July 2009 Archives

If it's hot enough to fry eggs, just shut it down.

The mercury reached 103 degrees today, the hottest temperature ever recorded in Seattle. Yes, lots of places get a lot hotter, a lot more often, but it's not supposed to happen here. It makes for a different walking experience through the city of hot pavements. You learn to plan your route along the shady side of the street as much as possible, except where the sidewalks are inconveniently closed, of course. The neighborhood coffee house advises iced drinks and offers water, otter pops, images of ice and meditation mantras such as "think cold".

I wonder how many people are missing that big December snowstorm right now.

I work in a feast or famine profession. When I have project work I sometimes work long hours, day and night, to the exclusion of much else. I become pragmatic and product focused, intent on producing value for a client. I am deeply interested in theoretical research, but professional necessity requires that theory be applied, tested in practice, if it is to be tested at all. I work in a profession, not a science, although it should be perhaps more science oriented. There is a field of architectural practice called "evidence-based design" which can mean different things to different practitioners.

I have been vectoring closer to a practice in which I can apply the theories I have particular interest in, which sometimes means making a move to a firm whose views of practice are more closely aligned to my own, which in turn might mean moving to a different region or practicing in another country. I am better situated now than I have been, and am starting to have hope that I might actually accomplish something meaningful and measurable. It's a constant push to keep up any headway, though, and sometimes I despair, like now. Later, maybe, I'll go into particulars of what I've been exploring, but now I'm getting ready to go to Norway for a couple of weeks. I will probably come back. Or I might stay - architects in Norway get three months of support paid by the state, every year. I think it's sort of a paid sabbatical, or maybe paid time to do research and study and then come back refreshed and informed and ready to do even better work, in line with keeping up the public health, safety and welfare, every year. Call me a socialist but that sounds pretty darn good right now.

See you in two weeks (maybe).

 

Perhaps I was a little across the line in the previous post. The truth is that I have a split professional personality. My main area of interest has to do with how people use public urban space, and how the built environment affects people's use of space. I do research in forms of spatial analysis that can help me to determine which aspects of the built environment have what effects, because I believe it has an effect, for better or worse, and I would like to design for the better effects as much as possible.

That said, I originally entered the field of architecture (too many years ago) for the same reasons most architects do. I love the play of form. In particular I am strongly affected by the play of light on form and material. This is such a simple thing, yet I never tire of it. The most mundane materials, the simplest buildings, take on a new aura with each change of the weather, each slightly different lighting condition. Someone asked me if I get tired of taking pictures of the same things and places all the time; I don't, because it's always different. The light changes and I see it in an entirely new way - in a "new light", in the literal sense. So yes, I'm a design addict, but I try to keep my priorities straight.


  

    
All images are of the Paccar Pavilion in the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington

I have a love-hate relationship with architects, even though I have two architecture degrees. Maybe that's why I have two architecture degrees - I wanted to able to fight them on their own turf to keep them from destroying the best parts of the cities that I love. That's a gross generalization, of course, and doesn't apply to all architects - just most of the well-known ones.

That's why I was pleased to find this book review of "Building Happiness: Architecture to Make You Smile". The write-up made me smile, because it says that the architectural aesthetics of our built environment are arbitrary and don't generate long-lasting happiness. Sure, we get some moments of individual happiness, and make pilgrimages to iconic buildings that are awe-inspiring and memorable, but in the built environments that we inhabit day to day, beauty gets old (although ugly gets old faster, I would think). We get used to it and it loses its impact. What really generates happiness in our everyday built environment is the spatial organization, so it turns out. We thrive when our built environment generates opportunities for social interaction. I told you so, architects - Ha! So take that and think it over long and hard.

Despite Igor's tongue-in-cheek (I think) claims, Belltown could be a great neighborhood. Monday the Bell Street Park was approved by the city council, which means that some of the Parks Levy funds ($2.5 million, I think) will be spent to widen one sidewalk to 26 feet along five blocks, putting in natural stormwater drainage systems (one of the best selling points for me), and getting local input for the design and features of each half-block of this linear park space. It also means reducing parking and having only one drive lane on five blocks of Bell Street. Per standard operating procedure, the media prompted businesses to make complaints about how loss of parking would drive away their customers. This really, really irritates me. I live in Belltown with thousands of other people who walk to these businesses and make up their daily supportive customer base, without which there wouldn't be so many businesses as amenities in Belltown. Yet their preferred customer, according to their statements to the media, is the one who drives from some other neighborhood and parks in Belltown because it's such a cool place to go. Don't I count? I go to your restaurants all week, but not on Friday and Saturday nights because I can't get in, too many people have driven in for a night on the town, in my town. Vote for the First Avenue streetcar so people can come here without having to drive and park. Then we could all sit out on your popular sidewalk patios without breathing exhaust fumes, and might actually be able to hold a conversation without shouting.



