I have recently become the chair for the Young Professionals Initiative for the RailVolution conference. I am very excited of the possibilities this will bring, including a chance to attend the conference myself this fall. I first heard of RailVolution while I was working for the urban design firm Crandall Arambula. At the time, all of my coworkers were beside themselves trying to get papers accepted for the 2008 conference, held in San Francisco that year.

The conference is unique in that it focuses specifically on encouraging light rail and its design in America amongst planners and urban design professionals. RailVolution started in Portland in 1989, and expanded to a national level in 1994. It is back in Portland this year, and this will be its first year that it has had a young professionals initiative to try and attract more emerging professionals to the conference.

My position as chair will involve leading planning an evening event that will specifically be geared towards a younger crowd as well as membership on the scholarship committee and potentially a voice in the local steering committee. As this will be the initiative’s first year, I hope to make it a strong one so it can grow in the future to include a larger event and perhaps even a panel. I believe it is a great idea to specifically encourage young professionals to this conference. They should be just as present as their older peers, which unfortunately has not been the case in years past. I hope this initiative can help to encourage attendance amongst the young. RailVolution is a great place for advocacy about the values of light rail and urban design as well as a chance to learn and network within the field itself. I am stoked to have this chance to be involved.

Lately my neck of the woods has been construction central. Good construction, though, which has been in the plans for almost a decade. The city is installing its next light rail line. It will be the first connecting route for southeast Portland. I may actually be able to use this wonderful mass transit system on a regular basis in the future.

I expect the line has been delayed because it is tied in with a complete overhaul of the eastside’s primary east-west connection bridge, Burnside, which in and if itself has required a complete overhaul of the aging sewer system that runs beneath the street. The corresponding East Burnside improvements are also extensive, turning the street into a one-way couplet and removing one of the more harsh intersections in the area. I am glad for all of the improvements, even if it means my sense of mobility is impaired while virtually all the routes available to me remain in dismal states of construction and repair.

I am glad for the progress this massive project shows, but I am not convinced all improvements to East Burnside will really be improvements. City officials have turned several blocks closest to the river into one-way couplets. My urban design training has taught me to avoid these car-friendly traffic movers at all costs in favor of two-way streets, which by design slow traffic. This is not logically the best way to move large amounts of traffic, but it does encourage drivers to be more aware of where and what they are driving through. Perhaps, it is argued, they will take more notice of the biker in the road, or the floral shop on the corner. In other words, they recognize the place as a neighborhood, not a road. A neighborhood they may patronize later. And the East Burnside neighborhood, with its central location in the city, could use this sort of support.

The one-way street changes are currently under construction, so this may be a mute point. I rode my bike through the new western couplet and it impressed me despite my academic protests. It is only two lanes wide and actually gives more of a neighborhood feel than the original 5-lane Burnside. However, their treatment of the return to the old road and the bridge is a disaster waiting to happen. It forces two lanes of traffic and a narrower-than-usual bike lane to go through a series of 90-degree turns to get back to western lanes of the bridge. I understand the turns were a result of lack of space, but while going through the bike lane, I felt it nearly impossible to both keep my bike within my lane and go a safe speed while traffic whizzed by my left. It was quite unnerving. What really gets me, though, is that it seems an easy fix. Rather than separating bike and pedestrian, the sidewalk could be extended to hold both as in the nearby Hawthorne Bridge, which is arguably the most biked bridge in the city and perhaps the country. Why that was not done here to begin with truly escapes me. Hopefully someone doesn’t lose their life for what was most likely a budget concern.

It’s funny the things you hang on to after you have traveled. I just cleaned out my jewelry box and in the process pinned a tiny evil eye bead on my shirt. It has been floating around my wardrobe for months now since I got back from Turkey. My program roommate gave me the thing- she got it from someone else wanting to welcome her to the country, and she thought it was cheesy. It is. Beside the bead hangs a bunch of fake plastic grapes. It really is spectacularly cheesy pin. And yet I still have it.

