The New High Line

The High Line is an elevated park that runs along a portion of Manhattan's west side. It was once a railway, in use from 1934 until 1980. As vegetation took over, it became an informal and (not completely) inaccessible greenway above the streets. Neighborhood residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond started Friends of the High Line in 1999, hoping to save the structure from demolition and build support for the park idea. The city approved funding in 2004, and the lower section (from Gansevoort to 20th Street) opened in June.



The park was designed by James Corner Field Operations, Piet Oudolf, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It is made up of pathways that weave through the original train tracks, as well as diverse plants inspired by those that grew in the absence of maintenance. The city plans to continue the park along the Hudson Yards to the Javits Convention Center. According to Mayor Bloomberg, the first section has sparked considerable neighborhood development, with more than 30 new plans now in the works. The Whitney Museum is building an extension by Renzo Piano at the Gansevoort entrance.



On a recent visit, I was impressed by the High Line's varied landscape and playful atmosphere. It offers a different perspective on the city, where things come into view that are usually hidden from street level. The path moves along and through buildings, creating excitement in the discovery of new environments.



The architecture is kind of slick, but it also has a relaxed, inventive feel that plays well against the seasoned ruggedness of its surroundings. I really like the idea of including the original train tracks. This might be even better if their continuity could somehow be maintained. They currently seem like set pieces rather than historically integrated parts of the neighborhood. I loved the rolling chairs on tracks, and the vegetation is tough and beautiful. The spectator windows onto the street (or into the park) are an interesting concept, framing everyday life as entertainment. However, I'm not sure the frames and stepped seating add much to the view, and they seem to draw energy away from the path. These opinions, however, are especially inconsequential in light of the overall greatness of the park.



The High Line is a wonderful part of the city's changing ecology, one that builds upon the old in shaping the new. I recommend starting with the exhibition Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City at the Museum of the City of New York. It includes detailed reconstructions of the island before modern development, giving a sense of how our current moment fits within the area's unfolding story.

(Photos by Peter Sigrist)

Transition States

Development, use, abandonment, reuse, demolition, redevelopment. Transition states. It seems that everything is in transition, but here I'd like to focus on the span of time between clearly defined places like factories and forests.

Development includes combining separate elements into new forms, like making something out of legos. Materials are assembled into buildings, which in turn form cities. This may fulfill a need or function based on reactions to things that came before. In this sense, new things embody the past.

When a thing no longer serves its purpose, it is often abandoned. At this point it can be reused in its current form, reassembled into something new, or destroyed. But it can never really be destroyed. Nearly imperceptible parts remain in circulation. They integrate with other things. They may haunt us in ways more tangible than the ways we haunt places. Smoke can be like a ghost that haunts us.

If left abandoned, things are said to return to nature. Not that they ever left, but they can again be transformed into something else. There is a period of transition. For a building, this may be when weeds start to grow around and within it, or when other life forms make it their home. Eventually it may be enveloped by a forest.

Plants are often considered therapeutic, like Mandela's prison garden. They are also zoned and regulated. We put them in our cubicles, malls, streets, airports, and they represent healthier locations. Why are the places we work not healthy in their own right? How did the real or perceived separation between healthy environments and work environments come about? What was the transition like? And how do we alter the resulting state?

We might consider what happens to the things we develop and abandon. Ideally they are reclaimed, reassembled, or disposed of with care. This is how we prevent a haunted world. Maybe this will help us improve the quality of work sites, or even change the nature of our work. As unhealthy places are abandoned, there is hope for transition. What will this transition be like?

In animation, creating a transition requires a momentary destination state. Maybe we can learn from this. If we envision a solution to each problem that confronts us, clearly defining our origin and destination, we should find improved transitions. Many people are doing this through ecologically oriented design, entrepreneurship, policy, architecture, education, activism, engineering, and other pursuits. Inclusive planning can help us work towards well conceived destination states. We'll still face the unexpected, but we can keep experimenting and solving problems as we move closer to where we hope to be.

(Credits: Photo of transitional space in Harlem by Camilo Jose Vergara of Invincible Cities. Photo of plants growing on an abandoned house from Houses of Tung Ping Chau. Photo of Nelson Mandela in his prison garden from City Farmer News.)

