NU Redux: Good, Better, Best

Editors¹s Note: The following was made from the author¹s 

opening remarks at the first Council meeting.

New Urbanists want to leave the world better than they found it. That¹s why

they insist on leaving their ivory towers and going out to engage the world.

Andres Duany points out that architects are often satisfied building

wonderful ivory towers flying beautiful banners, and refusing to muddy

themselves in sprawl and inner-city struggles outside their walls. But New

Urbanists, particularly the founders and staff of the CNU, have fought the

good fight instead.

So that today, less than ten years after the founding of the Congress for

the New Urbanism, the United States Department of Housing and Urban

Development tears down what Jane Jacobs called Urban Removal Projects and

replaces them with Traditional Neighborhood Developments. The governor who

heads the National Governors Association and the mayor who runs the U.S.

Conference of Mayors are New Urbanists.

And the magazine for the National Association of Homebuilders said five

years ago, in their section What¹s Hot And What¹s Not, "Say you¹re

neo-traditional even if you¹re not."

CNU member Harriett Tregoning founded and funded the Smart Growth movement

at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which later made

Atlanta the Smart Growth capital of America by taking away its highway

funding. CNU founder Peter Calthorpe forged alliances with environmental

groups like the Sierra Club, which today is one of the most effective

advocates of urbanism in the United States. These are successes very few

people would have predicted ten years ago.

Ironically, some of the biggest failures of the CNU come in the area where

it is supposed to be the strongest: in the making of beautiful places. The

CNU¹s critics say that¹s all New Urbanists care about, but getting TNDs

built is a long and complicated process, with many compromises along the

way. Many CNU members are unhappy with the quality of the places that have

resulted.

This reaction is both idealistic and pragmatic. New Urban designers

idealistically strive to make the best places we can (we are designers,

after all, because we respond to good design). And we realistically

acknowledge that the most important factor in public acceptance of New

Urbanism has been the successful completion of good models.

Last year, I made a short trip with Rob Steuteville, the editor of the New

Urban News. In the middle of visiting five New Urban projects in two days,

Rob suddenly said, "You know, sometimes visiting these projects really gets

depressing. When I started the New Urban News eight years ago, I thought

we¹d be a lot farther along by now. But on a scale of one to ten, I can¹t

give this project more than a three."

The next day we saw a town-center project under construction that Rob liked

a lot more: "I¹d give this a seven," he said.

"If this is a seven, the Campidoglio is a twenty-seven," I said.

"You can¹t compare a New Urban commercial development to a Roman piazza!" he

said with exasperation.

But New Urbanists know how simple some of the most beautiful Italian piazzas

(or best New England villages) are, and how simple it should be to make

something as good.

There are many reasons why we have yet to equal the quality of a good

American small town or city street from a hundred years ago, and often the

least of those is design. One is our contemporary building culture, which

has very low standards and a great deal of confusion about what makes a good

place. Another is the mass of building and planning regulations, which apply

generic, auto-based suburban standards virtually everywhere in the country,

regardless of whether they are being used in an old downtown or the middle

of a forest.

Again, we have an ivory tower problem. At the first congress, Michael Dennis

advocated that New Urbanists build only in the city, leaving the suburbs,

and thereby 90% of everything built today, to others. But we will never

reform America if we refuse to leave our noble fortress, thinking that our

beautiful banners will be enough to make others forsake developing

thousand-acre subdivisions.

How can New Urbanists work with Pulte Homes and Toll Brothers without giving

up the possibility of the best? To answer that, I would like to look at a

concept I learned in a different type of design, furniture design.

The concept is way of grading things qualitatively, as Good, Better or Best.

I first heard of Good, Better, Best when I owned a store called America's

Best Traditional Designers and Craftsmen. From my architecture practice, I

knew a number of craftsmen who made wonderful traditional furniture, windows

and paneling, and other types of cabinetry and woodwork. I also knew how

difficult it was to find these woodworkerswho usually worked out in the

country somewhereand how much more exposure greatly inferior craftsmen had.

