The sleek showroom captured by the astute eye of Ezra Stoller, 1955. Courtesy of Ezra Stoller © Esto / Yossi Milo Gallery

Wright’s bijou, as he described it,[i] was the architect’s first permanent work in the city, his first constructed automotive design, and one of his few interior-only projects. Realized during New York’s post-World War II commercial construction boom, it was the architect’s single gesture along the corporate corridor of International Style buildings designed by his rivals, the “glass box boys.”[ii] The showroom’s signature ramp was also one of Wright’s several design experiments with the spiral, culminating in the Guggenheim Museum.

The showroom was a bijou to me, too. It’s a character in my book, Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959. I spent considerable time studying, visiting, and writing about it. Imagine my shock on a warm day last month when I walked by showroom and witnessed it being gutted. A woman in construction gear, standing in front of the open doorway waved pedestrians past clouds of dust and dumpsters filled with the showroom’s remains en route to a nearby dump truck.

When long-time tenant Mercedes vacated the space last December, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy among others had been actively advocating to save it. But the fate of historic interiors in New York, where the power of real estate looms large, is always precarious. I later learned that once the possibility of a landmark hearing for the showroom was mentioned, the owner obtained a demolition permit and took immediate action.

That morning, as history evaporated before my eyes, I texted the news to a Wright community contact, and the word quickly spread.

Foreign automobile mogul Max Hoffman.  Courtesy of Mercedes Benz of North America

Emblematic of its time in both design and function, Wright’s jewel of a showroom had a wonderful human story, too. It was the product of a commission set between two fast friends—Austrian automobile importer Max Hoffman and America’s greatest architect— both of whom shared a love of fine automobiles and showing them off. Hoffman was the kind of fine feathered client Wright particularly enjoyed and was also one of the few for whom he completed multiple commissions. He was already in conversation with Hoffman about designing his home in Rye, New York, when their talks about the showroom began. The auto mogul’s offer to provide imported vehicles as compensation for services rendered made the partnership all the sweeter for Wright. Accepting immediately, he wrote to Hoffman that his ownership of Porsches would be “good for the appreciation of this fine foreign car” as there were none “within hundreds of miles of Madison, Wisconsin.”[iii]

Wright’s vision for the Hoffman Auto Showroom.  Drawing Courtesy of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.

Though, as I write, the bulk of Frank Lloyd Wright’s archives are en route to Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and the Museum of Modern Art, there is little of his work left in New York now—the Usonian Cass House on Staten Island, and, if you count it, the Little House II living room installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing.

Host to an array of the latest and greatest imported cars for nearly sixty years, the Hoffman Auto Showroom was a small yet vibrant slice of our built history, underappreciated in a locale where the value of square footage frequently supersedes its contents.

I don’t know why I walked past the showroom on that sunny day last month. Maybe fate drew me to witness its demise after so much studied reflection on its life. I’ve heard rumor that the gutted space may become a bank—a commodity we already have on almost every corner here. Regardless, it will be a long time before I walk by the intersection of 56^th Street and Park Avenue again.

Debra Pickrel, principal of Pickrel Communications in New York, is co-author of Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959 (2007, Gibbs Smith) and served on the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy board of directors for six years. In 2011, she wrote “Remembering Edgar” in memory of her friend and Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel for this website.

Endnotes:

[ii] Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 483.

[iii] Frank Lloyd Wright, letter to Max Hoffman, July 14, 1952, Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

“Architects have a greater ability to improve public health than medical professionals.”

That provocative statement was made by a physician, Dr. Claudia Miller, an assistant dean at the University of Texas School of Medicine, on a panel I moderated on healthy building materials during our second annual firm-wide Green Week.

From left to right:  HKS G Green Week 2 panelists Jason McLennan, Bill Walsh, Kirk Teske, Dr. Claudia Miller, and Howard Williams.

More than 800 of our co-workers heard nationally recognized leaders discuss everything from the impacts of LEED v4 to the latest in energy modeling software. In addition to Dr. Miller, the panel included Jason McClennan, founder and creator of the Living Building Challenge and CEO of the International Living Future Institute; Bill Walsh, executive director of the Healthy Building Network , and Howard Williams, vice president at Construction Specialties, a global building materials supplier.

Though the panelists – a designer, physician, manufacturer, sustainability activist, and a building certification creator – come with different skill sets and perspectives, their combined knowledge and collective purpose was clear: They made a unanimous call for cooperation and transparency from building product manufacturers. This is exactly the type of collaborative action our industry needs to shift the building materials paradigm from translucent to transparent, and from toxic to healthy.

Architects and designers can leverage their specification power to transform the building product marketplace, suggested Dr. Miller.  Like medical professionals, the design community has a duty to protect the public which has the right to know what’s in the products that surrond them. And the specifiers of those products  have the duty to select those that minimize impact on the environment and the people who occupy the spaces they create. Doctors can treat only one patient at a time, Dr. Miller added, while architects who specify environmentally responsible products help safeguard the health of a far greater number of people.

McLennan, an architect himself and author of the Living Building Challenge’s chemicals Red List, empathized with designers who want to do the right thing but face some huge challenges when they try. He said he understood that the design community is daunted by the obstacle of sorting through volumes of lists, varying standards, certifications, materials evaluations, and possible greenwashing. “The reality of all of this must seem overwhelming to an architect on a deadline – you shouldn’t have to be a toxicologist to specify healthy building products,” said McClennan. “The paradigm is backwards. We shouldn’t have to go out of our way to specify healthy building materials. The opposite should be true.”

Williams pointed out that architects and specifiers have numerous resources at their disposal to ascertain which ingredients should be avoided without having to fully grasp the science. These resources include the Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Project with its comprehensive chemicals library of more than 22,000 materials profiled; the EPA BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) 4.0 software and the S.I.N. (Substitute It Now) List, an NGO-driven project based in Sweden to speed up the transition to a toxic-free world.

Walsh reminded us that the volunteers of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative are working to remedy this challenge with their HPD Open Standard, a universal format that systemizes reporting language to enable transparent disclosure of building product content and associated health information. The HPD collaborative is comprised of a group of green building industry leaders who spent a year developing the standard, which launched last November.

A month later HKS sent an open letter to manufacturers requesting that they disclose the chemical contents in their products through the Health Product Declaration Collaborative. Since then, several other design firms have issued similar letters. The marketplace is taking notice. Manufacturers are reaching out to learn more about our goals.

In discussing concerns over VOCs, halogenated flame retardants and chlorine-based plastics, Walsh explained that “… we’re very early in the science of chemical impact, and the unknowns of the multigenerational impact of chemical exposure on people, but sunlight is the best disinfectant. We’re working toward a labeling-and-certification program that fully aligns with other systems, like the Living Building Challenge.”

While the chemical industry has been reluctant to open up, said Williams, there’s good reason for optimism. With the growing demand for greater ingredient transparency in all we consume and use from all sectors of the building industries, the voices of architects and designers, companies demanding green office space, policymakers, health and green advocates and, most important, consumers are being heard.

“I’ve had some extremely positive conversations with CEOs – there’s a noticeable market shift here and in Europe, especially in retail,” said Williams. He added that progressive companies like Google do not allow their workplaces to include substances on the LBC’s Red List.  Early on, he says his firm recognized the advantage of disclosing the chemical contents of its products.

All of us agreed that progress is being made toward improved transparency. And the power of actions taken by architects and specifiers will lead to more rapid change. A holistic approach to the problem among those pressing for the disclosure of product ingredients, consumer demand, manufacturers with credible and realistic answers from their supply chains all contribute to creating safer, cleaner products.

