Urban Spaces No. 3: The Design of Public Places

Edited by John Morris Dixon; designed by Harish K. Patel Visual Reference Publications, Urban Land Institute, 2004, 328 pp., $59.99. The introduction and preface to Urban Spaces cover many of the talking points that are familiar to new urbanists. The art of designing and building great urban spaces was greatly diminished in the middle of the 20th Century, only to be revived in recent years by new urbanists and others, according to John Morris Dixon, longtime editor of Progressive Architecture magazine. The members of the Urban Land Institute, which copublished this volume, are deeply involved in the changes that are taking place. Urban Spaces, like ULI’s recent Mixed-Use Development Handbook, features a lot of work by new urbanists. Yet a fair amount of other work featured is in the Modernist planning tradition that appears at odds with new urban ideas. The first project in the book, an urban renewal plan for Beijing, illustrates a new park “slashing diagonally” through an old city neighborhood, terminated by a museum on concrete pillars. Buildings on pillars violate the first principle of creating a human-scale urban environment — that buildings must animate the streetscape and enclose the public realm. Yet buildings on stilts appear to be a favorite idea of the design firm “annex/5,” which must be too cool for capital letters. The first four projects are drawn by annex/5, because the 38 firms in the book are presented in alphabetical order. The designs of annex/5 are futuristic and cold. But hold on — the next five projects are by Ayers/Saint/Gross, as dyed-in-the-wool a group of new urbanist designers as they come. These projects feature traditional city/town planning layouts and vernacular architecture, and the designs honor the users of the spaces, rather than glorify the architects. The juxtaposition of annex/5 and Ayers/Saint/Gross is jarring, but perhaps that’s indicative of the urban design field in the new millennium. For every Andres Duany, there’s a Rem Koolhaas. For every urban design that is based on the growing knowledge of traditional techniques of placemaking, another revels in abnormality. Urban Spaces covers this broad spectrum of modern urban design, including some of the most respected new urbanist firms and many others in what might be called the avant-garde. The book is copiously illustrated, with hundreds of color photographs, renderings, and plans.