Elisha Otis moved to Yonkers, New York in 1852 to convert an abandoned sawmill into a bed frame factory. Endless trips hauling debris from floor to floor gave the tinkerer a challenge: wasn’t there a better way? With the help of his sons, Otis designed and built the first “safety elevator” to manage the task. Two years later, Otis presented his invention dramatically at New York City’s Crystal Palace Exhibition, where he drew himself, on the elevator platform, high above the crowd, then cut the cable from which the platform was suspended. To the crowd’s astonishment, the platform fell only a few inches. The elevator proliferated, allowing people and goods to be hauled to new heights and clearing the way for taller buildings. Today, express elevators shoot up more than 100 floors, double-decked and kitted-out with electromagnetic brakes. These new technologies push the limits of even a New Yorkers’ need for speed: in the city’s elevator lobbies, “morning wait times ranging from 20 to 25 seconds are considered good, while those between 30 and 35 seconds are generally considered unacceptable.” Faster, higher, stronger: we watch our buildings zoom up and kiss the sky.

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, by Kate Ascher. The New Press, 2001. Click image to purchase.

The image of the elevator frames Kate Ascher’s new book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, a form-centered analysis of the towering building typology. Ascher underscores her focus on the technologies that have enabled the skyscraper – like the elevator – in the book’s organization: she takes the reader from the ground level introduction up, through “Building It”, “Living In It”, “Supporting It”, and “Dreaming It.” Ascher’s elevator, however, doesn’t reach other, crucial floors. Like her previous book The Works: Anatomy of a City, this is intended to be a graphic investigation of the inner workings of our urban environment, and as such, it is a success. But Ascher, with an extensive career in real estate, corporate finance and municipal government that has primed her to take this investigation further, has sacrificed a more thorough exploration of the social implications of living and working at greater heights in favor of a review of construction processes and technology.

The skyscraper’s “original purpose was to make money from real estate,” an intention that has given rise to its characterization as “the ultimate architecture of capitalism.” Skyscrapers, Ascher writes, are the invention of 1880s urban America, first debuted in New York and Chicago once the elevator became a mainstay and building technology hurled forward. The Beaux-Arts period filled New York City blocks with masonry giants, but all were surpassed by the summit of the Empire State Building, the world’s tallest building for almost four decades — until a new generation of “supertall” American skyscrapers built in the 1970s outdid their forebears, especially the Willis (Sears) Tower, bolstered by load-bearing steel tubes, reinforced concrete, and glass curtain walls. Soon enough, though, supertall skyscrapers were widespread in Asia, where the form began to include not only commercial but also residential, retail and recreational functions. Growing economies (and a new class of developers within them) have fueled the desire for tall buildings, and for the last two decades, the world’s largest and most advanced towers have been based in Asia and the Middle East, crowned by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, opened in early 2010 as the world’s tallest. The Burj and others like it, Ascher says, “represent a new extension of the skyscraper as an urban form.” This new class may not all push to new heights like the Burj, but they will certainly be multifunctional cities-within-cities, where 21st century citizens need only stroll to an adjacent floor to go grocery shopping, see a movie, and pick up the kids from soccer practice. At least, that is the idea.

A massive team of designers, architects, engineers, and builders is required to plan, develop, design and construct the behemoths. A solid foundation is key to structure, as tall buildings must battle multiple physical forces, particularly vertical and wind loads, that, according to Ascher, “really drive skyscraper design.” The higher a building is built, the greater the wind pressure, and the horizontal (wind) load that increases with height can multiply by twice as much as the vertical (gravity) load. But even strong foundations and structure can’t stop a building from swaying in the wind or during earthquakes, nor should they. Buildings are designed to be slightly flexible, just not to the point of breaking: this is where dampers come in. Dampers act as a pendulum at the tops of skyscrapers “to shift weight around to counteract the forces of the wind against a building.” The Comcast Center in Philadelphia has a giant water tank on the top of the building acting as its damper; the water oscillates to offset the buildings movement. Skyscraper facades, or skins, have also rapidly changed; today, most skyscrapers are clad in glass, which allows for more light and more useable square footage – but also more exposure to the outdoor elements from noise pollution to weather conditions.

Once the skyscraper is built, though, how is it managed? Power, air and water must be distributed throughout the building, utilizing mechanical floors and various other infrastructure efficiently. Considering the ubiquity of cell phones and wireless signals, buildings must also allow for signal continuity and enhancement, particularly for those important moments when rescue crews – like firefighters – need to communicate to each other. Life safety, in fact, is an important aspect of a skyscraper’s operations, and Ascher notes systems for prevention, rescue, and shoring up the building’s structure. For example, intumescent paint covers a building’s steel beams, puffing up when heated into a layer of foam to protect the steel from heating too quickly and losing strength. After safety, maintenance is central to building operations, and Ascher explores various mechanisms for window cleaning, waste removal, and facade and structural repairs. Skyscrapers’ systems are increasingly efficient, incorporating more self-sustaining and “green” systems, like black and grey water recycling. Black water is what comes from used sinks and toilets, and it can be treated and used to water green roofs, for example. Greening, both adding natural features to a building as well as making it more sustainable and environmentally friendly, will likely continue to be prominent in the future, along with a rise in mixed-use functions and, and of course, height.

No matter how tall or how green they become, skyscrapers exist within complex layers of society, culture, and politics; topics that Ascher skirts. I would have hoped that Ascher, the former vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation and someone who lists The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a favorite book on architecture, would have dedicated more of her attention to the socio-cultural complexities of skyscrapers, from occupants’ health to the balance between safety and surveillance. I would have preferred she explore the implications of a phrase like “segregate users” (in terms of entrances and use), for example, rather than explaining the intricacies of communications technology. Her assertion that skyscraper design is “about money” is undermined by the absence of a discussion of who benefits from the construction and use of a skyscraper, what its economic impacts are, or how the abundance of the form affects the city as a whole. Ascher succeeds in breaking down the typology to what it takes to get it made in technological and physical terms, but reducing a skyscraper to an exclusive object of engineering misses an opportunity to explore the relationship between architectural forms and the social context of their use.

…

Mercedes Kraus is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She co-founded and publishes Womanzine and has worked to engage the public in the built environment at both Van Alen Institute and the Institute for Urban Design. She loves pizza, outer space, and .gifs of both.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The Andrew Freedman Home at 1125 Grand Concourse | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

A large, imposing and seemingly abandoned mansion occupies an entire block on the Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets in the Bronx. The building — a neo-Renaissance, limestone palazzo behind a black iron fence and a large, tree-shaded lawn — stands apart from the neighboring apartment buildings and the stately street wall of the boulevard. Across from the Bronx Museum and just a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, the Andrew Freedman Home looks, at first glance, like an uninhabited relic forgotten during the decades of the Grand Concourse’s decline from grandeur. But closer inspection reveals a range of community-oriented activities that will be amplified this spring, when No Longer Empty, a young and nomadic cultural institution dedicated to bringing contemporary art to underutilized spaces throughout New York City, invites the public inside to experience a contemporary art exhibition of 30 new works that weave evocations of the building’s unique history into interpretations of contemporary realities in the Bronx.

