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CES 2018: Find All Our Coverage Here

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CES 2018 metropolis magazine

Ford aims to supply the autonomous vehicles (AVs) as well as the digital operating system for the future’s multi-modal transit networks At CES, Metropolis sat down with Jessica Robinson, Ford’s director of city solutions, to understand what she’s doing to pave the way for the company’s AVs and smart city products. Click here to learn more.


The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has long been a mecca for techies. Every year, crowds descend on practically every convention space in Sin City to see the latest and greatest products, from helicopters to smartphones. But global conglomerates and small start-ups alike are eager to attach the “smart” label to something new: cities and buildings. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been leading the charge vis-a-vis smart cities, with companies like Ford fully embracing how AVs can reshape how we live, work, and play.

While public sector employees were present at CES smart city panel discussions, with one even delivering a dire warning on smart city cybersecurity, architects were largely absent. The true advent of many of these technologies is still many years away, though the challenges and benefits are already clear for all to see. Read our coverage, linked in the slideshow below, to see what the experts are saying.

You may also enjoy “Exhibition Immerses Visitors in Korea’s Secretive Smart City.”

Categories: Cities, Planning, Technology, Transportation

The post CES 2018: Find All Our Coverage Here appeared first on Metropolis.


As Technology Reshapes Cities’ Economies and Daily Life, We Risk Widening Inequality

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SOM think tank urban technology

SOM is leading the redesign of the James A. Farley Post Office into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall, a rail station that will anchor real estate development on Manhattan’s Far West Side.
© Empire State Development, courtesy SOM, rendering by Methanoia


The relationship between the built environment and the internet is evolving as more cities rely on technology to facilitate urban life. In recent years, New York City has been particularly focused on becoming a leader in urban technology, championing a number of initiatives, from the CitiBike network to expanding the availability of free WiFi. As the experience of the city becomes increasingly defined by technology, the opportunity gap between those who have access to technology and those who don’t carries increased urgency, and narrowing that digital divide is a fundamental mandate for those innovating in the urban realm.

On October 18 at the New York offices of SOM, Metropolis’s director of design innovation Susan S. Szenasy led a conversation about how innovations in technology can be harnessed to best support the city’s growth. As the city continues to expand—the NYC Department of City Planning estimates the population will grow from 8.5 million in 2016 to 9 million in 2040—how do architects, technologists, and policymakers leverage and create technology that makes the city a more livable, equitable space for all its residents?

The panelists agreed that we must begin with a conversation about shared goals. “The big problem is that technology has moved more quickly than our ability to understand how it’s changing us,” noted Raju Mann, director of land use at the New York City Council. While there is generally a lot of enthusiasm around “the new,” it would be a mistake to embrace innovations without first testing them against our values. According to Mann, we must always be thinking about the city’s collective vision and how technology can help to translate and apply those goals at different scales.

SOM think tank urban technology

Commissioned to recommend how New York City could absorb nine million more residents, SOM developed a plan to bury and shrink the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, making way for new electric vehicles.
© SOM


While urban technologies are often associated with democratic ideals of greater and greater civic engagement, in practice they tend to be more insular. “What we usually see with urban tech is very vertical and very siloed,” explained Constantine E. Kontakosto, professor of urban informatics and director of the Urban Intelligence Lab at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. “The civic tech space has been focused on certain types of communities, historically. The idea of how we can bring technology to underserved communities who don’t have large economical development projects is what we’re really interested in.” But there is also room for optimism. The increasing amount of data being generated in the city has the potential to guide the types of questions we ask and help us make sure we are addressing the right ones. “The problem the agency sets out to solve is rarely the one we end up solving because once we start pulling in different sets of data we can see new patterns and insights,” said Mann.

Even as this tech-informed process unfolds, SOM’s design director Colin Koop underlined that we must question the potential consequences of designing cities that people can’t comprehend. “We struggle to communicate. Someone who’s seeking to take a technological approach to a problem and solve it in a way which should benefit individual lives—whether that’s through a shorter commute, better public spaces, lower utility bills—ultimately realizes that if people don’t understand it, they’re going to be inherently suspicious of it. If we don’t bring people along then we risk tearing at the fabric of the social construct that ties us all together,” Koop remarked.

Along those same lines, urban critic and author Karrie Jacobs cautioned that there is a crucial difference between a high-functioning city and an optimized city, which may lose the everyday frictions and surprises that define city living. “Is an optimized urban environment still an urban environment,” she questioned. “Do we want to rationalize everything?”

Through small-scale manufacturing, Clare Newman, chief of staff & EVP at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation is exploring ways of leveraging technology and high design “to forward and advance a vision of a city with more equitable jobs.” The Brooklyn Navy Yard is flourishing now as a “place-based economic development initiative” for “skilled craftspeople and blue collar talent as well as the talent sectors that are so crucial to New York.” Newman’s focus through her work is on ensuring that “in a rapidly urbanizing city, we still have a diverse workforce and truly diverse employment opportunities.”

The question of craft is not divorced from technology, as David Gilford, senior director of technology and design firm Intersection brought up. Like material objects, algorithms, interfaces, and code may also benefit from a local approach, he said: “We often think of technology and software as something totally abstract but it’s also made by people who are living and working in a particular environment. I think a lot about the difference of what would get developed by a technologist in a suburban office park versus by someone working in a tiny co-working space in Brooklyn. As they develop code that becomes part of the city’s they’re influencing, that is fundamentally different than the abstraction of some smart people in a room thinking ‘I know what New York wants.’ As we talk about what the future of craftsmanship is and the future of jobs … the consideration of who is creating this technology and how they’re part of the city itself is going to be really important to keep in mind.”

You may also enjoy “CES 2018: Watch Our Interviews With Three Smart Cities Experts.”

Categories: Cities, Housing, Ideas, Planning, Think Tank, Transportation

The post As Technology Reshapes Cities’ Economies and Daily Life, We Risk Widening Inequality appeared first on Metropolis.

St. Louis Arch Renovations Aim to Revitalize an Eero Saarinen and Dan Kiley Landscape

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St Louis Arch Redesign

©Gateway Arch Park Foundation

The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, home to the St. Louis Gateway Arch, has a long, protracted history. The original proposal for the memorial and grounds was conceived in 1947 by architect Eero Saarinen and landscape architect Dan Kiley, but funding for the scheme didn’t become available for another decade. Saarinen died in 1961, two years before construction began on the Arch. Meanwhile, the National Park Service (NPS) finalized the master plan with Kiley and later, in the early 1970s, took complete control of the project. The memorial was formally completed in 1983.

But the project suffered on its lengthy road to completion, says Gullivar Shepard of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). “All the federal legislation and design intent in that time had gotten a little confused. We recognize that the parks service is built for change and to preserve, but this whole project was about radical change.”

The Brooklyn-based firm is leading a $221-million renovation of the memorial, which will add significant site improvements as well as a 46,000-square-foot museum expansion (helmed by New York Firm Cooper Robertson) with new interactive exhibits. Shepard sees as part of his mandate to recover the diminished aspects of Saarinen and Kiley’s plan, while also optimizing the way visitors move in and throughout the site. “We’re finally taking this 70-year project and actually fulfilling this as a planning anchor and a core at which a vibrant downtown is being built,” he says.

It’s an admirable goal that has drawn incredible support from the public and private sectors. “[People] got engaged here, they celebrated every 4th of July here,” says Eric Moraczewski, executive director of the nonprofit Gateway Arch Park Foundation. “When you have that emotional tie to the community, and there is a chance to refresh and fulfill the vision of Eero Saarinen, people want to be a part of that opportunity.”

St Louis Arch Redesign

A massive parking garage was torn down and turned into an open space. Guests would usually park in the garage, see the Arch, and leave. The new park will attract more foot traffic to the city, and to the parks surrounding sights. ©Gateway Arch Park Foundation


When MVVA was awarded the project in 2010, it proposed 14 different “decision points,” each a contingent part of a larger landscape development. One of the decision points, while seemingly minor, was the installation of light poles. Saarinen, Shepard explains, “designed a light pole for the park that was never implemented, and the parks department installed something very different that wasn’t the original intent. Through serendipity we actually connected with the original pole company, Louis Poulsen, who helped design the poles [we now have].”

The latest additions include eleven acres of parkland, 5.4 miles of pedestrian paths, a grassy amphitheater, and shaded lawns. The most dramatic feature is a new land bridge that connects the adjacent Old Courthouse to the arch and the riverfront in one continuous greenway. (Previously, two caged pedestrian bridges spanning Interstate 44 connected the Old Courthouse and downtown St. Louis to the memorial.) “The impact of this is immediate,” says Shepard. “This really is a landscape defined by people’s experiences as they move from an urban environment into a park. The green edge wasn’t our limit—we moved highways, elevated waterfronts.”

The park’s grand opening is July 4th, 2018, a date that both Sheppard and Moraczewski feel is fitting for an achievement of this magnitude. “What’s been really beautiful about this partnership is the ability of all of [us] to work through challenges,” says Moraczewski, “whether it’s unforeseen conditions or historic weather occurrences, we’ve worked through those together. Shepard is equally as excited to see what the future holds. “The park takes on a life of its own, and that’s what I expect to continue going forward.”

You may also enjoy “VIDEO: Why the AT&T Building Matters.”

Categories: Architecture, Cities, Cultural Architecture, Landscape, Planning

The post St. Louis Arch Renovations Aim to Revitalize an Eero Saarinen and Dan Kiley Landscape appeared first on Metropolis.

Washington D.C.’s Riverfront Holds Vast Untapped Development Potential

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Washington DC waterfront SmithGroupJJR

The Wharf, a $2 billion mixed-use development on Washington D.C. waterfront, features this 300,000-square-foot, 10-story hotel by SmithGroupJJR. The building houses a Canopy by Hilton and a Hyatt House. Courtesy SmithGroupJJR


“We sometimes forget that D.C. is a waterfront city,” Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, who is an associate director at the Washington, D.C. Office of Planning, says. “But we have 47 miles of shorefront!”

Washington, D.C., sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Potomac and the Anacostia, yet its waterfronts remain ripe for redevelopment, as the recent completion of the first phase of a massive $2 billion development called The Wharf illustrates. And two major projects by the city’s water authority, DC Water –one a new pipeline designed to prevent runoff from entering the Anacostia, the other a new headquarters facility–are just a pair of highlights in the “Year of the Anacostia,” which celebrates the centennial of the river’s main feature: Anacostia Park. Balancing the forces of growth and development with desires for a sustainable and resilient waterfront is no easy task, especially with projects of this scale.

On December 6, in Washington, D.C., Susan Szenasy, Metropolis’s director of design innovation, led a conversation at the offices of SmithGroupJJR on the development and conservation of the city’s two riverfronts. Architects, planners, and sustainability experts used the opportunity to discuss strategies for both urban and environmental futures.

