Preservation Greensboro Incorporated

WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS: BIG CITY, SMALL CITY

By Blair Kamin, Architecure Critic for the Chicago Tribune

Special Guest of Preservation Greensboro

October 18, 2007

INTRODUCTION

It is a real privilege to be here. I want to thank Preservation Greensboro for inviting me. And I especially want to thank Benjamin Briggs, Judi Kastner and all the sponsors who have done so much to make this evening possible. It’s great to see such a large turnout. That speaks well about the future of architectural dialogue here in Greensboro.

You know, I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard a wonderful documentary about the Italian tenor Luciano Pavorotti. Pavorotti called himself an “eternal student,” and I felt that way as I prepared for this talk. I have learned so much about Greensboro and North Carolina that I didn’t know before.

I didn’t know about the Piedmont Triad. I didn’t know that Greensboro had so many different ethnic groups, including refugees from Vietnam; I thought everybody here was a drawling tobacco farmer. I didn’t know about the famous sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. I didn’t know about the beauty of Blandwood. And mostly--because I am preoccupied with what is happening in Chicago--I didn’t know of the architectural opportunities and challenges, the promises and the pitfalls, that you face as your city grows and changes.

And that, of course, is what we’re going to talk about tonight.

Now when Benjamin invited me here, he mentioned a memorable insult that New York architect Bob Stern had directed at your neighbors down the road in Charlotte back in the 1980s. Being a typically gracious, New York kind of guest, Bob gave a speech in Charlotte and told the folks there that they had “the ugliest collection of third-rate buildings in America.”

I think it’s fair to say that the implication of Benjamin’s instructions to me were clear: Bob Stern’s negative proclamation had shocked the leaders in the Charlotte and had inspired them to get off their duffs and hire a fancy, out-of-town architect, Cesar Pelli, to design their iconic Bank of America tower.

The point, it seemed to me, was I that was being brought in here like some Chicago hit man from of Al Capone’s gang.

So I spent weeks trying to dream up ringing insults that would top “Charlotte--the ugliest collection of third-rate buildings in America.”

I tried this one: “Greensboro—More ugly commercial strips than Jacksonville, North Carolina.

And this one: “Greensboro—the ugliest collection of fourth-rate buildings in America.”

But really, I’m not here to insult you or to hurl down proclamations from the top of the mountain. I just got off the plane 36 hours ago. I’m not the expert. You’re the experts. And besides, having walked the streets of this city for the past two days, I can see that you’ve made some impressive progress in reviving your downtown and that you have some very handsome buildings and public spaces. So I’m not here to insult you. I’m here to visit with you, as though we were sitting across each other at the kitchen table. I simply want to get a conversation going and to make this point:

Whether you live in a big city or a small, city, design matters.

And architecture matters.

Frankly, I have a hunch that I may be preaching to the converted on that point. You all know, I suspect, that architecture can make a huge difference in a city’s quality of life. This picture of the fountain at Chicago’s Navy Pier shows why. Fortunately, it was designed by architects who believe you should be able to interact with a fountain on a hot summer day, not by lawyers who would have put up a fence around the fountain because they didn’t want to get sued. So the fountain is a joyous place. As Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings and thereafter, they shape us.”

But I want to go beyond that generally-accepted idea tonight and speak especially to the political and business leaders of Greensboro: As this image of the new Cloud Gate public sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park reveals, architecture and public art are your brand. When you say “Chicago” these days in some parts of the world, people don’t ask about Al Capone anymore. They want to know about this piece of sculpture, this instant icon, which Chicagoans have nicknamed “The Bean.”

A skyline like Chicago’s demands to be read not simply as a collection of trophy buildings like Sears Tower, but as a three-dimensional expression of the city’s character.

But if your building is third rate, then your company’s image will be third-rate. And if your city’s buildings are third-rate, then the image of your city will be third-rate. And if the image of your city is third rate, then how on Earth are you going to attract the most desirable people—“the creative class,” as Richard Florida calls them?

You won’t. You’ll be a provincial backwater. You won’t be fully equipped to move into the 21st Century. It’ll be as though as you were living without cell phones and Blackberries and computers. They’re all essential right? Well, good design is too.