Andrew Freedman, a self-made millionaire financier who died in 1915, left much of his fortune to build the place as a retirement home for formerly wealthy people who had lost their fortunes, so that these newly indigent could spend their final years in the manner to which they were accustomed: dinners served in banquet halls by servants with white gloves, readings in a wood-paneled library, entertainment in the billiard, card or ball rooms. The Home operated on this vision from 1924 until the 1970s, when mounting operational costs and a dwindling endowment forced it to charge for accommodations. In 1984, the facility was purchased by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), a non-profit formed by local residents in 1973 to provide direct services to the elderly and disabled that has since grown into a property developer of low- and moderate-income housing with a portfolio of 28 buildings throughout the Bronx and a suite of programs in economic development and children and family services. MBSCC attempted to re-start the retirement home under a more inclusive model in 1985, but the endeavor eventually proved unsustainable, and activity was restricted to the refurbished lower ground floor, where a Head Start program, a day care center and a job resource center operate at a remove from the vestiges of both luxury and penury upstairs. The function rooms on the main floor are recently refurbished. The bedrooms on the higher floors have been abandoned for almost 25 years, and amid the chipping paint and splintering furniture are the personal effects of former residents, from postcards to upright pianos, and the professional equipment of a nursing home, from medical cabinets to beehive hairdryers. It’s not hard to imagine how the combination of grand spaces and ghostly absences could inspire visual artists. And Manon Slome and Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, the founder / president and executive director of No Longer Empty respectively, have been hard at work since last September making that happen.

No Longer Empty’s mission, as Slome and Hersson-Ringskog explain in the interview below, is to use the presentation of contemporary art as a mechanism for community revitalization — through partnership with local institutions, increased activity and awareness from non-local visitors, and innovative live programming that engages both. This process corresponds well to MBSCC’s current plans for the site. According to Walter Puryear, who manages much of MBSCC’s real estate and is responsible for the development of several ambitious new programs, in order for the organization to realize its mission of comprehensive community development, the long-term employability of local residents is an urgent priority. The vision for the Andrew Freedman Home includes an array of ambitious workforce development initiatives, including training programs for culinary and hospitality services (in coordination with the opening of a bed and breakfast currently under construction in one wing of the building), a small business incubator, a media center and a green technology training institute. In the meantime, make plans to visit the building in its current state this April, when No Longer Empty’s new exhibition, This Side of Paradise, opens to the public.

- C.S.

The Library at the Andrew Freedman Home

Tell me about No Longer Empty. How did the organization come to be?
Manon Slome: As a curator, my interest has long been the intersection of art and social issues. I founded No Longer Empty in April 2009 and since then we’ve organized 12 exhibitions throughout the boroughs. Before that, I worked at the Guggenheim and at the Chelsea Art Museum, where I was chief curator. But when I started I wasn’t out to set up an organization, I was just thinking about an exhibition and a site for it. It was around the time of Lehman’s collapse and the broader economic crisis, and I was walking down Madison Avenue noticing how many storefronts were empty and how even the active businesses were empty of customers. I began to conceive of an exhibition called Empty, and when I thought about where to do it, an empty storefront seemed like a great space.

A friend offered us a storefront adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel, a former fishing tackle store. We put on a show of ten artists’ work in a very short amount of time, and given the store’s history and the fishing-related artifacts that were left in the space, we worked around a maritime theme. For example, the artist Michael Bevilacqua’s piece referenced the drowning of the economy in nautical terms. We found the notion of responding to the site to be very evocative.

Installation view of "No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel," June - July 2009 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

What was most interesting to me was the reaction of people wandering down 23rd Street who popped their heads in and asked questions. We found that people who might not normally go to a gallery or a museum were comfortable coming to see this, and were interested in the work and in engaging in conversation about it. As a curator, there’s very little interaction with visitors built into the traditional processes of an art exhibition. For me, being present and available for conversation with visitors was very interesting.

After that, we were offered a second space in the Meatpacking District. It was a brand new condominium building with a vacant retail space. So, contrary to the fishing tackle store with its rich history, here was a site with no history. So we decided to reference the idea of a community in transition. We called the exhibition Reflecting Transformation and a lot of the works explored the notion of a neighborhood turning over and what that meant.

At that exhibition, we had our first panel discussion with thought leaders in public art, to probe the nature of what we were doing. The notion of a storefront as a semi-private, semi-public space was interesting to us; and orienting the exhibitions towards a wide public was very important for us. This launched our programming, which has since expanded to include children’s programming, artist-led workshops, roundtable discussions with the artists, and more. The programming and the community engagement became as important to us as the exhibitions.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog: The art can have multiple purposes, and every time we go into a new neighborhood, we are actively figuring out how art is going to be used differently in a new context.

Slome: For example, when we held a show in the former Tower Records Store on Broadway and 4th Street, visitors’ nostalgia for the record store where they hung out in college informed their experience of an exhibition curated around themes of music and the changing nature of music distribution.

Hersson-Ringskog: Or when we did a show on Governors Island, at which a lot of visitors remarked on the magic of being brought into a house that was otherwise vacant to see art that referenced the history, the past, the people that lived there, or what the island might be without human inhabitants.

"The Island of Dr Mastrovito" by Andrea Mastrovito at "The Sixth Borough," Governors Island, June - October 2010 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

How does your community research process typically work?
Slome: I come from an arts background and Naomi comes from an urban planning background, so our working together is a fabulous marriage of disciplines for community-based work.

When we go into a neighborhood, the first thing we do is get to know the organizations with deep roots in the community and partner with them to provide programming, to bring new people and new ideas to the community. And often community organizations are strapped financially, so our collaborative process is quite valued.

Take the Andrew Freedman Home as an example, which has a very particular history. All of that influences our ideas of what we might do here. First, you can’t ignore the history. But you also don’t want simply to mirror that history. This enormous abandoned building is a white elephant as it is on the Grand Concourse, so you don’t want merely to accentuate that. Rather, we want the exhibition to merge the history of the Andrew Freedman Home with the current day realities of the Bronx.

A third floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home

Any representations of the Bronx have to contend with the borough’s history of disinvestment and poverty and also the feeling that everything that’s not wanted in Manhattan is pushed onto the Bronx. This led to a good discussion about the title. Poor, in Style was our working title, but then we moved onto This Side of Paradise with all of its associations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, with 1920s ideas of class and the class loyalty that Andrew Freedman embodied, and with the ambiguous, ironic notion that we assume Manhattan is the paradise and the Bronx is something else, so let’s see how we can shift that.

We did a lot of research into the art that’s produced here. We didn’t want to create a show of exclusively Bronx-based artists; we didn’t want to make another kind of ghetto. But we learned about some phenomenal local work. And we learned about some fabulous organizations working in choreography and music. Obviously, the legacy of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop is incredibly important. All that will be reflected in the exhibition.

One of the things we’ve found in the Bronx is that it is a very fragmented borough. It is easier to get from here to Manhattan than it is to get to parts of the South Bronx. So it became very apparent that if we wanted people outside of the immediate vicinity to know about the show, we should partner with cultural organizations in other Bronx neighborhoods and work on transportation and cross-promotion. We’re going to be meeting with the Bronx Tourism Council to think about how we can realistically shuttle people around to various locations.

