Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In our quest to bring you a wide range of urban thought and action, Urban Omnibus has, over the past two years, shared perspectives on the social and environmental promise of vertical density, on the rich diversity of New York’s housing typologies, and on the specific social and cultural conditions of certain New York neighborhoods, from Jackson Heights to the East Village to East New York. This week, Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro brings those three themes together in a historical snapshot of Starrett City, a major housing development built between 1972 and 1976 in Southeastern Brooklyn.

Starrett City’s history is singular, formed in the urban crosscurrents of race, class, housing policy and the ever-evolving idea of community. As Genevro delved deeper into this story, speaking with long-time residents and some of the people who helped create and manage the development, she found much more than an account of how a fascinating New York neighborhood got to be that way. She found a thought-provoking counter-example to trends in housing and urban policy that prioritize individualized kinds of built form and ownership over shared resources and collective aspiration. 

The need to rethink shared resources is a recurring theme in innovative thinking about housing current and future urban populations. Just last week, the Architectural League joined with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council to unveil some provocative schemes for residential units and buildings that address New York’s shortage of housing for single adults and other “unconventional” households — households that form the large majority in the city these days. The schemes are part of the Making Room project, and were produced by four teams of architects whom CHPC and the League commissioned to test what kinds of housing could be produced for New Yorkers if certain housing regulations and standards were reconsidered. The architects’ proposals and the proceedings of the Making Room symposium will be available very soon on the Making Room website and the Architectural League’s website. One of the threads connecting the proposals was an emphasis on shared facilities and common spaces, which poses some interesting questions about the very idea of “home.”

In thinking about these questions, New Yorkers have a number of rich traditions to draw on. The cooperative housing model is much more ingrained here than in other cities. The diversity of our multifamily housing stock already relies inherently on sharing — boiler systems, lobbies, hallways — and on the intensive use of our streets and other public places. Looking a little deeper into the social story that inhabits the built environment — in this case, the story behind one of the last New York City developments built on the tower-in-the-park model — can only help illuminate new thinking about the relationship between people and buildings, and just might challenge us to question some of our basic assumptions about house, home and the American landscape. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user C-Monster

Some months ago I was asked to take part in a series of lectures on the reverberations of the idea of “house” in American culture. Being a New Yorker, I immediately moved away from “house” and towards “home” and “apartment.” To my mind, American mythmaking has given far too much weight to “house.” What interests me more is the idea of home and the many, many different ways Americans construct that. If the idea of “house” didn’t wield so much influence, what might that mean for public policy?

I have been intrigued by Starrett City for quite a while, since spending time in the neighboring district of East New York working on Architectural League projects on housing, park and community design. Starrett — renamed Spring Creek Towers in 2002 — is a community that works. It is one of the most racially integrated areas of the city; it is safe; and if the buildings themselves seem uninspired on the exterior, they nevertheless provide accommodating, affordable housing for moderate income New Yorkers in a well-tended landscape. There is a large group of residents who feel deeply connected to Starrett/Spring Creek Towers and who feel that it provides all they are looking for in a place to live. So the question is: How did a group of high-rise, unlovely brick buildings designed on the much-maligned tower-in-the-park model and built on a former landfill on the very edge of Brooklyn ever manage to become “home”?

THE SITE
The 46 residential towers of Starrett City, along with parking garages, a power plant, sports center and shopping center, were built from 1972 to 1976 on a large, marshy, city-owned site in southeast Brooklyn. Since the late 1960s, efforts had been made to develop the site, which offered the possibility of creating a very large number of new housing units without having to relocate current residents. The project site, between Flatlands Avenue and the Shore Parkway on the edge of Jamaica Bay near the Brooklyn/Queens border, had been used as a landfill. It was located across a small inlet from the Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Canarsie, and on its north side abutted East New York, which had changed during the 1950s and ‘60s from working-class Italian and Jewish to largely low-income black and Hispanic residents.

THE POLITICAL CLIMATE
New York City in 1972 was a city under stress. Crime was high and increasing; racial tensions were inflamed, the city’s manufacturing job base was disappearing, and its fiscal situation was deteriorating. Liberal Republican John Lindsay was mayor. He had attempted to introduce new approaches to planning, experimented with decentralization of control of the schools, and made an effort to integrate residential neighborhoods through introducing scatter-site public housing. But the ambitious 1969 plan for the city, developed by the City Planning Department, was never enacted; the effort at school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville eventually resulted in an enormously destructive teachers’ strike; and attempts to integrate New York neighborhoods produced an tense situation surrounding the Housing Authority’s proposal to build a project in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills. In general, there was widespread skepticism about the motives and capabilities of liberal-led government.

THE PROJECT
Work to develop the landfill site had been begun by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a union coalition that had developed a large number of cooperative apartments in New York over the years. UHF and its leader, Abraham Kazan, were pioneers in the development of workers’ cooperatives in New York City, and had created a substantial body of well-built, carefully managed, desirable and long-lasting housing that continues to this day to account for a very significant portion of New York City’s middle-income housing stock. For this and other projects, Kazan and the UHF worked with the architect Herman Jessor, who devoted his entire 60+ year career to the design of housing for workers, including the more than 40,000 units built by the United Housing Foundation in such projects as Penn South, Hillman Houses, and Co-op City. Jessor was known for his mastery of construction technology and building and zoning codes, and a superbly honed capacity to deliver the greatest possible amount and most practically usable space in his apartments.

Penn South

Hillman Houses

Co-op City and Baychester

In keeping with its other projects, the United Housing Foundation envisioned the Twin Pines development — as Starrett City was initially called — as a cooperative. But rising construction, financing and energy costs, and the fact that UHF was simultaneously developing Co-op City in the Bronx, forced the organization to sell the unfinished development. It found a willing buyer in the Starrett Company. Starrett saw potential in taking over the project because of a recent change in the tax laws, making it possible to sell tax shelters for low and moderate income rental (but not co-op) housing and thereby providing a very lucrative benefit to investors.

