The Fredösphere

Architecture Week is taking us down a back alley in the latest issue.  Literally:  alleys are a key element of the New Urbanist movement toward traditional city planning.  I think they're great:  houses can get those dang protruding garages and driveways tucked away in the back where they belong.

Cops dislike alleys because robbers lurk in them.  Firemen dislike alleys unless they are given the width and function of a conventional city street.  (Believe it or not, that has been tried:  check out the hilarious pictures of the perversely proportioned alleys and streets in the Parkside neighborhood of Houston, Texas.)  Sadly, exhaustive building codes can suck the life and charm out the environment.  If a flight of steps are old, weathered, and slightly uneven, that makes them beautiful -- but also slightly more likely to cause a fall.

Here's an introduction to New Urbanism, with photos of Seaside, Florida, perhaps the best known example of what the movement can do.  Unfortunately, as a resort town, Seaside cannot really be considered a proper test of the claims of the movement.

Here's a photo of an alley in Celebration, Florida, which I took during a whirlwind tour of that town a year ago.  Celebration is the famous, notorious, shark-bejumped New Urbanist experiment by Disney.  For more Celebration photos, go here.  For the full story of how Disney, Inc. promoted the concept of the town, then gutlessly abandoned the settlers to shifty developers, read Andrew Ross' account of living there for one year, or for the quick version, see Wikipedia.

Personally, I wanted to find that Celebration had succeeded.  In many ways, I suppose it has.  Nevertheless, the town has a slightly phony atmosphere everywhere you look, and it perpetuates the myth that New Urbanism is really about restoring the Queen Anne style to the dominant place in domestic architecture.   I wonder if they finally got the roofs to stop leaking.

Of all the buildings in Celebration, I thought only its moderne cinema really looked completely comfortable in its surroundings.