Event: State of Global Architecture
Location: Relative Space Concept Showroom, 02.19.10
Speakers: Jürgen Mayer H. — Principal, J. Mayer H. Architects (Berlin); Andres Lepik — Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Museum of Modern Art; Matthias Hollwich & Marc Kushner, AIA — Principals, HWKN, & Co-founders, Architizer
Organizers: Architizer; The Society; Azure magazine, Toronto

Jürgen Mayer H. and Neeraj Bhatia

Though the official title suggested a discussion of unrealistic breadth and forbidding gravity, this event in the “Azure Talks” series combined a preview of a forthcoming book, several of Jürgen Mayer’s recent projects, and an announcement of a competition winner by the latest social media website, Architizer. The talents behind this gathering imbued its diverse purposes with energy.

In the U.S., Mayer’s academic presence is larger than his built body of work, but this may change before long. His biomorphic-modernist designs have brought success early in his career; his buildings now appear throughout Europe, serving a wide range of programs and extending digitally generated geometries “beyond the blob,” in his description, into a kind of structurally plausible surrealism. The Metropol Parasol in Seville, Spain, built of Kerto laminated veneer lumber and resembling a half-dozen conjoined mushrooms sheltering a public plaza, market, and archaeological museum above recently discovered Roman ruins, is scheduled to open by the end of this year. Mayer expressed delight at its realization in Seville’s medieval town center, observing that “we have to celebrate Spanish culture to be brave enough to do something like this… I don’t think it would be possible to do something like this in Germany.” However, he also noted that a simpatico client would be more important than any particular project typology. Perhaps a local developer will be up to the challenge in the U.S.

Mayer also previewed and autographed his new book -arium (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010; co-edited with University of Toronto urban design professor Neeraj Bhatia), recently published in Germany and scheduled to appear here later this spring. The book uses weather, the fundamental antagonist of any form of shelter, as the central organizing principle for its theoretical and practical investigations (”weather and media,” “weather and war,” “weather and infrastructure,” etc.). In an era when architecture, economics, and culture are all searching for ways to adapt to climate change, Mayer’s fascination with the relations of order and disorder in both natural and built spaces promises a fresh set of provocations.

Launched last fall, Architizer occupies a digital niche complementary to established portals, databases, and resources and various publication sites for architects and designers.

The Architizer team of Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner, AIA, also announced the winner of their “Competition Competition 2010,” which invited entrants to submit unrewarded entries from any 2009 competition — a common-sensical way to recycle some of the ideas that architects prolifically generate, often with only the slimmest hope for recognition. A jury headed by Mayer and including MoMA’s Andres Lepik, Ada Tolla of LOT-EK, and Jared Della Valle, AIA, of Della Valle Bernheimer “judged [the 643 entries] on general architectural merit, not on the criteria of the original competition,” and selected “Dubaiing” by the Parisian team of Mickael Papin, David Neil, Pierre Silande, Nicolas Lombardi, and Magali Lamoureux, a zeppelin-like structure drifting freely above its host city, held aloft by helium and ballasted by a set of inverted building volumes. With Dubai itself behaving like a bit of a bubble, comparisons to the Floating Island of Laputa in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may be inevitable, but in such a recession-dulled climate, flights of imagination this free have grown rare; considering Architizer’s efforts to encourage them, it would seem churlish for questions of practicality to shoot them down.

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

Exhibition: “China Prophecy: Shanghai” (through 03.2010)
Location: Skyscraper Museum

“New York 1999,” New York World, December 30, 1900 (left); Lujiazui trio, Gensler.

Courtesy Skyscraper Museum

The third exhibition in the Skyscraper Museum’s “Future City 20 | 21″ series explores the idea that China’s largest city may be to the next century what New York was to the last. “If you think of New York as a predictor, it predicted Hong Kong perfectly,” says museum director Carol Willis. “The question is, what’s the 21st century’s future city?” “China Prophecy: Shanghai” suggests that a new kind of city on an unprecedented scale will be the urban model of the future, as influential in its approaches to density, planning, and design as New York once was (and, in some quarters, arguably remains), while growing at a pace that’s distinctly Chinese.

Shanghai is home to 18 million people, including 10 million in Puxi, its historic core area one third the size of New York, and some 3 million “floating” or non-registered migrants; considering the influx from rural regions, some demographers project expansion to 23 million by 2020. Rapid expansion, naturally, means aggressive urbanization. Traditional lilong lanes and shikumen housing in much of the city have given way to high- or mid-rises.

