Welcome to the Y.our E.nvironment O.f the W.eek!
We’re sharing inspiring and influential project solutions to increase the presence of design in our practice as we have the responsibility of shaping environments in the world for ourselves and the future.
Anagram Architects is a design consultancy firm established by Vaibhav Dimri and Madhav Raman in New Delhi in 2001. The partners are graduate architects from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. The firm’s practice is diverse and encompasses public infrastructure planning, urban design, architecture, sceneography broadcast design, furniture design and interior design
Along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Barnes museum presents an unassuming air, with crisp, elegant stone detailing recalling the Modernist work of Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn. Contained within it are the galleries re-created from the museum in Merion.
At the west end of the Barnes, the light canopy cantilevers over a terrace. A limestone rainscreen is attached to the steel-framed gallery building (at right) and a poured concrete pavilion wing (at left).
On the second floor, the architects have given gallery ceilings a very different treatment with cyma curve plaster moldings and clerestories of acid-etched glass.
The shaped ceilings in ancillary first floor galleries echo the barrel vaults of the galleries in Merion
On the first floor of the wing containing the Barnes collection, the main hall’s coves feature Henri Matisse’s “The Dance” murals. Williams and Tsien kept the proportions, scale, and placement of the installation intact, redesigning the cornices and moldings, lighting, and window coverings. The floor is Tennessee marble. This main gallery is oriented to the Parkway; visitors can view the murals from the balcony.
It is looking more and more likely that the “Mayan Temple” design (pictured) from STUDIOS architecture is going to become a reality as part of the massive North Bethesda development by JBG and MacFarlane Associates. The county has official signed off on the project, which includes what will be the tallest (and most pixilated) building in the county ringing in at close to 300 ft in height.
In addition to the residential and office towers there is going to be some major retailers. Ground breaking is scheduled for next Winter. [Credit: JBG and MacFarlane]
[Renderings: Vornado/Charles E. Smith]
With the new NPR building in NoMa well under construction, we have finally gotten our hands on the final design rendering from Hickok Cole Architects and just as suspected, it looks very similar to the version sent in by a tipster back in 2010. Once complete next year, the new 330,000 sq-ft space will include all of NPRs reporting and broadcast facilities under one impressive geometric roof.
[Credit: Hickok Cole]
Apparently Crystal City is on the verge of getting a brand spanking new 24 story office building and the site plans are currently under consideration for over 730,000 sq-ft of new gleaming glass space. The development will be on a parcel currently occupied by an old empty 12 story Federal office building that’s a victim of BRAC and would be torn down to make way for 1900 Crystal Drive. Very cool looking cantilever designed roof that will be interesting to see in execution. Much more to come…
With the completion of many of the brand new library building projects all over town, we wanted to check in on the few remaining ones still wrapping up. In addition to the Mt Pleasant and Northeast historic renovation projects, there are also still two more new buildings going up which are scheduled to be completed by early 2012.
The Francis Gregory library being built in SE (pictured above) is a collaboration between Adjaye Associates and Weincek Associates and the distinctive diamond shaped cladding that we saw in the preliminary designs last year is already up, and the interior build out is underway (which includes some pretty awesome furniture) all in line with the early 2012 completion.
Construction of the new Washington-Highlands Neighborhood Library is nearing completion. The new building (above) will open in early 2012 with over 22,000 sq-ft of new community space. Though the buildings look nothing alike, the design is also by the Adjaye and Weincek team.
You may want to start avoiding the area between 9th and 11th street NW for the foreseeable future because today (April, 4, 2011) marks the ground breaking of the massive City Center DC on the site of the old convention center. Developer Hines-Archstone has officially taken control of the 10 acre super block to get started on the long awaited multimillion sq-ft mixed use development.
This project has some serious potential to be an amazing gathering central pedestrian plaza to define the downtown, so we are excited to see the progress!
[Renderings: Shalom Baranes]
This development can’t come soon enough to open up the area directly across from Nats Stadium to the riverfront and in that regard, the new plans look pretty decent. The design includes around 40 boat slips and an esplanade and public plaza with space for some type of iconic sculpture. What do you think?
Density is all the rage these days. Urban economists, some of whom could be heard extolling the praises of "sun, skills, and sprawl" just a few years ago, now see increasing density as the key to improving productivity and driving economic growth. In his story for The Atlantic, "How Skyscrapers Can Save the City," Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser put it this way: "As America struggles to regain its economic footing, we would do well to remember that dense cities are also far more productive than suburbs, and offer better-paying jobs ... tall buildings enable the human interactions that are at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself." Well-intentioned planners and preservationists drive up prices when they stand in the way of taller and taller buildings, he argues. Overly restrictive height limitations not only impede economic progress, but make cities less, not more, liveable.
There can be no doubt that density has its advantages. In general, denser cities are more productive, more innovative, and more energy efficient. But only up to a point.