In the volatile racial climate of early-’70s New York, the change from a cooperative project to a rental project generated a great deal of controversy, because many residents of nearby Jamaica Bay neighborhoods equated rentals with low income black tenants and feared that the new project would “tip” the Brooklyn shore to all minority tenancy. To get the project approved, Starrett Housing Corporation promised the city’s Board of Estimate that it would create and sustain an integrated development with a 70 percent white population, which was the figure the developers believed would prevent the project from “tipping.”

Starrett City under construction

AN INTEGRATED COMMUNITY
Starrett hired a Lindsay administration housing official named Robert Rosenberg to create the integrated project that Starrett had promised the Board of Estimate — but which the company had no idea how to deliver. Realizing his task was first of all a marketing challenge, Rosenberg made a number of moves to make the development more attractive and to reinforce the sense that this was a fresh new community. He insisted on completing the buildings near the Shore Parkway first, rather than on the north near Flatlands. Prospective tenants would come into the development from the water side, rather than passing through the deteriorated blocks of East New York. He invested more in the landscaping than had originally been budgeted, and built an on-site sports club. He added canopies to the buildings, built a shopping center, and successfully lobbied to have an elementary school built on the site, with lots of parking that proved to be a significant attraction for teachers. He created a private security force for the project.

Making the apartments themselves appealing required less effort: the fact that the original architectural program was for cooperative units meant that they were larger than typical New York City rental apartments. Jessor designed apartment buildings from the inside out, with cross-ventilation in the bedrooms, entry foyers and windowed kitchens. Rosenberg skillfully used all these features in his marketing. He organized the first focus groups ever employed in multifamily rental housing, and he made the first television ads for a rental development.

He also managed the tenant selection process to make every building and every floor integrated. In 1988, 12 years after the development opened, an article in The New York Times called Starrett City perhaps the most integrated area of New York City: 62% white, 23% black, 9% Hispanic and 6% Asian or people of mixed race. Twenty years later, in 2007, the Starrett City census tract was 32% white, 41% black and 19% Hispanic. How these levels of integration were initially achieved — through the use of separate waiting lists for white and minority tenants — was the subject of a suit brought by the NAACP, which was settled in 1987 with an agreement that Starrett City would increase the number of apartments made available to minority applicants and that 20 other New York State housing projects built under the Mitchell-Lama program would set integration goals. This settlement was challenged by the Reagan Justice Department, which argued that the waiting lists constituted illegal use of quotas. This argument prevailed and the use of multiple waiting lists was ended.

Notwithstanding the controversy and attention that surrounded the suits, something significant — a community — had been established at Starrett City. Whether because of Rosenberg’s skillful marketing, or the fact that he and his tenant relations staff had an ample budget to fund tenant clubs and activities, or something about the self-selection of the tenants, or whether it was the aspiration to integration itself, Starrett residents seem, from the start, to have perceived their development as something particular and appealing.

Ellie Mandell, the white president of the local school board, told a newspaper reporter in 1988: “We want to live in an integrated community, that’s what we’re all about. Maybe we didn’t do so well in our generation, but we hope the kids who are growing up here together will do better.” Spencer Holden, a black resident and president of the Onyx Society, a benevolent association, told the same reporter: “I have lived all over New York and this is 1,000 percent better than any other neighborhood. I’m not saying everyone’s just nice, nice, nice. But when you’ve got blacks, Jews, Italians, all living together on the same floor, you’re not going to be yelling crazy things. I’m not saying everybody loves everybody else, but everybody lives with everybody else in a comfortable civilized manner.”

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In over 20 years as the executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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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.

This week, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) and the Architectural League are pleased to announce the Making Room Symposium, to be held on November 7 at the Japan Society. Buy your tickets today.

Making Room Symposium
Monday, November 7, 2011
8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
4.5 HSW CEUs

Making Room Afterparty in Nolita
Wine, hors d’oeuvres, and live jazz
6:00 p.m.
Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral Youth Center
263 Mulberry Street

For the latest information about this event, click here.

New York has an incredibly diverse population that lives in incredibly diverse ways. Yet the city’s housing, much of which was produced in the 20th century, does not meet the needs of a 21st century population. Households across the economic spectrum – from graduate students to senior citizens, extended families to multiple roommates, single professionals to working artists – are compelled to improvise their living arrangements in housing that can be illegal or unsafe. What New Yorkers need are more housing choices.

Making Room is a research and advocacy project initiated by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) to increase the range of options in New York’s housing market. Through its research, CHPC identified ways in which current housing regulations and standards in New York constrain the range of choices the market can offer, particularly for single-person households, shared dwellings and multi-generational households, through restrictions on unit size, subdivisions of existing units and definitions of who may jointly occupy units. To build on its research, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with it in a design study to propose and evaluate new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now.

The Making Room symposium will present innovative ideas produced by teams of architects commissioned by CHPC and the League, and in-depth discussion of their proposals by government officials, international architects and other experts. Making Room will point the ways forward to introduce more legal and safe options into New York City’s housing market. At the end of the day, the Making Room “after-party” will provide an opportunity for further informal discussion with the day’s presenters and others from across the spectrum of the housing and real estate communities.

Tickets
To buy tickets, click here.
Design Symposium (breakfast and lunch included) $150; Evening reception, $100; Discount rate for both events, $225. Student rate, $50 for both events (with current ID). There is no additional discount for Architectural League members. This event has limited capacity; to ensure a ticket, please register by October 31st. Tickets will be available at the door, space permitting.

