dialogue · Santa Monica. 2. 4 dialogue 3ff i Talking About Community 5 ... for new startups and germinate promising concepts. Accelerators are ... to David Thornburg’s ideas for

A Gensler publicationA Gensler publication

Talking about…The transformation of community life

Education gets its game onMuseums: The directors’ cutAviation’s moment of delight Healthcare: It’s all about you 27.

dialogue

Experience is the new measure of community—not just how well it works, but also how good it feels.

ON THE COVER: Arizona State University College Avenue Commons, Tempe.

opposite, from left: ASU College Avenue Commons; proposed Mexico City International Airport; Baltimore Southwest Partnership Master Plan; and the cover of Art Gensler’s new book, Art’s Principles.

FEaturEs 2 Getting its game on Speeding learning and spurring innova-tion are high on education’s agenda.

22 Healthcare’s future is youA connect-the-dots revolution gives health a uniquely personal focus.

16 Don’t forget delightAs they look for an edge, airports and airlines are taking travelers seriously.

28 Resilient communitiesIn a community context, resilience is social, economic, and environmental.

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DEpartmEnts 10Research: Academic libraries How students actually use them could make university libraries more relevant.

12 Roundtable: Art museumsFour art museum directors discuss the future of this vital cultural institution.

32 News + Views Compelling new work in San Francisco and Querétaro—plus Art’s new book.

dialogue27

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thErE’s EVEn morE onlinE atdialogue.gensler.com/v/27

To make it easy to keep up, we’ve created a landing page that takes you to the latest updates as soon as they appear.

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Can place change the way that students interact? Can it alter their perceptions of learning? Improve their levels of engagement and effectiveness? The evidence suggests that it can. Whether they’re just starting out or nearing graduation, it’s increasingly clear that students need creative environments to enhance their learning experience. Gensler researchers have asked how conventional academic settings perform compared with flexible, collaborative ones. Their studies show that the latter increase the level of collaboration among students. This maps closely with Gensler’s experience designing life sciences and technology work settings to spur innovation, but the goals of education are different. Industry-based incubators, accelerators, and coworking spaces are benchmarks, but academia has to find its own way and develop its own models.

reinventing educationEducational institutions are commissioning spaces that reflect a shift toward more varied ways of learning. The most successful spaces empower students to solve things that really matter in their social context. Who are these students? The new generation has grown up with unprecedented access to information. They expect institutions to keep pace with their experience. “They want more flexibility about when, where, and how they learn,” says Gensler’s David Broz. “They expect the same level of personalization that they get from phone apps.” That desire means that education is being rein-vented. There’s interest in leveraging the technology and the maker culture, and experimenting with new forms and formats. Broz and his Gensler colleagues are in the thick of it on a global basis. Here’s a report.

FROM MIddlE SCHOOlS TO UNIVERSITIES, THE PUSH IS ON TO SPEEd UP lEARNING ANd SPARk PEOPlE’S CREATIVITy. TECH FIGURES IN THIS, BUT PlACE IS wHERE INNOVATION HAPPENS.By allison ariEFF

Gets its Game on

Education

Students interact with their work in the Adventure Room at the PlayMaker School, Santa Monica.

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dialogue 27 I Talking About Community4 5

David Thornburg’s three optimal settings for promoting active, experiential learning.

learning as a team sportAcross education, there’s a heightened interest in active, experiential learning. A relevant model is provided by David Thornburg, an innovator in the field. In his view, optimal settings for learning balance the Campfire, where stories are told, the Watering Hole, where exchanges happen, and the Cave, where individual work is done. Gensler first applied Thornburg’s ideas to the New Line Learning Center in Maidstone, UK, as part of the Kent County Schools Program. Now they are finding applica-tion at the university level in Brazil in a multicity entrepreneurship program aimed at design and engineering students. Each location accommodates varied work styles, combining a technology-based lab environment with multiple spaces for collaboration and

team learning. Students are actively engaged with each other and their teach-ers,” says Gensler’s David Herjeczki. The shift these projects exemplify is grounded in findings that team learning has a higher benefit than traditional methods. University of Minnesota researchers studied two classes on the same topic and with the same teacher. Students had similar ACT test scores going in. Class 1 was taught in a tradi-tional lecture/lab setting and Class 2 in a flexible, collaborative active-learning setting. Afterward, students in Class 2 tested higher than those in Class 1.

scripting the unscriptedAt PlayMaker School in Santa Monica, the focus is on learning through play-ing, making, and discovering. Aimed at sixth and seventh graders, the program

PlayMaker School’s Maker lab, where students collaborate to build and test their ideas.

personal work. “There’s a strong sense that ‘this is our space.’ Students tell us they now realize how important the settings are,” says Gensler’s Patricia Nobre, who led the design. “The learning envi-ronment is highly customizable so the students can engage with it,” she adds. “Their ability to create experiences makes it memorable, a ‘wow’ that actu-ally reflects their own inventiveness.” Achieving a comparable “wow” is the goal for Wiseburn High School in El Segundo, California. Its four-story building will house three separate schools, each on a separate floor. They have different focuses, programs, and maker spaces. All three cluster easy-to- modify classrooms around common areas to get rid of corridors and achieve the flexibility and openness typical of creative workspaces. “This will facilitate

BAlANCEd lEARNING

THE CAMPFIREwhere stories are told.

THE wATERING HOlEwhere exchanges happen.

THE CAVEwhere individual work is done.

Da VinCi DEsiGnIndependent Small Learning Community

24 ClASSROOMS

Da VinCi CommuniCationIndependent Small Learning Community

24 ClASSROOMS

Da VinCi sCiEnCEIndependent Small Learning Community

24 ClASSROOMS

oFFiCEsSHARED AMENITIES, PERFORMING ARTS, COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Wiseburn’s collocated schools share an atrium and common-use facilities.

wiseburn High School in El Segundo, CA, combines three high-school programs and facilities under one roof.

provides students with three purpose-built spaces that encourage them to experiment, explore, and arrive at their own solutions to complex problems. “It’s pretty radical,” says Gensler’s Shawn Gehle. “PlayMaker renovated an existing school, replacing classrooms with prototypical settings for each of these activities.” PlayMaker students are immersed in virtual and physically interactive envi-ronments with myriad entry points to the problems they’re tackling—problems drawn from science, technology, engi-neering, art, and math. They collaborate with teachers in developing ideas in the Dream Lab, and then move to the Adventure Room. Here, their work is video-projected onto the floor so the students can engage directly with what they’re creating—one of many forms

THREE IN ONEof making, including 3D printing. “The school is designed to create a sense of possibility as well as give students the means to make it happen,” Herjeczki says. “They realize they don’t have to accept things as they are.” That same self-scripted approach to learning shows up in higher education, even where you wouldn’t expect it. Take College Avenue Commons at Arizona State University–Tempe. Universities are eager to leverage their real estate, so it houses campus activities that were once separate—like the Sun Devil Marketplace and the Del E. Webb School of Construction—in a mixed-use build-ing at the border of town and gown. “It’s where campus tours start,” Gensler’s Patrick Magness says. “It’s where ASU students take classes, professionals rub elbows with academics, ASU’s regents

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meet, and flat whites are consumed and live events seen.” Adds Gensler’s Julie Hutchison, “It’s intentionally diverse—designed to be curated, to be changed and changed again. Even the bookstore is less about selling books and more about promoting the culture that books help create.” Universities benefit from looking beyond academia for models. College Avenue Commons is the kind of fluid, fine-grained hybrid that’s also a staple of commercial mixed-use development. settings to speed innovationCompanies that take innovation seri-ously and invest huge sums in it are attractive (and attracted) to academia as potential partners, not just models. In considering which types of spaces will best facilitate innovation, universities

above: Arizona State University College Avenue Commons, designed with Architekton, Tempe.

