Author: Robert Hauer Santos Assoc. AIA

Event: Restoration of Bauhaus Building
Location: Museum of Modern Art, 07.09.08
Speakers: Winfried Brenne & Franze Jaschke — Partners, Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten (Berlin)
Moderator: Barry Bergdoll — Philip Johnson Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art
Organizers: The World Monuments Fund with support from Knoll

One of the successes of the Bauhaus school was the completion of the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, Germany. The building marked commercial and architectural success for the influential functionalist school. Designed by Bauhaus Director Hannes Meyer and architect Hans Wittwer, it became one of the most significant completed Bauhaus projects. Sited near Berlin in the former East Germany, its condition was for many years unknown and its existence almost forgotten by the West.

The 1930 building complex, consisting of administration, classroom, dormitory, refectory, and gymnasium space, was unlike other Bauhaus buildings of the time. Built out of butter-toned brick and stretches of red steel-framed glazing and glass block, it stood apart from the white-walled buildings associated with the Bauhaus style. In the dormitories, walls were color-coded according to floor and building — yellow, green, blue, and red.

When the project to restore the ADGB School began, these details were submerged beneath layers of architectural debris added by two totalitarian regimes. The National Socialist Party and the German Democratic Republic consecutively enclosed the complex’s broad glass walls beneath layers of brick and paint. The school was gradually surrounded with new buildings designed in the modern classical style favored by the itinerant regimes.

Rediscovering the colors locked beneath the additions was key to rehabilitating the school. The partners of Berlin’s Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten, Winfried Brenne and Franz Jaschke, took an archeological approach to unearthing the hidden layers. Demolishing walls had to be carried out with care as clues constantly emerged about the design philosophy and how the building was originally finished. Sifting through original documentation, they re-oriented the complex to return to its original functional intent.

For the office of Brenne Gesellschaft, confronting a historic puzzle proved to be an ongoing challenge. Many original details featured construction methods and materials no longer available, requiring in-depth research on how to reproduce them. Facing budgetary constraints and constant new discoveries, the architects were continually involved in the process of evaluating information and creating solutions on the fly.

The inaugural World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize, awarded for the preservation of modern architecture as part of the Modernism at Risk Initiative, was awarded to the Berlin firm for their work in revitalizing the ADGB School, representing a new focus on the forgotten challenges facing Modern buildings.

Robert Santos, Assoc. AIA, is a junior architect at Gruzen Samton Architects.

Event: Moynihan Station: What Needs to Happen Next?
Location: The Urban Center, 05.13.08
Speakers: Kent Barwick — President, Municipal Art Society; Richard L. Brodsky — Assemblyman, New York State Assembly; Anna Hayes Levin — Chair, Community Board 4; Daniel A. Biederman — President, 34th Street Partnership; Kathryn Wylde — President & CEO, Partnership for New York City
Moderator: Charles Bagli — Reporter, The New York Times
Organizers: Municipal Art Society

Moynihan Station may be the linchpin to open up the last undeveloped frontier in Manhattan, according to speakers at a recent discussion hosted by the Municipal Art Society. In an unusual display of agreement, speakers representing a local community board, developers, and politicians posited that the key to opening up the West Side to new growth may be to start work on what is achievable: Moynihan Station. Acknowledging the departure of Madison Square Garden from negotiations, among other realities in a limited West Side plan, panelists agreed that moving ahead with the proposed Moynihan Station in limited form would be most productive.

Fred Papert, founder of the 42nd Street Development Corporation and audience member, addressed the panel about what will happen to the Farley Post Office building site. “Why don’t we just get going?” he asked, pointing out that the Moynihan plan had already secured over $1 billion in funding from the Federal Government. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, echoing the sentiment that the project should move ahead, proposed a new authority to run the West Side development project, and an up-or-down vote on developing the Farley Post Office.

Robert Hauer Santos, Assoc. AIA, is a junior architect at Gruzen Samton Architects.

Event: Young Architects Forum: Resonance
Location: The Urban Center, 05.08.08
Speakers: Xu Tiantian — Principal, DnA_Design and Architecture (Beijing, China & Issaquah, WA); Geoffrey Thün & Kathy Velikov — Principals, RVTR (Toronto)
Organizers: The Architectural League of New York

“Resonance,” was this year’s theme of The Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Forum. It tackled the question: are architects developing productive ways to engage with today’s global priorities? Beijing- and Issaquah (WA)-based DnA_Design and Architecture attempts to blur the boundaries between the natural and built environment, while Toronto-based RVTR uses a process they call “collective intelligence” to produce zero-emission projects.

DnA_Design and Architecture uses context to mold and form space to create interior landscapes. The Ordos Art Museum in Inner Mongolia creates a circulation pattern that both highlights the works on display and carries the visitor through a series of panoramas and planned interior gardens. Locally quarried stone cladding echoes the forms of the surrounding rocky dunes. As centerpiece of a massive new city in Inner Mongolia, featuring hundreds of thousands of square feet of new housing, studio, and educational spaces built in a vast desert, the museum will feature contemporary Chinese artists and designers. Ordos city is being developed by more than 100 young firms from 27 countries, made possible by a local tycoon.

RVTR works through communication and networking to create architecture that contextualizes ecological awareness. Stressing a creative process that integrates mixed media and video, principals Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov argue that they are able to provide a product that responds intimately to client’s desires while reducing its ecological impact. In the Buenos Aires Pampas House, RVTR designed an international recreational retreat for a globetrotting client that maintains zero-carbon emissions. The complex offers open spaces interspersed with organically-shaped penetrating and extending chambers for specialized functions, ranging from outdoor sport viewing stations to interior chambers where sommeliers may cultivate their palates.

