This new MONU issue on the topic of Post-Ideological Urbanism probably touches on one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in our culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological – or better post-ideological – conditions of our society when it comes to cities. Today, ideology ap…pears to have become, and to have been reduced to, something merely aesthetic, something you can buy yourself into as Wouter Vanstiphout explains in an interview with us entitled “Acrobatic Narratives”. In that sense cities have become suspicious territories where hypocrisy and fakery prevail when it comes to urban ideologies…and a new sincerity is obviously needed in a world consisting of a multiplicity of choices and urban outcomes without a single consistent urban ideology as Melissa Dittmer, Jamie Witherspoon, and Noah Resnick point out in their piece “Choose Your Own Urbanism Presents: The Case of the Missing Ideal”.

The following text is an excerpt from an article entitled “CHOOSE YOUR OWN URBANISM PRESENTS: The Case of the Missing Ideal” that has been recently published in the latest MONU magazine:

It’s a hot, dry and dusty afternoon… But, then again, all the afternoons are hot, dry and dusty in Sin City.  You’re in your shoebox of an office with the top three buttons of your white cotton shirt undone, a damp towel on the back of your neck, and the sound of a rickety two-dollar fan blowing in your face.  The A.C. is on the fritz again, and you’re just about to phone up that good-for-nothing building super to complain, when you hear three soft taps on the glass pane of your office door – the one that reads: Calvin Lynch, Private Detective.

You ask her to have a seat in the worn leather armchair and offer her a cigarette and a glass of flat ginger ale.  She accepts neither and says she prefers to stand. 

“I’m searching for something,” she finally says, after standing in front of the window, staring out through the half-closed blinds. “They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, but this thing didn’t stay.  Or, maybe it never existed to begin with. Either way, I need your help.”

And then she says the magic words that for the first time since she walked through the door, piqued your interest: “I’m willing to pay you whatever you need to find it.”  You button your top three buttons, walk over to the window to open the blinds, and sit on the corner of your desk directly across from the slightly agitated but determined young woman looking you keenly in the eyes.

“If you’re ready to start now” she says “I’ve got a car downstairs waiting to drive us to the City Planning department.”  You ask her just what it is she thinks you can help her find, and she replies in a subdued, but urgent tone: “Las Vegas’ urban ideology.”

 If you grab your fedora and your decommissioned, but trusty police revolver, and hop into her waiting car to search for the guiding principles that shaped the city’s morpholgy: turn to page 69

 If you pull another cigarette from your crumpled pack, and explain to her that Vegas rejected urban ideology from the start, in favor of the capitalist gamble: turn to page 666

Las Vegas has perpetually been a city of conflicted narratives. From the dry desert ecosystem to the seedy commercial enterprise to the themed mega-resort to the recent trend of chic high-rise hotels and condominiums, the city is a collection of contradictions. Each identity exists as a totalizing world, literally and conceptually distinct from one another, yet occupying and often denying the same physical space. While these narratives sometimes overlap, there is the tendency for each to maintain its own independence. Las Vegas is built on storytelling. The city is as much about the stories it enables as the buildings, population, and hidden infrastructure that support it. It is a place where one goes to escape the weight of normative urban structure in favor of the whimsy, adventure, and multiplicity of urban outcomes without a single consistent urban ideology.

Architecturally, the image of Las Vegas is always referential. Drawing on the cultural exoticism of places like Paris, Venice, Egypt, or even ancient and Medieval Europe, the built environment of the downtown does not so much imitate but rather capitalizes on our hidden desires for these exotic encounters. This desire is not for the actual experience of visiting these places, but for the unique eclecticism and historic ideologies that each of these referential cities offer, all within the safety and comfort of the United States. The city itself is constructed like a “choose-your-own-adventure”, or interactive fiction storybook, where one’s experience is finely orchestrated by the various choices one makes as they flip non-sequentially through the pages.

