Rollins College: Exemplar of the American Renaissance

       Richard Kiehnel completed the Rollins campus plan in 1927.  The library, set to be a commanding 29-story structure, was the centerpiece.  Set at the terminus of a central axis that bisected a linear green and a common lawn, the dominant structure slated to be the tallest building in Florida paid homage to the University of Virginia and its founder, Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson built an “academic village” that placed the Rotunda, a half-size adaptation of the Pantheon housing the library, at the terminus of a linear lawn.  The rounded cranium housed the “brain” of the University, and it faced an unbounded horizon to symbolize the flow of knowledge into the young Republic. Jefferson envisioned a new kind of university dedicated to educating leaders in practical affairs and, a century later, his iconic hand directed Hamilton Holt.   

      Kiehnel grouped 29 structures to form a neo-Renaissance academic village.  Given the climate, openness and connection were keys.  Loggias and covered walkways linked the campus, while buildings were set on quadrangles and small courtyards to capture breezes and foster air circulation. “Breezy and cool” was how Holt described the scheme to create the first “open-air college” in the United States.

        The library was never built to its outsized specifications.  In fact, funding for

Mills Library was not secured until 1949, the year Holt retired. Designed by James Gamble Rogers II, the two-story steel framed stucco had a commanding arched entryway.  From its steps, one could glean a picturesque view that extended into Winter Park, as the oaks framing Interlachen Avenue directed the eye to the horizon.  This vista was also the route students took to complete their graduation ceremony. They marched across Mills Lawn to the Congregational Church on Interlachen, where they were introduced to the community as citizens ready for service. 

Rollins Graduation ca 1932

      The campus showpiece, Knowles Memorial Chapel and the Annie Russell Theater, was completed in 1932.  The Rolyat set the standard.  The buildings framed a cloistered patio garden centered on a Spanish tiled fountain circled by inlaid cypress.  Kiehnel designed the Annie Russell, while Ralph Cram, a noted ecclesiastical architect, designed Knowles Chapel.  The chapel reflected 17^th Century Spanish architecture, a period when Renaissance fashion transitioned to more classical forms.  The campanile, modeled after the Toledo Cathedral, towered over the campus.  Above the chapel’s entrance a carved stone tympanum depicted Spanish conquistadors planting the first cross in American soil, a reminder that Florida’s unique history was embedded in the college’s calling to prepare young minds for the future.

Knowles Chapel Bell Tower

       The campus was built largely in accordance with Kiehnel’s plan, but it had, from a modern perspective, a glaring omission—there were no parking lots.  In 1927 the automobile was an option, but once it became a necessity the campus’s pedestrian orientation suffered.  The widening and realignment of Fairbanks Avenue severed the central axis.  Graduation ceremonies were confined to campus and parking lots soon covered sites designated for open space.  In the 1990s road rage entered the picture, as Central Florida suffered the nation’s highest pedestrian death rate.

       Looking to the past for inspiration, the college and Winter Park championed a pedestrian-oriented urbanism patterned on the American Renaissance.  In 1997 Dover-Kohl redesigned Park Avenue.  Sidewalks were widened for outdoor dining, vehicular travel lanes were narrowed and bricked, and a prescription was provided for designing buildings based on the principles of traditional civic art.  In 2002, Rollins College commissioned Chael Cooper & Associates, in affiliation with Dover Kohl, to design the McKean Gateway and the Rinker Admissions Building on Fairbanks Avenue.  Taken together they established a definitive terminus and signified the willingness of both college and city officials to restore a walkable, pedestrian-centric community.  In 2014 a gateway was built at the head of a new walkway that bifurcated the linear green centered on Mills Library.  The Harvard Gates inspired architect John Cunningham’s concept for this signature piece, which marked the reestablishment of the historic central axis.

Rollins Gateway 

       The last three presidents of Rollins, Thaddeus Seymour, Rita Bornstein, and Lewis Duncan, labored to create the intimate sense of place Hamilton Holt revered.  Their efforts not only produced the most beautiful campus in the nation, they restored a vision grounded in the iconic ambitions of American higher education.   

