Tono Architects

Architect Hunter Johnson’s Latest Contribution To Fine Living Lancaster Magazine

Ah, the architect. In his unabashedly overexposed role in contemporary American media, he is the darling of the thirty-second television commercial, the stand-in for glossy magazine print ads, and the star of numerous recent big screen productions. [Using the gender-specific identification “he” is, of course, seemingly pejorative, until one looks closer at the plethora of thematic references. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this tongue-in-cheek article, indulge me.]

Apparently, a cultural mystique exists whereby architects are ubiquitously identified throughout various forms of modern media as hard-hat wearing, blue-print toting, T-square wielding, intently pondering professionals who frequent construction sites, gesticulate towards half-built high-rise structures, and live in intensely progressive multi-million dollar citadels. The literary view of the building design professional may depict him speciously, but often with admirable character traits and robust intestinal fortitude.

Whether he is Ayn Rand’s triumphantly exuberant Howard Roark from her paramount novel “The Fountainhead” or Paul Newman in the cinematic tour-de-force “The Towering Inferno”, the architect suggests a kind of honorable sophistication coupled with stylish sensitivity. Perhaps it could be said he exudes a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ and this provides him with credibility for numerous communication and advertising platforms.

Truth be known, as a child of the 70’s, I revered Mike Brady (aka Robert Reed). After all, this happily married father of six lived in an improbably spacious ranch in suburban Pasadena with a live-in full-time maid, worked a few hours a week and afforded lavish vacations to Hawaii and Disney Land. And he brought the maid along! What a life!

In more up-to-date interpretations, theatrical depictions have demonstrated the more beleaguered, desperate side of the profession. As the antithesis of 1974 Mike Brady, Woody Harrelson played the “starving artist architect” in the 1993 “Indecent Proposal” where he gambled away his wife for a quick seven figure fix. Or more currently, Adam Sandler reinterpreted “It’s A Wonderful Life” as the “low-man-on-the-totem-pole schlub architect” working for David Hasselhoff the “flamboyantly overzealous boss architect” in the 2006 melodrama “Click”. Careful what you wish for!

Then there’s my personal favorite, in which the architect becomes Supreme Being in “The Matrix Revolutions”. Here, the Creator of the cyber world of The Matrix when confronted by the movie’s protagonist with the question “Who are you?” responds, “I’m the Architect” demonstrating his ultimate omnipotence and absolute power.

Of course, we cannot forget those who assume the persona of the architect to gain prestige or affection from others in pictures and television. On the 90’s sitcom, Seinfeld, the character of George Costanza often took the alias of Art Vandelay, designer of that “Guggenheim thing” believing his esteemed fictional career could persuade others to fall for him. Matt Damon’s role in “There’s Something About Mary” impersonated an architect in order to win the love of the title character.

Abundantly proliferated and pushed to the point of caricature, the architect has become a reliable foil in the cultural landscape of fabricated commercialism. At the same time however, the modern media may be doing the profession an accidental service by depicting the fictitious personalities of the building design profession as reliably self-proficient individuals of resolve and reluctant heroism.

Thanks Hollywood, I guess.

Hunter Johnson pens latest article for Fine Living Lancaster Magazine.

“Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown” 

Part of the source of inspiration for my column in this issue comes from an unlikely, but imaginative source nonetheless. Having just witnessed again the spectacle that is the progressive rock band Rush a short while ago in the company of my brother and a close friend who shares our passion for overtly complex musicianship, introspective lyricism and devotedly intellectual thematic underpinnings, I was swooned by the sophistication of the production, stalwartness of musical craft and sincerity in the band’s delivery. After returning from the show and reflecting on the retrospective nature of the engagement, (the tour is aptly named “Time Machine” featuring a three hour cross-section of fan favorites stretching four decades), I found myself re-analyzing specific lyrical contents from the group’s early 1980’s anthem “Subdivisions”.

“Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone”

Identity is often rooted in a sense of place or a connection to one. Without the sense of belonging to a community, we struggle to find our own identity.

The physical description of community may vary and particularly in scale; however, urban centers tend to be identified as the places we recognize as home. And these urban centers have their own history, culture and idiosyncratic character. As we find a connection to a particular place, we bond with its history, culture and character – often taking those qualities as our own, especially over time.

When asked “where did you grow up” or “where are you from”, the response frequently results in the identification of a city or town. Less frequently do we recall, “I’m from the bypass” or “I grew up near the intersection of route something and highway whatever”. Without strong connections to an established, identifiable community, ones sense of well being, security and belonging suffers.

Perhaps this is part of the reason we have witnessed growing isolationism among youth (and adults) raised within the relative anonymity of our sprawling suburban developments. Latchkey children left to their electronics behind picket fences and manicured lawns may not breed the next generation of self-confident, well-adjusted adults. Real community is not necessarily gained in chat rooms, via text messaging and through online gaming.

“Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth

But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth”

Moreover, I fear the geographically subdivided landscape places unseen barriers among neighbors living in relative segregation from one another, particularly in homogeneous settlements removed of cultural amenities, places to recreate, or community gathering spots. Ideally, we would be well served to create integrated communities having varieties of housing types, places to shop, eat, worship and entertain, educational facilities, and cultural establishments all within walking distance to one another. Oh, wait… we have those already. They’re called cities.

Although I’ve sited reference to and inspiration from one source, tongue-in-cheek I find it necessary to quote another who so succinctly sums up the argument:

“It’s really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don’t have a downtown, you really don’t have anything. It’s hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.” – Ed McMahon, Entertainer

The following article was written by the Principle of TONO Architect for a recent edition of Fine Living Lancaster:

“Sustain”

By D. Hunter Johnson, AIA

Principal Architect for TONO Architects, LLC

Among popular culture’s more verdant and overused terms spoken unremittingly in business circles, online communities, print media and slick advertising campaigns, the qualifier “green” has become as ubiquitous and nondescript as “light”, and “free”. We attach the “green” superlative to our cars, toiletries, banking techniques, vacations, and yes, architecture. Whether self-gratifying or self-deprecating, we want to believe we are helping preserve the planet and its natural resources by purchasing products and services with smaller carbon footprints thereby presuming we have lessened the load on the local landfill and patched a little ozone back onto the Stratosphere.

At the same time, we still refer to ourselves as “consumers” with zealous vigor. Can one truly be a “green” consumer?

In the face of one of the worst economies in generations, sluggish, if not paralyzed by consumers shying from spending and thereby “consuming”, we find ourselves in the ultimate quandary. We recognize the need to stimulate the economy through spending therefore increasing sales, services, manufacturing and so on, and yet we refrain. The “economy” after all is the sum of our participation in the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. There’s that word again: “consumption”.

While the spoken mantra for the next generation is to step lightly upon the earth and to reduce, reuse and recycle, by doing so, our new conservationist mindset may in fact inhibit the economy. Or, is it the other way around? Are we inadvertently helping our environment by encumbering the economy simply by maintaining a more fiscally prudent approach at present?

Fundamentally, we should recognize the inherently paradox. While on the one hand, we desire to preserve our livelihoods by invigorating the systems of commerce we have developed in post-industrial America, and yet, we also desire to insure our quality of life by conserving the very resources consumed in that process. Perhaps we need a new model. One in which we move away from consumption and towards sustainability. Ultimately though, our system needs to be one of regeneration.

Having dinner with a friend and fellow pontificator earlier this week at a newly opened downtown establishment, we discussed many of these topics and then he mentioned upon returning to the Lancaster area a few years back he noted the popularity of the “I ♥ City Life” bumper stickers. It struck me as an appropriate allegory for sustainable living.

Lancaster was settled in 1733 as a strategic inland crossroads for regional commerce in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Some 277 years later, the city is experiencing another rebirth among its many by offering a healthy diversity of people, functions and attractions. Through significant civic and private investment strategies among the numerous grassroots “storefront” improvements in owner-occupied structures, the city has become a showcase for sustainability. At almost three centuries young, many of America’s urban centers represent our best opportunity for regenerative living by building upon the physical infrastructure that already exists. Intrinsically, cities, such as Lancaster, contain our largest infrastructure investments, our centers of commerce, and our seeds of government, therefore by their mere density and durability they have become our most feasible ecologically sustainable physical areas to maintain over the long term.

I recently heard Mayor Rick Gray say: “So goes the City, so goes the County.” A viable, healthy Lancaster city, means a robust, livable Lancaster County. As we keep the City healthy, we keep our heritage in tact, we pass legacy to our children and grandchildren, and we maintain irreplaceable physical infrastructure. Now that’s sustainability.

The following article was written by the Principle of TONO Architect for a recent edition of Fine Living Lancaster:

“Streets and Sidewalks”

By D. Hunter Johnson, AIA

Principal Architect for TONO Architects, LLC

A little over forty years ago, a phenomenon of broadcasting brilliance began glowing across our television screens depicting a rather unremarkable streetscape of brownstones and back alleys inhabited by a multicultural group of friendly neighbors, and their unusual non-human counterparts. Teaching lessons of cooperation, humility and friendship under the broader curriculum umbrella of grade school education, the inhabitants of Sesame Street have brought us other unplanned lessons in urban living and the life of the street.

Seeing the timeless children’s show of Sesame Street as an allegory for idealized city life; we can still find valuable elements applicable to our town, our time and our circumstances.

On the foremost, the title of the show itself contains the singular element of the city construct so critical to its vitality and mere existence: the street. For without it, we clearly find no means of circulation, whether vehicular or pedestrian; but moreover, in its absence, the city lacks the connective tissue that binds the urban fabric together. Because it is on the street, and its sidewalks, where inhabitants encounter one another, begin conversations, develop relationships, and participate in each other’s lives.

