CORKTOWN
the third part of a transcript of a public lecture given on October 21, 2020, at the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design.
new Corktown
So, here we flip from this very long preamble into to the main course of this talk which is a design demonstration. It is at this point that this lecture turns from urban theory into urban design theory. I cannot stress the difference between the two enough. There are some very fine theorists working in urban issues today. They are many sociologists, geographers or historians that primarily work outside of design culture but find an eager audience within it. There are also those that work within the architectural academy, so to speak, but their work is archival and occasionally analytical and so never strays past the boundaries of urban theory and into the realm of urban design theory.
As it turns out, design theory is actually quite rare in architectural discourse today. The lack might be due to the failed revival of traditional urban typology as it was put forward in the 1970’s in the work of Aldo Rossi and in the short-lived group of Italian architects called the tendenza. At the time, the appeal of a typological revival was extraordinary. Through the revival of traditional urban types, architecture could save the city from the ravages of modernization — the crude transformations of traditional cities brought about by the Great Acceleration. As mentioned above, however, the specifications of the contemporary technosphere exceed the specifications of traditional urbanism; neo-traditionalism lacks the design strategies needed to structure freeways and feeder roads, airports, parking garages or hospitals. The scale and complexity of contemporary cities cannot be rendered in traditional, platonic typologies.
While such attempts to revive explicit typologies did not succeed, the need for greater levels urban integration has not diminished but has become more urgent. From an urban perspective, the failure to revive traditional typologies did not alleviate our need to coordinate isolated parts into greater wholes. Achieving these synergies, however, requires a revaluation of the practices that limits design to the free invention of unique objects. It establishes an alternative model of form generation — variation, selection and aggregation — that is capable of producing a successful coordination of parts that define an urban project.
As we look to build out the modern legacy, it will be necessary to evaluate new and explicit methodologies of urban integration and the associated synergies they produce. As a point of departure for a new model of urban density, we will use the modern urban spine as the infrastructural underpinning of this new model. With this choice, the project respects the importance of modernism’s organizational logic as opposed to any fixed or final forms.
urban renewal
The project was done in 2016 for the Venice Biennale. I was joined in this effort by Jesus Vassallo, Gail Chen, Daniel Khuen, Chenyang Lyu, Peter Stone and Louis Wise. We worked through this program for densification in an area of Detroit called Corktown which is directly adjacent to the central business district, just to the right of the slide. At the bottom of the slide is the Detroit River, an international boundary. You can guess, Corktown was originally a district that housed the city’s Irish immigrants. It has actually been home to several waves of immigration but, by 2016, had seen better days in that it had lost 75% of its building stock. Furthering its decline, Corktown was surrounded by freeways and was cut off from the rest of the city. Except for a few new developments, it is a neighborhood that has largely been abandoned. For the exhibition, we were given this two block site indicated by the arrow, which today is a huge, decommissioned post office sorting facility. The ostensible purpose of taking on this site was to consider the role that design could play in the revival of the Corktown district. This unstated purpose raised an important question: can a single architectural intervention bring Corktown back to life?
Judging by others entries for the competition, the anticipated answer was that a significant public building in the manner of the Bilbao Guggenheim could serve as a catalyst for urban renewal. Like the Guggenheim, a new, high-profile building can be imagined to have a transformative effect on the surrounding neighborhood. This approach to urban revival, known generally as the Bilbao Effect, has been the principal urban strategy practiced by most architects since the discrediting of modern urbanism in the mid-seventies. If you allow me one more historical digression, I will define the Bilbao Effect and its relationship to modern urbanism. From this definition, two discrete methods of urban design intervention will emerge, indirect design intervention and direct design intervention.
the Noli Plan: indirect design intervention…
The first method of urban reform is indirect and it is as old as cities themselves. The process of indirect reform is made obvious in the 1748 Noli plan of Rome. What you see are public monuments, including the Pantheon, the Insula Sapientiae and the Insula Dominicana, the Church and Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the Palazzo della Minerva. Each of these monuments dominates the plan as hierarchical elements. A secondary urban fabric fills in around them, buildings that are shaped in deference to the primary position of monuments. The monuments change little, nowhere more so than in Rome, which was apparently built for the ages. The surrounding fabric, on the other hand, is made of more temporary and more malleable urban stuff. As its buildings constantly decline and are renewed, its fate it tied to that of the surrounding monuments. There is thus a primary and secondary relationship that has driven the dynamic of urban growth and regrowth since antiquity. When a new monument is inserted into the fabric or if it gets upgraded or renewed, the surrounding fabric is renewed in response.
