Category: In The News

Oculus 2007 Editorial Calendar
If you have ideas, projects, opinions — or perhaps a burning desire to write about a topic below — we’d like to hear from you! Deadlines for submitting suggestions are indicated; projects/topics may be anywhere, but architects must be New York-based. Send suggestions to Kristen Richards.
06.01.07 Fall 2007: Collaboration
09.07.07 Winter 2007-08: Power & Patronage

04.19.07 Call for Recommendations: AIANY College of Fellows
The AIA New York Chapter Fellows Committee is now accepting recommendations for those who will be nominated to fellowship from our chapter. Advancement to the AIA College of Fellows is granted for significant achievement in design, preservation, education, literature and service. Architects who have been members for 10 or more years are eligible for consideration.

05.01.07 Call for Submissions: Reinventing and Galvanizing Downtown
The Alliance for Downtown New York and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invite artists to creatively look at downtown construction sites. Projects should re-invent and transform community eyesores into places of attraction, curiosity, and anticipation. Proposals in all visual media — paint, collage, light, sculpture, architectural interventions — are encouraged. Projects will be evaluated in terms of effectiveness in ameliorating daily life in a construction zone and monetary feasibility.

05.04.07 Submission: Land Development Breakthroughs Visionary Award
This award recognizes projects with creativity, vision, and implementation of best practices in land development. Criteria for the award include effective leadership, team building, public relations successes, sustainable principles, community contributions, innovative solutions, and financial success, along with uniqueness and beauty. Finalists will be showcased at the upcoming Land Development Breakthroughs — Best Practices Conference, June 7-8 in New Orleans, LA. The winning project will be showcased in the Conference Review edition of Land Development Today magazine.

05.31.07 Submission: Urban Landscape Award 2007
This award sponsored by Eurohypo AG with Topos and Architektur&Wohnen seeks to raise the profile of projects that enhance inner-city open spaces, including residential blocks, mixed-use developments, and redesigned neighborhoods. Innovative sustainable development and economic and social integration will be expected. Public and private organizations, planners, and architects are invited to submit. Projects must have been completed between the years 2000 and 2006. The first-prize winner will receive EUR50,000 (appr. $67,000).

06.01.07 Submission: Schedium
The AIA NY Chapter’s Emerging New York Architects (ENYA) invites drawing portfolio submissions as part of its new program, Schedium, intended to celebrate the drawing abilities of emerging architects. Artists selected from the portfolio competition may be asked to participate in a live drawing series. International practitioners are welcome. Eligibility is limited to those with an architecture degree or international equivalent, who have received an architecture degree after 01.01.91 or received their architectural license after 01.01.97, whichever is less restrictive. Four winners will receive a $1,000 stipend plus additional benefits.

06.01.07 Submission: Challenge America: Reaching Every Community Fast-Track Review Grants
This grant category offers support primarily to small- and mid-sized organizations for projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations — those whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. Grants are available, in the amount of $10,000 each, for professional arts programming and for projects that emphasize the potential of the arts in community development. While not required, applicants are encouraged to consider partnerships among organizations, both in and outside of the arts, as appropriate to their project.

06.01.07 Competition: Walla Walla Market Station Design Competition
The Downtown Walla Walla Foundation and Valley Transit announce a competition to design a distinctive downtown transit station integrating various community needs. Walla Walla is an Eastern Washington city renowned for wine production and its picturesque and historic downtown. Three semi-finalists will win $5,000 each, and compete for a final $3,000 prize.

06.17.07 Submission: ShelterMe
ShelterMe calls for designs of temporary emergency shelters for deployment in a natural disaster. In the past two years, widespread catastrophic events have called forth large-scale international relief efforts throughout both urban and rural areas. Designers are challenged to present a cost-effective, short-term shelter that is affordable, lightweight, strong, and easily deployed. The competition is open to all registered members of the DESIGN 21: Social Design Network, who are at least 18 years old.

