Charles Duff: North Atlantic Cities - The Forgotten Blueprint for the Future

Speaker 1

There is a way of building cities. It's kind of hidden in plain sight. Americans don't talk about it much because most American cities aren't built this way. If we want to avoid the climate crisis, do we all need to live as densely as Paris? Do we all need to live as densely as Manhattan Island?

Speaker 2

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial, new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source. windows and doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. Today's guest is an author of a book, North Atlantic cities. His name is Charles Duff and I've got his book right here for anyone watching video. It's got this beautiful painting on the front. It's Vermeer's little streets. It's a painting I actually have in my office, just over there in the corner. And I found out about that painting actually when I read this book a few years ago. I think it was, I don't know, about three years ago. And the book really struck me because it gave me kind of a new vision for the future of some American cities and kind of a direction we could go in. And the reason I think that's so important is because I often talk compare architecture. If architecture is the hardware, people are the software. And that, and, and, and I love how Steve jobs thinks about this. He says, you can't start with the hardware. You can't just engineer a product for engineers. you really need to start with the user experience, the end user, and then back into the hardware. And so that's kind of how I think of our cities. It's we want to start with the software. How do we want to live? all those important. things that are where we've got strong communities and we've got strong culture and strong local identity and it needs to be environmentally resilient and it needs to be economically viable over a long period of time and it needs to be beautiful and it needs to be able to be safe and balance privacy with the public realm. All these kind of variables and then looking at what kind of hardware supports all those types of things.

Speaker 2

And it's not that I didn't know about the Netherlands or even what we start talking about in this podcast, Roe Homes or Roe Home Cities, but it was helpful to put language to it and also to see how some of these cities, you know, say a Paris or a Barcelona has developed very differently than a Netherlands or a London. And I really see Amsterdam and some of these Dutch cities as really, really great precedent to borrow from as we continue to across America as we continue to grow and population is and as we continue to you know rebuild things as we tear old things down so I got to talk with Charles Duff goes by Charlie and Was really fun to have him on the podcast and I hope you get something out of it and most importantly I hope it inspires you to pick up this book because it's really rich with a lot of interesting detail, a lot of even history and culture that I found very interesting. So if you're an architect or a developer or a city planner, student or a builder, I think it's really interesting. And honestly, if you're just a normal citizen too, just from a historic and cultural perspective, really wonderful book. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Please like, follow, share, share with your friends and let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks, Charlie. It's great to have you on the podcast. This is a round two as our first one. had some technical issues, so I'm excited to have you on into chat again, because it's fun to talk to you. Austin, it's a great pleasure. This time my battery is up and we won't have to switch to my cell phone and we won't lose track of time for the audience. It'll be good. Yes, Len, we had a little event last week.

Speaker 2

Well, I'm glad you, I appreciate you agreeing to do this again, because I think people are going to be really interested in what you have to say. And of course your book too, which is where I found out about you. And I'd love to kind of kick this off to start there. Your book, North Atlantic Cities. Why should people read it? What is relevant about these cities today? Yeah, I wrote a book called The North Atlantic Cities. And if you've never heard of the North Atlantic cities, I never had either. I made it up. So it's the story of a family of cities on the two coasts of the North Atlantic Ocean. The American side is mainly on the East Coast of the United States with some outliers and places like Montreal and Pittsburgh and St. Louis, a little bit of Chicago. On the European side, it's the Netherlands, where way of building cities is born. It's the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, with some outliers in northern France and Anziatic North Germany. the first reason people might want to read this book is that it is the story of some of the greatest cities in the world. We are talking about Amsterdam, London, New York, Boston. We are talking, you know, every city you can think of in the UK, the beautiful city of Bath, the beautiful cities of Edinburgh and Dublin. They're all part of this story. These are great cities. I think what I bring to this is that I'm the first person whoever seems to have noticed or cared about the fact that these cities are built in the same way. you know, most other cities in the world are built in different ways. There's a family of cities and they're great cities. And I, I tried to find a way to make it possible for people to understand them because I don't know about you, Austin, you're probably, you've got a much better eye than I do. And, but me, I find that cities are confusing and

Speaker 1

Sometimes I like the confusion, but after a while I sort of want to know where I am or how it got to be the way it is. And so reason one to read the North Atlantic cities is because it'll help you to understand some of the greatest cities that human beings have ever built. Why are they the way they are? What choices did people make? What were they up against? And it turns out that this big story, like any good story is really just a bunch of little stories. And the stories are great stories. If I didn't tell the stories well, well, poo on me. The stories are great stories. And I enjoyed finding out what they were. I enjoyed trying to tell them, and you might enjoy finding out what they are. So that's one reason. Second reason is

Speaker 1

that these cities are built in a way that is going to be really useful to us in our own lifetimes in dealing with the biggest, what I think of as the biggest issue that individual people can actually do something about. I don't think individual people can do a whole lot about nuclear proliferation or Israel and Hamas, or at least I don't think I can, maybe somebody can. But individual people had better do something about climate change. If we just sit around and wait for governments to do it for us, we're going to sit around until it's too late. We've got to take the lead there. And boy, wouldn't it be nice if there were some time-tested way of doing something important. that actually works and can actually help to solve the problem. And it turns out that there is. About half of America's greenhouse gases are a direct result of America's pattern of settlement. 40 % of our greenhouse gases come from buildings and 10 % come from transportation. And we have a lot of greenhouse gas from buildings. because most of our houses are free standing, they're exposed to the elements on all four sides. They've got big lawns around them, have to pave a lot of roads to get to them or past them. And we... also muck up the environment with transportation because we drive too much. So what are we going to do about this? And is there something we can do that's actually been tested and works? Is there something we can do that we'd actually like? If I'm going to sit here and say, there's an urban equivalent of eating three meals a day of nothing but broccoli, you're just going to tune off this.

