PERFORMING THE URBAN FORM-BASED CODES AS A METHOD OF ARCHITECTURAL CRITIQUE
Introduction
Form-based codes (FBC) are being adopted in progressive settings throughout the US (Parolek et al. 2008). They are a regulatory system for land development that is usually substituted for the existing zoning code. While zoning is focused on regulating and separating land uses and density, form-based codes are focused on creating a particular physical result, typically a more ordered and somewhat higher density place with a more urban or village-like character. Form-based codes have more flexibility for land uses and density than zoning, but are much more restrictive concerning the design of buildings, sites, and public spaces.
The context
According to the Form-based Code Institute (FBCI), which is an interest group promoting such codes:
Form-based codes foster predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code. They are regulations, not mere guidelines, adopted into city or county law … Form-based codes address the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks. The regulations and standards in form-based codes are presented in both words and clearly drawn diagrams and other visuals. They are keyed to a regulating plan that designates the appropriate form and scale (and therefore, character) of development, rather than only distinctions in land-use types.
(Form-Based Codes Institute 2013)
Form-based codes (FBC) followed on the popularity of design guidelines, which are usually applied as an overlay on conventional zoning. Design guidelines are quite specifically focused on the design, character, and details of new and renovated buildings, and are common in areas with some historic buildings. In contrast, FBC are a set of regulations applied to specific areas where a particular character is desired. Although the regulations sometimes cover public investments in streets, sidewalks, open space, and the like, the rules we are most concerned with here are those that impact, evaluate, or control architecture.
Like post-occupancy evaluations (POE), FBC are a way of evaluating certain qualities in built form to predict with some accuracy how a building will perform (or does perform) against the ideal situation as reflected in the code. Rules, laws, or guidelines that require a design to measure up to a specific directive are sometimes called “performance” measures. Post-occupancy evaluations, daylight requirements, energy efficiency, and accessibility guidelines are among the proliferating performance tests that a building design can undergo. Because of our computer capabilities, architects now have the means to build performance testing into the models that are created to simulate a building, so that as he or she designs, an architect can get a continuous read-out on whether a design is performing on target against a variety of criteria and rules.
Performance criteria/measures
In the past, architects used their own observations and their own long experience to evaluate a design according to criteria that they developed as a kind of sensibility. As he or she designed, the architect used his or her internal evaluations to guide the work, and thus incorporate them as part of the whole design process. Many things were left out, of course, and it was the designer and the client who prioritized the most important criteria to incorporate. Our tendency in recent years has been to proliferate performance criteria, because we now have the data and the capacity to measure and predict performance beforehand. Even quite complicated performance-based evaluation measures can get built into sophisticated computer simulations of buildings, and the model can then be iterated many times to maximize the fit with various criteria.
While in the past, the client and the architect had the greatest influence on the design, today we must also satisfy a more diverse set of audiences for architecture than was traditionally the case. The public, the government, users (broadly defined), and consumers have begun to insist that buildings perform according to more and more specific criteria. Form-based codes are just one area where a group of citizens, planners, neighbors, and policy-makers have inserted themselves into the traditional design process in order to achieve a public good, like a better urban environment. Most performance evaluations have a public purpose of some kind (safety, access, sustainability, user comfort).
Every performance-based criterion set starts out with an underlying, and somewhat isolated, ideal, such as creating a highly “green” building. By isolated, I mean that this performance specification is neutral with regard to other potential criteria, such as building function. These may conflict: for example, orienting the building to maximize daylight may mean that it fails urbanistic or wayfinding criteria. It is the traditional task of an architect to balance various requirements to create a great building. Soon, it will be the task of the computer to balance the performance criteria, maximizing each according to an algorithm, perhaps dictated by the design team. At present, good designers rarely allow the performance measures to generate the design. In the future, however, the performative criteria may get the upper hand entirely, because the complexity of the models makes the process more and more opaque, even to the designer (Scheer 2014).
Most performance evaluations are based on data. Certainly, people working with post-occupancy evaluations have been doing social science research for decades (see Chapter 19, this volume). This research, as the term “post-occupancy” implies, is gathered by studying built architecture. Sometimes it is based on surveys of occupants, sometimes it is observations of how people use a building, or both. Energy efficiency performance is even more clear-cut and based on the scientifically measured performance of specific materials, systems, and assemblies. This testing is best done in a post-occupancy setting, as well.
Form-based codes, on the other hand, are derived primarily from conventional wisdom, handed down from designers and other experts who have observed successful and unsuccessful urban environments and drawn conclusions from what they have observed (Ewing and Bartholomew 2013). Some of these conclusions are quite mundane and obvious: “people prefer to walk where there are street trees.” Recently, researchers have begun to test much of the underlying wisdom of FBC, using some of the same research methods used in post-occupancy evaluation. There have been no surprises: the conventional wisdom has proven to be generally true: people actually do prefer tree-lined streets.
