Caoineadh Dooley.

Like many memorable forays into the built environment this particular story begins with a trivial errand; one day this past August my watch died coincidentally at the same time as my co-worker’s. One of the partners mentioned there was a jewelry store by the Old Post Office that might be able to replace watch batteries and we set off at lunch to take care of the errand. The city I grew up in was predominantly a post-war city so the existence of a independently owned fine jewelry store that simultaneously sold breitling and rolex and replaced timex batteries for five dollars was somewhat of a welcome novelty.

We dropped our watches off and went around the corner to Dooley’s for a burger. Dooley’s was a famously non-descript pub lodged in the Chemical Building across the street from the Old Post Office in the most intact and urban area in St. Louis. The disregard for fenestration so often seen in truly exemplary watering holes made the gloomy two story space a welcome relief from the hot and sunny street and as my eyes adjusted I realized I had stepped back in time. Not only were the furnishings and plaid wallpaper strikingly dated but the weathered faces of the employees suggested they could have easily worked there for forty years, which in fact most of them had. As I finished off my cheeseburger (topped with a strangely satisfying pimento spread impersonating ball cheddar applied with an ice cream scoop) I thought to my parents stories of trenchers carving roast beef in dark saloons in early 60’s New York and realized this was my analogous experience.

Such experiences are generally antithetical to our the ideas of progress held by our society. Both the old trenchers in the Bowery and Cheddar Ball Cheese have now fallen victim to the desire for urban lifestyles that has been loudly proclaimed by persons such as Richard Florida It is of course a sad reality that as redevelopment occurs increased rents lead to the increasing property values that raise taxes and eventually force the redevelopment of almost all properties. In a related cycle, the capital necessary to redevelop forces the kind of massive rent increases that are not kind to independently-owned small businesses. Thus, in a bitter irony the laudable preservation of the long-endangered Old Post Office played an indirect but important role in the St. Patrick’s day demise of Dooley’s. Although many downtown developers and politicians, such as the CEO of Downtown St. Louis Partnership, were frequent customers none were able or willing to buck the market reality and facilitate the relocation of Dooley’s. As Dooley’s, Everest and several other recent cases attest there is now no room in downtown redevelopment for niche-defying small businesses. If given the option of the old sterile downtown-as-office park scattered with small struggling businesses or the current bland and overly safe disneyfied condo-land I would choose the former, but I'm sure Barb Geisman would beg to differ. After all, granting half the city twenty year tax increment financing is certainly a wise move in a a city with a notoriously constrained tax base. But then again, at least the dwindling conventioneers have a comfortable place to sip Gee and Tees.

Following recent trends, the condos in the Chemical Building will undoubtedly have a restaurant downstairs but if I am allowed to prognosticated I am sure it will contain “fusion” “pan-asian” or some other buzzword and probably be out of business within four years. The persistent irony of urban redevelopment is that the same unique local color that draws residents back to cities is so often obliterated by the demands they place on urban space. In this case the residents will certainly enjoy the ability to still live only yards from their cars in a dense city due to the convenient mid-block parking ramp that has replaced an authentic and distinctly local restaurant.

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We interrupt this irregularly scheduled blog

for a hefty dose of design nerdry:




To some extent right, but certainly over-amplifying the trope. For the record I enjoy fixing and repurposing things too much to ever be a minimalist and really it depends on what your definition of loft is. If that means sign a 10 year cheap lease on an entire floor of a derelict warehouse building and create my own space, well then sign me up! Also 80's lugged steel bikes are way cooler and more sustainable then Priuses.

< /nerdry >

and back to the highbrow discussion at hand...

Stoplight Urbanism Pt. I

Many of the interventions that have most radically reconfigured the urban environment are also those which paradoxically have evaded examination and refinement through their ubiquity. On a walk or drive through the city recent interventions such as parking meters, traffic lights, signage and one-way streets remain out of mind due to their prosaic and common nature. While some degree of control is of course necessary, there has been little inquiry into the effects of the present systems and into the possibilities that exist beyond the current reality. The following series of writings on the traffic light seek to detail its history, to examine its effect on social life, and to explore alternatives to the automated device. While almost any such element in the city could have been chosen, the traffic light poses an intriguing subject at the confluence of philosophies of control, technologic determination, and modernization.


