Bicycle parking in front of David Baker’s house, managed by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

San Francisco has recently sprouted an increasing number of clever and improvisational public spaces. Every one of them was designed to be temporary, with the possibility of becoming permanent. And all of them have been discreetly carved out of the city’s 25 percent surface area that’s normally reserved for cars, not people. Last week urban designer Andres Power was the first person ever given a “Street Champion” award, at a party thrown for the Great Streets Project by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and architect David Baker. The party raised nearly $6,500 for the Great Streets project, and raffled off a new PUBLIC bike. A photo auction that included an image by Tim Griffith, who provided the cover for Metropolis last month, raised $2,200.

 The story of how these spaces, both temporal (Sunday Streets) and physical (Pavement to Parks ) come to pass is a saga with many heroes, and a few villains. One space, Castro Commons, is now a permanent park. After the event, I caught up with Power and asked him about city politics, community input, and other matters.

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Managing crowds isn’t easy anywhere, least of all in the anarchic world of the Internet. Yet, ever since Jeff Howe first coined the word in Wired magazine, we’ve instinctively known that “crowdsourcing” would someday be the next big thing in design. The only problem was figuring out how. As Tropicana and Johnson & Johnson found out last year, crowds are very good at expressing dissatisfaction with bad design. But can their insights be harnessed to actually produce good design?  Last month, three mega design consultancies decided it was time to find out.

The least daring of them all is Continuum’s Open for Branding project. The Design Museum, Boston, is an unconventional client, to say the least – the nomadic museum has no permanent building and no real ‘collection.’ When they approached Continuum for re-branding, the project begged for an unconventional approach. Read more…

On a recent visit to Chicago, I ducked into the light court at The Rookery on the corner of Adams and LaSalle. I do this every time I’m in this city on the lake, because I love the space. As do others, apparently. While office vacancy rates are high around the country, at The Rookery only a small percentage of the space is available; according to the building’s website only 5,367 square feet are looking for tenants in this 12 story late 19th Century building where one floor alone can contain some 20,000 square feet. Read more…

A new trend is emerging as the baby boom grows older. Some homes and communities are designed to allow residents to age-in-place, or for young people to begin their lives in a house that can, eventually, be adapted as their mobility and accessibility needs change over time. These forward-thinking models provide an excellent vision for the future of housing. They can also serve as inspiration for improvements in consumer goods and the design of spaces, beginning today. Read more…

Today, at noon, there were 91,700 entries posted on New Orleans five years after Katrina. Everyone from President Obama to Sandra Bullock got mentioned. But of the thousands of articles, films, blogs, newscasts I skimmed through, not one architect or designer made the media’s list of interviewees. Yet New Orleans’ land use, planning, building and rebuilding—those physical interventions that are needed to create places for people, all of the city’s people—provide an opportunity to make the built environment part of our national discussion.

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The form of Duck-and-Cover produces the big box logo from a Google-Earth point of view, and a verdant garden at street-level, image courtesy RSAUD

Starting this Sunday, August 29, when the Venice Biennale opens (and runs through November 21), there will be a lot of chatter about what feeds architecture and design thinking in 2010. Here, we’re kicking off the discussion with a look behind the scenes at the U.S. Pavilion. Its curators, Jonathan D. Solomon and Michael Rooks named their show Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice. The title, they say, is meant to evoke our “can-do mentality”. Solomon, acting head of the department of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, for instance, starts his catalog essay by recalling the work of engineers who figured out how to save the Apollo 13 mission, urging architects to act as “initiators” who collaborate with other professionals to create a “charged atmosphere of solution-finding”. Could this be Horatio Alger meets Bob the Builder? No, it’s more like a call to action to solve some fierce, global problems: flooding, sprawl, lack of housing, poor access to fresh food and clean air. I spoke to Solomon and Rooks, who is Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum, just as they were about to fly to Venice to mount the show. Read more…

This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), our federal government’s attempt to ensure the civil rights of U.S citizens with disabilities. It requires that all public spaces and programs be accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities. This, of course, is a commendably idealistic standard. But as anyone who navigates the real world (either with a disability, or as in my case, with someone who has a disability) will tell you, the promise of the well-intentioned law has come true only partially. There’s much more work to be done! While the ADA has been a good start, and now that the architecture, building, and planning industries have gotten the ADA design standards down fairly well, it’s time for progress to be made in other areas of design. Read more…

In the wake of a collapsed construction industry, I’m constantly looking for good news coming out of the architecture and interior design industry. So when a note came from Pollack Architecture about the firm turning 25 this August, I reached out to founder Richard Pollack, FAIA, FIIDA, to give me hope. Known in the industry as a knowledgeable, committed, yet easy going guy with a great sense of humor, I asked Rich to talk about the current market and the future of his respected firm recently recognized as one among Interior Design Magazine’s Top 100 Design Giants. With offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Delhi and with a commitment to nurturing the special skills of the new generation of designers (recent hires include a junior designer with a dual degree in architecture and business), we had something to talk about. Read more…

Is there a blog, a website, a magazine, a book….that hasn’t yet told the story of Auburn University’s legendary Rural Studio? In the Metropolis archives alone, there’s a piece on the new pragmatism afoot these days at the popular Design-Build Masters Program, where Krystal Chang went to study construction but found inspiration in “unanticipated gestures” like “a neighbor offering to help, [the client] feeding us watermelons and muscadines, and most of all, the feeling that you have made someone’s life just a bit better….” Now everyone can experience this oft-told story and see its characters come alive in a PBS documentary, Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio, to be aired nationwide on August 23. As you watch, you may be struck by the chasm that exists between our architecture heroes (Peter Eisenman’s remarks are especially revealing) and those who think architecture has social and environmental relevance. Do we need to takes sides? I don’t think so. Great architecture has social and environmental relevance in the 21st century!

The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…