http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Architecture/Planning'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:21:52 GMT Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/673 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/673 John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer, “fell in love with archaeology” during college. His senior thesis at Cornell involved a 600-year-old Incan suspension bridge made entirely out of grass. Ochsendorf learned that this apparently primitive structure owed its astonishing longevity to regular rebuilds by the locals (during a community festival), and the use of renewable, biodegradable resources. While Cornell’s engineering faculty couldn’t see the point of this research -- “grass bridges over highway overpasses”? -- Ochsendorf realized that historical structures held important lessons for modern building technology.

The grass bridge raised several problems that now consume Ochsendorf’s academic and professional life. First, how to consider the whole life of a product when designing it, of particular import since “the 21st century is going to be a wild ride in terms of natural resources,” says Ochsendorf. Some building costs increase over time, consuming material and labor while deteriorating (nb: New York’s 1903 Williamsburg Bridge, with $1 billion in repairs, and still unsafe at any speed).

Ochsendorf suggests alternatives: making permanent structures with high quality construction and reusable materials (such as Roman stone arch bridges); very temporary structures, such as the grass bridge, or a Japanese pavilion made out of recycleable paper; or modular structures designed to change over time. Ochsendorf created “a medieval building for the 21st century,” a sustainable home made out of waste clay tiles, rammed earth from local chalk, and a heavy green roof on which sheep graze.

Ochsendorf also studies the integrity of existing historical structures: how to guarantee the safety of a medieval cathedral, or a 19th-century train station. The Pantheon’s stood for 2000 years, a brittle structure that inevitably develops cracks. Engineers today can’t say for sure “if something will fall down.” Ochsendorf is creating engineering tools to vouch for the masonry, steel and concrete holding up both historical treasures and more commonplace infrastructure. He is also working on high tech tools so engineers can examine building designs before construction to ensure “safe results,” and to create structures that will consume less energy and emit fewer greenhouse gases during their lifetimes. As composers know Mozart, and philosophers know the works of Plato, concludes Ochsendorf, the next generation of engineers must review the works of their forebears, if they’re to maintain existing infrastructure, and create better designs for the future. ]]> Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 The best way to help a community help itself, say Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills, is to enable its members to find their voices and talk to each other. In several projects in the U.S. and overseas, the two speakers are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process.

Cunningham describes her particular focus on African-American civic engagement. She confesses she had “come to the conclusion that the infrastructure of black civic engagement was dead” -- and then the U.S. elected its first black president. However, in spite or because of this triumph, she feels there’s more reason than ever to find channels for African-American involvement in the civic process.

Alexa Mills recounts her efforts in two historically black Brooklyn neighborhoods to create community-based media projects. A large Baptist church, the cornerstone of the community, was challenged by various issues of gentrification, and asked Mills to conduct interviews with a diverse group of African- American community members to hear their perspectives. “Their goal is to hear one another before projecting their voice,” says Mills. Although she went into the enterprise imagining organizing the community around affordable housing, she found that instead, there was fierce concern about white people moving in and behaving in an uncivil way: New neighbors wouldn’t say hello as they passed on the street or in buildings. She hopes her interviews and an envisioned future website will help make connections among new and old community members, and ultimately inform the church’s future efforts.

In another project, Mills worked with people in an Eastern Kentucky town who felt oppressed by the destructive environmental behaviors of local coal companies. She helped make a movie about one local man’s fish pond -- his life’s work -- that was poisoned by mining runoff. The web site designed by a community group hosts lively conversations about this video, and other issues provoked by mining, and partly through this technology, the group is learning to “fight for what it wants,” says Mills. ]]> Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/610 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/610 Half the world’s population currently lives in cities, and that number is spiraling upward, as urban settlements gobble up most of the world’s natural resources and emit the most pollutants. No wonder that these panelists perceive the challenge (and opportunity) of sustainability as much bigger than getting people to switch from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescents.

The “latest craze in city governance,” says Judith Layzer is making your city as sustainable as possible. New York for instance, has vowed to plant one million trees, and convert its entire taxi fleet to hybrids. Chicago is covering its rooftops in green; Toronto composts. Layzer believes there are “good reasons to worry we’ll see symbolic commitments with not much done.”

Cities struggle to undertake systemic change, partly because they don’t control the supply and demand mechanism for energy resources such as oil, which helps drive commuting and mass transit behaviors. Cities have also historically supported unfettered growth to keep their tax base high, and when confronted with a sensible, pollution saving plan such as switching traffic lights to LED lightbulbs, cringe at the high upfront costs. Layzer thinks successful urban sustainability initiatives will depend on national governments pricing natural resources appropriately (e.g., eliminating subsidies on fossil fuels); effective local leadership that makes the case for often unpopular schemes like parking fees and congestion pricing; and major coalition building.

No amount of green construction will help with reducing greenhouse gases to desirable levels if today’s buildings aren’t altered to reduce their CO₂ emissions, says
Milton Bevington. His brief with the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) in 40 cities worldwide is to provide market-based solutions, not handouts or tax rebates, to get efficient heat and power into millions of residential and commercial buildings. A large part of Bevington’s job is educating landlords and others about new financing approaches for retrofitting old buildings. One example: a Chicago bank designed a loan enabling the owners of the city’s 550 thousand multifamily housing units to use an “energy performance guarantee” as collateral. Borrowed funds go into reducing water and energy use, and “every single dollar required to pay back the bank” comes from a reduction in energy use. Bevington would like to see more investor-driven financing for energy efficient projects, which he believes could spread swiftly in both rich and poor countries “to change a large sector of the built environment.”

