-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

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

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

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

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

- C.S.

The Library at the Andrew Freedman Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A third floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A second floor corridor at the Andrew Freedman Home

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

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

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

Postcards on a bedroom wall at the Andrew Freedman Home

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

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

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

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

An abandoned Christmas tree at the Andrew Freedman Home

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

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

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

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

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

- C.S.

Image courtesy of Perkins+Will

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless otherwise noted, all images by Marcelo López Dinardi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-C.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flux City | Renderings | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

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

Flux City | Section | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

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

A history of landfill in Lower Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

In 1982, the MTA launched a multi-billion-dollar capital improvement program to rehabilitate the transit system. During that campaign, in 1985, a program was created to introduce original and integrated artworks into MTA stations and spaces and to promote design excellence as part of the rebuilding effort: Arts for Transit. Today, Arts for Transit oversees a number of programs that bring visual art and performance to the MTA network. They are most well-known for the Permanent Art program, which incorporates commissioned works of art into capital construction or renovation projects throughout NYC Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road and NYC Bridges & Tunnels. But their work isn’t limited to the permanent, or even the visual. They showcase the work of photographers in rotating temporary exhibitions, fill unused advertising space with posters by illustrators and other visual artists, and present thousands of musical performances annually at 25 subway and train stations.

Last week, we had a chance to speak with Arts for Transit Director Sandra Bloodworth, an artist herself, who first joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager, before becoming deputy director in 1992 and then director in 1996. While sitting in front of the newly-installed Sol LeWitt in the 59th Street-Columbus Circle station, we talked about the power of art to help turn a failing system around, activate spaces of infrastructure, and improve rider experience and quality of life.

- V.S.

Times Square Mural (2002) © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Times Square–42nd Street Station, A, C, E, N, Q, R, S, 1, 2, 3, 7 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell us about Arts for Transit and your role there.
I am the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The role of Arts for Transit is really two-fold. One part is arts — visual and performing, the temporary poster program, the Art Cards, Lightbox, and the larger mission of commissioning permanent art for stations being rehabilitated under a capital program. We have over 230 works of art installed in MTA NYC Transit, Long Island Rail Road, Metro North, and MTA Bridges and Tunnels’ facilities.

The other hat we wear is that of urban design and promoting design excellence in the agency. We advocate that good design does not have to cost more money. In fact, really excellent design can save you money. The best example of how we work in that role is what happened when the MTA decided to implement vending machines for MetroCard sales. The MTA wanted to make sure riders not only accepted the new system, but saw it as a good option, a better option. In conjunction with NYC Transit, Arts for Transit worked with the designers, Antenna Design, to ensure the machines were user friendly, appealing, and not incongruous with the station environment. The machines were installed in 1999 and they have served us quite well. People like them and use them. And they showed that a government agency can change how it does business in a positive way.

Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Clock (1992) © R. M. Fischer, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Paul Warchol.

In a way, the same thing is true with the art installations, though that’s a less definable topic. We started introducing art into the subway environment at a time when the system was on the brink of collapse, in the mid-1980s. The concept of putting art into that environment was a novel idea.

Around that time, New York City’s Percent for Art legislation was passed, which requires that one percent of the budget of capital projects is allocated for art. Even before that was passed into law, the MTA knew it was pending and used that momentum to advance the idea of dramatically changing the underground environment. Ronay Menschel, an MTA board member at the time, was the one who realized this would need to be managed internally and played a key role in establishing Arts for Transit. Wendy Feuer was hired as the founding director. Arts for Transit immediately engaged with the role of aesthetics within the architecture and industrial design of the MTA, and advanced the idea that if we’re going to spend real money on improving the system, let’s be sure to design it well.

What was the intent in installing quality artwork in the transit system? Did you want to enrich the community experience? Did you want to interrupt the routine commute and make people engage with the space?
It engages the public, yes, but it also sends a huge message that someone truly cares about this space and, accordingly, about the riders. People see the MTA as this big, anonymous agency. They might recognize some of the leadership from the press, but they don’t often think about the people that are behind the scenes, the architects, the engineers, the Arts for Transit folks, the designers, the rapid transit guys, all of these people that get up every day to make this all happen, or, in the mid-‘80s and ‘90s, were driven to turn this place around. Introducing quality art tells the public that there are all these people invested in the space.

