In Las Vegas, on February 26, at the Digital Signage Expo (through February 28) everyone will be talking about “New Design Directions: Dynamic Digital Environments.” In a session called “Transforming Architecture & Interiors Into Media-rich Environments,” Jeff Kovel, AIA, principal at Skylab Architecture in Portland, Oregon, will discuss, in some detail, his firm’s experience in building Camp Victory for Nike. From the conversation that follows, it seems that the ways and means of sustainable design are similar to integrating digital media into architecture. Both types of projects are organized around research oriented, multi-skilled teams. In my previous interview with Paul R. Levy, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Center City, we explored the use of digital media in the large-scale urban environment. Here we dig down into one, very particular building and its media-rich message.

Susan S. Szenasy: As architects working in the physical world of tangible materials and expressions, did you need to make a mind-shift when you took on the Nike Camp Victory project? That project, from where sit, has a sophisticated digital component, way beyond what you’re used in architectural software programs. To begin with, please describe what the assignment was, and what you had to learn immediately upon accepting the commission.

Jeff Kovel: Camp Victory began in research and collaboration; there was no predetermined outcome. This approach of creating a vision, prior to defining a project’s limitations, is a testament to Nike’s commitment to innovation. The project began by meeting Hush, our digital partner, for the first time. Jointly we were briefed on the history of Nike, Eugene (Oregon), and the US Olympic trials. A full day insight into Nike’s upcoming innovations, to be launched at the Olympics, followed. We were some of the first people outside of Nike to see the Olympic Speed Suit and track spike, the Knit footwear, and the efforts being developed around Nike+ (digital). The task at hand was to create a temporary interactive exhibition around these innovations, immersing the viewer in Nike innovation. The limitation was that we could not penetrate or damage the newly laid artificial turf field that was out site.

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Victoria Meyers is an architect with a prolific and varied career. She is a founding partner at hMa, where her current design interests include how architecture can achieve beauty while embodying the principle of “zeroness” as well as using sound and light to produce unique architectural solutions. But Meyers does not limit her endeavors solely to practicing architecture. She also writes—one book on light, another currently in development, on sound—and she teaches.

Given that the field of architecture has changed radically over the past five years through a convergence of economic factors and technological advancements, we asked Meyers to offer some of her observations on architectural education.

Won Dharma Center, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

Sherin Wing:  How did your own education influence the way you teach now?

Victoria Meyers: It’s hard to know what to tell people. My undergraduate degree was in civil engineering and art history, so I had a much broader knowledge of art history than my contemporaries at the GSD. It’s not for everyone to do what I did. Most people don’t want to be in school as long as I was, they don’t want to read as many books as I’ve read and they don’t want to spend as many hours studying as I’ve spent studying. But when I’m teaching and when I’m talking to contemporaries about a project, I will always go into the history of a typology more because that is very real for me.

SW:  How has your perspective on education changed over the years?

VM: For many years I was tough as a teacher, though now I’m not. I look at the kids and I see such a rough road ahead of them and I think back on my own educational experience. I think back at the different things that were evaluated and realize that things never turn out the way we were told or expect them to. When we were graduating, there was one or two students held up to us as superstars, but we never heard from them after graduation. I’ve also been behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and I know all the machinations of people who teach, psychological games, and how they’re presenting information.

Infinity Chapel, image via hanrahanmeyers.com

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In preparation for a panel I’ll be moderating on February 26, at the Digital Signage Expo (February 26-28) coming to the Las Vegas Convention Center, I decided to learn more about my panelists, their subjects, and the potential breakthroughs in media technologies. “New Design Directions: Dynamic Digital Environments,” organized by the irrepressible Leslie Gallery-Dilworth, FAIA, will conclude with a conversation between the day’s presenters and me. Here I start on the large scale, the city, and how the urban environment can benefit from the newest technologies, be it through offering new experiences or new development opportunities, all of which respect the glorious building stock that distinguishes many of our cities.  Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy certainly fits into our list of treasured cities. So I start my Q&A series by asking Paul R. Levy, the president and CEO of the Center City District to talk about a recent kinetic light installation in that historic area, and his hopes for what it will bring to his city.

