World Reusers

I love the World Redeemers church on Lamar between Park and South Parkway. They have redeemed a defunct mid-sixties auto dealership with a new use, and with touches and flexibility that make it a model of hackitecture, mixing imagination, architectural reuse, personal taste and economic necessity together into a simple and visually evangelizing complex.

They haven't added any new buildings to the complex, with the exterior show lot still intact. However, they surrounded everything (including a much less visible side street boundary) with a wrought iron fence painted in the church's theme colors, purple and gold.

Up against the sidewalk, the fence gives definition to the complex and the street, as well as security; The wrought iron fence, which I'm fairly certain is a new touch, gives a a traditionally ecclesiastical presence to a car lot form.

But it's the reuse of the showroom and signage where WRC really shines. First they changed the string of roadside signs along Lamar from huckstering messages of "Used Cars" and "We Finance" to

and

They also left the Service Entrance sign on the side of the showroom/sanctuary.

At first I thought they left it there due to its height -- too hard to take down. However, they painted around it and above it and so I figure they could have removed it if they wanted. I believe it was it was left there intentionally, as that's part of the sanctuary. It continues the transformation of the commercial huckstering into religious evangelism.

The sanctuary is the original lot's main showroom (I actually looked at a car there when I was a teenager).

The show windows are gone, bricked in and embedded with gothic-arched stained glass. The form of this building is very much the same however.

Without a doubt, the most creative reimagining is of the 3 tailfin beams supporting the west wall and roof of the sanctuary.

To the 3 they added a 4th, a mirror of the original vertical beam, and completed the Cross.

And then they framed it in neon, again in the same color theme, for souls passing by in the dark.

This complex is hackitecture at its best -- reused, imaginative, visual, eccentric.

A city like Memphis that is poor in resources but rich in imagination is the perfect studio for works like this church.

Memphis could be, should be, the world capital of hackitecture.

Memphis Builds a Hole

My long-simmering, near burnt thoughts on August's stunningly lopsided 10-2 City Council vote, clearing at least the political path for CVS to demolish the Union Avenue Methodist Church:

• The vote's a template for future defeats that advocates for a better built Memphis can't ignore. Organizational unity, education of both leaders and citizens, and political advocacy for both candidates and systematic change are important to avoid a thousand defeats and an uglier, less livable Memphis.

• A big mistake for the built community would be to try and pin the defeat on Memphis Heritage. In voting for the CVS anti-design, The Council ignored the Office of Planning and Development, the Land Use Control Board, the Memphis Regional Design Center, the Commercial Appeal, the Central Gardens Neighborhood Association, Playhouse on the Square, the Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the district's councilmen, Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn, and Memphis Heritage. It was a blow for preservation, smart growth, urbanism, walkability, planning and Memphis' built environment.

• Urbanists can separate themselves from preservationists in fast growing cities. In Memphis, preservation is a necessary tool of urbanism. We can say, "I don't care about saving that building, I care about good design", but as a practical matter 9 out of 10 people who don't care about re-using a good building also won't care about good urban design.

• I heard someone say that the defeat was due to poor lobbying by the opponents of the CVS design. I don't know enough about political campaigns to know the truth to this, but it does scare me that our Council could be so lightly principled that some special political ingredient -- beyond the public pleas of the staff, boards and associations mentioned above -- could have turned a 10-2 defeat into a 7-5 victory. Anyway, even if extra special lobbying could have made a difference, it strikes me as a very expensive, unsustainable, politically exhausting way to move toward a better built Memphis. A thousand city-wide mobilizations for a thousand buildings and designs that start at the bottom of a 10-2 hole won't work.

• The Council made it clear in their words and horsetrading what they would do the next month -- gut the Midtown Overlay.

• I don't think the Councilpeople who voted for CVS are clueless or idiots or [insert your insult here], but I do believe that the issues of smart growth, walkability, good design, much, much less preservation, have made little inroad into our city's political leadership. At this point, the great majority of our Council don't care. Their apathy is a core smart growth problem in Memphis.

• City Council meetings are like a game show hosted by the Great and Mighty Oz. Citizens stand below the raised, intimidating dais of the Council and are given a ticking 2 minutes to speak. Instead of a screamed "Silence!" a buzzer goes off when the speaker's minutes are up.

• Near the end of the debate, Councilman Bill Boyd let the crowd in on a dirty little secret. Numbers of supporters or opponents in City Council chambers don't sway their vote. Perhaps this where the off-the-clock lobbying comes in and citizen advocacy gets the buzzer.

• If you need political support for regression in Memphis, get yourself a spokeschristian. Very effective.

