a star studded afternoon

I’m definately on a vacation, but still worried about school starting up soon, as I have been for a while. How do you prepare for re-entry into grad school? Read a few Arch Records? Flip through a monograph or two? Starting working up my caffeine tolerance?

I guess one approach was the one I took this afternoon – touring another school’s architecture building and star-architecture campus. The University of Cincinnati has buildings by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Frank Ghery, Morphosis, Charles Gwathmey, Bernard Tschumi, Charles Moore, and I.M. Pei. I’ve got most of the photos posted up on my flickr account (see the sidebar).

Morphosis (left), Gwathmey (center), Moore (right).

Morphosis (left), Tschumi (center), above sunken stadium.

Designing architecture into a campus setting is different from designing it for a pre-existing city. The users are different, the context, the environment, the culture. I don’t know where else eight ‘brand name’ architects exist within several hundred feet of eachother. Each building is vying for recognition, in competition with its surroundings, instead of the easy win granted to other, more isolated works of star power. Does this type of building work better when contrasted within a constant and more mellow city fabric?

 

who you gonna call?

So when you have a city, with great housing stock, an impressive river front, and a well preserved downtown but you don’t see any people . . . what do you do? Design a new museum? Zone for more residential? Build a new live/work development? as an architect, a planner, a developer . . . in which role would you be in a better position to revitalize a downtown? Or to reconnect a strung out suburb?

Today’s visit to downtown Cincinnati was almost a complete lost cause – nothing was open. A nice Sunday afternoon walking in a dense, downtown environment and all the cafes were closed, the (free) botanical gardens were essentially empty, and the few retail shops we found all had their lights out.

But at least that area was unique. It had the townhomes of San Francisco, the hills of Rome, and the riverfront of Jacksonville. The town of Colerain, out by where I was staying, could have been anywhere on the outskirts of all those places. The car lots, the big box stores, the isolated chain restaurants, the fields of parking.

Gas prices were a topic of big concern out there, and how some poorer families were stretched to afford to both drive to work and put food on the table. How do you help an area that has developed so dependently on the car? It would cost billions to completely retrofit the area to be similar to a downtown environment, which is what some urbanists would be having you believe is the best solution.

Are architects all-encompassing enough to assist in the situation? Or are they so limited in scale that their typically single building intervention wouldn’t make a difference? Would a planner have more to offer, even with their lack of being able to see a project through? Or would it be an educated developer, with the money to back a project and a walkable design for an entire district? Who could best step in to lead the way for outerlying suburbs to densify their pre-existing retail/office nodes with transit oriented development? Maybe even a lawyer, with a specialization in zoning and code issues could better help a strung out town develop itself into something recognizable, something with a sense of place, more completely than an architect.