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.

© Agnese Sanvito | Courtesy of LFA

How do you create a context for good architectural work to be conceived and communicated, understood and valued, designed and built? The Architectural League of New York has been asking and answering this question since its founding in 1881, through lectures, design studies, symposia, exhibitions, prizes, publications and websites (like the one you are reading right now). The London-based Architecture Foundation (AF) has a shorter history — it was founded as the United Kingdom’s first independent architecture center in 1991 — but no less ambitious a mission: to “cultivate new talent and ideas” in architecture and urbanism. One of the many ways the Architecture Foundation does this is by helping to curate and produce the London Festival of Architecture (LFA), a biannual event that celebrates new design ideas in and for London. For its fourth incarnation in 2010, over 600 events, exhibitions, installations and tours responded to this year’s theme of “The Welcoming City.” Since Urban Omnibus is all about celebrating new design ideas in and for New York, we were curious to hear directly from some of the organizers about how to go about such an endeavor in the festival format. We were particularly interested in strategies to invite the public into a shared sense of transformative possibility about the built environment. So we caught up with Sarah Ichioka, director of the Architecture Foundation and co-director of the London Festival of Architecture, and Moira Lascelles, a consultant curator for the 2010 Festival. Read what they had to say about it below.

What is the London Festival of Architecture and how did it come about?
The London Festival of Architecture (LFA) is a citywide celebration of architecture in London. It consists of a series of installations, exhibitions and events that tackle key issues relating to architecture and the built environment today. The aim is to be as inclusive as possible and to bring awareness of the profession to a wide public.

The Festival originated in 2004 as the London Architecture Biennale and was focused in the Clerkenwell area of London – a neighborhood characterized by the large number of architecture and design firms based there. Since then, the Festival has grown and changed its name to appeal to an broad audience that extends beyond the professional design community.

The Festival has three core funders, two governmental (Arts Council England and the London Development Agency) and one private sector (Land Securities, a large property company). While core funding covers key central costs like our website, and some central project management salaries (the four LFA Directors all donate their time), the majority of Festival costs are met through individuals’ and firms’ in-kind support, through donation of labor, facilities, etc. There is a tangible spirit of enthusiastic volunteerism that really makes it happen each time.

How does the Festival’s stated connection to its local contexts play out, at the scale of the city and the scale of neighborhoods?
The Festival tends to focus on key areas, or ‘hubs,’ of London. These ‘hubs’ tend to be places that are experiencing a period of change or have projects or initiatives of architectural significance that the LFA feels are useful and relevant to highlight to a public audience. Curated core activities of the Festival are then located in these focus hubs.

In the past the Festival has focused on areas such as Canary Wharf, Kings Cross, Southwark and most recently the High Street 2012 area in East London and the Bankside Urban Forest in South London. Additionally, we actively encourage, and are incredibly grateful to, independent event organizers who stage events right across London allowing the Festival to be truly citywide. In the past, LFA events have been staged in Hammersmith, Barking, Croydon and Kilburn, to name only a few.

The Union Street Urban Orchard, designed by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry, has been employing the help of the local community and enthusiastic volunteers to regenerate this currently disused space. This collaborative project developed by The Architecture Foundation, Bankside Open Spaces Trust, ProjectARKs and the Wayward Plant Registry will run until 19 September. Photo (above): flickr user John999. Photo (below): James Nash

Final Review of the International Architecture Student Festival. Photo: LFA2010

Can you describe briefly two or three of the projects that the Architecture Foundation brought to the Festival and why?
The Architecture Foundation was responsible for delivering a wide range of events for the 2010 London Festival of Architecture, including the International Architecture Student Festival and the International Architecture Showcase. For the student festival, in collaboration with London Metropolitan University, the AF asked students from around the world to create site-specific installations to act as sign-posts for the LFA. For the showcase, the AF collaborated with the British Council to turn more than 30 international embassies and cultural institutes around London into presenting venues for a series of exhibitions, installations, events and talks programmes to highlight the dynamic architectural projects that are emerging from their respective countries and to address the theme of the ‘The Welcoming City.’

