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PLACES AS ART 
 
 by Mike Lipske 
 
 Commissioned In 
 
 Design Arts Program 
 
 National Endowment for the \ii- 
 
 Published 1»\ 
 Publishing < lentei 
 
 • iiliur.il Resoun 
 N<\> York 
 
 I 
 
This book was commissioned 
 by the Design Arts Program of 
 the National Endowment for 
 the Arts. 
 
 Frank S. M. Hodsoll, Chairman 
 National Endowment for the Arts 
 
 Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Director 
 Design Arts Program 
 
 Charles Zucker, Deputy Director 
 Design Arts Program 
 
 Project Director/Editor: Marcia Sartwell 
 
 Designer: Miho 
 
 Photo Editor: Eileen Levitan 
 
 Copyright© 1985 Publishing Center for 
 Cultural Resources. All rights reserved. 
 
 Library of Congress 
 
 Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 
 Lipske, Mike. 
 
 Places as art. 
 
 "Commissioned by Design Arts Program National 
 
 Endowment for the Arts." 
 
 Bibliography: p.92 
 
 1. Urban beautification — United States. 
 
 2. Architecture — Environmental aspects — United Slates. 
 
 3. Architecture — United States — Psychological aspects. 
 I. National Endowment for the Arts. Design Arts 
 Program. II. Title. 
 
 NA9052.L56 1985 711'. 4 85-19147 
 
 ISBN 0-89062-210-8 
 
 ISBN 0-89062-21 1-6 (pbk.) 
 
 Distributed by: 
 
 Publishing Center for Cultural Resources 
 
 625 Broadway 
 
 New York, N.Y. 10012 
 
Author's Acknowledgements 
 
 Many persons shared time and 
 knowledge without which this 
 book could not have been 
 written. Special thanks go to 
 Charles Zucker, deputy 
 director of the Design Arts 
 Program, National 
 Endowment for the Arts, who 
 provided the idea and the plan 
 for Places as Art . I also thank 
 Marcia Sartwell, publications 
 director, Design Arts 
 Program, for steady editorial 
 guidance; Thomas Walton, 
 associate professor in the 
 Department of Architecture, 
 Catholic University of 
 America, for assisting with 
 research; and Cecilia I. Parker, 
 for knowing the pitfalls 
 peculiar to book-making and 
 for suggesting ways around them. 
 —ML 
 

FOREWORD 
 
 LET THERE RE ART 11 
 
 Places can be works of art; 
 making them so requires that 
 urban form become a public, 
 aesthetic issue. 
 
 PLACE-MAKERS AT WORK 35 
 
 Six case studies of private 
 and public attempts to 
 advance the cause of design 
 excellence. 
 
 SHOWCASE PLACES 65 
 
 A portfolio of American 
 places as art, from 
 Rockefeller Center to the 
 <l iff dwellings of Mesa 
 Verde. 
 
 READINGS 92 
 
I 
 
 Foreword 
 
 The term "places as art" 
 challenges us to look at our 
 environment — and at art — in 
 a new way. Usually we think of 
 art as an object — something 
 that hangs in a gallery — or as 
 an event that takes place on a 
 stage. Yet places can be works 
 of art, too. They can satisfy 
 our desire for beauty, stir our 
 deepest feelings, link us to our 
 history. 
 
 The concept of Places as Art 
 gives us, in a sense, a new art 
 form. It is made up in part of 
 other art forms — sculpture, 
 gardens, open space, 
 buildings old and new, the 
 decorative arts; it depends for 
 its validity on the perception 
 that the aesthetic whole is 
 greater than the sum of its 
 parts and that the beauty of 
 the unity is the essence of its 
 interest and importance. 
 
 The idea, of course, is not 
 really new; history abounds in 
 examples. To take just two: 
 The Piazza Campidoglio in 
 Rome was designed by 
 Michelangelo to incorporate 
 existing buildings, the great 
 statue of Marcus Aurelius, 
 churches, steps, footpaths, 
 and so on. One could not 
 categorize the activity that 
 created the piazza as 
 architecture, urban design, 
 historic preservation, city 
 planning, or set design, 
 because it is all those things. 
 
 Yet it is more than the sum of 
 all those things. Disparate 
 elements have been drawn 
 into a harmonious whole and 
 lifted to a new level of beauty 
 and meaning. 
 
 The Lawn at the University of 
 Virginia is another example, 
 this one closer to home, and, 
 to a greater extent, conceived 
 at one time. Jefferson's plan 
 has as its centerpiece a 
 rotunda, which is flanked by 
 colonnades and by pavilions, 
 five on each side. Behind the 
 pavilions are living quarters, 
 gardens, and serpentine walls. 
 Here is a combination of 
 architecture, urban design, 
 and landscaping. Its place as 
 one of the world's great 
 conceptions derives not from 
 any one aspect or building but 
 from the order and purpose 
 that underlie the whole. 
 
 Sometimes, of course, places 
 acquire aesthetic significance 
 that has more to do with the 
 passage of time than with 
 design per se. Over the years 
 they take on new meaning as 
 landmarks, or as vessels that 
 hold our memories. The 
 changes that accrue over the 
 centuries can create, quite by 
 accident, an interrelationship 
 of buildings and landscape 
 that is precisely right — a 
 place that is art. Such a place, 
 for example, is the Tiber 
 Island in Rome, a 
 conglomeration of significant 
 
 and insignificant buildings 
 that over time has become an 
 irreducible aesthetic entity. 
 For the most part, though, 
 building Places as Art 
 requires conscious purpose, 
 vision, and the means to 
 realize that vision. 
 
 In past civilizations, the rich 
 and powerful could create 
 great places more or less by 
 decree; consider, for example, 
 how Florence's Piazza della 
 Signoria was shaped by the 
 purpose and vision of the 
 Medici. 
 
 But in out time, and in our 
 democracy, if we are to have 
 more places that are works of 
 art, we must have an informed 
 and interested citizenry that 
 understands the value of art as 
 well as the processes that 
 encourage its creation. 
 
 Great art — whether a painting 
 or a plaza — cannot be forced, 
 but it can be fostered. In 
 twentieth-century America, 
 Places as Art are most likely 
 to come into being when a 
 community believes, first of 
 all. that aesthetic values are 
 worth pursuing; and, second, 
 that it is through art that a 
 community best expresses its 
 ideals and aspirations. When 
 such a community articulates 
 the vision it has of itself, when 
 it has clear intentions and an 
 understanding of good design, 
 then wonderful things may 
 happen. 
 
The idea of Places as Art has 
 nothing to do with a particular 
 style. It has, on the other 
 hand, a great deal to do 
 with "process" — with the 
 way different communities 
 manage to make design 
 excellence as issue whenever 
 they build new places or save 
 old ones. 
 
 There is no single process for 
 creating Places as Art. That is 
 why this book identifies 
 several paths — ways that 
 individuals, associations, 
 institutions, and governments 
 have gone about getting the 
 subject of urban aesthetics 
 before the community. 
 
 Not every one of those 
 attempts to create Places as 
 Art will strike every citizen or 
 student of design as suitable 
 or satisfactory. Perceptions 
 and resources differ. Yet, it 
 seems to me, any good-faith 
 attempt to make a place 
 beautiful and whole is a step 
 in the right direction. 
 
 During much of the twentieth 
 century, we have seen the 
 fragmenting of the arts — the 
 break-up of art forms into 
 smaller pieces, each aimed at 
 addressing the special needs 
 of smaller audiences. But in 
 the last twenty years, there 
 have been aesthetic 
 movements that call for the 
 eye and the mind to integrate 
 the whole. Places as Art is one 
 of these movements, calling 
 
 for a new awareness of 
 coherence and unity in the 
 arts, especially the arts that 
 make up our environment. 
 
 It is our hope that this book 
 will spur that movement 
 forward, stimulating the 
 creation and celebration of 
 new Places as Art and the 
 burnishing and expansion of 
 existing ones— activities that 
 will greatly enhance the 
 American landscape and 
 engage the American spirit. 
 
 Adele Chatfield-Taylor 
 August 1985 
 


 
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 hen Lord Brabazon asked members of 
 the House of Lords to censure London construction 
 work in 1962 — expressing his dismay over "the recent 
 erection of buildings of a skyscraper type in the 
 Metropolis from the aesthetic and aeronautical point of 
 view" — his complaint was an early trickle in what has 
 become a river of criticism. 
 
 Not everyone condemns skyscrapers, of course. But 
 there is abundant evidence, in newspaper and maga- 
 zine articles, in books, in symposiums and panel dis- 
 cussions, in conversations half-heard above the din of 
 construction downtown, that more and more people are 
 unhappy with the form and feel of their cities. 
 
 The dissatisfaction with urban design and architecture 
 goes beyond the usual complaints about speculative 
 over-construction of office space, about projects that 
 come in over budget and late, or about the sort of logical 
 lapse that results in a commuter town's newest office 
 tower being built without a parking lot. Our displeasure 
 centers on something less palpable — the lack of Bra- 
 bazon's "aesthetic . . . point of view." Call it the acute 
 shortage of built beauty. 
 
 "If we don't demand good architecture, we don't deserve 
 it, and we won't get it," growled Robert Campbell, 
 architecture critic for the Boston Globe, when he 
 recently inaugurated annual awards for "the most awful 
 buildings" in Boston. Testing the curative power of 
 shame (not just for architects, but also for clients, gov- 
 ernment officials, and citizens who foster or accept bad 
 design), Campbell proposed prizes for a "forbidding 
 gray fortress" masquerading as a shopping/hotel com- 
 plex, for "an upended radiator" of a high-rise that 
 "offers not the least hint that its purposes include 
 human habitation," and for five more of Boston's "ugli- 
 est and most life-degrading buildings of the year." 
 
 Campbell's stab at negative reinforcement is only one 
 example of recent criticism of the designed environ- 
 ment. Ronald Lee Fleming and Renata von Tscharner, 
 of the Townscape Institute in Cambridge, Massachu- 
 
towers crowd Manhattan's 
 ■e. "It is as beautiful a land as 
 can hope to tread upon," said 
 ry Hudson. A trading post from 
 start, New Amsterdam gave 
 to the agglomeration of 
 lent, steel, and glass that 
 ;es for our most architecturally 
 ndable island. 
 
 2 city is a fact in 
 lure, like a cave, a run 
 mackerel or an ant- 
 ap. But it is also a con- 
 ous work of art. . . The 
 ne and the spire, the 
 ?/? avenue and the 
 )sed court, tell the 
 \ry, not merely of differ- 
 f physical accommoda- 
 ns, but of essentially 
 ferent conceptions of 
 n's destiny. . . With Ian- 
 zge itself [the city] 
 wains man's greatest 
 rkofart. 
 
 vis Mumford, The Culture of Cities 
 
 setts, write of the "banal sameness" that "haunts the 
 old commercial strip on the road to the airport as well as 
 the sparkling new development downtown." Another 
 observer speaks of "windswept . . . American plazas" 
 as "our cities' equivalent to the strip mine, desperately 
 in need of reclamation." Another decries the rise of 
 "marketecture" — office towers designed solely for 
 commercial appeal, in the manner of candy bars and 
 new cars. 
 
 "There is almost no one who is not bewildered by the 
 events of the last two decades in architecture," wrote 
 Paul Goldberger, of the New York Times, in a 1981 
 review of what he called "the hottest topic in Manhat- 
 tan's architectural salons," Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus 
 To Our House . Readers of Wolfe's attack on minimalist 
 excess, in the form of International Style architecture, 
 could be found well beyond Manhattan's salons. Four- 
 teen weeks on the Times best-seller list and a Book of 
 the Month Club selection, Bauhaus — with 130,000 
 copies sold in hardcover — may still stand as the ulti- 
 mate evidence of public dismay over contemporary 
 architecture. Probably not every reader yearned for 
 buildings that, as Wolfe wrote, "catered to the Hog- 
 stomping Baroque exuberance of American civiliza- 
 tion." But one may assume many felt short-changed, 
 even betrayed, by the places they saw as they traveled 
 about their town or city. One did not have to be a British 
 Lord to sense that buildings had become less breath- 
 taking, that from the square top of the newest high-rise 
 to the barren slab at its base something critical was 
 lacking, that the city center seemed as formula-built as 
 the temples of fast food on the interstate, that the mall 
 at the north end of town replicated the one at the south. 
 One did not have to be a Brabazon to know that places 
 can be art. 
 
 We are accustomed to thinking of art as an object that 
 hangs in a gallery or sits in a plaza. We also think of art 
 as an event — a concert or opera or play. But.places can 
 be works of art. An Italian piazza or a New England vil- 
 lage green each has the capacity to quicken our senses, 
 stir our emotions, and convey aesthetic integrity. Each 
 
I 
 
 links us to the people who created it. Each holds our 
 history. 
 
 Buildings — the best of them — are more than shelter. 
 An old structure, whether courthouse or counting- 
 house, becomes a stone vessel of civic culture. A new 
 building, born of a high-stakes design competition and 
 still as crisp as the architect's drawings, can fire imagi- 
 nations and focus a young city's vision of its place in 
 events to come. 
 
 "The urban landscape, among its many roles, is also 
 something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight 
 in," planner and educator Kevin Lynch wrote in The 
 Image of the City. "As an artificial world, the city 
 should be so in the best sense: made by art, shaped for 
 human purposes." 
 
