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…

Winning an award should be in and of itself good enough, but the satisfaction of the win inevitably deflates when you’re stuck with a plastic trophy to put on your desk. That was not the case when our Game Changers received their Corian, laser-engraved, geometric trophies by Tietz-Baccon at this year’s Game Changers awards ceremony.

The awards presented at the ceremony were custom designed, assembled, and graciously donated by the digital fabricators, based out of Long Island City. They were laser-carved out of Corian, with the seven sides of each award carved simultaneously. Their heptadronal shape allows for each model to sit on any side. Put together, they create an entirely different symphony of shapes and capture the spirit of our Game Changers.

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What is a Game Changer? Guests of Metropolis’ annual Game Changers awards ceremony this year encountered that very question at the host sponsor Axor’s immaculate showroom in New York’s Meatpacking District; in this generous upstairs space the class of 2013 Game Changers were inducted. The six honorees are the Women’s Opportunity Center’s life-changing project in Rwanda; architect and climate advocate Edward Mazria; SOM’s vision for a massive regional revival via the Great Lakes Century project; tastemaker and promoter of young design talent, Jamie Gray; a far-reaching research project in India, Dream:In;, and historian Vincent Scully, who inspired generations of thinkers, like the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, who accepted the award on behalf of Mr. Scully. Other VIP guests included John Cary and Bruce Nussbaum.

The awards presented at the ceremony were designed, made, and graciously donated by digital fabricators, Tietz-Baccon, based out of Long Island City. They were laser-carved out of Corian, with the seven sides of each award carved simultaneously. Their heptadronal shape allows each model to sit on any side. Aggregated together, they create an entirely different symphony of shapes and capture the spirit that resides in each Game Changer.

The event space similarly came together as a symphony of game changing design by the host and sponsor Axor, with support from Shaw Contract Group and Affordable Art Fair. The beer was lovingly donated by Brooklyn Brewery. As a snow storm loomed in the forecast, guests from all industries convened to usher in Metropolis’ Game Changers, with a special call out by Edward Mazria to top off the night of celebration, “Metropolis is the real Game Changer”. Please join us again next year.

Grace Ehlers is coordinator of marketing at Metropolis magazine.

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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Before his graphic commentary on the urban environment and its quirky denizens began to occupy the last page of Metropolis in 1998, we asked Ben Katchor to contribute to the magazine. His provocative visual-verbal narratives on urban manufacturing and sustainability grounded our preoccupation with these topics, still in the headlines. (Note President Obama’s second-term inauguration speech, in which the economy and climate change play important roles.)

On our May 1995 cover, Ben brought to life our story, Made in New York: The Art of Urban Manufacturing. He envisioned the look and feel of a many-layered city occupied by ordinary people, who are never quite so ordinary, making everything from Chinese food products to plywood shiva benches. When, in September 1996, we took a deep deep-dive into the subject of sustainability and the built environment, Ben showed what the city might look and feel like in 2030, if sustainable practices prevailed or if they didn’t. He saw a lively green city with bustling street life versus an abandoned pile of skyscrapers seen in the distance,  “From her concrete porch in her [subterranean] suburban home, Mrs. Levitt [wearing a gas mask] watches the sun set over a forsaken city.”

Each month for 15 years now, I look forward to reading Ben’s column as the magazine is being produced. And each month I chuckle at the foibles of teeming humanity negotiating the complex, friendly, awful, graceful urban environment where the new dukes it out with remnants of an ever-present past.  This is where we meet the architect who over-designs a light switch only to have a contractor install a cheap, noisy mechanism behind it, scaring the kids; or a man inside a Miesian skyscraper desperately trying to meet up with a woman on the windswept plaza below but she will have none of it. Modern architecture, it seems, can stifle romance.

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“Good ideas can come from anywhere,” Mike Hickok, one of our principals at Hickok Cole is fond of saying.  His vision and the idea of new collaborations were tested when we were tasked to design the office building of the future.