There’s a dilemma brewing for most of the world’s big businesses, says Bill Sisson, who is United Technologies’ point man in a business consortium effort on energy efficient buildings. While firms recognize the importance of energy efficiency, only 13% are rising to the challenge. Sisson’s group seeks to create a roadmap for zero net energy use in buildings, involving technology, improved financial mechanisms, and behavior change. Says Sisson, this is “really about managing risk and directing the future of business in the right way; we see this aspect of buildings as critical for our growth and presence in the market.” ]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/586 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/586 Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building’s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.

He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: “They told me, we hate what you’re teaching us. ... You’re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That’s how you teach structural engineering. Why can’t we study beautiful structures?”

They showed him a picture of the Salginatobel Bridge, built by “an obscure Swiss engineer, Robert Maillart,” about whom there was little published in English. This led to a major stretch of research by Billington, and opened up his lifelong interest in how great engineers delve deep into the nature of their building material, such as Maillart’s reinforced concrete, and discover how to make it beautiful.

In studying the work of Maillart and other European engineers, Billington learned that “truly great bridges are extremely interesting aesthetically.” They often result from competitions, satisfying criteria of structural art while wasting neither material nor money. Says Billington, the engineers “get elegance out of discipline -- they find play within discipline.” While most of Billington’s admired bridges were built in the 20th century (by men born in the 19th), he also pays tribute to Christian Menn, designer of Boston’s Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, completed in 2002 -- an asymmetrical cable stayed bridge that has become a regional landmark.

“Basic form and structure comes from the engineer’s imagination,” says Billington, which puts engineers “far ahead of us academics, who often think we make innovations and explain them to practitioners.” Menn and his peers are “out there doing art,” and Billington’s mission is to teach it. He gives his students a sense of how the engineer’s mind works, by assigning students to build small-scale versions of structurally significant bridges. These models show up in art exhibits, and Billington shows many slides of such work during his talk.

In a footnote, Billington discusses the dismal state of U.S. infrastructure, including the catastrophic failure of the Minneapolis bridge in 2007. This steel truss bridge, like so many in the U.S., was the product of an anonymous design process, says Billington, where bridges are copied decade after decade, in an “unthinking acceptance of designs that are already flawed.” ]]> Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/585 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/585 There’s more than a little magic in Werner Sobek’s constructions, which balance aesthetics, architectural constraints and pathbreaking science to, in his words, “go beyond” nature’s own limits.

Sobek walks us through his portfolio of engineering feats, enabled by a worldwide architecture and engineering business, and by his affiliated institute, where researchers are let loose on the most demanding problems of the business. For instance, in 1997, his group began to address a key issue the architecture and construction trades engaged in only through “theoretical discussion:” how to design a Triple 0 building –for zero energy consumption, zero energy emissions and complete recycle-ability.

Such innovative constructions require new, lightweight, recycle-able, load-bearing material. His interdisciplinary research team found inspiration in human bones, whose internal architecture is made up of cells arranged according to a certain geometry. They have developed a bioreactor, and are trying to work their bioengineered material into concrete, to make it both porous and strong, ultimately reducing energy and material input.

Sobek seems fascinated with structural systems that seemingly flout natural law: super light materials that support heavy weights; or vast constructions that exist for just a few hours. He designed a tent for the Pope’s mass in Germany intended for a crowd of 300 thousand, using a transparent wall made of under- and over-pressurized plastic that was sucked onto the structure by vacuum. Once the pump pressure was switched off, “things fell apart, and recycled easily.” He’s researched lightweight, branchlike structures for carrying loads, and scoffs at any analogy to a tree: “To say nature is always designing in an optimum way is nonsense.”

Sobek shows his audience a variety of facades and “adaptive skins,” including an atrium for a Swiss fertilizer firm that has an all glass roof that can rotate, as well as open and close in three minutes. His researchers have created load-bearing glass “shells” millimeters’ thick that neither crumble nor shatter when challenged by the weight of snow or a vandal’s blow. He’s clad a steamy Bangkok airport terminal in fabric that somehow blocks heat and runway noise, but permits the circulation of fresh, cool air.

These amazing inventions don’t spring up overnight. Says Sobek: “There are 1,000 problems I’m having around me, like a big herd of sheeps. From time to time, I take one, further develop it, then send it back to the herd. Only a few problems can be attacked, solved and brought into practice in short time. Many things we’ve been working on for 10 years.” ]]> Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/583 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/583 The largest scale migration in human history, says Xavier de Souza Briggs, is potentially the most transformative as well. It’s time to consider new frames for issues, he says -- not rehash “civic life as a competition over power” but perhaps see this as a moment when we can realize, finally, the ancient idea of a citizenship. For planners, this may mean learning “how to create a welcoming place, a sense of what’s possible.”

