Streets Are Rooms

The first step toward creating pedestrian friendly spaces is to treat each street as if it was a room in a house. By first, making sure all buildings have walls tight to the sidewalks, these buildings will form walls on either side of the street. The street then becomes an outdoor room. Whether the neighborhood is low rent or high rent, the outdoor space can be beautiful through city efforts.

On designated shopping streets, the first floors should have glass with shops or businesses visible. This makes for safe streets and active one's. One long blank first floor on a street can ruin the feeling of an area. 

Lights and wide sidewalks of brick and trees creating shade and buffer for childs safety can all be done by the city. 

In Portland, new buildings in the Bayside neighborhood have and have not been placed tight to the sidewalks. The DSS building sets back behind a parking lot in a suburban layout, destroying any hope for Marginal way to feel like a room there. The new university housing however, forms a wonderful outdoor street space and has a nice bus stop of glass in front. This simple rule can have dramatic positive results.

Streets are public space and have much potential for safety, and the pursuit of happiness!

(Originally posted 9/17/2008)

Warmth of a New Year

Inviting materials of Hamann House interior by Michael Belleau Architect.

When the holiday season comes along we thankfully switch our thoughts, concerns and feelings from me to us. Many of us naturally spend much of our year in a competition mode for perceived scarce resources or to protect our families in different ways.

But when December rolls around we begin to smile more, give more heartfelt greetings and as a culture agree to treat each other more as extended family. That warmth and generosity we normally reserve for guests in our homes extends out into the public space.

The care we put into making our homes as welcoming and warm and friendly and happy as possible can be extended into our public spaces in order to support our care for each other year round.

We need more chances to mix in public naturally, without signing up for anything.

I remember when I was studying in London and on new years eve my partner and I decided to go into the center and just be there. At this time in early 90’s there were armed police in the train stations due to terrorist attacks and in general people were more emotionally guarded.

We were in a random pub when the clock struck midnight and someone put on the old Monkees hit ‘Daydream Believer’. To our happy surprise immediately everyone began to sing along! People of all different walks of life bonded in that special moment.

Happy Holidays! -mB

20+ Years of Urban Design in Maine 2

I grew up in Orono Maine, a small college town in the middle of the state outside Bangor. We lived right on Main Street across from the road up to the schools. I walked to school every day and walked downtown to meet friends. The schools sat behind Main Street as they do in many Maine towns. The downtown had the town hall, police/fire station, post office, etc. all right there. Nice homes and churches lined Main Street close to town.

The state university main campus is on the other side of the Penobscot River which runs through the middle of the town. The University of Maine at Orono (UMO) is organized around a quad with the library on one end and the gymnasium on the other; mind and body. Students walk around, along and across the quad from class to class.

It's about the same distance, 1400 feet, from my house to Pat's Pizza (the original where Pat would stand behind the counter with his cigar and lip burn) as it is from the UMO library to the gym. This is the foundation for my personal sense of walkable neighborhood space and scale. I believe we can use these two examples to strengthen our state's town and city urban fabric ensuring economic success in the long term.

Creating a Peaceful Home

When I design a client's home new or renovation, I always work on clearing away the impediments to their relaxation. Eliminating barriers to peace and enjoyment are part of my work in this modern world of swirling information. I'm a minimalist in that I like to create spaces in which owners can naturally enjoy nature and light and materials without clutter. Everyday chores are exciting opportunities for the architect to celebrate living. The photo above is of a kitchen in a new home I designed in a neighborhood of small houses. By constructing a balanced, peaceful composition of utilitarian objects like counters and cabinets, fireplaces, floors and roofs and rooms, a calm atmosphere can occur.

I always strive for a dialogue with nature so that the act of living involves at least visual contact with the world outside. Materials can play a part by allowing feet and hands to touch natural objects and surfaces.

Knowing how to edit what is seen outside and what is not is a very important part of place creating and a peaceful home. This is why an architect can help you radically improve your sense of peace with careful cutting and pasting of walls and windows to bring out the best in your property.

Passive-Agressive House

Our current global crisis is based on the rise in CO2 levels. This rise is primarily a result of burning fossil fuels, mostly oil and coal. After Al Gore's movie in 2008, the green building movement took off and government officials and the private sector looked for a metric to mandate in order to reduce CO2 levels. They both found the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system easy to mandate.

Standards like LEED helped start a wave of certified buildings that shifted our attention from construction efficiency to environmental impact. Government agencies in the USA now require many new construction projects to be LEED certified. While these buildings are a little more energy efficient and certainly more responsible with water efficiency, toxicity and some materials embodied energy use, they do not exactly drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels.

I like to think of the Prius as an example of a lot of embodied energy (the energy used to make the car) in an energy efficient product that ends up using more energy total (embodied and life time of low gas use) than buying a used car of medium size would (no new embodied energy as the car already exists). And buying renewable bamboo flooring from China shipped halfway across the world (high embodied energy in fuel used in shipping) is questionable. Embodied energy is a more realistic way to look at the impact of building material choices on CO2 levels.

