City Cycling
Detroit: City of the Future
Henry Ford poses in the first car he made. In his 1922 autobiography, he wrote: “Industry will decentralize. There is no city that would be rebuilt as it is, were it destroyed – which fact is in itself a confession of our real estimate of cities. . . . The modern city has been prodigal, it is today bankrupt, and tomorrow it will cease to be.” At the time, Ford was building his vast River Rouge plant miles outside Detroit.

Frank Lloyd Wright and family escape by car to a new home in the Arizona Desert in 1928. Henry Ford had an ally in Wright, who wrote in his 1954 book, The Natural House:
When selecting a site for your house, there is always the question of how close to the city you should be and that depends on what kind of slave you are. The best thing to do is go as far as you can get. . . . The cost of transportation has been greatly decreased by way of the smaller car. In this way, decentralization has found aid, and the easier the means of egress gets to be, the further you can go out from the city. . . . Clients have asked me: "How far should we go out, Mr. Wright?" I say: "Just ten times as far as you think you ought to go." So my suggestion would be to go just as far as you can go - and go soon and go fast.
Wright’s advice meshed with a national narrative of Americans escaping the constraints of Europe into an ever-expanding frontier. The last we hear from Huck Finn, he’s planning to “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.” The architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1965 essay, “A Home is Not a House,” noted Americans' preference for the outdoors over built environments, even citing the space program: “America’s monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors – the porch, the terrace, Whitman’s rail-laced plains, Kerouac’s infinite road, and now, the Great Up There.” The place we've arrived seems to say that the drama and wonder of expansion were all in the journey.

State of the Union, a series by photographer Gregg Segal poses re-enactors at Civil War battle and encampment sites that are now parking lots and subdivisions. Traveling on assignment for magazines, Segal was disturbed by America’s growing sameness: "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape." His images seem to ask whether this is the soul of a nation Americans fought and died for, whether we're more the children of Abraham Lincoln or Henry Ford. What their banal settings so desperately lack can be found in the place the car first left behind: Detroit has history, variety, monumentality, significant architecture and fuel for the imagination.

Henry Ford’s 1904 Ford Piquette Plant may be Detroit’s, and America’s, most influential building; not for its own style, which is that of a nineteenth-century textile mill, but for the suburban world of malls, office parks and subdivisons it spawned, a nation of car-secondary landscapes and buildings. It was the first factory built by Ford and the birthplace of the Model T, which made car-ownership affordable to the average American and put the nation on wheels. The Piquette Avenue Industrial Historic District recognizes the significance of this building and its neighbors, early car plants that still employed 50,000 workers as recently as the 1950s when Detroit’s population peaked at 1.8 million. Today, Detroit's population is back to its pre-Ford 700,000.

Two blocks up Piquette Avenue, architect Albert Kahn’s 1921 Fisher Body Plant stands unrestored. The seven Fisher brothers’ company developed enclosed car bodies, adapting the automobile from fair weather touring vehicle to everyday transportation. Kahn is sometimes called the builder of Detroit for his many and often huge projects in the city, including the Packard Plant, now one of Detroit's signature ruins. It’s as hard to begrudge the Fisher Plant’s evocative decay as the colorful nature erupting through the sidewalk nearby. Detroit offers many such opportunities to experience the sublime; not chocolate cake sublime but Romantic Movement sublime, the pleasurable terror felt in the face of dwarfing enormity and nature's mortality-mocking permanence. Add the pathos, mystery and picturesque decay, and it's a strong brew. Detroit is now world famous for its much-photographed ruins. Rather than demolish them, the city might exploit their potential to stimulate tourism.

Unlike the red brick Ford Piquette Plant, Kahn's Fisher Plant is stripped of all conventional architectural decorum. He had begun using reinforced concrete to this then-radical effect in his 1905 design for Detroit's Packard Plant. Called "daylight factories” for their naturally-lit work floors, these buildings maximized windows and open interior space, paring structure to a minimum and pushing the limits of functionalism. Their exposed concrete structural frames weren't hidden under the sort of brick or stone skin into which stylizing architects would typically invest much of their effort, often to simulate a Renaissance palazzo or other borrowed model. In Kahn's industrial buildings, structure and skin were one, function was honestly expressed, integrity trumped artifice, and a powerful purity of form emerged. As Reyner Banham detailed in his book, A Concrete Atlantis, European architects were influenced by grainy photos of just such American factories in trade publications. Le Corbusier's seminal 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, reproduced these photos and held American factories up as models. The honest qualities of Kahn's plants would become articles of faith for modern architecture from the Bauhaus through the International Style and to this day. The source of this DNA lies scattered among the ruins of Detroit. If the Bauhaus could design its Dessau school in imitation of a daylight factory, might not Albert Kahn's factories one day house design schools?
For all its famed blight, this too is Detroit. The 1928 Fisher Building, “Detroit’s largest art object,” was a real estate investment of the Fisher brothers of "Body by Fisher" fame after they sold most of their coach works interest to GM for staggering sums. It was designed by architect Joseph Nathaniel French, working within Albert Kahn's office. Despite Kahn's role in launching architecture's unornamented modern movement, he did not consider himself a modernist and held that non-utilitarian buildings should be decorated. It's tempting to envision the Fisher Building's spectacular lobby used, like Milan’s Galleria, as a public living room.

The lobby of Detroit's 1929 Guardian Building is a fanfare for the common office worker.

Designed by architect Wirt C. Rowland, The Guardian Building is the sort of exuberant jazz-age skyscraper that largely defines older American skylines. The 1920s building boom coincided with Art Deco’s moment and was followed by a construction drought that lasted through decades of depression and war, leaving the style distinctly the face of the modern American city in its unbridled youth. Detroit has examples of national importance.

Glass-faced row houses designed by Mies van der Rohe look out on a nature in Detroit's Lafayette Park. Most architects would be surprised to learn that Detroit has in this project the world’s largest collection of buildings by Mies, one of the profession's two or three most revered twentieth-century practitioners. Lafayette Park is also considered the major built work of urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had earlier taught at the Bauhaus under Mies's leadership. Mies closed the Bauhaus in 1933 rather than capitulate to Nazi demands for the removal of Hilberseimer and another left-wing teacher, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Lafayette Park is a rare case of highly successful urban renewal; a vibrant, affordable community with a low vacancy rate more than a half century after its completion. (A renovated 1400 square foot three-bedroom row house was advertised earlier this year for $159,000.) The 2012 book, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies, looks at Lafayette Park through the lives and words of its residents, with many photos of the maximized social freedom and variety of living allowed by Mies’s less-is-more minimalism. Residents range from one who has never heard of Mies (“Is he a good architect?”) to one who can describe in detail the personal and professional relationships between Mies and his collaborators on the project. All praise Mies’s open sense of space. Lafayette Park's presence in Albert Kahn's Detroit is poetic justice. From the 1940s on, Mies's work was strongly influenced by Kahn's steel-framed industrial buildings.

As recorded by Kahn scholar Grant Hildebrand, Mies's student Myron Goldsmith recalled him poring over the designer George Nelson's recent book on Kahn's work in 1940. Mies had immigrated to America in 1938 to head the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute, now Illinois Institute of Technology. His chief assistant at the time, Gene Summers, has said Mies "was particularly impressed with the automotive architect-builder in Detroit by the name of Albert Kahn." By this time, Kahn had moved from his pioneering use of reinforced concrete to working with steel structure, and he was about to send a second wave of influence through modern architecture.

Resemblance alone speaks for Kahn's impact on Mies. At left, Kahn's extension to the La Grange Diesel Plant, as pictured in George Nelson's book, closely prefigures Mies's 1943 IIT Minerals and Metals Building, at right, his first construction in America. Mies's work from then on, including such iconic buildings as the Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building, would be rooted in the crystalline, steel-structure vocabulary of Kahn's factories. Lafayette Park's low-rise buildings in fact look more like a Kahn plant than conventional row houses. Kahn, who believed his stripped-down style was only suited to industrial buildings, would not have approved.

Kahn would have been appalled at this collage by Mies and his students. It appropriates a photo of Kahn's Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Plant from George Nelson's book, inserting a concert hall. The image argues for Mies's concept of universal space, liberated for any use by structurally unimpeded expanse and the absence of a use-specific received style. The idea is innately sustainable; neutral, flexible buildings are readily adapted to new uses when they outlive their original ones. As a bonus, architecture breaks free of any one prescribed use, reclaiming the timelessness and autonomy of ancient monuments. Mies's collage seems uncannily pertinent to Detroit, an entire city awaiting new use, rich with vacant factory floors, many by Albert Kahn. Proving the viability of former industrial plants as cultural settings, the Dia Art Foundation's collection has been based in a quarter-million square-foot 1929 Nabisco box printing factory in Beacon, New York, since 2003. The vast industrial setting is a critical part of the experience of the museum, helping justify an 80-minute train ride from New York City. Something similar in Detroit could add to the role of the venerable Detroit Institute of Arts in making the city an art destination.

