A few days ago, I wrote from Denver to recap the first day of the FORUM, the annual conference of the American Institute of Architecture Students. The AIAS is an organization that organizes collectively serves as the voice of students to the profession of architecture and design in North America and beyond. Continuing on for an additional three days, students from around the world came together to not only celebrate architecture but to consider the role of energy and sustainable practices in the built environment.
Since Gary Hustwit’s upcoming industrial-design documentary, Objectified, is all about products and the people who make them, here is a helpful (though incomplete) cheat sheet to what you’ll find in the just-released trailer: Naota Fukasawa’s hand, the wall-mounted CD player he designed for Muji, a Panton chair, an Apple laptop, a Mercedes-Benz (wild guess—it looks like the Stuttgart museum to me ) convertible, a Leica camera, a Braun radio, an Oxo peeler, Jasper Morrison’s Air chair being manufactured, a mess of cell phones, Muji and IKEA stores, Smart Design’s Flip Mino pocket video camera, and an ad for an Sanyo’s waterless Aqua washing machine. Oh, right, and Karim Rashid, too. God knows he needs the publicity.
Bert Gregory, CEO and President of Mithun, opens the new book about his firm’s history with the story of a dinner party. Described as an intimate meal with lively conversation and good food, the gathering is capped off by a question from the host, Debbi Brainerd of the IslandWood learning center project. “What gives us hope?” she asked each of the guests. When it was his turn, Gregory replied, “My hope is in cities and integrated design.”
A modern-day example of fractals in an African Village: a design sketch for a new community center in Zambia. Image courtesy of Ron Eglash.
We often hear about how the organic forms of nature inform design, but what about the complex repetitions of a mathematical pattern? Ron Eglash, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, was surprised to discover that many African villages traditionally organized their buildings in a complex geometric pattern known as a fractal, or a series of ever-diminishing similarly-shaped curves. Fractals had been considered a relatively modern mathematical discovery, and the geometric pattern was most frequently employed in computer graphics, so it was a revelation to learn that indigenous design included such seemingly contemporary shapes.
Trang Nguyen’s map of proposed charter schools focused on teaching sustainability in underutilized existing spaces.
I recently went to the end-of-semester review for Pratt’s urban-design studio, Central Brooklyn: A Model Net-Zero Carbon District. Led by the professors Viren Brahmbhatt and Meta Brunzema (a runner-up in Metropolis’s Next Generation competition), students attempted to find serious urban-design solutions to issues surrounding climate change. “The ultimate goal is to create implementable urban-design and policy ideas for a model Special Sustainability District,” Brahmbhatt says. “The central-Brooklyn site, which includes Bedford Stuyvesant and Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, was selected because it includes a great variety of urban typologies, socioeconomic settings, as well as Pratt, an institution with a sound commitment to reducing its carbon footprint.”
With a horrible mix of wintery weather and cancelled flights a common sight, for 650 architecture students to arrive on Denver was perhaps a greater function of passion than luck. Beginning yesterday, architecture students from across the United States, Canada and Australia came to Denver for FORUM—the annual gathering-cum—conference of the American Institute of Architecture Students. With the theme of energy, the conference is exploring not just issues related to sustainable design but also the “energy” of students, as for many FORUM is a ritual reunion of old friends as much as it is about exploring architecture.
I’m reading a new book from John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. It brings to mind the current discussions on infrastructure, particularly the Obama’s administration plan to create 2.5 to 3 million new jobs by rebuilding our decaying infrastructure.
There’s also talk among architects as well as AIA chapters about broadening the definition of infrastructure; they say it’s more than just road widenings and bridge rebuilding. It needs to include our schools, public buildings, parks facilities, and fixing suburban sprawl. They have a point.
Rendering of the proposed John and Frances Angelos Law Center at the University at Baltimore designed by Behnisch Architekten. Image courtesy of UB.
The University of Baltimore’s current School of Law building sits on the edge of the city’s bustling Mount Vernon neighborhood and at the heart of the school’s campus. Built in the 1980’s, the squat structure looks its age. “The building is set up in an old way,” says Steve Cassard, UB’s vice president for Facilities Management and Capital Planning. Classrooms are small, there is limited public space, and the law library is bursting at the seams. “The pedagogy of legal education is changing. Fostering interaction is important.”
This year, UB—now the 6th largest public law school in the country—launched an international design competition for a new $107 million law school, with funding for the competition provided by Baltimore-based Abell Foundation.The site of the future 190,000-square-foot law school is a coveted corner lot on a highly visible corridor; it can be seen from the city’s busy Pennsylvania Station, home to Amtrak, and from a major north-south highway. “It’s an opportunity for progressive architecture that reflects forward thinking,” Cassard says.
On November 17, the school awarded the design to Behnisch Architekten of Stuttgart, Germany, in partnership with Baltimore’s Ayers/Saint/Gross, Inc. As writer Stephen Zacks reports in this month’s issue of Metropolis, Stefan Behnisch is known for creating unique, high-performance structures, and it was his reputation for smart, sustainable design that helped edge him out over a very competitive field. (Behnisch beat out five finalists: Foster + Partners of London in association with Cho Benn Holback + Associates, Inc. of Baltimore; Dominique Perrault Architecture of Paris in association with Ziger/Snead Architects of Baltimore; Moshe Safdie and Associates, Inc. of Somerset, Mass., in association with Hord/Coplan/Macht of Baltimore; and SmithGroup Companies, Inc. of Washington, D.C.). “Stefan’s ideas about sustainable design and his creativity in responding to the evolving needs of higher education place him in the forefront of 21st-century architecture,” said UB President Robert L. Bogomolny.
Behnisch’s proposal for the law school includes classrooms, moot courts, a new law library, and other public areas for students. Now comes the hard part: turning rendering into reality. The design phase is scheduled to begin in the early months of 2009, with a construction start date of June 2010. The aim is to have the building open for the fall class of 2012.
Calvin Tomkins’s 1995 profile of the landscape architect Dan Kiley is worth a read.
When a few of us from the magazine visited Kevin Roche one morning last September—his recollections made their way into our recent stories on Eero Saarinen and Associates and Roche’s Ford Foundation building—he regaled us with tales of “four-martini flights” with the hard-partying Saarinen crew, and other architectural shenanigans. He also told a memorable story about Dan Kiley, who did a number of landscape designs for Roche and his partner, John Dinkeloo (including the Ford Foundation plantings). For one such project, Roche had hoped to impress some clients by bringing them on a site visit with Kiley.
I did a big song and dance about Dan Kiley. So we arranged to meet him down at the site. Dan drove down from Vermont. He arrived in an old Army overcoat, with no socks. It looked like he was wearing his pajamas. And he had no shirt.
This week on the Web many questions are being posed: How will the Obamas change the White House décor? Why did Frank Gehry lay off his Atlantic Yards team? What’s the best pop-up book about modern architecture? When is New York’s first LEED-Certified renovated hotel opening?
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