Library visits may be fewer in December and January as avid readers plow through their holiday cache of books. But that trend might not apply to the Round Top Family Library in rural Round Top, Texas. Here, on a recent visit, I discovered the library that dedicated townspeople have made into a place to enrich their community’s lives in many ways.

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The curvaceous forms created by Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg are rather susceptible to unfortunate botanical nicknames. His “Corncobs”— the concrete twin towers of Marina City, which are a Chicago icon (left) — will turn 50 on November 22nd this year. The Portland Cement Association (PCA) is organizing a conference to mark the occasion, and the Architecture Foundation will offer special city tours. But while Goldberg’s Corncobs are being rightly celebrated, the fate of his “Clover Leaf” – the building that was formerly the Prentice Women’s Hospital – still hangs in the balance.

In our February 2009 issue, Mason Currey explained the particular dilemma of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital. The building’s unique quatrefoil plan unfortunately also meant that it just couldn’t keep up as the operations of the hospital expanded. The Portland Cement Association celebrates the Corncobs for standing the test of time by being so “adaptable to several re-uses.”  This, it appears, is exactly where the Clover Leaf failed. The hospital moved its operations to a new building. And when the last tenant, the Stone Institute of Psychiatry, vacates in 2011, the building will be transferred to Northwestern University, who are in need of additional space for a research facility.

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Tadao Ando, Farnsworth House, 2009.

When I went for a tour of the Glass House, someone in the tour group shared with us yet another colorful, but completely unverifiable anecdote about Mies van der Rohe. Legend has it that on his first visit to the newly completed house, the master, having closely examined the structure, turned to Philip Johnson and said, “You never could do corners.”

Whether the story is true or not, it is one of many conversations, real and imagined, between Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which was designed earlier, but completed two years later, in 1951. Linked closely in time, and by the relationship between the architects, the two buildings together form a landmark in modern architecture. Not only do they speak to each other over 800 miles, agreeing in spirit, disagreeing on the details, they also continue to speak to artists, architects and designers today. Read more…

In 2009, The National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its Preservation Green Lab. Based in Seattle and headed by developer and urban policy consultant Liz Dunn, the Lab’s mission is to work with cities to develop new policies that leverage the value of the existing building stock as a resource for achieving cities’ overall sustainability and climate action goals.

As Dunn says, her work is founded on a belief that “existing buildings can be made to perform very well environmentally (and many of them already do)  but they also contribute to social and economic uses that cities care about when they think broadly about sustainability — including affordability, walkability, opportunities for local businesses, and overall quality of life.”

According to the Lab, district energy is one of the most promising solutions for bringing valuable old buildings up to new standards. District energy systems generate thermal energy at a central plant and distribute it to a group of buildings via underground pipes carrying hot or cold water. These systems are widely used throughout Northern Europe and are common in the U.S. for large campus-based institutions like hospitals and universities that benefit from economies of scale. Pioneering projects, including cities like St. Paul, Minnesota, Portland Oregon and West Union, Iowa, have brought renewed interest to the time-tested system. I recently sat down with Dunn to learn more about the Lab’s vision for district energy, and its work to craft policies that will help put historic districts on a new path to sustainability. Read more…

The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…

The architect Guy Zucker inserted an elegant, light-filled penthouse into this 1960s-era apartment building on Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Photo: courtesy Z-A Studio

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but during a recent 12-hour flight from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv, two Midwestern evangelical tourists on their way to the Holy Land could be overheard excitedly swapping notes on top upcoming destinations—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea. “Why would you even want to go to Tel Aviv?” asked one, for whom the city was clearly an airport and little else. “I don’t know, the politics?” offered his friend. The unintentional punch line (last time we checked, Jerusalem was still the seat of government in Israel) was made all the more comic for its blithe indifference to the recent buzz over the city’s regeneration. Tel Aviv is the secular antithesis to everything that ancient Jerusalem represents; it’s young, cosmopolitan, progressive, energetic, and gritty. And in the past few years—as numerous magazines have been tripping over themselves to report—it’s seen a rising generation of artists, architects, filmmakers, restaurateurs, fashion designers, and other creative types.

