The immense distances trash travels (and the amount of cost and energy used to transport, transfer, recycle, incinerate or dump it) pose obvious questions about how we expend environmental resources in support of our country’s vast consumption practices. According to Rit Aggarwala, former director of the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, it’s time to shift the ways we measure environmental impacts “from combustion towards consumption.” He was speaking at a conference of city planning professionals entitled Zoning the City, but the implications of his words extend far beyond land use: he was expressing the far-reaching truth that there’s more than just carbon in our footprints. And while engines and energy usage are the primary metrics used to calculate degrees of green, zooming out to a broader inquiry into the infrastructure that supports both the supply chain and the removal chain raises larger questions about the life-cycles of the products and materials that pass through our daily lives.

Two years ago, for its landmark exhibition Toward the Sentient City, the Architectural League commissioned five innovative design projects that interrogated the convergence of digital technologies and the urban systems. One of the projects, Trash | Track, started with a simple question: “why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain?” To close this gap in public awareness about where stuff goes after we throw it away, the team behind Trash | Track (MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory) devised sensors that would track the movements of a variety of everyday objects on their often convoluted routes to their final destinations. They completed a pilot project in partnership with the City of Seattle that visualized these journeys and documented the ultimate fate of pieces of trash that are barely considered after being tossed in the garbage (see introductory video below).

Trash | Track from senseablecitylab on YouTube.

To be sure, sensors and analytics can help us make more intelligent choices about how we use resources, but as we go about enhancing or improving complex urban systems through technology, we must also provoke discussion about what kind of city we want. What are the values that should guide our quest for efficiency, reliability and convenience in the technologies that support the urban environment? And how can those values be informed by careful consideration of those infrastructures that may be out of sight, but should never be — if we want ecological, economical and resilient cities – out of mind.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the fourth and final in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities. 

Garbage Truck at Night | Photo: Drew Geraets

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It; Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash; and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest. Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “infra-“ in infrastructure means below, which perhaps explains why we rarely pause to consider the sewers, water supply or electrical grids that enable the basic functions of urban living. Even when critical infrastructural systems are visible and not hidden below ground — like highways, power lines or traffic lights — their ubiquity and necessity put them just out of sight and out of mind. Until, of course, they break: a pothole is the quickest reminder of the good road maintenance we generally take for granted. How often do we stop to reflect on the full scope of what well-functioning roads and bridges and tunnels make possible? The desire to provoke that kind of reflection is what the City of Systems video series is all about.

Last year, Urban Omnibus spoke with Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an organization that since the 1920s has advocated strongly for “creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth.” Looking forward, Wright explained that future planning and advocacy efforts might be “less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.” Digital technologies offer one mechanism to get more out of our basic urban systems, facilitating use-on-demand systems or creating responsive environments. Yet, while our new digital infrastructure will do many things, it won’t, by itself, build roads over water. It might, however, enable us to maintain our physical infrastructure better: monitoring usage to identify greater efficiencies, to alert us of potential malfunctions, or to extrapolate broader patterns in regional flows of people and goods. Imagine if the data from E-ZPass toll payments on the Verrazano were made available to support, say, a more nuanced proposal for congestion pricing.

As we go about instrumenting all of our systems in an attempt to harness the excess capacity within them, we would be wise to contemplate the implications of how those systems came into being, what the assumptions were about their eventual use, and how those assumptions have played out in the lived experience of residents and communities. Visible from places in all five of New York City’s boroughs, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stands as an iconic reminder not only to appreciate a masterwork of civil engineering, but also to reflect on the systemic urban change that infrastructure can bring about.

This Urban Omnibus video is the second in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Interstate highway I-278 crosses the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

The original music in the video, “Verrazano” by Good Fruit, appears courtesy of the artist.

Earlier this year, Urban Omnibus sat down with TMC Director John Tipaldo, a systems engineer who oversees the facility, to learn firsthand about some of the priorities and technologies that influence the operation of traffic signals. Stoplights, it turns out, aren’t about limiting vehicular speed. They are about organizing who has the right to travel across a certain intersection at a particular time — cars going in this direction, cars going in that direction, pedestrians — and who has to wait until the other does so. In other words, traffic signals are about negotiating the interests of different users. What could be more urban than that? Find out more in the video below.

This Urban Omnibus video is the first in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Most talk of urban systems these days seems to focus on efficiency and effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on using digital technologies to increase both. At IBM Smarter Cities New York in October of 2009, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano posed questions to illustrate the significant role that technology plays in building smarter cities. With four billion cell phones, 30 billion RFID tags and two billion internet users constantly providing and collecting data, what happens when we apply analytics to guide more strategic resource allocation as our digital and physical infrastructures converge?

