Delancey Underground | image via nymag.com

LES LOW LINE
The Lower East Side might be getting a new park. The proposed project, the Delancey Underground, would repurpose the the abandoned underground Williamsburg Bridge Railway Terminal in an effort to inject some green space into one of the least green neighborhoods in the city and to join the ranks of the High Line in reimagining disused infrastructure. The subterranean wonderland lit by “remote skylights” would provide a green space “nearly the size of Gramercy Park” at the base of the bridge. The project, conceived by architect James Ramsey, PopTech executive Dan Barasch and money manager R. Boykin Curry IV, was presented to Community Board 3 on Wednesday evening. According to DNAInfo, the presentation “wowed” the packed audience. According to Curbed, skepticism abounded, despite the seductive renderings, about keeping the park safe and well lit, how it would be funded, or how the space would be programmed to best serve the community. Check out more renderings on Architizer and read more in New York Magazine.

On the Go Travel Station | image via popsci.com

TOUCHSCREEN TRAVEL
The MTA has a new magic map trip planner, the first of what they are calling their On-the-Go Travel Stations, now installed at the Bowling Green subway station in Manhattan. The Station is a 47-inch touchscreen that allows riders to access up-to-the-minute service announcements, plan trips and navigate the subway map. The upper portion of the screen is devoted to subway information, with clearly identifiable buttons for Service Status, Elevators, MTA Maps and Key Destinations. Service alerts scroll under the interactive portion, while the lower third of the screen is devoted to advertisements. For more coverage, including a video of the Bowling Green Travel Station, check out Popular Science.

TOOLS AT SCHOOLS
Engaging in a design process taps creativity, communication skills and general understanding of how things work. So why isn’t it introduced to students earlier in their education? That question is the basis for Tools at Schools, a partnership between design firm Aruliden and furniture manufacturer Bernhardt Design. The program asked 44 eighth graders from The School at Columbia University how they would redesign the basic components of classroom furniture: the chair, the desk and the locker. The students went through the entire design process: researching existing products, identifying what they saw as lacking, sketching and modeling their ideas and presenting them to representatives from Bernhardt and Aruliden. The designers took ideas from each team and turned them around into 3D models. From there, the students were invited to the furniture factory in South Carolina to see how designs become realities. The final products were presented at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair earlier this month and an exhibit of the furniture will open at the Museum of Arts and Design on October 6th. Read more of the coverage at Smart Planet.

Solar village, Solar Decathlon 2011 | Photo by Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy

SOLAR DECATHLON HITS DC
The 2011 Solar Decathlon has hit DC! After designing and building their prototypes on home turf, the nineteen teams began final construction of the houses in West Potomac Park on the 14th. Starting today, the houses are open to the public and judging has already begun. Only a few hours in, Team Maryland is in the lead, though Team New York (one of three New York/New Jersey-area teams participating in the event) has taken an early lead in the People’s Choice category. The houses will be on view through October 2nd. Keep tabs on scores and standings here and, for readers in the DC area, find more information about visiting the installation on the Solar Decathlon website.

EVENTS AND TO-DOs

PROJECT NEON: THE SHOW! In February, Kirsten Hively told us about her ongoing effort to document and celebrate the neon signage of New York City. Now, complete with a fetching new neon sign of its own, Project Neon has been turned into an exhibition, opening tonight, September 23 from 7-10pm, at Brooklyn’s City Reliquary. The show features several dozen of Hively’s photographs and marks the release of her new, free Project Neon iPhone app. For more on Project Neon, revisit our feature about the project, check out the website, or see a preview of the exhibit at the Times’ City Room.

DUMBO ARTS: The annual DUMBO Arts Festival starts tonight! Rain or shine, head towards the Brooklyn waterfront to check out three days of events with over 500 artists. Visit artists’ studios, watch performances by musicians, dancers, poets and circus artists throughout the neighborhood, commune with instrument makers in workshops, listen to tech gurus talk about the latest advances and join walking tours to hear little-known stories of the neighborhood. The festival runs from tonight, Friday, September 23, through Sunday, September 25. Check out the full schedule of events here.

