Architecture Addiction. Getting you where you need to be.
I just read this article by Rebecca Selove on NaturalHomeMagazine.com called “How Our Sustainable Tennessee Farmhouse Began.”
My husband John and I both grew up on farms, and for many years we’d planned to retire to a country home with room for vegetables and fruit trees. A few years before we expected to do that, my husband’s son Eric announced he wanted to leave his career as a corporate accountant so that he and his wife Audrey could develop a commercial organic vegetable farm. My husband said “Would you like a partner?” and that was the beginning of our search for a farm where we could all live.
In 18 months we located what we have decided is the perfect spot. Eric’s soil test results were encouraging, and beautiful creeks border the property on two sides along with a spring he could use for irrigation. There was a house which is now home to Eric, Audrey, and their two young boys, and enough road frontage that we would be allowed to construct a second home on the property. This past spring Eric obtained organic certification and officially launched Foggy Hollow Farm (read Eric’s blog) at Nashville-area farmers’ markets and restaurants.
From the start John and I planned to use LEED guidelines for Platinum certification, even before knowing all the details. We looked at library books on green architecture and perused the articles and ads in Natural Home. We found an architect on the Internet by using search terms like “green” and “sustainable” which led us to Mark West, who gives lectures in Middle Tennessee about LEED certification. We gave him our wish list—solar panels, geothermal heating and air conditioning, passive solar heating and ventilation, and rainwater harvesting capability. We’d hoped for composting toilets, gray-water recycling and bricks made from soil excavated for the house, but these dropped off our list as we learned about local building restrictions and the fact that no one in the area had experience making earth bricks.
We were startled when we saw Mark’s drawings for a modern-looking home with a butterfly roof, but accepted his assertion that it was the best way to integrate the details we considered essential for a sustainable farmhouse. It is on the south side of a hill for optimal solar energy generation, has two mudrooms, a root cellar and a modest footprint (1764 square feet).
We experienced angst in cutting a road up to our home site, and digging up what was a wildflower-filled meadow last summer. We’ll return native plants to the landscape, along with green beans for market. We take comfort in thinking about the solar energy we will put into the grid, and the rainwater we’ll use to irrigate a field once we figure out what kind of container can store it. We are thinking about what goes into this house from the “green concrete” in the foundation to the recycled steel in the roof. We hope we are balancing what we are taking with what we are leaving.
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I just read this article in the July/August 2009 issue of Natural Home Magazine by Judy Arginteanu and I wanted to share it with you.
The Sikora family works to restore and green the Willey House, a 1934 Minneapolis home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Built in 1934 for Malcolm and Nancy WIlley, this Minneapolis home was restored in 2007 using cypress, plaster and regional brick.
Restoring an architectural treasure is a formidable task, and Steve Sikora and Lynette Erickson-Sikora knew the challenges they would face when they bought Frank Lloyd Wright’s dilapidated 1934 Malcolm Willey House in Minneapolis in 2002. The task of restoring the famed architect’s first small home was made all the more daunting because the iconic house had been unoccupied for seven years, victim to Minnesota weather and bands of partying teenagers. Previous remodels had left scars, including a kitchen filled with pumpkin-colored plastic laminate and coppertone appliances.
Determined to bring the Willey house back to its former glory, Steve and Lynette spent nearly six years painstakingly rebuilding this first small, affordable Wright home, a prototype for his later Usonian houses. In the process, they came to deeply understand Wright’s genius, including his use of natural, indigenous materials and the coalescing of design, function and materials into a seamless whole.
Wright’s alchemy makes the 1,350-square-foot home feel both secure and spacious. A compressed entryway, one of his signature devices, leads into a large, open living space with kite windows and skylights. The kitchen—small but functional—communicates with the living space via a glass wall and a Dutch door that can be shut for privacy. A wall of French doors—a pioneering feature at the time—opens onto a brick terrace and into the yard. Open in summer, it completely erases any indoor-outdoor distinction; even when shut, its expanse is enough to soothe Minnesota cabin fever. Southern exposure brings passive solar heat in winter; a shed roof shelters the space when the sun is high in summer. The shade provided by four mature burr oaks also cools the house.
Whatever it takes
Nancy Willey, who was the wife of University of Minnesota dean Malcolm Willey, built the house for $10,000 in the depths of the Great Depression. Wright took the tiny commission—much less than anything he’d done before—largely because he had no other work. The house became pivotal in his career, moving him toward his crusade for small, well-designed houses for real people. “The more research we did and the more people we spoke to, we came to realize the importance of this house,” Steve says.
Lynette’s son, Stafford Norris III, supervised the restoration with help from his brother, Joshua. Hewing faithfully to Wright’s design, the family searched out authentic matches for materials they had to replace. Steve returned to the local brickyard in Menomonie, Wisconsin, to find exact matches for the originals made there. He spent more than a year working with Lynda Evans of Church Hill, Tennessee, brick-matching and historical restoration specialists StoneArt to replicate shale bricks he couldn’t find.
Wright constructed the home using red tidewater cypress for its beautiful grain. Although the wood deviated from Wright’s localist ideal because it’s not native to Minnesota, its durability was a boon, sustaining the house through its years of abandonment. “If it hadn’t been built of cypress, it wouldn’t be standing now,” Steve says. To replace wood damaged beyond repair, Stafford and Steve sourced cypress from salvagers who reclaim sunken logs in swamps and rivers, or salvage wood from beams, wine vats and water tanks.
“The thing about historical restoration is that you agonize over every little thing that must be replaced,” Steve says. “The original architectural ‘fabric’ is always retained unless there’s an incredibly compelling reason to replace it. Even the salvageable portions of rotted wood were repurposed.”
Integrity and sustainability
During the restoration, Steve and Lynette constantly weighed three issues: design integrity, sustainability and the house “as built”—because even the original builders sometimes deviated from Wright’s plans.
In some cases, practicality ruled. They replaced all the mechanicals with modern, high-efficiency heating and electrical systems. They replaced the worn-out rock wool insulation in the roof with expandable spray foam, which forms an airtight seal against the rafters. They installed a high-efficiency Unico high-velocity air conditioning system, even though the house is designed with myriad channels of cross ventilation and stays very comfortable in summer. “The realities of modern city life meant that we could not leave the house unattended with only screens latched,” Steve says. “The air conditioning system compensates for the lack of natural ventilation and thermal balance when the house is closed up for extended periods.”
In a few cases, the family had the chance to right old wrongs. “If we ran into a problem, instead of a Band-Aid repair for the fifth time, we would find the root cause and correct it,” Steve says.
The threshold between the living space and the terrace, long a source of disagreement between Nancy Willey and Wright, is a case in point. The architect, for aesthetic purity, designed a flat threshold to blur the lines between indoor and outdoor. Willey wrote to Wright: “The lack of a threshold will create … a triumphal archway to mosquitoes, flies, ants and all the insect comedy.” In the end, she took matters into her own hands and made do with a functional but aesthetically jarring aluminum threshold to ward off the march of elements and bugs. “And honestly, I would have to defend her decision,” Steve says.
Steve and Lynette rebuilt a raised threshold with the meticulously matched bricks from StoneArt, giving them the best of both worlds: Wright’s “indoor-outdoor” continuum and a seal against the great outdoors. “The house is like an open park pavilion on a hot summer day,” Steve says. “The scholar Grant Hildebrand identified two aspects inherent in Wright’s architecture that are plain to see in the Willey House: prospect, the ability to see; and refuge, the security of not being seen.”
Lynette loves the indoor-outdoor connection Wright created and the restoration maintained. “It’s like the sense of shelter you’d have in a cave or tree fortress,” she says. “Since childhood, I’ve had the deep desire to live in the forest, under or in a large mature tree. There’s a sense of safety, comfort and nature here.”
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In his article, “Five Ways to Change the World,” Jonathan Massey suggests that building a house is a good way to change the world.
