Streets Are Rooms

The first step toward creating pedestrian friendly spaces is to treat each street as if it was a room in a house. By first, making sure all buildings have walls tight to the sidewalks, these buildings will form walls on either side of the street. The street then becomes an outdoor room. Whether the neighborhood is low rent or high rent, the outdoor space can be beautiful through city efforts.

On designated shopping streets, the first floors should have glass with shops or businesses visible. This makes for safe streets and active one's. One long blank first floor on a street can ruin the feeling of an area. 

Lights and wide sidewalks of brick and trees creating shade and buffer for childs safety can all be done by the city. 

In Portland, new buildings in the Bayside neighborhood have and have not been placed tight to the sidewalks. The DSS building sets back behind a parking lot in a suburban layout, destroying any hope for Marginal way to feel like a room there. The new university housing however, forms a wonderful outdoor street space and has a nice bus stop of glass in front. This simple rule can have dramatic positive results.

Streets are public space and have much potential for safety, and the pursuit of happiness!

(Originally posted 9/17/2008)

Warmth of a New Year

Inviting materials of Hamann House interior by Michael Belleau Architect.

When the holiday season comes along we thankfully switch our thoughts, concerns and feelings from me to us. Many of us naturally spend much of our year in a competition mode for perceived scarce resources or to protect our families in different ways.

But when December rolls around we begin to smile more, give more heartfelt greetings and as a culture agree to treat each other more as extended family. That warmth and generosity we normally reserve for guests in our homes extends out into the public space.

The care we put into making our homes as welcoming and warm and friendly and happy as possible can be extended into our public spaces in order to support our care for each other year round.

We need more chances to mix in public naturally, without signing up for anything.

I remember when I was studying in London and on new years eve my partner and I decided to go into the center and just be there. At this time in early 90’s there were armed police in the train stations due to terrorist attacks and in general people were more emotionally guarded.

We were in a random pub when the clock struck midnight and someone put on the old Monkees hit ‘Daydream Believer’. To our happy surprise immediately everyone began to sing along! People of all different walks of life bonded in that special moment.

Happy Holidays! -mB

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 5

1992 article in Maine Sunday Telegram.

In 1992, a recession year, I wrote this article as a pep talk to the city. I talked about what an amazing pedestrian experience we had here and how we could strengthen this by looking at our past, our present, and our future. 

Using the diagrammatic historical analysis described in my previous post, I laid out a roadmap for urban design work that built on the cities past. 

Diagram from article.

We needed to reconnect streets from Congress across Commercial Street out into the waterfront and be able to walk all around the piers. The whole peninsula I suggested could have a marginal way walk around it. Plazas along the waterfront would encourage public use and hence economic activity. People should be able to walk all around the nooks and crannies of the waterfront. Mixed use buildings with waterfront use out on piers at pier level and other non-residential uses above with most density at Commercial Street. Imagine an outdoor fish market.

Graphics from article using my thesis project as example.

Commercial Street itself at the time was a giant gap between the waterfront side and old port. I proposed narrowing this length for pedestrians by extending the sidewalks the depth of the angle parked cars narrowing the distance from 60 feet to 36 feet. Also, to plant trees and put lights and bench infrastructure in. And to use form based coding to create a variegated building profile along the water's edge (nooks and crannies).

Portland has the bones of a medieval european pedestrian city with our brick sidewalks and historic center. In 1992 while malls ruled the country, this article stood for the human scaled life. Next, further discussion of the article's ideas.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 4

I drew these diagrams in 1988 studying Portland Maine while working on my thesis, a mixed use project on Union Wharf. At the time I lived in Boston. For me, being from Maine lent a sense of urgency to working on our urban design issues. I chose Portland as the most interesting urban environment. As a former commercial fisherman, I wanted to explore the overlap between the working waterfront and regular urban living. The first step was to use historical maps to analyze the waterfront.

In the first sketch a street along the waterfront (now Fore Street) for water access is balanced by a street up to the peninsula spine and one to the eastern shore. Just enough path to manage a settlement.

The 1775 diagram shows wharfs for ships but three horizontal as it were (Fore, Middle and Congress), dominant streets tell an almost agrarian story in that movement along the peninsula was important.

1823 diagram clearly shows a radical change. You can see how the city streets used to go right out into the water. The pattern is for a very aggressive urban leap out into the harbor. Sea commerce was in full swing. The Portland urban experience became constantly moving along a street with buildings on both sides that may or may not be hovering over the water. You could look between buildings to verify this.

The 1831 diagram highlights the delicate "soft edge" created by all the wharfs and large and small buildings and pathways along the water front. This crenallated edge provided a rich variety of pedestrian experiences unique to Portland defining it experientially from another place as all site specific spaces do.

