In this issue:
· NY, NJ Waterways Contend with Future
· How Traveling Transformed Kahn
· RPI Makes a Sound Investment
· Architect, Computer Design Fantastical Buildings

Event: Port Authority Speaker Series: On the Waterfront: Finding the Balance for Development and Communities
Location: The New School, 12.02.08
Speakers: Susan Bass Levin — Deputy Executive Director, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Carl Biers — Education Director, International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1588; Carter Craft — Former Director of Programs, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance; Venetia Lannon — Senior Vice President, Maritime Division, NYC Economic Development Corporation; Joshua Muss — President, Muss Development Company; Elizabeth Yeampierre — Executive Director, United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park
Moderator: Greg David — Editorial Director, Crain’s New York Business
Organizers: Center for NYC Affairs; Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy

Jessica Sheridan

The East River waterfront.

During the 19th century, New York and New Jersey waged so many disputes over their shared harbor that state police exchanged shots in the middle of the Hudson River. Since its inception in 1921, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), has administered the common waterways and waterfront interests of both states. It’s been a 50/50 partnership. For “On the Waterfront,” the program’s title derived from the classic film, Susan Bass Levin, deputy executive director of PANYNJ, did her best Brando stating, “I coulda been a contender.” She was referring to the gritty 1950s followed by the rapid decline of the city’s piers. In fact, it was the river crossings built by the PANYNJ that helped hasten their downfall as the population moved away from manufacturing, leaving an abandoned waterfront.

The longshoreman’s struggles against corrupt union bosses, which drove the plot of the movie, may be over, but longshoremen and the unions are still fighting to save their jobs. Carl Biers of the International Longshoremen’s Local 1588 in Bayonne and Jersey City is campaigning to save blue collar jobs on a former army base that has been targeted for high-end residential developments. Biers wondered why the Federal Government isn’t aiding ailing ports.

The PANYNJ’s $8.7 billion investment program is upgrading and improving the region’s infrastructure. Initiatives include the temporary and permanent PATH station at the World Trade Center; developing a WTC transportation hub; the AirTrain JFK; improvements at LaGuardia, Kennedy International, and Newark airports; expanding ferry service; redeveloping and expanding Howland Hook Marine Terminal in Staten Island; deepening river channels to accommodate deep-draft container ships; and advancing facility security.

“Nobody in this economic climate is going to be putting new projects into the ground in the near future,” said Joshua Muss of Muss Development Company. He sees the economic downturn as an opportunity for the development community to address which areas are appropriate to develop. But it takes years to get a project underway. For example, Muss has been developing Sky View Parc for Flushing on the Flushing River for 27 years. Originally a 14-acre brownfield, the mixed-use development designed by Perkins Eastman will include 800,000 square feet of retail space, six condo and rental buildings, a parking facility, and a 55-foot-wide river esplanade.

Waterfront activist Carter Craft’s hopes for the waterfront are less grand. He thinks of waterways as extensions of green spaces on land, echoing sentiments of his mentor Mike Davis, the recently deceased founder of the Floating the Apple organization. Davis fought to reclaim the Hudson, Harlem, and East Rivers for recreational use and “universal public access.” Craft noted that in addition to the Floating Pool in the summer, swimming in the rivers is a year-round activity. With decreased pollution, pilings are becoming homes for mussels, marshes and wetlands are being reclaimed, and piers are being transformed for recreational and commercial use.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park, encouraged waterfront communities to get involved with its development. The people of her community want to preserve manufacturing, maintaining their homes as well as their livelihoods. High on her wish list is to spread out green spaces, from the waterfront inland, to places that can’t immediately enjoy the waterfront.

