In 1963, by federal court ruling, South Carolina’s Clemson University was racially integrated. The ruling was regarding a 20 year-old Harvey Gantt, who despite excellent academics had been repeatedly barred from entering the university’s architecture program because of his skin color. Rather than accept the status quo, Gantt filed a suit which would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court before he was accepted. It was the first, but not the last time that Gantt would gain widespread attention for his talent, dedication, and ability to break racial barriers in pursuit of his goals.

Fifty years later, the AIA has selected Harvey Gantt to be honored with the 2013 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for his long career as an architect, politician, and pioneer in civil rights. The award is named after the former head of the Urban League who in 1968, called attention to the AIA’s lack of social advocacy, and challenged women and minorities to become more actively involved in the profession of architecture.

Courtesy AIA.

Gantt’s groundbreaking entrance into Clemson University was just the beginning of his successful career, which has been marked with achievements in several fields. After graduating from Clemson, Gantt earned a masters degree in city planning from MIT and then returned to Charlotte, NC. A year later in 1971, he founded the successful firm, Gantt Huberman Architects, with his partner Jeffrey Huberman. Since then, the firm has designed many prominent buildings in the Charlotte area including museums, educational buildings, and rail and bus stations. 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…

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!

Read more…

This fall, the American Institute of Architects announced a 10 year commitment to develop design and technology solutions for cities addressing public health, sustainability, and resiliency challenges. It’s the kind of commitment that many AIA members have long sought: putting human and environmental health and wellness at the center of the architecture mission. That the announcement was made at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York, gave it cache; more than 1,000 global leaders gathered to address the theme of “Designing for Impact.”

AIA is seeking to demonstrate the link between building design and the health of people who live or work there, and, says AIA CEO Robert Ivy, “bring the force of design to bear in the public health arena and debate.” The effort, called “Decade of Design” will involve funding and in-kind contributions from the AIA, Ivy says, through three initiatives: university research; community planning collaborations; and something called “Show Us Your APPtitude Hackathon,” designed to promote creative apps and technologies as springboards.

The first three recipients of research grants were announced. Texas A&M University’s project, Evaluating Health Benefits of Liveable Communities is a toolkit for measuring health impacts, which will include an empirical study of a LEED for Neighborhood Development project in Austin. The University of Arkansas’s Fayetteville 2030: Creating Food City Scenario Plan will study pathways to creating a local food infrastructure amid rapid growth. The University of New Mexico has a pilot program, Establishing Interdisciplinary Health-Architecture Curriculum.

For those who have long made the case that attending to issues of sustainability are the over-arching umbrella of any design or planning pursuit, finding ways to strengthen and illuminate these connections seems almost painfully obvious. But anyone familiar with architecture education and practice—where barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration are stiff—the links are too often ignored, overlooked, or poorly quantified. I asked Robert Ivy to talk about the impetus for this program.

Kira Gould: Why do you and the AIA see a need for funding the health/design connection at this time?

Robert Ivy: While many of us believe that the connections between health and design are there, what we need is proof. We want to help build up the data that will help us quantify and demonstrate, with rigorous case studies, the value of design in the context of these issues and the inherent relationship between architecture and public health. I’m inspired by the notion that we can participate in this.

I think it’s true—if not proven—that architecture can affect a community’s health, particularly in the area of ailments such as diabetes and heart disease. Basic design principles already encourage architects to consider health every day: we take into consideration how buildings have access to sunlight, fresh air, clean water. Ultimately, we want to be able to show and prove that buildings are making an impact. This requires evidence. We know, anecdotally, that certain types of places make people more productive. Quantifying this is the aim of this initiative.

Read more…

Photo by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

What is Research? In our age of information overload, does anyone have the time to do research? Does research lead to innovation, especially in the architecture practice? What is the future of research? How can the American Institute of Architects help? To find these answers and many more, the AIA Research Summit met this past summer in St. Louis. The delegation of 24 was split almost halfway between academicians and practitioners, with some AIA staff. It was a unique experience for me because research is not spoken in the same vocabulary or at the same level in my practice as was done at the summit. It is evident that academicians and practitioners see research with very different perspectives. Hence, the summit’s two distinct tracks of academic and applied research. The goal was to understand the similarities and dissimilarities among the two, form a connection between them, and make it easier for researchers to exchange information and learn from each other.

Image by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

Academic research focuses on gathering information and deducing specific conclusions. It generally tends to be lengthy as it includes background information such as method, experiments, data, and details in addition to the conclusions. Academics are striving to find new information and the results are rigorous.

Applied research may be understood as simply doing a Google search, although it would not be considered serious “research” in academic terms. Applied research involves finding information, aggregating the facts, and applying them to practice. Practitioners look for concise abstracts and many are driven towards visual forms of information. Small firms have multi-skilled professionals who do research as part of their other activities. Most of the large firms today have dedicated researchers on staff, creating specialized deductions to be used in the design practice.  Although small firms spend limited amount of time in research, their projects don’t seem to require the level of research a large firm might need. Apart from all this, Terrence E. O’Neal, AIA holds that there is tacit knowledge held in the minds of researchers, which needs to be extracted before the baby boomers retire.

Image by Lindsay Roffe at Ink Factory

Read more…

For the past ten years, evidence has been collecting in publications and exhibits that a new field of practice is emerging. It uses design as a tool to serve the public, including those who cannot afford design services. And it’s becoming clear that we now have a movement, not just a collection of well-documented projects and well-meaning people.  This is a new field of practice. The name that best describes it as a profession is public interest design. While many other catchy and descriptive names have been used such as community design, social impact, humanitarian, and pro bono, only public interest design bears the systemic permanence of a profession.

