Are Some Buildings Too Ugly To Survive?

So I never got around to mentioning this series of opinion pieces which appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago. They're on the above-mentioned topic, and most present a reasoned argument; for instance, Aaron Renn argues that "the most important criterion" for whether or not mid-century Brutalist buildings should be saved is "how well the building fits its purpose and function." He acknowledges that many housing developments of this era have proven beyond rescue because they were "conceptually flawed" from the start, but many more buildings "where the architectural quality and ability to adapt to contemporary standards at a realistic price is high" should be preserved if at all possible.

Raksha Vasudevan, Sustainability Associate at the National League of Cities’ Center for Research and Innovation, takes the question of whether to demolish, renovate or preserve it a step further. She argues that:

What is needed is an acknowledgement of the multiple and hidden costs of our choices. For example, what are the costs of demolition for the earth? What happens to the tons of concrete that fills up landfills around the country? Apart from the fact that demolition in itself is financially costly for government, there are social and environmental costs of that we often ignore. And while preservation is not always the answer for a community, the path to determining what is “right” lies in honestly weighing the economic, social, and environmental costs of our actions.

David Brown of the National Trust for Historic Preservation reminds us that art deco once faced the wrecker's ball down in South Beach, and Allison Arieff laments that many of Paul Rudolph's mid-century civic structures are currently slated for demolition. New Criterion contributor Anthony M. Daniels' contribution is the lone dissenting opinion here, and it doesn't take him long to bring the crazy:

Buildings should be preserved for one of two reasons: they were the site of events of great historic importance, or they are of aesthetic merit. Buildings in the Brutalist style — which uses raw concrete or other materials to make art galleries look like fallout shelters — are certainly aesthetically outstanding: unfortunately, in an entirely negative sense. A single such building can ruin an entire townscape, and it is often difficult to believe that such ruination was not the intention of the architect. 

What's interesting is that his argument would probably be supported by a majority of people: it's ugly, so tear it down. Case closed. But think of the ecological catastrophe that could result if all our concrete structures were simultaneously torn down: the captured carbon alone is enough of an issue, let alone our landfills. It makes me think what was done at Bellevue Hospital on the Upper East Side, where they built a new ambulatory care center to incorporate the facade of the original hospital building.

A curtainwall was all it took to envelop the existing structure and expand the building's footprint. I'm not suggesting that the original facade is anything like a Brutalist example, but this is a method that we could easily explore to deal with renovating buildings deemed too "ugly" to be spared the wrecking ball.

Dubai to Build Underwater Hotel

Yes, you read that right. They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- well, I've got a couple anyway: because what better place to build an underwater hotel than in the middle of the desert? Because where else would you insist on defying the laws of nature? Because who needs water to live? Oh, wait...

Planned Obsolescence Be Damned

"An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer" sounds like it might be the start of a pretty good interior design joke, but it's actually the start of a fascinating article in Wednesday's New York Times called An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time. It seems that in Amsterdam, where everyone already rides bicycles and recycles nearly everything and generally does good things for the planet, there now exists something called a "Repair Cafe" -- because they have a cafe for everything in the Netherlands, it seems -- where volunteers who "just like to fix things" will try to save your toaster from the landfill for the cost of, well, nothing:

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus. Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

What's so great about this is that not only does it prevent people from having to throw things away (though the Dutch only put less than 3% of their municipal waste into landfills, which is remarkable), but it also provides both a physical place where people who might not otherwise afford to pay for a repair can go and, perhaps more importantly, a social place with a sense of community built around issues of ecology and sustainability. According to the article:

“It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Evelien Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism. Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Crazy in a good way, I hope.

Fox News Says Wind Farms Cause Global Warming

No, this isn't a headline from The Onion; unfortunately, according to Treehugger, it's all too real:

The network got word of a new report that noted nighttime temperatures rose slightly in areas around wind farms, and then ran a series of segments about how wind farms cause global warming. So, of course, did Rush Limbaugh and many other conservative-leaning outlets and pundits.

