Public journal no 3

+ FALL 2014

CRAFTING AN ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITYTYIN Tegnestue

KRISTA DONALDSON ON D-REV AND SOCIAL IMPACT DESIGNInterview with nonprofit D-Rev’s CEO

REBUILD BY DESIGN: REEXAMINING RESILIENCEPUBLIC Journal asks the experts

FROM INTERESTTO IMPACT

Announces the launch of the

The go-to resource on design for a better world

Learn more atImpactDesignHub.org

IMPACT DESIGN HUB

Butaro Hospital in Rwanda by MASS Design Group. Photo by Iwan Baan.

impactdesignhub.org

NewsPublic interest design tidbits from around the world.

Business - Fourm Design StudioAn examination of a hybrid for-profit design office that provides nonprofit assistance. By Garrett Jacobs

Culture - TL MadeHelping San Francisco’s Tenderloin through design. By Andrew C. Goodwin

AIA - Resilience Energizes the AIA’s Philantropic EffortsThe AIA Foundation looks to demonstrate the value of architecture through actionable programs. By Andrew C. Goodwin

Editorial - When ‘Green’ Isn’t GoodIs resilience the new sustainability? By Katlhyn Kao

EventsA calender of conferences, seminars, and talks.

Gallery - Flight 93 National MemorialThe 9/11 memorial in Shanksville, PA., by Paul Murdoch Architects and Nelson, Byrd, Woltz Landscape Architects.

Behind The Scenes - TYIN tegnestueLyset Paa Lista. By TYIN tegnestue

Endnotes - Rapid Recovery Through Resilient DesignThe Washington National Cathedral. By Jacqueline Devereaux

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Read us online!Want more coverage on public interest design? Visit our website or download our app for more links to videos, interviews, etc. www.thisispublicjournal.comPublic Journal app available for Apple, Android, and Kindle devices.

Cover Image: The Big U, Rebuild by Design, p.60

TL Made

Rapid Recovery Through Resilient Design

DEPARTMENTSFALL 2014

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|3Fall 2014PUBLIC

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+ FALL 2014

CRAFTING AN ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITYTYIN Tegnestue

KRISTA DONALDSON ON D-REV AND SOCIAL IMPACT DESIGNInterview with nonprofit D-Rev’s CEO

REBUILD BY DESIGN: REEXAMINING RESILIENCEPUBLIC Journal asks the experts

TRY OUR NEW MOBILE

EDITION FOR FREE!

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CRAFTING AN ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITY What the burgeoning Norwegian firm TYIN tegnestue has learned since launching its humanitarian practice six years ago. By Katie Crepeau

E X C L U S I V E V I D E O S :I M P A C T D E S I G N H U BPUBLIC Journal features videos throughout its articles that you can view on the digital version of our magazine or by typing the links provided in your print copy.

REBUILD BY DESIGN: REEXAMINING RESILIENCEPUBLIC Journal asked a panel of experts to consider the winning proposals of the post-Hurricane Sandy competition. By Gilad Meron

KRISTA DONALDSON ON D-REV AND SOCIAL IMPACT DESIGNAn Interview with nonprofit D-Rev’s CEO.By John Cary

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|5Fall 2014PUBLIC

CONTRIBUTORSPUBLIC JOURNAL WOULD LIKE TO THANK THIS

ISSUE’S CONTRIBUTORS FOR THEIR DEDICATION.

PublisherMatthew Linden

Editor-in-ChiefAndrew C. Goodwin

Assistant EditorsBraulio Agnese

Nick Bilich

John Cary

Art DirectorMathieu Anfosso

Graphic DesignerTyler Thomas

Contributing WritersKatie Crepeau

Jacqueline L. Devereaux

Garrett Jacobs

Kathlyn Kao

Gilad Meron

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Copyright © 2014. PUBLIC Journal is published quarterly by ConsciousBuild, Inc., 1239 Garden Street, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401. No part of PUBLIC Journal may be reproduced in any form by any means without prior written consent from ConsciousBuild, Inc.

CONTACT

SUBMISSIONS LETTERS TO THE EDITORShare your thoughts with us by email at [email protected]. Letters may be edited for content and length and published in future issues or online on our blog.

PROJECTSDo you have a project that you think would be a wonderful addition to our content either online or in our quarterly journal? Send your ideas to [email protected]. Include your contact information so our team can get back to you about the project.

ARTICLESWe do not accept unsolicited articles. If you have an idea about an article, please send it to our editors with a brief description and writing samples of your previous work. You can reach our editors at [email protected].

SUBSCRIPTIONSEmail [email protected] if you have any questions about our subscription service. Subscribe to PUBLIC online at www.thisispublicjournal.com/subscribe. Allow six to eight weeks for the first issue to arrive.

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DIGITAL EDITIONPUBLIC Journal is available in a digital edition through an app that can be downloaded to iOS, Android and Kindle devices. Visit www.thisispublicjournal.com, scroll to the bottom of our homepage, and click on the appropriate button on the bottom right corner to download your free app now. You can purchase individual issues on our PUBLIC Journal app today.

KATHLYN KAO As a newly embossed New York inhabitant, Kathlyn Kao continues to pursue writing as a means to understand and explore the city. In this issue, she delves into Hurricane Sandy’s role as a catalyst for the ongoing sustainability vs. resiliency debate. She currently works at GRADE architects based in Manhattan and has just finished working with Do Ho Suh on his “Rubbing/Loving” project, exhibited at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea.

KATLHYN KAO JOHN CARY KATIE CREPEAU

JOHN CARY “Krista Donaldson and I didn’t exactly get off to a great start,” confides John Cary, when asked about the subject of his interview for this issue. The two met at an ironically elite convening on social impact design, but were among a chosen few only allowed to attend the closing session. “When I introduced myself as a writer, Krista dropped a pen and paper pad in front of me, volunteering me to be our table’s notetaker; I snapped back, saying that wasn’t exactly what I had flown across the country to do, not realizing she had as well.” Unexpectedly reintroduced by Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group just a few weeks later, they became fast friends. Following his adventures on Instagram, one could easily be confused where John Cary lives between running marathons and advising clients like TED, The Aspen Institute, and IDEO; like Donaldson, Cary lives in the Bay Area, along with his wife, author Courtney E. Martin, and their daughter, Maya.

KATIE CREPEAU An architect by training, Crepeau was drawn to writing in order to explore and share the evolving impact design movement around the world. After living in New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco, she relocated to London with her partner, a new adventure that has brought her in close touch with European architecture and design practices like TYIN tegnuste featured in “Crafting an Architecture of Necessity”.

GARRETT JACOBS As the son of a chef/party planner duo Garrett grew up around food and understands the importance of bringing people to the table. Receiving his education in post-Katrina New Orleans solidified Garrett’s commitment to improving the civic space by building networks of passion driven leaders. He applies his architectural design skills across fields and practices, noting that design is a transient mode of thought to be applied wherever one sees fit. Garrett currently manages a network of innovative public servants with Code for America by helping improve how government functions. In his spare time he can be found on his bike and aiding the volunteers of Architecture for Humanity.

JACQUELINE L. DEVEREAUX Jacqueline is an architect at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. which is an interdisciplinary firm specializing in delivering practical, innovative, and technically sound solutions across all areas of new and existing construction. She wrote “Rapid Recovery through Resilient Design” based on first-hand involvement in the surveying and development of repair drawings for the Washington National Cathedral following the August 2011 Virginia earthquake. “I have the utmost respect and feel truly honored to work on a building that maintains such a high degree of artistry, skill, and attention to detail throughout the height of the structure.”

GILAD MERON With a multidisciplinary background in design, research, graphic communication and environmental psychology, Gilad works as a strategist and researcher for various organizations in addition to writing on social impact design practices and design education. He believes design should be participatory and evidence-based, and leverages research and strategy projects to explore how design can be used to increase and improve civic engagement in our towns and cities.

Phot

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asi A

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JACQUELINE L. DEVEREAUXGILAD MERON GARRETT JACOBS

|7Fall 2014PUBLIC Fall 20146| PUBLIC

HUMANITY CAN BE AN UGLY THING. We are consistantly bombarded by images and news of war, disaster, murder, hatred, greed, and betrayal. But humanity’s propensity for good is a very powerful thing. It is the kindness that people show in the small moments of life that make all the difference. The movement of “resilience” in design tells me something about the goodness of humanity. Resilience shows me that people are paying more attention and showing the importance of helping others in times of struggle and disaster. This issue of PUBLIC demonstrates how resilience has impacted the world of design recently. Natural and man-made disasters have plagued our world of late. But more organizations are turning attention to help prepare a better future or prevent these disasters. We showcase the new resilience design studios program of the AIA Foundation. the winners of the Rebuild by Design competition, and the work of change-

making organizations like d-Rev and TYIN tegnestue, which are working to create a better world for those living in poverty. I believe that the key to a more resilient future lies in our communities. We must learn to love and work with one another. Being resilient does not just pertain to adapting to natural or man-made disasters. It means to adapt to any change and to recover quickly in every aspect of life. Recovery is not an easy thing, and it helps to have support. I encourage you to HELP and stand with one another in the face of life’s difficulties.

Andrew C. GoodwinEditor-in-Chief

WE ARE ALL PUBLIC. There is much good work being designed and built worldwide that PUBLIC Journal seeks to spotlight. Given the vast need, without attention being drawn to these efforts, the situation may seem hopeless. My intention with the creation of PUBLIC Journal is to bring a wider audience into this conversation. The more of us there are paying attention, the greater the chance that meaningful shelter projects and urban renewal concepts will get completed. That is my theory, in any case. I chose the name PUBLIC so that we could all feel a part of this conversation. These are matters of public concern, and unless and until we recognize that we all have a role to play in making our planet more liveable for everyone, then we may be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

There is much work to be done. Please join us: find a role that you can play, make a difference in your own community, create a project that inspires you, and help. We are all PUBLIC.

Matthew LindenFounder & Publisher

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Fall 20148| PUBLIC

AfH Names Eric Cesal as New Executive Director

NEWS FROM THE PAST QUARTER. PROVIDED BY IMPACTDESIGNHUB.ORG,

AN EVOLVING RESOURCE OF THE AUTODESK FOUNDATION.

“What originally started out as a couple of guys who created something to help one child in need, has grown into a worldwide movement of over 300 volunteer tinkerers, engineers, 3D print enthusiasts, occupational therapists, university professors, designers, parents, families, artists, students, teachers and people who just want to make a difference.” This is the story behind e-NABLE, a volunteer-led collaboration that develops, fabricates, and distributes low-cost 3D printed prosthetics to people with upper limb differences. The Autodesk

e-NABLE Gives the World a ‘Helping Hand’

Foundation is supporting this 3D mechanical hand maker movement with donated copies of the Inventor software through the Tech Impact program to help e-NABLE develop, test, and distribute a new generation of prosthetics. Jon Shull, founder of e-NABLE, shared this about the collaboration with Autodesk: “These days, the road from good intentions to effective action is paved with tools for design and collaboration. By making it easy and fun for volunteers to provide enabling technologies to underserved populations, e-NABLE and Autodesk can make a real difference.”

07.16

Architecture for Humanity announced long-time employee Eric Cesal as the organization’s new executive director to replace founding executive director Cameron Sinclair. Since first joining AfH in 2006 as a volunteer on the Katrina reconstruction program, Cesal has grown into leadership positions, namely with the Haiti Rebuilding Center and AfH’s global disaster operations. Along with design and building experience, Cesal has written about the intersections between humanitarianism and design and is best known for the 2010 memoir/manifesto Down Detour Road: An Architect in Search of Practice. With a refined focus on disaster reconstruction, active spaces, community resilience, and education spaces, the future of Architecture for Humanity with Cesal at the helm remains bright: “We will not be an organization that only responds to crisis and misfortune. We will be an organization that prevents crisis and misfortune. We will continue to stand on the side of communities that have been harmed by extreme weather, crisis and neglect. However, we will expand our focus to include communities at risk from harm, and help them strengthen against future calamities.”

06.13

+ NEWS

The nonprofit Make It Right – best known for building homes in New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina and, not to mention, founder - actor Brad Pitt - announced a new project in partnership with the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes of Fort Peck, Mont. The project entails building 20 Cradle to Cradle-inspired, LEED Platinum homes for tribe members in need of housing along with developing a master plan for the entire reservation, which is home to nearly 7,000 people. Make It Right has partnered with architects from Architecture for Humanity, Graft, Living Homes, Method Homes,

Make It Right Announces Montana Project 06.25

HomelessFonts.org Dignifies Through Individuality

An Upworthy.com post on the HomelessFonts project created by the Arrels Foundation made us stop in our tracks. The stunning video tells the stories of each contributor – Loraine, Luis, Francisco, Gemma, and Guillermo – to the font project, a collection of handwritten typefaces that not only support homeless people in Barcelona but also recognize the uniqueness and creativity of these individuals living on the street. This is one of the most dignifying projects we’ve seen in a long time. HomelessFonts is an Arrels Foundation initiative which consists of creating a collection of typefaces based on the handwriting of the homeless. The idea behind these typefaces is for people and brands to use them in their annoucements. All profits are intended to help the 1,400 people supported by the Arrels Foundation.

07.17

Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, and William McDonough + Partners and low-income homeownership experts from Neighborworks America to develop five home designs, which are set to be built this year. Enterprise Rose Fellow Joseph Kunkel, who is working with the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative, spoke with Inhabitat about the project: “As a tribal designer working in Indian Country, I feel we have an obligation to design and build housing that is tied to the culture, community and place of Fort Peck. We’re excited about the potential impact this project may offer the Assiniboine and Sioux community, along with provide a national precedent for Indian Housing nationwide.”

Watch! HomelessFonts

vimeo.com/96064485


The six-year project to complete 20 Football for Hope Centres has come to completion for Architecture for Humanity. In 2008, AfH joined forces with streetfootballworld to build 20 community centres in 15 African countries to address education and public health issues by using football as a tool for social development. Working hand in hand with teams of local consultants and designers, AfH developed unique designs to fit the local context and needs of the

local community. With the completion of all centres, over 20,215 children are now actively involved in sports and after school programs where they can safely play, socialize, and learn in their community. AfH Regional Program Manager Darren Gill had this to say about the impact of the program: “Football For Hope creates positive social legacy from the world’s favorite sport by breaking down social barriers and training the next generation. The unique design approach to every centre in our program allowed each community to integrate their own identity, which may be the greatest asset in the years to come. I sincerely hope others can learn from these successes and hopefully replicate similar programs in the future.”

