The latest Plaza de Armas readers forum was held at Trinity University’s Holt Conference Center. The packed-house audience played well the role of the choir with a few polite exceptions for the panelists to ponder the San Antonio-specific urban and architectural characteristics around which urban development dances.

Irby Hightower astutely offered several counter-intuitive insights to our urban heritage. For the past few decades there has been a focus on tree-preservation which unwittingly promoted an anti-urban predilection. (And by “urban” we mean walkable, transit-capable and livable density.) How can saving trees be bad? Well, when it becomes the basis for “urban” planning and development there is a lost opportunity to create livable urbanity. Further, Hightower pointed to creating great intersections as nodes of urban space rather than spreading urbanity along corridors in inherently lower-density efforts that do not create the synergies of livable higher density development. This is a call for what is commonly known as “transit-oriented development.”

Another refreshing point was made by Hightower in response to cautionary mention of gentrification, that double-edged sword of increasing land values and community displacement that comes with urban redevelopment of lower intensity / less utilized existing neighborhoods. San Antonio’s gentrification, he argued, is less harsh on existing communities than northeastern states’ scenarios where strong public debate has been played out. His rationale is that many existing residents here, and in other sunbelt cities, are homeowners, versus renters; and they therefore reap the financial benefit of their property selling. This often leaves them in a position of upward mobility to move to that suburban or exurban homestead of which they have dreamed. Whether or not this dulled edge does less cultural damage to existing inner-city communities under development pressure is certainly debatable but the economic story seems sound if significant percentages of residents have 100% equity in their homes.

That the discussion was at the level of urban design and barely touched on innovative architectural design was a little disappointing; but at the same time reassuring that the urban environment, among the preachers and the choir at least, is understood here in San Antonio at a high level. Understanding of the deep causes and effects will bode well for San Antonio’s next 30 years when we will see an additional 1 million residents occupy our fair city. It will help produce a “great” city made of “good” buildings. Hopefully, the next architectural readers forum will drill down to the scale and mechanisms of production of “great” architecture. In the mean time, let’s continue to build good, modest buildings.

As Mies Van der Rohe said, “I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.”

When asked this week by a client from where the phrase came I was stumped. I hoped it came from shipbuilding or sailing as do so many phrases.

I found from Wikipedia…”The phrase takes its name from the historical process of punching a hole in the margin of the document, next to one of the items on the list. This indicated that the work was completed for that particular construction task. Two copies of the list were punched at the same time to provide an identical record for the architect and contractor. [citation needed]”

I may just try this on my next one – then scan to PDF.

imagineSanAntonio invites you to join us for our first…
Livable San Antonio Conference

“Growing for the Future”


Regional and State Projections – Demographic, Economic and Geographic Shifts: Impacts on Housing, Transportation and the Built Environment
Friday, November 9, 2012
8:00 AM – 1:30 PM
Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center, 200 East Market Street, San Antonio, TX 78205

Registration Link

San Antonio is a wonderful place to live, work, and play. It is in a dynamic region that is poised for rapid population growth in the future. The Rockefeller Foundation projects that by 2050 the San Antonio urban area will more than double in population. But research shows the enormous social, economic, and environmental costs of uncontrolled or rapid urbanization. “Growth management” consists of public policy initiatives by public agencies and officials to lessen the adverse impacts of urban sprawl. But governments alone can’t achieve these objectives by themselves. Public-private partnerships and public participation are key factors to growth management, and collaboration and coordination between all stakeholders is of paramount importance. That’s the purpose of imagineSanAntonio – to break down the stovepipes of agencies and organizations in San Antonio and bring all stakeholders together to develop a common vision for the future.

Tom Payton writes on Plaza De Armas“….In response to Mayor Castro’s SA2020 initiative, the San Antonio chapter of the American Institute of Architects launched the annual Sustainable Urban Development Luncheon series. The goal is to spark public debate about how to make San Antonio a more successful, sustainable, and livable city. The first lecture, held in 2011, featured Peter Calthorpe, a San Francisco-based architect and urban planner who was named one of the 25 most innovative thinkers in America by Newsweek. A founding member of the Congress for New Urbanism, Calthorpe turned an eager audience on its ear with his provocative ideas for new urban development models in an age of climate change and ecological challenge. It was a message a city facing never-ending sprawl and drought needed to hear.

This year, the AIA has raised the ante with Dr. Richard J. Jackson, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also host of the recent PBS documentary “Designing Healthy Communities.” It too will be a presentation not to be missed….”

This past semester I led an advanced architecture design studio at UTSA College of Architecture themed “Architecture and Light.” The sun is a big gift for us each day. Too often designers of the built environment ignore it. Given the relentless recurrence of sunrise and sunset that is taken for granted, combined with the indoor lifestyle and object-oriented focus of so many architects of the industrialized world, I can see why this happens. But it is unacceptable given the huge impact solar radiation has on human experience, comfort, environmental qualities and energy use.

Always a key part of great architecture, careful consideration of of the sun’s light can provide broad environmental benefits and significant energy savings. Daylight harvesting was a common area of focus for each student’s projects. Daylighting techniques can be optimized through research, physical modeling as well as computer simulations.

Above are portions from a couple of my students’ final projects to design a new multi-disciplinary campus building for the Southwest School of Art’s historic Ursuline Campus. As her research contribution to the class’ analysis of the existing campus, Aleksandra Vucic studied existing daylight conditions in some existing studio spaces. Light meters were used to determine the daylight factor in a typical existing drawing studio. The deep overhangs of the existing buildings prevent effective daylighting through the windows. (Bottom Row.) To help minimize solar heat gain and glare Farbod Sabet Kassaei designed a kinetic fabric sunshade for the northwest exposure of his building and used 3d computer modeling to analyze the effect. By mitigating direct solar radiation with both the kinetic sunshades and tree vegetation, daylight harvesting via windows was proposed. (Top row.)