LIVING AS FORM: Also opening tonight is Creative Time’s new project Living as Form, which explores the intersection of socially engaged visual art, architecture, urban design, theater and activism, just to name a few disciplines. Bringing together 25 curators, taking place both in Essex Street Market building and the surrounding neighborhood, the project will feature over 100 socially engaged projects from around the world. An exhibition and related programming will be presented through October 12, all of which will lead up to a book, scheduled for publication in January 2012. Check out the schedule of events, as well as more about Living as Form here.

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Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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L-R: Empowerhouse, Solar Roofpod, eNJoy House

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

The Empowerhouse site, Deanwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

Team New Jersey, February 2011

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

Click images for captions.

If you’re reading this, chances are you are into cities or you are into design. Most likely, you think both are pretty interesting. But “urban” plus “design” does not necessarily equate to urban design, at least not as the term is understood in professional circles. Certainly, designers have helped to determine the physical form of cities throughout the history of human settlement, but in this country, a specific professional expertise or body of knowledge applied directly to the design of urban space has been a long time in coming.

The individuals we most commonly associate with the design of cities came from a variety of professional and educational backgrounds. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the modernization of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s, was a lifelong civil servant, educated in law. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, responsible for the original design of Washington D.C., and Ildefons Cerdà, responsible for the 19th Century expansion of Barcelona, were civil engineers. Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the new capitals of Chandigarh, India and Brasilia, Brazil, were all trained as architects. And then, of course, are the countless designers of the streets, plazas, parks, campuses and interstitial spaces that are no less designed than the buildings of the city.

Some date the “birth” of the urban design discipline to a 1956 conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design organized by Josep Lluis Sert, or to the establishment of the first graduate degree programs in the subject that emerged at places like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania a few years later, or to the raft of seminal texts on the subject published in that period, including Chermayeff and Alexander’s Community and Privacy (1960), Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Mumford’s The City in History (1961), Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Cullen’s Townscape (1961), Spreiregen’s Urban Design (1965) and Bacon’s Design of Cities (1967).

In the five decades since, the period in which degrees in urban design have existed in American higher education, urban design qualifications have required students to have pre-existing professional degrees in architecture, landscape architecture or, to a lesser extent, urban planning. This year, Parsons The New School for Design is launching the nation’s first undergraduate degree in urban design, which prompted us to ask the program’s director, Victoria Marshall, what exactly is being taught and what exactly it means for the training of a new generation of urbanists with a different relationship to the urban realm than the designers that came before. Marshall says she is most interested in teaching “how to see the city as a designer” rather than, say, how to design the city or its spaces. And from the diverse coursework offered, the education the program provides is, indeed, much closer to an overview of urbanism — the history, the theory, the social science — mixed with fundamentals of design — section, plan, model, 2D layout — than it is to a foundation course in how to propose physical interventions to shape the constituent elements of urban space. With that in mind, there’s a chance a degree offering such as this just might respond to the tremendous civic interest in cities and how they work, especially on the part of young people less and less interested in the traditional disciplinary alignments of the 20th century.

Click images for captions.

A CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA MARSHALL

UO: How do you define urban design?
Victoria Marshall: I think I define it differently than how others tend to do so. I think of urban design in terms of comfort with multi-scalar thinking, the ability to link the big and the small, from large landscapes to small urban interventions.

I’ve done a lot of research with ecologists, working a lot to translate ecology theory into urban theory: how do we read cities as ecosystems? Whether I’m teaching a class on building a little garden or conducting a big studio looking at the Meadowlands as a site, these topics translate across scales.

Other definitions of urban design might link it more to urban planning – to the writing of reports or codes – or to the scenographic presentation of how an architectural project in an urban context might appear for the purposes of the real estate market, for example. For me, urban design is neither a subset nor a superset of other categories. I’m more interested to talk about what the work is than to define the discipline.

A Google image search for urban design yields a combination of architectural plans, streetscape renderings and aerial photographs.