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Rollins College: The Renaissance Origins of the Most Beautiful Campus in America

     In August 2015, Princeton Review named Rollins College the most beautiful campus in the nation.  The decision was based on survey results, but the iconic beauty of Florida’s oldest college is rooted in history.  Its harmonious blend of Mediterranean Revival Architecture, intimate greens and plazas, scenic vistas, covered walkways, and oak-shaded paths is an exemplar of the American Renaissance, a generational effort to mold an unparalleled prosperity into a new urban civilization. The movement began in the 1880s and disappeared after 1930, “the last full flourish of the Renaissance that begun in Italy in the 15^th Century,” Henry Hope Reed writes.http://www.amazon.com/The-Architecture-Humanism-History-Classical/dp/0393730352 

       New England Congregationalists founded Rollins in 1885 and sited it on Lake Virginia in Winter Park, which was modeled on Riverside, Illinois, Frederick Law Olmsted’s prototype suburb.  Olmsted set a precedent for the American Renaissance by employing “the arts of civilization” to channel the “flood” of urbanization into humane form.  Like Riverside, Winter Park was centered on a rail station in a park and designed to the pedestrian scale.  Its 1883 town plan, which had concentric circles denoting five-minute walks radiating from the train station, ensured easy access to nature and transportation.  Rollins occupied the downtown’s southern terminus and, like Florida, it developed in unique fashion.     

     When the college was founded Florida was a backwater, the least populated state east of the Mississippi River.  A decade later, Henry Flagler had energized Florida’s dormant economy by building a series of luxury hotels in conjunction with his new rail line.  Eastern elites flocked to architectural marvels set in stunning subtropical settings.  The Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, the world’s largest wooden structure, was Flagler’s crown jewel and a precursor of Florida’s future.

      In the 1920s tourism became a staple of the first consumer economy, and Florida attracted the greatest investment in real estate capital in history. “The story of Florida is a story of adventure romance written through a long history—four centuries...The early search was for the Fountain of Youth and for gold, and the modern one is not essentially different,” John Nolen noted at a 1925 city planning conference. Flimflam and opportunism was rampant, but there was also significant investment. Villages turned into cities, and by decade’s end Florida was the first former Confederate state to have a majority of its population classified as urban.  Nolen, an Olmsted disciple, had multiple commissions in the state he called, “the nation’s great laboratory of city planning.”  The aesthetic competence that imbued Nolen’s new town of Venice marked the zenith of the American Renaissance.  Classical forms and a sophisticated park system placed recreation and leisure—the essence of tourism—on a higher plane.  An amphitheater adorning a beachfront park epitomized the neo-Renaissance plan’s essence—classical motifs celebrated nature and the arts to elevate the modern mind. 

Note amphitheater adjacent to the parkway terminating at the Gulf

          Hamilton Holt, the new president of Rollins, also adhered to this logic. A confidant of Nolen, the longtime editor of The Independent accepted the position “because Florida is the one state…where the spirit of progress most prevails and where results follow quickest from effort.” A consummate reformer, Holt wanted to break the staid academic formula by marrying pragmatism and the liberal arts.  He would direct Rollins, he wrote Nolen, on an “adventure in common sense education.”

       Holt’s first priority was to commission a plan for the 70-acre campus. An American Riviera was arising in Florida and the accomplishments of Rollins alumni George Merrick, the developer of Coral Gables, inspired Holt.  The new Miami suburb had drawn national attention for its unmatched assemblage of Mediterranean Revival architecture.  With its open courtyards, tiled roofs, stucco exteriors, high ceilings, and arched windows and doorways, this style combined practicality and aesthetics to meet the challenge of Florida’s hot, humid climate, Merrick also donated a 600-acre site for a private university in 1925, the year Holt came to Rollins.  

         By 1926 Holt had studied a series of Mediterranean Revival projects in Miami and St. Petersburg.  He chose the Rolyat Hotel as a model for Rollins.  Richard Kiehnel, a talented architect who introduced Mediterranean Revival to Florida, designed the St. Petersburg hotel (it was turned into a private school after the real estate market crashed in 1926).  Inspired by a medieval Spanish monastery, Kiehnel arranged a series of buildings around a large central plaza.  A dominating tower based on Seville’s Torre Del Oro was the focal point, an emphatic statement Holt wanted to replicate.

