Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of March 17, 2013

A survival guide for working moms (or parents) from Perkins+Will. Placemakers' take on Spiritual Zoning. An Array disaster preparedness plan. HDR on post-Katrina planning. Retail and walkability from Gensler. 130325

 

Working mom’s survival guide. Chika Sekiguchi, a senior associate with Perkins+Will’s Chicago office, talks about a women’s workshop focused on work/life integration and the trends working women are seeing in their practices.

Sekiguchi took six takeaways from the workshop to manage stress:

  1.  1. Move
  2. 2. Share
  3. 3. Unplug
  4. 4. Breathe
  5. 5. Nourish the soul
  6. 6. Practice gratitude

Via Ideas + Buildings

 

Spiritual zoning. Ben Brown, a principal and storyteller at Placemakers, discusses how a religious perspective can promote neighborliness and community, regardless of the actual religious tradition.

“People who identify themselves as religious may be more intolerant of others’ beliefs — just as many non-believers suspect — but they’re also more likely than people who aren’t religious to give money to strangers, help people outside their own households, and be more civically engaged.” – Ben Brown

Via PlaceMakers Blog

 

Disaster preparedness plan. Thomas Hudok, project Architect with Array, explores the importance of disaster preparedness at medical facilities – when a natural disaster occurs, hospitals must remain operational to support patients and staff.

The 1992 hurricane season in South Florida was a major turning point in how building codes adapted to address natural disasters. Hospitals in Florida immediately started to focus on hardening their buildings, adding emergency utilities and reviewing the Florida Building Code, which has since been rewritten to address the specific effects of tropical storms and acknowledges the critical need for medical care facilities to remain open during a storm.

Via Array Blog

 

Planning amiss post-Katrina. Mark Meaders, sustainable design project manager at HDR Architecture, recalls working on rebuilding homes after Hurricane Katrina and the importance of tenets of proper urban design: dense development with mixed-income units, commercial development with shopping options for the community and walkable neighborhoods.

Meaders says tenets of proper urban design are not being implemented in the Ninth Ward –  the development is similar to before Katrina causing a lack of businesses in the area. Residents have to drive 15 minutes to the grocery store and proper planning would have helped set up the area to truly grow and become a neighborhood again.

Via Blink Perspectives

 

Retail and walkable urbanism. Kathleen Jordan, a principal in Gensler’s New York office and leader in the firm’s Retail practice, examines today’s retail environment, and how department stores can definitely benefit from transit-oriented developments (light rail to shopping areas) coupled with walkable urbanism.

Transit-oriented developments and walkable urbanism “would signal a return to what made department stores so successful in the first place: the ability to offer convenience. After all, isn't living in an urban environment all about convenience? You walk to work; you have a million great restaurants at your disposal and world class cultural institutions at your fingertips.” – Kathleen Jordan

Via Gensleron Lifestyle

 

 

 

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of March 10, 2013

Olin Studio considers the intersection of planning and landscape. Landscape Urbanism spots an app for street design. SWA acknowledges the designers of the Golden Gate Parks.  An interview with an HOK designer. A different model for design education in Metropolis POV. 130318

Intersection of planning and landscape. OLIN Studio hosted a symposium that explored the intricacies of the relationship between planning and landscape architecture.

Several issues were brought up, including whether design should be brought back into planning. Or should planning sensibility be folded into the world of design? How are these topics relevant today? The symposium focused on the following themes:

  1.  Projective Work
  2. Powerful Players
  3. Global Scale
  4. Education and Conversation
  5. Art and Instrumentality

Via The OLIN Studio Blog

 

App for street design. Sarah Kathleen Peck, editor of Landscape Urbanism, writes about an app that lets you place various street elements in different spaces and adjusts the Right-Of-Way to desired traffic levels.

The app was designed by Code for America graduates and launched to increase real-time engagement at community planning meetings and allow people to work collaboratively with one another as well as share and edit each other’s creations. The app can be tested at at StreetMix.Net.

Via Landscape Urbanism

Related: StreetMix

 

Designers of the Golden Gate Parks. Rene Bihan of SWA Group blogs about the important legacy left by the designers and stewards of the Golden Gate National Parks. The landscape architect is hosting a fundraiser for The Cultural Landscape Foundation in honor of these citizens next month.

“Our vibrant and tightly-packed North Beach neighborhood is offset by the not-too-far-away wide open spaces of the Golden Gate National Parks (GGNP) that hint at the what the city was like generations ago and what the landscape was like before there was a city. It is no accident that these spaces are still here. The GGNP of today is the collective result of generations of activists, environmentalists, lawyers, stewards, and designers. We owe these individuals a great deal.” – Rene Bihan

Via IdeaSWA blog

Related: You’re Invited! An Evening Honoring a Model for Stewardship Innovation and Design Excellence

 

Interview with HOK designer. Todd Bertsch, Design Director for HOK in Atlanta, Georgia, discusses what it’s like to be an architect in Atlanta and some of the projects he’s worked on.