Houses can be pivots of social transformation. They provide the context for many consumption decisions; they shape the patterns of daily life and intimate relationships. Buckminster Fuller recognized the centrality of the house to social change when, in 1928, he set out to transform how we produce and consume housing, with the goal of improving family life. Inspired by Henry Ford’s Model T, which made automobiles affordable through assembly-line production, Fuller designed a lightweight, super-efficient aluminum dwelling intended for mass production in single- and multi-family versions. A standardized hexagonal floor plan would have provided occupants of the Dymaxion House with a suite of well-lit, well-ventilated rooms furnished with modern kitchen, bathroom and media equipment. The structure was designed to hang from a central mast by cables akin to nautical rigging, allowing one or more floors to be stacked up and suspended above the ground. Dymaxion housing was to transform human society by systematically reducing the waste of resources from energy and materials to labor and time.
Unlike the automobiles that inspired them, Fuller’s house never went into production. If it had, and had it worked as Fuller planned, the Dymaxion would have liberated families from dependence on electrical and gas networks, water supplies, sewer systems and roads as well as the social and financial systems — above all mortgages — that bond us to what Fuller considered a form of serfdom. Airlifted by dirigible from factory to building site, its mast anchored in a crater excavated by a bomb, his “autonomous dwelling unit” would have been installed wherever its owner found the best opportunities for work and leisure. In Fuller’s vision, these mobile dwellings would have created a self-regulating labor market as workers were freed to follow jobs. The state would have dissolved into a self-optimizing industrial economy in which consumers dealt directly with transnational corporations. Rather than maintaining large houses and working to meet mortgage payments, families would have been free to dedicate themselves to creative pursuits and domestic pleasures. [3]
Much as I admire the ambition of Fuller’s utopian propositions, I’ve come to realize that it takes a lot of grit to live even a little bit differently from others. Commissions for individual houses have perennially afforded architects and clients opportunities to experiment with new modes of living. In Women and the Making of the Modern House, Alice T. Friedman examines instances in which architects and female clients produced unusual houses that shifted the rhythms and rules of daily life. My favorite among her case studies is the house in Utrecht, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 for the widow Truus Schröder, who was seeking a flexible, egalitarian environment for herself and her children. The intersecting floor plates, beams, walls and windows of this modernist landmark are best known as compelling applications of De Stijl principles to architectural design. More importantly, though, the house’s multipurpose furniture and sliding wall panels enabled family members to define the degrees of intimacy or withdrawal they wanted. By granting occupants the freedom to reshape the house through moment-by-moment choices about how to live separately and together, the Schröder House demonstrated the capacity of architecture to open up alternative possibilities for everyday home life. [4]
The equally innovative King’s Road House in West Hollywood, California, also shows how architecture can foster new modes of living. Vienna-born architect R. M. Schindler designed this double house to accommodate himself and his wife Sophia as well as another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace, and two newborns. Four large rooms, built of concrete and redwood, have sliding walls that open onto partially enclosed patios and gardens. A single kitchen, garage and guest suite adjoin these rooms. Envisioned as studios for living and creative work for the four adults in this cooperative household, they provided each person with a discrete space that could be opened to or separated from the others. Narrow glass strips between concrete wall-slabs ensured that even with all the partitions closed, no one was completely sealed off from the household, and the shared kitchen encouraged collaboration in the rituals of daily life. Built in 1921, the house reflected traditional gender roles: the women’s studios adjoined the kitchen because, as Schindler noted, “the wives take alternate weekly responsibility for dinner menus.” Nonetheless, the King’s Road House established an unconventional model of domesticity at a scale somewhere between that of the nuclear family and the community. [6]
Should you ever be fortunate enough to build your own house, keep in mind how domestic architecture orders daily life and try changing the game.
Other suggestions include Vote, Shop, Raise a Barn, and Throw a Party.
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I just read this article by Larry Wilson called “Architect speaks out against modernism.”
Most of us choose early on in adult life to pull at least some of our punches.
We’d rather not offend. Or we just don’t want to get into it with others. At its best, this human trait is based in modesty. At its worst, it’s indulgent of nonsense and needless mediocrity.
Urban philosopher Leon Krier would seem to have never pulled a punch in his life. Best known to Americans as “Prince Charles’ architect,” Krier doesn’t mince words about what he sees as the pitfalls of pledging allegiance to the more brutalist aspects of Modernism.
No one who champions, say, Spanish Colonial Revival for houses or civic centers would have the gall to believe that the style is the best for everyone everywhere.
Modernism’s danger, Krier says, “is that it thinks it should replace everything else.”
It’s not just Stalinist apartment blocks, though, that get Krier’s goat.
After he gave a talk Monday night at the Pasadena Center, Krier was among a group walking along the north side of Green Street.
I nodded toward the new convention buildings that now surround the Civic Auditorium, replacing those from the ’70s that were, in Charles’ own favorite term for bad proposals for London, a carbuncle upon the town. Many have praised them for at least attempting to honor the classic Bennett & Haskell building in their midst, and I asked Krier what he thought.
He merely shuddered, and turned away. “An abomination,” someone else said.
“Just like the ones they replaced, they’ll be gone in 30 years.”
Krier is clearly no mere reactionary. He thinks and writes deeply about the loss of connection with the human scale in today’s cities. You can argue with his attitude toward all skyscrapers - I mean, I’ll take Manhattan, for instance, and he hates it. But not simply for its style - he says that unlike other buildings, massive towers have to be “rewrapped” every few decades, “and to pay for that, they have to go higher.” Because they take so much energy to maintain - think of the elevators alone - he cites starchitects’ edifice complexes’ “profoundly criminal nature.”
It’s entirely refreshing to encounter such an original mind. More of his thoughts from his Pasadena speech: “If we don’t revise our architecture, we’ll be revised by it.” “When I started to work for the Prince of Wales, it wasn’t the way to win hearts and minds in the architectural community.” “Most avant-garde architects not only live in traditional buildings themselves - they go on vacation in traditional buildings, they send their children to school in traditional buildings. It’s good enough for them, but not for the masses.” “People don’t change size because they are in a large or small city - that’s a physiological fact.” “We should build intelligently with natural materials in the places we have found them.”
It’s the suburb/’scraper model that destroys community, Krier says. We are both too vertical and too horizontal. He envisions a pedestrian city, five floors max, 10-minute walks to everything, no soul-less zoning. If Krier is crazy, it’s like a fox.
Public Editor Larry Wilson’s blog is www.insidesocal.com/publiceye.
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I juts read this article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple called “The Architect as Totalitarian.” Before you ask, yes, it’s about Le Corbusier.
I just want to say Thank You to Theodore for bolstering my already strong opinion about Corbu, namely, you’ve got to be mentally ill to think that his stuff is any good, and by “good,” I mean good for humanity, not for the evolution of ridiculous architecture ideologigies.
Great Quote #1:
When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.
Great Quote #2:
The most sincere, because unconscious, tribute to Le Corbusier comes from the scrawlers of graffiti. If you approach the results of their activities epidemiologically, so to speak, you will soon notice that, where good architecture is within reach of Corbusian architecture, they tend to deface only the Corbusian surfaces and buildings. As if by instinct, these uneducated slum denizens have accurately apprehended what so many architects have expended a huge intellectual effort to avoid apprehending: that Le Corbusier was the enemy of mankind.
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I just read Roman horror day at Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi by Ellis Woodman.
Maxxi, Rome’s National Museum of 21st Century Arts, displays a cynical disregard for its purpose, that marks a conceit too far for Zaha Hadid
This is the fourth time that I have reviewed a project by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in these pages, a task that I have always approached with a sense of awe for the practice’s quite extraordinary formal facility, tempered by sometimes very considerable misgivings about the plausibility of the completed work. When it has come to the crunch, I have always erred on the side of optimism but I hardly need to say that a less sympathetic observer might find much to object to in the practice’s built output.
As an architecture undergrad at the University of Idaho, I was assigned to do a project on Zaha Hadid. I recoiled, because I did not, and do not, like her work. I cut up a bunch of paint chips, through them on to a piece of card stock, and sealed it. Ta da. A big mess of lines and shapes that has nothing to do with anything.
Her latest monstrosity is Maxxi, a very expensive and very empty museum in a sleepy town outside of Rome.
