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Event: VisioNYC 2080: Towards a Risk-Resilient City
Location: Center for Architecture, 10.06.11
Speakers: Klaus Jacob — Geophysicist & Urban Environmental Disaster Expert, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Earth Institute, and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Respondents: Adam Freed — Deputy Director, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning; Deborah Gans, AIA — Principal, Gans Studio, & Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute; Jill N. Lerner, FAIA — Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects, & President-elect, AIANY; Donald Watson, FAIA, CIP — Architect & Planner, Vita Nuova, Former Chair, Yale School of Architecture Environmental Design Program, Former Professor and Dean, School of Architecture, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, & Co-author, Design for Flooding
Moderator: Lance Jay Brown, FAIA — Principal, Studio Lance Jay Brown, Distinguished Professor, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York, & Co-chair, AIANY DfRR Committee
Introduction: Illya Azaroff, AIA — Founding Principal, +LAB, & Co-chair, AIANY DfRR Committee
Organizers: AIANY Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee (DfRR)

NYSERDA’s ClimAID Synthesis Report (left); NYC Panel on Climate Change’s Climate Change Adaptation in NYC (right).

Courtesy NYSERDA (left) and NYC Panel on Climate Change (right)

Among prominent geophysicists, Klaus Jacob studies things he must tell the public about and delivers his warnings in terms as reasoned as they are bracing. His work during the 1980s led to the creation of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, NYC’s first seismic building codes, and other purposeful responses that have drawn national attention. Turning his attention now to the ominous synergies between sea-level rise and storm surges, he briefed the new AIANY Design for Risk and Reconstruction (DfRR) Committee’s first public audience on the need to assess flooding risks, develop engineering plans, and allocate funds to maximize resilience on every scale from single buildings to regions. A stronger case for the value of this emerging specialty would be hard to imagine.

Continued climate change is as close to a certainty as science can provide. With the “warning shot” of Hurricane Irene fresh in memory, Jacob cautioned that “we really are in trouble already” and described the need for risk-aware design, guided by the best available scientific information, as a race against time. Not all of his message was alarming: the best estimates of the benefit/cost ratio for flood preparation are in the 4:1 range, so that each dollar spent on measures that protect lives, places, and property brings about $4 worth of value in the form of destruction deferred. He commended city officials’ awareness of environmental hazards, but he noted that risk perception is notoriously difficult.

Multiple documents have been emerging on the subject, most recently the NYC Panel on Climate Change’s Climate Change Adaptation in NYC and NYSERDA’s ClimAID Synthesis Report. Their scientific grounding is generally improving, but Jacob critiqued the former publication for relegating the scenario of large-scale ice melts in Greenland and western Antarctica to an easily overlooked footnote. Planning for 100-year storm surges under current conditions is hard enough; scenarios involving rising sea levels at two or four feet call for higher degrees of resilience. New York’s subways — our most economically essential infrastructural component, but also “the default sewer system” during combined overflows — might take 21 days or longer to recover from a 100-year storm, producing time-integrated economic loss estimates between $58 and 84 billion. Under current financial (let alone political) conditions, marshaling the resources for preparations measured in the tens of billions is, to put it mildly, a reach.

Jacob does not let political pessimism paralyze his sense of urgency. “I’m not an architect, so I don’t give you the solutions,” he noted, “I gave you the problems.” Some available answers are facile or worse: denialism, inaction, and unchecked greenhouse-gas emission simply maximize hazards, and relying on insurance is hardly better (insurance firms are aware of climate change, and wind or flood insurance is becoming unobtainable). As respondent Donald Watson, FAIA, reminded the audience, Buckminster Fuller looked to “comprehensive anticipatory design science” for solutions to problems; Jacob and the panel likewise called on architects to look several decades beyond PlaNYC’s timetable and foresee adaptations to more drastic scenarios.

Waterfront cities worldwide offer a broad range of responses, some positive, some otherwise. Measures such as NYC’s Million Trees initiative have useful effects on certain scales (though they carry their own costs, should even a small percentage of these trees buckle in a storm). Large engineering approaches like London’s flood barriers (already being retrofitted) leave Jacob skeptical, though he hailed residential-scale inventions like self-deploying passive floodgates. He finds Lagos nightmarish but oddly resilient, with its informal and thus flexible infrastructure, but called Dubai blatantly irrational — noting the irony in that city’s development depending on the same mineral resource that contributes so heavily to the sea level rise that puts it at risk. He cited Hamburg’s Hafen-City, with its adaptive reuse of docks and elevated new Philharmonie, as an emulable balance of planning and creativity. Cities and architects alike, all speakers suggested, would be wise to reinvent themselves for an era when the Earth increasingly insists that human civilization’s growth, should it keep growing, must become dramatically and steadily smarter.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

Event: Buildings=Energy Exhibition and Opening
Location: Center for Architecture, 10.01.11
Speakers: Margaret O’Donoghue Castillo, AIA, LEED AP — 2011 AIANY Chapter President; Cynthia Kracauer, AIA, LEED AP — AIANY Managing Director; Michael Strauss — President, Center for Architecture Foundation
Organizers: AIANY in collaboration with the Center for Architecture Foundation
Sponsors: Underwriters: ARUP; Con Edison; Perkins+Will; Lead Sponsors: Buro Happold; STUDIOS Architecture; 3M Window Films; Energy Products Distribution; APG Design Studio; Sponsors: FLIR; MechoShade Systems, Inc.; Robert Silman Associates; Trespa; Supporters: Acheson Doyle Partners Architects, PC; DeLaCour Family Foundation; Ibex Construction; KPF; Syska Hennessy Group, Inc.; Friends: 1100:Architect; Bleecker Area Merchants & Residents Association (BAMRA); Brenda Levin; Capsys Corp.; Community Environmental Center, Inc.; Helpern Architects; Hugo S. Subotovsky AIA Architects, LLC; Levien & Company; New York Building Congress; Inc.; Oppenheimer Brady Vogelstein; P.W. Grosser Consulting, Inc.; Swanke Hayden Connell Architects; Viridian Energy & Environmental, LLC

