Author: Rick Bell, FAIA, AIANY Executive Director

Architectural boat tours help make sense of Chicago’s Loop, providing insight into design, development, and decision-making. Such tours are now here in New York with AIANY out on the water, working with Classic Harbor Lines on a trip that circumnavigates Manhattan, departing from Chelsea Piers. More information and tickets here.

A team of AIANY volunteer docents, led by Board Vice President Abby Suckle, FAIA, has developed a narrative and map that makes the tour both entertaining and educational. The map, Around Manhattan Now, lists 144 projects from Chelsea Piers (Butler Rogers Baskett) and 100 Eleventh Avenue (Atelier Jean Nouvel & Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners) up to the Peter J. Sharpe Boat House (Robert A.M. Stern Architects). Proposed waterfront plans, including The New Domino (Rafael Viñoly Architects) and Governors Island proposals (West 8, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, and Rogers Marvel Architects) are highlighted in the context of New York’s rich architectural, mercantile, and maritime history.

Volunteers, including Michael Bischoff, AIA, Kyle Johnson, AIA, and Deborah Young, AIA, have led those aboard down the Hudson and up the East, Harlem, and Bronx Rivers. Knowledgeable New Yorkers, including land use lawyer Michael Sillerman of Kramer Levin, have added their commentary. Sillerman’s two cents on the view of Lower Manhattan: “This is a good place to talk about transfer of development rights and the setback requirements that determined skyscraper form.”

Apart from the scheduled Saturday sailings, the AIANY and Classic Harbor Lines have also been able to accommodate special requests. Walter B. Melvin Architects, a Manhattan-based architectural firm, decided to bring the whole office for a firm outing, which, according to Melvin’s business manager, Jennifer Murray, provided “a good way of seeing lots of our work at the same time.”

Whether to cool off on a hot summer day or listen to the architectural commentary, come aboard for the tour and stay to take in the pleasures of the harbor.

First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris welcomed mayors from several U.S. cities to New York last Wednesday, April 13th, by offering to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge, a municipal asset whose value, she said, has been increased by adjacent design enhancements such as the Brooklyn Bridge Park. After brief introductions, including eloquent remarks by Ron Bogle, Hon. AIA, president and CEO of the American Architectural Foundation and Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the First Deputy Mayor told those assembled for the meeting of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD) that “the choice of where to live has never been more critical.”

The MICD is a partnership of the NEA, the American Architectural Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. At each of its meetings, mayors present to each other the major design challenges confronting their cities. Architects and designers join in to identify possible solutions and ways of proceeding, heightening the design consciousness of the elected officials in so doing. To this audience, Harris spoke of the success of the Bloomberg Administration in creating public spaces and physical amenities that are not just cosmetic improvements. Participants in the New York City session included Mayor Carl Brewer of Wichita, KS; Mayor George K. Heartwell of Grand Rapids, MI; Mayor Lori C. Moseley of Miramar, FL; Mayor Joseph C. O’Brien of Worcester, MA; Mayor Dayne Walling of Flint, MI; Mayor A C Wharton, Jr of Memphis, TN; and Mayor Jay Williams of Youngstown, OH.

Structural changes in New York, according to its First Deputy Mayor, include the reinvigoration and empowerment of the Art Commission as the Public Design Commission, and the creation of the Design and Construction Excellence Program led by the NYC Department of Design + Construction. Such initiatives show that New York City has “embraced good design, going beyond just new construction.” Governors Island, in particular, was singled out as the “jewel of the harbor” in the same week that Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Patterson announced the City’s new leadership in determining and managing its future.

Other achievements described included the creation of 693 acres of new parkland and the designation of more historic districts than in any prior administration. More than 100 rezoning actions have helped preserve neighborhoods and the 44 million square feet of commercial space in New York. The work of individual city agencies was spelled out in her remarks, intended largely for those coming from out of town who might not have noticed the DOT-created public spaces for pedestrians at Times Square and Herald Square. She spoke of the importance of culture to New York, saying that “cultural organizations contribute mightily to the quality of life in every neighborhood and are also large employers throughout the city.” Speaking more generally, she said that “our commitment is to go beyond business as usual and bring quality and commitment to the work of every city agency.”

Deputy Mayor Harris said that attention to design detail is important, that “sweating the small stuff matters not only in urban design, but even in the detailing of the full-length mirrors in the new Marriage Bureau.” Recalling her own marriage in the former facility in the Municipal Building, she said, “The Marriage Bureau used to be an experience brought to you by Franz Kafka, but now there are full-length mirrors.” She concluded by saying that there has been much discussion about the question: “What is the fate of commitment to good design during an economic downturn?” Responding to her own query she said: “The only answer it can be is that good design doesn’t have to be more expensive, it just has to be more good. In New York we’re investing for the long haul. The city will shine.”

