pedestrians on South Florida's hot streets.

n.b. On a related note, the Miami  Herald just published an article on the "best and worst intersections" in the region, based on the number of tickets issued by red-light cameras. Short version: be careful trying to cross US 1 in Coral Gables.

design and kitsch

great machine, silly design

Don’t get me wrong, South Miami’s new parking meters are great. They take credit cards and cash, and the system allows you to pay by phone. They even have photovoltaic panels which, presumably, generate electricity. So why do these cool new machines have such silly designs?

It wasn’t that long ago that television manufacturers mercifully stopped making sets that looked like pieces of wood furniture. The design disciplines have often suffered from a tendency to shy away from the formal potential offered by new technologies, materials and functions, and instead draped objects in the kitschy garb of the familiar and cliché. Nostalgia, provoked by an anxious fear of the present, is a powerful inertial force weighing on the design arts.

flash urbanism, food truck edition

We just returned from Food Truck Invasion, a weekly event which is probably the largest and loudest food truck gathering in South Florida. About 60 trucks set up shop in Tamiami Park, outside the county fairgrounds and next to FIU's main campus. Hundreds of people come out, drawn as much by the spectacle of the crowd as by their jonesin' for a minuta sandwich or plate of yaroa (imagine poutine crossed with a cheesesteak). It's a wonderful experience.

swimming upstream

Yes, that's a Mercedes-Benz straddling the sidewalk outside our favorite restaurant, Whisk.

Making our city more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists is an important goal, and good design is key to realizing those ends. We can make streets for walking, rather than conduits for motor vehicles, for example. But design can only take us so far.

We have to change our culture, too. And in Florida, this is an uphill battle. The recent New York Times article on pedestrian deaths in the United States, "On Wide Florida Roads, Running for Dear Life," notes that the poor design of Florida's roads only partly accounts for their extraordinary number of fatal accidents. The article describes the baffling habit of some drivers who speed up when they see pedestrians crossing the street. Closer to home, we've discussed the danger of unsafe streets before, but at some point we need to find a way - as a society - to inculcate a culture of safer streets. We're open to suggestions.

Milan by bike

In honor of Wouter Weylandt, a few thoughts on cycling.

Milan gets better every time I come here. One of the happy new discoveries is a network of bicycle lanes in the city, like these on via Vittor Pisani. The benefits are clear: less fuel consumed and carbon produced, less air pollution, healthier citizens and a more accessible city. Good bike lanes - note how these are separated from traffic by a median and have their own crossings, away from pedestrians - are just a part of the solution.

flash urbanism

Yes, Miami suffers from a lack of urbanism. We drive a lot. We get into our cars in our private driveways and garages, and we don't get out until we reach the parking lots and garages where we work and shop. We never walk, and we never congregate in the streets. We utterly lack a sense of urbanism, and thus, any sense of community.

Or do we? South Florida has a variety of walkable communities that create pockets of urbanism in the vast motopolis. One reason we chose to live in South Miami is its walkable downtown, just over a half mile from our house (we're within walking distance of four grocery stores, for example). In each of these pedestrian areas, you're likely to find whole communities of people drawn by the sense of community that comes with regular interaction with neighbors and strangers in public space.