Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with audio company Master & Dynamic to give away a set of lambskin-leather headphones, a headphone stand and a microphone designed for noisy environments (+ slideshow). (more…)
New York gallery Chamber is showcasing shelving and storage units by designers including Studio Job, Nendo and Gaetano Pesce for an exhibition to celebrate its second birthday (+ slideshow). (more…)
PANDA, an exhibition by OMA & Bengler, opens today at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale – After Belonging.
From the architect. PANDA investigates the accelerating influence of digital sharing platforms, their social and political implications, and pervasive impact on the built environment. In the early 2000s, the democratic spaces of the web were greeted as an alternative to centralized commercial and social structure; in 2007, after the financial landslide, the sharing gospel gave hope to those struggling to make a living.
The boom of “sharing platforms” provided the private sphere with powerful market mechanics, enabling the fluid commodification of life. Flexible, web-scale human resourcing drew “app freelancers” into the gig economy — an unprecedented economic reactivation of latent human assets. A new labor force emerged, one obliged to hire itself out for ever-smaller jobs with no safety net, as companies profited handsomely.
While sharing platforms employ organizational tools of savage power, masses are atomized — strong-armed into unorganized negotiation.
Crowds attack taxis and block streets as services are banned in countries around the world. Unrest is staged against app-based, short-term accommodation platforms and the conversion of entire buildings into de facto hotels.
PANDA is a counter-organizational platform, providing a tactical disruption-as-a-service toolkit, empowering app workers with the means to mediate terms with the platforms and their algocrat masters.
That the service materialized out of Kinshasa is probably a fabrication. Skirting traditional venture capital cycles,
it nevertheless emerged as a distributed, open source network of for-profit tactical nodes. Untraceable and decentralized, a system of vast data and self-regulating algorithmic control.
PANDA is at once an act of resistance and a business opportunity, conceived within the cultural framework and space of new digital economic realms. It is the antibody of metastasizing platform capitalism.
Within mere months, PANDA experienced dramatic expansion, crystallizing the masses in tactical just-in-time action groups: from intangible interventions to exaggerated physical transformations.
As software eats the world, as everything solid melts into air, PANDA recasts technologies of oppression into a machinery of individual empowerment. By providing tools to actively navigate the turmoils of new digital regimes, PANDA fosters a new sense of belonging and purpose.
PANDA has been led by OMA’s Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Bengler’s Even Westwang and Simen Svale Skogsrud. It is part of the On Residence exhibition, on display at the National Museum of Architecture.
OMA Team: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Paul Cournet, Giacomo Ardesio, Giulio Margheri, Laurence Bolhaar Bengler Team: Simen Svale Skogsrud, Even Eidsten Westvang, Øyvind Rostad, Kristoffer Sivertsen
Press Release via OMA.
When originally constructed in 1923, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad grain elevator was the world’s largest and fastest. Located along the city’s southernmost peninsula, the 24-story, 300ft. building was strategically sited for the movement of grain and other agricultural products to be shipped around the world. Turner Development transformed the towering industrial landmark, incorporating the original grain tower and thirteen silos, into the final design of the project which is now known as Silo Point.
In it’s design, Silo Point exists as both a reminder of the economy and culture that first transformed Baltimore into a major city, and a foreshadowing of the city’s emerging 21st century economy, culture, and population. Glass, concrete, steel, and soul, are in the heart of the development.
The conversion of Silo Point from an abandoned grain elevator into contemporary, urban condominiums and mixed-use development by Turner Development Group was inspired by one core idea: the best vision for a city’s future cannot ignore its past. Silo Point now boasts almost one million square feet, including 228 luxury condominiums and 20,000 square feet of retail, restaurants, spa and salon, and office space.
When it comes to designing apartment interiors, architects are favouring a minimal style. We’ve rounded up ten of our favourite examples, including one that looks like a gallery and another with a gold-filled cracked concrete floor. (more…)
This article was originally published in Metropolis Magazine as “When It Comes to Sustainability, We’re Ranking Our Cities Wrong.”