Keep Reading. Feel the cynisism.
Also check out the Pope’s involvement with this monstrosity.
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My friend Russ is running in this year’s Santa Speedo Run – for the fifth year in a row!
He’s raising money to support Crossroads for Kids.
Crossroads for Kids is dedicated to creating a safe and caring community where young people from at-risk environments discover a sense of belonging and a passion for life. With our summer camp programs as the starting point, we provide life-changing experiences and year-round support that builds trust and healthy relationships kids can count on throughout their childhood, teenage years and beyond. Our intentional programs and community partnerships open doors to new resources and opportunities that inspire and empower young people to fulfill their unique potential.
Learn more about seeing people running half-naked and support Russ!
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I got an email from my alma mater the other day. A student there is going on a grad school tour and wants to meet up with some alumni who have made it into the top architecture schools.
I am, by nature, a very helpful person. I immediately wrote to him, offering to show him around the GSD and introduce him to people.
As soon as I hit Send, I thought, Dear God, what will I tell him? (And: should I scare him off before it is too late?)
Will I be like our Peer Advisor during Orientation last Fall who told us that the stair wells were really good places to go cry after a review?
Will I be like my friend who acted as a Peer Advisor to this year’s incoming students, who heard herself telling them, “Be really careful when you go home at 4 AM: there have been a lot of robberies lately.”
Will I show him around the trays, overgrown with models and former models, a big PR-friendly smile on my face, saying “And over here on our left is where your soul will die…”
Will I warn him? Will I say that, you don’t know it yet, but you will probably lose all your non-architecture friends because you will no longer have time for them? That you can easily spend $100 in one week on sandwiches from Darwin’s because you never have time to cook? That you will discover that the real reason why architects wear all black is because we’re too sleep deprived to match colors properly?
Or will I be like I was early in the fall semester, back when I was still naive and full of love for the GSD, when I regalled prospective students with tales of our fierce camaraderie? The same camaraderie that, a year later, is the only item on the pro side of my list of pros and cons for the place.
The email from my alma mater has caused, first, a lot of introspection on how I came to Harvard, and second, a bit of depression about the enormous debt (both financially and emotionally) I have accrued here.
Who was I? Who was I when I believed with all my heart and soul that I was going to “change the world” with my architecture? When I proclaimed to everyone who would listen that my ideas for regenerative design would eliminate people’s utility bills? And make people happy?
Whoever that person was, I’m sorry.
What I discovered, slowly, was that we were being trained for the corporate side of architecture, the 80-hour-weeks of staring at computers, going blind drawing redundancy into construction docs to ward off the potential lawsuits, spending precious months making pretty pictures to please corporate clients.
My William McDonough dreams and my Nader Khalili fantasies have no place here. And the memory of last semester’s critic who laughed when we confided in her that in school we didn’t focus our time on the things that drew us to architecture, who replied, “You will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before you get to do what you want to do,” that is the scene that I wish someone had painted for me way back last year when I was still young and hopeful. Before Harvard had beaten the joy out of me.
To everyone I wish to offer the message from an architecture friend of mine in Pasadena: if all you want to do is single family homes, forget the years and expense of a master’s degree. Forget the years and expense of the licensure nightmare. Travel and discover what moves you, like Todao Ando did. Read copious amounts of architecture books. Practice drawing plans and sections of the structures that make you catch your breath.
Just design. Design without bearing the impossible yoke of ideologies that your academic masters would love to place upon you.
(And then, of course, have a structural engineer sign off on your drawings.)
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I just got an email from Amber letting me know that I made the list of 100 Innovative Blogs for Architecture Students
Whoo hoo! Architecture Addiction is #96:
Architecture Addiction: On her journey to becoming an architect who makes a difference, Kathryn Purviance journals her motivation, setbacks, and tips on reaching the top.
I would like to thank all of you…
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The Hannover Principles is a set of statements about designing buildings and objects with forethought about their environmental impact, their effect on the sustainability of growth, and their overall impact on society. They were first formulated by William McDonough and Michael Braungart for planning Expo 2000 in Hanover and are presented in a copyrighted 1992 document.
The principles may be summarized as:
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I just got my alumni magazine from the University of Idaho.
When I was there, there was a lot of hopeful talk about getting a new architecture building.
(Honestly, I thought it would be quite a while before that happened. Besides, I liked the building we had. Brick, covered in ivy, with intuitive navigation and daylighting. But I digress.)
So what do I see in the alumni magazine?
The School of Architecture is indeed getting a new building.
And the students are going to help build it.
I don’t mean that they’re going to make 3D models of it in rhino, or do some stuff in AutoCAD. I mean they’re literally going to build it with their own hands.
And I am so so so jealous.
I can imagine the students on the job site, pouring the foundation, setting up the trusses, learning through experience what all the parts are, how they all fit together, what they do.
Unlike last semester’s Building Construction class I took here at the GSD where we copied line drawings out of books in order to fulfill the requirements of our assignments. I didn’t know what all those little black and white lines were, or what they meant. What they were for. Why they’re important. All I knew is that I only had a couple of hours to whip it out so that I could go back to trying to please my insatiable studio critic. In other words, I learned squat about building construction (except what I remember from my Materials & Methods class at the U of I.)
I miss you, Idaho. My heart is always there.
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“In Architecture as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the operation.
The end is to build well.
Well building hath three conditions:
Commoditie,
Firmenes,
and Delight.”
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Word on the street is, you’re not supposed to write about how much you loved playing with legos in your grad school application essay. Because everyone does it. It’s cliche.
But now the temptation to do so is officially upped…with Lego’s new Architecture series.
Of course, like the wise people they are, they’re starting the series with six Frank Lloyd Wright sets, including the Guggenheim and Fallingwater.
Check it out:
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I’m reading a book called The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski. Interspersed with his retelling of building himself a shed for his boat, he relates a history of architectural practice.
This is interesting because I am learning at the GSD, if nothing else, that we are being trained to practice architecture in a particular kind of way. I constantly find myself questioning the pedagogy. I wonder if it at all fits in with the kind of architect I want to be.
I am a big fan of vernacular architecture, or, more accurately, of “primitive” yet effective built solutions to mitigate certain climate conditions. I have read Architecture without Architects a few times. In a nutshell, this is my observation: how did these so-called “primative” people build such beautiful and useful buildings, and if that knowledge, talent, and skill exists, then why do so many so-called highly trained and educated architects of our era build such ugly pieces of trash? Some famous starchitects build things that look as though a monster has chewed its way through metropolis and then puked it all up.
(Do you know who I’m talking about? Can you think of several famous contemporary architects of whom I might be speaking?)
And so, imagine my delight when I came across the following footnote in The Most Beautiful House in the World:
The two giants of late-nineteenth-century American architecture, Louis Sullivan and HH Richarson, both studied at the Beaux-Arts, but without completing the degree requirements. The great Victorian architect Edwin Lutyens studied at an art school for only two years, did not finish the course, and two years later established his practice, at the precocious age of twenty. Not one of the three best-known architects of the twentieth century – Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier – recieved a formal architectural education.
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I just received this cheery email from the AIAS:
Despite some recent positive news about the economy, it is expected that the economic recession will last until the end of this year and perhaps into 2010 and beyond. Some economists believe that the unemployment rate will continue to rise and will not begin to decline until the end of 2011. The situation is most dire for recent college architecture graduates. It is common knowledge that employment in firms is generally not presently available and is a condition which could remain for some time. While it is true that some companies are hiring there are not enough opportunities for the thousands of graduates seeking jobs.
In the short run, you may be forced to take a job that is not ideal or one that does not include working directly in an architecture firm. No matter the course you take, it is critical to remain connected to the architecture profession. It is important to maintain your skills and knowledge so that you are fully employable in the future.
