The Metropolis Observed
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interiors
the retail vs. Larry Flynt
Teamed with the porn king, a couple of L.A. architects hustle to prove that sex in a well-lit place is for everyone.
Porn reborn: attractive, public displays of affection at the $1 million-plus West Hollywood store. |
by Mike Steere
Can the sex shop be legitimized by blond wood flooring and a coffee-and-smoothie bar? The husband-wife design team of Ron Godfredsen and Danna Sigal, commissioned by Hustler magazine publisher and lewdness khan Larry Flynt, have created a respectable space for smut with Flynt's retail store on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Hustler Hollywood, which opened last December, proffers porn and sex toys in the same overlit, molecularly calculated, benign sort of way that the Gap peddles cargo pants and Restoration Hardware moves sock monkeys.
"The way things are set makes them either accessible or inaccessible," says Sigal matter-of-factly. Last fall, Flynt came to residential and commercial Godfredsen-Sigal Architects, based in Venice, California, to design an environment where outrageously sexual merchandise could be presented to upscale, aesthetically sensitive clients--especially women--who are repelled by the dingy and scabrous emporiums that usually sell such stuff. The space can be seen as a 9,000-square-foot, $1 million-plus effort to banish the furtiveness that goes with traditional sex shops. Godfredsen and Sigal agree that their design mission is aptly defined by the store's motto "Relax. It's just sex," writ huge on a lighted Lexan wall that corrals--without hiding--the adults-only zone of hardcore erotica, which comprises one third of the floor space. (The other two thirds are perfectly accessible to minors who might shuffle in just to buy a "Porn Star" T-shirt, a brand also sold at Urban Outfitters.)
Flynt's motivation, naturally, is commercial. Hustler Hollywood is meant to be the flagship and template for a national chain to be designed by Godfredsen-Sigal and managed by Flynt's 29-year-old daughter, Theresa, who runs the debut shop. (Flynt execs say they're scouting sites in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and other parts of L.A.) If this store and its offspring fly, Hustler-brand fetish videos and sex toys will go home in the Lexus from shopping districts all over the country, while Flynt's wholly owned LFP Inc., valued at $135 million, adds to its estimated annual profits of $27 million.
In the quick, from-the-car view, Hustler Hollywood manages to be both handsome and coy about its unique retailing mission. I'd driven by it a half-dozen times without making the connection between the clean, sans-serif "Hustler" on the glassy exterior and Flynt's relentlessly pornographic magazine. It looks like any high-concept chain retailer, working to be glamorous in a blah commercial space (this one used to house a Blockbuster and a Boston Market). Occupying the first floor of a two-story building, Hustler Hollywood's wraparound windows bring in natural light and up the acceptability factor--creating anything but a privacy screen between the shopper and the street. The store's one bit of flamboyance is an aluminum column outside topped with a rotating neon globe. But on entertainment-heavy Sunset, such flash is pretty much standard--and, unless you're already familiar with the wares within, you wouldn't mistake the thing for a phallic symbol.
This certain obliqueness about Hustler's erotic brand carries inside, where the familiarity of first impressions has been calculated. There are two entrances, both on Sunset, at either corner of the store. One takes customers into an aggressively bright, sculptural modern café, with round, brushed-metal tables. This area segues into a sort of techno mini Barnes and Noble with magazines and some books. Best-sellers like Tom Wolfe's latest share the shelves with hardcover erotica. (But still, this could just mean that you're in an outré neighborhood.) The other entrance is equally benign: to the left, logo hats and T-shirts; to the right, a conversation group of sofa and chairs; dead ahead, a gleaming, curvy cashier's island.
In the interest of keeping it clean, the architects trolled for design ideas on a national tour of mainstream and adult retailers--and then tried to evoke surroundings that their target shoppers already know. "You think about the upscale malls in Los Angeles," says Sigal. "You think about what makes people feel comfortable and pampered walking into an establishment." But unlike the Gap or Banana Republic, part of the ambient comfort here depends on deferring shoppers' encounters with X-rated material. About 6,000 square feet of the store is devoted to gentle erotica and the nonerotic, and these more conventional areas establish a visual positivity--bright light, panels of color--that remains the same into the third of the store with a posted 18-and-older restriction. "The ante is being raised as you go back," Godfredsen says, but the continuity of design eases the transition. Surroundings suggest safety, too. Hustler Hollywood's uniformly low displays open up front-to-back views of the whole store, simultaneously telling customers that they have nothing to hide and reassuring them that no creepy strangers (nor an uncle or coworker) are lurking.
