On Monday night, a crowd of 200 assembled at a construction site in Harlem for the first panel in a series called “Changing Architecture.” The discussion, moderated by Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan S. Szenasy, focused on the need for architects to develop a wider skill set that will enable them to take a more involved role in the building process of their projects.

Among the evening’s panelists was Peter Gluck, founder and principal at the firm Gluck+. He is a strong believer in architects getting their hands dirty at the construction site, working with communities, and being held responsible for a project coming in on budget.  He remarked that “Architectural thinking is seen as a luxury item not relevant to the real needs of the development process…Architects need to acquire multi-faceted knowledge and accept previously shunned responsibilities in order to change this perception.”

Design-build firms like Gluck+ have established successful practices by creating teams of skilled architects who have a firm grasp of making a building and everything that goes with it—a deep understanding of how their designs will be made by the craftsmen and builders involved. By utilizing this knowledge and following their work through the entire building process, the firm can ensure that the quality and cost of the finished building is in keeping with the needs of the developer and the surrounding community. Read more…

Following our site visit to Via Verde in New York City, we headed west to brisk yet sunny Chicago to Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park, submitted by its founder and sponsor, Inspiration Corporation Inc. The restaurant is located four miles west of the Chicago Loop in East Garfield Park, across the street from the 185-acre Garfield Park and one block from the Garfield Park Conservatory. Opened in 2011 the facility, located in one of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, is a nonprofit, social enterprise that provides healthy, free meals to the working poor as well as workforce training.

The dining room of Inspiration Kitchens - Garfield Park, Chicago.  Photograph: Steve Hall, Hendrich Blessing

The restaurant is close to Garfield Park, Garfield Park Conservatory, and public transit.  Illustration: Wheeler Kearns Architects

View looking past the restaurant toward the loop.  Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Among the smallest of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award finalists in size, Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park, like Congo Street Initiative and Via Verde, is a LEED Gold certified project and shares the intent of encouraging healthier urban living and sustainable development. During our two days on site, we met with Inspiration Corporation staff representatives from the community and city agencies, the design team, and program graduates to learn more about the project. We also sampled the food, enjoying three meals at the restaurant along with other diners. Read more…

Following our site visit to Congo Street Initiative in Dallas, the Bruner Foundation team headed to New York City to our next 2013 Rudy Bruner Award finalist site, Via Verde. Submitted by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses, Via Verde (the “Green Way”) is a 222-unit affordable housing development in the Melrose section of the South Bronx. The project, completed in 2012, was designed as a model for healthy and sustainable urban living.

View of Via Verde from fourth floor fruit tree orchard.  Photograph: ©David Sundberg/Esto

We spent two cold, windy days on site, touring the project with the design and development team, taking photographs, as well as meeting with people involved in its development, design, and operation in the Bronx and Manhattan. Like the Congo Street Initiative, Via Verde illustrates another approach to designing affordable, sustainable housing, albeit at a larger scale and catalyzed by a different set of circumstances.

Via Verde grew out of two international design competitions that were part of the New Housing New York (NHNY) Legacy Project, which sought to create a new standard for affordable housing and development. The first, the 2004 NHNY Design Ideas Competition, was sponsored by AIA New York (AIANY) in partnership with New York City Council and the City University of New York and solicited design concepts for three sites. Powerhouse: New Housing New York, an exhibit and public programming supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, showcased selected entries at AIANY’s Center for Architecture. Read more…

Authenticity. In a way paralleling analogies, the mind welcomes the sense of authenticity or authority communicated through allusions – finding references, direct and indirect, to ideologies, social hierarchies, a person, events, stories or comparable environments of another place or time.  They are, in a sense, “quotations” of something else and imply a kinship. Most familiar in built environments – and fully exploited in brands – are the repeated revivals of styles and references to iconic places, associating a place we design with other admired, envied, or ancestral buildings, gardens, or cities – or past and present celebrities.

They have been an integral part of design in America since the settlement by Europeans. Before and after the American Revolution Jefferson’s and others’ tangible architectural references to the democracy of ancient Greece, and the virtues underlying virile, republican Rome, were their way of expressing the ambitions of their new Republic. Later the allusions in the Vanderbilt’s and others’ homes and gardens built up and down the east coast, were intended to associate them with European landed aristocracy – the American continent’s colonial masters – and express the validity, and the confidence in the social stature of this un-rooted crowd of upstarts. Christian churches still tend to allude to the spiritual certainties at the medieval peak of their power and, more recently, designs of new communities tend to allude, detail-by-detail, to the small towns of a romanticized past in east or west.

