Category

Community Projects

‘HOOPS’ Opens at the National Building Museum

On
by Deane

The National Building Museum hosts an exhibition of the photographs of Bill Bamberger through through January 5, 2020. I covered the exhibition opening for Architectural Record. An excerpt of the article follows.

Bill Bamberger introduces his work at “HOOPS,” an exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

For basketball fans, the excitement of a game comes down to watching the players take their shots at the hoop. But in HOOPS, a new exhibition at the National Building Museum, photographer Bill Bamberger is the one taking the shot—sans players.

Featuring 75 large-format prints, HOOPS hones in on the informal arrangements of basketball venues around the world. By cutting out the players, Bamberger removes the idea of a moment frozen in time, to instead tell the broader story of place and environment, captured in vivid color.

The absence of people is a notable departure for Bamberger, whose work prior to this series includes portraits from the Rust Belt in the mid-1980s and post-genocide Rwanda.

In the tradition of the German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—a mid-twentieth-century duo whose oeuvre included multiple series of tightly cropped images of water towers, coal chutes, and other industrial relics—Bamberger narrows his focus to the ubiquitous basketball backboard. But unlike the Bechers, Bamberger widens his frame to include the surrounding environments of his subjects. Visual clues such as construction materials, condition, or landscape (Douglas fir versus camel thorn trees, for instance), suggest context and geography, offering the viewer clues about the unseen community each court serves. In perhaps cheeky allusion to the Bechers, the exhibition includes an image of a basketball hoop attached to a grain silo.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Metropolis Think Tank Looks at Puerto Rico

On
by Deane

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
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.

Multipurpose spaces can strengthen seasonal businesses

On
by Deane

Rock Chapel Marine solves the problem of what to do with a seasonal property in its off-season. At this road salt facility, winter is busiest, and stockpiles of salt are at their largest. But when icy conditions give way to warmer weather and the piles diminish, the Marine becomes an opportunity for community recreation, one which architects at Landing Studio have transformed from winter industry to waterfront amenity. With the firm’s imaginative recasting of the site, Rock Chapel Marine has become an example of how creative programming can bring year-round use to underutilized spaces.

The types of projects architects encounter have an extraordinary range. While they work on plenty of bread-and-butter office or residential buildings, they’re often asked to find solutions to uncommon—and highly interesting—problems, such as how to turn a still-operational road salt facility on a brownfield site into a community amenity. That was the challenge leveled at Boston-based Landing Studio, and one whose solution, Rock Chapel Marine, has garnered several awards for the firm, including a 2017 AIA Award for Regional and Urban Design.

Rock Chapel Marine, which is alternatively called “Publicly Organized Recreation Territory” (PORT), was once a 13-million-gallon oil tank farm alongside the waterways of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Prior to Landing Studio’s involvement, it had become a road salt terminal that would expand and contract based on seasonal demand. The terminal saw heavy wintertime use for the distribution of more than 100,000 tons of salt per year to aid in highway ice abatement, but it saw little activity during the warmer months. Now, it combines its function as the Eastern Salt Company’s storage facility with a more publicly enticing waterfront park, with the area of each relating to the current season: Winter equals more salt, less park; summer means less salt and more park.

Some of the structural shells of the old oil tanks remain, with new soil and plant cover added to begin the soil remediation process for a wildlife habitat upon a site that has seen half a century of heavy industrial usage. One of the larger tank shells has been converted into an outdoor amphitheater, and its frame supports lighting for the event space. Landing Studio repurposed an old tugboat as a lookout tower for the park, and illustrated salt piling strategies that would preserve neighborhood views to the waterfront; a new basketball court would be the last zone filled with salt if the spatial need arises. The architects also specified containment covers for the salt piles that lend a cleaner aesthetic to the industrial portion of Rock Chapel Marine while providing a backdrop for projected art installations and screenings.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Award: Rock Chapel Marine

On
by Architect Magazine: Articles by Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA

URL "http://www.architectmagazine.com/community-projects/award-rock-chapel-marine.aspx?" does not exist, is not readable or is protected against scraping.
Check if your IP address "107.180.116.38" has access permission to this URL.
Local server is unable to handle cURL functions.
Possible reasons:
- 'allow_url_fopen' option from php.ini settings file is set to off.

Ask your system administrator turn on the 'allow_url_fopen' option from php.ini and try again.
Headers received:
Array
(
    [0] => HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
    [1] => Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:06:08 GMT
    [2] => Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    [3] => Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    [4] => Connection: keep-alive
    [5] => Cache-Control: max-age=15
    [6] => Expires: Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:06:23 GMT
    [7] => Set-Cookie: __cf_bm=eyatGdGtFsqrQxLl5MJBjYMTACFcVihi0Dnl0gcMm9I-1728374768-1.0.1.1-D714AxLLAN3jLkYvqSs9JF4i4Vf8qBamIY7ZX27IDVzzQo.bseny82T234Qs8JyXlllj.YIE9sF2Db2OejgBZw; path=/; expires=Tue, 08-Oct-24 08:36:08 GMT; domain=.architectmagazine.com; HttpOnly
    [8] => Vary: Accept-Encoding
    [9] => X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    [10] => X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
    [11] => content-security-policy: frame-ancestors 'self' https://cms.hanleywood.com
    [12] => permissions-policy: battery=(), camera=(), microphone=(), midi=(), usb=()
    [13] => referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
    [14] => Server: cloudflare
    [15] => CF-RAY: 8cf4a1418f010cf3-LAX
    [16] => Content-Encoding: gzip
    [17] => 
    [18] => 
)
URL "http://www.architectmagazine.com/community-projects/award-rock-chapel-marine.aspx?" does not exist, is not readable or is protected against scraping.
Check if your IP address "107.180.116.38" has access permission to this URL.
Local server is unable to handle cURL functions.
Possible reasons:
- 'allow_url_fopen' option from php.ini settings file is set to off.

Ask your system administrator turn on the 'allow_url_fopen' option from php.ini and try again.
Headers received:
Array
(
    [0] => HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
    [1] => Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:06:08 GMT
    [2] => Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    [3] => Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    [4] => Connection: keep-alive
    [5] => Cache-Control: max-age=15
    [6] => Expires: Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:06:23 GMT
    [7] => Set-Cookie: __cf_bm=Od3o9l0cAIxaOuN0z.lWei.buLmrQoxROWWz6NbbqC4-1728374768-1.0.1.1-Hmhgwkm5xw6alQnsX.bP8kn.udQJd3V1O2xejK1K0V4jULGAFl6aSxDa2tjKr28EIP1AsU6X4UZhi1w.DrNRxQ; path=/; expires=Tue, 08-Oct-24 08:36:08 GMT; domain=.architectmagazine.com; HttpOnly
    [8] => Vary: Accept-Encoding
    [9] => X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    [10] => X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
    [11] => content-security-policy: frame-ancestors 'self' https://cms.hanleywood.com
    [12] => permissions-policy: battery=(), camera=(), microphone=(), midi=(), usb=()
    [13] => referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
    [14] => Server: cloudflare
    [15] => CF-RAY: 8cf4a141dbc10ff9-LAX
    [16] => Content-Encoding: gzip
    [17] => 
    [18] => 
)

Next Page »