Blooming (1996) © Elizabeth Murray, Lexington Avenue–59th Street Station, 4, 5, 6, F, N, R lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

These are works by the same artists you see in museums — Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Murray — but now you can see them on your way to the museums. Elizabeth was one of the first major recognized artists that did a project with us. She waived her fee and gave the public a phenomenal project at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. When developing the collection, if you will, we don’t only look to the art world. We also look to who is riding the trains and using these spaces — and those worlds very often overlap. The real challenge is to select works that speak to the ridership, that have a relevance to the place where they are installed. And I mean that in a more conceptual way, I’m not talking about only pictoral images referencing the site, like Heins & LaFarge’s depictions of Columbus’ caravel over on the Columbus Circle IRT platform — it’s a myth, by the way, that the caravels were meant to provide station information to people who couldn’t read the name tablet. They were purely ornamental.

We’re sitting in front of the perfect example of how the art can be about the people and the place, Sol LeWitt’s “Whirls and twirls (MTA)” at 59th Street-Columbus Circle. LeWitt captured the movement of the subway, the flow of people through the station. When you look at this artwork, you feel the motion around you, the energy — and the riders get it, it’s intuitive, we don’t have to explain it.

We’ve always felt that it’s not our role to be a gallery. We are creating work that becomes a daily part of people’s lives, as they travel their same route every day — or, when they take a different route, we want them to be excited about seeing something new.

Whirls and twirls (MTA) (2009) © Sol LeWitt, 59th Street-Columbus Circle Station, A, B, C, D, 1 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

How do you identify the artists you want to work with? The commissions range from the renowned, like LeWitt, to the lesser known. What’s the selection process?
At 59th Street-Columbus Circle, we had the opportunity to invite Sol LeWitt to create one of his wall drawings for this station. However, the vast majority of our projects are the result of an extensive selection process defined by MTA policy, with the understanding that we’re procuring artwork.

Every time we do a project we invite artists to submit through an open call on our website. Now, because everything is digital, we keep a bank of entries and review all artists for every project, though we ask artists to notify us if they are particularly interested in any specific commission.

We then have two meetings with a selection panel, which changes each time and is comprised of arts and cultural professionals and community advisors. In conjunction with our government and community relations staff, we work closely with the local community boards, to help us understand what the community wants, and to help us communicate how our work relates to them.

We narrow down the field of artists to about four finalists, who then come in for an orientation on the project. We ground them in the space, the architects provide an overview of the design of the station, and we visit the site. Then, they come back to us with a formal proposal. The voting panel selects the proposed artwork they think is right for that location, work that speaks to the community and is of the highest quality.

The process has served us well. We have an amazing collection from a diverse group of artists, both emerging and established.

Given the quality of the artwork, which you talk about as a true collection, what is your approach to maintenance or conservation, especially considering the pieces are installed in highly-trafficked sites that are difficult to keep clean?
We have always known that there would be limited resources to maintain this collection. So we have been rigid in what we allow to be installed into the system, with some exceptions to allow us to reach beyond what we know. Mosaics, ceramics, glass mosaics, those are durable materials. We’ve seen examples where pieces have lasted for over 100 years. So that was a logical direction to take. Many of our works, certainly our underground works, are ceramics or mosaics.

We also work closely with our Stations Department on how they maintain the pieces, and if there’s ever any question, they call us and we work as a consultant. Arts for Transit maintains and repairs things that we can do ourselves. Beyond that, we just want to make sure that we’re keeping our eyes on everything we’ve installed. Staff members are responsible for visiting a portion of the collection bi-annually to do condition reports. We want to be sure that the art is always in the best shape it can be.

You mentioned that you make some exceptions in the type of work you commission, to learn new things and experiment with different materials and media. What are some examples of that? I know that Leo Villareal will be installing his LED light sculpture “Hive” in the renovated Bleecker Street station…
Leo’s piece is a very good example of the kind of exception I was talking about. We worked with our Chief Electrical Engineer Stan Karoly to make sure that the work is durable and can be maintained routinely. The engineers were very excited about his piece, because it really celebrates their field. So yes, we are trying it out as a pilot, to see what our limits are. We probably can’t have twenty projects like Leo’s, but we can have one!

Union Square in Motion (2011) © Anezka Sebek and Joshua Spodek, with Jeanne Kelly, Hilal Koyuncu, Rose Maison, Umut Ozover, Josefina Santos, and Jaqi Vigil. Lightbox project commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell me about some of the temporary projects that fall under the purview of Arts for Transit.
We have a few special projects. For example, we just installed a zoetrope underneath Union Square that was designed by a group of Parsons students. In some ways it is a pilot for us to activate unused advertising space and illustrate how dynamic it can be, and to experiment with new media.

We also have a number of temporary projects that we do on a more routine basis. We have our Transit Poster program and our Art Cards that you see in the trains, which are often created by illustrators and graphic designers. Then we have our Lightbox photography project, which showcases the work of photographers that either relates to transportation, the system or to the local community. Those are on view on the lower level of Grand Central, at the 42nd Street and 6th Avenue station, at Atlantic/Pacific and Bowling Green.