We as architects have the power to seek out and specify healthier building materials. It’s our fundamental responsibility as design professionals to do so. Simply put, 21^st century buildings must show a deep understanding of much more than energy conservation. Our buildings need to address the long-term wellbeing of life (human and otherwise) and the environment that supports all living creatures.

Kirk Teske, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, principal and chief sustainability officer at HKS, a design firm based in Dallas. He is president of the AIA Dallas Chapter. Find Kirk at kteske@hksinc.com, www.hksinc.com and @KirkTeske on Twitter.

Other points of view about HPD -

The furniture manufacturer.

The chairman.

The founder of the Healthy Building Network.

The sustainable healthcare design leader.

Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group

Jared Green: You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

Kevin Shanley: There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost.

So will there be a diversion from Sandy? Yes. North Korea is percolating, and, now we’re focused on whether or not something terrible will happen there? As is the case with media and big events, each successive one diverts energy and intellectual focus from the present problem—in this case, Hurricane Sandy. Sandy will be forgotten in the national attention, and unfortunately at the local level, attention might diminish as well. While there will be some good policy people working at it, and the number of people personally affected won’t forget, our national focus on Sandy will fade. In some respects, the recovery is amazing. The human species is amazingly resilient. The Bolivar Peninsula was wiped clean. Today, you wouldn’t know it. People have rebuilt right there in exactly the same place. It’s phenomenal. The key is finding a way to rebuild strategically and learn lessons from these disasters to shape our future plans. We also need to find a way to take a long-term view on many of these problems.

JG: The New York Times reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to spend $400 million to buy up homes in New York City, demolish them, and then preserve the flood-prone land as undeveloped coastline. The idea is to spend some big bucks to turn some coastal areas into wetland or parkland. Does this approach make sense? Can this model be realistically scaled-up elsewhere in the U.S.? What are the alternatives?

KS: It’s a potentially very powerful tool. Speaking globally, the British and Dutch have been at it for decades. It’s called “managed retreat.” It’s about getting out of harm’s way. FEMA has been funding buyouts like that for a while now. It’s a really good program to remove the most at-risk structures, particularly federally-insured structures that time after time are repeat sinks for federal flood insurance claims.

What needs to be thought about, however, if you’re talking about scaling it up, is how to replace the economic value of the development that’s being removed from harm’s way. It’s about the loss of tax revenue. There are sales taxes based on the occupants, all kinds of revenue to the community. This revenue pays for schools, sewer systems, security, and all of the other things that we take for granted in government. Coastal real estate is expensive because it’s attractive. If you take that out of the equation, you’ve got to be ready to think how to replace that. That’s the challenge facing all of us. Great ecological strategies need to be considered economically, and vice versa.

JG: New York City seems to be seriously considering using “soft” green infrastructure instead of “hard” infrastructure, like hugely expensive seawalls, to protect against another disaster. In a recent Metropolis magazine piece, Susannah Drake, ASLA, ASLA NY Chapter president, described soft infrastructure as “transforming the waterfront from a definitive boundary into a subtly graded band.” The Dutch are already moving ahead with this kind of infrastructure, having seen the ecological damage caused by hard infrastructure. Will American policymakers ever buy into this?

KS: Soft green infrastructure along coastal fringe areas can play a really important role in restoring ecological functions to our coastlines. Our coastlines have been severely degraded from an ecological performance standpoint. Green infrastructure as protection for urban areas needs really serious science and engineering studies to figure out the effectiveness of the interventions across different scenarios. Just how effective is a coastal marsh of several hundred yards wide? We’re not talking about miles wide. We’re talking probably several hundred yards or hundreds of feet. What is the benefit to, say, Manhattan? How does that compare to other strategies? Can we take a blended approach to soften our edges and create redundant and resilient strategies?

I’ve seen some beautiful renderings of the edge of Manhattan as it could be. There would be dramatic changes in ecological performance and a transformation in public perception about the city as a green place. There are a lot of wonderful aspects to this. But from a surge and hurricane risk-protection standpoint, we need to be careful not to set up false expectations. To what extent do coastal marshes protect us when a surge comes in that is 15 or 20 feet above those marshes? The green infrastructure could impede the wave action and the movement of the water or even exacerbate the run-up of a surge in shallow waters. The Gulf Coast of the North American continent has a long, shallow coastal run-up, which tends to exacerbate wind-driven surge.

We need to ask specific questions about where the benefits are. We need to ask our scientists, engineers, policymakers, and economists if we are looking at increased sea-level rise rates that are projected to be about a meter every 100 years (three feet every 100 years). Also, rising water levels drown coastal marshes. That’s what has happened in the Galveston Bay complex. Because of subsidence caused by groundwater withdrawal, we lost square miles of emergent coastal marsh. The bottom dropped out and it drowned the marshes. How does this progression work? One can say, “Well, the marsh will just march inland.” Well, will it? Does the actual geography allow it to just march inward? Will there be a period where there’s nothing and then it has to get above a small bluff elevation? Those are important questions to ask if we’re talking about putting really significant resources into this green infrastructure approach to improving coastal resiliency.

Galveston Texas Galveston Island State Park near the gulf of Mexico / Chris Cornwell. Flickr

JG: Respected scientists argue that sea levels could rise four feet by 2100. If any of the recent hurricanes to hit the U.S. had occurred at higher sea levels, the damages would have been that much more extensive and costly to repair. What are you hearing about seal level rise? How does this change the timeline for action on improving coastal resiliency?

KS: Sea level rise is like watching the hour hand move. We are like grammar school students: the hour hand doesn’t seem to move during class. Our time horizons are measured in just a few years at best. If we’re forward-thinking, we might think out 10 years. The meaningful impacts of sea level rise, the really serious impacts are happening right now, but this is a process that’s been going on for thousands of years, millennia, actually millions of years.

Are anthropomorphic forces going to increase the rate of change? It’s a really good question and there are certainly many scientists who think that the burning of all this fossil fuel is increasing carbon dioxide, which is increasing the temperature of the globe, which is melting the icecap and raising sea levels. Will public policymakers be able to think out beyond a year or even 10 years to 100-year thresholds? The dialogue is there, but I don’t see it coming down to meet real public policy changes yet.

There are outliers in the predictive scientific community who suggest the possibility that if the Greenland icecap, which is the big gorilla in the room, increased its rate of melt or disintegrated due to some threshold that we’re not sure about, sea levels could rise very rapidly within an individual’s lifetime. It could be a disaster. Would we be prepared for that? Absolutely not. As somebody who thinks about public policy, I think we should be running scenarios. We are uncertain as to the disposition of our climate and sea levels. When you’re not sure of something you should be thinking about different scenarios. You should be thinking “Well, what if it’s only three feet in 100 years? What do I need to do? But what if it’s six feet? What if it’s 10 meters, 30 feet, in 100 years? What should I do?” This dialogue should be occurring so that if the natural world presents us with an existential challenge at least some part of the community has been grappling with it and may have some appropriate paths to take.

JG: You’ve been a long-time advocate for using natural systems to deal with water. In a recent article in The Huffington Post you write that Houston and other cities along the Galveston Bay rely on “antiquated storm-protection techniques and land practices doomed to repeated failures.” What’s needed are “policy shifts rooted in a natural systems-approach that work with nature’s tremendous forces.” What’s holding back these policy shifts? Where are the biggest obstacles at the federal and local levels?

