Archivo de la etiqueta: Boston

The Indicator: Sheltering in Place

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Last Sunday James S. Russell, architecture critic for Bloomberg News and a former editor for Architectural Record, mused on his personal blog about the possible influence Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth may have had on Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers who was also a student there.

Mr. Russell describes the campus as “a gigantic eerie, dozen-building concoction of grim ribbed-concrete hubris….” This is the sort of description that drives right to the heart of urban alienation. It’s Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This ability to sum up and drive the nail home is one reason he is the architecture critic for Bloomberg News. No side-stepping here.

It didn’t take long for someone to pounce on and, to use the popular pundit term, “eviscerate” Mr. Russell for what was viewed as his own hubris for thinking out loud about a sensitive topic. “Crass” is what writer Rory Olcayto called it from across the pond over at Architects Journal. Besides being a popular British put-down, Crass was also a British punk rock band that advocated anarchism. How dare he attempt to relate something he thinks about a lot (architecture) to the psychology of Bomber #2. Note: There is no evidence to support that attending the University of Massachusetts or living in its Brutalist architecture leads to violent behavior.

Meaningless aside but I thought I’d mention it anyway: I used to live across the street from Rudolph’s Lindemann Mental Health Center in Boston. I don’t think it had any effect on me one way or the other.

Maintenance workers at Cooper Union were directed to screw down all fourth floor windows in anticipation of angry Cooper Unionists hanging angry protest banners in response to the official announcement Tuesday that said institution will start charging tuition in 2014. That will teach them. Cooper Union’s president, Jamshed Bharucha, in the New York Times, said that they are operating under a $12-million annual deficit. Who doesn’t operate under a deficit? Times have changed. Idealism apparently has not.

Brian Eno, ambient music pioneer, has developed healing light and sound installations for the recently-opened Montefiore Hospital in Hove, east Sussex. Healthcare architects take note. According to The Independent, “Research has provided evidence that the use of art and music can produce improved psychological, physiological and biological outcomes of clinical significance in patient care.” Currently the music may only be heard in this one hospital, but Mr. Eno may have other such collaborations with architects in the works.

Andy Cook, an urban planning student (what do they do again?) at MIT provided a moment of reflection in the midst of his “letter” from the lockdown by reminding us that on the night and day of Boston’s “shelter in place” NASA announced that their Kepler satellite has discovered two earth-like planets. Caveat: They are 1,200 light-years away. Abstract from the journal Science: We present the detection of five planets—Kepler-62b, c, d, e, and f—of size 1.31, 0.54, 1.95, 1.61 and 1.41 Earth radii (R⊕), orbiting a K2V star at periods of 5.7, 12.4, 18.2, 122.4, and 267.3 days, respectively. The outermost planets (Kepler-62e and -62f) are super-Earth-size (1.25 < planet radius ≤ 2.0 R⊕) planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of their host star, receiving 1.2 ± 0.2 and 0.41 ± 0.05 times the solar flux at Earth’s orbit (S☉). Theoretical models of Kepler-62e and -62f for a stellar age of ~7 Gyr suggest that both planets could be solid, either with a rocky composition or composed of mostly solid water in their bulk.”

This changes absolutely nothing. Frank O’Hara’s former place of employment, MoMA is still going to tear down the American Folk Art Museum. As he wrote (and this has absolutely nothing to do with anything but I have always wanted to quote this):

I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Oh, American Fold Art Museum. I keep accidentally typing “fold” instead of “folk”. Maybe that is what MoMA needs to do: fold it in.

Going back to Mr. Cook at MIT. He admitted that he took a walk outside because he had run out of coffee. But as he said in the more grandiose manifesto-like passages of his letter, “the role of the planner is to confront these contradictions head-on.” This, intentionally taken out of context by yours truly, was the lead-in to taking us back to galactic scale: “Perhaps we could take a [sic] perspective of the astronomers, discovering a new planet 1,200 light-years away. How have those distant people gotten themselves into the mess they’re in? How could they begin to get themselves out?”

Maybe Brian Eno knows.

The Indicator: Sheltering in Place originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 26 Apr 2013.

