HDRI test

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It’s hard to keep up with new technologies.Thankfully, I know at least a dozen now obsolete technologies, so I still have a room to put new things in my brain.

Technically, HDRI is not new technology.It’s been around for over 100 years, but it’s only recently that computer programs have been development to automate what was once a manual process.Still, I approached HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) will be little hesitation.It’s photography, and of all the technologies I practice I’ve never been very comfortable with photography. I came to it later in my career and have never had any formal training in the field.I know enough to know that some people create art with a camera, and that’s not me.Instead, I approach a camera like a machine, not a paintbrush, and sometimes when I talk to a professional photographer I know I am only using 1/10th of the machine’s potential.Still, as a planner, I don’t want to bias the image: I want a machine that captures an image using an explainable process, and that image should speak for itself.

But, if you’ve ever been in the field trying to get a good shot, you know how much the image depends on host of environmental factors.Sun, clouds, rain haze, glare, all conspire to ruin the day you set aside for fieldwork.Once, on the third attempt to do site photography for a project I finally had a day I thought would be perfect, but after the two hour drive to the site, the farmers had tractors in their fields and the dust and haze they generated ruined the day for photography.

HDRI won’t fix all your field work issues, but it will help you take much better photographs.You can read more about it here, but in short, HDRI is the process of taking multiple photographs of the same shot and layering them together to provide a much more dynamic and richer image than any single shot could.For instance, consider this shot, the famous view from Delavergne Hill in the Town of Amenia in Dutchess County (click on picture for full size image):

View from Delavernge Hill: Auto exposure (1/400th S shutter speed)

Beautiful day, beautiful view, but the clouds!They are, in effect, creating underexposed spaces in your image by blocking the sun in some places and not in others.Look again.Dark spot in the center, looks at a glance like it might be darker forest, rather than the lighter field that it actually is.

So what do you do?Wait?Come back another day?

What you could do is take more pictures using different exposures and combine them to a single image.If you overexpose the image, you compensate for the cloud that darkened your field.

Overexposed image from Delavergne Hill (1/200th S shutter speed)

Also take an underexposed image to compensate for very bright areas :

Underexposed view from Delavergne Hill (1/1250th S shutter speed)

And then use a computer program to combine the images, taking the best from each:

HDR Image, using information from each photographs

You still have a darker spot in the center, but the colors are more dynamic and there are more subtle color contrasts, which tell your eye immediately there is a field in the darker spot.Not perfect, but better than the original shot.Hopefully, the images will only improve with the software that processes them, and as we learn more about the software. Being new to HDRI, we tested a half a dozen different software on the images you see here that the easiest and most foolproof software to use was Fusion which enabled us to produce an image that was true to the original shot, while still enhancing it with the depth of color.

The only thing the site photographer needs is a tripod and knowledge of how to work your camera in manual mode so you can adjust the exposures.(I took many more exposures than what I show here, but we only used three of them.)At the office, you process the photos with the software to produce the final image.

Finally, you might find someone who complains that this is an altered image, so therefore not as good for planning purposes as an image that comes straight from a camera.I understand the thinking behind this argument: people are afraid of bias.My response is that this is just a photograph.It is not how people with normal binocular vision actually experience a place.We experience a place with depth, with eyes that move, that are constantly changing focus, and with a field of view much larger than that of our cameras.Simply, the images produced by cameras are a poor substitute for that experience, and in planning, what we want to do is to convey the experience, and if we can do a better job with HDRI instead of using a single image straight from the camera, we should do it.

Give it a try, it’s not that hard, and it may help you salvage a day of field work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdri

Testing Augmented Reality in Planning & Urban Design

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A few months ago, I wrote about Augmented Reality and its potential to make a real impact in our planning work, and I had hoped that I would hear from other professionals about successes using AR in our field.

I got nothing involving real clients with real proposed projects, so we decided there was only one way to know for sure: we went out and tried it ourselves.

As a reminder, in theory AR in planning would allow users to see a proposed development through the camera on their mobile device in the actual place that it is being proposed.  The theoretical value is tremendous.  As a professional, we often go to a site with a plan, and unless the surveyors have staked and strung it, we have to figure out how that plan fits into the site using references or GPS units or other tools, but it’s often difficult and inexact.  And even if it is exact, we still have to image the development in place from the plan.  I would just love to just look through my phone to see where the buildings and road were planned.  How cool would that be?