Another embodied energy involves planning and how much energy people use driving to the building. It costs an additional 30-50% of the buildings active energy use to commute. Here is a good article on this embodied energy as well as the benefits of existing buildings.

So you could have the newest LEED building but located such that everyone commutes far and end up worse off than rehabbing an existing building in town.

But embodied energy, the energy it takes to make stuff and move it, is only a small part of the energy use problem. A better start to lowering CO2 emissions is to focus on fossil fuel use to create energy used to heat and cool buildings which accounts for almost 50% of our energy use. I try to think of what we can do to stop more coal plants coming on line in the US, China and India. In other words the forest-for-the-trees concept leads us to focus on cutting back our use of fossil fuels to heat and cool our buildings if you are an architect.

A popular metric for energy efficiency in building is the "Passivhaus" (passive house) certification. This rigorous standard developed in Germany focuses on reducing energy demand. Reducing energy demand implies not using a lot of energy to do this, hence, using "passive" methods rather than "active"(requiring energy) ones. The Passive House standard does this by addressing three definitions of energy efficiency: First, a building must be air tight so heat or cool is not lost or gained. Second, the building must have a very high level of insulation in the exterior envelope including windows, etc. so that heat or cool is not lost or gained and thus it has a very low heating energy use. And third, the amount of energy used for primary functions as in that used for the electricity must be very low as well.

This Passive House standard as it's called in the US is growing in use by governments in Europe to regulate energy use because that is precisely what it focuses on instead of everything as LEED type metrics do. Here, the use is growing especially at the green building house level.

Back in the 70's an energy crisis in the US led to a ton of experimentation with energy efficiency building design. Many architects created buildings with solar panels, passive solar heating through orientation and glass amounts, tromb walls, earth berming for insulation, solariums for circulating warmed air, and superinsulating or insulating the exterior building shell with much more insulation value than normal.

When Swede Bo Adamson and German Wolfgang Feist decided to create a very energy efficient standard for building in the late 80's they drew upon the work of the American pioneers of the 70's. Here is the wikipedia entry.

I worked for one of those American 70's architects here in Maine, Bill Sepe, who continues to build superinsulated buildings with air to air heat exchangers to provide fresh air to the super tight spaces. Passive house buildings are very healthy because of this constant air movement. As buildings became more air tight, we have not added the requirement for fresh air circulation and with the Passive House standard of .6 ACH 50 air tightness, the spaces require air circulation to be healthy. This requirement then makes a Passive House even more healthy than other buildings.

I'm a certified Passive House Designer through the Passive House Academy, based in Ireland affiliated with the international Passivhaus Institute in Germany PHI. The first Passive House in the US was built by Katrin Klingenberg in Urbana Illinois. She founded the Passive House Institute US, PHIUS, and became certified to train others to become certified. Unfortunately she wanted to be the only one in US allowed to train and a schism developed between the parent organization and hers. This has resulted in two certification possibilities here and I took the international one as best choice for long term. The PHIUS organization meanwhile has done fantastic work on moving passive house forward in the US so one can use resources from both organizations to get your Passivhaus project done.

Maine is a great place to build new or renovate to eliminate the need for almost all heating and thus, Passive House is a great metric to address this issue.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 3

The endless high school hallway. It's even shown up in my dreams. At the end is doors to gym; turn left and up a few stairs and down more hallway to doors to the parking lot. Most kids in Maine grow up with this space as a dominant experience in their lives. Every weekday life's most intense moments may happen in such a space. Monotonous for the most part, hermetic and claustrophobic, moving through such a space can imprint a linear, film-like space/time memory of planning.

They're so introverted.

Such stale experience could stifle the creativity of our future planners. The double loaded corridor is always forcing it's super efficient layout on design. In the photo above, the lucky students actually get light at the end of the tunnel. Like the train tracks of the Industrial Revolution, we are forced to take only one path submissively. The same attitude led to the elevated highways crashing through our delicate pedestrian fabric and Jacobs battling Moses.

But in a true village there would be one library for everyone in town and students in all grades, and you would walk to it from a classroom building. Spatial experience would vary moving from place to place in the course of a day. Performances would take place in which ever size auditorium in the center that was the right size for the event whether it was a grade school day time event or a community night time one. This is not to say grade schools would not have their own dedicated spaces, just that buildings in town would be shared by all and not wasted, lying empty at times and built cheap because they are not important to all.

Our Maine towns should slice and dice this endless hallway by building separate buildings like a village with connected covered walkways where used often creating courtyards, town squares and landscapes for yankee pedestrian delight.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 2

Our concept of family, home, and place come directly from experience. If we grow up in an apartment-like place in the middle of a packed urban context then that is our comfort zone and what we consider normal. If we grow up in a small town town in a single family home then that is our normal. Experiences throughout our life add to this baseline but none can be as strong.

