Frustrated by the lack of a cohesive vision for the neighborhood and concerned by a failure to connect development plans with broader issues of community services, infrastructure and sustainability, architects and Brooklyn residents David Briggs and Anthony Deen founded the advocacy group Gowanus by Design in 2009. Briggs and Deen wanted to encourage new clean-up and development strategies based on community input and the needs and opinions of those who work and live along the Gowanus. They soon realized that what they saw as the primary challenges for the site could be addressed through a series of design competitions, which would serve to provoke conversation, encourage community engagement and, hopefully, steer future development of the area. The first of these competitions, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, invited designers across disciplines to explore the potential for pedestrian-oriented development that engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Here, Briggs and Deen tell us more about the motivations behind and future plans for Gowanus by Design, and share the winning designs from Connections. —C.B.

The Gowanus is a canal and neighborhood under constant assault. For every contamination clean up there is an illegal dumping; for every marine species that returns to the canal there is a toxic overflow from the local CSOs. The nearby areas of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are neighborhoods of four and five story buildings, but the City has approved 12-story buildings for two separate major development projects in Gowanus. The fact is, the area suffers because there is no master plan. When the Gowanus Canal was listed on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List in early 2010, it was a welcome pause to what was becoming a rapid development process that did not address vital urban issues, such as contextual zoning, mass transit, community services or infrastructure.

The pending development of the Gowanus can also be seen as a local case study of a global trend. As more of our population move to cities — if current trends continue, 70% of the global population will live in urban environments by mid-century — pressure will increase to develop brownfield sites and other contaminated urban areas that were previously considered off-limits due to the extensive remediation they require.

In 2009, we founded Gowanus by Design as a community-based urban design advocacy group in response to these global shifts, our concerns about the trajectory of the proposed development and our desire to help remake our corner of the city. Our mission is to promote sustainable development that enhances the Gowanus Canal community without replacing the historic character and working class origins of the neighborhood, while responding intelligently to the environmental damage wrought by local industry over the past 150 years. Our members are local residents and industry professionals — architects, planners, cartographers and transportation experts. Our aim is to propose and advocate for new strategies for the development of the Gowanus area and to explore the larger urban planning challenges that the world will face as the global population migrates to the world’s cities.

After the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site, our focus shifted towards documenting the cleanup process and taking a step back to consider long-term planning challenges. When discussing how to effectively move forward, we realized that we had to sort through the myriad complex issues being raised in a comprehensive, yet understandable way. By identifying a series of broad questions about the latent problems at the canal, and connecting them to the future of transportation, education, sustainability, infrastructure and community services, we hoped that we could spark conversations that would lead to more research and community input. As our list of questions developed, we decided that each one could form the basis of a design competition, the results of which could create a mappable, online database that would serve to inspire new thinking on urban development.

The Gowanus Lowline jury

This year we launched our inaugural competition, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, as an ideas competition open to the international community. We invited speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engaged with the canal and the surrounding watershed. We ended up with 188 submissions, from 14 US States (26 entries came from right here in Brooklyn) and from 14 countries around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

On a Friday afternoon in June, the jury convened at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, located just one block from the canal, for several hours of review and discussion. Comprised of leaders in the design community Julie Bargmann (landscape designer and founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio), David Lewis (architect and partner of LTL Architects), Gregg Pasquarelli (architect and founding principal of SHoP Architects), Richard Plunz (urban planner and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation), Andrew Simons (designer and chair of Gowanus Canal Conservancy) and Joel Towers (architect and the Dean of Parsons School of Design), the jury focused on thoughtful and rigorous solutions to the problems of urban brownfield sites in general, and the canal area specifically. After much deliberation, they selected first and second prizewinners and four honorable mention winners.

FIRST PLACE
Gowanus Flowlands
Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle, Brandon Specketer
New York, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Gowanus Flowlands. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

The first prize winner, “Gowanus Flowlands,” was submitted by Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle and Brandon Specketer of New York, NY. The jury appreciated the team’s understanding of density and environmental remediation as part of a broader sustainable urban strategy. The proposal creates a compelling urban condition through a series of residential and academic buildings that extend above a commercial zone and hover over a series of filtering wetlands. Gowanus Flowlands creatively demonstrates how the area could be inhabited while living with remediation.