But even more valuable would be the ability to push out the proposed development to the general public or citizen planning boards using this technology.

You can read all about it in our findings here, but the short summary is that AR is not ready for use with the general public.  It’s way too jittery and inaccurate for real projects.  There is also the very real problem that it always shows proposed development on top of the existing image from your phone, so if you have vegetation or hills that screen your development in reality, that isn’t apparent in your AR version of reality.

There are still some applications, where AR as it exists today could add value:

  • Generalized planning exercises (e.g. “What’s the best use of this land?  Here are some very different options,”)
  • Exploration by the designers during the design phase (e.g. “how does this building feel on the site?”)
  • Voyeurs (e.g. “Let’s experiment!)

It’s really hard to overstate how disappointed I am.  I thought this was such cool technology.  I just wanted it to work.  I wanted to be able to tell the guy who asked the question, “what will it look like from my house?”  “Just download this and let’s take a look.”  But if I did that he’d be freaking out because the hill and the tree that screen the development aren’t screening, or that it’s jumping around all over the place.  It would certainly do more harm than good in that context.  We’re going to keep following it, and may even try it if we have the right design or generalized planning project, but for our bread and butter work, AR doesn’t make the grade.

Disagree?  Let me hear it, and let me hear why.

HDRI

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It’s hard to keep up with new technologies.Thankfully, I know at least a dozen now obsolete technologies, so I still have a room to put new things in my brain.

Technically, HDRI is not new technology.It’s been around for over 100 years, but it’s only recently that computer programs have been development to automate what was once a manual process.Still, I approached HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) will be little hesitation.It’s photography, and of all the technologies I practice I’ve never been very comfortable with photography. I came to it later in my career and have never had any formal training in the field.I know enough to know that some people create art with a camera, and that’s not me.Instead, I approach a camera like a machine, not a paintbrush, and sometimes when I talk to a professional photographer I know I am only using 1/10th of the machine’s potential.Still, as a planner, I don’t want to bias the image: I want a machine that captures an image using an explainable process, and that image should speak for itself.

But, if you’ve ever been in the field trying to get a good shot, you know how much the image depends on host of environmental factors.Sun, clouds, rain haze, glare, all conspire to ruin the day you set aside for fieldwork.Once, on the third attempt to do site photography for a project I finally had a day I thought would be perfect, but after the two hour drive to the site, the farmers had tractors in their fields and the dust and haze they generated ruined the day for photography.

HDRI won’t fix all your field work issues, but it will help you take much better photographs.You can read more about it here, but in short, HDRI is the process of taking multiple photographs of the same shot and layering them together to provide a much more dynamic and richer image than any single shot could.For instance, consider this shot, the famous view from Delavergne Hill in the Town of Amenia in Dutchess County (click on picture for full size image):

View from Delavernge Hill: Auto exposure (1/400th S shutter speed)

Beautiful day, beautiful view, but the clouds!They are, in effect, creating underexposed spaces in your image by blocking the sun in some places and not in others.Look again.Dark spot in the center, looks at a glance like it might be darker forest, rather than the lighter field that it actually is.

So what do you do?Wait?Come back another day?

What you could do is take more pictures using different exposures and combine them to a single image.If you overexpose the image, you compensate for the cloud that darkened your field.

Overexposed image from Delavergne Hill (1/200th S shutter speed)

Also take an underexposed image to compensate for very bright areas :

Underexposed view from Delavergne Hill (1/1250th S shutter speed)

And then use a computer program to combine the images, taking the best from each:

HDR Image, using information from each photographs

You still have a darker spot in the center, but the colors are more dynamic and there are more subtle color contrasts, which tell your eye immediately there is a field in the darker spot.Not perfect, but better than the original shot.Hopefully, the images will only improve with the software that processes them, and as we learn more about the software. Being new to HDRI, we tested a half a dozen different software on the images you see here that the easiest and most foolproof software to use was Fusion which enabled us to produce an image that was true to the original shot, while still enhancing it with the depth of color.

The only thing the site photographer needs is a tripod and knowledge of how to work your camera in manual mode so you can adjust the exposures.(I took many more exposures than what I show here, but we only used three of them.)At the office, you process the photos with the software to produce the final image.