look to incubators and accelerators. What’s the difference? Incubators—as common as baristas in the tech industry— are where people come up with ideas for new startups and germinate promising concepts. Accelerators are geared to people with developed ideas who need the funding to scale them up. The incubator/accelerator space is typically a hybrid combination of workspace, learning space, and social space, most of it flexible and multiuse. Sound familiar? PlayMaker School has comparable settings. It also maps well to David Thornburg’s ideas for learn-ing environments. “The emphasis is on scenario-based learning, giving people real-world experience in trying things out—a place to break things and fail fast on the road to success,” Broz says. The philosophy of “fail early and often”

opposite: The Sun devil Marketplace at ASU College Avenue Commons.

is the credo of Silicon Valley, of course, with its famous garages from which HP and Apple sprang. They are honored by Northwestern University’s The Garage, an incubator for student entrepreneurs that’s actually located in a parking garage, its parking stripes left intact. The Garage is part of a campaign to boost innovation and cross-departmental collaboration across the campus. Retail trends also influence incubator spaces. Gensler’s Mark Thaler points to New York University’s Mark and Debra Leslie Entrepreneurs Lab, made possible by a major gift to the school. Its location right on Washington Square Park is a way to grab the attention of student passersby. The 5,900-square-foot lab is a place where aspiring students, faculty, and research entrepreneurs from all of NYU’s schools and colleges can connect

7dialogue 27 I Talking About Community

find partners outside the academy, the likelihood of faculty and students mov-ing easily between theory and practice, seeing learning as a lifetime endeavor—these trends are making education and its settings more porous and better suited to how people actually learn, collaborate, and innovate.

allison arieff is SPUR’s editorial director. She writes regularly from San Francisco for the New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, and other publications.

Gensler’s Maria Nesdale. “That is shifting how people teach and UEL’s expecta-tions for the student experience.”

Converging around shared themesWhile education at every level is focused on speeding learning and supporting innovation, the more important trend is that these institutions are looking beyond the school, campus, and sector for examples of how do it. And industry views them as interesting collaborators. They recognize that the faculties and students are genuinely excited by the possibilities and open to what design and technology have to offer. If, in the past, educational institutions were focused on injecting “real life” into their programs, they are likely in the future to view the academic/real-world divide as a needless hindrance. The ability to

below: Johns Hopkins University’s FastForward East incubator, Baltimore, incorporates lab space.

and collaborate. “A full-time concierge acts as an ‘idea matchmaker’ to help people with shared interests find each other,” Thaler notes. FastForward East, a Baltimore startup incubator, is also visible from the street. Serving Johns Hopkins University’s schools of medicine, nursing, and public health, it gathers biotech, medical, and pharma entrepreneurs—in part by offer-ing 2,500 square feet of lab space, a scarce resource for young companies. In the UK, the University of East London (UEL) saw a model in Level 39, a Gensler-designed financial-tech accelerator at London’s Canary Wharf that surrounds budding startups with banking and financial services clients. UEL’s Business Innovation Center “is sparking interaction between startups and UEL’s faculty and students,” says

above: The University of East london’s Business Innovation Center sparks interaction with the city’s startups.

8 9dialogue 27 I Talking About Community

The 40-acre first phase of Duke Kunshan University (DKU)had its formal opening in November 2014. Founded jointly by Wuhan University and Duke University, DKU will grow over time into a 200-acre campus, planned by Gensler within the Kunshan Yangcheng Lake Science Park. The ini-tial phase includes an academic center, conference center, innovation center, faculty and student residences, and a service building. Tim Etherington, managing director in Shanghai, joined DKU founding partners and leaders in unveiling the brand-new campus. “The DKU campus blends local context with references to Duke University’s liberal-arts tradition,” he told the crowd. “It is a model of sustainable, energy-efficient development.”

THE NEw dUkE kUNSHAN UNIVERSITy CAMPUS OPENS NEAR SHANGHAI

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observed using printed books, while 23 percent were using computers or tablets. The Gensler study Librarians on Libraries also points to academic libraries’ growing focus on digital resources. But parallel research suggests a more nuanced view of this issue. Naomi Baron of American University found “a near-universal preference for print,” with 92 percent of 300 students surveyed reporting that they concen-trate best when working with print. A Student Monitor survey of 1,200 students also reported a preference for print for every type of study except research. This suggests that the question of books versus digital resources is not an either/or proposition: students increasingly want easy access to digital tools and resources, but it would be premature for libraries to shed their collections.

implications for the futureAcademic libraries can benefit from a better understanding of how and why students use them. What they value, beyond the libraries’ book collections, are the ways that focused study and research is supported. “The competition for great study spaces on campus is fierce,” says Gensler’s Melissa Mizell. UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library, which her team is renovating, accentuates libraries’ third place aspect: “the vibe, the slight din, the social component, being near others yet able to focus.” Commuting students and those struggling academically are the most in need of libraries and their services, but are not currently the library’s heaviest users. To serve them better, libraries will have to give them more targeted attention in the future. One approach to consider is to provide places where commuters can easily access a variety of study settings and resources; another is to put in place a network of outreach facilities tailored to the special needs of lower-performing students. Academic libraries will continue to evolve around core study and access needs. In this role, they will have to balance the energy of gathering with the need to support focused work. But they will also need to invest in new facilities that close the gap with students who aren’t being served by the current model. Adding spokes to the hub and integrating the digital more seamlessly are among the potential strategies.

While much of their content is web accessible, libraries endure on the campus. New Gensler research looks at their current and future use.

University and college students put in three times more hours studying on their own than studying with peers, according to a recent survey of 1,200 US students, ana-lyzed in Gensler’s Student Perspectives on the Library. The survey also confirms that extra study time correlates with better grades. Interestingly, while the A students put in the most hours, they use the library less than the B students. This suggests that the top performers are best able to screen out distraction. Whatever their perfor-mance level, students report that they prefer to study in the library. The main reason they give for this is straightforward: libraries offer places where they can focus, and focus makes their study time more effective.

the power of proximityGiven this preference, it’s surprising that two-thirds of students’ study time happens elsewhere. Their living situations may play a role: for individual study, students in dorms and campus housing prefer their own quarters slightly more than the library—with a slight gain in performance. Gensler’s research on student living confirms this, says David Broz: “Students expect to find a live/work environment at on-campus dorms and housing. This often reflects study habits they established in high school.” Students’ study time also relates to where and how they live. Those living on campus spend the most time studying alone and the most time studying collabora-tively. Those living within walking distance of campus also study slightly more than average, while those commuting to campus spend the least time on each activity. This suggests that commuters lack options about where to study, compared with their on-campus and near-campus peers. Providing more options that address their unique needs may be an important direction for libraries in the future.

the right resources—digital, physical, experientialA related issue that Gensler investigated is whether printed books are still important to students or if they mainly access content as e-books or other digital, web-conveyed formats. The research found that students visit academic libraries more often to access digital resources than to check out printed books, but access to both outweighs socializing, attending events, or seeking help from librarians. Asked about the relative importance of library resources, now and in the future, students reported a preference for digital resources (and integrated technology) over book collections. Research on library usage patterns, documented in Gensler’s Academic Libraries at a Crossroads, found that only 10 percent of students were

By mark thalEr anD tim pittman

A STUDENT VIEW OF

aCaDEmiC liBrariEs

GENSLER RESEARCH

mark thaler is a regional leader in Gensler’s Education practice, based in New York. tim pittman, Gensler’s New York–based research communications manager, coedited its 2014 Research Catalogue.

The most important resource provided by today’s libraries is quiet space, according to students. When asked about tomorrow’s libraries, quiet space remains important, while technology and digital resource concerns rise to the top.