For example, experts have observed that the ratio of street width to building height reaches a point where intimacy and human scale feel compromised. This is difficult to measure, but real, and rules of thumb have been devoted to quantifying the correct ratios. But even describing this simple rule of thumb makes us realize that there is a huge number of conditions that mitigate or exacerbate the ratio, and that perhaps intimate human scale is not always the point (e.g. Las Vegas, St Peter’s Square). But the study of these limits (and continued observation to enhance their specificity) is important information for designers, who can to use it or break it or develop a contrast, as needed for the context. All designers, to one degree or another, learn and use their craft by accumulating observations and understanding the known rules of thumb or data.
In addition to the conventional wisdom of experienced designers, FBC also incorporate the popular sensibility: they are a kind of crowd-sourcing mechanism, so that the sensibilities of the common man are queried. Through participatory planning, visual preference surveys, visioning meetings, and so on, the opinions of neighbors, planners, and government officials coalesce around the conventional wisdom, and emerging research brought to the process by consultants who specialize in FBC. The likes and dislikes that emerge are constantly being broken down and explained in finer and finer detail, so that precise rules can be written. FBC can be extraordinarily precise and quite long – 100 or more pages of code are not unusual, even for a small district.
Outcomes
The environments created this way are often successful and intimate pedestrian and people places, as the FBC intend. They are human-scaled, have ample public gathering places, and an attractive level of complexity. They are also all very strikingly similar, since they are following known urban formulas and urban typologies, which are only slightly modified for local effect. These are a particular “type,” born of a formula not unlike the successful and repetitious formula that drives the design of a suburban mall or a subdivision, but with a different intention. That FBC buildings are very similar implies that these urban typologies share many characteristics and that the people who create them appear to be more homogeneous than they probably are: do denizens of the French Quarter respond the same way as the denizens of San Antonio?
FIGURE 20.1 Form-based codes, like this one in Columbia Pike, VA, produce urban scale buildings of a particular type, broken up vertically to simulate narrow buildings. Contrast the new development on the right side of the photo with the iconic (and authentic) Bob and Edith Diner on the left.
Source: photo by Brett VA, licensed under CCx3.0.
Because they are created with a combination of research, expertise, and crowd-sourcing, FBC are an unusual way to critique an urban environment and its architecture. To be sure, FBC are not so much a critique of architecture as they are a critique of the business of real estate development, which often seems to have a tin ear (or greed) in regard to collective, public issues. That is why educating the public is also a common goal for these codes, as they are created and as they are written. FBC often contain within them little “mini guides” to good urban design, presumably not aimed at the trained designer, but at the real estate industry, the politicians, the street engineers, and the public.
With FBC, the act of evaluation applies to the entire body of new construction within a specific area. Is the building helping to create a street wall? Does it have a stated amount of transparency on the ground level? Does it respond to the immediate context in a respectful way? Is it oriented vertically or broken up in vertical segments to provide the illusion of verticality (Figure 20.1)? Are there openings every 25 or 50 feet? Is it complex in its expression (no boxes)? Most FBC go further and recommend, like design guidelines, incorporating copies of historic details, including eaves, porches, windows, stair rails, and materials that mimic historic ones in the neighborhood (Scheer and Preiser 1994). Like other performance criteria, the level of detail of the FBC has a tendency to increase as they are adopted successfully in communities. Citizens find this a satisfying way to control many design elements that they are unhappy about.
Performance measures are strengthened and promoted by their reference to data. They are, generally speaking, created by data-driven research, including user surveys, measurements over time, and observations. On the other hand, architectural criticism has sometimes in this book been presented as the personalized evaluation of the quality of a particular building, or even more narrowly as the review of the building’s aesthetic quality. What this book proposes is that these are two opposing (or perhaps complementary) views of evaluating the quality of a building. It is almost as if there should be a showdown between what the common man desires (represented by POE and FBC) and the perverse opinion of the dilettante critic.
Juxtaposition vs. complementarity
I believe that this is a very misleading opposition: criticism and performance evaluation are not two different/equal ways to evaluate quality. Performance measures do not evaluate the “quality” of architecture, they evaluate a building’s performance according to algorithms more or less generated by data. By suggesting that a building is “well designed” if it suffices all its performance criteria, we risk leaving almost everything about architecture that is important out of the evaluation. By designing only to maximize the performance of a building on various criteria, we leave the judgment of holistic design quality out of the picture altogether. No responsible architect does this.
