Favorite Architecture and Urbanism Posts for Week of Nov. 5, 2012

Preserving and maintaining Wright. An app for ecological urbanism. Soaking it up in Philly. Balancing design and value.

Frank Lloyd Wright conservancy. Build was invited by Larry Woodin, president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Tracy House in Normandy Park near Seattle. Build also talked to Woodin about how he got interested in architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright, and how he leads the charge on saving Wright houses from demolition.

Woodin discusses preservation and maintenance. “Maintenance is the priority. We must first ensure stability of the structure and provide the necessary upgrades. If the house is properly cared for, it’ll last a long time. Preservation and refinishing come after basic maintenance, and this includes adding elements that were in the original drawings but not built at the time (likely for reasons of cost). It’s important to draw that line and not do anything that we merely think Wright would have wanted but didn’t document.” – Larry Woodin

Via Build LLC Blog

App for sustainable urban design. Ryan Cunningham blogs about a new app called Ecological Urbanism created by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, which is the start of a deep dive into innovation research with real prospects for finding urban sustainability treasure.

“The app is well mixed with information; with staple projects like the High Line and Masdar, and exotic new discoveries like “Effectual Decentralization,” a project in Argentina that plans urban subdivision by watersheds. The information has a Wikipedia like feel, but the target of innovative hits a well curated mark; nothing less then what you’d expect from Harvard.” – Ryan Cunningham

Via Metropolis POV

Competition to soak up water. The design competition, Infill Philadelphia: Soak it Up!, sponsored by the Philadelphia Water Department, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Community Design Collaborative seeks to inspire teams of landscape architects, architects, and engineers to offer up sustainable, low-cost ”green stormwater infrastructure.”

The competition is part of a broader initiative in Philadelphia to use green infrastructure to revitalize communities. Bold, new ideas that come out of the programs will also be critical to “the implementation of Green City, Clean Waters, the city’s innovative, sustainable 25-year plan,” according to competition organizers.

Via The Dirt

More than a little paint. Nick Konen, marketing manager at HDR, blogs on his experience and lessons learned from flipping houses, and how those lessons can be applied to HDR clients.

“Our philosophy was to fix each house to a standard that we would feel comfortable living in. But design decisions become a bit more complex when you know how it affects potential profit. We spent time looking for the best value. At the check-out line, we would think twice before spending “a little extra” on kitchen tile. You can’t underestimate the importance of design. But at the same time, you can’t lose focus on the goal…to make money. It’s a delicate balance that requires both left and right brains.” – Nick Konen

Via Blink Perspectives on Design

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of Oct. 29

CAW offers Palo Alto architecture history. Gensler on re-imagining department stores. Placemakers on urban happiness. Twelve year-old preservationist. Disaster and Community Capacity.

Tribute to an artist and craftsman. Monty Anderson, principal at Cody Anderson Wasney, blogs about Pedro de Lemos, a self taught architect, craftsman and artist.

Anderson compares de Lemos with architect Birge Clark, and discusses his first de Lemos’ project, which was his home in Palo Alto and all the significant architectural contributions de Lemos made in the Palo Alto community.

Via Cody Anderson Wasney Blog

Resurgence of the department store. Kathleen Jordan, a principal in Gensler’s New York office, blogs about the future of the department store as there has been talk for years how department stores are dying.

“Department stores currently sit on a precipice: sales are languishing, malls are struggling, and their future existence is in question. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Exciting new strategies are emerging that capitalize on changing shopping habits and advances in technology. Department stores are uniquely positioned to lead this paradigm shift in the retail experience that consumers are already demanding.” – Kathleen Jordan

Via Gensler on Cities

Urban happiness. Hazel Borys, principal at Placemakers, writes on how we measure happiness, exploring if national happiness, well-being, and social capital are related to the way we plan our neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Borys explores how city of Vancouver is asking itself what more it can do to provide for physical, social, emotional, and spiritual needs.  Borys says, “The city has added spirit to the other pillars of a healthy community: complete community (land use, density); healthy mobility (transit); healthy buildings (zero carbon); thriving landscapes (open space); green infrastructure (water, sewers, storm); healthy food systems (organic agriculture, nutrition); healthy community (facilities, programs); and healthy abundance (sustainable economic development).”