TOdAy

Quiet space for students

digital library/resources

well integrated technology

Collaborative space for students

Books/stacks on-site

lIBRARy RESOURCES, TOdAy ANd TOMORROw

MOST IMPORTANT

lEAST IMPORTANT

IN THE FUTURE

ASU College Avenue Commons, Tempe.


lisaphillipsToby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum in New York

miChaElConFortiDirector of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA

hoWDo youDEFinEmusEum?

art Museums: the directors’ cut

ROUNDTABLE

michael Conforti: Museums have to think of them-selves beyond their galleries as they broaden audiences to include younger communities, linking those com-munities to the museum in ever more imaginative ways. We have to think of a museum as a forum as well as a gallery site.

how does the Clark relate to education?mC: The Clark has a dual mission, and is both an art museum and a center for research and discussion of ideas in the visual arts. It’s also a center for curatorial training and art historical education. As part of our dual mission we organize a graduate program with Williams College in the history of art. Williams College is one of the great centers for higher education in the visual arts. Many of its undergraduate and graduate students go on to become curators and directors. In addition, and curiously, there are more art historians per capita in Williamstown than any other place in the world.

how is this reflected in the buildings?mC: There is a quality of the Clark that separates it from most other art institutions: we started as a private collection—a bit like the Huntington in Pasadena, the Barnes, the Gardner, or the Frick. Our core permanent collection has expanded, as have our public, research, and education programs. Annabelle Selldorf, who led the renovation and expansion of the existing museum and the Manton Research Center, did an incredible job of enhancing the experience of the particular “period in time” aesthetic that was first put in place when the museum opened in 1955. We also wanted flexible spaces, especially for special exhibitions, as well as other public and support spaces. We now have a large-scale temporary exhibition space, which lets us experiment with themes that go well with our permanent collection and our core research programs. We are no longer confined by the character of our

We have to think of a museum as a forum as well as a gallery site.

how does the museum relate to new media?lp: New media is something that we were very involved with early on through the Media Lounge, with Rhizome, which is an affiliate organization we brought on 12 years ago. It’s also how we’ve approached our website, which is a space for presenting art and to visit. We’re commissioning artists every month to do digital work on our website. It had 2.5 million visitors last year, compared to the 350,000 people who actually visited the museum. It’s huge. And we have a really strong social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

tell us about the museum as a building. lp: We wanted it to be open and inviting to the public. That was part of our program when we were getting ready to design it. SANAA, the design architect, envi-sioned the lobby floor as an extension of the sidewalk. The idea is that you don’t have a barrier. I think more museums are sensitive to this now. The old-style museum building was like a castle or a fortress, pro-tecting the valuables, but we’re not like that. We want people to experience art right away—to experience it on the façade even before they get inside. We also wanted a building that wouldn’t be too pre-cious, because we know that artists are always testing the limits of a museum. And SANAA was really under-standing about that. We’ve drilled through floors, lowered ceilings. The exhibit spaces are designed so the art looks really good. I see the museum as kind of an expanded version of an artist’s studio or a loftlike space. There’s light on every level. There are skylights on every floor.

how does the museum relate to its context?lp: We’ve always been downtown. After going through 9/11 up close, we recommitted to that and also wanted to be trailblazing in our choice of a location. The Bowery—always a place we were told not to look at or walk in—seemed like an ideal place to build. It was languishing and full of possibility. The Bowery came to represent Skid Row, kind of a sore spot in the city’s landscape, but it’s got a much richer history. One of our projects is the Bowery artist tribute. We’ve recorded over 2,000 artists who lived and worked here, through videos and other oral histories. From abstract expressionists to pop artists to the minimal-ists and post-minimalists, almost every major artist who had a studio or lived on the Bowery is covered. It’s an amazing legacy, and that’s just through the 1970s. Two centuries ago, this place was an orchard!

We don’t have a collection, so that distinguishes us from other museums.

original building and collections, and yet we continue to honor them.

tell us about the museum program.mC: The Manton Research Center houses one of the largest art history libraries in the country, as well as the Clark’s collection of prints, drawings, and photo-graphs. The new Clark Center, designed by Tadao Ando, is a visitor center and a temporary exhibition site that encourages the museum to think well beyond our existing collection frame. The Clark Center can also be used for conferences and special events. Selldorf made the original art museum, designed by Daniel Parry in 1955, come alive again with an elegant and modern consciousness. Another Ando building at the Clark is the Lunder Center at Stone Hill, home of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. Its galleries are often used in the summertime for contemporary projects. For all these reasons, it’s hard to talk about our program in simple terms. The buildings embrace the wide variety of programs we do, and they sit in an extraordinarily beautiful, hilly landscape that is, in and of itself, a special public treasure.

how does the Clark relate to its context?mC: We have 140 acres and we program on the cam-pus regularly and often. Our campus expansion project was as much about enhancing the landscape as it was about adding and renovating buildings. We maintain a special quality of being a research center as well as an art museum, but one that exists in a unique natural environment. The Clark is located on the side of a hill-top, and many of our visitors come just to walk our campus. They want to spend time in the new facility, the terraces, and around the water feature that connects our buildings, but they also want to walk our extensive trails and experience the incredible view one gets from the top of Stone Hill. The view from our upland campus takes in the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Taconic Range of New York. To be situated in this vista landscape is unique among art museums. It’s very special indeed!

The idea of the art museum is in constant flux. As a building type, it walks a fine line between aesthetics and purpose, a fusion of art and programmatic intent that speaks to artists, curators, patrons, and communities. As a firm that helps bring these complex projects to life, Gensler invited four prominent directors to discuss their museums as exemplars of design and intent.

lisa phillips: We have a very special mission: to look at new art and new ideas and new possibilities for museums as institutions. That’s been part of our his-tory since 1977. It puts us in a great spot to innovate and experiment and question the possibilities for insti-tutions. We don’t have a collection, so that distinguishes us from other museums. We’re a museum of very contemporary art. And it’s hard to stay contemporary if you’re devoting resources and space to a collection that’s aging and becoming historical. So this gives us a lot of freedom, to experiment and to be nimble and to act on things very quickly as they’re happening. I look at the museum as an incubator for new art. We’re commissioning things all the time. We have a triennial that features emerging artists from around the world, early-career artists. We have an active resi-dency program. We’re incubating ideas through our scholarships and publications. We’re doing a series of critical anthologies with MIT Press, which will publish the first one, Mass Effect—a history of art and the Internet—in September. We stage conferences. Idea City, a conference and festival on the future of cities, is an example. We see conferences as a platform equivalent to our exhibition program. That’s not typi-cal for a museum either.


miChaElGoVanCEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

kathlEEnhoWESarah Rempel & Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA

If museums only comprised beautiful static, perma-nent concrete walls—walls that didn’t move but had a heaviness and depth of light and shadow and feeling— they could be overwhelming. Conversely, if everything were built to be temporary and functionally rearrange-able, that would also be flawed. One of the nice things about Renzo Piano’s build-ings at LACMA is that they’re very matter-of-fact, yet quite dynamic when you consider the whole expe-rience: riding the elevator, seeing the sky, the palm trees, and the Hollywood sign, looking out onto the changing view as you’re going up and down the glass elevator, and walking into an art space with skylights and windows. how do you see your responsibility to education?mG: Total. What I dislike is this idea that you have an art museum and then you add education like frosting on a cake or an additional ingredient. Everything we do is fundamentally educational. Education is something to do with learning, with expanding one’s range of experience, feeling, and knowledge all together to incorporate new things, new ideas, new feelings, new experiences.

how do you use new media? mG: We collect art made in new media. We also have updatable scholarly publications, and we emphasize the two-way street of social media. We have many digital initiatives, including tweeting in Spanish and English, award-winning blogs, and context-aware beacons that send information to your mobile phone as you walk through the galleries. But what I’m most proud of is that we’re the fourth most Instagrammed museum in the world, according to Instagram’s own data. That’s meaningful considering that more visitors are inspired to share their experience of LACMA than is the case at other museums worldwide with much greater overall attendance. And that social media is driving our physical visitor statistics up all the time.

Do you consider the museum itself to be art?mG: People sometimes posit as adversarial the rela-tionship between art and architecture. Or they suggest that the museum itself is an artwork. I think the key for a museum is to create conditions that ensure that its management and all the people who work there provide for a meaningful back and forth between the art and the architecture. The goal of museum design is always to think about that relationship. When you put art in a museum, the museum becomes its context. And context matters.

