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.

Carbon Neutral U (Metropolis)

In the age of global warming, the greening of the American college campus is a largely grassroots effort driven by students, faculty, and in-house staff dedicated to sustainable thinking. (link)
In late 2005 Yale University president Richard Levin exercised the considerable prerogative of his office and announced that his institution—with its 5,500 residents, 21,000 commuters, and 1.7 million square feet of office space—would slash its greenhouse-gas emissions. His chosen target seemed attainable enough: a 43 percent reduction by 2020, which would bring the university ten percent below 1990 levels, thereby exceeding Kyoto Protocol goals. More than two years later Yale’s carbon graph is a beautiful site in an otherwise Sisyphean struggle. The university has already cut emissions 17 percent, with projects under way expected to cut another 17 percent by 2009—putting Yale a decade ahead of schedule in reaching its target. The even better news is that Yale is far from alone among universities: nearly 500 schools have signed the American College & University Presidents Cli mate Commitment, which sets them toward climate neu trality by a specified date (although it’s toothier than it sounds).

But Levin isn’t smug. An economist by training, if anything he’s frustrated by the wide view. “We’re showing it can be done, but our carbon savings are miniscule compared to what needs to happen,” he says on the telephone one morning. “And even if you put all the educational institutions in the world together, it still doesn’t add up to much. The answer has to come from governments, and I think the major reason for doing this is to enlighten the public so that ultimately governments will get serious about it.”

Yale and other schools are being spurred to action by a catch-22: the environmental moves they make on campus matter far less than what they teach their students—and what their students teach the world. But presidents and professors realize that the best way to teach students is through what they do on campus. Today’s campus sustainability movement is balanced be-tween nuts and bolts and big ideas. Local action has replaced global symbolism.

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.

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)

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.

Conspicuous Consumption (Wired)

Pop quiz. How much energy are you using right now? Admit it, you have no idea. Building Dashboard could tell you. Developed by Lucid Design Group, it provides real-time, Web-based feedback on electric, gas, and water usage. “This once-a-month utility bill nonsense isn’t good enough to change behavior,” says Michael Murray of Lucid, which is working to outfit buildings with consumption sensors. The system sends the collected info via the Net to Lucid’s servers, where it’s packaged into a slick, widget-like interface. The hard part is making the data relevant to residents. For instance, students at Oberlin College see their per-person dorm room power consumption expressed not as kilowatt-hours but as the energy needed to produce a veggie burger. Of course, the more literal-minded can get the breakdown in old-fashioned pounds of carbon dioxide. (link)

Greenbuild Podcasts: The Vibrancy of Green (Metropolis)

90 minutes of audio from Greenbuild 2007.

This year’s Greenbuild, the annual conference of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), was all about two things:

Green has gone corporate—and that’s exactly what everybody wanted.
Past gatherings may have been intimate affairs, but this year’s event, in Denver, was a full-scale trade show, with 13,000 attendees walking around with tan totes emblazoned with Honda on the side, lots of corporate-sponsored parties, and a sold-out exhibition hall, with 700 exhibitors hawking their green products. It left little doubt that green, at least as it’s represented by the USGBC, isn’t about the counter-culture anymore. And yet, does that mean green’s gone mainstream?

When it comes to green building, now that we know what to do, how will we do it? USGBC president and CEO Rick Fedrizzi turned the question into a catchphrase: “immediate and measurable.” Green building needs “immediate and measurable” impacts; we need “immediate and measurable results in our efforts to reverse global warming.” It was the topic of the week, and the question that guided the podcast audio interviews you can download here: What can architects, builders, building owners, and building product manufacturers do that will have an immediate and measurable positive impact on the environment? And then, how do we measure that impact? Is it with LEED ratings, carbon offsets, and Cradle-To-Cradle certification? Or maybe one of the new “marks” that were announced at Greenbuild, like a “Living Building” or “Planet Positive.”

Episode 1: Green Standards (mp3)

- Jason McLennan, CEO Cascadia Region Green Building Council: Post-Platinum
- Scot Horst, chair, LEED Steering Committee: LEED’s evolution
- Jay Bolus: Executive Vice President, Benchmarking and Certification for McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry: Cradle-to-Cradle, the product

Episode 2: Green Tools (mp3)

- Guy Battle, Battle McCarthy Consulting Engineers/founder, dCarbon8: Carbon is the new gold
- Phil Bernstein, Vice President, Industry Strategy and Relations, Autodesk: Design tools for green
- Michael Murray, President, Lucid Design Group: A building dashboard

Episode 3: Mainstream Green (mp3)

- Jon Ratner, Director of Sustainability Initiatives, Forest City Enterprises: Developer green
- Clark Brockman, SERA Architects & Chris Ziegler, Sage Hospitality Resources: Portland green
- Patti Purcell, CEO, The Beam and Green Building Blocks: Consumer green

Loblolly: Plug + Play Construction (Wired)

Panels stuffed with wires and pipes, preassembled on a factory floor, make high tech green building a snap. (link) (photo by David S. Allee)

STEVE KIERAN STOPS BRIEFLY to survey the Chesapeake Bay from the living room of his half-built house. It's a great view, but today he's most interested in what's inside the walls of his utility room.

