Award Winning Park: "Wade Oval"

Cleveland’s Wade Oval is just seven acres, but it is uniquely-situated amid many of the most important cultural institutions in the city, including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Botanical Garden, and Cleveland Art Museum. Located in the University Circle neighborhood that is home to Case Western Reserve University, the Oval is at the center of a neighborhood that draws tens of thousands of students, patients and visitors daily.
At the request of University Circle, Inc., a local nonprofit planning and development organization, PPS worked with citizens in University Circle, institutional stakeholders and internationally renowned architects and designers hired to expand several of these institutions, to help the Oval’s adjacent uses benefit from their unique location on the Oval, and transform the Oval itself – and the boulevard around it – to become more welcoming to both visitors and the local community, and enlivened by events and activities programmed by the rich array of partners around it.

PPS recommended a plan to connect the institutions to one another and to the park, partly through small changes to building facades and outdoor areas that reveal more information about what's going on inside these buildings. Using PPS’s conceptual plan, University Circle, Inc initiated a $1.4 million renovation of the Oval, which was completed in October of 2003, revealing such improvements as new walkways, pathway lighting, benches, lampposts, drinking fountains, and a performance stage that blends in with the surrounding landscape. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s architecture critic, Steve Litt, wrote of the revitalized Oval “The transformation though modest in cost is astonishing. UCI has turned the park into a postcard-perfect amenity worthy of any city in the world.”

Can new architecture create successful places?

by Kathy Madden

People often ask me if a building has to be old or look historic to create a sense of place. I always answer with a definite "No!" While it may be easier to find older buildings where public activity flourishes, their success is not due to age or a particular architectural style. The main factor is actually how the base of the building is treated. A building with a well-designed (and well-managed!) ground floor can be a great place regardless of the style in which it is constructed. Let's look at two places which I think illustrate this point quite effectively: Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, and Rockefeller Center in New York.

Country Club Plaza, which debuted in the 1920s, is one of the nation's oldest shopping centers. Built in a style that mimics the architecture of Seville, Spain, it succeeds as a pedestrian district even though it was developed to accommodate cars. A few years ago PPS interviewed the managers of the complex, and we found that they attributed their success to four things. One, they offered a mix of attractions that appeal to a broad array of people – for example, by varying the price ranges of retail and restaurants. Second, they located necessities (e.g. bank branches, or doctors' and dentists' offices) in places that would lead people to pass by retail stores en route. Third, everything in the development allowed people to interact with it in some way. Children could touch sculptures; people could sit by pools and fountains; window displays were designed to maximize intrigue; outdoor cafes hosted jazz performers and other entertainment. And last, but certainly not least, blank walls were not allowed anywhere. Where management identified sterile areas around the exterior of the complex, they added plantings or artwork to liven the space up for passersby. What's remarkable is that, even though the Plaza is widely known for its historicist aesthetic, the people who run it cite very different reasons for its enduring popularity.

Rockefeller Center, though it was constructed just a short time after Country Club Plaza, couldn't look more different--but it is an even better public space. Its soaring forms are modernist icons, and the closer you get, the more these buildings come alive. Art deco sculptures grace the entrances. Ground floor windows protrude slightly from facades, enticing people to slow down and take a look at the goods inside. Changing exhibits and events in the center of the complex keep it humming in every season, while artfully placed wooden benches enable people to pause, rest, reflect, and take it all in. Here, a modern aesthetic gracefully accommodates a great public space.

Contrast the original Rockefeller Center with the more recently developed Rockefeller Center West (built in the 1970s on the west side of Sixth Avenue), however, and you'll see a very different way of building which has no sense of place. The buildings here do not have human-scaled bases: Store windows and entrances are set back from the sidewalk by nearly 50 feet, and the space between the building and the curb is basically empty. The retail is hidden so few people go window shopping. There is no reason for people to linger or make a return visit.

