Last month, the Queens contemporary-art mecca P.S.1 announced the winner of its annual Young Architects Program, which chooses an emerging firm to remake the museum’s courtyard through a temporary installation-cum-party space. This year’s selection, Pole Dance, combines a circus aesthetic with a hint of existential vertigo. The structure consists of 100 pivoting fiberglass rods bolted to the ground and connected by bungee cords to a net suspended overhead. Visitors—quickly transformed into participants—move a set of multicolored balls that fill the net, setting the whole structure in motion. It is the creation of Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), a Brooklyn firm founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2007. Earlier this week, Idenburg spoke to me about the P.S.1 installation, architectural cynicism, and striking the perfect balance between whimsy and anxiety.

Why did your proposal take the form it did? What does it mean?

We take interest in the effects and workings of the immaterial systems we have created to organize our world, especially in relation to the way we organize our physical surroundings. We think people’s care and attention towards our physical environment could be reinvigorated by taking some of the qualities of the virtual into the architectural project. The idea of the structure as an “interface” —elasticity, instability, and connectivity—were ideas we tried to incorporate.

This sounds very serious. At the same time, it is an installation for a few months that needs to accommodate parties. We wanted it to be a really fun place, precisely through this interactivity. We are interested in creating spaces, not objects. We wanted it to be a total dynamic environment. Read more…

In developing ideas for the What’s Next issue, we had a rather logical thought. The subject was “Landscape/Climate Change”—and the thought? We need to talk to a Dutchmen about this, for fairly obvious reasons. So we contacted Jan H. de Jager, a civil engineer and an expert on dikes and dams, who in the course of our conversation gave us a primer on the Dutch ways with water.
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Tell us how the Dutch approach the problem of rising sea levels. They’ve been at this for thousands of years.

Our coast is very soft and sandy, with a number of major rivers crossing into the North Sea. The country was actually formed by these rivers over the last one or two hundred thousand years. It’s a country built on sediments, which were brought in by the Rhine River. A couple hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even exist. Our ancestors have dealt with sea level rises in the past. And they had only modest means, so what they did was build little platforms, plateaus, where they built up their farms and houses. So when sea water would rise, they would run to their earth plateau and sit out the high water.

When the country got more inhabited, and now I’m talking about two thousand years ago, these practices were still in use. About one thousand years ago the population increased to such an extent that the people felt that we had to organize things. The water boards were an early form of democracy. Our oldest water boards’ [jurisdictions] are over one thousand years old. They choose a chairman and a secretary. All the people living in a certain area had to contribute to the water board, whether in money or manual labor, or horses or cows to transport earth. And then we started to build dikes. Not the same sort of thing we consider a dike now. These were earth berms, which were extended over many kilometers to fend off possible high waters. The water boards evolved over the years. In the early days, there may have been one thousand water boards, in a country the size of Maryland. But up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes. The number of water boards has decreased. We now have less than one hundred, which is cheaper and easier to manage. People don’t supply the labor anymore. They just pay a bill every month. The inhabitants pay according to the size of land they own and the properties built on it.

That’s how they maintain the dikes?

Yes. And to maintain the water levels, because precipitation falls into these polders behind the dikes and we have to pump it out. We also have water seeping in from underneath the dikes that has to be pumped out. All those costs are borne by the water boards but paid for by the inhabitants of the area. Read more…

Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Rafael Viñoly has built a reputation as an architect’s architect, a serene functionalist and a master of institutional design. Schools, civic buildings, convention centers, and the like have long been the mainstay of Viñoly’s practice—but in just the last few years, the health-care industry has become his particular architectural demesne. With six innovative projects recently completed or currently underway, Viñoly has staked out a position in the advance guard of medical science, even as the state of the art changes from day to day with new discoveries and new breakthroughs. I caught up with Viñoly to ask how he keeps up.

There’s a lot of bad hospitals out there, design-wise and otherwise. What is your firm trying to do differently?

There are a couple of areas in which these buildings have really failed in the past: one is in terms of their ability to accommodate changes in technology and science; and two, in going beyond a decorative approach to really improve the experience of the researcher, the doctor, and the patient. I think that the problem is that it’s always been the area of a reduced number of specialties. You’ve seen the same thing with transportation, everything getting outsourced to large acronym firms. I think that architects have to challenge that. Having a more curious approach—that’s something we at least think we have.

So how do you find out how these facilities actually work?