A recent article published in Nature makes a bold claim: we’re analyzing our cities completely wrong. Professors David Wachsmuth, Aldana Cohen, and Hillary Angelo argue that, for too long, we have defined sustainability too narrowly, only looking at environmental impact on a neighborhood or city scale rather than a regional or global scale. As a result, we have measured our cities in ways that are inherently biased towards wealthy cities, and completely ignored the negative impacts our so-called “sustainable,” post-industrial cities have on the rest of the world.Metropolis editor Vanessa Quirk spoke with Professor Wachsmuth to learn more about the unintended knock-on effects of going “green,” the importance of consumption-based carbon counting, and why policy-makers should be more attentive to the effects of “environmental gentrification.”
Vanessa Quirk: In your article for Nature, there was a line that, for me, really summed up the crux of the argument—”Many sustainability gains are simply a regressive redistribution of amenities across places.” Can you expound upon it further?
David Wachsmuth: The idea is that so much of urban sustainability, planning, and policy in general has been aimed at relatively narrow spaces: building-code improvements to make individual buildings greener, or neighborhood-scale improvements like new bikeways, greenways—those kinds of things. There is a lot of evidence that those really make individual areas, buildings, and neighborhoods greener places to live. The problem is that our cities actually exist in larger regional, and even global systems. What happens when you make one neighborhood greener is that people value that “green” as an amenity. That means that there’s more demand for people to live in those areas. When you’re faced with a limited supply of housing and a limited supply of space in the city, that green neighborhood ends up being really highly sought after.
People who can’t afford to live there, who used to live there and can’t afford it anymore because the rents are going up, they get pushed down into other areas of the city and the region. The result is that improvements to specific neighborhoods basically boil down to concentrating a lot of good things in one place and effectively pushing people who can’t afford them out.
VQ: Is that what you refer to as “environmental gentrification”?
DW: Exactly. In order to prevent runaway climate change, we have to make a lot of changes to the way that societies and cities are designed, planned, and organized. That’s not on the scientific level, but just on the level of everyday life. A lot of the greening improvements that particular cities have are things that people in everyday life would enjoy: better bike paths, better transit access, cleaner neighborhoods. That is great. Everybody should be able to have access to nice parks. But there’s only so much money to get spent on these issues, and cities inevitably prioritize projects that are good for local economic development, and focus on downtown areas. Poor areas and more suburban areas lose out.
VQ: You can see that very clearly in New York City and the Citibike program. It still isn’t in Harlem or in Queens. It’s very much concentrated in economic centers and tourist areas.
DW: Exactly. The other side of the coin is that when you look at the cities that tend to be celebrated the most for their sustainability victories, like New York and San Francisco, these are cities that are very prosperous. They are what we refer to as post-industrial, as they don’t do a lot of manufacturing any more; they’re much more involved in finance, in service sectors, in technology areas. Part of the reason we argue that these cities look so good in sustainability terms is because we define “sustainability” much too narrowly.
Take the example of San Francisco. If you look at per capita carbon emissions, it looks pretty low. We know why that is—lots of people take transit, housing is pretty dense, etc. But as soon as you start taking into account the fact that these people who live in San Francisco are consuming an enormous amount of goods from elsewhere in the world, and doing an enormous amount of travel outside the city, the carbon footprint situation looks totally different. We have this model in our mind—as policy makers, as academics, as urban thinkers—of the post-industrial city as the most sustainable city. But that’s only really true if we ignore all the environmental impacts that cities have outside their borders.
VQ: That gets to your idea of consumption-based carbon counts. Would you mind defining that?
DW: The general way that we measure cities’ carbon footprints is by looking at all of the activities that occur within cities and finding out how much carbon is associated with them. For example, if we know that people drive this much in a given city, we know how much carbon is produced for every mile that someone drives. You add up all the things that happen in the city that produce carbon. That’s the standard way it’s done.
What we’re saying is there’s a much better way to do this. Not to count the amount of carbon that is produced within a city, but instead count the amount of carbon associated with all the consumption that occurs within the city.