Tonight, I want to tease out that idea and look at how it relates to the future of architecture and urban planning in Greensboro. Since I hope that you, too, are “eternal students,” I want to begin with a short course in the architecture of my city. Then I’ll move to a discussion about the common design issues facing Chicago and Greensboro—present, past and future. And I’ll conclude with some thoughts about small cities making no small plans and offer a few thoughts about where things in Greensboro might go.

CHICAG0 101: A CITY OF INNOVATION

So let’s start with Chicago 101. Despite our vastly different scales, we have much in common. Both cities are hard-working, unpretentious commercial centers, not fancy-pants financial capitals. They are hubs of transportation and they have a distinguished history of manufacturing.

Both cities also can claim some notable architectural firsts. –you, of course, have Blandwood, A.J. Davis’ pioneering Tuscan Villa set handsomely on a hill. And we have a whole string of firsts--the first skyscraper, the first Prairie House, the first-glass box apartment buildings, and so on. In my view, Chicago is best understood as the place where the future arrived a little earlier than it did anywhere else.

First, in 1871, the city burns to the ground after that infamous cow in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn kicks over a lantern. The fire’s damage is devastating. But for architects, it’s a dream come true—a full-employment act.

They all rush to the city and many of them find work in the office of this fellow--William Le Baron Jenney, a bearded bon vivant and former Civil War engineer who served in the armies of Generals Grant and Sherman. “The Major,” is Jenney’s nickname. One of “The Major’s” specialties was building bridges so Union troops could cross rivers and lay waste to Southern cities. With Chicago booming in the 1880s, the Major puts his battlefield construction skills to new and historically-significant use.

In this building, the Home Insurance Office Building of 1885, he replaces load-bearing exterior walls with an internal, fire-proofed cage of metal. With that single stroke, the walls are freed from having to support the skyscraper and it can grow (eventually) to previously unthinkable heights. The Home Insurance Building itself, however, was just 11 stories tall.

In Chicago and other cities, architects like Louis Sullivan then raise the skyscraper to new heights, not only in size but in artistic perfection. A skyscraper, Sullivan says, should not only be tall; it should look tall, like his great Wainwright Building in St. Louis. Its clearly-articulated bottom, middle and top suggest the base, shaft and capital of a classical column.

Of course, Sullivan’s exquisite organic ornament is anything but classical. It animates the skyscraper’s inert steel frame, drives it skyward, and wraps itself around the building’s cornice as though it were living foliage.

But in Chicago, the so-called Gray City of skyscrapers turns out to be a crowded, disorderly mess. Goods can’t get through the tangle of carts and trucks on the streets. Business leaders worry that Chicago will choke on its off-the-charts growth.

So in shaping the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago, Daniel Burnham designs a utopian alternative to the Gray City--a White City of Beaux-Arts harmony and beauty, a total work of architecture, art and landscape art that would be beautiful and rational and orderly. That was all a fantasy, of course, but the White City turns out to be enormously influential. It shapes civic centers around the nation and even a portion of National Mall in Washington, whose grand axes, monumental focal points and serene reflecting pools clearly derive from the Chicago fair. “Make no little plans,” Burnham says. Only big plans have “the power to stir men’s blood.”

Then comes 1922 and the famous Chicago Tribune Tower architecture competition. The winner is Raymond Hood and John Mead Howell’s neo-Gothic tower, with its muscular Gothic piers, flying buttresses and a delicate crown soaring over the foot of North Michigan Avenue. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether Cesar Pelli gave it a look when he designed Charlotte’s Bank of America tower and whether my company should sue for copyright infringement.

But the second-place design in the Tribune competition, by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, turns out to have an even great impact. Its trim vertical look, with telescoping setbacks and flattened ornament, is an obvious predecessor to the Chicago Board of Trade skyscraper at the foot at the LaSalle Street financial district. And it also can be said, along with New York’s zoning laws, to have influenced the silhouette of the greatest skyscraper of all, the Empire State Building.

After World War II, Chicago innovates again when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe invents the steel-and-glass-box high-rise with his pioneering 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment towers. They transform skylines around the world from mountains of masonry into the glittering prisms of glass.

In the 1960s, Mies’ followers create new skyscraper technologies that let supertall buildings like the X-braced John Hancock Center reach new heights of efficiency and elegance. Then, in the 1980s, Helmut Jahn restores the romance of travel to the airport with his greenhouse-like United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare. A great place to suffer through flight delays.

