In this issue:
· Museum Makes History, Below Ground Zero
· New Barclays Center Design Eyes Atlantic Yards
· Sustainable Mobility Rolls On, Dutch Style
· Architecture Schools Struggle to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing Profession
· Art And/Or Architecture?

Event: Preserving the Past While Building for the Future: Creating the National September 11 Memorial Museum
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.13.09
Speakers: Alice M. Greenwald — Director, National September 11 Memorial & Museum; Mark Wagner, AIA — Senior Associate, Davis Brody Bond Aedas; Michael Shulan — Creative Director, National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Moderator: Lance Jay Brown, FAIA
Organizers: AIANY; National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Sponsors: Lead Sponsors: Digital Plus; Faithful+Gould; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Sponsors: Associated Fabrication

National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Rendering by Thinc Design with Local Projects, courtesy national911memorial.org

Construction of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum has made significant progress over the last year, despite public criticism that not enough development has happened. It is difficult to see the extent of that progress since it is being built below ground. According to Mark Wagner, AIA, senior associate at Davis Brody Bond Aedas, “typically you don’t register progress at a construction site until the structural framing is above ground, casting shadows and changing the way you visually experience the streetscape. The memorial, an open street level plaza, and museum constructed below the plaza will never cast a shadow.”

Wagner has been actively involved with the development of the museum since shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While working at Voorsanger Architects, he was asked by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to go down to the “pit” and see what might make sense to save. As project architect for the World Trade Center Archive, he was given no agenda, but due to his efforts more than 1,000 artifacts exist and will find a home in the museum.

The mission of the museum is to tell the story, document responses, and memorialize the attacks in 2001, 1993, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA. For some, visiting the museum will be a pilgrimage. “The 9/11 site is somewhat unique in its juxtaposition of sacred space to profane space,” said panel moderator Lance Jay Brown, FAIA. Added Alice Greenwald, director of the museum, “The museum must be about the people. Nearly everyone has a 9/11 story — and we live in a post-9/11 world… We must remember, and remember well.”

Ground Zero is both an archaeological and a battlefield site. It stands alone, yet is a part of the city’s fabric. Taking up eight acres of the 16-acre site, the museum and memorial are stitched together underground with other projects — and every project is on a different schedule. When visitors descend a ramp that echoes the one used by workers during deconstruction and reconstruction, they will experience the 70-foot-high slurry wall and seven stories totaling 150,000 square feet of space below grade at bedrock that make up the footprints of the Twin Towers. Wagner explained that “the architecture is intentionally minimal” to maximize the visceral experience.

“The site will be used as a vehicle for storytelling,” said Michael Shulan, creative director for the museum and memorial. The organization has an unprecedented amount of original material, with portions of the Towers’ building envelope being the largest. He claimed that there will be no need for dioramas or recreations with artifacts such as the Survivors Staircase (concrete remnants of the stair leading to Vesey Street that was an escape route for hundreds of people fleeing the North Tower) and the 36-foot-tall steel column removed at the end of the recovery efforts. In addition to objects, there are real-time phone conversations, e-mails, cockpit recordings, voice recordings, and videos to share with the public. The museum has launched a new web initiative called “Make History,” calling for first-hand images or stories about the events and the aftermath.

To those who doubt that physical progress is being made, Wagner offered: “I encourage them to take ride on the PATH train, which passes through the site. These below-ground spaces are quickly taking form and it is exciting to see the progress in this raw state.”

Event: A Conversation with the Architects of the Barclays Center
Location: Brooklyn Borough Hall, 09.14.09
Speakers: William Crockett, AIA, LEED AP — Director of Sports Architecture, Ellerbe Becket; Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA — Founding Partner, SHoP Architects
Moderator: Rick Bell, FAIA — AIANY Executive Director
Organizer: Empire State Development Corporation; Center for Architecture

Barclays Center.

©SHoP; detail elevations by Seong Kwon Architects

“Where do the things in dreams go? Do they pass to the dreams of others?” asked Rick Bell, FAIA, quoting from Pablo Neruda during a recent talk on the new design of Barclays Center. A bit like dreams, memories of the sports-and-entertainment arena’s previous, rejected designs hovered over the proceedings: Gehry Partners’ glassy, circular design, which got scrapped for a more economical (and bland) version by Ellerbe Becket. SHoP recently joined up with Ellerbe Becket to create a sexier new design, the subject of the evening’s talk. If all goes according to plan, Barclays Center will one day be home to the Nets basketball team, and the building will be a prominent part of developer Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards, a controversial mixed-use complex in Brooklyn.

