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One Size Fits One… (and it’s the worst one)

Transit, Urban Design, Urban Planning, walkability

The ubiquitous space, shape, but highly volatile speed of the car is much larger and faster than the universal space, shape, and speed of a human. Yet we continue, since post WW2, design and build everything and everywhere for space, shape, and volatile speed of the car. Streets widen, ground floors are parking lots, people are pushed towards the edges, and cars dominate our landscape. This is what ruins downtowns and isolates small towns. Cars are a suburban mobility tool.

That’s not say we need to ban cars. They do somethings great, such as get lumber, while not as good at others, such as exercising. The fact is that cars are best served for disparate suburban expanses. Walking, transit/buses, and bicycles work best in more urban areas. Cars work great in shorter-commutes and throughout suburbia. Trains, airplanes, and ships work best for long commutes.

The New Urbanism was new because it worked to humanize the car in cities, small towns, and new towns. We’re now moving into the Next Urbanism (and I write about this throughout this blog and speak about on podcasts, such as Kevin Klinkenberg’s Messy City). And as humans, we should be designing and building everything everywhere to accommodate for humans first, letting the right mobility serve us throughout the spectrum of urban to rural contexts.

Downtowns (regional centers) are marginalized by our 1.5 cars per person maxim (Spend 5-minutes walking around Downtown San Diego). Small towns are isolated by freeway by-passes, which need both regionally accessible cars and local people to be economically viable (think Ramona, Julian, and Jacumba, if in San Diego). The industrial era invention of cars and suburban sprawl go hand-in-hand, the built each other. Unfortunately, both cars and suburbs are inhumane and detrimental to our economy, environment, and cultural cohesion (See Sabre Springs).

The next urbanism means making downtowns less car-oriented, small-towns car-supported, and car-happy suburbia having sub-regional centers that are more urban/humane. This place, a small district in Tempe, AZ, Cul-de-Sac, is an example of the Next Urbanism… building more urban, sub-regional centers in the vast sprawl of suburbs surrounding downtown’s regional center. And, by the way, Opticos Design, Inc. is one our best architecture and coding companies.

Justin Shubow

Trading the Big Idea for One Building

Leon Krier, Public Space, Urban Design

President of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. that promotes the classical and humanistic tradition in public art and architecture, Justin Shubow is an architectural enigma to me. Obviously partisan, which I am admittedly too, his appearance on Ben Shapiro’s show demonstrates how his ideas for classical architecture are ascending again in Trump’s 2nd term. However, I see Trump as a criminal. That said, I supported Justin’s approach to the Eisenhower Memorial prior to Trump, so I have to check myself before I say too much, which is not my strongest trait.

As Leon Krier points out in his book on Albert Speer… Even criminals can make great architecture. Krier illustrates how Speer used classical architecture in support of his totalitarian regime by blowing it up to an industrial/modern megalomania scale. Today, the worst developer in NYC can support beautiful architecture despite his criminal intent as President. Right now, Trump is restructuring our government into partisan loyalist, which should be opposed rather than being complicit with. As much as I support classical and traditional architecture, I cannot enable Trump’s evil intentions in exchange for building a better FBI building. 

The basis of my criticism is that the FBI building is a one-off anecdotal, microcosm (DC) to the larger macro (USA) issue of how the General Services Administration (GSA) process that eliminates the ability for classical architecture to compete for new projects. Both are a problem. But I believe if we fix the macro problem we can influence how the micro is rebuilt in the future. My perspective is shaped by my membership with the GSA Design Excellence Peer Review Committee, which Trump is already reshaping into his image. 

Therefore, I suggest we advocate for our long-standing democratic processes to reform GSA and how we rebuild Federal buildings in the future for all rather than bow to a tyrant to get what we want today. It’s not worth the trade, IMHO.