Manhattan Flood Zones Under 4-Foot Sea Level Rise | LDEO & Civil Engineering, Columbia University | via transportationnation.org

FLOODED SUBWAYS
When Hurricane Irene was headed towards New York City, the MTA made the bold choice to shut down the entire subway system, anticipating widespread flooding of the tunnels which could cause significant damage to transit infrastructure. Though our subways escaped harm this time, the flood threat looks to be a harbinger of a future norm — unless we make some changes now. Last week, Columbia, CUNY and Cornell released Responding to Climate Change in New York State, a report commissioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The document is the result of three years of study into the potential local impact of sea level rise, temperature fluctuation and precipitation increases on infrastructure, economy and public health. The report offers adaptation and preparation recommendations for policymakers, managers and researchers. (Read more in The New York Times.)

Meanwhile, Andrea Bernstein at Transportation Nation points us to Flooded Bus Barns and Buckled Rails, an August 2011 Federal Transit Administration (FTA) report addressing climate change adaptation needs specifically in the realm of public transportation. Bernstein talks with Columbia professor and transit and climate change expert Klaus Jacob, who has worked with the MTA to model some worrisome future scenarios, and MTA Climate Adaption Specialist Projjal Dutta, who is working to implement preventative strategies. Of course, the MTA’s financial woes are well known, and these are costly measures — but Irene’s threat demonstrated that the possible impacts of climate change are closer at hand than we like to believe, and if you think mitigation strategies are expensive, imagine what would happen if we do nothing. According to Jacob, recovering from a full flooding of the subway system could take as long as 29 days, a timespan that would affect economic activity in the city to the tune of $4 billion a day.

photo via civiccenter.cc

BEFORE I DIE I WANT TO…
Candy Chang, public installation artist, designer, planner, TED Fellow, Omnibus contributor and part of the team that designed urbanomnibus.net and our 50 Ideas for the New City posters, has taken her project Before I Die to cities around the world. The project presents a huge chalkboard, painted on a neglected or underutilized wall, repeatedly stenciled with the sentence “Before I die I want to _____”, entreating passersby to fill in the blanks. Chang’s intention is to help people remember what is important to them and, in some small way, to acquaint people with their too-anonymous neighbors. Over the past few weeks, the corner of Adams St. and Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn has joined the ranks of New Orleans, Amsterdam, Querétaro, Lisbon, San Diego, Almaty, Ponta Delgada, Portsmouth as temporary home to Before I Die. From the looks of these photos from the Civic Center website (the design firm Chang started with James A. Reeves), Downtown Brooklynites aren’t short on hopes and dreams. Go check it out for yourself while you can and add your own aspirations to the jam-packed wall — the installation, on the construction boards of the future Brooklyn Shake Shack, will only be up through next Tuesday, November 29th.

© Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos | via todayspictures.slate.com

BUILDING THE VERRAZANO-NARROWS
For the past couple months, Slate has been presenting an incredible series of photographs from the collection of Magnum Photos. This week, we were treated to a series of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a vital piece of transit infrastructure whose lasting impact on Staten Island, New York City and the metropolitan region we explored in the third of our City of Systems videos. These shots document the human side of that story, with poignant portraits of construction workers assembling the “142,000 miles of twisted wire… and 8,000,000 bolts and rivets” that made this engineering marvel possible.

IS ROBERT MOSES FINALLY DEAD?
The Verrazzano pictures don’t just chronicle workers toiling on a massive public works project, but testify to an era when infrastructure investment was a political priority. The bridge was one of the final achievements of Robert Moses, whose legacy has been picked over and argued since his less than ceremonious expulsion from power in 1968. Beyond his reputation as power greedy and insensitive to the needs of neighborhoods, no one disputes that he embodied an era of consistent investment in infrastructure on the part of American governments at all scales. The end of that era, argues Matt Chaban in the Observer, begs serious questions about our current political climate’s failure to produce civic works responsive to contemporary needs. He takes Governors Christie and Cuomo to task for what he perceives as short-sightedness, and he calls out other leaders across the country who have done what Moses once thought impossible: they have pulled up stakes on active projects, prioritizing short-term political gain over jobs creation, regional planning and national competitiveness.

EVENTS and TO DOs

SEED AWARDS: The Social, Economic, Environmental Design (SEED) Network, a group of individuals and organizations dedicated to building and supporting a culture of civic responsibility and engagement in the built environment and the public realm, has announced the second annual SEED Awards for Excellence in Public Interest Design. The awards aim to showcase and promote projects that help create socially, economically and environmentally healthy communities, judged according to SEED metrics. Submit a project for consideration before January 16, 2012. Six winners will receive a $1,000 cash prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to present at the Structures for Inclusion conference in March, an annual event dedicated to highlighting the social and economic impacts of design, and will be included in a documentary series by The UpTake. Deadline: January 16, 2012. Find more info here.