Tell me a little bit about your educational and professional background.
I studied landscape architecture as an undergraduate in Australia, where I’m from. In graduate school, I studied landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. I have my own practice and have taught urban design for many years at all different institutions — Columbia, Harvard, University of Toronto, Pratt and Penn — and was exposed to many different types of graduate students. But my challenge here at Parsons is to teach urban design to undergraduates. Previous to this, urban design education at the undergraduate level hasn’t existed.

Did the desire to create an undergraduate urban design degree come from the institution or was it in response to student demand?
I’d say it’s institutional. The belief is that once we create the space, students will fill it.

Image: Elinor Mossop

What do you think someone who might want to declare urban design as her concentration is looking for?
We’re getting students who want the strong liberal arts component, but also want the design component, students who want a balance. They like the theory, they like the reading, they like the deep discussion, but they also like to make things and do things in class.

What kind of classes are offered?
On the history and theory side, we have “History of World Urbanism,” which digs into the history of cities since there was ever a city. There is another survey called “Urban Design since 1945.” And then there’s a lab sequence that students majoring in urban studies at Eugene Lang, the New School’s liberal arts college, can also access. That’s one of the reasons why the program was created. The New School is this amazing university, in New York City, with all these urban classes being taught to undergraduate and graduate students all across the university, from international affairs and urban policy at Milano, to design-specific classes at Parsons, to urban studies, environmental studies, the list goes on…

There’s also a core studio for urban design students, in which each student is given a complex problem on a complex site. Each has to do a lot of fieldwork, make a lot of drawings, talk to a lot of people. The studio teaches students how to research, how to do a pin-up, how to present and talk about their work.

Additionally, I taught a class called “Streetlife,” which was about exploring the street through drawing. Other classes are more about fieldwork: observation, taking notes, different ways of documenting a site photographically or otherwise. There’s also a class called “Sensing,” in which students build sensors, collect environmental data, do mapping and create their own aerial photography using balloons. They launch their own satellites and collect infrared data.

Is there a cohesive or canonical body of knowledge you want your students to graduate with? Do you think that exists yet in urban design? Is it emergent? Necessary?
Of course it’s necessary! “Urban Design since 1945,” as one example, looks at how all cities have changed in that period of time, which is also the period where the field of urban design emerged as a profession in this country. But we are careful not to place everything in an American context. Last year I had the opportunity to travel to China as a fellow of the India China Institute and more seriously study the way cities are being built now. If the students can have a sense of some of those dynamics in relation to all the work we’re doing in New York, then that’s a success for the program. Having a love for cities everywhere is key. Being interested in any city, anywhere a student might go, and being able to see it as a designer.

Do you see that interest and passion reflected in your students?
Absolutely!

Image: Colin McFadyen

What kind of professional opportunities do you see this program preparing students for?
I‘m not sure yet. Some of the students have said to me they’ve chosen this because it’s the kind of solid foundation they want for their university education. Others, I think they might work for a non-profit, like a neighborhood group. Any of our students would be an amazing asset for such an organization. They’ll have a strong design toolbox and an ability to participate with people and to propose collaborative ideas.

Given the extent to which ecological thinking informs your approach to urban design, where does architecture figure into this?
Part of the ecological approach for me has to do with how you understand yourself in relation to your environment. I think the way that architecture comes in has to do with measure and specificity. How do you understand what are you measuring? How do you get very specific? Architectural measures include how you work with scale, how you draw a plan, how you draw a section, how you understand the relationship between drawings and the three-dimensional space, between material qualities and material behavior.

So architecture inserts itself as visual language and as a set of methodological tools?
Yes, perhaps. But a lot of it comes from testing different things out and figuring out as we go what I think the students should know. The balloon mapping project actually ends up teaching students how to hack a camera, and then how to stitch all that data together. This serves as one example of new types of technological ‘knowledges’ in which students need fluency these days. They’re learning how to hybridize that with how to draw a plan or how to build a physical model.

Balloon Mapping Project | grassrootsmapping.org

So are the design skills students learn primarily in the service of analysis and representation? As opposed to proposing a design scheme?
No, you have to propose change. Even if I might, as a teacher, tend to move away from intervention, I will still require my students to design, say, a device that somehow transforms a condition.

