Our Motto:

You've got to hack your way through a lot of lunchmeat in this world.

Train-Wreck Urbanism at Skidmore

     With its new North Woods dorms, completed last year, Skidmore College had a chance to create an ensemble of buildings deployed coherently on the landscape, but opted instead to build something like a Houston subsidized housing complex using a method we call train-wreck urbanism.
     What do we mean by this? That the buildings are arranged arbitrarily on the site the way railroad cars would end up after a train wreck, strewn this way and that way, with no attempt to define public space, let alone decorate or embellish it. If the buildings are oriented to anything, it's to their parking lots.
     The degeneration of standards and norms, combined with historical amnesia, is now nearly universal in America, so it's not surprising to see those in corporate education doing as bad a job developing new buildings as the people who bring you subsidized housing, corporate fried food, and retail shopping.
     How might they do it differently? Look at the photos of traditional campus quadrangles from the period before the Second World War:

     This one is Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. Notice the principal feature here: formality. And the main objective of that formality: to successfully define public space: in this case the central campus commons. It is strongly defined first by simple geometry. The quad is a rectangle. The buildings are lined up to compose a "street wall" that function like the walls of an outdoor living room. Orderly rows of street trees reinforce the definition of space. The end result is a large outdoor living room. The buildings facing the commons are the most important and monumental ones. This is good, traditional design. Here's another:

     This photo of a Cornell quad makes essentially the same point. But here you can see how well the buildings form a "street wall" defining one edge of the quad. The trees could have been planted with more formality. These are unnecessarily arbitrary. Here's a campus from a foreign land:

     These are the "backs" of the buildings at Newnham College, Cambridge, England. Again, note not only how well the space is defined, but the unity of the architectural elements that do the work of defining it: red brick and white-painted trim, executed with care, artistry, and restraint.
     Now look at Skidmore College's new dorm "complex" (as we call anything with more than one building).

     Okay, ask yourself: how is public space defined here? The answer is: not in any meaningful way. It's not even clear which side of any building is the front or the back. The leftover scraps of land are treated as mere buffering devices -- as though the dorm "complex" and its accessory car infrastructure, were toxic and needed to be be quarantined from the rest of the campus and the adjoining woods.

Notice the pointless "change of materials" from the brick base to the other material above (we're not even sure if its wood or plastic or an epoxy composite). This is a cheap trick that architects use to try and make essentially boring buildings seem more interesting. It only emphasizes their banality.Take a look at the side elevations of these two buildings (arrows). How do the elements of one little window and a lot of plain undecorated siding address the public realm? What architectural language or grammar do these buildings employ? What do they tell us about our history and culture -- not much, except that we are cheap and artless. Note arrow at right. Here's another trick the architects like: breaking up a boring roof line into smaller units for no real structural reason. This is supposed to make all the units seem unique, but it only makes them look more the same. For those of you who think lack of landscaping is the problem, be advised that hiding the buildings behind shrubs and trees is not the remedy for bad architecture or bad urban design.

     This was the site plan as prepared by the architectural firm of Einhorn Yaffe. The "train wreck" elements can be seen clearly.
     We rate this project an "F."  There's a lot of yammer on Skidmore College's own web site about how "green" this development is. Green public relations is the new fad in corporate life (and Skidmore is a corporation). Corporations all over America are now desperately blowing green smoke up the rear ends of their shareholders, customers, and auditors. Whatever Skidmore may think they have accomplished in the way of "green" building materials, or "green" heating-and-cooling, or "green" lighting, you can be sure these lame gestures have been obviated by the choice to create just another car-oriented and car-dependent "train-wreck" housing "complex." The college has also completely failed to create a memorable place worth caring about. The school's previous foray into apartment-building, Scribner Village, back in the 1970s, also pretended to be "environmental" by employing board-and-batten wood siding. The college now regards Scribner Village as "decrepit" (they say so on their own web site) and they say it now has to be replaced. Get this: the energy-scarce future we are entering will require us to build things that last for more than thirty years.
     The sad part about all this is that it was not necessary to have such a disappointing outcome for the North Woods project. A little attention to history and cultural tradition might have prompted Skidmore's administrators to insist on something better.