As we’ve been working on our new building with Machado and Silvetti and with Gensler, the assumption seems to be, “Here are the parameters. Make it work.” We seldom say that to an artist. You don’t hear a curator or director telling, say, James Turrell or Chris Burden, “Well, I’m sorry. This is the space, we won’t significantly alter it, and that’s what you have to work with.” Yet we expect the architects to work within all of our parameters.

tell us about the museum’s program.kh: Our starting point was that we’re a collecting institution. And if the collection isn’t accessible and available to classes and students, then however you set it up, it’s like a library that has books that you can’t get to. It’s useless. Part of being accessible is having an entrance that is apparent and welcoming. Our pro-gram specifically described the characteristics of the entry experience. Visitors need to know how to get into the building. They should get some sense of what goes on there. They should be able to tell that it’s open and, more importantly, that they are invited in. And because we’re in Southern California, we asked for a really large exterior space—a social, aesthetic, and intellectual space for our students and other visitors. A key piece of this was Michael Asher’s intervention in 1969, when he took the doors off the Pomona College Museum and built this weirdly shaped, blind-pouch gallery. It was an extraordinary piece. For our “It Happened at Pomona” show, he declined to re-create it. He countered, “I propose that the museum remain open for the entire length of this segment of the exhi-bition”—nine weeks, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. And we did it. That openness and the ways the museum functioned at different times really sparked our thinking about access.

how will the museum relate to its context?kh: The museum serves the entire consortium of the Claremont Colleges as an academic resource across the curriculum. We are firmly committed to the educa-tion of our students at both Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges. And we really think that if stu-dents leave here without having a museum experience, we’ve failed. The communities we live in are the bigger layers around the campus. We live in Claremont, a small town that’s college-centric. Beyond it is the Inland Empire, which is economically depressed. We have a lot of visi-tors from there—from Ontario, Fontana, and places like that. There’s a big population pool to the east that extends to San Bernardino and Riverside. It’s essential that admission is free, and that when people walk in,

ROUNDTABLE

Eva hagberg Fisher, who conducted the inter-views, has published three books on architecture and design. She contributes to Metropolis and other design and cultural magazines.

it’s about providing something engaging and immersive on all kinds of levels—aesthetic, intellectual, and social.

michael Govan: Art has been around for millennia, while museums were created a few hundred years ago to provide access to and preserve objects of art or material culture. They now are also involved in the production of art, because there are so few mechanisms left to commission and produce art on a large scale. The term “accessibility” includes all the facets of access—physical, emotional, and intellectual. It encom- passes not only the physical space of the museum, but publications, lectures, related programs and artistic events, and online presence. I see LACMA as a town square, a multicultural cen-ter and gathering place for a multicultural community.

the art world requires flexibility and nimbleness, but a building is a commitment to time and space. how will laCma address that, planning for growth?mG: A lot of people will say “Oh, it’s just the art. The building doesn’t matter.” Well, rectilinear box galleries are a particularly coded cultural construction—they’re not neutral! Every decision is important when you’re framing cultural objects that have deep philosophies and ideologies embedded in them.

how do you prepare physically and architecturally for the great variety of art, heavy or complex?mG: You want a building where you can put a big steel sculpture on the ground—because if you can’t accom-modate Richard Serra, you shouldn’t be in the business of being a contemporary art museum. But you don’t want something that has too much weight and abso-luteness if the idea is to accommodate many different kinds of art in different emotional registers.

kathleen howe: We begin by asking what happens intellectually, in an engaging way, when someone comes to our museum. We want to encourage them to visit, and convey that it will be fascinating. It’s about providing something engaging and immersive. We want that to happen on all kinds of levels—aesthetic, intellectual, and social. It’s great if there’s something just jaw-droppingly wonderful once in a while, yet there’s also room for moments of quiet discovery.

how do you translate this into built space?kh: I think we suffer from hubris in thinking that we can, with an architect and with a museum staff’s input, come up with the perfect building that weds the art and the architecture. I feel sorry for architects because they’re hearing from museum people that they want this beautiful—always beautiful—and logical, easy- to-traverse building. And then we turn around and we say, “Oh, but we’d really like the mystery and the chance of discovery to be there.” Well, okay. Then we talk about it being transparent. But, oh no, we don’t want windows. And then we insist on having elegant galleries. But then we’ve got a student demographic, so we find ourselves saying we need some kind of domestically scaled space to house the more social activities that weren’t part of what the museum did previously. And no matter what kind of built space you have, it will eventually be challenged by an artist who wants something very different, who wants to reconfigure it or interrogate it.

i see laCma as a town square, a multicultural gathering place for a multicultural community.

they feel welcome. The other community we address is the greater Los Angeles arts scene. It’s important to us that our peers there think we do really good work and present beautifully installed shows. The Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight listed one of our shows in his year-end roundup of the 10 best. Art museums today have to be more accessible, and willing to experiment. We have to engage these differ-ent communities in ways that resonate with each and all of them. I like to think of our museum as a free-trade zone—a place where different people can meet and interact with each other, and with the work and ideas presented by the artists and curators.

hoWDo youDEFinEmusEum?

dialogue 27 I Talking About Community 17

What do casinos and airports have in common? “Both are ‘purpose-driven machines,’” says Gensler’s William Hooper, a leader of its aviation practice. While far more aspirational than gambling empori-ums, airports also have to meet the pragmatic demands of processing crowds of people every day. But this is just a baseline requirement. Airports’ more ennobling task—creating functional, secure buildings that also enhance the passenger experience—is complicated by a huge cast of potential stakeholders and a daunting set of revenue- enhancing imperatives. Knitting these diverse elements into a coherent whole that provides pleasing spaces for travelers constitutes the essence of contemporary airport design.

Divide and conquerAirport projects come in two varieties: retrofits or replacements and ground-up airports. Terminals in many cities are in dismal shape, say Gensler’s experts, yet building a brand-new airport is beyond the reach of many airport authorities. To meet their future needs, airports are taking a divide-and-conquer approach, focusing on incremental improvements that are financed and implemented over many years. Because many airports don’t have a lot of room for expansion avail-able, packing in new operational necessities and ever-larger amenities becomes a jigsaw puzzle. “The real innovation in airports is in plan-ning,” says Gensler’s Kap Malik. At LaGuardia, the firm proposed to gain space by adding height. “Security is a level above ticketing, with its own drop-off for passengers with no bags to check,” says his colleague Ty Osbaugh. Manchester, a gateway airport in the UK, is another example. It has three separate terminals currently. Gensler has been tasked to rebuild it in place, says Pat Askew, transforming

AIRPORTS ARE ExPERIENTIAl AS wEll AS FUNCTIONAl. HOw wEll THEy dElIVER AS PlACES wHERE PlEASURE lINGERS IN PASSENGERS’ MEMORIES IS THE NEw MEASURE OF SUCCESS. SO THE PUSH IS ON FOR NEw wAyS TO MAkE FlyING A dElIGHT.By martin pEDErsEn

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in natural light. All of this combined to create a warmer, less institutional vibe, a feeling achieved through the elegant sequencing of space. “We call them journey moments,” says Gensler’s Melissa Mizell. “At SFO, it was about the idea of intuitive flow. The terminal is laid out in such a way that you can stand at curbside and, if you look hard enough, actually see straight down a path to the airfield.” That setup was existing, but Gensler cleared things out of the way to improve the experi-ence. “It was always important that you have a sense of what comes next. If you are in security, you catch a glimpse of the recompose area and retail areas beyond. Seeing them keeps you moving.”

the airport by reconfiguring its departure areas and retail stores to create a consistent passenger experi-ence. To grow revenues, Manchester is also planning an “Airport City”–type development that will reinforce it as a destination. new rules of competitionAcross the globe, these purpose-driven machines share an increasingly urgent social objective: to bring order, clarity, calm—even beauty—to the passenger experience. To do this, airports and air-lines are breaking the people-processing mold. “They’re competing on experience and brand,” says Askew. “They have to woo new groups of passengers—like