AfH Completes 20 Football for Hope Centres

IDEO.org Announces 2015 Class of Global Fellows

07.25

07.11

Human centered design nonprofit IDEO.have announced four diverse and dynamic Global Fellows who will be joining the 2015 cohort. Hailing from Malawi, Ireland, Indiana, and the UK, the fellows – William Kamkwamba, Rebecca Hope, Jessie Wild, and John Collery – were selected from a pool of 656 applications. With experience in global health, entrepreneurship, network building, and invention, this group will work, learn, grow and innovate together to make the world a better place.

org

The 2014 Design Futures Student Forum united 60 young designers and 20 public interest design leaders from across the U.S. and around the world for a five-day intensive “school” experience at the Tulane School of Architecture in New Orleans. From in-depth, three-hour courses, to evenings indulging in New Orleans’ rich culture, this unique

“un-conference” fostered new insights, learnings, and connections amongst attendees. Industrial design student Mauricio Urueña shares his thoughts and takeaways from his experience: “In early-June, I had the chance to participate in the Design Futures Student Forum hosted by Tulane University in New Orleans, thanks to

Design Future is Social 07.08

one of four full-ride scholarships made available through the Autodesk Foundation. As a Master of Industrial Design student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, it was an incredible opportunity for me to meet students, professors, and professionals who share my passion and enthusiasm for public interest design. Nearly a month later, one of the ideas that sticks in my head is a quote from Thomas Jefferson, which Tulane professor Maurice Cox shared during one of the sessions: ‘Design activity and political thought are indivisible.’ Growing up in Colombia, I view political activity as something inherently social, which led me to an ‘a-ha moment’: design is inherently social. I heard – and experienced – this idea throughout the conference.”

FOR DAILY NEWS ABOUT THE FIELD, VISIT IMPACTDESIGNHUB.ORG

Architect and writer Rennie Jones recently showcased “9 Women Who Are Rocking Public Interest Design” in Architizer. We were thrilled to see familiar practitioners here on PublicInterestDesign.org – Emily Pilloton, Julia King, Erinn McGurn, Ceara O’Leary,Liz Ogbu, Marika Shioiri-Clark, Emilie Taylor, Chelina Odbert, and Deanna VanBuren – highlighted in a mainstream architecture news website. Along with the publicity, we hope the range of design initiatives and array of practice methods inspires more designers – men and women – to explore outside the bounds of traditional architecture and design practice: “Women are an inspiring presence in this sector of design and, in another trend that contrasts tradition, they are being recognized for it. There are many women (and men!) who put in the sweat and lack of sleep to establish the field, but here we will highlight nine of the next young guns.”

09.20

9 Women Who Are Rocking Public Interest Design

IDEO.org Announces 5 Funded ‘Amplify’ Ideas The Amplify Challenge on Women’s Safety announced five project teams who will receive seed funding and design support from IDEO.org. The program was conceived in collaboration with OpenIDEO and UK Department for International Development with the goal to bring a more human-centered approach to aid for people living in extreme poverty. Over the next 12 to 18 months, IDEO.org will work with the individuals and organizations from the five funded projects directly to support their efforts to launch, iterate on, and refine their pilots.

A Pop-Up Learning Center in Mumbai’s Red-Light District Creating a safe space in Mumbai’s red-light district – one of the city’s most marginalized communities – where girls learn life skills and become agents of social change. Life Skills Camp for Girls During School Holiday Breaks A series of structured life-skills camps held during school holiday breaks in Uganda that help girls avoid exploitation, build self-confidence, and explore their dreams for the future. Engaging Men in Urban Slums in the FightAgainst Gender-Based Violence A peer-to-peer education campaign to encourage men and boys in Kenya about preventing gender-based violence. The curriculum will be delivered through soccer clubs and other existing community initiatives.

“Community Concierge” Program Working together with an organization in Nepal, this project seeks to identify and train female leaders, who in turn provide information and guidance to other women in their community. Kidogo: Child Care Franchises in Urban Slums A “business-in-a-box” that helps women in Kenya launch their own in-home childcare business – providing a safe space for children in the community and steady employment for young mothers.

07.22


NEWS | Impact Design Hub

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PROMOTION

FUELED BY A PASSION FOR PEACE, A SMALL FIRM TACKLES INCARCERATION WITH DESIGN.

WHEN ARCHITECT DEANNA VAN BUREN returned to Oakland after six-plus years of working abroad, she struggled to find meaning not only in her own work, but within the broader architectural profession. An entrepreneurial, innovative spirit, Van Buren chose not to settle; instead, she tapped into her passions, articulated a mission, and got to work. Fourm Design Studio was founded on the principle that everyone deserves thoughtfully designed environments that nourish and sustain their lives. And Van Buren means everyone, from those experiencing a virtual space to those incarcerated in the vast U.S. prison network. Van Buren has broken down her approach into three personas: the Advocate, the Artist, and the Avatar. While each has overlapping qualities with the others, the Advocate is largely where Van Buren’s heart lies, especially in researching, teaching about, speaking on, and designing for “restorative justice.” The Artist is largely relegated to the design of gallery and commercial spaces, while the Avatar shows up in the design of virtual reality spaces. Although Van Buren’s hybrid model is still a work in progress, engaging all the personas throughout the creative and business process will help establish a sustainable practice.

FOURMDESIGNSTUDIO

Text: Garrett JacobsImage: Fourm Design Studio

+ BUSINESS

Above: DJDS San Bruno Jail with Anthony.

|15Fall 2014PUBLIC

DELIVERING A MISSION IN MANY WAYSADVOCATE As an innovative approach within the U.S.’s current adversarial trial-and-sentencing system, restorative justice embraces the potential to repair the victim’s, and possibly the perpetrator’s, troubles through facilitated discussions with all parties involved in a crime and possibly leading to alternative to incarceration punishments. Drawn to this practice because of its humble, empathetic approach, Van Buren began wondering what she, as a designer, could contribute. It turned out there were those working in restorative justice who believed that the physical spaces of criminal justice mattered very deeply, from courtrooms to prison cells. Van Buren eventually found sociologist Barb Toews, an adjunct professor at Bryn Mawr College who researches and teaches about social justice, and the two began a journey to create and implement a toolkit and curriculum for designers to work with the incarcerated prison population, that would explore the intersection between restorative justice and design. This is the first attempt in an iterative process that the team has tested for reenvisioning the spaces of incarceration in the US criminal justice system. Van Buren and Toews’ mission embraces three aspects. First, it materializes in the design of spaces for restorative justice conversations. It also builds creative healing power within incarcerated prisoners by facilitating design workshops for the prisoners to rethink the spaces involved in the sentencing process such as courtrooms, holding spaces, and prisons themselves. Finally, it is transmitted through tireless outreach and advocacy for design and its potential as a tool for social change.

AVATAR In support of the Advocate, Van Buren has adopted the mantra “it’s about what you say yes to.” So when a video game developer approached her about collaboration, Van Buren said yes. In collaboration with landscape architects Fletchers Studios, Van Buren is one of the first architectural designers to master plan a videogame environment and finds deep meaning in designing these virtual spaces. “When people are in the game, they’re actually going to be in a beautifully designed environment,” said Van Buren. “They might start to question what their physical world looks like. Can we start to influence visual literacy through the video game industry and raise our consciousness about design?”

ARTIST With virtual spaces and altruistically delivered justice design under their belt, why shouldn’t Fourm engage more traditional clients as well? Although these don’t pay nearly as well as the video garme industry, Fourm designers – Van Buren with one assistant – also express themselves by designing captivating spaces to increase foot traffic for art venues and clients who believe in design. To establish a small business, a person must be willing to do everything. Proof of concept is necessary before scaling up a mission-based practice, which unfortunately means that support from the architectural profession will be lacking, since much professional development is tailored to larger firms. Gaining a basic proficiency in business processes and budgeting, contracting, and client management tools is a requirement for staying afloat, and something Van Buren has done well. She brings to Fourm years of diverse experience, from designing furniture and small residences to working as a associate design director on medium- and large-scale mixed-use development projects in China, Australia, and Malaysia. “Working in a corporate setting taught me professionalism, how to take care of your clients and the importance of research for innovation,” said Van Buren. The combination of these experiences allows her to take on projects at any scale in support of Fourm’s mission-based efforts.

Currently, the firm’s work is a 50:50 split for public interest efforts and for-profit work, although Van Buren would prefer a 60:40 split. Profits from virtual and commercial design projects are reinvested to subsidize restorative justice workshops and research, but it’s not enough; Fourm still relies on grants and partnerships. Although the firm is building social capital, it remains difficult to unlock philanthropic funding because Fourm is a for-profit company. Fourm is researching alternative company tax structures like low-profit limited liability companies (LC3s) and funding sources such as social impact bonds from the public sector, but the firm is committed to remaining a for-profit venture. Van Buren believes that mission-based work should be compensated accordingly.

“We need to figure out how can we sell the things we’re making,” she said.

“I’m interested in doing well.” But before Van Buren can think about scaling up her firm, she needs to show that design can positively impact the success of restorative justice practices. Fourm is developing metrics to prove the success of its process. Once this evidenced-based design research can be demonstrated and restorative justice programs are adopted more commonly, Fourm and its partners will be able to make the case for more tax dollars to be allocated toward these efforts. The goal is to have this kind of work fully funded through tax dollars, in the end diverting money from the design and construction of prisons and other criminal justice infrastructure to facilities that support restorative justice and the reentry of prisoners into society.

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS Bringing the right people to the table can make or break a project. It’s important for Fourm to gather talented researchers, partners who understand the specific culture and politics of a place and a client that believes deeply in the work. The client can be a nonprofit, community group, or county or city government. Like many firms, Van Buren will also bring on a local architect of record for out of state projects. While it is important to note that although Fourm was established without a licensed architect, Van Buren believes the sustainability and growth of its efforts would benefit from having a licensed in-house architect, and is therefore currently working to complete her licensure. Van Buren understands the power of being in the room: she attends city council meetings and holds workshops with police departments, restorative justice practitioners, and city officials to plant the early seeds of change.

TAKING A RISK Advocating the power of design and its application in new and unexpected places will help diversify the architectural profession and sustain its growth. Honing in on a singular mission, as Fourm has done, will lead to the development of specific metrics that measure impact, and ultimately demonstrate how design, as a process, directly relates to, and can benefit many other professions and processes within our culture. There are numerous ways for humanitarian designers to focus their efforts, and plenty of room to avoid competition. New methods can be scrappy at the beginning. So what if it fails? As Van Buren put it “What’s the worst that can happen? I go live in my mom’s basement for a bit.” According to Van Buren, architects often “come in at the end of bad policy, and we try to keep up with them, then we realize that we’re running around after something that’s not working so well. That’s bad news.” Fiercely challenging this status quo, Van Buren believes that in the case of restorative justice, “the real challenge becomes: How do we design for peace?” In developing a sustainable mission-based practice, Fourm Design Studio is looking to answer this very question.

CHECK OUT THEIR WEBSITE!www.fourmdesignstudio.com

Fall 201416| PUBLIC

BUSINESS | Fourm Design Studio

“When you have such great pain you reach to numb it.

A broken leg will eventually heal and you can stop

taking the pain meds. But a broken life? It rarely heals

on its own. The need to medicate, placate, numb and

intoxicate never goes away. And that desire to remain

numb and temporarily pain-free supersedes the desire

to work, or be a present parent, or be legal, or even

go on with life.”—Emily Nelson,

beyondtheredchair.com

When friends are down on their luck, you lend a hand or loan some cash to help lessen the sting of their struggles. But when a metropolitan neighborhood of 37,000 people within a 35-square-block area is suffering day in and day out, the approach needs to be more systematic and sustainable. An engine must be created to ensure that the help that is given can be multiplied and spread throughout the community to counteract the cyclical destitution that results from ongoing struggles with violence, drug use, theft, and even prostitution. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district has confronted these and similar issues for decades and is considered the poorest, seediest part of the city. But now one organization is developing an economic engine to help this neighborhood. Social enterprise TL Made, which launched in 2013, is working with Tenderloin artists and designers to produce high-quality handcrafted products. TL Made exists to create a sustainable business for local residents in order to infuse the Tenderloin with jobs and tell the neighborhood’s story to the world. Tenderloin statistics read like something out of a sensational crime novel: the neighborhood is home to seven of San Francisco’s most violent areas; the annual crime rate is two incidents per resident and three major crimes per hour; and the neighborhood suffers more violent crimes every year than any other part of the city. Because of these facts as well as the general perception of the neighborhood, the cost of living remains low. There are 585 apartment buildings in the Tenderloin, largely

“single room occupancy” units in buildings marked as hotels. These rooms, which are sometimes no

bigger than 100 square feet, give many a place to sleep, but there are still more than 6,000 homeless that reside or pass through the Tenderloin on a daily basis. Whatever the cause of homelessness, it seems clear that the large number within the Tenderloin is also due to the number of charity organizations within the neighborhood. Lines go around the block for local soup kitchens and social service offices, and organizations like The Salvation Army, Raphael House (the first homeless shelter in the Tenderloin), and San Francisco City Impact have been around for decades to help people. But at some point you have to stop treating the patient and start treating the disease. This is where San Francisco City Impact found hope in the simple solution TL Made wants to implement: Give Tenderloin residents a job that matches their passion, love them and help them stay employed, and you will ultimately generate the hope and energy to end the struggles. TL Made started when Southern California native Amanda Phelps was introduced to Allen and Ayaka Lu by San Francisco City Impact’s executive director, Christian Huang. Phelps came to Huang in hopes of finding a way to showcase the creative talents of Tenderloin residents, who had no ability to leverage websites such as Etsy in order to build a vocation and generate income. Phelps had worked as a designer in the apparel industry and found herself in love with art and social justice. The Lus were also actively trying to use their skills in e-commerce, communications, and entrepreneurship to help marginalized in underprivileged communities. Allen Lu’s experience

Text: Andrew C. GoodwinImages: TL Made

AIDING THE TENDERLOIN THROUGH DESIGN

+ CULTURE

Top: TL Made’s team.

Bottom: TL Made’s scented candles, cards and T-shirts.

