Author: Bill Millard

Event: Building Type Awards Symposium: Housing Winners
Location: Center for Architecture, 05.28.09
Speakers: David Hacin, AIA — Principal, Hacin + Associates; Craig Copeland — Senior Associate, Pelli Clarke Pelli; Eric Bunge, AIA — Principal. nARCHITECTS
Moderator: Anthony Schuman — Graduate Program Director, New Jersey School of Architecture at NJ Institute of Technology
Organizers: AIANY; Boston Society of Architects
Sponsors: Benefactor: ABC Imaging; Patrons: Cosentino North America; The Rudin Family; Syska Hennessy Group; Lead Sponsors: Arup; Dagher Engineering; The Durst Organization; HOK; Mancini Duffy; Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects; Sponsors: AKF Group; Building Contractors Association; FXFOWLE Architects; Hopkins Foodservice Specialists; Ingram Yuzek Gainen Carroll & Bertolotti; JFK&M Consulting Group; KI; Langan Engineering & Environmental Services; MechoShade Systems; New York University; Pei Cobb Freed & Partners; Rogers Marvel Architects; Steelcase; Studio Daniel Libeskind; Tishman Realty & Construction; VJ Associates; Weidlinger Associates; Zumtobel Lighting/International Lights

The 2008 expansion of the Design Awards, adding the Building Type Awards (BTAs), a collaborative New York-Boston program, allows a wider and more detailed examination of the state of the art in specific areas (this year, Housing and Health Facilities). The symposium honoring the Housing winners anatomized an array of innovations on different scales, constructed for residents occupying different points on the economic spectrum. In luxury apartments and social-service housing alike, the emphasis fell on what Pelli Clarke Pelli’s Craig Copeland called “sustainability as a marketable quality” — a nearly effortless incorporation of green details into residences that are both graceful and financially viable. Panelists emphasized the concept of architectural activism, narrowing the design gap between market and subsidized forms of housing. Socially and environmentally progressive housing, in the hands of the kind of talent represented here, can give residents an enlivening atmosphere while offering visionary developers a fair and reliable return.

Boston’s Hacin + Associates took home Honor Awards for two entries, the FP3 adaptive-reuse loft condos at Fort Point Channel and the Project Place Gatehouse, a mixed-use halfway house that integrates 14 studio apartments with a restaurant, communal spaces, and the offices for Project Place, a nonprofit organization that transitions the formerly homeless back into employment and stable life. Both these projects merge modern geometries into Boston’s eclectic old building stock. FP3 threads a new structure through two preserved and renovated 1900-vintage buildings, handling the complexity of building on landfill in a seismic zone on a site where fire had destroyed a previous building. Capping all three buildings is an angled, prepatinated-copper-clad penthouse that honors existing cornice lines, view corridors, and even custom brick sizes. The striped brick Gatehouse emphasizes openness, natural light, and connections to the neighborhood, foregrounding its internal functions through external detail. The 14 interior designers engaged to create distinctive spaces have agreed to stay on and maintain them.

Pelli Clarke Pelli’s 250-unit Visionaire is the latest in the firm’s series of green towers in Battery Park City (BPC) for Albanese Development (along with the Solaire and the Verdesian, joining the latter in achieving LEED Platinum). It strikes a nautical profile with its curved and “tuned” curtain wall combining low-emissivity glass and terracotta rain-screening. Copeland pointed out that the amount of amenity-rich housing this building creates on 0.67 acres compares favorably with what suburbia would offer in 100 acres, saving a large spatial footprint and adding 40,000 square feet of headquarters for the BPC Parks Conservancy plus two public garden spaces. Integrated photovoltaics, wind cogeneration, natural gas-powered cooling, and an efficient filtration/humidification/ dehumidification system allow local thermal and air-quality control while drawing relatively little energy: costs run some 40% below those seen in an ordinary code-compliant building.

