Disposable Architecture

This post is part of a series on the blog InnermostParts.org called 'Building Blunders of Brandeis.' It addresses the physical aspects of the Brandeis campus, specifically the history and the current state of Brandeis University architecture and planning.

One of society's ongoing problems is what to do with old buildings.  Do we demolish them and build something new?  Do we renovate and re-purpose them?  If they're particularly special, we might even restore them to their original state.  Brandeis is no more immune to this problem than any city or town.  In fact, college campuses may feel the pressures to demolish old buildings stronger than any other communities.  Colleges depend on large donors to renew their facilities, and large donors want their names on fashionable new buildings.

Demolition of the Friedland Life Science Building

For several weeks now, crews have been working at demolishing the Friedland Life Science building and the Kalman Pre-Medical Building.  To my best knowledge, no one has made a fuss.  I'm not a science student, but I've visited both of these buildings.  Friedland was actually pretty quirky and interesting, with large white panels covering much of the exterior and short windows at the top of each floor, creating glass divisions between its five stories.  I believe it was designed by firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, and Abbott, which had some very famous founders.

Friedland Life Science Building. Architects: Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott. Built 1956-58.

Should we really treat buildings such as Friedland as disposable?  I don't think so.  Sure, they're not very much in style today, but someday we may come to regret losing them.  Harvard's now-loved Memorial Hall once faced the wrecking ball because 50-or-so years late it had fallen out of style.  Sure, Friedland isn't so grand, nor was it probably constructed so well, but it's so... well, modern.  It was of the era of the Space Race, and in my opinion it showed it.
Friedland isn't the only building with a funky, modern style.  Goldman-Schwartz?  East?  Spingold?  Schwartz and Brown?  All of these buildings have been deeply neglected over the years.  Under the right conditions, any of these buildings could receive its death sentence.  At Brandeis, we take the attitude that after a building goes up, it's okay to leave it to decay forever.  I urge Brandeis to treat its buildings with greater respect.
If you need reinforcement for what our '50s and '60s-era buildings could look like, visit the lobby of Gryzmish across from the campus center.  Without  daily wear from students, the interior has stayed fairly well preserved.  Really, take a look.  Once the examples of that style are destroyed, they will never come back in quite the same form.

Winter Sun Sets Over Friedland

Color is Better: A look at transit maps

Here in the Boston area we have what is, by American standards, a good commuter rail system.  It runs on weekends and holidays, it has a decent on-time performance, it can work for reverse commuting (trains run out of the city in the morning and in to the city in the evening, and it runs at off-peak hours for non-work related trips.  It's also really big.  I don't think its size is appreciated enough.  Why does this matter?  I believe it can affect ridership, even if only a little bit.  It's also a matter of pride and ownership.  If Boston area residents have pride in their rail system as a valued and vital resource linking their communities, then I believe they will be more likely to invest in it.  What's my suggestion?  Re-work the maps.

Here we have the standard MBTA system map.  Each purple line is a commuter rail line, running in and out of Boston through either North or South Station.  The thin, colored lines are the subway and light rail lines.  You can see how the lines relate to the bay, but the other three sides of the map might as well lead to an empty abyss.  Why not include an inset map showing how the MBTA Commuter Rail provides service to a large piece of the state?




Here we have a map of the commuter rail system from Wikipedia.  It shows the lines in purple and the area the MBTA services in pink.  The core city is a darker shade and the closer suburbs are in a middle shade.  It's not essential to the traveler, but it gives the viewer a better idea of the area the trains service.  Add a few major cities and it might give people a good impression of the system's size and all the people it can potentially service. 

This is the Copenhagen metro area transit map.  The subway lines are the thick yellow and green lines.  The regional trains are the gray lines, and the local trains are dark blue.  The most colorful lines on the map represent the S-Tog lines, the suburban train system most comparable to the Boston's Commuter Rail.  In my opinion, the spectrum of color gives you a better sense of the number of lines and their distance.

You could argue that the MBTA Commuter Rail lines shouldn't be colored because they're part of a secondary system of lesser quality than the "T" subway lines.  It's true that the S-Tog trains run every 20 minutes all day, except for peak-hours when they run every 10.  It's also true that the S-Tog is all-electric (no nasty diesel fumes).  Still, my hypothesis is that change can work differently.  Instead of using colors to show the investments we've made, use colors to increase support for investment.