Godfredsen and Sigal also flatter the shopper by flattering the merchandise. "Most adult stores feel like bargain-basement warehouses where they squeeze every piece of product they can into the smallest possible space," Sigal says. "The way the objects are displayed should be somewhat precious." The designers spread out glass-and-stainless steel display cases on wheels, one of which, in the red-walled adult toy section, holds oversize rubber phalluses. Such Hustler-abilia created unexpected visual pleasures for Sigal. "All of the bright-colored gel toys are really beautiful to look at," she says. "Put them on their own in glass display cases, with the lights on them, and they're shimmering like a little city of colored towers." The leather S & M regalia is its own kind of shimmering city, hanging on a flexible wall system of stainless steel pucks. Such high-end treatment reassures the nervous buyer that the stuff for sale is classy.
The strange alliance of Flynt and Godfredsen-Sigal came about from a referral from Flynt's attorney and close friend Alan Isaacman, for whom the architects had done residential designs. The partners' first Flynt job was a casino in Gardena, outside L.A., scheduled to open this year. A casino, followed by a sex shop, suggests a flashy, Vegas-style oeuvre, but the couple's work is generally more quiet and eclectic. Another current commission is a Santa Monica residence for the conceptual artist John Baldessari. (On the other hand, they've also worked on a dog food factory.)
Sigal says she and Godfredsen, both 35 and expecting their first child, worry not at all about being stigmatized by their affiliation with Hustler or Flynt. "We like to attract clients who think hard about themselves and their lives and the world," she says, "and Larry is delightfully thoughtful." However, Sigal admits that it took a few exposures to Hustler's wares before she and her husband could consider them without blushing, to the great amusement of Flynt, who still tries to shock them. "Throughout the meetings, Larry would leave something on his desk," Godfredsen says. "He'd have a dildo sitting right there, and that was like this little gag he was playing." But the more startling accommodation may have been on Flynt's part. The store's understatement flies in the face of the man's rococo, porn-king tastes. "Larry's very Versace," Sigal says. "This was a stretch."
Whether the stretch was worth it remains to be seen. It's largely up to how consumers interpret the message that circles the globe out front: "For the Rest of the World." The architects can't explain what it means. But Larry Flynt's brother and assistant to the chairman, Jimmy, can. This was, he says, an early battle cry for unapologetic raunch. It means, more or less, that Hustler is for people who don't want their porn dressed up as something else. Yet Hustler Hollywood contravenes the lewd and rude spirit that got Flynt's empire to the point of opening such a store. All along, the porn industry has managed to thrive in wretched-looking surroundings, without the brushed-metal café tables or spirulina drinks. But while wretched will probably continue to work for longtime sex shop habitués, Hustler Hollywood isn't for them. Says Sigal, "That wouldn't bring in a new breed of customer." |
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activism
not in my back Bard
Faced with a Gehry building, a college town balks at becoming another Bilbao.
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by Philip Nobel
Ever since a certain shiny building opened in late 1997 and transformed a once-faceless Iberian port into a must-see destination, Frank Gehry has been the toast of lackluster cities everywhere. But in one generally peaceful, well-to-do locale--Annandale-on-Hudson, New York--the specter of such a magnetic building has inflamed debate.
The drama began last summer when Bard College filed for permits to build a Gehry-designed performing arts center, a $25 million, stainless steel building that would seat about 800 for concerts, plays, and operas. In addition to neighbors' fears about a charismatic building drawing a surplus of visitors, the siting was a rub: close to the grounds of Montgomery Place, an 1804 manse that boasts sprawling gardens and what some consider the finest porch north of the South. (A text on the Montgomery Place Web site refers to it as "a place to be coveted, even by the most favored of fortune.") Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit organization that manages the property, complained that the proposed building would be visible from the hiking trails along the Sawkill Creek. While the difference of opinion has been framed as a classic preservation fight--the Montgomery Place contingent argues that the sight of the building's fly gallery would forever destroy the pristine course of the Sawkill--it's beginning to look a lot like NIMBY. Legions of stainless steel fetishists tromping through the hamlet may be scarier than the presence of the stainless steel itself.
