Urbanisms

A feature in this month's Architectural Record puts alongside one another six short interviews with architecture critics writing from six cities across the U.S. — Following, excerpts from four of them.

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe:

Campbell views the hot topic of sustainability as perhaps finally putting an end to the debates about arcane design theory, and becoming a new version of what had been considered Regionalism. "Sustainable design is a great opportunity for architects to sell themselves as environmental experts," he says. While sprawl is not as much a concern in Boston — a well-developed historic city — as it is in faster-growing cities, Campbell says the biggest environmental concern for the city remains the prospect of rising water levels, which he sees few architects addressing. "I can’t believe people are still developing big buildings on the harbor near sea level," he muses. He also laments the view that high-rise buildings are the only answer to increasing urban density in the name of sustainability. "The density of Paris is just as high, if not higher, than cities that have tall buildings," Campbell says. "In Midtown Manhattan, where every block is a single building with a single door, it becomes oppressive."

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune:

Kamin surveys the landscape of contemporary American architecture and sees a lot of Modernist projects he considers "one-offs," buildings that visually register within a city but don’t always contribute to street life. Exceptions include David Chipperfield’s Des Moines Public Library, which Kamin sees as part of an overall strategy of enlivening that city’s downtown. "The city is a project that takes generations to realize," he says. "To think that architects alone have the silver bullet that will change a downtown’s fate is ridiculous." But Kamin says more architects need to stop getting caught up in style wars and the obsession with sustainable "gadgets" — to borrow the Chicago architect and urbanist Douglas Farr’s terminology — that have the tendency to marginalize the profession. "Sustainability and architecture are ultimately about how we are going to live," he says. "You can’t ignore the small picture, so, yes, buildings should be green, but the real architects are the planners, politicians, and people who write codes."

David Dillon, Dallas Morning News:

Echoing most critics, Dillon says affordable housing remains a challenge for architecture. "If you ever wanted a real laboratory for developing affordable housing and prototypes, New Orleans is it," he says. "But what I’ve seen mostly is just a lot of New Urbanism stuff that doesn’t seem to get to the real problems of accessibility and affordability." Dillon, in his teaching role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studies affordable housing in the U.S. "It’s not a style exercise; it’s a community-building, economic exercise," he says, explaining why high-design architects don’t pursue the arduous process of piecing together funding for such projects. "Dallas is 40,000 units short in terms of affordable housing, and the houses built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations don’t even begin to touch this need."

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times:

"People are starting to lead more local, circumscribed lives, because it takes too long to drive to the other side of town. Much of the appeal of L.A. has been having access to the whole area — Malibu, Santa Monica, downtown, Pasadena," he says. Traffic jams, more planning, and more regulation "may well change the local myth of architectural freedom." For the past 30 years, architects like Gehry and Thom Mayne have drawn inspiration from industrial construction and the commercial strip, redefining what is ugly and what is beautiful. "We’ve been evaluating architects in Los Angeles on the basis of expressiveness and virtuosity. I don’t know if that’s appropriate anymore." With the new generation of L.A. architects working on tighter sites where freestanding expressions are less possible, "we may need a new way of thinking about these designers and whether they’re succeeding. Their work may be less loud, less in-your-face."

Agro-urbanism?

As far as I can tell — not having looked into it in any great depth yet — these two essentially equivalent concepts for urban high-rise dwelling, embodying 'sustainability' to the point of incorporating small-plot agriculture for every residence, have been published about the same time as solutions in two quite unrelated design competitions. The project at left, named Agro-Housing, is a proposal by Knafo-Klimor of Israel for a city in China, winning entry in a contest sponsored by the International Iron and Steel Institute. For further info, see the article here (via ArchitectureWeek's 'Green Wednesday' headline aggregator, last week's edition). At right, Center for Urban Agriculture, proposal for a specific Seattle site by Mithun, this year's winner (in the 'visionary' category) of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council's Living Building Challenge. For further info, see this article from today's 'AIArchitect This Week.' Mithun goes so far, apparently, as to call its project an 'urban farm.' That sounds like a pretty big terminological stretch to me, particularly as no such radical attempt to merge city living with the habits of tending the earth has yet gotten off paper. Still, one wonders if these things will start getting built in some form — and if so, who might want to buy in and make a go of urban-agriculturist lifestyle.

Update: The current ArchitectureWeek feature article covers the IISI sustainable housing competition in greater breadth.

