Live Urban Jacksonville Weekly: O (Urban) Pioneers!

I was very excited to watch the Urban Jacksonville Weekly podcast live tonight. The guests were Dr. Wayne Wood of RAP (Riverside Avondale Preservation) and Steve Lovett of  ELM (Ervin Lovett Miller). Most of the hour and a half show dealt with downtown Jacksonville development and ELM's architectural designs for the Laura Street Trio. Hopefully Steve Lovett wasn't too annoyed with my question about the conflict of many architect's desire to design innovative new buildings and preserve or reuse old buildings. Mostly I wanted him to address the hostility against historic classical form and the bias for new architectural forms taught in architecture schools. I want to make it clear that I am for projects like the Laura Street Trio and the adoption of New Urbanist principles in Jacksonville and smart growth zoning laws for the city as a whole. Mixed-use street-level urban design are the way of the past and hopefully the way of Jacksonville's downtown future.


Dr. Wayne Wood was the biggest surprise of the night. I was expecting anti-new stuffiness. He came across as an affable, progressive, civic-minded, funny guy (note to self -- take the Riverside historic house tour). In addition to historic preservation he's also a proponent of architecture that is old as well as new. Of the four proposals for the main library he preferred the more contemporary design by European firm (Hammer & Larsen of Denmark?) than the Robert A. M. Stern design we have now. He bemoaned the faux classicism of Stern's library design. I'm sure Mayor Peyton (who knows his constituency well) picked the design that would be most tolerable to Jacksonville sensibilities. Wood was right in complementing the library's interior program. Though any criticism he had about it's exterior aesthetics are mitigated by the bustle and energy that it creates in an otherwise empty downtown.


Guest co-host Melissa Ross of WJCT's First Coast Connect was cut to the chase with her commentary about downtown's need for adequate workforce housing. An audience member mentioned a need for a grocery store in the downtown center. Grocery stores want to make money and won't make an investment until they get census data that shows significant growth downtown to warrant  a Publix, Whole Foods or God-willing a Trader Joe's. History shows that it's these urban pioneers, willing to resettle abandoned city centers, to fix up and make downtown alive. There presence on the street at night will make downtown feel safe. Even though it's comparably safe already, negative perception is a reality to overcome. Ultimately it's not government or business that will make downtown happen but urban pioneers that make the blocks of Jacksonville their homestead.

A Better Jacksonville by (Information) Design: Message to AIGA JAX

In an article from EU Jacksonville, Joey Marchy, Co-Chair of AIGA Jacksonville, misses an opportunity with an argument made about the following dialogue.

[…]

“Graphic Design in the city will continue marching forward, elevate the city in ways we haven't experienced”

To which a reader responds,

[…]

“What, nicer ads being put up?”

Graphic Design or Visual Communications as some call it, can address problems in fields other than marketing, commerce or even city ambiance. What about Information Design? Take this image of London in 1954. It was drawn by physician, John Snow who had a theory about the death rates due to cholera as correlation to contaminated water from a communal pump on Broad Street. The black bars represent deaths from cholera and the dot in the middle is the Broad Street water pump. Clearly there was clustering around the suspected pump, but it was the outlying data points that revealed the answer. A woman who lived closer to different pump preferred to have water carried to her from the Broad Street pump contracted cholera. And the beer workers who lived and worked near the pump were saved because they drank almost exclusively beer and not the well water which it turns out was contaminated with sewage. Saved by great design (and possibly beer).[1]

While this story is a seminal moment in modern epidemiology it also goes to prove that graphic design is not frivolity. It saves lives and transforms our cities. As I mentioned in my previous blog post about brain drain, we need to find ways to connect people of all professions here in Jacksonville. Better design in this case can be information dense and interdisciplinary. I wonder how many Information Designers belong to AIGA Jacksonville.

Watch this lecture by Stephen Johnson explain this better than I do. Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map | Video on TED.com

[1] Tufte, Edward R. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1997. 27-37

Edward Tufte is a genius of information design whose work has made a profound influence on the design of our visual world.