Traveling Dinosaur Chicks (2010) © Takayo Noda. Art Card commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit.

How do you view the interface between the Arts for Transit works and station advertising? Especially as some ads, through technology or design, hover in a more ambiguous creative space — I’m thinking of things like the new 60-foot digital video wall on the other side of this station, currently being used by an Asics ad, or the large MoMA poster installation in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station in 2009.
Yes, advertising is blurring the lines. Those are both 100% advertising campaigns. Some of it is very exciting, but it can be a double-edged sword. We hope that we can capture some of that technology and energy and bring more interactive, video-based works to the public on a limited basis. And it’s no secret that the MTA needs to capture every dollar in order to provide the best service we can. And if any institution has the budget, the funds, to do a campaign, then we support the MTA capturing those dollars.

Also, the visual interface is more than just the advertising and the art. The MTA’s signage is so present in the world’s perception of New York City. If you ask people to visualize words of New York, they’re probably going to see them in Helvetica. We’re an icon of New York now, and it’s important that we keep that in mind when we think about how people interact with these spaces.

Music Under New York performance at 42nd Street-Grand Central

Tell me about the Arts for Transit music program Music Under New York.
There are a lot of myths about Music Under New York. We are not giving licenses or permits to people to play in the subway. Any musician — anyone, really — can go into a subway station and play music or do what they want, as long as they respect the rules of conduct. We are presenting a roster of musicians daily, over 7,000 performances annually, in 25 locations throughout our system, which we identified with our station personnel to make sure we don’t interfere with transit needs. We simply want to present quality music on a regular basis.

We hold auditions every May in Grand Central, and we hold a roster of about 100 acts at any given time. Once you’re in the program, you’re in. For many different reasons musicians move on, so every year we lose about 25 and add about 25.

What are some of the other projects in the works?
We have a number of projects coming up on the Pelham line in the Bronx, and in the Rockaways, either just installed or in the middle of installation. Jason Rohlf will be installing a piece at the Mott Avenue A station. Barbara Grygutis recently did the Whitlock Avenue 6 stop in the Bronx, which received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society’s MASterworks this year — it’s a remarkable project. Barbara designed sculptural furniture that exists within the windscreen. And, of course, the mega-projects: Jean Shin and Sarah Sze are both doing projects in stations along the new 2nd Avenue line, and Xenobia Bailey is doing a piece for the new 7 station at 34th Street. And James Carpenter collaborated with Grimshaw Architects to create a cable net to bring light into the Fulton Transit Center.

Bronx River View (2010) © Barbara Grygutis, Whitlock Avenue Station, 6 line, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Peter Peirce.

You are an artist yourself and you’ve worked with Arts for Transit for 23 years now. How do you define public art? What does it mean to you?
I started working, and still work, in public art because of the engagement between the built environment and the people who are in that environment — myself included. I’m an artist, so I was engaged with this environment before I worked for the MTA, but I felt it would be an incredible opportunity to be part of a team that affects the way your space looks.

People love to beat up on the MTA. But I’m still amazed to be part of an organization that has accomplished this type of change in the public environment. I believe public art changes the quality of life for everyone that walks through here. Maybe they are not aware of how or why, but ultimately it makes people feel good that someone makes this space a place where they might want to be.

And I think it has changed the perception of the New York subway. Plenty of people who ride the subway now don’t remember it when it was in really bad shape. But I remember when it was a sign of hope that if you could turn around the subway, you could change what was happening aboveground too. I believe that those went hand in hand. A lot of credit is given to a lot of different things for how New York turned around. But I believe there was no way it would have happened without the changes underground.

Sandra Bloodworth is the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. As director, she is responsible for the Arts for Transit programs, whose mission it is to commission public art that enhances the transportation environment. In addition to the Arts for Transit award-winning permanent art program, she is responsible for Music Under New York, the Transit Poster program and the Lightbox Project. She represents the MTA on station aesthetics and urban design issues, with a focus on promoting design excellence. She joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager and became deputy director in 1992 and director in 1996. She is the co-author of Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit. Her previous experience includes working as a development associate for the Studio in a School Association. Sandra has taught Visual Art and Urban Design in the Department of Art and Arts Professions graduate program at New York University and studio classes in the fine arts departments at Florida State University and the University of Mississippi. Bloodworth is an artist and holds a B.S. from Mississippi College, an M.A. from the University of Mississippi and an M.F.A. from Florida State University. Bloodworth received the Fund for the City of New York’s 2005 Sloan Public Service Award in recognition of her work in the field of public art.

