grow yer own

This summer I've noticed an urge to grow more of a garden than I ever have before. Maybe it's being in the midwest, I don't know. But it seems there's a movement toward integrating the urban eco-movement with the more or less rural one, and that includes gardening and growing as much as one can wherever one lives. The first picture is in my front yard where I have a plethora of Hungarian Hot Wax peppers growing alongside serrano peppers, rosemary, sage, basil and tomatoes. It's not much, really, still more of the herbs and spices kind of a garden than a sustenance garden. But it has led me tho think more about gardening for real next year and trying to grow things that are a bit more substantial and try to live a little bit off what I can grow. The split difference between growing your own and buying things shipped 1000 miles away is the farmers' market, which I've made a point of trying to get to every week. The second picture illustrates another step toward some type of self-sufficiency, which is the community- owned garden, this one owned by the Urbana Park District at Meadowbrook Park.

This picture is, believe it or not, part of a graduate student housing community. A lot of international students live there and bring along with them family members, children, parents and grandparents. There were thousands of hot peppers and tomatoes growing there, and a woman I ran into who is here with her son said she grows them and dries them to use the rest of the year.




I've thought at one point or another it might be better for me to study horticulture rather than architecture and I think one of the reasons is evidnet in the words themselves. Not the prefixes archi- and horti-, but in the rest of the words, -tecture and -culture. "-tecture" sounds technological, about makingsomething where there's nothing. That's all well and good but it often ignores what's happening around it. "-culture" seems more nurturing, helping to bring into existence what is happening anyway. Obviously there are architects who share this viewpoint, as it was I think Louis Kahn who said something like asking the brick what it wants to be before building. Perhaps we need an "archi-cultural" viewpoint that sees the built environment as a garden of sorts.

Crown Hall Luxe and Reduxe

I visited the IIT Campus in Chicago recently. The school is said to be undergoing a resurgence of sorts and given its status in architectural history one of the strongest points is the architecture department itself and the university's recent architectural makeover featuring a Rem Koolhaas-designed student center and Helmut Jahn-designed student housing. But IIT's jewel is the aptly named Crown Hall, a Mies Van Der Rohe building from the late 1950's. It looks great after a recent restoration, clean like a Mies building should look. The last time I saw it rust and peeling paint pocked the steel trusses and decorative columns. Wait... decorative? Mies? Decorative?

Well yes. The building is simply supported by four large trusses that allow the building to be completely open on the inside. Basically the ceiling is hung from the trusses. But the four trusses evenly distributed along the width of the building meant that there were no columns on the outside to break up the space and provide natural gaps so for fenestration. If you look closely at the picture to the left you see steel beams that are attached to the sides of the building but appear to do no structural work.

Here's a close-up of the corner and a pic of the entrance that shows two of the trusses holding the building up:

The Paul Galvin library on the IIT campus was designed to fit in with Mies' Crown Hall. but a funny thing is that while Crown placed more or less decorative beams on the side with the ostensible purpose of breaking up space and providing a rhythm for fenestration the Galvin library borrows the truss idea from Crown Hall and turns it into its own version of the hanging steel columns by placing large steel beams on the rook of the building with little or no structural purpose. In fact the way it looks is that form clearly preceded function and most likely added a great deal of weight to the roof. And there is little relationship, at least on the large scale of the rhythm of the beam placement and the window placement. And the entrance, lacking the subtle and beautiful stairs of Crown Hall, is obscured behind shrubbery:Crown Hall's symmetry on all sides precludes the idea of hierarchy in the exterior arrangement - that is the back looks the same as the front, giving no inherent idea as to where the entrance is. So essentially Crown Hall has two similar entrances, one on the north side and one on the south. The south entrance is more open, has the marble staircase and is the most visible and therefore the "main" entrance. But the north entrance faces a small quad of sorts, a sunken grass yard with benches that provides a social space to sit, play frisbee, whatever, and considering it's just across the street from the Jahn housing buildings it should be used quite a bit. However, to paraphrase a Robert Indiana text painting I've seen, every building needs it's hind part and in Crown Hall it unortunately faces this quad. The hind part isn't as messy as it could be, although it's obvious that any building, symmetrical or not, needs a place for trash removal and such. So a potentially strong public face is obscured by its dual role as its' rear end.
It's not so bad but it's far from sexy. Basement stairs, small dumpsters, parking for motorcycles and bikes locked to the railings aren't necessarily bad but they do signify an ad hoc approach to the rear, let's say, functions of a building such as waste removal. The extreme symmetry and lack of strong design hierarchy is an aspect of modernist architecture that looks great on paper but is stained by the messy reality of humans occupying and actually using the space.

This is not to say I don't like the building but just that it does prove the trusim about utopian thinking that it just doesn't jive with reality. But here to end are some pics which show how the building looks in its site and how, as an exhibition in the building shows, Mies' simplicity was influenced by Japanese buildings like tea houses and how timber, plaster and rice paper were reinterpreted in 20th-century materials.