Both these initiatives reinforce two of The Architecture Foundation’s key aims: exploring international links and collaborations with overseas partners and nurturing new and emerging talent.

The AF also aims to influence the quality of the built environment through real-time, 1:1 scale engagement with stakeholders, and through the fostering of productive interdisciplinary dialogue. For example, the Architecture Foundation staged two large scale interventions in South London, one of which was the building of an urban orchard and community garden complete with 85 trees. Taking its cue from Witherford Watson Mann’s vision for the Bankside Urban Forest in South London, this installation creates a place of exchange for local Bankside residents and visitors to the Festival. The Union Street Urban Orchard lasts until September 19th, after which time all the trees and plants will be redistributed around the local community greening estates and existing community gardens.

Another intervention that reflects this spirit of engagement and dialogue is the Oikos Project, a 120-seater theater built entirely out of locally-sourced, salvaged materials. It’s still under construction. This project was designed by the Berlin-based architect Martin Kaltwasser, and produced in collaboration with the political theater company the Red Room.

The Jelly Fish Theatre, designed by Berlin based architects Köbberling and Kaltwasser, is the UK’s first fully-functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials. Photo (above): Maja Mysliborska. Photo (below): The Oikos Project

Why do you think large-scale events such as this are important for cities?
These installations allow a broad public to interact with architecture and consider, in a very direct manner, changes — whether underway or yet to be initiated — to their local environment. It brings to life a subject that can at times seem intimidating or inaccessible.

In addition, temporary projects created in the spirit of a Festival can act as testbeds for longer-term strategies and solutions to a given problem. The ‘temporary state’ of these installations encourages people to allow activities to happen that they may usually deem to be too risky or expensive. Once they see how they work on a short-term basis they have more courage in pursuing longer term strategies.

Are there other comparable events taking place in London?
We are definitely the most comprehensive event of this sort in the UK, in terms of both geographic coverage and temporal length. For example, Open House London, a really great event that happens one weekend each autumn, is about getting people special access to see the inside of existing buildings. The Festival, in contrast or complement to this, is about creating new visions of how the city might be, whether this is through exhibition, debates, or full-scale interventions within the public realm.

In your opinion, to what extent does the Festival invite Londoners to share a sense of transformative possibility about the built environment?
Due to the wide variety of Festival events there is something for everyone! People can be affected on any number of different scales, from a debate or an exhibition to a transformative experience through an installation. The Festival makes these events and encounters possible.

What do you think are some ways that sense might be maintained after the event is over?
Legacy has been a key word for the LFA2010 and many of our projects have sought to plan for a longer life beyond the Festival closing date of July 4th. Two strong examples of this are The Union Street Urban Orchard, mentioned above, along with the Oikos Project, which saw the live build of a theater from recycled and reclaimed materials that will house specially commissioned plays on climate change in the autumn. The idea of legacy was also written into the International Architecture Student Festival Brief encouraging students to find local clients and building useful objects that could last. Our hope is that this aspect of the Festival will continue to grow in years to come.

Moss Your City. Design: by PUSHAK. Photo: The Architecture Foundation / Guy Archard. All Rights Reserved.

In all of its various activities, SUPERFRONT aims to subvert the traditional order of operations in architectural practice and discourse. For example, when the time came to open up the backyard as a community resource, Mitch opted not to stage a traditional architectural competition, in which designers work on spec in response to a pre-defined brief. Rather, SUPERFRONT first put out a call to community groups for program ideas that would support their missions, asking how each group might like to use the 1,000 square foot outdoor space for a public activity. Then the gallery partnered with Design in 5, the Architectural League’s group for designers five years or less out of school, to organize a Sketch120 charrette, in which each team of volunteer designers was assigned one of the briefs at random and had two hours to come up with a scheme. The winning design scheme, by a group called KIT, involves an canopy made of hula hoops to house and shade the activities of the New York City Explorers Carnival, a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center. This Saturday from 6 to 9pm, check out the public unveiling of the installation and the simultaneous opening of SUPERFRONT’s latest exhibition: Artists who Play Well with Architects. There will be live music and beverages.

