Angels in the Architecture

Residential, office and commercial space in a 'Central Park' like setting!

By: Brad Kik

 

No doubt the architecture is a local treasure, and of course the history is compelling, but how do you take buildings designed to confine the insane and create open, accessible urban design? Oh yeah, and with the State Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service making the rules. Ray Minervini, head developer of the Village at TC restoration project, works the Angels in the Architecture.

 

Here's the problem in a nutshell, from Ray Minervini:

 

The Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service will tell you flat out that they're not going to let you bastardize the building, in any way; if that means that you can't sell it and you have to demolish it, well so be it. Just go ahead and demolish it - we're not going to let you do what, in our mind, is contrary to the  "proper" preservation of the building. That's a concept that  I have a very difficult time understanding.

 

Minervini and I met to talk about the iconoclast architect Christopher Alexander; specifically his book A Pattern Language and his influence on Minervini's work at the Village. Alexander argues that the greatest buildings in the world were built without architects. Minervini might add that the greatest buildings in the world were built before the State Historic Preservation Office.

 

Ray Minervin(RM): Initially the plan was to demolish this building, and when I got involved it was because I had done restoration projects - nothing of this magnitude, but my belief was that there was actually no need to demolish these buildings; they were solid masonry construction; pretty similar to what you see in Europe. You go to Europe and you see buildings that are a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand years old and we're still using them. To me it wasn't even an issue - could these buildings be saved? Absolutely.

 

Brad Kik (BK): And you knew that before even setting foot in them.

 

RM: Oh yeah. One thing I learned a long long time ago is that buildings have two lives. They have an economic life and they have a structural life. Structural life is tied directly to the economic life. As soon as someone stops putting money into the building to maintain it, it begins to fall apart. The state was the entity that was putting money into the buildings; that said, "stop. We're not putting any more money into these buildings."

 

There's a couple of elements to the reconstruction, too; you have the physical building itself, and you have the uses of the building.

Porches on the backside of Building 50.

BK: Which is where the New Urbanism comes in.

 

RM: Yeah. And, there's another book that was written by Stewart Brand, who was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and that book is entitled How Buildings Learn. You've got to read that book, if you want to know what we do with old buildings. And it's so intuitive once you read the book.

 

See it's hard for us to think about them being anything other than what they initially were. It's hard for us to jump out of that box. The challenge is that institutional buildings like these have the most difficult time learning to become something else because of the nature of their construction. You can take a warehouse, which is big open space, and you can reconfigure it into smaller spaces very easily. It's difficult to take space that is all smaller rooms and reconfigure it into a bigger space. The reason why isn't just because of the physical fact of taking down walls; it's from the State Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service guidelines say you can't destroy the historic fabric of the building - and here, it's the corridors and all the little small rooms are the historic fabric of the building. Accept that as an unbreachable code - you can't change a building. On the one hand. On the other hand, though, it's ok to take what was a warehouse, which was one big room, and make it multiple small rooms. So, they're biased in their position, and that's why all these asylums, all over the country, are being demolished.

 

BK: And what does Christopher Alexander say about this?

 

RM: What he's telling us is that the beautiful places of the world weren't built by architects; they were built by people, and they evolved over time in patterns that were always repeated - the ones that kept repeating and stuck around. And if you just look at those patterns, they'll all be different - your patterns are different than my patterns - but when we identify them and focus on what it is that we need to do, like the smaller parking lots, defining the entrances, the transition from the public to the private. The whole series, in my mind, makes logical common sense. When you read it, then "yeah sure, I see that, I know that." But it takes us a while to be consciously aware of it. Sometimes it's more of a subconscious - "why is this place so appealing?" I don't know. Let me think about it for a minute and start looking around. Like when you go to the beautiful places in Europe - the piazzas - the vitality and energy that comes out of that convivium of people.

 

BK: When you began really looking in detail at the Village, did you feel like it captured that characteristic?

 

RM: No. Not at all.

 

BK: So did you feel like it was in opposition to that?

 

RM: I felt it could [capture the vitality]. First of all, what we had to do is shatter this image of what this building was. When the city and the township first acquired this building, their concept was that they were going to make a continuing care retirement community, in the biggest square foot buildings. Well you know that's not going to work. That's a plan created in a vacuum. Because we don't have that many old people living up here. If it was in the middle of Chicago you couldn't do it. We just don't have the mass to support it. So anybody doing their due diligence to determine what they want to make this building become could easily realize that one single use is not going to work. Also, I don't think that Christopher really talks about this as much as he should - I really think that we shouldn't think of buildings as being for specific uses. I think that we should let the buildings evolve and morph into whatever the market demands dictate.

 

So, how can you re-create these buildings to become something other than what they were? These were not buildings that invited; they were buildings that confined. That's the first thing to change. Stewart Brand says it takes about 30 years for a building to be vacant before people begin to lose the stigma of what it was. I think that that's true.