As this term enters the public discourse, will it be used by anybody to mean anything? Or, are there professional standards that need to be defined and understood – especially by the public – if this quickly emerging field is to make the valuable contribution that it can?

We don’t have to look very far into the past to see why clarity and definition are essential. Just ten years ago, “green design” could be falsely applied to anything; therefore it became almost meaningless. The term only acquired meaning when professional performance standards were defined.

Here it’s useful to look at other emerging professions and the steps necessary when these professions passed through similar moments of creation.

Doctor injecting a patient with placebo as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, photo via wikipedia originally sourced from the US National Archives.

Take public interest health, for example. In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service started a study of rural low-income men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who had syphilis. The 600 men involved thought they were receiving free health care, but in reality they were just being monitored like lab rats. When penicillin was discovered as a cure in 1947, the study continued for another 25 years without ever treating the men as patients, allowing many to die awful deaths and infect family members. Those conducting the study considered it to be in the public’s interest; and the last director went to his grave never acknowledging that ethical mistakes were made.

Read more…

Exterior of Brightcove’s new Global Headquarters in Boston’s Innovation District,
Photo courtesy of CBT Architects; © Mark Flannery

Cities everywhere are entering a new era of unprecedented collaboration as well as competition. If they are to thrive, they need to be great places. Knowing this, local governments are working with architects, urban thinkers, technology mavens, and other key players in the private sector to design and construct sustainable buildings and districts as platforms for the future. A synergistic symphony of urban design and development is commencing, harnessing creativity, lowering economic barriers, and generating productive energy with healthy, inspiring environments. Cities, much like states in the past, are now becoming the laboratory for innovation and change.

A new initiative, Cities as a Lab, is under development by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), with a full rollout planned for 2013. The project grew from the realization that policy experimentation and implementation has migrated downward from states to regions and municipalities that have become the powerhouses of democracy and experimentation. Our cities project aims to demonstrate through research findings, case studies, partnerships, and potential demonstration projects the power and importance of urban areas in a fully functioning polity. The melding of innovative design with the increasing power of technological solutions will be a key feature of this program.

The WarRoom inside Brightcove’s office in Boston.
Photo courtesy of Elkus Manfredi Architects; © Jasper Sanidad

For this program to work, we must tap into the talents of technology startups and innovation companies that have become the new post-industrial districts of the knowledge economy. At the forefront of this change is Boston’s new Innovation District boasting some 100 firms and 3,000 new jobs. The district hosts the largest start-up accelerator and competition in the world; its Innovation Center offers a supportive environment for entrepreneurs. The city’s once stagnating waterfront is rapidly becoming an economic powerhouse, a place to be, with livable mixed-use infrastructure, micro housing, restaurants, and cultural venues to attract a high-energy workforce.

Read more…

Do government incentives work? And which types of incentives work best? We at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) wanted to know the answers, so we partnered with the National Association of Counties to find out. We have known, anecdotally, for at least ten years, that the use of green building incentives have accelerated, mostly in jurisdictions that show a genuine and continued interest in making their environment more sustainable.

The Local Leaders in Sustainability research project, begun in 2007, seeks to examine green building practices in such communities. Their latest report, Green Building Incentive Trends: Strengthening Communities, Building Green Economies, is a tool for local governments looking to incentivize green design and construction in their communities. It focuses on five key areas: financial costs, oversight structure, local political and cultural environment, limits to power, and industry engagement.

We looked at cities and counties across the country to identify what works best and found some common threads of success. Communities that select incentives sensitive to the local government’s financial situation and communicate their environmental needs, clearly and simply, are more likely to see their plans implemented, than those who disregard these factors.

Read more…

Brownfield Site, photo from wikipedia

With the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spending $69.3 million to remedy brownfields across the United States, I was curious to find out how the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is involved with this important program. I emailed my questions to national AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Almost overnight the following responses arrived:

Susan S. Szenasy: The EPA recently announced an award of $200,000 to clean up a toxic, abandoned tribal administration building for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Tribe in Belcourt, North Dakota. In fact, there are now 245 EPA grantees, getting a total of $69.3 million EPA Brownfield grants. Are you aware of these programs and, if yes, how is the AIA involved in the restoration renovation projects?

Andrew Goldberg and Joel Mills: The AIA has long supported EPA brownfield programs, advocating to Congress for additional funding and for legislation to expand tax incentives for cleanup and redevelopment on brownfield sites.  Although the AIA does not directly get involved in specific EPA grantee projects as an organization, AIA members are frequently involved in working with communities that receive grants.

Read more…

Last week I received a press release from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) headlined, “Architects Oppose Effort to Repeal Energy Reduction Law for Federal Buildings.” This was in response to an action last week by the House Appropriations Committee, which approved the 2013 Energy and Water appropriations bill that included an amendment (sponsored by Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Republican from Louisiana) prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to implement Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

What is Section 433 and why should architects care? The provision is in many ways—all of them good, in my view—a radical one. It mandates a fossil fuel-free future for federal buildings. According to the law, all new federal buildings and older buildings undergoing renovations of more than $2.5 million are required to substantially cut their use of fossil fuels. The provision sets rigorous, targeted goals that culminate in a 100% reduction by 2030. For all practical purposes, this represents nothing less than the federal adoption of Edward Mazria’s 2030 Challenge.

Read more…