Then they built the railroad which after filling in behind became Commercial Street which cut the city off from the sea. The bottom four diagrams describe this new beginning; loss of the delicate soft edge; loss of the streets all running right out over the water; and finally a separation of the waterfront from the rest of the city.

Analysis like this helps us all create urban design plans which strengthen what we love about a place and move in a direction with confidence.

Here are two sketches of my thesis a mixed use development on Union Wharf using the above analysis. Offices and retail are toward the street and fish unloading and processing buildings are toward the pier end. The first sketch shows a movement from dense brick Commercial Street fabric (tiny piece of this shown far left and poking out at mid pier at bridge) to a pier column structure lighter wooden fabric with walkways along the edge.

Union Wharf thesis drawing. 

The next sketch shows the glass atrium arrived at from the brick courtyard just behind Commercial Street. The atrium has the brick fabric 4 stories on one side and the 3 story wooden fabric on the other. Eventually walking to the end of the atrium leads back into the brick fabric and either out to the fishing buildings from a fish market at grade or on second floor to the pedestrian bridge linking to the adjacent pier. This sketch is looking back toward Commercial Street direction.

Union Wharf thesis drawing.

Next we'll look at how the diagrams can inform an overall urban strategy for Portland.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 3

My first experience with truly great urban space was traveling through Europe during architecture school where I fell in love with medieval Seville and the spaces at the Alhambra and Mezquita in Spain. Just great spatial urban experiences.

Orange tree grid in the cathedral courtyard- Seville

Here sketching the courtyard attached to the cathedral in Seville I discovered how gardens can become an outdoor room with walls and paved floor. Each tree placed in a grid spot with water channels running in the paving irrigating them. Moorish garden design at it's best.

Mezquita de Cordoba- Cordoba

Having admired Escher's prints I fulfilled a dream of sketching the same tiles and scenes he had as in this sketch I made inside the infinity inducing Mezquita de Cordoba. Truly a spatial experience of the highest order.

Entrance to the Alhambra- Granada

It is at the Alhambra though where it all came together: entrance sequence, courtyards, gardens, mathematically complex tiling, intricate vaults, etc. I remember walking up the ramp to the entrance surprised when water began to flow down channels in the handrail height walls on either side of the ramp. A poetic experience if there ever was one.

Alhambra Palace- Granada

Here in the Alhambra the most extraordinary sequence of complex variety of spatial experiences created a lasting impression on my architectural mind. I wanted to create these experiences at home in Maine some day.

20+ Years of Urban Design in Maine 2

I grew up in Orono Maine, a small college town in the middle of the state outside Bangor. We lived right on Main Street across from the road up to the schools. I walked to school every day and walked downtown to meet friends. The schools sat behind Main Street as they do in many Maine towns. The downtown had the town hall, police/fire station, post office, etc. all right there. Nice homes and churches lined Main Street close to town.

The state university main campus is on the other side of the Penobscot River which runs through the middle of the town. The University of Maine at Orono (UMO) is organized around a quad with the library on one end and the gymnasium on the other; mind and body. Students walk around, along and across the quad from class to class.

It's about the same distance, 1400 feet, from my house to Pat's Pizza (the original where Pat would stand behind the counter with his cigar and lip burn) as it is from the UMO library to the gym. This is the foundation for my personal sense of walkable neighborhood space and scale. I believe we can use these two examples to strengthen our state's town and city urban fabric ensuring economic success in the long term.

20+ Years of Urban Design in Maine 1

I've been working on solving Portland and Maine's urban design problems for over 20 years. My first urban design proposal was an article addressing how to build on Portland's existing at the time great urban fabric to create economic success during the 1992 recession. Since then I've outlined numerous urban design solutions for Maine and Portland in particular. Here is a link to the Pecha Kucha presentation I did last winter quickly summarizing my work in this area: 20 Years of Urban Design in Maine by Michael Belleau

The slide above represents the locations of the generations of my family. My great grandfather took big city tourists out hunting as a guide. My great grandparents raised my grandmother in Dover-Foxcroft, a small town, where they had a cow in their yard. My father went up to work during Med School summer and apparently got jaundice drinking the cows milk, a condition expertly diagnosed by his professor that fall.

My father grew up in Sanford, a small town from where he, at age 12, got dropped off on his own at the closest train station and went to Boston for the day. There, wandering the Commons, a group of kids playing baseball commandeered him to be umpire and then, when inevitably the calls did go someone's way, they yelled at him, sending him scurrying off. His dad, a manager at Stop and Shop, had a camp built on a lake nearby where where we kids went every summer.

