Perpetual Halloween at the Inner Harbor?

Baltimore was a leader in reclaiming downtrodden industrial waterfronts. It was an early adopter of the "festival marketplace" concept incarnated at Faneuil Hall in Boston. It has added attractions, one after the other, a National Aquarium, an extension to it, a science center and an extension to it, it has its own World Trade Center (as State property), it has converted a defunct Power Plant into an entertainment venue with a giant guitar on the roof (Hard Rock Cafe) it has added a splashy visitors center and extended the waterfront promenade for miles in each direct from point zero: Harborplace.

Yet, controversy keeps surrounding the tourist Mekka. Earlier this year the Baltimore Development Corporation requested proposals for "new attractions" and received proposals for zip lines, Ferris wheels and cable cars which were quickly ridiculed by local leaders. The Greater Baltimore Committee and the local architecture firm of Ayer Saint Gross countered the set of carnival ideas with a much more serious and sustainable approach and a couple of creative suggestions: A new footbridge traversing the water and a new design for Rash Field. It was not even clear yet how this tempest in the harbor pond would settle, then the next idea started cropping up: Placing the nationwide entertainment concern Ripleys (Trademark exhibit: "Odditorium") in one of the pavilions and drape Chessie over the entrance, or a sunken pirate ship, or both.

Original Proposal for Harbor Pavillion Defacement

The designs were presented by the Baltimore firm Brown Craig and Turner and reviewed by the Baltimore Urban Design and Architectural Review Panel (UDARP). They were not exactly received with enthusiasm but the panel did, incredibly, also not reject them outright. So the ship was deleted but the monster kept creeping over the well designed pavilion.

General Growth, the owner of the ever less well performing pavilions (they have vacancies, a long time an impossible thought) apparently is groping for a solution and is scraping the bottom in the process. The pavilions might need a make-over and they might need some serious re-thinking, but turning them into a gateway to carnival rides is not the right answer.

October submission to the Design Review Panel

Making the city facing rear sides more attractive, opening them up to the envisioned world class urban boulevard on Pratt Street, bringing in local merchandise that appeals to residents and tourists and enhances and complements the meager downtown retail mix, those would be better answers and more in keeping with a location that wants and needs to be Baltimore's "living room", or as architect David Benn put it in an editorial about the waterfront promenade, Baltimore's "Central Park." Either way, the placement of junk entertainment along the water's edge has run its course (Chicago's Navy Pier) and 21st century solutions are classier and better (Chicago's Centennial Park). As we know from the freedom of speech debates at the Inner Harbor, the area is subject to many controls and regulations. The areas around the pavilions are public parks and it should be not too hard to control excessive signs and adhere to the original spirit of the Inner Hrabor Masterplan which was based on celebrating the water. (see also my SUN op-ed, Best Theme: The Water from July  2011.)

October submission to the Design Review Panel

An article on the proposed Ripleys will be in tomorrows Sun Paper. See article in this Link.

Commuter Rail and the Creative Class

Baltimore's self confidence is still so shaky that several Baltimore based organizers of the RailVolution conference which was held in DC this year doubted that one of the "Mobile Workshops" should showcase Baltimore. Well, the doubts were overcome and the tour for Baltimore named "Commuter Rail and the Creative Class" was reportedly the one that sold out first.
45 people signed up, hailing from Honolulu, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake City and many other places. They came on a MARC commuter train to Baltimore's Penn Station and were welcomed by a group of Baltimore guides, including me who guided them first on foot and later by Charme City Circulator bus.