Here's a taste of how this works. Fox Nation runs a gigantic headline, 'New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming' over a Reuters wire piece that expressly states that the turbines affect only "local climates". But no matter: that the report shows wind farms cause 'warming' was an irony too delicious to be passed up, or to be dulled by inconvenient facts.

So the slapdash notion that wind turbines are somehow causing global warming was gleefully catapulted onto the airwaves, another grand opportunity to scoff at environmentalists and liberals. 

The scientists behind the study, for their part, have spoken up against their work's misrepresentation in the media. In an email to Media Matters, the study's lead author said that the coverage is "misleading." Here's MM:

The researchers, led by Liming Zhou, said it is "[v]ery likely" that "wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air's heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases." The turbines pull down warm air, increasing land surface temperatures, which already have "a larger day-night variation" than the surface air temperatures featured in daily weather reports.

But none of that made the narrative on Fox. No, the desire to land an ideological potshot once again trumped an effort to craft anything resembling a truthfully reported story. As it so often does.

It's Shop Your Values Week

Shop Your Values Week starts today. From their website:   

We are the Future  Today's consumers are the new brand managers for companies big and small. With the easy sharing and transparency of the digital age, what we say and think has the power to both carry and destroy the reputation of a brand.  

We are the Community  When we raise our voices we spur improvements in the world of business. Why not bring that power to bear on our community, and to the shops and restaurants we visit every day in our neighborhoods?   

We Live Our Values  When thousands of New Yorkers shop, eat, and live their values, we will send the message that sustainability is profitable, ethics is indispensable, and community comes first. The message will be impossible to ignore.

The website encourages you to take a pledge that you will shop your values and provides a map of participating businesses as well as featured specials. What do you think: a good idea, some skillful marketing, or possibly both?

Those People Look Like Ants From Up Here!

Just came across this article at Discovery News suggesting that recent research shows that human societies more closely resemble that of ants than any of our nearest evolutionary brethren. When you think about it, I suppose it's not too surprising. According to Mark Moffat, the author of the study in question:

With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery. Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems.

Some ant super-colonies number in the trillions, but that in itself isn't necessarily a problem. The real issue here, the article points out, is that "what makes such size and growth possible is that membership can be anonymous...[m]embers are not required to distinguish each other as individuals for a group to remain unified."

The same applies to human beings as well, though unlike ants -- who use primarily pheromones to bond into discrete societies -- we have language and symbols and cultural practice and behavior. Though I personally found the following conclusion quite chilling: "Anonymous membership means that both human and ant societies can grow as large as environmental conditions allow, although some researchers suggest that an ultra large society can implode."

Sustainable Interior Environments, Explained

A Tale of Two Site Visits

Visiting architectural firms is always an interesting proposition. Will the offices be cutting-edge, incorporating the latest building technologies and current design fashion in order to impress potential clients? Or will they be less-than-interesting, drab and utilitarian spaces which cost little to create and even less to maintain? Having worked in offices of both types, I’m always interested to learn which path a particular firm takes.

Cook + Fox

The offices of Cook + Fox, while not particularly showy, are a near-perfect example of a firm which chooses to showcase its strengths in its work environment. Cook + Fox have been at the vanguard of sustainable architectural and interior design for many years, and their LEED Platinum-certified offices – housed in a landmark NYC building which used to be a department store – contain many beautifully-restored elements.

A view of the green roof outside the Cook+Fox offices.

Many of the materials utilized in the offices are sustainable, including the workstations, the surfacing, the carpeting and the paint. There are sustainable technologies built into the HVAC system, and Cook + Fox built a green roof even though they did not receive LEED credit for it. Instead, they simply believed it to be an important addition to the space which all their employees could enjoy equally through a virtual wall of windows.

41 Cooper Square

This newly-built, Morphosis-designed building on the campus of Cooper Union is a glaring example of sustainable design gone horribly awry. While not an architectural office per se, it does house the school’s engineering department. It also contains a myriad of sustainable design elements such as an operable building skin made of perforated and moveable stainless steel panels, radiant heating and cooling ceiling panels, a full-height atrium to improve air flow and provide increased interior daylighting, a green roof, a cogeneration plant and state-of-the-art laboratories. 