Om Sai Mandir, 45-11 Smart Street, Flushing, Queens

Matilde Cassani is an architect and artist whose most recent exhibition Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings is currently in its final week on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. For this project, Cassani has amassed an impressively comprehensive archive of sites of worship in the five boroughs that are located in residential, commercial or otherwise non-religious buildings, many of which serve recent immigrant populations whose demand for faith-based community facilities far outstrips supply. The architectural improvisations that respond to this increased demand constitute one subject of Cassani’s detailed documentary study. But she’s equally interested in the urban-scale implications of this phenomenon: the distribution of religious activity throughout the city and how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. She has produced a series of books that represent the archive and exhibited them alongside a set of Spiritual Devices, beguilingly simple sculptural installations that attempt to distill the elements of individual spiritual practice to the commonplace yet symbolic objects — prayer mats, icons, beads or candles — that help convert secular space into something both sacred and profound. The exhibition closes this Saturday, so be sure to check it out soon. First, read on to hear Cassani’s thoughts on what a city’s sacred spaces reveal about the complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life. -C.S.

Matilde Cassani with one of the five books of the Sacred Spaces archive installed at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

How did Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings come about?
The idea for the project was born three years ago, when I started asking myself where recent immigrants to contemporary cities were praying. I started looking around Italy and the first place I started investigating was actually a small village called Novellara, in a rural part of Regio Emilia. This village is the home of a lot of recent immigrants to Italy who are increasingly doing agricultural work in Italian farms, especially in the dairy farms that produce the milk for parmesan cheese.

This village has a population of no more than 12,000 people, but I found many different sacred spaces. And every year, the village plays host to a huge Sikh harvest festival, the Vaisakhi feast. Sikhs from all over Central Europe congregate in Novellara for this event.

After documenting this festival and the sacred spaces of this village, I started doing similar research and documentation in Milan, Palermo, Barcelona, Stuttgart, and then I came to New York. These days, whenever I find myself in a new city, I immediately start looking around to find sacred spaces.

How do you define what “sacred spaces in profane buildings” are?
For me, sacred spaces in profane buildings are places of worship in non-traditional sites, in buildings that have undergone a transformation of function. Many of these buildings are invisible from the outside. The interiors are what has been altered most to accommodate the needs of a particular religion’s worship practices. That improvised transformation fascinates me.

The word “profane” in this context refers the buildings being non-traditional or non-sacred. I was raised as a Roman Catholic with the idea that sacred space – the churches I would visit as a child – was always born as sacred, in a location that is precisely selected and central, with an architecture that makes it highly visible. “Profane” refers to sites not selected in this way.

Soho Synagogue, 38 Crosby Street, Manhattan

What do you think distinguishes New York City’s sacred spaces from similar environments you’ve studied in other cities?
At the beginning, I thought that since New York City has a completely different urban texture and a completely different immigrant story, its sacred spaces in profane buildings would be completely distinct from what I’ve found elsewhere. But actually the architecture of the places I found was very similar to what I found in Europe. The main difference is that in New York, there are so many more of these kinds of sacred spaces.

I’ve also noticed that New Yorkers seem more curious about their city than people are in other cities. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from New Yorkers about this project. People here seem to be excited about seeing something they’ve never seen before. And the communities whose places of worship were documented in the project were happy to find someone deeply interested in their communities and cultural practices.

What do you think a city’s sacred spaces reveal about that city?
I think these spaces reveal the ways displaced people maintain their identity after moving from one country to another. Cultural identity is not only food and customs; religion builds identity in ways that make the sacred space a community’s common point of reference. So it’s not only religious space, it’s much more: a community center, a café, many different things together in one multi-layered space.

So what’s more important for you, the spaces or how people use them?
Both. I think the spaces reflect what people are doing inside them in interesting ways. These places are sacred and profane at the same time, public and private spaces at the same time. They are religious places but also something else.

Spiritual Devices

Tell me about the Spiritual Devices.
The Spiritual Devices are foldable and transportable boxes that contain the kinds of objects I would find during my visits to sacred spaces all over New York: cheap clocks, tape on the floor to indicate the direction to Mecca, aluminum dishes, a camping stove.

I started making the Spiritual Devices while doing an artist residency in Germany. The goal was to evoke the fact that sacred space is not necessarily stable. It’s temporary. It migrates along with the people who use it. The temporary nature of these places and the symbolic value of the objects that inhabit them – many of which are cheap, mass-produced objects you might find in a supermarket – reflect some of the displacement and exile of immigration.

