I will be attending a conference M-W. Check it out: http://theatlantic.actevapsn.com/page_content.php?page_id=1513&Itemid=3

This is the homepage for the NewSchool of Architecture + Design 2011-2012 Graduate Thesis Studio. While there may be an occasional post here, the primary purpose of the page is to serve as a portal to the seventy-eight students and six faculty who will each be keeping their own ongoing written and graphic blog as a part of their thesis requirement.

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After doing this for so long, one would come to always expect to spend the most amount of hours on studio work.  This becomes a problem when other classes tend to fall to the wayside.  Regardless, I realize I need to somehow find even more time to do research on my thesis.  The topic is clear; performing arts. I felt as though I was moving in the right direction until Chuck brought of that specific example during the group discussion in research class today, and I once again found myself asking, “what is it that I am trying to achieve?”

However, my individual meeting with my adviser did help me get back on track.  I know I want to focus on how my topic plays a significant role in the development of young minds.  But, how will this idea translate architecturally?  How can I make this project something innovative and not just another performing arts facility?  My studio instructor says we know more than we think we know.  I believe-NO-I know I have the responses to the previous questions; it is just a matter of putting it all together.

Hello fellow thesis students,

If there is anyone who is looking for a discussion group and is designing performing arts spaces and/or k-12 educational facilites I am available to form a group.

It’s after 10:30pm, and as I sit here contemplating on how to create my own blog page, I think to myself what better way to spend Sunday night than to get this blogging show on the road.  I spent all of yesterday running errands, and figuring out how to put that damn electric scooter together; and all of today on CAD and figuring out how to create a dome in Sketchup (btw, if anyone knows please hit me up).  Life is crazy and frustrating at times, and I guess we all need a portal of which to relay our personal thoughts or exciting discoveries.  The thought of sharing my experience with this thesis project and exploring that of my peers is pretty amazing.  So as not to make this a long and dull first entry I will end with my favorite motivational phrase, LET’S DO THIS!

Adele creates architecture that is not only socially responsible but contextually responsible as well. What does this mean? It’s architecture that relates the structure to its cultural surroundings and environment. It takes in consideration the culture, the site context and the environmental parameters.

Another architect that I value for her architectural philosophy is Anna Heringer.

“Architecture is a tool to improve lives.
The vision behind, and motivation for my work is to explore and use architecture as a medium to strengthen cultural and individual confidence, to support local economies and to foster the ecological balance. Joyful living is a creative and active process and I am deeply interested in the sustainable development of our society and our architecture. For me, sustainability is a synonym for beauty: a building that is harmonious in its design, structure, technique and use of materials, as well as with the location, the environment, the user, the socio-cultural context. This, for me, is what defines its sustainable and aesthetic value.” – Anna Heringer

Environmental responsibility combined with thoughtful socio-cultural context and harmonious design, structure and materials, Anna creates architecture that relates the structure to the complexities and issues of the environment and the surrounding community. She has a passion for creating architecture that puts the needs of the community and its people first.

Although I am not necessarily looking at Cameron for his architectural projects, I am looking at his philosophy when it comes to architecture. I believe a lot in what he says in regards to why we should build and how to restructure our way of thinking. Architecture needs to go beyond building ‘iconic’ structures that will one day be studied within history books but we also need realize our responsibility towards man and create solutions for adapting to the needs of everyone.

As Cameron states “you build for the community as a whole”. You don’t build solely for the end user but you build for the surrounding community. Architecture effects everyone that comes in contact with it whether it be direct or indirect contact. Cameron combines social responsibility with simple systems and humanitarian architecture.

“Design like you give a damn.”- Cameron Sinclair

Wow, this quarter has gone by so quickly and I wish I had more time to devote to research. There is a lot to know and research, especially on a topic that involves a foreign country. It is much harder to come across current information for a third world country. Even harder is getting a hold of anyone since email is a bit too new for the country. Seems like my trip to the Philippines will have to hold off until Spring so I can have more time to plan it. I will be going by myself so I need to make sure I have every detail down.

My ROLs are coming along, although I am finding out more information on child development than anything else. I am focusing now on current statistical information and planning to try to wrap up all of the gathered information. A bit overwhelming but it’ll get there.

So I am looking to work with a group focusing on children and orphanages while I am staying in the Philippines. Because I will be traveling alone, it’s the safest way for me to travel. I am gathering a list of legitimate organizations that I will need to look into. Please message me if you have any other suggestions. It seems to be hard to decipher between the legitimate groups and those that just want your money. If anyone has worked with international volunteer groups, please let me know. Thank you!

I am planning my trip to Manila for winter break and I need some help. If anyone knows someone currently living in the Philippines or has been there recently, please email me. I am trying to get some conatcts for my trip. I would like to have a few people to contact there and be able to ask them questions regarding the orphanages in an around Manila.

You can add a comment here or email me at kate.anthony@student.newschoolarch.edu

Thank you!

So, my thesis topic has changed slightly. Instead of focusing in on female and youth trafficking in the Philippines, I will be focusing on the current state and designs of orphanages within Philippines. I will be answering a few questions:

• How can the facility create an atmosphere for positive mental and physical growth for these children?
• How can this facility allow for these children to become valuable and contributing members of society?
• How does architecture affect the development of these children and the surrounding community?
• What does the design of the facility need in order to assist these children with  the physical and social needs they require?

Upon further research, I am sure I will come across many more questions that will need to be answered.

Finally, it’s my third year of grad school! I have been waiting for this for the past two years. My name is Kate and I am a graduate student at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego, CA. I am really excited to start my research and learn more about my topic and learn more about myself in the process. Check back periodically for new updates and postings.

To get thing started while I’m going through my readings and compiling my thoughts for the thesis, here is a short e² VDO clip by the PBS on environmental design.

A little bit old, but the VDO does a pretty good job at taking a snapshot of where I’m heading with the research topic, “Imperative Architecture: Sustainability through Performative Design.”

Welcome to Adisak Archwuth’s NSAD 2012 Design/Thesis blog page.  Here you will find an ongoing design/research as well as opportunities for open discussion in regard to the thesis works below.  Since this is a work-in-progress, your suggestions, comments, passionate thoughts, philosophy and wisdom, personal or otherwise, are much appreciated.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld
Moshe Safdie
MVRDV
Peter L. Gluck
Roger Sherman
Rudolph Schindler
Steven Holl
Urban Housing Partners

The American middle class sees itself as having a crisis that is centered around a struggling economy and a shifting role in that their income cannot sustain their perceived level of need.  On a housing basis, this translates to the desire for more quality homes, bigger TVs, finer finishes and fewer worries.  The truth however, is that the American middle class is better off now than it has been in the past.  Kantz argues that the middle class is feeling the effects of the economic downturn not based on the reduced capacity of the American dream, but because the American dream has become skewed by a generation that has significantly increased it’s standard of living.  The typical American home is now in a situation where both parents work in order to bolster the family’s bank account, and the middle class has become more accustomed to buying more stuff because there is an excess of money to buy that stuff (Kantz, 2005).  If American’s were to look to the past to define their class, they would see that the American dream is alive and well, the social status that they are shooting for has radically changed however.  Simply getting by comfortably and without worrying about where their next meal is coming from is no longer considered good enough.  Mass media has put the upper class on a pedestal and the conflict arrises within the middle class that the finest things are not attainable.  In the last two decades, the face of the typical middle class American family has shifted to owning two or three cars instead of one, bigger more excessive homes, and the advent of new technologies like computers and cell phones have added to the spending as well (Kantz, 2005).  If we look at the historical income of the middle class, the question becomes, how do we define the middle class today?  Recent census data shows that the typical median middle class household income is around $42,000 annually.  In most places throughout the country that is enough to carry out the American dream by owning a home, paying the bills, and save for a child’s education (Kantz, 2005).  This data does not reflect however, the desire of most American’s to live beyond their means.  The rise in technology which has led to more, higher monthly bills and the need to attain “status symbol” possessions, puts the middle class’ self identity somewhere between middle and upper class.  If it were possible to return to a simpler time, when the goal was to provide for a family’s health, accumulate a nest egg to retire comfortably at 65, pay for two children’s college education, and afford the occasional luxury, we would discover that the American middle class as a whole is doing just fine.  The middle class is not in the midst of a crisis, but many Americans are.  If the issues of the lower classes and especially those living in poverty are not addressed by social media, when does the middle class take action to create a more healthy, sustainable population (Kantz, 2005)?  The tipping point is going to come when the population as a whole decides that the excesses are no longer considered just a typical addition within the average middle class home.  Only through truly understanding and appreciating the American dream, can the average middle class family begin to understand that they are living in it.  What can be considered scary to many social commentators, is the lack of empathy and sense of civic duty felt by the middle class, the question then becomes how do we define the middle class in the future?  And, if it no longer sums up the average American family, how will this affect the already massive rift between the lower and upper classes?

Over the last 20 years the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the population that falls under previously underrepresented demographics.  The amount of immigrants, along with a shifting ideology of what the American “nuclear household” means has completely changed the way we think about our population.  Within the span of a single generation we have gone from a society which is thought of in terms of the 2 parent, 2 child household to one that is completely void of a typical, ideal model.  No longer do Americans classify themselves as a normal family only if they are composed of the post-World War II “nuclear” system.  It is becoming increasingly more common to think of the family as something that bridges the gap between direct relation and starts to evoke a sense of familiarity based upon need.  Positive or negative, this change is becoming so commonplace that we are seeing the cultural mores start to reflect it.  One perfect example is the 2011 sitcom “Modern Family”, wherein the new models of typical American life are expressed as single parent, same sex parent, step-parent and interracial parent households.

There is also a dramatic shift from the rural to the urban lifestyle.  Rise in the numbers of “empty-nesters” as well as young dual-income couples have led to a desire for a more connected lifestyle manifested by a close proximity to amenities, both cultural and physical.  This could mean that people are starting to recognize that the desire to live within dense urban centers is not counter to their need for space and convenience.

Another interesting statistic is the rise of unmarried mothers giving birth.  One challenge will be to understand the complexities behind this phenomenon and diagnose the positive/negative impacts.  How has it come to be that more and more women are choosing to, or perhaps not choosing to, have a child without a spouse.  This rise can most certainly be linked to other demographic shifts, perhaps most noticeably the percentage of the population that is moving out of rural areas.  It can be observed through experience and history that rural lifestyle, especially in the south and places like the “bible belt”, is more centered around conservative, established mores than forward thinking and open-minded emerging statistics.  Therefore it would make sense that many of the young, new mothers would become interested in migrating to urban areas.

ROL Objectives are in the early stage of development but begin to break apart the problem into manageable pieces.  These can be thought of as the early drivers for understanding a problem which transcends the built environment and starts to become a social, economic, and political one.

1. -Increasing populations within urban centers
     How will the population of cities change in the next 20, 40, 60 years
Number of Inhabitants
Percentage of increase
Existing policies
     What will the housing need be on a generic basis
Figures of inner city dwelling
Number of inhabitants per dwelling
Future number of inhabitants per dwelling
     What is the density of major urban centers and how will it change
Look into the top 5 major American cities
Compare against top 5 cities worldwide
Examine increase of urban centers vs. decrease in available space

2. -Greater stratification of age groups and the way they affect the urban landscape

3. -New models of living within urban environments

4. -Common, historic compositions of urban environments

5. -Study into the symbiotic relationships formed within unique urban settings

6. -Changing demographics, and the way the will shape the future of urban environments

7. -Demographic changes historically and the way the have affected development

Increased populations, along with greater stratification within age groups, demand new models of living within urban environments.

Urban environments are often composed of people of varying age groups within different stages of life; when planned appropriately they have the ability to bring out symbiotic relationships and enhance community inter-dependance.

This thesis hopes to redefine how modern cities are thought of, no longer are they places built around necessity, with a complete disregard for those forced to inhabit them.  They are melting pots of commerce, entertainment, residency and public engagement.  Emerging Demographics seeks to understand how the newest generation of city dwellers responds and adapts to established public programming, as well as rethinking how a community unit within a city can grow and respond to a rapidly shifting demographic base.

Perhaps the most key idea when thinking about the future of our cities is understanding who will be inhabiting them.  How can we, as architects influence the way they grow so that the people who choose to live in an urban environment can be engaged and invested in their community.

Should be interesting to see this happen in LA- might also make aging and transitioning into a long-term care facility easier to deal with, for both patient and family.

I’m about 11 weeks late in updating my thesis blog. I’ve actually neglected  my regular NSAD graduate blog   altogether. But here is the initial portion of my written part for the thesis, intro, rationale and objectives covered.

Retirement communities are generally great  for serving an aging population. However, most are not properly equipped for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease. The disease takes a toll on not only the person diagnosed, but for the family and loved ones as well.  Creating an environment  specifically for those with Alzheimer’s Disease will  be beneficial not only for the diagnosed, but for their loved ones as well, by creating a space where they can also be involved in the care for their loved ones, while having the professional and medical assistance a retirement home provides.   By creating a less taxing and stressful environment, those with Alzheimer’s Disease can have a delayed progression in their disease, as stress is known to enhance the disease’s progression.

Subject Rationale & ROL Objectives

Subject:  To develop a space within a retirement community that will be dedicated to housing and observational research for people who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Rationale: There is still much to learn about Alzheimer’s Disease and its progression, but what we do know is that families are  often ill equipped  to handle the unique  challenges that come with Alzheimer’s Disease and they  may  hasted the disease’s  progression through poorly designed  environments.

Nomadic Sekwensin

The project is meant to develop a structural and architectural system that can mutate to serve the needs of the user. Concurrently its materiality is meant to reduce weight and waste increasing the flexibility of the system and its mobility. Once, the initial purpose of the system has become obsolete the system and its components can be disassembled and reassembled to serve a different purpose and in a different location. The project must also have the possibility to adapt to any site with irregular geographical features. It is also crucial for the system to adapt to the need of decrease or increase of squared and cubed ft. More importantly, it must allow the user to become a designer instead of an assembler of the unit.

Light-Stage

Traveling Art Gallery

Nomadic Home

As a student of NSA+D, I had the privileged of collaborating on this project. During the 2010 Summer Construction Studio a group of 8 students and 3 team leaders  worked on fabrication of doors, skylights, gates and windows. During the studio the four main containers were finished out and the first art exhibit was held on Sept. 4, 2010.

Periscope Project peers into future

To learn more about the project or to contribute :

Periscope Project

The Periscope Project is a uniquely situated cooperative studio, exhibition, and educational space committed to the nexus of art, architecture, and regional urban issues. Plainly, Periscope consists of a core group of educators, advocates, and community members energized to progress experiments in alternative development, public education, and cultural practices as viable agents for the production of urban-spatial pedagogies.

The role of the architect is in a time of flux.  We are in a time where the term “architect” is being used by many other disciplines.   The first time I went looking for a job and typed “architect” into the search query, I was surprised that the first 30 job postings were for “computer architect”.  As an undergraduate (sophomore) student in architecture my first reaction was that it somehow had cheapened the word.  After the initial reactions wore off, I began to self-analyze why I felt this way.  I came to believe that I had been led to this conclusion by generations of architects with a somewhat elitist view on what an architect is/does.  This was to be one of my first critiques of a comprehensive stance on what an architect/architecture is.

Being an architect is not a privilege.  It is a reaction to the culmination of pressure society demands from an individual to be omnidisciplinary.  Being great at many diciplines under the broader umbrella of architecture is what being an architect is.  These things all mixed together make up the foundations of an architect.  This architect soup of disciplines and how you choose to shape the environment around you is what makes you a great architect.  So go and learn to be a painter, a sculptor, a landscaper, a sociologist, an engineer, a welder, or even a computer architect because this will lead us to a paradigm shift, a shift that will make me believe that wanting to know something about everything is what we should all be striving for.

~Ryan Cole

http://prezi.com/2lrusz8q6tjf/thesis-prezi-2/

Calling the building’s architects, client, and property manager in hopes of acquiring architectural drawings from the 70s.

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction to the Graduate Design Research Project (DRP)

1.1  General Introductory Paragraph

There are 19 towers in Singapore larger than 450’ built 25-40 years ago that will require an updated system of environmental sustainability. Many of these buildings were not designed to utilize passive systems and rely heavily on mechanical environmental controls. It is my intention to develop a system that will provide a new façade to the existing structures. I believe this contemporary makeover will lengthen the lives of these aging buildings without the costly need for demolition and subsequent construction.

1.2 Statement of the DRP Challenge

The challenge with retrofitting a high rise is proving to a client/owner that it is more cost effective than demolition/new construction but can still be a desirable result.

1.3 Importance of the DRP Challenge

There is an increasing global shift to urban centers. Citizens can benefit from city life through is increased density, public transportation systems, and alternatives to the automobile. The value of land in cities will continue to rise, making the high rise the most economical model for land use. Aging buildings already in city centers will either need to be demolished to make way for the emerging needs of the city, or they may be altered to fit in with the sustainable urbanscape. The latter will be the most efficient use of dwindling natural resources and money. Architects must take the methods used in smaller scale typology reuse, and apply it to a typology that will be most significant in the future.

1.4   Theoretical or Professional Framework

Theoretical Precedents will be looked at to ensure the best system for the chosen site. Ken Yeang’s work in the region will help highlight the needs of a tower in Singapore’s equatorial climate. Newton Suites, by the Singaporean firm WOHA, is a recent example of a residential tower utilizing vertical gardens, as well as other passive design strategies. SOM has developed state of the art façade systems and will be studied. I would like to combine the technological advances in façade design and combine it with vertical gardens and local design principles. Singapore’s National Parks Board has created an incentive program where 50% of installation cost s of green roofs and vertical greenery will be subsidized. This could prove to be a great incentive to move aging buildings into the process of sustainable rehabilitation.

1.5  Statement of the DRP Method of Investigation

My intent is to select on prototype for this process. DBS Tower 1 by Architects Team Limited is my present choice. I intend to analyze the current building’s structure, orientation, program, and façade. After looking at successful contemporary high rises in the area and innovative façade systems, I intend to develop a system to attach to or replace the current building façade.