Finally, you might find someone who complains that this is an altered image, so therefore not as good for planning purposes as an image that comes straight from a camera.I understand the thinking behind this argument: people are afraid of bias.My response is that this is just a photograph.It is not how people with normal binocular vision actually experience a place.We experience a place with depth, with eyes that move, that are constantly changing focus, and with a field of view much larger than that of our cameras.Simply, the images produced by cameras are a poor substitute for that experience, and in planning, what we want to do is to convey the experience, and if we can do a better job with HDRI instead of using a single image straight from the camera, we should do it.

Give it a try, it’s not that hard, and it may help you salvage a day of field work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdri

Visual Resource Assessments: why are they so often wrong?

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The “bible” for visual resource assessments in New York was written 11 years ago by a guy just prior to his retirement from the Department of Environmental Conservation.  The best thing you can say about the graphics found there is that they are old school.

Hand made viewshed map found in “Assessing and Mitigating Visual Impacts”

While our “bible” is great on theory and process, it is terrible on the guidance it gives regarding the production of evidence needed to assess impacts.  Appendix A, which is purportedly a “complete discussion” of graphic tools, is straight out of the 1970s, complete with a graph paper line-of-sight (LOS) profile.

Hand drawn graph paper LOS profile found in “Assessing and Mitigating Visual Impacts”

I don’t mean to ridicule; these graphics had their time and place, but the fact that these materials persist in our most important guidance document is both absurd and embarrassing. The public and our planning boards do not find this acceptable evidence for assessing visual impacts. Simply, they need to see it. You can’t just give the public a plan, a LOS profile, and a viewshed map and tell them this is all the evidence they need to make an assessment of visual impacts.  When that was all we could do, it’s what we had to tell people, but now we can do so much better.

I would argue strongly that a real photosimulation is vastly more informative than a LOS profile.  Photosimulations actually provide evidence that communicates to local planning boards and the public.  An LOS profile may be something an old school landscape architect wants to see, but it has absolutely no resonance with the general public.

Applicants, planning boards, and environmental professionals realize our most important guidance document does not acceptably guide on the production of evidence in the 21st Century, and so we all have been muddling through when we write our scoping documents and put together our environmental reviews.  Ultimately, there are few documented standards because our primary guidance document was written without considering the vastly better evidence digital tools could provide, yet our scoping documents, and professional best practices, require the use of these tools.

The consequence is that the visual resource assessments found in EIS’s in New York are of shockingly different quality and content.  Because there are no instructions, or textbooks that firms can send their analysts to on the production of the materials required, the information we find in our most important disclosure documents on visual impacts is often misleading and wrong.  We are often hired to review these EIS’s and spend days and weeks documenting their deficiencies, arguing with applicants, explaining to planning boards on how to produce the evidence necessary so that informed judgments can be made.  It is a huge waste of time and money that could better be spent making the project better.

While these struggles might be good for my business, they are terrible for the state of planning and development in New York.  If the assessments are done correctly the first time, then our Boards and the public can start to discuss the merits of the proposal and how the impacts can be mitigated immediately, and the money spent on all the arguing can be better spent on other things.

So, finally to the real point of this post: we have been inspired to start to do something about the appalling lack of standards.  My office is producing a technical methods series on how to do a visual resource assessment.  The first in this series has just been posted here.  Our goal is to get one of these done every quarter and to build a body of resources to help the analyst do a good job.  Of course, who’s to say that we’re right?  I’m sure there may be people who disagree, or have found a better way.  That’s why we’re leaving these as open documents.  They will change and evolve with the technologies and methods.  People can feel free to use, copy, edit and reuse for their own purposes.  Want to make a textbook?  Go ahead and start; we hope to provide ample materials over the coming months.

Local press, local planning & public meetings

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If you really want to see where things happen in development in New York, it’s at planning board meetings.  It’s where all the pieces of a development come together, in a public forum, with members of the community.  Our process is so quirky, so uniquely American: who would design a system where non-professionals volunteer board members, just local folks from the community, are the final arbiters of planning judgment?  I love it, it is such an optimistic system: it says you don’t need to be a professional, you just need to care about the place where you live.  I truly enjoy being part of that process, but unless you have some business before the board, the meetings tend to be pretty dull.  Typically, the only people who come are people who have to be there.

That’s where the local press comes in.  At most meetings there is a person taking notes, and at times, what they write becomes a front page story in the local paper, because while they may be as exciting as watching grass grow, what goes on at planning board meetings is important.  The press also serves as a witness.  Open meetings are open in name only if there is no one witnessing them.  Even cub reporters on their first assignments witness these events for a much larger community.

