They got the Seaport right after all.

[ablarc]

^ It's that Disney name; brings out the haters.

There used to be a Hate Disney website. Does it still exist?

 

[bdurden]

^No hate for Celebration here--was that unclear? Now if you'd like to discuss Mashpee Commons...

 

[ablarc]

^ Oh, I didn't think you were one of the haters; it was pretty obvious you weren't. Most folks who live in Celebration are big fans.

There are, however, these rabid folks who use Walt's last name as a pejorative adjective. Among those interested in planning, they're a majority.

 

[czsz]

Celebration seems to share the failures of a lot of these developments, Disney or otherwise. Should we talk about the strip mall servicing the Kentlands?

Most folks who live in Celebration are big fans.

My relatives in exurbia enjoy their cul-du-sacs...I hope we're not making their attitude the primary yardstick for successful planning.

 

[kennedy]

You think Celebration or Mashpee Commons are bad? Try the "New Town at St. Charles" in St. Charles, MO.

Horrid. Sterile. Repugant. Awful. Trailer-Parkish, Fake, Low Density, and Tearful are all words that come to mind.

www.newtownatstcharles.com

 

[bdurden]

Celebration seems to share the failures of a lot of these developments, Disney or otherwise. Should we talk about the strip mall servicing the Kentlands?



My relatives in exurbia enjoy their cul-du-sacs...I hope we're not making their attitude the primary yardstick for successful planning.

Which failures exactly? Celebration, in general, does a pretty decent job. You can live, work, get educated, play, whatever else possible, in Celebration without ever having to leave or even get in a car. This cannot be said about most places, including historic towns in MA.

 

[ablarc]

Which failures exactly? Celebration, in general, does a pretty decent job. You can live, work, get educated, play, whatever else possible, in Celebration without ever having to leave or even get in a car. This cannot be said about most places, including historic towns in MA.

That's right, it can be used as a self-contained community. The truth of this can be determined by visiting. And the fact that you don't have to drive qualifies it as urban.

Before they see it, many folks assume it's part of Suburbia, because the theory's plausible. Those who have invested psychic energy into this belief even preserve that misconception after they visit. Through denial, some theories can achieve immortality; mere observation's not enough to cancel one that's well-loved.

Lots of folks love to diss Disney. Looks like you've encountered one or two of our very own practitioners. They're everywhere.

 

[czsz]

I made that comment in response to former Celebration resident bduren's point that subsequent phases of the town became New Urbanist in name only.

I also have to wonder to what extent any of these communities are "self sustaining". Are there really that many jobs in Celebration itself that no one has to drive outside? One of the most salient critiques of these developments is that they do not function very differently from most of suburbia in relation to their surrounds. Maybe you can walk to the grocery store, but you probably have to drive to reach any function (in most cases, work) that requires an economy of scale.

I think, in turn, this reflects the true flaw of the entire ideology, which isn't design-based at all: it's its faith in the free market. Unfortunately, Celebration and the Kentlands are still islands in the traditional suburban sea, and, at best, they are only examples that ought to be imitated by people with more power than private developers on limited plots.

 

[ablarc]

^ No, but some folks commute from Boston to Weymouth to work; maybe it's not the defining factor it was in the middle ages.

Baby steps. It's how we all got started.

Perfection comes later --or more likely, never.

 

[czsz]

Baby steps, maybe. But it's important we don't pat the baby on the back and tell it it can give up learning to walk now. These projects are the "better than a parking lot" of greenfield development - it's important they be held to a higher standard, especially when their only practitioners are developers who will want to coast along with only slight variations to their time-tested mould.

 

[bdurden]

The short answer is yes, and many Celebration residents do live and work in town. Not surprising, given real estate values, many of the homeowners also own the businesses where they work in the town center (dental, real estate, shop owers, etc). There is a significant amount of office space at Celebration Place, and along Celebration Blvd (going out towards I-4/Disney), above the stores in the center, as well as the hospital and school(s).

It is not popular to live in Celebration and travel Northbound into Orlando/Maitland/Winter Park; traffic is horrendous. If you can afford to live in Celebration then you likely work closeby, probably in Celebration; otherwise, the high paying jobs in the metro are in downtown Orlando or North (over an hour in rush hour traffic) and those individuals would likely never travel Southbound towards Disney/Universal.

 

[ablarc]

It?s the developers who chose to try something different and better. Left to the tender mercies of standard zoning, the area that became Celebration would have been built out in the usual way: as standardized Suburbia.

 

[scootie]

What's inauthentic about it?

[please forgive my modern architect 2 cents]

It is inauthentic because it replicates a historic growth that never occurred. I agree that the image is beautiful and the environment is rich and people would respond favourably to that [if in fact it was executed that well, the use mix worked and the people came, etc]. I think historic imagery is soothing in its familiarity. But why can?t the development of the desired richness be achieved without resorting to inventing a back-story that never occurred?

 

[ablarc]

It is inauthentic because it replicates a historic growth that never occurred. I agree that the image is beautiful and the environment is rich and people would respond favourably to that [if in fact it was executed that well, the use mix worked and the people came, etc]. I think historic imagery is soothing in its familiarity. But why can?t the development of the desired richness be achieved without resorting to inventing a back-story that never occurred?

Because the vocabulary permitted to Modernists is impoverished --precisely by prohibitions like the ones you're about to make, echoing the graybeard academicians of Modernist architectural theory.

