But the announcement, as distressing as it was, raises a whole bunch of questions. The first one, obviously, is: why now? The school points to its $12-million deficit. But this painful decision follows ten years of relentless deal making by the school: Cooper leased the empty parking lot on Astor Place for the garish Gwathmey Siegel-designed condos; it built a $111-million engineering building, designed by Morphosis; and entered into a real estate scheme that made way for the Fumiko Maki-designed colossus going up on Third Avenue. During more than a decade of wheeling and dealing, it’s safe to assume that a fair amount of money changed hands.To paraphrase Clara Peller: Where’s the money?
Were all of these deals bad ones for the school? (Let’s not forget: Cooper owns the land underneath the Chrysler Building.) Did the school build glitzy high-profile architecture it couldn’t afford? It claims that the new facilities are not related to the push for tuition, but given the size and expense of running them, that seems dubious.
Ariel Kaminer reported in the New York Times that Cooper is shelling out $10-million a year in “payments on a $175 million loan the school took out a few years ago, in part so that it could invest money in the stock market.” Faculty and students are pressing the school for a full, fiscal accounting. They need to know: Is the end of free tuition really the school’s only option? Or just the most expedient?
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…
Agility and adaptation are central to any professional field.
Those about to enter a profession must learn practical and intellectual skills. But the days when specialized and narrowly defined skill-sets guaranteed a steady and reliable “living” are gone. Today’s practical skills need to be accompanied by rigorous and critical modes of thinking.
One case in point is the graduate program at Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices (MDP). In conjunction with the school’s initiative, Designmatters, which provides a blueprint for design education, the Field track of MDP provides students with a unique foundation of theory and on-the-ground training. Faculty member Sean Donahue describes the program as structured around “Investigation and intervention—how designing can be an inquiry and mode of knowledge production to inform other disciplines and issues in a unique way. Also, how can these be combined with work being done in areas of ‘good’ and social impact?”
Proposals for collective farming models for women, image via mediadesignpractices/judytoretti/Six-Weeks-in-Uganda
While “activist” design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in their haste to be in the vanguard of a “new” approach and school-based design projects. These can be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while reinforcing cultural assumptions about the “other.” This is especially true of built interventions. These can be unnecessary, unusable, and often are left to decay. Wasted resources and human effort that fail to correct culturally essentializing narratives have been well documented in ecotourism and voluntourism. These consumer-based activities exemplify the perils of modern cultural colonialism. And while there are many defenders of the “good” they do, the fact remains that they, educational institutions, and even NGO’s like Oxfam struggle with their long histories of colonialism hidden yet still entrenched in many current activities.
Organization chart displaying the roles and structure of the [anti-NGO] NGO, image via mediadesignpractices/filter/field/mlamadrid/Planification-and-Self-Evaluation-Guide-for-Social-no-empowerment
To avoid producing solutions based on invalid, often fantastical cultural projections, proposals must be rooted in a deep understanding of the culture, people, economy, and politics of the places chosen for intervention. This is, after all, an intervention. The key, according to Donahue, is “to start not with what has been created by others to ‘solve problems’ but instead start with the realities of lived life. This more holistic and community-led approach develops an understanding of the conditions as they are now—not as they were 50 or even 20 years ago. These social conditions are a set of ongoing and changing situations that are embedded in social contexts.” Read more…
I once wrote a poem called “Profession of Mission” in which I attempted to write a personal mission statement. The poem rambled a bit, begged for clarity in my life’s purpose and ended with the word “crossroads” – no punctuation or finality – intentionally open-ended.
I wrote the poem in 2009 at age 44 – clearly the beginning of Mid-Life Crisis. Yes, young’uns, even older folks wonder what to do with the rest of their lives.
One week ago, at age 47 – no closer to an answer or closure – I took myself to Manhattan.
If I can “figure it out here, I can figure it out anywhere,” right?
I’m pleased to report that I found clarity in Chelsea … without a stitch of help from any of Woody Allen’s analysts.
But I did have help.
I attended a daylong workshop called “Design the Life You Love” created by New York-based product designer Ayse Birsel.
Ayse became a friend after I heard her speak at a user conference put on by a client of mine, Swedish design-software company Configura. Born in Turkey, Ayse is Pratt Institute-educated, a Fulbright Fellow whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, both in New York City.
