AndrewBlum.net

Saint Brad (Metropolis)

With his Make It Right project in New Orleans, Pitt may be on his way to becoming architecture’s most important patron. Is architecture up for the challenge? (link)

“So you’re a design junkie too?” Brad Pitt said to me, leaning out the door of an RV parked in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans one evening in December. I was his last interview of the day, and the lines around his blue eyes were thick with fatigue. Outside, a street party was starting up, with a zydeco band and a gumbo truck. There were flashbulbs and Angelina Jolie with Maddox, and Jerry Lee Lewis taking a turn at the piano. But the guests of honor were the people from the neighborhood, dispersed by Hurricane Katrina. Pitt’s new nonprofit, Make It Right, wants to help them “get a house” by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. The catch was that they had to choose one of the sustainable designs by 13 different architects—an amazing list that included Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban, and Kieran Timberlake.

“Our idea was, OK, these people need help rebuilding, so let’s bring in the great minds that we can find. And that was really exciting for me, being the fan that I am,” Pitt said, perched on the edge of the RV’s banquette. Are you bringing these architects here, I asked, because you enjoy working with them? “That’s one of the benefits certainly, but it’s not the driving factor.” So why do it? Why bring not just architects here but some of the world’s best? “I’ll tell you why,” Pitt said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. “Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice.

So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.”

Since when do movie stars have a better sense of architecture’s possibility than most architects? Post-Katrina New Orleans—like post-9/11 Ground Zero—was supposed to be a moment when architecture would prove its relevance. Instead, architects and planners came in like the cavalry, full of expert opinions about what New Orleans should look like and where it should (or more to the point, shouldn’t) be rebuilt. The result was that rather than providing houses, they seemed—in the name of good planning—to be taking them away. “It felt to me that architecture was trying too hard to make its point,” remembers Steven Bingler, founder of Concordia Architecture & Planning, in New Orleans. And was anyone really surprised? Architecture has always had trouble connecting with the masses. There’s that famous, perhaps apocryphal, statistic—architects design two percent of American homes—and the bald fact of the contemporary American landscape, with its big-box stores, chain restaurants, and bland condominiums.

Carbon Neutral U (Metropolis)

In the age of global warming, the greening of the American college campus is a largely grassroots effort driven by students, faculty, and in-house staff dedicated to sustainable thinking. (link)
In late 2005 Yale University president Richard Levin exercised the considerable prerogative of his office and announced that his institution—with its 5,500 residents, 21,000 commuters, and 1.7 million square feet of office space—would slash its greenhouse-gas emissions. His chosen target seemed attainable enough: a 43 percent reduction by 2020, which would bring the university ten percent below 1990 levels, thereby exceeding Kyoto Protocol goals. More than two years later Yale’s carbon graph is a beautiful site in an otherwise Sisyphean struggle. The university has already cut emissions 17 percent, with projects under way expected to cut another 17 percent by 2009—putting Yale a decade ahead of schedule in reaching its target. The even better news is that Yale is far from alone among universities: nearly 500 schools have signed the American College & University Presidents Cli mate Commitment, which sets them toward climate neu trality by a specified date (although it’s toothier than it sounds).

But Levin isn’t smug. An economist by training, if anything he’s frustrated by the wide view. “We’re showing it can be done, but our carbon savings are miniscule compared to what needs to happen,” he says on the telephone one morning. “And even if you put all the educational institutions in the world together, it still doesn’t add up to much. The answer has to come from governments, and I think the major reason for doing this is to enlighten the public so that ultimately governments will get serious about it.”

Yale and other schools are being spurred to action by a catch-22: the environmental moves they make on campus matter far less than what they teach their students—and what their students teach the world. But presidents and professors realize that the best way to teach students is through what they do on campus. Today’s campus sustainability movement is balanced be-tween nuts and bolts and big ideas. Local action has replaced global symbolism.