Eric Bunge, AIA, of nARCHITECTS (whose bespoke spelling hints at “n as a variable”) took some heady risks with the six-story Switch Building, a Merit Award winner on the Lower East Side that has attracted publicity despite a location in the shadow of Bernard Tschumi Architects’ Blue, and an alarmingly accelerated design schedule, including ad hoc revisions responding to changing instructions by the developer. The Switch is the firm’s first ground-up building and its first façade design; it incorporates alternating bay windows and Galvalume cladding panels, echoed by alternating rear balconies that create double-height spaces for light. Beyond the exterior, the innovation offers unique views and lighting subtleties to every apartment. Bunge and colleagues scrupulously “never turned a corner with a detail,” exterior or interior, front or rear, bringing material contrasts to a neighborhood not previously known for orderly, elegant forms.

Studio Daniel Libeskind, winner of a Merit Award for the Museum Residences in Denver, was unable to participate in the panel. The firm’s seven-story luxury complex across the street from the Denver Art Museum provides context and balance for the museum’s famously aggressive geometries, and a detailed presentation on this project would have been a welcome opportunity. An extended discussion segment demonstrated the willingness of both the panelists and their listeners to drill down and consider specifics of function and program: strategies for venting exhaust, double glass skins, mixed-income designs that avoid stigmatizing the most affordable segments — the myriad details that add up to new varieties of urban livability.

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

Event: Green Walls (Helfand Spotlight Series)
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.24.09
Speakers: Clare Miflin — Associate Principal, Kiss + Cathcart; Marni Horwitz — Principal, Alive Structures; Denise Hoffman-Brandt, ASLA — Associate Professor, City College School of Architecture and Urban Design
Moderator: Susannah Drake, ASLA, Assoc. AIA — dlandstudio, 2009 President, New York Chapter, ASLA
Organizers: AIANY in partnership with the New York Chapter, American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
Sponsors: Alive Structures; Landscape Forms, Inc.; New York City Green Roof and Landscape; Lieb’s Greenhouses Inc.

Green roofs have become a highly visible instrument and symbol of commitment to sustainable design. The same biophilic impulse applied to interior and exterior walls can improve a wide range of environments, but as the green-wall specialists who spoke at the opening of “Work in Progress: Green Walls” at the Center for Architecture emphasized, the practical challenges of working with vegetation are complex. Enthusiasm and good intentions alone won’t create a healthy botanical structure that improves air quality, water management, thermal control, acoustics, and aesthetics; it takes specific expertise and sound judgment about the right species and support systems for a particular space.

Clare Miflin presented a series of success stories including the Solar One environmental learning center at Stuyvesant Cove Park, the vine-covered Riverhouse at the Bronx River Greenway, and the Vertically Integrated Greenhouse, a hydroponic food-production facility proposed as a New York Sun Works demonstration project at the Science Barge on the Hudson. The Bronx project, she recalled, involved the opposite of architects’ customary thinking about hydrology: instead of striving to minimize water requirements, she found in working with the Gaia Institute’s Paul Mankiewicz that a “maximalist” approach to water use was preferable, creating a space with credible resemblance to a temperate rain forest.

Marni Horwitz, a certified green-roof and green-wall installer, recognizes risks as well as benefits. Cautioning that some businesses look to this form of construction for greenwashing purposes, she emphasized that green walls are a young industry with considerable potential to backfire when firms start “experimenting on clients.” One restaurant installed a green wall without proper irrigation; after a striking appearance for the first week or so, the soil dried, the plants died, and diners found bits of soil dropping into their meals. Modular soil-based systems can be dramatically beautiful, she said, but also labor-intensive and costly (up to $150 per square foot); irrigation requires constant attention; simple, seasonal native-species vines such as Virginia Creepers are often the most reliable choices.

