Let me walk you through.

Cloudscapes – Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Transsolar Klima Engineering | Photo by Shumi Bose

The Biennale occurs across two main sites; the spectacular Arsenale, a corridor of vast old military navy sheds in an arrested state of decay, and the Giardini, a large urban park housing 30 national pavilions which is one vaporetto stop down the Gran’ Canal. The last biennale of Architecture, curated by Aaron Betsky, saw the Arsenale crammed with many busy exhibits. This year’s exhibits — let’s call it a symptom of the recession — seem on the whole more ethereal and artsy, more like something you’d use to fill a gallery at PS1. After the blinding sun and sweltering heat, I enjoyed running through Olafur Eliasson’s dice-with-death twirling hosepipes, spinning in pitch-darkness emitting ominous electric whipping noises and flashes of light – but there was no chance in hell I was going to “meet” anyone there. Similarly, I loved Transsolar’s ultra-delicate iron ramp that snaked around fat brick pillars, into an enveloping and carefully controlled mist-cloud in another of the giant Arsenale galleries – but I couldn’t see a soul once up there. Perhaps that is why the Biennale judges decided to award most of their prestigious Lions to arguably unspectacular, but certainly humane projects; the Bahrain exhibit, which scooped the Golden Lion (and involved New York pillar of architectural criticism, Michael Sorkin), followed the plight of an indigenous coastal population who are valiantly resisting the onslaught of glitzy development, and who are using reclaimed materials to stake out their settlements.

Fisherman's Hut, Bahrain | Photo by Camille Zakharia

Speaking of humanity, the most hilarious moment of the Arsenale occurs in Wim Wenders’ 3D film about the SANAA Rolex Centre, which promoted Biennale curator Sejima’s latest big project; at one point, breaking tone with the ponderous voiceover, Sejima appears on a segway – a segway! – doing a fine impression of G.O.B. (it hasn’t been too long has it?) as she zooms round the slick walkways. And if it counts for anything, I managed to collar Wenders on what his pick of the Arsenale was; he identified the haphazard but utterly fragile and humane display thrown together by Chile, in the two-week window they had after the recent earthquake.

Back in the Giardini, the pavilions were something of puzzlement to me: so many of them seemed to want to be books. Old books, books from the nineties, OMA and Actar books. The German pavilion was a case in point; drawings of their chosen theme (the untranslatable phrase “Senn Sucht”) hung framed around the walls of a red room. And there were chairs in the middle. That’s it! There were two ponderous exhibits in the wings but nothing that translated to a genuine experience. The Swiss Pavilion showed an arcane research on bridges, photographed in black and white – beautiful maybe, but why? – whereas the Israeli went one further, and had you make up your own book from stacks of photographs dumped on the floor, exploring the theme of the kibbutzim.

Most disappointing for me personally was the French contribution, curated by Dominic Perrault, who is smart enough to know better. Through thick plastic hanging curtains, the curators had managed to emulate the smell of a Foot Locker exactly; the audio from much-celebrated (but now boring) Parisian urban night-skating was uncomfortably loud, and all the urban graphics and movies were incredibly — in the true sense of credible belief — dated. No doubt about depth of research or points of interest, particularly regarding regeneration of lesser-investigated French cities like Lyon, but the graphic style was pre-OMA, like old MVRDV books; sad to say but all the Scandinavians & Brazilians followed suit, presenting something like a “greatest hits” of projects we have seen before.

'Hylozoic Ground' by Philip Beesley Architects for the Canadian Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2010 |Courtesy Philip Beesley Architects

It wasn’t all bad; with characteristically English trepidation I have to say I liked the nerdy, scholarly British Pavilion — which investigated John Ruskin’s time in the host city when writing his masterful “Stones of Venice” — purely for the richness of the literary references in there. With a wooden scale-section of the 2012 Olympic stadium occupying the main room, it did seem a tiny bit schizophrenic, but the construction made for a great space for the drawing workshops hosted there in honor of Ruskin himself. Canada’s contribution had to be seen to be understood; Philip Beesley’s “Hylozoic” investigations are not altogether new (check out some YouTube videos about hylozoic soil here); this installation progresses his Cronenberg-like explorations of post-human life. Intense, enveloping and freakishly responsive, it is composed of thousands of plastic, metal and motorised components, and glowing biocells containing reactive pheromones. The whole thing used several levels of internal communication (mechanic, computerised, chemical) to react and respond both to itself and visitors. Very scary and weird for an insectophobe like me, but thrilling all the same; kids like it! The Belgians submitted a quiet, minimalist collection of salvaged building fixtures which bore traces of wear, like those circular scratches on steel elevator doors, or the center of stair treads where paint and varnish have long flaked off – suggesting perhaps the ghosts of “people meeting” in architecture?

Installaion by Do Ho Suh | Photo by Shumi Bose

And in the Italian International Pavilion, which basically functions as Sejima’s personal “Cabinet of Curiosities,” American Tom Sach’s obsessive and very funny reworking of Corbusier buildings raised a few smiles, while Korean Do Ho Suh – whose exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture opens in two scant weeks – installed a breathtaking cobweb of an installation; a 3D model of a Venetian Palazzo executed in mesh and suspended face down from the ceiling.

Romanian Pavilion | Photo by Shumi Bose

If I had to pick, the Romanian Pavilion was the one that shone for me – and from the sounds on the ground, for a few others too — if for no other reason than the fact that theirs was a refreshingly simple idea executed with poetry and precision. Entering the pavilion you are confronted with a large white box, around which runs a narrow corridor. The angles of the simple, whitewashed arc lean out ominously and twist, heightening the sense of slight claustrophobia as you are forced to edge past other keen biennalees. Reaching the far side of the ark, you are invited to enter through a door with no handle; only one person in at a time. Once inside, you occupy an eerily stark sanctuary, which corresponds exactly to the amount of personal urban space available to each citizen of Bucharest. The young team — some of them students aged 25 or so — make no bones about the absolute one-liner clarity of their project, but should certainly be commended for their courage, because it really works as an experience of space.