The New New South

When our grandparents re-imagined the urban environment, we wound up with Pruitt-Igoe and the Parisian banlieues. As a result, popular opinion leans somewhat sharply in the negative direction when it comes to large-scale urban renovations. Still, it is largely accepted, among the current generation of urbanists and architects, that the suburbs are in need of a serious, large-scale overhaul. It's always important, when taking on a major project, to learn from the lessons of the past. But what exactly do the tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas of the latter half of the twentieth century teach us? On the surface, it's that tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas make for dire cities. But beyond that, these stark interventions illustrate quite plainly that it is almost never a good idea to rip down everything and start from scratch.

It's too bad, really, because starting a city from scratch is a very romantic and exciting idea. But cities are places that are used by millions of people, in millions of different ways; the longer a place is inhabited, the more people develop routines in and around them. Aesthetics aside, familiarity sets in, and even ugly places can become comfortable and familiar. Modernist urban renewal projects didn't just fail because they were severe and lacked a sense of human scale; they failed, at least in part, because they ignored the patterns and rhythms of the places that they replaced.

It's encouraging, then, to see that some of the cities considered the greatest offenders by anti-sprawl camp are starting not only to attempt to densify, but that they are doing so in ways that adapt rather than replace their built environments. Take, for instance, Miami, where a former car dealership is being redeveloped as a highrise urban district, or Charlotte, North Carolina, which has taken several steps in the past few years to actually start acting like a city of its economic stature. A new light rail has been built, for instance, with plans for considerable expansion; density has been encouraged along the transit lines; in one suburb, all new commercial buildings are required to have at least two stories. For a city with a population density of only 2,515 people per square mile (slightly less than that of Bangladesh), these are very promising steps toward urbanization. Better yet, there's been no wholesale removal of the city's existing fabric; just modifications.

Other sprawling cities are starting to take notice. Atlanta, the undisputed Capital of the New South since its rapid revival back in the late 1980s, has recently taken note of Charlotte's urbanization, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calling the city "a feisty, undersized boxer [that punches above its weight]." No small words from the Rome of Suburban Postwar America. And as that same article notes (albeit in downplayed terms that any smart urbanist will snicker at), Atlanta is currently struggling under the weight of the obscene freeway system that grew as fast as the metro's population. The city is already saddled with several eight-lane freeways (that's eight in both directions, for a total of 16) and the Georgia State Assembly seems to be making transit decisions using a 1965-vintage playbook. With New Jerseyans now complaining about the gridlock in the Big Peach (which they actually do in the AJ-C article), Atlanta's mobility problems are looking like a very serious liability.

Charlotte, meanwhile, has half the population of Atlanta but less than half the congestion. It remains to be seen if Charlotte will ever catch up to Atlanta in terms of international economic stature, but even if it doesn't, Charlotte can lead the way as a slew of sprawling mid-sized Southern cities (the entire region is notorious for its sprawl, after all) seek to densify and re-work their urban fabric. By taking the lead on lifestyle issues, Charlotte could become the capital of the New New South.


(Photos from Flickr user wbwood1969 and The Daily Green.)

Considering Programmed Housing

The old abandoned St. Joseph's School is a sturdy old building; a four-story block of red brick and arched windows -- every smart developer's dream. The surrounding neighborhood, Arbor Hill, is a bit run down, but the quality of the housing stock is high, and prices are still relatively low. The potential for an attractive, walkable community is high. To the southwest is downtown Albany and the stunning New York State Capitol; to the southeast, the Hudson River. Conditions being what they are, gentrification and displacement seem inevitable. And then, of course, comes the news: someone is going to turn the old school building into artists lofts. It's an all-too-familiar story.

But this telling has a twist: the artist housing, to be called Academy Lofts, is not an island unto itself; the plans call for the school's former gymnasium to be converted into a community art center where classes would be taught by the building's residents. These artists, who would qualify for the rental units only if they required affordable housing to make a career of their work, would be moving into a programmed housing development, where their residency required active participation in the cultural and social life of the neighborhood.

At the heart of the gentrification problem is the challenge of getting new residents with different sociocultural backgrounds moving into a neighborhood to engage with their neighbors -- and, on the flip side, convincing often very tightly-knit communities to open themselves up to new residents and see them individually as potential partners instead of a combined, faceless threat. If artists are the stormtroopers of gentrification, the set-up at Academy Lofts is particularly ingenious in that it quickly embeds the artists moving into the neighborhood into the existing community, directly connecting new residents with their new neighbors through free or low-cost community programming.