The evening’s most visionary discussion, offered by Denise Hoffman-Brandt, ASLA, concerned integrating green walls into broader systemic thinking. Her City-Sink project addresses the function of plants as carbon-sequestering agents, not just ornamentation, in urban space. Retrofitting roadside sound-barrier walls along the Staten Island Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to suspend plants on geotextile fabrics held by rebar cages, creating microclimates and areas sheltered from sun scorch, Brandt’s system converts a component of an otherwise harsh and drab highway environment into an ecological asset.

As NY-ASLA President Susannah Drake, ASLA, Assoc. AIA, pointed out, plants as a design element have a long history, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the ivy of college campuses. Arguments in favor of green walls, as Miflin mentioned during the panel segment, involve measurable cost-benefit ratios as well as intangibles: they reduce asthma and air-conditioning use while providing “increased worker productivity and happiness.” Hoffman-Brandt stressed the scalability of the various benefits relative to initial costs and noted that the more manageable vines, while useful in smaller urban settings, do not maximize biomass for long-term carbon storage as bulkier species do. More complex local ecosystems, including urban fauna — birds, beneficial insects, occasional snakes — are “hard to sell to community boards,” Hoffman-Brandt acknowledged, perhaps touching on a core conflict between philosophies of design: the uncontrollable messiness of nature vs. the urge for predictability and reductionism that shapes many modern spaces. “The thing to take away from these green walls,” she added, “is the kind of language they’re setting up for microclimate and microconditions and diversity” — natural qualities that users and observers of these spaces may need to adjust to.

“No system is going to be 100% perfect, except in theory,” commented Horwitz. The pragmatism and attention to detail in this discussion suggests that the local green-design community has moved well beyond the stage of initial enthusiasm that sees natural elements as a panacea, instead taking a realistic nuts-and-bolts approach to the specifics of leaves and roots.

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

Event: Le Corbusier: Latest News from the Front
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.03.09
Speakers: Jean-Louis Cohen, Ph.D. — Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture, New York University Institute of Fine Arts; Mary McLeod — Professor of Architecture, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (respondent)
Introduction: Francine Goldenhar — Director, La Maison Franç aise, NYU
Organizers: La Maison Franç aise, NYU; AIA-NY Global Dialogues Committee

If understanding modernity means understanding Le Corbusier, it’s apparent that nobody completely does. Even historian Jean-Louis Cohen, steeped in the minutiae of Corbu’s life, works, correspondence, and psyche, finds that the study of Modernism’s chief theorist reveals incessantly unfolding levels of mystery. “I don’t consider myself a Corbumaniac,” Cohen averred, and his scholarly attention to the details of Corbu studies seems to have immunized him against the extreme reactions that Corbu tends to evoke. (Anyone assuming that time has calmed down the Corbuphobic faction should look at Guy Booth’s screed in the BBC Magazine, attacking his legacy as “monstrous.” This appeared less than a month ago.)

Like many public figures who operate under pseudonyms, Corbu had what Cohen calls a “double nature”: he was simultaneously Corbusier the prophet and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret the “Sunday painter” and private man. Corbu wrote some 20,000 to 25,000 letters, including one or two a week to his mother, as well as the Gesamtkunstwerk now known in John Goodman’s improved 2007 translation of Toward an Architecture, plus a series of lesser, unpublished writings that advanced his thinking. (“Every time Corbusier lost a competition,” Cohen said, “he tried to get revenge with a book.”) He engaged in complicated relations with the political world, drawing up plans for both Stalinist Moscow and the Italian Fascist government’s colonial regime in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Cohen finds his politics “more naive than cynical”); he may have had flings with dancer Josephine Baker and/or the center of the British Profumo scandal, Christine Keeler (then again, Keeler’s signature in his correspondence may be a prank). He was not above doctoring photos to prove a point or publishing others’ designs as his own.