Romanian Pavilion | Photo by Shumi Bose

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Shumi Bose is an architectural writer and researcher. She is currently working between London and New York.

Swoon, a Brooklyn-based artist, has worked in a variety of media to engage constructed environments. She has used the city as canvas for her cut-paper woodblock prints, often seen wheatpasted on city streets. Since 2006, she has used cityscapes as inspiration as she designed, built and sailed on raft flotillas created as intentional communities of artists and musicians. Now she can be found in Haiti co-running the Konbit Shelter Project, a group of artists, builders, architects and engineers who are using their skills and resources to build homes and community spaces in post-earthquake Haiti. Read our conversation with Swoon below. To inquire about availability of Swoon’s work, contact Christina Ray.

Photo by Flickr user niznoz.

Let’s start with the city street and the relationship between the conditions of inspiration, production and display. What is the difference to you between creating for a canvas versus for a city wall? Does the distinction change the audience, the message, or both?
Almost the only difference for me in creating for a protected indoor setting versus creating for outside is a practical one. Things have to be smaller and faster to put up outside, more streamlined in their design. If I am cutting paper to create a portrait, and I find myself making really large cuts, I know it’s going to be a lot harder to paste up quickly. Or, if I am making something huge, I know that it will have trouble finding itself within the small architectural niches of a more dense urban area. Because my way of working and creating portraits evolved entirely in dialogue with city walls, these practical considerations, as well as thoughts about how people relate to the portraits when they see them on the street, are a big part of forming what you see, whether I am making a gallery installation, or working on the street. The creative process is very quiet compared to the execution and the life of the piece. And the conditions of inspiration? That’s just day to day.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. Photo © Tod Seelie/todseelie.com.

Since 2006, you have designed, built and traveled on fleets of rafts and vessels manned by a community of artists. Your initial motivations were threefold: to create, to interact with others, and to explore. What is the role of place or site in these intentional communities? How does the social element relate to the spatial?

I wanted to understand the city more and more — from how people live within it and interact with it, to how it is created, built, broken and rebuilt.Over the first two years, the rafts were intentional communities. The Miss Rockaway Armada was a collectively built and run, floating, intentional community. We made all of our decisions together. We were an experiment for ourselves as well as a public facing one — traveling down the river and talking to everyone we saw.

The Switchback and the Serenissima projects were a blurrier line between art and life. I measured the bridges on the Grand Canal in Venice to the inch at low tide before building the three boats that traveled there. They were made as a kind of an homage to that place — little, monstrous, fantastical, floating bits of city. I envisioned them like seeds, blown far from the mother tree, having evolved in their own way, somehow finding their outgrowths back in their land of origin. The first time I saw Venice rising up out of the sea like it does, I was so affected that I knew one day I would make something that let me understand that place better, and that was a response to it. There was also a whole undercurrent of thought about rising tides, and being refugees from a society that is no longer functioning with relation to the planet’s ability to sustain it. The very fluid community that formed around these projects is a part of a larger community of artists that already exists, and are the only thing that made such a project possible.

What do you see as the role of the artist in the kind of recovery work you are undertaking in Haiti? How does this project relate to other aspects of your work — or do you see it as something entirely distinct from your artistic oeuvre?
I guess I view the role of artists like myself and the Konbit group who are here in Haiti right now in two ways. First, we hope to acknowledge that beauty and soulfulness are important in the rebuilding effort, as well as the nitty gritty work of getting roofs over people’s heads. We also are in the unusual position of operating independently. As a small, self-directed group, we have a fluidity that many large NGOs don’t have. There are so many levels to this process, I think a plethora of responses are welcome and needed.

How this relates to the rest of my life and work I think is yet to be seen.

Konbit shelter prototype build, Braddock, PA. Via konbitshelter.org.

From your wheatpaste street art to Swimming Cities to your current work in Haiti, your work has flowed between the use of the built form and cities as canvas or inspiration to the actual construction of livable spaces. How has each body of work influenced or informed the others?
Snowball effect? I started by drawing it, and found that I wanted to understand the city more and more — from how people live within it and interact with it, to how it is created, built, broken, and rebuilt. The question of how so many people will survive on a planet that clearly cannot support them all is very central in my mind, as well as the role that cities, architecture and living systems have in that. Right now I am trying to understand more intimately how it is that we might all live and survive here — and to try and help in very small but concretely tangible ways while I am learning.

Regarding the Konbit shelters: Why did you choose this particular method of construction and design? What climate, community or resource considerations led you to decide on superadobe structures?
After the earthquake, I became really obsessed with the dome. I think this is a common condition that sometimes strikes people. It’s one of the most perfect structures. It handles forces so beautifully, both within the structure, and without — from distributing a force evenly throughout the whole structure to deflecting wind and water via the curvature of its walls. Researching further into variations on domes as living structures, I found the work of Nader Khalili. Khalili dedicated the later part of his life to developing earthquake, hurricane, fire, and flood resistant housing for the world’s poor using a minimum of materials — mainly dirt. He developed workable systems and left the use of them free of patents for humanitarian aid. Ben Wolf and I knew we wanted to work on a building project to help out after the quake, and it made a lot of sense to learn about an existing developed system, rather than try to reinvent the wheel, and to share it with people who could find it useful.

We’re here building now — and so far so good. We are using the dirt that we dug out of the foundation to build with and, though building materials are pretty horribly expensive here, it’s working. We are building first a community center/hurricane shelter, and hope to return in late fall/early winter to create some houses.