Featuring presentations of work by
Stan Allen & Rafi Segal – Principal, Stan Allen Architect and Dean, Princeton University School of Architecture; Founder, Rafi Segal Architecture Urbanism
Deborah Gans – Principal, Gans Studio and professor, Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Peter Gluck – Principal, Peter Gluck and Partners Architects
Jonathan Kirschenfeld – Principal, Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects
Ted Smith – Principal, Smith & Others

With discussions of the designs presented and related policy issues by
Matthew Blesso - President, Blesso Properties
David Bragdon – Director, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
Azby Brown – Founder, Future Design Institute, Tokyo
David Burney – Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction
Seth Diamond – Commissioner, NYC Department of Homeless Services
Alex Garvin - Principal, Alex Garvin and Associates
Rosalie Genevro – Executive Director, Architectural League of New York
Linda Gibbs – Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New York
Mark Ginsberg – Partner, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
Amie Gross – President, Amie Gross Architects
Vicente Guallart - Founder, Guallart Architects and Chief Architect, City of Barcelona
Rosanne Haggerty - President, Community Solutions
Graham Hill – Founder, treehugger.com
Robert LiMandri – Commissioner, NYC Department of Buildings
Jerilyn Perine – Executive Director, Citizens Housing & Planning Council
Mark Strauss – Senior Partner, FXFOWLE Architects
Mathew Wambua – Commissioner, NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development
Tom Wargo – Director of Zoning, NYC Department of City Planning

Making Room has been made possible through a generous grant to CHPC from the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the support of the CHPC Board of Directors, the Lavanburg Foundation, the estate of Marian R. Naumburg, Edison Properties, and the Japan Society of New York.

…………….

UPDATE: Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times coverage of the CHPC/Architectural League Making Room project and symposium is now available at nytimes.com.

UPDATE: Making Room symposium details announced: Monday, November 7, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. at the Japan Society. (NOTE: This event has passed.)

New York City has a remarkably diverse population and, in many respects, a remarkably heterogeneous housing stock to provide it shelter. From Riverdale to Tottenville, Flushing to Chelsea, Washington Heights to Jackson Heights to Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers inhabit an amazing spectrum of residential building types, developed and accumulated over the history of the city. At many critical junctures over the last century and a half, New York City has been an innovative leader in housing regulation and finance, encouraging and shaping development to ensure that dwellings are safe and respond to evolving standards of livability.

But even with the great resources of its varied housing stock and its strong tradition of housing advocacy and reform, New York has a hard time producing enough housing to meet demand. And in moments of economic and social transition, housing supply and housing need can get seriously out of whack.

Over the last several years, the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) has been researching and analyzing how and where New York’s residents live and the housing that is available to them. Their findings have revealed many discrepancies between the kinds of houses and apartments people need and those they can find. CHPC has identified New York City’s accreted mass of housing regulations and standards — all created with progressive and worthy goals in mind — as one of the factors that contributes to this mismatch. For example, regulations have tilted what the housing market produces towards larger units, for households assumed to be “families,” even though only 17% of New York’s dwelling units are occupied by traditional nuclear families. A huge underground or improvised housing market has developed over the last two decades as people try, often in desperation, to find places to live that are affordable and can accommodate their particular needs.

Around the world, architects, developers and policymakers are responding to the shifting demands of urban dwellers with new forms of housing in ways New York is not. If our city wants to continue to respond to the needs of its dynamic population, it must continue to innovate in the types of housing it produces. In 2009, CHPC brought architects from Tokyo, Barcelona, San Diego, Montreal and Leipzig to New York for a landmark symposium (read UO‘s coverage of that event here) that introduced an audience of housing experts from design, development, law, policy and government to the vanguard of housing design for 21st century cities.

This symposium was part of a broader project — called Making Room — to take a fresh look at how housing and space standards constrict the choices architects and developers are able to introduce into New York’s housing market. To move that project forward, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with them to carry out a design study to produce new models for comfortable, desirable dwellings. Four teams of leading New York architects, each with expertise and a particular perspective, have been asked to respond to this challenge. On Monday, November 7, the architects and their teams — Stan Allen and Rafi Segal; Deborah Gans; Peter Gluck; and Jonathan Kirschenfeld — will present their ideas in an all-day symposium. This event is only one part of a much larger research and advocacy project that will include exhibiting these designs publicly and identifying what laws and codes currently on the books are preventing new modes of residential living from becoming available.

In the video above, CHPC Executive Director Jerilyn Perine (who was formerly the commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development), Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro, Chhaya Community Development Corporation Executive Director Seema Agnani, and Blesso Properties President and Founder Matthew Blesso discuss the state of the city’s housing, the underground housing market and some of the kinds of changes that could make New York housing more responsive to the ways we live now. Over the coming months, Urban Omnibus will be providing regular updates on the Making Room project as it develops. Stay tuned.

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Matthew Blesso is President and Founder of Blesso Properties. Prior to founding Blesso Properties, he worked as a commercial lender, most recently in the Real Estate Finance Group at BHF Bank (now PB Capital), a German bank. Matt is a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Municipal Arts Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Urban Land Institute, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the Manhattan Real Estate Network. He is also a member of Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for the Citizen Housing and Planning Counsel and a founding member and the chairman of the Leadership Board of the Fourth Arts Block as well as Board member of the Institute For Urban Design.

In over 20 years as executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Jerilyn Perine is the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) where she spearheads a high impact agenda to improve the quality of public debate, inform public policy, promote new ideas, and engage a wide audience as well as a diverse and active Board Membership to improve NYC neighborhoods. Ms. Perine is an urban planner with 30 years of experience in housing and community development. She was appointed Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by both Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to lead America’s largest municipal housing agency with more than 3000 employees and an annual operating and capital budget of $800 million. As Commissioner, Ms. Perine was the author of Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, announced in December 2002 that provided $3 billion over 5 years to preserve and create over 65,000 units of affordable housing. Under Mayor Giuliani she designed and oversaw the management and operation of programs designed to return a significant inventory of tax foreclosed residential property to local, private ownership. Ms. Perine is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was a member of the International Brownfield Exchange between 1998 and 2002. She serves on the board of Highbridge Voices, a children’s choir in the South Bronx; West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing; and the New York Housing Conference.