I grew up first in the Boston/Cambridge/Lincoln PBS-ish world in Massachusetts before moving to Orono, a small town with a University. Many of my friends parents were professors and there was always an air of intellectualism about amidst the intense practicality of a rural environment. This combination of thinking while shoveling snow colored my future urban design outlook.

And now my kids are growing up in Portland on the "gold coast" as some of us Mainers like to snicker. They do, however, go to Bangor for winter vacations to hang out with my mother, their "Oma", and down to Shapleigh for summer vacations at camp and thus enjoy a similar geographical comprehension of the state.

City Center Streets for Bikes & Pedestrians

Currently we are on the cusp of the movement to convert our streets from automobile only to "complete streets", those that fully accommodate all modes of transportation. This means the creation of bicycle lanes first and foremost. These bike lanes are best made as separate from auto lanes with barrier to get parents with kids and the vast majority of people who will bike to feel comfortable. This means more width sometimes in street section and more infrastructure.

Of course this is wonderful to get the kind of dedicated bike lanes like Copenhagen has but perhaps in city centers we should think about how wonderful narrower streets feel to walk down and that it may be best to turn the street lanes in city centers into bike lanes. A gradual shift from sitting in a high speed vehicle to pedaling to walking as primary mode of transportation can follow the gradual shift in urban fabric from isolated building in countryside to tight walkable medieval pedestrian street city centers.

Sometimes its better to skip the intermediate step of building for current trends and save money by just converting what we have bit by bit.

Complete Streets Restore Immediate Surroundings

The future is bright for humans moving through space. As we move back to a more body centered environment and away from the automobile centered 20th century, the quality of space increases dramatically.

When we slow down our movement through space our eyes pick up more information about our surroundings. Driving fast in a car, eyes can only pick up that there are some buildings or woods or parking lots around us. However, walking we begin to notice every little detail around us. Who cares what kind of elaborate trim detail is around that door or what the door joinery looks like at 35 miles per hour? Walking by our eyes scan and pass over the granite curb, every brick in the sidewalk, the craftsmanship in the wrought iron lamp post, the way the storefront glass meets the frame. And each door is a statement about design and care in the area.

Same with bicycling. Biking makes us notice every bump and object in our path as well as what each biker and each pedestrian is wearing. I believe the bike lane separated from the roadway entirely as shown above is best. Believe it or not, if complete separate bike lanes are available a kazillion more people will get out of their big nasty cars they can't park anyway and bike places. And kids can finally get around without chaperones. And one car families....

For a short video on complete streets in NYC: click here.

The slower you move the closer your field of awareness becomes. Because of this natural visual and sonorous and olfactorous heightened awareness of the near, we care about much smaller pieces of the built environment than when driving.

Freeway architecture can be big boxes of ribbon windowed office  buildings because we can only catch a glance at them. We are interested in 500 foot segments. Pedestrian architecture must be interesting at the 1 foot segment level. This means the more pedestrian environments we create, the better quality architecture and urban space will result.

Let the complete streets begin!

Elements of NE Style: Hedges

Walkway Walls

I love hedges. Encountering ubiquitous hedges while living on Cape Cod and in England, I experienced them as living walls. They can define a space, shield you from the wind, screen out ugliness or create privacy. I think they are an element of New England design.

House Hedge

There are many different species of hedge plants but I think of only a few due to the time I spend on Cape Cod. The emerald arborvitae is evergreen, soft and can grow very high, but also susceptible to snow damage and deer nibbling; a good choice non-the-less for general purpose evergreen hedge. The Yew has poisonous berries but makes a nice hedge.

Cotswolds Yew Hedge

Here's video of trimming it

The deciduous north privet, though needing to be trimmed a few times every year, is my first choice overall due to density and ability to shape it in that you can do topiary with it. It's listed as invasive so if not already in your area, you may want to be consult your nursery to be sure it's okay ecologically. Only plant the fast growing privet if you can trim it regularly from all sides.

Knot Hedge

One way to plant a hedge using arborvitae as example is this. A good generic hedge choice site is this. Another generic hedge planting instruction is this.

Road Hedge

The largest hedge in the world is the Meikleour Beech Hedge in Scotland built in 1745 and over 98 feet tall. Hedges can define property lines or screen out your driveway and it's parked cars. Here's a classic shot of big pine tree hedges used as windblock in Japanese farms from Rudolfsky's "Architecture Without Architects":

 Shimane Prefecture Farm Hedges

You can also do cool topiary things with hedges.

Sculptural Hedge at Audley End

Here's a link to a nice blog entry on hedges in Nantucket.

Let's close with this:

Yew Hedge at Blickling

Is it a house or a hedge?