We start by setting up an office in the hospital, and our team develops a day-to-day relationship with the people who work there. You need to be constantly addressing this question of how you make a group understand their relationship with the other groups in the overall fabric—and how their field is changing. Research is not something that ends when you put pencil to paper. Read more…

Who dares say what counts as “smart” when neighborhoods evolve? Look no further than the beige-and-black cover of The Smart Growth Manual. That’s the guide to repurposing American land use, not a guide.

Who could claim such authority? Look down the cover for the author credits: this is a volume “from the authors of Suburban Nation,” Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, whose indictment of sprawl in that book inspired legions of citizens to learn mind-numbing public review procedures in order to give their towns a center again. Now Duany and Speck (who is a Metropolis contributing editor) say that this book is a go-to resource for citizens who have enlisted in that fight, complete with rounded corners for easy thumbing. Actually, they say it’s the go-to resource. It situates places along a rural-urban continuum and lays out how people should plan, circulate, live, and work in those places for a healthier life and climate.

Unsurprisingly, the authors easily defend their claims. We caught up with them via conference call with Speck in Washington, D.C., and Duany in Miami. An uninhibited discussion, with stirrings of a sequel, followed.

Who’s the audience?

Andres Duany: This is a response to the empowerment of citizens in planning. The public process has become very broadly based—it’s expected now [that citizens will participate in charettes] and often the outcome is questionable. That has to do with expertise. So this manual is for elected officials and for citizens who participate in the [planning] process.

Jeff Speck: You can read it in the public hearing, while you’re waiting for your project to come up. Read more…

Dean Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway, but lately he has been tinkering with an ambitious array of technologies related in some way to sustainability. His distributed power generation and water purification systems, for instance, might help developing countries leapfrog the need for conventional infrastructure. He’s also delving into small-scale combined heat and power (CHP) systems, solar technology, and carbon capture and sequestration. And he’s turned North Dumpling, his small island off the coast of Connecticut, into an off-the-grid demonstration plot for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

During his keynote address at last month’s Build Boston, Kamen talked up his firm’s portable water distiller and Stirling engine power generator, among other recent innovations. He also made a vigorous pitch for his For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) foundation, which promotes science and technology in schools and organizes an international robotics competition. After the keynote, I spoke to Kamen about renewable-energy technologies, the pros and cons of nuclear power, and the characteristics of a smart grid.

What do you make of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification system?

It’s great that there’s an organization out there that’s helping to quantitatively assess and give people guidance on how to be green, because while everybody knows it’s a good idea, nobody seems to know exactly how to assess it—there are so many intangibles and so many complex unintended consequences of doing things.

In your own experience, which design elements you have found to be key in reaching zero net-energy consumption?

There are some areas where there’s such low-hanging fruit that people just don’t go after it, like good insulation and good seals, so you’re not  trying to heat the great outdoors. I also think a relatively substantial piece of low-hanging fruit is combined heat and power. If, for example, you took one of our Stirling generators and used it in the home, it would make use of one hundred percent of the electricity, and you could expect it to make use of eighty or ninety percent of the waste heat. When people buy electricity from Boston Edison, thirty-five percent of the coal they burn is making electricity, which means that sixty-five percent is doing nothing but killing fish in a river somewhere because you can’t move the heat around. So I think any place where you can make use of waste heat, you should generate your electricity on-site with a CHP unit. Read more…

The Aeron Chair has about 200 parts—all of which have to be analyzed to determine its carbon footprint. Photo: courtesy Herman Miller

There’s a reason why big companies are almost duty bound to take the lead in sustainable design. To get a handle on the complexity of the task—whether it’s designing a zero-energy building system, or truly closing the loop on a task chair—requires time, money, and expertise. Recently I spoke to Gabe Wing, Herman Miller’s Design for the Environment manager, about the unique challenges of achieving carbon neutrality for products.

Is carbon neutrality for products even possible and, if it is, what has to be done to get there?

We’ve been working in this area for several years. With products, there are some pretty significant challenges to approaching carbon neutrality. The first thing you have to do is determine how much energy is used to assemble and extract all the raw materials from the ground through your production and delivery. Then you need to look at how you handle end-of-life disposal. To go into that process is a significant endeavor and the best way to do that today is through some proprietary software packages. Read more…

A rendering of the CityCar on the streets of Manhattan. Image: William Lark, Jr., Smart Cities

When I first saw computer renderings of the MIT Smart Cities research group’s CityCar a few years ago, I thought I was looking at a pie-in-the-sky vision of a distant (and idealized) future. This compact, stackable electric vehicle is supposed to dock at charging stations throughout a city, allowing lucky urban dwellers to simply swipe a card for an instant, on-the-go rental. But it turns out that a system like this—dubbed Mobility on Demand by the MIT researchers—could become a reality in the tantalizingly near future. The Smart Cities team has already developed three concept vehicles, including the CityCar—it’s currently working with General Motors on a drivable model—and it has an initial pilot program, using an electric bicycle, tentatively lined up for Boston next summer. Ryan Chin, a PhD candidate in the Smart Cities group, predicts that a full-fledged system will happen within the next five years. (A $100,000 prize awarded by the Buckminster Fuller Institute last June should help here.) Recently, I spoke to Chin about the principles of Mobility on Demand, his team’s fleet of lightweight electric vehicles, and the differences between car development in Cambridge and Detroit.