KS: The biggest obstacle is the lack of public awareness. FEMA creates flood-risk maps or flood insurance rate maps. In the coastal areas of North America they are woefully inadequate. FEMA realizes that and they’re in the process of updating them. In our region we haven’t seen the updates. We’re waiting with bated breath. We’re not sure we’ll entirely agree with their characterization of risk. Large swaths of the community rely on this public information to advise them about the level of risk. They look at the maps and say “I’m not at risk,” whereas actual surge models being prepared show huge areas are at risk. So, first there has to be clear science that determines what defines the level of risk.

Second, there needs to be clear communication about the risks. That can be through things like flood insurance rate maps, but it also needs to be through public education and policy. There needs to be clear disclosure on every real estate transaction. There was an effort in the Clear Lake City area, which is in the Houston metro region where NASA’s Johnson Space Center is located. They actually put up signs, little colored pylons that indicated “This is the water level for a category four storm. This is the water level for a category five storm.” These little pylons were 10 feet tall and very clear. You see it there and you would wonder, “Gee, should I buy a house here?” or certainly “Gee, should I make sure I renew my flood insurance?” A local politician, at the behest of the real estate community, insisted they be taken down.

JG: Beyond research you’ve also made these natural systems work in real-world landscapes. The Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston really set the example for how to turn a trash-soaked eyesore into a beautiful piece of parkland that also supports flood control. Houston seems to really understand the value of this kind of multi-use infrastructure. What led to the changes in Houston’s approach to its waterways and green space?

KS: Houston is just beginning to learn the value of its waterfront real estate and for Houston it’s the value of our rivers and streams (we call them bayous).

ASLA 2009 General Design Award of Excellence. Buffalo Bayou Promenade. SWA Group / Bill Tatham

A lot of cities around the country are actually way ahead of Houston in having recognized that value, whether it’s a coastal waterfront or a river waterfront. In Houston, the new riverfront has been the result of years of work by lots of individuals, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. Each main bayou in the city has its own citizen advocacy organizations. Some of them are fairly significant and have permanent staff, whereas others are purely volunteer citizen groups. There have been willing ears in the public agencies. More recently, there has been support at an elected official-level, including a very supportive mayor right now. That’s very encouraging. But we have a long ways to go. We’re just starting on this effort. We have 2,000 miles of open stream channels in Harris County alone, so we’re just beginning.

JG: You’ve done a lot of work in China. What is your impression about how they are approaching coastal resiliency? Is there a uniquely Chinese approach to these issues that we can learn from in the West?

KS: The universe of what’s going on in China is amazing. You might think “Ah, Beijing controls everything. They can tell everyone what to do.” Well, it actually doesn’t work like that. The local government officials can have a surprising amount of independence and resistance to federal or provincial policies. There’s that normal political friction that happens between different units of government. Good policies are being generated at the federal level, at the Beijing level; good policies are being generated at provincial levels. Good policies and projects are being implemented at local municipal levels. That’s exciting news.

The country is doing great wetlands restoration projects. Wetland parks are all the rage across China. Kongjian Yu, FASLA, principal at Turenscape and professor at Beijing University, probably has a dozen wetland parks on his desk in his office at any given time. We’re working on a number of them. It puts to shame anything we’re doing here. On the other hand, one has to balance that against the unbelievable rate of urbanization and its impact on the environment in China. It’s maybe only a drop in the bucket toward mitigating the impacts of urbanization that are going on right now.

Fuyang Waterfront Park / SWA Group

The good thing is they’re very interested in the topic. The people that we work with, which is a very self-selected group who are willing to pay a foreign consultant to come and advise them, are already interested. I have a biased view… I could paint this rosy picture of China because we go over there and we are talking to people that share our environmental values. But there are many who don’t share those values and that are in business just like in any country anywhere in the world. They’re just trying to add value and sell that value and profit and move on to the next project.

You take the whole climate issue in China. China’s doing some of the most progressive carbon-capture energy production in the world. For a while, they were the largest producer of solar cells. They’re the largest producer of wind generating equipment. There are all these sort of extremes of what they are doing. Yet in the global sense, they’re producing more carbon dioxide than anybody on a more rapid basis. They’re increasing their carbon and energy footprints. They’re still below us on a per-capita basis, but they’re working very hard to catch up to our own huge footprints. So you will find a really mixed bag in China.

What can we learn from China? We ought to be studying what they are doing right and trying to learn from their successes. To the extent they’re interested in partnering so they can learn from us, we ought to be sharing those solutions with them. It’s a wild ride, like a rollercoaster, and one who’s end we can’t see from our vantage point.

Jared Green is editor of The Dirt, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). The Dirt covers news on the built and natural environments.

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This post is syndicated with The Dirt, a weekly news site focused on the built and natural environments with feature stories on landscape architecture; it explores design and policy developments related to land and water use, urbanization, transportation, and climate change.

That groundbreaking piece of legislation is currently threatened. A new energy bill is circulating through Congress called the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013. According to durabilityanddesign.com, the proposed bill, sponsored by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rob Portman (R-OH), “would promote greater use of energy efficiency technology in commercial and residential buildings…”

But of course in the loopy, cynical, alternate reality of Washington, there’s a catch: the AGA is now pushing to include an amendment in the new bill, or introduce separate legislation, that would weaken or eliminate Section 433. Last week more than 350 of our leading architectural, engineering, design, consulting, and construction firms presented a letter to Congress protesting the move. It’s a veritable who’s-who of the built environment, with one conspicuous absence: the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

What gives? When asked about their glaring absence, Roger Platt, Senior Vice President Global Policy & Law at the USGBC, responded, “I wouldn’t read a thing into not being on that particular letter. We’re fully in support of all federal policies that have helped make the vision of the 2030 Challenge so consequential, including those in Section 433. We’re in continuing communication with Rep. Wyden’s office and many other members of the committee, and will be sending in our letter. This is a crucial debate. In our communications, we’re also looking at the short term consequences of the attacks on sustainability that this Senate debate has provoked, not the least of which is an effort to ban the use of LEED by the Federal government.”

Ironically, the attack on Section 433 is actually a sign of progress. “Building sector energy consumption and projections are trending dramatically downward,” Edward Mazria says. “Although it’s cause for celebration for the rest of us, it’s worrisome to the gas and fossil fuel industry.”

Mazria maintains that the building sector is transforming so rapidly it’s ahead of 2030 targets:

“As a result, we have no need to add more electricity generating capacity—additional power plants—to service the Building Sector today, or in the near future. In fact, if we incorporate the ‘best available demand technology’ in our building designs (roughly equivalent to meeting the 2030 Challenge targets), we can reduce the 2030 Building Sector’s energy consumption even further.

It is fair to conclude, given what we know about our continuing reductions in building energy consumption, the American Gas Association is running scared and pushing for repeal of Section 433 to derail our progress and thereby secure a continued demand for natural gas.

What other reason could there be for crashing our celebration party?”

The accompanying graph shows where energy consumption for the building sector is headed, and why the American Gas Association is working so hard to snatch environmental defeat from the jaws of impending victory.

The chart demonstrates the steadily improving Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) for the building sector. At each interval measured, buildings have become more efficient. The gap between the most recent projected 2013 AEO, and the projected 2005 AEO represents the added savings gained through better building design, and low and renewable energy systems.

Kids are now writing their own code for school projects and the position of ‘programmer’ in archi-firms has been virtually absorbed by the designers themselves. In essence, the barrier for entry into developer circles is almost zero. SOM, now in collaboration with CASE (a building information modeling consultancy based in New York City), are now faced with the question: “Why are we inventing tools that already exist?”

