Photo credits from left to right: Kyle R. Brooks; Steven Yavanian; Frank Guittard; Jason A. Tax.

Be sure to join us on July 8th for the latest in the Architectural League’s Conversations on New York series of public events. This one features former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff, who set in motion many of the most significant urban projects of the past decade, from the Olympic Bid to congestion pricing to PLANYC 2030. Doctoroff will be in conversation with Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker. (Thursday, July 8 | 7:00 p.m. | The Great Hall, The Cooper Union | 7 East 7th Street | 1.5 CEUs).

And that’s not all that’s going on next week. On July 7th, there are two stimulating panel discussions to choose from. Up in East Harlem, a panel discussion and tour of Tapestry, the new mixed-use, green building, will highlight affordable housing and sustainable design. If you’re more up for a debate on what housing in 2050 will look like, the Forum for Urban Design is hosting a moderated discussion of their own. With the American population projected to grow by another 100 million by then, you can listen to two men with very differing opinions talk about how they think the American urban and suburban landscape will have adapted by then.

Speaking of ideas about the future, Crains, in honor of their 25th anniversary, reached out to a variety of New Yorkers from all disciplines and has come up with 25 ideas to create a better, future New York City. These ideas include topics familiar to Omnibus readers, such as how to rethink Governors Island, how to develop the local food chain, and how deal with New York’s traffic.

Back on May 3rd, ground broke on the Via Verde project in the South Bronx, a new mixed-use development that will include a variety of living environments for a multitude of income levels, and is also slated to certified LEED gold upon completion. The project will also help the city get to Mayor Bloomberg’s goal of an additional 165,000 affordable housing units by 2014. Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary for HUD was at the ground-breaking ceremony, was recently interviewed by Architectural Record to discuss the effects of the stimulus package on affordable housing, and the role that architects have in reshaping urban communities. With $13.6 billion in stimulus funds allocated to HUD, that money has been critical to the continued construction of multi-family homes, and both HUD and architects have an unique opportunity to create a new sustainable model for lower-income communities.

The former Domino Sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront has long been the source of contention within the neighborhood regarding future plans for the abandoned site. This past Tuesday, the City Council gave its support for the $1.4 billion development plan to turn the site into a 2,000 unit residential development. With this approval, the project is expected to gain final approval from the City Planning Commission next month. 660 of the units will be for lower income and working class families, and the Community Preservation Corporation, the developer for the site, conceded to reducing the height of the two tallest buildings (although the total number of units will remain the same), and will keep the main refinery building and the 40 foot tall Domino sign intact. Shuttle buses to the nearest subway stop will also be provided, but with the large number of parking spots that are planned for, many fear that the development will not encourage sustainable living in any regard, and have a negative impact on the surrounding community.

Making Policy Public, a program of The Center for Urban Pedagogy, has released their latest poster, “I Got Arrested! Now What?,” the sixth in the series that explores complex public policy through graphic design; past topics have included street vendors and predatory equity. This one deals with the juvenile justice system, following “Chris” from his arrest through trial in court, explaining each phase of the process and even giving important tips.

Image by Iwan Baan via Fast Company

The Summer Warm Up begins this Saturday at P.S 1, featuring Pole Dance by SO-IL, winner’s of the Young Architects Program. Constructed of a large mesh net set on a 16′x16′ grid of metal poles, bungee cords connected to the poles allow visitors to manipulate the net and the yoga balls atop the net. Perhaps the most interactive (and fun!) of the past few installations, you can also manipulate the sound of the poles or watch real-time visualizations of the installation from its own website.

That sounds like a great way to kick off what for many New Yorkers is a three-day weekend. Fireworks are along the Hudson River again this year. Below, a time-lapse video of last year’s display on the Hudson:

NYC Time Lapse July 4th, 2009 from BoB Coon on Vimeo.

If you’re staying in the city, take advantage of the summer weather, and check out Time Out’s guide to the long weekend. And for those that want to stay in Brooklyn, there are a few patriotic events there as well, including a bar crawl in Greenpoint that culminates in a “Most Patriotic” costume competition.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

If, like me, you work elsewhere during weekdays, these factories can seem subdued or even dead. It’s hard to tell which ones have been converted into condos and which still house makers. When I have time, maybe I’ll go back and take pictures during the day of these great old buildings.

The site-specific aspect of the installation was great—it brought both arts-followers and passers-by together on street corners with the artist to watch what had been previously hidden.

One stop was ACME Smoked Fish. Their trucks and logo are familiar, but I had never really paid the factory much attention. Piles of coral-colored salmon made the video compelling and I could have watched all night.

