Finally, Texas A&M beats t.u. at two things this year... football and campus honors. One blog lists Texas A&M University as one of the 20 ugliest colleges in the USA:

18. Texas A&M- There’s not much wrong this campus except for the lack of color. One poster said it’s essentially “BEIGE BEIGE everywhere…” I couldn’t agree more. And, um, “Aggieland”??? Not exactly an appealing phrase, is it? And on their website, they have an extremely strange lack of pictures of their buildings. Just keep adding fuel to my fire, Texas A&M. Knock yourselves out.

My favorite part? The Biochemistry & Biophysics building (affectionately and uncreatively known as Bio/Bio 'round those parts) is featured on the site. IN PARTICULAR, the lab I worked in as an undergrad is pictured. Sweet!

For those who take offense, no worries, for I don't particularly agree with many of the blog's top 20 list of beautiful American campuses. Pepperdine? Good gawd, are we really so swept away by a campus simply because it has a ocean view? Its' buildings are hideous!

Filed under architecture · texas

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some of you may enjoy these fairly high-resolution historic photos of Dallas. These photos document the various freeway projects in Big D, mostly from the 60's onward. A few of my favorites:

• 1953-present: US 75 North, Central Expressway
• 1969: Interstate 635, Stack Construction at IH-30 (above photo) and US-80 (formerly I-20)
• 1963: Interstate 30 (formerly Interstate 20), just East of Downtown Dallas

These photos are key to understanding the city in its temporal context; thank goodness somebody thought to archive them. The construction of these highways allowed for all the outward growth that Dallas experienced since the 1960's, and has changed the face and character of the city in countless ways.

Filed under architecture · culture · dallas · photography · texas

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times has a nice take on modern Dallas in the Travel Guide's "Dallas Does Dallas."

The city seems willing to throw off its long-held infatuation with glitz and glamour, while remaining obsessed with maintaining a reputation for impeccable, indisputable good taste.

[...]

At the heart of it all — this zeal for glamour and sophistication, a supreme faith in the transcendent power of surfaces — is a Texan’s pride and a Texan’s insecurity: you don’t leave the house without looking your best, because you never know whom you might see, and who might want to find you lacking.

The quick rundown... what meets the Times writer's approval?

• NorthPark Center
• Nasher sculpture garden
• a new opera center by Norman Foster
• a new theater by Rem Koolhaas
• a proposed bridge spanning the Trinity River by Santiago Calatrava
• a Latino Cultural Center by Ricardo Legorreta
• a symphony hall by I. M. Pei
• Philip Johnson’s Crescent Court complex
• Dallas Museum of Art
• Campisi's
• Hotel ZaZa
• Uptown/West Village
• Oak Cliff/Bishop Arts District/Hattie's

I'd say that's a pretty decent list of things to do, see, buy and eat if you're going to be spending a few days in Big D.

Filed under architecture · art · culture · dallas · food · texas

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought I would link to an article in today's SF Chronicle about the brou-ha-ha in Berkeley over a proposed construction project (one that, incidentally, involves my favorite market, Trader Joe's):

In a city famous for its love of specialty gourmet food, irate neighbors are fighting a new Trader Joe's slated for University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, now home to a Kragen outlet.

Residents are concerned about traffic, parking, the building blending in with the neighborhood, and the large volume of low-cost alcohol for sale just a few blocks from the UC campus, Berkeley High School and a number of homeless service agencies.

Based purely on aesthetic concerns, I am very much in favor of the new project. It is probably too big for the site though, and wish it could be scaled down smaller. The proposed building would replace a very tiny strip mall that has a large parking lot plopped down in the corner of the lot. The parking lot completely destroys the corner of that intersection.

But I also understand the neighbors' (ahem, my neighbors') concerns... I live just one block north of the top of the map there, and I would worry about my quiet victorian house with a small backyard having to sit next to a thriving retail center. I know there is a tendency to assume that cities want the extra tax revenue and therefore always favor business in these situations, but is this true?

How do cities typically confront these issues in a fair, legitimate way?

UPDATE: For the record, my house is really where the "d" is in "Trader Joe's" on the map. Not that it really matters.

Filed under architecture · berkeley · california · culture

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

And thus it begins: Reuters cites a growing trend of people wanting to live in human-scale houses:

Some say this trend is a good alternative to suburban sprawl when the denser housing takes the form of a diverse neighborhood, with businesses, shops and public space all located within walking distance.

(That's probably why humanity has built that way for basically five thousand years.)

I've often thought that the misguided aim of owning a starter castle out in the 'burbs was a Baby Boomer thing. I can't wait for the day when we look back at those rediculous formerly-upscale-but-now-mostly-dated-and-still-treeless cookie cutter homes out in the middle of nowhere and say "what the hell were people thinking?"