The tour was geographically limited to the area around Penn Station also known as the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. The guests walked south on Charles Street, saw on their way the new University of Baltimore (UB) law school under construction (architect Stephan Behnisch, Stuttgart), the new University of Baltimore student housing also under construction and finally entered Baltimore's first Transit Oriented Development (TOD) project: Symphony Center, a project resulting from the construction of Baltimore's initial light rail line.Tony Rogers explained the concept of urban housing and offices with suburban amenities and how the large parking garage is built right over top of the historic Howard Street freight tunnel in which famously a hazardous material tanker car caught fire a few years ago and brought all of downtown to a standstill. It was noted that the large garage is not easily to fill and that structured parking represents a large "stranded cost". Next the group walked over to the new "Fitzgerald" apartments developed and managed by the Bozzutto group. Toby Bozzutto explained how he as an English major picked the name in honor of the writer who lived in adjacent Bolton Hill. The Fitzgerald shows how far Baltimore has come in the last decade. Here no longer the attempt of bringing the suburb to the city, rather an attempt to bring New York style to Baltimore. The market rate apartments fetch top rents and boast a very stylish amenity and community area on the entry level. The project just garnered the top design award of the local AIA. Since the project was constructed on UB's former main parking lot, it too, features a huge parking garage that is partly empty. The garage well hidden from Mt Royal Avenue is quite visible from the Johns Falls Expressway and Penn Station.

 Mobile Workshop participants duly noted that, remarkably, two developers in a row had stated that they had built too much parking. That in itself illustrates the cultural shift that is currently occurring from cul de sac to walkable and transit connective with bike racks and Zip Cars in front of dense living on top of Barnes and Noble and a pizza joint.

The latest model Charme City circulator bus (the hybrid Orion) took the group to a trip down memory lane at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum with its open air tram rides. Stops and tours of the Charles Theatre, ArchPlan's Printers Square Apartments (market rate and affordable housing in rehabilitated former industrial building and a historic firehouse showcased by developer Bill Hazlehurst) and the spanking new Artist Housing on Greenmount Avenue, City Arts, developed by Jubilee Baltimore, concluded the tour. At City Arts a art student from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) explained what artists want in housing and how students from near and far were attracted to this cool facility, no matter that it is located smack in the middle of a heavily disinvested area. Video clip of City Arts.

The tour showed that Baltimore is grasping the concept of the creative class as well as the idea of transit oriented development and building from strength to such a degree that this tour could even impress people from those cities like  Portland, Seattle and LA that attract young people in droves. All projects are rental apartments and all were fully occupied, the Printers Square, Fitzgerald and City Arts filled in record time. (Tour guide and City Arts developer Charlie Duff addressing the workshop participants: "When you people from Portland come to see Baltimore, I imagine it is like going to the zoo". lots of laughter). Well not anymore. People come to see Baltimore thriving, however not everybody here has gotten the message yet.

Printers Square Apartment  explained

After the open ride at the Streetcar Museum

The Fitzgerald: Transit Oriented Development in Baltimore
From the Mobile Workshop program



Growing or Shrinking - The US "Legacy" City in the 21st Century

As co chair of the AIA Urban Design Committee I helped organize this year's urban design lecture during Architecture Month. The topic: "Shrinking/Growing, Baltimore's Future." The two speakers were David Dixon, FAIA from Boston and Tom Murphy, former Mayor of Pittsburgh and now senior ULI fellow in Washington DC. The event hit a nerve with the Baltimore community and was standing room only. Both speakers and I had participated in the WYPR Midday talk show with Dan Rodricks earlier the same day under the same topic. Download audio.

Tom Murphy, drawing heavily from his Pittsburgh experience but also from the research in his current position at the Urban Land Institute postulates that cities find themselves in a similar revolution as when the automobile became the prevalent mode of transportation. Now it is the knowledge revolution that changes cities just as radically as industrialization or the automobile has done it before. The most prominent representatives of the knowledge industry are "meds and eds", large hospital complexes and their associated research and the universities and colleges. Murphy pointed out that Johns Hopkins is the largest employer in the State and together with the University of Maryland at Baltimore bring about $2.4 billion into the city. He challenges the city to utilize this money to grow development and keep talent in the city and multiply it. Murphy pointed out that San Diego which used to be a sleepy Navy outpost now receives also $2.4 billion in research dollars at its universities but it also has about the same number of dollars as venture capital investments which  puts in in the #1 spot in the country in that category whereas Baltimore with only $225 million in venture capital puts it on a bottom rank.

