EVERYONE DESERVES GOOD DESIGN was the mantra of Public Interest Design Week (PID Week), anchored by the 13^th annual Structures for Inclusion (SFI) conference. Hosted by the University of Minnesota’s College of Design (Cdes) in Minneapolis, from March 19-24, PID Week was animated by nearly 500 attendees – architects, designers, students, professors, the media and interested public from across the country, and a dozen or so from far off places - who embedded themselves in the thought, language, and practice resonating at the intersection of good design and public service. Branded in orange and black across T-shirts and carrying bags, the phrase EVERYONE DESERVES GOOD DESIGN was visually underscored by three black and orange icons titled Products (cube) Places (triangle/map pin-like shape) and Processes (circle).

PID Week attendees at reception and gallery at the College of Design’s Rapson Hall, U of MN. On view is the exhibition Rural Design: A New Design Discipline. Photo Credit:  College of Design

According to John Cary, of PublicInterestDesign.org and chair of PID Week, this was a first-of-its-kind conference.  It did not disappoint. “We decided to unite otherwise disparate events, in an effort to combine resources and audiences,” wrote Cary in a post-conference email-chat. “Our goal with the expanded slate of events was to appeal to the design disciplines more broadly as well as other stakeholders, such as beneficiaries, clients, and funders.”

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In 1963, by federal court ruling, South Carolina’s Clemson University was racially integrated. The ruling was regarding a 20 year-old Harvey Gantt, who despite excellent academics had been repeatedly barred from entering the university’s architecture program because of his skin color. Rather than accept the status quo, Gantt filed a suit which would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court before he was accepted. It was the first, but not the last time that Gantt would gain widespread attention for his talent, dedication, and ability to break racial barriers in pursuit of his goals.

Fifty years later, the AIA has selected Harvey Gantt to be honored with the 2013 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for his long career as an architect, politician, and pioneer in civil rights. The award is named after the former head of the Urban League who in 1968, called attention to the AIA’s lack of social advocacy, and challenged women and minorities to become more actively involved in the profession of architecture.

Courtesy AIA.

Gantt’s groundbreaking entrance into Clemson University was just the beginning of his successful career, which has been marked with achievements in several fields. After graduating from Clemson, Gantt earned a masters degree in city planning from MIT and then returned to Charlotte, NC. A year later in 1971, he founded the successful firm, Gantt Huberman Architects, with his partner Jeffrey Huberman. Since then, the firm has designed many prominent buildings in the Charlotte area including museums, educational buildings, and rail and bus stations. Read more…

Shenzhen China, Steven Holl

The March issue of Metropolis digs deep into how the creative process happens for a number of designers. From Steven Holl’s watercolors that structurally ideate—and ultimately become—homes, to John Pawson’s travel photographs that inform the museum he’s building, and Matali Crasset’s modern vessel inspired by age-old dishes. These stories not only show how designers navigate the tricky spaces between design concept and final product but also reveal how art is integral to the design process. Indeed, in each of the pieces—the watercolors, the photographs, the African bowls—art is firmly in timeline of the design project it’s attached to.

Is there, then, a line between what is art and what is design? What is the fundamental difference?

Typographer and designer Roberto De Vincq de Cumptich, author of Men of Letters and People of Substance, defines the difference as being about the economics of consumption: Design demands and expects a consumer, art hopes for one but is not dependent upon it. He writes:

“Design is not Art, since Art exists as an answer to a question posed by an individual artist, while Design exists as an answer to a question posed by the marketplace. Design must have an audience to come into being, while Art seeks an audience, sometimes, luckily, finding it, sometimes not. Art pushes the limit of human experience and language for its own sake, while Design might do this but only to humanize and integrate people’s lives in the context of an economy. Design needs an economic system, while Art does not. Art may become a product, but it’s not the reason why it was created, but how our society transforms it into a commodity.” Read more…

What if you could create a network of libraries in Africa to feed communities with knowledge, creativity conduits, and revenue? David Dewane, a young architect with Gensler and a visiting assistant professor at Catholic University, is working with a diverse team—and a campaign through Kickstarter, the online funding platform—to make it real. (There are only a few days left in the campaign.)

Dewane (who trained with Pliny Fisk III at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin) and his partners have conceived Librii as “a network of low-cost, digitally powered libraries deployed along the expanding fiber optic infrastructure in the developing world.” The idea is to bring digital and physical resources, managed by professional librarians, to emerging markets to that people in those communities can address their own educational, informational, and economic challenges.

