Vision for the South Boston Seaport

The big mall in Toronto is the Eaton Centre, although it is more of a large-footprint mall than a vertical one. It spans the distance between two separate subway stops!
 
In my own experience, it seems that shoppers don't really want to go up and down between stores. I remember a few years ago the Fanueil Hall shops in the two long buildings used to have stores on the ground level and stores on the second level. However, you had to go into a lobby and up, then wander the corridors to find them. Then, they reconfigured the buildings to have the second floor spaces directly accessible and part of the ground floor businesses. This seems to have worked out much better, as I rarely used to see anyone on the second floors.
 
I think that for someone to design a vertical mall would be a very interesting design challenge, something for some college kid to do for a project of something. Figure out how to move people and product efficiently. I'm sure it's been looked into before, but whatever.
 
Very interesting. I envisioned something that looked much more functional, and frankly, not very pedestrian-friendly.
 
Re: South Boston Seaport

vanshnookenraggen said:
Since a great neighborhood is made up of various layers of historical development we all need to give this area a break since this is really only the first layer (or second if you include the warehouses).
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This generalization is often, but not always, true. This certainly doesn't describe Back Bay, for example, if you omit Boylston Street. It also doesn't do much to explain such architecturally consistent districts as Belgravia (London) or Carroll Gardens and Forest Hills (New York). Or for that matter, Miami Beach.

It also doesn't explain the adulation being heaped on Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands, including by you, van ;) (post 87ff).

I think if you ask a place to be good from the get-go, you can't go wrong.
 
Well the seaport is looking like it will have some architectural consistency. But the seaport is not the Back Bay, Forest Hills, Amsterdam, etc. The places you speak up, that we all hold in such high regard, were wealthy residential neighborhoods. The Seaport was envisioned as a "neighborhood" in the loosest definitions. It was a place to expand the Financial District and the Back Bay office zones.

True it COULD have been envisioned as a wealthy district but since it wasn't I think my generalization still applys.

I think the bigger issue is that we don't ask places to be good from the get-go. We wish they were but the process seems to dilute good buildings and reward boring, ugly boxes.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Well the seaport is looking like it will have some architectural consistency. But the seaport is not the Back Bay, Forest Hills, Amsterdam, etc. The places you speak up, that we all hold in such high regard, were wealthy residential neighborhoods.
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That's true of Back Bay, but not Forest Hills, which was built for the working class (now long gone, admittedly). Only the town houses in Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands are for the wealthy. The rest is middle class stiffs like you and me; Dutch wealth is spread around a little more equitably than you'll find in this country.

Look at the first picture in post #87 of the other Seaport thread. The townhouses are for the very affluent, but the corner apartment building isn't, and neither is the stuff on the inlet's other side.

The Seaport was envisioned as a "neighborhood" in the loosest definitions. It was a place to expand the Financial District and the Back Bay office zones.
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...and as such it's only humdrum due to greedy developers spending less than they could have to turn a buck.

True it COULD have been envisioned as a wealthy district but since it wasn't I think my generalization still applies.
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I think your generalization was that great neighborhoods dvelop as a result of layering over time. This is often true, but not always --and building for the wealthy isn't always a precondition for an ex nihilo nice place either, as Forest Hills demonstrates.

I think the bigger issue is that we don't ask places to be good from the get-go. We wish they were but the process seems to dilute good buildings and reward boring, ugly boxes.
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Certainly true. Part of the reason is we don't know how to ask for nice places. Some folks think virtue resides brick, others think it's plant material, yet others think it's absence of shadows. Most folks on this forum can see the absurdity of these shibboleths, but we don't control the process (fact is, we don't even influence it as much as we could!).
 
Belgravia is boring. Most of Forest Hills is too - it's mostly interesting as a tudor curiosity amid the aesthetically inconsiderate wastes of Queens. The Back Bay has been subject to more layering and alterations that it might seem; almost all the townhouses on Newbury have been retrofitted with additions for commercial purposes, which is actually one of the things that makes the street appear so interesting.

The Amsterdam development has received praise as a well-done new development, with the implicit understanding that a historically layered development might be preferable. Interestingly, the variegation in the new Amsterdam rowhouses appears to understand this by imitating the stylistic variegations common to historically layered neighborhoods.
 
czsz said:
Interestingly, the variegation in the new Amsterdam rowhouses appears to understand this by imitating the stylistic variegations common to historically layered neighborhoods.
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That's right. It learns by observing and imitating the obvious lessons of the past, instead of the utilitarian theories of the present that turn out to be useless in making a humane environment.

That's the point I've been trying to make, and I thank czsz for making it so succinctly for me.

"...imitating the stylistic variegations common to historically layered neighborhoods..."

You hear that, van? It is possible to reproduce the effects of layering. You just need to: 1. know what they are; and 2. be willing to reproduce them.