On Friday, 03.26.10, New York State Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch addressed a well-attended breakfast meeting of the New York Building Congress (NYBC) at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. After introductions by NYBC President Richard Anderson and Chairman Peter A. Marchetto, Ravitch started by saying that he “once thought that the politics of getting something built in NY was difficult, but now I know that it’s a piece of cake” compared with getting the state budget approved. He explained that “for many years NY has balanced its budget with one-shots — that’s to say with asset sales or bonds.” Ravitch, a former builder (at HRH) and MTA chair, continued: “We’re running out of assets to sell. This is not a sustainable course of action.” He explained that Medicaid costs are going up in double digits and revenues are down despite the recovery of Wall Street: “We’re still way off from where we were in 2007.”

Stimulus funding was described as “two years of one-shots.” Ravitch pointed out that the state surcharge on income tax expires next year. The metaphor used by the lieutenant governor was that of a looming precipice: “We’ve built the cliff higher and higher off of which we will fall when there are no more one-shots.” He warned that the growth of our revenues is significantly behind the growth of our expenditures, and that gap is growing every year. “It is a dilemma for those elected to public office who are used to optimism and growth. Reality is beginning to sink in — it ain’t gonna happen,” he said, “and therefore we have to rethink what goes into a state budget and impose discipline on the Governor and the Legislature.”

Ravitch went into detail describing the Executive Budget, which includes revenues from taxes on income, cigarettes, and the sale of wine in grocery stores. But, he noted, the state Legislature is not disposed to adding any taxes, which will mean that more cuts are needed. Therefore, Ravitch proposed several new ideas as part of a five-year financial plan, including the creation of a Financial Review Board, with the goal of getting to a real balanced budget and going to a modified gap accounting system. With verbal flair disguising hard-nosed fiscal acumen he explained the difference between budgeting on an accrual rather than a cash basis of accounting, declaring a need to avoid moving money from one year to another without any budgetary constraints.

The idea of borrowing money, one of the proposals from the Lieutenant Governor, was not without controversy. He stated, “the imagination of the financial services industry is limitless. It’s all about taking from the future to pay for today’s problems.” Ravitch recalled the days when he didn’t pay a lot of attention to Albany, explaining that “there is an opaqueness about what happens in Albany,” and that “it is hard to get the information out” despite that fact the “what the state does and doesn’t do will have a very dramatic impact on our lives…. The preservation of public infrastructure is at stake, and that education is similarly state-supported, with the state paying the lion’s share of a viable public education program.” He added, “Health is the same, with funds for public health clinics coming through the Health and Hospitals Corporation.” He also noted that this is the second year in a row that the state has had to eliminate its road and bridge program.

The speech was a literal call for “public involvement and public awareness, needed at a level that we’ve never had before.” He pleaded for more involvement in Albany, saying, “There is a human cost to cutting services, particularly in health and education.” He concluded by saying that during the next few weeks the Executive Branch of the state government will be working very intensely: “I can candidly say that the state runs out of cash on June 1st, so there must be a budget by then.”

During the subsequent question and answer period, Anderson replied that everybody “can do something on this subject, starting with talking with public officials. We cannot let this subject go un-discussed.” For more detail on Anderson’s response, see the NYBC website, http://www.buildingcongress.com/. Luckily, the AIA New York State Lobby Day takes place on Tuesday, 04.20.10, and the budgetary priorities of necessary spending for educational facilities, infrastructure, and public transit are very much on the table. Our delegation will be lead by AIANY President Tony Schirripa, FAIA, IIDA, and President-elect Margaret Castillo, AIA, LEED AP. For more information about local advocacy on State policy issues, contact AIANY Policy Director Jay Bond at jbond@aiany.org. “It’s important that, as a profession, we follow developments the state budget–and that, as architects, we let our concerns be known to the lawmakers of New York,” reminded Tony Schirripa, FAIA. “Architects don’t practice in a bubble. We work in New York.”

“I want to bring you greetings on behalf of the President,” were the first words of Adolfo Carrión, former Bronx Borough President and now head of the White House Office of Urban Affairs. He described President Barack Obama as “someone who understands urban, someone who understand smart growth.” Carrión noted that when Candidate Obama came to the U.S. Council of Mayors, he said he understood that the relation of our urban areas to Washington is broken. Shortly after the inauguration the Administration created the White House Office of Urban Affairs to enable intergovernmental collaboration, “a heavy lift” according to Carrión, designed to “wrap its arms around this challenge.”

Referencing the stimulus funding website, http://www.budget.gov/, a half-dozen times for emphasis, Carrión elaborated upon three primary and felicitous goals of the Obama Administration:
· Create smarter and more competitive regional economies
· Enhance environmental sustainability and responsible growth
· Design opportunities that speak to the places where people live, noting that this placed-based concept is at the heart of your work as architects.

