lone_pedestrian

Ed. I got in, now I just have to figure out how to pay for it.

I meant to post this earlier but you know what they say if you want something done ask a busy person. On re-reading it I realized it is related to this blog but since I got so far off-topic with the LP I did not bring it up in my application. Here we go:

I grew up surrounded by a history that I absorbed but never truly appreciated until I was an adult. One of the last working farms in Nassau County was a mile from my home. My school, our church, the pharmacy, the hardware store and the deli were well within walking distance even for a child. The silver commuter train that whisked me into the City was twenty five minutes away on foot and 10 minutes away by bicycle. I grew up in the kind of environment that New Urbanists strain to create out of whole cloth.

Only when I began to explore my interest in the history of architecture and planning at New York University did I come to truly appreciate how much of my upbringing was made possible by the old Urbanism of the place I lived. Since then I have consciously sought out places that allow me to travel freely on foot and by bicycle including Astoria, Queens and Boulder, Colorado. My appreciation of the kind of independence and freedom such places provide is the direct result of the combination of my formative experiences and my academic pursuits.

For several years I struggled personally and academically and now that I have the ability to produce quality work I wish to return to school. I believe my experiences provide an "on the ground" perspective of what it means to live in an historic neighborhood without necessarily being aware of the specifics of that history. When proposing adaptive re-use or preservation projects to private stakeholders or to the public I would be able to tap into what they value about their neighborhoods and workplaces. After all, I came to value my freedom of movement and familiarity with my neighbors well before I understood that these were, in part, a function of urban design.

I want to devote myself to the study and practice of historic preservation because I believe that how we choose to construct our environment and live in it has far ranging cultural and ecological consequences. The most energy efficient, accessible and culturally significant places are those that already exist and not those that require new land and new materials to construct. My primary interests lay in the study of waterfront areas in the United States. Being on the edges where two radically different systems meet makes them both complicated and highly significant. Such areas have gone through several periods of momentous change from the historic transition from sail to steam to the much more recent shift from industrial to residential, cultural and recreational uses. I am interested in how such places are perceived and what factors drive people to consider a site historic and worthy of preservation. New York City provides numerous examples of the sites I am interested in and Pratt Institute is ideally located for me to explore such issues.

In The Modulor Le Corbusier writes "Architecture is judged by the eyes that see, by the head that turns and the legs that walk." It is upon reading passages like this that he manages to move me despite my disagreements with him. In all that I have done, and at times failed to do, I never stopped turning my head, moving my feet and learning all I could about the world through which I traveled. Using my experiences and the skills I would acquire in your Historic Preservation program, I believe I can help positively re-form our built environment and improve the ways we all live.

So Far Today Anyway

via 3 Quarks Daily which you might want to be reading, like, you know, daily.

I have some issues with this gentleman (www.kunstler.com), a little cranky and paranoid but frequently an interesting read. He makes the entire topic seem wacky instead of being as relevant as it should be. Frankly I disagree with his recent paean to New Urbanists. Their building codes are unnecessarily restrictive and frequently elitist as a result. People should be free to decorate their property however they wish, the only thing zoning codes should address is street layout, building footprints, uses and open public spaces. No historic neighborhood has houses that look exactly the same, there are variations due to personal taste and the passage of time. It is those things that give a neighborhood character otherwise you will be living in Main Street USA or worse.

My trip to San Francisco has inspired me to look at my carbon load, as it is called (no giggling in the back rows). All this plane travel supposedly puts me in the average or just below average category. If it were not for that I would be very far below average. It made me wonder about the environmental impact of train travel but I could not find any definitive information. It is so infrequent in the United States that they have not even bothered to account for it but if you are going to make the argument that alternative forms of transportation are better then you should have some numbers to back it up.