One Woodward Avenue, completed in 1963, was the first skyscraper designed by Detroit-based Minoru Yamasaki. Although he is most famous for designing New York’s World Trade Center, Yamasaki's Detroit work has a better relationship of detail to overall scale. When America started building again after World War II, it was as a grown-up world power donning sober International Style architecture. Yamasaki provided an alternative, enlivened with decorative historical and regional influences: “There must be elements of delight, to offset the monotony of mass-produced building and to enhance the enjoyment of life.” This personal inflection keeps his Detroit buildings looking fresh today, amid their now often bland-looking International Style contemporaries.

Yamasaki’s 1964 DeRoy Auditorium at Detroit’s Wayne State University rises to a crescendo of pointed arches. The Auditorium’s top-heavy design should be balanced by its reflection in the now empty reflecting pool, itself an emblem of Detroit’s troubles. Until it’s refilled, Yamasaki’s whole is less than the sum of its parts. In fact, its only half its parts. The building shows the influence of Islamic architecture which Yamasaki first adopted for his design of the 1961 Dhahran Air Terminal Building in Saudi Arabia.

Inside the DeRoy Auditorium, the lines of Yamasaki's stair railing sketch the base of his World Trade Center towers to come. In a 2001 Slate piece, architect Laurie Kerr makes much of the towers’ implied pointed arches and Yamasaki’s description of the plaza between them as a “mecca.” She argues that the Saudi Binladen Group would have had a hand in his several Arabian projects and that Osama Bin Laden “must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality.”

With a manufacturing history dating to well before Henry Ford, Detroit has a wealth of anonymous but architecturally interesting industrial buildings that might serve art as well as industry.

A city street through a neighborhood of disappeared houses evokes a country lane. Much of Detroit now looks like this, as if to prove Henry Ford’s prediction that cities will cease to be. This photo’s belatedly replaced sidewalk corner responds to a court order that Detroit honor curb ramp requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Blocks like this are a new kind of introduction of nature into a city; not encapsulated, planned parks but swaths of green randomly marbled through the urban fabric. They might remain as a surreal cocktail of city and wilderness, or be made laboratories for experimental forms of housing supported by existing infrastructure.

Detroit presents the spectacle of a major American city returning to nature.

Piranesi’s etchings of tree-sprouting Roman ruins come to mind.

A brick house with graceful tile and stone begs to be restored. Its new roof and brickwork may buy it some time.

Tyree Guyton returned from military service to find that his old neighborhood looked like “a bomb went off.” He and his grandfather Sam Mackey began making art from abandoned houses on Heidelberg Street in 1986. Although some of the houses have been lost to arson, the Heidelberg Project continues to be an attraction and source of local pride. The attention has made the area a safer place for its residents.

Carl Nielbock came from Germany to discover his roots in Detroit, the home of his black G.I. father, and stayed. A sign outside his ornamental metalwork company, C.A.N. Art Handworks, demonstrates its stock in trade while celebrating the city whose architectural heritage the business helps restore. Unsanctioned expressions like this sign, the Heidelberg Project and Detroit's other outdoor art installations are in the American spirit of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, a national landmark. These works and the efforts of those who take it upon themselves to mow the city’s neglected parks or prune its trees give one hope for Detroit.

A brick house in Detroit' historic Corktown neighborhood is scratched with names and initials of those who waited at an adjacent streetcar stop, some of whom have returned to update their entries. The architectural visionary Lebbeus Woods wrote in his book Radical Reconstruction that "the complexity of buildings, streets and cities, built up over time and across the span of innumerable lives, can never be replaced.” The book's words and illustrations propose an alternative to demolition, which destroys the past, and restoration, which denies history's failures and reinstates the old order to blame for them. Woods' chosen principle "to create the new from the damaged old" would be well applied to Detroit. The city's historic resonance is not only irreplaceable but unavailable to competing suburban developers or practitioners of New Urbanism.

The inscribed brick house stands on a graceful, leafy block of Bagley Avenue. Henry Ford built his first car in a backyard coal shed on the street.

Ford poses with his bike in 1893. The 1890s saw the greatest boom ever in bicycle popularity, a craze boosted by technological improvements including inflatable tires. In 1896, Ford built his first car, outfitting it with bicycle tires and calling it the Quadricycle. A new boom was born. Ford’s insistence that the city would disappear made good business sense. Cities, after all, were negotiable by streetcar or bicycle. General Motors notoriously bought and decommissioned many American cities’ streetcar systems in the 1950s. This is known either as “streetcar conspiracy” or “streetcar conspiracy myth,” depending entirely on your politics. Detroit’s streetcars were sold to Mexico City, still in good enough shape to serve there for another thirty years.

Bicycles ply the Dequindre Cut, overlooked by graffitti art and one of Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park Towers. Opened in 2009, the recreational greenway was converted from a rail line originally cut into the ground to pass below crossing streets.

Streets and car traffic pass above the Dequindre Cut's cyclists and pedestrians. Historically, industrial routes similarly avoided public streets. The Australian architectural educator and bike planner Steven Fleming, in his 2012 book, Cycle Space, notes the potential of abandoned industrial rail lines and waterways, often overlaid or skirted by the public streets of later civic development, to be sewn together into vast networks of bike paths: “As a cyclist, I see parallel cities coming into focus, on industrial land, with their backs turned on those places where people drive.” The car-free streets of Detroit’s vacated residential blocks could add to the city's brownfields as a canvas for such a bike network. Detroit's less-than-walkable density puts it in a prime position to benefit from the kind of bike system Fleming envisions. This is a more important priority than it might at first seem, one with implications for job growth. Even in oil-invested, red-state Texas, major cities are creating bike lanes and bike share programs. Robin Stallings, head of the bike advocacy group Bike Texas has said: “Companies like Samsung and Google are looking at the bicycle facility infrastructure before they decide what city they're going to locate in. So this is really being driven by economics in Texas. It's not all about people seeing themselves on a bicycle, but seeing what it does for the quality of life in a city." As Frank Lloyd Wright used to say (without crediting Dorothy Parker): "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
Henry Ford argued that we’d never rebuild cities as they are. Would we accept the automobile as a new invention today? Today’s safety standards, environmental awareness, and appreciation of the social and cultural benefits of density say no. As ethicist Randy Cohen has noted: “If you introduced a transportation system in the U.S. by declaring: ‘It’ll slaughter 30,000 people a year and hospitalize ten times that number,’ it’s hard to believe it would catch on.” We tolerate cars because the world they've created over the course of a century requires them. Facebook and smartphones notwithstanding, our lives are built on the platform of Ford’s dirty and dangerous late nineteenth-century technology. Cars have certainly evolved, but even electric ones are charged by fossil fuel, and they won't make a nation of paved sprawl more sustainable.
The car wasn’t even universally embraced in Ford’s day. Technology historian Peter Norton points out that the introduction of cars to cities in particular met strong public resistance, forcing the industry to fight back; when the public branded fast drivers “joy riders,” car interests coined “jay walkers” to shift blame for street carnage onto pedestrians. Norton also notes that “America’s love affair with the car” was no one’s spontaneous observation, but a promotional catchphrase seeded in 1960s television. Auto makers and oil interests depended heavily on New York’s Robert Moses and his acolytes nationwide to muscle cities into car deference. New York’s 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, run by Moses, were largely auto industry ads for a car-based world of tomorrow. Jane Jacobs’ resistance to Moses took her from neighborhood activist to national icon. Their streets-for-cars versus streets-for-people battle, billed as the central drama of urban planning, is now slated for operatic treatment.
Detroit is a telltale worth watching. As the birthplace of the car, it was first to suffer from Ford's dream of a post-urban America. By rights, it should be first in line to become a new kind of post-Ford American city. A new streetcar line is already in construction. If there’s an afterlife for Detroit, there may be for Buffalo and other American cities loaded with our history and architectural heritage.
American cities aren’t the places to flee they once were. The sooty, overcrowded metropolis of Henry Ford’s day is now a thing of China, where people are as desperate to own cars as we once were. Americans are less shackled to cities by jobs and more likely to live in them by choice. Vishaan Chakrabarti’s compellingly illustrated 2013 book, A Country of Cities, makes an overwhelming case for the personal and national benefits of re-urbanization, a trend that he notes is already under way. The greater the number of Americans who live in cities, the healthier and wealthier we’ll all be, even those of us who don’t choose the urban option. This, and everything else Detroit has to offer, make its fate a national concern.

A wooden street lamp pointed out near the Fisher Body Plant is a small part of Detroit's irreplaceable authenticity. This ArchiTakes post and one to follow, on Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, are the product of a single 25-mile bike tour generously hosted by the author of the blog, One More Spoke, and his ebullient fiancée. Their love of Detroit, despite its hardships, was infectious. But for a missing section of pedestrian overpass handrail likely lost to scavengers, no part of the tour felt unsafe. People in Detroit greet each other when they pass. Anyone who doesn't is assumed to be visiting from New York.
Next up: Detroit's Grand Central
Detroit: City of the Future
Henry Ford poses in the first car he made. In his 1922 autobiography, he wrote: “Industry will decentralize. There is no city that would be rebuilt as it is, were it destroyed – which fact is in itself a confession of our real estimate of cities. . . . The modern city has been prodigal, it is today bankrupt, and tomorrow it will cease to be.” At the time, Ford was building his vast River Rouge plant miles outside Detroit.