“Practicing architecture is this incredible collision of solving technical problems, exploring philosophical ideas and expressing creativity. We have the opportunity to affect what our communities look like, how society operates and how people live. We can blend beauty and poetry to create these high-performance buildings that have a positive influence on the world. These challenges thrill me every day.” – Todd Bertsch

Via HOK Life

 

Different model for design education. Sherin Wing examines the graduate program at the Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices (MDP), which provides a unique foundation of theory and on-the-ground training. Advocates of the program hope the model will influence other design programs.

While “activist” design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in their haste to be in the vanguard of a “new” approach and school-based design projects. These can be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while reinforcing cultural assumptions about the “other.”

Via Metropolis Magazine POV

 

Top Design and Urbanism Posts for March 3, 2013

HMC's world-changing innovation. BNIM teaches kids about water. A Stantec POV on urban or suburban. Catapult Design on understanding others to understand yourself. 130311

Innovation to change the world. Steve Prince, managing principal at HMC Architects, discusses the video “Making of the Social Rules Project” spearheaded by Professor Paul Steinberg, which was made in part with a $5,000 grant awarded for an innovative environmental sustainability education initiative to Harvey Mudd College from the Design Futures Foundation.

Prince interviews Steinberg on how the project came to fruition and the next steps for the video.

“The Social Rules Project itself grew organically–first as a book for the general public, then an idea for an animated film, and eventually a video game and social media website. There came a point when, with 100 students busily working on these various projects, we realized that we’d better start documenting this remarkable collaboration on film.” – Paul Steinberg

Via HMC Architects Blog

 

Educating kids on water. BNIM works with consultant Chris Becicka to create a curriculum for the classroom on Kansas City’s stormwater and how people impact it.

BNIM developed a five-day curriculum full of information and activities, putting their ideas and pictures into a book called “Stormwater KC to the Sea.” BNIM found all the materials the teachers would need, created a kit for them, and then piloted the program, first inviting teachers to a training session.

Via BNIM Blog

 

Urban core or suburbs? Joe Geller, vice president at Stantec, explores the challenges of urban development in the Boston area based on what the millennial generation wants.

Geller writes that be thinks Boston and similar cities will be seeing a lot more re-urbanization and densification and less focus on intensified suburban development.

“If people are in school longer, waiting longer to get married, not having as many kids, and are looking for a real urban experience, why would they move to the suburbs? Can these suburban developments continue to attract the high-tech employers that rely on that demographic to support their business if they now all want to live in the city? If one of the biggest challenges to future development is transportation, are suburban locations, with their limited public transportation and reliance on highway infrastructure, really well positioned to support this type of growth? Can these suburban developments create the buzz necessary to attract the expected 24/7 experience?” – Joe Geller

Via Stantec Blog

 

Understanding others to understand yourself. Tyler Valiquette, COO and cofounder of Catapult Design, examines people’s behavior and how they often resist changes to their accustomed behaviors. In order for designers and engineers, who are always addressing social issues, to be successful, they need to work on overcoming this behavior.

How do we attempt to tackle culturally instructed behavior? Valiquette says that contemporary psychological theories of behavior change tell us that people’s behaviors are based on attitudes, beliefs, and values and that changes in behavior rely on changes in these underlying attributes. “In the field of design for social impact the theories of behavior change and human-centered design converge and they both clearly indicate that an understanding of values is key: successful designs appeal to people’s values and so do successful behavioral change campaigns.” – Tyler Valiquette

Via Catapult Design Blog

 

spinningcogsAgents of change in AEC.  Thought leadership is a topic Walter Communications discusses frequently, and we would like to learn more about the prevalence of it within the Built Environment industry. We invite you to take our survey and let us know your thoughts on thought leadership and in return, we'll share our full report of findings with you.We are also profiling firms with noteworthy thought leadership programs -- you can view highlights of these discussions, such as the profile of the research program at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.

 

 

 

Favorite Design and Urbanism Blog Posts for Week of Feb. 25

Cannon tells us where science is headed. Perkins+Will on the telecommuting debate. Design schools and future cities in The Dirt. Luckett + Farley and achieving the best medical outcomes. Oreo's social media campaign extends the cookie vs. creme debate.  Untitled-1

Where is science headed? Mark Whiteley, global science and technology practice leader at Cannon Design, published the article “Top Ten Trends For Design Led Science in 2013,” in the Huffington Post, which examines the direction science and research are headed.

The article lists the following 10 trends as the key drivers for science in 2013:

  1. New Business
  2. New Cultures
  3. New Learning
  4. New Senses
  5. New Personalization
  6. New Shortages
  7. New Magnetism
  8. New Geographies
  9. New Partnerships
  10. New Spaces

Top Ten Trends For Design Led Science in 2013 via Huffington Post

Via Cannon Design Blog

 

The telecommute debate. Rachel Casanova of Perkins+Will writes about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision requiring all employees to work in the office each day, exploring how it has sparked varied responses.

Many organizations believe that when people are in close physical proximity, employees establish relationships that lead to faster decision making and better results. That said, the most successful workplace designs incorporate a variety of settings and technologies that enable connection and collaboration, both locally and globally. Casanova shares some ideas that may be helpful in developing a successful workplace. This includes looking at culture, workforce management, work-life blending and collaboration.

