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Leon Kreir / New Urbanism / Tall Buildings / High Density / Mobile Technology
Jules Lubbock interview with Leon Kreir architect, theoretician and advocator of the traditional urban centers and the "New Urbanism" movement.
Kreir's traditional point of view for the city lacks on giving a convincing argument on the existence of the high densities found on the modern metropolis.
It jumped to my attention his state of denial by the answer given to the questioning of a possibility for change with the present mobile communication revolution and how this could have an impact on the highly congested cities.
"JL There is an argument that with mobile communications, with your iPhone and BlackBerry, the need for the physical office is beginning to decline, that people can work in a nomadic fashion, on the move, from their homes, from cafés, so maybe something radical is going to happen to these highly congested commercial cities."
"LK That would mean there had been a need for these high densities. I’m absolutely convinced there never was. They developed because there were lifts and cars and mechanised transport but there was never an absolute need. One could have reorganised modern office building in such a way that you’d never need utilitarian high rise."
source: Building Design
Kreir's traditional point of view for the city lacks on giving a convincing argument on the existence of the high densities found on the modern metropolis.
It jumped to my attention his state of denial by the answer given to the questioning of a possibility for change with the present mobile communication revolution and how this could have an impact on the highly congested cities.
"JL There is an argument that with mobile communications, with your iPhone and BlackBerry, the need for the physical office is beginning to decline, that people can work in a nomadic fashion, on the move, from their homes, from cafés, so maybe something radical is going to happen to these highly congested commercial cities."
"LK That would mean there had been a need for these high densities. I’m absolutely convinced there never was. They developed because there were lifts and cars and mechanised transport but there was never an absolute need. One could have reorganised modern office building in such a way that you’d never need utilitarian high rise."
source: Building Design
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by armando garcia orso on -
Higher is no better. Developers are who build high rise buildings because money and we follow them with no reason. Nomadic is no more fashion... it is a reality and architecture and urbanism will change in different ways.
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Permalink Reply by Juan Gomez-Velez on -
There is an author named Clifford D. Simak that published a collection of short stories named "City", from material that originally circulated in the forties. He declared the City ....terminally ill and inevitably headed towards extinction.Society, people like you and me would become victims of social apathy, all the way to the pathological aversion of leaving the security of our own home. Widespread and almost instantaneous communication may still make this a fate of the well to do, the so called 1st world, should we come to feel that anyplace beyond our door is unsafe, unclean or unholy.Poets,dramaturgists and prophets may see things clearer than we think.
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Permalink Reply by oz on -
City ....terminally ill and inevitably headed towards extinction or simply existential success centers
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Permalink Reply by Simone Bosco on -
I think we need a revolution. Cities and human settlement patterns have historically changed radically when technological advancements in the field of transportation and communications occur. With the rising price of fuel, the advent of the hybrid or other types of cards, and the OBVIOUS advances of the IT world/internet world, we need to rethink the way we live, build cities, and do business and work. Is anyone out there reading the writing on the walls? Old habits die hard except in the face of crisis. We are heading there. Read the writing.
Urban planners and architects need to get on the ball and see that the way we operate in the business world, and generally move around, live, work, and play, can and should radically change-as well the way we build cities, towns, roads, and any human habitat.
Get to know your neighbor, and plant a garden. Just think all the time we spend in the car could be spent watering our plants. OK OK I'm on a rant this morning.
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Permalink Reply by Rafael Marxuach on -
I'm with you Simone, as much as I love walking on any great European city, modern technological advancements do have an impact on how we think, live and work. If we as architects and planers miss to see the changes that are happening in society, how could we as a profession maintain the art to project?
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Permalink Reply by Simone Bosco on
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Exactly. I keep banging my head against the bureaucratic mentality I work with. UG. Become a friend of mine on archN.
I think the popular support of regionalism amongst planners could be suspect. There should be this kind of functional reframing of the dependency on regional centers. They have their place---of course...it's not that they will become extinct...but I also think small local business and activity centers should and will become a more integral part of the public realm, mostly because they are closer to home, and thus aren't as expensive to get to (fuel wise). The popular regionalism planners have been touting needs to be balanced with a consideration towards technological changes in the marketplace and social places at work and at home. Just look at the way people network now. I can talk to you (Are you in Puerto Rico now?) We can have entire conferences online replete with breakout groups! I think regional centers have their function and uses---BUT, small local businesses and local hang out spots also have a huge appeal. They are more intimate. .Relocalising the way we do things seems to be an imperative as far as I'm concerned. For example...I'd like to be able to not HAVE to go anywhere but somewhere close-by. Small business centers and local nodal town centers should be resuscitated so people only have to make short trips for random reasons. Of course, those employees who work in regional activity centers and/or have to have face to face contact with the public or their customers/clients, or otherwise rely on some aspect of a regional center, have to continue to be wed somehow to either living near them or commuting...but I wonder what will really happen to corporations if the driving cost of energy keeps driving the cost of doing business up...well that is another subject...and true for anyone really...but I predict transportation costs to become unweldy. I'm thinking of doing my thesis on this. But first, I'm heading to the beach.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Watkins on
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I don't think it's all bad news. The best and most sought after places to live are medium density - usually no more than 3 or 4 stories high, but then there are many who feel NYC is a wonderful place to live. The New Urbanist philosophy could be applied to a large city with high density in the middle for those who want it, decreasing with distance from the city.
Some kind of Smart Growth boundary would be needed, though, for sustainability reasons (and perhaps for long term affordability issues - reducing land speculation, releasing only as needed... less sure of myself there.) So that would mean a certain minimum density, certainly higher than conventional suburbs.
Creativity can make all places great to live - but it seems easier as density increases because it enables social interaction and makes commerce easier, all in all leading to a vibrant community.