At a larger scale, when yearning for the refuge felt in an earlier home territory, we still try to transplant European or eastern landscapes in western American deserts, and other allusions invoke emotion-filled memories of earlier homelands in the architecture and street scenes in the urban villages of every colonial or immigrant settlement. At a place like Disneyland or the Las Vegas Strip, the high density of very different cultural allusions adds to the excitement and   “disorientation” into a novel kind of reality. At times, allusions relate to functions, too, like naturalistic ponds or the famous duck and hot-dog buildings, and crisply detailed metal and glass have been used to allude to the precise, efficient, high-tech thinking or manufacturing processes that go on inside.

The Sanssouci summer palace in Potsdam – more elegant allusions in the “form” of structural ornament to the court’s “care-free” life – the “function” inside.

Read more…

Last week community planner Ron Shiffman received the 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership, presented by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Municipal Art Society. Ron’s acceptance speech, read parts of it below, evokes the “pivotal role” Jacobs played for Ron and urbanists everywhere, “in forging the way we think about people, cities, and the economy.”—SSS

The position I filled at Pratt fifty years ago was ironically created because of Jane’s advocacy against a Pratt planning proposal for an area of Brooklyn now known as Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill—an action I will forever be grateful for. Brooklyn benefitted because a well intentioned, but misguided, plan was defeated and I benefitted because I got the job opportunity of a lifetime.

I had the honor to meet Jane a few times, almost always with my good friend Roberta Gratz. In the early 70’s, Roberta and I took Jane on a tour of the South Bronx where my colleagues and I were working with residents committed to rebuilding their communities [the Peoples Development Corporation and Banana Kelly among them]. Jane immediately sensed that this, not planned shrinkage as proposed by some, was the way to rebuild our vulnerable communities.

One of Jane’s greatest attributes was to give voice to those who struggled to preserve and revitalize their community, an effort [that] many others were engaged in [including] Elsie Richardson, Don Benjamin in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Jane understood the struggle of groups like Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn whose opposition to the misuse of eminent domain and the abuse of power by some pitted them against the some of the city’s most powerful entities. She inspired journalists like Norm Oder to put voice to their struggles. Read more…

Experiencing a sense of community – belonging to a successful network of human alliances – is one of the great pleasures of the places we build.  And at village or at city scales we dedicate an enormous share of our resources to accommodate and symbolize the group’s protection, effectiveness, and cohesion.  Facing the propensity for destruction and violence that’s inherent in person-to-person competition, we strengthen bonds and loyalties with places to meet, act out our agreements and shared stories, resolve the inevitable conflicts and plant symbols of our “social contract” – the places to eat together, judge, worship, trade, play, and celebrate with shared movements, ideas, voices. and action – and finally in the burial grounds that record the continuity of the shared gene pools.

“The Greek theater where a city saw and heard itself being a community – sharing its myths, passions and history”

Civil society’s most honored monuments are the places where a community can read the stories of individual competitors surviving and prospering together – stories of victories, resolved conflicts, bonds of loyalty, generosity and philanthropy, and the favor of a deity. It’s seen in the bold, arrogant commercial and town hall towers of medieval Europe’s newly independent cities – with their symbolism of wealth and power that’s inherent in penetrating a skyline. Today we do the same. We announce our stability and pedigree in the neo-classical languages of power – in finance, universities, and governments – or the engineering of grand transportation infrastructure and waterfronts that tell stories of still larger geographical alliances. And the most moving are the places where citizens see – and hear – themselves being a community, sharing the passions stirred by their myths, arts, and on-going history – the Greeks in their intimate theaters or today’s crowds in museums or performing arts venues. And it can happen in parks, plazas, and arenas where spectacles, music, or sports – at small and large scales – evoke feelings of solidarity, working or fighting side-by-side as a team or as a gang, making connections just as binding – at least for the moment – as genetic kinship. These places where we reinforce and celebrate – respond to – our prospering alliances are the settings where we experience what we call “sense-of-place” and “authentic” communities.

