New Tools for Development

Block Change

Developers see new tools as keys to equitable development.

Even for multiblock, city-defining developments, blueprints often merely represent best-laid plans. The reams of traditional visuals and data used to describe bold real estate projects—square footage, cost, economic impact, and assorted dimensions and proportions—don’t really communicate the true impact such projects can have on neighborhoods and cities, leaving an incomplete picture when such proposals are evaluated.

That’s why a new breed of data-focused tools and tool kits are being used to change how development is measured and reshape what’s ultimately built. With new ways to track and evaluate social and sustainable impacts, designers, planners, and architects can bring more rigor, and ultimately achieve better results, to urban design.

“Bringing the qualitative and quantitative together is where a lot of urban design resides,” said Mary Anne Ocampo, a principal and urban designer at Sasaki, the interdisciplinary design and architecture firm. The practice just launched an updated Density Atlas, a collection of diverse urban case studies measuring population density, building size, and floor area ratio, among other characteristics, to help planners, architects, and developers understand how different facets of density affect design and cost. Sasaki inherited the project from famed MIT urbanism professor Tunney Lee, who passed away last year, and relaunched it this past spring.

“The intersection of financial investment, climate change responsibility, and equitable and just cities is very key,” Ocampo said. “The Density Atlas provides tools to help quantify these components.”

Breaking down preconceptions of what density means into standard measurements at the same scale, the Atlas aims to create a common language around the impact of how buildings are arranged. While planners tend to look at population density to determine the need for certain city services, realtors and developers may focus on dwelling unit density to understand sellable or rentable square feet. This global directory of urban neighborhoods, which covers the block, neighborhood, and city scale, helps practitioners understand how planning and massing can affect a design project.

“It doesn’t solve everything, but metrics can be useful to compare different aspects of new communities,” Ocampo said.

She added that density lends itself to this kind of tool because without a common understanding of exactly what one is talking about, the term can be misleading. Combining measurement tools such as floor area ratio and neighborhood scale allows for more common denominators, an especially important element when presenting projects to community groups and local leaders, who often prioritize neighborhood character and preservation and fear the impacts of increased capacity and population. Sasaki has just begun to use the tool in its own planning processes and hopes it will help the firm arrive at a shared understanding with stakeholders.

Density, for all its different dimensions, is a relatively easy concept to quantify compared with inclusivity. Canadian impact development company DREAM, which has a portfolio of $10 billion spanning Europe and North America, believes it can, in the words of head of real estate finance and development Tsering Yangki, “make sure measurement and money are married together” and find how to track and increase important social performance metrics.

The vehicle for change, the firm’s first annual impact report, seeks to track and improve progress on community, health, and wellness goals within its ongoing 34-acre multiuse ZIBI project, which straddles the Ottawa-Quebec provincial border.

The project has been in the works for years, in part owing to zoning challenges and protests over the land’s sacredness among indigenous communities. As the mini-city grows, DREAM will measure three key metrics: affordability, environmental sustainability, and inclusivity. Per Pino Di Mascio, head of impact strategy and delivery, the latter is the most challenging measure.

Creating communities where people have more social interaction and are happier in their environments can be hard to quantify and measure, said Di Mascio, especially without overstepping privacy boundaries. The report analyzes job creation among different groups, especially women-led firms, and attempts to map social interaction and gauge community happiness. DREAM also hopes to preserve the site’s connection to the Algonquin tribe and provide employment for the Algonquin Anishinaabe nation.

Going forward, the development will make sure larger residential buildings, the first of which should open next year, include 30 percent affordable units and explicitly measure—via surveys and staff interviews—how common rooms are booked and utilized and how different social strata are interacting. The goal, according to Di Mascio, is to go beyond property management and focus on community curation, with additional employed positions dedicated to the social well-being of the project.

“With impact investing, you should have data-driven answers about where you’re investing so you’re investing money where you can achieve social good,” Di Mascio said.