It's only the theory that says you can't; and it's about time the theory hit the dustbin.

That's as true in Boston as it is in Amsterdam. We don't have to settle for the mediocre just because developers know a mechanistic formula for profitability (fat megalumps) and architects won't let themselves search history for the cure ("times have changed; we can't hope to do better than Kendall Square anymore").

Yes, we can.

That's been the whole point of this thread.

* * *

Re-read the first post in this thread. Does its last sentence still seem true, or have this and the other Seaport thread turned out to be vehicles that we have all learned from?

Maybe discussion does after all lead to development and evolution of understanding ... and we're not all just flapping our mouths.

.
 
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While I like the warm and fuzzy dialectic proposed by your post, I implore you to moderate the following interpretation of my comment:

You hear that, van? It is possible to reproduce the effects of layering. You just need to: 1. know what they are; and 2. be willing to reproduce them.
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I would not call this reproduction, but imitation. Good imitation? Yes. Achieving something akin to its purpose? Yes. But actual historical layering is always preferable.
 
Some of Rem Koolhaas' words [from Final Push in SMLXL] regarding contextualism and rationalism.

"Contextualism

The central moment of the contextualist epiphany is the collision of a projected ideal with an empirical necessity. Insofar as the latter transforms the former and dampens its utopian tendencies, the contextualist derives not only aesthetic pleasure, but also-more importantly a degree of antimetaphysical comfort.

A contradiction lies at the heart of contextualist design: in the contextualists' favorite examples, these collisions and aborted utopias are literally generated by the course of events over long periods of time; but the modern contextualist is forced to telescope vicissitudes of centuries into a single moment of conception. In an act of more-or-less inspired projection, the contextualist generates a scenario that simulates the history of the next 400 to 500 years. Through this extrapolation in the name of history, the contextualist short-circuits historical continuity.

A second problematic area is that of empirical necessity. In simulating the aesthetics of history single-handedly, the contextualist must impersonate - with equal conviction - both sides in the reenactment of the eternal battle between the ideal and the real, the Platonic and the circumstantial. The contextualist's search for empirical necessity - the circumstantial forces that will inflect the pure model - can become frantic. The existing is squeezed for its maximum potential to inspire imperfection and cause impurity; it is forced to carry assumptions and speculations that it can hardly support and is thus subjected to an idealization in reverse. The circumstantial becomes another utopia, with a subsequent loss of precisely that aura of concreteness and specificity that the contextualist doctrine set out to maintain.

Finally, since the contextualist, a Popperian, does not believe in utopia, the contextualist's aesthetic lacks exactly that dourness that would make its violation a drama. In both its preemptive aspect and its perverse idealization of the empirical, contextualism actually precludes a series of more complex and precise choices that could bring the actual context into focus.


Rationalism

The appeal of rationalism lies in the chaste economy of the imagination that it postulates: it asserts that it is redundant and even dangerous to invent or replace forms of urban organization - the street, the plaza, etc. - that have been perfected over centuries. Within this restoration of sanity, it is disconcerting that everything the 20th century contributed to the historic sequence - new types that are demonstrably responses to authentic programmatic demands and inspirations - is excluded. Through this arbitrary closure, the infinitely reassuring dream of a world inhabited by a known series of typologies and morphologies, endowed with eternal life and capable of absorbing all programs, turns ominous when, for instance, Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Public Library is shamelessly recycled in Luxembourg as the new European Parliament.

With such theories, culture is at the mercy of an arsenal of procrustean types who censure certain activities and expressions with the simple excuse that there is no room for them and at the same time proclaim the continuing validity of others simply because they do not disrupt the continuity of the urban texture. (In the Parliament competition, for instance, the program included a 5,000 m2 conference center. For such elements, there is no typology.)

With their obsessive legitimizations from history, both contextualism and rationalism are preemptive tactics that abort history before it can happen."
 
With such theories, culture is at the mercy of an arsenal of procrustean types who censure certain activities and expressions with the simple excuse that there is no room for them and at the same time proclaim the continuing validity of others simply because they do not disrupt the continuity of the urban texture.
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This is exactly the case with the new anti-shadows law.

Re: contextualism

Koolhaas should stick to writing books and stop building things that prove him full of hot air. His point is apt for the SBW. We don't need "contextual" as much as we need urban. What is being built in the SBW is theoretically contextual but it is at heart suburban development.

I don't even know if developers know how to do urban anymore. In NYC they are sorta forced to but I'm sure if they had their way they would build suburban crap (take the proposed Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards in Brooklyn and Manhattan, respectively.)

My point is that while contextualism is great to have, it is only part of the solution. I like the developments from Amsterdam not because townhouses are contextual (in this case you could argue they are) but because they are intrinsically urban. The interesting (IMO) designs just add character.

