The emperor might have beautiful clothes, but what about the shoes?

By 21^st century standards, it would seem like a moot point that buildings in high density downtowns would attempt to have at least some street level engagement, meaning that the ground floor offers something for passers-by to look at beyond a mere blank wall.  Usually this translates to a large window for a display that correlates to the activity inside, and since most people in big cities do not want their private lives to be a stage, residential uses on downtown ground floors are not typically very desirable.  However, most businesses—particularly retail—find it not only desirable but advantageous that pedestrians and motorists can easily peer into their establishments: the only thing better than a good window is an equally conspicuous door nearby.  Thus, many buildings that may otherwise house residences, offices, or even covered parking on the upper levels will still have a gregarious ground floor that establishes a dialogue with the street.  Sometimes the “foot” of the building is the most heavily ornamented, while all the other floors between the foundation and the cornice are a bit more austere or conventional.

A survey of any older downtown district confirms this phenomenon, such as the photo below from Roanoke, Virginia:

 

This perfectly conventional building from, most likely, the latter half of the 19^th century was ubiquitous across American cities up until around 1960.  The dichotomy of large, retail-oriented windows on the ground floor and smaller, more private fenestration on each upper level was a standard building typology of that time.

But it all changed concurrent with the decentralization of American cities after World War II.  Automobile ownership was already advancing rapidly beforehand, with the brief exception of the first few years of the Depression (and after 1933, vehicles per capita in the US resumed climbing, despite the persisting economic malaise).  After the surrender of Japan, American soldiers returned home to take advantage of the GI Bill and moved with their sweethearts to a brand-new house in what was probably farmland before they left to fight the Axis Powers.  Then, together, they commenced in an unprecedented babymaking celebration.  A surge in the economy, the population, the rate of homeownership, and private automobiles culminated in the emergence of a new way of life in which downtowns were increasingly less critical for daily routines.  By the time the overwhelming majority of households owned vehicles in the 1950s, old downtowns were not only passé, the physical form was downright inconvenient.  Floorspace in these old buildings wasn’t large enough for the logistical improvements that allowed for supermarkets.  Living above or in close proximity to work was unnecessary thanks to cars.  Small yards in the homes close to downtown put people unappealingly close to their neighbors.  Downtown streets could not begin to accommodate the level of parking available in a typical shopping mall, out around the cheaper land near all the new housing.

In the 1950s and 60s, urban retail didn’t just evolve in its physical form; the old typology almost completely collapsed.  The most outdated old buildings fell vacant and into disrepair; city leaders often demolished them to offer better parking opportunities in an attempt to bolster downtowns’ accessibility.  New structures often needed so much parking that it had to be stacked on the first few stories, below the office uses.  And since downtown parking demand outpaced the need for these surviving urban structures to offer goods and services, the newest generation of buildings turned away from the streets, reducing or eliminating visible displays or entrances.  Quite a few downtown buildings in the mid 20^th century oriented themselves toward a parking garage, built to one side, connected to another block by a skyway, or perhaps underground.  Meanwhile the street and sidewalk merely hosted service vehicle access or fire escapes, but no primary entrance.

For many readers of this blog, a description of the cataclysmic shift in urban design over fifty years is unwarranted, but even for the unacquainted, it doesn’t take much to get the idea across.  I could provide dozens examples of civic buildings, office towers, parking garages, or even shopping centers that features flout this disregard for city streets and sidewalks, but a particular structure comes to mind for its critical place within its city’s landscape.

Lake Point Tower in Chicago, viewed from the lake in the center of the above photo, is among the city’s most iconic buildings: at the time of its development, the 70-story structure was the tallest residential tower in the world.  To this day, it remains the only Chicago highrise that sits to the east of Lake Shore Drive, on a promontory that also includes the city’s famed tourist attraction, Navy Pier, visible in the lower right corner.  It bears a more than passing resemblance to the Spartan elegance associated with Chicago’s favorite (adopted) architect son, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose Second Chicago School of thought during his tenure at the Illinois Institute of Technology exerted a profound influence on the cityscape during middle of the 20^th Century.  The similarities between Lake Point Tower and the work of Mies should come as no surprise; its architects were among his students.  Different vantage points reinforce the distinctive status of this edifice in relation to the waterfront and neighboring highrises.