I lived as a teen in a house on Main Street in a small town in the middle of Maine- Orono- a college town. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to live outside of town as I could walk across the street up to school; I could walk down to Pat's Pizza, the IGA, or LaVerdiere's (LaVerdiere's Halloween commercial) . Most of my friends could walk to school or bike if they wanted to. My concept of place is rooted in this typical small town main street space. When we got our licenses we cruised around some but of course, we spent a lot of time parked downtown and hanging out with each other leaning against our cars with the Jensen triaxials cranking out hard rock . My urban experience was main streets and the campus at UMO.

Later I fell in love with the copper roofs and burnt orange medeival fabric of the Gamla Stan in Stockholm, the brick Back Bay of Boston, the canals in Leningrad, the Moorish courtyards of the Alhambra, and the Portland Maine peninsula. These experiences compliment the main street base line by adding intricacy and spatial complexity to the pedestrian possibilities.

Our Maine spaces can improve through the strengthening of our experiences growing up here. We can focus on how our kids walk to school- what can we do to make these walks safe, fun and social? In Orono I just walked across the street and started up the short street to school. In our Maine towns we can build sidewalks and bike paths from dense housing areas to schools in town with police warming glass huts at center junctions to watch over things. My Main Street had trees along the road with sidewalks leading through town and across the bridge up towards the university. Our kids could benefit from bike paths speeding along the street and cutting through the neighborhoods.

Our families crave the coffee shop, IGA, Pat's Pizza and LaVerdiere's type stores along our Main Streets. In high school we were bored and needed places to gather and do things. We loved finding places to just hang out and look at something. This could be a view over a river or pond or a view at the town. Spatial experiences were much sought after if I think about it now, looking back. It's up to us now to help create a variegated in town spatial experience for children to move through and build enjoyable experiences. My high school Main Street life did that for me.

High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 1

(I write this while sliding across the bright winter landscape on a train from Portland to Boston just passing a trailer park in Maine where a bright red classic very old truck lies tucked against the back of a trailer.)

It occurred to me the other night while driving through a blizzard to my sons basketball game how formative and memorable our high school sports experiences are. And how they shape our perception of communal space and place making.

As I peered through the windshield heavily obscured by the sticky snow, crusty wipers leaving the central drivers portion unswept and incorrectly designed sweep direction depositing a line of slush swept from the passenger side to the center of drivers vision, my memory jumped to my bus rides through the Maine countryside to high school basketball games in dead winter. Orono High School played up in class B back then and we travelled all the way to MDI (Mount Desert Island for you folks from away) to the east, Schenck and Stearns to the north (the Millinockets) and Dover-Foxcroft, Lincoln, etc. Quiet snow-filled rides home stopping at McDonalds for as many Big Macs as we could afford. If you were lucky and your girlfriend was a cheerleader you could sneak a little making out in.

Contrary to the suburban experience of moving from one heavily populated area to another, the Maine experience moves from one small town to another (even our "cities" are really small towns in disguise) through vast stretches of countryside, silent in the white winter nights. We had no electronic devices to pass the time so we looked, talked and slept on the bus. Being funny was a prized asset. The land opened up to pastoral sweeps and closed deep inside coniferous forests. Winding paths slowly climbing along rivers and bridges hung over the rocky ocean.

Many times the bus road along a rivers edge and you knew we were arriving because the houses got close together and an old big brick mill might appear before what passed as a Main Street with at least two businesses or much more came into view. Then we would turn off this spine and go behind this strip, off to the side and pull up to the local high school- often an old pseudo Georgian block- and enter a plain brick box gym through a side door with nothing but a parking lot and fields there covered in white.

Who were these people who lived here? What did their dad's do? Did they like their school? Would the crowd yell at us? And of course we would have heard about a special player or two, having been instructed by the coach to pay particular attention to them, and that stopping them would be key to victory. Coming out of the locker room, stepping on to the hardwood floor we would immediately spy the good player(s) and begin to estimate his talent. Is he too good for us? Of course he knew we knew about him and this gave him even more confidence especially in his "house". He would execute their warmup drills with as much nonchalance as possible and we would try our best to do the same.

Every gym is different and these spaces could arguably be considered the most important or having the greatest impact from a memory standpoint on us Mainers. Case in point, when our 8th grade team played Veazie (kids from Veazie can choose Orono or Bangor High), the gym was on the top floor of the police-fire-townhall-gym. That alone creates a nice Yankee sense of multi-use buildings and frugality. So there we were playing a game on the bouncing wood floor watching their top player, Lenny, warming up. First thing to notice was his shot was very accurate and curiously very flat- with almost no arc. The game began and one of our players with the most beautiful shooting forms, Charlie, jumps up and fires a perfectly arcing, back rotating, shot and- THUNK! The ball hit the ceiling only about a third of the way up it's projected journey. Guess whose shot did not have that problem?

Welcome Back Kimmelman

NYTimes architecture critic Michael Kimmelman gave a talk at Portland's MECA (Maine College of Art) in the ICA's Osher Room June 21st to a good size audience of students and area cultural enthusiasts. Kimmelman started this position at the Times last fall after returning from his previous post at the Times writing from Berlin and elsewhere on a variety of subjects in his, "Abroad" column. Prior to going abroad he was the paper's long time art critic taking a different route from the typical art critics who were acting out emperor fantasy's by giving a thumbs up or down to individual artists.