L-R: Empowerhouse, Solar Roofpod, eNJoy House

Every two years, 20 interdisciplinary teams of college students from all over the world converge on the National Mall in Washington, DC to showcase their entries in the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. Part design competition, part educational program and part workforce-development strategy, the Decathlon challenges each team to design, build and operate a solar-powered, single-family house. Student participants get valuable hands-on experience, exposure to new materials and technologies, the freedom to experiment with new ways of building and a chance to help inform the broader public about opportunities offered by energy-efficient construction, products and technology.

Houses are judged by ten metrics: Architecture, Market Appeal, Engineering, Communications and Affordability are judged by experts in their respective fields; Comfort Zone, Hot Water, Appliances, Home Entertainment and Energy Balance are measured through point-earning task completion and performance monitoring. In other words, success is determined not only by design quality, engineering, affordability and feasibility, but also by each team’s ability to educate and engage the public about and with their work. To help teams do this, the DOE has organized a series of workshops (for industry professionals, consumers and the visiting public), house tours, and even team-hosted dinner parties and movie nights. Teams spend nearly two years preparing for the competition, designing and building their prototype houses locally, before they disassemble, ship and reassemble the final project in DC for the formal judging.

The 2011 Solar Decathlon will take over the National Mall from September 23 through October 2. Colleges and universities from around the globe are represented — including Tonji University in China, Ghent University in Belgium, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand — but the majority of teams hail from the US. This year, three of the 20 teams are from right here in the New York metropolitan area: Team New York, Team New Jersey and Team Parsons/Milano/Stevens.

In an effort to learn more about our local decathletes and their designs, we spoke to representatives from each team as they prepare for the big event: Christian Volkmann, the program manager of Team New York (City College of New York); Richard Garber, a faculty advisor and architect of record for Team New Jersey (New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey); and Laura Briggs, the faculty lead for Team Parsons/Milano/Stevens (Parsons The New School for Design, The Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology).

• • •

The Solar Roofpod by Team New York/CCNY | Click to launch a slideshow of images from all three teams.

THE SOLAR ROOFPOD
TEAM NEW YORK: CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK
by CHRISTIAN VOLKMANN, PROGRAM MANAGER

Rooftops of buildings in cities are largely underutilized, yet they offer true potential as living spaces because of their direct access to sun, wind and water. Team New York designed the Solar Roofpod to integrate with flat rooftops of existing mid-rise residential or commercial buildings, enabling eco-conscious urban dwellers to live sustainably as stewards of a more resilient urban environment.

As architecture and engineering students, we are the future custodians of New York City.Our goal is to directly benefit not only pod dwellers, but also those living in the buildings beneath. We calculate that, compared to a conventional NYC apartment, a single pod could generate over $2,500 in annual utilities savings while avoiding the generation of over 4,000 kg of CO2. Extend this concept exponentially to an entire city — to every urban environment on the planet — and we believe the gains could be significant.

We want the Roofpod to be more than just a house, more than an energy source or a garden. It is a piece of urban infrastructure, part of an integrated system that simultaneously addresses the challenges of electrical energy production, heating and cooling, stormwater retention, heat island effect, urban wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration with biomass. Collectively, Solar Roofpods, green roofs and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) arrays can form a new layer of resilient urban infrastructure.

Rough construction of our prototype Roofpod is almost finished. Plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems are already installed. We adopted a modular yet customizable approach to assembly, to reduce on-site construction time, mitigate disturbances to inhabitants and neighbors, and allow for sizable economies of scale when numerous Roofpods are fabricated and installed.

Solar Roofpod exploded axonometric | Courtesy of Team New York/CCNY

The Roofpod will look like a one-story penthouse structure. The Envelope is comprised of 64 poplar wood-framed, customizable “building blocks,” clad with opaque, transparent and louvered glazed curtain wall; a steel beam Dunnage Garden, irrigated with stormwater and greywater, distributes the load evenly to the host structure beneath and provides urban biomass and wildlife habitat; and a Solar Trellis, installed on the pod’s roof, is the pod’s primary energy source. Inside, living spaces flow around a central core, which contains all the functional amenities of the house: mechanical room, bathroom, kitchen appliances, home entertainment, a tilt-up bed and storage closets.

The Roofpod is engineered as a “smart house” rather than a “passive house.” Accordingly, we incorporated a number of active systems to regulate and control the lighting, HVAC, water systems and appliances. Sensors collect lighting, heating and cooling performance data and assemble it in a logger system. A next-generation graphic digital display allows inhabitants to be aware of the Roofpod’s minute-to-minute performance, encourages energy-conscientiousness and may assist the city with peak load management.

This generation of students will be tomorrow’s decision-makers for green policy development, education and the professions of architecture and engineering. Participating in the Solar Decathlon, particularly in the presentation activities scheduled for DC, allows the students to be true representatives of this development, now and for the future. We want this project to inspire future generations of students as well. So, with that in mind, we are working to find a permanent home for the prototype Roofpod after the competition. It will either return to the City College campus in West Harlem to be used as a visitor center and classroom for sustainability education, or it will be installed at CUNY’s planned Maritime Education Center, on Pier 26 in TriBeCa, along the Hudson River.

Our students said it best: “As architecture and engineering students, we are the future custodians of New York City. Many of us in Team New York came here as immigrants from all over the world; we see tremendous potential to enhance our diverse and vibrant global city through innovative design.”

• • •

The Empowerhouse | Photo by Lisa Bleich | Click to launch a slideshow of images from all three teams.

