Being Remarkable

If your work isn't remarkable today, you may not make it. Seriously... your business just might not survive. The Era of the Company had three primary virtues: quality of work, speed of delivery, and economy of services. Better. Faster. Cheaper. Today, however, if you're a design type and all you have to offer is some combination of these virtues, you likely won't be around much longer. As discussed earlier, there simply aren't enough jobs to go around, nor are there likely to be enough in the foreseeable future because the carnage in the banking industry isn't over yet. So firms that are nothing but better, faster, and cheaper are a dime a dozen. Don't be one of them. Your work really must be remarkable in some way.

Out of the Pit

How can you climb out of the better, faster, cheaper pit? There are likely many ways, but here's my story: I was once a small-town architect fighting for the next small-town job, which likely was a pre-engineered metal buildings of some sort. For years, I had been a supporter of the principles of the New Urbanism. I wrote letters to the editor, and showed up at City Council meetings, all to little avail. Thirteen years after graduation, I had only influenced one single developer to build New Urbanism. To that point, I'd been nothing more than a cheerleader. It was time to get on the playing field.

How Can I Help You?

So I started going to New Urbanist workshops, and showing up at symposia. I went to design charrettes, asking simply "what can I do to help?" The New Urbanists don't turn down willing hands, so I found plenty of things to do. Really famous New Urbanists started inviting me on their charrettes, which was really cool... these people had been my heroes for years. But it's amazing how many heroes need a helping hand. So I joined the cause, and there has been no turning back. Stunningly great things have happened to me over and over again simply because I showed up and said "what can I do to help?" Find a cause you're passionate about, and join it. You won't look back.

Finding a Need

Once I started asking "what can I do to help," all sorts of needs cropped up. Some of them were initiatives others were already working on, such as the Transect, and they just needed more willing hands. So I helped where I could with those initiatives. But once you open your eyes to needs, you see them all around you. And many of them weren't being met. So about a dozen years ago, I said to myself "I'm going to start finding needs that aren't being met and filling them." In every single case, there were others who were far more qualified to meet that need, but all those people were busy doing other things. So even though my qualifications were very low, my willingness to meet those needs was high. And so, because somebody's gotta do it, I took my best shot. And time and again, things have worked out great as a result.

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The Death of Advertising

Advertising... You Gotta Be Kidding Me!

Advertising, as we know it, is dead. Actually, if you're a design type, it may have never been alive to begin with. Architects, for example, were forbidden from advertising for decades, which was only permitting it in their codes of ethics in recent decades in most places. We've just discussed why conventional marketing methods for design types are broken... but what are you gonna do... turn to print advertising? You've gotta be kidding... when is the last time you've heard of an architect getting a job from an ad they put in the newspaper?? C'mon... that simply doesn't happen!

The only print advertising that can do you any good is in publications focused enough, and with a passionate enough following, that they'll actually figure that if you're savvy enough to advertise in their favorite niche publication, you're savvy enough for them. Restore Media is such a company; their Traditional Building and Period Homes magazines have just such a following. But for general-audience print advertising, you can forget it.

Radio is no better than general-audience print... does anyone even listen to the radio anymore? People are far more likely to have "time-shifted audio media." In other words, albums and audiobooks they can listen to at their convenience, and on their own schedule, with no commercial interruptions. TV is much the same... you can download your favorite shows to your iPhone or iPad, and watch them when you're ready, rather than when the networks say you should watch them.

The Lowest Point

The worst type of advertising you might contemplate is spam. If you advertise in the newspaper, on the radio, or on TV, people will simply ignore you... or never be there to hear you in the first place. But if you spam them, they'll detest you. Matter of fact, there's likely no better way to make sure that someone never does business with you than to spam them.

The Spam Vaccination

Spammers have created a huge unintended consequence that will change business for at least the next generation, if not forever: They have conditioned us to delete their unwanted interruptions to a degree nobody ever anticipated. Our delete keys have grown a hair trigger. If something even has the whiff of spam in the subject line (forget the body of the email) we hit Delete and it's gone. Don't waste our time! We won't tolerate it anymore!