Rolyat Hotel ca 1925

My next blog will analyze the Plan for Rollins.  On the relationship between Holt and Nolen see

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner, http://lalh.org/john-nolen-landscape-architect/

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Homelessness Demands Enlightened Plans not Poltical Correctness

Homelessness is defining the public agenda in Los Angeles and Portland.  In September, Mayor Eric Garcetti declared that homelessness had reached a “state of emergency” and Mayor Charlie Hales stated that a “homeless crisis” had beset Portland.  Since then the cities have allocated a combined $130 million to the issue.  Ted Wheeler, the frontrunner in the Portland mayor’s race after Hales dropped out, has made homelessness a priority in his campaign.

This summer I assessed the homeless use of public parks in Portland. In the course of my research, I walked five miles a day on average and regularly interacted with the homeless.  It was sobering.  Just as there are few atheists in foxholes, encountering the homeless—humans confined to a prison without walls on the edge of the abyss—produces either good existentialists or classical Hobbesian liberals, who see humans as fallen creatures destined for ruin without the oversight of a civic sovereign. Politically correct academics, I learned, have a different take.  Homelessness is not an existential crisis that demands interdiction; rather speaking “truth to power” and raising class-consciousness is the solution to a marginalized population deprived of inclusion.

Last week I attended the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) Conference in Los Angeles.  I was eager to see how historians are mining the past to address homelessness, as SACRPH’s stated mission is “bridging the gap between the scholarly study of cities and the practice of urban planning.”  American city planning has a rich history of housing the less fortunate. A century ago, John Nolen declared the novice profession’s mission was “housing the industrial classes, which is agreed to be one of the pressing problems of our civilization.” Nolen’s precedent, however, was ignored, as social theory not historical analysis informed the conference's opening plenary’s discussion of the homeless.   

Catherine Gudis, a cultural historian, addressed the issue in a session entitled, “Social Justice Through a Historical Lens.”  She introduced the subject by trumpeting her participation in a parade that celebrated “the accomplishments of Skid Row people and their visionary initiatives.” A worthy endeavor, but after the event Gudis assuredly returned to suburban Riverside where she is employed.  She never shared her encounters with the homeless, a population plagued by mental illness, drug addiction, and physical ailments.  Nor did she mention the need for enlightened plans to coordinate policing and social services.  Instead, she offered academic adages that stressed process over plans, offering street performance and art as mediums to procure a more inclusive public sphere and to inspire political action. Political action, of course, is not enough.  Moreover, to romanticize homelessness as a class struggle is to invite anarchy.  

This fall elected leaders in Vancouver, Washington (part of Metropolitan Portland) lifted the ban on camping in public spaces.  Within two weeks, 150 people occupied the edge of a residential neighborhood near the downtown.  The encampment had no leadership, policies, or infrastructure—no planning—and chaos ensued. Sleeping bags, shopping carts, mattresses, coolers, garbage, luggage and bike frames collected on street corners.  Amy Reynolds, an administrator with the nonprofit that runs Share House, the shelter around which the camp formed, was besieged by calls from alarmed residents complaining that, "Somebody is defecating in my yard. People are undressing outside my house. People are having domestic disputes, getting in screaming matches and physical fights.”http://www.oregonlive.com/homeless/2015/11/vancouver_tries_legal_camping.html  A reality check ensured, and city officials closed the camp.  The lesson learned is that homelessness demands a comprehensive solution, which only well-designed plans can secure.  

Whether attempting to mitigate homelessness, climate change, or housing affordability, livability is the key to good planning.  The Obama Administration restructured the Department of Housing and Urban Development on the Six Principles of Livability, which are drawn from the New Urbanist template for establishing pedestrian oriented neighborhoods with access to transit and a mix of uses. Livability is also keys to the Housing First initiative, which advocates moving the chronically homeless into apartments without preconditions.  Making housing the first the step to stability and sobriety is a radical reversal of standard practice.  In 2006 Lloyd Pendleton, chair of Utah's Task Force on Homelessness, championed the approach, and since then three quarters of the state’s homeless have left the streets.

The Portland Business Alliance is sponsoring Pendleton, a former executive manager of for Mormon Church’s Welfare Department, to speak to the “homeless crisis.” The city, the organization contends, “needs solutions now.”  Academics tend to deride the New Urbanism (SACRPH attendees greeted the term with catcalls) and the Mormon Church, but these organizations are skilled in implementing path-breaking plans that can solve a national crisis.  As history shown, this is the prerequisite to solving problems that demand political acuity not political correctness.

