Random architectural musing, while driving through the Carolinas Medical Center complex over the weekend: Do they teach classes in architectural school on how to make medical office buildings ugly?

They must, because otherwise the law of randomness would mean now and again there would be a medical office building constructed that wasn’t ugly and was even, you know, agreeable to look at. Ditto for hospitals. (Presbyterian Hospital, at least the older red brick part, on Hawthorne/Queens, is the pleasant exception to this pattern.)

You’d think doctors’ groups and medical institutions would be particularly on the lookout for designs that encourage people to walk — you know, get exercise? Ward off heart disease and diabetes and obesity? You’d be wrong. Most of their buildings are surrounded by moats of asphalt parking lots.

OK, end of random thought.

I heard an interesting proposal last week from architect-planner Terry Shook, who keeps a sharp eye on what’s happening to properties along the Lynx Blue Line. It’s a different way to look at the property-value increase along the line — who benefits and who should benefit, and whether the city is letting developers get off too easy on the design of TOD projects.

The way it works now: The city, hoping to spur transit-oriented development (TOD) projects along the rail corridor, generally has taken the initiative to rezone properties to the TOD zoning. This creates an incentive to developers, which is why the city has done it.

But, as Shook points out, it also raises the value of the property, even if no developer has bought it yet. So in many cases it’s the original property owners, not the developer seeking to do TOD, who benefits from the new, more intense zoning.

Why not, he suggests, hold off on giving out the TOD zoning until a development proposal comes in? That way the city has some leverage to hold over a developer whose proposal might not, otherwise, have great design? He offers in evidence the very tall project going up on Tremont at Camden Road: Its street-front design isn’t very good, although it meets the TOD zoning requirements. If a property is already rezoned for TOD, the planners don’t have as much leverage as they might if the owner was having to win a rezoning.

Here’s some quick armchair analysis: The Shook idea would mean developers have to fight for a rezoning, which could well be a disincentive. Yet it would also mean the developers wouldn’t be paying as much for the land, assuming that TOD-zoned land costs more to buy than industrial- or business- or other-zoned land. So while one incentive would be removed, there’d be another in its place. And if developers aren’t paying so much for the land, they’d be more amenable to including affordable units in their projects — especially if the city planners were pushing them to do so, in order to win a TOD rezoning.

I’m not saying Shook’s idea is the solution to all problems. I’m saying it’s an interesting view to ponder. Any developers or planners or property owners have thoughts, either pro or con?

Historic trolley car No. 85 (above)

Tracks before their time

Who knew? Maybe you did. But it was news to me to learn from CDOT interim chief Danny Pleasant that the construction work on Elizabeth Avenue near Central Piedmont Community College includes laying streetcar tracks.

The work started as a “pedscape project” — making the area amenable to pedestrians. Developer Clay Grubb, whose project is at the Presbyterian Hospital end of Elizabeth, wanted wide sidewalks. CPCC, which generates pedestrian traffic, got excited about the pedscape idea, Pleasant tells me, and is moving its parking garage entrances off Elizabeth.

And some $5 million in CATS money is paying to lay down streetcar tracks. Makes sense. Why rip the street up in 10 years, when the streetcar line is actually getting built? And in the interim, what about good old trolley car No 85, (pictured above) which was banned from sharing the Lynx Blue Line with the heavier light rail cars?

Pleasant says the light fixtures are being installed with the electricity that eventually will be needed for streetcars. (Or something. I am no electrician so I’m probably getting that part wrong.) When done and the streetcars are finally set to run, all they have to do is put in catenary lines, he says.

The 2030 Transit Plan shows streetcars on that section by 2023 — 15 years off.

I caught up today with Dan Morrill, historian-about-town (he’s a UNC Charlotte history prof and consulting director for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission) and he offered perspective on the Wachovia debacle and how Charlotte has faced similar economic crises in the past. (A quick tip o the hat, also, to Charlotte historian Tom Hanchett’s book “Sorting Out the New South City,” which I used to fill in some details.)

“The current situation is serious. It is catastrophic. But is is hardly unprecedented,” Morrill told me.

Charlotte was once a gold town — gold mines, companies that supported mining, even a mint making gold coins. Then came the California gold rush. “All the gold mines left, and the gold mining companies left,” Morrill said. The banks declined.

Three Charlotte men — lawyer J.W. Osborne, physician C.J. Fox, and merchant/lawyer William Johnston — decided the city needed revitalizing and they pushed to build a railroad. In 1852 the first passenger train of the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad arrived. In 1854 the North Carolina Railroad arrived. “It made Mecklenburg for the first time a functioning part of North Carolina,” Hanchett wrote. The railroads, Morrill said, “made Charlotte what it is.”

The Civil War was an economic catastrophe for Charlotte, he said. So was the Great Depression.