Speaker 1

broadcast and that'll be the end of it. But if I tell you that there's a time-tested way of cutting your carbon footprint pretty dramatically that actually works and is not a really big change from what we're doing, well, I think that's kind of important. And the North Atlantic cities have been building themselves in a particular way since about 1622. Call it 1622. which is a little more than 400 years. And during that time, they've evolved a way of building buildings, neighborhoods, streets, whole cities, sometimes whole metropolitan areas, that makes it possible for people to lead good lives. Not each a broccoli lives, you know, cheeseburger and fries lives with a low-carbon footprint. And I was really intrigued to discover that and figure out how it works. And I tried to tell it to you. I think it's something that would be really, really useful for us to know. In general, we Americans like to have big houses on big lots, and that's a basic problem. We can't really have both. And there people who say, well, we can have small houses on big lots, but the big lots are a problem. The North Atlantic way of building cities says, you don't have big houses, you just can't have them on really big lots. And the people who have been building the North Atlantic cities over the last 400 years have figured out lots of different ways to do that in ways that people actually like. many of their works in cities like London and Boston, are not just pretty to look at. They're the most expensive pieces of real estate in the Western world. People are willing to put their money where my mouth is, they really like it. So there you go, long answer to a short question. I think it's a fun book about important stuff. It's got a lot of history in it, but it leads up to stuff that we need to do right now.

Speaker 2

I think that's a great place to jump off. Thank you. Yeah, I think when I read, you said you were the first to notice or articulate. And I think that's one of the things I noticed in the book. You gave me some language for things about seeing the difference between Amsterdam and London and Paris. And obviously I knew there were differences, but like understanding like, that is the difference. And even here is why it was really helpful for me. And then secondly, really thinking about these North Atlantic cities as a precedent for what is possible today in the U.S. in a way that is palatable. If you were to tell me like we should be building Paris all over the U.S. I said, well, that's a nice idea. As a builder, as a developer, someone has to get things built and sell them and lease them up and all that. going, you know, that might work in a few places, but that's kind of a hard sell. I'm from Houston. I live in Oklahoma, but these gentle density city cities of the North Atlantic cities. I see a lot of potential here and not just on the you know, you talk about the environmental side, which I am a huge proponent of, but also there's so many other benefits of the social benefits and the cultural benefits and the economic benefits too that you talk about in your book. And so maybe from here, if you can talk about what are some of these differences, what, is the North Atlantic way of building and how does that compare to say, you know, a Paris or a Vienna that stands, in people's minds. Cool, yeah, sure. Basically, in what we call the Western world, there are three ways that people build cities. There's a way in continental Europe, there's a way in continental North America, and then between continental Europe and continental North America on the two coasts of the North Atlantic, you get a third way. And since I'm the first person who seems ever to have noticed that, I got to call it whatever I felt like.

Speaker 1

And I named it after the Atlantic Ocean. That's what has tied it together. If you live in continental Europe in a big city, you probably live in an apartment. And the cities of continental Europe are very, very dense. They're very crowded. Paris has 50,000 people per square mile on average. That may not mean a whole lot to you if you don't think in square miles, but here's something. You may have been to New York, you may have been to Manhattan Island, or at least you've seen pictures of it, or movies about superheroes fighting monsters in it or something. New York is also very crowded. Manhattan Island is exactly as crowded as Paris. Or turn that around, Paris is exactly as crowded as Manhattan Island, except for one thing. When you think about Manhattan Island, If you're anything like me, the first thing you think about is skyscrapers. And Paris doesn't have any. So Paris has much less indoor space than Manhattan Island does, but it has just as many people per acre. If you've ever been in New York apartments, you know that they're small, they're cramped, and very often they're dark. Well, in Paris, they're smaller, they're cramped, if that's a word, and they're certainly darker. Whenever a Paris apartment gets some sunlight, the real estate ads proclaim bright, sunny apartment, and they don't do it for everything. says that a house in Houston is bright, sunny, because every house in Houston is bright and sunny. But most apartments in Paris are dark, and if you've got a bright, sunny, when you trumpet the fact and get extra money for it. So. The cities of continental Europe are cities in the school of Paris. They're crowded, the apartments are small, you get sick of those narrow four walls. It's hard to entertain at home. And the people of the cities of continental Europe have figured out how to deal with that. And they dealt with it by having good street life, good public life. If you think about it, the word restaurant is a French word, the Parisians invented it.