In August, Leon Botstein, president of Bard, predicted that construction would begin by February. This inspired foes of the building to import preservation experts from as far away as Virginia and to rally behind local powers like Richard H. Jenrette, a prominent financier and partner at the New York investment banking firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. (Cofounder William Donaldson has also been busy; he's a key player in the fight against Donald Trump's oversize Trump World Tower, opposite the United Nations building in Manhattan.)
Instead of construction, February found passions running high. After months of competing spin, it appeared that Bard had bent, remaining faithful to Gehry (Botstein likes to remind people that "he is universally recognized as the greatest architect working"), but agreeing at a planning board meeting to review other campus sites. Though still harboring their wariness of the project, the preservationist crowd declared victory immediately: Lucy Kuriger, director of Montgomery Place, says the concession was "huge. The best of all worlds." But her faction seems to have jumped the gun. As confirmed by Marcela Appell, the chair of the local planning board, the alternate site review is merely a standard phase in the lengthy state environmental quality review process. A final decision on the project will not be made until this May.
As the Bard negotiations were wearing on upstate, a whale of a Gehry project in Manhattan breached and resubmerged last fall. In November, a hushed, back-of-the-envelope plan for a Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum on Pier 40, also on the Hudson, became public when it was revealed on the front page of the New York Times, seemingly taking government officials and community groups by surprise. Since then, while conventional wisdom considered the project dead (Mayor Giuliani, for one, does not like surprises), it has been moving forward very quietly below the surface.
Funding is not yet in place, but big donations could start rolling in from up north. The new Guggenheim might be a perfect reprieve for the crowd-averse in Annandale-on-Hudson, in the form of a colossal diversion for Gehry fans. Why travel 90 miles from New York City if you have a larger (and presumably equally shiny) structure in your own backyard? |
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dining
dim sum of the parts
Creating a restaurant space where video installations and savory meatballs meet--and make sense.
Some of EAR Studio's dynamic video wallpaper for Z-Dim, scheduled to open this summer in Southfield, Michigan. |
by Pilar Guzman
Imagine a 9,200-square-foot dining room with lofty ceilings, where patrons choose eclectic snacks from carts while watching mini-screenings by video artists. The design challenge: to feed the minds and bellies of Detroit suburbanites without making them toss their dim sum--style savory meatballs before they get to the big-screen movies.
This mission comes from Michael Weinstein of New York--based Ark Restaurants (Bryant Park Grill, Lutèce), whose dream was to "take [the dim sum] approach--the cacophony--and create an international menu." Z-Dim is one of four restaurants scheduled to open this summer in a new Sony Theatres-Star Theatres Cineplex in Southfield, Michigan. It's an odd adventure in not only cuisine but in restaurant choreography: architecture and design by Jeffrey Beers International with video art curated by Thundergulch director Kathy Brew. Weinstein explains, "I wanted this to be out-of-the-box, lots of color. Diners should be thrown by it."
To realize his vision, Weinstein approached Beers, which has experience with big, inventive restaurant spaces like Manhattan's China Grill. He then hired Brew, whose Thundergulch project functions as an arts and technology center, to curate about three hours of video art. She's considering everything from Nam June Paik's acclaimed Lake Placid '80, complete with a chanting Allen Ginsberg and images from the Olympics, to works by Laurie Anderson and David Byrne to animated shorts by relative unknowns.
As for the more three-dimensional installations, project manager Alan Shamoun says that the team of architects wants to articulate what he considers "a vague statement on chaos... through the concept of restaurant as food factory." To offset the space's Blade Runner--esque, postindustrial vibe--the sweeping scale, rubberized floor, and a wall of exposed wiring that looks like a giant microchip--they went with a simple shell and primary color scheme. According to Shamoun, the design invokes "familiar, comforting images." Some reassuringly unsci-fi elements are the red corrugated metal archway that recalls a barn interior between the entry hall and the dining room and the hood over the gas range, which was inspired by a merry-go-round.