 Shaped with grace and well-crafted, the city is stage 
 and backdrop for our daily urban drama. Yet too often 
 we sense that the set is ill-proportioned, the lighting 
 unfocused, the play poorly written. We might leave — 
 mayor or man on the street — if we did not suspect we 
 were members of the cast and not just the audience. We 
 know the shopping mall is not a village green, that the 
 library plaza with its concrete benches is no Piazza San 
 Marco, that Brutalist buildings are too aptly named. We 
 know we can churn out office towers almost as effort- 
 lessly as we can fried-chicken stands, but must they 
 look so . . . churned out? 
 
 Pieces of the public realm: Brick 
 buildings of restored Bulfinch 
 Square (top), in Cambridge, 
 Massachusetts, were to be 
 demolished to make way for a 
 parking garage. Space sized to 
 human scale distinguishes greens 
 of South Royalton and Weston, 
 Vermont, (middle) and old New 
 Canaan, Connecticut. 
 
 Why is it that, as the Globe's Robert Campbell says, 
 "The places we value and love so much . . . have 
 almost never been created in our own time"? The 
 answer, he suggests, has little to do with nostalgia. "It 
 has to do with the things that make a city, any city in any 
 period, livable for human beings. It has to do, above 
 all, with creating a humane public realm . . . We can 
 often make good buildings today, but seldom good pub- 
 lic realms. When we think of great cities we think first 
 of their great public streets .... But where in our 
 time have we created a single great street?" 
 
 New Canaan 
 
Wtyit is tfje cttp but tfje people? 
 
 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus 
 
 I 
 
 Ours is a quantifying age. The concept of places as art 
 is, on the other hand, not something that can be mea- 
 sured off in square feet or calculated as a percentage of 
 the municipal budget. As real as the Statue of Liberty, 
 the "art" in "place" remains as intangible as your mem- 
 ory of Manhattan at a precise moment after dusk. 
 
 Art — a welded-steel abstraction — may not render a 
 plaza a "place as art." However, function — a Seattle 
 manhole cover embellished with an artist's design of a 
 whale — may make of a streetcorner a "place." 
 
 In a recent catalog of books on planning, there were 
 advertisements for reports and texts on the use of 
 microcomputers, on sign control, on economic devel- 
 opment, on zoning, on how to be an expert witness. 
 There were, and are, no manuals on creating places as 
 art. Yet the idea is old, as old as hills with classical tem- 
 ples on their summits. 
 
 Genius loci — spirit of place — is the ancient concept 
 that most closely suggests the meaning of, and means of 
 creating, places as art. In Bellows Falls, Vermont, a 
 row of nineteenth-century storefronts — with facades 
 restored and signs improved by young businessmen — 
 could draw warm applause from the deities that the 
 Romans said were guardians of every special place. In 
 Miami, with its breezier gods, spirit of place might be 
 better expressed by a condominium with a large hole in 
 its middle, as well as by the palm tree and whirlpool 
 bath nestled within the twelth-floor skycourt. ("Beach 
 Blanket Bauhaus," is how Patricia Leigh Brown, in 
 Esquire, described the work of Arquitectonica, the 
 Florida firm that designed the condominium and other 
 new buildings that "fit the city snugly, like some way- 
 ward architectural bikini.") In Santa Fe, New Mexico, 
 an "adobe" house — with stucco and paint over cinder- 
 block walls — constitutes an acceptable offering to art, 
 tradition, and the forms of Pueblo Spanish Revival 
 Style. In Escondido, California, a growing community 
 in search of its public image, plans for a new civic/cul- 
 tural center, developed through a recent architectural 
 design competition, represent now-and-future genius 
 loci, for "places as art" can say not only what we are but 
 what we hope to become. 
 
I 
 
 A brass band marches down 
 Bourbon Street, giving voice to the 
 spirit of New Orleans 
 
Eight apartments share the 
 skycourt at the Atlantis, a 20-story 
 condominium at the edge of 
 Biscayne Bay in Miami. 
 
"Beach Blanket Bauhaus": 
 Buildings like the Atlantis, by 
 Arquitectonica, express spirit of 
 place, as do the adobe apartments 
 of Taos Pueblo, in and northern 
 New Mexico. Below, in downtown 
 Seattle, a manhole cover puts art 
 underfoot. 
 
 The concept of places as art is an acknowledgement 
 that color, form, texture, balance, and composition 
 merit equal consideration with the economic and social 
 demands that guide planning and development. New 
 places as art are created, and old ones saved, when 
 leaders recognize and articulate the vision of self 
 shared by a community, and when they foster coopera- 
 tion among the hundreds of place-markers that trans- 
 form the city daily. Thus the concept travels with 
 questions: How does one give voice and, ultimately, 
 substance to the intangible? How does one popularize 
 the notion that the form of the urban environment is, 
 among other things, an artistic issue? 
 
 One can try summoning expert testimony. "Architec- 
 ture," said the English critic John Ruskin, "is the art 
 which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by 
 man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental 
 health, power, and pleasure." What Kevin Lynch called 
 "a distinctive and legible environment" may be a balm 
 for urban anxiety and, at the same time, "heightens the 
 potential depth and intensity of human experience." 
 
 However, if an expert student of the city such as Lynch 
 knew that vivid urban settings were more than luxury, 
 he also knew how difficult it can be to chart a course 
 toward improvement. No single artist creates a place as 
 art, for the city, wrote Lynch, "is the product of many 
 builders who are constantly modifying the structure for 
 reasons of their own," and "only partial control can be 
 exercised over its growth and form." 
 
 In the crash and din of urban development, arguments 
 for beautiful buildings that rise from harmonious set- 
 tings may go barely heard. Mistaking price for value, 
 people may say that truly great design is simply too 
 expensive. Yet the scale of the budget and the scope of 
 return on investment must be measured against poten- 
 tial long-term gains. 
 
 No matter how monumental the initial cost of a new 
 building, or of any development project, that sum may 
 represent less than half of eventual costs. Be it a high- 
 rise, a shopping center, or a downtown park, the com- 
 pleted project must be operated and maintained, and 
 such costs are influenced by the quality of design. The 
 
Now suited to Steinways, Bulfinch 
 Square was restored by Graham 
 Gund Associates. The complex 
 bears the name of the Boston-born 
 architect of Faneuil Hall and the 
 Massachusetts State House. 
 
useful life of a building, its attractiveness in the local or 
 national marketplace, its responsiveness to present 
 and future management plans, its ability to foster 
 employee productivity — each needs to be considered 
 along with today's design and construction expenses. 
 
 Beautiful places attract tourists and, of course, tourist 
 dollars. However, the well-conceived city may also 
 draw new business in the form of corporations seeking a 
 rewarding environment for workers. The city govern- 
 ment that fosters great public architecture also sets the 
 tone for better private architecture. (Call it inspired 
 leadership or peer pressure, the effect is the same: 
 quality begets quality.) And, while good design is not 
 the cure for every urban ill, the city that is legible as 
 opposed to chaotic, that rewards the senses rather than 
 insults them, also heightens community pride and 
 spirit. In New York, our capital of graffiti, consider the 
 eight-foot, fiberglass pear that hangs at street level out- 
 side a Grand Union supermarket on East 86th Street. 
 Designed by Milton Glaser, the pear "is voluptuous, 
 sensual; the color a soothing pale green," reports 
 Smithsonian magazine. Furthermore, "the neighbor- 
 hood has paid it the ultimate compliment: in more than 
 two years [Glaser's] pear has never known the touch of a 
 felt-tipped pen." 
 
 Educating the eye, places as art spawn an aesthetically 
 sensitized public, and all that that may bode for better 
 design and development in years to come. Such places 
 constitute the ultimate act of civility toward citizens 
 grown cynical about the ruling deities, be they public 
 or private. And such places are being created in Ameri- 
 can cities. Officials and developers, architects and art- 
 ists are finding the means to breathe substance into an 
 aesthetic concept. They are saying places as art matter, 
 and are laying their convictions on foundations of 
 cement. 
 
 A giant, pale-green pear soothes 
 the eyes of passersby at a New 
 York supermarket. Below, the glass 
 and cast-iron pergola in Seattle's 
 Pioneer Square, formerly a trolley 
 waiting stand, was restored with 
 private funds. 
 
 
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lund Rome a city of bricks and 
 t it a city of marble. 
 
 istus Caesar 
 
 i Marco on the Hudson.' the 
 a at the World Financial Center. 
 ;w York's Battery Park City 
 slopment, will be the first major 
 ic square on the river. The 
 3-and-a-half-acre space, with 
 1 of the Statue of Liberty, was 
 gned by artists, an architect, 
 a landscape architect. 
 
 "It's going to be a fabulous, wonderful place," says 
 Victor Ganz. "It could be an American, latter-day San 
 Marco." Ganz, an art collector and retired businessman 
 who is chairman of the fine arts committee for New 
 York's Battery Park City development, is talking about 
 a San Marco on the Hudson River, a three-and-a-half- 
 acre public plaza, across from the Statue of Liberty, 
 that has been jointly designed by an architect, artists, 
 and a landscape architect. 
 
 Scheduled for completion in 1988, the waterfront plaza 
 is being called a keystone to Battery Park City, the mas- 
 sive residential and commercial community being built 
 on 92 acres of landfill at the tip of lower Manhattan. 
 (When Battery Park City is fully developed, it is esti- 
 mated that its working population will be 31,000 peo- 
 ple, its residential population about 30,000. ) The plaza 
 will serve as a link between the Hudson and the World 
 Financial Center, the complex of office towers and 
 glass-covered "wintergarden" that has been designed 
 by architect Cesar Pelli. Surrounding a cove on the 
 river and incorporating a section of Battery Park City's 
 1.2-mile waterfront esplanade, the plaza — with its 
 eight unified-but-distinct spaces — will accom- 
 modate individuals, small groups, and large gather- 
 ings. Intended as a major public amenity for all New 
 Yorkers, the space was designed by Pelli, artists Siah 
 Armajani and Scott Burton, and landscape architect 
 M. Paul Friedberg. 
 
 Reaction to the plaza design, at least in the pages of the 
 New York Times, has gone beyond favorable.'There are 
 fountains, steps, a walking path along the Hudson 
 River, a lawn for plaving frisbee. There seems a place 
 for every conceivable public desire, from meditating at 
 the river to nailing down a business deal at lunch." 
 
 "The plaza will function as both stage and auditorium," 
 goes another account, "and when we walk across it we 
 shall feel twice ourselves." 
 
 "I didn't want us looking at so-called 'plunk art,' " says 
 Victor Ganz. He credits the excellence of Battery Park's 
 fine arts committee (members include art historians, an 
 
architect, a curator from the Whitney Museum, and 
 other arts professionals), and the fact that the commit- 
 tee was granted "a hell of a lot of autonomy" by the 
 Battery Park City administration, with enabling the 
 group to plot a redefinition of the roles of architect and 
 artist in the design of public places. Of the plaza 
 design, Ganz says, "I believe it represents the first 
 example of an intensely close and frank collaboration 
 among architect, artists, and landscape architect in the 
 total development of a major urban space from its very 
 beginning." Rather than embellish a plaza with art 
 objects, Battery Park's developers, urged on by Ganz's 
 committee, are creating a place as art, as well as a 
 working addition to New York's public realm. 
 
 Not every city will stage developments the size of 
 Battery Park. But metropolitan weight is not a require- 
 ment in the planning and creation of places as art. In 
 Seattle, a city with a population around one-fourteenth 
 that of New York's, local artists have worked, along 
 with architects and engineers, on design teams for 
 a number of public projects. The city's Viewland - 
 Hoffman electrical substation, with an abstract mural 
 along the back wall and a whirligig compound that dis- 
 plays work by two Washington folk artists, was Seattle's 
 first such project. Completed several years ago, 
 Viewland - Hoffman has won awards for its design. Art- 
 ists have gone on to collaborate with architects on other 
 Seattle City Light substations. 
 
 Not surprisingly, however, there were initial reserva- 
 tions about the role of artists in designing public works. 
 "City Light said, 'What are you people doing? What a 
 strange idea. Is it appropriate to put artists to work on a 
 substation?' " recalls Richard Andrews, then adminis- 
 trator of the Seattle Arts Commission's Art in Public 
 Places Program. 
 
 Paid from city percent-for-art funds, Seattle artists have 
 helped design police stations, parks, bridges, and 
 sidewalks. Artist Jack Mackie, member of a design 
 team developing a new look for a stretch of Seattle's 
 Broadway Avenue, created Dancer's Series: Steps, 
 bronze dance instructions inlaid in the pavement at 
 
 Whirligigs made by folk artists Emil 
 and Veva Gehrke were 
 incorporated into the design of 
 Viewland-Hoffman electrical 
 substation in north Seattle. 
 
:e dance steps, by artist Jack 
 le, teach the tango and 
 >n a Seattle sidewalk. 
 
 eight locations on Capitol Hill. Embellishing city side- 
 walks with diagrams for foxtrots and rumbas is one way 
 of enlivening what Andrews has called "the generally 
 anonymous vacuum of American streetscapes." 
 
 "The complete lack of surprise in American street- 
 scapes is an awful failure," says Andrews, now director 
 of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment 
 for the Arts. "In many European cities, you walk 
 around and are never sure what's going to be around the 
 next corner. In American urban design, you always 
 know what's around the corner." 
 
 Creating an element of urban surprise takes a bit of 
 planning. Not long ago, the Seattle Arts Commission 
 hired an artist and a designer to prepare a study of 
 existing and future possibilities for incorporating art 
 into the city's downtown core. "In commissioning this 
 study," Andrews wrote in the introduction to Artwork 
 Network, "we make the assumption that artists have a 
 fundamental place in city planning. As the downtown 
 changes and as an increasing number of buildings are 
 constructed in a style concerned more with filling zon- 
 ing envelopes than with creating a cohesive urban land- 
 scape, the role of art in the city takes on increased 
 importance." 
 
