On the edge of extinction. Architectural criticism can be a productive and a creative literary practice. Its best practitioners challenge architects to examine their work while, at the same time, help them evolve their profession. Architecture and architectural criticism can be bound together in a mutually constructive association, each contributing to the other in reactive and proactive ways. Established as an ambassador of the built environment, the architectural critic began life as an exalted figure, revered by most practitioners and read by a relatively minor segment of society. With the advent of the more wide reaching design journals, architects breathlessly anticipated the next issue of their favorite magazine, looking forward to biting criticisms of other architects’ projects. Then came the Internet, and an even wider public had access to national newspapers, websites, and blogs. On a parallel but inverse evolutionary track, some would argue that the architecture community has become too specific, self-contained, and defined internally by specialty practices: architect, urban designer, interior architect, planner, community developer, design builder, academic, graphic designer.
Scott Timberg’s article “The Architecture Meltdown” (Salon, February 4, 2012) asks the question “Where does architecture go from here?” without offering an answer, so I will. The piece makes a compelling case for the demise of “star-chitecture,” which rose with the recent debt-fueled construction bubble. But Timberg presents only a fraction of the story. While the traditional work of architects designing for fee-paying clients has declined and may, as Timberg observes, remain depressed for some time to come, non-traditional job opportunities for architects have never been better and while it may take some time for these markets to mature, they seem likely to grow much faster in the years to come.
After mounting a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and then placing a diverse collection of vintage streetlights like lit columns at a main entry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), artist Chris Burden astounds us again. LACMA presents Chris Burden’s Metropolis II.
1100 miniature cars race along 18 lanes of traffic around 25 buildings. Given the miniature scale, they speed the equivalent of about 230 miles per hour. 13 trains mosey along through this mini-city as well.
I’m of the first generation that grew up with computers. This doesn’t mean that I was born with an innate ability to use them, but being around something fosters a sense of acceptance and curiosity towards that thing. To see what I mean, give a two year old an iPhone and see how quickly she manages to unlock it and then delete all your apps. At first her actions are accidental, but eventually she recognizes a pattern of cause and effect. I grew up learning how to learn software. My father had a range of CAD software installed on our home computer and I constantly played around with these tools for no reason other than my own amusement. Ashlar Vellum (the 80s version) was my prepubescent gateway drug to digital design and the computer simply became part of how I experience the world.
During a final review in graduate school, a well-known ‘environmentally-responsible’ architect told me that my project would suffer from inadequate daylight levels due to the strategy I had employed. This came as a surprise to me because the ‘problematic’ spaces were rather small with large amounts of north facing glass, but I assumed that the critic must’ve been right, given his collection of completed projects and, after all, I was just a grad student whose projects were small enough to fit in a jump drive. I later studied the project in a lighting simulation course and found that the ‘problematic’ spaces received plenty of daylight and, if anything, they were better than the ‘unproblematic’ spaces because of the more evenly distributed northern light.
The point isn’t that the critic was wrong, though he likely was, but rather that the success of a design is based upon decisions made in response to collections of information. In some cases, we don’t have all the necessary information or we don’t fully understand the inherent relationships so we fill in the blanks by throwing darts with our intuition. As I start my career in architecture, I’m left wondering what influences the accuracy of my intuition: is it possible for me to develop it faster with better accuracy, and broader relevance?
Recently a friend and her son visited a modern healthcare facility and, on the way to their relative’s room, came across the well-appointed lobby with sculptural features, art on the walls and warm colors. “Wonder what that’s costing?” said the son. “That’s one area they might save on healthcare costs.”
My initial response, when I heard this, was that a growing body of evidence is showing that an upgraded hospital environment can positively affect health status and improve treatment outcomes. If anything, those fancy architectural features might well be reducing healthcare costs.
Then I had some second thoughts. Was healthcare design(to which I had devoted that last eight years of my journalistic career and helped usher in the evidence-based movement) really having that sort of impact? What is architectural “evidence,” anyway, and how does it differ from what designers have always done? What are architects and their sponsors doing to make it work for them? Or is it working for them?
It turns out that this is a big and largely untold story outside of health care, with implications for architecture in general. On the one hand, evidence-based design is advancing more rapidly than perhaps many realize, both within architecture and the general public. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of projects have signed on and formal research papers are indeed being published. On the other hand, though, the trend shows every sign of a work in progress, evoking persistent questions and lingering skepticism from many designers and sponsors. I must confess that I, too, had my doubts in the early days about the scientific validity of evidence-based design, wondering whether it measured up at all to the standards of evidence-based medicine.