As with all things SUPERFRONT, the installation in the backyard is more than meets the eye. The appropriateness of the design of the canopy to its specific, intended use — to frame a safe, playful and multi-generational event space — is just part of the project’s broader objective: to reimagine the relationship between the architect and the public in the creation of public space, whether temporary, permanent or somewhere in-between. The theme underlying the charrette was “Temporary Publics.” Here’s how SUPERFRONT defines that theme:

Mismanaged crises of the past few years (from the failure of physical infrastructure to the catastrophes of bond markets) have complicated our notion of the architectural relationship between temporality and typology. For example, temporary FEMA trailers in New Orleans remain occupied as primary homes five years later, or luxury projects that became icons before they were even constructed remain stalled as holes in a sidewalk.

Sketch 120: “Sketch Cypher — Temporary Publics” hosted by SUPERFRONT and Design in 5, a group of the Architectural League, invites you to reconsider the possibilities of public architecture in this moment of temporal-typological crisis. What if the industry never returns to normal, if real estate financing never materializes, and all we had to work with, as architects, were our own ideas, a discarded space, and a nebulous public?

What if temporary were forever? The goal is to design a public space with these precepts.

SUPERFRONT itself embodies these precepts. The collaborations, exhibitions and events it organizes plumb the depth and breadth of subject matter that experiments in architecture currently confront. And it situates each of these experiments in the cultural context of the space’s location in Bed-Stuy and in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary practice.

Photo by Dave Rittinger

The jury who selected the winning scheme consisted of DJ /rupture, nArchitects and Slade Architecture. The design team, KIT, is comprised of Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster and Read Langworthy. New York City Explorers (NYCE) is a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center created by Kisha Edwards-Gandsy & Keyanna Murrill that provides classes, camps, childcare, two indoor play spaces, and party planning for families throughout NYC. The NYCE Carnival at SUPERFRONT aims to provide safe, carnival style atmosphere complete with scheduled films, games, contests, healthy food vendor sampling, and creative family programming.

PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT Team:
SUPERFRONT Project Team: Nicole McGlinn, Project Manager; Mitch McEwen, Executive Director; Lily Fuks, Project Intern; Melissa Frost, Gallery Intern; Sarah Millsaps, Engineering Consultant;

Designers, KIT:  Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster, Read Langworthy

NY City Explorers: Kisha Edwards-Gandsy And Keyanna Murrill, Co-Owners

Design and Construction Volunteers: Jack Bader, Rodrigo Balarezo, Alex Baumel, Cristina Greavu, Elizabeth MacWillie, Scott Miller, Viren Patel, Shinjinee Pathak, Herbert Ramirez, Rian Rooney, Aviva Rubin, William Serbin, Irmak Turan

Installation photograph by Dave Rittinger. See more of his photos of PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT on Flickr.

In celebration of my birthday, a sunny three-day weekend, and the acquisition of a brand-new bike, I decided to take a ride out to visit the Candela Structures on Flushing Bay.

The Candelas are two fiberglass prefab shells that sit at the World’s Fair Marina, just north of the Mets’ new stadium. These relics of the 1964/5 World’s Fair were designed by architect and industrial designer Peter Schladermundt (not Félix Candela as the names and nearby signs might lead you to believe). A year ago, journalist Paul Lukas and I researched and produced a show about them at the inimitable City Reliquary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Paul and I had first found out about the structures from a Mets fan message board. I’m a sucker for any kind of adventure, great or small, so as soon as I found them on Google Maps’ satellite view (they’re hard to miss once you look), I knew I had to see them in person. And once we did (on our way to a game at Shea Stadium shortly before it was demolished) we developed a crush on them that snowballed into a crazy-long research project, the exhibition, and a website documenting everything we know.

