Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”

Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.

The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.

Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. Read more…

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto will be designing this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, came the recent announcement. This prestigious commission is given once a year to an international architect who has not completed a building in England. In the past it has been given to major names such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Oscar Niemeyer. Fujimoto will be the thirteenth commission for the pavilion, and at age 41, is the youngest architect to ever receive this honor.

Fujimoto’s design is for a semi-transparent ring that shelters visitors from the elements and forms a visually engaging backdrop. The ring itself is constructed from a lattice formation of thin steel poles that form an irregular, helter-skelter geometry. Fujimoto has stated that his intent is to encourage visitors to interact with the landscape, by emphasizing the transparency of the design, and the cloud-like qualities of the structure. The 350 square-foot space will also include seating areas and a café for visitors. The pavilion will be built for three months on the Serpentine Gallery’s lawn in Kensington, London, after which it will be dismantled like its twelve predecessors.

The pavilion’s unusual design fits in neatly as an extension of Fujimoto’s recent work. His firm, Sou Fujimoto Architects, has lately been maintaining a high profile with several bold experiments in residential architecture, like his recent House NA. Each room of this nearly entirely transparent house is at a different elevation, and connected by ladders or stairs to the adjacent rooms. 2008’s Final Wooden House was another experiment in multiple levels and dynamic use of space. The house is a box formed out of wooden blocks that are stacked to create an irregular, undulating floor plan. Floors from certain areas become seating for other areas of the house, and the use of each space changes according to the perspective of the inhabitant.

Fujimoto’s latest design is an exciting continuation of his experimental approach to architecture. The pavilion will be on display from June 8 through October 20 of this year.

Brian Bruegge is an undergraduate student at Fordham University, majoring in communications and media studies, and history. He also studies visual arts and environmental policy, and has previously written for several other websites and publications on a range of topics.

Victoria Meyers is an architect with a prolific and varied career. She is a founding partner at hMa, where her current design interests include how architecture can achieve beauty while embodying the principle of “zeroness” as well as using sound and light to produce unique architectural solutions. But Meyers does not limit her endeavors solely to practicing architecture. She also writes—one book on light, another currently in development, on sound—and she teaches.

Given that the field of architecture has changed radically over the past five years through a convergence of economic factors and technological advancements, we asked Meyers to offer some of her observations on architectural education.

Won Dharma Center, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

Sherin Wing:  How did your own education influence the way you teach now?

Victoria Meyers: It’s hard to know what to tell people. My undergraduate degree was in civil engineering and art history, so I had a much broader knowledge of art history than my contemporaries at the GSD. It’s not for everyone to do what I did. Most people don’t want to be in school as long as I was, they don’t want to read as many books as I’ve read and they don’t want to spend as many hours studying as I’ve spent studying. But when I’m teaching and when I’m talking to contemporaries about a project, I will always go into the history of a typology more because that is very real for me.

SW:  How has your perspective on education changed over the years?

VM: For many years I was tough as a teacher, though now I’m not. I look at the kids and I see such a rough road ahead of them and I think back on my own educational experience. I think back at the different things that were evaluated and realize that things never turn out the way we were told or expect them to. When we were graduating, there was one or two students held up to us as superstars, but we never heard from them after graduation. I’ve also been behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and I know all the machinations of people who teach, psychological games, and how they’re presenting information.

Infinity Chapel, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

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This blog series is about an opportunity.  It’s written from the point of view of an architect and urban planner trying to work out ways that more of us can design more practical, meaningful, beautiful places—the kinds of places most likely to realize both our own intentions and the aspirations of patrons, clients, and publics who rely on us.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Frank Gehry, architect. Sketch by Albrecht Pichler

My basic idea has been to step back, look at the unfinished cultural revolutions of Modernism, and continue to build on their defining enterprise—the rapid advance of reliable sciences. The impact they have had on construction-related technologies has been enormous. But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice. We have valuable bodies of knowledge about the physical environments we build “out-there” on the land—places that profoundly affect how we all feel, think, and act everyday over a lifetime—yet we are only beginning to understand how each of us actually experiences those environments, “in-here,” and why we respond and react the ways we do. In the design professions we are, in a sense, like doctors trained more deeply in anatomy than in a patient’s total experience. That’s more or less left to informed “intuition” and, in the case of our professions, ideologies or “design sense.”

Contemporary knowledge of the biological foundations of “experience” is potentially as revolutionary in its own way as the re-discoveryof the arts and natural philosophy of Greece and Rome by the humanists of the European Renaissance. We now have effective ways to understand the exceptional skill of the artists and designers who, over millennia, have been creating the world’s great places. We can’t know what was in their minds, of course, but we can know why we respond to their work as we do.  Some very smart people are at work in this field, learning and writing about nature and human nature, and I have laid out a sketch that applies my understanding of their findings and ideas in an organized perspective—a way of thinking about design that I call “a new humanism.”

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When I asked philanthropist Eli Broad what he was looking for amidst the many competition entries for the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, his answer was clear. He wanted the most iconic design, one that could make a statement about the institution’s ambition. And what was that ambition? to make a difference in the community.