 Seattle's Artwork Network study recommends sites for 
 art, and for projects involving artists in design, 
 throughout the city's "network of primary public 
 places." Traffic islands, parks, alleys, proposed mono- 
 rail stations, sidewalks scheduled for repair, even an 
 unused drive-up book return at the Seattle Public 
 Library are identified in the study as places to put art 
 and places to become art. 
 
 "There are no real guidelines for any of this yet — we're 
 just making up procedures as we go along," Richard 
 Andrews, in an interview in The New Yorker magazine, 
 said of Seattle's efforts to inject artists into urban 
 design. "A lot of city-owned space is in streets and 
 sidewalks, you know, and triangles between streets — 
 leftover spaces of all kinds. . . . We want to give artists 
 an opportunity to shake up everybody's thinking, 
 including their own." 
 
At a Minneapolis music shop 
 customers know where to park. 
 
ART OF CITY 
 SIGN WILL WAIT 
 3N AN INFORMED 
 D CRITICAL 
 DIENCE. 
 
 n Lynch, The Image of the 
 
 ♦ 
 
 The authors of Seattle's Artwork Network study observe 
 "that the places which come to identify a city are often 
 those preserved or developed by government. . . . 
 Although some of the finest urban spaces in Seattle . . . 
 have been privately developed, private interests tend to 
 develop uses downtown that are too specialized to cap- 
 ture any sense of the community's character." 
 
 In the Boston Globe, critic Robert Campbell writes, 
 "It's crazy to expect a variety of developers and archi- 
 tects, each independently pursuing separate goals, to 
 produce building that will magically aggregate into 
 good streets and urban spaces .... They have to be 
 given rules that will insure that each new building will 
 do its part in creating the public realm." 
 
 Builder and rulemaker, local government sets the tone 
 for city form. In creating the public realm — whether a 
 new city hall or a new sidewalk — government defines 
 our expectations of urban design. Through its actions 
 as well as its declarations, it can make informed design 
 clients of citizens, creating a climate where the aes- 
 thetic point of view in architecture and development is 
 not merely appreciated, but anticipated. 
 
 Other institutions in the community can also raise the 
 issue of quality. The case studies in the next chapter 
 provide examples of ways in which academia, the 
 press, industry, professional societies, individuals, 
 and government have created, critiqued, or simply 
 cheered along potential places as art. A sampling of 
 other means for improving urban design follows: 
 
 ♦ The Washington Monument and St. Louis' 
 Gateway Arch, Boston's City Hall and the U.S. Capitol, 
 the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House have one 
 thing in common. Each is a product of design competi- 
 tions, an old and reliable method of fostering architec- 
 tural excellence. Design competitions can help 
 
 ! street lamp and 
 ;stone pavement keep 
 nporary Seattle in touch with 
 
 St. 
 
Where the soaring starts: At the 
 Gateway Arch in St. Louis, two 
 young visitors inspect the 
 foundation of our tallest monument 
 
great city is that which has the greatest men 
 d women. 
 
 t W hitman. Song of the Broad-Axe 
 
 1 whirl: New Yorkers have 
 j in Rockefeller Center's 
 m plaza, off Fifth Avenue, 
 Christmas Day in 1936 
 
Names of the dead and missing are 
 inscribed on the granite wall of the 
 Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in 
 Washington, D.C. A nationwide 
 competition for the best memorial 
 design drew more than 1 ,400 
 entries. 
 
 crystallize a community's vision of itself, let lesser- 
 known talent compete with established professionals, 
 even boost a capital fund-raising drive. Types of com- 
 petitions range from "open," to "invited," to "on-site 
 charettes." Advice on choosing the best style of compe- 
 tition and on how to manage one successfully can be 
 obtained from local and state design societies, state 
 arts councils, and the National Endowment for the 
 Arts. 
 
 Some county and state governments have found it 
 helpful to publish design manuals or policies that set 
 standards for public architecture. A Kansas state 
 design manual, for example, defines architectural aes- 
 thetics as "the interplay of planes; the proportions of 
 height, width, and length; the combination of contrast 
 and continuity; and the use of materials . . . [to] create 
 beauty and enhance the purpose and presence of a 
 structure." Final design of state projects, declares the 
 manual, "should be exemplary to others in the [archi- 
 tectural] profession and be worthy of representation of 
 the state of Kansas." 
 
 A City review boards and arts commissions can 
 function as design watchdogs, with local architects and 
 other appointed citizens studying development pro- 
 posals and, when necessary, seeking modifications in 
 design. In Baltimore, the city's design advisory panel, 
 composed of architects, landscape architects, and 
 architectural historians, meets regularly to review pub- 
 licly funded projects. The Seattle Arts Commission, 
 whose membership includes artists, engineers, archi- 
 tects, and urban planners, performs a similar role, 
 advising city government on the design of capital 
 improvement projects. In Kansas City, Missouri, the 
 municipal arts commission has been called that city's 
 "aesthetic conscience." Its members review and 
 approve plans for public projects, and examine ele- 
 ments of private development (from lighting to land- 
 scaping) that impinge on the public realm. 
 
 H Cities without a review board can address the 
 subject of urban design in other ways. In early 1984, 
 Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard established an ad hoc- 
 advisory committee on the arts to help "change the face 
 
 Man fights bull in a tile mural at the 
 Plaza shopping center, in Kansas 
 City, Missouri. Below, new National 
 Aquarium hoists sail in Baltimore's 
 Inner Harbor. 
 
of Phoenix in the next five years by substantially 
 improving the 'look' of the City and the cultural quality 
 of life in the City." The 26-member committee was 
 expected to investigate the desirability of a city arts 
 commission and of adopting legislation to set aside a 
 percentage of municipal construction funds for the 
 "artistic enrichment of the City." The committee was 
 also asked to study "various possibilities of City beauti- 
 fication," including "such things as securing profes- 
 sional painting and landscaping advice for blocks or 
 neighborhoods which desire to 'spruce up,' the installa- 
 tion of decorative street lamps, benches, flowerbeds, 
 and other facets of 'streetscapes' for both downtown 
 Phoenix and outlying areas." 
 
 ▼ Art institutions can encourage a fresh look at their 
 hometown. In May 1983, the Walker Art Center, in 
 Minneapolis, sponsored a three-day public symposium 
 that focused on four central city projects in the plan- 
 ning or construction stage. A bus tour to each site was 
 followed by presentations from project architects and 
 planners. Invited "respondents" — six nationally rec- 
 ognized experts in architecture, preservation, and 
 development — then discussed the projects in terms of 
 their relation to the city as a whole, the range of urban 
 amenities they might provide to a broad cross-section of 
 the community, and their outstanding characteristics as 
 architecture and urban "place." Results of the sympo- 
 sium, which was called Minneapolis Profile 1983, were 
 published as a special issue of the Walker Art Center's 
 Design Quarterly. "Our feeling is, the more informed 
 the public is, the better chance we have for better 
 architecture," Mildred Friedman, the center's design 
 curator, says of thinking behind the symposium. "We're 
 not trying to make architecture critics out of the public. 
 What we're asking is, 'What is the impact of this devel- 
 opment?' What we're trying to create here is an aware 
 audience, so that when something is proposed here, 
 they have some awareness of what the impact of big 
 structures, and small structures, will be on the city." 
 
 LJ In many cities, attempts to enhance the urban 
 image go astray by relying on imported models for 
 development. The desire for improvement is sincere, 
 but the result is architectural sameness. Where possi- 
 
 Preservation comes naturally in 
 Charleston, South Carolina (above 
 and at left). A Society for the 
 Preservation of Old Dwellings was 
 established in 1920. The city's first 
 historic-district ordinance was 
 
 passed 1 1 years later The Dock 
 Street Theatre, just down from St 
 Philip's Church, was restored 
 during the 1 930 s, with Works 
 Progress Administration help. 
 
I 
 
 •HMimillFW!. 
 
 /ntown San Francisco's 
 ptured skyline during the 
 Ds. 
 
ble, it may make more sense to encourage those build- 
 ing types and architectural styles that constitute a 
 signature for local taste. In San Francisco, for example, 
 a proposed downtown plan criticizes the "bulkiness and 
 repetitive boxiness of many recent structures [that] 
 have obscured the fine-scale sculptured skyline of pre- 
 World War II San Francisco." The plan recommends 
 buildings with "generally thinner and more complex 
 shapes" as well as "more expressive, sculptured build- 
 ing tops." According to Jonathan Malone, a member of 
 the city planning department, the document "doesn't 
 say every building has to look like the Chrysler Build- 
 ing or the Empire State Building." It does, however, 
 express as desirable "the evolution of a San Francisco 
 imagery that departs from the austere, flat top box — a 
 facade cut off in space." Other cities take sterner steps 
 to hold the line against foreign styles. In Santa Fe, New 
 Mexico, one of the country's oldest historic-district 
 ordinances (written in 1957, revised during 1982-83) 
 calls for design review, usually by a board whose mem- 
 bers are appointed by the mayor, of remodeling, addi- 
 tions, new construction, and demolition in five city 
 historic districts. In Santa Fe's core historic district, all 
 remodeling and new construction must adhere to what 
 are known as the Pueblo Spanish Revival or Territorial 
 Styles of architecture. 
 
 Santa Fe's consciousness of urban design tradition pre- 
 dates its ordinance. A 1912 map of the city, showing 
 public improvements proposed by the planning board 
 of that time, bears the legend "Ancient Streets To Be 
 Left Undisturbed." According to Design & Preservation 
 in Santa Fe, a 1977 study prepared by the city- 
 planning department, the historic-district ordinance 
 represents more than legislation for the protection of 
 adobe. The study notes that the ordinance "put much of 
 the city's cultural aesthetic development into the hands 
 of Santa Fe residents rather than those of the devel- 
 oper. . . . what came out of the ordinance is the view 
 of the people of Santa Fe. . . . it is an expression of the 
 population regarding the perceived character of the 
 community." 
 
 Dome aglow, the 77-story Chrysler 
 Building, in New York City, was a 
 summit of Art-Deco flair when it was 
 completed in 1930 
 
Prescriptive ordinances, advisory boards, design com- 
 petitions — all can preserve or create places as art. But 
 cities and towns are complicated environments, with 
 more on the agenda than architecture. In America, not 
 every city has a sufficiency of pre- World War II skyline 
 to suggest an alternative to architectural standardiza- 
 tion. Not every town has the consciousness of architec- 
 tural heritage or, for that matter, the heritage itself that 
 a Santa Fe does. Even in cities with a past, change 
 roars in with a force that seems to preclude planning for 
 art. "Proposals for blockbuster new buildings [in Bos- 
 ton] surface so often they dull the imagination. . . . 
 such growth is the architectural equivalent of the Big 
 Bang," writes the Globe's Robert Campbell. 
 
 In any large urban project, city officials and developers 
 conduct negotiations that establish a building's use, the 
 materials it will be made of, the location of its 
 entrances, the amenities it will offer. Calls for an aes- 
 thetic intent in development may be resented, and 
 resisted, as a troublesome addition to an already com- 
 plicated, highly political process. Yet processes 
 change. There are new things under the sun — Battery 
 Park City and its arts committee with "a hell of a lot of 
 autonomy" being one massive example. 
 
 For better or worse, we build as we believe. A cathedral 
 or a curbstone may each signify what we aspired to in 
 our finer moments, or only that we worked with one eye 
 on the budget and the other on the clock. 
 
 "Architecture presents man, literature tells you about 
 him, painting will picture him to you," believed Frank 
 Lloyd Wright. "You can listen and hear him, but if you 
 want to realize him and experience him go into his 
 buildings, and that's where you'll find him as he is. He 
 can't hide there from you and he can't hide from 
 himself." 
 
 ank Lloyd Wright and his 1910 
 ibie House, in Chicago. 
 
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 F 
 
 ew Americans think that city-making 
 is a fine art," wrote city planner and author Kevin 
 Lynch. "We may at times enjoy a city, but only as a fact 
 of nature — just there, like a mountain or the sea. But, 
 of course, we are mistaken; cities are created objects, 
 and at times in history they were managed and experi- 
 enced as if they were works of art. However misshapen, 
 a city is an intended landscape." 
 
 Many Americans may still take for granted the cities 
 they inhabit. But more and more of us — from architects 
 to state governors — are demonstrating our appreciation 
 of the intentions behind place-making, and of the bene- 
 fits of thoughtful, intentional design. 
 
 Each of the following case studies details an attempt to 
 come to terms with the issue of quality in place-mak- 
 ing. One, a privately managed awards program, simply 
 drew attention to well designed, but for the most part 
 overlooked, buildings. Another tells of an effort to 
 focus public attention on the nature of city-making, an 
 effort made in the belief that a better informed citizenry 
 is our best guarantee of better civic space. Still others 
 were attempts to encourage excellence in public archi- 
 tecture, or to cure social ills through careful redesign 
 and through the commissioning of public art. 
 
 Although most city-making is the work of government, 
 perhaps the important lesson in these examples is that 
 individuals and non-government institutions can take 
 the lead in advocating design excellence and artistic 
 merit in development of public facilities. A profes- 
 sional society, a school of art, a newspaper, a corporate 
 patron — each can advance the cause of places as art. 
 
