News – What’s New at AIANY and the Center for Architecture.

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

P2C panel (l-r): Tom Krizmanic, AIA, Principal; Kay Sargent, IIDA; Jennifer Busch; and Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, IIDA, LEED AP.

Kristen Richards

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.

Event: Helmut Jahn: A MIXED GREENS LECTURE
Location: The New York Academy of Sciences Headquarters, 7 WTC, 03.15.07
Speaker: Helmut Jahn — President and CEO, Director of Design, Murphy/Jahn; Carol Willis — director, Skyscraper Museum (introduction)
Organizers: The Skyscraper Museum; The New York Academy of Sciences

The Deutsche Post Tower in Bonn, Germany is routinely green.

Andreas Keller, courtesy Skyscraper Museum

As one might expect from a product of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Miesian curriculum, Helmut Jahn, FAIA, offers “an attention to performance on all levels” as the key to sustainable design. He finds that “…the right answer to all problems is dealing with light, dealing with natural air, and dealing with water;” optimizing function in these areas, he believes, is the most effective way to make buildings energy-efficient and comfortable. Get the basics right, Jahn insists, and retain Mies’s farsighted attention to the properties of today’s materials, and advanced green technologies (heat recovery, greywater processing, etc.) will be largely unnecessary.

Sustainability per se, as the term is commonly understood, doesn’t appear to be a critical priority for Jahn. After walking the audience through a series of towers his firm designed, he confessed, “Maybe I don’t even care how green they are.” He regards LEED and comparable environmental accounting systems as more valuable for marketing purposes than for efficient operation; he noted that in a typical 40-point LEED Gold building, the Veer Towers in Las Vegas, 19 are directly attributable to design, and only five of the 19 involve reductions in energy use. “Building green does not necessarily mean that it’s going to be good architecture,” he says; sustainability appears as a welcome byproduct of his emphasis on functionality.

Most of the projects presented are in Europe, where energy costs are historically high, codes are rigorous, and clients need little persuasion about the virtues of efficiency. In Berlin’s Sony Center, a short 7-meter leafspan maximizes natural ventilation, and features regarded as innovative in the U.S. (raised floors, low-E fritted glass, load-bearing mullions) are routine. The twin-elliptical-shell Deutsche Post Tower in Bonn, has minimal energy requirements, needing no cooling towers or supply/return ducts; its thermal management relies on Rhine water, interior sky gardens, the heat-storing properties of concrete, the aerodynamic properties of its own envelope, and simple fans. Jahn’s ideas are also expanding to Asia and the Mideast; one tower for Pearl River New City in Guangzhou, China, will sport a vertically shingled facade that acts as an exterior sunshade and allows natural ventilation, and new forms are planned for Doha and Abu Dhabi (watch for a particularly daring structure in the latter, tentatively nicknamed the Twister). The dominant aesthetic in Murphy/Jahn’s work tends toward dematerialization, as biomorphic and modernist: buildings with skins that breathe and skeletons that put every molecule of their materials to work.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Oculus, Icon, Content, and other publications.