Urban Omnibus and the Architectural League, as part of our mission to foster excellence in the design of the built environment, want to infuse this conversation about what’s technologically possible with informed debate about what kind of urban future is desirable. The Architectural League has been looking at the implications of computing embedded in our everyday environments, or situated technologies, for several years. Through a symposium, pamphlet series, exhibition and recently-published book called Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, the Situated Technologies project has engaged architects, artists and technologists in a provocative exploration of what design has to offer, and how design can critique, the ubiquity of sensors and automatic data generation in our urban experience. Gregory Wessner, who has overseen the project as the League’s exhibitions and digital programs director, characterizes the central issues as an urgent question: “At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact are they having on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?”

Meanwhile, Urban Omnibus has been reporting on what some of these trends and technologies have to offer the evolving conversation about infrastructure investment, public participation and open data. But for all the innovations and policy recommendations that emerge from these multiple and overlapping convergences (digital and physical, dematerialized and apparent, data and visceral experience), our primary objective is to encourage greater intimacy with the choices and operations that give shape to the urban environment. To that end, we want to foster appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the urban systems that currently enable us to go about our day, those systems that we take for granted — like the expectation that a stoplight will always, eventually, turn green.

The music in the video, “Bellows” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.

But before we delve headlong into the happenings, conversations, performances and talks of early May, we wanted to hear directly from some of the institutions behind this ambitious undertaking. In the video below, Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director of the Architectural League, Eva Franch, Director of Storefront, and Brett Littmann, Executive Director of the Drawing Center, explain in their own words what the Festival is, how it came about, and what they hope its legacy will be.

And don’t forget to join us for the Festival itself, May 4-8, 2011. It kicks off with a keynote address by Rem Koolhaas, and includes presentations by a number of people whose ideas you’ve seen on Urban Omnibus: Robin Chase, Frank Duffy, Suketu Mehta, Adam Greenfield and others. Stay tuned Click here to learn more about our poster campaign, which is up on a wall or a fence near you from Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica to Brooklyn Flea in Clinton Hill to Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. And come visit us in our booth at StreetFest on May 7th, on Rivington near the corner of Bowery.

FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR THE NEW CITY
SCHEDULE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4
Keynote Address: Rem Koolhaas (7pm)

THURSDAY, MAY 5
The Heterogeneous City: Vito Acconci, Jonathan Bowles, Rosanne Haggerty, Suketu Mehta. Moderated by Jonathan F.P. Rose (1–3pm)
The Networked City: Adam Greenfield, Natalie Jeremijenko, Anthony Townsend, McKenzie Wark. Moderated by Joseph Grima (4–6pm)
Keynote Address: Jaron Lanier, The Networked City (7pm)

FRIDAY, MAY 6
The Reconfigured City: Robin Chase, Elizabeth Diller, Frank Duffy, Pedro Reyes (2–4:30pm)
Keynote Address: Antanas Mockus, The Sustainable City (5pm)
Mayoral Panel, The Sustainable City: Sergio Fajardo, John Fetterman, Greg Nickels, Michael Nutter. Introduction by David Byrne. Moderated by Kurt Andersen (7–8:30pm)

SATURDAY, MAY 7
StreetFest (11am–7pm)
Workshop Session 1: World Café: Downtown NYC, Policy Issues (10am–noon)
Workshop Session 2: World Café: Built Environment (2–4pm)
Session leaders include David Benjamin, Andrea Blum, Anna Dyson, Mitchell Joachim, Lydia Kallipoliti, Mitch McEwen, Jorge Otero-Pailos and Roo Rogers.

Broad participation, it goes without saying, is hardly taken for granted in most kinds of large-scale urban development, even though a public review is legally mandated. Many things hinder public input on large urban development projects. For lay citizens to weigh in, they must first overcome the complexities of environmental and land use review procedures and then contend with the inconvenience and confrontation symptomatic of many community meetings. And the proposed plans to which the public is invited to respond are often subject to the manipulations of whoever is doing the proposing. In April of 2008, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff noted, in relation to the Hudson Yards plan, that misleading and incomplete renderings produce a “distorted picture of reality” that “stifles what is supposed to be an open, democratic process.” With that in mind, Norman Oder, the writer of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, told us that “Betaville offers great promise in equalizing the information gap and helping present, from the start, a more honest perspective on development projects big and small. Such a service is only fair, and long overdue.” At the moment, setting up a Betaville for another part of town still presents some technical barriers to entry. But the project nonetheless reminds us to question, and to advance, the established methods and norms of public review and participation in our cities’ ongoing processes of change.