 Philadelphia: Private Awards to 
 Inform Designers and Their Public 
 
 "Select, though not elite," is how the Philadelphia 
 Inquirer, in the mid-1970s, described winners of that 
 city's privately administered building-of-the-month 
 
 
 p 
 
 
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 Similar cityscapes: From top, 
 Seattle, New York, and Chicago 
 
Hll /nose things— 
 naae, decoration- 
 it architects are 
 reluctant to use 
 2 part of what 
 wes up a citu S/i 
 s a wau of tell in a 
 witects to looA at the 
 
 "nacu 
 
 far v 
 
 awards. Understandable, given that honored buildings 
 included a Passyunk Avenue pizzeria, an Atlantic City 
 fudge shop, and a shocking-pink brick rowhouse on 
 North Lawrence Street. If art was here, one sometimes 
 had to squint to see it. 
 
 But for David Slovic, the Philadelphia architect who 
 conceived of the awards, and who today acknowledges 
 "the funkiness of the concept," the monthly prizes were 
 also a serious matter. For one thing, says Slovic, the 
 awards were intended "to get people in the city looking 
 at the environment more, to become more aware that 
 the city has a lot of riches. I thought of them as a teach- 
 ing tool. I was propagandizing for architecture." 
 
 At the same time they instructed the lay public, build- 
 ings-of-the-month were meant to serve as continuing 
 education for the city's architects. "The choices . . . 
 did raise specific issues about architecture, design, 
 and urban living," Slovic wrote in the spring 1984 issue 
 of the journal Places. "For architects, who have the ten- 
 dency to identify as architecture only what is built by 
 the educated hand and eye of other architects, the 
 Building-of-the-Month Award was a public celebra- 
 tion, a lesson in public aesthetics." 
 
 During 1976 and 1977, Slovic and his partners at Fri- 
 day Architects/Planners handed out twenty building- 
 of-the-month awards. Certificates — each embossed 
 with a gold seal that bore, in Latin, the motto, "Every- 
 one is to be trusted in his own special art" — went to a 
 diner, a medical center, two Dodge dealerships, a 
 municipal Christmas-light arrangement, and other 
 winners. "We tried to keep them fairly topical," says 
 Slovic, who now has his own architecture and urban- 
 design firm in Philadelphia. "In September, we did a 
 school. In August, we'd do something at the shore." 
 
 Neighborhood newspapers published press releases 
 and photographs that accompanied each month's 
 award, according "instant landmark" status to local 
 winners, says Slovic. "The buildings selected were not 
 always great buildings," he says. "But they always had 
 one great feature. Therefore in articles about monthly 
 
1 
 
 At St Albans Place, Philadelphia, 
 townhouses that date from the 
 1 870s enclose a garden-street that 
 has no automobile traffic 
 
winners you'd learn about design through that one 
 feature." 
 
 One award winner, an Italian restaurant, was honored 
 by Friday Architects for its 1939 exterior, with "an 
 easy-to-read neon sign complete with chef and "an 
 outstanding black-and-white tile design that charm- 
 ingly integrates signs and decoration, giving the entire 
 street frontage a cheerful and inviting look." 
 
 A small church was singled out for its "effective use of 
 architectural symbolism to enhance a building's func- 
 tion," namely the "permastone facade ... in the shape 
 of a peaked roof typical of one-story churches" that 
 had been applied to the front of the two-story stucco 
 building. 
 
 By pointing out the symbolic facade on the church or 
 the sign on the pizza parlor, says Slovic, building-of- 
 the-month awards also told "architects, who at that time 
 were debating whether these things were good for their 
 buildings, 'Look around you.' All those things — 
 signage, decoration — that architects are so hesitant to 
 use are part of what makes up a city. It was a way of 
 telling architects, the trained people, to look at the ver- 
 nacular.'' Recognize the "tenacious optimism" 
 expressed by a shocking-pink rowhouse, as Slovic 
 wrote in Places, and the perceptive designer may grasp 
 "the means for making authentic places emanate from 
 the patterns of life at hand." 
 
 jh tree: Fan-shaped ginkgo 
 3S fall on North American 
 walks every autumn. Grown in 
 )le gardens in China and 
 in since ancient times, 
 goes fare better than most 
 > in polluted modern cities Sole 
 3sentative of a group of related 
 ts that were abundant 1 65 
 )n years ago, ginkgoes are 
 3 fossils, believed to no longer 
 in the wild. 
 
 Slovic says Friday Architects abandoned private 
 award-making because it became too time-consuming. 
 But he still believes cities can benefit from similar pro- 
 grams that honor architectural diamonds in the rough 
 and rhinestone rowhouses. 
 
 "Each community should be encouraged to do some- 
 thing like that," he says. "I meant to encourage people 
 to use their own judgement. That then becomes a part of 
 public discussion. Then people really look around and 
 say, 'What's good that we have?'" 
 
 As for members of his own profession, he says, "We, as 
 architects, enliven people's experiences. I felt, as far as 
 
Steel framing evokes the 
 Philadelphia house where Ben 
 Franklin lived. The floor plan is 
 detailed in white marble set in blacf 
 slate. A museum sits below ground 
 Franklin Court, a Bicentennial 
 project by the architectural firm of 
 Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, 
 won a 1984 Presidential Design 
 Award 
 
~* 
 
 
the sensitivity behind these buildings, if architects 
 could learn from that and look at that, then we could 
 make better buildings. To look at how people live, and 
 not at what other designers have already conceived of, I 
 think that's really key." 
 
 Colorado and Florida: State 
 Prizes for Places 
 
 Professional societies and state governments can do 
 much to focus public attention on exemplary architec- 
 ture. Awards programs in Colorado and Florida have 
 each honored outstanding place-makers in order to 
 encourage better design in private and public develop- 
 ment projects. 
 
 "I would like to give everybody the inclination to ask 
 themselves what they want in their particular commu- 
 nity," says Denver architect Stuart Ohlson, founder of 
 the award-making Colorado Design Alliance. "If we 
 can't have selfish interests in the places we occupy, 
 we're going to be subject to the conditions of develop- 
 ment, rather than controlling them." 
 
 Colorado's "energy boom, which seemed to represent a 
 growth in development and population," says Ohlson, 
 was the impetus for forming the Colorado Design Alli- 
 ance in 1982. (The alliance's membership is drawn 
 from state chapters of the American Institute of Archi- 
 tects, American Society of Landscape Architects, and 
 American Planning Association, and from the Consult- 
 ing Engineers Council of Colorado.) With the state's 
 population expected to soar and the number of build- 
 ings within its borders expected to double, alliance 
 members felt Colorado citizens should be encouraged 
 to help guide the design professionals who will shape 
 the state's physical development. 
 
 "We weren't anti-growth," says Ohlson. "We wanted to 
 encourage those who were in the design and develop- 
 
 Tounsts crowd the restored Main 
 Street of Breckenndge, Colorado, 
 winner of a 1 983 award from the 
 state's private Design Alliance. 
 Breckenridge was listed as a ghost 
 town in some guidebooks as 
 recently as the 1960s. The town's 
 enactment of strict historic-district 
 guidelines, in the 1970s, was 
 complemented by private 
 
ment game to do the best possible work. One of our 
 objectives was to provide a forum through which obser- 
 vations, attitudes, criticisms could be dealt with effec- 
 tively. The Columbine Awards were an attempt to 
 channel that." 
 
 For the alliance's 1983 Columbine Awards for Design 
 Excellence, the professional organization divided Col- 
 orado into five geographic regions and, through news- 
 paper balloting, asked citizens to vote for the best of the 
 state's buildings, plazas, streets, and other designed 
 projects. Nominations were solicited through newspa- 
 per articles about the awards; names and telephone 
 numbers of local alliance members were published, 
 and readers were asked to suggest favorite projects. 
 Regional ballots were then published in newspapers, 
 and readers voted for one of five projects in their area or 
 wrote in their own candidate for a design award. 
 
 Throughout Colorado, more than 4,000 Columbine bal- 
 lots were cast. The mixed-use development Writer 
 Square (described in the Denver Daily Journal as "an 
 architectural bridge between the historic low-rise 
 buildings of adjacent Larimer Square and the modern 
 high-rise buildings of the new downtown Denver") was 
 the winner among Denver-region voters. Other Colum- 
 bine winners included a resort development near 
 Durango, Colorado, and the restored Main Street of the 
 former mining town of Breckenridge. In a ceremony at 
 the Denver Botanic Gardens in June 1983, Columbine 
 Award plaques were presented to local officials, archi- 
 tects, engineers, and others responsible for each win- 
 ning project. 
 
 In Florida, the Governor's Design Awards program, 
 begun in 1980, also aims to focus public attention on 
 good design, but with the goal of encouraging better use 
 of taxpayer dollars. 
 
 Richard Chalmers, dean of the School of Architecture 
 at Florida A & M University, says the awards program 
 grew out of a conversation with Governor Bob Graham. 
 "Our governor is very interested in building and archi- 
 tecture," says Chalmers. "Back five years ago, we were 
 talking and we asked what incentive is there for agen- 
 
 ired, original lighting fixtures 
 tinate the house at the restored 
 iger Theater, in Pensacola, 
 ier of a 1 984 Florida Governor's 
 gn Award. Denver-area voters 
 ;e Writer Square (top) to 
 ive a 1 983 Columbine Award in 
 irado. 
 
cies of government to use the taxpayers' money in a way 
 that results in better architecture." Chalmers says Gov. 
 Graham suggested the annual awards program that 
 would recognize outstanding public projects. 
 
 Nominations for the annual awards, invited in eight 
 categories that range from educational facilities to res- 
 toration-and-recycling projects, can come from any 
 agency of local or state government. "The user makes 
 the nomination," says an official in the governors office 
 of planning and budgeting. "That's the ultimate test of a 
 public building," he says, adding that each nominated 
 building must also have been in continuous use for two 
 or more years. 
 
 As in Colorado, recognition — in the form of a certifi- 
 cate : — goes to every member of the development team, 
 including the government official who oversaw comple- 
 tion of the winning project. A bronze plaque is mounted 
 on the actual structure selected by the awards jury. 
 Each year's jury is composed of members of Florida's 
 design and engineering societies, plus one layman. 
 The position of jury chairman rotates annually among 
 the deans of Florida's three schools of architecture. 
 
 "Boston's downtown 
 development in the past 
 twenty years has been 
 explosive. In this short 
 period of time . . . the 
 architectural fabric of 
 Boston has been trans- 
 formed. This develop- 
 ment, in the opinion of 
 design professionals and 
 the public at large, has 
 been undertaken without 
 enough regard to the 
 needs of citizens for a 
 better city environment." 
 
 Governor's Design Award winners are not always build- 
 ings. A bridge over a state road in Sarasota County won 
 a 1983 award, according to the St. Petersburg Times, 
 for its "clean, low-profile design." A vaudeville-theater 
 restoration project, carried out by the city of Pensacola 
 and the University of West Florida, was a 1984 winner, 
 along with a downtown redevelopment project in North 
 Miami, and a native-stone visitor center at a state park 
 near Micanopy, Florida. 
 
 Boston: '\ City Upon a Hill' 
 Ponders its Livability 
 
 As Webb Nichols tells it, the seed for the Boston Con- 
 ference — that city's wide-ranging and remarkable 
 examination, during 1984, of development in its down- 
 town and neighborhoods — was planted during a slide 
 show at the Boston Globe. 
 
 Sunday boaters cruise the Charles, 
 with Boston for their backdrop 
 
3sent shock: Its glass sheath 
 lecting the clouds over Copley 
 luare, the John Hancock Building 
 vers above Trinity Church, 
 jposite, old Faneuil Hall. 
 
A Cambridge, Massachusetts, architect, Nichols has 
 expressed his worries about Boston development, and 
 about the danger of losing the city's "spirit of place nur- 
 tured over three centuries," in the opinion pages of the 
 Globe. Invited in early 1983 to discuss architecture and 
 development for Globe editors, he decided to present a 
 slide-show "walking tour" of the city. During his pre- 
 sentation, Nichols projected two slides, one of down- 
 town Boston, the other of downtown Los Angeles. "And 
 the editors, who are pretty sensitive people, couldn't 
 tell which was which," recalls Nichols. Later, he met 
 with Thomas Winship, the newspaper's chief editor, 
 and suggested having "someone from the outside come 
 in here and evaluate the city for those of us who can't 
 see the forest for the trees." 
 
 "I was concerned about Boston. I'd lived here since 
 1967, and there seemed to be a great difference 
 between the city one fantasizes about — the 'walking 
 city,' Back Bay, cobblestones — and the city as it is. 
 My intuition was that the city was being overbuilt and 
 the quality of some of the work was inferior." An advan- 
 tage of bringing in hired architectural guns to analyze 
 the city, he says, is that "they've got no vested interest. 
 They're not going to get any projects from the city." 
 
 Ultimately, "Boston: A City and Its Future" took shape 
 as a collaborative effort of the Globe and the Massachu- 
 setts Institute of Technology, with the four-part confer- 
 ence designed, managed, and staffed as a research 
 project of MIT's Laboratory of Architecture and 
 Planning. 
 
 During the first, fact-finding phase of the conference, 
 nationally known experts in architecture and planning 
 were brought to the city to hear from public officials, 
 developers, and other Bostonians who have contributed 
 to the city's physical transformation. The experts 
 attended hearings at three sites in different areas of 
 Boston, as well as a day-long, wrap-up session at 
 Faneuil Hall. At that final session, the visiting experts 
 presented their findings to an audience of citizens and 
 city officials. 
 
 "There seemed to be a 
 great difference between 
 the city one fantasizes 
 about— the 'walking city,' 
 Back Bay, cobblestones— 
 and the city as it is. My 
 intuition was that the city 
 was being overbuilt and 
 the quality of some of the 
 work was inferior." 
 