To read one of these young-adult detective noir novels in numerical page order, rather than the non-sequential path, would yield a disjointed presentation of the text and result in an incomprehensible narrative. In an analogous way, a geographically linear excursion from any two locations on opposite sides of the Vegas Strip will provide a similarly incoherent urban phenomenon, in sharp contrast to the highly controlled encounters of the establishments that line the Strip itself.

A study of Las Vegas suggests that in a city with no overarching ideological framework, each inhabitant is given the opportunity to choose their own.  This choice, however, is made from a highly curated menu of theatrical pastiche and capitalistic excess. The urban environment is designed to lead visitors through a multiplicity of destinations, via a selection of predetermined pathways, rather than provide a sequential unfolding of city fabric. 

For a full version of the article, click here.

This article was co-authored and designed by Melissa Dittmer, Jamie Witherspoon, and Noah Resnick.

NOW DOCKING.  Recognizing the potential influence of the cruise industry upon Detroit, the Detroit / Wayne County Port Authority commissioned HAA to design a new 22,000 square foot international ship passenger terminal. Officially opening next week at the foot of Bates Street, between Atwater Street and the Detroit River, The Port Authority Terminal is designed to function as both a domestic and international facility, including associated functions such as customs, border patrol, baggage handling, ticketing, and queuing. The building and dock will accommodate Great Lakes cruise ships, tall ships, and other large vessels, as well as the offices for the Port Authority. 

The Port Authority anticipates this terminal will serve as a port of call for the many cruise vessels that sail the Great Lakes each summer, some providing accommodations for over 400 passengers.   Mid-way through construction, the American Recovery and Reinvestment act provided additional funding for the construction of a wharf and an extension to the building, allowing even larger ships to dock at the facility. 

These cruise lines, tall ships, and vessels will ideally make Detroit one of their premier urban ports, bringing tourists and their dollars directly into downtown Detroit. Detroit will offer a unique counterpoint to other ports of more rural locales.  In this capacity, the terminal serves its most important function; a pristine gateway, welcoming visitors with a gleaming reception and ultimately providing direction to the region’s greatest assets.

Additional terminal programming could include:

Cruising the Great Lakes:  Great Lakes and St Lawrence Seaway cruise ships tour international tourists through the Fall color season in late August through September.

Water Taxi Service: The DWCPA has proposed a cross-border water taxi service between Detroit and Windsor. This ferry service could also be extended to domestic port communities up and down the Detroit River.

Conference Facility: The terminal offers spectacular views and flexible meeting spaces for special events or educational opportunities.

Eco-Tourism: As part of the 2008 U.S. EPA Brownfields Conference, of which the DWCPA resided on the Host Committee, eco-tours were conducted as part of a unique mobile workshop. Long-term, the Port Authority would like to link the facility to the International Wildlife Refuge and Belle Isle, via water-based tours.

Eco-Industrial Tourism:  The introduction of Eco-Industrial Tourism via an Eco-Industrial Cruise Line. See previous rogueHAA post outlining this concept.  

Hydrokinetic Energy Generation: The DWCPA, through a DTE Energy Foundation grant, has been studying the feasibility of generating hydrokinetic energy at its facility in partnership with a University of Michigan start-up company called Vortex Hydro Energy. Other partners include the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and NextEnergy.

For additional information, media links, and cruiseline concepts:

Click here for previous post on the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority

Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority

Port Authority To Open, CBS

Cruising Towards Eco-Industrial Tourism

NOW DOCKING: Detroit’s evolving waterfront gets new terminal building.

Since as early as the 1960’s, there has been a narrow yet persistent thread of architectural design dedicated to inflatable structures. From Rehner Banham’s, Environment Bubble (1965) to the more recent Rem Koolhaas/Cecil Balmond collaboration at the Serpentine Gallery (2007) and Kengo Kuma’s Tea House at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt (2008), these bulbous spaces have challenged traditional construction techniques and patterns of occupancy. Without traditional compression supports like walls or columns, the form of these buildings becomes a direct translation of the relationship between the material and air pressure.