The Accidental Environmentalists (Metropolis)

A chronic problem with employee retention led this pragmatic client to building green. (link)

NAVY FEDERAL CREDIT UNION
Pensacola, Florida
Client: Navy Federal Credit Union
Architect: ASD

When Ebb Ebbesen began work six and a half years ago on a call center for 250 telephone operators, he never imagined it would transform into a green corporate campus with 3,000 employees and more than half a million square feet of office space—all of it LEED rated. In fact, he had never even heard of LEED. “There was no sustainability road map at the time,” recalls Ebbesen, senior vice president of construction and process improvements at Navy Federal Credit Union, which is the largest member-owned credit union in the world, with more than $30 billion in assets. “But I knew what we were looking for: a building where employees are pleased to come to work in the morning and still smiling when they leave at night.”

This wasn’t just kindness but corporate necessity. At the time, Navy Federal’s turnover rate for telephone operators surpassed 60 percent annually. Ebbesen’s primary task for the new building was to turn that around. But he had no corporate checklist for environmental happiness—until he realized that LEED would be close enough. “Once we started going down through the point structure, it helped us make decisions that would continually reflect on this idea of ‘employee focus,’” Ebbesen explains. “We used the LEED template for discipline.” Today Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus, in Pensa cola, Florida, has a turnover rate of 17 percent and is expanding so fast that Ebbesen has his superiors eyeing the property next door.

When did this become the story of green? Architects and corporate facilities managers will often look across a table and—garnishing their declarations with an anecdote about a trip to the rain forests or something desperate their teenage daughter said—proclaim that green is the right thing to do, that green will pay for itself in energy savings, that green will serve as a highly visible symbol of their organization’s commitment to an optimistic future (and their shareholders too). All are undoubtedly valid motivations. But the confounding surprise of Navy Federal’s Heritage Oaks campus—designed by Atlanta’s ASD—is that they are saying none of those things while doing all of them.

Hard Focus (Print Mag)

Digital technology is transforming photojournalism in hot spots around the world. (link) (photo by Riccardo Gangale)

What does conflict look like? Some people are fortunate enough to know only from the photographs they see in newspapers and on the web. But between the moment a picture is taken and its appearance on our computer screen or in our morning paper there exists a technologically remarkable chain of communication. Gone are the days when photojournalists lugged a chunky Rolleiflex TLR into the field and sent film home on planes. Digital technology has streamlined the process—while adding a few of its own complications. To find out more about how technology is changing photojournalism, I tracked down a few of the conflict photographers who travel around the world from hot spot to hot spot, snapping images and sending them back to their editors at home.

Bird Bath (Wired)

Sure, a Jet's Wings Need Scrubbing, But Its Guts Need a Flush, Too (link)

Philip Joshua eases his chrome-rimmed Ford crew cab into mid-morning traffic on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, keeping pace with a taxiing passenger jet. It doesn't take much. We're moving 5 miles per hour, if that, slowing even more for bumps on account of the 40 gallons of hot water in the trailer behind us. Also in tow is a 24-kilowatt generator and a mysterious black cart that could pass for a stadium speaker. Evidently, this setup is Pratt & Whitney's EcoPower Engine Wash rig, and we're on our way to bathe the business ends of a 767.

Air Travel Innovations (Travel & Leisure)

Breakthrough planes from Boeing and Airbus, fresh approaches to cabin design, and new services on the ground aim to change air travel for the better. (link)

Each step is familiar and unpleasant. I am getting on a plane from New York to Seattle to visit the mock-up of the new 787 Dreamliner, which Boeing promises will herald a more comfortable era of air travel. But since the Dreamliner won’t be flying until the end of the year at the earliest, experiencing this comfortable future means enduring the present: discolored wallpaper, worn cushions, tabloid-size windows, and fluorescent lights. A few hours later, all the familiar discomforts are there: my mouth and contact lenses are dry, I’ve got a wisp of a headache, and the walls have closed in. But the future will be better, right?

Blake Emery is Boeing’s director of differentiation strategy, responsible, in part, for making the company’s planes more comfortable than anyone else’s. When we meet, he’s talking about a dinner party where—not for the first time—a frequent flier eagerly shared ideas about how to improve passenger comfort. "I cringe. Not that I wouldn’t love to hear something different, but it’s like, Gee, you don’t have enough legroom? But that’s not going to change, because you’re talking about the most expensive real estate on the planet."