 *„/,„./„..,//.■ 
 
The conference format is 
 now a tool that can be 
 used by other cities con- 
 fronting development 
 issues. "We believe the 
 model is replicable." 
 
 "Tying the conference to an accountable set of facts 
 about geographic areas of the city" was a major contri- 
 bution of MIT's Laboratory of Architecture and Plan- 
 ning, says Thomas Piper, principal research scientist 
 at the lab and the conference's project director. Lab 
 staff designed the series of three community-based 
 workshops — what Piper calls "a moveable feast" — 
 that focused on city areas subject to differing develop- 
 ment pressures. 
 
 The first area chosen for study — downtown extending 
 to the waterfront — shows the concentrated effects of 
 large-scale development that began in Boston in the 
 late 1950s. The second study area, Washington Street 
 from Chinatown to Roxbury, links two inner-Boston 
 neighborhoods that have benefited little from the city's 
 building boom. Copley Square, the third area, com- 
 bines aspects of the first two study sites, according to an 
 MIT newsletter, "as the place where the affluent com- 
 mercial spine of Back Bay, extending from the down- 
 town area, meets the economically mixed neighborhood 
 of the South End, many of whose residents have experi- 
 enced or are threatened by displacement." 
 
 Each city section was described in detailed case stud- 
 ies prepared by MIT research staff. "The case studies 
 were actually briefing documents for the local as well as 
 the national panelists," says Piper. Those local panel- 
 ists, who gave presentations at workshops and who took 
 questions from the public and the invited national 
 experts, included more than two dozen officials, 
 developers, design professionals, and community 
 representatives. 
 
 For its part, the Globe provided extensive daily cover- 
 age of the spring 1984 workshops and of the wrap-up 
 conference at Faneuil Hall. In November 1984, the 
 newspaper also published a 48-page magazine supple- 
 ment on the conference and issues it raised. Titled "The 
 Livable City?" the supplement was intended, accord- 
 ing to the Globe, "to further and to focus the debate" on 
 Boston development. 
 
 At the heart of that debate is the fear that the city's 
 downtown has been developed without regard for civic 
 
needs, that despite projects that are the envy of other 
 cities, much of Boston's building has failed to produce 
 a substantially better public city. 
 
 "Boston's downtown development in the past twenty 
 years has been explosive," Globe editor Winship wrote 
 in a pre-conference letter. "In this short period of time, 
 under the leadership of political administrators com- 
 mitted to city growth, the architectural fabric of Boston 
 has been transformed. This development, in the opin- 
 ion of design professionals and the public at large, has 
 been undertaken without enough regard to the needs of 
 citizens for a better city environment. The massive con- 
 struction program has also raised the question of social 
 equity, as the downtown appears to be prospering in an 
 era of declining Boston neighborhoods." 
 
 The five national experts invited by the Globe and MIT 
 to participate in the Boston Conference included: J. 
 Max Bond, Jr., chairman of Columbia University's 
 Graduate School of Architecture and Planning; Dolores 
 Hayden, professor of architecture and planning at the 
 University of California, Los Angeles; Allan B. Jacobs, 
 professor of city and regional planning, University of 
 California, Berkeley; Moon Landrieu, former mayor of 
 New Orleans and secretary of Housing and Urban 
 Development during the Carter Administration; and 
 Barton Myers, professor of architecture at UCLA. 
 
 AtFaneuil Hall on May 12, 1984, the panelists offered 
 a variety of prescriptions and observations. Allan 
 Jacobs urged the city to devise a new master plan, lest 
 future development be left to the "whims of chance." 
 
 Barton Myers saw Boston in danger of becoming a typi- 
 cal "unicentered North American city, with its radi- 
 cally high-density, high-rise downtown core, with its 
 sprawling, radically low peripheral areas." Moon Lan- 
 drieu, on the other hand, defended tall buildings: "I 
 don't find working on the fortieth floor of a high-rise 
 inferior to working in a sweatshop in the basement of a 
 building of human scale." 
 
 Was the conference a success? "A very valuable stan- 
 dard-setting exercise, a consciousness-raising exer- 
 
 "For we must consider 
 that we shall be a city 
 upon a hill. The eyes of all 
 people ate upon us." 
 
cise," is how John de Monchaux, dean of MIT's School 
 of Architecture and Planning, summed it up. "The 
 chief purpose was to inform the debate that would 
 shape Boston. I think in the broadest sense it did that," 
 he says, adding, however, that only the next half-dozen 
 years of city development will begin to tell the tale. 
 
 To Thomas Piper, of the MIT Laboratory of Architecture 
 and Planning, the conference format is now a tool that 
 can be used by other cities confronting development 
 issues. "We believe the model is replicable," he says, 
 provided "you can bring in one of these powerful com- 
 munications technologies, a newspaper or a television 
 station," and provided a city has the services of "a 
 broker like MIT." 
 
 Webb Nichols, the architect who proposed the confer- 
 ence, gives Boston's 1984 debate on development 
 mixed marks. "We still really don't have a consensus of 
 how the city should go," he says. At the three local 
 forums and at the Faneuil Hall wrap-up, "it was diffi- 
 cult for people to hold on to a discussion of how Boston 
 is being built." In a city with social and economic ten- 
 sions, "the more one seemed preoccupied with that, the 
 more it seemed an elitist preoccupation." 
 
 Yet as a result of the conference, says Nichols, "I think 
 there has been a sensitivity toward building now in Bos- 
 ton." And he believes that public forums and newspa- 
 per coverage that focus on urban design, thus creating 
 citizens informed about architecture and development, 
 "can help prevent bad work from taking place." 
 
 The Globe, in its special conference supplement, 
 reminded readers of testimony from an old Boston 
 hand: "For we must consider that we shall be a city 
 upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," John 
 Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 
 told New England-bound Puritans in 1630. 
 
 In later days, said the newspaper, descendants of those 
 first Bostonians had "leveled the hills and pushed them 
 into the sea to create the Back Bay, the South End, and 
 other wonders of urban elegance .... In the late 20th 
 and into the 21st century, Bostonians must decide how 
 
 : of place: On an April night in 
 , Paul Revere saw the lantern 
 inst Church's lofty steeple, and 
 off to rouse the minute men. 
 
to control and enhance their environment .... In 
 addressing the civic design of this prosperous, hand- 
 some, widely admired, world-class city, John Win- 
 throp's warning," suggested the newspaper, was "worth 
 recalling." 
 
 Escondido: Staging a Competition 
 to Focus the City's Vision 
 
 'The idea," says Rod Wood, assistant city manager of 
 Escondido, California, "was to set a trend for excel- 
 lence in architecture." The problem, he says, was that 
 when people tried to visualize Escondido's badly 
 needed new civic/cultural center — the acknowledged 
 starting point for local architectural excellence — that 
 the downtown complex should look "nice" was all any- 
 one could agree on. 
 
 "Everybody in the community knew we wanted an 
 architectural masterpiece — within the budget," says 
 Wood. "But no one could visualize what that building 
 would look like. Ninety-five percent of the reason we 
 went with a design competition is we didn't specifically 
 know what we wanted." 
 
 Escondido officials did know a new civic center would 
 fulfill three major needs — providing government office 
 space, a center for conferences and meetings, and a 
 cultural facility for the performing and fine arts. For the 
 city of 72,000 people, situated thirty miles northeast of 
 San Diego, the civic center also represented a way to 
 insure Escondido's role as a leader in northern San 
 Diego County. 
 
 For Escondido, and for architects invited to partici- 
 pate, the city's 1984 design competition posed a unique 
 opportunity to devise a development scheme for an 
 entire downtown block in a fast-growing southern Cali- 
 fornia community. According to Rod Wood, the city 
 also hoped its competition would attract national atten- 
 tion to the city's proposed $52-million construction 
 project, thus increasing Escondido's chances of obtain- 
 ing corporate and foundation funds to support civic- 
 
 "Ninety-five per- 
 cent off the reason 
 we went with a 
 design competition 
 is we didn't specifi- 
 cally know what we 
 wanted . . . .The idea 
 was to set a trend 
 for excellence in 
 architecture." 
 
m so excited I ivant to 
 n out tomorrow and 
 irt building it." 
 
 center cultural programs. As Wood points out, "It's very 
 difficult to ask somebody for $100,000 for a project 
 they've never heard of." 
 
 The two-stage urban design competition was partlv 
 financed with funds from the Design Arts Program of 
 the National Endowment for the Arts. Escondido 
 advertised its competition nationally, to attract a wide 
 range of entrants and to provide younger architects the 
 opportunity to compete with well-established firms. 
 Further, the city agreed to pay a $7,500 honorarium to 
 each of five design-team finalists, and an additional 
 $10,000 prize to the competition winner. 
 
 The eleven-member jury for the seven-month competi- 
 tion included professional designers and architects and 
 Escondido city officials and residents. In an important 
 sense, however, all of Escondido helped judge the 
 contest. 
 
 "We opened up the first and second stage of this compe- 
 tition to the public to get comments," says Rod Wood. 
 "In the first phase [when 108 architects submitted pro- 
 posals] we had over 1,500 citizens make comments. 
 They were all typed up and presented to the jury." 
 
 During the second stage of the competition — when five 
 finalists refined their submissions — the city aired a 
 twenty-minute cable television program that presented 
 the top designs and further explained the city's civic- 
 center plans. Viewers were given an address to which 
 they could send comments. Also, a local newspaper 
 published photographs of finalists' designs and pro- 
 vided information about the civic center. The purpose 
 of the public polling, says Wood, was not to pick the 
 winner of the competition (the jury would do that), but 
 to help jury members gauge public taste in the diverse 
 community. 
 
 The jury's unanimous choice for the winning civic-cen- 
 ter design came from Pacific Associates Planners & 
 Architects, of San Diego, whose plan featured a wel- 
 coming city-hall entrance, lattice-covered arcades, 
 intimate courtyards, and a chime tower above a reflect- 
 ing pool. 
 
I 
 
 In Escondido, California, the town 
 solicited comments from citizens to 
 help an eleven-member jury select 
 the winning entry (above) for a new 
 downtown civic/cultural center 
 
[lie jurors were 
 npressed because the 
 esig)i captured a sense 
 fspirit" 
 
 ific Associates Planners & 
 hitects proposed the scheme 
 ove) that Escondido hopes wi 
 a trend for excellence in 
 hitecture. 
 
1 
 
 "The jurors were impressed," William Liskamm, a San 
 Rafael architect and the competition's professional 
 adviser, told the Los Angeles Times, "because the 
 design captured a sense of spirit." 
 
 Escondido's official assessment of the design competi- 
 tion that yielded a city's vision for architectural excel- 
 lence may have been best expressed by Mayor Ernie 
 Cowan. "I'm so excited," said the mayor when the win- 
 ner was announced, "I want to run out tomorrow and 
 
 In the late 1930s, MacArthur Park 
 visitors savored the urban scene 
 across untroubled waters. 
 
 Los Angeles: Culture as Cure 
 for MacArthur Park 
 
 Like a foster parent taking on a troubled but promising 
 child, the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design 
 has "adopted" MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, with the 
 intention of molding a thicket of crime into a place as 
 art. 
 
 "The goal of this program is to give MacArthur Park a 
 new identity," says Al Nodal, director of exhibitions at 
 Otis/Parsons. "Right now, the identity is crime. You 
 say 'MacArthur Park' and people shudder. We're trying 
 

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 ;Arthur Park around 1940, 
 ;ing toward the Hollywood Hills. 
 ', white buildings at the park's 
 e, where Wilshire Boulevard 
 rsects the park, house the Otis 
 nstitute. 
 
to change the identity to art. 
 that qualifies as a tall order. 
 
 For Nodal, and for art, 
 
 "In all of Los Angeles, there may be no other gathering 
 place quite like MacArthur Park, centerpiece of the 
 city's most crowded neighborhood, one of its most bus- 
 tling and varied, and one of its poorest," reported the 
 Los Angeles Times. Once a park "for daytime strolling, 
 evening dances, plays and other activities befitting its 
 affluent surroundings," MacArthur declined over the 
 years, becoming "a haven for the unemployed, winos, 
 and other homeless wanderers," and, after dark, a stag- 
 ing ground for "dope dealers and those who prey on the 
 weak." Elderly neighborhood residents, said the Times, 
 "remember the old days in the park but now avoid it as 
 if it were a swamp." 
 
 Nodal, who is directing the Otis/Parsons program to 
 reshape the park, sees the thirty-two-acre site as some- 
 thing more — a potential "urban laboratory" in which 
 to "demonstrate the potency of creative approaches and 
 fresh thinking toward complicated urban issues." 
 
 "We want to understand and build upon the park's char- 
 acter," Nodal told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. 
 "What we want to avoid like the plague is any sense of 
 highbrows imposing clever ideas on a passive public. 
 We're talking to everyone we can around here, generat- 
 ing interest where there was only despair, focusing 
 energy where official initiatives fail." 
 