At least 3% of the world’s population today live in places where they were not born, says Anna Hardman, and this number is rapidly rising. And yet “immigrants are invisible in dramatic and not so dramatic ways.” When riots exploded outside Paris two years ago, “policy makers had no tools to grasp what was happening” because they hadn’t collected information on immigrants in those neighborhoods. “They thought it would destroy the perception that everyone with a French passport is a Frenchman.” But officials and planners must take greater heed of immigrants, given their growing economic impact in both their new homes and their countries of origin.

Focusing just on integration in migrant cities misses two other vital processes, says Abel Valenzuela, Jr. While migrants often lead precarious lives, frequently under the radar of the authorities, they nevertheless are powerfully transforming the neighborhoods into which they move. In South Central LA for example, Latino immigrants have recently surpassed African-Americans, bringing “new cultural mores, economic opportunities…and lots of great food.” Soccer lovers take over parks, and street life feels noticeably different, with vendors, art, employment markets and bazaars. Some communities welcome these changes; others attempt to curtail new activities, frowning on colorful public events and fearing negative impacts on labor markets. Valenzuela sees immigrant flow on the whole as “an economic and cultural stimulus” that may lead to revitalized civic institutions. He promotes policy reform, a path toward normalization for undocumented immigrants and defusing racial tensions that immigrant legislation provokes. He also suggests planners look beyond big gateway cities to rural communities and suburbs, to which immigrants are also bound.

Although Lawrence CommunityWorks has built well-designed housing and launched a slew of ventures in this old Massachusetts mill town, Jessica Andors takes greatest pride in her group’s network organizing approach. She notes that many “community development interventions are to a large extent supply side--designing the best housing, offering programs to meet local needs.” CommunityWorks instead focuses on investing in “informed, educated demand, with people voicing and acting collectively toward what they want.” This ultimately gives them an opportunity to shape the political environment that doles out important resources. CommunityWorks helps families save money, buy homes, invest in higher education; it builds mutual support networks; and engages in collective action to “transform the landscape of the city, whether economic, civic, or physical.” ]]> Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/580 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/580 Even as new supercities pop up around the world, with populations in the tens of millions, urban planning remains stuck in an older time. As Dennis Frenchman says, “Amazingly very little progress has been made ... We’re using basically the models and methods of the 1920s.” Frenchman says we need to confront the immense challenges of rapid urbanization, universal mobility sustainability and basic livability.

Some emerging concepts include new century cities, where single “messy” mixed-use zones will house shopping, living, and commerce. He describes technology networks built into urban environments, producing streams of data that not only reveal how a city works, but allow better real-time management of systems. Cities will sense traffic flows and change street signage and lane markings accordingly. Smart cars will guide users to available parking. Public buildings will have changing faces. This “agile infrastructure has the potential to make day to day interactions more efficient and productive, but also more personal, because systems can interact with you and adjust to your desires,” says Frenchman.

Boston invests big-time in infrastructure, says Antonio di Mambro, but its transportation system is very “Boston-centric.” He believes it’s time to convert this system into a regional one, “tied to a new image of the city.” Di Mambro is developing a new transportation network based on the area’s “educational necklace,” developing a West Station hub that connects universities to each other, and to the rest of the world.

Di Mambro also describes how coastal cities should plan for global warming impacts. He describes Venice’s strategic plan to defend itself from rising water, which includes massive mobile flood barriers, environmental restoration, economic development of neglected areas and green infrastructure.

In the 1990s, Martha Lampkin Welborne became convinced that Curativa, Brazil’s public transit system would be perfect for LA. In this system, buses operate in dedicated lanes, with costs far less than those required for subway or even light rail. A nonprofit team “created the vision and sold it to everyone -- the MTA and the city.” After this accomplishment, LA’s mayor drafted her to create an economic center in a desolate city stretch. In re-imagining Grand Avenue, says Welborne, she has been transforming a physical vision into a reality, starting with a precise economic analysis, politicking with city and county officials and collaborating with Frank Gehry.

“Without being hyperbolic, it’s the greatest building boom in human history,” says
Tom Campanella of China’s construction frenzy. Campanella marshals many astonishing facts to back up the statement: In Shanghai, more than 900 million square feet of commercial office space were added to the city between 1990 and 2004, roughly equivalent to 335 Empire State Buildings. Between 1985-1995 Shanghai’s footprint and suburbs jumped from 90 to 790 square miles. China will end up with more than 1 billion people in its cities. We Americans must “learn humility,” he says, in imagining urban planning for this scale of building boom, or establishing what constitutes good versus bad urbanism. ]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/573 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/573 Who better than Gary Hack to recount the colorful 75-year tale of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning? Associated with the department for more than half its life, and saturated with its lore, Hack reaches backward to describe the story’s “five acts,” and then forward to imagine the department’s future.

The department emerged in the midst of the Depression, with faculty engaged primarily in city planning. Graduates “went out with the equipment to plan the massive growth in this country that occurred after World War II,” says Hack, with the know-how for laying out roads and neighborhoods. Act 2, “the urban studies years,” came after the war, with the department swelling to accommodate returning GIs, and a growing interest in studying “the implications … of renewal and slum clearance.” The last half of the ‘50s proved fertile, with the launch of Harvard and MIT’s Joint Center for Urban Studies. Then came the 60s, and “forces at work that tore the department apart.”

The Vietnam War, city riots, and questions about the direction of urban growth, “raised enormous doubts about … what planning was up to.” MIT faculty and students became advocates for neighborhood groups. In Act 3, “the urban action era,” a new department head added such fields as criminal justice and environmental planning, and committed to diversity of both faculty and students.