Paul Levy, President and CEO of the Center City District

Susan S. Szenasy: I understand that Philadelphia’s Center City District (Market Street East at the Gallery), which you oversee, has been designated as a large scale digital signage area. What will this initiative do for the area (talk about your expectations here)? And why, in the first place, has it been decided to establish digital sign guidelines?

Paul R. Levy: Market Street East is a 7 blocks shopping and hotel district that is just one portion of a 120 block business improvement district that covers the entire central business district of Philadelphia. In the 19th and early 20th century it was the city’s primary department store shopping district, but it declined for much of the latter half of 20th century. Now, it is the link between a large convention center and the Independence National Historical Park and is being repositioned a hospitality, destination retail, and entertainment district. Digital designs were approved to achieve two objectives: animation of the exterior of several large buildings and the generation of new revenues that can be captured by developers who are seeking to transform obsolete buildings and vacant sites. The guidelines were established to limit signs to only those properties that have a minimum of $10 million capital investment in their building for general renovation purposes, to limit the locations that can have signs and set size and other design parameters.

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In the course of reporting my piece on Edward Mazria, I had a very interesting conversation with Andrew C. Revkin, for years an environmental reporter for the New York Times. Today he writes the paper’s Dot Earth Blog and also teaches at Pace University. A big admirer of Mazria, Revkin has an altogether clear-eyed view of the environmental road ahead. An edited version of our talk follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: First off, what’s your role at Pace?

Andrew C. Revkin: I am Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.  And I co-teach three courses. One is a new course I’ve launched called Blogging a Better Planet. In the spring I co-teach a documentary production course, where we do films on sustainability topics, and an environmental science communication course.

MCP: You’ve been aware of Ed’ Mazria’s role in the environmental movement for a while. How would you characterize it?

ACR: His case—and it’s a good and simple one—is that buildings really matter. He’s trying to shift how we design them, and how we design architects, as well.

MCP: How does his advocacy differ from someone like Bill McKibben http://www.350.org/?

ACR: I think Ed is focusing on things that are imminently more doable. Bill is very good about building movements around numbers, but has not adequately articulated how you get there. In other words, besides yelling at fossil fuel companies. That may be something that needs to be done, but it’s not a path that will actually change a lot of things. Ed is working in a space where there’s a lot to be done, both on existing structures and on new buildings. There’s huge potential to make big gains.

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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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One of this month’s fabricating duos, Jason Pilarski and Steven Joyner of Machine Histories, often works with fine artists to figure out how to bring their larger-than-life pieces into the world.  Their 2009 effort for artist David Schafer, Separated United Forms, was part of a 1% for the Arts commission for the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena and encapsulates the intricacies of their tech-meets-manual approach.  Schafer, an NEA-award recipient whose work has been shown at PS1 and De Vleeshal in the Netherlands, talks about the pair of sculptures:

Jade Chang: You and Jason taught a class together at Art Center?

David Schafer: Yes, it was a moment at Art Center where there was an opportunity to develop a new kind of interdisciplinary curriculum.  I was frustrated with Art Center because there was a Fine Art program, but no way to allow them to have access to the digital side of things.  Jason and I taught digital practices and sculpture. It was not market driven, instead, it was more or less taught from an art perspective. Students could bring in own conceptual ideas, they wouldn’t have to design a blender or anything, and they’d learn rapid prototyping machines and 3D modeling.  We had fine art-style crits—the kind that go on and on—to discuss their work.

JC: And how did you meet Steven, the other half of Machine Histories?

DS: The three of us came together in that class.  Steve was really brilliant.  They just had lots of energy, and the class became a platform for these things to evolve and develop.  It was great to have fine arts students in the class with transportation design students, product design, to discuss everything from product theory to appropriation. Steve is definitely the one that’s the most organized.  He does go to great lengths to make the greatest looking racking to hold something—he gets as excited about the case as the thing in it.

