Author: Bill Millard

Event: Iran Old and New — Architecture from Cyrus the Great to the Present
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.01.10
Speakers: James McCullar, FAIA — Principal, James McCullar & Associates Architects; Ali Akbar Saremi — Architect & Professor, Tehran University; Mahvash Mehr Afshar — Head of Board of Directors, Tavon Consulting Engineering, Tehran; Noushin Ehsan, AIA — Chair, AIANY Global Dialogues Committee;
Introduction: Theodore Liebman, FAIA — Principal, Perkins Eastman
Organizers: AIANY Global Dialogues Committee

Since the 1979 Iranian revolution replaced the secular Pahlavi dynasty with a Shi’ite regime, Iran’s government has been frequently in the news, but the nation’s culture, history, and architecture have been largely invisible to Westerners. Contrary to some expectations, creative design is alive and well in Iran; the national heritage inspires a loyalty that runs much deeper than politics.

Iran and AIANY have strong ties; James McCullar, FAIA, past president of AIANY, has traveled there extensively. McCullar’s slides from Persepolis and Isfahan provided a historical background through the Islamic conquest and the rule of Safavid emperor Shah Abbas, who moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and began an extensive building program. Noted for its four-gated Naghsh-e Jahan Square, several mosques (particularly the Shah Mosque and the Friday Mosque, probably a 14th-century building), the Grand Bazaar, a well-preserved synagogue, and other features built during and after the city’s ascendancy under Shah Abbas, Isfahan offers timeless lessons in urban planning and sustainable construction appropriate to a demanding arid environment.

Ali Akbar Saremi, architect and professor at Tehran University, continued the chronology through the 19th century, when Iranians traveled to France and England to study military engineering during a war with Russia, expanding intercultural exchanges and bringing eclectic effects into Iranian architecture that would last into the next century. European and Persian influences mingled, Saremi noted, affecting Iranian ornamentation, housing, and furniture.

Tehran arose under Reza Shah Pahlavi to become a world-class city by the 1940s, with modern railroad and government buildings and a new university. Saremi came to appreciate abstraction and the International Style, going on to doctoral work with Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. Pointing out features of contemporary Iranian buildings, he expressed the view that there is no such thing as Islamic architecture, despite contentions with authorities over whether a certain building or façade is “Islamic enough.” Islam is a religious and ideological system, Saremi said, not a structural vocabulary. The regime may change, but Iranian design practice cannot be reduced to essentialism.

Mahvash Mehr Afshar, the head of the board of directors at Tavon Consulting Engineering, speaking largely in Farsi (translated by Noushin Ehsan, AIA), devoted attention to the condition of women in Iran and distinguished their social challenges from the professional climate. Gender prejudice may keep her from being a judge or singing in public, she observed, but it has not prevented her from heading a major architecture firm. “Persian women don’t go with the flow,” she said; “they create the flow.” She and other Iranians are involved in a long fight for freedom; as Saremi observed, architects anywhere must deal with demands imposed by the powerful. Yet one suspects, or trusts, that the living legacy of a culture that has sustained itself since the days of Zoroaster will ultimately persevere.

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

Event: Not Business as Usual: Community Board Round-Up
Location: Center for Architecture, 08.18.10
Speakers: Shaan Khan — Director of Community Affairs and Constituent Services, Office of the Manhattan Borough President; David Paul Helpern, FAIA, LEED AP — Founding Principal, Helpern Architects, & Member, Community Board 8, Manhattan
Moderator: Margery H. Perlmutter, Esq., AIA — Partner, Bryan Cave, & Director for Legislative Affairs, AIANY Board of Directors
Organizers: AIANY “Not Business as Usual” initiative
Sponsors: Chief Manufacturing; Lutron Electronics; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Architects bring a highly appropriate skill set to the public sector, said land-use attorney and AIANY Director for Legislative Affairs Margery Perlmutter, Esq., AIA, and her fellow panelists: not only technical expertise but a capacity for negotiation and problem-solving when the problems are complex and the affected parties diverse. New York’s community boards, populated by dedicated appointees and charged with influential (though not decisive) advisory roles in land-use decisions, are an ideal instrument for applying those skills, and AIANY is actively encouraging the city’s architects not only to work with the boards but to serve on them. The latest panel in the “Not Business as Usual” (NBAU) series offered a practical primer on the history, structure, and function of this segment of city government.

Shaan Khan, director of community affairs and constituent services at Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office, presented a rundown of how community boards have evolved since their origin in 1951 as advisory groups, and on how they operate today as sovereign agencies under the 1975 City Charter. Each of the city’s 59 boards (12 in Manhattan) includes 50 volunteer members, half appointed by the borough presidents (BP) outright and half after City Council nominations; the members represent important demographic constituencies and good-government groups and serve staggered two-year terms.