The key function of a city is to enable exchange, interaction, and the combination and recombination of people and ideas. When buildings become so massive that street life disappears, they can damp down and limit just this sort of interaction, creating the same isolation that is more commonly associated with sprawl. As Jane Jacobs aptly put it: "in the absence of a pedestrian scale, density can be big trouble." Skyscraper canyons of the sort that are found in many Asian mega-cities, and that are increasingly proposed in great American cities, risk becoming vertical suburbs, whose residents and occupants are less likely to engage frequently and widely with the hurly-burly of city life. Edward McMahon of the Urban Land Institute cuts to the chase, differentiating between density and high-rise buildings in his recent post for Citiwire, “Density Without Highrises?”. If the pendulum originally swung too far in the direction of sprawl over the past 50 years, the risk today is that it is swinging way too far back toward high-rise skyscrapers. "To oppose a high-rise building," he writes, "is to run the risk of being labeled a NIMBY, a dumb growth advocate, a Luddite — or worse. Buildings 20, 40, 60 even 100 stories tall are being proposed and built in low and mid-rise neighborhoods all over the world. All of these projects are justified with the explanation that if density is good, even more density is better"
Bicycles have already become an essential part of our culture, but now they're shaping our urban and social spaces too.
Reuters
New York City isn't known as a biker's paradise, with its overcrowded subways, pedestrian-packed sidewalks, yellow taxis snarled in traffic, and noisy buses. Yet even New York City is heading in the direction of places like Portland, Paris, and Copenhagen, which have embraced and promoted bike culture and bike sharing in the urban environment. Over the past four years, the Bloomberg administration has rolled out more than 250 miles of bike lanes. And this summer NYC will introduce its own bike-share program with 10,000 bikes and 600 docking stations around the city.
While New Yorkers pride themselves on always being first, the city is just catching up when it comes to bikes. In fact, the bicycle is the most commonly used mode of transportation around the world. Think of a bike as a tool, a toy, a connector and a mode of expression with a low barrier to entry. It's probably the most hackable (and hacked) simple machine on the planet. Bikes not only get us from place to place, they are the focus of a number of conversations about how we organize communities and define and share social boundaries, and how we can harness human power to recycle energy back to the grid. Most importantly though, bicycles are an intrinsic part of how we imagine and design the city of the future. They will play a significant role in shaping identity and communities and influencing social dynamics in urban areas, because they are the next great technology platform. Mode of Self-Expression
Most people remember their first bike. Mine was a BMX, which immediately gave me a shared identity with the coolest guys I knew. It also made me more adventurous. I felt I could go anywhere and do anything because my BMX gave me freedom not only to roam, but also for self-expression. I customized my bike to look like my favorite BMXer bikes. But it wasn't just about the look; the changing features and functionality I made were my first steps toward creativity and experimentation. I tweaked the bolts on the front axel so they accommodated foot pegs I had fashioned to do certain tricks. I designed and built my own ramps to help me jump higher. Bikes were already inspiring me to add things to my environment. I was becoming a designer.
Here in New York we're seeing that search for self-expression on a much larger scale in the form of subcultures like the Black Label Bicycle Club, a so-called "outlaw bike club" whose members custom-make "mutant" cycles known as tall bikes (two conventional bike frames soldered one atop the other). This community of bikers go dumpster diving for spare parts. They also find vegetables to share at vegan meals, an activity directly tied to ideas about reusing resources wasted by others.
Black Label and similar groups can also be seen as a form of anarchic and anti-consumerist expression, as symbols of freedom. Bicycle culture is their inspiration to live off the grid. My brother has traveled to New York from Nashville several times to participate in Black Label's annual "Bike Kill" tall bike jousting event. He often travels here via a tight network of tall bikers that can be likened to an underground railroad, a community that connects cities. Community
Go to a bike shop in your neighborhood and you're likely to find a social space where you can not only buy a new saddle, but also get in touch with like-minded members of the biking community. People swap ride stories and repair tips. Bike shops are community hubs, where groups and new friendships are forged and social activism takes root.
You see this in the emerging movement to open nonprofit bicycle shops in large urban areas to engage troubled youth and redefine the behaviors of communities. One organization called Red, Bike and Green, a community-building collective of black urban cyclists founded in 2007 in Oakland, California, wants to create a "sustainable Black bike culture" that will improve the physical and mental health of African-Americans and improve their neighborhoods. RGB is a direct response to a number of health and environmental problems that are the result of misguided city policies.
