Infrastructure and the Future: Assessing the Architect's Role

INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE FUTURE: ASSESSING THE ARCHITECT’s ROLE

Edited by Amanda Reeser Lawrence & Elizabeth Christoforetti

NEU Conference Series 1

INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE FUTURE: ASSESSING THE ARCHITECT’s ROLE

Edited by Amanda Reeser Lawrence & Elizabeth Christoforetti

NEU Conference Series 1

Infrastructure and the Future Assessing the architect’s role NEU Conference Series 1 Northeastern University School of Architecture 360 Huntington Avenue 151 Ryder Hall Boston, MA 02115 617.373.8959 www.architecture.neu.edu Copyright Š 2010 School of Architecture Northeastern University ISBN: 978-0-9830024-0-6 Designed by Paste in Place Printed by Universal Millennium

Contents INTRODUCTORY REMARKS amanda reeser lawrence and george thrush

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Never mind the Buildings: thoughts on an infrastructural future IAN BALDWIN

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CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE moderated by sarah williams goldhagen

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SYSTEMS INFRASTRUCTURE moderated by tom keane

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GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE moderated by tim love

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

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AFTERWORD elizabeth christoforetti

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Introductory Remarks

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Infrastructure and the Future

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Amanda Reeser Lawrence 5

November 21, 2009 9 am West Village F Northeastern University “Infrastructure and the Future: Assessing the Architect’s Role” is the first conference in a series organized by the School of Architecture at Northeastern addressing real-world issues facing architects today, particularly issues that span the academic and the professional realms. Our larger aim is to question, and hopefully broaden, our understanding of the role of architecture in addressing issues that are facing the contemporary city.

But why infrastructure? Certainly this is a hot topic at the moment. Infrastructure, of course, was a central component of President Obama’s Stimulus Plan, and The New York Times annual architecture issue this year focused on infrastructure. Closer to home, we see panels at various architectural conferences, both professional and academic, issues of journals and magazines—including the most recent issue of Architecture Boston—and symposia like this one, all addressing the topic of infrastructure.

But, as we were conceptualizing this conference, it seemed to us that none of these were really asking the crucial question: “What is the role of the architect?”

Whether publicly or privately funded, architects have traditionally participated in major publics works projects—designs of schools, rail stations, and other buildings of public utility. While such projects continue to have value, the emergence of new technologies, settlement patterns, and economic relationships mandate that architects find new ways to participate in contemporary debates over where the country might most rationally and profitably invest in the future.

Introductory Remarks

Our aim then, today, is to not only ask fundamental questions regarding infrastructure’s definition and scope, but to demarcate more speculative strategies for 6

architectural involvement moving forward.

This conference is different from most in two respects.

The first is the multidisciplinary quality of this diverse and esteemed group of colleagues and speakers that we’ve assembled today—architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, policy makers, historians, and information designers.

Secondly, and perhaps even more important, is the format of the event. We will focus on conversation and debate among the panelists rather than individual papers. The moderator in each of the three panels will lead the discussion through a series of focused questions, with the aim of generating meaningful debate about this critical issue, as well as to gain a perspective that’s both pragmatic and critical.

By bringing together this group of experts with first-hand experience materializing projects, along with researchers and a concerned public, we hope to produce knowledge on the topic in a way that reflects Northeastern’s commitment to addressing these contemporary challenges and socially relevant issues as they arise out of practice.

The day is organized into three panels. Our first panel is on civic infrastructure, the second on systems infrastructure, and the third green infrastructure. Grouping the subject matter in this way enabled us to bring together speakers with common expertise and demarcate critical areas of interest, suggesting different architectural agendas.

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introductory remarks george thrush 7

We at the School of Architecture see this conference as part of a much larger project—one that brings the creative and analytical skills of the architect to a wide range of real challenges facing our cities. Infrastructure is certainly one of those challenges. How do we correct for decades of neglected infrastructure maintenance, for example? This is certainly one question, but perhaps it is one more of policy than design. A more pressing question for architects is likely “what kind of infrastructure do we need to design for the future that will support our needs for transportation, communication, and the economy in a way that the infrastructure investments of the 1930s, such as rural electrification and municipal public works did for subsequent generations?” And importantly, what role do architects play in this discussion?