The former New Yorker called for a national conversation on the future of cities and metropolitan areas, dubbed “metros” for short. His office helped create an inter-agency group on urban policy involving 17 disparate agencies. This has led to a co-joined and coherent strategy of smart growth and smart investment. He noted that “regional innovation clusters strengthen regional economies and make them more competitive,” and that smart growth “aligns land use with transportation investment.” Continuing on the theme of transportation-oriented development, he stated, “We have an imbalanced transportation spending framework and are starting a working group on transportation to manage the conversation on funding.” He criticized the antecedent formula as unsustainable, with 85 cents on each U.S. transportation dollar going for highways and only 15 cents devoted to mass transit.

“We need to change, but we need help getting there,” Carrión declared, noting that there is much opposition to public-transit reprioritization: “those [highway] interests are very strong, and they’re not kidding. There are people who have created industries around this funding imbalance.” The Administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative combines initiatives at DOT, HUD, and DEP to facilitate transit-oriented development. “Investments in the basket of opportunity come from the notion that we are a country of neighborhoods. Not all places around the country nurture opportunity — they’re not walkable,” he noted, adding, “We need to invest in infrastructure to build a foundation for smart growth.”

The penultimate portion of Carrión’s remarks was direct, eloquent, and straightforward: “We are urban. We are more concentrated in large urban areas. The trajectory is global. More than half the world’s population lives in cities now. We need to build place, and the place needs to work. Our partners in that exercise are in this room and are [also] the people you represent around this country. How we improve the human condition in the place where people live their lives is what architects struggle with, what architects have fun with. We ought to do this in partnership.”

Carrión exhorted the 300 or more architects in the room to ask members of Congress to champion urbanism and smart growth, creating neighborhoods of opportunity. Quoting Frank Lloyd Wright, he recalled the adage that “physicians can bury their mistakes, but architects can only advise their clients to plant vines.” He concluded by saying: “We share the burden that you carry. If we didn’t do so in the past, we are doing so now under this President. We are building the platform for the future of the American Republic.”

Dr. Richard Farson is a psychologist, author, and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. He psyched out the architects in the Grassroots plenary, saying, “Something is beginning to stir in the design professions, dramatically changing the role of architects in the world.” He gave as the three most important AIA initiatives: the redirecting of the public identity and image of architects; the use of design to deal with the most pressing issues of the time; and that design should serve all the people. Saying that social responsibility goes “way beyond sustainability,” Farson noted that “architecture, as the leading design profession, is, potentially, the most powerful profession on earth. You can meet society’s most pressing needs.”

Long interested in the field of design, Farson was the founding dean of the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts, and a 30-year member of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen, of which he was president for seven years. In 1999, he was elected as a public director and served on the AIA’s national Board of Directors. He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. With these credentials and background, he spoke of having to think beyond the scale of individual buildings: “You have to design a new approach to architecture, not only in the private sector but also in the public sector. To tackle these questions of infrastructure we need to become meta-designers.”

In the course of his remarks, he threw out a few glib one-liners, including, “Anyone working at what they were trained to do, is probably obsolete,” and Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, “If it’s working it’s obsolete.” He noted that architecture is “one of the few professions that is dominated by its clientele, or rather, which has come to be dominated by its clientele. This was not always the case.” He referenced the book Leadership by Design by Ambassador Richard N. Swett, FAIA, “which is about the standing of architects, and how that has changed over time.”

“The public has to learn what designers can do,” he suggested “You’ll need collaboration with social scientists, political leaders, and all sorts of people you don’t deal with now.” And he appended three friendly warnings:

· The higher you go with leadership, the less you deal with problems and the more you deal with predicaments.
· Architects strive for perfection; as we tackle these complex problems, we need to take a lot more risks, and that must allow for failure.
· Meta-design is a higher calling; the money needed for meta-design is an investment — we’ll get it all back as you architects reduce discrimination and divorce, and as you build community and democracy.

Farson concluded with a reference to the movie “Its Complicated,” in which Steve Martin plays an architect. He reminded those present that architects have a secret weapon: mystique. He said, “You have created moments of power and strength and excitement and spirituality and earthiness and beauty.” During the lively question and answer session that followed, he was asked about ways in which the social responsibility of the profession can be enhanced. His answer was telling: “We have to increase our numbers. We have to increase what we are doing. We’re not mobilized as an architectural profession to deal with the great issues of our time. We need to work more effectively with the media. Commoditization is the danger, and the trouble.” Also, answering a direct question, he was able to plug his award-winning documentary film, “Journey into Self,” available online through Psychological Films in Laguna, CA.

As the Grassroots blizzard blanketed DC, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley said, “I’ll talk about the art that we must all be committed to, the art of creating and maintaining beautiful and livable cities. Cities must be places where everyone’s heart can sing.”