Today, Chicago continues to innovate with Millennium Park, the splashy public space that completely upends Frederick Law Olmsted’s model of a park as a serene respite from the harsh, industrial city. Millennium Park is instead a joyous, post-industrial playground, highlighted by dazzling sculptural objects—like the snaking Frank Gehry pedestrian bridge you see here. To walk into Millennium Park is like walking into the future. Innovation, it makes clear, is in Chicago’s DNA.

Very well, then, you might conclude-- Chicago is a perfect city and the key to Greensboro’s architectural future is to become a little Chicago, a Chicago South.

Which would be dead wrong. Every city has its own DNA. Every city has its own distinct geography and climate and building traditions, and every city needs to cultivate those to become a truly special place. Greensboro has done this well in the new Center City Park, with its North Carolina red bricks, its Mount Airy granite, its distinctive clay pottery and its sheltering wood pavilions. You don’t need to copy Chicago. You should be yourselves. Besides, there are lots of bad things in Chicago. The city often serves as the great American exaggeration, expressing at larger scale--and often in excruciating contrast—the best and the worst of American architecture.

THE PRESENT/PART ONE: ARE YOU URBANIZING YOUR DOWNTOWN OR SUBURBANIZING IT?

Like your downtown, which has far too many gargantuan parking lots for its own good, downtown Chicago is forever confronting the challenge of how to be urban in our predominantly suburban, auto-dependent nation.

And it does not always succeed, as you can see from this God-awful theme attraction—Capone’s Chicago, it was called. This little piece of Disneyland materialized about 15 years ago on the road leading into our downtown from the highway. Architecture critics pray for stuff like this. It makes us seem so relevant.

The fake, 1920s facades of this building are almost literally wallpapered onto its synthetic stucco background. The scale of the windows and details is shrunken to two-thirds or three-quarters of normal size in order to appear approachable—a trick straight out of Disneyland. The colors are straight out of a comic book. And smiling Al Capone reigns it over it all--no longer a cold-blooded killer, but sweet, chipmunk-cheeked “Uncle Al.”

Well, be careful what you wish for. After Capone’s Chicago closed, this is what replaced it: Chicago’s very own Rainforest Cafe, complete with a giant green frog hunching on the roof. I suppose it could be worse--the blasted thing could go “Ribbit” every five seconds.

The sad saga of this block presents a vivid reminder that as cities grow, it is far from inevitable that they will become more urban and more urbane.

The real enemy, of course, is the car, at least if you allow it to take over your city, as it seems to have done in this Greensboro residential complex, Arbor House. The apartments are raised above the street. The part of the building along sidewalk is given over to metal mesh that barely hides the parking deck. To get inside, you walk over something that’s a cross between a land bridge and a pirate’s gang plank.

As unfortunate as that is, it’s worse in Chicago, as our hulking apartment high-rises make clear. No, I am not showing you the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project. This is a private luxury apartment tower. But it is so visually monotonous that it looks like public housing or something from the East Berlin School of Architecture.

Here is its parking garage: A six-story eyesore, with the cars inside completely unshielded. This parking garage is taller than the entire residential complex in Greensboro I just showed you.

And here is an ever more outrageous example: A roof garden and other amenities line the top of this parking garage, but the garage itself, 10 stories high, destroys the scale and character of the street below.

This is plop architecture: Apartment buildings plopped on bases that throw the proportions of the buildings totally out of whack. Some of these buildings look like a man with his pants hiked up too high.

All this serves as a cautionary tale: You can simultaneously add density to your downtown and strip it of urbanity. By urbanity, I mean the qualities associated with the late, great urbanist Jane Jacobs: Human scale, eyes on the street, a mix of uses, short blocks.

I think you can do better. Surely there are other, more appropriate models for mixing density and urbanity: Human-scaled mid-rises or neo-traditional neighborhoods like your South Side, where the cars are deftly tucked behind the street and shops enliven the ground-level facades. It was good to read in this morning’s News & Record that both mayoral candidates consider South Side a model for combating sprawl.

We tend to think of cities as collections of great buildings, but the soul of a city is its streets—not the buildings, but the spaces in between the buildings; the voids, not the solids; the ground, not the figure. You have some fine streets here in Greensboro—Elm Street, in particular—but the downtown still has far too many streets that seem like miniature expressways—more corridors for cars than places for people.

