loud paper

where the wild things are

 
Earlier this month at the opening the Safari 7 Reading Room at Columbia University’s Studio X, a cross section of the city’s architecture, landscape, design, and urbanist ecosystem sipped from red plastic cups and milled around an oversized table map listening to podcasts. Meanwhile, from Midtown, Manhattan to Flushing, Queens other animal habitats were teeming with life: snakefish, squirrels, and worms twitching and writhing within the urban environment. Launched over the summer, Safari 7 is a self-guided podcast tour that narrates the wildlife and habitats along the No. 7 subway line.

The project brings together infrastructure, communications, ecology, and participatory design. Produced as a collaboration between Janette Kim and Kate Orff of The Urban Landscape Lab research group at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Glen Cummings of graphic design studio MTWTF, the reading room is not a library in the traditional sense, but a spot where you can take the time to read the nature around the 7 line, listen to a narrative, pick up a map, and plan your own eco-commute. 

You can read my Q&A with Janette, Kate, and Glen over at the Architect's Newspaper.

How did you first conceive of the project?

Janette Kim: Safari 7 started when the three of us—Kate, Glen, and I—started collecting our research on the National Parks Service. The parks provide rangers, maps, and even self-guided cell phone tours that provide access and interpretation of parklands. We began to discuss what would happen if we could provide ranger tours of New York City as a layered urban ecosystem, and started to imagine that this tour could be more hands-on, more exploratory, and follow the notion of a citizen scientist—someone who doesn't just take in information from an authoritative source, but produces it through the process of exploration.

Was the 7 subway line a natural fit? Does Queens County lend itself to ecological study more than the other Boroughs?

Glen Cummings: The 7 line wasn't just a good fit, it was the inspiration. The 30-minute ride from Times Square to Flushing or visa versa is the perfect time to connect to the micro events that are happening right outside the train windows.

JK: We've received suggestions already to do the G and 6 lines, but the 7 train is especially fascinating. We like the fact that it traverses so many different types of neighborhoods and people, and runs through neighborhoods that offer a fascinating history of combined natural and social influences.

Bryant Park is a product of varying interpretations of public investment, from its stint as the Croton Reservoir to the home of the New York Public Library. Jackson Heights is one of our nation's only examples of the Garden City movement and Sunnyside Gardens is one of the nation's first planned communities after World War I. Flushing Meadows is famously the result mass dumping of tons of ash from the city's garbage incineration, the transformation by Robert Moses into a major transportation corridor and the site of two world's fairs, and the ever-encroaching return of a neglected wetlands.

GC: Diversity is a defining characteristic of the borough of Queens: More types of people from more countries, living in more types of places, with an eclectic grouping of creatures and plants around them, than anywhere else in the U.S. The 7 line helped us narrow down this discussion by acting as a natural transect, that is, a line along which you can examine differences.

In addition to urban explorations, what more about our built environment can Safari 7 participants take away from the project?

GC: We are definitely interested in connecting a wide range of people with the urban nature in their own backyards by using mass transportation the means of travel, and by offering up a model for how people can connect to the environment in an active rather than passive way.

Our hope is that viewers and participants become interested and therefore more attuned to the world around them. Most city infrastructure is constructed in a brutal way because government didn't really understand how interconnected environment, health, and commerce were and are. It is the overlaps and intersections between these infrastructures, housing fabrics, human animal and plant habitats that tell the story.

One example is U Thant Island, just south of Roosevelt Island. The construction of the Steinway Tunnel produced a pile of soil that was dumped at the closest high point in the East River floor. The pile emerged from the river as an impromptu island and now has a flock of cormorants nesting there.

We see the 7 line, as well as the whole MTA system, as a tool for urban exploration and a tool to connect with the built natural environment. Robert Moses’s view of connecting the city to nature is to connect the city with the parks and beach as recreation destinations, but we're interested in the inter-connections and micro-environments all the way along the line, and how they are experienced in peoples daily life, not just at the end points.

Above ground trains offer you a spectrum of less-spectacular environments, whose range and impact are even more interesting, because these are the environments we live in. Understanding what lives there, what grows there, how they relate, is what it is all about.

Does a growing awareness of habitats and biodiversity dovetail with trends in sustainability and green building design?