The spammers have so firmly conditioned us to reject them that a curious thing has happened: Nobody wants to hear about your business anymore. They won't tolerate talk about your company. They haven't the slightest interest in your mission statement, your vision statement, or your business plan. Just forget it... they're not listening. You might as well be talking to a brick wall. I call it the Spam Vaccination. (That's my term, but not my idea; the idea originated with Seth Godin... great guy... if you don't follow him and his books, you should.)

So if conventional marketing doesn't work, and advertising doesn't work, either, what's a design type to do? There are actually many reasons for hope, and we'll discuss them in the next several posts. As a matter of fact, this oncoming age of great necessities may be the best thing that ever happened to you. Just don't think that you're going to get there doing thing in the conventional way.

PS: This post is part of a bigger story outlined in New Media for Design Types. The most recent piece of the story was Why Marketing Doesn't Work Anymore for Architecture. Lots more to follow!

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Smaller & Smarter

Some may have heard me speak many times about building Smaller & Smarter, but what does that really mean? Here are some principles it may include:

A. Radically smaller spaces: Go to a restaurant with tables and booths, and observe which fill up first... almost always, it's the booths. A dining room can seat 6 comfortably in about 180 SF. A booth can seat those same 6 people in about 36 SF. Why not give people what they'd rather have, and in 1/5 the space?

B. Multi-Purpose instead of redundancy: McMansions have 3-5 places to eat, from the dining room to the nook to the bar to the eat-in kitchen to the "cafe" with the cute little awning over the espresso machine to the... you get the picture. But our ancestors had rooms that fulfilled many purposes... a true "keeping room" was where all the housekeeping was done, for example. SmartDwellings have single things that do many jobs, rather than many things that do a single job.

C. Radical space utilization: Why waste the space in a wall? SmartDwellings often board one side of an interior wall (no sheetrock mold debacle here) and leave the other side open, with shelves, so that the entire wall becomes a shelving unit. And yes, we have figured out where to put the pipes, wires, and switches.

D. Radical space utilization 2: Why waste bigger spaces, like the underside of the recycled bench or church pew that makes up the dining booth, or the space under a bed? SmartDwellings don't. These larger volumes that are normally lost typically become highly useful pull-out baskets and shelves.

E. Kitchen base cabinets: In suburbia, base cabinets are a study in waste: one little 1x12 shelf in an entire base cabinet sets the stage for accumulations of never-used stuff. But not in SmartDwellings. We use every bit of base cabinets for pull-out shelves and drawers.

F. Boarding: You thought we were done with boarding in item C, right? Guess again! Boarding all the walls results not only in the first step to the elusive sheetrock-free-house, but also allows attachment of pegs, racks, shelves, hanging items, cabinets, and even appliances anywhere on the wall, without having to hunt through the mush-like sheetrock for a stud.

G. Authentic Attics: Upper levels of SmartDwellings often have insulated rooflines rather than insulating ceilings, with 160° air above in the summertime. Insulating the attic not only means that you can store heirlooms there without worrying about them frying, but pipes there won't freeze and burst, and ducts there won't be exposed to extremes of temperature. And you won't have to ventilate the attic, because it's semi-conditioned by virtue of the insulated roofline. There's another benefit as well: you can use LVL ceiling joists with T&G 2x floorboards, because the ceiling doesn't need to be insulated. So you get authentic exposed beams instead of the fake ones we've been building for years. And you save a bit on the budget as well.

H. Outdoor Living Rooms: This could/should be at the top of the list, but I saved the best for last. If you entice people outdoors into great public or private realms, they will get acclimated to the local environment, and when they return indoors, they'll only need heating or cooling in the most extreme times of the year. So for many months, the equipment can stay off. And there's no piece of equipment so efficient as one that is off. There's another benefit as well: if people are acclimated to the local environment, they can actually use less-expensive outdoor space as living space for much of the year, reducing the need for interior space. And that smaller interior space needs less conditioning: a classic virtuous cycle. It's unlikely there's anything else one can do to be more sustainable than this.

