III) URBAN FORM 101 [slide #4]
I would like at this point to introduce a brief account of the formal order of traditional cities, what I call “Urban Form 101.” Although there is ongoing discussion among the growing number of design professionals interested in traditional architecture and urbanism about the best agents and mechanisms by means of which to deal with land-use issues at metropolitan and regional scales, there is a virtual consensus among us that the mixed-use walkable neighborhood is the sine qua non of urban design and ought to be a focus of both public policy and our design efforts, whether such neighborhoods are considered in isolation or in relationship to other neighborhoods. A neighborhood standing alone in the landscape is a village; several neighborhoods in the landscape, a town; many contiguous neighborhoods in the landscape together constitute a city or a metropolis. But to make traditional neighborhoods today requires a conscientious rejection of the way we’ve been making human settlements for the past fifty-seven years.
Every city (or town or village) is a dynamic, overlapping, conflicting, and multi-dimensional order; and if we think of any good city, we can identify at least four kinds of order: an ecological order, an economic order, a moral order, and a formal order. A good city quite clearly is itself and occurs within an ecological order. A city is a trans-generational artifact by means of which the human animal dwells in and on the landscape. If this artifact is made intelligently and well, both the human animal and the ecological order of which it is part will thrive. If the city is not made well, both the human animal and the ecological order will suffer in both the short and long term--but especially human beings, because in a strictly natural frame of reference, nature always wins. The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace diversity and entrepreneurial freedom. Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute the material goods and services necessary to the material well being of the populace; and beyond this to create the surplus wealth---and hence, the leisure---necessary for the various kinds of non-subsistence cultural endeavors—music, art, scholarship, sport--that are the very hallmarks of urban culture. Just as important however is the recognition that a good city is also a moral order. The marks of this order are the existence of various religious, civic, and political institutions that are sufficiently strong and influential to restrain the excessive individualism that a free economy encourages. Such institutions will seek to educate individuals in a variety of moral and intellectual virtues, and to promote among individuals a sincere regard for the common good. If these institutions are in good working order, they will be promoting and sustaining a shared sense that the city is not only a marketplace but also a moral community; and that the market exists for the community and not the community for the market. Finally, the formal order of the city is what architects typically deal with, and is what architects typically think of when we think about the city. Most people intuitively understand the relationship that exists between the formal order of a city and its economic order, because it requires economic power to build significant buildings; but we may have more trouble seeing the relationship between the formal order of a city and its moral order. I want to suggest that the traditional western view of the good life as individual excellence lived in community is evident also in the formal order of the traditional city, and is a counterpoint to our own individualist / emotivist culture that manifests itself physically as suburban sprawl.
Leon Krier, the most influential traditional urbanist of our time, has graphically compared the traditional urban neighborhood to a slice of pizza [SLIDE #5]. A neighborhood is to the larger city what a slice of the pizza is to the whole pie: a part that contains within itself the essential qualities and elements of the whole. In contrast, the separation of uses typical of the modern suburb (and typically mandated by modern zoning) is analogous to separating all the ingredients of the pizza from each other: the crust here, the sauce over there, the cheese someplace else, the pepperoni way out yonder, et cetera. [SLIDES 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,zones and arterials] This latter arrangement has all the ingredients of the pizza, but it is not a pizza precisely because it does not have the form of a pizza. Similarly, the post-war suburb has all the ingredients of a city, but it is not a city because it lacks both the physical and the social form of a city. And the reason this matters (again, as all Catholics should know) is because very purpose of the city—the good life for human beings—is not so separable from the formal order of the city as our cultural ideal of suburbia leads us to believe.
So what are some of the key features of the formal order of traditional towns and cities? Another famous Krier drawing illustrates diagrammatically several characteristics of the formal order of the traditional city [[SLIDE 12]:
Cities include a private / economic realm and a civic realm, identifiably separate but necessarily mixed together.
Cities are made of blocks of buildings that define a public realm of streets defined by private buildings, and of plazas and/or squares typically fronted by civic buildings or focused on a centralized monument.
Plazas are hard-surfaced [SLIDE 13], while squares proper are usually a planted green space [SLIDE 14]. Plazas are more common in European cities, and squares in Anglo-American cities. Both are rare in America after 1945.
Virtually all urban streets connect; urban culs de sac are rare. Although there is a recognizable hierarchy of streets according to traffic capacity (and hence, size), urban streets always accommodate pedestrians. American cities tend to line most of their streets with trees; European cities tend to limit trees to Boulevards and Avenues.