Frank Lloyd Wright and family escape by car to a new home in the Arizona Desert in 1928. Henry Ford had an ally in Wright, who wrote in his 1954 book, The Natural House:
When selecting a site for your house, there is always the question of how close to the city you should be and that depends on what kind of slave you are. The best thing to do is go as far as you can get. . . . The cost of transportation has been greatly decreased by way of the smaller car. In this way, decentralization has found aid, and the easier the means of egress gets to be, the further you can go out from the city. . . . Clients have asked me: "How far should we go out, Mr. Wright?" I say: "Just ten times as far as you think you ought to go." So my suggestion would be to go just as far as you can go - and go soon and go fast.
Wright’s advice meshed with a national narrative of Americans escaping the constraints of Europe into an ever-expanding frontier. The last we hear from Huck Finn, he’s planning to “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.” The architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1965 essay, “A Home is Not a House,” noted Americans' preference for the outdoors over built environments, even citing the space program: “America’s monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors – the porch, the terrace, Whitman’s rail-laced plains, Kerouac’s infinite road, and now, the Great Up There.” The place we've arrived seems to say that the drama and wonder of expansion were all in the journey.

State of the Union, a series by photographer Gregg Segal poses re-enactors at Civil War battle and encampment sites that are now parking lots and subdivisions. Traveling on assignment for magazines, Segal was disturbed by America’s growing sameness: "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape." His images seem to ask whether this is the soul of a nation Americans fought and died for, whether we're more the children of Abraham Lincoln or Henry Ford. What their banal settings so desperately lack can be found in the place the car first left behind: Detroit has history, variety, monumentality, significant architecture and fuel for the imagination.

Henry Ford’s 1904 Ford Piquette Plant may be Detroit’s, and America’s, most influential building; not for its own style, which is that of a nineteenth-century textile mill, but for the suburban world of malls, office parks and subdivisons it spawned, a nation of car-secondary landscapes and buildings. It was the first factory built by Ford and the birthplace of the Model T, which made car-ownership affordable to the average American and put the nation on wheels. The Piquette Avenue Industrial Historic District recognizes the significance of this building and its neighbors, early car plants that still employed 50,000 workers as recently as the 1950s when Detroit’s population peaked at 1.8 million. Today, Detroit's population is back to its pre-Ford 700,000.

Two blocks up Piquette Avenue, architect Albert Kahn’s 1921 Fisher Body Plant stands unrestored. The seven Fisher brothers’ company developed enclosed car bodies, adapting the automobile from fair weather touring vehicle to everyday transportation. Kahn is sometimes called the builder of Detroit for his many and often huge projects in the city, including the Packard Plant, now one of Detroit's signature ruins. It’s as hard to begrudge the Fisher Plant’s evocative decay as the colorful nature erupting through the sidewalk nearby. Detroit offers many such opportunities to experience the sublime; not chocolate cake sublime but Romantic Movement sublime, the pleasurable terror felt in the face of dwarfing enormity and nature's mortality-mocking permanence. Add the pathos, mystery and picturesque decay, and it's a strong brew. Detroit is now world famous for its much-photographed ruins. Rather than demolish them, the city might exploit their potential to stimulate tourism.

Unlike the red brick Ford Piquette Plant, Kahn's Fisher Plant is stripped of all conventional architectural decorum. He had begun using reinforced concrete to this then-radical effect in his 1905 design for Detroit's Packard Plant. Called "daylight factories” for their naturally-lit work floors, these buildings maximized windows and open interior space, paring structure to a minimum and pushing the limits of functionalism. Their exposed concrete structural frames weren't hidden under the sort of brick or stone skin into which stylizing architects would typically invest much of their effort, often to simulate a Renaissance palazzo or other borrowed model. In Kahn's industrial buildings, structure and skin were one, function was honestly expressed, integrity trumped artifice, and a powerful purity of form emerged. As Reyner Banham detailed in his book, A Concrete Atlantis, European architects were influenced by grainy photos of just such American factories in trade publications. Le Corbusier's seminal 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, reproduced these photos and held American factories up as models. The honest qualities of Kahn's plants would become articles of faith for modern architecture from the Bauhaus through the International Style and to this day. The source of this DNA lies scattered among the ruins of Detroit. If the Bauhaus could design its Dessau school in imitation of a daylight factory, might not Albert Kahn's factories one day house design schools?
For all its famed blight, this too is Detroit. The 1928 Fisher Building, “Detroit’s largest art object,” was a real estate investment of the Fisher brothers of "Body by Fisher" fame after they sold most of their coach works interest to GM for staggering sums. It was designed by architect Joseph Nathaniel French, working within Albert Kahn's office. Despite Kahn's role in launching architecture's unornamented modern movement, he did not consider himself a modernist and held that non-utilitarian buildings should be decorated. It's tempting to envision the Fisher Building's spectacular lobby used, like Milan’s Galleria, as a public living room.

The lobby of Detroit's 1929 Guardian Building is a fanfare for the common office worker.

Designed by architect Wirt C. Rowland, The Guardian Building is the sort of exuberant jazz-age skyscraper that largely defines older American skylines. The 1920s building boom coincided with Art Deco’s moment and was followed by a construction drought that lasted through decades of depression and war, leaving the style distinctly the face of the modern American city in its unbridled youth. Detroit has examples of national importance.

Glass-faced row houses designed by Mies van der Rohe look out on a nature in Detroit's Lafayette Park. Most architects would be surprised to learn that Detroit has in this project the world’s largest collection of buildings by Mies, one of the profession's two or three most revered twentieth-century practitioners. Lafayette Park is also considered the major built work of urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had earlier taught at the Bauhaus under Mies's leadership. Mies closed the Bauhaus in 1933 rather than capitulate to Nazi demands for the removal of Hilberseimer and another left-wing teacher, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Lafayette Park is a rare case of highly successful urban renewal; a vibrant, affordable community with a low vacancy rate more than a half century after its completion. (A renovated 1400 square foot three-bedroom row house was advertised earlier this year for $159,000.) The 2012 book, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies, looks at Lafayette Park through the lives and words of its residents, with many photos of the maximized social freedom and variety of living allowed by Mies’s less-is-more minimalism. Residents range from one who has never heard of Mies (“Is he a good architect?”) to one who can describe in detail the personal and professional relationships between Mies and his collaborators on the project. All praise Mies’s open sense of space. Lafayette Park's presence in Albert Kahn's Detroit is poetic justice. From the 1940s on, Mies's work was strongly influenced by Kahn's steel-framed industrial buildings.

As recorded by Kahn scholar Grant Hildebrand, Mies's student Myron Goldsmith recalled him poring over the designer George Nelson's recent book on Kahn's work in 1940. Mies had immigrated to America in 1938 to head the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute, now Illinois Institute of Technology. His chief assistant at the time, Gene Summers, has said Mies "was particularly impressed with the automotive architect-builder in Detroit by the name of Albert Kahn." By this time, Kahn had moved from his pioneering use of reinforced concrete to working with steel structure, and he was about to send a second wave of influence through modern architecture.

Resemblance alone speaks for Kahn's impact on Mies. At left, Kahn's extension to the La Grange Diesel Plant, as pictured in George Nelson's book, closely prefigures Mies's 1943 IIT Minerals and Metals Building, at right, his first construction in America. Mies's work from then on, including such iconic buildings as the Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building, would be rooted in the crystalline, steel-structure vocabulary of Kahn's factories. Lafayette Park's low-rise buildings in fact look more like a Kahn plant than conventional row houses. Kahn, who believed his stripped-down style was only suited to industrial buildings, would not have approved.

Kahn would have been appalled at this collage by Mies and his students. It appropriates a photo of Kahn's Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Plant from George Nelson's book, inserting a concert hall. The image argues for Mies's concept of universal space, liberated for any use by structurally unimpeded expanse and the absence of a use-specific received style. The idea is innately sustainable; neutral, flexible buildings are readily adapted to new uses when they outlive their original ones. As a bonus, architecture breaks free of any one prescribed use, reclaiming the timelessness and autonomy of ancient monuments. Mies's collage seems uncannily pertinent to Detroit, an entire city awaiting new use, rich with vacant factory floors, many by Albert Kahn. Proving the viability of former industrial plants as cultural settings, the Dia Art Foundation's collection has been based in a quarter-million square-foot 1929 Nabisco box printing factory in Beacon, New York, since 2003. The vast industrial setting is a critical part of the experience of the museum, helping justify an 80-minute train ride from New York City. Something similar in Detroit could add to the role of the venerable Detroit Institute of Arts in making the city an art destination.