By 1980, academic life had evolved into an “era of parallel solitudes,” clusters of people intensely involved with each other “with a minimum amount of glue.” This Act 4 saw the start of an international planning focus, as well as a turn toward giving students the skills to be directly involved in building and real estate.

The most recent period, Act 5, has witnessed DUSP leaders working “hard to lift out of the rich bouillabaisse constructed over all those years some themes with crosscutting energy, things that could bring people together,” such as projects in New Orleans.

Hack imagines that MIT’s DUSP, along with other U.S. planning departments, will need to function in an increasingly global and interconnected world. Confronted by climate change, and massive growth of cities, planners will need to transcend their traditional ways of thinking and working. Hack concludes with a thought experiment: If we built high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor, cutting travel time from Boston to New York to one hour, what kind of development should occur, and what are the likely impacts? “We’re ill equipped even to answer these questions, and we need to do better,” Hack says. ]]> Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/568 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/568 This presentation feels akin to a new Disney ride: During your tour inside David Macaulay’s imagination, prepare to soar over Rome’s great monuments, raft within the human body’s circulatory system, and dismantle and rebuild the Empire State Building.

Don’t expect much in the way of explanation or background, but simply sit back and enjoy as this master illustrator rolls out sketches and storylines from some of his greatest published and unpublished hits. Macaulay delves into the structure beneath the built and the biological. But as detailed and accurate as his examinations may be, he embraces the whimsical and fantastic. He admits to loving ruins, so creates his own – “It makes one almost nostalgic.” He imagines an archaeologist 2000 years hence exploring the ruins of a motel, exhuming a pair of skeletons on a bed watching a dead TV, described by Macaulay as “deceased on a platform facing the sacred altar.”

These flights of fancy come whizzing at us so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Macaulay takes us on a tour of an alphabet book constructed of landscapes-- cows in a field and railway tracks, shadows and reflections. Ducks flying are arrayed as a melody from Handel’s Water Music. The book “died at F…More than anything, the world needs another alphabet book!” Asked to do drawings for a book on the brain, Macaulay decided to build a giant brain that would be fun “to wander through.” He recounts, “Hippocampuses are nice and shiny and smooth, it would be fun to slide down a few times, enlivening the brain experience.”

Macaulay never loses sight of his goals, though. “Making things big seemed an ideal way of reacquainting people with the mundane and familiar.” His drawings help him, and his readers, understand the structure, properties, and forces underlying organic and inorganic things in the world, whether zippers or can openers, ancient sailing vessels, digestive systems, or entire cities. His ongoing fascination with Rome has led to multiple attempts to unpeel its historic and architectural layers. A pigeon swoops through the city, revealing perspectives of the Pantheon and Rome’s treasures only a bird could see. Macaulay likes “twisting and distorting to reinforce a sense of movement.” Another approach employs a man on a scooter, providing a street-level view, fragmentary, and yet another uses a television repair man, who shows us details in buildings, “the way stones are cut, old and new.”

Next stop for Macaulay: a book on the Earth and how it works. ]]> Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/564 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/564 William Mitchell and Ryan Chin propose an attractive alternative to the carbon-belching, gas-guzzling autos clogging our thoroughfares, a vision that is as much about transforming cities as about remaking cars. The City Car, a tiny, electric-powered, foldable, stackable vehicle, is their solution to freeing urban centers of paralyzing, polluting traffic, and the nightmare of parking.

Along with a tiny footprint and lack of tailpipe emissions, the City Car comes equipped with an onboard operating system that allows the car to communicate with the rest of the fleet, and omni-directional robot wheels that turn (all the way around) on a dime. Chin enthuses about the car as a “highly personalizable, customizable thing,” whose intelligence will allow it to be ergonomically configured for each driver, and whose exterior may reflect the color or even political preferences of the driver through organic LEDs.

The principle behind the car is shared use – a ride you can grab where and when you need it, especially useful for that last leg of a commute. Mitchell describes stacks of these cars stationed at the most useful points around a city, wherever you need mobility. Swipe a credit card, pick up your ride, and drop it off at your destination. Says Mitchell, “It’s like having valet parking everywhere, except you don’t have a 17-year-old who’s going to drive your car at high speed...”

City Cars “make much more efficient use of urban infrastructure,” says Mitchell. Regular cars sit around 80% of the time, “burning up expensive urban real estate.” More than 500 City Cars could be parked around a city block. On the road, these cars are much friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists than SUVs. Mitchell envisions far fewer road deaths in a City Car future.

Mitchell believes the City Car could “change the auto business from what it is now, a low margin, commodity product business, to an innovative service business.” Think Google rather than Ford. Shared use vehicles could also drive a “dynamic new energy market, compatible with clean, intermittent energy sources,” charging up when the sun shines and sending unused battery capacity to the grid.

Mitchell demonstrates his grand ambition with images of Florence, Italy. Today, “all the centers of humanism in Florence are actually parking lots.” With rows of City Cars in underground lots, “we give the piazzas back to the people.” Theory has shifted into practice, as City Car-like scooters head for Milan and to Taipei, where they will be stationed at convenience stores that dot the city.