After the Civil War, Edward Dilworth Latta and D.A. Tomkins launched the region’s industrial age with cotton mills.

After the Depression, mayor and businessman Ben Douglas pushed for an airport. That built the city’s role in commerce and distribution.

In each case, Morrill said, the decisive factor was assertive leadership.

Ahem. Who will play that role today? Politicians, who must always look to the next election, usually have a hard time taking a long-term view. The business oligarchy — is that really the best leadership model for the 21st century?

My prediction is we’ll see nonprofits — foundations and philanthropic funders — stepping in to play an expanded role.

No one knows, of course, what the loss of Wachovia bank from Charlotte will mean long-term. Will it stop the tower under construction? I think that’s unlikely. But an oversupply of office space may cause uptown rents to sink. Call it “affordable housing for offices.”

I’ve been taking some time off after working as the editor of the 2008 Citistates Report, which debuted in Sunday’s Observer. If you read it, you may recall that writers Curtis Johnson and Neal Peirce suggested the inside-the-beltway crowd isn’t going to pass meaningful legislation on controlling greenhouse gas emissions – and thereby save the globe from grave peril – and that the best hope lies with “bold, visionary urban regions.”

Or maybe state regions?

This week marks the formal start of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It’s a carbon cap-and-trade program among 10 northeastern states from Maine south to Maryland. Other regions, and California, are watching to see how it works.

But to quote Peirce and Johnson, why not Charlotte? Why shouldn’t this region become the first metro region to try something similar? To be innovative on energy? To lead?

If you’re thinking “Why worry about all this energy stuff when the nation’s financial system is in crisis?” here’s a possible answer.

It’s a report from my friend, Christine Gorman, a former Time magazine staffer and current free-lance science and health writer, who was at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York.

The plenary session yesterday [Wednesday] was kind of a sleepy affair until Al Gore got all worked up and said “clean coal is a lie. It’s like healthy cigarettes” and argued that the current financial crisis is nothing compared to what’s going to happen with the environment. “The world has several trillion dollars in sub-prime carbon assets,” he says. Then he went on to call for a national “smart grid” for electricity and a carbon tax to reduce the payroll tax.

North Carolina showed some initiative with its Clean Smokestacks Act several years ago, to help cut down on air pollution and ozone. Surely it’s time for some similar initiative to deal with the even larger problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s another chapter of the old story: Bad design can undermine even the best intentions.

I caught up with former UNC Charlotte Vice Chancellor Doug Orr last week at a breakfast meeting of University City Partners to note the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking for University Place.

Orr, now president emeritus of Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, is a widely respected figure in this region. He was key to the creation of University Place in the early 1980s, which was a groundbreaking effort by a state university to shape the development near it. The place drew tours of planners from all over the world.

In those days mixed-use development (homes and stores and offices all mixed together, the way they have been in cities until the mid-20th century) was viewed with suspicion here by residents and developers alike. Orr and UNCC colleagues Jim Clay and Al Stuart worked like dogs to educate people on the value of mixed-used development, to pull together a plan and see it executed. So did numerous other people and institutions. Finally, University Place was born.

But what should have been a triumph of good city planning simply doesn’t work as a neighborhood. With all those good intentions, the project design is deeply flawed. It’s multi-use, but not truly mixed use.

The design is, inherently, post-WWII suburbia. Homes are separated from the small, but very pleasant retail area around the artificial lake. The rest of the place is big box stores and chain restaurants and surface parking lots. It needed a street grid, with stores and homes interspersed along sidewalks. It needed, basically, New Urbanist design. Compare University Place to Baxter Town Center in Fort Mill to get an idea of What Might Have Been. And it needed city zoning and building standards that would allow it. They weren’t in place in the 1980s. The other component institution, such as the University Hospital and a branch of the public library, were built with standard suburbia models. They are isolated pods sitting in parking lots, without sidewalks or connections other than clogged traffic arteries.

In the 1990s, UNCC under then-Chancellor Jim Woodward turned its attention elsewhere. The rest of the University Place property became a Big Box Bonanza. The surrounding area suffered from the same disastrous planning.

Charlotte’s elected officials and appointed planning commissioners in the late 1980s and 1990s chose the “let the marketplace decide” philosophy. The marketplace – as it does – created short-term profits and the ugly development that conventional suburban zoning rules produce: horrific traffic and an unwalkable section of the city.

It was a tragic missed opportunity for a part of the city that deserved far better. Those who worked so hard for University Place deserved better. The whole UNCC community deserved better.

Today, some determined people, including current UNCC Chancellor Phil Dubois and University City Partners have undertaken the long and expensive process of retrofitting this standard-issue sprawl into something that will endure and enhance UNCC’s future. Transit may well be the factor that will save University City from its past. But it’s a daily, visible reminder that no matter the good intentions, without good design, even good initiatives can falter.