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.

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.

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.”

Dreaming In Code (Metropolis)

Jonathan Harris distills the Web’s infinite avalanche of thoughts, facts, and feelings into exquisitely framed portraits of humanity. (link)

One late-winter morning Jonathan Harris sat in front of a MacBook in his Brooklyn apartment and opened the Web site We Feel Fine. Candy-colored digital balls and dots bounced around a black background. He clicked on one, and it shattered into a spinning sentence of text that flew to the top of the screen: “I feel for you.” Then he clicked on another, and another—all statements beginning with “I feel,” harvested live from the Web’s millions of blogs by this artwork he cocreated:

I feel so lonely today.

I feel he is there watching over me and even more so when I am in the garden.

I feel like I’m in tenth grade all over again.

I feel your might; I only have relinquish’d one delight to live beneath your more habitual sway.

That last one is from William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” Janiele, a 23-year-old in Radford, Virginia, posted it on her MySpace blog “twenty-one minutes ago.” Unsurprised by the serendipitous beauty his Web site creates, Harris then clicked on “Montage,” and a grid of colored squares dissolved one by one into thumbnail images, the visual confetti of the blogosphere: American Idol contestants, the Eiffel Tower, prom pictures, a puppy. Clicking on one created an elegant little explosion of more candy-colored dots, as the image—a corgi frolicking in the grass, suddenly worthy of Tibor Kalman—expanded to fill the whole window. Clicking again launched the page the dog came from, with an intimacy so sudden it felt like magic: “Bron’s Blog: Knitting Without a Net.”

Then the wizard pulled back the curtain. “We realized there was all this amazing humanity hiding on the Web, but most people considered it to be a cold, inhuman space,” Harris explains, speaking for himself and his frequent collaborator, Sepandar Kamvar, whose day job is technical lead of personalization at Google. “So we asked, ‘How can we systematically quantify feelings using the Web?’” In a process Kamvar describes as “not quite rocket science,” they wrote a program that scrapes new blog posts, looking for the statement “I feel.” With the duplicates thrown out, it yielded 20,000 “feelings” a day. Harris punched up the raw feed of XML code in a source file—in other words, plain text. “Just in this form we could tell it was amazing material,” he says. “Which is when the next big layer comes in: how to visualize all this information.”

We Feel Fine—together with the handful of Harris’s other works—defines a profound new kind of information design: it whittles down the world’s 70 million Web sites and blogs into a framed image of humanity. And it does it live, continuously, and autonomously. Architects and designers have experimented with computational design, letting a computer run through a spectrum of possibilities within a given set of parameters. But Harris’s creations are different: rather than static buildings, magazine covers, or shopping bags, they are constantly changing artistic responses to a constantly changing world. By using the Web as both site and material, they offer a way of seeing rather than merely being a sight.

If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the largest number of people possible,” he says.

Living On the Network (Metropolis)

Objects should celebrate our connection to the digital world, not minimize it. (link)

The week in January when Apple announced the iPhone, I went from an ecstatic reverie of secular futurism to feeling pretty let down. The problem wasn’t what the iPhone didn’t do, the “features” it lacked. The thing was thrilling—a beautiful object, crystalline in its realization, revolutionary in its interface—and of course I wanted one. But I had mixed feelings about what it represents.

The iPhone epitomizes the larger movement in the shape of digital products today: industrial design is all about making containers for bandwidth, bringing form to the threshold between the physical world of our bodies and the digital world of the network. Yet in a single stroke of product and interface design, the iPhone nearly wiped away that threshold altogether. Its touch screen eliminated the need for buttons, its cellular connection eliminated the need to be anywhere in particular, and its form suggested that we’re nearly able to replace objects with flat slabs. But should we? The digital network has been socially transformative—and that’s a fact worth celebrating, not smoothing over be-neath a smudge-proof screen.

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

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.