It took weeks of long meetings and passionate discussions before we finalized our plan concepts. Through it all, we realized that we wanted to work differently than we were used to working, to design the building envelope. We had just seen the Metropolis film, Brilliant Simplicity, which inspired us to look for opportunities of cross pollination or cross disciplinary thinking that we could build upon, tinker with, and synthesize into a simple concept.

A substantial portion of our legwork was done in the form of traditional research. From the books and writings of Branko Kolarevic and Ali Rahim (UPENN); Lisa Iwamoto, Bill Mitchell (MIT); Chris Luebkeman (Arup): and Jim Glymph (Gehry), we learned about digital fabrication techniques like sectioning, tessellating, folding, contouring, and forming.  We learned about rapid prototyping and rapid tooling, parametric design and “file to factory,” innovative materials, and new modes of fabrication. And we were inspired by Kolarevic’s phrase, “form follows performance,” and by Iwamoto’s ideas about the correlation between architecture and its modes of representation and construction.

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Last week the American Institute of Architects gave SOM’s “Great Lakes Century – a 100-year Vision” its 2013 Institute Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design. Coincidentally, we named the project and the brilliant team behind it, lead by Phil Enquist, one of six Metropolis 2013 Game Changers, now in our January issue.

I first heard of the Enquist team’s ambitious plan in 2008, just as our world was receding into the financial turmoil that decimated the architecture profession and extinguished many a dream. Yet here was a small group of architects daring to dream, and enthusiastically telling me about their massive undertaking, as we gathered in the firm’s Chicago office, high in the city’s historic Santa Fe Building. Designed in 1904 by the legendary Daniel Burnham, whose spirit is palpable in the office’s sunlit atrium, but more importantly, it infuses the Great Lakes project. His words propelled the SOM team forward: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

20 percent of the world’s fresh water is found in the Great Lakes, Courtesy of Earthsat/ESRI

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Like every other design magazine we, at Metropolis, receive hundreds of good wishes for the holidays; which we really appreciate! In addition to the growing number of e-cards, much of what comes into the office continues to be the traditional holiday greeting—paper, folded or single page, with glitter and cutouts. But let’s consider this stat: According to Recycleworks.org, there are “2.65 billion Christmas cards sold each year in the U.S.” That’s enough to fill a football field 10 stories high. And when you add the envelopes and the business cards stuffed inside? That’s a lot of paper to just throw away in January.

I am a digital native, and I believe there are only three reasons you should send a printed card:

• It’s the only way you know how; I love the card from Grandma!
• You’re a paper printing company; send it on recycled stock!
• Or it accompanies a box of cookies.

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When we published a Metropolis issue on Access in 1992, we were optimistic about the positive changes the Americans with Disabilities Act would bring to the designed environment. Signed into law by president Bush the elder two years earlier, the ADA was a hopeful expansion of civil rights, promising to include citizens with disabilities, in all that America offers. Considerate design was to be at the heart of this momentous social change. Well, it didn’t quite turn out to be that momentous. Compliance to the law seemed to wipe out the possibilities for design thinking about real people’s real needs.

Five years earlier we told the story of Patricia Moore, an industrial designer and gerontologist, who as a young woman took aging seriously and set out to experience the built environment—from street crossings to shopping—as an eighty-something. With the aid of a professional makeup artist, she navigated the world as an elder whose mobility and reflexes had been compromised by the natural process of growing old. In addition to her own research, Moore was also instrumental in helping craft the ADA. Through the years, her abiding commitment to inclusive design has never flagged (though it has been often frustrated by an uncaring marketplace).

As we developed our 9^th Annual Next Generation Competition, focused this year on inclusive design, we asked Moore to serve on our Advisory Board and as a member of our jury. In between one of her trips to China and some other far-flung stop, we caught up with Patricia A. Moore, president of MooreDesign Associates, LLC. Her stellar credentials include communication design, research, product development and design, package design for such clients as AT&T, Bell Communications, Citibank, Maytag, 3M, Sunbeam, and scores of others. As February 18, 2013, the deadline for Next Gen entries nears, I decided to ask my friend Pattie to talk about design in the service of human needs, give some advice to practicing designers, as well as those just stating out. Here is what she told me:

Susan S. Szenasy: Your game changing work came into my consciousness when we, at Metropolis, ran an article on you at age 26 navigating the built environment as an eighty-something. This was 26 years ago, when I came on board as the editor of the magazine; your story has informed my thinking about design responsibility ever since. For those few who might not know your story, can recap the reasons for your so-called “cross dressing” adventure?

