Deane Madsen | Articles

Metropolis Think Tank Looks at Puerto Rico

On November 23, 2018

It was an honor to be invited to attend and cover the DC edition of Metropolis Magazine’s Think Tank program. Susan Szenasy, who is director of design innovation for Metropolis, led a discussion on architects’ efforts at recovery in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season. Speakers included Marilyn Shapley, senior policy adviser, Mercy Corps; Erika Ruiz, director, Enterprise Community Partners; Armando Nazario, senior associate, Perkins+Will; Yanel de Ángel, associate principal, Perkins+Will. An excerpt of Think Tank coverage follows.

How Architects Are Helping Communities in Puerto Rico Rebuild

Panelists at this Metropolis Think Tank event at Perkins+Will’s D.C. office stressed the importance of remembering that there’s no one-size-fits-all fix.

It has been more than a year since Hurricanes Irma and María ravaged Puerto Rico. Even now, accurate estimates of the actual death toll—in excess of 3,000 fatalities, according to the latest available report—remain elusive. The commonwealth’s power grid still lies in ruins.

Simply put, “the island stopped working after the hurricane,” said Armando Nazario, a senior designer at Perkins+Will, at a recent Metropolis Think Tank panel convened at the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. The discussion, moderated by Metropolis director of design innovation Susan S. Szenasy, dwelled on the challenges of delivering aid to Puerto Rico’s unevenly developed and funded urban and rural communities, each with its own pressing needs. “We also don’t have the census data that helps support this [to make] each community self-sufficient,” Nazario explained.

Working with representatives from various international organizations, Nazario and his Perkins+Will colleague Yanel de Ángel, an associate principal, helped spearhead ResilientSEE, which aims to “build a resilient Puerto Rico.” Self-sufficiency, de Ángel affirmed, is key to meeting the group’s goal because “if you’re not feeling empowered, a sense of responsibility cannot be bestowed.”

For municipal rebuilding efforts, the panelists stressed the importance of remembering that there’s no one-size-fits-all fix. For some neighborhoods, residents want centralized community hubs with dedicated solar panels; in others, people are channeling resources into individual household solar systems. Other regions have looked to invest in water filters.

“You have to start that conversation with the community,” said Marilyn Shapley, a senior policy adviser with Mercy Corps, a nongovernmental aid organization. “We have to start with conversations of what that risk is, what their risk tolerance is, how their safety nets are in place, if they have them in place. It does take a village, and it does start with actually talking to every single village.”

Read the full story at Metropolis

Crosstown Concourse Wins Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award

On October 17, 2018

by Deane

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced that Crosstown Concourse, a mixed-use redevelopment of a former Sears Roebuck distribution center, won a 2018 Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award. This award comes the same week that the building’s original occupant, Sears, filed for bankruptcy.

It’s been a tumultuous ride for Sears, with the closure of distribution centers decades ago portending the former titan of retail’s eventual collapse. With the rise of online retailers has come the steady decline of brick-and-mortar shops, even the big box stores that once anchored suburban shopping centers. Where new business models rely more on carrier infrastructure and customer reviews than on physical showrooms, legacy businesses have struggled to keep pace and maintain relevance. If there’s a silver lining to the emptying out of all of this retail square footage, it’s in projects such as Crosstown Concourse, which successfully repurposes a 1.3 million-square-foot structure, transforming it into a one-stop-neighborhood filled with young disruptors of the type much more likely to purchase with one click than mail-order anything. As I wrote for Architectural Record back in February, the Crosstown Concourse redevelopment offers a potential template for oversized buildings that have remained standing long after the businesses that occupied them evaporated:

“As cities grapple with the respective futures of their industrial pasts, they would do well to look at Crosstown Concourse. For this development, the vision was strong and swayed a diverse group of prospective tenants to get on board. From an environmental standpoint, the transformation of the Sears building into a successful venture like Crosstown Concourse turned a white elephant into green one.”

The Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award jury included Mtamanika Youngblood, an Atlanta preservationist, Jeffrey Cody, a Getty Conservation Institute historian, and architecture critic Paul Goldberger.

Rachel Whiteread Retrospective Opens at National Gallery of Art

On September 21, 2018

by Deane

(Untitled) Domestic marks the entrance to the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at the National Gallery of Art East Building.

The National Gallery of Art hosts a retrospective exhibition of the work of Rachel Whiteread through January 13, 2019. I covered the exhibition opening for Architectural Record. An excerpt of the article follows.