This collaboration has given birth to a new interface, AEC-APPS, described as “part Wikipedia, part GitHub,” which will create a library of digital tools for both users and makers alike. Additionally, there is also a strong social component that makes it easier to find the perfect tool, and begins to outline the collaborative mentality among the BIM community, much like that of contemporary programmers. Through crowd sourcing from members, users not only stay informed but also feed a community voice that, if loud enough, could sway software vendors to the demand of the users.

This collective influence has the strength of creating feedback loops within the system, providing the site with the power of becoming the “cradle to grave of tools,” and potentially instilling the decency of democracy into the BIM software market. Although saturated with grassroots programs, there is also a shortage of vendors providing for the design sphere, now monopolized by the big names like Rhino and AutoDesk’s Revit. Introducing both scales of tools as equals, AEC-Apps gives the underdogs a leg-up.

In this fusion of “us” and “them” – grassroots and vendors, architects and programmers – AEC-Apps has the potential of mediating between dualities that are already intensely close; as well as creating efficiency in finding the app that you know already exists. Ultimately, admit Nicholas Holt from SOM and David Fano from CASE, that the app will provide the freedom for digital tools to be artful. “Like Leonardo da Vinci who [made] paints from things he [found] in the hills of Italy,” note the collaborators, digital tools are the raw ingredients that should be curated to the needs of each specific vision – a flexibility that their website begins to envision.

Alex Garkavenko is a graduating senior in architecture at Parsons School of Design in New York. She is both a designer and writer, with particular interest in contemporary issues facing architecture, urban and product design.

In their innovative study, Body, Memory, and Architecture, architects Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore spell out how the experience of architecture originates as a body’s responses – how architecture is, in a sense, a “body-centered” art. They distill our enormously complex human nature into convincing insights, and the ways they trace out their significance make their insights immediately available to apply in practice.  The basic ideas, once they have been stated, may seem simple and obvious–fact, they have been exploited brilliantly by artists, designers, and critics.  Yet the power of the insights to steer designs into more satisfying, humane environments – from grand monuments to livable communities – is more often mysteriously neglected.

This is a mystery to me because generations of educators and students have had readily available Geoffrey Scott’s extraordinary The Architecture of Humanism.  The first of many popular editions was published in 1914.

The Architecture of Humanism

In clear and persuasive language, Scott describes the pleasure, the “delight,” we can take in the art of architecture – the line, mass, space, and coherence of the form itself – as we transcribe the compositions of physical contours “into terms of ourselves and ourselves into terms of architecture.”

“The whole of architecture is,” Scott says “invested by us with human movement and human moods, given clarity and value by our intellect.”  And he summarizes this way:  “The humanist instinct looks in the world for physical conditions that are related to our own. For movements which are like those we enjoy, for resistances that resemble those that can support us, for a setting where we should be neither lost nor thwarted.  It looks, therefore, for certain masses, lines and spaces, and tends to create them and recognize their fitness when created.  And, by our instinctive imitation of what we see, their seeming fitness becomes our real delight.”  This, he says, is “the natural [spontaneous] way of receiving and interpreting what we see… This is the humanism of architecture.”

He describes how, without conscious effort, we follow lines of paths and sculptural gestures, tracing out with moving eyes their orientation, extension, and interpenetration until resolved.  And, within our bodies, we sense the movement as an eloquent line “speaks to us.”  And mass, its contours and dimensions in light and shade, is sensed – like a human body – in terms of its unity, stability, and proportions, and at the same time its pressing weight, balance, and support, as if they were forces we feel acting on ourselves.  Likewise, the configuration of spaces are sensed in terms of the body’s potential movement or repose – open-ended or enclosed and secure – with the resulting clarity and pleasure, or contradiction and confusion.

Then, what the body senses and feels, the mind tries to understand, and together they bring into play our capacities and memories to find or invent coherence – intelligible, usable patterns and order – just as we experience in ourselves a consistent cohesive presence, or literally, a person-ality.

Palladio’s Villa Capra, “La Rotonda” near Vicenza in Italy.

For some of us, this is a narrow, essentially sculptural definition of architecture. And perhaps because Scott was writing in Italy as a colleague of Bernard Berenson and a literary rival of Ruskin’s, he narrows his view further to the classical tradition in design – Greece, Rome, and 400 years of Renaissance architecture.  He dismisses both medieval traditions and the 19^th and 20^th centuries’ romanticism as “misplaced logic.”  But the long and versatile life of the classical forms, designed “when thought itself was humanistic,” still tells his story today.  “The center of that architecture was the human body,” he says, and when we feel an arch “spring,” a line “soar” or a dome “swell” the body responds before we grasp the cultural messages and meanings.

Scott calls this response “unconscious mimetic instinct,” and recent studies of the brain show what is happening. First, we spontaneously tend to mimic, to mirror – reflect – the movements and feelings we sense in both the people and places around us.  And second, in order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of sensations, we are continually mapping in our whole body neurosystem, a representation – a simulation – of our surroundings. It’s in that “embodied simulation” – the same predilections/capability widely used in sports training – that we fix in our memory, predict what will or could happen next and then take action.  Third, simply intending or imagining action – exploring, soaring, falling, relaxing – activates brain regions that are involved in the actual physical movements themselves.  Those sensations naturally arouse memories and reasoning, and trigger the body chemistry that diffuses through the mind and body as pleasure, confidence, anxiety, fear, curiosity or desire. The end result may be as fleeting as a quick navigational decision or as lasting as an aesthetic experience.  But the response is not optional; it’s everyday life.

An organizing metaphor

The important point, extended and studied further by Bloomer and Moore, is that the evolved body is the primary medium for an experience of the built environment. And the mind uses that physical experience, past and present, as the most reliable basis and, in a sense, an organizing metaphor – a kind of instinctive frame of reference – for understanding, judging, and designing the built environment.  They apply, too, the work of contemporary philosophers and creative social scientists – the cutting edge of their moment – bypassing the dead-end idea that the body is separated from, and somehow “inferior” to the mind.

In a sense, they spell out the visceral components of responses like those explored in Places/people on earlier posts.  And I would add the idea that this organizing metaphor, together with our superb detection skill, inescapably guides interactions with all of our environments – not only the places we build, but also with people, with nature, and with our own mental, intellectual environments, “in here.”  Then their combined insights seem to me to lead in the interesting, productive directions that I outline and expand on here.

A psychophysical framework

Bloomer and Moore describe how we tend to – are predisposed to – identify and interpret our surroundings in terms of our body’s own three-dimensional experience – four, for those who want to think of movement and time as a “dimension.”  As we interact with environments and create the mental map of our total body, based on what we have learned it is and can do, that map structures how we see the world – with “me” at the center and extensions out into “my” perimeter – as we feel ourselves connecting and becoming an integral part of our surroundings.

The map tends to be made up of a unified perception of boundaries, dimensions, and coordinated parts, connected by centers and joints, plus rhythms and a sense of sequences as time passes.  It’s the source of the edges-paths-nodes-landmarks-districts language that Kevin Lynch uncovered and codified, and it’s disciplined by an awareness of our own specific physical capabilities and the resulting patterns of cause-and-effect. When the senses are alerted by a built environment, that map – and I would add the stories we build within it – as much as, and often more than the place itself, is what animates the neural networks that become our “experience.”

Jefferson’s University of Virginia – the human psychophysical framework in practice – with its heart/lawn, topped by the domed head/library flanked by colonnades/arms, and a framed vista reaching out, extending its boundaries into – in his design and in his policies – the open continental frontier that became America.