That aspect of feedback is key to the work of Deanna Van Buren, a noted restorative-justice advocate and prison abolitionist who runs her own Oakland, California, design firm, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. The studio’s projects often rely on a series of toolkits originally geared toward incorporating the feedback of prisoners into the design of correctional facilities. (Van Buren once taught a course in a Pennsylvania facility.) The scope of these tool kits, meant to help architects design new community centers and spaces for nonprofits by tapping into the needs and experiences of those whom these spaces serve, has since expanded into different areas, including designing spaces for survivors of violence. There’s even a tool kit meant to help developers learn new ways to finance these unorthodox projects.

“We don’t often talk with users, often just the people in charge,” Van Buren said about architects and the design process. “That’s not really visionary.”

Van Buren argues that these series of exercises and activities—including creating paper and physical models and collecting images in a collage to communicate the values of a new space—can help close the design literacy gap, a crucial barrier to more community involvement and feedback.

“We live and work and play in architecture, and the fact that nobody knows how to use it as a powerful tool to achieve outcome and results is problematic,” she said. “We have to take responsibility for the fact that people don’t understand these things.”

For Van Buren, this kind of engagement with those most directly affected by a new project is an example of co-learning within the development process, in which the designers and users educate one another. She advocates these steps for any design project. If it’s impossible to improve what one doesn’t measure, perhaps it’s impossible to design for a community without designing with a community.

“Don’t do it to be warm and fuzzy,” said Van Buren. “Do it so you won’t get

COURTESY ZIBI

COURTESY DESIGNING JUSTICE + DESIGNING SPACES

DAVID SCHALLIOL

Top: The Zibi waterfront development in Gatineau, Quebec Middle: Scenes from one of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces’ workshops Bottom: A screengrab from Density Atlas, an online tool partly developed by Sasaki

Middle Waters

Exhibit Columbus explores the interconnected ecosystems and built environments of the Mississippi watershed.

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

DAVID SCHALLIOL In the minds of many coast dwellers, the American middle exists only in reference to their own condition: flyovers, breadbaskets. Middleness isn’t a state of being in and of itself but rather an aberrated refraction of the coasts’ sparkling prisms. For those who live in the middle, their existence and identities are fractured between geography, industry, and policy, while being outwardly lumped into regionalisms: the Midwest, the heartland.

At this year’s Exhibit Columbus (Indiana, that is), which runs from August 21 to November 28, curators Mimi Zeiger and Iker Gil chose the curatorial theme New Middles to explore the conditions of middle places and middleness itself. Zeiger and Gil define the middle by the Mississippi watershed: the 2,350-mile-long river drained by tributaries that occupy 1.2 million square miles, across 32 states. Though the exhibition will address broader themes within the watershed, like indigenous and Black histories in Columbus’s regional past, several of this year’s participants are addressing the watershed itself as an ecological condition of the middle. By doing so, Exhibit Columbus is positing that the characteristics of middleness describe an interconnectedness of ecosystems controlled by structures, systems, and ideologies that govern the built environment.

“We’re thinking of the watershed as both something real and as a metaphor,” said Zeiger. “Columbus is connected to the Flat River, to the Ohio River, then to the Mississippi, so the interconnection to the watershed is literal. And given that what happens upstream is connected to what happens downstream, there's a metaphor of interconnection.” Occupying only a sliver of this region, Columbus’s 30-square mile footprint and its stock of notable modernist architecture become a starting point for dissecting the watershed itself, as well as metaphoric connections between the city and surrounding ecosystems of land and water, and infrastructure to maintain them.

The 2021 Exhibit Columbus Photography Fellows, Virginia Hanusik and David Schalliol, work at opposite ends of the watershed—Hanusik in New Orleans and Schalliol in Minneapolis—but both explore how ongoing systems development (infrastructure, flood plains, food systems, etc.) connects middle dwellers across multiple regions. Their work at Exhibit Columbus will be displayed in storefronts, on garage doors, and in alleyways throughout the city.

Hanusik’s photographs are striking contrasts between the monumental scale of water management infrastructure on the southern coast of Louisiana and the gentle landscapes in which it sits. An image of weathered wooden needles from the Bonnet Carré Spillway or of an industrial canal levee memorial plaque placed in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina points to the heavily engineered, albeit extremely fragile, objects that regulate environments—and are increasingly failing to do so under climate change.