“The Anacostia was pretty much a dumping ground since the early 1800s,” says Maureen Holman, who is sustainability chief for DC Water. “It’s where a lot of the industry was focused, and where sewage and other things were focused. We’re looking at how to deal with some legacy pollutants—those effects are still there—to eventually get us to a point where the river is fishable and swimmable.”

Washington DC waterfront SmithGroupJJR

The hotels anchor the entrance to a new three-acre park. Seen here is just the first stage of The Wharf; the project will eventually see three million square feet of new development built along one mile of waterfront. ©SmithGroupJJR


In many ways, the Anacostia is still a dumping ground: During heavy rain events, the District’s combined sewer often overflows, bringing untreated waste into the river. But the Anacostia River tunnel, which will open in March, will reduce direct sewage dumping into the river by 81 percent. The tunnel opening will go a long way toward making the Anacostia River fishable and swimmable, but the cleanup effort will rely on a number of agencies to fulfill this river restoration goal. The Anacostia River flows through many jurisdictions, and receives runoff from all of them. As the city’s chief resilience officer, Kevin Bush, puts it, “watersheds don’t care about administrative boundaries.”

“With private development having been very successful, the next step is cleaning up a lot of the contaminated sites,” says Erin Garnass-Holmes, who is project director for the Anacostia Waterfront Trust. “That effort points to an important part of resilience: Building resilient networks of people and engaging stakeholders.”

Gabriel agrees: “You can’t really get anything done without a coalition,” she says. “The 2001 Anacostia Waterfront Initiative was a memorandum of understanding between some 30 entities that committed to a singular vision, toward the revitalization of the waterfront.”

The bulk of the private development to which Garnass-Holmes refers is The Wharf, which was led by PN Hoffman. The Wharf sits upon the Southwest waterfront, due south of L’Enfant Plaza in a part of the city that was wiped bare nearly five decades ago under the banner of urban renewal. “The way that projects are developed today is different than it was 50 years ago,” Shawn Seaman, executive vice president and principal of PN Hoffman, says. “The Wharf and Southwest were basically wiped off the map in order to make it more auto-centric; Now, it’ll be more sustainable. The Wharf, I hope, is the foundation and the basis for the great thriving city of the future.”

With a rebuilt seawall that anticipates future sea level rise, The Wharf looks to protect the enormous investment poured into it. “Educating our children, and ourselves, in terms of our environment, begins not at the building level but at the site level,” says Merrill St. Leger, who is leader of the urban design and planning studio at SmithGroupJJR. “There’s always the competing desires to be on the waterfront but also to protect it. We’re seeing more and more pilot projects that showcase resiliency and sustainability aspects.”

The “how” of it all circles back around to Garnass-Holmes’s idea of resilient networks of people, and part of that is hiring locals as well as giving them training toward careers in infrastructure. “There’s an effort in the District to create an infrastructure academy to train people on how to get infrastructure jobs,” Bush, the city’s resilience officer, says. “We’re trying to make sure we’re creating jobs for residents of the District across all education and income levels.”

In the end, the more people continue to live in the places they work, and work in the places they live, the more resilient both the people and the places will be.

You may also enjoy “Carol Ross Barney is Chicago’s New Daniel Burnham.”

Categories: Cities, Planning, Think Tank

The post Washington D.C.’s Riverfront Holds Vast Untapped Development Potential appeared first on Metropolis.

New Journal Delves into the Political Realities of Architecture and Urban Planning

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take shape journal architecture urban planning

The debut issue of Take Shape—a new journal about the intersection of architecture and politics—is devoted to lofts and includes a wealth of textual and visual perspectives and resources on the contemporary built environment. Courtesy Take Shape


Who says design publishing is dying? Take Shape—a new journal devoted to architecture and politics—is the brainchild of editors Nolan Boomer (formerly of Princeton Architectural Press), who was interested in urban design but wanted to look deeper into the political realities of planning, and Julia Llinas Goodman, a legal reporter on labor and civil rights who also wanted to cover the effect of urban planning on individuals.

“We wanted to bring these spaces together to create something informed by both artistic and political methods of information gathering,” says Llinas Goodman, who enlisted a third editor, Cole Cataneo, and designer Sean Suchara. “Take Shape unites a broader audience invested in understanding the experiential realities linked to the built environment. For us, this means including work by both the users and creators of buildings, in a way that neither elevates experts over everyday users nor ignores the broader systemic causes of urban planning problems.”

The debut issue, centered on industrial reuse—specifically lofts—features a mix of long-form journalism and critical essays, as well as more unusual pieces such as a satirical visual proposal to reclaim foreclosed McMansions for artists’ space and a list of DIY safety tips crowd-sourced from loft dwellers and fact-checked by a volunteer architect. The publication’s next iteration will focus on commuting. Says Llinas Goodman: “We aim to explore how community action and urban design can shift outdated conceptions of travel from point A to point B.”

You may also enjoy “2018 Game Changers: 5 Remarkable Individuals Who Are Transforming Architecture, Design, and Cities.”

Categories: Architecture, Cities, Planning

The post New Journal Delves into the Political Realities of Architecture and Urban Planning appeared first on Metropolis.

This Tiny Amsterdam Neighborhood Is a Prototype for Grassroots Urban Planning

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Buiksloterham Amsterdam grassroots planning

To aid in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing among self-builders and organizers in Buiksloterham, Amsterdam, The Hackable City group created a phone app dubbed The International Building Exhibition App. Its participants can geolocate a given building (i.e. an apartment complex like this one) and view the information residents and builders had shared on its design, construction, permitting, and habitation. Courtesy The Hackable City


As social media evolves and urban design evolve, are there possibilities for the two to cross-pollinate and offer new, more democratic paths in city-making?  This question was the starting point for The Hackable City, a research project now six years in the making. Initiated in 2012, The Hackable City is a partnership between the firm I founded, One Architecture and Urbanism (based in Amsterdam and New York), and the Dutch independent research group The Mobile City, as well as a number of embedded researchers at universities across the Netherlands.

Since its founding, our Hackable City initiative has become increasingly focused on a development close to home—the unassuming neighborhood of Buiksloterham, which stretches across a formerly industrial waterfront just north of Amsterdam’s historic core. The site in question had long been in development limbo; the 188-acre reclaimed brownfield, once home to an airplane factory, an oil refinery, and shipbuilding spaces, was slated for redevelopment by the city in the early 2000s. However, in 2008, the Dutch economy crashed. The developers pulled out, project funding folded, and Buiksloterham’s fate was thrown into uncertainty.

Soon after, an informal group of planners, urbanists, and Hackable City members collectively called Beleef Buiksloterham (“Experience Buiksloterham”) pitched a new direction to the city for the site’s development. Our angle was: what if, instead of letting the highest-paying developers take the reigns, Buiksloterham became a living laboratory for the idea of a circular economy—an approach in which resources such as energy, water, building materials, and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing are thought of as circular systems? Another central tenet of the proposal focused on accessibility and self-building. What if—in this one neighborhood—locals, residents, and engaged citizens were given the agency to directly participate in the design-build process using everyday social tools like Facebook and Twitter?

Buiksloterham Amsterdam grassroots planning

Sample screenshots from The International Building Exhibition App that Buiksloterham residents can use. In this entry on the app, for example, certain slides explore how this building’s energy-efficient glass facade functions. Courtesy The Hackable City


Idealistic though it may sound, Circular Buiksloterham, as the district has come to be called, is inching toward reality. With the City of Amsterdam’s endorsement and the hard work of many invested coalitions, the brownfield has become a long-term experiment prototyping the potential of organic, bottom-up planning. This new model involves long-term, public-private partnerships putting design into the hands of residents and small collaboratives.

Throughout Buiksloterham’s development, Hackable City researchers have used the site to create programs, games, and publications around the idea of “hackable city-making;” i.e. the use of “hacker” techniques in urban design. In 2014, our researchers and Hackable members created a phone app allowing self-builders (residents organizing the creation of their own homes) in the neighborhood to share lessons learned about building design and construction, interactions with contractors, and more. Our researchers also created a series of games exploring topics from energy efficiency to water management. Public workshops with residents and designers have become part and parcel of the planning process, rather than a box to check off a grant application—this is both what makes Buiksloterham so unique and has also allowed it to secure municipal backing for the long haul.

“It’s a long process, but it goes gradually, and you grow with it,” said a Buiksloterham resident, in conversation with Bart Aptroot, director of One Architecture and Urbanism’s Amsterdam office. “It’s nice that there’s time to learn, for example, that you can develop ideas and desires for your new home even in the pressure cooker housing market of Amsterdam. Though we originally wanted more space, we ended up in a smaller house with a garden. I always wanted that garden, but forgot it was a possibility.”

At present, the entire district of Buiksloterham is slated for an estimated $2.5 billion in funds for future development, including $55 million in construction costs for a 180-unit apartment complex designed by Beleef Buiksloterham in partnership with future residents. The entire district should eventually facilitate about 4,000 housing units, of which about 10 percent have already been built. Among those completed is ELTA, a 16-unit apartment tower designed by our core team at One Architecture and Urbanism, Bot Bouw Initiatief, and co-developed with the building’s tenants.

Buiksloterham Amsterdam grassroots planning

Community workshop with self-builders, architects, designers, and planners from Beleef Buiksloterham. Courtesy The Hackable City


In current estimates, the neighborhood is projected to grow from 200 to around 10,000 residents, with current zoning regulations allowing for around 3.7 million square feet of additional commercial space and a half-million square feet of communal and recreational space. Besides One Architecture, DELVA Landscape Architects has also assisted in the design of public infrastructure and greenways. Most other projects have been initiated through smaller collaborations among self-builders. The neighborhood is already home to an informal bar named Café de Ceuvel that also serves as a major social and organizational hub. The district also includes a public school for children with mental disabilities, a primary school, and medical practice, all of which are housed in temporary structures until permanent accommodations are constructed.

The creation of all these institutions have been community-led initiatives. Under current market conditions, the neighborhood’s overall revenue for development, generated from taxes and outside investment, will quadruple. We hope that Buiksloterham can set an example of the power of grassroots planning practices for iterative neighborhoods as well as the successes of long-term investment in community partnerships across the world.

The Hackable City recently released a series of informal toolkits on collaborative urbanism and grassroots citymaking, ‘The Hackable City’ Cahiers 1-3, available on the collective’s website. In Fall 2018, stay tuned for the forthcoming Springer edition The Hackable City Edited Volume: Digital Media and Collaborative Citymaking in the Network Society.

Matthijs Bouw is the Founder and Principal of One Architecture & Urbanism, an Amsterdam and New York-based design and planning firm, as well as Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow for PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Hackable City is a project by One Architecture and Urbanism, The Mobile City, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Ministry of Internal Affairs, Pakhuis De Zwijger, and Stadslab Circulair Buiksloterham. Their work has been funded, among others, by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Special thanks to Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange for their collaboration.