THE PRESENT/PART TWO: ARE YOU SIMPLY BUILDING REAL ESTATE OR CIVIC SYMBOLS THAT PEOPLE WILL BE PROUD OF?

Now let’s move to another aspect of the present: The skyline.

I love the old Jefferson Pilot Building, with its twin towers, its terra cotta façade and its bust of Thomas Jefferson overlooking Elm Street.

I don’t think it was at all a coincidence that somebody put this building on a postcard. This skyscraper was a civic symbol as well as a piece of real estate. It spoke of craftsmanship and attention to detail and a prosperous Greensboro that had fully embraced the 20th Century.

But would anybody put these [contemporary] Greensboro skyscrapers on a postcard? They are utterly undistinguished, wasted opportunities to enliven the civic realm. They flunk what I call “the postcard test”: If a skyscraper is beloved enough, it will enter the realm of popular culture and you’ll see it on T-shirts, key chains and dinner plates.

In Chicago these days, we are in the middle of a skyscraper building boom and one of the developers, as you can see, is a famous fellow who always seems to be having a bad hair day.

When it is completed in 2009, Donald Trump’s Trump International Hotel and tower will rise to a height of 92 stories and 1362 feet. It is a residential tower, not an office building, and it points to a major shift in skyscrapers; they are no longer just places to work, but places to live.

This one, as designed by Chicago architect Adrian Smith, is a contextual tower with setbacks that reflect the heights of nearby buildings like the Wrigley Building, the old Spanish Revival skyscraper with its trademark clock tower.

It also has a spire that wasn’t there when the project began. But then our mayor, the all-powerful Richard M. Daley, decided that the building should have a spire. So he called Trump into his office and “The Donald” and “The Mayor” went at it in private. Guess who won? After the mayor got his way, the headline on our story was: “Daley to Trump: ‘You’re Spired!’”

One of the fascinating things about residential skyscrapers is that they don’t have to be as business-like and buttoned-down as a corporate headquarters. Here, for example, is Chicago architect Jeanne Gang’s Aqua tower, an 80-story hotel, apartment and condo tower. Its spectacularly undulating facades are based on the idea that a skyscraper in a tightly-confined urban area should reach out to capture prized views.

At Aqua, the computer-designed balconies stretch and curve to provide views of such nearby landmarks as Millennium Park. They promise to give this tower, now under construction, a remarkably sensuous presence, one which will be entirely different from Chicago’s old worship of the right angle.

Yet Aqua is simply a warmup for Santiago Calatrava’s Chicago Spire, a 2000-foot luxury condo tower where prices will start at $750,000 for a studio and go to $40 million for a penthouse. (I sure won’t be living there.) This tower is remarkably thin as well as remarkably tall, its thinness made possible by high-strength concrete. Each floor would rotate 2.4 degrees above the one below it, making it appear as the Spire is twisting into the sky like an oversized drill bit.

Calatrava insists that his tower resembles a ballet dancer pirouetting into the sky. But if the Spire represents the feminization of the skyscraper, it is the most phallic feminization on the planet. The Spire, too, is under construction, though there remains considerable skepticism about whether it will be completed.

But the broader point all these buildings raise for Greensboro is this: The next tall building on your skyline may be residential, not office; that building may be tall and thin, not short and squat; and this building could be boldly expressive, a skyline icon, not just another box like the one now being built across from Center City Park.

HISTORIC PRESERVATION: ARE YOU SAVING THE PAST OR JUST A SLIVER OF IT?

Now I want to move to the past--specifically, the issue of preserving the past--and the new threats evident in that area: Back in the 1960s, the pioneers of historic preservation faced stark choices as they battled to protect such renowned structures as New York’s Pennsylvania Station: Either save the building or watch the wrecker’s ball smash it to smithereens. Since then, the preservation movement has won some remarkable victories, such as the transformation of Chicago’s Reliance Building into a boutique hotel or your successful saving of the Carolina Theater.

But now there is a new cloud on the horizon, and it looks like this: Instead of preserving the entire building, developers are keeping only the building’s façade. This is called a “façade-echtomy,” which sounds like “lobotomy,” and does damage that is just as lasting.

Here’s how it works: A massive steel scaffold holds in place three facades that provide a tangible record of the construction boom that followed the Chicago Fire of 1871. Eventually, the facades will sheathe the back of a parking garage for a new residential skyscraper.