Bicycles help create cohesion in communities and aid social services, especially in developing countries. In many African countries -- Zambia, for example, where frog has worked on projects -- bicycles are converted (or hacked) into makeshift ambulances that help voluntary health workers transport women in labor to far away birthing centers. Bicycles are also used to stay in touch with mothers after the birth to ensure adherence to HIV testing programs for the infant, as well to deliver critical services. Shared Social Space
These community hubs and organizations reflect how bikes help create new shared social spaces. That's because the bike is an inherently social machine. It has no walls; it's human powered and we can all (some more than others) try our hand at hacking and repairing them. In turn, bike-share programs like Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., raise questions about ownership and social spaces. As a mode of transportation in crowded cities, bikes take space from cars, which can be seen as a form of environmental protest. Critical Mass, a cycling event held monthly in over 300 cities around the world, is a good example of biking as a mass movement that many regard as a form of political protest. Not surprisingly, a backlash is brewing against pro-bike policies: In New York, opponents of bike lanes accuse the city of favoring bikers over car drivers.
Technology Platform
Bikes help you get around cities and can also tell you about your city and your interaction with it. The Copenhagen Wheel project, in that Danish city, transforms ordinary bikes into hybrid e-bikes (an electric bike that harvests the energy you input while braking and cycling and stores it for when you need a boost). They are also mobile sensing units that can map pollution levels, traffic congestion and road conditions -- all in real time and of course controlled from your smartphone. In this way the bike becomes a sensing platform that captures data about people, behavior, neighborhoods, and health.
Bikes have already changed our relationships to each other and the urban environment, but consider the potential for so much more.
Imagine a future where cities go beyond bike lanes and build the urban environment around bikes. What would a bike highway look like? What would city life be like without cars? Imagine a healthier city -- no more kids in the Bronx with asthma -- and reduced automobile fatalities.
The biggest opportunity here is that given what we know about how bikes change our social dynamics, how would this play out on a mass scale? Amplify that with sensing and tracking technologies on board the human battery-powered bike platform and the possibilities are endless. Handgrips that monitor your pulse and heart rate multiplied by millions will help us better understand the people who live in entire neighborhoods, and the pace of life from a global perspective. Such data will inspire exciting design solutions.
In many of the most crowded, densely packed cities around the world a bicycle is the most convenient (if not always the safest) way to move around. Now even cities with more well developed transportation infrastructure are catching up and adding bicycles to the mix. That's because bicycles are an essential part of our culture and our lives. They stir memories and self-expression. They encourage social interaction in urban environments that can be lonely and isolating. They are a mechanism for political and social organizing and activism. And with new technologies, bikes are a way to gather information about how we live and relate to one another in the shared space that is the city.
The late artist Mike Kelley spent most of his career working in Los Angeles, but his origins lie in Westland, Michigan, a working-class town 16 miles outside Detroit. One of his final works before his suicide in January reconnects with those roots using a replica of the classic ranch-style home he grew up in in the 1950s. The public art piece, called "Mobile Homestead," toured through Detroit and surrounding towns on a flatbed truck to demonstrate a symbolic reversal of the "white flight" from a struggling city to its suburbs.
The project began in 2005 when Artangel, a British organization that produces site-specific art, asked Kelley to create its first project in the United States. Kelley responded with the idea of transporting a model of his childhood home from downtown Detroit to his real-life home in the suburbs, then back again. A trilogy of films about the journey emphasize the extreme inequality between communities within the city and outside it, interviewing everyone from strippers to church officials to Ford employees along the route.
The house made stops at locations relevant to Detroit's history as well as Kelley's childhood: Corktown, the city's historically Irish neighborhood; Dearborn, where Ford was founded; Wayne, where Kelley went to school; and finally Westland, where he grew up.
Now the project is about to find its final resting place. Beginning next month "Mobile Homestead" will be installed on a parcel of land behind the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, to be completed next year. The ground floor of the house will serve as a functional community space with free classes and a barbershop, while a basement designed by Kelley will provide studio space for artists and room "for more covert activities—what he called 'private rites of an aesthetic nature,'" according to Artangel. (Sounds fun either way.) The film trilogy premieres today at the Whitney Biennale in New York City.
Designed to allow the High Line to pass beneath it, the 18-story Standard hotel was constructed using sculptural piers that raise the building 57 feet above the street grid. New York–based Ennead Architects accentuated the hotel’s distinctive presence with a central “hinge” that divides the structure’s two slabs.
Jury: “The building addresses the urban scale as a tower relating to the High Line [and the Hudson River]. … There is clarity in the choice and articulation of materials and a sense of restraint, though the end result is one of high visual impact.”
Client: “I usually renovate older buildings, and this was ground-up construction. Add to that the matter of the High Line and it was a unique challenge … We had to be sensitive to this new landmark. It tramples through our site, but it also defines it. That said, we wanted to not be overly shy or reverent toward it. Whatever we put up there would have to jump the train tracks.” —André Balazs, owner, as told to Vanity Fair
Anagram Architects is a design consultancy firm established by Vaibhav Dimri and Madhav Raman in New Delhi in 2001. The partners are graduate architects from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. The firm’s practice is diverse and encompasses public infrastructure planning, urban design, architecture, sceneography broadcast design, furniture design and interior design