Bedlam is a great new coffee house in Belltown that has really raised my hopes for the neighborhood, and I try to stop by every day. I think they're trying to be the living room or community center for the neighborhood, and I really like it. There is a free meeting room in the back that anyone can reserve. They have sidewalk chalk on hand that people make great use of. They have also rescued the Belltown Needle, a local icon that appeared last Halloween on a vacant lot (where the Speakeasy used to be; see Hideous Belltown for that history) that the owner is ready to grade for a parking lot (temporary, everyone hopes). Now that the street park has passed, they hope to put the local needle on a pedestal on Second and Bell. I like this place and I hope they do well and can stick around.

  

One of the early users of the sidewalk chalk wrote "CRACK - COFFEE - CRACK" with arrows pointing in the appropriate directions. This is one of the things that worries people about the Bell Street Park; that it will just be more of a haven for drug dealers. I worry about this myself. The level of drug presence goes up and down in Belltown. There were dealers all over the sidewalks all the time; then the Honduran drug gang chased them away; then the Hondurans got busted. Now with non-stop street construction all over Belltown, and new businesses like Bedlam coming in, the dealers seem to have a low profile. I've been going to Bedlam every morning, and usually walking by after work too, and not seeing any drug dealers all week. Then Friday morning there are all these young men on the sidewalk throwing gang signs at each other, and I finally realized what was going on - people don't just drive to Belltown on weekends for a night on the town at a restaurant or club; they drive here for drugs, and the dealers show up for them. Why should we provide parking for people coming to our neighborhood to buy drugs, attracting the dealers and leaving us with all of the attendant ills of the drug trade? Maybe it's not hurting you, buyers, but there's a lot of unpleasantness that goes with the business that you don't live here to see.

Most of the streets of my neighborhood have been in various stages of reconstruction for some months, which is sometimes fascinating. I've already discussed the bricks under Fourth Avenue. The other day I was walking to work (I usually get distracted by something or other when walking to work) and stopped on Second Avenue to watch them digging up the street. I had seen a pile of timbers there the day before and was curious about them. That morning I got to watch the guy with the backhoe carefully picking these timbers out of old concrete deep in the street bed. The Merlino Construction foreman came over to talk to me (I was taking photos) and told me that these were streetcar crossties put down before the turn of the last century, and that you could tell because they were untreated heart of cedar. We both commented on how they were taking these old remnants out now, while we are building new streetcar tracks elsewhere. It was a fabulous reveal of a moment in history. I hope the First Avenue streetcar passes and gets built soon.

 

 

 

I have been working a lot, which is good, in many ways, not all. More on that later. When I'm busy generating income, rolling the billable hours along and too busy to write or do much of anything else, it helps to have some sources of inspiration to carry me through these dry days of all work and no play.

Lisa Town has a blog called Inspiration Wall, where she reliably posts choice bits from the wide range of resources she reviews as well as from her own observations and experience, attractively packaged and tastefully written up, there at the fingertips.

Igor Keller writes a photoblog called Hideous Belltown. Belltown is my neighborhood, and I don't find it that hideous, but he walks the same routes and takes a lot of the same photos, from the same point of view, that I do. He's been around a lot longer than me and knows interesting neighborhood histories, where the skeletons are buried, and writes with a slightly jaded and cynical sense of humor. He gives regular reports on the status of his windowboxes so that I know exactly where he lives, and we probably pass on the street quite often.

Marcus Werner, SpaceFlaneur, was the inspiration for this attempt at blogging and I consider him a sort of mentor. He gets too busy to write too, but has a variety of web outlets for quick short posts, like tumblr, where I can find something like this:

 

...which comes from the University of Darmstadt, has to do with Raumsoziologie which tranlates to the Sociology of Space in English, which reminds me of why I got into this work, why I work so long and hard, just for a chance to apply my real interests in practice and to promote more research in turn, set up a feedback loop between theory and practice, which has not been easy to do.

But thank you to these sources of inspiration and sanity, and others not mentioned here.