VIEWPOINT - CUDC Quarterly 1:2 - Winter 2001

A Simple Question
Bryan Wahl
Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio

A colleague recently asked me if I had given up architecture and "turned urban designer" due to the fact that I had taken a position with the UDC and, more particularly, had begun working with a computer program called GIS (Geographic Information System). This application is more associated with social science and planning than with architecture, but it’s also incredibly helpful with some aspects of the urban design process. It seemed a little strange that a computer application should define the boundary between two professions, but even more troubling to me was the conviction in my colleague’s voice as he asked his question.

At the time I responded defensively that I am an architect, not an urban designer. After all, I reasoned, I just received a master’s in architecture from Kent State University (though I did spend my last two years of school focusing on urban design). Later I realized that I spoke too quickly and needed to give more thought to the meaning of this question. The distinction between the allied professions of architecture and urban design isn’t so easy to interpret.

Throughout my undergraduate education, I was taught to focus on the individual building, with minimal attention to the larger urban whole. The same thing held true in the firms where I have worked. Whenever the topic of urban design came up, I was looked at as a sort of alien life-form. My architect colleagues would ask, "Why would you ever want to do that?" I would say "Because UD is where the real design takes place." I didn’t understand why there would be such a tension between two discplines that share a common goal of improving the built environment.

That tension comes from both directions. Just the other day, a colleague at the Urban Design Center commented on a particular structure, "Why would an architect ever design a building like this?" He seemed to have in mind a set of standards that related only to urban design issues, without perhaps taking into account all of the other issues that the architect had to consider. While most architects have difficulty understanding what it means to design within a context that includes nonphysical issues, most urban designers have similar difficulty understanding the design of individual buildings as solutions to particular formal and structural problems. Both shape the world and have an impact on people, but both could do better if they realized that both kinds of thinking are needed to sustain the built environment.

In many ways, I am coming to understand that both kinds of design are fundamentally the same. The urban designer and the architect both engage in similar types of problem solving, working within a range of constraints to solve particular design tasks. The biggest difference is that the urban designer deals with a broader array of constraints and variables and can’t be quite as certain of the final outcome--or at least not as certain as architects like to be.

It was obvious that my architect colleague was critical of me for "turning urban designer," whatever that means. I’d like to think that I am designing the way an architect does but in a broader arena. I have training in architecture accompanied by an education in urban design, which allows me to bring a design sensibility to the larger context with an appreciation of the individual building. As a designer I am a collaborator between the the fields of urban design and architecture, and such a collaboration can only yield a better outcome.