Sedum America Style

I for one would welcome a green roof-a-thon here in the States, and it seems like Cincinnati may be throwing down the gauntlet:

 

Officials want to see more green roofs on building tops in Cincinnati.

 

The City Council on Wednesday became the first in Ohio with a plan to channel grants and loans to residents and businesses to replace tar and shingles with vegetation.

 

Supporters of the idea want to see Cincinnati become a leader in green roofs, a European-born movement that has spread to only a few U.S. cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle. […]

 

A report by the Green Roof Research Program at Michigan State University estimates that 12 percent of all flat-roofed buildings in Germany are covered with vegetation. It noted several barriers to widespread acceptance in the United States, including lack of government incentives or tax breaks.

 

”What the city of Cincinnati is doing is the largest effort I have heard of,” Monsarrat said. ”It will be interesting to watch that and see how it works.”

 

Hey Portland, are you going to let Cincy get away with that? How about you Chicago? Mayor Mike? Let’s up the ante here…

 

Less Parking

Apropos to the post below, it seams as though some cities are beginning to rethink the unhelpful and backward urban policy of minimum parking requirements for new construction.

 

Like nearly all U.S. cities, D.C. has requirements for off-street parking. Whenever anything new is built — be it a single-family home, an apartment building, a store or a doctor’s office — a minimum number of parking spaces must be included. The spots at the curb don’t count: These must be in a garage, a surface lot or a driveway.

 

D.C. is now considering scrapping those requirements — part of a growing national trend. Officials hope that offering the freedom to forgo parking will lead to denser, more walkable, transit-friendly development. […]

 

Parking requirements — known to planners as ”parking minimums” — have been around since the 1950s. The theory is that if buildings don’t provide their own parking, too many drivers will try to park on neighborhood streets.

 

In practice, critics say, the requirements create an excess supply of parking, making it artificially cheap. That, the argument goes, encourages unnecessary driving and makes congestion worse. The standards also encourage people to build unsightly surface lots and garages instead of inviting storefronts and residential facades, they say. Walkers must dodge cars pulling in and out of driveways, and curb cuts eat up space that could otherwise be used for trees. […]

 

”We’re forcing people (through parking requirements) to invest in spaces for automobiles rather than in spaces for people,” she said. ”There’s no way to recover that use.”

 

Excess off-street parking is insidiously destructive public policy; it’s bad for the environment (more greenhouse gases), bad for cities (more traffic), bad for neighborhoods (dangerous and inhospitable curb cuts) and bad for buildings (less space for people).

 

As a resident of a dense urban neighborhood, I can confidently say that neighborhoods (and blocks) are safer and more vibrant when stoops and storefronts are active and cars stay on the street.

 

That’s not to say there should be no off-street parking whatsoever, just that it should be geared toward appropriate scale development and, as the article suggests, should stipulate reasonable maximums rather than minimums.

 

This is a good step, and other creative driving disincentives, along with an imperative policy towards better transit, would go a long way to creating healthier, happier and more pleasant communities for people outside of their cars.

 

You and Whose Money

Exciting architecture!  But, who’s going to live in it?

 

A Constructive Example?

China seems an awfully problematic place to turn when looking for inspiration to jumpstart the still shameful rebuilding efforts in New Orleans.

 

However one feels about its other policies, the Chinese government is clearly not afraid to invest in the future of its cities…

 

Meanwhile, three full years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, much of the city remains a wasteland…

 

…

 

Yet the kind of visionary urban plan that could address these issues in a bold and thoughtful way has yet to materialize. Instead, some of the country’s greatest architectural minds are inventing the future in cities like Beijing, Shenzhen and Dubai, where their talents are more appreciated

 

You’d think forced evictions, inadequate compensation, repression of dissent and official corruption would be enough to disqualify China as an model example of anything, much less the monumental physical, economic and social task of rebuilding a predominantly poor and black American city.

 

One might even infer the ability of the Chinese to “invest” in their cities in such an impressive way may be inextricable from their “other policies”. Policies so problematic that even some of those “greatest architectural minds” often stop to consider what it means to sell their talents to an “appreciative” client like China.

 

News in a Box

My first impression of the new Grimshaw designed bus shelters and newsstands popping up around the city has been an unqualified “meh”.

 

It seems the stainless and glass boxes would feel more at home in Toronto say, or some European second city, than on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn; and it’s hard not to immediately imagine the gleaming boxes adorned with graffiti, broken glass, and the other scrapes and bruises of New York life. They look vulnerable and high maintenance.

