Edward Mazria and the 2030 Challenge respond to the American Gas Association’s attack on Section 433.

Last week a House Appropriations Committee approved a spending bill for energy and water agencies and, tucked into it, was an amendment (sponsored by Representative Rodney Alexander, a Republican from Louisiana) that would essentially gut Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. That provision mandates the eventual elimination of fossil fuels by most federal buildings by 2030. An odd assortment of the usual suspects (think: evil oil companies), and some real head scratchers (companies at the forefront of energy efficiency) have banded together to kill Section 433. According the E&E Daily, the American Gas Association has been circulating a position paper entitled, “Fossil Fuel Elimination Rule: Issue Brief.” On Friday, Edward Mazria and the folks at the 2030 Challenge responded to the brief. It’s essential reading: http://www.architecture2030.org/enews/news_050412.html

Last week I received a press release from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) headlined, “Architects Oppose Effort to Repeal Energy Reduction Law for Federal Buildings.” This was in response to an action last week by the House Appropriations Committee, which approved the 2013 Energy and Water appropriations bill that included an amendment (sponsored by Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Republican from Louisiana) prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to implement Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

What is Section 433 and why should architects care? The provision is in many ways—all of them good, in my view—a radical one. It mandates a fossil fuel-free future for federal buildings. According to the law, all new federal buildings and older buildings undergoing renovations of more than $2.5 million are required to substantially cut their use of fossil fuels. The provision sets rigorous, targeted goals that culminate in a 100% reduction by 2030. For all practical purposes, this represents nothing less than the federal adoption of Edward Mazria’s 2030 Challenge.

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This morning I received a breathless (as in, accusatory! alarming!) press release from an organization called the National Civic Art Society. They’re the Washington-based group that’s orchestrated much of the opposition to Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial. “National Civic Art Society Calls Attention to Conspicuous Gap in the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s Meeting Minutes,” read the headline. The release—short on actual facts but long on incriminating conjecture—then went on to accuse the commission of secretly approving adoption of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence Program as the method of choosing a designer for the memorial, as if organizing a competition and inviting the best available architects were an indictable offense. Imagine that?

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New York University announced yesterday that it was scaling back its controversial plans for expansion by “almost a fifth.” Wow, now that’s a significant number, you might think, if you didn’t already know how these cynical games are played. The school had originally proposed adding 2.5-million-square feet of dorms, classrooms and commercial space to the two superblocks it owns south of Washington Square Park. A couple of new towers (designed by Toshiko Mori and Grimshaw Architects) were part of the plan.

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“Lost New York” by Nathan Silver or Marcia Reiss

This morning I received a strange “press release” in my inbox. It was from Nathan Silver, a frequent Metropolis contributor. Silver is the author of the seminal 1967 Lost New York, a book that was hugely influential in helping to spur the nascent historic preservation movement. Lost New York has been in print, continuously, since its publication four and a half decades ago.  An updated and expanded version appeared in 2000. Apparently, there’s now a new book with exactly the same title, on exactly the same subject, and it has the original author crying foul.

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I live on St. Charles Avenue, home to the famous New Orleans streetcar line. It’s home also (in addition to some insanely impressive houses) to one of the most unique urban spaces in America. The St. Charles Avenue streetcars run on a tree-lined strip known locally as “the neutral ground.” This is simply a “median” in other cities, but in New Orleans there is—inevitably—a more colorful name, with a whole bunch of history attached. The neutral ground is no exception. As Ann Nungesser writes on About.com:

“The big neutral ground in the middle of Canal Street in downtown New Orleans is apparently the reason all medians are called neutral grounds… . The French Creoles were living in the French Quarter and the new Americans were living on the other side of Canal St… . around the turn of the nineteenth century. There were tensions between the two groups who had different lifestyles, manners, and values, but Canal St was literally the neutral ground where they met. Even the streets that didn’t exist until long after those ethnic tensions [eased] have neutral grounds, never medians in New Orleans.”