Speaker 1

and may still have the best in the world, although I'm kind of partial to what the Italians do. so, you know, the cities of continental Europe have apartments, high density, and lots of street life. People need to get out of their four walls, and if they're entertaining, they need to entertain somewhere else. And Vienna is like that, and Berlin is like that, and Rome is like that. The cities of continental Europe are like that. It's a type of city, the high density apartment house city with a lot of street life. Okay, so pop over to the other side of the Western world to continental North America, to the Midwest, to the Southwest, to the Northwest, the West, and there's a type of city that you find there. The standard city of continental North America, I think of as suburbs around skyscrapers. They are as different from Paris as day is from night. Paris has 50,000 people per square mile. Your native town of Houston has 3,000 people per square mile. That's about five, that's less than five people per acre. So if you live on an acre lot and you've got, you know, a spouse and three kids, you're denser than the city of Houston. So that's pretty amazing. So if you live in Paris, you've got so many people so close that you've got a million stores and cafes and restaurants and boulangeries and patisseries. If you live in Houston, there's no one place that has any number of people within walking distance of it. You can't run a store without a parking lot. And what this means is that if you live in Houston, you have to get in a car and drive somewhere just to get a toothpaste, just get a, you know, a Bistromian Rye somewhere.

Speaker 2

have a playdate with your kids. Or to have a playdate with your kids. That's exactly right. so the cities of continental North America have very low densities. They are suburbs around skyscrapers. And people do an enormous amount of driving. In continental Europe, people don't drive a lot. They walk a lot. These cities have a lot of mass transit. In continental North America, you don't have enough density to support mass transit. And the distances are too great to walk to anything except maybe a fire plug. And so everybody drives a lot. And you've got a lot of asphalt paving because the lots are wide. You've got a lot of underground utilities. You've got water lines. You've got sewer lines. All these things are expensive to build. And then when they wear out after 80 or 90 years, municipalities tend to... get into serious trouble. So there's something to be said for each of these ways of building. The people in Paris do not envy the people in Houston, and the people in Houston don't envy the people in Paris. You can live both of these ways. The big difference is that if you're living in Paris, you've got a low carbon footprint. If everybody lived in Paris, the polar bears would be happy and we wouldn't be having constant fire alerts through North America, know, right? The day before yesterday, there were dust bowl conditions in Chicago. We wouldn't be having dust bowl conditions in Chicago if everybody lived the way people live in Paris. So that gets to the question, all right, if we want to avoid having dust bowls in Chicago, if we want to avoid burning down half of Los Angeles, if we want to avoid the climate crisis,

Speaker 1

Do we all need to live as densely as Paris? Do we all need to live as densely as Manhattan Island? Well, Austin, mean, you put it better than anybody could. Even if you want to do that, you can't. I mean, we can't afford to do that. We've got 330 million people. Are we going to build enough brand new housing for 330 million people all stacked up on top of each other? with the most expensive construction technologies there are, and the construction technologies, steel and concrete and skyscrapers, are the most dangerous to the environment of all building technologies. Now, they don't use a lot of land, but they certainly have big carbon inputs in their construction. Do we really have to do that? What? The answer, please. That's where the North Atlantic cities come in. If you look at Amsterdam or the other Dutch cities, if you look at London or Edinburgh or Dublin or the other cities in the British Isles and Ireland, if you look at Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Brooklyn and the other cities of the North Atlantic belt in the United States, they're kind of Goldilocks cities. They're not too hard, they're not too soft. They're not as dense as Paris. Paris has 50,000 people to the square mile and the North Atlantic cities have somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000. That's the range, with Rotterdam and Baltimore at the bottom and Boston and London at the top. And so they're nowhere near as dense as Paris. They're a lot denser than Houston. And if a North Atlantic city is playing its cards right, the people who live there can have the best of both worlds. If you go to any of the North Atlantic cities, you will see neighborhoods where people have houses that are as big as houses in Houston.

Speaker 1

and they can walk to a good commercial street in three or four minutes. This is true almost everywhere in London, and it's true in lots of places, in Boston and Washington and Baltimore and Brooklyn. The North Atlantic densities allow you to have a good mass transit system. You don't have to be as dense as New York. The transportation experts say, that the best transportation systems in America are not in New York. But if you look at the systems and ask how do they actually serve their people, the transportation experts say the two best systems in the United States are Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts. These are cities that are 12,000, 15,000 people per square mile. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, you need to share warmth with party walls. You need to walk to retail. You need to have good mass transit. And cities like Boston and London and Washington and Brooklyn, New York and Amsterdam can do that. and Paris can do it too. And Manhattan Island can do it too, but you don't need to go crazy like Paris and New York because you know, you don't need to live in a small, crap dark apartment. I've lived in row houses now for 50 years and I'm a right good size physical body. you know, it works. You can walk to public life and you can open your door and have private life. So I started out, I wanted to, I thought that the North Atlantic cities didn't like themselves enough. My first thought was to come up with a big coffee table book full of of Playboy centerfold pictures of row houses. And as I got into it, I found that it actually full of interesting stories. It got to be really cool stuff, but it became important and it turned into a book. it is still, was surprised to find how interesting it was.

