Town Architect Lessons: Large Buildings

I serve as Town Architect at a number of towns, neighborhoods, and institutions. Over the years, I've developed numerous lines of reasoning for resolving problems. I'm going to start posting them here as they come up... maybe just to remember them myself (and hope that they help someone else, too.) Or maybe there's a broader use for them... we'll see. But in any case, here's the first one:

Great cities often handle immense quantities of square footage in ways far more compact and that feel far more natural than what we usually accomplish today. Much of that has to do with the increments of the work. Take a typical block, for example. Normally, it would have been built out over time by a number of architects/builders in small increments. The largest buildings warranted the best architects, to the point that if you were building out an entire block, you hired the best architect in the land to design it for you. So anything built at the scale of the block would be done by the most masterful hand.

Today, however, a block-scale building (200' to 400' long) isn't all that unusual. Which means that it's far more likely to be done by the best architect in town rather than the best architect in the land. In other words, in all likelihood, a less masterful hand. What to do? Making it come off as a single building is likely to produce highly regrettable results. Try this approach instead: Look at the architect's best work. Is it a building that's 80' wide? Or even 50' wide or less? Whatever it is, this is the measure of the architect. Have them break up the block-size building into increments of their measure or less, and design each as its own facade. Don't consider the others nearby when doing so... just the individual "building" in question. Then move on to the next, as the block would have been designed had it been built in incremental fashion. You're far more likely to have acceptable results this way.

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Neighborhood Schools

Recently, we've been building schools out on the highway, but is there anything more insane than combining lots of children with speeding traffic? Schools belong in neighborhoods, where they are far more sustainable, instead of inside vast parking lots... but if they're located somewhere that everyone has to drive, the parking is necessary. Here's a post that looks at misconceptions of neighborhood schools, and principles upon which they may be successfully built. It uses the school in DPZ's Village of Providence as an example, and also lays out an ideal urban school of 56 classroom that fits on one block.

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Preservation and the Dilemma of the Unlovable

Here's a story about a Paul Rudolph school that's about to be demolished. Here's a website dedicated to saving the school.

Paul Rudolph did some of the most famously unlovable buildings in human history. On the one hand, there's a danger zone for all work: when its survival falls into the hands of the next generation, because kids have a strong tendency to reject their parents' generation's work. So there's a great culling at that point, especially since the advent of planned obsolescence in the 1920's, with the corresponding push to embed "trash-and-replace" into our culture. But Rudolph's work has long since passed to the generations of his grandkids and beyond, which tend to have a lot more sympathy. He would have been over 90 now. Yet his work is still highly unlovable to anyone but an architect... so preservation as a movement, born to protect lovable buildings, needs to ask itself if it's damaging its credibility by protecting the patently unlovable simply because it has now become old.

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Literary Lunch on Light Imprint

FYI – a free to USGBC members continuing education webinar you might be interested in and/or sharing with others.  This will include some of the latest case study project advancements on Light Imprint:

Literary Lunch with Tom Low
Author of "Light Imprint Handbook: Integrating Sustainability and Community Design"
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: noon-1 p.m. ET
Eligible for 1 GBCI CE Hour for LEED Credential Maintenance (activity type: general)

Register here

To see this and other Island Press publications, click here

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Why Use Zenfolio to Host Photos?

If you want to host images on the web, think about Zenfolio... I've used it for over a year and am delighted. If you sign up, use my referral code (TMZ-JQZ-7BX) and get $5 off.

If you read Useful Stuff, you've heard me talk about Zenfolio on several occasions. Here's where I first discovered it, and why I chose it over the competitors. Here's the big image management breakthrough, which Zenfolio handles like a champ. Here's an update on my RAW workflow, and its Zenfolio connection. Here are some thoughts on social media, including how Zenfolio fits into my overall plan. There's more, which you can read if you search for "Zenfolio." Bottom line is, I did a lot of research and they're the clear best choice, IMO, on many counts, including:

* Coolest, most professional-looking interface of any of the big hosting sites.

* Simpler and fairer royalty system if you're interested in selling images or prints.

* Unlimited storage.

Check it out... see for yourself.

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Apple & iWeb shortcuts

I have several websites. The Original Green site, the New Urban Guild site, the Guild Foundation site, and the Mouzon Design site are all built in iWeb and hosted on Apple's MobileMe. I have a MobileMe "family plan," which allows up to five accounts on one membership, which costs $150 or so per year (or $2.50 per site per month.) Wanda is using the fifth slot for a site she's building called Friends of Flamingo (Flamingo Park, which is our neighborhood park.) I bought a second MobileMe membership which I'm using for other things. One of those other things will be hosting the Katrina Cottages site, which is currently hosted by Earthlink for nearly $100/month, 40 times as expensive as the MobileMe option, as I detailed here.

