Longitudinal Slum

Digging These Stripmall Starbucks

As I'm sitting at an Oak Ridge Starbucks on a rather generic strip I'm beginning to see Starbucks has done something fairly obvious and smart to the strip building typology. They've included an outdoor shaded patio. It isn't much, but creates a fairly pleasent space where people can spend leisure time outdoors on a quasi public realm. It feels like it could be right on the sidewalk, if there was a sidewalk. Every other building on the strip takes a defensive posture in the form of shrubbery, solid walls, dark tinted glass, or glass plastered with advertising. The Starbucks patio bleeds into the parking lot and onto the strip itself, in this case Turnpike road.

The Starbucks itself is empty, and there is nobody else on the patio right now, but that may have to do more with the people of Oak Ridge doing their church deeds at the moment.

The remainder of this particular strip isn't too bad - lots of plush grass landscaping in need of fertilizer and watering - and I think the other side of the street has a narrow token sidewalk (I've seen one pedestrian in Oak Ridge). The Starbucks patio is a good step and maybe over time we can band-aid something good together.

And if you prefer to by-pass the patio and indoors, there's always the drive thru.

Starbucks On The Strip

A short trip to Tennessee and less than five minutes from the Knoxville airport is a conveinient roadside Starbucks complete with outdoor patio with the constant hum of traffic zipping by.

The Strip, Visited

Does the retail strip even have a chance, when any coverage it receives focuses on its generic or even 'ugly' looks, its alienating qualities, and automobile driven planning strategies? Dan Berry writing for the New York Times visits U.S. Route 1 with Kevin Fry, President of Scenic America, and Brad Cownover, its director of scenic conservation services.

Of course we agree that it is ugly, alienating, and results from automobile infrastructure. However it is these qualities that define what this generic place is and where the opportunity lies to make the strip a better place. Focusing on the aesthetic qualities of the strip are secondary to the infrastructural or operational issues that can impact how the strip is used and engaged. Understanding the strip goes beyond 'pimping awnings' and limiting the heights of billboards.

A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not. [NY Times]
above image by Ángel Franco

Finally A Substitute For The Obsolete Town Square

Lisa Selin Davis looks at a new take on the enclosed shopping mall that is developing in Natick MA, where 215 condominiums are being built adjacent and with direct access to the Natick Mall. Similar to higher-end Lifestyle Centers which combine outdoor shopping, condominium living, and commercial office space, the Natick development uses the increasingly unpopular enclosed mall as a substitute for the 'urban', and is re-branding the typology as such.

The developer, General Growth Properties, recognizes the optimized position existing malls already occupy in the suburban landscape, being situated at highway interchanges within the regional transportation network. One of the new condo owners, Michael DuGally, recognizes the development for what it really is, "People want to live there because it’s classy and yet a hip, urban environment."

This is a good thing. Regardless of the execution of this development and its resident's misconception of what constitutes 'urban', it begins to put certain components in play that can begin to form a fresh look at suburban living and eventually transform how we understand this often maligned swath of the city. Is living with direct access to a mall a bad thing? Probably not. Load the mall up with the services people require - gyms, fine dining, grocery shopping, and maybe education and religious services - and the mixture of various programmatic elements have the potential to make the mall more urban than the 9-5 downtowns of many American cities. Such cross-programming also has the potential to carry along the benefits of sustainable living already enjoyed by residents of dense urban environments like New York City.

When Downtown Is in the Suburbs [NY Times]
image by Jodi Hilton

The Truth About Housing

Slate is offering a three-part excerpt from Witold Rybczynski's new book Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville where the author follows the development of a new residential subdivision from inception to completion. In the process he writes about the modern home and community. A couple of segments from the excerpts go far to, or begin to explain the look of much of residential and commercial architecture today, much to the disapproval of those in the design community who have turned their back on this market. First from Why Do We Live in Houses:

Four out of five new housing units built in the United States are single-family houses. This statistic has less to do with the nature of the home-building industry, or the suburban location of new housing, than with buyers' preferences, that is, What People Want.

The second is from The Ranch House Anomaly:

Home buyers' affair with modernistic design is over. When I leaf through a directory of one big home builder's current models, I notice that all the houses have similar architectural features: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors. Americans' fondness for such conventional imagery is characterized by some critics as nostalgic and retrograde. In fact, it represents a long domestic tradition that extends to colonial New England and Virginia. In that history, the brief fling with the rancher was an anomaly.

If Witold is correct, this doesn't fair well for architects or designers who can be lumped in with the critics mentioned above who dismiss house styling as nostalgic and retrograde. So is it possible for architects to contribute to this portion of the building industry, while simultaneously giving the homeowner what they want, ie: pitched roofs, gables, dormers, bay windows, keystones, shutters, porches, and paneled doors, and at the same time applying the problem solving skills that designers are more likely to have than the typical developer? Architects will likely have to get over their aversion to ornamentation (most architects anyway), and they will have to define what the problems are with the typical residential subdivision. Sustainability? Modularity? Transportation? Density? Cultural? Land-Use? Social?

Why Do We Live in Houses, Anyway? [Slate]
The Ranch House Anomaly [Slate]
How a Cornfield Became New Daleville [Slate]
image by Witold Rybczynski

Woodbridge, VA is Omaha, NE is ...

While driving in Woodbridge, VA this week, through a retail center populated with the usual suspects - Target, Panera Bread, Men's Wearhouse, Hooters, etc. - Emily turned to me with a ring of either amazement, or horror, in her voice and proclaimed "This is Omaha!"