WHERE IS NEW YORK?: Last week, Senator Chuck Schumer and NY State Senator Daniel Squadron announced that $14 million had been secured for the redevelopment of Pier 42 into a public park. On Monday, Columbia University’s Urban Planning Program is hosting a panel discussion addressing questions of the future of Pier 42, the role of community plans in urban development and how to activate civic participation. The panel includes three of the authors of the 2009 community plan A People’s Plan for the East River Waterfront, Jason Cheng (CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities), Anne Frederick (Hester Street Collaborative) and Damaris Reyes (GOLES), moderated by Kaja Kuehl (GSAPP). Monday, November 28, 6:30pm. Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University GSAPP. Free and open to the public. Find more info here.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1969 | via nydailynews.com

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
The Omnibus is signing off until Monday. Have a wonderful holiday weekend!

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

Manhattan’s density, supported by its mass transit infrastructure, is the principle reason the average New Yorker has a smaller carbon footprint than her counterpart in another large US city. At the urban scale, this density is, of course, enabled by a singular combination of geographic, economic, social and political factors. But at the scale of the city’s individual buildings, high-rise living and working are made possible by technological factors. And some of the technologies developed for lifting people, water, hot and cool air to great heights currently work in much the same way as they did when initially introduced. How often do we stop to consider the systems required to make a building function?

This question bears more urgency than casual wonder. 39% of CO2 emissions derive from building operations, including plumbing, electricity, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) and, in the case of high-rise buildings, the elevator system. To be sure, innovative work in architecture and engineering is improving the performance and efficiency of building operations, yet many people are unaware of the scope of energy intensive activities required for a building to function. So, with this in mind, we spent a day with Jim Ferrari, the chief mechanic of 515 Madison Avenue, a midtown Manhattan office building designed by J.E.R. Carpenter and completed in 1931, to find out more about what exactly goes on behind doors that typically only maintenance workers pass through. What Ferrari revealed was a series of day-to-day systems that many of us — those concerned with the environmental sustainability of our building stock — talk about improving without necessarily being able to visualize.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the third in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

515 Madison Avenue | Photo courtesy of Newmark Knight Frank

The music in the video, “Mistral” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.

“2010 will bring New York City’s first Comprehensive Waterfront Plan in a generation. Will this plan be adequate? How will we implement it? A world-class waterfront is an expensive but worth-while investment. How can we secure the necessary capital dollars to build it and maintain it? How can New York and New Jersey get its share of funding for the restoration and improvement of our neglected estuary?” –Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance

This past Tuesday, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance convened a diverse array of organizations and individuals to attempt to answer some of these questions and to dance around the elusive idea of a collective vision for the New York-New Jersey Harbor, home to the largest port on the Eastern Seaboard. The Department of City Planning will soon release Vision 2020, the City’s first comprehensive waterfront plan since 1992, yet the real future of New York’s waters appears considerably less in focus. Obscured by diverse cultural narratives and interests, shifting global trade mechanisms, transitioning regional economies, floundering ecological systems, pending sea level rise, limited funding, and rampant uncertainty, the path towards collaborative consensus among the diversity of stakeholders invested in the harbor — what many were amiably calling New York City’s “sixth borough” — is difficult to discern.

The choices of breakout sessions in the morning included workshops on ecology and economy and plans to get New York’s two million children on and in the water. I attended a panel titled “Future of the Port,” and learned that some parts of this puzzle resemble a giant game of Risk, with enormous plastic pieces. Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association presented the changing global dynamics of container shipping. Boats the size of the Empire State Building, called the Super Post-Panamax fleet, sit somewhere in the waters that sandwich Central America and wait to squeeze through that formally US-owned slit that is currently expanding, at great expense, to embrace them. In New York and New Jersey, many in the maritime industries hope to make similar accommodations in the harbor by dredging the existing beds (15 to 20 feet deep in most places) to a depth of 50 feet and adding at least 10 more feet of clearance to the Bayonne Bridge. Joseph Curto of the New York Shipping Association explained how the new depths will make New York sexier than competing ports in Norfolk, Newport News, Baltimore, and others that already have the appropriate depths, cheaper labor costs, and resolved locations for dredge material deposition. At least that is the hope. By seducing new ships to New York, we could see “an increase of 200,000 blue collar jobs,” an important and threatened form of well-paid employment that doesn’t require a graduate degree. However, there is a risk. After the dredging, upgrades and expansions, trade dynamics might still send all the ships to Los Angeles’ Long Beach port, or to the incredibly more sophisticated ports in Rotterdam and Hong Kong, as pointed out by Manju Chandrasekhar of Halcrow. There are also the dramatic ecological effects that such processes have on the harbor estuary — which was also once “world class,” as consultant Andrew Willner pointed out. I became anxious just thinking about it. One thing seems clear: after the first of these extremely large boats passes through the canal, predicted for 2015, the cargo business in New York Harbor will change. How it will change depends on who rolls the right dice and wins the battle.