Patricia A. Moore: In 1979, when I undertook my “Elder Empathic Experience,” the focus on ageing was primarily a medical model for treatment of illnesses and the chronic conditions related to growing older, and being an elder. The architecture, design, and engineering communities were essentially ignoring older people, with the very erroneous assumption that elders were not “consumers,” but rather “patients,” and therefore, not their concern.

My personal tipping point was the moment I was chastised by a superior at Raymond Loewy International. I was the youngest and only female industrial designer in the New York Office. We were gathered in a meeting room, discussing the design a refrigerator, when I asked if we couldn’t consider some door handle solutions that would be easier for elders and people with grasp and strength limitations to use.  The response was a dismissive, “Pattie, we don’t design for those people!” Those people? If the Raymond Lowey organization wasn’t designing for consumers of all needs, then who was?

I realized that observation and surveying, while important tools, would not be adequate to communicate the findings I so passionately knew to be true. As a child, watching my grand parents and their friends struggle with the activities of daily living, I instinctively knew the failure wasn’t theirs, but the result of poor and inadequate design solutions.

When I met the television and film make-up artists who helped to create the various elder personas I utilized, from the first day my foot touched a sidewalk in New York City (May 1979) until my last sojourn in October of 1982, I realized the means to provide a proper “wake-up” call for action. By becoming woman in her eighties, I was able to immerse myself into the daily reality of life as elders living in a youth-oriented society.

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Since 2007, Metropolis, with editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy has traveled to more than 35 cities and 150 architecture firms, design organizations, and industry shows in the United States and Canada delivering the Metropolis Tour. With the help of various sponsoring companies through the years, this Metropolis-produced CEU-accredited film screening and discussion program continues to inspire, intrigue, and challenge today’s practicing professionals in architecture, interior design, product design, and engineering. Sponsors for 2013 include KI, Kimball Office and Universal Fibers.

In 2007, our editor took a close look at the winners and runners-up from our annual Next Generation Design Competition and decided that the projects, products, and ways of working submitted as competition entries were not only forward-thinking—they were inspiring, innovative, and brilliant. The magazine decided to produce a new film for the Metropolis Tour program based on these individuals and teams. In mid-2008, Brilliant Simplicity was born. The film is as inspiring now, as it was four years ago.

The film delivers an overview of what so many innovative designers are doing to have a positive impact on the world while maintaining a commitment to achieving excellence in design. It’s proof that good design and sustainability can effectively coexist on all scales. It emphasizes the necessity for research and an ever-widening collaboration that, in the most fortuitous circumstances, can lead to innovation. And today, that word, innovation, has become our culture’s mantra.

From the largest and smallest offices of Gensler, Perkins+Will, HOK, LPA, NBBJ, Leo A Daly, and SOM to the various groups at Studios Architecture, Callison, Mithun, Shepley Bulfinch, and Cook+Fox, we’ve gained insight further into our own industry, and the culture of the design firms, and we’ve learned from each audience in a different way.

In her May 2010 Notes column, Lifelong Learning editor Szenasy states that “the future is clear: designers need to learn cross-disciplinary teamwork; to create a more sophisticated understanding of sustainable design; to reach out to larger communities and groups that have a voice in reshaping the urban form; to harness a new generation’s enthusiasm for saving the environment as well as its understanding of technology and connectivity.”

The film had a slow start before the design world fell off the cliff as the 2008 recession hit. Then it picked up momentum as design firms began to redefine themselves for the “new normal” and it continues to ignite conversations about the importance of research, collaboration, and innovation. LPA Architects in Irvine, CA documented the Metropolis Tour program they hosted in June:

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