“I’m creating these projects as a means of understanding the landscape and the larger issues around climate change and landscape transformation,” said Hanusik. “I started these projects that focus on the architecture and infrastructure of the region as a way to see them as symbols of our values and how we organize space.”

For the exhibition, Hanusik expanded her body of work beyond the Gulf Coast. She traveled north to photograph Decatur County, Indiana (which abuts Columbus’s Bartholomew County), as a way of pointing toward upstream challenges like farmland runoff contaminating the Mississippi River, which creates “dead zones” for sea life in the Gulf; her photographs of Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers remind viewers of dammed or leveed waterways that protect upriver farmland at the expense of communities near and far. Watershed infrastructure, she posits, dictates what—and who—bears the brunt of worsening flooding, and what (or who) is worth maintaining.

“I'm thinking about how these decisions around water management, as they relate to agriculture, infrastructure, and logistics— how those decisions way far upstream have consequences the farther down that you go,” said Hanusik. “The project is about the ways that the Mississippi River has been altered and controlled over time and how we’re feeling those impacts in Louisiana now.”

Derek Hoeferlin, architect and Exhibit Columbus University Design Research Fellow, also examines the scale of human impact on the watershed with Tracing Our Mississippi, an interactive installation and public programming series that expands upon his ongoing watershed atlas research project. The atlas displays systems like dams, levees, and transmission lines layered upon other sets of information like forested areas, contested lands, and resource extraction landscapes. “Ultimately, the themes narrate complicated issues across the Mississippi watershed at multiple scales and emphasize one objective: the relentless control of the Mississippi’s landscapes for developmental gain,” said Hoeferlin in his 2020 Exhibit Columbus Design Presentation.

“Derek has certain tools to talk about the vastness of the watershed and about infrastructure,” said Gil. “Everything there is now basically an artificial environment. How has that system changed the relationship between the communities and the river—and who has won? Who hasn’t?”

Both Hanusik and Hoeferlin are exposing one peculiarity of middleness: While the middle is a place that relies on natural systems, it is constantly at odds with those systems. The result is a heavily controlled environment, perhaps made unnatural by a century of “progress” that has, in turn, shaped future conditions. “I’m looking at the idea that there are no natural disasters anymore,” added Hanusik. “They are human engineered, directly or indirectly—products of policy that we have formulated over time.”

Schalliol’s work also addresses those controlled systems but instead focuses on how those systems produce interconnected landscapes and identities among middle inhabitants. His images of a community garden in Columbus show women crouched in the landscape, planting seedlings at dusk. “It was one of these places where people give so much love and care and attention to,” said Schalliol.

Yet he doesn’t see this scene simply as a pastoral moment; rather, it is a result of the same controlled waterways and logistics systems expressed in Hanusik’s infrastructure portraits. “The way that the community garden provides access to healthy food—foods

that might not otherwise readily be available—these are all ways that people want to create new possibilities in the context of a world in which food insecurity is a major problem, in part because of the complexities of the supply chains that drive industrial agriculture,” he added.

Photographs of massive feedlots in the Texas panhandle juxtaposed against small, community-supported agriculture in Minnesota are, in his lens, products of the same system with vastly different outcomes, speaking to the middle’s different yet interwoven relationships with the environment, agriculture, and labor. These projects serve New Middles not only to illustrate the myriad ways the watershed is experienced from its north to south ends, but also to speak to what Zeiger calls the plurality of middle identity.

“The many middles that make up the watershed are strong enough in their own right,” said Zeiger, “that sense of multiple selves in solidarity with other cities in the middle, using culture to tell multiple narratives.”