The Candela Structures: A New York City History Mystery at the City Reliquary

Our show was subtitled “A New York City History Mystery,” partly because up until the last minute (when we got a major detecting-assist from New York Times reporter Susan Dominus) we couldn’t confirm Peter Schladermundt as the structures’ designer (though we knew he had designed the overall marina), but also because the narrative of the show was as much about us unraveling the mystery of the structures as it was about the structures themselves. The buildinglets (as I like to call them) raised so many questions from the moment we first saw them. How had we never seen them or heard about them? How on earth could they be bus shelters (as the nearby signs claim) when they’re so far from the road and not at all closed off from the elements? Why were they named after Félix Candela? As we started researching them, we found more questions than answers, which just drew us in deeper. Why were they not mentioned in Candela’s archives? Why did his widow not remember them? We discovered there had been a third structure in the center that had housed a Coast Guard exhibit, but it disappeared soon after the Fair ended. Whatever became of it? And why did the other two survive when so many of the buildings built for the Fair were demolished when it closed?

This illustration was used on a promotional postcard for the Fair. The structures shown on the dock were never built, but the illustration has circulated among World's Fair collectors, creating confusion about how many structures actually existed. (Courtesy of Owens Corning)

Architecture is just another kind of storytelling, and stories are what make a space into a place.The structures are minimal surfaces, a topic that Candela researched extensively. But beyond looking like they might have been designed by him (though they weren’t), we never found any solid connection. They were, in fact, designed by Peter Schladermundt, an architect and industrial designer, and were made of prefab panels — a sandwich construction of fiberglass reinforced resin surrounding a 2-inch foam core — that snap together. As far as I was able to determine, they are the oldest standing fiberglass structures in the city.

Despite that, I know these structures aren’t central to the history of architecture or the history of New York (and they don’t even appear to have made the cut for the new AIA Guide—drat), but I love them nonetheless. They’re so unexpected, so unlike anything else in New York City, and so utterly charming. They’re not pretentious, they just stand guard by the bay, watching the sailboats come and go, the planes take off and land at LaGuardia, and the cars drive by. They were there long before I arrived in New York in 1993, waiting to be discovered. How many other pieces of New York history are hiding in plain sight, with stories to tell? Architecture is just another kind of storytelling, and stories are what make a space into a place and connect all the disparate pieces of the metropolis.

The structures sit at the water’s edge, on the northern end of Flushing-Corona Park — not the most convenient location to get to from North Brooklyn via public transportation — so I decided to pay my respects by bike, with the added incentive of a stop at Timmy O’s Frozen Custard in Corona on the way. What a ride! Grand Avenue passes by some beautiful old factories, but the roads are a mess and drivers are not particularly interested in slowing down for bikes. In Maspeth the traffic increased, the quality of the road decreased, and buses are ever present. But I made it across the L.I.E. on-ramps, past a Memorial Day observation, and crossed Queens Boulevard. There are some amazing views from this area back toward the towers of Manhattan, but admiring them requires stopping and clambering onto the sidewalk, as the roads are unforgiving of lapses in concentration.

Partway into Corona I lost the thread of Corona Avenue’s many curves. I managed to find my way back, though, and even found my way to Timmy O’s for a much needed break. A large frozen custard from Timmy O’s is huge, but I ate it all and headed for the home stretch. After a few wrong turns and dangerously pothole-filled roads I finally came to the edge of the huge fields of parking lots around the baseball stadium. I dismounted and walked along the narrow sidewalks to the one spot I knew led across the spaghetti of roads to the marina.

At last! My first glimpses of those two old friends were as delightful as ever. I’ve seen them now in all seasons: surrounded by cherry blossoms, dusted with snow, and capped with autumn foliage, but they really look smashing against the deep green of summer leaves. I was happy to see people enjoying the shade under the eastern shell, and I was only too happy to collapse under the shade of the western one and enjoy the breezes off the bay.

