Event: Not Business as Usual: Community Board Round-Up
Location: Center for Architecture, 08.18.10
Speakers: Shaan Khan — Director of Community Affairs and Constituent Services, Office of the Manhattan Borough President; David Paul Helpern, FAIA, LEED AP — Founding Principal, Helpern Architects, & Member, Community Board 8, Manhattan
Moderator: Margery H. Perlmutter, Esq., AIA — Partner, Bryan Cave, & Director for Legislative Affairs, AIANY Board of Directors
Organizers: AIANY “Not Business as Usual” initiative
Sponsors: Chief Manufacturing; Lutron Electronics; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Architects bring a highly appropriate skill set to the public sector, said land-use attorney and AIANY Director for Legislative Affairs Margery Perlmutter, Esq., AIA, and her fellow panelists: not only technical expertise but a capacity for negotiation and problem-solving when the problems are complex and the affected parties diverse. New York’s community boards, populated by dedicated appointees and charged with influential (though not decisive) advisory roles in land-use decisions, are an ideal instrument for applying those skills, and AIANY is actively encouraging the city’s architects not only to work with the boards but to serve on them. The latest panel in the “Not Business as Usual” (NBAU) series offered a practical primer on the history, structure, and function of this segment of city government.

Shaan Khan, director of community affairs and constituent services at Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office, presented a rundown of how community boards have evolved since their origin in 1951 as advisory groups, and on how they operate today as sovereign agencies under the 1975 City Charter. Each of the city’s 59 boards (12 in Manhattan) includes 50 volunteer members, half appointed by the borough presidents (BP) outright and half after City Council nominations; the members represent important demographic constituencies and good-government groups and serve staggered two-year terms.

Members are required to attend monthly meetings observing parliamentary Robert’s Rules of Order, plus meetings of committees on major areas such as land use, transit, zoning, and education and topical subcommittees (a few boards have “green” subcommittees; the Upper East Side’s Board 8 has one on the Second Avenue subway). With 300 vacancies opening up each year in Manhattan alone, BPs are constantly looking for citizens with detailed local knowledge and community commitment. “Public membership,” with topical input but no full-board voting role, is another way to contribute.

After 45 years in the neighborhood and 40 years making professional presentations to boards, David Helpern, FAIA, was appointed to the Upper East Side’s Board 8 in 2007; he has participated in deliberations over everything from awnings and sidewalk cafés to institutional expansions and the controversial Foster + Partners tower above the Parke-Bernet Galleries. “Amazingly,” he notes, “there are people who do not realize how accessible the community boards are.” He advises architects presenting to a board always to make their case on the merits and never to laud their own expertise over the views of laypeople. Debates can be passionate, particularly in ULURP, but he has found his colleagues impressively knowledgeable and civil: “We do not always agree, but we always part friends.” (See Helpern’s article “The Hottest Seat in Town” in OCULUS, Spring 2010, pp. 30-31)

Urging architects to scrutinize the quality of their argumentation, graphics, and technology, Perlmutter recommends making community board presentations an opportunity to influence debate, not a mundane chore. She observed that professionals who understand cities on a physical level can offer an informed voice that officials hear all too rarely. “Architects are not involved in politics enough… 100% of what goes on in [city] politics has to do with architecture ultimately, or urbanism.” AIANY’s contact person for architects interested in seeking board positions is Policy Director Jay Bond.

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

Event: Bicycles as Transport: From Alternative to Mainstream
Location: Center for Architecture, 08.12.10
Speakers: Jack Schmidt — Director, Transportation Division, NYC Department of City Planning (DCP); Jon Orcutt — Director of Policy, NYC Department of Transportation (DOT); Caroline Samponaro — Director of Bicycle Advocacy, Transportation Alternatives
Moderator/Introduction: Robert Eisenstat, AIA, LEED AP — Assistant Chief Architect, Design Division, Engineering Department, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Organizers: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee as part of the exhibition “Our Cities Ourselves”

Bike lane on the Grand Concourse.

