• My career sowing seeds of better design

    Here are roles and strategies that I have experienced to help many others to heal a damaged built environment.
    If you want to have the most sustainable healing impact on our damaged built environment, the architectural ideal of the lone genius isn’t the best way to go about it. If you have a choice between becoming that lone creative genius yourself and helping many others do better work, then by all means...Read more

  • Urban multifamily buildings and the architecture of community

    Mid-rise residential buildings are an essential component of urbanism when they respond to context and help set the pattern of streets and blocks.
    Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Torti Gallas + Partners: Architects of Community . “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.” Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast “You can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.”...Read more

  • Five steps to super blocks

    Designing a sophisticated city, one block at a time.
    Here's a step-by-step process to designing a piece of a city. Don't be put of by the design complexity and follow these steps, one after another: 1) Draw a truly large block—it doesn't have to be stiffly rectangular either; the best way to accomplish irregular blocks is to simply cover the space...Read more

  • Car-pedestrian interactions and the parking ribbon: Campus design, part 10

    Giant surface parking destroys the geometrical coherence and pedestrian connectivity of a campus. The solution lies in limiting the width of the parking without reducing the number of parking spaces.
    Author’s note: This is the last in a series of ten essays that present innovative techniques for designing and repairing a corporate or university campus. These tools combine New Urbanist principles with Alexandrian design methods. The controlled interaction of cars with the pedestrian realm is...Read more