Members are required to attend monthly meetings observing parliamentary Robert’s Rules of Order, plus meetings of committees on major areas such as land use, transit, zoning, and education and topical subcommittees (a few boards have “green” subcommittees; the Upper East Side’s Board 8 has one on the Second Avenue subway). With 300 vacancies opening up each year in Manhattan alone, BPs are constantly looking for citizens with detailed local knowledge and community commitment. “Public membership,” with topical input but no full-board voting role, is another way to contribute.

After 45 years in the neighborhood and 40 years making professional presentations to boards, David Helpern, FAIA, was appointed to the Upper East Side’s Board 8 in 2007; he has participated in deliberations over everything from awnings and sidewalk cafés to institutional expansions and the controversial Foster + Partners tower above the Parke-Bernet Galleries. “Amazingly,” he notes, “there are people who do not realize how accessible the community boards are.” He advises architects presenting to a board always to make their case on the merits and never to laud their own expertise over the views of laypeople. Debates can be passionate, particularly in ULURP, but he has found his colleagues impressively knowledgeable and civil: “We do not always agree, but we always part friends.” (See Helpern’s article “The Hottest Seat in Town” in OCULUS, Spring 2010, pp. 30-31)

Urging architects to scrutinize the quality of their argumentation, graphics, and technology, Perlmutter recommends making community board presentations an opportunity to influence debate, not a mundane chore. She observed that professionals who understand cities on a physical level can offer an informed voice that officials hear all too rarely. “Architects are not involved in politics enough… 100% of what goes on in [city] politics has to do with architecture ultimately, or urbanism.” AIANY’s contact person for architects interested in seeking board positions is Policy Director Jay Bond.

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

Event: Bicycles as Transport: From Alternative to Mainstream
Location: Center for Architecture, 08.12.10
Speakers: Jack Schmidt — Director, Transportation Division, NYC Department of City Planning (DCP); Jon Orcutt — Director of Policy, NYC Department of Transportation (DOT); Caroline Samponaro — Director of Bicycle Advocacy, Transportation Alternatives
Moderator/Introduction: Robert Eisenstat, AIA, LEED AP — Assistant Chief Architect, Design Division, Engineering Department, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Organizers: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee as part of the exhibition “Our Cities Ourselves”

Few changes in NYC’s built environment in recent years have catalyzed as much optimism, or provoked as much opposition, as the steps taken by the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) to reclaim space for bicycles. For a low infrastructural investment (paint, concrete, and signage, plus planners’ labors), the city is restoring balance among all forms of transportation. Cycling’s mode share is rising sharply, thanks in large part to the new lanes, racks, and parking rules (see “DCP’s New Balancing Act on Bike Parking,” by Bill Millard, e-Oculus, 01.13.09), but it still remains around 1% — not yet high enough that most citizens view biking as a norm.

Cycling promotion is no fad, Jack Schmidt of the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP) pointed out: it’s the fruit of a planning process that began with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991 (an audience member also linked it to the 1979 bike-lane experiment under Mayor Ed Koch). Schmidt and colleagues generate the quantitative studies that inform policy and infrastructural choices, finding how many subway stations in each borough lack bike parking, or how many citizens perform daily “peripheral travel,” going somewhere other than the central business district. City government is moving forward on innovations like NYCyclistNet, a route-planning tool that incorporates feedback options so that cyclists can comment on the system’s output and improve it.

DOT’s Jon Orcutt presented data linking absolute decreases in injury counts with rises in the number of cyclists. Urban biking gets safer the more people do it, and the spread of protected lanes increases the number of potential riders. With more than 200 miles of new lanes in three years, plus public bike-sharing in the works, the city is approaching a point where residents can dispense with driving for short trips in most neighborhoods, though large areas (particularly in eastern Queens) remain underserved.

In NYC, as Transportation Alternatives’ Caroline Samponaro pointed out, the pedestrian is king, rightfully and numerically. Advocacy groups have driven measurable progress in five areas affecting mode choice: protected space, bike sharing, parking, bike culture, and popular opinion. The critical channel is that last one: convincing more cyclists to follow laws and habits that promote pedestrian safety (as in the “Biking Rules” campaign), and convincing more pedestrians that cyclists are allies, not antagonists. Perceptions in this area rarely follow statistics or reality. That 1% mode share will approach 10% only when cyclists and cyclophobes communicate more and better; events like this panel offer exactly such an opportunity for constructive conversation.

