Rethinking the Office Park

For my Contemporary Architecture class this semester, every two weeks I write a response to our readings and the topics in class.  I've found the assignments interesting, so I'm sharing my writings with you.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons, en route to Boston’s North Station via the Commuter Rail, I pass by a most dreadfully soulless corporate office park in Cambridge.  I wonder who ever decided to call some unadorned brick, concrete and glass structures surrounded by a sea of asphalt in the middle of no place distinctive a “park.”  A new T station opened in the 1980s and some companies decided to plop a few mid-rise buildings nearby with little attention to context, the human scale, or any measure of livability.  Unfortunately this is the postmodern architecture, in all its blandness and lack of social consciousness.  Recently a high-end condominium developer has constructed a dense complex called CambridgePark (what else?), but why would anyone want to live there?  Sure, you have access to the T, but only if you’re willing to walk past the monster of a parking garage across the street.  The reading in our first two weeks of class that interested me the most was "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism" by Mary McLeod for explaining this architecture. 

The link between the politics of the Reagan presidency and the postmodern architecture of the time makes a great deal of sense.  The office buildings at CambridgePark have no social vision and aspire to no universal social order other than the 9-to-5 workday of the professional.  The McLeod reading points out the spike in commercial property completions in the early eighties, enabled by the deregulation of business in America by Reagan.  At the same time, the modernist desire to provide housing for the poor waned, with fewer apartments built under the Section 8 low-income housing program each year from 1982-87.  The change in values from social aims to material aims is architecturally evident at CambridgePark as well.  Across the Alewife Brook Parkway are the Rindge Towers—high-rise public housing buildings constructed in typical modernist tower-in-a-park fashion.  Today buildings like these are plagued with rodents and roaches, but they stand for a noble aim of housing those less fortunate in a decent building with plenty of sunlight and space outdoors.   

In the Eighties, architecture was used by corporations for grabbing attention.  The office buildings of CambridgePark, while bland now, were probably considered quite slick in their day, with glass atriums and alternating horizontal bands of glass and stucco, brick, or concrete.  Companies that lacked the capital to build skyscrapers downtown could construct a larger building with an abundance of parking outside the city.  The Reagan administration, preferring a limited government approach in virtually all matters, lacked a policy to strengthen America’s cities, so the suburbs prospered.  Although the two main buildings at CambridgePark were constructed in 1985 and ’86, they lack the decoration that refers to traditional American architecture and characterizes much postmodern architecture, as also stated by Diane Ghirardo in Architecture After Modernism. 

I believe that this discrepancy points to a transitionary period in the 1980s into which many buildings like the CambridgePark offices exhibit the negative qualities of both modernism and postmodernism.   From modernism they take the poor urban contextualization, anonymous appearance, and lack of regional characteristics in design.  From postmodernism they take the lack of social aspiration, materialist corporatism, and meaninglessness.  While AT&T could afford to hire Philip Johnson to design his famous Chippendale-topped skyscraper for New York, most corporations could not afford such bold postmodern statements.  The result was a boring mix of modernism and postmodernism.  However, poststructrualism is creeping into the area around this corporate office “park.”  Today it’s not so sure about its identity as a single-use commercial zone.  With the new condominiums next door you can live right next to work and not miles away—so sometimes it’s a residential neighborhood.  The Alewife Bike Path connects the T station to neighboring communities, and it’s in the process of expansion—so sometimes it’s an active recreation park.  These modern-postmodern straddling buildings may soon become much more unsure about their identities and drift into the realm of the confused postmodern.

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.

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.