Health indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. Healthcare costs are rising to unprecedented levels. To address these challenges, it’s become imperative that our municipal policies and initiatives be reconsidered. How can design help? As I see it, design provides a key preventative strategy. Designers can improve public health outcomes and enhance our everyday environments. The lens of design can help us focus and re-conceptualize the public health impacts of our cities and buildings. Healthy communities will help stem our raging epidemic of obesity and the chronic diseases that result from our sedentary lifestyles and bad diets.

But when you think of health, you may be thinking of the medical industry and the illnesses it treats. It’s time to turn this idea on its head. Let’s start focusing, instead, on preventative strategies that reduce the incidence of sickness in the first place.

A key policy, health by design, can be integrated directly into our cities, and architects can play a central role in designing healthier buildings and communities. Many of the problems we face today can be solved by simply looking at the amenities people already want from their cities: developments close to transit, shopping, restaurants, social services, and community services. These are essential parts of a comprehensive, systems-level solution. Active lifestyles rely, in large part, on expanding the options for when, where, and how people can live, work, and play.

Cities and towns looking to help their people stay healthy, now have access to a helpful document, produced by the American Institute of Architects. Local Leaders: Healthier Communities Through Design is a roadmap to design techniques that encourage residents to increase their physical activity. I see this new publication as a key resource for government officials, design professionals, and other stakeholders collaborating to address America’s public health challenges.

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Art and architecture thrive on influence, an asset that knows no boundaries, geographic or disciplinary. It is in this spirit that we welcome new voices, perspectives and interpretations.
 National Building Museum and Metropolis Magazine contributor, Andrew Caruso, begins the 2013 run of Inside the Design Mind with an emerging voice: Yang Yongliang.  At only 32, this Chinese born graphic designer-turned digital artist has come of age in one of the most pivotal (and controversial) times in his country’s history. His digital-collage reinterpretations of China’s cities present explorations of the built environment that are simultaneously critical and aspirational, dark and foreboding yet filled with light. Already showing in galleries from Shanghai to Paris, we think he’s one to watch.



Andrew Caruso: What parts of your childhood influenced the way you approach art?


Yang Yongliang: I grew up and learned about art in an old town that had retained its traditional Chinese character. My teacher made oil paintings and he taught me basic exercises in drawing and watercolor. I remember him telling me on his deathbed that he was thinking about painting. His manner and attitude toward art had a far-reaching influence on me and his death had a profound impact. 



AC: You originally studied very traditional forms of art making. Why then did you begin your career with digital media?

YY: My childhood education included traditional paintings and calligraphy and at university I learned graphic design. I began using different software programs and studied photography and shooting techniques. Combining these skills became natural. 



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Our introductory Green Team blog addressed a common misconception: There is no space left for new landscapes in New York City, the dense urban expanse that is our home turf. In fact, there are available spaces, but they’re likely to come with some complex problems. Finding ourselves wrestling with small, challenging, and limited spaces, we sometimes take an unexpected approach. We look up!

Our initial site analysis for New York projects—and others—entails, in part, identifying ALL available space than can be improved. Crisp, white walls may be de rigueur for the interior artist, but they are far too banal for a vibrant, metropolitan landscape. By using a site’s vertical surfaces, we can expand the benefits of a project to include increased planting areas, aesthetically appealing live or inanimate screens, thoughtfully designed edge conditions, improved views, reduced cooling requirements for adjacent buildings, and the mitigation of urban heat island effect (UHI), thus furthering the definition of “the space.”

The design of exterior vertical surfaces can take on many forms and configurations including green screens, green walls, cable trellis systems, wall-mounted planters, trellises, and planters housing fastigiate (columnar) species, to name a few. The selection of the proper treatment for these surfaces is based on sun/shade conditions, design intent, the structural capacity of the surface to receive the enhancement, available soil volume for plants, and so on. If we propose a woven wire or cable trellis system, we must consider the method of its attachment to the building’s surface as well as whether the receiving wall or support structure can sustain its weight load in addition to the living, twining plants that will grow over the plane. Some factors that influence plant selection, as well as the ultimate success of the installation, are planters, soil volume, irrigation, and solar orientation.