Speaker 1

and really surprised to find that it was really important. The world is full of people who have bright ideas. And will the bright ideas work or will they not work? Well, you've got to test them. Well, here's a bright idea. How about living at 10,000 to 15,000 people per square mile? You don't need to ask whether that can be made to work. It works. It's happening every day. Not only does it work, but people love it. Yeah. It's a lab experiment and the lab report has been written and published. It works. You don't have to wonder about it. And if you're trying to figure out how your city should change over time, how your city should grow, the lesson of the North Atlantic cities can be really useful to you. and say, well, I tried this and it worked. Tried that, did work. Here, there's some basic things you're going to try to do. So I don't know. It turned out to be much more interesting than I expected it to be. I was just looking for an excuse to write a book and I had a question in my mind. said, there are these three ways to build a city. Why are there three ways to build a city? And I figured that out by the time I was 23 years old and I figured,

Speaker 1

couldn't possibly have been the only person who had ever noticed this. And I figured somebody must have written a book about it. And by the time I was older, I realized that either nobody had noticed or nobody cared. So I went to work. I'm going to share a little trick we use at Building Culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations. Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than a kind of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the windows open, this is almost like a door hinge. And so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a two four window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. So check out Sierra Pacific windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source windows and doors. We at building culture use both of them regularly. You know, it's a boy. You've got me going in a number of different directions here. So I'll respond to a few things and, um, you know, that I think. Houston and Paris are such good examples because you've got high density and low density. think it's really important to connect Paris to Manhattan because people think density and they automatically think Manhattan. understanding that Paris can actually be just as dense at, know, five, six stories versus skyscrapers. But you're also giving up actually people having space. I don't know what the average unit is in Paris versus Manhattan, but I'm guessing Manhattan has larger units for people.

Speaker 1

about twice as large. Yeah, okay. Right. But it's also what's interesting is, you know, these are the two kind of extreme examples of extremely low density suburban sprawl and extremely high density, Paris or Manhattan. And both might have their benefits. Paris has, you know, a croissant shop on every single block. forget what the statistic is. It's insane of how many croissants. croissant shops there are per capita bakeries per capita. It's unbelievable. I wish I actually knew it off the top of my head. So there's real benefits. There's the street light, there's all that, but there's also real downsides. can't, apartments are dark, they're small, you can't entertain inside. And I don't mean you can't raise a family, right? Of course people have families all over, but might be a little less comfortable. Houston or Oklahoma City or Phoenix or Atlanta, there's all kinds of cities in the Midwest that are kind of sprawling out just like Houston. There are some benefits. People have bigger houses. They've got bigger lots. There's some convenience there, but there's also downsides. I grew up where my dad, it was completely normal for him to commute an hour to work and an hour and a half on the way home. And now that I'm at the age where I've got kids, a one-year-old and a five-year-old, that would be, and how much little time there is, you where you're trying to work and you're trying to you know, work out of the gym a few times a week and take care of yourself and then have family. There's no, when you give two and a half hours of your time away or two hours of your time to commuting each day, there is no time left. You know, and so there's beyond the environmental impact and then of course the cost impact of having to own a car to do anything. And if you have kids, everything has to be planned and there is no organic play, no organic interactions with your, you know, there is the sense of community and all that. So there's

Speaker 2

positives but downsides. And what I really like about these North Atlantic cities is it does seem to balance a lot of these things really well. Where you get that increased density at 12 to 15,000 people an acre. What is that per acre? Because I was looking it up while you were going. So Paris at 50,000 people per square mile is 78. 20 to 25 people per acre. Okay. Okay. Cool. And then Houston, said is five. So that 20 to 25 people, uh, an acre seems to be a really nice balance where you can have like a balanced private life and public life where you can still have a street life. just might, you might have to walk a little farther. You can sustain other kinds of transit while still allowing cars. think you've even mentioned that people still drive in Amsterdam. They drive a good bit, just a lot less than here. Um, and And then you can also even have large houses. can have 4,000 square foot row homes, 5,000 square foot row homes that are gracious and wonderful feeling, and keep the identity of a neighborhood. So I just, for me, it seems like something that's really, feasible and possible. And of course I kind of think about city building over a hundred plus your timeline, you know, you can't snap your fingers and change a city in a decade or two decades at that. This is a kind of a long-term trajectory. So it's kind of like, as we've kind of recognized that endless suburban sprawl doesn't work socially, economically, environmentally, culturally, what do we start? What's the vision that we can start going to? And I think it's so important to have a vision so people actually know what we're trying to do. And so I think for me, that was what's so powerful about reading your book, which is why I've got the picture of, you

Speaker 2

Vermeer's Little Streets on my wall in my office and my other office too, because I found it inspiring and a vision to kind of like work towards. And it's not, hey, we need to just replicate exactly Amsterdam here today. It's Oklahoma City is Oklahoma City. Atlanta is Atlanta. But how do we take those principles that we do know work and reinterpret them in our own cultural way? And so that reminds me, go ahead. You sound like you're about to respond to that. is going to say that this can be much more useful to you in the Sun Belt than it is to me here on these coasts. You guys are growing. You guys are growing fast. A lot more stuff than we are. How you build really matters. It's kind of, you know. Yeah

Speaker 2

I think it does. It really matters. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah. So, no, speaking of one of the things that I did find so interesting in your book too, was some of the cultural, wait, maybe it was cultural and economic differences and stuff that actually led to say like an apartment house based city like Paris. Yeah. Or, you know, in Amsterdam. And I think people might find that pretty We

