Open letter to architects (and other tragic heroes)

It is time to bring the noise in a big way. No more whining. No more complaining. If you are still around – congratulations – you are one of the few left. Now let’s feel those bass cannons.

 

Images of sonic weapon and following text from BLDG BLOG article here:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/bass-ganglia.html

Inspired by experimental Japanese sound weapons prototyped during World War II, Alberto Tadiello’s E13 000625 (2010) mounts a bass cannon onto the wall of an art gallery, where it greets visitors with an alarming, vibratory blurt. 

Régine Debatty calls it “the sound that hits you in the stomach.”

2011 – The (new) Manifesto

*a work in progress*

I’m stating the obvious I know, but this has been a really difficult few years for the practice of architecture. Thankfully, things have really stabilized and thanks to that I have had a chance now to sit back and review past successes and failures. And the New Year presents an opportunity to pen these as a guide for future practice.

The project successes have been amazing – the whole reason I started the practice to begin with. There have also been a number of misfires, and they have been directly attributable to breaking my own rules. Rules that, prior to a global economic meltdown, seemed effortless and ingrained thanks to previous mentors who had already been through a downturn. Somehow though, (because of the lack of good jobs, because of the failed economy, because I had a house payment due) I was able to rationalize that it was OK to bend the rules temporarily, with a promise to return to normal later. Not following these rules has been the main reason for my stresses these last few years, and in the end it really had nothing to do with the outside forces like I had originally rationalized. I caused my own stress. Go figure.

So here they are. They are intended here as a guideline for me, but they have value here to future clients, too.

1-Love is a Requirement

No more superficial projects. No more degrading projects. Ever. Every new project, regardless of size, needs to have an end goal to be a source of pride; for me, for the rest of the design team, for the client, for the community. Life is too short to accept anything less.

2-Equivalent Expectations

As an architect, I am expected to know all the adopted building codes, new model energy codes, all the latest building materials (tested or not), and be current on all my continuing education requirements. In addition, I am expected to have all the latest technology (BIM, drafting, graphic, analysis and otherwise) and hardware to run it completely under control. OK – I accept. As a client, I now have basic expectations of you, or I can’t accept your project. Good clients:

1. Understand their own businesses/homes, and make conservative decisions based on that understanding that they share with the design team as project goals.
2. Have a building program that identifies required spaces and square footages. If they don’t, we will create one as the first phase of work as a requirement before proceeding to any design work. No more shortcuts. Period.
3. Share their budgets. OK this maybe should be #1. This is the single biggest reason for recent project crashes. If you honestly don’t know your budget, we’ll help you figure it out as a work product, because you need to know it immediately so the designer can make informed decisions. If you already know it, and decide you just don’t want to share it, keep walking…
4. Have funding that matches their budget. I’m tired of being cast in the role of “banker”.

3-Hard work is required, but Talent is King

I come from a blue collar steel town, and I’ve been working my guts out since I was 15. I routinely work more hours on a project than original projections. When #1 above is satisfied, it doesn’t feel like work. But here’s the dirty little secret – project inspirations can (and usually do) come in flurry and explosion of visions and sudden understandings. These flashes, of course,  have their origins in the years and years of background training and education. The project needs to be set up to allow that flash of inspiration to guide the whole team to a successful conclusion, and the team needs to allow that spark to be the guide and follow it. If it isn’t followed, the project will fail. Great architecture is like great songwriting – inspiration is a required ingredient. If you don’t care about this, you probably don’t really care about #1 either.

Upcycle Living – Phoenix, AZ

Here is a great local company that I really like.  These containers are inevitably not reused because it is cheaper to build new ones than to ship them back, and they are great frames for construction. I bet solutions like this this end up factoring in to part of the rebuilding effort in Haiti, too. I’m touring the local model that they have built on Roosevelt (not far from my first office), and will post some pictures of that trip.

http://upcycleliving.com/

Bruce Nauman – “Leave the Land Alone”

This installation occurred in LA on September 12.

The link to the NYT blog is here (and excerpted below): http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/seeing-things-written-on-the-sky/

Photos by Andreas Branch/Patrick McMullan, courtesy of ForYourArtSkywriters spell out “Leave the Land Alone,” the message of Bruce Nauman’s “Untitled 1969/2009,” over the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, Calif., on Sept. 12.

Seeing Things is a biweekly design column by Brooke Hodge, a design writer and curator based in Los Angeles.

Last Saturday morning, the Los Angeles art community gathered to kick off the fall season. Artists, curators and collectors met — not in a gallery but on the lawn of a Pasadena, Calif., home — to witness the realization of a site-specific project by the artist Bruce Nauman.

When he was living in Pasadena in 1969, Nauman proposed a skywriting piece for an earth-art exhibition: a single plane would write “Leave the Land Alone” in the loops and arabesques of classic script. It was never executed, perhaps because it was too expensive, or maybe it wasn’t taken seriously.

That is, until the curator and writer Andrew Berardini came across Nauman’s proposal in a book of the artist’s collected writings. Berardini worked with Jay Belloli of Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts, where they both serve as curators, to bring the four simple words to life in the sky above the Arroyo Seco, a scenic canyon and important watershed charged with history, not to mention environmental issues.

Forty years after Nauman committed his words to the page, five planes streaked across the sky spelling out Nauman’s message in the capital letters dictated by contemporary skywriting practice (which, like almost everything else, has gone digital). The capital letters lent the elegiac text an extra measure of assertiveness. Giving new meaning to the term “temporary installation,” the words vanished in minutes.

When Nauman first conceived of the project, it may have been targeted at “Land Art,” which was then in its ascendancy, but “Leave the Land Alone” was all the more resonant this fall, just two weeks after the massive Station Fire cut a vast swath of destruction through the nearby Angeles National Forest. Nauman’s skywriting project is one of a series of projects commissioned for the exhibition “Installations Inside/Out,” curated by Belloli and Sinead Finnerty-Pyne, to mark the Armory’s 20th anniversary.

Members of L.A.’s art community watch as the words of Nauman’s “Untitled 1969/2009″ appear in the sky above the home of Molly Munger and Steve English at a viewing party hosted by the Armory Center for the Arts, Karyn Kohl and ForYourArt’s Bettina Korek.

SF Precedent – At home in PHX?

Not only is this an interesting solution, but it makes good financial sense to develop (even temporarily) underutilized sites in downtown PHX. Something like this would be right at home along Roosevelt, and help reinforce the City’s commitment to the developing art scene.

This from the Architect’s Paper Blog, posting by Lydia Lee (http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/4337.)

While the recession has put a damper on development along San Francisco’s Octavia Boulevard, the mayor’s office has reached out to Douglas Burnham of Envelope A+D to come up with something cool to temporarily fill the two vacant lots that front Hayes Green at the intersection of Octavia and Fell.

Burnham’s plan sounds like a lot of fun. He plans to transform the space into a mini-shopping, dining, and entertainment destination called PROXY–using a series of modular units that will be recyclable in two or three years when things ratchet up again. The vision includes a group of  pop-up stores,  a food court served by “slow food” carts, an art gallery, and a courtyard for projecting outdoor movies.  Design-wise, the spaces will make their transient nature apparent, revealing their infrastructure (e.g., wiring, water storage) and their modular assembly.

We know what those contrived shopping-n-dining plazas feel like (to wit:  Santana Row), so we can’t wait to see what happens when you have an architect as the prime mover. With buy-in from the city and from the neighborhood association, Burnham plans to put things in place this spring.  See below for an idea of what will replace a parking lot and a bunch of weeds.  How inspiring is that?

A Place to Sleep

This organization is focused on trying to solve the housing problem in a way that is certainly more sustainable, but sure to incite.  By using shipping containers that are left in ports (it is cheaper to build new ones than to ship them back), they are re purposing the containers to create simple, affordable solutions.

Their website link: http://aplacetosleep.org/index.html

Their current woes: http://www.ecohomemagazine.com/green-builders/proposal-to-turn-shipping-containers-into-homes-draws-negative-reaction-from-fort-worth-texas-council.aspx

Of course they are running into issues that will ultimately effect how they will present and build their efficient solutions. It seems that there is currently a gap between what the public (or even more importantly City Council) views as acceptable and what the group can currently deliver.  It will be interesting to see if  design can move the needle on this stalemate.

Reburbia finalists announced

The winners of Reburbia, the Suburban Design Competition, have just been announced today. The competition, sponsored jointly by Dwell and Inhabitat.com, called for design solutions that would address the problems that plague present-day suburbia by envisioning different scenarios for the future.

This happens to be my favorite by Galina Tahchieva, and you can see the full posting here: http://www.re-burbia.com/2009/08/04/sprawl-building-types-repair-toolkit/

Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing the Urban Fabric by Galina Tahchieva

“Revolution, baby.”

As I am working up a plan to try and salvage a large-scale residential project by taking a more in-depth look at the pro-forma (no small feat considering how land and housing prices have changed), I am reminded of the design successes we had on a similar project in Tempe in 2006. That project, too, was about more efficiently utilizing the land and doing it in a more appropriate way. It was also about playing directly to the specific location (a group of properties adjacent to Arizona State), so the product offering was very dependent on place – focusing mostly on student housing and working within the existing zoning requirements. Unfortunately, that developer also could not weather the coming economic storm, but the lessons learned there apply to the work we are doing now to understand just how exactly new projects are supposed to get built in the new economy.

The good news: The days of “build it and they will come” are over, at least for the near future.

The bad news: The inverse that seems to be in play, “perfect build” let’s call it, is much deeper water than we architects are used to. The product needs to be spot-on. Exactly the right price. Exactly the right style. Exactly the right size. Exactly the right location. And while the design is humming without hitch, it needs to be equally matched with an over-performing financial analysis that the banks will take notice of so developers even have a shot of  getting a construction loan.

At least in the metropolitan Phoenix area, I can’t really complain about this “new rules” condition. I have watched almost an entire generation build mostly shoddy homes in areas that should not have been built on anyway in further expanding concentric rings away from center city. In addition to being over-priced, the obnoxiously bad home and development designs were outdone only by the shockingly bad workmanship (and that fulfills my sweeping generalization quota for this paragraph). My industry, the building industry, has certainly “made our bed”.

So, what’s next then?

As the rock band Silversun Pickups would sing…”revolution, baby.”

Exterior Rendering

Section 1

Section 2

Floor Plan