One Woodward Avenue, completed in 1963, was the first skyscraper designed by Detroit-based Minoru Yamasaki. Although he is most famous for designing New York’s World Trade Center, Yamasaki's Detroit work has a better relationship of detail to overall scale. When America started building again after World War II, it was as a grown-up world power donning sober International Style architecture. Yamasaki provided an alternative, enlivened with decorative historical and regional influences: “There must be elements of delight, to offset the monotony of mass-produced building and to enhance the enjoyment of life.” This personal inflection keeps his Detroit buildings looking fresh today, amid their now often bland-looking International Style contemporaries.

Yamasaki’s 1964 DeRoy Auditorium at Detroit’s Wayne State University rises to a crescendo of pointed arches. The Auditorium’s top-heavy design should be balanced by its reflection in the now empty reflecting pool, itself an emblem of Detroit’s troubles. Until it’s refilled, Yamasaki’s whole is less than the sum of its parts. In fact, its only half its parts. The building shows the influence of Islamic architecture which Yamasaki first adopted for his design of the 1961 Dhahran Air Terminal Building in Saudi Arabia.

Inside the DeRoy Auditorium, the lines of Yamasaki's stair railing sketch the base of his World Trade Center towers to come. In a 2001 Slate piece, architect Laurie Kerr makes much of the towers’ implied pointed arches and Yamasaki’s description of the plaza between them as a “mecca.” She argues that the Saudi Binladen Group would have had a hand in his several Arabian projects and that Osama Bin Laden “must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality.”

With a manufacturing history dating to well before Henry Ford, Detroit has a wealth of anonymous but architecturally interesting industrial buildings that might serve art as well as industry.

A city street through a neighborhood of disappeared houses evokes a country lane. Much of Detroit now looks like this, as if to prove Henry Ford’s prediction that cities will cease to be. This photo’s belatedly replaced sidewalk corner responds to a court order that Detroit honor curb ramp requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Blocks like this are a new kind of introduction of nature into a city; not encapsulated, planned parks but swaths of green randomly marbled through the urban fabric. They might remain as a surreal cocktail of city and wilderness, or be made laboratories for experimental forms of housing supported by existing infrastructure.

Detroit presents the spectacle of a major American city returning to nature.

Piranesi’s etchings of tree-sprouting Roman ruins come to mind.

A brick house with graceful tile and stone begs to be restored. Its new roof and brickwork may buy it some time.

Tyree Guyton returned from military service to find that his old neighborhood looked like “a bomb went off.” He and his grandfather Sam Mackey began making art from abandoned houses on Heidelberg Street in 1986. Although some of the houses have been lost to arson, the Heidelberg Project continues to be an attraction and source of local pride. The attention has made the area a safer place for its residents.

Carl Nielbock came from Germany to discover his roots in Detroit, the home of his black G.I. father, and stayed. A sign outside his ornamental metalwork company, C.A.N. Art Handworks, demonstrates its stock in trade while celebrating the city whose architectural heritage the business helps restore. Unsanctioned expressions like this sign, the Heidelberg Project and Detroit's other outdoor art installations are in the American spirit of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, a national landmark. These works and the efforts of those who take it upon themselves to mow the city’s neglected parks or prune its trees give one hope for Detroit.

A brick house in Detroit' historic Corktown neighborhood is scratched with names and initials of those who waited at an adjacent streetcar stop, some of whom have returned to update their entries. The architectural visionary Lebbeus Woods wrote in his book Radical Reconstruction that "the complexity of buildings, streets and cities, built up over time and across the span of innumerable lives, can never be replaced.” The book's words and illustrations propose an alternative to demolition, which destroys the past, and restoration, which denies history's failures and reinstates the old order to blame for them. Woods' chosen principle "to create the new from the damaged old" would be well applied to Detroit. The city's historic resonance is not only irreplaceable but unavailable to competing suburban developers or practitioners of New Urbanism.

The inscribed brick house stands on a graceful, leafy block of Bagley Avenue. Henry Ford built his first car in a backyard coal shed on the street.

Ford poses with his bike in 1893. The 1890s saw the greatest boom ever in bicycle popularity, a craze boosted by technological improvements including inflatable tires. In 1896, Ford built his first car, outfitting it with bicycle tires and calling it the Quadricycle. A new boom was born. Ford’s insistence that the city would disappear made good business sense. Cities, after all, were negotiable by streetcar or bicycle. General Motors notoriously bought and decommissioned many American cities’ streetcar systems in the 1950s. This is known either as “streetcar conspiracy” or “streetcar conspiracy myth,” depending entirely on your politics. Detroit’s streetcars were sold to Mexico City, still in good enough shape to serve there for another thirty years.

Bicycles ply the Dequindre Cut, overlooked by graffitti art and one of Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park Towers. Opened in 2009, the recreational greenway was converted from a rail line originally cut into the ground to pass below crossing streets.

Streets and car traffic pass above the Dequindre Cut's cyclists and pedestrians. Historically, industrial routes similarly avoided public streets. The Australian architectural educator and bike planner Steven Fleming, in his 2012 book, Cycle Space, notes the potential of abandoned industrial rail lines and waterways, often overlaid or skirted by the public streets of later civic development, to be sewn together into vast networks of bike paths: “As a cyclist, I see parallel cities coming into focus, on industrial land, with their backs turned on those places where people drive.” The car-free streets of Detroit’s vacated residential blocks could add to the city's brownfields as a canvas for such a bike network. Detroit's less-than-walkable density puts it in a prime position to benefit from the kind of bike system Fleming envisions. This is a more important priority than it might at first seem, one with implications for job growth. Even in oil-invested, red-state Texas, major cities are creating bike lanes and bike share programs. Robin Stallings, head of the bike advocacy group Bike Texas has said: “Companies like Samsung and Google are looking at the bicycle facility infrastructure before they decide what city they're going to locate in. So this is really being driven by economics in Texas. It's not all about people seeing themselves on a bicycle, but seeing what it does for the quality of life in a city." As Frank Lloyd Wright used to say (without crediting Dorothy Parker): "Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
Henry Ford argued that we’d never rebuild cities as they are. Would we accept the automobile as a new invention today? Today’s safety standards, environmental awareness, and appreciation of the social and cultural benefits of density say no. As ethicist Randy Cohen has noted: “If you introduced a transportation system in the U.S. by declaring: ‘It’ll slaughter 30,000 people a year and hospitalize ten times that number,’ it’s hard to believe it would catch on.” We tolerate cars because the world they've created over the course of a century requires them. Facebook and smartphones notwithstanding, our lives are built on the platform of Ford’s dirty and dangerous late nineteenth-century technology. Cars have certainly evolved, but even electric ones are charged by fossil fuel, and they won't make a nation of paved sprawl more sustainable.
The car wasn’t even universally embraced in Ford’s day. Technology historian Peter Norton points out that the introduction of cars to cities in particular met strong public resistance, forcing the industry to fight back; when the public branded fast drivers “joy riders,” car interests coined “jay walkers” to shift blame for street carnage onto pedestrians. Norton also notes that “America’s love affair with the car” was no one’s spontaneous observation, but a promotional catchphrase seeded in 1960s television. Auto makers and oil interests depended heavily on New York’s Robert Moses and his acolytes nationwide to muscle cities into car deference. New York’s 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, run by Moses, were largely auto industry ads for a car-based world of tomorrow. Jane Jacobs’ resistance to Moses took her from neighborhood activist to national icon. Their streets-for-cars versus streets-for-people battle, billed as the central drama of urban planning, is now slated for operatic treatment.
Detroit is a telltale worth watching. As the birthplace of the car, it was first to suffer from Ford's dream of a post-urban America. By rights, it should be first in line to become a new kind of post-Ford American city. A new streetcar line is already in construction. If there’s an afterlife for Detroit, there may be for Buffalo and other American cities loaded with our history and architectural heritage.
American cities aren’t the places to flee they once were. The sooty, overcrowded metropolis of Henry Ford’s day is now a thing of China, where people are as desperate to own cars as we once were. Americans are less shackled to cities by jobs and more likely to live in them by choice. Vishaan Chakrabarti’s compellingly illustrated 2013 book, A Country of Cities, makes an overwhelming case for the personal and national benefits of re-urbanization, a trend that he notes is already under way. The greater the number of Americans who live in cities, the healthier and wealthier we’ll all be, even those of us who don’t choose the urban option. This, and everything else Detroit has to offer, make its fate a national concern.