On the night of November 23, 1993, artist Rachel Whiteread received awards for being both the U.K.’s best artist and its worst. She won the Turner Prize, the Tate Britain’s £20,000 award for top emerging visual artists in the U.K.; but she also garnered a far more dubious distinction: the “Anti-Turner Prize,” which was drawn from the same shortlist as the real Turner prize and included a purse of £40,000, from a group called the K Foundation, who sought to recognize Whiteread as the worst artist in the world. Both prizes related to Whiteread’s highly controversial “House” installation—a life-sized cast of a Victorian East End house, rendered in spray-on concrete.

The same night, in between receipt of the two prizes, Whiteread learned that “House” itself would also be demolished in the name of redevelopment. Although it stood for only 80 days, the piece stirred debate about artists dabbling in architecture as well as the broad trend toward gentrification. Public opinion of the piece at the time ranged from eyesore to masterpiece, with the dual awards reflecting the extreme positions.

A quarter of a century later, Whiteread’s work has continued to accumulate honors, and a retrospective exhibition of her works—titled Rachel Whiteread—from the last 30 years shows a progression of spatial and textural investigations that expand upon themes explored in “House.” Launched at the Tate, the exhibition stopped in Vienna before making its American debut on September 16 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Following the show’s four-month run in the capital, it will open at the Saint Louis Art Museum in March 2019.

Read the full story at Architectural Record. Rachel Whiteread is on view at the National Gallery of Art East Building from September 16, 2018 – January 13, 2019.

The entrance to the Rachel Whiteread exhibition passes a field of resin sculptures, “Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces),” from 1995.

The first gallery highlights early works included in Whiteread’s breakout 1988 show surrounding “Ghost,” her first foray into casting a room.

Whiteread’s casts of mattresses and bathtubs, among other domestic items, fill a large gallery.

“Untitled (Book Corridors)” occupies a corner of a lower-level gallery.

“Untitled (Book Corridors)” shows hints of color where fabric from book covers remained part of the cast after the books were removed.

“Flat Pack House” (2017) was commissioned for the new U.S. Embassy in London.

An orange resin bathtub draws focus in a gallery filled with other domestic items.

Investigations of doors, cast in translucent resin, line one gallery wall.

After the death of Whiteread’s mother, sorting through the boxed contents of her house provided the artist with fodder for another series of casts, including “Contents” (left) and “Fossils” (right, on shelf).

(Untitled) Domestic marks the entrance to the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at the National Gallery of Art East Building.

Hurricanes in Architectural Record

On August 26, 2018

by Deane

Every year between June and November, Atlantic cities brace themselves for hurricane season. In 2017, three major hurricanes struck the U.S. and wreaked extraordinary damage and loss of life. I wrote about the effect of these hurricanes and the subsequent recovery efforts each region has undertaken in the year since for Architectural Record. An excerpt of the article follows.

To call the 2017 hurricane season “devastating” hardly captures the severity of the toll levied upon lives, homes, and infrastructure over the course of a single month. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria were responsible for hundreds of deaths—almost 3,000 in Puerto Rico alone, according to the most recent estimates—and approximately $300 billion in damages last year. Each of these storms brought enough destruction to rank in the five costliest since 1980, and their quick succession compounded the carnage; many hurricane victims had barely recovered from one storm before the next arrived.

Recovery efforts began as soon as the winds subsided and the waters receded, yet, a year later, many displaced residents are still rebuilding, and, in some places, power still a problem. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 season, Architectural Record contacted architects in each affected region and has followed up with many of the same people a year into the recovery efforts. Rising sea levels and climate change are pushing waterfront communities to reevaluate their hurricane preparedness strategies and push for increased resiliency measures, to make communities better able to withstand whatever weather is in future forecasts.

Hurricane Maria
Landfall: Sept. 20, 2017 (Puerto Rico)
Fatalities: 1,427 (latest estimate as of press time)
Damages: $125 billion

The damage dealt to Puerto Rico in the one-two punch of Irma and Maria was so extensive that its government estimates recovery may take another decade, according to a report issued to Congress in August. The island’s aging electrical grid, strained by Irma, was nearly obliterated during Maria, leaving 3.4 million inhabitants in the dark for months; though authorities say power has been restored, the system is considered vulnerable. Also ongoing are efforts to assess with any accuracy exactly how many fatalities Maria caused; long-term flooding, combined with lack of potable water and basic sanitation, are among the lingering detrimental effects that have elevated the number of deaths indirectly caused by Maria, especially among weaker segments of the population. The island’s economy and infrastructure, which were already suffering prior to the hurricanes, will require significant reinvestment just to bring baseline services back online.

