Northampton Web Log

Last August Northampton Redoubt interviewed James Howard Kunstler, noted author, social critic and a leading proponent of New Urbanism. He spoke on infill development, specifically as it pertains to the thirty-one unit Kohl condominium proposal off of North Street in Northampton, which has since been amended to twenty-five units. Mr. Kunstler did not have the benefit of viewing the Kohl proposal prior to the interview, but he weighed in nonetheless.

NR: Mr. Kunstler, is all infill good?

JHK: There are many ways of looking at it okay, one way is this: that we are now entering an era in which we are going to reactivate our existing towns because the suburban project is over. We will be reactivating and infilling our towns. What we’re seeing now is that in the early stages of this we’re not very good at it. Over the last fifty years of putting most of our investment in suburbia our skills have been lost. We’re getting them back, but we have a ways to go. To some extent the New Urbanists have been very helpful in retrieving the necessary principles and methodology for doing this kind of work. We owe them a real bit of gratitude for diving back into the dumpster of history and getting this information, for example, (on) how to design mixed use urban buildings.

What’s really going on at the moment is that the architects have not kept up with the urbanists. The urban design is getting back to a pretty good normative level where we’ve rediscovered that you have to bring the building out to the sidewalk edge, if it’s a downtown business building. It has to relate directly to the street and the public realm which is composed mostly of the street. And that you have to make a provision for retail at the ground floor and other things upstairs. We get that now; we’re doing that pretty well, at least in my town of Saratoga Springs, (NY), which is a comparable caliber sort of town to Northampton.

What you’re seeing is that the architecture has not really come back to this level of urban design. The architects are still lost in the raptures of modernism, which includes an inability to proportion buildings correctly or to ornament them with any kind of conviction. One of the guiding principles of the modern experience in modernist ideology is that you can’t do ornaments on buildings. That has tended to persist and it’s still with us. At the highest level of architecture, the highest levels of practice in architecture these days, the big stars are still preoccupied with mystifying the public and that’s exactly what we don’t need. We don’t need to confound people’s expectations about how the building’s work or how they relate to the public realm. In fact we need to reconnect the broken connections. The architects are not helping at the moment although at the non star level, the level that they’re practicing in Saratoga Springs and perhaps over in Northampton, at the non star level they’re not as preoccupied with making statements of mystification as much as they are in New York (City) or Barcelona. But the lack of skills is still obvious. We’ve had a very exuberant period of infill here (Saratoga), with about seven to eight new buildings in the last forty-eight months; almost all apartment buildings with retail on the ground floor; they behave the way we want them to, the urban setting. But the architecture really lacks conviction and grace.

NR: In Northampton we’ve had a couple projects in the past couple of years downtown where they’ve taken previously developed sites and put in, as you say retail on the first floor, dwellings on the second floor and that isn’t really being argued. What is being argued is there’s a proposal now to put in thirty-one condominiums in an urban forest that’s right now very close to wetlands. This would be single use, there wouldn’t be any frontage on the street; they are not creating a traditional street with the faces of the buildings towards the street. They’re creating basically parking lots in the forest and the backs of the buildings would front the parking lot. You would drive down a traditional street that’s been there for over a hundred years with single or maybe two family homes, quaint homes, and it would culminate in a thirty-one unit subdivision of row houses. And the city recently rewrote its local wetlands ordinance to allow for encroachment up to within ten feet of wetlands in the built up areas. The argument has been not so much that infill in and of itself is good or bad but rather is (in regard to) the design of this particular project going forward.

JHK: Yeah, it sounds pretty bad. I think that’s correct to say if the proposal does not include the creation of a legitimate urban street that relates to the building, if it’s just a tower in a parking lot.

NR: It is two or three story row house condominiums. There is no street per se in the traditional sense. The streets now are dead-ends.

JHK: Well they need to create traditional streets and the town should make it illegal to do any more cul de sac type development. Clearly that is now something that we’re done with in America. For one thing it implies that the thing is going to be automobile oriented. There is no question that the car dependent period of our history is coming to an end. Now what you’re seeing is an inability for us to let go of that idea. So we’re still designing for it. I think the truth of the matter is it’s over.

NR: The argument in favor of these condominiums is that it’s better to eliminate the in-town forest rather than to eliminate the forest that’s in the outskirts of town.

JHK: You end up with a whole set of issues that relate to confusion over urban and rural typology, which is to say, people end up being very confused about what’s the town and what’s the country. They’ve got an impulse to both urbanize the rural edge and then to try to ruralize the affect of urbanizing the rural edge. All their impulses are confused and I see this all over the place.

NR: Unfortunately infill has been called, “good,” simply by the use of that term.

JHK: People have also co-opted the term New Urbanism and then done half-assed versions of it. Just co-opting a name doesn’t make it good.

NR: We’ve talked about the design but the buildings are designed poorly and they don’t match the existing character of the neighborhood. It means a lot more traffic and a lot more asphalt. When we’re going to be building to within ten feet of wetlands it generally doesn’t account for one hundred year floods and what homeowners might end up living with after the property is conveyed to them.

JHK: I would just add f**k those motherf**kers.

NR: As a result of this type of issue some private residents in the city have formed a group called the Northampton Design Forum and they’ve invited the Notre Dame School of Architecture, the graduate school, to come here with Dr. Philip Bess.

JHK: I know Phil Bess very well and I admire the Notre Dame School very, very much. They’re one of one or two university programs in America that know what they’re doing. He’s a really a good man and he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

And with that the community now turns to consider Notre Dame’s suggestions which can be viewed at http://sites.google.com/site/northamptoncharrette/.

The councilor from Northampton’s fourth ward, David Narkewicz, moved Thursday night to reform council rules as they pertain to committees that city councilors can serve on. In a five-four vote the ordinance amendment failed which means that it will not come back before the council for more discussion in two weeks.

Councilors Spector, Murphy, Dostal, M. LaBarge, and Ray LaBarge voted no.

Among the more interesting developments, though councilor Spector expressed that he would like to hear from his constituents on the matter because it was new to him, he then voted to kill the amendment making it unlikely that he will weigh it further unless it is brought back in a different form.

As well councilor M. LaBarge expressed strong concerns about members of the council serving on municipal boards like the Board of Public Works, Planning Board, Conservation Commission and Zoning Board of Appeals, but then voted against her concerns to kill the amendment. Go figure.

As the chair of the city’s Central Architecture Building Committee councilor Murphy argued against the amendment, as did councilor Dostal, who is a member of the BPW. The amendment would have disallowed this type of service as the boards are comprised presently. Interestingly, these boards have been involved in two of the more controversial issues in town lately, those being the Hilton Garden Inn and the proposed landfill expansion. However councilor Narkewicz argued that the rules that define committees could be modified to formally include council participation. He further added as incentive to continue the discussion that the rules as they are allow members of the city council to appoint themselves to staff the planning board, a separate decision making body.

Councilor Narkewicz’s amendment to section 22-1B of our city code would have codified how members of the council may participate in our government as follows:

“Members of the City Council may only serve on the committees and commissions listed in (1) above or those otherwise created to expressly include City Council representation. New members of the City Council elected while holding appointment to any commission or committee shall resign said appointment prior to beginning their term of office.”

Though I have disagreed with councilor Narkewicz on some of his past votes and opinions, on this one I think he got it right and, for what it’s worth, I applaud his effort to reform the rules to the betterment of the community. This change would have closed a loophole and removed some of the, “whims of politicians” from the policy making process as councilor Narkewicz put it. If you get a chance to watch the city council meeting on nctv cable channel 15, give it a look-see.