That is very different way of thinking of the typical urban elements than that proposed by modernism. Traditionally, the fabric of the city was animated by a vernacular building culture which codified typical urban forms and would thereafter be employed in both its construction and reconstruction. In large part, what the first generation modernists argued was that industrialization broke with the logic of vernacular cultures by transforming the transportation infrastructure, by introducing large-scale projects (urban factories and high-rises) into the urban fabric, by displacing traditional building types with new techniques and materials, and by causing demographic shifts that profoundly changed traditional city life and the forms that long supported it. In the absence of a functional building culture, modernists insisted that all of the city must now be directly designed by the architect. The authority of typical urban forms — blocks and streets, alleys, courtyards and monuments — authority that was granted by vernacular cultures, would give way to the demands of industrialization, and replace typical vernacular protocols with the direct design of the city.
plan Voision: direct design intervention…
Thus, we arrive at the direct design of the city. Like the Noli Plan, its emblem is a figure/ground drawing, not of Rome but of París under the notorious renovations of Le Corbusier’s 1925 plan Voisin. Renovation is not the right word, however, as the plan did not so much renovate the urban fabric as it eliminate it. This is the same medieval fabric that was cut through by Haussmann’s boulevards in the nineteenth century. Haussmann designed spaces, not forms, yet he reproduced the ancient logic whereby monuments, new and old, remained the dominant elements within the urban scene and adjusted the fabric accordingly. Le Corbusier would eliminate the secondary status of the fabric altogether, replacing its deferential form with enormous cruciform towers laid out in a grid. It was a direct design intervention that would turn a fabric in thrall to monumental production, into a monument in itself. No longer dominated by the hierarchies of church and state, direct design intervention would transform the modest shops and houses of medieval Paris into its destiny.
Not that any such glorious liberation from all of urban history worked out. While direct design intervention flourished and the plan Voisin becoming the template for much of the production of Paris outside the Boulevard Périphérique, the plan would not be given the chance to rewrite urban history inside the great city. The success of the Radiant City model of “towers in the park” was not limited to Parisian Faubourg, but would rewrite the suburbs of every European capital and it continues to rewrite every Asian capital city to this gap day.
Cutting a long and familiar story short, plan Voisin, and the direct design methodology that it employed, was fully discredited as an urban model and it was discredited in the most public way imaginable — a televised implosion. Its first two rounds of experimentation, lasting the fifty years from the plan Voisin of 1925 up to the destruction of the infamous housing project Pruit Igoe beginning in 1976.
Plateau Beaubourg: indirect intervention of postmodernism.
It just so happened that in 1971, about the same time that Pruit Igoe was being prepped for demolition, there was a competition in Paris for the new Pompidou museum. It was imagined to have, simultaneously, both a global and local impact. Globally, it was to be the creation, from scratch, of a world-class institution of Modern Art. Simultaneously, it would be the means by which to revive the flagging Marais-Beaubourg district in which it was located. In both these global and local ambitions, it succeeded, wildly. Adjacent to the enormous urban renewal project at Les Halles, the Centre Pompidou provided an essential counterpoint to the tight medieval fabric of the surrounding district. Following a Haussmannian tradition, the new institution was marked by an enormous open plaza backed up by an architecture that celebrated everything the district was not. It remains an exceptional monument, one of the most visited sites in one of the most visited cities in the world. It was also a god-send to the architectural profession that was caught in the public relations disaster of its failed urban experiments. In the Centre Pompidou, it immediately recognized the ancient logic of indirect urban reform; after so much effort at direct design, all that was needed was a surgical strike at the heart of the dereliction and the rest would take care of itself. Architects need only return to their traditional focus on the monument and reforms throughout the district would follow. In an apparent win/win, a hierarchical monument proved its influence over the quotidian world basking in its glory. And unlike the direct design experiments of modern urbanism, the results were convincing to all.