To assist you with planning your future, the AIAS has published numerous tips and tools. The subjects include:
1. Internship Issues
2. Developing Your Professional Skills
3. Community Service and Volunteerism
4. Additional Relevant Work Experiences
5. Preparing for the Future
6. Taking Care of Your Personal Economic Conditions
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Join us for the 2009 Honor Award Gala
Thursday, June 4, 2009
VIP Reception: 6:00 pm
General Reception: 7:00 pm
Dinner & Award Program: 7:45 pm
Black-tie attire
Celebrate the leaders championing the charge for a greener tomorrow at the National Building Museum’s 2009 Honor Award Gala: A Salute to Visionaries in Sustainability.
On Thursday, June 4, the National Building Museum will honor leaders in sustainability who have significantly improved the built environment through their vision and achievements in green building and design. This year’s Honor Award recipients are:
S. Richard Fedrizzi and the U.S. Green Building Council in recognition of 15 years of unparalleled leadership in the promotion of sustainable building practices.
Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City of Chicago in recognition of a historic commitment to planning a vibrant, healthy, and sustainable urban environment.
Majora Carter in recognition of her pioneering vision and advocacy to create sustainable urban environments, and her ability to unite stakeholders in partnerships across the public and private sectors.
Louis R. Chênevert and United Technologies in recognition of their commitment to improving the energy efficiency of buildings and development of sustainable communities.
Collectively, these visionary leaders have had an extraordinary impact on the greening of America’s built environment. This year’s Honor Award gala will be attended by corporate, government, and association leaders from around the country; we hope you will join us.
Visit the 2009 Honor Award: Visionaries in Sustainability web page to purchase tickets, for information about sponsorship, and to learn more about the honorees.
For more information, contact Tasha Passarelle at 202.272.2448, ext. 3112 or tpassarelle@nbm.org
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I was just reading a depressing article on (guess)…the economy and its ramifications on my chances of a summer internship.
Applications at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design are up 30 percent this year. At MIT’s architecture program, applications are up 40 percent. There just aren’t any jobs, said Deborah Johansen, Harvard design school spokeswoman.
Fantastic. I needed a break anyway.
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Our career fair was Friday.
Before I tell you about it, let’s do some simple math.
There are about 500 of us.
(plus)
A few recent graduates
(plus)
MIT’s graduate architecture program. [First years = about 24 people]
(minus)
the 16 firms that came to the career fair
(equals)
not a whole lot for hope for anybody.
I went in the morning, dressed up, made up, resumes and design sheets in hand, and I waited in line with everybody else.
While waiting in line, I met some students from MIT. Their program isn’t large enough for their own career fair. I found out that we have the same projects.
“Do our critics and your critics have secret meetings together?” I asked.
“They’re married to each other,” the MIT student replied. Two of our critics are maried to two of their critics.
Huh.
So I waited for a total of two hours and got to speak to a total of four firms.
A lot of firms, I heard from other people, weren’t even sure if they were even hiring.
One recruiter (and I’ll let him remain anonymous) told me that he used to foresee their workload by three to four months, but with the economy the way it is, he can only see three to four weeks in advance.
Which put me, who was only looking for a summer internship and not a “real” job, in a better spot, he said.
Then he confided, “There are easier ways to make more money. If you can be successful in architecture, you can be successful in anything.”
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We have a Career Fair here at the GSD tomorrow.
There will be 16 firms.
There are 500 of us.
For more reasons to freak out, check out this depressing slide show profiling unemployed architects.
(And good luck with your grad school applications!)
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Blaine Brownell of Discover Magazine wrote this little piece of eye candy I thought you’dlike to see –
Sustainable Architecture Takes Cues From the Original Green: Nature
Want to cool a building? Steal a trick from the forest canopy and use leaves for shade, as Osaka University did with its Frontier Research Center(pictured above). Builders, architects, and designers seeking better ways to go green are increasingly turning to nature—the original green—for solutions that have proven track records in the real world.
Engineering inspired by nature can be “functionally indistinguishable from the elegant designs we see in the natural world,” says Janine Benyus, a leading proponent of nature-based design and founder of the >Biomimicry Institute. Benyus says the strategy has already yielded a wide range of new products that may replicate nature’s successes: ceramics with the strength and toughness of abalone shells, self-assembling computer chips that form by processes similar to the way that tooth enamel grows, adhesives that >mimic the glue that mussels use to anchor themselves in place, and self-cleaning plastics based on the structure of a lotus leaf.
Some biomimicry efforts are tackling large-scale challenges such as supplying energy to an entire building. The Kyoto-based company Kyosemi has developed a power-harvesting solar cell that imitates the way that trees collect sunlight from various angles with their leaves. Called Sphelar, the product comprises little spherical cells that can be incorporated into a building’s windows. Unlike standard photovoltaic panels, Sphelar can absorb light from many directions, providing more consistent power generation as the sun moves across the sky.
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In the last post, I pointed the way to the NAIOP study. It’s been making waves here at the GSD. Making more waves is the backlash.
So here’s the rebuttal for you –
A Hog in a Tuxedo is Still a Hog:
The NAIOP Disinformation StudyBy Edward Mazria
I was wondering when it would happen, a Building Sector disinformation campaign launched by vested interests. Well, it’s happened. The campaign hit The New York Times on Saturday, and it comes from NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association. It appears just as the country has come to grips with the fact that buildings are responsible for over 50% (50.1% to be exact*) of all the energy consumed in the US. It comes at a time when Americans are trying to reshape their energy policy and wean themselves from dependence on foreign oil, dwindling natural gas reserves and dirty conventional coal.
This disinformation campaign is obviously meant to stall, confuse and distort. The first salvo, a spurious study and press release, was issued two days before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on improving building energy code standards.
It is clear from a simple analysis of the study that NAIOP commissioned a building energy efficiency analysis to support predetermined results. They contracted with ConSol, an energy-modeling firm, and asked them to analyze five (yes, only five) efficiency measures for an imaginary, square-shaped, four-story office building with completely sealed windows and an equal amount of un-shaded glass on all four sides of the building. In other words, analyze an energy Hog.
They conducted the analysis for different cities and climates - Newport Beach, Chicago and Baltimore - without changing the design to respond to these very different climates. They did not study changing the shape of the building, its orientation or form, or redistributing windows or using different windows to take advantage of natural light for daylighting or sunlight for heating (office buildings are day-use facilities). They did not study shading the glass in summertime to reduce the need for air-conditioning, using operable windows for ventilation (not even in Newport Beach with its beautiful year-round climate), using landscaping to reduce micro-climatic impacts, employing cost-effective solar hot water heating systems, employing an energy management control system or even study the impact of using inexpensive energy-saving occupancy sensors in rooms to turn off lights.
In other words, NAIOP intentionally kept out of the analysis all the readily available low-cost, no-cost and cost-saving options to reduce a building’s energy consumption. This deliberate omission is glaringly apparent in their press release and in the NY Times article. In fact, they take so many inexpensive, energy-saving options off the table that it is impossible for the imaginary building to reach commonly achievable energy-consumption-reduction targets. They then add an inflammatory headline to their press release, “Results show efficiencies unable to reach 30 percent mandates”, and state that, “The study provides an unbiased insight into the energy targets practical to commercial development today.”
Using this analysis as their baseline, NAIOP goes on to report, without any objective basis, that “reaching a 30 percent reduction above the ASHRAE standard (a commercial building energy code standard) is not feasible using common design approaches and would exceed a 10-year payback.” They conclude, “achieving a 50 percent reduction above the standard is not currently reachable.”
Clearly, this study is meant to confuse the public and stall meaningful legislation, insuring that America remains dependent on foreign oil, natural gas and dirty conventional coal.
The U.S. peaked in oil production in 1970 and natural gas in 1973. Our reserves are in steep decline and 70% of the remaining world oil and gas reserves are located in the Middle East, an area stretching from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union. This type of activity by NAIOP not only hurts our country, it is also a disservice to their membership and all those in the Building Sector who work hard to deliver a high-quality, energy-efficient building product.
NAIOP touts itself as advancing responsible commercial real estate development and advocating for effective public policy. This study and misleading campaign accomplishes none of these goals.
The American public deserves better.
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I just read this article by Saqib Rahim in the NY Times.