Made in Germany

The 2007 Solar Decathlon (see earlier) has been won by the trim entry from Technische Universität Darmstadt. In my inbox this morning was an AIA news bit reporting Darmstadt's win in the big one, the Architecture competition. Local kids University of Maryland took second in Architecture, and the other Euro entry, from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, won third. Darmstadt and Maryland retained their Architecture leads, in the end, to place first and second overall, with third place going to California's Santa Clara University. All three were among the entries scoring a full 100 points in the Energy Balance competition.

The exhibition continues through tomorrow, the 20th. Unfortunately, though the whole thing's just a few miles away from my brother & sister-in-law's in Fairfax (where I'm staying while I work on the house), I've had a terribly busy week and will not get down to the Mall after all. It looks like there's been no shortage of visitor interest, however. Check out the photos at the event site.

Change comes to Washington

The National Mall in DC again in 2007 turns green in October, with start of the third biannual Solar Decathlon tomorrow. Opening to the public won't be for another week & a half, but teams will be putting their entries together at the Mall site from tomorrow — or rather, from tonight, at midnight (about the time I'm posting here, in fact), as one team website informs readers.

The upcoming event was only very dimly present on my own radar, I acknowledge, until a couple of weeks ago, when I stopped by the architecture school at the University of Maryland to poke around a bit, as I was passing through the area. The fenced enclosure where their entry was awaiting some finish work was open, fairly irresistible, and I walked in & chatted with a team member about the event & the entry's competitive prospects. He seemed pretty up-beat about things.

He might've had reason to be, since in some respects there's no need for guesswork about what sort of competition they're up against: all twenty entries, published as detailed construction documents, are available for view (& download) on the Solar Decathlon site. But at the same time, there's a lot one can't know, surely — even about one's own team's entry — until all are built & performing (or not) under the common test conditions. Competitors include other US universities with notable technical & design programs — like MIT, entering for the first time — along with less prominent US programs and a few schools from outide the US (one Canadian, two European). The two earlier competitions' winner, University of Colorado at Boulder, is in the running again. (There seems to be some feeling that Colorado-Boulder's cheek-by-jowl relation with the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden, CO may give it a degree of unfair advantage. But who knows whether that's reasonable fear or not.) And there appears to be a great deal of sponsor interest & investment, from many angles US & international. On the face of it, the likelihood of an easy prediction about the competition outcome seems small to me.

I've only spent a little time on the Decathlon web site, & on a few of the teams' sites. There's a lot about the whole grand thing, though my interest is strongly piqued, that I won't get to look into even after the event's come & gone. I do hope to get down to the Mall, however, and actually see some of what's on display this go round.

Illustration illumination

The handful of people who check in on this blog from time to time may recall my April 17 post pointing out Diane Rehm's show with Richard Preston, about his book The Wild Trees. Glad to be able to report now that the illustrator for that book, Andrew Joslin, into whom WP's comment got me to do a little investigating online, found the post and has added there a comment that gives some insight about his own background and his approach to the drawings. My sincere thanks to Andrew for taking time to connect with us here.

LATER: Andrew's left a further comment and a link to the climbing gear sketch that caught Preston's eye and got him the illustration job. Do take a look at the comments there.

For starters

One of the bits from a recent email newsletter from Coastal Connection, a publn. for builders & remodelers I've been getting — this, headed "Making sense of green building":

Alex Wilson has been at the business of "green building" long before it was a hot topic. He's the founding editor since 1992 of Environmental Building News — a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, advertising-free monthly assessment of green-building practices — and president of BuildingGreen.com, an online portal for rational green building know-how. Builders and remodelers entering the "green space" will surely want to consult Wilson's Green Building Products: a compendium of some 1,600 products that qualify as green. But first, you should pick up his most recent book, Your Green Home: A Guide to Planning a Healthy, Environmentally Friendly New Home, as a primer for prioritizing the issues and steering customers in the right direction.

My take-home message from this book: Green is not about choosing pressed-granola flooring and whole-wheat cabinets. Material selection takes a back seat to the two most important steps to building a green home. First, build a smaller house, so you use fewer materials in the first place, and second, focus on making homes more energy efficient, so the continuous consumption of energy is limited. After that, reliance on alternative-energy supplies and resource-efficient building materials makes sense.

Someone might add (though at first glance it seems out of place, directed at architects & builders): first, consider seriously whether a new building's needed at all.

Living high

Climbers, Tolkien readers, and other persons with an interest in life on planet Earth, if they haven't already encountered Richard Preston's story of recent discoveries in the rarefied ecosystems of high California rainforest canopy, are bound to find Monday's Diane Rehm interview fascinating. I certainly did.