Last week, Parsons the New School for Design announced that it will begin offering an MFA in “Transdisciplinary Design” this fall. If you have no idea what that means, you’re not alone—the program’s chair, Jamer Hunt, recently made a short video to find out how some random New Yorkers would define the nascent discipline. (Watch until the end for a cameo appearance by MoMA’s Paola Antonelli.) Read more…

Photo: the Design Revolution Road Show on Flickr

Last night, in San Francisco, Emily Pilloton and her merry band of  humanitarian-design crusaders hosted the official send-off for their Design Revolution Road Show, which will be touring the country in a vintage Airstream trailer between now and April. I am very sorry I wasn’t able to attend—the invite to the “parking lot party” touted a tantalizing trifecta of mobile food vendors: one taco truck, one pizza truck, and one cupcake truck. Fortunately, even if you can’t make it to any of the tour stops, Pilloton and company are posting copious photos and videos on their blog. In fact, the Road Show has already made three pre-kickoff stops, including one at Pilloton’s alma mater, Redwood High School.

One other piece of related news: Pilloton’s nonprofit, Project H Design, is in the running for a $50,000 grant from Pepsi to help launch Studio H, a design-build program in the poorest county in North Carolina. It’s a terrific idea, so be sure to take a moment to vote for Studio H here.

You can also watch a video about Studio H, “the country’s first design, vocation, and community-service program in a public high school,” after the jump. Read more…

Civic involvement is top of mind in Washington, D.C.—at least in the White House, even if it’s scarce on the Hill. This spring, it will be also on the agenda at the National Building Museum, which, on May 11, will honor three “civic innovators” who have helped build strong communities and neighborhoods, made breakthroughs in clean-energy technology, and aided in recovery from a natural disaster. The honorees are Perkins + Will, the architecture firm well known for its stellar pro-bono work, in addition to its expertise in building stellar schools, hospitals, and other large projects; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon; and the founders of the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village (Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, Ann Marie Wilkins, and Jim Pate).

Perkins + Will’s Hector Garcia Middle School, in Dallas, was included in our recent survey of outstanding K–12 schools. Photo: James Steinkamp/courtesy Perkins + Will

The designers at Perkins + Will are the first to tell you that their pro-bono work enriches them as practitioners and human beings as much as it helps their clients. Read more…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…

Architecture-school crits are a famously bruising rite of passage for aspiring design professionals—unless, apparently, your professor is from the renowned Japanese firm SANAA. In the introduction to The SANAA Studios 2006–2008 (Lars Müller Publishers), the Dutch architect Florian Idenburg recalls a crit from his student days in Rotterdam, conducted by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima:

I remember Sejima sitting, quietly smoking, listening to an exhaustive argumentation to justify one of the less elegant proposals. After a long silence her response was liberating. Pointing first to a sketch and subsequently to a plan she spoke softly: “This … I like … this … I do not like.”

For Idenburg, steeped in the “paranoiac-critical method” of Rem Koolhaas, the directness, simplicity, and seeming intuitiveness of Sejima’s judgment came as a breath of fresh air. He ended up interning at SANAA’s Tokyo office and eventually became an associate at the firm. (He’s now a partner at SO-IL, in Brooklyn.) And, in 2006 and 2007, he helped bring the firm’s understated method to the United States, co-teaching the first two of its three spring studios at the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

But this slim volume—which Idenburg edited, and whose full title is The SANAA Studios 2006–2008: Learning from Japan: Single Story Urbanism—actually provides relatively few glimpses of Sejima and her partner, Ryue Nishizawa, in the classroom. Its focus is not so much what the Princeton students learned from SANAA, or how they learned it, as what the rest of us can learn from the firm’s work and Japanese architecture in general. Read more…

Did you know that you can earn continuing-education credits just by reading Metropolis stories? It’s true! Simply visit our CE page, pick a course—there are AIA registered ones for architects and IDCEC approved choices for interior designers—and complete an online participant exercise. Just this afternoon we added a new course that is AIS/CES registered for one learning-unit hour: “Radical Green,” by Suzanne LaBarre, from the October 2009 issue of the magazine. Questions? Send us an e-mail at ce@metropolismag.com.

We knew architects liked the Chartwell School after it was voted one of the Top Ten Green Projects for 2009 by the AIA. Apparently, students like it too.

Last week, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) picked Chartwell, an elementary school in Seaside, California, as the recipient of its 2009 Livable Buildings Award. The prize, given for outstanding environmental design, relies on polls of building occupants to gauge happiness with air quality, lighting, acoustics, and a variety of other conditions in the workplace. Those results, along with net energy emission (Chartwell strives for zero) and general design quality, are considered in the jury’s final decision. Read more…

Photo: Rafael Ng

Walking up Chapel Street, in downtown New Haven, an uncannily familiar form becomes visible inside the large windows of Paul Rudolph Hall. There is a massive yellow curve, illuminated like a neon billboard, and it isn’t until you pass directly beneath the entrance to the building that you realize you are looking at a full-scale McDonald’s golden arch. People gather on the sidewalk and stare in confusion. An adjacent poster offers clarification: What We Learned, a new exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture, returns Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their legendary 1968 Las Vegas studio to Yale for a much-anticipated 40-year reunion. Read more…

The City College of New York (CCNY) announced this afternoon that it will offer a new interdisciplinary master’s program called “Sustainability in the Urban Environment.” The 31-course program, which begins next spring, will incorporate architecture, engineering, and science into the curriculum, and will lead to a Master’s of Science in Sustainability. (Read more about it here.)

Having noticed similar initiatives from other universities in recent months, I got to wondering:  How many graduate programs in sustainability are there, anyway? Read more…

Photo: Stefano Paltera/courtesy the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

Keeping tabs on the Solar Decathlon is a bit like watching a slow-moving golf tournament. Over two weeks, 20 college and university teams from around the world compete to see who has created the best residential prototype for a solar-powered home. The houses—installed in a Solar Village on the National Mall in D.C.—are judged on ten criteria ranging from architecture and lighting design to communications and net metering. The daily tallies are kept on a giant leaderboard as well as on the Decathlon Web site.

Last Thursday, as the competition was nearing a close, the house from Team California held the top slot after coming in first in the architecture competition. But by the end of the day, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had bumped California from first place with just one final contest to go: net metering. Each home is equipped with a meter to gauge how much energy it produces and consumes; a team gets 100 points for producing at least as much energy as their home needs and they get up to 50 points for generating a surplus that could go back to an energy grid. Read more…