08.01.07 Competition: Connecting Market East: Student Design Competition
The Ed Bacon Foundation, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization, launched its second annual national student design competition, open to architecture, planning, and design students across North America. Entrants must create design solutions for improving Market East in Center City Philadelphia focusing on re-connecting Market East and its destinations to the street, transit, and the city at-large.

12.31.07 Submission: Just Jerusalem
Just Jerusalem calls for innovative visions for Jerusalem and what it might be if justice and urban livability — rather than competing nationalist projects — were the principle points of departure. Sponsored by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS) and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), the project’s goal is to allow for the envisioning of Jerusalem, real and symbolic, as a just, peaceful, and sustainable urban locale by the year 2050. Entries are open to architects, urbanists, artists, historians, poets, political scientists, philosophers, economists, engineers, and all others who have ideas for the future of the city. Multi-disciplinary teams are encouraged.

Event: 2007 Temko Critics Panel: A Critical Situation: What to Make of Starchitecture, And Who To Blame For It
Location: Baruch College, 03.28.07
Speakers: Karrie Jacobs and Philip Nobel — Contributing Editors, Metropolis; Jeremy Melvin — Architectural Review, consultant to Royal Academy of Arts Architecture Program, London; Rowan Moore — Director, The Architecture Foundation, and critic for Evening Standard, London; Moderator: Joseph Grima — Director, Storefront For Art and Architecture
Sponsors: Forum for Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; hosted by the Newman Institute for Real Estate Studies, Baruch College

“I’ll jump into the deep end: starchitecture isn’t such a bad thing,” moderator Joseph Grima posited to the panel of design journalists and critics. “It’s good for your profession — it gives you something to write about.” Using Frank Gehry, FAIA, as an example of a global brand, he asked, “Are journalists to be blamed or credited?”

Jeremy Melvin, author of Isms: Understanding Architectural Styles (Universe 2006), commented that the conversation has been the same for the last 100 years, and will be the same for the next 100. The problem, as he sees it, is that in the last 15 to 20 years, there’s been more money to spend on architecture, causing “brand inflation.” He cited the Gazprom Tower competition as a “significant” example: “Invite all the same architects, and the winner is RMJM, a firm not that well known outside of the U.K. The design was not very good, but not worse than the others.” But it was a competition where “the quality of design dissolved.”

Philip Nobel asked if there is a connection between celebrity and quality. Melvin responded, wryly, that “celebrity can be achieved without doing anything,” yet there’s also the “irony” of those who reach “hyper-celebrity” because they have huge organizations behind them (he finds Norman Foster looking to sell his firm for £500 million “absurd”). Nobel pointed out that Zaha Hadid came to celebrity through her art and media buzz — which “is problematic — does that mean it’s good or just photogenic?”

Grima wondered if there’s complicity between architects and the press. Rowan Moore sees a “major shift in the scale of the phenomenon of starchitecture” where “clients and architects are controlling access to those they know will be positive; the balance of power has changed.” He said it boils down to “persuasion and charm, similar to the games fashion houses play.” Karrie Jacobs agreed, saying developers are buying into starchitecture in a big way, with “Broadway-style lists of credits in real estate ads. As architecture is recognized by popular culture, it becomes less the domain of a small group of experts and opinion makers.” She suggested someone should draw up a chart of how much a starchitect’s name adds to the square-foot value of a project.

To Grima’s question, “Has any building been killed by the press?” With a devilish grin, Melvin answered, “I’ve done quite a bit of slaughtering. Critics should be in the business of criticizing. Otherwise, what’s the point?” He later said that if the art world has experts who authenticate artworks, “why not have critics to authenticate good design?”

Grima then asked the panel if starchitecture has replaced what used to be “movements” or “isms.” Moore said, “I’d rather have starchitecture than isms or ideologies as style. Maybe it is progress. Or maybe I’m being too optimistic.” Nobel countered that in architectural education, “what might be good about isms is you’d have something to teach — not graphic chicanery. There are victims here — us — when these juniors start building.”

