1.21.2005
An Old Rant
Organizing files on my computer today, I found this essay that I wrote last spring. I couldn't post it then because it referred to my then-employer. But now I am gone from there and while it could use some tightening up, I like it.
I came remarkably close to finishing my childhood tonight. I had found it after a brief search on ebay, of course, and spent moments of my free time fitting the pieces together over the last week. It is a puzzle called Verticalville.
When I was a little boy growing up in suburban Boston, my family had this same puzzle, a cartoon drawing of a city stacked layer upon layer like pancakes with a train winding around the core, encircling the stack like a strand of DNA. Closer inspection of the drawing reveals endless stories: a man is fishing off a ledge and accidentally tears off the pants of a jogger below, an outfielder in the baseball stadium is leaping so high to catch a flyball that he teeters on the edge of the bleachers, close to falling off the city.
I’m not so big on reminiscing. I like to think of myself as a man who pushes forward looking for new adventures. But the last year or so has been a challenge to me. It has offered little intellectual stimulation through employment and sometimes going through old motions can comfort. And this puzzle has significance in that it is, I believe, the beginning of my fascination with cities, the ground floor of my urban planning career from which hopefully many levels will rise. I wrote about this puzzle in my application essay for grad school, talking about my fascination with creating places where everything seems to be happening at once.
Throughout my masters program, I toyed with this idea of making everything come alive at once. I was, and still am, particularly fascinated with making the past come alive and interact with the present and future. Not in a Disneyland sense – no animatronic figures – but in an intellectually stimulating way. I like the idea of tinkering with public spaces so that people are pleasantly coerced into thinking twice about how the place came to be. I like this idea because I hope it will make people ask the same question about all the places they visit and help them to stay awake and alive. All the more so to appreciate the everyday beauty of life.
This is a troubling problem for me because I have a job at one of the nation’s premier New Urbanist firms, Calthorpe Associates. It is an alright place to work. The people are kind, well-intending. But I have philosophical misgivings about the work we produce, the work we are known for. True, I think that in the grand scheme of things, the projects we create fall into the plus column. We enable people to live in beautiful homes where they are not as reliant on automobiles, have increased access to open space, and are encouraged to socialize with their neighbors in a way that Americans haven’t been doing for fifty some odd years. Those are all good things, I’d like to think. We’re still eating up land, but at a much slower pace, and we are doing it in a way that taxes the natural environment much less.
But the way we do it, the style and strategy we use to achieve these ends, it disrespects American culture. We are not just building these communities with a half a century old template, we are quoting the past verbatim. We are not playing on old themes, we are trying to return to them, to the womb of quaint suburbia that never really existed. It would not bother me nearly so much if we were just placing our buildings in the same way we used to, but somehow New Urbanism believes that the architecture we construct must be the same as it used to be as well. The buildings must look the same. We must have porches and stoops, and they must look like the porches and stoops of the 1950s. And because ours is an economy where most homes are built on speculation by middle-men home builders, and because those builders aren’t well-versed in architecture, New Urbanist design firms like us end up producing frighteningly detailed and prescriptive documents commanding these builders to construct the homes in certain ways. Porches must be a certain depth. Certain colors cannot mix. Windows must be spaced just so.
On one level, the builders cannot be faulted. While it is true that they have been known to build ugly homes with great and gaudy columns and atria, homebuyers eat them up with a spoon. If homebuyers do not demand ‘authentically constructed and designed homes,’ then the builders will not build them, because it’s more expensive and time-consuming to do so. And it is here that New Urbanists intervene. We are doing the thinking on behalf of suburban Americans, making their homes authentic because life is too complicated to expect them to have decent taste.
That bothers me as a matter of principle, that we are trying to recreate the past for people because they are not doing the thinking for themselves. It is Orwellian. It is ominous. It implies that, as a culture, we are dead in the water. What happens after fifty years of being force fed the past, when we finally catch up with where we were when we gave up on going forward in the first place? Eventually, we will have to push forward and create new environments for ourselves, creating new solutions.
What’s more, as everyone knows, it’s impossible to recreate the past. We end up placating ourselves by spoon-feeding Americans a low-quality ersatz past that blinds us to the challenges we should instead be contemplating and attempting to solve. We dumb ourselves down.
Like I said before, I do not wish to re-experience the past, nor to reincorporate it directly in my world, at least not word for word. There are lessons to be learned from the past, and I wouldn’t even begrudge someone for trying to sample them. But despite my distaste for trying to relive it, there I was plugging away this evening, stuck with a box full of sky blue pieces, trying to fit them together to recreate the flawless sky behind my cartoon puzzle. I say I came remarkably close to finishing because there was a piece missing. About halfway up on the left side, right near the baseball stadium with it’s leaping outfielder, there’s a hole in my childhood.