I have been thinking about Turkey a lot today since reading about the 6.0 earthquake that occurred this morning in part of the area through which I traveled last October. I can just remember staring out my bus window as I passed dozens of similar villages similar to those now pictures in the aftermath, thinking only at the time how opposing our lives were. Unlike me, these people lived in remote places, on family farms that had been there for millennia. I remember farm wives in peasant dress leading cows into barns beneath their dwellings. Skinny chickens darting back and forth along the road, trying to avoid the lumbering vehicle- one of very few that probably ever come along some of those roads. The locals tend to travel by hanging on to the side of a tractor, or in the back of a truck- I often saw some such farmer giving people a lift to and from destinations. These people lost everything as their traditional mud brick dwellings bit the dust this morning, some even lost their lives.

As my supervisor in Istanbul informed me over lunch at the top of one of the buildings in concern, there are rarely standards in countries that aren’t first world, even in countries like Turkey that are earthquake-prone. Even if standards do exist, they are rarely enforced, and therefore never followed. As population centers boom and mid-rises pop up by the thousands, the problem escalates- not even evil eyes can ward them off then. Case in point: Haiti. It’s scary to think of how many more Haiti-like disasters will occur in this coming century. Today’s earthquake was “lucky”- it hit in a remote area where many of the dwellings are still traditionally built, and therefore by tradition built to withstand the elements of their environments, including earthquakes. The new population centers will not be so lucky in the future. Standards, though expensive to sometimes implement, really are worth our time. Today, I am thankful for the bureaucracy of enforcement, and keeping those in places without such luxury in my heart.

Sanli Urfa, a city in Southeastern Turkey

My brother has decided he wants to enter the design field as well now. Not as an architect, but in the creative side of advertising- which, of course, will require a lot of graduate school on top of his German lit degree. It’s been interesting watching him create the materials he is going to need to get into a design program as I am simultaneuously working on materials that will get me a design job. The emotions of the process that run through him are much more acute because of their newness- sometimes I miss that excitement.

They tell you that as a designer, you are much like a bottle of wine- you only get better with age and experience. They tell you to not expect to do any good work before the age of 50. But as you age, the emotional excitement dies as well, and the process becomes more like a well-worn sweater. It’s still warm and beautiful, but not your Sunday best. You can switch up your process, much like changing your sweater, but the fact remains that it is still a design process, something you have learned to work through over and over again. Just like a sweater is still a sweater.

Is design better with age? You certainly learn to channel and control your inspiration to a much greater extent, gleaming more out of each morsel and perfecting the outcome from experience. But there are less morsels, and they are in constant danger of becoming stale. The trick seems to be changing your process often enough so that your design does contain enough of the acute emotion that comes with novelty while also improving upon your old bag of tricks. Perhaps you do grow better at this balancing act with age. I do know that I would never prefer to go back to the emotional rollercoaster of being a new designer now that I have a grasp on the strength and control that comes with a strong process. Here’s hoping age works.

My cohousing complex composes the northwest side of my new plaza.  It is to be a truly urban cohousing- an apartment complex with shared community spaces that could be open to the greater public.  By extending the use of certain spaces beyond the housing community, you at once engage the larger urban context as well as give the community a means by which to support itself, therefore keeping the community affordable.

Cohousing is a European concept, but it has existed in the US since the late 1970’s.  Almost all cohousing in America is suburban in its character, mimicking the popular cul-de-sac neighborhoods in its layout and service offerings. In the past few years, many more urban initiatives have gotten underway in the USA, but for now all examples of this style of cohousing exist only in northern Europe.  Typically those complexes consist of a ground floor of community spaces with apartments above, and look no different than any other apartment complex in their neighborhood.