Although not an architect, Kimmelman did briefly cover the subject between studying at Yale and Harvard as an editor at ID magazine and architecture critic and New England Monthly Magazine.

Yes, I said Yale and Harvard. He grew up in the West Village of NYC, son of a doctor and an activist. He went to Yale for undergrad and Harvard for grad where he studied art history. Oh, yeah, also he is a concert pianist of the highest caliber. Let's see, Yale....Harvard.....concert pianist...... award winning writer for the NYTimes......that pretty much makes him perfect. What about physical subjects you ask? That level of piano play is actually incredibly physical but I'm guessing he is also a triathlete and maybe a fencing champ or some other semi-obscure sport associated with the bourgeoisie (I had to look that word up- I guess that gives me away). I'll take another guess and say he can tell a good wine from bad and eats really, really healthy meals, his wife is slim and highly educated but put her career on hold to care for the kids who are all testing 3 grades above. Yes, I'd like to come back as Michael Kimmelman in my next life, I'll just say it now and get it over with.

Shoot, maybe I'm thinking of Adam Gopnik....

In any case in the old days a journalist, a writer, would get an assignment wherever the need arose. Whether it's covering the night beat or the latest show at the Met, you wrote a story with a compelling narrative for an audience not necessarily schooled in your topic. Better to have a well written story by an amateur bird watcher than a poorly written one by an expert. Thus, better to have a well written story on architecture by an art critic than an okay one by an architect. Especially a really good writer with a curious and probing mind.

And so Kimmelman began his reign as architecture critic at the Times a year ago and supposedly did an about face from the previous critic's attention to individual architects and their individual buildings as art objects to public space and housing. No more museums and lots of everyman places and physical experiences. He had made the morally uplifting decision to focus on the "us" rather than the "I". Much was said regarding the possibility there would no longer be interviews with Gehry and Piano but instead public comments on a place or built situation.

First up: bicycle paths. Next; housing, parks, urban design exhibits, trees in the city, multi-building urban development, sports venues, and...... a project by Piano- but one in the shadow of an architectural masterpiece and so, demure by default.

But then, a focus on Columbia and how new buildings are targeting the poor conditions like crime in Medellin and education in Bogota. These articles suspend the cultural reality that architecture in the first world is primarily a reward for acquiring wealth for a moment and let us enter the fantasy world of a poor third world culture where architecture has a higher calling out of necessity. Could architecture help? Would we have to wait until we were truly slum ridden and desperate here and perhaps all willing to believe in an unverifiable greater good in order to perceive a common goal? Could the impending implosion of the US lead to a classless society? Could liberal ivy league youngsters guide us to a higher place using non-profits and third world experience and kickstarters?

Anyway, back in NYC he gives a big thumbs up to Cohen's steel and glass canopy bridging two Goldman buildings over a slice of financial area "public" space. Cohen is head of architecture at Harvard and likes to play with a parametric modeling program that assistants turn into reality. The glass is sleek and the steel is sleek and the geometry is sleek. It does fit well with the surroundings and greatly enhances the area while performing it's function. Rolex should shoot an ad there. And that's how architecture works, a good solution has a budget and a client and solves a problem. Whether the king requests a private marble chapel or the collective needs a bamboo library, the process is fairly similar as architects know.

Here is a quote from the article:
Sculpture is always closer than architecture to pure form, being mostly liberated from all the obvious constraints (environmental, economic, technological and political) that shape any building’s design. Architecture is a contaminated art in this sense, but that is also a virtue. It’s a social art. It creates social spaces. The best architecture embraces and pushes beyond this, formally.

There’s a metaphor at play. A free society consensually accepts its governing burdens and principles. Constraint and freedom: the essence of good architecture and a healthy culture.

Now this strikes me as an attempt at an erudite poetic aphorism or something. I like the, "contaminated art.", phrase and that the contamination is what makes it social. But the, "pushes beyond this, formally." is a bit redundant. The last big picture type statement is more ad copy for a big firm. The dilemma for us architects is we love good copy but we know too much to ignore the perhaps amateur statements.  

And as the recession thaws a tiny bit, the MIT and Harvard architecture grads can come back from Africa having designed award winning straw and mud hospitals and libraries to take what was learned to design mom and dad's vacation home to LEED platinum standards.

As noted in his essay on Pruitt-Igoe and Penn South housing projects, architecture has less influence than politics as it should. I'm reminded of a comment by Mark Cousins (an Architectural Association lecturer) pointing out how classical architecture has been tagged as democratic, elitist, ideal, fascist, human, anachronistic, etc. One minute Jefferson is mistakenly using it as a symbol of democracy (Athenian "citizens" not such a democratic group), next Speers is adding steroids and then Stirling is under fire for post modern masterpiece.

Fortunately in countries on the edge of socialism for purely practical reasons like parts of Latin America, Spain, Italy, etc., functionalism, or, original modernism, is still the only choice and so the new work is all "okay" by architectural culture tastemakers. This style covers slum libraries as well as ocean villas. Like the French, the idea is that we are all voting the same way even if only a few are invited to the soiree and only those at the soiree are invited to apply for a job working at the UN.