There seems to be a tension between the individual scale of the Spiritual Devices and the community scale of the documentation of Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings.
Yes. Somehow, there is a kind of contradiction between these community places – which exist for small groups of people to come together at a particular point in a day – and the individual practice of one person building his or her own identity.

The exhibition at Storefront is the first time I have shown both of these projects together. They are related, of course, but I think it’s helpful to look at them separately, to look first at the research and then to experience the Spiritual Devices.

The research process for this exhibition began when I first arrived in New York. I decided that instead of looking for sacred spaces myself, I would ask citizens to report on where sacred spaces could be found. I built a very simple website and asked people to upload pictures and different stories about these sacred spaces. I received a lot of different kinds of material: from simple snapshots taken by passersby to fascinating stories about memories of particular buildings. Some of these memories explained how it used to be a bakery or a bank; others were personal stories about going to a place to pray or to see friends. One interesting case study is the synagogue on Crosby Street that used to be a flagship Gucci store. Another interesting case is an entire street that is full of temples; a huge, religious boulevard in Flushing, Queens called Bowne Street. In some ways the street is one enlarged, sacred space that is also differentiated: Catholic Korean churches, Catholic Chinese churches, Catholic South American churches, Hindu temples, Sai Baba temples… So many communities seem to have a point of reference there.

Sacred Spaces around Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens

While people were submitting information about sacred spaces all over the city, I started to look closely at these places. Another example is one of my favorite places that I visited, the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing. It’s in a formerly residential brick building, but the interior is amazingly transformed and truly beautiful. When you walk in the door you face a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a place to store your shoes and a big box containing turbans to wear if you don’t have your own. The proper sacred space has a deep red carpeted floor that leads you to the altar, which is surrounded by musical instruments.

Downstairs you have the canteen with a huge kitchen that serves everybody who enters the temple. The third floor has rooms for some of the spiritual leaders of the congregation, and then you have another room that contains the sacred book, the Granth Sahib. In the Sikh religion, the sacred book is revered, so the way the book is treated is very important. The room where the book “lives” is actually the best, most precious and most recently refurbished room of the house. There are two beds, and it looks like a normal bedroom for humans — but it’s not for humans, it’s for the sacred books. Every day, one of the books is brought downstairs, read from beginning to end, and then taken back upstairs and put to bed.

Sikh Center, Flushing, Queens. Bottom image: the room where the Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) is kept.

So how did you represent your research in an exhibition context?
I produced five books; each one is a survey at a different scale. The first book maps the whole city and I’ve simply listed all the sacred spaces I found, in order to investigate the dimension of the phenomenon, the relative invisibility of the sacred spaces. The second book questions the profanity or the non-traditionality of the places. It includes information about the location and context of these places, with Google Maps images and their addresses. An address like Apartment #4N really tells you something about the architecture and original function of a particular place. The third book is a collection of stories and images submitted through the website. The fourth is a reflection on the different typologies and how the sacred is adapting in different ways. In some cases the sacred space is a small flat inside a commercial building; in others an entire residential building is transformed for various activities related to worship, like the temple’s canteen, the temple itself, the apartments of the monks or priests, communal spaces, storage, etc. And the fifth book is an in-depth case study of the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard that I described. For the exhibition, I mounted each of the books on a pedestal and arranged a series of the Spiritual Devices on the floor, in particular relationships to the wall, the street and the books. In this way, I tried to transform Storefront’s gallery into a kind of sacred space, a system that unveils something that is both sacred and not so sacred at the same time.

An excerpt of a geographical listing of Brooklyn mosques from Book 2 of the Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings archive. Click to enlarge.

As an architect, what do you see as the contemporary role of architecture in religious practice?
It’s very difficult to say, because it’s contradictory in many ways: these places are outside of what we consider to be architecture; they are rarely designed by architects. Yet, I think architects must reflect on the fragmentation of religious space in cities. Religious spaces are no longer a big point of reference in the centers of neighborhoods. We need to consider what that means for our cities and communities. It’s not just about the small scale of transformed interiors; it’s an urban-scale phenomenon.

In complex environments like cities, architecture becomes a container of different things, and the same is happening to traditionally sacred spaces. I’ve seen examples of communities buying what used to be, say, an Orthodox church and converting it into a Hindu temple.

Masjid Manhattan, 33 Cliff Street, Manhattan

So what do you see as the role of the city in contemporary religious practice?
I think cities are only beginning to digest what the proliferation of all these sacred spaces means. On the one hand, the increased demand for religious spaces seems to show that there’s not enough space designated for these purposes. Cities, therefore, are in the role of enveloping sacred spaces that have emerged on their own inside of non-traditional buildings. On the other hand, the fragmentation and dispersal of sacred space is making the whole city more sacred in a way. It’s no longer secular.