A Cliche for the Wrecking Ball

We're not so far from our annual demarc between Future and Past that I can't sling a cliche back over into auld lang syne:

preservationists can't let go of the past.*

Like any cliche, you can find someone who fits it. But I've found that that nostalgia for the past can coexist happily with the complete physical destruction of its artifacts. People can easily talk about happy memories in places being pulverized around them.

In my estimation, people dedicated to saving older buildings are motivated not by a fetish for the Past but by a specific and recent history lesson. The lesson that in America over the last 60 years, we have built bad where we have demolished great. We have destroyed and replaced visually exciting, energy creating buildings with walk-stopping parking lots, energy-draining setbacks and city-killing banality. Not always, of course, but 9 out of 10 times, if not 99 out of 100 times.

As urbanist James Howard Kunstler put it in this excellent podcast on preservation:

we're not capable of putting new things up that are as good as the old things we're losing. It's hard to account for that. We're not really dumber than our great-grandparents and we're certainly a lot richer than they were... But there were forces in our culture and in our economy that have prevented us from putting up buildings that are as worthy or as beloved or as lovable, as worthy of our affection, as these things we're losing.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was. It doesn't have to be that way, but it still is.

Until we can consistently replace good with better, or at least, as-good, many of us will see the approaching bulldozers as tools of regress, coming to wreck our neighborhoods, our districts and our city's Future.

* most recently penned by Commercial Appeal editor Chris Peck.

Start Defacing our Economic Advantage

During his 12 Suggestions talk last year, Jeff Speck made his audience gasp when he showed that Memphis had replaced the Masonic Lodge

with the Blake Building.

On Halloween I had a few minutes to ponder this very weird replacement while I waited for a bus on Second Street.

I pondered the Blake Building's rigid box form, the panels and ornamental grills aggresively enforcing opaque 2-dimensional facades,

the strangely placed fire panels,


the structure on top of the box.

Standing there, bored and a little liquored up, I wondered: is it possible that the original building is still there, hidden under a goofy modernist facade?

Then last week, I had the honor of talking with Keith Kays, the architect leading the charge for the protection and appreciation of Memphis' great modernist buildings. I mentioned the goofy building at 2nd and Madison and he said, "you know, the original building is under all the panels"

Wow! It is still there. Very, very exciting.

Except ... it isn't. The hidden building isn't the Masonic Lodge, the Victorian in the photo at the top. Unfortunately that really is gone. Speck's liner notes,

note that it was demolished in the early 20th century and replaced with the Germania Building that is now presumed hidden at 2nd and Madison. While I don't know what the Germania Building look/s/ed like, I do assume that a structure built on a prominent downtown corner in the early 1900s is probably still pretty beautiful.

Conceivably Memphis could have 2 good outcomes from this.

1. By removing the panels and grillwork, we can daylight the early 20th century Germania Building underneath
   
   
2. By re-forming the freed groovy modernist panels and grills in a more porous manner somewhere else on our streets, we can create urban space where there's only urban void now.
   

I'm hoping to get closer soon and see if I can get pictures, from inside or out, of the hidden building.

Public Input about Dis/Connections

From Shelby Farms Park Conservancy and the Greatest Memphis Greenline:

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, Shelby County Government and Greater Memphis Greenline have announced two public input meetings for discussion of the design and management of the new urban greenway connecting Midtown Memphis to Shelby Farms Park.

• July 6 from 7pm-9pm at the Benjamin Hooks Central Library, 3030 Poplar Avenue.


• July 7 from 6pm-8pm at Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove Road.

The meetings will be an opportunity for citizens to talk about the opportunities and challenges that come with greenways and will feature national trails expert Robert Searns. Representatives from Ritchie Smith Associates, the trail designer, will also be present.

The greenway—a former rail corridor being converted into a multi-use path—will stretch from Tillman Street at Walnut Grove Road to Shelby Farms Park, connecting neighborhoods and providing a safe opportunity for people to recreate, commute and exercise.

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy will manage and operate the greenway, with support from Greater Memphis Greenline—a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collaborate in a public-private partnership with local government in the development of unused railway right-of ways and easements in Memphis and Shelby County, and to create a world-class recreational park/hiking-biking trail system.

And from the Memphis Regional Design Center:

Are you concerned about the designs of our highway interchanges?

Then plan to attend the

TDOT Public Hearing to review proposals for the I-55/Crump Blvd. interchange Tuesday, July 7th, 6 to 8 pm Central Station Corner of S. Main & G.E. Patterson

The redesign of the I-55/Crump interchange will have a major impact on the future of the Historic Marine Hospital, the National Ornamental Metal Museum and surrounding developments. Please plan to attend this important meeting that will clearly impact this important Downtown Memphis neighborhood.