Kimmelman read a prepared text with projected images on a screen behind him. He ran through some of the topics covered by his articles. Columbia (country) was featured as well as a housing project in the Bronx full of sustainable features by British high tech architect Nick Grimshaw. Grimshaw's office has focused more lately on large infrastructure commissions not necessarily full of structural gymnastics of the Waterloo kind. Kimmelman gave his version of the, "Yeah, but do the toilets work?", report.

Here's an architect magazine report:
http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/Building_types_study/Multi-Family-Housing/2012/via-verde-dattner-architects-grimshaw-architects.asp

So, what if anything is lost when a non-architect writes about architecture? Well, I think these articles are more reporting than a complete analysis. A reporter visits a place; talks to people, takes pictures; gets some background; writes best story. If you want the buildings or urban spaces or urban movements put into historical context and broken down from the macro scale of the arc of settlements to the contemporary obsessions by region and the technology of making, etc. then buy an architecture magazine. I find the Kimmelman articles great reading and informative.

If you would like to pour yourself a mimosa on Sunday and catch up on what has crossed over from merely existing to topical by Times standards (and I always find that interesting enough) and you want interesting reading, then read the latest Times article. Or, serendipitously put on your Oscar Niemeyer Museum t-shirt as I did and go to a Kimmelman lecture at your local cultural institution. You can still wear black but the thin horizontal librarian glass frames are out- large frames are in.

Kimmelman's parent's were a doctor and an "activist". I'm guessing his mom was the activist and had an influence on him the incredible successes did not obscure. The current real or feigned concern for "us" as opposed to "me" in today's kids is a trickle down from the 70's when tv shows like, "Welcome Back, Kotter", had a liberal school teacher dispensing wisdom to the public school kids while perfectly happy with his teacher salary. This moment between the 60's revolt and the 80's yuppiedom created an atmosphere where it was normal to think of the group over oneself. Kimmelman, like me, would most likely carry some of this in his cultural DNA. Thus, returning from his Berlin "Shprockets" atmosphere, he may find a need to let this attitude resurface. Or it's just the trend.

Welcome back, Kimmelman.

The Greenest Building

Great screening of the movie, 'The Greenest Building', last night at the Portland Public Library with the writer/director Jane Turville in attendance. The movie walks through a history of the historic building preservation movement and the sustainable movement and discusses how the two can be linked now to form the kind of life we all desire. Recycling a building is much more sustainable usually than demolishing a building and building new for many reasons.

One reason is the material in the existing building took a lot of energy to create and new materials must consumer a lot of energy to create so you are throwing away embodied energy and using new embodied energy.

Also, an older building many times is built to last a long time whereas some developers create buildings merely for profit and no regard for the place they are build or the long term impact. This leads to many 'souless' buildings and hence, places.

This leads to another factor which is a sense of place manifests over a long time with the stories accumulating of members of families as craftsmen working on the area's buildings and thus making history which is tossed aside in the name of efficiency. When we include the psychology of an area into our decision making process, we are more balanced. We are not machines and cannot continue to treat ourselves this way.

One hope is the sustainability movement will help stretch our development timeline to include 100 years from now and what sorts of places we'd like to inhabit.

The greenest building may be one that already exists waiting for some sustainable tweaks. Maybe there is no place like home.

Portland Waterfront Discussion at Maine Historical Society

Nice discussion Tuesday night on Portland's waterfront. Mayor Brennan gave a good outline of the potential for the area; Ann Pringle discussed the history of the zoning and how we should allow for things like fishing to come back as railroads are coming back as well as trying to avoid the pretend waterfronts like Baltimore; Bill Needleman gave a good discussion of the urban fabric noting the piers used to be extensions of Portland streets (as noted in my article 'Portland's Piers Are Streets' ); and Steve DiMillo gave a great history of growing up working for his father's restaurant, how his dad developed Long Wharf on an burned coal storage site, and how the area was once filled with little shops, etc.

The city is aware of the potential to use form based code to promote the sort of pedestrian fabric we crave but are not in a position to move forward with this according to Mr. Needleman.

The pedestrian wharf edge walk from Commercial Street to DiMillo's restaurant is one of the city's gems and whatever we can do to promote this sort of place is in public and private interests. One key is having restaurants or other public places to go to on wharf that naturally has pier owners creating public paths down pier for access.

As an architect who has worked since 1992 on Portland's waterfront urban design issues and lives here and who was once a commercial fisherman working on a dragger similar to one's shown above, I am grateful for what we have. People come here for the site of working boats and fish markets and seafood.

Together, private and public we can find a way as Ms. Pringle noted, we have already created an environment for a partnership that other cities envy.