I decided early that I wanted my complex to be more of a beacon for the neighborhood; therefore the community spaces needed to reveal themselves rather than bury underneath I created a glass tower separate from the apartments directly upon the public square. This tower at once announces the difference between this type of housing and typical apartment living.  All community activities have a direct visual conversation with the public plaza with only a layer of glass as separation.  The private apartments then cluster themselves around a courtyard behind this tower, thus creating a gradient of privacy and separation back from the plaza. The courtyard and all other community spaces align themselves to a shifted grid that engages the center of the plaza more, and consist of similar light materials such as glass.  The type of glass and its’ translucency will vary depending upon the amount of publicity each community space’s program specifies.

The original, regular grid remains to comprise the more privatized spaces of the program, in particular the apartment themselves.  These spaces are characterized by much more solid materials such as concrete.

The play between the two grids and the way they intersect and interlock has been of utmost importance in the articulation of the spaces.  For the most part, the public grid has taken precedence over the private, thus carving away at its spaces, a philosophical gesture to the basic function of cohousing- the reversal of the helplessness and loneliness of isolation.  I am currently working on refining this play both within the plan and elevations (the exteriors of the building), and eventually I will speak more upon these.  In the meantime, here is the basic floor plan diagram for my building (north is up, as in the site diagram I placed above):

Midthesis.

That is the major qualification to my life right now.  I have spent one term in school designing thus far, and now I will spend another refining.  To spend 20 weeks on a project that culminates your learning for the past 5.5 years of school is a very daunting task.  I constantly feel as though my design decisions should be faster, simpler, better- and perhaps they are compared to even two years ago, but they are still simply slow in my mind.  As a result I have definitely been losing myself in this project in an attempt to end my school years on a high note.

The project is one I would have not expected myself to choose, but at the same time it fits the slant of my scholastic career thus far.  My studio professor was concerned with the redevelopment plans for an extension to his neighborhood here in Portland, and led my studio for the first four weeks to develop a lower density alternative (sort of a Brooklyn versus Manhattan scenario).  After working for eight months in an urban design firm, I was looking forward to this part of the project, and I felt the design I created was fairly well done.  I wanted to be far-reaching  in my focus, and as a result I concentrated heavily on reorganizing the transportation hierarchy in order to grow this small neighborhood into a cohesive piece of northwest Portland.  I was fairly heavy-handed with the street grid, restoring it whenever possible, moving freeway off-ramps to better connect with arterial routes that had transformed since the freeway’s construction in the 1960’s, and giving over much more space to the pedestrian and bike.  I believe it is these elements that encourage neighborhoods over any other-the neighborhood will automatically thrive if it is walkable and bikable.  This element is particularly important in Portland, where many such neighborhoods already exist and must compete with one another for residents in order to continue to thrive.  Afer establishing my vision for the tranportation grid of the neighborhood, my designation of services and block development was much less forceful.  Here I favored allowing the neighborhood to grow itself organically over time rather than in a rigid, prescribed fashion.  I did designate some streets as retail (an extension of what has already developed in this area), and these streets are also treated differently within the transportation hierarchy compared to nieghborhood streets. I also created a central plaza along this retail extension that interrupts the restored street grid and establishes a center to the neighborhood between two major parks and aerterial routes with some major retail and community activities to occur around it.

Other than these strong moves, I only suggested small pocket activities that could be scattered throughout the neighborhood and therefore  easily accessible to all.  These pockets of activities included small parks, community gardens, and community services such as libraries, schools and rec centers.  One of my reviewers called this strategy shockingly “laissez faire,” but I think it would be an interesting plan to implement, particularly for a neighborhood that has a history of good organic growth.  In fact, it is potentially more unwise to try to overdirect growth in such circumstances, a move that could interrupt the good growth patterns the neighborhood has already established.

After spending four to five weeks on this element, we switched into designing buildings for the rest of the studio.  We are all architecture majors in the studio, after all.  For this portion of the project, we are each developing a building scheme of our choosing that is appropriate to our urban design visions for the neighborhood extension.  Here is where I surprised myself- rather than choosing a commercial or community building to round out my portfolio (which had been my goal upon entering my final project), I chose a housing complex.  It is still a larger scale than most of the single family to small multi-family development projects that currently dominate my portfolio, but it is still housing.  Apparently I love the subject, which, of course, I already know I do. I find places we live, our homes, to be of the utmost importance in our emotional states, and therefore some of the most important and meaningful architectural spaces that we can design.  Which translates to difficult, which translates to fun.  So after a short debate with myself, I decided why not go with something you would love to design and have some pre-existing experience with?  It worked for my undergraduate final project (a surf “shack” at a time when I was throughly in love with surf culture and had lived with a surfing romate for two years), so it could work for my thesis.