We work with a wide variety of systems and approaches on vertical landscapes throughout the city. At Spring Street Plaza, a 200-foot-long wall abutting the adjacent building was designed and installed to allow us to use a vertical screen system for vines. This wall provided the structural support for the vegetated system while ensuring that no portion of the work was attached to or interfered with the structure of the neighboring property (our post on property lines talks about the consequences of this). Once installed, the green screen, with its dense vine cover comprising six vine species, provided a sense of enclosure for the plaza, acting as a vegetated backdrop to the small “rooms” of the plaza design. The wire grid also provided structure for the installation of custom light tubes into the screen, creating a playful effect of illuminated planting at night. The 10-foot height of the new wall—a pedestrian scale intervention— also helps deemphasize the presence of the adjacent building.

A view south across one of the seating “rooms” of the plaza showing the vine-covered green screen along the western edge of the site. Photo courtesy Elizabeth Felicella

Light tubes inserted into pockets in the wire grid screen accent the vines and illuminate the site. Photo courtesy Elizabeth Felicella

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It’s a warm summers day on Governors Island in 2015. Tourists doze in gently rocking hammocks while a lone musician softly plays to the clinking of coins in his guitar case. Basking in the shade of a nearby tree, a teenager sprawls on the grass pretending to read history while two ballet dancers practice in the long shadow of Liggett Hall. It’s numerous stone balconies full of workers on laptops, the archways and warm lighting fill the heart of Governors Island with quiet contemplation.

Liggett Hall is a former military office and barracks, designed in 1929 by McKim, Mead & White in the Georgian Revival style. Encompassing 400,000-square feet of space, this elegant building of stone and brick serves as an iconic gateway between the park on the south side of the island, and the largest adaptive reuse project in the country.

Liggett Hall, photo courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

Education, art, music, business. These are just some of the pieces of the puzzle of opportunity that is the RFP (Request For Proposal) on Governors Island. With a $260 million investment in park amenities—potable water, 21st century electrical and telecommunication systems, and improved access—New York City is betting on Governors Island as a premier destination for tourism, culture, and business.

Liggett Terrace, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

Last month I went on a private guided tour of Governors Island. A short 10-minute ferry ride took me from the southern tip of Manhattan to the waiting Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island. Two minutes off the ferry and I’m whisked off in an armored gulf cart for a vision filled tour of the future. Koch’s enthusiasm and excitement filled my head with beautiful landscapes, restored relics, creative uses of historic buildings, resilient park spaces, art, culture, advanced business, and great opportunities.

South Battery, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

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While evolution’s natural selection is about competing individuals, a broader perspective on our response to built environments, another set of genetic preparations for survival – another set of innate pleasures – is seen in the ways we mate and settle in communities.  Both the biology and practical survival benefits are compelling – cohesive family groups, strength-in-numbers, extended expertise gained by learning from each other, trading, collaborating and specializing – and we are powerfully motivated to merge our competitive interests into a cooperating population when we can find like-minded people.

Look again at the choice of a “good home.”  For those who can choose, it may well be on high ground, overlooking water and set in parkland.  But making choices based on limited resources, we most often live in clusters – compounds, hamlets, villages, towns, gated or not – where the comfort of refuge is in the presence of neighbors, and security is found behind a protective “wall” of social contracts – customs, laws, and patrols.

It’s a way we’ve been prepared to transcend the in-born human limitations that frustrate competitive success.  We volunteer to compromise our hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – as we join in larger and more powerful alliances – friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  And those connections, like our connections to nature, tend to draw their power from the spiritual experience – the sense of entering into, belonging to – something larger than our own day-to-day material world.  We sense ourselves joining in time cycles that exceed our life, and the ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.