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Carl Skelton, born in Toronto in 1961, now lives and works in New York City. In his spare time, he’s the founding director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC), and the Integrated Digital Media programs of NYU’s Polytechnic Insitute. Carl’s current BxmC initiatives include partnerships with people and organizations as diverse as the Municipal Art Society of New York City and the M2C Institut für angewandte Medienforschung, Bremen (Betaville), the Music Technology program at NYU Steinhardt (Emotive Association project), and Microsoft Research (Games for Learning Insitute). Keep an eye out for upcoming public media installations in New York, and a book project with Luke DuBois.

Late last year, Michael Van Valkenburgh, principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), showed us around the massive construction site that stretched along Brooklyn’s waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Avenue. It was a cold day in early December and the hum of hydraulic excavators and tractors evoked the site’s industrial past more than its recreational future. But even so, with the undulating topography of Pier 1 in place and almost ready to open to the public, Van Valkenburgh conjured an image of just how much use he expected the park to see in its first open summer. The six months since Pier 1 and the four months since Pier 6 opened have certainly borne out Van Valkenburgh’s prediction that Brooklyn Bridge Park will give “Brooklyners a park that they desperately need.” Listen to more of what Van Valkenburgh has to say about the twelve year (and counting) planning and design process in the video below. The word “process” is key, especially for a landscape of this complexity. Construction continues on the remaining phases of the project, scheduled to open over the next two to three years. But even after construction is complete, the park’s role in the public life of the city will only have just begun to emerge.

Like any new urban park, particularly in a place like New York where the supply of available land is so constricted, this park is about more than open space. It’s about infrastructure, industry, environment, government and (of course) real estate. According to Gullivar Shepard, an architect at MVVA who has been with the project from its initial planning stages through the design and construction, the site is “a bundle of amazing complexity: years and years of leftover right-of-ways, infrastructure claims on the site, pieces of actual working infrastructure that have to be maintained. So we can’t just change the program of the land to accommodate park users, [the park] has to… hold up the functioning of the city.” In The New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff writes that “Much as Central Park embodied Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of American democracy on the eve of the Civil War, Brooklyn Bridge Park… is an attempt to come to terms with the best and worst of our era: on the one hand, concern for the environment and an appreciation for the beauty of urban life and infrastructure; on the other, the relentless encroachment of private interests on the public realm.”

As for the former — the mutual reinforcing of environmentalism and urbanism — the design of Brooklyn Bridge Park demonstrates what Andrew Blum has described as a ”a concern for ecological processes that is not merely illustrative, treating nature as if it were a museum exhibit, but rather that is necessarily rooted in a holistic understanding of site ecology.” For Blum, this approach “suggest[s] that nature could be legible as an integrated part of urban experience — a perspective crucial to reimagining cities as the keystone of a more sustainable way of life.” Sustainability, it seems, encompasses more than materials or environmental performance, it becomes a way to reorient the public perception of the city and how it works. That said, plenty in this park takes a literal understanding of sustainability to a new level: the park benches are made from wood salvaged from demolished shipping terminal buildings on the site; the “Granite Prospect” is made of stones recycled from the Roosevelt Island Bridge; stormwater-based micro-environments support diverse ecosystems.

As for the latter — the increasing reliance on private monies to provide public goods — the planning of Brooklyn Bridge Park explicitly acknowledges that the maintenance costs over time will far outweigh the construction costs. The proposed solution — up to 20% of the park land can be developed to generate revenue — led to fierce debate (and a court case that argued a violation of the public trust doctrine). In 2002, four years after the masterplanning process began, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki signed an agreement to provide the land and to create the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation (BBPDC) as a subsidiary of Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). As the park’s developer (and MVVA’s client) the BBPDC would also develop commercial properties to fund maintenance and operational needs. Twelve days before Pier 1 opened, the nature of this city-state partnership changed dramatically. Governor Paterson relinquished the State’s stake in the project, effectively handing control of the process to the City. Reporting in the Architect’s Newspaper, Matt Chaban refers to this event, rather than the park’s opening, as the “real occasion for celebration.” The announcement of the new deal re-affirms the need for the park to be financially self-sustaining and requires looking for alternative revenue sources beyond the site’s residential developments.

Parks are designed to evolve, to change and grow over time. In this case, that evolution will be marked by the growth of trees and plants, by the increase in New Yorkers’ awareness of their relationship to the water and our city’s industrial past, and, perhaps, by the shifting demands of the market. Most commentators, including Blum and Ourousoff, invoke Frederic Law Olmsted and Central Park when they talk about Brooklyn Bridge Park. We’ve had 143 years to watch that park evolve and respond to the changing circumstances of the city that has alternately celebrated and neglected it. But yet when it comes to new parks, we still tend to talk about them primarily on opening day. In an effort to keep the critical conversation about public space active, Urban Omnibus likes to check in on projects at different stages in their life spans, when the buzz has quieted, when the beauty and richness of experience has begin to inscribe itself into public consciousness, and when questions still remain. -C.S.