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Leon Krier’s recent broadside against Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., had me thinking about the world’s most famous architect. For a man who created one of the most important buildings of the 20th century, Gehry, who turns 83 in a couple of days, has hit a fair number of potholes in recent years. Here’s a quick review of some of them (at least the ones I could think of off the top of my head):

December 2003: In February the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened to universal acclaim. The consensus? The creator of the Guggenheim Bilbao had done it again! Frank Gehry, as a global cultural figure, could not be riding any higher. That perception begins to change when the developer Bruce Ratner unveils his colossal Atlantic Yards proposal for downtown Brooklyn. It includes a new Frank Gehry–designed sports arena, along with Frank Gehry–designed commercial towers and apartment buildings. (Confession: I liked it, with a few caveats, but I didn’t live in the neighborhood.) The scheme lands on the doorstep of Brownstone Brooklyn with a resounding thud. In a very bad early sign, Robert Moses’s name is invoked.

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Although 2012 Game Changer Tim Duggan would never describe them that way, the series of events that led him into landscape architecture almost feels like some sort of divine intervention. Some time in the late 1990s, Duggan was working on a backyard project in suburban Kansas City (Tim’s late father was a concrete contractor). It involved moving three hundred pound stone stairs. A nosy neighbor walked over and asked, “Who did this design?” Duggan said, “I did” and showed him the drawing. “I hear you’re going back to K-State and I wanted to let you know that they have a pretty good program,” the neighbor said. “So if you want to move these rocks around the rest of your life, that’s fine. But if you want to draw those rocks and tell other people where to put them, then you should look into landscape architecture.” Read more…

On my second week in New Orleans, on a sweltering August day, I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, sponsored by the local AIA chapter. It was a dispiriting experience. While much of the city had seen its fortunes rise, the Lower Ninth, the neighborhood most affected by Hurricane Katrina, was still a kind of lunar landscape, desolate and depopulated. There were, however, two notable exceptions: the Holy Cross neighborhood (which had seen about half of its residents return) and Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development, a bright cluster of about 75 houses, designed by a veritable who’s who of contemporary architecture: Kiernan Timberlake, Shigeru Ban, Graft, Morphosis, as well as a number of notable local architects.

Make It Right remains an active construction site, the ultimate work in progress. Led here in New Orleans by Tom Darden, the organization has set an ambitious goal: to complete all 150 houses by 2014. (They plan to break ground on a Frank Gehry-designed house soon.) While working on the Game Changers profile of Tim Duggan, Make It Right’s landscape architect, I interviewed Darden. The 32-year-old executive director talked about the background of this seminal project, its unforeseen challenges, and its potential for global impact. An edited version of our talk, conducted at the Make It Right offices, follows.

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Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design for “Spectral Scriabin” at the Lincoln Center in November 2011. Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times

If you talk to lighting designers about new technology—as we did recently—it’s hard not to conclude that the incandescent bulb is headed for almost certain extinction. The reasons seem obvious: LEDs are a lot more energy efficient and much (much) longer lasting. What’s not to like? Well, for now, price. But once economics of scale are achieved and the cost of LEDs come down, then it’s simply a matter of time before the incandescent—at one time, a radical breakthrough in its own right—shuffles off into obsolescence.  And that has Jennifer Tipton, the legendary theatrical lighting designer, worried:

“My biggest concern is that the incandescent lamp will completely disappear, and with it the spectrum that it brings,” she told our Barbara Eldredge recently. “This means that all of the color that has been devised over my lifetime will no longer be the color that my eye recognizes. LEDs are great—they add to the toolbox. But if you look at the spectrum of an LED and the spectrum of an incandescent, they’re just fundamentally different. LEDs don’t produce that warm candlelight glow of the incandescent bulb at a low reading. Unfortunately, this has happened throughout the history of lighting. Each new lamp has been colder than the one before it. Lighting today is very, very cold, tilting almost to the inhuman. So I guess I’m old fashioned, like the people who complained about missing the glow of gaslights when electricity came in. But I do feel very strongly that the toolbox should be complete, and that you shouldn’t entirely give up one thing just to have another.”

Lighting for the Yale Repertory Theater’s recently-produced ‘Autumn Sonata’, designed by Jennifer Tipton. Photo: T. Charles Erickson/Yale Repertory Theatre

Related: In Leading Luminaries, we spoke to seven of our top lighting designers about new tools, new technologies, new challenges, and the way forward.

Jennifer Tipton is an award-winning lighting designer, internationally renowned for redefining the relationship between lighting and performance. She has collaborated for five decades with a veritable who’s who of the stage, with such companies as the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Dance, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and venues such as the Metropolitan Opera. Tipton has won two Tony awards, two Drama desk awards, and was awarded The Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize. Since 1991, she has served as an adjunct professor of lighting design at the Yale University School of Drama. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.