The significance of the commitment, submerging our own identity, what we are, into a group, can be read in the quick, often violent emotions evoked by – and the willingness to die for – such concepts as turf, ghetto, comrades, and fatherland and by the anxiety of personal separation or exclusion from the “refuge” of a group. These can be – they have been – life-or-death issues.  And forms of hospitality – of sharing food and warmth – are one of the defining customs of a family or a culture. Further, the most admired virtues in many societies are self-sacrifice, loyalty, and courage – deciding to overrule our other survival instincts on behalf of justice, fairness, “duty” owed to others – or instantaneously, without thinking, responding to people in distress.

The underlying biology is in the mix of hormones stirred first by an initial encounter and then validated by repetition. Natural selection has made us a gregarious species, and while we respond to a threat with the well-known “fight-or-flight” impulses – aggression or fear – we may instead, in the same instant, detect a level of warmth or welcome. We’re prepared for the nuanced, often involuntary messages we receive from faces, body language, words, and voices to trigger a different body chemistry, one that induces a “tend-and-befriend” openness, curiosity, empathy and, ultimately, altruism.

We are quick to search out and detect capabilities and competence in potential allies and mates; we want to experience the pleasures of trust, of aligning our feelings and beliefs with theirs, and the sense of bonding outside ourselves.  And while the ease and intensity of person-to-person connections – the chemistry – varies from gene pool to gene pool, introverts and extroverts, and with gender and age, we all tend to mirror – to attune ourselves to – each other’s feelings and behavior. The result is the kind of emotional contagion that underlies both person-to-person empathy and the behavior of crowds or mobs. In other words, our brain networks – its structure – can be shaped by what other people do around us.

“Water, food, and spiritual security – the working and symbolic
crossroads for a cluster of alliances.”

Relationships

In practice, social relationships are our primary “environment.”  We are born into them.  They are part of our identity and shape an experience of the places we build in two important ways.  First, in the constant overload of received information we tend to single out and give first priority to social information. And the resulting pleasure or anxiety of person-to-person connections is often the strongest emotion feeding our responses.  It may be an ephemeral interaction between people and a place – in rituals, trade, sports, or public promenading – or more permanent, like selecting the refuge of a home in a neighborhood of allies and the prospect out onto a reassuring village street.

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In our blog, From Field to Park, we discussed the post-tagging process for trees and transporting them to a project site. Here, we turn our attention to property lines and their importance to a project’s success.

It is not often that property lines are tangible, constructed elements visible at the boundary of every plot of land or building lot. More often, we find that these critical legal delineations—represented by a linear arrangement of one long and two short dashes on surveys or within drawing files—are not easily identified in situ. They can be like the mosquito buzzing in your ear. You never see it, but then feel the bite. An error in siting this legal boundary correctly in the field or on drawings can quickly escalate from minor drafting revisions to major design changes or worse. Inherently an American privilege, property ownership is measured in fractions of an inch. As designers, we must be aware of what that fraction may cost if not properly documented.

A misconception when reviewing design drawings? The belief that a contract limit line, natural features like streams or ridgelines, or built elements such as perimeter fences or building facades are what demarcate the edge of the property. It’s imperative that at the start of a project, the true property line—and not an arbitrary edge—is identified. An assessment of edge conditions should be part of the initial site analysis to determine if future design elements will impact this relationship.

Credit: Mathews Nielsen

We used a red balloon to represent a proposed sculpture to assess sight lines at our West Point Foundry Preserve project. The designers studied the views from within the property as well the view into the property from adjacent lots to the project site. Views are not confined by property lines and must be considered from all angles.

There can be several oversights at the property perimeter. These are often discovered in later, more costly stages of a project and frequently occur when the initial assessment was not comprehensive or when insufficient data was available for a site. Some typical lapses include subterranean footings for buildings or structures that extend beyond the property line, misdirected overland drainage flows that will either unnecessarily enter or unlawfully exit the site, or the construction of a barrier (wall, fence, screen, etc.) that is improperly located on the adjacent property. While a site element and its foundation may be positioned properly, we must also consider the excavation of and any necessary shoring for foundations that may extend beyond the property line.

