Design in 5 is a group of the Architectural League of New York for designers of all disciplines 5 years or fewer out of school, or under the age of 35. Their goal is to “provide unique opportunities and activities for exchanging ideas across disciplines, fostering camaraderie, and above all, having fun.” One such opportunity is their annual design charrette, Sketch120, in which participants are given a design problem and two hours to brainstorm with pen and paper. The resulting work is then pinned up for an informal discussion with an invited jury. To get a sense of the event, look back at this 2009 Omnibus profile of the group with a video glimpse into that year’s Sketch120 event.

Today, Design in 5 and the League announced that this year’s charrette is scheduled for Saturday, April 16. The topic: Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And they’re bringing some twists to the challenge this time — at three points during the two hour brainstorming session, a new constraint or demand will be added to the brief that will require major revisions to the project designs. The pin-up session will then include all four iterations of each team’s design proposal.

Also new this year, two of the projects will be selected by the jury to be displayed right here on Urban Omnibus! Read on for more information, or check out the full event listing over at archleague.org. Registration is required — get your names in soon.

From Design in 5:

Sketch 120: Greenpoint Edition
Jury to include Andy Bernheimer, Mario Gooden, and Linda Pollak
Saturday, April 16
2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Fowler Arts Center, 67 West Street, Brooklyn

Greenpoint has lived disparate incarnations, from forests and farmland to a manufacturing hub and center of Polish immigrants; to an extension of “hipster” Williamsburg to an ever more gentrified community of professionals.

In 2005, the city approved a major rezoning of the waterfront, a formerly industrial area, allowing for larger-scaled residential structures, along with inclusionary housing and open space. The impact of the more recent recession, however, has slowed the ambitions of developers, leaving many projects incomplete or scrapped altogether.

Design in 5 invites you to design a building proposal within this context of a neighborhood in transition. In the coming years, Greenpoint will need to balance internal issues like demographic integration, preservation of architectural and cultural heritage, and toxic industrial remediation, while deciding upon its relationship with the city at large through adaptations in public transportation and infrastructure.

Participants will be asked to design a multifunctional building or buildings and open space on a formerly industrial plot, combining residential units with community-enhancing activity spaces. At three points during the charrette, a new constraint or demand will be announced which will require major revisions to the project designs.

Following the two-hour design exercise, all four iterations of the participants’ design proposals will be pinned-up for a discussion led by an invited jury. Two projects will be published and displayed online on Urban Omnibus. Drinks and other refreshments will be served during the pin-up and discussion.

Registration is required. Registration for Sketch120 is $10 for League members; $15 for non-members. All participants must register individually here. If you would like to participate as a team, please email anderson@archleague.org specifying the names.  Additional information will be provided to registrants on April 11th.

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Photo by Flickr user themikebot.

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.

If, like me, you work elsewhere during weekdays, these factories can seem subdued or even dead. It’s hard to tell which ones have been converted into condos and which still house makers. When I have time, maybe I’ll go back and take pictures during the day of these great old buildings.

The site-specific aspect of the installation was great—it brought both arts-followers and passers-by together on street corners with the artist to watch what had been previously hidden.

One stop was ACME Smoked Fish. Their trucks and logo are familiar, but I had never really paid the factory much attention. Piles of coral-colored salmon made the video compelling and I could have watched all night.

Next was Royal Engraving, and its 250-year-old engraving machines. That’s history for you. That video was a little less striking at first—so much paper—but the subtle, rhythmic moves of the press and the workers responding to them became hypnotic. The satisfying thud of a stack of thick paper being tapped into alignment and the frighteningly efficient swish of a guillotine chopping the stack made for a great sound track. This video, like the ACME video, had only the sounds of work being done, no interviews or voiceovers, just feeling like a spy with x-ray vision.

The last stop was Dobbin Mill, where Robbin Silverberg makes fine art papers. Although this was also a view of fabrication, it didn’t fit in with the other two. Not only was the process less mechanical (though there was a brief view of an awesome paper press), Robbin Silverberg explained what she was doing as she worked, which made the video feel more like a PBS video and less like the vouyeristic view through the wall the other videos achieved. I understand that Sarah Nelson Wright was looking to connect craft and factory fabrication, but I think the three together would have been stronger if they had been more of a type.

That’s just quibbling, though—this was an amazing installation that changed forever the way I see those particular street corners. I can’t wait to see what project Sarah Nelson Wright dreams up next.


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.

All images by Kirsten Hively. Text adapted from an article originally published on Hively’s blog Catasterist.