Audience Q&A: Is starchitecture a good thing? Moore: “I don’t think it’s fantastic; it’s open to abuse, but it doesn’t kill people.” Melvin: “You’re being too kind. It can hurt people.” Jacobs: “Ostentatious, over-the-top buildings used to show off nationalism. It beats the hell out of an arms race.”

How do you teach a client to think differently about architecture, to make better choices? Moore: “Call out bad buildings and bad shortlists.”

Would a global economic downturn affect starchitects? Nobel: “They’re trying to build practices that are recession-proof. You won’t kill starchitecture.”

Kristen Richards is editor-in-chief of OCULUS and ArchNewsNow.com.

Event: Emerging Voices Lecture Series
Location: Urban Center, 03.22.07
Speakers: An Te Liu — artist, associate professor & director, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto; Jared Della Valle, AIA, Andrew Bernheimer, AIA — Principals, Della Valle Bernheimer
Organizers: The Architectural League of New York

“I hate it and I’ve almost rid my life of it,” proclaimed An Te Liu about IKEA furniture. Jared Della Valle, AIA, and Andrew Bernheimer, AIA, have no fondness for the mass-market designs either. For them, buying from IKEA and scavenging from the trash were equally distasteful methods for furnishing their office in their early days.

But Liu confessed to liking the designs better with a few not-so-minor alternations. Ignoring IKEA’s arcane instruction sheets, he assembled the parts for a desk into an angular hanging sculpture; he also reconstituted table panels to form a striped wall mural.

Like Andy Warhol, Liu, an artist and director of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, is known for using mundane objects as building blocks for new, unexpected forms. Drawn to the cheery colors of 3M sponges, he used them to create walls and pillars in his Soft series. In another project, he constructed totemic pillars out of air purifiers. He appropriated a photo of Levittown as source material for endlessly repeating ornamental wallpaper — an ironic critique of the myth of individual autonomy within a vast built network of sameness, he explained.

Bernheimer and Della Valle, principals of Della Valle Bernheimer, also delight in reinventing familiar forms, but with a highly utilitarian bent. When their firm needed new office furniture, they decided to sidestep stores like IKEA and buy a CNC milling machine to make their own ultra-customizable modular table. The duo’s love of individual variation characterizes their condominium at 245 10th Avenue, whose textured, reflective façade resembles an ever-shifting steam cloud, and a residence in Connecticut that appears to float in the treetops that surround it.

Perhaps the perfect complement to Liu’s Levittown wallpaper was Della Valle Bernheimer’s recent affordable housing project in East New York. The firm strove to break the mold of cookie-cutter design in the collaborative project, built for a mere $108 per square foot but offering a high level of architectural variation. Instead of “I live in the third house down the block on the left,” the owner can say, “I live there,” Bernheimer said.

Though a cynical police officer once challenged him, claiming the houses were “too nice for this neighborhood,” he holds on to the hope that the development may have a regenerative effect on the area. Certainly it’s been a positive step for the first-time homeowners who are beginning to move in, a group of people whose houses are as diverse as they are.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.

New plans to green cities, countries, and the world seem to be popping up everywhere. Similar to Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, the Mayor of London’s office recently announced its “London Plan.” Although it is difficult to tell how successful these initiatives will be — goals and objectives have only been laid out at this point — I believe a global discussion about reducing carbon emissions beyond the Kyoto Protocol is a step in the right direction.

The two plans were the subject of a recent discussion at the Center for Architecture, 03.27.07, organized by the Forum for Urban Design and sponsored by the AIA NY International Committee. Debbie McMullen, who is heading the planning team in London’s Mayor’s office, and Rohit Aggarwala, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, agreed that both cities can and should learn from each other as each initiative progresses.

