For some, Paolo Soleri was the perfect iconoclast. For me, in 1975, as a young intern architect, he was an ideal mentor. My arrival at his home in suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, for the beginning of a summer workshop at Arcosanti was the start of a mesmerizing experience. On a suburban street lined otherwise with ranch style houses his home, which he called Cosanti, loomed behind large earth-formed concrete apses. Inside a massive concrete shade canopy hung over an azure pool, and the sound of homemade bronze bells tingling in the breeze provided a comforting oasis from the searing desert heat. It was like nothing I had ever seen before: Not classical, but certainly not modern. Something somewhere in between.  Soleri’s drum had a distinctly different beat—one that was more connected to the movement of the sun than to blind historic precedents or the sleek abstractions of ocean liners.

My six weeks of hard labor at Arcosanti were infused with lessons about sustainable design principles long before they ever graced the pages of swank architectural magazines or directives from green building councils. And there were those vast decorative concrete panels, formed with colors and textures that came directly from the native soil. More than a hundred volunteer workers from all walks of life, and from most corners of the globe, slept, ate, and dreamed together in a sparse “plywood city” at the bottom of the mesa. Lunchtime and evening talk sessions with Paolo ignited conversations that usually carried late into the night. The conversations spanned from the writings of French philosopher Taillard de Chardin to the life of bees. Above all there was a palpable spirit of meaningful inquiry and camaraderie all around. Read more…

Indulge me.

I once wrote a poem called “Profession of Mission” in which I attempted to write a personal mission statement. The poem rambled a bit, begged for clarity in my life’s purpose and ended with the word “crossroads” – no punctuation or finality – intentionally open-ended.

I wrote the poem in 2009 at age 44 – clearly the beginning of Mid-Life Crisis. Yes, young’uns, even older folks wonder what to do with the rest of their lives.

One week ago, at age 47 – no closer to an answer or closure – I took myself to Manhattan.

If I can “figure it out here, I can figure it out anywhere,” right?

I’m pleased to report that I found clarity in Chelsea … without a stitch of help from any of Woody Allen’s analysts.

But I did have help.

I attended a daylong workshop called “Design the Life You Love” created by New York-based product designer Ayse Birsel.

Ayse became a friend after I heard her speak at a user conference put on by a client of mine, Swedish design-software company Configura. Born in Turkey, Ayse is Pratt Institute-educated, a Fulbright Fellow whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, both in New York City.

She is perhaps best known for designing Herman Miller’s Resolve office system and Moroso’s M’Afrique collection. She and partner Bibi Seck own Birsel+Seck, a design studio that also works with Johnson & Johnson, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, OfficeMax, Renault, and Target. Ayse designed a potato peeler for Target that’s just $7.99, she says. So, even if you never make it to MoMA or Cooper-Hewitt, you can see (and buy) her products at a Target near you.

Ayse has taken her product design methods – which she calls Deconstruction:Reconstruction™ – and developed the “Design the Life You Love” workshop with concepts and exercises that even non-designers can easily grasp.

The workshop has become a mission for Ayse: “Our lives are our most important project,” she says.

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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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I picked up the phone one morning and heard a man say in Hungarian, “Korab Boldizsar vagyok,” I’m Balthazar Korab. He needn’t have followed up by adding, “I’m a photographer.” I had known that for some time. As a young design magazine editor I was drawn to his crisp, moody, beautifully framed black and white images of the built environment, including the best of modernism. But I did not know, until that morning, that we shared a homeland and were both shaped by the cold war.

His story, like mine, began in Hungary. He came to the US in 1955. I arrived here in 1956. We were both refugees from post-WWII Eastern Europe. He left Hungary in 1949 when the Iron Curtain closed around the Soviet Union’s newly claimed satellites. Eight years later my parents whisked my sister and me out of Hungary, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the revolution.

After I heard Korab’s voice and I learned of our shared beginnings, I redoubled my interest in his work. His color photos taught me to appreciate the modernist innovators who built a small mid-western town, long before I visited there (Columbus, Indiana: An American Landmark, 1989). Then I found out that his intense images of Eero Saarinen’s work also revealed the story of the architect’s design process. In 1955 when he arrived in Michigan, Korab was hired by Saarinen to document the design development on buildings that were destined to gain iconic status. It’s not hard to make the connection between the initial fame and historic legacy of buildings like Dulles Airport in Virginia and the photographer’s eye.

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As an architecture student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, I was a bit put off by the cult of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil. While I knew how talented and what a visionary he was, I found it upsetting that every new project of any significance was automatically assigned to the “living legend”. There was at the time, and still is, a practice by politicians that goes like this: whenever a public project is in need of exposure or dealing with a controversial proposal, they would attach Niemeyer’s name to, in order to avoid debate and discord. Who could, after all, argue with a “genius” creation? Without a doubt, most often than not, the Niemeyer creations were, indeed, genius. But what about the abundance talented architects prevented from even proposing their own visions?

It took some time for me to separate the circumstances in which Niemeyer’s talents where applied from his designs, career, and humanity and thus fully appreciate what he was all about. Like my fellow student, now architect and entrepreneur Henrique Thoni, said to me when discussing Niemeyer’s legacy, “Many can question his design, his social, and political beliefs. But drawing a curve is a challenge that only a few dare to face. He chose this path. Moreover, he did it when the straight line was the rule.” Read more…

When we published a Metropolis issue on Access in 1992, we were optimistic about the positive changes the Americans with Disabilities Act would bring to the designed environment. Signed into law by president Bush the elder two years earlier, the ADA was a hopeful expansion of civil rights, promising to include citizens with disabilities, in all that America offers. Considerate design was to be at the heart of this momentous social change. Well, it didn’t quite turn out to be that momentous. Compliance to the law seemed to wipe out the possibilities for design thinking about real people’s real needs.