For example, almost everybody these days has a smartphone in their pockets. The production of them takes an enormous amount of energy and therefore carbon emissions, but they’re basically produced in other parts of the world, mostly in China and the Far East. A normal count of carbon usage in San Francisco doesn’t account for all the computers or smartphones that people have. But if you assign the responsibility for that carbon to the people who are buying and using these products, then researchers have found that that more than doubles the amount of emissions associated with wealthy cities.
Normally we don’t count that, but we should. Because that’s part of the lifestyle in these post-industrial cities.
VQ: Right. It’s a more equitable way of looking at it. You’re assigning responsibility to the consumer and not just the producer, because obviously the producer only has things to produce if there is demand on the consumption side.
DW: When you think about it, part of the reason why wealthy cities are so wealthy is not that they removed themselves from global manufacturing, but that they occupy a very privileged position there. The banks are located in New York, the same banks that finance all the factories. It seems pretty unjust to say, “Look at how successful New York’s been at reducing carbon emissions” when New York is the center of all the global activity that pollutes other parts of the world.
New York has exported its pollution. That’s partly why we say that a lot of sustainability gains actually turn out to be “regressive redistributions.”
VQ: You say in the article that we need to control for income and lifestyle when measuring low-carbon benefits of density…
DW: Because otherwise, if you don’t do this, you’re always going to bias your measurement toward wealthy cities. Because wealthy cities have managed to climb up the value chain to do what we call the command and control functions. The corporate headquarters, the banks, the law firms—these are the activities that produce less local pollution.If you don’t take into account the fact that there’s a whole global network for the way goods and services are produced and consumed, you’re going to bias your measurements of who’s green in favor of wealthy cities.
I don’t think that there’s anything too malicious going on here. Part of the reason why we haven’t done such a good job at this is because it’s hard to do. It’s much more straightforward to count locally produced carbon emissions than to take into account the regional and the global context. The problem is that we need to do it, if we want to have a truly accurate picture of urban sustainability.
You also mentioned how cities are often more homogeneous because of sustainability practices, because of the environmental gentrification you were talking about earlier. Maybe we’re not only biased toward wealthy cities, but homogeneous cities as well?
In a perfect world, all parts of our cities, our regions, and our countries would have equal access to environmental amenities. We’d have great parks everywhere, we’d have great changes everywhere. We don’t live in that world. We live in a world where these kinds of amenities are concentrated in specific areas, particularly in downtown neighborhoods. These are the ones where the most international travelers come through, and they have a lot of symbolic resonance.
The problem is that sustainability becomes another pathway along which displacement occurs, and therefore we get less diversity than we would have otherwise.
VQ: How should researchers be better at analyzing our cities and how should policymakers be better at enacting urban policy?
DW: The way I would think about this is to think about different actors and what constrains them. You can’t expect anybody in the city government to take too much time thinking about what’s happening outside the city. The business of a mayor is to run their city as best they can. We have to recognize that, so it would be unrealistic to say, “Look, the mayor of New York should be paying attention to what’s happening in China.” It would be nice, but that’s not going to happen. Policymakers, who are operating within relatively restricted jurisdictions, should focus more on the social equity side of sustainability issues.
For example, environmental gentrification is an issue that the New York City government, the San Francisco city government, and any other wealthy city government should have on its radar. It’s an issue that is occurring within municipal boundaries. Policymakers have been much too slow to recognize the environmental impacts that groups that we don’t think of as environmental actors are making. We think about housing movements that fight for good rent controls, for more affordable houses being constructed, for more public housing. These groups are actually making very serious environmental interventions. But they don’t use that language, so policymakers aren’t inclined to think of them as environmental groups.
We know one of the things that cities can do to really lessen the environmental impacts of city life is to build really good affordable housing. Policymakers certainly should be paying more attention to the social equity implications of sustainability policies—and also getting as many people around the table as possible to talk about environmental issues, including social groups who are fighting over issues like housing and transit. These are environmental issues, whether or not we use that language.