Highlighting their ecological concern, Thün and Velikov presented their Venice Lagoon competition entry. What they call “buoyant aquacology,” RVTR proposed a way to save Venice from rising sea levels by building on the lagoon itself. Floating barges contain algae that create food and fuel for their inhabitants. The vessels attempt to provide life in a world where humans coexist with nature rather than subjugate it.

Robert Hauer Santos, Assoc. AIA, is a junior architect at Gruzen Samton Architects.

Event: Architecture and Recovery: The Guardians Institute in New Orleans
Location: Museum of Arts and Design, 04.17.08
Speakers: Jens Holm — Associate, Rockwell Group; Kate Stohr — Cofounder, Architecture for Humanity; Herreast Harrison — Founder, Guardians Institute
Moderator: Martin C. Pedersen — Executive Editor, Metropolis
Organizer: Museum of Arts and Design

At the fringe of recovery efforts in New Orleans are community anchor buildings. The celebrity-driven focus on replacing damaged housing has partially obscured the city’s need to bring roots of shared place and heritage back to its communities. It is a type of project that Kate Stohr, cofounder of Architecture for Humanity, calls a “beacon of hope,” and one her organization has committed to creating in post-hurricane New Orleans. Jens Holm of the Rockwell Group, working closely with Architecture for Humanity, provided his energies to designing a new home for the Upper Ninth Ward’s Guardians Institute.

Herreast Harrison, founder of the institute — and a bit of a New Orleans cultural icon herself — explained that the institute exists to make a difference in young peoples’ lives, to bring the “living heroes” of the neighborhoods into children’s lives, connecting them with their past and orienting their future. A tradition of beadwork, crafts, theater, and family responsibility handed down through Mardi Gras Indian culture is preserved in classes for the neighborhood children and through care for the elderly. Though short on dollars, the Institute hopes to include permanent space for a museum, academic institution, and neighborhood playhouse.

Holm packs an amazing amount of program and flexibility into the proposed 2,500-square-foot Guardians Institute building. It offers multi-use space providing exhibition, performance, education, and administration functions. With roots in the design of the traditional shotgun style home, the new building will expand on and open this archetype based on free circulation. Broad façades that open for performances are visible from the street.

The institute is also designed for hurricane and flood survivability, according to Holm. Its first floor is built four feet above grade to withstand minor area flooding. The second floor is placed high enough to stay dry through floodwaters of the type encountered during Hurricane Katrina, which left a nine-foot-high watermark in the neighborhood.

Though the meeting of Harrison and the Rockwell Group was paid for in part by Architecture for Humanity, there is a continuing need for funding to advance this project. With an estimated cost of roughly $300,000, the Guardians Institute has a substantial challenge ahead of it before groundbreaking. Federal funds have not been forthcoming and other levels of government have declined to help, preferring that development come from the private sector.

A condemned home on an adjoining corner lot waits for a possible phase two design and expansion — an expansion that may not come if New Orleans’ business-first administration puts developers’ needs ahead of those of the community.

Rob Santos, Assoc. AIA, is a junior architect at Gruzen Samton Architects.

Event: Reimagining Risk: Rwanda
Location: The Urban Center, 02.28.08
Speakers: Alfred Ndabarasa — Second Counselor, Republic of Rwanda’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations; Carl Worthington, AIA, ASLA — Director of Planning and Urban Design, OZ Architecture (Colorado); Cathy Leslie, P.E. — Civil Engineer, Tetra Tech & Executive Director, Engineers Without Borders-USA
Moderator: Andrew Blum — Journalist, Contributing Editor, Metropolis & Wired
Organizers: The Architectural League of New York

Emerging from its four-year war in 1994, Rwanda was saddled with the social memory of brutal genocide and devastation of the country’s already limited infrastructure and economy. Despite this, a decade of quick recovery saw reconciliation, increase of GDP to prewar levels, rapid population growth, and a return to democratic political structures.

The new government moved to tackle problems created by the rapid urbanization of the capital, Kigali, which had expanded from a population of 6,000 in 1962 to almost 1,000,000 today. The plan, called Vision 2020, forecasts a strong Rwanda with solid institutions, tough on corruption, democratically decentralized, focused on developing human capacity, and equitable to men and women of all ethnic groups. The plan proposes that Rwanda become the transit hub of Africa, thanks to its central location.

OZ Architecture was selected to provide what would amount to a country-wide urban plan, encompassing urban planning in the Kigali city center, land management planning in the northern and southern wildlife preserves, transportation and energy management, and ecological mapping of watersheds and natural/agricultural uses. The team needed to provide not just design expertise, but also to create public-policy solutions to the myriad of problems common to many developing nations.

Watersheds will play an important part in new urban forms. The plan for Kigali and other proposed satellite centers calls for efficient use of land that doesn’t interfere with runoff and handles drinking water and effluent through natural processes. Part of the proposal addresses the shortage of energy and water through the recycling of waste in biogas generators. The proposals for city living are an evolution of existing town development patterns rather than a redesign imposing foreign cultural values.

The OZ team’s work has reached from the very large scale, such as the newly planned Bugesera International Airport, to the exceedingly mundane, such as the design of a new type of brick that can be produced locally and frees individuals from the need to procure expensive factory-produced building materials for their homes. The integration of these scales will provide an efficient resolution to the problems facing the country, as the multiplicity of individuals working at the small scale will have a collective positive effect on the ecology of the country and the quality of life of its citizens, while macro projects will link the new structures with regional neighbors and the international community.

Robert Hauer Santos, Assoc. AIA, is a junior architect at Gruzen Samton Architects.