For years, New York City’s electricity grid has strained under the stress caused by peak demand, the times (like midday or, in a seasonal cycle, the summer) when residents are most apt to use electrical appliances and max out the municipal power network. Stress on the aging system will likely only increase in coming years, with some experts predicting a 30 percent uptick in the city’s peak demand by 2030. One strategy to deal with the problem, addressed by a panel on “Smart Grid for Smart Cities” yesterday morning at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, is the creation of a more flexible energy system—one that allows customers to know exactly how much energy they’re using and lets them reduce their load (by, for instance, shutting off their water heaters when they’re not home). For city residents, that will mean smaller energy bills at the end of the month. Other features of the smart grid—like the storage of electricity, harvested during lulls and used during times of peak demand—also increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system, while reducing its environmental impact. Read more…

If you think Thom Mayne designs buildings that stand out for the sake of standing out, you’re only partially correct.

Last week, at the Center for Architecture in downtown Manhattan, Mayne gave a talk on  “performalism,” a portmanteau that describes how architectural form can influence building performance—the way, for instance, the scrim-like façade of Morphosis’s San Francisco Federal Building effectively replaces a traditional cooling system, or the dramatic roof of the still-in-process Phare Tower that doubles as a wind farm and electricity generator, both engineering feats as much as architectural ones. The idea, according to the architect, is to use architectural skins and shape to increase environmental performance, reduce financial burden, and integrate various programmatic and mechanical systems: to create, in Mayne’s words, “layers and layers of performance.”

And, of course, to produce a building that grabs attention. 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

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…

Last night was the press preview for The Wright, a sleek new restaurant shoehorned into a tiny space at the southwest corner of the Guggenheim Museum. For anyone who remembers its former manifestation—a maroon-walled café crowded with tables and framed photographs—the new interior will seem like a major departure, and an appealing one at that. Designed by the New York architect Andre Kikoski, it is pristine white with a few bold exceptions: the saturated-blue banquettes, a curving walnut wall above the bar, and a series of powder-coated aluminum planks mounted to the walls and ceiling. The last turns out to be a site-specific sculpture by the British artist Liam Gillick (who also happens to be Kikoski’s neighbor) titled The horizon produced by a factory once it had stopped producing views.

As for the cuisine, it will be what you might call Upper East Side comfort food: seared diver scallops, Maine lobster, slow-roasted suckling pig. (The chef is Rodolfo Contreras, a David Bouley protégé.) The Wright opens to the public on December 11. A few more snapshots follow, after the jump. Read more…

It’s been over a year since the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt announced the departure of Paul Thompson and formed a search committee to find a replacement. No official announcements have been made and the staff members I’ve spoken to have either been clueless or mum. So, while doing the rounds in Europe this week, the subject came up again. Names bandied about included: the MoMA’s Paola Antonelli (“She is ready for the Cooper-Hewitt, but the current staff isn’t ready for her,” I heard); the Cincinnati Art Museum’s director, Aaron Betsky (“He’d never be able to deal with the bureaucracy of working in triplicate forms”); or Craig Miller, who did a great job building up the design collection at the Denver Art Museum (“He seems happy as curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art”). Then, suddenly, a wise friend whispered: Bill Moggridge. Read more…

This morning I dropped by Pike Loop, a temporary installation in downtown Manhattan designed by the Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler and fabricated by a large industrial robot that goes by the name R-O-B. Unfortunately for a robot lover like me, R-O-B had decamped the site weeks earlier, after having carefully stacked and epoxy-glued more than 7,000 bricks into a looping wall that runs the length of a small pedestrian island on Pike Street near Chinatown. (Scroll down to watch a time-lapse video of R-O-B at work.)

The resulting installation is not something that’s likely to stop passersby in their tracks—it is, after all, a brown brick wall—but it’s an appealing piece of urban art nonetheless. For me, it was all about city textures: Peering through the gaps in the brickwork, you see passing traffic, chain-link fencing, the garish signs on the storefronts across the street. An otherwise drab corner of the city suddenly seems a bit more colorful and strange.

Pike Loop was realized thanks to Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program. “It’s our first time bringing robot art to the streets of New York, certainly,” the NYCDOT’s commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, told me in a recent phone call. “It’s cutting-edge innovation—and, you know, it’s a bit of a surprise. So it brings that element of play and liveliness to the streetscape.”

Here’s that time-lapse video: Read more…

Photos: Cristina Naccarato/Broken City Lab

Just across the river from Detroit sits a city forgotten. Battered by the fall of the auto industry and struggling to keep its economy running, Windsor, Ontario, has seen some tough times in recent years, and things aren’t likely to improve any time soon. It has the highest unemployment rate in Canada, a plummeting population, and the empty storefronts and foreclosed homes that have come to define this generation’s Great Recession.

Though geographically south, Windsor’s been called the Detroit of the North. For some locals, it’s simply a broken city. But there’s a growing movement that believes Windsor is a city that can be fixed.

A group of artists, activists, and urbanists has come together in Windsor with the straightforward-yet-complex goal of repairing the city. Their group is called the Broken City Lab, and it meets weekly to collaboratively dream up ways of engaging the community in a conversation about Windsor’s future. Read more…

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To introduce his panel at last Thursday’s Infrastructures for Change Workshop, in Chicago, Giles Jacknain reminded us that the ancient Greeks had two words for city. The first was asty—or the inanimate bricks and mortar. The other: polis, or the city as a human entity. The conversation we were about to have, he suggested, was about moving from “asty to polis.”

Jacknain is the founder of the consultancy the Oikos Collective and a faculty member of Archeworks, which sponsored the day-long Infrastructures for Change event. The conference offered a mash-up of bottom-up and top-down projects designed to make cities of the future sustainable “before it’s too late,” as more than one speaker put it. It’s the first in a series of Archeworks workshops that will showcase design alternatives to the waste-intensive, auto-dependent, low-density infrastructures of the 20th century. Read more…

Photo: Stefano Paltera/courtesy the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

Keeping tabs on the Solar Decathlon is a bit like watching a slow-moving golf tournament. Over two weeks, 20 college and university teams from around the world compete to see who has created the best residential prototype for a solar-powered home. The houses—installed in a Solar Village on the National Mall in D.C.—are judged on ten criteria ranging from architecture and lighting design to communications and net metering. The daily tallies are kept on a giant leaderboard as well as on the Decathlon Web site.

Last Thursday, as the competition was nearing a close, the house from Team California held the top slot after coming in first in the architecture competition. But by the end of the day, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had bumped California from first place with just one final contest to go: net metering. Each home is equipped with a meter to gauge how much energy it produces and consumes; a team gets 100 points for producing at least as much energy as their home needs and they get up to 50 points for generating a surplus that could go back to an energy grid. Read more…