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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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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This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.

In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.

The short answer: “to scratch an itch.”  We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace.  Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.

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350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

It’s the New Year, but here in San Francisco (to quote that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra) it’s déjà vu all over again. After a year of growing optimism about the economy, I feel a dot-com fever coming on. Apartments and even condos are rising all around South of Market (SoMa), the hub of the city’s tech industry—and we’re following new commercial leases like celebrity marriages. Did you hear? Salesforce just signed an agreement for all 27 floors of 350 Mission, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed tower now in construction. This topped off a year of big moves in SoMa by Twitter, Square, Zynga, Yammer, Airbnb and other tech darlings. According to reports, the demand is driving some owners of Class A office buildings to strip vacant floors back to the structure in hopes of boosting their “creative space” appeal.

350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Like their dot-com predecessors, this new cast of entrepreneurs prizes SoMa’s stock of historic mid-rise, light-industrial buildings. Those around Third and Brannan Streets are considered some of the hottest properties in the city (or so I’m told by friends fretting over looming lease renewals). In the gnarlier corner of SoMa where I share an office space, itself a dot-com relic, anticipation is running high. Even a nearby church, vacant since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, is up for grabs.

Landmark 120, church, photo by Yosh Asato

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In a study he calls The Origins of Architectural Pleasure, architecture professor Grant Hildebrand analyzes how specific responses to architecture, including aesthetic experience, could well have originated in evolved behavior. The details of the research and reasoning he assembles seem to me a clear, persuasive foundation for a more rigorous, more effective humanism.  He’s distilled the enormous complexity of a mind and body into concepts usable in day-to-day design, and that’s why my own explorations build on and in a sense grow out of his.

Habitats

He starts with the idea that natural selection clearly favors those who have imagined, found, and then re-shaped an environment into a “good home.”  And, as a result, natural selection has favored “an innate predilection to build in some ways and places rather than others,” adapted to the natural settings where a family would thrive.  Drawing on the social sciences, literature, the arts, plus his own observations, he traces the value we place on these selected sites and architectural forms back to biology – to innate survival-based behaviors.  Naturally, many of his insights are being applied in our day-to-day practice, though many are ignored or given a low priority, but whatever theory guides a design, he shows ways our publics are most likely to respond and why.

Specifically, Hildebrand points out that a safe, effective habitat must offer both a refuge, providing a microclimate, protection, and concealment – especially for the times when we are least watchful or most vulnerable – and a prospect, a look-out with views over well-lighted open spaces, the places that may offer opportunities – food and water, “provisioning,” exploring, trading – or reveal threats and approaching predators.  The natural places that would offer both together – a cave, cliff dwellings, and edges-of-the-forest, with an overlook ahead, protection behind – and ready access to a generous, fertile, natural setting of climate, land, and water – seem like archetypes, found again and again.  And he cites examples from a range of cultures over long spans of time – in Japan, throughout Europe, and today’s America.

“We built ourselves into the life of the desert” — Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Scottsdale

Building ourselves into the life of the land. Hildebrand explores in more depth the design implications of “refuge and prospect,” but first I want to expand further on responses to the component of experience we tend to call “nature” – the interacting processes of climate, geology, hydrology, and biology that go on whether we intervene or not.  Our relationship is inherently ambiguous.  Surviving and prospering depends on understanding, mastering, and managing its impacts, and our human “dominion” over nature – our separation and superiority – is institutionalized in our biblical and classically based civilizations.  Yet in practice, we are an inseparable part of any natural environment we invade, and whether driven by visions of quick exploitation or sustainability, private possession or the public domain, ultimately we rely on an intimate, nuanced collaboration.

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Our most recent post on Debating the Value of Mid-Century Modern discussed the architect as multi-party advocate and mediator. It was the last in a series that explored the interactions among the stakeholders of these buildings and how original design intent may hamper or encourage their rehabilitation and reuse. With this post, we begin a series that will focus on the technical aspects of modern materials and assemblies, including how construction methods of the period affect today’s decisions about the repair and improvement of mid-century building envelopes.

