A Work in Progress

We Tend to Forget the Process of Building Something

When my daughter was very young it was one of my great joys to read Laura Ingalls Wilder books with her. One thing I never forgot was her vivid description of the building of frontier towns and farms. Her father built several houses, a store and helped build many other buildings and was the paymaster for the railroad crews. Read about the building of the Dakota towns and you will see a wild and frenzied push that often was driven by the need to get something up and running. Ms. Wilder tells of the woman who ran the hotel while the crews were still building it!

Go back to the same communities today and you will see tree-lined streets and fine buildings and public squares -- the perfect little Nineteenth Century towns that are often pointed to as examples of the 'right' way to build. We forget that the buildings we see are the ones that gradually and thoughtfully replaced the frenzied framing of the first incarnation of these towns. We also forget what an improvement the first town was over the railroad camp.

Today it is fashionable to look down on suburbia in the design community, but one needs to take a look at how the dream of ownership and the maturing of our outlying communities is progressing. I've just finished a rendering of a new pedestrian friendly mixed use project that will replace a 1950's strip mall and create a village center in one such community. Look at the older suburbs with their mature vegetation [and impressive deer herds] objectively and you will find plenty of good. That is not to say we don't need to improve the commercial centers and infrastructure, but that there is good reason to love and improve these places.

We need to remember that in the 1960's we thought it would be a wonderful thing to build those big blocks of subsidized housing that, in plan anyway, were very similar to apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. Dismal failure! A less dense revival with a sense of "this is my house, this is my community" is working. In New Orleans a program is in place that allows returning homeowners to buy the abandoned property next door for expanded yards or gardens.

This Commentary by Joel Kotkin is a thought ful examination of where we are going.


Here I'm working on the look for a new mixed use rehabilitation of a strip mall.