For the first of the afternoon sessions, I attended “The Rising Tide from the Bottom Up: Climate Change Resiliency at the Community Level,” which reminded New Yorkers that residents in every borough are among the most vulnerable to adverse and unpredictable climate events predicted for the near future. The panel’s focus was how to prepare, equitably and appropriately, for such events. Following a choppy live feed from environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, panelists from the government, including Amber Greene from the Office of Emergency Management and Aaron Koch of the Mayor’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, presented the familiar and requisite evocative and poorly animated maps conveying the parts of the city that would experience a storm surge given a variety of storm strengths and potential sea level heights, with data grids and charts to validate the visuals. The images, however, as many activists and officials fail to recognize, lack a personal immediacy for many audiences. A mother living on a block a mile inland in Brooklyn, for example, might not see the value in taking educational courses that teach flood preparation, regardless of whether her apartment falls inside a line that is yellow, orange or red. Elizabeth Yeampierre, from the Sunset Park community-based organization UPROSE, stressed that integrated and customized plans that cater to specific communities are essential for ground level buy-in and viable emergency response mechanisms. Whereas in Florida boarding up and sandbagging a home is as natural as covering a pool, in New York we have to take specific steps toward disseminating critical knowledge to empower individuals and families with the capacity to address crises as they arise.

The final afternoon panel I attended was titled “Show Us the Money: New Advocacy and Funding Mechanisms for Federal Dollars.” Whether a massive and centralized construction project like face-lifting a bridge or a decentralized educational program concerning the boarding of windows, most of the projects that touch the harbor come with substantial price tags if they are to achieve the scale of influence and effect required for success. Not surprisingly, project financing was the however-many-billion-pound gorilla in every room at the conference that day. The panel, representing a mix of government civil servants and environmental or conservation-driven NGO representatives, did not have any easy answers. The primary points they stressed were: 1) the importance of a collective and organized voice through collaboration, and 2) a clear agenda of well researched solutions. Curt Johnson of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment cited the organization’s achievements in the Long Island Sound while Chad Lord of the National Parks Conservation Association pointed to the success of the Great Lakes Coalition in capturing $475 million for the restoration of the Great Lakes’ waterways. Leveraging the statutory capacity of the Clean Water Act to funnel all the funding from the EPA enabled the coalition to realize a variety of projects through many different government agencies. The golden ticket again was the coalition’s success in establishing strong alliances by finding common interest among disparate organizations and advancing with a unified voice. When I left, I had yet to hear effective strategies on how to galvanize such strength.

What I did hear was that the institutions and individuals represented are the beginnings of the group that must come together with a collective vision. Overall, I imagine most of the attendees would agree with me that the event was a success, with progress made towards coming up with some shared, actionable answers to the questions the conference posed. However, as community organizing consultant Lee Stuart pointed out, those attending the conference are already a part of the “fifteen percent” that she considers “easy-ins.” That fifteen percent will participate in the movement regardless. That of course leaves the challenge of locating and incorporating the opinions, knowledge, and ideas of the remain 85%. Fifteen percent does not a social movement make. To achieve the inclusive strength required to realize a truly collective voice that might be sufficient to enact appropriate and sustainable responses to the issues facing the NY/NJ harbor, we need a participation model that moves beyond the conference, with its almost requisite structure of snapshot panels and pay-to-play participation. What that model might be, hopefully time will tell.

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Image: Super Post-Panamax via E.R. Schiffahrt.

Will Martin is a designer, media artist and a continuing resident artist in the UnionDocs Collaborative program for the research and production of non-fiction art. He lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Almost exactly one year ago, the Museum of Modern Art and PS1 launched an unprecedented interdisciplinary experiment meant to re-think New York Harbor in light of climate change, sea level rise and storm surge. The project, Rising Currents, elevated the use of design as a tool for addressing these local and global issues whose immediacy and relevancy is (almost) beyond debate. On October 6, MoMA hosted a panel discussion to mark the end of the Rising Currents exhibition and address the potential afterlife of this landmark project and how it reoriented the city towards its water and towards the idea of soft infrastructure that blurs the hard edge between water and land. A panel that included Amanda Burden, Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning, and Guy Nordenson, structural engineer, architect and author of the study On the Water: Palisade Bay, analyzed the impact of the project, from policy change to more theoretical re-conceptualizations of waterfronts.

The five projects comprising Rising Currents used as their guide Nordenson’s Latrobe Study, an exploration of the ramifications of severe urban flooding in New York/New Jersey’s Palisade Bay, which was directly influenced by the failure of design in New Orleans during Katrina. The Latrobe Study embraced the watery reality of our near future – by 2080 the waters surrounding New York City are predicted to rise by at least two feet, and potentially devastating storms will inundate the metropolitan area with greater frequency — and provided concrete examples of how to use what seems like an impending disaster as an opportunity for redefining our city.