Next was Royal Engraving, and its 250-year-old engraving machines. That’s history for you. That video was a little less striking at first—so much paper—but the subtle, rhythmic moves of the press and the workers responding to them became hypnotic. The satisfying thud of a stack of thick paper being tapped into alignment and the frighteningly efficient swish of a guillotine chopping the stack made for a great sound track. This video, like the ACME video, had only the sounds of work being done, no interviews or voiceovers, just feeling like a spy with x-ray vision.

The last stop was Dobbin Mill, where Robbin Silverberg makes fine art papers. Although this was also a view of fabrication, it didn’t fit in with the other two. Not only was the process less mechanical (though there was a brief view of an awesome paper press), Robbin Silverberg explained what she was doing as she worked, which made the video feel more like a PBS video and less like the vouyeristic view through the wall the other videos achieved. I understand that Sarah Nelson Wright was looking to connect craft and factory fabrication, but I think the three together would have been stronger if they had been more of a type.

That’s just quibbling, though—this was an amazing installation that changed forever the way I see those particular street corners. I can’t wait to see what project Sarah Nelson Wright dreams up next.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

All images by Kirsten Hively. Text adapted from an article originally published on Hively’s blog Catasterist.

Kirsten Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Together with journalist Paul Lukas, she recently co-produced a show at the City Reliquary on the ersatz Candela Structures in Queens, and when not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

Brooklyn Makes
A project by Sarah Nelson Wright
with sound by Jennifer Stock
Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10, 2009
7:30 – 10 p.m.
Pick up a map at Space on Dobbin (50-52 Dobbin Street in Greenpoint) or download a copy from www.brooklynmakes.org

For the past year I have been working on a project called Brooklyn Makes, a site-specific video installation in the Greenpoint Williamsburg Industrial Zone. On October 9th and 10th, streets that normally seem dark and deserted at night will be activated with three large, colorful video projections revealing the highly skilled and creative labor that takes place inside during the day. Captured inside each business, the videos and sounds bring North Brooklyn’s hidden labor onto the public streets.

Manufacturing used to be synonymous with Brooklyn. When I first moved to North Brooklyn, I heard a lot about the area’s industrial past.  The history is written into the architecture: The Pencil Factory, The Gretsch Building, the (now destroyed) Old Dutch Mustard Company.  Many of these buildings have been renovated into residential spaces, while others have been completely leveled to make way for new construction.

Exploring my neighborhood, I noticed that several of the warehouses I assumed were empty or residential were in fact still industrial. A truck would load sheets of marble, a raised gate revealed an elaborate woodshop, methodical drumming turned out to be a printer. I started working for a filmmaker named Isabel Hill who made a documentary in the 1990s about North Brooklyn manufacturing called Made in Brooklyn, which provided an in-depth look at city policies designed to push manufacturers out of Brooklyn. Growing up in the Bay Area in California in towns that have few traces of industry, my impressions of manufacturing mostly came from old films of people working on assembly lines and statistics from the anti-sweatshop movement. What fascinated me about Made in Brooklyn was the way the workers talked about their jobs – jobs that were satisfying, upwardly mobile, highly skilled, and, to my surprise, creative.

Today Brooklyn has a well-developed reputation for creativity, much of it high profile. Bands get their start in new spaces in Bushwick, open studios from Greenpoint to Gowanus showcase artists working in all media and material, DUMBO’s art spaces house cutting edge performance, craft fairs and flea markets provide marketplaces for Brooklyn’s independent makers. These creative practices and events often inhabit the buildings formerly home to Brooklyn’s manufacturers. It is now a familiar story: artists seeking live/work space move into commercial buildings where manufacturers are struggling or being pushed out, the creative and residential presence makes a formerly industrial neighborhood desirable, and most artists eventually get priced out by high-end residential development, fleeing with the manufacturers, left to wander to the next frontier. Unfortunately for many displaced industrial businesses, the cost of relocating in the city often spells doom.

These two groups, artists and manufacturers, have often been pitted against each other, despite sharing some practical needs as well as other, more intangible similarities. In recent years, the explosion of the craft community highlights the act of making as a creative act in itself, one that is highly satisfying even in the absence of design. This is why knitters will pay more for yarn to make a scarf identical to one you can buy for less, the one produced overseas in a factory by a person who is overworked and unfairly paid. There is pleasure both in the act of making and in the act of resisting alienation from the things in our lives that comes with globalization.

The idea of craft today resists the idea of factory, or at least the idea of factory as many people imagine it: abusive, repetitive, and unskilled. But visit many of the surviving manufacturers in Brooklyn and you find the same level of skill, attention and dedication to quality of work that occurs in Brooklyn’s artist studios and craft circles.