Further, the flow of information can be two-way.  Once, when reviewing an application for a wireless facility, we discovered that the applicant neglected to mention that they were working with a neighboring community to place another facility there.  Their application required such disclosure, but we only learned about this omission because a reporter who worked both beats asked the obvious question: are both these towers needed to fill the gap or can it be accomplished with just one?

With the consolidation of the newspaper industry, not all communities where I work still have local press coming to planning board meetings, and this is a tragic loss for the process, and may be a threat to how our planning system functions in New York.  Is a public meeting open, if that meeting is not witnessed by anyone?  Of course it is legally, but in practice, is a public meeting with no members of the public attending so different than a closed meeting?  There are minutes, but the completeness of written minutes varies tremendously from community to community; some are transcripts, while others not much more than a record of agenda items and actions taken.  Local cable TV is now bringing the Planning Board meeting into some of our homes.  But, again, if it’s no one’s job to pay attention, will we?

In my opinion, the local press fulfills a critical role in our planning system.  It’s their job to pay attention and distill a two-hour meeting down to a column that takes two minutes to read.  Without them I think we’d have to reexamine our way of planning in New York, as I believe they are a necessary part of open meetings and an informed society.  Sure, I sometimes cringe when I read an article that focuses on the tangential and neglects the central issue, but that attention is surely better than no attention at all, which without the local press, is what could happen.

Defining a Scenic Protection Overlay

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I have had the good fortune of working with the Town of Amenia in Dutchess County to help them redraw the Scenic Protection Overlay (SPO) found in their zoning ordinance.  We live in an area of exceptional scenic quality and many Towns in our region have adopted some kind of regulation designed to preserve their scenic qualities.  The most common methods you’ll see are simple: some kind of ridgeline protection or regulations that cover areas of the highest elevation.  We looked at these in Amenia but then considered, what makes this Town of such exceptional scenic quality?

Flint Hill Road, looking south, northwest Amenia
Clark Hill Road, eastern Amenia

Yes, the hills and highest areas are important, but it’s also the working lands that give the area not only scenic qualities but help to define its character.  The people of the Town live in hamlets and scattered houses in a working landscape.

The Oblong Valley, eastern Amenia,

Some, but not much of the Town can be considered a natural landscape, primarily, it’s a landscape that people have worked for hundreds of years and developed into productive farmland.  Its scenic quality is enhanced through the active use of the land, and the local agricultural economy, which is varied.  Along with field crops, you have several horse farms, dairy and specialty cattle.  Some folks have fields full of goats, and at least one gentleman keeps emus.

Emu in field in south central Amenia

The prior SPO drew the boundaries solely by identifying areas that could be seen from three or more scenic viewpoints.  [These scenic views were identified back in the 1980s when NYS was defining the Scenic Areas of Statewide Significance.  This corner of Dutchess County was considered for a SASS but for whatever reason, one was never designated here.]  What this meant in practice, however, since there were many (~50) scenic viewpoints, is that the highest elevations were covered because they are the most visible, but most of the farmland in the lower elevations was not covered.

Smithfield Valley, northwestern Amenia

This means that in the photographs you see here, most of the forested hills you see are in the Town’s SPO, while the farms and working lands in the foreground are largely outside the SPO.

This is an ongoing project, and the final method has not yet been selected by the Town, but all methods currently under consideration use a hybrid of covering the most visible land regardless of use, while also covering the most visible farmland.  More on this topic and the how the final SPO was drawn and, hopefully, adopted soon.

Flint Hill Road, looking west

Augmented Reality

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As a technology guy, I’m always keeping my eye out for exciting technologies that have the potential to change things.

Ten years ago I thought that visualization and virtual world technologies taken from computer gaming was the way forward in physical planning and design review.  Instead of looking at a rendering, or a photosimulation, or even an animation, people would instead walk through their future as one would playing a first-person shooter game, except, of course, without the rocket-launcher[1].  While there have been some great examples of applications of these technologies, they are still far, far from the norm.

Nevertheless, the latest thing I have my eye on is Augmented Reality.  I mean, why use your computer to walk through the virtual world of the future you’re planning, when you can actually get out and walk the streets yourself and “see” what the future would look like while you’re out there.  Technically, this is now possible.

Here’s a newsy overview of Augmented Reality.