The end result will look something like this: A façade for condo tower parking garage that preserves the streetscape but is essentially lifeless. Note the darkness in the windows above the ground floor. Note the lack of street level entrances along the sidewalk. This is architectural taxidermy, grafting the facade onto a new internal structure, as though it were the skin of a stuffed animal.

You should congratulate yourselves that you have avoided this trend so far on Elm Street.

On Chicago’s Maxwell Street, it has wreaked havoc. Here is the Maxwell Street of old, the Lower East Side of the Midwest, a raucous streetscape full of Jewish peddlers and their customers.

And here is the way Maxwell Street looks day after the University of Illinois at Chicago decided to redevelop the area and made the facade-echtomy the redevelopment tool of choice. The facades have been clipped onto the front of a new parking garage, complete with curtains and blinds in their upper-story windows to mask the cars behind them.

Technically, the restoration work is very good; the medallions, fluted columns and ornamental brick are all beautifully restored. The problem is that Maxwell Street never looked like this.

Many of the facades were moved off other buildings in the area and rearranged to create a supposedly authentic streetscape. In reality, it’s more of a stage set version of the past populated by life-size sculptures, like this one of a woman shopper sitting on a bench. This is not the preservation of history; it is the editing, erasure and eradication of history.

I would urge you to avoid it here in Greensboro at all costs.

THE FUTURE: GREENING CITIES AND SAVING THE PLANET

We’ve talked about the present and the past. I want to close by talking about the future--specifically, the future of the planet and why architecture matters for its future.

Greensboro has begun to embrace this future with its new, environmentally-friendly Proximity Hotel, and for good reason. Cities contribute about 75 percent of all heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions to our atmosphere. But they only comprise 2 percent of the earth’s land mass. Buildings are said to account for as much as half of the world’s greenhouse gases. I’m glad that you’re on this bandwagon, but I will be frank: One green building in a city known for its parks, parkways and other natural amenities is not enough. And Chicago can help show that way.

Our Mayor Daley has both a green thumb and an iron fist. In the “make no little plans” tradition of Daniel Burnham, he has vowed to make Chicago “the greenest city in America.” And he has backed these words with action.

Since his tenure began in 1989, he has led a remarkable transformation of Chicago’s once-harsh cityscape. Flowers have been sprouted throughout the downtown. More than half a million trees have been planted. And the city has become a national leader in the development of green roofs, like this one atop City Hall. The green roofs combat the urban heat island effect and they are certainly more pleasing to look at than a roof covered with asphalt. Today, Chicago has more green roofs than every other city in America combined. And it also has solar panels on the roofs of buildings like the Museum of Science and Industry.

True, of Chicago’s approximately half a million buildings, just 29 are officially certified green buildings. But you have to start somewhere in fighting global warming. And Chicago has gotten off to a spectacular start with the green roof at Millennium Park.

MILLENNIUM PARK: A BOLD VISION OF THE FUTURE

You already have a fine downtown park, so I’m simply going to show you this one for fun. Millennium Park used to be an open pit at the foot of the downtown skyline, with exposed commuter railroad tracks and surface parking. And this is what that pit looks now: A 24 and a half acre green roof built over a parking garage and those commuter railroad tracks, which are still operating.

The park actually opened four years late—four years after the start of the Millennium--and it cost about half a billion dollars, more than triple the initial estimate. But private donors--Oprah, the Pritzkers and the Crowns picked up about half its cost. And the park has turned out to be an incredible success story—a new paradigm for an urban park.

At Millennium Park, the focal point is not grass and trees that make you feel like you are walking into a landscape painting. Rather, it is enormous, closely-spaced objects—like the Cloud Gate sculpture or a pair of glass block towers with giant faces projected on them or Frank Gehry’s bandshell, with its headdress of curving steel.

Here’s a better view of the bandshell, which houses a stage for performances by the Grant Park Symphony and a variety of other groups. An enormous trellis of curving steel pipes—600 feet long by 300 feet wide—spreads out over an oval shaped lawn and creates a magical domed space that invites people in. The bandshell is alive with concerts at night. Yet it also a quiet space, perfect for Tai Chi, during the day.

