The view looking up nearly any avenue in Manhattan is more or less the same: buildings line a ruler-straight street all the way to the horizon. But the view up Park Avenue, south of 42nd Street is cut short. Grand Central Terminal, the city’s iconic train station sits over the avenue, which leads up to it like a grand boulevard. Its preeminence in the physical landscape accurately reflects the terminal’s preeminent place in New York’s cultural landscape as well. Grand Central has remained in this spot for one hundred years; it almost seems as though this is the only way it could have been.

But the longevity of Grand Central Station did not always appear so inevitable. When it was completed in 1913, Grand Central Terminal replaced the earlier Grand Central Station, itself built to expand the original Grand Central Depot. Three rail stations in under half a century? This made the new terminal seem likely to be as ephemeral as its predecessors had been. Yet, Grand Central has stood for one hundred years, and in New York City that is no small feat.

In commemoration of its centennial the New York Transit Museum has released a new book, Grand Central Terminal: 100 years of a New York Landmark. Rather than try to offer a comprehensive history, the book takes a close look at various moments in the terminal’s life. Through these vignettes, we’re reminded that it was not the functionality of the station, or the magnificent architecture alone that gave Grand Central its staying power. Rather, it was the Grand Central’s ability to carve its own special place in the city, and come to represent so many different things to different people. Imagining New York without Grand Central Terminal now is like trying to imagine it without a Central Park or a Wall Street. Read more…

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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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…

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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Of New York City’s many architectural gems, Grand Central Terminal has always been a highlight for me. While modern buildings lend themselves better to the abstraction I search for in my photos, this great terminal captivates me in a different way.  It’s not an easy building to shoot from the street. The surrounding towers don’t allow much perspective and good light.

The magic happens inside. It has been called one of the city’s best indoor spaces and I couldn’t agree more. That it hosts a multitude of activities and the thousands who pass through everyday, and still remains “grand”, is just amazing. The scale of the main concourse is a lesson in architectural proportion. It allows expansiveness without dwarfing the human scale or affecting the flow it was designed to handle. Of course, its character is closely connected to the noble materials used and the elegant details, but for me the way the light enters it is what gives the space its fabled grandeur. No wonder it has attracted photographers and cinematographers alike, for decades.

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Wrapped into our predilection to explore, and at times our most urgent immediate motivation, is the search for orientation – to know exactly where we are.  Again, what happens in a built environment parallels person-to-person encounters. We want to eliminate unknowns and get-our-bearings in relation to the mental maps that we have constructed over time. Being disoriented – being “lost” – triggers anxiety, fear, and ultimately panic. It is clearly a “peril”, and it can be costly. Though we lack the innate homing skills of other animals, we do have an evolved capability to learn how to navigate; it’s another way we “master” our environment and feel “in control”.

“The classic legibility of a city – geography and the power of the alliances that built Florence”

Maps and legibility

In his pioneering study, The Image of the City, professor Kevin Lynch analyzed mental maps created by many people to orient themselves in a city.  Although each individual’s map was necessarily unique, he found important overlaps – propensities – that he organized into clear, practical, usable ways that we use to make a city “legible”. Many of his insights and much of his vocabulary of  “imageability” and “way finding” have been adopted, built upon, and absorbed into the conventional wisdom of generations of designers because they can be successfully applied in practice – and not only in his field, urban design. It seems likely that he is describing patterns that come naturally and easily into most human minds – a specific genetic preparation for learning.

In any case, we all know that aids to navigation and clues to orientation are integral parts of built environments – whether conscious and intended or not. Lynch focused on the physical form of Boston, but his pattern of thinking also organizes the broader bands of perception that we habitually use in practice to find our way.

• He identified five key elements that continually reappeared in mental maps – edges, paths, districts, nodes, and landmarks – and spelled out common themes that are perceived in each of them, primarily qualities of clarity, continuities, differentiation, and dominance, and the awareness of motion and time – plus, naturally, the recognition that all are then interpreted through filters of culture, personal skills, and associations.
• In addition to distinctive spatial forms, sources and echoes of sounds, aromas or stench, temperatures, wind and light levels are all elements in the maps.
• Sensing distinctive kinds of human presence and action, past, present, and anticipated – the social and cultural clues – can be even more powerful. The energy and excitement of crowds and commerce, a fear of strangers and violence, or the reassurance offered by records of long established human settlement, all tell stories of stability, danger or vitality that define a place – and whether we want to be there or, instead, find a path to escape or explore further.
• Ultimately, of course, the underlying coordinates of a mental map are framed in the context of our own pressing motivations, accumulated memories, and the feelings locked into them.

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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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If something between $467 million to $504 million were about to be spent in your back yard, wouldn’t you want to know what those dollars would buy and add your voice to the discussion?

Map of the Gowanus Canal Superfund Study Area, courtesy EPA

Those dollar amounts reflect the estimated cost for cleaning up the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. The canal, an EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) Superfund site, is an extremely polluted body of water with hazardous materials like coal tar, oil, metals, and other toxins. These contaminants are resting in the sediments at the bottom of the canal. The EPA’s job is to study the area, determine who is responsible for the contamination, create a plan for clean up, and oversee the clean up, which is paid for by the responsible parties. The EPA does this with the objective of removing risk to human and ecological (plant and animal) life in and around the canal.

January 23rd Carroll Gardens EPA Public Meeting, photo by Ryan A Cunningham

To help them achieve that objective, the EPA has defined a series of 9 criteria for evaluating the alternatives for clean up. Many of these criteria focus on common sense things like smart, efficient, and safe actions; but there is one very key criteria that you should care about, “Community Acceptance”.

January 23rd Carroll Gardens EPA Public Meeting, photo by Ryan A Cunningham

Community acceptance is what makes this a great time to speak up. Right now the EPA is in the Proposed Plan Comment Period, which is the time when the agency is required by law to take comments on its proposal for how to clean the canal; and they must respond to these comments in documented form.

Why comment? Here are a couple of reasons.

1. Everyone is listening – Politicians, businesses, and the media are all watching very closelyhow the various groups involved, including the community, are responding to the plan.
2. It’s on the record – Community groups, mission driven organizations, and concerned citizens not only can know they are being heard, but will actually see their comments (or similar ones), answered in written form by the EPA.
3. Now is the time – The public comment period is the primary time that the community has to comment on the proposed plan. It’s open till March 28, and after that, there will be a lot less attention paid to the comments and questions surround the plan.

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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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