Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure
He made a completely novel innovation at HUD when he picked up the phone and starting talking to people like he department of public transportation—they 30
had lunch every couple of weeks—and the environmental protection agency. There is this kind of interconnectedness that is both necessary and can also get out of control politically, I think particularly in this country. Now in the United States, I still can’t figure out why it’s so difficult to do what you, Marcel, have done as the czar of the built environment in the Flemish region. Guido Hartray Just as an example, we did some work with the Metropolitan Transportation Association (MTA), which has a goal in New York state that something like fifty percent of new development would happen within the radius of a transit stop to promote transit-oriented development. The MTA is great in that respect, but then when they go to implementation, they have to look at implementation from the point of view of ‘these are the parts of the city we control.’ And so, you have something that’s incredibly ambitious, but obviously the parcels they control are never going to result in that kind of ambitious goal that they set for themselves. It relates exactly to the questions of sectorial division. Because once the problem has been put in the field of a specific agency and they have drafted an RFP that you have responded to, the design problem is probably already gone. The question is how you get into this position where you are the steward that has to bridge between these agencies. That gets messy for the person who ends up being your client because here they’ve gone through the whole process to neatly define a problem, and hand it to you, the architect, to solve. But, in fact, that whole process of neatly defining the problem was really excluding most of the really interesting and innovative solutions to that problem. Byron Stigge The question to us right now is, ‘What is the role of the architect?’ And, ‘Why is it so hard in the US, and why are we struggling so much?’ The best architects structure a compelling argument that develops a good civic infrastruc-
Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain, Chicago, IL