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…
The international design competition, sponsored by HP and Microsoft, in partnership with the creative platform Talenthouse, was called the HP/Microsoft Smart Office Challenge. The challenge was nothing less than to design the ultimate office space of the future. No pressure. The only requirement was that the design had to feature existing HP technology.
Our team won both the judges’ and the people’s choice awards. We are MulvannyG2 Architecture and industrial design firm Zac & Co., formed as collaborators on a design called HP MIMIC, a movable workplace that can be customized by touching a screen. With this design, users will be able to transform their offices to match their individual work styles and requirements, in addition to incorporating their company’s culture. Made of rigid aluminum and fully wired, the “plug and play” design features a collapsible system of rotating electrochromatic glass modules, controlled via a HP tablet interface. Last month, a prototype, built by HP, was presented at the Alt Design Summit in Salt Lake City. This animated video, created by MulvannyG2, illustrates the concept.
Here Alan Feltoon and Zachary Feltoon – in real life they’re father and son – discuss their design process for the HP MIMIC, the rapidly expanding role of flexible technology in the workspace, and the importance of design competitions in pushing forward new ideas.
Alan Feltoon: Collaboration can be wonderfully messy, particularly when crossing disciplines, with the potential for creating big ideas and concepts. Our two firms had previously worked together on the Battery Park Conservancy Design Competition, “Draw Up a Chair.” Through that process we realized how well we work together and were eager to do it again. The HP/Microsoft Smart Office Challenge presented an ideal opportunity.
Zachary Feltoon: I found it fascinating how much the language surrounding various types of creative design can differ. At first, it was like having a multilingual charrette. We were using different terms, yet trying to get to the same place. But soon we progressed to conversations that would include all aspects of the user experience while also using other mediums to inform our own work. When you collaborate you open yourself up to new ideas, and in that regard you’re never working solely within your own medium.
Making Room, a new exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has struck a serious nerve with New Yorkers. The exhibit, which will be on view until September 15, shines a light on many of the city’s biggest housing problems, and puts on display several architectural proposals designed to alleviate them. Mayor Bloomberg has even gotten the city government involved, and is strongly pushing for many of the solutions it suggests.
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tours the Making Room Exhibit on January 22, 2013. Photo Credit: Spencer T. Tucker.
The impetus for the exhibit was a set of figures uncovered by the Citizen’s Housing Planning Council (CHPC) that showed a disparity between the types of available housing in New York, which are primarily designed for traditional nuclear households, and the increasing demand for single and other non-traditional housing. Currently, only about 18 percent of the city’s population is part of a nuclear family household. Yet over half of New York is single, and the city lacks enough single bedroom and studio spaces to house them.
Coupled with this are decades-old city regulations that place restrictions on how and where people can live. For instance it is illegal for more than three unrelated adults to share a residence, or for someone to inhabit a living space smaller than 400 square feet. These restrictions mean that residents are resorting to their own improvised solutions, which are often dangerous or illegal, to be able to live in this outmoded housing stock. Topping it off, the city will need to absorb a projected increase of over 600,000 new residents in the next twenty years, most of whom will also not find the current housing stock appropriate.
Sensing this problem back in 2011, CHPC and the Architectural League invited five teams of architects to submit proposals for housing solutions that could alleviate these problems, keeping restrictive zoning ordinances a non-factor in their designs. The submissions took several different approaches, primarily focusing on flexibility of use, compact living quarters and shared spaces. One design, by Deborah Gans, proposed a series of conversions that could be performed on a single family home in Queens, which would allow the owners to rent out extra sections of the house when they no longer needed the space themselves.
A rendering of a street of converted single family homes in Astoria, Queens. The conversions would allow the original owners to rent space in their homes that otherwise be would underutilized, while still maintaining adequate space and privacy for owner and renter. Rendering by Gans Studio. Courtesy MCNY. Read more…
Congo Street Initiative, Dallas, TX. Courtesy of Congo Street Initiative
As an architect and advocate for better urban environments, I am excited about my new role as director of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence at the Bruner Foundation (Cambridge, MA). The biennial award, founded in 1987 by architect and adaptive reuse pioneer Simeon Bruner, recognizes places distinguished by innovative design and their social, economic, and environmental contributions to the urban environment. To date, the RBA has recognized 67 projects and awarded $1.2 million to support urban initiatives.
In the world of U.S. design competitions, the RBA is unique. We ask our applicants to submit detailed written analyses of their projects—from multiple perspectives—along with descriptive images. And entries must have been in operation long enough to demonstrate their impact on their communities. Our selection process includes intensive site visits to our finalists’ projects to help us fully understand how their places work.