A mind as large as Corbu’s is full of ambiguities, and Cohen approaches them with both tolerance and skepticism. Cohen’s Corbu is a “spongelike” creature, borrowing ideas from cities and colleagues, creatively refracting his influences as much as he reflected them. Conditions on the front lines of Corbusiology appear lively and turbulent; London’s Barbican Centre is currently hosting an exhibition of his work, and Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s planned addition to the grounds of the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp is stirring controversy (Cohen believes it violates the contemplative spirit of the site but has gained public approbation as a “genius meets genius” project). Even while confining his attention to Corbusier’s works and thought directly — many more panels and volumes will be filled with theoretical debates over his legacy as an urbanist, the (mis)applications of his work in America and elsewhere, and the counter-reactions they have evoked — Cohen made it clear that “a lot is still to be expected from this man.”

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

Event: Global Dialogues: Seoul, Newark, and New York
Location: Center for Architecture, 01.23.09
Speakers: Young Gull Kwon — Deputy Mayor and Chief Design Officer, Seoul, Korea; Stefan Pryor — Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Newark, NJ; Alexandros Washburn, AIA — Chief Urban Designer, Department of City Planning, NY
Moderator: Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY
Organizers: AIANY; NY Projects, Inc.
Sponsor: NY Projects, Inc.

Three cities at very different stages of their evolution are looking to the design professions for guidance to achieve a green future. As recounted by AIANY Executive Director Rick Bell, FAIA, Newark’s new mayor Cory Booker has emphasized that a prominent place for green thinking in cities isn’t just a pleasant amenity; it’s an urgent priority. The Seoul Design Olympiad last October launched a campaign to inform the world about Seoul’s progress, with a visionary architect/planner, Dr. Young Gull Kwon, as its deputy mayor. Newark, smaller and more troubled, is applying progressive planning to its physical environment for the first time in its history, and has made surprising headway toward a green-collar economy. NYC, Newark, Seoul have things to teach each other, and the intersection of their perspectives afforded an opportunity for cross-cultural communication.

Seoul, energized economically by its information-technology industry, is dramatically reconfiguring itself from a “hard city” based on construction and heavy industry to a “soft city” that’s ecologically healthier, culturally vibrant, driven economically by ideas and high technology, and determined to prioritize the pedestrian experience over automotive speed. Kwon discussed the steps Seoul has taken both to rebuild and redesign itself, from major infrastructural changes (demolishing 3.7 miles of downtown highway to restore the Cheonggyecheon stream and recreational park), to carefully coordinated micro-level design strategies (a uniform font for signage, a palette of official city colors, a streamlined subway map, and even a new civic mascot, the protective lion-like mythical creature Haechi).

Seoul, like Curitiba, Belgrade, and very few other cities, benefits from design-savvy leadership, i.e., an architect in high office. Kwon has collaborated with Mayor Oh Se-Hoon and Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak (Seoul’s previous mayor) to bring about a logical and thorough rethinking of public space according to a “total design concept” combining traditional building styles with contemporary minimalism and advanced information technology. Kwon’s visuals, an “airy city… [observing] an aesthetic of emptiness,” amount to an argument that cities worldwide should consider giving architects more civic clout.

Newark is a different case, badly damaged by 1960s “urban renewal” and consequent riots, out-migration, and economic decline. Deputy Mayor Stefan Pryor acknowledged the problems, emphasizing the utter disregard for design in much of Newark’s housing stock (the dreaded “Bayonne box”), but also offered encouraging news. Under Booker, with a one-third drop in the murder rate, a return to inward migration (population has risen since the 2000 census), and coordinated efforts toward transit-oriented development and affordable housing, Newark is bouncing back. Efforts to revitalize the Passaic riverfront hold polluters accountable for remediation costs, limit auto parking, build quality-of-life features like greenways, and incentivize green development through tax abatements and payments in lieu of taxes are putting Newark in a position to make the most of its assets, including the nation’s second-largest seaport and extensive transit infrastructure.

