Regional and Urban Design Committee

Design Review - Another Hurdle or a Step towards Excellence?

  • 1.  Design Review - Another Hurdle or a Step towards Excellence?

    Posted 01-23-2015 03:58 PM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    Friday, January 23, 2015

    Design Review - Hurdle, Safeguard or a Step towards Excellence?

    Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. (H.L. Mencken, the Libido for the Ugly, 1927)
    Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist. (Vitruvius, 10 Books on Architecture)
    That good design adds value to buildings and, on the urban scale, to entire cities, is an increasingly popular insight, yet, not a new one. Design review as part of development approval has been around for decades, a testament to the importance of good design, despite Mencken's spiteful observation. (One of the oldest review committees may be the Vieux Carre Commission, established in New Orleans in 1936, admittedly for mostly historic preservation, a subset of design review).
    In Baltimore the importance of design is recognized with the clumsily named Urban Design and Architectural Review Panel (UDARP) whose predecessors go all the way back to 1964.  Other cities such as Seattle or Philadelphia (2012) started design review much later. The questions this article tries to explore are: Can good design be ordained or achieved through advisory peer review? Are those design reviews effective or are they just a fig leaf, or even worse, an impediment?


    We will skip over the deeper questions such
    Design Review in Baltimore: Mixed use tower at the
    Inner Harbor, review of massing models (photo: Philipsen)
    as what design is, what is meant by good design or aesthetics, what the government rights are for regulating design in the context of free speech or what the delineation between urban design and architecture is. All these questions bedevil not only drafters of the development codes that establish design review but can get in the way of any given review itself. Instead of a scholarly ....
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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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