One of the biggest challenges in Puerto Rico’s recovery is its geographic position as an island territory; Florida and Texas, by contrast, were able to make use of established interstate routes, networks, and supply chains to begin disaster assistance even before their respective storms hit. “Being on an island, it’s easy to see your borders, and it’s also easy to understand that you’re kind of on your own and there’s no way to get immediate help,” says Jonathan Marvel, one of the cofounders of Resilient Power Puerto Rico (RPPR). His team mobilized in the immediate aftermath of last year’s hurricanes to begin installing solar arrays on the roofs of community centers, to power up critical services, and, long-term, create redundancy with the power grid in the event of future outages. “What we’re trying to do is create a shelter-in-place model, using renewable energy, that could be attractive at a global scale for other places,” he says.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Snarkitecture Opens Its Fun House at the National Building Museum

On July 14, 2018

by Deane

Fun House at the National Building Museum

The National Building Museum has filled its Great Hall with summer-themed “Block Party” exhibitions for the last several years. I covered this year’s installation, the fifth overall and the second by Snarkitecture, for Architectural Record. Fun House will be on view through Sept. 3. An excerpt of the article follows.

Washington, D.C.’s cultural institutions can feel a bit stuffy and buttoned-down, but a newly opened exhibition at the National Building Museum (NBM) encourages something wholly unexpected: Fun. For the fifth iteration of its series of “Summer Block Party” exhibitions, the NBM brought back New York-based firm Snarkitecture to build an immersive installation within its football field-sized (and, crucially, air-conditioned) Great Hall.

The first go-round was a tentative toe into the large-scale exhibition water, with Bjarke Ingels Group’s self-referential BIG Maze occupying just one end of the Great Hall in 2014. Icebergs, in 2016, went full speed ahead into the cooling metaphor, serving up partially submerged polycarbonate “bergy bits” (as well as ice cream) in James Corner Field Operations’ blue-netted seascape. 2015’s edition, The Beach, also by Snarkitecture, remains one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions ever, receiving over 180,000 visitors during its eight-week run.

Fun House keeps a kidney-shaped, kiddie-pool-sized version of The Beach’s main attraction: A ball-pit filled with thousands of translucent plastic balls that made for oh-so-many slow-motion backdives and Instagram pictures. And it adds an encapsulated retrospective look at Snarkitecture’s other work through a gabled, roughly 24-foot-tall house at the center of the Great Hall.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Children jump into the pool at Fun House

Left to right: Alex Mustonen, Maria Cristina Didero, Daniel Arsham, and Benjamin Porto

“Usually with art and architecture, you go and you stand—and you don’t touch it. You just kind of feel the space around you,” says Snarkitecture partner Benjamin Porto. “But part of our work, in the removing of color, is that you start to focus on the material and the textures. People let their guard down, and then they start touching everything, and that’s how you let adults be kids. I think kids will have fun with anything; it’s more about how you get adults to engage.”

Engagement starts just inside a white picket fence, where visitors enter through an excavated foam doorway that recreates Dig, a piece commissioned by New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2011. The ceiling of the central hallway pays homage to the firm’s partnership with apparel retailer Kith, with dozens of all-white Air Jordans suspended from the ceiling. Off the hallway, typical residential features are reimagined to fit the playful Snarkitecture ethos, displaying various pieces from the firm’s last decade of production. In the bathroom, the hexagonal penny tile floor repeats as a camouflage print on clothing—a 2015 collaboration with Print All Over Me—hanging from the walls; an all-white wooden crate filled with more of the translucent balls of The Beach stands in for the bathtub. In the study, explorations into furniture—a broken cabinet, a cracked marble record crate, and a bifurcated bench—dive into Snarkitecture’s fascination with creating a sense of erosion.

“There’s a type of Japanese pottery, kintsugi, which is broken and then reassembled, and the crack shows the imperfection in it,” says Snarkitecture co-founder Daniel Arsham. “So much of our work is about this area between construction and demolition. You could look at this house and say, ‘O.K., the house is actually falling apart,’—it’s being peeled away. But you could also look at it as being in the process of construction. It’s either decaying or being built. And that middle place where the work sits is often where we try to situate a viewer.”

Read the full story at Architectural Record.