Passive House Windows- Energy Balancing

Here in Maine we need to design our buildings to the Passivhaus ( or "Passive House" as sometimes used in English speaking countries) standard in order to reduce our heating needs to almost nothing and to reduce our electrical energy needs as well. Part of this effort involves choosing triple pane well-insulating windows and installing them with thermal bridge free details.



The recommended window insulation value (resistance to heat transfer in hour square foot degrees Fahrenheit per British Thermal Unit or, hr ft2 F/ BTU ) for a window off the shelf is a minimum R 7.1 or an installed minimum of R 6.68. This R6.68 number holds true for the installed value of the glazing components of a Passive House door as well. These numbers are recommendations for Central European climate and thus a higher R value for Maine is certainly preferable. And certified Passive House windows are best.

Now part of a Passive House strategy to achieve low energy use is to gather as much solar heat gain as is practical without overheating. To this end the glazing in windows must be significant on south sides of the building and somewhat east and a bit on west sides with minimal on north. And the glazing in the windows must be shaded with overhangs tailored to each compass orientation to avoid overheating in summer and let lots of sun in, in winter. And this glazing must be designed to allow a certain amount of solar heat gain without reflecting too much so the heat passes into the building. This solar heat gain has a number called the solar heat gain coefficient or SHGC which represents the amount of solar heat allowed in with 1 representing all of it and 0 meaning none. A good SHGC for Maine would be between 60-62% or .60-.62 SHGC. A minimum of 50% solar heat should be allowed or .50.

Shading devices like overhangs or attached fins to keep summer sun out are important as a Passive House cannot have temperatures indoors exceed 77 degrees Fahrenheit for more than 10% of the occupied year (recommendation is 5% as global warming continuously upgrades the average temp).

A window is "energy balanced" if it takes in the same amount of energy in a year as it loses. It is "positive" energy balanced if it takes in more energy in a year than it loses and a Passive House wants to have a positive energy balance for each window without overheating beyond the above limit.The calculation for energy balance involves a calculation for window transmission losses (QT) and one for window solar gains (QS).

The formula for window transmission losses is QT (in kBTU/yr) =  sum of (Uw, installed x Aw x ft  x Gt) where Uw is the U value (U= 1/R) of the window installed in BTU/hr ft2 F; Aw is the total window area in ft2 (square feet); ft is the temperature correction factor usually 1.0 and is unitless; and Gt is heating degree hours in kFhr/yr (thousand degree Fahrenheit hours per year) for your area.

The formula for window solar gains is QS (in kBTU/yr) = r x g x Aw x G where r is the solar reduction factor plus the glazing fraction so a multiple of 4 factors and is unitless; g is the "g value" or solar transmittance also unitless; Aw is the area of the whole window unit in ft2 (square feet); and G is the global solar irradiation during heating period in kBTU/ft2yr (thousand BTU's per square foot year).

These windows are key whether building to meet new Passive House standards or retrofitting to meet the EnerPHit Passive House renovation standard. I'll talk about the meaning of the formula components and more in future. 

Creating a Peaceful Home

When I design a client's home new or renovation, I always work on clearing away the impediments to their relaxation. Eliminating barriers to peace and enjoyment are part of my work in this modern world of swirling information. I'm a minimalist in that I like to create spaces in which owners can naturally enjoy nature and light and materials without clutter. Everyday chores are exciting opportunities for the architect to celebrate living. The photo above is of a kitchen in a new home I designed in a neighborhood of small houses. By constructing a balanced, peaceful composition of utilitarian objects like counters and cabinets, fireplaces, floors and roofs and rooms, a calm atmosphere can occur.

I always strive for a dialogue with nature so that the act of living involves at least visual contact with the world outside. Materials can play a part by allowing feet and hands to touch natural objects and surfaces.

Knowing how to edit what is seen outside and what is not is a very important part of place creating and a peaceful home. This is why an architect can help you radically improve your sense of peace with careful cutting and pasting of walls and windows to bring out the best in your property.

Passive-Agressive House

Our current global crisis is based on the rise in CO2 levels. This rise is primarily a result of burning fossil fuels, mostly oil and coal. After Al Gore's movie in 2008, the green building movement took off and government officials and the private sector looked for a metric to mandate in order to reduce CO2 levels. They both found the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system easy to mandate.

Standards like LEED helped start a wave of certified buildings that shifted our attention from construction efficiency to environmental impact. Government agencies in the USA now require many new construction projects to be LEED certified. While these buildings are a little more energy efficient and certainly more responsible with water efficiency, toxicity and some materials embodied energy use, they do not exactly drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels.

