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…

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!

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Construction has begun on Kuntsevo Plaza, a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development in the Kuntsevo district of western Moscow. The project, designed by U.S.-based architecture firm the Jerde Partnership, will occupy an entire city block and is being touted as Moscow’s first integrated mixed-use destination. The objective is to create an urban focal point, welcoming to residents, commuters, and visitors alike.

The site will be a hodgepodge of interconnected, geometrically shaped buildings, accented by vibrant colors – a nod to the Russian Avant-garde art movement. Large meandering glass roofs will allow sunlight into the interior public spaces, providing appealing, open areas for residents, workers and visitors. Combined, the buildings will be home to shopping and entertainment, an office building, and two large residential towers. David Rogers, design director at Jerde, says the goal of the project’s design is to bring new life and energy to this part of Moscow.

One of the key design features is ease of access, both to the surrounding areas, and within Kuntsevo Plaza. The development is located next to a commuter transit line, linking it to the greater area of Moscow. Also, the completed site will have several entrances from different directions, allowing for the fluid movement of pedestrian traffic through Kuntsevo Plaza, and simplifying access to the surrounding areas.

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This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.

In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.

The short answer: “to scratch an itch.”  We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace.  Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.

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350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

It’s the New Year, but here in San Francisco (to quote that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra) it’s déjà vu all over again. After a year of growing optimism about the economy, I feel a dot-com fever coming on. Apartments and even condos are rising all around South of Market (SoMa), the hub of the city’s tech industry—and we’re following new commercial leases like celebrity marriages. Did you hear? Salesforce just signed an agreement for all 27 floors of 350 Mission, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed tower now in construction. This topped off a year of big moves in SoMa by Twitter, Square, Zynga, Yammer, Airbnb and other tech darlings. According to reports, the demand is driving some owners of Class A office buildings to strip vacant floors back to the structure in hopes of boosting their “creative space” appeal.

350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Like their dot-com predecessors, this new cast of entrepreneurs prizes SoMa’s stock of historic mid-rise, light-industrial buildings. Those around Third and Brannan Streets are considered some of the hottest properties in the city (or so I’m told by friends fretting over looming lease renewals). In the gnarlier corner of SoMa where I share an office space, itself a dot-com relic, anticipation is running high. Even a nearby church, vacant since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, is up for grabs.

Landmark 120, church, photo by Yosh Asato

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NYIT student volunteer working on construction site of Nosara Recycling Center, August 2012

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about sLAB Costa Rica, the design-build initiative at the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), with my studio, Holler Architecture, taking the lead. Back then my students had just finished the design of a much needed Recycling and Education Center for Nosara, a small community in northwestern Costa Rica. This past summer the project made a huge step toward reality. Funded in part through a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter over 30 NYIT architecture students traveled to Costa Rica during July and August and volunteered on the construction site of this important community project. In order not to loose momentum the students have set up a second Kickstarter campaign to help finish the project this coming January.

This past summer under the supervision of local construction professionals we were able to set up the construction site, complete the site grading, concrete foundations, and concrete block walls; and even built the first wooden roof truss. Read more…

Concrete, edited by William Hall with an essay by Leonard Karen, $49.95 US/CAN, Phaidon March 2013, www.phaidon.com

When I encounter a book dust jacket that’s textured to the touch I usually assume that it’s a willful distraction from the contents within; not so with Phaidon’s Concrete. Its striated cover perfectly evokes its complex subject.  Concrete, despite its historical roles from the Roman Pantheon to Fallingwater,  is a much-unloved material, rough to the touch and to the popular imagination.  Both the volume’s introduction and essay make immediate acknowledgement of its unpopularity. William Hall writes:

“Despite its range and ubiquity, many people associate concrete with rain-stained social housing, or banal industrial buildings,” writes William Hall. “Detractors of concrete cite such tired monoliths, and point out the failure of the material. Its economy and speed of production have inevitably led to its use on buildings of poor quality – frequently compounded by substandard design and inadequate maintenance. But concrete cannot be held responsible for all the failures of concrete buildings. For too long negative associations have dominated the public perception of concrete.”

A turn to the first photo in volume can do wonders to allay this perception, with a gently undulating concrete bridge complementing a rocky Austrian river view. Concrete need not be forbidding! And look, there’s the Guggenheim on the next page. Who doesn’t like that?

Concrete is something of a constructive wonder. This slurry of mineral and water is adaptable into almost any number of shapes and frames. The fact that most of these shapes haven’t been particularly imaginative is no fault of concrete itself; no more than wheat is to blame for Wonder Bread.