Rockefeller Center and Country Club Plaza make it clear that success as a public space is independent from architectural style. But as Rockefeller Center West illustrates, newer buildings often fall short of the mark. This is also true regardless of style. In fact, many of the worst new buildings are those designed to look old or historic, which don't work because they hide their ground floor uses behind a "charming" facade.

So although great new buildings may be few and far between, I stand behind my emphatic "No" -- there is NO reason new architecture can't contribute to an enhanced sense of place in the public realm. I would love to hear from readers of this blog about new buildings that succeed at their base--that engage the sidewalk with transparent ground floors and a mix of retail and other uses. What new architecture is striving to create better places?

People=Power!

By SAM COOPER

Fred Kent believes in people power.
You can have the most attractively built community in the world, he says, but if people don’t come together to mix in public spaces, it’s just dead space.

Kent recently spoke to the West Vancouver Chamber of Commerce and Mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, in relation to the plans to renew Ambleside.
The world-renowned urban planning expert has worked with over 2,000 communities through his New York-based Project for Public Spaces consultancy, started in 1975.

His theory is that attractive, non-automobile dominated public spaces layered with multi-use functions will pump vitality back into communities that have become too isolated.

Educated at Columbia University, Kent brings studies of geography, economics, transportation, planning and anthropology, into his “place-making” philosophy. He’s taken about a million photos in communities around the world, using time lapse technology to understand the underlying motivation of people’s attraction, or repulsion, to certain public spaces.

“Foot movements are like a sort of language,” he explained of his photographic methodology, to a table of listeners including Goldsmith-Jones and Park Royal vice-president Rick Amantea, over a lunch of grilled salmon at Saltaire in Ambleside.
The group had earlier toured Ambleside and found traffic overpowered their conversations.
“Your main street is only functioning at 40 per cent of what it could be,” Kent said.
“When you look at your city, there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of things not happening.”

Kent’s group holds that great cities have a formula of ten great destinations. And each location should also be enriched by ten different activities, he says.
But a location doesn’t have to be an attraction like the Eiffel Tower to draw people.

For example, a city hall, library, laundry, coffee shop, and bank could be layered together.
“If you triangulate those things with other activities you’d have one of the busiest places in Canada.”

Busy is a positive concept for Kent, meaning regular people interacting.
“The important business of the city is in the social functions, not what happens in city hall,” he said.

Hearing this, Goldsmith-Jones nodded enthusiastically.
“I try to go to a different coffee shop every day and I find what I’m running into is so interesting, I have to move back my (municipal hall) meetings,” she told Kent.
Kent suggested West Vancouver citizens should be engaged in a process to imagine what new public spaces in Ambleside should encompass.

Lifestyle Centers & European Roots

Exerpt from Good Malls and Bad Cities by Philip Nobel

There’s really nothing wrong with Santana Row. There should be, of course; we’ve all been bred to hate malls, and what could be more hateful than a mall masquerading as a chic, vaguely European town? Taking advantage of the sun in San Jose (the more or less real place it is situated in), the mall does away with interiority, offering shoppers an artfully paved and fountained plaza, arcaded sidewalks, live music, “street food,” and oversize chess in a shaded square—all to differentiate yet another collection of shops from the market. Crate and Bar­rel, Design Within Reach, and the Container Store anchor one end of the neighborhood, luring you with the promise of a design-rich life.

Santana Row has a hotel too—a very good one—right on the main drag, and walking out the huge stone portal of the front door at night, seeing the sidewalk cafés packed under the brick arches and the lovers all atangle at the glass-and-steel tables, shopping bags at their feet, you might be drawn in for a second, overlooking the uniform signage, the uniformed guards, the too feeble stream of traffic in the well-controlled quasi-public street, and the way everything conspires to keep the experience free of distracting surprise. You can even live there. Above the main street and ringing the plaza are flats and town houses, accessible through their own garages and concealing their own swimming pools but opening out to the little shopping city with cute Juliet balconies. “Call it energy, call it charisma, call it style & substance,” the marketing copy reads. “Santana Row has a certain something that is impervious to time.”