 

The Times discusses another important aspect of the new stands: the implications to the newsstand operators. It sounds like they may be getting the short end of the city’s lucrative contract with Cemusa:

 

Before 2003, newsstand operators paid the city a licensing fee, but owned and paid for their newsstands and, under certain circumstances, could sell them. Now the newsstands are owned by Cemusa, and operators pay a two-year city license fee of $1,076.

 

Some 280 current operators are being given new newsstands, free of charge, and Cemusa is responsible for maintaining them. But the newsstand operators do not share in advertising revenues…

 

Michael Hajovsky, who has owned newsstands for two decades, runs a pre-Cemusa stand on 46th Street and Broadway… He is still angry that his two stands “were confiscated without any compensation by New York City,” he said. “In a couple of years I would like to retire,” Mr. Hajovsky, 66, said. “But now I’m no longer an owner, I am a renter, and my pension is very small.”  [Emphasis mine]

 

Disinvesting the operators from their stands seems like a terrible long term move. Couple that with questionable design (at least in terms of function and upkeep), and these designer boxes may end up being bad news.

 

Whitewashed Modesty

The piece in last week’s New Yorker on Santiago Calatrava was interesting enough, but was it me, or did his self-effacement border on disingenuous?

 

“Architect’ comes from the Greek, and means ‘the one who commands the workers,’ ” he says. “The name of the architect gets forgotten. I learned this very early: that the day before the opening you are responsible for everything, and the day after the opening you are nobody. That is part of the job: you have to take your bag and your tools and go and build something else.”

 

That’s a beautiful idea, one that I can certainly appreciate, but Santiago Calatrava?

 

Today’s top architects, including Calatrava, are hardly anonymous: the real-estate trade press in New York refers to the prospective PATH terminal at the World Trade Center as “Calatrava Station.”

 

And:

 

…over lunch in the Café Calatrava, a ground-floor restaurant in the prow of the pavilion, which, a couple of years ago, was renamed in the architect’s honor. (“We called to ask him if we could use his name,” Elysia Borowy-Reeder, the senior director of communications, told me. “He said sure. I think he thought it had always been called the Café Calatrava.”)

 

The modesty bit is charming to a point, but he is clearly far from the introverted, anonymous artist that he professes. Santiago, you’re a Starchitect® for crying out loud! Go with it!!

 

Ionic, or Ironic?

OK, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume this Slate piece is meant as sarcasm, (though I’m not so sure Mr. Rybczynski is predisposed to irony)…

 

The real surprise is that a campaign based on change eschewed Gehry-esque billowing-cloud shapes, Libeskindian jagged shards, and even stainless-and-maple Starbucks moderne. Is Obama a closet Classicist, or is this merely another measure of this contradictory politician?

 

…because of all the vapid over-analysis of the Mile High columns, this one might actually win an award for stupid.

 

Glass Houses

From the once esteemed Wall Street Journal, we learn that many homeowners are simply shocked to find that their newly minted, west facing, high rise apartments, with full walls of glass, actually require window shades.

 

The air conditioning could barely keep the temperature tolerable as sun baked the $1.5 million apartment on summer afternoons. And the sun bleached her pair of brightly colored European sectional sofas, which cost $20,000.

 

In June, Ms. Antani gave in, spending $12,000 on motorized shades that she keeps lowered during the day. “I love being able to see everything,” says Ms. Antani, a 23-year-old graduate student. But “the sun’s just in your eyes; you can’t focus. Everything is so bright.” [Emphasis mine].

 

She “gave in”? Spending .8% of the condo cost on an essential furnishing is a sacrifice? C’mon folks, better journalism please.

 

And setting aside the socio-economic implications of a 23 year old grad student affording a $1.5 million condo, glazing technology is simply much better than is being described here. It sounds like our heroine (and her prized “European sectional sofas”) might have bought into an over-priced and cheaply made building.

 

The problem, which the article barely acknowledges, is that glass residential towers are de rigueur in urban real estate these days, yet only a small fraction are built with the budgets and design integrity required to responsibly integrate all that glass. The annoyances expressed by miss sun-in-her-eyes and others in the article suggest cheaply made glass towers are surely energy hogs of the highest order.

 

Buildings account for roughly 40% of all energy use in the U.S.(residential buildings account for 54% of that). We need better policies at all levels of government to raise the quality of our built environment and reduce energy use by buildings, especially as it relates to irresponsible developers out to make a quick buck on a high-end fad. I’d like to see stories focusing on that rather than the banal hardships of un-savvy luxury condo buyers.

