Why I Left Architecture for Urban Design
Written by Marcy McInelly
I have always loved cities, towns, and villages, especially the social places they make possible and the rich human expression found in their buildings, parks, plazas, and public spaces. When I was young I was fascinated by the different responses to climate, geography, and history that you can see in different cities. I saw this in the city of Seattle where I grew up, the countryside of Vashon Island (where I also grew up), Portland where I went to high school, and European cities that I visited as a teenager. When it was time to pursue an education I knew I wanted to help make cities but I wasn’t sure what educational or professional path to pursue. Planning, architecture, or landscape architecture? The thing I really needed, which is a hybrid of all three, didn’t exist then, or I suppose that I would have gotten an education in it and become a professional in that field the early 1980s. Urban design, which is what I was searching for, didn’t exist as a pursuit, at least not in the western US where I went to college. I had to start with architecture, and it took me 20 years to find urban design and figure out how to practice and make a profession of it. Ultimately I had to form my own urban design company, which I did in 1995.
To study architecture was partly a practical decision; it was a field of study at the in-state university I could afford to attend, the University of Oregon. At the time the University of Oregon was known for contextualism and regionalism, at least as it applied to buildings, but urban design was not a defined area of study at the school. Nonetheless I had architecture professors who taught me important urban design concepts: how to consider not only the building but its context; that buildings formed ensembles, that there was such a thing as a background building, that buildings should respond to the landscape and the site, and they could, when skillfully designed, amplify and manipulate the experience of a place through use of materials, framing, and scale. These lessons are useful to me even today.
I particularly remember a class taught by Thom Hacker, which was a survey of his favorite buildings from all over history and all over the world. There was a landscape architecture school and I took some classes, including one taught by Ron Lovinger, which was, as with Thom’s class, a very personal survey of influential and favorite design approaches. One of my friends at school, Charlie Wenzlau, shared Robert Venturi’s book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” which opened my eyes to ideas about the scale of buildings in relationship to the scale of cities and the possibilities for interaction between the two. But generally there was no study of cities, their history and planning, the multiple factors that created them, maintained them, or the elements of their evolution.
I discovered I was more interested in the space between the buildings than the buildings themselves
In all the talk about buildings, I discovered I was more interested in the space between the buildings than the buildings themselves. I said and thought this before I knew of Jane Jacobs or Jan Gehl. For reasons I can only suspect, my professors never talked about Jane Jacobs. I am glad to know that most architecture students learn about her now. On the other hand, I was fortunate to be taught by a group of professors who had studied and worked with Louis Kahn. Learning about his philosophy and works I began to understand that through architecture one could make common space; almost (as I interpreted it) that architects had a primal, even moral responsibility to create the spaces for human assembly.
A responsibility to create the spaces for human assembly.
I began to form a philosophy that spatial constructs—of which buildings were a small part—could reinforce social connection and be used to define and nurture community, and that appealed to me.
I longed for a formal study and discipline dedicated to the study of common space. Later as I became involved in the Congress for the New Urbanism, I imagined that what Kahn talked about: devising an architecture to accommodate the human need to assemble was akin to what the Congress for the New Urbanism and urbanists refer to as the “public realm.”
Louis Kahn’s striving to devise an architecture to accommodate the human need to assemble is related to what urbanists call the “public realm”
Immediately after graduating with my Bachelor of Architecture I went to NYC, spent five years fulfilling my architecture internship requirements, passed the architectural exam, all the while learning about the public realm in one of the most interesting cities in the world. I returned to Portland a registered architect and practiced for a few years at FFA (Fletcher Farr and Ayotte) and SOM (Skidmore Owings and Merrill) and worked with architect and urban planner George Crandall. In 1995 I founded Urbsworks to dedicate myself to urban design. At that point, with more than 10 years of experience in the architecture profession, I knew that my experience with building design, including user programming, construction and materials, spatial proportion and composition, circulation and movement, would be better applied to the neglected space in between the buildings. In some of my early marketing material I said that Urbsworks’ focus “is the often-neglected space between the buildings.” Urbsworks went on to work on projects that to this day include streets, street networks, community master plans, zoning codes, charrettes, and collaborations with engineers, architects, landscape architects, planners, ecologists, municipal governments, developers, and others.