“This is a new kind of library,” Dewane says. “It will be the first that will actively engage users as content creators, the first that will operate on a sustainable business model, and the first designed to maximize the potential of high-speed information exchange in developing markets.” The business model involves Librii paying the construction costs and content costs up front, after which revenue streams will shift operating costs to the users.

Dewane, and his team, believe that this is an answer to a major need: one billion people living in Africa, and only three percent of them have access to broadband Internet. They see access to knowledge as an essential component of social mobility, and view Africa as a place to demonstrate that link. They chose Ghana as their launch point because it has been a technology leader on the continent.

Why Kickstarter? Seeking funding this way was not the easiest path, Dewane says. “It would have been simpler to solicit big companies, such as those in the energy sector that extract resources from Africa and put in infrastructure.” Through his firm, Dewane would, in fact, have had a way to reach some of those companies. “We chose social funding instead because we wanted to draw attention and energy into the project,” he says. “It would start to build a community excitement around the idea, not just get a check from and go off and do it. So far that is exactly what’s happening.” Gensler has been supportive. The Washington, D.C. office of the firm will produce the drawings and the firm has provided some pro-bono time to help get the project off the ground. Read more…

When we started planning our “creative process” issue, it became obvious that we’d use the opportunity to circle back to Steven Holl, whose watercolors we’ve featured in the past and remain absolutely central to his process. Holl has published two books of watercolors, Written in Water (Lars Müller, 2002) and Scale (Lars Müller, 2012), and loves talking the role they play for him. In fact, the connection between initial drawing and completed building is often remarkably strong. The AIA 2012 Gold Medal-winning architect is an utterly disarming interview (it feels like you’re having drinks with him at a bar instead of conducting a formal inquisition). Our conversation formed the basis for the recent magazine article. An edited version follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: Your watercolors are famous. Are they always the first gesture on a project?

Steven Holl: Yes. And I have thousands of them. Do you know how many watercolors I have?

MCP: I have no idea.

SH: More than 10,000. I have these boxes over my desk. They go all the way back to 1977.

MCP: How did that start?

SH: I have always drawn. Drawing is central to architecture. I used to do pencil drawings. Around 1979 I streamlined it to the 5-by-7 watercolors. I decided to fix that format so that I could always have my sketches available.

MCP: Do you draw when you’re travelling?

SH: Yes. Every day. I did three drawings this morning between six and nine. I worked on three different things. I’m working on a big project in Dongguan, China. And yesterday we changed the entire concept. And you know what? A five-by-seven-inch watercolor pad will hold 5.5 million square feet. Read more…

In our last post, you met the finalists of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award, a biennial program that recognizes excellence in urban placemaking. This is the first of our dispatches from the field, as the Bruner Foundation team travels the country to examine the five selected projects. During our intensive, two-to-three-day visits to each site, we’re conducting interviews, taking photographs, and gathering information for our selection committee’s meeting in Oklahoma City this coming May, during which they will select the Gold Medal winner.

Congo Street, Dallas, TX

For our first trip, we headed south late last month, trading cold and snowy Boston for the relative warmth of North Texas to visit Congo Street Initiative in Dallas.

The project is among the smallest of this year’s five finalists. Located along a reconstructed block-long street in the East Dallas community of Jubilee Park, it involved the construction of a new “Holding House” and the reconstruction of five existing houses in collaboration with the street’s residents.

Congo Street Site Plan

The idea for the project emerged from a desire to stabilize home ownership for the families who live on Congo Street, many having occupied their homes for generations. The modest 640 square-foot houses, built in the 1920s, were in various states of disrepair, targeted for demolition and redevelopment.

Working with the residents, city, corporate, and nonprofit partners in the Dallas community, buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a local nonprofit community design center that submitted the project, crafted an alternative strategy for redevelopment. It focused on rebuilding the existing homes and street infrastructure over the next five years without displacing a single inhabitant. Staff from bcWORKSHOP and architecture students from the University of Texas at Arlington began working with Congo Street residents in 2008, exploring approaches that would enable them to remain in place without undue financial burden. Read more…

“Was James Stirling modernism’s last great prophet, or postmodernism’s original poster child?” If this question keeps you up at night you might not rest any more easily after you’ve finished the book that it launches, Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist. But the fault would rest more with the intriguing excess of ideas that the author presents, rather than the absence of any comparably pithy, one-line answer.