1.6  Preliminary Schedule

Week 5: Find initial bibliography of readings

Week 6: Research Singapore High-rise architecture (case studies, local policies, etc…)

Week 7: Research passive/active systems

Week 8: Analysis of prototype building

CHAPTER TWO: Research into the Graduate Design Research Project (DRP)

2.1 Literature Review

See Attached Bibliography

2.2 Case Studies

Typological: Newton Suites, Singapore (WOHA)

Climatic: Editt Tower, Singapore (Ken Yeang)

Building Systems: Pearl River Tower, Guangzhou, China (SOM)

Methodological: Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain (Herzog & de Meuron)

Performative: Dynamic Towers, Dubai, UAE (David Fisher)

2.3 Legal Issues

Zoning

-FAR, Height, Setbacks

-Seismic, Flood Plain, Underground transportation

Building Code

-Related to façade or program alteration (structure/contruction type should remain)

2.4 Financial Issues

I intend to prove the following formula:

Cost of demolition + Cost of new construction < Proposed System Cost

I will also investigate the city’s subsidy program for “greenscapes”

2.5 Preliminary Building Systems

-Curtain walls

-Passive/operable/automatic shading devices

-Double/Triple facades

-Integrated vegitation

-Can material that is removed from the building be salvaged and incorporated into the design of new sustainable systems?

-Water collection systems

-Mechanical ventilation update requirements

-Maximizing Daylighting/ Minimizing sunshine + unwanted solar gain

2.6  Specialized Building Performance Criteria

2.7  Parking

Original should remain

CHAPTER THREE: Pre-Design and Field Analysis

CHAPTER FOUR: Design Process

CHAPTER FIVE: Final Design

CHAPTER SIX: Conclusions

BACK MATTER

-Bibliography

-Glossary of Terms

-Student Biography

DBS Tower 1 (Singapore)

There are 19 towers in Singapore larger than 450’ built 25-40 years ago that will require an updated system of environmental sustainability. Many of these buildings were not designed to utilize passive systems and rely heavily on mechanical environmental controls. It is my intention to develop a system that will provide a new façade to the existing structures. I believe this contemporary makeover will lengthen the lives of these aging buildings without the costly need for demolition and subsequent construction.

http://prezi.com/dctgm8p9gaam/thesis-2012/

T.R.Hamzah & Yeang
“The firm’s design expertise is in their ecological approach for the design of large projects and buildings that include consideration given to their impacts on the site’s ecology and the building’s use of energy and materials over its life-cycle. Much of the firm’s early work pioneers the passive low-energy design of skyscrapers, as the ‘bioclimatic skyscraper’.”

David Fisher

“Dr. Fisher’s professional activity has always been focused on two concepts: An industrial approach involving the use of prefabricated units, and Dynamic Architecture, where the traditional three-dimensional design meets a fourth dimension: Time.  With his invention of the Dynamic Tower, he is transforming Time to herald a new era of Architecture.“

Architecture is inherently static. I am interested in the evolution of architecture towards a more dynamic nature. Possible themes I intend to investigate:

-adaptive architecture

-dynamic architecture

-responding architecture

I want to explore  the recent advances in material science and computer processing, and how these could shape the future of a urban architecture, specifically in the multistory typology. Can a building have a brain and system that will modify the building’s components to achieve optimized efficiency with respect to:

-unwanted solar gain (minimizing sunshine)

-desired solar gain (maximizing daylight)

-rainwater utilization

-non-electric illumination

-visual/auditory privacy

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.

Awesome! but not quite what I am trying to do…

Name: Torrey Hager

Research Project Name: Moducation/ Modular Modification

PART ONE: Preliminary Introduction—50pts

 Preliminary Abstract:

Subject Sentence (What is the essence of what you want to talk about?):

To create spaces that can provide variation of functionality and form. These spaces are to enhance the education and program through the use of small modular units that can be augmented to fit the user and program.

Rationale Sentence (Why is what you want to talk about important?):

The current state of educational spaces lacks pliability and inspiration.

Literature Review Objectives:

Points of additional, sometime peripheral, knowledge that you need to fully understand your subject area. For example, if you want to know how someone interprets visual sights you need to understand how images transmit from the eye, through the optic nerve and to the brain. Your research goals must be:

Reflective of the words you use in the Subject and Rational sentences. Begin with an action verb, and Be answered through the review of literature (the connections should be obvious):

1. Inspirational spaces for education

2. Small modular units

3. Pliable architecture

4. Variation of function and form

5. Current state of educational spaces

6. Enhancement to educational program

Statement of the Problem.

With time and the introduction of new technologies the human means of communication and interaction have changed. The human population has grown but we have continued to disconnect ourselves from one another, our surroundings and most importantly ourselves. Our environment has slowly become consumed by under designed buildings, cheap solutions and advertisements. The distractions of our society have caused us to lose the valuable connections with art, culture, place, and people.

Critical Position.

This is idea of communication has lost its meaning and there is a need for our society to develop these connections once more. We have to begin to push ourselves into uncomfortable situations so that we can begin to learn things we never anticipated. We begin to grow as people when boundaries are pushed and connections are made.

Technology has provided us with vast opportunities of communication, however the introduction of technology and fabrication has also hindered our direct connection with the very things we come in contact with on a day to day bases. Utilizing this innovation of new means of communication and pairing it with the primitive ways give us the opportunity to reconnect while staying current. The marriage of the two vernaculars can be implemented in communication techniques, crafts and educational opportunities to provide us with a better sense of connection.

A place where these things can begin to exist is what many cities are lacking. We have created places that are cluttered with distractions and our experiences have become full of diversions. We need a place or places to reconnect with the people around us, the places that we inhabit and the very person that we are.

Process/Method.

The introduction of these connections happens on several different levels of comfort. Providing places where people can begin to say or do things that they would not usually do based on the environment that they are in. Creating a places that can accommodate the complexity of the human mind. A series of places that begin to allow for people to take a moment and reconnect with the very things that they have lost a connection with. Composition of from that can create a unique experience. Utilizing the current technology and implementing classics compositions of form, light and void to create these types if spaces. A place where people can communicate with one another, to learn about new things and create unexpected relationships.

Inspirational Websites…

http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/critical-playground/

http://pamphletarchitecture.blogspot.com/

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/

http://www.leadpencilstudio.com/main

Cool Projects…

http://www.dezeen.com/2011/01/14/mr-design-office-by-schemata-architecture-office/

http://www.dezeen.com/2011/07/25/miles-and-miles-of-sticky-tape-by-monika-grzymala/

http://www.dezeen.com/2011/01/04/aesop-at-merci-by-march-studio/

SourceURL:file:///Users/torreyhager/Desktop/Thesis_Prep_I_Final%20TLH.doc

http://www.fredericeyl.de/aperture/index.php?main=2&sub=5

http://www.architecture-page.com/go/projects/low-rez-hi-fi__all

http://www.vizeer.com/eltopo%E2%80%99s-interactive-liquid-wall-a-flexible-and-strong-wall-design-by-stephan-ulrich/

Bibliography..

For an architecture of reality by Michael Benedikt

Space and Sense (Essays in Cognitive Psychology)  by Susainna Millar

Visual Thought: The depictive space of perception (Advances in Consciousness Research) - Liliana Albertazz

Architectural Lighting: Designing with Light and Space (Architecture Briefs) - Hervé Descottes

Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries - Hugh Davies

James Turrell: Geometry of Light - Gernot Bohme

Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia (Extra Large Series) - Philip Ursprung

Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture - John P. Eberhard

Inquiry by Design: Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience in Architecture, Interiors, Landscape, and Planning - John Zeisel

The current standing of my thesis proposal has much to do with the design philosophy. Trying to find a architecture that can begin to make connections. Connections with others, oneself, culture, and environment. Finding a method and program that can relate to this idea of subconscious relationships to form, space, light and arrangement. Providing a innovative means of connections. Marrying technology and existing research and methods or architecture and psychology to create such that becomes a new type of space.

I believe that architecture is another form of art, but in this form we are creating art as experience. Processing and analyzing the current state of a context in a broad sense drives the discovery of inspirational components that can give direction to the project and experiential elements. Utilizing diagrammatical thinking to create concepts into reality, then these concepts begin to inform spatial experiences, needs and arrangements.

Architecture is about the essence of conceptualizing space through contextual understanding. This contextual understanding is a driver for the process of creation. Creating space so that we are not avoiding the human mind. Spaces that begin to speak to the subconscious on a deeper level then strictly programmatically. Using this symphony of form to allow for the suggestions of emotion, thought and subconscious reaction.

This is not to say that architecture is purely sculptural. Program is the reason for architecture to exist, but not the sole purpose. Program becomes part of the contextual consideration. Conceptualizing the relationship of assigned typology and other inspiring context to inform a strong opus of forms that evoke activity of the human mind.

Human perception generates specific emotions, provokes thoughts and subconscious reactions.  To play with the human mind through the creation of structure gives form, light, material and space a distinct meaning. Taking the mind to a different place through the relationship of space and form. Designing with intent, intent to create space that connects with the human perception, cultural identity and with regards to craft that can be experienced through generations.

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After a lecture by Kim Kilkenny, Chair and CEO of CCDC San Diego, CA in which he informed us that legislation was passed on the issue of redevelopment in downtown San Diego.

Legislation passed to eliminate the redevelopment plans of downtown San Diego.  This directly affects the affordable housing sector and the homeless population.

After this lecture, I began researching the homeless services provided in San Diego on [ http://www.211sandiego.org/].

I was shocked to find a website where you could check the availability of beds in homeless shelters around the city as if you were shopping on expedia.com. Although this service is good for the network of services that exist, the average homeless person does not have the type of access needed to acquire this information.  After investigating the possible vacancies in the shelters around San Diego, I found all 3 that are located in the downtown area are full a 6-10 week waiting list.  In addition to that, the few further out of downtown that do have some vacancies either work on a daily raffle system or only have single beds available [making the issue of women with children and homeless families completely out of luck].

I started wondering if the presence of street people was simply a result of inadequate infrastructure and accommodations for this particular demographic.

This began to inform a redirection in my thesis design.

[THE RECLAMATION OF VACANT LOTS AROUND THE CITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE GROWING HOPELESS POPULATION]

Key Concepts: Temporary Architecture

Fold-able Architecture

Design for Dis-assembly

What makes it different from existing homeless shelters????

1. Privacy

2. Autonomy

3. Storage for Stuff

4. Safety

5.Illness

6. Education

The use of vacant lots will allow for greater help, having specific lots for specific demographics all in walking distance from one another and hopefully decreasing the presence of street people in downtown San Diego.

As a result helping a disadvantaged demographic and eliminating the negative affects on tourism that the presence of street people have on the downtown San Diego area.

Is there such a thing? and how is it determined….?

49% African American
35% Caucasian.

Position Statement:  Social consciousness and a humanitarian based mindset is essential in the design process.  Understanding the demographic, evaluating the needs, creating an environment to better such demographic and laying the groundwork for lasting progress are essential in times like these.  The gap between the haves and the have nots is becoming wider and wider; architecture has the power to mediate this growing distance.

S:  To develop a constructive environment for urban nomads [homeless] to thrive while lessening their socially perceived negative impact on the urban environment

R:  The homeless lifestyle is similar to other nomadic societies of the world, however this lifestyle without support can be disruptive to the urban environment and dangerous for the individual.

ROL Objectives:

Define:  Constructive Environment

Identify:  Environment to thrive

Discuss:  Perceived Negativity within the urban environment

Compare/Contrast:  Nomadic  societies within US to other nomadic societies

Analyze:  Important elements that support a nomadic lifestyle

Analyze:  The therapeutic benefits from allowing groups to express their differences.

When moving to San Diego, I was alarmed at the number of homeless living on the streets; passing at least 15 in the 5 block walk to NSAD each day.  In this past year at New School I have began scratching the surface of the homeless issue and the idea of rehabilitation.  In the winter quarter of last year under the direction of Chuck Crawford we explored the Monarch school moving into the Barrio Logan area. Most people focused on the students of the monarch school, I however chose to focus more on the existing homeless population as we all the parents of the monarch students. I felt it paramount to increase the similarity in progress between the student’s day and the parent’s day.  Increasing this similarity would serve as a form of positive reinforcement.

Vacant lots were reclaimed and stations were installed.  These stations became the H.I.S.P Groundworks Project. H.I.S.P. being an acronym representing hygiene, identification, sustenance and progress.  These stations were placed around the Barrio Logan area and served as the hubs for the most basic steps toward rehabilitation.

For my thesis I would like to explore the idea of a shelter cart community.  Essentially I would like to interview some of the homeless community (documentary style) and understand the basic things they carry on a daily basis; their must haves.  I then would like to create a prototype cart that they could use throughout the day that would then transform at night into a form of shelter.  The ultimate idea is that these shelter carts are modules that could assemble together (link if you will) with one another creating a shield for the community and would inturn make a center courtyard.  In this inner courtyard is where the H.I.S.P Groundworks Project would be housed as well as other necessary facilities.  The community that is created would happen in designated areas; places where warehouses have been torn down and nothing has been commissioned to be built etc.  Essentially making a park for the homeless to call a safe haven.

I have thought about it and I understand the stigma that is attached to this demographic; all the more reason to redefine it. The redefinition of a “squatter town” which I’m sure comes to mind with all Ive proposed is both possible and progressive.  Safety, rehabilitation, re-assimilation, and a welcoming community both psychologically as well as physically are all key concepts in this design.

Its somewhere in between a portable rehabilitation area and a nomadic homeless shelter. I intend to provide all the same amenities and facilities a typical homeless shelter would however the intentional nomadic aspect of this proposal is designed to play on the psychology of the homeless especially those deemed clinically homeless.

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Located in Eastern Europe, Poland is bordered on the west by Germany, in the north by the Baltic Sea, in the north-east by Russia and Lithuania, in the east by Belarus and Ukraine, and in the south by Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland covers a total area of 120,728 square miles. The capital city, Warsaw, is situated in the center of the country.

POLISH WORKING CLASS

In the years following World War II, the composition of the Polish working classes changed significantly. Agriculture, which underwent several major changes in government policy during this period, consistently lost stature as an occupation and as a lifestyle in competition with expanded urban industrial opportunities. In the early post communist era, industrial workers faced high unemployment as privatization and the drive for efficiency restructured their enterprises. By the early 1980s, the working population reached a stable proportion of 40% in industry, 30% in agriculture, and 30% in the service sector. In 1992 workers in many industries, including coal and copper mining, aviation, and automobiles, organized strikes to protest lower wages and the displacement caused by economic reform (Poland 34).

Poland has a highly educated workforce, especially in math and science. This continues to be reflected in high levels of enrollment in universities. Around 65% of the college-age population was enrolled as of 2006 (World Bank).But over the last ten years, it has been common that Polish people migrate to the United Kingdom in hopes of receiving a steady job with a high salary. Some who are lucky and can learn English quickly have found success, but most are finding that without speaking English, it doesn’t matter if you have a law degree or an economics degree, Polish people are queuing for jobs in the UK. While the vast majorities have found work in the building industry, or as cleaners or waitresses, not everyone has been happy. Trained lawyers have found themselves working as barmen for example. Migration is not easy; there are winners and losers, and the losers are visible in the streets around Waterloo station before dawn, huddled under thin sleeping bags, sometimes in pairs for the shared warmth. The Polish charity Barka seeks out Poles sleeping rough in London, and encourages them to abandon their attempt to make it in the UK. It gives them tickets to get home and offers them somewhere to live once they arrive (Gentleman 2).

            Poland also has one of the largest labor forces in Eastern Europe, at 16.8 million individuals (CIA World Factbook). Additionally, wages in Poland are low compared to Western European wages, which is often why the UK seems like the promise land. The average wage was around $16,000 annually as of the first quarter of 2008, compared to around $40,000 in neighboring Germany (Central Statistical). These factors make Poland an ideal location for sourcing and manufacturing. Nearly 30% of Polish workers were involved in industry in 2007 (CIA World Factbook).

“Poland’s political and economic success have given it a sense of confidence and a new profile on the international stage. It’s a member of NATO. In fact, it now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. Poland has a strong economy – the sixth biggest in the European Union now and the only European Union country to avoid a recession altogether. None of its banks needed to be rescued. Its economy grew 4% last year, and is on track to grow 3% in 2012. Why, you’ll ask. How did it survive the turmoil in the Euro Zone? One answer is that it has strong domestic demand and has been pouring money into infrastructure projects,” (Zakaria 2012).

Poland has the largest economy in Eastern Europe, with GDP totaling $420 billion in 2007, more than double that of the Czech Republic (International Monetary) and one of the highest levels of foreign investment at $13.9 billion as of 2006 (UN Conference). Poland’s economy has been growing quickly, at about 6%, for the past 5 years, and was growing at an even faster pace before this (International Monetary). Machine building, iron and steel, coal mining, chemicals, shipbuilding, food processing, glass, beverages, textiles are the major industries in Poland (CIA World Factbook).

Because Poland has one of the largest labor forces in Eastern Europe and offers some of the lowest wages, public housing in this country is essential. Some of the users/occupants of public housing in this region would be single parents, the unemployed, the elderly, families with dependent children, disabled people, migrants, ethnic minorities, and other displaced people.  Since industry is a leading career for Polish workers, any public housing site should be located near jobs and near public transportation. Due to it’s developed infrastructure, skilled workforce and projected economic development, Poznan Poland makes for a strategic location for the site of a new model of sustainable, social and cost effective public housing development.

POZNAN

Poznań is the capital of the Province of Wielkopolska and it is one of the oldest and largest cities in the country. The city is situated at a strategic location on the crossroads of the most important road and rail transportation routes from Paris in the west, through Berlin and Warsaw to Moscow in the east, and from the Balkans in the south through the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia in the North. The city lies halfway between Warsaw and Berlin and 81 miles from the German border. The city is inhabited by 552,000 people. The population density is about 2.2k people per 1 kmsq. The limits of Poznań can be inscribed within a circle that is approximately 27 km in diameter. Poznań’s location in relation to Berlin, one of the largest urban areas in Europe, is conducive to growing mutual relations between the cities, which in turn is significant for numerous aspects of Poznań’s development. A well-developed system of roads and railway lines in the Wielkopolskie province makes Poznań easy to access. The completion of the western section of the A2 motorway from Nowy Tomyśl to Świecko in 2012 will be of special significance. Poznań also has a regional airport, which provides regular connections to many European cities (Poznan.pl).

Today, Poznań is an important center for trade, services, industry, culture, higher education and science. It is also among the leading Polish cities in terms of its economy. Poznań is one of the most economically developed regions in Poland. Poznań is known to be one of the greenest cities in Poland. There is an abundance of gardens, parks or woods that occupy 30 % of its area. Close to the city there are the forests of Wielkopolska National Park and Zielonka Forest (Poznan.pl).

