In this issue:
· Biennale Curators Build a Future from Russia’s Industrial Past
· Three-Dimensional Portfolio: New Practices New York Exhibition
· Active Design Goes Public
· Panel Gives Road Map to Greener, Cheaper Housing
· Designing the Details: 2 Firms Expand into Product Design

Event: Factory Russia: Russian Pavilion Exhibition at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.09.10
Speakers: Sergei Tchoban — Partner, NPS Tchoban Voss, & Principal, SPEECH
Moderator: Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY
Introduction: Vladimir Belogolovsky — Founder, Intercontinental Curatorial Project
Organizers: AIANY

The Paris Commune Factory, one of several industrial sites in Vyshny Volochyok proposed for renewal under the Factory Russia plan.

Yuri Palmin

“Our future is in a respectful dialogue with the past,” claimed St. Petersburg- born, Germany-based architect Sergei Tchoban, in a preview presentation of Russia’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale. For the Biennale, that dialogue is about a former industrial town of 60,000, halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow called Vyshyny Volochyok.

Tchoban set the stage by discussing the historic renovations carried out by his firm, NPS Tchoban Voss. Photographs of Berolinahaus, for example, an art-deco office building designed by Peter Behrens on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, depicted restored façades and recreated period details. (Tchoban noted the environmental benefits of preserving the “embedded energy” that goes into a building’s initial construction.) He illustrated how these considerations — of history and human-scale architectural details — appear in Russian buildings and master plans developed by SPEECH, his collaboration with Moscow-based architect Sergei Kuznetsov.

For the Venice Biennale, he and his co-curators invited several Russian architects to re- imagine new programs for shuttered industrial sites scattered throughout Vyshny Volochyok. Though “everybody knows this town doesn’t need a Museum of Modern Art,” Tchoban said, he presented plans for cultural programs that would be contextually appropriate: a theater and institute dedicated to preserving local folk music, and a museum of industrial technology. A waterfront site would become a water recreation area. Historic buildings would be repurposed. And one site would return to active industrial use as a textile factory anchoring a fashion district. New programs and buildings are essential to renew interest in this and similar small towns, he said, if they are to compete with the major metropolises like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In summarizing the curators’ primary concern, Tchoban explained, “The problem with our occupation in past years was that we began to be spectacular, and more spectacular, and much more spectacular. We’ve lost our imagination of ‘town,’ our imagination of human scale, and I think that’s the most important point of what we’ve worked out [in the Russian pavilion].”

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

Event: New Practices New York Exhibition Opening
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.15.10
Organizer: AIANY New Practices Committee
Sponsors: Lead Sponsor:Dornbracht, MG & Company; Valiant Technology; Sponsor: Espasso, Häfele and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Media Sponsor: The Architect’s Newspaper; Friend: Benjamin Moore

Members of the 2010 New Practices.

Alex Welsh

Winners of the AIANY New Practices Committee’s portfolio-based competition for emerging firms in NYC include: EASTON+COMBS (highest honor); Archipelagos; Leong Leong; Manifold; SOFTlab; SO-IL; and Tacklebox. Examples of their work are now side-by-side in an exhibition at the Center for Architecture. Designed by Leven Betts Studio, the exhibition is organized by media type — drawings, models, and video — so viewers can draw comparisons. An entire gallery is devoted to models, more than any previous NPNY exhibition, ranging from foam- core study models to carefully crafted final versions.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the exhibition is the video component. Each winning firm was asked to create a short film about their practice. These films, which loop on small flat- screens, feature interviews with firm principals, shots of firm members at work, and, in some cases, edgy music. The personalities of the firms are intimately revealed, and adjacent larger flat-screens feature a scrolling portfolio of their work.

Also on view are the physical portfolios, which viewers are invited to flip through. Since the competition was based on these portfolio designs, they stand as examples of successful layouts. The exhibition will be on view through 10.23.10 at the Center for Architecture, and then it will travel to São Paolo in 2011. To learn more about the seven winning firms, attend the Winner’s Symposium on 07.29.10, when they will present their work and discuss the organization of their practices. Tours of the studios will also be part of openhousenewyork, 10.09-10.10.10.