Here is a presentation of an actual technology that is (kinda) workable.

In the past, physically immersive environments have had extremely limited applications and were most often seen at universities.  About six years ago we worked with researchers from Penn State to provide them our model of Lower Manhattan for their Computer Aided Virtual Environment (CAVE) so that they could allow people to walk up Greenwich Street while in State College, PA.

A real person inside a virutal model of Lower Manhattan, circa 2006

It was a huge exercise, involving all kinds of gadgets and goggles, all very cool to the technology geek in me, but also completely impractical considering the way planning and design are done.

So imagine a world where you have a hand-held device, like an iPad.  The device is spatially aware: it knows where it is in space and knows its orientation.  That becomes your virtual camera into the 3D model of your development or rezoning proposal.  When you move in real life, you move in the 3D model, and your screen changes to show how the development would appear from that location.  Everything is online so you can have anyone with the device download the app and walk the proposal.  If you’ve ever been out to a development site, big or little, you know how difficult it is to relate the plans to the ground, even for professionals.  With Augmented Reality you’re instantly beyond that, beyond plans and maps, with a proposal that can be seen and evaluated from a human perspective.

3D model of a proposed development, you can walk around it, see it from the street, in this case even go inside . . .

Augmented Reality is so radically different from the way proposals are evaluated (plan, elevation, rendering/photosimulation) that the bar to general use for this technology is set very high, but we occasionally encounter the unusual client who’s looking at doing something big, something new, where this technology might have a real application.  I haven’t found the great success story with a planning application of augmented reality, but I’m hoping folks who do will share it.  Follow @augmentedreal on Twitter for up to date news from the research community.

[1] Actually, sometimes the rocket launcher may be useful in expressing an opinion on poor design: kind of like the mythical Facebook dislike button.

The disconnect between what we can do, and what is asked of us

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When I first heard the concept of what would become CommunityViz back in 1996(!) I found it absolutely compelling.  The idea was to make a modeling system where you could see the change your urban models were predicting as if you were looking out your window.  For most of their existence urban models produced numbers: numbers of people, jobs, households, etc. aggregated by census tracts or Traffic Analysis Zones so that we could run our travel demand models.   Adding 3D visual simulation to real urban modeling was a huge deal—a paradigm shift.  Urban models had been around as long as we’ve had computers, but they never matched the visualization of growth with the data they produced; maps and graphs, yes, but buildings and streets, no.  The promise of CommunityViz: matching urban modeling with visual simulation and policy simulation and impact analysis.  Wow!  And they wanted me to help do this.  What an opportunity!  Here is the video we created in 1996 to describe the concept.  Still looks very cool.

Let me say that CommunityViz is a great tool, but it never quite became what it set out to be.  Sure there were technical difficulties of which I know all too well, but that was not and is not the major impediment to its wide spread use even today.  Planners, whether you be a quant, gearhead, policy wonk or a planitect now have a host of new tools available at very reasonable costs, including CommunityViz, but really we have disturbingly little call for them.

There, I said it.  Blasphemy! Especially for a guy who spends an enormous amount of time and money keeping up on new tools.  It’s been three years now since I’ve been in my own practice, and probably the biggest surprise for me after many years of pushing the envelope and trying new things, is how much of what we do in planning (at least in New York State) is driven by 1) environmental reviews, and 2) routine, tradition & local laws.

Triggering SEQR (New York’s State Environmental Quality Review) is not something that is taken lightly by any community.  In short, any discretionary action taken by the gov’t must consider the environmental impacts of the action.  If it’s not a big deal, you make a negative declaration and you’re done.  But if you have the potential to negatively impact the environment (defined broadly) you’ve got to do an environmental review, and most environmental reviews cost more money than anyone wants to spend.  This keeps communities from thinking big, or even thinking medium.  When NYC shut down portions of Broadway to traffic many people were scratching their head: How did the City do that?  The environmental review should have taken at least a year and probably much more, yet the City went from idea to implementation in a few short months.  Here’s how: Officially, the street closures are temporary measures.  You’ll notice that there is no new curbing or bollards set into the pavement.  It’s all planters, painted pavement, boulders, tables and chairs, all stuff that can be removed in a day, and temporary actions don’t trigger SEQR.    So now we design our projects not to be the best they can be, but to avoid SEQR?  Apparently so, in some cases.