.

Interview conducted by Varick Shute. Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who creates life-sized portraits of people she meets, using woodcut block prints and paper cutouts. Swoon’s galleries are city walls, often in the environments that inspired the prints. With influences ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of street environments.
 Since 2006, she has also designed, built, and organized fleets of rafts including those of the Miss Rockaway Armada and most recently the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a large scale installation at Deitch Projects in New York City. Swoon’s boats are inspired by dense urban cityscapes and thickly intertwined mangrove swamps from her Florida youth. She is an international artist with major pieces in the Museum of Modern Art, PS1’s groundbreaking exhibition GREATER NEW YORK, and Brooklyn Museum of Art. Swoon has been traveling for the past several years creating exhibitions and workshops in the United States and Europe.

A “skyscraper showdown” is in headlines this week, making contentious building projects a recurring theme for the summer. This time we have 15 Penn Plaza vs. the Empire State Building. The City Council has approved plans for a 67-story tower to be built two blocks away from, and just 34 feet shorter than, the iconic Empire State Building. Detractors claim New York’s skyline will be ruined and views of the city’s most recognizable structure will be obstructed, and the sole councilperson to vote against the project, Charles Barron, dissented due to what he saw as an insufficient number of contracts set aside for minority and women-owned businesses; supporters point to job creation, economic development, and the constant growth and change intrinsic to our fair city. Meanwhile, Brian Lehrer asks how this hasn’t come up before and over on Co.Design, Ken Carbone offers up a few alternative ways for the structure to stake its claim on the skyline.

It’s no surprise, thanks to the dysfunctions of Albany and the (many) gubernatorial scandals of recent years, that this year’s candidates for Governor of New York are promising reform and change. But on one topic of great concern to the NYC metropolitan area in particular, public transit and the extraordinary debt faced by the MTA, the candidates’ platforms are unclear. In an op-ed in the Albany Times Union, John Petro and Dan Morris of the Drum Major Institute point to Albany and the state government’s inadequate investment in public transit as a primary cause of the MTA’s now-spiraling deficits and they call on the candidates to clarify their platforms and voice their ideas. In the words of Petro and Morris, “Our public transit system is an irreplaceable asset and an invaluable part of the nation’s infrastructure that should be protected. Leaders in state government better start treating it that way.”

Early last year we talked to Colleen Werthmann and Michael Premo, two of the minds behind Brooklyn at Eye Level, a theater performance with a journalistic approach that explored all aspects of and viewpoints on Atlantic Yards. This fall, the investigative theater company The Civilians is updating the material gathered for that production to present In the Footprint. Again bringing interviews and documentation about the development to the stage through dance, music and spoken word, The Civilians offer a multifaceted portrait of a complex project. In the Footprint will run from November 12 through December 11, 2010 at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy has released its latest video, produced by a group of students from Brooklyn’s Walt Whitman Middle School who ask: Why are there so many empty lots in our neighborhood? The Good, the Bad, and the Empty, which premiered on Places this week, takes us on a vacant lot tour of Flatbush and follows the students as they question local residents, landowners, community activists, and city officials about the existing conditions of the unused lots and why they were left dormant in the first place. The students find everything from trash-strewn, abandoned “construction sites” to well-tended community gardens, and share their ideas to activate these vacant, underutilized spaces.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

<!–3773e2a181ce4a8ba0164fcb203978cc–>

“Towers in the Park” sounds like what they are: high-rise residential buildings sited on large lots of open space. This particular type of building configuration — popular in postwar American urban renewal schemes, often used in public housing as well as in limited equity cooperative housing societies — is visible all over New York City. In urban design and architecture circles these days, this building typology is more often maligned that celebrated. Here on Urban Omnibus, we’ve presented some alternative views: we’ve walked among the housing projects of Avenue D with a sociologist who grew up there and we’ve looked at how some of the elements that urbanists tend to criticize about these towers actually make them uniquely suited to serve the interests of some of the city’s senior citizens. Both of these perspectives dealt more directly with the tower than with the park. Today, in the second of our series of reports on student projects in architecture and design schools, we hear from a designer and educator about an urban design studio project at the University of Michigan that sought to reimagine towers in the park, and their potential for reintegration with the rest of the city, by keeping the tower and reworking the park.

The Michigan students’ ambitious scheme reflects the growing support among New York City officials to reconsider the development potential of underutilized open space on city-owned land. In December 2006, the city put out bids for 600 new housing units on the sites of public housing projects. Speaking to the New York Sun in April of 2007, Department of Housing Preservation and Development spokesperson Neill Coleman said that the inventory of vacant land for affordable housing “is pretty much exhausted, so we’re looking for new sources of land.” Since then, the Department of City Planning has been working with the New York City Housing Authority to do just that: to modify height and setback requirements and to reduce the amount of required parking in order to facilitate new construction. The new construction envisioned in the studio project described below is not exclusively concerned with making more housing units, it also imagines a new way of weaving towers-in-the-park into their surrounding, and rapidly changing, neighborhoods. Read more below. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user ShiftOperations.

Michigan in New York
As part of its sequence of studio courses with sites across the United States and the world, the Master of Urban Design Program at the University of Michigan recently re-envisioned Manhattan’s Lower East Side housing projects. The housing projects, located between the Brooklyn Bridge and 14th Street, comprise one of the country’s largest concentrations of towers-in-the-park, the high-rise buildings set on superblocks that New York and other American cities erected as part of urban renewal schemes in the aftermath of World War II.

Borders of the Lower East Side's towers-in-the-park. (Includes Stuyvesant Town above 14th Street that was not part of studio project described in this text.) Source: Sanborn/Digital Globe.