Listening to a Smart City interview with author Sean Safford a few months ago, I was struck by the author's explanation of why some Rustbelt cites in the US have fared better than others, and what this might mean for urban neighborhoods like Arbor Hill. In his book, Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown, Safford compares the steel towns of Youngstown, Ohio, which he describes as having had a very densely-woven social network during the decline of the steel industry, with Allentown, Pennsylvania, which had a looser, more flexible social network. His argument is that Allentown has fared better in the long run specifically because its loose network of connections was more amenable to creating the kind of broad coalitions that were able to adapt to change rather than resist it, whereas Youngstown's extremely dense network was too closely tied to the status quo.

Neighborhoods that are dealing with gentrification -- often places where ethnic or racial enclave communities exist -- the standard scenario over the past few decades seems to have been that of a very tightly-knit community resisting encroaching development. Safford's research, if it can be applied at the neighborhood level (and I don't see why it can't), suggests that these communities might be much better off accepting that the neighborhood will change, and working to build broad community coalitions to try to help the existing community adapt to these changes rather than fight them.

Urbanists around the country are abuzz with chatter about how the Obama Administration's stimulus plan could revitalize American cities and metropolitan areas. Check back tomorrow for more on why programmed housing developments like Academy Lofts should be a key part of that national conversation.

Posh to be Poor?

I've been reading a lot of articles lately, and as wrong as it may sound, it seems as though poor is the new black in the Western World. Now I don't mean more people are becoming poor, because that's obviously true, but it seems that lately a lot of professionals have drawn inspiration from the condition. For example, the Times ran an article about architect Teddy Cruz and his social housing experiment in the Hudson River Valley. The development, which features a modern day mesh of architectural elements, draws inspiration and, at times, form, directly from favelas.


Another prime example is seen in the press that a group of British artists received when they essentially hijacked a vacant multi-million dollar mansion. Late last year, the artist collective Da! moved their group into 18 Upper Grosvenor Street, one of London's more exclusive neighborhoods. They lived and worked here for at least a month with no word from the owners and no word from the cops. I can see this becoming a trend in America, with so many mansions going into foreclosure or sitting on the open market. Perhaps there will be a slight role reversal, where the homeless end up taking over these huge mansions because nobody can afford them or to maintain them. I mean, you can already get 3000 sq ft of 1920's craftsmanship for under 100k in Detroit, why even waste your time with money anymore? Just move in! Some cities are even working on programs to move the homeless into foreclosed homes, according to Fox News. If you want a mansion for nothing, now just may be your chance.

Finally, one of my favorite artists/designers just released a transportable abode for the homeless. I know this has been an ongoing project in every architecture school in the world for the last 50 years, but nobody does it quite like James Westwater. There is something compelling about his project, "homeless chateau," and the idea of living in a rectangular prism in an abandoned warehouse. How different is this from living in a warehouse loft? Having neither heat nor electricity would be rough, but you're not paying $3000 a month. Anyways, I'm not really suggesting these are real lifestyle choices that will become widely popular anytime soon; I'm simply suggesting these ideas are growing in popularity.

In order to dig further into this idea that we are being inspired by the conditions of being poor -- conditions that will increasingly affect the middle class worldwide -- I will investigate 3 divisions of urban planning which directly connect to choices in lifestyle and are dictated by income. Those divisions are Transportation, Food, and Shelter. Over the next 2 weeks I will dive into each category and explore the trends that are leading to a more frugal lifestyle for citizens of big cities.


(Photo from NYT, Gurdian, and James Westwater. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Demand for Recyclables

Alright, there’s been a lot of talk going around the blogosphere lately about the recycling epidemic forming in the United States. Basically, if you haven’t already heard, the United States sends a majority of their recyclables over seas to China to be processed into new materials, however, because of the global economic crisis prices for recyclables have plummeted leaving the United States with a growing pile of trash. So yes, this is a problem, but seriously, don’t you think it’s an even bigger problem that we create so much waste we have to ship it overseas?