For millenia movement through cities and villages was regulated by mutual interest and rooted in a notion of common-law that began to be restricted with the enclosure movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Under such a system no traveller had a superior right over another; no person or vehicle had dominance and all spatial claims to the space of the road were recognized to have equal value. Such informal systems did not end with the enclosure movement or industrial revolution, they continued decades into the early twentieth century.

While in many western countries the establishment of the primacy of the automobile led to a drastic shift in custom and space, in developing nations the assimilation of motorized transportation in society has been unable to change customs regarding road use. In this regard, Stanford Gregory’s comparison of the informal driving practices of Egyptians with the linguistics of pidgin languages is fascinating. As a modern western observer, Gregory paints the typical first impression of chaos but is able to “discern an order in the madness,” which he believes is clearly emblematic of “social interaction at a fever pitch” [Gregory, 337]. Such intense systems of concession, predicated in intense interaction, result in the ability to change formation instantaneously and avoid obstacles and stoppages as they occur. These fluid dynamics utilize the whole of human reaction and intellect and exhibit a complex relation of communication and instinct not present in the smartest mechanical control.

In the developed world the industrial revolution initiated an era of technological determinism in which centuries of developments in civilization were rejected or radically reconfigured by an increasing reliance on totalizing rationalism and a preoccupation with efficiency through mechanical means. The technological pace of development was far faster than ever seen in human history. As a result of this pace, nothing other than the easily quantifiable instantaneous result was considered to have value. In the face of the accepted perfection of the machine, humans, especially those of lesser breeding and education, were considered to have little value.

The first traffic signal in human history was installed on December 10th 1868, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. The signals were intended to protect Members of Parliament crossing the busy street. They also helped to afford them a degree of separation from those whose interests they ostensibly represented. Like many traffic control devices, it had its lineage in railroads, who had been using semaphores for several decades. The London signal was a combination of a standard railroad semaphore arms and gas warning lamps but was not automatically controlled. The signal acted as a mechanical appendage of the constable who stood on the traffic island by telegraphing his orders to the mass of carriages, carts, and pedestrians. The signal was a technological aid but not a technological determinant. The London Signal was also an epitomization of the uneasy relationship between human and technological control: less than a month after the signal was installed the gas lamps exploded injuring the police officer “who had thought he was in control” [Pile and Thrift, 262]
and the age of the machine in traffic control had begun.

To be continued....

Works Cited

1. Gregory Jr, Stanford W. “Auto Traffic in Egypt as a Verdant Grammar.” Social
Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 48, No.4. 1985: 337.

2. City A-Z. Ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 262.

A Modest Anarchic Proposal

No I have not abandoned the blog. I am reaching the midpoint of my graduate studies and am feeling the results of both my chronic over-commitment and my desire to start using this media as a vehicle to disseminate my research in a more serious way.

In short I have been hoarding content and will gradually begin releasing it as soon as I am confident in its readiness.

The first inquiry I would like to present is a series of essays is drawn from recent research into the nature of structured traffic control and the effect that such control has had on our cities.

Urbanist Zeitgeist: St. Louis Union Station Part I

It is relatively easy to pass by or through a specific place without fully comprehending the implications of the place on overarching patterns of urbanism or conversely the reflections of larger social and cultural patterns within everyday spaces. In this essay I seek to establish the specific site of St. Louis's Union Station in its current state as both a reflection of larger attitudes to urbanism and a destabilizing force on surrounding areas.




Union Station is a surprisingly late manifestation of the Victorian unease between tradition and rapidly changing technology. Like much earlier examples such as London's St. Pancras Station Union Station consists of a thin street building built in an overly traditional vocabulary (in this case halfway between Richardsonian Romanesque and French Chateau) which disguises a steel framed trainshed from public view. That the stone terminal building was built in St. Louis during the same decade as three muscular modern skyscrapers by Louis Sullivan points to a continuous thread of conservatism which continues to dominate the built environment here to this day.

At the time of its construction the 11 acre trainshed was one of the largest in the world and served a peak of 100,000 passengers a day. Fast forward a half century. The process of urbanization has become internalized. Physical urbanization is no longer necessary as increased communication allows connection by proxy and urban space has been supplanted by a decentralized urban society [see Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution] As physical proximity becomes unimportant and speed of travel increases de-densification increases and the confined vectors of rail transit become less effective; combined with the well documented collusion of government and the auto industry transit and rail foundered. The station officially was mothballed in 1978.

