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Valley
News, March 27, 2005
Donald Maurice Kreis
Lebanon
could learn something from Las Vegas.
Few
may realize that the best model for redesigning West Lebanon and
the dysfunctional Route 12A retail zone is the fabled city of glittering
casinos in the Nevada desert. And few people would get the irony,
since Learning From Las Vegas is a much heralded 1972
book about design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, known
in the Upper Valley as the architects of Dartmouth College's controversial
Berry Library, comnpleted in 2002.
The
Lebanon Planning Board would be particularly surprised to learn
that Las Vegas has anything to do with the designs the board has
been reviewing from a group of Dartmouth undergraduates. Under the
tutelage of Karol Kawiaka, an architect and visiting instructor
in the college's Studio Art Department, these whiz kids have imagined
workable schemes for West Lebanon that legions of planners and officials
have failed to envision, let alone implement. They have turned the
congested mess along Route 12A into something coherent, beautiful
and convenient.
The
students themselves disclaim any connection between their designs
and the architectural evolution of L! as Vegas with
its famous strip. They prefer comparisons to quaint New England
villages like Hanover and Woodstock -- or to
downtown Burlington, with its pedestrian mall and jaw-dropping views
of Lake Champlain.
“We
were careful not to use any urban examples,” explains senior Eric
Chaves, lest their proposal be dismissed as mere “spectacle.” Thus,
the images they present of a new West Lebanon reflect what he describes
as a “comfortable, old-style feel, like Burlington.”
The
student proposals actually consist of three different schemes, but
each diagnoses a single, overwhelming problem: gridlock. That’s
gridlock as distinguished from traffic; the students carefully evaluated
the actual numbers of vehicles passing through West Lebanon and
found it to be both reasonable and manageable.
Thus,
Scheme I would split Route 12A into parallel, one-way routes with
high-density commercial activity between them. Around this would
sprout a grid system of roads, a system for imposing order upon
chaos that is familiar to New Yorkers as well as those in Las Vegas.
Scheme
II would move commercial uses to the east side of 12A (reserving
the land between the highway and the Connecticut River for residential
use) where a central parking garage would house vehicles, and a
town square, not unlike the Dartmouth Green, would be surrounded
by buildings with first-floor retailers and offices on upper floors.
The current left turns from the Interstate 89 exit ramp would be
replaced by a series of “Michigan lefts,” which involve first turning
right and then making a u-turn across a median.
Scheme
III focuses on roundabouts to address the gridlock and the creation
of a new town center, built around a sugarbush farm that would offer
a public celebration of maple syrup production. Each plan would
revise the zoning regulations to allow for residential development,
particularly affordable housing. Each calls for reconfiguring the
area to draw people to the river.
All
three schemes attempt to change the way people think about West
Lebanon. “Our designs cultivate better spatial memory,” according
to senior Ellen Tani. In other words, Tani wants people to imagine
something other than sprawl, congestion and that terrible left turn
at the intersection of Route 12A and Interstate 89 when they think
about a trip to West Lebanon. She speaks of “visual apertures that
lead your eye to the landscape.” A central premise of the students’
work is that the area, fronting the Connecticut River, is actually
quite a beautiful bit of geography. They just want people to be
able to see it.
On
the Web site the students have created to promote their proposals,
the visual depictions make the new West Lebanon look much like Taft
Corners, a recent commercial development outside Burlington. But
the new town green there has a stultifying uniformity, because the
buildings that frame it were all designed at the same time to conform
to a particular developer’s needs.
Here,
the students envision a variety of projects, each designed independently.
The challenge in re-visioning West Lebanon is not really how West
Lebanon will look but how it will work . Which
brings us back to Las Vegas and its fabled Strip. In 1972, the Strip
looked like West Lebanon—boxy buildings behind big parking lots,
garish signs designed to appeal to motorists and one congested street
connecting it all. It was provocative back then for Venturi and
Scott Brown to proclaim that the “vulgar extravaganza” of the Strip
was worthy of serious comparison with Baroque domes and Gothic cathedrals.