Some challenges stand in the way of shared use vehicles taking our cities by storm: Regulations and politics must align to support this complement to public transportation; and consumers in large numbers must be persuaded to give up private car ownership. “What I want is a clean, perfectly maintained vehicle at my disposal when I need it, perfectly reliable, preheated, pre-cooled when I get into it,” says Mitchell. “Why on earth would you want to own a motor car?” ]]> Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/556 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/556 It took John Fernandez more than a year just to begin to understand the political players and competing interests in New Orleans, and so it is no surprise to him that coming up with a common goal for rebuilding the city, much less a “resource efficient one,” proves elusive.

Nevertheless, Fernandez and other MIT researchers aspire to make post-Katrina New Orleans a successful case study of a city “becoming green,” perhaps serving as a model for other urban centers, particularly those facing climate change challenges.

Fernandez became deeply involved in New Orleans’ struggle when he was invited to examine the city’s public housing units, most of which had been condemned without inspection. He discovered that the vast majority were either habitable or recoverable. The “decided lack of a civic voice” forced the city’s poorest to abandon their homes, often for FEMA trailers. Now, New Orleans Office of Recovery Management seems to be moving in a more progressive direction, according to Fernandez, looking to rebuild the city in a way that balances the needs of different stake-holders and applies real science to urban design.

Fernandez and his colleagues have developed a software tool to help city policy-makers make informed decisions about approaches to rebuilding. The researchers use material flow analysis, measuring inputs and outputs of material and energy, durability of housing stock, cost data on building types, energy use rates, waste generation rates. They also apply data on population and employment, housing needs and growth priorities. With this tool, New Orleans urban planners can model an entire green city, or target specific neighborhoods. Modeling like this can provide incentives for designers, engineers and home builders to focus on innovations in such areas as water recovery, onsite energy production and home resilience. Fernandez describes a house that rises when water lifts it during dramatic flooding.

Ultimately, Fernandez hopes to “increase urban resource efficiency” in New Orleans and beyond. His tools attempt to make this possible by first precisely verifying how different kinds of buildings reduce carbon emissions, energy use, and construction materials, among other things. While making new, green buildings will have a critical impact on our use of energy, Fernandez notes that the biggest opportunity lies in improving energy use in existing buildings. City governments, as well as academics, must rise to the challenge “in addressing barriers to a green, urban future.” ]]> Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/482 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/482 With staggering statistics, John Fernandez persuades his audience that rapidly expanding urban centers are consuming too much of the world’s resources, setting the stage for global crisis. Yet Fernandez counters his own bleak picture with some bright examples of design that could help humans live within their environmental means.

Fernandez talks of the buildings we use for shelter at home and work, and the infrastructure that connects these. Energy is consumed to construct (and demolish) these places, to move materials, and sustain people when inside, with light, heat and ventilation. A typical U.S. citizen today will consume the equivalent of 3.6 million pounds of minerals and fuels in one lifetime. The U.S. has 130 million residential buildings, and we’re adding 1.8 million residences annually. But that’s nothing compared to China, says Fernandez. Shanghai adds more building space annually than exists in all of Manhattan. 80% of CO2 emissions are caused directly or indirectly by people living in cities, and it’s estimated that when the global population hits 9-10 billion by 2040, that will add another 2.5 billion people to the three billion who currently live in cities. The earth, quite simply, may not be able to support the needs of an overwhelming and energy hungry urban populace.

Fernandez describes humanity’s “ecological footprint.” He notes that in the late 1980s we passed one “ominous threshold,” when humans began devouring planetary resources unsustainably -- “digging into the natural capital,” as Fernandez puts it. Old growth forests chopped down for houses can’t spring back and ecosystems collapse.

Yet even as we continue consuming ourselves out of our global home, Fernandez sees possibilities of holding demand steady in our global built environment. He shows examples of passive homes (pioneered first in the 1930s by MIT) that recover and circulate heat produced by people; windows in which enamel is baked on to glass designed to maximize solar heat gain in winter; materials with 10-20 times the thermal resistance of today’s home insulation; solar homes and commercial high rises that shield and shade themselves; micro wind turbines and power grids in community developments -- which, taken together, might keep our material and energy demand steady even as global population and affluence rise.

The “elephant in the room” is climate change, which may overwhelm these nascent efforts. Fernandez also sees a dire need for investment in R&D by the $600 billion-per-year U.S. construction industry, which astonishingly invests one-tenth as much in forward thinking as do comparable industries. ]]> Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/470 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/470 After viewing William Mitchell’s presentation, viewers may wish to apply to MIT, or at the very least, take a campus tour, to experience up close the architecture he describes. Mitchell’s talk -- drawn from his recent book, Imagining MIT-- first skims the history of MIT’s classical, industry-minded buildings, then focuses on a recent billion-dollar construction boom that has resulted in pathbreaking examples of urban design for academic purposes.

Mitchell provides five case studies, replete with slides, of architectural design and development. It is “an architecture story we don’t often read in newspapers or in glossy books—the inside story about how large and complex buildings get put together.” When this process takes place within the context of big money, and many competing organizational, physical and political needs, “dialog, interaction and intense argument” result.

