Why do you live in Cleveland?

In a rather surreptitious turn of events WCPN (the local National Public Radio Station - or as most in Ohio call it, Hippie Liberal Media - kidding! Or am I?) aired a piece on their daily local morning show called "The Sound of Ideas"entitled "The Soul of Northeast Ohio Communities" which simply asked, what are the local assets that the region currently contains? The basis of the conversation is the results of a three year Knight Foundation study.

Also as part of my inbox I received an email entitled "Why do you love the place you live?" (Grist) which utilized the results of a recent Gallup Survey entitled "Soul of the Community". If I could pull a quote from the Grist Article of the poll:

Year after year, what comes to the top of the list is not economic opportunity or other "practical" factors -- but instead the things that are much more intangible and yet still deeply felt. Things like friendliness and beauty:

Social offerings are the top driver of attachment in 2010, not only across all 26 communities, but also in every community individually. This includes the availability of arts and cultural opportunities, availability of social community events, the community's nightlife, whether the community is a good place to meet people, and whether people in the community care about each other.

A community's openness is the second most important factor to residents. This is regarding whether residents view their communities as good places for different groups, including older people, families with children, young adults without children, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and young, talented college graduates looking for work.

A community's aesthetics -- in terms of its overall physical beauty and the availability of parks, playgrounds, and trails -- is the third most powerful driver of community attachment. A community's education offerings are the fourth most important driver, which include ratings of local colleges and universities and public K-12 education.

Which is a rather interesting thought. So I come back to the original question, "Why Cleveland?" Sure, its cheap to live here and there are some great restaurants, and the lake is fun, the parks are fantastic and there are some really amazing neighborhoods and tons of potential. But is that enough? Is it?

-ps, Sound of Ideas still has Multhrop's photo, which makes me sad, I don't mind the new guy, but I had grown to really like good ol' Dan.

Connecting Cleveland: Beyond the Burnham Plan Charrette

I posted this rather late, as I am of the opinion that no one in Cleveland goes to anything if they have too much time (more than a week) to plan ahead. However if you come on down the charrette you may get the opportunity to work with me as I will be one of the many talented and good looking facilitators that will be helping herd the masses at this public event. I think mostly I am just there to hand out papers and google how to spell words.

Connecting Cleveland: Beyond the Burnham Plan

Tuesday, November 30th

noon - 7pm

Cleveland Public Library, Stokes Wing, Room 218

The Cleveland Group Plan Commission invites you to participate in a design charrette to develop a unified vision for Downtown Cleveland built around signature public spaces and the connections and opportunities that link development projects from the Cuyahoga River, the proposed downtown Cleveland Casino, across Public Square to Malls A, B, C and the new Medical Mart and Convention Center, and onward to the lakefront.

The charrette will be held on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 from Noon until 7pm in Room 218 East/West of the Cleveland Public Library. Take the elevators in the Louis Stokes Wing to the Second Floor (business department) and turn left.

This charrette is an afternoon-long work session, facilitated by theCleveland City Planning Commission, ParkWorks and the Kent State Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. The event is being organized in collaboration with the Cleveland chapters of the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Planning Association.

Your participation is critical to the success of this work. Ideas and recommendations from the Connecting Cleveland charrette will be incorporated into the downtown connections plan being prepared byLMN Architects and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol. LMN and GGN are also working on the Convention Center and Medical Mart project.

Schedule:

• Noon: Welcome and introductions
• 12:15 pm: Overview of process and the design assignment
• 12:45 - 4:30 pm: Work session in small, interdisciplinary design teams
• 4:30 - 6 pm: Pin-up, drinks and dinner/snacks
• 6 - 7 pm: Community presentation/conversation, coffee & dessert

If you plan to attend, please RSVP by November 23 to Gina Love Slade at (216) 696-2122 ext. 101 or glove(at)parkworks.org. A briefing document will be sent to all charrette participants a week before the event.

If you have questions in the meantime, please contact Terry Schwarz at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, (216) 357-3426 or tschwarz(at)kent.edu.