There's a FAQ from TDOT on their proposed changes.

Inside the Overton Square

Memphis Heritage is hosting a meeting about Overton Square from 4-6 p.m. this Wednesday, May 20th, at their headquarters, 2282 Madison (at Edgewood).

Like the last public Overton Square meeting, this one also and unfortunately takes place during business hours. Memphis Heritage has told me that this was designed several weeks ago as a educational/informational meeting and has morphed into an advocacy meeting because of the recent contract on Overton Square. From here out, advocacy meetings will take place after normal business hours so members and concerned citizens can participate.

More on Demolition Without Design

The most frustrating thing for urbanists is that there is so little rhyme or reason to how the city disposes of these buildings. With no plan for replacement, the creeping creation of vacant lots in the name of “much needed” parking or blight removal is insidious.

Detroitist Francis Grunow has written a very interesting plea for a comprehensive redevelopment strategy -- what I think you would call urban planning -- in the midst of Detroit's demolition free-for-all. Without at all denying the need for urban triage in a shrinking city like Detroit, he argues for "the repositioning of the city’s core assets, its undervalued anchors, as the urban basis for revival and long-term regeneration".

One of the bases, the anchors, is the incredibly beautiful and incredibly threatened Michigan Central Station,


designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. Detroit plans to "use economic stimulus money to demolish Michigan Central and stick the gratuitously negligent billionaire owner, Matty Moroun, with the bill"

Random questions that aren't completely rhetorical:

1. why is demolition of neglected private property considered an acceptable governmental responsibility but moth-balled maintenance is never, even when the plan is to force a billionaire to pay up?
   
   
2. what's wrong with treating urban anchors as visual and monumental rather than economic anchors, especially if we're talking about low demand real-estate? Monumental anchors give a city body and presence.
   
   Even as monuments, you can't let the street front die, but can you mothball the tops without having to mothball the bottom?
   
   
3. Is there such a thing as phased renovations of major buildings like you see with the Phase I, Phase II of suburban developments? Could you "subdivide" major buildings?
   
   
4. Why can't a municipality pay for modern infrastructural improvements like electricity and plumbing in a dense urban renovation like they do for new roads, sewers, electricity and water in suburban developments. The former might make greater economic sense.
   
   
5. Will a full-blown urbanist movement emerge, in the mode and possibly from the ranks of the preservationist and environmental movements, with the same willingness to fight for its principles? Or has it already emerged?
   

Urban Redo

Let's take a mulligan on the last 50 years of Memphis city planning.

That's what we had to do with this massive Jackson Avenue urban renewal tract from 1961, immediately north of St. Jude (from the Commercial Appeal's Memphis Memories).

Memphis renewed the area cleared as suburbish strip malls. 40 years later, it had to renew the renewal.

Absence of decay is not presence of vitality. Demolition is not design.

Return of Main @ Jefferson

I went to the Lowenstein Building opening on Wednesday and was happy to see this great project completed.

Also cool to see its across the street neighbor, the Courtyard Marriott ascending at Main @ Jefferson. This is the visualization.


And this is the actualization, still in progress.

Hugely exciting to see the rebuilding of that corner.

I hope the local buildings can collaboratively use the new space and energy on the street.

By the way and along the way, this is what happens when you treat the street as incidental:

Don't waste the opportunity!

The Exotic in Normal

Perhaps because I was born in the era when many were being built, I never cared much for Memphis' modernist buildings. They were the normal, while the strange were the older, traditionalist buildings I might see in my rare trips downtown and less rare trips to midtown.

But time has subverted and replaced the norm, and I've come to love what I can see now as the historical exoticism in buildings that looked so boring to me as a kid.

Like the Normal Masonic Lodge.

A simple modernist building overall, it has a nice horizontal tile-inlayed plane on its second floor, horizontal concrete borders around its windows, a concrete Masonic icon and most interestingly, these short and stout columns

which remind me of Botero. It's like the builders were afraid to give up traditionalism and settled on these as a lifeline. A hesitant traditional touch that is weirder than anything modern they could have added.

Unfortunately, while I appreciate how its landscaping evokes the building's era in its rigid untouched normalcy, it also taints the building's exoticism.

While architectural styles have changed much, suburban-style berm and bush landscaping style hasn't. We risk overlooking the special in the building due to the sameness of the lawn.

And it is a risk, because the coming westward expansion of the University of Memphis will threaten even special buildings. A building mistakenly branded as insignificant by a berm doesn't stand a chance.