SFO T2’s other lasting contribution was the building’s subtle connection to its host city—the design is based on the analogy of San Francisco as a series of distinct neighborhoods unified under a giant sky. Rooting terminals in their place is one of the most difficult chal-lenges facing airport designers and owners. Airports must pass a taste test, Young says: If you blindfold someone, drop them into an airport, and then take off the blindfold, do they know where they are? Are they in Dubai? Los Angeles? Or in some shopping mall? “To me, that’s the litmus test,” he says. “You need to design the airport so it feels like a real place, reflecting its community without becoming a theme park.”

vacation travelers, families, or high- mileage business travelers—and keep existing customers coming back.” Kashyap Bhimjiani adds that it’s hap-pening in India, citing Gensler’s recent upgrading of Chennai’s airport as a domestic and global gateway to the Madras region, which he helped design. A spate of airline mergers is also having ripple effects on airport design. For example, the marriage of United Airlines and Continental has prompted a retooling of United’s identity, brand, and passenger processing. As a result, Gensler is working with United’s brand consultant at Newark Liberty Interna-tional to overhaul the former Continental terminal to project the United brand.

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Re-Stacking the building creates a new level where passengers with no bags and boarding passes from home, get dropped off at security level and by-pass ticketing altogether. Signed from the approach road, these passengers are “Ready to Fly”.



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The advent of more fuel-efficient, longer-range aircraft, such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350, is driving growth of point-to-point international flights. Gensler’s recent expansion of JetBlue Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Inter-national Airport supports that airline’s use of smaller planes on routes to the Caribbean and Latin America. Another project—new gates at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport—anticipates its future growth in cross-border flights.

hospitality mattersAs airports upgrade their facilities, “these terminals are becoming less like bus stations and much more like hotel lobbies,” says Gensler’s Terence Young.

“It’s the idea of the first-class lounge experience being distributed through-out the airport.” Indeed, more and more airports are taking cues from the hospitality industry and looking for ways to put the cus-tomer first. Gensler developed this idea fully at San Francisco’s Terminal 2, which reopened in 2011. It remains a seminal project, one that has informed airport design all over the world. At Terminal 2, ticketing took on a concierge feel; lounge furniture was introduced, proving popu-lar with passengers; lighting and finishes were softened and varied; concourse sightlines were made clearer; and artist Janet Echelman created a stunning public artwork in a concourse drenched

below: This concept for New york’s laGuardia Airport lets passengers with carry-on bags speed to their gates.

previous page, top left to right: San Francisco International Airport Terminal 3 Boarding Area E and Terminal 2; bottom: Jackson Hole Airport, Jackson, wy.

impact of new planesnew long-range aircraft enable regional airports to add point-to-point routes that bypass traditional hubs. if they have customs facilities, they can host international flights.

hospitality reignstaking cues now from the hospitality industry, airportsare catering to passengers with concierge-like ticketing, casual furniture, and upgraded amenities.

toward the airport Citymany metropolitan airports are redefining themselves as destinations, adding complemen-tary uses like hotels, offices, restaurants, and entertainment.

room to growthe real innovation taking place in airports is in planning. lacking room to grow horizon-tally, many are adding height within their existing footprints.

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a grand-scaled ticketing hall upstairs, they arrive at their destination only to wait for their luggage in a dreary space that invariably feels like a basement. This setup, however, is something of a relic, and it’s coming under assault from that small but powerful disruptor: the smartphone. Much of what passengers once did in those large ticketing halls can now be more efficiently accom-plished on handheld mobile devices. And as the demographics continue to shift toward the digital, this behavior is likely to become even more common. A recent Gensler proposal for Mexico City’s new international airport openly challenged the old stacking paradigm. As Keith Thompson explains, “Departure is important and drives a lot of revenue, but we think that arrival has been over-looked as an essential component of the passenger experience.” Instead of a conventional ticket counter at the top, with baggage claim at the bottom, the design flips it. Passengers can walk from plane to baggage claim on the same level. “The baggage claim is an open space upstairs, with outdoor views,” Thompson adds. The stacking paradigm also results in a more compact overall development, potentially reducing cost.

Gensler has employed a number of site- and location-specific strategies to accomplish this goal. At Chennai International Airport, for example, the design team inserted an expansive land-scaped garden between the ticketing hall and the passenger concourse. The lush garden does double duty, as both a placemaking device and a means of stormwater retention. “And because it’s filled with native plants, it’s visually connected to its location,” says Bhimjiani. In Wyoming, at the Jackson Hole Airport, the design is inspired directly by its unique, almost otherworldly location inside a stunning national park. “Everything is very much hand-crafted,” says Gensler’s Brent Mather. “The structure and exposed ceilings are all wood. There’s a lot of casual furniture, as opposed to sterile, pack-in-the-people airport furniture. We also added a fire- place to give people the feeling that the airport is an extension of the lodge where they were just staying.”

Celebrating arrivalDespite all of the changes in aviation, the basic layout of terminals hasn’t changed much since the glory days of air travel. While passengers depart from

right and below: Proposal for a new Mexico City International Airport.

a new main event

the proposed mexico City international airport makes arrival the feature, all on one daylight-filled level.

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arriving passengers encounter a spacious, light-filled Customs hall, moved up out of the basement.

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to change. With the aviation industry evolving quickly, airports are renovating or replacing out-of-date facilities to meet new business, community, and operational demands. While airports are still purpose driven, they are focused on the travelers they serve. “The art and science of airports is all about the quality of the passenger experience,” Gensler’s William Hooper sums up.

martin pedersen writes from New Orleans for the New York Times and Metropolis, among other publications.

In Incheon, Terminal 2 is under way to support South Korea’s 2018 Winter Olympics. Gensler’s international termi-nal at Chennai is also up and running, a key project in India’s national effort to bring its airports to a global standard. Both speak to aviation’s importance to countries as a competitive advantage. In Denver, leveraging a new 22.8-mile rail link with the city’s downtown, the airport is being recast as a regional destination—a place people will want to visit even when they’re not traveling. The reinvention of Denver Interna-tional Airport—which will soon boast a new transit hub, hotel, and conference center—reflects a global trend: that existing airports feel a strong impetus

below: The new westin hotel and transit center at denver International Airport.


HealtHcare’s Future:

mEDiCinE With

IN MINDa revolution in healthcare is under way that is focused on serving each person’s unique needs and situation. the implications are wide-ranging.By yukiko BoWman anD EDWarD kEEGan

Healthcare makes a 17 percent contribution to the US economy, up from 1 percent a century ago. Sheer size along with cost pressures and competition make the sec-tor ripe for disruption. It’s already happening: healthcare is being turned inside out. This reflects our growing ability to leverage digital connectivity to gather and consolidate health data, analyze it on a macro and micro level, and then use it to transform treatment. Along with this, healthcare’s settings are changing fast. They are being called on to support new delivery models that put people first, whether they’re patients or consumers. Gensler is involved with both. Here’s a report from the experts in its Health & Wellness, Life Sciences, and Mission Critical practices on what they’re seeing as they engage with and contribute to this unfolding revolution.

Tulsa Cancer Institute, Tulsa, Ok.

2524 dialogue 27 I Talking About Community

below: Tulsa Cancer Institute, Tulsa, Ok. opposite: Cleveland Clinic data Center, Brecksville, OH.