Beehive hair dryers on the fourth floor of the Andrew Freedman Home

Hersson-Ringskog: We’re exploring whether it’s possible to establish a pilot program that addresses the mobility issues here, like a bike-sharing program. Being able to move between different cultural organizations is an important aspect of having a vibrant arts scene.

An alliance is being formed called the Bronx Cultural Alliance, which will create a structure for collaborations between organizations like Wave Hill in Riverdale, the Point in the South Bronx, Lehman College in Bedford Park, Hostos College in the South Bronx, and others. The point is to create a tighter-knit cultural landscape in the borough.

Tell me about your curatorial process?
Slome: Most works we present, about 70%, are commissioned. The basis of our curatorial work is site-responsive or site-specific. In most cases, we already have interest in the artist to begin with: I’ve done a studio visit; I know the work. And because the sites we go into are non-traditional sites, there’s often phenomenal opportunities for the artists to create outside the box.

Community revitalization is also a part of your mission, how does that factor into your process?
Hersson-Ringskog: We take a potential liability to a neighborhood corridor – an empty building or inactive business can bring down a neighborhood’s quality of life by reducing foot traffic – and activate it with artwork, and with live programs that engage the community: panel discussions, children’s workshops, music or dance performances. In this way, we are advocating for interim use, for a more nimble, flexible and creative city. In addition to curating and producing the exhibition, we also research what’s unique about the area and create cultural maps that indicate to exhibition visitors all of the other cultural opportunities available in the vicinity – from parks to other art organizations to stores or restaurants.

A second floor corridor at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: We encourage our audience to discover the area. So we might arrange some sort of discount to a local restaurant for exhibition visitors, or try other kinds of things to keep foot traffic up and to keep people patronizing local businesses.

Hersson-Ringskog: And we track these effects through head counts, through measuring increased foot traffic and evaluating collaborations. Our research and analysis allows us a distinct and deep understanding of the site, the building details, and the area where it’s located. And we are able to relay some of that understanding back to the property owners. Further down the road, it would be interesting for No Longer Empty to have an arm that could advise on community conscious retailing or to provide other insights into community revitalization that emerge from our process.

In terms of the legacy of the projects we work on, the Bronx Cultural Alliance is a fantastic initiative that will continue forward. Art in Empty Spaces is another legacy project, where we work with Manhattan’s Community Board 3 to take No Longer Empty’s model and scale it up.

Postcards on a bedroom wall at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: The community board learned that storeowners and residents weren’t happy about the vacancy rates in the area. So they asked us to match arts groups up with these empty spaces and then to create a program that would get visitors to visit them. An organization we’ve talked to here in the Bronx is WHEDco, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which is working on a new site on Southern Boulevard. WHEDco surveyed how many local dollars are going out of the community because of the lack of stores and services. They’ve asked for our advice on how to activate the storefronts under an elevated rail-line, to get the community to recognize the stores’ existence in order to increase foot traffic and eventually attract the kind of retail they need. If you can draw foot traffic for an exhibition, you can demonstrate the demand for the right kind of retail.

If you produce quality programming, people will come. I’m always very concerned with issue of legacy.

Hersson-Ringskog: And after we conjure up an exhibition and programming, in the long term we are also giving people an opportunity to dream. People come into an exhibition and see a space transformed. I think that’s where, perhaps, crowdsourcing could come in: we could create opportunities for visitors to share their vision for the site or the area.

We are a young organization with a clear mission of knitting a vibrant cultural landscape through art and interim use. We know how to take over empty spaces and turn them into professionally curated art exhibits with programming, but in terms of creating and supporting a cultural landscape that’s sustainable, we’re working towards that, testing and learning different tactics along the way.

An abandoned Christmas tree at the Andrew Freedman Home

Manon Slome (PhD), President and Founder of No Longer Empty, is an independent curator working in New York City. From 2002 to June 2008 she was the Chief Curator of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. During that time, she curated and oversaw a program of some forty exhibitions, symposia and museum publications as well as monographs and scholarly essays. Ms. Slome became highly involved with the Israeli art scene during her research for the exhibition, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on, (2005) and has followed and researched the Israeli scene for the last three years. Prior to the CAM, Ms. Slome worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum for seven years and was a holder of a Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study program.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, Executive Director of No Longer Empty, has spearheaded community and real estate outreach strategies for No Longer Empty in order to study and measure the effects of art as a tool for re-activating corridors and making a local economic impact. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Masters Program in Urban Planning where she studied urban green sustainability, specifically green roofs. She is also recipient of the William Kinne Fellowship Award. Naomi has also worked for an information architecture firm in Washington DC. Currently serves on the Executive Board of the Columbia University’s Alumni Association.

These days, the imperative of sustainable design invokes the health of ecosystems more readily than the health of individuals. Fossil fuels expended, old growth forests cut down, carbon produced in manufacturing: the environmental stakes are well known. But the biological implications of the choices we make in constructing our buildings and cities are harder to come by. The shocking medical realities of malignant substance like asbestos have led to surprisingly little public information about substances that may be damaging, if only we had sufficient data from consistent testing.

To redress this lack of information, the architecture firm Perkins+Will went about creating a free, online database – called Transparency – of building materials that contain substances known or suspected to be harmful to health. The database is geared towards the consumers who most often specify what materials should be used in a building project – architects and interior designers. The firm based their listings on a careful, two-year review of scientific papers and government research. The goal is to “encourage the building product marketplace to become more transparent from extraction to end of life for all points of contact, from manufacturers to de-constructors, so that people are further empowered make informed decisions about specifying, maintaining and disposing of the products in their buildings.”

In the interview below, Peter Syrett, Associate Principal at Perkins+Will explains the development and applications of Transparency, reflecting on architectural responsibility, the nature of scientific certainty and the role of buildings as instruments of public health.

- C.S.

Image courtesy of Perkins+Will

Urban Omnibus: Tell me about Transparency.
Peter Syrett: Transparency is, first and foremost, a concept. We’ve applied this concept to the development of an online tool to help consumers or anyone else understand the total footprint of a project or a product in ecologically- or socially-responsible terms. The classic example of this type of thinking is, “What’s the environmental footprint of my lunch? Where does it comes from?” If it’s sourced locally, it has a lower embodied energy than if it’s a piece of beef from Argentina with a higher embodied energy. The point is to try to understand the implications of your actions as a consumer.

How does the tool work from a consumer’s point of view?
As a consumer, your power is at the point of purchase. In order for you to apply that power, you need to understand, at the point of purchase, what you’re buying. That’s the idea of transparency. At the point of purchase of a building product, the specifier or gatekeeper of that purchase is often the architect or designer. And so it is up to the architect or designer to understand the ecological composition of a carpet or a window system or a cladding system outside a building.

In essence, right now, as an architect, you’re blind when you buy something. You are privy to a product’s price, you are privy to how it relates to certain building codes – how it would combust, etc. You may be privy to some of the manufacturing process, but not all. And you may be privy to some of the composition of the product, but not all. But you are unable to make a comprehensively informed decision on your purchase. Transparency is about being able to make informed decisions, to compare in a meaningful way multiple things next to each other and understand the ecological implications of your purchase. Daniel Goleman writes about this in his book Ecological Intelligence, and so we are seeking to apply that logic to the building product world.