Poznań’s economy is diversified in terms of structure and well developed in terms of sectors with a dominating service sector. Diversified industry, the dynamically growing sector of commercial and financial services as well as the significant potential of specialized construction companies that are capable of competing with foreign constructors make Poznań one of the leaders among Polish cities that are well developed in terms of economy. The economic development of Poznań is strongly influenced by the Poznań International Fair (PIF), which is one of the ten biggest industrial exhibition companies in Europe (Poznan.pl).

Seventy percent of Poznań’s employed inhabitants work in services and 28% in industry and construction. In 2009, there were 222,000 people employed in Poznań. The leading employers in Poznań (employing more than 1000 people) operate in the following sectors: manufacturing, construction, transport, communications, financial agents, education, health care and administration (Poznan.pl).

Throughout the 20th century the German authorities kept the military character of Poznań. Apart from being a fortress, the city was also a provincial cultural-administrative centre that did not contribute to its urban development. Not earlier than at the beginning of the 20th century new perspectives appeared as a result of changes in a war technique, degradation of the meaning of fortifications as well as administrative decisions concerning area enlargement. The city’s hosts, especially its energetic mayor, Richard Witting, took advantage of an opportunity which appeared to make Poznań an important center of German culture in the east, and, simultaneously, to create an elegant city full of greenery and light. As a result, Poznań’s architectural picture was almost entirely changed. The most important enterprise at the beginning of the 20th century was the development of a fortification belt surrounding the city (Poznan.pl).

SITE

(See attached for graphics)

The site is approximately 270,000 GSF and is located on the border between significant features such as the train station, ITM Poznan, Drweskich Park, and downtown Poznan.  Currently the site includes boarded up warehouses and old factories. After moving the old industrial activities out of the area, a unique opportunity lies to re-link and anchor these adjacencies with a new typology.  The site location is prime because it is near local transit, near ITM which is a large exhibition space that provides a great deal of jobs, and has existing crosswalks across busy streets and train tracks.  The site’s close proximity to downtown is key since a large portion of Poznan’s jobs are offered in the service industry. 

HOUSING PROTOTYPES

(See attached for graphics)

            Finding and defining a new scheme for social housing can be difficult. To design rental housing is to create a stage set for a number of different domestic lives. The answer lies in flexibility and an economical use of space for the array of tenants. Reviewing past prototypes and theories will help catapult any new model for public housing.  Corbusier’s theories were developed to industrialize construction with new technologies and to bring qualitative space to the masses. Today we face different challenges that call for new solutions. The goal is to answer the demand for energy efficient, low carbon structures with an ever-evolving building system that is both competitive and innovative.

Understanding alternative retroactive manifestos can push architects to intellectually grow and understand the ever-evolving built environment. Recently, Danish developments are focusing more towards flexibility, a flexibility where smaller units can be transformed into bigger ones.  To keep this in mind, MVRDV and ADEPT architects designed Sky Village. The high-rise’s main concept is centered on a system of individual units that can be stacked in various configurations to maximize available space and allow for easy structural changes in response to market demand.  Flexibility is one of the building’s key design elements, and its modular composition (“pixels”) allows property managers to alter its structure to suit tenants’ needs. Each pixel is about 60 sq meters and they all are arranged around a central core. Sky Village is meant to merge the idea of the single family house and a village all into one vertical unit. The units, or pixels, can also be joined together to form larger spaces to accommodate larger apartments (Meinhold 2008).

Felipe Campolina, a Brazilian architect, combines eco-friendliness with the mobility of a trailer – all within the confines of an urban environment with these green roofed, transportable, stackable dwellings. The exoskeleton structure that houses the individual units has three major components. One is a lift for the modules to move up and down, as needed by the tenant. The next is a tower with a staircase, elevator and water storage space. Finally, a lattice-like structure between each tower provides a place for units to slide into their levels and pivoted into designated slots, six slots per floor (Van Valen 2010).         

Each unit is built using standard OSB plates with thermal and acoustic insulation bound by a rigid steel frame. The unit is comprised of two boxes, one inside the other. The modules boast a living room, dining room, bathroom and bedroom. Another cool feature is the ability, while stacked on the superstructure, to pivot your view twenty degrees without disruption of neighboring units. The complete structure would have a relatively small impact on the ground level because the first level of units begins approx. 30 ft above the crowded urban center below (Van Valen 2010).

            The city of Beirut finds itself at the heart of the developing Middle East. Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron have designed this apartment tower with overhanging floor plates and terraces for Beirut, Lebanon. The building will comprise five different modular floor slabs used in varying combinations to create a mixture of overhangs and terraces. The project is founded on five principles: layers and terraces, inside and outside, vegetation, views and privacy, light and identity. The result is a vertically layered building expressed by diverse sizes of slabs which create both openness and privacy and enable flexible living between in- and outside. Its stratified structure is differentiated by the individual residences set back or forward to allow for terraces and overhangs, light and shadow, and places of shelter and exposure (Mills 2010).

            Extensive overhangs provide shadow and reduce the solar gains of the building to a minimum. Wherever needed, perforations mediate the levels of light and solar exposure. Their density, shape, and shadows generate an unmistakable pattern that clearly distinguishes the identity of the tower from its surroundings. Furthermore, the relative thickness of the floor plates is substantial enough to balance the daily temperature cycles by virtue of its thermal mass, storing heat over the course of the day and releasing it during the cooler nights (Mills 2010).

            To guarantee sufficient differentiation of the building volume and maintain a reasonable building ratio, the tower is made from five module floors that repeat in different combinations. The slabs of each floor protrude around their entire circumference by 60 centimeters, easing construction and maintenance of the extensive glass façades. The structure is carried by the core and a regular column-grid that spans up to 14.7 meters. Each quarter of the tower has its own lobby with elevators serving no more than two apartments at a time. For higher efficiency two lobbies share service elevators, MEP risers, and fire escapes. The mix of apartments of different sizes and types such as simplex, duplex and townhouses with pools are distributed throughout the building to offer a variety of conditions to meet each tenant’s needs and provide each apartment with a unique identity (Mills 2010).

            These connections offer multiple ways to solve many issues in the housing world. As stated earlier, social development is an important factor in users, along with the ability to grow and contract as needed. Projects, like the ones above, offer that solution. Flexibility and variables offer something new to tenants that developers and architects had just stopped doing, believing that it simply cost too much. But marrying nature, the built environment, and technology can result in getting more for less.

Malmö, Sweden provides an example of the successful sustainable revitalization of a social housing project. The project was built in the 1950s and was facing economic, social and environmental hardships. The City of Malmö identified issues and concerns facing the residents throughout the planning process, eventually focusing on housing, energy efficiency and access to green space as key priorities. The implementation of environmentally sustainable solutions such as the Malmö green roof project has led to Augustenborg becoming a pilot site for testing green roof technology and stormwater management techniques. This greatly reduced the amount of flooding in the district and enabled a much higher retention of residents and improved quality of life (Green Social).

“These days, people don’t build a lot of social housing, and when they do it is usually, as architectural critic John Bentley Mays noted, “architecturally dull and oppressive places, like jails, meant to encourage tenants to move on as quickly as possible” (Alter). Our role as architects should be to discover a symbiotic relationship between the built environment and the user, and consider a developmental and evolutionary process that allows the building to be in constant change.  We are not only meant to design buildings, but to make them act as catalysts of emergence. Utilizing technology, and utilizing the user interface to create a spatial setup that is systematic towards matter, space, and fabrication can address the issues of traditional construction techniques. Our interaction with technology has not always been a one-sided interface since it has become a customary piece of our lives, intertwined in design, education, business, etc. Technological advancements have propelled the creation of web lectures, international business ventures, and living/smart buildings. However, socially, it eliminates human interaction, which is a large element of architecture.

            Having variable parts and pieces to a unit allows for a tenant to grow within the space. People’s lives change over time, therefore their unit should be allowed to change as well, without having to move every year. Social development is a part of life, so converging architecture with social development allows the user (the tenant) to interact with its interface (their home).  Architecture, like people, is ever changing, and must grow and evolve within the natural environment.

            Lucien Kroll Architects created a student housing concept where students were able to come in and develop and define their own spaces, even choosing their own materials. “The floor slabs are open between one level and the next, the walls are cut out, the skylights are transparent everywhere, and the balconies are visible to one another. There are numerous entries, so people can come from anywhere, from the cellars to the attics and terrace staircases, from the walkways. This allows even what are often cumbersome restraints, such as fire escapes, to be dealt with in different ways. Meme is translated into the much discussed elevation with its mixture of windows and wood, aluminium and iron panels: a repertoire of constructional elements using the modular coordination of assorted elements,” (domasweb.it).

            Israel-based Knafro Klimor Architects offer a new prefab concept is a modern housing solution that integrates green building practices, smart growth principles and traditional values to create sustainable urban communities within China’s growing metropolises. “Agro-Housing tackles the looming statistics with a high-rise apartment complex concept that incorporates a vertical greenhouse, creating compact homes that also enable families to grow their own organic produce. Other communal spaces are also built-in, such as a kindergarten on the ground floor, a ‘sky club’ on the building’s green roof, and flexible spaces for professional meetings and informal gatherings,” (inhabitat.com).

PROGRAM

(See attached for graphics)

            To design rental housing is to create a stage set for a number of different domestic lives. Understanding the Polish lifestyle can aid in creating a program for this public housing project. The Polish lifestyle revolves around family and friends. Hosting is a big part of their lifestyle because they pride themselves on great hospitality. The first few minutes of any meeting is spent in greeting each other and shaking hands. Familiarity is expressed with embraces and pecks on the cheek. Public opinion poll results have for years consistently shown that Polish people find a successful family life is the most important value. Poland has one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe. Polish cuisine and dining table etiquette is a perfect reflection of the warmth in the Polish character. Having a meal with one’s family is not just consumption of food – it is celebration. Guests are always welcomed. Breakfasts and dinners are generally heavy with vegetables and cold cuts of meat. Cold cuts and sausages are mainly grilled more or less ceremoniously at the country home, in the garden, in the forest, or on the front lawn.

            Walking the dog is one of Polish peoples’ most popular forms of spending free time. Poles are also going in for more and more sports activities. Cycling, going to fitness centers, bowling and roller-skating are a few popular sports. Other pastimes include more artistic settings. Poles are reputed to be avid readers and can be said to have a keen interest in the arts. Polish writers and filmmakers in particular are internationally renowned. Poland has a lively cultural scene with around 280 arts festivals taking place across the country covering all types of music, film, video, theatre and the visual arts. Poles are particularly keen on jazz music with around 30 jazz festivals taking place each year. Paper cut outs from Poland are also renowned throughout the world.

            Intercity trains link all the main towns and cities in Poland. It is worth getting to your destination in half the time a car journey would take. This is especially true of weekend journeys, when traffic both inward-bound as well as out of town can get really heavy.

This site will include commercial, office, retail, housing, and industrial. This new typology combines high build density with public services. Creating function, public interest, and human scale are important factors that will drive the upcoming design.  It will have individual niches and common outdoor spaces forming a collective piece of architecture. Growth and flexibility are all important factors.

The project has multiple common spaces, lots of natural daylight and airflow, wide paths for security, sustainable elements and durable materials with long life cycles, community gardens, an open concept site plan for neighbors to keep eyes on the street, and be well lit even at nighttime. Summary of spaces:

            Site Plan: The buildings are oriented for maximum daylight and airflow for each unit. There is an efficient amount of parking for the project. Making the site mixed use with commercial or retail on bottom may not only provide jobs for the residents or local amenities but will also act as a security aid as well. 

            Apartment Units: There will be a mixture of unit types to accommodate all individuals or families.  These units will have as much storage as possible and an efficient use of space. There can be more than one use for each room. Perhaps there will be movable walls to open or close a space up as needed. The concept of the units is to have the tenant decide how much space they can afford/need and that is how much space will be built out for them. The people who build these units out are the factory workers with the factory that has been reopened on the west side of the site.

            Common Space: In order to provide a sense of place, common space and green space has been added to the project. Outdoor space is important for health thus a playground, shaded sitting spots, a dog walk, and walking paths and bike paths are included. This is done through a public plaza in the center of the site and an extension of Drweskich Park. There is private space that is for residents only that include roof decks and one ground level space next to the community gardens. The rest of the plaza and park extension is public.  The plaza consists of a beer garden, sitting areas, public art pieces done by local artists, several water features that are nice to sit around during summer or can turn into ice rinks during the winter.

            Community Gardens/Greenhouses: These are set up for the residents of the project. Each unit can come with a sliver of land for the tenant to be able to grow their own flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Because it snows in Poland during the winter, greenhouses are included in the project too. These are open to the residents as well. The roofs of the greenhouses also host photovoltaic panels to absorb sunlight.

            Factories: There are two old warehouses directly adjacent to the site that are being re-opened and adapted to new uses. The large factory on the west side of the site will be re-opened to host construction jobs to build out this public housing project and the units for the tenants. It can also offer maintenance jobs for the project. Also, since furniture typically stays with the apartment, the factory will host a show room of options.  The second, smaller warehouse will be re-opened and used as a daycare/pre-school. Residents gain priority but it can be open to the public as well. It hosts classrooms and activity centers along with a playground and an enclosed, secure outdoor space just for the kids.

            Commercial/Retail: There are several commercial and retail spaces that are included in the project’s program. There is one level of basic retail on the ground floor with three levels of office space above. Each can be built out to size and square feet requested per the tenant. There is also a farmer’s market on the ground level where the residents can buy/sell their flowers, fruits, vegetables, etc.  It can provide jobs and a local amenity to residents.  Lastly, there is a three level food court with a roof deck for outdoor seating. Here, locals and residents alike can have small food stations/restaurants where they can utilize their fruits and vegetables from the community garden/greenhouses or perhaps the items they bought at the farmer’s market to create a new local amenity. It can be a place where, for example, a resident bought fresh fish from the farmer’s market and can bring it to a station in the food court and have it cooked for them.

SUSTAINABILITY FACTORS TO BE CONSIDERED

“Green Social Housing refers to affordable housing developments that incorporate elements of sustainable design in order to improve the livability for residents while simultaneously reducing their environmental footprint. Many social housing developments of the past were built with the intention of improved livability; however, they often fell short due to a lack of attention to the ongoing operational costs of the housing – which can land on the shoulders of those with the least ability to pay or back onto the government. Currently, many social housing developments are funded by local governments, which are often struggling to keep budgets in check,” (Green Social).

Some sustainable technologies that have been used or considered in green social housing projects include:

• District Energy/Heating Systems
• Bioswales
• Solar energy capture and wind turbines
• Sustainable bio-filtration systems
• Green roofs
• Energy efficient design and lighting
• Water efficient design including low-flow shower heads and toilets
• Transit, cycling and walking oriented design

With one third of the world’s population living in substandard housing, a new model of sustainable, social and cost effective public housing needs to be developed. Public housing can be referred to as “housing where the access is controlled by the existence of allocation rules favoring households that have difficulties in finding accommodation in the market”. It can translate into forms such as social rental housing, cooperative housing, affordable housing, or mixed tenure. Public housing has developed in response to the inability of the housing market to respond to the general needs for housing particularly for low-income people. Public housing policies are taking into account public participation and the need for public-private partnerships.

The principles of sustainable development in the long-term perspective should be taken into account when formulating social housing policies.  A study completed by UNECE Workshop in 2003 stated that “the emergence of social ghettos in certain neighborhoods and the dilapidation of housing condominiums after privatization of the public housing stock to tenants in countries in transition, are just two examples of the need for new approaches to social housing which meet the objectives of sustainable development, social cohesion and inclusion of citizens / inhabitants.”

According to the United Nations, seven billion people are living on this planet. That number will only continue to rise. One third of the world’s housing population is currently in inadequate housing and 50% of the world’s population is living in cities. The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) had a goal of housing everyone. Existenzminimum was their attempt to insure a minimum level of quality housing that included fresh air, daylight, and good hygiene at the lowest cost possible. Unfortunately, while their intentions were noble they have thus far failed.  Because of this, a new model for public housing, a new type of sustainable, social and cost effective Existenzminimum that can fit within a multitude of budgets including government bodies and non-government bodies is needed.

It is arguable that design, along with technological advancements, has always been forces to reshape culture, even if it was done unintentionally. The idea that there is a minimum level of resources required to sustain the survival of a human being has arisen as the stipulation of living space in housing schemes. For Existenzminimum design as an environmentally sustainable development, one must review the quantities of energy and raw materials used to produce or sustain particular lifestyles. To do this, designers must reduce those requirements or value-engineer them, all while maintaining a minimum level of adequacy for its occupants.

With the origination of public housing in the East Block of Europe, I plan to review the past, analyze what is happening today, and propose what can happen in the future in this region. Included in this review will be:

(a) Role and definition of social housing;

(b) Social housing governance;

(c) Sustainable development of social housing.

“Public housing projects are not lacking in natural leaders, they contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each other’s’ social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what’s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people,” (Jane Jacobs).

BACKGROUND

CIAM

The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded in June 1928. CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of “architecture as a social art”. The social programs of German architects dominated its earliest conferences, dedicated to questions of Existenzminimum. The organization was hugely influential. It was not only engaged in formalizing the architectural principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning. CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals. Existenzminimum was their attempt to insure a minimum level of quality housing at the lowest cost possible. Team Ten, also known as Team X, was a splinter group of the CIAM whom attended the 9^th conference of CIAM in 1953. Their intent was to challenge CIAM’s approach to urbanism. Some group members included Peter and Alison Smithson of England and Aldo van Eyck and Jacob Bakema from the Netherlands. The group’s theoretical framework disseminated through New Brutalism (the Smithsons) and Structuralism (Eyck and Bakema). Shortly after their devastating critique, the CIAM organization disbanded in 1959 as the views of the members diverged.

Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist with interest in urban planning, cities, and the decay of downtowns. In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs opposed virtually all single-use development, but particularly what she called “massive public housing projects” that “tend to cause their city surroundings to deteriorate.” As the blocks around public housing decline, the result is that “as time passes, less and less healthy adjoining city is available to tie into.”