"Look at that," Kieran says, leading me into a small, tidy space filled with neat bundles of flexible orange tubing. Bolted to the wall is a row of black manifold boxes, each the size of a coffee cup. "It's beautiful. It's like the engine of a car." He's right; it looks less like a typical utility space – meters and junction boxes crammed with wires that splay off in all directions – and more like a piece of industrial design, crafted with planning and precision. And for good reason: This room and two more like it hold the house's high tech systems. It arrived at the site as a single unit stuffed with a tankless water heater, pumps, and other equipment ready to hook into the air, water, data, and power systems.

Snapped together from a combination of modules, panels, and preformed structural frames, the Loblolly house, named for the loblolly pines here in the Maryland tidewater area, is a manifesto for a new way of building. Architect Kieran and his partner, James Timberlake, have long been known for their finely crafted and energy-efficient buildings and materials. But the Philadelphia-based pair wanted more than just high-profile commissions – they were looking for a breakthrough technology that would let them make smarter, greener structures that could go up quickly and cheaply.

In 2001, after studying how the automotive, aircraft, and shipbuilding industries had revolutionized themselves over the previous 15 years, Kieran and Timberlake realized that architecture needed the equivalent of an integrated circuit. They began to combine glass, drywall, pipe, and wood frames into finished units, each precision-engineered for cost, beauty, and sustainability. In the Loblolly house, the walls and floors are made of panels (some as tall as 21 feet) that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing, and ductwork already in place. And the main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and the galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in preassembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble.

The Green Urban Office (Metropolis)

With natural lighting and amenities for transportation, HOK’s downtown Toronto studios set the gold standard for office interiors. (link) (pdf of transit diagram)
It was Night of the Living Designers. When the elevator doors opened, they were drawn like zombies toward the light, possessed by their desire for operable windows. Or at least that’s how Gordon Stratford, director of design at the Toronto office of the global powerhouse HOK, remembers the first day in the firm’s new space. Wave after wave of the 190 architects, planners, interior de-signers, and urban designers who work there skirted past the pavilion-like front desk, crossed the studio’s narrow floor plate, and immediately began opening and closing the windows—a modicum of control that became an occasion for quiet glee.

Those operable windows epitomize the relationship between sustainability and community manifested in this office renovation. Along with each work area’s individual thermostat, the windows demanded a change in both space-sharing habits and design practice. “We needed to cooperate to make sure the space works,” explains Nadia Orawski, an HOK designer and the office’s unofficial sustainability expert. But they also led to a symbolic change—their panoramic view of Toronto became the metaphor for a big- picture view of the health of the planet. In the two years since HOK moved in, the windows have helped staffers recognize the importance of the firm’s own sustainability efforts as well as the environmental impact of their design work on the global and local communities. The results have been tangible: the new office has become a platform for education and community outreach.

Greener Education (Metropolis)

Parks and organizations worldwide are learning “public-space management” from the Central Park Conservancy. (link)

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux imagined Central Park as a model for all parks, but even they’d be impressed by this: the Central Park Conservancy, the not-for-profit organization that manages and maintains the park, has been quietly sharing its expertise on park management, maintenance, and development with more than 50 parks from all over the globe. Now the Conservancy is thinking of going pro, transforming its “park mentoring” program from a possible distraction to a potentially lucrative little sideline, positioned somewhere between landscape architecture and management consulting—like a graduate school for parks. “Central Park is our focus, but our mandate is always to be at the forefront of the parks movement and help other parks as much as we can,” says Doug Blonsky, Conservancy president and Central Park administrator. “We realized we might want to study this and see if there’s actually a business model here.”   

The Conservancy has been a paragon of public-private partnership since its founding in 1980, but the mentoring program evolved slowly. Until five years ago the organization dispensed advice ad hoc through informal phone calls, visits, and e-mails with other park officials. But as Central Park increasingly became a symbol of a revitalized New York—indeed of rejuvenated cities everywhere—more and more parks from farther afield have sought its expertise in “public-space management,” as Blonsky terms what he views as effectively a new profession. Today the Conservancy organizes workshops, shares its library of how-to materials, and evaluates other parks’ plans, often charging them a small fee for its services (on a sliding scale).

“Urban parks today talk about collaboration and partnerships,” says Tim Fulton of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, which has consulted Central Park extensively for advice. “The Central Park Conservancy has mastered that, and we’ve all learned from their mistakes.” It’s not something you can study at any university (yet), but in Central Park at least, school is in session.