THE EMPOWERHOUSE
PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN, THE MILANO SCHOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, MANAGEMENT AND URBAN POLICY AT THE NEW SCHOOL, and STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
by LAURA BRIGGS, FACULTY LEAD

From the beginning, Team Empowerhouse wanted to take the Solar Decathlon beyond the Washington Mall. We felt it was important to create an urban response to the competition brief and to foster local DC relationships. We established a partnership with the Washington, DC branch of Habitat for Humanity and the DC Department of Housing and Community Development — the first time that a Decathlon team has collaborated with these civic and government agencies at the outset — to create a two-family home for residents of the DC neighborhood of Deanwood.

The Empowerhouse site, Deanwood

Deanwood, a primarily African-American community, is in one of the greenest wards in Washington, DC and has a long history of community activism. Today, the area is undergoing a powerful revitalization, with economic development and environmental sustainability as key components of the resurgence. Since spring 2010, members of our team have met with community stakeholders and residents to better understand the community, their needs and what design aspects they value most. The reality of the place and people has nurtured our students’ thinking and helps them see the project as more than just a technological box.

Site orientation drives the overall form of the home. The Empowerhouse is elongated on its north-south axis with street-facing front porches and main entrances on its north façade; living spaces situated in the southern, more private sections of the home; and back porches that open onto private backyards. After the conclusion of the competition, when it is reconstructed in Deanwood, the house will be expanded into a two-family home, each with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on two levels and a rooftop terrace with planters for growing vegetables.

We are now in the midst of building our exhibition house. The house is primarily constructed of engineered wood, a renewable material that provides maximum stability while keeping material consumption low and the structure lightweight. We are using prefabricated panels to minimize labor and construction costs, and digital modeling and fabrication technologies to increase efficiency and accuracy. All energy needs for the Empowerhouse will be provided by a photovoltaic (PV) array on the roof (one of the smallest arrays you will see on the Mall), and blown-in cellulose insulation will provide thermal properties that adhere to Passive House principles, today’s highest energy standard.

The team wants to encourage more flexibility in future policy, to help DC implement these technologies and adopt sustainability standards on a broader level.We want to provide Empowerhouse residents with the ability to produce all of their energy, reduce their water usage and grow their own food. The house will consume up to 90 percent less energy for heating and cooling than a typical home, and will achieve net zero energy consumption. Sensors for heat, lighting and air quality will log performance data and be visible through a web platform. As opposed to “smart home” controls, which anticipate homeowners’ needs, we implemented a “smart homeowner” system, which provides information and feedback to the residents.

The project does not stop with the house. Our team is working hard to engage with the community, leading workshops for residents and connecting with community associations and neighborhood infrastructures. The team has also established working relationships with several DC agencies — the District Department of Transportation, the District Department of the Environment and the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs through the DC Ambassador Program — to encourage more flexibility in future policy, to help the District implement these emerging technologies in the green building field and adopt sustainability standards on a broader level.

The fact that the Solar Decathlon requires students to not just imagine but realize solar and sustainable technologies is a great advantage. The students are learning, in a hands-on way, how the next generation of buildings will be designed and constructed, and will leave school with the skills needed to make a difference within their disciplines. Our team has worked with over 200 graduate and undergraduate students in fashion design, product design, management, communication design and technology, as well as architecture, engineering and urban policy. The project is a catalyst for faculty, administrators and students to embrace sustainability as a completely interdisciplinary matter.

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eNJoy: A Generation House by Team NJ | Click to launch a slideshow of images from all three teams.

eNJoy: A GENERATION HOUSE
TEAM NEW JERSEY: RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY and NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
by RICHARD GARBER, FACULTY ADVISOR

For Team New Jersey’s 2011 Solar Decathlon entry, we want to integrate passive design strategies, new solar technologies and contemporary architectural ideas to create a new paradigm for the single-family home — the eNJoy House.

I am convinced that this house could be both customizable and affordable to the public. Its value as an introduction to sustainable, high-performance design is crucial.The architecture students from NJIT and the engineering students from Rutgers have been working together since January 2010. Since the fall, we have had the opportunity to work with a variety of professional and industry partners, including Arup (the engineer of record), Northeast Precast (who has worked with us on the design and is fabricating all of our precast panels), Skanska (our general contractor), and Petra Solar (who are supplying the photovoltaic panels). The students have been to each of their facilities and for the last 6 weeks have been working at Northeast Precast, literally forming and pouring the 36 or so unique concrete panels that will make up the house. The use of digital and fabrication technologies and access to the extensive knowledge base of our partnering companies have afforded the students experiences they generally wouldn’t get in an undergraduate architectural education.

One of our primary goals has been to revolutionize the image of high efficiency housing by giving it a new aesthetic. We are working with precast, insulated, concrete panels — a material solution seldom considered for use in conventional single-family homes — in all roof, wall and floor assemblies. The high thermal mass properties of this concrete contribute to the passive control of the space’s climate. (We are striving to achieve self-sufficiency, net zero energy use and minimal environmental impact for all of the electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems in the eNJoy House.) The use of modular components allows for a faster construction process, thereby reducing labor costs.

Team New Jersey, February 2011

With the interior, we wanted to highlight the concrete’s essence while still creating a relaxed atmosphere. We kept the circulation simple by centering the core, giving the house a sense of freedom. By using Panelite and lighter materials as accents, we can lend color, translucency and tactility to the space. While design quality, engineering, and affordability – as well as things like location – all are important factors in considering the type of space one lives in, overtime these become secondary to the experiences one is able to enjoy. I think we have very consciously designed the house for these experiences, taking into account ideas like universal design, and have attempted to match our performance and aesthetic goals to them.

Portability and ease of assembly/disassembly are constraints that had to play a significant role in our design — the eNJoy house will be built in New Jersey, dismantled, shipped to DC and then reassembled in only 24 hours for the competition. It will then be disassembled and moved again to its final home.