 Art may prove the salvation of MacArthur Park, but 
 crime and cleanliness are of more immediate concern to 
 the neighborhood. Thus, Nodal has worked at commu- 
 nity organizing as well as at arts planning. Through the 
 new MacArthur Park Community Council, Nodal has 
 obtained public and private funds for the Otis/Parsons 
 art program, as well as the backing of the Los Angeles 
 Police Department and the city's Recreation-and-Parks 
 and Cultural-Affairs Commissions. In October 1984, 
 Nodal and the community council's chairman, a local 
 hotel owner, called the first meeting of a "Business 
 Watch" group. An organizing session for the neighbor- 
 hood's first community crime-watch program, the meet- 
 ing was attended by more than one hundred local 
 
 "The goal of this 
 program is to give 
 MacArthur Park a 
 new identity. Right 
 now, the identity is 
 crime .... We're 
 trying to change the 
 identity to art." 
 
 r* 
 
 rwm 
 
We want to under- avoid like the plague is 
 
 and and build upon any sense of highbrows 
 
 ie parks character. imposing clever ideas 
 
 \ loat we want to on a passive public. " 
 
 i r\ i i i 
 
 Mi 
 
 ;n of MacArthur: In 1942, the 
 rk was named after General 
 luglas MacArthur (statue at top). 
 le Otis Group" honors the 
 jnder of the Los Angeles Times. 
 Nodal, of Otis/Parsons, sees the 
 rk as an urban laboratory for 
 ring with culture. 
 
 merchants. The community council has also formed a 
 beautification committee to oversee MacArthur Park 
 trash clean-up efforts. The councils public-affairs 
 committee has been given the task of winning favorable 
 press coverage for community efforts. 
 
 Meanwhile, Nodal is pushing forward with the MacAr- 
 thur Park cultural program. Phase I, in early 1984, and 
 "designed," says Nodal, "to introduce a more visible 
 cultural presence in . . . the community and to initiate 
 interest in a program of public art," brought the creation 
 of three temporary public art works and two semi-per- 
 manent sculptures by Los Angeles artists. The art 
 works — partly intended as a means for testing local 
 waters — were installed on the Wilshire Boulevard 
 frontage of Otis/Parsons, directly overlooking the park. 
 
 During Phase II, in late 1984, a national committee of 
 artists and public-art experts gauged community reac- 
 tion to the first five art works, surveyed sites for future 
 MacArthur Park art, and selected artists for Phase III of 
 the program. Those Phase III artists, after meetings 
 with neighborhood residents, were expected to create 
 (on site in MacArthur Park) up to ten works of art that 
 would be maintained by Otis/Parsons. Finally, during 
 Phase IV of the visual-arts program, in late 1985. 
 a permanent work of neon art was to be created for 
 the exterior of the Otis/Parsons Exhibition Center on 
 Wilshire Boulevard. 
 
 In conjunction with the visual-arts program, Otis/ 
 Parsons has planned a design-demonstration project, 
 featuring Los Angeles designers and artists, to develop 
 an overall plan for architecturally and functionally 
 refurbishing the long-neglected city park. 
 
 "The mandate of this team will be to build on the park's 
 character to create an urban place that is expressive of 
 its traditions, aspirations, and values," reports Otis/ 
 Parsons. "Elements of the plan [to be presented to the 
 community in a fall 1986 exhibition and symposium] 
 will include general lighting in the park, the lighting of 
 specific art works and existing monuments, and the 
 refurbishing of the General Douglas MacArthur monu- 
 ment .... Proposals for improving MacArthur Park 
 
Bandshell, converting the currently defunct Senior Cit- 
 izens Center into a working arts and crafts facility, and 
 for the renovation of other existing structures in the 
 park, such as the boathouse, food concessions, and 
 bathrooms, will be developed. Seating, walkways, and 
 landscaping will also be treated." 
 
 Meanwhile, while the sculptors sculpt and the design- 
 ers design, an Otis/Parsons performing-arts advisory 
 committee will help arrange six MacArthur Park mini- 
 festivals of dance, opera, theater, music, comedy, and 
 folklore to be presented free in the park during 1985 
 and 1986. 
 
 Adoption, of course, is forever, and even an arts pro- 
 gram as ambitious as Otis/Parsons' should offer contin- 
 uing hope, not just a short-term diversion from 
 community problems. To that end, Nodal and Otis/ 
 Parsons have prepared plans to evaluate the MacArthur 
 program and to develop criteria for continuing it. 
 
 "Can Al Nodal and his group overcome the old indiffer- 
 ence of Angelenos to their public spaces?" asked the 
 Los Angeles Herald Examiner in an article on the 
 MacArthur Park art program. "Can [Nodal] learn to 
 walk upon the water?" 
 
 Nodal would seem to think so. His faith in the possibil- 
 ity of remaking places with art is great. "Artists," he 
 believes, "are capable of providing the leadership 
 needed to revitalize a community." He also hopes other 
 cities will be encouraged to study Otis/Parsons' efforts 
 as a guide to reshaping their own troubled urban spaces 
 into places as art. 
 
 "We feel artists can come in with a fresh approach," he 
 says, "using culture, using art, to give a community a 
 new focus. We're trying to do that for this neighbor- 
 hood, which hasn't had a focus, which has been 
 blighted over the years. We're hoping this program will 
 be the first model for that sort of approach, which can 
 then be tried elsewhere." 
 
 Angelenos rowed their boats at the 
 park in the early years of this 
 century, relaxed on shore during 
 the 1940s, attended drawing class 
 in the 1950s 
 
Dolumbus, Irwin Union Bank^ 
 ist addition was designed by 
 vin Roche John Dinkeloo & 
 sociates, completed in 1973. 
 
 "We're third in the nation 
 with buildings by famous 
 contemporary architects — 
 forty-seven now and three 
 on the drawing boards." 
 
Columbus: Corporate Support for 
 Prairie Architecture 
 
 "It's a delight to be mayor of Columbus, Indiana," says 
 Robert Stewart. The Columbus native and first-term 
 mayor mentions the excellence of his city's schools 
 and cultural activities as two reasons Columbus 
 ranks as more than "just another typical Midwestern 
 community." 
 
 But treasures of stone, and steel, and glass — the nota- 
 ble buildings that have gone up in Columbus since the 
 1940s — are what draw some 50,000 sightseers a year 
 to the town, and are what have earned Columbus the 
 title of "Athens on the Prairie." 
 
 "We're third in the nation," Stewart says of the city, 
 "with buildings by famous contemporary architects — 
 forty-seven now and three on the drawing boards." 
 Given Columbus' size (population 30,000), the town 
 almost certainly qualifies, as the Chamber of Com- 
 merce likes to point out. as "the most concentrated col- 
 lection of contemporary architecture in the world." 
 
 "On Sundays, the citizens of Columbus worship in 
 churches designed by Eero and Eliel Saarinen," 
 reported Time magazine in 1977. "They borrow books 
 at a library built from the innovative plans of I.M. Pei 
 and embellished with a bronze arch sculpted by Henry 
 Moore. They shop in a glass-enclosed piazza designed 
 by Cesar Pelli, and send their children to schools con- 
 ceived by architects Harry Weese, Eliot Noyes, and 
 John Warnecke." 
 
 Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church, completed in 
 1942, is the oldest of Columbus' contemporary archi- 
 tectural treasures. Saarinen was commissioned as 
 architect at the urging of J. Irwin Miller, a Columbus 
 industrialist who has been dubbed "the Medici of the 
 Midwest." Miller, 76, is chairman of the executive and 
 finance committee of Cummins Engine Company. The 
 company, with headquarters in Columbus, manufac- 
 tures diesel truck engines and employs 9,000 people in 
 the Columbus area. 
 
 Built treasures draw students and 
 lay enthusiasts of architecture to 
 Columbus, Indiana, where a 
 Cummins Engine Company 
 program has paid design fees for 
 schools and other public 
 structures. 
 
*chitectural excel- 
 lce has "brought a 
 lality of life into 
 is little commu- 
 ty which otherwise 
 3uld have been 
 lattainable. 
 
 In the mid-1950s, after he had become board chairman 
 at Cummins, Miller further nudged his hometown 
 toward architectural excellence when he announced 
 that the newly formed Cummins Engine Foundation 
 would pay design fees for new public schools in 
 Columbus. 
 
 "This was the period when the baby-boomers were 
 entering school," says Ann Smith, public-information 
 manager at Cummins Engine. "Columbus had built no 
 new schools since the 1920s, and there was a need for a 
 number of schools to be put up quickly." 
 
 Other city agencies have since taken advantage of the 
 Cummins Foundation architecture program. Founda- 
 tion guidelines stipulate that the public governing 
 board responsible for construction choose its architect 
 from a list of first-rank American designers. The list 
 must be compiled by "a disinterested panel of two of the 
 country's most distinguished architects." Architects 
 chosen by a city agency must also be ones not previ- 
 ously selected for Cummins-supported projects. As of 
 late 1983, the Cummins Foundation had spent more 
 than $8 million on the architecture program. 
 
 "Cummins has handled this whole thing very adroitly," 
 says Robert Brown, owner and publisher of the Colum- 
 bus Republic newspaper. "The architects for these 
 buildings are not selected by Cummins. An architect 
 who has done a building doesn't get back on the list. 
 Cummins pays the architect without any restriction on 
 the size of the building, the design of the building. It's 
 just about as hands-off a program as there can be." 
 
 In 1957, the Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary School, 
 designed by Chicago architect Harry Weese, became 
 the first public building to result from the Cummins 
 program. In all, a dozen schools have been built with 
 architectural fees paid by Cummins. Other Cummins- 
 supported public buildings in Columbus include a fire 
 station, a regional mental health center, the city hall, 
 and the Columbus Post Office, which is the first United 
 States post office to be designed by privately paid archi- 
 tects. 
 
 J. Irwin Miller and Cummins Engine have set the pace 
 
 i Columbus Fire Department's 
 tion No. 4, built in 1967, was 
 iigned by Venturi & Rauch. 
 
for fine architecture in Columbus. But other public and 
 private structures have been designed by well-known 
 architects without Cummins' assistance. "We've been 
 fortunate," says Mayor Stewart. The town's renowned 
 architecture has brought its own benefits, he says. 
 "We've never made any campaign to attract visitors," 
 but they still pour in — lay enthusiasts of design by 
 ones and twos and architecture students by the bus- 
 load. The town's famous contemporary architecture has 
 also encouraged citizens to preserve and restore the 
 community's fine old architecture. According to the 
 Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, downtown 
 merchants cooperated several years ago "in storefront 
 repainting and new signage for a 'model block' 
 [designed by architect Alexander Girard] between Fifth 
 and Sixth Streets on Washington Street .... Since 
 then many downtown area owners have followed the 
 master plan to rejuvenate the typical Midwestern nine- 
 teenth-century buildings." 
 
 "It's brought a quality of life into this little community 
 which otherwise would have been unattainable," 
 Robert Brown says of his city's devotion to architectural 
 excellence. "It's encouraged other people to do things 
 they might not otherwise have done. A case in point," 
 says the publisher of the Republic, "is our newspaper 
 building." The Republic plant, designed by Skidmore, 
 Owings & Merrill, won a 1975 honor award from the 
 American Institute of Architects. "We wanted to do 
 something that was compatible with the community," 
 explains Brown. "There's a certain amount of peer pres- 
 sure. When people do something horrible [in terms of 
 design] letters are written to the newspaper complain- 
 ing. 
 
 Of course, even the most artful architecture must suc- 
 ceed as shelter. Fortunately, the treasures of Columbus 
 do just that. "They are places to learn in, pray in, read 
 in, have fun in, work in, bank in, have the daily life of 
 the community written and printed in," reported 
 National Geographic . "Small town in scale," the maga- 
 zine said of the buildings of Athens on the Prairie, 
 "they fit in like slightly eccentric neighbors, adding 
 variety, provoking debate, and stimulating a taste for 
 the unconventional." 
 
 The 1964 North Christian Church 
 was the last building designed by 
 architect Eero Saannen. 
 

S H O W CASE P I. A C IE S 
 
n December 1933, St. Patrick's 
 "athedral towered over the 
 oundation for Rockefeller Center's 
 11-story International Building. 
 
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ROCKEFELLER CENTER 
 
 I ineteen buildings in a city studded with nota- 
 ble architecture, Rockefeller Center is one of Ameri- 
 ca's classic urban spaces, a city-within-a-city that, 
 according to a 1939 guidebook, "stands as distinctively 
 for New York as the Louvre stands for Paris." 
 
 » 
 
 Designed quickly, by a crew of architects, the complex 
 expresses a degree of integrity that generally appears 
 only in single structures created slowly and in solitude. 
 "It is a feat of mingled inspiration and accommodation 
 that architectural historians will go on pondering for as 
 long as the Center stands." wrote Brendan Gill. 
 
 In the 1920s, the midtown site where Rockefeller Cen- 
 ter now stands was occupied by bordellos and speak- 
 easies. A new opera house was proposed as a suitable 
 replacement for the low-toned neighborhood, and 
 financial backing from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was 
 secured for the project. The stock market crashed a 
 year later, and the opera house plan was scrapped. 
 Rockefeller, however, still held the lease for three 
 expensive blocks of Manhattan. A new plan was devel- 
 oped for a skyscraper complex that would stand as an 
 example for future urban planning. 
 
 "Wasteful," "undistinguished," and "inartistic" were 
 just a few of the criticisms hurled at the scheme before 
 construction began. By 1938, when the Center was 
 nearly complete, New Yorkers had grown more enthusi- 
 astic about Rockefellers addition to the urban land- 
 scape. "This is the Future," said social historian 
 Frederick Lewis Allen. 
 
 In a city of superlatives, Rockefeller Center set new 
 standards for greatness. The 850-foot RCA Building, 
 nicknamed the "Slab," was not only one of New York's 
 tallest skyscrapers; in gross space, it was the world's 
 largest office building. Inside Radio City Music Hall, 
 where ticket prices began at 40«*, New Yorkers could 
 wonder at the golden proscenium arch, its 300-ton 
 
truss the heaviest that had been used in a theater. They 
 could listen to the world's largest theater orchestra, and 
 watch films on the world's largest movie screen. When 
 the Rockettes came on stage, the audience enjoyed the 
 world's longest line of precision dancers. 
 