Next Page, Top: TL Made cards.

Next Page, Bottom: Al is a Leathersmith in the Tenderloin.

|19Fall 2014PUBLIC |19Fall 2014PUBLIC Fall 201418| PUBLIC

developing e-commerce brands for some large apparel companies was an added bonus to the couple’s passion for the people of the Tenderloin. Therefore, when Phelps met the Lus they saw the commonality of their goal and decided to create TL Made. Since its inception, TL Made has created an inventory of homemade candles and soaps, screen-printed shirts and linens, jewelry, and leatherwork, all of which is sold online. In addition to Phelps and the Lus, TL Made’s staff of three and TL’s handful of artists, including a 70-year-old leatherworker, have created a sense of hope within the neighborhood that seems contagious. The beauty of TL Made’s story is that all of the profits go back to the Tenderloin and the residents that work to make these products. TL Made has seen an explosion of interest from customers wanting to support the group’s efforts, and frequently it struggles to fill orders quickly enough. But this isn’t the only demand it can’t keep up with. In a conversation with Pushpa Samuel, TL Made’s social enterprise manager, Samuel mentioned the overwhelming number of requests from Tenderloin artists and artisans looking for work. It’s a conundrum: If demand increases and the workforce increases, then supply should increase. But two things stand in the way: an appropriately sized workshop and storefront, and a consistent volume of web sales.

Currently, TL Made’s workshop sits above the San Francisco City Impact thrift store, and an extremely large screen-printing press occupies about 75% of the floor space. The press has been an amazing addition and helped increase the production of t-shirts, but there is a definite lack of space for other artisans to work and display their handicrafts. TL Made also has found that the ebb and flow of web orders has not allowed them to keep people employed full-time. The group is now engaging in a concentrated push to market the website and advertise its potential to fill larger orders for everything TL Made sells. But until the organization finds a larger home, it will continue to pound the San Francisco pavement with pop-up booths at farmers markets and street fairs. “I think it is great to let people know what is going on, and that is the reason why we are driving all over the city doing pop-ups,” Samuel told PUBLIC. “Ideally, stores don’t need to do pop-ups, but we know this is the best way to get the word out. And it is not just to show people the handmade, high-quality products produced by artists in the Tenderloin, but also to have people say, ‘Oh, are there ways we can volunteer to help these people out?’” Offers to mentor people, create job profiles, and promote TL Made products are a regular occurrence at the organization’s pop-ups. Ultimately, TL Made’s mission is to transform

lives within the Tenderloin. Giving their artists an opportunity for job growth and prosperity is part of their enterprise. TL Made’s future seems bright, and the larger San Francisco community continues to offer praise and support for its mission. The next time you are in San Francisco, reach out to TL Made and help foster positive change by buying handcrafted, locally made products that not only inspire, but heal and sustain.

Fall 201420| PUBLIC Fall 201420| PUBLIC

CULTURE | TL Made

TL Made TLMade is a social enterprise centered on working with local Tenderloin resident artists and designers to create high-quality hand-crafted products for sale. We want to tell the stories of the Tenderloin through the products we create. 100% of our proceeds go back into serving the community through San Francisco City Impact. San Francisco City Impact SF City Impact is a holistic and comprehensive non-profit organization that provides services for all of the people in the inner city of San Francisco. We exist to intervene on behalf of the people in the inner city by providing a dining room, health and wellness center, food bank, leadership school, elementary school, adopt a building initiative, recovery home, four social enterprise businesses, and a volunteer center to equip and mobilize people to intervene on behalf of others.

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ResiliencE Energizes the AIA’s Philanthropic Efforts

NEWLY REBRANDED AND REFOCUSED, THE AIA FOUNDATION LOOKS TO “DEMONSTRATE THE VALUE OF ARCHITECTURE THROUGH ACTIONABLE PROGRAMS.”

Text: Andrew C. GoodwinImages: AIA Foundation

SINCE 2005, THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS (AIA) has maintained a philanthropic arm that many institute members have rarely understood or engaged with. Seemingly little more than a scholarship and grant provider, AIA Legacy had its ups and downs in the decade after it was launched but maintained that it was “dedicated to the belief that good design is good for all and plays an essential role in transforming lives and building a better world,” as the AIA website describes it. But now, in the midst of a nonprofit and pro bono design boom, the institute has reinvigorated and rebranded this arm as the AIA Foundation (AIAF). Just as the AIA is an advocate for architecture in the U.S., the AIAF is positioning itself to be the preeminent advocate for those demonstrating the value and impact of good design throughout the country and overseas. Beyond the nonprofit’s existing mission to be a steward of historic preservation (especially the AIA’s Octagon House in Washington, D.C.) and an administrator of the institute’s scholarship and educational programs, the AIAF is launching three new programs, each with initial five- to seven-year plans: design and health, research, and the national resilience program. The AIA has long focused on health through design and, through its biennial Latrobe Prize, research in architectural design and practice. Thus the national resilience program, with its goal of creating regional “resilience design studios,” is a new focus for both the AIA and the foundation, and the AIAF’s new leader and champion is well equipped to take on the challenge.

>>

From Left to Right: Sherry-Lea Bloodworth Botop, Belgian Governor Jan Briers, and AIA Foundation Board President George H. Miller.

+ AIA


TAKING THE REINS

Earlier this year, former AIA President and current AIA Foundation Board President George H. Miller, FAIA, named Sherry-Lea Bloodworth Botop as the AIAIF’s executive director. With impressive credentials in the nonprofit design and architecture arena, including director of strategic development at Architecture for Humanity, the New Orleans native had been active in the nonprofit fundraising arena for almost a decade before jumping into the role of architectural activist after Hurricane Katrina. When Bloodworth Botop says she has a passion for resilience and disaster relief, it comes from the most intimate place of her heart. She and her family were in a shelter when Hurricane Katrina hit. After the storm passed, she was one of the first to survey the damage and begin coordinating efforts to help thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi receive medical aid. In her coordinating efforts she met Kate Stohr of Architecture for Humanity, and within no time she was working with the organization, coordinating programs for the Gulf Coast, later rising to development director before departing to lead the AIAF. She also helped to lay the foundation for the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio with architect David Perkes. “My philosophy is ‘doing.’ Period,” said Bloodworth Botop when asked about taking the reins at AIAF. She believes that the foundation “is more about demonstrating the value of architecture through actionable programs. It is about doing things out in the public with partners that show communities the value of architecture.” At the AIAF, she has the chance to create something that can give back to the global community, as well as the architectural community. Resilience is the key to unlock this opportunity. For Bloodworth Botop, it’s about “integrating policy and change into disaster recovery and building in the value of the role of architects in that process.” Thus (and as an extension of her work with Architecture for Humanity) the National Resilience Initiative and the effort to launch regional resilience design studios with Architecture for Humanity and Public Architecture were born.

THE REGIONAL RESILIENCE DESIGN STUDIO

For the last decade, Bloodworth Botop has been trying to recreate the structure of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio elsewhere around the U.S. Now, with the AIAF, she has that opportunity, and she seeks to address complex code issues, threat issues, and sustainability through a program dedicated to good, affordable design. Bloodworth Botop is fueled in this endeavor by a plethora of good experiences, including her work on the Biloxi Model Home Project during her tenure at Architecture for Humanity. The goal of the Biloxi Model Home Project was to provide design services and financial assistance for the families of Biloxi, Miss., whose homes were destroyed

“It is about doing things out in the public with partners that show communities the value of architecture.”

in Hurricane Katrina. Through this program the reconstruction of hundreds of partially destroyed homes was initiated, and the team from the Gulf Coast was able to create a series of guidelines and standards to design and construct homes in the region. The AIAF, with Architecture for Humanity and Public Architecture, have created the National Resilience Initiative, which aims to launch five Regional Resilience Design Studios. The first regional resilient design studio was launched earlier this year with the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) Center for Resilient Design as one of several partners. Based in Newark, N.J., the studio will be focused on design and research starting with disaster recovery from areas hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. The AIAF is strategically positioning these resilient design studios in parts of the country with specific natural disaster needs. “It became very clear to me in working with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], and local community agencies that what we needed was a system in place that was clearly defined in a network of best practices of resilience,” Bloodworth Botop explained. “We plan to address issues in the region, learn from those issues, and share the lessons learned – as well as provide an opportunity for people to access our collective expertise.” Universities will partner with the AIAF on these regional resilience design studios, and the foundation aims to help develop curricula on resilient design that can become integrated into higher education. In working with these design studios, students will have the opportunity to gain experience, receive an education, and potentially receive debt relief for their student loans (once the National Design Services Act becomes law). But college students won’t be the only people learning something at these studios. Bloodworth Botop

>>

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If you are a member, check our website for more information at www.thisispublicjournal.com/aia

Opposite: The Octagon Building in Washington D.C.

Above: The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

AIA | Resilience Energizes the AIA’s Philanthropic Efforts

Fall 201426| PUBLIC

REGION TOTALS:

Pacific / Mountain StatesMidwestGulf / Southern CoastMid-Atlantic CoastNortheast Coast

AFH3017188353011392434

AIA853299203501574312080

PUBLIC ARCH434826266515701013

TOTAL15897144294682745215527

LEGEND:

- AFH Chapter Membership per City

- Participating Staff in 1% Firm Network per city

- AIA Component Membership per city

Number of members:

100 500 1,000

AIA Components per state:

0-500 500-1,000 1,000-5,000 5,000+

Below: Map of the AIA Foundation’s presence throughout the U.S.

believes that these studios will be a collective fountain of knowledge flowing from multiple professional organizations. “I see these as laboratories for producing work where we can integrate our combined knowledge through Public Architecture, Architecture for Humanity, and the AIA,” said Bloodworth Botop. These three organizations, which serve as strategic partners and sponsors for the resilience design studios, also have a membership that covers 90% of the architects in the U.S. Harnessing this combined knowledge will provide the nation with a very powerful engine in the fight to build a more resilient future.

LOOKING AHEAD

“The challenge to transform our cities to be more resilient for extreme events should be seen as an opportunity to make our cities better places to live from day to day. Integrated design is key to creating multiple benefits such as smarter land and energy use, improving infrastructure, creating local jobs, restoring natural habitat, making well-used and well-loved public spaces, and addressing environmental justice issues. The increasing public awareness of risk is an opportunity for all of us to make stronger and more livable cities.” So noted David Perkes of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. Statistics paint the picture of the risk of these extreme events, which many now confront as apportunity as Perkes points out. When we take hurricanes into consideration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated that 39% of the nation’s total population live in Coastal Counties in 2010. That number is close to 120 million people, and the population in these counties is rising. Therefore, we will always need to provide shelter and infrastructure in areas prone to hurricanes. There have been similar increases in the frequency of large earthquakes and tornadoes. Researchers like geophysicist Tom Parsons have found that unlike hurricanes, disasters like earthquakes can still be explained by random chance. “Basically, we can’t prove that what we saw during the first part of 2014, as well as since 2010, isn’t simply a similar thing to getting six tails in a row,” Parsons said, relating earthquake consistency to a coin flip. Therefore it isn’t a matter of just moving new or replacement communities away from disaster-prone areas. It is, more importantly, about how we construct future buildings and communities to be resilient to potential disasters. The AIAF’s resilience program is a response to a national need, because hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, and winter storms will continue to batter the U.S. “After Katrina, I knew we needed water, and we needed architects,” Bloodworth Botop said, articulating the important role that architects play in creating a more resilient world. The AIAF’s resilience program is far beyond the programs that AIA Legacy ran a few years ago. Although the results won’t be immediate, the intention and energy are clear and action-oriented. “My dream would be to spin off many of these studios in each region and help them stay there permanently,” said Bloodworth Botop. “On a federal level, we want HUD and FEMA to know architects are part of the solution. We want to become a point of contact post-disaster so we can give advice in the next steps.”

“We can integrate our combined knowledge through Public Architecture, Architecture for Humanity, and the AIA.”

WORKS CITED:- Becky Oskin. “Big Earthquakes double in 2014, but scientists say they’re not linked”July 1, 2014. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-earthquakes-double-in-2014-but-scientists-say-theyre-not-linked/- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Communities: The U.S. Population Living at the Coast” September 1, 2014. http://stateofthecoast.noaa.gov/population/welcome.html

AIA | Resilience Energizes the AIA’s Philanthropic Efforts

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WHEN ‘GREEN’ ISN’T GOOD

NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S NOV. 12, 2012, COVER, depicting New York City just days after Hurricane Sandy had churned through the Mid-Atlantic, featured an unforgettable image by architectural photographer Iwan Baan. Shot at night, Manhattan’s lower third is dark, the result of a massive power outage brought about by storm flooding. (Because it sits on higher ground, Battery Park City was spared and appears in the photo as a twinkling island amid the urban sea of blackness.) This is partly explained by sustainability. “ ‘After 9/11, Lower Manhattan contained the largest collection of LEED-

certified, green buildings in the world. But that was answering only part of the problem. The buildings were designed to generate lower environmental impacts, but not to respond to the impacts of the environment – for example, by having redundant power system”, said Jonathan Rose, urban planner and developer of Jonathan Rose Companies. The area was designed to be sustainable, not resilient. “Resilience” as a concept has started to gain public attention since Hurricane Sandy’s havoc. But within the architectural community, it’s being marketed like the newest iPhone; headlines such as

“Resilience Is the New ‘Green’“ or “Resilience: The New Sustainability” are everywhere. Though it doesn’t seem to have had the chance yet to prove itself a viable contender against climate change, has resilience already reached what sustainability connotes now? Fashionable, trendy ... perishable?

Text: Kathlyn KaoPhotos: Yuka Yoneda and Benjamin Hait-Campbell

QUESTIONS ABOUT WHETHER RESILIENCE IS THE NEW SUSTAINABILITY ARE MISSING THE POINT.

WHITHER SUSTAINABILITY?

Two years before Hurricane Sandy hit, the Museum of Modern Art showed Rising Currents, an exhibition that highlighted new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City’s coastline to respond to the impacts of climate change. It was an important display of issues and ideas, designed to revitalize discussion among officials, policy makers, and the general public about climate change and rising sea levels. And yet despite the exhibit, despite the disasters before and after it, the cumulative effect of which suggested that something was indeed amiss in the climate, it was not until May of this year that the U.S. unveiled a “historic” climate change plan that would cut U.S. carbon pollution by 25% — a number nowhere near the estimated 70%–80% cut in CO2 emissions needed to curb climate change.

