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Places: Floating some thoughts about waterfronts
Saturday, March 04, 2000 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Architect Alex Krieger, the Riverlife Task Force's choice to create a bold vision and design guidelines for Pittsburgh's riverfront, offers a look at what's happening on the waterfronts of other cities in the current issue of Preservation magazine.
Last fall, Krieger hosted a Harvard conference on waterfront development, inviting eight cities to share their experiences on confronting and directing change: Amsterdam, Bilbao, Genoa, Havana, Las Palmas (chief port of the Canary Islands), Shanghai, Sydney and Vancouver.
"Waterfronts have an enduring, even eternal dimension as they bear witness to and often take the brunt of the ebbs and flows of a city's prosperity," Krieger writes.
He sees waterfronts as opportunities to create a strong sense of place, as with Genoa, where the harbor's amphitheater-like form is a "powerful focusing device -- like a gravitational force orienting the entire city to the old harbor."
In Amsterdam, Sydney and Vancouver, as in Genoa, geography and architecture combine to create memorable waterfronts that leave lasting impressions.
"The value of these postcard views is not to be dismissed," Krieger writes. "An unforgettable setting can help attract global markets while forestalling the this-could-be-anywhere quality of much current urban development."
Krieger cautions against the "thin-line planning" of waterfronts, resulting in a "facade fronting the water" rather than waterfront development that is woven into and benefits adjacent neighborhoods.
"Too many cities have quickly accepted second-rate development proposals or engineered entire redevelopment plans around specific sites to enhance commercial real estate or jump-start waterfront renewal."
Bilbao did it right, by engaging Frank Gehry to design a spectacular waterfront museum that instantly put the town on the international cultural map. "Now they are pursuing more conventional redevelopment efforts."
In Vancouver, they focused first on housing, transforming several downtown waterfronts from industrial and rail uses to residential ones. The city is well on its way to its goal of adding as many as 25,000 mid- to high-density housing units.
And housing "has created demand for virtually everything else: service establishments, shops, entertainment facilities, public transportation and open space."
There are many lessons for Pittsburgh here, but ultimately the city's success in transforming its riverfront lies in something uniquely suited to its geography, heritage and hopes for the future. We should look at other places not to copy what's been done, but to be inspired to create something that is all our own.
Krieger has his work cut out for him, not only because so much of the riverfront here is devoted to industrial use, but also because the design of the new North Shore riverfront park is well under way.
The park, designed by the Virginia-based landscape architecture firm EDAW with input from the community, is still evolving. But at this stage it looks very much to have been designed by a committee, with a little something for everyone and not enough of any one thing to constitute the "bold vision" the task force dreams of.
Another consideration in the long term is that Krieger's design guidelines can only be as strong as the group that enforces them. Now that architect John Martine has joined the city Planning Commission, it may be better equipped to handle such a role. But too often the commission has approved -- even gushed over -- dull, uninspired buildings, like the Lincoln at North Shore apartments and the design for the new Seagate headquarters by Tasso Katselas Associates, to be built just east of the convention center.
A better solution is needed, perhaps establishing a well-qualified design review board specifically for riverfront development, the way the Historic Review Commission oversees planning in city historic districts.
Arlene Coles, whose home is across Sheridan Avenue from the new Home Depot in East Liberty, writes that its architects "must not have had a concept of space. There is not enough room for the big trailers to pull into the loading dock. The drivers must encroach onto the residential sidewalks and into the communal driveway for our homes. ... Sheridan Avenue is too narrow for those big trucks."
Coles said Home Depot has asked that smaller trailers be sent, "and they have promised to add some landscaping to our side, but I expect the trucks to just run over the landscaping. We also hear their intercom and music. My neighbors and I are not pleased with this big box."
Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com
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