David Dixon pointed out, population growth might not be a good measure for success. For one, it is rather a household that is the economic unit and in terms of households Baltimore today has almost as many as in its heydays due to the shrinking size of households and the ever increasing spatial needs per household. Dixon and Murphy both had assisted New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and both pointed out that the matter of growth and shrinkage should not be measured quantitatively but qualitatively in response to the question of what creates value. Dixon showed how Baltimore stands in the growth of college educated 25-34 year olds living in or near the metro core (6th in growth and 8th in absolute numbers) and stated that the new features young people are looking for are not the cul de sacs and large yards their parents liked but walkability, transit and urbanity. As a result, "walk scores" result in lots of value added. Older cities such as Baltimore have good walks scores almost built into their DNA, although pedestrian safety, bike amenities and good connections to transit will require continuing investments.

Both agreed that cities like Baltimore have an enormous opportunity to capture the young generation currently looking for attractive knowledge city urbanity, especially when they are like Baltimore located in a growing region.

Dixon presentation: Baltimore in the age of the Walk Score
Murphy presentation: Building on innovation  (currently a ULI text by Murphy shows up, the actual presentation will be linked shortly).

Baltimore: From industrial port city to knowledge community with urban vibe

The Green Revolution: GreenBuild in Toronto

The Green Building Council (GBC) is supposedly the fastest growing non-profit worldwide. It's annual conference in Toronto drew 23000 people to the Canadian metropolis. Toronto is an apt place for the conference, an economically healthy metro area, growing with dense new housing in all parts of the City (not only along the water), located right in the center (the coats looking down their noses), competing maybe with Chicago, both having turned from bland gritty metropolises to ones that shine with green roofs, biking and waterfront parks. Indeed, SOM just put forth a proposal to include Canada and the US, Toronto and Chicago  into a multi-state Great Lakes regional masterplan.


I recall well a speech of one of the GBC founding members maybe 15 years ago at the National Building Museum in DC in which the idea to measure buildings for their environmental performance was laid out and with this in itself not very unique or revolutionary idea he explained the beginnings of the LEED process, something that seemed complicated and almost non-doable back then. Since then the requirements have sprawled, the acronyms are countless (a favorite right now EB-OM, pronounced ebom, meaning "Existing Buildings- Operation and Management).
GBC does not only draw the cooks of the granola and Birkenstock scene who want to be one with nature, not only the green-washers who sell the same old stuff with a new label (although they were numerous on the exhibition floors) it draws engineers, contractors, landscape and building architects, even artists and it also draws developers, building managers, owners and municipal and state agencies who oversee or plan the building process. Thus, this conference was a really good cross section of all the parties involved in building something. GBC is not only a certification process, it is also a movement full of activists who want a better world. In this quest it attracts intellectuals and creatives of all kinds. Mayor Bloomberg of NYC as well as the NYT journalist and Pulitzer Price winner Thomas Friedman (Hot, Flat and Crowded") lend their names and keynote speeches to this conference. So did cutting edge thinkers and explorers such as Neri Oxman who heads up the MIT materials lab in which they try to grow materials that self adjust from their own "DNA" just like nature. Or Natalie Jeremijenko from NYU's Environmental Health Clinic who has found super creative ways of visualizing environmental issues in her dirty metro turf of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.  Or Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, a revolutionary in the visualization and representation of data, obviously a key issue for environmental building performance or any other performance, for that matter. These three women impressed me the most because they presented their creative and cutting edge thinking in a funny, modest, self deprecating and thus enormously subversive manner while the men laid down a lot of bombast and chest pounding, especially the architect John Picard who presented himself as a self appointed leader that will help the rest of us to see the light and the fantastic profits coming from well performing real estate assets. Krugman as well, he actually told the assembled crowd in the Canada Air downtown arena that (in spite of all the bad trends out there in society) "you are too dumb to quit".  Among the men presenters who did chest pounding was also John Picard who got never tired of referencing himself as a "rocket scientists" (as an engineer he worked on rockets) and triathlon fighter who wants to win and transferred this mindset to the quest for the best performing building.

Neri Oxman's presentation was one of the most brilliant intellectual performances I have seen in a long time, particularly noticeable when  she responded to questions from the audience in the way how she paraphrased the questions and put them into context. Not only did she fully "get" the questions and remembered them, she had to repeat them for the audience (for recording purposes and so all could hear them) and she did this with such brilliance that even dull questions started to shine and be brought to the level in which the question became relevant and a foil for her to explain her thinking. Her quest fro bio-mimicry is a long way from becoming reality, her horizon was over a thousand years at which time our cloths grow with us like our skin and mere eye contact will download information (well, it does today, but maybe in a less controlled way she has in mind). Still, even with the tiny "cultures" of materials she has created in her lab she has created unexpected beauty that made it all the way to a MoMa art exhibit. (pictures). Oxman, who also studied medicine, probably illustrates best how creative thinking emerges from the interesting of various disciplines culminating in "design" in the broadest sense and in the sense of problem solving.