But probably a bigger issue to the acceptance of new technologies is simple routine, tradition & local laws.  We do things a certain way because that’s the way we’ve always done them, and those traditions, more often than not are prescribed by local laws, many implemented generations ago.  When you make a submission to a planning board, you are submitting pieces of paper that will be distributed to the planning board members for review, and they’re the same pieces of paper your grandfather submitted in 1970.  A plan:

A plan for a townhouse development in NJ

And an elevation:

Elevations for the townhouse development in NJ

And maybe a rendering that they can also use for the marketing brochure.  But if you submit a CD with an animation, or a website, or any kind of digital media, they might accept it, they might not, but it is certainly outside the requirements for submission, and unless you show it when you appear before the board, no one will look at it.  So if you’re an applicant going before a board, why should you bother doing anything extra?  Sometimes, if you think you have a steep hill to climb in getting your approval, you’ll go that extra mile and do something like rendering an animation, but if you don’t have to, most don’t.

This inertia makes what happened in Glen Cove in December 2009 so very, very interesting.  They adopted the Visual Simulation Ordinance:

In short, Glen Cove now requires that larger projects prepare a visual simulation showing their project either in photosimulation or in real-time simulation, and they require that submissions to the planning board not only include paper, but digital files in DXF/DWG and SKP formats.  The City is accepting these submissions and is slowly building a 3D digital database for their community.  For those familiar with the development and approval processes, what they’re doing in Glen Cove is absolutely revolutionary.  For those familiar with technology, we’re simply welcoming Glen Cove to the 21st Century.

The real impediment to the realization of technology in planning is not the technology.  Back when CommunityViz was conceived, we needed new technologies, but we certainly have some fantastic technologies now.  What we really need is a legal and regulatory environment that welcome, encourage, and even require such technologies, and without that kind of environment, there will remain a disconnect between what we can do, and what is asked of us.

So take a look at what’s going on in Glen Cove, talk up their Visual Simulation Ordinance and maybe we can welcome more of our local governments to the 21st Century, and we can apply some of these awesome technologies more broadly than we can ever do now.

In the Service of Others

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Lee Molyneaux recently retired from the City of Kingston Planning Board after 23 years, serving most of that time as the Board’s Chair.

On Monday March 7th I had the pleasure of joining Lee, his family, and about 50 of his fans at a wonderful dinner held in his honor to thank him for his years of service.  As anyone who appeared before his Board could tell you, he exhibited great respect for the process, the people with whom he served, and especially for the applicants and others who appeared before his Board.  He treated everyone with the same dignity and respect regardless of their position or reason to appear.

Lee Molyneaux

Lee’s story is an example of why our system of planning functions.  It works because people like Lee step up to help, to give back, because they care enough to make their communities better for themselves, and their neighbors; it only works with a civic citizenry.

Many people don’t realize that the American system of planning is nearly unique in the world.  In America, and specifically New York, our system requires that we have local residents like Lee making the important land use decisions in their community, decisions that they literally have to live with.

Lee’s day-job requires him to dangle 18 feet above the street in a bucket truck fixing traffic signals.  His replacement as Chair, Wayne Platte, works for the Kingston fire department.  They aren’t planners, engineers, policy wonks, or design professionals.  When you step back and look at it, our system of planning is incredibly optimistic: It not only assumes that citizens with day-jobs are willing and able to make the important decisions about the future of their community, but that they will do it freely as volunteers, without expectation of reward, other than the thanks of their neighbors.

America has an exceptional culture of generosity.  As a people, we give generously, and as a group, planning board members give more to the betterment of our communities than most of us.

Lee Molyneaux recently retired from the City of Kingston Planning Board after 23 years, serving most of that time as the Board’s Chair.

On Monday March 7th I had the pleasure of joining Lee, his family, and about 50 of his fans at a wonderful dinner held in his honor to thank him for his years of service to his community.As anyone who appeared before his Board could tell you, he exhibited great respect for the process, the people with whom he served, and especially for the applicants and others who appeared before his Board.He treated everyone with same dignity and respect regardless of their position or reason to appear.

Lee’s story is an example of why our system of planning functions.It works because people like Lee step up to help, to give back, because they care enough to make their community better for themselves, and their neighbors; it only works because of a civic citizenry.

Many people don’t realize that our system of planning is nearly unique in the world.In America, and specifically New York, our system requires that we have local residents like Lee making the important land use decisions in their community, decisions that they quite literally have to live with.

