Bjork finds a model of a city inside her TV

All the work we have been doing on models in Studio 3 (and watching the undergrads put together their models earlier this semester) has reminded me of one of my all-time favorite videos on YouTube, where Bjork explains how TV works. This makes me want to put some circuit boards in my model. You can enjoy it here.

Studio Project 3

The Studio 3 gang is busy creating site plans and three dimensional models of portions of our neighborhood infill sites. Here is my terrain after a couple of days of cutting topo lines from chip board. We are all working at twenty scale: one inche equals twenty feet. I decided to build a wooden frame for my model, to keep it from warping but also to provide a square edge that I could lay my layers of board into and use as a jig to keep everything in line.


Here Austin is finishing up the pen work on some really sharp looking section drawings. He is getting all his 2D stuff done before starting the 3D model.


Meanwhile over on Casey's side of the room an oval-shaped neighborhood park is beginning to emerge out of chipboard and blades. It's truly magical!

Studio 3 Project 2

I have neglected my blog for nearly a month and I feel pretty bad about it. Here is the main reason: our graduate studio class was working on this infill development project. A good bit of time was devoted to the SketchUp model, and I am including the fly-through movie here. I pulled the two-foot contours up pancake style, and drew my roads and sidewalks right onto the pancake terrain. This was a little time consuming. Some of the buildings I drew into the model, others were pulled up out of a flat version of the master plan and moved.

The site is a 31-acre area between town and campus. A historically significant cotton mill is on the site, that's the big red building with the rows of large windows in the model. There are some other buildings, but I chose not to keep them. Part of the site is in the FEMA 100-year flood zone. That's where I put the constructed wetland.

The concept was "home". The design is meant to foster aging in place. A specialty grocery store, recreational opportunities, retail and mixed use buildings should provide residents with all their daily needs right there in the neighborhood. The idea of "neighborhood completeness" which Douglas Farr introduces as a modified version of LEED-ND certification requirements in his book Sustainable Urbanism drives this design.

Right off I will admit that the entrance from Spring Street has a problem in that the two towers frame a view of the corner of the assisted living center. In the model I ran out of time and didn't finish all the roads. Also you can see on the master plan that there are a lot more trees on the plan than are visible in the model. I think there are some good things in this plan, and there are a lot of things that need work. Go ahead and start tearing it up; I can take it.

Don't Top The Crapemyrtles

My blog needs a picture and I would like to get on my soapbox for a moment and state my position on the great crapemurder debate of the last few decades. This is a photo of some crapemyrtles at my Studio 3 design project site, the E.E. Cooley Cotton Mill grounds and environs. This is what happens when you leave crapemyrtles alone. Would you not rather look at this all winter than the stubs that remain where people have topped crapemyrtles all over town, all over the south? I had a neighbor in Chapel Hill who had some nice 30 foot crapemyrtles that she, one afternoon in February, cut back by fifteen feet or so. I asked her (politely) why she did this and she could only come up with the reason that this is what you are supposed to do, you need to cut them back before the ACC tournament.

I have pruned hundreds of these in my career as a landscaper. All this tree needs is about a half hours worth of thinning. Remove branches that are dead, dying or crossing, and remove some of the inward growing branches to improve air circulation (reducing risk of sooty mold). That's it. Topping the trees causes buds to break from below the bark, resulting in vigorous, suckering type growth which is too weak to support the blooms. These weak branches then bend over or snap, which doesn't matter really because they are just going to be cut off at the end of the season anyway. A good example in Starkville are the ones along the entrance to McDonald's behind Strange Brew. It seems to me that those who prune crapemyrtles this way view the tree as strictly a producer of color. The thinning technique that I describe results in a tree that looks good year round. Or, as the photo proves, you can do nothing at all to the tree and it still looks pretty darned good. The visual interest comes from a pattern created by gradients: multiple thick trunks at bottom give way to multiples of multiple thin twigs at the top, a steady visual rhythm of coarse to thin texture. Put a bird feeder in it and you have a middle ground, a stage for dynamic movement through which one can view the background in the distance. If you lop off the crown in the misguided assumption that it will produce more bloom next summer you loose all that dynamic potential.

This is at a smaller scale than is generally discussed in Studio 3, but I saw the tree on my site and wanted to share these thoughts with everybody.

Mo Rocca on The Future of Traffic

This post and the previous are from the journal project for the Community-Based Planning Seminar most of my Studio colleagues are also taking. I am sharing them here because a blog is no good if it is not updated regularly and I thought my classmates might be interested. I just watched a piece by Mo Rocca on CBS News Sunday Morning about the Future of Traffic. The piece isn't online yet, but here is a link to Mo Rocca's "Tomorrow Show" where it will be posted eventually.