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In our previous post, “Tree Tag…You’re It”, we let you in on the details of what landscape architects call “tree tagging,” as well as my spring experience with tulip poplars, and some of the challenges we face in the field during the selection process. Here we discuss the post-tagging process.

The landscape architect’s job doesn’t end when she leaves the nursery. The trees we’ve selected must be maintained, cared for, and prepped in anticipation of delivering them to the project for installation. This multi-step process involves digging up the trees from the field, preparing each tree by its root condition, packaging, delivery, and finally, installation.

Tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) tagged in spring 2012 were alive and well at the nursery in the fall …and had grown over an inch in caliper in five months!

Digging Times

Digging trees is dictated by the calendar year and season, as well as by planned installation schedules, and even specific plant types.

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichtum) trees tagged in the field are dug and balled in burlap by machinery in early spring, prior to the planting season.

A tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), for instance, isn’t a picky tree, but others certainly are. Trees we call “fall dig hazards” drop their leaves well into the season—they don’t go dormant until very late in the fall. These finicky species include hawthorn, sweetgum, cherry, and pear trees. Read more…

The concepts “natural selection” and “survival,” in the evolutionary sense, ultimately mean competitive reproductive success – passing the genes on to other generations – and they are implicit in – in a sense they drive – everything we design, build, and inhabit.

The ancient city of Petra at a desert crossroads, now in Jordan

In practice, every human choice is about “rewarding” ourselves with “pleasure.”  Scientist Steven Pinker puts it neatly “…(G)enes selfishly spread themselves.  They do it by the way they build our brains.  By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.”  In other words, when our thoughts and actions trigger pleasure circuits – a reward system of connections and chemistry in the brain and body – we sense we are enhancing our odds for surviving and prospering – winning Pinker’s “lottery” – in whatever environment we encounter.  The “happiness” we’re in “pursuit of” is not an abstraction, but repetitions of these kinds of physical pleasures.

Naturally, “survival” – the word I’ll use to refer to “natural selection” or “reproduction of the fittest” – means staying alive and healthy, pairing with the right mate, raising a family and building a secure, nurturing habitat.  It’s built into innate predilections. Then, in practice, “survival” involves competing, winning and sustaining the independence to control “my” surroundings for “my” interests.  That, in turn, is likely to work best by acquiring the strength of more knowledge, better tools and more skills, multiplying them through trusting alliances, and exploring, migrating or trading to gain access to still more resources. It involves, too, constantly moving ahead, avoiding losses and anchoring security by storing-up and protecting the “wealth” that has been won, earning respites from challenges – in other words “prospering.”  The most valuable “wealth” was and is, of course, the accumulated knowledge needed to master the environments we encounter and to manage them in ways that maintain a constant competitive edge.

Further, the natural in-born human limitations that can stand in the way of competitive success keep us searching for ways to transcend them.  And with our evolved creative imaginations we continually develop technologies – tools or weapons – that diversify and multiply our biologically constrained skill, time, and energy.  Equally important, innate predilections – reinforced by body chemistry – to advance by cooperating comes into play.

Survival-of-the-fittest includes a propensity for the forms of moral behavior that make trust and collaboration possible. We’re prepared to volunteer to compromise a hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – by merging our own personal projects into the survival and prosperity of larger and more powerful alliances – mating, friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  We exchange a measure of freedom for strength and diversity. And then those connections, in turn, become part of our identity. They draw their power from another innate level of pleasure we tend to call spiritual experience – the sense of entering into and sharing – belonging to – something larger than one’s “self” – a larger purpose and sense of destiny.  The ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally; joining in time cycles that exceed our lifetime and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.  Some, of course, try to escape the rigors of earthly competition altogether by living in an imagined or virtual world.