Boundaries: Extensions of Ourselves

Our constant awareness of the body’s physical boundary – the separation between internal and external – together with the reach of our senses beyond, underlie a spontaneous, imaginative extension of ourselves into space.  In this sense our boundaries are flexible, and they’re determined only when we actually enter relationships – interact – with a place.  This phenomenon has become part of the conventional wisdom since such studies as “The Hidden Dimension,” “Personal Spaces,” “The Territorial Imperative,” or William Whyte’s research on public places. They’ve shown how most of us inevitably and fatefully define, possess, and defend a larger, inviolable “turf” that is part of “me.”

The actual dimensions and meanings attributed to the extended space naturally vary across cultures and depend on the setting – among friends or strangers, isolated in broad open spaces, jostled in the brotherhood of stadium crowds or the voluptuous body heat of a ballroom.  In our culture, we tend to define an intimate dimension by “arm’s length” or less, and informal, social, “conversational” distance up to about 12 feet in front us; the shrinking of these distances is a distinctive quality of many other cultures and essentially all festival, and celebration places.

But to understand experience and responses it’s important to recognize that we extend the sense of a “personal” space out along the pathways we’ve learned to other environments, especially where we have experienced emotional rewards and successes – work places, clubs, favorite landscapes, or the center of our village. We live, in a sense, in an environment defined by the boundaries of our actions.

In exploratory moods, we welcome, too, the fluidity and mystery of blurred boundaries – like the courtyards, arcades or porches where boundaries are intended to overlap, or the ambiguity of fenced perimeters intended to unify college campuses. Those semi-secure boundaries at Harvard’s Yard and its Houses invite diverse, improvised responses like the overlaps of college life with Harvard Square, and then, as they’re extended out along the Charles River – and the regional “T” and streets – personal perimeters become as open-ended as an imagination.

The Charles River, extending the boundaries of Harvard College life as open-ended as an imagination.

Marking out boundaries tends to be the first step in defining a home.  And the vocabulary of the edges dominates the scene with walls, gates, or levels of stewardship. They’re marked most emphatically, of course, at the places we expect to protect – with a defensible perimeter at “my” room, a family’s home site and its vistas – its refuge and prospect extended out to the neighborhood – or a walled city, national border, or sanctified ground. We routinely calibrate those distances and mark their edges with physical forms or symbols that match the level of expected threats or intended invitations.  And those boundary lines, especially “my” property lines, are the essential act of settlement.  Once mapped, they are among the most permanent human marks ever made on the land – in cities and over countrysides.

Boundaries: Coherence

In a parallel way we welcome the clarity of a taut fitted skin of shingle-style houses, the undulating, “living” skin of a Baroque church inside and out, or the tall hedges of Southampton. In those unequivocal boundaries we sense a coherence, like the body we experience within our own enveloping skin, yet because it is the breaks in any unified boundary that are the principal clues for predicting how to use or navigate through a place, we take pleasure in discovering and exploring them. We see “invitations” into complex, layered spaces – the vistas through colonnades into linked courtyards or cloisters, glass walls, tree lined meadows, shuttered porches in hot climates or the continuous transparent iron balconies that define the edges of New Orleans’ streets.  And the pleasure is doubled when we find nested within them a coherent, comfortable sanctuary.

The “living” skin of a Baroque church – San Carlos alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.

Boundaries:Design criteria

The recognition of extended personal space by designers is now commonplace when setting out criteria for built environments –in precise, carefully graded zones and perimeters of personal, family or public space, indoors and out; in personal space-allowances for crowded concourses, playing fields or parks; in criteria for privacy and personal expression at work spaces; or security provided by a prospect – eyes-at-the-window that overlook and protect “our turf” on the public street.

In reverse, we attribute boundaries and fields of influence in and around the architecture, landscapes, and settlements we build. Feeling as uneasy with crowding and invasion of their “turf” – their dignity – as we do our own, we design buffers and defend setbacks extending the protected boundaries of the environments we value – from a homesite to National Parks or historic battlegrounds.

The innate propensity to draw boundaries naturally creates conflicts – on the ground, of course, but also in a mind where they become obstacles to more effective built environments.  This is one more case where the defensive pride of individual designers or our guild-like professions, and more profoundly the binary thinking that denies the facts of ecology, setting apart “human” from “nature” – or a mind from the body – obscures an essential unity.

The important point here is that the boundaries we recognize confer a sense of possession.  They define “me” versus “others” and gain added power when felt to be ancestral, traditional or sacred – in other words linked to a family’s genes’ survival.  As a result, a challenge can ignite instant passions, violence or group solidarity, and the high value placed on boundaries can be read in the mass of legislation governing land ownership and use and measured even more precisely by prices paid for secluded privacy or extended boundaries – spaciousness – indoors and out.

In other words, we move through a world organized by the boundaries that we perceive, starting with our own. And the energy each of us invests in identifying and defending them sets up, in a sense, overlapping, competing magnetic fields of varying strength that, attracting and repelling, shape our movements, experience and responses to the places we build.

* * * *

The next post continues exploring how we experience architecture in terms of our “psychophysical framework” – our three-dimensional coordinates, multiple centers and linked movements.

This is the eighteenth in a series of posts that spell out a set of ideas called A New Humanism: in architecture, landscapes, and urban design. They’re about enlarging the way we think about design by applying, in day to day practice, a broader range of insights into the cutting edge sciences of nature and human nature — using them to understand how our evolved mind-and-body actually experience the places we design, and why people respond the ways they do.

Robert Lamb Hart is a practicing architect and planner educated at Harvard GSD and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and a principal in Hart Howerton, a planning, architecture, and landscape design firm with an international practice out of offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Park City, and Boston. He believes that the design professions have been falling behind in their understanding of one of the defining enterprises of the Modern revolution, the application of the maturing, fast-moving sciences of ecology and human behavior — and the compromised results are showing.

Albrecht Pichler, who drew the sketches, is a practicing architect and a principal in Hart Howerton’s New York office.

Landscapes do not exist in isolation. They occupy a very specific spatial context. The materials of a landscape—furniture, paving, lighting, plants, etc.—are in constant conversation with their environs. So, the process of material selection typically requires that a landscape architect look beyond the project’s boundaries to understand how the materials will be integrated into the larger context. Sometimes, we want a material to fit in. At other times, we want it to stand out or contrast with the surroundings. A sensitive approach to material selection that allows for the preservation of a site’s character while modernizing other design features is often required when working on historic locales.

Contrary to what you might believe, contemporary furnishings can sometimes blend seamlessly with historic elements. This was true for our project at St. John the Divine, a massive and unfinished 1892 gothic cathedral in New York City. Our modern day challenge was to design a playground adjacent to this cathedral.

Children’s play equipment is typically bright, showy, and clunky, made to appeal to kids. So it may seem that playground equipment has little in common aesthetically with a gothic cathedral, but we argue that they actually share structural similarities–the steel frame of the play equipment and the buttresses and arches of the church.

The play equipment in the foreground reflects the gothic architecture of the adjacent cathedral while providing multi-faceted climbing surfaces.  Photo: Mathews Nielsen

Our design team worked with a playground equipment manufacturer to create clean, minimalist play pieces, their forms echoing the gothic arches, while providing plenty of child-friendly interactive forms and surfaces. The use of a single dark color created harmony between the equipment and the cathedral. This design element was extended to the fence at the perimeter of the play yard, enhancing the impression that both elements look like they belong.

The structure of the cathedral windows were translated into the fence panel. Photo: Mathews Nielsen

When we desire a material to blend in with its surroundings, landscape architects frequently call for it “to match existing,” though we know that there isn’t always a perfect match. What happens when existing material is from another century? Or, when rain, snow, sun, and traffic have transformed it so much that new material stands out like a sore thumb? Unfortunately, time machines haven’t hit the mass market, so we are forced to explore other options.

