The Babuk Report

Category: Pop Culture

A Perfectly Suburban Afternoon

Christopher Hume, the architecture critic for the Toronto Star newspaper, recently wrote of his ten most favourite streets in the “905 area code”, a euphemism for the Toronto suburbs. True to the title, he wrote only of the streets, not of specific buildings on the streets, but of the streets themselves, and how the backdrop of architecture contributed to the ambience.

Now, Oak Park is a nice town. Like any Chicago neighbourhood, it has nice, but not great, streets. I grew up with an insatiable admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright and that period of about twenty years or so that came to be known as the Prairie School. Now that I live in Oak Park, and am surrounded by landmark Prairie School architecture, I have an understanding of why it only lasted twenty years or so. It’s very formal, predictable and dare I say boring, after twenty years or so.

I’ve grown to like mid century modern design. Oak Park has a couple notable mid century modern houses, but they stick out like a sore thumb and it’s doubtable if these days that they would ever make it past the litany of committee approvals required in this town.

Come to think of it, neighbourhoods of mid-century modern design usually don’t have great, walkable streets, though they quite likely have streets that are sensational to experience at higher speeds, in motion.

Thinking of mid century modern in the Chicago area, we have Flossmoor, Lake Forest, the Illinois Institute of Technology campus – all wonderful communities, but hardly known for delightfully sensual, engaging and walkable streets.

A house in Las Vegas – lots of street presence, but no pedestrian interaction

Granted, the Chicago area isn’t really known for mid century modern. Some of the greatest mid century modern works appear in the “desert communities” – like Las Vegas or Palm Springs. Definitely not walkable streets, but sensational to drive at night.

British historian Reynar Banham used to refer to this as the “architecture of energy”, Regina architect Clifford Wiens described this as being “motion is the aesthetic of modern man”.

A gas station in Palm Springs, with pedestrian stairs leading up to the plaza level with filling pumps

Mid century modern buildings are quite fabulous to experience – they were big on defining spaces through abstract elements that could be imagined as all sorts of things. This concept of mid century modern supported exuberant stand alone buildings, separated by other stand alone and equally exuberant buildings by non descript space.

Palm Springs house with patio

Mid century modern spaces are inward and private, not public.

Even the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair – a very mid century modern event – defined its spaces in relatively private ways by turning its back to existing, defined streets and creating “plazas”.

Perhaps on of the best examples of exuberant architect and a walkable street could be Frank Lloyd Wright’s JC Morris Gift Shop on Maiden Lane in San Francisco. The street would be walkable regardless what someone built on it. Frank Lloyd Wright’s wall – however beautiful and elegant – really doesn’t contribute to the street in a constructive and supportive way.

While I’m a great fan of both walkable streets and exuberant architecture, finding the two together in harmony is a rare occasion.

July 12, 2009
Big People. Little Cars. Tiny Houses. The Scale of our Neighbourhoods

It was an odd conversation over the July Fourth barbeque. One side started talking about the increasing waistlines of various people. The other side was talking about my Mini, and their new-found interest in Microcars. Then – like a flyswatter hitting a mosquito – the two groups found out about each other. A sort of reverse serendipity in a way.

For some years, I’ve been promoting the virtues of smaller houses, and expounding on my theory of how we’ve designed our neighbourhoods around cars, and that the size of our cars has directly influenced the size of our houses.

A building with people, built to the scale of jetliners

Think of an airport terminal, and how gates need to be spaced far enough apart to allow adequate space between airplanes, and enough internal space to accommodate enplaning and deplaning passengers and supporting areas. Same kind of idea.

1957 Chrysler 300

There is fresh, new interest in smaller houses, as I predicted in “The Rise and fall of the McMansion and other Midwestern Housing Trends”. The most notable example of interest in market driven, small houses – like the line of Katrina Cottages marketed by Lowe’s Home Centers.

1972 Fiat 500L

While this change was driven for reasons other than our taste in automobiles, it’s ironic that this is just in time for Chrysler – formerly known for very large cars – to become part of Fiat – known for very small cars.

Land uses and traffic along the Chicago River

During the age of canal building, substantial monetary capital was invested into building canals. Land along the canals – a manmade feature – became very valuable because of the uses one could put beside this new transportation artery. This concept was magnified with the advent of railroads and became known as “frontage”. Build the largest building possible on the smallest of frontage, for economy and efficiency’s sake. This concept was extended to a hierarchy of roadways, and gave rise to “skyscrapers”. Not every land use wants to be in a neighbourhood of tall, closely built buildings. Dwellings – where people live – need sunlight, and a connection to land.

The type of transportation used between places defines the physical area covered by a neighbourhood of places.