What do you want your students to understand about cities and cities’ role in the world?
I’m very interested in cities as urban ecosystems. Our students start to become very sophisticated in navigating the rhetoric that gets produced around cities, but then, very strategic in ways that they can intervene or engage the city that is meaningful ecologically. For example, we had a discussion in class last week about things that are sustainable but not necessarily ecological. You can design a zero-waste shoe, or buy one, but does that kind of thinking actually change the way one acts in the world? The ecological approach is supposed to build a sustainable city, but we’re teaching them to approach it socially – and this harkens back to the social activist legacy of the New School – to approach it in terms of equality, difference, justice. If our students can perceive and communicate and strategically design how to engage and propose change, or allow the imagination of change to be engaged by others, I think that would be a success.

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Victoria Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons the New School for Design and the director of the BS Urban Design Program. She is a fellow of the India China Institute practicing landscape architect and the founder of TILL, a Newark based landscape architecture and urban design office which offers design services that transform contemporary landscapes such as reclaimed river beds, brownfields, rooftops and environmental justice neighborhoods.

The PS90 building from a courtyard-facing window.

Facing both 148th street and 147th street in Harlem, mid-block between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards, is a majestic building built in 1906 as Public School 90 and recently converted into 54 market rate condos and 20 middle-income apartments. Earlier this month, the National Dance Institute (NDI), a non-profit that provides free dance instruction to 40,000 students in New York City public schools every year, announced it was moving to an 18,000 square foot “Center for Learning and The Arts” at the PS90 building, which means NDI will, for the first time in its 34-year history, have studio space of its own. And just last week, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, the design firm responsible for the conversion, shared the Lucy Moses Prize with the rest of the PS90 design and development team*. The New York Landmarks Conservancy bestows this prize to honor excellence in historic preservation.

PS90 rooftop before construction.

Original 2nd Floor Plan of the 1906 building.

As a model of adaptive reuse, PS90 demonstrates that good bones can make for successful surgery. Coverage of the conversion on Curbed makes repeated references to the gargoyles that adorn the roof line. The site’s real estate developer describes the grand design of this building as “a textbook example of Collegiate Gothic-style architecture” that blends “functional muscularity and stately elegance,” calls the building “among the finest schools ever built in New York City,” and references the design choices and prolific career of the building’s original architect C.B.J. Snyder, including his choice of a through-block H-shaped plan for the building (see original building plan at right), which maximized the amount of natural light possible for a mid-block site.

C.B.J. Snyder was the superintendent and chief architect for New York City Schools from 1891 to 1922. During his tenure, he oversaw the construction of more than 400 public schools, of which nearly 300 are still in use. PS90, however, saw its last students in the late 1960s. In 1970, the building was declared obsolete and abandoned. But while it had to wait forty years to be reborn in 2010 as a residential building with a ground-floor community facility, in the early 1990s the building played a significant role in inspiring a group of young architects to make a case for incorporating evolving knowledge of how we learn most comfortably and most productively into the design of learning environments. It was one of six sites chosen for a landmark design study organized by the Architectural League and the Public Education Association called New Schools for New York: Plans and Precedents for Small Schools (1992). On the occasion of PS90′s rebirth as a residential complex and community facility, we thought we’d dust off the publication that documented the design study and check it out. What we found reminds us of how relevant the designs and development strategies remain nearly twenty years later.

Interior classroom before the conversion.

Towards the end of 1988, New York State established the Schools Construction Authority (SCA) to build new public schools and manage the design, construction and renovation of capital projects in New York City’s more than 1,200 public school buildings. At the time, over half of New York’s schools had been constructed prior to 1949, including the prodigious output of Snyder.