The Manhattan housing projects were selected for study for three reasons: 1) After a studio that designed a new city in Turkey outside of Istanbul, we wanted MUD students to shift their attention from the tabula rasa to an existing urban context; 2) For an international student cohort consisting of people from the United States, China, Egypt, India, Korea and Nigeria, the towers-in-the-park typology is universally familiar and the lessons learned from designing for it are applicable to cities worldwide; 3) The Lower East Side housing projects’ particular conditions – abutting rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and owned by a cash-strapped New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that is looking for opportunities to increase its revenue stream – made the topic timely.

The outcomes of the studio benefited from the students’ range of professional and academic backgrounds in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Over the course of a single semester, the 12 students in the studio visited New York twice, documenting and analyzing the site. Thereafter, three teams of four students each developed three detailed concepts, complete with comprehensive programs of use, design guidelines and implementation strategies.

A figure-ground diagram illustrates the amount of open space available for development among the towers-in-the-park of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Towers-in-the-Park: Open Space as Opportunity
The studio combined urban development with urban preservation: all project dwelling units were to be conserved in the interest of maintaining one of Manhattan’s important supplies of low-income housing. It proposed capitalizing on the projects’ extensive open grounds – approximately 84% of the site area – for new housing, work spaces, institutions and community facilities that would help generate new revenue streams for NYCHA while integrating the projects with adjacent neighborhoods, improving their connection with East River Park, and enhancing the quality of life for existing residents and newcomers.

By looking at the housing projects’ open spaces as a development opportunity, the studio questioned one of the major principles in post-World War II American urban renewal, which was to reduce the amount of ground each housing project covers. Based on nearly a century of housing reform attempts to open low-income neighborhoods to light and air and reduce their population densities, the need for open space was often cited by architects and public housing authorities as justification for building ever-taller housing projects. From the 50% ground coverage of mid-19th-century “model” tenements to the 16% ground coverage of mid-20th-century Lower East Side public housing, the provision of open space helped drive the design of urban housing for low-income people.

But open space did little to integrate these towers with their surrounding neighborhoods, and many post-World War II public-housing residents — whose high-rise homes were built in undesirable or outlying parts of the city where land was cheap enough for city, state and federal agencies to buy — felt isolated from the rest of the city. The land use planning practices prevalent at the time segregated residential from commercial uses. Almost from the start, post-war towers-in-the-park were criticized by social observers and project residents. The decision to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and, more recently, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, serve as reminders of the perceived inflexibility of the towers-in-the-park housing typology. Part of the premise of this studio was to find a way to intervene in this typology without destroying the existing housing units.

Today, the revitalization of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens adjacent to housing projects has added pressure to reconsider superblock open space, where community renewal stops at the housing projects’ edges. For the Michigan studio, the questions became: Can the under-utilized open space within tower-in-the-park superblocks be repurposed to accommodate neighborhood redevelopment trends, to serve housing project residents better and to help preserve public housing by leveraging NYCHA’s existing assets?

Analysis reveals the Lower East Side’s potential connections to rest of Manhattan.

Studio Outcomes
For the Lower East Side’s towers-in-the-park — including the cooperatives built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and other subsidized housing projects clustered around the Williamsburg Bridge — the Michigan design teams identified space for between 4,400 and 8,000 new apartments (both market-rate and “affordable”); a range of 1.6 million to 5 million square feet of commercial development; and from 600,000 to 3 million square feet of institutional spaces (for libraries, community centers, schools and colleges). The potential exists for between 13.7 million and 22 million square feet of new buildings in and around the towers. And because Michigan students arranged these additions between existing buildings along new streets and pathways cut through superblocks, the scheme conserves all NYCHA apartments.

The results: a boulevard-like FDR Drive, where some of Manhattan’s most desirable apartments can be located; lively streets connecting East River Park to inland neighborhoods; mixed-uses along Avenue D and Madison Street serving residents and visitors (offering business and employment opportunities, too); and at key points, where space, views and new land and water transportation connections encourage them, residential, office and hotel towers that will embellish the lower Manhattan skyline. The studio found that all of these uses can be accommodated by new buildings that cover between 30 and 40% of the lot size. This amount of ground coverage is higher than the study area’s current average but lower than blocks in the most desirable parts of Manhattan, including the Upper East and Upper West Sides. Therefore, the proposal will not obstruct existing housing units’ light and views.

Top: View of new buildings among towers-in-the-park. Bottom: View of new library near Manhattan Bridge. Public buildings reinforce the East River as a public amenity. They are erected by developers whose projects are rewarded increased floor areas.

At ground level, the Michigan studio proposed changing the form and use of open space. The landscapes of tower-in-the-park open spaces are typically passive and homogeneous. The studio’s strategy was to integrate intimate open spaces with a variety of new buildings, including schools (from pre-schools to colleges), live/work lofts, market structures, places of business and community centers. Rejecting the reductive planning philosophies of the 1950s that segregated housing on superblocks, the design teams programmed both buildings and spaces to promote active use throughout the site and to support residents’ ability to participate in community life and a dynamic local economy.

To implement their concepts, the Michigan teams proposed the creation of a public development agency similar to the New York State Empire Development Corporation or Battery Park City Authority whose structure would support both substantial community representation and a clearly-articulated process for larger community input. Indeed, given the complexity of the project and its likely impact on tens of thousands of people, the teams advocated an additional year upfront for creating the agency and its processes of decision-making and communication.

Project funding was also considered. Design teams suggested that federal dollars be applied to East River Drive, transportation and waterfront improvements. They also proposed that the sale or lease of NYCHA-held land underwrite improvements to existing apartments while maintaining their affordability and contribute to the maintenance and construction of affordable housing at other NYCHA projects and in other sites around the city. (Sales and leases include the transfer of air rights from empty or under-developed parts of the site area to locations where high density is desirable.) Additional affordable housing was proposed through incentives such as the New York “80/20” program that permits larger buildings if 20% of their units are provided at below-market rents. And tax credits and/or building bonuses could be offered to developers erecting public amenities and services on a turnkey basis (e.g. schools, libraries and community centers). Although new to NYCHA, such programs have ample precedent in New York City.

