Congo Street Initiative, Dallas, TX. Courtesy of Congo Street Initiative

As an architect and advocate for better urban environments, I am excited about my new role as director of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence at the Bruner Foundation (Cambridge, MA). The biennial award, founded in 1987 by architect and adaptive reuse pioneer Simeon Bruner, recognizes places distinguished by innovative design and their social, economic, and environmental contributions to the urban environment. To date, the RBA has recognized 67 projects and awarded $1.2 million to support urban initiatives.

In the world of U.S. design competitions, the RBA is unique. We ask our applicants to submit detailed written analyses of their projects—from multiple perspectives—along with descriptive images. And entries must have been in operation long enough to demonstrate their impact on their communities. Our  selection process includes intensive site visits to our finalists’ projects to help us fully understand how their places work.

Inspiration Kitchens, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of Inspiration Kitchens

The RBA selection committee meets twice: first to select five finalists and again to select the Gold Medal winner. Assembled anew for each award cycle, the committee comprises six urban experts including a mayor, design and development professionals, and a past award winner. This year’s group includes mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City, planner Ann Coulter from Chattanooga, landscape architect Walter Hood from Hood Studio in Oakland, architect Cathy Simon from Perkins+Will in San Francisco, Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Susan S. Szenasy, and Jane Werner, executive director of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the 2007 Gold Medal winner. The committee reviewed 90 applications from 31 states and the District of Columbia to choose the 2013 five finalists. Collectively, the projects they chose represent a diversity of creative, collaborative approaches and scales in tackling significant urban challenges:

• Congo Street Initiative - Dallas, TX - submitted by buildingcommunityWORKSHOP
  The sustainable rehabilitation of five houses and street infrastructure along with construction of a new home that provided transitional housing, in collaboration with resident families
• Inspiration Kitchens – Chicago, IL – submitted by Inspiration Corporation
  An 80-seat restaurant providing free meals to working poor families and market-rate meals to the public as well as workforce training and placement
• Louisville Waterfront Park – Louisville, KY – submitted by Louisville Waterfront Development Corporation
  An 82-acre urban park developed over more than two decades that reconnects the city with the Ohio River
• The Steel Yard - Providence, RI – submitted by Klopfer Martin Design Group
  The redevelopment of an abandoned, historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, workforce training, and small-scale manufacturing
• Via Verde - Bronx, NY – submitted by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses
  A 222-unit, LEED Gold certified, affordable housing development in the Bronx designed as a model for healthy and sustainable urban living

Louisville Waterfront Park, Louisville, KY. Courtesy of Louisville Waterfront Park

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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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Perkins+Will, in collaboration with Atelier Ten, volunteered their time to design the first environmentally sustainable mentoring module. Called LaunchPad, it uses a repurposed shipping container for the Infinite Family initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa where millions of children grow up without the influence of adults. Amy Stokes, the program’s founder, wants to change this.

Due to the AIDS epidemic in the region, which has spread to one in ten people being infected with HIV, a disproportionate number of children and young adults are growing up without parents or without adult mentors. In response, Stokes’ Infinite Family enlists volunteer mentors from around the world to interact one-on-one via web video with at-risk youth, forming lasting relationships and helping them to become assets to their communities.

Infinite Family’s first LaunchPad mentoring lab opened in August 2012, in Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg. Their plan is to open one hundred LaunchPads over the next five years, serving more than 11,000 children. Rendering courtesy Perkins+Will.

The program has been a great success.  More than 400 mentors have given their time, engaging some 600 children over the last three years and helping them gain the confidence and self-reliance they need to become leaders in their communities.

Infinite Family’s first state-of-the-art module marks an important milestone for the program. There is funding in place to construct three more, potentially affecting the lives of thousands of under-served youth living in difficult situations. “One of the keys to successful mentoring is to have a place that is conducive to a good experience,” Stokes says. “Our LaunchPad is that place.”

I posed a few questions to Mike Kane, an architectural illustrator at Perkins+Will, who donated his time to the project and the program’s founder, Amy Stokes to learn more about the modules. The unit utilizes passive cooling, an interactive thermal wall composed of recycled water bottles, and battery-powered back-up storage banks to allow them to function off-the-grid when necessary.

The self-sustaining module utilizes operable windows and a canopy structure for passive cooling to reduce energy consumption and keep costs down. Photo courtesy Elske Photography.

Laurie Manfra: How did Perkins + Will become involved with Infinite Family?