The structure borrows heavily from Mies’ Bauhaus movement origins, which deliberately sought to avoid engagement with the landscape or local vernacular in an attempt (at least to some degree) to transcend it; thus it earned the uncomfortable nickname “International Style”.  Though the style fell out of favor in the last quarter of the 20^th century for exuding more than a whiff of elitism, the disassociation with place and regional culture certainly gives Lake Point Tower a majesty that underlies the luxury of the residential units inside.  And if it seems regal now, one can only imagine what it looked like when first constructed 45 years ago.  In 1968, it felt even more like an island: Chicago’s central business district was declining, as was the case across the country.  While the city’s above-average public transit system precluded the need for as many parking lots and garages as most Midwestern cities, much of the central city struggled to retain offices and shops, let alone residences.  Lake Point Tower was a risky enterprise—a relative orphan in the Streeterville neighborhood, capitalizing on remarkable multi-directional views of both the Loop and the skyline.  After the residential boom that began in Streeterville and other parts of Chicago’s CBD in the 1980s, Lake Point Tower stopped seeming so lonely.  But the evidence remains powerful of the time period in which it was conceived.  While it often looks fantastic from the water or zipping by on Lake Shore Drive to its west, the other, more pedestrian scaled access roads paint a different picture:

Nothing but a big blank wall across most of the Illinois Street frontage, with the exception of a tiny convenience-type retail opening at the green awning.  The Grand Avenue frontage on the north side of the tower is much the same way: virtually no engagement with the street.  Pedestrians have virtually nothing to look at as they walk by, which might not be such a concern if it were a particularly sleepy or attractionless part of town.  But it isn’t.  Throngs gather at Navy Pier just a block to the east, particularly when the weather is nice.

Thus, the designers of Lake Point Tower missed out on a critical opportunity to divert the attention of passers-by.  Pedestrians in the area, many of which are tourists, would easily have patronized shops and restaurants along Illinois Street or Grand Avenue, so it perfectly embodies a failure to capitalize on the commercial possibilities afforded by this premier urban location.

In the tower’s defense, it is a product of its time.  The architects did not take the designs of pre-war commercial buildings to heart, because in 1968, they were by and large irrelevant.  Lake Point Tower was an investment risk when central cities across the nation hemorrhaged jobs, burned-out swathes reminded everyone of escalating social unrest, and both petty and crime increasingly dominated the news headlines.  Downtown Chicago had plenty of highrises in 1968, but it could not boast a great number of residential high-rises.  Many people living downtown back then were looking for ways out.  Thus, this tower responded to the social climate by turning inward.  It still offers the luxuries its target demographic would expect—a pool, park, playground, shops and restaurants—but they first (and sometimes exclusively) serve the residents under the shared roof.  Dwellers of this tower could function for days without leaving the building’s grounds; an elevator would be all they need. The gourmet restaurants might attract outsiders in order to break even, but they cannot rely on display windows for promotion, and the outside world that chooses to patronize them will probably get there by car.

Lake Point Tower is hardly unworthy of its pivotal role along the Chicago lakefront, as well as its many firsts.  But from an urban design standpoint, its imperfections create what almost amounts to blight on the streetscape.  It may still be luxurious, but it did not place among the top 10 priciest condo buildings last year, and as Streeterville and Near North neighborhoods have invited dozens of other luxury high-rise condo, apartment and hotel developments in the ensuing decades since 1968, most subsequent towers have consciously engaged with the street and sidewalk, as evidenced by the photo below:

Developers have nothing to gain by pasting a blank wall across the ground floor of their buildings, and these days, most new construction recognizes this, even in downtowns with less of an active street life than Chicago.  Many cities remain too decentralized to warrant a store-lined first floor on every downtown street—after all, the suburbs remain the retail hub for most of metropolitan America, despite some recentralizing activity in the last twenty years.  However, most architects, developers, and city planners know better than allow blank walls to permeate new construction; a superficial window display with public art or an advertisement still offers a vast improvement.  Lake Point Tower will probably remain a Chicago icon for decades to come, but its admirers will reserve their kindest words when describing it—and viewing it—from a distance.

