In this issue:
· President’s Message: 2008 Theme Architecture: Designs for Living
· Bringing Building Code up to Code
· Layering, Stacking Landscapes
· Business Targets Design
· The Future of Professional Practice: DC Smorgasbord had Something for Everyone
· Critique: New Museum’s Cause for Culture
· Holocaust Memorial Defines Architecture, Architect, People, Place
· Apartment… Sweet Apartment

I am extremely honored to serve as AIANY President at a time when its influence is at an all time high thanks to the phenomenal success of our Center for Architecture. I hope to bring the same level of energy to the Chapter that I brought to our Housing Committee programs. The 2008 Board of Directors is filled with leaders experienced in serving on our committees, teaching, and developing programs and exhibitions. Our committees are energized as never before. Their collective vision truly reflects the AIA as a member-driven organization.

The 2008 theme — Architecture: Designs for Living — is envisioned as a “big tent,” to include the broad range of building typologies that shape our communities and urban design that defines our city. The theme incorporates and expands on themes by my immediate predecessors: Bringing Cultures Together (Susan Chin, FAIA, 2005); Architecture as Public Policy (Mark Strauss, FAIA, AICP, 2006); and Architecture Inside/Out (Joan Blumenfeld, FAIA, IIDA, LEED AP, 2007). As Joan’s Inside/Out focuses on the interiors of buildings, Designs for Living continues the progression from buildings to community. It is meant to appeal to the widest audience of architects, industry, and friends of architecture. The theme is also a response to Mayor Bloomberg’s initiatives for PlaNYC 2030, which anticipates the need for sustainable growth to accommodate one million new residents.

An important goal is to enhance the Center as both a local and international forum for architecture and urban design. Increasingly we are part of an emerging global community, from our own city to emerging regions around the world. As architects, we belong to an extended family represented by the AIA with over 80,000 members — from urban chapters like our own to many others like the AIA Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where I grew up, but each committed to a vision of design excellence for a sustainable future. The 2008 theme and programs support building partnerships to achieve that vision.

A monthly Public Lecture Series at the Center will showcase current design directions that will form the “building blocks” for new growth envisioned by PlaNYC. Our 12 committees that focus on design will present the series, starting with Educational Facilities on January 22.

A Global Dialogues series forms partnerships that will place the AIA in support of emerging initiatives that will affect future growth. A United Nations Conference on Sustainable Urban Design that will share PlaNYC initiatives with global cities is planned during Earth Week in April. In September, a Northeast Megaregion Conference with the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, the Regional Plan Association, and AIA chapters from Boston to Washington, DC, will explore the role of new development linked to high-speed transit. Programs with the Swiss Consulate and NYU’s Maison Française will share design directions in a larger cultural context in the fall. And presentations on global cities and projects by AIANY architects working abroad will continue throughout the year.

Nine major exhibitions at the Center, beginning with Building China: Five Projects, Five Stories opening February 26, include showcases of sustainable design, design awards, emerging practices, architectural schools, and conclude with the Designs for Living theme exhibition. Our Design Awards Program will be enriched by the addition of Biennial Building Type Awards co-sponsored with the Boston Society of Architects. The goal is to promote design excellence and innovation in schools, sustainable and urban design, housing, and other facilities that form the fabric of our communities.

We wish to thank the many sponsors of the 2008 Inaugural Theme Fund. We could never achieve the quality of advocacy and design excellence at the Center without your generous support.

I look forward to seeing each of you at upcoming Center events, the Design Awards Luncheon on April 30, and the Heritage Ball on October 30. Please contact me at any time at president2008@aiany.org, as I welcome your comments.

James McCullar, FAIA, is the 2008 AIANY President.

Event: Green the Codes: PlaNYC on New York City’s Building Codes
Location: Tishman Auditorium, 12.17.07
Speakers: Dan Doctoroff — Deputy Mayor; Patricia Lancaster, FAIA — Commissioner, NYC Department of Buildings; William C. Rudin — President, Rudin Management; Ashok Gupta — Director, Air and Energy Program, U.S. Green Building Council, New York, & board member, Natural Resources Defense Council; Nancy Clark — Assistant Commissioner for Environmental Disease Prevention, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Edward Ott — Executive Director, Central Labor Council
Moderator: Russell Unger — Executive Director, U.S. Green Building Council, New York
Organizers: USGBC-NY; Parsons, The New School for Design; The New School Tishman Environment and Design Center

It would be Dan Doctoroff’s last public speech as Deputy Mayor, pointed out Russel Unger, executive director of the U.S. Green Building Council. Offering advice for his successor in the form of “Doctoroff’s Three D’s of Deputy Mayorhood,” he said he’d learned the first one — “distract,” followed by “duplicate” good ideas worldwide, and “distinguish” oneself from anyone named Moses — the hard way: “If you want approval for a major rezoning… first pretend that you want to stick a stadium in the middle of it.”

