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Folded Landscapes

Today is the opening of the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. The major news agencies are all carrying the story and are depicting the whole emotional and nationalist side of this event. What interests me here is the architecture. The memorial consists of a field of trees with “light benches” folding out of the ground. These folded planes are each dedicated to a person who died in the pentagon and the plane that crashed there.

The imagery here strikes a chord with me. This method of landscape design, stitching lines in the ground and then folding planes, is something that I feel quite versed in. This is a design strategy that I employed in two different projects in design school. On that note, I have to say that from the photos I’ve seen I think this jobs has been well thought out and implemented. This method of landscape structuring has become more common since its use in the Vietnam memorial by Maya Lin, but in this project it has been brought down in scope from one large gesture to many small personal gestures. Though I wish there was no reason for it to exist, I look forward to visiting this memorial some day soon.

3 years

Its been over three years since I moved to Northern Virginia and said good bye to my friends and Alma Mater in New Orleans. How was I to know that 3 months later the world would end and everything New Orleans would be measured in relevance to Katrina. Now, as we welcome in year 3 PK, New Orleans is facing the possibility of another major disaster. It is my hope of hopes that Gustav does not undo all the rebuilding and planning that have happened in the past three years.

If the worst happens and the city is deluged again, I worry that the country will not be as generous as last time; I can already hear them crying on the senate floor for abandonment and rebuilding elsewhere. I can see the talking heads blaming New Orleans for not “learning its lesson,” as if the city had not been flooded numerous times in its past. If the money does come again, I can just imagine the repressive building codes to and flood plane restrictions, all methods of preventing future loss of property. Yet the city would become one big concrete block raised 40 feet in the air.

How can we have rebuilt an entire continent over 50 years ago and then proceed to fly to the moon, but we cannot rebuild or even protect one city from the tempests of fate? It is simple, we’ve gotten to arrogant and stopped innovating. Instead of looking at how to build flood proof buildings and levees to hold back the water, we should be looking at buildings that will adapt to flooding and remember that the yearly flooding of the Mississippi is what raised New Orleans above sea level. Imagine, a city that truly embraces the entity of being Creole; it could be a hybrid of Venice, Amsterdam, and its current state. Improved dikes would protect the most historic neighborhoods, and the newer/rebuilt lower lying areas could be designed to raise and fall with the tide.

An open letter to the Municipal Government of New Orleans

As a former resident of New Orleans, Tulane School of Architecture alumni, a preservationist, and as a future architect I implore you to stop the destruction of modernist buildings in New Orleans.

Ever since the Vieux Carré Commission stood up to Robert Moses and the original planned route for I-10, there has been an understanding in New Orleans that its buildings are the presents physical link with the city’s history, and that history and tourists desire to explore it and embrace it has been the economic engine that has allowed rebuilding to be a possibility. If there has been one place that preservation has failed in New Orleans, it is in regards to Modernist architecture. The city was done a historical and architectural disservice with the destruction of the Rivergate, a building that was unique in New Orleans’s architectural landscape.

We now stand on a precipice, the bulk of the schools scheduled to be closed and demolished are some of the few examples of southern regional Modernism in New Orleans. With their destruction we stand to lose a huge part of our architectural and cultural history. In addition, by demolishing the schools we are only contributing more waste to the environment, and ever since Katrina New Orleans has contributed more than its fair share of construction and demolition waste. Instead these buildings should be preserved, even if their former purpose is lost. Let them be redeveloped into apartments and condos, civic centers and community centers, or supermarkets and office parks; all of which have been done with former warehouse and mill buildings within the city, why not schools?

It has been 5 years since I last set foot in my city, and I know the economic and cultural landscape have changed since I’ve left. But I cannot imagine driving down Claiborne and not passing Eleanor McMain High School nor will Carollton-Riverbend ever be the same without the voices of school children echoing from the Audubon Charter School (formerly Lusher Upper School). I know that I was not born and raised in New Orleans, but it is more my home than anywhere else I have lived. I may just be another Yankee who lost his heart to New Orleans, but I found my voice and my soul there. I hope that when my life brings me back to the only city I call mine, it will be to a place with a full sense of its past and present and a hope for its future.

Critial Olympianism

SCOTT BURNHAM has a realy good post about the Beijing Stadium. He contends that the now ubiquitous “Bird’s Nest” shows a striking similarities to the improvised safety screening that Chinese migrant workers erect in buildings. This woven mesh of slates IS eerily similar to the form of the outer skin on Herzog & de Meuron’s Stadium.

[Image via SCOTT BURNHAM.]

