Planning

“Barton Myers is an avowed urbanist—a self-described radical in his early advocacy of old-fashioned qualities like density, mixed-use, and contextual planning in the late 1960s when that fundamentally conservative position was considered counter-culture. Myers’s urban manifesto was codified in “Vacant Lottery,” the title of the Design Quarterly issue co-edited by Myers and Canadian architect and educator George Baird in 1978. The term lived on long past the journal’s circulation cycle as both an urban infill strategy and an acknowledgement of the ceding of city planning responsibility to the “lottery” of private developers’ proposals. What is fascinating about Vacant Lottery is that it defined themes that can be consistently traced through Myers’ urban planning work from the 1960s on. These themes were manifested in projects of such a wide range of scales, programs, and clients that one must understand the fundamental impulses of each project in order to understand their commonalities.

Myers’ guidelines for a new kind of urban redevelopment now sound like widely-accepted truths—the motherhood and apple pie of planning—to a contemporary generation schooled in the principles of new urbanism. They were, however, revolutionary when first articulated in the 1970s. He proposed low scale infill developments instead of always building to maximum heights; the combination of old and new buildings; useable open spaces; a deliberate mix of styles that encouraged preservation and reuse of older buildings; mixed use and variable scale buildings for neighborhoods and the avoidance of single-zone areas.”

-- Excerpted from the essay by Natalie Shivers in Barton Myers: Works of Architecture and Urbanism