You may also enjoy “How Architects Can Fight Climate Change During the Midterm Elections.”

Categories: Cities, Ideas, Planning

The post This Tiny Amsterdam Neighborhood Is a Prototype for Grassroots Urban Planning appeared first on Metropolis.

Preview James Corner Field Operations’ New Brooklyn Park

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Domino Sugar Factory Park James Corner Field Operations

Portions of the park’s platform were raised three to seven feet from their previous levels, elevating the entire park well above the site’s 100-year floodplain. This also makes the park level with the Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment site. Courtesy Aether Images


Four 36-foot-tall steel cylinders, once containing thousands of gallons of sugar syrup at Brooklyn’s old Domino Sugar Factory, now stand front-and-center at Domino Park. The six-acre landscape, which is set to open this June, features some 30 different factory “artifacts” selected by New York–based landscape firm James Corner Field Operations (JCFO), which led the park’s design. Old warehouse columns will support an elevated walkway; metal screw conveyors formerly used to move sugar (think enormous drill bits) will stand as steel sculptures, and ferry-goers along the East River won’t miss the park’s two enormous turquoise cranes. While these artifacts, along with a factory-inspired playground, may steal the show, the project features a wide range of spaces that the architects and developer hope will become a vibrant public space that serves local residents.

Domino Sugar Factory Park James Corner Field Operations

While JCFO is designing the park, SHoP Architects was responsible for the development’s overall master plan. SHoP also designed 325 Kent (the shorter O-shaped structure at center-right), one of the development’s residential buildings. Courtesy Aether Images


The park was commissioned by the developer Two Trees, the company that’s behind the adjacent 11-acre mixed-use Sugar Factory redevelopment. When complete, the development will feature 2,800 residential units (of which 2,100 will be market rate and 700 affordable), 600,000 square feet of commercial office space, and 200,000 square feet of retail. The project hasn’t been without controversy, both for its luxury units and its design for the landmarked factory. By 2014, Two Trees reached an agreement with the city regarding the number of affordable units. Last year the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the design for the factory.

While the entire development now has the greenlight, most of it hasn’t been built. The only complete building is the copper- and zinc-clad 325 Kent, a residential project by New York–based SHoP architects. Three other skyscrapers, plus an office building that will rise within the old Sugar Factory’s 19th-century masonry shell, will be built over the next several years.

Domino Sugar Factory Park James Corner Field Operations

The plan for Domino Park. River Street, an existing North-South road, was extended through the site and will run alongside the park. Courtesy James Corner Field Operations


These new buildings will sit in blocks created by the extension of several existing East-West Brooklyn streets through the redevelopment site. The lengthened streets (Grand Street, and South 1st through S. 4th Streets) will all meet River Street, another existing road that’s been extended through the site. According to Lisa Tziona Switkin, senior principal at JCFO, these multiple street grid connections are an important gesture that communicates that the park is indeed open to all.

While Two Trees is paying for the park’s construction and upkeep, JCFO worked closely with the New York City Parks Department during the design process, ensuring Domino Park would met the agency’s standards. JCFO also says it conducted large- and small-scale community outreach to determine what amenities, such as the volleyball court, should be built. The park will also be fully open to the public from dawn till dusk. (In fact, the city is holding some of Two Tree’s money in escrow; those funds can be taken in the event the developer fails to maintain the park.)

In designing Domino Park, JCFO allocated the most active public programs (a 1,750-square-foot dog run, two bocce courts, a 6,300-square-foot multi-use playing field, and the volleyball court) closer to the noisy Williamsburg Bridge, which supports eight roadways and two subways. The center of the park, which includes a large stepped viewing platform and a water feature, aims to attract large gatherings. The park’s northern half features what JCFO calls more “passive uses,” such as a food stand, picnic tables, playground, lawn, beach chairs, and an elevated walkway. The walkway, which is flanked by two bright turquoise cranes, will undoubtedly be the park’s signature feature, as well as welcome shelter during hot summer months. The walkway, says Switkin, “doubles as a two-block long shade trellis.” That, and the addition of six acres of parkland to a neighborhood severely lacking green space, will be welcome relief.

You may also enjoy “This Tiny Amsterdam Neighborhood Is a Prototype for Grassroots Urban Planning.”

Categories: Landscape, Planning

The post Preview James Corner Field Operations’ New Brooklyn Park appeared first on Metropolis.

Secret Cities: Upcoming Exhibition Will Explore the Architecture and Planning of U.S. Nuclear Sites

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Secret Cities Manhattan Project exhibition

SOM’s wartime efforts in Oak Ridge extended into postwar redevelopment with permanent housing. Seen here: Postwar housing by SOM, Oak Ridge, 1948. SOM © Torkel Korling, compliments of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP


If you’ve never heard of Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; or Hanford and Richland, Washington, you’re not alone. In fact, the clandestine nature of these places is by design. But the upcoming exhibition Secret Cities: The Architecture and Planning of the Manhattan Project, opening May 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., aims to reveal much of their history and built forms.

As part of the U.S. war effort in the early 1940s, the federal government built facilities for the development and testing of atomic weapons. Alongside these, it also constructed housing for the involved scientists and technicians in semi-urban communities as secretive as their work.

The housing stock of these self-contained cities was composed mainly of single-family homes, often built from semi-prefabricated kit houses made of cemesto (a cement-and-asbestos board), but also included Nissen and Quonset huts. In postwar urban development, these communities became proving grounds for planning concepts, especially regarding hastily assembled accommodations for returning soldiers.

The cities also functioned as test sites for architectural practice: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), which comprised some 20-odd employees prior to the war, was commissioned to develop the master plan and select buildings for Oak Ridge. Working alongside Turner Construction—which built and managed city services in Oak Ridge— SOM laid the groundwork for what would become comprehensive corporate architecture and engineering practices after the war.

Throughout Secret Cities, the museum looks back 75 years to the formation of these instant communities—all of which continue to thrive as centers of research and development—and their contemporary implications. While the broader ethical questions behind the atomic bomb loom, curator G. Martin Moeller, Jr. concedes the issue’s contentiousness lies beyond the scope of the exhibition. Says Moeller: “We try to help people understand how that unique built environment shaped the way in which people lived.”

You may also enjoy “Here’s How You Design for Living and Working in Outer Space.”

Categories: Architecture, Planning

The post Secret Cities: Upcoming Exhibition Will Explore the Architecture and Planning of U.S. Nuclear Sites appeared first on Metropolis.


This Book Imagines How Cities Let Humanity Survive Cataclysmic Climate Change

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2100 dystopian utopia book studioteka

In the world imagined by 2100: A Dystopian Utopia, polar regions have become more habitable and host megacities like this one in Troll, Antarctica. Courtesy UR (Urban Research), the publishing imprint of Terreform, New York, 2017


The science fiction worlds of author Ursula K. Le Guin are more than fantastical—they’re also careful studies of how environments (and environmental crises) shape societies. It’s no surprise, then, that Le Guin is a favorite of architect Vanessa Keith, founder of Brooklyn-based StudioTEKA Design, whose new book mines similar speculative and analytical ground. Published last year by the imprint Urban Research2100: A Dystopian Utopia imagines how, in spite of catastrophic climate change, humanity might adapt its settlement patterns to new environmental conditions and perhaps even flourish. “All of the technologies that we’re referencing…in the book are things that someone, somewhere is researching,” Keith tells Metropolis. “We envision that in 80 years this stuff could be in place solving our problems.”

In 2100, most of Earth is uninhabitable: Only northern swathes of North America, Asia, and parts of Antarctica can easily support human habitation, while more central latitudes face searing heat or intense storms. This all-too-conceivable scenario (one based on a 7.2°F global temperature increase, an estimate some call conservative) has led to the formation of megacities in the habitable zones, leaving behind smaller “extraction cities” elsewhere that serve as centers or renewable energy capture, high-tech agriculture, and manufacturing and industry. (As the regular population evacuates these “extraction cities,” such as New York and Manila, the city’s old infrastructure and architecture are recycled or re-used. The resulting land is re-purposed or given back to the local ecosystem.) Furthermore, each megacity has a close partnership with an extraction city, where the former provides a rotating supply of labor in exchange for energy and resources.

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The book assumes a global average warming of around 7.2°F, though in such a scenario, arctic regions could warm as much as 27°F. This map, which depicts habitable areas in the year 2100, is part of an introductory chapter that outlines how the world (and human society) might adapt to a warming planet. Courtesy UR (Urban Research), the publishing imprint of Terreform, New York, 2017


Keith describes how different settlements adopt different approaches to architecture and urban planning. For instance, New York becomes the Western Hemisphere’s “storm energy capture center,” with underwater turbines harnessing wave energy. Urban farms are installed beneath overpasses while new parks serve as buffer zones for storms. (The extraction cities in 2100 typically have a limited population of rotating inhabitants, while the compact megacities depicted in the book have approximately 10,000,000 inhabitants each, or around 1,000,000 per 5.53 square miles.) By contrast, in the new megacity of Nuuk, Greenland, densely inhabited megastructures are arrayed vertically along a mountainside, a Hyperloop-like transportation system connecting them all.

Elsewhere, another extraction city—Phoenix—focuses on agriculture and energy production primarily through greenhouses and solar panels. Re-purposed houses in the city’s suburban sprawl now host wind turbines on their facades and algae farms on their roofs. Meanwhile, in megacity Vancouver, a wide array of architectural interventions to existing structures (such as new canopies of fruit/vegetable gardens and cantilevered parks) allow for more population density and productivity.

2100 dystopian utopia book studioteka

By the year 2100, the book imagines, New York City experiences “100-year floods” every four years. The city leverages old infrastructure to capture storm energy, such as by building a wind belt (a more efficient type of wind turbine now in development, seen here in a triangular grid) on top of old brownstone apartment buildings. Courtesy UR (Urban Research), the publishing imprint of Terreform, New York, 2017


There’s no question that the circumstances outlined in 2100 are grim, but the book optimistically depicts a world where humans have found a way to make catastrophe work. “I think that architecture and design [is] an optimistic endeavor,” says Keith. “You’re trying to imagine a future; you’re given a site, and your site has constraints, and you’re trying to imagine, ‘What is the best possible future for this place?'”

In trying to always imagine the best possible trajectory for humanity, Keith and her studio hope 2100 inspires those who might feel powerless in the face of climate change. “Some of the stuff that we’re looking at is really dire, but if we can’t imagine a positive outcome for ourselves, it’s very, very difficult to get people to do anything except bury their heads in the sand,” she says. “Can we use some of our powers of imagination to envision potential futures for ourselves as a species?”

You may also enjoy “The Untapped Promise of Arctic Urbanism.”

Categories: Architecture, Cities, Ideas, Planning, Sustainability

The post This Book Imagines How Cities Let Humanity Survive Cataclysmic Climate Change appeared first on Metropolis.