Speaker 2

Interesting if you could give some background on that. Sure, you know, I don't know, I'm an American and so I think when you've got America and you've got Europe and you go to Europe and Europe's really different from America. It was a surprise to me to find that there really two parts of Europe and they're really different from each other. And you know, it's basically the Netherlands and the British Isles and then everybody else is different. What I think you're edging up to, Austin, if you had to go back a little bit in time, if you got in the wayback machine and go back to the year 1600, if you had visited Paris and London in the year 1600, you wouldn't have been able to tell them apart. Maybe people were speaking different languages, but there wasn't any difference in the physical whatever of the city. two kinds of residential structures in London and the same two kinds in Paris. There were a small number of noblemen. A nobleman lived in town palaces. And the best way for me to think of a nobleman's town palace in either London or Paris in 1600 is to say that it was a castle on a, and of course, a castle on a compressed lot, half an acre or an acre. But otherwise it was a castle. had walls around it. It had a courtyard. There was a big building sort of in the middle. And it wasn't just a nuclear family. It wasn't just mom, dad, and 2.3 kids. You had feudal retainers. You had armed guards at the door. You had stables out back. You had ladies in waiting. A nobleman's palace was a palace, and it had maybe 100 people living in it.

Speaker 1

London had two or three dozen of these things, and Paris, which was the capital of a bigger country, had maybe 100 or sometimes 200 of them. And they were models of the royal palace, they were palaces. And that was one way that people lived in London and Paris in 1600. And every European city was some version of that. London and Paris were the two biggest. But every little capital, in Germany or something, had a castle in the middle. Every county seat in England and Ireland had a castle in the middle. And one or two noble families living in a palace. What about everybody else? 99.5 % of the people did not live in city palaces. They lived in the ancestors of row houses. They were on small lots, know, somewhere between 12 and 20 feet wide. And they were made out of wood, often wood with plaster, half timber. Half timbering takes a lot of maintenance in a wet climate with a lot of temperature variation. you know, London and Paris were dirt poor at 1600. These were third world societies. The best way I find to think of how common people lived in London or Paris or any European city in 1600 is that they lived in shacks. These things were built like shacks. They were poorly built and they were poorly maintained. And rich people lived in big shacks and poor people lived in little shacks, but they all lived in shacks. And a good way to think of it is to think of the standard way to fight a fire in a European city in 1600. Nowadays, if there's a fire, you try to spray water on it and put it out. In 1600, if there was a fire in a city, the standard way to fight it was to take a hook and pull down the house. Now, for one thing, they didn't have very good pumps, but for another thing, their houses were shacks. All right, you can take a hook to a modern house and...

Speaker 1

pull all you want, you won't pull it down. But in 1600 in London or Paris or any city in Europe, the house was on fire, you just pulled it down. And the house let you do that because the house was poorly built and poorly maintained, it was a shack. So all throughout Europe, 1600, London, Paris, every city, you've got these two radically different ways. You've got nobles living in palaces. and everybody else, the common people, living in shacks. And then, and you know, that's a model of society, because these societies are places where kings and nobles have all the power and most of the money, and you know, nobody else has much. They're not very proud of themselves, and they don't boast with architecture, and they don't have architectural style. But then, long about 1600, For the first time, you get a whole European country. that doesn't have a king, doesn't have a powerful nobility, it's run by common people. And it's a success. It becomes the richest country in Europe in the 1600s, and it's run by common people. Lots of them do quite well. None of them get to be as rich as a nobleman in Paris or London. They are middle-class people, and they're running a whole country. It's called The Netherlands, Holland, and the seven provinces. The Netherlands is the first big, rich, successful country run by middle-class people. And what do they do? They figure out how to build houses that treat middle-class people with dignity. If you look at the shacks that

Speaker 1

You know, everybody lived in it in 1600. They were rattletrap, but they didn't have any style. The Dutch were the first people to build middle-class city houses out of durable materials, usually brick. Brick was a luxury material in Holland in 1600, but by 1650, the Dutch had invented brick kilns that could make a million bricks at a time, and they could build whole cities out of brick. And this is something I never even thought about, that these are the first houses that allowed middle class people and even working class people to have durable materials. They weren't shacks. They stood up, you couldn't pull them down with a hook. And it's no wonder that the Dutch invented the first good pumpers to fight fires with water. They had houses you couldn't pull down. So that was one thing, but the other thing is, you know, in 1600, the common people never got architectural style. Only nobles got architectural style. But the Dutch, well, you had common people running the whole shebang. And not only that, but this was the generation of the great Dutch painters. people who invented the North Atlantic building tradition were, you know, the guys who lived next door to Rembrandt and Vermeer went to school with them. This was the Dutch Golden Age, one of the great artistic golden ages in history. And the builders of Dutch houses figured out how to take the houses of the common people and build them out of durable materials and then touch them with the magic wand of architectural style. It's the first time in history, as far as I know, that common people anywhere get stylish architecture. If you know anything about, the Dutch invented the row houses, essentially what they did. If you know anything about London or Philadelphia or Brooklyn or Amsterdam, these are cities of brick row houses. They go on for miles.