Concept view. Buildings in light blue are inserted among towers-in-the-park. Concept includes improvements to East River Park and water and land transportation systems.

Lessons
The Michigan studio learned the following lessons:

• It is possible to redevelop tower-in-the-park public housing without demolition or displacement.
• Tower-in-the-park open spaces are readily adaptable to a variety of physical and programmatic interventions, leading to inventive urban design.
• Forms of development financing that have evolved since post-World War II urban renewal can help support tower-in-the-park redevelopment, including public/private partnerships, incentive zoning, development rights transfers, etc.
• Tower-in-the-park housing, familiar to cities around the world, can be part of urban revitalization strategies that are socially and environmentally more sustainable than demolition schemes that dislocate communities and waste their physical materials.

For New York, the Michigan studio identified the development potential of one corner of NYCHA’s 2,500 acres of property. As the city’s largest landlord, NYCHA, more than any other owner, is positioned to reshape New York’s skyline — while it improves the quality of life for its residents. At a time when financial difficulties encourage the authority to explore alternative methods of retaining and improving its housing stock, the opportunity that this studio investigated is rich with possibilities for both a large public landowner like NYCHA and for the city and citizens it serves.

Roy Strickland is Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, with Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, is the designer of the new Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Manhattan. He led the MUD studio consisting of Komal Anand, Daren Crabill, Emek Erdolu, Yingying Guan, Seun-Hyun Kim, Rachan Ky, Jun-Yi Lin, Obiamaka Ofodile, Kwanseok Oh, Danna Reyes, Amal Shaaban and Xuan Zheng.

Unless otherwise noted, all images produced and provided by the University of Michigan MUD Studio.

Flooding in Nowshera, Pakistan, August 5th, 2010. Satellite Image: Digital Globe

With the frequency of apocalyptic natural disasters only seeming to increase, the major lessons we learned at the Institute for Urban Design’s Rebuilding a Sustainable Haiti symposium — that relief is not reconstruction, that holistic approaches to recovery and service delivery must engage national development frameworks, that investments in education and health are inextricable from infrastructure — resonate with the humanitarian nightmare continuing to unfold in Pakistan. An area the size of Italy is currently underwater. And while the known death-toll is mercifully lower than the Haiti earthquake or the Asian Tsunami, the scale of devastation is far greater: tens of millions of homes and livelihoods have been destroyed, cholera is spreading fast, and the worst of the flooding is not necessarily over. Speaking at the Asia Society yesterday, George Soros reminded the audience not to forget, amid the appeals for immediate assistance, the role that continued emission of greenhouse gasses has played in warming the planet and making its storms stronger. If you’re looking for ways to help, one option is Relief4Pakistan, a grassroots campaign working with MercyCorps. To donate $10 to the UN High Commission for Refugees from your mobile phone, text “SWAT” to 50555.

Our friends at We Make Money Not Art have a comprehensive review of a new book called Urban Interventions — Personal Projects in Public Spaces. The work described in the book — 200 projects that, according to publisher Gestalten, “surprise and provoke with work in cities including New York and London, but also in countries such as China, Columbia, and Turkey” — reminds us of the extent to which performances, installations and creative structural improvements in public space have become a genre of public art unto themselves. The emerging field of practice, of course, also includes many architects and designers seeking to suggest alternative uses and futures within public space, kind of like the temporary structures built from found materials over the course of the Make a Difference in Two Days Event we hosted with Bryan Bell in late 2008.

Sometimes, proposing the redesign of a public object on your own initiative doesn’t require a one-off installation. Especially if you can share it with readers of the New York Times. Interdisciplinary design team antenna (who have lent their considerable talents to everything from subway cars to office furniture) recently offered a Times op-art piece that points out what’s wrong with New Yorkers’ least favorite TV screens — the ones in taxis — by offering a viable alternative scheme.

Not too long ago, we took a walk with Neil Freeman to the geographical center of New York City. If that whet your appetite for centers, then head to Lebanon, Kansas for “The Centers of the USA,” an exhibit of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, open indefinitely since August 14th. “The exhibit depicts and describes several of the ‘Centers’ of the United States, such as the geodetic center, in Lucas, Kansas; the geographic center, near Belle Fourche, South Dakota; and the current population center, in Edgar Springs, Missouri.”

Photo: Eric Allix Rogers

Lights out for the flying saucer: the Architect’s Newspaper reports that Terminal 3 will be demolished and Terminal 4 will be expanded. As much as we love mid-century modern, Terminal 3 has been need of an overhaul for some time now. Any chance the expanded Terminal 4 will be as much fun as the JetBlue terminal?

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Are we growing more than plants?  This question — blown up in large pink letters on a white wall in a small gallery on the Lower East Side — frames the core of the Amplify exhibition. Like the Lower East Side, the exhibition, which is the product of over one year of planning, research and design, is undergoing a process of evolution and reinvention. The larger initiative, Amplifying Creative Communities, pioneered by the Design for Sustainability and Social Innovation (DESIS) Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, represents the first stage of a multi-year project made possible, in part, by the Cultural Innovation Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation.