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

Event: Active Design Planning Workshop: Design Professionals
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.08.10
Speakers: Ernest Hutton, Assoc. AIA, FAICP — Principal, Hutton Associates; Suzanne Nienaber — Training Coordinator, NYC Active Design Program; Karen K. Lee, MD, MHSc — Director, Built Environment Program, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Reena Agarwal — Design Policy Analyst; Joseph Sopiak — Senior Design Liaison, NYC Department of Design and Construction; Charles McKinney, Assoc. AIA, ASLA — Principal Urban Designer, NYC Department of Parks; Donald Burns — President, APA New York Metro Chapter; Lauren Yarmuth, LEED AP — Principal, YRG / Urban Green; Tricia Martin — President, American Society of Landscape Architects, New York, & Principal, WE Design; Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY
Organizers: AIANY; NYC Active Design Guidelines Team

Matthew Serban

Through the combined efforts of five city agencies, a group of academic advisors, AIANY, and a host of editors and consultants, the Active Design Guidelines: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design (ADG) was launched in January. This document combines research about the relation of the built environment to public health with practical recommendations for constructing urban spaces that respect the human body. The ADG team is now taking steps to make sure this volume moves off the shelves of architects, planners, and civic officials and into the public discourse.

The first in a series of outreach workshops — first addressing design professionals, with further meetings planned for educators and the real estate industry — gathered a small interdisciplinary group to brainstorm about ways to increase awareness of the ADG’s potential to reshape urban space. Karen Lee, MD, MHSc, reprised the case she has made at the Fit City panel series, describing the sea change from design strategies aimed at infectious disease to a new priority, the “diseases of energy,” a category of clinical conditions resulting from the societal-scale substitution of medications for human activity.

If the designers of 21st-century public space can implement epidemiologic knowledge as effectively as their early-Modernist predecessors did, history offers reasons for encouragement. Thanks to aqueducts, sanitation, and construction standards that brought light and air into dank urban spaces, the city’s infectious-disease mortality statistics from 1880 to 1940 improved dramatically — predating the discovery of penicillin (1939) and the antibiotic era, one should note. America’s most significant health victories have more to do with spatial design and public health measures than with medical technologies, applied one patient at a time. For a comparable re-engineering of built space to encourage better use of human energy, the design professions have the tools at hand already: e.g., replacing mechanical transport with inviting, prominently-placed stair designs, augmented by skip-stop elevators where possible. (Where it isn’t, slowing the elevators down is an effective way to encourage people to take the stairs.)

Charles McKinney, Assoc. AIA, ASLA, observed that no one disagrees that the ADG’s measures are worthwhile. The challenge is one of rhetoric, memetics, and motivation, weaving the ADG principles into city policies and everyday practices. Discussion recurrently touched on the synergies between environmental and public-health progress: architect and sustainability consultant Lauren Yarmuth cited the experience of the U.S. Green Building Council in promulgating the LEED system, noting that these standards became far more effective once they were linked not just with honorable intentions, but with measurable incentives, such as the marketing advantage developers could claim once a building earned its precious-metal plaque.

Through a broad range of mechanisms, from social media to sponsored events to incorporation into RFPs, codes, and awards criteria, the ADG message will soon be spreading through the professional and local communities most directly affected by the bodily consequences of design.

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

Event: High Performance Strategies for Affordable Housing
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.12.10
Speakers: Christine Hunter, AIA, LEED AP — Principal, Magnusson Architecture and Planning; Paul Freitag, LEED AP — Development Director, Jonathan Rose Companies; Shillpa Singh — Sustainability Manager, YRG Sustainability; Yianice Hernandez — Green Communities Senior Program Director, Enterprise Community Partners; Jonathan Braman, LEED AP — Energy Performance Analyst and Project Manager for Multi-Family Developments, Bright Power
Moderator: Esther Yang — Project Design and Management, Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation
Organizer: AIANY Committee on the Environment

Joyce and David Dinkins Gardens on West 153rd Street.

Jonathan Rose Companies

A recent panel on green affordable housing featured quite a diverse group, not only architects but also people working in development, certification, and energy analysis. “The aim is to get us all out of our respective bubbles and really talk about how we can use our mutual insights to move forward,” said moderator Esther Yang, an Enterprise Rose fellow, as she introduced the panel.

Yianice Hernandez of Enterprise Community Partners discussed how her organization’s Green Communities Initiative supports the development of sustainable affordable housing through funding and education. At the heart of the initiative is the Green Communities Criteria , which is designed as a “cost-effective road map” to guide people through the design and construction principles for this type of housing, she said, adding that following the criteria helps reduce utility costs, conserve resources, and improve indoor air quality. Since they offer the possibility of funding, similar programs are often more attractive than LEED for affordable housing projects, added Yang, who is currently working on project design and management for the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, a nonprofit organization that develops and manages affordable housing in the Bronx.