Judging by the presentation by SHoP’s Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA, and William Crockett, AIA, LEED AP, of Ellerbe Becket, the new design couples visual flair with an attention to scale and a transparency designed to make the structure seem welcoming, not overbearing. The architects described a prominent entrance plaza at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues leading to a glassy entryway that allows views straight into the arena, including glimpses of the scoreboard and a sports practice court. A canopy overhead is intended as a “grand civic gesture onto the plaza,” Pasquarelli said, adding, “It has a large oculus in the middle of it so that light can penetrate through. It’s more than 30 feet in the air, and it becomes this kind of way of seeing the building as you approach it from the west.”

To break down its mass, the building is composed of three horizontal bands. (See “SHoP Architects Joins the Nets Design Team,” In The News, e-Oculus, 09.15.09.) An intricate steel latticework helps, too: it casts shadows during the day, making the building seem less bulky. By night, the latticework will be softly lit from inside, creating a distinctive pattern of glowing lights. (Attendees were able to check out the effect in a model.)

Some questions about the project remained unanswered. Eliciting grumbles from community activists who oppose Atlantic Yards, Bell chose not to allow questions pertaining to the process surrounding the complex, explaining that the session’s purpose was to focus purely on the new design. And while the architects explained many specifics of that design, just how the arena will be integrated with the complex’s future towers remains shrouded in mystery. During the Q&A, one audience member asked what would happen to the oculus if another building slated for that spot were constructed in the future. Pasquarelli replied that the whole canopy might be removed or extended, or perhaps new escalators or elevators could even go through the oculus. As time goes by, it will be interesting to see just how this project — and the opposition surrounding it — plays out.

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

Event: New Amsterdam Bike Slam Symposium: Global Trends in Sustainable Mobility
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.11.09
Speakers: Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY; Eric Niehe — Ambassador, Netherlands Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and project leader, NY400; Walter Hook, Ph.D. — Executive Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy; Willem de Jager — Director of Sustainable Mobility, RABO Bank, Amsterdam; Paul Steely White — Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives (moderator/speaker); Heather Allen — Senior Manager for Sustainable Development, Union International Transport Public; Ruth Oldenziel — Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology; Eric van der Kooij — Spatial Planner, City of Amsterdam; Christopher O. Ward — Executive Director, Port Authority of NY and NJ; Janette Sadik-Khan — Commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation; Pieter de Haan — Traffic Psychologist, Institute for Shared Space; Herman Gelissen — Public Bicycles OV Fiets; Arjen Jaarsma — Balancia; Jeff Olson, Alta Planning; Pascal van der Noort — Velo Mondial (moderator/speaker)
Moderators: Paul Steely White — Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives; Karen Overton — Catalyst Coordinator, Partnerships for Parks, and founder, Recycle-a-Bicycle; Caroline Samponaro — Director of Bicycle Advocacy, Transportation Alternatives; Andy Clarke — Executive Director of American Bicyclists LAB; Nazli Parvizi — Commissioner, Community Assistance Unit, Mayor’s Office, NYC; Pascal van der Noort — Velo Mondial
Organizers & Sponsors: Transportation Alternatives, NYC; Velo Mondial, Amsterdam
Cosponsors: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

Two-hundred orange bicycles were available free to the public for NY400. Later this year, most of the bikes will be donated to Recycle-A-Bicycle. The rest will be auctioned to the public, supporting a charitable cause.

Richard Koek, courtesy ny400.org

The 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival provides the occasion for Dutch-American cultural exchange — and, as diplomat Eric Niehe said, not only celebrating but also publicly investing in future relations, fostering a common cosmopolitan environment of entrepreneurship and tolerance. Along with the gifts of 200 orange bikes and a Ben van Berkel/UNStudio-designed pavilion at the Battery, plus a competition between planning/design teams to imagine ways to make New York bike-friendlier (won by Team Amsterdam’s combination of Dutch city planners and American designers), this all-day symposium gave architects, planners, public officials, scholars, and activists a chance to trade ideas about combining infrastructure, culture, and public education to build an environment that citizens gladly navigate on two wheels.

The Dutch love bicycling, but not just because their land is flat, because of some aversion to obesity, or because their practical modern design prizes qualities associated with bikes (energy efficiency, health). Like other industrial nations, the Netherlands went through a period in the mid-20th century when bike use was declining; reviving a flagging bike culture took conscious effort. From the 1970s onward, public and private officials have made a bike renaissance a priority, and today the nation has more bikes than people.