Primary urban streets—typically designated as Boulevards [SLIDE 15] and Avenues [SLIDE 16]—carry large volumes of traffic; but unlike suburban arterials, they have on-street parking to protect pedestrians, and wide sidewalks to safely and comfortably accommodate pedestrians (and in some places the patrons of outdoor cafes).
Secondary urban streets are narrow, and usually permit parking on one or both sides [SLIDE 17]. They allow traffic to connect to major streets, but their narrow width requires cars to move slowly. This creates an inherently safer pedestrian environment. Lanes constitute a third kind of street, essentially a service street for garage access, utilities, and trash collection [SLIDE 18].
Private buildings relate to the street in a consistent and disciplined manner. Private buildings consist of buildings used primarily for commerce [SLIDE 19] and for dwelling [SLIDE 20]. These buildings front and spatially define streets, and often shelter a mix of uses. Buildings used for commerce may have residences above the ground floor; and buildings primarily intended as residences may also shelter small offices or businesses.
Good cities provide a variety of housing types, often on the same block. In addition to various kinds of detached single-family houses, there may be row-houses, flats, apartment buildings, coach houses, and the aforementioned apartments-above-stores. [SLIDES 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27] The consequence of this concentrated mix of housing is that the young and the old, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy, can all find places to live within the neighborhood. Small ancillary buildings are typically permitted and encouraged within the back yard of each lot. In addition to parking, this small building may be used as one rental unit of housing or as a place to work. [SLIDE 28]
A good neighborhood has good schools in the neighborhood, and particularly elementary schools within walking distance of both students and teachers (and because of the variety of housing types in the neighborhood, teachers can afford to live there if they so choose). [SLIDE 29]
[SLIDE 30] Good cities provide parks of various sizes throughout neighborhoods for both passive and active recreation.
[SLIDE 31] Good neighborhoods reserve prominent sites for civic buildings and community monuments. Buildings for education, religion, culture, sport, and government are sited either at the end of important streets vistas, or fronting squares or plazas [SLIDE 32].
[SLIDE 33] All of these civic, commercial, residential, and recreation buildings and uses are within pedestrian proximity of each other—a five-to-ten minute / one-quarter-to-one-half-mile walk. The most important implication of this is that persons who are too young, too old, too poor, or too infirm to drive a car remain able to live a relatively independent life in their community. The car becomes a convenience rather than a necessity.
[SLIDES 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39] Thursday projects: Armour Field / Ada, MI / Greensboro, NC
These then are some of the formal characteristics of traditional urban neighborhoods. And I can summarize our current situation by saying on the one hand that making neighborhoods of such quality today is as simple as looking closely at, emulating, and attempting to improve upon the most beloved cities and neighborhoods in the world; and on the other hand that making such neighborhoods is as hard as the fact that in most places in America today it is literally illegal to build such environments, and also---to complicate matters even further---that we have lost the cultural habit of doing so.
I’ve so far been contrasting two formal paradigms of human settlement: the traditional urban neighborhood and the post-war automobile suburb. And lest you think I exaggerate the point by dividing the history of human settlements into pre-1945 and post-1945 periods, I contend that this essential division is warranted, precisely because it represents the temporal demarcation between walkable human settlements and those that require mechanical transportation to perform the majority of life’s daily tasks---though I will be the first to admit that the cultural antecedents of sprawl go back much further. (Oh, and did I mention that obesity rates in our auto-centered culture are at an all-time high?) Anyway, the Catholic Church too has been engulfed by the suburban tidal wave of the past half-century, with less than happy consequences for both the Church and the Church’s witness to and evangelization of the world. But alarm bells are sounding; and there is now a swelling chorus of voices claiming that the social and cultural costs of sprawl are excessive, that sprawl itself is both culturally and environmentally unsustainable; and that the only alternative to suburbia is the revival of the art of making traditional cities. So I want to spend the rest of my talk this afternoon pursuing the implications of these ideas for church architecture, especially in light of recent history in the post-conciliar Catholic Church.
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OVERVIEW
I) INTRODUCTION
II) CITIES AND THE GOOD LIFE
III) URBAN FORM 101
IV) CHURCH FORM: LITURGY AND THE LOGIC OF ARCHITECTURE
V) NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER / HEAVENLY WITNESS: practical suggestions
TEN PRINCIPLES OF GOOD URBAN NEIGHBORHOOD DESIGN