Charles Simonds' Bodies and Bricks

Great lecture by Artist Charles Simonds at ICA the other night. He creates tiny worlds with clay. Beginning with videos of himself emerging naked from a clay pit in NJ (where he got his clay) made back in early 70's, he presented a history of his work. In the early videos he smeared his body with clay to make a clay landscape of himself before using tiny clay bricks to build structures on top of his body/landscape. This duality of body-like landscapes with small worlds of brick became a central theme for him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHkrAj83ihE&feature=related

Working then on the lower east side of NYC in very run down neighborhoods close to where he lived, he constructed tiny clay brick worlds in little niches of crumbling hollowed out building corners, etc. Short videos he made were great to watch combining the work with the times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgI66suWifQ

A good video doc. of his work although in spanish is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAKb59fB8W0&feature=related

To get an idea of the times this movie of him is great as well though nothing to do with the art per se:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgJNA9zB4Y&feature=related

The landscape portion evolved to become surrealist sculptures with mouths or other dreamlike evocations emerging. Noguchi, Giacometti, etc. come to mind.

Eventually the work moved into galleries such as the Whitney where Mr. Simonds found a way to connect back to the street art by placing two complimentary creations in buildings across the street from the window in the Whitney room.

Mr. Simons explained he works with internal dialogues for the "little people" at times but also with meta narratives of a more primal nature as in Jungian archetypes though he did not specifically mention Jung necessarily. He did mention his parents were both psychologists and implied this subject was part of his work.

Outdoor work continued in art parks.

As the work became more refined and customer's requested pieces constructed inside their homes,

he began to do both extended multifaceted works with ideas and their counter ideas bouncing back and forth and extremely elegant riffs as it were on a simple idea. The brick constructions at times became soft as the landscape.

In the larger works the landscapes took on a more almost Henry Moore like importance to the overall piece.

Or completely heroic.

Can the work inform today's architecture? Of course. In the early 70's the ecology movement, anti-war movement, back-to-the-land movement, all can be found in today's America. Our desire for sustainable living includes architecture made of natural materials, food grown locally without any harmful chemicals, and not fighting wars on the other side of the world in order to protect other countries from themselves. One big difference is our desire to avoid fossil fuels now. But we would not have the technological head start here again if it had not been for the good work done during the Carter administration when we could only get gas every other day according to your license plate.

In this work the narrative is people building the present by excavating the past in a continuous cycle.

Simplistically, the mud brick locally made is very natural and local, etc. And Mr. Simonds points out how building with earth bricks is a universal method globally back thousands of years such that he will hear people tell him his work reminds them of Pueblo cliff dwellings if they are from North America, or  North African early history dwellings if they are from Europe, or Chinese early history if from Asia, etc. Primal qualities of material and construction of course are evocative of sustainable living and architects have used rammed earth construction and straw bale construction since the 70's for this reason.

However, if we look closer at the places created by Mr. Simonds we find the integration of building with landscape; the ritual narratives relating to the buildings (as in his court piece where the defendant is either pushed into the pit or walks around to meet the judge and leave free); the psychological stimulations rather than the technological. All this can be incorporated into our Maine way of living as it can be experienced in our towns when we tune into the emotions.

And drop out of the rat race.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68

Very good movie on the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth". Great explanation on failure not due to single cause as our cause-and-effect western cultural conditioning would have us believe. There were many factors and maintenance was one of them. We are trained to look for single remedy for an ailment and we do same with social problems. Hope some day we see the interconnectedness of the social fabric.

The "slums" were cleared away for boulevards or later, 'modern' blocks and either way, we look back to see the building fabric was usually fantastic, only the maintenance was bad. One day a block of flats is 'poor', and the next, 'rich'; with no change to the buildings other than upkeep. 

In this movie, a project usually held up as the symbol of modern residential architecture's failure to be humane, turns out to have failed for reasons other than style or form. Must viewing. 

Downeast Architect

When we 'downeasters' think of architecture we usually think of different styles such as “shingle style”, or “50’s modern”. Artists are often taught that in order to reach their ultimate potential, they must find their muse leading he or she to develop their own voice, or style, and fame and fortune will soon follow. But ‘style’ denotes a method and look which must suppress the individuality of the client and the particular circumstances.

As a Maine architect I have come to discover that notions of style can limit our buildings to functioning as misplaced postcards instead of celebrations of family and community.

We may create great buildings without catering to our preconceptions. These buildings may involve linking the various client needs in ways particular to them. I see architecture as a vehicle for the client to reach their ultimate potential and inner peace. And in Maine, that means my self-actualization may not be part of the puzzle. Nor will it be necessarily true that a client will make requests based on their need to achieve their ultimate potential.

In the harsh climate and harsh economy of our state we quickly develop interpersonal relationships that work to sustain our lives. Inner peace in Maine comes from a warm fire and good conversation. A Yankee mentality delves into areas where the 20^th century notion of, “avant-garde”, has limited use and conversely, notions of historical style can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. Our serenity is more complex and psychologically based than a goal such as, “always new”, or, “always old”, can resolve.

When I played basketball at Orono High School in Maine every player had different strengths and weaknesses. And these changed during the course of even one game. As coaches we use the phrase, “smart choice”, when talking to our players about the hundreds of decisions they make every game. The same holds true in architecture.