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Happy 96th Birthday I.M. Pei

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Ieoh Ming Pei, the Chinese-American architect who is arguably the greatest living member of the modernist generation of architects, turns 96 today. When he received his Pritzker Prize in 1983, the jury citation stated that he “has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms”.

Though known as a modernist, Pei has rejected the implications of globalism inherent in the “International Style“, instead advocating contextual development and variation in style. He has commented “the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose”. On a trip to China in 1974 he even urged Chinese architects to look more to their architectural tradition, rather than designing in a western style.

Pei’s most well known work is likely his crystalline extension to the Louvre in Paris; other highly influential works include the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.

To celebrate I.M. Pei’s 96th birthday, we invite you to take a look over the catalog of his works here on ArchDaily, after the break…

AD Classics: Le Grand Louvre
AD Classics: JFK Presidential Library

AD Classics: Bank of China Tower

AD Classics: East Building, National Gallery of Art

AD Classics: Luce Memorial Chapel

AD Classics: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

AD Classics: Everson Museum

Happy 96th Birthday I.M. Pei originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 26 Apr 2013.

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The Devastating Effects Of Climate Change Come Alive In GIFs

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Jefferson-0-feet

Have you ever wondered what major coastal cities across the world will look like if the worst of climate change predictions come true? So did Nickolay Lamm, a 24-year-old researcher and artist who saw The New York Times‘s “What Could Disappear,” a series of interactive maps that depicted the effects of rising sea levels from climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global mean sea level has risen between 4 to 8 inches over the past century, and will continue rising between 8 inches and 6.6 feet by 2100.

Having only seen the over-exaggerated imagery of blockbuster Hollywood disaster movies, Lamm wanted to bring The NYT‘s maps to life with GIFs, in order to give a more accurate portrayal of  what our world will look like if necessary measures are not taken to combat climate change.

Meticulously assembled with computer software and an infinite supply of coffee, Lamm’s GIFs show 4 major USA metropolitan areas inundated with 5, 12, and 25 ft of water respectively. Click through to see the devastation unfold before your eyes!

Statue-of-Liberty-0-feet

Lamm compiled images of major US landmarks, and spent between 5 to 15 hours to illustrate each scene on Photoshop. According to Lamm’s posting on StorageFront.com, the GIFs display each city consumed by sea water as follows:

0 feet: Today’s sea level
5 feet: 100 to 300 years
12 feet: Potential level in 2300
25 feet: Potential level in coming centuries

1. Miami

gif1

A view of Ocean Drive in Miami, FL

gif2

Miami’s famed South Beach

South-Beach-Map-25-feet

Almost all of the Miami metropolitan area will be consumed by water if sea levels rise by only 5 feet

2. Boston

gif3

An ariel view of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood 

gif4

The Boston Harbor Hotel

gif5

Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA

3. New York City

gif6

New York City’s iconic Statue of Liberty

Statue-of-Liberty-Map-25-feet

The effects of rising sea levels on the New York metropolitan area

4. Washington, D.C.

gif7

The Washington Monument on the National Mall

gif8

D.C.’s famous Jefferson Memorial

Jefferson-Memorial-Map-25-feet

The effects of sea level flooding in D.C.

Happy Friday everyone!

GIFs via Mashable

Maps via StorageFront

Seattle Leads the Way in Tracking Building Energy Use

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Enthusiasm for water and energy data collection for commercial and residential buildings has been growing strong across the U.S. in major cities such as Austin, New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. It’s no surprise to learn that Earth-friendly Seattle is ahead of the game when it comes to tracking its buildings; reports show that the city is receiving data for a whopping 87% of its commercial and multi-residential buildings over 50,000 square feet, which totals to 1,160 individual properties covering over 200 million square feet of the city.

But that’s not all. New cities are hopping on the data collection bandwagon, most recently Minneapolis – the first city in the Midwest to adopt rules for energy benchmarking and disclosure. Other cities who already have a green reputation, such as Boston, are upping their game to adopt this beneficial practice in an effort to create even healthier and more prosperous urban conditions. With the President himself expressing support for cutting energy use by constructing more energy efficient buildings at last week’s State of the Union address, water and energy data collection is finally receiving the attention and consideration it deserves.