Cultivating Growth, Lessons in Livability for Conservatives

Portland is on a growth splurge; between 2012 and 2014 its population grew faster than 81 percent of the nation’s metro areas.  Sixty percent of the 59,016 new residents moved to the area, a trend that is expected to continue. Portland is a magnet for Millennials; the 18-to-34 years olds who move at nearly double the national average. Since 2010 Portland, along with San Francisco, Denver, and Austin, has experienced the highest influx of Millennials aged 25-34, the cohort crucial to economic growth.  Portland also attracts Millennials with college degrees at double the national average.  Their unemployment rate is 4.8 percent, which is not the scenario Claire Miller laid out in her often-cited article, “Will Portland Always be the Retirement City for the Young?”http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/magazine/will-portland-always-be-a-retirement-community-for-the-young.html?_r=0 Portland is prospering, a lead city in a national urban renaissance.  Since 2008, its gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by 22.8 percent, the top rate in the nation.  The irony is that the city’s greatest attribute—a superior quality of life—is the product of intelligent planning, an attribute the GDP does not measure.

The GDP, as Robert F. Kennedy stated in a celebrated 1968 campaign speech, counts "everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."  It measures “the ambulances to clear our highways of carnage” and “the loss of our natural wonder to chaotic sprawl.”  Nor does it measure “personal excellence and community values” that “are surrendered in the mere accumulation of material things.”  Kennedy’s speech struck a nerve across the nation, and that year Portland’s revival took root after a task force recommended replacing Harbor Drive with a public waterfront park.  Within five years, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt had a plan to renew the downtown and Governor Thom McCall had initiated the “Oregon Experiment” in land use planning, which required cities to establish urban growth boundaries (UGB).  Over time, regulation and innovation meshed the Portland region’s three elemental landscapes—wilderness, rural, and urban—in sustainable and profitable form.  Its lively pedestrian-oriented, bike friendly, nature infused environment offers new venues for work and leisure.  And in a period of political turmoil, it offers a model for conservatives as well as liberals.     

Conservatives fear the nation has entered an “Age of Exhaustion,” as the Great Recession eviscerated capitalism of any moral certitude.  Mass stupidity and speculative greed brought the nation to the edge of collapse, and the problem confronting Republicans is primarily “mental and spiritual,” according to David Brooks.  Sounding much like Robert Kennedy, his solution is to invest in communities and adhere to “a goal more profound than material comfort.” (New York Times, October 20, 2015) 

Brooks believes America is flailing because suburbia is in decline.  For conservatives, the sweet spot in American history for lies between the 1950s and the 1970s: the period when the suburb was in ascendancy, Leave It to Beaver and The Brady Bunch were the perceived norm, and suburban inhabitants “aspired to golf’s paradisiacal vision.” The Great Recession sent the striving for “par,” Brooks’ metaphor for balancing one’s commitment to community with individual desires, into the rough.http://www.amazon.com/On-Paradise-Drive-Always-Future/dp/0743227395  Once pinnacles of stability, suburbia is in transition and golf is in remission.  The sport has lost 24 percent of its participants since 2002, and for every golf course that opens, eleven close.  Proximity to bike trails, not golf courses, now informs real estate decisions, an indication of the new economic geography driving the post Recession economy.

Portland, not surprisingly, is the only major city in the United States to receive a Platinum designation from League of Bicyclists.  Twenty-five years ago, community activists set the groundwork for creating an interconnected system of natural lands and bicycle trails within the UGB.  Today, over 200 miles of bike trails link 17,000 acres of system of parks, a project aided by two regional bond measures and a levy–more than $400 million dollars.  The Intertwine Alliance, a coalition of over 140 public, private and nonprofit organizations, is working to expand the system and integrate nature and recreation more deeply into the daily life of the region.  At the same time the city of Portland is completing a new comprehensive plan to accommodate a population increase of over 200,000 in the next 20 years, and greenways, low stress bikeways, are key components.  They will link a system of “complete neighborhoods,” places that allow people of all ages and abilities safe and convenient access to the goods and services needed in daily life — where they can get to grocery stores, schools, libraries, parks and gathering places on foot or by bike. They are well connected to jobs and the rest of the city by transit.  And they have a variety of housing types and prices for households of different sizes and incomes.

