In an age of globalization, local character turns up in surprising places. Take the suburbs. “It’s very easy to say that the world is being Americanized,” says Jacqueline Tatom, D.Des., assistant professor of architecture, whose comparative study of the peripheries of Lyons, France, and Boston was recently published in Suburban Form: An International Perspective. “Many new building typologies in suburbs around the world are very similar and were often first built in the U.S.
“But if you compare suburban landscapes in different countries over time, you discover that development never happens in quite the same way and doesn’t produce quite the same kind of city. There are very deep-seated cultural predilections at work that mediate global trends.”
Tatom, who also is director of the Master of Urban Design (MUD) Program, is uniquely suited to explore how cultural attitudes shape development. Born in Morocco to an American father and European mother, she was raised in Europe; studied in Austin, Texas; Paris; and Boston; and has practiced in Paris; Douala, Cameroon; and New York.
“Jacqueline approaches contemporary urban design with a distinctively international perspective,” architecture Dean Cynthia Weese says. “Issues of transportation, infrastructure, de-urbanization, revitalization and environmental sustainability — these are topics that are really only beginning to be studied as global phenomena.”
Always drawing
Tatom moved frequently as a child. Her father, a civil servant working for the U.S. Army, was transferred from Texas to Morocco, France and finally Germany.
As Tatom finished high school, her father retired to Austin, and she began studying architecture at the University of Texas.
“I was always drawing as a child, and every time we moved, I’d build a cabin or create a special room for myself in the new house,” she recalls. “And like many young people, I wanted to make a difference in the world. Architecture was a good fit.”
After two years in Austin, Tatom returned to France, and in 1980 she earned the title of Architect DPLG, the French professional degree. She began working for Bouygues, one of France’s largest construction/engineering firms.
Tatom worked on projects in Paris, Nigeria and Algeria for Bouygues, and in 1984 she spent several months with a Cameroonian architecture firm before returning to the United States.
She settled in New York and worked with Gruen and Associates, developing a proposal for the Weehawken, N.J., waterfront; and then at Studio for Architecture, where she met her husband, Paul Naecker.
In 1986, she became an associate at SITE Projects Inc., the design office founded by artist James Wines and partners.
“I think I really became an architect during my four years at SITE,” Tatom muses. “I was given a lot of responsibility. James would hand over conceptual sketches and let us, the architects, translate SITE’s ideas and sensibilities into built works.”
Tatom describes several projects she oversaw as “installation art writ large,” memorably the Allsteel furniture showroom.
“We stripped office-furniture pieces to their steel skeletons, then bolted them upside down on the ceiling in typical office layouts,” she recalls. “The design saved space in the showroom; showed off the furniture as solid and well-made; and created a strong presence that enhanced the identity of the company.
“It was also a wonderfully subversive critique of the corporate world.”
Mapping evolutions
SITE’s use of narrative content and fascination with the generic proved deeply influential; it contributed to Tatom’s own interest in finding meaning in ordinary urban landscapes, outside the great cities in which she’d been living.
After 10 years of professional practice, she also wanted to teach. So, in 1990 she enrolled in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, studying with noted urbanist (and future dean) Peter Rowe, whom she says “opened my eyes to the research possibilities of the suburbs, what he called ‘the middle landscape.'”
At Harvard, Tatom began mapping the respective evolutions of Lyons and Boston over the past 200 years, with particular focus on highway corridors and surrounding suburbs. She was struck by certain similarities — as well as profound differences — resulting from specific cultural, topographical and ecological conditions.
In plan, new suburban developments in both cities “look the same, with looped cul-de-sacs, wide lots, houses with attached garages,” Tatom notes. Yet where Americans maintain a “common landscape” of manicured lawns, the French plant tall, privacy-protecting hedges.
“On the surface it’s a minor thing,” she says, “but it completely changes the character of the subdivisions and the relationships between neighbors. It creates a very different kind of everyday landscape.”
Tatom earned a master’s of architecture in urban design with distinction in 1992 and pursued research on Lyons to obtain a doctorate of design in 1995, six months after the birth of her daughter.