Today
the Strip resembles Times Square, to the chagrin of Venturi and
Scott Brown. (In the couple’s latest book, Venturi dismisses the
Strip as a “scenographic Disneyland.”) The casino resorts have migrated
to the street, the parking areas have been pushed behind the buildings,
a new monorail a block to the east provides rapid transit, and there
is a vibrant pedestrian life facilitated by skyways at intersections
and spectacle along the sidewalks. Nobody cruises the Strip anymore
in a car, unless just passing through.
The
lesson for West Lebanon is that the metamorphosis of the Las Vegas
Strip happened by going with, not against, the grain of commercial
enterprise. It is indeed possible to reconfigure a commercial zone
originally conceived around the automobile to a place that is best
experienced by walking or even by using mass transit. And if anything
proves that architectural styles need not be uniform, or even dictated,
it’s a busy street that includes a fake Egyptian pyramid, a knock-off
of the New York skyline, a scaled-down Eiffel Tower and a credible
imitation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
The
Dartmouth students clearly understand the West Lebanon reality and
hope to take advantage of it. In particular, they seek to use what
is usually regarded as a negative — the short life of most retail
buildings these days, driven by investor expectations of instant
payback. This, they think, could allow West Lebanon to transform
itself slowly but surely over the next decade or two.
Kawiaka
got her students excited about a revitalization project in a formerly
decaying industrial section of Barcelona in Spain. The district,
bearing the cheeky name “22@,” is being transformed into a vibrant
neighborhood centered around information and communications technology.
Economic incentives are the force behind 22@; the city has allowed
higher density development in exchange for commitments to build
affordable housing and more public spaces. Key phrases from the
magazine article Kawiaka distributed on the subject are “proceed
piece by piece” and “no attempt to induce architectural masterpieces.”
This
does not mean the plan to redesign West Lebanon is without a sense
of urgency. Even as they express interest in the students’ proposals,
city officials are pondering the construction of a new road that
would likely kill the possibility of making the river available
for public use. With every ten-minute left turn off I-89, the pressure
increases for some kind of action by officials — enlightened of
not.
“West
Lebanon is going to grow no matter what they do,” Chaves notes.
Given that nobody wants to do business in an ugly, needlessly congested
place, he calls the proposals he and his classmates developed what
West Lebanon “can’t afford not to do.”
Unfortunately,
that’s no guarantee bad things won’t happen. For example, nobody
intended Loudon Road in Concord to require nearly every shopper
to make a left turn to get on or off Interstate 93, an experience
at least as memorable as driving in West Lebanon. Avoiding such
unintended consequences requires everyone to examine what’s possible
in the era of the automobile.
On
this point, everyone needs to avoid the nostalgia trap. Senior Victor
Fressie speaks wistfully about “a certain look to New England towns
that we don’t see in West Lebanon — tree-lined streets, wrought
iron benches and lamps, mailboxes . . .” But that “certain look”
was not someone’s vision for how a quaint New England village ought
to appear. Rather, it was a natural response, in an era before zoning
and planning, to the conditions of the time: the building technologies,
the dominant modes of transportation prior to the automobile age
and the ways in which most people made their living.
The
students also struggled with whether they, the creators of the built
environment, should try to be social engineers. Should they encourage
people to drive less and to appreciate the value of living, working
and shopping in a high-density environment?
“It’s
not that we’re trying to modify behavior,” maintains sophomore Parke
MacDowell. He thinks the objective is simply to make the new West
Lebanon “easier than what’s currently there.”
Senior
Miriam El Rassi disagrees. “I actually think we are trying
to influence people” and their behavior, she contends. Her classmate
Victor Fressie has a ready example of problematic behavior: the
shopper who wants to stop at both Kohl’s and Staples, stores within
a few hundred feet of one other but are in separate shopping complexes,
preventing pedestrians from walking between them.
Such
conditions are precisely what these students hope to see repaired.
Their challenge was not simply to make it possible to move around
West Lebanon without a car but to make moving around seem appealing
and effortless.
And
in its eternal bid to cause gamblers and tourists to enrich the
local economy, nobody does “appealing and effortless” better than
Las Vegas.
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