I chose to design a cohousing apartment complex right on my new plaza, sort of a beacon of community to this newly established extension.  For those of you who are not familiar with the term, cohousing is “community housing.”  It is not a commune, although it does have a strong community association and shared community spaces that the members are encouraged, and sometimes required to use.  Each resident still gets their own private apartment, although its size is somewhat reduced because of the plethora of community spaces available.  My professor compares it to European apartment living.  The ideals behind every cohousing community include a strong sense of community with each member providing support and friendship to eachother (much like an extended family) and the encouragement of diversity in all its forms. These ideals line up with my vision for the neighborhood, so I thought it an appropriate “catalyst” project for the neighborhood center.  It is not a living situation for everyone, but I think the neighborhood I have envisioned would benefit greatly from such a beacon in their community.

Over the past few years it seems that carbon emissions and the push for a zero carbon world has dominated environmental news.  Part of this is due to its high-profile advocates such as Al Gore for global warming, of which carbon emissions are a major factor, and impressive projects such as Masdar City in the U.A.E., the world’s first zero carbon city, by Sir Norman Foster.   The other part of its news domination is the cold hard fact that it is a major contributer to global warming.  Since the industrial era, the amount of carbon in the air has increased 35%.  As we “modernize” (i.e. cut down trees and use our natural resources), we reduce our planet’s natural carbon sinks (places that either store or exchange CO2 into other gases), and its percentage builds up.  The bad part is, that as this gas builds up, it warms our planet, thus reducing its ability to handle the carbon even further.  For example, our oceans are the largest carbon sink on our planet, handling up to 30% of all emissions ever. However, as the temperature of the ocean rises, even a fraction of a degree, its ability to dissolve the gas reduces, thus releasing more into the atmosphere which causes more warming . . . . it is a vicious cycle.  And one that is already in motion, which is why scientists are so concerned about reducing carbon emissions so drastically so quickly.

I am currently involved in an independent study that is looking to see if the layout of the urban grid in a city has any factor on carbon emissions.  If it does, then we may be able to lay out the cities of the future in a way that naturally promotes a zero carbon lifestyle.  I thought I would share the introduction to the study, with perhaps more to come later.  Enjoy!:

Introduction

In a world of dwindling natural resources, it is more important than ever to create places that are inherently less taxing to our natural environment.  For years people have understood that there are techniques to building in a way that demands less from our planet.  By existing more in harmony with the natural world, we call these built places sustainable.

The extent to which a building can be made to harmoniously exist in its environment certainly depends upon the locality in which it is placed.  In the past, we have understood this term “environment” to encompass climate and natural resources. However, with over 50% of the world’s population now living in cities, we are residing more and more in an environment of our own making.  City forms have a large factor in forming the location in which we are creating sustainable buildings.  Unlike the natural environment, we have a say in the shape of this form.  As such, is there a certain basic form we should be encouraging in our cities in order to allow our built environment to demand less from our dwindling natural resources?

Cities are incredibly severe on the natural world.  Such a concentration of people demands large-scale buildings and transit systems, which in turn intensify the modern problems created by our built world.  For example, buildings alone cause more than a third of the emissions for carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. Transportation emissions comprise another third.  Cities incorporate both these sectors.  Being dense in their layout, there is little natural world to mitigate their problem at the site, which in turn is detrimental to both the city’s long-term health and the landscape that eventually receives the high concentrations of its emissions.  Many cities have recognized this major problem, and have vowed to become “zero-carbon” in the near future.  Most of the current efforts for a zero-carbon future focus upon mitigating the effect current levels, a massive undertaking in and of itself.  However, it may be possible to use the form of the city itself, the basic city grid, to self-regulate its emissions by encouraging less vehicular traffic and providing maximum opportunities for zero carbon building.  Such a possibility could drastically reduce carbon emissions from cities effortlessly.  Thus it becomes a worthwhile endeavor to ask:

Can the layout of the city grid effectively reduce carbon dioxide emissions?  What key factors of the grid influence its effectiveness in mitigating its own carbon dioxide emissions?