SECOND PLACE
[f]lowline
Aptum/Landscape Intelligence: Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen
Urbana, Illinois

Click thumbnails to see images from [f]lowline. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

“[F]lowline,” submitted by Aptum/Landscape Intelligence (team members Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen of Urbana, Illinois), was awarded second prize for its clever adaptation and response to changing environmental and urban conditions. As with “Flowlands,” “[f]lowline” proposed living with remediation through a series of insertions, such as pooling parks and floating forest barges, and by doing so, offered a vision of a possible hybrid urban condition.

HONORABLE MENTION
Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow
Agergroup: Jessica Leete, Claire Ji Kim, Shan Shan Lu, Winnie Lai and Albert Chung
Boston, Massachusetts

Click thumbnails to see images from Domestic Laundry. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
Gowanus Canal Filter District
burkholder|salmons: Sean Burkholder, Dylan Salmons
University Park, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from Filter District. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Originally, the competition brief indicated that there would be three honorable mentions. But as the deliberations proceeded through the afternoon, the jury focused on four entries that formed two pairings: “Gowanus Canal Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow”; and “Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry” and “B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge).”

“Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry” both accepted the existing conditions as a starting point, yet offered different solutions: “Filter District” proposed that three areas south of 3rd Street on both sides of the canal be depressed to promote tidal flushing and create a node point for peripheral development. “Domestic Laundry” offered a range of solutions along both sides of the canal, suggesting a phased, realistic approach that embraced the myriad technologies that the canal cleanup would require.

HONORABLE MENTION
Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry
Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson
Brooklyn, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Made in Brooklyn. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge)
Austin+Mergold LLC: Jason Austin, Alex Mergold, Jessica Brown, Sally Reynolds
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from B.Y.O.B. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Both “Made in Brooklyn” and “B.Y.O.B.” relied on a more traditional typology to link the neighborhoods on both sides of the canal: the bridge. However, each team was careful to expand on the structure’s conventional use. “Made in Brooklyn” proposed the bridge as a catalyst for growth on either side of the canal by creating a commercial spine on the crossings that would nurture current interest (and pride) in Brooklyn industry. “B.Y.O.B.” proposed various bridge prototypes, designed by local stakeholders, that reflect the existing neighborhood character while connecting current and proposed adjacencies.

After deliberations concluded, we asked the jurors to reflect on Gowanus Lowline and comment on what they’d like to see in future competitions. Several of them noted that more emphasis should be placed on understanding Brooklyn, its character, the local climatic conditions, and, in this particular case, the topography around the canal. Additionally, since the science required to properly remediate the area is truly complex, they suggested that future competitions be designed around some of the specific remediation solutions currently being developed by the EPA as part of the Superfund cleanup process.

As we move forward, our competitions will take the ideas and feedback generated from Gowanus Lowline and continue to explore the broad questions that we think will help people better understand the changes taking place at the canal and in the surrounding neighborhood. We will advocate for new strategies and a sustainable approach to urban development and plan to share our work with local groups, other like-minded professionals, and New York City’s Department of City Planning.

These winning entries from Gowanus Lowline: Connections, along with approximately twenty other thought-provoking entries selected by the committee, and three projects from the seventh grade class of the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a local middle school, will be on display at the SET Gallery, 287 Third Avenue, Brooklyn for two weeks in September. The show will open on Thursday, September 15, from 6—9pm. For more information, click here.

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After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, David Briggs worked in upstate New York and for William McDonough in New York City. He opened his own office in 1993 and began working on residential, commercial, and restoration projects that addressed sustainable design issues. In 1997 Mr. Briggs was awarded the AIA New York City Chapter Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant. He has also served as a Visiting Critic for the Weimar Bauhaus-Universitat “Summer Academy in Rome” as well as the University of Pennsylvania and taught as an adjunct professor at Philadelphia University. Since 2002, he has served on the Board of Trustees for the Amber Charter School in Harlem where he chairs the Facilities Committee and has been Board Secretary for the past four years. Mr. Briggs is a LEED Accredited Professional and is licensed to practice architecture in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Washington DC. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