The phenomena of suburbanization and disinvestment in urban areas is also deeply rooted in American culture. In some ways the migration to the suburbs was the technologically aided fulfillment of the dream of Jeffersonian Democracy. As Witold Rybczynski quotes de Tocqueville "The spirit of equality has stamped a particularly uniform pattern on the habits of private life" (Rybczynski, 112.) Rybczynski interprets this as evidence of the United States having the first equally distributed urban society. Unlike Europe there has never been a sharp delineation between sophistication (urban) and rusticity (rural) rather the whole culture falls on a reasonably level ground between the two. Given this proposition (if culture is urbanized urbanization becomes to an extent superfluous) and the rootlessness of the American people (refer to Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis) it is reasonable to conclude that the speculative and impermanent nature of the American city is a direct result. As Lefebvre notes "Urban democracy would imply an equality of places" while the traditional urban concept of "centrality would produce hierarchy and therefore inequality" (Lefebvre, 124). Of course the enduring paradox is that once the undemocratic hierarchy of the city is broken through decentralization segregation (economic, racial, ethnic, and social) is the inevitable undemocratic result.


To be continued...



Part I Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: the University of
Minnesota Press, 2003.

Rybczynski, Witold. City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World. New York:
Scribner, 1995.

Only A Pawn in Their Game...

A few weeks ago I found myself standing in Cincinnati; I was in the company of several other explorers, historians, and photographers seeking out subjects in the grimy industrial valley extending northwest from the Ohio River and downtown. Home to an enormous rail yard, rail terminal turned museum, and an impressive density of outmoded, derelict, and undervalued industries, the Mill Creek valley is notable for raw sewage releases from the overtaxed municipal sewage treatment plant. A series of impressive concrete and steel viaducts traverse the railyards and creek and it has been said that the gloomy and almost gothic expressionism of the 8th Street viaduct inspired set designers for Batman Returns.

On either side of the viaduct are dozens of small factories and warehouses that, having been abandoned by their original proprietors, have been amalgamated into the sprawling Lower Price Hill complex of the Queen City Barrel Company. Queen City recycles the eponymous 55 gallon drums whether steel, aluminum, cardboard, or plastic. Plastic and paper drums are shredded (uncleaned) and sold back as raw material and metal drums are placed in an incinerator to flare off the content before being sanded and repainted. (This might be the only case of recycling being less ecological than disposal!) Due to the undesirable nature of the work, excepting the management, the workforce is in entirety composed of Mexicans of dubious legality. In 2004 a large building containing stored drums burst into flames and the resulting massive fire and pollution plume forced large evacuations suspiciously only hours after the company sold the land to the city....

(Fire Site)

During my visit I observed a huge jumble of drums in the building immediately adjacent to the viaduct piled to the ceiling and in danger of collapse. These drums had formerly contained both ammonium tetrachloride and pre-made salsa mix. The city of Cincinnati has purchased the entire complex for redevelopment and Queen City's tenure will allegedly only extend until April. The second building I shot in was supposed to be completely vacant, yet contained several palettes of mysterious aluminum drums labeled in Japanese. At this point it became clear that despite numerous agreements the company was at least engaged in covert action in blatant violation of their promises to vacate if not more serious crimes with the suspicious fire a year before.

The complex is spread piecemeal among dozens of former manufacturing facilities spread on either side of the viaduct and we continued on to a building that was formerly a knife factory. It was a double height space again stacked to the ceiling with blue barrels in a rambling maze-like pattern. In the back a gang of Mexicans was disposing the barrels in a large shredder. As we stepped in we knew something was different. Before I got a photo off my throat began to burn. I put on my p-100 respirator. Even that did not seem to help matters and in the end I never got more than ten feet in from the sidewalk. But then again the owner has assured reporters that the company fulfills federal standards so we should have all just breathed easy. In any case we quickly left and I still find myself thinking about those poor Mexican laborers working without respirators in those conditions for 10 or 12 hours a day. But for the owners it is cheaper and easier to just dispose of the workers when they inevitably develop debilitating respiratory conditions rather than even attempting to make the minor outlay to look after their well-being. In a country with our abundant wealth such actions are not only incredibly immoral, they hint at a pervasive corrosiveness undermining our supposedly cherished principles of life and liberty.