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I am a climate refugee, or at least, I was for nearly 2 weeks after Superstorm Sandy hit the NYC metro area. What is a climate refugee?  It’s someone who’s been displaced due to the effects of climate change.  Millions of people throughout NY, NJ and CT are now official members of this latest category of citizens.  Climate change has been called a moral issue because impoverished nations are supposed to be the first impacted.  Sandy illustrated that rich localities can easily become the Third World when the web of infrastructure we depend on collapses.  It’s a good bet another Sandy will hit the region within five to ten years. It was the second hurricane to ransack the northeast in two years.  Let’s hope the next downpour isn’t a category 3 or 4.

Climate Refugees Map by UNEP

The aftermath has brought about two major ways of looking at our future.  One is to explore how the region can become more resilient and adaptive to climate change.  The other calls for “rebuilding stronger than ever” and implementing sea walls to protect the Big Apple from surging water.  Both paths are extremely challenging, because we are facing three-front fight.  We have to adapt to how our footprint has already altered weather patterns. We have to muster the willingness to continue eliminating further damage to the climate, and we must unlearn what we think modern society is.  Lastly, we have to do this as budgets and debt make it impossible for expensive solutions.

My Experience

At around 7p.m. on the night before Sandy made landfall, the lights in my house flickered and then went black.  It would be nearly 14 days before they came back on.  My house was built in the 1960’s – it is a beautiful vintage, mid-century style ranch home.  When first built, it was a model for the future. Everything in the house is electric from the hot water heater to the space heating to the air conditioning.  Three decades ago, electricity was cheap.  Now, homes with electric-centric mode of operation are a financial burden.

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We interrupt our Tree Tagging series to bring you this special post…Our Green Team wanted to share some of the more interesting holiday plant facts we’ve uncovered so you can impress your family, friends, and colleagues while sipping on a poinsettia (1/2 ounce Cointreau, 3 ounces cranberry juice, and a champagne float) and enjoying a handful of chestnuts (Castanea sativa) at your festive upcoming gatherings.

The Holiday Tree Tradition

Evergreen trees have been a symbol of the season since the sixteenth century, but the Germans were not likely thinking about the evergreen tree market as a booming winter business. Approximately 30 million trees are sold over the holidays each year in America. Where do all of these trees come from?  The bulk of the U.S.’s crop (98 percent, to be exact) comes from tree production farms, with Oregon topping the list of acreage dedicated to holiday trees. In 2007, the total farmed acreage was equivalent to nearly 40  New York Central Parks!

The Mystery of Mistletoe

Much like an overeager paramour kissed under the mistletoe, the seeds of this plant (Viscum album in Europe and Phoradendron serotinum in North America) “stick” to a host plant after being transported by birds. Mistletoe is parasitic and lives off a variety of tree species by extending a proboscis-like root structure into a branch, through which it pulls nutrients and water. This sapping of nutrients can weaken the host plant and occasionally results in death. Due to its parasitic nature, mistletoe can only be cultivated by seed. So, be careful who you kiss this season, or you might find yourself with a draining new attachment of your own.

More Than Just Candy!

Royal ambassadors in ancient Rome were known to carry mint sprigs in their pockets, because the aroma of peppermint (Mentha x piperita) was thought to prevent a person from losing his or her temper. Today, peppermint oil is used in a variety of home remedies, mainly as a calming agent to soothe an angry person or upset stomach. Remember to have your peppermint candy cane in hand to keep your cool while holiday shopping!

The Fashionable Holiday Sweater

The holiday tradition of ugly sweaters wouldn’t be nearly as irritating if it weren’t for their scratchy wool. When Australian sheep farmers started planting non-native species of clover (Trifolium sp.) in the 1940s, they observed a heartier clover crop, but at the cost of decreased sheep flock sizes. It turned out that the more vigorous, non-native clover contained an endocrine disruptor that lead to the sterilization of the sheep and therefore,  notably reduced flocks. The clover’s self-defense mechanism, while extreme, is certainly something to ponder over a glass of eggnog at your yuletide family function.

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