Mike Kane: Scott Schiamberg, a former senior designer with Perkins+Will and now a visiting scholar at MIT School of Architecture, introduced the project to our New York office.

Amy Stokes: Infinite Family was introduced to Perkins+Will by a mutual colleague, with whom Scott had worked on the NYC Olympic bid. Scott was immediately enthusiastic about the project and brought to bear vast experience, ideas, and outside resources to guide it.

LaunchPad is truly the state of the art for distance mentoring. It’s a place that signals that important work is being done by the mentee and their mentors, and it’s a place where students come to invest in themselves and develop the self-reliance they need to build better lives.

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As a professional in my late 20s I reached a point when architecture school was no longer a recent memory, so I began to seek ways to build closer ties with my alma mater, Tulane University.  While I look forward to financially supporting my university one day, I haven’t been out of school long enough to be able to contribute in that manner in a meaningful way. My engagement with the MSRED program at Tulane Architecture arrived at an opportune time and provided a different way to contribute.

I am the national research knowledge manager for healthcare sustainability for Perkins+Will, a global interdisciplinary design firm where I focus exclusively on reducing the resource impacts of the built environment on human and ecological health. In this role, I’m 50% research and 50% project based and work with clients like Stanford University Medical Center, the National Guard Health Authority for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and many other organizations.  My research is often integrated into the broader context of a specific problem, in collaboration with NGOs and private organizations. In most disciplines there is an inherent need for research and innovation. This need is of particular importance in the emerging field of sustainable design, where each new generation of projects seeks to identify innovative solutions that will enable them to continuously raise the bar of performance. Sustainable buildings seek to do less harm to the environment, while living buildings strive to do no harm and achieve a form of stasis. Ultimately the goal is for regenerative buildings that have the capability to heal. Today there remain significant gaps in our knowledge and expertise.

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In the winter of 2010, I moved back home to my small hometown on the coast of Washington State, having just spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chuprene, a tiny village in Bulgaria. While there I had been mostly insulated from the realities of the recession in the U.S., so I was shocked to return to a job market similar to that of Eastern Europe. It quickly became clear to me that even with my college degree and international work experience I needed to get more specialized education to be competitive in a tough job market.  I also felt that I needed more practical experience to interest potential employers. While looking for a job during the day and researching graduate programs at night, I came across a new graduate program at Tulane University, called a Master of Sustainable Real Estate Development (MSRED). It appeared to combine the kind of advanced studies with practical experience that would strengthen my resume in both these critical areas.

After a visiting New Orleans and Tulane’s campus to meet with MSRED’s director, Alexandra Stroud, I confidently enrolled in the inaugural class. The one-year professional graduate degree program focuses on sustainable real estate development by cultivating practical skills in business, economics, community planning, and environmental design. This holistic approach, enhanced by being located within the School of Architecture, recognizes that real estate development is physical and tangible; that it’s difficult to understand the nuances and long-term impact of physical property only in a business sense. While Tulane’s program does emphasize core business skills, it’s presented in concert with the culture and environmental impacts of buildings.  In addition, the city of New Orleans served our laboratory, attracting a diverse group of students to the MSRED program. My classmates came from Fortune 500 companies, event planning, city government, school teaching, and construction and project management with a range of prior academic degrees that included planning and architecture, liberal arts, accounting, and even forestry degrees.

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In my previous blog, The Built Environment v 3.0, I observed how the profession of architecture is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The last 100 years of increasing specialization, which has disempowered practitioners and dwindled our scope of influence, has run its course. We are now in a time of reversal, thanks to digital ubiquity, a generation raised in it, and a profusion of processing power harnessed by tools that can drive exploration, parametric analysis, and robotics.

Radical new tools are almost always followed by tectonic shifts in thinking. So it follows that entrenched behaviors perpetuate until someone unlocks new ideas that, in the right circumstances, catch the popular imagination and ultimately seed new ground that creates a “new normal”. This, to me, describes what is happening in architecture today. We are living in a time of great opportunity for our profession, and we need to act accordingly.

In late 2010, I asked my partners for permission to craft the agenda for one of our semi-annual, firm-wide gatherings of design leaders. This became the Perkins+Will Innovation Summit, designed to explore ways of amplifying our creative thought leadership in a global context by building our awareness of people in linked businesses, those who have pioneered new paths in a shifting landscape of practice. Our inspiring speakers set the tone for our explorations:

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In my last post I argued for the need to enable face-to-face interactions, though I certainly didn’t mean to imply that we should require people to show up at the office every day. The big idea in the NetWork study is providing or enabling a choice of settings that support a breadth of needs. “Face-to-face” is one still-needed capability. Another is being able to move between several options for getting the work done.