It’s interesting to imagine that, had the redevelopment of the Marais-Beaubourg district been proposed ten years earlier, the revival of indirect design might not have occurred. In 1960, the Radiant City was still the preferred model of urban renewal and the tabula rasa rebuild of the plan Voisin might well have carried the day with the construction of a more modest version of the plan in the Marais-Beaubourg district. (The museum is located in the renovation zone of the plan Voisin .) As it happened, however, the Centre Pompidou provided an almost perfect solution to the disastrous experiments in direct design. Returning to the win/win of monumental intervention became the point of departure for a new, post-modern urban strategy.
Thirty years hence, the Bilbao Effect would codify the indirect approach and consolidate its claim as the primary model of architectural intervention into the city. It’s influence enduring for decades until finding its way into an 2016 exhibition concerning the reform of urban Detroit.
Corktown
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Becket
So, our decision on the Corktown project was that an indirect design intervention would not be sufficient to revive the district. For an urban catalyst to actually work there must be something to catalyze. With so much of the existing building stock demolished, it became clear that it would need to be replaced; in other words, we would need to take on, not just the two blocks, but the entire 255 blocks as an exercise in direct design. Would it work to pick up a discredited project of direct design and systematically address the failures of its last round of experimentation? Specifically, we took on what we identified as the project’s six, most egregious problems,
As we started to think through ways to design all 255 blocks, we returned to the experimental tradition of modern urban urbanism and based our work on six of its specific failures or flaws. It is not a comprehensive list and not all modern urban projects contain all six flaws except, perhaps, the plan Voisin or Pruit Igoe. The moral of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus is, even if you create a monster, you do not quit the laboratory. The tragedy of Dr. Frankenstein is not that he created a monster but that he created a monster and then abandoned it.
five failures of modern urbanism
For all of its failures, the modern city, like all cities, remains a work in progress, and we either take up that work or we narrow our scope and build bastions against it. This willful ignorance of the larger picture is at the root of most contemporary urban problems. Favoring tactics over strategy, we celebrate the local (as the limits of our expertise) at the expense of understanding how it functions within the greater scope of the environment.
Inasmuch as postmodernism discredited, not only modern urbanism, but the experimental ethos in which it was conceived, previous experiments remain unevaluated and subsequent revisions were never attempted. In other worlds, much unfinished work has been left behind. What follows are revisions to this ongoing work on the modern city. These revisions are largely defined by its early failures, many of which continue go unaddressed to this day.
These failures circle around a single dilemma; broadly speaking, this dilemma is born of the privileging of space over time. The rejection of temporal basis of design results in a definition of urban form as a static composition (otherwise known as a masterplan) rather than dynamic aggregation. When considering the renewal of Corktown, nothing was more counter to our purposes than to gratuitously plan out the entire 255 block area as a single composition, frozen in time. Master plans are static (they are not finished until each element is in place and, when they are finished, they are finished forever. In thinking through the past failures of modern urbanism, it seems important to reimagine modern urbanism as a temporal aggregation that has no final stage because it is complete at every stage. Most of the failures in modern reform stem from a static interpretation of urbanism.
The first failure came from the conception of urban reform as a tabula rasa proposition that required the immediate demolition of all existing assets no matter how valuable. Our answer to this failure was a staggered or phased replacement of existing assets over their lifetime. The second failure we wanted to address questions modern urbanism’s conception of open space as a generic landscape that need not be accounted for either aesthetically or functionally. Our answer to this failure was the development of a type of urban forestry as a cyclical series of carbon sinks. The third failure was the limitation of urban reform to architectural reform instead of also including infrastructural reform. Our answer to this failure was to incorporate a spine-based urban organization into the reform project. The fourth failure of modern urbanism that the project to addresses is the routine reduction of type to a simple repetition of identical, usually platonic, forms. Our answer to this failure was the invention of a flexible system of typological variation and selection called the Search Space. The fifth and final failure of modern urban reforms was an insufficient connection to the natural world. Our answer to this failure was to integrate the reform project into indigenous ecologies of the city and its region. Our adjustments of these ecologies include the design of landscapes, the modulations of urban and architectural space, the choice of materials, add up. Our answer to this failure was to integrate the reform project into natural systems, creating a holistic material culture.