Jessica Sheridan

Few changes in NYC’s built environment in recent years have catalyzed as much optimism, or provoked as much opposition, as the steps taken by the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) to reclaim space for bicycles. For a low infrastructural investment (paint, concrete, and signage, plus planners’ labors), the city is restoring balance among all forms of transportation. Cycling’s mode share is rising sharply, thanks in large part to the new lanes, racks, and parking rules (see “DCP’s New Balancing Act on Bike Parking,” by Bill Millard, e-Oculus, 01.13.09), but it still remains around 1% — not yet high enough that most citizens view biking as a norm.

Cycling promotion is no fad, Jack Schmidt of the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP) pointed out: it’s the fruit of a planning process that began with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991 (an audience member also linked it to the 1979 bike-lane experiment under Mayor Ed Koch). Schmidt and colleagues generate the quantitative studies that inform policy and infrastructural choices, finding how many subway stations in each borough lack bike parking, or how many citizens perform daily “peripheral travel,” going somewhere other than the central business district. City government is moving forward on innovations like NYCyclistNet, a route-planning tool that incorporates feedback options so that cyclists can comment on the system’s output and improve it.

DOT’s Jon Orcutt presented data linking absolute decreases in injury counts with rises in the number of cyclists. Urban biking gets safer the more people do it, and the spread of protected lanes increases the number of potential riders. With more than 200 miles of new lanes in three years, plus public bike-sharing in the works, the city is approaching a point where residents can dispense with driving for short trips in most neighborhoods, though large areas (particularly in eastern Queens) remain underserved.

In NYC, as Transportation Alternatives’ Caroline Samponaro pointed out, the pedestrian is king, rightfully and numerically. Advocacy groups have driven measurable progress in five areas affecting mode choice: protected space, bike sharing, parking, bike culture, and popular opinion. The critical channel is that last one: convincing more cyclists to follow laws and habits that promote pedestrian safety (as in the “Biking Rules” campaign), and convincing more pedestrians that cyclists are allies, not antagonists. Perceptions in this area rarely follow statistics or reality. That 1% mode share will approach 10% only when cyclists and cyclophobes communicate more and better; events like this panel offer exactly such an opportunity for constructive conversation.

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

Event: Active Living Research and NYC Active Design Summit
Location: Center for Architecture, 07.28.10
Speakers: Jim Sallis, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University, & Program Director, Active Living Research; Karen Lee, MD — NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH); Jon Orcutt — NYC Department of Transportation (DOT); Shampa Chanda — NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD); Alexandros Washburn, AIA — NYC Department of City Planning (DCP); Adena Long — NYC Department of Parks; Andrew Rundle, Dr.PH — Physical Activity Epidemiologist, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Joyce Lee, AIA, LEED AP — NYC Office of Management and Budget; David Burney, FAIA — Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC); Lourdes Hernández-Cordero, Dr.PH — Clinical Sociomedical Sciences Researcher, Mailman School, Columbia; Mindy Fullilove, MD — Clinical Psychiatry/Public Health Researcher, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Mailman School, Columbia; Kevin Nadal, Ph.D. — Multicultural Psychology Researcher, City University of New York
Organizers: Active Living Research, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; AIANY

Courtesy of NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

After five Fit City conferences and the Active Design Guidelines (ADG) publication, researchers nationwide are exploring the relation of urban design to epidemic “diseases of energy” that are reaching the point where institutional status seems appropriate. The recent half-day summit drew attention to policy and infrastructural expressions of the city’s commitment to active design and these efforts’ basis in research. What began with common sense, good intentions, and foundation grants is now a movement picking up steam in New York and beyond.

While not a public meeting, the Active Living Research (ALR) Summit included one announcement of potential public interest: DDC Commissioner David Burney, FAIA, citing the overwhelming response to the ADG, proposed a new Center for Active Design, a nonprofit organization that would launch in spring 2012, when current funding for the ADG team expire. Burney and other officials highlighted current and projected efforts to reshape civic space to foster healthier living. Along with pedestrian-plaza reclamations and bike lanes, various agencies are conducting behind-the-scenes activities such as “food desert” mapping to guide City Planning zoning-incentive decisions (the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health program, or FRESH). Volunteers partnering with the Parks Department have built mountain biking and bicycle motocross facilities at long-neglected Highbridge Park; when the High Bridge reopens in 2012 or 2013, linking Manhattan and Bronx bike paths, Washington Heights may become the city’s center for extreme sports.