Via Placeshakers and Newsmakers

Young preservationist. Laura Wainmain, of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, talks to Daniel Linley on how young preservationists are saving places around the country.

Twelve-year-old Daniel of Elkhart, Indiana, set out to compare the energy efficiency of windows in his home ranging from 1920 to 2002. Daniel and this father tested each window three times after a period of 30 minutes, and performed all their tests at night so that the sun would not corrupt their data. Daniel discovered the living room windows from 1920 emerged the winners after holding in nearly 70% of the heat, while a single-paned window held in nothing.

Via National Trust for Historic Preservation Blog

Disasters and community capacity. Project for Public Spaces and Peter Smith, CEO of the Adelaide City Council in Australia, have been working together to create new models of governance and organizational culture that are more supportive of placemaking.

Here’s an excerpt from the paper that shows how this model of governance needs be nurtured to attain true resilience in time of crisis:

It can be argued that community resilience is not just about returning to the previous state of “community capacity,” but about building community competencies so that community capacity continues to increase over time and supersedes the previous state. In this context, community capacity can be thought of in terms of community attributes, such as the ability to self-manage and self-determine, the level of entrepreneurship, concern about issues/activism, volunteering and the general level of positivity/optimism about the future.

Via Project for Public Space’s Placemaking Blog

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of Oct. 22

HDR considers design in business. A practitioner's POV on research. Perkins+Will farms a rooftop. Pinteresting preservation ideas. 

Design as a business. Chad Narburgh blogs on how at any truly innovative company you will find that design is at its core and is used to drive business.

“Design as a business” places managers on the opposite side of designers, partially due to the fact that managers are typecast as profit-driven pragmatists while designers are stereotypically seen as time-hungry idealists. I noticed that the stereotypes tend to come out when a project reaches critical mass, by either going over budget or not meeting the client’s design expectations. – Chad Narburgh

Via Blink – Perspectives on Design Blog

Research in today’s world. Deepika Padam an architect in San Francisco, blogs on what she learned about the role of research in today’s world of excessive information at the AIA Research Summit this past summer.

Padam said the experience was unique because research is not spoken in the same vocabulary or at the same level at her practice as was done at the summit. She learned that academicians and practitioners see research with very different perspectives: academic and applied research.

Via Metropolis Magazine POV Blog

Urban agriculture. Gisela Garrett blogs on how the Perkins + Will New York office set up gardening and maintenance for a rooftop farm in Queens, which included tidying up the chickens’ coop and yard.

The environmental impact of rooftop farming in urban areas is extremely positive, with contributions ranging from stormwater management to decreasing the demand on buildings’ HVAC systems. A recent study says that New York City has vast potential for urban agriculture as it “can play a critical role as productive green urban infrastructure.”

Via Perkins + Will Blog

Pinterest for preservation. For those preservationists who aren’t familiar with Pinterest, Sarah Heffern of the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides 10 tips on how to use Pinterest for historic places and beyond.

Some of the tips for preservationists include cross-promoting other service on your Pinterest page, using the search function and expanding your online store.

Via National Trust for Historic Preservation Blog

Note: Follow AEC Idea Exchange on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/aecideax/

Gangnam Style and Neighborhood Identity

Most people have seen the mega-hit video “Gangnam Style” by South Korean rapper Psy. The K-pop video, which was released on July 15, 2012 on YouTube, climbed to 100 million views in 51 days, beating Justin Bieber's "Baby" and Rebecca Black's "Friday," and prompted an overwhelming number of response videos. The lyrics are catchy, the dance moves quirky, making it addictive to watch over and over.  The video mocks the Gangnam district of Seoul, an affluent and hip neighborhood where young people go to party. In the song, Psy describes the kind of guy he is and the kind of girl he wants, illustrating the pretentious culture of people who hang out in Gangnam. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0?rel=0&w=560&h=315] The music video is a sensation gone viral. Currently, the music video has been viewed over 530 million times on YouTube and is the site's second most watched video. It has broken the Guinness World Record for the most likes on YouTube and has 2 million likes on Facebook. Katy Perry and Britney Spears are tweeting about it.