If "the image is beautiful and the environment is rich and people respond favorably", then instead of just asserting again that we just shouldn't do it, why don't you write a thoughtful, well-reasoned and reasonably lengthy argument for why --without resorting to unverifiable claims of historical determinism.

You'll find the best you can come up with is that the theory implanted in your education says so.

Why don't you free yourself from the pedants?




In hindsight, anything that happens in history can be explained as inevitable --including Revivals, Reformations and Renaissances.

 

[scootie]

Because the vocabulary permitted to Modernists is impoverished --precisely by prohibitions like the ones you're about to make, echoing the graybeard academicians of Modernist architectural theory?..

Couldn?t you just sum up by saying: past architect good, present architect bad? ?..and that we need to have strict design regulations because architects can no longer be trusted? Nonsense.

I made a point already why don?t we talk about that instead of shooting down the ?prohibitions? that you think I?m going to make at some unidentified future time? [ .. or was it supposed to be now, Doh!]. The point was that in the past the facades were a result of need, use and current technique, not merely eyewash for the public caf? denizens.

Don?t get stuck on style. The guts underneath the structures depicted in your post would be thoroughly modern. Or are you proposing that builders be required to go back to building with unreinforced masonry because that?s what the public wants? [and the public wants seismic restraint as well, a dilemma].

Speaking of unreinforced masonry, the neighboring Fort Point Channel warehouses are a good example of a ?rich environment that people respond favorably to?. The history of the Boston Wharf Company warehouse development could not be more speculative and ad hoc. These buildings were built to suit businesses according to idiosyncratic market demands. That this district is rich and picturesque is not debated, just that the original motivation in its creation was not focused on that goal.

 

[ablarc]

... resorting to inventing a back-story that never occurred?

That's the prohibition ^, and it includes 'most everything that pre-existed Modernism, doesn't it? The loaded term "inventing a back-story that never occurred" was your way of describing architectural moves that could just as easily be seen as ongoingly natural, because they work. But you'd have to be less judgmental and ideological, and stop dividing history into "then" and "now." That's the ideology showing. (Don't even know you're doing it, do you? It's OK, most folks are brainwashed by the same dogma --certainly most architects.)

 

[scootie]

Au contraire, there is no prohibition, this is America, you are free to construct a back-story that never occurred whenever you wish. carry on.

 

[ablarc]

Thank you.

 

[czsz]

Hey, America isn't the only land of opportunity anymore. You can invent any backstory you want in China now, too!

An immense building project on the outskirts of Shanghai is transforming that city's hinterlands into nine satellite towns that will eventually house 500,000 people. While projects of this magnitude are seemingly underway throughout China, the designs of each satellite city being built under the auspices of the "One City, Nine Towns" scheme are remarkable in how they echo the architectural and urban planning sensibilities of nine foreign cultures. They do this in a nod to the "ethnicities" of the different multinational corporations present in the area, as well as the region's colonial past:

...[O]ut of farmers' fields, an entire German-style town has sprouted, its brightly hued gingerbread homes modeled on those of Weimar in Germany. The new town, which will soon house some 30,000 distinctly un-German people, was designed by Albert Speer, son of Adolf Hitler's favorite architect. Forty kilometers away in Songjiang, barefoot migrant workers are building another massive satellite city, this time a vision of ye olde England with tidy Tudor cottages, cobbled paths, a giant castle and a garden maze. In Pujiang, another Shanghai suburb, 100,000 citizens will soon occupy an Italian dreamscape complete with languid canals. In all, at least 500,000 people are expected to live in Shanghai's...new satellite towns, each designed in the style of a different Western nation. Zhou Jin, an executive currently residing in Shanghai, will soon move into a $67,000 apartment in Anting, where a Volkswagen factory reinforces the German motif.

Luodian is a fully-fledged copy of a Scandinavian town. Even the weather seems to have been specially imported to this newly built development in Baoshan, one of 16 districts in Shanghai. It is a gray November afternoon when Liu Jianguo, vice-general manager of Shanghai Golden Luodian Development, shows us round. If you live in Luodian you don?t need to go abroad, he says.

The developer (of Songjiang) hopes to attract a Scottish whisky retail and product exhibition shop, a department store selling Scottish souvenirs; a souvenir shop selling English Premier League football shirts, an English porcelain shop and a waxwork exhibition similar to Madame Tussaud?s. Other ideas include bringing in fast food outlets such as KFC, McDonald?s and Pizza Hut; a variety of Chinese and Western restaurants; a bridal service including a church; a green area and British-style buildings to make ?Thames Town? a popular wedding destination.

They also have German and Italian flavors of these. I think they just copied Canaletto for the latter.

They got their Seaport right after all?

http://brandavenue.typepad.com/brand_avenue/2006/07/one_city_nine_t.html

 

[ablarc]

I'd be happy if the Seaport looked this good. All the fundamentals are right, and I see a sound urban environment. It's not art, but neither is the North End --and it doesn't have to be.

This looks pretty good too:

I detect a whiff of superciliousness in the assumption that any right-thinking person would condemn this. Snobbery and condescension are the observer's social baggage, not inherent in architectural form. We can choose to project them onto architecture or not, and when we do, they say more about us than about the architecture.

What I see in the Chinese examples are sound urbanism, and I'd be happy if Boston could do as well.

Sure seems better in most ways that actually matter than what we actually got at the Seaport.