We really like this new local blog:
I-Saratoga

It's very nicely written by somebody who calls himself "Horatio Alger" (and we have no idea who he is). Witty, cheeky, and well-researched.

Check it out yourself.

Review: the Mabee Building (Adirondack Trust) on Church Street

     In traditional urban design, many of the buildings in a given town can be described as "background" buildings. They are not great civic monuments and were never intended to be. They don't try to make "great statements," nor do they have to -- though they can certainly express the personal pride of the owner by way of good design. There's no rule that they can't be elaborately ornamented, or built of wonderful materials, and historically many of our background buildings show high levels of artistry. Think of the Arcade Building on Broadway or the Algonquin. At the more modest end of the scale, notice how the rather plain Roohan Building (Putnam Market) has taken its place in the background of our main street. You hardly notice it anymore. It does its job nicely in the background of Broadway's greater "main street" context.
     The new Adirondack Trust building on Church would typologically be a background building -- except for the peculiarities of its site. it was built next to a vacant lot on one side -- now used for surface parking -- and is set back from Woodlawn Avenue by a little plaza on the other side, intended to preserve an historical remnant of the old railroad right-of-way. There's not much background for the new building to fit into.
      At five stories, it also pushes up against the limit of appropriate normal height in downtown Saratoga. So it really stands out. There is barely any transition from the buildings coming down the block from Broadway, either (The Country Kitchen, the Post Office, etc). Crammed behind it is a massive parking deck. The builder was Bast-Hatfield and the architect was Saratoga's Tom Frost.
      We'll say this for it: it doesn't pretend to be a bunch of separate buildings. It's a unified design. The bays are just bays, and don't affect to be anything else. The facade facing Church Street is dignified and formal. It's not rotated at any strange angle to make it look "sporty." It's pretty clear what's the front and what's the back. The materials are straightforward and comprehensible. there's an attempt to create some interest with different types of windows -- and for the most part the windows are properly vertical. The building has a base, a middle and a top. There are pediments and a cornice line, and arches over the top-floor windows. These are all pretty good for a background building. Finally, standing where it does, the building effectively terminates the vista of Railroad Place at Church.

 Our only beef is that the ventilation and air conditioning mechanicals are visible above the roof from even a very acute angle on the street. This shows we have not given up one of the more unfortunate habits of 20th century architecture -- the tendency to forsake the roof line.  We have to take more care with this.
      At some point in the 21st century, when car storage is not such a big issue, the surface lot just west of the Mabee building on Church Street may become what the Deity intended it to be, a building lot, and then the Mabee building will have a little company on the street, more context to form a background to be part of.
      One thing I like to think: on snowy evenings around Christmas-time, when the sun has already gone down, people will be able to look up and see lights burning in offices of the new building, and it will give them the feeling that the town is more alive at its center than it was a year ago, when there was nothing there.