Existenzminimum (a.k.a. subsistence dwelling) is based on a concept of universal access to affordable housing and healthy dwelling for all. This concept includes minimally-acceptable floorspace, density, fresh air, access to green space, access to transit, and other such resident issues. The architects of this time were eager to build as much cost-effective housing as possible, partly to address Germany’s postwar housing crisis, and partly to fulfill the promise of Article 155 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution, which provided for “a healthy dwelling” for all Germans. Germany’s first President, Friedrich Ebert, signed the new German constitution into law on August 11, 1919. The fundamental principle of the Weimar Constitution was that Germany was to be a republic on the parliamentary model with a parliament elected using proportional representation.

The Weimar Constitution was divided into two main parts. The two parts were divided into sections. Section 5 covered the fundamental principles of economic life. “One of the fundamental principles was that economic life should conform to the principles of justice, with the goal of achieving a dignified life for all and securing the economic freedom of the individual.” This drove Existenzminimum. In the late 1920s the principles of equal access to light, air, and sun, and the social effects of a guaranteed Existenzminimum became a matter of lively popular debate all over Germany.

Between 1925 and 1930 Germany was the site of innovative municipal public housing projects, mostly in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt .  This was brought out in response to the poor living conditions pre-war, and as a response to the anti-urban Garden City Movement in Britain. These projects were low-rise and often in suburban settings, to free the residents from urban squalor.  In these new public housing projects, residents were provided access to light, air, and sun.

Architect Martin Wagner and city planner Ernst May were responsible for many of these projects built in and around Berlin and Frankfurt. In Berlin, Wagner worked with the former Expressionists Bruno Taut in developments of flats and terraced houses. Taut’s designs featured modern flat roofs with access to sun, air and gardens, and generous amenities like gas, electricity, and bathrooms.  This struck a debate on whether or not these developments were too progressive for “simple people”.  Berlin mayor Gustav Boss defended the new design standards stating, “We want to bring the lower levels of society higher.”  After this, the term functionalism began to be used.

In 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter. The representatives of the 51 countries signed the Charter in 1945. The United Nations pledges itself to “promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development”.  The Organization feels that “international peace and security are possible only if the economic and social well-being of people everywhere is assured”.  Because the UN sits as the global center of international building, it has been their responsibility to set priorities and goals, as a minimum standard, for rich and poor countries under development.

Countries that share boarders often feel the instability of its neighbor. Continuous poverty, unemployment, conflict and social disruption can interject into its neighbors economic and social issues. “A border–the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory–forms the edge of an area of ‘ordinary’ city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence,” (Jane Jacobs). To aid this issue, the UN has played an integral role in international consensus-building, a modern form of Existenzminimum. In the 1960’s, the United Nations set these goals through a series of 10-year International Development Strategies. “The UN continues formulating new development objectives in such key areas as sustainable development, environmental protection and good governance – along with programs to make them a reality,” (UN.org). At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted a set of Millennium Development Goals that are to be achieved by 2015, aimed at eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability. In September 2008, Governments, foundations, businesses and civil society groups announced new commitments to meet the Millennium Development Goals at an event at UN Headquarters.

In 1988, CECODHAS was established as the European liaison to promote the right for decent housing for all. Their promotion expands over 19 countries and includes over 21 million homes across the European Union. CECODHAS’ vision includes decent and affordable housing for all in communities which are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable.  CECODHAS Housing Europe, the European federation of social, cooperative and public housing, is organized in three sections and three working groups; Policy Formulation and Lobbying, Communication and Research. The Observatory is the research branch. Its main aim is to identify and analyze key trends and research needs in the field of housing and social housing at European level, and provides strategic and evidence-based analysis in the field. CECODHAS has memberships open to national organizations of providers building and/or managing social housing in EU Member States.

CHAPTER 2: CASE STUDIES & ROL

         The basic goal of housing policy is to provide the whole population with good, adequately equipped dwellings of suitable size in a well-functioning environment of high quality at reasonable cost. Social housing in Europe is as diversified as the number of countries. Since there has been a movement towards the decentralization of social housing is in the process in many European Union (EU) countries. This movement brings with it a new role for local authorities. According to the study completed by the UNECE Workshop, financing these projects has become very difficult. This is why the use of private organizations and NGO’s has become prevalent. However, in countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, the privatization process has reacted more slowly.

CZECH REPUBLIC

After 1989, the Czech government tried to retain the existing “housing privileges” for those who already occupied public housing. The state could not give the same level of economic subsidy to all existing and newly created households as in such case the state budget would end in the bankruptcy. By doing so, they privatized public units into the ownership of the tenants at very low prices. This allowed the proportion of owner-occupied housing to rise over 90% of the total housing stock. Between 1990-2004, the public housing stock had sold out. In 2002, the government subsidized $528 million dollars into public housing projects. Between 2003-2007, the government spent $868 million on the construction of 23,000 social housing units. By 2005, that decreased to $375 million. Since 2006, government subsidies have gradually come to an end. Because of this, 70% of public housing has been privatized. Since then, the Act on Unilateral Housing Rent Increase has been in force; its aim is to remove, by the end of 2010, differentiated rent levels. Their goal is to close the gap between affordable and free-market rents. Going forward from 2011 on, housing rent levels in the Czech Republic will depend on the local demand and supply in the housing market. The Czech housing policy must find ways to prevent rent inflation which is often connected with demand-side subsidies (grants and loans for owner-occupied housing or housing allowance for tenants).

Social housing is not defined on the central level, with the exemption of the Act on Value Added Tax. The reduced VAT rate in the Czech Republic has been increased from 5% to 9%; the Act amendment (approved in 2007) includes also the definition of “social housing”, for which the reduced tax rate has been applied since January 2008. For new construction, as well as for fitting, refurbishment or change of the “social housing buildings”, including facilities, the reduced tax rate is applied. The reduced tax rate is also applied for construction or change of residential as well as non-residential building or family house (or even space in a building) with the aim to create “social housing”, (Workshop, 2003).

In the Czech Republic, the financial affordability of newly built dwellings is considerably lower than 15 other European Union countries. When taking into account aggregate average figures there is clear trend of decrease in financial affordability of housing and housing expenditures became the main consumption item in the household budgets; this trend has been currently strengthened by the end of economic subsidies and substantial house price growth in the last two years. In 2011, the median monthly salary in the Czech Republic, after tax, is $958. The market rate rental price for a 538 square foot unit is $945. That equates to about 98% of one person’s salary.  As there are no private developers of affordable rented flats in the Czech Republic, there is a need to satisfy housing needs of the group of socially disadvantaged persons because of aging population as well as because of the existence of families with low incomes, (Workshop, 2003).

SCMBD (Union of Czech and Moravian Co-operative Housing) is an association of housing cooperatives that promotes throughout the Czech Republic. Founded in 1969, it consists of 635 housing cooperatives and represents about 20% of the total housing property in the country. Their mission is to protect the interests of the cooperative housing movement as a whole and to provide housing.  They constantly evaluate their issues that cannot be solved successfully by an individual co-op or a regional association. They also offer education and training for its member cooperatives as well as small, emerging cooperatives, on legal, technical, and economic issues as well as cultural issues. As SCMBD is a member of international cooperative organizations, they represent its member cooperatives in negotiations with the government and non-government organizations.

SLOVAKIA

Last decade brought substantial changes in the housing sector in all the countries in transition. Their scope and impact have never been experienced before in Europe. Before 1990, the State was involved significantly in the housing development. In Slovakia, with upwards of five million inhabitants, more than 1.3 million dwellings were built between 1948-1990, with the highest intensity in housing construction reported over the period 1971 – 1980 (more than 40,000 flats completed yearly). After 1989, Slovakia transitioned from a national economy into a market economy, which in turn influenced housing construction. Between the years 1991-2000, housing construction decreased by 25%, leaving a substantial part of housing to the owner-occupied sector. By the year 2000, 93% of all completed dwellings were owner occupied. By 2003, only 5% of housing was in the public rental sector.

According to a study completed by UNECE in 2003, the real costs for housing in both existing and newly built dwellings exceed the affordability limits of many households and housing becomes financially inaccessible for some households without various forms of subsidies. The median monthly salary after tax is $864, while a one bedroom rental unit costs $590. That is almost 70% of one person’s monthly income. The unbalanced occupancy structure has started the discussion of what public housing is and what it needs to be. There is a general understanding that certain public intervention is necessary to increase affordability of housing for lower income groups. Low average income of the population and a high unemployment rate constitute the most significant barrier for the access to the housing market. Because of that, it is considered necessary that the State and municipalities in a long run create suitable conditions and adopts efficient measures to provide for the affordability of housing for the inhabitants.

In 2000, the Slovakian government has introduced programs with the goal to improve the occupancy structure and increase the share of public rental housing. These include:

- State subsidy program for municipal rental housing construction provides grants in amount of 30-50% of construction costs;

- Long-term low interest loans for municipal rental housing construction from the State housing development fund;

- Subsidy program for technical infrastructure necessary for housing construction;

- Program of the state guarantees for market bank loans for municipalities.

This program has helped to start construction of over 9,000 public housing units (typical construction ranks between 10,000-14,000 market rate dwelling units per year). Slovakia’s State Housing Policy states that one of their targets is to gradually increase the construction of new rental dwellings (both private and public), so that their share would be approximately 50 % of the new construction around 2010, (Workshop, 2003).

POLAND

Poland has no national policy dedicated to building homes for low-income groups or helping them afford renovations. The market price of houses and land increased by 100 percent in 2004 alone, and values continue to rise every year. A comparatively high value-added tax, 23 percent, significantly adds to the cost of renovations. As a result, nearly 12 million Poles—almost a third of the population—live in overcrowded homes. More than 60 percent of apartments need serious renovation. More than half of the housing stock is more than 40 years old. Low-quality building materials and poor insulation are resulting in high monthly energy bills, making funds even scarcer for families to improve their living conditions, (Habitat.org).

At the end of the communist era, housing was a major social problem. In 1990 the disparity between available dwellings and number of households requiring housing was estimated at between 1.6 million and 1.8 million units. At the same time, the Polish birth rate added pressure to the housing situation. By the late 1980s, the average waiting time to buy a house was projected at between fifteen and twenty years if construction continued at the same rate, (Poland Housing, 1998).

By 1988 Poland ranked last in Europe in housing with only 284 dwellings per

1,000 persons; 30 percent of Polish families did not have their own housing accommodations; and the average number of persons per dwelling was 20 percent above the European average. In addition, the average usable area per dwelling in Poland was 10 to 15 percent below the average for other socialist countries and 30 percent below the average for Western Europe. By early1990, the state housing administration was abolished, (Poland Housing, 1998).

Poland has excessive regulations on rentals. A few rules include: lease agreements cannot be shorter than three years and cannot be terminated unless a tenant does not pay his or her rent for several months at a time. All evictions have to be approved by courts of law, which can actually suspend the eviction until the evictee is provided with a new social dwelling. In 2001, there were a total of 22,977 evictions from market rate rental housing, 21,221 of those evictions were due to tenants being months behind on rent. Because a large number of evictions were taking place, to try to prevent a growth in homelessness, governments started creating social hostels as a temporary shelter.

Rental regulations are meant to protect poor households but by the same token they hit landlords and discourage private investment in affordable rental stock. They also create pressure on local authorities to provide more social housing in order to enable quick evictions. Non-profit housing associations such as TBS provide subsistence housing with controlled rents, but this type of housing is too expensive for the lowest income households. Meanwhile, the existing social stock is insufficient to bridge the supply gap.

The Polish Chamber of Commerce of Low Cost Social Housing (TBS) was founded in 2002 and is a voluntary, independent and permanent self-government economic organization. It gathers Low-Cost Housing Societies and other companies operating within the sphere of low cost housing, town and country planning, real estate management and turnover, enterprises dealing with the financial side, and those aimed at the development and spread of initiatives favoring building development and knowledge of the sector. TBS’ main goals are: to represent and protect the interests of its members including public authorities, scientific and economic institutions and foreign bodies;  to diffuse modern technical and economic knowledge and to elaborate plans for the development of housing construction and infrastructures.

Poland’s total output on public housing is only 2.5%. Throughout the country’s transformation years, the government – while it has offered substantial support for the TBS program – it has practically left new municipal construction to its own resources. The government was more eager to develop a sustainable housing program it could control rather than subsidize the construction of substandard social ghettos. The housing authorities rightly assumed that broad participation of local authorities in the TBS program could improve the use of the scarce municipal housing anyway. It would facilitate the moving of better-off municipal tenants from the municipal stock to the TBS stock. It was also expected that the number/quality of social dwellings for the disadvantaged and the evicted would grow as a result. As an additional benefit – not much new unsustainable housing would be produced, (Poland Housing, 1998).

Recent years saw the opposing trends in municipal housing stock and TBS completions. Steep growth of TBS program was accompanied by a downward trend in municipal housing construction. At the same time, the number of social dwellings with lowest rents steadily grew by several thousand yearly. However, the number of suspended evictions shows that the shelter for the lowest income households is still insufficient, which impedes the development of the housing market.

The Act of October 25, 1995 determined the legal basis for the creation of LCHS, as also for the National Housing Fund, created for the issuing of low interest long-term loans (about 30 years) for the building of moderate-rent apartments by the LCHS’s.  However, today the role of the LCHS, in the light of the difficult financial situation of Polish society, requires a change in the functioning of the LCHS, which cannot simply build apartments for rent, but must also be active in other spheres connected with housing construction. They must create a new financial security for a situation, in which the tenants loose their jobs and are not able to pay the rent. Such a security is necessary, as it is linked with the compulsory discharge of loans, taken by the LCHS for the construction of apartments for rent.

Poland’s difficult financial situation results in social building having small chances of development, what means that a financial assistance from the structural funds would be necessary. The difficult economic situation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe result also in small chances for the development of social housing in those countries and thus a financial assistance from the structural funds seems expedient.

HUNGARY

Social housing has been neglected in Hungary since 1990. The transfer of the state owned housing stock to the municipalities in 1991, and the speeded up privatization resulted in a weak public housing sector. By 2001 the share of the public housing decreased from 21% to 4% of the total inhabited stock. The housing subsidy system in Hungary has not been successful in addressing the social housing issues effectively. The housing allowance program is managed by the local governments helping the households to pay for the maintenance costs of public housing.  According to 2001 figures, the total amount of debts was $17.3 million, and around 4-5% of the households have more than 6-month longer overdue payments. Recent estimates show the total cash benefits programs on housing related expenses amounts to 3.5-4.5% of the total household expenditures on housing.  The public housing sector is a loss generating service for the local governments. The rents cover approximately 30-40% of the actual costs related to the residential sector. Minimum wage in Hungary after tax is about $354 USD, and to rent a one bedroom apartment, it costs $290 USD, (Ratcliff, 1989).

The potential demand for rental housing is around 750,000 rental units, out of which about 500,000 units need social support.  Because the government has gained so much debt in housing subsidies, they are no longer interested in increasing the public housing sector. The political issues that governments have to deal with can create cause to not increase public housing. The catch is that people cannot afford a rent increase and home owners do not want social rentals in their neighborhood for fear it will drive down home values.

In 2000, Hungary launched a housing program that was a grant program for local governments supporting five housing areas: rentals sector, energy saving renewal, rehabilitation programs, land development, and housing renovation owned by churches.  This program offered 75% of investment costs to local governments who supported social rentals, cost based rentals, young family housing, elderly or pension homes. Between 2000-2002, several hundred local governments took part in the program. The total investment amounted to 50 billion HUF ($215 million USD) and more than 10 thousand new public housing units. The policy set a regulation that the rents should be a minimum of 2% of the construction cost. This allows for a quicker cost recovery on the projects. However, the average rents were considered too high, which kept the need for more government assistance. The building authorities have very limited legal rights to prescribe a minimal maintenance level for the buildings. Most places neglect maintenance of their buildings and they do not have enough reserve funds, (Ratcliff, 1989).

LOSZ (Hungarian Association of Housing Cooperatives and Condominiums) was established in May 1990. LOSZ brings together regional and independent associations offering products and services that relate to the maintenance and renewal of residential buildings for public housing. The main objectives of LOSZ are to improve the operating, legal and management environment of public housing. Annually, they construct about 256 units.

CHAPTER 3: NGO’s WORLDWIDE VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE

While several public housing projects succeeded in giving lower-income families a place to live, they also led to the creation of suburban ghettos, most of which are being torn down today.  Alternate non-government organizations such as the Rocky Mountain Institute, Atlantic Meets Pacific, and ZETA Communities are making other attempts to solve these problems.

The Rocky Mountain Institute’s vision is a “world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever. Our mission is to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources. RMI’s style is non-adversarial and trans-ideological, emphasizing integrative design, advanced technologies, and mindful markets. Our strategic focus, executed through specific initiatives designed to take our work rapidly to scale, is to map and drive the transition from coal and oil to efficiency and renewables. We work extensively with the private sector, as well as with civil society and government, to create abundance by design and to apply the framework of natural capitalism.”  Their guiding principles are based around the concept natural capitalism, including radical resource productivity, biomimicry, service and flow economy, and reinvestment in natural capital.

Atlantic Meets Pacific consists of leaders and audiences that bring critical life issues to the table through critical thinking and conversations. These are typically held through events such as festivals, forums, and roundtable dinners. Each conversation is characterized by meaningful and logical content and unique perspectives of professionals.

ZETA Communities is an organization that builds modular homes in a factory. The homes are not stick-built homes, but are built in assemblies (floors, walls, and ceilings). Because of this, a single 1,500 square-foot home can be built in one day. Each piece of the assembly is certified green or is from sustainable sources.  Often rooftop solar panels are put in place to help create a net zero energy home. ZETA sets its sites on cities as their target market. They are able to recognize that populations all over are shifting towards cities which makes land a vital resource. Since land in or around cities will only become more limited, it is imperative that organizations such as ZETA think of creative ways to use the space. The modules are stackable for city sized urban lots and to create a new generation of efficient buildings. Some of their spaces are as small as 300 square feet but utilize concepts such as placing a larger sink in the unit or by providing sufficient storage to make sure the person using it doesn’t feel like they’re lacking by living in a smaller space.  The entire concept of these smaller units is developed around the idea that its residents will inhabit the city more and become less private by only using the module as a place to sleep at the end of the day.

CONCLUSIONS

         It is always beneficial to have a high homeownership rate; however, there must be a balance. Otherwise, the imbalance produces social and market risks. The housing situation for many tenants in countries in transition is very difficult. Privatization has created a situation where these people often do not feel safe or stable anymore. Because social housing is often frowned upon by homeowners, they are often spatially excluded. This limited perspective leads to amplifying the social exclusion processes rather than reducing them. Therefore, it is a necessity to search for new social housing schemes.