(Allegedly Mothballed Incinerator)

Up the street is the incinerator which again is supposed lie cold; however the palettes of shiny barrels awaiting paint and dirty barrels awaiting flaming belie the clandestine night burnings Queen City still engages in. Such is life in Cincinnati: the government ignores industrial transgressions and puts business profits ahead of the health and well-being of its residents. This echoes a common story from twenty years ago when Proctor and Gamble blatantly continued to fire excess chemicals off in their incinerator down the street for nearly a decade after being ordered to cease; somehow no one with authority managed to connect the noxious haze the settled every morning at dawn over the entire valley with the region's largest employer.

So the next time some silver spoon-fed pundit or hack politician suggests that we should deport the Mexicans and build that ludicrous wall because there are plenty of Americans who would gladly reclaim their jobs, just remember the poor workers at Queen City Barrel and countless other such businesses whose very lives are being sacrificed at the altar of insignificant overhead. Many of them may not live long enough to see their families join them or their children make a better life than they have done.

The American dream of course only applies to its official citizens -- and then only the politically connected ones.

On Modernity (and lousy furniture design)...

This really is unrelated, but I feel obligated to share this personal story.

This morning as I pulled on my jeans (two legs at a time like all great men) I realized my pocket seemed a little light. Wallet? Check. Pen? Check. Cellphone? Cellphone!? Fortunately this happened on the day I don't have class until 4:00pm so I did have the luxury of time to search. After turning my apartment inside out (which was a mean feat given that all of my studio supplies are here until I move them back to school tomorrow) I began running over the alternatives in my head. I hadn't used the phone for two days so it could have been left at the library or in Givens Hall or at the community center in The Ville (see yesterday's post) or worst of all on the metro bus. I visited both the library and Givens and checked their respective lost and founds... nada.
I came back home and remembered I took the trash out so I dutifully dug through kitchen garbage just in case... nope. All the while I was thinking if I just had a roommate who could call the phone while I walked around looking for it; such are the joys of living alone, but then again no one eats your food either.

Finally I remembered you can send text messages from your phone on the t-mobile website. I fired one off and heard a glorious beep... somewhere in my 743 sf apartment. So armed with a maglight and the laptop I stalked around the apartment playing a high tech version of hot and cold for an eternity. Wasn't modern technology supposed to change us for the better not make life more complicated in the same routine?

For the record the phone was hiding inside the recliner. It is a recliner that has an internal mechanism that drops the back and kicks out the footrest (one of my sweetest pieces of free furniture ever) and on the left side (only!?) a metal rail serves to catch anything that slips through the cracks. I had even picked up and moved the damn thing twice... if any furniture designers are listening please make sure stuff doesn't fall or drops straight through on everything; after all beauty is a byproduct of intelligent function.

In other news I got into John Hoal's studio so I will be using New Orleans as the site for several urban design projects.

...And We're Back

Well I must confess to being particularly derelict regarding the blog. I've actually been working behind the scenes on a feature story (to debut soon) which is a new development given that my previous posts have basically been written off of the top of my head. I had an internet-free vacation at my parents house for Christmas, but instead of resting went all out on photography logging almost 700 images in locations from Columbus to Cincinnati to New Jersey. You can see some of the goodness on my flickr photo pool or just wait for future installments of FOTOFriday. As a result of all that effort once I made my way back to St. Louis I became entirely worthless for about 5 days other than eating and sleeping copiously.

I have always been a person who does not mind expending any amount of effort for an interesting or noble cause I can believe in and this semester at Wash U. seems to do just that. Whether because of Dean Lindsay's social outlook as pertaining to architecture (which this campaigner applauds heartily) or simply because of the alignment of the stars, I have been lucky enough to once again dabble academically in both issues of shrinking cities/abandonment and in community-based design and development; the first with Gia Daskalakis in a seminar examining the convergence of landscape architecture and urbanism and the second in a seminar involving the design of a community market in the historic African American neighborhood of The Ville. I should find out my option studio assignment tomorrow and that has the potential to either sweeten or balance the package, but it is looking up so far as compared to last semester.

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Study Abroad as missed opportunity!?