RABO Bank’s Willem de Jager reported that many leading Dutch corporations have jointly agreed to remove 10% of the cars from the rush-hour roads. Taking a bottom-up, voluntary approach and embracing alternative transportation (bikes, walking, and public transit), flexible hours, telecommuting, encouraging employees to work closer to home, and greened-up corporate vehicle fleets, these firms have not only made a dent in congestion levels costing roughly $7 billion annually in lost productivity and health expenses; they’ve become more desirable employers. Balancia’s mobility consultant Arjen Jaarsma emphasized that there is no such thing as cycling planning in isolation; it is part of an integrated approach to traffic safety, legal/regulatory mechanisms, air-quality policy, and related concerns. Sustainable mobility, Velo Mondial’s Pascal van der Noort summed up, needs a political choice for a long-term balance among “emission-rich, emission-poor, and emission-free” modes of movement. “The car with petroleum,” he said, “remains in the 20th century.”

Surprise appearances by the Port Authority’s Chris Ward and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan ensured that local visions weren’t overshadowed by the Dutch experience: Ward ventured several ambitious predictions about ways New York’s infrastructure may adapt to a future where intellectual and cultural production, not the troubled finance industry, is likely to be the region’s chief driver of economic growth. Sadik-Khan recounted the city’s widely emulated recent achievements in transforming streets from vehicular corridors to spaces for people, earning applause from the audience by declaring, “I don’t look at biking as alternative transportation. I look at it as transportation, period.”

This philosophy is well-aligned with the Netherlands’ low-key, utilitarian bike culture, which treats bikes as a matter-of-fact transport-mode choice by members of the whole population. As global bike-culture hero Gil Peñalosa (Bogotá parks commissioner and brother of mayor Enrique) has said on a number of occasions, cycling facilities are adequate only if they are safe enough for eight-year-olds and 80-year-olds. The predominantly male, risk-tolerant riders who were out in force at Sunday’s NYC Century Ride bring enormous energy to local sustainable-mobility efforts, but they cannot be the sole constituency for urban cycling infrastructure if New York is to reach Dutch levels of non-automotive mode share. We’ll need more protected lanes, practical bikes suited to moms rather than messengers, efficient and affordable bike-rental programs like the smart-card-based OV Fiets system, ample secure bike parking (the 2009 Bicycle Access Bill being a good start), and law enforcement against vehicular violence (the Dutch legal approach, several panelists mentioned, recognizes all users’ equal right to the roads and protects the most vulnerable by presuming motorists are at fault in auto-bike crashes).

Continues…

Event: Deans’ Roundtable and Exhibition Opening: “Arch Schools 2009: Visions of The Future”
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.17.09
Speakers: George Ranalli, AIA — Dean, City College of New York; Mark Wigley — Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation; Anthony Vidler — Dean, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art; Urs Gauchat, Hon. AIA — Dean, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Judy DiMaio, AIA — Dean, New York Institute of Technology; William Morrish — Dean, Parsons, The New School for Design; Thomas Hanrahan, AIA — Dean, Pratt Institute; Stan Allen, AIA — Dean, Princeton University; Evan Douglis — Dean, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Marilyn Jordan Taylor, FAIA — Dean, University of Pennsylvania;
Moderator: Robert Campbell, FAIA — Architecture Critic, Boston Globe
Organizers: Center for Architecture

“There is a perception that the world of architectural teaching and the world of architectural practice are changing more rapidly now than they usually do,” said Robert Campbell, FAIA, architecture critic for the Boston Globe, in his introduction to the AIANY’s fifth annual Deans’ Roundtable. In recent years, he posited, students have become far more diverse in terms of nationality, ethnicity, and economic background, and have grown increasingly concerned with environmental and social responsibility. Rapid technological progress has led to significant changes in many curricula and created a widening gap in computational prowess between students and instructors. At the same time, lines have blurred between traditionally distinct disciplines such as architecture, urban planning, and landscape design. While the ten assembled deans accepted Campbell’s general assessment of the issues facing architecture schools, their interpretations of the specific nature of the changes taking place differed, as did their thoughts about how to respond.

One of the liveliest debates centered on technology. Several speakers claimed that hand drawing was a fundamental part of architectural education; but others, such as Princeton’s Stan Allen, AIA, said it was time to move on. “I think we can talk about certain fundamental ideas of spatial imagination — the ability to think three-dimensionally, an understanding of projection systems, and so on — that belong historically to the culture of drawing…. you can get at all of that in a much more sophisticated, and, I actually think, faster, way through computation.”

Columbia University GSAPP’s Mark Wigley agreed with Allen, calling the hand-vs.-computer debate “unbelievably reactionary and unnecessary.” However, he expressed confidence that the wide diversity of educational philosophies and approaches found in different schools augured well for the future of the profession. “One of the great things about schools of architecture in the U.S. is that they’re all so different, and that to some extent they’ve managed to resist the forces of standardization.”

