In this month’s issue, we profiled Muji creative director Kenya Hara’s design venture, Architecture for Dogs. Hara paired big-name architects and designers like Kazuyo Sejima (of SANAA fame), Konstantic Grcic, and Toyo Ito with a dog breed, and challenged them to build something that puts pets and their owners on a more equal footing. But Hara had much more in mind for the initiative than a fun exercise in creating at canine scale.
Today, at Design Miami 2012, Architecture for Dogs formally launched as part exhibition contest, part commercial company and part crowdsourced online project. Part one, the exhibition concept, begins with the thirteen initial designs in the collection. Part two is provided by Imprint Venture Lab, a business incubator and partner in the project, which will develop the concepts for the market, bringing flat-packed versions of the designs to retail outlets around the world in spring 2013. For part three, check out www.architecturefordogs.com, the project website that launched this morning.
On my second week in New Orleans, on a sweltering August day, I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, sponsored by the local AIA chapter. It was a dispiriting experience. While much of the city had seen its fortunes rise, the Lower Ninth, the neighborhood most affected by Hurricane Katrina, was still a kind of lunar landscape, desolate and depopulated. There were, however, two notable exceptions: the Holy Cross neighborhood (which had seen about half of its residents return) and Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development, a bright cluster of about 75 houses, designed by a veritable who’s who of contemporary architecture: Kiernan Timberlake, Shigeru Ban, Graft, Morphosis, as well as a number of notable local architects.
Make It Right remains an active construction site, the ultimate work in progress. Led here in New Orleans by Tom Darden, the organization has set an ambitious goal: to complete all 150 houses by 2014. (They plan to break ground on a Frank Gehry-designed house soon.) While working on the Game Changers profile of Tim Duggan, Make It Right’s landscape architect, I interviewed Darden. The 32-year-old executive director talked about the background of this seminal project, its unforeseen challenges, and its potential for global impact. An edited version of our talk, conducted at the Make It Right offices, follows.
Suzan Tillotson’s lighting design at the Lincoln Center, New York. Photo courtesy Suzan Tillotson Associates.
The work of lighting designer Suzan Tillotson is no doubt quite familiar to Metropolis readers. She collaborated with Rem Koolhaas, Josh Prince-Ramis, Petra Blaisse and the designers of OMA on the now seminal Seattle Central Library. She worked with Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the School of American Ballet, at Lincoln Center, and teamed with SANNA on the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York. Recently Barbara Eldredge spoke to her for our Leading Luminaries story. An edited version of their conversation follows. –Martin C. Pedersen
A while back Metropolis identified day lighting as the next big thing in the field. What is today’s next big thing?
It’s definitely LEDs and organic LEDs. I’ve just seen some promising lighting packages. Really small assemblies, with low wattage that can flood a whole ceiling with light.
Tell me a little more about organic LEDs.
I saw the first usable one at Light Fair in Philly last spring and to be honest with you I’ve been trying to use it ever since. It’s very difficult because I haven’t been able to get it on a job. The photometry has been slow. We’ve got it now, but we’re waiting for pricing. It’s not cost effective yet. It’s more expensive than the typical LED but it’s has a lot of promise.
About seven years ago James Benya, the Portland, Oregon-based lighting designer, introduced us to daylighting. Much to his chagrin, daylighting subsequently became one of the most popular and most commonly misapplied green building strategies. When we decided to interview leading lighting designers for our Leading Luminaries story, we knew the outspoken Benya would be one of our subjects. An edited version of his conversation with Derrick Mead follows.
–Martin C. Pedersen
About five years ago, you helped us identify daylighting as the next big thing in the field. What’s happening now?
More and more, we’re seeing every project come in with LEED aspirations. People are looking into daylighting. I got a call yesterday from a professor at the University of Texas Austin School of Architecture, who wanted me to give him a serious set of daylighting examples. I said, “OK, but you’ve got to understand, I’m not going to give you bad examples that have been spun into good ones. I’m going to give you projects that are simple, work fine, but may not be glamorous.” People in architecture and engineering tend to over glamorize projects, because of their aesthetics, and sweep the concerns surrounding energy efficiency and daylighting under the rug. I said, “These are genuine projects, but you’re not necessarily going to see a lot of them published. They’re everyday jobs.” We’re not going to fix energy problems in the world by turning edifice projects green with a whole of money and greenwashing. It’s going to be the other 10,000 projects where we’re going to make the biggest difference.
You’ve been critical of a lot high profile projects that have used daylighting. Why?