As a first step to answering these questions, we propose to compare and contrast different existing block forms within one city in order to learn if there is indeed a singular grid form that is more sustainable. For our purposes we have chosen Portland, Oregon- one of the cities seeking to become zero-carbon and the location of our university.  After choosing neighborhoods of similar density but varying block size, we will collect data such as traffic counts, size of streets, current CO₂ “sinks” (sites that absorb CO₂), average distance to amenities, street to lot ratios, and current carbon levels. From this analysis we hope to identify one particular grid system that provides the most potential for self-reliance, and thereby develop and ideal city grid form. 

I have a new painting. Like most of my paintings, it deals with opposites- this time, dreams versus reality. Also like most of my paintings, its theme was not planned but rather developed over time as my thoughts slowly seeped themselves onto the canvas. In other words, I have been working over this relatively small canvas for about a month for little tiny spurts at a time, every time I felt sure of where to take it next. I like working this way because it does allow me to develop a theme over time, and the results are typically solid.

I am intrigued by the theme I have hit upon in this painting. I understand its development at this time in my life because I am of an age where I have developed a memory bank of major past dreams and thoughts to compare to my present reality and wide-open future. However, I find it especially intriguing because dreams have recently taken a center stage nationally with Barack Obama’s election. Here is a prime example where we will see how the dreams of a campaign, dreams a whole nation rallied around, take shape in reality.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, though, is the coincidence of my painting and consequent intellectual dwelling upon the difference of dreams and reality with the death of Jorn Utzon, the visionary behind the Sydney Opera House. Here is a man who won the Pritzker Prize, the nobel prize of architecture, for a body of impressive work, but will have his legacy shaped by the creation of one building- or rather, the legendary fiasco surrounding its construction.

Utzon won the competition for the Sydney Opera House with what can best be described as a “napkin sketch”- a simple vision set forth in a quick sketch. His vision was bold and beautiful enough to win the unknown architect an international-level competition, beating out 800 other entries, but not calculated to the level needed to rescue itself from the onslaught of very real engineering and construction limitations.

Utzon’s project spent years in development as he and his engineers tried to figure out a way to build the flying concrete shells of the vision, spectacularly burning through money and time in the pursuit of fusing reality and Utzon’s dream without compromise. In the end, Utzon completed only the concrete shells of the exterior before he and the Australian government that hired him parted ways. The interiors were finished by another architect, and were never to the vision of the original sketches. Utzon himself never set foot on Australian soil again, never reconciling the fiasco. In the 50 years since Utzon won the architectural competition, the world has not stopped talking about the project; but mostly, it is a constant discussion of the Opera House as a dream deferred.

No matter how much praise Utzon received for his spectacular concrete shells, the shadow of the project’s shortcomings and tumultuous construction has constistently haunted this once golden vision. Utzon sought the ultimate- a dream that was reality, but in his quest he failed to work within reality. His legacy will always include this lesson to the rest of us.

Perhaps we are better for it. Dreams are not an easy reality, and are not always meant to be. But that is not to say they should not be sought nonetheless- to dream and achieve is perhaps the best part of being human. The key to achieving their fusion not in constant defiance of one for the other, but rather seems to lie in simply understanding the differences in dreams and reality. My painting poses this question- I leave it to each viewer to figure out the answers for themselves, hopefully in a better fashion than Utzon did.