There’s really nothing wrong with Easton Town Center either. It’s actually sort of charming the way the planners of this mega-mall in Columbus, Ohio—again seeking that elusive saturated-market edge—have modeled the thing after an ideal American courthouse square. It’s a true Midwestern civic typology, missing only the civic, but there’s an Apple Store and a place for the kids to play outside; it’s not at all a bad place to kill a few hours between the airport and your next pilgrimage to the Wexner Center.

At Easton Town Center the mall-planning protocols are retained to a much greater degree than at Santana Row (there’s a proper interior, modeled incongruously after a Milanese arcade, and you’re glad for it when it sleets). But there is still that salutory urge to make a center, even to flatter the “consumer” by advertising it as such; and judging by the foot traffic around its signature square one winter weekday last year, it works. As at the more upscale Santana Row, the mall is surrounded by housing, though not in the complex. On the access roads all around, there are acres of low town-house blocks that reminded me of similar swaths near Harvard Square. You can live close to other people, and if you can’t quite abandon your car, it would be possible at least to leave your SUV in one of the shared garages when you scamper across the street to go to Johnny Rockets. You could even walk to a movie theater.

It was visiting those two sprawl-patching hot spots within a few months last year that began to erode my knee-jerk aversion to malls: fake places, captive minds, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. I still feel like it’s the end of the world when I see a shopping center replace the exterior life of a city—the beautiful, well-scaled, well-heeled streets of Providence, Rhode Island, may never recover from the vampire of Providence Place—but in San Jose and exurban Ohio, there is scarcely a center to mourn, and the malliers should be credited for responding to a human urge that looks like it will easily survive the decentralizing effects of multiuser gaming and Netflix.

People like to gather, and not just to shop. For many years I liked to think that it was in search of those extracommercial urban moments that Americans went to Europe in such numbers: a stroll on cobbles, a chance crepe stand or busker, the feel of being in a mass. But there’s a predictable feel to those places these days that rivals the formula of the American mall. Think of the center of any European city: the train station lets out at one end of the pedestrian-only zone, chain stores are everywhere, the unified street furniture and signage announce an advanced state of central control. Parking is underground, out of sight. Events are known, programmed, and disturbances of the peace are few. Though you’re still free to riot after a soccer match.

In terms of land use, it’s preferable to paving the orchards or cornfields to make more sprawl (even in the form of little downtowns), but experientially the zentrum and the shopping center are fast converging. You scan the shop windows as you wander toward the city’s central point—a clock, a fountain, a bridge—just as you would gravitate toward the food court or art object at the center of some old-school mall. Walking around the center of Munich for several days last winter, I found it increasingly untenable to prefer one form of regulated commercial experience to another, to damn the American solution and reflexively embrace the European. The city fathers had even installed an ice rink at the gate of the main walking street, just as shrewd mall-makers from Edmonton to Dallas have done since the 1980s.

With free speech (thriving elsewhere) taken out of the equation, with all arguments based on “authenticity” banished to the postmodern echo chamber, with the European models of urbanity themselves sinking into the for­mulaic banal, places like Santana Row and Easton Town Center look like unadulterated good news—little training grounds for the experience of being with lots of other people on a street at the same time. That alone can build civic health. And subversion is only a wireless connection away.

"Place-making" Arizona Style

Tempe officials hope to make downtown a "place" - a vibrant hub of pedestrian activity engulfing Papago Park, the Mill Avenue District and Tempe Town Lake.

To do that, Tempe needs a seamless connection of pedestrian-friendly roads and walkways throughout the region. It needs to cluster landmarks, destinations and icons close together, then build attractive passageways between them, Phil Myrick, vice president of Project for Public Spaces, said at a meeting Monday.