Contemporary sustainability is about relieving symptoms, not

addressing causes.

+ EDITORIAL

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By and large, until now sustainability has been the prevailing strategy to defend against climate change. Though sustainability was originally defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, it has maintained an admirable, heroic stance of prevention for the last four decades.Sustainability’s basic agenda was to strive for equilibrium between the built environment and the natural world. Yet in the decades following significant policy reforms like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, sustainability’s once-relevant methodology to tackle climate change — identify an environmental problem, develop a technical remedy, and sell it to legislators and the AEC community — began to turn sour because of its restrictive nature and cause-effect obsession. Today’s concept of sustainability is encapsulated in Del Monte’s recent pitch for plastic-wrapped, unpeeled, single-serve bananas. The petroleum-based packaging was argued to be sustainable because the bananas would keep longer in vending machines, resulting in fewer deliveries and, therefore, lower gasoline usage. As Daily Show host Jon Stewart aptly noted, “What function does the bag serve that the peel does not currently serve? A product for people who love bananas but hate their biodegradability?” However absurd the Del Monte concept was, Stewart’s criticism was on point. Contemporary sustainability is no longer an appropriate strategy for risk mitigation against the climate crisis because it fails to create efficient, dynamic, systematic solutions for today’s globalized world. Instead, contemporary sustainability is about relieving symptoms, not addressing causes.

A FRAMEWORK IS SET

It wasn’t until after World War II that environmentalism grew in popularity as the public began to acknowledge the effects of environmental negligence and widespread air and water pollution. Environmental groups surfaced, and the nation saw a series of game-changing policy modifications that set the precedent of future environmental tactics. Policy-driven enterprises responded to such things as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which discussed how DDT was contributing to a declining bird population; a massive 1969 oil spill at an offshore well in California’s Santa Barbara Channel; and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus note in their 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” the dominant approach to environmental issues originates from the belief that change will occur at policy level. Thus the environment is separated from human identity, turned into a problem that can be controlled and contained.

“When we use the term ‘environment,’ it makes it seem as if the problem is ‘out there’ and we need to ‘fix it,’” says Susan Clark, executive director of the Columbia Foundation, in Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s essay. “The problem is not external to us; it’s us. It’s a human problem having to do with how we organize our society.” An example of environmental objectification can be found in the use of the color green. In 2012, STAR (Strategies and Architecture) released the satirical essay “O’Mighty Green,” which featured photos of iconic buildings and places, such as the Berlin Wall and Le Corbusieur’s Villa Savoye, altered to show them covered in plants. “If the Iconic buildings simply needed to be iconic, the Green buildings simply need to be green. ... Green as a function. Green allows sustainability to be bought per m2, or to be painted on, or glued on. Sustainability is a Photoshop filter in CS6: Ctrl+Green,” asserted STAR. “As if trying to heal cancer with aspirins, Green is the phenomenal formula that turns sustainable everything that it touches.” >>

Previous Spread: Flooding near Transmitter Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Left: The water had risen several feet.

Opposite: The damage from the storm.

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EDITORIAL | When “Green” Isn’t Good


The shift from “us versus the environment” to “us and the environment” is happening as resilience addresses issues ranging from personal health and well-being to economic woes to the rebuilding of New York City’s coastline.

Left: Ominous clouds looming over the city skyline.

Below: Choppy waters below the Statue of Liberty.

Yet could humanity possibly be included within that framework? Could poverty, famine, war, psychological trauma, and disease be considered environmental? Could our human fragility and mortality be considered environmental? In architecture, contemporary sustainable practice hasn’t strayed too far from the same restrictive definitions and cause-effect obsession that defines policy reform. Standards such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED outline proper methods of attacking specific environmental problems within the building industry. But it lacks the strength to tackle carbon and other emissions to a degree that most scientists believe is necessary for a worldwide reversal of climate change. Take, for instance, the dual-flush toilet. The logic is simple enough: to conserve water, produce water-efficient toilets. Yet even if every individual had a dual-flush toilet and was conscientious enough to use it properly, it seems unlikely that a technical fix such as this could create the kind of risk mitigation expected today.

“Programs that incentivize standards of sustainable building often understand environmental performance as a separate category, one that can be considered when the circumstances favor it — for instance, when the developer anticipates owning the building for long enough that the tax breaks will offset the capital expenses of energy efficient ethnology — and disregarded when they do not,”as was stated in C-Lab’s “Expanding Evironmentalism” article. This phenomenon is well described in MOS’s Afterparty, the winning entry for the 2009 PS1 Young Architects Competition, The design was a grouping of fuzzy conical towers. MOS described its installation as “the need to look for new promiscuities, new methods of design, after the party of a sort of high-formalism which has dominated academic discourse. In this particular case it’s with the basic structural arch and dome geometries, rough base materiality and the production of a totalizing ‘environment,’ (literally cooling down the courtyard through stack effect) looking towards a more primitive state of architecture.” What’s ironic here is that while the intended primary attraction of Afterparty was its high formalism, the public discussion doesn’t extend further than the towers’ functional, technical qualities, which aren’t really new or innovative sustainable tactics. Which is to say: Afterparty’s use of passive design strategies isn’t all that different from STAR’s O’Mighty Green parody. It is this reduction of design to meet standards of sustainability that reinforces ineffective sustainable habits, measured in incremental technical fixes, without prompting a more systematic rethinking of the relationship between building performance and the larger social and political contexts.

THE RISE OF RESILIENCE

Ecologist and environmental scientist C.S. Holling defines resilience as “the measure of the system’s capacity to withstand disturbance and assimilate waste.” Adaptation and recovery are both integral to this strategy — and, notably, absent in sustainability’s strategy of prevention. Unlike contemporary sustainability, in which the environment is so acutely defined that it almost becomes meaningless, resilience opens its arms to embrace multiple scales and profession beyond design, such as engineering, psychology, and economics, thereby making the environmental crisis more immediate. Already, the shift from “us versus the environment” to “us and the environment” is happening as resilience addresses issues ranging from personal health and well-being to economic woes to the rebuilding of New York City’s coastline. Compared with sustainability’s focus on lists and checkboxes and scores, resilience’s broad definition has the advantage of being flexible enough to encourage innovation and nontraditional practices, both of which are essential for city growth. According to the United Nations, over half of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and by 2050 that amount is expected to increase to 70%. This means a rise from 3.3 billion to 6.4 billion people living in urban areas. Yet beyond simply being centers of human density, cities are humankind’s most vulnerable artifact of diversity, innovation and industry. But growth without diversity can only lead to collapse. A perfect example of this is Detroit: Before Henry Ford showed up, Detroit had a population of 285,000; within a half century, thanks to the demands, and the success, of car manufacturers, it had become a metropolis of 2 million. But its eventual demise was caused by a complete dependence on a single kind of innovation. Lacking contending industries and other modes of innovation, Detroit’s rise and fall paralleled those of the automobile industry. In Matthew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy’s 2013 book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, city growth is described as dependent upon citizens’ ability to constantly innovate and reinvent themselves: “[Cities] provide a landscape that allows the spectrum of ideas to blossom. As the city grows, this makes it more and more multidimensional. Cities seem to open up: the spectrum

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of functionalities, job opportunities, connections, etc. that is the key to the vitality and the buzz of successful cities. It’s this densely packed distributed diversity that lends cities their ability to innovate when one economic or industrial wave crests, it ensures that there are always new groups jockeying to embraces the next wave, and different kinds of thinking and capacities that are ready to deal with the inevitable disruptions that ensue.” Take, for instance, the North Sea flood of 1953 in the Netherlands, in which 2,000 people died, the equivalent of 60,000 people in the U.S. today. At the time, as a below-sea-level nation, the Netherlands had dikes and other sea defenses to protect it against ocean threats, but after the flood, the country created the impressive Delta Works, a massive set of flood barriers, to protect itself. Since then, the Delta Works have performed well, but now, as rising sea levels become more and more worrisome, it is feared that the rigid infrastructure will not be able to accommodate the ever-rising water tables. Unfortunately, this is the truth for majority of cities that are located on or near the coast. Seawalls, docks, and levees may be something of a defense against water surges, but they were primarily built to be infrastructure for city commerce, and certainly not with our current climate

change crisis in mind. In an unfortunate bit of echoing, New York City’s own marshy coastlines were demarcated with seawalls created by the first Dutch colonists — and as seen with Hurricane Sandy, the city experienced the exact issue the Netherlands faced six decades earlier. Today, shorelines require a more flexible defense. Designers are trying to reinvent the city’s edges to not only refortify the needed seawalls, but also to incorporate secondary and tertiary defenses against potential disasters. The design team of ARO and dlandstudio was one of the five included in Rising Currents, which invited firms to rethink New York’s urban coastal landscape. Their approach incorporated the hard infrastructure of seawalls and the reintegration of New York’s native absorptive marshlands, creating a kind of Venetian waterway to mitigate rising sea levels. Four years later, there is progress on the actual implementation of such resilient systems. This year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $1 billion to be distributed among the six winners of the Rebuild by Design competition, launched in an effort to redesign New York and New Jersey coasts to deal with climate change. Among the winners is Bjarke Ingels Group, which has gained the most attention for its redesign of Lower

The problem of climate change can no longer be prevented.

Manhattan. Like ARO/dlandstudio, BIG’s proposal incorporates both hard and soft infrastructure. This year, for the first time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s annual report shifted its preventative language to terms of adaptation. The problem of climate change can no longer be prevented, as the bricklayers of the environmental movement had once hoped, four decades ago. Unfortunately, however, in its contemporary manifestation, sustainability’s results are not effective enough to confront issues of climate change and risk mitigation. But resilience can. By embracing both adaptation and recovery, it is embedded with tolerance for disaster and encourages flexible, dynamic systems to cope with such disasters. By no means is resilience the new sustainability. It is, instead, the next step after prevention has failed.

Opposite: The river is almost spilling over the banks.

Left: Parts of the Brooklyn waterfront were completely submerged.

WORKS CITED:- Iwan Baan. “New York Magazine” 2012.- Various Authors. “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront.” New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Print.- C-Lab. “Expanding Environmentalism” 2010. Volume 24: 64-65. Print.- Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. “The Death of Environmentalism” Editorial. The Breakthrough. N.p., 25 Feb. 2011.- Fridolin Simon Frand and Kurt Jax. “Ecology and Society: Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object.” 2007. The Resilience Alliance.- “UN Says Half the World’s Population Will Live in Urban Areas by End of 2008” 26 Feb. 2008. Internet Archive, The Associated Press.- Various Authors. “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: IPCC WGII AR5 Technical Summary” Rep. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 31 Mars 2014.- Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella. “The Resilient City: How Modern Cities recover from Disaster” 2005. New York: Oxford UP.- Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees. “Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.” 1996. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society. Print.- Bryan Walsh. “Sandy: What a Coastal U.S. Can Learn from Other Threatened Cities” TIME. N.p., 05 Nov. 2012.- Working Together to Build a More Resilient Region. “Working Together to Build a More Resilient Region Comments” N.p., n.d.- Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.” 2013. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Print.- Andrew Zolli. “Learning to Bounce Back.” 02 Nov. 2012. The New York Times.

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Krista Donaldson

ON D-REV AND SOCIAL

IMPACT DESIGN

INTERVIEW WITH NONPROFIT

D-REV’S CEO.

To usher in PUBLIC’s growing coverage of product and service design for the greater good, Asssistant Editor John Cary spoke recently with Krista Donaldson, CEO of D-Rev, a groundbreaking nonprofit technology organization uniquely focused on people living on less than $4 a day. Among many other associations and accolades, Donaldson is a lecturer at the Stanford d.school, was recognized among Fast Company’s 50 Designers Shaping the Future in 2013, and has spoken at top thought leadership events, like the Aspen Ideas Festival, Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, PopTech, and TED.

What were some early influences or experiences in your career? I’ve always been amazed how things are built, so product design and engineering rather naturally became my fields of study. (If you look around, everything is designed by an engineer, designer, or architect!) It was during my undergraduate years at Vanderbilt University that I was exposed to social justice and what it means to contribute to a community. It went beyond just volunteering: Working for better communities was instilled as a central part of one’s life. My mom was a social worker and my dad is a doctor, so this type of thinking was a natural fit. What wasn’t as clear to me early on was how to use engineering and design to serve the public good. When I was in university, there wasn’t yet Engineers Without Borders or opportunities of the type. And if you look at the lineage of engineering, there have been very few overt links between design and service. Historically, it’s been much more about technology than people. But why do professions exist in the first place? To serve people.

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Text, Interview: John CaryImages: D-Rev; portrait by Jason Madara

+ FEATURE

I went to Stanford for graduate school and found my tribe in product design. It was there that I first learned about the appropriate technology movement that started in the late 1960s. This was pre-Wikipedia, so I read everything I could about it in the library. It was mind blowing. It directly informed everything that I did after and was the basis for my Ph.D. research in mechanical engineering design at Stanford.

How did you translate that understanding into work opportunities? I had met Martin Fisher, co-founder, KickStart International, when he gave a talk at Stanford as a returning alum. After some convincing him that ApproTec — what KickStart was called then — needed an intern, I later moved to Kenya as their first engineering intern. KickStart takes a market-based approach to creating irrigation tools for small-scale farmers. Their work begs the question, “How can product design lift people out of poverty?” I see products as tools. It’s thus critical to understand the connection between products and the people using them. And it hinges on those users getting the product consistently, and with consistent high quality. In our line of work, if we screw up, we’re really hurting people, because they do not have disposable incomes. It’s not like here: When my iPad breaks, that’s not stopping me from putting food on the table. Living in Kenya during my tenure with KickStart, I saw so many failed big-money aid projects. For a great read, see Binyavanga Wainaina’s [Harper’s] piece “Pure Product,” from 2007; it is still relevant today. Even today, it’s as if poor people are the testing ground for sexy ideas from the West. So my career and D-Rev are laser-focused on people and what serves them best.

