Zuccotti Park, before and after Occupy Wall Street, image via Curbed NY

If you believe that good and bad intentions eventually circle around to some sort of cosmic resolution—karma, if you will—then the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park are sweet indeed. Why? Zuccotti Park (named for John Zuccotti, former deputy mayor, former planning commissioner, chairman of the real estate behemoth Brookfield Properties, and all around operator—a deep pocketed capitalist, if you will) is one of those strange New York anomalies: privately owned public space. The park, which until the protesters arrived was very much under the radar, is the product of a 1961 zoning ordinance that gave developers (like John Zuccotti) extra height in exchange for the creation of plazas, parks and atriums, which they were in turn responsible for maintaining and keeping open to the public. The Plaza Bonus, as it was called, inspired more than 500 of these hybrid spaces. Some, like the atrium at the IBM Building, were genuine public amenities; others were altogether forlorn and “parks” in name only.

Zuccotti Park (originally called Liberty Plaza Park—think barren and windswept) was created in 1969, when U.S. Steel was given an extra 500,000 square feet of office space at nearby 1 Liberty Plaza . And guess who owns the 54-story building and adjacent park today? Brookfield Properties. So it all ties together rather neatly: the protesters were allowed to gather in Zuccotti Park because the Plaza Bonus that created it allowed them to.

Somewhere Holly Whyte is smiling.

Related: Martin Pedersen explains the fallout of the plaza bonus in this Metropolis film, My Banal Neighborhood.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

It is no exaggeration to say that Steven Jobs may have been the most important person in the history of design, but of course he was not a designer. I’ve come to think of him, instead, as the world’s greatest art director, the ultimate end user, a one-man focus group for cool. His famously secretive design department (quick, name another Apple designer besides Jonathan Ive? You can’t), was dedicated in large part to one exceedingly challenging task: pleasing Steve. He dreamed, they executed, he critiqued, in an endless, iterative loop that never really ended. (iPhone 5 anyone?) What was no secret to the world was that everything he touched, from products, to movies, to ad campaigns, took on a sophistication, beauty, and smartness that went beyond anyone’s expectations. Steve was a master at the “whole package.”

Designers say it all the time: you can’t do a great project without a great client. In a sense Apple was lucky enough to have in Jobs the most brilliant, intuitive, perceptive design client imaginable.  He kept hitting the ball back to them, harder. If they pleased him—no easy task, surely—the marketplace and the press was usually a breeze. What he brought to the table—for the designers at Apple and the agencies they worked with, especially—was irreplaceable. The good news: there are likely some Jobs-inspired projects and campaigns still in the pipeline. The bad news: They won’t get perfected by the master.

Metropolis’ art directors, Dungjai Pungauthaikan and Ashley Stevens, take a look at Apple’s most memorable campaigns over the last two decades.

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The corner of Canal and Rampart Streets in 1954.

I’d been driving past the long abandoned Woolworth’s store on the corner of Canal and North Rampart Streets since I moved to New Orleans in July. And every time past I thought, in my typical New York naiveté (if such a thing exists), “That site desperately needs a building—the bigger, the better!” Later I learned that a somewhat controversial project was  in fact awaiting approval: a 190-foot, mixed-use residential tower.  Urbanistically speaking, this is just what the doctor ordered. The right building here on the upper edge of the French Quarter could act as a kind of gateway to both the quarter to the east and the downtown business district.

The historic preservationists in town almost reflexively opposed the project, citing its excessive height (seventy feet taller than current zoning). The truth is, preservationists here have a longstanding aversion to both tall buildings and (or should we say especially?) modern ones. This proposed tower, pushed by the local developer Praveen Kailas and designed by Harry Baker Smith Architects, was clearly a duel offender.

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The interior of the house designed by Ying chee Chui as part of MIT’s 1K House project. Photo: Ying chee Chui

Interesting news out of Cambridge last week: MIT announced that the first prototype from its 2009 “1K House Project” was recently completed in Sichuan  Province,  China.  Designed bya recent graduate of the architecture school, Ying chee Chui, the Pinwheel House is a steel-reinforced brick house (created to withstand an 8.0 earthquake) with a modular layout comprised of simple rectangular rooms surrounded by a traditional courtyard.

The goal of the studio project—conceived by Tony Ciochetti, chairman of MIT’s Center for Real Estateand clearly modeled after Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child—was a daunting one: design and build a $1,000 house. Like the one-hundred-dollar laptop, the one-thousand-dollar house has a nice, clean media-friendly ring to it. It’s certainly eye-catching as a concept. But what are we to make of the news, slightly buried in the MIT release, that construction costs for the Chui house totaled $5925, or six times the stated goal?

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Yesterday’s New Orleans Times Picayune carried a front page story—fittingly, I guess, on the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—about the Army Corps of Engineers’ new rating systems for the country’s levees.  The report gave a “near failing grade to New Orleans area levees,” despite the $10-billion effort to rebuild them after Katrina. The levees are designed to withstand surges from a “100-year hurricane,” or a storm with a one-percent chance of happening in any given year. For storms the Corps described as “500-year events,” all bets are apparently off. “Larger events, however, would cause flooding,” the piece stated, rather bloodlessly. “Reviewers estimated those events could kill as much of 3 percent of the area’s population, and inundate as many as 191,180 structures, resulting in $47.7 billion in damage.”