Doctoroff went on to make a case for PlaNYC 2030, particularly its green component, as his and Mayor Bloomberg’s real legacy, and for the Building Code as a powerful instrument for realizing it. Finding widespread evidence of the need for greener construction, the city is combining economic incentives with the code to induce developers to improve the performance of both new and older buildings. Revised last spring (its first major overhaul since 1968), approved by City Council to take effect in July 2008, and scheduled for periodic revision on a three-year cycle, the code will now address sustainability as well as safety. The next revision, Doctoroff said, will focus largely on green features. By 2015, the code will require all existing buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to perform audits and retrofits, which he said will pay for themselves within five years; all new buildings will have to meet higher standards for energy and water efficiency, recycling of construction debris, recycled content, and other sustainability strategies.

Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster, FAIA, summarized the new features, promising her department would have “new tools to enforce the codes.” To streamline approval of innovations, the code will allow materials that meet national standards, removing the local roadblock of the department’s Materials and Equipment Acceptance (MEA) index. It will also conform to the International Code Council format and allow electronic processing. The next iteration of the code will promote a citywide greener profile through reflective or green roofs, more efficient heating/cooling, graywater processing, and energy-saving relaxation of continuous ventilation requirements in some parts. Fee rebates will create incentives for LEED status, demolition-waste recycling, and use of renewable energy. Lancaster cited Local Law 86 as evidence that the public sector intends to lead by example.

Continues…

Event: Spacefighter: Winy Maas
Location: Columbia University, 11.28.07
Speaker: Winy Maas — Principal Architect, MVRDV
Organizer: Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Columbia GSAPP

Winy Maas doesn’t understand why the revival of New Orleans has been such a slow process: “As a Dutchman, to me it’s rude; it’s insane.” One of the founding partners of Rotterdam-based MVRDV, Maas is part of the effort to finally make it happen. “I like what Brad Pitt is doing,” he said. MVRDV is one of 13 firms participating in Pitt’s initiative, Make it Right, for which they developed five prototypes for Lower Ninth Ward homes based on the shotgun typology and designed to withstand flooding. Additionally, MVRDV imagined Newer Orleans, a “hill school” conceived from a child’s sketch of an ideal school. Rubble from Katrina is piled to form a hill, and classroom boxes jut out from the sculpted landscape. Maas, who is trained as a landscape architect, architect, and planner, explained: “It celebrates what happened [the flood] and that gives it a certain ‘edginess’.”

A theme that persists in MVRDV’s work is the layering and stacking of landscapes. Simple forms are bent, twisted, wrapped, and elevated, allowing for manipulation of the ground plane and the creation of public space that ties into the surrounding urban fabric. Recent projects that reflect this approach include the City Sofa in South Korea, an open air cinema that functions as a “public couch” with a huge cantilever over a dramatic entry sequence; and SkyPark Pittsburgh, a park structure suspended from towers that “brings the farm to the city,” enticing suburban dwellers to move downtown. Gyre, a retail project in Tokyo, comprises layers of shops — each building level rotates at different angles according to zoning requirements. The fire stairs are located on the exterior, allowing visitors to move up through a series of outdoor terraces. The exterior cladding looks like black rock — a metaphor for nearby mountains.

History can act as another layered landscape, as is evident in past work by MVRDV. EXPO 2000 in Berlin, according to Maas, is “not a garden, not a building.” The structure — intended to explore the concept of a “new nature” in an increasingly dense society — is currently abandoned and used only by birds and squatters, a fact that Maas finds poetic.

MVRDV’s design concepts are relatively simple (”You can’t put everything in your building,” as Maas tells his students), yet the resulting spaces are anything but. The firm strives to create socially and historically relevant buildings through extensive research, and whether or not the future use of all the projects can be determined, even futility adds to their substance.

Murrye Bernard is designer with TEK Architects in New York City and Director of Forward, the quarterly publication of AIA’s National Associates Committee.