As MIT’s architectural advisor, Mitchell had to address the pragmatic requirements of laboratory research, and office, dormitory and social spaces, as well as try to encourage bold, adventurous and playful design. The Ray and Maria Stata Center, by Frank Gehry, for example, began as sketches, with “roots in abstract expressionist painting.” Mitchell describes a struggle to keep the freshness of these early sketches while developing the structure. “A building can easily go dead and boring while going through the process,” he says. Modeling the Center consisted of crumpling up pieces of paper and dropping them onto rough outlines of buildings. 3D computer modeling was used to execute the tricky design, and this helped liberate the building from the traditional repeated grids and modules. The digital model also provided precise coordinates for the building’s construction. Traditional methods of architectural layout, “with tape measures and plum bobs, were not going to work with a building like this,” says Mitchell. Ultimately, “it became a landscape of highly varied spaces that …enabled construction at a reasonable price of forms of great complexity.”

In final form, the Stata Center illustrates a principle close to Mitchell’s heart, that of nonassigned space. In traditional lab buildings, corridors and other ‘nonproductive’ spaces are reduced as much as possible. But in the Stata Center, and other works Mitchell showcases, circulation space plays multiple and important functions: “serendipitous meetings happen,” and the unassigned nooks and crannies become places for unexpected conversations, quiet reflection or even the convergences of disciplines. Also, the unorthodox design “cut canyons through buildings,” so even people housed deep in the heart of the structure connected to the exterior, with light, air and a view.

Mitchell conveys how MIT’s latest architecture has fundamentally shifted to accommodate the fluidity of intellectual life there. “The most important resource at MIT is people, and they thrive if they have a vibrant social environment…where they can bump into each other in ways that lead to productive intellectual exchange.” Great universities “should aim high,” say Mitchell, and while “architecture is intensely practical, at the same time it should always be an affair of the imagination and spirit.”

]]> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/456 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/456 “If there is any kind of profession that’s gotten away with a kind of benign neglect of diversifying itself over the course of last 30 years, it’s architecture,” says Ted Landsmark. With one chart after another, he plots the dismal record of design schools, firms and professional associations in modifying their singularly white profiles.

Of the 100 thousand licensed architects in the U.S. today, 1,571 are African American and 186 of these are African American women. In 2003, a mere 40 Masters students graduated. And more than 1/3rd of these graduates obtained their degrees from an historically black college or university. The rest of the schools offering architecture educations have graduated a few score of African Americans, compared to thousands of white students. “If we were to triple the number of African Americans who graduated from programs over the next decade,” says Landsmark, “we would still only be up to 10%.”

Why are law and business much more diversified professions than architecture?, queries Landsmark. He cites one argument that “smart black guys won’t choose to become architects because they can’t make as much money as lawyers.” But compensation levels are just fine, he notes, and “if people of color are too smart to go into the field, what’s wrong with all the white men who do?” The economic side is bogus. Instead, Landsmark notes that most black architecture graduates of historically black colleges opt to avoid the abuse of working for a firm and taking a licensing exam when they can go directly to work for HUD, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Landsmark also cites the patronage and class system involved in obtaining private work, which “determines who can survive in a field.” White social networks deprive African Americans of start-up opportunities and access to markets. There’s also a noticeable absence of black role models, and African Americans’ own orientation toward “community based work that is not celebrated by publications, schools or awards.”

At a time when there is a greater global need for designers, and when architectural firms are eager to tap into new markets, the nation can’t continue to ignore the African-American talent pool. Among other solutions, Landsmark suggests increasing public awareness of architecture, targeting young people. This might mean scholarships, or putting card tables out in front of Home Depots in communities of color. Architecture firms should invest in their black associates -- growing their careers and increasing their visibility, and establish mentoring programs. Radical steps must be taken, he says, “or someone else will stand here and use the same slides” 10 years from now. ]]> Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/329 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/329 The evolution of architecture resembles nothing so much as the fleshing out and refinement of an organism, in William Mitchell’s condensed account. In pre-industrial times, architecture was “fundamentally skeleton and skin—a structure that protects and keeps out the weather.” The industrial era brought an increasing awareness of the mechanical physiology of buildings: “the flows of electricity and waste removal were overlaid on the skeleton.” In our own times, buildings have acquired “artificial nervous systems” superimposed on the flow networks. Mitchell embraces new architectural forms emerging from this latest digital technology, and gestures toward entire cities connected by a mesh of intelligent buildings. He sees “more interesting urban expressions beginning to develop,” among them Chicago’s Millennium Park, where the Crown Fountain displays giant digital images of city residents through whose mouths water flows. As information becomes increasingly mobile, opportunities arise in nontraditional public spaces for digital access, and work, creativity and social clusters emerge.

Mitchell points to some of MIT’s new buildings, from dorms to the Stata Center, as examples of places that “support ad hoc interactions, spontaneous connections.” With “more fluid nomadic patterns of space occupation, this unassigned space is enormously productive,” says Mitchell. Rooms can be used at any time, for any reason—whether to work or drink coffee. But the same kind of digital access enables students in seminars “to Google topics and introduce the result of a search in real time,” Mitchell wryly notes. Ultimately, though, when “technology becomes unobtrusive” and “disappears into the woodwork,” architects will be liberated to refocus on such fundamental human requirements as light, air, and sociability. ]]> Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/317 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/317 There’s no love lost between Kristina Ford and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin; he made it clear that she was not welcome as the city’s main planner when he assumed office. The bone Ford has to pick is not merely with the current mayor and his notion of a casino- and hotel-dominated New Orleans, but with a wrongheaded planning process in her hometown, and elsewhere in U.S. cities. One big issue for Ford: how cities often treat the comprehensive land use plans they generate every few years as if they are realistic blueprints. “People look backwards when creating a vision of the future, and it’s often a nostalgic vision of what used to be—better in memory than in fact.” Ford notes, “I don’t know many plans from 15 years ago that contemplated Walmarts, or Home Depots.” Over time, zoning decisions diverge from the plan — or people simply ignore the plan altogether.

