Where the Cars Are

It has become a cliche of city planners to blame the woes of the urban world on the automobile. But the much-abused automobile is beginning to find a few champions in important places. New York City's new Planning Commission chairman, Architect William F. R. Ballard, 58, celebrated his appointment by sounding off loud and clear in defense of the auto. "The better and fuller life includes the free use of the automobile," he said. "Planners who try to discourage its use make me sick. I believe in direct transportation."

In its current issue, ARCHITECTURAL FORUM disassociates itself from the notion that the automobile should be banned from the city as a public nuisance. Instead, FORUM suggests, the road itself can be used "to reshape--and thereby revive--the core [of the] city," and discusses some current proposals. Some simply involve the exercise of taste, others a more radical rethinking of the nature of the city in the age of the automobile.

Into the Core. Urban freeways should be made part of the city and not simply corridors through it. They should go between neighborhoods, not across them. They should be multilevel, depressed or elevated to take up as little space as possible. Buildings may be built over them and across them, parks and playgrounds under them, restaurants and parking garages integrated into their structure. These principles were laid down by Landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin after studying the sad case of San Francisco, whose citizens finally rebelled when they discovered that the state's new expressways ran spang across the view of the hallowed Ferry Building and the city hall, and organized a protest so impressive that all building was halted while the city fathers took second thought.

Freeways can be fed into a loop road that swings around but does not cross the city's core. In the core itself, vehicles can be given their own level, restoring the surface to the pedestrian. The argument here is that modern city streets, crowded with trucks, buses, cars and through traffic, are more of a hazard than a convenience to the urban native or even the visiting shopper. British Critic Gordon Cullen once characterized them as rushing rivers between the city's buildings, carving urban land into isolated islands.

An early effort at this separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic was City Planner Victor Gruen's proposed (but never executed) plan for Fort Worth, in which the ring road fed autos into vast parking garages penetrating the downtown area, while trucks were shunted into an underground network that would allow direct access to basement delivery rooms. Only pedestrians would be allowed on the surface streets, except for slow-moving shuttle cars like those used at world's fairs. A more sophisticated version of this separation of car from pedestrian was projected for Dallas two years ago by a team of Columbia University planners. It achieved the separation by stacking them vertically in a single, six-layer sandwich combining roads and buildings.

Street-as-Building. Most radical is the theory that the street itself should be a building--or at least a garage. This abandons the whole concept of a central core and instead stretches the elements of urban living--shops and department stores, theaters, auditoriums and community buildings--along the superhighway.

In essence, the street-as-building is an attempt to recast the city in terms of the wheel instead of the foot, of time rather than space. In ancient Florence, say, a five-minute walk brought a man anywhere he wanted to go, and resulted in a close, pedestrian-scaled grouping of buildings. But five minutes in a car becomes five miles on a highway, and is just as convenient as five minutes on foot--except for the problem of dismounting and leaving the car on arrival. The new streets-as-buildings would provide garages at every stop, making disposal of the auto as simple as flinging the reins to the hostler at the local inn.

A proponent of this general concept is Reginald Malcolmson of the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose solution is a continuous six-level building, a quarter of a mile wide, with a oneway highway on each side. Two of this ribbon-building's levels would be below ground, devoted to railroads, subways and trucks. The four stories above ground would be exclusively for parking --providing a kind of continuous drive-in. Stores, apartments, office buildings and theaters would be grouped along its length. The streets-as-buildings suggest nothing so much as a series of new China walls. But there is no reason why new foot-scaled squares like Florence's Piazza della Signoria could not arise at intervals along the new complexes.

Still more visionary are the designs of Arizona Architect-Painter Paolo Soleri. A pioneer in what FORUM calls "America's newest art form, the highway as architecture," Soleri has built model bridges that combine sculptural excitement and utilitarian practicality with apartments in their abutments, restaurants and bars-with-a-view in their bubble turrets.

Saving Themselves. Though the Dallas and Fort Worth projects are gathering dust, they have strongly influenced several real efforts of cities to revitalize themselves. The FORUM cites three: Philadelphia's Penn Center and forthcoming eight-block Market East; Worcester's proposed conversion of its downtown district into a web of walkways, shopping malls, moving-belt parking conveyors, surrounded by an outer loop for cars; Gruen's Midtown Plaza for Rochester, N.Y.--a complex of air-conditioned shopping malls, garages and new buildings that has brought an estimated 25,000 more people a day into the city's center. "Not even in our most optimistic moments," says Gruen, "could we have foreseen the extent to which the plaza has become a focal point of civic, political, cultural and artistic life."

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