A “mews” or backstreet, in London

Walking between places usually led to places located within a half mile or a kilometer of each other. These neighbourhoods are more apt to have a variety of services on a smaller scale, built closer together. Think of how many groceries one could carry while walking – this may define how many grocery stores one could find within the radius, while that radius area needs a certain population density to support these stores. At one point in history, to support a walkable economy, grocery type items were sold in “general stores” – increasing product lines to allow financial viability. And likewise, to maintain this density, dwellings were closer together. In Chicago, we have “bookend” neighbourhoods – blocks of single family houses that are terminated with walk up flats.

An unknown regional mall in an unknown city

Personal, mechanized transportation – the automobile – exaggerated this notion to an extreme; in doing so, this scale of neighbourhood – the scale of the automobile – dedicated the most amount of land necessary for transportation uses while increasing the area of our neighbourhoods. One won’t bat an eyebrow to travel more than a mile to shop at a store where one could purchase an entire week’s worth of groceries. In dispersing the apparent neighbourhood so sparsely over such a great area, the social fabric unwinds. People become anonymous. Driving everywhere cuts down on exercise opportunities, just as a loose urban fabric doesn’t seem to care as much about physical appearances – like obesity.

Light rail transit on sodded trackbeds in Grenoble, France

The perfect compromise seems to be public transit – capable of carrying large numbers of people varying distances.

The coming of smaller cars to North America may create denser, closer knit neighbourhoods. Anyone who has spent any amount of distance in my Mini will attest to its lack of comfort, one shies away from travelling far. One would tend ot patronize closer services, or use transit. The smaller dimensions may give way to smaller streets. Chicago neighbourhoods were a mass of two way streets until cars came to be so large that only one drive aisle – not two – could fit on a roadway. Yet, one still needs streets to allow travel between places. Movement between places is an important concept in this era.

The small house movement is an interesting one. A sustainable community needs a critical mass – a density that will allow a certain number of people to be within a certain distance of employment, cultural and shopping services to support the same. A hallmark of land planning since the industrial age has been the importance of movement between places, manifesting itself in transportation.

Federal Hill, Baltimore. These houses measure sixteen feet (about five metres) wide

And certainly, smaller houses with smaller footprints could use far less land than McMansions. Smaller houses could be placed together in relatively dense groupings and achieve the same sort of – whatever openess – one may achieve in low density, large footprint dwelling configuration.

An interesting study could be the ratio of transportation right of way area per capita of a post war suburb vs. a pre war neighbourhood to find efficient and effective land use. Further, my gut feeling is that some of the more effective land uses may be more livable neighbourhoods.

July 7, 2009
Land Development Strategy on Autopilot

First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us”

                Sir Winston Churchill

“Motion is the aesthetic of modern man”

                Clifford Wiens

Maybe it was driving through a crowded parking lot, looking for a parking space. In amidst the row of SUV’s there appeared to be an empty space, only to come upon it and discover that it’s simply a smaller car packed between the Escalades. Or maybe it’s noticing the difference in scale between neighborhoods built at different decades; and that their scale varies directly with the size of their garages. Whether we want to acknowledge this or not, we’re designing our housing stock around our taste in automobiles.

“In the Industrial Age: first we build our cars, then build our communities around them”

                Darrel Babuk

A Forward Thinking concept at the time

Take the ’51 Ford as example. In retrospect, it might seem to be something akin to a lunchbucket on wheels; yet in it’s day, it was a Ford’s first revolutionary design of the modern automotive era. Revolutionary in more ways than one; as the embodiment of the GI Housing Bill and the Interstate Highway Act of a few years later, it conquered countless acres of former rural farmland and helped populate these territories with people and commercial strips.

Levittown was another Forward Thinking concept of its time

In 1951, the sought after housing stock was a single family home of two, maybe three bedrooms with only one gathering space not related to food. These houses were probably configured as two separate levels, one being built inside a roof attic space to conserve materials, thus price. It allowed its occupants to spend more money on other things, like fancier cars…

Cars had smiles in this era – this was our dentist’s car

Later on, by the late 1960’s, it was commonplace to expect our cars and houses to be exuberantly flamboyant. Houses had grown into sprawling ranches and split levels; despite experiments with swoopy rooflines, they still weren’t too large in floor area.

Note that the roofline of this house creates the same sort of smile as did our dentist’s car

Instead, individual houses sat on large plots of land, requiring cars to ferry their occupants back and forth. The idea of a two car family had just entered American lexicon, a two car garage proudly displayed to the street was a status symbol to behold. Cars enveloped similarly swoopy masses of sheet metal, they were difficult to manouever through city street. Chicago reverted many of its neighborhood streets to one way traffic, to accommodate these vehicles.

