Urbanism

CATFIDDLE STREET

Here is a recent photograph of Catfiddle Street an infill development in Charleston, which is slowly coming together. The house in the foreground is being built by Vince Graham and was designed by George Holt and Andrew Gould. The veranda has wrought-ironwork, a signature of colonial Charleston. The walls are  painted a deep Pompeiian red. The arched opening on the extreme right leads to Reid Burgess and Sally Eisenberg’s courtyard house. The next house was designed by Julie O’Connor. The turquoise house and its neighbor on the left are the work of Bevan & Liberatos.

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CHARLESTON, CHARLESTON

My friend Vince Graham holds a copy of my new book in front of his Charleston home. The house features in Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City, published by Yale University Press. The book combines three themes, architecture, cities, and real estate development. May 28 is the official publication date but the book is available now. You can read an early review in The New Criterion, and in the May 25 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

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ROCK CENTER REDUX

There have been a number of articles about the new Hudson Yards project in New York: Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, Michael J. Lewis in the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker. Schwartz is forthright: “what Hudson Yards really feels like is a nice airport terminal, with the High Line as its moving walkway.” Lewis likes the observation deck of the tallest skyscraper. Kimmelman doesn’t say much about the architecture but like Lewis he points out the paucity of urban design in the master plan, and both compare it unfavorably to Rockefeller Center.

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STREETSCAPE

Passing the entrance to 10 Rittenhouse Square on 18th Street in Philadelphia today I was caught up short. Robert A. M. Stern Architects, who designed the 33-story apartment tower, have done something cunning. The entrance to the tower is distinctly low key, a simple break in a low stone wall, flanked by two piers topped by stone balls. Beyond the break, a short path leads to a glass marquee over the front door. It was the wall that interested me. 10 Rittenhouse Square’s immediate neighbor is the Fell-Van Rensselaer mansion, designed in 1898 by the great Boston firm, Peabody &

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PARKWAY OR BOULEVARD?

Last year was the centenary of the design of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Designed by the Parisian landscape architect, Jacques Gréber in 1917, the avenue slashed diagonally across William Penn’s grid, connecting Logan Circle to Fairmount, a hill which would be the site of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gréber was a notable figure. He worked with Horace Trumbauer (the architect of the future museum) on several mansions, including the Versailles-like Whitemarsh Hall, and collaborated with Paul Cret on the Rodin Museum. (Trumbauer and Cret first proposed the idea of a parkway.) Gréber, who was the chief planner of the 1937 Paris International Exposition,

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MEGACITY

serveimageRather silly op-ed piece in today’s New York Times arguing that the mayoralty of Toronto’s Rob Ford, which made most Torontonians—and Canadians—cringe, was actually a sign of a healthy politic. Toronto, like Montreal, has regional not municipal government, imposed, I hasten to say, not by popular choice but by a provincial fiat. The amalgamation of a traditional central city with its surrounding metropolitan suburbs, is virtually impossible to achieve in the U.S., although it is the dream of many American city planners. Such amalgamation, the argument goes, would spread the advantages and burdens of urbanization over the entire metropolitan population,

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BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS

serveimage-2I just came across an advertisement from JP Morgan Chase in the Atlantic. “What the rebuilding of Detroit can teach us” was the tag line. What caught my eye was the accompanying photograph of a downtown scene with a futuristic-looking streetcar rolling down the street. It looked like one of those hi-tech jobs one sees in German or Swiss cities. A closer look at the small type revealed that this was a “rendering,” what used to be called an “artist’s conception,” before PhotoShop made such images entirely lifelike. The so-called M1 line is currently under construction; it will run all of 3.3 miles.

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MAKESHIFT METROPOLIS

ScanOwl Publishing House in Taipei has just issued a translation of Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities. The book has also been translated into Russian (Strelka Press, Moscow) and will soon be available from Commercial Press of Beijing. Translations of  Home and One Good Turn are also available from Owl.

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