In our last post, you met the finalists of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award, a biennial program that recognizes excellence in urban placemaking. This is the first of our dispatches from the field, as the Bruner Foundation team travels the country to examine the five selected projects. During our intensive, two-to-three-day visits to each site, we’re conducting interviews, taking photographs, and gathering information for our selection committee’s meeting in Oklahoma City this coming May, during which they will select the Gold Medal winner.

Congo Street, Dallas, TX

For our first trip, we headed south late last month, trading cold and snowy Boston for the relative warmth of North Texas to visit Congo Street Initiative in Dallas.

The project is among the smallest of this year’s five finalists. Located along a reconstructed block-long street in the East Dallas community of Jubilee Park, it involved the construction of a new “Holding House” and the reconstruction of five existing houses in collaboration with the street’s residents.

Congo Street Site Plan

The idea for the project emerged from a desire to stabilize home ownership for the families who live on Congo Street, many having occupied their homes for generations. The modest 640 square-foot houses, built in the 1920s, were in various states of disrepair, targeted for demolition and redevelopment.

Working with the residents, city, corporate, and nonprofit partners in the Dallas community, buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a local nonprofit community design center that submitted the project, crafted an alternative strategy for redevelopment. It focused on rebuilding the existing homes and street infrastructure over the next five years without displacing a single inhabitant. Staff from bcWORKSHOP and architecture students from the University of Texas at Arlington began working with Congo Street residents in 2008, exploring approaches that would enable them to remain in place without undue financial burden. Read more…

Experience tends to take place against a background of expectations.  In his studies of perception in the arts, E. H. Gombrich describes how our responses become shaped by what he calls a “mental set,” a form of selective attention – a filter to avoid being overwhelmed by an inescapable mass of sensations.  In practice, it primes the senses and frames perception until much of what we see is what we expect to see.  Our minds are predisposed to mobilize past experiences and often years of study – or just as often, visions aroused by advertising language and judgments of peers – to prepare for identifying the “distinctive features,” the characteristics of a place that are most likely to be relevant to our immediate intentions for advancing a “personal project.”  With different levels of intensity, propensities to plan or to improvise – differing by age, gender, health or intent – we often enjoy surprises, but we still crave the pleasure of a basic predictability, to anticipate what a place – like a person we encounter – will do to us or for us.

Climbing to Chartres Cathedral, standing on its hilltop, rising above the town, with aspiring lines linking heaven and earth, firing up expectations of profound spiritual experience

In other words, we naturally bring into play another basic survival skill, the ability to think ahead.  We draw on both our literal “explicit” long-term memories and the momentum of “implicit” ones that fill our conscious mind to imagine a future experience in a place. And we often find as much pleasure, or anxiety, in the structured anticipation as in its actual, complex, challenging presence.

Because a “mental set” tends to create a context for responses, naturally it may become self-fulfilling. And because it’s shaped by the places where we live and the biases built into the languages we speak every day, the mental images we’ve formed can fill the brain’s networks until they override an on-the-spot experience with easy habitual patterns of judgments or stereotypes. But just as often the preconceptions are repeatedly penetrated and updated by feedback from the qualities of the place itself, and the mental set, for better or worse, is re-primed by the design. In the end, the mind that remembers a place is no longer the one that encountered it.

Looking for evidence

Many of the most effective designers are the ones that have educated themselves about, and analyzed the likely expectations of their intended audiences. Thoughtful research into the likely stresses and fears brought by people to hospitals and schools is now a routine part of many design processes and has produced pleasing, welcoming – more “humane” – user-friendly, child-friendly places. Sophisticated architects and landscape architects have learned how to design convincing first impressions and sequences of experiences, composing signs and symbols, light and color, scale, soft or warm places, the presence of non-threatening sounds or people, and the presence of nature – all in ways that tell a story of empathy, understanding, and security – offering a sense of refuge, and neutralizing “perils” and fear – in advance, almost like the refuge of home.

Read more…

I have mixed feelings about the sea of mail that inundates us around the holidays. Having worked with architecture firms for many years, I’ve had the card versus email greeting debate time and again (and, admittedly, landed on both sides over the years). But once in a while, I receive a card that reminds me what thought and intentionality can do for the “hard copy” format.

KieranTimberlake’s annual message of good wishes is a five panel, fold out card. On the one side there are elegant, muted-hue diagrams from five of the firm’s green roof projects, illustrating how the vegetation has evolved over time. The Middlebury College Atwater Commons project, for instance, is shown in 2003 and 2012; the other depictions vary in duration. All prompt careful study.

Read more…

Any environment that encourages walking is a place that works. We may be walking up or down stairs or to and from meeting rooms. It doesn’t matter why we’re walking, as long as we do. Interiors designed to encourage getting up and moving around may have open, central staircases that link floors together or cafeterias that are located within walking distance from workspaces.

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.

Read more…

Congo Street Initiative, Dallas, TX. Courtesy of Congo Street Initiative

As an architect and advocate for better urban environments, I am excited about my new role as director of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence at the Bruner Foundation (Cambridge, MA). The biennial award, founded in 1987 by architect and adaptive reuse pioneer Simeon Bruner, recognizes places distinguished by innovative design and their social, economic, and environmental contributions to the urban environment. To date, the RBA has recognized 67 projects and awarded $1.2 million to support urban initiatives.