Event: Albi Cathedral & the Architecture of Louis Kahn
Location: Center for Architecture, 11.25.08
Speakers: Nathaniel Kahn — Documentary Filmmaker; Carol Krinsky — Professor of Architectural History, NYU Department of Art History; Robert McCarter — Ruth & Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Washington University & Author, Louis I. Kahn; Sue Ann Kahn — Musician & Flute Faculty, Mannes College the New School for Music; Alexandra Tyng — Artis & Author, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture
Organizers: AIANY; La Maison Francaise
Sponsors: AIANY Architecture Dialogue Committee; Champion: Studio Daniel Libeskind; Supporters: Gensler; HumanScale; James McCullar & Associates; Friends: Benjamin Moore & Co.; Costas Kondylis & Partners; Forest City Ratner Companies; Frank Williams & Associates; Hugo S. Subotovsky Architects; Ingram Yuzek Gainen Carroll & Bertolotti; Mancini Duffy; Magnusson Architecture and Planning; Rawlings Architects; Ricci Greene Associates; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Syska & Hennessy; Trespa North America; Universal Contracting

Albi Cathedral (left) inspired Louis Kahn’s design for the Mikveh Israel Synagogue (right).

Courtesy http://www.albivisit.com/eng/albi-cathedral.html (left); courtesy http://www.design.upenn.edu/archives/majorcollections/kahn/likmikveh.html (right)

It wasn’t until he travelled to Rome and France that architecture clicked for Louis Kahn, stated his son Nathaniel Kahn. It was among the ruins that he discovered concrete. And it was a trip to Albi Cathedral in Carcassonne, France, that he began to see drawing as a way to get at architecture.

Built by an Albigensian bishop in the 13th century, Albi is fortress-like with narrow, sunken windows rising between smooth walls on a sloping base (designed to ward off projectiles and ramming). The straightforward plan is that of a large nave flanked by chapels of equal height, and the 78-meter-tall bell tower is one of the tallest in the world.

Contrary to Kahn’s drawings before this visit, his notebooks were filled with sketches that are emotive and immaterial, said Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn. They show massings, highlighting the space around the cylindrical towers (which he believes may have influenced Kahn’s ideas of served/servant space). The volume seems to float above the ground, featuring the quality of light rather than structure. Individual bricks and stones are not drawn. Instead, Kahn focuses on walls activated by lines of light and shadow.

After his trip, Kahn produced some of his most acclaimed work. The Salk Institute, Philips Exeter Academy Library, Kimbell Art Museum, and Yale Center for British Art were all designed once he returned. The influence of Europe can be seen most clearly in the never-completed Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia, according to McCarter. Albi-inspired cylindrical volumes surround a large, open space. The volumes have mirrored arches carved out of them, seeming to have been eroded by light, emulating Roman ruins. It is uncertain whether Kahn would have understood architecture in the same way without Europe, but it is clear that in the drawings that were produced, Kahn’s revelations changed his perspective on architecture.

Event: Press Tour, Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Location: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 10.20.08
Speakers: Shirley Ann Jackson — President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Johannes Goebel — Director, EMPAC; Bill Horgan — Associate Principal, Grimshaw Architects; R. Lawrence Kirkegaard, Hon. AIA — President & Principal Acoustician, Kirkegaard Associates; Craig Michael Schwitter, P.E. — Partner & Regional Director, Buro Happold North America; Denzil Gallagher — Partner, MEP Regional Discipline Leader, Buro Happold North America; William Paxson, AIA — Partner, Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Ernesto Bachiller — Associate Partner, Davis Brody Bond Aedas; and others

EMPAC exterior (left); concert hall (right).

Kristen Richards

A recent tour of the new Grimshaw/Davis Brody Bond Aedas-designed Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, revealed a building so high-tech that sci-fi comparisons are inevitable. As visitors peered around one futuristic all-black theater, EMPAC director Johannes Goebel jokingly referred to it as “the Darth Vader space,” while project architect Bill Horgan of Grimshaw Architects compared it with “The Matrix.” One of two studios devoted to new-media performance and scientific data visualizations, the 3,500-square-foot Studio 1, is wrapped with pockmarked acoustic tiles. Hovering overhead are metal rings, providing a framework to hold a 360-degree panoramic screen and projectors for immersive virtual environments, aided by heavy-duty processing power (the building is connected to the university’s supercomputer). A computer-controlled rigging system can be used to fly people or objects through the space.