The LEED edifice of prerequisites and requirements, of charts, tabulations and metrics seems trite and even counter productive in light of some of the brilliant thoughts expressed about "what is NEXT" (the theme of the conference. However, as Bloomberg pointed out, "what cannot be measured, cannot be managed". I suppose that the power of the LEED certification process which is now applied in 21 countries worldwide is that it appeals to the number crunchers and that the green benefit can actually be translated right into dollars and cents. Words like "value added" and marketability of your assets ring in the ears of building managers and developers all over the globe and without them, the transformation of buildings as the largest contributor of global warming gases will never happen. So, let's put up with the cumbersome work sheets and the point chasing for the time being until "green becomes the new normal" as Krugman put it.

Maroon 5 concert after the Krugman speech at the Air Canada Center

Global reach: Reprsentatives of different countries talk about LEED 

and beyond

The low tech streetcars are everywhere, just like they used to be in Baltimore

Toronto, city of scale and style contrast

Libeskind in Toronto, ROM

An urban farm and petting zoo right in the central city (Cabbagetown)

Toronto's glistening Towers at dusk. It is not architecture that sets Toronto apart but density and central growth

Denver Thriving

Not that Colorado was spared from the everlasting Great Recession. The same transit authority RTD that has with Fastrack the nations largest transit expansion project underway is currently planning to cut 10% of their servicesfor lack of operating funds. Colorado stocks are down along with the rest of the nation, homeless people abound downtown.

Yet, the city is full of energy and large projects. Fastrack, the largest transit project. Stapleton, the nations largest redevelopment project. Population growing. Forbes naming Denver the 9th best place in the US to do business in 2011. The city is full of young people on bikes, new brew pubs open, cranes tower over the city. For an impressive list of projects see Cityscape.

Right next to the still pretty new Libeskind Art Museum the Clyfford Still Museum for art will open its doors later this year. Still, an abstract expressionist painter, bequeathed his work to a city that would show all his art under one roof. It took almost 25 years for a city to step up, but in 2004 Denver was selected as the place to show this Still's important opus, an important testament to a strong will to be a cultural center.

Denver skyline, mountains from City Park and the Science Museum

New Housing in downtown near Union
Station

Brandnew Museum for Coloroado History. Not opened yet

Clyfford Still Museum

New Court House

Massive mixed use redevelopment of the Union Station area
with new rail station for regional trains to Boulder and
Stapleton

The Denver Fastrack project is similarly proof that the leaders of Denver don't think small. The transformation of the Union Station area in itself is an impressive and courageous urban transformation with transportation as the catalytic element. A similar feat is envisioned for the end of the Stapleton line with massive development near the iconic tent airport terminal crowned by a train station designed by Calatrava. However, Calatrava just resigned from this project and the architectural future of the station and hotel complex is currently in limbo.

Denver, which has formed a political union with the surrounding county, has reached almost the same size as Baltimore. The metro region, depending if Boulder is included or not, is with 2 million residents also comparable to the Baltimore metro region.

Although Denver's main attraction, the Rockies, are miles away and nothing but a scenic backdrop when in the city and although the South Platte River and its tributary the Cherry Creek are not particularly impressive bodies of water, planners have begun to maximize the water's value and created "waterfront" property. Denver was much more ransacked by accommodation of the automobile than Baltimore or DC (freeways, downtown surface parking lots and suburbanization of the city are still visible everywhere), the City has embarked in a massive re-tooling of the City from re-zoning to transit and a systematic recalibration of thoroughfares such as Colfax.

As a result Denver has completely remade its once staid image and moved way up the food chain among the great American Cities.


New "waterfront" hosuing along the Cherry Creek



Calatrava's Stapleton train station concept. He
resigned from the project in September 2011