Luxury and simplicity

Over time the concept of luxury changes drastically. These mossy bricks cover the floor of a Dean and Deluca cafe in Georgetown in DC. It was about 8 am and there was nothing else open and no one else in the place, a little too early for most of those rushing to work. When I was looking at these, I was reminded how anti-septic a place like my grandmother's was (when people pine nostalgically for the smell of their grandmother's houses, cookies and all, I think of pine-sol and raid). Someone of her generation had had enough of nature encroaching into their spaces, they needed a time and space away from dirt and moss.

Here however, in the cafe section of an expensive grocery store, bricks were covered with moss and small finches flew about, competing for crumbs. This space is a semi-outdoor space, and I'm sure there were no finches flying around in the grocery part of the store, but how barren and dirty this must have seen to someone of a much older generation. My generation grew up in anti-septic rooms and with antibacterial soap and with lives much more complex than most of those in my grandmother's generation. The addition of a few finches or standing water just under the walls (made of garage doors, how cheap) reads less of mosquitos and malaria and more about authenticity and lack of pretense, even in a place purposely chosen and designed with this type of "authentic" experience in mind. It also reads of simplicity and lack of fussiness, traits lacking in many people's everyday lives.

Small-town Urbanism

Small-town urbanism

What makes a place a city? What makes a place urban? By definition it would seem a part of either would be a large population, or at least population density. But can urban simply be a style appropriated for marketing purposes? Or can urbanity actually be created in a small place, designed for those who desire urban amenities in a place in which it doesn't naturally arise?

The sign here is for a condo conversion in downtown Champaign, IL. By declaring itself the "heart of the city," one has to ask what city exactly is being talked about. A town, yes; a city, well, that depends on definition. Champaign certainly doesn't have the population usually associated with cities; in places, however, it does have the population density of larger cities. And for a block or so it has many of the amenities - expensive restaurants, numerous bars and cafes, apartments above storefronts. These are the kinds of things that only 15 years ago or so would be found exclusively in larger cities. Good beer, good coffee, good food it seems were not so long ago nowhere to be found in places like this.

Then again, Champaign is a college town, albeit a schizophrenic one, spread out across two downtowns, Champaign and Urbana, and also the University of Illinois campus. The possibility of urbanism was diffused, much moreso than in towns with similar college populations like Madison, Ann Arbor or Bloomington, Indiana. Add to that mix the usual new exurban box-store style growth and the problems of keeping a population density that could support true urbanism multiply.

One problem is that the market for downtown apartments is small, but the developers who have been renovating and building apartment and condo buildings seem to think that in an area where the average house sells for $133,000, condos whould sell for $200,000 and up. Word around here is that units in one recent building were mostly purchased by the University, artifically inflating the market price for condos. Much of the building stock that remains, such as this building here, sits empty, perhaps a tax write-off, definitely a blight on the landscape and definitely underutilized. The idea of conflating "urban" or city with luxury seems ridiculous in an area in which within a matter of a few blocks houses with yards and ample space cost less than the "downtown" condos offering little more than a shallow feeling of urbanism.

The failure of luxury marketing in this regard has been manifested recently in the closure of two stores, a wine and grocery store and a combination art gallery/cafe. In order for this area to be more livable, it needs a place people can buy real groceries, not just wine and cheese. The limited appeal of an art gallery in the area is already taken care of by a gallery in Urbana and by the numerous art fairs and sales sponsored by art student groups as well as the local Springer Cultural Center. Developers and retailers it seems want to jump the gun on gentrification, before any of the real living that usually comes before ever has a chance to take hold. That shallow feeling of urbanism is even shallower when couched in terms of fake luxury.

That said, though, it seems there are successes here and it makes for a comfortable place to spend time if not to live. It's become an entertainment district while avoiding the Disneyfication and corporatization that has plagued many other small downtowns desparate for revitilization. The campus town area and the exurban sprawl are the places corporate chains feel more comfortable, and therefore the downtown area remains in the hands of independent businesses and small non-profits. Many of the apartments, those that have not yet been gutted, remain somewhat affordable, although not compared with nicer and larger spaces within a mere few minutes' walk or bicycle ride. And there is the lack of a grocery store nearby, coupled with the problem of parking: existing apartments and condos are not required to provide parking, but newly constructed buildings are; this means that for those who already live in the area or those moving into the more affordable buildings, a car is necessary for shopping, but difficult and expensive to keep nearby, while for those who can afford the newer places, car storage is built into the price. This has the unfortunate and seemingly unrelated side effect of keeping the market for having a nearby grocer down (Urbana, on the other hand, has been less successful in attracting both development and nightlife businesses, while oddly maintaining three nearby grocery stores.) But in order for this to be a real urban space and not just a shell of an entertainment district dependent for its existence on the ups and downs of a fickle economy, it needs a real spine, a real base upon which real lives, and real spaces, can be built.