Politicians and business leaders such as British Prime Minister David Cameron and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt have learned the dance moves. New parodies of the video are popping up daily – from wedding parties to Philippine prison inmates. U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-Moon has praised the video as a "force for world peace" and South Korea’s top economic official Bahk Jae Wan pointed to the video as an example of creativity and international competition that the nation needs. Millions around the world are obsessed with his moves, style and music.

Seoul’s Gangnam neighborhood has also been in the spotlight. The video was filmed throughout the Gangnam area in the tour buses, spas, shopping areas and even atop one of the World Trade Center Seoul buildings. As a result of “Gangnam Style’s” success, the neighborhood itself is now known world-wide alongside Beverly Hills, and Roppongi as ultra-affluent and trendy hotbeds. Gangnam has been featured major news outlets in the US and around the world and South Korea tourism organizations are hopeful that the video drives more visitors and consumers to the shops, services and businesses in the district.

A strong identity for a neighborhood or region is something that city officials, planners and designers strive to create. These reputations attract new residents, consumers and eventually grow local economies. What would be your neighborhood's equivalent of “Gangnam Style”?

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of October 15

Placemakers describe the new incrementalism. BLDG Blog illuminates a memorial to a buried village. Perkins+Will looks down. Streetsblog looks at public space proposals for Midtown East.

The new incrementalism. Howard Blackson blogs about how the latest design trend is  designing a place to be realized in very gradual stages. Not in terms of planning for phases built out in a predetermined sequence, but about individual lots changing and evolving over time.

Blackson discusses this slow urbanism as having three typologies:

1. Blow-up architecture: a movable, removable or deflatable architecture that is the most temporary of any building type.
2. A Movable Feast: The pre-fab shipping container, or modular construction type, is built to last but is able to be picked up and moved from place to place as needed.
3. Tear down that bearing wall, Mr. Gorbachev: ‘Grow’ or ‘Go’ homes in which the idea of building a structure to be torn down and replaced by a comparable one isn’t an economic reality anymore unless land cost is not an issue.

Via Placeshakers and Newsmakers

Memorial to a buried village. Geoff Manaugh blogs about a new project by Bo Li and Ge Men, students of architecture at ETH Zürich, which proposes a kind of buried chandelier to memorialize lost villages in Switzerland—architecture destroyed by landslides, replaced by light.

The project reminds Manaugh of the odd memorial known as the Cretto di Burri, by artist Alberto Burri, in which an Italian village called Gibellina, destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, was replaced—or, rather, memorialized—by a field of poured concrete.

Via BLDG Blog

Don’t forget to look down. Pat Bosch of Perkins + Will blogs about how much you get to know about a city by looking down instead of up.

“For quite some years I have found myself looking down and discovering that sidewalks, streets, and pavers of cities may tell more about a city than its buildings. As an architect I have always looked up and across cities. I have tried to understand them as diagrams or rather intellectual masterpieces of urban planning, but sometimes the secrets of their essence and ethos lie silently in the tiles, bricks, and pavers of their sidewalks, plazas, streets, and courts.” –Pat Bosch

Via Perkins + Will Blog

No ‘Flying Doughnut’ at Grand Central. Foster + Partners, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and WXY architecture + urban design unveiled proposals to remake public space in the Midtown East neighborhood of New York City, as the Bloomberg administration sets out to rezone the area for taller towers.

The three firms focused on the area immediately around Grand Central Terminal, because although it lies at the heart of the district, the public realm outside the station’s grand interior often leaves much to be desired. SOM’s proposal includes building a circular walkway above Grand Central, floating up and down between new skyscrapers on either side of the train terminal. In a panel discussion with the architects, New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson dismissed the concept as a “flying doughnut.”

Via Streetsblog