The city is also laying groundwork for a public/private partnership on bike sharing. Asked about the French experience with Vélib rentals, DOT’s Jon Orcutt noted that the system’s widely publicized problems generate useful feedback about ways to fine-tune details of pricing and vandal-deterring design. Aware of the mixed results in Paris but also the positive effects in multiple cities, NYC is weighing potential vendors carefully before setting an announcement date.

In briefer talks, ALR’s participants presented epidemiologic and sociological findings on a cluster of interrelated topics: walkability studies, ethnic-group correlations with views of physical activity as a cultural norm, and an “intervention block” reversing blight from the 1980s crack-cocaine trade.

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

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 motorized movement 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: Our Cities, Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life (Media Roundtable)
Location: Center for Architecture, 06.24.10
Speakers: Michael Sorkin — Distinguished Professor of Architecture & Director, Graduate Program in Urban Design, City College of New York & Principal, Michael Sorkin Studio; Elizabeth H. Berger — President, Alliance for Downtown New York; Walter Hook — Executive Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP); Norman Garrick — Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Connecticut & Co-chair, Transportation Task Force, Congress for the New Urbanism & Trustee, Tri-state Transportation Campaign
Moderator: David Owen — Staff Writer, The New Yorker & Author, Green Metropolis (Riverhead, 2009)
Organizers: Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in collaboration with AIANY

2030 vision of urban transport in Ahmedabad, India by Bimal Patel and HCP Design and Project Management.

Bimal Patel and HCP Design and Project Management, courtesy AIANY

In the context of the BP oil spill and the nation’s seemingly ineradicable dependence on the same toxic substance, the possibility of reconfiguring urban space in ways that help restore environmental balance begins to look less like utopia and more like an imperative. Owen and others have been making the green-urbanist case for years, offering the combination of urban density and sustainable design as a logical, desirable response to global warming and all the other ill effects of a petroleum-dependent economy. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and AIANY are now joining forces to bring this case to the public in concrete, accessible forms.

For “Our Cities, Ourselves,” an exhibition currently on view at the Center for Architecture, the ITDP has engaged architects in 10 cities to translate green-urbanist principles into buildable forms, with an eye on realization by 2030 and an emphasis on transportation systems. ITDP Executive Director Walter Hook laid out the history of these efforts along with the increasing dangers ahead if large developing nations recreate 20th-century America’s transportation monoculture on a vaster scale. The plausible future, he said, will either be an ecological nightmare scenario (some 390 million cars in China by 2030 and a temperature increase beyond that which scientists claim the planet can tolerate), or a series of site-specific transformations that draw on local talent and traditions to correct developmental damage and promote low-impact forms of transportation.

Organized along a set of “Ten Principles for Sustainable Transport,” the designs in the exhibition build on ideas already known to produce results in revitalizing damaged urban areas. The exhibition’s title evokes the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s medical/sexual manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, broadly influential since the 1970s in clarifying connections between personal matters and their political aspects. It combines this progressive tone with common-sense appeals reminding viewers that the automotive era is a brief segment of urban history — destructive, but by no means irreversible.

The architects have chosen different strategies and scales for Ahmedabad, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Dar es Salaam, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mexico City, NYC, and Rio de Janeiro. Projects range from HCP Design and Project Management’s construction of a public square in Ahmedabad — a site where any significant new civic space amounts to a cultural innovation — to the transformation of Lower Manhattan into an auto-free “ecozone” by Michael Sorkin Studio.

