Last week on ABC’s Nightline, Bill Weir, the host of the segment “This Could Be Big,” waved our October issue on national television. The segment was on QR codes, and our cover had a big one on it. Weir’s question was, “Will this get bigger, or will it end up on the dust heap of technology?”

Our technology issue was all about how digital tools are shaking up the design profession, from architects learning code to using software for participatory design. Putting a QR code on each of those stories was a no-brainer—they add a multimedia layer of information to the page.  But the QR code on our cover was really the masterstroke—it’s a portal to Metropolis’s first digital cover.  When our art director Dungjai Pungauthaikan called the designer Peter Alfano to create the content that lies beneath that huge pixelated box, she said “Peter, this is the cover you’ve been waiting for.” We will say no more, except that once you’ve watched Weir’s segment below, we suggest you get hold of our October issue, and use a smartphone on it. (Or click here)

The “boxes of squiggly lines” are not quite as easy as they are made out to be, as our art department discovered in implementing them. They had to take into account various video formats, incompatible web browsers, and different smartphones. But they stuck it out. Because until Weir’s fancy trick with the champagne bottle becomes generally available, the QR code is very far from the dust heap—it is still our easiest link from the printed word to the digital world.

Read our technology issue here, including the story about QR codes integrated into clothing.

Zuccotti Park, before and after Occupy Wall Street, image via Curbed NY

If you believe that good and bad intentions eventually circle around to some sort of cosmic resolution—karma, if you will—then the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park are sweet indeed. Why? Zuccotti Park (named for John Zuccotti, former deputy mayor, former planning commissioner, chairman of the real estate behemoth Brookfield Properties, and all around operator—a deep pocketed capitalist, if you will) is one of those strange New York anomalies: privately owned public space. The park, which until the protesters arrived was very much under the radar, is the product of a 1961 zoning ordinance that gave developers (like John Zuccotti) extra height in exchange for the creation of plazas, parks and atriums, which they were in turn responsible for maintaining and keeping open to the public. The Plaza Bonus, as it was called, inspired more than 500 of these hybrid spaces. Some, like the atrium at the IBM Building, were genuine public amenities; others were altogether forlorn and “parks” in name only.

Zuccotti Park (originally called Liberty Plaza Park—think barren and windswept) was created in 1969, when U.S. Steel was given an extra 500,000 square feet of office space at nearby 1 Liberty Plaza . And guess who owns the 54-story building and adjacent park today? Brookfield Properties. So it all ties together rather neatly: the protesters were allowed to gather in Zuccotti Park because the Plaza Bonus that created it allowed them to.

Somewhere Holly Whyte is smiling.

Related: Martin Pedersen explains the fallout of the plaza bonus in this Metropolis film, My Banal Neighborhood.

“Frozen Skyline[i]” and “Layoffs Sweep Architecture Profession as Economy Worsens[ii]” were the headlines in 2008. Architects watched projects put on hold, hoping for a more favorable financial climate even as projects in the pipeline dissolved. In 2009, one article listing architecture as the Number One hardest hit profession, described the situation: “it was the worst of times, and it was the worst of times.”[iii]

Four years later, while other industries have seen some recovery, architecture and construction continue to languish. The number of employed architects has steadily declined from 2008, currently resting at 70% of the pre-recession peak numbers. This lingering atrophy begs the question: will we ever recover to pre-recession numbers or will the current situation be ossified, permanently restructuring architecture as a smaller industry?

Last week, Yale University hosted a panel discussion on job creation, featuring Rick Levin, the University’s president and an economist, as well as distinguished faculty members Robert Shiller, John Geanakoplos, Judith Chevalier, William Nordhaus, and Aleh Tsyvinski. President Levin spoke about the university’s obligation to address the current and growing unemployment protests around the country, and how a discussion between economic thinkers on an innovative, academic level, might offer generative ideas to the dialogue at the federal level.

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For a month now New York’s Zuccotti Park has been a digitally radiating lamentation of capitalism’s cruelest traits. The Great Recession, the park’s inhabitants say, made it impossible to mask hypercompetitive, socially atomizing forces inherent in the status quo. It’s an odd scene set against the forbidding façade of World Trade Center One, rising comically out of proportion to every unfortunate park, street or building near its base. Somewhere down there the general assemblies of Zuccotti Park scramble for alternatives to the system of irrational speculation that, incidentally, spawned WTC One. What would that system look like?

The major critique of Occupy Wall Street is that they haven’t uniformly articulated such a system yet.  But their spontaneous reinvention of Zuccotti Park offers glimpses of alternative urban design in real time. It brings to life the art world’s increasingly popular genre of social experimentation. As I’ve written about before, the temporary Guggenheim Lab used vacant space to invite civic input on urban design alongside a stream of expert informers. Creative Time’s “Living as Form” in the Lower East Side’s historic Essex Street Market did much the same thing, but from a consciously radical perspective in tune with the emergent zeitgeist. The exhibit, which closed Sunday, was a study of how to foster substantive social interaction.

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Architect Jeanne Gang on the terrace of Aqua, an 82-story skyscraper in downtown Chicago. Photo: Anna Knott.

The first time we met, Tim McCormick was standing in front of the colorful community center that Jeanne Gang had designed for his thriving non-profit. The centerpiece of the ground floor was set of large steps, with dark green shag carpet cascading down the entire thing. After the usual pleasantries, I asked McCormick what he thought of the space, and he magically lit up. He couldn’t wait to show off the building.