An efficient housing system needs to be put in place to prevent the accumulation of evictions or past due rents.  It also needs the rent and operational revenue to be predictable and stable for the public sector landlords. A reform to the present day system is needed. The government has failed so they passed the responsibility along to privatized organizations.

Because the government can no longer afford to subsidize privatized projects, the owners cannot afford to maintain their buildings. Consequently, design has suffered and life cycle costs have risen. The government needs to be cut out of the scheme altogether.  A new model of public housing should utilize an efficient building system and sustainable products with long life cycles to keep the building as maintenance free as possible. This will allow for owners to rent their units at a lower rate, which in turn can be affordable to the same target audience as public housing, and still be considered market rate units. This will allow for social cohesion to indirectly take place because the quality will be physically and environmentally friendly and will be affordable to all. The new scheme will cut out the need for government policy and government intervention altogether.

I plan to implement transformative designs by way of:

• Assessing industry trends & client needs;
• Evaluating relevant technologies;
• Analyzing alternative business models & implementing financial sustainability;

• Assessing production systems and the environmental impact of products and innovations.

Strategies leading to the creation of sustainable neighborhoods and cities should be supported.  The protection of the environment, the promotion of environmentally friendly behavior, the use of innovative energy-saving solutions in design, and shortening the daily commuting distances would be cost-effective and would improve the quality of life in those neighborhoods.  It is equally important to try to strike the right balance between the principles of the compact city with raised densities and those of the green city. The concept is characterized by flexibility, variability, innovations, change. The new social housing forms increase the responsibility of eligible households but also give them more choice. The imperatives of giving choice and having higher respect for preferences of target population support the sustainability of social housing schemes, (Workshop, 2003).

In her admiration of cities as “delicate, teeming ecosystems” Jane Jacobs disdained public housing projects as places of concrete monocultures deliberately designed without the functional and commercial diversity she admired. The street-level merchants who kept traditional neighborhoods safe both by their watchfulness and the activity they promoted were typically obliterated by urban renewal—leaving public housing residents deprived of grocery stores, restaurants, or services.

A New Model of Prefab Existenzminimum

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.

As am going on with my research, I can see that I am actually getting more focused and eliminating the innumerable probabilities of what the research should be about. At this juncture I can say that I have eliminated the question of building the house with concrete.

It is actually very possible to completely fireproof a house from external fires if it is built with concrete. This is because concrete does not burn and has very low conductivity of heat. Therefore my main focus is essentially at fireproofing of fire-susceptible single family homes from external fires. The method/system that I will be looking for should be sustainable and economical, otherwise it would have been easier to build a concrete house in the first place.

Came across two kinda similar projects for my case studies. The most intriguing part was that almost a hundred years apart, one was done by Frank Lloyd Wright and the other one was done by his grandson Eric Lloyd Wright. The both seem to have been  interested in creating fireproof houses. Frank did his in Chicago and Eric did his in Malibu.

I have been looking at ways of how to fireproof a house. First of all I have to define the word fireproof to real get to the crux of the matter. As defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, fireproof means to make (something) safe from fire. It is to keep something safe from the adverse effects of fire. In the context of a house, it therefore means to keep the house and the contents of the house intact when there is  a 100% likelihood of fire damage to the house and its contents. I am looking to explore and establish if this concept of fireproofing is indeed possible. The main focus will be fireproofing from the fires that start from without.
I will be posting my findings as I progress in my quest and expedition.

There are a few pictures on the link below.

http://interwork.sdsu.edu/fire/photo_gallery/FireFightingPhotos.htm

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.

The driving factor of this thesis is an attempt to develop an urban development project that not only deals with the governing factor of rural sprawl but also utilizes it as an opportunity to create a new approach to commercial development; an  urban development that gives back to the community through environmental, social, and aesthetic design.

The fundamental body of reasons serving to account for my thesis are:

1. Population growth, particularly an influx of young families in Freehold, NJ. This has led to a demand in housing and thus, commercial development.

2. The problem arises when buildings are haphazardly placed throughout a rural neighborhood with minimum consideration for community or environmental issues.

3. Eco-Friendly possibilities. Freehold, NJ is a rural area with a very rich history in farming and cultivation.

With this design solution comes consideration of context, form, human interaction, and program. These items should create a conceptually driven design that aims to develop a relationship between the activated public space (nature/parks) and corporate/commercial building (culture/inhabitable space). The form of the building will be a collective expression of contextual restrictions, zoning envelope, and specific environmental opportunities on site. This project should seek to animate an urban center on a desolate site. The form and program of the buildings should generate outdoor spaces to attract lively public use and create an ideal work environment.

Across the country, people are debating the issue of sprawl as governments try to reconcile growing needs for new housing and commercial development with demands to protect open space.

It is the purpose of this thesis to investigate the possibility of a new approach to corporate development in rapidly growing rural communities, one that recognizes the inherent indissoluble relationship between nature and culture. It will consider a site in the town of Freehold, NJ; a rural town that is rapidly losing its historical character and place to the induced development projects caused by urban sprawl.

Reanalyze the prison correctional facilities specifically for individuals with drug related offenses in order to better design a specialized typology on rehabilitation through its physical, environmental and therapeutic settings.

An ode to a father, a story of growing up with two mothers, a request for a cloak of visibility, and a reflection on goodbyes. Here are four Freshly Pressed standouts from this week — all quite personal pieces that have resonated with many readers. Go ahead and dive in:

Why I Don’t Diet — An Ode to My Father

My father spent his years fighting his size, wishing he was smaller, weaker, less of a giant. He was taught to hate his body, and he was ashamed of the amount of space he took up. But he passed his strength to me, and I won’t squander my inheritance. I will not let myself be diminished.

Tiffany Kell, a contributor and dancer at More Cabaret, reflects on her father’s recent passing, and his long struggle with his weight and health. She describes him vividly — “born larger than life” and of a family made of “Viking stock” — and creates a strong, invincible man in our minds.

“But he didn’t want to be a giant,” she writes. “He wanted to be thin.”

She recounts the experimental diet programs he tried, his obsession with calorie counting, his celiac disease, and — finally — his last year: wasting away, becoming a shadow of himself. This post isn’t simply an ode to her father, but an intimate, powerful piece about who she is and where she comes from — and ultimately becoming comfortable in one’s own skin.

“Aunt”s and Other-Mothering in a Queer Household

As Queer Black women, we don’t have many role models. The connection and communication with our elders is rare. It’s important to recognize and honor the LGBTQ women in our lives who have come before us, blazing trails that we may not have ever known we’d walk.

This week, we read a number of posts celebrating Mother’s Day, from reflections on motherhood to interpretations on “mother.” Nitra at Wise Edits tells a bold and moving story about growing up in an unstable household of drugs and abuse — and finding happiness and a haven through her Aunt Dee. But this woman disappears from her life, and it’s not until Nitra is older, and comes out to her family, that she learns who Aunt Dee really was, and is.

Beautifully told, Nitra’s piece celebrates the connection between mother and child, unbreakable bonds over time, and the queer household. We appreciate her warm, honest voice and tribute to the women in her life.

The Lip Pencil of Invisibility — And a Grown-up Woman’s Request for JK Rowling

Women of a certain age.

Something happens.

No need for an invisibility cloak.

We just vanish.

Ping.

The author at Memoirs of a husk muses on a number of issues in this poignant post: Beauty. Womanhood. Aging. She writes about what happens when you “fray around the edges”: when you need a lip pencil and clear mascara to get noticed, yet no matter what you do, you’re no longer you: “You start to see just that — a woman, nothing more,” she writes. “No past, no personality, no added dimensions.” At the end, she asks JK Rowling for assistance — to invent a cloak of visibility, “not for our fraying lips and bushy eyebrows, comfy midriffs or laughter lines, but for us. Whoever we are.” We like this blogger’s voice: it’s fresh and unique, and her style is quiet yet sharp — we’re curious to read what she tackles next.

On Goodbyes

Of course there are friendships that reside far beyond geography’s lethal grasp, laughing in the face of distance. “A friendship that can be ended didn’t ever start,” wrote the French poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais. Philia, or the platonic love between friends, is perhaps not as sexy as its cousin eros – romantic love, but it’s the purest of all the loves. No sex or jealousy to muddy the waters. No mandatory filial piety. No professional incentive. Just the pure joy of voluntarily shared company, of dipping into each other’s souls every once in a while.

Nick Ashdown, the blogger at Advokat Dyavola, has lived in Russia, Turkey, and Rwanda, so he knows a thing or two about goodbyes. Yet they never get any easier. Here, he discusses the word “goodbye” (which he finds absurd, as “nothing feels good about it at all”), and its euphemisms (“see you later” and “let’s stay in touch”). In his reflections, he describes the different connections we have in our lives: people we may never see again, but also those friendships that last, despite the distance.

In a time when some of us wander the world as nomads, and many of us communicate and maintain relationships online, Nick’s thoughts on goodbyes and friendships are at once timely and timeless — and relatable to others.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think should be Freshly Pressed l? Leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Happy Theme Thursday! Sharing and managing your work online should be easy, and today I’m thrilled to announce a new theme from our friends at The Theme Foundry that helps you do just that!

Snap is a responsive, lightweight, and minimalist theme that makes it easy to feature your projects. Snap’s clean grid based blog layout and configurable page templates also make it incredibly flexible.

Read more about Snap in the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Since the dawn of time, humankind has yearned for control. While we can’t give you more control over most of your life, we can give you more control over your widgets. And today, with the new widget visibility tool, you can configure your widgets to be shown or hidden only on certain pages.

Widgets are a way to add new content (like your Twitter stream, a tag cloud, or a link to your blog archives) in the sidebar, header, or footer of your site. To see the widgets you have available to you, log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on Appearance » Widgets. To add a widget, simply click on it and drag it up and over to the right of the widget screen, into the Default Sidebar, Header Area, or Footer Area section of your site. Then, to control visibility, expand the widget and click the Visibility button next to the Save button.

For example, if you wanted the Archives widget to only appear on category archives and error pages, choose “Show” from the first dropdown and then add two rules: “Page is 404 Error Page” and “Category is All Category Pages.”

You can also hide widgets based on the current page. For example, if you don’t want the Archives widget to appear on search results pages, choose “Hide” and “Page is Search results.”

Visibility is controlled by five aspects: page type, category, tag, date, and author, but each visibility rule is handled separately, so there isn’t a way, for example, to only display a widget on posts that are categorized as “Summer” and also tagged with “Picnic.”

The visibility panel is available today in every widget for every user on WordPress.com; visit Appearance » Widgets in your blog’s dashboard to take control. Or, to learn more about using widgets on your blog, check out our recent Introduction to Widgets series: Widgets 101, Widgets 201, and Widgets 301.

All kinds of organizations make their home on WordPress.com: small businesses, municipalities, religious organizations, schools, community groups. We also provide an online HQ for quite a few non-profits, from the global to the hyperlocal. They turn to WordPress.com for an easy-to-use, low cost solution that gets them an effective web presence without diverting thousands of dollars from their missions: helping others.

Here are just a few of the organizations that call WordPress.com home, and some of the ways they’ve used WordPress.com to create compelling sites that tell their stories and engage their supporters — nearly all for little or no cost:

Girls’ Globe

Girls’ Globe is a Sweden-based non-profit that connects individuals and organizations dedicated to the rights, health, and empowerment of women and girls.

The site creates a space for bloggers and non-profits to share stories of their challenges and successes. Each of those stories becomes a learning experience for women’s rights advocates, giving them a new tool, suggesting an effective strategy for advancing girls’ rights, and providing international exposure.

Girls’ Globe uses the Oxygen theme, taking advantage of its post slider to create a colorful, graphic homepage that showcases the site’s most powerful stories. A custom menu guides visitors both to topical content and to pages critical for any non-profit: About, Partners, and Donate, where embedded PayPal buttons let visitors easily support the organization using either US dollars or Swedish krona.

(Oxygen is a versatile theme that’s quite popular with non-profits — check out how the Little Hippies Foundation and SimpleNeeds Georgia have made it their own.)

Turning Pages

We found many literacy organizations on WordPress.com — fitting, for a platform that’s about writing and reading great content. Among them is Turning Pages, a South Carolina non-profit offering adult literacy and math classes and tutoring:

Turning Pages relies on the Confit theme, originally designed for restaurants but perfect for creating websites with focused, easily navigable home pages. Their mission is front and center, and the home page also makes important information like address and office hours, a contact form, and a donate button accessible with no further clicking. In the sidebar, a custom menu lets potential volunteers and adults seeking assistance find relevant information easily. (If you’re interested in building a website with a home page rather than a blog, as Turning Pages has, check out our home page tutorial.)

Confit is designed for a large custom background image, and Turning Pages has chosen a panoramic shot of the Congaree River bridge, a Columbia landmark. It adds visual interest and emphasizes that this is a community-focused organization while not distracting from the important content on the page — a perfect double-duty background.

Tuning Pages isn’t the only organization that saw the potential in the Confit theme — the Vida Vegan Conference is also using it to share information about its upcoming gala, benefitting a chimpanzee sanctuary.

Invisible Children

When the world first became aware of the atrocities committed in Uganda by Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, sending footage of Kony viral, Invisible Children was one of the main drivers behind the campaign. A California-based non-profit, Invisible Children is dedicated to ending the use and abuse of child soldiers in Africa, and their online component is powered by WordPress.com VIP:

Invisible Children is packed with information, from an interactive crisis tracker that lets visitors zoom in to learn more about specific incidents across Africa to a lobbying sign-up form and Congressional calendar for would-be activists. Compelling video and data help them make the case for their work, and the site provides ample opportunity for interested visitors to get involved, from simply making a donation to attending an event to applying for a job.

The breadth of organizations using WordPress.com VIP is truly remarkable — from Invisible Children to the Partnership for a Drug Free America to the charity: water blog.

Metro Council for Teen Potential

You might not think that a theme called Fruit Shake featuring bananas in its header would be a good foundation for a non-profit website — but then, you haven’t seen the Metro Council for Teen Potential:

Based in Rochester, New York, The Metro Council is a community youth support organization offering health and skills education, mentoring, and leadership training to young people in the greater Rochester area. Using Fruit Shake, they’ve created a simple, clean site. A front-and-center mission statement and bold photos of the teens it works with give visitors an immediate sense of what the organization does, and the navigation options in the sidebar make it easy to sift through the site’s options.

From animal welfare organizations to museums and municipal organizations to scholarship funds to community groups distributing food and clothing to the homeless and beyond, non-profits use WordPress.com to get their word out about their missions, attract volunteers, fundraise, and organize events, all in the name of the greater good. We’re proud to give them a platform that helps them create change.

Every few weeks, we’re sitting down with an Automattician to help you get to know the people who work behind the scenes to build new features, keep Automattic running, and make WordPress.com the best it can be. This week, we’re very pleased to introduce you to Mr. Philip Arthur Moore: Theme Broker, global nomad, and emoticon expert.

What kinds of awesome things do you do at Automattic?

I’m currently the Premium Theme Team lead at WordPress.com. The majority of my waking hours are spent feverishly obsessing over making premium themes a world-class experience for all WordPress users. This means a lot of different things: ensuring that customers are well-supported in our premium themes forum; auditing every single line of code in every premium theme; educating the WordPress theming community on proper approaches to WordPress theme development; and with my colleagues coming up with strong, robust guidelines for developing themes the WordPress.com way.

One of the more exciting parts of my job is being able to partner and work very closely with premium WordPress theme shops like Graph Paper Press, The Theme Foundry, Press75, and Organic Themes to bring some of the best WordPress.org themes onto WordPress.com for our users’ delight. In many ways I feel like not only do I have Automatticians as coworkers but partner theme shops as well. Many a long night has been spent prepping premium themes for their launches, none of which would have been possible without solid, thriving relationships with our partners. In short, premium themes are my life right now.

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on recently.

My favorite ongoing project is _s, or Underscores. It’s a starter theme on which every single Automattic premium theme is built and it was created to both help us do our jobs better and educate the WordPress community on theming best practices. I actively contribute to the project primarily because I strongly believe in developer education and Open Source. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to play with git and GitHub, which is one of my favorite companies in existence.

It’s hard to understand the power of _s unless you see what’s built with it. Further, Ryu, A Simpler Time, and Untitled were all created using _s, but you’d never know it without being told and that’s what makes the starter theme so powerful. To date, Underscores has around 34 total contributors and it’s always open to more. I’ll continue to work on it because it provides a solid benchmark on which to grade other themes and it also gives me a chance to interact with the theming community. 

What have you learned that you can share with WordPress.com users?

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in life is that writing will take you everywhere. It doesn’t matter what occupation you hold or what you study, writing will take you far. If you are a new blogger who doesn’t know what to write about, just write; it’ll come to you. If you form the habit of blogging daily or weekly and stick to it, you’ll find your voice in no time and you’ll thank yourself for slogging through the days when writing didn’t feel so great. Keep at it and don’t stop, and a year from now you’ll be thankful your fingers kept tapping on your keyboard.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Without a doubt what I appreciate most at Automattic is the level of confidence that my colleagues and I have for each other to be the best in the world at what we do. We push each other to grow and learn, rarely — if ever — accept the status quo, and always think about how to make things better. We’re managers of one who rely on trust and sound judgment to guide our collective ship; it truly is a pleasure working with a company filled with so many independent thinkers who care most about pushing the needle forward day by day.

It also feels incredible to know hundreds of other like-minded individuals spread throughout the world who are firmly united by the goal of making the web a better place. I’m not alone in my love for WordPress and an open web and being virtually surrounded by others who share the same views really is something special.

What do you love to do in your spare time?

Spare time will almost always consist of one, or any combination of the following:

1. Reading up on fellow Third Culture Kids, Third Culture Adults, and Global Nomads. I’ve lived mostly outside of my birth country (the US) for the last decade and connect best with expats and mobile souls.
2. Watching Seinfeld episodes for the umpteenth time. George is getting upset!!!
3. Digging deeper and deeper into the Spotify rabbit hole to find smooth chillout and lounge tunes.
4. Making a concerted effort to call my family and best friends on the phone to tell them that I miss them and love them very much. The art of long, rambling phone conversations must live on.
5. Finding out where the best dark chocolate is located in the world and dreaming of those places in my sleep. If it’s less than 85% dark let’s not talk.
6. Reading books on Buddhism and living a mindful life. It passes by so quickly so let’s make it a good one!
7. Figuring out how to randomly interject emoticons into online conversations.
   (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
8. Taking public transportation in large cities. Tokyo’s rail system is the tops.
9. Walking nowhere in particular.