The college paints the town anything but red.

The phrase infill development can loosely refer to a wide variety of approaches with the overriding aim of introducing (or reintroducing) a higher density of habitable buildings into a mature, already established built environment. In most cases, the surrounding infrastructure for an infill parcel has long been in place, the adjacent properties are at least partially if not completely built, and zoning regulations already encourage a particular kind of land use. Usually the infill target is a vacant lot, often which previously hosted a structure that has since been demolished. Sometimes the parcel was simply an inadequate size or an unusual shape, precluding it from getting developed to the same degree as its neighbors; other times the zoning is too stringent and prohibits what a developer may perceive to be the highest and best use of the land. But infill does not apply just to vacant parcels. The phrase “highest and best use” suggests some sort of intervention if property is perceived to be underutilized as well. For example, in successful town centers, high property value and high density of structures usually benefit from co-dependency when viewed through the lens of land economics. That is, because the cost of land in a sought-after downtown is high, it becomes far more prudent to build intensely in such a district, which usually results in vertical development, since that’s the only way to squeeze in lots of leasable area on a small parcel. The high concentration of economic activity in these clusters of towering structures downtown helps to attract other developers and further escalating demand for a finite stretch of land. The densest, most valuable urban real estate in the US has little room for one-story buildings like warehouses or most strip malls, and even lower tolerance for surface parking lots. Thus, the replacement of a parking lot, a squat relic from the industrial heyday, or a privately managed green space with a tall structure with the potential to generate greater revenue also constitutes infill development.

In principle, the typical infill project should serve as a win-win situation for both public and private interests: the developers get to build in a usually already desirable area without incurring much of the cost of infrastructure (since most of it has already been installed long ago); the public sector gets to add a more valuable piece of real estate into its tax rolls. Yet infill projects still tend to be highly controversial across much of the US, with adjacent property owners typically raising the loudest objections. Why would they fight a development that will most likely help sustain high property values in the area while further dispersing the tax burden across a greater number of owners? The problem is that infill indisputably adds density to the district, and Americans intrinsically distrust density. While such an assertion may seem to paint the populace with a brush that is both broad and steeped in vinegar, the evidence that Americans eschew density is everywhere, and I’m not intending this statement as a criticism. The majority of American cities—particularly the older, eastern ones that predate the automobile—have largely been shrinking for more than a half century. Though rural America has depopulated as well, it is not out of the farmers’ desire to move to the city; both rural and urban dwellers have fled en masse to the low density suburbs. The US has always boasted incredible stretches of sparsely inhabited land; even as the population exceeds 300 million, it can still make this claim. But by most other countries’ standards, even the cities themselves boast vast expanses with few or no people. American cities are, on average, among the least densely inhabited in the world. In many regards, it is an achievement: a product of such aggregate wealth that we can afford to live and function with great distances between one another. It is a triumph of self-actualization. But low density also undercuts the ability for cities, often limited in their capacity to grow through annexation, to continue to administer and function effectively when people demand to live far away from one another, often outside of the municipal boundaries altogether.

The result of this aversion to density is manifest in the numerous complaints and challenges to infill development. It will cause ungodly amounts of traffic in the area. It will spark an increase in crime. It will deprive the children of outdoor space in which to play. Many remonstrators have even claimed that it will lower property values. Though such a notion goes against the fundamental intent of infill, such objections may at a micro level (both spatially and temporally) be true: if the prevailing culture of the district is anti-density, the act of shoehorning density will only undercut the overall appeal of the area and may lower demand for property. (Then again, it could attract a new demographic specifically drawn to such density.) A trick of the trade among developers who work in already high density areas is that they must inflate the leasable area of a building beyond their goal for profitability, because they will always have to cut back the density when the neighbors raise objections through their council members. Thus, a developer seeking to build a six story building on a neglected parking lot in an a tightly-knit middle class neighborhood will likely initially propose eight or nine stories; otherwise, if he or she begins with a six-story proposal, the neighbors will probably try to whittle it down to only four.