Multiple identities, narratives, and experiences of these development systems that manipulate, enforce, and fail color the middle as a united front. Solidarity, then, becomes a force for the middle’s future, particularly as middle cities turn their energies and investments back toward their waterways. As we see places like Columbus, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Chicago pour enormous development efforts into revitalizing riverfronts within the Mississippi River watershed, Exhibit Columbus presents an opportunity to root those efforts in a grander context, beyond “amazing real estate opportunities,” postindustrialization, or placemaking. The exhibition is beginning those difficult conversations about considering our neighbors—no matter how far away—in such endeavors. “Exhibitions are almost an excuse for other things to happen,” said Gil. “Exhibit Columbus is that format to have those complicated conversations, but also is beginning to point at the foreseeable future.”

Anjulie Rao

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

This page: For her Exhibit Columbus project, photography fellow Virginia Hanusik also traveled to Decatur County, Indiana, northwest of Columbus.

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

NYC - HARIRI & HARIRI ARCHITECTURE D.P.C. Zephyr™ BLOCK ©2012 modularArts, Inc. U.S. Patent 8,375,665 Crush™ PANEL @2011modularArts, Inc. Photo by Steve Hall, Hall +Merrick Photography. Designer: Eastlake Studio.

Fall Guy

Who was William Friedman, the mystery man who designed Champlain Towers South?

continued from front page Both Friedman’s firm and Breiterman Jurado are out of business, the former inactive since before Friedman’s death despite listings in several unofficial business directories, the latter involuntarily dissolved in 1988. Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) lists Friedman’s license as “null and void,” expiring in 2005. Messages left at a number listed for Friedman & Associates were not returned.

Defunct firms can be easy scapegoats, and deceased architects are not in a position to defend themselves. The scarcity of public information about Friedman, moreover, leaves him exposed to the kinds of conjectures that inevitably follow major disasters. His obituary in the Miami Herald emphasizes his hobbies and sociability as much as his work; he graduated from a major university’s architecture program (BArch, University of Florida, 1953) but kept a relatively low professional profile.

“We have no record of William Friedman as a member and haven’t heard anything anecdotally from members with reference to him,” reported Vicki L. Long, CAE, Hon. AIA, executive vice president and CEO of AIA Florida. He was also unknown to the national organization. “Mr. Friedman was never an AIA National member,” said Matt Tinder, AIA’s senior manager for media relations. “AIA National does not have any records or information about him.”

Emporis lists five buildings designed by Friedman: three in the Champlain Towers complex (the now-demolished South, 1981; North, 1981; and East, 1994); Mirage on the Ocean (1995) in Surfside; and James Central Towers (1968) in Miami Beach. Representatives of these buildings’ real estate offices did not reply to inquiries about Friedman by press time.

One of the rare references to Friedman in public documents is a cryptic decision from October 25, 1966, in which Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal denied his petition to overturn the Board of Architecture’s six-month suspension of his registration, for causes not specified. The court found that one of two counts against him was “properly and sufficiently proven,” rejected the other count, and imposed a “new and proper suspension order in accordance with his conviction under Count One.” DBPR has located an 86-page file on this case, reported deputy communications director Patrick R. Fargason, representing the Board of Architecture. DBPR’s policy for release of such records includes internal review and redaction of nonpublic information, completed shortly before press time; the department accordingly provided the file to this reporter.

The file on Friedman comprises correspondence and legal documents pertaining to his suspension, reinstatement, initial licensing, and related matters. The charge against him that stuck concerned a commercial building at 2625 Southwest 22nd Street in Miami whose sign pylons did not meet Dade County code and collapsed during a hurricane in September 1965, as did components of two other Friedman buildings, one commercial sign pylon and one residential roof. A board hearing on May 20, 1966, with legal counsel present, unanimously found Friedman guilty of “gross incompetency,” dismissing five other counts in nonunanimous decisions, including the one invalidated by the District Court of Appeal, and suspended his license. He appealed for reinstatement to the Florida Supreme Court, which dismissed his appeal on April 6, 1967. After a final appeal failed, he was suspended from June 1 to December 1, 1967.