Alexandros Washburn, AIA, chief urban designer of the NYC Department of City Planning, connected the principles represented by NYC’s two dominant 20th-century urban-planning figures, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, into a new synthesis that redefines the Athenian notion of civic virtue in contemporary ecological terms. What today’s cities need, he said, and what NYC under PlaNYC should get, is a form of sustainable modernization that combines the quantitative scale of Moses-era projects with the qualitative sensibilities prized by Jacobs. The success of the High Line’s redevelopment could be a precursor for wide application of this philosophy. Along the Hudson, the Han, and the Passaic rivers, policies and priorities are converging to make a sustainable urban future look increasingly credible.

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

Event: NYC Department of City Planning’s Bike Parking Zoning Amendment
Location: Center for Architecture, 01.09.09
Speakers: Howard Slatkin — Deputy Director, Strategic Planning, NYC Department of City Planning (DCP); Stephen Johnson — Project Manager, NYC DCP
Introductions: Ernest Hutton, FAICP, Assoc. AIA — Principal, Hutton Associates; James Wright, AIA — Associate Principal, Lee Harris Pomeroy Architects
Organizers: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee; AIANY Housing Committee

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man,” novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in The Red and the Green (1965). “Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.” Because some of our fellow citizens are not so pure in heart, however, we New Yorkers need safe places to store our bikes. The shortage of reliable bike parking, according to a series of studies by the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP), is a major reason why cycling, despite its obvious benefits environmentally and otherwise, hasn’t broadly displaced other transportation modes for routine commuting and errands as well as occasional recreation. Consequently, DCP is proposing a zoning text amendment that would require bike storage in new residential, commercial, and community facilities. In a recent presentation, DCP’s Howard Slatkin and Stephen Johnson outlined the proposal.

The amendment balances two policy goals: mainstreaming urban cycling by reducing the theft risk for riders, and easing compliance for property owners. While requiring Class 1 (indoor, secure, and accessible) space for half the units in multi-family residences over 10 units, one bike space per 7,500 square feet of floor area for offices, one per 10,000 square feet for most commercial uses, and one per 10 vehicle spaces in public garages, it offers developers an incentive by exempting the bike space from floor-area calculations.

Smaller buildings can waive the requirement, as can buildings with infrastructure conditions not conducive to bike storage. Buildings zoned for manufacturing and certain other uses have no requirements, but can take advantage of the floor-area exemption if they provide bike space. Universities get the exemption for one space per 5,000 square feet, and half of these can be outdoor (Class 2) spaces. The proposal leaves storage plans open, specifying 15 square feet of space for each bike stored horizontally but also accepting 6 square feet for vertical hanging designs. To keep bike parking (or ostensible “bike parking” masking other uses) from becoming a loophole for FAR calculations, it sets maximums for the floor-area exclusions; to allow owners to offset the costs of building racks, hangers, or other facilities, it is silent on the topic of fees, neither prohibiting nor specifying charges to users.

DCP referred the amendment to community boards, borough boards, and borough presidents last November 17 for review and comment. Developer support is widespread, according to the New York Post — perhaps in part because the requirement applies only to new construction, enlargements of 50% or more, and conversions to residential use. Access and parking in existing buildings remain obstacles and are not addressed in the amendment. City Council is expected to consider it this spring after a City Planning Commission hearing.

Promoting biking (particularly bike commuting) strikes green-urbanism proponents as a healthy, low-cost no-brainer: the reduction in motor-vehicle use cuts carbon emissions, personal expenses, obesity, congestion, and bloodshed in the streets. Biking advocates view DCP’s proposal as a glass half full: Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, commented that it “is an investment in the future. We need to match it with bicycle access to the office buildings of today, which still account for 85% of buildings in 2030.” The city still needs many more measures — beginning with the 200 miles of new bike lane construction targeted for 2009 under PlaNYC, as well as addressing safety questions involving law enforcement and driver behavior — before it can claim a bike-friendly environment resembling places like Portland, Boulder, Copenhagen, and Bogotá.

