Every so often, big brands have really good ideas; ideas that extend to capture the things that make us human. BMW Guggenheim Lab’s Public/Private online game is that good of an idea, but not without existential conflict.

The game is simple enough. Users select a common place they come in contact with (like where they work), slide it along five columns and drop it to say how often they seek privacy in that place—“Never,” “Rarely,” “No Opinion,”“Sometimes,”,“A lot”. This should be easy. But you’re left to consider the times you’re actively seeking privacy, over places you would just prefer to have privacy in. Such as, am I searching for   privacy when I go to Central Park? Or am I going there to be part of the crowd,  but also want to be alone?  In a hotel lobby, for instance, guests like the idea that they “could be alone, but not lonely.” Clearly, the idea of public/private, particularly if you live in a place like New York City, is not that simple. Read more…

We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry:  Will there even be office buildings in the future?  How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now?  What impact will technology have on design and engineering?  But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”

As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew.  If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.

The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before).  Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!

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In Las Vegas, on February 26, at the Digital Signage Expo (through February 28) everyone will be talking about “New Design Directions: Dynamic Digital Environments.” In a session called “Transforming Architecture & Interiors Into Media-rich Environments,” Jeff Kovel, AIA, principal at Skylab Architecture in Portland, Oregon, will discuss, in some detail, his firm’s experience in building Camp Victory for Nike. From the conversation that follows, it seems that the ways and means of sustainable design are similar to integrating digital media into architecture. Both types of projects are organized around research oriented, multi-skilled teams. In my previous interview with Paul R. Levy, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Center City, we explored the use of digital media in the large-scale urban environment. Here we dig down into one, very particular building and its media-rich message.

Susan S. Szenasy: As architects working in the physical world of tangible materials and expressions, did you need to make a mind-shift when you took on the Nike Camp Victory project? That project, from where sit, has a sophisticated digital component, way beyond what you’re used in architectural software programs. To begin with, please describe what the assignment was, and what you had to learn immediately upon accepting the commission.

Jeff Kovel: Camp Victory began in research and collaboration; there was no predetermined outcome. This approach of creating a vision, prior to defining a project’s limitations, is a testament to Nike’s commitment to innovation. The project began by meeting Hush, our digital partner, for the first time. Jointly we were briefed on the history of Nike, Eugene (Oregon), and the US Olympic trials. A full day insight into Nike’s upcoming innovations, to be launched at the Olympics, followed. We were some of the first people outside of Nike to see the Olympic Speed Suit and track spike, the Knit footwear, and the efforts being developed around Nike+ (digital). The task at hand was to create a temporary interactive exhibition around these innovations, immersing the viewer in Nike innovation. The limitation was that we could not penetrate or damage the newly laid artificial turf field that was out site.

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As we wound down our a charrette, an exercise somewhere between a Top Chef “quick fire” and a game of “exquisite corpse,” we remembered seeing flickering pixels, oversized movable louvers, folding organ-like planes, and stretching ribbons. Our research yielded a number of innovative precedents —both theoretical and built— from architects and engineers experimenting with movable facades around the world. We had examined automated fins and shading umbrellas, tessellated screens and adaptive fritting from ABI, the homeostatic façades from Decker Yeadon, and the Aegis Hyposurface from Goulthorpe, among others.

But it was not enough that these façade components moved, either by means of carefully controlled computerized programming or by more rudimentary manual, hydraulic, or mechanical means. The movement that we were trying to describe was different. It had to be tied to performance. It had to respond to the sun. As Mike Hickok often said, it had to behave “more like a plant, less like a machine.” With our newly acquired understanding, how could we propose a future in which shading devices would deploy and contract biomimetically, like the artificial muscles we studied, in response to the sun?

Then we had a rude awakening. How could we even begin to tinker with these shapes with our limited experience, with the kind of software that had the capabilities to produce what we needed?  Clearly we had found ourselves at the convergence of technology, media, and representation. We needed to make leaps in all three. As Lisa Iwamoto describes on her book Digital Fabrications[i], our design had to inform and be informed by its modes of representation and production. We had to go beyond, way beyond, the limitations of what we traditionally produced in-house and do it at the fast pace of a design competition. At once we were dealing with modeling software shortcomings, researching smart materials, studying artificial muscles, defining performance, contracting out the scripting of algorithms, buying software, and storyboarding the presentation to determine deliverables and staff allocation.

Rhino image of ribbon

Mike Fischer[ii], a fifth young designer was brought on board, contracted to work side by side with our team to help with computational modeling and scripting. We shifted to Rhino, a NURBS-based modeling software that would allow us to conceptualize, tinker, and control our shading strands. While developing the component, we needed to test it across the façade. Mapping it and remapping it to control its size, density, and openness required formulas—a lot of formulas—which we crunched in Grasshopper.

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This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.

In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.

The short answer: “to scratch an itch.”  We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace.  Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.

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In the course of reporting my piece on Edward Mazria, I had a very interesting conversation with Andrew C. Revkin, for years an environmental reporter for the New York Times. Today he writes the paper’s Dot Earth Blog and also teaches at Pace University. A big admirer of Mazria, Revkin has an altogether clear-eyed view of the environmental road ahead. An edited version of our talk follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: First off, what’s your role at Pace?

Andrew C. Revkin: I am Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.  And I co-teach three courses. One is a new course I’ve launched called Blogging a Better Planet. In the spring I co-teach a documentary production course, where we do films on sustainability topics, and an environmental science communication course.

MCP: You’ve been aware of Ed’ Mazria’s role in the environmental movement for a while. How would you characterize it?

ACR: His case—and it’s a good and simple one—is that buildings really matter. He’s trying to shift how we design them, and how we design architects, as well.

MCP: How does his advocacy differ from someone like Bill McKibben http://www.350.org/?

ACR: I think Ed is focusing on things that are imminently more doable. Bill is very good about building movements around numbers, but has not adequately articulated how you get there. In other words, besides yelling at fossil fuel companies. That may be something that needs to be done, but it’s not a path that will actually change a lot of things. Ed is working in a space where there’s a lot to be done, both on existing structures and on new buildings. There’s huge potential to make big gains.

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Here is a simple idea: Hoist up a 20 pound bag of soil or rocks and let gravity’s pull turn that bag into a source of energy— energy enough to produce illumination.

Gravity Light is taking this idea and using it to solve a problem: the lack of electricity and its light in developing countries. In industrialized countries, we take illumination for granted. The opportunities that come with lighting up the night—reading, conversations, doing homework— could easily be encouraged with some smart design and can have profound implications for quality of life, especially in education.

GravityLight: lighting for the developing countries.

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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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A hot button topic in architecture and design is intelligence; making cities, cars, products - even our wrists - smarter.

What if your air conditioner was smarter? What if your smart phone could tell you when someone was in your apartment? What if your iPad told you that it was raining at home, but no worries, your windows are closed?

I, for one, think this service is long over due. As a renter I need something simple, flexible, and that works without wires or crazy hardware installations. SmartThings promises to do all that, and more.

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