It’s been sold as the ultimate no-brainer climate investment: Make a building that’s more energy efficient, and you’ll pocket the savings while avoiding harmful emissions.
With buildings accounting for 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, the “green” building has also gotten a look from Obama administration policymakers hoping to shrink the nation’s carbon footprint.
Now a group of builders has issued a report arguing that the green-building vision may be more of a myth. You can make a building more energy efficient, the group says, but it won’t come cheap, and it could take decades to pay off.
The report, released this week by the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, found that a 50 percent energy improvement beyond federal standards is technically impossible. A 30 percent target is achievable, but only by adding a million-dollar solar system that could take up to 100 years to pay for itself.
Experts say it is one of the first efforts they have seen to question whether the green building’s economic foundation is as solid as advocates claim.
The association, which represents developers of office buildings and other commercial properties, goes by its former acronym, NAIOP. John Bryant, a lobbyist for the group, said he wants the report to wake up policymakers who are considering a big hike for building energy codes.
“Some of the language that’s been used in mandate proposals might not be as achievable as people have said,” he said. “We don’t want to stop the debate – we want it to move forward; we just want to add some economic data to it.”
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I just read an article about a family in Alabama who built their own house with the wood and stones they could find.
I love this stuff.
As a contractor, Guy knew that most building projects waste a lot of usable materials. “In my line of work, getting rid of old junk and debris is part of the bidding process anyway,” he says. “So if I got a job remodeling a house built in the early 1900s and happened to see a dilapidated barn on the property, I’d just ask the owner, ‘What’s the future of that barn?’ Generally, he’d say, ‘You can have it.’”
In the five years it took to complete the project, Guy collected old wood, tin and other materials from as many as 75 sources; every town in Randolph County is represented. “I got wood from old barns and sheds; some pieces I just found in a field somewhere,” he says. “My company also did a whole lot of work on a church from the 1850s that people claimed was the oldest in the county. I got all the windowpanes, some trim and a few pieces of lumber from that.”
Guy estimates that 85 percent of the house is made from reclaimed materials; the other 15 percent is wiring, plumbing, lights and the store-bought rocks that make up the 30-foot indoor fireplace.
For Guy and Kay, building the house was more than a means to an end: It was an important part of raising their sons, Jeffery, 22; Kyle, 20; and Adam, 18. “I wasn’t about to raise three boys who wouldn’t know how to work and get really tired and sweat and bleed,” Guy says of his sons, who were 15, 14 and 12 when the project began. “This project turned them into three fine young men. It taught them values and character, respect and responsibility.”
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I just read another article about architecture students leaving their architecture buildings and going outside and building something real.
Every time I read something like this, it makes me happy. It makes me happy because it’s what I want for myself.
We like to joke that we don’t get to build anything until our fifth year.
(Ours is a 3.5 year program. Not funny.)
In 16 days a team of undergraduate architecture students will travel to a township in South Africa to construct a nursery school for 80 children in just six weeks. Thirty-six second and fifth year students from the University of Nottingham, and their tutors Adrian Friend and Rashied Ali, have designed the building following a student competition.
The students are also are fundraising in order to buy materials and finance their flights. They will set off in 19 days for the township of Jouberton, near Klerksdorp which is 250km south west of Johannesburg.
The project began in September 2008 when more than 200 students entered an internal competition to design the nursery school. The brief specified a sustainable building, which took into account best practice in terms of kindergarten education.
In December 2008 a panel of tutors selected a project from one of the second year’s six units. A series of interviews was held with students from the second and fifth years to select the team that will travel to South Africa.
A series of timber portal frames has been constructed as a test in the grounds of Nottingham University school of architecture.
The project is being run in collaboration with Education Africa, a Johannesburg-based charity. It follows on from earlier building projects designed and constructed by students from Austrian schools of architecture in other impoverished townships.
The nursery is expected to be complete by the beginning of May. Regular updates will be posted and webcam images will be posted by the students.
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We had our first review of the semester yesterday.
I realized that a large part of my frustration and disillusion with this project stemmed from the fact that there was a fundamental difference in what I though the assignment was…and what the critics thought the assignment was.
And I didn’t realize this until late in the review.
I had been operating from the idea that we were supposed to build a structure out of brick with certain programmatic elements (a stair, a bench, a portal.)
Which is what I did. I had a house design I came up with about a year ago that I liked very much, so I isolated the staircase and further developed it within the confines of this assignment. I looked at certain historical precedents, such as the ancient Roman hypocausts and Asplund’s Little Chapel and used certain elements to refine my project. I was pleased. I could imagine myself and my friends sitting on its wide platforms, comfortably warm as the masonry slowly released the heat from the two-flue fireplace that punctured the structure. Perhaps we would have a few drinks. Perhaps a couple would descend the stairs and make their way to the intimate bench hidden in the structure to cuddle by the enclosed fireplace below.
(At one preliminary pin-up, I was told that my narrative was not helpful.)
But as we progressed in the project, I became steadily aware that something was terribly, terribly wrong. My classmates were designing things that made me wonder: How will that stand up? What if a strong wind comes along? How can a person actually use your stair when the treads are so tiny? How can a person be at all comfortable sitting on that?
I was further dismayed by the displeasure the critics took in my project. One even remarked, “It looks like that could be built tomorrow.” As though that were a bad thing.
I asked my critic about it later. Is it a bad thing to design something that looks like it could be built tomorrow?
Her answer astonished and disturbed me:
“In practice, no. In academia, yes.”
(I think I hate you, academia.)
I just didn’t get it…until late in the review.
The assignment, it finally dawned on me, was not to actually build something that would be comfortable to use. It wasn’t necessarily to design something that could even be built.
The assignment was to see what crazy tricks I could make a brick do. Really. That was it. So simple. It was, essentially, not at all about designing something with firmness and commodity, but rather, just mental masturbation.
Our next project will again concern designing with a particular material (so we’ve been told). This raises the question: do I play along? Do I make – what? Vinyl siding? – twist into funny convuluted shapes and make a pretty rendering of it for Review Day? What? Really?
Or do I design something that people would enjoy using, that serves some actual purpose…and get executed for it before a firing squad of academics?
I know the answer. Hand me my last cigarette.
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I just want to know.
Why does making a study of architecture = staring at a computer all day?
Why does it mean placing your entire life, your relationships, your friendships, your hobbies, your meals, your sleeping, your sanity, everything on hold?
My classmates stay up most of the night, every night, staring like zombies at their computer screens, contorting their spines into curious shapes in order to accomodate the low-to-the-desk screens of their laptops. Everyone looks pale and sick. We all look like hell.
I am on Day Two of my boycott against the insanity.
You know what I did instead?
I went outside. Gasp! Into the sunlight and fresh air!
And then later I delighted myself by taking photographs of beautiful old brick buildings here in Boston.
And then later I pleasured myself by paging through a book about tree houses around the world!
Oh architecture, I still love you. I continued to be fascinated by you and your ways. I still want to learn to speak your language so that I can utter your terribly beautiful poetry.
But this pedagogy is making me lose my mind!
The other day, I was describing our current project to my boyfriend.
He asked, “But, aren’t you supposed to be designing something *real*?”
His comment frustrated me.
It frustrated me because I agree with him. I think we should be doing “something real.” I think we should be outside building. Talking to people. Seeing how we can improve their lives. We should be talking to real architects. We should be going to planning and zoning meetings. We should be out in the community gaining first hand experience. Changing lives. Being brilliant. You know, all the things we came here to do.
Instead, all of our hours are filled with staring at our computer screens, cut off from humanity, working in a state of exhaustion, frustration, and panic.
Is this the best way to teach the next generation of architects? Really?
(Is this why our school goes by the name Graduate School of Divorce?)
(And is this why so many people who get a degree in architecture go into another field altogether after graduation?)
I just want to know.
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In my last post I quoted a book I just read about Jersey Devil called Jersey Devil: Design/Build Book by Michael Crosbie.
This morning I finished another, called Devil’s Workshop by Susan Piedmont-Palladino and Mark Alden Branch, which likewise has a quote about the place of architectural education that continues to be relevant.