Similarly, there are restrictions on the edginess of the on-screen entertainment. "We're not going to have chopped-off heads," Brew says. To frame the more complicated, extended visual pieces, Brew brought on video and sound artist Ben Rubin (with graphic designer Randy Zwirn) of EAR Studio in New York to create what Brew refers to as "dynamic video wallpaper." These whimsical animation bits include monochromatic, undulating canvases, live feeds from the kitchen, and a floating lemon overlaid with scrolling recipe text. |
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graphics
Stern expression
Pentagram uses multiple typefaces to rebrand Yale's architecture program, as well as its new dean.
Some of the 60 different fonts that Pentagram's Michael Bierut selected for official Yale posters, top; the newsletter, Constructs, center; and an exhibition invitation, bottom. |
by Pilar Guzman
It's not surprising that outspoken architect Peter Eisenman has nothing complimentary to say about the Yale Graduate School of Architecture's new design identity. "I think he told me that one of the lecture posters was 'the ugliest thing [he'd] ever seen in his life,'" recalls principal Michael Bierut of the New York--based international design firm Pentagram.
What is surprising is that Bierut, the man responsible for the school's new identity, is completely unfettered, if not a little amused, by Eisenman's scathing feedback. After all, it was Bierut's choice to use no fewer than 60 fonts in a design package that so far includes only an issue of the newsletter Constructs, four promotional posters, and one exhibition invitation. And he and his team at Pentagram were just doing what they were brought in to do when the iron-fisted architect Robert A.M. Stern was named dean last September: rebranding the school with graphics that would both jibe with the new leader's notorious dynamism and also temper it.
Before Stern was even a contender, prospects for the post were a little grim. That the other candidates were lackluster, according to an article by Marc Wortman in the October 1998 issue of this magazine, was symptomatic of the institution's overall malaise--an identity crisis rooted, in part, in fear of dogmatic leadership. Stern insists, as he did back then, that "the school suffered from the absence of leadership." When he assumed the role of dean, the famous dialectical forum of the days of Paul Rudolph and Vincent Scully seemed a distant memory. The truth was that while innovative thought and practice still existed beneath the radar, Yale had become the safety school for those set on Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard. "Yale used to be very self-aware, the intellectual hotbed that fostered a lot of great architectural thinking," says Bierut, "but they hadn't been putting it out there. We were brought in to amplify the new programs."
Stern's charge to reinvigorate the department's anemic public face is something of a double-edged sword: to employ his celebrity, talent for promotion, and charisma toward resurrecting the school's sterling reputation--but to do so with extreme delicacy and without intimidation. "Strong leadership doesn't mean singular direction," Stern says. "There is no one line being thrown out there."
Accordingly, Bierut had to convey a strongly eclectic message. "It was feared that the program would solely reflect Bob's interest in architectural historicism." He insists that Stern is "really kind of intellectually omnivorous," and that the multiple type sizes and styles of Pentagram's design suggest that the program, like its leader, is "anything but dogmatic." Stern concurs that this approach is appropriate to his agenda. "The rich juxtaposition exactly mirrors the way we are doing things," he says.
Since a single typeface is conventionally the surest way to establish a graphic identity, Bierut observes, "I can't say I've ever seen this approach before, by me or anyone else." Known for creating graphic identities for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the American Museum of Natural History, to name a few, Bierut is no stranger to consistent typeface. "All our work for BAM, from direct-mail pieces to permanent signage, is in the same weight of the same typeface, News Gothic," he points out.
But for the Yale project, Bierut recognized the need to "swing resolutely in the other direction." He suspects that just about anything else might have reinforced people's worst fears about the direction of the department and the potential of a Stern dictatorship. "A consistently traditional Neo-Classical approach might in fact have been harmful," Bierut says. "I suppose there are other ways to suggest pluralism, but the simplest graphic device seemed to be using the different typefaces. So by necessity, the identity is intended to emerge from diversity." As, perhaps, are responses as democratic as Eisenman's. |
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merchandising
i'm a little teapot
Here is my handle, there goes my clout. Michael Graves products are on Target. |
by Philip Nobel
As Martha is to KMart, so Michael Graves will be to Target. Living up to its playfully haughty nickname "Target" (that's TAR-Jhay), the national retailer has released its "exclusive collection" of Graves-designed housewares. The line includes about 350 products, designed in as many days over the course of last year.