At the Amococo installation, this relationship is articulated on a large and complex scale. Architects of Air, a UK based design firm, used translucent vinyl in a range of colors and geometric patterns to create a 10,000 square foot inflatable ‘luminarium’. The designers utilized only natural light through a series of occuli to illuminate the interior spaces. Music streamed throughout the installation, enhancing the sensory experience while mixing with the muted sounds of the world outside. This distinct contrast between the interior and exterior created a dramatic immersive environment which changed throughout the day.

The installation was on view at U of M’s Palmer Field from June 23 through June 26 as part of Ann Arbor’s Summer Festival. However, the installation is part of an international tour so check the designer’s website for their upcoming installations.

Mapping the Terrain

Works by Emily Duke

April 2 – April 30, 2011

Opening Reception:
Saturday, April 2, 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.

In Mapping the Terrain, sculptor and ceramicist Emily Duke focuses on architecture and systems of order to address her own relationship with the structures she occupies and their relationship to the climate of her surroundings. Duke references elements from construction sites, agricultural buildings, and manufacturing complexes to base her objects. She builds formal compositions coupling true right angles with shrunken scale and skewed perspective to present intimacy in structures that are ordinarily massive and complex in our common terrain.

Using the naturally rich color and texture of unglazed clay as her primary material, Duke’s minimal use of additional color allows the forms’ shadows to create depth and emphasize interior space. By simplifying her structures, Duke accentuates patterns of organization and the intersection of lines and creates a sense of delicacy through the combination of linear structure and mass elements.

Emily Duke’s first solo exhibit in Detroit opens at Re:View Contemporary Gallery on Saturday, April 2, with a reception from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Re:View is located at:
444 W. Wiilis
Units 111 & 112
Detroit, Mi 48201
(at the Willys Overland Lofts)
Tel: 313.833.9000

WELLS HALL ADDITION

Since March of 2009, HAA has been working with Michigan State University (MSU) to design a new language arts facility on its East Lansing campus.  As lead designer, HAA has collaborated with executive architects and engineers, Integrated Design Solutions (IDS), to realize this $38m campus relocation project.  Resulting from the necessary demolition of an historic facility in the university’s north campus, relocation efforts require multiple renovations, and ultimately a new facility for language arts faculty, graduate students, researchers, and advanced instruction.

This facility, commonly known as the Wells Hall Addition, will be the focus of a four post series that will chronicle the design, documentation and construction of the new 88,000 gross square foot building.  Each post is intended to provide a candid glimpse into HAA’s design process.  From understanding the externalities of program, site and client need, to confronting the inherent complexity of adding one building to another, each post will use the Wells Hall Addition to illustrate the demands on contemporary design practice, and the rigorous intellectual project that is required to address them.

The four posts will discuss the following main topics:

CONTEXT, QUESTIONS AND COMPOSITION

OLD MEETS NEW, STRUCTURAL FORM AND FUNCTIONALITY

DOCUMENTING COMPLEXITY

CONSTRUCTION MATTERS

POST 1

CONTEXT, QUESTIONS AND EVIDENCE

INSTITUTIONAL EVOLUTION AND GROWTH

As universities continue to evolve to meet their ongoing educational missions, their physical environments must be updated.  In many cases, this no longer means providing basic instructional space, student unions, and housing.  Instead, it means leveraging a given university’s academic heritage, identity and funding resources to create new, competitive, and contemporary facilities that not only support their mission, but also provide profound opportunities for intellectual – and financial – growth.  This current mandate has arguably never been as important, or as challenged, as it has been over the last few years.  Amidst global economic circumstances that have impacted both endowments and potential outside funders, universities have required strategic thinking to guide their investments, ensuring each one brings real, lasting value to their institutions.

In some cases, this may mean the development of specific building types, including research laboratory facilities that provide opportunities for advanced, funded research, such as the recently completed University of Michigan Biomedical Research Building.  Or, the new Hylton Performing Arts Center which utilizes a diverse array of funding sources to provide George Mason University with a new destination and revenue-generating facility that can garner significant donor support, and become a vehicle for a new university identity.