I like to think of the Prius as an example of a lot of embodied energy (the energy used to make the car) in an energy efficient product that ends up using more energy total (embodied and life time of low gas use) than buying a used car of medium size would (no new embodied energy as the car already exists). And buying renewable bamboo flooring from China shipped halfway across the world (high embodied energy in fuel used in shipping) is questionable. Embodied energy is a more realistic way to look at the impact of building material choices on CO2 levels.

Another embodied energy involves planning and how much energy people use driving to the building. It costs an additional 30-50% of the buildings active energy use to commute. Here is a good article on this embodied energy as well as the benefits of existing buildings.

So you could have the newest LEED building but located such that everyone commutes far and end up worse off than rehabbing an existing building in town.

But embodied energy, the energy it takes to make stuff and move it, is only a small part of the energy use problem. A better start to lowering CO2 emissions is to focus on fossil fuel use to create energy used to heat and cool buildings which accounts for almost 50% of our energy use. I try to think of what we can do to stop more coal plants coming on line in the US, China and India. In other words the forest-for-the-trees concept leads us to focus on cutting back our use of fossil fuels to heat and cool our buildings if you are an architect.

A popular metric for energy efficiency in building is the "Passivhaus" (passive house) certification. This rigorous standard developed in Germany focuses on reducing energy demand. Reducing energy demand implies not using a lot of energy to do this, hence, using "passive" methods rather than "active"(requiring energy) ones. The Passive House standard does this by addressing three definitions of energy efficiency: First, a building must be air tight so heat or cool is not lost or gained. Second, the building must have a very high level of insulation in the exterior envelope including windows, etc. so that heat or cool is not lost or gained and thus it has a very low heating energy use. And third, the amount of energy used for primary functions as in that used for the electricity must be very low as well.

This Passive House standard as it's called in the US is growing in use by governments in Europe to regulate energy use because that is precisely what it focuses on instead of everything as LEED type metrics do. Here, the use is growing especially at the green building house level.

Back in the 70's an energy crisis in the US led to a ton of experimentation with energy efficiency building design. Many architects created buildings with solar panels, passive solar heating through orientation and glass amounts, tromb walls, earth berming for insulation, solariums for circulating warmed air, and superinsulating or insulating the exterior building shell with much more insulation value than normal.

When Swede Bo Adamson and German Wolfgang Feist decided to create a very energy efficient standard for building in the late 80's they drew upon the work of the American pioneers of the 70's. Here is the wikipedia entry.

I worked for one of those American 70's architects here in Maine, Bill Sepe, who continues to build superinsulated buildings with air to air heat exchangers to provide fresh air to the super tight spaces. Passive house buildings are very healthy because of this constant air movement. As buildings became more air tight, we have not added the requirement for fresh air circulation and with the Passive House standard of .6 ACH 50 air tightness, the spaces require air circulation to be healthy. This requirement then makes a Passive House even more healthy than other buildings.

I'm a certified Passive House Designer through the Passive House Academy, based in Ireland affiliated with the international Passivhaus Institute in Germany PHI. The first Passive House in the US was built by Katrin Klingenberg in Urbana Illinois. She founded the Passive House Institute US, PHIUS, and became certified to train others to become certified. Unfortunately she wanted to be the only one in US allowed to train and a schism developed between the parent organization and hers. This has resulted in two certification possibilities here and I took the international one as best choice for long term. The PHIUS organization meanwhile has done fantastic work on moving passive house forward in the US so one can use resources from both organizations to get your Passivhaus project done.

Maine is a great place to build new or renovate to eliminate the need for almost all heating and thus, Passive House is a great metric to address this issue.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 3

The endless high school hallway. It's even shown up in my dreams. At the end is doors to gym; turn left and up a few stairs and down more hallway to doors to the parking lot. Most kids in Maine grow up with this space as a dominant experience in their lives. Every weekday life's most intense moments may happen in such a space. Monotonous for the most part, hermetic and claustrophobic, moving through such a space can imprint a linear, film-like space/time memory of planning.

They're so introverted.

Such stale experience could stifle the creativity of our future planners. The double loaded corridor is always forcing it's super efficient layout on design. In the photo above, the lucky students actually get light at the end of the tunnel. Like the train tracks of the Industrial Revolution, we are forced to take only one path submissively. The same attitude led to the elevated highways crashing through our delicate pedestrian fabric and Jacobs battling Moses.

But in a true village there would be one library for everyone in town and students in all grades, and you would walk to it from a classroom building. Spatial experience would vary moving from place to place in the course of a day. Performances would take place in which ever size auditorium in the center that was the right size for the event whether it was a grade school day time event or a community night time one. This is not to say grade schools would not have their own dedicated spaces, just that buildings in town would be shared by all and not wasted, lying empty at times and built cheap because they are not important to all.