Event: Does Design Really Matter?
Location: Rockwell Group, 12.04.07
Speakers: David Rockwell, AIA — Founder, Rockwell Group; Paula Scher — Principal, Pentagram
Moderator: Linda Tischler — Senior Writer, Fast Company
Organizers: New York Glasshouse

Courtesy Glasshouse New York

Some observers feel that businesses are just using ‘design’ as a watchword, not really investing beyond a vague box they’re sure customers want checked. Design is more popular than ever in the business world, but originality is still rare.

The way for businesses to stand out, according to David Rockwell, AIA, founder of the Rockwell Group, is through artistry. “Craft cuts through the tendency for homogenization of design,” he said. Paula Scher, principal at Pentagram, held that clients are much more aware of the importance of design now than in the past; yet, she still has had to work hard to convince some clients of her vision. Linda Tischler, senior writer at Fast Company, recalled talking with a business figure who wished he could dispose of all the design related to his business, and the ensuing costs, if he could get away with it. But all-in-all, the panel felt that companies were moving in the right direction in recognizing the business importance of design businesses.

The Target store, one of the evening’s sponsors, was a popular example, for better or worse. Scher appreciates that Target has done so much to embrace design in individual products, but the look of their stores in general could do more as models of good design.

Glasshouse, a London based salon for entrepreneurs, which this author helped to launch in NY, tackles a different topic each season. These “conversations,” in Glasshouse-speak, track the zeitgeist among entrepreneurial types. Speakers and moderators are culled from the up-and-coming superstars in their fields. At this session, design was on everyone’s lips.

Event: The Future of Professional Practice
Location: Capital Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC, 12.02-04.07
Organizers: American Institute of Architects; AIA Practice Management; AIA Technology in Architectural Practice; AIA DC; AIA Delaware; AIA Northern Virginia; AIA Educator/Practitioner Network; AIA Integrated Practice; AIA Design-Build; AIA Small Project Practitioners
Sponsors: Victor O. Schinnerer & Co. Inc; Adobe; Newforma; Graphisoft; Bentley.

This chart shows changes from 2006 to 2007 in the readiness of staff at several levels to take on progressively more sophisticated 3-D/BIM tools (numbers at left show years of experience).

Source: The Fergus Garber Group, Palo Alto, CA

Perhaps the most telling riff played on the conference’s basic theme was that new employees know more about technology than seasoned partners, that information technology was galloping ahead at a prodigious rate, and that the conference was here to let the younger, avant garde strut their stuff on integrated delivery, leveraging emerging technology, and innovative practice management.

As it turned out, this umbrella conference drew value from every generation, from baby boomers to GenYers. James H. Timberlake, FAIA, of KieranTimberlake Associates, Philadelphia, kicked things off before a Washington, DC gathering of 260 from 39 states, the UK, and Australia with a two-hour keynote in which he gave a not-so-flattering picture of productivity changes in the construction industry. Whereas productivity in non-farm labor (including construction) rose by 215% between 1964 and 2004, construction productivity alone actually declined by 5% over the same 40-year span.

This suggestion isn’t new. What is new was Timberlake’s acknowledgment of these three factors:

    1. Split in the role of the ancient master builder into a number of design and construction roles, creating dispersion of a once concentrated skill base;
    2. “burgeoning materiality,” that is, the explosion of new materials in the last 25 years (aerogel, titanium, zenite) — “Novelty is [found to be] sufficient to justify use,” he and partner Stephen Kieran, FAIA, wrote in Prefabricating Architecture, but “beyond infatuation …lies a world of purposeful form yet to be explored;” and
    3. lack of “refabrication” of the industry to obtain the quality, schedule, and cost control long boasted by the auto, shipping, and aircraft industries.

Five tracks. Concurrent break out sessions pursued five tracks:

    A. Leading the business
    B. Developing the people
    C. Delivering the work
    D. The range of technologies for your firm (basic)
    E. Leveraging BIM and Integrated Practice (advanced)

Continues…

Event: The New Museum of Contemporary Art opening
Location: The New Museum of Contemporary Art
Architect: Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA (Tokyo) — Architect; Gensler (NY) — Executive Architect

The exterior (left) and lobby (right) of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jessica Sheridan (left); B.A. Cook (right)

The New Museum of Contemporary Art has been open to the public for a little more than a month, and this author believes it is one of the best new built projects. Designed by Tokyo-based Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, with Gensler (NY) serving as executive architect, this small building continues the New Museum’s role as rebel for the cause of culture.

