The OCULUS Committee and AIA New York Chapter will be hosting a release event for the newest edition of the AIA Guide to New York City on 06.02.10. In memory of author Norval White, FAIA, e-Oculus will be publishing a special tribute issue to coincide with the celebration. We are seeking personal anecdotes, images, and remembrances — any and all are welcome. Please e-mail them to eoculus@aiany.org by Friday, 05.14.10.

· Subway Construction Cuts, Covers, Mines its Way Down 2nd Avenue
· Learning from Paul Rudolph: Successes, Failures, & Strategies
· Getting it Wright: Exhibition, New Restaurant Reinvent the Guggenheim
· Publication Looks to Locals for a Sense of Place
· AECOM Contemplates Lessons Learned in Three New Books

Event: The Second Avenue Subway: A Twenty-First Century Subway for the City of New York
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.12.10
Speaker: Judith Kunoff, AIA — Chief Architect, NYC Transit Authority
Organizer: AIANY Transportation & Infrastructure Committee

Second Avenue Subway platform.

Courtesy http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sas/

It is 90 years after a commission was formed to determine the feasibility of the Second Avenue Subway (SAS). Now, after a cycle of jump-starts and stalls, the TBM (tunnel boring machine) is slated to connect to the F and Q lines next year, thus paving the way for the completion of Phase 1. While it is understandable that there is a level of skepticism, Judith Kunoff, AIA, chief architect at the NYC Transit Authority, is optimistic that the 2016 deadline will be met and the new T line will soon run from 96th Street to 63rd Street.

The reasons for the delays are as cyclical as the economy. The SAS’s funding has suffered the burden of the Great Depression, WWII, the Korean War, the 1970s oil crisis, and now the latest economic downturn. Not only that, but construction itself has faced its own pitfalls due to unexpected challenges. Two 100-year-old water main feeds at 91st and 95th Streets needed to be replaced; and a Memorandum of Understanding with the NYC Department of Buildings was created to ensure that building owners are taking responsibility for their buildings’ stabilization during tunnel construction.

Nevertheless, construction has begun. Residents and business owners along Second Avenue can attest that rock excavation is well underway at 96th St. Although the “cut and cover” method that is being used is very disruptive to the Upper East Side neighborhood, it is necessary as it will allow for larger maintenance spaces, Kunoff explained. Luckily, this portion of Phase 1 is almost complete. Blasting has just begun at 72nd St. using “mined cavern” construction, which is much less disturbing as most of the work occurs under ground.

The stations themselves incorporate a combination of new sustainability goals (using green specifications) and existing standards for ease of maintenance. For example, there is an attempt to buy locally or within the U.S., the concrete mixture incorporates fly ash, and regenerative breaking is typical. Technologies are used to reduce energy consumption as well, such as heat extraction over the vehicles and air will be tempered with fans at both ends of the platforms. Also, a continuous soffit integrates mechanical, electrical, security, fire alarms, audio, and signage in one.

The design of the stations references the SAS construction. Developed by the NYC Transit Authority with AECOM, the shape of the arched canopies, escalator shafts, and egress passages represent the TBM coming to the surface. The finishes are comprised of porcelain panels and granite tiles, and flat screen panels display advertisements and Arts for Transit.

Ultimately, as has been the case throughout the SAS’s history, major funding is needed to complete the project, stated Kunoff. And while state funding and federal funding have contributed, she hoped aloud that New York State will be in the position to give more funds to help establish a capital program, or at least make a dent in the $1 billion deficit.

Event: At Risk! The John W. Chorley Elementary School, Middletown, NY
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.11.10
Speakers: Carl Abbott, FAIA — Carl Abbott FAIA Architects/Planners; Steven Forman, AIA — Senior Associate, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects
Introduction: Sean Khorsandi — Co-Chair, Paul Rudolph Foundation
Moderator: Fred Bernstein — Architecture Critic
Organizers: Center for Architecture in partnership with the Paul Rudolph Foundation; Preservation League of New York; World Monuments Fund
Sponsors: Modernism at Risk is sponsored by Knoll, Inc.

John W. Chorley Elementary School.

©Andrei Halwell

“While there were several architects in the 1970s known as paper architects, Paul [Rudolph] is becoming one by default as his buildings are being removed,” warned Sean Khorsandi, co-chair of the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Calling attention to one of 13 threatened (or recently demolished) Rudolph projects, the John W. Chorley Elementary School in Middletown, NY, could be razed next year to make way for a parking lot and new school building. To identify preservation strategies, panelists drew on lessons learned from attempts to save other Rudolph buildings, most notably Riverview High School in Sarasota, FL (demolished 2009), and the Yale University Art and Architecture Building (restored in 2009 by Gwathmey Siegel to wide acclaim).

