About the Center for Building Communities
Everybody complains about the lack of affordable housing, the spread of drive-everywhere sprawl, and the looming energy, environmental, and economic crises. But where are the solutions — the specific ways to build and, more importantly, to rebuild communities so as to address these problems?
Too often the solutions proposed are one-dimensional: affordable housing is often ugly, and safe walkable communities often high-priced. It´s hard to find the complete package. And the complete package that suits one locality may not suit another.
The Center for Building Communities aims to fill this gap by generating ideas and examples for the construction and real estate industries, so they can create places that are at least regionally appropriate, and at best delightful.
The CBC´s approach to these design challenges fits with the traditional orientation of Notre Dame architectural education, in which students learn “not only the principles of designing and constructing buildings, but also the importance of enriching the identity and cohesiveness of the communities where they live and work.”
For example, does your family need to own two or more cars? Do you have to drive everywhere — to work, school, stores, friends, and fun? Could your grown kids afford to live nearby if they wanted to? Do folks who walk downtown hesitate to cross Main Street? Can they even walk downtown anymore? Do streets, parks, and public squares beautified at great time and expense still remain devoid of public life?
Then your community´s got problems — the kind of problems the Center for Building Communities was established to help fix.
These problems stem in part from a bad rulebook — the old-fashioned “Euclidean zoning” that keeps home, school, work, and shopping separate. Updating that rulebook can help, but replacing it with a new one isn’t the answer, because places differ. We need a new playbook, not a new rulebook. Like good coaches, good designers understand the principles of the game, but that doesn’t mean they call the same play every time. “In matters of Architecture and Urbanism,” writes Leon Krier in Building Cities, “fundamental principles are of universal value, but realizations are always local and regional, adapted to specific climate, topography, materials, and industry.”
For example: Sidewalks are good – every place should have sidewalks, right? That´s rulebook thinking, because sidewalks aren´t a “fundamental principle.” Playbook thinking observes that sidewalks with no shade, no benches, nothing to see or do along the way, and leading from nowhere to nowhere aren’t likely to attract many walkers or generate public life. Another example: Big-box stores are bad — they shouldn´t exist, right? Again, that´s rulebook thinking (not to mention guaranteed futility). Big boxes have a role in the playbook, but not necessarily the leading role. They can share parking with other destinations, and (given the proper legal agreements and incentives) a variety of smaller businesses and other uses (including residential) can be “wrapped” around their otherwise blank walls.
The CBC´s pragmatic but principled approach also applies to the use of sustainable technologies including modular construction, automated parking, and green building materials and methods. Even the best ideas don´t work everywhere. As our colleague Carroll William Westfall puts it, “We…teach our students how to work with the appropriate national, regional, and local traditions of urbanism, architecture, and construction. What works in America won’t necessarily do well in Panama. What is right for Boston is not right for Phoenix.” Good design and good technology appropriate to the place can allow beauty, convenience, sociability, and sustainability to flourish together.
An initiative of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, the CBC seeks communities where we can work with local people — first to identify specific problems in specific places, then to discuss and design solutions that will be healthier (in every sense of the word), more beautiful, more efficient, and more affordable than before. The CBC is already collaborating with industrial and graphic designers and structural engineers, and seeks to collaborate with academics and independent scholars in other related fields such as psychology, sociology, law, business, history, humanities, political science, engineering, chemistry, biology, environmental science, and more.