The Candela Structures are very much in need of repair. While from a distance they are pristine and white — an almost shocking sight in a city of grey concrete, grey asphalt, and bricks of various earthy hues — up close rust, cracks, gaps, and graffiti mar their graceful symmetry. The gaps reveal the seams of the prefab pieces and, in a couple of places, the metal clips that hold them together. It’s clear that rain and ice have invaded the interior. How much longer can they stand without a major overhaul? They’re amazingly resilient — a function of both their elegant geometry and their lightweight material — especially considering they were built for a temporary event. They no longer sport their angled glass walls and the middle structure is gone without a trace, but the remaining two fiberglass shells still stand as architectural icons on the waterfront.

I feel a real affinity for these quirky little structures. They’re elegant, but odd — they seem to belong to some other city — and they aren’t nearly as grand in scale as the other survivors of the two World’s Fairs in the park, but there’s something charming about that. And even though Paul and I had solved so many of their mysteries (it was a real pleasure to speak with Peter Schladermundt’s children who confirmed him as the designer after we had followed so many false leads), we never did find out what happened to the third one that once stood in the middle, but that mystery only adds to their appeal.

I’ll continue to visit them whenever I have time, hopefully to see them restored and enjoyed into the future, though I worry I’ll just be watching them fall further into disrepair. They lie in that unfortunate gap that swallows a lot of urban artifacts — the space between history and the too-recent past, out of fashion but as of yet unrecognized as part of our cultural heritage. I hope the Candelas survive that awkward transition and find a permanent spot in the cityscape, and that by uncovering part of their story I’ve helped in some small way.

Post script:  While I wouldn’t recommend the bike route I took — though it was convenient for frozen custard on the way out and lemon ice on the way back — I definitely recommend a visit to the marina to see the Candelas in person. You can reach them by bike more easily, I think, using the 34th Ave bike lanes (what I plan to do next time), by subway from the number 7 stop at Willets Point, by car via Northern Boulevard, or by sailboat in Flushing Bay. And look for them next time you fly in or out of LaGuardia. Directions, photos (including historic photos from the World’s Fair), and all kinds of other information are available at candelastructures.org.

All photos by Kirsten Hively. Kirsten Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Together with journalist Paul Lukas, she recently co-produced a show at the City Reliquary on the ersatz Candela Structures in Queens, and when not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

Natural disasters: how can we improve?
Panel discussion with Martin Bell OBE, Dame Barbara Stocking (Oxfam GB) & Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity)
May 25, 2010
Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London

A mixed and studious crowd gathered at the Royal Geographic Society last week, exuding a slightly nervous goodwill as we waited for latter-day saints Cameron Sinclair, of Architecture for Humanity, and Dame Barbara Stocking, of Oxfam GB, to be introduced.

Natural disasters have long and often been the cause of major political reform, international cooperation and the coming together of intellect and humanity. However, with events occurring at a larger scale and greater frequency than previously witnessed, the need to galvanize and channel our energies seems more urgent than ever.

Panel chair, fêted journalist and erstwhile MP Martin Bell OBE first met Cameron Sinclair while reporting on the violence in Kosovo in the early ’90s. Set up in 1999, AfH engages in building activities, supplied pro-bono by volunteers, in communities of need – defined not only by crises but also including those beleaguered by endemic or sustained poverty. A genuine fairytale of an organization, garnering adoration and disdain in (not quite) equal measure, AfH nonetheless prides itself on somewhere near 5,600 volunteers from over 83 cities, and cynicism notwithstanding, does some amazing reconstruction work.

Behind the cuddly organization and camera-friendly baby face, Sinclair exhibits jaws of steel, using military terminology abundantly; volunteers undertake a “tour of duty,” services are measured “on the ground” and in terms of strategy and impact, and not simply as aid packages to be “air-dropped in.”

Tugboat vs. Ocean Liner
Not for the first time, Sinclair pulled out his analogy of tugboat vs. ocean liner, in his demonstration of the agility of a NGO operating as a small, nebulous and peripatetic network. Perhaps this mentality is best demonstrated by the TED-funded Open Architecture Network, which utilizes open-source innovation to develop and host designs; in three short years of activity, the OAN shares thousands of design projects under creative commons licensing, from the prosaic to the outlandish, across the globe.