Contemporary architectural taxonomy, when you narrow it down to subjects worth a book-length study, is difficult about as often as it is simple. No boundary is more suspect than one between modernism and postmodernism, where laws become undermined by endless inbred impulses, whether conscious or not. These classification debates can lead to oversimplified questions of whether a building’s appearance suggests doctrinaire rigidity or ironic quotation; that glib test of whether it looks like the Villa Savoye on the one hand or a clock, a buffalo, a tureen,  a Cistercian gristmill on the other. In the absence of other evidence, sometimes purely structural analyses are a fair foundation for these judgments.

Happily, however, Lawrence is engaged in quite a different, and far more rigorous pursuit. She’s concerned with a close analysis of Stirling’s own thinking about his projects and his idiosyncratic conception of modernism, as “a set of principles that transcended association with the contemporary or even with the twentieth century; they had nothing to do with any stylistic language, modern or remote. As Stirling was fond of saying, ‘There’s nothing fundamentally new about modern architecture,’ by which he meant that modern qualities could be found in buildings throughout all of history.”

This may not be a useful way of thinking about either modernism or postmodernism in the larger world, but it certainly is an interesting way to think about James Stirling. Lawrence advances the Harold Bloom-influenced thesis that Stirling’s invocation of the past bore a unique stamp, forsaking reference for its own sake in favor of a vital present-ness.

“’To revision’ something, as Bloom notes, is to literally ‘see’ it ‘again.’ This is a distinct idea from referencing, a more neutral act in which the element brought forward from the past is acknowledged as complete and left more or less intact. The Latin root of ‘reference’ defines an origin point—-in other words, a fixed and knowable beginning. Copying similarly implies that the original element is unmodified; the later version simply a repetition of the earlier incarnation. Re-visioning, on the other hand, acts more violently and more decisively on the precedent, violating its initial terms. The act of revision necessitates some kind of change—-a ‘correction,’ to use Bloom’s term.”

Lawrence takes as her focus only six of her subject’s significant works, those “focused on Stirling’s investigation of historical sources and their investigation to modernism,” a tour which affords a fascinating frame for her thesis but, just as valuably, the opportunity for a rigorous examination of several of Stirling’s greatest works.

An intriguing starting point: a list of Stirling’s declared favorite works while in architecture school featured Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and Ouevre Complete but also A.E. Richardson’s Monumental Classic Architecture in Britain and Ireland, and Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower’s British Art and the Mediterranean, a volume I’ve never heard of, but which traces the seemingly very un-Stirlingesque “Mediterranean influence on English art, from prehistory to the nineteenth century.”

We start, unsurprisingly, with Corbusier. Stirling’s Flat at Ham Common (a collaboration with James Gowan) was an acknowledged response to Corb’s Maisons Jaoul, which Stirling repeatedly disparaged for its perceived turn from that architect’s earlier “rationalism.” And why revise a master’s undistinguished work?

Partly, Lawrence speculates, to distinguish the project from prewar modernism and, more importantly, to “rationalize” Corbusier’s precedent. Stirling and Gowan modeled a close accord between structural circumstance and visibility, bathrooms and bedrooms cluster along the structural cross walls, living rooms along the facades freed from load-bearing constraints. They jettisoned French vernacular features, such as the earth roof and the Catalan vault at Jaoul, while turning to English cheap and “messy” Londonstock brick. Later Stirling paired a photo of a window at Ham Common with one of a Liverpool dock, to emphasize a natural English connection; at the same time he was tidying the perceived irrationality of Jaoul. He referred to bricks as a “9-inch-by-4 ½ inch pre-cast-system” and used them precisely here, distinctly differentiating brick sections of the facade from concrete, another retort to the perceived subjective sloppiness of Corbusier’s treatment of these two materials at Jaoul.

Stirling and Gowan, Ham Common. The de Stijl–influenced stair volume of the two-story buildings. Photo: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © CCA

Stirling’s and Gowan’s game becomes subtler in the next example, the design for Churchill College at Cambridge. Here they embrace the traditional courtyard model, on a vast scale. “More broadly, symmetry at Churchill was put in the service of a very different ideological goal than it had been for the Neo-Palladians,” writes the author. “Rather than operating as any kind of idealizing or historicizing impulse, it instead became a means to distill the core attributes of the courtyard type into a pure form, to reduce the courtyard model to its essence. For example, the idiosyncratic outer walls of a typical Cambridge college that must respond to existing structures or sight constraints are here, in the absence of any context, made rectilinear; the ‘quadrangle,’ more often than not a five- or six-sided shape, with randomly angled sides of uneven lengths, its taken to its logical endpoint of a perfect square; the usually erratic paths across the courtyard are now straightened and evenly spaced. Symmetry, then, as employed at Churchill College, abstracts and ‘corrects’ the typical features of the Cambridge College…” Read more…

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto will be designing this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, came the recent announcement. This prestigious commission is given once a year to an international architect who has not completed a building in England. In the past it has been given to major names such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Oscar Niemeyer. Fujimoto will be the thirteenth commission for the pavilion, and at age 41, is the youngest architect to ever receive this honor.

