Tag: towers in a park

• The day modern architecture died

  

  In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe.

  Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called it the “nicest place she’d ever had.” 

  But 16 years later in 1972, the first 3 buildings within Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. And in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jencks proclaimed that the day Pruitt-Igoe was demolished was the day that modern architecture had officially died.

  The modernist dream had failed. Architecture had failed us. Segregated “towers in a park” was not the way to socially engineer away poverty and slums from our cities. 

  This is the narrative that we have told ourselves, not only in St. Louis, but in cities all around the world.

  But was it really all architecture’s fault?

  Stuyvesant Town in New York (80 acres) shares many of the same architectural ideals that Pruitt-Igoe embodied and it seems to be holding up just fine. The same could be said for Lafayette Park in Detroit (46 acres), which is probably more telling given what the city witnessed in the years following 1956 – the year Lafayette Park was completed.

  So the reality is far more complex.

  Between 1950 and 1970, St. Louis lost about 30% of its population. Coming on the end, Pruitt-Igoe had a vacancy rate of 88%. Racial tensions were also surging. Here’s how the American Institute of Architects put it back in 2012:

  Pruitt-Igoe was built during a tumultuous time in U.S. race relations in a city with an intense history of racial segregation. Pruitt and Igoe were designed as separate, racially segregated projects: Pruitt for African-American residents, Igoe for whites. As the towers were going up, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision banned segregation. Faced with the possibility of living next to African-American neighbors in an integrated Pruitt-Igoe, white residents moved out en masse, exacerbating Pruitt-Igoe’s vacancy problems.
  

  So while most cities rightfully would’t dare build in the spirit of Pruitt-Igoe today, this was not a strictly architectural problem. There is always an underlying social, political, and economic environment. And unfortunately architecture, alone, cannot solve everything. 

  If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend you check out a paper by Katharine G. Bristol called, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

  Image by Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian

  2015.09.25

• The big challenge is suburban infill

  

  Thorncliffe Park Drive (TORONTO) by Jenver Rosales on 500px

  Between the 1950s and 1980s, Toronto built a lot of towers. A 2010 report by the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal identified 1,925 rental apartment towers of 8 storeys or more across the Greater Toronto Area. 

  That’s the second largest inventory of apartment towers in North America – many or most of which are in car-oriented suburban neighborhoods.

  Of course, Toronto continues to build a lot of towers. But this second and current wave of towers is quite different than the last. Virtually all of them are now condo (as opposed to rental) and most are concentrated in central neighborhoods that are generally well-serviced by transit.

  This has created a lot of positives for the city. It brought more people into the core to live, which in turn brought more retailers and employers into the city. It has created what I believe is a more vibrant and exciting 24/7 city.

  But this return to city centers (as well as the economic spikiness it has created) is now well established both in Toronto, as well as in other cities all around the world. Every real estate conference or panel you go to now talks about Millennials and their desire to be in walkable communities. We got it.

  And relatively speaking, those kinds of communities aren’t that difficult to create when you’re infilling city centers. Certainly not at this point. The street grid and bones are usually all in place. And the urban form is often conducive to transit.

  The real challenge – and thus opportunity – for Toronto and lots of other cities is how to urbanize the (inner) suburbs and in particular these “towers in a park”. If you follow this space, you’ll know that there’s a lot more that we could be doing.

  How do we rethink their relationship to the rest of the city? How do we better connect them through transit? How do we plug them in economically? In my opinion, these are far more difficult tasks. But they’re important ones for the long-term success of our cities.

  2015.06.10

• Spectrum of Hope

  

  Built in the late 1940s, Regent Park was Canada’s first and largest social (public) housing project. Like many housing projects of this era, it was modeled after Le Corbusier’s “towers in a park” ideology, though in this case most of the buildings were only a few storeys tall and hardly towers. 

  It was built to correct what had become a major slum on the east side of downtown Toronto. And like many cities around the world, this type of built form was viewed as the solution. Urban slums were crowded and dirty. Density was bad. The solution was to spread people out and surround them with green space.

  But that didn’t work out so well. Regent Park failed. So today we are once again starting again. Phase by phase, the old is being demolished and the new is being built. However, unlike the last time, I think this time it’ll be for the better. 

  But there’s something very ironic about this story.

  Before Regent Park became Regent Park, it was called something else: Cabbagetown. That neighborhood of course still exists in Toronto – it’s adjacent to Regent Park – but it’s now a bit smaller having given up a portion of its land to the first iteration of Regent Park.

  Today, what remains of Cabbagetown has become an affluent and desirable inner city neighborhood with, allegedly, the largest stock of Victorian housing in North America. But of course it wasn’t always that way. At the time that Regent Park was being conceived, Cabbagetown was a slum. And that’s why we built Regent Park version 1.0. It was the solution for this entire section of the city.

  The photo at the top of this post is the southeast corner of Gerrard Street East and Parliament Street. The building at the corner is the Hotel Gerrard. The photo is from 1919, which means it’s a photo of Regent Park when it was still called Cabbagetown. It’s part of what we demolished to make way for the new. 

  In 2013, that same corner looked like this:

  

  What’s ironic about all of this, is that the area we spared from grandiose urban renewal plans actually became the richest part. And where we intervened is where things got screwed up. So much so that we’re now starting entirely from scratch, again. All of this just makes wonder whether Cabbagetown, in its entirety, would have ultimately taken care of itself had we just left it alone. 

  But what’s in the past is in the past.

  So to end on a positive note, I’d like to share a short video that somebody recently shared with me called Spectrum of Hope. It was co-directed by 7 young artists from the neighborhood who are calling it “a piece for Regent Park, by Regent Park.”

  //player.vimeo.com/video/106104994?color=ff9933

  Spectrum of Hope from Twice Upon a Time – Toronto/NYC on Vimeo.

  I think it’s a great example of the positive momentum developing in this neighborhood. I hope you’ll give it a watch and then share it around. Click here if you can’t see the video above.

  2014.12.27