Lafferty Architecture, PC

Order Diversity Choice - Collection of Thoughts En Route

2011-07-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

2011-06-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Continuing an earlier thread about Place...

Among the particulars that make a place are ... "topography, weather, plants, animals, agriculture, its language, voices, and stories.... I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it." (From and essay, Imagination in Place, by Wendell Berry)

How do we reinstate myth in our environment?
There is no common myth - the shared stories continue to diminish.

What is myth? For purposes of this conversation, "a myth is a symbolic narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form." Stories of radical beginnings and radical endings.

Activities: LIVE! Work, Play, Sleep, Exercise, Bathe, Meditation, Worship. Eat, Sell, Buy. Create, Procreate, Recreate. See and be seen.

Living Cities - Spaces alive with activity. A relic of time evolving through a series of small acts.

The site carries the genes of Architecture

99% Invisible-29- Cul de Sac

2011-06-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

This is a really great audio clip (about 11 minutes) about the cul-de-sac; the ubiquitous form of suburban development that has shaped American cities and defined 3 generations.

99% Invisible-29- Cul de Sac

BuildingGreen.com LIVE: Green Building Jokes by Tristan Roberts on 12/03/2007

2011-01-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Humor directed at mindless USGBC adherents! I laughed out loud at a few of these!

BuildingGreen.com LIVE: Green Building Jokes by Tristan Roberts on 12/03/2007

10 reasons to be nice to pedestrians in 2011 - This Land's blog - Boston.com

2011-01-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

This is tongue in cheek to some degree, but very, very true. I am walking more. Probably 3 days a week to work, minimum. My perspective of my hometown is very different on foot than it is from the drivers seat.

10 reasons to be nice to pedestrians in 2011 - This Land's blog - Boston.com

New Study Shows Walkable Neighborhoods Make People Happier : TreeHugger

2010-12-30T12:11:00.000-08:00

This study provides further "proof" that walkable neighborhoods are a desirable objective (in spite of the name of the Blog).

New Study Shows Walkable Neighborhoods Make People Happier : TreeHugger

And anecdotally, my own experience provides additional evidence. Having moved from a beautiful suburban neighborhood with few sidewalks, 3/4 acre lots, houses set far back from the street (75 + feet), few front porches and no where to go but in a big loop, to an in-town neighborhood with front porches, sidewalks, houses 35 -40 feet from the street, and restaurants, shops, and other businesses within walking distances I can attest to the conclusions of this study. Yesterday, I walked to and from my office (about .8 miles from my house) twice. My mood noticeably shifts during the walk each way.

The Motorist's Identity Crisis | Planetizen

2010-12-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

Yet another great article on the perceptions that surround car ownership, walking and cycling!

The Motorist's Identity Crisis | Planetizen

Real Estate & the Economy: Death of the 'McMansion': Era of Huge Homes Is Over - CNBC

2010-08-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

This report is encouraging! I am optimistic that we can build smarter; the house is just the beginning. Our cities need to change too. Especially when it comes to over dependence on the automobile and the idea that continued development that expands the perimeter of the city and the construction of new roads (i.e., sprawl) is the hallmark of a thriving local economy.

Real Estate & the Economy: Death of the 'McMansion': Era of Huge Homes Is Over - CNBC

Architizer – Empowering Architecture – Blog » Blog Archive » Bicycle City

2010-08-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

After having 2 cyclists killed and another seriously injured here in Winston-Salem in the past 6 weeks, this is a refreshing article. We need to get beyond the notion that because "I am bigger" (frequent car driver thinking) that the smaller vehicle/person better stay out of the way. This is bullying, pure and simple. ...Or what about the clod who says the bicyclist who was hit as someone who got what they deserve, because they were on the road. That line of thinking mirrors the thinking of the person who says a woman was raped because she dressed provocatively. In the "Big" picture, we cannot continue to develop our cities in the same ways, but have to explore new alternatives that encourage other means of transportation.

Architizer – Empowering Architecture – Blog » Blog Archive » Bicycle City

Beyond the Priesthood | Planetizen

2010-08-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

Mr Katz succinctly sums up just why our cities have become such monotonous, scaleless, characterless, sprawling collections of buildings and roads. (Notice I did not use choose to degrade the word "place"). We need to "see" what we are doing before we do it. This is the conversation I frequently have with my building clients. It is a lot cheaper to draw it first and change it than to build it first and change it.

Beyond the Priesthood | Planetizen

Burt's Bees, Tom's of Maine, Naked Juice: Your Favorite Brands? Take Another Look -- They May Not Be What They Seem | Personal Health | AlterNet

2010-08-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

This article points to the "man behind the curtain". Necessary reading for anyone who sees their shopping as "marketplace voting".

Burt's Bees, Tom's of Maine, Naked Juice: Your Favorite Brands? Take Another Look -- They May Not Be What They Seem | Personal Health | AlterNet

the Original Green

2010-08-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

Urban Forestry and Sustainable Cities - They need each other, but Steve Mouzon points to one aspect of a disturbing trend where bureaucratic posturing supersedes common sense.