When and why did Perkins+Will see the need to establish this service?
This is an issue that some of my colleagues at Perkins+Will and I have been wrestling with for a long time. Over a decade ago, I was working on cancer center and we decided that we wanted to make it carcinogenic-free. We thought, somewhat naively, that this would be a straightforward or self-evident process. It wasn’t. We simply couldn’t get the information.

And so we locked onto this idea of finding ways to make the information available. How else can we make sure that we’re making things in line with our values? If the building materials in a cancer center are possibly carcinogenic, clearly that’s against the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

Do you see the information and materials listed as part of a growing database?
As I see it, there are two ends to the spectrum. There’s understanding what the implications of substances in buildings materials are — that’s our precautionary list, our list of asthmagens and asthma triggers, and our list of flame retardants – and then there’s understanding what the materials are made of in the first place – that’s our work with construction specialists to label a product with lists of its components. With those two ends, you have the clarity of knowing what’s actually in the product and also a detailed back-up to help sift through what government regulators think may be harmful to humans or environments. Our databases are living lists: substances come on and off the market; regulations change; other governments are doing their own testing (the impact of the European Union’s chemical policy will obviously be important to materials specifiers in the US, for example).

What are some of the other ways the information is categorized on the site?
If you go the website, transparency.perkinswill.com, you can search by health effects; you can search by division numbers according to the Construction Specifications Institute (like concrete, masonry, metals); you can search by substance name. There are several ways to search, for example, if you are concerned about respiratory issues in particular.

We started in 2009 by releasing our Precautionary List, a list of substances that, whenever possible (and it’s not always possible), should be avoided. We soon realized that there are big holes in the knowledge base, particularly opaque sections of the material market. Flame retardants, for example: there’s virtually no information out there. So we hired a researcher from Berkeley, Dr. Arlene Blum, whose team did some original research. Asthma triggers are another important area about which very little information is compiled. Eleven people in the world die every day from asthma, and 30,000 people have asthma attacks.

Speaking of the precautionary list, the website invokes the “precautionary principle.” Could you explain what that means?
The precautionary principle comes from the Wingspread Conference, which was a gathering of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists in 1998. Its primary concern was with climate change. The principle essentially states that in the lack of scientific certitude on a topic or an issue, one should choose a more conservative position rather than assuming that there’s nothing to worry about. That’s what we have applied in our compiling of the existing information about material safety. In other words, if you worry about the consequences of your acts, and if you are given a choice and you don’t know scientifically whether something is good or bad, then is better to err on the conservative rather than a purely rational position based on the limited testing that’s been done.

Science has never been about certitude. Once one scientific question is answered, there is always another question to be asked. And in the global climate change debate, we’ve seen people use that fundamental structure of science against what the Nobel Laureates agree is pretty clear evidence about climate change.

Of course, science will continue to explore human health and substances. But it may not clearly come back to the lay population, like myself, in a way that can be applied without a huge amount of additional research. The issue is not so much the lack of scientific study, it’s the lack of people’s ability to digest the information that’s out there. Both sides of the fence agree on that.

I’m interested in what you were saying at the beginning about a comprehensive understanding of the footprint of products and materials, from extraction to disposal. Is that sort of full life cycle, supply chain, systems thinking different from the ways in which existing regulation or standards view material safety?
Yes and no. In essence, the regulatory framework that governs what goes into building products relies on the permitted substances listed in the Toxic Control Substances Act of 1976, which lists about 82,000 substances. Of those, about 600 appear on an EPA watch list, and of those only 200 have been tested and only five have been banned. In other words, the substances in our building products are pretty much unregulated and unmeasured. So the burden is on the consumer to know what might be harmful, and yet it’s so opaque that it creates a central contradictory proposition. In terms of regulation and the market, the government isn’t looking at this terribly well. And for many reasons, we don’t really know what the products are made of. So it’s a real quandary. That’s why the concept of transparency is so important.

The food industry presents a good model for us. It’s a much more transparent industry in terms of content. Take, for example, a company like Coca-Cola. It has been able to maintain its top secret formula while still listing the primary ingredients on the can so a consumer can decide if she wants to put that in her body or not. So I don’t really buy the proprietary argument that more information infringes on intellectual property. If there’s a chance that BPA is harmful to infants, then of course I want to know that my baby’s formula is BPA-free.

Which raises the question, how has the construction industry reacted to Transparency?
Very well, I would say. This past year has been the year of transparency, in a way. Initiatives launched at GreenBuild; the Environmental Product Declaration process developed by UL Envrionment that recently came out. I think these efforts show that the thinking around this path is beginning to change and hopefully in the near future we’ll see broader adoption by the whole design committee. After all, one of the reasons to share this information is to begin to move the whole market. It doesn’t help if we have all this knowledge and research and silo it. We encourage our peers, firms large and small, to use it. The more people use it, the better the whole industry will be — and we hope that our peers have other knowledge that they can begin to share. Maybe there’s a whole other way to think about this profession, to think about resources, to begin to get the greatest leverage out of our collective experience.

How do you personally define responsibility in architecture?
A long time ago, people understood the importance of building for their own health. It was more immediate because buildings were shelter and therefore survival. I believe that buildings are essential to public health, I believe buildings are instruments of public health. And to that end, I want to make sure that I make environments that are healthy and allow people to be healthy and thrive. And that means understanding what they are made of.

Unless otherwise noted, all images by Marcelo López Dinardi.

Peter Syrett AIA, LEED AP, is Associate Principal and K-12 Education Market Leader at Perkins+Will’s New York office. His expertise focuses on sustainable institutional projects, specifically K-12 and healthcare work. He leads teams in viewing the larger ecological picture, one that looks beyond LEED, overseeing projects from brainstorm to detail. Peter’s philosophy on design is the creation of a unique conceptual vocabulary that embodies a client’s mission in space, material, form and character. He lectures regularly on green institutional design and is a recognized expert in the field. He is currently teaching a class at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies entitled “Managing Sustainable Building Projects.”

The Future History of New York City | View of Manhattan Looking South | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

Late last year, Vishaan Chakrabarti, whose passionate rallying cries for infrastructure investment and urban density are familiar to regular readers of Urban Omnibus, unveiled a radical proposal (dubbed LoLo, as in Lower Lower Manhattan) to connect the Financial District to Governors Island through a land bridge made of landfill, replete with a new mixed-use, high-rise, green infrastructure community.

The setting for his presentation was a conference called “Zoning the City”, convened by New York City’s Department of City Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and Chakrabarti’s premise was how to zone for a modern Central Business District, for affordability, for livability, for energy and waste, and finally for resilience. He armed his argument with planning instruments and infrastructure developments, such as the transfer of air rights and the provision of waste-to-energy facilities, and he closed with a bold vision to create a projected “88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city” in a neighborhood that is currently harbor.