The London Plan — which was generated by 2007 Pritzker Prize-winning Richard Rogers — lays out a series of targeted goals rather than a prescriptive set of rules, allowing for the plan to adjust as the market requires, explained McMullen. In order to reach 30% carbon reduction by 2025, the Mayor’s approach is to educate residents to change their behavior, retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient, and to design for zero carbon emissions in all future development. The plan incorporates the established congestion charging, and initiates new strategies such as developing radial mass-transit routes, expanding canal systems, constructing new sustainable buildings while allowing for appropriate historical preservation, and providing a range of “social housing” types (50% affordable housing is the current goal). Perhaps most important is that the Greater London Authority (GLA) is partnering with private organizations to help with funding and oversight.

PlaNYC has 10 goals that are divided into three categories. OpeNYC aims to improve travel times, create more affordable housing, and ensure all residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park. MaintaiNYC will provide cleaner water, reliable power, and a state of good repair throughout city infrastructure. Finally, greeNYC will reduce global warming emissions by more than 30%, achieve “the cleanest air of any big city in America” (according to the website), clean contaminated land, and reduce water pollution.

Both plans seem to have the same goals. Questions about their effectiveness remain. Which city will be more successful? Will the GLA’s involvement in the implementation of the London Plan be more effective than a lack of a designated oversight committee in NYC? Will the NY State government impede NYC’s progress — a level of bureaucracy that does not pertain to London? Will the fact that Mayor Bloomberg has a term limit help give NYC an extra push forward, or will a concern for his legacy hinder long-term planning? Will the 2012 Olympics aid or hamper London’s Plan? Only time will tell.

In this issue:
·United Nations Approves Master Plan
·Art Deco Jewel Gets 21st Century Uplift
·Look No Further Than Chelsea’s “Vision Machine”
·A Permanent Dinner Party in Brooklyn
·Historic Waterfront Contributes to New Urbanist Future
·Pratt Institute Provides Modular Homes for Artists
·Friends Seminary Renovates and Expands
·Chic Hotel Has Designer Views to Match

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United Nations Approves Master Plan

More than 50 years after it was built, the United Nations will undergo a $1.9billion renovation. The scope of the Capital Master Plan (CMP) covers over 2.5million square feet on more than 17 acres. Plans include replacing or refurbishing deteriorated equipment and systems, creating more redundancy, improving security and energy efficiency, removing hazardous materials, and achieving code compliance for all the buildings in the complex. Priorities include a temporary 10,000-square-foot conference building, and for the existing buildings, the installation of new curtain walls, a full sprinkler system, new mechanical and electrical systems, asbestos abatement, and landscaping.

In addition, a number of sustainability measures will be implemented. With these improvements, the U.N. is aiming to bring the headquarters — composed of the Secretariat building, General Assembly hall, Conference building, basement and garage, Dag Hammarskjöld Library, and South Annex — to a level comparable to a LEED Silver rating. Several design teams are on the project, including Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering, Helpern Architects, HLW, R.A. Heintges & Associates, and Syska Hennessy Group.

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Art Deco Jewel Gets 21st Century Uplift

Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners is planning a comprehensive restoration and revitalization of the Shreve, Lamb and Harmon-designed Art Deco lobby in the Empire State Building, a designated NYC landmark (and #1 on the AIA list of America’s Favorite Architecture). A number of historic features and distinctive architectural details, which have been obscured by alterations over time, will be restored or recreated while allowances for better operations as a modern office building will be made. Included in the plans waiting for Landmarks approval is the restoration of the lobby’s historic ceiling mural depicting a celestial sky rendered in gold and silver leaf, an element that was fully covered by a hung ceiling with fluorescent lighting in the 1960s.

Also planned is the replacement of the long lost, original incandescent uplight fixtures with modern, energy-efficient fixtures supplemented with carefully located downlights. Beyer Blinder Belle will also address important planning and design issues throughout the lobby’s street entrances, corridors, retail spaces, and elevator bank areas, including a fully equipped tenant visitor desk and improved pedestrian circulation while maintaining security, improving signage, and making optimal use of currently under-utilized areas.