So what exactly is Mobility on Demand?

Mobility on Demand, at the highest level, is a very sustainable personal-mobility system for urban environments. How it works is you have a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles that are placed at charging stations throughout the city. And at each of these charging stations you can pick up or drop off one of these vehicles. You have either an RFID reader or an access card or a credit card that releases the vehicle to the user. And then you are allowed to drive any one of these vehicles to any other station in the city. So these stations would be distributed throughout the city at convenient locations, within reasonable walking distance. And the whole idea is that you can pick up vehicles and drop them off anywhere; you don’t need to return it back to the location you took it from. Read more…

Balkany in front of a Gropius-designed power plant on the Reese hospital campus. Photo: Edward Lifson

When Chicago recently dreamt of hosting the 2016 Olympics, its bid included the demolition of an unused hospital complex to make way for an Olympic Village. Then a young architect in town named Grahm Balkany sounded alarm bells that some of the buildings, the planning, and other aspects were the work of the pioneer of modern architecture and creator of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius! Once Chicago lost the Olympics to Rio you’d think the city would have called off the bulldozers, right?  Alas, if you think that, obviously you don’t know “The Chicago Way.”

During our recent conversation, Balkany looked battle-weary, as if he fears that if he ever got a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up to find the Gropius buildings gone. It often takes a transplant to show locals what they’ve got. Balkany moved from Denver to Chicago in 1998. “Specifically for the architecture,” he says. “I saw a beautiful Gothic Revival limestone field house, and learned Chicago was about to tear it down! I thought, man, you don’t have buildings like this where I’m from and here they toss them out like rubbish.” He wrote letters to newspapers, and helped establish Preservation Chicago to advocate. Three years ago Balkany brought to light drawings, letters, and blueprints that seem to show that Walter Gropius and his firm, the Architects’ Collaborative, were heavily involved in designing at least eight buildings, plus the master and site plans and the landscaping of the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the near south side by Lake Michigan. Balkany founded the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to try to save it all. The city of Chicago, which now owns it, has other ideas.

Did you celebrate when Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics?

We would never celebrate anything that is a loss for Chicago. But I admit a part of us rejoiced. Only that part that sees this as an opportunity to revisit the premature decision to demolish Michael Reese Hospital. Read more…

Gail Vittori and Pliny Fisk III, directors of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems

Emilio Ambasz’s claims not withstanding, no one person can declare themselves the father (or mother) of sustainable building. It was clearly a group effort. The same, of course, can be said for green hospital design. But one of the seminal figures there is Gail Vittori, co-director (with her husband, Pliny Fisk III) of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, in Austin, Texas. Vittori served as chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Healthcare committee and co-authored (with Robin Guenther) Sustainable Healthcare Architecture (Wiley). Recently I talked to Vittori about the challenges and the imperative of green hospitals.

What’s the state of sustainable health care? Is the term still an oxymoron?

Because of its regulatory requirements, its 24/7 operations, and the specific nature of what it does, health care was slow to pick up on sustainability. It really does operate as a unique segment within the architecture and building world. But with the introduction of the Green Guide for Health Care and the knowledge that LEED for Healthcare is in development, all of that has provided a structure for people within the industry to understand that “green” and “health care” is not only a good fit, but an imperative. Read more…

Photos: Seong Kwon/courtesy Public Art Fund

Richard Woods, a British artist known for covering public spaces with whimsical architecturally-inspired graphics, recently opened his latest installation at New York’s City Hall Park. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, wall and door and roof transforms two security booths plus an interior door in the lobby. Recently, I spoke with Woods—whose work was also featured this summer in an exhibition at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery—about the motives behind wall and door and roof, his impressions of City Hall, and viewer reactions to his work.

Tell me a bit about the development of this project. How did you come up with the idea, and how long did it take to execute?

My public projects regularly take one architectural style and impose a contradictory style onto the surface. I liked the idea of juxtaposing a surface pattern synonymous with low-cost private housing onto this great public building. The work took approximately a week to manufacture in the studio and about the same time to install on site. Read more…