Fujimoto’s design is for a semi-transparent ring that shelters visitors from the elements and forms a visually engaging backdrop. The ring itself is constructed from a lattice formation of thin steel poles that form an irregular, helter-skelter geometry. Fujimoto has stated that his intent is to encourage visitors to interact with the landscape, by emphasizing the transparency of the design, and the cloud-like qualities of the structure. The 350 square-foot space will also include seating areas and a café for visitors. The pavilion will be built for three months on the Serpentine Gallery’s lawn in Kensington, London, after which it will be dismantled like its twelve predecessors.

The pavilion’s unusual design fits in neatly as an extension of Fujimoto’s recent work. His firm, Sou Fujimoto Architects, has lately been maintaining a high profile with several bold experiments in residential architecture, like his recent House NA. Each room of this nearly entirely transparent house is at a different elevation, and connected by ladders or stairs to the adjacent rooms. 2008’s Final Wooden House was another experiment in multiple levels and dynamic use of space. The house is a box formed out of wooden blocks that are stacked to create an irregular, undulating floor plan. Floors from certain areas become seating for other areas of the house, and the use of each space changes according to the perspective of the inhabitant.

Fujimoto’s latest design is an exciting continuation of his experimental approach to architecture. The pavilion will be on display from June 8 through October 20 of this year.

Brian Bruegge is an undergraduate student at Fordham University, majoring in communications and media studies, and history. He also studies visual arts and environmental policy, and has previously written for several other websites and publications on a range of topics.

What if you herded a bunch of architects into one neighborhood and let them loose to design…

It’s been done before. Columbus, Indiana, comes to mind with more than 60 public buildings by signature architects. Ok, it’s a city not a neighborhood, but you get the idea.

Northern Liberties, a late 18^th century Philadelphia neighborhood exhibits a high concentration of architect- designed structures blossoming along its comfortably scaled streets. You can’t help noticing, pondering what it means to have so many new, well intentioned buildings jostling each other in one place.

By mid 19^th century, Philadelphia had banned certain noxious industries from downtown, relegating them instead to Northern Liberties. Immigrant workers and artisans ensconced themselves and their homes amidst the din and dust of their own livelihood. Remnants of abandoned mills, tanneries, and breweries are now interspersed with old brick row homes standing inhabited and intact.

New residences and commercial properties designed by contemporary architects bring vitality and economic promise to an area of the city that, for many years, was stuck in neutral. The neighborhood has become more intensely gentrified with many cafes, bars, microbreweries, restaurants, outdoor dining, festivals in summer and a retro 1950’s looking bowling alley. A big community garden on grassy, sloping land is a great playground for kids. In short, Northern Liberties is a magnet for resident artists, architects, designers, and other professionals who, in a sense, represent a tie to those workers and artisans of the past.

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In the building industry, architecture and engineering firms are full of talented people who solve complex problems as a matter of routine. So why are their IP portfolios virtually empty?

I spent most of my working life in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology sectors. I specialized in intellectual property after spells in research and then commercial roles. For ten years I was the director of the Intellectual Property Institute. In 2010 I joined Billings Jackson Design as business director.

I have had less than three years experience in my new industry sector so, clearly, I claim no great knowledge or insight, but maybe it’s useful to get a picture of an industry from the perspective of an outsider so, here goes…

Firms of architects and engineers operating in the building industry use and generate considerable intellectual resources. They are usually staffed with highly qualified, motivated professionals with a mixture of creative and technical expertise, which is not matched in many industry sectors, if any. It is surprising, to me at least, that these intellectual resources are rarely identified, valued, managed and effectively exploited within such firms.

Problem solving (generating good ideas) is the life-blood of the industry, but these good ideas are seldom captured, managed, and exploited internally in a structured and effective manner. They are almost never exploited externally, traded with third parties as the subject of formal intellectual property rights. This is not generally the case in companies that are heavily reliant on scientific or technical expertise, where the role of intellectual property protection (through patents and trademarks) in justifying and enabling R&D investment is well understood.

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