Speaker 1

And if you and many people think that the Roe House is a sort of an old fashioned building type or a sort of a low building type, a blue collar building type. Well, the Roe House was invented by the Dutch. The first ones were built in 1622 in Amsterdam and they were a luxury product. They were a luxury product in a middle class society. They're nothing at all like a nobleman's palace in Paris. but they were a luxury product for middle class people. that was new. But the people in Paris couldn't have cared less about it. They had a king with a glorious court and a big palace at Versailles and another one at the Louvre. And the dukes imitated the king and the marquise imitated the dukes and the counts imitated the marquise. And eventually you got down to the, they all built palaces and eventually you got down to rich commoners. They couldn't afford to build palaces, but they lived in a society that liked palaces. And so the French figured out how to build big buildings that looked like palaces, but middle class people could rent two rooms, three rooms, four rooms in them. And they invented the luxury apartment house. And if you go to Paris, you can walk for miles down beautiful streets of buildings that looked like palaces, but aren't. They are apartment buildings. So Paris was a city where fashion was set from the top. And if you think about it, at 1600, there were two ways you could live. You could live in a palace, or you could live in a proto-rohouse. The Dutch figured out how to make the Proto-Roe house into a noble thing, but the Parisians said to hell with that, we're going to figure out how to make palaces for middle class people. And that's what they did. It became the city of apartment houses. Well, then you get to London and the British Isles. And London in 1600 had palaces and shacks just like Paris. But by 1700, something had happened.

Speaker 1

the nobles of England and Scotland stopped building town palaces. And instead of middle-class Londoners tried to copy palaces, noble Londoners built Dutch-style middle-class row houses. And you can walk for miles in London through row house neighborhoods that were built for the nobility and gentry of England in the 1700s and the 1800s. So Paris took one road where everybody wanted to live in a palace. London took the other road where everybody wanted to live in a row house. In between you've got the Dutch who invented the row house and made it possible for people to choose. If the French had settled North America, then the cities on these goes to the United States might have apartment houses that look like palaces, I don't know. But the French did not settle most of North America, a bit of Quebec, but nothing else. Instead, it was the Dutch in New York and the English everywhere else, and they brought their building tradition. And as soon as they could afford to set up brickyards, as soon as they could afford to have masons, as soon as they chopped down a lot of trees and They couldn't just build wooden houses. But when they got tired of fires, they started building row houses. New York started to look like a Dutch town. Philadelphia immediately started to look like a British town. And the rest of them followed suit and still do. This is not just history. In the North Atlantic cities today, it's a living tradition. people are building row houses every day. I live in Baltimore and in the suburbs of Baltimore, people build a couple of thousand row houses every year. When I was growing up and I grew up here, row houses were unfashionable. That has changed. There are now fashionable row houses, very expensive row houses. Some of them are treasured antiques. A lot of them are brand new. So that's

Speaker 1

that change is being made. Not fast enough to ward off environmental collapse. But at any rate, those of you out in the sun-built, where cities are growing very rapidly and you have to build thousands of houses every year, come see what we've figured out. We've figured out a lot of stuff about how you can live a good life on less land. It's a really, I think it's a nice model to have, uh, in the sunbelt, have super low density suburban sprawl, and then we've got just punctuations of big apartment buildings of 300 to 500 unit apartment buildings. everyone, every time when a developer goes to build one, the whole, you know, surrounding community comes out rioting and picketing because they don't want a big giant apartment complex. Uh, in the neighborhood. And of course, that's not everywhere all the time, but that's a pretty consistent theme that happens at city councils locally. It's we don't want this big apartment building. while that might seem mean and, you know, a lot of times those people just get labeled as NIMBYs and sometimes that's just true. But other times I'm kind of going from my own experience. like, get it because you're trying to make up for so much density from the lack of density and you really need it because you're a growing city. but these big apartment buildings really aren't that pleasant to look at or live in or be around. versus, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have any of them, but if we had more of the gentle density row homes kind of in general and kind of spread out that, that density throughout the city a bit more, I really think we could have such a pleasant, city in aggregate. And it reminds me what you were talking about. I loved how you pointed out the simplicity. in these Dutch cities and the Dutch Ro homes. know, Paris literally looks like a palace as you are walking around it. I mean, if you just pull up Google Maps like the the stone and the ornamentation, I mean, it's it's stunning. It's beautiful. But then the Dutch, it's the brick. And I mean, I've got a brick picture behind me because I especially trained as a Mason for a couple of years. And we actually do structural masonry because we're building these brick Ro homes for multiple reasons, because they're

Speaker 2

durable because they don't catch on fire and the termites don't eat them and they're more resilient to mold and mildew and flooding and high winds. They're really more resilient to just about everything compared to how we build it except for major earthquakes. But when you're building small buildings, you can control for that anyway. But this idea of these simple kind of vernacular buildings that are so beautiful. because they're actually meant to be background buildings. It's not that you can't stop and look at one and see how this one building is beautiful, but really it's the experience of being in a city. like if reading a book in every sentence is, know, the most complex sentence, you know, it's exhausting. You know, you need some prose, you know, and just some, some writing and then, and then a point that really drives it home. And that's the... the punctuation or that's the cathedral or it's the civic building that really draws your eye. And so it's another reason why I really love this idea of these kind of simple, humble, everyday beauty. And gosh, I think about this a lot too, of how much we need in our society's beauty. And there's just so much ugliness. I mean, you live in Baltimore, so I'm sure there's plenty of ugly everywhere, but I mean, so much of what is built today, like literally being built as we speak, across the sunbelt and other parts too, it's just soul sucking, you know, ugly. And I think, you know, life is difficult. Life is full of suffering. Life is not just a walk in the park or at least, you know, I'm 36 years old, but I've learned that the hard way, I guess you could say. And I can't help but think having kind of an environment, a habitat that just celebrates the simple everyday beauty is a really wonderful thing and a real gift to society. And it's one of the reasons I love that painting of Vermeer's Little Streets because it's just a