Our Maine towns should slice and dice this endless hallway by building separate buildings like a village with connected covered walkways where used often creating courtyards, town squares and landscapes for yankee pedestrian delight.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 2

Our concept of family, home, and place come directly from experience. If we grow up in an apartment-like place in the middle of a packed urban context then that is our comfort zone and what we consider normal. If we grow up in a small town town in a single family home then that is our normal. Experiences throughout our life add to this baseline but none can be as strong.

I lived as a teen in a house on Main Street in a small town in the middle of Maine- Orono- a college town. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to live outside of town as I could walk across the street up to school; I could walk down to Pat's Pizza, the IGA, or LaVerdiere's (LaVerdiere's Halloween commercial) . Most of my friends could walk to school or bike if they wanted to. My concept of place is rooted in this typical small town main street space. When we got our licenses we cruised around some but of course, we spent a lot of time parked downtown and hanging out with each other leaning against our cars with the Jensen triaxials cranking out hard rock . My urban experience was main streets and the campus at UMO.

Later I fell in love with the copper roofs and burnt orange medeival fabric of the Gamla Stan in Stockholm, the brick Back Bay of Boston, the canals in Leningrad, the Moorish courtyards of the Alhambra, and the Portland Maine peninsula. These experiences compliment the main street base line by adding intricacy and spatial complexity to the pedestrian possibilities.

Our Maine spaces can improve through the strengthening of our experiences growing up here. We can focus on how our kids walk to school- what can we do to make these walks safe, fun and social? In Orono I just walked across the street and started up the short street to school. In our Maine towns we can build sidewalks and bike paths from dense housing areas to schools in town with police warming glass huts at center junctions to watch over things. My Main Street had trees along the road with sidewalks leading through town and across the bridge up towards the university. Our kids could benefit from bike paths speeding along the street and cutting through the neighborhoods.

Our families crave the coffee shop, IGA, Pat's Pizza and LaVerdiere's type stores along our Main Streets. In high school we were bored and needed places to gather and do things. We loved finding places to just hang out and look at something. This could be a view over a river or pond or a view at the town. Spatial experiences were much sought after if I think about it now, looking back. It's up to us now to help create a variegated in town spatial experience for children to move through and build enjoyable experiences. My high school Main Street life did that for me.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 1

(I write this while sliding across the bright winter landscape on a train from Portland to Boston just passing a trailer park in Maine where a bright red classic very old truck lies tucked against the back of a trailer.)

It occurred to me the other night while driving through a blizzard to my sons basketball game how formative and memorable our high school sports experiences are. And how they shape our perception of communal space and place making.

As I peered through the windshield heavily obscured by the sticky snow, crusty wipers leaving the central drivers portion unswept and incorrectly designed sweep direction depositing a line of slush swept from the passenger side to the center of drivers vision, my memory jumped to my bus rides through the Maine countryside to high school basketball games in dead winter. Orono High School played up in class B back then and we travelled all the way to MDI (Mount Desert Island for you folks from away) to the east, Schenck and Stearns to the north (the Millinockets) and Dover-Foxcroft, Lincoln, etc. Quiet snow-filled rides home stopping at McDonalds for as many Big Macs as we could afford. If you were lucky and your girlfriend was a cheerleader you could sneak a little making out in.

Contrary to the suburban experience of moving from one heavily populated area to another, the Maine experience moves from one small town to another (even our "cities" are really small towns in disguise) through vast stretches of countryside, silent in the white winter nights. We had no electronic devices to pass the time so we looked, talked and slept on the bus. Being funny was a prized asset. The land opened up to pastoral sweeps and closed deep inside coniferous forests. Winding paths slowly climbing along rivers and bridges hung over the rocky ocean.

Many times the bus road along a rivers edge and you knew we were arriving because the houses got close together and an old big brick mill might appear before what passed as a Main Street with at least two businesses or much more came into view. Then we would turn off this spine and go behind this strip, off to the side and pull up to the local high school- often an old pseudo Georgian block- and enter a plain brick box gym through a side door with nothing but a parking lot and fields there covered in white.

Who were these people who lived here? What did their dad's do? Did they like their school? Would the crowd yell at us? And of course we would have heard about a special player or two, having been instructed by the coach to pay particular attention to them, and that stopping them would be key to victory. Coming out of the locker room, stepping on to the hardwood floor we would immediately spy the good player(s) and begin to estimate his talent. Is he too good for us? Of course he knew we knew about him and this gave him even more confidence especially in his "house". He would execute their warmup drills with as much nonchalance as possible and we would try our best to do the same.

