Bad Urbanism 2
This is a sizable residential development in Philadelphia built within the last 10 years. This project does a number of things well architecturally, but completely fails from an urban design point of view.
First, the good: The scale is appropriate for the city – 4 story row houses. And the scale of the street, that is the proportion of the heights of the facades of the buildings to the width of the street, is also quite comfortable. There is some variation between the buildings – more than is typical when so many houses are built at the same time by the same builder. But the variation is not as diverse as it would be if these houses were built by different builders at different times, as you typically find in the city. There is also good use of a number of different materials, stone (albeit synthetic), brick, copper and slate roofing tiles. This variety makes the houses themselves pleasant to look at.
So, with all of these successful design moves, what is wrong with it? Let’s take a closer look at the street level of this development.
I’ve taken the photo from above and masked out the upper levels of the houses so we can focus on the street level. As you can see, this street is completely dead. This is a result of the design of the first floor of these buildings. This first floor is completely solid – solid walls, solid garage doors and solid entry doors. There is no life coming from these buildings, it is always exactly the same. Secondly, the entry doors are right at the sidewalk level. Since most people find this uncomfortable, the entries have been set into a vestibule as opposed to being raised several steps up as in more traditional row houses. This results in people disappearing quickly into the buildings, rather than lingering on the steps.
This street is also dead because there is no parking on the street. Street parking creates a barrier between pedestrians and traffic, which makes the sidewalk comfortable to walk along. Street parking is actually not possible on this street because there are so many garages. In fact, there are so many garages, there isn’t enough curb to fit a parking space. These garage entries further erode the comfort of a street because pedestrians now have to continually look out for traffic crossing the sidewalk. Thirdly, these garages are serve as the front doors to these houses – people enter their houses through the garage. Ultimately, this creates a street of houses inhabited by cars, rather than by people.
So, how do you fix this? The easiest thing to do would be to make this street into an alley and put the main entrance to these houses on the other side of the houses on a more pedestrian friendly street. An alley can capture all of the ugly stuff – garage doors, garbage cans, etc, and hide them from the public. This allows the front of building to have proper entrances for people and creates the ability to have a lively and pleasant street.
Tags: building, city, garages, new urbanism, street life, urban design, urbanism, walkable