Anthony Deen is a co-founder of Gowanus by Design, and owner of deenstudio. His projects include work for jetBlue, British Airways and Chelsea Market in New York. Prior to starting deenstudio, Anthony was the Senior Design Director at The Phillips Group, and served as Vice President of Design and Development for the Virgin Megastores in North America. Anthony was also a senior architect with the Rockwell Group where he helped found the Interaction Lab, developing digital media for built environments. Anthony began his career with Samuel Anderson, Winka Dubbeldam and James Garrison, where he won an AIA-NY Project Award. Anthony earned his undergraduate degree at the Cooper Union, graduate degree from Parsons School of Design and did additional study in urban design at the City College of New York. Anthony teaches design studio in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design where he was the founding director of Parsons’ Design + Technology department. Anthony is also a member of the EPA’s Gowanus Community Advisory Group and lives in Carroll Gardens with his family.

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

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Stephen Mallon is a photographer invested in capturing extraordinary moments in the industrial landscape and the surreal beauty of the machines and sites that populate it. But the projects Mallon documents aren’t your everyday construction sites. “Next Stop Atlantic” follows an MTA recycling program that uses retired subway cars, stripped and cleaned, to rebuild underwater reefs along the eastern seabed. “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549″ documents the recovery of the US Airways airbus, piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, that landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese resulted in engine failure. In “A Bridge Delivered,” one of his time-lapse projects, Mallon shows us the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge, crossing the Harlem River to connect Manhattan and the Bronx. Most recently, Mallon completed “Volare,” a series of images following the construction of a new roller coaster on Coney Island. We recently had an opportunity to talk to Mallon about his work, the underappreciated beauty of engineering and how photography can provoke contemplation of industry and our natural environment — and their unexpected convergences.

An exhibition of Mallon’s series “Next Stop Atlantic” will be presented at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville in June 2011, and will also be on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey later this summer. In spring 2012, “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549” will be exhibited at Webster University in St. Louis. “A Bridge Delivered” has been selected for inclusion in this summer’s Rooftop Films Summer Series here in New York City.

Volare, Coney Island | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How do you conceive of or identify your projects? What does it mean to you to be an “industrial photographer,” as you’ve described yourself in the past?

I am attracted to a lot of different subjects in the industrial world. I just finished a project documenting the construction of a new roller coaster for the Wall Street Journal. It’s the first new coaster in Coney Island in over 50 years. A few months ago, I was in Brazil on a commission to photograph on an offshore drilling platform for a series titled “Petrobras.”

I am hoping to be in a number of recycling plants over the coming months. I move from commission to commission, along with continuing my long term project “American Reclamation,” which is a series of images about material and space reuse in the 50 states.

But I am actually getting away from identifying myself as “an industrial photographer.” I realized, after framing my work that way, that people saw me as someone who was shooting only the box on a conveyor belt.

It seems that you have a particular interest in recycling and salvage. How did that interest develop?

I have been shooting industrial landscape work for almost all of my life. I got away from it during university, but in the late ’90s I started finding the antenna and the oil container really appealing again. After a meeting with a book agent to publish a collection of my work, I realized I needed a project to focus on. Recycling was a natural fit!

Next Stop Atlantic | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Tell us about “Next Stop Atlantic.” This series documents an MTA program that recycles retired subway cars by using them to create artificial reefs — “moments of violent recycling,” as you’ve described it. How did you find out about the project?

I was out scouting a location for a portrait in New Jersey when I recognized a barge loaded with subway cars sitting in a shipyard in Bayonne. The yard was owned by maritime contractor Weeks Marine. I sent them information about my recycling project, and the MTA and Weeks let me follow the subway cars out into the Atlantic Ocean. I spent just shy of three years going out on multiple trips.

The moment the car hits the water there’s this Titanic-esque moment when the water overtakes the car as it sinks. It’s incredibly fast — from the moment it’s picked up and thrown overboard for the fishes. The change from seeing steel lying on a barge out in the Atlantic to watching water rush in as it hits the ocean is quite dramatic.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549 | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

In a lot of your work, bodies of water play an important role. In your series “Flight 1549,” you document the recovery of the US Airways airbus that famously landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese caused its engines to fail. Are you particularly attracted to maritime industrial subject matter?

It just keeps calling my name. Similar to shooting objects placed on a white background or against the sky, water isolates the machine.

How did you get interested in creating “A Bridge Delivered,” your time-lapse video of the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge? Did you know immediately that you wanted to document it?

