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Planning Rwanda (Metropolis)

Thirteen years after the genocide, the tiny African nation begins imagining its future. (link)
Just before nine one morning in May, I arrived at the Alpha Palace Hotel, not far from the center of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. A team of American architects waited nervously outside, dressed in blue suits and holding battered travel tubes of drawings. In them was the conceptual master plan for the future of Kigali: a sweeping vision to turn today’s red-dirt ad-hoc city into a verdant capital with tree-lined boulevards, mixed-use neighborhoods, a new university, parks, and a network of wetlands to mitigate storm-water runoff. OZ Architecture, from Denver, along with EDAW, a landscape-architecture and urban-planning firm, had been quietly working on the scheme for three years. This morning, 13 years after Rwanda’s genocide, they would present it to an audience of local planning officials, foreign consultants, and politicians. I had come to watch, to see what American-style urban planning looked like in Rwanda, and what it could possibly do to help transform a place of poverty and struggle into one of prosperity and peace.

Swim Laps in Your Own Private Ocean — With an Ocean View (Wired)

Olympic-size is for plebs. Thanks to advanced hydrotechnology, swimmers can paddle in a private ocean — like this $3.5 million, 20-acre, half-mile-long, 66 million gallon leviathan recently certified by Guinness as the largest pool in the world. Located in Algarrobo, Chile, about 70 miles west of Santiago and just yards from the Pacific, the pool at the San Alfonso del Mar condo complex handles water treatment like a surgical strike. While most pools filter all the water several times a day, the San Alfonso's 150 in-wall sensors focus the cleanup only on the dirty bits. Fernando Fischmann, developer of this "pulse oxidation" system, is cagey about specifics, but he says it uses at least 10 times less chemicals per gallon than conventional setups, at a 50th of the cost. Also helping to keep the water clear are a nonstick plastic liner and the immense volume of the pool itself, which dilutes the concentration of any contaminants. Do Fischmann's claims hold water? According to Ralph Keller, an expert in industrial hygiene, the principles are sound — for the short term. "For the first few years," he says, "it may just be the size of the pool that's keeping it clean." In the meantime, Fischmann's company, Crystal Lagoons, has been tapped to install half a dozen more super pools for some big backyards in Argentina, Panama, and — of course — Dubai. (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.”

Rare Bird (The New Yorker)

Talk of the Town (link)

For all its eccentricities, bird-watching is a respectable hobby, practiced by psychiatrists, kings, and forty-six million Americans. But plane spotting—which also entails tramping around swamps to watch flying objects—somehow lacks the same cachet.

Phil Derner, Jr., the president of the Web site NYCAviation.com, estimates that there are fifty active plane spotters in the New York City area. At noon last Monday, nearly all of them were gathered, telephoto lenses in hand, in North Woodmere Park, which is situated at the head of Jamaica Bay and beneath the flight path to Runway 22 Left at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The occasion: the maiden arrival, from Frankfurt, of the double-decker Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in the world. (It was on a promotional and “route-proving” trip organized by Airbus and Lufthansa.) During its development, the A380 had been trouble for Airbus, with production delays resulting in cancelled orders and layoffs. But the Airbus is big and she is rare, and that is more than enough to bring out a crowd of plane geeks.

A tenth grader named Matt—he asked that his last name not be used, since he was skipping school—had travelled from Westchester with his father, a lawyer. “I think the A380 is a landmark in aviation,” Matt said, explaining why he had come. “My mom was really against the idea.”

“It’s his passion,” his father said. “We were struggling for a while, because he wants to be a pilot, and we want him to be an engineer. We have only one kid, so a pilot seems kind of, you know.” Matt recently started taking an online course in Danish, to prepare himself for a job with Scandinavian Airlines. “They have a really good fleet, a lot of long-range A330s and A340s,” he said, before excusing himself to watch a Singapore Airlines 747-400 on its final approach.

The spotters had been nervous for days. J.F.K. has four runways, some as long as fourteen thousand feet, which can be used in either direction. That means dozens of spotting sites, some miles apart, and it wouldn’t be possible to know in advance which runway the Airbus would use. “The thing that will suck is that if we are at N. Woodmere, and they decide to send him to 31L or 31R,” someone had written on the group’s message board.

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.

IDEO’s Urban Pre-Planning (Metropolis)

Can its “Smart Space” practice shake up the lumbering world of infrastructure, zoning, and public process? (link)

Eighteenth and Vine—Kansas City’s historic but down-and-out jazz district—had a vision problem. “I always heard people say, ‘The vision for 18th and Vine is this, the vision for 18th and Vine is that,’” says Daryl Williams, director of research and policy for minority entrepreneurship at the Kansas City−based Kauffman Foundation. But whenever he asked people in the community what the vision looked like, nobody could ever produce a picture. “It was just people talking,” he says. “But a vision is not something you talk about, it’s something you look at.”

