Urbanism

Downtown Fort Worth is a lively urban place that includes a central plaza, shops and restaurants, movie houses, theaters, a concert hall, and a public library. At the head of Main Street is the 1895 Tarrant County Courthouse, which resembles the state capitol in Austin, but with a clock tower instead of a dome. The downtown architecture is a mixture of styles: the Renaissance Revival courthouse, Sullivanesque office blocks from the early 1900s, Art Deco buildings from the 1930s, and modern towers from the 1980s (notably two glass hulks by Paul Rudolph). Most of the commercial construction tracked recurring oil booms.

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I spent a weekend in Seaside, the emblematic small beach town that launched a thousand traditional neighborhood developments. Seaside is now more than thirty years old and looks it—in a good way. It is not merely a question of mature landscaping and weathered materials, but also of the indefinable small adjustments that take place when a place grows into itself. Unexpected things have happened, of course, not least a real estate bonanza. At Seaside, modest wood-frame houses on small lots regularly go for well over a million dollars. A beachside house designed by the late Aldo Rossi—nothing spectacular—is on the market for $11 million.

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As this postcard shows, downtown Fargo, North Dakota in 1924 was a busy place. Broadway is not as crowded today, but it’s much more lively than when I was here last, more than 20 years ago. The North Dakota energy boom is taking place a two-and-a-half hour drive away, but in some ineffable way the prosperity has trickled down. I am told that real estate values are way up, and apartment builders can’t keep up with demand. The architecture school of North Dakota State University is celebrating its centennial and I am giving a keynote talk tonight at the Fargo Theater.

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Núria Ferragutcasas, who is the US correspondent for the Catalan newspaper ARA, interviewed me about the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site at Ground Zero. Her last question—“What is your opinion about the new site as whole? Do you like the Memorial? Is it appropriate?”—prompted me to reflect further on the subject, so here is an expanded version of my answer.

Cities have regularly suffered catastrophic events—plagues, floods, sieges, and fires—and have commemorated them in different ways. The Monument to the Great Fire of London, for example, was erected only a decade after the fire.

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The other day a visiting Polish architect asked me what I thought of the new urbanism movement. It is a good question. On the one hand, the continued expansion and growth of the Congress for a New Urbanism is impressive. I recall the first meeting, in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993. Barely filled a small room. Today the annual conventions attract halls full of enthusiastic members. New urbanism  was jump-started by Seaside, whose celebrity and undoubted success—financial as well as architectural—encouraged real estate developers, community and neighborhood groups, city planners and architects, to take a long hard look.

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