CNU XVI:
New Urbanist guru thrashes Austin six ways from Sunday
April 10, 2008Austin has been doing at least some of the right things for itself over the past decade to counteract sprawl. The city has actively, and very successfully, leveraged public property to promote downtown housing and retailing. A commuter rail line is in the works, a few years after voters narrowly defeated a light-rail plan. A Great Streets program aims to recapture traffic lanes for wide sidewalks enhanced with trees and pedestrian amenities.
But when the Congress for the New Urbanism met in Austin, April 2-6, one of CNU’s founders and leading lights thrashed his host city. In a session on the integration of tall towers into the urban system, Stefanos Polyzoides berated downtown Austin in general for its extensive “dead frontage” of blank walls and parking garages, and its residential skyscrapers in particular as “a towering sprawl.”
Austin architect Sinclair Black, speaking just before Polyzoides, had been slightly more diplomatic. Black talked about the demolition, in the early 1960s, of a “perfect New Urbanist neighborhood” between the Capitol and the University of Texas campus to build “the ultimate black hole” of state government buildings. He described a vision he and his UT architecture students had developed in the late ‘70s -- a dense, mixed-use downtown filled largely with perimeter-block buildings four to eight stories tall. That notion didn’t fly, and Austin soon embarked on a skyscraper binge that continues to this day.
Black noted that he did get to to design one mid-rise building according to his perimeter-block scheme -- the AMLI apartment block, with street-facing retail and below grade parking, catercorner from Antoine Predock’s new city hall. The project has been a bang-up success and the keystone of the only Great Streets block yet completed. (Black created the Great Streets program.) When the same developer planned another project with the same number of units one block away, however, below-grade parking was deemed too expensive; that project, now nearing completion, puts all the residential units in a high-rise slab tower, with a large parking garage taking up most of the site.
Polyzoides accepted that towers are a necessary element in the New Urbanist’s tool box, but he added, “We need to understand where high-rise buildings belong and how they (can) reflect the values and character of our city.”
He indicted Austin’s recent high-rises on six criteria -- some aesthetic, some functional. He had prepared a visual presentation of these criteria with examples from downtown Los Angeles and suburban Orange County, to illustrate the differences between urban character and sprawl, but he added Austin examples, which came disturbingly close to the Orange County model. The criteria strike me as sound and generally (but not dogmatically) applicable:
• In collective form, towers should cluster together to “represent the essence of the core of an urbanized area to the world,” Polyzoides said. In sprawl, towers are usually widely scattered or isolated.
• Towers should respect the city block form and its traditionally incremental character, based on a “rhythm of land divisions.” In sprawl, the block often doesn’t exist or is denatured by being occupied by only a single building. (Polyzoides praised Black’s AMLI project, however. Though it is a single building, its frontage on all four sides is highly animated with street-level retail and upper-story balconies set into rhythmically lively contemporary facades. Below-grade parking enables those positives.)
• In massing, low and midrise forms should be proportioned to mediate between the tower and the street, so that the tower may relate to its surroundings rather than stand apart from them and come “crashing to the ground.”
• The ground floor frontage should be “fairly continuous and open” along the street, not made diffuse by parking lots or opaque by blank walls. “The amount of dead frontage in this downtown (Austin) is higher than I have seen anywhere in the United States. It is shocking and scandalous that municipal authorities would allow this to happen,” Polyzoides said.
• Public space should be defined by building walls and edges where people are present, either actually or by implication, with apartment windows and balconies on the floors immediately above street level. The public space is deadened if several parking levels intervene between the ground floor and the occupied floors.
• High density is best enabled by mass transit; parking should be limited and operated as a “park-once” public utility. (“Park-once” means that a single garage serves many destinations within easy walking distance.) Of downtown Austin, Polyzoides said, “If you have this much parking, what you are is a towering sprawl. These buildings are not urban. They’re impostors; they’re suburban sprawl buildings in the middle of town.”
Later, he added, “It is inappropriate to inject this kind of density in a city without a transit system.” I assume he meant something like “a transit system that serves lots of places with frequent service.” Austin has a transit system; it just isn’t sufficient yet to support high density.
Austin might deserve a partial indulgence on the transit issue. A full-spectrum rail transit system, beyond the initial commuter line already planned, seems likely given that the light rail proposition came within a hair of voter approval. Rail transit proposals often fail badly the first time and succeed on the second or third try. Downtown Austin’s concentration of residential towers could well boost the odds and advance the timing. As we’ve seen in San Antonio, the absence of concentrated density can give opponents of rail transit a politically effective (if specious) argument.
To prevent duplication of the other ills, Polyzoides recommends a “form-based code” specifying a range of allowable building types, scales and frontage-design standards tailored to each block. Such a code is the chief product of San Antonio’s River North Master Plan, for which both Polyzoides and Black served as consultants.
Polyzoides also noted that Austin is the largest city in the nation without a formal design-review process.
I’ll add these cautionary notes:
First, the River North form-based code is yet to be finalized and adopted by the San Antonio City Council, much less tested and proved in actual use. Although my hunch is that a form-based code might be more effective in Austin than in San Antonio, it would be premature to cite the River North planning process as a model that Austin should emulate.
Second, design review can make projects worse as well as better. Its effectiveness depends in part on the standards to be applied, in part on the quality of staff support and in part on the skills, knowledge and good sense of review committee members, who are unavoidably political appointees. Ultimately, the quality of design review depends on the quality of local political leadership. But so does much else.
Mike
Greenberg
