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 May 5, 2008 | Vol 7, No. 09 |
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In This Issue: – A Holiday from Gas Taxes or from Reality? – Calendar For those of you who were not able to attend this year's event, or for those of you who would like to revisit Regional Assembly 2008, RPA invites you to visit the wrap-up at www.rpa.org/ra2008 where you can download speech transcripts and video, session presentations and other interesting tidbits. The site is continually being updated as material arrives, so please visit now and in the future. Thanks again to everyone who made this year's Assembly a success. We look forward to seeing you all again soon as we carry forward the momentum, shared visions and bright ideas generated at Regional Assembly 2008. So what have our policy responses been to this challenge? Over the past three decades, cars and trucks have gotten larger and less fuel efficient, total vehicle-miles traveled have burgeoned and we have taken virtually no steps to develop alternative fuels or alternatives to ever-longer commutes on increasingly crowded highways. Consequently, the nation’s energy supply has gone from one-third to two thirds reliant on foreign oil. America’s energy and tax policies have been stuck in the 1950s, when we were the world’s largest petroleum exporter, instead of the largest importer that we are today. With oil hovering around $120 per barrel and gas prices exceeding $4 per gallon, political leaders are looking for scapegoats, not real solutions, to the mess that is our national energy policy. Most are blaming greedy oil companies and commodity speculators for high prices, not the nation’s wasteful use of energy, growing consumption and competition from China and India for scarce resources. Presidents and Congresses from both parties can fairly share the blame for ducking this issue and continuing to pander to voters instead of proposing real solutions. The last serious presidential candidate to propose raising gas taxes to limit consumption and fund alternative energy research and mass transit was Senator Paul Tsongas in his 1992 presidential bid. His campaign ended in the Michigan primary, when voters resoundingly rejected his proposed 50-cent a gallon gas tax increase. Since then we’ve gotten only gauzy promises for increased ethanol production or energy independence from both Republican and Democratic candidates – responses based largely on results of focus groups, not on the urgent need to reduce the nation’s over-consumption of imported oil. The bipartisan failure of leadership on this issue reached a new level this week with the announcement that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was joining John McCain in calling for a “gas tax holiday” for the summer. This “holiday” will save the average U.S. family anywhere from $0 to $70 over the course of the summer, depending on whose estimate you use, and speed the bankruptcy of the transportation trust fund, already expected to move into deficit by the end of 2009. It won’t do a thing to focus the nation on what we really need: national energy and related tax policies designed to reduce oil consumption and oil imports and put us on the track to an alternative energy future. This isn’t just a national issue: proposals to suspend state gas or petroleum taxes are circulating in the legislatures of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. What America and the region really need is leadership, not pandering on an issue that is fundamental to the nation’s future security, competitiveness and the success of global efforts to manage climate change. – Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association Struggling with Our Modernist Heritage – the Bell Labs Charrette Now, Holmdel and most of the other Bell Labs are vacant, undone by both economic and political changes. In New Jersey, civic and public officials are figuring out what to do with the Holmdel facility, important both architecturally and in terms of economic history. Built between 1959 and 1962, and expanded in 1966 and 1985, the facility once housed 6,000 scientists, researchers and support staff on a 472-acre tract in Holmdel. Both the building and the surrounding landscape, significant examples of mid-century modern architecture, have been deemed eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Research conducted in the building led to several significant technological advancements, including the transistor and the cell phone. RPA participated in a recent inter-disciplinary design charrette organized by Preservation New Jersey, AIA-NJ, DocoMomo, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Recent Past Preservation Network and the Cultural Landscape Foundation. The charrette – which took place April 11th to 13th – was hosted by Holmdel Citizens for Informed Land Use and facilitated by Clint Andrews, chair of the planning program at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University . The charrette was part of an ongoing attempt to find a graceful future for the facility, vacated by Alcatel-Lucent (successor to Bell) two years ago and on the market ever since. So far, the proposals that have surfaced have not been kind. An interested developer proposed several schemes which did not respect the historic qualities of the building and site, and included demolishing the building and subdividing the site into single-family lots. Fortunately, this was not well accepted by the municipality and the developer has since left the scene. The redevelopment of the former Bell Labs facility poses thorny questions for the planning and design community. While clearly an icon of a certain period of our recent history, where corporate America and modernist architecture aligned to create new models for the corporate workplace, the facility – with its vast building set in splendid isolation within 472 acres of lawns, ponds and woods – is also emblematic of a bygone era of suburban sprawl, with all that it represents in terms of waste. From a sustainable-development point of view, the Bell Labs site is as outdated as Stonehenge. A simple re-tenanting or re-purposing of the building has no future in the world we now live in. Bell Labs and other comparable case studies raise some difficult issues with which the historic preservation movement must come to terms. The rigid formality of the massive building and the strict geometry of the access roads, circulation system and parking lot layout seem terribly dated and mall-like. Indeed the same formal model was used all over the nation to build regional malls. Should we seek to preserve all the early examples of the auto-oriented environments we created in the 1950s and 1960s, whether they were workplaces, places of commerce, residential or other, no matter how unsustainable these land use models are? I think not. The charrette brought together top-notch professionals from leading architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation and engineering firms from throughout the Northeast. There was also compelling testimony from former workers at the facility and current residents. Many valuable ideas came out. There was clearly an emphasis on finding viable models to both re-purpose the building and retrofit it to make it and the surrounding landscape perform better from a sustainability point of view, without compromising the essential elements of its historic character. This objective appeared achievable, from a technical point of view, no matter what the ultimate use – or combination of uses – ended up being. Indeed there was a noticeable emphasis on mixed-use solutions as the most viable and most appropriate. However, perhaps RPA’s most significant contribution was to point to the bigger picture. If all we achieve is to find more energy efficient ways to run the same building within the same land use pattern, how ultimately sustainable is that? Even if a “silver bullet” solution is found (a single user with deep pockets willing to take on the entire facility – a GooglePlex was suggested as were a university or some other large research, educational or health care institution) will that not simply perpetuate the existing, unsustainable land use and transportation pattern? Regardless of current market conditions – and there is a lot of vacant office space in Monmouth County, with more to come as a result of the decommissioning of Fort Monmouth – is a replacement office use the most appropriate solution to this challenge? In a sense, Holmdel and Bell Labs is a story oft repeated throughout America. We are all well acquainted with the history of company towns, whether the industry was cereal mills, roses, blueberries, steel, defense, tourism, gambling, electronics or whatever. In a world of global markets and global corporations, the single-industry town is not a good bet.
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.
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May 6 May 6 May 7 May 7 May 12 May 17 May 22 May 27 May 28 May 29 May 31 June 10 June 17 September 27 November 15 |
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Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President / Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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