Maybe it's time we begin to look at our recyclables as a raw material rather than a waste product. Many designers from around the world have been creating beautiful products made from post consumer products. Take for instance the Campana Brothers or Piet Hein Eek, both creating beautiful furniture from reused materials and both happen to be outside of the United States. Perhaps it's time for US designers to start looking at these waste materials as a material to work with rather than ignore. The alternative craft movement in the US have been quick to use found materials as it is economically attractive due to the fact that waste is generally free. Also, the use of waste materials is an evironmentally sustainable idea, cutting down on the mining, processing, and shipping of raw materials.

Aside from the alternative craft movement, there have been a few grassroots movements to use our waste as a raw material and divert malterials from being barged overseas or dumped in a landfill. Tiny Texas House has been carefully deconstructing houses in their region and building new prefab houses out of the materials. For me this just makes sense, and apparently it is working from an economic perspective as well.


So what is really stopping these ideas sound really great, and seem to make so much sense, what is stopping them from really taking off? Well there are 2 real issues. First, economic feasibility, Tiny Texas Houses works however they are only producing a very small amount of homes a year and aimed at a particular market who are willing to pay a high price for sustainability. The production of houses is a very refined process and the mining and transporting of materials is rigorously efficient. Maticulously taking down houses and preserving the material is a much slower process and therefore costs more money. New processes and networks need to be put in place before these ideas can really take off. These can come in the form of online networks or informal networks. Ebay and Craigslist are 2 online networks that have done a great deal for reuse. Think about how many items have been listed on craigslist that would most likely have found the landfill 10 years ago? Informal networks can work too, for instance the scrap industry, where legitimate, (and sometimes illegitimate) scrappers pick up reusable materials and sell them to scrap yards for a small profit.


Second, a paradigm shift will have to occur in which the general public changes their opinion on the value of our recyclables. Big name designers don't fool around with used materials because they presume their consumers will not appreciate used materials over new ones. This is why reuse is still a niche market. It is important to note however, that reuse is gaining steam and many companies, such as Frietag, maker of recycled messenger bags, have made enormous strides in changing the perception of used materials. The best way to infiltrate popular opinion is to hit the authorities in consumer products. When Macy's, Bloomingdales and Barneys start selling reuse, soon to follow will be all the small retailers scattered across the nation. But in order for reused goods to get there, there needs to be a good amount of quality designs using these materials to choose from. Maybe we need a national design challenge or something.


(Photo from TreeHugger. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from DesignCrack. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from TinyTexasHouses. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)
(Photo from TreeHugger. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Time to Reassess the Boxscape

Home in suburban Milwaukee for the Thanksgiving holiday this past weekend, I was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, into my very first Super Wal-Mart. From an urbanist's perspective, it was horrifying; one massive indoor space with a seemingly endless procession of aisles filled with every piece of crap you could imagine, stretching off to -- literally, it seemed -- the horizon. Indoors. It was the diametric opposite of "finely-grained." But the experience got me on the newly-minted bandwagon of architects and planners wondering aloud about how big-box and chain retail might be better integrated as metro areas shift and change over the coming decades. Redemption is not impossible for such places.

Last month, Wendy Waters wrote about new research from the University of Alberta that suggests that the presence of large, indiscriminate retailers like Wal-Mart can actually improve independent retail in the area by forcing owners to re-strategize and become more specialized in what they offer consumers. This makes plenty of sense: business owners that do nothing in the face of increased competition are hardly the kind of flexible, dynamic people that add to a local economy; nor are their businesses likely to be the ones that add to local character, which is often one of the most loudly mourned of the assumed casualties when big boxes come to town.

Wonkser (and long-time Where blog crush) Ryan Avent made another recent argument in defense of chain retail, suggesting that it strengthens urban economies and brushing off the argument that chains kill local retail:

Should we be upset when new chains move in? No, not really. There are reasons that chains do well nationally, namely, convenience and price. We should hold chains to high design standards, but there’s no reason to deny local residents access to chain retail. I have seen folks argue that chains are bad because they take profits elsewhere, but this is essentially an autarkic argument–that we’d be better off doing everything for ourselves. Obviously, that’s not the case. Successful businesses provide value for consumers, and preventing those businesses from operating here would deny consumers that value. Sometimes scale economies are important, such that national chains can deliver sharply lower prices. This is good for local consumers, who should be free to decide when they want to spend their money on independent retail and when they just want the best deal available. Moreover, many District [of Columbia] firms benefits from national and international business. A local only model leaves everyone poorer...