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Look No Further Than Chelsea’s “Vision Machine”

A 23-story tower, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, to be known as 100 11th, will feature a highly engineered and technologically advanced curtain wall. Each pane will be set at a unique angle and torque, giving each apartment its won configuration of glass. Across the street from Gehry Partners’ IAC/InterActive Corpration office building, the residence will feature 72 one-, two- and three-bedroom residences ranging from $1.6million to $22million. The building will be ready for occupancy late fall 2008.

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A Permanent Dinner Party in Brooklyn

The centerpiece of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, designed by Susan T. Rodriguez, FAIA, design partner at Polshek Partnership Architects, is Judy Chicago’s iconic installation The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a triangular banquet with 39 place settings for important historical women (from Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Woolf to Eleanor of Aquitaine). The spatial arrangement of the Sackler Center allows visitors to progress through its concentric layers from public to private. Beginning with a linear gallery space featuring The Banners, a series of seven Aubusson tapestries, The Dinner Party is accessed though an aperture at the apex. Upon exiting the central gallery, viewers enter a gallery space that includes The Heritage Panels, which summarize the research done by the artist and her team on the lives and accomplishments of the dinner guests.

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Historic Waterfront Contributes to New Urbanist Future

The Jersey City Planning Commission has approved Meltzer/Mandl Architects’ design for a six-story, 108-unit market rate condo building in a “New Urbanist” community sited within the Jersey City historic waterfront district. The 200-foot-wide building will be distinguished by a curved façade composed of aluminum composite panels, called Alucobond, set against granite façades at the property line. This project is part of the second phase of Liberty Harbor, billed as a city-within-a-city with 7,000-10,000 condo residences, 150,000 square feet of retail space, public parks, and recreation centers. When completed, development will feature the work of 10 notable NY-area architectural firms.

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Pratt Institute Provides Modular Homes for Artists

Garrison Architects, along with Marble Fairbanks, Obra Architects, Narofsky Architecture, Peter L. Gluck & Partners, Architects have been invited to design a new modular residence for graduate art students on the Pratt Institute campus. Faced with the challenge of maximizing units within a relatively small space and abiding by strict zoning guidelines, Garrison’s concept blends living, exhibition, and performance spaces under one (green) roof. A vertical atrium cuts through the center of the building and tectonic shifts in the modular building create a network of porches and walkways within the atrium, encouraging collaboration and exchange among students.

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Friends Seminary Renovates and Expands
The first phase of an ongoing multi-million dollar comprehensive multi-phase renovation and expansion of Friends Seminary School, a 220-year-old Quaker school overlooking Stuyvesant Park on East 16th Street is almost complete. The renovation, designed by Helfand Architects, encompasses approximately 27,000 square feet. Upon completion later this spring, the school will have a consolidated library, five new classrooms, a science lab, new bathrooms, and a vertical circulation core, making it easier for students and staff to navigate through the different properties. The project management firm Levien & Company is representing the owner and will continue to remain project consultant for additional projects slated for the summer.

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Chic Hotel Has Designer Views to Match

The Z Hotel, a new hotel in Long Island City located across from Manhattan’s 59th Street, offers each room a view of the Chrysler, Empire State, and Citicorp Buildings from guest room accommodations — including the bathrooms, where the skyline is framed in a single pane of glass. The 12-story building, designed by Andre Kikoski Architect, is clad in a window wall that also reflects the cityscape; LED’s illuminate the façade, replicating the energy of the city. The hotel’s public spaces have been designed to attract the neighborhood’s clientele (Silvercup Studios for one and Silvercup West on the boards, for another) with a below-grade restaurant and lounge with 25-foot-tall ceilings, and a rooftop bar with a 260-degree view that will be open in the summertime.

In case you haven’t heard, there is a man with a family in NYC aiming to put us all to shame. Colin Beaven, or No Impact Man as he calls himself on his blog, is spending one year with his wife, two-year-old daughter, and dog, attempting to live without making a net impact on the environment. He is documenting his experiences daily, so check out the website often. In the future there will be a book and documentary film as well.