As one of the installation’s curators, Lara Penin, an Assistant Professor in the Design and Management department at Parsons, describes it, “The exhibition is a research process, a process of interaction in which the content can change before, during and after the exhibit.”  So, like the plants on display at the exhibition that need to be watered in order to survive the August heat, the exhibition is designed to grow. The gallery offers a number of points of interaction where participants can contribute ideas, offer suggestions and “vote” on their favorite examples of sustainability and social innovation from around the world.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

For example, a large map of the Lower East Side printed on a tabletop, which was produced in cooperation with Green Map, invites the public to draw on their own knowledge to scrawl examples of innovative practices from the Lower East Side on specially-designed blue index cards and place them in the appropriate location on the map. In this way, the designers of the exhibit hope to gather more evidence of community-building, political-engagement and sharing-economies taking place in the neighborhood.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the site of much social innovation resides in the district’s over 40 community gardens. Yet, in September, a 10-year moratorium that governs the protection of the gardens is set to expire, leaving room for hungry real estate developers to turn [garden] “plots” into [condominium] “lots.”  On August 10th, hundreds of gardeners gathered and testified before the City Council in protest of lessening the current protections on the gardens.

As part of the research for the exhibit, the DESIS Lab worked with over 75 students enrolled in a course on “Design and Everyday Experience” to survey and document 17 gardens by interviewing members, taking photos and mapping them digitally using Green Map. Each of the gardens is represented in the gallery by an individual white crate housing a potted plant, some individually and creatively designed by the gardeners themselves. Several days before the opening, a “Happy Green Hour” event was held in partnership with the Lower East Side Ecology Center in order to plant the boxes that made up one wall of the exhibition.

Anyone who has spent time in the community gardens of the Lower East Side knows that their true nature is wild and arresting; many are filled with metal and wooden sculptures, colorful blinking lights, flags and Mexican papel picado (cutout paper) as a backdrop to the frequent community events, music and theater. Yet, the gardens of the exhibit are deliberate and designed. In fact, every element of the displays has been designed over a painstaking eight-month process.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

At the opening, which attracted nearly 150 people, a teenage girl from the neighborhood that volunteers with the Green Oasis Community Garden on 8th Street between C and D, beamed with pride and excitement over the miniature representation of her garden on display in the gallery. This is a small but telling sign that the “amplification,” a concept used by the designers at the DESIS Lab, of these activities can make a difference for gardeners and residents on the Lower East Side, participants and passersby that experience and interact with the display, design students as well as the broader design community focused on sustainability and social innovation.

The exhibit seeks to reframe sustainability as a social issue rather than a scientific one. At the same time, it attempts to translate individual and local instances of social innovation such as community gardening to wider and more substantive socio-economic issues. Images of local innovation in sectors such as food and housing from around the world displayed on wall-mounted iPods as well as large colorful design scenarios printed on posters and short videos on cultural diversity, caring for the elderly, eating healthily and living together, all of which were designed by students in an intensive summer course.

The week after the exhibition, the DESIS Lab organized a workshop for a small group of design faculty from around the country and the world, including well-known designer Ezio Manzini from Italy’s Milano Politechnic whose work has deeply influenced the Lab’s founders. The workshop began with a guided tour of the exhibition that spilled out of the windowed gallery and into the amphitheater where Wendy Brawer, the founder of Green Map, led participants on a walk through notable sites on the Lower East Side. The group examined the stickers on the door of activist-space ABC No Rio, nibbled on freshly-made matzo from Streit’s, browsed the stacks at Bluestockings bookstore and peered through the gates to catch a glimpse of the chickens at M’Finda Kalunga Garden.

The DESIS Lab will be turning their attention on a new neighborhood in New York for the upcoming year. The exhibition still has a few weeks to grow but the research process is only beginning.

Photo: Eduardo Staszowski

Amplify is on view August 5^th-September 15^th at the Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement, 466 Grand Street, New York, NY 10012.

Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management program at Parsons The New School for Design.

In 1856, George Dodd, a Victorian historian, wrote, “The supply of food to a great city is among the most remarkable of social phenomena, full of instruction on all sides.” Thus far, Foodprint Project events have borne out the truth of this statement, bringing together an audience and speakers curious to relearn their city using food as a guide, and passionate about the potential for reshaping food systems through urban design. At both Foodprint Toronto and Foodprint NYC, we have learned about creative solutions, unique opportunities, and shared challenges — and yet we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Sarah Rich and I co-founded the Foodprint Project as an exploration of the ways food and cities give shape to one another. As we told Urban Omnibus back in February, days before our first event, we wanted to see what you could learn if you used food as a lens to look at the city.

So, with two cities — New York City and Toronto — under our belts, what have we learned?

Many extraordinary and peculiar factoids, certainly: enough to keep us well-stocked at dinner parties for years to come. Toronto, for example, is the second largest urban food processing hub in North America (after Chicago) and its food factories still occasionally overwhelm certain neighborhoods with the smell of roasting coffee beans, freshly-slaughtered beef, or potato and leek soup. We also learned that turning just 10% of NYC’s private backyards over to urban agriculture would produce 113 million lbs of vegetables each year, or enough to feed 700,000 people at current rates of consumption.

We have also confirmed one of the Foodprint Project’s founding premises: the best food conversations are hyper-interdisciplinary. As Nevin Cohen, urban planner and panelist at Foodprint NYC, put it, “Food is a social justice issue and a public health issue; it’s also an economic development issue, it’s a transportation issue, it’s a regional planning issue, it’s an ecological issue.” By inviting panelists whose work engages deeply with the city’s food systems, but who come from widely differing perspectives — such as a First Nations fisherman, a food scientist working to redesign salt crystals, an architect using urban agriculture to retrofit ‘60s tower blocks, and the health official in charge of drafting Toronto’s first city-wide food policy — we’ve created new connections, both personal and conceptual.

Map via the NYC Regional Foodshed Initiative of the Urban Design Lab, a Joint Laboratory of the Earth Institute and Columbia University GSAPP

But, perhaps most interestingly, by addressing the same four questions in both New York and Toronto, we have been able to start pulling out some of the larger issues that make feeding a city — any city — the most complex, potentially rewarding, and endlessly fascinating design challenge we can imagine.