Every client is different. Here are some examples of buildings for folks here in Maine, many within a few blocks of each other, who’s needs turn out to be more than just the image of Yankee regionalism we picture in our minds:

Kids Hugging Mom Addition/Renovation:

The Willard Beach area of South Portland consists of small houses on small lots on small streets. One couple came to me requesting an addition to their hip roofed, vinyl sided 2-story cube of a house. The sunny side of the house was in back so we oriented all our new work to capture this sun. Included in this was renovating the existing house to replace an almost non-existent kitchen with a sun filled useful one. Thus, pieces were added to the back and sides, some on piers to save a gorgeous willow tree. These new pieces took the form of simple gabled forms in the New England tradition. The idea of the addition acting like children hugging their mother who was holding up the fort, so to speak, would make a happy place. These angled forms and spaces solved the psychological need for more relaxing places to balance out the overall house. There is no style to the house, only the realization of practical needs such as light and space as well as psychological needs such as, ‘friendly’.

Maison Haus:

Another couple with 2 young children had relocated from NYC and bought a lot close to Willard Beach. After investigating the possibility of saving any part of the small, dilapidated cottage on the lot, we decided it would be more economical to tear it down and build a new house. The owners, who were European, wanted a clean open modern home but to have a gable-roofed exterior, double hung windows and faded wood siding to evoke barn qualities. The result is simple, minimalist, within budget, and without any identifiable ‘style’.

D.I.Y. House:

This next project was also located in the Willard Beach area and involves a young couple building the house themselves. After analyzing their site, I made study models to determine the best use of the lot. The result is a series of boxes, two of which are mostly built now, which create and focus views on 3 very different outdoor spaces. The front yard is spatially connected to the living room; the courtyard is spatially connected to the dining table; and the woods out back are practically part of the kitchen. Their desire for an environmentally friendly home resulted in our use of non-toxic materials, super insulation, a wood stove, and a full roof deck designed to handle planting vegetables and lounging. As one of them felt symptoms of SAD, we used large picture windows to fill each space with natural light. The siding is hand-troweled stucco, an affordable sustainable material, and the details are boat-like as the client is a boat builder/ inventor. I was fortunate to actually build the house with the owners. Functional and psychological needs are met within very tight budget. The result is particular to the client and the site.

Shingle Style Garage:

In counterpoint to that project, I was commissioned to design a garage for a couple who needed to store their vehicles and boats as well as have a home office space and play room. Here there existing house was shingle style of sorts and they had a strong psychological need for a garage which would be visually compatible with the existing house. In this case I created a shingle style garage to meet their psychological needs and it blends in very nicely. So, I am not advocating a deliberate avoidance of any style, but merely that each project is unique and no formula should be used to obfuscate this uniqueness.

Airport Fire Station:

For instance, I designed a fire station while employed by Harriman Associates (Erik Greven, principal in charge) that could only fit on it’s site. That site was midpoint of the runway at Bangor International Airport. The most important requirement was a three-minute response time to either end of the runway. All requirements regarding number and type of particular fire trucks, sleeping, etc. guided all design decisions. However, the ‘look’ of the building is a reflection of the surrounding large airplanes. This fire station would not fit in a town center. And a village fire station would seem very out of place beside the runway.

In conclusion, in Maine we can build with our own Yankee sensibility as our guide. Each building decision can be about the link between the buildings and the town and the users and less about a particular style. This pragmatism along with our sometimes unexpressed psychological needs can help keep Maine, Maine.

Koolhaas 3 In 1 Promotes Upper Middle Class Values Worldwide.

Rem Koolhaas' recent lecture "3 in 1" http://vimeo.com/25071414 walks through a brief history of the firm OMA as created and promoted by himself. He walks through his history beginning with a brash upper middle class desire to stand out as a young man by focusing on perceived big picture issues rather than soup kitchen ones and ending with a desire to leave the starchitect era by creating signatureless work.

The beginning of the slide show reminds me of those photos of some dadaist dandy's in their 3 piece suits making fun of the world while attempting to start the next attention grabbing art movement. Sometimes great ideas come out, sometimes not. I like the way he puts dollar amounts next to his books to better explain how to survive while experimenting without actually having to sit in an architects office for years and learn how to put all the pieces together, codes, etc. He divides his career into segments from starving artist to starchitect and beyond. This is a nice tool for an audience of architects to understand the trajectory of a 'successful' career. An attempt to answer the ever present question from students and colleagues, "How did he do that?". It's a nice format and diffuses the idea of the starchitect making pronouncements from upon high. There's a great picture of Libeskind sporting a giant gloating smile in front of a model of the proposed buildings rising from the ashes of immense death and destruction as an example of the starchitect.

In Koolhaas' era, writing supplemented his lifestyle and talk did indeed lead to commissions along with diagrammatic but beautiful paintings by colleagues. The dandy's life moved merrily along and eventual starchitect status bestowed. In addition to a success story Koolhaas takes opportunities to insert justifications for his work. By using a format of A leads to B leads to C, he can assert that his perceived desire to turn the world into a giant shopping mall is simply not true and quite the contrary as a matter of fact. A statement like this can come after a statement of fact about history and be followed by a statement of fact about technology and all in a linear description of his chronological existence and so all statements are then perceived by the audience as historical facts merely illuminated. Clever but not necessarily illuminating.

