The Poetry Foundation in Chicago is a place that works. “Let me count the ways,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning has famously said.

The building, designed by John Ronan Architects, opened in June 2011. It’s an optimal environment to celebrate poetry—even on cold, cloudy almost-spring days like the one on which I visited it. Starting with the sidewalk, passersby are intrigued by views into the courtyard and the rest of the building. The very tall zinc wall between the sidewalk and that courtyard, is punctured by thousands of round holes that invite the curious to move in for a closer look, just as if you were to put your eye against a keyhole and see into a room. This “peeking” experience generates pleasant anticipation. Once you enter the courtyard, the wall helps to keep the city hustle-bustle at bay.

Upon entering the building, you pass through a well-ordered and luxuriously planted courtyard. Gazing out at this space from inside helps you restock your mental energy and focus your thoughts. The generous windows facing the courtyard make it hard not to look outside.

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For some, Paolo Soleri was the perfect iconoclast. For me, in 1975, as a young intern architect, he was an ideal mentor. My arrival at his home in suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, for the beginning of a summer workshop at Arcosanti was the start of a mesmerizing experience. On a suburban street lined otherwise with ranch style houses his home, which he called Cosanti, loomed behind large earth-formed concrete apses. Inside a massive concrete shade canopy hung over an azure pool, and the sound of homemade bronze bells tingling in the breeze provided a comforting oasis from the searing desert heat. It was like nothing I had ever seen before: Not classical, but certainly not modern. Something somewhere in between.  Soleri’s drum had a distinctly different beat—one that was more connected to the movement of the sun than to blind historic precedents or the sleek abstractions of ocean liners.

My six weeks of hard labor at Arcosanti were infused with lessons about sustainable design principles long before they ever graced the pages of swank architectural magazines or directives from green building councils. And there were those vast decorative concrete panels, formed with colors and textures that came directly from the native soil. More than a hundred volunteer workers from all walks of life, and from most corners of the globe, slept, ate, and dreamed together in a sparse “plywood city” at the bottom of the mesa. Lunchtime and evening talk sessions with Paolo ignited conversations that usually carried late into the night. The conversations spanned from the writings of French philosopher Taillard de Chardin to the life of bees. Above all there was a palpable spirit of meaningful inquiry and camaraderie all around. Read more…

Mineirao sketch by Bruno Campos

Superbowl might attract North America’s largest TV audience, but the biggest sporting event is still World Cup Soccer. Like the Olympics, they happen only every four years, and involve massive logistics. What does this mean to the hosting countries? There’s no time to waste in getting the venues ready. This is just what’s happening in Brazil, the country hosting the 2014 World Cup. An exhibit in New York,  “Brazil + 2014: Sustainable Stadiums,” shows that Brazilians are hard at work to build spectacular buildings that are also sustainable.

Brazil and soccer are inextricably linked. The country can boast of being the home to legendary players and winning an unparalleled five championships. Now it will, once more, try to make history by making 2014 the greenest, most sustainable World Cup ever. To that end, the architects of the stadiums are putting forth their best creative efforts to make their buildings as functional and iconic as they will be eco-friendly.

Mineirao field and bleechers view, rendering courtesy BCMF Arquietos

Scattered throughout the country, in 12 cities, the stadiums are a mixture of new structures and comprehensive renovations of existing ones. One thing connects them all: the push to make sustainability taken to its highest standard, from traffic logistics to the smart use of water. All strive to deliver buildings that are in keeping with the country’s strong architecture heritage. Incidentally, among the well-known projects in the show, the Mineirao Stadium, is a renovation of a stadium adjacent to Oscar Niemeyer’s  early seminal project, the Pampulha Complex in the city of Belo Horizonte.

Mineirao birds-eye view rendering, courtesy BCMF Arquietos

The Mineirao, as it’s known, is a Brutalist structure designed in 1945 by Eduardo Mendes Guimaraes. The building is now protected as a historic landmark, thus its main shell cannot be altered. How, then, to make the massive concrete structure useful beyond the sporting events?

Mineirao plaza rendering, courtesy BCMF Arquietos

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Reading Peter D. Smith’s latest volume, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, is akin to strolling through a contemporary city, wherein broad impressions are punctuated by specific and visceral encounters. The elements that make and shape cities and urban experiences, from the physical contours to the social interaction that takes place within their borders, are all explored in broad chapters such as “Where to Stay” and “Getting Around”. Short narratives highlight these well-researched surveys, topics that deserve their own explication on different elements of the city that we think we understand, but as Smith quickly reveals, we don’t. In the chapter on “Where to Stay”, we are given a brief history of the meaning of wharves then and now in cities such as London, San Francisco, and New York in “On the Waterfront.”  The chapter “Getting Around” is separated into subtopics like “Walking”, in which the author takes us on a short tour of “Mumbai’s Skywalks”. And what would an essay on “Traffic” be without looking at the history of the ever-present “Parking Meter”? Throughout the book Smith references London and New York as points to depart from and return to. It is a book with a large intellectual scope. And clearly, there is much more to say.