The flipside is that whilst tugboat AfH may well be more nimble and efficacious at community level, ocean-liner Oxfam, due to its size and longstanding relationships with organizations such as the UN, weighs in at the criticial stages of advocacy and government policy. Though the effects of grassroots activity can filter up and effect change, such change must be established at the level of national governance to become sustainable rather than spontaneous or sporadic.

Dame Stocking emphasized that protective measures need to be embedded in local governments and societies as well as at the national level; a predictable but no-less urgent agenda for action included pushing for climate change goals to be met, particularly in the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions, as agricultural societies are placed in greater jeopardy than ever. Governance at the national level needs to become more porous and engaged with disaster management, taking responsibility for aid management and crisis protocol, activating local and social networks; foremost though, year-round disaster risk reduction needs to be acknowledged and given much higher priority both by governments and humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam, though urgent appeal in the event of disaster is oftentimes a more emotive “call-to-arms.”

Media
Indeed, what happens when the media leaves? Media attention naturally drives up donations of resources and time – which need to be spread out over longer periods, rather than arrive in inefficient, erratic spikes. There is also a seeming public appetite for failure, and this is in a sense on the shoulders of NGOs and the media; too often a realistic timescale is not projected, leading to a sense of expectancy and the proliferation of misinformation. The need for commercially saleable news often supercedes deeper investigative journalism; either this reliance on AP-wire reporting must be reversed, or citizen journalism could step up. In fact, such use of social networking has benefited crisis areas in Kenya, Haiti and South East Asia, utilizing GPS technology to create more accurate geospatial maps of activity and need.

Sinclair conceded that the media should be welcomed to critiquing NGO activity where relevant – but they could also hold similar fire to private sector stakeholders or participants, for example the oil companies in the wake of the recent Gulf spill, which was practically unreported in the US mainstream media.

Stocking noted that aid agencies can also be very defensive with the management of information. Increased honesty would create a more fruitful relationship between the media, agencies and the public.

In punk-rock style, Sinclair cited Fred Cuny, whistleblower and humanitarian martyr who’s been missing in action since 1995, as a major influence. And he reminds us that with the increase of social networking, one cannot hide. Instead, the use of storytelling, not to manufacture truth, can expose a greater complexity of aid work than has been attempted. Recognizing the need to share failures, he pondered why donors expect NGOs to demonstrate a 100% success rate when even politicians need just over 50% – a seemingly whimsical thought, but particularly biting in the light of the United Kingdom’s currently “hung” parliament.

Architecture
Architects, surveyors and planners are often at a loss in terms of how to gear their practice towards aid. Firstly, architects can’t expect to get involved straight away – it’s one for the long haul. AfH are often the “last ones out,” and Sinclair states their key activity takes place between four months and four years after crisis events. The key is in balancing immediate humanitarian concerns with the potential for economic stability and recovery, towards long term solutions. For example, a crisis in housing in Haiti must not benefit the manufacturers of prefabricated housing in Iowa, whilst creating no jobs and making no use of indigenous skills and materials in Haiti. Architects operating in a humanitarian sphere needs must accept greater liability, looking at his projects less like an artwork but more like a business model, much in the same way as a developer.

No final delivery is worse than no response at all, so architects cannot afford to be prima donnas about designs; a degree of humility must be learned. Yet beauty need not be discarded for functionalism; what needs to be produced is not just a beautiful building aesthetically, but also in terms of equity; “building in beauty” at this level becomes crucial because of the maintenance and subsequent equity. This is an example of an aesthetic concern being reconfigured in terms of development and sustainability in economic terms.

Sinclair and Stocking both underlined the importance of utilizing both indigenous and donor skill sets – squeezing not just money or even donations-in-kind but crucially, knowledge. Like the sunken-eyed Bob Geldof at LiveAid (go study pop history, those of you too young to remember), the perkier Sinclair exhibits a hunger for extracting the maximum from those who approach his organization, but unlike Geldof, they don’t just want you to “give us your f***ing money” – they want your mind too, which, in these times, is all to the good.

