Tag Archives: Urban Planning

Architecture, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 5

More Poor Richard, Part 5
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Cities, Utopia and Superheroes

41.       The greatest cities are probabilistic happenings that have already occurred and may again given the right conditions.

42.       A city can no more relate to only itself than it can only relate to the outside world. Neither inside nor outside exist in isolation.

43.       We need never fear Utopia as long as we are asking the right questions.

44.      Utopias are absurdly impractical flights of fancy, which are often the source for the best kind of dreams.

45.      Superheroes live in cities. Supervillains live in gated lairs. Do we want a nation of superheroes or supervillains?

46.      Superman would never find a phone booth in a suburban office park.

47.      Even Spiderman needs a car to get around suburban sprawl. No tall buildings to swing from, you see…

48.     Too many cities are built to be sanely mediocre when they should be designed to be “insanely great”*. (*Steve Jobs)

49.     Every city needs jazz hands.

50.     Every city should have that “boom boom pow”.

Issue 6 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Architecture, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 4

More Poor Richard, Part 4
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Architecture

31.       Standardization is a blessing for quantity and a curse for quality in architecture.

32.       Poor is the architect whose responsibility ends when the drawing is complete.

33.       Modernism is the Dr. Frankenstein, Post-Modernism is the Monster, and Deconstructivism is the “Abby Normal” (witty but, ultimately, derivative of the real Monster) of 20th century Architecture.

34.       Architecture in the absence of art is construction. Architecture in the absence of science is art.

35.       The three-dimensional context for all buildings is the playful absence and presence of light.

36.       Building may be in the details but architecture is in the questions.

37.       Beauty made lie in the eyes of the beholder but some eyes beholden better than others whilst some are better liars.

38.       Architecture should always be naked.

39.       Refining in architecture is about ‘re-finding’ the essential purity of the thing momentarily lost to the initial excesses of the architect.

40.       Building is never ‘more’ and always a bore. Architecture is to adore.

Issue 5 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Architecture, Editorial, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 3

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More Poor Richard, Part 3
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Creating and Creativity

21.       Planners with 20/20 foresight are more valuable than those with 20/20 hindsight.

22.       Organisms are machines for living. When it comes to creating machines, Nature is still infinitely superior to Man.

23.       Man assumes a God-like artifice compared to the machines he creates but, compared to the Nature of the Universe, Man is an ant.

24.       A little humility before Nature goes a long way.

25.      Creativity is a newly (re)discovered path that is often more important than the destination itself.

26.       Creativity and space flow with an energy born from the same source.

27.       For any true artist, a blank page is exciting and frightening in equal measure.

28.       Creativity is the vibrant symbiosis of courage to succeed and fear of failure. Too often, urban planners suffer from an abundance of the latter and deficiency in the former.

29.       Shame on the architect who does not design with love and builds that which is unloved by its own creator.

30.       For an architect or planner, doubt only marks the beginning of a path to wisdom. Doubt only marks hubris if it is treated as a destination unto itself. Take the path and never assume you have arrived.

Issue 4 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Architecture, Editorial, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 2

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More Poor Richard, Part 2
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNUA-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Architecture

11.      Quality is presence of value and not absence of mistake.

12.       Profit is not an aesthetic choice. It’s a surrender.

13.       The act of design condemns all architects and planners to play God poorly, some more so than others.

14.       Good design enhances everything as surely as bad design defiles all.

15.       Architecture cannot save the world, only people can. This is why God sent a carpenter to be the ‘temple’.

16.       If architecture is a language, then a lot of architects are speaking in gibberish.

17.       Don’t judge a building by its façade. Every building is a story waiting to unfold for those willing to read it.

18.       Architecture always lies. Technological innovations only make the lies more transparent.

19.       Standardization is a blessing for quantity and a curse for quality in architecture.

20.      Architecture represents the outward appearance of things best when the architect understands the inward significance of those things.

Issue 3 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Urban Patterns

Urban Patterns | New York, New York USA

“Even old New York was once New Amsterdam,
Why they changed it, I can’t say,
People just liked it better that way.”
— Istanbul (Not Constantinople), They Might Be Giants (BTW, now in San Francisco)

Maybe you were expecting this…

“These vagabond shoes are longing to stray,
Right through the very heart of it: New York, New York.”
— New York, New York, Frank Sinatra

Urban Patterns | New York, New York USA
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A

New York is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2016 population of 8,537,673 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment around the world; its fast pace defining the term “a New York minute.” Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world. Dutch merchants and settlers originally founded New York (originally named New Amsterdam) – along with three other Dutch forts in present-day New York State – on Manhattan Island at the conflux of the Hudson and East Rivers into a natural harbor at Upper New York Bay in 1625. As evidenced in the Castello Plan (see below), the early settlement was composed of small-scale offset regular-ish grids oriented to the shoreline of the Hudson and East Rivers at the southern tip of Manhattan Island (Source: Wikipedia).

Redraft of the Castello Plan of New Amsterdam in 1660, redrawn in 1916 by John Wolcott Adams and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (Source: Wikipedia).

Over the first 100 years of the settlement, this geometric layout (in the modern Wall Street area) evolved into a classic, European deformed grid pattern. In planning terms, Manhattan is probably best known for the 1811 Commissioners Plan (see here for more information), which imposed a gridiron over most of the island north of the Wall Street area.

1789 Plan of New York, New York USA (Source: University of Texas).

However, as evidenced by historic plans of New York such as the 1789 plan of southern Manhattan (see above), this gridiron was really an extension of an already-existing regular grid immediately north of that area, predating the Commissioners Plan by two decades.

Satellite view from 20 km of New York, New York USA (Source: Google Earth).

The overall linear (more or less, south to north) shape of the island was well-suited for regular grid extension, especially in the middle portion of the island around Central Park. At 843 acres, Central Park (designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and the English architect Calvert Vaux) is still one of the largest urban parks in the world and the most visited park in the United States. Architects and planners often discuss the planning of Manhattan to the exclusion of its larger urban context (especially in discussing the 1811 Commissioners Plan). However, the island is well-embedded within its larger urban context, possessing some 19 bridge and tunnel connections to the surrounding area, especially to the north of the island where 12 (63%) of these connections are available.

(Updated: August 14, 2017)

Urban Patterns is a series of posts from The Outlaw Urbanist presenting interesting examples of terrestrial patterns shaped by human intervention in the urban landscape over time.

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