AndrewBlum.net

Saint Brad (Metropolis)

With his Make It Right project in New Orleans, Pitt may be on his way to becoming architecture’s most important patron. Is architecture up for the challenge? (link)

“So you’re a design junkie too?” Brad Pitt said to me, leaning out the door of an RV parked in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans one evening in December. I was his last interview of the day, and the lines around his blue eyes were thick with fatigue. Outside, a street party was starting up, with a zydeco band and a gumbo truck. There were flashbulbs and Angelina Jolie with Maddox, and Jerry Lee Lewis taking a turn at the piano. But the guests of honor were the people from the neighborhood, dispersed by Hurricane Katrina. Pitt’s new nonprofit, Make It Right, wants to help them “get a house” by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. The catch was that they had to choose one of the sustainable designs by 13 different architects—an amazing list that included Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban, and Kieran Timberlake.

“Our idea was, OK, these people need help rebuilding, so let’s bring in the great minds that we can find. And that was really exciting for me, being the fan that I am,” Pitt said, perched on the edge of the RV’s banquette. Are you bringing these architects here, I asked, because you enjoy working with them? “That’s one of the benefits certainly, but it’s not the driving factor.” So why do it? Why bring not just architects here but some of the world’s best? “I’ll tell you why,” Pitt said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. “Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice.

So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.”

Since when do movie stars have a better sense of architecture’s possibility than most architects? Post-Katrina New Orleans—like post-9/11 Ground Zero—was supposed to be a moment when architecture would prove its relevance. Instead, architects and planners came in like the cavalry, full of expert opinions about what New Orleans should look like and where it should (or more to the point, shouldn’t) be rebuilt. The result was that rather than providing houses, they seemed—in the name of good planning—to be taking them away. “It felt to me that architecture was trying too hard to make its point,” remembers Steven Bingler, founder of Concordia Architecture & Planning, in New Orleans. And was anyone really surprised? Architecture has always had trouble connecting with the masses. There’s that famous, perhaps apocryphal, statistic—architects design two percent of American homes—and the bald fact of the contemporary American landscape, with its big-box stores, chain restaurants, and bland condominiums.

The Accidental Environmentalists (Metropolis)

A chronic problem with employee retention led this pragmatic client to building green. (link)

NAVY FEDERAL CREDIT UNION
Pensacola, Florida
Client: Navy Federal Credit Union
Architect: ASD

When Ebb Ebbesen began work six and a half years ago on a call center for 250 telephone operators, he never imagined it would transform into a green corporate campus with 3,000 employees and more than half a million square feet of office space—all of it LEED rated. In fact, he had never even heard of LEED. “There was no sustainability road map at the time,” recalls Ebbesen, senior vice president of construction and process improvements at Navy Federal Credit Union, which is the largest member-owned credit union in the world, with more than $30 billion in assets. “But I knew what we were looking for: a building where employees are pleased to come to work in the morning and still smiling when they leave at night.”

This wasn’t just kindness but corporate necessity. At the time, Navy Federal’s turnover rate for telephone operators surpassed 60 percent annually. Ebbesen’s primary task for the new building was to turn that around. But he had no corporate checklist for environmental happiness—until he realized that LEED would be close enough. “Once we started going down through the point structure, it helped us make decisions that would continually reflect on this idea of ‘employee focus,’” Ebbesen explains. “We used the LEED template for discipline.” Today Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus, in Pensa cola, Florida, has a turnover rate of 17 percent and is expanding so fast that Ebbesen has his superiors eyeing the property next door.

When did this become the story of green? Architects and corporate facilities managers will often look across a table and—garnishing their declarations with an anecdote about a trip to the rain forests or something desperate their teenage daughter said—proclaim that green is the right thing to do, that green will pay for itself in energy savings, that green will serve as a highly visible symbol of their organization’s commitment to an optimistic future (and their shareholders too). All are undoubtedly valid motivations. But the confounding surprise of Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus—designed by Atlanta’s ASD—is that they are saying none of those things while doing all of them.

The Ultrabuilder: Bill Baker (Wired)

Seventy feet beneath the Las Vegas strip, in a construction pit that will become the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, Bill Baker is looking for local talent. Baker is the head structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the famed building design firm responsible for the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Time Warner Center in New York, and scores of other colossal glass boxes across the globe. This morning he's wearing a hard hat and an orange safety vest as he watches a Nevada construction crew at work. He'll likely draft some of them for his next big project, the multibillion-dollar Crown Las Vegas Resort and Casino. At 1,888 (lucky) feet, it will feature what could be the world's highest gaming room, 142 stories above the desert floor. Provided, that is, the Federal Aviation Administration will let it scrape the skies so close to the airport.