U of M Biomedical Research Building

Hylton Performing Arts Center

For The Cooper Union, capital projects have been leveraged to both improve learning environments, and to cultivate an image that is more aligned with the school’s design legacy.  Meanwhile, the Barnard College, Nexus/Diana Center, works to provide a destination for campus interaction, while also challenging preexisting implicit urban boundaries between the academy and city beyond its walls.

Cooper Union

Nexus/Diana Center

Still, other universities that may be extremely limited in available area for any academic functions, simply need to expand and create new campus locations.  Under considerable community scrutiny, Columbia University has begun to create a new campus in West Harlem and Harvard University plans to continue its expansion, albeit slowed by the economy, across the Charles River into Allston.

Columbia University Harlem Campus

Harvard University Allston Expansion

In each case, the institutional need to grow and evolve is manifest in the architecture that is realized.  As both physical indicators of a university’s highest aspirations, and irrefutable testaments to its history, the buildings, spaces and landscapes established in these projects provide the real currency for exchange between the institution, its students, and the world outside its gates.

BOOM

As Michigan State University (MSU) continues its own evolution and growth, it is one of the many public universities that are going through a building boom of sorts.  Through several major projects, the university is making significant strides to update and improve its campus.  From academic projects such as the new Bott Building for Nursing Education and Research, to the Plant Sciences Expansion, and new, donor-funded, high-profile projects such as the Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid (and documented by Architect-of-Record, IDS), the university is poised to have nearly six major projects completed by 2012.

Plant Sciences Expansion

Broad Art Museum

Even in the midst of difficult economic circumstances, universities such as MSU realize the need for new facilities to maintain and improve the institution’s competitive position as a destination for research, higher learning and investment.  It is within this context of institutional demand and financial austerity that the Wells Hall Addition has been designed.

As a historically bucolic and pastoral university such as MSU accommodates new development, and correspondingly new ideas in space and design, obvious challenges exist.  At the core of these challenges, one can find important questions to consider:

• How can a new building with contemporary demands for performance, innovation and overall design be situated within an existing complex of offices and classrooms to dramatically improve its physical appearance, leverage the existing strengths of its site, and eliminate past physical barriers that complicate important student circulation?
• How can we maximize precious capital investment for the university in ways that may be extremely effective, equitable and sustainable, but less conventional than projects in the past?
• How do we combine a university’s embodied architectural heritage and history with a current identity of innovation, research and engagement?

POSITION AND SITE ENGAGEMENT

The building position and landscape design play a particularly important role in reconfiguring and improving the spatial experience between the new building and the existing campus context.  On the west, important physical and visual linkages are established between the main road and the building entry that will become the new address for the building complex. On the east, the prevailing architectural geometry and ground floor classroom program provide formal and functional mechanisms to directly engage the existing park.  Through this engagement the new construction and existing building are linked to a vast lawn and woodland that provide space for day-to-day student circulation, contemplation and discussion.
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BUILDING COMPOSITION

The new building is 4 stories in height.  The upper 3 floors form a rectangular building with a longitudinal axis running north-south over an existing single story classroom building.  It is rotated in plan approximately 30 degrees creating a perpendicular relationship with an adjacent existing building to the north.  The form establishes a physical span that figuratively links the west and east sides of the building that had been previously perceived as separate, while also creating a dynamic form that directly engages existing paths of travel through campus.

The angled rectangular upper portion of the building and the parallel lower portion are linked to one another via common stairs at the north and south extents of the building, and by an elevator core and communicating stair that is set outboard from the upper portion, reconciling the two main building geometries.  This outboard core and stair are positioned at approximately the mid-point of the building, aligned with the main entry, providing visual identification as a beacon along the west side of the complex.

By limiting the overall width of the upper portion of the building and placing important programmatic elements – where students, faculty and staff will be working – close to sources of daylight and actual exterior views, the users of the building will have a direct connection to their outside environment. In this case the design places conventional offices, open office areas, meeting spaces, break-out spaces and primary circulation routes in direct proximity to daylight and views.  This is even more noteworthy given the visually stunning context surrounding the new building. To take full advantage of the view to the existing park and reinforce interaction and connectivity between floors, the design includes a three story communicating space.  This space provides break-out seating and opportunities for art display.