Mayor Riley, who has worked long and hard with the American Architecture Foundation to educate elected municipal leaders about the importance of design said, “In the art of city building we must first seek not to make any mistakes. In Charleston we had made some mistakes, but we were determined to build beautiful and affordable housing. There is no excuse for building anything in our city that isn’t beautiful.”

Based on his experience in Charleston he was able to say, “One of the great challenges of city building is the restoration of downtown. The fact of the matter is that downtown is the public realm. It is where your citizenship is reinforced and where the rich and the poor can come together. Those are the reasons why the restoration of downtown Charleston was so important.”

Perhaps it was obvious to everyone in the audience, but in the context of the transformation of Charleston, his comment that “in an urban setting people don’t like to walk past vacant lots” took on new meaning: “In Charleston we got new shops downtown. It was great for our city. We got good design, good storefronts, at a human scale.”

Riley continued: “Saving buildings makes a difference on the street, even if you are saving a three-story building just to make sure that the ground floor is active.” He quoted Louis Sullivan as having said that form follows function — in Riley’s estimation that doesn’t mean that a parking garage has to make a big deal about showing off the cars parked there. He suggested the use of louvers, saying, “You don’t have to see the cars to have parking downtown.”

His speech was full of anecdotes and stories, including case studies of specific buildings in Charleston. But one of his tales that particularly resonated with the issues of downtown’s special places had Vincent Scully and Louis Kahn walking around Red Square and, as he put it, “One said about St. Basil’s, ‘Isn’t it lovely how it hits the sky?’ and the other said, ‘Yeah, but isn’t it so lovely how it hits the ground?'” From this Mayor Riley deduced that, “This is what great cities do. They have rules. We study what the city needs to be.”

A lot of his remarks at Accent concentrated on specific public spaces, including parks. For example, “When people say why build parks, that parks take property off the tax roll, they don’t understand what makes cities great. We’ve created the most lovely places. Every park design is different. Parks can be reposeful places for busy people in the center of a city. When you build a beautiful public realm, the private investment follows.”

“Charleston is a city you can walk,” he said. “Not having to drive downtown, and not having to find a parking place has saved a lot of marriages. The trams go where people want them to go.” He continued, “Let’s say that all of us here agree with all this, but what about political support?” His case studies described public engagement in the process and the outcome of decisions about public projects and spaces. He quoted a gun-toting security guard at a downtown liquor store as thanking him (during a purchase) for creating a park “that was the prettiest thing he ever saw.”

The third inaugural of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took place on Friday, January 1 at City Hall Park. Remarks were brief, perhaps because of the biting cold and the lack of the stars whose presence had lengthened the event four years before. The Mayor started with a reference to the people’s party that took place on New Year’s Eve at Times Square: “Last night the final moments of 2009 passed into history, and as they did, Americans from across the country looked to New York to ring in a new year, a new decade, and a new beginning. And that is only right, because our city has always led the nation, not just in celebrating holidays, but in pioneering the most innovative and ambitious new ideas.” He noted the historic achievements and leadership of New Yorkers, saying, “We have built the country’s largest affordable housing program and adopted its most sweeping public health agenda. We have pursued the boldest sustainability agenda on the planet. And we have made the greatest city in the world even greater.”

A central theme of the inauguration was the importance of immigration reform to New York and its economy. Mayor Bloomberg called our city “the world capital of opportunity and entrepreneurism,” and a place where “innovation occurs when people look with fresh ideas at old problems, and then work together to solve them.” Rhetorical flourishes in the speech gave hope to the environmentalists, builders, and architects present, including newly inaugurated AIA New York Chapter President Tony Schirripa, AIA, IIDA, whose theme this year addresses architects as leaders. The Mayor said: “We will find innovative new ways to create jobs in the industries of the future, from bioscience and arts and culture, to green technology that fights global warming and local asthma at the same time,” and “the future starts here, it starts now, and it starts with us.”

While the city’s Active Design Guidelines, a successful collaboration between several mayoral agencies, was not specifically called out in the short speech, its upcoming launch the evening of January 27 at the Center for Architecture, was anticipated. The Mayor said, “Conventional wisdom holds that by a third term, mayors run out of energy and ideas — but we have proved the conventional wisdom wrong time and again, and, I promise you, we will do it once more.”

From my perspective, the best embellishment in the inaugural speech was the Mayor’s concluding quote of the analogy from E.B. White’s Here is New York: “New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village — the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up.” Before the Staten Island P.S. 22 chorus broke into a G-rated rendition of the Jay-Z song “Run This Town” (from Blueprint 3), the Mayor ended, “On this first day of the year, the first day of the decade, and the first day of the future of this great city — the way is still up.”