Via Ideas+Buildings

 

Design school and cities. Jared Green of The Dirt looks at the role of the design academy in dealing with today’s challenges — urbanization, climate change, biodiversity loss, population growth – which was discussed in a keynote speech at the Innovative Metropolis conference.

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Dean Mohsen Mostafavi said that design schools “construct knowledge, conduct research, and disseminate information,” but also “advance alternative possibilities, new ideas.” In a review of how urban design and planning have evolved, Mostafavi outlined the new directions the GSD program is proposing for cities, with its drive towards new theories of landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism.

Via The Dirt

 

Achieving best medical outcomes. Thomas Hammer, an Associate and Senior Project Manager at Luckett + Farley, writes about Evidenced-Based Design (EBD) for healthcare, the deliberate attempt to base building decisions on the best available evidence, with the goal of achieving the best possible outcomes for patients, family and staff.

“There’s growing evidence suggesting the physical design of a healthcare environment can unintentionally contribute to negative outcomes.  However, on the other hand, a carefully choreographed EBD facility can help the patient, family and staff come together to enhance the experience, increase safety and deliver a higher quality of care.” Thomas Hammer

Via Luckett + Farley Blog

 

Innovative Social Media Campaign

Cookie vs. Creme. Fans of Oreo cookies often love to separate Oreo cookies, eating just the top or the creme. The company, which has been monitoring this debate on Facebook and Twitter, has turned to four inventors to create high-tech, robotic-like machines that divide the two sets of Oreo consumers. As an expansion of its "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign — which launched on Instagram earlier this month, encouraging people to share pictures — Oreo is posting videos to YouTube over the next two weeks that show an innovative way to eat the snack. With this latest effort, Oreo aims to boost its YouTube subscriber base — which totals about 9,000 — as well as engagement.

Via Mashable

 

 

Blog Post Roundup for Week of Feb. 18, 2013

HOK's secret to productivity. Manaugh and the fifth wall. Lake|Flato on the environmental imperative. Deep fried America by HDR. Gensler's maximum connectivity. 130225

Secret to productivity. Daphne Kiplinger, who works in HOK’s Washington, D.C.’s office, explores increased productivity and relaxation in the workplace, citing in recent article in the New York Times.

“No matter how productive we are, we cannot come up with more time.  What we can control, however, is the amount of energy we have to spend on accomplishing these tasks. Energy may not be infinite, but it is renewable, and it is in our power to find ways to renew it.” – Daphne Kiplinger

Via HOK Life

Relax, You’ll Be More Productive Via New York Times

The fifth wall. Geoff Manaugh examines Petro Vlahos, who passed away this week and was "the pioneer of blue- and green-screen systems" in cinema, of highly specific recoloring of certain surfaces in the everyday built environment that allows "filmmakers to superimpose actors and other objects against separately filmed backgrounds" to walls that aren't really there.

While “these sorts of walls and surfaces are not architecture, we might say, but pure spatial effects, a kind of representational sleight of hand through which the boundaries and contents of a location can be infinitely expanded. There is no "building," then, to put this in Matrix-speak; there are only spatial implications. Green screen architecture, here, would simply be a visual space-holder through which to substitute other environments entirely: a kind of permanent, physically real special effect that, in the end, is just a coat of paint.” – Geoff Manaugh

Via BLDG Blog

The environmental imperative. Bob Harris, a partner at Lake|Flato, discusses in a video how people find themselves living in deprived nature conditions, but how designers of the built environment can learn to reconnect people to land, beauty and themselves.

“Certain individual designers possess a particular bio-intuition that manifest itself in what has become known as biophilic elements of design. Could this explain why such works of design universally appeal? It may be that through a better awareness of our own cognitive wiring we might learn to reconnect to a beauty in nature that we have forgotten and build places that speak to the soul.” – Bob Harris

Via The Dogrun

Deep fried America. Steve Goe, Director of Healthcare Strategy at HDR Architecture, writes on how the future need for hospitals will be substantially reduced and restricted to the care of the most acutely ill patients who require intensive care and monitoring, providing challenges for health planners and architects to create spaces that are intended to transform as health delivery evolves.

The County Fair, where deep fried treats are introduced, is one example of people not taking responsibility for their health and contributing to the epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases. Healthcare facilities may become like “retail malls, where the procedural rooms, imaging and intensive care beds are the anchor tenants, and the rest of the facility is constantly changing its ‘stores’ over time through tenant improvements.

Via http://blink.hdrinc.com/deep-fried-america

Maximizing connectivity. Hao Ko, a principal and design director in Gensler’s San Francisco office, discusses the new corporate headquarters of NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley visual-computing pioneer, and how the new facility reflects their core belief that their people are their greatest asset.

Gensler is designing a building that allows staff to work together more efficiently while capturing the culture of their work—a building that is a physical manifestation of the soul of their company. Phase 1 of the new headquarters in Santa Clara will be a two-story building where the experience of moving through the building is one of unimpeded flow for the estimated 2,500 building occupants.

Via GenslerOn Work