13.5.09
8.5.09
Now that studio is finished for the year and I'm wrapping up my writing projects for my other classes, I'm gearing up for hitting the rails for a few weeks at the end of May.
We'll be in MPLS from May 16th through the 27th and Chicago from the 28th to the 31st. Drop a line if you will be too.
23.4.09
The Superblock in the American Psyche
One of my current projects is a historical piece for a book on the Megablock in Chinese urbanism that is being put together by Columbia's School of Architecture. One chunk of the book is going to be on international comparisons, so I'm writing a short piece about the experience of Boston's West End.
The West End is (or was?) a neighborhood on the northwest side of the CBD bordering the North End, the Financial District and Beacon Hill. It was one of the city's densest neighborhoods and had a building stock much like the North End does today. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood ethnically (especially for Boston in the 50s), with big Italian, Jewish, Polish and Albanian populations as well as a small mixture of Blacks and Bohemians (in the Greenwich Village sense, not the Prague sense). As I already said, it was dense, with about a 150 units per acre (the North End today is around 100, a suburb is usually between 2 and 6) and over 70% building coverage. At its height around 1910 there were about 22,000 people living there, although by the 50s this had dropped to around 7000.
And then came urban renewal:
Through the 50s and 60s, the neighborhood was demolished and the roughly 1000 3 to 5 story buildings were replaced by about 10 highrise apartment buildings (strangely enough, the number of units stayed almost exactly the same, although they tended to house significantly fewer people). The intricate street grid was replaced by a pair of superblocks. Ever since, the West End has been the example to generations of architects and planners being trained at MIT and Harvard as what not to do as a planner.
To me, there are several stories here. The first is, obviously, the displacement. For Bostonians thinking about the West End, this sociological story is the most important part of what happened. Indeed, I've been working lately with the community in Allston and I don't think it's a coincidence that the West End comes up fairly often in discussions about their own struggle with Harvard's expansion. What's interesting about this is that the West End, as it exists now, is being judged an architectural or planning failure for sociological or political reasons.
When judged by straight up quantitative methods, the West End is pretty successful. The apartments are almost always fully rented. The income levels of residents is higher then the area median. If I was an urban planner from Mars, with no idea of the history surrounding them, I think it's possible that I would accept that they are a successful part of Boston and say that they, in terms of architecture and planning, could be replicated in other parts of the city. Yet, the historical background of displacement makes that sort of statement completely impossible.
Obviously, this isn't just a statement that is true in Boston. Almost every major city in US has had some type of horrible urban renewal story that ended in highrise apartments and superblocks. And so, instead of being a tool that planners can use today, the superblock and highrise apartment housing are persona non grata in American planning. Read more...
17.4.09
New Layout
As you've probably noticed, I've been working on a new layout for this site over the past month or so. I'm hoping to start using it more professionally. I've cleaned up a lot of old (no longer functioning) links and added a CV. My full portfolio will be following soon, but for the moment, I've simply linked to work examples on Flickr. I'm also hoping to start writing more often about my various research objectives. I feel that, for the last two years or so, I've been too busy to blog, but at the same time it's taken away from the ease and fluidity of my writing. In any case I think it's important to start again. If you do link here and you haven't already switched, the URL is now www.zakcqlockrem.com as well.
Also, I recently finished up working on a short "zine" for the GSD's Ecological Urbanism conference (which I also live-blogged here) with some other people from the TRAYS journal. Click on the image below to download.
14.4.09
6.4.09
Studioworks: Core Studio 2: Assign. 2
Studio project number 2 for this semester. This is basically a smart growth project where I used bicycle paths and pedestrianization as an organizing principle.
1.3.09
Studioworks: Core Studio 2: Assign. 1
I almost forgot to post this one. This is the first project for Core Studio 2. We were given a square in Cambridge and told to make a collage of a temporary use for the square. My partner and I came up with this idea of burying a Mammoth in the snow and then letting it slowly be uncovered as the snow melted.
18.1.09
If anyone is going to be in Montréal any time soon, make sure you check out the Canadian Centre for Architecture's current exhibit Actions: What you Can Do With the City by Mirko Zardini, who happens to be teaching a Montréal studio at the GSD this semester, and who also did the awesome exhibit Sense of the City a few years back.
Read more...13.1.09
My Playground
I guess in retrospect it probably was pretty unlikely that Free Style Walking was invented in the nineties in the parking lots of Southwest Minneapolis and Edina... we were this good though... at least as I remember it.
8.1.09
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