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.

What Happens to the (Holyoke) Mall?

Today I visited Western Massachusetts' foremost shopping center, the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside.  I went to this regional mall countless times growing up.  If the nearby one-story Eastfield Mall didn't have what you wanted, or you really wanted to make shopping an activity rather than a task, you went to the Holyoke Mall.  Built in 1979, this retail behemoth dealt the killer blow to our downtown department stores.  (Chances are good that if you grew up in suburban or rural Western Massachusetts, you probably weren't even aware as a child that Holyoke had a real city center with brick and stone multi-story buildings).  Climate-controlled, easily accessible by the automobile, and offering all the stores you could want in one location, the mall has been the retail venue of choice since its inception.

Thing is, I don't like malls much.  Like many others, I've learned that they're built upon the unsustainable foundation of cheap oil.  Patrons of the Holyoke Mall don't drive there just from Springfield (8 miles away), they come from places like my suburban-rural hometown of Wilbraham (20 mi), Greenfield (32 mi), and no doubt well into Vermont (more than 50 mi).  Over the past half-century, we have consolidated and centralized our retail centers into huge shopping centers only accessible by automobile and paltry bus service shunned by white, middle-class customers.  As a result, malls have a huge carbon footprint.

So what's the answer?  Today's urban planners, many of whom subscribe to the theory of New Urbanism, would like to see a resurgence of our traditional mixed-use city centers.  Shops on the ground level, offices and housing above.  Currently, Northampton has the only lively downtown with stores lining the street.  The shops are cute and many do pretty well, but they're just little boutiques.  What if you want to buy a pair of socks?

Holyoke and Springfield find themselves in quite a conundrum.  One answer would be to move the mall downtown, where it would be closer to where people actually live.  That won't work at the Holyoke Mall's current scale, nor anything close to it, because the mall depends on attracting customers from an entire region--not just a city.  Today, there's no way for most people to reach the center of Springfield or Holyoke except by automobile.  So you could move the parking downtown, but how would the city streets handle all that traffic?  The Holyoke Mall depends on two interstate highways (I-90 and I-91) and the six-lane Holyoke Street to feed it.  Basically, the Holyoke Mall is a monster.  It is unsustainable not just in its location but in its size.

For those of you who wonder what my work might be as an urban planner, this is a prime example of one of the huge problems people of my profession have been tasked to solve.

What's my ideal vision for shopping in Western Massachusetts?  The anchor stores (Macy's, Sears, Target, Best Buy) would embrace urban store designs for Main Street in Springfield and High Street in Holyoke.  (Some chains are showing that they're willing to adopt an urban format, but at this point only in large cities).  The real estate is certainly available in Holyoke in many sizes and forms.  The stores would have to be smaller and more efficient with their use of space.  If the cost of gasoline rises to $5 or above, the PVTA might consider light rail in the region.  Those who cannot travel to downtown Springfield or Holyoke by foot, bicycle, or bus would do so by tram or train.

Then there's the question of how to get those suburbanites to fill abandoned buildings and construct on vacant land in the city.  And what do we do with the mall, which apparently has some significant period-significant details like that UFO-style lighting, the geodesic dome, the wooden benches and planters?  Perhaps someday it can be transformed into a new town center.  The answers aren't all there yet, but in challenges such as these I see great opportunity.

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.