Design activism is on the rise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.

Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.

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Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, discuss this year’s Smart Environments Awards.

The annual IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards recognize excellence in interiors that are in tune with 21st-century needs and desires—meaning that they are beautiful, sustainable, and accessible. Click here to read about this year’s winning projects. For monthly coverage of the best in sustainable design, subscribe to Metropolis today.

Civic involvement is top of mind in Washington, D.C.—at least in the White House, even if it’s scarce on the Hill. This spring, it will be also on the agenda at the National Building Museum, which, on May 11, will honor three “civic innovators” who have helped build strong communities and neighborhoods, made breakthroughs in clean-energy technology, and aided in recovery from a natural disaster. The honorees are Perkins + Will, the architecture firm well known for its stellar pro-bono work, in addition to its expertise in building stellar schools, hospitals, and other large projects; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon; and the founders of the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village (Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, Ann Marie Wilkins, and Jim Pate).

Perkins + Will’s Hector Garcia Middle School, in Dallas, was included in our recent survey of outstanding K–12 schools. Photo: James Steinkamp/courtesy Perkins + Will

The designers at Perkins + Will are the first to tell you that their pro-bono work enriches them as practitioners and human beings as much as it helps their clients. Read more…

If you’re in any way part of the American environmental movement, you love and admire Interface’s Ray Anderson, like I do. He’s been the leading voice in putting our carpet industry on a sustainable course, as everyone will admit. His thoughtful, provocative, and evocative speeches have inspired designers, architects, manufacturers, and other CEOs alike, and his books continue to help reshape business thinking everywhere. Selfishly, we want him to go on forever, because we need to be inspired by someone who practices what he preaches. And make no mistake about it, Ray’s presentations are as powerful as any Baptist preacher’s sermons. His soft, southern cadences ring in our ears long after he’s left the room.

So it’s very difficult for me to share this news with you. Ray has been diagnosed with cancer. He explains his condition in his clear, no-nonsense manner in a video message he recorded on Tuesday. His office confirms that Ray is “feeling healthy” and that he is “maintaining his schedule and keeping commitments” and is staying “focused on the work that he loves.”

Photo:  Mark Steinmetz

Click the play button to view the beginning of last week’s “Show Snapshots” event. (Watch parts two and three of the video on our Multimedia page.)

Last Wednesday, news was made at the Davis & Warshow bath products showroom. Hilary Beber, a policy analyst in Mayor Bloomberg’s office of long-term planning and sustainability and a panelist that evening, came to the event directly from a City Council meeting where legislators unanimously passed New York City’s new Energy Conservation Code. It was an exciting and hopeful moment for the 200 or so NYC interior designers and architects in attendance, especially since, earlier that week, reports that the new code had been emasculated circulated in our local media.

Hilary Beber and Rick Cook at last week’s event

And, so, the designers present got much more than they expected when they signed up to be part the showroom’s annual “Show Snapshots from Greenbuild,” organized by Metropolis. Beber kicked off her presentation of the finer points from our new energy code (effective July 1, 2010), which pushes the city’s building owners to reach new levels of efficiency in the coming years. The ruling will also help create nearly 18,000 new jobs—a modest number, to be sure, since the city has reported a loss of around 200,000 jobs in 2009, with the architecture, interior design,  and construction segments having been hit especially hard. Rick Cook, a panelist, gave a personal scale to these local hardships when he remarked that last year his firm, Cook + Fox, sent 22 people to Greenbuild; this year only the two principals attended. Read more…

Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s editor in chief, Susan Szenasy, discuss a recent executive order by President Obama that promises exciting opportunities for design collaboration.

In her monthly editor’s letter, Szenasy presents opinionated takes on some of the most pressing issues in design today—from the urgent need for research and collaboration in the industry to the crucial steps required for a more sustainable future. It’s a perfect example of the kind of critical, cross-disciplinary design coverage you can only find in the pages of Metropolis. Click here to subscribe today.

