@bernicebuffalo: In Buffalo where it snows like crazy, I bike year-round.
#SeasidePrize2024 @bernicebuffalo: Where you invest your love, you invest your life. That’s what small-scale developers do. I love Buffalo like crazy.
#SeasidePrize2024

Honfleur is a French town on the English Channel at the mouth of the Seine with so many lessons on how to get small-scale urbanism right. This 🧵 is a small sampling of patterns we need to see a lot more often in the US. Put as many eyeballs as possible on a view into nature, whether it be water, farmland, or forest. And be sure the buildings front onto the view so people from several blocks away can walk the street and enjoy the view.

A vibrant street scene does not require a Broad Street; the scale can be entirely humane. Paris does this fabulously. Of all the Goals in the Middle Distance I've ever seen, the Paris Opera House is clearly top-tier. Such a goal can draw you from many blocks away.

There are no skyscrapers in this view of Brooklyn. But with 5-12 story urbanism, you can build pretty much anything. Actually, traditional cities before elevators achieved champion densities at 5-7 stories. There is no magic story number, but low-mid-rise can get the job done. I normally call similar things "train-wreck public housing," but this one seems to have a bit of physical order... but you have to look for it. Anyone know how this feels on the ground?

Poundbury has an amazing selection of Missing Middle Housing types. There's also a strong mix of social (affordable) housing, but you can never tell which it is. And there are many businesses, so people living & working there don't have to have a car. There's no way to know whether these Poundbury apartment blocks include social housing units, but if they do, this is affordability with dignity and with no hint of lesser-income stigma. It's good enough for the King's town; is it good enough for your town?

This is heartbreaking. Reminds me of the devastation post-Katrina. And especially post-Dorian in Marsh Harbour. An utterly unthinkable disaster.

https://twitter.com/JordanHallWX/status/1639614835594866689

@ErinRNapier I'm going to lay something completely unfair upon you, and you and Ben can tell me to go away and you'll never hear from me again. But please hear me out. On the Wednesday after Katrina made landfall, my dear friend Michael Barranco called @wandamouzon and said...

What is the 15-minute city? It's every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name. And if the old parts haven't been destroyed in the last century, it's where the tourists go. And people travel across oceans to see the best of them. Forty years ago, a few pioneers decided to start building 15-minute cities again. Actually, they built 5-minute cities because they didn't think people would walk 15. This is Seaside, Florida where it all began. Time magazine called it "the little town that changed the world."

What is Goldilocks Messy? As a place recovers from disinvestment, disaster, or sprawl, what's the just-right balance of messy and clean? A place needs to be improved enough to give hope, but be imperfect enough to feel human. How do we find that place? Ben & Erin Napier may be doing the best job of anyone I'm aware of getting to Goldilocks Messy in Laurel Mississippi. What they're doing in this little town creates enough hope that Laurel is swarmed with fans on pretty days, but they're not sanitizing anything so far.

Many now protest anything that would reduce consumption of anything as "forcing us into poverty," with vows to fight fiercely against it. @RizomaSchool posted a meme on localized warming vs. all-house warming and got savaged for it. How, when, and where did this begin? @RizomaSchool Basically, this is about the same thing as a morbidly obese person saying "how dare you limit what I eat?" My dad was 5-8 and at one point got over 215. He hated it, and worked hard to get it off. I know no morbidly obese person clamoring to gain more weight. Why?

I'm upgrading my Townhouse Guidelines. They address the composition of everything visible on the building and its front yard. Floor plans can be whatever they need to be. But first, there are 3 core choices: single design, composed block, or individual designs. Three core choices of townhouse design: A single design for all townhouses in a block, a composed block with some repeated designs, and individual designs along a street. Classical too vernacular. Beautiful to charming. (This is the French Quarter vernacular & classical.)

What is authenticity, both at the scale of urbanism & the scale of architecture? Are the only authentic places & buildings those built by hand before the Industrial Development Complex? Or can we build authentically using some of today's processes? What's touchable; what's not? Shutters are things that open and shut. If they don't have hinges to allow that, and if they don't have shutter dogs to hold them open, they are not shutters, but rather "screw-on do-nothings" because they screw on the wall and do nothing.