Baker inspects welds with his fingertips and, not one to suffer waste (even in Vegas), he looks appraisingly at the oversize columns. Then he rests a dusty dress shoe on a pile of rebar and turns to Brian Calley, an engineer at Schuff Steel, with the question that got him up early this morning, a question that's key to making the steel-framed Crown a reality: "So, what's the biggest thing you're working with?" The Crown will use around 72,000 tons of steel, and Baker needs to know that Schuff can handle that kind of metal. At Calley's answer (16 feet wide by 60 feet long), the bespectacled Baker enthusiastically sticks two thumbs up in the air. The fewer pieces you have to pick up and connect, the faster the building rises. And Baker knows that speed and efficiency will be just as important to getting the Crown off the sketch pad as the schematic itself. "Erection is everything," he explains. The problem with most ambitious architectural endeavors is that "people don't figure out the right way to build them when they design them." (Wired.com link)

Floor It! (Wired)

En Suite Garages Make for Dee-Luxe Apartments in the Sky (link)
In most Manhattan apartments, a closet counts as a bonus. But a new condo building at 200 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea ( conveniently located just steps from a nudie bar and a taxicab body shop) takes New York real estate excess to dizzying heights. Behold the En-Suite Sky Garage — an 8,000-pound-capacity freight elevator that whisks your Bentley directly into your pad. Of course, vertical parking is an old idea: At the Starrett-Lehigh Building, two blocks away, massive lifts that could accommodate entire boxcars of cargo once connected a ground floor rail yard with upstairs loading docks. Today, Martha Stewart rides those same elevators in her car to get to her office. At 200 Eleventh, this extravagance will run you at least seven figures — though it looks like every unit will be spoken for when the building opens in 2008. The cheapest garage-equipped two-bedroom carries a $4.7 million price tag, and the 3,585-square-foot penthouse runs $16.8 million. But, really, bringing your car inside is a luxury only in Gotham. As coordinating architect Sara Lopergolo puts it, "It's like suburbia in the sky."

San Francisco Federal Building (AIASF podcast)

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Produced for the exhibition STREET CRED San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience, this podcast features architect Thom Mayne, principal of the Los Angles-based firm Morphosis and designer of the new San Francisco Federal Building, in conversation with Andrew Blum, a Brooklyn-based writer and contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines. Mayne discusses the social implications of his most recently built project—both in terms of how it serves federal employees and the public. Produced and edited by Melanie McGraw, with photography by Keith Baker, Tim Griffith, and an introduction by exhibition co-curator Julie Kim. (link)

Brad Cloepfil: The Elementalist (Metropolis)

Brad Cloepfil’s emerging body of work may symbolize a shift away from glib shape-making toward a more timeless and lasting architecture. (link)

On a rainless Portland day Brad Cloepfil and I walked the seven short blocks from his studio to the massive former cold-storage warehouse that houses the offices of Wieden + Kennedy, the advertising agency that coined “Just Do It.” The building opened seven years ago, but the receptionist still greets the architect by name. Ours is a well-worn path. Every commission of Cloepfil’s since—a formidable and growing list, including five art museums and an office building for Disney—was sealed upon crossing the threshold to Wieden + Kennedy’s central space. It’s easy to see why. In photographs the big central atrium, wrought in concrete and wood, looks intimate and cool. In person it opens up in a way no lens has captured—a visceral neck-snapping surprise that combines the tectonic power of Kahn with the odd wonder of Piranesi. It has been a reputation maker, and justifiably so.

Cloepfil climbed the bleacher seats and paused for a moment on one of the catwalks that cross the main void. An ad guy zipped by on a scooter, and Cloepfil giggled—a high-pitched little sound that came unexpectedly from his big body but seemed to define his attitude toward this and all his work: boyishly bemused at his own good luck on the surface, but in full control to the core. “Whatever it is that you sensed when you walked into the room, that you couldn’t see from a photograph, makes me believe in architecture,” he says.

Cloepfil is an elementalist in an architecture culture in which image is king. With the opening of the Seattle Art Museum in May; the Museum of Arts & Design, on Columbus Circle in New York, next year; and ambitious projects in Michigan, Denver, Dallas, and Glendale, California, coming down the pike, Cloepfil is emerging as a leading American architect of a new type: not a showman or a theorist, not a regionalist or a corporate architect at the helm of a large firm, but a sort of high-art boutique practitioner (meaning he chooses projects carefully) with a burgeoning reputation for powerful, if subtle, buildings.