N.B.  Hat-tip to Cameron, the guys at AfH and particularly to Susi J Platt & Purnima McCutcheon, designers of the Yodakandiya Community Complex, briefly discussed during the RGS event, it was also shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award 2010 on the same day, and deservedly so.

Shumi Bose is an architectural writer and researcher. She lives in London.

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. Images via 21st Century Challenges.

In the past decade, more than 50 new libraries have been created in New York City elementary schools through the combined efforts of the Robin Hood Foundation and New York City Board of Education (now Department of Education). Last week the Architectural League hosted a panel discussion to take a closer look at the creation, development and architectural expression of the libraries. The event went beyond a congratulatory retrospective of these beautiful rooms to raise challenging questions about the nature of public/private partnerships in public service and the difficulty of scaling up and systematizing bespoke processes. Architectural League executive director Rosalie Genevro moderated the panel of David Saltzman, Robin Hood Foundation executive director; Harold Levy, former Chancellor of the City’s Department of Education (formerly the Board of Education); Lonni Tanner, Robin Hood’s former Director of Special Projects and one of the principal players in the establishment of the Library Initiative; Henry Myerberg, an architect involved in the initiative from its inception; and Scott Lauer, an architect and a former Director of the Library Initiative for the Robin Hood Foundation.

One open question that resonated throughout the conversation — and, to be sure, throughout the multiple plot twists in the design, construction and use of the Robin Hood Libraries — concerns the appropriateness of objective metrics for success in evaluating learning environments, especially given Robin Hood’s mission: to eradicate poverty in New York City. Saltzman earned applause when he listed the libraries, alongside piano lessons and little league baseball, as “things that are just good” regardless of whether or not their impact is quantifiable. More than one audience member remarked that the recent publication of The L!brary Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools by Anooradha Siddiqi, another former director of the Library Initiative and the event’s introductory speaker, reminds us that part of the process of qualifying the impact of a transformational environment, leaving aside quantifying it for a moment, relies on the testimony of students, parents, teachers, designers and school administrators. In that spirit, the Omnibus recently went to Clason Point to check out one of these libraries at Bronx Public School 69 and to see it in use. Impressed, we wanted to hear firsthand about how this library came to be, so we spoke with the designers, Richard Lewis and Jason Gold of the firm Richard H. Lewis Architect (the firm designed 10 Robin Hood libraries in total), and with Alan Cohen, the inspiring principal who made it happen. Check out the video below:

When asked why Robin Hood chose the library as the educational environment to target, Lonni Tanner explained the intention to find a place that “100% of school population could use.” Her guiding belief lay in the potential power of activating one space in the school where students’ “imaginations could run wild.” The Foundation determined that a library – if designed, equipped, staffed and programmed well – possesses this potential in ways that the classroom, the cafeteria and the gym do not.

That power is palpable in the P.S. 69 Library. Each of the libraries is beautiful (click here to see a slideshow of Library Initiative libraries). And each is, in the words of Richard Lewis, “its own little world” that attests in its own way to the stated goals of the initiative: to redefine the mission of the library as a resource for the entire school community; to rebuild the library with new design standards and unique imagery; to replenish the library with new books and technology; to retrain school staff to make full use of the library; and to reassess the impact of the school library to track progress and impact. What sets the P.S. 69 library apart is the way its location within the school makes manifest the priority the school places on reading and learning.

When Principal Cohen arrived at P.S. 69 seven years ago, he found a failing school on the verge of being taken over by the state. He immediately set about changing the school’s culture and raising student achievement. Siddiqi writes: “Displacing his own office and those of the rest of the administration, he advocated situating the library in a horseshoe plan around the stair at the main entrance to the school. Students walking into the building must enter up ‘through’ the library to the main floor, forcing them to confront the spectacle of the library coming in, going out, and passing through.” The library opened one year ago. It certainly inspires the imagination to run wild. And it inspires belief in the transformative possibility of making a principle – that reading and learning are central to student achievement and therefore central to increasing economic opportunity – no longer exclusively symbolic. -C.S.