Because you’ve got to get the window-to-wall ratio down to a practical percentage. Take the New York Times Building. Here’s an overglazed building, where it’s very difficult for people to work near the windows, because there’s so much light. In order to control it, they had to put in shades, which defeats the purpose of the daylight. The Aria hotel, in Las Vegas, has an almost 100% window-wall ratio, with many of the facades facing the sun. And that’s in the desert! Not a good idea. Of course they employed fritting and other technologies to reduce the impact, but the fact of the matter is you can’t have that much glass without having thermal gain problems. You can underglaze a building, in which case not much happens. It’s an insulated box. But you can overglaze a building, so any savings you achieve by turning off lights are more than eaten up by the solar gain. There is a balance or plateau in most projects, where you can make tradeoffs. But that plateau has a rather limited range. It’s between 25 and 40 percent window-to-wall ratio. At 25 percent you get less daylight but better insulation; at 40 percent you get more daylight but less insulation. They’re both reasonable tradeoffs. You go to a 100% window to wall ratio, and you’re in trouble. That message doesn’t really get out. We’ve got to encourage the community to seek that technical balance. You must design buildings from the ground up with that balance being part of the thinking. It can’t be something that someone tries to fix or fit into the project after the architecture is determined. The New York Times building is a great example, I think, where specific architecture was determined, and they brought in a daylighting expert to try to make it work. In that regard, it’s not a very good building.
For our Leading Luminaries story, Barbara Eldredge and Derrick Mead interviewed eight of our top lighting designers. To create the article that appeared in our December issue, we pulled together all of their interviews and edited them into a group conversation. I think it represents a kind of state-of-the-union for the discipline. The following is an edited version of Eldredge’s lively conversation with Hervé Descottes, the founder of L’Observatoire International. –Martin C. Pedersen
About five years ago, we identified day lighting as the next big thing in the field. So what’ today’s next big thing?
It’s LESS. (laughs)
Less?
Less is definitely a lot more.
What do you mean?
Less color, less uniformity. Be more customized. It’s about precision. I think lighting hasn’t been very precise. It’s been a lot about quantity and light level and making lots of surfaces of light and using the technology at the maximum of the extravagance of the technology.
So it’s about subtlety and form?
Yes. And it’s about time! It’s about time the lighting designer gets the place they deserve.
Do you think that lighting designers have been under-acclaimed?
No. Over-acclaimed.
You think so?
Absolutely. I think every lighting designer thinks they are much more important than they are. Many lighting designers think they’re the architects. I think its good with this recession that everyone is little bit more appropriate in their roles. Design is a team sport. Everybody has an important role. And I think for a long time lighting designers got so excited by this technology construct that they give themselves a little bit more importance than they really were in the course of the project. Lighting is important, but so is subtlety, refinement , and respect for the architecture . Thinking that we’re artists when we’re only lighting designers is not important.
Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design for “Spectral Scriabin” at the Lincoln Center in November 2011. Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times
If you talk to lighting designers about new technology—as we did recently—it’s hard not to conclude that the incandescent bulb is headed for almost certain extinction. The reasons seem obvious: LEDs are a lot more energy efficient and much (much) longer lasting. What’s not to like? Well, for now, price. But once economics of scale are achieved and the cost of LEDs come down, then it’s simply a matter of time before the incandescent—at one time, a radical breakthrough in its own right—shuffles off into obsolescence. And that has Jennifer Tipton, the legendary theatrical lighting designer, worried:
“My biggest concern is that the incandescent lamp will completely disappear, and with it the spectrum that it brings,” she told our Barbara Eldredge recently. “This means that all of the color that has been devised over my lifetime will no longer be the color that my eye recognizes. LEDs are great—they add to the toolbox. But if you look at the spectrum of an LED and the spectrum of an incandescent, they’re just fundamentally different. LEDs don’t produce that warm candlelight glow of the incandescent bulb at a low reading. Unfortunately, this has happened throughout the history of lighting. Each new lamp has been colder than the one before it. Lighting today is very, very cold, tilting almost to the inhuman. So I guess I’m old fashioned, like the people who complained about missing the glow of gaslights when electricity came in. But I do feel very strongly that the toolbox should be complete, and that you shouldn’t entirely give up one thing just to have another.”
Lighting for the Yale Repertory Theater’s recently-produced ‘Autumn Sonata’, designed by Jennifer Tipton. Photo: T. Charles Erickson/Yale Repertory Theatre
Related: In Leading Luminaries, we spoke to seven of our top lighting designers about new tools, new technologies, new challenges, and the way forward.
Jennifer Tipton is an award-winning lighting designer, internationally renowned for redefining the relationship between lighting and performance. She has collaborated for five decades with a veritable who’s who of the stage, with such companies as the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Dance, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and venues such as the Metropolitan Opera. Tipton has won two Tony awards, two Drama desk awards, and was awarded The Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize. Since 1991, she has served as an adjunct professor of lighting design at the Yale University School of Drama. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.