Alienation

In any mix of diverse and mobile populations, under any social structure, the built environments, the public faces of places financed and occupied, naturally express the victories, values, religion or status of the winners. When, for better or worse, they also become symbols of exclusion and oppression, they become physical targets for the outsiders – called, naturally, barbarians, rebels or terrorists. They have been throughout history. And in our globalizing, urbanizing settlements we can expect continued destructive responses to the places we build.  The alienation is just as deeply felt as “belonging,” and the winners are responding as they always have, with hardened perimeters and surveillance – refuge and prospect.

Read more…

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Baltimore’s Northeast Market—a fixture in the city’s Middle East neighborhood since 1885 and a cultural anchor of its community—is not the kind of place that sells cage free eggs and locally grown kale. It does, however, boast some of the city’s best lake trout (technically Atlantic whiting but so fried and delicious who’s checking?) and homemade Snowballs, two beloved local delicacies. The 36,000 square foot public market sits at a crossroads between Johns Hopkins Medical Campus and the mostly African American residential community of East Baltimore, providing a critical point of interaction between local residents and the institution, who have had a difficult and sometimes antagonistic relationship. But the relationship is complex: Johns Hopkins is both the largest employer in the area and a key institutional partner in the adjacent $1.8 billion redevelopment project, a project which has been a point of contention in the community for the last decade.

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Photo by Bogdan Mohora

Read more…

Ever have fond memories of feeling wrapped safely in a quilt? We all love the feeling of comfort and safety that comes with quilts, blankets and the loving hands that made them. And the quilting bee, a community of women working their craft, is well known in our folklore.

Artists Tony Anella and Cara McCullogh of Albuquerque, New Mexico, have taken these ides of comfort, quilting, and community and applied them to ‘the land’.

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” –Aldo Leopold

The result is what they call, a land quilt: an interesting idea that combines public art, community gathering, and ecological restoration.

Photograph by Robert Reck Photography

The land quilt attempts to create a small patch of temporary safety and security for life. Read more…

Second place team Neighbors before “Vs for Victory”.  Photo by Julie Chen

Why would someone pay to work round the clock for three straight days, toiling in makeshift workspaces on temporary installations? Thirty-two people enlisted to do just that in this year’s Common Boston Common Build. Some were drawn by the thrill of competition. Others came out of a desire to connect and contribute to community.  But CBCB offers competitors an opportunity beyond mere sweat and skill: the chance for anyone to be a “designer.”

Artist Janet Echelman and Metropolis Magazine contributing editor Ken Shulman view the CBCB project gallery at the BSA Space. Photo by Julie Chen

People of all backgrounds and experience levels participate in the competition, with results that showcase dynamic partnerships drawing on multiple disciplines. This year’s “Neighbors” team included graphic designers, engineers, carpenters, and aspiring business school students. Their project, a series of iconic V-shaped structures, vied for first place. Brian Jaffe, a new admit to MITs Sloan School of Business, joined the team on his first weekend in Boston; at the CBCB Awards Ceremony, he confessed that his second weekend in the city couldn’t possibly measure up.

The first place Common WIT team with its winnings. Photo by Julie Chen

Centered around the iconic Flatiron Building, the area boasts an array of design destinations, lovely parks, celebrated dining options, and a glut of retail shops and showrooms. Here, we’ve listed the area’s best.

Check out the Metropolis Design Guide for Design Week events and highlights from New York’s most design-forward neighborhoods. And look for the printed version of the Metropolis Design Guide around the city, especially in Chelsea at WantedDesign, in Midtown at the Architects & Designers Building and the Decoration & Design Building, in Flatiron at the New York Design Center, and at the newsstand at ICFF at the Javits Center.

Keep an eye out for what we “like” during NY Design Week. Around the city, you’ll see our lovely signs, produced by 3M Architectural Markets using 3M ™ Crystal Glass Finishes, at all of our editors’ favorite, must-see spots. Throughout our neighborhood listings, you’ll also see a next to our favorites.

METROPOLIS LIKES AVENUE ROAD
Newly opened for ICFF, the showroom will launch the latest pieces from Christophe Delcourt and Yabu Pushelberg. Collections include designs by Jacques Guillon, Simone Coste, Moss & Lam, and others. For more information, see listing below (image courtesy showroom).

Read more…