Preliminary Palisade Bay master plan | Copyright Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, and Architecture Research Office | via workshopping.us

Amanda Burden served on the jury for the project and has been an interactive observer of its progress, becoming a sort of outsider-insider. She clearly articulated how these five projects have directly informed the City’s new waterfront plan, unveiled just a few days after this panel took place. For example, according to Burden, the plan’s draft recommendations for storm water surge barriers, wave-attenuating features, and proposed changes to building codes and zoning to improve the resilience of new buildings to coastal flooding and storms — protections that can already been seen implemented in the plans for Coney Island — were partially inspired by the hurricane-resistant housing models developed by the nARCHITECTS team. Her description of the “dizzying array of new types of public space … blurring the edge between land and water to near hyperbole” developed by team Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis inspired a series of recommendations for ways to activate underutilized public land on the waterfront. Burden spent some time outlining the City’s new waterfront plan, embracing the notion that New York’s water deserves as much planning attention as the land receives. She went so far as to call the water New York’s “sixth borough.”

“The era of confronting water is past. The idea of water meeting land across an edge drawn more easily on paper than on the ground, is no longer tenable.”One project the City has undertaken already is Kate Orff and SCAPE Studio’s Oyster-Tecture, which recalls New York’s natural history with the wondrous, dynamic oyster which both filters water and forms natural wave-attenuating reefs. The very morning of the panel, the US Army Corps of Engineers, along with the New York Harbor School, was installing an experimental oyster reef in the city, just off Governors Island.

Guy Nordenson emphasized the overarching questions that guided him in the afterlife of Rising Currents: Can designers instigate policy change? What is the role of aesthetics in policy in climate change adaptation, in developing political consensus and breakthroughs? And what role does MoMA as an institution have in this?

Nordenson also spoke of how his study and research evolved in the past year since the initial Rising Currents workshops. Coming full circle, Nordenson used his insights and conclusions from his Palisades Bay study to address the problems of the Mississippi Delta. A project he undertook with architects and engineers at Louisiana State University has led to a proposal to create diversions from the Mississippi to rebuild wetland that has been eroded over time due to the channelization of the Mississippi, which used to feed these areas but no longer does. Through an invitation to showcase his research at the Venice Biennale, Nordenson took his two case studies, Palisades Bay and the Mississippi Delta, to an international audience and, with the aide of pretty plexi-glass renderings of both regions, conveyed the reorientation of the water-inclusive, sustainable world that drives his research and design.

The US Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia | Palisade Bay and Building with Water | Guy Nordenson, Catherine Seavitt, Architecture Research Office, LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio and Anthony Fontenot | via workshopping.us

One member of the evening’s architect- and designer-heavy audience spoke critically of the delayed response by policy makers to address these issues. However, as another member of the audience observed, “It’s actually the designers and architects that have been slow to react to the issue. … Not-so-long ago [we] were not-so-interested in these things. I think it is up to us to move more quickly, with the hope that the policy makers will then respond to it.”

Another speaker highlighted MoMA’s role in urging design toward more socially-engaged ends. Andre Singer, a real estate developer, who, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, helped fund this project, spoke of MoMA’s recent programming, which he sees as more socially and politically engaged with current issues in architecture, including both Rising Currents and the current exhibit, Small Scale Big Change. As he pointed out, “Social engagement was one of the main themes running through Modernism and in this way I think MoMA goes back to what it originally was.”

Anuradha Mathur, a designer and landscape architect who along with her partner Dilip da Cunha were invited to speak about their Mumbai-focused exhibit SOAK, captured what seemed to be the prevailing reaction to the project: “Every once in a while there is an exhibition that goes beyond the language by which it is described, challenging the popular imagination and calling for a new one. Rising Currents, to us, is one such exhibition. It calls us to go beyond the language of the waterfront. … The era of confronting water is past. The idea of water meeting land across an edge drawn more easily on paper than on the ground, is no longer tenable.”

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Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homely beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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.

Acting responsibly in an era of climate change often requires choosing among worthy options: organic or local? Build a log cabin or move to a high-rise? Write to your Senator or stage a sit-in? For designers, the choices tend to be bound by measures to cut costs, save watts, or earn LEED points rather than informed by a deep understanding of the political, economic and social positions embedded within each choice. Choices about how to act must begin with analysis of the positions behind them. And Underdome, a project recently launched by Janette Kim and Erik Carver, performs that analysis: distilling each position it identifies to its essence, classifying each into broad themes – territory, power, lifestyle and risk – and then diagramming the relationships between positions, clusters of positions and themes. These themes provide the organizing framework for a series of panel discussions that Underdome is convening this month at Studio-X (you can read a little more about last night’s inaugural session at the bottom of this post). The next three discussions promise to advance the dialogue about energy, architecture and public life by linking it to examples of provocative interdisciplinary work while uncovering some of the overlooked narratives that influence thought and action around energy. Join the conversation this Thursday and again next week. But first, find out more about how Kim and Carver conceptualized and realized this ambitious project in the interview below. -C.S.

