Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

116
Figure 5.8
Lexington Avenue, Dilworth, Charlotte,
NC. This street was laid out in the early years of the
twentieth century when car ownership was very low.
Its narrow dimensions mean that cars today must
move slowly between parked vehicles for safety.
Such narrow street designs are back in favor with
designers, planners and some transportation
engineers as American professionals relearn that
streets are for pedestrians as well as automobiles.
Walters_05.qxd 2/26/04 7:22 PM Page 116

---

minimize the chances of a bad architect or a philistine
developer ruining an urban area with a poor design.
In this endeavor, some of our fiercest critics are archi-
tects. Generally the complaint is one of ‘restricting
design freedom’, as we noted earlier, but sometimes
the quarrel goes deeper. This more profound attack
on design guidelines was articulated by Australian
architect and academic, Ian McDougall, at a confer-
ence in Melbourne in the year 2000. McDougall
expressed this more abstruse antagonism against ‘so-
called New Urbanism’, by arguing that ‘(w)e are sick
of the urbanism of the café and the perimeter block.
The city must not become the normalising environ-
ment of nostalgic guidelines … skeletal rules derived
from deconstructing outmoded models of the city’
(McDougall, 2000: p. 30). At the same conference,
another Australian academic, Leonie Sandercock
posed the question: ‘Who wants to live in a city
frozen in its own historical aspic?’ (Sandercock,
2000: p. ix). This rhetoric was ratcheted up a notch
or two with the assertion by McDougall that it was
important for architects to debunk the sanctity of
context, history and memory.
To us, this sounds like the worst of modernist
rhetoric retooled for a new and unsuspecting audi-
ence. Only modernist doctrine considered it cool or
appropriate to revel in the destruction of the past. All
other periods of architecture established some rela-
tionship with history other than destroying it. The
modernist city, by contrast, was a place of demolition
and free composition of isolated objects in the
reduced landscape of the city, and the restoration of
traditional urbanism marks a return to respect for
people and the public spaces they inhabit. Designing
great streets that frame the public realm of the city
and provide places for public life isn’t recycling tired
old ideas from Haussmann’s Paris. It is more like
waking up to a world of sanity after experiencing a
nightmare. We are returning to an urbanism centered
on people rather than abstract ideas, and urban space
rather than architectural form. Using design guide-
lines isn’t historicizing the city. It’s implementing
good urban manners and putting people first. How
many more loud, boorish buildings do our cities
need?
Such an approach requires architects to design
once more within context, as illustrated in Figure 5.9.
This means seeking continuity with context and
history and rejecting idiosyncratic buildings based
on contrast with their setting, except in the most