Bringing density back in to city making has been back in vogue for awhile with the reintroduction of the 'Transit Oriented District'. This hasn't been without its disappointments.

My friends took this building, acquired in the 1970s, and kept it, renovated and refined it, honoring it for its original design intentions, while overlaying years of upkeep and refinements. They made a great thing even greater. Actions, when placed together, that constituted a kind of love. They loved it, not just in thoughts and feelings, but in action. It made for a wonderful experience.

The design of things, the design of cities, are all required to go through their requisite 'purification'. But instead of a distillery's chromium piping, a city has code-enforced banality. The act of codifying what is 'good', as practiced in our administered system, renders our cities into something not awful. Yet something that is without character.

The Architect's Newspaper:

"Details are sparse during the period of Zaha Hadid replacing Assemblage. First, over the two year span, Assemblage was never officially notified that they had lost the bid. Although, in private they knew they were frozen out of conversation. Second, leading Iraqi architectural critic Ihsan Fethi said there has been a veil of secrecy as he has tried several times to see the plan for the parliamentary building. Finally, the Iraqi Council of Representatives never had a chance to choose the winner selected by the RIBA judges."

I would imagine that there must be pressure from the other side, too. The great ones will get dissed by their own contingent to avoid giving folks the wrong idea that they are paying too much attention to context, and not enough to the art and theory of their work. Yet by accident or design, the work of the elite actually does contribute to improving a city. It's nice when it happens.

Here in Pasadena, Morphosis has pulled this off, on California Boulevard, on the CalTech campus.

Witness the ongoing saga at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With the acquisition of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street, came a crafted building praised by many critics. After some wavering on the issue, it was announced that this building would be torn down to make way for a new MoMA addition, throwing MoMA headlong into a classic preservation debate. Keep or Tear Down. Keep the quirky structure by the architects Tod Williams + Billie Tsein, with all of its accompanying issues mis-matched floor elevations and the like, or scrape it clean and start over.

Current advanced thought in the architectural world and associated academia proclaims that computer design can take us to places in architectural form that past practice could only dream about, and it because it can done, it should be done.

Here's another idea…

Everything about moving up through the building helps to build the excitement. We'll start with the long and deep red space that houses the linear assent up from the parking garage. The zig and zag through the main lobby spaces, a sequence of unexpected volumes, all lined with the beautiful fir paneling, foretelling the concert hall inside. Working up to more intimate spaces that lead to the part of the hall you are headed towards. Free flowing and refined, adventurous and in good taste, with a sense of movement the whole time. Finally, the concert goer moves through a discreet portal and into the great concert space, the musical instrument in which you will experience the concert. Wonderful experience in site and sound. The very culmination of why the procession is so important in architecture. It places you in the right frame of mind to experience great art.

Where I come from, building setbacks at the front are primary and irrefutable elements of the zoning code. Intrusion is forbidden up to a few inches above the ground plane, except for landscaping and the odd lamp-post. The front-yard setback is the hallmark what what is considered to be good suburban design, the semi-public space that sets a residence or other suburban building away from the activities of the street, and helps to create a pleasant and pastoral street volume.

"The rest of the country looks to California. Not for what is conventional, but for what is necessary—necessary to keep faith with our courageous forebears.What we have done together and what we must do in the coming years is big, but it pales in comparison to the indomitable courage of those who discovered and each decade thereafter built a more abundant California. As Legislators, It is your duty and privilege to pass laws. But what we need to do for our future will require more than producing hundreds of new laws each year.

Grand Avenue in Los Angeles is a showcase of premier American Architecture, created by premier American Architects. So far the buildings that have been created have not been cooperating with each other to make the great urban space Grand Avenue could be.

The title of an interesting article about craft in the New York Times, by NPR correspondent Alan Davidson. Interesting to me, because I'm curious about the economic models that support crafts-people and how they compare with the economics of those who craft cities, and the value to those who support the craft.

Over time, the tourist appeal of the Highline will diminish, and its infrastructure will burnish itself into the surrounding neighborhood. Hopefully it will be kept it good repair, to be treasured for many years to come. The displaced will find other quarters in the Burroughs, and some will still survive in the shadows of the trestles as before.

I'll send this out to you: parallels can be drawn in how we imagine and build cities. The culture within the government, planning, and architectural communities can have their own way of inhibiting things. I offer a few examples for your reading pleasure, and you may have a few of your own. Here goes:

"Guenther Demnig is the artist and sculptor behind the stumbling stones (shown in the photo in the link). Here, he installs new bricks in Berlin. He says formal memorials are too abstract. Not so with the stumbling stones. 'Suddenly they are there, right outside your front door, at your feet, in front of you,' he says."

It is the designer and the builder who is interested in doing great design, and leaving a mark, but who is also interested in being a part in the whole great city. It is someone who reads what the past can teach, in dialog with the designs and construction methods of our current age. It is someone who appreciates the rules as a framework for building, but who is also aware of the need for fluidity and flexibility of those rules, with a lack of unreasonable encumbrances, in order to active the extraordinary…

With a few exceptions, city builders of the 'civilized' world are confronted with considerable rules to follow, and clearances to be reviewed, in order to be allowed to build a project. These are processes devised for the public good, established to enforce the public will, to make manifest the political power of government, and to greatly influence and control what may be constructed within a community. They are also processes that happen to squander our resources, and hamper us (all of us) in building the best possible cities.

"Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk."

The quality of multi-family housing around the world isn't what it could be. All of it could be improved, especially with regards to what is available to low and moderate income people.

Apple stores are textbook cases for how buildings and businesses can contribute and make a good city. They add substance and interest beyond their initial functional purpose; they are conceived and constructed with the deepest care. Although they take on a machine-like character, they are executed with considerable skill, lavished with attention to detail, and are well loved by the designers, builders, and the ones writing the checks. They are ultimate crafted urban element, a gift to each place that makes a home for them.