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The Smoking Ruins of Architecture

The profession of architecture is lying in smoking ruins right now, and other place-making disciplines such as planning, interior design, construction and its trades, landscape architecture, and several engineering disciplines are having it very tough as well. But the worst thing you can do if you're a design type or a construction type is to keep hoping for 2006 to return. Doing so only delays your transition to a new ways of doing business... and delaying could cost you your business, because the old ways of doing things simply aren't working any longer for most of us.

This is because business is changing in profound ways, the scale of which nobody alive today has ever seen. As a matter of fact, this change will likely be as large as the Industrial Revolution, making it the biggest change in how we do business in two centuries. The term "paradigm shift" gets thrown around loosely, but this is the real thing.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of "going to work" at a "job" didn't exist for most people. But the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Era of the Company, and companies have dominated our economic lives from that day until now. Generations of people in the industrialized countries fell in step with the Organization Man, and corporations, commuting, workweeks, and paychecks became trappings of modern life.

Throughout the 19th century, the domination of the company often reached beyond our economic lives, imposing hardships on their workers' entire existence while the "robber barons" profited to an excess not previously seen outside the ranks of royalty. The folk song "I Owe My Soul to the Company Store" is a testament to this era. But the labor unions that struggled in the latter years of the 19th century gained traction, then power, around the turn of the century and work conditions and salaries spiked upward.

Before the unions gained power, wages weren't usually high enough to relieve workers of most burdens, so most blue-collar and some white-collar workers raised their own food, made their own clothes, and often built their own homes. But as wages rose dramatically through the first couple decades of the 20th century, it became possible for the first time for working-class people to specialize in one thing (their job) and make enough money to purchase all the necessities of life from other specialists.

This sea change had an unintended consequence that didn't become fully evident for almost a century. Specialists are experts in their field. You're not, if you don't work in their field. So you have no authority to tell a specialist "your work isn't broad enough," or good enough, or whatever. So the specialists did what specialists do, focusing on smaller and smaller parts of life. Some say that specialists know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about only one thing. Others are less kind, saying the climax condition for specialists is to know absolutely everything about nothing at all. In either case, specialization was the death knell of holistic living. Transportation engineering specialists built streets that transported more cars faster, but were dreadful places to walk. Volume builders built unlovable ranchers very efficiently. Shopping center developers built some of the most unwalkable places the world had ever seen in very efficient fashion as well. Together, the specialists built some of the most barbaric public realms in human history.

But the story doesn't end there... it gets worse... for awhile. Just a few years after the ascendency of the unions, the Great Depression struck, impaling almost all aspects of economic life for more than a decade. Most agree that FDR's massive top-down government programs such as the WPA were essential parts of pulling out of that grand morass. There's no doubt that WWII helped us pull out as well, but that war carried with it unforeseen baggage: never in American history had so many Americans been conditioned for so many years to obey orders from higher up the chain of command and control. The subservient attitudes of the 1950's should have come as no surprise.

We gave up even larger portions of our lives to the specialists. Women submitted to "twilight birth," where they were sedated to within an inch of consciousness. We let doctors perform whatever surgeries they recommended, with no thought of a second opinion. And we bought whatever houses the volume builders built. This condition persisted from the end of WWII until the mid-1960's, when we began to painstakingly take back aspects of our life one at a time. My mother fought valiantly for a "natural childbirth" for my youngest sister Hazel in 1969. That didn't include my Dad in the delivery room; all she accomplished was her ability to give birth without being sedated. More recently, we've taken back out ability to medicate ourselves with vitamins and herbs. I haven't taken a prescribed drug in more than two decades... maybe three... I can't remember.

Social media is working magic that was unimaginable a decade ago. Once, we read the daily newspaper, watched the evening news, and followed the American Top 40. But over the past decade, we've learned how to speak to ourselves again. If you haven't read it, the Cluetrain Manifesto was simply prophetic of our day. And Seth Godin's Linchpin is essential reading a decade later. And so today, with as dreadful as conditions are in the place-making professions, I believe we're on the brink of a new Golden Age  because of the invention this new age of great necessities will foster. What do you think?