Smart Cities Conference Raises Concerns About Those Left Behind by Technology

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaking at Smart Cities New York, which ran from May 8 – 10 in New York City. Courtesy Smart Cities New York


Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t known for pulling punches, and at a recent smart cities conference, he lived up to that reputation. During his keynote discussion, he spoke to a packed audience about the need for social inclusion, saying “if you can’t have people with the tools to access [smart city technologies], it’s just a good concept for a conference.” While the blunt comment may have been expected of Emanuel, that urgent warning wasn’t an aberration at the conference either.

Now in its second year, the Smart Cities New York conference is built around the international smart cities industry, a field with major players like Panasonic and Bosch, as well as countless small startups. (As the industry has grown, so has its prominence: smart cities has also become a major focus at CES.) Smart city tech generally falls into a few basic categories: mobility (think autonomous vehicles and bike shares), open data (analyzing cities’ public data to gain insights and improve public services), and smart buildings/infrastructure (a field usually focused on energy efficiency).

While you’d expect an industry conference to focus on trends and innovations, Smart Cities New York’s second day of discussions (especially those focused on urban planning) frequently discussed the wide pitfalls facing cities vis-a-vis technology.

This circumspection was perhaps due to the preponderance of public sector figures, like Emanuel, who repeatedly emphasized the need to ensure that this emerging industry benefits cities’ disenfranchised residents. Urbanites who can’t harness publicly-available data or new apps may not see the benefits of, for instance, improved transit or public health. As Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms put it, her greatest fear is that we’re “creating an even larger divide with underserved communities.” By focusing on technology’s problem-solving abilities alone, she continued, we’re “addressing one issue, exacerbating another.”

Deepening the challenge is the tech industry itself, which seems to be receiving the lion’s share of this generation’s economic growth. In a separate panel, Seth Pinsky, an executive at RXR Realty and former head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), said that the 21st century’s digital innovations are creating clear economic winners and losers. Until wealth is shared more evenly—a far-off prospect, he said—the growing economic gap will cause increasing political instability. Deliberate policy remedies, such as affordable housing, could ameliorate the situation, he added.

smart cities new york 2018 recap

From left to right: Michael Berkowitz of 100 Cities, Mayor Gregor Robertson of Toronto, Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms of Atlanta, and Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb of Rotterdam. Courtesy Smart Cities


While many panelists issued dire warnings, several participants did highlight solutions. Gregor Robertson, the mayor of Vancouver (a city that was an early adopter of “open data”) cited Vancouver’s CityStudio program as template for other cities. CityStudio pairs students with local universities to create urban-focused initiatives (such as an online map of Vancouver’s unused spaces) and develop skillsets germane to smart city industries and public governance. Similarly, Emanuel dwelled on Chicago’s scholarship and education programs, describing them as helping prevent greater socioeconomic divides. “Libraries are becoming job training centers,” he said, adding that Chicago’s public schools, parks, and transit were all being “invigorated with a new mission” of ensuring an inclusive, equitable city.

If there was another sentiment that cut across almost every panel, it was that cities—and not state or federal agencies—would be the ones to fix these problems. Emanuel said that “we’re in an inflection point where the nation-state is in decline,” with city-states rising to power the global economy.

Or as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio put it in a brief appearance, “we, at the city level, are the agents of change right now.”

You may also enjoy “This Tiny Amsterdam Neighborhood Is a Prototype for Grassroots Urban Planning.”

Categories: Cities, Planning, Technology

The post Smart Cities Conference Raises Concerns About Those Left Behind by Technology appeared first on Metropolis.

New Talent 2018: Nonprofit LA-Más Is Revitalizing Los Angeles’s Overlooked Corners

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LA-Más is directed by Elizabeth Timme, left, who helms the organization’s design, and Helen Leung, right, who leads its policy and community-facing functions. Courtesy Brian Guido


Our annual New Talent survey spotlights practices across the design spectrum. These architects and designers look to multiple branches of activity for inspiration, from urban agriculture and grassroots organizing to branding and identity. Stay tuned throughout July as we feature these New Talents on our homepage!


Los Angeles is preoccupied. In the past two years, the city gained a couple of NFL franchises, completed a $1.5 billion light-rail extension, was awarded the 2028 Summer Olympics, constructed the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, and approved Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to beta test a network of high-speed tunnels. Despite the rapid development, L.A. is grappling with growing pains: unprecedented levels of homelessness, persistent housing shortages, and a gentrification crisis.

Few design groups are working harder to address these ailments than LA-Más, a nonprofit architecture and policy practice based in Frogtown. “We’re like the Jonathan Gold of urban design,” says LA-Más cofounder Elizabeth Timme, referring to L.A.’s colorful and beloved food critic. “We share the idea that you should represent diversity and hold space for the entire Los Angeles community. You don’t try to sanitize it.”

To this end, LA-Más takes the form of a one-two architecture-logistics punch. While Elizabeth Timme oversees the firm’s design direction, codirector Helen Leung leads policy and community engagement: “My experience in policy and working in the community complemented Elizabeth’s in architecture,” says Leung. Since LA-Más’s inception in 2013, the duo have collaborated on dozens of projects aimed at transforming L.A.’s streetscape and small businesses, acquiring along the way a reputation for low budgets, good communication, and quick turnarounds.

LA mas urban design interventions

For Sam’s Corner Store near MacArthur Park, LA-Más helped showcase an expanded offering of fresh produce and healthy food options with bright exterior paint, bilingual signage, and “fresh” icons throughout. Courtesy LA-Más


Leung and Timme’s practice grew out of a shared affinity for L.A. and simultaneous frustration with the city’s status quo. Timme, a third-generation architect and Harvard GSD graduate, grew up in the Southland and returned after stints at a hot list of architecture studios and a period working on medical projects in Liberia and Rwanda. Leung lived in Frogtown as well as Chinatown’s William Mead Homes, one of L.A.’s few public-housing projects, and, after graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, nabbed a fellowship in the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at HUD. Before joining Timme at LA-Más, she worked for then–city councilman and current mayor Eric Garcetti, for whom she focused on and became proficient in community outreach and policy change.

Currently, the pair are collaborating with the mayor on his Great Streets Initiative, a series of improvements that will revamp some of L.A.’s more dilapidated thoroughfares. In 2015, as part of this undertaking, LA-Más completed phase one of its Reseda Boulevard project in the San Fernando Valley: A network of thick white lines reimagines the sidewalks’ concrete as stone; custom summer-yellow chairs and bike racks visually (and programmatically) extend storefronts to the street; and shades of cool blue paint coat the underside of a multi-storefront awning. Though the modifications were originally conceived as a temporary installation, Reseda businesses wished to preserve them. “Because we worked with a local community group, we were able to make sure that they were going to maintain it and own it,” explains Leung. “It’s almost been three years and it’s still looking new.”

LA mas urban design interventions

In the Go Ave 26 project, LA-Más spruced up a multimodal transportation hub near the Lincoln/Cypress metro station, improving visual clarity and pedestrian safety. Courtesy LA-Más


Since its success at Reseda, LA-Más has begun focusing on another of Garcetti’s Great Streets: an undernourished stretch of Western Avenue. The firm’s plan calls for an array of pedestrian-focused street improvements meant to benefit more than a dozen small businesses. (The first phase of the proposal is slated to be unveiled to the public in August.)

To provide Angelenos with some relief from soaring rents, LA-Más began experimenting with accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small residential buildings constructed in the vacant space of a preexisting housing unit’s lot. Along with designing a 1,100-square-foot, $300,000 pilot project in Highland Park, LA-Más is championing pro-ADU legislation (California’s senate bill SB-831). The system could prove to be a critical tool in easing the state’s housing crisis without irking NIMBYs, and, according to Leung, form an “easier, cheaper, and potentially community-led way for Los Angeles to add housing in general.”

LA mas urban design interventions

Hollywood Pop typifies what LA-Más refers to as “fuzzy urbanism”—the reclamation of underutilized space that serves to whimsically (but intentionally) blur the boundary between public and private. Courtesy Brian Guido


While the scope of some of LA-Más’s endeavors stands to alter entire neighborhoods, others call for revitalization on a smaller scale. Located on the southwestern corner of Ivar and Selma Avenues, and sited on a missable sliver of dirt between a sidewalk and a parking lot, Hollywood Pop is a curious project and an instructive example. By inserting cartoonishly bright green plywood “trees” and red-orange picnic tables, LA-Más provided what is probably the most colorful and alluring public seating in Hollywood. The flashiness feels appropriate, though, as Pop is in full view of nightclubs and landmarks like the Hollywood Sign, Amoeba Music, and the International Scientology Center.

Instagram-friendly, inviting, and thoughtfully simplified, Hollywood Pop reflects the ethos of both LA-Más and Los Angeles. “Our work is a celebration of the areas we’re working in,” asserts Timme. “It’s meant to be provocative and to call attention to territory that has previously been ignored or neglected.” Los Angeles might be distracted by its shiny new toys, but LA-Más remains laser focused on fixing the city’s chronic ailments, one intervention at a time.

You may also enjoy “Forgotten Photographer Marvin Rand Documented Los Angeles Modernism Like No One Else.”

Categories: Cities, Ideas, Planning

The post New Talent 2018: Nonprofit LA-Más Is Revitalizing Los Angeles’s Overlooked Corners appeared first on Metropolis.

The New Development That Promises to Transform Boston’s Waterfront

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OMA is designing 88 Seaport, one of the many new towers planned for the Boston Seaport development. 88 Seaport will include just over 430,000 square feet of office and 60,000 square feet of retail. Courtesy WS Development


Countless cities across America have sprawling, empty waterfront sites that once hummed with factories, trucks, and trains. For Boston, it was its Seaport District—a swathe of land approximately a mile deep and long, located east of the city’s downtown. And while the Seaport District still features its fair share of industrial buildings and surface parking, a 23-acre development situated right next to downtown Boston is sprouting new towers: around eight blocks have complete buildings, with one block under construction and nine blocks awaiting development. The under-construction block includes 88 Seaport, an OMA-designed retail-and-office project that will rise 18 stories. And while the Boston Seaport development promises a series of new public amenities, including landscape architecture by James Corner Field Operations, this concentrated growth has called attention to the resiliency and flooding challenges facing the broader Seaport District.

Given it’s prime location—a stone’s throw from the Financial District and the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway—the site seems like a natural locus for density. However, this wasn’t always the case. Once clam flats, the Boston Seaport became a rail yard in the late 1800s, fell into disuse after WWII, and later became notorious for its parking lots and criminal activity.

Development came slowly: a large federal court building (1999), convention center (2004), and new bus rapid transit stations (2004) all landed there, followed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s new ICA building (2006). The 2008 recession slowed the neighborhood’s growth, and while one company—WS Development—isn’t the only developer operating there, that company became a major force in 2015 when it bought multiple parcels (20 city blocks total) in the Seaport District. In doing so, and having obtained the permits to modify the area’s public space, WS set it sights on using good urban design to support a vibrant retail scene.