 Nowadays, Rockefeller Center is admired less for its 
 size than for the intelligence with which it was 
 designed. Walking among the Center's towers, one 
 becomes conscious of relationships between individual 
 structures. Different spaces between buildings, and 
 differing heights and circulation patterns, blend to form 
 a coherent whole. The creation that Lewis Mumford, in 
 1940, called "architecturally the most exciting mass of 
 buildings in the city" is a vision of the future that con- 
 tinues to inspire. 
 

 
 
 
 
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FALLINGWATER 
 
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 rank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a house can- 
 tilevered over a waterfall on a forested site in the Bear 
 Run Valley of Pennsylvania, was designed in 1935, 
 when the architect was sixty-eight years old, and in the 
 fourth decade of his career. 
 
 For Wright, the house in the woods came at something 
 just short of midpoint, wrote Tom Wolfe, in "the most 
 prodigious outpouring of work in the history of Ameri- 
 can architecture." 
 
 "In the next twenty-three years, until his death at the 
 age of ninety-one in 1959, he did more than half of his 
 life's work, more than 180 buildings, including the 
 Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin; 
 Herbert F. Johnson's mansion, Wingspread; Taliesin 
 West; the Florida Southern campus; the Usonian 
 homes; the Price Company tower; and the Guggenheim 
 Museum." 
 
 Wright designed Fallingwater for Edgar J. Kaufmann, 
 Sr. , a Pittsburgh department store owner and the father 
 of one of the architect's apprentices. Although an 
 admirer of Wright, Kaufmann was surprised by his first 
 sketches for the house, having imagined that his coun- 
 try retreat would be near, but not necessarily over, the 
 water. "E.J., I want you to live with the waterfall, not 
 just to look at it," Wright told Kaufmann. 
 
 As conceived by Wright, the house would be formed of 
 concrete terraces that echoed the rock ledges of the 
 landscape. To support a house that, in Wright's words, 
 came "leaping out" over the falls, the architect relied 
 on cantilever beams of reinforced concrete. Vertical 
 planes of sandstone, quarried on the site, separate the 
 horizontal concrete terraces. The rock ledge beneath 
 the house penetrates the living-room floor, forming the 
 hearth. 
 
 Years later, speaking of the house and of the man for 
 whom he designed it, Wright said, "I think you can hear 
 the waterfall when you look at the design. At least il is 
 there, and he lives intimately with the thing he loves." 
 
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 was trying," Eero Saarinen said of his design for 
 the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, "to reach for an abso- 
 lutely permanent form — a high form." 
 
 A slender hoop rising 630 feet above a bluff along the 
 Mississippi River, the Gateway Arch is our tallest mon- 
 ument. Known officially as the Jefferson National 
 Expansion Memorial, the arch honors our third presi- 
 dent and commemorates America's westward growth. It 
 was also intended, in Saarinen's words, as "a triumphal 
 arch for our age as the triumphal arches of classical 
 antiquity were for theirs." 
 
 Son of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, the younger 
 Saarinen designed the United States Embassy in Lon- 
 don, the Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy Air- 
 port, and the Dulles Airport building outside 
 Washington, D.C. But it was his plan for a stainless- 
 steel arch on the Mississippi — first prize winner in a 
 1948 design competition that both Saarinens entered 
 separately — that brought the son independent notice. 
 Eero Saarinen died in 1961, more than a year before 
 assembly of the Gateway Arch got underway, and seven 
 years before it was dedicated. 
 
 Composed of an inner skin of carbon steel and an outer 
 one of polished stainless steel, the arch is a catenary 
 curve, measuring the same distance from ground to 
 crest as it does from extrados to extrados. 
 
 For Saarinen, creating the proper memorial involved 
 more than selecting an appropriate sculptural form. He 
 also worked to integrate the intentions of the monument 
 with the site. 
 
 "The arch was placed near the Mississippi River, where 
 it would have most significance," he said of his design 
 in 1959. "Here it could make a strong axial relation 
 with the handsome, historic Old Courthouse which it 
 frames. Here, from its summit, the public could con- 
 front the magnificent river . . . All the lines of the site 
 plan, including the paths and the roads, and even the 
 railroad tunnels, have been brought into the same fam- 
 ily of curves to which the great arch itself belongs." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 PASEO DEL RIO 
 
 
 
 ne level down from the busy streets of the city, 
 San Antonio's Paseo del Rio has been described, in the 
 AIA Journal, as "a linear paradise of infinitely changing 
 vistas . . . animated by the presence of buildings, 
 shops, restaurants, and people." 
 
 There was a time when San Antonio's ten miles of river 
 corridor seemed quite the opposite of paradise. After 
 the flood of 1920 raised the waters 35 feet above nor- 
 mal, there was talk of covering the river for a sewer and 
 converting the space into a major avenue. Four years 
 later, the San Antonio Conservation Society was 
 formed, and by 1937 work had begun — much of it car- 
 ried out through the Works Progress Administration — 
 to improve rather than bury the river. The WPA project 
 brought stairways, footbridges, plantings and 17,000 
 feet of river walkway that stretched the length of 
 twenty-one city blocks. 
 
 Saved from sewerage, the San Antonio River is now rec- 
 ognized as the city's foremost downtown amenity. The 
 U-shaped Paseo del Rio, a loop in the river with parks, 
 cafes, and esplanades, is a magnet for tourists as well 
 as San Antonio residents. The Paseo is linked to the 
 city's regular street system by bridges and spiral stairs. 
 Tall cypress trees offer vertical scale, and bridges frame 
 distant views. A Texas counterpart to the quais of Paris, 
 San Antonio's river walk is an urban experience unique 
 in America — the sunken, flowing heart of a bustling 
 city. 
 
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 ^H T HIHotr than a centur) after its heyday, the 
 town of Jim Thorpe, in northeastern Pennsylvania's 
 Carbon County, remains a nearly intact showcase for 
 Victorian-era architecture. 
 
 Wealth brought in European artisans and Tiffany glass, 
 to embellish and adorn the elegant brick mansions on 
 the stretch of Broadway called Millionaire's Row. 
 Mauch Chunk, as the town was originally known, was a 
 hub in a network of canals, railroads, and mines — a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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JIM THORPE 
 
 linchpin in the Industrial Revolution. At its capitalist 
 peak, the town is thought to have had more resident 
 millionaires, per capita, than any place in the United 
 States. Asa Packer, one of those millionaires and the 
 founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, built an Italian- 
 ate villa in Mauch Chunk in 1860. He had artisans 
 carve 5,000 rosettes into the mansion's mahogany and 
 walnut paneling. 
 
 An 1874 guidebook recommended Mauch Chunk as 
 "the Switzerland of America" and one of the nation's 
 "most noted and popular inland summer resorts." 
 Times changed for the worse, and in hopes of recaptur- 
 ing lost glory Mauch Chunk renamed itself, in the 
 1950s, after the great Cherokee athlete Jim Thorpe. 
 
 Thorpe had never visited Mauch Chunk. But he had 
 first achieved national celebrity as an athlete while 
 attending Carlisle Indian School, 90 miles away. At the 
 suggestion of Thorpe's widow, his body was laid to rest 
 beneath a 20-ton granite tombstone on the east side of 
 town. 
 
 using its architectural heritage to attract tourists. 
 Guided walking tours and other ventures have been 
 planned, to cater to visiting fans of architectural 
 Victoriana. 
 
 A 1979 study, conducted for the Carbon County Plan- 
 ning Commission by the architectural firm of Venturi, 
 Rauch, and Scott Brown, urged local officials to focus 
 on Jim Thorpe's identity as a "jewel-like town with a 
 proud industrial heritage." The town and its architec- 
 tural treasures are tightly nestled in a winding valley 
 between mountain walls. "In the interlocking of land 
 with built form . . . Jim Thorpe is utterly unique," 
 noted the study. "It is beautifully, ingeniously and rela- 
 tively unalterably engaged in a difficult and spectacular 
 site, and remains a place where natural elements [and] 
 form built with nature, to human scale, and expressive 
 of the town's past . . . still remain as the focal features 
 of the landscape." 
 
 In recent years, the town of Jim Thorpe has steered a 
 different, perhaps surer, path toward economic rebirth, 
 
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THE PLAZA 
 
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 It was called Country Club Plaza back in 1922. 
 Over the decades, it has grown into a retail Brigadoon, 
 with fountains, sculpture, and tree-lined boulevards. 
 There are hotels, condominiums, and more than 150 
 stores and restaurants. Now known simply as the Plaza, 
 Kansas City, Missouri's shopping city is a 55-acre retort 
 to the idea that one retail complex must resemble 
 another. 
 
 If the Plaza represents the shopping-center-as-art, 
 indigenous art it is not. In America's heartland, Plaza 
 managers prefer a Spanish motif of red-tiled roofs, fili- 
 gree ironwork, and ornate towers. The decorative art — 
 ranging from mermaids to winged steeds, and including 
 a wood-carved Last Supper and a mural of toreadors — 
 also nods toward the Old World. 
 
 The Plaza's creator, however, was an American origi- 
 nal. Born in Johnson County, Kansas, before the turn of 
 the century, Jesse Nichols made his mark early as a 
 salesman, turning profits on everything from fresh meat 
 to Idaho mines. An established developer by 1908, he 
 invested in statuary and other art objects for the neigh- 
 borhoods he built. Nichols sent complimentary notes 
 and occasional reprimands to homeowners, depending 
 on the degree of care they lavished on their property. 
 
 Around 1920, Nichols began buying up swampland for 
 a site for Country Club Plaza. The first major shopping 
 center catering to customers who would come by auto- 
 mobile, the Plaza was planned with gas stations and 
 garages. Parking lots, built to sit just below eye-level, 
 were hidden by fences. 
 
 The first business at the Plaza, a beauty salon, opened 
 in 1922. Customers were introduced to something new 
 — the permanent wave. In the more than sixty years 
 that have passed since then, Jesse Nichols' Plaza has 
 continued making waves as a shopping center perma- 
 nently ahead of its time. 
 
 
 
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T1IE OLD POST OFFICE 
 
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 n 1971 a demolition contract had been signed for 
 the Old Post Office, in Washington, D.C. The ten-story 
 Romanesque Revival castle on Pennsylvania Avenue 
 was destined for the rubble heap. 
 
 Today, thanks to local preservationists and a $30-mil- 
 lion restoration, the old building is alive with activity, 
 putting a new spin on the expression "mixed-use." 
 
 Government agencies (including the National Endow- 
 ment for the Arts) occupy the building's 120,000 
 square feet of office space. Shops and restaurants 
 spread across the building's lower levels, where postal 
 clerks once sorted mail. Finally, there is a vertical 
 national park — the building's clock tower — where 
 tourists take the elevator to admire the bells up top and 
 the view of Washington outside. 
 
 For the Old Post Office, 1971 was not the first time it 
 evaded a date with dynamite. In the 1930s, when the 
 building appeared to stand in the way of completing a 
 complex of government office buildings in the down- 
 town Federal Triangle, a local newspaper called the 
 post office a "granite pile" and urged its destruction. 
 
 Washington, D.C. architect Arthur Cotton Moore was 
 among the preservationists who lobbied to save the Old 
 Post Office in the 1970s. In 1977 Moore's firm won the 
 federal design competition to restore the building. He 
 gutted much of the building's interior and replaced the 
 metal roof with a skylight. Now sunlight pours into the 
 atrium, illuminating federal corridors as well as the 
 retail "Pavilion" that lies 215 feet below the glass roof. 
 In the Pavilion, a raised stage sits at the foot of the clock 
 tower. Free concerts and other entertainment are 
 booked daily. "We made it into a playful building," 
 Moore told Historic Preservation magazine. "It's not just 
 another federal building." 
 
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UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
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 , rchitecture is my delight," Thomas 
 Jefferson once said, "and putting up and pulling down, 
 one of my favorite amusements." 
 
 In Charlottesville, Virginia, America's most notable 
 amateur architect created one of the world's great archi- 
 tectural conceptions. The beauty of Jefferson's design 
 for the University of Virginia lies not in any single 
 detail or building, but in the order and purpose that 
 create harmony among separate architectural parts. 
 
 Jefferson's principal object was to establish an institu- 
 tion of higher learning befitting a young republic — "an 
 academical village . . . affording] that quiet retire- 
 ment so friendly to study." But he also believed that 
 buildings themselves can be tools for teaching and 
 instruments of civilization. He intended that the uni- 
 versity pavilions would serve as "models of taste" and 
 "specimens for architectural lectures." 
 
 The Lawn, the name for the complex that Jefferson 
 designed, has as its centerpiece a domed Rotunda. 
 Inspired by the Roman Pantheon, and containing the 
 university library, it is flanked by ten classical pavil- 
 ions, five on each side. These were the university's ten 
 schools, and each held classrooms as well as profes- 
 sors' living quarters. Behind the two-story pavilions 
 came single-story dormitories for students. Between 
 these building rows, Jefferson left space for the gardens 
 that were delineated by a serpentine wall. A practical 
 visionary, he designed the undulating wall partly to 
 save on materials; a curving wall would be stronger 
 than a straight one, and could be built one brick thick. 
 
 After retiring from the presidency, Jefferson devoted 
 much of his time to creating America's first non-church 
 university. He was seventy-four when he laid the cor- 
 nerstone for the first campus structure, in 1817. When 
 Jefferson died, on July 4, 1826 only the Rotunda 
 remained to be completed. One hundred and fifty years 
 later, the American Institute of Architects declared the 
 university buildings and grounds designed by Jefferson 
 the nation's foremost architectural achievement. 
 