The prevailing thinking in the late 1980s – determined in the balance sheets of construction, building maintenance and human resources – held that to make a school economically feasible, it had to be the size of a city block. Yet, the economy of scale argument led to learning environments that were demonstrably failing New York’s children. With the SCA in place, and the city embarking on its first major school building program in many years, the League and PEA partnered to organize a design study that would challenge that received wisdom by producing designs for small schools that would demonstrate ways in which the building of small schools could employ a variety of different development strategies. The League worked with over 70 architecture firms and individual designers on six sites in four boroughs, including sites in Morrisania, Flushing, Sunset Park, Prospect Heights, Washington Heights and Harlem. The designs were featured in an exhibition and a publication. The New Schools for New York design study, along with an earlier Architectural League design study called Vacant Lots (1987), marshaled the energy and creativity of a community of architects and applied it to issues in the public interest of all New Yorkers.

Vacant Lots (1987) and New Schools for New York (1992) | Published by Princeton Architecture Press

Michael Manfredi, who participated in both design studies and worked on the PS90 site, described the period as one in which architects were “hungry to actively participate in socially minded projects.” Manfredi and partner Marion Weiss, whose firm’s portfolio now includes built projects such as Barnard College’s Diana Center and the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, initiated their joint practice for work on Vacant Lots and New Schools for New York. He describes the opportunity that the League provided for young designers — to produce designs with real-world utility on urban in-fill sites, to engage the public sector, to foster fellowship with other designers interested in social justice  – as unique at the time.

While the historical moment was one of economic and architectural stagnation, the beginning of a new school building program created an opening for design innovation and, crucially, real collaboration between an education reform advocacy group, a cultural institution dedicated to nurturing excellence in architecture and urbanism, and a community of designers who wanted to put their talents to good use.

In addition to multiple site visits and neighborhood analyses, the League gave the architects a clear mandate. It reads as follows:

Task: Design an adaptive reuse of abandoned PS90 as a multi-use community center.

Site: Public School 90, a vacant elementary school on West 148th Street in Harlem was declared obsolete and abandoned by the Board of Education during the 1970s. Completed in 1906, PS90 is a five-story, masonry bearing wall H-plan school similar to many others around the city built during the term of innovative Superintendent of School Buildings C.B.J. Snyder. The Bradhust district of Harlem, in which the school is located, includes many vacant apartment buildings currently being renovated for housing for the homeless and for low-income families. The Harlem Urban Development Corporation and a number of community organizations and institutions have proposed the comprehensive Bradhurst Plan for this area as a way of addressing the economic, educational and social needs of the existing population and the new residents who will move into the rehabilitated housing.

Architectural Program: Architects were asked to propose how the existing structure of P.S. 90 could be renovated as a community center, including a small alternative high school for 250 students. Other uses to be included in the building were an auditorium/theatre and gymnasium for community use, a branch library, an infant and toddler care center for 45 children, an early childhood center for 60 children, social services offices, a senior citizen’s center, and a health clinic. Design issues of particular importance were how to create appropriate access, circulation and security within the building. The proposed program envisioned almost round-the-clock use of the building by a variety of groups, all of which would benefit from sharing amenities and facilities.

Each of the five teams who worked on this site developed an original scheme. The City College Architecture Center envisioned a Maison du Peuple where residents share cultural recreational and social services organized around an interior plaza carved from the basement, ground and second floor. Brett Boyd Steele posited that the school of the future is “no more than a transmitter,” meaning his abstract scheme, with its emphasis on mobility and circulation, prioritizes the social program over the container. Carlos Wolovick‘s scheme would preserve the historic exterior of the structure but replace the interior, using the crossbar of the “H” to connect the functions and spaces within the building. Francis L. Turner sought to encourage public use of facilities with a bridge/crosswalk to link new and existing buildings on a roof garden level. And Weiss Manfredi proposed an “improvisational, educational and cultural center” in an “agora” opened up between the two separate buildings, the high school and community center, created by removing the bar of the buiding’s H. In conversation, Manfredi describes the idea as ”an act of tactical removal” that took out the connection between the two arms of the H in order “to make a more porous connection to the community.”

The Weiss Manfredi scheme removed the connection between the two sides of the H to create a public open space that allowed passage between 148th and 147th Streets. Click to enlarge.