“Iron in combination with concrete, reinforced concrete, is the building material of the new will to form,” wrote Erich Mendelsohn in 1914. “Its structural strength capable of being loaded almost equally with stress and compression will give rise to a new, specific logic in the laws of statics, logic of form, of harmony, of implicitness.”

Subsequent failures are of imagination, not of material.

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1996, Oscar Niemeyer, page 123, photo courtesy of Leonardo Finotti
This 50 m (164 ft) wide flying saucer, perched on the edge of a cliff, was designed when Niemeyer was 89 years old. A wide winding slope connects visitors to the entrance 10 m (33 ft) above the ground.

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Our most recent post on Debating the Value of Mid-Century Modern discussed the architect as multi-party advocate and mediator. It was the last in a series that explored the interactions among the stakeholders of these buildings and how original design intent may hamper or encourage their rehabilitation and reuse. With this post, we begin a series that will focus on the technical aspects of modern materials and assemblies, including how construction methods of the period affect today’s decisions about the repair and improvement of mid-century building envelopes.

From the beginning, materials were significant to the design intent of modern architects and to the performance of their buildings. This trend first emerged in Europe before World War I, when design forcefully aligned itself with industrial production, challenging centuries of architectural values and design approaches. Visually, buildings no longer reflected history. Instead, they echoed the aesthetics of civil engineering and industrial structures. Traditional craftwork was replaced by factory-built components assembled on site with a minimum of expressive handwork, just as glass, steel, and concrete began to be viewed as expressive elements. This shift represented a deliberate affront to refined stone surfaces, the complexity of carved ornament, and the social hierarchies implicit in previous building facades and spaces.

The recessed windows, deep sills, and overhanging cornices of masonry buildings such as McKim, Mead & White’s 1872 Boston Public Library (left) shed wind-driven rain better than the sheer elevations of International Style buildings like Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany (right).

Photo Credits: Boston Public Library Collection, no known restrictions; and Flickr user Franz Drewniak (drz image), respectively

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On May 17, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that Chinese solar cells and panels imported into this country will now face tariffs of more than 31 percent. The ruling is a result of petitions filed by German-owned solar cell manufacturer, SolarWorld Industries America, demanding that Commerce conduct antidumping and countervailing duty investigations into Chinese solar imports. Supported by a small coalition of other solar cell manufacturers, the petitions allege Chinese producers have been selling products in the United States for far less than their true value. They accuse the Chinese government of giving manufacturers subsidies that are illegal under World Trade Organization (WTO) practices including huge cash grants and tax breaks, and greatly discounted raw materials, land, and utilities. Earlier this year, Commerce imposed anti-subsidy duties ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent on Chinese solar cell imports.

The Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE) fears new tariffs will cost some U.S. solar workers their jobs. Image via coalition4affordablesolar.org

The latest ruling is not a surprise. SolarWorld’s majority market share grants its petitions great weight under current trade laws with which Commerce must operate. But the verdict does call into question the efficacy of the laws. “This is 1930s trade law being practiced by a German who wants to begin a trade war between the U.S. and China,” said Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE), an advocacy group representing almost 200 companies opposed to the tariffs. Some accuse SolarWorld of trying to undermine its competitors. “It’s literally like the last X-Men movie,” said Shah.

Top solar producers in the United States spoke out aggressively against the tariffs last week, arguing the measure will send an already struggling solar industry into chaos and cost workers their jobs while projects are stalled. “There are a number of projects in North Carolina and California that have been delayed until they can nail down what price they are paying for solar modules,” said Shah.

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Oyster-tecture is one of several emerging practices that are shifting the way we think about infrastructure. The old ideals behind public works projects were focused only on enhancing people’s lives. Oyster-tecture provides needed services to people while also fostering vibrant, healthy ecosystems. The result is a more affordable, resilient, longer-lasting underpinning that surpasses New Deal-style construction. The technique can be applied at the small-scale such as in a single city, estuary, tidal river or bay or at the large-scale to aid an entire region, metropolitan area or megalopolis. In this part of my oyster-tecture series, I explore both scales to highlight the benefits of each and demonstrate how they are interdependent. The next post will go on to evaluate the viability and costs of developing infrastructure based on oysters.  Oyster-tecture is a big idea. It could save millions of jobs, generate billions of dollars in revenue, and protect coastal communities from ecological and economic collapse, and maybe even save the world.

New Infrastructure

I shouldn’t say oysters could save the world. They can’t, but they could save the majority of the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They could also save the West Coast and most of the northern coast of Europe…and maybe even the coastal areas of the Mediterranean Sea, and probably a few parts of Asia too - so, not the entire world, but a large portion of it.

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