The low-density suburbs are places of social death and depression.
With good design I would think we can push the "medium density" envelope up a little, to the high side of medium density. With some kind of revolution of high-rise design, maybe someone can make push it even higher, but that's being quite speculative.
The important thing though is to not push the density without regard for the quality of the space.
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I strongly agree with the comment at the original page:
"Greater productivity within the city, and greater intellectual output from this co-location, is what has driven not just city growth and social justice, but also our greatest human achievements in science and literature. If the city were kept to Leon's 4 storeys, the economic value placed on centrality would, in effect, push the poor even further out, creating a far greater barrier to entry than the "elitist" congestion charge. If Leon believes that the fast-urbanising rural poor around the globe can be made to wait for stone-built 4 storey houses before they eat at the capitalist table, he is much mistaken." (commenter: Michael MacLean)
The central reason that New Urbanism makes a better place to be is that it puts things closer together, and that's largely about density. That's a big part of why old medium density neighborhoods are better than suburban sprawl, and why a big city can be such a happening place.
(Comments CC-BY-SA and GFDL as usual... I want to get more pages on the Appropedia wiki about these topics.)
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Permalink Reply by Valerio Curti on
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Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/cal.html#essays
Calvino's Invisible Cities is a collection of brief essays, each written on some paradoxical city. The framing device is that these are cities which Marco Polo has encountered on his mission to explore Kublai Khan's realm. In the preface, Calvino writes Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expedition, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odour of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the dispatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.
Cities & Desire 2
At the end of three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia, a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list the wares that can profitably be bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked here over fires of seasoned chery wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram; and tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes - it is said - invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.
Cities & Signs 5
No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection. If I describe to you Olivia, a city rich in products and in profits, I can indicate its prosperity only by speaking of filigree palaces with fringed cushions on the seats by the mullioned windows. Beyond the screen of a patio, spinning jets water a lawn where a white peacock spreads its tail. But from these words you realize at once how Olivia is shrouded in a cloud of soot and grease that sticks to the houses, that in the brawling streets, the shifting trailers crush pedestrians against the walls. If I must speak to you of the inhabitants' industry, I speak of the saddlers' shops smelling of leather, of the women chattering as they weave raffia rugs, of the hanging canals whose cascades move the paddles of the mills; but the image these words evoke in your enlightened mind is of the mandrel set against the teeth of the lathe, an action repeated by thousands of hands thousands of times at the pace established for each shift. If I must explain to you how Olivia's spirit tends towards a free life and a refined civilization, I will tell you of ladies who glide at night in illuminated canoes between the banks of a green estuary; but it is only to remind you that on the outskirts where men and women land every evening like lines of sleepwalkers, there is always someone who bursts out laughing in the darkness, releasing the flow of jokes and sarcasm.
This perhaps you do not know: that to talk of Olivia, I could not use different words. If there really were an Olivia of mullioned windows and peacocks, of saddler and rug-weavers and canoes and estuaries, it would be a wretched, black, fly-ridden hole, and to describe it, I would have to fall back on the metaphors of soot, the creaking of wheels, repeated actions, sarcasm. Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
Marco and Kublai
From the foot of the Great Khan's throne a majolica pavement extended. Marco Polo, mute informant, spread out on it the samples of the wares he had brought back from his journeys to the ends of the empire: a helmet, a seashell, a coconut, a fan. Arranging the objects in a certain order on the black and white tiles, and occasionally shifting them with studied moves, the ambassador tried to depict for the monarch's eyes the vicissitudes of his travels, the conditions of the empire, the prerogatives of the distant provincial seats.
Kublai was a keen chess player; following Marco's movements, he observed that certain pieces implied or excluded the vicinity of other pieces and were shifted along certain lines. Ignoring the objects' variety of form, he could grasp the system of arranging one with respect to the others on the majolica floor. He thought: "If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains."
Actually, it was useless for Marco's speeches to employ all this bric-a-brac: a chessboard would have sufficed, with its specific pieces. To each piece, in turn, they could give an appropriate meaning: a knight could stand for a real horseman, or for a procession of coaches, an army on the march, an equestrian monument; a queen could be a lady looking down from her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree.
Returning from his last mission, Marco Polo found the Khan awaiting him, seated at a chessboard. With a gesture he invited the Venetian to sit opposite him and describe, with the help only of the chessmen, the cities he had visited. Marco did not lose heart. The Great Khan's chessmen were huge pieces of polished ivory: arranging on the board looming rooks and sulky knights, assembling swarms of pawns, drawing straight or oblique avenues like a queen's progress, Marco recreated the perspectives and the spaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights.
Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to comparison with the game of chess. Perhaps, instead of racking one's brain to suggest with the ivory pieces' scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it would suffice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successive state of the board as one of the countless forms that the system of forms assembles and destroys.
Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the bishop's incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and downs of every game.
The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game's purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the true stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness . . .
Playing Chess
. . . The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game's reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.
Then Marco Polo spoke: "Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it to desist."
Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency that amazed him.
"Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum's nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree's being chosen for chopping down . . . This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding . . . "
The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows . . .
The Great Khan's atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."
"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."
Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylong, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World
He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
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Huh?
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Permalink Reply by Michael McKenzie on -
I'm amazed by this conversation, and I'm biting my tongue to avoid saying what really needs to be said here...so with a high 5 to Chris, and in an attempt to ad clarity in a polite way;
All of the questions raised here have already been answered...with exhaustive tests, analysis, and the best studies your own profession can do. High density urban core is the answer BUT it needs your most creative juice. Stop the nonsense and get to work. (excuse me I should have added a 'please' there) and...
Please read ALL of Jane Jacobs for starters...and then be what you studied so hard to be, dreamed about for so many years ... BE Architects!
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