There were challenges. Landowners on the Bowery did not want to sell their lots to yet another developer looking to make luxury apartments. The museum decided to continue building downtown post 9/11. The design team instituted artful and careful use of materials on a frugal budget ($64 million for 60,000 square feet).

Quietly strong, many feel the building works at street level by provoking passersby to peer into its glass lobby. Unobstructed views within welcome installation art. The rest of the building is composed of five almost translucent aluminum clad offset stacked blocks. The top two house the offices and education center with skyline views, while the other boxes provide three open-plan gallery levels partially lit from above by natural light. Gallery levels three and four with a connecting stairway offer choices for multi-media art. The subterranean level forms a theater, quite large for a small museum that will host film series and projection artworks.

The building has flaws, however; the circulation among the levels is bumpy, gallery spaces though open are small, and craftsmanship is not impeccable.

Time will tell if the New Museum’s impact is only of this moment or if it will be able to re-invent itself with the city’s future. The first scenario is akin to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum — a building that was innovative for the post World War II period, but by the end of the 20th century became an agent for the Upper East Side elite, as the institution attracted the upper-crust creating high-end luxury residential development. The second scenario is comparable to the Pompidou Centre, by Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA, and Richard Rogers, RIBA, Hon. FAIA. It was equally original when built and constantly re-invents the concept of the urban plaza to this day. Could the New Museum and the Bowery co-exist and follow this example? The realist would say no but for now let’s enjoy this moment.

B.A. Cook is a NYC-based architectural designer and freelance writer.

Event: Screening of Michael Blackwood’s film, “Peter Eisenman: Making Architecture Move”
Location: The Paley Center for Media, 10.28.07
Speakers: Peter Eisenman, FAIA — Founder & Principal, Eisenman Architects; Michael Blackwood — Director, “Peter Eisenman: Making Architecture Move;” Ron Simon — Curator of Television, The Museum of Television & Radio
Organizers: The Paley Center for Media, The Architectural League of New York

Event: Dialogue: Jacques Herzog and Peter Eisenman
Location: Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, 12.04.07
Speakers: Peter Eisenman, FAIA — Founder & Principal, Eisenman Architects; Jacques Herzog, Hon. FAIA — Senior Partner, Herzog & de Meuron (Basel, Switzerland)
Moderator: Jeffrey Kipnis — Curator of Architecture and Design, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH)
Organizers: GSD, Harvard University

Though both events — a screening of the documentary “Peter Eisenman: Making Architecture Move,” and a dialogue between Jacques Herzog, Hon. FAIA, and Peter Eisenman, FAIA — were intended as debates between Eisenman and a relevant players in architectural practice, they focused mainly on re-examining Eisenman’s belief in architecture based on the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany. During the Herzog discussion, the memorial served to answer the question: “What is architecture?” The screening used the memorial to highlight the maze of relations, characters, and politics of Eisenman’s vision.

Directed by Michael Blackwood, the documentary aptly captures the myriad voices and opinions that influenced the course of the memorial’s creation as well as its future. The first half of the film is a collection of opinions from German politicians, filmmakers, and writers that documents the obstacles to the memorial’s creation and interprets the controversy over the abstractly minimalist “memory-scape.” The second half views visitors’ responses to the memorial and each other. Acting as a silent observer, the film shows the memorial melting into society and history. In short, the film itself becomes a part of the formative process as well as a documentation of it.

At the Herzog debate, when the fundamental question of “what is architecture” arose, the discussion turned into self-reflection. Eisenman defined himself as a conceptual stronghold — someone who revels in theory over pragmatics. He recounted that sculptor Richard Serra, one-time collaborator on the memorial, stated it was Eisenman’s best work because “it does not have plumbing.”

In the end, Eisenman, as in all his works, presents a self-evaluation adding meaning and value to the creative process. For him, the transformation from his intellectual pursuits to his physical manifestations is anti-climatic. The finished product must be experienced and continuously evolve through visitors and inhabitants.

Harry Gaveras is the principal of Propylaea Architecture, and co-chair of the Emerging NY Architects (ENYA) Committee, AIANY. Chi-Fan Wong is a visiting assistant professor and director of exhibitions at Pratt Institute, Department of Undergraduate Architecture.

Event: This Will Kill That? Presents Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
Location: Center for Architecture, 12.05.07
Speaker: Sharon Marcus — Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Columbia University, & Author, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999)
Organizer: Emerging NY Architects (ENYA) Committee, AIANY

Author Sharon Marcus discusses her book.