Even if all the proposal provokes is discussion about the crucial intersection of waterfront planning, densification and big ideas for New York’s growth, it is notable for its provenance. LoLo was conceived by students in a Columbia University graduate studio, led by Laurie Hawkinson with the collaboration of Chakrabarti,  for which students of architecture and real estate worked together on a site – Governors Island – and a topic – ’speculation’ – that have both gotten a lot of play in the past few years and whose implications and possibilities are far from exhausted. The historic significance of Governors Island and its protected status as a park need not preclude the intensification of its use as an integral part of New York City’s infrastructure and landscape. And as for ‘speculation,’ the term has distinct and specific definitions in both architecture and real estate, but with the common meaning, according to Hawkinson, of “taking a really big risk.” For Chakrabarti, ‘speculation’ is a word that “aptly describes the prerogative that designers and developers share, which is to imagine that which does not yet exist.” Hawkinson directs the advanced studios at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Chakrabarti directs Columbia’s Real Estate Program and has recently launched The Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE), an independent think tank at Columbia that aims to “redefine sustainability as dense, mixed-income, mixed-use, transit-based urban development.” The LoLo project has progressed from a student project to the basis of serious study on land creation by the team at CURE, which is engaging experts and City officials to explore the hurdles — from environmental concerns to marine navigation concerns — and the possibilities of the scheme.

The point of Urban Omnibus studio reports is to redress the tremendous intellectual loss that occurs when a student project is completed and young professionals are unleashed into the world. Very seldom do the hard work, dogged research and often revelatory design schemes that students produce ever make it out of the studio environment and into a wider, real world conversation. LoLo is a rare exception, finding its way into the “Zoning the City” conference, The New York Times, CBS Local News and ongoing conversations throughout New York and beyond.

The Speculation Studio marked the first time students from these two programs worked together on a design studio, and signals an overdue evolution in architectural education. The boldness of the schemes and the cogency of the accompanying financial analysis explode the myth that considering financial implications in a student design process will constrain creativity and innovation. Read on for a conversation with Hawkinson about the studio’s theme and site, about the nature of the collaboration between architecture and real estate students, and about the return of big ideas.

-C.S.

The Future History of New York City | Plan | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

Tell me about the idea for this studio.
Laurie Hawkinson: We did this studio in the fall of 2010. Vishaan and I had been discussing collaborating on a studio that brought architecture and real estate students together to work on a joint project. Governors Island seemed timely and not completely exhausted as a subject of study. We also felt that the present constraints placed on Governors Island by local, state and federal authorities – its edge cannot be altered; permanent housing is prohibited – were something that should be questioned.

Given the desire to bring together students from architecture and real estate, we wanted to choose a topic that grew from the common ground between the two professions. That’s how we came up with “speculation.” Even if architecture and real estate look at the topic differently, it’s something both groups of students can engage. In architecture, we’re always speculating because we are making; we’re speculating on conditions that aren’t here yet by projecting into the future. And in real estate, projecting into the future takes on a financial aspect. We talked a lot about value: where you create value, how you create value. When you speculate, you also have to establish certain assumptions that you take forward. The students’ initial research led them to statements of “we’re assuming that the population will be X, or that the value here is Y, then we can do Z.” We made ground rules and set stakes, and we wanted students to consider issues of density, of energy; we wanted them to ask where and how is this city going to grow? 

Farm Park | Six plans | Breanna Carlson, Peter Katz, Georgina Lalli, Pedro Zevallos | Click to enlarge

Did you find any differences between how real estate students and architecture students talk about creating value?
It was amazing to observe how much they traded hats all the time. When the groups were presenting, you might not be able to tell which student was studying in which program.

For instance we had one project that was a vertical farm. The students figured out the cost of the tomato they were going to sell there and how they were going to make it work; they were so precise about all of the metrics and that really galvanized them around the power of the knowledge that they mutually brought to the table.

Flux City | Renderings | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

“To propose these Metabolist, Archigram-like forms and then to run a pro forma on them and make it work was amazing to see.” -Vishaan Chakrabarti Tell me about some of the other projects in this studio.
Another project added a lot of vertical density in the East River, creating a kind of archipelago of islands going from Governors Island up the river, mindful of shipping channels and other factors. Other projects included a proposal for an Olympic Park that transforms into housing over time, an educational institution, a major convention center. The infrastructural logistics are what become very interesting about these projects. You have to get large numbers of people there in very short periods of time. The real estate students helped define the metrics: if you build a new subway line, where would it go? Or if we are going to rely on ferries, how many will there need to be? As architects, we tend to simply draw a little dotted line and say, “we’re going to put a ferry line here.” But in this studio we were able to delve a little deeper to ask what is really involved in creating the kinds of infrastructure to support large-scale interventions.

Flux City | Section | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

Take the example of the Olympic Village proposal for 5,000 units of housing: you have to consider how an Olympic athlete can get within 20 minutes to any venue. So you have to think about the network when you’re working with that kind of a scale. If you’re doing 23 units on, say, Wooster and Grand it’s a different story – you may have parking issues, but you’re not going to have to deal with major infrastructural issues like water and energy.

A history of landfill in Lower Manhattan

Of the six projects that the student teams designed, the scheme entitled “The Future History of New York City” which proposed what we are calling LoLo — by Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner – was the most extreme. It was also incredibly thorough and realistic. They began by looking at environmental issues, and the topic of dredge started to direct their project: the metrics of dredge, where it goes, and how to project that into the future and assign it value.

In addition to looking deeply into dredge, they were also working with a parametric model. And, for me, the most powerful aspect of the project is the way they created a new zoning protocol that takes into account energy and rising water levels to make a responsive system. In other words, instead of just caring about the setbacks and the shadows on the streets and things like that, they were calculating energy points people would get for acknowledging solar orientation or surface area.

The Future History of New York City | Parametric models used to calculate zoning protocols for density and for projecting value | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

If you bundle all of your intentions and speculations together, it’s much more powerful, especially at this scale. The proposal explained how to get water from the city (there’s no water on Governors Island currently), how to create a wastewater treatment plan, how to capture rainwater. They thought about how to build the new land with a slope that would retain water and would also anticipate flooding in the future. They thought about how to create conveyance and transport systems. They also staged it in a very smart way: it’s much cheaper to build a subway system by dropping a concrete tube into the water and then building landfill around it rather than burrowing through hundreds of years of Manhattan. Again, the real estate students helped us think through these issues.

The really brilliant part is that way the landfill connects existing Lower Manhattan to Governors Island. The real estate angle is the strong feeling that the proximity to – the extension of — Lower Manhattan is what will maximize value. And they did this without compromising the landmarked park space on the Northern end of Governors Island. So it makes for a kind of Central Park green space.

The Future History of New York City | The phases of creating LoLo | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

“Capacity creation  – adding landfill, decking over railyards, upzoning around transit corridors – is fundamental to our future.” -Vishaan Chakrabarti

So what happens next with this project? It has gotten a lot of attention. Vishaan presented it at the “Zoning the City” conference and then there was an article about in The New York Times.
The students that worked on it have now graduated, but have continued to work on it as alumni. Vishaan has taken the project to the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) for additional study and we are organizing a roundtable discussion about the proposal this month. Vishaan and I are dead serious about it. We have invited some expert guests to whom we will present of the project and then discuss how to think about it more seriously.