Khorsandi began by describing the architecture of the school: four open-plan classroom zones around a central circulation spine; gently terraced floor levels hug the landscape; and roof trusses and clerestory windows flood the interior with daylight. The open plan makes the school adaptable to almost any use, Khorsandi noted, and needlessly destroying the building would not only erase part of Middletown’s cultural heritage, but entail environmental costs as well.

Carl Abbott, FAIA, of Carl Abbott FAIA + Associate Architect/Planners, who helped lead the attempt to save Riverview High School in Sarasota, FL, showed photographs of Riverview’s deterioration and the alterations that ruined the original architectural concept. These misguided changes — Abbott called them “abortions” — prevented Sarasotans from understanding Riverview’s value, he said: “A big chunk of this is awareness of people realizing the masterpiece that they have in their community.” Though his team solicited support from famous architects, he said this strategy backfired: “The school board people were not looking at name recognition for the building — they wanted us to show them why it was a good building.”

On the positive side, Steven Forman, AIA, a senior associate at Gwathmey Siegel, described his experience as a senior architect restoring the Art and Architecture Building at Yale. Despite abundant technical challenges, the project was a success, he said, “because the money was there, the will was there, the client was there, the construction manager was there. They ‘bought in’ as partners in the whole construction process. In 30 years of building, I’ve never had that experience.”

Abbott simplified the checklist for successful preservation even further: “It’s awareness, it’s time, and it’s money.”

During the Q&A, an audience member pointedly asked whether people even like the Chorley school. Abbott acknowledged that Rudolph could make “demanding” and “intense” architecture, but the question was ultimately put to rest by Fred Isseks, a Middletown high school teacher in attendance: he estimated that 90% of his students love the building. Some of those students were in the audience, and one spoke passionately about her appreciation for the Chorley School.

Positive testimonies such as these, coming from members of the local community, are crucial, said moderator Fred Bernstein. “Buildings will be saved because people come to like them, not because architects say they’re important.”

Carl Yost is the marketing and publicity coordinator for Gabellini Sheppard Associates. He has written for Forbes.com and The Architect’s Newspaper, among other publications.

Event: AIA Member Tour: Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum
Location: Guggenheim Museum, 03.10.10
Speakers: David van der Leer — Assistant Curator for Architecture and Design, Guggenheim Museum; Andre Kikoski, AIA — Principal, Andre Kikoski Architect
Organizer: AIANY

The Wright.

Andre Kikoski Architect

Re-imagining the spaces of the iconic Guggenheim Museum is no easy feat. However, recently AIA members toured an exhibition and the museum’s new restaurant space that accomplish just that. David van der Leer, assistant curator for architecture and design, led a group tour of the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, and architect Andre Kikoski, AIA, principal of Andre Kikoski Architect, discussed his design for The Wright, a sleek dining space that occupies the museum’s former cafeteria.

On view through 04.28.10, Contemplating the Void features renderings by more than 200 international artists, designers, and architects who were asked to imagine their own interventions for the museum’s rotunda. Although the museum has installed many artists’ interventions in the past, this exhibition displays proposals without any intention of execution, freeing the artists from legal and financial constraints. The proposals range in media from detailed digital renderings to delicate hand drawings. The curators chose not to frame the works, so it looks like an “all-star studio pin up,” according to van der Leer.

The proposals are diverse: Snøhetta’s “G-String (The Guggenheim Unraveled)” depicts the unwrapped spiral re-wrapped around the neighboring Upper East Side; Toshiko Mori, FAIA’s “Soft Landing” explores her interest in textiles with nets strung across the rotunda for visitors to climb or fall into. GROUP8 imagined a Swiss chocolate extrusion of the space in its proposal “Tasting the Void,” while Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects illustrated a giant water column shooting through the space in its work, “1000m3 of water or 2,000,000 lbs.”

Unlike the participants in Contemplating the Void, Kikoski faced many restraints for his design of The Wright, including budget, schedule, and the challenge of creating a space with longevity: the restaurant will be a permanent fixture in the museum rather than a temporary installation. The Guggenheim’s former cafeteria featured dark brown carpet and bright red walls, and visitors could see all the way through to the dishwasher from the front entrance. Kikoski’s team spent time modeling the design on the computer to correct perspectives and “bring movement into a basically square space.”

Kikoski sought to “create a space to complement the museum,” which he accomplished by developing an analogous material palette, including white Corian counters, and referencing the geometry of the iconic building with swooping arcs in the form of the bar and the layered ceiling plane. For his time, Frank Lloyd Wright used daring materials and technologies, Kikoski explained, so he approached the project as he imagined a young Wright would if he were alive today and working as a young architect.