The question of whether it is theory or practical experience that forms the primary knowledge base of architecture has remained one of the central dilemmas of architectural practice and education since the Renaissance. During the nineteenth century, France and England exemplified this dilemma in the divergent ways in which they educated architects. France, where architects were educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, considered theory primary; England, where education tended to rely on apprenticeships, considered practical knowledge primary and thought of architecture as a trade than as a learned profession. For most of the nineteenth century the United States followed the English model, as it had during the colonial era. American architecture in the eighteenth century had relied on pattern books written expressly for the owner-craftsman who found himself “in the remote parts of the Country where little or no assistance for Design can be procured.” While the more theoretical treaties of Vitruvius or Palladio were available in colonies, they were expensive. The pattern books were popular and contained details, elements, and entire buildings that could be “executed by any Workman who understands Lines…” Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, American education abandoned its craft-based tradition and turned toward the Beaux Arts model as the path to professional legitimacy. Consequently, the values of apprenticeship, such as construction and craft, were marginalized by a curriculum that emphasized delineation, history, geometry, and engineering principles. The knowledge gained from making buildings became peripheral to the professional definition of the architect, and so remains today.
The professional internship, which would seem at first glance to redress the division between theory and practice, in fact reinforces it. The internship derives from the recognition that a theory-based education has certain limits, yet even here the novice architect is rarely offered field experience, and never actual construction experience, but rather the chance to apply to a “real” project the same abstract design skills learned in the academy. Those design skills, developed and refined on monumental and idealized studio projects, are more often than not applied to the proverbial fire stair and bathroom details. Students who look to the internship as the time to learn finally “how things go together” find that budget and expedience often conspire to limit their access to the construction process. More than that, however, the segregation of the architect from the activities if the building is endemic to a professional culture in which practice is defined as the rendering of a service, The internship is dedicated to training, some might say indoctrinating, new professionals in the “how” of serving the client, rather than the “how” of building the building. The perceived loss of respect for architects throughout the construction industry can be seen as one of the inevitable results of this situation. The increasing interest in design-build in the part of many architecture students (and the media) might be said to be another, though the design-build studios now offered by a number of academic programs are still seen largely as supplements to a theory-based education.
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For our first studio project of the spring semester here at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, we’re to design a structure that relies on compression. It should include a portal and a place for two people to sit. And it should be made completely out of brick.
Michael Meredith, who is leading studio this semester, supplied us with copious pdfs of precedents.
But I find myself turning to Jersey Devil for inspiration.
I checked out both books on Jersey Devil from our library, and in each I was struck by how well their ethos resonated with me.
This is how Michael Crosbie, author of Jersey Devil: Design/Build Book describes it:
Much of early America was built by architects who operated similarly to Jersey Devil. They were called “architect/builders” and often traveled through a region designing and building houses, churches, stores, and schools. They too would begin with some basic assumptions about the building required, develop designs, and then execute them, making adjustments to meet the demands of the site, materials, program, and climate.
It was during the Industrial Revolution that this relationship between architect and architecture began to disintegrate. Mechanized production, the division of labor, and the sheer demand to build more structures faster affected architecture by forcing a wedge between designer and builder. Architects set themselves apart as a professional class that was quite different than mere tradesmen. Buildings were (and still are) designed in their entirety down tot he last detail before ground was broken. Then drawn and written instructions were given to the people who would assemble the structure – the builders – who were required by law not to deviate from the plans in any way without express permission from the architect. Any changes necessary were communicated back from the building site to the architect in the office.
This divorce was ultimately institutionalized by the American Institute of Architects, which, in 1909, adopted a code of ethics that explicitly forbade architects from engaging in building construction. Thus the hand and the mind were severed in the creation of the built environment. Certain trends in architecture today reflect the malignancy of this separation. Technological advancements is bittersweet: it often makes our lives easier by placing buffers between us and the real world of raw experience. The fabrication of built reality fir the architect is not unlike eating synthetic food or engaging in telephone sex. Meanwhile, the ethics of architects who chose to build their own designs are suspect while others receive public acclaim for their unbuilt (if not unbuildable) designs. We live in strange times.
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I just read this article in the South Bend Tribune by Gene Stowe about architecture student Matthe VanSoest.
Architecture student Matthew VanSoest plans to design more than buildings in his career. He wants to design better schools, better communities, better downtowns for a better life, especially for struggling small towns such as his native Bremen.
VanSoest, who graduated from Bremen High School in 2004 and earned a bachelor’s degree at Ball State University last year, will graduate with a master’s degree in architecture from Ball State next year.
He has interned at Ancon Construction Co. during summers and other breaks for three years and expects to work at the company when he has finished his education.
VanSoest’s broad interest — far from “trophy architecture,” designing skyscrapers or monumental buildings — traces to his observation of job loss and downtown decay in Bremen.
“It’s just a small town,” he says. “You see more and more people going to Mishawaka or Plymouth or Nappanee. There’s a lot of programs at Ball State that are nationally known for community revitalization. These programs have gotten me interested in it as well in using architecture as a way of helping people, helping small communities.
“I think they’re being overlooked,” with more focus directed to on larger cities, VanSoest says. “Architects can almost become urban designers. That’s what I’m concentrating on.”
The architect can brainstorm with the community, find strengths and weaknesses, and propose changes. “In a lot of cases, it’s not just one building,” he says, but rather a block of buildings, town center or gateway to the downtown.
For example, redesigned town centers could increase interactions among residents. “There’s a loss of a sense of community,” VanSoest says. “Neighbors don’t know their neighbors. Architects think in that way. It’s not just one building.”
Last semester, he was part of a team that worked with leaders in Topeka, a community with a significant Amish population and ties to the RV industry, not unlike his home area.
Among other things, the team proposed buildings to fill vacant lots and a trade school to improve the education level in the community, which hopes to develop a high level of energy independence and expects to have the largest wind farm in the Midwest.
“The level of craftsmanship is there,” he says. “The question is, how do you use it? The architect, I think, has to think outside the box and not just focus on aesthetics and function.”
This semester, he’s on a team that is working to revitalize a section of Muncie, Ind.
“I’ve done some work in Muncie with urban design,” VanSoest says. “Right now, we’re looking at 10 houses in Muncie that are deemed unfit.”
The team proposes to save the houses and retrofit them to be sustainable. The plan includes shared yard and garden space for the neighbors. A grant will support construction for one house according to the plan.
“Maybe that model can serve for other houses in the area,” he says.
Charter schools, like urban planning, are a big concentration for VanSoest. His work with Ancon has included consulting with a school in St. Joseph County.
“It’s thinking of new ways you can design a school,” he says. “It’s not just the architecture.”
As a Ball State University Business Fellow, on an interdisciplinary team that includes education, finance, economics and other majors, he was part of a two-year research project, “Charter School Patterns of Innovation: A New Architecture for a New Education,” sponsored by Eli Lilly.
“The team researched exemplary case study exemplars throughout the country in order to understand the unique ways charter schools operate,” VanSoest says. “Because charter schools have more freedom in how they teach, each school can take a different focus with their curriculum.”
The team applied the results of their study to Indiana partner charter schools, interviewing teachers and students, conducting building assessments and providing hypothetical designs. It will present its work in Portland in March and is writing a book about the project
“The group finally created 50 design patterns or principles that would become useful tools to actively engage school administrators, designers, parents, students, teachers, communities, and businesses in the development of their school,” he says.
“The patterns or ideas go way beyond providing solutions for a facility of learning and teaching, but begins to look at ways buildings themselves can actually be learning tools, creating an image of the educational environment that creates pride in the students’ and a presence in the community, or identifying ways to supplement the school’s funding needs.”
In a design competition sponsored by Cripe Architects and Engineers, VanSoest proposed a Charter School of the Dunes in Gary, a middle school that includes space that would be useful for parent-student nights and community events as well as classrooms and a cafeteria. His design placed first, and some of the ideas will be incorporated into a new school in the Gary area.
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Jon Stewart calls this the Greatest Depression.
Michael Cannell of the NY Times tells us that design loves a depression.