“The ability to grind through data is a big part of personalized medicine,” says Gensler’s Sarah Bader. The beneficiaries include patients with rare diseases who once had difficulty getting effective treatment— they are now candidates for the new “calculated” therapies. Likewise, Gensler’s Jim Simon adds, physician- to-physician knowledge has grown in sophistication. “Physicians now have real-time access to a global net-work of colleagues. They can learn about an epidemic from on-the-ground sources and then tap them to identify promising treatments and containment mea- sures.” To keep the whole network informed, computers can track informal as well as official communications. Computers are also transforming standard testing work flows. Quest Diagnostics’ new laboratory in Marlborough, near Boston, integrates a clinical diag-nostic lab with an automated sample flow system. “It’s the heart of a 200,000-square-foot facility that opti-mizes how specimens are processed,” Gensler’s Chris Haynes explains. “Overall turnaround is faster, and the results can be delivered on a cloud-based platform, even to smartphones.” A 2-foot-high raised floor simplifies the way the IT network and lab utility infra-structure are deployed, allowing greater flexibility to accommodate changes in work flow or equipment. “It marries data management with the wet lab in an environment that facilitates this with mission critical–style robustness,” Haynes notes. This points to a trend, Wilhelms adds: “Healthcare is increasingly augmented by computers and analytical machines. For patients, this means very tailored, low-impact therapies in the future.” The Cleveland Clinic Data Center also supports a 24-hour, on-call nurse advice program. As Metcalf describes it, “Calls go through the data center and are routed to the appropriate nurse. Because nurses give medical advice, everything is recorded and stored.” Digitization also enables fortuitous, ad hoc responses, says Simon, citing the example of a physician on an overseas flight: “He used his iPhone to access the online health records of a very sick fellow passenger, diagnose the problem, and save the passenger’s life.”

personalized: healthcare’s next frontierAt the same time that large healthcare institutions are using data to better manage client health, “wearable” devices are growing more popular. They could soon deliver a constant stream of personal, health-related data. Devices to monitor diabetes and Parkinson’s in real time point to a new generation of personal prod- ucts that support healthcare management.

in the name of wellnessThe US Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated a switch to electronic health records, spurring health institutions to implement or deepen their use of computerized systems. With pre-existing conditions no longer an obstacle to healthcare insurance, the ACA makes medical privacy less of an issue, encouraging people to share health information in the name of wellness. The ACA’s incentives also support the push for more effective, less costly treatment—at a time when super-computers and Big Data are helping to deliver it. Electronic records improve the quality of care by removing the potential for lost or misplaced informa-tion, streamlining access to it by physicians and patients, and coordinating care by teams of providers in different locations. In the future, “your digital medical records will be like your bank account,” says Gensler’s Jackson Metcalf. “Insurance carriers and healthcare providers will give people a convenient way to share that data, like an ATM card or a digital wallet.” They will likely charge others outside their network a fee for doing so, he adds, as a way to pay for the data centers where they store and process the data. The convenience of sharing data is a competitive advantage for carriers and providers, but its importance is much broader. Leading medical centers like Cleveland Clinic use high-performance computers for medical research aimed at developing targeted gene-therapy treatments, and even predicting new diseases. “The goal is to aggregate and analyze the DNA profiles of tens of thousands of patients to find patterns that improve treatment outcomes,” Gensler’s Paul Wilhelms says. “If a set of genetic factors correlates with favorable out-comes, they can use these factors to design a tailored therapy for patients who fit that profile, reducing the time and risk associated with treatment.”

toward a faster diagnosis The Cleveland Clinic was the first medical center to apply Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, to medicine. “By compiling huge amounts of patient data, it reveals similarities that would normally escape notice,” Metcalf says. “It dramatically speeds up diagnosis.” Watson complements Cleveland Clinic’s Gensler-designed data center, he notes. “Medical researchers have highly specific, often unforeseen requirements for sensitive, power-intensive equipment. It’s much easier for Cleveland Clinic to recruit research-ers when they know their needs will be met. Its high-performance computing center ensures that.”

healthcare is being supported now by computers and analytical machines. the aim is low-impact, personalized therapies.


opposite: A concept for the walgreens Community Pharmacy. below: The Innovation Hub at Jump Simulation, OSF Healthcare System, Peoria, Il.

“Wearables and smartphones are affordable and widely used,” Bader observes. “The availability of data-driven healthcare, with a network of providers, will change the landscape.” MyQuest, a Quest Diagnostics app, gives patients 24/7 access to lab results, says Gensler’s Barbara Bouza. Walgreens is another front-runner, combining in-person and digital engagement to stay connected with its customers. One-third of Americans live within 3 miles of a Walgreens. “At the store, people can talk with a nurse practitioner as well as a pharmacist, and take care of everyday health needs, like shots and health screenings,” Bader says. “From their phones, people can get everything from reminders to take their medicine to access to a physician through WebMD.” The new Walgreens Community Pharmacy will extend healthcare to consumers. Convenience is a big factor—its proximity to customers compares favor-ably to public access hospitals offering critical care, which target patients within a 35-mile radius. Healthcare insurance carriers like Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield are also embracing a retail model to help their customers understand their coverage (or sign up for it) and educate themselves on wellness. “People know they have to take charge of their health, but they’re not always sure what to do,” Bader says. “By locating where its customers shop, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield can start that dialogue.”

toward “total person” healthcare“Integrating healthcare with retail is part of making it user-friendly,” says Gensler’s Tama Duffy Day, “but the push for personalized medicine is also transforming clinics and hospitals.” She points to the Tulsa Cancer Institute (TCI) as an example. TCI pairs advances in treatment with a conscious focus on patients as human beings whose lives are bigger than their disease. From a design standpoint, TCI combines many of the same strategies that make medical center data centers flexible with experiential ideas drawn from hospitality— hotels, resorts, and spas. Cancer care has changed dramatically, individual-izing treatment. “TCI’s clinicians see these changes in real time,” Day says. “They need incredible flexibility.” TCI has movable walls and a raised access floor, so updating equipment and introducing new treatments are easy. “From a patient perspective, the journey is thought out from start to finish,” she adds. “There’s no crowded waiting room. Instead, there’s constant visual relief—gardens, courtyards, and privacy. The Oklahoma prairie beyond them filters through the space.”

Transforming healthcare is just as important for medical centers. It’s led the OSF Healthcare System in Peoria to partner with University of Illinois engineers to develop The Innovation Hub at Jump Simulation, a collaborative center aimed at transforming healthcare by integrating data, analysis, treatment, and follow-up— tailored to the individual. On the R&D front, Texas Medical Center partnered with Houston’s Rice University and the University of Houston to develop TMCx, an accelerator focused on biomedical and medical technol-ogy breakthroughs. Northwestern Medicine’s Lake Forest Hospital, near Chicago, is planning to redevelop its 161-acre campus, including a replacement hospital, around consumer-driven concierge medicine. “We came up with ‘avatars’ of likely clients to understand how they will relate to the hospital and the campus emotionally and quali- tatively, so the healthcare experience works for them,” Day explains. The avatars reflect a range of potential clients, along with the people who might accompany them. They also include caregivers. Different scenarios help the Lake Forest team imagine how the new hos-pital and future campus will be experienced. Day gives the example of a pregnant woman who chooses to give birth at Lake Forest. The team uses the avatar to discuss every detail of her visits. This dialogue among healthcare providers and their planners and designers creates an experiential narrative around a particular patient type. When all of the avatar-based narratives are combined, it allows the team to envision how Lake Forest will be redesigned around a holistic approach to healthcare. “A holistic approach means that the campus, the hos-pital, and the caregivers are aligned—the healthcare settings as well as the technology that connects everyone and makes life easier and more convenient,” Day says. “It’s a ‘total person’ approach to healthcare delivery,” Bader adds. “Along with personalized treat-ment, it serves patients better because it’s focused on their individual experience.”

yukiko Bowman is a San Francisco–based writer for Metropolis and other publications. Edward keegan contributes to Architect from Chicago and has published three books.

innovations like wearables and real-time data give pharmacies a bigger role in healthcare.


The word resilience sparks thoughts of natural disasters. Three current Gensler projects show that it’s really about reviving and sustaining the qualities that make a place uniquely a place.