tabula rasa, failure one
Responding to the first failure of modern urbanism, the designs of Corktown replace tabula rasa planning with an extension of the reforms over time. In short, a master plan is replaced by a master schedule. As old building stock phases out, new construction phases in. The goal was to avoid tearing anything down that still has value. How much value is not always easy to ascertain. Buildings in the United States are already on a fairly short life cycle of 25 years for commercial buildings and 60 or 70 years for residential. These two cycles average out to 50 years. Simultaneously addressing the despair over the impermanence of contemporary construction, we tried a simple thought experiment that turns insubstantial construction to our advantage. The thought experiment is a story about time travel. I go out to Main Street and teleport myself 50 years into the future. When I get out of the time machine and look around, everything I see around me will have been built after 2020. In other words, it will have been built knowing everything we know about our future needs today. Looking around at Main Street, 2070, we can ask “how did we do?” Did we build what we needed to build, did we even imagine what we needed to build?”
What the experiment tells us is that each building cycle presents a design us with an opportunity whether we choose to take it or not. When we think of replacement schedules as opportunities to implant a new urbanism within the old, the city starts to be seen for what it is, a seedbed for new versions of itself. In Corktown, the new version will be more at variance with the urbanism of the recent past, and it will be grown on an accelerated schedule. But the opportunity is there, especially given that so much of the building stock has already expired and been demolished. It is simply waiting for a strategy. Not only impermanence, but the city’s dereliction and bight can be turned to its advantage. That sucking sound you hear is the population of the surrounding suburbs fleeing its expensive and dysfunctional infrastructure and moving into the type of density that will be required to take us into the future.
dead space, failure two
Our second challenge was to take on modern urbanism’s conception of open space as a generic landscape that need not be accounted for either aesthetically or functionally. In the scheme, we tested models of density with a fifty, fifty ration of density to open space. In other words, half of the territory is unbuilt with every other block ends up being left empty. If you build density, you must build open space.
The open space proposal begins with a proposal for urban forestry that comes from a slight variation on a tree farm. Recognizing that half the weight of wood is carbon, extensive tree plantations become significant carbon sinks, especially when their cutting schedule is based in carbon sequestration. Our first move was to take the two-block post office sorting facility and turn it into an intensive nursery for trees to be planted throughout the designated open spaces of Corktown. We were inspired by the Hantz Woodland project that we discovered in our research on Detroit. It is a fantastic solution for mediating the blight of Detroit. The idea came from one of Detroit’s larger landholder who recently began to plant trees over 100 empty blocks as a cash crop. The plantations would renovate urban bight while also receiving a return on the company’s real-estate investment. The trees are guaranteed for fifty years growth before any large scale cutting would commence. The presence of the trees has already produced a counterpoint to the dereliction in a way that only an urban forest can. And while their ability to sequester carbon was not a motivation, it will certainly be counted as a benefit in any sort of future carbon market.
The Hantz Woodland gave us a model with which to address modern urbanism’s conception of open space as a disused, generic landscape that need not be accounted for. This development corrects for the second significant failure of the modern urban project. The lifeless, unkempt, undistinguished spaces of the typical European or Asian housing estates are the target here. The spaces required by increases in density have long outstripped the budgets of local municipalities and the imaginations of urban designers.
Our answer to this failure was the development of a type of urban forestry as a cyclical series of carbon sinks. Trees draw carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in its wood. Half the weight of wood is carbon. That carbon stored in the wood can be preserved by its subsequent use as a building material. Ultimately, what we were after was to use the trees as a link between the built environment and the carbon cycle. More specifically, we asked if it was possible for urban forestry to be the integrating agent between the urban and natural cycles? Using the language I defined above, the question can be broadened as follows: can the mass planting of trees help to integrate the technosphere with the biosphere?