In the world of U.S. design competitions, the RBA is unique. We ask our applicants to submit detailed written analyses of their projects—from multiple perspectives—along with descriptive images. And entries must have been in operation long enough to demonstrate their impact on their communities. Our  selection process includes intensive site visits to our finalists’ projects to help us fully understand how their places work.

Inspiration Kitchens, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of Inspiration Kitchens

The RBA selection committee meets twice: first to select five finalists and again to select the Gold Medal winner. Assembled anew for each award cycle, the committee comprises six urban experts including a mayor, design and development professionals, and a past award winner. This year’s group includes mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City, planner Ann Coulter from Chattanooga, landscape architect Walter Hood from Hood Studio in Oakland, architect Cathy Simon from Perkins+Will in San Francisco, Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Susan S. Szenasy, and Jane Werner, executive director of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the 2007 Gold Medal winner. The committee reviewed 90 applications from 31 states and the District of Columbia to choose the 2013 five finalists. Collectively, the projects they chose represent a diversity of creative, collaborative approaches and scales in tackling significant urban challenges:

• Congo Street Initiative - Dallas, TX - submitted by buildingcommunityWORKSHOP
  The sustainable rehabilitation of five houses and street infrastructure along with construction of a new home that provided transitional housing, in collaboration with resident families
• Inspiration Kitchens – Chicago, IL – submitted by Inspiration Corporation
  An 80-seat restaurant providing free meals to working poor families and market-rate meals to the public as well as workforce training and placement
• Louisville Waterfront Park – Louisville, KY – submitted by Louisville Waterfront Development Corporation
  An 82-acre urban park developed over more than two decades that reconnects the city with the Ohio River
• The Steel Yard - Providence, RI – submitted by Klopfer Martin Design Group
  The redevelopment of an abandoned, historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, workforce training, and small-scale manufacturing
• Via Verde - Bronx, NY – submitted by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses
  A 222-unit, LEED Gold certified, affordable housing development in the Bronx designed as a model for healthy and sustainable urban living

Louisville Waterfront Park, Louisville, KY. Courtesy of Louisville Waterfront Park

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

Read more…

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

Read more…

We know, both intuitively and practically, that socially interactive spaces, furnished with warm materials and rich textures, are beneficial and useful to the people who occupy them. But how do you convince the data-driven person who pays the bills? Buildings cost money. Owners want their dollars to go far. That’s reasonable. It’s because of this that architects are asked to prove that their designs marry performance and efficiency with inspiration and user comfort.

Federal Center South

Our practice is focused on designing amenity-rich architecture, from spaces where interaction can take place in laboratories to art rooms and family lounges in hospitals. Atriums are utilized in all kinds of building typologies to bring daylight deep into a floor plate, create a natural gathering spot for users, and aid in wayfinding. Our recently completed U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle, illustrates this approach. The building uses an oxbow-shaped atrium to connect conference rooms, amenities, and offices. Here the atrium is particularly successful because it utilizes biophilic strategies that connect employees to living systems through the use of daylight, views, fresh air, vegetation, and natural finishes. All of these strategies, together, enhance the user experience. But such amenities add to the building’s square footage and often the construction cost – thereby reducing the efficiency of the cost per square foot. Measuring their appeal to the users’ humanity can be proven by the employees’ enhanced performance and satisfaction.  Still, making the case for this can be challenging from a purely quantitative standpoint.

We were recently challenged to design a new office building for a technology firm that wanted to measure the efficiencies and performance of the new project. I was part of the team asked that our decision-making process be based on empirical data rather than qualitative emotion.  The company had a strong desire to have a healthy, inspiring workplace for its employees, but required all qualitative design decisions to be based on evidence. They weren’t going to be sold on pretty renderings alone.

Read more…

Construction has begun on Kuntsevo Plaza, a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development in the Kuntsevo district of western Moscow. The project, designed by U.S.-based architecture firm the Jerde Partnership, will occupy an entire city block and is being touted as Moscow’s first integrated mixed-use destination. The objective is to create an urban focal point, welcoming to residents, commuters, and visitors alike.

The site will be a hodgepodge of interconnected, geometrically shaped buildings, accented by vibrant colors – a nod to the Russian Avant-garde art movement. Large meandering glass roofs will allow sunlight into the interior public spaces, providing appealing, open areas for residents, workers and visitors. Combined, the buildings will be home to shopping and entertainment, an office building, and two large residential towers. David Rogers, design director at Jerde, says the goal of the project’s design is to bring new life and energy to this part of Moscow.

One of the key design features is ease of access, both to the surrounding areas, and within Kuntsevo Plaza. The development is located next to a commuter transit line, linking it to the greater area of Moscow. Also, the completed site will have several entrances from different directions, allowing for the fluid movement of pedestrian traffic through Kuntsevo Plaza, and simplifying access to the surrounding areas.

Read more…