Lee’s day-job requires him to dangle 18 feet above the street in a bucket truck fixing traffic signals.His replacement as Chair, Wayne Platte, works for the Kingston fire department.They aren’t planners, engineers, policy wonks, or design professionals.When you step back and look at it, our system of planning is the most optimistic system imaginable: It not only assumes that citizens with day-jobs are willing and able to make the important decisions about the future of their community, but that they will do it freely as volunteers, without expectation of reward, other than the thanks of their neighbors.

America has an exceptional culture of generosity.As a people, we give generously, and as a group, planning board members give more than the rest of us.Thanks for the years of service Lee.Thanks for stepping into some big shoes Wayne, and thanks to every planning board member who answers the call to serve.

Misty watercolor memories . . .

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In my last post I stated that I’m not an artist.  This took at least one person by surprise since much of my firm’s work is visual, she assumed that I have some kind of artistic bent.  Not a bad assumption since I work in a field where many can bring out a pencil and instantly sketch out their ideas.  When they do that and then hand the pencil to me, I want to say, “Yeah, I never learned how to use one of those.”  Instead I say, “No, I think you captured it perfectly.” :-)

To me, our visual work is about data: CAD plans, elevations, materials, grading, landscape plans all merged together into an honest representation of the future.  We (usually) don’t design it, but we can evaluate the design of others and tell you what it will all look like and its impacts, so you can decide if it’s what you want.  I appreciate a beautiful watercolor rendering used to express and idea or design intent, but in most cases that’s simply not good enough for decision-making.  I like the starkness of photorealism.  A good watercolor artist can make a strip mall and parking lot look beautiful.  I have no idea how they do that, but they do.

Back in 2004, I was part of a team that produced several dozen photosimulations showing zoning build-out of the rezoning of the Hudson Yards on the west side of Manhattan.  If you’re not familiar with it, the Hudson Yards rezoning turns this low-rise industrial area into Midtown West, and includes some of the highest zoning densities found in Manhattan.

So when we’re 95% of the way done with the photosimulations, we got a call that told us our client’s representative–who I’m not going to name–didn’t like the way the photosimulations looked and that he was going to recommend they be replaced by watercolor renderings.  Concerned, we produced watercolor versions of the photosimulations using the watercolor function of our image processing software.  No good.  The word from upstairs was the photosimulations we produced made the buildings look too big.

Of course our response was, but the buildings ARE big because the proposed zoning includes the highest density zoning district in Manhattan, and that allows for very, very big buildings!  The photosimulations show those very big buildings in all their . . . bigness.  As they should!  But no.  The photosimulations were banished and they were replaced with watercolor renderings:

Mid-block watercolor from Hudson Yards EIS

This is supposed to show the mid-block open space between 9th and 10th Avenues, which is now an open railroad cut.  Look at all that open space!  And the buildings they just seem to fade into the background . . .

Simulation of midblock open space

But when the size of the open space is shown with in a verifiable simulation that shows the actual size of buildings that could be built under the rezoning, the perspective changes, and that open space seems rather modest.

Every experienced planner has faced some kind of professional disappointment during their career, and our experience with the Hudson Yards remains at the top of my list.  The work we did was acknowledged to be accurate and correct, but did not follow the accepted narrative.  Since neither SEQR nor CEQR require photosimulations, and since the Scoping Document hadn’t yet been finalized, the decision to go with the watercolors in place of the photosimulations was completely legit, but at the same time that decision turned the requirement to disclose impacts in the EIS on its head.

I believe that there were, and still are, a lot of great reasons to rezone the Hudson Yards, and to rezone the area with very high densities.  Heck, with the talk of extending the #7 Subway into Secaucus, there are even more great reasons for Midtown West.  But you’ve got to be honest about it, and pitching dozens of verifiable, accurate, reliable photosimulations and replacing them with three watercolor renderings was not the way to do it.

Even though this happened seven years ago, whenever I see a beautiful watercolor rendering of a project or proposal, I look at it with suspicion.  I know that there are other easier, cheaper and more accurate ways of doing a rendering, which leaves me wondering, why do a watercolor?

I still have all the sims we did, but here are a few of them.  Double-click to see the image at a larger size.

33rd Street and 10th Avenue, existing and build-out conditions
Looking up 11th Ave from 27th St.
View from 34th St looking east.