Perhaps I spoke too soon about the virtues of the truly open and public nature of the Wisconsin Capitol. Governor Walker has essentially closed the building down, slowly forcing protesters out in a war of attrition. Despite a court injunction that the building shall remain open during public business hours, only those with scheduled appointments are being allowed in, and even then they are escorted to and from their appointed room.
Since last Sunday, the Walker administration has increasingly restricted access to the Capitol, making protests more and more difficult. But some protesters have refused to cave in.
The harsh temperatures haven’t made it easy. For the last several nights, people have been gathering outside the Capitol near the King Street entrance, where they chant and take turns talking through a bullhorn.
People are allowed into the Capitol if they have an appointment with a legislator. They can attend hearings or Supreme Court sessions in the building without an invitation, but only up to the capacity of the room. “If a hearing room allows 103 people, 103 people will be admitted,” he says. “Not 104. Not 110.”
A shame to see this happen to a public building. What was once a part of the city’s fabric and a key element of the State’s civic space has been reduced to a Gubernatorial stronghold. There’s a huge police presence. Many of those cops are certainly conflicted between the need to follow orders and their solidarity with protesters seeking to protect collective bargaining rights.
As the governor and his aides have attempted to limit access to the state Capitol—which the Wisconsin constitution says must remain open to all citizens—Sheriff Mahoney has steadily argued that he and his deputies are present both to maintain public safety and to defend the right of citizens to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances.
As Walker’s lawless approach has gone to extremes, culminating in a failure by the governor’s Department of Administration to obey an order from a Dane County Judge that the Capitol be opened, Sheriff Mahoney has become more explicit in his objections.
The sheriff objected when Dane County deputies, who have been frontline officers from the start of the recent protests, were the doors of the Capitol were not opened. Finally, he pulled his officers from the scene.
“When asked to stand guard at the doors that duty was turned over to the Wisconsin State Patrol because our deputies would not stand and be palace guards,” said Sheriff Mahoney. “I refused to put deputy sheriffs in a position to be palace guards.”
It’s a shame to see such a public and democratic space closed and silenced like this.
UPDATE: Matt Wisniewski has a third video installment of the ongoing protests at the Capitol:
As painful and divisive as the recent events in Madison, WI have been, I’ve been overcome by the openness and civic use of the Wisconsin State Capitol and the adjoining Capitol Square. Mammoth recently posted an excellent piece on observations of the social action and public space as they’ve intersected at Tahrir Square in Cairo. In that same vein, I’d like to highlight the civic spaces and public buildings in Madison as another interesting case.
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Madison is a planned city, home to the state’s capital and the state’s flagship university. James Doty, a territorial judge passing through the area in the 1830s loved the site so much, he purchased land, platted streets and lots, and convinced the territorial legislature to designate his paper city as the new capital. Doty selected a site on the natural isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona for the city, designating the highest ground for a capitol building and public square. Influenced by Washington, DC, Doty planned a rectilinear grid of streets, augmented by radial avenues emanating in all directions from the new Capitol Square. The narrow nature of the isthmus cut most of those radial avenues short, but the natural setting more than made up for the truncated corridors.
image from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection
Several buildings served as Wisconsin’s capitol, occupying the same square. The state looked into expanding their current building when it was destroyed in a fire in 1904 – just five weeks after the legislature voted to suspend the Capitol’s fire insurance policy.
A new capitol arose soon thereafter. The current building was constructed between 1906 and 1917. Keeping in line with the grandiose ambitions of the city itself, the planned building would have eclipsed the US Capitol in height – though the final design brought the dome to a height of 284 feet – three feet shy of the US Capitol. The Capitol has four wings, oriented to the cardinal directions. Each wing looks towards one of the radiant streets from Madison’s original plan. The building is grandiose, ornate, and inspiring – keeping to the City Beautiful movement of the time.
cc image from kern.justin on flickr
Around the same time as the new capitol’s construction, the City enlisted the help of John Nolen, an aspiring planner and landscape architect to help beautify the city’s parks and public spaces. Nolen crafted a plan to improve Madison’s parks, connect the city to the surrounding lakes, and generally improve the city’s civic spaces.