I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the phenomenon. Because, as I’ve said, these spaces are more than just places of worship; they are community facilities, social spaces, but also the container of a certain kind of sacredness.

And each one is different. Some are very private; some are very public. Some open, some closed. And the interiors are totally fascinating: the materials and objects found inside are often quite cheap, yet there is so much care and attention paid to these environments. It’s really impressive and often very beautiful. And in some of the older sacred spaces, you can see the story of their gradual transformation and growth in the details.

Shan Xiu Taoist Temple, 128 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

All images courtesy of Matilde Cassani and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Matilde Cassani is an architect and researcher who lives and works in Milan, Italy

For all the griping about tourist crowds, corporate control or inauthentic sanitization, no one can doubt Times Square’s status as iconic, legendary and spectacular. In an excerpt from his 2006 book On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, Marshall Berman, a scholar whose Marxist readings of urban history might lead one to expect a dismissal of the area’s redevelopment in the 1990s, writes, “it isn’t as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared. It’s nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani’s project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn’t turned the city into Disneyland. The thrill’s not gone.”

Of course, much of that thrill comes from the dazzling electric signs, the teeming crowds, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place. But the group responsible for its upkeep, the Times Square Alliance – which was originally formed as a Business Improvement District in 1992 to provide additional security and to clean the streets, and subsequently grew to produce New Year’s Eve, Broadway on Broadway and other large events – also sees Times Square as a fertile canvas for contemporary artists, a unique opportunity to bring individual, creative visions to bear on a popular landscape that we think we know. So Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins hired Glenn Weiss, a veteran arts administrator and curator with a diverse body of work that has ranged from putting on shows at Storefront for Art and Architecture and PS1 in the 1980s to implementing local government public art programs in Seattle and south Florida, to bring public art to Times Square.

Business Improvement Districts are more commonly known for putting on events (alongside traditional maintenance activities) than they are for robust public art programs. Weiss cites other examples, like the Downtown Alliance, the Madison Park Conservancy or the Chicago Loop, as examples of local or community-based groups committed to public art. But few places can claim the sheer number of visitors or the indescribable energy of Times Square. With those unique characteristics in mind, we took Weiss on a walk through Times Square to talk about the place, the role of public art in civic life and some of the art works he has facilitated over the past three and a half years. It was one of his last days on the job, as he prepares to move to Houston to take on yet another exciting challenge at the intersection of community engagement, urban placemaking and contemporary art practice.

– C.S.

What do you do?
For the past three and a half years, I’ve been the manager of public art and design for Times Square. We look for the very best in contemporary arts in all mediums and all forms, and we invite artists to come in and diversify the activities and reputation of Times Square as it is today. We want Times Square to be seen as part of New York as a whole. And since the best in contemporary art and design is part of that whole, we want that to be in Times Square.

I see myself primarily as an arts administrator who also does curatorial work rather than the other way around. The difference is that my goal is to facilitate creative people to do their best work. I’m less concerned with evaluating whether the work is excellent to present or whether it advances the field, I’m evaluating whether or not I can help an artist do something special in a particular place with a particular community. And in Times Square, that community is the 300,000 people who pass through here every day.

Times Square is the most amazing document of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

How did this job come about for you?
When I first heard about this opportunity in Times Square, I was living in Florida, where I managed a public art program and worked in urban design and planning for a suburban, planned community called Coral Springs. I think part of what qualified me for this position – in addition to my experience as a curator in alternative art spaces and as an arts administrator in local government – was a blog about public art I’d been writing for the previous two years or so for ArtsJournal. There were not many people writing consistently on public art at that time.

So you’ve worked with public art in a wide variety of contexts.
When I moved here for this job in 2008, it wasn’t my first time in New York. In the ‘80s, I studied architecture at Columbia, and during that time I became friends with a lot of great artists in the East Village, one of whom is Kyong Park, who founded Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1982. We worked together for two years running Storefront, and we became very engaged in how artists and architects are able to make an impact with their work. We did several major public projects: one dealt with homelessness and how to build shelters, another was our attempt to save Adam Purple’s Garden in the Lower East Side. We didn’t think to label these projects as “public art,” we just thought of ourselves as doing stuff out in the world. To be here, doing that, during those early years was an exceptional experience in my life.

After that, I moved to Seattle, but I simultaneously became the architecture curator at PS1, so I would return to New York to manage the exhibitions I organized up until 1990. When I first moved to Seattle, I curated a series of outdoor exhibitions on people’s front yards. Then I was hired to be the manager of the public art program for King County, which surrounds and includes Seattle. So that’s where I “learned” public art in an official sense.