Here's an MBTA Commuter Rail system diagram in many colors, created by a Wikipedia user.  It's not a map, but it shows the lines and stations.  Doesn't it make the system seem larger?  Look at all those lines and stations!  As a Brandeis student, my station isn't just some place on a purple web.  It's a station on the red rail line.  I can look at the map and better identify the stops along my line (aka all the places the train can take me).  It's unique, it's my line.

For a fair comparison, I've provided the closest official example I could find, the MBTA zone diagram.

Couple coloring the lines with thickening them (make them look important, like the primary means of getting around) and you've got a better map, in my opinion.  Include some more lines to show the trains that don't run the full lines (e.g. North Station to South Acton rather than Fitchburg) and it's even better.

The colors will have a different psychological effect on each person, but I believe that one thing most everyone could take from it is a greater appreciation for the wonderful resource we have in Eastern Massachusetts known as the MBTA Commuter Rail.

2nd Annual Boston Bikes Report

Tonight I attended Boston's second annual Boston Bikes Report.  More than once Boston has been rated the worst biking city in the country, but King Mayor Menino has made a new pledge to bicycles.  He hired Nicole Freedman, former Olympic bicycle racer, to lead the effort toward making Boston a "world-class bicycling city."  While she used to race and she says she'll ride on any highway, it's not the hardcore bicyclists that Nicole is looking to target.  No, Nicole wants to see everyday people on bikes, which is how it should be.  After spending four months in Copenhagen, where more than half of all trips are done by bicycle, I'm quite critical of Boston and other North American cities for their very poor bicycle infrastructure.  In two years Boston has gone from less than one-half mile of bicycle lanes to more than 15 miles.  It's still pretty sad, but a huge improvement.  We rank #1 in the U.S. for improvement in the number of trips over 2008--63%.  The big news was that by July 2010 we're going to have a bike-sharing program with 2,000 bikes at 85 stations across the city.  Overall the presentation was great, and gave me a little relief from my frustration as U.S. cities look to catch up where cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam have been excelling for years.

Thanks Nicole for your work, and I look forward to much, much more.

David Byrne's "True Stories"

Last night, on the recommendation of a friend, I watched the 1986 film "True Stories" by Talking Heads frontman and noted urban design and cycling advocate David Byrne.  It had some great commentary on fossil fuel age transportation, including this great quote from Byrne as he drives past the soaring elevated sections of a highway junction (clip):

"Well, I suppose these freeways made this town and a lot of others like it possible.  'They're the cathedrals of our time,' someone said.  Not me."

Bryne also comments facetiously on the bland, garage-fronted, person-less suburban landscape, calling it beautiful, and recognizes the featureless, modular, inexpensive metal building as "the dream modern architects had at the beginning of this century finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it."  He addresses the issues of suburban sprawl and excessive consumer culture and links the two quite well through scenes at the mall and in the home of a women who never leaves her bed.

The most prophetic moment moment of the film comes from a monologue given by the founder of the town's largest company, a computer manufacturer named Varicorp.  He predicts the rise of the creative class, a group of people who work independently of large corporations, live without separate concepts of work and home life, the weekday and the weekend, and working not for a living or for a place in heaven but "working and inventing because they like it."  This really struck me.  Twenty-three years later we have the live-work suite, the most popular unit in new development, and a mixing of uses (residential and commercial) as the primary means to creating high-quality urban environments.  Check out the monologue in this YouTube clip.  it's something you need to see.  Like my friend Matt, I highly recommend the film to any urbanist.

Critical Mass Boston

This past Friday evening I participated in an event called Critical Mass, with the purpose to celebrate cycling and assert cyclists' right to the road.  In Boston, bicyclists hold a ride on a last Friday of every month, starting at Copley Square in the Back Bay.  There are no organizers.  I heard about the event from some fellow Brandeisians through Facebook.  I'd never done any real urban riding before, so naturally I felt anxious as I sat with my Schwinn on the Commuter Rail, waiting to arrive in Boston.  Since I work at WalkBoston Fridays, I rode the bike over to Old City Hall and locked it up outside the office.  Making it from North Station without incident felt like quite an accomplishment! 