Interestingly David Brooks envisions a similar future.  He thinks Republicans and Democrats should  unite and launch initiatives to enhance opportunity in middle-, working- and lower-class neighborhoods. He is keen on improving educational opportunity and “putting the quality of the social fabric at the center of the politics.” First, however, Brooks must realize that a neighborhood is not a subdivision, it is a place defined by livability--not the groomed vision of a golf course.  Moreover, the policies to create complete neighborhoods are already in place, and not just in Portland. 

The Obama Administration restructured the Department of Housing and Urban Development on the Six Principles of Livability, which focus on making the automobile an option not a necessity.  Establishing safe walkable neighborhoods with transportation choices is the best way to decrease living costs, improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote public health.  Investing in livability not only enhances the GDP, it fosters personal excellence and community values.  Once this happens, we will all be shooting par.

Can Mayor Hales Jump the Shark and Lead Portland to the Promised Land?

Charlie Hales shocked Portlanders when he announced he is withdrawing from the mayor’s race.  The decision was political, politicians do not cede office without calculation, but it was also honorable.  The city is grappling with prosperity, and Hales will now focus on crafting a new comprehensive plan to address the issues of rapid growth, rising rents and homelessness.  Most mayors live for a revving tech sector and lucrative real estate market, but Portland is different.  It has, historian Carl Abbot writes, “a moral political culture that values the public good over the individual.”

Four decades ago, Oregonians invested in the novel idea that the judicious use of land could create a sustaining mix of private capital and civic enterprise.  The investment is generating a considerable return.  Portland is a magnet for the so-called “creative class,” the knowledge workers that are crucial to the 21st century economy. In contrast to metropolitan areas of similar size (e.g. Austin and Minneapolis) attracting the creative class, the Rose City does not have a major research institution.  Its lure is a lively pedestrian-oriented, bike friendly, nature infused urban environment that offers new venues for work and leisure.  In the past five years software industry jobs have expanded by almost 70 percent, from 7,200 to over 12,000.  The Pearl District alone has three collaborative work centers—Central Office, We Work, and Desk Hub—that are key indicators of a thriving tech sector.  At the same time the Pearl’s rents have exploded, rising nearly 50 percent in a year.  My 1000 square foot unit rented for $1700 a month one year ago—today it goes for $2500 a month. 

Not surprisingly, the neighborhood is rife with land sharks.  At the local breakfast café I feel I have been transported to Orlando circa 2006, as jargon filled discussions mimic real estate infomercials: “set investment goals,” “secure return” and “outperform the market.”  The difference is the product for sale.  “Drivable sub-urbanism,” as real estate expert Christopher Leinberger calls it, fueled Orlando’s real estate bubble and bust.  “Walkable urbanism” is for sale in the Pearl District.  The neighborhood's high walkscores www.walkscore.com signify that most daily needs can be met within walking or rail transit distance.  Rents and property values are higher, but when the car is an option Leinberger found walkable urbanism less costly than than owning a car and living in a suburban subdivison. http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/documents/foot-traffic-ahead.pdf  I make ends meet because I lives sans auto and rent my parking space for $200 a month.  Giving up the automoblie mitigates the impact of high rents, but once the land sharks smell blood humanity suffers.   

Advertisement for Walkable Urbanism

Large outside investors have a found a formula for translating properties with high walkscores into profits. They have been especially active in city's near eastside, buying apartment buildings at $100,000 a unit, investing $15,000 in unit upgrades, and then selling the building at $150,000 a unit.  The other strategy is to make upgrades and then significantly raise the rents, which often forces out existing renters.  The land sharks are feeding and their tactics explain why Mayor Hales declared that “a lot of the city is at a very fragile point right now.”

Cutthroat real estate speculation brought the country to the edge of economic collapse in both the Great Depression and the Great Recession.  A skilled technocrat, Hales is the one person who can ensure that a new comprehensive plan will direct development for a future population (expected to grow by 200,000 in the next twenty years) on lines that will procure sustainability, equity and profit.  There is a unique moral dimension at play in Portland, and Hales' ability to navigate the perils of prosperity will play to a much larger audience than the city’s 660,000 residents. 

This summer the Mayor attended the Vatican summit on climate change.  Portland is a prototype of the Promised Land Pope Francis envisions, a city where carbon is in remission and nature is ascendant.  Portland remains a work in progress, and reaching the Promised Land requires a leader who must convince citizens not to worship the Golden Calf.  Has a Portland Mayor ever had a greater exit?