But the point is not to illuminate, rather to set the stage for confirmation as a leader on the world's stage to be followed towards progress. It's a great video to watch because it's fun to follow the steps so to speak. And as any upper middle class schoolboy knows, a sense of wit, humor and detachment are most important.

Management he argues, as it relates to maximizing profits, is currently blockaded in architecture offices by a medieval compensatory system where fees are fixed to construction costs rather than quality of product. Therefore time spent increasing the quality of the design are dollars picked from the architects pocket.

The huge CCTV building in Beijing he presents as a contextual marvel because you can see it from a small old house in an old cozy neighborhood and from a big highway with other tall buildings....?? Not sure how that works but no matter because some workers on the building loved working on it and felt proud of themselves for all the work they did like most people do when they spend a lot of time and effort on something. Again, not sure what Koolhaas is saying but it's for sure a huge building and not woven into anything particularly.

So anyway, now he's trying to jump to the front of the next post-starchitect or more realistic or marxistically put, post-economic meltdown trend which naturally is to be wholly pragmatic and therefore cut the fat and build with more basic issues like utility, firmness, sustainability. Koolhaas ever the stylist decides this means to build with generic features rather than idiosyncratic ones. So he is out to create an architecture in his office of generic pieces. This is somewhat reminiscent of Venturi's math building if I remember and truthfully, Gehry takes chunks of generic fabric and plays surrealist with them as well but this is more chunks of SOM stuff- sort of Meisian knockoff fabric. Of course, many architects over the years have been creating subtle works so this announcement is more of a fashion statement.

There is a warning regarding preservation movement as a marketing leviathan to be tamed now and a bit about artists desires to create huge crypto-fascist works........ yeah, artists not architects- just checking to be sure I wrote that correctly. As artists have huge spaces to work with whether they want them or not.

I like this lecture and Koolhaas' effort to keep architecture fun, relevant (by creating a think tank AMO offshoot that is doing good work on energy use) and discussed. His upper middle class schoolboy values create sparkling interest. They fall flat of course when they stray outside such as flights into slum cities. Now we need lively discussions from those working in giant slums as to what sort of complexity theory interventions may lead to universal sanitation, earthquake proof DIY structures, etc. And what is an architecture of reduced style anyway? What is mission of architecture from a place of little style? Who will lecture on this? Bernard Rudolfsky was a treasure trove of information. Is architecture about more manual labor to create more fulfilled families due to employed fathers. Or is architecture for a few higher IQ engineers to work on and to create the materials in robotic factories? Why is not every new building celebrated as another piece in a puzzle of wonderful public spatial experience already in progress?? We need about 9 more architects from 9 totally different backgrounds to add to this lecture and get a read on the potential of next steps.

In the end I see an eventual shift from object to field of course and hopefully an end to the desire to ignore great examples of human scaled public space labeling it as unfashionable or irrelevant when to do so merely describes human bodies as unfashionable or irrelevant.

Nothing could be more absurd.

Engaging Community for a Sustainable Future

GPCOG held a forum on how to engage the greater Portland community in creating a more sustainable future. Ori Brafman explained his thesis behind his book "The Starfish and The Spider"- a great take on top down versus laterally constructed organizations. A spider dies when it's head is cut off but a starfish grows another leg and starfish. Craigs List is a starfish organization with no real central head. Certainly many are trying to cash in on Gladwell''s formula for success but this idea was well stated and informative.

CH2M Hill firm members presented a methodology for gathering information and sharing it to arrive at solutions which are not predetermined and pull ideas from all. Essentially there is always an internal tension between the goal oriented process and the creativity required for great solutions. By splitting up and allowing small groups to identify the problems, the ideal outcomes and then look for solutions, the process is decentralized. By allowing participants to throw ideas out and then modify them as they hear other ideas, each person learns and adapts in real time and solutions emerge with collective authors.

Kudos to GPCOG for a terrific morning!

Box Modern

There is a great gallery show of modern architecture (highlight's are Scogin/ Elam's constructivist and Shim/Sutcliffe's craftsmanship and Forbe's 80's shaker modern work) built in Maine with lots of models downtown (Storefront for Architecture Maine 443 Congress St. through 13th Nov.) which most of you know but just wanted to show appreciation to Carol Wilson for putting it together. When I came back from London in the mid 90's Carol and I were pretty much the only architects in Maine doing modern architecture and now this American version of 50's through 70's style has come back mostly in a plain box form. Maine like any rural conservative place has not fully embraced mid century modern but there are nice practical yankee-like aspects to this style that do fit well with us. Here is a fire station I did in the late 90's while working for Harriman Associates fresh from London and I had the then late 90's style of box modern in mind in this appropriate location on the runway at Bangor International Airport. Note the Corbusian strip window, roof deck enclosed by walls, minimalism, etc.: