Design Matters

The built environment is all around us.  Good design can make what is built both functional and pleasing.  There is a saying that form follows function, but as we know that is not always the case.  It is all too often that an architect wishes to make a statement and that can easily lead to function following form.  Often, the Starchitect form is not overly pleasing, and actually does little for the good of the landscape in which it is located.  Design failures can be simple and hardly noticed, or they can be big and regularly noticed.  This post is about a few areas of what I interpret to be design mishaps in my local community of McFarland, WI.

Snow pile indicates extent of clearing.  Look into photo and see rocks and
planter which prohibit snow  plows from getting through
Looking south

Design informs how we interact not just with the constructed world, but with others around us.  Sometimes design failure is about forgetting simple aspects of human life and physics--e.g. the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  For many, many years college campuses forgot about that and placed rectangular sidewalks around a square thinking no one would want to walk the diagonal, across a square.  The first design issue in McFarland is the new child play area adjacent to the library.  I am sure some landscape architect received many kudos for the design.  What stood out in my mind is the layout of a boulder next to the sidewalk.  A standard five foot wide sidewalk, constructed with the library, runs from the public sidewalk to the library entrance, and this sidewalk runs along the edge of the child play area totally reconstructed last summer.  The design, and construction of the play area involves large stones (and bench) at the edge of the sidewalk.  Up until the construction of the new play area the sidewalk was cleared in the winter, but  this past winter it was not cleared.  The reason is simple, the boulders prohibit the use of a small tractor, skid-steer, or small utility vehicle (such as a John Deere Gator) to clear the sidewalk.  Someone was not thinking. Clearly they did not care about the shortest distance between two points.  Having worked in local government for over 33 years one thing is certain, public works and park crews are built around the use of machines, no one is going to hand shovel unless it is absolutely necessary.  Even if they had a walk behind snow blower they do not wish to get out of their enclosed piece of equipment and do another chore.  This is a small matter of design, but one that should have been caught.

10+ minutes before school release cars are backing up on the roadway
The school addition could have been constructed toward this intersection

The other aspects relate to the construction of the elementary school directly behind my home.  There was at one point two schools on the site, but the oldest school, a two story building which had many aspects of good urbanism, was razed.  In its place is a massive one story building attached to the building that remained.  Two things strike me about this school.  First its site was designed not for its intended K-2 inhabitants, but for cars.  Second, it is a great example of suburban design, and more importantly an example of how not to design.

Crossing guard in Yellow.  Like the Maytag repairman?

The form follows function of design clearly is not at work in its parent pick up and drop off.  This is an utter failure.  This year, even though construction on the school was completed last September, the school district still has most all children who attend the school bused to the school, pretty much regardless of location in the Village.  Even before the new school was built this drop off configuration was completed at a large cost.  Since the outset it has failed.  The vehicular traffic picking up and dropping of school children is so great that it backs up onto the street, as can be seen in the attached photos (the crossing guard told me it often backs up even greater than the time I happened to view it last week).  The back up affects non-school traffic, and is a clear failure of design to have form follow function.  And, it is not like someone did not inform the powers that be that this was going to happen.  A neighbor to the school, who was employed as a city planner at the time, wrote a letter to the Village and school about the poor design and the effect it would have on traffic.  How much worse will it be if the school no longer chooses to bus so many K-5 students?