Speaker 2

a little row house and it's kind of, you know, it's got cracks in it and you know, the shutters are sideways and you know, there's, there's a woman working in the background and somehow it's stunningly beautiful too, you know, and you didn't have to, it's not Notre Dame and it doesn't need to be. And I'm not against Notre Dame, but there's so much to be had in everyday beauty. And so I find it such an inspiration in, in that way. Well, yeah, I mean, and you can build ugly row houses. I've seen an ugly row house. I'll be glad to show you some. Every row house city has some real corkers. But the worst, worst I've ever seen, brand new, were under construction the last time I was in Seattle, Washington. You can, I've seen play-

Speaker 2

You yeah.

Speaker 1

Seattle, in my humble opinion, is a beautiful place. Wonderful, beautiful city. And I don't know anybody in Seattle who wishes he lived in Baltimore or Oklahoma City or even Paris. They're happy as clams out there in Seattle, and who can blame them? But they don't think they're dense enough. They're very eco-friendly, and they think they need more density. So they're building a lot of apartment houses, and they're doing it very well. but they're also experimenting with row houses. And I wish I could remember the street if I could, as I said, all said some pictures I took of, I think very few people have looked at as many row houses as I have, and these win the prize for being ugly as dumb as row houses in Charlie Duff's universe. It's really pretty. just looked at them and thought, Shazam! How did? You had to try hard to make them that bad, you know. That's things work. It's so easy. It's a rectangle that if you just use like brick and just four windows and they can be the simplest right home and it can be beautiful, you know, or at least, you know, simple and, you know.

Speaker 1

A carpenter friend of mine who has worked all over my city for years says there are really only six houses in Baltimore. They probably just move them around. Yeah, and it works.

Speaker 2

It's kind of like apple pie. mean, you know, there's variations, like apple pie is also apple pie. know, and it's good. You don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. You start with apples and you add pie and you get apple pie, yeah. One thing, Austin, I can't let you get away with imagining a city that's just houses. The apartments are a good idea for an awful lot of people. And cities need to have good apartments. And if you don't have a lot of... people in your household if you don't want a lot of space, if you move around a lot, if you don't have a lot of money. When I was in my 20s and even in my 30s, was usually working 80, 90, 100 hours a week. I didn't care where I lived. There's never a home. And apartments are a good thing. America, does not do good apartments, but it's possible to do good apartments, and America should figure that out. Paris is not, you're right, Paris is not a good guide in how America should build apartments. Now they're wrong with Paris if I had to live in an apartment, I'd just as soon live in Paris, but it's not right for American conditions. The way Americans so often build apartments nowadays is also not very useful. It's exactly what you described. You take this giant building, usually a bunch of apartments around the parking garage, a Texas donut, and you just sort of plunk it down as close as you can to a freeway interchange. And so you get a lot of density, but it doesn't support transit. It doesn't support

Speaker 1

retail. It doesn't fit into a neighborhood. there is, the good North Atlantic cities have figured out how to do this. And my favorite example is an American example. And it's not a new experiment. It's something that sort of evolved in the 1920s and 30s. If you go to Washington, DC, you'll notice that there are big avenues named after states. Two of the biggest and busiest are Wisconsin Avenue and Connecticut Avenue. And they come here in Northwest Washington. And these are big, busy streets. And they have bus lines and Connecticut Avenue. I think they both have subway lines. So you need a lot of density to support a subway line. And they've got it, because these avenues are wallpapered with apartment houses. The apartment houses are six to 15 stories tall, and they've got a lot of density. And Washington has a lot of people who want to live in apartments. Every city does. And these avenues are really wallpapered with apartment buildings. But if you walk behind the apartment buildings, you're in streets of family houses. Some of them are row houses, but many are not. Some of them are semi-detached. Most of them are single-family detached houses on fairly small lots with really good landscape. And this is a win-win. People who want to live in apartments get good apartments, and the density of those apartment houses makes it possible for people who live in houses to walk to retail and have robust mass transit. Everybody wins. If I were, if you think about the cities you live in, you've got a lot of big arterial roads and nobody would ever want to have a house on one of them. They're much too busy. They're noisy. But an apartment building, if you can get up above it, if you have good insulated windows and walls, that's sort of feasible. This Washington pattern of an avenue and side streets is something that