EXTERIOR DUALITY

Fundamentally, the exterior of the Wells Hall Addition is developed to support the whole of the building, including the important interior functions it houses.  The integrated design methodology throughout the project has been cultivated to facilitate this and has resulted in:

• Generous ambient daylighting
• Efficient and informed use of materials at specific locations
• Orientational devices, providing direct sight lines to the exterior at most corridor termini
• Open and dynamic facades that reveal the activities within

However, the exterior of the building is also a study in contrast, revealing the relationship between the university’s 20^th century built form – visible throughout the south campus – and a contemporary form that places a premium on practical innovation, versatility and site engagement.  One look at the west side of the building, facing Red Cedar Road, and another at the north, south and east side of the building, illustrate a building design carefully navigating important considerations of architectural language and message.

On one hand, a staid, archetypal form of a simple masonry, with punched window openings and sills, provides daylight to faculty offices, and addresses the more public Red Cedar Road.  This façade is momentarily broken by the outboard elevator core, a position made necessary due to the existing building below, but made visually operative as a cue revealing both an alternate geometry in the building, and a very different architectural form beyond.  This other architectural form is legible from the south, where the dynamic raked section of the new presentation space is revealed.  But, it is most notable from the east, where the entire 300’ length of the building opens up to the People’s Park, providing ample daylight for all faculty, students and researchers within the open office suites, and a generous view out to the lawn, woodland and river, below.

This exterior duality gives a brief glimpse into the important, and legitimate struggles institutions must engage, factoring perspectives of donors and alumni, with those of prospective students and their parents, not to mention faculty and researchers.  Across this spectrum of opinions, tastes, and needs, is a series of important options HAA has worked carefully and strategically to help university leadership navigate.  It is a very real part of contemporary design practice, where clients must be informed and persuaded by evidence, and where the perceived carte blanche bestowed on so many “starchitects” carries no currency.

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CONSTRUCTION UPDATE

Construction began on the Wells Hall Addition in September, 2010 with utilities and interior demolition.  Today, the existing Wells Hall has been refitted with a new structural system to support the building above (see the next post for details).  As the foundations are laid, and the steel emerges from the existing building, the new geometry and volume of the addition takes shape.

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

For information on HAA’s additional project partners, please see below:

SDI

NTH

Kirk Associates

Barton Malow

Last Friday, HAA joined hundreds from around the world to celebrate Park(ing) Day, a one day event that highlights the need for more livable and vibrant public spaces in our cities.  With some help from Unilock and Landscape Forms, pavers and sod where placed on a parking spot at the corner of Gratiot and Woodward.  Soon, there was a green patch of space, an unusual site especially when one is accustomed to see a car in its place instead.  Onlookers were curious. Drivers paused. Parking enforcement stopped, then questioned, and questioned some more, but finally drove off.  This was the idea—to get people to notice, ask questions, and interact. For those that stopped by, they got the message and left with a smile on their faces.

For more information on Parking Day: http://parkingday.org/

City Bird and Bureau of Urban Living Park(ing) Day

In 2005, ReBar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single 2 hour metered parking space in downtown San Francisco into a temporary public park.  The goal was to provoke an examination of the values that generate public urban space by briefly transforming territory typically reserved for vehicles. The intervention aimed to address a broader range of public needs by providing a public green space.

Today, Park(ing) Day has evolved into an annual worldwide event that empowers the community to enact urban change by creatively altering parking spots for the betterment of the public.  This year, Park(ing) Day will be on Friday, September 17^th.  HAA will be participating in this unique project, and is in the process of selecting a location and designing the Park(ing) spot.  Please check back for updates.

If you would like to create your own Park(ing) space or would like more information, please click here: http://parkingday.org/

License to Participate: http://parkingday.org/src/NPD_license_2010.pdf

Park(ing) Day network: http://my.parkingday.org/

The United States Green Building Council 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition challenged young designers to envision a LEED platinum home in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans.  Due to recent stipulations which require new homes to be raised above flood levels, the brief asked that entries find creative ways of addressing this prerequisite, while also maintaining strong ties to the neighborhood context, and designing under a $100,000 construction budget.