Personally I find this to be a wonderful thing, with just one caveat. This is a great example of critical regionalism. An architect is taking a native form and filtering contemporary design through it. The mesh could easily have been some less derivative form, but through the interpretation of the wooden slats it becomes essentially Chinese. The big warning I have here is that this is critical regionalism because the artistic direction for the Stadium comes from someone who is OF this culture, unlike the architects who are outsiders.

Articles of Interest

Here are some links to articles that have peaked my interest in the last few days:

‘Can of ham’ to rival Foster’s Gherkin – Building What is it with Londoners and buildings that look like food? I am waiting for the Yorkshire pudding building, or the spotted dick building.
FreshWater House by Chenchow Little Architects | CoolBoom This is a nice little piece of critical regionalism. The shutter walls are really genius way of bringing operable shutters to a contemporary design style. In addition the bundle of sticks element of the architecture thoroughly responds to the beach setting.
19th century Western town layout: myth vs reality | Cyburbia – urban planning community Cyburbia has an interesting discussion on the depiction of frontier/western towns in cinema and in real life. I find the discussion of early planning and zoning and false fronts very interesting.
AIA Deconstructs Green-Building Standards| News | Architectural Record Architectural Record has an article about the AIA’s analysis of three different green building standards: LEED 2.2, Green Globes, and SBTool 07.

Green Buildings

Newsweek has an interview with William McDonough, Q&A: The Future of Green Buildings | Newsweek Future Of Energy | Newsweek.com, which focuses on his ideas about the green building movement and the direction architecture is taking. For those versed in Green Architecture, there really is nothing new in this article, but for the general public this can serve as a nice introduction to some of the standard green concepts such as “cradle to cradle design”, densification, green roofs and renewable energy.

Its the global economic paradigm, stupid!

[Image via TRiver.]

As anyone who has been even remotely cognizant of the news can tell you, the US is facing some bad times. We are having credit failures, banking collapses, increased food costs, increased energy costs, a craptacular housing market, and a general retail slump. The last one is worrisome to me, the incessant purchasing of the American middle class has been the economic engine keeping this boat afloat and paddling upstream. With the recent closing of national chains such as Steve and Barry and the downsizing of Starbucks I have to wonder how this is affecting the independent merchant, and then I stop and realize that except for the high-end boutiques and artists and artisans there really are no more mom and pop shops in this country. But that chilling thought aside, the area most visibly harmed in this country has been the housing market. People have lost their houses and many who haven’t are trapped in their homes until the market rises again. This directly affects the architectural community in this country; the majority of architectural services are performed in the residential sector, either as new construction or renovation. With people being upside down in their mortgages, there is little available capital for renovation and additions, and less demand for new homes. Less new homes means less institutional (schools and government) construction and in turn less incentives for commercial construction. The great hope has been that while the credit market is global, the housing market slump would stay local, or at least national. But this article in the Scotsman, Architect firm axes workers – Scotsman.com Business, helps to drive home the point that this economic crisis is no longer a local event.

Now as a community, we architects have two choices, we can either shrug and play ostrich until we too have to join the breadlines or we can try to design a solution. I think that if we can help change the design discourse from luxury and excess to efficiency and thrift we will see a capital return on our efforts. But I have to stress that cutting budgets are not enough. There is no reason why architects are not developers in the US, we are skilled in design and planning in ways that developers aren’t and we can see beyond the bottom line to the total life and health of a project. In addition, I think we need to start thinking locally again and starting small. We as designers should lobby our local governments to construct well designed bus shelters and other utilitarian spaces, and if the mass transit system doesn’t exist we should push for its development.

Bang Zoom, To the Moon Greg Lynn

[Image via Life Without Buildings via io9.]

In his blog Life Without Buildings, my fellow Tulane Alum, Jimmy Stamp, discusses the latest proposed moon habitat from NASA. Like most of the other articles I’ve seen he discusses the igloo-like shape and inflatable (gas-itechture) structure, yet this discourse is really lacking.

What we are seeing here is not just another exploratory vehicle that will double as a place for astronauts to sleep. Consider Voyager for a second Ann Druyan recorded all sorts of sounds emblematic of the human race, to act as a time capsule, a display of who we are; this is the first piece of human architecture to be built on another celestial body, and I have to ask, where’s the outrage? Of all the structures in all of human history, this is what we build, an inflatable breast? It looks like something Greg Lynn would create, but instead it was designed by engineers? In addition, since when do we allow engineers to create the first lunar human dwelling? Where is the discussion of the space it makes, the space within and the views out? Are there views out? How does it interact with its environment? All of these questions are not a part of the discourse, but they should be. If this was going to be built on earth, in Antartica or below the ocean, these questions would be asked, and maybe those questions are coming. But the discourse should go beyond the poetics of space in space, how is this station powered? Are they using solar arrays, or can they use solar glazing and create views and power at the same time? Is this going to receive oxygen from earth in canisters or farm it through phytoplankton and algae? I guess I’m just an all or nothing kinda guy, don’t tempt me with these images and not give me a full photo tour and write up of the entire moon base.