By alEC appElBaum

resilience as local revitalization“Planning at a community scale too often discounts the community itself,” says Peter Stubb. He and Elaine Asal were part of a Gensler team that worked with seven Southwest Baltimore neighbor-hoods to plan their revival. The effort stands apart from traditional planning projects in that it allowed residents in this disinvested and troubled corner of the city to serve as true cocreators. “It was about creating a resilient process, a malleable framework in which residents could find their own voice,” Asal says. The project was also unique in that the energy needed to drive it was already in place when Gensler arrived at the table. “The neighborhoods formed work-ing groups,” Asal explains. Each group explored such issues as commercial development, housing, and neighbor-hood preservation and branding. “It was

exciting for us to translate their work into more formal ideas.” The team met with working groups’ leaders to distill key issues, bolstering the groups’ findings with quantitative and qualitative data and urban design analysis. It kept different stakeholders in the loop and convened a series of public design workshops. The resulting Southwest Partnership Master Plan out-lines a set of design recommendations that build on a framework of “big ideas.” This socially focused approach to planning enabled all involved to under-stand the existing urban context better. It also spawned engagement strategies that helped the neighborhoods arrive at low-cost, targeted ways to revitalize. These efforts were key to ensuring that the different neighborhoods’ visions of their future aligned. “By involving every neighborhood, we got them involved

with each other. They came into the process with separate agendas, but then saw the need to connect,” Asal says. One of those engagement strategies was an “analog hackathon” in which members of the community brain-stormed what locally based projects and activities could be carried out quickly at a grassroots level. “The ideas put for-ward included adopting buildings that people would clean up on weekends; creating events around a circus perfor-mance; and tracing the history of a neighborhood and sharing it online and at local events,” Stubb notes. The seven neighborhoods are now forming a 501(c)(3) entity to carry out the master plan’s recommendations. Their willingness to invest time and energy in Southwest Baltimore despite its challenges speaks to and is predictive of its resilience.

While disasters grab headlines and set defensive agendas for resilience planning, they’re only part of the story. Resilience is also about strengthening communities economically and socially, as three Gensler projects illustrate. Baltimore’s resilience challenge is to jump-start local prosperity without harming community cohesion and pride. China’s yunnan province wants to balance economic and population growth with the need to preserve ample green space for agriculture, wildlife, and recreation. makkah is the focus of national efforts by Saudi Arabia to diversify its economy, provide jobs, and maintain a high standard of living. While environmental issues run through all three, their planners’ real focus is on resilience as future-proofing—ensuring that each community can thrive, but thrive on its own terms, specific to the place. Local engagement includes working with tradition to avoid or resolve conflicts. Nature is part of the existing context, along with other dimensions that make a community what it is. Gensler works with all of these issues to foster, channel, and sustain growth effectively.

The Southwest Partnership Master Plan, Baltimore, approaches revitalization one neighborhood at a time.

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space intact,” Ford explains. To accom-plish this, the Gensler team planned circulation, and defined development boundaries around the area’s strong but not always visible social anchors. “The air is great in Qujing,” Ford says. “It’s also a place where the older genera-tion lives with their families. Those ties matter and any redevelopment has to consider them. So wellness rose quickly to the surface. But spas and recupera-tive centers have broader appeal in China, with its aging population.” The everyday activities of an agrarian economy produce specific community settings, says Gensler’s See Chen Chang— “small places where people dry chili, spices, and corn, for example. Through our fieldwork, we realized that people value and maintain these spaces. They gather there during commmunal festivals and also as part of daily

life, so we’re making them part of any new development.” “China’s tendency is to see open land as ripe for development,” Ford says. “Napa Valley was once looked at simi- larly, but the community pushed back. Qujing’s valley is now at the same crossroads.” The team incorporated urban growth boundaries in the plan to help persuade local officials to see that the valley’s economy depends on it, he explains. “The amenity is already there,” says Ford. “The challenge is to keep new growth from encroaching on it. Contain-ing new growth preserves the valley and strengthens its communities.”

sustainable living at human scaleCarlos Cubillos and his team faced a blank slate as they developed a plan for an entirely new community, Makkah Techno Valley, focused on developing

the tech sector in Saudi Arabia. To attract the talent such a venture needs, the planners pressed the idea of sup-porting sustainable living at human scale. Urbanity in this context meant blending work and the rest of life, and making daily life more livable. To counter the intense summer heat and ensure year-round walkability, the planners wove in shading and breeze corridors, and created outdoor settings that provide storm drainage to mitigate sporadic floods. Walkability matters, Cubillos explains, because “innovation can take place anywhere. It doesn’t necessarily happen in a lab.” Several universities are active partners, with classrooms for knowledge transfer collocated with nascent businesses. Making the outdoor spaces in between them a feature of the new community resonated with students, Cubillos adds.

“It supports how they live and work, and speaks to their technological ambitions, but its roots are in the place and culture, which guide how people interact.” It will be a “town without gates” that invites people to collaborate—as they must to generate new ideas—without overstep-ping bounds. This meant making community life more intuitive, Cubillos notes. “The innovators have families, too, so tradi-tion is in play. So we proposed to let community happen in a more open way.” Separation is provided where it mat-ters, but this is not a walled town. “It’s designed to support the flow of people’s everyday lives in harmony with their society’s requirements,” he says.

resilience is as diverse as place itselfPlaces are markers for the intangibles that people really cherish: memory,

culture, and family, along with hopes for the future. When planners talk about resilience, they’re definitely thinking about natural events that are part of the unfolding history of a place—although potentially more problematic as popula-tions grow and people start living in environmental danger zones. But there’s more. “Resilience is also about making the connections that matter to a community durable under changing conditions,” Stubb explains. He and other Gensler planners tasked with promoting resilience find that a lot of reinforcement for place comes from steps to make that place more social. When people ask, “How can we keep things as they are?” they’re expressing apprehension about the unknowable future. The better questions to ask are, “What do you love about this place? What works well and what doesn’t?”

Resilience accepts a world that’s constantly in flux. How do you discover new truths and strengthen old ties and roots? It takes early and ongoing conversation, intensive efforts to build consensus, and a constant grounding of the new in each place’s nature and self-knowledge. These are planners’ tools of resilience—how they surface and burnish the behaviors and traditions that lead communities to invest their hopes in a place, whatever its challenges.

alec appelbaum teaches at Pratt Institute and writes for Fortune and the New York Times. He also teaches a climate-readiness curriculum for K–12 students, AllBeforeUs.

resilience as regional well-beingWhile the Baltimore planners focused on that city’s revitalization, their col-leagues in China faced the challenge of managing urban growth without creating sprawl. Shanghai-based Tom Ford says that Qujing, located in a fertile valley in Yunnan Province—the headwaters of the Pearl River—reminded him of California’s Napa Valley a generation ago. “Despite regional growth, Napa succeeded in preserving what makes it what it is: its vineyards and its beauty.” Qujing anchors a comparable area. Believing that resilience is achieved by reinforcing existing ties to land, culture, and family, Ford and his team aimed to bolster people’s health and wellness, as well as protect farming, recreation, and natural features. “The goal is to absorb new growth in a synergistic way, keeping families together and the green

ECO- FARMlANdSTRATEGIC USE OF THE NATURAl ENVIRONMENT

NATIONAlPARkGROwTH BOUNdARy AT MOUNTAIN AREAS

Preserve the natural features and scenic qualities while stimulating economic growth.

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Limited Development Area

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Implement planned activities without damaging the delicate ecosystem.

Integrate a health and wellness theme with the culture and climate.

The liaokuo Mountain Master Plan for Qujing, China, balances growth, community, and nature.

INCORPORATE HEAlTH

BENEFIT, NOT IMPACT

PROTECT, NOT ExPlOIT

Makkah Techno Valley spurs innovation in the context of Saudi Arabia’s climate and traditions.