Given the amount of work done on zoning protocols alongside an actual scheme for the infill and design and development of that infill, it seems there are a lot of things that can be learned from the project – whether or not it goes anywhere.
It’s kind of funny when you propose extreme or seemingly impossible conditions, and then you realize that there are other people who are thinking along similar lines. And then there is a plan from the turn of the 20th century, a proposal similar to this one. It turns out that it’s not so unreasonable of an idea and we’d like to engage the City in discussion about it.

How rare is it for a project that emerges in the context of a graduate architecture studio to get put out there to generate discussion?
It’s pretty unusual, I would say. There are certainly exemplary student projects, and sometimes they might submit to a competition and receive some notoriety. And I think more and more students are becoming more entrepreneurial about their work at school. But it is rare for a project to have an afterlife such as this. And perhaps the collaboration with students of real estate enabled this project to live on beyond the studio. But there are other ways that the public might engage with a proposal such as this beyond the real estate implications.

What architects do is make ideas visual. The real estate component on its own wouldn’t necessarily produce imagery that makes viewers say “Wow!” Architects think about how people read and understand information and therefore are able to encourage people to imagine something as outrageous as a land-bridge to Governors Island, and see that maybe it’s not so outrageous after all.

…

Laurie Hawkinson is principal of Smith Miller + Hawkinson Architecture. She received her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California at Berkeley, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York and received her Professional Degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union. Professor of Architecture with tenure at Columbia University, she is currently the Director of the Advanced Studios at the GSAPP; and has served as visiting professor at SCI-Arc, Harvard University, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Miami. Significant completed projects include the Corning Museum of Glass, the Wall Street Ferry Terminal and “Strategic Open Space” Public Realm Improvement Strategy for Lower Manhattan. Projects currently under construction include the new Land Ports of Entry at Champlain and Massena, New York and a new Emergency Medical Services building for the City of New York. Collaborative projects include the North Carolina Museum of Art Amphitheater and Site Master Plan, the Museum of Women’s History and the NYC2012 Olympic Village. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Wooster Group and serves on the Contemporary Arts Council of the Museum of Modern Art.

HOLIDAY HIATUS
The holidays are upon us. And while we busy ourselves this week with buying urban-themed gifts for loved ones, we are also planning to take a little extra time in the first days of the new year to do some Omnibus brainstorming, housecleaning, and party-planning. So we will be back in full force on January 9th, just in time to celebrate our third birthday, preview an exciting new line-up of features, forum posts and special projects for 2012, and invite you officially to our second annual benefit party, which will take place on February 28th. Mark your calendars! And don’t forget your pens, pencils or laptops while you’re enjoying some holiday downtime — the deadline for our Unfinished Grid essay competition is just a little over a month away!

Meanwhile, yuletide cheer is once again broadcasting itself on the built environment of New York. Beyond the many iconic Manhattan landmarks and events to choose from — the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, Big Apple Chorus performances by the South Street Seaport tree tonight and tomorrow, ice skating in Bryant Park, the New York Stock Exchange’s own tree — make some time to treat yourself to some of the most festive urban explorations the outer boroughs have to offer, starting with the famous lights of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

YEAR IN REVIEW
Another staple of the holiday season is the reflection on the year coming to an end through best-of lists and year-in-review recaps, and the architectural and urban affairs press is no exception to this tradition. Over on The Atlantic Cities, Nate Berg lists his top ten examples of long-form urban journalism from the past year. On Grist, Greg Hanscom profiles the year’s major urban trends, from what the census tells us about younger Americans’ preference of cities over suburbs to how Occupy Wall Street might inform politicians in 2012. TIME magazine’s list of the top 10 green buildings of 2011 includes some uplifting examples such as the school in Greensburg, Kansas that was completely destroyed by a tornado in 2007 and rebuilt this year according to the highest sustainability standards. But when 2011 is remembered by future historians, it will be for the range of protest movements which ignited in cities across the world. The New Yorker‘s Elissa Curtis rounds up the year with commentary on twelve poignant images capturing “Twelve Months of Protest.”

A NEW TECH CAMPUS FOR ROOSEVELT ISLAND
On Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the city’s $100 million competition to build an applied sciences and technology campus on Roosevelt Island. After weeks of deliberation and negotiation, Cornell University and Technion Israel Institute of Technology were chosen to build an innovative network of research and lab facilities. The Bloomberg administration labeled this project as a “new land grant,” affirming their belief that this partnership will foster economic growth, develop the city’s research and development sector and attract high-technology entrepreneurship to the metropolitan area. Early projections argue that the Cornell campus will generate over $23 billion in economic activity in the next thirty years and will create over 20,000 jobs. The first phase of the new campus is expected to be constructed by 2017. Read more of the coverage at DNAinfo and Curbed.

STUDENTS TAKE ON PERFORMING ARTS AT GROUND ZERO
While the performing arts center at Ground Zero is seemingly indefinitely paused, students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning took on the program as a studio problem this past semester. The challenges of the site, even if we ignore the budgetary and political constraints for a moment, are daunting. The students had to take into account the site’s emotional, as well as infrastructural, demands. And their scheme had to accommodate 100,000 square feet of program on 30,000 square feet of land. Check out The New York Times article and accompanying slideshow.

NEWSFLASH: NEW YORKERS ARE OBSESSED WITH THEIR TRANSIT
Google has released its annual year-end Zeitgeist report for 2011. While some of the results are less than surprising (Apple made it to the U.S. top ten twice with the iPhone 5 placing 6th and the iPad2 placing 10th) and some are a little unnerving (how did Ryan Dunn make it to 3rd?), they get more interesting when filtered by region. The top three searches for the New York region are (in descending rank order) MTA, NJ Transit and Hopstop. New Yorkers are seemingly obsessed with transit (as are we). Rounding out the top ten for NYC are the DMV, Con Edison, Hurricane Irene’s Path, the NYCDOE, EZ-Pass, the Brooklyn Public Library and, oddly, the Williamsburg bowling alley Brooklyn Bowl. Read more at Gothamist or explore this year’s Zeitgeist for yourself.

ElectriCity exhibition at the New York Transit Museum

ELECTRICITY: EMPOWERING NEW YORK’S RAILS
The New York Transit Museum has organized a fascinating exhibit that dives into an aspect of the city’s rail system that many of us take for granted: its energy supply. The third rail isn’t just a metaphor for sudden death, it’s part of a complex infrastructure that powers the subway and commuter trains. Designed by Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, the exhibition uses the powering of trains to explain the science of electricity more generally, from generation to distribution. The show is a great destination for kids, and just might inspire a new generation of young people to ask questions about where our energy comes from and to demand alternatives. ElectriCity: Powering New York’s Rails is on view at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn through December 2016. Read more of the coverage at The New York Times.

Macy's department store employee cleaning up piles of debris after the Christmas shopping rush. | via Gothamist

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING, CIRCA 1948
On a lighter note, if you think that the Christmas shopping rush is bad now, take comfort in the knowledge that it has never been good. This week, Gothamist has unearthed some 1948 photos documenting the shopping and its aftermath of the holiday rush at Macy’s.