So I started a store to sell their work.

Once I was selling eighteenth-century-style American furniture, I had to

learn more about it, and I learned all sorts of things I heard about in

architecture school. That included the secrets of traditional finishes, the

qualities of various woods, how traditional joinery differed from

contemporary practice, and a knowledge of how construction details varied

from region to region.

I went to museums and looked at the best American furniture collections,

which trained my eye to see subtleties I hadn¹t noticed before then. And I

found lessons that applied to the design of architecture and urbanism.

The dimensions of the eighteenth-century chair embodied hundreds of years of

experimentation. By 1700, chair makers had discovered the proper angle for

the back, the perfect height for the seat, and the ideal depth for a cushion

which would support the leg without cutting off the flow of blood behind the

knee.

Chairmakers perfected the form for the comfort of the human body and then

used that form to make supremely beautiful art from functional objects.

Sheraton chairs, Chippendale chairs and Hepplewhite chairs all had the same

basic dimensions and yet they looked very different, because both their

forms and their elaboration were very different.

The chairmakers knew where to put their energies in making those

elaborations. All the best chairs had several carvers working on them: the

best carver would work on the top rail, the next best would work on the

carving around the seat, and the apprentices would carve the feet. Not

because the feet were less important than the top rails, but because they

were farther away from the eyes of the beholders.

In 1951, the leading dealer of eighteenth-century American furniture wrote

an interesting article for Antiques magazine in which he ranked many pieces

of antique American furniture as Good, Better or Best, and showed how to

make those judgements. He later turned that into a book of the same name,

which became one of the most influential books in the world of antiques.

The criteria for the judgements were simple: 1) design and proportion, 2)

construction and detail, and 3) materials and finishes.

There are some obvious comparisons with the Modernist principles of

architecture and urbanism which swept away traditional design. Even though

they invented "the science of Ergonomics," many of the Modernist designers

who made furniture only paid lip service to the functional paradigms for the

comfort of people sitting in their chairs.

The proof is in the pudding: in the name of functionalism, superstar

architects and designers like Mies van der Rohe and Charles Eames designed

some of the most uncomfortable chairs in the history of the world. They were

less interested in comfort than the the expression of modern materials and

industrial processes.

Van der Rohe wanted to perfect the assembly process of chairs made with

curved chromium tubing. Eames was fascinated by the manufacturing process

for bending a piece a piece plywood. Both wanted to tackle problems like

speeding up the mass assembly line, or how to make chairs that would stack

efficiently for storage. Each wanted to create an unprecedented form that

expressed their industrial age and individual creativity. That produced a

very different result than the traditional values of Good, Better, Best,

which judged objects not on the basis of their originality, but on the

execution and elaboration of ideas and forms that had been proven to work.

Enough looking at different examples of eighteenth-century chairs trains the

eye to see the differences and appreciate the distinctions that distinguish

one from another: one sees immediately that while one Chippendale chair

might have a pair of front legs with beautiful curves, another chair has

legs that by comparison are only good. Similarly, one chair might have a

beautifully carved top rail, but another might have even better carving. Put

that all together, and you have a list of objective criteria for judging

furniture.

The same principles apply to architecture and urbanism. Traditional

buildings and streets are judged not on their originality, but on the

quality of their design and their execution of enduring principles distilled

over time. Twentieth century architecture and urbanism rejected timeless

principles of design for principles judged to be of the time. This was often

done by turning traditional principles on their head, to create what Machado

and Silvetti call "unprecedented reality."

The search for novelty made the criteria for judging architecture and

urbanism subjective, while the standards for judging traditional

architecture and urbanism are comparative and objective. For example, within

the various forms of Classicism -- Romantic Classicism, Palladianism, etc.

-- we can say which in each category are Good, Better or Best.