I know next to nothing about the development history of the building from the photo below, taken during a brief visit to Blacksburg, Virginia last year. I don’t even recall enough of where it’s located to attempt any research.

But I can draw conclusions based on what I know about the surrounding area. Blacksburg is unquestionably a college town, hosting Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech, the largest and most recognized higher learning institution in the southwest of the state. With a population of around 42,600 (by the 2010 Census) and a university enrollment of over 30,000 there can be no doubt that Virginia Tech is the lifeblood of the city and region’s economy.

College towns are typically more amenable to densification of the built environment than other communities of similar size. And densification is exactly what it would appear this building has achieved, since it is obviously a newer structure than either of its neighbors; it was inserted in the vacant lot between them.

The sociological conditions here are simply suitable for infill: the large student population results in a significant constituency that will only live there for a limited time and does not usually concern itself with the long-term impacts of developmental changes, particularly if they occur outside the campus boundaries. Students are rarely homeowners in towns like Blacksburg. In addition, they are far less likely to be vehicle owners: while I saw plenty of cars clearly registered under University parking, the fact remains that, common to most campuses, a preponderance of students get around by foot or bicycle. A pedestrian dominated city is more likely to see further density as an asset (one additional building that is within walking distance), and the increased density is just as likely to attract bicycles and walkers as it is to attract cars.

I’m not entirely certain on the developmental aim of this building. The fenestration doesn’t make it a dead giveaway as an apartment on the upper two floors. Though that’s what I expect it to be, the building doesn’t advertise itself as apartments, which could have proven a mistake in a city filled with renters. Why be subtle about it in an area where apartments are rarely stigmatized? Conversely, the different pattern of windows, the wooden signage, and the shaded patio seating all suggest that the first floor hosts some other retail use. The one jarring feature of this structure is the fire escape:

Fitting it between the new building and the adjacent blue house was quite a challenge. As one of the earlier photos reveals, the eaves of the two structures are butting up against one another. The owners of this house next door would have had just cause to complain about a deteriorated view—if they cared enough. However, I would have guessed this blue house to be a subdivided apartment building, filled with not-too-particular students and run by a landlord who knows that his backpack toting clients are rarely all that choosy. Regardless, this jungle gym of a fire escape also provides an unusual backdrop for patio seating that isn’t likely to appeal to many; the umbrellas offering shade are probably unnecessary most of the time, since a patio wedged in like this won’t usually receive too much sunlight. Wouldn’t it have been better to flip the building 180 degrees, placing the patio and the fire escape next to the shorter, virtually windowless brick structure on the other side? Then again, the targeted student customer does not usually put much stock in aesthetics of living conditions; they have the rest of their lives to worry about that, most likely in another city.

It’s hard to imagine anyone falling in love with this building from an architectural standpoint, yet it manages to offer commercial and (presumably) residential space just a cartwheel away from the campus—in the middle of a block, of all things. By most metrics it would appear to be a successful infill development. It hosts a mix of uses and contributes to Blacksburg’s tax base. And while it is possible that the neighbors subjected it to greater design scrutiny than I’m assuming, one might guess how it would have turned out if a throng of adjacent property owners had nitpicked the original plans due to some of the weaknesses that I have pointed out. Infill might sprout up more easily in a fertile, permissive culture, but the result isn’t necessarily “highest and best” from a design standpoint. Those NIMBYs that developers and planners both like to castigate could very well have steered this project in a far more prudent direction for long-term viability, which is why the development world continues to pursue infill in fiercely protected urban historical districts that support high density, despite the inevitable “Think of the children!” opposition that it nearly always encounters.