HAA’s design approach focused on the stoop as a critical physical and social space. By emphasizing this literal and conceptual middle ground between the public street and private home, the design attempted to mitigate contextual issues brought on by lifting homes above Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters.  The resulting design directly opens traditionally public functions to the front of the home and the stoop, reinforcing the connection of the home to the community.

The design team also sought to mine and reinterpret the rich architectural history of New Orleans.  Drawing from influences of traditional shotgun and side gallery shotgun homes, we developed an architecture informed by cultural and historical traditions, which capitalized on the embedded logics and efficiencies of these traditional forms in new and unique ways.  The result is an elongated, 850 square foot, two-bedroom home that will fit in nearly any urban lot.  The design is strikingly contemporary in materiality and detail, but contextually referential in form and scale.

Environmental sustainability was also a key component in the development of the project. The home achieves a LEED Platinum rating through an integrated strategy of site and building components.  Major site features include minimized and pervious paving surfaces, native plantings, runoff/ rainwater collection and storage, family vegetable gardens, and strategic tree planting for shade.  The design was also required to provide one on-site parking space, which became seamlessly integrated into the overall site strategy.  Architecturally, the home’s reduced square footage minimizes the ecological footprint.  Solar shading and efficient mechanical and electrical systems reduce energy consumption.  Used for wall construction, the Structurally Insulated Panels provide efficient thermal and air barriers, reduce waste, and reduce material consumption.  The design also features low-flow plumbing fixtures, including toilet flushing from rainwater, increased building insulation, a healthy and safe interior air environment, and a graphic manual for the education of the homeowners.  This will assist the homeowner with the maintenance and efficient operations of the home.

Recognizing an aging American population, the competition further challenged designers to provide barrier free elements in the home. Thus, the spatial flexibility to accommodate physical disabilities was integrated early into our design process.  The home’s elevated floor level is made accessible by a stair with a landing midway and lower risers with longer tread depths to ease the burden of the steps.  Internally, the master bathroom and kitchen are to be ADA ‘Type B’ compliant and accommodate generous clearances in corridors, rooms, and door access areas.

Entries have been submitted and winners at the regional level will be announced July 15.  Following the regional evaluation, another round of judging will occur at the national level.  Afterward, the Salvation Army will then fund the construction of four ‘semi-finalist’ homes.  These newly constructed homes will then be evaluated on their occupancy performance.  Two teams will go on to receive finalist awards following the evaluation period.

In many ways, this competition challenged young designers from across the country to consider the collective issues that will determine the design and construction of American homes in the coming years.  Accessibility for the aged and disabled, ecological sustainability, environmental stewardship, energy efficiency, housing affordability, and design sensitivity are all paramount challenges that will require innovative and sensitive design solutions.

The World Expo 2010 is currently underway in the city of Shanghai, China. Staged along both banks of the Huangpu River, more than 190 countries and 50 international organizations from around the globe have come together to share pavilions and exhibitions. The theme of the exposition is Better City – Better Life, and is an opportunity for countries from around the world to showcase their artistic, cultural, and architectural talents.  With an estimated 70 million visitors, the event is said to be the most expensive and also largest World’s fair site – 5.28 square km – in history.

The tradition of World Expositions stretches back to the Great Exhibition at Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London. At that time, the Exposition provided a unique opportunity for the convening of cultures which otherwise would remain largely separate. Today, even in an era when globalization drives this cultural fusion, the Expo continues to hold an important position both as a cultural venue, political platform, and an opportunity for Shanghai to demonstrate its international significance both to its citizens and the world.

Additionally, the event provided an opportunity for the City of Shanghai to develop its infrastructure system, which will benefit the city long after the exposition closes at the end of October. After a flurry of construction over the past months, the city now has a new airport terminal, new metro lines, roads, parks, and public areas which will greatly enhance the city’s future.

Working in China over the last few months, HAA employees were able to tour many of the iconic National Pavilions and experience firsthand this historic event.