NYC’s cyclist population is expanding, and DCP statistics cite a 35% rise in bike commuting in the past year alone, but the urban-cycling demographic skews toward younger people and those with a taste for risk. As former Bogotá Parks Commissioner Guillermo Peñalosa stressed in a keynote address to last summer’s “Toward Carfree Cities” conference in Portland, the practical metric for a city’s bike-friendliness is whether 80-year-old grandmothers and eight-year-old kids feel safe riding there. By this standard, NYC has quite a way to go, but city agencies appear committed to pedaling forward.

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

Event: Samuel Ratensky Lecture: Green Urban Solutions
Location: Center for Architecture, 11.03.08
Speakers: Jonathan F. P. Rose — Jonathan Rose Companies; Carmi Bee, FAIA — Principal, RKT&B Architects (introduction)
Organizers: AIANY Housing Committee

One night before American voters turned a historical corner, Jonathan Rose of Jonathan Rose Companies laid out a set of principles and achievements that might serve as a blueprint for a progressive national housing policy. Since the 1980s, when his advocacy of green urbanism was ahead of its time, Rose’s firms have prospered by offering affordable urban residences close to transit, constructed to maximize people’s exposure to nature; with the Rose Companies’ four services (planning, development, owner’s representation, and a green real estate investment fund) now in demand, he chooses projects according to whether they advance certain essential principles on a broader scale.

Rose prefers “resilience,” with its clearer sense of systemic dynamics, to “sustainability.” The greening strategies that characterize his firms’ projects — dense urban infill, support for human-powered and public transportation, win/win synergies in resource-management technologies, and pervasively biophilic design (bringing humans close to nature) — are all aimed at helping communities “adapt like living systems to change,” Rose says. One of his recurrent approaches is derived from igloos: “get the skin right and the rest follows.” On the single-building scale or in a wider master plan, he is convinced that current environmental and economic conditions call for development strategies that replace mere “transactional” priorities with those that catalyze transformations.

“Much of real estate investment is about buying and selling and buying and selling,” Rose says. “We’re about buying and keeping.” Treating the fabric of communities as a value in itself, not a rapidly alienable commodity, isn’t utopian; for Rose and colleagues, it’s good business. He offered evidence that efforts to reduce climatic impact are fully compatible with healthy returns on investments: comparing the cost/benefit ratios of a range of approaches to climate change, he pointed out that apart from increased vehicular fuel efficiency, all the steps whose benefits outweigh their costs lie in the building sector. He has supported ambitious greening strategies by a range of architects nationwide, including Harry Teague Architects’ high-density complex in Aspen, CO, a mixed-use master plan with Calthorpe Associates and Claudio Vigil Architects in Albuquerque, NM, Dattner Architects’ David and Joyce Dinkins Gardens in Harlem, and the South Bronx’s award-winning Via Verde with Dattner, Grimshaw, and the Phipps Houses.

As in an individual organism, a building, or a community, Rose believes, the critical principle determining national directions is the interconnection of all variables and the inseparability of environmental conditions from economics. The current foreclosure problem, he says, is largely a sprawl problem. The well-intended National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created a legal framework that actually encouraged developers to create more sprawl — a proliferation of small plots falls below the radar of the EPA, whereas a single multi-unit urban development would be held up for five years by impact-statement regulations. It’s no surprise which housing typology became more widespread. Around the same time, Congress rejected infrastructural planning legislation in favor of a regulatory framework that’s easier to dodge. In Rose’s view, it’s time to recognize that careful national planning can prevent such unintended consequences and drive development toward greener, denser urban forms.

The upcoming transition in Washington provides an opportunity for the national rediscovery of integrated planning, as Theodore Liebman, FAIA, suggested during the Q&A period. Rose’s response expressed a belief that our future is in our metropolitan regions, and we need a cabinet-level national planner who can coordinate the work of the housing, environmental, transportation, agricultural, and other relevant agencies.

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