Five years earlier we told the story of Patricia Moore, an industrial designer and gerontologist, who as a young woman took aging seriously and set out to experience the built environment—from street crossings to shopping—as an eighty-something. With the aid of a professional makeup artist, she navigated the world as an elder whose mobility and reflexes had been compromised by the natural process of growing old. In addition to her own research, Moore was also instrumental in helping craft the ADA. Through the years, her abiding commitment to inclusive design has never flagged (though it has been often frustrated by an uncaring marketplace).

As we developed our 9^th Annual Next Generation Competition, focused this year on inclusive design, we asked Moore to serve on our Advisory Board and as a member of our jury. In between one of her trips to China and some other far-flung stop, we caught up with Patricia A. Moore, president of MooreDesign Associates, LLC. Her stellar credentials include communication design, research, product development and design, package design for such clients as AT&T, Bell Communications, Citibank, Maytag, 3M, Sunbeam, and scores of others. As February 18, 2013, the deadline for Next Gen entries nears, I decided to ask my friend Pattie to talk about design in the service of human needs, give some advice to practicing designers, as well as those just stating out. Here is what she told me:

Susan S. Szenasy: Your game changing work came into my consciousness when we, at Metropolis, ran an article on you at age 26 navigating the built environment as an eighty-something. This was 26 years ago, when I came on board as the editor of the magazine; your story has informed my thinking about design responsibility ever since. For those few who might not know your story, can recap the reasons for your so-called “cross dressing” adventure?

Patricia A. Moore: In 1979, when I undertook my “Elder Empathic Experience,” the focus on ageing was primarily a medical model for treatment of illnesses and the chronic conditions related to growing older, and being an elder. The architecture, design, and engineering communities were essentially ignoring older people, with the very erroneous assumption that elders were not “consumers,” but rather “patients,” and therefore, not their concern.

My personal tipping point was the moment I was chastised by a superior at Raymond Loewy International. I was the youngest and only female industrial designer in the New York Office. We were gathered in a meeting room, discussing the design a refrigerator, when I asked if we couldn’t consider some door handle solutions that would be easier for elders and people with grasp and strength limitations to use.  The response was a dismissive, “Pattie, we don’t design for those people!” Those people? If the Raymond Lowey organization wasn’t designing for consumers of all needs, then who was?

I realized that observation and surveying, while important tools, would not be adequate to communicate the findings I so passionately knew to be true. As a child, watching my grand parents and their friends struggle with the activities of daily living, I instinctively knew the failure wasn’t theirs, but the result of poor and inadequate design solutions.

When I met the television and film make-up artists who helped to create the various elder personas I utilized, from the first day my foot touched a sidewalk in New York City (May 1979) until my last sojourn in October of 1982, I realized the means to provide a proper “wake-up” call for action. By becoming woman in her eighties, I was able to immerse myself into the daily reality of life as elders living in a youth-oriented society.

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One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.

By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.

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After more than a decade of planning, the future of the presidential memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, at least as conceived by architect Frank Gehry, is no longer certain. In September, the National Capital Planning Commission declined for the second time to review Gehry’s design; construction cannot begin without its approval. This is the latest in a series of setbacks for the current proposal, which includes the suspension of its Congressional funding (now temporarily restored through a continuing budget resolution) and an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the process used to select Gehry.

The debate over his design grows more contentious as its future becomes less certain. With both supporters and opponents dug in, victory for either side will likely bring further discord. This is not the path to the unifying national symbol we expect presidential memorials to be. We need to find another one, to consensus rather than division. This path is easy to see when we retrace the steps to our current divided and uncertain circumstances.

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Frank Furness, Architect
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), 1876
Photo: Gutekunst

Descendents of Frank Furness, the great 19th century Philadelphia architect, were emphatic. It’s not pronounced Fur-Ness, it’s Furness as in “furnace”. No matter how you say it Furness sometimes “can’t get no respect.” During his lifetime he completed some 1,000 projects yet too many of those distinctive works were callously demolished by his own hometown. The glorious Victorian interiors of the PAFA building were once covered in sheet-rock during the 20th century.

A glimpse of PAFA’s hand crafted Victorian interior
Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Is anyone stoking the furnace of his reputation in the 21st century?

George E. Thomas, cultural historian and author, met with Harry Philbrick, director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA), an unabashed enthusiast of architecture. They conspired to pull off Thomas’ idea of a citywide celebration this year – “Furness 2012 Inventing Modern” — with exhibits and events fanned out to Philadelphia cultural venues and onto the web. You now have a rare, multifaceted view of an architect who embodied the essence of 19th century Philadelphia, and is considered a linchpin in the evolution of American modernism.

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We get definite psychological benefits from feeling a sense of awe, so says recent research by Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker. Places that work can make us feel that rare emotion, as these researchers learned. In their study of people “who felt awe, relative to other emotions [such as happiness], felt they had more time available … and were less impatient … [those who] experienced awe were also more willing to volunteer their time to help others … more strongly preferred experiences over material products … and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

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