A wooden street lamp pointed out near the Fisher Body Plant is a small part of Detroit's irreplaceable authenticity. This ArchiTakes post and one to follow, on Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, are the product of a single 25-mile bike tour generously hosted by the author of the blog, One More Spoke, and his ebullient fiancée. Their love of Detroit, despite its hardships, was infectious. But for a missing section of pedestrian overpass handrail likely lost to scavengers, no part of the tour felt unsafe. People in Detroit greet each other when they pass. Anyone who doesn't is assumed to be visiting from New York.
Next up: Detroit's Grand Central
Looking Over the Bike Share Gift Horse
Central Park users rub shoulders with cars on the main loop road until 7PM on weekdays, even though Olmsted and Vaux’s 1857 park design is predicated on sunken transverse roads to block out the sight and sound of street traffic. It’s hard to say what’s worse; the exhaust sucked into lungs of joggers or the nullification of a planned and celebrated refuge from the streets. The deference to cars is striking, given that most New Yorkers don't own one and under a quarter of Manhattan households do.
Move it over, city folk; cars coming through! An advertisement in a 1909 issue of Life magazine aims at city dwellers, the logical market when the great majority of Americans, and certainly those of means, lived in cities.
On July 8, 1909, the New York Times published this illustration of “The New Fifth Avenue: New York City’s Greatest Driveway,” showing its planned widening by fifteen feet for vehicles. The image is a reminder that New York wasn't conceived around the demands of the automobile, and it shows the pedestrian literally losing ground. The choice to widen Fifth Avenue, then more associated with the carriage trade than delivery trucks, suggests an upper class invested in the automobile.
The proletarian Model T notwithstanding, cars remained a luxury well into the twentieth century. In 1925’s The Great Gatsby, a rich man is driven by his mistress in a luxury car; they mow down a lower class victim and leave the scene. The circumstances of their hit-and-run were still a potent class commentary in 1987 when they were replicated in another quintessential New York novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. The available range of car models has long been a matter not of varied needs, but of gradations of style finely calibrated in response to the social status and aspirations of the market. Trading up from a Chevy to a Buick is about much more than finishes. In the context of such ingrained class sensitivity, having cars displaced by mere bicycles is bound to be apocalyptic. Status goes a long way toward explaining the hysteria over the bike share docking stations for New York's new Citi Bike system.
It’s impossible to bicycle in New York without feeling engaged in class warfare. When I first bought a bike to ride to work, I picked up a guidebook to cycling basics and was puzzled to find a chapter on activism. My puzzlement lasted exactly as long as it took to find out my compact new bike wasn’t allowed on any elevator at work. Cars may be welcome in Central Park against history’s and Olmsted’s intentions, but my bike wasn’t worthy of the freight elevator. Outside the million square foot office building, a single inverted “U” rack had a stripped bike frame chained to it, like a skeleton at a poisoned watering hole. Citi Bike removes this kind of impediment, and even the purchase of a bike, from the path of the novice bike commuter.
This bike share station in front of Manhattan’s Main Post Office is all but empty on a recent morning rush hour, pointing to heavy use of the system for commuting. The station is adjacent to the Eighth Avenue protected bike lane, at right.
Turning around and looking uptown from the same location on Wednesday of last week at 8:50AM, a line of parked police cars fills the bike lane. This section of it is occasionally used as an NYPD parking lot.
The officer who double parked in the bike lane that day would probably never have thought of parking in a vehicle traffic lane, but completely blocked bikes with evident bravado, forcing several cyclists a minute into traffic. Instances of cyclists struck by cars receive notoriously little follow-up from the NYPD. According to a StreetsBlog article, “The overwhelming majority of injuries to city cyclists and pedestrians — debilitating, life-altering wounds included — are never investigated by police, much less prosecuted.” A New York Times article, "Reckless Drivers Who Hit People Face Few Penalties in New York," states that many motorists are never even ticketed for taking a life. Unless eyewitnesses come forward, hit and run drivers readily escape prosecution by claiming they never saw the victim; New York's "leaving the scene" law requires the driver to have known personal injury was caused. Without witnesses, the driver's word may outweigh evidence.
When not being characterized as “sociopaths on wheels” by the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo ("The bike-lane cancer"), New York cyclists are often viewed as indulging in frivolity in the path of drivers just trying to get to work or do a job. This bias was promoted in last Sunday's New York Times, where Matt Flegenheimer's article about the bike share stations began: "They rose from the earth overnight, some said, muscling the cars from their curbside perches: more than 300 hulking monuments to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s surrender to the whims of the New York City cyclist." Perhaps he's being ironic, but his look at New Yorkers' appropriation of the docks as street furniture takes time to give ammunition to bike share opponents, pointing out one station's accumulation of "rotting strawberries, pale fries, an empty can of an alcoholic energy drink and a crushed pack of cigarettes." He then takes a magnifying glass to “the dirt-specked water that tends to pool in the corridors between curbs and stations, even well after a downpour,” as if peering for microbes in the mouth of a gift horse. Dirt specks! In New York! Flegenheimer might have balanced his reporting that "the bike-sharing stations remain a source of dismay to some residents" by noting the opinion of many that they're a sane alternative to urban driving. He himself reported in the Times last year that drivers predictably kill over 150 New York pedestrians and cyclists a year. What's an isolated incidence of litter on a bike share station compared to the climate change that now has many of us living in marked-down Flood Zone A real estate, if our homes there still exist?
Although it was said the bike share docks would block trash pick-up, this sanitation worker isn't missing a beat, without even using the nearby access space created by removal of a docking post.
Among other trumped up objections to the new bike share stations, they have been criticized for creating barriers in front of large apartment buildings. Closely parked cars create barriers too, as this photo shows. A parked car amounts to a private claim on public space, earned by a payment not to the city, but to General Motors. By contrast, Citi Bikes are a shared amenity within financial reach of all. Seven or eight bikes can fit in the space of a single parked car that may make a handful of trips a month. Each bike makes many trips a day. While a car is essential to some New Yorkers with special occupational or mobility needs, there are few places on earth where owning one is more discretionary. Most arguments against the bike share stations make sense only as tactics to defend on-street parking by car owners. Cars have a status long promoted by the automobile and oil industries, but the assignment of the urban cyclist to the status of bike messenger or fast food delivery guy will increasingly become a thing of the past as the bike share program broadens cycling into a mainstream layer of transportation. Entitlement to street parking for having the means to buy a car doesn’t stack up against the daily number of clean, safe bike trips across town represented by shared bikes' appropriation of a parking space.
When I first became a bike commuter, a funny thing happened on the way home from the office. I skipped the final turn toward home to keep floating happily over the surface of the city and seeing its neighborhoods in a new, more reachable way. After twenty years of living here, it was as if New York opened up in a whole new way. I discovered parts of the city and its surroundings I’d never seen before, soon in the company of generous guides and new friends. Cycling lends itself to connection with surroundings and other cyclists, in sharp contrast to the anti-social encapsulation of driving, which turns our streets into rivers of crosswalk-nosing self interest and horn-blowing anger. The cyclist is surrounded by the open air of the public realm, the driver by an isolating bubble of private property. Many Citi Bike commuters will dock their bikes with a twinge of regret that the ride's over. If that twinge means the ride of their life is about to begin, they'll have the bike share gift horse to thank.
Looking Over the Bike Share Gift Horse
Central Park users rub shoulders with cars on the main loop road until 7PM on weekdays, even though Olmsted and Vaux’s 1857 park design is predicated on sunken transverse roads to block out the sight and sound of street traffic. It’s hard to say what’s worse; the exhaust sucked into lungs of joggers or the nullification of a planned and celebrated refuge from the streets. The deference to cars is striking, given that most New Yorkers don't own one and under a quarter of Manhattan households do.
Move it over, city folk; cars coming through! An advertisement in a 1909 issue of Life magazine aims at city dwellers, the logical market when the great majority of Americans, and certainly those of means, lived in cities.
On July 8, 1909, the New York Times published this illustration of “The New Fifth Avenue: New York City’s Greatest Driveway,” showing its planned widening by fifteen feet for vehicles. The image is a reminder that New York wasn't conceived around the demands of the automobile, and it shows the pedestrian literally losing ground. The choice to widen Fifth Avenue, then more associated with the carriage trade than delivery trucks, suggests an upper class invested in the automobile.
The proletarian Model T notwithstanding, cars remained a luxury well into the twentieth century. In 1925’s The Great Gatsby, a rich man is driven by his mistress in a luxury car; they mow down a lower class victim and leave the scene. The circumstances of their hit-and-run were still a potent class commentary in 1987 when they were replicated in another quintessential New York novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. The available range of car models has long been a matter not of varied needs, but of gradations of style finely calibrated in response to the social status and aspirations of the market. Trading up from a Chevy to a Buick is about much more than finishes. In the context of such ingrained class sensitivity, having cars displaced by mere bicycles is bound to be apocalyptic. Status goes a long way toward explaining the hysteria over the bike share docking stations for New York's new Citi Bike system.
It’s impossible to bicycle in New York without feeling engaged in class warfare. When I first bought a bike to ride to work, I picked up a guidebook to cycling basics and was puzzled to find a chapter on activism. My puzzlement lasted exactly as long as it took to find out my compact new bike wasn’t allowed on any elevator at work. Cars may be welcome in Central Park against history’s and Olmsted’s intentions, but my bike wasn’t worthy of the freight elevator. Outside the million square foot office building, a single inverted “U” rack had a stripped bike frame chained to it, like a skeleton at a poisoned watering hole. Citi Bike removes this kind of impediment, and even the purchase of a bike, from the path of the novice bike commuter.
This bike share station in front of Manhattan’s Main Post Office is all but empty on a recent morning rush hour, pointing to heavy use of the system for commuting. The station is adjacent to the Eighth Avenue protected bike lane, at right.
Turning around and looking uptown from the same location on Wednesday of last week at 8:50AM, a line of parked police cars fills the bike lane. This section of it is occasionally used as an NYPD parking lot.
The officer who double parked in the bike lane that day would probably never have thought of parking in a vehicle traffic lane, but completely blocked bikes with evident bravado, forcing several cyclists a minute into traffic. Instances of cyclists struck by cars receive notoriously little follow-up from the NYPD. According to a StreetsBlog article, “The overwhelming majority of injuries to city cyclists and pedestrians — debilitating, life-altering wounds included — are never investigated by police, much less prosecuted.” A New York Times article, "Reckless Drivers Who Hit People Face Few Penalties in New York," states that many motorists are never even ticketed for taking a life. Unless eyewitnesses come forward, hit and run drivers readily escape prosecution by claiming they never saw the victim; New York's "leaving the scene" law requires the driver to have known personal injury was caused. Without witnesses, the driver's word may outweigh evidence.
When not being characterized as “sociopaths on wheels” by the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo ("The bike-lane cancer"), New York cyclists are often viewed as indulging in frivolity in the path of drivers just trying to get to work or do a job. This bias was promoted in last Sunday's New York Times, where Matt Flegenheimer's article about the bike share stations began: "They rose from the earth overnight, some said, muscling the cars from their curbside perches: more than 300 hulking monuments to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s surrender to the whims of the New York City cyclist." Perhaps he's being ironic, but his look at New Yorkers' appropriation of the docks as street furniture takes time to give ammunition to bike share opponents, pointing out one station's accumulation of "rotting strawberries, pale fries, an empty can of an alcoholic energy drink and a crushed pack of cigarettes." He then takes a magnifying glass to “the dirt-specked water that tends to pool in the corridors between curbs and stations, even well after a downpour,” as if peering for microbes in the mouth of a gift horse. Dirt specks! In New York! Flegenheimer might have balanced his reporting that "the bike-sharing stations remain a source of dismay to some residents" by noting the opinion of many that they're a sane alternative to urban driving. He himself reported in the Times last year that drivers predictably kill over 150 New York pedestrians and cyclists a year. What's an isolated incidence of litter on a bike share station compared to the climate change that now has many of us living in marked-down Flood Zone A real estate, if our homes there still exist?
Although it was said the bike share docks would block trash pick-up, this sanitation worker isn't missing a beat, without even using the nearby access space created by removal of a docking post.
Among other trumped up objections to the new bike share stations, they have been criticized for creating barriers in front of large apartment buildings. Closely parked cars create barriers too, as this photo shows. A parked car amounts to a private claim on public space, earned by a payment not to the city, but to General Motors. By contrast, Citi Bikes are a shared amenity within financial reach of all. Seven or eight bikes can fit in the space of a single parked car that may make a handful of trips a month. Each bike makes many trips a day. While a car is essential to some New Yorkers with special occupational or mobility needs, there are few places on earth where owning one is more discretionary. Most arguments against the bike share stations make sense only as tactics to defend on-street parking by car owners. Cars have a status long promoted by the automobile and oil industries, but the assignment of the urban cyclist to the status of bike messenger or fast food delivery guy will increasingly become a thing of the past as the bike share program broadens cycling into a mainstream layer of transportation. Entitlement to street parking for having the means to buy a car doesn’t stack up against the daily number of clean, safe bike trips across town represented by shared bikes' appropriation of a parking space.
When I first became a bike commuter, a funny thing happened on the way home from the office. I skipped the final turn toward home to keep floating happily over the surface of the city and seeing its neighborhoods in a new, more reachable way. After twenty years of living here, it was as if New York opened up in a whole new way. I discovered parts of the city and its surroundings I’d never seen before, soon in the company of generous guides and new friends. Cycling lends itself to connection with surroundings and other cyclists, in sharp contrast to the anti-social encapsulation of driving, which turns our streets into rivers of crosswalk-nosing self interest and horn-blowing anger. The cyclist is surrounded by the open air of the public realm, the driver by an isolating bubble of private property. Many Citi Bike commuters will dock their bikes with a twinge of regret that the ride's over. If that twinge means the ride of their life is about to begin, they'll have the bike share gift horse to thank.
5 Folding Bikes for the City
Brompton World Championship racers in obligatory jacket and tie depart from Blenheim Palace. The dress code suggests both the folding bike's roots in English quirkiness and its usefulness for urban commuting.
There's no better way to take possession of a city than on a compact folding bike. Neighborhoods that would be discouragingly distant on foot become only minutes away. Distant communities that might otherwise go unexplored become riding destinations with the option of making part of the trip on a bus or train next to one's unobtrusively folded mount. A folder can be carried into shops and restaurants, avoiding the inconvenience and unreliability of chaining up outdoors. Owning a truly compact folder is like having a bike in your back pocket. It can shrink an entire city. Not only does such a bike take you to fresh places in town, it does so without compromising the spatial immediacy of walking. Philippe Starck has said, "frankly, it isn't Manhattan that interests me. The center of Manhattan is very civilized, a nice international city. I am more interested in the passion of New York, and that's why I go with my motorcycle or bicycle to the Bronx, Queens and Harlem. There, you are like a spectator in front of the most beautiful drama in the world. Every corner of the street seems like an opera stage, a stage for drama. The vibrations there are very strong."
New York is now following the lead of European cities like Copenhagen, where streets have been reclaimed for pedestrians and cyclists. Janette Sadik-Kahn, the city's progressive Department of Transportation Commissioner, hired the visionary Danish urban planner Jan Gehl in her effort to favor people over cars. Even with initiatives to accommodate bicyle commuting by allowing bikes in office buildings, go-anywhere small-wheeled folding bikes have distinct qualities that complement New York's increasing bike-friendliness and will always give them advantages in cities. Their popularity is exploding. As little as five years ago, a Brompton folding bike was a rare sight in New York. Now they're everywhere.
It's hard to say whether demand or the seductive challenge of designing a better folder is more at work, but recent years have seen a flood of new folding bike designs enter the market. Most are aimed at buyers who intend to fly or drive a folded bike somewhere, then ride it, often in a vacation spot. These typically have wheels of 20-inch diameter or more. A subset of 16-inch wheeled bikes that can be carried about indoors target those who use a folding bike as an everyday part of city life. In a place like New York, after which Kryptonite Locks names its most secure products (like the "New York Fahgettaboudit" lock) the chief advantage of these bikes is theft resistance. However, other advantages are reason enough to own a compact folder. They take up less space in a small apartment, lend themselves to intermodal commuting, and allow one to take a bike, folded, straight through a public building like Chelsea Market, instead of locking it outside and doubling back for it. You'd like to ride to work today, but rain is forecast for the afternoon? Go ahead and ride in, and bring your bike home on the bus if the rain appears as scheduled.
An F-frame Moulton is superimposed on a standard bicycle. Small wheels are geared to turn farther with each pedal stroke. Alex Moulton saw advantages in small wheels that carry on in today's urban-oriented folding bikes.
The small-wheeled performance bicycle was pioneered in England by Sir Alex Moulton, whose F-frame model with 17-inch wheels was introduced in 1962. By 1965, his company was England's second largest single-brand bicycle maker. According to The Spaceframe Moultons, by Tony Hadland, Alex Moulton observed that, "with the exception of vehicles for use on soft ground, such as tractors, wheel sizes for virtually all vehicles have decreased as design has evolved - all modern cars, railway locomotives and aircraft are 'small-wheeled' compared to their Victorian or Edwardian predecessors." Moulton's original intent was to free up space above the wheels for storage and allow step-through mounting. The naturally greater rigidity of smaller wheels coupled with high inflation pressure insured that there would be no increase in rolling resistance compared to large wheels. To soften the harsh ride that might otherwise result, Moulton added front and rear suspension. The suspension had the additional benefit of resulting in what Moulton called "a total advance over the high pressure unsprung large wheel in road-holding and comfort." His design was also radical in its abandonment of the classic diamond-shaped frame. Moulton said that if "that quadrilateral bit of piping" were launched on the market today, its top tube would probably not be allowed for safety reasons. Moulton's alternative "F-frame" was easier to get on, unisex, and one-sized.
Moulton was also aware that smaller wheels have less inertia, present a smaller face to the wind, produce less spoke turbulence, and more rigidly transmit the rider's energy to the road, all enhancing performance. In 1982 he introduced a version that replaced the F-frame with a spaceframe on the same small wheels, further reducing the loss of energy through flexing. His theories were proven in 1984 when a spaceframe Moulton set the world speed record for a non-recumbent bicycle at 51.29 mph. Most Moultons are designed to come apart easily into two pieces for transport, but none fold. Nonetheless, the brand's technical innovations, starting with the idea of a high-performance small-wheeled bike, have largely informed the design of today's folding bikes. Bike Friday makes marketing points of the easy mounting that Moulton saw as essential and the performance he pioneered for small wheels, while the Brompton's suspension concept first appeared on Moultons in the 1960s.
Radical technical innovations like Moulton's and those of recumbent bicycles are suppressed by the International Cycling Union which regulates the Tour de France. Its rules don't just perpetuate the basic bicycle form established by John Kemp Starley's 1885 Safety Bicycle for the Tour but, by association, for mainstream bicycling. Much of the resurgence of recreational cycling in America owes to Lance Armstrong'sunprecedented 7 consecutive Tour de France victories. No surprise to anyone who knows the power of a product endorsement, everyday American cycling has taken on a more performance-oriented cast because of his heroic stature.
A public that associates large-wheeled bikes with Lance and small-wheeled ones with circus clowns will be surprised to know that almost all of the compromises made by folders have to do with folding rather than wheel size. The tighter the fold, the fewer the options. The five higher-quality bikes covered here are defined by the emphasis they put on one or the other and the ingenuity with which they narrow the gap between the two. The game not only makes for great design watching, but has larger implications for the way people inhabit cities.