Cal Berkeley is one of the few major research universities in the country that has a research group devoted to innovation in the built environment. The Center for the Built Environment brings together a faculty from architecture, computer science, electrical engineering, environmental psychology, and environmental engineering. The projects they work on reflect this broad, in-depth approach that is praxis-oriented and deeply rooted in research.
Collectively, they pursue strategies that promote and improve the energy efficiency and environmental connectivity of buildings. This is done by devising new gadgets as well as by studying, measuring, and quantifying such things as occupants’ usage and a building’s behavior over an extended period of time. That data is used to create strategies for both new ways to design as well as new designs. The work is foregrounded by the inherent connection between energy-use patterns and environmental quality and how a better understanding of that relationship will improve the quality of our built environment, and also improve economic efficiency.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, left, celebrates with the University of Maryland team after they placed first in the overall U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011, alongside Richard King, right, Director of Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Oct. 01, 2011. (Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)
The Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon 2011 is now officially in the books. Despite the sub-par sunshine and weather throughout the week, the competition ended with success. Nineteen student teams from universities around the United States and elsewhere competed to the final day. They were challenged to design, build, and exhibit solar- powered homes during a weeklong competition. The homes had to do everything you would expect from a typical house while striving for net positive energy balance and remaining affordable. Hot water, temperature and humidity controls, home entertainment, and appliances were all measured for performance while architecture, engineering, communications, and market appeal were judged for excellence in design and promotion. Standings shuffled daily and sometimes hourly, but in the end it was The University of Maryland’s entry, WaterShed, that took home first place overall.
My background prepared me for the Solar Decathlon competition. But I wasn’t sure how to apply my interest in sustainability and architecture in a meaningful way until the Solar Decathlon challenged our class at RISD to build a house that produces all its energy needs. For us as students, this was an unparalleled opportunity to use architecture and design to address global energy issues, environmental concerns, and learn essential practical skills to address them. It also showed me that it takes leadership and collaboration to understand and engage the world around me. It changed my DNA as a designer.
Growing up in a South American country where petro-politics shaped the culture and the economy, I was acutely aware of energy issues. The country’s abundance of oil fueled its development for the past century. It has also, unfortunately, become a political weapon that’s led to regional instability, corruption, and many social ills. Our dependence on fossil fuels has restricted our ability to advance in many other areas. Tom Friedman refers to this condition as a “resource curse.” For me petro-politics generate social issues that translate to an architecture of dependence.
Started in 2000, and every other year subsequently, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams from around the world to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that consume only the energy they produce. These net zero-energy homes need to have all the modern conveniences for our everyday lives while incorporating the latest technology. And, of course, we must make these homes beautiful, engaging, and relevant.
The Decathlon involves ten contests, each managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Through these contests, NREL monitors all aspects of energy production and consumption, as well as subjective grading for architectural design, marketability, and the teams’ communication skills. Though the competition occurs in the United States, it has spread to Europe and China. It is one of my favorite U.S. exports.
Photo: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon
It was in the fall of my third year of architecture school at RISD that I learned about the Solar Decathlon. The project was presented to us as a studio to design and build solar powered, modular, sustainable homes that would be displayed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and put us in competition with universities from around the U.S. and the world. It sounded amazing.
Both SCI-Arc and Caltech came into this year’s Solar Decathlon competition knowing that the public acceptance of CHIP would be challenging. When you are designing something intended to be a home for an individual there is no way to please everyone. Everyone has his or her own personal tastes, lifestyles, and prejudices making the judgment of a home completely subjective.
Architecture, however, is not subjective and the more you become involved with the discipline the more apparent this becomes. The challenge with the Solar Decathlon is that we’ve been dealing with two distinct audiences with two distinct objectives. The public judges us on taste while the architectural audience judges us on the rigor of our design approach. Practicing architects always deal with these two audiences and to please both is a rare feat. Would we be able to do this?
CHIP (Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype) is a new architectural proposition for sustainable housing. It uses the platform of the Solar Decathlon (through October 2) to disseminate big ideas to a wide audience. Developed over two and a half years, the project is a result of a unique collaboration between two schools, each on the leading edge of their respective fields of Architecture and Engineering. Students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have learned to speak each other’s language in a generative effort to create a truly innovative home that furthers the discourse of green-tech housing.
Photo: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon
Photo: Darius Siwek
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