Mix, Mash, Mod Architecture

I hope that the real cutting-edge, progressive architecture of the future will not be starchitecture but mashups and remixes -- building into, around and on top of the existing, with the least destruction. Creating new space not from scratch, but out of pre-existing building blocks, with infill and onfill -- buildings that grow out of other buildings. No more painting over the canvas, no more unsustainable churn. Architects will become hackers and hackers will become architects.

The benefit to under-urbanized Memphis: formation of a dense, sustainable and creative urban texture. Churn is the enemy of a vital Memphis.

Climbing the C&I Bank Building

Architects and architecture lovers presented lots of great ideas at last week's meeting to save the C&I Bank Building (an example), and a few that Memphis Heritage and friends have begun work on.

While the best idea will be the idea that saves the building from the worst idea, which is the Regional Chamber's plan to sell the building for kindling, until then I declare my idea the best and hope those with an interest will consider making it the best in fact.

Make it the home of The Junkyard Memphis.

Why?

It fits the Mission of Junkyard:

The primary purpose of The JunkYard is to engage the efforts of local artists and art students in the construction of their own museum. Once open, the exhibits will feature large climbable structures that can be enjoyed by everyone of all ages. This tactile nature of the new museum will be a useful learning tool for kids of all ages, as well as a method for creating an emotional link with adults and their city.

The C&I has a large 4 story glass atrium, with balconies open to it, that seems perfect for the climbable structures that Junkyard Memphis wants.


(While it's not mentioned on the Junkyard website, I've always heard that the City Museum of St. Louis is a model. A few photos from that museum can help you envision the types of climbing structures possible.)

The stupendous views from that atrium out at downtown Memphis are a huge part of that emotional link to their city.



Since the C&I Bank Building has already been gutted, its interior is a tabula rasa for the imaginations of the artists and art students.



Plus,

it's a wonderful piece of architecture-as-advertisement, an iconic Fun House beckoning over the right field wall of Autozone Park for the multitudes of kids and adults who go to Redbirds games every year.



And because of the glass atrium, the favor is returned to the Redbirds.


If they exploit this spatial and visual connection, each could help the other be much more than they are by themself.

Along the same lines, it's would form the 3rd vertex in the fun and education triangle of Downtown Elementary and Autozone Park. See:


It could be a tangible, visible, climbable lesson in recycling and creativity.

The Ascent of King Edward

A forlorn beauty when I passed it a year ago,


Jackson's King Edward Hotel was in the middle of a vibrant restoration when I passed by again last week.


The King Edward has been empty since 1967, for 40 years before its restoration began late last year. In comparison, our own great Hotel Chisca closed as a hotel in the early 1970s, but was occupied as headquarters by the Church of God in Christ until the early 1990s.

Let's wish the developers, who include Deuce McAllister, the greatest success on their work. Afterwards we can invite them to take the train up to Memphis, for a visit to Main and Linden.

Meeting Wednesday about the C&I Bank Building

From Memphis Heritage:

Important Meeting Regarding the Future of The C & I Bank Building 200 Madison Francis Gassner, Architect Built 1974

There will be a meeting for all those concerned about the future of the Gassner Building, 200 Madison Ave., at Memphis Heritage's Headquarters, Howard Hall at 2282 Madison Ave. at Edgewood on Wednesday, August 13 @ 12 noon. Please feel free to bring a sack lunch we will provide beverages. The meeting should be over by 1:30.

The building is presently owned by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce and is for sale. To date all of the parties interested in buying the property have plans to demolish the mid century modern Memphis Landmark (in one case to build a surface parking lot). This meeting will be to assist everyone in knowing the latest plans for the property and to discuss alternatives to it's demolition. Please email June West at jwest@memphisheritage.org if you can attend this meeting or if you are interested in getting follow up information on our plans. Thank you for your support of historic Memphis.

The C&I Bank Building was completed in 1974, designed by Francis Gassner, FAIA (1927-1977) of Gassner, Nathan, and Browne Architects. The innovative design used tubular truss framing and butt glazing to shape the building and enclose its atrium. When completed, the C&I Bank was applauded for its geometry and light-filled atrium. The C&I Bank was recognized by both state and local AIA Awards, and, in 1979, the Museum of Modern Art included the building in its exhibit of the 400 buildings that "have had a significant influence in the recent directions of architecture." In 2000, the C&I Bank building was recognized by the Memphis Chapter of the AIA as the Design of the Decade (1971-1980). The C&I Bank building was purchased in 2004 by the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation for use as its headquarters.

June Waddell West
Executive Director
Memphis Heritage
www.memphisheritage.org
901.272.2727
fax 901.272.0149

More background on the threat.