Peeking into the toolkit of a digital designer you’ll find an unruly mess of apps and code, a reflection of the rapid changes now taking place in the field. From the beginning of the digital boom SOM, the architecture firm, has witnessed this development, not as a mere bystander, but as a creative partner. As early as the 1980s, the firm has been collaborating with digital specialists like IBM; back then, info modeling options were sparse and keeping up-to-date with innovations typically involved updating your AutoCAD. Fast-forward to the present, and the floodgates have been released.

Kids are now writing their own code for school projects and the position of ‘programmer’ in archi-firms has been virtually absorbed by the designers themselves. In essence, the barrier for entry into developer circles is almost zero. SOM, now in collaboration with CASE (a building information modeling consultancy based in New York City), are now faced with the question: “Why are we inventing tools that already exist?”

This collaboration has given birth to a new interface, AEC-APPS, described as “part Wikipedia, part GitHub,” which will create a library of digital tools for both users and makers alike. Additionally, there is also a strong social component that makes it easier to find the perfect tool, and begins to outline the collaborative mentality among the BIM community, much like that of contemporary programmers. Through crowd sourcing from members, users not only stay informed but also feed a community voice that, if loud enough, could sway software vendors to the demand of the users.

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What is a Game Changer? Guests of Metropolis’ annual Game Changers awards ceremony this year encountered that very question at the host sponsor Axor’s immaculate showroom in New York’s Meatpacking District; in this generous upstairs space the class of 2013 Game Changers were inducted. The six honorees are the Women’s Opportunity Center’s life-changing project in Rwanda; architect and climate advocate Edward Mazria; SOM’s vision for a massive regional revival via the Great Lakes Century project; tastemaker and promoter of young design talent, Jamie Gray; a far-reaching research project in India, Dream:In;, and historian Vincent Scully, who inspired generations of thinkers, like the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, who accepted the award on behalf of Mr. Scully. Other VIP guests included John Cary and Bruce Nussbaum.

The awards presented at the ceremony were designed, made, and graciously donated by digital fabricators, Tietz-Baccon, based out of Long Island City. They were laser-carved out of Corian, with the seven sides of each award carved simultaneously. Their heptadronal shape allows each model to sit on any side. Aggregated together, they create an entirely different symphony of shapes and capture the spirit that resides in each Game Changer.

The event space similarly came together as a symphony of game changing design by the host and sponsor Axor, with support from Shaw Contract Group and Affordable Art Fair. The beer was lovingly donated by Brooklyn Brewery. As a snow storm loomed in the forecast, guests from all industries convened to usher in Metropolis’ Game Changers, with a special call out by Edward Mazria to top off the night of celebration, “Metropolis is the real Game Changer”. Please join us again next year.

Grace Ehlers is coordinator of marketing at Metropolis magazine.

The city of Zhengzhou in central China recently opened the doors of a new 60-story skyscraper, now the tallest building in the city, providing a new centerpiece for the surrounding area. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the circular tower known as Greenland Plaza is shrouded in a screen of aluminum panels and incorporates a roof-mounted heliostat. Both features are designed to maximize daylight inside the structure, reducing the amount of energy used and heat generated.

Exterior of Greenland Plaza by day. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

Greenland Plaza by night. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

The aluminum screens, which obscure the building’s glass walls when viewed from below, are mounted with an outward lean, and calibrated to reflect the greatest amount of daylight through the windows. At night, the panels switch duties, and shine with artificial light that illuminates the entire façade like a beacon.

Glass and aluminum cover the building’s exterior. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

The heliostat, another sunlight-driven feature, is mounted on the roof, and uses mirrors to evenly redirect daylight down into the atrium of the building’s upper floors. The use of this technology allows natural light to fill the large interior space rather than electrical lighting. A computer-monitored system measures the interior sunlight and contributes additional electrical lighting when necessary.

The heliostat, located at the top of the building. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.

Daylight is directed into the atrium. Photo by Si-ye Zhang, courtesy of SOM.
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Last week the American Institute of Architects gave SOM’s “Great Lakes Century – a 100-year Vision” its 2013 Institute Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design. Coincidentally, we named the project and the brilliant team behind it, lead by Phil Enquist, one of six Metropolis 2013 Game Changers, now in our January issue.