Better Red than … an intern-architect?

The Washington Post ran an article by Philip Kennicott in this Sunday’s Style & Arts section about the massive building boom and its affect on the culture of architecture in china. The article goes into depth about how the western concept of permanency and a national architectural identity is in direct contrast to the Chinese (and very eastern) concept of impermanence and intellectual assimilation. This article paints a very interesting picture of how the “Star-chitect” designed buildings fit into the context of the awakening Beijing and compares them to the temporary workers housing.

What intrigued me about this article is how it describes architectural education and the path of current and recent architecture students. The author describes that many students and recent graduates have portfolio’s filled with built projects, whereas here it may be years before a young architect (such as myself) can see any of their work built. This is all too true of an observation, and just like our falling math and language test scores this is an indication of our inability to keep up with world markets. It is common here to reserve “design” work for those who are already licensed and who have a thorough understanding of the components of a building, in doing so, we end up with stale stagnant fabric architecture. The designers here are building buildings which were ideologically relevant 20 years ago; yet those in the office with on average the best understanding of the current design theories are kept drafting and picking up red lines until they pass their exams and leave such childish things as independent thought behind or they leave the profession for something more stimulating.

One of the things that struck the biggest chord with me in this article was the last paragraph. Philip Kennicott predicts this of outcome for most of the hordes of newly educated Chinese architects:

They will emerge from architecture schools and go straight into the state-affiliated design institutes that do the heavy lifting of architecture. They will work for years in a system that resembles medical internship in this country — small pay for huge amounts of work, with the credit taken by their superiors. They will design factories and apartment complexes and shopping centers, with little more creative input than one has pressing the button on a photocopying machine. They will further a profound transformation of their country, with virtually no influence on its direction.

At this I am forced to ask, how does this differ from my experience, and the experience of many other young minds here in the US? We work long hours (hardly any intern architects I know are paid hourly like the AIA encourages, instead we are all salaried), our salaries do not keep up with other professional careers of similar educational requirements and social status, and we have little to no input (and many will never have any input) in the architectural and design dialogue going on in our own country. It is only the exceptional few (by virtue of intelligence, place of education, connections and birth) who get to play a part of this great American architectural dialogue.

And really, how American is American Architecture? Kenicott argues that Chinese Architecture is a nihilistic non-architecture, an assimilation of world thought reproduced through the designs of masters and the hands of untrained workers in a nature of semi permanence and constant change. It is my opinion that the new American Architecture is one and the same. Look at an issue of Architecture Record, the magazine of the AIA, how many projects are built outside of the US and how many by foreign architects? These projects, when they are built, the workforce is composed of untrained itinerant labor, who not only cannot rivet straight, but also cannot install rudimentary wall flashing and end damns. And as for impermanence, look at most of the non-Environmentally friendly buildings built in the last 20 years in our country and you will see structures designed to deteriorate and be replaced within 10-15 years. For over 50 years of the last century, the world was preoccupied with the divide between communism and capitalism. Somehow in the last 20 years US and THEM have essentially become the same.

The Metro, The Metro, The Metro’s on Fire!

So this past week there were a number of fires and closings of stations within the DC Metro system. While the fires and the maintenance issues that caused them (and many more during the previous years) are one issue, the greater issue at hand is that these incidents completely incapacitated the Red and Orange lines. On a system with three major corridors downtown serviced by 5 lines, the loss of two (one of which runs alone on its corridor) is tantamount to a 50% loss of service. This is unacceptable in the 21st century, and especially in the Nation’s Capitol, where a 30 mile commute can take 2 hours by car.

On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an article identifying the double track system as the achilles heel in the Washington Metro. I have to agree with them. One of the greatest strengths of the NYC subway is that it can divert around stations and segments of tracks which are under repair or out of service. With the current system if a single track is out of service all trains must share a single track to bypass the problem. If both tracks are incapacitated by jumper or a fire than the whole system shuts down.

The problem with this article is that it gives no suggestions on how to improve the system besides creating a dedicated source of funding. In addition, while I am a proponent of increasing the capacity and coverage of the Metro system I worry that continued expansion without a remedy of the double track system will just lead to a rail analogous of the beltway and poor road planning in the area. It would be my suggestion that in addition to building the Dulles extension and a ring line, extra tracks should be added to all of the current lines. In an effort not to disturb stations, the two additional lines should function as bypass lanes for future express trains – they could be tunneled below the existing stations. While this seems outlandish, they are already talking about tunneling to put a line in Georgetown.