Criticism (good criticism), on the other hand, is the interpretation of a building or a series of buildings that places them in context with intellectual and aesthetic currents, and which critiques the holistic design ideas, the message and meaning of the building, and the conditions under which it arose. Critics are highly selective: very few buildings are reviewed at all. Most buildings are background to the culture – generally very derivative or typologically known, generally performing well but not very well, and on the whole, having no interest or intention for the advancement or revelation of the culture or the city or the art of architecture. Most buildings are designed to maximize a series of criteria, both the public-purpose performance criteria already discussed, and also the economic, functional, and image performance required by the owner. They do not rise to the level of interest for architectural critique. There is very little to say about them, and what meaning they have simply reinforces the culture as it is. So for example, a new mixed-use building that follows an urban formula or FBC speaks only to the meaning we can attach to the formula (Why this formula? Why now?), not to the particulars of that building.
So the act of reviewing a building at all is a selective act that has as its purpose to call attention to some cultural moment that the building elucidates (even if it is bad). Critics are simply not interested in buildings that are polite, comfortable, ordinary, and closely following a known form-type. It is arguable that the only way to create an interesting and important building that pushes the culture forward is to break away from the ordinary, comfortable, and politely contextual. As a designer, I like to understand the conventional wisdom and know how to put it into practice, but I also want to be able to use my own interpretation of the history of the site and the problem, for example, to provide a unique and authentic response, rather than be driven to use a specific formula.
This is an important dilemma. Whereas it is possible to satisfy POE criteria and most other performance measures while still designing an interesting or avant-garde building, it is not possible to do so in a district where FBC are strictly applied. Because FBC require (by law) a conventional context-based solution rather than a unique response, it is probable that they inhibit architectural excellence and innovation, at the same time that they inhibit developer-driven banality (Scheer 1999). By following form-based codes precisely, we create popular, normal, predictable, competent and comfortable, yet entirely unremarkable architecture (still difficult to pull off). On the other hand, without FBC, we usually get very weak and even offensive “product” – the result of real estate market forces, industry habits, and inertia. What we don’t have, in areas with FBC, are the many disappointing attempts at something different, which can become an affront to everyone. But we also do not have a few stunning and creative works that help us understand the art of architecture and the larger currents of meaning of the culture (Figure 20.2).
FIGURE 20.2 Form-based codes create architecture that is vaguely historic and conventionally pretty, but not meaningful to the place and culture. This project could be anywhere and has no aspiration but to serve the real estate development.
Source: photo by D. Scheer.
Conclusion
Here is where a good critic becomes a vital part of promoting design excellence. The critic does not instruct us on a few simple rules for good normal design, such as those put forward by FBC or POE. We learn a completely different thing from a good critic: the shattering of tradition, the way to see something we had not seen before, the place of this new addition in the continuity of the city and the culture. We learn why the architect did not follow the known rules and why this is important or badly done. We learn the relationship of this art, architecture, to other arts and movements and politics. These reflections and contemplations are not offered as a way to make better buildings in the future (however buildings are defined as “better”), but are offered as interpretations to allow us to see the architecture and the places in all their fullness, i.e. not getting lost in specific criticisms of the width of the hallway to accommodate traffic (POE), or the distance of the door from the sidewalk (FBC). The critic will identify large problems of the culture and society that are embodied in the architecture, and draw our attention to creative movements.
The critic, hopefully, will also let us know when performative measures have gone too far or been applied too rigorously or restrictively. When the general urban environment becomes tame and codified and Disneyfied, it is the job of the critic to encourage more innovative work, to ask the public to look beyond its conventional ideas of prettiness, retro urban types, and pedestrian scale: to call attention to public places that are exciting and relevant and forward-thinking, rather than just good “people places.” The critic can also deplore the use of “old-timey” architecture that cynically mimics a past that never existed, even as the public swoons over the brass fittings and “brick” façade.
Critics also give people a language to use to talk about what is happening around them, in their neighborhood. Instead of helplessly saying, “it’s just too big,” people who follow an enlightened critic can talk about the legacy of the older homes, the instruments of power that drive real estate, the destroyed patterns of the city streets, the trade off between building here versus somewhere else, all of which have great legitimacy. There is a direct relationship between the kind of knowledge that critics can bring, and the broader knowledge of architecture and place in the community.
References
Ewing, R. and K. Bartholomew (2013) Pedestrian- and Transit-Oriented Design. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association.
Form-Based Code Institute (2013) “What Are Form-Based Codes?” http://www.formbasedcodes.org/what-are-form-based-codes
Parolek, D., K. Parolek, and P. Crawford (2008) Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
Scheer, B. C. (1999) “When Design is Against the Law.” Harvard Design Magazine 7.
Scheer, B. C. and W. F. E. Preiser (eds) (1994) Design Review: Challenging Urban Aesthetic Control. New York: Chapman and Hall.
Scheer, D. (2014) The Death of Drawing: Architecture in the Age of Simulation. London and New York: Routledge.