“We talk a lot about [developing] the character of historic European neighborhoods,” says Ali Ribeiro, WS Development project manager. She says the company views the Seaport as a very long term investment, one where quality design could pay dividends for generations.

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Lisa Switkin, senior principal at JCFO, says JCFO, NADAAA, and Sasaki aimed to create intimacy and warmth in the Seaport’s public spaces; that feeling would soften the development’s otherwise glassy architecture. The trio’s coordination will be most evident at Harbor Square (located just north of Congress St.), where the surrounding buildings are setback to admit light and create a sense of openness. Courtesy WS Development


Consequently, in 2015 WS also engaged a trio of firms to compose a master plan for the site: New York City–based James Corner Field Operations (JCFO), Boston and New York–based NADAAA (led by Nader Tehrani, dean of the Cooper Union’s architecture school), and Watertown, MA–based Sasaki. The three firms (which are landscape architecture, architecture, and multidisciplinary, respectively) collaborated closely to shape the neighborhood, coordinating its landscaping (both plantings and hardscapes), urban design, building massing, and building programming.

The resulting master plan has two main pedestrian axes. The first is a North-South linear park dubbed “Harbor Way” that runs from Summer Street (where Boston’s main convention center is located) to Northern Avenue (just short of the ICA and waterfront). This pathway is punctuated by “Harbor Square Park,” a 1.5-acre park nestled between four of WS’s towers. The second pedestrian axis is Seaport Boulevard, which runs East-West and features several lanes of traffic, though is being redesigned to include pedestrian-friendly features like a green median.

Harbor Way will reference New England’s geology by featuring several “glacial erratics,” essentially massive boulders that mimic the stranded stony masses left behind by glaciers. Harbor Way and Harbor Square Park are the project’s grandest gestures: “It’s meant to be a connector to the water, to the other open spaces, and in and of itself, fun and family-friendly… [Harbor Way and Square Park] are that live-work-play spine,” says Lisa Switkin, senior principal at JCFO.

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This grand stair will link Harbor Way to Summer Street and the convention center beyond. The landscaping, here and throughout the Seaport, aims to evoke the Massachusetts coast: JCFO selected salt- and shade-tolerant plantings and installed a wooden boardwalk. The enormous boulders will certainly standout; “There was a desire for something that felt much more wild there,” says Switkin. Courtesy WS Development


Like any major development, Boston Seaport hasn’t been without its controversies. In early 2017, WS scrapped plans for a 200,000-square-foot cultural center, opting instead to build two performing arts complexes: Seaport Performing Arts Center (SeaPAC), which will feature a 500-seat venue and 100-seat black box theater, and the Fort Point Community Theater, a 150-seat black box theater. A late 2017 Boston Globe article portrayed the broader development of the Seaport District as a missed opportunity to help correct the city’s socioeconomic and racial segregation.

WS says it’s doing its part—the development is complying with the city’s 15 percent affordable housing requirement, with the affordable units spread throughout the Seaport’s residential buildings. All in all, the entire seaport will feature 3,200 residential units when complete, with around 480 designated “affordable.” (“Affordability” is calculated using Area Median Family Income, with the City of Boston administering the lottery for the affordable units and rent subsidies.) While the Seaport District can be hard to reach on public transportation, and short of inexpensive parking, there are public amenities for the Bostonians who make it: Already built destinations include Seaport Common, a half-block plaza and green space, and District Hall, a public workspace that includes a cafe, restaurant, common areas, and meeting rooms. (The Hall was funded by WS and its partners, and designed by Hacin + Associates, who also designed IDEO’s new Cambridge office.) Additionally, WS says it has committed to an additional 10,000-square-foot civic space which may or may not include a public library.

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In commissioning OMA for 88 Seaport (shown here), and selecting firms like JCFO, NADAAA, and Sasaki, Ribeiro says that WS aims to “elevate the level of design and bring in teams that have not done a building in Boston.” Courtesy WS Development


But the Seaport’s biggest challenge may come from it’s biggest neighbor: the ocean. Recently some have questioned the long-term viability of the Seaport District and the City of Boston has been candid about the risks. Richard McGuinness, a city planning deputy, told U.S. News and World Report that “We know the water is going to be coming in through South Boston, pretty much from every direction, by 2070.” In coming decades, rising sea levels will expose the area to increasingly severe flooding.

WS insists it’s taking steps to avoid disaster. Yanni Tsipis, a senior vice president at WS Development, tells Metropolis that ground under six city blocks in the Boston Seaport development (all located between Congress Street and Seaport Boulevard) have been elevated above the 500-year floodplain. “We believe in science and, in many cases, are raising the existing grades in the neighborhood by four or five feet to ensure that our future buildings are well above long-range flood elevation,” says Tsipis. While all of WS’s Boston Seaport projects are elevated above the 100-year floodplain, many other nearby buildings (especially those in the adjacent Fort Point area) remain susceptible to flooding.

Moving forward, the newer buildings in the Seaport District—and many U.S. waterfronts—will simply have to be designed with resiliency foremost in mind. 88 Seaport’s mechanical equipment will all be located on the building’s second and third floors, well above any future flood waters. Speaking to Boston.com, Tsipis said “we go into development in the Seaport with eyes wide open.”

The entire Boston Seaport development should be complete within the next six to nine years.

You may also enjoy “A Closer Look at David Adjaye’s First Skyscraper, Now Rising in Lower Manhattan.”

Categories: Landscape, Planning

The post The New Development That Promises to Transform Boston’s Waterfront appeared first on Metropolis.

In New York City, a Bold Urban Plan Seeks to Revitalize Miles of Shoreline

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Flushing Bay is located near Citi Field and the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, meaning simple wayfinding and lighting improvements could bring thousands of new visitors to the bay’s promenade, which stretches more than 7,000 feet. Courtesy Riverkeeper/Perkins+Will


For our annual cities listings, Metropolis took a novel approach to avoid the typical ranking: We surveyed 80 leading architecture and design professionals, asking them to nominate places in three categories—design powerhouses, buzzing cultural hubs, and cities that inspire or personally resonate with them. The results turned up the usual suspects as well as some unexpected newcomers, and our coverage is similarly heterogeneous, from profiles of local firms to spotlights on grassroots initiatives and sum-ups of cities’ design goings-on.

This project from New York City reflects the megalopolis’s position as a “powerhouse” global Design City. Stay tuned to our homepage as we publish more 2018 Design Cities!


New York City once had a thriving waterfront: The metropolis sprouted countless wharves and bulkheads through which goods moved from factories to warehouses and the world beyond. Although that commerce is long gone, planners and developers have reclaimed only a few of these postindustrial sections, such as those in Brooklyn’s Dumbo and Queens’s Long Island City. Now two plans by the architecture firm Perkins+Will aim to proactively reshape polluted, neglected stretches along Newtown Creek, Flushing Bay, and Flushing Creek into vibrant public assets.

You could be forgiven if you haven’t heard of these areas. The once heavily industrialized Newtown Creek features 11 miles of shoreline that winds along the Queens-Brooklyn border. (From 1915 to 1917, the waterway handled as much freight tonnage as the entire Mississippi River.) While the creek is highly polluted, its Superfund site designation (encoded in 2011) and subsequent cleanup could radically remake its landscape. Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek, meanwhile, were significantly shaped by the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, which filled in much of their marshland and laced the area with highways. The bay abuts multiple residential communities along with Willets Point, a formerly industrial neighborhood poised to welcome real estate developments housing 15,000 new residents.

Perkins Will riverkeeper flushing newtown urban plan

The Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek vision plan includes a proposed Queens Water Exploration Center (seen here). It would serve as a focal point for the bay’s revitalization, serving as a community center that supports recreational boating, conservation efforts, and ecological education programs. Courtesy Riverkeeper/Perkins+Will


Enter Riverkeeper, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group focused on the Hudson River and its many tributaries, including Newtown Creek, Flushing Creek, and Flushing Bay. Anticipating changes for these waterfronts, Riverkeeper asked Perkins+Will to help produce a vision plan for each site. “Our community outreach process started right off the bat and was really intensive,” says Chrissy Remein, Riverkeeper’s New York City water-quality project coordinator. For one year, the Perkins+Will and Riverkeeper teams conducted one-on-one meetings, discussions with public agencies, pinups at local bars and restaurants, and even email campaigns soliciting ideas, connecting with several hundred people for each plan.

Local partners proved essential in facilitating this process. For Newtown Creek, Perkins+Will and Riverkeeper worked with the Newtown Creek Alliance, a local community and ecological advocacy group. The Guardians of Flushing Bay, another local environmental group that focuses on recreational boating, became another critical ally. In collaborating with them, says Perkins+Will senior urban designer Daniel Windsor, “the idea was to catch as many ideas as possible and…really siphon those down into what we thought was achievable and appropriate.”

Perkins Will riverkeeper flushing newtown urban plan

Newtown Creek is still an active industrial waterfront, so its vision plan calls for public uses and environmental restoration to work alongside existing businesses. A new landing where bustling Vernon Boulevard meets the creek includes a dock for small boats, public seating, and a landscaped embankment. Courtesy Riverkeeper/Perkins+Will


The end result is a range of tailor-made interventions. For Newtown Creek, this includes a broad spectrum of place-specific solutions: redesigning active industrial bulkheads to accommodate habitat-restoring vegetation, installing public viewing platforms at strategic points, and converting unused sections of the creek into marshland. At Flushing Bay, the vision plan includes a host of new trails, the rebuilding of an oyster reef, and a new Queens Water Exploration Center that will serve as a hub for recreation, education, and research. Both schemes make use of green infrastructure, including rain gardens and catchments to capture rainwater before it washes pollutants into natural waterways or triggers environmentally damaging combined sewer overflows. (Most of New York City still channels rainwater through its sewer drains and pipes, leading to a situation in which even light rainfall can overwhelm the sewer system and precipitate untreated wastewater discharges into the environment.)

Implementing the plans’ various recommendations, however, may take years—even decades— depending on which (and whether) agencies and politicians step up to the plate. The biggest shortterm challenge is just raising awareness of the sites’ potential, something that was previously hard to do. “A lot of times you can easily try to explain what the benefits of some of these solutions are,” says Windsor. “But until people really see it, it’s hard for them to get excited. It’s hard for elected officials to really sell it, ’cause that’s what it comes down to.” There’s no price tag that comes with the plans quite yet, but for locals, it won’t be a hard sell.

You may also enjoy “New Talent 2018: Nonprofit LA-Más Is Revitalizing Los Angeles’s Overlooked Corners.”

Categories: Cities, Landscape, Planning, Transportation

The post In New York City, a Bold Urban Plan Seeks to Revitalize Miles of Shoreline appeared first on Metropolis.