"When you push them together, it makes more energy," Myrick said. "There should be so many things to do that everybody in the community has the opportunity to go there and spend hours."
Tempe hired the New York-based nonprofit consulting organization to help bring people to downtown Tempe landmarks.

Through town hall meetings and volunteer data collectors, including more than 100 ASU students, the consultants are identifying the key destinations that can become "places."
Myrick calls his project "placemaking" - turning a neighborhood, city or destination from somewhere people can't wait to get out of to somewhere they never want to leave."
[Tempe has] all the elements, but they're not organized in a way that makes sense," Myrick told a joint meeting that included the Tempe City Council and the boards of directors from the Tempe Chamber of Commerce, Tempe Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Downtown Tempe Community.

He then presented a preliminary plan to link Tempe's landmarks and destinations in a way that would entice pedestrians to stop and spend time instead of passing through.
"We can't leave it to the private sector to come up with a vision for this lake," Myrick said. "It's just not going to happen."

City staff, volunteers and ASU planning students combed Mill Avenue and other locations, asking questions and gathering data to pinpoint the most popular destinations, their strengths and their shortcomings, said Eric Hansen, a Tempe planner who has been working on the project

A Trainspotter's Paradise

Birmingham Railroad Reservation Park
Forum for Urban Design

Some cities have a river; others have a harbor. In Birmingham Alabama, residents cozy up to an 11-track railroad corridor. Still very active, the railroad serves as a vital emblem of local history and character but also, by running through the heart of downtown, splits the city in half. To help stitch the downtown back together, Tom Leader Studio’s masterplan re-envisions the area as a park that puts Birmingham’s train infrastructure in the spotlight.

Tom Leader’s design concept for the park was apparent from the get-go. As principal of Tom Leader Studio, he explained that “rather than sticking a park next to a rail viaduct and calling it a day, the idea was to put primary park circulation up at the level of the train because they love trains. [Birmingham residents] actually go on weekends and trainspot on some of these overpasses.” Using this quirky hobby as a cue, the firm aimed to provide greater access to the trains by designing a catwalk structure that runs parallel to the rail corridor. The park, which will cover a total of 21 acres, is organized into different zones with themes of rail, community, and nature. Besides the rail catwalk, the plan features a community-oriented segment at the eastern end that includes an amphitheater with a whimsical rain curtain, an arts plaza and a stage platform for regional events such as Birmingham’s celebrated “Crawfish Boil.” The middle and western edge fulfill the “nature” piece of the vision through a zone of open space with several knolls that Leader describe as waves that “rise up and down against the railroad track.” Though filled with intimate and unique details such as the wave-like hills and the rain curtain, the park’s strongest asset still remains its dynamic rail-oriented circulation.

For the Railroad Reservation Park, Tom Leader Studio collaborated with ConsultEcon, and Tom Martin economic planners for the client, the City of Birmingham Mayor’s Office. Currently, the plan is being further developed through schematic designs, and construction is projected to begin later in 2007.

The "Sameness of Communities"

Change is the new permanence, and as Adam Gopnik pointed out so elegantly in a recent New Yorker column, this yields a weird sameness everywhere. Manhattan is but one example of this phenomenon:

...New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.
By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other. Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid. In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other. Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

(Left: typical Lower East Side street scene, around 1900.)

The demise of insular enclaves of all sorts is not necessarily bad, if only what replaces these things is the ideal multicolor, socioeconomically diverse metropolis that most people dream about owning together. (Which no one believes the gentrified city is, except perhaps for the people who can easily afford it.) So how that distinctiveness is maintained, preserved, or encouraged across the "one grid" of the city is thrown into extremely sharp relief.