Kate Orff: Sustainable development is inseparable from robust habitats and global biodiversity. Who could imagine living in a world of smooth, glassy, high-tech, supposedly “green” skyscrapers in a world with no bees or bats—surrounded by silent forests and empty seas? How would our crops be pollinated? What would we eat?

Growing awareness of habitats probably reflects a growing understanding of the less superficially technical and more emotional and compassionate side of the sustainability question. We've modified the globe to create human (and as the exhibit shows, deer and geese) habitat all over the world and people are beginning to expand the view and see that in some cases human habitat excludes animal life. In some cases, like we've pointed out in the exhibit, along the 7 line—they co-exist in surprising and unexpected ways.

What is your favorite stop?

KO: I like Bryant Park—the maze of tunnels from different periods of time disorients even the most jaded New Yorker—and I like thinking that just a couple of feet above me someone is reading the newspaper and sunning on this thin lawn carpet. Second choice would have to be Willets Point and the experience of riding through the treetops on my way to US Open tennis match.

GC: Downtown Flushing. My family is from Flushing and I've always loved the bustle of the train station area. The noise, the food, people come from every direction and going in every direction all at once. What a beautiful mess!

Collaborators Glen, Kate, and Janette

 

green scheme

I wrote up a brief piece on Eve Moser's  Seeding the City for I.D. magazine. It is only in the print edition, but I've put the full text below to spread the work on her project. Eve's looking for participants to grow a rooftop patch. No green thumb needed.

You can follow the greenroof takeover on the Seeding the City blog.

Green Scheme

A New York artist harnesses social networking to build roof gardens.

Eve Moser is launching a pyramid scheme. The Brooklyn artist is no Madoff, however— rather than padding her pockets, she’s trying to spread environmental awareness, one roof garden at a time. Participants in her new public art project, Seeding the City, get a homegrown 2-by-4-foot green-roof module installed on their rooftop, but only after they’ve convinced friends and neighbors to join. “It’s about connecting people with their landscape and with each other,” Moser explains.

She conceived Seeding the City in 2007 while working on High Water Line, a chalk boundary that ran through New York waterfront communities 10 feet above sea level to demonstrate the impact of rising oceans. The culturati cheered the project, but Moser wanted to reach the “ecologically repressed”—her term for poor urban communities living with a legacy of industrial pollution. So last summer she began teaching teens at the youth shelter Covenant House how to build the green-roof modules. Once installed, the modules are marked with a rooftop flag and street- level signage to generate interest and word-of-mouth buzz.

Moser is also mapping each location on the project’s website, then using an application that monitors urban heat-island effect to track how much heat the new vegetation is absorbing. Moser hopes that the site, which also hosts blogs, forums, and information on environmental remediation, will foster a community that can spread to other cities. “The challenge is to keep it lively and engaged so it doesn’t die on the vine."

feeling sentient

It took awhile for my brain to formulate the words “science fair” as I walked through Toward the Sentient City, now on view at the Architectural League of New York, but once there I couldn’t shake them. The two words weren’t meant as derogatory or judgmental, quite the opposite. Curator Mark Shepard brought together five projects that embed the urban environment with the technologies of ubiquitous computing—sensors, RFID tags, and networks—and the result is a welcome familiarity.

Here, technology wants you to engage, not just with it, but also with the people and critters in the world around you. Amphibious Architecture, a collaboration between The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, dunks an array of interactive tubes in the East River and the Bronx River. Equipped with sensors, the tubes collect water quality readings and monitor for fish. In the gallery, viewers are asked to text the fish a watery “What up?” and the fish report back on the state of their ecosystem. The architecture here is not just amphibious but anthropomorphic; I sent the fish a message and the fish wrote back “Underwater, it now loud,” signaling the presence of marine life, and urged me to text friends AhoyAnchovie and HeyHerring.

The National Science Fair, first founded in 1941, rose to popularity in the 1950s under the shadow of the cold war. Meanwhile suburban kitchens filled with appliances and ever more complex chemical solutions, science fairs served a double purpose. They trained American youth and offered the public a perceived transparency to the scientific and technological developments. If a high-schooler could build a crystal radio set, then the country’s future is in good hands. In many ways ubiquitous computing a similar model. The complex networks that provide the underpinnings of daily life are made visible; as seen in Trash Track that uses RFID tags to map garbage or Breakout! an experiment in co-working in the city’s café, parks, and public space. 