She is perhaps best known for designing Herman Miller’s Resolve office system and Moroso’s M’Afrique collection. She and partner Bibi Seck own Birsel+Seck, a design studio that also works with Johnson & Johnson, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, OfficeMax, Renault, and Target. Ayse designed a potato peeler for Target that’s just $7.99, she says. So, even if you never make it to MoMA or Cooper-Hewitt, you can see (and buy) her products at a Target near you.
Ayse has taken her product design methods – which she calls Deconstruction:Reconstruction™ – and developed the “Design the Life You Love” workshop with concepts and exercises that even non-designers can easily grasp.
The workshop has become a mission for Ayse: “Our lives are our most important project,” she says.
Entrance: As visitors enter the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, they will be surrounded by lush landscaping that is built into the structure itself. The 250,000 square-foot complex is intended to act as a demonstration of ecological and sustainability principle, with the building harnessing energy from water, sun, wind and even museum visitors to power exhibits and conserve resources.
“There is no Plan B, because there is no Planet B,” said UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon at Stanford University earlier this year. In the decades since we first glimpsed Earth suspended in space and seemingly without boundaries, we’ve been learning to become aware of the fragility of life. We now know that the planet can quite happily continue without us. Bacteria and probably cockroaches will survive most disasters, but with a population of 7 billion and growing, it’s not so evident that our species can do the same.
Promenade: The open plaza of the new Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Science will lead visitors to the Energy Playground and the adjacent Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County.
Life depends on energy for every necessary exchange. At each stage of that exchange, some energy is lost as heat or as increased disorder or entropy. Most of this energy comes from the sun. Life depends on how well we manage this exchange.
We live in that very narrow interface where conditions are hospitable to human life and, as the sun slowly runs out of energy; if we waste it, we hasten our demise. Of course, in geological terms, this is a long way off. We can, however, address the issues here and now and see what we can do to make our planet a great place for more of us to live – hence the importance of earth sciences.
Evening signage: At night, the new Museum of Science will be illuminated with various colors of light and signage, reflected on the planetarium and building structure.
One evening, while we were designing the Node chair, my wife Isa and I were musing: What if we were to peek into the classroom after hours, once the students and teachers had gone home? Could the chairs, designed to be mobile, foster collaboration and interaction, also have the same desire to connect? If they came to life, would they take on a mind of their own? The Node love story, told in film, is a playful response to our musings. Happy Valentine’s Day! Enjoy connecting!
Elger Oberwelzwas on the design team at IDEO when they worked on the Node chair, produced by Steelcase.
Moving earth is always exciting to watch. For me, it was even more so as I watched them break ground on the Colorado State UniversityEngines and Energy Conversion Laboratory’s (EECL) expansion into the Powerhouse Energy Institute. This development is the latest step in a march of innovative progress that has characterized the lab since it’s beginning in 1992. Three years ago, when I decided to attend CSU for Mechanical Engineering, the lab with its innovative, student-involved research approach played a major role in my choice. Interestingly the EECL was named one of the top 25 ‘Awesome College Labs’ by Popular Science in 2011 – Wow!
The great research environment within the EECL may have pushed me to apply for a position at the lab, but it is the building that has made the lab comfortable and inspirational. The 1936 Art-Deco brick structure with its large, welcoming doors and multitude of windows, combined with the work and people, houses the true spirit of ‘The Engines Lab’ as a location that has served to unite private and university research and development with the goal of innovation to improve human life.
Three years and many great projects later, the power of the building has come to the forefront of the lab with the development of the new Powerhouse Energy Institute. Led by architect Bob Hosanna, the Neenan Company has worked collaboratively with the Powerhouse Energy Institute staff to design a highly sustainable solution for its expansion. The new building is a 65,000 square-foot addition onto the south end of the former Fort Collins power plant in North Old Town Fort Collins. The new workspace is exciting in itself. But this addition is especially meaningful to the lab as the design (and present construction) has been in complete alignment with the innovative, yet historically respectful tradition of the lab. The current structure is an awesome tribute to the individuals who made the building, Fort Collins, and Colorado so great. As a result, the design team was inspired to create an addition that complements the building, mimicking the original structure while still making it cutting-edge (LEED Platinum rating is expected). Fittingly, the facility will be a laboratory for the development of green building technologies. The vertical-axis wind turbines and a woodchip hopper for a gasifier system will stand where four smokestacks and a coal-hopper once stood, creating a modern study tool for the historic building’s former structures.