Using Fuller and Sadao's Dome Over Manhattan as a guiding metaphor, the Underdome project identifies a range of positions on energy and public life and assigns to each a corresponding architectural icon.

What is Underdome?

Janette Kim: Underdome is an architect’s guide to contending energy agendas. The project maps debates and classifies positions on energy in an effort to explore their implications for public life and the built environment. You could think of it as part architect’s handbook and part voter’s guide: it connects users to ideas by exposing them to writings, projects, and interviews about the use and distribution of energy.

Erik Carver: You could also think of it as a catalog of approaches to reforming energy use. While it is put together by architects for architects, Underdome looks at work from a number of disciplines, including economics, environmentalism, community advocacy, political science, policy, planning, and design. It’s launching with a website and a series of panel discussions this month.

How did it come about?

Erik: Last year, the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) — and the attendant buzz of large projects and actual energy reform — provided a great opportunity to rethink the relationship of sustainability and public space. With the combination of the financial crisis and the ensuing atmosphere in which political realities seemed suddenly up for grabs, we saw how energy reform could work not just incrementally but instantly, and that inspired us to ask the question, what kind of disciplinary blinders have we as architects been wearing all along? We started off looking at the limits of architectural practice; is tweaking the efficiency in today’s buildings the best way to achieve energy goals?

Janette: Sometimes it seems that the role of the architect, when it comes to saving energy, is to source the right product or to calculate LEED points — as though the engineers and the bureaucrats alone can find the right way to minimize our energy usage. Or sometimes we push for design strategies — self-sustaining cities, locavore farms, town center densification — without interrogating some of the assumptions and belief systems behind them.

But when two contending approaches to energy are compared side-by-side, bigger issues emerge. Should we invest in market-based development of efficient products or support direct government investment in new infrastructures? Should we build zero-emissions cities in the desert, or revise the distribution networks of today? Should we buy better or consume less?

We started framing the project with the support of the Van Alen Institute’s New York Prize Fellowship in Systems and Ecology this spring and began a long research process which included interviewing energy experts and working with a team of excellent research assistants with backgrounds in architecture, political science and planning to develop the guide. Then came the exercise of classifying the positions and assumptions that emerged and organizing the information along the lines of a voter’s guide.

Homepage of www.theunderdome.net (detail)

Can you describe how you imagine the user’s experience of the website? Walk us through what she will see, read, learn, click through, etc.

Erik: If you go to the front page of the website, you’ll see a playful city map which charts out energy agendas as a series of architectural icons — small cartoon buildings representing the positions in the database. These icons are arrayed along four sets of axes which attempt to spatialize the agendas, almost like a structuralist game board.

Janette: The map on the front page can be read in a couple different ways: it imagines the built environment as a place in which various camps have created their own vision of how things should be. We’ve drawn a mini-Utopia to raise questions about the spaces and architectures that align with each position.

Erik: Clicking on one of the icons takes you to a page with quotes and images from thinkers, agencies, and policies advocating that agenda; as well as commentary and debate. From there, you can browse opposing positions, jump to advocates or commentators to see other positions that they address, or join in the discussion.

Janette: We strongly encourage users to make comments on these pages to contribute their own evaluation of these positions, or alternate interpretations of the issues outlined here. The guide can also be used to study the work of individual experts, policies, and projects, which can be found by clicking on the names of these examples in the policy pages or on the site map. And the guide also provides a bibliography and link resource for future reference.

How did you go about defining and classifying the various models of energy efficiency that will appear on the website?

Janette: The guide’s taxonomy covers the political, spatial, and cultural dimensions of energy, and revolves around four main topics: “Power” asks how governments, corporations, organizations and individuals have the potential to restructure energy performance. “Territory” asks how energy transforms and is transformed by the changing networks of today’s metropolis. “Lifestyle” asks what kind of norms and behavior energy performance schemes imagine. And lastly, “Risk,” as a kind of meta-category that cuts across these other fields, asks how we weigh priorities among a diverse set of interests and contingencies.

Erik: Each of these categories is populated by a number of clashing positions. If you look at the “Power” topic, for example, positions are tested against a individual-centralized axis and a socialized-free market axis. Approaches that call for a strong state investing in energy-related improvements tend to cluster along the centralized axis, while those supporting grass-roots organization or individual responsibility (as different as those approaches may be) fall on the individual end of the spectrum.

Janette: Similarly, approaches that emphasize a redistribution of resources can be compared to corporate-based models of investment and development along the socialized-free market axis. In this way, friends and foes are drawn on the map itself.

Many positions, of course, do not fit squarely within any matrix. At times examples challenge our very thinking about power. (Does the humanitarian non-profit fit under a socialized model because it is directing resources to the disadvantaged, or is it based on a free-market model through its financial relationship with companies?) Nonetheless, we hope that this kind of matrix can pose questions that might eventually rearrange these alliances and form new positions. And we invite users to use the comments section and, eventually, submit work that challenges and tests these viewpoints further.