Reclaiming Suburbia

Excerpts from "Breaking the Density Deadlock" by ALAN EHRENHALT

Tysons Corner isn’t much to look at. I don’t mean simply that it’s unattractive — although it is — but that when you pass through it, along the main commercial strip of Route 7, in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, you don’t even get the feeling that anything substantial is there. You see a long, loose string of office buildings built in the 1970s and ’80s, scattered over a stretch of two or three miles, few of them close together or in any way congruent with each other. You pass two huge regional shopping malls, both tucked behind vast parking lots and barely visible from the highway. You don’t know for sure when you’ve reached the place, and there’s no way to tell when you’ve left.

If you work in local government anywhere, the odds are you have heard the joke that there are two things Americans can’t stand: sprawl and density. I refer to it as a joke, but in fact it comes close to being a literal truth. Millions of Americans who live in places like Fairfax County visit places such as Boston and San Francisco and wish they could recreate some of that urbanity and elegance for themselves. But faced with the reality of what true urban sophistication requires — height, big crowds, and strangers from the city flocking in on trains, they back off. That’s the deadlock of density.

The developer of this project, the Macerich Co. of California, is pressing all the right New Urbanist buttons. Its computerized graphics envision spacious plazas, sculpture gardens, skating rinks and performance space. Macerich talks about making the Intersection of Routes 7 and 123 into a new “Central Park,” a “100 percent downtown corner.”

Most intriguing of all, Macerich is promising to take the blank acres of asphalt that dominate Tysons now and superimpose a grid that would provide 54 additional pedestrian-friendly streets for traffic to move in, generate a huge increase in sidewalk capacity, provide up to 14,000 curbside parking spaces, and in the end create something that doesn’t just possess the density of a city but actually looks like a city.

My guess is that when all of this development is completed, 10 or 15 years from now, I do not expect that Tysons Corner will much resemble the green pedestrian oasis pictured in the computerized Macerich sketches. But I think it will be quite a bit better than what is there now. I also think it will be a commercial success.

I’m convinced of that because I see all around me a generation of young, mainstream, middle-class adults — label them any way you want to — who are looking for some form of mid-level urban experience, not bohemian inner-city adventure but definitely not cul-de-sacs and long commutes. There are more of them coming into the residential market every year. They like the idea of having some space, but they aren’t fleeing in terror at the mention of density. They aren’t willing to sell their cars, but they appreciate the advantage of having another way to get around. If Tysons Corner is rebuilt on a reasonable human scale and with a modicum of physical appeal, they will go for it, imperfect as it may be.

And then we will begin to see experiments of this sort in suburbs all over the country, launched by developers and local governments that may still be a little nervous about density but will know one thing for sure: If Tysons Corner can be reborn, nothing in the suburbs is beyond hope.If the effort to rebuild Tysons Corner somehow succeeds, it will become a national model for reclaiming suburbia.

Ten Principles for Creating Successful Squares

by Project for Public Space PPS

The Small details add up to great places.

Squares have been a core focus of PPS beginning with our first project 30 years ago--Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens. We've honed the ten principles below based on the hundreds of squares--the good and the bad--that we've analyzed and observed since then. What stands out most is that design is only a small fraction of what goes into making a great square. To really succeed, a square must take into account a host of factors that extend beyond its physical dimensions.
1. Image and Identity
A popular square in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Historically, squares were the center of communities, and they traditionally helped shape the identity of entire cities. Sometimes a fountain was used to give the square a strong image: Think of the majestic Trevi Fountain in Rome or the Swann Fountain in Philadelphia's Logan Circle. The image of many squares was closely tied to the great civic buildings located nearby, such as cathedrals, city halls, or libraries. Today, creating a square that becomes the most significant place in a city--that gives identity to whole communities--is a huge challenge, but meeting this challenge is absolutely necessary if great civic squares are to return.

2. Attractions and Destinations
Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco.

Any great square has a variety of smaller "places" within it to appeal to various people. These can include outdoor cafés, fountains, sculpture, or a bandshell for performances. These attractions don't need to be big to make the square a success. In fact, some of the best civic squares have numerous small attractions such as a vendor cart or playground that, when put together, draw people throughout the day. We often use the idea of "The Power of Ten" to set goals for destinations within a square. Creating ten good places, each with ten things to do, offers a full program for a successful square.
3. Amenities
Circular benches provide a comfortable place to sit in Rockefeller Center, New York City.