Long Emergency Notes du Jour

     The price of oil (in the $70s) is about double what it was when The Long Emergency first came out. The colossal edifice of miracle mortgage mischief that led to the housing bubble is now veering toward an unprecedented crash in real estate values and sales. The investment markets are wobbling as shock waves from non-performing loans shake the mile-high stacks of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized loan debt obligations, and all of the other Frankenstein investment instruments creatively engineered in the climactic orgy of cheap energy capitalism. The polar ice caps are toast (pardon the mixed metaphor) but you can apply to Al Gore for more details on climate change. (We're believers.)
     In the past couple of years those paying attention to the oil scene have developed a deeper understanding of the oil production picture out there. Virtually all oil producers have made it clear that they are in terminal depletion (that is, past peak) except for secretive Saudi Arabia -- though their production figures speak for themselves, falling from 9.6 million-barrels-a-day in 2006 to 8.4 m/b/d so far in 2007. (And the suspicion is that Saudi Arabia's once-mighty Ghawar oil field is in decline.) The North Sea is in steep decline, ditto Alaska. Russia is verging on a steep production drop. Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, Kuwait, the UAE, are all past peak.
     Meanwhile, Something very interesting and rather ominous is resolving out of blizzard of statistics, reports, scenarios, and competing interests in the background. This is the oil export crisis.
     It is now apparent that oil exporting nations are seeing their exports falling at a much steeper rate than their production declines. The aggregate global oil production decline is running between 3 to 5 percent annually now, but the export decline is running above 7 percent. In five years, it may be as high as 50 percent. That means the major importing nations (the US, Europe, Japan, China, India) will only be getting half the imports they get now -- and bear in mind that the US imports more than two-thirds of the oil we use.
     The poster-child for this problem -- as far as the US is concerned -- is Mexico. 60 percent of Mexico's oil production comes out of a single super-giant field, Cantarell, off the Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico. Cantarell is the second largest oil field ever discovered (after Saudi Arabia's Ghawar). It came into production relatively late in the oil age and was subject to very aggressive drilling with the latest technology (horizontal bores, gas injections to keep pressure up) with the result that it was only depleted more efficiently. The aggressive production may have also damaged its geologic structure. The net result now is that production out of Cantarell is crashing very steeply, at a minimum of 15 percent a year. That means in six or seven years, Cantarell is finished. However, long before then, Mexico will lose its ability to export oil to the US.
     That's going to be a mighty big problem -- or set of problems. For one thing, Mexico is America's number 3 source of oil imports (after Canada and Saudi Arabia). So, in two or three years, we will lose our number three source of foreign oil. By the way, there is no real evidence that "new discoveries" oil "new production" anywhere in the world will offset global production drops.
     The Mexican government depends on it's nationalized oil production (Pemex) for 40 percent of its operating revenue. So, what we're also looking at South-of-the-Border is the potential for a lot of economic and political turmoil as the Mexican government loses revenue and loses its ability to maintain its social safety net (which includes food subsidies). The upshot of all this is that the US is likely to see a ramp-up in illegal immigration. The last time there was turmoil in Mexico -- the long revolution that ran from 1913 to 1940 -- one quarter of the Mexican population left, and most of them landed in the US. The population of Mexico then was about 23 million. Now it's over 100 million. If this turmoil escalates into violence, the US may even have a military problem with Mexico.
     As this occurs, though, there will be plenty of other trouble with oil resources elsewhere around the world, and that will be reflected in global finance and the condition of national economies. The US consumes close to 20 million barrels of oil a day, and we produce less than 5 million. Something will have to give.
     In light of these circumstances, we have a few suggestions for the people of Saratoga to think about:

• Perhaps we should examine our assumptions about motor-based tourism. This is the twilight of Happy Motoring. The tourist economy here had better make plans for visitors to get here by other means -- and that pretty much means getting our railroad infrastructure back to a high level of service. We have a new train station, but it is in an extremely awkward location. It will require far better connections to downtown than just the taxi-cab fleet. And the track roadbed between Schenectady and Montreal will require major refurbishing.
  
  
• We'd better stop investing in parking structures. The future will not be about cars. We know it's hard for people to believe this, but you just have to overcome your incredulity. These massive expenditures for parking will come to be seen as massive misallocations of scarce capital resources.
  
  
• We will be going through a natural gas scarcity crisis along with the permanent global oil crisis. In the current cycle of development here in Saratoga, developers have made the huge mistake of putting individual gas furnaces in all the new condo units, both office and residential. In a few years, the homeowner's associations of these buildings will face substantial expensive retrofits to put in central heating. We're not sure what we'll be heating with when gas becomes either too expensive or relatively scarce. A simple process of elimination points to coal. We're not even sure that the design of these buildings can accommodate the requisite plumbing or ducting. But they'd better start thinking about this.