Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  “They end up with a bias against Edge City because it’s a community in spite of planning, not because of planning. They see the subservience to the automobile. They rail against it rather than try to plan around it. The bottom-line reduction of that argument is that cities are not about cars; cities are about people. Cars and hence Edge Cities are just not ‘healthy for humans and other living things,’ or so the argument goes.

  “When they do go out to look at it, they’ll look at each building as an isolated artifact rather than see the entire Edge City as a cohesive architectural whole. Because they don’t see a whole there. It’s city ad hoc rather than the intentional, beautifully planned fabric that is Washington, D.C., for example. One of the things that may be operating here is that because Edge City is such a recently evolved reality, architects don’t know how to think about it. In no one place or in no consistent stream throughout that process are you taught about finances and business and the development process and how to work with the bank. That’s very much an along-the-way kind of thing. Development ethic or even theory is not a real part of the program.

  “The academics, meanwhile, say, ‘It’s not our job to produce sawn-off baby architects.’ The academics say that it’s their job to produce people with the great foundations of the big ideas and the technical skills. See, there’s a lot of ego in the artistic process, and architects consider themselves artists. We tend to value the art more than the technology. Sneering, I think, is a little overdone. Condescend? Yes. I mean, in your industry the people who write the big novels or the definitive biographies are different than the people who crank out the obits and the want ads.”

  Okay, so why did they try to run John Portman out of the fraternity?

  Levy rolls his eyes.

  John C. Portman, Jr., is the godfather of Edge City design. He changed forever the way American cities work and look. He is the architect who, in 1967, developed the first of those classic Hyatt Regency Hotels with the rooms all around the edge and the enormous thirty-story atria in the middle, with their hanging gardens and crystal elevators and their ziggurats. But even before that, he celebrated the enclosure of ever larger and more lavish megastructure environments, such as Atlanta’s Peachtree Center. His efforts like the Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Renaissance Center in Detroit have been major hits with the public and widely copied by other builders, lending credence to his claim to be “the people’s architect.” But he is viewed in many architectural circles as the Dark Side of the Force—as guilty of apostasy.

  His first sin was that his exuberant American design yawps turn life inward toward the air conditioning and away from the beastly streets. But on top of that, he went on actually to build his own buildings. He stopped waiting around to find a client to put up the buildings he wanted to build and started putting them up himself. As recently as the 1980s, AIA chroniclers explain, it was considered a gross breach of ethics for an architect to have an equity interest in the buildings of his own design. It was thought that an ownership interest would encourage the cutting of corners. The public’s interest would not be kept foremost. It was cause for formal censure. Portman broke through all that. He became—gasp!—a developer. His conduct eventually inspired other architects to adopt a more hands-on attitude toward city building, but not before he was summoned to a high inquisition before the AIA priesthood.

  Explains Levy: “Architecture had for years been seen as a gentleman’s profession. It’s an interesting avocation and a wonderful combination of art and science. It’s very easy to get so involved in making the beautiful building come true that you can go out of business. To this day, I know architects who’ll do a couple of development projects to make enough money, and they’ll practice architecture until their money runs out and then they’ll do another couple of development projects to make some more cash.

  “The people who could practice over the long haul were able to ignore the vagaries of commerce—they were gentlemen. If it took five thousand hours to do a building that had been budgeted for only four thousand hours, they could afford to spend a thousand hours for free because they didn’t have to make a living. They had independent incomes.

  “I mean somebody like Jefferson, who is held to be the first American architect—he spent the latter part of his life building and rebuilding and unbuilding and overbuilding Monticello. It was only because he had money and education and prestige and had traveled to Europe to see Palladian buildings—only because of his gentlemanly status that he could exercise his architecture. Had he been a cobbler, he probably couldn’t have been an architect.

  “The marketplace? I think we’re a lot better at it than we used to be. I think it’s a kind of benign myopia. It’s been said that architects are business people who lose a little on each project and try to make it up in volume.

  “Capitalism is a wonderful system and it’s given us the ability to have these little toys and to eat good lunches. But in this culture you can justify nearly anything—nearly anything—if you can make a buck at it. Therefore, decisions that are based on business precepts rather than esthetic precepts will have primacy. And they can be countervailing forces, yes. Business can get in the way of art. People are drawn to architecture for the art of building beautiful spaces that house well the human enterprise.

  “I think there is a real difference between art and business. Traditional architecture is on the side of art, not on the side of business.”

  Fine, responds art historian Dillon. No argument, none at all. But even if you revere art, what sense does it make that “all of our models for urbanity and cities and what they mean are all nineteenth-century models? Even though if you look around Dallas and Houston, you have a hell of a hard time figuring out exactly how those would fit.

  “If you pick up all of the current literature on cities, every one of them has the model with one downtown. Where all the tall buildings were. Where people lived close to work and where there was this street life and it’s Hudson Street or something. Most of the discussion about cities is still very much imbued or infected or infested with that kind of thinking. Therefore it’s very difficult to come to terms with the reality of a place like Dallas. Our parent is Los Angeles; it’s not Boston or San Francisco. Our next of kin are Albuquerque and Phoenix and Atlanta.

  “I’m interested in this part of the country because it attempts to come to terms with certain realities like the car and the garage and the freeway. I can make a case for a downtown as essentially a tourist, entertainment, and business center. It’s not what we would all have as the best of all possible worlds. But it’s more realistic—the notion of a downtown as one of five or six special ized districts. Sort of picking out this part of the urban pie—maybe no housing or very little housing; maybe very little shopping. Maybe all of the other stuff will go out somewhere else. Houston’s already that way, you know.

  “But when I say things like that, it’s oh, no, the worst possible thing. It’s kind of a blindness. I spend a fair amount of time in architectural schools around the country. You look at what students are drawing and what they’re being taught, and you see the house for the collector or an art museum. A big one a few years ago was some project for the Berlin Wall. Students need a passport to see the sites that they’re designing for.

  “In the meantime this other stuff is all around them, and nobody’s addressing it, because it’s too difficult. It’s not a traditional design problem. It’s not about buildings necessarily; it’s about spaces and landscapes.”

  Indeed, I came to wonder about parking lots. They’re the most ubiquitous built form in Edge City. Why are they so ugly? Could there conceivably be something inherent in Edge City parking lots that requires them to be that way? Or is it simply that most designers have not considered them worthy of study? Gas stations from the 1930s, after all, are now thought of as neat, and worth preservation. I wonder what will happen when certain strip shopping centers get old enough and unfashionable enough to not be worth bulldozin
g. (In Texas, developers say, a building “don’t wear out; it uglies out.”) Will they end up being renovated by artists who suddenly realize what a wonderful big, cheap space an old K mart is? After all, somebody had to be the first to have the brainstorm of turning an old brick warehouse or textile mill into condominiums. I wonder what these new places will look like.

  In Houston, in recycled neighborhoods such as Montrose, and the Village, near Rice University, gas stations are becoming florist shops, and old theaters are becoming bookstores. But not a lot of that has happened yet nationwide. “It’s just outside the pale of the traditional nineteenth-century image of urban—which is about street, block, and square,” says Dillon. “I mean, that’s the kind of architecture that is history. Yes, it’s history.

  “Suburbs are all just dismissed as seas of anonymity. That’s scary to me, because you can’t define the problem. Design professionals want to have nothing to do with these places; they have almost no interest in them.

  “Sort of like a 1950s’ way of thinking, as though nothing ever happens out there.”

  “I don’t think we were social revolutionaries,” Gerald D. Hines demurs. “Developers are not leaders of the trend. People who are point men get killed. You want to be out in front of the market a little bit. One step. But you’re not out there five steps ahead. You hope. You better not be. Survival is the most important thing for a developer.”

  Disclaimers aside, Hines conceptualized at a higher level than most of his clan. He attempted to reconcile the automobile with the requirements of urban amenities. He invented the Houston Galleria.

  This is how he figured:

  Americans are individualists. The automobile is the finest expression of transportation-individualism ever devised. Edge Cities never succeed financially without accommodating the automobile. However, parking lots spread buildings apart. The farther apart buildings are, the less willing people are to walk between them. The fewer people there are within walking distance of any one place, the less able that place is to support civilization as measured by the existence of restaurants and bookstores. Therefore, individualism in the form of the automobile, fights the formation of society and community and civilization.

  Hines, by examining the apparent chaos of Edge City and building the Galleria, found a way to address the problem.

  To be sure, this part of Texas is never going to be confused with the Left Bank of Paris. When pairs of battle choppers start slowly sweeping the sky over the Galleria area in muscular, deliberate arcs, the locals glance up at the Cobras with their weapons platforms akimbo and say, “Guess George is coming home.” This area is home to enough unabashed mercantilism to make a Renaissance Venetian blush. The Houstonian complex, where President Bush maintains his Texas voting address, is a five-minute drive away.

  Nonetheless, the Galleria area is evolving. The best restaurants in the Houston region are there, not downtown. A newspaper poll revealed that the most beloved place in the whole urban area was the six-story, Philip Johnson-designed water-wall sculpture and park right next to the Transco Tower. And society has rewarded Gerald Hines for his insights into the human condition. To get to Hobby Airport, where he parks his white Cessna Citation III jet, Hines drives a chocolate Ferrari Pinin Farina 400i with a speedometer that winds out to 180 miles per hour. His offices in the Transco Tower look down not just on the Galleria, but on traffic helicopters.

  The Houston Galleria area is larger than downtown Amsterdam, or Cologne, or Denver. Twenty-five years ago, the land on which it stands was only a prairie with a one-room schoolhouse on it. By any rational assessment of attempts to create a whole new urban world from scratch, what is there today is not all that ragged. How did this come to be?

  “I don’t think anyone could honestly say they knew at the time about the effects of density,” says Louis S. Sklar, the Galleria’s overseer for Gerald D. Hines Interests. “The equation was a very simple one: the driving force was a refined version of greed.”

  The land cost so much that most of it had to be covered with leasable buildings if the project was to be economically feasible. That meant that parking had to be multilevel rather than surface, which drove up the cost even more. It was so high, in fact, that the Galleria was forced for economic reasons into a conceptual breakthrough: diversity.

  Hotels and office buildings were incorporated because the different kinds of people they attract were needed for the package to make money. And the parking arrangement worked, Sklar says, because it is “all weather-controlled, it’s pleasant, there’s activity, it’s safe, there’s no third-party violence, no potholes, no curbs to step off, no cars to splash you, there’s plenty of parking, it’s free, it’s clean, it’s well lighted, and you don’t have a choice.

  “That should come first. You don’t have a choice.”

  To students of human behavior like Hines, what is going on in Edge City is no great mystery.

  “We felt we were just following a trend of making people more efficient. That’s why we were the pioneers of mixed use. If you have everything in one place, you minimize your travel time. That’s why high-rise apartments will really never succeed. People are creatures of convenience. They want to park next to their house. They don’t want to go into a garage and walk up into a high-rise. Can’t bring my groceries into my back door. I have to jog on the asphalt, the concrete jungle. Give me a choice, and I’m going to go out to suburbia. They’s why Edge Cities are developing. People say, ‘I can have both. I can work and live in my twenty-minute span.’ ”

  Hines and Sklar say that the real trick to the 45-acre, 3.9-million-square-foot, 11,263-parking-space Galleria is that it has gone through an aging process similar to the old downtowns. Buildings of various eras and visions are adjacent to each other, offering layers and textures. “The Galleria will never be finished,” says Sklar.

  Notes Sklar, “We weren’t just doing architectural fantasies, nor were we backed up with a family fortune that would allow us to develop thirty or forty acres and see whether anybody came or not. Everything we did had to meet the test of the market. It’s good. It causes compromises. The difference between success and failure—soul or no soul—has a lot to do with both our incremental approach and whether or not you stay on top of the market.”

  Some architects and planners have come up with exciting visions of how to bring civilization to Edge Cities.

  One idea getting a lot of attention is that of Peter Calthorpe of San Francisco. He proposes that “pedestrian pockets” be built. These would be dense, walkable centers, a quarter of a mile in radius, with mixed use: residential, jobs, shopping. Citylets, if you will. They would be dotted throughout the otherwise thinly developed suburban landscape, and linked together by light rail until they formed a web.

  There is, unfortunately, not yet anything like them built. So it’s tough to imagine all the Unintended Consequences that may ensue. The plan, for example, would require significant government involvement, both in setting the site of the “pockets” and in paying for the light-rail lines to connect them. That would be a challenge. But the idea of alternating high, walkable densities with low, car-oriented ones does sound promising. In principle, it would be like the Galleria, only open-air, and with housing.

  Then there was the urban village idea as practiced by Scott Toombs in his Princeton Forrestal Center. On the north end of the New Jersey Edge City of U.S. Route 1, he developed a dense, walkable, outdoors-oriented place that was meant to be a magic small town of the twenty-first century. Offices were located above shops, and there were restaurants and a hotel, and people could walk everywhere, but there was still plenty of parking on the streets and in the decks at the exterior of the village. There were flags and bands and it was really neat. It was not unlike New Canaan, Connecticut, in fact, where Toombs had his main office. Only it was built from scratch.

  There were a few unresolved problems. One was that there was a real village not far away. It had the benefit of having taken centuries to ev
olve. It was called—Princeton. It was a more inviting place to be. Another problem was that Toombs’s village had no people actually living in it. There was no residential development. Another was that the priests of the market—the bankers—were not all of the same church. It is a given that those who understand office real estate deals rarely understand retail deals, and those rarely understand hotel deals. This is a problem that also afflicts Galleria-style solutions. Toombs, unfortunately, ended up with a consortium of eleven lenders, all of whom had to agree in order for him to correct any flaws that might crop up in his scheme. That turned out to be a recipe for rigidity. This division of expertise among financiers is a genuine problem for mixed-use places. It is not easily fixed. It makes some people wonder whether mixed-use developments have any future at all.

  But another, more serious, problem is that other attempts at creating “urban villages” have been put together by designers who are so addicted to planning and control that they make anarchy look inviting. They validate Robert Venturi’s command: “Messy vitality over obvious unity.” Their places never seem to come alive, for there is no easy way for them to evolve. In South Hadley, Massachusetts, Graham Gund designed a place across from the campus of Mount Holyoke College called the Village Commons. It is sort of an idealization of what New England would have been like if the original settlers had had air conditioning and Evian water. The Village Commons, like Forrestal Center, has been hailed in all the right design magazines. But this “first postmodern New England village” is the kind of place where a battle went on for months over what kind of sign the hairdresser could have outside his shop. It seems that the hairdresser saw the interior of his place as sleek and hip and full of shiny surfaces and loud music. He wanted to continue this kicky motif on a stylized white, gray, and scarlet logo outside. The protracted fight was literally measured in inches over how far outside his door he could carry his design into the exterior controlled by Graham Gund. The question is, Is this any way to create life? Did villages really evolve under strictures like this any place other than in The Scarlet Letter?