I’ve heard your early work described as political in nature. Do you think about your work in public art as political?
I don’t. In the ‘80s, in Seattle as well as at PS1 or at Storefront, my work was very clearly political: I wanted to change the world, I wanted to find artists and architects that were interested in changing the world and I wanted to work with them.

In Seattle, after running the public art program for King County, I decided I wanted to be a community activist in my neighborhood, which was a very low income and very diverse community. And what happens when you dedicate yourself to the community is that all those abstract ideas about who is to blame for various kinds of social injustice suddenly seem not to function very well. Not only do you have to work with real people who have wonderfully different ways of doing things, but you also have to start making compromises in order to effect change within your community. When you start to do that, the strategy of being aggressive toward the powerful doesn’t function as well any more.

Given the trajectory of your career — moving from being a curator in the vanguard of art and culture to a role in municipal government instituting public art policy — what does “public art” mean to you? How would you define it?
Public art, as I see it, began as an idea that architecture had failed to humanize its environment, that the bad modernism and strip-down economics of government buildings had left public architecture bereft of any human intimacy. Public art as we think of it today emerged from a passionate urge to bring back that sense of human intimacy.

But these days, architects are finding ways to bring that intimacy into our built environment. So public art, when it works well, becomes about finding ways for artists, administrators and curators to work together – in  collaboration with communities of people who use or visit a particular place – to create the conditions for some new thing to be born.

What does Times Square mean to you?
From 1990 until I moved back here in 2008, I hardly ever visited New York. And in 1990, Times Square was a very different place than it is today! Even when I did live in New York in the ‘80s, I would rarely ever come to Times Square. 42nd Street was very active, whether it was with movies or porn or drugs, but Times Square itself was very quiet. There weren’t even very many electric signs at that time. Other than when people came to see Broadway shows, there was a sense of emptiness.

When I came back for the first time in 2008, it was completely surprising to see the number of people, the number of stores, the kind of transformation to a place that seemed more normal in a way but also not normal at all. Times Square is the most amazing document of 21st century entertainment, of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

There is no other place like it, maybe in the world. Times Square is a place of visceral experience; it is not a place of thought. And making that connection in an artwork – to experience, rather than to thought – can be extremely difficult.

So what was the process for presenting public art in that context?
We started by identifying the public space throughout Times Square, both the plazas and the privately-owned public spaces. We did two open calls for ideas, one in 2009 and one in 2010. Basically we just said “give us your ideas about what you would like to do and we will evaluate the quality of the proposal and the feasibility of actually making it happen within that space.” Our criteria for selection, beyond making sure every proposal considered was functional and safe, prioritized projects that somehow spoke to Times Square and the people who would be here.

When I first came, we started out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with Tattfoo Tan’s giant mural on the front of the bus terminal and then a smaller mural on a fence on 8th Avenue by Kai McBride. Our idea was to go from all these corners because, here in Times Square itself, there is very little space. When the Mayor closed Broadway to traffic, then everything changed.

"Nature Matching System" mural at the Port Authority Bus Terminal | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

How has the public art program interfaced with the urban design changes that happened over the past few years, if at all?
Tim Tompkins is very concerned, and rightly so, that Times Square be a great public space with valuable civic events and people on the ground. The Times Square Alliance did not want Times Square to be just left as an empty plaza or open only to corporate events. The public art program became a kind of demonstration project to show how these plazas could be a benefit to the general public. Remember: on an average day, 300,000 people pass through Times Square.

One thing about Times Square is that an audience is always here, in a way that does not exist when you are in, say, Madison Square Park or in front of the County Court House. So one of the main objectives for artists or designers is to figure out what to do with that audience. How do you engage them, where do they physically place themselves? How do they as a group go in and out?

One of the great projects from Performa in 2009 was Arto Lindsay’s dance performance where a line of fifty dancers slowly made their way through Times Square. I loved the way the crowd dealt with how to keep up with the performance. They had to keep running around ahead of the dancers. So you have the dancers in a line, but the people move in blobs and waves as they try to keep up with the the dancers — and the strange phenomenon is that the crowd didn’t give the dancers any space. They would keep crowding around them again and again, so the crowds become part of the interactive potential for the artist.

Here is another type of interactive project, a piece called Performer by Adam Frank, installed in Anita’s Way, which is the name for the pedestrian passageway of the Bank of America Tower. Adam calls this a “self-affirmation piece.” If you stand in this spotlight on the ground, your presence triggers the sound of beautiful applause for you and only you.