The Pudong New Area — a stretch of waterfront and countryside across the Huangpu River from Puxi — now hosts the Lujiazui financial district and its exuberant icons, including the rocketlike Oriental Pearl television tower (a local equivalent of the Eiffel Tower), designed by Shanghai Modern Architectural Design Co., and two of the world’s top 10 supertall towers (about to be joined by a third). The three largest skyscrapers, says Willis, express Shanghai city leaders’ sense of the past, present, and future: respectively, the Jin Mao tower’s pagoda-like geometries by SOM’s Chicago office, the contemporary modernism of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) and Leslie Robertson’s World Financial Center, and the twisting, segmented, biomorphic Shanghai Tower, a 128-story Gensler design that, when completed, will mark China’s place in the age of green building technologies.

Models and diagrams of these, KPF’s Jing An complex, John Portman’s mixed-use Tomorrow Square, the Xintiandi and Rockbund preservation/reclamation projects, and others offer details on the buildings’ structures, design evolution, and urban roles.

Three main models of urbanization, Willis says, characterize today’s Shanghai: patchwork modernization in the Puxi core, a commercial incursion of self-contained high-rises into the two-story, pedestrian-scale city fabric; superblocks with supertowers, executed by decree according to the master plan for Pudong, often surrounded by green space as separate islands with little street-level life nearby; and historic preservation with adaptive re-use, as in developer Vincent Lo’s Xintiandi (”New Heaven and Earth”), a car-free entertainment district of restored shikumen. Here, architect Benjamin Wood developed new variations on the lilong street form, hybridized with modern infrastructure and program.

Shanghai, like New York before it, is adopting modernity’s vertical and horizontal transformative technologies, but on a larger scale and several times as fast. Processes that took New York roughly from 1880 to 1930, Willis says, are occurring in Shanghai within 10 years, and a full century’s worth of development and acculturation here has shoehorned there into less than three decades. China has the advantage of modernizing at a point when ecological knowledge is far greater than when America was undergoing similar change, but Shanghai may not dodge the bullet of aggressive automobilization to the same extent New York did. With a far higher national savings rate, Willis notes, construction is unlikely to stop booming despite global recession. It’s possible that both American successes and American errors will find echoes there.

“China Prophecy” is evolving during its long run through next March: it will soon add a wooden scale model of the Lujiazui district, and a lecture/panel series featuring American architects with major Shanghai projects will begin in October. Along with models and other static visual elements, an animation by Crystal CG places newly planned buildings within their urban context, suggesting that the 2010 World Expo (”Better City, Better Life”) may situate Shanghai as tomorrow’s global utopia, much as the 1939 World’s Fair did for New York.

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

Event: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling Panel
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.02.08
Speakers: Ali Rahim — Director, Contemporary Architecture Practice; Hina Jamelle — Director, Contemporary Architecture Practice; Neil Cook — Designer, Reiser + Umemoto; Michael Overby — Designer, Reiser + Umemoto; Scott Marble — Partner, Marble Fairbanks; Karen Fairbanks — Partner, Marble Fairbanks; Barry Bergdoll — The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA (introduction); James McCullar, FAIA — 2008 AIANY President & Principal, James McCullar & Associates (introduction)
Moderator: Peter Christensen — Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA
Organizers: Museum of Modern Art; Center for Architecture
Sponsors: Center for Architecture; AIANY Housing Committee

Contemporary Architecture Practice. “Migrating Formations, 2008.” Commissioned by MoMA for the Home Delivery exhibition. High-performance composite. This project supported in part by Z Corporation and ARUP.

Photograph by Richard Barnes, © 2008 The Museum of Modern Art

They are the only works that visitors to MoMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition inevitably see twice, remarked curator Barry Bergdoll. They’re at the heart of the show’s mission to explore evolving technological innovations in architecture fabrication and delivery. Yet the three digitally designed and manufactured walls in the vestibule have been overlooked in most press coverage, Bergdoll said, at a recent panel featuring the three NYC firms behind the creations. Calling them “among the most radical propositions in the show,” he said the museum commissioned the projects as “provocations to see where we are in the still-nascent revolution” of computer-aided design and manufacturing.

Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle of Contemporary Architecture Practice (CAP) explored the design possibilities of rapid 3-D printing with “Migrating Formations,” a semi-opaque divider whose biomorphic forms resemble rows of bones. The printing was extremely fast, and the process obviated using molds or mechanical joints (the pieces were joined with epoxy resin). One day, similar technologies will be able to print entire homes in a day, Rahim said, which would be efficient, but not necessarily for good aesthetics. Home design is becoming easier for anyone with access to the technology — for better or worse. Therefore, CAP aimed for experimentation balanced with aesthetics. The patterns created by the wall’s curvy, bonelike pieces range between bulbous and angular forms to maximize the visual impact while adhering to the firm’s design sensibility.