The New Schools for New York design study tested a variety of development strategies to deliver smaller schools. In Sunset Park, the task was to design a new complex that included an elementary school for 350 children and a public library, thus leveraging the resources of multiple city agencies in a shared capital project. (R. Darby Curtis and Mark Ginsberg, principals of the team that designed the PS90′s recent residential conversion, worked with Julia Doern on a scheme for this site for the design study). In Prospect Park, the task was “to divide a large high school into four distinct academies.” This strategy for decreasing school size within existing school buildings has been used often in the past decades, and remains difficult to do well; competition for space and other challenges of coexistence in shared facilities have often demonstrated the complexities of reshaping the physical environments of school buildings. Looking back, the benefits and possibilities of small schools has, over time, informed the ways certain New York City public schools are organized and built. But the important successes of the small schools movement has not removed the significant barriers to providing New York’s school children with ideal spaces in which to learn. Small schools themselves are no panacea to entrenched challenges in education and school administration.

The reuse of PS90 may have taken forty years, but it nonetheless reminds us that resources are available in the city that can be put to use. The New Schools for New York design study was one way to test specific ideas through collective research and design experimentation. It was one way to consider how to translate ideas about social organization, education, and implementation processes into physical forms. And the broader lesson, that the convening of designers to work on spatial solutions to social challenges has a role to play in improving urban life and landscape, is one we must continue to relearn. The New Schools for New York design study provides a powerful case study of doing just that. And therefore, it still has much to teach us. -C.S

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* The PS90 development team is: Curtis+Ginsberg Architects, L&M Development Partners Inc., Harlem Congregations for Communit Improvement Inc., Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, Rodkin Cardinale Engineers, GACE Consulting Engineers, Old Structures Engineer, PC, and Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners PLLC.

Contemporary photos courtesy of L&M Development Partners. Historical diagrams from New Schools for New York, by the Architectural League of New York and the Public Education Association, published by Princeton Architecture Press, 1992.

Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch are the co-founders of Project: Interaction, a 10-week after school program that teaches high school students to use design to change their communities. As students of the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Dukes and Koch are well versed in the ways design thinking and methods can inspire change and solve problems. Inspired by the achievements of practitioners today, they found themselves imagining the potential impact of starting design education at an earlier age. On September 29, the Project: Interaction team will teach their first class, fifteen 9th and 10th grade students at the Urban Assembly Institute for Math & Science for Young Women in Downtown Brooklyn. Their intention is to encourage skills in and engagement with creative thinking, problem solving, observation of the world around us, and the sketching, building and communication of ideas. Dukes and Koch talked with us about the motivations behind the project, and the importance of education in the still-evolving field of interaction design and how to use the city as a classroom. If you like what they have to say, check out their Kickstarter page, where they are working to raise money for classroom supplies and materials. -V.S.

What is interaction design?
Katie Koch: Interaction design is a holistic process of thinking about an unmet need. The process includes observing and defining a problem, imagining possibilities for how we might fix it, and implementing and testing our ideas in the form of prototyping. The problems we address range from the ways you use your cell phone, to how you get money out of an ATM, to how you order and receive your Netflix DVDs.

Carmen Dukes: It’s important for interaction designers to understand the people who experience the products and services we build. It’s our responsibility to evolve our ideas to accommodate the needs of the people who interact with them.

How did Project: Interaction come to be?
Katie: Carmen and I met in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I started my career in graphic design and have been a long-time design evangelist. My practice as a designer helped me have a greater understanding of the world around me and fueled my interest in studying the people and things in my environment. So last year I decided to return to graduate school.

Carmen: My background is in film and television and currently I work in web and mobile production. In my spare time, I’ve spent hours studying game design and how successful games create meaningful experiences. The overlap of these personal passions led me to the field of interaction design.

Katie: During the first week of classes at SVA, we both attended a lecture by accomplished interaction designer Kim Goodwin. She issued a call to action for designers to educate and train people to employ creative thinking to solve day-to-day tough problems. Carmen and I walked away with the same thought: why isn’t anyone teaching these skills to kids?