A vaguer but potentially more troubling item is an anonymous whistleblower letter to the board dated November 1, 1967, and retyped in the board’s office. Authored by “a graduate architect working in a local office,” this letter assails 12 local architects as “persons whose only interest is to make a fast buck and who do not care about the dignity of their profession. It has come to my attention, and I understand it is common knowledge between builders and ‘professional designers,’ that the following persons will seal any set of plans that you bring them,” writes the correspondent, before offering a nonalphabetized list of names. William Friedman’s appears at the top. The whistleblower also charges two of them (not including Friedman) with advertising, a practice banned at the time by the AIA.

An April 8, 1963, letter from board executive secretary W. Richard Glavin regarding a Friedman employee’s intent to sit for the state exam notes that “Friedman was at one time called before the Board for possible plan stamping.” Glavin’s file memo of March 28, 1963, describes informal inquiries about Friedman among Miami architects; he found no information but noted that he would keep checking. An April 11, 1955, letter to Friedman from another board official (secretary-treasurer Mellen C. Greeley) regarding his certificate of registration, shortly after he passed the junior exam in January of that year (having failed on his first attempt in June 1954), includes this admonition: “Your attention is directed to the rules regarding use of a seal. This information has been sent you previously but we will be glad to answer any questions you may care to ask.” The portrait that emerges from these documents suggests that the board had Friedman on its radar over these offenses for several years before taking action against him.

Structural engineer Allyn Kilsheimer, based in Washington, D.C., and contracted by the city of Surfside to investigate the collapse site and the sister tower Champlain Towers North, has examined the Champlain South construction documents (available in public records) and is reluctant to single out Friedman for culpability. “I know nothing about him, and I’ve learned nothing about him at all, and I’ve never heard of him before,” Kilsheimer said. “All I have are the drawings he prepared.” Having worked in building design, construction, and collapse forensics for five decades, Kilsheimer recalls “the kind of drawings we would get from architects” in the era when Champlain South and North were built. “The drawings that I saw from him, if I compare them to what I remember we were seeing 40 years ago, it’s pretty much the level of drawings that we would see at that point in time.... Back then a lot was left up to the contractor to make decisions on, but that’s how it was done at the time.”

Champlain South was “a conventional mild-steel-reinforced flat-plate concrete building ... and our office probably did a hundred of them back in that era,” Kilsheimer said. In that setting, “you have to meet the 1979 Southern Building Code, which is what this building was designed under, and it is not nearly as specific about many, many things as today’s codes are.... I remember seeing some drawings back then where you’d see an elevation of the building, and it would say, ‘facade by contractor.’ That isn’t what this guy said. He gave a lot more information than that.”

Responses to building collapses (particularly by lawyers), Kilsheimer observed, if not attributable to “a God-driven structural failure,” often target an architect because the structural engineer was the architect’s consultant. “I’d love to blame architects for as many things as I possibly can,” Kilsheimer said, “but I don’t see how you would blame the architect if his structural engineer made a mistake.” At the Champlain South site, as investigations continue and commentators direct spotlights toward the developers, the condo association, former Surfside building inspector Rosendo Prieto, and even a U.S. Navy offshore test explosion 250 miles north, near Daytona Beach, conjectures about responsibility remain premature. Kilsheimer refrained from blaming members of either profession.

South Florida’s long-standing reputation for regulatory capture during its 1980s building boom, locals note, was not built solely on detective novels or episodes of Miami Vice. This is a region where developers and civic officials are chummy enough that a well-connected construction firm (Munilla Construction Management) implicated in the multifatality collapse of a pedestrian bridge near Florida International University in 2018, and subsequently bankrupted, can then be awarded a major airport contract as if nothing went wrong.

Surfside is not Miami, however. The small North Beach city (population 5,725) has been described as wealthy and sleepy. Whether its scale and profile are conducive to narratives of malfeasance will remain unknown for some time, though this may not forestall attempts to connect the dots. Efforts either to connect Friedman substantively to the tragedy or to ascertain whether he is being inaccurately censured for it will be hampered by the shortage of dots he left to connect. Bill Millard

The aftermath of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida, in late June

PUBLIC DOMAIN/MIAMI-DADE FIRE RESCUE DEPARTMENT

That Man from São Paulo

Historian Jean-Louis Cohen remembers Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the legendary Brazilian architect, who died in May at 92.