As a new transplant to the city, skittishly checking weather reports for any and all tropical depressions forming in the Gulf, my response? No kidding.

Katrina, after all, wasn’t a “500-year event.” It was a Category 3 hurricane. Bigger storms might hit the city in the future, when as the Times Picayune correctly pointed out sea levels are likely to be significantly higher. My problem with the Army Corps of Engineers’ report isn’t with its dire predictions. (Dealing with the specter of hurricanes is part of the bargain you strike living here; it’s a lot like Bay Area residents and the so-called “Big One”.) The Corps doesn’t seem to recognize—at least, not publicly—that its 100 year-plus policy of taming the Mississippi River by brute force might need a rethink. And this isn’t just a local issue. Towns and cities up and down the Mississippi face the same threat. Building higher walls, in the end, won’t solve the problem. As a number of landscape architects have been telling us for a while, we might have to let some of the water in, to keep the rest of it out.

To read the Times Picayune story, click here.

Recent Metropolis blog post about the Mississippi.

Metropolis article - “What’s Next”

Q&A with Dutch water engineer, Jan H. de Jager.

The Municipal Art Society (MAS) announced winners of its annual MASterworks awards last week, honoring projects that in its words “make a significant contribution to New York’s built environment.” In the past five years, the awards (in the Best Building category) have gone to a slew of well-known firms: Morphosis, Gehry + Partners, Renzo Piano Workshop. This year was no different, with projects by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Foster + Partners topping the list.

The jury—Rafael Pelli, Deborah Berke, Marc Kushner of HWKN, and Charles Bendit of Taconic Investment Partners—also gave a Best Green Design Initiative award to the Design Trust for Public Trust for its High Performance Landscape Guidelines, done in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Below, images of the winning projects, with edited descriptions provided by MAS:

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Photos: Robert Vizzini

It was one of the most profound pieces of public art I’d ever seen.  The tribute first appeared on the night of March 11, 2002, six months after the World Trade Center attacks: twin beams of light, pointed to the heavens, emanating from close to the site.  It literally stopped me in my tracks. I remember standing on the sidewalk—five or six miles away—looking up at the lights slicing through the clouds, disappearing into infinity, thinking: this is the ultimate memorial.

Tribute in Light—designed by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian Laverdiere and Paul Myoda, with Paul Marantz as lighting consultant—became an annual event, sponsored by the Municipal Art Society, appearing at dusk every September 11 and fading with the dawn of the following day. It has remained remarkably powerful, largely because of its impermanence. Read more…

In news that will surely gladden the hearts (and backs!) of schoolchildren everywhere, the Yale School of Medicine announced today that it will give each of its students an iPad2 for classroom and clinical use. All paper-based course materials will be eliminated. “We started thinking about this about a year and half ago, shortly after the iPad was released,” says Michael Schwartz, assistant dean for curriculum at the school. “We were spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on paper, and the students didn’t always read it.” (Medical students, it turns out, aren’t all that different from twelve-year-olds.)

The advantages here seem obvious: cost, environmental footprint, and ease of use. At any time, students can hit the “sync button,” as Schwartz calls it, and get revised lectures. This paperless transition was done without a lot of IT expertise, in house, with relative ease.  “We set up a server, which compressed and condensed the data for use on the iPad,” Schwartz says.

So is the beginning of the end for the traditional textbook? “I think so,” he says. “It’s much more convenient, easy to update. In the old days, we had to wait for an updated edition of the book. Now if a teacher wants to change their approach, they can easily do that and it’s fresh for the next year.”

It seems as if it’s just a matter of time—and budget—before all schools eliminate the physical textbook, and end that all too common sight: the 70-pound student lugging forty pounds of textbooks in a bulging backpack, bent slightly at the waist from the effort, as if trudging into a stiff wind. Good riddance.

Last week a local architect forwarded an interesting press release from Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic development alliance for the region. It announced, with great hyperventilating fanfare, that Gameloft, “one of the world’s largest publishers of digital and social gaming,” would establish a new video game development studio in New Orleans. This was one of those Richard Florida-type stories that seemed too good to be true. And maybe an indication that the Crescent City had indeed become a draw for the coveted “creative class.”

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Photo: Francesca Pedersen.

The conventional wisdom about New Orleans these days is for the most part positive: an engaged mayor (with the obligatory “60 Minutes” profile under his belt), rebounding neighborhoods, improving schools, young people flocking in.  All of this is true, as far as it goes, but it’s an incomplete accounting. What has gone largely unreported in the mainstream press is the condition of the neighborhood hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.  Much of the Lower Ninth Ward—despite the heroic efforts of Brad Pitt and Make It Right—remains desolate.

This past weekend I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth, sponsored by the local chapter of the AIA and hosted by John Williams, who in addition to his work as executive architect for Make It Right has taken on the role of unofficial master planner for the embattled neighborhood. While there are pockets of hope in the Lower Ninth—the Holy Cross section has seen about half of its residents return—the overall picture is troubling.

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