Passersby triggering applause at "Performer" by Adam Frank

Tell me about some other artists and artworks that you brought to Times Square, and how they responded the context they found here.
One of the major ways that visitors to Times Square engage with the place comes from photography and the public’s desire to make a visual record of themselves experiencing something new. As an artist, how do you take advantage of that?

"Valentine Heart" by Gage / Clemenceau | Photos courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

In 2009, Gage / Clemenceau Architects attempted to do just that with Valentine Heart. They made a sculpture of a heart and also designed a little stage in front of the sculpture with up-lights. People waited in line to have their picture taken on the stage with the heart. Gage / Clemenceau understood what people wanted to do and how to create a setting for it in Times Square.

The first and only time we tried using the three billboards at the southern end of Times Square — the NASDAQ, the Reuters, and what was then Panasonic News, which is now the Sony News — was two years ago during Performa ’09. For a piece called Snorks, the artist Loris Greaud had all three screens playing images of fireworks for 20 minutes that relate to a complicated project of underwater animals and fireworks in Abu Dhabi.

We did a piece with the Cuban artist Alexander Arrechea on the NASDAQ Board right after the economic crisis, which was a giant animation of a wrecking ball smashing against the NASDAQ sign. Not only did the public not really recognize what was happening, but even NASDAQ did not necessarily recognize the relationship between the piece and what was going on in the world.

What we found is that for the artists as well as the people who come to Times Square on a daily basis, the memory of being in Times Square and the projection of being in Times Square is almost as important as actually doing the work in Times Square.

"Black Sun" by Alexander Arrechea | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

That seems to reflect what you were saying about people’s primary point of engagement being photos of themselves in this place, the desire to create a memory of having been in a place seems a primary reason that a lot of people come.
People come here to experience the center of New York. For example, my wife’s relatives are from Argentina. When they come to New York, they don’t think about whether or not they might come to Times Square. They have to come to Times Square on a visit to New York.

Another thing that interests me about Times Square is that a lot of the social services remain. Right in front of us is the Woodstock Hotel, which provides services for very low-income seniors, and there are facilities for the homeless nearby. These types of uses may no longer be considered to be part of the character of the place in the way they might have been in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, but the living legacy of the senior center in the Woodstock Hotel is just as much a part of Times Square as the history of the Paramount Theatre, the site of the first youth fan craze for a musician, for Benny Goodman in the ’30s. Years later there was an actual riot for Frank Sinatra, with teen girls fainting as he arrived to perform. These historical moments become part of the density of the experience.

Do you consider the billboards and signs themselves to be a form of public art?
No, I don’t. They are very infrequently used to engage or empower an individual community or to bring the artist and the community together. But I do think what makes Times Square unique is the way that it fills up your whole cone of vision and your peripheral vision: everywhere you look, there’s this lighting and this crazy energy that you don’t experience in physical space anywhere else in the world. When you’re here, you feel the space of it as opposed to a combination of the particular buildings or other individual components.

But, speaking of billboards, a little known fact is that 1 Times Square on the southern end has no occupants, aside from a Walgreens on the ground floor. It is completely economically supported by the advertising from the billboards.

Public art by the Red Stairs | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

You’ve worked at the county level in Seattle, at the town level in south Florida, and in Times Square you are working at the relatively small scale of a district, albeit one of the most iconic districts in the world. In terms of having a coherent, influential or successful public art program, do you like working at the district level?
I think the great public art administrators and curators in the country are those that have a single place of operation where they continue to work over and over again. Of course there are groups like Creative Time that do great work pretty much everywhere. But, for me, a sustained effort will produce better results than what’s possible in a county or a large city or a state, where you would have to come into a community one time, learn once, listen once, and then leave. I think it’s far more difficult at larger scales to do work that’s the same level of quality, unless you are very lucky or have the benefit of an artist’s sheer determination to do a great job.

What’s next for you?
I’m going to run the Art League Houston, which is an art center near downtown Houston. My goal is to expand its capabilities in serving the artist community and those people who want to make art – fusing adult education with community engagement. I have this idea in my head, after being here in the land of the virtual, to get back to something my parents dreamed of in the ’50′s and ’60s, which was for people to make art together. In their generation they called it a hobby; in ours we call it Do-It-Yourself; but whatever we call it, there’s a desire for physical and collaborative activities, for people to come together and make art together. I’d like to try to help create space for that in Houston.

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Glenn Weiss has maintained a diverse professional practice assisting governments and civic organizations with physical transformations of cities and neighborhoods through urban planning, architecture, landscape and public art. Since May 2008, Glenn Weiss has developed and managed the new public art program for the NYC Business Improvement District responsible for Times Square and the Broadway Theater District. He is currently the executive director the Art League Houston.