The Ultrabuilder: Bill Baker (Wired)

Seventy feet beneath the Las Vegas strip, in a construction pit that will become the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, Bill Baker is looking for local talent. Baker is the head structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the famed building design firm responsible for the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Time Warner Center in New York, and scores of other colossal glass boxes across the globe. This morning he's wearing a hard hat and an orange safety vest as he watches a Nevada construction crew at work. He'll likely draft some of them for his next big project, the multibillion-dollar Crown Las Vegas Resort and Casino. At 1,888 (lucky) feet, it will feature what could be the world's highest gaming room, 142 stories above the desert floor. Provided, that is, the Federal Aviation Administration will let it scrape the skies so close to the airport.

Baker inspects welds with his fingertips and, not one to suffer waste (even in Vegas), he looks appraisingly at the oversize columns. Then he rests a dusty dress shoe on a pile of rebar and turns to Brian Calley, an engineer at Schuff Steel, with the question that got him up early this morning, a question that's key to making the steel-framed Crown a reality: "So, what's the biggest thing you're working with?" The Crown will use around 72,000 tons of steel, and Baker needs to know that Schuff can handle that kind of metal. At Calley's answer (16 feet wide by 60 feet long), the bespectacled Baker enthusiastically sticks two thumbs up in the air. The fewer pieces you have to pick up and connect, the faster the building rises. And Baker knows that speed and efficiency will be just as important to getting the Crown off the sketch pad as the schematic itself. "Erection is everything," he explains. The problem with most ambitious architectural endeavors is that "people don't figure out the right way to build them when they design them." (Wired.com link)

Planning Rwanda (Metropolis)

Thirteen years after the genocide, the tiny African nation begins imagining its future. (link)
Just before nine one morning in May, I arrived at the Alpha Palace Hotel, not far from the center of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. A team of American architects waited nervously outside, dressed in blue suits and holding battered travel tubes of drawings. In them was the conceptual master plan for the future of Kigali: a sweeping vision to turn today’s red-dirt ad-hoc city into a verdant capital with tree-lined boulevards, mixed-use neighborhoods, a new university, parks, and a network of wetlands to mitigate storm-water runoff. OZ Architecture, from Denver, along with EDAW, a landscape-architecture and urban-planning firm, had been quietly working on the scheme for three years. This morning, 13 years after Rwanda’s genocide, they would present it to an audience of local planning officials, foreign consultants, and politicians. I had come to watch, to see what American-style urban planning looked like in Rwanda, and what it could possibly do to help transform a place of poverty and struggle into one of prosperity and peace.

Watch This Space (Print Magazine)

Publishers grapple with online video (link)

When President Clinton appeared—in video!—on my laptop screen in the fall of 1998, his index finger jabbing at Kenneth Starr, the future arrived with a shock: The news was no longer something you either watched or read. Somehow, the web was going to make it both, simultaneously.

Nine years later, we’re living in a YouTube world, and video has suddenly become a must-have for print publications—even the ones struggling to have an online presence at all. According to Bart Feder, president and CEO of The FeedRoom, the broadband video company of choice for many magazines and newspapers, “Over the last 18 months, every media company has begun to believe they need to be a digital media company.”

That goal still seems a long way off. Bringing online video up to the quality that most publications are producing in print remains a challenge, even for the best financed. Concierge, Condé Nast Traveler’s online home (and a FeedRoom client), has integrated video across the site, but the footage itself looks like an A/V club spree, a standard that would never fly in the magazine itself. And The New York Times may be adding web-video components to a remarkable number of stories, but much of it still looks like the local news—a substantial notch below the paper’s print reporting and photography.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

Originally published in the book "Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," coinciding with the exhibition "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," at the Municipal Art Society, September 25th 2007 - January 5th 2008.

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.

When I “look, listen, linger and think” about my corner of the world, I am persistently confronted with the broader world beyond. The barbershop chatter is in Creole, the cigar store might be closed for the end of Ramadan, and the cyclical chanting of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, echoes from an upstairs dance studio. Planes pass overhead on their way to La Guardia. And at all hours people pause at the top of the subway stairs to finish their cell-phone conversations.

This last activity is remarkably dominant and has come to define the character of the place. They lean against the station railing three or four at a time, talking with one hand to an ear and their heads cocked high. Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global. And so have our problems.

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.