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

Left: constructing a public interest design project in Brooklyn | Right: Bryan Bell leading a workshop and presentation

Before Urban Omnibus went live, we co-hosted a weekend-long event that invited teams to design a project in the public interest and build it from found materials in two days. The event was led by Bryan Bell, on the occasion of the launch of his 2008 book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, which surveys the field of “creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good.” Bell, founder of Design Corps and co-founder of SEED, has been working towards a better understanding of how design can affect communities and serve the under-served for over twenty years.

His most recent initiative, The Public Interest Design Institute is devoted to educating architects about how to fold public interest design into their practices. Starting next month, the Institute will be hosting two-day training events at universities throughout the country. According to Bell, despite increasing interest from designers, professional schools of architecture have not focussed on equipping students with the unique skills and knowledge relevant to public interest design. Therefore, specific training is urgently needed. With the support of the Surdna Foundation and the Architectural League, the Public Interest Design Institute will hold one of these training sessions at Yale University in January. For more information about the event or to register, click here.

Bell will lead the event with the support of instructors dedicated to public service from around the world, utilizing case studies that adhere to the standards and evaluation metrics set forth by SEED. Participants will earn certification in the SEED process, which means they will learn how public interest design is re-shaping the design profession, how to find new clients embedded within communities, how to identify new fee sources and structures, and how to measure and maximize its positive social, economic and environmental impact on communities.

Public Interest Design Institute at Yale University
January 13, 9am – January 14, 5pm, 2012
New Haven, CT
For more information, click here.

Bryan Bell is the founder of Design Corps, founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED. Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic, Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design.

Orchard Beach (pavilion at left) | photo: emixpix.com

Deborah Wye is a seasoned curator of visual art, with over 30 years experience at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was most recently the senior curator of prints and illustrated books until her retirement late last year. Since then, she’s taken on a different kind of research project, one that marries her curatorial expertise with the passionate curiosity of a true urban enthusiast: the fascinating history and uncertain future of the Orchard Beach Pavilion at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. For Wye, a keen interest in the pavilion itself — the Depression-era politics of its development, the social story of its decades of public use, the architectural choices for the building itself — transformed into a desire to advocate on behalf of its preservation, so that “layers of history [can] be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers.” To that end, she has curated an exhibition that is currently on view at the City Island Nautical Museum and has been presenting a related lecture about the building at interested forums throughout the city. She’ll be reprising this presentation for the Department of Bridges and Tunnels in December, the East Bronx History Forum in January, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion and the Bronx County Historical Society in the spring. In May of next year, she’ll present at the Bronx Central Library, where an abbreviated version of the exhibition will be on display. 

For a deteriorating building whose history is most often overlooked, an advocate like Wye offers a fortuitous opportunity for a grass-roots approach to historic preservation to benefit from a professional command of art history and a passerby’s amazement at New York’s architectural treasures, some of which truly take us by surprise and capture our imagination. So we asked Wye to tell the story of how she discovered this building, how she went about researching it, and what her personal hopes are for its future. 

- C.S.

The Orchard Beach Pavilion in 1937 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive, all rights reserved

A fenced-off landmark is languishing in the Northeast Bronx.

I can’t remember when the grand Orchard Beach Pavilion first grabbed my attention. It is a massive gray structure, hard to ignore, but it had an abandoned air about it — sitting there in the background of the beach experience, with no one seeming to notice it, even at the height of the season. But I began to look more closely, and as I started to notice its classical and Moderne details, I became curious about its function and its deteriorating condition. The Pavilion once served as the entry portal for changing rooms and lockers occupying areas behind each curving wing. And there were lots of shops and dining possibilities, for a quick snack or for lunch in a more formal setting with tablecloths. There was once a staffed medical station, and a police outpost that still functions today, as do Parks Department offices. But I believe that the way the Pavilion’s form responds to the curving beach was also meant to serve a dramatic, theatrical function, the focal point of a bold and ambitious public project.

When I discovered this monumental structure, it was a mess, and after a few years went by, even the concessions were closed up. Protective fencing was added to keep people away at a certain distance. Scaffolding appeared. I wondered if that was a good sign — that maybe some improvement was in store.

Although I live in Manhattan, I found out about this building when my husband and I bought a weekend house on City Island, which, to us native Bostonians, was like a funky Cape Cod. I began biking a lot and discovered nearby Orchard Beach — truly a wonder. It was off-season, before the Beach was teeming with people, some 1.4 million each year. I couldn’t believe the views I saw as I rode along the stone boardwalk that hugs the crescent-shaped shoreline. Somehow I knew — I can’t remember how — that Robert Moses was responsible for “inventing” this beach. Of course I had heard of Moses, having lived in New York briefly in the 1960s and then moving here permanently in 1979, but I wasn’t very knowledgeable about him. I only knew he was supposed to be bad. But with my good luck at finding Orchard Beach, as I looked out at the water, I could only say “thank you” to the much-maligned master builder.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Once I retired from my position as Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, in the fall of 2010, and finally had some free time, the first book I read was The Power Broker by Robert Caro, that riveting story of Robert Moses. But I also learned of a newer book, Robert Moses and the Modern City, from 2007, by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, that offers a different perspective on Moses and acknowledged a range of accomplishments. Most helpful for me was the catalogue of projects from the 1930s (the period of the so-called “good Moses”), each described in great detail, including Orchard Beach.

I began taking courses on the history of New York City and its architecture, taking walking tours and joining all sorts of organizations in the “preservation community.” I was thrilled with the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2006 designation report on the Orchard Beach Pavilion, recognizing the beach project as “among the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.” I was inspired. I dove in and began studying the building in earnest, not only its architecture but its place in New York history. Moses became even clearer in my mind, and I also found out a lot about the remarkable Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and the impact of the Moses-LaGuardia team through FDR’s New Deal programs of the Great Depression.

Robert Moses and Fiorello Laguardia | photo via swimminginthecity.com

The style of the WPA-funded Orchard Beach Pavilion, with its imposing but sleek monumentality, is sometimes referred to as “Federal Moderne” and it shares characteristics with many public buildings built through the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. I realized by now that I was tackling my subject as if I were doing curatorial research for the kinds of exhibitions I have curated at MoMA. But this time, I had no real goal yet. I was just learning and amassing material. It was such a great subject!

From left: Pavilion Entry Balcony; Pavilion Collonade; and Pavilion Colonnade with Greek fret trim | Photos: Carl Foster, New York Landmarks and Preservation Commission, 2006

The project took me to places and parts of New York City I had never explored. My subway map was worn out and taped together. In the Bronx, I visited Marianne Anderson, the administrator for Pelham Bay Park, the park in which Orchard Beach is the star attraction. She very nicely gave me a tour of all the closed-off parts of the Pavilion, which are alarming in some cases. And I met Librarian Laura Tosi at the Bronx County Historical Society, in a neighborhood where I also saw the historic 1758 Valentine-Varian House and the Williamsbridge Oval Park, another Moses project of the 1930s. I walked the extraordinary Grand Concourse to learn more about Art Deco, since the Pavilion is often cited for its Deco details. I joined the Friends of Pelham Bay Park, an advocacy group, in hopes of finding others who might share my passion for the Pavilion, and then began to attend meetings of the East Bronx History Forum. But my research also brought me beyond the Bronx, to the Parks Department’s Olmsted Center in Queens, where a bonus was the nearby Queens Museum of Art (originally the New York City Building for the 1939 World’s Fair) by the architect Aymar Embury II, who is also credited with the design of the Orchard Beach Pavilion.