Out of 681 projects submitted in 1971 to the competition for Paris’s Centre Beaubourg, 10 received a prize from the jury, with a single 1 coming from the Southern Hemisphere. The proposal, for a striking concrete volume hovering over the ground, belonged to a young Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who had built Brazil’s pavilion at the Osaka world expo the year before. Conceived as a monumental frame in the historic center of the French capital, the Beaubourg scheme also channeled the ideals of São Paulo’s modernists, as perhaps best embodied by João Batista Vilanova Artigas’s Faculty of Architecture, completed in 1969.

Banned from teaching at that school by the military regime after the 1964 coup, Mendes da Rocha developed in his practice a close relationship with Brazil’s largest metropolis that lasted until his death in May of this year. So strong was his connection to the city and its culture that I often referred to him as “that man from São Paulo,” a nod to the Technicolor film That Man from Rio, in which Jean-Paul Belmondo walks on a tightrope high above the construction site of Brasília.

Operating in an inconspicuous office located a stone’s throw from Oscar Niemeyer’s lyrical and majestic Copan building, Paulinho—as he was affectionately called— had an intimate knowledge of the city, as I experienced on multiple occasions, walking in his company in the streets of the center, or driving in the sprawling neighborhoods in search of his early buildings, which literally dot the landscapes of the metropolis. On these trajectories, he shared not only his subtle readings of São Paulo’s geographic features but also his views on the buildings of his colleagues, from Vilanova Artigas to Fábio Penteado.

Born in 1928 on the coast, north of Rio de Janeiro, in Vitória, the capital of the small state of Espírito Santo, to a father who was a distinguished civil engineer, Mendes da Rocha studied at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo. There he rapidly established a reputation on the strength of his 1958 arena for the Clube Atlético, a disk of concrete carrying a light metal roof set on top of a layer of training facilities.

From that project on, he explored at every scale the spatial and lyrical potential of this ubiquitous material of modernity, for which he imagined an alternative strategy using vertical elements, from pillars to walls—breaking from both the obsession with the skeleton frame deriving from Auguste Perret and the fixation on thin shells typical of Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, and other architects of the Carioca School. In the domestic realm, the house Mendes da Rocha built for himself in 1967 in the Butantã district of São Paulo, today absorbed in a dense jungle, was a manifesto pleading for the versatility of concrete; in addition to playing a load-bearing role, the material is imaginatively applied in the suspended sliding doors and central hearth. No other architect has been more inspired by Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette, which was designed top down, from the roof to the ground. Beginning with his Brazilian Sculpture Museum—or MuBE—completed in 1995, Mendes da Rocha’s buildings were most often conceived as overwhelming frames, under which the main spaces are deployed. Other projects such as the Quay of Arts in Vitória (2007) appear to levitate, generating generous open areas at grade.

The exploration of what large containers can host in the metropolis is also the theme of his SESC—or Social Service of Commerce—24 de Maio in São Paulo, a powerful work of urban infrastructure completed in 2017. Responding to a program that had seen its best interpretation 30 years earlier in Lina Bo Bardi’s Pompéia scheme, he imagined an extraordinary mille-feuille of uses in what is probably his most refined sectional parti, culminating in a rooftop swimming pool in which the users become the masters of the skyline. An unrepentant leftist, Mendes da Rocha was committed to the idea of architecture understood as a public service.

The most ambitious among Mendes da Rocha’s designs saw him observing and strategizing the transformation of vast areas, from the valleys surrounding São Paulo to even larger territories. This facet of his practice was anchored in an acute perception of the New World’s relationship to history and nature, he wrote in a 2000 article: “In the Americas, our eyes turn toward the notion of building cities in nature, establishing new rationales about the state of the waters, plains and mountains, the spatiality of a continent, new horizons for our imagination with respect to the shape and ingenuity of the things we are destined to build.”

In 2023 the Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos, Portugal, to which Mendes da Rocha gifted his archive, will host a retrospective exhibition dedicated to his entire

Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2006, was among the finest architects of his generation.

REUTERS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO