Economic Success Alone Does Not a Livable City Make-–Architecture Critic Will Morgan

Economic Success Alone Does Not a Livable City Make-–Architecture Critic Will Morgan

 

It is summertime in Providence, and the rhythm of the town shifts. Students have left and many residents have decamped for the beach. In this vacation mindset, Carolyn and I took a June trip to Raleigh, North Carolina (an easy, non-stop flight from Providence on Breeze). A holiday offers a shift in perspective, and for an architecture critic, that means getting new perspectives on how other places address issues that we grapple with at home. While Providence is addressing its housing crisis by erecting faceless, offensively boring apartment blocks, Raleigh shows what the future will be like with the unchecked proliferation of larger, unbridled “ubiquiboxes.”

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Raleigh is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, fueled by the Research Triangle (the South’s answer to Route 128 and Silicon Valley), and its proximity to three major research universities, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, and North Carolina State. A salubrious climate, lower taxes, and plenty of job opportunities for an educated class of tech workers has drawn thousands of newcomers to Raleigh and its suburbs, so that the metropolitan area has nearly a million and a half residents. One such suburb, Cary, now has more people than  Providence. Labeled a Containment Area for Relocated Yankees by humorist Garrison Keillor, Cary is home to 55,000 Indians, many with Ph.D.’s. The Triangle Area rivals Boston in terms of scientific brain power.

 

    

When I first started visiting Raleigh many decades ago, it was an attractive, somewhat sleepy Southern city, lamenting the loss of its major economic bases of tobacco and textiles. There were, however, some ungentrified residential neighborhoods and an abundance of city parks, but there was nothing like Providence’s wealth of historic architecture. The old State Capitol of 1840 by New York architects Town & Davis is a handsome Greek Revival pile, but there’s a far lesser reservoir of landmarks. After the Second World War, the architecture school at the North Carolina State became a hotbed of Modernism––only Los Angeles had more Modernist houses than Raleigh. But many of these noted residences by émigré designers have been leveled to build the new apartments.

 

 

The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad station in Raleigh, a handsome 1941 classical temple, will soon be replaced by an over-scaled ubiquibox. Architect Frank Harmon, who led the dispirited preservation efforts to save the station, told GoLocal, “Developers have maxed out in Washington and Richmond, and so they are marching South.” In his efforts to save the Seaboard’s signature building, Harmon argued that a train station was one the few public places of which so many people had memories. Sadly, the city, state, and the developers quashed any thoughts of homage to history in favor of the faceless everywhere USA.

 

The development of the Research Triangle slowly started to change the region’s fortunes in the 1970s, abetted by the state’s strong support of higher education, particularly in tech research. The spread-out nature of the Triangle resulted in traffic that is as nightmarish as it is constant. Now, it is difficult to distinguish much of the North Carolina capital from other booming places with a class of young workers living in high rises and crowding breweries and trendy restaurants. The influence of the design school is limited locally (very much in the same vein as RISD–a presence rather than an influence).

 

A few architects, nevertheless, are designing contemporary houses and inserting them into neglected older neighborhoods close to downtown. One of the most intriguing is an 8-apartment building on a small lot in such an inner-city area. The ever-inventive Los Angeles architect Lorcan O’Herlihy created an affordable residential block employing inexpensive materials, complete with roof deck and views of downtown. Sensible and human-scaled housing such as South E8 offers an alternative to the giant apartment blocks, what Nilda Cosco, North Carolina State professor of environmental behavior, calls “spreadsheet design.”

 

 

Raleigh may be housing its smart young people, but every new ubiquibox constructed where an older, beloved building was razed represents a missed opportunity to create a civilizing and more livable city. As we rush on building junk, let the North Carolina capital city be a lesson to Providence to be careful of what we wish for.