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To understand how landscape architecture can address our society’s rising security concerns, we naturally turned to the eminent architect Laurie Olin in our November issue. His Philadelphia- and Los Angeles-based studio has long engaged with the thorny task of designing the public realm, from New York’s Bryant Park, to the grounds of the Washington Monument. I met with Olin in his sun-drenched office overlooking Independence Hall in the heart of historic Philadelphia. Some of our long conversation about designing for security was published in the article “The Trouble with Washington.” The conversation continues below:

Avinash Rajagopal: How did designers get left out of the conversation on security?

Laurie Olin: Why do designers get left out of so many conversations in our environment? It’s partly because people don’t realize what we can do and how we can help, and partly because people panicked.

A few years ago, after 9/11, when the federal government insisted on closing Chestnut street here in Philadelphia— basically paralyzing this end of our city with their notion of defending Independence Hall from some sort of attack—it took us three years to unwrap that, and to get the street open, and to get the barriers down. I personally had to go down to Washington to talk to two senators one day, to get them to reopen one of the main arteries of our city, which passes in front of Independence Hall.

Now the truth is that any teenager could figure out how to blow up Independence Hall if they wanted to. You could do it from any of these offices around here; it’d be so easy. Probably no one will. Even if they did, it is a building that, thanks to the American Building Survey, has been documented to death, and it could be rebuilt. If Dresden has been rebuilt after the fire bombing of WWII, surely we could rebuild this hall. It’s been rebuilt two or three times already, those aren’t the real towers anymore. It’s like those old shrines in Japan that are rebuilt every 25 years. They’re 800 years old, but they’re really only 25 years old. Yes, Independence Hall was built in 1759, but its been rebuilt many times since. There’s a lack of perspective on the part of the current administrators.

A sunken wall and bank were used as security measures in 17th and 18th-century parks in France and England. Some of these, like this one in Greenwich, near London, have been modified into embellishments. Image courtesy Laurie Olin.

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The industrial designer Dan Sturges may have more perspective on electric cars than anyone in the automotive industry. He began working on what he calls “small local vehicles” as early as 1988. He founded trans2 in 1991 and four years later commercially introduced the first “neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV).” Given this long history, Sturges is a firm believer in the potential of EVs, as well as an utter realist. Currently a faculty member of the graduate transportation and design program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he is also collaborating with Clean Tech Los Angeles to create a transportation think-tank modeled on the MIT Media Lab. An edited version of our far-ranging talk (in preparation for my story on BMW in the October issue of Metropolis) follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: Some sort of mainstreaming of electric vehicles seems to be occurring. You’ve been working on and studying them for a while now. From your perspective, is that what’s happening?

Dan Sturges: Yes. Every major car manufacturer has some type of electric car program either commercially available or in development. Obviously there are numerous ways these products can be designed. You see a lot of range, from pure electric vehicles to plug in hybrids. I think a lot of people believe electric drive is certainly part of our future. The question is, what technology is the winner in that space? Is it one of those that I mentioned, or is it fuel cells?

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Andrew Blauvelt, photo courtesy of Walker Art Center

Since taking the position of design director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1998, Andrew Blauvelt’s title and responsibilities have expanded steadily. In 2005 he added curator to his title, then in 2010 he also became chief of audience engagement and communications. During his 14 year tenure at the art center,  he has curated internationally recognized shows, increased the museum’s community involvement through such projects and public programs as the upcoming skyways show that will surely provoke discussion, and has been the leader of the Walker’s design studio, a recipient of more than 80 design awards that recognize the institution’s renowned graphic communications.

The Walker Art Center, Herzog & de Meuron building, photo courtesy of Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center began as a collection in 1879, in the home of successful lumber baron, Thomas Barlow (T.B.) Walker, whose residence was very near where the institution stands today. Formally established in 1927, the Walker became the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest. In 1988 the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened and represents a unique partnership between the city, which owns the land, and the art center, which fills it with temporary and permanent works of art.