In the case of New Orleans, a city Ford reveres for its vibrant, distinctively diverse culture, urban planning never took into account how people actually lived -- in tight-knit neighborhoods, relying on an underground economy and spotty transportation. So after Hurricane Katrina, it is essential, believes Ford, that rebuilding plans embrace reality. Real urban recovery would mean luring back New Orleans residents, currently dispersed all over the country, with jobs. “With big contracts coming in, 25% must go to native New Orleanians,” says Ford. “If they don’t have skills, they should be taught.” When one family member returns, it “creates a toehold for the whole family to return.” Ultimately, “words for planning are gimmicks,” says Ford. Planners must stop “tinkering at the margins,” but step right into the politics of their communities, and “invite ways to measure their own effectiveness.” ]]> Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/306 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/306
There is general agreement that to call New Orleans home means “living with danger, dangerously,” as William Barry put it. You’re “relieved when you dodge the big one, but the big one was always going to come,” says Lawrence Jenkens. So now that it has come, what next?

There’s a consensus here that much is salvageable—even in the most flooded areas of the city. Ellen Weiss worries about “the impulse to bulldoze and start from scratch with a fantasy solution,” because so many of New Orleans “shotgun neighborhoods” are underappreciated historically and architecturally. John Klingman disputes the notion that the city is “gone or fine—it’s everything in between.” Many of the older buildings are made of old growth cypress from drained swampland—an extremely resilient wood that could “endure or be reused in many ways.” But, he says, the people are in limbo, and the infrastructure and rules are broken. The question is how to “balance repopulating with good planning.” Richard Tuttle wonders if large sections of the city’s outlying wetlands should be off limits to development and “brought back as natural resources.” This would raise hackles in the petroleum industry, he notes. And while tourism is a top priority, William Barry worries that rebuilding can put “authenticity of place at risk.” John Klingman suggests sidestepping preservation issues by constructing 100 new schools, and replacing a debilitated education system with one attractive to all economic groups. Richard Tuttle would like to see “unemployed workers learn trades and be at the center of rebuilding,” but frets that Washington will cater to large and powerful financial and political interests. “This is potentially a great moment, but as someone who lives there, I’ve become cynical,” he says. ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/268 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/268 Without much national fanfare, Chicago has transformed itself into a paragon of green virtue. The remarkable achievements cited by Mayor Daley include: converting nearly every inch of the city’s 26 miles of lakefront to public use, including parks, fountains, bike paths, theatre and concert space; planting 1.6 million square feet of gardens on the roofs of city hall, city schools, parking garages, museums and stores like Target and Walmart, thus lowering temperatures in the summer and energy needed to cool buildings; transforming brown fields into new industrial facilities, affordable housing, green spaces, and generating three thousand new jobs; creating environmentally sensitive construction standards for all public buildings, and helping private enterprises achieve similar standards, including the use of recycled materials and solar panels.

Ken Greenberg notes across the U.S. a new “understanding of the cohabitation of nature and society of humans in cities,” one which “cuts across class and political divides” because of the “powerful allure of natural features.” Hillary Brown observes among urban designers “a new shared language based on ecological metaphors and whole systems thinking.” She champions “demystifying sustainable practices, making the benefits of greening comprehensive and transparent to everyone,” including those who pave city sidewalks and roads, build sewers and treat water. Robert Campbell admits “green looks better” but warns that “green buildings are largely symbolic,” because “they won’t solve the world’s energy problems by a long shot.” People are obsessed “with the Eden of the natural world, which blinds us to reality.” The only long-term green solution involves “reorganizing the patterns by which we inhabit earth” -- compact settlement in cities, versus suburban sprawl. Doug Foy says, “Anything we do to put things in cities…and to keep them off of green landscapes… is a win.” He concludes that all great cities require useable water front, transit systems for dense habitation, neighborhoods and nonprofit organizations that sustain the economy through ups and downs. ]]> Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/232 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/232 Bridges serve a utilitarian purpose, but they should also please the eye. David P. Billington celebrates an influential group of Swiss structural engineers who forged a tradition of bridge-building in the 20th century that united form and function with unprecedented grace. His lecture describes the offerings of an exhibit at the MIT Museum that showcases the works of Robert Maillart (1872-1940), Othmar Ammann (1879-1965), Heinz Isler (b. 1926), and Christian Menn (b. 1927). These architects, inspired by masterful teachers of the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology, first honed their exacting designs in the rugged mountains of Switzerland, and then branched out to the rest of the world. Billington describes Maillart’s iconic, 1930 Salginatobel Bridge, high in the Alps, which improves on old Roman bridge designs using a 3-hinged arch and reinforced concrete. He toasts Ammann’s Verrazzano Narrows and George Washington Bridges as well as Menn’s very recent Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston, the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world. Billington believes these are structures that will “outlast all our lives, enrich the environment and not desecrate it.”]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/218 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/218 The opening of The Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT’s latest innovative building, inspires this panel’s historical review of collegiate architecture projects. James Ackerman provides the longest lens, focusing first on the earliest, national trends, when buildings served as both residences and classrooms. In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson housed different disciplines in different pavilions. The Gothic style came next, cloisters and all, to promote “monkish learning closed from the community.” Signature buildings started popping up in the late 19th and 20th centuries, driven by “the patron demanding distinction rather than blending in.” Kimberly Alexander notes that throughout MIT’s history, its architecture has always embodied the institute’s mission. On its original Boston campus, the Rogers Building housed the first instructional physics laboratory. Students of this land-grant college were treated to European teachers and their vision. When MIT landed in Cambridge, its classical buildings “embraced new technologies” such as poured concrete and factory sash windows. After World War 2, the campus welcomed projects by international stars Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto and I.M. Pei (‘40 MIT) to embrace all aspects of community life. Charles Vest describes both the difficulties involved in completing the Stata Center, and the opportunity he saw “to create things of historical importance in the development of MIT”-- buildings that would somehow reflect not just academics and research, but the community itself.