Did you know Automattic is hiring? We want people who are willing to work hard, share their ideas, learn from their colleagues, take initiative to get things done without being told, and those who aren’t afraid to ask questions. Think you fit the bill? Work with us.

In some parts around the world, this Sunday is dedicated to the mothers out there. For Mother’s Day, we’ve rounded up sites on motherhood, parenting, and family. On WordPress.com, you’ll discover mothers on all paths: new moms, stay-at-home-moms, single moms, mothers who are full-time writers, and more. (Even mommy men, as you’ll see below.)

We especially want to highlight bloggers with unique perspectives and thoughtful commentary, as well as collaborative blogs with multiple contributors. So, we hope you enjoy this sampling of sites in honor of this special day.

Butterfly Mind

Creative nonfiction writer Andrea Badgley lives with her husband and two children in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. In the past, she’s caught our eye with thoughtful posts on both family and the writing life: a piece on putting food on the table, and a post on revisiting her childhood diaries. Her blog is a delight: lovely musings on motherhood and parenting, and lighthearted pieces, too (be sure to check her humor category).

On her About page, Andrea says her mother once told her to never ever stop writing — good advice, mom! — and we’re glad to see her reflections on WordPress.com. Her voice is strong, yet quiet and eloquent; follow along and read how she balances all the things that life throws at her.

The Mamafesto

On Avital Norman Nathman’s blog, The Mamafesto, motherhood and feminism collide. The writer, mother, and former high school teacher writes provoking, intelligent posts on a number of topics, from gender and media to activism and reproductive rights.

In a recent response to a Huffington Post article about a mother who posted pictures of her six-year-old cross-dressing son on Facebook, she writes:

Maybe – and just hear me out – instead of suggesting that we *don’t* share these pictures over fear that it will damage our children somehow, we actually share more of them in hopes of normalizing and accepting these types of things.

Being a “pink boy” doesn’t have to mean anything beyond being a boy who happens to love pink.

We enjoy following the commentary and personal writing on her blog — and, whether you agree or disagree, you’ll appreciate that she asks questions that make her readers think. We also like that she showcases her freelance work on another WordPress.com site using the portfolio-style theme Hatch; if you dig her blog posts, be sure to poke around her other projects.

Kristen Hansen Brakeman

Essayist and fiction writer Kristen Hansen Brakeman is a busy writer and mother — she’s got her hands in numerous cookie jars: a WordPress.com blog of sharp, often hilarious writing; her work as a production supervisor on TV variety shows; and her book projects — she’s currently seeking representation for an essay collection and a humorous fantasy for kids.

In addition to exploring topics of aging (check out her popular post on the dreaded word “ma’am”), family, and other subjects with her dose of humor, she writes about life in the Sandwich Generation: raising three daughters while taking care of an aging mother.

Mommy Man

Stay-at-home dad, writer, and “mommy man” Jerry Mahoney lives with his boyfriend, Drew, and their two twins (who were conceived via gestational surrogate, with eggs provided by Drew’s sister, Susie). On his blog, he writes about issues of gay parenting and being a stay-at-home dad (consider his post on “dadscimination,” his thoughts on whether kids deserve a mom, or commentary on an episode of Modern Family).

There’s lots of stuff to read here, so if you don’t know where to start, visit his “Best O’Blog” page, or read more about his unique story in his Modern Love essay, “Mom/Not Mom/Aunt,” in the New York Times.

Spilled Milk

Spilled Milk is a collaborative blog featuring photography collections by 19 mothers around the globe. Each week, a new theme prompts one of the contributors to reflect on parenthood and “the complexity and beauty that comes with raising our kids.” The site design is minimal and elegant, and the bloggers use tiled galleries to display sets of gorgeous images.

Check out the recent contributions that interpret the themes of “Experience,” “Mess,” and “Meal.” The themes are broad, allowing each photographer to get creative with snapshots and compile personal yet cohesive collections of what it means to be a mother, wife, and observer of the fleeting, intimate, and precious moments of our lives.

More collaborative blogs

Mothers With Cancer is a group blog of 20 mothers with cancer. Some of these women have been in remission for years, while others are newly diagnosed or are battling a new recurrence. Off the Merry-Go-Round is a space for discussion and inspiration for six women who have chosen their families over full-time careers. Also, Peanut Butter on the Keyboard is a blog where parenting and publishing intersect, led by a group of mothers who also happen to be romance authors.

And more: a mix of moms on WordPress.com

We love the variety — and fun and fitting blog names — of sites focused on motherhood:

This week’s three selections address some of our favorite topics: reading and writing. If you’re looking for inspiring and thought-provoking posts, you’re in luck. From the hunger that develops when a reader can’t find the time to read, to the power of the dictionary and your own memories, we’ve got something for everyone.

We are all travelers here

I miss the feel of bound paper between my fingers.

At daybreak, my quiet commute, punctuated by the flipflipflip of pages, chapters, worlds.

At nightfall, crisp, cool sheets, and the sweet scent of sleep. My heavy eyelids and my frantic panic to read just one more (just one more) paragraph, before giving in to rest.

After a hectic month cut into her reading time, Vanessa at Rant and Roll succinctly and beautifully describes longing for the written word. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Occupied with our other pursuits, some of them creative, some likely not, we often find ourselves unable to carve out time to settle into a good book. Vanessa’s post will inspire you to do so. (And as an added bonus, she includes a short video of the incomparable, funny, and always charmingly self-effacing Ray Bradbury that is well worth your time.)

Rediscovering the dictionary

… as far as a conventional desk dictionary is concerned, I haven’t used one in a long time. My vocabulary is more than adequate for the kind of fiction I’m writing, and whenever I have to check a definition just to be on the safe side, there are plenty of online resources that I can consult with ease. So although I have plenty of other reference books, I just never saw the need for Webster’s.

But I was wrong.

If you’re a writer (and there’s a good chance you are, after all), this is a must-read post. Author Alec Nevala-Lee, on his blog of the same name, explores the power of dictionaries in the writing process. Using a New Yorker article by creative nonfiction pioneer John McPhee as a jumping-off point, Alec dives into his own dictionary-related history. He comes out changed, with a new appreciation for that most dependable of reference books. Check out his post and we bet the same happens to you.

Writing, Time Machines, and Memory

Our time machines can exist in many forms, the memories of others, books, video, and the landscapes in which we live. We take all of this data, and what exists within our own minds, and put these fragments together like a puzzle, negotiating the connections and determining their importance. What results is a narrative we can repeat, a story that is much less about the past than it is about the future.

We are constantly creating and recreating our narratives of identity, cultivating a sense of who we are and where we fit within our cultural contexts. We want to understand ourselves, and perhaps even more so, to be understood by others. I suspect our compulsion to record and save and archive everything arises from this keen desire to narrate our story to others, and find connection.

In this thoughtful post, Michelle from the blog Play looks at how our memories interact with and help create our art. Touching on everything from writing to psychology to pop culture, Michelle explores the hard questions that plague those trying to accurately portray their own realities. What is the absolute truth about your past? Just how reliable are those memories you’re writing about? Michelle tackles all this and more here, in an excellent example of long-form writing.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

Theme Thursday is here, and I’m excited to announce the three fantastic new themes we’ve wrangled for you this week.

Handmade is a beautiful retro-styled blogging theme for foodies and crafters, designed with love by the folks at Obox Themes. Focusing on an amazing attention to detail and gorgeous typography, everything in Handmade has had hours of attention poured into it. Tender, loving care would be an understatement. Handmade can be trusted to display your gallery and blog posts in the best way possible on a small screen. It works well across all screens whether that be tablet, PC or even mobile.

Read more about Handmade on the Theme Showcase,  or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Untitled is a beautiful free theme for showcasing your photos and videos. Designed by one of our own — the talented Nate Schaumburg — Untitled’s features include a full-width front page slider, support for post formats, and a mini carousel that appears on single pages.

Read more about Untitled on the Theme Showcase,  or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

Finally, I’d like to announce — not on a whim — our third theme of the day, On a Whim. Designed by Meagan Fisher, On a Whim is a bold and colorful premium blogging theme, with a touch of whimsy. Its features include support for several post formats, links to social networking profiles, and an optional second navigation menu in the footer.

Read more about On a Whim on the Theme Showcase, or test drive it for yourself by going to Appearance → Themes in your Dashboard.

If you’ve ever had a question about WordPress.com, chances are you’ve visited our Community Support Forums. Forums are a great place to search for solutions and get answers. While our Happiness Engineers help out in these forums, WordPress.com enthusiasts — people who are passionate about WordPress.com and helping fellow users — provide the majority of answers.

We’ve interviewed forum volunteers Sergio Ortega (airodyssey), Mike Brough (auxclass), and Tess Warn (1tess). Today, we’re excited to introduce another prolific volunteer: Lorraine Murphy (raincoaster). We chatted with her about how she got involved in the forums, as well as her tips for getting and providing great support.

You’ve been blogging at raincoaster.com since 2006 and write for many other blogs. Tell us how you got started on the web, your blogging, and why you chose WordPress.com.

At the turn of the century, I was at home — unemployed — trying to build a freelance business writing and desktop publishing career, while struggling with an undiagnosed illness. I couldn’t go out much, yet wanted to socialize. I knew there were forums and a social life to be found online, so I went to find them. And boy, did I ever.

I joined actor Viggo Mortensen’s fan base, and six weeks later the other members pooled their funds to fly me out to New York to meet him. These women had no idea who I was, but they wanted me to have that experience, which I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t help but be moved by that. Suddenly, it seemed to me that yes, the world may be full of strangers, but no, not all of them are hostile. Getting online changed my worldview.

I delved deeper into the online life, learning how to use a blog as practice for my writing career. I realized everything I owned had come to me thanks to my engagement online, and if the web could do that for me, I could do that for other people.

I launched my business raincoaster media, using transformative social media to bring about positive change in individuals and organizations. One of my students, a man who has lived at homeless shelters for 17 years and uses his blog as a portfolio for his poetry, was recently published in Geist, Canada’s premier literary magazine. Another, April Smith of AHAMedia.ca, has started a media business in Vancouver. She’s been profiled on the BBC three times, and is more famous than I’ll ever be. That’s how you know you’ve really empowered your students — when they surpass you.

I came to WordPress.com after I lost 400,000 words on my first blog, when the Diary-X service went down with no backups. I searched for the most secure, turnkey system I could find; everyone I trusted suggested WordPress, and WordPress.com in particular — they knew I didn’t want to get “under the hood” and tinker.

I got my first big break from Manolo, a famous shoe blogger and hilarious fashion writer at Shoeblogs.com. I started writing for his parenting blog years ago, and I still make fun of celebrities on Ayyyy.com and occasionally blog at Manolofood.com.

I’m also writing for the DailyDot.com, focusing on Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and hacktivism in general. I love shining a light on people working to make the world a better place. It’s important to keep writing and raising awareness.

What’s the story behind the “raincoaster” nickname and the “49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude” motto?

Until recently, I lived on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, pretty much the roughest place in Canada: the average life expectancy is 42 years and change. It rains all the time there — it’s a very noir place — and raincoaster just came to me one day. It also makes a nice nickname for someone named Lorraine. As for my motto? I’m a smartass, and I love poetry and puns, so it sort of came to me one day. It fits.

How did you first get involved in WordPress.com forums?

I was confused about the difference between WordPress.com and .org, between the forum and the support docs, and between staff (Happiness Engineers) and volunteers. I thought I could do a solid job volunteering in the forums and explaining the features of WordPress.com to users. Volunteers Timethief and Doctor Mike were kind enough to guide me back to the shallows when I got in over my depth, but very soon I found that I could answer people’s questions.

You’ve posted over 60,000 replies in the WordPress.com forums since 2006. Thank you for your support! What types of questions do you like helping users with, and what do you find the most rewarding about contributing?

I like answering someone’s first question the most. People are often shocked by how fast they get an answer, how clear it is, and how they can put the solution to work right away; they’re very grateful, and it’s wonderful to see. The next best thing is when people who’ve asked questions in the past come to the forums and start answering questions themselves.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from your volunteer experience in the forums?

Meaningful, strong relationships can be forged over mundane, repetitive questions about domain mapping. Really, my forum experience at WordPress.com shows that humans are, even in the midst of technology, fundamentally human.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved in the forums?

READ. Read everything. Once you think you know everything, go to the forums every day and scroll down the thread titles. If one issue stands out as having too many replies, or is a topic you don’t know the answer to, read it. Once you can scroll down an entire page and know all the answers without opening the threads, you can start answering things.

Thank you, Lorraine, for your WordPress.com community support and for taking the time to answer our questions.

Remember, forums are there for the community — this means you. If you have a question, search the forums to find the answer. If you’re knowledgeable about WordPress.com, find an unreplied thread — maybe you’ll be able to help a fellow user.

Customizing your blog’s theme is one way to show off what makes you you. Young adult novelist Nova Ren Suma does a beautiful job of this at distraction no. 99, using both free and premium options to make Sight her own. (Once inspired, you can get busy customizing your own blog!)

To start, here are Sight and distraction no. 99, side by side:

Nova’s customization makes a big splash

As a professional writer, Nova’s blog connects her to both her readers and fellow writers. She sets the tone right away, by using a custom header and custom background. Nova also uses two of Sight’s most compelling options to great effect: the featured image slider and both of the available custom menus.

Nova’s custom header spells out clearly that you’re reading the blog of a young adult author. The bold, clean black/white/red color scheme and overall look complements her background nicely:

Nova’s chosen “Dreaming of Stardust” as her custom background, giving an ethereal look to the blog that mimics the feeling of her books’ covers. Think about how your own background and header play off of each other. Together, do they create a look that represents your personality?

Next, Nova uses Sight’s image slider option, allowing her to present the content she most wants readers to encounter, in a professional, magazine-like way. This is an easy way to add movement to Sight, and is a snap to deploy. Nova simply marked the posts as “sticky,” and made sure each one had a featured image. Sight will display up to 30 of your latest sticky posts this way, giving you lots of flexibility.

Nova also uses multiple custom menus. Notice the two menus in the header photo above? There’s the horizontal one running underneath the header, which is her blog’s primary navigation. But she’s also chosen to use the secondary menu option in the header itself, right up near the search bar. Here Nova’s added some custom links, using this high-profile spot to draw your attention to her personal website, as well as offer more information on two of her books:

A sidebar that just won’t stop

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out how effectively Nova uses her sidebar. There’s not an inch of wasted space here.

Nova shares information on herself, her work, her book reviews, her appearances, and more, carving out room in the sidebar to keep all of this important stuff in one place.

Nova’s About.me widget makes a strong impression. Notice how effective it is, providing a quick bio and multiple platforms for following and interacting with Nova. You’ll also see a text widget below it, sharing her “upcoming appearances.”

At the very top of her sidebar, Nova showcases her most recently published book with an image widget that links to her personal website using a photo of the cover. Just underneath this, she cleverly uses a text widget to provide a summary of the book’s plot, along with several quotes from book reviews.

A final point about Nova’s sidebar: she’s chosen the order of her widgets with care. This isn’t some hodgepodge mix. She’s got her most vital stuff — her recent book, her appearances, herself — right up top, where you can’t miss them. Nova employs lots of other widgets as you scroll down her sidebar (recent posts, recent comments, Twitter, and a tag cloud, to name a few), but it’s no accident they are where they are.

Consider your intended outcomes with your own blog. What’s important to you? What do you want people to see first? As you think about which widgets to use to pull off your vision, don’t forget to spend some time on their order, too.

Want more help exploring all the possibilities in widgets? Try this trio of posts from The Daily Post:

• Widgets 101
• Widgets 201
• Widgets 301

All the sweet customization goodies

Finally, Nova adds one more layer of customization to her blog with custom fonts and custom colors, as part of the Custom Design upgrade. For just $30 a year, she’s able to pick fonts that are different for each part of her site, but work together overall for a consistent look. And with the custom colors she’s chosen, her entire site is tied together, top to bottom.

distraction no. 99′s custom fonts:

distraction no. 99′s custom colors, with a snippet of her background:

WordPress makes it easy for you to play around with different custom font and color options, before you even decide to purchase the upgrade. Check out these two great articles to learn how, and to see more examples of blogs using custom fonts and colors:

• Personalize Your Site with Custom Fonts
• Personalize Your Site with Custom Colors

I began investigating different means of water energy and have found that there are 3 major ways producing energy from water, tidal power, wave power, and ocean thermal power.  These are projects that are actually is use today, and successful in their purpose.

The Open-centre turbine is an innovative turbine designed by the Open Hydro Group. A prototype was installed at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney in 2006. In May 2008 it became the first tidal turbine to contribute to the UK grid.

The Pelamis machine consists of a series of semi-submerged cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. As waves pass along the length of the machine, the sections move relative to one another. The wave-induced motion of the sections is resisted by hydraulic cylinders which pump high pressure oil through hydraulic motors via smoothing hydraulic accumulators.  The hydraulic motors drive electrical generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a single umbilical cable to a junction on the sea bed. Several devices can be connected together and linked to shore through a single seabed cable.

Evopod is a semi-submerged, floating, tethered tidal energy capture device. It uses a simple but effective mooring system that allows the free floating device to maintain optimum heading into the tidal stream.  The power generation equipment is similar to that of a wind turbine and is housed in the cylindrical shaped watertight lower hull, which is deeply submerged below the water line and supported by small waterplane area surface piercing struts.

[DESIGN AND PLANNING STRATEGIES]

By truly grasping how elements in nature are structured, much can be learned and interpreted into architecture.  The forms and structure that we can gather from nature can be all the inspiration that is needed to create beautiful, free-flowing architectural design.  In creating a building, structure, form, etc. that directly correlates with its surroundings, successfully and clearly displays circulation, and enables the user to interact with the space on a physical and spiritual level, the kind of architecture that can potentially be produced could evoke a feeling of WHOLENESS, BELONGING, COMFORT and INSPIRATION in the user.

-Circulation will be the most emphasized architectural principle used for this project. With a very linear site, circulation, although an elementary principle and something that should always be extensively investigated, will have to receive extra attention and detail because if executed correctly, the way one moves around the site and interacts with each element will ultimately decide how one feels about the space.