...It’s important to remember that chains can complement indie business. Some folks want to spend their money at an indie home furnishings store and save money by shopping at Giant. Others want to save money on their furniture by shopping at Target, and go all out at a local organic grocer. It takes all kinds.

Avent also makes the case in his post for the densification of areas looking to increase commercial vibrancy. In urban areas, where parking is scarce, businesses must draw on the local population for revenue; thus, independent retail flourishes in densely populated areas; the residential use must come first. It follows, then, that anyone looking to increase the diversity of businesses in an area currently starved for independent, specialized retailers should focus on increasing residential diversity. Re-thinking big box stores like Super Wal-Mart will require a residential component of some sort. We've been seeing this type of thinking slowly take shape as malls have begun incorporating condos over the past decade or so; more recently, strip malls have started looking at residential retrofits as a solution to waning consumer interest.

I can't help but wonder what it might be like to live in, around, or on top of a reclaimed Wal-Mart. The idea that the suburbs of today will look vastly different a few decades from now is an enticing one, but it's still difficult to imagine what, exactly, they might look like. Hopefully, as urbanists, we can learn to stop avoiding these stores entirely (I know I'm not the only one who does it) and start thinking more constructively about their future uses. The sooner the better, it would seem.

(Photos from Flickr user austrini, and from bustler.net. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

reUsing the Economy

Recently, I wrote a short spot on scrappers and trashers. It focused on 2 professions, the first belonging largely to illegal immigrants trying to make a living under the radar by picking up scrap metal and selling it to recycling yards, the later focuses on a new industry aimed at vacating foreclosed homes by literally trashing all that remains from the previous inhabitants, including TV's, personal items, and furniture. It went on to compare the two and pose the question, what is right and what it wrong? What is socially accepted, and what is environmentally responsible?

Today, I present to you a third option. An option that I believe reflects the inherent sustainability and opportunity that is present in these times of economic hardship. Richard Bryant is a 62 year old widowed man living in Detroit Michigan. He runs a resale shop out of the ramshackle house next door, selling used good from foreclosed homes and abandoned homes of the deceased. Every two weeks or so Bryant will get a call from a real estate agent who will offer him all the remains from a newly vacated home so long as he clears the house. He then picks up the goods and brings them back to the house next door as new stock for his flourishing resale shop.

Reuse is such a beautiful thing, and to realize that, one must only surpass the stigma that everything good must be new. Braynt has capitalized on this beauty, and those who realize it, will too capitalize by finding great materials at a price simply incomparable to any other. It doesn't require sacrificing quality (often the opposite), it doesn't require parts made by slaves, it simply requires one to disregard a persistent social stigma. And when you buy a reused clock for instance, you can rest assured that you are saving a perfectly good clock from the landfill, that you are saving a new clock from being made (theoretically), and that your clock has a history and a story unlike any other.

The benefits and appeal of reuse are no surprise to those who value the environment, but the real relevance of Bryant's story comes from it's place in today's economic crisis. It fits the bill calling for a new green economy by celebrating wholeheartedly the ideals of reuse. It provides goods at a price which can be obtained by all, including those who have lost their jobs in recent months. Everything is found locally, and transportation is kept to a minimum. But the best part of this story is the fact that Bryant has created his own business, his own initiative, just out of the dilapidated house next door. Without an ounce of business experience, but the drive to keep busy, Bryant grew a grassroots business from the ground up. In the meantime, he has created a life that he is happy with, and unwilling to leave. He provides a truly sustainable service to the community, and operations like these, I believe, lead to stronger, healthier communities and economies. In a time of economic hardship, Bryant has found hope and opportunity in what was previously seen as waste.

(Photo from detroitblog. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Can Buildings Learn?

How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand, is a perceptive study of how the built environment changes over time. Brand draws insight from historic and contemporary buildings to explain why some remain useful and/or well-loved, while others become obsolete. He compliments his examples with wonderful images throughout the book.

Brand points out the double meaning in the word “building” (both noun and verb, action and result) to explain that architecture is not a fixed entity. Thus buildings can evolve toward greater complementarity with their occupants and surroundings. Brand recommends that building processes incorporate this notion of continuous adaptation and improvement with time.