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All images courtesy of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

In all of its various activities, SUPERFRONT aims to subvert the traditional order of operations in architectural practice and discourse. For example, when the time came to open up the backyard as a community resource, Mitch opted not to stage a traditional architectural competition, in which designers work on spec in response to a pre-defined brief. Rather, SUPERFRONT first put out a call to community groups for program ideas that would support their missions, asking how each group might like to use the 1,000 square foot outdoor space for a public activity. Then the gallery partnered with Design in 5, the Architectural League’s group for designers five years or less out of school, to organize a Sketch120 charrette, in which each team of volunteer designers was assigned one of the briefs at random and had two hours to come up with a scheme. The winning design scheme, by a group called KIT, involves an canopy made of hula hoops to house and shade the activities of the New York City Explorers Carnival, a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center. This Saturday from 6 to 9pm, check out the public unveiling of the installation and the simultaneous opening of SUPERFRONT’s latest exhibition: Artists who Play Well with Architects. There will be live music and beverages.

As with all things SUPERFRONT, the installation in the backyard is more than meets the eye. The appropriateness of the design of the canopy to its specific, intended use — to frame a safe, playful and multi-generational event space — is just part of the project’s broader objective: to reimagine the relationship between the architect and the public in the creation of public space, whether temporary, permanent or somewhere in-between. The theme underlying the charrette was “Temporary Publics.” Here’s how SUPERFRONT defines that theme:

Mismanaged crises of the past few years (from the failure of physical infrastructure to the catastrophes of bond markets) have complicated our notion of the architectural relationship between temporality and typology. For example, temporary FEMA trailers in New Orleans remain occupied as primary homes five years later, or luxury projects that became icons before they were even constructed remain stalled as holes in a sidewalk.

Sketch 120: “Sketch Cypher — Temporary Publics” hosted by SUPERFRONT and Design in 5, a group of the Architectural League, invites you to reconsider the possibilities of public architecture in this moment of temporal-typological crisis. What if the industry never returns to normal, if real estate financing never materializes, and all we had to work with, as architects, were our own ideas, a discarded space, and a nebulous public?

What if temporary were forever? The goal is to design a public space with these precepts.

SUPERFRONT itself embodies these precepts. The collaborations, exhibitions and events it organizes plumb the depth and breadth of subject matter that experiments in architecture currently confront. And it situates each of these experiments in the cultural context of the space’s location in Bed-Stuy and in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary practice.

Photo by Dave Rittinger

The jury who selected the winning scheme consisted of DJ /rupture, nArchitects and Slade Architecture. The design team, KIT, is comprised of Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster and Read Langworthy. New York City Explorers (NYCE) is a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center created by Kisha Edwards-Gandsy & Keyanna Murrill that provides classes, camps, childcare, two indoor play spaces, and party planning for families throughout NYC. The NYCE Carnival at SUPERFRONT aims to provide safe, carnival style atmosphere complete with scheduled films, games, contests, healthy food vendor sampling, and creative family programming.

PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT Team:
SUPERFRONT Project Team: Nicole McGlinn, Project Manager; Mitch McEwen, Executive Director; Lily Fuks, Project Intern; Melissa Frost, Gallery Intern; Sarah Millsaps, Engineering Consultant;

Designers, KIT:  Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster, Read Langworthy

NY City Explorers: Kisha Edwards-Gandsy And Keyanna Murrill, Co-Owners

Design and Construction Volunteers: Jack Bader, Rodrigo Balarezo, Alex Baumel, Cristina Greavu, Elizabeth MacWillie, Scott Miller, Viren Patel, Shinjinee Pathak, Herbert Ramirez, Rian Rooney, Aviva Rubin, William Serbin, Irmak Turan

Installation photograph by Dave Rittinger. See more of his photos of PUBLIC SUMMER at SUPERFRONT on Flickr.

MITCH MCEWEN is the Director and Founder of Superfront. She is Principal of A. Conglomerate and a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design. The Akademie Schloss Solitude has granted her a residency fellowship in architecture for 2012-2013. Her architectural work has been published in Architectural Record and the New York Times, and her writing in African-American studies has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (IRAAS, Columbia University, 2007, 2009). Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than fifteen exhibits and published 4 exhibition catalogues. In 2006, she was invited to join the adjunct faculty of Columbia GSAPP as Adjunct Assistant Professor to create a new cross-disciplinary course for urban planners and urban designers. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia GSAPP and A.B. from Harvard.