We felt it was important to consider the house’s post-competition fate because of the educational potential it carries. A few months ago, we made the decision that the house should not be lived in, as it will have greater educational value as a demonstration structure on a visible, accessible site in New Jersey. (We will decide on the specific post-competition site by the beginning of August.) After spending 18 months on design and construction it is, on one hand, strange to conclude that the house should never be “lived” in, but I am convinced that, at a slightly larger scale, such a house could be both customizable and affordable to the public, so its value as an introduction to sustainable, high-performance design is crucial.

As of last weekend, the house is being constructed in a parking lot on the NJIT campus in Newark. It should be completed in about 3 weeks, at which point it will stay on campus and will be accessible for tours through late August.

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Christian Volkmann is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, focusing on the integration of technical and environmental topics into the design process. He is part of the joint faculty for the newly launched “Sustainability in the Urban Environment” Masters program, combining Science, Engineering and Architecture.

Laura Briggs is a Chair of Sustainable Architecture Research at Parsons The New School for Design where teaches courses on ecological design and is the faculty lead for the school’s 2011 entry into the Solar Decathlon. She has taught architecture studio and construction technology at University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University and at University of Michigan as the Mushenheim Fellow. Laura is a partner with BriggsKnowles Studio in New York City, a practice recognized for its use of light, color and the integration of energy efficient and renewable energy technology. She holds a Masters Degree from Columbia University’s Advanced Architectural Design Program and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Richard Garber, AIA, is a principal of GRO Architects and an associate professor at NJIT’s New Jersey School of Architecture, where he teaches design studios and directs the school’s FABLAB, a unique design and manufacturing laboratory. His work uses computer simulation and computer numerically-controlled hardware to generate innovative design, construction, and assembly solutions. He holds architecture degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Columbia University.

Now, architects, artists, planners and leaders of arts institutions are working to articulate why so many people lost, and are continuing to lose, their homes, and what opportunities for aid were lost or ignored as the country sank into a recession. To say the financial crisis is not at its root a problem for architects is to overlook the inherent ties between success, investment and dwelling that define a national identity.

In an effort to harness the ideas of the creative community to provoke change, the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have embarked on curatorial projects that deconstruct “foreclosure” in markedly different ways. Essentially, both ask for a new, creative perspective on how to fill the vacant, unused and struggling spaces produced by the financial crisis.

Photograph of public program City as Stage, in conjunction with the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, The Kitchen, NYC, 11 June 2011 | © Maria Rapicavoli

FORECLOSED: BETWEEN CRISIS AND POSSIBILITY
In Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, a group exhibition and series of public programs curated by Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) Curatorial Fellows Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, Sadia Shirazi and Gaia Tedone, “between” is the operative word. Well, that and “foreclosed.” Using foreclosure mainly as a point of departure, the show and discussions posit multiple approaches to looking at and utilizing the forgotten spaces that embody the aftershocks of a declining economy and ask how artists, architects and planners grapple with a culture of crisis.

“City as Stage,” a conversation between GSAPP Professor Emeritus and planner Peter Marcuse, urban planner/architect/artist Damon Rich, Director and Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Radhika Subramaniam and artist Tania Bruguera, moderated by Sadia Shirazi, was held at The Kitchen on June 11th. The afternoon began with a screening of Beau Geste by Yto Barrada. In Beau Geste, Barrada patches a malignant hole in a palm tree in a vacant lot in Tangier, trying to thwart a developer who gouged it in hopes of killing the tree, thus allowing him to build up the lot. This guerilla-style urban intervention set the tone for the ensuing discussion on several levels: the scale was small, the action direct, and its consequence indeterminate.

Yto Barrada, still from Beau Geste, 2009. 16mm film transferred to digital video, color, sound; 3 min | Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut, and Galerie Polaris, Paris

The crucial question facing the arts community, the panel seemed to agree, is: what actions can artists or arts organizations take to resist the consequences of foreclosure and fight the momentum of their underlying causes by empowering marginalized populations and interrogating systems of power? “It is easier to see the consequences than the causes of foreclosure,” Marcuse observed. He went on to say that the globalization of capital and a crisis of taxation have led to increased segregation, polarization and reallocation of urban space internationally.

Radhika Subramaniam discussed the challenges of engaging with catastrophe in the urban landscape. Ground Zero, she offered, is a site perceived as uniquely American, even uniquely New York. Visiting a memorial at that site is an experience of specific remembrance, not necessarily of reflection on tragedy more generally. Neighbors in Lower Manhattan, Subramaniam recalled, thought it would be inappropriate to include a memorial to Hurricane Katrina victims at Ground Zero, preventing a larger conversation about a shared vulnerability. As the urban landscape changes, physical sites become locations of selective remembering, or of selective amnesia. By locating art performances in these spaces and purposefully soliciting the narratives of affected communities, she suggested, we will come to a better understanding of what is being lost and what can be produced to take its place.

Tania Bruguera, an anchor of both the discussion and exhibition, dissected the ways that artistic practice can team with cultural institutions to bring agency to individuals. Bruguera, whose project Immigrant Movement International is sponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art (QMA) in conjunction with the exhibition, emphasized the importance of “arte util” — art that is useful. Util in Spanish translates into both useful and tool, Bruguera noted, and for art to be useful one needs to work with the correct tools: in this context, knowledge of politics and the ability to communicate with politicians. Bruguera encouraged audience members to form counter organizations in opposition to existing government bodies and to align with politicians to reverse the aggressive attitude many officials have towards activist art groups. The purpose of these counter organizations was unclear — would they serve as protests in and of themselves or establish themselves to provide services? Tania’s description of the outcome of her own project in Queens had an equally indeterminate direction — is the art the action itself or is it what that action produces?