 

And by the way, the issue of dead birds is very real.

 

Crabgrass Modern

 

 

Imagine that, environmentally conscious landscape design.

 

…a number of (landscape) designers have begun to champion an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with a sensitivity to aesthetics and a flexibility that they said was missing from green-gardening crusades of the past.

 

This is obviously a wonderful thing, and some of the work in the Times piece is outstanding, but articles like this tend to read a bit like trend-spotting, rather than journalism (I do realize it’s the Home & Garden section).

 

Another point: conventions are extremely powerful and once set, quite difficult to alter. Getting clients, much less entire industries, to shift from broken, destructive conventions is no small task:

 

Still, he and other designers said, the message of conservation and environmental responsibility cannot be couched in punitive terms if it is to succeed. “People shouldn’t have to make a choice between beauty and sustainability,” Ms. Cochran said. “Our work is designed so that I am able to say to our clients during a presentation, ‘Oh, and by the way, its also sustainable.’ ”

 

If articles like this help the cause as part of broader popular narrative that’s great, but let’s try to avoid giving “sustainability” the whiff of second-home-exceptionalism.

 

Well Enough Played

So, after all that fuss, 2 Columbus Circle seems to have turned out pretty OK.

 

Cloepfil is a sophisticated architect who, at his best, can endow simple geometries with a powerful dignity. His style couldn’t be more different from that of Edward Durell Stone’s late period, which dances on the edge of kitsch, and he has tried to transform Stone’s fussy marble froufrou into something serious and tasteful. Sometimes, as in the long, turning lines of glass, he manages to assert himself firmly enough to keep the old building at bay. At other times, like at the base of the building, where he has kept all but one of Stone’s lollipop-shaped columns and put them behind glass, he seems to have given up altogether and settled for a curatorial role.

 

I can’t say I fully understood the lengthy, vehement and extremely high-profile efforts to save the original building for all eternity. It seems as though many people only liked it because they got used to hating it so much:

 

the building provides an object lesson in the inexorable march of architectural fashion and may point to an even more basic truth about people and buildings: we get used to things we don’t like and then come to like things we’ve got used to.

 

Regardless, the new building will certainly do something the old one couldn’t muster the architectural integrity to do: actually function as an art museum.

 

Manhattan as Wind Farm

Now we’re talking.

The plan, while still in its early stages, appears to be the boldest environmental proposal to date from the mayor, who has made energy efficiency a cornerstone of his administration.

 

Mr. Bloomberg said he would ask private companies and investors to study how windmills can be built across the city, with the aim of weaning it off the nation’s overtaxed power grid, which has produced several crippling blackouts in New York over the last decade.

While it’s unlikely something like this will happen anytime soon, you’ve got to hand it to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for even going there.

Whatever your opinion of Mayor Bloomberg, the scope of his environmental agenda is admirable. But as we saw with another great idea of his, getting far reaching, ambitious projects through New York’s political landscape is unimaginably difficult.

UPDATE: I think this article is making a rather simplistic critique of the windmill proposal. (Though there are some illustrations in the article that take some funny jabs.)

 

UPDATE 2: Also, a slightly tongue-in-cheek piece on the mixed history of Dutch windmills in Manhattan.

 

UPDATE 3: My pals at Pinko Magazine share their thoughts on the issue.

 

Giving Architecture a Bad Name

Must we pretend to take this nonsense seriously? 

From a distance, the pavilion — with its massive, steel-reinforced Douglas fir columns and beams and its roof of angled, suspended glass planes — looks like an explosion in an architecture factory. [Emphasis added] 

Please stop.

Prefab Promises

I saw the ‘Home Delivery’ exhibit at MoMA last month and was left a bit more bummed than inspired. This slideshow from Slate hints at some of what bugged me:  

“Prefabricated houses have remained an elusive goal for architects, and the MoMA show is a stylish litany of second-place finishers, also-rans, if-onlys, and downright losers.”

There is a sense, ultimately, of failure in most of the projects in the show, if the idea is that prefab techniques can generate truly desirable and affordable homes. As the show illustrates, this promise has never been fulfilled in a meaningful way. And the full-scale works in the adjacent lot felt a bit gimmicky, again, if we’re focused on the real world potential of prefab to better people’s lives and environments.

The most interesting (and slightly incongruous) work in the show was by San Diego architect Teddy Cruz. The Parc Foundation in Manhattan currently has a worthwhile show up exploring this work.