We faced these issues while working on a historic roadway renovation of Manhattan’s Washington Mews. The design included re-grading the roadway that comprised a patchwork of materials including Belgian block, basalt stone setts, bluestone slabs, and concrete. Our design team studied historic photos of the site to understand how the roadbed had been altered over time and to verify how long each material had been in place. We discovered that the patchwork of paving materials dated to 1933.

The historic significance of the materials lead to us decide to remove each stone type, take it offsite and store it, then bring it back and reset it at the new elevations. During this process, stones often crack or suffer damage, resulting in an overall material deficit for new construction. This leads to a search for materials to fill the gaps. Fortunately, used Belgian block is easy to come by in New York; it was historically used as ballast to add weight to ships. The bluestone slabs, a local stone that we sourced out of New York, were also an easy match. However, the basalt stone setts were much more challenging. Basalt is a local rock that was commonly used as a paving stone but not as pervasively as Belgian block. Therefore, the market for used basalt setts was negligible. So, the hunt began.

Comparing stones on site, the much taller stone in the middle is the original basalt block that was to be matched. Photo: Mathews Nielsen

We worked with several stone dealers to try to find a match for the basalt stone. Basalt pavers sourced out of Turkey seemed the most promising. When the supplier sent us photos of them, we thought our search was over. But when the shipment arrived, we discovered that the finishes were a total mismatch to the naturally aged basalt on site. And while working with a contractor, we realized that the existing stones were an average 8 inches deep, exceeding the depth needed for reinstallation. By simply cutting the stones in half, we doubled our existing stone stock and were able to make up the difference, avoiding the need to import more basalt.

The final roadbed. Photo: Mathews Nielsen

While the cut side of the stones lacked that special patina only years of exposure to New York street life can create, we are confident that they will age similarly over time and blend right in.

In our next Green Team post, we’ll discuss another common material found in landscapes across New York: stainless steel.

Johanna Phelps is a landscape designer at Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects in New York City. Since receiving her MLA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, she has worked on urban campus projects in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia, a botanic research institute in Texas, and a public plaza in Bilbao, Spain.

This is one in a series of Metropolis blogs written by members of Mathews Nielsen’s “Green Team,” which focuses on research as the groundswell of effective landscape design and implementation. Zeroing in on the design challenges the Green Team encounters and how it resolves them, the series shares the team’s research in response to project constraints and questions that emerge, revealing their solutions. Along the way, the team also shares its knowledge on plants, geography, stormwater, sustainability, materials, and more.

The landscaped courtyard—“The Yard”—provides space for fabrication and events.  Photograph: The Steel Yard

Along with Congo Street Initiative and Inspiration Kitchens, the Steel Yard incorporates the rehabilitation of existing buildings and the use of recycled materials; like Via Verde and Louisville Waterfront Park, it is a brownfield site. The unseasonably cold weather we’ve experienced on most of our trips persisted during our visit to Providence. While the outdoor courtyard was quiet, indoors, people were occupied with creative metalworking and craft making while we met with staff, board members, program partners, community representatives, and funders from the Steel Yard.

Welding classes and workshops are offered. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Located in Providence’s Industrial Valley along the Woonasquatucket River just west of downtown, the Steel Yard occupies the site of Providence Iron and Steel Company, a 100-year old business that closed in 2001.The property was purchased by two graduates of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), who lived in the adjoining Monohasset Mill artists’ live/work complex. The 3.5-acre site, with its gantry cranes and rough brick and metal buildings, became an ad hoc community and gathering space for people interested in creative, industrial arts.

The Steel Yard before site improvements and remediation.  Illustration: Klopfer Martin Design Group

The Steel Yard was incorporated into a nonprofit organization and subsequently hired an executive director to oversee expansion of the organization and the redevelopment of the site. Landscape architecture firm Klopfer Martin Design Group came on to develop a master plan that retained the rough, industrial character of the site while addressing the cleanup of contaminants generated by the former occupants. Remediation required compliance with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s (DEM) regulations, and months of education and negotiation with numerous environmental agencies including the Narragansett Bay Commission.

The master plan for the site. Illustration: Klopfer Martin Design Group

The resulting design, completed in 2010, is a creative response to strict regulatory requirements and the Steel Yard’s commitment to use the best sustainable practices possible within a tight budget. A minimal amount of the most contaminated soil was removed. The remainder was treated with a binder and consolidated and covered with clean soil and a combination of landscaping and paving to create nine different environmental caps in the process. Permeable paving reduces runoff, and the site is graded to create a moat that collects storm water, 90 percent of which remains in the area.

Landforms like this raised platform and moat address environmental remediation and stormwater runoff. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

The project’s landforms and variety of paving materials create visual interest and allow for numerous activities including tractor-trailer deliveries, product fabrication, display, and gathering spaces for events. Scrap metal is incorporated into retaining walls and railings. Native, easily colonized plants recreate the untended, “urban wild” look of the site prior to remediation. Hook-ups for future power and plumbing have been provided throughout the property to allow for future expansion of programming and facilities.

Gantry cranes and retaining walls of recycled steel recall the site’s heritage. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

A variety of paving materials create visual interest and serve as environmental caps. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

The Steel Yard seeks to foster the industrial arts and incubate small business within a creative environment of experimentation. Today, the campus offers industrial arts classes for adults and area youth, a work force training program, and fabrication space used by the organization and area artists. Through its Public Projects program, the Steel Yard works with local artists to design and produce custom-designed street furniture like bike racks, fencing and gates, trashcans, and tree guards that are positioned downtown and in city neighborhoods, recognized by their Steel Yard logo. The Steel Yard is host to numerous public events, including an annual Halloween Iron Pour, classic car shows, movie nights, private weddings, and other events.

A ceramics co-op offers workshop space for students and area artists. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Funding for the $1.2 million development included two EPA brownfield redevelopment grants. Ongoing operating and program support for the organization is provided by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, private donors, and partnerships with local businesses as well as earned income from classes, site rentals, and the Public Projects program.

In a few short years the Steel Yard has become a center for creative activity. It bridges the traditional arts community on Providence’s East Side with manufacturing businesses and the city’s industrial, lower income West Side. The project has received recognition for its innovative approach to site remediation, including a 2011 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and documentation as a case study for brownfield regeneration by the EPA and others. Investment in and redevelopment of the property and surrounding mill buildings reflect the city’s growing interest and pride in its industrial heritage and creative community.

The annual Halloween Iron Pour event features artists and live music. Photograph: The Steel Yard

Now that our site visits are complete, our Bruner Foundation team will take the information we’ve collected and prepare our report for our selection committee. The committee will meet in Oklahoma City this month to determine which of the five finalists will receive the Gold Medal and $50,000 and which will receive Silver Medal and $10,000 to forward their projects. Stay tuned!

Anne-Marie Lubenau, AIA, is director of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) for the Bruner Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An architect and advocate for educating and engaging people in design of the built environment, she is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and was a 2012 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

This post is part of a series written and curated by RBA that focuses on placemaking in American cities. The blogs offer a detailed look at the 2013 award selection process and site visits, case studies from past award winners, and highlights from events such as the Bruner-Loeb Forum.

Pavillion Elevation. Rendering by Local Office Landscape Architecture

A Miami Beach native whose inspiration is heavily influenced by her city’s abundance of nature, be it from the ocean or the flora, Oka Doner has left her mark on her home town, in projects like “Walk on the Beach,” the mile long floor installation that greets passengers at Miami International Airport.