Tell us about the precedents and references that guide this project, Buckminster Fuller’s Dome and the voter’s guide.

Erik: Our interest in the legacy of Buckminster Fuller’s work stems from his desire to to synthesize social reform, technology and architecture in his far-reaching visions of a better world. It was exactly 50 years ago that Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed a 2-mile dome over midtown Manhattan, which was intended to centralize climate control and quickly pay for itself in energy saved. It’s a perfect image for showing how reimagining building and infrastructure while hewing to an efficiency imperative could mean radical experimentation and the expression of new urban collectives.

Janette: The dome is often used as a symbol of the overreaching aspirations of grand Utopian schemes — and while this certainly warrants critique, what’s really interesting about the project to us is the way it rewrites equations of efficiency in relationship to a new public space of the city.

Erik: The official voter’s guide became a model for us of something that could condense a lot of complex information into something accessible and democratic. Of course, it has a meta-politics, a way of indexing political information that contains its own biases and assumptions, but this is something we were interested in taking on. Plus we just like voters’ guides.

Janette: Voters’ guides are an example of a way to lay out the issues without taking sides. They focus debate on certain issues and invite their users to make informed decisions. But the voter’s guide isn’t enough – of course the democratic process expands far beyond the polling station.

For architects, this question of how we vote is critical. Architects make their political and environmental priorities known in so many ways: by designing, writing, raising questions, framing research, promoting ideas, forming clients and educating them all at the same time.

Erik: It’s clear that energy and the environment are the topics of our generation. There is a lot of work being done on these problems, with competing and sometimes oppositional claims. Therefore, acknowledging the different political and social lenses that are informing agendas on energy use is important. Exploring an expanded spectrum of agendas might be a first step towards connecting them with architectural priorities. Because evaluating these programs in terms of dollar and carbon savings doesn’t get to the real questions: What city do we imagine for ourselves? What forms of political representation and authority work best, and who do they work for? What kind of lifestyles do we want to encourage?

And so, to explore these questions, we are using the strategy of debate. The process of testing agendas against their counterpoints asks you to articulate why you stand for one approach in the face of all other priorities. It defines what’s at stake. There is no clear answer to any of these issues, but through debate we publicly get to weigh the options, set priorities, and ultimately, take a stand.

How do you expect the user, armed with the information you present, will approach the topic of energy efficiency differently after she has explored the website? If she is a designer, how might the information presented inform her design process? How would you like visitors to the site to act and think differently after they have explored it?

Erik: We hope the site will help users think about energy as an ongoing conversation which has a history and connects with ideas about how the world is and should be, not just a list of products to buy or no-no’s to avoid. For architects, this could mean interrogating our assumptions about what is within our power, what the point of efficiency is, what the buildings we work on are saying and doing. For users in general, it might mean diversifying ideas of what sustainability could be, getting beyond skepticism, or confirming already-held suspicions. Hopefully, people will find it informative, go on to learn more about something we posted, and have more arguments with their friends.

Janette: For me, this project opens up some questions about how design can operate in the political field of energy. At hand are questions about how we research, relate, and weigh different models of efficiency in relationship to an ever-expanding range of criteria. I’ve taught several studios to architecture students using this guide as a basis: students were asked to research a given position, make a design proposal based on that position and then to argue it with their classmates. Through this process, some students found new hybrid positions, some developed projects that embodied debates, while others held their ground. My hope is that the guide will encourage designers and users to take positions. And, because climate change is an unpredictable threat, we begin to design for contingencies we might normally overlook, and anticipate broader constituencies that will maintain and monitor new spaces for years to come — models that might need to move beyond the traditional architect-client model.

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Last night was the first of the Underdome Sessions, a series of public panel discussions that are an integral part of the project. The first theme to be discussed was Territory, and featured presentations by Petra Todorovich of the Regional Plan Association; June Williamson, co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia; Denise Hoffman-Brandt, a landscape architect whose work focuses on landscape design as a means for environmental sustainability; and Laura Kurgan, who teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning at Columbia University, where she is Co-Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) and the Director of Visual Studies. Georgeen Theodore, principal of Interboro, moderated. The discussion began with the question of how energy performance re-frames the networks of the contemporary metropolitan region. It soon expanded to address the variety of scales of investigation and intervention — from micro-ecosystems on urban streets to strategies for improving the performance of the suburban landscape, and from the cohesiveness of the metropolitan region to global flows of capital and migration. What emerged from the diversity of perspectives and precedents discussed was a passionate call to think holistically and systemically at every scale. The next three discussions promise to be equally provocative, so mark your calendars: on Thursday, October 14th at 6:30 is the Power discussion, featuring Moshe Adler, James Gallagher, Laurie Kerr and Reinhold Martin. Next Tuesday the 19th at 7pm is the Lifestyle discussion, with  Sarah Beatty, Jonathan Massey, Jerilyn Perine, Heather Rogers and Meredith Tenhoor. And next Thursday the 21st at 6:30 is the Risk discussion, with Scott Holladay, Cary Krosinsky, Jonathan Levy, Michael Osman and Rae Zimmerman.