The Lavezzorio Community Center, designed by Studio Gang. Photo: Steve Hall

McCormick quickly came across as exactly the kind of caring leader you’d want running a community center and nonprofit focused on reuniting foster kids with their biological parents. And though he may have quietly groused about the extra money spent cleaning the abundance of windows in his prized building, he proved to be the type of client that Gang and her team needed to realize this design marvel on Chicago’s South Side.

Just like other Studio Gang clients that I’ve spoken with, McCormick exuded deep pride and gratitude for the extraordinary pro bono contributions made by Gang and her team. The moment that she was announced earlier this week as a 2011 honoree of the MacArthur Fellows Program (more commonly known as the “Genius Award,” to the chagrin of its recipients), I thought not of her acclaimed Aqua Tower or other well-published work, but instead of her roster of pro bono clients, like McCormick, and the people they help each day—and what the award might possibly mean to them.

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The interior of the house designed by Ying chee Chui as part of MIT’s 1K House project. Photo: Ying chee Chui

Interesting news out of Cambridge last week: MIT announced that the first prototype from its 2009 “1K House Project” was recently completed in Sichuan  Province,  China.  Designed bya recent graduate of the architecture school, Ying chee Chui, the Pinwheel House is a steel-reinforced brick house (created to withstand an 8.0 earthquake) with a modular layout comprised of simple rectangular rooms surrounded by a traditional courtyard.

The goal of the studio project—conceived by Tony Ciochetti, chairman of MIT’s Center for Real Estateand clearly modeled after Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child—was a daunting one: design and build a $1,000 house. Like the one-hundred-dollar laptop, the one-thousand-dollar house has a nice, clean media-friendly ring to it. It’s certainly eye-catching as a concept. But what are we to make of the news, slightly buried in the MIT release, that construction costs for the Chui house totaled $5925, or six times the stated goal?

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The Municipal Art Society (MAS) announced winners of its annual MASterworks awards last week, honoring projects that in its words “make a significant contribution to New York’s built environment.” In the past five years, the awards (in the Best Building category) have gone to a slew of well-known firms: Morphosis, Gehry + Partners, Renzo Piano Workshop. This year was no different, with projects by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Foster + Partners topping the list.

The jury—Rafael Pelli, Deborah Berke, Marc Kushner of HWKN, and Charles Bendit of Taconic Investment Partners—also gave a Best Green Design Initiative award to the Design Trust for Public Trust for its High Performance Landscape Guidelines, done in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Below, images of the winning projects, with edited descriptions provided by MAS:

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In news that will surely gladden the hearts (and backs!) of schoolchildren everywhere, the Yale School of Medicine announced today that it will give each of its students an iPad2 for classroom and clinical use. All paper-based course materials will be eliminated. “We started thinking about this about a year and half ago, shortly after the iPad was released,” says Michael Schwartz, assistant dean for curriculum at the school. “We were spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on paper, and the students didn’t always read it.” (Medical students, it turns out, aren’t all that different from twelve-year-olds.)

The advantages here seem obvious: cost, environmental footprint, and ease of use. At any time, students can hit the “sync button,” as Schwartz calls it, and get revised lectures. This paperless transition was done without a lot of IT expertise, in house, with relative ease.  “We set up a server, which compressed and condensed the data for use on the iPad,” Schwartz says.

So is the beginning of the end for the traditional textbook? “I think so,” he says. “It’s much more convenient, easy to update. In the old days, we had to wait for an updated edition of the book. Now if a teacher wants to change their approach, they can easily do that and it’s fresh for the next year.”

It seems as if it’s just a matter of time—and budget—before all schools eliminate the physical textbook, and end that all too common sight: the 70-pound student lugging forty pounds of textbooks in a bulging backpack, bent slightly at the waist from the effort, as if trudging into a stiff wind. Good riddance.

Last week a local architect forwarded an interesting press release from Greater New Orleans, Inc., an economic development alliance for the region. It announced, with great hyperventilating fanfare, that Gameloft, “one of the world’s largest publishers of digital and social gaming,” would establish a new video game development studio in New Orleans. This was one of those Richard Florida-type stories that seemed too good to be true. And maybe an indication that the Crescent City had indeed become a draw for the coveted “creative class.”

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Earlier this month word come out of Chicago—specifically, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture—that His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, the nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, planned to build the world’s tallest building. The Kingdom Tower, as it’s called for now, will top out at an almost incomprehensible 3280 feet. That’s roughly two-thirds of a mile.  (Frank Lloyd Wright’s not looking so wacky after all.)

How exactly are we supposed to greet this news? Does the world need a 3280-foot tower? Did it need the 2717-foot Burj Khalifa in Dubai, designed by Smith and Gill while at SOM? Of course not: super tall buildings aren’t shaped by profit—upturned boxes and their attached casinos are created for that—they’re shaped by hubris, pride, and aggressive symbolism.

The good news: this is an extraordinarily gorgeous rendering. The laws of physics dictate that absurdly tall buildings taper as they reach for the heavens. This presents some wonderful sculptural possibilities; ones that Smith and Gill have taken advantage of here. There’s also something oddly beautiful about super tall buildings, in the abstract: they photograph well, they look awe-inspiring from the window of an airplane, or the front seat of a car headed in from the airport. It’s at street level where the idea loses its romance. They’re great, in other words, until they become real.

The bad news here: the symbolism seems particularly ill-timed. With world financial markets tottering and the hopes of an Arab Spring dashed, along comes the autocratic and oil rich Saudi royal family to sponsor the next world’s tallest building. (It is literally one of those records made to be broken.) My reaction isn’t wow—we know they can do it, they’re structural geniuses—but why?