Sorkin emphasized that no single technology solves the problems of cities. Lower Manhattan is blessed not only with a high percentage of transit use, but with a resilient “medieval” street plan. Removing the FDR Drive below the Manhattan Bridge, along with its associated infrastructure, would open up surprising amounts of space for civic functions. Elizabeth Berger of the Downtown Alliance expressed agreement in principle on reinventing the business district as a greener, transit-intensive district with an increasing residential component; this development philosophy is good for local business, she said. Her group’s new plan for Water Street as a rescaled, pedestrian-friendly boulevard meshes with the Sorkin vision, but she pulled up short of a complete ban on cars, claiming it would isolate the neighborhood.

New Urbanist engineer Norman Garrick placed the range of changes in a global context, offering Zurich’s integrated approach to transit as an alternative to large-scale motorization that he has seen in China and Jamaica. Owen also emphasized the astonishing changes occurring in China, where “the Manhattan” is a unit of scale and 10 new Manhattan-sized urban formations are on the way. Development on such a scale and pace, he noted, makes good design an urgent challenge: build a high-performing city, a New York or a Bogotá, and it will be emulated. The key question may be whether such places can be emulated widely enough and fast enough.

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

Event: Facing the Crisis: Continuity and Change in Global Architecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 05.05.10
Keynote Speaker: Kenneth Frampton — Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia GSAPP
Speakers: Richard A. Cook, AIA — Partner, Cook + Fox Architects; Jordan Gruzen, FAIA — Partner, Gruzen Samton; Thomas Scheel — Vilhelm Lauritzen A/S; Julien de Smedt — JDS Architects
Moderator: Peter V. Noonan, AIA — Principal, McInturff Architects
Welcomes: Rick Bell, FAIA, Executive Director, AIANY; Torben A. Gettermann, Ambassador, Consul General of Denmark; Marianne Ibler — Architect & Publisher, Archipress
Organizers: Center for Architecture; Consulate General of Denmark; Archipress M

Formal clarity, high performance, social purpose, and ecological awareness make Danish Modernism a beacon to the global design community during today’s combined environmental and economic troubles. It’s a different world now, nearly nine decades after Vilhelm Lauritsen founded his firm VLA: tightly interconnected on an intercontinental scale, acutely aware of historical burdens, open to certain forms of optimism. If the idea that we can design our way out of today’s crises is asking too much, mitigation strategies can still draw on traditions with a record of converting crisis to opportunity.

The four firms represented at this joint Danish-American event, one older and one newer firm from each nation, explored the dialectic between tradition and crisis. The event doubled as a prelaunch book reception for Global Danish Architecture 4: Crisis & Tradition by Kenneth Frampton, John Cava, and Marianne Ibler (Aarhus: Archipress, 2009; U.S. release anticipated later this year).

It’s a truism that what was once avant-garde is now venerable tradition, but some traditions are more adaptable than others. Keynote speaker Kenneth Frampton navigated the complex “Zen-like, gnomic” sense of tradition in an overview of 20th-century and contemporary Danish work, quoting Catalan philosopher Eugenio D’Ors (”all that is not tradition is plagiarism”), and exploring architectural implications of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of tension between “rupture, the avant-garde gesture” and the normative. Emphasizing Danish academic standards, linkages to landscape, and craft traditions, particularly brickwork (e.g., the expressionist Grundtvig Church, begun in 1921 by Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint and finished by his son Kaare Klint in 1940), Frampton located Danish design’s strength in “a delicate precision which you could think of as normative,” linked to handicrafts that industrial methods never quite extinguished.

Variations on these norms formed a common thread among the featured discussions. Thomas Schell presented the past and present work of Lauritsen’s VLA, from a succession of airport terminals and embassies through the Folkets Hus or People’s Palace (now a music venue, still bearing its exuberant three-story frieze), and the organically striated Tuborg Waves office complex; the longevity of VLA’s designs reflects the conviction that “architecture is an act of love, not a stage set.” OMA alumnus and former Ingels partner Julien de Smedt described himself as “born with a brick in his stomach” like all his countrymen: he’s Belgian, and thus an improbable representative of Denmark, but his young firm is punching well above its weight, winning more commissions after the crash than before it, from innovative housing and recreational facilities to an iconic ski jump at Holmenkollen, Norway.