The Miller Hull Partnership Proposes Turning a Defunct Seattle Tunnel Into a Landscaped Canyon

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The Miller Hull Partnership has proposed removing the roof of Seattle’s defunct Battery Street Tunnel, converting it into a landscaped ravine. The proposal would see the tunnel’s structural beams salvaged and used to support elevated pedestrian walkways. Courtesy The Miller Hull Partnership


During the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for prominent architects to put forth bold visions for the future of cities. Frank Lloyd Wright presented his initial ideas for Broadacre City in 1932 and continued refining them until his death in 1959. During the postwar era, Buckminster Fuller proposed enclosing part of Manhattan under a geodesic dome, and Paul Rudolph famously proposed a Brutalist megastructure over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, still a glimmer in Robert Moses’s eye at that time.

Perhaps chastened by the reactions to such grandiose schemes, the architecture profession from the 1980s onward took a more conservative tack, generally preferring to pour its most ambitious efforts into corporate projects. At the same time, the automobile-oriented orthodoxy of postwar American urban planning began to be seriously questioned. Infrastructure that seemed visionary in the 1950s is now considered archaic and anti-urban.

In Seattle, the Alaskan Way Viaduct—built as part of a postwar expressway project that sliced the waterfront off from the rest of downtown in a manner that Robert Moses himself might have conjured up—is rapidly approaching the end of its life as a conduit for automobiles. The fate of one viaduct segment has been especially debated: The Battery Street Tunnel, which travels underneath six blocks of downtown Seattle.

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In addition to the tunnel, The Miller Hull Partnership’s proposal includes changes to nearby University Street. The street would be pedestrianized and form a landscaped connection between the waterfront and Seattle’s Freeway park. It would include a salmon run, seen here. Courtesy The Miller Hull Partnership


While the Washington State Department of Transportation plans to fill the Battery Street Tunnel with rubble from the demolished viaduct, The Miller Hull Partnership has taken the lead in envisioning an alternative, innovative repurposing of the tunnel that would physically reconnect downtown Seattle with its waterfront and symbolically reunite the city with the stunning natural beauty of the Puget Sound region.

Miller Hull proposes removing the tunnel’s roof and creating an artificial canyon in the place of Battery Street that would connect Denny Park with Puget Sound. The bottom of the canyon, formerly the freeway road bed, would be excavated and converted into a creek with a salmon run. The creek’s shores would be lined with native vegetation (including towering Douglas-fir and western red cedar trees) and a variety of pathways and gathering spaces. The tunnel’s concrete ceiling beams would be removed and placed vertically into the ground, supporting a suspended pedestrian walkway through the new tree canopy.

The vision extends beyond Battery Street Tunnel: Miller Hull sees it as part of a larger push to create a continuous greenbelt around the downtown core. Existing natural amenities—Denny Park, the Lawrence Halprin–designed Freeway Park, and the in-progress James Corner Field Operations–planned waterfront—would be connected by pedestrianized streets such as the Battery Street Tunnel, University Street, and several avenues running north and south.

miller hull battery street tunnel seattle

Miller Hull’s proposed greenbelt, with Denny Park (top left) connecting to the waterfront (bottom) via the reclaimed Battery Steet Tunnel. Freeway Park (top right) would connect to the waterfront via a pedestrianized University Street. Courtesy The Miller Hull Partnership


David Miller, the Miller Hull Partnership’s founding partner and professor of architecture at the University of Washington, explains that the project could be a game-changer for Seattle, putting the city on the map for urban design that’s rooted in the ecology of the larger bioregion. While pioneering projects like Miller Hull’s Bullitt Center may be familiar to architects and others in the design industry, a series of verdant artificial canyons in the heart of a major city’s downtown would catch the attention of the general public in much the same way the High Line, another piece of reimagined urban infrastructure, captured the imagination of New York.

The project’s biggest challenges aren’t technical, but political; it needs public leadership with the vision and determination to push it forward. A local advocacy group has formed to help that effort.

Miller was beginning his career in architecture while Buckminster Fuller and Paul Rudolph were proposing their own radical interventions in the urban environment. He says with a laugh, “My son is so sick of hearing me talking about the 1960s, but things like this remind me of those times. At the University, we’re trying to get students interested in thinking more about the city, being proponents of big ideas about the city, and about how to transform the city.”

You may also enjoy “In New York City, a Bold Urban Plan Seeks to Revitalize Miles of Shoreline.”

Categories: Cities, Landscape, Planning

The post The Miller Hull Partnership Proposes Turning a Defunct Seattle Tunnel Into a Landscaped Canyon appeared first on Metropolis.

Landscape May Be Architects’ Best Tool for Tackling Inequality

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chicago inequality ross barney think tank

The Chicago Riverwalk, designed in part by Ross Barney Architects (RBA). Courtesy Kate Joyce


Often described as the most American of American cities, Chicago has developed a particularly virulent strain of what is perhaps the chief malady afflicting the nation: inequality, which Think Tank moderator Susan S. Szenasy called “the essential city and place conversation of the 21st century.” Parts of Chicago function as red-hot venues for real-estate speculation and redevelopment (one quarter of its households earn more than $100,000 per year) while vast swaths of its South and West sides resemble hollowed-out and disinvested Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Detroit.

So a conversation on how design can soften the edges of inequality couldn’t be more at home than in Chicago—or more precisely, the Metropolis panel discussion “Designing Cities for Equity and Justice,” hosted at the downtown Chicago offices of Ross Barney Architects.

The conversation began with a rare bit of data on the toll that entrenched and thoroughly normalized segregation takes on the city. The Metropolitan Planning Council’s (MPC) 2017 study on the cost of Chicago’s segregation, introduced by panelist and MPC president MarySue Barrett, was a way for the non-profit urban planning organization to push back against objections that fixing inequality is simply too expensive. “We asked ourselves: What does that status quo cost us?,” she said.

Compared to median rates of segregation, the bill is measured in billions and beyond, according to the MPC. Most basically: lost income ($4.8 billion in African-American income alone), lost lives (30 percent fewer homicides), and lost potential (83,000 fewer bachelor’s degrees).

“We have to quantify benefits so that we can debunk this idea that it’s more expensive to do balanced, mixed communities. It’s actually more expensive to continue with what we’ve been doing,” said Barrnett.

chicago inequality ross barney think tank

Left to right: Szenasy; Carol Ross Barney, founder/design principal, RBA; MarySue Barrett, president, Metropolitan Planning Council; and Anne Thompson, senior vice president of architecture and design, Related Midwest Courtesy Kate Joyce


“You do it because it’s the right thing to do, but you also do it because of the economic benefit,” said panelist Anne Thompson, senior vice president of architecture and design with developer Related Midwest. Her firm worked with the MPC and Ross Barney Architects on projects that position public spaces as the ultimate arena for integrating people across socioeconomic lines, beyond the mixed-income, private-financing model that has dominated affordable housing for decades. “The space between buildings that allow people to congregate, to gather, to see themselves in a common space [together] is invaluable,” said Thompson.

Ross Barney Architects’ Chicago Riverwalk is one such venue. (The firm collaborated on the project with Sasaki.) A series of landscaped urban rooms that offer visitors places to rest, converse, and kayak, the Riverwalk points the way to a much longer ribbon of riverine landscapes. Known as a lakeside city, Lake Michigan’s shores are dwarfed by the 150 miles of riverbank provided by the Chicago River, which runs through many neighborhoods that are “environmentally deprived” and suffer from a lack of green spaces, said panelist Carol Ross Barney.

The wide range of the river means that it can act as a focal point for local color and culture from neighborhood to neighborhood, and that’s good in “a city that has many [cultures] and celebrates many,” said Barrett.

“We can talk about the whole city in terms of systems, and how justly they serve different neighborhoods,” said Ross Barney.

The notion of landscape as a locus of community across socio-economic borders is even more pointed at Lathrop Homes, a 1930s public housing project that’s being repurposed into mixed-income housing by Related Midwest, and survives today as one of the city’s best examples of well-designed subsidized housing. A Jens Jensen landscape, it’s centered on a wide community lawn and borders the Chicago River. The project, which will feature landscape architecture by Brooklyn-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, will encourage residents to explore this landscape together with its kayak launch and boathouse. It’s been a wildly complex project, balancing housing equity with landscape and architectural preservation.  The panel mused about how much less of a fee Van Valkenburgh might have been willing to take for the prestige of working on a historic landscape and building and the charitable nature of its mission. But Ross Barney said that’s backwards. “The real hard problems,” she said, “are the ones we should pay for.”

You may also enjoy “Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Reveals What Its Toronto Smart City May Look Like.”

Categories: Cities, Landscape, Planning, Think Tank

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Lessons on Participatory Design from San Francisco

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participatory design lessons San Francisco

Perkin Eastman’s design for the Harvey Milk Plaza Courtesy Perkins Eastman


Developed in Scandinavia in the 1970s to give factory workers a voice in improving their working conditions and processes, participatory design democratizes the design process by incorporating input from all stakeholders and hopefully results in a more successful project. Today, it is commonplace for firms working on public projects to hold community meetings and design charrettes. Soliciting input online opens up a broad channel of communication but can also be an overwhelming firehose. At the San Francisco offices of Perkins Eastman, seasoned designers and policy wonks talked about their experiences with participatory design in a panel led by Metropolis director of design innovation Susan Szenasy.

Participatory design is critical because it “creates a sense of shared authorship,” said Erich Burkhart, a principal at Perkins Eastman. “These decades-long projects face all sorts of hurdles, and they’ll never be built unless there’s a reservoir of community advocacy.” When talking to Silicon Valley companies who want community buy-in for their office development plans, Allison Arieff, editorial director at urban think tank SPUR, recommends they start the conversation with “half of a plan.” “You can’t just present a project and say it’s designed for the community,” she said.

participatory design lessons San Francisco

The design features a public staircase that rises up from the sidewalk and over a metro station. Courtesy Perkins Eastman


However, connecting with a meaningful spectrum of the community may require considerable initiative. For BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)’s last customer survey, interviewers went into the stations with tablet computers and directly surveyed nearly 44,000 riders. “If you hold a meeting, you might get comments from 10 to 20 people, and those responses might be skewed,” said Tim Chan, BART’s stations planning acting group manager. To inform a competition to redesign Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco, the organizers went through a community input process via the online platform Neighborland, which garnered comments from 11,000 people and completed surveys from 2,600. “To have that kind of feedback was incredible,” said Andrea Aiello, executive director of the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District and president of The Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza. “We would have never been able to reach all these people with a traditional community charrette.” One of the biggest challenges is identifying who all the stakeholders are. “Sometimes they’re not the most vocal or obvious folks out there,” said Burkhart. Connecting with people in the homeless community, those who speak different languages, and those of different generations could all be relevant to the project.