Other panelists’ opinions on this topic, it became apparent, were mixed. Damon Rich agreed that in order to effect change one needs to be able to “talk the talk and walk the walk.” But gestures, which Subramaniam defined as “small actions of imagination that get lodged in your shoe and build up over time,” Rich felt to be an ineffectual romanticism. Coalition building, in Rich’s experience, is the surest way to guarantee change, and arts institutions, he argued, should become the nexuses around which activists and communities can converge. Returning to the Queens Museum of Art, Rich noted that it is the only museum he has worked with that has a community organizer as a defined staff position. For Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, the QMA 2009 exhibition of Rich’s work, he worked with the community organizer to engage housing advocacy groups, elected officials and a range of advocates in Queens neighborhoods affected by the foreclosure crisis to make the show both informative and useful.

Sam Dufaux of WORKac (left) and Michael Bell of Visible Weather (right) | Photograph by Don Pollard via The Museum of Modern Art Inside/Out blog.

FORECLOSED: REHOUSING THE AMERICAN DREAM
Reinhold Martin and Barry Bergdoll, curators of MoMA’s forthcoming exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, hosted the first in a series of open studios at PS1 on June 18th. Participating teams pinned up the early stages of proposed architectural interventions in “megaregions” — metropolitan areas that lies within a corridor between two major cities – that have been dramatically affected by foreclosure. Where the Whitney ISP/Kitchen exhibition and discussion aimed to be open-ended, so as to allow for interdisciplinary connections at all scales, MoMA grounded itself in real sites where architecture as a specific discipline can alter an environment and thus change the course of an economic downward spiral. The exhibition, as the title suggests, will interrogate and, one hopes, reframe the “American Dream” that has shaped our flawed housing policies and design preferences. It remains to be seen if the plans imagined by assembled firms will go farther than MoMA’s walls, but the show has the potential to popularize innovative and economically sustainable design themes.

Responding to ideas in the soon-to-be-published Buell Hypothesis (a screenplay style research publication from the Temple Hoyne Buell Center investigating the housing crisis and the American dream), the proposals retrospectively pretend that when the foreclosure crisis hit, the government had turned to architects to help build a solution. Zago Architects, the firm designing new housing for Rialto, California, moved forward from the hypothetical premise that when stimulus money was allocated the Federal government had devoted funds to architects. With this imagined money in mind, the team proposed new typologies that blended the natural botany of the region with biodiverse landscaping in swooping flows of dense housing that create pockets for privacy and play by relaxing coincident boundaries.

Richard Zago and Jeanne Gang | Photograph by Don Pollard via The Museum of Modern Art Inside/Out blog.

Perhaps MoMA’s exhibition will spur the administration to think more creatively when doling out cash in the future. As Andrew Zago pointed out, what came before the crash can continue after, and it is imperative to consider how to reuse the investment already made on the ground. However, as the exhibition moves forward and the emerging conversation surrounding foreclosure continues among cultural institutions, the creative minds at work must be cognizant of their objectives: to truly aid those who are losing their homes and to build a new platform on which Americans, and citizens internationally, can construct housing paradigms and approaches to ownership, investment and property.

At “City as Stage,” Damon Rich remarked that often when a cultural phenomenon arises as a popular subject of study in arts institutions, it simply serves to let institutions air grievances about a contemporary topic while business proceeds as usual. Given the grave and wide reaching effects of foreclosure, we should hope this won’t be the case. Instead, as both the Whitney ISP and MoMA shows articulate, we have reached a point of reflection where now scholars, artists and architects can create inventive partnerships that intervene directly to patch cracks through which marginalized people can fall. To do this will require a marriage of agency, responsibility and an inclusive creativity.

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Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer and Urban Omnibus project associate residing in New York City.

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.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

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All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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.

Advanced Design Studio II, the second in a series of six studios in the Master of Architecture program at Parsons the New School for Design, asks students to address architecture’s role in constructing contemporary social relationships by reconsidering one of our most familiar architectural spaces — the residential dwelling. Architects Bronwyn Breitner and James Slade, the instructors of Design Studio II, saw the mix of uses along the Lower Concourse and the strong character of the surrounding neighborhoods and landmarks as the perfect context for an exploration of the contemporary dwelling and the influence of culture, technology, history and policy on the places we call home. Here, Breitner and Slade discuss the studio and the site, and share some of their students’ work. -VS

A historical photograph of the north side of the studio site, a former lumber yard. Many of the identifying landmarks still exist. The primary change was the introduction of the elevated Major Deegan Expressway along the waterfront which hugs the site to the west.

Advanced Design Studio II, the second in a series of six studios in the Parsons Master of Architecture degree, traditionally focuses on a housing program. This year, we broke down the spring 2011 semester into three parts: we began with an analysis of housing precedents both in New York City (to understand the local evolution of housing projects) and globally (to understand past and current housing solutions); next, we conducted an extensive site analysis of our selected studio site; and finally, the students worked in pairs to develop and represent their own housing proposal.

NYC DCP revised zoning map

We selected a site within the Lower Concourse in the South Bronx. This 30-block pocket in the southwest corner of the Bronx was rezoned in 2009 by the Department of City Planning (DCP) to maintain the existing manufacturing zoning and add permitted residential use. In recent years, much of the local industry has relocated and the occupancy has decreased by 30%, leaving a neighborhood characterized by underutilized multi-story lofts, single-story automotive buildings and industrial sites, all with valuable real estate development potential. The DCP identified the neighborhood as ideal for much-needed new housing development because of its easy access to public transportation, its proximity to the ever-desirable Harlem River waterfront and its fantastic views to Manhattan.

A Google satellite image of the Lower Concourse district showing the studio site.

Looking back from the 149th Street bridge towards the site. The newly adopted zoning plan permits 400 ft tall mixed-use towers along a new waterfront greenway.

