utterly opinionated

I was disappointed.   And then I wasn’t.

Every month Kim, Sara & I host a cityLIVE! event.  We are interested, as we believe our audience is, in understanding issues that impact our city and region.  We are interested in holding a forum that allows everyone to attend.  And we are most interested in nurturing a thoughtful exchange of ideas.

And so last night I was disappointed.  Some people came to our event with their minds made up.   They intended not to listen to others.  They did not intend to exchange ideas.  The resulting conversation was bitter and cruel.   “Answer the question” they shouted when they didn’t like the answer they were given.  Some even challenged the location of the venue, the legitimacy of the panel and the sincerity of the speakers.

Admittedly, the topic we chose was an emotional one — the fate of Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.  Should the Igloo be demolished or should it be saved? This iconic building, a spectacular remnant of the Modern Movement, has a sordid history.  It was built where a vibrant neighborhood once was.  It left behind it a wake of blight and devastation as big as a Tsunami wave.  The Hill District, a predominately African American neighborhood, still lies in ruins sixty years later.  Lingering bitterness and mistrust accompany the physical devastation.  Mistrust of black for white.  Mistrust of everyone’s motives.  MISTRUST.  I did not understand this clearly until last night.

The event and the tense exchanges left me feeling unsettled, as if somehow the questions we’d asked, the issues we’d raised, the panel we had so carefully selected were irrelevant next to this much bigger issue.   I felt like an impostor in the room.  I heard clearly that I had no right as a white woman to have a say about the fate of the Igloo.

This thought rankled with me.

How can a civic building belong to one neighborhood or to one group of people?  How can it’s future lay in the hands of politicians who will soon be gone?  This building and it’s history is far bigger than that.  Its fate should be decided by Pittsburgh’s people – ALL of them.   As the event came to a close I felt very alone with these thoughts.

Then something remarkable happened. A steady stream of people came to thank me.  Emails followed.  How unfortunate that not everyone understood the nature of the event, they said.  The Igloo is important to us too.   We want an opportunity to be educated, to help decide.   We want to hear other perspectives .  We want to be involved.

So many voices, thinking just what I had.  And with every voice, the disappointment faded.

Remember this story?   Mon dieu!  You don’t have to spend $1010 on a trash can.

I love the pragmatic simplicity of Parisian trash cans.  A short steel post, with a ring at the top, bolted to the sidewalk with a plate.   The bag is held in place by an enormous, sturdy, bungee cord.

Get a local manufacturer to make these and I’ll bet they won’t cost much more than $50 a piece.  In Paris, you don’t have to walk much further than a block or two to find one.   They don’t take up much space, and the bag is simple to replace.

When did we start to believe that trash needed an architectural masterpiece to house it?     Admittedly, this solution was born as a safety measure, after trash cans became a great hiding place for bombs.  I love this solution.  Bombs can’t hide in clear plastic bags.

Bring it on!

We sold our Lake House a couple of years ago.   It had become a burdensome retreat, large and a lot to care for.   Most days we’d sit in the tiniest room just off the kitchen, reading and looking at the gorgeous lake view.

I’ve adapted to life without a weekend retreat.  Still, I daydream about the perfect place to spend a weekend day and list the formula in my mind.  No more than an hour’s drive from our home in downtown Pittsburgh;  one room with a great view;  a fireplace center stage;  by water; on a biking trail;  with grounds that are rough and weedy.

Heaven.

And then I found the Red Guest Houses.   Designed by Totan Kuzembaev for a resort near Moscow, they have helped to transform once filthy waste land.  I will  build one.  It will hover above the old steel and weeds, right next to the river, bright red against the grey ground.  Apart, yet part of the landscape.  My Red Guest House will be something new and creative set into the solid roots of the region.

Soon.

cityLAB is going to pop Pittsburgh up in some other cities.  We are hosting a one-day creative event (a charrette) at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh. Designers, architects, artists and wanna-be artists will work in teams to design a pop up that describes Pittsburgh best.

Not sure what a pop up is?   Come and find out at 10 am.

Creative and itching to design?  Stay on and we’ll assign you to a creative team.

Curious and got a point of view?  Come to the presentations at 2:30 pm and join in the critique.

Questions?   Email me at eve@citylabpgh.org.  We’ll be working in the College of Fine Arts Building at CMU, Room 214.

Everyone is welcome!

Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh.  While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired.   The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter.   It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought.  What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.

Santa Monica, on the other hand, is celebrating its bus system   Last year their Big Blue Bus Agency awarded Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects and Bruce Mau Design the Big Blue Bus Architectural and Branding Package.   These two internationally recognized firms were charged with the job of exploring how public transportation has the potential to cultivate, enrich and connect the community.

Their joyful solution, “The Blue Spots” takes the dreary out of bus stops.  Eventually, these flexible blue shelters will be implemented at 360 stops.

Ours or theirs?   You pick.

Endless miles of freeway have always irritated me.  They plow through neighborhoods, dissecting blocks and turn well worn paths and local connections into dead ends.  Instead of sustaining cities they perpetuate sprawl.

Someone in Melbourne must be thinking the same thoughts.

While riding a 20 mile loop through Melbourne’s close-in neighborhoods, I found myself riding UNDER a freeway.  This creative solution, while not a pretty ride, re-connects the neighborhoods on either side of this freeway and gives back what it took away.  I rode for miles with the sounds of fast-moving traffic above, on a smooth concrete deck, hung by steel straps from the substantial freeway structure above.

Brilliant.

As part of an annual its North American Tour Day to call attention to modernist design, DOCOMOMO US has designated Pittsburgh a Tour Day city. The tour will focus on key post-WW II buildings in the Golden Triangle, starting at the original ALCOA building at Mellon Square, including Miens Van Der Rohe’s Mellon Hall at Duquesne University and ending at the Portal Bridge at Point State Park. The tour will be led by architectural and preservation professionals.

Pittsburgh Moderns organized by the Pittsburgh Chapter of DOCOMOMO, is a group of architects, historians, and artists.  The tour is free and open to the public.  

This is a great opportunity to learn about a group of buildings that make Pittsburgh’s Downtown quite distinctive.

The August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh’s Downtown is close to completion.  It is an important building, a cultural center devoted to the African American Arts, and it has been a long time coming.

A few weeks ago I watched the sidewalk being poured.   Tree beds were cut and granite curbs were put in place.  And that’s when the obsessing began.  I tried hard not to let it irk me, but hey, I’m an urban designer.    We study what makes cities work.  We notice the details and replicate the good ones.  And we obsess about the bad ones.

In the 1980s Pittsburgh created sidewalk standards for it’s Downtown district.    The intent was that over time, as sidewalks were replaced due to disrepair, they would be replaced with an homogenous, elegant and timeless standard.  You have all seen this standard on Grant Street.  The lovely brick sidewalks with granite curbs and the beautiful metal tree grates suit the solid, historic character of the city.

I’m not necessarily for homogeneity, but in this case I’m disappointed by the missed opportunity.   While the Center’s aggregate sidewalk looks crisp and new they do not follow these standards.  There is aggregate where there should be brick.   There are mulched tree beds with bushes where there should be grates.   And so the building feels a little like an island, not quite attached to the mainland.

What a shame.   Here was an opportunity to finish the final block of Liberty Avenue properly, and it has been squandered.

The devil is in the details.