THEMEVIllAGESCONTINUITy OF ExISTING VIllAGES & FARMlANd

lIAOkUO MOUNTAIN MASTER PlAN Qujing, yunnan Province, China

MAkkAH TECHNO VAllEy Makkah, Saudi Arabia


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s split dEcisionmuh-tay-Zik | hoF-FEr SAN FRANCISCO

The edgy office at 220 Sansome Street in San Francisco—home to advertising agency MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER—is a 7,000-square-foot testament to collaboration between client and designer. “I wanted to invent something I couldn’t think of,” explains John Matejczyk, the agency’s cofounder and creative director. “It all started with helping the Gensler team understand who we are—a creative mix of weirdos and adventuresome thinkers. But I wanted all that adventure to be sitting on a well-reasoned pedestal.” And the colors? “They come from our work and our people,” Matejczyk says. Distributed across the 15th and 16th floors of a high-ceilinged, 1920s building, the existing space was raw but striking, with steel trusses and concrete ceilings, floors, and walls. Gensler designers Collin Burry, Aishanie Marwah, and Howard Yao based their approach on an analogy of the two hemispheres of the brain—celebrating the contrast between the “white canvas” of the artistic mind with the “black suit” of the business mind. The work zones—including a 64-foot-long collaborative table with 32 workstations, private offices,

team tables, collaboration zones, and café—are rendered in white, while the more formal, client-focused spaces are black. “In their old office, people were spread out and chopped up,” said Burry. “They didn’t like that. The idea here was to put everyone at a long kitchen table, so to speak.” But there are also opportunities for people to find solitude upstairs or brainstorm with their team. They can also transform the space easily for client presentations. Within the pared-down color palette is a rich mélange of textures, furniture, and lighting fixtures. The cofounder’s wife, Lyn Matejczyk, combed through antiques shops and flea markets to assemble a collection that ranges from a kidskin loveseat to wicker ottomans—all refinished, reupholstered, and repainted. The communal worktable ensures a constant hum of collaboration, but Burry felt it was important to highlight the connection between the two floors with a “crazy blacked-out staircase” adorned with print ads and framed stills from the agency’s commercials. “Sometimes the biggest challenges create the biggest opportunities,” said Burry. “This design allows the agency and its work to keep evolving.”

total area: 7,000 sfFloor levels: 2Ceiling heights: 12 ft (15th floor) and 19 ft (16th)

katie tandy, a Bay Area–based writer, contributes to the Huffington Post, Design Bureau, and other websites.

By katiE tanDy

34

rootEd in placEEl palaCio DE hiErro QUERÉTARO, MExICO

Two hours north of Mexico City is Querétaro. As the capital of the most diverse of Mexican states, Querétaro is attracting investors with big plans for the historic colonial town. When Mexican retail chain El Palacio de Hierro asked Gensler to design a 300,000-square-foot luxury department store there, it set out to uncover the region’s DNA through site and field research. “The client wanted a deeply rooted, yet updated, more modern interpretation of Querétaro,” explains Gensler’s Michael Gatti, who led the New York–based team with assis-tance from Gensler’s office in Mexico City. To begin, Gensler created a story line that spoke compellingly to Querétaro’s varied landscape and rich spirit. “We took into account the characteristics inherent in the Palacio brand—that it’s authentic, natural, classic, and modern—and how those four ideas are manifest in Querétaro,” says design director Kate Russell. Gensler developed the story line with an eye toward Querétaro’s remarkable landscape, including a high desert, tropical forests, and lush jungle to the east, and dusty brown hills and tumbleweeds to the west. The team also

looked closely at the region’s native materials and took inspiration from influences such as its natural wellsprings. Collaborating with the building architect, Javier Sordo Madaleno, Gensler created a true indoor-outdoor effect. “The garden at the entrance extends into the building, while the building reaches out into the garden,” says Russell. Inside, each floor offers a different experience, with the journey beginning at ground level, mirroring Querétaro’s own rocky foundation. The tropical forest–inspired second level evokes the local climate and indigenous plant life. The third floor emulates a celestial experience, representing the night sky through ceiling and lighting treatments. The heart of the experi-ence is the central atrium and fountain, complete with water features and hand-cut marble forms that resemble river rock. “The Querétaro store is very popular,” says Antonio Caliz, head of Gensler’s Mexico City office. Following its opening, sales exceeded projections by 50 percent, reports Palacio Marketing Director Carlos Salcido. “It truly captures our DNA,” he adds. “It’s given our brand an exceptional head start in one of Mexico’s fastest-growing markets.”

total area: 300,000 sfnumber of departments: 40+age of retail chain: 125 years

aryn Beitz, a New York City–based writer, is pursuing her MFA degree in Communications Design at Pratt Institute.

By aryn BEitZ



groW your oWnour FounDEr WritEs a nEW Book

By stEphaniE shaCtEr

Formats: Print and e-bookto buy: Available from Amazon.comlearn more: www.artsprinciples.com

When Art Gensler spoke to fellow graduates of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in March, he noted how he’d come full circle—from being a student of great teachers to becoming a teacher himself. The occasion was the opening of the College’s new outpost at 26 Broadway in Manhattan. Art used it to unveil a work of his own, his new book, Art’s Principles. “I wrote it because I wish I’d had it when I ventured out to start my own firm,” Art said. “We need practitioners— in architecture and other fields—to understand the day-to-day realities of their profession in a business context.” Art’s book draws on his decades of experience as a giant in the design field. Coauthored with the educator Michael Lindenmayer, Art’s Principles is an accessible guide to growing a firm and building one’s own career. The book is peppered with real-life examples, and its wit is captured in illustrations by Gensler Principal Doug Wittnebel. Both help make Art’s Principles a memorable as well as a valuable read.

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Issue Editor

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lead designer

Ngoc Ngo

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Aryn Beitz

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See Chen Chang, Shanghai

Carlos Cubillos, Washington, DC

Tama Duffy Day, Chicago

Tim Etherington, Shanghai

Tom Ford, Shanghai

Michael Gatti, New York

Shawn Gehle, Los Angeles

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David Herjeczki, Los Angeles

William Hooper, Washington, DC

Julie Hutchison, Chicago

Patrick Magness, London

Kap Malik, Los Angeles

Aishanie Marwah, San Francisco

Brent Mather, Denver

Jackson Metcalf, Chicago

Melissa Mizell, San Francisco

Maria Nesdale, London

Patricia Nobre, Boston

Ty Osbaugh, Washington, DC

Kate Russell, New York

Jim Simon, New York

Peter Stubb, Baltimore

Mark Thaler, New York

Keith Thompson, Los Angeles

Betsy Vohs, Minneapolis

Paul Wilhelms, Houston

Howard Yao, San Francisco

Terence Young, Los Angeles

Gensler is a leading architecture, design,

planning, and consulting firm, with offices in

the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the

Middle East. Dialogue magazine focuses on

design’s ability to transform organizations and

improve people’s lives.

Dialogue issues and added content can be

found online at dialogue.gensler.com.

Individual articles also appear as features

on www.gensler.com (now iPad compatible).

Dialogue is produced twice a year by Gensler

Publications. © 2015 Gensler. To comment

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All images are credited to Gensler unless

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Tiago Chediak, courtesy of Lisa Phillips:

page 12

Ted Fahn: page 19 center left

Joe Fletcher: page 16 top; page 18

center right

Gensler/Ryan Gobuty: cover; pages 2–3;

page 4; page 7; page 21 bottom

Emily Hagopian: page 36 top

Roman Iwaisikwa/The Clark, courtesy of

Michael Conforti: page 13

Nic Lehoux: pages 16–17 top right

Maryland Historical Society: pages 28–29 top

Charlie Mayer: page 1 right; pages 34–35

Nick Merrick: pages 22–23; page 24

Matthew Millman: pages 16–17 bottom

Nacasa & Partners, Inc.: page 9 large image

Catherine Opie, courtesy of Michael Govan:

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Scott Pease: page 25 top and bottom

Pomona College, courtesy of Kathleen Howe:

page 15

Jasper Sanidad: page 1 far right; pages 32–33

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top right

Morley von Sternberg: page 8 top

Bill Timmerman: page 1 left; page 6; page 11

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