The wall behind the bar appears to shimmer with fiber-optic walnut panels that are backlit with LEDs. Tiered banquette seating upholstered in bright blue and an art installation by artist Liam Gillick inject color into the space. Yellow, orange, red, gray, brown, and beige powder-coated horizontal aluminum bars line the walls and wrap the ceiling. They bridge the building’s distinguishable portholes, but the outlines are still visible: “I didn’t want to erase or celebrate, but leave them as memory,” Kikoski said.

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

Event: Book Talk — Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.09.10
Speakers: Ned Kaufman — Author, Principal, Kaufman Heritage Conservation, Director of Research and Training Programs, Rafael Viñoly Architects, & Adjunct Associate Professor of Historic Preservation, Pratt Institute
Moderator: Erica Stoller — Director, Esto Photographics, Inc.
Organizers: AIANY Historic Buildings Committee

Courtesy Routledge

One’s sense of place greatly varies depending on their role as either resident or visitor. In his new book, Place, Race and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (Routledge, 2009), Ned Kaufman explores these distinctions as well as the architectural and urban elements with which each type of inhabitant identifies. In his professional work and research, Kaufman has come to the conclusion that the iconic places that resonate for residents differ from those identified by outsiders. For instance, a traveler may cite a central bell tower in a city as significant, whereas a resident may refer to a local coffee shop. Professional travelers or visiting historians are interested in evaluations, according to Kaufman, and residents are interested in the experience of their setting. As architects, it is crucial to understand the aspects of a location that may be overlooked or dismissed from an outsider’s perspective.

In his book, Kaufman delves into the traditional role of architects as historians, traveling to undocumented places in the 18th century, and returning with drawings of the urban environment, collections of native items, and stories of encounters. It is in the narratives, memories, and traditions of locals that a city’s true identity resides. Kaufman concludes that the key to capturing the spirit of a place is in intangible heritage and the concept of social value.

The “living history” of a community, as Kaufman calls it, is the story-scape that is crucial to absorb when making an analysis of a society. Harnessing the power of local tradition and knowledge will allow architects to produce inspired acts of documentation, preservation, and revitalization. “If we want to leave places better than how we found them,” Kaufman stated, “…we need to get beyond the traveler’s sense of place.”

Jacqueline Pezzillo, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP, is the communications manager at Davis Brody Bond Aedas and a regular contributor to e-Oculus.

Event: Book Launch: The Evolution of Design + Planning in the Age of Climate Change
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.18.10
Speakers: Joe Brown, FASLA — Chief Executive, AECOM Planning, Design + Development; Christopher Benosky, PE — Principal/Regional Director of Water and Environmental Services
Organizer/Sponsor: AECOM

Courtesy AECOM

Many firms release monographs that are ideal for coffee tables, but AECOM’s three new books, Climate Design: Design and Planning for the Age of Climate Change, The Bigger Picture, and Asia Beyond Growth, include a broad focus beyond the firm’s work to convey concepts and solutions of interest to all designers, architects, planners, engineers, policy analysts, and academics. Joe Brown, FASLA, chief executive at AECOM and former EDAW chief executive officer and president, explained that these books are evidence of why EDAW chose to merge with AECOM last year: “They are invested in global and intellectual capital.”

In creating Climate Design, AECOM employees collaborated with academics including Peter Droege, professor at the Institute of Architecture and Planning, Hochschule Liechtenstein, an expert in renewable energy and sustainable design, to explore ways that the built environment — urban infrastructure, landscape design, and large-scale development — can adapt to changing climates and prevent further damage. The authors concluded that new technology isn’t necessarily the answer; rather, they promote a return to natural design instead of working against it. As Christopher Benosky, PE, principal and regional director of Water and Environmental Services, explained, this book doesn’t give specifics on the evidence of climate change, but offers a new way of thinking. For example, designers face the challenge of integrating buildings and cities with rivers and wetlands. “What if we look at cities as watersheds” by designing low impact developments, Benosky proposed.

The Bigger Picture celebrates AECOM’s many projects around the world, but also acknowledges where they have failed: the middle ground that lies between mega-projects such as the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, an entire new city complete with a Guggenheim Museum, to smaller designs for children’s gardens and the regeneration of Manchester city center. This book, written by Fay Sweet and designed by Pentagram, bridges between the practices of EDAW and AECOM, and documents projects from the research stage through concept, planning, and construction. Firms of any size can benefit from the lessons AECOM learned while executing these diverse works.

The “visual cacophony of Asia with numbers and facts to go along with it” describes Asia Beyond Growth, stated Brown. Packed with photos, statistics, and graphs, the volume shows that Asia is home to the world’s largest and fastest growing cities, and AECOM has completed many projects there. Not a monograph, this book is, instead, a compendium of knowledge gathered throughout these projects. Asia Beyond Growth may offer interesting information, but it fails to offer a remedy for growing pains.

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