Walking back from a meeting at Long Wharf, Matthew and I noticed that trees were being installed on Broad Street.We were pleased to run into Gigi Saltonstall from Richard Burck Associates overseeing the planting of the trees, and watched as Broad Street came to life with new street trees. 

Next up: benches!

- Meera

We're big pattern fans here at Utile (a segment of our office consists of closeted Studio Alchimia and Memphis enthusiasts).

  Top: Memphis Illustration, date unknown. Above: George J. Sowden, interior designs, 1983.

So, we were thrilled to see Andrew Zago's recent drawings for the MoMA Foreclosed exhibit.

I have some doubts about the overall exhibit premise and the projects, but I do appreciate the hint of heterogeneity and lack of architectural totalitarianism in Zago Architecture's rendering style.

- Meera

We are pleased to see our good friends---and frequent collaborators---at Reed Hilderbrand called out by Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation as one of the ten "notable developments in landscape architecture" in 2011:

On the outskirts of Boston, Watertown, Mass.-based landscape architecture practice Reed Hilderbrand is one of today's most influential design firms. This past year saw the unveiling of five distinct and significant public spaces: Kaufmann Center for the Performing Arts, Kansas City (with Moshe Safdie architect), the design leverages the site's 60' elevation change weaving in terraces and slopes that connect to neighboring communities; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, (Machado + Silvetti Associates, architects), a two-block extension provides a new Arts Piazza while creating a site for an expanded out­door sculpture program; Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Co., a new urban park--in the form of an earthen plinth that grounds the building and provides a respite from the downtown; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, Ill. (John Ronan Architects), located within a new two-story translucent frame headquarters, the garden has been designed to host intimate poetry readings and small gatherings, while accommodating easy movement through the courtyard and into the building; and the Center for Advancement of Public Action, Bennington Campus, Vt. (Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects) which integrates this contemporary center into the campus by embracing its rich landscape palimpsest: the hedgerows that mark 19th century field patterns and the meadow and pond surviving from the early 20th century estate era which today form the heart of the college.

Above: Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Colorado. Allied Works (architecture) and Reed Hilderbrand (landscape architecture).

With the Honor Award for Design Excellence for the Harbor Islands Pavilion came this trophy:

 

As a new study from the Preservation Green Lab [part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation] shows, the answer is “a resounding ‘usually.’”

Turns out, the question of building reuse is much more nuanced and interesting than can be answered with an blanket strategy – which is not at all surprising. Whether an existing building should be retrofitted or demolished is a question of use [both previous and planned], climate, construction type/materials, etc – and also a clear understanding of carbon footprinting:

“Since it can take decades for a new building to “pay back” its embodied carbon through improvements in operational efficiency (see “A 2030 Challenge for Building Product Manufacturers,” EBN Feb. 2011), this study’s conclusions about carbon emissions should come as no surprise: based on climate-change considerations alone, almost every useable building in every region of the U.S. should remain standing—even if these buildings are not retrofitted to improve energy performance. Carbon payback time for the buildings studied ranged from 10 to 80 years.”

In any case, studies like this should have a big impact on how we think of using, and reusing, our existing urban fabric – both as designers, and as people with a vested interest in legitimate, effective responses to climate change.

-Marilyn.

Collaboration and the workplace have been in the news lately----see Susan Cain, “The New Groupthink” in the New York Times; Allison Arieff on The Atlantic website; and the panel discussion on The Not So Corporate Campus at SPUR (moderated by my grad school classmate). And the recent spate of articles have led to much debate in our very open office.

Of the recent stories, one of the most interesting--at least architecturally--is in the new New Yorker, where Jonah Lehrer writes on "Groupthink" and the magical place that was MIT's Building 20. This building, designed in one day, was quickly and cheaply constructed by MIT to temporarily house the Radiation Lab (or Rad Lab). Over time more groups were thrown in there, and the underdesigned nature of the building led to fortuitous encounters by scientists lost in the corridors (the A wing leads to the B wing, which leads to the E wing----and makes no sense!) and a wide range of intellectual breakthroughs---including Chomskyan linguistics, Bose electronics, and the first video game. The cheap, no-frills structure enabled users to remake the spaces to meet their needs. For example, in developing the first atomic clock, Jerrold Zacharias knocked out two floors to make room for three-story-tall metal cylinder. Walls were knocked down willy-nilly whenever one of the occupants wanted to expand his or her territory.

As Fred Hapgood wrote in his book Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination, "The edifice is so ugly . . . that it is impossible not to admire it, if that makes sense; it has 10 times the righteous nerdly swagger of any other building on campus, and at MIT any building holding that title has a natural constituency."

The RAND Corporation building in Santa Monica similarly encouraged chance encounters and led to unexpected collaborations. A mathematician drew a diagram of how to maximize interaction, and the building plan is a literal construction of this diagram---and an extension of RAND's interdisciplinary research model. It's pretty fascinating stuff. (Another one of my grad school classmates, Michael Kubo, wrote his thesis on the RAND building, and was lucky enough to raid their archives before the building was demolished.)

In an era of overdesigned buildings intended to spark collaboration, it is worthwhile to revisit these remarkable underdesigned spaces.

- Meera

 

PS The main point of Jonah Lehrer's excellent article was debunking myths about brainstorming---basically, uncritical group brainstorming doesn't work. Study after study has proved that people are far more effective at coming up with ideas when working alone. But physical proximity matters, too. In Building 20 and the RAND headquarters, scientists wandered out of their private offices and encountered people with different ideas, expertise, and experiences, which spurred creative thinking.

This winter the Queensland Museum of Art invited Yayoi Kusama to do an installation in the museum. The pattern-obsessed artist created a totally white room, and then invited children into the space and gave them colored dot stickers. Within two weeks every surface was transformed into an explosion of color.

This brought to mind our work on the Essex Street pedestrian mall in Salem. At public meetings we gave participants dot sticks with which they could "vote" on their preferred option.

The Yayoi Kusama exhibition might be a community meeting gone wrong----or very right!

- Meera

Parking garages, environmental graphics, and color theory are three longtime Utile obsessions.

One recent project combines all three and came to my attention via the always-interesting Co.Design site. In Sydney, Australia, the graphic design/artist duo of Craig&Karl designed an immersive mural for an underground parking garage.

The Craig&Karl work brings to mind the Dutch artists Haas&Hahn and their exhibition at Storefront---by far the best designed exhibition at Storefront that I've seen.

Bright color palette, smartly applied = joyful spaces. It's both not that complicated a formula, and surprisingly hard to pull off.

- Meera