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

Event: Active Living Research and NYC Active Design Summit
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.28.10
Speakers: Jim Sallis, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University, & Program Director, Active Living Research; Karen Lee, MD — NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH); Jon Orcutt — NYC Department of Transportation (DOT); Shampa Chanda — NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD); Alexandros Washburn, AIA — NYC Department of City Planning (DCP); Adena Long — NYC Department of Parks; Andrew Rundle, Dr.PH — Physical Activity Epidemiologist, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Joyce Lee, AIA, LEED AP — NYC Office of Management and Budget; David Burney, FAIA — Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC); Lourdes Hernández-Cordero, Dr.PH — Clinical Sociomedical Sciences Researcher, Mailman School, Columbia; Mindy Fullilove, MD — Clinical Psychiatry/Public Health Researcher, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Mailman School, Columbia; Kevin Nadal, Ph.D. — Multicultural Psychology Researcher, City University of New York
Organizers: Active Living Research, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; AIANY

After five Fit City conferences and the Active Design Guidelines (ADG) publication, researchers nationwide are exploring the relation of urban design to epidemic “diseases of energy” that are reaching the point where institutional status seems appropriate. The recent half-day summit drew attention to policy and infrastructural expressions of the city’s commitment to active design and these efforts’ basis in research. What began with common sense, good intentions, and foundation grants is now a movement picking up steam in New York and beyond.

While not a public meeting, the Active Living Research (ALR) Summit included one announcement of potential public interest: DDC Commissioner David Burney, FAIA, citing the overwhelming response to the ADG, proposed a new Center for Active Design, a nonprofit organization that would launch in spring 2012, when current funding for the ADG team expire. Burney and other officials highlighted current and projected efforts to reshape civic space to foster healthier living. Along with pedestrian-plaza reclamations and bike lanes, various agencies are conducting behind-the-scenes activities such as “food desert” mapping to guide City Planning zoning-incentive decisions (the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health program, or FRESH). Volunteers partnering with the Parks Department have built mountain biking and bicycle motocross facilities at long-neglected Highbridge Park; when the High Bridge reopens in 2012 or 2013, linking Manhattan and Bronx bike paths, Washington Heights may become the city’s center for extreme sports.

The city is also laying groundwork for a public/private partnership on bike sharing. Asked about the French experience with Vélib rentals, DOT’s Jon Orcutt noted that the system’s widely publicized problems generate useful feedback about ways to fine-tune details of pricing and vandal-deterring design. Aware of the mixed results in Paris but also the positive effects in multiple cities, NYC is weighing potential vendors carefully before setting an announcement date.

In briefer talks, ALR’s participants presented epidemiologic and sociological findings on a cluster of interrelated topics: walkability studies, ethnic-group correlations with views of physical activity as a cultural norm, and an “intervention block” reversing blight from the 1980s crack-cocaine trade.

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

Event: Active Design Planning Workshop: Design Professionals
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.08.10
Speakers: Ernest Hutton, Assoc. AIA, FAICP — Principal, Hutton Associates; Suzanne Nienaber — Training Coordinator, NYC Active Design Program; Karen K. Lee, MD, MHSc — Director, Built Environment Program, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Reena Agarwal — Design Policy Analyst; Joseph Sopiak — Senior Design Liaison, NYC Department of Design and Construction; Charles McKinney, Assoc. AIA, ASLA — Principal Urban Designer, NYC Department of Parks; Donald Burns — President, APA New York Metro Chapter; Lauren Yarmuth, LEED AP — Principal, YRG / Urban Green; Tricia Martin — President, American Society of Landscape Architects, New York, & Principal, WE Design; Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY
Organizers: AIANY; NYC Active Design Guidelines Team

Through the combined efforts of five city agencies, a group of academic advisors, AIANY, and a host of editors and consultants, the Active Design Guidelines: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design (ADG) was launched in January. This document combines research about the relation of the built environment to public health with practical recommendations for constructing urban spaces that respect the human body. The ADG team is now taking steps to make sure this volume moves off the shelves of architects, planners, and civic officials and into the public discourse.

The first in a series of outreach workshops — first addressing design professionals, with further meetings planned for educators and the real estate industry — gathered a small interdisciplinary group to brainstorm about ways to increase awareness of the ADG’s potential to reshape urban space. Karen Lee, MD, MHSc, reprised the case she has made at the Fit City panel series, describing the sea change from design strategies aimed at infectious disease to a new priority, the “diseases of energy,” a category of clinical conditions resulting from the societal-scale substitution of motorized movement for human activity.

If the designers of 21st-century public space can implement epidemiologic knowledge as effectively as their early-Modernist predecessors did, history offers reasons for encouragement. Thanks to aqueducts, sanitation, and construction standards that brought light and air into dank urban spaces, the city’s infectious-disease mortality statistics from 1880 to 1940 improved dramatically — predating the discovery of penicillin (1939) and the antibiotic era, one should note. America’s most significant health victories have more to do with spatial design and public health measures than with medical technologies, applied one patient at a time. For a comparable re-engineering of built space to encourage better use of human energy, the design professions have the tools at hand already: e.g., replacing mechanical transport with inviting, prominently-placed stair designs, augmented by skip-stop elevators where possible. (Where it isn’t, slowing the elevators down is an effective way to encourage people to take the stairs.)

