On my second week in New Orleans, on a sweltering August day, I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, sponsored by the local AIA chapter. It was a dispiriting experience. While much of the city had seen its fortunes rise, the Lower Ninth, the neighborhood most affected by Hurricane Katrina, was still a kind of lunar landscape, desolate and depopulated. There were, however, two notable exceptions: the Holy Cross neighborhood (which had seen about half of its residents return) and Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development, a bright cluster of about 75 houses, designed by a veritable who’s who of contemporary architecture: Kiernan Timberlake, Shigeru Ban, Graft, Morphosis, as well as a number of notable local architects.

Make It Right remains an active construction site, the ultimate work in progress. Led here in New Orleans by Tom Darden, the organization has set an ambitious goal: to complete all 150 houses by 2014. (They plan to break ground on a Frank Gehry-designed house soon.) While working on the Game Changers profile of Tim Duggan, Make It Right’s landscape architect, I interviewed Darden. The 32-year-old executive director talked about the background of this seminal project, its unforeseen challenges, and its potential for global impact. An edited version of our talk, conducted at the Make It Right offices, follows.

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Though I edited the magazine Healthcare Design for eight years, and wrote and commented upon dozens of projects, I’ve seldom visited them personally to see what they really look like and how well they work. An exciting exception occurred this past October, when on a trip to Las Vegas I visited the Frank Gehry-designed Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

To say that the Center, which opened this spring, is controversial is putting it mildly. Though it’s gained its share of praise from professional architecture critics, who have called it Gehry’s most impressive work since the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, other observers have said that it resembles a cake melting in the sun or a building falling down. Still others have seen a fitting metaphor for brain disease and disorders, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, with the image of a collapsing cerebellum.

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The top picks from the “most green” and “most important” lists: William McDonough’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center (left) and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

This week, when Lance Hosey released the G-List, his survey of the top green buildings since 1980, he was responding to Vanity Fair’s celebrity rankings of the top-rated buildings of the last 30 years, which anointed Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao as the most important building of our time. But Gehry’s name was nowhere to be found on the G-List. Why was I searching for some signs of him among the greens? Read more…

Design was in the air this month, and we took in great heaving gasps of it as we ran from one event to another (and from one blog to another). New work was released, exhibitions were exhibited, and awards were awarded. For those who feel like the month passed them by, here’s our shortlist from May’s cornucopia of design news:

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A Pavilion Fiasco at the World Expo

What could possibly go wrong with an event that combines Shanghai and showiness? The pavilions. The U.S. pavilion has been called “a sorry spectacle,” and don’t even get us started on the terrifying animated baby mannequin in front of the Spanish pavilion. The only point of agreement, it seems, was the general nostalgia for the great Expo designers of yore.

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Honored by the AIA

Early this month, the American Institute of Architects announced the 2010 AIA/HUD Secretary’s Awards and the 2010 AIA Housing Awards. But the ones to really look out for are the seven young firms that won the New Practices New York awards: EASTON+COMBS, Archipelagos, Leong Leong, Manifold SOFTlab, SO-IL, and Tacklebox. Their prize-winning work will be on view at New York’s Center for Architecture from July 15.

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The Pritzker Ceremony and the RIBA Awards

A galaxy of starchitects and other glitterati descended on New York’s Ellis Island for the Pritzker Prize ceremony, where the Japanese firm SANAA received architecture’s biggest prize. Meanwhile, 101 buildings received the architectural excellence award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

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Frank Gehry Stirs Up a LEED Controversy

Frank Gehry’s cavalier comments on the LEED ratings system raised a few hackles. While the focus of the discussion shifted from Gehry to the legitimacy of the ratings themselves, New York’s Bank of America tower was awarded LEED Platinum, making it the greenest skyscraper in town.

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The blogosphere is buzzing with Frank Gehry’s derogatory remarks about green design. In a recent public interview, the starchitect summarily dismissed the movement that’s working to make the built environment more responsive to our deteriorated natural environment. With buildings known to produce more than half of the world’s carbon output, surely those who design and build them have to shoulder some responsibility. But not, apparently, Gehry. He cavalierly called out LEED ratings (and thus the many efforts made every day by architects and designers to make our world less toxic, use available energy and water more carefully, pay mind to the site and its proximity to public transit, etc. ) as “political” and “bogus.” This is unfortunate for everyone concerned, and everyone must be concerned. But I’m not surprised, though I am saddened no end. Read more…

Every year since 2002, the Cintas Corporation has selected the nation’s most prestigious privies and solicited Internet votes to decide the winners of the America’s Best Restroom Award. Top prize this year goes to a piece of over-the-top lavatory opulence in Branson, Missouri: the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, whose ladies’ room (above) includes stained-glass windows, cut orchids, granite-and-onyx sinks, chandeliers, and a “ceiling reproduced from the 1890’s Empire Period.” Yow.

The other four finalists are not quite as lavish: Read more…

 
The Italian manufacturer MDM World announced this morning that its Estrema chair, designed by Massimiliano Della Monaca, has been certified by the folks at Guinness World Records as the (drum roll, please) World’s Lightest Chair. Made from a single layer of carbon fiber, Estrema weighs a mere 1.36 pounds. That is indeed very light. By comparison, Frank Gehry’s aluminum Superlight chair, for Emeco, weighs 6.5 pounds. Heck, some issues of Metropolis weigh more than 1.36 pounds. Despite its light weight, the chair can support about 220 pounds—impressive, but probably not enough for widespread adoption in the States, where the average adult male tips the scales at 190 pounds. 
 

The proposed Atlantic Yards design in 2006 and now. Images: Gehry Partners and Ellerbe Becket

How should we greet the news today that the Frank Gehry–designed arena for the Nets in Brooklyn has officially been scrapped in favor of a cheaper scheme by Ellerbe Becket, the Kansas City, Missouri, firm specializing in convention centers and sports complexes? The world’s most famous architect has essentially been “value-engineered” out of the project. This is hardly shocking. Gehry laid off dozens of architects working on Atlantic Yards at the end of last year and let slip in an interview that he thought the project was dead, only to recant later under pressure from the client, Forest City Ratner. But it is depressing. Read more…

An 88-foot-tall neon sculpture that sits atop Roanoke’s Mill Mountain gives Virginia’s fourth-largest metropolis its nickname, the Star City of the South. As of last month, there’s another piece of architecture that would lay claim to the glow of the sobriquet. Randall Stout, a Los Angeles–based architect and onetime Gehry protégé, recently completed the Taubman Museum of Art, an 81,000-square-foot building that is more than a little indebted to Libeskinian angularity and Gehry-esque flow. It’s not Stout’s first museum (he also designed an extension of the Hunter Museum of American Art, in Chattanooga), but, formally at least, it’s a fairly radical addition to an architecturally staid city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There are a few sustainable elements—low-E glass, a good amount of natural daylight, some local materials—but, alas, no LEED certification. Among the inaugural exhibitions are Rethinking Landscape, which surveys contemporary landscape photography, and In the Cataclysmic Calm, a show (no, it’s not a volume of contemporary free verse) on the making of the building itself. More photos after the jump. Read more…

Even though I wrote approvingly of the Frank Gehry designed (and now much reviled) Atlantic Yards project when it was unveiled four years ago (Brooklyn’s Proposed Stadium: Not a Bad Idea), I’m still on the Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn newsletter distribution list, receiving missives from the group on a weekly basis. Read more…