Whether or not an organization recognizes or even actively supports it, chances are really good that work is happening in places (virtual or physical) that don’t resemble the familiar assigned seats approach. Whether someone travels to customers, or sits in meetings all day, works from home or at their neighborhood Starbucks, they are working in places and spaces other than a workstation. In fact, they are working in places other than “the office”. This shift is partly driven by the nature of modern work and partly by personal preferences.

The authors of our NetWork paper urge us to recognize, plan, and manage “the workplace” as an expansive network of settings – only some of which are under the control of influence of the organization. This implies that we need to provision workers - not just workplaces – to enable them to work anytime and anywhere.

Perhaps this gentleman has grown too comfortable working in the car.

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Jason Harper, architect and associate principal in the New York office of Perkins+Will and expert hospital and healthcare facility designer.

The 20^th Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) concluded this spring with a rousing speech by Dr. Richard Jackson, a pediatrician and chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. You may have seen him hosting the four-part documentary Designing Healthy Communities on PBS, which previewed the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) just released report Weight of the Nation about the epidemic of obesity in America. The report notes that two thirds of adults and one third of children in the U.S. are overweight or obese. How can this be? Where have we gone off the rails?

Dr. Jackson said that the design of the built environment is killing us and threatening the very viability of our society. We are now almost entirely dependent on cars, with fewer and fewer of us walking to work or school (or anywhere for that matter). The statistics in the IOM report are sobering. But what was most interesting to me is the report’s number one strategy for combatting the obesity epidemic in our society: change the design of our built environment to increase physical activity. Not simply changing our eating habits, not exercising more, not drinking less sugary soda. Yes, these things are important but they pale in comparison to the impact that the design of the built environment is having on our bodies.

As an architect and planner of healthcare environments, I’ve been watching with great interest the mushrooming awareness of the impact of the built environment on public health. The Fit City movement is a hot topic in urban design circles. Now, with Dr. Jackson leading the charge, many designers are using the newly available data (including the IOM report) as ammunition in their push towards new models of healthier urban and architectural design.

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I admit it. I tend to overuse the phrase, “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” So here I go again. I’d like to point out that we need to bring two issues together when it comes to getting things done:  We need to temper our ability to do our work digitally and in places that aren’t offices and at the same time appreciate the role played by shared physical places in enabling performance.

In the first few pages of our Network paper, the authors emphasize the value of face-to-face interactions: They note that “the more we live in a digital world, the more important it becomes to reconnect with the physical environment. We’re spending more and more time working, socializing and playing in virtual settings. Communities of practice are expanding, effectively combining social and information networks. Games are becoming incredibly realistic – some in terms of sight and sound, while others replicate real life with virtual pets, babies, families, gardens. However… there are certain skills that are critical to successful face‐to-face social interaction, and we only master those skills by using them. So the physical environment remains vital to communication, interaction and developing skills”.

Google is known for thoughtfully provisioning workers: Visitors to any office can expect to find Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and “huddles”; video games, pool tables and pianos; cafes and “microkitchens”; and good old fashioned whiteboards for spur-of-the-moment brainstorming.

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http://youtu.be/VE86C5qPWLg

At the University of Minnesota College of Design graduation ceremonies, on Saturday, May 12, John Cary, who received his BA in 1999 from the same school, delivered the 2012 commencement address. After thanking dean Thomas Fisher and the faculty of the educational institution that “has given me so much,” Cary started with his inauspicious beginnings and launched into the story of his inspirational and accomplished life story and career—the two intricately entwined. His trajectory is sharply focused on the growing field of public interest design, an area that he is personally is helping to define. Here is his message to the graduating class, any graduating class in any field in fact, as well as the design professions in search of defining the 21^st century practice.—SSS

I came to the University of Minnesota in 1995, having graduated from a Jesuit high school in Milwaukee’s inner city. Few people, except my parents who are here today, know that my first semester GPA in high school was a whopping 1.9. If you weren’t book smart or an athletic super star at my high school, you kind of fell through the cracks. At least I did.

Thankfully, I landed in the basement, where an inspiring teacher—who was trained as an engineer and taught drafting classes—introduced me to design. It was through that high school teacher that I got involved with Habitat for Humanity, and helped transform an abandoned house into a family’s dream home—to this day one of the most meaningful projects that I’ve ever worked on.

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