In January, the results were rolled out in "From Pompeii to Pop Art," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Despite the distraction provided by more than 50 Michael Graves teakettles singing together like a calliope, the richness of the moment was hard to miss: Graves had returned to the scene of a less triumphant moment in his past. Ten years ago, when his grandiose expansion plans for the Whitney didn't survive a change in the museum's administration and the ire of its neighbors, the defeat marked the end of the media reign that had brought Graves' brand of cartoon classicism to the attention of cultural consumers of every stripe. Now he's back, in a nifty Nineties way, delivering the products directly to the masses. Tea cozies may have replaced antiquity, but the Target line is all branded in Graves' signature shade of blue. At the Whitney, Graves (sporting a Graves-blue shirt) raised a glass of wine (from a Graves-blue--labeled bottle) from the Clos Pegase winery he completed in Napa Valley in 1984. Beneath "chandeliers" made of $7.99 slotted spoons (Target paid a Brooklyn metalsmith $18,000 to craft the spatuliers), he had assembled a happy universe of can openers and ice buckets, toasters and teakettles (most with bulbous, Graves-blue details). The teakettle is the star of the line and, at $34.99, a Graves-blue-light special compared to the very similar design he completed for Alessi in 1985.
Target's cheeky high-low attitude toward its partnership with Graves was made clear by other cues at the unveiling--caviar-topped potato chips were not unknowingly passed--and in the advertising campaign that followed. In February, Target ran a pair of half-page ads in the New York Times and later in other publications (including Metropolis). On the first page, with white on black sans-serif elegance, the company announced the "new work" now showing at its big-box galleries nationwide. On the second page, a man in three-piece tweeds, round Corbu glasses, and a bow tie stands behind a pedestal on which a teakettle gleams with all its Starck-derived sass. (Overheard at the Whitney: "Who does he think he is, Philippe Graves?") The man in the ad is not Michael Graves, but like good French cooking, he was more Graves than Graves could ever be. "I love this design because it never betrays its own artifice," the admen wrote for their stand-in. "It is provocative without calling attention to itself, aesthetically pleasing without being narcissistic. Did I mention it whistles?" Then, on the back of New York City buses, there are the ads starring Graves' spatula (with, surprise, a bulbous, Graves-blue handle) as the "Hipper Flipper."
What the Target line does for Graves' hipness factor, however, is up for debate. Even one of Graves' own employees could not resist quipping, "What's next? Eisenman's Bradlee's collection?" Though Peter Eisenman was nowhere in sight at the Whitney gala, representatives of several other New York architectural offices were seen poking through the wares. A partner at a well-known firm, speaking on condition that his espionage go unremarked, did allow that he was interested in landing a similar deal.
Haven't we seen this before? The last time architects turned en masse to product design for survival--the early-90s era of Bob Stern's sheets and pillowcases--it was because there was nothing to build. But now, when commissions are easier to come by for architects of Graves' stature, what's the motivation? Folly? Fun? A hedge against economic meltdowns to come? In his address at the Whitney, Graves himself cut to the inescapable conclusion about this career move: "Architecture is a losing proposition, and if you go buy a teapot everything will be fine." |
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planning
big men on campus
Can Caldwellian Prairie accept Koolhaas Modern without a brawl?
Van Valkenburgh's rendering of the proposed landscape at the Ilinois Institute of Technology. |
by Katherine Anderson
In the years after World War II, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used to invite the landscape architect Alfred Caldwell over to his apartment for martinis. Then the head of the College of Architecture at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology and ultimately the architect of 20 buildings on campus, Mies had hired Caldwell to teach at the school, as well as to landscape some of its grounds. What made their collaboration remarkable was the fact that Caldwell's style--of the Jens Jensen Prairie School--had none of the obvious elements in common with Mies's abstract, placeless International Modernism. While Caldwell was interested in the social agenda of Modernism, his work was regionally specific and organic.
