What is cross-cultural?

Award-winning Japanese architect Hitoshi Abe, chair of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was the first Japanese [national] chair of architecture in a US university. (The original article, from UCLA International Institute, indicated he was the first in an American university. But Jaime Lerner, an architect/urban planner from Curitiba, Brazil, whom I interviewed in May, wouldn’t like that particular usage of the word America. Therefore consider this usage of US as cross-cultural.)
One of Abe’s initiatives includes the creation of a Laboratory for Cross-Cultural Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, in which design culture is expanded through the development of cross-cultural programs, Wendy Soderburg’s UCLA article indicated. The city chosen as the center’s first focus of study is Tokyo, an area Abe knows well.
“Each year, UCLA will collaborate with one city outside the U.S. to create a new architectural and urban design methodology,” Abe said. “Large-scale cities along the Pacific Rim, like Tokyo, offer amazing opportunities for research because they are designed differently than current designs based in Western culture.”
Let’s hope there’s more of this in architecture schools henceforth. We certainly don’t need more so-called Mediterranean Revival that so plagues towns like Sarasota, Fla. (Why don’t they just fess up and call it Mediterranean inspired? Kind of like the town’s idea of Moderism. We’ve already gone through Post-Modernism, so let’s come up with a new, truer moniker?)

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Filed under: architecture, design

Forget Widening them, Let’s Narrow the Roads: an architect’s success story

When the shelter industry is in a tizzy over Obama’s forthcoming infrastructure plans, which will naturally entail shovel-ready projects such as road widening and lengthening, one builder/developer asks a municipality to narrow its roads. “We asked to reduce impervious surface area and avoid overheating of the microclimate,” says Pacific Northwest-based architect Ross Chapin in an Architect magazine online article. The project of subject is Wyer’s End, in White Salmon, Washington.

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Filed under: architecture, sustainability, transportation, urbanization

Garage sores

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This garage appears like some sort of growth off the side of the house. Front-loaded garages are passe and exemplary of poo design. That’s why Space Design Journal is calling for no more front-loading garages. They turn the most gorgeous designs into a yawning monster, and they make the house smack of suburbia. Developers should like the idea of rear-loading garages, this editor’s preference, because it’s a space saver and adds to the communal impact of the neighborhood. Take a cue from the New Urbanist movement and put your garages in the back of the house. Or consider the following suggestions from Bloodgood Sharp Buster Architects & Planners, which has offices nationwide:
house-forward designs that diminish the impact of the front-loaded garage
alley-access rear-loaded garages
adding a porte cochere.
Learn more by downloading BSB’s What Is Happening to the Garage on the second page of the PDF list. It’s a brief and creative article.

Not convinced? Read a brief and humorous discussion of it.

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Filed under: architecture, design, real estate

Garage sores

Photo credit
This garage appears like some sort of growth off the side of the house. Front-loaded garages are passe and exemplary of poo design. That’s why Space Design Journal is calling for no more front-loading garages. They turn the most gorgeous designs into a yawning monster, and they make the house smack of suburbia. Developers should like the idea of rear-loading garages, this editor’s preference, because it’s a space saver and adds to the communal impact of the neighborhood. Take a cue from the New Urbanist movement and put your garages in the back of the house. Or consider the following suggestions from Bloodgood Sharp Buster Architects & Planners, which has offices nationwide:
house-forward designs that diminish the impact of the front-loaded garage
alley-access rear-loaded garages
adding a porte cochere.
Learn more by downloading BSB’s What Is Happening to the Garage on the second page of the PDF list. It’s a brief and creative article.

Not convinced? Read a brief and humorous discussion of it.

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Filed under: architecture, design, real estate

Double blight: unused Wal-Marts

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It doesn’t happen often enough but at times you’ll see vacant Wal-Mart stores (and yes, we’ve all seen vacant K-Mart stores). Some towns are putting these to good use. Julia Christensen, author of the newly published Big Box Reuse, collects stores about those uses. For example, the Calvary Chapel in Pinellas Park, Fla., formerly housed itself in a former Winn Dixie grocery store. It doubly blessed the community by renovating another big box store, this time a Wal-Mart, for its new home.
Read more about the book and the big box rehabs at Sustainablog.org.