The safety of objects.

The escalation of airport security after September 11th has unambiguously complicated air travel. Hardly a year has gone by since that tragic day without the introduction of a new major regulation, generally enforced by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). The use of small box-cutters to intimidate the passengers of the four hijacked airplanes prompted the FAA to expand its restrictions on knives—formerly permissible if the blades were less than four inches long—so that no blades of any sort were allowed. This new regulation became a mandate just a day after the attacks , and restrictions since then have been, for the most part, cumulative. The most significant initiative took place on November 19, 2001—in time for the busy holiday travel season—when Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which officially formed the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Although the breadth and intensity of control of the FAA (under the Department of Transportation) still transcends all other aviation-related authorities—after all, it was the FAA’s decision that halted all air travel for a few days after 9/11—passengers are far more likely to experience a regulatory onus through their more routine engagement with the TSA. (Though also initially under the authority of the Department of Transportation, the Administration saw its authority shift in 2003 to the Department of Homeland Security, which was also created as a direct consequence of the September 11th attacks, under the original name of the Office of Homeland Security.) The TSA radically transformed the implementation of airline security, beginning with a fundamental nationalization of the process, which, prior to 9/11, usually involved airport authorities contracting out the passenger screening task to private companies. Though some of the earliest regulations appear relatively subtle from the passengers’ perspectives—criminal background screenings on 750,000 airport employees, locked cockpit doors, reduced partitions between first class and business class passengers—the majority of them directly affect the customer base, because the passengers are the target of federal scrutiny. Almost anyone who has flown in the past decade is familiar with the regulatory additions: sophisticated metal and explosive detectors, x-rays, and lighting to determine authentic watermarks on drivers’ licenses or other personal ID. Many of the interventions have forced passengers to change their behavior: removing their shoes and belts, discarding all liquids bought from outside the airport, bagging personal toiletries under three ounces (anything larger is prohibited), undergoing far more frequent hand inspections of bags and even occasional frisking from TSA authorities. Enhanced security staffing has allowed the employment of body pattern recognition (BPR), so that passengers exhibiting suspicious behavior—excessive sweating, thick clothes on a warm day, use of pay phones—may undergo additional questioning. Following the failed attempt on Christmas Day 2009 by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear, the recent announcement that airports would expand the use and availability of full-body scanners was more remarkable by how little controversy it aroused, even as civil libertarians have criticized numerous initiatives since 9/11 for privacy violations.

To a large extent, Americans have adapted to these restrictions with unusual reticence, most likely interpreting them as necessary precautions in the interest of national security and the prevention of another attack at the magnitude of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The most obvious burden the restrictions have imposed is one of time—it is no longer possible to arrive at a flight 20 minutes prior to departure. The TSA screening process, at its smoothest, will usually still take at least 10 minutes, and depending on passenger traffic (which often varies during different times in a single day), can last approximately an hour. Even smaller airports often induce a significant queue, particularly since they engage in the more nationally regularized process with fewer TSA staff. Most airlines recommend arriving at an airport 75 to 90 minutes in advance of departure, while checking in at least 30 minutes in advance. In an effort to abide by the restrictions, airline revenues have floundered over the past decade, instigated at least in part by the crippling FAA suspension on all civilian air travel in the days immediately after the attack, though escalating oil prices and the economic downturn have subsequently contributed to the airline industry’s woes. To counter these rising costs, airlines have stripped away benefits such as on-flight meals while adding fees for checked luggage. Neither of these policies, of course, makes air travel any more appealing to customers, and they only add to the accumulation of annoyances originally induced by TSA’s demands during the security screening process. At the end of 2009, the chief executives of several major airlines many airlines have argued that consumers’ perceptions of the inconvenience of flying may have had more of an impact on the industry than travelers’ concerns about another hijacking or bombing attempt. Prospective passengers have undoubtedly weighed the advantages of air travel versus automobile, bus, or rail travel, in terms of additional embedded or elective fees, and on-trip amenities. But the biggest variable undoubtedly remains temporal: all of these inconveniences amount to more time a passenger must invest in a flight, to the extent that short-haul trips between major airports such as JFT to BOS may take longer than a car, train, or bus ride. Maneuvering through the safety gauntlet slows customers down enough that airlines lose their biggest advantage: speed of travel.