On his Blog,

the Original Green

Steve writes with common sense about the location of street trees, roads and sidewalks. He uses a number of illustrations to point to the fallacy of the arguments that trees and pavement cannot mix unless the pavement is well beyond the dripline of the trees.

One more example to add to his list:

This is Wendover Road, in Charlotte, NC. In the early 1970's the City of Charlotte, during a street widening project of Wendover Road, wanted to cut down all of the trees that you see adjacent to the curb - for the reasons the Urban Foresters cite and because of "safety" concerns. This became fertile soil for protest (remember the times) by many local citizens, but especially high school students. You can see by the photograph, that the protesters prevailed. This in itself is amazing, given the times and the general outcome of these skirmishes. To date safety has not been an issue - in fact I would submit that the proximity of the trees to the street actually slows traffic. And the trees are still alive. Charlotte bills itself as the city of trees, and over the years has in fact become that - at least in certain areas.

How not having a car became Hollywood shorthand for loser. - By Tom Vanderbilt - Slate Magazine

2010-08-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

In this article in Slate Magazine,

How not having a car became Hollywood shorthand for loser. - By Tom Vanderbilt - Slate Magazine

Tom Vanderbilt writes about one of the unspoken assumptions of life here in the good ole US of A. We are programmed to equate freedom and much more with car ownership in a society where every adult over the legal driving age is expected to own a car. In fact what we are doing is limiting freedom - especially for our youngest and oldest citizens. Our young are hauled from one programmed event to another (also creating hardship for those who do the hauling) and our elderly, instead of being able to live independently with dignity are forced into regimented "retirement" communities. And finally, the cost of car ownership, could be transferred to other areas of our life where we would derive much greater benefits.

The Naked City: How Charlotte competitor builds its streetcar

2010-08-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

Mary Newsom, in an article about transit in Charlotte and St Louis has some useful advice for the Triad where too often, "Regionalism" is a dirty word.

The Naked City: How Charlotte competitor builds its streetcar

Returning from CNU 18 -Atlanta GA

2010-05-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

The theme of the conference: New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places

"effective strategies for overcoming the hindering effects of sprawl and disinvestment upon healthy, walkable urban environments ... replacing dysfunctional development with pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that promote healthy lives, healthy environments, and even healthy wallets."

Areas of discussion included:

health impacts of sprawl
transformation of cities through Community Improvement Districts (CID)
Health Impact Assessments (HIA) as a means of combating obesity and other chronic diseases resulting from the places that we live, work, play, and learn.
Ongoing "Urban Lab" tasked with offering up solutions to 5 areas of interest to the City of Atlanta including connecting Downtown and the Beltline to "Recreation Centers of Hope" and MARTA Transit Stations as well as improving water use practices.
Design techniques and Form-Based codes
Retrofitting Suburbia
LEED ND and other Community Wide Sustainability Certification Systems
Small Increment Urbanism
An address by Shaun Donovan, Secretary of HUD, describing efforts within the government to work cooperatively with Transportation and the EPA; reducing automobile dependency and energy use: increasing livability by changes in policy that will increase mixed use development; as well as an announcement of new funding for projects that reinforce these efforts.
Health and transportation: increase physical activity; improve safety and respiratory health; reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Transit Oriented Development (TOD)
New Urbanism as an antidote to Water Sustainability; Clean Water Corridors
Freeway Teardowns
Agricultural Urbanism: Local Food; "Food Deserts"; the Sustainable Region - Greening the land the economy and the built environment with discussion on the "heat island effect" resulting from cities leading to warming beyond that of CO2 emissions.
Creating Authentic Places - best practices
New Urbanism and Accessibility especially as it relates to Inclusive Housing (book title) and aging in place; the creation of lifelong neighborhoods.

What is the take away beyond what is bulleted?

We have come a long way since the days of Urban Renewal and Robert Moses but we have just as far to travel.
Diversity engenders more sustainable and resilient opportunities for life and growth than a mono-culture.
We are facing enormous environmental challenges as a result of unsustainable development patterns and carbon-based energy consumption. They demand cooperation, dialogue, creative thinking, developing new paradigms, re-learning lessons from the past, finding and developing areas for growth that are not based on living on the "capital" of our natural resources.

There is so much more - this is just the tip of the iceberg!

There were networking opportunities; I regret to say that I did miss the opening night session that was focused on cycling in our cities and included David Byrne (of the Talking Heads) who has been stalwart in his commitment to cycling as a means of transportation to the point of traveling with a folding bicycle.

Attached is a link to the CNU Charter Awards through 2009.
http://www.cnu.org/awards
This is a great site to view the form and place making possibilities of New Urbanist principles in practice. The awards for this year will, I am sure, be posted in the not to distant future. Of particular interest in the 2010 group are Lifelong Communities: Retrofitting Suburbia for Seniors and Southlands: Agricultural Urbanism.