Today, IIT again has commissioned two seemingly disjointed projects: a Rem Koolhaas/OMA-designed campus center and a Caldwell-inspired landscape plan, put together by the firm behind Harvard's landscaping, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts (with Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture of Chicago). The McCormick Tribune Campus Center will be situated between the academic buildings and the dormitories, bound on its west side by State Street. The landscape plan covers State Street and the 60 acres west of it, where the classrooms are. It is on the main campus drag, then, that the two projects will meet. The question is whether or not they will meet harmoniously--with each other and with their distinguished antecedents and neighbors.
A Rotterdam-based architect with a post-national approach, Koolhaas intends for his $27 million, multiuse building to "re-urbanize the void." Along sharp, intersecting diagonal passageways--and in places like the bookstore, bowling alley, and coffee shop--the academic and social sides of the campus will converge in this university version of the mall. The site for the Campus Center is underneath the elevated tracks of Chicago's rapid transit train. To reduce and contain noise from the el--while reasserting the spirit of Modernism and technological aggressiveness that Mies brought to IIT--Koolhaas will wrap the tracks in a stainless steel tube.
For the space along State Street, and west of it where five core Mies buildings sit, Van Valkenburgh Associates has drawn up a plan that restores Caldwell's Prairie School plantings and builds elsewhere. The overarching idea is for a high canopy of native trees, such as honey locust, catalpa, and white ash, irregularly grouped around grassy open spaces. An idyllic theory, but in practice, will this juxtaposition of Koolhaas's unsentimental, complex aesthetic with a Midwestern, Caldwellian groove have a schizophrenic effect?
One element tying Koolhaas's and Van Valkenburgh's plans together is their treatment of what both firms call "desire lines." Koolhaas/OMA put abrupt, diagonal passageways into the building based on observations of student movement. Van Valkenburgh Associates looked at Koolhaas/OMA's studies, as well as some of its own, and laid long, curving diagonal paths across its plan. Both parties also make a concerted effort to unify the east and west sides of the campus. For Koolhaas, that means establishing a new heart for the school with his building. Van Valkenburgh aims to absorb the different elements of the campus with the continuity of a tree canopy.
The challenge now facing IIT is one that Caldwell and Mies met gracefully in their day. Jan Rogatz, IIT's project manager for the landscape plan, notes that in the late 1940s, "Caldwell went to the woods with his students and got trees. He didn't look for the most beautiful, but for those with the most interesting structure." The trees were set against Mies's clean compositions of steel, glass, and brick. Franz Schulze, a Mies biographer, says he'd give the combination "an A." Matthew Urbanski, senior associate and project designer at Van Valkenburgh Associates, agrees that it's a pairing to be emulated. "The irony is that they worked fabulously well together. Right along Mies's Crown Hall, there are these big, irregularly placed honey locust trees that Caldwell put in; they're very tall and very close to the building." He adds, "This is where the combination really sings: in the tortured quality of the trees against the pristine, prismatic quality of the building."
With initial plantings just getting under way this spring and the Campus Center project not breaking ground until early 2000, it's too soon to tell whether Koolhaas and Van Valkenburgh will be clinking martini glasses. Yet the burst of activity along State Street signals a renewed vitality at one of America's distinctive architectural institutions. While IIT remains a Miesian attraction, plenty find it in need of new energy: Some of Mies's buildings could stand spiffing up, almost a third of Caldwell's trees have died, and the noise and location of the el is divisive. Though risky, the pairing of a Koolhaas building and a Caldwell-inspired master plan might just be the second coming of a lively union at IIT. |
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development
newer urbanism
An Alabama experiment in applying the precepts of traditional neighborhood development to a rural, historically significant black community. |
by Jonathan Lerner
"Traditional neighborhood development is associated with the fast, the mighty, the fantastic," says Stephanie Bothwell, director of the American Institute of Architects' Center for Livable Communities. "We think we get things done."
When Bothwell began work to resuscitate the poor, rural, black community of Snow Hill, Alabama, applying the tenets of New Urbanism, things got done, too--but in a less fast, less mighty, and less fantastic manner. Bothwell, who recently assumed the AIA post in Washington, D.C., was an associate professor of architecture at Auburn University in Alabama when, in 1994, some Snow Hill residents approached her for help. New Urbanism had been tried before mainly in affluent resort and residential developments, and Bothwell's previous experience was true to that. She'd been on the staff of Duany/Plater-Zyberk, the Miami firm known for designing such high-profile New Urbanist communities as Seaside, Florida, and Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Existing and historically significant Snow Hill, which was centered around a now-defunct, formerly independent black boarding school, was in another realm altogether.