Every gym is different and these spaces could arguably be considered the most important or having the greatest impact from a memory standpoint on us Mainers. Case in point, when our 8th grade team played Veazie (kids from Veazie can choose Orono or Bangor High), the gym was on the top floor of the police-fire-townhall-gym. That alone creates a nice Yankee sense of multi-use buildings and frugality. So there we were playing a game on the bouncing wood floor watching their top player, Lenny, warming up. First thing to notice was his shot was very accurate and curiously very flat- with almost no arc. The game began and one of our players with the most beautiful shooting forms, Charlie, jumps up and fires a perfectly arcing, back rotating, shot and- THUNK! The ball hit the ceiling only about a third of the way up it's projected journey. Guess whose shot did not have that problem?

Original Cumberland County Civic Center by architect Catalano

The original building was designed by Eduardo Catalano who I had the fortune to work for years ago. Catalano was a modernist from Argentina who taught at MIT. He worked in the popular brutalist style which lost favor due to cold abstract concrete but was actually a very good style in section (looking at design as if you cut it open like a cake so you saw the layers). Latin architects are trained with structure just as important and landscape and we can see this in his work. He drove a 450SL Mercedes and his office was a plain clapboard house in Central Square in Cambridge Mass. with a 6 foot tall wood stockade fence all around denying all views in from the street. I would walk down the sidewalk from the 'T' (subway) and open the fence door and POW! a lush garden of color greeted you. Then a short walk through this to the glass entry (a small add on to the original small wood house).

His first claim to fame was his own small house built in 1954 in NC where he was teaching. It was simply a roof of wood in form of hyperbolic parabola. This was a popular area of interest in architecture at the time. In 1956 the house won House and Home Magazine's "House of the Decade" award. Frank Lloyd Wright praised it openly.

Together with fellow Argentinian modernist Pietro Belluschi, Catalano designed the Julliard School of Music. When Diller Scofidio and Renfro renovated that building and Lincoln Center you can see how they paid tribute to Catalano by making the restaurant in center of plaza with grass roof mimic the house Catalano built back in 1954.

With the Cumberland County Civic Center he managed to cram a large program in a small urban site with great finesse.

Program requirements were tough: seating requirements on small site; truck access requirements somewhat unrealistic; etc. The seating views are all great; the egress in emergency is fantastic with plenty of doors; the glass lets outside view in to see what is going on. The hill town solution to the corner egress gets a lot of flack but his heart was in the right place. Glass corners allowed those inside to be in touch with the outdoors- not isolated- and they framed the sculptural pillars.

And, as was his South American custom, he integrated a garden of local plants (pine trees). And the budget was reduced to the point he could just put flat metal siding on it and he had to reduce a nicer structure to the minimum. Classic Catalano is the use of only four large concrete pillars to support the whole roof as structure was one of his great interests. In this promotional rendering showing a possible renovation idea you can see how the building managed to place all that space between two streets and not excavate down to magma:

When it opened in 1977, it was considered the, "toast of the town", according to a PPH article in 1999. Catalano said at the time:

"(This) is why architecture is a temporal art. While our sight focuses on one
area of space, the image is vivid . . . like a direct sound in music. But that
image is enriched by the reverberation from other images perceived earlier,
all overlapped in a fulfilling experience of space and time."


When Postmodernism arrived he was ushered over to emeritus. Although not in favor now, he did a good job for the times.

From ZZ Top to Cindy Blodgett and the quintuple overtime state championship game between So Po and Bangor, we've all had great experiences there and enjoyed great intimate views from every seat.

Replacing the dark gray of the metal siding with a bright orange or green or yellow, etc. would be a great start. Integrating the new renovations with the existing building is always a challenge but I believe the original has good bones and a good heart.

Here's more on Catalano from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/15/eduardo-catalano-obituary

The Greenest Building

Great screening of the movie, 'The Greenest Building', last night at the Portland Public Library with the writer/director Jane Turville in attendance. The movie walks through a history of the historic building preservation movement and the sustainable movement and discusses how the two can be linked now to form the kind of life we all desire. Recycling a building is much more sustainable usually than demolishing a building and building new for many reasons.

One reason is the material in the existing building took a lot of energy to create and new materials must consumer a lot of energy to create so you are throwing away embodied energy and using new embodied energy.

Also, an older building many times is built to last a long time whereas some developers create buildings merely for profit and no regard for the place they are build or the long term impact. This leads to many 'souless' buildings and hence, places.

This leads to another factor which is a sense of place manifests over a long time with the stories accumulating of members of families as craftsmen working on the area's buildings and thus making history which is tossed aside in the name of efficiency. When we include the psychology of an area into our decision making process, we are more balanced. We are not machines and cannot continue to treat ourselves this way.

One hope is the sustainability movement will help stretch our development timeline to include 100 years from now and what sorts of places we'd like to inhabit.