The real star of the show, though, turns out to be Cloud Gate, the enormous work of mirror-finished steel by London sculptor Anish Kapoor. It has become an instant icon with its reflections of the sky and skyline. True to its name, it is a three-dimensional work of art, one that, like a traditional gate, beckons you to walk through it and to explore its spectacular, dome-like underside.

Millennium Park park is just as alluring at the Crown Fountain, which consists of two 50-foot towers of glass block facing each other across a reflecting pool. The artist, Jaume Plensa from Barcelona, designed each side of the glass block towers to project faces of randomly-selected Chicagoans on LED screens.

Every few minutes, these modern gargoyles spit out water and create raucous scenes like this. It’s an instant piazza, where people are drawn not only to see the fountain but other people. This idea is as old as time and yet this is a new kind of public space that recognizes the way we live now: People who are used to interacting with the computer now hunger for iconic works of public art with which they can interact.

A footnote: A recent city of Chicago study estimated that the park would increase the value of nearby residential units by $100 per square foot. The value of residential development attributable to the park over the next ten years is expected to total $1.4 billion. That’s pretty powerful proof, as Daniel Burnham would have said, that beauty pays.

CONCLUSION: SMALL CITIES MAKE NO SMALL PLANS

Now I fully suspect that some of you are going to hear all this say: “Forget it. We are a small city, not a big city. We do not have the resources to do a Millennium Park.” But my aim tonight hasn’t been to push one specific example; it’s been to suggest an overall vision which embraces the idea that design matters.

Small cities are doing that as well as big cities. And so are small towns.

In Columbus, Indiana the foundation of the Cummins Engine Company long ago instituted a program in which it paid the design fees of leading architects who shaped the city’s schools. And the impact of that program later spread to scores of other buildings--newspaper headquarters, churches, golf clubs, fire stations, and banks.

More recently, small cities like Des Moines, Iowa have drawn up impressive master plans for their downtowns and brought in world-class architects like Britain’s David Chipperfield to design their public libraries. Des Moines’ public library has a green roof. You can see the park in the background.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw the same kind of thing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which, like your High Point, is a city known for making furniture.

Grand Rapids just opened a new art museum by a young Los Angeles-based architect who is a protege of the great Japanese architect Tadao Ando. It is the world’s first all-new green art museum, a serene, temple-like presence that wonderfully complements a handsome contemporary public space designed by Maya Lin that’s located next door.

This public space comes complete with a mist fountain and a sunken oval room that becomes an outdoor skating rink in the winter. Together, the museum and the park make a powerful statement that this small city recognizes that design is an integral part of its future.

And that, I think, is a good place us to conclude. Instead of coming here and insulting you, as Bob Stern did in Charlotte, I’ve come instead and visited with you. But make no mistake: This visit was very much a challenge.

My challenge to you--to the business leaders of Greensboro, to the political leaders and to the citizens--is to recognize that architecture matters and to act on that understand in fresh and creative ways.

You’ve made a good start in reviving your downtown, but now it’s time to raise your game to the next level. You can:

Expand the downtown revival beyond Elm Street to create lively districts; right now, you have one lively street and everything else is pretty much a desert;
Extend the vitality of downtown into the skyline, which desperately needs a powerful vertical presence, a new campanile, to symbolize downtown’s rebirth;
Encourage the creation of contemporary architecture that will signal that the downtown is not standing still and that it has moved decisively into the 21st Century
Ensure that density is accompanied by urbanity in new downtown residential developments—indeed, in all projects
Keep on preserving the past—the whole past, not mere slivers of it
And green the downtown, its buildings and public spaces, in a way that gives new meaning to the name Greensboro.

There’s an old saying: You get what you deserve. Well, we get the built environment we deserve, especially in a small city. Chicago, a big city, can take the occasional bad building; it fades into the woodwork. But here, every building counts; it has a disproportionate impact on the urban fabric. There is not a lot of room for error. So my advice to you is this: Seize every chance you get. Be bold. And absolutely, positively, do not accept mediocrity.

Every building is a new piece of the evolving metropolis, a new layer of the ever-changing urban collage. This collective work of art forms an unflinching record of who we are and what we do. It connects us in time and space to those who went before us even as it represents our legacy--for better or for worse--to those who come after.

That’s why architecture matters.

It’s your city. It’s your legacy. It’s your choice. I trust that you’ll make the right one and that I’ll be back here someday to write about the “Greensboro Renaissance.”

Thank you