The industrial looking “Flatform” by Marble Fairbanks was made, instead, of two laser-cut metal sheets that could be transported flat and then connected with foldout tabs. The result: a kind of “stainless steel Velcro,” as Scott Marble put it, where the intricate system of pinwheeling and opposing tabs provide the wall’s structure as well as its visual appeal. He was enthusiastic about how new digital fabrication techniques have inspired fresh architectural forms, seeing it as an opportunity to further architectural processes, not products, he said.

Reiser + Umemoto RUR Architecture used laser-cut steel to a different effect in “Vector Wall.” Undulating patterns of slits allowed the steel to be hammered into flowing curves, an easier installation than for Flatform, which required a squadron of students to help attach the tabs. The “Vector Wall” design process involved experimenting with variables such as the slits’ length, spacing, and patterning, said Neil Cook, one of the designers involved in the project. Like the other walls, Reiser + Umemoto is already exploring similar ideas and forms on a larger scale in projects such as the O-14 commercial tower in Dubai.

While the panels addressed technological and aesthetic concerns, the architects seemed less preoccupied with the practicality of their creations. Despite the three walls’ permeability, there was barely any talk about issues of visual or auditory privacy (apparently the designers all chose to envision their projects as decorative dividers). Bergdoll aptly observed that all three seemed more in the realm of materials research than an actual domestic program. Still, the panel justified the walls’ prominent placement, helping to elucidate some of digital design and fabrication’s advantages and pitfalls.

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

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.

Event: The Sustainable Works of Foster + Partners: A Mixed Greens Lecture
Location: New York Academy of Sciences, 7 WTC, 02.22.07
Speaker: Brandon Haw – senior partner, Foster + Partners; Carol Willis – director, Skyscraper Museum (introduction)
Organizers: Skyscraper Museum; New York Academy of Sciences

Will 200 Greenwich Street bring America to the forefront of green design?

Courtesy Foster + Partners

Foster + Partners’ designs emphasize a dialectic between the environment and technology, emphasized the firm’s senior partner, Brandon Haw. Recalling his own 1960s upbringing in an “art family” that treasured the off-the-grid principles of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, Haw was naturally drawn to the early work of Sir Norman Foster, Hon. FAIA, and Buckminster Fuller. “Bucky’s dome could have been used for the Willis Faber building,” he commented. Some features of that forward-looking Foster-designed 1975 building have become staples of sustainable design and corporate communitarianism: a green roof, open-plan workspaces, escalator-based vertical transportation, and raised floors. Then-and-now photos show how little modification this building needed as its occupants adapted to computerization and other changes over three decades.

As widely as Foster’s designs have varied, they have implemented recurrent principles: functional cladding, external positioning of cores, and attention to the details of airflow, heat exchange, and light. A point-by-point system of ecological analysis from site to materials guides all Foster projects, skyscraper-scale and otherwise. It’s become common to preface discussions of green design strategies with Al Gore-style data graphics on global temperature, carbon dioxide, demographics, and resource use. Haw’s presentation of this material was bracing without being alarmist; he recognizes the urgency of curbing greenhouse emissions has reached cultural and economic realms, and he applauds businesses that recognize common interests linking carbon footprints, quality-of-life improvements for workers, and financial performance. Foster + Partners is dedicated to building tall as much for the anti-sprawl effects of high urban density as for the customary financial motives.

The triangular Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt (1997), arguably the first green skyscraper, treats German unions’ requirement that all workers be within 7.5 meters of a window as a productive constraint. Considering its central atrium space, “gardens in the sky,” and ample natural ventilation (used 85% of the year, improving on the original target of 65%), its internal offices are in higher demand than those facing outward. A mixed-use “vertical city” currently on the boards, the Moscow City Towers, will resemble “Commerzbank blown apart, turned inside out,” incorporating negative-pressure ventilation and energy systems that employ river water. For Aldar Central Market, a tower/souk complex in Abu Dhabi, the firm studied indigenous architecture to combine traditional heat-management strategies (sloping roofs, wind-catching chimneys) with modern photovoltaics and thermal tubes.

Similar structural and solar-energy-capturing strategies in the ill-fated 980 Madison tower ran into local opposition, but Haw promises the firm will return to the Upper East Side with a new design. Europeans have outpaced their U.S. counterparts in building green; Germany’s tight regulatory environment, in particular, makes eco-technology a priority in projects like the Reichstag, New German Parliament restoration, and the Free University in Berlin (the biomorphic “Berlin Brain”). The American architectural community’s focus on stylistic debates strikes Haw as frivolous, but he notes and hails rapid change on this side of the pond. Some years ago he remarked to colleagues, “We can’t tell the Americans what to do, but when they get it, they’ll get it big-time.” The Hearst Headquarters and similar buildings have proven Haw prophetic in that regard. Since Fuller and other Americans established green-design in the first place, it’s refreshing that we’re beginning to catch up.

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