With the lights up, the futuristic decor is rather imposing, but the true function of the space, as well as the smaller Studio 2, is its ability to disappear and adapt to varying theatrical contexts, often infused with video or projections that provide an enveloping sensory experience. The studios and a larger theater with a fly tower were designed for “a sense of not knowing what one will find when one walks in,” Horgan said. In a building where various shows might happen at the same time, acoustic isolation was crucial, so Studio 1 was designed to be structurally separate. It floats independently within the larger building, supported by a series of springs, explained Craig Schwitter, P.E., of Buro Happold, one of many firms that contributed their expertise in the building design.

EMPAC’s cedar-clad concert hall.

Kristen Richards

Representing the analog side of the building’s program, a more traditional concert hall was inspired by the resonant chambers of stringed musical instruments. The hall’s red cedar-clad rounded exterior dominates the center of the building’s seven-story atrium. Unlike the curved exterior, the hall’s interior is basically shoebox-shaped, but it is slightly convex to improve acoustic diffusion. Supported by a web of steel cables, a ceiling made of thin fabric reflects high-frequency sounds, while an upper volume above it reflects low-frequency sounds, helping to perfect the acoustics. Vaguely visible from the outside through the glass façade, the rounded form of the concert hall is the building’s dominant visual icon, its curves providing a contrast with the surrounding linear geometries. In one of many eco-friendly touches, the façade carries a system of hollow mullions containing hot water to help heat the space in winter, explained Denzil Gallagher of Buro Happold. Visitors who touched the mullions could feel their warmth.

EMPAC concert hall interior (left); Studio 1 (right).

Kristen Richards

All in all, the tour revealed EMPAC to be a visually eclectic but highly functional space that is already helping to promote experimental endeavors in architecture, digital technology, and performance. New-media art collective Workspace Unlimited (founded by an architect and an artist) has already put Studio 1’s panoramic screen to use. The group’s EMPAC-commissioned multimedia art installation “They Watch” employs hacked video-game software and motion-tracking technology to let viewers walk around the studio to explore virtual architectural environments and interact with animated characters in real time. The tour’s one disappointment was the lack of a demonstration of such spaces’ prodigious audiovisual capabilities, leaving this visitor resolved to return one day to see them in action.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for OCULUS, The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.

Event: Current Work: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Wolf D. Prix
Location: The Cooper Union, 11.20.08
Speakers: Wolf D. Prix, Hon. FAIA, FRIBA — Co-founder, Coop Himmelb(l)au
Moderator: Thom Mayne, FAIA — Principal, Morphosis
Organizers: The Architectural League of New York

BMW Delivery Center, Munich, Germany.

Image by Ari Marcopoulos; courtesy of Coop Himmelb(l)au

Practice is “not a color but an idea, of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds,” reflected Wolf Prix, Hon. FAIA, FRIBA, of Coop Himmelb(l)au. During the last 40 years, the Vienna-based firm, founded by Prix with Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer, has tried to create an architecture with a “psychic” ground plan, not a physical one, characterized by walls that “no longer exist” and spaces that “are pulsating balloons.” With designs intended to expand the horizons of architecture and urbanism, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s projects are a result of the relationship between designers and computers. Prix explained, “During design development, we use modern technology as the main tool to create models, which are consequently dismantled and re-crafted with human energy [that then] projects back into the computer.”

Prix continued, “Coop Himmelb(l)au separates itself from other architecture firms because we don’t base our work on systems of measurement on the scale of human proportions. We create buildings from our fantasy that are often radically unconventional.” For the BMW Welt (BMW Delivery Center) in Munich, a glass-and-stainless steel structure has suspended bridges interconnecting components Prix calls “Forum, Tower, Double Cone, Lounge, Premiere, and Marina.” The design process involved re-crafting computer models over and over again to compensate for potential human fault. He described the building: “Our heartbeat becomes space; our face is the façade. Simply psychic.”

Christian Bergner, Assoc. AIA, currently works at Caples Jefferson Architects, having previously worked with Studio Daniel Libeskind. Bergner is also a member of the AIANY Emerging NY Architects (ENYA) Committee and seeks LEED accreditation.