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…

Gone are the days when you have to trawl through Wikipedia and scores of architecture blogs to reliably research a building online. OpenBuildings.com is the Web site architecture geeks like me have been waiting for: it aims to collect everything there is to know about individual buildings into one mega-resource. Even better, the information is crowdsourced, Wikipedia-style. Readers can submit buildings to the site and upload images, additional information, or even their own opinions. Read more…

In keeping with President Obama’s “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance” executive order, we’ve seen a decisive push for greener federal buildings over the past year. It even appears that different agencies are actually vying with each other for the most sustainable buildings—NASA seems absolutely thrilled that the new Propellants North Administrative and Maintenance Facility, at the Kennedy Space Center, will be its greenest facility ever.

The building will be “a future hub for spacecraft fueling support and a storage facility for cryogenic fuel transfer equipment,” so I was expecting suitably fancy, futuristic technology. Instead, the design and construction team is gunning for a LEED Platinum rating with some good old-fashioned methods—recycling and Dumpster diving. Read more…

The proposed new State Center Complex in Baltimore

Last week, the Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun announced that it will be a consultant on both the State Center Complex in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Great River Park Project in St. Paul, Minnesota. As large-scale exercises in urban redesign, the two projects couldn’t possibly be more different, so Mithun’s multidisciplinary researchers and designers will definitely have their work cut out for them.

The State Center is a vital transit hub at the heart of Baltimore. When it was built in the 1960s, it replaced a vibrant urban neighborhood with a 28-acre, single-use campus of government office buildings.  Last year, the State Center began work on a 15-year, $1.5 billion project to undo that damage and re-invent itself. Mithun has been named as one of the design firms who will help integrate the State Center into the urban fabric, creating a mixed-use community through public-private partnerships. The proposed plan will introduce housing, retail, and parks while relocating the government offices currently occupying the complex. The transit hub will now also be a sustainable, walkable neighborhood, in keeping with the principles of New Urbanism.  Read more…

Oil Field #13, Taft, California, Edward Burtynsky

In last week’s Q&A with Susan Szenasy, the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest spoke of the role of art in raising awareness about ecological issues. In a similar vein, Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty is an art exhibit that hopes to do for sustainability what war photography does for the cause of world peace: shock us into caring. On view at the Exit Art gallery, in New York, until August 25th, the exhibit brings together the work of nine photographers whose viewfinders have discovered the disturbing beauty of ecological disasters. The images are haunting in a way that is surprisingly reminiscent of pictures of children in war zones. There is the same sense of innocence lost, bringing on an urge to do something.

Ecoaesthetic is the first show organized as part of an art initiative called Social Environmental Aesthetics (SEA).  Conceived by artist Papo Colo, the SEA hopes to build a permanent archive of art that addresses social and environmental issues, and will organize related exhibitions, lectures, and public events at Exit Art gallery.

Here is a little taste of the images on view at Ecoaesthetic: Read more…

La Marqueta, between 111th and 116th streets in Harlem, New York, was once the place to drive a bargain on plantains and avocados. But it never recovered from a slow decline in the 1970s, and several attempts to revive it have failed. Luckily for neighborhood residents, however, La Marqueta was built under the tracks of the Metro North rail line. That has given the Harlem Community Development Corporation (CDC) a rather bright idea. With the Center for an Urban Future, an independent think tank, the Harlem CDC is arguing that it is time to give Harlem its High Line.

The High Line has become a sort of urban-planning stereotype by now. Just tagging a project with the words “High Line” defines it instantly—community-led revival of defunct infrastructure for the creation of public space. The presence of an elevated, preferably abandoned rail line is, of course, vital. So the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, the Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia, and the Embankment in Jersey City have all lined up for their very own High Lines, but these projects are little more than replicas of what has already been achieved in New York. Thankfully, La Marqueta is actually an entirely different proposition, in spite of the overused descriptor. Read more…

Dr. Dickson Despommier’s ten-year-old vision of vertical farm facilities for urban areas received a shot in the arm last week. When the architectural firm Weber Thompson presented their design for the Newark Vertical Farm to city officials and local businessmen from Newark, New Jersey, the response was generally positive. This is probably because, unlike previous vertical-farm designs, Weber Thompson’s sane, grey, industrial-style facility looks like it can actually be built. Read more…

Ministers from 24 countries, representing 80 percent of global energy usage between them, put their heads together in Washington, D.C., last week at the first ever Clean Energy Ministerial. The big guys signed up to take action on things like carbon capture, clean energy, and electric vehicles, but their plans for the building industry are particularly interesting. For if all goes well with the Global Superior Energy Performance (GSEP) partnership that was announced on Tuesday, we might have to look at sustainable architecture in a new way.

In minister-speak, the GSEP partnership will be “a multi-country effort to create and harmonize nationally-accredited energy performance certification programs that encourage and reward strategic management of energy use and third-party verified energy reductions.” Essentially, Canada, the European Commission, France, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States have signed up to adopt a global standard not just for deciding how sustainable a building is, but also what the acceptable methods for reducing energy consumption will be. And this rating/reward system will not be LEED. Read more…

As of last month, travelers catching an American Airlines flight out of New York’s JFK airport have a new option for killing time before their boarding call: an 8-by-12-foot digital display, conveniently located between security and the departure gates, that lights up and announces “Welcome to the Smarter City!” every time someone walks within six feet of its huge, colorful screen.

Passersby who are suitably enticed to check out the gizmo will find an interactive touch-screen display showcasing IBM’s recent foray into large-scale, digital-technology-driven solutions for smarter, more livable cities. Specifically, users will be able to explore six neighborhoods of a hypothetical city, and learn about the various smart systems that IBM has imagined for them—things like coordinating police and fire department responses to emergencies by shared data systems, or centralizing health-care information to allow citizens easy access to their medical records. Bright and cheery touch icons lead the way to fancy animations, impressive graphs, and videos of mayors telling you how IBM solutions have transformed their cities.

Nifty stuff—but since when has IBM cared about smart cities? Read more…

From left: Andy Warhol, David Whitney, Philip Johnson, Dr. John Dalton, and Robert A. M. Stern in the Glass House in 1964. Photo: David McCabe

Writing 24 years ago in Architectural Digest, Vincent Scully called Philip Johnson’s Glass House “the most sustained cultural salon that the US had ever seen.” Within the glass walls of that modernist marvel, people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert A. M. Stern battled wits over the endless martinis supplied by Johnson and his partner, David Whitney. Now, thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the School of Visual Arts (SVA), that vibrant discussion continues at glasshouseconversations.org.

After the architect’s death in 2005, the National Trust realized that it would be meaningless to preserve the building without attempting to preserve the culture of inquiry and debate that animated it for so many years. In 2008 and 2009, they held two events under the new Glass House Conversations program, inviting cultural, business, and educational leaders to sit around and have a chat, just like the old days. (Metropolis’s editor-in-chief, Susan Szenasy, co-moderated the conversation in 2008; watch the video here.) This year, the Philip Johnson Glass House teamed up with SVA’s graduate programs in interaction design and design criticism to update that format for the age of Web 2.0 and social networking. Read more…