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

Brooklyn Makes
A project by Sarah Nelson Wright
with sound by Jennifer Stock
Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, 2009
7:30 – 10 p.m.
Pick up a map at Space on Dobbin (50-52 Dobbin Street in Greenpoint) or download a copy from www.brooklynmakes.org

For the past year I have been working on a project called Brooklyn Makes, a site-specific video installation in the Greenpoint Williamsburg Industrial Zone. On October 9th and 10th, streets that normally seem dark and deserted at night will be activated with three large, colorful video projections revealing the highly skilled and creative labor that takes place inside during the day. Captured inside each business, the videos and sounds bring North Brooklyn’s hidden labor onto the public streets.

Manufacturing used to be synonymous with Brooklyn. When I first moved to North Brooklyn, I heard a lot about the area’s industrial past.  The history is written into the architecture: The Pencil Factory, The Gretsch Building, the (now destroyed) Old Dutch Mustard Company.  Many of these buildings have been renovated into residential spaces, while others have been completely leveled to make way for new construction.

Exploring my neighborhood, I noticed that several of the warehouses I assumed were empty or residential were in fact still industrial. A truck would load sheets of marble, a raised gate revealed an elaborate woodshop, methodical drumming turned out to be a printer. I started working for a filmmaker named Isabel Hill who made a documentary in the 1990s about North Brooklyn manufacturing called Made in Brooklyn, which provided an in-depth look at city policies designed to push manufacturers out of Brooklyn. Growing up in the Bay Area in California in towns that have few traces of industry, my impressions of manufacturing mostly came from old films of people working on assembly lines and statistics from the anti-sweatshop movement. What fascinated me about Made in Brooklyn was the way the workers talked about their jobs – jobs that were satisfying, upwardly mobile, highly skilled, and, to my surprise, creative.

Today Brooklyn has a well-developed reputation for creativity, much of it high profile. Bands get their start in new spaces in Bushwick, open studios from Greenpoint to Gowanus showcase artists working in all media and material, DUMBO’s art spaces house cutting edge performance, craft fairs and flea markets provide marketplaces for Brooklyn’s independent makers. These creative practices and events often inhabit the buildings formerly home to Brooklyn’s manufacturers. It is now a familiar story: artists seeking live/work space move into commercial buildings where manufacturers are struggling or being pushed out, the creative and residential presence makes a formerly industrial neighborhood desirable, and most artists eventually get priced out by high-end residential development, fleeing with the manufacturers, left to wander to the next frontier. Unfortunately for many displaced industrial businesses, the cost of relocating in the city often spells doom.

These two groups, artists and manufacturers, have often been pitted against each other, despite sharing some practical needs as well as other, more intangible similarities. In recent years, the explosion of the craft community highlights the act of making as a creative act in itself, one that is highly satisfying even in the absence of design. This is why knitters will pay more for yarn to make a scarf identical to one you can buy for less, the one produced overseas in a factory by a person who is overworked and unfairly paid. There is pleasure both in the act of making and in the act of resisting alienation from the things in our lives that comes with globalization.

The idea of craft today resists the idea of factory, or at least the idea of factory as many people imagine it: abusive, repetitive, and unskilled. But visit many of the surviving manufacturers in Brooklyn and you find the same level of skill, attention and dedication to quality of work that occurs in Brooklyn’s artist studios and craft circles.

In contrast to the work of artists and crafters, who lend value to their work by leaving their marks, most industrial labor is invisible. Hidden behind warehouse doors, the meticulous work of these makers erases their presence from the objects they make. The more perfect the job, the less you see of the person who made it – and the architecture concurs. Often industrial spaces shut out the public, many times with good reason. The manufacturer may have valuable equipment or trade secrets to protect and safety regulations to follow, or, more likely, the sounds and smells may bother passersby or residents.

Something is lost, however, both for the plight of industry in the city and for the consuming public in this invisibility. It is difficult to build public support for manufacturing the public cannot see. In a city where most people work in service industries, knowing how things are made is exciting, and knowing thing are made here, even in small pockets, gives hope in the midst of a disempowering economic system.

During Brooklyn Makes, I hope to give the public a peek into this hidden world. At Royal Engraving, most employees are new immigrants and many start sweeping the floors and end up learning the art of printing business cards and invitations on 250-year-old machines. Acme Smoked Fish, one of the largest smoked fish processors in the United States, employs 150 people. At Dobbin Mill, artist Robbin Silverberg makes handmade paper for artist books on custom equipment made by another nearby manufacturer. Each video provides a unique window into a complex fabrication process.  Come see for yourself!


Images, top to bottom: Worker using a 250-year-old machine to engrave business cards and invitations, photo by Sarah Nelson Wright; A video of Robin Ami Silverberg making paper for artist books projected onto Dobbin Mill, photo by Nicolas Vernhes; Acme Smoked Fish, photo by Sarah Nelson Wright.

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.