-Organic architectural principles promote harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches that encourage the building and its surroundings to be one unified, cohesive entity that co-exists with one another.

-Structure is the basis of everything, living or man-made.  The implementation of the visual expression of structure and the celebration of structural elements will create clarity within the forms.  This design principle will allow for a relationship between the natural structures, which surround the buildings, and the structural integrity of the buildings themselves.

-A Self-sustaining development project comprised of mix-used buildings that can be powered by the conversion of energy that is produced from a rising tide.  During hurricanes, and tide changes, the tide rises substantially; this poses the chance to implement a hydropower system that intakes the powerful rush of the water and collects and stores the energy that is produced.

For years, Smith Point County Park, located on the Fire Island barrier beach, New York, has been a desirable retreat for surfers, families, vacationers, and avid beachgoers alike.  But in the past few years the clear state in which hurricanes and erosion have left the beach, and many other beaches along Southern Long Island, is much cause for concern.  Because of this, tourism and overall business for the beaches has radically declined, as a result the beach itself and the town surrounding it has financially and aesthetically suffered.  It is the intention of this thesis to restore and revive the beach, and to mend the once vibrant relationship of co-dependency between the surrounding town and the beach itself through articulated design approaches.

[RATIONALE]

By revitalizing the beach and developing new program along the island, the county and town of Shirley can benefit from the revenue that will be produced, which will hopefully lead to enabling the surrounding areas to further develop as well.  Smiths point beach is 1000 ft strip with the Atlantic Ocean on the south and the Great South Bay on the North, there is great opportunity to address both waterfronts architecturally and bring a new outlook to the area.

[THESIS STATEMENT]

The purpose of this thesis is to restore and revive a once thriving beach through the development of a more permanent means of alleviating erosion and developing a program that can financially and aesthetically provide for the beach and the surrounding town.

1. make it bold
2. real golfer versus disc golfer
3. brand, marketing
4. craziness, humor, bold
5. bring park & building together as one
6. the surfer look, the disc golf look… authentic
7. water
8. poetic
9. makes sense
10. new typology

1.  Strategies?
2.  Designing around a pattern
3.  Land forms
4.  Eisenman
5.  What is being tested?
6.  Clubhouse? Pavilion? Visitor’s Center? Facility?
7.  Morphing into landscape
8.  Handicap accessibility throughout course?
9.  Design of the land
10.  Constraints/Agenda

simple diagram explaining the program that I have developed so far for the actual clubhouse

1. steel shoe tree?
2. city has no money
3. role of public facilities
4. connection between other activities & location
5. detach from sport
6. passion for project
7. multiple uses, usage at night
8. public transportation
9. central location
10. space is a premium

Weekdays at Morley Field can attract about 250 people per day.  The weekend is when business really picks up and you can find anywhere from 350 to sometimes over 400 people per day.  Course owner and founder Snapper Pierson has noticed a steady increase in traffic over the past few years.  He has been quoted saying that “It seems to grow 10 to 15 percent every year.”

This information is paraphrased from an article that I recently read describing some of the usage patterns at Morley Field.  The article was written by Tim Coffey for the San Diego Business Journal about 11 years ago back in the year 2000.  I found it interesting because I have never played this course until last year and it felt like way more people do use the course now then back in the year 2000.  According to some of these numbers from the article we can figure that Morley Field is now dealing with numbers as large as 650 people per weekday and 900 people per day on the weekend.  These numbers were figured out using 250 & 350 as base numbers and adding on 10% each year up until 2011.

All in all, the amount of users increases every year and so does the interest and exposure of this wonderful place yet the course and facilities within never increase or expand.  It is time to look into solutions for expanding Morley Field and creating an overall better experience for everyone that uses the space within.

Portable Building in China.

15 stories in 2 days.

Cool video about designing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4PwHD7XKj0

Working on my thesis…

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Subject: Re-thinking the learning environment for the 21st Century

Summary:

The next generation has new learning needs that are arising from rapid shifts in societies and markets worldwide.  The traditional American educational process and environment are no longer adequate to produce a qualified and relevant society in todays world.  The educational system needs to make a shift as rapid as those occurring around it, and re-think the learning environment for the 21st Century.

A high percentage of students graduating high school and college admit to not feeling prepared for the work force.  Many are jobless despite having a degree and what used to be considered an admirable education.  The way that these students were educated is not longer relevant to our current society and is not producing the qualified workers for the market.  Most businesses today say that they cannot find enough skilled workers, a situation which will only be exacerbated by the pending retirement of the baby boomer generation who will soon be taking their years of experience and finely honed business skills out of the workplace.  The American education system is not meeting the needs of American business, and is training people for a future that no longer exists.  Thousands trained for industrialized jobs are without work, while companies based on current technologies of the day such as Google, Facebook, Zynga and Amazon cannot hire enough qualified employees.  The pace of change in todays world is fast, and our educational system needs to catch up.  For most kindergartners today, the jobs that they will have when they grow up do not even exist yet.  It is essential that our education system shifts to teach them not a specialized skill, but a skill set that will enable them to adapt and flourish in our rapidly changing world.

According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, crucial areas of accomplishment include critical thinking and problem solving, communication, creativity and innovation, and collaboration and team building.  The importance of creativity in schools today is supported by another respected voice in education reform, Ken Robinson.  He purports that creativity is greatest at the intersection of divergent disciplines, an opinion that is seconded by Frans Johansen, the author of “The Medici Effect”, who asserts that diversity is driven by innovation.

The comprehension and development of these 21st century skills is of foremost concern in producing qualified workers and a competent society for our time. Educational environments need to be re-thought and re-designed to accommodate and inspire the growth of these skills however possible.

Sources

-21st Century Skill Set

http://www.p21.org/documents/RTM2006.pdf

-Magazine “The Economist”

-Ted Talk, Ken Robinson

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

-Frans Johansen

speech at Greenbuild 2011: http://www.greenbuildexpo.org/speakers/Master-Series/Master-Series-Speakers/Frans-Johannson.aspx

book: “The Medici Effect”

Sustainability in a major way

http://www.oregonsustainabilitycenter.org/about/

Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, at Greenbuild 2011 giving a brief overview of some of the ideas in “Reinventing Fire”…

http://www.greenbuildexpo.org/speakers/Master-Series/Master-Series-Speakers/AmoryLovins.aspx

Recently, it has become clear that the American education system is no longer adequate.  Businesses cannot find enough skilled workers, even though a high percentage of Americans between 25 and 32 are unemployed.  This lack of skilled workers will only be exacerbated by the pending retirement of the baby boomer generation, who will soon be taking their years of experience and finely honed business skills to a beach in the Carribean.  The American education system is not meeting the needs of American business, and is training people for a future that no longer exists.  Educational environments need to be re-thought and re-designed to foster the development of the 21st Century Skill Set; critical thinking and problem solving, communication, creativity and innovation, and collaboration and team building.

Advances in alternate energy technology down to the root of not just the physics but the chemistry of our technologies continues to offer incredible  possibilities for the future of economics.  Justin Hall-Tipping, an entrepreneur in advanced energy development, has studied and recognized the power of science in addressing issues of energy that expand beyond what is normally known in terms of generation and the grid for transport and use.  Through a remarkable understanding of chemistry and the energy potential in controlling the electron, advanced atomic engineering can transform the very smallest components of our world into generators and storage of energy for a world-wide demand with lesser detriment.

The economic issues we are facing today consistently return to the demands of our society for fossil fuels.  Advancing new technology into more efficient and more widespread applicable use only increases the reasonability and economic opportunity in drastic transformation of the world we live in.  As stated in the July 2011 TedTalk, a problem of viewing our world through a lens of normality only prohibits our advancement into a better, more resilient future.  Normal in this day and age is not good enough and in every facet we should be continually moving forward to make the world a better place for all.  Addressing energy problems should act as a very promising start.

A recurring concept in sustainable urban design relating to architecture and value in capitalist speculation is social capital.  The idea reflects not necessarily on the directly monetized value of a building or a space, but rather an additional value attributed with design that successfully creates spaces that people find an informal capacity to enjoy social experience.  In pressing for smaller private realms and re-immersing people back into dense urban lifestyles where shared public space becomes the primary element of social fabric as a common living room, it is crucial to understand what characteristics help create successful zones of impromptu public gathering.

William H. Whyte addressed this issue in a study which he presented in a video called Social Life of Small Urban Places.  By tracking human movement through major plazas, their interactions and their exchanges, and comparing them amongst a multitude of different plaza designs, the film identifies a few very useful consistencies that contribute to successful city spaces.  Busy places really tend to be the most successful, demanding human density and offering the ability of people to watch other people.  This centrality allows for a ‘choreography’ of human promenade through the central zones of open spaces, while those that congregate generally find successful spaces for seating where seating is available.  This means proper heights and surfaces for ledges and benches as well as appropriate backings and socially appropriate sizing of seating places.  The video points out how small benches do not satisfy this as they present uncomfortable proximity of strangers in places without the proper density.  A variety of sitting potentials and options also contributes to successful sitting scenarios in a plaza, offering a sense of choice and freedom.  The scale must also be addressing the pedestrian if it is expected to attract appropriate densities.  This includes the level of visibility, either at street level or at a common vantage point that permits overview of some urban spectacle.  As the video progresses it reinforces these characteristics, employing the utility of proper natural light, offering some relative availability of food or drink, presenting an appropriate presence of trees and vegetation, and realizing the success of ‘usable’ water features.  Urban entertainers who have the freedom to congregate with the masses also creates a degree of city theater.  With unexpected shows of human action amidst appropriate human traffic, a well designed plaza should offer public spaces that function for unplanned social enjoyment.  

This multitude of successful traits creates a relatively simple precursory guideline for programming relative social spaces.  As this thesis looks to accommodate large living spaces by bringing them back to centralized open space rather than isolated suburban living rooms, the Social Life of Small Urban Places offers a good analysis for a preliminary framework.

Paolo Soleri’s thoughts on urban design and architecture’s role within it carries a great many relative thoughts and reflections in relation to this developing thesis study.  With his idea of arcology, a combination of ecology and architecture, Soleri addressed issues of urban growth and human society here in the United States that are now becoming crises in our present day.  Our persistent outgrowth through suburban sprawl has damaged our capacity to share in spontaneous human interaction as well as find means to access nature, but it has also hastened the deteriorating effects on our natural world through a spread of such wasteful and excessive living standards.  His ‘urban laboratory’ at Arcosanti has acted as the testing ground for his theories and beliefs of urban ideals in regard to human happiness and appropriate human environments.

Critical Thought
Soleri’s case for the city recognized long term effects of American society’s consumptive nature and how such continuous wasteful expansion would contribute not only to environmental destruction but spread to dangerous politics and to destructive results to all of mankind.  His strong criticism of suburban lifestyles not only reflects on the urban dis-functionality but also the environmental costs due to forces of social influence.  In conversation, he had stated: 

“It should be self-evident that the suburban and exurban expansion of cities as we have now, with their demands in terms of production and consumption, are destructive to the environment.  The bigger my house is, the more I’m going to stuff things into it.  And the bigger my house is, the more isolated my house is going to be from the next house.  It’s very elementary.  So the logistics of human connection should not be just connecting mentally or socially, but connecting physically, connecting physical needs – groceries, utilities, garbage, water, sewers.  We should perhaps, as environmentalists, accept the very notion that we have a need to congregate.”

Here alone he related what today’s sustainable urban design initiatives centralize on.  Not only is suburban lifestyle spread so far that social interaction becomes a foreign event, but the very livelihood demands a consumer lifestyle.  Simply stated, “Now, the most consuming, the most wasteful, the most polluted, the most segregating kind of shelter we can devise is the suburban home… Those boxes are the epitome of consumption.”  Sustainability in architecture and urban design is more than just building more energy efficient buildings and transit, it goes down to the core of American society.  What we demand in our own personal lives has become almost an exceptional level of entitlement, and what is sad is how this level of expectation has created in society such an extreme separation from reality that they cannot realize that continuing this kind of lifestyle would require ‘increasing numbers of people to live like serfs so that the planet could support our way of life.’  This is consistent with the way our economy has been running over the last decade in reflecting on the real estate crisis.  Houses generated increased capital solely on human speculation, common day middle men passing an unchanged product from one person to the next for profit,  all the while using this increased money to buy real physical products made by impoverished people around the world.  And sadly this is the system, which Soleri relates:

“And so we end up having this notion that unless we partake in the market cycle, we aren’t good Americans.  The politicians tell us that; the corporate community tells us that; the theologians tell us that; academia tells us that.  So we are really leading some kind of utopian dream that is very dangerous.”

And it is dangerous precisely because of the politics such a system needs to employ to propagate its existence, where we can wage war for resources to maintain excessive lifestyles and where we can continue to buy from countries whose governments carry out practices we as a society truly do no want to defend. The way suburbia has shaped the American urban layout reaches beyond just local economics, it does force demands on people around the world.  And the best thing Soleri suggests is that we need to take the American Dream and frugalize it.

What all entails from existing sprawl and suburban lifestyle also fails to give what richness exists only in urban environments of density and interactive society.  With the city comes dynamism as Soleri calls it, and he states that human progression fails because,”This is a consequence of a dynamism that doesn’t exist in individuality.  Nor in the suburbs.  The critical masses don’t develop there.  Without a critical mass, you don’t have fire, you don’t have energy, you don’t having thinking.  We have to transcend our individualism.  Life is a transcending process.”  The city presents the opportunity for this.  It exists not only as an environmentally sound alternative but also to create a human habitat that really capitalizes on the value of human interaction.  The dynamism of an urban centrality creates a realm of learning for all when full of life, options, and things to entice human curiosity.  And this is again where a contest towards capitalism arises because of the dangers of efficiency and the lack of compassion found in the system today.  The city must become more than a machine, it needs to become a habitat created entirely for the people that live within it.

Proposing Alternatives
Arcosanti as the physical experiment of Soleri’s ideals occurred in isolation un-compromised by conditions found in existing human developments.  Although I disagree with the complete need to start human nature over from scratch,  with optimism I see the possibility of saving our existing urban cores through proper and responsible redevelopment.  Regardless of the isolation of his own urban ideal, he raised many concepts on which his ideal was based which hold as strong and rational alternatives to the problems we now face.  

• Self-Containment of Habitat:  Designing and limiting the destructive sprawl necessary for the function of complex social events.
• Cityscape and Countryside Reciprocity:  Natural and agricultural lands must be preserved for any level of survivability of populations and ecosystems, thus the city must act to shelter in a manner that respects bordering lands.
• Effective Use of Resources:  Our use of fuels and resources to manufacture human products needs to be done responsibly in regard to the capacity of which exists.
• Hunger and the Urban Effect:  Put an end to suburban development on prime agricultural land which only creates greater limits on food producing capacity and contributing to unnecessary hunger.
• The Recycling Tempo and Its Planetary Optimization:  Minimize waste by utilizing reuse of water and material products towards longer or more natural life cycles
• Crowding Versus Dispersion:  Crowding contributes to a positive urban effect, sprawl leads to disruption, waste, and pollution.
• Small is Beautiful:  Build appropriately to the need; Big is not ugly, but ‘Gigantism’ is poor packaging and so wasteful.
• The Waste of Commuting:  Communities of terrible individualist segregation with wasted social and cultural potential
• Mixed Use and the Burden of Deserted Places:  Multiple uses lessens desertion and the subsequent lawlessness, vandalism, and social weakness associated with it
• Segregation and its Impact on Individuals and Society:  Build focusing on equity which contributes to real dynamism.
• Self-sufficiency or Self-reliance:  Not self sufficient, but to some degree of self reliance, a defensible logic for human existence.
• Social Science Versus the Art of Living:  Through an individual’s environment much can be learned if that environment carries enough of society.  There is no exact science of living.
• Ownership: Public Versus Private:  Everything relates to everything else, its hard to claim absolute belonging.
• Productivity, Frugality, and the Marketplace:  Frugality can lead even the most productive to valuable lives in a greater human world of equity.
• Individualism and Society:  “The individual who has denied society will be low on the scale of worth, as low as the society that has denied the individual.  Capitalism and communism should get together and bump heads on the subject.  In practice, they are extremes, both foreign to reality.  Unfortunately, we, with cruel single-mindedness and catastrophic consequences, mistake the practical for the real.”

Analyzing the History
To effectively challenge what today exists as normative values in urban design it is crucial to understand and recognize what conditions of the past shaped these decisions and identify why those solutions have become insufficient in addressing the same problems today.  The dominant trails that must be traced center on transportation through and about our cities as well as the related density changes through the transformation of populations’ locations.

The city has developed with a very direct relation to modes and availability of transportation.  Tracing our modern conceptions of time and productivity in the working world to the industrial revolution, early industrial cities were originally built in densities to permit people access to work by walking.  Without modes of transit available for the general masses there existed no possibility in creating an economic machine based on worker labor without their direct residences having access to factories and plants.  These new human densities with the availability of jobs and capital opportunity in the productive age started the creation of a city based almost entirely on machine efficiency.  Without proper planning or regulations this led to conditions marked by poor sanitation and ineffective human crowding.  Transit in its early stages seemed to be a responsive development with upper class demand to escape urban conditions.  Trolleys were one of the first forms of mass transit, relying initially on horses, improving to cable pulled track cars, and eventually to electrically powered track cars.  As the technologies and  investment grew, this permitted the outgrowth of human populations away from the urban core with the advent of centralized outskirt communities of cable car suburbs.  What next truly drastically transformed the potential of outward spread of the city was the personal automobile.  With the availability of personal vehicles that permitted access to ever greater distances, cheap land could be developed into greater and greater sized individual sanctuaries.  

As a general outlook on the precursory elements contributing to urban growth, the personal automobile has become the tool of greatest influence in dictating the direction of urban design.  What needs be understood through the critical eye, though, is that this form of transportation was absolutely viable and entirely reasonable in the time of its growth and expansion.  With booms in the development, extraction, and use of oil throughout the United States, the industry was able to make the alternatives something affordable.  I venture to say where we are now is not remotely the same.  When our lifestyles are propagated by waging imperialistic ventures across the world to regain access to a resource we have either depleted domestically or will not extract for the sake of our own direct environments, then such a system must be altered.  The solutions return to issues seen in early human densities.  Regardless, as populations increase and every individual continues to have their own automobile, the same problems arise as early trolley and horse carriage industrial cities witnessed, just over greatly increasing distances: inefficiency in congestion.  This is where urban design and lifestyle choices must be influenced, not just for the sake of efficiency, but for the actual long-term survival of our economy.