On the side of researchers, there are also the international organizations and non-profits. These are actors who are a lot less constrained by the geography issue. Researchers absolutely should be making sure that they bust out of city boundaries when they’re studying and analyzing the impacts of environmental policy. We absolutely need to look at things on a regional scale. We know that things that happen downtown have knock-on effects that ripple through the entire suburban landscape as well.
International organizations, national governments, nonprofits, and other groups should be doing their best to connect policymakers across multiple boundaries. Even if the city governments can’t, the state and the national governments could be the ones to say, “Hey, you guys need to talk to each other.”
Municipalities rely on grants for a lot of their programs. Grants could be given preferentially for sustainability policies that are going to have some kind of regional analysis built in. In a nutshell, all the different actors should operate in the largest possible terms that they’re able to.
VQ: September is our cities issue and every year we rank cities according to their livability. We really struggled, as we do every year, with how to rank the important elements that really make a city “livable.” Have you gone about doing this? Ranking cities or at least analyzing cities according to best practices, according to a more regional framework, or carbon consumption or that kind of thing?
DW: The problem is that, and this is a pretty classic academic response, we just don’t have enough data to do this properly. If you wanted to just look at carbon accounting, which is such an important issue, there are only a few cities that have done proper consumption-based carbon counts. Until more cities have done that, comparing them is just not going to tell you that much.
The other problem is that you really do run into issues of boundaries and jurisdiction. If we’re comparing cities, we have to compare whole regions. You don’t just look at the city, because the city boundary is a historical accident. We look at the whole urban region that’s all functionally interconnected.
But the problem is that the way that these are defined really varies across place. Even just within the United States, the census bureau defines urban regions based on counties, but if you look at the southwest the counties are huge. But in the northeast they’re tiny. Even just within the U.S., where statistics are really good, it’s very hard to compare cities. If you look at it internationally, forget it. At the end of the day the problem is we don’t have the data to do a good job of comparing cities. Period.
That doesn’t stop us from comparing them, which means that it’s always going to be, whether we like it or not, subjective and partial. My job is not so much to do the rankings as it to say, “We need to get a lot better at how we measure what’s going on in cities if we want these rankings to have real meaning.”
VQ: You said there are only a couple of cities that have counted carbon according to consumption. Which are they?
DW: San Francisco’s done it. Seattle has. London has. Some researchers who aren’t even working directly for a city are looking at consumption carbon counting. There was one recently done in Shanghai.
I think we’re probably not far off from a lot more of these being done, because part of the issue has been the methodology. That problem’s more or less solved now. Now, it’s just a question of municipalities stepping up and saying, “Okay, we’ll start measuring our carbon this way.”
Another part of the problem is that some of the cities that have been quite progressive in terms of their climate policy probably stand to come out looking much worse, if they do a proper measurement. At the end of the day, the consumption-based accounting is going to reveal a lot more carbon associated with wealthy cities.
It’s a bit of a tough sell to say to policymakers because they may look bad. Even so, San Francisco and Seattle, they’ve done this. It’s definitely not impossible.
VQ: It takes a self-reflective city.
DW: Exactly.
VQ: It makes me think of Bjarke Ingels’ idea of “hedonistic sustainability.” This almost puts a critical eye on that; it’s almost like you’re saying, “Well, maybe on an individual level, that might be valid, but if you zoom out, you’ll look and see the side effects of this hedonism.”
DW: Ingels very correctly identified the fact that sustainability can be a very luxurious, pleasurable thing. That’s good. But the problem is that sustainability and environmental issues then become tied up in all the usual questions about inequality, about who has access to amenities and who doesn’t. At the end of the day we’re arguing that the environment is an amenity, and like other amenities, it’s being distributed in radically unequal ways. I don’t think he’s wrong, but if we believe what he’s saying, we should get a lot better at how the amenity of sustainability gets distributed among the people.