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Filed under: architecture, art, community

Architecture & Elitism

Many bring an elitist attitude toward architecture; however the only architects you’ll really hear elitist spouting from are the household names like Gehry and Duany.
Here are what some American architects are saying about their current situation, according to an Archinect survey.
“Bush really killed my career. Licensed, Cornell degree: three layoffs in six years. Two weeks severance each time. All well-known mid-sized firms. Each new job means new software, politics and process to learn, while trying to exceed expectations. Why do (did) kids fresh out of business school get paid twice what I fought to make with my 15+ years experience? I just finished my student loan payments last year! Now I have to give myself a 20% pay cut because Bush mugged the treasury? I have no savings or assets. I’ll be 50 in six years. What a waste. I’m too experienced for boutiques, and look like damaged goods to the big guys. From what I hear, every city is facing layoffs, so moving would be a huge waste of my limited means. Not a happy camper.”

“I wish I were a dentist or a plumber.”

“I was laid off in 2002, went right back to school, and I have been an ICU nurse for 1.5 years now, starting pay is 2.5 times what I left as an architect. I work 32 hours/week, I never regret the change.”

“Overeducated, underexperienced, horrible economy, timid hiring by firms = me struggling to get by, and probably leaving architecture and never coming back…”

“I spent 4 years at great college, and then 5 years working in the industry, to only run someone’s firm for $24/hour. I’m disgusted at the industry pay standards and happy to no longer be in it full time. All no owner level architects are grossly under paid and over worked. If it wasn’t for architects this world would not be like it is. There needs to be greater respect for that. Unfortunately, it took leaving the industry to regain quality of life. I’m happy to be helping people and getting paid my worth.”

On the other hand you have this kind of comment:
“I am 40 and have worked everyday in architecture since I had my first internship at 20 years of age. Maybe taking a breath and a pause will be a blessing in disguise.”

“There’s ups and there’s downs, this will rebound, and out of it a new architecture will be born. Mark my words, innovation will prevail.”

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Filed under: architecture

Fabricating some prefab realities

“My theory: the rong people are behind the prefabricated housing movement in this country,” Karrie Jacobs starts in her Metropolis mag piece, “Industrialists without Factories.”
She should know, having written a plethora for Metropolis mag about what she calls the prefab mania.
And it is a mania. I’m a fan of modular housing (not necessarily the same as prefab) but can’t we go more toward the chick who designed the most popular of choices (which seemingly haven’t been used, BTW) for emergency housing back in 2005? (Sorry I can’t recall her name but she’s in NY somewhere.) Let’s make it available like the old Sears homes.
Jacobs discusses prefab products made of innovative materials, and discusses also that architects claim it’s difficult (if not impossible) to find capital to find such ventures. That seems terrifically bogus to me. Drive to any major shipping area of the US and see the miles of graveyards of shipping containers. How many architecture contests are being won by using these? How many other materials that are exceedingly sustainable and don’t require high capital funding are already out there? C’mon, folks. Step up and smell the rotting shipping containers– or bamboo, or hemp, or rice, or mud.
Jacobs suggests industrial designers, who are trained to formulate designs for mass consumption, perhaps rather than architects should be involved with prefab designs. To that point, Metrop Mag writes in an earlier issue that the AIA passed a resolution (several years ago, that is) stating it was “inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.”
That article also states one of Buckminster Fuller’s maxims: “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.”