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GAMES HOUSE 
 
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 wo boxes framed in steel — with walls of glass 
 and stuccoed industrial sheeting — the Charles Eames 
 house and studio in Pacific Palisades, California, "is 
 serene and utterly unpretentious . . . the parent of 
 virtually all of the 'high-tech' buildings of today," wrote 
 Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New York 
 Times. 
 
 "Unlike these descendants, however, which often seem 
 to be following a fashion that celebrates industrial 
 imagery as an end in itself, the Eames house makes of 
 its industrial materials a gentle esthetic." 
 
 Best known for the form-fitting chairs that bear his 
 name, Charles Eames was also a film maker and a 
 designer of movie sets, toys, exhibits, and — during 
 World War II — stretchers and splints. Born in St. 
 Louis, he flunked out of Washington University, where 
 he had been studying architecture. Later, he was 
 invited to the Cranbrook Academy of Art by its director, 
 Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, where Eames became 
 head of the experimental design department. 
 
 In the late 1940s, Eames designed — for his own home 
 — one of the most celebrated houses of the twentieth 
 century. Set between a hillside and a row of eucalyptus 
 trees, the Eames house had been commissioned as a 
 case study by Arts & Architecture magazine, and it was 
 to be built entirely of industrial products that could be 
 ordered from catalogs. 
 
 The house's skeleton consists of 4-inch by 4-inch steel 
 columns, with diagonal braces absorbing wind loads, 
 and a light skin of steel sheeting and glass. The living 
 room is the full height of the two-story house. Two upper 
 bedrooms, reached by a spiral stairway, have sliding 
 panels that open onto the living room below. At the 
 opposite end of the rectangular house, there is a two- 
 story studio. 
 
 Charles Eames and his wife and professional collabora- 
 tor, Ray Kaiser Eames, decorated the house with sculp- 
 ture, Indian artifacts, toys, seashells, and other items. 
 "The house is really less an industrial object than an 
 industrial container for other kinds of objects," wrote 
 Paul Goldberger. "The overall effect to a first-time visi- 
 tor was rather like being inside a Joseph Cornell box." 
 
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STATUE OF LIBERTY 
 
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 ven though it was New York's tallest struc- 
 ture when dedicated in 1886, and a gift that commemo- 
 rated our independence, the Statue of Liberty — now a 
 national icon — received a frosty reception in America. 
 
 "Liberty Enlightening the World," as the statue was 
 originally named, was only grudgingly accepted by 
 Congress. The gift of the people of France was con- 
 demned in some circles as a "pagan goddess." One New 
 York newspaper, in an editorial, fretted whether — "in 
 view of the climate" — the figure would arrive properly 
 draped. The statue that has become a symbol of free- 
 dom to millions of immigrants and would-be immi- 
 grants, had no place to stand until Joseph Pulitzer, the 
 Hungarian-born press baron, used his New York World 
 to whip up enthusiasm, and dollars, to complete a ped- 
 estal on Bedloe's Island. 
 
 That pedestal is nearly as remarkable as the sculpture 
 it supports. Designed by American architect Richard 
 Morris Hunt, the classical pedestal is 154 feet high. Its 
 concrete walls are clad in pink granite. With the 53- 
 foot-deep foundation on which its rests, it was the sin- 
 gle greatest mass of concrete yet poured. Yet for all its 
 bulk, it remains a proper pedestal, three feet taller than 
 the statue above, yet never upstaging it. 
 
 Created by sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, her gown of 
 copper hammered to a thickness of only 3/32 of an 
 inch, the Statue of Liberty gets further support from the 
 iron skeleton devised by Gustave Eiffel, the engineer 
 who later designed the Paris tower that carries his 
 name. With a central iron pylon bearing the weight of 
 the statue, and a secondary internal framework lightly 
 but firmly holding Bartholdi's sculpture in place, Lib- 
 erty contracts or expands with changing temperatures, 
 and gives slightly before the wind. America's best- 
 known piece of sculpture is thus also one of the earliest 
 examples of curtain-wall construction. 
 
 Arriving by ship, packed in 214 crates, it was an 
 expensive marvel. The statue alone is estimated to have 
 cost more than $400,000 to create. Building the pedes- 
 tal and erecting the gift from France cost another 
 $350,000. On the other hand, restoration of the Statue 
 of Liberty, for its 1986 centenary, is expected to cost 
 approximately $30 million. 
 
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 MESA VERDE 
 
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 he cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park 
 are America's first apartment houses. Constructed more 
 than two centuries before Columbus sailed for the New 
 World, the ruins remain an architectural triumph and 
 an archeological puzzle. 
 
 Nestled in the canyon country of southwestern Colo- 
 rado, the multi-story houses were built by Anasazi 
 Indians, "the ancient ones" in the Navajo language. 
 Scarcely a hundred years after they were built, the cliff 
 dwellings, and the mesa itself, had been abandoned. 
 No sure explanation exists for the Anasazi's departure 
 from Mesa Verde. Enemy harassment, drought, and 
 overpopulation have all been suggested by archeolo- 
 gists as possible reasons. 
 
 We do know that the architectural flowering that led to 
 the cliff houses is unique in prehistoric North America. 
 The Anasazi's earliest pole and mud houses, con- 
 structed atop the mesa, were followed — over a span of 
 centuries — by the immense structures of coursed 
 masonry built along the walls of rugged canyons. 
 
 The dwellings remained undisturbed until December 
 1888, when two cowboys chasing strays came upon 
 "Cliff Palace" — the largest cliff dwelling in the United 
 States. Constructed in a cave that is 325 feet long, 90 
 feet deep, and 60 feet high, Cliff Palace contains more 
 than 200 rooms. 
 
 Ransacked for years by pothunters, Mesa Verde's 
 ancient apartments became a national park in 1906. 
 
ADIM.S 
 
 Itl :ai)in(;sbvpl\ci: 
 
 ban design, architecture, and public art are the sub- 
 ts of a vast literature. Anyone seeking a fresh view- 
 nt on his city, or on ways that places can be art, may 
 ifit from reading such fundamental texts as Edmund 
 con's Design of Cities, Jane Jacobs' The Death and 
 e of Great American Cities, Kevin Lynch's The Image 
 the City and A Theory of Good City Form, Lewis 
 imford's The Culture of Cities, or Paul Spreiregen's 
 ban Design: The Architecture of Towns and Cities. 
 irks by earlier writers, such as the 19th-century 
 dscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (see Civi- 
 ng American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law 
 nsted's Writings on American Landscapes, edited by 
 J. Sutton), or Leon Battista Alberti (his Ten Books on 
 •hitecture, published in 1485, suggests that the city 
 lould by no means be either so big as to look empty, 
 • so little as to be crowded," and offers practical 
 /ice on the making of squares and on other subjects), 
 1 have as much to tell us as the latest issue of a con- 
 iporary professional journal. For a highly personal, 
 i witty view of the ills of 20th-century architecture, 
 n to Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. A 
 ective list of other useful books and articles follows: 
 
 ardsley, John. Art in Public Places: A Survey of Com- 
 munity Sponsored Projects Supported by the National 
 Endowment for the Arts. Andy Leon Harney, ed. 
 Washington, DC: Partners for Livable Places, 1981. 
 ;ming, Ronald Lee and Renata von Tscharner. Place 
 Makers: Public Art That Tells You Where You Are. New 
 York: Hastings House, 1981. 
 
 sen, Kevin W. , ed. The City as a Stage: Strategies for 
 the Arts in Urban Economics . Washington, DC: Part- 
 ners for Livable Places, 1983. 
 
 ndbook of Architectural Design Competitions. Wash- 
 ington, DC: American Institute of Architects, 1981. 
 ich, Kevin. "The Immature Arts of City Design." 
 Places 1 (Spring 1984): 10-21. 
 
 tional Endowment for the Arts. Design Competition 
 Manual. Cambridge: Vision, The Center for Envi- 
 ronmental Design and Education, 1980. 
 *e, Clint and Penelope Cuff. The Public Sector 
 Designs. Washington, DC: Partners for Livable 
 Places, 1984. 
 
 Battery Park City 
 
 Pelli, Cesar and Nancy Rosen. "The Chemistry of Col- 
 laboration: An Architect's View." In Insights/On 
 Sites, edited by Stacy Paleologos Harris. Washing- 
 ton, DC: Partners for Livable Places, 1984. 
 
 Tomkins, Calvin. "The Art World: Perception at All 
 Levels." The New Yorker, 3 December 1984. 
 
 Boston 
 
 "The Livable City? — Surging Growth Confronts Bos- 
 ton's Legacy." The Boston Globe, 1 1 November 1984. 
 Columbus 
 
 A Look at Architecture: Columbus, Indiana. Columbus 
 
 Area Chamber of Commerce, Inc., 1984. 
 Miami 
 
 Brown, Patricia Leigh. "Designs on Miami: The Young 
 Partners of Arquitectonica Have a Blueprint for the 
 City of the Future." Esquire, December 1984. 
 
 Minneapolis 
 
 "Center City Profile." Design Quarterly 125, Walker 
 
 Art Center, 1984. 
 New York 
 
 Wiseman, Carter. "High Rise, Hard Sell: Now, 
 'Designer' Skyscrapers." New York, 11 March 1985. 
 Philadelphia 
 
 Slovic, David and Ligia Rave. "Building of the Month 
 Awards: Philadelphia." Places 1 (Spring 1984): 
 44-59. 
 
 San Francisco 
 
 Downtown: Proposal as Adopted by the City Plan- 
 ning Commission as a Part of the Master Plan, 
 November 29, 1984. San Francisco Department of 
 City Planning. 
 
 Santa Fe 
 
 Design & Preservation in Santa Fe: A Pluralistic 
 Approach. Planning Department, City of Santa Fe, 
 January 1977. 
 
 Seattle 
 
 Andrews, Richard. "Artists and the Visual Definition 
 of Cities: The Experience of Seattle." In Insights/On 
 Sites, edited by Stacy Paleologos Harris. Washing- 
 ton, DC: Partners for Livable Places, 1984. 
 
 Artwork Network — A Planning Study for Seattle: Art in 
 the Civic Context. Seattle Arts Commission, 1984. 
 
 Tomkins, Calvin. "The Art World: Perception at All 
 Levels." The New Yorker, 3 December 1984. 
 
PICTURE CREDITS 
 
 page 
 
 photographer 
 
 front cover, top left: David Meunch 
 
 top right: Norman McGrath 
 
 bottom: Miho 
 
 back cover, top: Miho 
 
 bottom: Robert Kristofik 
 
 14. Miho 
 
 15. top: Steve Rosenthal 
 
 middle, left: John Sherman (fIStop Pictures) 
 middle, right: Clyde H . Smith (fIStop Pictures) 
 bottom: Courtesy: The Townscape Institute 
 16- 17. Miho 
 
 18 . Norman McGrath 
 
 19. top: Norman McGrath 
 middle: Miho 
 
 bottom: Charles Adler 
 
 20 . Steve Rosenthal 
 
 21 . top: Milton Glaser, Inc . 
 bottom: Miho 
 
 22 . Cesar Pelli & Associates 
 
 23 . Seattle Arts Commission 
 
 24 . Jack Mackie 
 
 25. Miho 
 
 26. Miho 
 
 27. Miho 
 
 28. Miho 
 
 29. top: Miho 
 
 middle: Plaza Merchants Association 
 bottom: Miho 
 
 30 . National Trust for Historic Preservation 
 
 31 . Miho 
 
 32 . California Historical Society 
 
 33 . Miho 
 
 34 . top: Edgar L . Obma, 
 
 The Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial 
 
 bottom: Miho 
 
 3 7. Miho 
 
 39 . James E . Graham 
 
 41 . Mark Cohn 
 
 42-43 . City of Breckenridge 
 
 44 . top: Courtesy: Barker Rinker Seacat 
 bottom: Howard N . Kaplan 
 
 45. Miho 
 
 46 . Steve Rosenthal 
 
 47. Courtesy: The Boston Athenaeum 
 50. Miho 
 
 52-53 . Marvin Rand 
 
 55-56 . Los Angeles County 
 
 58. top, middle: Los Angeles County 
 bottom: Diane Jackson 
 
 59. Los Angeles County 
 
 60 . Balthazar Korab 
 
 61 . Ike, Beverly 
 
 62 . Balthazar Korab 
 
 63 . Balthazar Korab 
 
 66 . Rockefeller Center 
 
 67 . Sepp Seitz (Woodfin Camp) 
 
 68 . left: Sepp Seitz (Woodfin Camp) 
 right: Miho 
 
 69. John Wienrich; courtesy Rockefeller Cente, 
 
 70. Harold Corsini, Western Pennsylvania Cot 
 
 71 . Miho 
 
 72 . Dennis Reeder 
 
 73 . top: Dennis Reeder 
 
 middle: Craig Aurness (Woodfin Camp) 
 bottom: Miho 
 
 74 . top: Roloc Color Slides 
 
 bottom: Courtesy: The Townscape Institute 
 
 75. top: Miho 
 Miho 
 
 Roloc Color Slides 
 bottom: Miho 
 76-77. Miho 
 
 78 . Plaza Merchants Association 
 
 79. top: Plaza Merchants Association 
 bottom: J .C . Nichols Company 
 80-81 . F. Harlan Hambright 
 
 82 . Robert Llewellyn 
 
 83 . top: Robert Llewellyn 
 84-85 . Michael Bruce 
 
 86. N .Y. Convention and Visitors Bureau 
 
 87. Sepp Seitz (Woodfin Camp) 
 88-89 . Robert Kristofik 
 90-91 . David Meunch 
 
1 
 
 : 
 

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