Before I begin with the following thoughts I would like to disclaim that I do not condemn the practice of foreign study in general, as I believe immersion outside one's comfort level and personal experience is essential to growth. That caveat having been stated, I will address the problems with study abroad programs in the discipline of Architecture.

Study abroad programs have become a major industry for higher education yet in architecture they often function somewhat paradoxically. Ideally the purpose of such study is complete cultural immersion and appreciation for other approaches to universal problems as well as invaluable personal experience with works of architecture. This perhaps is key as the subtle characterization of light and space in three dimensions is virtually impossible to fully comprehend through representations alone. I would argue that the cultural understanding and immersion is just as crucial to understand how in the context of the built architecture. The paradox of study abroad is that it tends to take two forms which are counter to some or all of the goals of foreign study.

First, study abroad tends to easily become corrupted by the virulent architectural studio culture leading to sequestration of students inside studio rather than outside among the architecture and the culture. One example of this would be a prominent architecture school [name redacted but they will be playing in the Rose Bowl this year] who houses students for its Florence study program in a villa over 40 km from Firenze. One can logically question, given the distance, just how often the students will ever reach their alleged object of study.

The second type of study program is the whirlwind study tour (ie If It's Tuesday, this Must be Belgium). While very strong experientially such programs utterly fail at cultural immersion and understanding and often end up as a surreal blur of architecture fueled by lack of sleep, disorientation and booze.

Then there is the question of whether study abroad programs are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of global forces.

I was privileged enough to spend about 12 weeks studying in Italy three years ago and was startled to realize (although it shouldn't have been much of a surprise) that the phenomena we studied in the greatest depth were unnervingly similar to problems faced back home. For two weeks we studied the sprawling "Adriatic City" a loose conglomeration of big box stores, warehouses, housing tracts (with cul-de-sacs even!) and apartment buildings that sprawls across the Adriatic plane over half the length of the coast. This area is characterized by shoddy speculative building, heavy industry,automobile dominance, and wall sized supergraphics that would make Morphosis proud. Obviously these are resultant from truck-based shipping, the highway network needed to facilitate it, and the speed at which the observer moves relative to the context; all of these have as much to do with Italian history and culture as sushi does.

After this project the subject for my independent study became abandonment and, while dealing with historical examples of abandonment and ruin, I found the project focusing more on contemporary examples of abandonment from shuttered gas stations to abandoned tourist motels to industrial relic that were, to my view, suprisingly littering Italy often almost in view of the throngs of tourists. With a step back it is clear that such sheer disposability of the built environment is certainly not limited to Italy; as a continuation of the project I extended it to the United States and used it as the basis for my senior thesis project. Much like the sprawling environment of the "Adriatic City", abandonment is a symptom of global processes that supersede natural and cultural boundaries.

Given that the major forces shaping Architecture are globalized and transnational in their effect, is it necessary to pack up and move to China to learn about rampant development and environmental un-sustainibility (or for that matter how to fight such proclivities and forces)? I argue that my talents are better used here. If a casual jaunt through the North Side, Alton, Brooklyn, or Sauget is any indication there is a surfeit of work to be done...

Notes from St. Louis: Winter Night on Skinker

Striding along the rubble strewn sidewalk on the lazy curve of Skinker at an hour until midnight on a cold Monday night, my attention is drawn by an approaching rumble. As I near the overpass with its elegantly spare streamlined details my eyes dart above as the metro train passes over. Adjusting back from the rhythmic pools of bright light radiating from the warm windows my eyes are drawn to a lone mitten among the gravel and litter. I ponder how the intrinsic pairing of mittens and socks always seems to tempt the fates to separate them.

My mind is still on this tack a minute later when I must divert in the street to walk around a militarily anti-urban crabapple tree which has claimed the sidewalk with its lower branches. It is Skinker at night however so I am in no danger of traffic.

As I near the crass glare of the taco and chicken stacks a pungent aroma assaults my nostrils, that of a cigarello. Looking around to see if anyone is blatantly getting blunted in the parking lot, my gaze is caught by motion on the other side of the street.

Under the full moon a stray dog is making his way north on the sidewalk. We exchange quick guilty glances, each one wondering what the hell the other is doing out on this icy night.

I leave Skinker and shuffle my way on the ice towards my warm home.



Don't expect to hear much more from me this week... Studio Final has come calling...