The journey of Architect This City has been an organic one. When I first started blogging regularly in September 2013, I had no plan in mind other than that I wanted to write about cities. I had just come off working full-time on my startup, Dirt, where I had gotten into the habit of writing and I enjoyed it immensely. So I wanted to continue.
Cities seemed like the perfect umbrella to capture all of my passions: architecture, design, planning, real estate, and even technology. And so I rebranded brandondonnelly.com—which I had already been using as a microblog—and slapped the title “Cities” on it. (That personal microblog has since become brandondonnelly.me.)
Then, after a few months of blogging, I was having drinks with a good friend of mine and telling her about my new daily discipline. She immediately asked me what it was called and, when I replied by saying that I didn’t really have a name for it, she insisted that I create one immediately. Since she’s one of the brightest people I know, I gave it some serious thought. A few days later, Architect This City was born.
I liked the idea of having a distinct brand, because then it meant it could grow beyond just a personal blog. It could become a real community of people passionate and committed to building better cities. And that ultimately became the goal as I got deeper and deeper into writing.
Since that time last year, I’ve had friends guest blog on ATC. It has gone on to become syndicated on Mobility Lab and Urban Times. And it has been featured by the Guardian in the UK has one of the big city blogs in the world. But even more exciting are the moments when somebody tells me, either face-to-face or through a quick message, that they’re really enjoying ATC and that they read it daily. That’s what keeps me going.
Lately though, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. What’s the purpose of ATC? What’s the why? I thought about writing a manifesto of sorts, but that just seemed unnecessarily onerous. So I sat down, primarily on the subway, with Evernote, and I wrote a purpose statement for ATC:
To promote the building of beautiful and environmentally sustainable cities that offer strong economic opportunities and a high quality of life.
That’s really what I believe cities should do. They should be enjoyable and beautiful places to live life and they should empower people to get richer. At the same time, we need to be aware that as more and more of the world’s 7 billion people move into cities, the need for environmentally sustainable solutions is only going to increase.
So those are the kinds of discussions I hope we can have on ATC. Regular scheduled programming will continue as usual, but hopefully now the why is clearer. If you have any feedback on the above statement, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.
Take a look at this tweet I came across yesterday:
A different way of thinking, a century apart. pic.twitter.com/GoxUQs0bB4
— Darren Proulx (@dnproulx)
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On the left is a picture of some crowded and dense city at, I presume, the turn of the 20th century. And on the right is a picture, today, of your generic suburban city with lots of cars, a broad street and auto-oriented signage everywhere.
As the captions say, the city on the left is what modernist architects like Le Corbusier and powerful city builders like Robert Moses were trying to fix. What we ended up with, as a result of these efforts, is the city on the right. Now, today, we–architects, planners and urbanists–are all trying to correct what we see as a huge misstep in the way we designed and built cities.
But is it really an anomalous misstep or is it simply a preferential pendulum that swings back and forth from generation to generation? One generation thinks cities are dirty and evil and that they need to be evacuated. And then the next generation loves them and wants to move back into them, which is what’s happening today.
Dogma–particularly when it comes to cities–takes a long time to percolate through the system. Le Corbusier was espousing his city building ideals of “towers in parks” in the 1920s. That’s when he proposed to demolish 2 square miles of Paris (Plan Voisin) and turn it into what most people today would think looks like a New York public housing project.
But for these new ideas to take hold, young architects, planners and builders first need to become indoctrinated in school or wherever they’re learning the ropes. Then, they need to get out and start practicing and mature to a point where they’re starting to influence and control substantial city building decisions. That’s why, I think, Le Corbusier’s ideas of the 20s really only became widely accepted as planning principles in the post-war years.
Because of this though, I sometimes wonder if I too am just following the natural cycle of changing tastes. When I went to architecture school, we were taught that public transit is more efficient than private cars, density is good for the environment and for economic development, and that Le Corbusier was generally a crappy city builder. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that that is generally the view I take here.
But when I ask myself this question, I think of a few things. First, if you look at the urbanization of ancient cities, they were always organized around strong public spaces. The desire for human beings to be able to walk around, conduct business and socialize with each other is not a new phenomenon. And our post-war planning ideals put a strain on that.
Second, take a look at the world and what’s happening. The majority of people now live in cities and we’re continuing to urbanize at a frenetic pace. Shenzhen in China went from a population of just over 300,000 people in 1979 to over 10.5 million people today. That is the pace of urbanization that city builders need to deal with. It’s unprecedented.
And to even begin to make that manageable, I don’t think we can continue to build cities like the ones on the right side of the picture, above. It’s unsustainable both environmentally and from a mere space planning standpoint. There simply isn’t enough room.
So call me a product of the times, but I just don’t see our current planning goals as one side of a swinging pendulum. I see them as a return to what cities have always been about: a place for people to interact, socialize and generate wealth.
Late last month it was announced that the 30 St. Mary Axe tower in London–also affectionately known as the Gherkin–had gone into receivership. The reason was a mismatch of assets and liabilities, specifically currency losses:
A fund managed by IVG Immobilien AG, once Germany’s biggest real estate company, and London-based Evans Randall Ltd. bought the Foster + Partners-designed tower from reinsurer Swiss Re Ltd. for 600 million pounds ($1 billion) in 2007. Part of the IVG fund’s loan was in Swiss francs, which have gained about 63 percent against the pound over the last seven years, increasing the amount owed to the point that it breached rules on how much debt could be held against the property.
But what I found interesting while reading Bloomberg and Monocle, and learning about the loan default, is that there seems to be a lot of people in London that really don’t like this tower. Shaped like a giant pickle, it’s been the brunt of many lewd jokes, I’m sure.
However, within the architectural community, the Gherkin tower is generally revered as a pretty awesome piece of architecture. It’s a highly sustainable building that employs a number of natural ventilation and passive heating and cool techniques. It’s estimated to consume half the energy of a “typical” office building.
At the same time, the mixed feelings surrounding the Gherkin tower reminded me of all the controversy surrounding the Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal addition here in Toronto. In fact, I just read somewhere that somebody rated it one of the top 10 ugliest buildings in the world.
And certainly, I hear lots of people criticize the building here in the city. Often, they mention how much wasted space the angular walls generate, which makes me wonder why we have so many people living in the suburbs when there are so many space conservationists among us.
Personally, I love the Crystal. And I also love the Gherkin. They’re big and bold and they piss a lot of people off. Good, I say.