Usually it's a city's big downtown buildings--the skyscrapers, the museums, concert halls, and stadiums--that capture public imagination. These projects are usually headlined by starchitects, who are given license to lavish innovative design touches on their buildings. Sometimes, in fact, a project's high production values, to use a cinematic term, can obscure dubious economics. The Chicago Trump Tower and the Chicago Spire are two local examples of high-profile projects that promise to dump hundreds of luxury condos into an already saturated market.
Because they're lower profile projects, buildings beyond downtown or in the suburbs are less likely to feature distinctive design. The San Francisco Chronicle's John King has put together a kind of manifesto for minor architecture along the lines of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Among other qualities, minor literature is written in a major tongue but speaks for minorities at the fringes of the imperial center. King's manifesto for buildings in the strip mall zone of urban neighborhoods and suburban business districts calls for applying the same development principles as iconic structures in the city center:
- Make a good first impression: Make the lobby attractive, not just a conduit to the elevators.
- Be realistic: Vintage details are too expensive now. Embrace new materials, codes, and the constraints of a site. Turn limitations into virtues; don't mourn what's no longer possible. Work through the logic of new materials. (Note to my home town of Oak Park, IL: Frank Lloyd Wright was a lot more interested in plywood and concrete than he was in stained glass. Enough with the faux Prairie-style glass panels already.)
- Local residents need to loosen up: Don't impose
pre-conceived notions or mess too much with
an architect's vision. Too much local input can lead to incoherent, artificial
buildings that, ironically, ignore the setting. King quotes an architect who's coined the term "Neo-Mexiterranean" to describe the generic California architecture neighborhood activists often demand.
- Give color a chance: The drab palettes of many new buildings don't reflect historical styles. Older buildings have neutral palettes because of exposure to weather, not because the master builders of the past liked beige.
- Get your coffee at Philz: King's model neighborhood building, the Mission Creek Senior Community Center (pictured above), has a Philz Coffee on the first floor instead of a Starbucks. Independent design offers better support to independent local businesses.
- Just say no to value-engineering: Resist the temptation to cut subtle effects for measurable cost savings. Get too persnickety about cost effectiveness and you'll end up with another strip mall. In beige.
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