Mo Rocca rides around in cars and talks to an old guy (I didn't catch who he was) about paying attention while driving. The old guy says that road signs are actually distracting. Reading a sign that warns of children playing might cause you not to notice the actual children playing. Drivers rely too much on signs, he says, to the degree that they feel they don’t need to be alert to other visual cues and they pay less attention to what is happening in the street. This leads to Mo Rocca’s introduction of the “Naked Streets” campaign that is taking hold in Europe. He travels to Holland and records a piece about a four-way intersection where the stoplight was removed and a roundabout installed with no signs. The mayor of the city explains that the problem with traffic lights is that they make everybody feel safe, but one driver running a red light can cause a deadly accident. The roundabout forces drivers to use visual cues from their surroundings and to communicate with each other. There are even bike lanes (designated by alternate paving surface and color) that wind through the roundabout. Mo Rocca rides his bike through the intersection on the bike lane and a car yields to him and he calls out “thank you!” in Dutch. The mayor says that when the intersection had a stoplight there were four accidents a year (or was it four fatalaties? I don’t recall). Since the removal of lights and the installation of the roundabout there have been none.

Could Americans, who are notorious for texting, shaving, eating breakfast and surfing the web while driving, ever be able to design and use such a system? Mo Rocca then goes back to the states to report on the development of cars that drive themselves using remote sensing technology. One of the designers of one of the cars says that this kind of automation is working well for the airline industry and is the future of driving in America. It was pretty scary. Exactly the wrong solution to the problem, instead of trying to get people more engaged with the street, with what is going on around them, these designers want to turn to technology to allow people to become even further removed from their physical surroundings. So that they can concentrate on what? I wonder.

Local Farmland Viewed as Possible Industrial Site

The current issue of the Columbus Dispatch online has an article about the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors giving their official support to a proposed industrial aerospace park on 2,500 acres west of the Golden Triangle Regional airport. It sounds like a good industry to develop, MSU has an aerospace engineering program, Columbus has an air force base and Eurocopter has a manufacturing presence near the airport. The plans will be presented at East Mississippi Community College on October 18th. My biggest concern is that it replaces farmland. All three cities in the Golden Triangle have industrial areas that could benefit from this development. It seems that instead of getting into a drawn-out battle over which city gets it, the organizers used a 1980s-era solution and decided to stick it into a rural area that is a ten-minute drive from everybody. What if we took a big picture approach? Give it to the town that needs it most. That would be West Point. I come from a "Triangle" myself: THE triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. We put a research park in the midpoint of our three cities in the 1950s and enjoyed a half-century of prosperity in the age of the automobile. With no mass transit system in place, however, some hard choices are going to be confronted by the denizens in the next half century. I say build the Global Industrial Aerospace Park in West Point, give that town a boost, and save the farmland.

Follow up on Columbus Charette

I recently read an article in the Columbus Dispatch called "Burns Bottom dispute continues to sizzle." Our Seminar in Community Based Planning attended a community design charette in Columbus, Mississippi in early September. The charette was designed to help the town citizens and leaders incorporate a number of elements, most notably a soccer complex, into a comprehensive plan for the city. Now a county supervisor is advocating for upgrades to the existing city parks to be included in the plan. Political grandstanding or responsible activism?

The article is about a meeting organized by last Thursday by Lowndes County’s District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks of African-American elected officials, ministers and community leaders. From the comments section below the article I gather that Leroy Brooks is an outspoken and perhaps polarizing figure in the community. He claims that the city parks have long been neglected and there is nothing in the article to dispute that. He sees some movement happening on the soccer complex and perceives an opportunity to generate support for improving the parks. At a recent joint meeting of the town council, county supervisors and Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority officials,he asked that the city parks be a part of the plan and got voted down. At that meeting, the supervisors voted unanimously to commit $3.25 to the Burns Bottom soccer complex and alleviate the city of any financial responsibility, if the city later pays to renovate the Trotter Convention Center. Brooks calls that vote illegal, because the meeting was considered a workshop. Included in Brook’s suggested improvements are a new building, a rubberized outdoor basketball court and a pavilion.

Brooks wants this all included in a comprehensive recreation plan. He says he supports the soccer complex, but that efforts to improve all the parks should be included with the effort to build this new park. He downplayed the racial aspect in his comments, but Rev. Larry Story of Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church was a little more forthright. From the article:

“I think that’s just a way of saying no,” Story said of the decision to put off further consideration of the issue until a later date. “It seems like the board (of supervisors) has historically been locked around racial lines. I think unless the three-vote majority have hearts of compassion, nothing is going to change, except you’ll see an uprising of the African-American community. People seem quick to jump on the African-American community, as far as drugs and crime, but they don’t want to make an investment in the community. It seems like there’s constant division down racial lines.”

I don't know whether Mr. Brooks or any of the other people from the meeting attended the charette. The design team was very professional and seemed to have done their reconnaissance work well; it seems inconceivable that they would not have approached Brooks or the ministers ahead of time and tried to get them involved. Reaching out to minority communities is definitely in the charette handbook. As I recall, there was some discussion of the parks and it was an item on the flip charts.

The town needs a comprehensive plan about how to improve the parks. I don't think it has to be attached to the Burns Bottom project, but it should be addressed somehow.

It is disturbing to see how negative and even rude the comments after the article are. I guess it is a sign of the times, small-minded, short-sighted people emboldened by the rancor of the August town-hall meetings. One responder said “you stupid ass people…don’t blame anybody but yourselves for putting into office those selfish pricks who waste our taxpayers money on their silly projects.” I hope nobody uses language like that in my comments section!