Feeling environmentally irresponsible? Well, Step It Up 2007 might help. Acting as an organizing hub for the National Day of Climate Action, 04.14.07, the website lists national gatherings, rallies, events, and a blog with frequent postings by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. Throughout the day, links to the events will be posted. The aim is to “have the largest protest the country has ever seen, not in numbers but in extent.” To find a local activity, or list your own, click the link.

Atlas of Novel Tectonics, a book by Jesse Reiser, AIA, and Nanako Umemoto of NYC-based Resier + Umemoto RUR Architecture, has won two international awards: The Jan Tschichold Prize for Best Designed Swiss Books 2006, and First Prize of The Gutenberg International Prize of Leipzig…

Connecticut-based Fletcher Thompson Architecture Engineering has opened a New York City office…David Koren, CPSM, Assoc. AIA, has joined Perkins Eastman as an Associate Principal and Director of Marketing after 15 years of professional experience, including Senior Associate and Marketing Director of Gensler’s Northeast Region…

Jeff Speck will retire from his position as Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts in May and return to private practice as a city planner…Cathy Lang Ho has decided to leave The Architect’s Newspaper and return to freelance writing and editing…

Oculus 2007 Editorial Calendar
If you have ideas, projects, opinions — or perhaps a burning desire to write about a topic below — we’d like to hear from you! Deadlines for submitting suggestions are indicated; projects/topics may be anywhere, but architects must be New York-based. Send suggestions to Kristen Richards.
06.01.07 Fall 2007: Collaboration
09.07.07 Winter 2007-08: Power & Patronage

04.06.07 Call for Papers: Sixth International Conference on Courthouse Design
The AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice seeks contributions to a discussion among world leaders in the justice field regarding innovation in planning, design, technology, and research for courthouses. This year’s theme is Sustainable Excellence, and the conference, which will take place at the Marriot Brooklyn Bridge 09.26-28.07, will explore ideas surrounding sustainable communities, design excellence, green design, among others. For more information click the link; for inquiries, address all questions to Katherine Gupman, AIA project manager via e-mail or call 202-626-8051.

04.15.07 Registration: Re:Volt
Urban Revision seeks for plans to intelligently and sustainably power a city block. Think big ideas with a small environmental impact. Winning entries will receive $2,000 and put into action by Re:Volt. Submissions are due by 05.01.07.

04.16.07 Submission: New York Designs: Starts & Finishes
The Architectural League of New York created the New York Designs juried lecture series in 2003 to provide a forum for innovative and accomplished work built in NYC. This year’s program focuses on the evolution of a project, from start to finish aiming to illuminate the link between the conceptual and built realms. To be considered for presentation in the Architectural League’s New York Designs lecture series, individuals and firms are invited to submit one work that was recently built in NYC. There are no limitations in terms of project type, program, size, or budget.

04.19.07 Call for Recommendations: AIANY College of Fellows
The AIA New York Chapter Fellows Committee is now accepting recommendations for those who will be nominated to fellowship from our chapter. Advancement to the AIA College of Fellows is granted for significant achievement in design, preservation, education, literature and service. Architects who have been members for 10 or more years are eligible for consideration.

04.20.07 Call for Presentations: 2007 Design-Build Conference & Expo
Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) is now accepting submission of abstracts for its 2007 Design-Build Conference and Expo. While all submissions will be given equal consideration, DBIA specifically seeks presentations focused on the following areas: The “Fusion” of Innovations, Managing Risk in Design-Build, Effectively Integrating Specialty Contractors and Manufacturers/Suppliers on the Design-Build Team, and Managing the Design-Build Process.

05.01.07 Submission: USGBC Natural Talent 2007 Design Competition
Hosted by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Emerging Green Builders NY (egbny), this competition provides applied learning for emerging designers in integrated design, sustainability, innovation, and social consciousness — all components of the LEED Green Building Rating System. The winner will compete for a national award at Greenbuild, the USGBC’s Annual Green Building Conference and Expo. Awards include Green Building Scholarships as well as registration to Greenbuild, where finalists’ entries will be displayed and final judging will occur. The competition is open to all university level students (of any discipline and level), and individuals with less than five years experience in the building industry.