Filed under architecture · culture

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although the author of this CNN article is certainly hyping New Urbanism beyond its merits, I continue to think denser living will be a defining movement for our generation (like white flight was for the previous generation, except without all the racism).

Filed under architecture · culture

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pitiful updates around here lately. Sorry about that; I'm trying to work out some delicate issues surrounding my thesis project. Hopefully I'll be able to post more soon.

In the mean time, I came across an interesting article in the Times that I thought I'd share. Apparently, the private sector contractors that build Army standard-issue housing have been listening to some New Urbanists:

One of the newer suburban developments in Fairfax County, Va., is the Villages at Belvoir.

Belvoir is Fort Belvoir, a military post. And the Villages, 15 New Urbanist towns, are on-post housing for soldiers and their families.

The first, Herryford Village, was occupied last year: 171 town houses and houses designed in a local Georgian Colonial style. It has a Main Street with shops and a clock tower, playgrounds, and village greens with open-air pavilions and centralized mailboxes where residents can socialize informally. There is not a tin hut or cinderblock house in sight.

One of those New Urbanists mentioned in the article is Calthorpe Associates here in Berkeley. It turns out the firm is right across the street from our Safeway grocery store. Kinda fun.

Anyhow, it pleases me that we're thinking again about building pedestrian-friendly towns with Main Streets and small shops. Unfortunately, the vast bulk of new development is not planned like the above, let alone our own local bastion of New Urbanism, Hercules. No, unfortunately, most new development is sprawly disorganized auto-centric bullshit like Frisco, Texas. Sigh.

At least there are some people trying to do things right...

Filed under architecture · california · texas

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've hoped for some time that our generation will evolve away from the typical Baby Boomer dream of owning a giant pretentious house. If you ask me, there are too many suburban and exurban zones littered with McMansion "subdivisions." These developments (a far cry from real neighborhoods) consist of rows upon rows of new, identical, treeless "Texas Tuscan"-style homes that manage to pull off the rather impressive feat of being simultaneously joyless and unsustainable. The McMansion is perhaps best summarized in this Urban Dictionary entry:

A large and pretentious house, typically of shoddy construction, typical of "upscale" suburban developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Such houses are characterized by steep roofs of complex design, theatrical entrances, lack of stylistic integrity and backsides which are notably less fussy than their fronts. They are often placed closely together to maximize the developer's profits and appeal to people who value perceived social status over actual, physical, economic or historic value.

Although Nancy is just a school teacher, she mortgaged herself up to her neck to buy a new McMansion on Woodbridge Road Court in Clayton Hills Valley Estates at North Pine River Hollow Meadows.

As I understand it, the reasons people buy these houses must be because:

• they are cheap compared to the alternatives— you get a crapload more bang for the buck, but often at the expense of quality construction and good architecture;
• these types of homes are the only ones being built in many communities;
• people just don't know any better, because they've never lived in a human-scale home; and/or
• many of those that live in these suburban developments unconsciously embrace (or even defend) the rather racist foundations of Caucasian suburban flight in the late twentieth century.

We should be living closer to each other in smaller, more efficient, human-scale homes. On the other hand, this just seems a bit extreme.

Filed under architecture · energy

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim of blogs for industry brings some much-needed data to the discussion of ag product transportation. After crunching some numbers from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), he concludes that:

[Commercial transportation adds up] to about 14% of total US energy consumption...which means that transportation of Ag products at "more than 20%" would be on the order of 3-4% [of total consumption.]

His estimates are probably good, and generally jive with other statistics provided by the EIA regarding petrol consumption. It is useful to keep in mind that the numbers he uses do not consider import of foreign products (and during the winter months, many fresh fruits and vegetables do come from South American sources). Huski may be correct in pointing out that eating only local foods makes an impact of questionable magnitude on the current energy market. But for many, the ethics of being earth-friendly are completely separable from economics. An article in today's San Francisco Chronicle illustrates that considering energy when choosing everyday foods is a growing habit for many people ^(†).

A decision clearly more important than food is in choosing good locations for cities before they are built. This may end up being a critical investment we can make in our nation's future; due to their scale and lack of density, our current urban models are overly dependent on abundant sources of energy for transportation. There are no guarantees that said energy will be around just two generations from now ^(‡).

The EIA says that the United States uses oil for transportation disproportionaly from the rest of the world. Mind you, this is not in a per capita sense (although I bet that's true too), but in a usage distribution sense. From the EIA:

In the United States, in contrast to other regions of the world, about 2/3 of all oil use is for transportation [...] (in most of the rest of the world, oil is more commonly used for space heating and power generation than for transportation.)