Tackling urban planning, public policy, and economics in under an hour is perhaps a trifle ambitious. In both Toronto and New York, however, street food trucks proved to be a bite-sized introduction to the way economic and regulatory forces play out to shape an important urban food delivery system. Mapping the city through the lens of food, using either analytic or social measurements, can both clarify existing problems and uncover previously unseen opportunities. As a channel of communication as well as a marker of identity, an understanding of our edible history can help us imagine our urban food futures — futures that are inextricably linked to both local infrastructures and global systems.

Map of Toronto's foodshed by Nina-Marie Lister

So — at the risk of seeming self-congratulatory — perhaps the most important thing we have learned thus far is how important these conversations really are. Sitting architects and urban planners down with farmers, food scientists, public health officials, artists, activists, and CEOs, even for an all-too-brief panel conversation, seems to prompt fresh debate and insight — and some genuine surprises. At Studio-X in New York, our jaws collectively dropped as the CEO of Jetro Cash & Carry, purveyor of bulk quantities of chips to New York’s bodegas, issued a passionate plea for radical junk food taxation (“We need to tax the hell out of deep-fried products in this city!”). And I was not the only person taken aback when Toronto’s Senior Health Advisor told us that she’d taken the city’s food purchasing budget of $2 million to the Ontario Food Terminal, determined to demand more locally-grown produce, only to realize she had far too little money to negotiate effectively with the vendors there.

My hope, then, is that as the Foodprint Project expands its own footprint to visit new cities (we are fundraising on Kickstarter for Foodprint LA), as well as engage in more sustained conversations and interventions across cities, we can begin to map the kind of food system and cities we’d like to see, as well as understand the ones we have. As a start, follow the links below to watch video of each panel from both Foodprint NYC and Foodprint Toronto, and read more about what the two cities can learn from one another in light of the panelists’ conversations.

Graphic via streetvendor.org/vendys/

Zoning Diet
How do zoning, policy, and economics shape the city’s food systems?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Street food vending provides something of a cautionary tale, as city planners use the design tools at their disposal to pursue frequently contradictory goals with varying degrees of success.

New York City caps vendor permits at three thousand (four thousand in summer), despite demand that Sean Basinski, Director of the Street Vendor Project (whose work Omnibus readers will remember from Making Policy Public: Vendor Power! -ed.) estimates at 20,000 to 30,000. A few years ago, the city launched its Green Carts program, hoping to leverage some of those wannabe street vendors to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the city’s food deserts. “A great idea,” agreed Basinski, “but the way the city allocated permits means that people in the Bronx would get a permit to sell in Staten Island.” The result is that “maybe two hundred of the thousand available permits are being used, which is better than nothing, it’s true, but certainly didn’t realize the program’s full potential.”

But while New York gives with one hand and takes away with the other, Toronto has adopted a more enlightened, thoughtful, and utterly ineffective approach to mobile snacking. Until recently, archaic legislation that restricted street food to “cooked meats” translated into a streetscape filled with hot dog stands. Catalyzed by a 2007 design competition organized by urban innovation group Multistory Complex, the city jumped on board, and tried to leverage an expanded street food menu to achieve economic, health, and community building goals. Two years into its pilot project, however, Barbara Emanuel, Senior Policy Advisor at the Toronto Board of Health, readily admitted that the project has been “strangled at birth” by an overdose of well-intentioned regulations that handicapped vendors with 1,000 lb food carts (which can’t be stored on the street overnight, but which the city designed specifically so they couldn’t be towed), as well as more than $30,000 in start-up costs.

Clockwise from top left: Ravine City by Chris Hardwicke; Cover, A Gastronomical Map of Manhattan; Not Far From the Tree, Toronto; Photo © Naa Oyo A. Kwate

Culinary Cartography
What can we learn when we map a city using food as the metric?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Looking at the city through the lens of food — or putting on your “fruit goggles,” as Toronto’s urban fruit forager Laurel Atkinson described it — requires redrawing the map. In both cities, food blurs administrative boundaries, creating a new cartography of need, opportunity, or community. But while in New York, we heard from panelists who used food mapping as a diagnostic (whether it be to trace hipster geography or obesogenic environments), in Toronto, our panelists used food’s map-redrawing capacity consciously, in order to break down social barriers and build new connections.

Edible Archaeology
How has today’s food culture been shaped by social changes, economic fluctuations, and technological innovations throughout the city’s history?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

A consistent narrative across both cities was the way that waves of immigration have reshaped the urban foodscape — physically as well as culturally. New York’s pastrami and bagels are the result of Czar Nicholas III’s anti-semitic laws, but its pre-Prohibition network of German-style breweries (more numerous than Starbucks’ branches are today) not only owed their existence to German immigrants, but also to the opening of the Croton Reservoir, which brought copious amounts of clean water to the city for the first time. In Toronto, a wave of post-Second World War immigration spurred the construction of the Ontario Food Terminal — the first modern wholesale food distribution center on the continent and a model for New York’s Hunt’s Point, among others.

In addition to the aspects of edible history that continue to shape the present, panelists at both New York and Toronto pointed out the foods that have been lost forever — oysters the size of dinner plates, and vast shoals of Lake Ontario Atlantic salmon  — the natural bounty of both cities transmuted into old money and fancy mansions. But although it’s impossible not to feel some nostalgia for flavors and foods that have been lost for ever, perhaps the most interesting outcome of this panel is the way a vision of radically different historical food infrastructure — whether it’s oyster barges brokering deals along the East River, or beer caves dotting the Manhattan bedrock like swiss cheese — makes it easier to imagine, in turn, a radically different food future.