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New Media for Design Types

The conventional marketing methods that worked so well for so long in the design communities are now broken, and at a very critical time for most designers. This is the first in a series of posts that will describe a new system of engagement with your markets that is built for the future. This system was first designed for architects, but it now works for planners, landscape architects, interior designers, engineers, and others engaged in place-making disciplines.

Place-making design professions are lying in smoking ruins in most places, and the worst thing you can do is to keep hoping for the return of 2006. We'll take a look at designers' historical marketing methods, and examine the reasons why they won't be working again anytime in the near future. Most professions disdained traditional advertising methods for years; some have only recently allowed their members to advertise at all. But advertising for design types is broken for a different set of reasons we'll examine in detail.

But it isn't just that specific methods of marketing and advertising have lost their effectiveness. Rather, we have all been changed in ways we could not have anticipated a decade ago, and that change has created a twin phenomenon: For 200 years, companies have dominated economic life in industrialized and post-industrial nations. Today, the Era of the Company is ending, just as the Age of the Idea is beginning. This paradigm shift is larger than anything business has seen in the past two centuries, and it won't just affect how we do business, but it will also affect who we are.

The Era of the Company was based on a set of virtues, including quality of work (quality of design for designers, of course,) economy of fees, timeliness of delivery, and quality of customer service. The Age of the Idea will be built on a very different set of virtues, including patience, generosity, participation, and collaboration. We'll look at the implication of each of these in detail, but it's worth noting here that they often run counter, and sometimes directly opposite, to the virtues of the Era of the Company. Patience, for example, can seem opposite to timeliness, as can generosity seem opposed to economy. This means you can't mix and match these virtues very well. Indeed, many of the ideas we'll talk about will seem like a recipe for sudden death in business... and they truly will be, if you try to add them piecemeal onto a business designed for the Era of the Company. But if you're willing to remake yourself, instead of just remaking your marketing, then these principles can be used to accomplish remarkable things for your design practice.

This new system we'll examine is an ecosystem of a dozen New Media nodes. Some of these nodes will require time commitments beyond what you're currently doing, so you'll need to make some choices. I think those choices are easy: would you rather spend time marketing using tools of an era in its sunset years that no longer work, or would you prefer to spend your time with tools built for the age ahead of us? Most of these nodes, to be fair, simply ask you to do things you're already doing, but in a different way.

We'll spend a lot of time on blogging, because it's a major linchpin of the entire ecosystem. We'll look at the overall structure of the blog, and also the structure of each blog post. Then we'll look at the things you need to do in order to promote each of your posts. Next, we'll look at pages you can add to your blog to make it more useful. We'll finish with ten rules of thumb for blogging.

Twitter is next... we'll look at why to tweet, and how the whole thing works. There are ten rules of thumb for Twitter as well. You may feel you know your website, and what it should be. I believe people are looking for a new graphic image in the post-Meltdown world. If you're a design type, you should present your work to your colleagues at least once a month. We'll discuss the things that speaking engagements can do for you. Idea Cards are to the Age of the Idea what business cards were to the Era of the Company: essential. If participation becomes one of your virtues, then we'll look at reasons why you should participate with colleagues on various listservs. Email is a classic example of something you're already doing... but likely need to do it a little differently.

Spamming is a cardinal sin of the age of the idea, so you'll need to communicate with people who give you permission to do so: those who subscribe to your mailing list(s.) Design types are visually-oriented. You take lots of pictures, don't you? Sure... we all do. So what do you do with them? We'll look at ways of making them useful to others, while benefitting you at the same time. Ever thought you might have your own app? Think again! Once, there were causes on facebook. Now, facebook has discovered they can make more money with "pages." We'll explore each. We'll also look at the basics of facebook pages for design types, and also LinkedIn.