Why did you decide to work with high school students?
Katie: If you ask any designer where she first learned about design she will likely be able to recall a specific moment that opened her eyes to this world. In high school I was very much into math and science classes and engaged with art in my free time, for fun. I didn’t know about design as a way to use my logical left brain and my creative right brain together to create artifacts and experiences that make people’s lives clearer, easier, and more fulfilling. High school students are often investigating broad sets of interests, figuring out what their personal passions are while beginning to understand and establish their place in the bigger picture beyond school. They are at a crossroads in many ways and I imagine many would be delighted by the discovery of design just as I was.

Carmen: A knowledge of design methods is a transferable skill set. Giving students a toolkit that they can use to explore and solve problems that matter to them will be powerful no matter where their future careers lead them.

Before the semester begins, you are asking the students to complete a survey about their existing knowledge of design. What will you ask them and how do you hope to use their answers?
Katie: We will start by asking the students to draw a picture of their favorite place in New York City. Then, to answer questions about their favorite school subjects, what kinds of activities they like, and why they want to be in the program. We want to find out what knowledge the students already have so we can leverage and build upon their existing interests.

Carmen: This exercise is also a simple way for us to begin to get a sense of our students’ personalities. The more we can get to know our class, the better learning experience we can provide.

Tell us a little about the curriculum and planned program for your first semester of Project: Interaction.
Katie: The first few weeks will be spent covering design basics, talking about what design is, how to observe the people and places around us, and how to develop new ideas. We’ll take a field trip to a working design studio, R/GA, so students can see how designers work together in the context of a business. Then we’ll spend a couple of weeks on more intensive topics like the increased availability of mobile devices as a way to connect to other people and communities. The class will end with a three-week project that the students can share with parents, teachers and their schoolmates.

Carmen: The goal of our curriculum is to expose our students to design in a relatable and tangible way. It is critical that we engage them by using all the senses, so in-class activities and assignments will be hands-on — rapid sketching sessions, prototyping with Legos and letting them act out their ideas.

Katie: Our students might be surprised when they come to our first class. We want to show them that you don’t need a fancy computer to start designing; anyone can start by sketching with only a pencil and paper. We expect that the students will want to start using a computer or other device to help them solve the problems we present to them but we think it’s important to learn first how to approach issues using their brains before relying on a machine to support their thinking.

Your curriculum overview shows that you plan on staying very NYC-specific. Why did you choose such a place-based approach to the subject?
Katie: A lot of the concepts we’re presenting are fairly abstract. We wanted to ground the program in something the students are already familiar with. New York is a city made up of communities, and that’s a theme that the students will already understand.

Carmen: We want the students to rethink parts of New York City they see everyday; for example, offsetting the experience of a crowded subway commute with better bike lanes or creating green spaces for enjoyment, collaboration or recreation.

We received a lot of advice from educators about the importance of making each lesson in our program meaningful for student retention and engagement, so it was critical to us that we create connections between the city and our students. The curriculum we’ve designed will help them explore the city and the final project will give them an opportunity to apply their new-found design skills to a project that impacts their immediate community. We’re excited to be working with folks from Transportation Alternatives for the final project. They will work with the kids to observe and document city life on the street outside their school and envision ways to better utilize the space for the people who use it each day.

Katie: Ultimately, we hope our students will walk away from the class with the understanding that practically everything around them is designed, and that they, too, can participate in shaping their world.

How are you balancing the curriculum to reflect both the more consumer-driven side of design practice and the potential for design to effect social change?
Katie: Because of the way they think, designers are in a unique position to incite changes in the practice of design and in the business of the clients with whom they work. There are plenty of design studios that are focused on sustainable practices or are incorporating design for good into their services. Designers think through problems by reframing how they see them, and they often act as change makers because of their unique perspective. We’d like to reinforce that idea with our students.

Carmen: We will talk about both commercial and social design, depending on the lesson, so that students will have a comprehensive understanding of what role design has in an organization. The similarity between design firms focused on designing products for consumers and those focused on design for social change is their process for defining a problem or unmet need and arriving at the right solution. These are the methods that we are teaching.