But Bothwell accepted the challenge, and she and Auburn colleague Paul Zorr and their students have been both preserving and reconceiving Snow Hill for four years now. "Andres Duany always says, 'Experiment with the wealthy, and use what you learn to help the rest,'" Bothwell explains. "My feeling was that the principles of New Urbanism were applicable to Snow Hill."
While the principles carried over from the wealthy to the rest, problems in the Snow Hill project--both practical and cultural--were largely new to Bothwell. More expensive projects are typically driven by a single, eager developer with a ticking bank loan, under the supervision of city planners and the pressure of deadlines. All of these create an impetus to reach decisions and break ground. Pushing for the renewal of Snow Hill, by contrast, were only individuals in a community that lacked rational planning structures--commissions and master plans, charrettes and hearings. "In a less formalized community, there's a process of building consensus from within," Bothwell, who is white, notes. "Here's an African-American culture rediscovering something about itself. It resists happening from any but its own internal beat."
Along with accommodating a different sense of urgency and time, Bothwell also had to respect the presence of an important history--something absent from a place like Disney's new town of Celebration. "The issue here is of preserving this landscape so that it resonates with its past--as opposed to asserting something altogether new," she explains. Snow Hill has a living population with an unbroken memory. In building a town on a green field, or even repopulating a moribund urban neighborhood, she points out, "You're not mucking with anybody's self-image. At Snow Hill, every change is tender and sensitive."
Schools are at the core of any community. The first rip in the seamless facade of Celebration, after all, was a polarizing fight among residents over the educational program. At Snow Hill, the school was the town's very wellspring. Founded in 1893--in a log cabin, with three students and a budget of 50 cents--by a graduate of black Tuskegee Institute, it grew to comprise 27 buildings, 4,000 acres, a staff of 35, and 400 students, who received liberal arts and vocational training and built most of the campus structures. The school also sold parcels of land to black families, enabling them to move out of the old plantation slave quarters to establish their own farms and create the sort of self-sufficient, sustainable community that planners today dream of. Later, the school operated within the segregated public education system. Then in 1973, as part of an integration plan, the school was closed. Little remains: an uneasy patchwork of land ownership and a handful of dilapidated structures. Descendants of the original families still have their small holdings, but few farm them; most commute elsewhere for jobs. There's not even a post office. "When the school closed, we lost a hub," says Consuela Lee, who was the first resident to get in touch with the Auburn architects.
A granddaughter of the school's founder (and aunt of the filmmaker Spike Lee), Lee spent her childhood at Snow Hill, and retired there after a career as a music teacher. "We grew up here privileged intellectually," she recalls. "We were isolated from the demeaning things outside. Not having to go out to work in the kitchens of white people, having our own farms--when we got to the integrated society, we knew who we were."
Local residents continue to move slowly toward consensus on a vision, while Auburn faculty and students are considering several approaches to laying out a town that would respect what Bothwell calls "this delicate landscape that could easily be overwhelmed. It's important to bring the population together in a way that honors the land--with intense clustering, say, at the key intersections."
One idea is to find, elsewhere in the county, old structures similar to those remaining at Snow Hill that might otherwise be left to decay, and to relocate them in a placement that would reprise the old campus plan. For new construction, the intention is to use materials, like clay and timber, taken from the site--as was done when the students themselves put up the school's original buildings. The Auburn architects have studied traditional African houses and considered making new ones at Snow Hill in an African adobe style, fired from inside. Some of their town plan concepts have adapted African village forms in which, for example, houses are clustered around a court, or arranged in concentric rings.
Meanwhile, Auburn students, in what Zorr calls "the first scratch in the ground," have completed a modest proj-ect, one that sets a precedent for construction that respects the place's history. They cleared the evocative site of Snow Hill's springhouse and built an amphitheater using local stone and cedars as posts to support a canvas canopy. "It's a marvelous, low-budget piece," Zorr says. "They poured the concrete pavers using the springhouse water and local sand, and cast leaves into them. When the work was done, it looked as if always had been there." |
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