There were lots of cameras snapping away, ours included.  We’ve added some photos to WNYC’s Cityscapes Flickr group, and so should you.  Be sure to tag them urbanomnibus!

Andrea from WNYC recorded video testimonials of where people want to explore next. We’ll post a link as soon as those go up.  If you couldn’t make it – where do you want to go next? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Thanks to everyone that came out for the event!  We had a blast, and can’t wait for the next one.

About a month ago we posted a video site tour of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk with artist and designer George Trakas. Something about this unexpected urban park struck a chord with many of you, so we, along with our friends at WNYC: Cityscapes, wanted to invite you to come explore it.

This Thursday, April 23^rd, at 6:00, Urban Omnibus is partnering with WNYC to bring you a guided tour of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk with its designer, environmental sculptor George Trakas. With stunning views of the city’s skyline and the surrounding industrial landscape, the tour will be an opportunity both to explore our changing cityscape and to reflect on it. Bring your walking shoes and digital cameras. Friday morning, post your photos to the Cityscapes Flickr group and tag them as urbanomnibus. The tour starts at 6:00 and will conclude at dusk.

Check in with us here on urbanomnibus.net for more information in the next few days. Also check in on the Cityscapes page at WNYC.org. If you have any questions, email us at info [at] urbanomnibus [dot] net or call us at 718 249 9348. The entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk is accessible from at the end of Paidge Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one and a half blocks east of McGuinness Boulevard. Click here for more details on directions to the site.

Come one and all.

Newtown Creek’s notoriety as one of the most polluted waterways in the country belies its peculiar beauty and uncommon potential to provide vistas of New York’s industrial history and the scale of the city’s waste management machine. It’s also a wicked cool place to impress a date with a surprise picnic.

Artist George Trakas saw the potential of this canalized estuary as he navigated the waterways of New York over the past forty-five years. When the City’s Department of Environmental Protection launched a $3 billion upgrade of the wastewater treatment facility in the late 1980s, Trakas was able to seize the opportunity – through the City’s Percent for Art program – to go beyond the brief and to provide public access to the water for treatment facility employees and local residents. And by access, he means access: visitors won’t merely see the water from above, behind a fence. Rather, you can descend staged granite steps to the water’s edge and sit (or dock your boat) on a series of getdowns perforating the bulkhead along the Whale Creek tributary. It’s part amphitheatre and part shore, with horticultural and sculptural references to local history, geology, and geography. But it’s also a model of a successful community engagement process. Trakas participated in meetings with the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee every month for the past ten years, incorporating community feedback and priorities into his design. Instead of using art to conceal environmental hazards with decorative band-aids, Trakas has created a Nature Walk that provides an interpretive frame on its surroundings and invites visitors to share his delight in water, industry and the urban beauty of the overlooked.

Clearly, I’m a fan. Are you? I’m curious to hear people’s notions of how public funds for design and construction should incorporate or accommodate art. Is public access to New York’s waterfronts a citizen’s right or a passing fetish? Does the scale of environmental degradation (the Greenpoint oil spill dwarfed the Exxon Valdez and is the subject of constant litigation) on Newtown Creek render the artistic response to the wastewater treatment facility upgrade seem too-little-too-late? And, from those of you who have visited the Nature Walk, send in any stories (run-ins with the swamp thing? a marriage proposal? extreme urban golf? )

The Nature Walk is just one part of a 53-acre project. The environmental engineering team includes Hazen & Sawyer, Malcolm Pirnie and Greeley and Hansen. Polshek Partnership Architects served as masterplanners and architects, led by James Polshek and Richard Olcott. Phase One of the Nature Walk was begun in 1997, completed and opened to the public in 2007. Phase Two will continue over the water and Phase Three – to be completed in 2016 – will bring the Nature Walk all the way to Kingsland Avenue. Check out a rough plan of Phase One below.

– Cassim Shepard

For an overview of the project in architectural terms, start here.

This pamphlet overview by NYC DEP outlines the Nature Walk and its design elements.

Get involved: keep up to date with work of the stewards who advocate for Newtown Creek’s revitalization and environmental remediation.

Newtown Creek was an early case study site for the development of an innovative collaborative mapping project on environmental justice issues. Check out habitatmap.

Keith Rodan has been documenting the site on video for years, and we thank him for the use of his 1998 footage in the video above. Check out his site, filled with lots of other NY-waterfront related gems.

Architecturally, the treatment facility itself is something to behold. And, the Nature Walk wasn’t the only aspect of the plant’s upgrade that employed artistic practice: the lighting accentuates this new landmark in the Brooklyn-Queens skyline, and an indoor/outdoor fountain on the southern side of the plant by Vito Acconci will welcome passersby to the visitor’s center and administrative building.