RESOURCES: Stata Center Dedication Ceremony ]]> Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/219 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/219 William Mitchell opens this session by describing MIT as an “enormously critical place.” The Stata Center, during its design and construction, fed the campus “attitude of not taking anything for granted and rethinking premises.” So it’s no surprise that debate and some sparring ensue during this spirited panel. Frank Gehry describes imbibing Talmudic learning from his grandfather, a constant inquiry which leads to the “final essence—the Golden Rule.” He believes his design process follows this rule: “being a good neighbor, respecting the architecture around me.” Robert Venturi apologizes for being grouchy, then reminds his audience that “campus is a community and not a stage set….Down with the old romantic idea of the artist as being original in order to be good.” Venturi then proclaims his love for the earliest MIT buildings. Gehry responds, “You sound like you’re fitting in well to the resurgence of fundamentalism.” The two find common ground in their respect for clients that manage to establish, in Venturi’s words, “a feeling of trust, mutual understanding” in spite of the “Byzantine complexity” of their projects. Kyong Park calls for a movement in architecture that can, post 9/11, “be part of bringing back to the future hope and possibility.” John Curry describes presiding over a series of dialectical processes in the course of bringing the Stata Center to fruition -- “between sustainability and style,” “between commons versus cloisters,” and “between the cheap and the durable.”

ABOUT THE MODERATOR:
William Mitchell is the former Dean of Architecture at MIT; he also serves as architectural advisor to the President of MIT. As such, he has been a crucial advocate for commissioning innovative architecture for the campus. His most recent book is Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.

RESOURCES: Stata Center Dedication Ceremony]]> Tue, 06 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/170 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/170 Throughout history, humans have created unique physical spaces in which to live, work and socialize. But the digital age has completely transformed the places in which we conduct our affairs, according to William J. Mitchell. We don’t congregate at the town bank any more for financial transactions. We visit ATMs or bank online. Interactions that once required people to face each other now take place via computer, often across vast distances. Mitchell describes the disappearance of familiar public structures like phone booths, as well as the migration of work from office to just about anywhere a wireless connection is possible. As technology becomes imbedded in our lives and literally disappears into the woodwork, Mitchell sees the possibility for new kinds of extended communities. Network technology has enabled “discontinuous, asynchronous global agoras,” says Mitchell, exemplified by the most recent Gulf War protests. Organizers used digital space (email lists and websites) to help orchestrate public gatherings, which in turn generated images fed back to the Internet, spurring interest in country after country, time-zone after time-zone. Mitchell believes that such networks open up new methods for human assembly and political organization, but also increase the risks to individuals of surveillance.]]> Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/136 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/136 Vale provides a historical overview of public housing in America and shares insights from his most recent book Reclaiming Public Housing. He shows provocative images from early advertisements to demonstrate some of society’s long held attitudes toward public housing and those who live in public housing. He analyses government policies as they evolved to provide housing to “reward people who are most deserving” of assistance, or to provide housing assistance as a “coping mechanism”. ]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]> Tue, 10 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/121 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/121 Rafael Viñoly and Frederic Schwartz led the THINK team, whose design was one of two finalists for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s World Trade Center design competition. In this talk at MIT, Viñoly gives a candid and personal account of one of the most emotionally charged competitions in US history. He talks about winning and losing, down to the final moments of the competition.]]> Tue, 08 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/69 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/69 In this lecture, Dean Mitchell highlights the integral relationship between the rethinking of effective educational methods and the changes to the physical space in which teaching and learning take place. He defines a building as part of a system that supports a community for learning, interaction and discourse. This lecture includes a slide presentation and discussion around some learning spaces on campus, and the some of the newest buildings at MIT. ]]> Thu, 13 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/24 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/24 A panel discussion in celebration of the MIT Press's publication of Karl Haglund's book Inventing the Charles River.

This event features a distinguished panel of civic leaders, urban planners and writers in a lively discussion of the Charles River Parklands' history and its future role in the re-greening of the metropolitan park system. ]]>