Throughout the book, buildings are discussed in ecological terms. Brand relates “low road” and “high road” development to r- and K- selected species. The low road is associated with rapid cycles of adaptive use and reuse (such as an industrial warehouse converted to a restaurant, then a bar, then apartments). The high road refers to incremental change over generations (such as a mansion cared for lovingly and eventually preserved as a museum). A combination of both approaches can bring about multifaceted environments that are both attractive and useful.

Brand finds that “age plus adaptivity is what makes buildings come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.” People modify the built environment, and in the process discover ways of making buildings last. If the longterm use of buildings is an effective means of conserving resources, the ideas presented in How Buildings Learn have much to contribute to sustainable development.

There is a six-part BBC series on How Buildings Learn posted for free viewing on Google Video (see links to each part below).

1 of 6 - "Flow"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639555925486210852

2 of 6 - "The Low Road"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5088653796598486022

3 of 6 - "Built for Change"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6141960341438553915

4 of 6 - "Unreal Estate"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8761299882173964035

5 of 6 - "The Romance of Maintenance"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5407846553590755822

6 of 6 - "Shearing Layers"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2283224496826631552

(Photo included with permission from William Bernthal. The original full-sized version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Wisdom of the Buck

In honor of the Buckminster Fuller Institute's week of events honoring their namesake (take note, New Yorkers), a quote from the architectural luminary:

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
-- B. Fuller

More @ core77.

Architectural Revision

The term "revision" means, literally, to "see again." And in a recent article for the Toronto Star, Christopher Hume inadvertently showed how revision is sorely missing from the urban design dialog today.

Early in the article, which discusses the gentrification of Toronto's Liberty Village neighborhood: "Speaking of parks, there is virtually no green space anywhere here; perhaps the city should finally grapple with the issue of Lamport Stadium, which is so rarely used it could easily be demolished to make way for a park." And then, shortly thereafter: "recycling...old structures ensures a level of integrity and sustainability vital in an age of global warming."

So what gives, Mr. Hume? Why no love for Lamport Stadium.? Surely, if Vienna can figure out how to turn gasometers into a dazzling residential complex, Toronto can pull off the conversion of a stadium into a park without wasting all of that energy by tearing down the existing structure, no? As the urban affairs critic of the largest newspaper in one of the world's few truly global metropoli, Hume is, by default, a major voice in the current discussion on how cities should evolve. It is telling that he would so quickly dismiss a stadium that would probably be relatively simple to convert to public green space.

Culturally, many of us still think of old buildings as things that should be demolished to make way for that which is new, shiny, and more immediately perceived to be "green." But while converting stolid brick warehouses into luxury condo complexes is all well and good, architectural revision is a field with no horizon. Every underused or unattractive building can be rethought and retrofitted to become something that better serves the needs of a surrounding community. It just takes some spitshine and imagination.

How could Lamport Stadium be revised, as a piece of architecture? While an actual Torontonian would probably have the best answer, let's give it a shot. First off, as can be see in the above image, there is very little physical structure to the stadium. The bulk of the site (the playing field) is at-grade, or at least near it. The elimination of any gates or perimeter walls and the conversion of the obscenely large surface parking lot on the southeastern end of the site would create a sizable, T-shaped open green area that could be made quite lovely by a good landscape architect. The wings of green space that currently flank the stadium could be converted to community playing fields with shaded seating areas under the bleacher structures.

The bleachers themsevles provide the best opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. How could large, clunky concrete structures be revised to serve optimally as part of a public park? While there are many possibilities, the first that comes to mind is: terraced community gardens. With the removal of most or all of the seating and the addition of some permanent soil beds, the porous concrete structures would be the perfect support system for a vertical farm, to be tended by Liberty Village neighbors.

Check out the picture of Lamport Stadium to the right. Cover the steeply-sloped back sides of the bleachers with solar panels or photovoltaics, retrofit what are assumedly locker rooms in the podium under the arched structure, and you've got a zero-energy community center for cold or rainy days. Heck, once you get going, this is more fun than it is challenging.

Revising and rethinking our buildings is a critical step that needs to be taken for us to move closer toward a truly sustainable form of urbanism. What are some strange buildings that could be revised to better serve your city's needs?

(Photos from Google Maps and Flickr user antifuse. The original full-color versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)


Links:
Liberty Village highlights poor planning (Toronto Star)

Creative Recyling: Gasometer City (Treehugger)