When Armando Codina who, with his daughter Ana, is developing the Downtown Doral project, went looking for something that would make a statement about the new independent municipality, he was searching something that “would give it a heart.” Having chosen Oka Doner, he says, “She was the natural artist to do something special in our new city, so the selection was easy,” Codina explains. “Michele is a world-renowned artist whose roots are very much a part of the history of Miami–Dade, having grown up in Miami Beach,” he adds.

Designer artist Michele Oka Doner at her loft studio, in front of a scale drawing of maginification of nacre.  Photo: Paul Clemence

The Codinas hired Oka Doner to develop the plans for a pavilion and landscape of the downtown Doral Park, planned for the center of town and facing the new town hall as well as a mixed-use building.

The Doral is located where Miami meets the Everglades Reserve, where city meets wilderness, so its position inspired the idea for the park. The landscape is to be a dialogue between man’s works and nature’s processes. Parts of it will be manicured; parts of it will have a feeling of spontaneous growth. “I wanted something feral, something that spoke of the wilderness of the adjacent Everglades,” Michele told me when I recently visited at her work/live loft, amidst an inspiring array of drawings, books, sculptures, and an exquisite selection of her findings of and about nature, which she calls her “library of barks, shapes, and textures.”

Oka Doner’s Second Library, a repository of shapes, surfaces and materials.  Photo: Paul Clemence

Wall at Second Library.  Photo: Paul Clemence

The “feral” beauty will be the pavilion, designed to function as a band shell and a place for the community to gather. Inspired by two pieces of bark she found years ago in one of her many walks, the pavilion will be a tour de force of engineering–a solid concrete shell, poured-in-place in custom-routed formwork over reinforced steel. Half of the structure will support extensive epiphytic plantings (plants grown over other plants in a non-parasitic way); the other half will be covered by a layer of iridescent materials, like mica and mother-of-pearl.

To arrive at the architectural plans that could deliver an object as close as possible as the one envisioned by Oka Doner intuitive process was a long journey with lots of back-and-forth between high-tech, digital manipulation and analog processes of drawing and modeling. Jennifer Bolstad, a principal at Local Office Landscape Architecture (the landscape designers on the project) recalls their extensive research. “The process started with found objects from nature, selected by Michele, which was then scanned 3-dimensionally and manipulated digitally using 3D modeling software. Scale models were printed using the MakerBot 3D printer (a fellow Gowanus-based startup) and then these models facilitated collaborative, analog tweaking of the design using sculptural tools and methods.” She adds, “We went through a few iterations of this process before arriving at the final digital model, which was then sent on to the fabricator (who makes rocket parts for NASA and large-scale theme park characters for Disney World), to create the formwork molds for the concrete.” When I asked Jennifer about the collaborative process, she said, “Michele pushed us in new directions. We started with nature and engaged with new technologies to take that same nature to a new, civic, role.”

Bark piece and 3-D print model.  Photo: Paul Clemence

Pavilion Northeast and Northwest elevation.  Drawing by Local Office Landscape Architecture

Identifying with the idea of the total work of art, Oka Doner’s creations tie in with an unmistakable Gesamtkunstwerk thread. She applies her talents to almost every material possible, from bronze to glass, even paper, creating books, public art commissions, jewelry, and many other objects, functional or not, but always expressive. But with this project, her first free-standing structure, the artist brings her vision to a new level and scale, drastically broadening the scope for its application.

“Michele has given us something that I believe will become the symbol of Doral and is a piece that represents South Florida, our waters, our reefs, our hammocks, and the influence of our Everglades,” says Codina proudly of the design.

Downtown Doral Park section with Pavilion elevation. Rendering by Local Office Landscape Architecture

The late Balthazar Korab (the well known photographer and Michele’s friend from her Michigan days) famously said about himself: “I am an architect with a passion for nature’s lessons and man’s inventions.” At the pavilion, scheduled to be completed this summer, Michelle Oka Donner combines both of these passions, drawing on nature and bringing us full circle back to it as she creates the new.

Paul Clemence is an award-winning photographer whose work is part of many collections, including the Mies van der Rohe Archives and housed by MoMA, New York.  He exhibits both in the U.S. and on the international fine art circuit, from classic B & W prints to large scale photo installations. A published author, his work can also be seen in major design and lifestyle publications. His “Architecture Photography” Facebook page receives over half a million hits monthly.

How do we practice something we think we already do well? Most of us assume we are communicating clearly all the time. The problem with our communication is that we are fulfilling only half of the bargain; we have so much to say that we forget to listen (or we’re listening to ourselves). Yet, listening may be the most important element of collaboration. We credit ourselves with being attentive, but we recognize the real thing when we note: “She’s a good listener,” we inadvertently make an implicit confession; to listen well is rare.

The first step in listening well is simply to hear what someone is saying. The next step is to acknowledge what you “think” you’ve heard, and not simply by nodding in agreement – that is diplomacy. Echoing back to the speaker what you have understood reinforces the authenticity of the interaction and may clarify the message for others in the room. To listen effectively is to reflect just enough comprehension back to the speaker while devoting your attention to what is being said.

From the other side, to be listened to, fully and earnestly, is to be accepted. Real listening encourages and supports a deeper, mutual exchange. Of course, being heard is so unusual and so unexpected that it can also be uncomfortable. As mild panic settles in, we admonish ourselves: ‘Best say something useful!’

Opening the Door

Collaboration opens the door for more to enter. Inviting collaboration starts with the basics–hearing everyone introduce him- or herself. Further devices can be used to open things up. For example each participant might pin a thought, concern, or revelation anonymously to the wall. Barriers break down and people get more comfortable with one another. Later, each participant might put forward an alternative to the plan being discussed, or suggest three good reasons why a popular idea is mistaken.

Finding strengths and weaknesses becomes the shared work. Issuing an invitation to participate fully makes it possible to explore, weigh, and compare without injuring anyone’s self-esteem. The discussion becomes livelier, the results richer.

Useful Conflict

Now that the doors are open, we need to be prepared for whatever walks through – the good, the bad, the ugly … and it can get ugly. But that’s okay, because conflict is both unavoidable and essential in the context of collaboration. Until we push up against one another, until an earnest proposal meets an equally earnest rebuttal, we may be getting along, but we don’t know quite where we stand. Conflict can open a conversation about a fuller spectrum of possibilities. The acceptance of conflict demands openness.

Openness brings candor, candor brings conflict, and conflict signals that the collaboration is real. The problem is that conflict can remain under the radar, hidden in hallway conversations or whispered asides. Best to have it out in the open where it can be useful.

The Utility of Failure

Wrestling matches like this mean that ideas get pushed, tested, and strained. Failure results. The gurus of collaboration – like IDEO designer Tim Brown and education guru Ken Robinson – urge us to “fail early, and fail often.” Those most statistically successful collaborators – kindergartners – do not focus on failure at all. Their trials and errors are instead a seamless part of discovery (otherwise known as play). This works superbly for a short while until our parents, our educational system, and society at large indoctrinate us with definitions of right and wrong. Since acknowledgement of failure is a catalyst for any collaborative effort, pushing back against these powerful frameworks, while difficult, is essential to successful collaboration. We must accept inevitability of failure in order to transcend it. For those working alone, failure can be paralyzing. Members of a healthy collaborative group can insulate each other from fears that accompany failure. Nobody gets fired. All boats fall and rise with the tide.

Shared Aims

Collaboration requires a common aim – a direction – distinct from the tactical goals that support it. This defines a ‘page’ that everyone can turn to at the outset, the choirmaster’s C note that precedes the singing of the choir. Rather than restricting the conversation, a clearly articulated, shared aim, in fact, allows for more creative digression, offering wider insight and re-framing participation that may have appeared irrelevant.