The historical layers are what we all love because it is true character that cannot be reproduced. You could build a complete reproduction of the Lower East Side or the West End but when you walk down the streets there will be no soul; the history of these places are etched into the buildings like war wounds; any reproduction is just good makeup.
 
What a polysyllabic torrent that Koolhaas can release! Sound and fury, signifying...

Architects are mostly no good with words. Attempting to write reveals the muddle in their minds.

In this regard, Corbu was just as bad as Koolhaas.

Turgid.
 
I didn't expect this to be dismissed out of hand. Is it really not making any sense to you? I think Koolhaas' ideas are important [he certainly has influenced ALL of the Amsterdam work shown as examples in the thread] and this passage is [IMO <--(I just figured out what that means)] particularly relevant to the discussion.

what part don't you understand?
 
Words.
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No, it's very concrete. Jane Jacobs devoted a chapter to the need to mix old and new. You can take a stab at applying similar principles to decent effect, but it's no substitute for the real thing. As Van put it:

The historical layers are what we all love because it is true character that cannot be reproduced. You could build a complete reproduction of the Lower East Side or the West End but when you walk down the streets there will be no soul; the history of these places are etched into the buildings like war wounds; any reproduction is just good makeup.
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ablarc said:
What a polysyllabic torrent that Koolhaas can release! Sound and fury, signifying...

Architects are mostly no good with words. Attempting to write reveals the muddle in their minds.

In this regard, Corbu was just as bad as Koolhaas.

Turgid.
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I think you've proved your own point here, which, to your credit, is probably why you post so many pictures. You didn't answer the question, just commented on the futility of asking the question.
 
czsz said:
Jane Jacobs devoted a chapter to the need to mix old and new. You can take a stab at applying similar principles to decent effect, but it's no substitute for the real thing.
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A desirability, not a need. If it were a need, it would be hopeless to build wherever no previous buildings stand (as in Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands, where most places not a single old building can be seen).

Sometimes there's no old to mix with; history is full of urban settlements erected in the middle of nowhere. When that's the case, you can sometimes preserve or react to pre-existing elements of topography, but it's often a tabula rasa. That doesn't mean you wring your hands and give up, lamenting "Jane Jacobs says we're doomed to fail!", and then come up with Kendall Square.

A classic case of inviting the perfect to defeat the possible.

* * *

Maybe this is also the place to note that Jane Jacobs, being human, was also fallible. Her declarations on a subject don't need to be accepted with the finality of the Koran.
 
scootie said:
I didn't expect this to be dismissed out of hand. Is it really not making any sense to you?
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Sorry, didn?t mean to be dismissive. The passage is witless and ponderously written; and that puts obstacles in the reader's path.

The following part, however, rings true; he accurately describes a process I often use in my contextless Valhalla:

In simulating the aesthetics of history single-handedly, the contextualist must impersonate - with equal conviction - both sides in the reenactment of the eternal battle between the ideal and the real, the Platonic and the ... circumstantial forces that will inflect the pure model ... The existing is squeezed for its maximum potential to inspire imperfection and cause impurity ...
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what part don't you understand?
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The parts I suspect the writer doesn't fully understand, which I've bolfaced Maybe you can explain them, scootie; you?re more attuned to his opinions :). The unbolfaced words I simply disagree with:

antimetaphysical comfort ... short-circuits ? idealization in reverse. The circumstantial becomes another utopia, with a subsequent loss of precisely that aura of concreteness and specificity that the contextualist doctrine set out to maintain.
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I think I understand his claim here, but it?s an unfortunate choice of words (was there a translator? Is it perhaps his fault?):

it is forced to carry assumptions and speculations that it can hardly support and is thus subjected to ?
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This passage is especially opaque:

the contextualist's aesthetic lacks exactly that dourness that would make its violation a drama. In both its preemptive aspect and its perverse idealization of the empirical, contextualism actually precludes a series of more complex and precise choices that could bring the actual context into focus.
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His claim here is largely true --if badly put:

The appeal of rationalism lies in the chaste economy of the imagination [pew!] that it postulates: it asserts that it is redundant and even dangerous to invent or replace forms of urban organization - the street, the plaza, etc. - that have been perfected over centuries. Within this restoration of sanity, it is disconcerting that everything the 20th century contributed to the historic sequence - new types that are demonstrably responses to authentic programmatic demands and inspirations - is excluded.
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With such theories, culture is at the mercy of an arsenal of procrustean types who censure certain activities and expressions with the simple excuse that there is no room for them
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Showing procrustean tendencies of his own?

(In the Parliament competition, for instance, the program included a 5,000 m2 conference center. For such elements, there is no typology.)
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True enough, but it needn?t be an excuse for disruption.

With their obsessive legitimizations from history, both contextualism and rationalism are preemptive tactics that abort history before it can happen."
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We?ll have to wait a few hundred years to determine the truth of this claim.
 
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