More on tracking building energy use after the break…

Architecture 2030, inventor of the 2030 Challenge, an incremental set of energy-reducing targets for building sector professionals, says that the sector is undergoing a dramatic transformation. As of July 2010, 73% of the 30 largest Architecture/Engineering firms in America had adopted their challenge to incorporate into their designs “appropriate planning and passive design strategies, improved material selection, building envelope design, more efficient lighting, equipment and appliances as well as on-site and community-scale renewable energy technologies.” If the building sector continues to lead, Architecture 2030 believes that it can “dramatically reduce U.S. and global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions over the next twenty years and beyond.” 

Collecting, documenting and displaying the effects of these design decisions in a way that makes them useful for the future is a matter of governmental policy and it’s clear that governments who choose to implement such policies are seeing real results. Cities experiencing disclosure requirements for energy and water are reporting lower energy costs for businesses – one of the desired outcomes – along with the bolstering of market forces and the motivation of owners and tenants to invest in energy efficiency improvements. New York City is uncovering intriguingly less-than-ideal performances of some of its LEED buildings while older buildings seem to be doing less harm than expected – evidence of significant knowledge that would otherwise go undetected.

Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston hopes to reveal similar potentials in his own city by filing the Building Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance with the Boston City Council, another component of the Mayor’s extensive action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Lessons learned from experienced cities informed the Ordinance, which will similarly require “all large and medium sized buildings to report annual energy use, water use and greenhouse gas emissions tracked through Energy Star Portfolio Manager,” only one of the many services offered by the EPA to educate and organize new leaders in this green endeavor. Other services include help centers, workshops, daily technical assistance and a how-to-guide to facilitate the transition to more earth and energy-friendly buildings.

According to Brian Swett, Boston’s Chief of Environment and Energy, “the Building Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance follows the principal of what gets measured gets managed. Through measurement and transparency, the Ordinance will encourage cost effective building investments in energy and water efficiency that will improve building performance, save money, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” With this quickly-spreading concern for water and energy conservation, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of our nation’s cities follow Seattle’s lead.

References: Greenbiz.com, Architecture Source, Architecture 2030, The American Institute of Architects, City of Boston

Seattle Leads the Way in Tracking Building Energy Use originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 24 Feb 2013.

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I Want to Be Metropolitan: Boston Case Study

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I Want to be METROPOLITAN is a research project on small scale metropolises, MINI Metropolis, using Boston as a case study to provide a different reading of the city. The study focuses on showing the efforts that the city of Boston has made in order to grow with metropolitan characteristics while remaining at a much smaller scale than cities like New York, London, or Tokyo. The morphology of Boston has been achieved through different metropolitan interventions that occur on different scales. These are divided on an infrastructural scale, urban scale, and architectural scale. By means of analyzing these different aspects, we can compose a vision of a future Boston, or Fictitious Boston, derived from its metropolitan potential.

The book is structured into four chapters addressing the different scales of analysis.  The first chapter compiles general data of the city, and provides a background view of the infrastructural efforts that the city has done to accommodate its population. Examples of these are the Big Dig, land reclamation, and its transportation network. These are efforts that are very difficult to find in other cities of similar scale, and provide the first clue towards the potential of the future of Boston and its current success.

The second chapter identifies Boston’s poly-centrality, a characteristic that  appears in big metropolitan cities like Tokyo. Rather than having a single civic  center or a downtown, Boston accommodates different urban cores such as an  industrial core, an institutional core, a commercial core, and others within the  confinement of its limited area. The chapter is subdivided into separate sections to  explain each core and their significance in the city. In homage to ‘’Made in Tokyo’’, chapter three catalogs hybrid buildings in Boston,  referencing the ambiguity of these buildings being born out of a metropolitan  context and transported to a less dense setting. Not to be confused with mixeduse buildings, hybrid buildings emerge mostly in metropolises with high density  and land value, providing new, interesting ways of life in the city.