Time from A to B isn’t the only dimension to suffer in the wake of September 11th. These intensified security measures have exerted spatial implications as well, and airports can suffer profoundly. The new equipment, increased personnel, elongated queues, and partitions take up much more space than the “old-fashioned” passenger screening measures, and my guess is that the smaller airports, with far less available floor space, suffer the brunt of these initiatives. Woodrum Field, the regional airport of Roanoke, Virginia (ROA), shows what happens when the primary terminal is unprepared for radical changes:

This photo represents nearly the entirety of the airport’s one concourse, visible as soon as a passenger emerges from the TSA security station. It isn’t large, of course, but that’s not a surprise, considering the airport serves a metro area of only 300,000 persons.
Here’s the overhead sign which I was standing under in the first photo:

Notice that it lists six gates. Immediately to my left and slightly behind the point I was standing (back toward the airport’s entrance) is the busy Gate 2:

But if I look over to my right, what do I see? The glass partition separating me from the people who are still making it past the Transportation Security Administration. Far more telling is the label directly above the partition:

It would appear that the sprawling security configuration induced from 9/11 takes up an entire gate. The last two pictures demonstrate this more clearly:


Roanoke Regional Airport apparently had to sacrifice one of its six gates for enhanced security procedures. It’s possible that such a shift amounted to no more than an administrative blip for the Roanoke Airport Authority. After all, the Roanoke metro is only growing modestly, at less than 4% since 2000. And, the number of enplanements at ROA declined over 5% from CY 2008, falling below 300,000 in CY 2009. But if two days of universally suspended flights after September 11 was enough for some airlines to skirt bankruptcy, one can imagine how sensitive the entire aviation industry is toward minor changes, and removing 16.6% of an airport’s available gates is hardly minor. The results of this cut undoubtedly impacted the airlines’ ability to schedule flights, as well as the timing of liftoffs on ROA’s two runways. Airlines most likely had to reduce the number of flights available during the day, juggle the times at which flights could arrive at the airport, or compress the headways between flights for the ones with highest demand, resulting in a greater likelihood of delays due to less cushion time between flights. If things got too bad at ROA, some prospective passengers may opt for other airports in the region, such as Lynchburg Regional Airport down the road (LYH), particularly if the later airport had a design that didn’t need to cut a gate to make room for new TSA regulations. While nearly all airports across the country have suffered declining passenger volumes over the past couple years, it is possible that having six gates available would have at least mitigated some of Roanoake’s diminishing enplanements. Falling passenger numbers and fewer available gates could ultimately influence some of the City of Roanoke’s own economic development initiatives, since passenger volume numbers generally correlate heavily to a region’s sphere of economic influence.

This blog article does not intend to lambast the FAA, TSA, DHS or any of the other acronyms that have engendered the culture of aviation security we can observe today. The fact that attempted terrorist attacks on airplanes persist nearly a decade after the planes crashed into the Pentagon and WTC indicates that expansive and adaptive security measures are still worthwhile. But top-down initiatives elicit a bottom-up response that rarely meshes perfectly with the intended results. It is just as possible that other airports in the country had to make even greater spatial sacrifices in the interest of security; imagine what would have happened to an airport that had to sacrifice one of only two gates. Some safety measures incur the greatest cost at the point of installation, such as the square reflective devices embedded in streets that I blogged about earlier. Others have long-term implications. In the case of Roanoke Regional Airport, the culpability may rest on the TSA, or with the original aviation architects who failed to design a concourse that could adapt to changes. The wisest resolution would avoid ascribing blame and simply allow the airport authority and the airlines to continue collaborating to provide passengers with the most efficient mode of transit available, even if, someday, our TSA passenger screening stations require enough space to hold a passenger’s dressing rooms.