The adoption of a shared aim carries with it a requirement: giving each participant a specific assignment. In sport, knowing your position and playing it promotes teamwork. The larger goal is to defeat the other team, but each player has different functions to perform to achieve it.

Improvisation

In the collaborative setting, people feel most comfortable when they know what their roles are and then use them as points of departure for lively, innovative play. The shared aim also allows for creative transcendence of “position” to generate unexpected combinations and creative results. Without a starting position, new alignments and combinations are not possible. We do not know where collaborative forces will lead. The unexpected strengths and interactions of the participants create endless possible outcomes that can’t be foreseen. Likewise, in jazz, an accepted tune or musical structure opens to tremendous freedom of expression in and around the implied form. The tune may never even be played … yet it remains present, the parent of delightful, improvisational offspring.

Tethered Digression

With improvisation comes digression. Not all digressions are created equal, since not every side trip is tethered to a common aim or “tune.” So often in a meeting, a wave of frustration rolls over us as someone wanders off the path of conversation. “Stick to the point!” we silently shout. It is true. Staying with the topic is essential to pushing things to a conclusion. Yet tethered digression may allow collaborators to discover useful territory that would have otherwise been overlooked. Creative collaboration must harness the forces of inevitable wandering and targeted “inefficiency.”

While the straight path marches towards the obvious horizon, divergence can broaden the field of vision. Meanwhile, it is not easy to pay attention when our fellow collaborators veer away from what we have been thinking. This again requires us to listen actively. As trust and familiarity and shared experiences accumulate, collaborators begin to trust ‘divergent’ detours and learn when and where to look for the ‘convergent’ pathways that allows a group to move forward.

Incentives

Collaboration demands extra time, money, patience, and energy. Is it worth it? Is it a luxury or a necessity? Are we wasting time or (ultimately) saving it? Is a collaborative effort the best response or a shallow compromise?

As long as participants view collaboration as an indulgence, they will gravitate toward the straightest path to completion. This will certainly yield a solution, but not necessarily the best one. For any collective effort that will require widespread support in the future, shortchanging the collaborative process could prove detrimental. The group may find itself reworking and backtracking in pursuit of consensus. This costs time and money. It is better to embrace the collaborative process from the beginning and get it right the first time.

When collaboration works, the results tend to be quietly durable; the conclusions balanced and robust. When collaboration is absent, the results can be disastrous. Like it or not, we are increasingly, inextricably connected to these disasters.

A Flood of Confusion

On Sunday, August 25, 2005, Hurricane Katrina reached Category 4 intensity, with winds gusting to over 215 mph. In so many ways, the federal, state, and city governments were unprepared for the disaster that followed. Worse, the official response was slow, uncoordinated, inefficient, and ineffective. The heroes who emerged were the first responders. Their stories of creative collaboration contrasted sharply with those in positions of governmental authority, whose lack of coordinated efforts seriously delayed rescue initiatives. A striking example was the initial refusal and late acceptance of international assistance by the U.S. government.

There are, of course, complex institutional and bureaucratic impediments to what might have been a more collaborative response. At the same time, we see the need for both individual and organizational collaboration as we prepare for and deal with the environmental shifts that are occurring more often.

Deep Trouble

The Gulf Coast disaster provides a persuasive example of the enormous costs of weak collaboration.

We do not have to look far to see the complexity and depth of our self-generated local and global problems: they monopolize the news. The British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that flowed for three months in 2010 was the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. For weeks, we collectively fell into the growing gap between our actual and imagined capabilities. We saw how we are inextricably connected to these failures of collaboration, how our fates are intertwined, and how we must meet these challenges together. If we believe the illusion that BP must solve its own problems alone, then we multiply the collective costs and undershoot collective potentials, and by wide margins. The BP spill left 4.9 million barrels of crude oil in a 580-square-mile section of the Gulf. Its effects will be felt for decades. Would the costs have been different in an environment that valued openness and collaboration?

Mining the Possibilities

There are, near at hand, instructive examples of our own potential to collaborate. The 2010 Chilean mining accident began when a collapse trapped 33 men 2,300 feet underground, where they survived for a record 69 days. Once they found the miners alive, the government took over the rescue from Compañía Minera San Esteban, a company notorious for its unsafe mines. Chilean authorities deployed three large drilling rig teams, nearly every government ministry, and sought the expertise of NASA along with that of more than a dozen international corporations.

Foreman Luis Urzúa’s levelheadedness and humor was instrumental in keeping the miners focused on survival. He credited the majority decision-making techniques employed in the collapsed tunnel for the positive esprit de corps and the group’s dedication to a common goal. “Everything was voted on. … We were 33 men, so 16 plus one was a majority.” Did the collaborative actions of these desperate men waste time, or buy it?

False Security

Are the rest of us really so different? Look at Fukashima’s Tepco nuclear reactor meltdown. Many concerns had been raised about plant safety in Japan, and many inspection reports had been falsified. The conversation about nuclear power was highly constrained and hierarchical…and it resulted in a massive gamble. A Japanese calamity becomes a global calamity. We are all starting to look a bit like a miner; we are stuck, the familiar tools and remedies no longer available. Someone said that there are no natural disasters, just natural events with dire human consequences. If every disaster is man-made, perhaps by working together, some of them might be un-made.

NEW DIRECTIONS

While creating Collaboration we often felt like we were stating the obvious – and we are. It feels obvious because we think we know how to collaborate, though we may have forgotten a few details. We think we collaborate all the time – and tell ourselves (and everyone else) that we do it so well. But the way we actually work tells a different tale. You might recall the parable of the blind men and the elephant. A group of blind men encounter an elephant and describe it very differently. Each experiences something completely unique – a tree trunk, a snake, a gurgling ocean, a rope – and a few were wildly poetic, beyond what anyone might see. In sum, their limited observations yielded a more complete picture of what was there, but without a collaborative lens to focus these impressions into a coherent whole, we are lost in the dark. If we do not make a concerted effort to share our perspectives, our world will be (like that of the blind men) small, subjective and incomplete.

We each have much to give. True collaboration creates the territory in which our individual talents, ideas, and energy harmonize with those of the wider community. Every voice has something to add, but you must speak to be heard. Collaboration is extraordinary when we participate knowingly and whole-heartedly, calling upon every resource. By sounding such a simple note, we hope to resonate with others who suspect that it is more fun, and often more beautiful to play together. Thank you for playing!

Barry Svigals, FAIA, writes about the origins of the book, Collaboration: “The idea of the book emerged from a wonderful collaboration with Trina Learned, who lured me into a presentation at the national convention of the Society of College and University Planners. Trina spearheaded the initial effort, however the book clearly required another level of involvement. Enter Maria Verrier and Jon Calame. What transpired was a gradual evolution of the most blissful working relationship I have ever experienced.  Along the way and most assuredly at the finale, we had the creativity and editing talents of Randall Hoyt, graphic designer and long-time conspirator on other projects. Although as far as we know he has never written explicitly about collaboration, we must mention the name of Sir Ken Robinson. His ideas, spirit, and delightful humor came into our conversations so often; we could not fail to include him. Last, I want to acknowledge the patient forbearance of my partners at our architectural practice of Svigals + Partners, Jay Brotman and Bob Skolozdra, who took up the slack as I engaged in what was not immediately contributing to our bottom line. They believe as I do in the profound necessity to work and play together. In the spirit of collaboration, we are all thankful.”

Link to The DNA of Collaboration