An illustrated companion to The Embrace of Buildings by Lee Hardy. Preface and Chapters 1-5
Preface
Page x: "A carpet of housing subdivisions, shopping malls, parking lots, freeways, and gas stations was being rolled out from LA."
Page xi: "Following up on that lead, I soon discovered the existence of The Congress for the New Urbanism"
Chapter 1:
The Invisible Hand of Uncle Sam
Page 2: "... often driving where I needed to go along gritty commercial thoroughfares and featureless arterials."
Page 2: "Must we choose between deteriorating urban cores and degraded suburb landscapes?"
Page 3: "FHA guidelines clearly favored single-family homes...and the home industry built accordingly—especially after the Second War World." This is Levittown, built between 1947 and 1951.
Chapter 2
In Every Garage a Car—No, Make that Two Cars
Page 10: the Futurama exhibit at the World's Fair of 1939, NYC.
Page 10: "...designed to sell America on the glorious vision of a nation crisscrossed by fourteen-lane, limited-access superhighways.
Page 10: "In 1956, Eisenhower signed the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act ... the largest peacetime public works project in the history of the world."
The Street Hierarchy
Pages 12-13: The Street Hierarchy, a system of major arterials flowing between discrete land use pods. The pods themselves serviced by cul-de-sacs that empty into collector roads that in turn empty into the major arterials.
Page 13: "Shared public space—built, formed, used, and valued— has virtually disappeared."
Chapter 3
EVERY HOME A COUNTRY VILLA
The Villa Rotunda, by Andrea Palladio (c. 1590), an aristocratic country estate in northern Italy that served as a model for the magnates of the industrial era of the 1800s.
John Nash's Park Village development in London, circa 1820. Note curvilinear streets, and, by contrast, the regimented row housing on the upper right, and the duplexes to the immediate right.
Page 16: The story of the growth of suburbia... [was] made possible by increasingly affordable homes and transportation.
Page 16: "The entire middle class, and a good deal of the working class, could now live in downsized versions of the country villa on the edge of town in a naturalistic setting provided by a private yard."
Page 15-16: "Thus was home-life and work-life divided between the private domestic sphere of the family the country, managed by the female, and the public sphere of work in the city, run by the male."
SEVEN FEATURES OF A WALKABLE NEIGHBORHOOD
Center and Edge
Page 28: "Walkable neighborhoods have an idenfiable center and a distinct edge."
Walkable Scale
Page 28: "Walkable neighborhoods are typically defined by a five to ten-minute walking radius."
The circle represents a 5-minute walking radius; the neighborhood contains residential, civic, retail, transit, parks and schools within the 5-minute walking radius.
Mixed Use
Page 28: "Walkable neighborhoods have a mix of land uses. In them you will find not only houses, but stores, offices, restaurants, pubs, coffee shops, schools, places of worship, post offices, libraries, parks, squares, and transit stops—all within a walkable range."
Connected Streets
Page 29: "Walkable neighborhoods have a manageable block structure and a fine network of streets."
Street and block plan in a proposed Master Plan for Wheaton, Illinois, courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Urban Design Studio.
Street and block proposal for Wealthy/Jefferson area, Grand Rapids, MI. Courtesy of the Inner City Christian Federation.
This comparison between the street hierarchy, on the left, and the grid system, on the right, make it clear that adjacency does not equal accessibility. Note that in both plans the home and school are in the same positions relative to each other. But in the street hierarchy one would typically drive to school along the collectors and arterials, while in the grid one can easily walk.
Building Hierarchy
Page 29: "Walkable neighborhoods are typically laid out so that special buildings occupy special sites."
A design study for Congress Parkway, looking west, Chicago. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Urban Design Studio.
Public Transit
Page 29: "Walkable neighborhoods are connected to other neighborhoods and to the central business district by way of public transit."
Mixed residential types on the same block. Here a multi-unit building anchors a corner in Wicker Park, Chicago.
Page 30: "Seven features. None of them complicated or expensive. Put them together and you have a neighborhood scaled and built for human beings in all their diversity."
Consider a single block in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, originally built before rigorous functional zoning. A healthy mix of land uses and residential types.