Again, recall the chance encounters portrayed in the Brooklyn borough inhabited by muppets and their gregarious human companions. On the front stoops of the brownstones and outside the neighborhood grocery, the sidewalks teem with life. The interstitial space of the city becomes the place where residents, business people and visitors conduct their collective lives. Connection occurs in these places when we afford them the opportunity and realize their potential.

Pulling from the inimitable writings of Jane Jacobs and her mid-last-century classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors… which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms. Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small changes from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.”

Fortunately, the streets and sidewalks of Lancaster are well “equipped” for dignified and purposeful urban living. More to the point, the activation of the sidewalk equips it for purpose greater than its mere utility as a pedestrian way.

Take note of North Prince Street during First Fridays as the most intense example. Not only is the sidewalk well served, but witness the effect the enlivened space has on the surrounding neighborhood, businesses and infrastructure. The entire social fabric of the community is strengthened through the chance encounters found there.

On the other hand, call to mind the 300 block of North Queen Street on a given weekday, or the areas around Central Market on Tuesdays, Fridays or Saturdays, or any number of sidewalks, side streets and alleys when the weather is favorable in the evenings. You are bound to find innumerable members of the Lancaster community sitting on front stoops, playing on city sidewalks and participating in their neighbors’ lives.

 Check back for additional articles…..

The following article was written by the Principle of TONO Architect for a recent edition of Fine Living Lancaster:

 “Connections”

By D. Hunter Johnson, AIA

Principal Architect for TONO Architects, LLC

Founded in the early part of the eighteenth century by Dutch settlers, the city of Lancaster, then a rural borough in William Penn’s western woods, has grown into one of America’s one hundred largest metropolitan areas. And yet, there remains great distinction between the confines of historic Lancaster city and its growing exurban surroundings. With a population of nearly 55,000 inhabiting a relatively quaint seven square miles, the County Seat boasts historic landmarks, rich cultural history, modern conveniences and a distinctly colonial architectural flavor unique to south-central Pennsylvania.

By contrast, just beyond its municipal borders the famously pastoral landscape of Lancaster County continues to transform from agricultural heartland into a suburban bedroom community of almost a half million residents. With plain people sharing rural highways with modern teenage drivers, somewhere in between the vibrancy of a relatively well preserved and rejuvenated colonial settlement and its twentieth century cul-de-sac developments, lies a curious tension.

First a little pretext. Unlike many of the neighboring cities of its generation, the urban infrastructure of Lancaster has managed to roll with the proverbial punches delivered by decades of cultural evolution including civil strife, economic depression, manufacturing divestment, sub-urban development, and perhaps the most significant blows to American city centers: urban renewal and the advent of the personal automobile. Perhaps more so, the shear magnitude of Lancaster’s agricultural strength withheld rapid suburban expansion in the first half of the previous century thereby slowing the dismantling of the city’s strength: its quintessential intermingling of places to live, work and play.

Nevertheless, racing into the twenty-first century, the area is fast losing its farming heritage, strained under the volume of planned residential neighborhoods providing commuters opportunities to grab parceled acreage of former corn fields while by comparison, the urban center rebounds amid renewed value in living close to cultural amenities and minimizing one’s carbon footprint.

Acknowledging the aforementioned without prejudice and intent on discovering the relative successes and, albeit failures, of planning, architectural design, and building construction in contemporary Lancaster, this column will discuss the distinct tensions surrounding the juxtapositions inherent in our area. Moreover, the forthcoming series of articles will examine the connections within our community existent between the people, places and things we do. Foremost will be the unabashed attempt to understand the role of architecture in our community and its ability to figuratively, and quite literally, build it (or in errant cases, dismantle).

To place the discussion into the broader context and help define successful cities and their composition, one must inherently defer to Jane Jacobs and her paramount work of 1961 “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in which she says they possess “a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially”. Furthermore, she states “dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

Dare I say, Lancaster falls to the later containing the seeds of its own regeneration, begun several decades ago and now burgeoning as a destination for fine living with a quality of life unmatched throughout the region?

Albeit the work is still incomplete and as the city center prospers as a destination for entertainment and culture, many parts still lag behind waiting to re-connect to the whole. What is more, the surrounding county’s suburban landscape sprawls at unprecedented pace creating pockets of dis-connected residents bound to their automobiles, electronic devices and internet service. Using today’s lingo, connectivity, without face-to-face encounters, may just weaken our communities.

Maybe valuable lessons come from the past and perhaps new ones will rise from innovative young minds seeking community apart from chat rooms and online social networks.

Again, deferring to the inimitable Ms. Jacobs, “It may be romantic to search for the salves of society’s ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time. Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?”

Perhaps the strength of our community comes from its diversity of talents and opinions nestled together in relatively dense quarters among a rich fabric of social amenities. Maybe our quality of life is made better because Lancastrians embrace both our heritage and our progressive spirit.

As the constructed environment of our area evolves, it appears we will need to strike a balance among these apparent disparities in order to remain sustainable, relevant and connected. 

Check back for more installments….