Interestingly,  hybrid buildings also emerge in Boston, which registers another clue of Boston’s  metropolitan potential. In present days, urban topics and strategies mainly focus on cities with extreme  conditions such as high density, increasing congestion, and fast growth. This book  intends to create a dialogue that addresses the missing topics in urbanism for  smaller, slower, and much more stable cities. Chapter four concludes the study by  introducing our vision of new projects for the city of Boston to generate an open  conversation about the topic. This leads us to the possible implementation of the  research topic and methodology on other cities similar in size and pace to Boston.

CONTENT

006 Mini Metropolitanism
014 I Want To Be Metropolitan
022 Boston Infrastructure
126 Urban Cores
230 Metropolitan Hybrids
308 Fiction Boston
392 Mini Metropolis
398 Bibliography / Image Credits
399 Credits



Publisher: ORO
Size: 7” x 9” portrait
Pages: 400 
Paperback: Flexibound  (350 Photographs, 100 Illustrations)
ISBN: 978-1-935935-58-2 





I Want to Be Metropolitan: Boston Case Study originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 06 Dec 2012.

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New iPhone App Unlocks Downtown San Francisco’s Secret Public Spaces

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Think of the indoor park at 135 Main Street as your multilevel living room in the middle of downtown. Inside, several floors of couches and carpets beckon the lunchtime napper.

San Francisco’s downtown business district, a flatland where the office towers are tall enough to blot out the sun, doesn’t have much park space. And when the goof-off options during business hours are limited to trips between a private office and a private restaurant for lunch, the city can start to feel a little inhospitable. Where to find a place to sit in the sun, a table for eating a homemade sandwich, a planter of flowers, a flat surface on which to momentarily set down one’s coffee?

According to the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR, downtown alone has more than 50 such places — they’re just well hidden. “The issue is that a lot of people don’t know these spaces exist,” says Karen Steen, publications and communications manager at SPUR. “They’re not well marked. Sometimes they’re upstairs, on a roof, or sometimes it’s an interior atrium and there’s no way of knowing it’s a public space.” To call attention to these oases of urban respite, SPUR and the developer Escape Apps have released an iPhone app that documents and maps downtown’s indoor parks, rooftop terraces, urban gardens, and bamboo forests (yes!). Read more.

This sun terrace at 100 First Street is accessible via a staircase on Mission. On your way up, grab some grub from the deli at the foot of the stairs.

The app, SF’s Secret Spaces and Hidden Oases, sheds light on downtown’s uncataloged network of privately owned public open spaces, or POPOS (also POPS), as they are known in urban advocacy parlance. In 1985 the city strengthened its public-space requirements by asking developers to provide one square foot of open space for every 50 square feet of occupied office area; over the past few decades downtown has accumulated a nice share of POPOS. The app features plenty of snippets and sun terraces worth discovering, but there are also some hard-to-miss large plazas. The trouble, explains Steen, is that even obvious plazas can look like no-trespassing zones, and there are no signs that say otherwise. “The developers are following the letter of the law to create these spaces, but they’re not necessarily letting everybody know that they exist,” she says.

The Citigroup Center, at Sansome and Sutter streets, owes its skylit atrium and marble arches to the 1912 Paris-London Bank building, which was hollowed out to make way for palm trees, a crêpe stand, and your afternoon coffee run.

The app works like a guidebook to downtown, with tips on park closing times and suggestions for improvements like better signage or the need for a restroom. The project grew out of a 2009 report from SPUR that evaluated San Francisco’s POPOS, which in turn was inspired by a 2006 assessment of the spaces by the art and design studio Rebar.

560 Mission Street is an urban garden with a high bamboo grove. The path steps down to a granite plaza with tables, chairs, and delis close by.

If you’re in Boston or New York, not to worry—another urban research group, ICE-POPS, has got your back. Tally up your local POPOS and check out the guides that are still in progress. Seattle and Pittsburgh, you’re next!

The sun terrace at 150 California Street is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Don’t be deterred by the lobby guard—just sign in and head on up.

Open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., the indoor park at 101 Second Street is a five-story skylit atrium with café seating on the mezzanine.

The urban garden at Empire Park beautifies the site of a demolished building with big brick planters, café tables, and a sculptural fountain.