In contrast to the work of artists and crafters, who lend value to their work by leaving their marks, most industrial labor is invisible. Hidden behind warehouse doors, the meticulous work of these makers erases their presence from the objects they make. The more perfect the job, the less you see of the person who made it – and the architecture concurs. Often industrial spaces shut out the public, many times with good reason. The manufacturer may have valuable equipment or trade secrets to protect and safety regulations to follow, or, more likely, the sounds and smells may bother passersby or residents.

Something is lost, however, both for the plight of industry in the city and for the consuming public in this invisibility. It is difficult to build public support for manufacturing the public cannot see. In a city where most people work in service industries, knowing how things are made is exciting, and knowing thing are made here, even in small pockets, gives hope in the midst of a disempowering economic system.

During Brooklyn Makes, I hope to give the public a peek into this hidden world. At Royal Engraving, most employees are new immigrants and many start sweeping the floors and end up learning the art of printing business cards and invitations on 250-year-old machines. Acme Smoked Fish, one of the largest smoked fish processors in the United States, employs 150 people. At Dobbin Mill, artist Robbin Silverberg makes handmade paper for artist books on custom equipment made by another nearby manufacturer. Each video provides a unique window into a complex fabrication process.  Come see for yourself!


Images, top to bottom: Worker using a 250-year-old machine to engrave business cards and invitations, photo by Sarah Nelson Wright; A video of Robin Ami Silverberg making paper for artist books projected onto Dobbin Mill, photo by Nicolas Vernhes; Acme Smoked Fish, photo by Sarah Nelson Wright.

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.

Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the book I’m Outta Here! The group met around mid-day at New Work City, one of Manhattan’s first “coworking” communities. The space, located on the 5^th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil (SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in November 2008.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, and telecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps and BarCamps) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

As the material artifacts of offices – messages, documents, photos and plans – are digitized and stored on servers, physical spaces have the potential to become increasingly open, flexible and sharable. Data security concerns aside, one can imagine a future scenario when most of the tools that we need to work effectively will be accessed and stored in “the cloud”. This allows the dynamic reorganization and co-location of people, firms and activities that have been separated since the early days of industrialization, the advent of the hierarchical firm and the rise of cities themselves. For example, an office building might house a conference room that doubles as an entertainment room for the co-located apartments. Such arrangements will require new ways of thinking about private and semi-private spaces, trust and security, and ownership and property.

Rather than lonely, pajama-clad programmers holed up in Grandma’s basement, a closer look at the nature of virtual work reveals that after several years of experimentation — ranging from working from home in relative isolation to slouching uncomfortably at Starbucks — mobile workers (including freelancers, the self-employed, remote workers and entrepreneurs) have begun to band together to form office communities of like-minded coworkers whom they don’t actually work with, but rather, they work alongside in order to “cross-pollinate.”

This cross-pollination comes in many forms, from the informal, water-cooler conversations about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to intensive lunch meetings about bookkeeping for freelancers, and from quickly troubleshooting a Google Calendar feature to collaborating on events and projects. For example, while New Work City hosts regular workshops for technology entrepreneurs, it is also a hub for Open Government meetings.

In late January, on a trip to Kansas City to meet with the Kauffman Foundation, I stumbled into a Panera Bread directly across from my eco-friendly hotel in order to get some lunch within hours after landing. After devouring a bowl of chicken soup in one corner of the nearly-empty restaurant, I noticed two women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle sign on the table that announced “Creative Club” in large letters and “Jelly” in smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly, founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at someone’s apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designer Ezio Manzini, presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such, the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas Workspace, a coworking community for writers and researchers located on a “Am I really in Brooklyn, New York?” street lined with large Victorian houses garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September 2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate “quiet work” like writing with “loud work” such as doing phone interviews, which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking, a community for designers in downtown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at EcoSystems, which is currently located on the 4^th floor, guided us through all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty stair after another since we had exceeded the elevator’s carrying capacity. The building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking community in January 2009, Tyson said, “I want to be surrounded by really smart people…I have a strong affinity for community.” Treehouse will soon be offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested in learning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the day recalled a very different experience that I’d had several weeks earlier while away at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived the rigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from The X-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks that scanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reserve a hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously close to the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out the nearest Internet “café” (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, call AT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, upon entering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed to make calls while in the café. In addition, only one person was allowed to accompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge. Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japan’s Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the country’s unemployed youth who have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of an English telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hour cafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pink comic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs and shower caps for 160 yen in the women’s restroom so that their guests can freshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though I can’t claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hour visit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction, perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found – to my utter surprise – that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative. Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importance of opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers won’t ask “What do you do?” over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East Village but rather “Where do you work?” Rather than merely a place to do work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.

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.