Weeks Marine has a construction division and they gave me a call last summer to see if I would want to come out to shoot it. I knew immediately that I wanted to document it!

A Bridge Delivered from stephen mallon on Vimeo.

Over 30,000 images comprise “A Bridge Delivered,” but in your still photographs the individual moments you capture are very precise. Did you think about these two projects very differently, or did your photographs suggest how best to portray the idea?

Yes, the process of telling a story in motion has been a change for me. I used to look for one or a few images to encapsulate the event. Now I am looking for clips, longer moments in time to keep the viewer engaged and the story running.

Practically speaking, how do you negotiate such immediate access to your subjects? How do you get as close as you do?

Having the existing body of work has made clients and locations much more comfortable. They see that other people have trusted and commissioned me in the past, which boosts their confidence.

American Reclamation | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How would like your photography to affect or inform the way your viewing public sees or considers the city and its infrastructure?

Some people are horrified about the artificial reef program, but I think it’s because they don’t know the details about how it is designed to help the environment. I am fortunate that I have been able to photograph these historical projects that are all tied to New York — my interest is in making unique images of historical moments. The response to these projects has been amazing and I am truly grateful.

What types of projects are you working on now?

I’m designing a remote camera that will let me shoot hi-res time-lapse footage from any location for an extended period of time — I’ll have more details soon! I am also conceptualizing my own proposal for an artificial reef. But that is going to take some time!

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

All photos courtesy of and copyright Stephen Mallon

Most people look at work sites and machinery and see nothing more than concrete and steel. Stephen Mallon looks at them and sees both a surreal beauty and the wonder of their engineering. His work has been exhibited widely and featured on numerous websites, in print and on TV and radio, including National Public Radio, Flavorwire, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Wired, New York Magazine, NBC, Vanity Fair and CBS News. Stephen has traveled everywhere from Africa to Brazil, searching out artificial landscapes and industrial footprints. He has also been commissioned by a wide range of clients, including the Sunday London Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Publicis, Sudler & Hennessey, and MAYTAG. Mallon’s photos have been honored by Communication Arts 2008 and 2009, the New York Photo Festival 2009 and the Lucie Awards 2009. Since 2002, he has been a board member of the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and served as president from 2006 to 2009. He lives in New York with his wife and their young daughter.

Click the image above to launch a slideshow of selections from The Night Shadow by Michael Neff.

I am interested in looking more closely at the spaces and objects that surround us in our daily lives. It is easy not to be present, especially in New York, and I try to keep myself open to the out of place, surprising juxtaposition, or formal beauty that can be found by walking out the door. This point of view has led to projects ranging from investigations of grocery store price stickers to photographs of the spaces around big box stores. Ultimately, my work stems from an instinct to point at something and say, “Look!”

The Night Shadow project began in March of 2006. I was living and working in the West Village. I often worked late and on my walks home I began to take notice of the shadows along my route — primarily ones cast by exterior lights on buildings and street lights, but sometimes by interior light shining through a window. I did some drawing experiments in 2002 where I sat in a café and repeatedly traced sun-cast shadows of window lettering on my table. The sun moves quickly in relation to something so small so I would start at one end of the type and work my way to the other. By the time I was done the whole shadow had moved and I would start again. The end result was very much like Heidi Neilson’s Long Island City Sundial project; it almost felt like animation.

I chose chalk for this project because it seemed right. Much like shadows, chalk is impermanent. I also recognized that many shadows fall on buildings and my intention was to share something beautiful and surprising, not anger home or business owners. By choosing chalk over paint or ink, I left the outcome up to those who chose to engage. If someone didn’t like the work, they could wash it away or wait for it to rain.

I draw and photograph all of these works at night. Night in New York City is surprisingly bright. During the day, shadows change quickly, which inevitably results in distorted tracings. Shadows cast by electric lights gave me the opportunity to spend time on each piece and make very intricate drawings. I once spent 3 1/2 hours making a drawing on Hudson Street that was probably 150 feet long and 8 or 10 feet wide.

The photograph is an important part of the process, acting as documentation and a vehicle to share the work, so the fact that the drawing is fugitive doesn’t bother me. But I enjoy hearing that people have run across the drawings in person. There haven’t been that many and they don’t last very long, so there’s something special about encountering the work out in the city itself.