Bike Friday (think “Man Friday”) bills its products as performance bicycles that happen to fold. As former bike racers, company founders Hanz and Alan Scholz are attuned to performance, but with a particularly inventive streak. They've taken on challenges as daunting as a folding recumbent tandem and a bike that converts from tandem to single-rider. Like standard bicycles, Bike Fridays are available in multiple sizes and can be customized. (The company prides itself on accommodating even those with special needs.) The folding feature of most Bike Friday models is intended to allow transport of bikes to distant locations in hard cases. They appeal to many older cyclists who are more likely to have the means and free time for the “performance that packs” travel riding to which this lends itself. The company's recently launched Tikit brings the performance emphasis of Bike Friday to 16-inch wheels. Although it's not the smallest fold out there, it's the fastest. Given its potential for customization and performance, the Tikit most closely resembles a standard bike among those discussed here. It's the clear choice for anyone who wants both a city folder and a light touring bike in one package. Made in America, parts replacement is easy. Bike Friday's frames also come with a lifetime warranty.
Nationality: American, based and made in Eugene, Oregon Introduced: 2007 Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm Frame material: steel Weight: 25 pounds for a medium size "Standard" model Speeds: 1 to 27 Ride quality: excellent Folded size: listed as 24H x 35L x 15W, varies with model size and handlebars Folding speed: 10 seconds / 5 seconds with hyperfold option (adds $300) Rolls folded: well Carries folded: fairly well Stands folded: fairly well Cost: from $1,098 Pro: multiple sizes, highly customizable, easily replaced American parts, lifetime frame warrantyCon: large folded size
The Tikit Hyperfold demonstrated
Brompton