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Filed under: architecture, construction, design, green

Solomon speaks: the WPA and New Urbanism

“The idea that is emerging from many sources in different forms is to retool America – its cities, its industry, its infrastructure and its landscape – to flourish in the post-oil economy of the mid-21st century. The post-oil economy will be as profound for the 21st century as the railroad was for the 19th, or the automobile was for the 20th, and it will be carried with a force of inevitability greater than either.”
So wrote Dan Solomon, co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (as brought to my attention by Filmanowicz’s twittering/blog).
“Now American housing faces new challenges. Most Americans cannot afford housing in the great urban centers that are served by public transportation and should be the locus of economic activity. There are no policy tools to address the growing disparity between the costs of producing housing, particularly housing that does not depend upon automobiles, and what middle class people can afford.”
Read his piece in the SFChronicle.

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Filed under: architecture, community, construction, housing, Obama, real estate, transportation, urbanization

Solomon speaks: the WPA and New Urbanism

“The idea that is emerging from many sources in different forms is to retool America – its cities, its industry, its infrastructure and its landscape – to flourish in the post-oil economy of the mid-21st century. The post-oil economy will be as profound for the 21st century as the railroad was for the 19th, or the automobile was for the 20th, and it will be carried with a force of inevitability greater than either.”
So wrote Dan Solomon, co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday (as brought to my attention by Filmanowicz’s twittering/blog).
“Now American housing faces new challenges. Most Americans cannot afford housing in the great urban centers that are served by public transportation and should be the locus of economic activity. There are no policy tools to address the growing disparity between the costs of producing housing, particularly housing that does not depend upon automobiles, and what middle class people can afford.”
Read his piece in the SFChronicle.

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Filed under: 1429145, architecture, community, construction, housing, real estate, transportation, urbanization

Gertude Lempp Kerbis: An Architectural Pioneer

When she was in college she broke into Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Wisconsin, slept in it overnight and listened to Beethoven, waking the next morning with a knowledge so enviably keen self-awareness: she would become an architect. In the next few years she would realize that intention, studying under world-renown architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Six decades later Chicago architect Gertrude “Gert” Lempp Kerbis has received the 2008 American Institute of Architects Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of her work includes Modernist designs on the Air Force Academy, O’Hare International Airport and a condo building in Chicago.
“Her contribution is definitely two-fold: the progress she made so that women can be architects and then the progress she made as a designer,” Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, principal of Ross Barney Architects, says in an 18-minute doc made about Gert. The doc was shown recently at the Cliff Dwellers Arts Foundation, an artsy hangout in Chicago’s Loop.
“I was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright… (Gropius and Mies). These were the visionaries of our age,” says Lempp Kerbis says, who’s also worked for SOM.
While studying at the University of Wisconsin the Chicago native read a Life magazine article in which she discovered Wright’s Taliesin was just near. “So I immediately left the dorm and hitchhiked (there). It was like a group of buildings, and this particular building has glass going all the way to the floor… so you could easily see into these living rooms and bedrooms, which is what I was peering into. As I was peering into this marvelous enchantment I had heard heavy footsteps behind me and I turned around, thinking someone was going to scream at me, and it was a white peacock in full flutter. It was so amazing, it was like an outer body experience.”
Lempp Kerbis founded Chicago Women in Architecture (which meets Tuesday, 20 Jan). “I had asked Mies if I could please do my own thesis, and he said to me, ‘You mean you want me to work on your project and you don’t want to work on my project? No.’”
Shortly therafter Gert began working for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. There she was lead designer of the dining hall of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She also designed O’Hare International Airport’s Seven Continents Building. One of her most discussed projects is an urban renewal project for the City of Chicago, an 11-unit condominium building at 2131 N. Clark Street. It earned her a Distinguished Building Award from the AIA.
Originally she thought it was a “very undesirable site.”
“I thought I could change that… if I created a kind of special space to isolate you from the bus line and the traffic. The bedrooms looked out on the greenhouse. Their living rooms and dining rooms opened out on the greenhouse. Forty percent of the people who originally bought the greenhouse 35 years ago are still residents. I love the project,” she says.
To learn more about Gert contact the Chicago AIA. Meanwhile see some recent video of her through the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Filed under: AIA, architecture, events