KickStart is a form of aid, but what about the bigger system of international aid? During my time working on the ground with aid recipients, one of the biggest frustrations was with the deployment and practices of foreign aid. Yet I realized I didn’t know a whole lot about aid as a system or even the larger motivations, so I decided to go into government. I knew good people go into aid to help, but I found most overcome by the system and bureaucracies. So much in aid is disconnected and siloed, even conflict and post-conflict aid, where you think there would be a well-thought-out continuum of strengthening systems to support creating economic independence. So I took special interest in post-conflict reconstruction and went to the U.S. Department of State as an American Association for the Advancement of Science diplomacy fellow focused on Iraq. The country was supposed to be post-conflict by the time of my arrival, but it wasn’t. I initially thought that U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would be leading reconstruction, but it had actually just been moved from the Department of Defense to the State Department. My job was basically to be a worker bee in the system trying to get, and keep, Iraq’s power system running. The big lesson for me was that reaching political goals for electricity reconstruction wasn’t necessarily aligned with understanding what people, the Iraqis, wanted. They want electricity. They wanted to have lights, air conditioners that turned on when they got home from work. The demand for power surged with new electronics coming in the country after the end of sanctions. If the U.S. government had focused on meeting demand, instead of arbitrary power generation metrics, security, an ultimate goal, could have been a lot better for everyone there. With electricity reconstruction, specifically, there wasn’t a lot of systems thinking, as in what happens between the power plants and the switch on someone’s wall. It reinforced, for me, that product development is not about the product, for example, the power plant or the water pump; it’s much bigger than the product. It’s about all of the things that go into the product, like fuel, and all the things that must happen for the product to solve a problem, like reaching the user and working the way it is supposed to. Today, I’m really happy that USAID is more deliberately recruiting engineers and scientists into government, bringing crucial technical expertise and understanding.

Above: Donaldson at Al Quds Power Plant near Baghdad.

Opposite, Top: Donaldson checking out Brilliance at a hospital in Chennai.

Opposite, Bottom: Brilliance in use in the Philippines.

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FEATURE | Interview with Krista Donaldson

Fall 201440| PUBLIC

“I see products as tools. It’s thus critical to understand the connection between products and the people using them.”

So what brought you to D-Rev? D-Rev was co-founded in 2007 by Kurt Kuhlmann and Paul Polak. I was recruited in 2009 by long-time D-Rev board member Jim Patell, founder of the d.school’s popular “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability” course. At the time, D-Rev was more or less a skunkworks with cool technical projects, but the projects weren’t really going anywhere. D-Rev had a lot of very technology-centric stuff, such as a low-cost microscope for diagnostics, a project that ultimately exemplified a need that existed, but one without demand. We think of these all as good failures because we learned from them. As an organization, we firmly believe in being transparent, so even projects that don’t go anywhere or we decide to kill are on our website.The one good thing that I did very early on at D-Rev was cancel projects. D-Rev is committed to developing products that serve needs and demand. Without demand, where is the accountability? There’s little requirement to deliver the value that users truly need if demand is ignored. I would like to see more projects in the sector canceled for not meeting user, system, and market requirements.

So what distinguishes D-Rev’s approach today? D-Rev operates on three big principles. The first is that we’re user-obsessed. I really believe in this. Most products have an array of users, so we map out that ecosystem of stakeholders,

the context, market, and price points. With most new product ideas trying to get traction, the user diligence process is too short and overly focused on the intended end users. Understanding all user needs takes time. For example, we spend a lot of resources understanding if and how users buy products, and we learn critical insights that dictate approaches. We’ve seen that clinics, even low-income ones, will often prefer to purchase a higher-priced product through a trusted local distributor, rather than directly online at a lower price. The reason: They want to have the confidence that they have access to maintenance support. The second principle is that our products need to be world-class. That means they must perform on par or better than the market. The prevailing thought in the aid world seems to be that a low-tech product is good enough for the poor. That doesn’t cut it for us, and it shouldn’t for others. Our third principle is that our model and products are market-driven. We determine a price point, based on user capacity, and then we design to that. It forces us to iterate. Only if there is demand can it scale to every user that needs it. This reality holds us accountable to our customers.

A distinguishing aspect of D-Rev seems to be its focus on impact. Tell us about that. We’re obsessed with impact. Unfortunately, the philanthropic sector doesn’t incentivize truly transparent impact assessment, which is critical for iteration. It’s often little more than, “Oh, you didn’t meet your targets.” We need much more depth to determine and understand impact.I love it when organizations post their impact data. The next thing I always wonder, though, is: Where do those numbers come from? And what do they really mean or indicate? Most impact assessment is still very old-school, resource-intensive, report-heavy, and not necessarily lean for startup organizations, like D-Rev. One notable tool exception is the Progress Out of Poverty Index, an initiative of the Grameen Foundation, which has short surveys focused on country-specific needs of the poor. I’m also enormously proud of D-Rev’s Impact Dashboards that have clear and up-to-date data and definitions. Impact informs everything we do. I’m very pragmatic about it. We are often pressured by the global health funders to do clinical trials, which are needed to test new products relative to the status quo. It’s a practice that I reject for most of our products, which are built on previously proven science, but more than anything because it often asks us to submit already vulnerable patients to sub-standard care.

Opposite: Agung - Bali.

Above: ReMotion Knee sketches.

|43Fall 2014PUBLIC


Fall 201442| PUBLIC

This type of work has many names: public interest design, social impact design, etc. What term most resonates with you and D-Rev? Design is design. We happen to be in the business of focusing on problems that are not traditionally profitable, but it’s still design. I like design for social impact, but isn’t that redundant? I also struggle with the labeling. It’s like the term

“developing country.” There’s no really good term — what makes a place “developing,” or

“developed”? — which is why we use frequently use the term “low-income regions.” One term that doesn’t resonate with me, however, is “resiliency,” at least from a product-

Above: Amputee being fitted for ReMotion Knee in Bali.

development standpoint. The intent is good, but it connotes a determined “sticking with it.” Instead, I see design as iterative, user-centered, and evolving, not eternal.

What do you see as the next frontier for the field? I’m excited about the next wave in design. If appropriate technology movement is the second wave, after Marshall Plan–style foreign aid, then the rise of social entrepreneurship, albeit more pragmatic/business focused, shifted toward user thinking. Now we are finally in a new phase focused on impact. I really believe that everyone’s intentions have been good and sincere along the

way, but in figuring out problems, a lot has gotten lost in the details and ideologies. Both for design for impact as a field and for us as an organization, I also see intellectual property as a huge issue. I want to emphasize that we protect our IP. We have to as a market-based organization, and I think it is critical for supporting scale and ensuring the highest quality products reach our customers. I also see lots of bright spots, particularly in global health. It’s not the traditional big groups on the stage, but instead small, highly effective user-centered groups, like Wild4Life, delivering high-quality healthcare in rural Zimbabwe, or Health in Harmony in remote Indonesia and Borneo.

Health in Harmony recognized that local people were cutting down the rainforest to pay for basic health services. By addressing people’s medical needs they enable the local population to protect the forest and local diversity.

What is going to get us there, to that brighter future where impact is front and center? I would love to see funders empowering grantees to take educated risks. I’d also love to see much greater accountability in the funding sector, tied to transparency in impact reporting and incentivizing iteration. I’d love to see investment in groups that are actually making a measurable impact, and not just generating a lot of press or great at writing proposals. If the impact isn’t clear or positive, then I want to see discussions about what was learned. The other thing that’s really needed is multiyear funding; product development and delivery doesn’t happen in a year. We have seen foundations abruptly change direction. Those changes are incredibly hard on organizations like ours. I also see a lot of entities, including bilateral aid programs, stuck in the first two waves of history: traditional foreign aid and technology-driven, instead of people-driven, innovation. They most often invest in consortiums and university research, even though we know that neither is structured to bring products to market or solutions to scale.

In closing, what would you say to someone just starting out in the field? D-Rev receives many requests for informational meetings with students in particular. We love the interest in the sector and try our best to respond to, encourage, and support everyone. What I tell students is to get involved with service projects at your school, in your community, in product development, but more importantly with impact assessment. Early-stage work of figuring out solutions has the appearance of being more fun and sexy, but I really think late-stage product development and impact assessment are where it’s at.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT D-REV’S WORK, VISIT www.d-rev.org AND WATCH KRISTA’S 2013

TED TALK AT ted.com

“ We happen to be in the business of focusing on

problems that are not traditionnally profitable,

but it’s still design.”



WHAT THE BURGEONING NORWEGIAN FIRM TYIN TEGNESTUE HAS LEARNED SINCE LAUNCHING ITS HUMANITARIAN PRACTICE SIX YEARS AGO.

THE LUSTROUS ENTRY HALL of the Student Society in Trondheim, with its stately, chevron-topped columns circling a dramatic, sparkling chandelier, seems an outlier in the portfolio of Norwegian architecture firm TYIN tegnestue, which has become known for dynamic, textured, and eclectic buildings around the world. However, this restoration project — a competition won and completed in 2007, during founders Yashar Hanstad and Andreas Grøntvedt Gjertsen’s third year of architecture school — set the philosophy behind the internationally acclaimed TYIN (pronounced “teen”) into motion. While restoring the 1920s Rundhallen (Student Society) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Hanstad and Gjertsen decided

they needed a change of scenery, so they bought a boat. Living on the hundred-year-old boat, named TYIN, in the frigid waters surrounding Trondheim, the young architecture students frequently aired their frustrations about spending a year improving a space that was in perfectly good shape. They stumbled on a comic strip that perfectly encapsulated how they felt: In the first and second scene, a seagull is shown apathetically flying in an open sky. Then the seagull realizes how bored it is. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” it shouts. “This is soooo boring!” After this realization, the seagull returns to cruising the sky, as in the first two scenes. To Hanstad and Gjertsen, the comic symbolized the cycle they wanted to escape: airing frustrations about meaningless actions but never making a change. So the architecture students made a pact never to work again on a project that, at the end of the day, made them scratch their heads and wonder why they were doing it.

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Text: Katie CrepeauImages: Pasi Aalto

+ FEATURE

CRAFTING AN ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITY

In 2008, Hanstad randomly began talking with a man named Ole Jørgen Edna at a gas station. Edna told him about an orphanage that he had built along the Thailand-Myanmar border and how he was in need of expanding it. Looking to fulfill this deep desire to take action on their pact, Hanstad told Gjertsen about the opportunity, which they decided to leap on. The pair decided to take a year off from university, packed their bags, and booked a flight to join Edna along the tropical Thailand-Myanmar border, taking the boat’s name, TYIN, with them as a reminder of their pact and the launch of their practice. The duo arrived in the small village of Noh Bo, Thailand, in the fall of 2008. Home to 2,000 Karen people who escaped decades of conflict in Myanmar, Hanstad and Gjertsen spent the first few weeks acclimating to the village life and meeting the residents of Noh Bo. They also spent time with Edna at the orphanage, meeting and playing with the children and observing how the children lived. Edna explained the need to expand the orphanage so within a few weeks of arriving, the newly founded TYIN tegnestue was presented

with its first project. Bringing on locals they had befriended, the pair, along with four fellow architecture students who arrived later, designed and constructed the Soe Ker Tie House, a set of six bamboo-and-wood sleeping huts, featuring butterfly roofs for natural ventilation, that could house 24 children. Although the huts are captivating and have appeared in numerous design magazines and books, the process and methods employed ended up being far more important than the structures themselves. “We made so many mistakes in that project,” said Hanstad, “but we’ve learned so much from it.” In one instance, Hanstad and Gjertsen decided to replicate a traditional Norwegian building technique — similar to stacked log walls built with thick, aged trees — in bamboo. They split the bamboo stalks in half and stacked them into a neatly aligned façade. The next day they returned to a warped, shrunken, cracked wall of bamboo, as well as a group of irritated Karen builders. One of the men thrust his machete through the wall, tearing it entirely off of the structure. At that moment, Hanstad and Gjertsen knew they needed the locals to show them how it could be done

“Listen more than you talk”

Previous Spread: Old Market Library. Space for quiet reading for a few in the study.

Opposite, Top Left: Rundhallen. After a building period of 12 months, the building re-opened in October 2007.

Opposite, Top Right: Rundhallen. Close-up of the wardrobe-system.

Opposite, Bottom: Soe Ker Tie House. A swing made from bamboo and natural rope gives hours of fun.

This Page: Soe Ker Tie House. Halfway through the project the main structures are in place.

FEATURE | Crafting an Architecture of Necessity

Fall 201448| PUBLIC

Top Left: Soe Ker Tie House. The area in the back with benches, swings, and spaces.

Above Left: Soe Ker Tie House. Experimenting with different ways to make windows. Airy, simple, and beautiful.

Above: Soe Ker Tie House. The six houses are placed at varying distance and angles to make different kinds of spaces for different kinds of activities.

better. Four days and truckloads of bamboo later, the Norwegians were presented with six huts wrapped in beautiful woven bamboo screens. This drove home the invaluable lesson of listening more than talking. “We have two ears and one mouth,” said Hanstad. “Listen more than you talk and you will be successful.” Along with learning locally appropriate building techniques, the fledgling architects felt the absence of the engineering safety net once structures began going up, so they called on professors back in Norway for advice on calculating loads. One offered a method that TYIN still employs to this day in areas without stringent building

codes: Get 10 people on top of the structure, and then shake it as hard as you can. If they don’t fall, then it’s safe. Despite the mistakes, the duo were able to do something that the vast majority of architecture students are not. “For the first time, our ideas on paper were becoming reality,” said Hanstad.

“Architecture was becoming 1:1 in scale. It was becoming heavy, and we were really feeling the dimensions, which was very new to us.” Six months after arriving in Thailand, Hanstad and Gjertsen had completed their first ground-up project in a place of their choice, for people that needed it.



With an injection of confidence from the Soe Ker Tie House, TYIN built three additional projects in Thailand over the next two years. The one that proved most impactful to the firm itself came through a partnership with Community Architects for Shelter and Environment (CASE), which taught TYIN about the value of community engagement and how to “leave more behind than the physical structure.” After working with fellow Norwegian students in a village near Noh Bo to complete the Safe Haven Bathhouse and the Safe Haven Library — the latter giving TYIN international recognition when it was named a 2009 Building of the Year by ArchDaily — Hanstad and Gjertsen set out for the dynamic urban environment of Bangkok, where they met CASE architect Kasama Yamtree. Yamtree, who was extremely well versed in participatory and community-led design in Bangkok’s slums, took them to the area of Min Buri. After observing Yamtree’s connections with the locals and thorough understanding of the neighborhood, Hanstad and Gjertsen decided to approach their fifth project by following in the footsteps of CASE. The pair dedicated five months solely to interviewing locals, conducting a variety of workshops, and gaining a comprehensive understanding of Min Buri in order to understand what TYIN could do, if anything at all. The result of their extensive community study was the Old Market Library, a small but powerful intervention that reenergized Min Buri’s old market location, which remained rundown from a fire in the late 1990s. Within a row of shops, a dingy, narrow space was transformed into a community library, offering up spaces to read, study, and escape to a serene patio along a small canal. Similar to previous projects, TYIN, CASE, and a group of dedicated locals sourced materials nearby, the majority of which were repurposed castoffs. People brought old wood planks to form the walls and ceilings, while CASE donated wooden boxes that were turned into bookshelves, all contributing to a warm and inviting space enhanced by richly textured natural materials and brightly colored accents. Over five months of community research, TYIN discovered the importance of actively involving locals throughout the process, from inception to maintenance. To gain trust and encourage participation early on, TYIN began with children, the easiest age group to engage. The initial workshops were simple: draw flowers and plants and watch the animated movie Ice Age. Hanstad

“Leave more behind than the physical structure ”

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Top: Old Market Library. Passing the Library there is a busy street with motorcycle-taxis,street vendors and kids running about. There is, however, still a great potential in the neighboring structures for more business and activity.

Middle: Old Market Library. View to the outside street from the main room in the library.

Bottom: Old Market Library. The kids in Min Buri community presenting sketch-models they made together.

Fall 201452| PUBLIC

The Architect’s Toolbox watercolors.

and Gjertsen incrementally introduced more complex drawing exercises and construction projects along the way, and by the end of the five months, the children were building models and designing structures, a way for them to communicate their hopes about having a place to gather with friends and do homework. The adults, however, were not as easy to engage. But over time and with enthusiasm from the children, they recognized the potential for a common space to not only transform the children’s experience in Min Buri but also their own. As the common space evolved to include places for them to have meetings, gather with neighbors, and read, the adults were just as eager to see the derelict space transformed. and wanted to see it completed. Once the project began construction, TYIN had a regular group of locals working alongside them every day, committed to seeing the project come to life. In the end, the local people most involved had developed an attachment to the library and a sense of achievement and pride in their work. This is what keeps the library functioning in the long-term, long after TYIN returned to Norway.

Fast-forward to 2012 and six projects after the Min Buri library, and TYIN releases the Architect’s Toolbox, a “mobile, sturdy, practical and simple to use” guide based on what they had learned in four years since starting their practice while simultaneously completing their architecture degree. In contrast to the usual architectural practice manual, which often focuses on checklists, project phasing, contract management, and scheduling (valuable information yet lacking in the human element of architecture), TYIN’s toolbox is both inspirational and practical, offering insights and suggestions on how to design an “architecture of necessity.” In 32 pages, TYIN uses simple watercolor images paired with a few sentences to quickly convey the firm’s methodology. When it comes to communication, TYIN suggests, “Don’t worry too much about language difficulties. Use the universal language of the drawing and be aware of your collaborators body language.” For hands-on

fieldwork, which TYIN frequently engages in, they recommend Antibac to stay clean and healthy while simultaneously noting, “Knowledge of basic sanitation is not available to all. Don’t confuse lack of education with respect for local culture and tradition.” One of the firm’s favorite tools is the white board: “White board drawings are immediate, changeable and intuitive. ... Only the strong ideas will survive the elusive quality of the white board.” A hammer, flashlight, handsaw, and first aid kit also appear in their toolbox, along with a mobile phone. Finally, TYIN always brings a laptop, which serves as a “sketchbook, telephone, cinema, encyclopedia, music machine, organizer, game center, day planner, dictionary, and internet provider.” However, they warn, “Don’t give the computer an unreasonable amount of credit; it will not make your design for you.” Working in remote places and showing up with no preconceived designs has forced TYIN to strip its architecture kit to the basics — essentially, everything you need can be carried in a backpack. Although TYIN is a young firm, the toolbox represents a fundamental look at how Hanstad and Gjertsen design, build, document, and share their work.

“Be precise, stay sharp, and cut the crap ! ”



After spending four years working in Thailand, Burma, Haiti, and Uganda, Hanstad and Gjertsen returned to Norway in the hopes of finding projects within and around their homeland. Linking up with university programs, they began by building a few small structures with architecture students through studio courses. As recent graduates, the duo was excited to take students out of the studio and get them building in the real world, as they had done only a few years prior. In the summer of 2013, the Porto Marghera exhibition in Venice was designed and built by 70 architecture students over 20 days using reclaimed timber from the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale’s Canadian pavilion. TYIN then partnered with NTNU for a design-build course closer to home. Using the methods learned in Bangkok, TYIN and 15 architecture students conducted workshops with children in Gran, Norway, to develop a project that encouraged walking and biking to school. A series of colorful huts were built along the main route to provide places for the children to meet while traveling between the school and their homes. In the fall of 2013, a group of 50 landowners in Lista, Norway, approached TYIN about realizing a project to draw attention to the area, which was dealing with a shrinking population. Invited to temporarily relocate to the area by the group’s enthusiastic leader Solveig Egeland, Hanstad, Gjertsen, and 14 architecture students from Mexico and Norway arrived empty-handed, with no specific project site chosen, no housing for project participants, no sponsors, and no government approval. It was truly a blank slate.

“Improve yourself through studying your own work”

As with previous TYIN projects, the entire community pitched in, providing shelter, food, and the materials and machinery to build. After speaking with Egeland’s group and witnessing the arresting landscape, the team identified an area with rolling sand dunes to showcase Lista’s wild, natural beauty, and conceived of a “lookout cabin” as an invitation for people to enjoy the view. As the design unfolded, the local government required that all materials used for the project had to be fully removable, meaning no concrete foundations. With this constraint, TYIN turned to a reliable and popular Scandinavian material:

wood. The entire structure — from foundation to roof — is constructed of wood and can be taken apart and removed when necessary. In a matter of three weeks, the design team and the community constructed a 60-meter wood pathway that winds its way across the rippled landscape to arrive at a warm wood cabin wrapped in reclaimed wood and an array of mismatched windows. Overjoyed with the structure that offers panoramic views of the southern tip of Norway, the locals have named it

“Lyset paa Lista” — the “Light of Lista” — referring to the “dazzling natural light unique to this area.”

This spread: Lyset paa Lista in Lista, Norway.



clients in a meaningful and manageable manner. But even if the firm itself isn’t growing, the transparency of process it presents and the information it provides allows others to learn from TYIN’s experience and spread the firm’s approach to architecture. Since its inception, TYIN has documented projects with fervor. Frequent collaborator Pasi Aalto beautifully photographs each one and provides them to Hanstad and Gjertsen for free. Timelapse videos, drawings, 3D models, reports, and project descriptions are easily accessed on the firm’s website. Further, Hanstad

Today, TYIN continues to build both in Norway and internationally, albeit at a deliberately slower pace. Although the question of scale and impact is a hot topic within the social impact design community, TYIN is not jumping on the bandwagon so quickly. With a new Trondheim performing arts venue under construction and another project kicking off in Brazil, Hanstad and Gjertsen are intentionally keeping their team of two and bringing on collaborators — students, peers, and locals — when appropriate. This affords them time to iterate and improve their process with their

and Gjertsen travel extensively around the world to give lectures, lead workshops, and share their work in exhibitions. The most magnetic aspect of TYIN is Hanstad and Gjertsen’s candidness. In front of a theater of students in Madrid, and without any hesitation, Hanstad described TYIN’s first projects as disasters. “We cannot go to an area and do a stunt for two weeks and then go home,” he said. “We shouldn’t glorify this idea of traveling somewhere and doing something quickly, because it will not be sustainable in the end. If you do a stunt, you do

it for your own good. If you’re doing it for yourself and to learn, then maybe do it. But know that it’s not sustainable.” They also speak openly about the fact that the projects that brought them notoriety were not financially feasible, pointing out that they used student loans used to pay for travel and materials. Since graduating from NTNU in 2010 and fully embedding themselves in practice, TYIN has come to understand the necessary aspects of an architectural practice. “Running a business is a very complex thing,” said Gjertsen. “We get quite a

lot of inquiries from students who want to do work with us. But I don’t think they realize how boring it is to run a company. It’s e-mails and accounting and a lot of administrative work. There’s so much under the surface of the structures we present that they seem quite boring, at least from the outside. But it’s important and it’s part of the work.” This kind of honesty, humility, and transparency that TYIN displays has the potential to shape the emerging field of socially orientated design.

vimeo.com/90755931

www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1736

ORGANIZATION TYIN tegnestue TEAM Yashar Hanstad, Andreas Grøntvedt GjertsenESTABLISHED 2008WEBSITE www.tyinarchitects.com

WORKS CITED- AASchol.ac.uk. “AA School of Architecture – Lectures Online.” 2012. www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1736- Basulto, David. “AD Interviews: Andreas G. Gjertsen / TYIN tegnestue” 12 May 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed 04 Sep 2014. www.archdaily.com/?p=505300- Hanstad, Yashar and Andreas Grøntvedt Gjertsen. “Lyset Paa Lista_Project Description.” 18 March 2014. Accessed 04 Sep 2014. www.tyinarchitects.com/downloads/- tyinarchitects.com. “TYIN tegnestue Architects.” 2014. www.tyinarchitects.com- vimeo.com. “The Architecture is Present_ TYIN.” 2014. vimeo.com/90755931

* Don’t forget to check out the “Behind The Scenes” Section on page 86 to see more details from the Lyset Paa Lista!

Watch! TYIN Lectures



AFTER HURRICANE SANDY, SOME OF THE BEST DESIGNERS IN THE WORLD SPENT A YEAR DEVELOPING NEW IDEAS FOR REBUILDING THE COMMUNITIES THAT HAD BEEN AFFECTED BY THE STORM. WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT RESILIENCE FROM THEIR PROPOSALS? PUBLIC JOURNAL PUT THE QUESTION TO A PANEL OF EXPERTS.

REBUILD BY DESIGN: REEXAMINING RESILIENCE

ON OCT. 29, 2012, at approximately 8:02 p.m. EST, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in Atlantic City, N.J. Two days earlier, the storm had hit Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, where residents reported just hours after Sandy passed that “everything is destroyed.” As it moved north over the next three days, the storm grew. By the time it touched down on the New Jersey shoreline, Sandy was more than 900 miles wide, making it the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The effects were devastating. In less than 36 hours it wreaked havoc in 24 states, killed 109 people, and left more than 6 million residents without power. The hurricane, which came to be known as “Superstorm Sandy,” ultimately caused nearly $68 billion in damages and losses, making it the second costliest storm in U.S. history (Hurricane Katrina totaled $108 billion). Less than six weeks later the U.S. government responded, and President Barak Obama issued an executive order establishing the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. In June 2013, the Task Force launched an unprecedented urban planning and design competition called Rebuild by Design.

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Rebuild by Design (RBD) was created to develop innovative and implementable proposals for rebuilding communities and fostering social, economic, and environmental resilience in the regions affected by Sandy. Amy Chester, RBD’s project manager, explained how the competition was unique: “We didn’t just send out an RFP and choose the best ideas. We spent a long time finding the right teams who were both interdisciplinary and highly experienced in resilience. ... Once we selected 10 final teams, we brought them all together, on the ground in the Sandy-affected region, and the first thing we said was, ‘OK, forget everything you think you know. We’re going to do research together.’” Following three months of on-the-ground research and community engagement, teams spent another nine months immersed in collaborative work sessions informed by an advisory board and a rotating cast of resilience experts. In June 2014, after more than a year of work, six winning proposals were announced. Each represents a unique approach to rebuilding and protecting against future storms that simultaneously incorporates economic development, ecological restoration, and public resources. The government allocated $930 million in total to the winning proposals, and although this may seem like a lot, each team had proposed a multi-billion-dollar project. To be sure, there is no way any of them are going to break ground soon. So what was the point? From the start, RBD was about generating ideas and moving the conversation about resilience forward on a national scale. It was about bringing together some of the best designers in the world and getting them to focus their expertise on developing innovative ideas around resilience and rebuilding. While some question whether the

“brand-name” firms in the competition, including the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), were necessarily the best qualified to be working on such crucial civic projects, it is important to recognize the unique value they provided: Such firms helped to bring tremendous visibility to resilience work within the design industry. For the hundreds of smaller, lesser-known design studios that look to Rem Koolhaas and Bjarke Ingels as trendsetters, and for the many thousands of students who dream of working at firms like OMA and BIG, RBD was a milestone in raising awareness about public interest design and the capacity for design to incorporate social, environmental, and economic outcomes. Overall, RBD was unquestionably an immensely valuable process, but what about the deliverables it produced? Did they accomplish the goal of developing innovative and implementable proposals

that foster social, economic, and environmental resilience? PUBLIC put the question to six resilience experts, each from a different field, in an effort to understand the competition and the winning proposals from a diversity of perspectives.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering: Sandra Knight, senior researcher in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland, director of the university’s Center for Disaster Resilience, and former deputy associate administrator for mitigation at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). • Coastal Geology and Restoration: Robert Young, professor of coastal geology and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.• Architecture and Disaster Relief Planning: David Perkes, founder and director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio and a former Loeb Fellow and White House Champion of Change.• Community Design and Public Engagement: Ceara O’Leary, Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow, designer at the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, and a former community designer at bcWORKSHOP.

• Construction and Real Estate Development: Mike Grote, director of building programs at Alembic Community Development, lecturer in sustainable real estate development at Tulane University, and a former program manager at Architecture for Humanity.• Environmental Sustainability and Coastal Resilience: Tim Beatley, chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, professor of sustainable communities, and the author of numerous books on resilience and environmental sustainability.

For the purposes of this article, PUBLIC has paraphrased many of the comments from these experts. While nearly all of the following content came from the collective expertise of the people we spoke with, the manner in which it is framed represents the author’s views, not necessarily those of our panel.

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Before analyzing proposals about resilience, however, it’s important to understand what, exactly, the word means. While there are many definitions, a few key elements of resilience are always the same, whether you’re talking about ecosystems, infrastructure, or people: (1) The ability to withstand. Is the system or entity strong enough to absorb an impact or built with sufficient flexibility to endure an impact? (2) The ability to rebound. Once affected by a disaster, how quickly can the system return to full strength and function at full capacity? (3) The ability to adapt. After a catastrophe, can the system be made more resilient and better equipped to handle the next disaster? (4) The amount of preparation. What new

elements are implemented in order to learn from past mistakes and avoid future disasters? These four elements — withstand, rebound, adapt, and prepare — constitute the core of what it means to be resilient. Although we tend to think of resilience in terms of physical infrastructure such as buildings, bridges, and roads, it is equally important to address it from social, economic, and ecological perspectives. Resilience means protecting homes and businesses, but it also means protecting access to healthcare, protecting local job stability, and protecting ecosystems. With this in mind, our experts helped analyze the six RBD proposals to explore the lessons and insights within each one.

RBD was a complex design challenge that focused on different geographic regions, each with a multitude of factors to address and variables to incorporate. As a result, the proposals are quite diverse, yet nearly all of the teams have offered plans that integrate social, economic, and environmental factors into their built forms. The New Meadowlands proposal exemplifies this approach. Integrating transportation, ecology, and development, the proposal states that it will transform northern New Jersey’s Meadowlands basin “to address a wide spectrum of risks, while providing civic amenities and creating opportunities for new redevelopment.” The project is rooted in the ecological restoration of the area, focusing on the strategic placement of berms, marshes, and ponds. These ecosystem-restoring features double as disaster-protection measures by offering physical protection from stormwater surges and natural catchment areas that will reduce stress on the sewage system during storms, making the area less susceptible to flooding. This strategic ecological restoration also includes public amenities through new parks and scenic recreational areas, as well as new transit lines to provide access, both of which, in turn, are projected to help raise economic value of the area and bring new jobs to surrounding neighborhoods. This integrative approach is present in nearly every winning proposal because it was essential. The strength and robustness of any plan for resilience is dependent on its level of interconnectivity. Redundancy through overlapping systems is a defining aspect of true resilience. It not only ensures multiple lines of defense during a crisis, but it also provides mutual benefits and sustained support for each system. The design teams showed that creating real resilience requires interconnected systems and approaches that incorporate multiple outcomes. In this case, the New Meadowlands proposal developed a way to restore ecology, provide public amenities, and catalyze economic development.

Integrative Approches Are Essential

NEW MEADOWLANDS: PRODUCTIVE CITY | REGIONAL PARK The Meadowlands, New JerseyTEAM MEMBERS: MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra DesignSUMMARY: The New Meadowlands project articulates an integrated vision for protecting, connecting, and growing this critical asset to both New Jersey and the metro politan area of New York. Integrating transportation, ecology, and development, the project transforms the Meadowlands basin to address a wide spectrum of risks, while providing civic amenities and creating opportunities for new redevelopment.WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/mit-cau-zus-urbanisten-final-proposal/#details

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Although this type of integrative approach is essential, our experts in real estate development and civil engineering raised questions about flood-risk reduction and incentivized behavior. Could some of the proposals actually encourage more risky development? Similar to the New Meadowlands proposal, the Living With the Bay proposal details a number of highly integrated approaches to rebuilding areas of Nassau County, N.Y.’s South Shore, an area that was hit particularly hard by Hurricane Sandy. Although the proposal is highly strategic and expertly addresses ways to rebuild the area, it raises larger questions about whether those major infrastructural improvements will actually invite increased real estate development in an already risky and dangerous area. If we continue to make infrastructure larger and more robust, what is the message we’re sending to residents about the risks of living in that region? Critics and community advocates argue that it would be unjust to tell residents they have to leave their homes and relocate, so what are the options? Our civil engineering expert explained that it goes beyond the physical design of space:

“A key mechanism in protection against future storms are land-use policies and building codes. They are the true long game. It’s imperative that in high-risk areas we make it a legal requirement for developers build to higher standards. But

even then, it’s important to remember that there is always a limit to how resilient a building can be. There should also be new land-use policies implemented that actually prohibit development in risky areas. We should not be afraid to say certain areas are simply too dangerous to rebuild.” Other areas, however, are simply too valuable not to rebuild — or, more accurately, too valuable not to protect. The Hunts Point Lifelines proposal is a prime example of this. Hunts Point is a major hub for the New York and New Jersey food distribution industry; not only is it a critical link in the food supply chain for 22 million people, but it’s also an employer of more than 20,000. While those jobs are all critical for food distribution distribution, they also necessitate a high volume of truck traffic in the community, which leads to increased air pollution, higher asthma rates for locals, and more dangerous roads for pedestrians and children. The Hunts Point Lifelines proposal integrates a number of key features to address these pressing challenges. The proposed “Cleanways” would improve air quality, provide greater safety for pedestrians, and reduce costs for businesses owners by expediting transit at critical points. Similarly, the proposal for the construction of a massive “Levee Lab” functions to protect local business from future floods, provide new public space amenities, and help stabilize the ecology of Hunts Point. As with the Living With the Bay

Proposal, though, it’s important to take a step back and look at some of the larger challenges. To be sure, protecting the food distribution industry is absolutely critical, but so is addressing broader socioeconomic resilience. Hunts Point is part of the poorest congressional district in the country; in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of that district’s population lived below the poverty line, and it suffered from a 60% unemployment rate. These statistics help provide a broader perspective on what is most needed in Hunts Point: job training and new employment opportunities. Protecting the safety of Hunts Point because of its status in the food-supply chain is essential, but creating real resilience means more than protecting the environment and the local economy. It also means helping sustain the individuals and families in the community so that they can withstand the financial burden of future natural disasters. Resilience is dependent on interconnectivity of systems — physical and environmental systems just as much as social and economic ones, and not only at the regional scale, but also at the scale of families and individuals.

Major Infrastructure Invites Major Development

LIVING WITH THE BAY: A COMPREHENSIVE REGIONAL RESILIENCY PLAN FOR NASSAU COUNTY’S SOUTH SHORE: Long Island, New YorkTEAM MEMBERS: Interboro / Apex / Bosch Slabbers / Deltares / H+N+S / Palmbout / IMG Rebel with Center for Urban Pedagogy, David Rusk, NJIT Infrastructure Planning Program, Project Projects, RFA Investments, TU DelftSUMMARY: How do we keep Long Islanders safe in the face of future extreme weather events and sea-level rise? How do we ensure that the next big storm won’t be as devastating to the region as Sandy? And what can we do to improve the water quality and quality of life in the region? What can we do to make “bay life” safer, healthier, more fun, and more accessible? WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/interboro-team-final-proposal/

HUNTS POINT LIFELINESBronx, New YorkTEAM MEMBERS: PennDesign / OLIN with HR&A Advisors, eDesign Dynamics, Level Infrastructure, Barretto Bay Strategies, McLaren Engineering Group, Philip Habib & Associates, Buro HappoldSUMMARY: The 1-square mile of Hunts Point peninsula is the intersection of the local and the regional in rebuilding by design. What’s at risk in Hunts Point is the hub of the food supply for 22 million people, a $5 billion annual economy, over 20,000 direct jobs, and livelihoods of people in the poorest U.S. Congressional District. HUNTS POINT LIFELINES builds on assets and opportunities of regional importance, and a coalition of national leaders in community environmental action, business and labor, to create a working model of social, economic and physical resilience. The project demonstrates a model of WORKING WATERFRONT + WORKING COMMUNITY + WORKING ECOLOGY that applies in maritime industrial areas across the region.WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/penndesignolin-final-proposal/#details

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but there are specific low-lying areas that are particularly vulnerable to flooding. We should be realistic about the dangers of rebuilding in such places. Going back to the principles of resilience — withstand, rebound, adapt, prepare — we know that interconnected systems can help mitigate risk in vulnerable areas. The Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge team addressed this directly through its four-pronged approach. The proposal focuses on Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken in New Jersey, all of which are highly susceptible to both flash floods and storm surges. Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge integrates hard infrastructure (walls, levees, and barriers) to block storm surges at critical locations and soft infrastructure (parks, green roofs, and bioswales) to absorb and retain water overflows to reduce flooding, all supplemented with policy recommendations that prepare for future urban infrastructure to be more resilient. In addition, many of these features double as public spaces and amenities for local communities, which in turn will help raise the area’s economic value and provide healthier urban environments for all.

For RBD, the vast majority of resilience planning was designed to keep communities and shorelines in place, but make them less vulnerable and more capable of surviving future storms. That is an excellent approach for the near future, but as our expert in coastal geology pointed out, “Rebuilding in vulnerable areas will be a loser in the long run. We need to seriously consider the ramifications of rebuilding in the places that we know are going to be destroyed again.” This raises essential questions about what “long-term planning” really means. Looked at from this perspective, RBD’s winning proposals appear to only showcase a certain kind of solution, one rooted in rebuilding, which in some cases is inherently shortsighted. This is not to say that we should simply abandon every area that was affected by Hurricane Sandy,

RESIST, DELAY, STORE, DISCHARGE: A COMPREHENSIVE STRATEGY FOR HOBOKENHoboken, New JerseyTEAM MEMBERS: OMA with Royal HaskoningDHV; Balmori Associates; and HR&A AdvisorsSUMMARY: Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken are susceptible to both flash flood and storm surge. As integrated urban environments, discreet one-house-at-a-time solutions do not make sense. What is required is a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the density and complexity of the context, galvanizes a diverse community of beneficiaries, and defends the entire city, its assets and citizens. WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/oma-final-proposal/#details

What Does Long-Term Really Mean?

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While this approach is highly integrative and represents great strategic planning to both avoid and mitigate the damages caused by storms, it ultimately relies heavily on hard infrastructure, on physical barriers designed to block or barricade against a storm. There is a long history within both the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA of investing in hard infrastructure as flood prevention, but the prevailing knowledge is changing that. Our experts in architecture, coastal geology, and construction agreed that these hard infrastructural approaches are fundamentally flawed, both physically and philosophically. Physically, building walls is simply not the answer. We know from countless disasters that no matter how strong a wall or levee might be, inevitably a storm capable of overwhelming it will arrive. By building barriers, we set ourselves up for future failure, period. To be sure, there are certain areas where we will do whatever it takes, including building walls. For example, we will ensure that Lower Manhattan doesn’t go under water because it’s too valuable to lose, but for the rest of the city, or places across the river, are walls really the answer? Are these truly “long-term” solutions, or are we really just dealing with the next 50 to 100 years?

We see this approach very clearly in the Big U proposal, which transforms the southern tip of Manhattan into a expansive multi-use park that would not only retain massive amount of water during storm surges thus reducing the risk of flooding, but would also encourage economic development, foster healthy lifestyles, and provide much needed green public space in the Financial District. The plan also includes structural barriers that run up both sides of Manhattan, stretching up to West 57th Street and East 42nd Street. While the park at the tip of the city is incredibly appealing for its public space amenities and long-term potential, it is somewhat unrealistic. This is not to say that Big U isn’t technically feasible or programmatically ingenious. It builds off of precedent projects of similar scale in the Netherlands that have been successfully constructed. This is an important point: The Big U is rooted in a sociopolitical landscape that does not exist in the U.S. Despite the proposal’s technically feasibility, it’s hard to imagine a project of this scale becoming real. Yet the renderings are so undeniably appealing that it’s not hard to see why the Big U received the most money ($335 million) of any RBD winner. This raises an important question about public interest design work as a discipline. Our

expert in architecture put it quite well: “If we’re really committed to the public’s interest, then is there a point at which we’re overselling something instead of just giving the facts and letting the public decide?” It’s a vital critique when talking about public interest design: How cautious do we need to be about getting too good at pitching ideas? Perhaps more importantly, a large part of the Big U project relies on new structural barriers around the edges of lower Manhattan. While this may have to be the answer for certain high-value areas, it brings up other, more fundamental issues. Philosophically, building structural barriers leads to questions of democracy and equality. Why do some neighborhoods get a barrier wall, but not others? Building large-scale structural barriers could potentially create a kind of civic arms race in which every neighborhood is demanding a wall for protection. What kind of future does that lead to? Do we really want a city that’s walled off from the rest of the world, or a city whose protective barriers separate, rather than unite, its communities? Could there be a way to help rebuild and maintain communities while simultaneously retreating from certain high-risk areas? Our expert in coastal geology offered some interesting ideas for why and how this might happen.

>>THE BIG U: New York, New YorkTEAM MEMBERS: BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) with One Architecture, Starr Whitehouse, James Lima Planning + Development, Project Projects, Green Shield Ecology, AEA Consulting, Level Agency for Infrastructure, Arcadis, and the Parsons School of Constructed EnvironmentsSUMMARY: The Big U is a protective system around Manhattan, driven by the needs and concerns of its communities. Stretching from West 57th street south to The Battery and up to East 42th street, the Big U protects 10 continuous miles of low-lying geography that comprise an incredibly dense, vibrant, and vulnerable urban area. WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/big-team-final-proposal/#details

Previous Spread: View of kitchen and administration building.(Photo: Elizabeth Felicella)

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LIVING BREAKWATERSStaten Island, New YorkTEAM MEMBERS: SCAPE/LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE with Parsons Brinckerhoff, Dr. Philip Orton / Stevens Institute of Technology, Ocean & Coastal Consultants, SeArc Ecological Consulting, LOT-EK, MTWTF, The Harbor School and Paul GreenbergSUMMARY: The Living Breakwaters project reduces risk, revives ecologies, and connects educators to the shoreline, inspiring a new generation of harbor stewards and a more resilient region over time. Staten Island sits at the mouth of the New York Bight, and is vulnerable to wave action and erosion. Rather than create a wall between people and water, the project embraces the water, increases awareness of risk, and steps down that risk with a necklace of breakwaters to buffer against wave damage, flooding and erosion.WEBSITE: www.rebuildbydesign.org/project/scape-landscape-architecture-final-proposal/#details

patterns, but our experts argued that there are simply too many variables to predict. The proposed breakwaters would likely cause, among other things, changes to water-flow patterns, sediment regression, and potentially species shifts in coastal ecosystems. Beyond these large-scale shifts are numerous other positive and negative feedback responses that cannot be modeled. In short, it is simply too hard to predict how many factors will be affected. Perhaps at some point we may have to say “environmental impacts be damned, we need to save this shoreline,” but we should be very thoughtful about how such a location is selected. As an alternative, it’s important to think not only about large-scale changes like breakwaters and levees, but also about how small-scale mechanisms can collectively have a significant impact. Our experts in community design and coastal reliance both posed the question: Are there ways we can decentralize the mitigation process? How could small-scale changes, such as permeable pavers and pocket parks, help reduce flooding? While large-scale interventions are essential, they are not the only answer. When a disaster at the scale of Hurricane Sandy happens, there is often a tendency to have a knee-jerk reaction that is equal and opposite. Unfortunately, this type of immediate response is often oversimplified and diluted down to, “Well, we need to do something broad and sweeping because if we do it at the granular level, we’ll never get there. It will be too slow and too expensive.’ It would be interesting to see designs that challenged this view points and demonstrated the capacity of small-scale collective action. This is also tied to a larger critique of the reactive nature of resilience planning. The U.S. tends to respond after a storm hits rather than consistently investing in preventative measures along the way. We need more focus nationally on proactive resilience planning, not only because it will save lives and communities, but also because it will save money. Every year the U.S. government is forced to spend billions of dollars in off-budget funds on disaster recovery, most of which is largely used without due consideration. Funds simply go wherever they are most needed for the short-term, and solutions generally address only immediate needs, not long-term solutions — guaranteeing that even more money will have to be spent somewhere down the road. What if each RBD team was led by a brain trust of community developers, economists, bankers, federal agents, and real estate professionals whose job it was to help direct proposals toward long-term financial feasibility? If that were the case, then maybe some of these projects would actually get built.

With the rise of landscape urbanism and new ecology-rooted approaches, planners and developers alike have begun to experiment more heavily with soft infrastructure as a mechanism for flood mitigation. Soft infrastructure is loosely defined and comes in a variety of forms, from flood-proofing roofs and elevations of buildings to constructing bioswales, berms, and marshes. Nearly all RBD proposals include aspects of soft infrastructure as part of an integrated approach. In particular, the Living Breakwaters proposal takes a novel and ambitious approach to ecologically based infrastructure by building large offshore breakwaters. As the proposal describes, “breakwaters are rocky sloped walls placed within the water column that can drastically dissipate destructive wave energy. ... A necklace of breakwaters is proposed along the South Shore to buffer against wave damage, flooding and erosion.” Our experts in coastal geology and environmental sustainability agreed that such breakwaters would help reduce the risk of flooding under typical conditions; however, it is unclear how much they would help communities during a storm surge at the scale and magnitude of Hurricane Sandy. The Living Breakwaters team backed up its proposal with advanced computer modeling to show how the breakwaters would affect water

When Does Industry Trump Ecology?

“We have been thinking for the last 200 years about how to hold shorelines in place and keep houses where they are because people think of retreat or relocation as resulting in abandoned wastelands and ghost towns. What if we change the game and have a design competition where the charge is to help communities reconfigure the vulnerability footprint of those communities by getting some things out of harm’s way while benefiting the community at the same time? What if RBD asked teams to develop proposals for how to create a gradual and managed process of moving properties out of harm’s way in a such a way that would actually enhance the community, add to the tax base and the economic value of the properties, and provide new public amenities and healthier neighborhoods all at the same time. What if that was the design challenge for RBD?”

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Regardless of the approaches that the RBD teams took and the lessons that can be learned from their proposals, it’s important to look at the big picture. Nothing has actually been built yet, so the process of review and critique can function constructively to help direct projects to be more equitable, safe, and sustainable. But beyond the proposals themselves, the competition as a whole offers a number of highly beneficial outcomes that should not be overlooked.

There was intense exchange and review among the design teams. Many team leaders have publicly commented on the tremendously beneficial experience that RBD provided, that there were dozens of lessons learned by hearing from the different teams and engaging in the process. Every single team leader brought up the immense amount of new knowledge they gained from engaging with one another, and one would hope that as a result, the practices of some of the world’s most famous architects will be more attuned to resilience planning and community engagement, both of which are desperately needed in the design industries. Furthermore, while it’s easy to critique the feasibility of such large-scale infrastructure projects, that’s not to say there’s no value in the proposals and what teams produced. One of the most important early steps in the process of resilience work is to have a framework for conversation, particularly for engaging with

communities and civic leaders. What the winning teams have produced for RBD is a perfect starting point for this. Our experts in public engagement and disaster relief planning both made sure to point out that teams have created a huge set of materials for public outreach, awareness building, and conversations around planning, all of which are an essential part of any sustained effort toward resilience. These proposals can be used to facilitate conversations with their respective communities to discuss what the best options are and how to move things forward — a prime opportunity to pair the technical expertise of designers and planners with the local expertise of communities and stakeholders. The real question is what will happen next.

Knowledge Sharing and Collective Capacity

Ji’SAPPLICANTSACCEPTING

HUMANITARIAN DESIGN COMPETITION

THE PROJECT IS REAL

APRIL 25-26, 2015SAN LUIS OBISPO, CAMORE INFOS AT WWW.JOURNEYMANINTERNATIONAL.COM

F I R S T A N N U A L

This fast paced, interactive competition will present pre-approved architecture, engineering and construction management university students with the most challenging, frustrating and fulfilling problem statement the developing world can muster. Did we mention . . .

The winning proposal will be considered on a funded, real world humanitarian project.

PRESENTED BY

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE REBUILD BY DESIGN COMPETITION, VISIT

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conferences,seminars& talks Calendar of Events

from October 2014 to January 2015.

SustainatopiaConference - October 29 - November 2, 2014

Los Angeles, CAwww.sustainatopia.com

NCHC - Designing for Civic Engagement

Workshop - November 7, 2014Denver, CO

nchc.confex.com/nchc/2014/webprogram/Session3860.html

PUBLIC Journal Launch PartyPanel Discussion - November 5, 2014

San Francisco, CApublicjournal.eventbrite.com

Autodesk UniversityConference - December 2-4, 2014

Las Vegas, NVau.autodesk.com/las-vegas/overview

GET INVOLVED

IN THE AIAS

Building Trust International Design + Build WorkshopWorkshop - November 15-29, 2014 Phnom Penh, Cambodiawww.buildingtrustinternational.org/getinvolved.html

IIDEX Canada Exhibit - December 3-4, 2014Metro Toronto Convention Centre North, Toronto, Canadawww.iidexcanada.com/2014

AIAS Forum Conference - December 29, 2014, to January 1, 2015 Nashville, TNaiasforum2014.com/

PID Institute Course - October 24-25 2014Charlotte, NCwww.publicinterestdesign.com/charlotte/

Structures for Inclusion Conference - Registration opens January 10, 2015Detroit, MIdesigncorps.org/sfi-conference

+ EVENTS

Architecture for Social JusticeConference - November 5-8, 2014St. Louis, MOnetwork.aia.org/AcademyofArchitectureforJustice/Home/FallConference/

Global Socail Business Summit 2014Conference - November 27-28, 2014Mexico City, Mexicowww.gsbs2014.com/

PopTech - Rebel-Lion 18Conference - October 23-25, 2014Camden, MEpoptech.org/rebellion

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FLIGHT 93NATIONALMEMORIAL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ERIC STAUDENMAIER

+ GALLERY

Previous Spread: Visitor shelter.

This Spread: Visitor Shelter and Memorial Plaza Gateway near the Crash Site.


Memorial Plaza Along Crash Site.


This Spread: Wall of names with Ceremonial Gateway to Crash Site beyond.

Next Spread: Wall of Names.


PROJECT INFO: Flight 93 National Memorial - Phase 1LOCATION: Shanksville, PA, United StatesARCHITECT: Paul Murdoch ArchitectsLANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: Nelson, Byrd, Woltz Landscape ArchitectsCIVIL ENGINEERS: The Eads Group, RBA PartnersSTRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Sato & BoppanaMEP ENGINEER: HF Lenz CompanyLIGHTING DESIGN: George Sexton & AssociatesGRAPHIC DESIGN: Impact Design AssociatesTYPOGRAPHY DESIGN: Ana LlorenteSECURITY DESIGN: Sako & AssociatesCOST CONSULTANT: Davis LangdonIMAGE CREDITS: Paul Murdoch Architects PHOTOS © Eric Staudenmaier

DESCRIPTION: The Flight 93 National Memorial is a new, 2200-acre national park at the site in Western Pennsylvania where United Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001. The park is a designed memorial landscape that commemorates the 40 heroes on Flight 93 who gave their lives thwarting a terrorist attack on the United States capital. The design was selected through a two-stage, international design competition in 2005. Juries included planners, landscape architects, architects, designers, government representatives, family members and community representatives. In the first stage, Paul Murdoch Architects presented a master plan with key memorial features, such as a tower of 40 wind chimes, a large curving landform with memorial trees defining a field of honor, memorial walls that frame the flight path and enclose a visitor center, and a memorial plaza along the edge of the crash site, culminating in a ceremonial gate. In the second stage, Nelson Byrd Woltz was invited to join the design team, along

with a team of consultants, to develop the design. Following selection, the National Park Service became the administrator of the design process through a contract with Paul Murdoch Architects. The park transforms the site, almost 70 percent of which was a coal mine prior to September 11, into a designed memorial landscape that enhances the qualities and physical features of the site for its expressive power. An experience of moving through a restored site of varied characteristics uses healing of the land to reflect the growth and healing possible for people who will come visit this place. It focuses visitors’ attention on the crash site and presents a variety of open space experiences developed through a master plan to be implemented over several phases. In keeping with the mission statement, “a common field one day… a field of honor forever,” more than a dozen distinct elements will organize the visitor experience, beginning with the Sacred Ground where Flight 93 crashed, and radiating across a mile-wide Field of Honor to include panoramic overlooks, a Visitor Center, memorial tree groves, and the sentinel-like Tower of Voices near the park entrance. The first phase, dedicated on 9/11/2011, includes the entry road, re-grading of the large field of honor, and the memorial features adjacent to the crash site. Educational programming at the visitor and learning centers in the next phase of work will guide visitors toward a deeper appreciation of the sacrifice of the 40 Heroes. The sustainable design vision for the park will build upon the large-scale reclamation undertaken by mining companies and will include reforestation, pond and wetlands rehabilitation, and planting of thousands of wildflowers and natural grasses.

Visit: www.paulmurdocharchitects.com


BEHIND THE

SCENES WITH TYIN

BEHIND THE

SCENES WITH TYIN

LYSET PAA LISTA Lista is situated in the southernmost part of Norway, and it is home to some of Norway’s most unique and fascinating landscape. The small region is troubled by increasing migration, a problem all too common in small, rural parts of Norway today. This particular project was born out of the desire to combat this development. This was to be done by showcasing the wild natural beauty of the area, hoping to draw investments and funding to Lista. The client, or rather clients, was a group made up of 50 local landowners. The group is lead by Solveig Egeland, an enthusiastic and energetic woman whom has a great deal of passion for her local area. This group wants to realize the areas potential for tourism, an ambition they share with the local government. We decided the best way to go about this would be to create a physical structure in the midst of the sand dune landscape, so potential investors and decision makers can experience the beautiful and unique nature of Lista firsthand. The group working with us on the project included architecture students from Mexico and Norway. We started out empty-handed, there were no sponsors, no government approval, no specific lot to work on and no housing for the project participants. The student group was very positive and easy to work with. The process can be described as typical TYIN, as design took place on the lot in tandem with the building process, guided by pragmatical factors such as material availability. The entire local community of Lista pitched in, helping with sleeping arrangements, providing food, materials, and access to machinery. In just three weeks, the project participants managed to create a sizable structure. Our overarching idea of the project was to create a rigid construction that would stand out

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and form a contrast to the wildness of the Lista nature. The construction forms a straight line over very complex and uneven landscape. A wooden pathway running 60 meters in length ensures universal access to the small cabin found at the end of the structure. The cabin is optimized for enjoying the beautiful scenic landscape that surrounds it. A prerequisite for the task placed on the project by local government was to abstain from the use of permanent materials. Any construction in this unique area has to be fully reversible. This ruled out the use of concrete in the foundation work. Our answer to this challenge was rooting poles deep into the sand ground, and then constructing on top of these. The hut is structured as a seamless

continuation of the pathway. Our aim for the project is to kickstart a positive development in the area, helping it combat the migration problem. Shortly after the completion of the project, the local ground owners named it “The light of Lista”, referring to the dazzling natural light unique to this area.

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DESIGN ORGANIZATION: TYIN tegnestue LOCATION: Lista, Farsund, NorwayCLIENT: Hanangermona GrunneierlagBUILT BY: Students, local owners and TYIN

BUILDING PERIOD: September 2013AREA: 120 sqmCOST: 300,000 NOK/ 36,000 EURUNIVERSITIES: Tecnol—gico de Monterrey, Puebla; Norwegian University of Science and TechnologySTUDENTS:Håvard Eide, Marco Antonio Aparicio Kirwant, Jonas Velken Kverneland, Margarita Cuesta López, Hildne Nessa, Henriette Bakke Nielsen, Fernanda Miranda Noriega, Monir Jiménez Fernández Rafaelly, Paulina Martínez Rodríguez, Kornelie Solenes, Rosalba Martínez Villaseñor, Sissel Westvig, Simen Andreas AasSPONSORS:Innovasjon Norge, Byggvell, Montér, Naust Bygg, NorDan, Optimalt AS, NTNU

Text & Graphics: TYIN tegnestue

+ BEHIND THE SCENES


Rapid Recovery Through Resilient Design

AUGUST 24, 2011, IS A DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET. That morning I was called by my boss at the Washington, D.C., office of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates to join a team that would assess the damage suffered by the Washington National Cathedral during a 5.8 earthquake the day before. As I pulled up to the building, I was awestruck not only by the its sheer size (it’s currently the sixth largest cathedral in the world), but also by the intricacy and extraordinary level of craftsmanship expressed so gracefully in each of its facades. I was overcome with sadness as I saw just how much damage had occurred during the earthquake. In the days and weeks that followed, however, I also came to realize just how well the cathedral had weathered the event, and I was moved not just by the soaring spaces of this High Gothic masterpiece, but also by its resilience in the face of natural disaster.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE AND MANY OTHERS ON OUR WEBSITE

www.thisispublicjournal.com

Text: Jacqueline L. DevereauxPhoto: Colin Winterbottom

CASE STUDY: THE WASHINGTON NATIONAL CATHEDRAL

Above: WJE DAT member at Washington National Cathedral during eartquake damage inspections.

+ ENDNOTES

Fall 201490| PUBLIC

THINK BEFORE

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