An Excerpt (with my favorite parts bolded)
Now, given that all those slick Miami condos are sitting empty in the sky, designers like the Campana Brothers, with their $8,910 Corallo chair, and Hella Jongerius, with her $10,615 Ponder sofa, might have a harder time selling their wares. Already designers are biting their knuckles over the damage reports. The American Institute of Architects reported that last month’s billings index, a gauge of nonresidential construction, reached its lowest level since it began collecting data in 1995.
The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.
“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”
…
Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II.
Will today’s designers rise to the occasion? “What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “This might be the time when designers can really do their job, and do it in a humanistic spirit.”
In the lean years ahead, “there will be less design, but much better design,” Ms. Antonelli predicted.
There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Also, he mentions my favorite architect:
One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.
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I just came across a blog post by an architecture student from Johannesburg, South Africa.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Goodbye Architecture
So after 4 years I have decided to say my goodbyes to architecture, and Im thrilled about it. It takes a while to admit when something is wrong for you- but I refuse to wake up everyday with a deep sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I know plenty of people go to work everday, doing a job that they’re not happy with, but stick with it because of financial security or a comfort zone - I am not one of those people! Even though I havent a clue what I’m going to do now, I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I somehow have faith that things will fall into place. In the meantime, Im going to start a new blog, that hopefully will be updated more regularly and will probably focus on photography which is really the one thing I can probably say that I’m passionate about. I do however have the utmost respect for architects! Its a challenging job, and takes amazing people to do it well.
She posted images of her final project. You gotta see them.
So then here’s a comment somebody left:
This post showed up in a Google alert for me on architecture. I must say that I do find your buildings to be very interesting and active. There are many elements in your work that emphasize your sensitivity to the terrain. I would certainly like to see the plan of some of these, it is much more important than the exteriors.
One thing that school doesn’t teach you, and they actively lobby against it, is that focusing on exteriors disregards the reason for a building, what is happening INSIDE. Exterior aesthetics are important, but only to the person that views a building as an object, rather than a building, which is constructed to offer protection from the OUTSIDE.
I too hated architecture school with an unabated passion, but after getting out, the job is nothing like college. It seems that the only people that try to teach architecture students are the people that were massive failures at performing the work. In other words, they are useless to the world other than removing the desire from students to do good work. They place emphasis on theory, rather than real world concepts. Drawings and models are nice, but the built environment is the end result, not a bunch of pretty stuff in the studio.
That said, architecture is honestly the most fulfilling profession that you could possibly find if you actually like studying the built environment. Hopefully, the professors have not killed that for you because your exterior designs are very engaging.
Good luck!
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I love this. Some UH Architecture students are going to build on Fiji.
Fiji will receive help from UH architecture students
A group of eight UH architecture graduate students will help design buildings for the island of Batiki in Fiji. According to Adi Asenaca Caucau, former minister of housing in Batiki, Batiki is the most economically depressed island in Fiji. Students will have the chance to see their building designs go from concept to completion. Each student has been assigned a specific building to design. Buildings that they’re working on include: a community center, a church, a school and a library. The designs will be built within the next two years and will benefit the 2,000 people of Batiki.
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My thesis is still a couple of years aaway, but I already know what I want to do.
I want to build.
Truong Minh Nhat had the same drive. While his fellow students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture were producing renderings, he built his design.
A folding electric bicycle. And it actually runs.
OMG. How cool is that?
Capella, as Truong Minh Nhat calls his creation, is an electric bike made with light composites that the Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture student says can be folded and put into a backpack.
Capella can have its wheels, chain and chain-ring bolt folded into the body.
Users can take the bike along when traveling and escape the crowd anywhere, Nhat says, adding that it can travel at 30 kilometers per hour with a battery that will run for 12 kilometers after it is charged for two hours.
Nhat says most of the designed components are not available in the market, like a semicircle top bar.
“I had to convince and explain a lot to bike component makers, although I was making only one and offered them high prices,” he says.
Starting the project more than half a year ago as his graduation thesis, Nhat put a lot of time and effort into it.
He spent one month sketching out the design, which was inspired by the Unicorn that controls the star Capella in Greek mythology.
“My product targets teenagers who want to ride bicycles, so I paid due attention to its stylish design,” Nhat says.
To ensure that all the parts followed the design, Nhat had to stay with the people making them all the time and because they were more than 30 kilometers apart, he had to shuttle back and forth many times everyday.
Two days before the deadline, Nhat was overwhelmed with separate components, electricity systems and batteries.
He invited some workers to his house to assemble the bike. All of them then slept for only two hours each night until the bike was complete, Nhat says.
Although he submitted his product just two hours before the deadline, he obtained high marks for it.
“My application for intellectual property right has been approved,” says the graduate of the university’s Industrial Design Department.
“I am now studying ways to improve the bike’s eminent functions before seeking partners to launch the product in the market at a price reasonable for Vietnamese people.”
Since the first bike was made manually by assembling separate components, it still has certain shortcomings, he says.
Nhat expects to replace some of the bike’s components with even lighter materials to reduce its weight to around 10 kilograms.
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A lot of grad school deadlines are past, but if you still have a few left to go, well, honestly, it’s probably too late for this little essay on designing your portfolio.
But
if you’re not applying until NEXT Decmeber, take heed.
This essay comes to you from DesignIntelligence
An Enviable Design Portfolio
Harold LintonGreat portfolios assist in our understanding of not only individual designers and their work but also their larger design vision and contributions in allowing us to see the familiar in an unexpected way. One recalls the story of the arrival of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio in Peter Behrens’ office and work stopping for the rest of the day as the office staff of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, et al. leafed through the pages and saw their modern world anew. A quality portfolio is like a garden, constantly being watered for future nourishment and beauty.
What might be the most appropriate format for your portfolio? Is your work best presented in a clean, well-organized wire-bound pamphlet design with an accompanying CD or DVD or as a personal Web site that is continually current and updated frequently? Do you prefer the drama of opening a beautiful boxed set of individual plates or do you envision an elegant hardbound book made with the artistry of a person knowledgeable about the craft of handmade paper and the book art form. No matter which format you adopt, Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the school of architecture at Yale University, has carefully chosen words of advice: “Among the many ingredients that help define an excellent portfolio, coherence and modesty are paramount. Plain is better than fancy; simple much better than complicated. The portfolio is a tool for conveying a sense of the work; it should not be an advertisement for itself.”
A finely tailored portfolio is the most important tool you can bring to an application for admission to a graduate school or for a design grant, competition, job interview, or to a potential client. Like a well-tailored suit, the portfolio is critical in establishing that great and lasting first impression. Recent graduates from pre-professional degree programs (B.A. and B.S.) and professional degree programs (B. Arch and M. Arch) enter the field through the interview process, demonstrating their talent and abilities with portfolios in hand. As one progresses in the profession, an up-to-date portfolio demonstrates accomplishments from position to position.
Your vision of the world has something of value to offer. Invest in a design presentation that clearly communicates and supports your vision. Through careful planning and rehearsal, decisions regarding the character, content, visual weight, material sense, size/scale, and format are all selected to meet your vision. The portfolio itself may be executed in one format such as a print booklet or may incorporate many forms, including CD, DVD, Web site, or PDF files. Going digital means designing a Web site not only to promote personal and professional work globally but also to act as a resumé, giving an introductory statement of background and professional expertise in anticipation of presenting a full portfolio during the interview process.
Regardless of its format, the portfolio design should set in motion a well-conceived visual discourse, one that will capture, arrest, and hold the attention of the intended audience. An increasing number of students and young professionals are linking a PDF of a well-designed print portfolio to their Web site, thereby establishing a coordinated design format as both an online presence and a leave-behind print piece. The need for portfolio media to being cross-platform (PC and Mac) is a necessity. Recently, the trend is toward all-digital initial contact, such as an introductory e-mail containing a PDF file of a resumé and PDF teaser/mini-portfolio sent to potential employers. Advantages are that they can reach a larger audience quickly, and they will likely connect with the more technologically savvy design employers.