I first heard of the Enquist team’s ambitious plan in 2008, just as our world was receding into the financial turmoil that decimated the architecture profession and extinguished many a dream. Yet here was a small group of architects daring to dream, and enthusiastically telling me about their massive undertaking, as we gathered in the firm’s Chicago office, high in the city’s historic Santa Fe Building. Designed in 1904 by the legendary Daniel Burnham, whose spirit is palpable in the office’s sunlit atrium, but more importantly, it infuses the Great Lakes project. His words propelled the SOM team forward: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

20 percent of the world’s fresh water is found in the Great Lakes, Courtesy of Earthsat/ESRI

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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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In 1969 Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, a tributary of Lake Erie that meanders through Akron and Cleveland, combusted into flames after years of pollution and waste accumulated along its shorelines. While this was not the first time the river caught on fire, it ignited the nation’s attention and inspired significant environmental action, including the creation of our Clean Water Act, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Nearly forty years later, Lake Tai, China’s third largest freshwater lake, was engulfed in a mat of blue-green algae large enough to be seen from space. The toxic bloom left 2 million people without drinking water for a week. Within the last decade, Lake Tai has been overwhelmed by pollution from rapid development, harmful industry, and chemical-heavy agriculture practices.

In the wake of these infamous events, the U.S. federal government and China’s central government have invested billions of dollars to clean up and redevelop their lakefronts. While the cost of a second chance to create a healthy balance between economic development and environmental integrity is steep, it also leaves an invaluable legacy of hope.

Cities along Lake Tai have agreed upon a bold ecological framework that sets back future development and wraps the lake in a thick band of reconstructed wetlands to filter runoff. In the U.S., Great Lakes cities are reclaiming industrial land, lot-by-lot along the shore, to remediate soils and build a foundation for future growth. We at SOM have had the privilege of working with forward-thinking municipalities in master planning these “second chances” from Wuxi, China to Chicago, Illinois.

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Heroic. Contemplative. Grieving. Victorious. The rebirth of the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan has engendered significant public reaction and reflection. With implications as complex as they are profound, it is not surprising that it has taken more than a decade to heal the urban scars of September 11, 2001.

I had the rare opportunity to sit down with three architects working on the site, Santiago Calatrava, David Childs, and Daniel Libeskind, at the recent AIA Convention in Washington DC, where they were honored along with four others, as “Architects of Healing”.  We discussed their experience of reshaping one of the most culturally significant sites in the history of the United States.

With this interview we begin a series of conversations, “Inside the Design Mind”, with key architects, exploring the motivations of today’s design icons and influencers. This initiative is part of the National Building Museum’s intention to tell the story of our time through architecture, engineering, and design.

Andrew Caruso: What is it about architecture, perhaps distinct from other art forms, that promotes a healing process?

Santiago Calatrava: I never thought about that, but we understand architecture as having a sense of permanence. Architecture mostly survives us. Whatever we build, we are conscious that it stays for the next generation. In terms of giving the sense of being remembered, architecture is very useful.

Being remembered, in Latin, is the root of the word monument. So, the monument character [sic] of architecture has to do with passing an idea to the next generation.  On one side architecture will preserve [this memory] to the next generation so that it never again happens; and on the other side, [the attitude] to rebuild, is also exemplar for the coming generation. From these two points you can see analytically the deep sense of the effort in lower Manhattan.

David Childs: I’m not so sure I buy into that. Can you really describe sculpture being different from painting, from architecture? Over the past three or four decades there has been a merging of these disciplines. I think, in fact, these things have blurred. It’s so wonderful, the openness of it. Architecture can certainly [heal] in its own way, but so can poetry.

Daniel Libeskind: Architecture promotes healing because it brings people together. It is literally the space of emotions and of our lives. There’s nothing abstract about architecture when it comes to healing. Yet it’s something also of dreams because architecture creates the perspective of orientation — of where you are, and of memory — at the same time. In that sense I think it’s the greatest instrument of healing that we have. Every urban context and building brings people into a social and contextual whole. That is the enigma and the power of architecture.

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On March 22, 2012, in celebration of the United Nations’ World Water Day, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s (SOM) City Design Practice launched the Great Lakes Century Vision video. The goal of the video, produced in collaboration with the award-winning design firm Thirst, was to broadcast and garner international support for a bold 100-year vision for the environmental and economic renewal of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence region.

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The Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York. The lower levels are being renovated.

The ancient Egyptians were the ur-preservationists, but I have always thought that there was something perverse about their method of immortalizing dead kings. The first part of the process, carried out by skilled professionals, was to extract all the internal organs of the Pharoah’s body—all the parts that we call “vital” for good reason, that enabled the man to walk, talk, eat, and think. These the embalmers put away in sealed jars. They then went to great lengths to swathe the hollow shell of a body so we can go stare at it in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Much like the Egyptian mummifiers, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) of New York gave the Manufaturer’s Hanover Trust Company building landmark status in 1997, but protected only its exterior. Read more…