Boulder along sidewalk edge
Looking north

The school district is its own worst enemy.   To pass a referendum many years ago now they decided to break schools by grades rather than create neighborhood schools.   Instead of having two elementary schools of K-5, there is a K-2 school and another school for grades 3-5, at the opposite end of town.  Meaning more kids beyond a reasonable walk distance. The obvious ramification is kids just don't walk to school, they get driven (or bused).  By their own design of grade configuration they are making it more likely for parents to drop off and pick up their child, and of course it is double and triple fold when you have children in more than one school.  And people wonder why their is an obesity epidemic among youth. Part of the blame goes to schools and not just because of grade configuration.  Blame also needs to be placed on the "mandate" of the Department of Public Instruction that new schools have a minimum acreage requirement.  For elementary schools it is 12 to 15 acres.  This moves schools to the periphery of the community to access land availability, but where there is the least walkability and bikeability.   It is a promotion of the auto-oriented car culture. It is funny how so many climate change warriors fail to look at simple regulations and mandates that encourage auto dependency.  (If Governor Evers desires to reduce carbon, he failed to promote schools in walkable areas as head of DPI for many years.)  Auto dependency has now been so ingrained in the nation that it is expected and that low level of expectation leads to bad design, and places cars over people.  I have yet to meet a second grader that drives, but yet what one sees from the street is not the school, but the parking lots.

View up Sure Street from Exchange Street 

The other aspect of the poor school design is that it failed to do one of two things:  It was not built to the corner, and absent that it was not built to provide a terminated vista for the one street that approaches the school, Sure Street.  however, when you look up Sure Street to the school what do you see?  A parking lot.  the corner, which is but a half block from the Village Hall and Library, is occupied by a detention basin, parking lot, and pavement for drop-off and pick-up,  not a building.  It was possible to design the building at the corner or with a terminated vista as viewed from Sure Street.  The car culture kept it so neither design principle could be met. The school building addition could easily have been designed to provide either a presence at the corner, or with a prominent feature visible from Exchange Street up Sure Street, say a well designed main entry.  Then again, that would have required the architect, school board, and village to think beyond a car dependent culture, but alas that was apparently above the capabilities of those groups to understand and appreciate.

View from Sure at Johnson
Main entry to school is just to the left.
Snow piles obscure (a temporary screen) the vehicles in the parking lot

And it is that lack of appreciation for the aspects of design as to why so much design fails.  If one were to look at the cities and villages which persons hold in high regard in Wisconsin they are ones that have not lost their traditional downtown.  Would the small communities of Door County be so attractive if the villages had not required at least some design to keep building close to the street (urbanism) rather than providing a sea of parking and the building far back? Or, think of Mount Horeb and Cambridge each with dynamic downtown which embraces good urbansim.   I have written before about walk appeal, which you can read here, so it is not necessary for me to also identify the importance of urban design for walking.

School bus from Elementary School  in subdivision adjoining the school

How important is a terminated vista?  Well, for those in the Madison, WI area, think of what the view up East or West Washington Avenue (or any of the other side streets for that matter) would be if instead of the State Capitol it was a parking lot or ramp? How well would that please they eye?   What is important is that such terminated vistas be used more frequently, it should not only be the State Capitol building.  Public use buildings, whether a school, church, library or administrative building need to provide a place of prominence in the community--it adds to the purpose of what a public building is for and what it provides to the community.  It adds a sense of place and it adds a sense of grandeur.  Instead since the arrival of the car culture, generally post WWII, many public buildings fail in this test.  They are designed for cars, not people, they are designed not to provide pleasing views, but to make sure there is sufficient parking in front.  (Deflected vistas, depending upon the overall viewscape, can also be an effective tool, but alas suburban car culture also fails in the use of that design principle.)

WI State Capitol Building

There is also the failure of design professionals--planners, architects and landscape architects who have become too comfortable with the status quo car culture that is  inherently dangerous to the human scale.  Until the public starts to demand designs for the human scale and not the car scale, we will simply continue to see seas of parking and uneventful buildings that do little to raise the imagination. How many new public buildings, constructed in a suburban fashion in the last 70 years do you think are or will be worth saving 50 or 100 years distant?  Urban design need not be expensive, and that is what Starchitects do not like.  Good urban design uses simplicity to perform elegance, not disjointed and crazy roof lines or fenestration.  It will probably be less than 100 years, if  not less than 80 years out, that the school behind me will be torn down and another unimaginative building put in its place.

First seven photos by Author on 3/14 or 3/15 2019

Last photo from Google Images