Why is this so? In part, because the United States is one of the only industrialized countries that has a high level of commercial activity even in the most inhospitable regions of its interior. North America contains regions of vastly differing climates, and time after time, we have chosen to plunk down entire communities where the local environments do not support agriculture (a.k.a. "life"). Life in a desert city, for example, would be impossible without access to cheap, abundant transportation. The "flourishing communities in the desert" require daily import of food for each of its citizens, a feat only an industrialized country could pull off, and one that is, if not unsustainable, then just plain dumb. I mean, seriously, why do people want to live in places like this? (Viewed along a different axis, the treeless suburban houses remind you an awful lot of the old Soviet-style apartment buildings...)

Why do people live there? I can only guess that it's the access to cheap housing. If true, this would suggest that we'll continue building "out" until we run out of fuel, literally. It's not apparent to me that there's a clear solution... but to be perfectly honest, Jim succeeded making me question whether or not there's a clear and present problem. I do know that I don't like the current method of urban outgrowth—it seems rediculous to plan urban, suburban and ex-urban communities the way we do now (which is to let the housing builders raze the local flora, construct entire residential zones consisting of identical houses in rows, then move on without planting more than 0.3 trees per hectare).

But this, I know, is an unpopular idea. Nobody wants the state dictating where to build housing (I certainly don't). I think the only way to fix this problem is to change the culture so that people would want live close to farms, close to clean water and close to public transportation. This is already happening in California, and as much as I would hate to admit it, the local/organic foods movement can take some credit for that. It remains to be seen if this attitude will be adopted elsewhere...

^(†) See also: this article at infosthetics. Excerpt: 'OilStandard' illustrates a potential future when oil will replace gold as the standard by which we trade all other goods & currencies (thanks to Nick for the link).

^(‡) For the record, I am certainly not proposing any Malthusian catastrophe. It's just that we may make life easier for future generations if we build cities in a way that has worked for thousands of years (i.e. densely, and close to water and agriculture), rather than the way we started just sixty years ago.

Filed under architecture · culture · economics · energy · food

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I am a big believer in the inherent good of technology, I also am secretly a bit of an environmentalist. I worry a lot about how the standard of living in most of America is so thoroughly enmeshed with The Automobile. In particular, I think we Americans need to think more about where we place our burgeoning towns, as well as put more thought into the planning of these urban centers. I would also claim that the demand for out-of-state agricultural foodstuffs are the source of many problems with regard to energy consumption. Fixing this problem may not be easy, but would have enormous benefits for national energy policy.

Continue reading "Technology may not fix America's energy problem (but food choices will)" »

Filed under architecture · economics · energy · food

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According a recent review in the journal Nature, the leaders of the Bauhaus school of design found inspiration in the life sciences. When Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and others fled Germany for London in the 1930's, they found patrons in some rather unlikely places:

One of these was the ecologist Julian Huxley. As secretary of the Zoological Society of London he had an apartment at the zoo, which he used partly as a showroom for modernist design. Here, scientists, artists, architects, environmentalists and the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells regularly met for discussions about how to save humankind from environmental, economic and social destruction.

Bauhaus design was one of the group's chief passions, and Gropius looked to Huxley and his friends with hope and admiration. Traditional architecture and design reinforced an unfortunate dualism between people and nature, Huxley believed, whereas the Bauhaus approach promised a harmonious reunion. To Huxley, nothing less than the evolutionary survival of the human species was at stake.

[...]

Visitors to the zoo could observe their own primitive desires in animals, [...] so it was of moral importance to place the animals in a model home for healthy living. The gorilla house and the penguin pool, along with a series of other buildings, were therefore built in the Bauhaus style.

But it was also politically important to the group to display thriving animals such as penguins in a highly unnatural setting, to show that humans too could prosper in new environments. "The most unlikely animals seem to thrive under what would seem the most unnatural conditions," zoologist Peter Chalmers Mitchell observed, if they have "freedom from enemies, regular food and general hygiene". The same would hold for workers and the poor, who desperately needed to be liberated from their 'natural' condition of criminal and filthy slums.

Interesting. We've apparently gone full circle, as the current Zeitgeist places a much higher value on authenticity; zoos and natural history museums now aim to show animals in the most natural environments possible. Journalism, television, and Hollywood all now completely dismiss the ideal in favor of what is real (if you consider "reality tv" real).

Since we have a greater desire to see the world as it really is, I wonder if society still has the same expectations from architecture that it once had. I suspect that we no longer expect architects to solve the ills of the world; however, many cities are starting to realize the impact of good architecture on maintaining vibrant urban life.

Rather than indicating a retreat for design's promise to the world, I think this change signals a refinement towards a more realistic offering of how design can address the human condition. This is good—it means rather than promising the world, we're moving in a direction that has the potential to yield demonstrable results.

Filed under architecture · biology · culture

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)