Common ideals linked Copenhagen and New York well before Jan Gehl’s consultancy with the city’s Department of Transportation. Richard Cook, AIA’s discussion of sustainable technologies at Cook + Fox’s One Bryant Park, the porous and flexible Live Work Home in Syracuse, and elsewhere drew on another tradition: that of America’s oldest representative democracy, the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee (”people of the longhouse”) nations, emphasizing seven-generation planning that respects natural cycles and resources. One Bryant Park implements this philosophy through passive-solar heating, water and heat recapture, nocturnal ice generation, and other high-performance strategies adding up to an estimated 77% thermal efficiency (reversing American buildings’ average of 73% heat wasted).

Wrapping up the proceedings, Jordan Gruzen, FAIA, profiled six decades’ worth of Gruzen Samton buildings demonstrating the firm’s commitment to “sustainability before it became the right thing to do on its own.” Its design for below-grade Central Park stables during the Lindsay administration, had it been built, would have been the first green municipal structure, decades before the term became current. Realized projects such as Horizon House in Fort Lee, NJ (with all apartments facing the Hudson and the morning sun, instead of double-loaded corridors), the Northtown and Southtown UDC residences on Roosevelt Island, reuse projects such as El Museo del Barrio, and more recent collaborations with Morphosis at Cooper Union and with Foster + Partners on a new Yale School of Management building all evince a knack for common-sense detailing and whatever bold strokes a site requires. Though American eyes often turn to Denmark and other European nations for advances in sustainable design, Gruzen, Cook, and their colleagues are living evidence of a lineage worth emulating right here at home.

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)

Multiple topical panels reinforced a common theme of data-intensive pragmatism. An example is the public-domain data policy described by Christopher Dempsey, the director of innovation for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), treating transit information like weather forecasts, not trade secrets or state property, and making it freely available to third-party developers large and small. Within one hour after MassDOT released five pilot bus schedules, Dempsey reported, someone had added them to Google Earth; in a week someone had developed a widget delivering arrival times to people’s desktops; and by a month someone had built countdown signage at no cost to the DOT. (The MTA has recently taken a similar step for NYC transit apps.) Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts will reliably develop useful tools in an open-source climate, it appears, provided the raw material of research remains simple, accessible, and non-proprietary.

Other highlighted projects, ranging from Zipcar and the NYC Department of Transportation’s traffic studies, to the Port Authority’s advanced freight-control systems and breakthroughs in “radical housing” by Common Ground, the Rose Companies, NYCHA, and activist/theorist Jerilyn Perine, offered wide variations on the Assembly’s unifying theme: that the challenges of urban density call for connectivity, bottom-up idea generation, an across-the-board end to organizational siloing, and, in many areas, the pervasion of urban space by technology.

Yet the more information that is generated through social media and other new tools, the more planners and other citizens will be able to evaluate a controversial argument raised during the morning plenary by RPA’s Director of the Center for Urban Innovation Julia Vitullo-Martin. She held that “the most important technological principle for cities is that George Orwell was wrong.” Contrary to Peter Huber’s claim, in Orwell’s Revenge, “that technology would increase the authoritarian power of government,” she said, “in fact what’s happened, as we all know, is the opposite: increasing electronic technology [increases] devolution, democratization, and decentralization.” Many also know that grappling with Orwell is a risky endeavor; it may be an understatement to note that, regardless of the effects of proliferating CCTV cameras on London crime, an untroubled acceptance of universal-surveillance conditions was far from unanimous on the panel or around the room.

The Assembly also put a few of the internal contradictions of futurist urbanism in plain sight, in the form of a Tesla plug-in roadster and model charging equipment. While it may be an undeniable part of the future’s resource-management solution, and a lovely bit of eye candy, most attendees were too engaged in conversation to ogle over the car. In this crowd, networking and idea-swapping were the real draw.

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

Event: The New Urbanism of Mayor Lindsay: The Downtown Scene
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.31.10
Speakers: Hilary Ballon, Ph.D. — Deputy Vice Chancellor, NYU Abu Dhabi, & University Professor of Art History and Archaeology, NYU
Organizers: AIANY; NYU Grey Art Gallery; Fales Library

John Lindsay campaigning for mayor in Jamaica, Queens, 1965.