 

So one of the strategies here is, let's let the market demands dictate what the buildings become, rather than saying x amount of square feet of residential, x amount of square feet commercial, lets think about what a village is in Europe, where you have the butcher, the baker the candlestick marker; you have the brick oven which we're building in the middle of what will be the piazza. Traverse city doesn't have any public space, if you think about it. The only public space it has is the open space, just across the road; the only other public space Traverse City has is the road itself - we do use the road itself as that public space - and we do that when we have Friday night live, when we have parades. We're creating a piazza here - we've got a lot of public space, and we didn't put a gate across the road when we started this development. This is open space; this is the commons. This is the Traverse City commons and that's they way we're developing it. A place to celebrate life - that's what its all about.

 

BK: Is this where that opposition comes in?

 

RM: If you look at the back of the buildings - we're limited to what we can do to the front of the building, because of the State Historical Preservation Office and the National Park Service standards, we can't touch the front of the buildings. What we can do to the front is miniscule in terms of visual changes. We can do a lot more in the back, so the back is becoming the new front. That's where we're putting the parking, and if you walk around the back of the building now you'll see we've added a tremendous number of porches and new entrances. We're creating, again, a space that's inviting to people. We're inviting people. We put steps up to the porches that didn't have steps going up to them before; we took the cages off the porches.

 

We've had the opportunity to play social architects, in a way. We have this certain thing in our mind, like I said; we want the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the brewer, the coffee shop, the deli, so on. Some of those elements of community that feed off of each other. The more that they help each other, the more synergy that you create and the more spontaneous order that continues to happen.

 

There's nobody doing what we're doing; nobody that's going out and getting the baker. I want a wood fired brick oven on that piazza. We're building one right now. I want a winery - an urban winery over in the laundry building. We're building one right now. I want the coffee roastery over there, underground cheesecake factory going in there, a Mercado we're building in all the way through the garden level, so you'll be able to walk from Stella, through the garden level, a gallery of shops, boutiques, stores, specialty food stores, all the way through to Cuppa Joe. Then we'll do another restaurant behind Cuppa Joe, the lower level of the chapel. Another nice restaurant there. The upper level of the chapel, which was the center, geographically the center of the building, but was also the central focal point where people, the patients went, for entertainment, and for church services, was the chapel, which was a really spectacular room, we want to use for a variety of visual and performing arts - art type movies - again, we're creating this entertainment district.

 

If you went through the list of patterns that CA talks about, you probably would find about 85% of them implemented here (laughs). They're too numerous for me to just spit them out to you.

Cuppa Joe's in Building 50 is a happening spot for lunch.

BK: Sure. So are there any patterns that really stuck out to you, that now you have not been able to implement - that have been too challenging to make work?

 

RM: The real challenge is the inability to modify the building as we need to do it for the purposes of the Historical Preservation Office and the National Park Service. There's this [gap] between the preservation of the building and creating a marketable product. You know, they really don't care if it's marketable.

 

The reality is this, the unfortunate reality, where they say "form follows function" - you've heard that. no way - form follows funding. Unless someone is putting money into the project, it will not happen. So you can have this absolutely beautiful design where form is following function, but if nobody is willing to put the money down on the line to make it happen - that stuff ain't happening. It takes the dollars to make it happen. And how do you get the dollars into the project - you've got to create a product that the market wants, it's a simple as that. Form follows funding. It's been a battle making that concept understood. The Historical Preservation Office and the National Park Service will tell you flat out that they're not going to let you bastardize the building, in any way; if that means that you can't sell it and you have to demolish it, well so be it. Just go ahead and demolish it - we're not going to let you do what, in our mind, is contrary to the "proper" preservation of the building. That's a concept that I have a very difficult time understanding. From my perspective, preserving the building is of the utmost importance. We fought that battle and we're still fighting that battle.

 

One of things that Christopher Alexander talks about is creating that transition from the public space to the private space, and if you look at this building, I call it the great wall of Traverse City. How do I get in to this building? One of the things he talks about - one principle - is that you need a clear, visible transition from the public to the private space, and how do you choose that - it's the road that leads to it, the pathways that lead from the road, the place where you park your vehicle; never more than seven cars in a group - not a sea of asphalt. Our codes say that we have to have lots of asphalt. Our codes don't care. Our curb codes weren't created to save buildings of this architectural integrity. Our codes were created to park cars. All of the beautiful places of the world were built before cars. What we used to do is build for people, and not for the automobile. Now, we built for the automobile first, and then the place we create for people is secondary. If we don't have a place for the SUV and the hummers, you just can't do that - they're not going to let you do that. So what I say is "get your ass out of the car" - this is a beautiful place. We're all getting fat and obese. Take a walk!

 

Brad Kik is the co-director of the Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND), based in Bellaire, MI.