When gathering online input, limiting and fine-tuning the questions is key, panelists reiterated. The organizers of the Harvey Milk Plaza competition winnowed the proposals down to three finalists before soliciting public feedback. They also made sure the questions were in layperson language and used the Likert scale to quantify reactions. Keeping the questions high-level also helps to channel useful data, said Eric Birkhauser, project manager at VIA Architecture. For a survey about a redesign of BART entrances, one of the questions was, “’Is transparency important at street level?’ versus ‘Should we use glass?’” he said.

The Think Tank discussions in San Francisco were held January 31 and February 1. The conversations were presented in partnership with DWR Contract, DXV/GROHE, KI, Sunbrella, Visa Lighting, and Wilsonart.

You may also enjoy “How Architecture Can Help Address America’s Mental-Health-Care Crisis.”

Categories: Planning, Think Tank

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Let There Be…Real Estate? How Developers and Churches Are Joining Forces in London

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churches real estate development london

Developer Thornsett Group worked with London’s Bethnal Green Mission Church to realize fourteen condominiums and a new church, all located within the same building (seen here). Courtesy Jack Hobhouse


If Jesus were alive today, would he be a property developer? As empty space in London becomes increasingly scarce and many projects remain stuck in planning purgatory, developers and local churches in the city’s east end are crossing the aisle to create a new development typology that benefits both saints and sellers.

“I always say, God isn’t making any more land so we need to make better use of what we’ve already got,” half-jokes Bernadette Cunningham, a devout Catholic and director of Thornsett Group, one of the key players in such church-led collaborative developments. The Irish-born Cunningham began working at the family real estate developer business almost two decades ago as a marketing associate, eventually becoming director of the 25-person company. With a background in economics and a PhD in theology, Cunningham currently helms Thornsett with both faith and finances on the mind—a duality in which she sees zero conflict, she explains over the phone.

Prior to working with churches, Cunningham had a track record of developing projects with nonprofits. In 2006, Thornsett embarked on an ambitious redevelopment scheme—its largest in the English capital—with the national hospital charity Barts Trust on the last undeveloped World War II bombsite in London. Working with Thornsett, Barts Trust enabled the construction of 185 luxury apartments (50 of which are social housing units) across 47,360 square feet of residential development, plus over 50,000 square feet of commercial space (27,000 of which is retail). In exchange, Thornsett built a new cardiac and cancer research center in 2010 through a $23 million donation to Barts Trust. Spanning some six blocks, the total value of the development scrapes around $100 million.

churches real estate development london

The new Bethnal Green Mission Church Courtesy Jack Hobhouse


With such a hefty debut, Cunningham has since ascended to brokering deals with the Diocese of London. Her dual position as a person of faith and head of one of the U.K.’s most agile property developers enables her to play both sides of the court, suggests principal Tom Rhodes of local practice Gatti Routh Rhodes, who partnered with Thornsett to design the newly-completed Bethnal Green Mission Church.

The Bethnal project, completed October 2018 on a tight budget of $9 million, saw the construction of 14 condominiums (collectively called the Macpherson Apartments) above and around the new church, which continues to serve the community. Although the church is still a few weeks from its public debut, its positive public effects already apparent—a new street-facing café, the Beehive, is buzzing with local freelancers, while the park in front of the church (shuttered by authorities a couple years back due to its prominence as a crime and drug spot) is finally open again. “Now that people can cross from the main road to the pubs and restaurants under the railway arches, the businesses are booming,” says Rhodes, whose office is based in the building, along with the vicarage.

churches real estate development london

Gymansium within the Bethnal Green Mission Church development Courtesy Jack Hobhouse


While Bethnal Green Mission Church is a new construction, Thornsett continues to do God’s work with fresh projects in the pipeline. A couple miles further north in the London borough of Hackney, adjacent to a medieval military tower and the recently pedestrianized end of Mare Street, sits the parish church St John at Hackney, whose 18th century church steeple is currently crowned in scaffolding. The church survived the bombing of World War II and a subsequent fire only to fall into serious disrepair over the next half-century. By 2010 it faced threats of demolition despite its historical import. To raise funding for its much-needed restoration, St John’s pop culture–savvy Reverend Gordon summoned the likes of Coldplay, Robbie Williams, and Ed Sheeran to host concerts in the epic venue. Still, its speculative future remained bleak—until Thornsett got involved.

In less than six months from now, 58 condominium units (dubbed Hackney Gardens) will have taken root in the tombstone-lined churchyard as part of a mixed-use scheme developed by Thornsett, backed by St John at Hackeny (who authorized the use of its historically-listed grounds), and designed by British architecture firm DLA Design. For its cut of the deal, St John will receive an approximately $6.4 million-facelift (partially subsidized by the developer) that will be designed collaboratively by the renowned minimalist architect John Pawson and artist and designer Es Devlin. (Devlin’s psychedelic immersive set designs have framed the life performances of musicians from Kanye West to Beyoncé.)

churches real estate development london

Rendering of the restored St John at Hackney church. The adjacent Hackney Gardens development will also house a new community center (to be run by the church) that will offer programming that supports the educational needs of local youth. It will also host the East London Scouts, who currently occupy a building on the south of the site, according to DLA Design. Courtesy John Pawson Ltd.


With land payment (worth approximately $3.2 million) doled out by Thornsett and matched by the Big Lottery Fund (a non-governmental public body that gives out some $640 million of funds raised by the National Lottery each year to charitable causes), St John at Hackney’s undoubtedly trendy future restoration is in the bag. But the developer’s good deeds extend beyond the site of worship. Hackney Gardens will also house a community center and a new semi-public garden appropriately titled Prodigal Square. “We had to work around the walls propping up the tombstones, which are technically listed property, which is why the Square is classified as a semi-public space,” says Cunningham.

While some Londoners may scoff at yet more luxury housing, Cunningham sees a social value in such developments. “From the sale price of the apartments, we can help support the local community,” Cunningham explains. “Housing is obviously a big need in London, but we have lots of other needs as well—and churches have historically provided a lot of those resources.”

From St John at Hackney’s Lighthouse project (which feeds over 100 homeless people every week in a lunch club program catered by Hackney hipster haunt Morito), to youth camps, single dads clubs, and winter shelters provided by Bethnal Green Mission Church, the churches collectively offer a huge range of services to a local community in need. A symbiotic partnership with Thornsett both elevates and reinforces the work of these good Samaritans, whose virtuosity keeps the good PR rolling for the developer.

churches real estate development london

The New Mildmay mixed-use development, completed in 2017 Courtesy Will Pryce


Other local developers have already seen the light: In 2010, social housing provider Genesis Housing Group teamed up with Shoreditch Tabernacle Baptist Church, commissioning two London-based practices FCBStudios and Matthew Lloyd Architects to design a $58 million mixed-use scheme (dubbed New Mildmay) that features a new church with 35 residential units above and adjacent to the place of worship—again, both anchored and fast-tracked through planning loopholes by Shoreditch Tabernacle Baptist Church’s Grade II–listed Tab Centre community center. Completed in 2017, New Mildmay distinguishes itself from the other two mixed-use developments in its inclusion of affordable rent housing, as well as condominiums.

churches real estate development london

The new chapel for Shoreditch Tabernacle Baptist Church in the New Mildmay development


As with Bethnal Green Mission Church, the design of New Mildmay opted for architectural camouflage—the “New London Vernacular”-style brickwork blending into Hackney Road’s rows of terraced housing, with a garden shared between chapel and residents. Cheery color-blocked doors and amphitheater-style seating area provide neighborly identity and flair. Despite its sleek and tranquil environment, New Mildmay is a more inward-seeking design by comparison, with less generous allowances of public space.

Cunningham predicts even larger developers will soon be getting in touch with their spiritual side to cash in on this burgeoning typology. “Thornsett has a unique track record, but we are not going to be the only ones for much longer,” she says. As church-led developments become an increasingly enticing endeavor boasting big profit margins, will these developers keep up the saintly work, or will their lust for capital oust them from the Garden of East London?

You may also enjoy “Fall Books Preview: 27 Top Picks from Metropolis Magazine.”

Categories: Architecture, Planning, Preservation

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Urban Planning Lessons from the D.C. Region

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Urban Planning Lessons Washington DC

From left to right: Susan S. Szenasy, Metropolis director of design innovation; Barbara Mullenex, managing principal, Perkins Eastman; Matt Ginivan, senior vice president of real estate development, JBG Companies; Mignon Anthony, chief operating officer, Alexandria City Public Schools; Anthony Williams, CEO and executive director of the Federal City Council and former Washington, D.C., mayor Courtesy Peter Jakubowski/Perkins Eastman


Like many other cities around the world, Washington, D.C., has undergone expansion and contraction tied to generational shifts in attitude toward urban living. But Washington is also a curious case in that its height restrictions limit vertical growth, which forces developers to consider alternative means of increasing density within a regimented city grid. In the 1960s, planners invoked eminent domain to transform swaths of Washington’s Southwest and Southeast quadrants, and the effects of that urban renewal linger in the forms of displaced populations fighting to regain a foothold in the capital as well as informal business districts that empty out after-hours.

Architect Barbara Mullenex likens urban renewal’s effect on the city to a forest clear-cutting, but sees policy as a vehicle toward managed restoration. “The highway administration divided cities and tore down the urban fabric,” she said recently at a Metropolis Think Tank panel discussion. Mullenex, who is a managing principal at Perkins Eastman, was involved in master-planning a massive development in the area, called the Wharf, that had prompted the talk.

Urban Planning Lessons Washington DC

Perkins Eastman designed WeWork’s campus in Arlington, Virginia. Courtesy Assembly Studios


Once a relatively dilapidated waterfront stretch between a fish market and a few motels and restaurants, the Wharf has been redeveloped into a busy living and dining destination that reconnects the adjacent neighborhood to the Potomac River. For Mullenex, who was onstage by thought leaders working in Washington’s metro region, the project “is kind of full circle of urban renewal.” She highlighted late “more enlightened policy making” that aimed to “develop policies that would allow for future re-growth or revitalization of those areas.”

When Anthony Williams was mayor of Washington, he played a role in formulating the policy work Mullenex cites, and he still has a hand in shaping the city as executive director and CEO of the Federal City Council, which acts as a development facilitator and go-between for business leaders and government officials at the federal and city levels. During the age of urban renewal, government agencies had the ability to enact sweeping changes, as was the case in Southwest Washington, or further north with Robert Moses in New York, or in West Adams, Calif., where Williams grew up watching the Santa Monica Freeway divide his neighborhood. “As an African-American, I have a more nuanced view of urban renewal, despite all its horrors, and despite my neighborhood being destroyed,” he said. “At least the government was doing something, as opposed to saying the free market will take care of everything.”

While the federal government was re-shaping Southwest into superblocks of either agency offices or Modernist multifamily towers, another urban hub was taking shape across the Potomac, in Virginia: Crystal City. To Matt Ginivan, a senior vice president with developer JBG Smith, Crystal City once represented a Jetsons-age mentality in the way its infrastructure was designed to funnel people from homes to highways to parking garages and into office towers, connected by sky bridges. Contact with the natural elements was minimized. Now, Ginivan says his team at JBG Smith wants to change the paradigm. The question they’ve been asking lately is “How do we change it from a place where people are going in and out of it every day, to a place where people are living, and mingling, and experiencing the environment together?”