Other examples of Aymar Embury's civic architecture in New York. From left: the New York City Building at the 1932 Worlds' Fair (now the site of the Queens Museum of Art) photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive; the Prospect Park Zoo, photo: Deborah Wye; the pavilion at Jacob Riis Park, photo: Deborah Wye

There was more research and more travel — to the lovely Prospect Park Zoo, where the exterior is much the same as when Embury designed it in 1935 (which isn’t the case for Central Park’s Zoo, also designed by him at about the same time but now drastically altered). I made my way to Jacob Riis Park, where Moses and Embury worked together, and the buildings share the sleek classicizing aesthetic of the Orchard Beach Pavilion, something both men favored. In fact, Moses believed that structures for the public should be traditional rather than avant-garde in style. And he found the perfect collaborator in the rather conservative Embury, who served as the Parks Department Consulting Architect for hundreds of projects. Embury was also an architectural historian, a Princeton graduate, and an accomplished and well-educated man generally, exactly the kind of Ivy-Leaguer that Moses, a Yalie himself, always preferred for his top team.

I also discovered the places where New York history professionals and amateur “buffs” like myself spend lots of time, from the Municipal Archives to the Milstein Division of the New York Public Library. Photo archives were another story. One stand-out was the immense collection of 1930s photographs of New York City taken by Berenice Abbott for a WPA project and available on the Museum of the City of New York’s website. While Moses made sure Orchard Beach was carefully documented in photographs for the Parks Department, some great images were also taken at the time by the firm of Gottscho-Schleisner.

So, what happened with all this research? It turns out that last summer, July 25 to be exact, was the 75th anniversary of the dedication of Orchard Beach. I seemed to be the first one to realize that, even taking the Pelham Bay Park Administrator by surprise.

Orchard Beach opening day ceremony, 1936 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

When talking about my project with Barbara Dolensek, Vice President of the City Island Historical Society and Nautical Museum, she suggested a 75th anniversary exhibition. That opened in July with about 55 photographs. The community is enjoying the show, which has had some good coverage in the local press, and my PowerPoint talk got a standing-room-only crowd. (Granted, it’s a small place!) Now, I’m taking this illustrated talk “on the road,” so to speak, in order to garner interest in the Pavilion.

I want people to know about it, to give it the recognition it deserves. I want these layers of history to be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers. Today, the Parks Department is in the midst of a scoping process for a possible restoration of the Pavilion. They have received bids for a six- to nine-month study of the building that will result in proposals for various options: restoration, partial restoration, and also replacement buildings. Community meetings will be part of that process, and I’m gathering names at my talks so I can contact people about them.

The building might be beyond repair. It seems to have a concrete condition called alkali silica reaction, which is disfiguring the building and could be eating away at its foundations. If the Pavilion is actually in dangerous condition, of course measures will need to be taken. But hopefully, this process will mean at least partial restoration, as well as a re-vamping so it can serve as a modern recreation center that fulfills the needs of the community. The residents of the Bronx, as well as those from the rest of the city and beyond, deserve to have this extraordinary example of civic architecture accessible. Great buildings can make people feel great. Even the inimitable Robert Moses thought so. In a quote that might sound a bit corny now, I think he got it right: “I believe in bigger and better construction for public recreation because I am satisfied that it makes people better.”

Personally, I’m not averse to a solution for the building that would combine old elements with new ones. I just want restoration to ensure that visitors can remember the New York history embedded in this structure. It represents a time that is mostly forgotten — the depth of the Great Depression and the massive federal response engineered by FDR, the idealism that was once part and parcel of grand civic architecture, and the leaders with huge personalities who were somehow able to accomplish great feats for New Yorkers. The scale and ambition of the Orchard Beach project, embodied in the Pavilion, seems unthinkable today. But its evocative style is a tangible reminder of the period — this was the 1930s and this is what public buildings looked like. It has an unmistakable symbolic resonance.

All of this might seem like a rationale for letting the building just sit there, to serve as a kind of museum artifact. That’s not what I want. I want people to make use of the building and fully experience its architecture. I can think of so many ways for it to function, in addition to dining, relaxing, and overlooking the beach. How about holding a wedding there? The building could house exercise rooms with equipment, there could be yoga classes. What about interactive displays for children, installations by local artists, and presentations of Bronx history? There is room for a skate park, for a pool, and for so many other things. But such plans need active community involvement. I hope I can help make that happen.

So now, I continue to visit the Pavilion — like an old friend — to pay respects and stay inspired. And I also say a quick good-bye each week on the way back to Manhattan as we cross the City Island Bridge and see the huge, mysterious structure from a distance across the water.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Deborah Wye was a curator at The Museum of Modern Art for 31 years, before retiring in 2010. She now works for the Museum on a part-time basis, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the prints of Louise Bourgeois.

When we spoke to landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh in December 2009 about Brooklyn Bridge Park, just before the first phase of the project opened to the public, he spoke about what it means to design something that continues to live and grow, and how this particular site offered an opportunity to completely reimagine what parks should be in today’s cities. Next week, on Tuesday, November 22, at 7pm, Van Valkenburgh will elaborate on his ideas about design, ecology and landscape across a variety of scales and locations, in “Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens.” The talk, organized by the Architectural League and co-sponsored by the Cooper Union, will be followed by a conversation with Kate Orff, partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and Vice President for Landscape at the League. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Read on for more information (check archleague.org for the latest about the event):

Current Work
Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
“Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens”
Introduced and moderated by Kate Orff
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
7:00pm
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
1.5 CEUs

Michael Van Valkenburgh will present the recent work of his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Based in Brooklyn and Cambridge, MVVA is a landscape architecture firm, which works on projects in scale from the city to the campus to the garden. MVVA’s commissions have sought to achieve an “ecological urbanism,” with projects such as the Master Plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Wellesley College, and built work like Mill Race Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park.

The office, led by its three principals, Laura Solano, Matthew Urbanski, and Michael Van Valkenburgh with a staff of 65, works closely with urban planners, architects, engineers, and ecologists. The firm’s projects have received numerous honors, including the ASLA Design Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects; the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York City; Progressive Architecture Awards; and awards from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada. MVVA has also won multiple high-profile design competitions including Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto, and The City + The Arch + The River competition for St. Louis and East St. Louis. Van Valkenburgh received the 2003 National Design Award in Environmental Design from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and was the 2010 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Van Valkenburgh earned a B.S. in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, and a M.F.A. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Van Valkenburgh teaches landscape design as well as the use of plants as design material. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Landscape Architects.

Kate Orff is a partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and is the Vice President for Landscape of the Architectural League of New York.

Tickets 
Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Member tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program. Non-members may purchase tickets here.

Organized by the Architectural League of New York. Co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

Video from the September 2010 Urban Omnibus feature Park as Process: Brooklyn Bridge Park.