Katerina Kampiti

For many, the image of “home” connotes a single, cozy structure surrounded by a yard. However, in compact urban environments the apartment becomes the unit of domestic life. In Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, Sharon Marcus argues that apartment buildings embody the intersections of city and home, public and private life, and masculine and feminine spheres. She set out to prove this theory by researching 19th-century Paris and London.

Marcus found that London and Paris regarded the apartment unit in very different ways. For Londoners, the phrase, “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” carried psychological as well as cultural meaning. The English sought to make every residential building appear as a house; multiple units were arranged to simulate a mansion on the exterior, often in a horizontal format with separate entries hidden from view. Foliage and trees surrounded these “homes,” further de-emphasizing urbanity and aiming to create a sense of privacy for the inhabitants.

Parisian residential architecture, on the other hand, embraced scale and verticality, integrating buildings with monuments. Multi-use buildings were much more common in Paris than London. Privacy was not as important as the social relations among building inhabitants. Parisians entertained in their bedrooms, which were considered a private realm in English apartments, and Parisians accepted the lack of privacy, trading solitude for a view of the lively street.

Illustrations from the period further depict the contrasting attitudes towards apartment life held by the English and the French. London homes are shown in plan and elevation, whereas Parisian apartments are revealed in section, placing their “private” lives on display. As New Yorkers, it’s easy to draw comparisons between 19th century London and Paris and our own modern, urban dwellings. It seems we’ve ended up with a blend of both.

Murrye Bernard, Assoc. AIA, is a designer with TEK Architects and Director of Forward, the quarterly publication of AIA’s National Associates Committee.

(continued from above)

Other panelists voiced the development, environmentalist, public health, and labor perspectives on the proposed changes. Ashok Gupta, director of the Air and Energy Program at USGBC-NY, pushed for less friction in the array of incentives that developers and builders face; Nancy Clark, assistant commissioner for environmental disease prevention at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, warned against unintended consequences like the “tight building syndrome” of poor ventilation and increased respiratory disorders that marked the energy-policy choices of the 1970s. William Rudin, president of Rudin Management, offered 3 Times Square as an example of design that commits to options despite a bleak economy. His firm decided the current payback on installing photovoltaics was insufficient, but prewired the building to allow such features later if the numbers change.

The evolving code will need a full range of stakeholders’ input. Edward Ott, executive director of the Central Labor Council, stressed that negotiations about standards should include workers and their communities. Resistance to new practices in the building trades, he said, was not automatic — “retrofitting, frankly, for us,” he noted, “is 100 years of good work” — and the early perception that green building was “a red flag” for labor, in his view, was fading with the recognition that high-performance building and post-petroleum-dependence technologies jibe with workers’ values. “Working-class people tend to resist change because of a history of it being done at their expense,” Ott maintained, adding that just treatment of workers’ interests includes the siting of NIMBY-provoking infrastructure (power plants, e.g.) so that poorer neighborhoods don’t always end up with the most noxious burdens. As NYC edges toward sustainability — and figures out just whose interests its physical environment is designed to sustain — this reminder of the city’s intertwined layers of class was both timely and refreshingly urgent.

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

(continued from above)

Small stone makes big waves. At the session entitled The Transitional Small Practice: Alternate management strategies, Daniel M. Garber (of the Fergus Garber Group, Palo Alto, CA) showed how small, growth-hungry firms must employ innovative often riskier, design and delivery methods to replace safer traditional methods.

Garber’s view on integrating roles in the firm when transitioning from 2-D to 3-D/BIM is shown in the chart. The chart shows changes from 2006 to 2007 in the readiness of staff at several levels to take on progressively more sophisticated design and delivery tools (numbers at left show years of experience).

When smartly done, results are:

· better coordinated production
· streamlined production documentation
· greater client participation in design phase
· shorter design cycle.

Town Hall tales. The proceedings ended with a novel device called the Town Hall. Genially presided over by Architectural Record deputy editor Charles Linn, FAIA, this town hall mushroomed fast into informal, animated, often blunt exchanges, as though the pent up listening of the previous two days finally detonated into some frank but all-in-all civil exchanges. Topics: BIM and its high technical but low design impact; the undesirable designation (by architects) of the architect as Master Builder (preferred: Team Captain; Master Coordinator); the dangers of getting lost inside the new technology; the paradox of earning HSW credits at BIM-related sessions but none on managing people; anxiety as motivator; and the risks inherent in the new technology of making decisions too fast, without enough thought.

AIA has promised to make transcripts of talks available at about this time on its website.