Photograph by Katrina Thomas, courtesy of the photographer, via the Museum of the City of New York

Casual readers of Hilary Ballon’s title could be fooled twice: there’s nothing here about the 1960s “downtown scene” in the Warhol sense, and no references to The New Urbanism as advocated later by Andrés Duany, FAIA. But a new kind of urbanism (uncapitalized) was brewing in those heady days under Mayor John Lindsay. An approach to policy that brings architects into public service and recognizes the critical effects of design on the quality of life, these concepts are now familiar enough in city-planning circles to seem transparent. However, when Lindsay took office in 1966, in the twilight of the Robert Moses era, they were innovations. They are among the many changes that appear, through historical excavations of Hilary Ballon, Ph.D., to be valuable long after the Lindsay era was dead and buried. Ballon’s work on Moses (editing Robert Moses and the Modern City along with Kenneth Jackson) did a great deal to complicate and rescue the reputation of that pivotal figure; she is now bringing a comparably balanced perspective to a very different metropolitan icon.

Mentioning the phrase “quality of life” in the same breath with Lindsay’s name is a guaranteed provocation for those who associate him with transit and garbage strikes and rising crime rates. Lindsay’s leadership is overdue for a reappraisal; it’s about to get one not only from Ballon, but from the Museum of the City of New York, which will mount an exhibition called “The Lindsay Years” this May, along with a day-long symposium, a book edited by Sam Roberts of the Times, and a WNET documentary. Lindsay couldn’t deflect every social storm that battered NY, but some of his less-heralded accomplishments helped the city eventually become, once again, not only governable but worth inhabiting.

Lindsay took the heat for, among other things, a host of problems he’d inherited from predecessor Robert Wagner. Largely unrecognized in this picture is the paradigm shift he generated by making the design of public spaces an institutional priority. “Moses didn’t regard design as a matter of public policy,” Ballon noted. At the peak of his power, even some of the strongest legacies of “the good Moses,” such as his myriad playgrounds, took a cookie-cutter approach to design. Under Lindsay, whose campaign made urban design a prominent component of his platform, the city got Richard Dattner, FAIA’s Adventure Playground, a park-use policy under August Heckscher and Thomas Hoving, Hon. AIA, that made Central Park a “space for happenings,” and an explicit recognition of pedestrians’ right to street space. We got Battery Park City, built on downtown landfill, with new rules preserving visual corridors and pedestrian paths. Most important in the long run, we got the City Planning Commission’s Urban Design Group, an architectural and infrastructural brain trust that pioneered tools such as bonus zoning and air-rights transfer, all guided by a philosophy of using zoning, as Ballon said, “to create public benefits, not just restrict harms.”

Though Moses was largely defanged by then, it must be noted, we also nearly got his long-planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (LoMEx). Lindsay first campaigned against it, but after taking office reversed course and supported it, assigning the Urban Design Group to come up with a plan less intrusive than Moses’s massive elevated roadway. The group brought architect Shadrach Woods back to NY from housing-project work in France in 1968, “committed,” as Richard Buford’s invitation letter declared, “to the proposition that the expressway not be a scar on the body of the city.” Woods produced feasibility studies incorporating immense sociological data on SoHo residents and businesses, all aimed at mitigating neighborhood conflicts and preserving the area’s cast-iron architecture. Even in attempting to implement LoMEx, Ballon noted, Lindsay’s team thought progressively about how it might be a positive influence, a mixed-use project including replacement housing, not just another neighborhood-killing car conduit like the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

Veterans of Lindsay’s City Hall and the Urban Design Group spoke spontaneously as well, including Jordan Gruzen, FAIA; Terrance Williams; Lance Jay Brown, FAIA; and former mayoral chief of staff Jay Kriegel. All recalled the era as a formative period in their careers and an unsung heyday in the city’s development. Ballon quoted Ada Louise Huxtable, Hon. AIA, writing of Lindsay’s group in a 1971 Times piece with her customary prescience, hailing “a revolution going on in American cities: in conceptual, legal, and administrative aspects of zoning that sets such innovative patterns of land use that it will change whole parts of cities as we know them. Don’t write off the revolution because it is being made by men in business suits at City Hall.”

