Between the Lines, 2009

Letter to Editor, The Architect’s Newspaper, 2009-11-04

I applaud The Architect’s Newspaper for covering NYC’s new Street Design Manual, David Byrne’s new Bicycle Diaries book, plans for Greenwich South, and the editorial on rerouting car traffic through Times Square, all in recent issues. I think it is worth noting that all these subjects have been, for the last 70 odd years, the province of transportation planners and traffic engineers (how one actually “engineers” traffic is a bit of mystery to me). And our cities’ streets have suffered accordingly. For a good history, read The Pedestrian and City Traffic by Carmen Haus-Klau (Wiley & Sons, 1990).

But can we lay blame solely at planners’ and engineers’ feet? Where have architects been since Corbu proffered his mission of the city as speed machine? As Moshe Safdie wrote in The City After the Automobile (Basic Books, 1997): By the 1990s, “…the isolated pursuit of architectural form had become both plausible and respectable in schools and in practice.” One byproduct is architecture ignoring “…what often appear[s] to be overwhelmingly related transportation problems.” Perhaps (and I hope) we are witnessing a reengagement of architects with the land between buildings.