This ecosystem of nodes can be "Googlicious" all by itself, but it only gets better as you accumulate visitors and followers. We'll finish with some pretty cool possibilities of what you might do with such an ecosystem, and back it up with a set of resources I'm confident you'll find useful. As always, and especially now, let's discuss this stuff! What do you think?

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What Makes A City Great?

A great city must do three things (in fairly equal importance):

1. It must set the stage for memorable human interactions to occur. This requires a network of pedestrian-friendly streets connecting great civic spaces such as plazas, squares, greens, and parks. Both the streets and the civic spaces should be enclosed as outdoor rooms by a fabric of buildings appropriate to the region in which they are built, and interspersed occasionally (especially at civic spaces) with memorable civic buildings. Central London, Paris, Rome, Manhattan, and Charleston qualify in spades. Orlando, Dallas, and many others do not.

2. It must provide a baseline of predictability. No matter how good the physical environment, visitors won't often come to a city where basic services don't work. Nor will they often come to a city where their personal safety is too much in doubt. When services and safety get bad enough for long enough, the residents will begin to move elsewhere.

3. It must provide a broad selection of opportunities to thrive and prosper. Once, financial opportunities dominated this discussion, but today, thriving is increasingly including the quality of life, not just the standard of living. In other words, the city's "cool factor" is growing in importance.

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Reviewing Enchantment

Guy Kawasaki's hot-off-the-presses Enchantment started off weakly, or so I thought, because I didn't yet appreciate the full picture he was painting. Chapter 2, for example, is How to Achieve Likability, and includes sections like "Perfect Your Handshake" (complete with a mathematical formula for handshake excellence,) "Use the Right Words," "Accept Others," "Don't Impose Your Values," and "Create Win-Win Situations." C'mon... how Self-Help 101 can you get? Actually, this is Self-Help 001... the remedial course. But I greatly admire Guy's body of work, so I soldiered on... to the part where it says "don't use war analogies" so... umm... I guess I plodded on. And there were several other things that kept me going in the early chapters:

First, the book has a regular stream of very useful checklists, none of which I'd ever seen before, even though Guy credits others for some of them. The book is worth the read just for the checklists. I've been a fan of checklists for years, but especially after reading The Checklist Manifesto recently, but that's another review for another day.

Next, the book is full of useful quotes, most of which I hadn't seen, even though many were from some of my favorite quotable people. A good quote is what proverbs have been for ages, and what Twitter occasionally rises to today: the encapsulation of an important truth into a concise and sticky statement. We should all aspire to articulating things this way.

Guy also has some hilarious phrases peppered through the book. Things like "group-groping" (the work of a committee,) "helicopter parents" (hover around their kids,) "fiefdumbs," (like fiefdoms, and just as stupid as a fiefdom would be today) and the "Dopeler Effect" (stupid ideas that sound smarter when they come at you faster.) Granted, I'm a Phrase Freak, but I'm sure you'll also find many of them either useful, amusing, or both.

Chapter 3, How to Achieve Trustworthiness, sounds equally elementary to the previous chapter, but the sophistication of the material is warming up at this point, and Chapter 4, How to Prepare, is getting seriously useful. The “Qualities of Enchanting Causes” are very good, as is the checklist in “Make It Short, Simple, and Swallowable.” Have the discipline to do each exercise in the book; you’ll be glad you did. For example, Guy gives you one line to write your positioning statement. His is “Empower people.” Mine was much longer... until now.

Chapter 5, How to Launch, contains a highly instructive discussion of whether we should decrease choice or increase choice. At first, Guy sounds like he’s also illustrating high levels of cognitive dissonance, but if you read closely, he outlines conditions under which each approach can work. Chapter 6, How to Overcome Resistance, includes a parallel discussion of the virtues of ubiquity alongside the virtues of scarcity.
Guy really hits his stride in Chapter 7, How to Make Enchantment Endure. The discussion on building an ecosystem and the next on diversifying the team are worth the purchase price of the book, IMO. Full disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of the book.