There’s comfort in that.

Or discomfort, if we use the street furniture developed by JooYoun Paek and David Jimison as an example. Capable of making vagrancy judgments, their Smart Bench uses movement sensors and a hearty robotic system to boot sitters if they lounge too long. Wall text describes all three of the Too Smart City projects (bench, trashcan, and street sign) as “overly enthusiastic”—a phrase that captures and critiques the blind deployment of computational technology in the urban realm. Are Paek and Jimison suggesting that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with these technologies? As our actions in public space are tracked and monitored is the correct response acceptance, awareness, or action?

Just as mid-century science fairs’ optimism was colored by atomic fear, Toward a Sentient City has its own specter: the fate of the environment. Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, Dot Samsen, Ai Hasegawa, Cesar Harada, and Barbara Jasinowicz, comes across at first as a cheerful, hands-on learning station. Designed to call attention to carbon offsets, houseplants are hooked up to devices that tracks their CO2 output. That local system is then tied into a city-wide network of other houseplants which regulates energy usage and carbon absorption. Sounds friendly enough, the plants thrive when everyone in the network gets along. But, if not “then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity.” Users have the option of being “selfless” or “greedy.” Plants live or plants die on collective decision. It’s a grim opposition. But such darkness embedded in the brightly lit gallery is just as welcoming as any sanguine accessibility.

now everyone hearts haertling

From what I can ascertain talking to the friends and family of the late Charles Haertling, the Boulder-area architect was passionately devoted to the natural world and to radical, forward-thinking architecture. His designs blend the two into an organic style totally his own, unabashedly. I wrote a portrait of Haertling and his work for the Archive section of this month's Dwell. I think it captures his iconoclastic dedication to architecture. I couldn't have done it without the help of my lovely and talented friends, graphic designer and artist Laura Haertling (his daughter) and photographer Cody Andresen, who directed me the work and connected me to the rest of the family and to clients. Thank you.

Below, Brenton House, 1969, a foam and steel wonder that made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Sleeper.

Here is a black and white PDF of the piece, sadly, it isn't online and my copy of Dwell hasn't arrived to get a crisp color version.

Download Dwell_retrospective_july_august_2008.

Update: now available online!

  

pink and green

This weekend is the AIA Conference in Boston, exciting, no? No.

Sure, I'll roam the expo floor, but I am really going to Beantown for the new exhibition, Parti Wall, Hanging Green, at pinkcomma gallery. The show features some of my fave firms, young offices that I've been lucky enough to write about or work with over the last couple of years, including: Höweler + Yoon Architecture; MOS; over,under; Studio Luz Architects; and UNI. I love it when the world gets small.

Here's the info:

Ten emerging architecture and design firms collaborated to create a prototype green wall. The planted installation will be suspended from a blank brick surface on the newly converted loft building at 90 Wareham Street in Boston’s South End. The five-story-high structure will be visible from the entrance to the gallery, where the installation’s collaborative design process and works of individual firms will be on display. The ten firms—all of which were formed in the last six years—joined together to establish the Young Architects Boston Group in January. The group’s prototype green wall will illustrate how Boston’s scattered brick surfaces could become opportunities for zero footprint public art that improves the city visually and environmentally.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Viewing, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
After Party, 10:00 p.m. - midnight

pinkcomma gallery
81B Wareham Street, Boston, Massachusetts

gone fishing

Last week I watched a team of artisans paint fake moss on a fake Cyprus tree, which soaks in a fake swamp intended for very real alligators (including an albino one). I was on a building tour of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, home of the Steinhart Aquarium. In addition to a research center, offices, exhibits, dioramas, and fish tanks, the building contains a spherical planetarium, the form mirrored by a four-story rainforest biosphere. Let’s not forget the three different interactive aquariums, holding up to 100,000 gallons of water each. On top, a green roof planted with native species molds itself over the whole kit and caboodle.

Renzo Piano is given due credit as architect, but the building is so complex even that term seems to be overreaching. So then, who to laud? Arup did a bang up job with the sustainability, MEP, and structural features.  Stantec Architecture (formerly Chong Partners Architecture) is the architect of record. Rana Creek Living Architecture consulted on the living roof. And there are exhibition designers Thinc and Cinnabar, aquarium experts PBS&J, and the dozens of people who hand-painted the tide pools…or the rollercoaster designer who was called in to craft the helix ramp in the rainforest.   