The Kauffman Foundation, with $2 billion in assets, bills itself as “the foundation of entrepreneurship”; but 18th and Vine, right in its backyard, had for decades been struggling to reinvigorate its storied past as a center for both jazz and black-owned businesses. In the late 1990s the American Jazz Museum opened, but rather than revitalize the community it seemed to turn a living place into a museum. For nearly a decade the Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation (JDRC) had been struggling to attract commerce back to the neighborhood without much success. So over lunch with now former JDRC president David Whalen at Peach Tree, the Vine’s famous soul food restaurant, Williams offered to “bring some resources to bear” to help develop a vision for the neighborhood—essentially to create a marketing brochure to attract future development. “We want to see the neighborhood be successful,” he told Whalen, “not by dictating what it has to be but what it can be.” Eighteenth and Vine had already tried the if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach with the jazz museum. What Williams envisioned instead was a set of possibilities rooted in the history of the neighborhood: “A straw man—something to give the community a jumping-off point to really do something else.” He had an idea how to get it.

A few months earlier Williams had visited IDEO—the California-based design consultancy eternally famous for designing the mouse and the Palm Pilot—for help restructuring Kauffman’s internal organization. But he was also thinking about 18th and Vine. In 2000 IDEO had begun supplementing its industrial-design work with a growing interest in designing spaces, including hospitals, schools, and hotels. A couple of years ago that scale shifted again, to the point that the work of IDEO’s Smart Space practice, led by architect Fred Dust, now looks a lot like urban planning—but not in any conventional sense. Instead of doing massing studies or land-use plans, laying out infrastructure, writing zoning codes, or proposing blockbuster museums, IDEO’s Smart Space group articulates the spirit of a place but leaves its realization to the clients: developers, park conservancies, hospitality companies, and—Williams soon determined—the JDRC, with the Kauffman Foundation footing the bill.

Roshi Givechi, a frequent collaborator in the Smart Space practice, first came to Kansas City in April 2005. Soon after, she and her team, including IDEO designer Joe Graceffa, immersed themselves in “the Vine,” applying the multidisciplinary method they bring to nearly all their projects, whether bathroom cleaners or hotel rooms. They hosted “whine and dines” (focus-group dinners), walked the streets, ate in the restaurants, did historical research, took photographs, and interviewed dozens of people about the neighborhood, sometimes on videotape. Part anthropology (with IDEO’s trained anthropologists), part site exploration (with IDEO’s trained architects), part documentary filmmaking (with IDEO’s trained media artists), their approach is to seek the qualitative essence of the community from the perspective of the community.

The Active Edge (Metropolis)

Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park seems destined to become New York's third great urban landscape. (Metropolis, March 2006)

If you are looking for a sense of what's to come with Brooklyn Bridge Park--the great 85-acre park soon to take shape along 1.3 miles of the Brooklyn waterfront--then Teardrop Park is a good place to start. Nestled into only two acres between apartment buildings in Battery Park City, it has a small sloping lawn, a tiny marsh, and a pathway that winds up to the top of a stone wall, which in wintertime glistens with dripping ice. Completed in 2004, it's a romantic, adventurous place that abandons Modernist landscape architecture's single crisp layer of meaning in favor of something moodier. The landscape architect of both parks, Michael Van Valkenburgh, likes to think Teardrop has what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls "psychological immensity."

But Teardrop had a princely $17 million budget and a generally agreeable site. Brooklyn Bridge Park is landscape architecture under live fire, with a complicated site (already occupied by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a quartet of five-acre piers supported on 12,000 wood piles), a strict budget ($150 million for 85 acres), and a democratic imperative heightened by its size and inherent status as a symbol of the "New Brooklyn." Still, it is easy to imagine that when it's completed in 2012 it will be New York City's third great park, after Central Park and Prospect Park.

The Peace Maker (Metropolis Magazine)

As he works on the landscape at the de Young museum in San Francisco, observers wonder: can Walter Hood bridge the divide between public space and in-your-face architecture? (Metropolis)

Just before lunch on a bright day in April, Walter Hood straddles a low wall at Splash Pad Park--which he designed--and says, "I like public space messy." Not strewn-with-garbage messy, but messy in spirit. Messy, even, in the way that America is today. "It took me awhile to get around the nonpristine concept of public space," he says, surveying the scene. A woman lying on the grass mutters to herself while a pack of high school kids tosses a football, which sometimes careens dangerously close to Hood's head. Traffic on the I-580 freeway whizzes by high above, and palm fronds rustle in the wind. Wearing dark sunglasses, and inserting "man" and "ya know" in sentences alongside "intervention" and "engagement," Hood exudes both star power and moral rectitude, like a landscape architect version of Bono: "You can make spaces that allow people to understand where they are just by letting things be versus trying to control everything. That's an aesthetic that I'm trying to become more comfortable with."

Downsview Park (Metropolis)

The Prediction Issue: Downsview Park
Toronto reinvents the park as a flexible landscape for a changing community.

Ask Bruce Mau if his design for Toronto's Downsview Park is going to be beautiful, and he sighs. "Actually, we began somewhere different on that issue," he says. Specifically Mau's studio began with a humbling insight: the park of the future is a moving target. Rather than shaping a fixed program into a formal landscape, Downsview imagines a flexible program and an evolving landscape. Not that there's no site plan--there is, and the first bulldozers are expected to begin work on the 300-acre public park this summer--but Downsview Park's backbone is unapologetically ideological. Design decisions follow conceptual rather than formal guidelines, effectively jumping the track of the landscape architecture's history.

As Mau explains, "In order to produce a place or a cultural entity in the past, it was about fixing it and making it solid and defining it for all time. Our project is really the opposite: it's about designing it to be changed, designing it to be evolving, but to make the design so robust that it sustains itself through that evolution--like any other living thing."