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Figure 6.27
Gateway Village, Charlotte, NC, Duda
Paine architects; Cole Jenest and Stone, landscape
architects, 2001–02. Innovative fountain and
landscape design enrich and unify the main public
space between office buildings to right and left, and
apartments in the distance.
Figure 6.28
Gateway Village / Trade Street
condominiums, Charlotte, NC, David Furman
architect, 2001. The dominant vertical rhythms of the
street façade are enhanced by the pedestrian’s
perspective, giving a sense of urban compaction
and activity. In the distance is the Bank of America
tower by Cesar Pelli (1992).
Figure 6.26
Urban housing, 400, North Church Street,
Charlotte, NC, FMK architects, 1997. The repetitive
rhythms of projections and recessions in this façade
create multiple shadow patterns and sources of
visual interest.
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long and potentially bland façade. Figure 6.30 illus-
trates how the designers of an apartment building in
Atlanta have organized the entrances to acknowledge
the powerful rhythms of the older apartment house
across the street. Note that we recommend 
subtle
articulations to create vertical rhythms. It is not nec-
essary to push and pull the plan into fancy geome-
tries to achieve this effect. In fact, the more simple
and regular the plan, the more effective are the
smaller scale design moves. Small scale elements such
as pilasters, cornices, string courses (a row of bricks
laid vertically), lintels, projecting window sills,
drainage pipes and awnings are all useful devices to
achieve the necessary articulation (see Figure 6.31).
Controlling the Car
Despite all the good ideas and techniques discussed
earlier, none of these efforts at placemaking will work
effectively if private cars dominate spaces used by
pedestrians. In America, almost everybody depends
on automobiles for almost every aspect of daily and
family life, and while light rail transit is changing
some patterns of personal mobility, no development
can succeed in the marketplace if it doesn’t design for
the car. This is one major difference from European
cities: in those locations, despite increasing use of cars
in urban areas, large percentages of people still orga-
nize their daily lives around convenient public tran-
sit, and private cars are effectively banned from large