With this in mind, Guy Horton and I decided to ask Smith about his thoughts on issues in a time when developing nations are experiencing and experimenting with different development models, and our industrialized urban centers are seeking strategies for renewal and reinvention. We also asked his thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary cities in other parts of the world, including some of the BRIC economies, as well as nations in conflict. This is what he had to say.

Sherin Wing:  Let’s begin with contemporary urban spaces in industrialized nations, what elements do you think are at the forefront of our experiences of city-spaces?

Peter D. Smith: If I think of the cities of the industrialized world and how their spaces influence our experience of them, then I think first of how you get around those cities, of the transport infrastructure: the subways and underground systems especially. You can’t say you really know London until you’ve travelled beneath it. The Tube network is like a vast organism penetrating the substrata beneath the city.

The buying and selling of goods is one of the most ancient aspects of urban life. The Egyptian hieroglyph for a town was a circle with a cross in it – the circle representing defensive walls and the cross the meeting of routes at a marketplace. Today, shopping remains one of the big attractions of the city, even in the age of the Internet, like the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the largest such market in the world. This is a remarkable, dynamic urban space with its own history and traditions. That’s a very different experience from the sterile streets and shops of Ginza. And a recent poll showed that Londoners placed the capital’s shops top of the list of what they liked most about their city.

Of course, the streets and squares are also important, the open spaces around the city’s structures. There may be broad avenues in some districts – probably choked with cars and trucks – and, in other areas, smaller streets, built on a more human scale where there are less people and where the experience of the city is more intimate.

And we shouldn’t forget urban parks and green spaces – some of them quite small, where the sound of the passing traffic remains a constant reminder of the big city beyond the trees. Others are so large that the city’s towers vanish into the hazy distance and you could be in the countryside. All these spaces contribute to our experience of the city.

Tokyo Sky Tree from Asakusa, courtesy P.D. Smith

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The opening reception for Reimagining the Waterfront, the East River Esplanade design competition organized by CIVITAS, was held at the Museum of the City of New York early last week.

Indicative of the civic yearnings of the Upper East Side—They want a High Line of their own! –the competition’s  results hinted at some of the unique qualities of the Upper East Side, Harlem, and the East River.

The winning idea—a blue skye concept entitled “3X: 300% More Esplanade,” designed by Joseph Wood—would expand the esplanade with a series of canals and pathways that wind their way through the streets of the Upper East Side and Harlem. While not remotely feasible, the bold proposal shows the necessity for  connecting the communities of the Upper East Side and Harlem with  the East River.

“3X: 300% More Esplanade by Joseph Wood

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Living in a big city can be hard. If you live in New York, you have probably quoted the famous song, “If I make it there, I can make it anywhere.” But Portland-based developer Gerding Edlen recognizes the need for giving a softer side to the city.

They develop buildings that, from my perspective, promise to be soft on communities, soft on the environment, and soft on residents.

Gerding Edlen has spoken with Metropolis before, but now they are considering bringing rental development to the east coast, potentially to New York City. I spoke with Mark Edlen, CEO, about their development plans and how those plans fit into cities like ours, “the city that never sleeps.”

“We’ve seen a movement to the cities. Cities are the solution to our global population growth,” said Edlen. His firm recognizes that people see city living as a way to help solve global problems. They also see how it’s becoming more popular to live a mobile and sustainable urban lifestyle.

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Photo: Darius Siwek

CHIP (Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype) is a new architectural proposition for sustainable housing. It uses the platform of the Solar Decathlon (through October 2) to disseminate big ideas to a wide audience. Developed over two and a half years, the project is a result of a unique collaboration between two schools, each on the leading edge of their respective fields of Architecture and Engineering.  Students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have learned to speak each other’s language in a generative effort to create a truly innovative home that furthers the discourse of green-tech housing.

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Photo: Luke Brummer.

How many liters of virtual water does it take to make one pot of tea? Close to 90 liters, depending on where the tea was grown. The virtual water content of a product is the volume of freshwater used to produce it, illuminating the fact that—from source to glass—much more water goes in to making a product than the amount of water it contains. This is what inspired German designer Timm Kekeritz to create a simple graphic to display the amount of virtual-water it takes to produce certain everyday products.

Kekeritz, an interactive designer who has practiced professionally for 10 years, had always focused on water conservation. But after reading Dr. Arjen Y. Hoekstra’s paper on the amount of indirect virtual water in items like tea and coffee, he designed a poster that made the topic easier to visually comprehend. The popular infographic has since been published in multiple magazines including SEED, IDN, and Gestalten Verlag and inspired the creation of the iOS application Virtual Water. We spoke with the designer about his thoughts on virtual water consumption and the app intended to spark conversations about our disappearing resource. Read more…