Chapter 8, How to Use Push Technology, is chock-full of the stuff we expect Guy to know best, and he doesn’t disappoint. From the general principles at the beginning of the chapter, he takes us on a tour de force of the best ways to use the tech that’s out there to get a message out, from presentations to email to twitter. Here’s another chapter that’s worth the price of the book.

Chapter 9 is the counterpoint: How to Use Pull Technology, and it’s equally valuable. Repeatedly through the discussions on websites, blogs, facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, I found myself saying “I hadn’t thought of that”... and I really like thinking about these things.

The book is a bit like a workout, beginning with a slow warm-up, building into a crescendo of usefulness in the middle chapters, and then easing into the cool-down of the latter chapters. But by the time I got to the final chapters, I was enchanted, and happily read through How to Enchant Your Employees, How to Enchant Your Boss, and How to Resist Enchantment (from those who use enchantment unscrupulously.) At the end, the wisdom of the early elementary chapters is obvious, because those things are a necessary part of the process of enchantment. Well worth the read... see for yourself... and make sure you read to the end.

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Extraordinary Singleness of Purpose

The best professional advice I've ever received came on a lunch hour in 1983, and it changed my life. I was in architecture school at the time, and we had a program called “Lunchline” where students would brown-bag lunch and gather around one of the original speaker phones (a big wooden contraption with protruding electronics) and have a conversation with a prominent architect. I was in my last year of school at the time, and the architect that day was Michael Graves. Late in the conversation, a freshman asked a typical freshman question: “Mr. Graves, what’s the secret of success in architecture?” I was afraid Graves would blow him off or make a fool of him, but, always the gentleman, he did not. Instead, he took him seriously, and responded with four words that changed my life: “Extraordinary singleness of purpose.”

Had he said “great design talent,” "superb drawing ability," “wealthy parents,” “strong political connections,” or even “good looks,” I’d have been out of luck, because I had none of those. But “extraordinary singleness of purpose”... I could decide to have that!!! I could wake up every morning and choose to have extraordinary singleness of purpose, and then simply have the will to carry it out! By making the secret something we could choose rather than something we were born with, Graves empowered his listeners like nothing else he could have said.

Years later, on New Year's Day of 2005, I believe, Andrés Duany called up and said "wanna go hang out with Michael Graves today?" Of course I did! Frank Martinez, a student of Graves many years ago and Miami architect and New Urban Guild member, picked us all up and we spent the entire day finding the latest cool stuff in Miami. Somewhere along the way, I told the story and asked Michael if by chance he might remember the conversation. His answer, in his typically humble and gentlemanly way, was "I can't imagine having said something so insightful." But he did. And it has changed so many things for me since that day.

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Praise, Thankfulness, and Blessing

I know very little about the three ancient virtues of praise, thankfulness, and blessing. Or at least the first and last... I was taught as a child to say "thank you." But let's consider all three and how they can work together:

Praise is something you give to someone else because of things they have been or have done in the past. Put another way, it's recognition of a job well done or a life well lived. We frequently praise people once they've died, but not so predictably while they're still alive. Judging by the great praise/complaint imbalance, an alien might assume that humans have nearly as much of a problem praising someone as telling someone they love them. And they just might be right.

Thankfulness is something you give to someone else in the present moment. It's the most well-understood of the three, IMO, and also the most common, as noted above.

Blessing is something you give to someone in the interest of the future. It is, by contrast with thankfulness, something that we hardly understand at all anymore. Today, getting "blessed out" is slang for getting cursed out. Once, however, many cultures understood and practiced blessing. Blessing is stronger than "best wishes for the future." Instead, when you bless someone, you accompany the blessing with something like "... may this be so..." or "... let this be so..." It's telling a good truth for someone else in advance: exactly the opposite of a curse.

One other thing to note... I have no idea what effect praise, thankfulness, and blessing might have on the receiver, but it clearly has a healing and empowering effect upon the giver. Try it out, if you don't already, and let's talk about what you discover.