For more information about Neff’s work, check out his website and his Flickr page. All photographs copyright Michael Neff, all rights reserved.

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Michael Neff was born in Seattle, Washington. He earned a BFA in photography wih a minor in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Brooklyn and dreams of driving on the West Coast.

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

Click the image above to launch a slideshow of "Coney Island." All photos copyright Jeff Goldberg/Esto.

I have been making paper sculpture since 2006. I was influenced by the dollhouses that I watched my aunt and uncle create when I returned home to Japan on vacation. They made me realize a love of miniature worlds.

I am from Osaka. My miniature worlds are patterned after Japan and New York, but also an imaginary place.

I fold and glue pieces of colored paper to create 3D sculpture with a special focus on small details. That is the most interesting part for me to work on.

The concept of my work could be expressed as “Feel as if you are here.” I hope to provide small happiness and kindness to people through my art work.

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

Click on the image above to launch a slideshow of photographs from “The Quiet City.”

I started photographing in Industrial Business Zones (IBZs) after moving to Brooklyn in 2006.  I was intrigued by the transformation, from industrial to residential use, of areas like Williamsburg and DUMBO. Visits to Sunset Park, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Long Island City, and East Williamsburg followed. The industrial pockets of New York City are often unseen by many residents unless they work or live nearby. I began to photograph the IBZs when most industrial businesses were closed, on Sunday afternoons. Most of the work is void of people. There is a surreal and at times eerie quietness that is rare in New York City.

“The Quiet City” is an ongoing personal project and does not purport to reveal absolute truths or confront issues of zoning or gentrification. There are historic aspects to the work but ultimately all of my work ties back to one subject matter: beauty. Beauty the way I see it, often vernacular, utilitarian and graphic. The aesthetics of the scenes are most important to me, relating to formalism and classic landscape painting. I am fueled by an interest in architecture, infrastructure and a love for lines, texture, materials and color.

Chances are, these areas will look very different ten years from now. Many of the IBZs are located on prime waterfront property or adjacent to expanding, already gentrified neighborhoods. My intuitive work process brings me back to these places on a regular basis to see what is new and what I will find. If I am able to secure funding I hope to expand the scope of the project to include all New York City IBZs and ultimately publish the complete body of work as a book.

Douglas Ljungkvist is a Brooklyn based photographer originally from Sweden. His focus is on travel, architectural photography, and personal projects. His work has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, Tate ETC UK, Focus Magazine, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. He is the recipient of accolades from the IPA, The Color Awards, Px3, and was runner-up in the 2009 Travel Photographer of the Year contest, New Talent category. He has exhibited at the Bridge Art Fair during Art Basel in Miami and at Michael Mazzeo Gallery in Chelsea.

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

Remember how much fun we had when we got together and made a difference in two days? Well, a team of North Carolinians felt like taking matters into their own hands, without warning and without ceremony. Design activist extraordinaire and organizer of our Make a Difference event, Bryan Bell, recently shared with us these photos. He had nothing to do with the objects; neither did the photographer, Rebecca Necessary. They found the designs with a note attached that reads: “Anonymous public gifting by Raleigh designers.”

Be inspired. Click the image above to view a slideshow of the Raleigh designers’ work.

All images by Rebecca Necessary.

Just in time for the warm weather, we wanted to share the process with citizen-designers across the city, in the hope of inspiring some small-scale, local interventions in your neck of the woods. If you stumble across, or initiate, a compelling design action in the public interest somewhere in the five boroughs of New York, we want to hear about it.

Below are descriptions of when the seven teams got up to over the weekend. First, check out a video that shows them in action:

Team NC State
Hans Hesselein, David Moses, Andrew Nicolas, Thomas Ryan
Bryan’s popularity as an educator precedes him. An interdisciplinary group of alumni from North Carolina State – two architects, a landscape architect and a graphic designer – some of whom worked with Bryan as undergrads before moving to New York joined in the fun. After raiding a New Jersey nursery for plants, piping and lumber, the team set about the task of creating sensory linkages across the divide of the Gowanus Canal. The eventual solution – a beautiful set of birdhouses – turned the site’s specific ecology into a point of connection rather than separation. And we weren’t the only ones to notice, check out blog coverage here that also got picked up here. [Update Sept. 15, 2010: For a look at the progression of this project from temporary design experiment to community-driven, multi-disciplinary operation, check out our feature Canal Nest Colony.]