This then relates to the transformations of population densities.  Early cities were founded and functioned on density.  It was the inefficiency of design and the lack of infrastructure and health regulations that really drove such a desire for alternatives outside the city.  The housing tenements of the working class were atrocious with no design provisions guaranteeing ventilation, sewage, adequate lighting, or clean water.  As these conditions spread in the city amidst the Industrial Revolution and growing working class populations, transit offered the upper class and middle class the means to escape to larger private outskirt homes rather than address these issues.  With the luxuries of private lifestyles and the greater affordability for cheap homes outside the city, suburbia has grown over the decades from upper class refuge to the common American Dream.  

Reflections
As with transportation, this persistent practice of sparse development has become outdated.  The city should no longer be rejected and should be the center of reevaluation in regards to development.  Instead of permitting developers to continue selling lifestyles that have been enslaving people to debt, we should take a serious look at revaluing what we as a society cherish and adapt accordingly.  The past was shaped by the freedom and efficiency allowed by the automobile, but the more people have spread out to these suburban pockets the greater the transit times both over distance and through congestion has been the direct result.  The cost to live such lifestyles really is strangely absurd if thought through rationally.  The speculative prices of these repeated private homes often cost more than people seem to be capable of affording, their long-term value as an investment is generally just an illusion, the cost of gas and vehicle operation keeps rising, and the amount of time trying to go to and from work daily increases as populations grow larger with more of these developments.  Even manufacturing and agricultural sectors are becoming so separated and displaced that the cost of transportation for base goods and materials continues to increase overall costs.  Essentially, the problems of the automobile carry the same problems as suburban lifestyles.  Even if and when alternative energy is developed, widespread isolation and long distance commutes will require greater measures of material waste and environmental destruction rather than condensing our energy and consumption cycles to something that not only reduces our impact but becomes economically regenerative to a stronger and effective economic structure.  In the study of history it is important to recognize the conditions that dictate why society moves in the direction it does.  The direction we are heading is only repeating the same mistakes that have driven us into the economic and social crisis we live with today.  We are living in the past and it is time to critically evaluate alternatives that really direct us towards a more promising future.

Architecture as a whole really is an entirely distinct field of philosophy.  Every artist and builder has a set of beliefs by which they can qualify the value of their work, and from this arises the extensive range of architectural monuments that stand all about us in our built environments.  As with philosophy, there exists no absolute answer or perfect form. This gives rise to the question as to what the role and responsibility of the architect is.  It is my opinion that the architect has the power to influence the world we live in as every physical alteration to our environment can directly or passively be for  better or for worse.  In physical form the static nature of our buildings should always preserve the safety of the public, but it is in the design and art of architecture by which we  have the power to test our beliefs with positive motions towards improving this world, and it is with this premise that the philosophy to my design arises.

Simplicity and Honesty
Clean forms and honest materials I believe are some of the finest means of creating beautiful architecture.  Simplicity in form demands a mastership in craft and spatial arrangement in an architecture’s program.  Simplicity focuses on the architecture itself.  It helps capitalize on the beauty of location, the creation of spaces themselves, not an illusion of something it is not.  Honesty is directly tied in this regard.  Fake stone siding as a finish to wood frame constructed architecture creates such a cheap imitation of an honest and beautiful process, both for what wood frame construction can be and what stone construction used to be.  When materials are left bare for what they really are, architecture has the potential to actually create an art with respect for reality.  Architecture should not flaunt a false image of capital value, but rather should express every appreciation for what it truly is, and through doing so form responds to every asset of value that can be instigated through its physical existence in forming genuinely valuable space.

Density and Frugality 
As populations increase and the cost of widespread transportation invalidates lifestyles of excessive consumption, oversized personal homes, and commuter cycles, we must find ways to make space in smaller areas.  With density comes frugality, and frugality leads to greater sustainability.  Although the commuter lifestyle can persist for some time to come, our urban design should develop towards one that centralizes the necessaries of life.  If not just for economic reasons but also social reasons it only seems responsible to bring people back into proximity with each other.  Looking at modern design throughout Japan its apparent what can be done with spatial constraint.  Spaces become something new when the direction of growth moves from horizontal expansion to the vertical.  And in finding we have less private space to occupy we have less space to fill with unnecessary consumer goods we find we rarely use.  Creating comfortable space within minimal areas acts to preserve natural land and resources to be enjoyed by all while simultaneously moving the population closer to one another, acting as a stimulus to bring people back from their personal worlds in suburban isolations.

Locality and Community
Architecture should respond to the environment in which it exists.  Although architecture of the city has developed with great influence by an international style, wherever a place has some identity the architecture should become an embodiment of those beliefs.  This does not mean exact replication or emulation of the existing, nor does it deny challenging the expected, but architecture ought to respond rather than attack its place of existence.  Challenging preconceptions of typological forms, adapting the use of traditional materials and building techniques, and responsible design in regard to a location’s climatic condition all offer means of differentiating architecture. It is through this kind of differentiation that architecture holds the power of identity
that helps shape people’s view and value of community.

Coexistence with the Historical
A common attack on modern architecture is its recurrent non-conformity with traditional and classical styled architecture of the past.  This challenge, if not outright rejection, of the past can produce experiences and emotions just by standing amidst the past.  As Daniel Libeskind has done with the Military History Museum, the old does more than simply stand beside the new, rather they are intertwined, creating an event almost unbridled should each stand alone.  Architecture with history is another great contributor to a place’s identity, but replication of the past does not really enhance such a presence, and generally acts to cheapen it.  The contrast between old and new can act to highlight the characteristics of value in both.  As with any response to site and local conditions, history effects the direction of design.  Whether it be an evolution of a style or an artistic movement highlighting a moment in time, the historical and the modern have absolute capacity for beautiful coexistence.

More Than Just Sustainable
In building and creating designs for functional purpose, our choices ought to make outlooks at doing more than just reducing the impact to our planet.  Architecture can be tied into ecosystems through the functional processing and recycling of material and energy through the workings of a structure,utilizing rather than wasting.  Variable waste water can be directly diverted to re-appropriated use, energy generation can be cycled back into the grid.  Architecture has the potential to move forward in ending close looped systems.  Just because common sustainable practices are widely understood and codified does not limit us from finding and testing new ideas.  Architecture carries a capacity to directly impact the world we live in, and as such it is our responsibility to stay informed and persist in innovative practice to push even further beyond sustainability.

The existing economic issues we are now facing are not solely a consequence of political decisions and economic policies, but rather a consequence of greater social development in response. As a society we have become entranced by a lifestyle of overconsumption and excess with little thought of the long-term repercussions. The great availability of credit in combination with unrestricted and terribly regulated spending, trading, and lending could have been foreseen as a system of inevitable failure. Yet despite the actual fall, we try to recover with the same lifestyle that brought us to such crisis with little recognition of our own individual influence. We have developed into a society of personal entitlement, and without transforming our mindset of the American Dream and personal happiness the persistence of this society will doubtless fall to this willful ignorance of reality.

Such a reality corresponds to the historical development that has brought us to this place in time. We have become so disconnected from the source of material supply that we fail to acknowledge that we get so many of our material possessions by purchasing from underpaid labor abroad that comes at the cost of jobs in the United States. We have lost a sense of community and responsibility to the nationalism that we as a country boast and it is crucial for us to recognize and find new means of producing market goods here in the United States while also producing affordable lifestyle options for those that take less skilled manufacturing and agricultural jobs within our society.

In essence, these issues have crucial relations to our existing urban design layout, connecting to issues of suburbia, architectural spatial allotments, and city zoning practices, and this thesis will test how architectural design can provoke social change towards more sustainable and more socially responsible practices and lifestyles.  By studying and analyzing the history of our current state of being, resource efficiency and modes of production, and negotiating and challenging the present notion of the American Dream, an architecture should arise that liberates people from their current existences of isolation and revalue not solely private property but rather public spaces and true community.

Welcome to the progress record on the 2011-2012 architecture thesis project by Thomas Ross.  Here I will relay the transitional formation of an architectural design solution to issues most drastically affecting the future of the United States in the world economy.  Through the various measures of research, speculation, experimentation, and design, it is wholly hoped that a plausible alternative to existing social, economic, and political trends can be addressed through an architectural realization.

Design Portfolio

Architectural Design Portfolio

Final Architectural Thesis Document

Please click the above link to see my final thesis document regarding the revitalization of Detroit thru architecture and planning.

Final Thesis Gallery Board

Newschool of Architecture and Design’s public relations manager, Anna Cearley, recently interviewed me about Detroit and the progress of my thesis. We talked about my project for quite a long time. I am not sure if she is putting together a press article for the school or if she is just gathering “thesis-Intel”, but I was pleased that she was interested in my project. She encouraged me to update my blog on the current state of my thesis and dare I say it, maybe even start a video blog on the subject. Is that a “Vlog”? I’m not sure… but I’ll definitely consider it! Reason being, not many people who do not live in or around Detroit are aware of its problems, outside of the occasional newspaper article about abandoned buildings, cars, corrupt city officials, or the impending “financial manager”. However, when talking about the city, I always mention the great things that I am aware of and love about Detroit; When the city comes alive at the start of April, AKA “April in the D”. St. Patrick’s Day when the city forgets its loss and the streets fill with enthusiastic youth partaking in green beer festivities. Events like the Downtown Hoedown, Detroit Electronic Music Festival, 4^th of July at the Riverfront, any Tigers, Red Wings, or Lions game, Motown Winter Blast, concerts at the FOX and the Fillmore, during these events the emptiness dissolves and this dead city that the nation knows explodes with life. The city thrives in these moments because its people LIVE for these moments, when communities in and around the city unite for the gritty good of Detroit. If only the rest of the nation could see what I see! Change is possible through advocacy and awareness, and perhaps my little project, blog, or “vlog” could lend a hand in the process of much needed revitalization.

So now that I’ve rambled on, I should get back to business. I’ve not yet posted on the revised subject and rational of the project, so here that is:

Due to Detroit’s large geographical boundaries and its recent declines in population, few healthy communities exist; communities where citizens want to live and work. Through master planning the city of Detroit, MI, community development can be created in a way that promotes the city to evolve into series of iconic structures that represent the essence of the community to which it was constructed.

For a good portion of this quarter, I’ve been exploring some case studies regarding new urbanism, planning, and the “shrinking city”. A model that I’ve come to draw strategies from is Youngstown, OH and its Youngstown 2010 plan. The city, while it is much smaller in size than Detroit, essentially had the same problems of industry and population loss. Briefly, the Youngstown plan envisioned reshaping the city incrementally and voluntarily, and utilized tax incentive programs to move residents to healthier communities, leaving the leftover space for industrial businesses that needed the room.

For my initial planning process for Detroit, three different strategies were applied utilizing Policy, Program, and Infrastructure. Policy pushes the Youngstown model, and utilizes incentive programs to encourage residents to move from the areas of blight, which, when comparing demographic information, I found to be the core of the city surrounding Hamtramck, and Highland Park. By doing this, density is created throughout the remainder of the city. The next phase of the strategy is to use the now vacant core and create mass urban agriculture that combats Detroit’s “food desert” and feeds it’s residents. Program is a strategy to reshape community zones via freeway boundaries, creating walk-able, pedestrian friendly communities. This strategy would also identify the “missing pieces” of neighborhoods and develop typologies for architectural in-fill and branding of communities, aka, the series of iconic structures I mentioned earlier. The last planning strategy is Infrastructure, which through the aid of non-profit organizations, would work to revitalize the main thoroughfares of Detroit, specifically Grand River, Michigan Avenue, Fort Street, Woodward Avenue, Gratiot Avenue, and Jefferson. Creating a series of parks, schools, community centers, etc, that could build on the presence of the existing architecture and infrastructure and revitalize surrounding communities.

During my midterm reviews, the strategy of policy was strongly favored, however, some aspects of infrastructure and program can be applied when moving forward. Below are some photos of my midterm presentation. 

A model of Corktown, in which densification occurs along Michigan Avenue.

Moving forward from midterms, I’ve been working on the development of proper agricultural boundaries and exploring methods that incorporate existing infrastructure to support the farm system, perhaps rehabbing old factories as mills or factory farming for meat production.

So, a sustainable system of farming is created and could challenge the present food stamp and welfare model that exists in the city. Currently, there are very few grocery stores that exist in Detroit, AKA, the “food desert”, so those who are on the food stamp program must get their food from the surrounding convenient stores or fast food restaurants, hence the popular problem of skyrocketing obesity rates in the city. Recently, I read an article in the New York Times by David Firestone, in which he was touching on the subject of financial status of Detroit. In this article, he mentions community revitalization in the southwest side: “…newcomers from Mexico and other countries have revived several avenues with restaurants, groceries, and other stores. More diversity, more immigrants – that’s the key for the future…” (I plan on touching on the diversity issue in my project, but I’ll leave that for another day.) This article is one of many sources I could quote on the importance of food supply for healthy community development. This policy plan for agriculture could not only serve to make residents healthier, but also create a model of new urbanism; a city that is self-sustaining, who is no longer dependant on surrounding areas for food and goods.

Additionally, when moving residents from areas of blight, where do they go? I have been considering the role of my architectural response to this planning strategy, and perhaps the “iconic structures” that are created are ones that encompass elements of housing, food, and community centers. So, mixed use structures of farmers markets, housing, joining rec-centers or parks, and centers to provide education regarding health and integrating this locally grown produce into diets… the program possibilities for these structures are vast, and I believe that depending on where they are placed within each community, the program can vary.

I have some more data mapping that I have to do before I can move forward with test sites and analysis and dare I say it, test models for a building typology. I’m considering including some vacant structures in my designs for this building, and am excited at the possibility of incorporating Detroit’s existing architecture into this new building typology. As it is finals right now, I’m not sure how much of that I am going to be able to finish before then, but I still have next quarter to really dig into the structure.

Recently a student asked me, “so whats happening in Detroit?” My answer was, “what’s NOT happening?” Detroit has reached a time of incredible possibilities, and its often been said that Detroit could be the new model of urbanism when change happens; WHEN change happens. Unfortunately the circumstances of Detroit have led the rest of the nation to believe that the city is dead, but I’m here to say that through its people, Detroit is very much alive. A lurking zombie-city it may be, but one that is nevertheless moving toward recovery.

While derelict buildings are common in Detroit, the city is actively engaged in reducing their numbers. One major funding source is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will be used to demolish more than 10,000 buildings by the end of current mayor Dave Bing’s term. Here, a collapsing building on the city’s east side is demarcated by city barriers before its soon-to-come demolition.

For the architect occupied with the tasks of urbanism, the measuring rod will be the human scale.
-Le Corbusier’s The Athens Charter.

After the downfall of the last hundred years, architecture must once again be placed in the service of man. It must lay sterile pomp aside, concern itself with the individual and create for his happiness the fixtures that will surround him, making all the movements of his life easier. Who can take the measures necessary to the accomplishment of this task if not the architect who possesses a complete awareness of man, who has abandoned illusory designs, and who, judiciously adapting the means to the desired ends, will create an order that bears within it a poetry of its own?
-Grossman. New York, NY: 1973

I’ve been trying to find a map or full list of Matty Maroun’s property holdings in Detroit, but so far have not had much luck. Here is some of the information I have found out:

Manuel “Matty” Maroun:

• Owns 625 parcels in Detroit, many purchased in Wayne County’s annual tax foreclosure sale for as little as $500
• Is the largest private-property owner in MI
• Is 83 years old
• Owns 400 vacant/dilapidated buildings, which are believed to discourage jobs and investments from coming to MI
• Owns the Ambassador Bridge, and is the only private owner of a border crossing between the U.S. and Canada
• Wants to build another bridge like the Ambassador and is suing to stop construction of the Detroit River International Crossing; a proposed publicly owned bridge

“You have to have a certain amount of grudging admiration for Matty Moroun, sort of like you do for crabgrass or those zombies in the low-budget horror flicks we used to watch as kids, when we should have been running around getting fresh air and exercise.

Matty takes a licking; has holes blown through him, is exposed and denounced, and he keeps staggering on, as only a true zombie can, toward the goal of twinning his Ambassador Bridge, or at least preventing a new, internationally owned one from being built.”

- Read more at http://www2.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14725

“The second tier of US cities, such as Detroit, show how far, and how fast, cities can fall. Once nearly unimaginably wealthy, loaded with rapacious industrialists-cum-philanthropists, they have deteriorated into doughnuts: big, fat suburbs with a hallow core. These cores are inhabited by those who once powered the engines of industry and have become surplus to requirements, an urban generation abandoned. Welfare and fast-food dependent, they are the models of the unhealthy city.”

-Edwin Heathcote, “Cities of Hope: growing populations need new solutions”

Here’s a link to the preliminary site analysis document.

Site Analysis

Here’s a link to a case study analysis I did of the EMPAC and Curve performing arts centers.

Empac+Curve

-Oslo Opera House, Norway (Snohetta Architects)

-Royal Playhouse, Copenhagen, Denmark (Lundgaard+Tranberg Architects)

-Curve, Leicester, UK (Rafael Vinoly Architects)

-EMPAC, Troy, NY (Grimshaw Architects)

-Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (Zaha Hadid)

-Lincoln Center, NY

-National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, China (Paul Andreu Architects)

-Kilden PAC, Kristiansand, Norway (ALA Architects)

-Mashouf PAC, San Francisco, CA (Michael Maltzan Architecture)

-Palacio de las Artes, Valencia, Spain (Santiago Calatrava)

This book looks into the gradual evolution of the Lincoln Performing Arts Center and square in New York City from the early 1950′s to its current condition. The analysis gained from this reading will hopefully help me in my thesis research by giving me clues as to how to rehabilitate an urban “dead zone.”

Stanton, Frank. Lincoln Center: The Building of an Institution. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Print.

(Back cover) “A lively and intelligent book that easily and competently unriddles the avant-garde feats of Rauschenberg’s Pop Art, Tinguely’s suicidal machines, John Cage’s ‘music of chance,’ and Marcel Duchamp’s glasspainting, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even,’ from which the title derives…” -Wylie Sypher, Book Week

I’m reading this book to gain insight into the theories and practice of the performing arts as a means to better understand the building typology of a Performing Arts Center.

(Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde. Viking Compass Edition. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965. Print.)

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