An Epic Failure of Planning: The World Expo and the US Pavilion | Planetizen

2010-05-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

An Epic Failure of Planning: The World Expo and the US Pavilion | Planetizen

Yes

2010-03-06T21:31:00.000-08:00

Everything is interconnected. (I can post between Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Blogger, and IPhone)

2010-01-18T19:52:00.001-08:00

Thinking of urban spaces!

A brief explanation of what is to come

2010-01-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have been returning to issues that were central to my entering the field of architecture some 30 years ago. I have been returning to my studies that preceded that. What I am finding is that the core issues that were my passion then are still my passion today. I took a diversion - one that was not productive professionally or spiritually. But we can always pick up where we left off. That is what I am in the process of doing now. I have been reading and studying those people who excited me and challenged me before. I am finding new sources who have carried the torch.

For the unforeseeable future, I will be working to build on these themes.

From: A Timeless Way of Building

2010-01-11T06:10:00.000-08:00

We have been taught that there is no objective difference between good buildings and bad, good towns and bad.

The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwhole and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying and miserable.

But it is easy to understand why people believe so firmly that there is no single, solid basis for the difference between good buildings and bad.

It happens because the the central quality which makes the difference cannot be named....

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

by Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building

Thoreau on "growing down by subtraction"

2009-08-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

'The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountaintops. But lo! Men have become tools of their tools (my emphasis).... We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and higher state to be forgotten." (p 292, Walden, Thoreau, Henry David, from the Portable Thoreau.)

See Rethinking the mall

2009-08-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

For an assessment of the ICSC convention in Las Vegas, with especial emphasis on the future of the mall.

the Fate of Ought-To

2009-07-31T08:44:00.001-07:00

the Fate of Ought-To

Shared via AddThis

A Trip to New Orleans

2009-07-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Architects and Planners would do well to listen to the poet when dealing with subjects like Place and Space. I wrote this after a trip to New Orleans. It still rings true (even post Katrina) and sheds some light, I think, on why subjects like place are so hard to pin down.

A Trip to New Orleans
(November 28, 1983)

A trip to New Orleans
A Latin City, African American City, American City, European City
Begun with a plan
Now growing laissez faire.

Fan on the land
following geography.
Port – looking out to the greater world
A Place so strong in its character,
all other places are but a dream.

Wharves and rivers,
decay,
food/habitat/architecture/climate/geography/ritual intertwined
Home to jazz, to zydeco – Native music
A melting pot of all cultures.

Food – native; local.
Food and drink so strongly its own,
that they define the place.

Catholicism—pageantry, festivals, carnival
Bacchus – Dionysius
gives way to silence, contemplation, and sacrifice.

Truly springtime is the time to awaken the desires,
the yearnings of the flesh,
of the soul to rise,
in dance and song, in revelry.

A Place to travel, to give thanks
to travel to arise; to live; to be alive!

And leaving New Orleans is to leave a dream of sensual delight.
To return to a media generated chimera of distorted perception
of life without mystery or magic
A ghost image without spirit or soul viewed only in mirrors.

Rethinking the Street Space: Why Street Design Matters | Planetizen

2009-07-23T11:10:00.001-07:00

Rethinking the Street Space: Why Street Design Matters | Planetizen

Shared via AddThis

A Fable About Sprawl | Planetizen

2009-07-23T11:06:00.001-07:00

A Fable About Sprawl | Planetizen

Shared via AddThis

2009-07-22T08:00:00.001-07:00

A different view of "Place"

Place and Placemaking in the Urban Environment

2009-07-21T12:46:00.001-07:00

I am beginning a conversation on the qualities of "Place". The purpose is to get beyond the idea that great cities are big cities with professional sports teams. While there are of course many large cities that have a strong sense of place, the opposite is also true.

Qualities that are important are of course the same qualities that define good design. Scale; form; proportion; color; texture; space; shape and mass; color; texture and pattern; line; unity and variety; balance, emphasis, and rhythm.

But there are other qualities that may be overlooked. Things like climate and light. Indigenous building traditions. Food. Sounds and smells. Lifestyles - are people indoors most of the time or do they get outside. Does everyone go for a "Passagiatta" - the evening stroll many Italians practice.

Finally, how do we begin to capture these elements in the American city and town where either they have been destroyed in the name of facilitating the easy movement of vehicular traffic or they never existed to begin with.

2009-06-22T19:29:00.001-07:00

Ada Louise Huxtable quote

"The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, vision versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture's essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us use and know.

" - "The New Architecture" by Ada Louise Huxtable, 1995

2009-06-22T19:28:00.001-07:00

Louis Kahn Quote

“All material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent,
and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light.
- Louis Kahn”

Architecture

2009-06-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

"Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became." ~Louis Kahn