Speaker 1

Kenbuk is, I think, a really good way to build the United States. And if you do enough of it, everybody wins. I have a bunch of friends who grew up in Northwest Washington. Their childhoods were idyllic. They never had scripted play dates. They could walk to the movie theater. They'd walk to stores, things like that. It was just idyllic. And it's still there, and kids still grow up that way. I think that's a very important point and certainly don't mean that I don't think there should be apartment buildings more critiquing the way they are done in the U.S. because I told you last time about this neighborhood, if you ever come to Oklahoma City, I'll have to show you Wheeler District and it's right by downtown. mean, it's just a half mile from downtown and it's still in the middle of being built. It's only five years old, but kind of their base house. They're not attached houses. But they're actually, they're row home in their function, I guess you could say, is in their pretty narrow lots. They're 32 foot wide lot, 28 to 34 foot wide lots, kind of deep, 80 feet deep. So you've got kind of a narrower house, a 14 to 16 foot courtyard out the back, and then a garage off an alley. So like I'm saying, it's kind of like a row home set up with an alley. They just happen to be eight feet apart from each other. And so each lot is 3,200 square feet, 3,800 square feet. And that's kind of the... probably, I don't know, 70 % of the land area in terms of housing. And then you've got this little town center where they've got some live work units and some townhouses and some fourplexes and small apartment buildings and an office building and a taco shop and a coffee shop, taco shop and coffee and beer. And then they've actually got this apartment building going up, that's two or 300 units, and it all integrates so well together because as you just said, when you want some density so you can support some commercial and have that coffee shop and have that center of the neighborhood where people can have these kind of loose connections and relationships and kids can run around. And it's a really wonderful how it's been built out. And I think that makes a ton of sense to have, you our neighborhoods really do need kind of centers in some way. And maybe that's along the highway, right? Not everything is perfect. Speaker 2 (01:01:46.072) but having these little centers of density of apartments and other things that do support the commercial. And then you can still have quiet residential streets all around for whoever wants to live there, families. I think that's something that's really important to me is making the city, the urban experience more friendly to families. Cause what happens is in most of the Sunbelt cities, people might grow up and they're in an apartment building or something like that. And they might get, you know, married or something and it still works for them. But then when they have kids, there really aren't good urban options for families and row homes or even detached to single family can, but integrated in a great urban neighborhood can be wonderful places to raise a family. so I think that was a really great place to, to emphasize that, to, want Is there something online that your audience and I can look at, see the Wheeler District? Either that or you should organize a field trip for us. I want to come look at this stuff. me what is and let's go at some other time. That's great. Speaker 2 (01:02:56.31) Yeah, we'll need to. Yeah, I probably, the main website, I don't know if it would show the best images of it, but I actually should do that sometime. We were just walking through it. And actually I've got a couple of videos on YouTube where I have walked through it actually a bit. Yeah, I would love to do that with you sometime. Yeah. And while you're public. And with all of your public. mean, you've got about... Do what? Be a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. And Carlton Landing too. There's some really great places being built. So I do have a lot of hope. To wrap up here, you know, and I'm sure you've traveled a lot, you've written a lot, you've talked to a lot of people. Speaker 2 (01:03:43.798) What's kind of, when you talk to other architects, developers, builders, students, what's your message to them? What do you kind of hope they take away when you, I know you've done a bunch of talks at Harvard and other universities and book talks. kind of what we've been talking about, that there is a way of building cities. It really works. It's kind of hidden in plain sight. Americans don't talk about it much because most American cities aren't built this way. But this way of building cities exists in America. as it does in some parts of Europe. And it solves an awful lot of problems at once. It is a more economical and ecological way of housing a whole lot of people. It can be built without fancy technologies. It allows people to have the best of both worlds. You can have a spacious family house and a low carbon footprint. at the same time. Otherwise, I just like to fill in with a bunch of pretty pictures. If I'm talking in your town, I'll try to have pretty pictures of your town and things that work. But that's the basic message, that there's a way of building cities. It's not just a good idea. It's been road tested for 400 years. Any place in the United States can learn from it, and if we do learn from it, we'll be happier. Speaker 2 (01:05:45.422) Charlie, thank you so much for coming on. Be sure to check out his book, North Atlantic Cities. And I hope to visit Baltimore at some point. I hope to visit Oklahoma City. If you wonder why the economy is so uncertain, I think it's because I have left the American labor force. I've now retired. So maybe I can figure out how to get to Oklahoma City. We've got some stuff coming up that we're starting to build here in a few months. We should be breaking ground on including some row homes. So in this really great, we've got about an acre and we're putting 18 row homes and some really nice mixed use office building commercials, all just two story, but we're fitting a lot in with some really complex courtyards and interblock development. If you've got some plans, send them to me. I will. shoot you some of the renderings in the video. You'll love it. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Speaker 1 (01:06:49.55) I'll send you a plan of a friend of mine, architect friend of mine, designed a successful row house development at 32 units to the net acre. Wow. They're ugly as sin, that's just the other client with no taste. But the land planning is dropped at brother. It happens. Speaker 2 (01:07:14.158) Yeah. Well, if you can get one right, I always say get the urbanism right because you can always replace the architecture later. Once you get the urbanism wrong, it's much harder. Yep. Yep. And he somehow managed to build a bunch of row houses that actually looked like a medical office building. didn't know it could be done. that's sad. That's so sad. Well, Charlie, thank you so much and look forward to keeping up with your work. Thank you so much, I want to keep up with yours. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.