TO DO
First up on this week’s roundup: stuff to check out this week. Our October calendars are bursting with a plethora of first-rate events, installations, programs and otherwise worthy additions to your to-do list.

For the advance planners out there, check out the line-ups for another event-packed weekend starting October 8. Next weekend brings both Conflux, a festival devoted to art and technology in the urban environment, and Open House New York, a weekend of tours through and access to sites of architectural, engineering and design significance all over the city, many of which are ordinarily closed to the public. Many OHNY tours fill up early — sign up for your favorites ASAP. And stay tuned for more details on both events here on Urban Omnibus, coming your way next week. While we gear up for that weekend of urban exploration, there’s plenty going on this weekend as well:

Greenpoint / Williamsburg
Omnibus contributor Sarah Nelson Wright has kept us posted on all things North Brooklyn this weekend. Wright is the curator of Common Ground: Imagining North Brooklyn, now on view at the Renaissance Center of North Brooklyn, which exhibits works from artists inspired by the area. Tonight she is hosting a film night (with discussion following) that will feature three documentaries on abandonment, development and habitation in North Brooklyn. Then on Saturday night in Greenpoint, she and Nathaniel Lieb will be participating in Bring to Light, New York’s first Nuit Blanche festival, organized by DoTank:Brooklyn. Fifty artists will create “light, sound and unexpected installations” that inhabit street corners, galleries, shops, rooftops, vacant lots and buildings in a celebration of “the magic and luminance of light.” All this and more — throughout the weekend, Greenpoint Open Studios offers access to more than 160 artist and exhibition spaces in an effort to foster support for the area’s art community.

Staten Island
Then spend your Sunday on Staten Island for a sneak preview of Freshkills Park. Look back at Zach Youngerman’s report on the project from this week’s recap of ASLA: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, DESIGN as a preface for this weekend’s activities, which include canoe, trolley and walking tours, workshops, birdwatching and kite flying. This first-ever public event at the site is free and open to all from 11am-4pm.

DUMBO
Another after-dark destination can be found at 81 Front Street where artist/designer/programmer Eric Corriel’s site-specific digital video installation DUMBO Underwater will be on view through October 13. The piece, inspired by issues around climate change and scientific projections that rising sea levels could leave many coastal cities partially underwater, imagines DUMBO flooded by the East River and “transform[s] the possibility into an experience.” Watch a video of the 80′ x 9′ installation at the top of this page, or go see it in person between sundown and sunrise.

Lower Manhattan
If you are still looking at the sidewalks to find cuts and patches, maybe a different urban intrusion has caught your eye. Four years ago, an artist from Brooklyn added his John Hancock to the streets and sidewalks in the form of a singular, continuous line (about eight miles long) drawn with paint. He attached a bucket to his bicycle and rode through the city, painting the line in the middle of the night in the shape of his name, MOMO. Maybe you’ve seen it, but if not, Momo has a map of the trajectory on his website, as well as a video following the line through downtown Manhattan.

NEWS
Next up: things you should know.

Dirty Water

Anyone unconvinced about the importance of stormwater management for New York City might consider watching the video above. Speaking of dirty water, this week the Environmental Protection Agency designated Newtown Creek as New York City’s second Superfund site this year, meaning the Gowanus Canal — pronounced a Superfund site in March — is no longer the city’s sole site contaminated enough to warrant federal designation. The City isn’t leaving the problem entirely to the EPA. Mayor Bloomberg announced on Tuesday a new “green infrastructure” plan to reduce sewer overflow, clean up the waterways and save $2.4 billion in future sewer management costs. (And if anyone has seen the new Wall Street movie, did you catch the cameo of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, specifically the elevated walkways designed by Ennead, playing the role of a California sea water cold fusion factory?)

Atlantic Yards
Two sets of headlines circulated this week about the development of Atlantic Yards with the release of renderings by SHoP Architects of a public plaza outside the arena at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, and developer Bruce Ratner’s acknowledgment that the announced 10-year timeframe for completion of the project was a best-case scenario. AY watchdog Norman Oder offers an extensive media response roundup and breaks down both the design and public policy issues surrounding the two announcements on Atlantic Yards Report. In an op-ed for the New York Observer, Oder shares a more detailed look at the ‘fuzzy math’ that consultants KPMG used to support the case that “the housing market would be healthy enough to absorb 1,930 luxury condos” over the originally proposed 10-year timetable.