Foodprint Toronto | Photo by Stacy Lewis

Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios
What are the opportunities and challenges of the city’s possible food futures?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Any discussion of the future of food involves an equal measure of doomsday scenarios and creative solutions: in Toronto, we heard about wheat speculation, peak phosphorus, and food’s role in the fall of civilizations; in New York, we heard about 3D food printers, military rations, and synthetic meat. But perhaps the most important topic we have discussed is how to take these local, context-specific, good ideas to scale — and, indeed, whether that’s possible or even desirable.

In Toronto, The Stop’s Kathryn Scharf articulated the dilemma precisely: “The food movement — the alternatives that have been built over the past twenty or thirty years across North America — have been built on a shoestring. They’re volunteer-based, completely precarious, and often just one dynamic facilitator away from ruin. But that’s also the reason they work: they’re organically grown and shaped by the needs of a specific community.” The Stop itself has recently decided against further expansion (“We can’t just parachute into new communities and tell them what they need,”) in favor of a more thoughtful response: sharing its best practices to help other, smaller or struggling, local food programs move toward sustainability.

Although “many municipal authorities are way ahead of state or national governments in terms of food systems innovation,” according to Foodprint Toronto panelist Evan D. G. Fraser, each individual city is still inextricably bound to a global agricultural hinterland that operates at a much vaster scale. His book, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, advocates a policy-driven, “nested bioregionalism” in the urban supply chain, which would capture efficiencies of scale and climatic advantage, but balance them with a local food system that acts as an insurance policy.

But this is all an imprecise science, as both Scharf and Fraser made clear. “The hard science isn’t there,” Scharf acknowledged. The numbers don’t exist that predict the scale at which food system renewal and regeneration must happen, nor how large Fraser’s suggested “cash reserve” needs to be.

In other words, for all the innovation and success stories on display in both cities, there are enormous gaps in infrastructural analysis: understanding where and what supports are needed, as well as what role each of the food system redesign levers (consumer demand, for example, or regulation) could and should play.

The Foodprint Project is raising funds for Foodprint LA through August 26th. Visit Kickstarter.com to make a contribution. Pledge gifts include copies of The Foodprint Papers, seats at the Foodprint LA VIP dinner, and more.

Foodprint NYC | Photo by Rachel Hillery, Columbia GSAPP

Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography and a freelance writer with work published in GOOD, Dwell, Wired UK, Volume, and more. She is also co-director, with Geoff Manaugh, of Future Plural; co-founder, with Sarah Rich, of the Foodprint Project; and co-curator of Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture during March and April 2010.

This week we explored how web designers and developers can help city governments serve their constituents more effectively, particularly through thoughtful adoption of apps. Boston is one of the cities working with Code for America to do this, and some of its neighborhoods may be leading the charge. Participatory Chinatown, a new urban planning video game designed by the Asian Community Development Corporation, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, and collaborators from Emerson College, is attempting to bridge the gap between the frustrations of top-down planning and the interactive collaboration possible through online games. Video games are potent ‘viewing machines‘ when it comes to urban experience, their abstract bounds often coinciding with real-life problems and constraints. In this one, players on PC can navigate a 3D Chinatown simultaneously with other players, making decisions about housing, public space and work, later exploring different redevelopment proposals while making comments and suggestions.

If Gov 2.0 apps and participatory gaming solutions can help streamline city services or engage community members in urban visioning exercises, can they help stem the tide of service cuts by city governments across the country? This week on The Avenue, Mark Muro and Kenan Fikri take a detailed look at a sobering report released in July by the National League of Cities that predicts “local governments… will shed up to 500,000 more workers by the close of fiscal year 2012–on top of the 300,000 already laid off between August 2008 and July 2010.”

More locally, an agency whose finances seem to be perpetually in a state of crisis is, of course, the MTA. This week City Limits took another look at the sorry state of affairs, further unpacking the implications of recent service cuts. Facing significant debts, the MTA’s uncertain financial future requires additional cuts to service, fare hikes, and the search for stable subsidies. Meanwhile, can private enterprise step into the void left by service cuts? Brooklyn is seeing the expansion of private commuter vans, or “dollar vans,” which provide affordable (and often unauthorized) transportation over discontinued MTA bus lines at around $2. Controversy has arisen over the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s plans to create a pilot program in this vein, which critics claim is a privatized replication that would further undercut the city’s existing bus service. On a regional scale, students at Penn have envisioned a high-speed Northeast Corridor that would best Amtrak’s current and proposed rail lines, creating a 37 minute ride from Philadelphia to New York City. You may remember Bob Yaro, one of the professors who taught the Penn School of Design students, from this UO feature last summer.

Still from Gordon Matta-Clark's Day's End (16mm, 1975). Courtesy of Light Industry.

And if you’re looking for something to do next Friday, Light Industry is screening two filmic records of the Hudson River piers before they were torn down. The first of these chronicles a 1975 piece by Gordon Matta-Clark, in which he made characteristic cuts and incisions to the derelict Pier 52 to transform it into an “indoor water park.” The film is “one of the few records we have of both [Matta-Clark's] great work and of the abandoned Hudson River piers” and will be screened alongside another cinematic evocation of the architectural oddities of the piers immediately before their demolition, a classic of gay erotica by Arch Brown called Pier Groups. Something for everyone.

Another film made all the more poignant by the destruction of the buildings that provide its setting is James Marsh’s 2008 Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire. Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who performed the 1974 stunt between the twin towers of the World Trade Center depicted in the film (and who has been hanging out at the Cathedral of St John the Divine ever since) has recently taught his first ever group master-class at the studio of choreographer and extreme action hero Elizabeth Streb, whom Omnibus readers might remember from her turn as a juror in the ideas competition to Reinvent Grand Army Plaza.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.