P.S. 69, Bronx | Richard H. Lewis Architect | Photo: Peter Mauss/Esto

As Mayor, he was well known for his trademark low-budget solutions to Curitiba’s mobility and environmental problems such as bus rapid transit, cash-for-trash, and the transformation of floodplains into sprawling city parks. Perhaps less known is Lerner’s longstanding embrace of high-rise density, from the intense mixed-use corridor that lines Curitiba’s BRT routes to his current proposals for densification of new transit nodes in São Paulo, in which the revenue created through new density is proposed to fund critically needed park and transit infrastructure.

Bus Rapid Transit stop, Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: Mathieu Struck

“The City is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution” Lerner insists in reference to climate change. Few topics charge him up like the issue of urban mobility. For smaller neighborhoods, he proposes miniature electric cars for individuals called Dock Docks. In larger cities, he proposes transfer tubes to move passengers from smart buses to smart subways in free fare zones. In Lerner’s world, everything must be smarter, and must use every unit of space and resource with wisdom and clarity. His work continually recognizes that the jump in scale from Curitiba to São Paulo demands a jump in the scale of intervention. Yet in all cases Lerner states unequivocally that the key issue facing a rapidly developing planet is the distance people must travel to get to work – the means by which that distance can be smartly traversed and reduced, he rightly asserts, are the keys to global sustainability.

About green buildings, by contrast, he shrugs. Nice, he says, but the real issue is how people move between the buildings.

Bus, Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: Mathieu Struck

Scalable solutions to urban mobility and sustainability require the logic of design

And with this simple shrug he plunges our professions, without pretense or guile, into the quandary of our epoch. It is human nature, after all, to toil within our arena of influence, even if that arena has no more impact than the proverbial re-arranging of the Titanic’s deck chairs, with perhaps some brilliant thoughts on design and recyclable content on the way down. Madonna made it clear that we are living in a material world, and we as architects, planners, and developers build much of that new material, with limited opportunities to remake the material that came before us. While it is true that a large percentage of greenhouse gases are generated by the existing building stock, how much agency do we have to meaningfully alter the majority of this existing stock? Do we honestly believe weatherizing McMansions will solve a thing? Noble though it may attempt to be, the impact of building greener new buildings and retrofitting a few older ones is negligible compared to the scale of global climate change, yet that is the limited potency that the design and development professions manage to muster and ballyhoo.

The actual material we as professionals wield in response to worldwide urbanization is a broader and far more significant matter, and demands that our professions influence the form and mobility, the very morphology, of our cities. It was not that long ago that we as architects had a far greater arena of influence, that we designed cities for monarchs and pontiffs, that we planned subways and schools for citizens and scholars, that we swayed the heads and hearts of presidents and prime ministers.  The word architect was once synonymous with power.

We were, once, important.

Today the word “architect,” though officially adjudicated by the AIA along an increasingly narrower bandwidth, is more commonly heard in reference to strategists like Karl Rove. Not since Harvey Gantt, former Mayor and Senate candidate, have we seen an actual architect in a major position of power in American politics. How far we have fallen since (or perhaps in part due to?) Thomas Jefferson.

Intersection, Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: Mathieu Struck

Yet lead we can and lead we must. What Jaime Lerner teaches us, what students today tend to understand better than practitioners, is that as designers we can lead as others cannot. We are empowered with a holistic understanding of the environment and a project-based education that are ideally suited to the challenges of our day. Even business schools are attempting to adopt a “design-based thinking” curriculum, an arena in which we hold the high ground. As Lerner’s work so clearly reveals, the ability to conceptualize scalable solutions to urban mobility and sustainability requires the logic of design. It is with that field of vision that designers – be they architects, planners, or developers – can take on the scale of the problems the entire globe faces rather than settling for the sustainability scraps left on our plate.

Few words summarize this better than Jaime’s response to the question burning in me after the lecture. In which capacity has he had the ability to have more impact, I asked, as an architect or as a mayor?

He smiled wryly, took a long sip of deep red wine, and said “I’m the best client I ever had.”

All images by Flickr user Mathieu Struck. Some rights reserved.

This is the fourth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. 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.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…