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Carmen Dukes is a digital producer at Hit Entertainment where she is responsible for creating games and websites for global kids brands including Barney and Friends and Bob the Builder. Previously, she worked at VH1.com where she developed interactive content in support of VH1’s popular Celebreality shows. Her professional interests include video game mechanics for interaction, sustainable product design, data visualization, and educational technology.

Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.

In the past decade, more than 50 new libraries have been created in New York City elementary schools through the combined efforts of the Robin Hood Foundation and New York City Board of Education (now Department of Education). Last week the Architectural League hosted a panel discussion to take a closer look at the creation, development and architectural expression of the libraries. The event went beyond a congratulatory retrospective of these beautiful rooms to raise challenging questions about the nature of public/private partnerships in public service and the difficulty of scaling up and systematizing bespoke processes. Architectural League executive director Rosalie Genevro moderated the panel of David Saltzman, Robin Hood Foundation executive director; Harold Levy, former Chancellor of the City’s Department of Education (formerly the Board of Education); Lonni Tanner, Robin Hood’s former Director of Special Projects and one of the principal players in the establishment of the Library Initiative; Henry Myerberg, an architect involved in the initiative from its inception; and Scott Lauer, an architect and a former Director of the Library Initiative for the Robin Hood Foundation.

One open question that resonated throughout the conversation — and, to be sure, throughout the multiple plot twists in the design, construction and use of the Robin Hood Libraries — concerns the appropriateness of objective metrics for success in evaluating learning environments, especially given Robin Hood’s mission: to eradicate poverty in New York City. Saltzman earned applause when he listed the libraries, alongside piano lessons and little league baseball, as “things that are just good” regardless of whether or not their impact is quantifiable. More than one audience member remarked that the recent publication of The L!brary Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools by Anooradha Siddiqi, another former director of the Library Initiative and the event’s introductory speaker, reminds us that part of the process of qualifying the impact of a transformational environment, leaving aside quantifying it for a moment, relies on the testimony of students, parents, teachers, designers and school administrators. In that spirit, the Omnibus recently went to Clason Point to check out one of these libraries at Bronx Public School 69 and to see it in use. Impressed, we wanted to hear firsthand about how this library came to be, so we spoke with the designers, Richard Lewis and Jason Gold of the firm Richard H. Lewis Architect (the firm designed 10 Robin Hood libraries in total), and with Alan Cohen, the inspiring principal who made it happen. Check out the video below:

When asked why Robin Hood chose the library as the educational environment to target, Lonni Tanner explained the intention to find a place that “100% of school population could use.” Her guiding belief lay in the potential power of activating one space in the school where students’ “imaginations could run wild.” The Foundation determined that a library – if designed, equipped, staffed and programmed well – possesses this potential in ways that the classroom, the cafeteria and the gym do not.

That power is palpable in the P.S. 69 Library. Each of the libraries is beautiful (click here to see a slideshow of Library Initiative libraries). And each is, in the words of Richard Lewis, “its own little world” that attests in its own way to the stated goals of the initiative: to redefine the mission of the library as a resource for the entire school community; to rebuild the library with new design standards and unique imagery; to replenish the library with new books and technology; to retrain school staff to make full use of the library; and to reassess the impact of the school library to track progress and impact. What sets the P.S. 69 library apart is the way its location within the school makes manifest the priority the school places on reading and learning.

When Principal Cohen arrived at P.S. 69 seven years ago, he found a failing school on the verge of being taken over by the state. He immediately set about changing the school’s culture and raising student achievement. Siddiqi writes: “Displacing his own office and those of the rest of the administration, he advocated situating the library in a horseshoe plan around the stair at the main entrance to the school. Students walking into the building must enter up ‘through’ the library to the main floor, forcing them to confront the spectacle of the library coming in, going out, and passing through.” The library opened one year ago. It certainly inspires the imagination to run wild. And it inspires belief in the transformative possibility of making a principle – that reading and learning are central to student achievement and therefore central to increasing economic opportunity – no longer exclusively symbolic. -C.S.

P.S. 69, Bronx | Richard H. Lewis Architect | Photo: Peter Mauss/Esto