This has many useful benefits. One is that you can teach the principles for

making a good traditional building or street to anyone, so that the student

does not have to be especially talented to reach the level of Good. With the

looser standards of Modernism, only the most talented and inventive reach

the level of Good. The exception is in a Modernism based on well-defined

principles, as is taught at Cornell. But in this age of Eisenman and

Koolhaas, that is rare.

Another benefit is that when dealing with the contemporary building culture,

we can have different standards for different clients. Pulte Houses gets the

parti and materials that a budget for the Good level can support, while the

high-minded developer of the Windsor, an expensive Duany Plater-Zberk

designed TND-like resort in Florida, gets a code for the Best. Pulte might

be allowed to use the Windsor line (no relation) of wood substitute windows,

while Windsor can be held to the highest window standards, with only wood

(unclad) allowed.

A large obstacle to improving the buildings in New Urban developments has

been the cost of quality materials and supplies. Most of the projects can¹t

afford the best supplies, and there is an enormous drop in quality from the

best to practically everything else.

When dealing with window manufacturing companies, we can have one set of

standards for the economy budget (Good), another for a better budget, and

third for the highest budget (Best). If we can pull some of the largest

manufacturers and builders up to the level of the Good, we will have

accomplished a lot. Trying to raise the level of design and construction of

the pseudo-traditional materials and supplies prevalent in the building

industry today is one of the primary missions of the Institute for

Traditional Architecture.

Implicit in Good, Better, Best is also a way to resolve Rob Steuteville¹s

problem: if we create a scale with Good assigned 1 to 10, Better 11 to 20,

and Best 21 to 30, we can grade the 27 piazza on the same scale as the 9 TOD

town center without disparaging the town center.

There are also less obvious implications. Comparing Seaside to Celebration

illustrates one of them. At Seaside, Duany Plater-Zyberk and Robert Davis

proposed a regional, construction-based vernacular, while Robert A.M. Stern

Architects, Cooper-Robertson & Partners and Urban Design Associates planned

Celebration to be built with a style book. Thus Seaside has blocks with

consistent building types such as Charleston houses facing each other across

the streets, while Celebration intentionally makes every block and facing

block have a mix of styles that are primarily confined to the massing and

the front façade.

This is partly, I think, because my old boss Bob Stern likes playing with

style, designing one house with five elevations, for example. And perhaps

partly because so much of Urban Design Associates¹ work has been with

inner-city clients who can not afford traditional construction: their

traditional component is mainly in their urbanism and their facades.

But more importantly, Seaside was built by private owners and small

contractors, while Celebration was built by national "homebuilders." There

was plenty of money to be made at Celebration, but most of the builders did

not want to spend too much time thinking about their Product: a generic name

that accurately reflects the amount of design time spent on the individual

buildings.

Achieving the streetscapes that were built at Celebration was an important

achievement. It was enough to say that inside the houses the homebuilders

would build a product their buyers would want.

Celebration raised the standard for large-scale development in Florida,

where there are only a few new projects that can be called Good. But if you

drive from Celebration to Miami, for every 100 places you see along the

waynew or oldCelebration is better than 99 of them. That¹s something to be

proud of.

This is probably the first time since CNU I in Alexandria that we will spend

so much time talking about design. Everyone who was there knows that was a

very special event: you looked around the room and thought how lucky you

were to be at the start of something like the CNU. We talked a lot about

design, but the unspoken sentiment below the surface was how we would use

design to change the world.

I also remember CNU IV, here in Charleston. Mark Schimmenti said, "This is

the best. All this great discussion and then you step outside and you¹re in

Charleston." I think we¹ll have just as good a time this weekend. On with

the show. Thank you for coming.

John Massengale is an architect and urbanist in New York, and the Director

of the New School for Traditional Architecture and Urbanism (TAU) in

Charleston, South Carolina. Co-author, with Robert A.M. Stern, The

Anglo-American Suburb and New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and

Urbanism 1890-1915, he has a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced

Studies in the Visual Arts to write Do the Right Thing, Notes from a

Metaphysical Planner.