Kingsbridge Armory
CITYLIMITS reports on the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment as a group of Bronx students provide their input on the future of the site. The students had participated in Center for Urban Pedagogy‘s Urban Investigations program and were using their new knowledge to invoke change at a community meeting last week. Project leader and CUP program manager Valeria Mogilevich stated “We’re trying to get students to change their perception of how the city works, and their potential impact on it.” The students, who had no prior knowledge of Community Benefit Agreements, started the program in the summer and created a poster at the end of the seminar, to educate the community on the effects of the redevelopment.

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

With temperatures in the triple digits earlier this week, residents in major cities like New York, Washington and Philadelphia felt the heat more so than those living in more rural areas due to the heat island effect. That said, a new study out of Georgia Tech posits that among cities, the wider the sprawl the greater the affects of climate change. In other words, get dense to get green! Back in January, the Omnibus brought you Clip-on Architecture: Vanessa Keith’s bold vision for how to knit green interventions into our existing urban building stock in order to redress the affects of tropical deforestation. Keith is hardly the only one turning attention to the roof in attempts to cool buildings, and thus the city, down. By creating the roofs out of a light-colored special polymer, or installing a rooftop garden, or “living roof,” you have the ability to reduce temperatures by almost half, as well as save on cooling costs. While the initial costs of installing such systems has often scared owners in the past, perhaps the weather of the past week will have them reconsider the option. One local enterprise, the Brooklyn Grange Farm, recently installed a green roof at their home in Long Island City, and also sell their goods at various markets around the city.

The design company IDEO is now using video and social media to promote positive thinking about climate change and its future impact on the Earth through their Living Climate Change project. They also recently announced the winner of their video challenge, which allowed filmmakers to showcase what their vision of the future shaped by climate change will be. Below is a short video explaining the premise behind it all (via Flavorwire):

Our Invitation To You from IDEO on Vimeo.

Public transportation has long been touted as one way to lead a more sustainable life, but many New York City buses often move at the same speed as pedestrians, leading to frustration from passengers and city officials alike. However, thanks in part to an $18 million federal grant recently won by the city, plans for the 34th Street Transitway are one step closer to becoming a reality. With over 90% of the traffic at Herald Square coming from pedestrians or transit riders, the plan calls for buses to have their own corridors to allow them to function similarly to the subway, and hopefully be faster and more efficient. Hopefully this project will be the first of many successful ventures to revive the whole city bus system.

Images via WebEcoist; Left – exterior of the pavilion; Right – interior view of the “forest”

Green space may be at a premium in most major metropolitan areas, but DUS Architects out of Amsterdam created a small, wooded retreat for city dwellers with their Unlimited Urban Woods pavilion. From the outside it was just a small, unassuming box, but once you stepped inside they were able to create the illusion of a never-ending forest through the use of just one planted tree and carefully angled mirrors.

In recent years, New York City has been creating, expanding, and renovating numerous parks along the city’s waterfront, most recently the Brooklyn Bridge Park, which opened the first phase to the public in March of this year. However, one op-ed writer for the New York Times, offers the argument that while many are stating that we are “reclaiming” the waterfront, we’ve never really had control of it until now. When it was dominated by shipping and manufacturing in the 19th century and first half of the 20th, the waterfront was a dangerous, crime-ridden place, one that many New Yorkers did not dare to explore. According to the author, Nathan Ward, we’re not reclaiming it, we’re claiming it.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation has recently announced that it is seeking proposals to develop a new hub in the Bronxchester Urban Renewal Area in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. In addition to the new Yankees Stadium and plans for the Grand Concourse, the City is hoping to further encourage revival through the introduction of a mixed-use development including commercial space, community and educational centers, and other public and semi-public spaces.

Long Island was home to some of the first suburbs in the country, and back in March, the Long Island Index sponsored a competition to ‘Build a Better Burb’ and reconsider the notion in todays economic climate. The 23 finalists were recently announced, with many ideas centered around the concept of walkable, sustainable communities, and are now inviting the public to vote on the “People’s Choice” award. Winners will be announced in October 4th.

This weekend, July 9-11, the Anthology Film Archives is presenting “The Outer Boroughs on Film.” A majority of the documentaries being shown were filmed during the 1970′s and 80′s, when crime, disinvestment and a major fiscal crisis threatened the rapid decline of many neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

If you’ve ever been intrigued by what it takes to be a window cleaner, and what exactly they are thinking working high above the city streets, the New York Times recently had a two-part question and answer series with Andrew Horton. Horton was a window washer for over two decades and now runs the city’s main safety training program.

Robert Moses certainly left his mark on the city in the 1930′s, but one that has been unseen by most is the “Freedom” Tunnel, named after the graffiti artist Chris Pape, that runs under the Upper West Side. Used briefly by Amtrak, it then became home to many of the city’s homeless population, and a prime canvas for Pape and other graffiti artists. Functioning as an active train line once again, it offers urban explorers a world of stunning contrast to explore, as seen below (via Wooster Collective)

Freedom Tunnel from Charles le Brigand on Vimeo

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

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…