I learned months ago that if you switch back and forth between MobileMe accounts while building the various websites, you'll screw up other MobileMe services such as calendars, contacts, etc., because when you switch away from your main MobileMe account, it switches off syncing for those services. So I created a second user on my computer. The Original Green site is hosted on my main user's MobileMe account, so I called the second user New Urban Guild, not that it mattered, because I used it to work on the New Urban Guild site, the Guild Foundation site, and the Mouzon Design site. But there was a problem. If you simply switched MobileMe accounts while in the New Urban Guild user, iWeb got confused. Let's say I switched from the Mouzon MobileMe account to the New Urban Guild MobileMe account so I could work on the New Urban Guild website for a change. When I opened the New Urban Guild website in iWeb, all the pages were red in the sidebar, indicating that they all needed to be updated, even if I hadn't made any modifications. But I noticed this didn't happen when I'd actually changed the MobileMe account, logged out of the New Urban Guild user, and then logged back in. So I got in the habit of changing MobileMe accounts and logging out and back into the New Urban Guild user to work on a different website. But that's laborious.

Here's what I discovered last night: I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me earlier, but I simply made a computer user for the Guild Foundation and another for Mouzon Design. Now, I keep the Guild Foundation user signed into the Guild Foundation MobileMe account all the time. Same for Mouzon Design and the New Urban Guild. And the Steve Mouzon user (my main user, obviously) is signed into the Original Green MobileMe account all the time, too. This is much cleaner... all I have to do is switch from one user to another and everything's set up and waiting for me.

One other thing... did you know you can open multiple inspector windows in iWeb at the same time? Apparently the limit is 8, because after that, it won't let you open any more. To open a second one, just hold down the option key, then drag the inspector window... kinda like option-dragging to duplicate something. I arrange them all on my second monitor like this:

The cool thing is that when you quit iWeb and restart, they're still there... so you only have to open them all once.

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Folder Structure Shortcut

I figured out an easier way to build the folder structure for a new website. The Guild Foundation website will include material once found on the New Urban Guild website. Because they're two separate (but closely related) entities, they really should have two websites, so that's what I'm doing now. The Guild Foundation ("the Foundation," for short) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which researches principles and practices of sustainable place-making and distributes that information through a number of events, publications, and resources. The New Urban Guild ("the Guild," for short) is a for-profit LLC that acts as an agent for a collection of several dozen architects, designers, and other New Urbanists dedicated to the creation of sustainable places. In short, the Foundation is primarily about principles, while the Guild is primarily about putting those principles into practice.

So I'm now building the new Foundation site completely from scratch. Actually, I had one page up so far, but that was it. My first step is what I'm doing now, which is to build the folder structure so I have a way to organize the information. Creating every folder from scratch seems like a lot of wasted time, especially since some information repeats every time. So I created a master folder which looks like this:

I copy this master folder, with its nested sub-folders, into each new page's location. I change the word "Master" to whatever the page name is, like "Open-Source Tools." I then drop the folder into A Better Finder Rename, with "Process Subfolders and their Contents" checked, and change the 0.0 to whatever the number is for the page. It changes the folder, and all the folders within it. A big time-saver. Maybe that was obvious to everyone else already, but it's a new trick to me. Cuts the time to build the new site structure to less than 1/4 of building it manually.

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1 Bryant Park and the LEED Problem

1 Bryant Park received a LEED Platinum rating using glass walls, which leak energy faster than the cheapest tract-house wall it's legal to build. How can this be? Is the LEED system flawed? And why do we keep building with a wall material so inefficient? http://bit.ly/dazQX1

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Agonizing (Sorta): #Unfollowing #Guy #Kawasaki

Can't believe I just did that! I just unfollowed Guy Kawasaki on Twitter! And I really love the guy... one of the first big Apple evangelists, and full of all sorts of wisdom... but for whatever reason, he feels compelled to Tweet about every 18 seconds or so.

Maybe it's the latest practice, as the Twittersphere is becoming increasingly clogged with Tweets... Tweet as often as possible so someone actually hears you. But when you force yourself to Tweet so much, even the most brilliant of us run out of good material.

My new policy, when considering whether to follow someone, is to look at their first page of Tweets and see if the content is meaningful to me. If not, I don't follow them, no matter how many followers they have. If it is, I follow them, no matter how few followers they have. I've been someone's first follower on a number of occasions.

Why? Collecting followers by following lots of people feels a lot like a high school popularity contest, or a Rod Stewart song... can't decide which. Plus, if someone follows you and 60,000 other people, what're the chances they'll EVER hear anything you have to say? Close to zero, of course.

So to me, it's all about content. I'll trade you some of my useful stuff for some of your useful stuff. Why else Twitter?

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