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, photo courtesy of Walker Art Center

The Walker’s long-standing focus on modern/contemporary art began in 1940s.  Its 1971 building by Edward Larrabee Barnes became a national model for museum design with its elegant white terrazzo floors, and galleries with a graduated ceiling height that spiral around a central access core. In 2005 a major expansion, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, opened. With its innovative building design, Sculpture Garden, and progressive exhibitions and public programming, the Walker is a destination point for local, national, and international artists, designers, and visitors.

1971 Edward Larrabee Barnes building, 2005 Herzog & de Meuron building behind, photo courtesy of Walker Art Center

On recent warm September day in Minneapolis, Andrew agreed to answer some questions about the role design played in the Walker’s distinguished history and what he’s up to in 2012 and beyond.

Mason Riddle: Historically, architecture and design have played important roles in the Walker’s programming.  Could you list a few examples of projects, exhibitions or publications?

Andrew Blauvelt: The Walker became an Art Center in 1940 and since that time it has had a design program. The early projects included Everyday Art Quarterly (EAQ), the first museum journal on design, which later became Design Quarterly (DQ). The Idea House Project, which was a museum-sponsored program for modern architecture, was also initiated in the 1940s. The Walker created a design gallery, one of only a few museums (not be confused with decorative arts) to do so in the United States, until the early 1960s when museum director Martin Friedman arrived and did away with dedicated galleries. His wife, Mickey Friedman, became a design curator, one of many women who have had that role at the Walker since the 1940s. She established the Walker’s modern day presence in the design world with a series of major exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s: Mississippi: Image of the River; Tokyo: Form and Spirit; Architecture of Frank Gehry; Graphic Design in America; and, the Architecture Tomorrow series.

Since those early days the Walker has also had an in-house design studio that produced the graphics, initially for exhibitions and simple communications, as well as exhibition design. Later it also produced EAQ and DQ magazines. During that time, Martin hired Peter Seitz, then a recent Yale graduate who was also in the first student class at Ulm, the successor school to the Bauhaus in Germany. He introduced a truly modern and more European focus to the graphic design at the Walker. This was in the 1960s.

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For my recent story on BMW’s new i-3 electric car, I interviewed a number of transportation experts, including the legendary (and altogether charming) industrial designer Don Norman, who as it turned out currently serves as a consultant to the German automaker. Norman, the author of eight books and more academic papers than even he can count, was limited in what he could talk about concerning his client, but he did offer some fascinating insights into the future of cars and urban mobility:

Martin C. Pedersen: You consult for a number of companies, including BMW. What are you working on these days?

Don Norman: Obviously, I’m not allowed to talk a lot about what I do for BMW, but I can say that I’m working on electric vehicles with them, mostly in Munich, and a little bit in Mountain View, California, where they have a technology center. We’re working on a whole bunch of concepts. They’re also pulling me into issues involving today’s vehicles. I’ll tell you one of the big issues that they’re faced with—and it’s not a secret. All of the companies have this problem: cars are getting too complex. People can’t figure them out. I did a review for one of the car magazines. They brought a Ford to my house with the new Microsoft control system. We sat and reviewed it. It was overwhelming. We couldn’t figure out how to get half of the stuff to work. The same goes with BMW. They loaned me a new 5-series car. The guy sits down with me and we go over every single component of the car. Everything seemed sensible and straightforward, but it took between 30 and 40 minutes. When he left, I couldn’t remember anything. In fact I couldn’t even start the engine.

MCP: Your role, as they keep cramming more technology into these cars, is to help simplify them?

DN: We’re looking at a lot of things. The electric vehicle (EV) raises special questions. One of the main issues is range anxiety. BMW launched the Mini Cooper series two years ago. They produced 500 electric models and they asked UC Davis to do a study. Most of the drivers ended up loving the car. They had all sorts of concerns that turned out not to be true, especially about range.

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