James Huemoeller’s UBC SALA Studio Looking at the Future of Cities
This Fall, James Huemoeller will teach the “Suburban” studio looking at the future of cities focusing on the Newton Town Centre in Surrrey, British Columbia.
“When buildings stand isolated, oblivious to any urban infrastructure that gathers them together, their impact is effectively limited to the farthest sight line measured in architectural feet instead of urban miles.” - Albert Pope
This studio is a journey into the unique characteristics of suburban spaces that surround our increasingly monotonous, sanitized urban cores. These cores currently hold sway over urban thinking, but this is not a permanent state. As architects, we have a duty to infuse areas outside the centre with enthusiasm and energy, allowing these communities to thrive as unique urban places.
To do so means accepting a different kind of urbanism. In the centre, space is at a premium and, therefore, the focus of design. At the edges, space is in excess, and landscape becomes dominant. The excess space means buildings are free to relish in their objectness, protected by mid-century zoning codes. Yet this freedom renders architecture in suburban contexts powerless to have any urban impact. The antithesis of the Rossian primary urban artifact. A series of functionally separated zones (street, bike lane, planting strip, sidewalk, planting strip, parking, lawn) means architecture’s only hope for a transformative urban project is through spectacle, Denice Scott Brown’s Vegas Strip.
As we inevitably move beyond car-centred development, we are called to reimagine the suburbs. We must find a new avenue for an operation that rejects the “decorated box” and the derivative New-Urbanist villages that came later. This is a call to action, a challenge to acknowledge that the genie is out of the bottle and to strive for a new, innovative approach to suburban architecture. In other words, we must abandon our obsession with the core and embrace the mess we have made, but with more optimism about what design can achieve.