Back in 2003, a group of suburban experts got together and created a little documentary called The End of Suburbia. Like any movie with the word “End” in the title, it’s your typical doomsday call, suggesting the forthcoming oil peak will cause the end of the American way of life. Normally I avoid these types of movies due to their depressing subject lines and the lack of solutions they set forth. This movie does not break the doomsday mold at all, but the information it does give, from historians and authors that take up a significant portion of my bookshelf, makes it worth seeing. And besides, I do believe that discussing the cause can lead to better solutions.

The movie is basically a history lesson. It follows the rise of the suburbs as a movement to get away from industrialized factory cities, and its heavy subsidization by an energy industry looking to increase its product demand. The film then skips to the future, and the looming problem of what happens when the cheapest and most plentiful energy source- oil- runs out. This is an issue made all the more pressing, as their experts point out, by the expected world peak around 2010. There is no known source of alternative energy that can be produced cheaply on the scale that our lifestyles require in such a short amount of time, and most still rely upon oil in some way for their production. In other words, as we are already maxing out on our oil, we have no choice to curb our energy usage with the forthcoming drop in supply. And, as the experts in the documentary so blatantly pointed out, few people know or understand the chaos this will cause, and even less have prepared for it.

In the five years since this documentary appeared, more people may be aware of the oil peak, but very little preparation has been occurring. And now, the issue is compounded with a mismanaged financial sector, potentially leaving no excess in which to build our way out of the looming energy crisis. The doomsday sentimentality of the documentary may not be far off, as our lifestyles are already showing the toll of rising energy costs, and the dark future the movie predicts is looming ever closer.

It would have been nice for the documentary to offer some hope for the future as far as some sort of solution. The experts do touch lightly but unenthusiastically upon the ideas of New Urbanism and its emphasis of small, self-supporting clustered development- sort of like the old main street style of life as a solution. However, in general the film concentrates too much upon the movement’s dismissal as being “too historical” for modern life. Instead the last few minutes of the film focus upon a portrayal of the complete abandonment of the suburbs. If this were to happen, if people literally left the suburbs to rot in the countryside and all moved back to the city, we would have complete and utter chaos. Like the rise of the industrial city, the surge of the masses to the post-oil city would cause massive infrastructure and humanitarian problems. Slums and crime would skyrocket. There also becomes an issue of food production- cities have very, very large footprints, and cost profound amounts of energy in order to sustain them. Abandoning the suburbs entirely is a very catastrophic idea, one that would cost us more than it is worth.

The best solution is that of the walkable neighborhoods promoted by New Urbanism. Perhaps it is a historical model, but historically our energy use was much lower and these sorts of local clusters proved successful networks within those times. It would be quite easy to retrofit many existing suburban neighborhoods with such a center, and then use mass transit to connect the centers together.

Successful cities already work in this way. Cities are essentially many clusters within close proximity of each other- a downtown district, employment hubs, university districts, bordering housing districts- each with the ability to function independently but through cohabitation, these clusters increase their potential. Granted, the distances covered by suburbs are much greater, but if we simply convert our suburbs to independent infrastructures centered around mass transit hubs that allow for easy travel inbetween, we can somewhat “save” our way of life by simply weaving them into a more successful version of the metropolises that they already strive to be. We may not be able to convert each and every suburb, but we can strategically choose places that will be beneficial for everyone in the long run, and allow for an easier transition into the America of the future.

The End of Suburbia is a fantastic movie in the respect that it acts as a wake-up call to the pending problem of the oil peak and the effect it will have on our American lifestyles. However, it could have done itself some good by proposing some more concrete solutions for its convertees to use in working towards a better future. I have hope that some of the thoughts upon solutions that I offered here are covered in the documentary’s sequel- “Escape from Suburbia,” which was released last year. I’ll have to watch and find out. In the meantime, I do encourage people to sit and watch this 52 minute documentary- just remember to take it with a grain of salt.

I took this picture near my house. The neighborhood is so old that there are horse tie rings embedded into the curbs. Although no real horses are now tied to these rings, many of my neighbors have replaced them with small plastic replicas such as the ones pictured above. What a creative and fun use for something now obsolete.