From the beginning, materials were significant to the design intent of modern architects and to the performance of their buildings. This trend first emerged in Europe before World War I, when design forcefully aligned itself with industrial production, challenging centuries of architectural values and design approaches. Visually, buildings no longer reflected history. Instead, they echoed the aesthetics of civil engineering and industrial structures. Traditional craftwork was replaced by factory-built components assembled on site with a minimum of expressive handwork, just as glass, steel, and concrete began to be viewed as expressive elements. This shift represented a deliberate affront to refined stone surfaces, the complexity of carved ornament, and the social hierarchies implicit in previous building facades and spaces.

The recessed windows, deep sills, and overhanging cornices of masonry buildings such as McKim, Mead & White’s 1872 Boston Public Library (left) shed wind-driven rain better than the sheer elevations of International Style buildings like Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany (right).

Photo Credits: Boston Public Library Collection, no known restrictions; and Flickr user Franz Drewniak (drz image), respectively

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If you want to peer into the future of architecture and infrastructure, try comparing the impact of two vastly different maps of the same place.

For this post, I am using a map of the United States; but you could use just about any map of any country on the planet.

Map of the United States

Looking at this map, you will see what you typically think of as the United States, with the lines that divide the landmass of regions into our familiar states. These boundaries were politically inspired, and whether influenced by natural features or not, the lines don’t heed to the ecological realities on the ground or in the water.

This process of artificially delineating land with straight lines continues as you zoom further into the map— states divide into counties and then cities, towns, villages, subdivisions and even further into individual property lines. Real estate developers, engineers, designers, and architects define their project sites against such lines and from there we get houses, office buildings, restaurants, hospitals, campuses, and neighborhoods. As this process fleshes out, the ecological functionality of the place is often dismantled in an effort to accommodate the infrastructure required to “serve” the location. That’s one way of looking at a map… and so far, it seems to be the only way.

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With apologies to real estate agents, we’d like to say that the three most important factors in design are scale, scale, and scale. One reason is that many of the worst environmental design blunders of the 20th century have been mistakes of scale — especially our failures to come to terms with the linked nature of scales, ranging from small to large. The cumulative consequence of these failures is that the scales of the built environment have become highly fragmented, and (for reasons we detail here) this is not a good thing. Can we correct this shortcoming?

Most designers know something about “fractals,” those beautiful patterns that mathematicians like Benoît Mandelbrot have described in precise structural detail. In essence, fractals are patterns of elements that are “self-similar” at different scales. They repeat a similar geometric pattern in many different sizes. We see fractal patterns almost everywhere in nature: in the graceful repetition at different scales of the fronds of ferns, or the branching patterns of veins, or the more random-appearing (but repetitive at different scales) patterns of clouds or coastlines.

Figure 1. The beautiful structure of fractals, patterns that are repeated and sometimes rotated or otherwise transformed at different scales. Left, a natural example of ice crystals (Photo: Schnobby@wikimediacommons). Right, a computer-generated fractal coral reef that, helped by color and shading effects, could be mistaken for a natural scene (Photo: Prokofiev@wikimediacommons).

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“May you live in interesting times.” So goes the Chinese curse.  And make no mistake, ours is one of the most “interesting times” we’ve ever experienced. I’ve been around long enough to remember working pre-computer, Internet, email, Apple products, and even pre-fax machines. The amount of change in my lifetime has been staggering and the pace of that change is only increasing. More than that, my anxieties about keeping up, let alone getting ahead of the curve somehow, are also increasing.

A typical office space in 1962

The evolving office in 2012, equipped with Allsteel’s collaborative furniture collection, Gather

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I see Hong Kong as a model of smart growth management and land use planning. It’s a city were policy dictates that development must concentrate on only 25% of the land area, with the remaining 75% preserved as open space. This policy ensures that the region’s lush green spaces remain intact. It also maintains scarcity and high land values in developable areas. This is crucial to the local government because its primary source of income is land leasing.

Looking at development in Hong Kong through Western eyes, I noticed another impact of the city’s tightly concentrated density: the compact clustering of residential and working populations supports a diverse, competitive, and often ingenious retail community.

My first up-close encounter with the retail streetscape occurred in Tsim Sha Tsui, an upscale neighborhood on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor (map). What struck me most was the extreme permeability at the pedestrian level. Few storefronts at the ground floor, save a handful of banks and higher-end boutiques, have full walls. Separated from the sidewalk by only a few inches of floor height, merchants do business in cheerful cubicle-sized spaces under fluorescent lights while people flow past, around, in and out. Read more…