Spotlight Vol. 7, No. 9: Book Review - Rearranging Place, a Challenging Assignment

by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Suburban Transformations, by Paul Lukez, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Architecture is primarily a visual profession. Although texture, smell and even taste may have at times played a part in the design of a building, when we use our senses in relation to the built environment, sight usually comes first. 

That being the case, perhaps it's not surprising that many architects are very good at making visual things, whether on a piece of paper, a computer screen or with pieces of foam board, but not that great at constructing things from words. I remember with amusement watching students at Harvard's Graduate School of Design during their final reviews, standing mutely in front of fabulous creations, often unable to say anything intelligible about them. (Planning students, on the other hand, often spoke remarkably cogently about very boring proposals.)

There are exceptions to this generalization of course. The architect Rem Koolhaas, who began his career essentially as a journalist, is an excellent writer, as he has shown in seminal works such as Dreamhouse New York. Some of his critics might snipe that he is a better writer and theorist than designer. 

All this comes to mind in reviewing Suburban Transformations (Princeton Architectural Press 2007) by Paul Lukez. In Suburban Transformations, Lukez, an MIT-trained architect in private practice in the Cambridge area, shows through pictures, diagrams and accompanying text and charts how the suburbs of highways and shopping malls could be redeveloped. 

The cover of the book is particularly striking, and typical of what Lukez imagines. It shows layers of new streets and green fields, in elevated corridors, being built over existing highways and shopping malls, in a lattice-work fashion. It's a bold, startling transformation. Whether or not these largely imagined landscapes are actually possible is less important than their helpfulness in sparking new thinking about how suburban regions could be transformed. 

As the suburbs age around the nation and the Tri-state region, in the context of both climate change and changing tastes, how to redevelop the suburbs and retrofit new infrastructure and projects within them has become one of the most central tasks of our times. Lukez's work is a valuable addition to this, even if his theory strikes me as shaky.

The book has seven chapters where Lukez lays out his methods, and then five case studies that show how he hypothetically might transform existing cities and towns, or parts of them. Three of the case studies are in his own Massachusetts: Burlington, Dedham and Revere Beach. A fourth is a small town near Amsterdam, and the fifth is Shenzhen in China. 

He calls his method the "Adaptive Design Process." He states that with it, he can take the existing features of a natural and constructed landscape and build on them to create a denser and more appealing place. "By mapping and cross-mapping the rich variety of features that make up any site, such as environmental features, topography, street patterns, building profiles and sights and smells, opportunities for identity can be determined in even the most generic of places," Lukez says.

All this is very good, and noteworthy. 

Where I have problems with Lukez is where he ventures into theory to underpin his proposals. It's there that I find the architect less skilled with his narrative structures than his imagined physical ones. 

Lukez picks up from journalist Joel Garreau the idea that the principal problem with the suburbs is their lack of history. Because they are new, he and Garreau say, they don't have the patina of age and the complexity of older cities. While this idea is not without some validity, it's essentially a minor factor in the lack of congruity in what we typically call the suburbs. Post World War II landscapes lack a feeling of place because they are built around the highway and the automobile, which because of the necessity of parking, automatically fragments a built environment and makes cohesive space extremely difficult to construct. It's not a question of age. 

People forget that place-rich and cohesive environments like Park Avenue around Grand Central Station are relatively new ones, being constructed only after the decking over of the open rail yards there in 1913. This area has a feeling of place not because it is old - it isn't - but because the built environment generated by a system built around walking and mass transit is automatically, or almost so, place-generating. 

All of this prompts me to think about the difference between theory and practice. Lukez's proposed techniques for inserting new structures into and around existing parts of suburbia, such as "enveloping," "morphing" and "absorption," are valuable as techniques of design, gestures with the pen that show what is possible. While they certainly could be absorbed into some theoretical or analytical explanation of what Lukez is trying to do, these techniques essentially exist outside any explanation of them.