The freshness of sixties design got a bit tired, then mired in the seventies. Maybe it was the energy crunch, or maybe it was by a series of laws that controlled, rather than encouraged design. By the time the eighties came to be, a book by Jane Jacobs “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” came to be better accepted, and we sought ways to do more with less. A few indulgences came in small packages. Sudden interest in condominiums and townhouses were met by happy buyers in BMW 5 Series sedans. Oddly, while we learned to drive more fuel efficient cars, we started to drive more cars, it really didn’t stem our consumption of resources. We rebuilt our cities, yet kept developing new suburbs. We simply found ways to use more resources.

These days, we have McMansions and SUV’s of all sizes, though the family units that live inside the McMansions are smaller than what lived in the 50’s or 60’s tract homes. The McMansions lack design originality, though they boast rare and expensive finishes, like kitchens with granite countertops. Didn’t the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building mine out one of Michelangelo’s historic marble quaries? Our freeways are constantly choked with traffic. Our expectations have become supersized as we simply want more of everything – good design doesn’t really count, just that there be more of it! The car enveloped by a swoopy mass of sheet metal in the late 1960’s is no larger in floor area than a 21st century full size SUV, yet our SUV’s take up considerably more volume and weigh substantially more. And about the original marble cladding of the Amoco Building – once it was removed due to damage, wasn’t it pulverized and used as roadbed gravel for an extension of the Stevenson Expressway?

Would we have a different urban infrastructure design if we had started to drive vehicles like this?

It makes one wonder about the preponderance of human nature to simply go on autopilot without question: where would we be now if during the fifties and sixties, we had stuck not to the large cars but rather to concepts like the original Austin Mini or Fiat 500; the concepts being produced in Detroit as Ramblers or Crossleys. Would our cities be much more geographically compact, would we be using public transit more often, and would we be living our lives in public rather than in the cocoons of gated communities?

“How often I found where I should be going, only by setting out for somewhere else”

                Buckminster Fuller

June 29, 2009
The “Architect – Comedian” as the next new comic sensation

At a farewell party last night, one fellow picked a conversation topic started expounding on “lawyer-comedians”.

Now, I can count lawyers as being among my best of friends, however: a “lawyer – comedian” sounded as oxymoronic as would an “architect-comedian”. I somehow doubt if anyone could find comedy in issuing a change order or an Expression of Interest document.

Thinking of it, until very lately, the only architects ever depicted on prime time television programs were the likes of Mr. Brady of “The Brady Bunch”, or the owner of “Mr. Ed – the Talking Horse” – all these characters being rather contrived. For television, the images of lawyers have been dressed up by inserting a bit of drama into their daily routines – a procedural time out while appealing a stay of execution, for example. We architects could never inject excitement into a Contemplated Change Notice addressing plastic laminate countertop surfaces.

The only group less likely than “lawyer – comedians” or architect – comedians” may be an “accountant – comedian”, perhaps developing comedy in changing the standard office ledger paper from six column to five. A cost effective move, no doubt.

Fortunately, we found a more entertaining conversation topic that involved commenting on wine from Ontario vineyards.

June 27, 2009
The Calgary Flames in Chicago

Friday, May 1, 2009

The Canadian Club of Chicago planned a Calgary Flames Pep Rally during the Calgary Flames / Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup Playoff Series. With nary a day’s notice, the Canadian Club sent out hundreds of e-mail invitations and contacted media. We fielded calls from the Chicago Tribune and local TV news outlets. This became a story on three different radio stations in Calgary and a front-page headline story in the Calgary Herald.

The thought was that we would march around around the United Center seven times at dawn and blow horns at it, kind of like the biblical story of Joshua marching around Jericho for seven days. Then we’d go have breakfast at the Billy Goat. Leading the charge was going to be my trusty little red and white Mini Clubman Estate, proudly flying a Calgary Flames flag from its window. At daybreak, navigating undauntedly through the streets of Chicago’s west side, it arrived at the United Center for its appointed rounds. On the fifth lap, a taxi cab was seen pulling up on Wood Street, east of the UC, and dropped off a well dressed fellow, it was before 6AM. Perhaps my trusty little red Mini with a Calgary Flames flag may have been a bit noticeable in that neighbourhood, that time of morning, in front of all the security surveillance cameras, but this fellow waved me down and introduced himself as Ken King, President and CEO of the Calgary Flames.

Another fan appeared from Calgary in a similarly flagged vehicle, as did a vehicle with Consular plates and two Consular staff.

While Mr. King noted that the smaller the turnout, the better the news story this would be, there were four television news helicopters flying overhead, fighting for the same airspace over the United Center to get an anticipated crowd shot. We waved.

In order to get access to the Canadian Club’s e-mail list, I had to cut a deal with their Marketing Committee, who is a Trade Attache for the delegation du Quebec in Chicago. I could hear him loudly grinning over the phone as he commented how great my Mini would look flying a Canadiens flag at a Montreal / Chicago rally. Paybacks can be nasty in this town.

May 1, 2009