Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”

Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.

The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.

Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. 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

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“Wave Signal”                                                                                          Photo:  Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Sweeping ocean vistas display their obvious beauty but waves speak an arcane language all their own. Frederic Raichlen, professor emeritus at Caltech and an expert on coastal engineering and wave mechanics, has a new book Waves (MIT Press). He is a kind of wave whisperer.

A colleague once claimed that MIT Press could take any subject and make it boring. They failed here since this little pocket book, the latest in their “Essential Knowledge” series, is fascinating.

Raichlen presents a specific formula, then suggests measuring wave intervals with a stop watch, “it’s like taking the pulse of the ocean.” The book may not be for the math phobic. But you can still glean a more scientific appreciation of ocean wave phenomena and coastal transformation that will only increase your awe of 50 foot high tsunamis, 80 foot high rogue waves…and tiny ripples lifted by a gentle breeze across a pond.

Raichlen then converts your bathtub into a handy testing tank for wave generation, pushing down and lifting water with the palm of the hand making homemade tsunamis…at scale.

He discusses strategies and limitations of coastal breakwaters, seawalls and the like. His analysis of water and rock erosion by conceptual diagrams is intriguing. Additionally, as the best teachers do, he deftly applies analogy, illustrating an earthquake’s effects by way of a piano keyboard.

Waves gave me a more substantial understanding of the coastal impact of global warming. Surprisingly, though, I don’t think there was a single mention of the term in the entire book.

Photo: Han Singels. Uiterwaarden bij Graaf, 2005 colour print, collection artist

Sweet & Salt, an elegant tome by Tracy Metz & Maartje van den Heuvel, provides further illumination as they outline the history of Dutch attempts to tame the ocean. This is combined with a broad survey of the arts and water, inspiring creative use of landscape design and water. As pioneers and masters of water control and containment, the Dutch have “been there, done that” but are now moving towards a more zen-like philosophy of accommodation.

The cost to render invincible some 3,600 miles of U.S. eastern coastline in the face of impending oceanic doom is beyond both possibility and calculation. A recent, invaluable, short article (for the New Yorker) by Eric Klinenberg, “Adaptation,” provides other perspectives on the problem that may not make for dramatic headlines but is profound, nevertheless.

Social scientists have documented how relative social cohesion of one neighborhood allows its residents to survive natural disasters (like heat waves) as compared to adjacent populations of the same economic status, same demographic makeup facing the same forces of destruction – a prescriptive microcosm for a critically interdependent society.

As Klinenberg’s article indicates, even if the causes of climate change were halted today we’ve already bought decades of rising sea levels and fearsome atmospheric aberrations that will have to be faced.

Across the world, new strategies are cropping up including floating pavilions, smart power grids, wetland restoration, farming new oyster beds, retreating to higher ground, and so on. Debate rages over whether or not to build massively expensive “hard” solutions, that take too long to build and are only temporary defenses against surges, not rising sea levels. A growing “architecture of accommodation” is what Klinenberg anticipates. A more subtle point is that these responses should represent a duality of purpose, enhancing ordinary city life not just thwarting disaster.

Neptune, God of the Sea, just called. And he’s upset. His eternal rhythms are increasingly contorted by strange influences from man-made atmospheres. Those who have camped their civilization at water’s edge now face Neptune’s revenge.

Creativity has to answer his call with optimism across all borders technical, social, and political. Essentially, affirming interdependence, a gift we’ve been blessed with since, at least, the Stone Age.

“Neptune’s Reach”                                                                                    Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Joseph G. Brin is an architect, fine artist, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA.

Like any megalopolis, Sao Paulo is a plethora of experiences at once fascinating and dizzying. Take a simple walk or drive and the city comes at you at a frantic pace, synched to an ever-growing volume of traffic and speed. The contrasts are closely juxtaposed, like an impossible surrealistic collage. From humble to ostentatious, jammed streets, popular dwellings next t neo-kitsch condo towers, favelas and Niemeyer, a Calatrava-esque cable bridge over one of the most polluted rivers, a constantly hovering helicopter flotilla, Mendes da Rocha classics here and there, and graffiti art everywhere. And so it goes in a city that never ends.

If you are there with an agenda, the city absorbs you even more as the time pressure is added to finding routes to get to your appointed destination. Anything can happen.

That was the case for me this past summer while I was installing my solo show for BoomSPdesign, covering the conference, and simultaneously attending DesignWeekend, even as I was looking for new subjects to photograph. I was all over the place, crisscrossing the city non-stop, going in every direction, literally. By the fourth day I was ready hide and sleep in. But the opportunity to go on a DesignWeekend tour of private interiors by the Campana Brothers seemed like a must.

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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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Last week the American Institute of Architects gave SOM’s “Great Lakes Century – a 100-year Vision” its 2013 Institute Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design. Coincidentally, we named the project and the brilliant team behind it, lead by Phil Enquist, one of six Metropolis 2013 Game Changers, now in our January issue.

I first heard of the Enquist team’s ambitious plan in 2008, just as our world was receding into the financial turmoil that decimated the architecture profession and extinguished many a dream. Yet here was a small group of architects daring to dream, and enthusiastically telling me about their massive undertaking, as we gathered in the firm’s Chicago office, high in the city’s historic Santa Fe Building. Designed in 1904 by the legendary Daniel Burnham, whose spirit is palpable in the office’s sunlit atrium, but more importantly, it infuses the Great Lakes project. His words propelled the SOM team forward: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

20 percent of the world’s fresh water is found in the Great Lakes, Courtesy of Earthsat/ESRI

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The 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion built in London’s Kensington Gardens and designed by Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, is the single best example of prospect and refuge I have ever seen. It’s definitely a place that works.

All signs point to human comfort where we’re in a refuge with prospect, accompanied by biophilic design elements. Such spaces are welcoming to our species, possibly because in our evolutionary past they helped secure our survival.

What does it mean to say that a space provides prospect and refuge?  Prospect is the ability to look out and determine what’s going on in a nearby area; refuge is, well, a sheltered space. Generally, when both are present and at their best, a refuge has a lower ceiling (or some other similar surface) and a view out over an area that has a higher (or no) ceiling and is more brightly lit. When our ancestors lived on the savanna with few tools to protect themselves, this sort of configuration allowed them to relax a little, knowing that they could see trouble approaching.

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Whether you call her Hurricane, Superstorm, or Frankenstorm, Sandy has brought devastation, destruction, and lasting change to our waters’ edge.

Across New York City and the tri-state region, neighborhoods glimpsed the climate change forecast—massive flooding, storm surges, and rising seas. With lives lost and billions in damages, it’s safe to say our communities will never be the same.

Red Hook flooded, photo courtesy The Brownstoner

Into this new reality comes a renewed vigor for finding new ways to cope. In New York City we’re hearing about many different solutions including storm barriers, oyster reefs, and waterfront parks—and as many political opinions. Some of these ideas treat water as something to keep at bay, working like the Dutch to build walls to protect us and keep the water out.

But storm barriers pose a lot of problems. They wreak havoc on the marine environment, are challenging to implement legally and politically, can cost billions, and are a binary system, meaning they work up until they fail, then it’s a disaster. A barrier does help with one thing—preserving what we have.

Brooklyn Bridge and harbor, New York City, New York. 1903

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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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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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