After work when it came time to ride over to Copley, I realized how disoriented I felt bicycling rather than walking around the city.  Suddenly I had to deal with a bunch of one-way streets and I lacked the time to think about my direction at each intersection.  When I arrived at Copley Square there were already a number of cyclists, many with single-gear or fixie bikes, others with modified road cycles, and a whole bunch of people in costume for Halloween.  I felt silly with my mountain bike.  I ran into a fellow I met at the HONK!Fest and we chatted for a bit.  Again, no one was in charge, so we just had to wait until someone started riding and then follow. 

With over 100 cyclists, we took over the streets of downtown Boston.  It was simply amazing and brought a huge grin to my face.  Instead of being pushed to the margins, we owned the road.  Collective action gave us the right to ride in freedom.  Instead of thinking about the car behind me or the intersection ahead, I could actually take in the sights and lights of the city.  And the pavement--so smooth!  The automobiles have it so good.  We blew through the red lights, with people physically blocking the cars along the way.  It was brilliant, and sooo satisfying to stick it to the faceless, polluting cars.  Still, the whole thing was rather self-indulgent.  We made it nearly impossible for pedestrians to cross the streets, and that brought on a little guilt.  While it's not right to act as the automobile drivers do and selfishly take up the entire street, I don't think it really hurts anyone to do it for an hour or two once a month.  I'll be sure to participate again.

Could you see Boston making changes like these?

Expanding on the last post about the conservatism in urban design in the Commonwealth, I found this video about shared streets in Auckland, New Zealand.  They're based on successful designs in Denmark by Gehl Architects.  I had the amazing privilege to learn from two architects of that firm last semester. Perhaps someday I could bring streets like these to Holyoke or Cambridge, but not to Boston.

Massachusetts: Too Conservative?

Sure, Massachusetts leads when it comes to civil rights or protecting the environment, but I've learned during my time as a planner-in-training that when it comes to transportation, the Commonwealth is quite conservative.

Yesterday at work, I spoke with a colleague about the state and possible reconstruction of Longfellow Bridge, also known as the Salt-and-Pepper-Shaker Bridge due to the shape of its central towers, between Boston and Cambridge.  The current configuration of the bridge, the cross-section of which you can view here, includes the MBTA Red Line running in 27' down the middle, two vehicle travel lanes on each side taking up between 48' and 51'8", a 3'-3'6" shoulders doubling as bicycle lanes, and a sidewalk of 10' on one side and 6' on the other.

The first problem is the narrower sidewalk, which while at some points has 6 feet of width, narrows down to about 2 feet at one point with a light pole right in the middle.  The second problem relates to the cars.  The bridge, considering its location, carries very few cars.  Around twice as many people pass over the bridge using mass transit than private automobiles.  This begs the question, why are there four vehicle travel lanes?  Not only is such a mix unsustainable, it's also unnecessary.  I understand that there needs to be enough room for one vehicle to pass another in emergencies, but that does not necessitate another whole travel lane.

Make less room for cars and what do you get?  Fewer cars.  Longfellow desperately needs to be reconstructed, so let's transform Longfellow Bridge into a 21st century travel way, with one vehicle travel lane each way, wide bicycle lanes and wide sidewalks.  None of the proposed alternatives include closing vehicle lanes permanently.  However, as my co-worker pointed out, vehicle travel will be reduced to one lane each way for prolonged periods during construction--why not just leave it like that?

The Red Line will also require shifting during the rebuild, which will be very expensive.  Instead of shifting the tracks multiple times to get it back in its original position, shift them just once or twice and use the opportunity to  change the configuration.  Change one side of the bridge into a dedicated way for pedestrians and bicyclists and leave the other side for cars.  The Longfellow already offers the best view of Boston--you'd even be able to turn it into a tourist attraction!  Unfortunately the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Highway Department lack the vision to make the change.  It makes me wonder whether I could do transportation planning in the Commonwealth without becoming horribly frustrated in trying to fight the culture. 

Other examples of conservative transportation planning: PVTA won't consider light rail, the MBTA insists on bus rapid transit instead of new subways and won't electrify the commuter rail, and the legislature won't consider raising the gas tax.  Boston still lags on bicycle policy & action, and I'm not sure that the idea occurs to a single public official to substitute street parking for real bicycle lanes or even to restructure street parking pricing.