Walking up the stairs of Coop Himmelblau’s Central Los Angeles High School No. 9. Photo: Dave Lauridsen
I will admit, I was naïve. I should have known better. I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, after all, and negotiate that stark reality on a daily basis. But I had a vision: a cockeyed, unrealistic vision that high school students would (willingly) take on projects that resembled, in almost every conceivable way, homework. (Don’t fault me for trying.)
We collected about 200 surveys for our story on Central Los Angeles High School No. 9, and more than twenty students checked the box indicating they wanted to write a short essay or blog (very short—no extra work involved! I assured them) on the school’s architecture.
My thankless job? Prodding, nagging, and hectoring them into actually producing copy. My batting average? About eight for twenty four. I tried to get boys involved—even one—but struck out. The casual reader might not notice this lack of testosterone, but professional educators worried about achievement gaps surely won’t.
As a writer who has spent decades polishing the art of procrastination, I was impressed with the student’s ability to push our deadlines to near drop-dead dates. “How much time do I have?” I heard more than once, usually from boys. In the end most of the students who formally committed to writing something came through. One student essay by Esthefanie Peraza, missed the deadline for print, but the internet (god bless it) is loose in that regard. So here is Esthefanie’s lovely piece on shadows:
Students in the upper courtyard of Coop Himmelblau’s Central Los Angeles High School No. 9. Photo: Dave Lauridsen
Everyone always talks about conducting post-occupancy studies, but for a variety of reasons (some legitimate: cost; some less so: exposure) architects rarely do it. At Metropolis, we’d talked about it for a while, but we either couldn’t find the right project or, more importantly, a client willing to subject their building to criticism from the people who use it. (Who needs that?)
Earlier this year we got lucky. At a lunch (arranged by Amanda Walter) with Gary Gidcumb, a Los Angeles-based partner at HMC Architects, I mentioned how I’d always wanted to do a post-occupancy story on the Coop Himmelblau-designed school in LA, Central Los Angeles High School No. 9, and somehow involve the students. “We were executive architects for that project,” Gidcumb said. “We can help you make that happen.”
Gidcumb introduced me, via email, to Katherine Harrison, No. 9’s executive director. Katherine had strong opinions about the school’s architecture—during our first conversation, she commented on the “awkward transitions between social spaces”. But she was game, went through the approval process, and then helped us create a survey that identified people in the school—students, teachers, and support staff—willing to participate.
We collected about 200 surveys. After reviewing them, our writer, Christopher Hawthorne, did a masterful job of synthesizing their spirit into the finished story. On our end, we followed up on anyone willing to participate, with emails and phone calls. The completed surveys were a kind of portrait of adolescence, writ small: hilarious, dutiful, insightful, incoherent, incomplete, indifferent. “You know what?” I said to our edit and art team as we passed around the surveys one morning. “Kids haven’t changed that much since I went to high school. And that was a long time ago.” Below are some of the surveys we gathered for our story on high school No. 9.
In our June 2011 issue, Peter Hall writes about the fascinating relationship that the giant design consultancy, IDEO, has with a very particular type of client – governmental agencies. The firm’s trademark design thinking method is showing mammoth bureaucratic juggernauts like the Social Security Administration a deep insight into who uses their services, and how they can help streamline even the most convoluted process, allowing government officials to effectively reach out to the citizens who need them (while saving costs). In the process, IDEO also had its own significant learning curve on how to use design to fix problems in governance.
There are some interesting parts to that journey that we couldn’t share with you in the magazine, like the videos produced by the firm as part of two projects: monitoring energy use in buildings operated by the General Services Administration (GSA), and helping Clark Realty understand what kind of housing wounded veterans really need.
The GSA came to IDEO to understand how they might meet President Obama’s directive that all government buildings are to reduce energy consumption by 30% below 2003 levels by 2015. So in a sense, the client was already converted. But the administrators weren’t the only stakeholders in the project. Read more…
The work of Sheila Hicks is a feast for more than the eyes. As writer Véronique Vienne found out in writing a feature article on the artist for Metropolis, Hicks’s brilliantly colored loops, tangles, weaves, and tassels produce an instantaneous, visceral reaction. You can sample the splendour of the textile installations on pages 78-85 of our June 2011 issue, or here. But we couldn’t resist offering up some more images of Hicks’s art, and a video of her speaking in her characteristically intuitive way at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum last month:
(click on images to enlarge)
Trapeze de Cristobal (1971) (detail)
Wool, linen, cotton; 129 15/16 X 783/4 inches
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Read more…
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