Agricultural outdoor rooms on the edge of a neighborhood can provide fruits and vegetables to neighborhood restaurants, but there is a hidden benefit that might be greater. Ask children “where does food come from,” and the overwhelming answer is “the grocery store." Few children living in town know any farmers at all, and much of our food now comes from outside our nation’s borders. Bio-intensive agriculture is “good-neighbor” agriculture, requiring far less industrial equipment but more farmers for the same acreage.

I always fail at #FF because I want to tell people why I appreciate the work of people I follow, and it takes so much time I never finish. Crashed again a week ago yesterday. So here's my #FF +1 with just usernames. @_buildingbeauty @1000yearhouse @ad_mastro @akatieanna #FF +1: @amandakhurley @ann_sussman @apatterntolearn @Arch_Revival_ @ashleycaryn @atgmiami @bernicebuffalo @BrooklynSpoke @CheapoCrappy @ClassicCph @cognazor @colvilleandersn @CommEdgeCollab @cr8_communities @createstreets @DAAJr904 @dan_rube @DanielParolek @DavetheDeal

There are countless good bones in American downtowns across the country, but they're seldom connected to enough good tissue to be filled with life. This thread is on the Downtown Top Ten things needed to make downtowns thrive. And none are the usual suspects. I've omitted stuff everyone else talks about because you already know that. This list starts with #10, which is the easiest to do, and works up to #1, which is the hardest to accomplish, but the most important. It might take a few days because there's a lot of important stuff.

The big purple Bin 612 building welcoming you to the Cotton District immediately intimates that you're entering a place that's not normal. Built incrementally from a shabby mill village after the mill closed & beginning a dozen years before Seaside, it's audacity incarnate. The Cotton District is home to the greatest new collection of both Core and Upper Missing Middle Housing types I'm aware of anywhere in America. Many are three-story walk-ups. @KarenParolek, @DanielParolek, and @johnthebad would love to share a day here. I'd love to join them.

I have COVID. Posting this in hopes my experience might be helpful to someone else. And before saying anything else, this is huge: one thing is certain about this disease, and that is that everything else about it is uncertain. So there are no guarantees of anything. Symptoms began a week ago this morning but assumed it was allergies. But I’m fully vaccinated so COVID symptoms could be light. I had to fly to a speaking engagement Friday so went to get tested before travel. But taste & smell were fading that morning. The test confirmed it.

Wanda and I married after my first year in architecture school, and soon thereafter she asked me the most searching question of my career so far:
(This story begins - but doesn’t end - here: originalgreen.org/blog/2020/myst…) 1/ “Why is it that you refuse to design anything anyone else I love would love?” “Do I?” “Of course you do!” “How do you know?” “Have you ever listened to non-architects talk about architecture?” “Our professors tell us we’re supposed to educate the client.” 2/

The left image is Renaissance Florence; on the right is an Atlanta interchange, shown at the same scale. This was my first image to go viral, thanks to a repost by Lloyd Alter at Treehugger. For weeks, I had to keep proving that the scale was the same; I still have proof. 1/ The Florence image is +/- 40 blocks left to right; the Atlanta image, is 4. In Florence, most streets are 10-15 feet wide, with only the largest over 30. Most are paved inexpensively. In Atlanta, most rights-of-way exceed 500 feet, at millions of dollars per mile.
2/

So very sorry to hear that Dan Camp passed away this morning after what I understand was roughly a 3-week battle with COVID-19. He was a rare proto-New Urbanist, starting construction on Starkville's Cotton District in the mid-1970s. I discovered the Cotton District completely by accident while on a lunchtime walk during an architecture recruiting trip at Mississippi State in the 1990s. And Dan did such an excellent job with the Cotton District that the city elected him their mayor for several terms.

Skyscrapers have a number of problems that my big-city friends don't want to hear about. If you're from NYC or Vancouver, you just might want to skip this thread. It won't be the end of skyscrapers because skyscraper cities have too much sunk cost but others may reconsider. 1/? The elevator is absolutely essential to reaching those many floors, but who wants to be trapped in an elevator now with a bunch of strangers, any of whom could be an asymptomatic COVID19 carrier? Or maybe the carrier just stepped out moments before but their droplets remain?