A view of the main circulation spire at 41 Cooper Square.

While all of these features may lead to increased energy efficiency and cost savings over the life of the building, they are employed in such a way as to make the interior environment seem cold and uncaring. Although the building was “conceived as a vehicle to foster collaboration and cross-disciplinary dialogue,” the stark monotonous white of its interior and its severe angularity – as well as its seeming lack of these very spaces – serve at cross-purposes. This building may have cost a fortune to construct, but its sustainability is too well-hidden and technological to have a positive impact.

Toward a Design Research Ethics

As a field of practice still in its relative infancy, it is a worthwhile exercise to consider interior design research in light of any and all ethical concerns that such research could produce. In their Practical guide to behavioral research: Tools and techniques (1980), Robert Sommer and Barbara Baker Sommer outline the main tenets of the American Anthropological Association's code of ethics which, in large part, serve as an excellent basis for an inquiry into what a similar code for design research practices should include.

They write, "The code states that anthropological researchers

1. have primary ethical obligations to the people, species, and materials they study and to the people with whom they work.
2. must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does no harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work
3. must determine in advance whether their hosts or providers of information wish to remain anonymous or receive recognition and make every effort to comply with those wishes.
4. should obtain in advance the informed consent of people being studied, providing information, owning or controlling access to material being studied, or otherwise identified as having interests that may be impacted by the research.
5. who have developed close and enduring relationships with either individual persons providing information or with hosts must adhere to the obligations of openness and informed consent, while carefully and respectfully negotiating the limits of the relationship.
6. although they may gain personally, they must not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological materials." (p. 26)

As someone who has studied anthropology and sociology, there is a straightforwardness and simplicity here which I appreciate. But designers will no doubt encounter additional ethical considerations, especially those designers who practice sustainability and embrace the core concepts of the "Three E's": ecology, economy and equity. Along these lines, I will attempt to rewrite the tenets outlined above to include the wide variety of implications inherent in design research.

A code for design research ethics should include:

1. No harm should come to the physical or mental health, safety, dignity, welfare or privacy of the individuals participating in research.
2. Researchers will not interfere with the stated purpose of a particular built environment or the practices of its occupants.
3. Extreme care should be taken not to negatively affect the attitudes of the users of a space towards either the space itself or those perceived to be in charge of its operation.
4. Informed consent of research participants must be acquired prior to the research.
5. Design research must operate free from the economic support of individuals or companies involved in the various building trades.
6. Researchers must not disrupt or exploit individuals, groups, animals, biological materials, and cultural practices as they relate to the built environment. Such practices will not be unduly influenced or altered by the researchers.
7. Design should be inclusive of all levels of abilities of users of a space from both a functional and sense-based standpoint.

Tweet This

Because I've hit a bit of a wall in my research proposal and need a diversion, how about I summarize another study? According to this one, birds are singing louder today than they did 30 years ago in order to be heard above the din of modern life. "The research found sparrows in San Francisco’s Presidio district changed their tune to soar above the increasing cacophony of car horns and engine rumbles."

So they are not only getting louder, but they are actually changing their songs. Out in nature, if you will, sparrows sing in low, medium and high frequencies -- but, in the city, it's been discovered that they've all but abandoned the low to medium ranges and only use the highest ones, something now officially called the "San Francisco dialect." This is because:

Songs need to be heard, not just because they sound pretty — birds use them to talk to each other, warn away rivals and attract mates. If you go into a bird’s territory and play a song from the same species, they think a rival competitor has invaded its territory. If the rival bird can’t hear the song and vamoose, then it may come to bird fisticuffs. That can lead to injury or death.

Turns out that it's not only humans that are affected by all the noise that has come to dominate our lives in urban centers, and it provides yet another reason to safeguard the areas of our cities which shelter us from all the cacophony. Fortunately sparrows are a resilient bunch, but I fear that humans aren't quite as adaptable.