Sometimes very subtle. Now that the term starchitecture has settled in (as both compliment and swipe) to describe a certain ambition, it remains to be seen whether clients and critics have the stomach for showpiece buildings that don’t fully show up in photographs—for Cloepfil’s kind of build ings. But he doesn’t pretend to care. His inventiveness is never about reinvention. Instead, he draws on a deeper font. “One of the things architecture does is communicate in an iconic way,” he explained, back at his studio. “That’s where architecture begins. It just picks up the conversation that’s been going on forever. And that gives me strength because I don’t have to make the new icon. All I’ve got to do is serve architecture.”

Made in the Shade (Wired)

Jeanne Gang Angles for Energy Savings With Tilted-Window Design (link)

Look up at the sun. (Ouch!) Now look down at the ground. (Ahhh.) That pretty much sums up architect Jeanne Gang's breathtakingly simple approach to reducing energy use in Windermere West, a 26-story condominium destined for Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. She tilted two-thirds of the south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows away from the sun, letting the structure make its own shade — no duckbill protrusions required. It's mainly a summertime strategy: The hottest sun of the year is also the highest in the sky — and typically coincides with the most expensive electricity. The sawtooth design creates balconies that block direct midday sun, decreasing the need for power-hungry air-conditioning. In winter, when the sun is lower, rays pass through the windows to warm the interior. Gang worked with engineering powerhouse Arup to calibrate the facade. Using a computer model, they gradually angled the glass until they hit the sweet spot — skewed enough to keep living rooms from baking, but not so much that they feel like the inside of a boat. The magic number for Chicago's latitude? Exactly 71 degrees. Which should also be the temperature inside.

The Dream Life of Toronto

(Originally published in ROM, the magazine of the Royal Ontario Museum)

Places may seem like physical things, but they come to life only when imbued with meaning and memories. And that’s what thrills me about the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the ROM: more than just a museum of objects, it seems destined to become the leading repository of the dream life of Toronto. And not a moment too soon.

In 2001, not long before the ROM began its expansion project, I moved to Canada from New York—for love, and  to study human geography at the University of Toronto. My academic focus was “sense of place,” which I soon found to be a very complicated thing. In the old formulation, a sense of place was most closely identified with traditional villages, where people share a history and build that history into the landscape with their homes and monuments. But my new city was proving itself to be a different kind of place altogether—seemingly bent on reinventing the idea of cosmopolitanism.

As an American in Canada during those charged months after September 11, I felt this personally, as I faced what it meant to be a global citizen of a changed world. And I watched as the city faced it physically, as this current crop of architecturally ambitious public buildings, helped along by the Ontario SuperBuild Fund, brought that old question back to the fore about Toronto as a “world city.” With the release in the newspapers of each new set of architect’s renderings—wild squiggles and flying tabletops—the questions became clearer and the arguments in the press and at the dog park more tense: What is Toronto’s place in the world? What should the city become? And what does that have to do with architecture?

Let There Be Light (Wired)

The sun is always shining somewhere in Innsbruck. Unless, of course, somebody turns it off. That's because the Austrian city has the Bartenbach LichtLabor artificial sky. Equipped with 3,000 computer-controlled fluorescent, halogen, and LED bulbs, the 14-foot-tall dome can simulate daylight conditions - from a clear summer morning to a stormy winter afternoon - anywhere on Earth. The idea is to let architects see how natural light might filter through future building configurations. In recent years, computer modeling has largely displaced simulators like this one. But sometimes, silicon just won't suffice. For example, when the architects at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill wanted to prove the brilliance of their planned 919-window roof for a new terminal at Singapore's Changi International Airport, they invited officials to Austria for a sneak peek. "It was a hard sell," architect Ross Wimer says of the $1.7 billion plan, "until they stuck their heads inside the building." (link)

Photograph by Joerg Reichardt.

Architectural League Emerging Voices (podcasts)

The Architectural League created the annual Emerging Voices lecture series in 1982 to recognize and encourage architects who are beginning to achieve prominence in the profession. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the series focuses primarily on built work, at a variety of scales, and is structured to reflect the diversity of contemporary practice–geographically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Interviews were conducted by journalist Andrew Blum and were recorded on the evening of each Emerging Voices lecture.

J. Meejin Yoon & Eric Howeler
Howeler + Yoon/MY Studio, New York City and Boston

Sharon Johnston & Mark Lee
Johnston Marklee and Associates, Los Angeles

Ammar Eloueini
AEDS, New Orleans and Paris

Mark Anderson & Peter Anderson
Anderson Anderson Architecture, San Francisco and Seattle

Trey Trahan
Trahan Architects, Baton Rouge

Lisa Iwamoto & Craig Scott
IwamotoScott Architecture, San Francisco

An Te Liu
University of Toronto, Toronto

Jared Della Valle & Andy Bernheimer
Della Valle Bernheimer, Brooklyn