Writing - Architecture & Urbanism

Hotels play a significant role in global real estate.  While occupying significantly less space than offices and somewhat less space than retail, hotels have continued to grow and new hotels have been built as global travel for business and pleasure continues to increase.  As this has occurred, hotels have had to renovate and build to suit the specific demands of different traveler types that have changed significantly over the last couple of decades.  While hotel rooms must still fulfill the same basic functions as they have for the last hundred years, they have followed trends in apartment buildings that have seen rooms shrink and demands for amenities grow.  New hotels tend to have more space for socializing.  The lobby, once a transient zone reserved for checking in and out, has become a place to hang out, work, and take a meeting.  A wider range of restaurants and bars are being offered and amenities such as game rooms, libraries, and fitness centers are becoming increasingly common.  At the same time, rooms are becoming more interesting and highly designed as hoteliers compete to attract an increasingly style-conscious generation of business and leisure travelers.

This book presents the architectural work of FGP Atelier Founder Francisco Gonzalez Pulido from the years leading up to the founding of FGP Atelier. I was involved editing the book and conducting the interview with Gonzalez Pulido that opens the book. I was also collaborated with FGP Atelier COO, Gergana Gonzalez Pulido, on the graphic design of the book.

Architecture and fashion – specifically, the fashion of how people are clad – have a long and complex relationship.  Each has influenced the other in a variety of manners ranging from the way in which a space serves as a stage on which new fashions can appear to how fashion is influenced by a design philosophy embodied in an architectural style.  The colors, patterns, forms, degrees of elaboration of clothing have influenced wall covering, drapery, and the overall style of rooms.  The habit of hosting large dinners and balls, parties and salons, has shaped the form that historic domiciles have taken.  The broader lifestyle of bedrooms, dressing rooms, morning rooms, game rooms, drawing rooms, receiving halls, kitchens, and servants’ rooms could all said to be closely linked to what is considered fashionable and the broader habits of a given society.  

The notion of a “site” has become something architects fixate upon.  We yearn for a potential client to identify a site in order to begin developing intriguing concepts to help win the job.  We analyze the ecology, orientation, mobility infrastructure, utilities, history, cultural traditions, habits, and broader urban context in which the site exists.  In doing so, we think about the program, allowable building density, building traditions, and overall goals of the client.  In some cases, we may consider the buildings that still exist on the site or that have existed on the site in the past.  Generally, the site that we are given is in a desirable location.  It is a place that a group has determined is of value.  This value is often directly tied to the program that the client hopes to bring to the site.  Further, this value is tied to the inhabitants who will animate the program when the building is complete.  The location must conform to their expectations, desires, need for security, proximity to other activities, and broader cultural tradition defining how they interact with each other and the city.  If these conditions can be fulfilled by a particular location, then it is determined that the site can support the often considerable investment required to create a new structure.

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This essay is not going to be about how to take comprehensive steps to help retail establishments address an impending crisis that not only threatens a range of brands and real estate concerns with bankruptcy, but the viability of the entire economy.  Retail Therapy by Mark Pilkington provides a powerful exploration of such concerns and is an advisable resource for anyone who is interested in addressing the underlying challenges facing retail.  This essay will instead look at how the crisis facing retail is playing out urbanistically, in terms of design, and spatially.  This will involve exploring the historic position within the city, the power that product, display, and store design has had to drive interest from consumers, and the recent trends leading up to the current crisis.  With this understanding in hand, we will then be able to begin to ask how design and city planning can contribute to a broader revitalization of retail.  This will allow us to go beyond asking how retail can be revitalized to asking how we can deal with the tremendous vacancies and threat to real estate value that a shift to online sales implies.  In the end, we hope to offer a set of scenarios for how traditional retail space on main streets and in malls might be used that extends from historic habits, while also being grounded in future trends of how we live and consume as well as our broader desire and goals for ourselves, local community, country, and world.

Like almost every aspect of the United States economy – from education to health care to prisons and all forms of communication and even social interaction – the investment in new infrastructure, neighborhoods, and real estate more broadly has become increasingly driven by demands for ever higher profits.  While real estate developers have always been driven by making money on the space they create, there was a time during the last hundred years when the government invested more heavily in new infrastructure (such as the Interstate Highway System and many urban transportation systems that were built as well as the countless bridges, tunnels, and dams) and when more investment was being made in affordable and public housing through building new units and rent control.  This period was one of tremendous growth of suburbs throughout the country coupled with unprecedented economic prosperity and considerable population growth.  The era allowed many who grew up in crowded inner city conditions to find an escape in new spatious light filled homes with lawns and attached garages.  At the same time, the migration to the suburbs caused many neighborhoods in cities across the country to decline.  The process was further precipitated by racial politics that encouraged segregation and white residents to flee.  