05.11.07 Submission: Promosidia International Design Competition
This competition calls for indoor chair designs that are innovative, technically feasible, designed to be mass-produced, and mostly made of wood. Submissions must identify the use and function of the chair, giving due consideration to ergonomics and materials. Designs of seats such as chaises lounges, divans, stools, and pouffes are ineligible. Eligibility is limited to designers under 40 as of 09.08.07. Six designs will be displayed at the Promosedia International Chair Exhibition in Udine, Italy, and the winning entry will be developed into a prototype.

Event: Process 2 Collaboration 4: Inside/Outside — Seamless Collaboration
Location: New York Design Center, 03.14.07
Speakers: Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, IIDA, LEED AP — Principal, Perkins+Will; Tom Krizmanic, AIA — Principal, STUDIOS Architecture; Kay Sargent, IIDA — Principal, IA; Jennifer Busch — Editor-in-Chief, Contract Magazine (moderator)
Organizer: New York Design Center

This Process 2 Collaboration (P2C) was the last in a series of four programs exploring the collaborative process between architecture and interior design. Instead of presenting case studies as previous programs did, the panel focused on the issues involved in collaboration — the good, the bad, and the ugly — with no holds barred.

For Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, IIDA, LEED AP, the barriers — and problems — “come up when the building architect doesn’t express to the client that the interiors should be part of the discussion from the beginning.” Kay Sargent, IIDA, agreed, saying, “Interior design is too often thought of after the fact.” And that is when, she said, instead of collaboration, it becomes competition — primarily for budget, and “it ends up as money not well spent. There needs to be a more holistic solution.”

Moderator Jennifer Busch asked, “Who does take the lead? Have designers abdicated leadership?” Sargent said it starts with contracts, and pointed out that 10 years ago, interior designers were often the project managers, but that project management firms have come to the fore who “beat you up in front of the client, and you’re dead before you start. Are they project managers or project meddlers?” Blumenfeld would like to see designers as co-equals to architects, or even lead in orchestrating base building and interiors, because “buildings need to be thought from the inside out… It’s the client’s choice… we’re bad sales people if we can’t get them to understand. If we don’t bring up larger issues, such as space and purpose — not just programming — then we’re just a commodity.”

“Are the seeds of collaboration planted or not planted in design schools?” Busch asked. “Architectural training has students coming out thinking they’re ‘Masters of the Universe’,” said Tom Krizmanic, AIA. “They need to understand there are things they can’t do.” Sargent didn’t mince words: “It’s absurd that architecture and interior design students don’t spend a year actually building things to understand how things go together. We don’t encourage collaboration.” She said she is “appalled” that interior design programs “have a touch of architecture,” yet architects are “qualified to do interior design.”

This raised the issue of why it’s taking so long to “professionalize” interior design and allow designers to sign off on plans. Blumenfeld bemoaned the fact that students come out of architecture schools “without a real understanding of interior design,” but she believes that until interior design education changes to include knowledge of infrastructure and such, designers should not be allowed to sign drawings. Sargent had a very different take: “Lightning may strike me dead, but my advice to students is get four years of interior design, then a Masters in Architecture.”

Considering that the program topic touched on this year’s AIANY Chapter theme “Architecture Inside/Out” (and is the focus of the upcoming spring issue of Oculus), this writer asked the eternal question: What is the difference between interior architecture and interior design? Sargent felt the difference was more semantic, saying, “There’s still a negative connotation to the term ‘interior designer’.” Blumenfeld proffered that urban and interior design have more in common than architecture and interior design: “They both deal with large constituencies, user groups, providers, movement, and use of space.”

Kristen Richards is editor-in-chief of Oculus and ArchNewsNow.com.