The Brompton's 10.6" wide fold allows it to unobtrusively occupy an aisle in a bus or the space under a café table. A folding bike's accommodation to city life is a game of inches.
Brompton makes only one frame style, and it's as if all of the company's creative energy has gone into its perfection. No 16-inch wheel folding bike folds into such a compact package. Quickly lifting the Brompton's seat post causes the rear wheel and triangle to swing under the frame, greatly reducing the bike's length and allowing it to stand upright on its own in what's known as a half-fold. This is enormously useful not just as a kickstand, but for taking the bike inside the corner deli and instantly folding it far enough to be a non-nuisance to others. Folding the bike entirely except for the steering post allows it to be pulled around by the handlebars as a compact package on caster-like wheels attached to the rear triangle, very much like a suitcase. The final move required for folding, lowering the seat, firmly pins the folded package together with the seatpost. The simplicity and effectiveness of this finishing touch makes the Brompton feel unimprovable. A simple block of rubber cushions the rear triangle against the seatpost, providing rear suspension. With "extremities" including the front fork, steering post, seat post and rear triangle available in titanium, the Brompton can shed a couple of pounds while gaining additional ride-softening. Dispensing with the three-speed rear hub and relying on two speeds can drop a few more pounds and make for a bike that's very easy to carry and adequate to relatively flat urban terrain like most of New York's. Bromptons come in a wide range of colors that can be independently applied to the main frame and to the extremities, allowing for a huge degree of personal expression.Nationality: British design, made in London
Introduced: 1981
Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm
Frame material: steel
Weight: from 20 pounds, including seat and pedals
Speeds: 1, 2, 3 or 6
Ride quality: good
Folded size: 22.2H x 21.5 L x 10.6WFolding speed: 20 seconds
Rolls folded: very well
Carries folded: very well
Stands folded: very well
Cost: from $1,000
Pro: Very compact, stable and maneuverable when folded; rear suspension; personal expression opportunities with color
Con: cannot be customized or adjusted except for seat height.
The Brompton fold demonstrated
Dahon Curve

The Dahon Curve D3
Founded in 1982 by laser physicist David Hon, Dahon commands two-thirds of the world's folding bike market and currently sells 35 models. If your local bike shop carries a folding bike, it's most likely a Dahon. The bikes range from cheap and heavy with ephemeral parts to expensive and high-performance with durable components. The company's only current 16-inch wheeled models, the Curve SL and D3, fall into respectable enough positions on this continuum. At $599, the Curve D3 is the most affordable bike considered here. In contrast to the way the Brompton folds into a tightly pinned-together package, the Curve's folded shape is held together by magnets and rather floppy. Dahon's are available with integrated floor pumps concealed in the seat post, a very elegant and useful feature.
Nationality: Los Angeles based, made in Asia and the Czech Republic Introduced: 2007 Wheel size: 16 inch / 306 cm Frame material: aluminum Weight: 22.3 for SL / 25.4 for D3 Speeds: 9 for SL / 3 for D3 Ride quality: good Folded size: 24.2H x 26.9L x 12.9W for SL / 25H x 26.1L x 13.3W for D3 Folding speed: 15 seconds Rolls folded: fairly well Carries folded: poorly Stands folded: fairly well Cost: $999 for SL / $599 for D3 Pro: light weight for SL / low cost for DL3 Con: doesn't lock together well when folded Dahon website A Dahon Curve SL review and Curve D3 review The Dahon fold demonstrated Mezzo

Nationality: British design, distributed by California's Marin Bikes, made in Asia
Introduced: 2004
Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm
Frame material: Aluminum
Weight: from 24.25 pounds
Speeds: 4, 9 & 10
Ride quality: very good
Folded size: 24.8H x 27.2L x 12.2WFolding speed: 20 seconds to unfold, 10 seconds to fold
Rolls folded: fairly well
Carries folded: fairly well
Stands folded: well
Cost: from $900
Pro: Approaches the Brompton's compact, stable fold with a better ride, more adjustable fit and greater gearing options
Con: Requires an extra step to fold and doesn't fold as small, compared to the Brompton
Strida