Too often, the work that takes place to build and re-build our cities occurs in isolated parcels of varying scales driven by the ambitions of real estate developers to create new space through investment in order to ultimately make a profit.  Spending directly by city governments mostly takes the form of infrastructure maintenance or tax incentives to developers to build projects.  Rarely does a cohesive vision for city or regional planning emerge.  The result is often the perception of urban development driven by speculation leading to higher rents, taxes, and gentrification that can force existing residents out.  At the same time, it is important to realize that through new developments, the tax base can increase, developers can support the construction of new infrastructure, and can help active previously dormant sections of the city, bridge disconnected parts, and ignite new vibrant urban life. The conversation is particularly charged in the context of projects that have received national attention and considerable criticism such as Hudson Yards as well as a national affordable housing crisis that is making it difficult for many people to live near their jobs or in neighborhoods their families have called home for many decades.  Hudson Yards in particular has been criticized for creating a series of uninspired buildings surrounding an ultra-luxurious shopping mall.  Even The Vessel that could have been seen as a positive contribution to the cultural landscape of New York has been met with skepticism as a result of its extreme cost, void like form, and lack of a clearly positive impact in a city beset by extreme and increasing inequality.  The one exception to this criticism is The Shed that many view as a much needed space that fills rather than creates a void in the cultural landscape.  

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The general inability to offer broad strategies for solving the growing crisis of affordable housing in America is related to a propensity to look at one aspect of the problem rather than exploring the interconnected web of past and present variables that go into defining the complexities of the problem of creating and offering housing at a cost that is aligned with income, jobs, location, and generally what people can afford to pay for a dwelling unit as related to other costs of living.  We too often accept the parameters of the object that we want to create and the place in which we want to create it without fully understanding the multitude of forces that go into making that figure and the ground on which it sits.  The history and lessons of how housing has been subsidized via government backed mortgages, concentration of low-income families in high-rise buildings, and programs that offer tax incentives to developers are often overlooked in the context of specific new housing plans that seek to address a small portion of the demand and offer a specific return for a particular constituency. At the same time, the entangled history of housing and racial discrimination, zoning laws guiding development and neighborhoods that develop a particular character and type of resident, systems of value that drive what we want out of a housing unit, and the way in which we build community and transform our world through technics and work are often considered outside of the immediate task of developing a design that can be built at a low cost.  We should seek to fully analyze how the cost of other goods and services impacts what one can afford to pay for housing.  The cost and benefits of transportation, digital, and social networks should be considered.  We should also consider integrating new housing into employment channels.  Most importantly, we should think beyond the division between affordable and market rate housing in order to arrive at a situation where all housing is affordable and it is seen as a right not a privilege.

A number of trends exist in architectural practice.  These range from the continuing process of globalization, the media attention placed on architects that encourages differentiation, and the continued dominance of the icons that result in the need to grapple with the productization of space, prefabrication, and affordability.  In discussing these concerns, architects, critics, and theorists often speak directly to the current problem and the way that the primary parties frame it.  They rarely look at the broader theoretical foundation on which the architect may have built their practice and how that theoretical foundation is playing out in the present work.  In the process, criticism and interpretation run the risk of remaining confined to a particular realm of the world, how we inhabit it, way of talking about building, and capacity to get something out of the space in which we live.  In this sense, conversations often reference a small subset of discourse without considering the expanded field that determines the conditions of that subset.  This conversation fails to take into account the series of translations that take place between different levels and spheres of discourse, material flows, political authorities, subjectivities, temporal structures, purposes, ends, and frameworks of judgement that together have profound consequences on how we conceptualize space, inhabit it, and encounter something called architecture along the way.

The consequence of this omission is that we often find ourselves confronted with an investment that has been made in something that the owners and builders consider to be architecture, but that those who will ultimately inhabit it do not like.  This is essentially a situation where a particular collection of subjects do not want to live their lives within the sway of a particular architect author.  While one could say that they should just escape to another locale, doing so runs the risk of negating a particular investment as well as opens the possibility of a broader disjunction that could exclude a vast range of people from a capacity to influence how the space they inhabit is designed.  Further, by cutting off people from determining what is architecture, it opens the possibility that the work of architects becomes increasingly focused on problems that are internal to architecture and divorced from the problems of people.  If the works of architecture are intended to serve some higher purpose and function in an elevated manner for the inhabitants, it also cuts people off from such contact and how that contact can function for us all.