I was headed there for the architecture. Tel Aviv is home to both the largest and densest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world, and to an impressive array of new projects by emerging and established architects. Specifically, I was in town for Houses from Within, a 48-hour event during which the city opens its doors and allows access to all kinds of buildings, large and small, public and private, historic and contemporary, obscure and celebrated (more than 160 sites in all). This urban steeplechase, now in its third year, is an ideal (if exhausting) means by which to assess the current moment in the city’s rebirth, and to see up close how the often contradictory municipal attitudes toward development, planning, and preservation play out in the built environment. Read more…

Last April we wrote about Rafael Viñoly’s final big push to win approval for his firm’s proposed $1.5 billion redevelopment of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Today, Viñoly and co. cleared what should be the last hurdle of a drawn-out and often contentious regulatory review process when the City Council of New York approved the project’s proposed zoning change. The New Domino is now slated to break ground next year.

Frankly, we have mixed feelings about this result. On the one hand, the development will preserve the historic (and badly decayed) Domino refinery; create 660 new units of affordable housing; and open up the waterfront to citizens with a quarter-mile public esplanade. On the hand, it’s going to turn yet another modest, charmingly run-down corner of Brooklyn into a cluster of condo towers—and put yet more pressure on an already overtaxed subway line.

Guess you just can’t stop progress? Tell us what you think using the comments form below.

Image: courtesy Rafael Viñoly Architects

The International Living Building Institute recently launched the Living City Design Competition in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This international competition calls for design teams to re-imagine the future of our cities and use photorealistic renderings to demonstrate how current technology could transform existing cities into Living Cities—communities capable of achieving all 20 imperatives of the Living Building Challenge 2.0. The first prize is $75,000 plus media coverage and the second prize is $25,000. In addition, the National Trust for Historic Preservation will award a separate prize of $25,000 for the entry that most powerfully integrates a city’s existing built assets and architectural character into a vision for its future sustainability.

At first glance it may seem surprising that the National Trust is not only helping to promote this design competition, but also offering a substantial prize of its own. Why would an organization dedicated to preserving our cultural heritage make such a substantial investment in a design competition about the cities of the future?

The answer tells you something very important about both the National Trust and the Living City Design Competition. Read more…

From left: Andy Warhol, David Whitney, Philip Johnson, Dr. John Dalton, and Robert A. M. Stern in the Glass House in 1964. Photo: David McCabe

Writing 24 years ago in Architectural Digest, Vincent Scully called Philip Johnson’s Glass House “the most sustained cultural salon that the US had ever seen.” Within the glass walls of that modernist marvel, people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Robert A. M. Stern battled wits over the endless martinis supplied by Johnson and his partner, David Whitney. Now, thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the School of Visual Arts (SVA), that vibrant discussion continues at glasshouseconversations.org.

After the architect’s death in 2005, the National Trust realized that it would be meaningless to preserve the building without attempting to preserve the culture of inquiry and debate that animated it for so many years. In 2008 and 2009, they held two events under the new Glass House Conversations program, inviting cultural, business, and educational leaders to sit around and have a chat, just like the old days. (Metropolis’s editor-in-chief, Susan Szenasy, co-moderated the conversation in 2008; watch the video here.) This year, the Philip Johnson Glass House teamed up with SVA’s graduate programs in interaction design and design criticism to update that format for the age of Web 2.0 and social networking. Read more…

“Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” was what Bucky Fuller, with characteristic verbosity, called his strategic approach to solving complex problems, and he issued a call for a “Design Science Revolution.” Every year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) honors one of the brave souls who takes up the challenge, and shows how we may “make this world work for all.” On Wednesday, the BFI announced that this year’s $100,000 prize will go to Operation Hope, a project that has worked for more than 40 years to reverse the process of desertification and protect Zimbabwe’s grasslands.

In 1992, the Zimbabwean wildlife biologist, farmer, and politician Allan Savory founded the Africa Center for Holistic Management (ACHM) to further his efforts to combat the depletion of grasslands while maintaining the health of livestock. On a 6,500-acre rangeland learning center, Savory and his associates—including his wife and five African chiefs—established a previously unsuspected cause of desertification: a faulty decision-making framework. Operation Hope employed a new approach called “holistic rangeland management” and achieved astonishing results, transforming barren land into green grass and open water, and increasing livestock by 400 percent.

This incredible ecological transformation has far-ranging ramifications, “mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide.” If that isn’t enough to merit socially-responsible design’s highest award, then I don’t know what is.

Image: courtesy the Buckminster Fuller Institute