-grabbed most of the above notice block from the fine folks at the CUDC.

Greening Modernism | Preservation, Sustainability, and the Modern Movement

I received a rather interesting email this morning. If we button ourselves up in the wayback machine and take a long look at Cleveland's recent past we may well remember when County Management (only a 33% indictment rate!) decided they should consolidate by purchasing the Marcel Breuer Ameritrust Tower (at the corner of East 9th and Euclid Ave.) and then in an effort project their new, more environmentally friendly persona, demolish it for a brand new building. Many people cried foul (including yours truly) and a grassroots (of sorts) campaign was launched. Being as how this involved architecture AIA Cleveland eventually got involved at the very end (yes that was meant as snarky).

So the email I read this morning was in reference to a recent article in Metropolis Magazine whereas one Carl Stein (you may remember his lecture during the Breuer bruhaha) has recently released his new book Greening Modernism.

I would take a quote from the email, which was a quote from the article, which was slightly a quote from the book and post it here so that all this elaboration comes to a fine point (emphasis not mine, but close enough to what I would do).

"For Stein, the title Greening Modernism means two things. Firstly, the book is a rallying cry for those building in the modern “style” to return to the Modernist philosophy which, he believes, has a Green heart, with a capital-G. Secondly, he’s calling for a literal “greening” of Modernist buildings. He proves that the most sustainable building is an existing one and believes in recycling and retrofitting Modernist structures, citing a case study of a 29-story Cleveland high-rise. The building was marked for demolition until it was saved by a campaign to protect it and the city’s cultural heritage — in this case, the only high-rise by Marcel Breuer, the influential Hungarian-born Bauhaus graduate and instructor. The campaign, he notes, avoided the 1.7 million gallons of oil it would have taken to build anew."

Oh, how I remember to be all full of hope and vinegar.

I would like to also apologize publicly for being all full of vinegar when I had dinner with Mr. Stein after his lecture. Disgruntled young archi-wrecks have no place at civilized table side conversation. I am now older - but still disgruntled. Grrrr.

Sanford Kwinter: Requiem for the City at the End of the Millenium

Requiem For the City at the End of the Millenium (Actar)

Sanford Kwinter

2010

Kwinter is one of the theorists that I absolutely adore, whether or not I agree nor understand the specific point of an essay; he is one of the few writers that allows my own mind to parse my limited knowledge and question my own thinking. Much like a rather thick bowl of oatmeal Kwinter's style relies on some personal asides (requiring some extra curricular examination of historical styles or events) and wordplay that may require some extra trips to a handy dictionary. This is no "Theory for Dummies" book and for that I am rather thankful. Kwinter manages to hold erudite discourse without "talking down" to the reader and structures the essays in classic logical styles making leaps of faith easy to undertake.

"Requiem" is a small collection of essays based primarily upon the idea of the city that celebrate a seemingly modernist take of putting the architectural expression of the city under a critical lens (and like Eisenman, pulls no punches).

This is no manifesto for urban manifest destiny, rather an exploration of the pragmatic goals of urban design set against the experiential intent of the designers. Kwinter relies on an heightened awareness of socio-economic impacts upon architectural styles coupled with the new constraints and releases of social technologies. While there seems to be a tone of hesitant fear (warning?) of the mechanations of social techonlogy they center mostly on possible misuse and a disconnection of the tangible idea of "real".

But this is the constant theme of the collection. What is a city? A mere collection of housing that allows for the concentration of density or rather a collective of thought and ideas that has formed it own and powerful identity? This was the rabbit hole the collection warrants chasing.

As for the book itself, it is a small read, much less dense then FFE in scope and breadth of coverage. The little white book fit well inside my jacket pocket, to be retrieved during lulls in the day. While this is the second Actar book I have received that has been printed out of order (why is there 20 pages or so before the table of contents?) that alone was not the causation for reading a second time. For educators out there who would pass along essays to students, I highly suggest having them create comments or questions during their reading so you can ascertain on which ideas they find problematic. Of course that is a post for another day.

book image from Actar