Sarah Wesseler is a marketing coordinator at Gruzen Samton.

Event: TOWARD “ANARCHITECTURE”: A Conversation between Architects and Artists
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.16.09
Speakers: Joe MacDonald — Founder Urban A&O; Mark Foster Gage — Principal Gage/Clemenceau Architects; David Marcus Abir — Artist & Composer; Alex Amini — Artist; Ula Einstein — Artist
Moderator: Farnaz Mansuri, Assoc. AIA — Principal, de-spec
Organizer: AIANY New Practices Committee

In the past, architects designed by sketching and making models — a hands-on approach similar to that of a traditional artist. Now, architects employ technologically advanced software and materials that allow them to create ever more sculptural spaces, challenging the notion of what constitutes a building. The line between art and architecture seems more blurred than ever — or is it? In the early 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark formed the Anarchitecture Group, seeking to push the boundaries of architecture. In the same spirit, the AIANY New Practices Committee gathered a group of artists and architects to discuss whether there is a middle ground between the two fields.

Artist and composer David Marcus Abir borrows materials and building systems from architecture for his installations. “Tekrar,” a sound installation for The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, was organized with angled walls to emulate the structure of the human ear. To produce a multi-sensory experience in his work, he uses “light and shadow to create or expand a physical space.”

Similarly, the work of artist Ula Einstein expresses spatial qualities. For “A Plan for Her,” she collected architectural drawings found on the street, added her own markings, and cut them into strips, that she wove through a found rack. “I’m influenced by windows and openings,” she explains, which is evident in her sculpture titled windows: rolls of paper are set on end like miniature skyscrapers, with openings rhythmically sliced along the surfaces.

Alex Amini, an architect-turned-artist, creates abstract drawings using ink on mylar and enamel on cardboard, among other media. His architectural background is evident in his work, but he prefers to make spontaneous lines as opposed to the “forceful lines” in architectural drawings. Amini also appreciates the autonomy of being an artist, explaining, “The most painful part of being an architect is having to hand off your work to someone else to build.”

Conceptual architecture, however, avoids this quandary. Joe MacDonald, founder of the architecture firm Urban A&O, is exploring several “client-less” projects such as the Bone Wall and the Cairo Tower. MacDonald is able to indulge his preoccupation with pattern by transforming two-dimensional geometries into three-dimensional structures via the modeling software CATIA. The resulting forms appear more sculptural and less inhabitable.

Architectural firm Gage/Clemenceau is known for fluid, ethereal designs, but partner Mark Foster Gage said, “I don’t think what we’re doing is art.” He believes there is a strong distinction between art and architecture, and that blurred boundaries are rare. While interior and exterior surfaces offer opportunities for creativity, architects must “stuff what’s between with plumbing.” Moderator Farnaz Mansuri, Assoc. AIA, countered that some installations take the function out of architecture, citing Gage/Clemenceau’s Valentine to Times Square as an example. Apparently art and architecture, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.

Murrye Bernard, LEED AP, is a freelance architectural writer and a contributing editor to e-Oculus.

(Continued from above)
Most of all, we’ll need widespread acculturation. Implanting a cycling culture that’s essentially absent, historian Ruth Oldenziel noted, is harder than reviving one that just slipped for a few decades. And as Walter Hook, Ph.D., pointed out, the challenge of helping populations discover the advantages and joys of sustainable transportation is not a matter of leisure but a matter of global urgency. He predicts climate-change negotiations are likely to break down as developing countries resent developed countries’ expectations of sacrifices that the developed countries never had to make, but cycling and other low-impact transport options are among the most useful strategies the First World can learn from the Third. Some ideas moving in the opposite direction are counterproductive: China once built the world’s best bike facilities, then tore them down in the 1980s. Dutch planners like Hans Monderman (inventor of the signless, informally negotiated “living street” or woonerf) are joining colleagues elsewhere, particularly Copenhagen’s Jan Gehl and the New Yorkers who draw on his ideas, in building industrial-world cities that will be more constructive examples to nations that are now on the brink of industrializing — and, if they repeat our carbon-spewing habits, of rendering all our green commitments moot.

Ultimately, a sustainable mobility culture will have to arise from individual perceptions as well as collective decisions. AIANY’s Rick Bell, FAIA, observed that cycling is “also a way of looking at how things happen in the world,” connecting the rider with principles regarding urban space and time such as eurhythmy, symmetry, and symbiosis. That last concept — stressing one’s embeddedness in the wider urban organism, not isolation from it — seems well worth keeping in mind as cities and their residents consider ways to disengage from the 20th century’s technologies and move purposefully into the 21st.

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