Inspiration Kitchens, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of Inspiration Kitchens
The RBA selection committee meets twice: first to select five finalists and again to select the Gold Medal winner. Assembled anew for each award cycle, the committee comprises six urban experts including a mayor, design and development professionals, and a past award winner. This year’s group includes mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City, planner Ann Coulter from Chattanooga, landscape architect Walter Hood from Hood Studio in Oakland, architect Cathy Simon from Perkins+Will in San Francisco, Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Susan S. Szenasy, and Jane Werner, executive director of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the 2007 Gold Medal winner. The committee reviewed 90 applications from 31 states and the District of Columbia to choose the 2013 five finalists. Collectively, the projects they chose represent a diversity of creative, collaborative approaches and scales in tackling significant urban challenges:
Congo Street Initiative - Dallas, TX - submitted by buildingcommunityWORKSHOP
The sustainable rehabilitation of five houses and street infrastructure along with construction of a new home that provided transitional housing, in collaboration with resident families
Inspiration Kitchens– Chicago, IL – submitted by Inspiration Corporation
An 80-seat restaurant providing free meals to working poor families and market-rate meals to the public as well as workforce training and placement
Louisville Waterfront Park– Louisville, KY – submitted by Louisville Waterfront Development Corporation
An 82-acre urban park developed over more than two decades that reconnects the city with the Ohio River
The Steel Yard - Providence, RI – submitted by Klopfer Martin Design Group
The redevelopment of an abandoned, historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, workforce training, and small-scale manufacturing
Via Verde - Bronx, NY – submitted by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses
A 222-unit, LEED Gold certified, affordable housing development in the Bronx designed as a model for healthy and sustainable urban living
Louisville Waterfront Park, Louisville, KY. Courtesy of Louisville Waterfront Park
We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry: Will there even be office buildings in the future? How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now? What impact will technology have on design and engineering? But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”
As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew. If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.
The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before). Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!
“Good ideas can come from anywhere,” Mike Hickok, one of our principals at Hickok Cole is fond of saying. His vision and the idea of new collaborations were tested when we were tasked to design the office building of the future.
It took weeks of long meetings and passionate discussions before we finalized our plan concepts. Through it all, we realized that we wanted to work differently than we were used to working, to design the building envelope. We had just seen the Metropolis film, Brilliant Simplicity, which inspired us to look for opportunities of cross pollination or cross disciplinary thinking that we could build upon, tinker with, and synthesize into a simple concept.
A substantial portion of our legwork was done in the form of traditional research. From the books and writings of Branko Kolarevic and Ali Rahim (UPENN); Lisa Iwamoto, Bill Mitchell (MIT); Chris Luebkeman (Arup): and Jim Glymph (Gehry), we learned about digital fabrication techniques like sectioning, tessellating, folding, contouring, and forming. We learned about rapid prototyping and rapid tooling, parametric design and “file to factory,” innovative materials, and new modes of fabrication. And we were inspired by Kolarevic’s phrase, “form follows performance,” and by Iwamoto’s ideas about the correlation between architecture and its modes of representation and construction.
Most design competitions are won by entries with a narrow focus, as architects know only too well. There is simply no time to work through all the issues and tell a comprehensive story. The goal is to unearth a single idea and then work to present it in the most compelling fashion. Those who try to design too much fail. Those who concentrate on a succinct scheme, succeed.
When we began working on the Office Building of the Future Competition we realized that this was one of those game changing assignments, and it needed a completely new approach. Only by integrating a variety of issues such as engineering systems, site constraints, market forces, and architectural design could we hope to understand the challenge facing us. How then, could we achieve this integrated concept with limited time and resources?
We called our friends and some of our most trusted consultants: Mark Tamaro at Thornton Tomassetti for structural engineering; Christian Agulles at WSP Flack+ Kurtz for MEP Engineering;and Paul Totten atSimpson Gumpertz & Heger for building enclosure consulting. We fully expected to have to “sell” them on this project. After all, we wanted them to donate their most valuable commodity, their time. Their response was quick and definitive. Not only would they work with us, but they were excited by the prospect.
A fundamental piece of Architecture 3.0 is to give everyone access to better design. Period. Better design can take the form of housing, civic structures, parks, sports centers, restored habitats or community developments.
Many organizations are developing open source options that increase access to such places.
The precedent of transparency, peer review, and collaboration built into the open source software can be influential in disrupting architecture from its status quo mentality in building design and construction. The results could be strengthened neighborhoods and enhanced quality of life.
WikiHouse is an open-source set of construction documents that “allows anyone to design, download, and ‘print’ CNC-milled wooden houses and components, which can be assembled with no formal skill or training.” One of its instigators, the designer Alastair Parvin from design collective 00:/, sees the future of design and construction of housing as a process “done not just by teams of professionals, but by open communities of user-makers, designing and making for themselves.” Open source plus digital fabrication equals a building economy that cab deliver (1) choice in design, (2) great design, and (3) customizable design. Sounds promising? It is. This is a revolutionary way of producing architecture. And Wikihouse is more than deserving of the TED Prize.
Indicative of the civic yearnings of the Upper East Side—They want a High Line of their own! –the competition’s results hinted at some of the unique qualities of the Upper East Side, Harlem, and the East River.
The winning idea—a blue skye concept entitled “3X: 300% More Esplanade,” designed by Joseph Wood—would expand the esplanade with a series of canals and pathways that wind their way through the streets of the Upper East Side and Harlem. While not remotely feasible, the bold proposal shows the necessity for connecting the communities of the Upper East Side and Harlem with the East River.
Congo Street, Dallas, TX
Congo Street Site Plan
Inspiration Kitchens, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of Inspiration Kitchens
Louisville Waterfront Park, Louisville, KY. Courtesy of Louisville Waterfront Park
Political Hardball: Part 2 Updated
Remembering Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bijou
It’s Show and Tell Time for Building Product Manufacturers
Q&A: Kevin Shanley
Political Hardball: Part 2
SOM and CASE Invent a New Interface
A New Humanism: Part 18
The Green Team Part 13: Game, Sett, Match
On the Road with the Rudy Bruner Award: The Steel Yard - Providence, RI
Designing from Nature
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