Photos: Noah Christman, courtesy of SPUR

New iPhone App Unlocks Downtown San Francisco’s Secret Public Spaces

Posted on by

Think of the indoor park at 135 Main Street as your multilevel living room in the middle of downtown. Inside, several floors of couches and carpets beckon the lunchtime napper.

San Francisco’s downtown business district, a flatland where the office towers are tall enough to blot out the sun, doesn’t have much park space. And when the goof-off options during business hours are limited to trips between a private office and a private restaurant for lunch, the city can start to feel a little inhospitable. Where to find a place to sit in the sun, a table for eating a homemade sandwich, a planter of flowers, a flat surface on which to momentarily set down one’s coffee?

According to the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR, downtown alone has more than 50 such places — they’re just well hidden. “The issue is that a lot of people don’t know these spaces exist,” says Karen Steen, publications and communications manager at SPUR. “They’re not well marked. Sometimes they’re upstairs, on a roof, or sometimes it’s an interior atrium and there’s no way of knowing it’s a public space.” To call attention to these oases of urban respite, SPUR and the developer Escape Apps have released an iPhone app that documents and maps downtown’s indoor parks, rooftop terraces, urban gardens, and bamboo forests (yes!). Read more.

This sun terrace at 100 First Street is accessible via a staircase on Mission. On your way up, grab some grub from the deli at the foot of the stairs.

The app, SF’s Secret Spaces and Hidden Oases, sheds light on downtown’s uncataloged network of privately owned public open spaces, or POPOS (also POPS), as they are known in urban advocacy parlance. In 1985 the city strengthened its public-space requirements by asking developers to provide one square foot of open space for every 50 square feet of occupied office area; over the past few decades downtown has accumulated a nice share of POPOS. The app features plenty of snippets and sun terraces worth discovering, but there are also some hard-to-miss large plazas. The trouble, explains Steen, is that even obvious plazas can look like no-trespassing zones, and there are no signs that say otherwise. “The developers are following the letter of the law to create these spaces, but they’re not necessarily letting everybody know that they exist,” she says.

The Citigroup Center, at Sansome and Sutter streets, owes its skylit atrium and marble arches to the 1912 Paris-London Bank building, which was hollowed out to make way for palm trees, a crêpe stand, and your afternoon coffee run.

The app works like a guidebook to downtown, with tips on park closing times and suggestions for improvements like better signage or the need for a restroom. The project grew out of a 2009 report from SPUR that evaluated San Francisco’s POPOS, which in turn was inspired by a 2006 assessment of the spaces by the art and design studio Rebar.

560 Mission Street is an urban garden with a high bamboo grove. The path steps down to a granite plaza with tables, chairs, and delis close by.

If you’re in Boston or New York, not to worry—another urban research group, ICE-POPS, has got your back. Tally up your local POPOS and check out the guides that are still in progress. Seattle and Pittsburgh, you’re next!

The sun terrace at 150 California Street is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Don’t be deterred by the lobby guard—just sign in and head on up.

Open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., the indoor park at 101 Second Street is a five-story skylit atrium with café seating on the mezzanine.

The urban garden at Empire Park beautifies the site of a demolished building with big brick planters, café tables, and a sculptural fountain.

Photos: Noah Christman, courtesy of SPUR

ArchitectureBoston Expo (ABX)

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Produced by the Boston Society of Architects, the ArchitectureBoston Expo (ABX) will take place November 14-16 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Boasting the most comprehensive education program and largest marketplace for the design and construction industry in New England, the event offers over 175 professional development opportunities. This covers a range of topics from building technology to design, software, social sustainability and code. The tradeshow and conference launches on Wednesday morning with Speaking of Architecture, an Opening Plenary panel discussion moderated by Renée Loth of ArchitectureBoston Magazine and Robert Campbell FAIA of the Boston Globe. Tours are also provided, allowing attendees an inside look into some of the most unique and interesting buildings in Greater Boston, including the recently re-opened Tea Party Museum, Hostelling International and the MassArt Tower Building.To register and for more information, please visit here.

ArchitectureBoston Expo (ABX) originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 09 Oct 2012.

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