For more than three decades now, two bright-orange Panton Chairs have graced my apartments in New York City. They started out in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom, and now they’re my dining chairs, to be seen clearly from every angle of my tiny downtown loft. And I love looking at them—their shiny, smooth, sensual plastic forms, their striking Sixties color, their generous seat pans from the front, sleek profiles from the side, and humanoid bottoms from the back please my eye endlessly. Believe it or not, I also enjoy cleaning them—going over the smooth plastic with a damp cloth, then buffing it dry is a satisfying moment, in contrast to my other furniture, which needs vacuuming, dusting, and sometimes  toxic stain removers. My Pantons, in fact, stand in defiance of complex maintenance. They are truly Modern chairs in this regard too. And reports to the contrary, my Pantons did not throw guests across the room, break under them, or in any way cause discomfort or bodily harm to anyone. As far as I’m concerned they’re ergonomically, sculpturally, materially, and aesthetically perfect.

As someone who sometimes teaches design history, I also appreciate the chairs’ breakthrough design and materiality, product engineering, and manufacturing methods. The Panton, after all, is the first chair made of one piece of material, a process that took many years and many trials to develop and perfect, starting in the early 1960s. Knowing these historic facts also increases my appreciation of the chairs. And understanding that many trials and errors go into innovative products reminds me that design breakthroughs are not about “aha!” moments, but a sustained commitment to an idea. Read more…

If you live on Manhattan island and you’re feeling as guilty as I am for throwing out your old laptop and other electronic devices—or hoarding them in your small apartment because you don’t want to add toxic chemicals to landfills here or in China—relief is coming soon. Starting January 4 and continuing all month, you can opt in to free e-waste pickups either at your home or at your place of business. The program is being instituted by The 4th Bin, the folks who sponsored the successful 4th Bin competition last fall (check out my note on the winners). All you need to do is fill out the forms posted on their site, and you’ll learn what happens next.

In addition, the group is working with City Harvest, the organization that feeds 1.4 million New Yorkers from high-quality foods donated by restaurants, farms, and manufacturers. To that end, The 4th Bin will take your old cell phones and PDAs and direct any proceedings from these collected devices to the well-regarded food bank; click here for details.

In 2005, New York City alone threw out some 250,000 tons of electronic trash. That’s a frightening number when you think about e-waste’s potential for poisoning our groundwater, as well as for squandering some highly-sought-after industrial materials like copper. Behind the new bin design and the upcoming collection program is Valiant Technology, a young tech-support firm founded seven years ago by four socially conscious friends. Their initiative was originally propelled by the city’s announcement that, come July 1, 2010, our e-waste will need to be recycled (the sanitation department will no longer pick up your old TVs, computers, cell phones, other electronic gadgets.) This program will surely have resonance in other cities just as rich in e-waste as we are here in New York. What’s your solution?

Update: NYC E-Waste Pickups Expand to Brooklyn

I have never before muscled in on presentations when I’ve been asked to moderate a panel, but this time I did. It was last week at Build Boston, during a full-day symposium on socially sustainable design, when I broke my neutrality rule and showed some examples that make New York City—and other American cities too—an obstacle course for people with some disability or another. The topic of our panel, “New Models of Home for our Third Age,” made me think about how dense urban settlements, with their notoriously small living spaces, invite us to make the city itself into our living rooms (lecture halls and exhibition spaces), dining rooms (restaurants), and backyards (parks). What with the growing discussion about the advantages of urban living for aging populations—mostly because of easy access to goods and services—I wanted to call attention to the reality of our cities: how inaccessible they really are, and how much remedial work they need at every turn.

What follows are photos of three places that our publisher, Horace Havemeyer, has identified as problematic. How does a man with forearm crutches, who likes to eat in restaurants and visit cultural institutions, get past such thoughtless or piecemeal amenities? I also included one small, hopeful sign for the future. Read more…

Photo: courtesy Steelcase

When Jim Hackett, Steelcase’s CEO, and James Ludwig, the company’s VP of global design, invited us—panelists and moderator—to dine at Wright’s restored Meyer May house, I felt my spine tingle. On the evening before the September 10th symposium, which focused on what today’s designers can learn from the master, I was thinking of how uncomfortable sitting in those stiff chairs would be. But instead we were all pleasantly surprised and grew to understand that Wright knew exactly how to bring people together.

With Jim and James seated at either end of the table and functioning as family patriarchs, the setting turned us into a lively group, willing to express opinions, argue (collegially, if heatedly at times), exchange ideas, and come away feeling that each of us had something to add to the discussion. Though the food, prepared with local produce, was delicious and the service courteous, we felt that it was Wright’s design that made it all work. Read more…