Victoria Meyers is an architect with a prolific and varied career. She is a founding partner at hMa, where her current design interests include how architecture can achieve beauty while embodying the principle of “zeroness” as well as using sound and light to produce unique architectural solutions. But Meyers does not limit her endeavors solely to practicing architecture. She also writes—one book on light, another currently in development, on sound—and she teaches.
Given that the field of architecture has changed radically over the past five years through a convergence of economic factors and technological advancements, we asked Meyers to offer some of her observations on architectural education.
Sherin Wing: How did your own education influence the way you teach now?
Victoria Meyers: It’s hard to know what to tell people. My undergraduate degree was in civil engineering and art history, so I had a much broader knowledge of art history than my contemporaries at the GSD. It’s not for everyone to do what I did. Most people don’t want to be in school as long as I was, they don’t want to read as many books as I’ve read and they don’t want to spend as many hours studying as I’ve spent studying. But when I’m teaching and when I’m talking to contemporaries about a project, I will always go into the history of a typology more because that is very real for me.
SW: How has your perspective on education changed over the years?
VM: For many years I was tough as a teacher, though now I’m not. I look at the kids and I see such a rough road ahead of them and I think back on my own educational experience. I think back at the different things that were evaluated and realize that things never turn out the way we were told or expect them to. When we were graduating, there was one or two students held up to us as superstars, but we never heard from them after graduation. I’ve also been behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and I know all the machinations of people who teach, psychological games, and how they’re presenting information.
Hildebrand’s research he applies to architecture the familiar landscape concepts of “refuge and prospect”; it spells out how our search for both is a response to shifting intensity among contending predilections. The basic impulse is evident early in the hide-a-ways and forts built throughout childhood. And gender, age, resources, time-of-day or season, strength or vulnerability, or urgent motivations of a “personal project” clearly can have widely differing influences on the way each of us will seek out a secure place. But he backs up a convincing case that designers can produce more welcoming, satisfying, human environments by recognizing that their publics will in fact experience them in these deep-seated, survival-based terms.
Sanctuary
Hildebrand takes the next step, too, defining and illustrating the architectural qualities that underlie protection and a release from fear or out-of-control nature in a “refuge”. Most important is the low height and enfolding form of a “ceiling” plane or overhanging trees. Light levels lower than in surrounding spaces, protected openings plus mostly solid-seeming walls – often the reality of, or echoes of earth forms, color, and materials – all naturally reinforce the feeling. Then horizontal dimensions significantly smaller than those of surrounding spaces – the “cozy” inglenook, “den,” or walled gardens – and an entrance that is a succession of vestibules or buffers, elevate the retreat into a “sanctuary”. As a prime example of combined refuge and prospect he again uses the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright with their focus on cave-like hearths and long, sheltering overhangs, combined with broad windows and projecting decks – warmth, protection, and openings out to freedom.
“Hearth and ‘prospect’ at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water”
He could have cited, too, the secure “shells” of more popular, conventional houses with their courtyard or backyards and outlooks into the neighborhood. And there are other dimensions of “refuge” as well.
In the course of reporting my piece on Edward Mazria, I had a very interesting conversation with Andrew C. Revkin, for years an environmental reporter for the New York Times. Today he writes the paper’s Dot Earth Blog and also teaches at Pace University. A big admirer of Mazria, Revkin has an altogether clear-eyed view of the environmental road ahead. An edited version of our talk follows:
Martin C. Pedersen: First off, what’s your role at Pace?
Andrew C. Revkin: I am Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. And I co-teach three courses. One is a new course I’ve launched called Blogging a Better Planet. In the spring I co-teach a documentary production course, where we do films on sustainability topics, and an environmental science communication course.
MCP: You’ve been aware of Ed’ Mazria’s role in the environmental movement for a while. How would you characterize it?
ACR: His case—and it’s a good and simple one—is that buildings really matter. He’s trying to shift how we design them, and how we design architects, as well.
MCP: How does his advocacy differ from someone like Bill McKibben http://www.350.org/?
ACR: I think Ed is focusing on things that are imminently more doable. Bill is very good about building movements around numbers, but has not adequately articulated how you get there. In other words, besides yelling at fossil fuel companies. That may be something that needs to be done, but it’s not a path that will actually change a lot of things. Ed is working in a space where there’s a lot to be done, both on existing structures and on new buildings. There’s huge potential to make big gains.
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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