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Costs of Sprawl - Part 1

The financial consequences of sprawl are steep, and also broad, affecting budgets in places we might not often think of. This post is the first in a series that will examine the costs of sprawl to cities, neighborhoods, and citizens.

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Automobile Poverty

Automobile Poverty - Part 1 (Money)
Where we live is a huge part of how well we live... especially whether we live in a place that forces us to drive everywhere. This post looks at the numbers, showing the massive financial benefits of walkability. For millions, it could be the difference between living in poverty... or not, especially as the price of gas goes up.

Automobile Poverty - Part 2 (Time and Health)

Driving everywhere in sprawl impoverishes us in more places than just our pocketbook. There are immense time costs that likely go beyond what you may realize. And the health costs of sprawl may be the most grievous of all.

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The Legacy of Michael Barranco

Actually, the title's a bit misleading, because this post is only about the parts of Michael Barranco's legacy which I've observed personally. Michael was a Renaissance man; an architect, artist, musician, and civic leader. The more than two and a half thousand people who packed the Performing Arts Center at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi on Saturday for the celebration of Michael's life attested to how much he meant to so many in his community. But Michael's life and work also had a much broader impact, even though he never would have told you so himself.

I first met Michael in Jackson, Mississippi, at DPZ's planning charrette for Lost Rabbit, a new town on the Ross Barnett reservoir near Madison, Mississippi. Mark Frascogna and Richard Ridgeway, the Town Founders of Lost Rabbit, had selected Michael to be the Town Architect. We had a lot to talk about from the very beginning, because I'd served as Town Architect in a number of new towns and neighborhoods for several years. I could go on for hours about the character, intensity, and basic decency of this man, but then, many others share those characteristics. Let's look instead at the events spawned as a result of those characteristics.

Several months after the planning charrette, Michael started talking to me about an architectural charrette to develop home designs for Lost Rabbit. This is highly unusual, because most first-time Town Architects without a long-running history in the New Urbanism tend to use their position to secure as much work as possible for themselves. Michael, on the other hand, was doing the right (but highly unusual) thing of bringing in some of the best New Urbanist architects he could find. We selected Eric Moser, Julie Sanford, Lou Oliver, and Milton Grenfell from the ranks of the New Urban Guild and set the charrette for July, 2004. It would be the second official New Urban Guild charrette, after the one at Alys Beach that January.

Michael was a major part of an extraordinary decision made on the first morning of the charrette to focus on a best architecture of the region. Previously, most developments picked a random handful of historical styles for their architectural "collection." This decision, made jointly but with Michael's urging, transformed so many things about the way we have worked in the years since. But that was only the beginning of transformations. A much bigger one was a couple days away.

The charrette proceeded with palpable excitement over this different way of doing architecture; and the shadows of new insights hung strong in the air.  Michael and Jene hosted dinner the night before the charrette ended; it was an evening of new bonds and new ideas. The final day came and went, as did the celebratory dinner. Later, as we stood in the parlor of our B&B, the Millsaps-Buie house, came the most transformative moment of my career. We were still trying to get our minds wrapped around all the new implications of this way of working. I had been searching for years for what I called the "Transmission Device of Living Traditions," not sure quite what it was, but clear on the fact that it allowed ordinary people, for most of history, to build extraordinary places better than what the best planners and architects could do now. Late that evening, someone was describing an architectural element's function as "We do this because..." And then it hit me: "We do this because..." That's it!! That's the Transmission Device!!! If you put ever pattern of a language of architecture into these terms, then you open up the rationale of the patterns and allow architecture to live again! It isn't just some random collection of historical styles... it's what we do and why we do it! Had Michael not advocated so strongly on that first morning for taking this approach, for reasons none of us understood at the moment, the Transmission Device might not have been rediscovered that last night. And so many things might have remained locked up to us, even unto this day.

Just over a year later, the Gulf Coast was irreparably and violently changed by Hurricane Katrina. I had been on the road for several days before and after the storm, and returned to Miami both physically and emotionally exhausted on September 2. My wife and business partner Wanda met me at the office door. She said "I've been on the phone with Michael Barranco; it's urgent. You need to call him tonight." I was exhausted and wanted to call him on Monday. Surely he'd be out of the office by this hour. 