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)

Miami’s Marine Stadium, whose attractions included speedboat racing and concerts, offers a happier story. Closed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 but structurally sound, this origami-like design by Cuban architect Hilario Candela of the local firm Pancoast, Ferendino, Grafton, Skeels, and Burnham brings the forms of Pier Luigi Nervi, Max and Enrique Borges, Oscar Niemeyer, and others to Biscayne Bay on a vast scale. Amid conflicting estimates of renovation costs and an attempt at demolition using Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, Jorge Hernandez reported, the community has rallied along with the WMF, Docomomo, and others to oppose a “heavy-handed…. ridiculous” retail-oriented plan that would remove the stadium, then a second plan preserving only the grandstand. The inseparable grandstand-basin combination attained local historic designation without the approval of the city as owner; further engineering studies, charrettes, and the election of a preservation-minded mayor all point to eventual success in preserving this icon of borderless hemispheric culture.

In Holmdel, NJ, Eero Saarinen’s elliptical Bell Labs research complex strikes a deliberately lower profile — original occupant AT&T preferred to hunker down out of public view — but helped set the standards for sleek corporate campuses in its day. AT&T’s successor Alcatel-Lucent moved out in 2007, and potential developer Preferred Unlimited planned to raze the buildings in favor of high-end residential, a corporate park, or other profitable uses. Maximized ratables outweigh historic and architectural considerations for township officials, commented Michael Calafati, AIA, and NJ’s higher-level governance is weak, but the restoration question at least remains open. New developer Somerset has welcomed a preservation charrette; Calafati describes the firm as “not perfect, but one we can have a conversation with.”

The afternoon panel, “Sustaining Operations in a Modern Building,” struck more confident notes, discussing the ongoing experiments with roof-panel materials and successive structural renovations at Scottsdale’s Taliesin West and the robust inverted ziggurat of Atlanta’s Marcel Breuer library. Ahead of its time in anticipating the broadened functions of a post-Carnegie-era library as well as defying local preferences for columns and coziness, the building provides essential community space at a transit-accessible downtown location. It is a flak magnet over issues unrelated to its operations (e.g., gatherings of the homeless), and Fulton County voters passed a 2008 bond referendum calling for an alternate central site along with branch expansions, but the amount has been reduced, says director John Szabo, who believes finances ensure any replacement is “a long way from happening.” Even if it does, Breuer’s building will be a candidate for conversion to an academic facility or museum, though vigilance and stepped-up public relations are critical.

Much of the day’s discussion analyzed why some preservation efforts capture the public’s imagination, and why Chicago’s never quite did. Panelists agreed that popular enthusiasm is essential to save a building. The Olympic bid had many Chicagoans wearing “rose-painted” glasses; hospitals in general can inspire more fear than affection; Chicago development invokes the tendencies for clout to outweigh reason and accountability. Despite Chicagoans’ famous knowledgeability about their architectural local heroes, many were unaware of Gropius’s involvement. Others simply “hate Modernism.”

One recurring theme was whether Modernist buildings are, as one questioner put it, “cuddly.” To part of the population, they never will be, and their other attributes (being breathtaking, structurally honest, well-programmed, or provocative) won’t matter. The difficult yet essential task, said Carl Stein, is educating citizens to distinguish between truly Modernist buildings — serious in intention, purposeful in advancing ideas, active in social contexts — and mere object-buildings in a modern style. Particularly as mid-century and later works approach the 50-year standard for landmark eligibility (a standard that many found open to rethinking), Stein emphasized a frank awareness that “one reason Modernism has been under heavy attack is… the idea we can solve things by conscious action.” What these buildings are up against is often not just an antipathy to bèton brut but a deeper antipathy to rationality itself.

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

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.