Consider the photo above: I took this shot from within a 9-inch-thick acrylic tunnel, looking through a 100,000-gallon tank (the flooded Amazon rainforest will eventually contain arapaima, giant catfish, vegetarian piranhas, and a giant anaconda) and into the curve of the glass biosphere. That dappled light is from the skylights punched in the living roof.

An interlocking network of designers, contractors, engineers, and artisans isn’t really unique (well, until you start adding scientists, biologists, and 38,000 animals), but maybe, just maybe, it chips away at the starchitect mantle.

accessories for modern living

This is not quite a typical loud paper post, since I don't think I've ever written about jewelry design and only snark about fashion, but I wanted to call two designers to the fore.

First up: Kiosk sends word that Salvor Projects is having a studio sale, beginning today. All I can say is that their mathy, semi-architectural patterns and textures are amazing. I hope I can crave out some time to make it to 28th Street.

Second: Mollie Dash. I met Mollie at the Brooklyn Flea, the new flea market near my house. (Disclosure: I asked her to create a piece for me as a birthday present to myself, it will be ready on Sunday, I can't wait.) Each of her pieces is handmade and original. She repurposes old costume jewelry, vintage beads, and chains into sophisticated designs that are modern, with a little tarnished glory.

Here's Mollie on what makes her work eco friendly:

I run my studio out of my home, where I practice daily conscientious decision making on the amount of waste I produce and how many resources I require to live. I discovered recently that environmentalism is not about doing everything perfectly; it's about doing what you can. How this translates into the products I make is that they're made by a person who strives to leave a small footprint on the earth.

In my work I use many discarded, thrifted, donated, and yard sale-derived materials. I prefer metal over plastic. I like to pick things up off the street. I use a minimum of new stones. I use cotton and linen cord, rather than leather. I make things last.

prairie style

Via.

The March 31 issue of the New Yorker features a droll short story by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in Chicago, Great Experiment mixes doses of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with a former-Baffler proofreader’s midlife crisis. Straight out of the gate it offers a blissfully succinct critique of green building:

The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were going organic. They had light-green facades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.

There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.

Just wait until he describes the interiors of the hip and aging. Spot on, Beck poster included. Also, check out Eugenides’ sweeping and perverse Middlesex—it is one of my all-time favorite reads.

it's a gas

Eric Paulos, Ergo

CO2, CH4, N2O, NOx, SO2, or  O3?

I am not sure that this is the party for smokers, SUV drivers, or people who struggle with body odor, but Berkeley-based architect and all around character Jordan Geiger sends word of Vapor, the new show at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery which opens tonight. Geiger and co-curator Alison Sant have assembled a group of artists, architects, and designers preoccupied with air quality, an illusive medium at best. The works are varied, some object-driven, some conceptual, some techy, all with a whiff of the political. The exhibition features: Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos, and Preemptive Media.

The curators write:

Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as subject matter, medium and metaphor.

Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies—sensors, databases, and communications equipment— that are only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also refers to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art's medium. Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

The curators have also put together an impressive line up of public events and lectures, as well the Vapor Symposium, co-sponsored by and hosted at the California College of the Arts, will take place April 19, 2008. Who doesn’t want to tour Jeremijenko’s One Trees Project? (Which involves biking around to some of the piece’s 1,000 cloned trees.) There is a catch: “Participants will also help to render air pollution evident by wearing Clear Skies Facemasks that visualize urban air quality.” Breathe deep.

I heart agriculture culture

Via Pedal Tractors

When Work AC’s project Public Farm 1 was named the winner of the Young Architects Program at P.S.1, it made me think that agriculture would be the next big architectural meme. (A theme that’s been working through the art world for a some time now. In 2006, I wrote on artist/farmer Matthew Moore.)

Clearly, farming is in the air. This week the wise folk at CUP staged a discussion between Futurefarmer Amy Franceschini (archived loud paper interview here) and Michael Hurwitz, director of New York’s Greenmarket program. Today Pruned has a great round up of aggie-inspired art and architecture. Included is Edible Estates, the project by architect and artist Fritz Haeg that replaces the domestic front lawn with victory gardens.  I look out at the vacant lot outside my window and dream of summer tomatoes.