Urban Planning Lessons Washington DC

The firm was also responsible for master-planning the Wharf, a busy living and dining destination in Southwest D.C. that reconnects the adjacent neighborhood to the Potomac River. Courtesy Jeff Goldberg/Esto


Part of the answer has to do with strategic redevelopment that finds new uses for some of the existing stock of office blocks within Crystal City, especially now that it has been named one of the two sites for Amazon’s second headquarters (the Think Tank panel occurred just prior to Amazon’s announcement). This kind of redevelopment, where aging commercial corridors have been up-zoned to allow mixtures of retail and residential uses as well, is happening in cities across the United States. In Crystal City, a WeWork/WeLive outpost designed by Perkins Eastman has opened recently, combining shared workspaces with flexible living quarters. Another co-working space, 1776 Crystal City, rents out workplaces within its ample office tower floorplate. The area benefits from dual Metro station access and is a stone’s throw from Reagan National Airport, making it a transit-connected environment within easy reach of Washington’s traditional downtown, and beyond. Then there are the infrastructural improvements, such as the addition of a bus lane and a bike lane. “We don’t have the L’Enfant plan, the natural grid,” Ginivan said. “We have Route 1, and that’s still elevated in lots of areas. We have big superblocks. But there’s about a two-block stretch of Crystal City that feels like a vibrant, bustling business district.” And, with the advent of Amazon’s HQ2, National Landing—which is what local officials are calling the combination of parts of Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Potomac Yards—is likely to get a lot busier in the near future.

Of course, adding residential zones within commercial districts only works if the residents have all the amenities they need. One of the biggest concerns for young adults in the area is where they’ll send their children to learn. So the transformation of a vacant office building in nearby Alexandria into the Ferdinand T. Day Elementary School—a K-5 program focused on STEM education—both infills an underutilized resource, and provides another outlet for families who might be moving into the area. Mignon R. Anthony, who is chief operating officer of Alexandria City Public Schools, sees these kinds of architectural opportunities as being critical to the balance of urban and suburban lifestyles. “Sometimes we find in architecture that we’re only dealing with the issues of space,” Anthony said. “It’s our responsibility to think about how technology drives the way we learn, and the way we use the space.”

The idea of the interconnected global village is one that still resonates, but at a local level, it’s more about the connections people make in real life, on a daily basis, with their surrounding environments. As cities recover from previous generational evacuations from their downtowns to the suburbs, they attempt to entice suburban residents back into their urban cores with livable, walkable neighborhoods that offer more opportunities for personal connection. Former Mayor Williams acknowledges the difficult balance of bringing new residents in without ousting the old: “A little gentrification is good,” he said, “The bad part is displacement.” That’s a lesson Washingtonians learned nearly 50 years ago, and many have not yet recovered from it. As this city and others adopt growth strategies and seek investment, they would be wise to consider development tools that look for opportunities to connect with existing community assets.

The Think Tank discussions were held on September 26 and 27 in Washington, D.C. The conversations were presented in partnership with DWR Contract, DXV/GROHE, KI, Sunbrella Contract, Visa Lighting, and Wilsonart.

You may also enjoy “Architect Peter Barber Is Reinventing London’s Housing.”

Categories: Cities, Planning, Think Tank

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Year in Review 2018: Whose Resilient Future?

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year review 2018 whose resilient future

Resilient Equity Hubs— a part of the author’s All Bay Collective “Estuary Commons” proposal for San Leandro Bay in the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge—form alliances across political jurisdictions and property lines to reconfigure structures of wealth creation and ownership. Courtesy All Bay Collective


“Your urgency is not my urgency.” This was the rebuke from Marquita Price of the East Oakland Collective (EOC) at a design critique for the Resilient by Design (RBD) Bay Area Challenge this past March. Our team, the All Bay Collective, was working with EOC and other community-based organizations to champion racial and economic equity as part of our climate adaptation proposal. Price, who joined us for jury questions, rejected an impassioned plea by Dutch resilience ambassador Henk Ovink for more immediate action. A rush to judgment, she said, would foreclose a deeply empowered public process.

RBD—initiated by cities, agencies, and community groups around San Francisco Bay—leveraged $4.6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation to support nine teams of architects, landscape architects, engineers, ecologists, policy experts, and community partners from September 2017 to May 2018. Our task: to envision a region more resilient to climate change and its attendant risks. The brief explicitly called for reckoning with “the roots of systemic racism” and the “enduring reproduction of marginalization” that have left communities of color more vulnerable to climate hazards. In response, participants called for a familiar tool kit of “multibenefit solutions,” including those that would monetize ecosystem services and tap both public and private funds to accommodate diverse interests.

year review 2018 whose resilient future

Courtesy All Bay Collective

But as Price reminded us, the expediency and holism of a “multi-benefit” solution, no matter how expertly arranged, do not assuage deep-seated concerns about privilege and power, fears of gentrification, or distrust of its underwriters. Such rhetoric only compounds criticisms of resilience for its neoliberal stance, eagerness to speculate on disaster, and prioritization of the ecological over the political.

Fortunately, a closer look at the same RBD proposals reveals more pointed debates about the assumptions that underlie resilient planning approaches—asking which (or whose) version of “business as usual” we should be willing to overhaul. One team “unlocked” development potential; another shunned “wealth hoarding” through “voluntary limits to consumption.” One grounded wealth creation in the ownership of small lots; others (including our team) supported community land trusts and other cooperative models of ownership that aim to sidestep market volatility. Such healthy, necessary debates must take center stage within resilience narratives. Without them, empty “win-win” rhetoric will preclude the emergence of real public power and forestall any lasting, substantial decision-making.

JANETTE KIM teaches architecture at California College of the Arts. She participated in the All Bay Collective with AECOM, CMG, CCA, and UC Berkeley, as well as Silvestrum, David Baker Architects, Skeo, and modem.

You may also enjoy “Against Pluralism, Again: Two Books Rethink Theory and Criticism’s Role in Architecture.”

Categories: Cities, Ideas, Landscape, Planning

The post Year in Review 2018: Whose Resilient Future? appeared first on Metropolis.

Bjarke Ingels Group Makes Its Own Proposal for Brooklyn’s Looming BQE Repairs

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Bjarke Ingels Group BQE repairs plan

Aerial view of BIG’s Brooklyn-Queens Park (BQP) proposal Courtesy BIG


The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), completed in 1954, is a testament to postwar American ingenuity. Where it passes Brooklyn Heights, across the East River from Lower Manhattan, it occupies a pair of cantilevers—one each for northbound and southbound traffic. The Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a beloved linear park, occupies a third cantilever, 50 feet above what had been a working waterfront and is now Brooklyn Bridge Park.

But the cantilevered roadways, which support about 150,000 vehicles a day, will soon be structurally unsound. Some observers think it’s time to simply close those sections of the BQE and let the cars fall where they may. They point to other cities that have shuttered elevated highways, including Seattle, where 90,000 cars a day seemed to disappear when the Alaskan Way Viaduct was taken out of service in January. (Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s transportation commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says she thinks “trucks only” is a good idea. “It’s 2019. Haven’t we learned anything?” she asks, referring to the notion that every automobile must be catered to. “When we closed Times Square to traffic, people were predicting ‘car-mageddon.’”)

So far, though, New York City is committed to repairing the 1.5-mile section of the BQE that skirts Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO. The search for a way to do that without closing, or damaging, the Promenade has set off an unofficial competition among architects. The latest entrant is Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the Danish-American architecture firm, which last year moved its U.S. office from Manhattan to Brooklyn. There, “we saw posters for neighborhood meetings and decided to get involved,” says Jeremy Alain Siegel, an architect at the firm. This week, BIG released a plan that would replace the existing expressway while leaving the Promenade intact and adding acres of new parkland. Called BQP (Brooklyn-Queens Park), it is similar to a plan proposed by Mark Baker, a lawyer and pharmaceutical executive who has lived in Brooklyn Heights for 30 years. (Baker was formerly a chairman of the Brookklyn Bridge Conservancy before stepping down to focus on his plan, called the Tri-Line, as it would distribute parkland on three levels.)

BIG will formally unveil its plan at a town hall meeting tonight, at 7:00 PM at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The firm proposes creating a new six-lane highway at grade level, where it would replace an upland section of Brooklyn Bridge Park. But the highway would be decked over; the deck plus the BQE cantilevers would provide additional parkland and space for community amenities, including parking and a light-rail system. In the most appealing version of BIG’s plan, the existing Promenade and Brooklyn Bridge Park would become part of a multilevel recreation space stepping uphill from the harbor to the Heights.

How the BQP will be received remains to be seen. Two ideas proposed last year by the city’s Department of Transportation incensed local residents. The first called for closing the BQE one lane at a time, which would result in traffic snarls over a period of at least eight years but leave the Promenade intact. The second would turn the pedestrian-only Promenade into a temporary highway (which would have to be widened and supported on temporary columns) while the roadways below are repaired. Once reopened, after an estimated six years of construction, the Promenade would be restored to its pedestrian use—and possibly even expanded. But community opposition to closing the Promenade, even temporarily, is intense.

Bjarke Ingels Group BQE repairs plan

Section of BIG’s BQP proposal showing the cut through the Promenade to Brooklyn Bridge Park Courtesy BIG


The Brooklyn Heights Association, a community group, has helped circulate yet another plan, by architect Marc Wouters. Under Wouters’s proposal, a temporary highway would be built on land borrowed from a nearby at-grade roadway, Furman Street, and the inland edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park (the active areas of the park would be untouched). In this scenario, the Promenade would be closed only briefly. Once the cantilevered portions of the BQE reopened, Furman Street and the affected section of the park would be restored.

Meanwhile, Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller, has put forth ideas of his own. One would involve closing part of the BQE permanently; a few lanes would remain open to trucks, for which it is an essential artery. Drivers of cars—who would have to find other routes—would be incentivized to carpool or travel off-peak, and public transit options would be improved. Not rebuilding the cantilevered roadways would save money that would be invested on bus and subway upgrades.

No matter which plan is chosen, the repairs will cost billions of dollars. Siegel said he believes BIG’s approach might be the most economical because “we’re building the roadway once, not twice, and it’s a simple at-grade roadway rather than a 90-foot-high column-supported structure.” In addition, he said, “it delivers a lot of community benefits.” Noting the similarity to Baker’s plan, Siegel said, “There are a lot of people coming forward with ideas, which I think is a very healthy thing.”

You may also enjoy “In San Antonio, David Adjaye Designs a New Art Gallery That Takes Cues From Regional Architecture.”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: comments@metropolismag.com

Categories: Cities, Planning

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