A square should feature amenities that make it comfortable for people to use. A bench or waste receptacle in just the right location can make a big difference in how people choose to use a place. Lighting can strengthen a square's identity while highlighting specific activities, entrances, or pathways. Public art can be a great magnet for children of all ages to come together. Whether temporary or permanent, a good amenity will help establish a convivial setting for social interaction.
4. Flexible Design
Tennis on the square, Copenhagen.

The use of a square changes during the course of the day, week, and year. To respond to these natural fluctuations, flexibility needs to be built in. Instead of a permanent stage, for example, a retractable or temporary stage could be used. Likewise, it is important to have on-site storage for movable chairs, tables, umbrellas, and games so they can be used at a moment's notice.

5. Seasonal Strategy
The holiday market in New York's Union Square.

A successful square can't flourish with just one design or management strategy. Great squares such as Bryant Park, the plazas of Rockefeller Center, and Detroit's new Campus Martius change with the seasons. Skating rinks, outdoor cafés, markets, horticulture displays, art and sculpture help adapt our use of the space from one season to the next.

6. Access
A short pedestrian crossing at Plaza Santa Ana in Madrid, Spain.

To be successful, a square needs to be easy to get to. The best squares are always easily accessible by foot: Surrounding streets are narrow; crosswalks are well marked; lights are timed for pedestrians, not vehicles; traffic moves slowly; and transit stops are located nearby. A square surrounded by lanes of fast-moving traffic will be cut off from pedestrians and deprived of its most essential element: people.

7. The Inner Square & the Outer Square
Ground floor retail rings the edge of this square in Verona, Italy.

Visionary park planner Frederick Law Olmsted's idea of the "inner park" and the "outer park" is just as relevant today as it was over 100 years ago. The streets and sidewalks around a square greatly affect its accessibility and use, as do the buildings that surround it. Imagine a square fronted on each side by 15-foot blank walls -- that is the worst-case scenario for the outer square. Then imagine that same square situated next to a public library: the library doors open right onto the square; people sit outside and read on the steps; maybe the children's reading room has an outdoor space right on the square, or even a bookstore and cafe. An active, welcoming outer square is essential to the well-being of the inner square.

8. Reaching Out Like an Octopus
A great square reaches out into the surrounding neighborhood, like Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy.

Just as important as the edge of a square is the way that streets, sidewalks and ground floors of adjacent buildings lead into it. Like the tentacles of an octopus extending into the surrounding neighborhood, the influence of a good square (such as Union Square in New York) starts at least a block away. Vehicles slow down, walking becomes more enjoyable, and pedestrian traffic increases. Elements within the square are visible from a distance, and the ground floor activity of buildings entices pedestrians to move toward the square.

9. The Central Role of Management
Attentive maintenance is an essential part of good management in St. Stephen's Green, Dublin.

The best places are ones that people return to time and time again. The only way to achieve this is through a management plan that understands and promotes ways of keeping the square safe and lively. For example, a good manager understands existing and potential users and gears events to both types of people. Good managers become so familiar with the patterns of how people use the park that waste receptacles get emptied at just the right time and refreshment stands are open when people most want them. Good managers create a feeling of comfort and safety in a square, fixing and maintaining it so that people feel assured that someone is in charge.
10. Diverse Funding Sources
Sponsorships can help fund events like Festa Italiana in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.

A well-managed square is generally beyond the scope of the average city parks or public works department, which is why partnerships have been established to operate most of the best squares in the United States. These partnerships seek to supplement what the city can provide with funding from diverse sources, including--but not limited to--rent from cafés, markets or other small commercial uses on the site; taxes on adjacent properties; film shoots; and benefit fundraisers.