Business Casual
Patrick Candella, Scott Corey, Philip Kuehne, Viren Patel, Mary Polites
This group of passionate young designers met while studying at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and most of them live in Jersey City. As such, they brought a fresh perspective to the sometimes parochial language in which New Yorkers articulate design challenges. Their site was a large parking lot that services several big box stores. The lot is ringed with an invisible and unmarked electric fence that, when crossed, renders shopping carts inoperable. The team observed dozens of paralyzed carts discarded around the periphery of the lot and very few deposited at the official corral at the center. If there were a corral before the fence, then maybe the employee whose job it is to return the carts wouldn’t have to manually unlock each cart one by one. If there were unlocked carts at the most popular points of pedestrian entry to the lot – near the path to the adjacent mall or near the light rail stop – customers arriving on foot could pick them up along their way. To address this problem, Business Casual scrounged around the NJIT woodshop for discarded plywood and built two shopping cart corrals that responded to actual observed use patterns. Imagine that.

Due North
Samuel John Reilly, Koren Sin, Stephanie Vito
These three young architecture students are new to New York. As undergraduates in Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning semester in the city program, the team responded to a simple problem they themselves faced as newcomers: directions. But instead of constructing orientation devices as an end in themselves, they assembled large amounts of discarded cardboard near their Flatiron District Cornell outpost into street furniture that points the passerby on her way while providing a resting spot for the road-weary.

Austin+Mergold and Company
Jason Austin, James Bowman, Alex Mergold, Denise Ramzy, and Sally Reynolds
Wayfinding was a recurring challenge that teams sought to address with simple design interventions. Austin+Mergold and Company closely observed tourists exiting the subway unable to locate themselves (see video below). Their solution borrowed less from street furniture and more from weather vanes, encouraging pedestrians to look upwards to find their way. And their careful consideration of New York’s skyline led them to evoke the horizon’s most conspicuous absence and place of remembrance for New Yorkers and out of town visitors alike, the twin towers and Ground Zero.

watch Austin+Mergold and Company’s site analysis video

General Assembly
Jaime Keeler, Josie Lawlor, Sarah Lawlor, Elle Przybyla, Jonathan Zames
This loose collective includes architects, writers and filmmakers whose research process for this exercise brought each of them home to his or her neighborhood only to discover a city-wide design challenge: too many plastic bags yet never one when you need one (to, you know, curb your dog, or cover your bicycle seat in the rain). Inspired by the practice of taking a penny and leaving a penny, General Assembly fashioned a simple series of perforated cylinders that attach to signposts, allowing citizens to put a ubiquitous piece of litter to good use. Check out more of their work here.

Columbia Students
Christina Akiskalou, Daniya Atta, Anastasia Choli, Elia Karachaliou, Pablo Perez Palacios, Eleni Petaloti, Pietro Todeschini
A group of international students in GSAPP’s Advanced Architectural Design professional program took inspiration from the rain on the first day of this two-day adventure. The rain stopped, the air was still warm, but who wants to hang out on a rain-drenched campus bench? So with rolls of altered bubble-wrap and containers made from takeaway soup canisters, a makeshift, reusable ground cloth was born.

Hester Street Collaborative & Leroy Street Studio
Anne Frederick, Morgan Hare, Dylan House, Marc Turkel, Jess Osserman, Shawn Watts
When it comes to making a difference through design, planning and organizing in the public interest, these collectives are professionals. The Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) is a design-build non-profit that works with schools and community groups in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The Collaborative emerged from the architectural practice of Leroy Street Studio, and the two groups took this opportunity to come together and to reconnect with their shared backgrounds in design and construction. One of the Chinatown elementary schools where HSC works lacks the street access to their playground that would make it a genuine public amenity, so the team went about creating a new gate, cutting out the chainlink, and creating a much needed connection point between school and neighborhood.