The building dates from the early twentieth century and is listed due to its historical and artistic heritage value by the INBA, the INAH and SEDUVI. It was originally intended to house multiple dwellings but in its long life has sheltered from the headquarters for the United Mexican Booksellers to a pastry shop. All that previous experience is precisely what gives it a particular personality and makes its interior space unique. As happens with a real individual, the building acquires its character through its experiences, almost empirically, and hence its distinguishing marks, scars, wrinkles, which in this project will not be erased or cleared, but will form part of the expression when acquiring a new use, one more chapter in its rich life.
The context in which the site is located has suffered many causalities over time. In the early twentieth century it was an area of country houses, but the growth of the city and its proximity to the historic center caused the abandonment of these properties. The massive destruction that the earthquake of 1985 generated in the neighborhoods of the city center, a negative effect on the dynamics of population distribution and the consolidation of historic districts of the urban area.
As it is a listed building by the INBA, the intervention must preserve the essence of the existing architectural object. It responds to the requirements of three different government bodies, flexible spaces and visual breadth, seeking to give each customer a sense of ownership of their space, emphasizing the entrance plaza.
To create without building sounds like an almost impossible goal, but certainly effective and innovative. The idea behind the project is dominant over any formal representation of it. It is precisely the clarity of a concept which determines the power behind a project that is visually very attractive, overcoming the physical elements that materialize it into reality. In the end what remains is a memory rich in sensations, generated from everything that is and was, of unexpected and constant stimuli in which what is predominant is the space more than anything -the architecture.
There are some successful precedents that have handled the ideas mentioned above, as the work of Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, or more recently the El Matadero project in Madrid, interventions that go beyond taking an “old” shell and rejuvenating it. It is about playing with the existing, not adapting it, renewing it or improving it, but simply using it, a more courageous and complex action than what it seems, an action that is almost against the alleged work of the architect widespread in schools and the workplace of the profession. It is about making architecture without building.
From the earliest sketches, we sought to generate solid and empty blocks, that is the positive and negative between spaces, the arrangement of these blocks in which we play with their height around a central courtyard. With this we achieve static spaces (living rooms, study) and dynamic spaces (stairs, corridors).
The building’s interior is rich in textures, they abound. Textures that cannot be produced artificially, textures generated only with the passage of time and that in no way will be denied. No matter if there is worn paint, exposed partitions, vegetation coming out of the walls or beams that once held something and now are almost sculptural features, nothing is touched, the only “limit” is of course the preservation of the building.
This article is part of our new series “Material in Focus“, where we ask architects to share with us their creative process through the choice of materials that define important parts of the construction of their buildings.
Casa dos Caseiros was designed by architectural firm 24.7. The project is 70 meters square and was a private order for a large-scale social steel framed housing project to be built in some cities in the state of Rio de Janeiro. We talked with the architect Giuliano Pelaio to learn more about material choices and challenges of the project.
What were the main materials used in this project?
GP: Concrete building blocks, aluminum frame, glass, and thermoacoustic tile.
What were your main sources of inspiration and influence when you were choosing the materials used in the project?
GP: Streamlining the construction process, labor, ease of construction, and price.
Describe how decisions on materials influenced the design of the project.
GP: In this case, the modulation using concrete blocks required by the family determined the whole structure and the dimensions of the living spaces.
What were the advantages that this material offered for the construction of the project?
GP: Increased mobility during construction, labor, and reduced costs.
Did the choice of materials impose any kind of challenges to the project?
GP: Not necessarily a challenge, but the choice of material did need to be interpreted properly and use the volume to its maximum capacity to make the most of their flexibility for modulation, which really helped the construction time.
Did you ever consider other possible materials for the project? If so, how would that have changed the project?
GP: At first we wanted to build the house with a steel frame. Due to the scarcity and expense of that type of skilled labor, we had to adapt to a more popular system while still keeping its intended purpose in mind.
How did you research suppliers and builders suitable for materials used in the project?
GP: All suppliers for this project were already our partners.
Casa dos Caseiros / 24.7 arquitetura design
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A technical fault trapped 180 passengers inside the doughnut-shaped viewing pod of the i360 observation tower last night, leaving them suspended above Brighton’s seafront for two hours. (more…)
Sig Nordal 