images from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection
Nolen also offered improvements for State Street. State Street was the one radial avenue that cut across Madison’s grid without interruption from one of the city’s lakes. State Street also served as an important link between Madison’s two key institutions – the State Capitol on the eastern end, and the University of Wisconsin campus on the western end.
image from Madison: A Model City – UW history collection
Many of Nolen’s ideas, like those of many City Beautiful plans, were never fully implemented. Nevertheless, the Capitol Square remains a key civic space in Madison. State Street is still the key link between the Capitol and the University, lined with bars, restaurants, and shops. The terminal view of the Capitol Dome is a constant one for anyone in the city.
cc images from the queen of subtle and BoonLeeFamPhotography on flickr
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Given the nearly constant expansion of the security impulse, the most remarkable thing about Madison’s plan, civic spaces, and public buildings is just how public and civic they remain. The Capitol Square hosts numerous events, from weekly outdoor orchestra concerts to Madison’s weekly farmer’s market.
Even the mundane daily uses are exemplary of the Capitol’s civic nature. Due to the city’s location on the isthmus, often the fastest way to get from one side to the other on foot is to walk through the Capitol. Unlike far too many civic buildings in Washington, DC, the Wisconsin Capitol remains open to the public, not fortified and protected like so many other civic buildings.
Nothing made this openness more apparent than the nearly constant protesting taking place over the past week and a half on the Capitol grounds and within the Capitol itself.
cc image from Lost Albatross on flickr
Twovideos from Matt Wisniewski capture the spirit and the civic use of this particular space.
I can’t imagine a similar event taking place in any of the public buildings in DC. None of them remain as open as the Wisconsin State Capitol. Philip Kennicott warned of the implications of closing the Supreme Court’s main entrance, symbolic of a larger issue with our civic and public buildings:
All across Washington, the doors, terraces and plazas of our essential public buildings have been closed off to the public, likely forever. But the closing of this front door, which will now be used only for exiting the building, is not just another front door lost to paranoia. It is the loss of what may be the nation’s most important portal.
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By a thousand reflexive cuts, architecture loses its power to mean anything. The loss to the citizens of the United States is enormous. We are becoming a nation of moles, timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances. Soon, we will lose our basic architectural literacy. The emotional experience of entering a grand space has been reduced to a single feeling: impatience in the august presence of the magnetometer.
Madison’s alt-weekly newspaper (appropriately titled for the city as The Isthmus), like many weeklies, has had some of the best coverage of the ongoing political saga unfolding in Madison. Bill Lueders stepped back on Thursday, offering perspective on the past two weeks, and their implications on the future of life and politics in the state of Wisconsin:
But as a lifelong resident of Wisconsin, I’m saddened — truly and deeply saddened — by what Walker has set in motion. It will change the state forever, causing profound and lasting damage, no matter how the budget stalemate plays out.
Scott Walker’s declaration of war against Wisconsin’s teachers, nurses, social workers, 911 operators, prison guards, park rangers, sanitation workers, snowplow operators, engineers, police officers and firefighters — and their inevitable decision to join the battle — could be for Wisconsin what the attacks of 9/11 were for the nation. It will create a deep before-and-after divide, between a time of relative innocence and a time of perpetual conflict and insecurity.
The difference is that the attacks of 9/11 were external, and stirred a sense of national unity. What has been fomented in Wisconsin is a rupture among ourselves, one that will ensure acrimony and contention for many years, perhaps decades. The dispute will be not just between Walker and his tens of thousands of newly impassioned enemies, but between the state’s citizens — worker against worker, neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member. (Personally, I think a colonoscopy without anesthesia might be less painful than the next get-together of my extended family.)
Regardless of how the Wisconsin budget situation plays out, how the political winds shift in response, I hope these events have not provided the security apparatus with the opportunity to restrict access to the Wisconsin State Capitol. I hope these events are not the first reflexive cut of many that Philip Kennicott warned of. The scars from this particular budget fight will last for a long time in Wisconsin, but I hope this “perpetual conflict and insecurity,” as Lueders puts it, does not claim the openness and civic purpose of the Wisconsin State Capitol as one of its victims.
Board games: Greater Greater Washington notes that the Feds have filled two of their four slots on the WMATA board, naming Mort Downey and Marcel Acosta to the positions.