This is a study for the wood cycle, the carbon uptake of a tree is rapid at first, at maturity it tapers off. If you grow a tree to maximize carbon sequestration and storage, you cut it at its peak. For firs, the peak is around 25 years. This is half the length of the average building cycle. So, those two cycles are staggered where the trees are cycling faster than the life of the average building. The beauty of these overlapping cycles, the variety that they bring to an evolving urban district, cannot be overstated.
outmoded infrastructure, failure three
Another source close to Corktown was one of the great successes of the direct design intervention, at least in this country. I am referring to Mies van Der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Lafayette Park, which is just a few miles east of the site. This project answered the fourth failure or modern urbanism that limited urban reform to architectural reform instead of also including infrastructural reform. Lafayette Park famously incorporated a spine-based urban organization into the reform project. The continuous grid of the site was demolished to create a continuous greensward, the principal open space around to which the various densities of the project were built. The greensward was created by removing four intersections altogether along with the elimination of an astonishing 44 intersection angles. What the success of Lafayette Park tells us is that successful urban redevelopment requires both architectural and infrastructural transformations. Peripheral connections remained intact allowing for direct connections to the surrounding grid (something that Corktown lacks).
typological impoverishment, failure four
Responding to the semantically impoverished architecture of modern urbanism, we devised an alternative to traditional typology that we refer to as a search space. Modern urbanism often reduces typological variation to a simple repetition of a single type — for example, a housing block or a tract house. The project addresses the routine reduction of type to a simple repetition of identical, usually platonic, forms. Our answer to this failure was the invention of a flexible system of typological variation and selection called the Search Space.
To achieve this, we employed a few rudimentary algorithms that distorted base forms along three axes. These transformations produce a three-dimensional table of variations called a search space. The first transformation across the x/z plane changes the height of the vertical axis transforming a low rise variant to a high rise variant. The second transformation across the x/y plane shifts the location of the vertical axis transforming the position of the high rise from left to center to right. The third transformation across the y/z plane subtracts a module along the horizontal axis transforming a full block variant to an L-shape variant.
These three simple translation and copy algorithms are combined into an overall “space” with the intent each variant in this space would combine well with others, creating greater wholes out of mere parts. And again, if the parts of the city don’t achieve synergies with each other, then there is no city. Traditional typologies are not adequate, contemporary programs are too complex and too large to be squashed into simple forms. In contrast to traditional types, we need a more fluid version of variation, selection and aggregation.
Having deployed the system, I would compare this with a housing project, or office park or subdivision. Right? It was designed and built all at one time by one group of people. While they are anthropomorpically scaled, they could be built all at once as a superblock. It can achieve the significant economies of scale afforded by contemporary construction. But given what was designed is more of a system than a composition, it has enormous flexibility. With the variation and selection of the search space, Corktown can be developed according to many scenarios, some of which are foreseen and some of which are unforeseen.
And from probably somewhere 2035 we could use that to manipulate the density with search space by changing out selections. And ultimately, big build out a fabric of the time that achieved densities that would allow for mass transit.
disintegration, failure five
The fifth failure of modern urban reforms was the provision of open green space that provided inhabitants with only a superficial connection to the natural world. Our answer to this failure was to integrate the building cycles into natural cycles, in the case of Corktown, into the carbon cycle.
This is actually what we put on the site that we were given, which was a hotel and apartment building plus an office building and small convention center all made out of cross laminated wood timber. This is the site we were given with the Detroit River out front. Our first stage was to renovate the existing building, turning it into a nursery.
This is a view from phase three, somewhere around 2035. That’s a view of the big wood building we are proposing for the original two blocks. We’re proposing that all new construction be cross laminated timber,
So, that is the build out. This is the block and out of time thumbing through this just so you can see that our ambition to tie architecture to urban ism was followed through long tempted to follow through on it all the way down to the construction. The use of cross laminated timber used in SLM project as a model and engineering project to do this. And that’s it, the scene.
Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones. -Bertolt Brecht