Organizing files on my computer today, I found this essay that I wrote last spring. I couldn't post it then because it referred to my then-employer. But now I am gone from there and while it could use some tightening up, I like it.
I came remarkably close to finishing my childhood tonight. I had found it after a brief search on ebay, of course, and spent moments of my free time fitting the pieces together over the last week. It is a puzzle called Verticalville.
When I was a little boy growing up in suburban Boston, my family had this same puzzle, a cartoon drawing of a city stacked layer upon layer like pancakes with a train winding around the core, encircling the stack like a strand of DNA. Closer inspection of the drawing reveals endless stories: a man is fishing off a ledge and accidentally tears off the pants of a jogger below, an outfielder in the baseball stadium is leaping so high to catch a flyball that he teeters on the edge of the bleachers, close to falling off the city.
I’m not so big on reminiscing. I like to think of myself as a man who pushes forward looking for new adventures. But the last year or so has been a challenge to me. It has offered little intellectual stimulation through employment and sometimes going through old motions can comfort. And this puzzle has significance in that it is, I believe, the beginning of my fascination with cities, the ground floor of my urban planning career from which hopefully many levels will rise. I wrote about this puzzle in my application essay for grad school, talking about my fascination with creating places where everything seems to be happening at once.
Throughout my masters program, I toyed with this idea of making everything come alive at once. I was, and still am, particularly fascinated with making the past come alive and interact with the present and future. Not in a Disneyland sense – no animatronic figures – but in an intellectually stimulating way. I like the idea of tinkering with public spaces so that people are pleasantly coerced into thinking twice about how the place came to be. I like this idea because I hope it will make people ask the same question about all the places they visit and help them to stay awake and alive. All the more so to appreciate the everyday beauty of life.
This is a troubling problem for me because I have a job at one of the nation’s premier New Urbanist firms, Calthorpe Associates. It is an alright place to work. The people are kind, well-intending. But I have philosophical misgivings about the work we produce, the work we are known for. True, I think that in the grand scheme of things, the projects we create fall into the plus column. We enable people to live in beautiful homes where they are not as reliant on automobiles, have increased access to open space, and are encouraged to socialize with their neighbors in a way that Americans haven’t been doing for fifty some odd years. Those are all good things, I’d like to think. We’re still eating up land, but at a much slower pace, and we are doing it in a way that taxes the natural environment much less.
But the way we do it, the style and strategy we use to achieve these ends, it disrespects American culture. We are not just building these communities with a half a century old template, we are quoting the past verbatim. We are not playing on old themes, we are trying to return to them, to the womb of quaint suburbia that never really existed. It would not bother me nearly so much if we were just placing our buildings in the same way we used to, but somehow New Urbanism believes that the architecture we construct must be the same as it used to be as well. The buildings must look the same. We must have porches and stoops, and they must look like the porches and stoops of the 1950s. And because ours is an economy where most homes are built on speculation by middle-men home builders, and because those builders aren’t well-versed in architecture, New Urbanist design firms like us end up producing frighteningly detailed and prescriptive documents commanding these builders to construct the homes in certain ways. Porches must be a certain depth. Certain colors cannot mix. Windows must be spaced just so.
On one level, the builders cannot be faulted. While it is true that they have been known to build ugly homes with great and gaudy columns and atria, homebuyers eat them up with a spoon. If homebuyers do not demand ‘authentically constructed and designed homes,’ then the builders will not build them, because it’s more expensive and time-consuming to do so. And it is here that New Urbanists intervene. We are doing the thinking on behalf of suburban Americans, making their homes authentic because life is too complicated to expect them to have decent taste.
That bothers me as a matter of principle, that we are trying to recreate the past for people because they are not doing the thinking for themselves. It is Orwellian. It is ominous. It implies that, as a culture, we are dead in the water. What happens after fifty years of being force fed the past, when we finally catch up with where we were when we gave up on going forward in the first place? Eventually, we will have to push forward and create new environments for ourselves, creating new solutions.
What’s more, as everyone knows, it’s impossible to recreate the past. We end up placating ourselves by spoon-feeding Americans a low-quality ersatz past that blinds us to the challenges we should instead be contemplating and attempting to solve. We dumb ourselves down.
Like I said before, I do not wish to re-experience the past, nor to reincorporate it directly in my world, at least not word for word. There are lessons to be learned from the past, and I wouldn’t even begrudge someone for trying to sample them. But despite my distaste for trying to relive it, there I was plugging away this evening, stuck with a box full of sky blue pieces, trying to fit them together to recreate the flawless sky behind my cartoon puzzle. I say I came remarkably close to finishing because there was a piece missing. About halfway up on the left side, right near the baseball stadium with it’s leaping outfielder, there’s a hole in my childhood.
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