Charles McKinney, Assoc. AIA, ASLA, observed that no one disagrees that the ADG’s measures are worthwhile. The challenge is one of rhetoric, memetics, and motivation, weaving the ADG principles into city policies and everyday practices. Discussion recurrently touched on the synergies between environmental and public-health progress: architect and sustainability consultant Lauren Yarmuth cited the experience of the U.S. Green Building Council in promulgating the LEED system, noting that these standards became far more effective once they were linked not just with honorable intentions, but with measurable incentives, such as the marketing advantage developers could claim once a building earned its precious-metal plaque.

Through a broad range of mechanisms, from social media to sponsored events to incorporation into RFPs, codes, and awards criteria, the ADG message will soon be spreading through the professional and local communities most directly affected by the bodily consequences of design.

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

Event: Our Cities, Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life (Media Roundtable)
Location: Center for Architecture, 06.24.10
Speakers: Michael Sorkin — Distinguished Professor of Architecture & Director, Graduate Program in Urban Design, City College of New York & Principal, Michael Sorkin Studio; Elizabeth H. Berger — President, Alliance for Downtown New York; Walter Hook — Executive Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP); Norman Garrick — Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Connecticut & Co-chair, Transportation Task Force, Congress for the New Urbanism & Trustee, Tri-state Transportation Campaign
Moderator: David Owen — Staff Writer, The New Yorker & Author, Green Metropolis (Riverhead, 2009)
Organizers: Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in collaboration with AIANY

In the context of the BP oil spill and the nation’s seemingly ineradicable dependence on the same toxic substance, the possibility of reconfiguring urban space in ways that help restore environmental balance begins to look less like utopia and more like an imperative. Owen and others have been making the green-urbanist case for years, offering the combination of urban density and sustainable design as a logical, desirable response to global warming and all the other ill effects of a petroleum-dependent economy. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and AIANY are now joining forces to bring this case to the public in concrete, accessible forms.

For “Our Cities, Ourselves,” an exhibition currently on view at the Center for Architecture, the ITDP has engaged architects in 10 cities to translate green-urbanist principles into buildable forms, with an eye on realization by 2030 and an emphasis on transportation systems. ITDP Executive Director Walter Hook laid out the history of these efforts along with the increasing dangers ahead if large developing nations recreate 20th-century America’s transportation monoculture on a vaster scale. The plausible future, he said, will either be an ecological nightmare scenario (some 390 million cars in China by 2030 and a temperature increase beyond that which scientists claim the planet can tolerate), or a series of site-specific transformations that draw on local talent and traditions to correct developmental damage and promote low-impact forms of transportation.

Organized along a set of “Ten Principles for Sustainable Transport,” the designs in the exhibition build on ideas already known to produce results in revitalizing damaged urban areas. The exhibition’s title evokes the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s medical/sexual manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, broadly influential since the 1970s in clarifying connections between personal matters and their political aspects. It combines this progressive tone with common-sense appeals reminding viewers that the automotive era is a brief segment of urban history — destructive, but by no means irreversible.

The architects have chosen different strategies and scales for Ahmedabad, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Dar es Salaam, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mexico City, NYC, and Rio de Janeiro. Projects range from HCP Design and Project Management’s construction of a public square in Ahmedabad — a site where any significant new civic space amounts to a cultural innovation — to the transformation of Lower Manhattan into an auto-free “ecozone” by Michael Sorkin Studio.

Sorkin emphasized that no single technology solves the problems of cities. Lower Manhattan is blessed not only with a high percentage of transit use, but with a resilient “medieval” street plan. Removing the FDR Drive below the Manhattan Bridge, along with its associated infrastructure, would open up surprising amounts of space for civic functions. Elizabeth Berger of the Downtown Alliance expressed agreement in principle on reinventing the business district as a greener, transit-intensive district with an increasing residential component; this development philosophy is good for local business, she said. Her group’s new plan for Water Street as a rescaled, pedestrian-friendly boulevard meshes with the Sorkin vision, but she pulled up short of a complete ban on cars, claiming it would isolate the neighborhood.

New Urbanist engineer Norman Garrick placed the range of changes in a global context, offering Zurich’s integrated approach to transit as an alternative to large-scale motorization that he has seen in China and Jamaica. Owen also emphasized the astonishing changes occurring in China, where “the Manhattan” is a unit of scale and 10 new Manhattan-sized urban formations are on the way. Development on such a scale and pace, he noted, makes good design an urgent challenge: build a high-performing city, a New York or a Bogotá, and it will be emulated. The key question may be whether such places can be emulated widely enough and fast enough.

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