Courtesy of the Center for Architecture

The Center for Architecture’s fall exhibition, “Buildings = Energy,” explores how critical choices made by architects can bring about positive changes in cities’ energy use, more specifically NYC. It echoes the “Design for a Change” platform of 2011 AIANY President Margaret O’Donoghue Castillo, AIA, LEED AP. Castillo, who recently returned from attending the UIA’s 24th World Congress of Architecture in Tokyo, an event that brought to light the post-earthquake challenges facing the country, believes that “this exhibition couldn’t be more timely. Architects should be involved in the political aspects of energy use.”

The exhibition is comprised of informational boards illustrated with project examples, including models and mock-ups of sustainable building strategies. It examines energy use through a variety of lenses, including programming, passive vs. active systems, site and material choices, and concepts such as embodied energy and Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCA). The exhibition also offers examples of how to extend the lives of buildings through renovations, retrofits, reconstruction, and deconstruction projects.

On the mezzanine, viewers learn the basics behind concepts such as peak load, heat flows, and R-value. They also get a glimpse of energy-saving gadgets like the Kill-a-Watt, a meter that assesses appliance efficiency, and the Power Cost Monitor and wattson01, which are systems that display real-time energy use for an entire building. The exhibition also highlights various municipal- and community-based efforts that aim to reduce energy use, such as PlaNYC 2030, Urban Green Council, CCNY’s Solar Decathlon entry Solar Roof Pod, Pratt Center for Community Development, and Solar One by the NYC Department of Education.

Although many of the concepts presented will be familiar to Chapter members, the format is easily digestible and should prove engaging and educational for just the curious visitor. It is on view through 01.12.12.

Murrye Bernard, LEED AP, is a freelance architecture writer and a contributing editor to Contract Magazine and e-Oculus.

Event: Oculus Book Talk: James Russell, The Agile City
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.15.11
Speakers: James S. Russell, FAIA — Bloomberg Architecture Critic & Urban Analyst, Author of The Agile City (Island Press, 2011)
Organizers: AIANY Oculus Committee

The Agile City

Courtesy AIANY

“We need to focus on solutions to issues for the next five years to turn this industry and economy around, not 20 years from now,” bemoaned a colleague of mine on the economic state of our industry and our country. So with the title of James S. Russell, FAIA’s book The Agile City: Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change, the answer to questions about needing another book on the era of climate change is most definitely yes!

The Agile City is not just another book on this subject. As architecture columnist for Bloomberg News, Russell does what so few do well — viably connecting mainstream economics with building civic engagement and place-making strategies. “The same kinds of design acumen and analytical prowess that the nation regularly invests in biotechnical breakthroughs or in building a better portable music player can be applied to cities and the environment. We simply have to choose to focus our talents in this way.” We only have to look at Hurricanes Katrina and Irene to be reminded that this lack of attention does come at a cost and it’s not just on the lines of a ledger. The agile city would develop out of inventive policies that “deploy regulations straightforwardly, balancing them with incentives. Rules will reward performance (energy, water, and emissions saved), rather than prescribing what light bulbs we’ll use and what cars we’ll drive…. producing economic values that gross domestic product (GDP) fails to measure, like increased real estate values from repaired natural systems and health care costs saved from reduced rates of cancer.”

Russell draws our attention back to carbon neutrality in buildings and transportation, the two largest sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that respectively account for 40% and 28% of emissions. He provokes us with his questions around planning for both our cities and our suburbs asking how we can reconcile change with the “understandable fear of neighborhoods and individuals that they will bear the brunt of the burdens.”

So what is the 21st-century community that Russell envisions and why have some cities in Europe been more successful than we in accomplishing this? Is shared public and civic space less important to us as a culture? This question resonates most recently with changes in our own city. For spaces like Times Square and its lawn chairs “Janette Sadik-Khan, was not shoving a carbon-reduction strategy down citizens’ throats,” writes Russell, “but was cutting through a bureaucratically encrusted process that had made a task as minor as relocating a curb as complex as negotiating a major international treaty. The Times Square strategy inspired by a street-design innovator from Copenhagen, Jan Gehl, was driven by the need to smooth traffic flow, which was done by reducing the number of intersections that were too close together, and making pedestrian movement smoother and safer — both incidentally, carbon-reduction tactics.” In a city with no backyard, it was exciting to find places where there actually was one. This is a perfect example of what Russell illustrates as a goal — how the government can encourage people to embrace new attitudes toward community and the economics of ownership, whether in the public private realm.

The power to take action is in our hands. As a first step, read this book and then connect the dots for yourself in terms of professional practice, economic growth, and being part of the change toward a more “agile city”.

Maxinne Rhea Leighton, Assoc. AIA, is a member of the AIANY Oculus Committee. She is in charge of managing the Northeast Region Business Development and Marketing at Parsons Brinkerhoff. Maxinne is also working with the New York Transit Museum on a new book on Grand Central Terminal for its centennial in February 2013.

Note about Oculus Book Talks: Each month, the AIANY Oculus Committee hosts a Book Talk at the Center for Architecture. Each talk highlights a recent publication on architecture, design, or the built environment — presented by the author. The Book Talks are a forum for dialogue and discussion, and copies of the publications are available for purchase and signing. The next talk will take place on 10.25.11, featuring a conversation between Janette Sadik-Khan and David Byrne, author of Bicycle Diaries. Click here to RSVP.