Downey is a former executive for the US DOT under the Clinton Administration and is currently a transportation consultant. Acosta is the Executive Director of the NCPC, and formerly worked for the Chicago Transit Authority. Personally speaking, Downey is a regular commuter and rider on Metro, and Acosta lives car-free in DC.
Downey, a consultant who previously served in the Clinton administration and as executive director of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority — and a Vienna native who has ridden Metro for 20 years — has fairly modest aspirations as he takes his seat on the board on Thursday: “The federal government would like its employees to arrive at work on time, fundamentally alive.”
Can’t argue with focusing on your core mission.
Never mind the bollards: Second Ave. Sagas up in New York takes a look at some really horrendous security ‘bollards’ (using that term loosely) surrounding the new Atlantic Ave. LIRR Terminal in Brooklyn. Read up on the new terminal here (City Room, MTA press release).
When the new terminal building at Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, critics and columnists praised the light and airy nature of the building. Featuring a seemless integration of art and architecture, the new terminal building is representative of the MTA’s current approach toward offering its customers a convenient and mostly state-of-the-art facilities when it opens new structures. Outside, though, the security bollards tell a different story, one of overreaction and blocked sidewalks to a public structure that needs to be able to handle heavy pedestrian flow.
When the new building first opened, attention was focused on the inside, but the security bollards, shown above, drew some warranted criticisms. Gersh Kuntzman in The Brooklyn Paper was particular critical of their appearance and size. He noted the bunker-like mentality of the security measures and called the giant bollards “14 mammoth concrete coffins that give the beautiful new facility the look of an outpost in the Green Zone.”
Atlantic Ave station bollards - CC image from Ben Kabak on flickr.
Yikes. SAS continues:
The specter of terrorism and counterterrorist measures make for uncomfortable subjects. New York City’s subways are notoriously porous, and New Yorkers try not to dwell on the ways our city has become a target for America’s enemies. Still, these bollards do nothing to make a new train terminal accessible or user-friendly. They exacerbate fears about our safety while blocking the city’s sidewalks and its transit access points. There are tasteful ways to guard against terrorism, and then there are these granite blocks, seemingly dropped from a quarry onto Flatbush Ave. with no regard for purpose or appearance.
Here in DC, we have to deal with all of the same terrorism concerns. Clearly, some bollards are better than others in terms of their design and day to day function. We have some well-designed examples here in DC (the paths/retaining walls around the Washington Monument come to mind), some bad ones (the doors at the Capitol Visitors Center that are too heavy to open), and plenty of ‘temporary’ barriers scattered across town.
Fifty Nifty United States: Matt Yglesias links to a James Fallows bit on an idea from Fakeisthenewreal.com to re-draw state lines every so often as a means of ensuring a relatively equal population distribution amongst all 50 states.
Two thoughts – if this seems odd, perhaps it shouldn’t. Each state will be going through this process in the next few years after the collection of the 2010 Census data. Even in DC, we’ll re-evaluate the ward boundaries to ensure that each one has a roughly similar number of people within it.
Also, the proposal reminds me of the 70s era proposal for the 38 states of America.
Political realities would likely stop anything like this from ever happening, but it certainly is an interesting thought experiment. Furthermore, when looking at the political implications, it’s worthwhile to note how the arbitrary political boundaries have real political consequences in Congress.
Streetcars, eh? Planning Pool has a nice audio slideshow (complete with narration in a lovely Canadian accent) of Vancouver’s demonstration streetcar line. The line is using borrowed cars from Brussels, and will be evaluated during the upcoming Olympics for future, permanent installation.
There are always tensions between openness and security, and cities like DC have plenty of examples of this – everything from bollards anchored in 6 feet of subterranean concrete to jersey barriers strewn in front of building entrances. Given these tensions, there are questions about how much is necessary, and how that which is necessary can be better designed:
Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.
This tension has serious consequences for how we use space…
The Capitol Visitors Center was built, amongst many reasons, to help enhance security for visitors to the halls of Congress. It’s also meant the death of traditions:
Before the advent of the CVC, a visit to the Capitol meant a tour for taxpaying citizens guided by hapless interns who would straight up lie to them. Just bald-faced, outrageous, entirely untrue claims about the nation’s history and its legislative process.