Within this 30-block parcel we assigned one specific site to the students: a full city block with four very different characters at each of its boundaries. The site is bounded on the west by the elevated Major Deegan Expressway; on the east by Gerard Avenue, directly across the street from Gauchos Gym, a neighborhood icon and community hub; on the north by 149th Street, the only currently commercial street in the neighborhood; and on the south by 146th Street, a small and relatively quiet two-block road. The diverse nature of the site, its 15’ change in section east to west across the site, its location within this newly rezoned district and its proximity to the historic Grand Concourse to the north provided a challenging and rich opportunity for the students to envision a new character for the neighborhood within which to situate their own housing proposals.

In the site analysis phase, we reached out to individuals knowledgeable about the district and invited them to meet with the students to share their perspectives. We met with developer Andrea Kretchmer of The Kretchmer Companies, who is working on a proposal for an affordable housing development across the street from our site and is also actively involved with Gauchos Gym. We also met with Paul Philips and Vineeta Mathur from the DCP who were instrumental in drafting the recent Lower Concourse rezoning. These meetings, together with the students’ site analysis work and a very detailed analysis of the zoning regulations, led to the students’ preliminary massing proposals.

A study of building morphology and use.

Analysis of two main traffic corridors defining the Lower Concourse. Different approaches to engaging the ground plane and the path itself.

A section shows some of the challenges of the studio site - a change in section of 15 ft from east to west, and the elevated Major Deegan Expressway to the west. Photos were taken from a nearby parking structure to study the views to the Harlem River and Manhattan from different levels.

A shadow study at the equinox showing the neighboring lots fully developed under the new zoning provisions illustrates a rather sunny site despite the waterfront towers.

A study of available commercial and infrastructural amenities helped the students identify what type of commercial program made sense to introduce into their building proposals, each of which was mixed-use.

Using the insights from the site research, each team had to formulate a unique and comprehensive program for the site that included housing as well as a complimentary “Program X.” Program X was intended to respond to the needs of a changing neighborhood, potentially provide a catalyst for the future development of the area and integrate with the required housing program. Proposals ranged from the introduction of an artist-in-residence sponsored community art center to a public fitness circuit woven into the lower floors of the building to a supermarket. This independent program development required that the students think beyond the physical boundaries of our site by envisioning and influencing the Lower Concourse’s shift from district to neighborhood.

Students worked with physical and digital tools to convert their conceptual responses to this complex site into architectural solutions. The results of the 15 week study were diverse. Many of the projects developed a perimeter street wall with a central courtyard, though the program and nature of the courtyards were varied. Other projects broke the boundary of the block entirely and introduced perimeter parks and plazas that engaged the street. Circulation was often introduced through and across the site as a shortcut accessing Program X and/or the proposed public waterfront park, reflecting a general interest in incorporating public programs for the community.

The fitness circuit team allowed the public program to influence the unit development by designing flexible units around the athletic terms “Pivot” and “Slide.” A courtyard project utilized a series of solar studies to carve away at the extruded site, resulting in a sun-filled central public courtyard and a perforated metal façade system which responded to the location of the sun, controlling solar gain in each unit. In the most successful projects, the housing unit itself retained the required level of privacy but — when combined with shared private amenities, a public program and circulation —also allowed a typically introspective program to introduce character and identity to a developing neighborhood. Ultimately, the projects were nuanced and engaged concepts, from the neighborhood scale down to the scale of the unit, that created a unique vision of housing in New York City.
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PROJECTS:

Students: Olga Anaya and Tamara Yurovsky
A building proposal on the south side of the lot stacks the comforts of the suburban house vertically, providing affordable housing units for families of different sizes. Each unit has a private and semi-private terrace, and access to the common vertical “street” with shared amenities.

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Students: Rahul Shah and Yoseff Ben-Yehuda
Site analysis revealing the current flooding of the NYC sewer system during a storm surge prompted this team to propose a model building with constructed wetlands at the ground level. Coupled with a collection chamber and contained primary treatment stage, the wetlands treat the sewage from the building and collected rainwater. A series of elevated walkways provide public space above the wetlands and weave beneath the elevated highway for safe and easy access to the waterfront park.

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Students: Michael Goetz and Cristina Lorie
Census data indicates that the South Bronx has a very high obesity rate. This team responded by introducing both a traditional gym facility and a public fitness circuit within the residential building. The required 60’ setback provided an opportunity for an 1/8 mile public running track around the building and swimming lanes. The residential building has a separate, private circulation route. The residential units themselves referenced fitness, each falling into either a “Pivot” or a “Slide” category.

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Student: Josh Stone
A sophisticated circulation system stitches a path from Gauchos Gym across Gerard Avenue through the proposed building to a new basketball court and locker room facilities. Another route allows direct access between a much-needed market at the northwest corner of the site and the historical Bronx Terminal Market. Residential units above are broken into three main buildings, angled in plan and section to permit sunlight into the central courtyard.

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Bronwyn Breitner received her MArch with Distinction at Parsons the New School for Design, and her BA at Duke University in Anthropology and Photography. Prior to co-founding 590BC, Breitner worked at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects on a wide range of projects including dense urban residential developments and medium scale commercial offices. Breitner has taught both undergraduate and graduate level design studios at Parsons the New School for Design and at the Pratt Institute. Breitner’s work has been exhibited at The Center for Architecture in NYC and at the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain.

James Slade has a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and a Masters of Architecture from Columbia University where he was awarded an Honor Award for Excellence in Design upon graduation. In 2002, he co-founded Slade Architecture. Slade was also recognized by the Architectural League of New York in the Young Architects Program early in his career and selected by them again in 2010 for their Emerging Voices program. He is a licensed architect in New York, Florida, Missouri, and Pennsylvania as well as a LEED-AP. In addition to his work at Slade Architecture, Slade currently teaches a graduate level architecture studio at Parsons School of Design and has taught in the past at Barnard/Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Florida International University and Philadelphia University. Before Slade Architecture, he was a partner in Cho Slade Architecture.

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