PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

Powelton Village has every reason to top the list of Philadelphia's most desirable neighborhoods. Let's start with location. As the first residential area west of Center City, it is a brisk 15-minute walk from downtown. It boasts some of the best transit connections in town, a rich stock of Italianate villas and Victorian twins, and postcard views of the skyline. Geographically, it occupies the same urban niche as Georgetown and Cambridge.

A building that runs on half the usual amount of energy? How ho-hum. These days, most new construction in Philadelphia can do that without even trying, simply by adhering to the U.S. Green Building Council's basic LEED standards. What would be really interesting is if someone put up a major building that consumed no energy at all.

Anne Tyng, a pioneering woman architect whose ideas about geometry influenced Louis Kahn's buildings and who later had a child with him, died Tuesday, Dec. 27, in Greenbrae, Calif. She was 91, said her daughter, Alexandra, who lives outside Philadelphia.

I set out the other day to find the outer edge of the Philadelphia suburbs and ended up in a Chester County subdivision called Oakcrest. Located 45 miles west of Center City, just outside Coatesville, Oakcrest has a network of immaculately paved streets, glossy utility boxes, and an active sales office. What it does not have is a lot of houses.

Family Court may go down in history as the ultimate stealth building. Now under construction at 15th and Arch Streets, the scandal-tainted state courthouse was initially outsourced to a private developer and designed in secret.

This has not been a good year for despots. North Korea's Kim Jong Il met his maker, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is under arrest, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad faces a future that looks rocky. But in Philadelphia, City Council members get to rule their districts with an iron hand - at least for now.

Lenfest Hall, the new dormitory and rehearsal hall for the Curtis Institute of Music, exhibits all the familiar tropes of a building by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: the square windows, the ghosts of classical columns, the bold typography, the contrast of an overscale design element (a bay window, this time) with Lilliputian doors. Yet, technically speaking, Lenfest Hall is not a Venturi and Scott Brown building.

Was it only three years ago that Radar Magazine crowned Drexel University the "ugliest campus" in a roundup of American colleges? The charge seemed a bit unfair then, even if Market Street was still ablaze with Drexel's orange-brick relics. But it's clearly wrong today.

There are signs, ever so faint, that Philadelphia is starting to build housing again. Two companies just went head-to-head for the right to develop a high-visibility corner at Broad and South Streets. Northern Liberties is awash in orange zoning notices, just as it was in the boom years. A developer even wants to build a mid-rise condo building in quaint Chestnut Hill, on Magarity Ford's Germantown Avenue property.

It's as much a Philadelphia landmark as the statue of William Penn on City Hall, though hardly something that aspires to be an emblem of greatness. Is there anyone who has traveled the south Delaware waterfront and not marveled at the four-story concrete skeleton that lurks behind the RiverView shopping center on Columbus Boulevard, its naked columns flouting both gravity and civic decency?

Besides being a busy commercial strip, a popular commuter route, and the boundary between Philadelphia and Lower Merion, City Avenue is a living, breathing, controlled experiment on how clashing policies affect two hoary American tribes - city-dwellers and suburbanites.

When Philadelphia's big real estate developers find a neighborhood they like, they really dig in. Bart Blatstein has made himself the virtual lord of Northern Liberties with factory-style lofts and hip hangouts. Now Carl Dranoff is firmly on his way to becoming the boss of South Broad Street.

Nothing separates architects from the rest of humanity like concrete. Architects will go into raptures over its tough, tactile quality. But among the general public, who tend to associate the material with no-frills highways and bad public housing, concrete buildings evoke a visceral dislike. Maybe attitudes would be different if more people encountered Doylestown's Mercer Museum, a quirky French chateau formed entirely of concrete, window frames and roof included.

NEW YORK - It's easy to find the new entrance to the High Line park. Just follow the stream of people in skinny jeans and espadrilles heading west from the subways around Penn Station. The parade becomes a throng as you near 10th Avenue, once a lonely outpost where the blocks were lined with trucks and streetwalkers and not much else.

In 1960, Philadelphia peered into a crystal ball and tried to divine how the city would look 25 years in the future. The exercise in clairvoyance produced the city's first Comprehensive Plan, an amazing, 375-page document that showed the rough outlines of what would become Penn Center, Market East Station, and the revitalized Society Hill neighborhood.

TICKETCITY Houston 30 Penn St. 14 FIESTA Okla. St. 33 Stanford 30 ROSE Oregon 45 Wisconsin 38

Here's a little thought experiment to get you steamed: What if the celebrated urban planner Edmund Bacon had embraced the prevailing ideology of the 1960s and leveled Society Hill, replacing its blocks of outmoded, colonial-era townhouses with sleek modern high-rises for middle-class families? Would Philadelphia be a livelier, more successful place today?

NEW YORK - If Americans were certain about anything in the terrible days after the World Trade Center towers were flattened before our eyes, it was this: There would be a memorial here to the dead, and it would acknowledge the footprints of the two vanished skyscrapers that dominated the skyline for 28 years.

How small can you make a park and still have it serve as a civilized refuge from the teeming city? Philadelphia is about to find out.