But Wanda persisted, and so I called. Michael was still there. He said "Steve, we're assembling a Governor's Commission, and we'd like to have you come and speak to them very soon about how to rebuild Mississippi according to the principles of the New Urbanism..." We talked for a good while longer about the particulars, and about the storm. Michael was still running his office by candlelight, as Jackson had taken a big hit from the storm, too, even though it is well over 100 miles inland. 

I realized immediately that the job was too big for me. The rebuilding of the entire Gulf Coast deserved the very best, and deserved more than just a speech. I called Andrés Duany and arranged to come back in the morning to discuss this new development. Andrés, revered by many as the world's greatest rock star of planning, said "this is too big for me, too... let's call in the entire Congress for the New Urbanism." And so we did. And with this began a series of events that changed forever both the Gulf Coast and the New Urbanism.

Through the years that followed, Michael worked quietly at the highest levels to advance the right ideals of rebuilding. Without him, we were just a bunch of outsiders, but with him, we were far more effective. If you really pressed him, he would simply say that he was doing what any civic-minded person would do. But he's responsible for so much more than that. The Mississippi Renewal Forum was the largest planning event in human history, with nearly 200 planners working side-by-side in one cavernous room to re-plan the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It never would have happened without Michael. The Katrina Cottages initiative sprang out of the recovery work. Katrina Cottages would likely never have existed without Michael. So many careers, including my own, have been unalterably changed by the awful necessity of trying to stand up and do something to help those devastated states recover... and that first big move in Mississippi that opened so many doors thereafter would never have been possible without Michael. Even today, the New Urbanists are the most trusted people in recoveries in other places such as Haiti... and that all began with Michael. So this one man, humbly doing what he considered to be his civic duty, has seen the influences of that duty ripple outward far beyond what he ever would have imagined, around the country and across the seas.

That civic duty now has ended. One week ago tonight, Michael died in a one-car accident in northern Mississippi returning from a meeting with clients. Those with great burdens of duty often carry exhaustion around with them wherever they go. The police say there were no skid marks... Michael had fallen asleep.

But though his duty has ended, his legacy has only begun. We who knew him well mourn his loss deeply, but there is so much that will live on. How might we recover differently from future disasters, both at home and abroad, because of what Michael started? How might the Katrina Cottages become a part of the solution of affordable housing? And of multi-generational homesteads? And of working from home? How will architecture change, now that we understand the Transmission Device? Will we again see living traditions in architecture as a result? It may take a lifetime to discover answers to these and other questions about the legacy of Michael Barranco.

-Steve Mouzon

I participate in a new blogosphere phenomenon known as #LetsBlogOff on Twitter, where word of each blog post is spread. Normally, I take the topic in a green direction and post it on the Original Green Blog, but I the subject this week is "What is Legacy," and I can't think of a more appropriate and timely story to tell than Michael's. Here are the other participants who have posted so far today:

Veronika Miller	@modenus	Modenus Community
Richard Holschuh	@concretedetail	Concrete Detail
Mark Robertson	@markosul	The Pan-Americans
Saxon Henry.	@saxonhenry	The Road to Promise
Tourney Central	@tourneycentral	TourneyCentral Touchline
Bruce Dahlquist	@DLA_Architects	DLA Architects Blog
Bonnie Harris	@waxgirl333	Wax Marketing
Rufus Dogg	@dogwalkblog	DogWalkBlog
Betsy De Maio	@egrgirl	Egrgirl's Blog
Paul Anater	@paul_anater	Kitchen and Residential Design
Sean Lintow, Sr.	@SLSconstruction	SLS-Construction.com
Becky Shankle	@ecomod	Eco-Modernism
Nick Lovelady	@cupboards	Cupboards Kitchen and Bath
Izzy Darlow	@izzydarlow	Robbing the Void
James Dibben	@bluecollarcoach	Blue Collar Coaching

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