After 48 hours in the field, the teams reconvened at Cabinet Magazine‘s Gowanus space to share their processes, sites and projects with Bryan and the public. In the presentations, Bryan urged the teams to identify stakeholders affected, issues addressed and materials used. He encouraged all participants to check back on their projects and to continue to observe their sites. Observing real use patterns, talking to people about their needs, working in a community you know well: all these are hallmarks of Bryan’s philosophy of design as activism. The weekend proved that even the smallest-scale interventions can go a long way towards expanding the understanding of what design can do. Now it’s your turn, go out there and make something. The first step, as these designers experienced first-hand, is to watch closely and listen carefully.

“Migrants from poor countries send home about $300 billion a year. This is more than three times the global total in foreign aid, making ‘remittances’ the main source of outside money flowing to the developing world “(New York Times Week in Review, November 18th, 2007).

The Mouride Brotherhood is a West African Sufi order of Islam based in the holy city of Touba, Senegal. Adherents have lived and traded in urban enclaves on every continent for much of the past fifty years. But I first came to understand some of the complexity of the Brotherhood’s commercial and financial network in a studio course I taught last year, Remittances: Global New York. The studio examined the pathways, institutions, and built products of the informal global trade in money. It asked the question: how is the movement of money manifested, and in what forms, in urban centers worldwide? New York City was our laboratory for experiments with this phenomenon, and students investigated two sites in Jackson Heights, Queens and one in Harlem, the stretch of West 116th Street that some call Little Senegal.

At first glance, the streetscape of Little Senegal reads as a typical ethnic enclave in New York. By looking closely beneath the surface of storefronts and street vendors, architecture student Anna Maria Bogadóttir discovered a global trade and remittance system that includes millions of $200 transactions, itinerant merchants moving from Hong Kong to Jeddah to New York to Paris, and the transnational financial flows that have funded the urban development of Touba.

This week Urban Omnibus presents the beginnings of Bogadóttir’s discovery process and invites readers to dig into the literature that reveals the complex relationship between this neighborhood, a global religious and financial network, and the urban development of a large African city of which too few of us are aware. This presentation, like the surfaces of New York’s streets that we walk by every day and take for granted, is only the start of the story. Look closer.

Detailed inspection of our urban fabric, and the financial systems that undergird it, challenges the common presumption that the Global North, or developed world, establishes institutions that dominate the Global South, or developing world. This studio documented and responded to the reverse trend, in which the developing world establishes new patterns in its host cities, dollar by dollar, person by person, often in ad hoc, makeshift, and opaque ways.  The result is a massive, still growing, dynamic global network of physical, communication, and institutional spaces.

Architects and urbanists need to recognize the spatial definition of these patterns: what do they look like now?  What materials, networks, technologies and programs inform or build each pattern? How does the informal city embed itself in the formal city? How do the informal and the formal cities transform one another? And what might each look like in the future?

– Laura Kurgan

For a thorough overview of worldwide remittance flows, check out the research and website of the International Fund for Agricultural Develoment (IFAD).

For press coverage of how remittances affect the global economy and how individuals are constantly reinventing this often informal framework, start here:

Western Union moves Migrant Cash Home, The New York Times, November 22, 2007

Interactive map illustrating the dispersal of remittance funds throughout the world, The New York Times, Week in Review, November 17, 2007

Immigrants push Western Union to share the wealth, in The Nation, May 11 2007.

The Million Dollar Club Project, an initiative to bolster the economic agency of remittance senders.

These scholarly sources offer an introduction to the Mouride Brotherhood and the holy city of Touba.

A sociological analysis of how the Mouride Brotherhood addresses globalization:
Diouf, Mamadou; Translated by Steven Rendall. “The The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture – Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 679-702

An examination of commercial strategies employed by Mouride business people:
Ebin, Victoria. “À la recherche de nouveaux ‘poissons’: stratégies commerciales mourides par temps de crise”, Politique africaine 45, 1992, pp. 86-99.

A book-length account that links global and local elements of the experience of West African street merchants in New York City:
Paul Stoller. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

How urban design in Touba reflects its position as the center of the Mouride Brotherhood:
Ross, Eric. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.

(Most of the Sufi shrines discussed in this book can be viewed in high-resolution satellite images by downloading this Google Earth file)

How Sufi brotherhoods shape the practice of Islam in Senegal
Mbacké, Khadim; Translated by Eric Ross and edited by John Hunwick. Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005.

Anna María Bogadóttir is a candidate in the Master’s of Architecture Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is Director of Visual Studies and the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL).

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