Jonathan Braman, LEED AP, emphasized the importance of benchmarking to get a sense of a building’s strengths and weaknesses in energy performance, before embarking on a renovation. Various benchmarking technologies are available, including EnergyScoreCards, an online tool offered by his energy-consulting company Bright Power, which can be used to translate the raw, hard-to-decipher data from utility bills into a format that can be easily understood, he explained. A grading system of A to D rates a building’s performance in areas such as heating, cooling, water usage, and carbon footprint.

In collaboration with Dattner Architects, Jonathan Rose Companies has used some affordable housing projects in NYC as experiments to push the limits of what’s possible, explained Development Director Paul Freitag, LEED AP. One project involved renovating 10 identical affordable housing buildings on West 135th Street to make them dramatically more sustainable. The challenge in another project, Joyce and David Dinkins Gardens on West 153rd Street, was to take an existing building type — the block-and-plank midrise affordable housing building — and figure out how to greatly boost the sustainability at no additional cost to the company. With the help of grant funding, it turned out to be possible, Freitag said.

From her recent experience in property management, Yang emphasized that, generally, the best bang for the buck comes not through technologies like photovoltaics but through improving performance by analyzing the fundamental qualities of the building: its orientation on the site, the energy-efficiency of the building envelope, and systems such as HVAC and water conservation. “From a property manager standpoint, I’m looking for the largest expenditures that I’m going to have in operating this building, and trying to reduce those — so having bamboo flooring may not come before adding an additional layer of insulation to the building,” she said. Thinking in those terms helps keep rents low for the tenants and, for a property manager, ensures enough money for running the building.

Meanwhile, aesthetics can’t be ignored. A lot of affordable housing projects look boxy and blandly similar, which can lead to the inhabitants feeling stigmatized, Yang said. She praised the design of the façade of Joyce and David Dinkins Gardens for its multiple materials and different colors of brick. For designers on a tight budget, the challenge is to “add interest and not insert sterilization,” she said.

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

Event: Beyond Architecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.07.10
Speakers: Alexander Lamis, AIA — Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects; Lisa Green — Partner, Selldorf Architects
Moderator: Donald Albrecht — Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of the City of New York

Patterned glass from the Robert A. M. Stern collection for Bendheim, Merletto (left); 90 degree coffee table from the Vica Collection by Selldorf Architects.

Courtesy Robert A.M. Stern (left); Selldorf Architects

Contemporary architects are increasingly drawing upon the legacies of designers such as Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames by exploring product design and creating holistic environments in which all elements exist cohesively. Firms such as Robert A.M. Stern Architects and Selldorf Architects have established branches of their practice devoted to furniture, product, and textile design, which not only serve to enhance the buildings and interiors they design, but are also independently marketable.

Lisa Green, a partner at Selldorf Architects, describes the furniture in the Vica collection — a name coined from a furniture and interior design firm of Selldorf’s grandmother in Cologne — as “only as big as it needs to be.” The simple lines, proportions, and crafted details of the furniture are constantly revisited. The collection is designed to be formal yet comfortable. The Vica collection also includes light fixtures, door pulls, and tabletop accessories originally designed for the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. While Green says that the majority of orders from the collection are for interiors designed by Selldorf Architects, the firm is planning to open a showroom in NYC.

Alexander Lamis, AIA, a partner at Robert A. M. Stern Architects who also manages Robert A.M. Stern Interiors and Robert A.M. Stern Design, which licenses the firm’s product designs, describes the practice’s oeuvre as “spoons to cities.” Its “spoons” include product design such as candlesticks, bowls, ice buckets, and place settings dating back to 1985. The practice’s furniture design includes lounge furniture, and furniture for healthcare, hospitality, and residential settings. While designing the Nashville Public Library, the building inspired a line of furniture called The Library Collection comprised of reading chairs, tables, and study carrels. The firm focuses its product design on the contract market place and has established partnerships with multiple manufacturers for which it designs furniture, textiles, and landscape accessories. Expanding beyond the design of products and furniture, the practice collaborates with its product partners, such as Bendheim glass and Bentley Prince Street Carpet, to develop marketing and ad campaigns. By doing so, both the practice and the manufacturer gain brand exposure.

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