Eli Broad knows a thing or two about architecture and community, having been a cultural benefactor and funder of buildings by Frank Gehry, Diller Scofidio Renfro, and Renzo Piano. He’s also a creative and financial force behind countless educational programs around the U.S.

The chosen entry was by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), known for their radical and cutting edge design, in line with Broad’s and the university’s desire to shake things up in East Lansing.

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A bit of very interesting (and perhaps long overdue) news trickled out of Brooklyn yesterday. On the Brooklyn Nets web site, a blog entitled “Barclays Center: Wooing critics with great architecture,” links to Karrie Jacobs’ terrific review of the arena. It cites Karrie’s long time opposition to the development, along with her almost grudging admiration for the arena as a piece of architecture.  The blog concludes, presumably with the authorization of both the Nets and Bruce Ratner, “Jacobs asks if SHoP can get its hands on the master plan for the rest of the site. [emphasis added] In fact, it has and is working on re-shaping the original master plan laid out by Frank Gehry.”

Here’s the link and the morsel of real news: http://www.netsdaily.com /2012/11/15/3648742/barclays-center-wooing-critics-with-great-architecture

After more than a decade of planning, the future of the presidential memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, at least as conceived by architect Frank Gehry, is no longer certain. In September, the National Capital Planning Commission declined for the second time to review Gehry’s design; construction cannot begin without its approval. This is the latest in a series of setbacks for the current proposal, which includes the suspension of its Congressional funding (now temporarily restored through a continuing budget resolution) and an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the process used to select Gehry.

The debate over his design grows more contentious as its future becomes less certain. With both supporters and opponents dug in, victory for either side will likely bring further discord. This is not the path to the unifying national symbol we expect presidential memorials to be. We need to find another one, to consensus rather than division. This path is easy to see when we retrace the steps to our current divided and uncertain circumstances.

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When people think architecture, they think of building spaces or developing sites for human use. Over the years, this concept has expanded to include social activism. In the U.S., for example, there is Architecture for Humanity, Project Row Houses, and Make It Right. These groups address issues of poverty, displacement, and housing. Human Rights, however, extends beyond creating spaces for the economically disadvantaged or the impoverished. In fact, as Graeme Bristol of the Centre for Architecture & Human Rights (CAHR) argues, development projects are responsible for displacing 105 million people around the world, more than disaster-, conflict-, and persecution-based displacements combined. Indeed, in this case, Human Rights are defined as freedom from development, rather than the freedom to pursue architectural development.

The problems lie in the model for non-profit organizations and NGO’s. One is that many of these organizations have predetermined agendas that dictate their interventions. Part of this is driven by the funding cycle. Donors are not always inspired by the creation of t-shirts or pig farms. Yet a school designed by a famous architect attracts new and loyal donors. But this emphasis on building ignores development-induced displacement and results in projects that are disconnected from the needs of local populations. Unneeded buildings waste resources, time, money, and labor.

Graeme Bristol, Founder & Executive Director, CAHR

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Last week I experienced my first New Orleans hurricane. I’d been through big storms in the northeast before—a number of times, one time on a small island—but this one felt different. Maybe it was the timing, so close to the anniversary of Katrina. Maybe I’ve chosen to live in an inherently vulnerable city. The good news: the levees performed well (thank you, Army Corps of Engineers), the bad news: the local utility company didn’t. Hurricane Isaac did, however, provide some valuable life lessons:

1. There are only two kinds of hurricanes.
Boring hurricanes involve power outages, unrelenting heat, unrelenting rain, fierce winds, agitation, anger, dead cell phones, and acute internet withdrawal. “Interesting” hurricanes include all of the above, plus boats, helicopter evacuations, National Guard troops, motels in Arkansas, brushes with death, and occasionally death. Boring is better.

2. There is no such thing as a small hurricane.
Unlike tornados and earthquakes, hurricanes are easily tracked. You are given ample warning. Having experienced Isaac, I have now established a baseline metric for future evacuations: if a storm turns the corner at Key West and enters the warm waters of the Gulf already a hurricane, I will immediately start packing.

3. Blizzards are more fun than hurricanes.
At some point you can venture out into a snowstorm. Throw a snowball, make a snowman, frolic. In New Orleans you really can’t step outside in a hurricane until the tree limbs stop crashing to the ground. And then what?

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What is good design? It achieves function in an efficient and inspired way. While this formula usually makes for some unique creations it can also reduce design to something that’s “cool”. But fulfilling a function also implies that design is a service. Designers meet the needs that feed the demands of the market (or the client); a new building, a teapot, a raincoat are just some examples of market-driven design.

This month in Sao Paulo, Brazil BoomSPdesign will focus on the issues of good design, including its often ignored and less glamorous sides. The global forum opens on August 22nd and runs through the 24th. Perhaps the conference’s theme is best illustrated by the story of “Pipoca do Valdir” (Valdir’s Popcorn).

Valdir’s push cart, photo courtesy of BoomSPdesign.

Valdir Novaki was a Brazilian redneck from rural Parana who dreamed of going to the big city and making a name for himself. After years of waiting for a license to operate a popcorn pushcart in Curitiba, he got his wish. He quickly realized the need to differentiate himself from the other street vendors. From the immaculately clean cart, to a variety of flavors and original spices, nothing was ordinary in Valdir’s new business.

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