Is nothing sacred? Security kills even the most benign and stupid traditions.
At the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s 11/12 forum to discuss the Greater Washington 2050 plan, one attendee asked about the inherent contradiction between the agglomerations and concentrations inherent to urbanism and the desire for various federal agencies to have uber-secure campuses – or at least ones that put on that particular show in the theater.
DC’s Planning Director, Harriet Tregoning, mentioned the inherent tension between the openness of urbanism and the desired security, but also noted there were some design considerations that need to be taken into account.
All the more reason to push for the elimination of unnecessary security theater – as the built forms that result likely aren’t all that desirable.
Mammoth again notes the challenges of updating our infrastructure, both to provide redundancy and security, as well as enhance development and feed the economy.
I do greatly appreciate the thrust of one of those student projects, ‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’2, which argues that, though Beirut’s “urban fabric… lacks consolidation… optimization or efficiency”, this is not a weakness, but a strength: “it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience.” Though made more specifically in reference to urban form and less in reference to infrastructure, this point reminds me of two things.
First, as faslanycnoted in the comments on a previous post, the impact of an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides should be evaluated not just by its scale, but also for its degree of distribution and connectivity…
Second, and directly related to that first advantage, I’m also reminded of the article Fracture Critical, which ran recently in Places and draws an interesting parallel between two ways of designing specific infrastructures, fracture-critical and fracture-resistant, and ways of designing larger systems. […] Given that the consequences of a networked super-project being fractured would be enormous, I suspect that there’s a place for being cautious about the design of such projects, even while recognizing their value.
Lots to digest here – the notion of how we perceive ‘infrastructure’ is key. I suspect the urbanist sees it as the backbone on which a city can grow – as we see vestiges of that growth in the urban forms and fabric from various generations of housing stock, transportation facilities, etc…
5. Parcel by Parcel
It also raises the issue I noted with some of the proposed Eco City Beautiful infrastructure – how does one visually convey the vision of urban development around a core infrastructure system without dictating architecture and urbanism? How do you convey the kind of organic growth of a city – parcel by parcel, building by building? Mammoth again:
I’d like to think that learning to work infrastructurally (to use Lahoud’s language1) means working more flexibly (despite rhetoric which differs sharply from modernist rhetoric, the two designs presented appear to be close kin of modernist residential housing collectives and contemporary superblocks, as both take a large piece of land and develop urban fabric wholesale upon it), less directly (designing the infrastructure upon which the city grows, with an awareness of how the shaping of the infrastructure will affect the growth of the city, but not presuming to design the city itself) and accepting a degree of loss of control over the aesthetics of the resulting city fabric (which presents a host of drawing problems — how do you draw something which you are not presuming to design and still manage to communicate the importance of the work you’ve done in designing the scaffolding? — but still seems to me to be a humility worth developing).
“Accepting a degree of loss of control” is a nice way to put it. Kostoff described the key attribute of cities as “energized crowding,” a kind of social context that can’t fully be designed.
Louis Uchitelle argues that we’ve got a superproject void in the US these days – Infrastructurist responds with an impressive list of projects, if only a little disjointed – and mammoth notes the missing connective tissue:
That said, Infrastructurist doesn’t really respond to Uchitelle’s points about the relationship between scale and economic effect, as Uchitelle is arguing not just that that contemporary infrastructure projects are smaller, but that there’s something fundamentally different about the economic effect of a very large project, like the ARC Tunnel, which, while physically impressive, operates in a relatively small geographic territory, and a superproject, which connects formerly disconnected territories (as the interstate highway system did), aggregating markets. The obvious contemporary corollary to the interstate is high speed rail, but Uchitelle also rightly notes that the Obama administration project which is closest to a superproject, defined not just by impressive physical impact, but also by economic effect and ability to facilitate new connections, is the proposed integrated health care computer network.
While the idea of high speed rail has the potential for that kind of connectivity and transformation of markets, what’s missing is the systemic planning. Looking at DC as a analogous situation, the city and region have benefited immensely from a system planned as a system – and built out in full. Piecemeal construction on a line by line basis has been less than successful in other cities, and that pattern could hold for intercity rail, too.