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Family: Husband, Paul Naecker; daughter, Theresa-Anne Naecker, 9 Education: Diplôme d’architecture DPLG, Unité Pédagogique d’Architecture N. 1, 1980; master of architecture in urban design, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1992, with distinction; doctorate in design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1995 Hobbies: Traveling with family, cooking, gardening, dance and yoga |
After graduation, she served as a research fellow at Harvard’s Unit for Housing and Urbanization; was principal instructor of urban design for Harvard’s Career Discovery Program; and taught briefly at the University of Texas.
She became a visiting professor at Washington University in 1997 and assistant professor in 1999. In 2000, she was named co-director, with Assistant Professor Tim Franke, of the MUD Program and has been sole director since Franke’s departure last year.
Tatom’s ongoing research focuses on developing methodological tools to represent and interpret the form of today’s cities. Since coming to St. Louis, she has been mapping de-urbanization in the city’s core and has presented her findings at several conferences.
Her research on urban highway design — an offshoot of her work on suburban highway corridors — will be published in the forthcoming anthology Landscape Urbanism: A Reference Manifesto.
“Highways are used by the public, funded by the public and built on public land,” Tatom explains. “They should be thought of as public space.”
She points to historical precedents such as New York’s Riverside Drive or Boston’s The Fens, which integrate transportation and infrastructure with housing, public institutions and recreation.
“Today, architects in Barcelona think of highways as completing the city, rather than ripping it apart,” she says. “Many sections of their recently built beltway are decked to provide community spaces.”
With Associate Professor Eric Mumford, Ph.D., Tatom recently organized two symposiums on “Design, Modernity and American Cities.” Participants, bridging practice and scholarship, sought to move “beyond criticism and nostalgic solutions” to address “unique aspects of American culture and political economy.” The proceedings are being edited for publication.
Urban design program
The desire to examine American cities on their own terms also fuels Tatom’s leadership of the MUD Program, one of just a handful nationally to focus on ordinary and ubiquitous American urban conditions and to include landscape architecture and infrastructure design in its curriculum.
Founded in 1962 during the heyday of urban renewal, the MUD is among the nation’s oldest urban design programs.
Yet just as American cities have continued to evolve, so too has the MUD, which now explores entire “metropolitan landscapes.” That shift reflects increasingly blurred distinctions between ‘urban’ and ‘suburban.’
St. Louis County, for example, contains many high-density pockets, while parts of historic St. Louis are virtually suburban in layout and scale.
“We are interested in exploring new kinds of public spaces that correspond to the way people live today in our car culture,” Tatom explains. “Today, watershed boundaries are perhaps as important as municipal boundaries in shaping planning and design decisions.”
Offered as a stand-alone post-professional degree and in conjunction with the graduate architecture degree, the MUD is organized around core seminars and designs studios. Tatom’s introductory “Elements of Metropolitan Design” class has examined St. Louis-area sites such as The Galleria, Ballas Road and Swansea, Ill.
Studios by other MUD faculty have explored redevelopment of local malls; the Missouri-Mississippi river confluence; California’s Central Valley; and light-rail corridors in Austin and Queens, New York.
“In architecture schools, the design studio is both a place of professional apprenticeship and theoretical research,” Tatom says. “Specific programs provide opportunities for students to develop conceptual skills under the guidance of professors who are at the same time clarifying their own thinking about issues.”
For instance, raw data for Tatom’s work on de-urbanization was largely generated through her “De-urbanization/Re-urbanization” studio. Over the past four years, the studio, which she has taught at both graduate and undergraduate levels, has mapped distribution of vacant lots and buildings in St. Louis’ North Central Neighborhood.
“Many areas are simply written-off as ‘blighted,’ but the reality is much more complex,” Tatom notes, adding that many streets remain intact physically and socially, even areas with high vacancies.
“We use empirical tools to find out what is actually taking place, then students explore alternative scenarios of re-investment, or even continued dis-investment, through the design process. For me, this interface between education, research and practice is very rewarding, and one of the key contributions the University can make to the design professions.
“Everything I’m doing stems from a fascination with how cities change in response to cultural change,” Tatom summarizes. “My work is partly empirical, partly propositional, very much about finding the right words to describe the new landscapes we live in.”
Though some things — technology, capital investments — change very quickly, “what really interests me are things that change very slowly, such as the ‘waking dreams’ that inform decisions people make about their environments, or the character and topography of the natural landscape, which impacts the way an urban area develops for centuries.”
“These are, for me, the roots of a sense of local identity, of place.”