The greenest building may be one that already exists waiting for some sustainable tweaks. Maybe there is no place like home.

Portland Waterfront Discussion at Maine Historical Society

Nice discussion Tuesday night on Portland's waterfront. Mayor Brennan gave a good outline of the potential for the area; Ann Pringle discussed the history of the zoning and how we should allow for things like fishing to come back as railroads are coming back as well as trying to avoid the pretend waterfronts like Baltimore; Bill Needleman gave a good discussion of the urban fabric noting the piers used to be extensions of Portland streets (as noted in my article 'Portland's Piers Are Streets' ); and Steve DiMillo gave a great history of growing up working for his father's restaurant, how his dad developed Long Wharf on an burned coal storage site, and how the area was once filled with little shops, etc.

The city is aware of the potential to use form based code to promote the sort of pedestrian fabric we crave but are not in a position to move forward with this according to Mr. Needleman.

The pedestrian wharf edge walk from Commercial Street to DiMillo's restaurant is one of the city's gems and whatever we can do to promote this sort of place is in public and private interests. One key is having restaurants or other public places to go to on wharf that naturally has pier owners creating public paths down pier for access.

As an architect who has worked since 1992 on Portland's waterfront urban design issues and lives here and who was once a commercial fisherman working on a dragger similar to one's shown above, I am grateful for what we have. People come here for the site of working boats and fish markets and seafood.

Together, private and public we can find a way as Ms. Pringle noted, we have already created an environment for a partnership that other cities envy.

Charles Simonds' Bodies and Bricks

Great lecture by Artist Charles Simonds at ICA the other night. He creates tiny worlds with clay. Beginning with videos of himself emerging naked from a clay pit in NJ (where he got his clay) made back in early 70's, he presented a history of his work. In the early videos he smeared his body with clay to make a clay landscape of himself before using tiny clay bricks to build structures on top of his body/landscape. This duality of body-like landscapes with small worlds of brick became a central theme for him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHkrAj83ihE&feature=related

Working then on the lower east side of NYC in very run down neighborhoods close to where he lived, he constructed tiny clay brick worlds in little niches of crumbling hollowed out building corners, etc. Short videos he made were great to watch combining the work with the times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgI66suWifQ

A good video doc. of his work although in spanish is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAKb59fB8W0&feature=related

To get an idea of the times this movie of him is great as well though nothing to do with the art per se:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgJNA9zB4Y&feature=related

The landscape portion evolved to become surrealist sculptures with mouths or other dreamlike evocations emerging. Noguchi, Giacometti, etc. come to mind.

Eventually the work moved into galleries such as the Whitney where Mr. Simonds found a way to connect back to the street art by placing two complimentary creations in buildings across the street from the window in the Whitney room.

Mr. Simons explained he works with internal dialogues for the "little people" at times but also with meta narratives of a more primal nature as in Jungian archetypes though he did not specifically mention Jung necessarily. He did mention his parents were both psychologists and implied this subject was part of his work.

Outdoor work continued in art parks.

As the work became more refined and customer's requested pieces constructed inside their homes,

he began to do both extended multifaceted works with ideas and their counter ideas bouncing back and forth and extremely elegant riffs as it were on a simple idea. The brick constructions at times became soft as the landscape.

In the larger works the landscapes took on a more almost Henry Moore like importance to the overall piece.

Or completely heroic.

Can the work inform today's architecture? Of course. In the early 70's the ecology movement, anti-war movement, back-to-the-land movement, all can be found in today's America. Our desire for sustainable living includes architecture made of natural materials, food grown locally without any harmful chemicals, and not fighting wars on the other side of the world in order to protect other countries from themselves. One big difference is our desire to avoid fossil fuels now. But we would not have the technological head start here again if it had not been for the good work done during the Carter administration when we could only get gas every other day according to your license plate.

In this work the narrative is people building the present by excavating the past in a continuous cycle.

Simplistically, the mud brick locally made is very natural and local, etc. And Mr. Simonds points out how building with earth bricks is a universal method globally back thousands of years such that he will hear people tell him his work reminds them of Pueblo cliff dwellings if they are from North America, or  North African early history dwellings if they are from Europe, or Chinese early history if from Asia, etc. Primal qualities of material and construction of course are evocative of sustainable living and architects have used rammed earth construction and straw bale construction since the 70's for this reason.

However, if we look closer at the places created by Mr. Simonds we find the integration of building with landscape; the ritual narratives relating to the buildings (as in his court piece where the defendant is either pushed into the pit or walks around to meet the judge and leave free); the psychological stimulations rather than the technological. All this can be incorporated into our Maine way of living as it can be experienced in our towns when we tune into the emotions.

And drop out of the rat race.