Architecture students are inventing teaser portfolios or mini-versions of full portfolios. These 4- to 5-page preview portfolios, together with a letter of introduction and resumé, are useful to introduce oneself in request of a formal interview. Students are also attending large career day events, at which a career day sheet of their work is the status quo. A career day sheet is basically a single page with a well-organized grid of sample images of one’s work on the front, and background resumé and contact info on the reverse. These brief snapshots of one’s work seem at first blush far too brief to explain the accomplishments of the designer, but conversely, they speak reams to the employers who sit in review behind tables in the hall. These employers see numerous students and samples of work; the career day page is portable and easy for them to take back to the office. There, they can use the page to aid discussion with colleagues, which may lead to an invitation to the new graduate to present a full portfolio and interview for a position.
Since buildings, landscape designs, and interiors are impossible to transport, and even models and renderings can be large and impractical to carry, the print portfolio is the enormously practical instrument and still the standard in the industry. In the course of a career, a designer will likely prepare several portfolios, each one adapted to a different purpose. In each case, your portfolio needs immediate and dramatic impact to distinguish you from others with whom you are competing, and it has to clearly answer the questions in the minds of those reviewing your work for whatever purpose. The portfolio is a graphic history of skills and accomplishments, and it must be seen not only as a problem in design but also as a tool to promote you to prospective employers and clients. Each year, architecture and allied design students (landscape, interiors, planning, and the like) enter the job market, and the competition grows increasingly intense.
Cesar Pelli, writing in the book Portfolio Design states, “The portfolio tells me about the abilities of its designer to communicate ideas and images in graphic form. Much like in a building, there is a great deal of freedom within the physical limits set by the medium and the cultural limits set by convention, and I can tell about the judgment of the designers by how constrained they have been by these limits or by how much freedom they have taken with them. I can even judge how well they have managed their time in either overdoing the portfolio design or in having established an efficient process for preparing it.”
The challenge of proper self-promotion through portfolio design is assessing one’s own strengths and accomplishments objectively. Preparing a portfolio requires you to take a step back from your own design work and make an evaluation as unemotionally as possible. Learning to be observant about the strengths and weaknesses of your work encourages the development of a critical and unbiased eye useful to the portfolio design process and to your professional career generally. Inviting the opinions of trusted advisors and colleagues also helps eliminate the initial fears many people have about putting together a portfolio.
Planning a portfolio presentation also requires a keen sense of organization and an ability to arrange various written and visual materials into a unified graphic package as well as the ability to maintain a focused vision throughout the development of the presentation. It is important to consider the audience and the skills and elements they may be attracted to or looking for. In general, all of those people who review portfolios will be looking for a businesslike attitude and a pragmatic soundness in the work as well as creativity and pure grace and beauty. Creativity is important, but employers want designers who are able to solve problems economically and quickly. Architects and designers are proposing to spend other people’s money, a lot of it, and a solid portfolio presentation will go a long way toward persuading others that you can be trusted with that responsibility.
Student designers with a creative future will have a natural curiosity about life and the world. Assembling a portfolio is an exercise that prepares them for future accomplishment in the real world by teaching how to evaluate one’s own work and to understand how that work will appear to other professionals. A good portfolio illustrates one’s strengths and demonstrates an understanding of format, graphic design, typography, concept development, problem solving, and business communication. A portfolio not only represents a body of work acquired throughout academic and professional life, but it displays this work in such a way that a design philosophy is made manifest. Of course, most undergraduate students have not chosen a specific area of design philosophy and tend to be generalists. This is not a drawback because many good designers are generalists; they can solve any problem. Having a focus too early in your career can limit possibilities for growth and development. One’s portfolio represents an evolution, not an end in itself. The educational experience involves growth, and growth, as in the cultivation of a garden, often requires us to set aside prior knowledge to consider new concepts and directions. As noted architect and educator Max Underwood says:
“There is not a single formula for assembling a good portfolio. Not only will the thinking of architects and designers change in the course of their career, but also portfolio objectives change. In applying for advanced study or a professional position, the goal may be to demonstrate a variety of interests, or a process of growth and learning over time. In applying for a specific grant or competition, the goal may be to demonstrate knowledge and expertise in a specialized area known to be of interest to the grant or competition administrators. Some professional portfolios are prepared only after considerable consultation with a client and present the designer’s ideas about how a single project might be carried out, complete with a specific cost analysis. How focused the portfolio presentation is often depends upon what the recipient is looking for. Remember, you are selling yourself or your ability to execute a particular project or work in a particular environment. You will want to demonstrate ingenuity and uniqueness to make a strong impression, but you must also demonstrate sound judgment.”
If you are enthusiastic about your work, you will find portfolio assembly an intriguing and creative activity. But it also involves hard judgments. You must act like an editor as well as a creator. Consider your audience. Get your point across with a limited number of images, demonstrating an ability to be selective, critical, and concise. Extracting the essence, every page or plate must build on the previous page by adding new ideas without redundancy, by expanding concepts, by taking a fresh approach to how the material is presented. You will then have a portfolio that sets you apart from others.
Harold Linton is a professor of art and visual technology as well as chairman of the department of art and design at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. He is the former assistant dean of architecture at Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Mich. Linton is the author of Portfolio Design, a best-selling book in the field, and he is currently at work on its fourth edition. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader on portfolio design topics.
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My favorite project on Inhabit’s Top Ten Green Architecture Projects of 2008 by Mike Chino is the The World’s First Energy-Generating Revolving Door
Harvesting the kinetic energy generated by crowds of people is one of our favorite approaches to renewable energy. Recently Netherlands-based Natuurcafé La Port installed an energy generator in a rotating door, so every time someone walks in for a cup of coffee, they give just a little bit of their energy back to the coffee shop. We keep saying that solving the problem of global warming will require that we open up new doors in the field of renewable energy, but we must admit that we never expected to mean it literally!
The door was part of the refurbishment of the Driebergen-Zeist railway station designed out by architecture firm RAU and built by Boon Edam. The door is expected to generate around 4600 kwh of energy each year, which may not sound like much - but every little bit helps. To enhance the design, the team decided to include a transparent ceiling to show how the system works, and LEDs display the amount of energy that it is generated each time someone walks in the door.
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As I BS my way through this paper we’re supposed to write over break, I thought I’d share something I found by a fellow architecture student.
Architectural Terms
Sense of Entry
The front door is big and far away.
Human Scale
Less than 400 feet tall.
Skewed Grid
The design looked too boring with a regular grid.
Pedestrian-Oriented
Doesn’t have enough parking.
Contextual
Is surrounded by a lot of other buildings the architect couldn’t tear down.
Theoretical
Nobody in their right mind would ever consider building the crazy thing.
Signature Building
You can’t afford it.
Less Is More
The designer ran out of ideas. Cheap Skate.
Classically Proportioned
Traced out of a book of Greek architecture.
Postmodern
Traced out of a book of Roman architecture.
International Style
No country will take responsibility for it.
Deconstructivist
The backhoe ran into it during construction—and they liked it.
Seismically Designed High Rise
In an earthquake, the structure will not collapse, but will drop all of its glass and stone panels into the street turning pedestrians into a stew-like mush of pureed flesh.
Jury
Firing squad.
Design Review Board
Failed architecture majors.
Architecture Student
Egotistical masochist with no money.
Thanks to Nor Khairul!
Source
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Know of some others I can add here? Let me know. Have you already visited some of these places...or planning on it? Let me know and I will feature your story and your photos here!
It is my dream to start a new kind of architecture school. Unlike most architecture schools, you wouldn't have to submit GRE scores or good grades or letters of recommendation. You wouldn't have to put the rest of your life on hold for 3 to 5 years. You wouldn't have to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debt. At my architecture school, anyone could come for a few weeks and learn how to build a house with their own two hands. My teachers would take skills and concepts from some of these other workshops I've listed above... except classes would be held year-round to make it easy to fit into your schedule. I would have a number of different campuses around the country that would teach building designs approriate to the local climate. And I need your help. Can you donate land for a campus? Can you teach a workshop? Can you provide start-up capital? Let me know.
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