5 Folding Bikes for the City
Brompton World Championship racers in obligatory jacket and tie depart from Blenheim Palace. The dress code suggests both the folding bike's roots in English quirkiness and its usefulness for urban commuting.
There's no better way to take possession of a city than on a compact folding bike. Neighborhoods that would be discouragingly distant on foot become only minutes away. Distant communities that might otherwise go unexplored become riding destinations with the option of making part of the trip on a bus or train next to one's unobtrusively folded mount. A folder can be carried into shops and restaurants, avoiding the inconvenience and unreliability of chaining up outdoors. Owning a truly compact folder is like having a bike in your back pocket. It can shrink an entire city. Not only does such a bike take you to fresh places in town, it does so without compromising the spatial immediacy of walking. Philippe Starck has said, "frankly, it isn't Manhattan that interests me. The center of Manhattan is very civilized, a nice international city. I am more interested in the passion of New York, and that's why I go with my motorcycle or bicycle to the Bronx, Queens and Harlem. There, you are like a spectator in front of the most beautiful drama in the world. Every corner of the street seems like an opera stage, a stage for drama. The vibrations there are very strong."
New York is now following the lead of European cities like Copenhagen, where streets have been reclaimed for pedestrians and cyclists. Janette Sadik-Kahn, the city's progressive Department of Transportation Commissioner, hired the visionary Danish urban planner Jan Gehl in her effort to favor people over cars. Even with initiatives to accommodate bicyle commuting by allowing bikes in office buildings, go-anywhere small-wheeled folding bikes have distinct qualities that complement New York's increasing bike-friendliness and will always give them advantages in cities. Their popularity is exploding. As little as five years ago, a Brompton folding bike was a rare sight in New York. Now they're everywhere.
It's hard to say whether demand or the seductive challenge of designing a better folder is more at work, but recent years have seen a flood of new folding bike designs enter the market. Most are aimed at buyers who intend to fly or drive a folded bike somewhere, then ride it, often in a vacation spot. These typically have wheels of 20-inch diameter or more. A subset of 16-inch wheeled bikes that can be carried about indoors target those who use a folding bike as an everyday part of city life. In a place like New York, after which Kryptonite Locks names its most secure products (like the "New York Fahgettaboudit" lock) the chief advantage of these bikes is theft resistance. However, other advantages are reason enough to own a compact folder. They take up less space in a small apartment, lend themselves to intermodal commuting, and allow one to take a bike, folded, straight through a public building like Chelsea Market, instead of locking it outside and doubling back for it. You'd like to ride to work today, but rain is forecast for the afternoon? Go ahead and ride in, and bring your bike home on the bus if the rain appears as scheduled.
An F-frame Moulton is superimposed on a standard bicycle. Small wheels are geared to turn farther with each pedal stroke. Alex Moulton saw advantages in small wheels that carry on in today's urban-oriented folding bikes.
The small-wheeled performance bicycle was pioneered in England by Sir Alex Moulton, whose F-frame model with 17-inch wheels was introduced in 1962. By 1965, his company was England's second largest single-brand bicycle maker. According to The Spaceframe Moultons, by Tony Hadland, Alex Moulton observed that, "with the exception of vehicles for use on soft ground, such as tractors, wheel sizes for virtually all vehicles have decreased as design has evolved - all modern cars, railway locomotives and aircraft are 'small-wheeled' compared to their Victorian or Edwardian predecessors." Moulton's original intent was to free up space above the wheels for storage and allow step-through mounting. The naturally greater rigidity of smaller wheels coupled with high inflation pressure insured that there would be no increase in rolling resistance compared to large wheels. To soften the harsh ride that might otherwise result, Moulton added front and rear suspension. The suspension had the additional benefit of resulting in what Moulton called "a total advance over the high pressure unsprung large wheel in road-holding and comfort." His design was also radical in its abandonment of the classic diamond-shaped frame. Moulton said that if "that quadrilateral bit of piping" were launched on the market today, its top tube would probably not be allowed for safety reasons. Moulton's alternative "F-frame" was easier to get on, unisex, and one-sized.
Moulton was also aware that smaller wheels have less inertia, present a smaller face to the wind, produce less spoke turbulence, and more rigidly transmit the rider's energy to the road, all enhancing performance. In 1982 he introduced a version that replaced the F-frame with a spaceframe on the same small wheels, further reducing the loss of energy through flexing. His theories were proven in 1984 when a spaceframe Moulton set the world speed record for a non-recumbent bicycle at 51.29 mph. Most Moultons are designed to come apart easily into two pieces for transport, but none fold. Nonetheless, the brand's technical innovations, starting with the idea of a high-performance small-wheeled bike, have largely informed the design of today's folding bikes. Bike Friday makes marketing points of the easy mounting that Moulton saw as essential and the performance he pioneered for small wheels, while the Brompton's suspension concept first appeared on Moultons in the 1960s.
Radical technical innovations like Moulton's and those of recumbent bicycles are suppressed by the International Cycling Union which regulates the Tour de France. Its rules don't just perpetuate the basic bicycle form established by John Kemp Starley's 1885 Safety Bicycle for the Tour but, by association, for mainstream bicycling. Much of the resurgence of recreational cycling in America owes to Lance Armstrong'sunprecedented 7 consecutive Tour de France victories. No surprise to anyone who knows the power of a product endorsement, everyday American cycling has taken on a more performance-oriented cast because of his heroic stature.
A public that associates large-wheeled bikes with Lance and small-wheeled ones with circus clowns will be surprised to know that almost all of the compromises made by folders have to do with folding rather than wheel size. The tighter the fold, the fewer the options. The five higher-quality bikes covered here are defined by the emphasis they put on one or the other and the ingenuity with which they narrow the gap between the two. The game not only makes for great design watching, but has larger implications for the way people inhabit cities.





Bike Friday (think “Man Friday”) bills its products as performance bicycles that happen to fold. As former bike racers, company founders Hanz and Alan Scholz are attuned to performance, but with a particularly inventive streak. They've taken on challenges as daunting as a folding recumbent tandem and a bike that converts from tandem to single-rider. Like standard bicycles, Bike Fridays are available in multiple sizes and can be customized. (The company prides itself on accommodating even those with special needs.) The folding feature of most Bike Friday models is intended to allow transport of bikes to distant locations in hard cases. They appeal to many older cyclists who are more likely to have the means and free time for the “performance that packs” travel riding to which this lends itself. The company's recently launched Tikit brings the performance emphasis of Bike Friday to 16-inch wheels. Although it's not the smallest fold out there, it's the fastest. Given its potential for customization and performance, the Tikit most closely resembles a standard bike among those discussed here. It's the clear choice for anyone who wants both a city folder and a light touring bike in one package. Made in America, parts replacement is easy. Bike Friday's frames also come with a lifetime warranty.
Nationality: American, based and made in Eugene, Oregon Introduced: 2007 Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm Frame material: steel Weight: 25 pounds for a medium size "Standard" model Speeds: 1 to 27 Ride quality: excellent Folded size: listed as 24H x 35L x 15W, varies with model size and handlebars Folding speed: 10 seconds / 5 seconds with hyperfold option (adds $300) Rolls folded: well Carries folded: fairly well Stands folded: fairly well Cost: from $1,098 Pro: multiple sizes, highly customizable, easily replaced American parts, lifetime frame warrantyCon: large folded size
The Tikit Hyperfold demonstrated
Brompton



The Brompton's 10.6" wide fold allows it to unobtrusively occupy an aisle in a bus or the space under a café table. A folding bike's accommodation to city life is a game of inches.
Brompton makes only one frame style, and it's as if all of the company's creative energy has gone into its perfection. No 16-inch wheel folding bike folds into such a compact package. Quickly lifting the Brompton's seat post causes the rear wheel and triangle to swing under the frame, greatly reducing the bike's length and allowing it to stand upright on its own in what's known as a half-fold. This is enormously useful not just as a kickstand, but for taking the bike inside the corner deli and instantly folding it far enough to be a non-nuisance to others. Folding the bike entirely except for the steering post allows it to be pulled around by the handlebars as a compact package on caster-like wheels attached to the rear triangle, very much like a suitcase. The final move required for folding, lowering the seat, firmly pins the folded package together with the seatpost. The simplicity and effectiveness of this finishing touch makes the Brompton feel unimprovable. A simple block of rubber cushions the rear triangle against the seatpost, providing rear suspension. With "extremities" including the front fork, steering post, seat post and rear triangle available in titanium, the Brompton can shed a couple of pounds while gaining additional ride-softening. Dispensing with the three-speed rear hub and relying on two speeds can drop a few more pounds and make for a bike that's very easy to carry and adequate to relatively flat urban terrain like most of New York's. Bromptons come in a wide range of colors that can be independently applied to the main frame and to the extremities, allowing for a huge degree of personal expression.Nationality: British design, made in London
Introduced: 1981
Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm
Frame material: steel
Weight: from 20 pounds, including seat and pedals
Speeds: 1, 2, 3 or 6
Ride quality: good
Folded size: 22.2H x 21.5 L x 10.6WFolding speed: 20 seconds
Rolls folded: very well
Carries folded: very well
Stands folded: very well
Cost: from $1,000
Pro: Very compact, stable and maneuverable when folded; rear suspension; personal expression opportunities with color
Con: cannot be customized or adjusted except for seat height.
The Brompton fold demonstrated
Dahon Curve

The Dahon Curve D3
Founded in 1982 by laser physicist David Hon, Dahon commands two-thirds of the world's folding bike market and currently sells 35 models. If your local bike shop carries a folding bike, it's most likely a Dahon. The bikes range from cheap and heavy with ephemeral parts to expensive and high-performance with durable components. The company's only current 16-inch wheeled models, the Curve SL and D3, fall into respectable enough positions on this continuum. At $599, the Curve D3 is the most affordable bike considered here. In contrast to the way the Brompton folds into a tightly pinned-together package, the Curve's folded shape is held together by magnets and rather floppy. Dahon's are available with integrated floor pumps concealed in the seat post, a very elegant and useful feature.
Nationality: Los Angeles based, made in Asia and the Czech Republic Introduced: 2007 Wheel size: 16 inch / 306 cm Frame material: aluminum Weight: 22.3 for SL / 25.4 for D3 Speeds: 9 for SL / 3 for D3 Ride quality: good Folded size: 24.2H x 26.9L x 12.9W for SL / 25H x 26.1L x 13.3W for D3 Folding speed: 15 seconds Rolls folded: fairly well Carries folded: poorly Stands folded: fairly well Cost: $999 for SL / $599 for D3 Pro: light weight for SL / low cost for DL3 Con: doesn't lock together well when folded Dahon website A Dahon Curve SL review and Curve D3 review The Dahon fold demonstrated Mezzo

Nationality: British design, distributed by California's Marin Bikes, made in Asia
Introduced: 2004
Wheel size: 16 inch / 349 cm
Frame material: Aluminum
Weight: from 24.25 pounds
Speeds: 4, 9 & 10
Ride quality: very good
Folded size: 24.8H x 27.2L x 12.2WFolding speed: 20 seconds to unfold, 10 seconds to fold
Rolls folded: fairly well
Carries folded: fairly well
Stands folded: well
Cost: from $900
Pro: Approaches the Brompton's compact, stable fold with a better ride, more adjustable fit and greater gearing options
Con: Requires an extra step to fold and doesn't fold as small, compared to the Brompton
Strida


- Detroit: City of the Future Aug 14, 2014
- Looking Over the Bike Share Gift Horse Jul 12, 2013
- 5 Folding Bikes for the City Nov 20, 2009