This question of agency—who has the capacity, the authority, and the ability to act?—is one that permeates much of what we do here. Our mission of urban engagement here at Northeastern takes many forms, but they all touch on the question of agency, and efficacy. Some of our faculty are working on what one might call more traditional areas of research, such as more energy efficient and architecturally flexible building panels, and whole new approaches to heating and cooling buildings. There are others here that are working on things that are less typical for architecture schools to work on. One of them is a focus on the market-driven building types that actually shape the everyday character of our cities, and account for ninety-five percent of our built environment—urban housing, office buildings, parking structures, hotels, retail spaces, and the like. These are not peripheral elements of study at the school, but actually the focus of graduate education.

Subsequent conferences are already underway to address subjects like housing delivery systems and a revisiting to the topic of building type, this time as both

Introductory Remarks

a theoretical framework and a tool for engaging the practical world of building economics and decision-making. Look for more current information about our 8

extensive series of publications on these and other topics at architecture.neu.edu.

So, as we get ready for this day, I want to reiterate a couple of things that Amanda said because this is a very different format than almost all of us are used to. The biggest difference is that the moderator is king. The moderator shapes the discussion; the moderator will be asking panelists questions. I would add finally that the real objective of this format is, in the words of Fred Friendly when talking about the virtues of this approach, “the idea is to make the process of decision-making so excruciating, that there is no way to escape without thinking.” And I hope that we can live up to Mr. Friendly’s ideal. I want to thank all of you very much for coming.

Infrastructure and the Future

Never mind the Buildings: thoughts on an infrastructural future Ian Baldwin A century ago, E.M. Forster published a short story in the Oxford and Cambridge Review. “The Machine Stops” portrays a future in which humanity lives in an automated underground complex known as The Machine.1 Its inhabitants have only to push buttons to summon food, clothing, and remote-controlled medical care.

Repulsed by the thought of physical interaction and the “horrible brown earth” above, they live happily in hexagonal cells, alone yet connected through pneumatic mail speaking tubes, and video screens, delivering lectures and calling forth literature and music on demand.

Watching the video of Infrastructure and the Future over a broadband connection running at 8.9 megabits per second, reading its participants’ blog posts, tweets, and e-mails while pulling PDFs of their articles off the web, Forster’s future looks uncanny. It suggests an appraisal both ominous and opportune: today’s continuously connected, socially networked public life is more about the networked than the social.

We too live within a machine, one woven throughout the industrial era by the ever-evolving networks, processes, and systems that supply the communication, hygiene, mobility, and power upon which modernity rests. This dependency has always come with unease—Forster’s story has human society perishing as the machine slowly breaks down—for infrastructure underpins the very narrative of progress. The floods that recently inundated Pakistan, washing away five thousand miles of roads, bridges, railways, and utility lines, were said to have set back the country by years, if not decades.

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never mind the buildings

A selection of homegrown infrastructural failures in the past decade: New York went dark in 2003, New Orleans’ levees failed in 2005, Minneapolis’ main inter10

state crossing fell in 2007. This past spring, a massive water main rupture forced the residents of Boston and twenty-nine surrounding towns to boil or buy their water for days. At these moments, the American myth of the self-reliant frontiersman falls away to reveal a people whose existence is built upon cheap and widespread infrastructural provision.

Architecture is deeply dependent upon this web of urban services to locate, construct, and sustain its creations (even an off-the-grid house is typically built with materials from on-the-grid factories). David Harvey has argued that physical networks are the foundational step in the production of space. They lay out the boundaries within which architects and others further define material experience.

Yet it is only recently that architecture as a discipline has begun to investigate infrastructure’s spatial potential.

“Infrastructure” first appeared in Washington political columns in the 1950s as an obscure NATO term for French airfields. Newspapers began to use it commonly in the 1970s to describe the public works of previous decades falling into disrepair.

Thus infrastructure was linked early on with crisis, with operative questions of how to reinforce and repair.

This began to change in the late 1990s, when academic geographers in the UK (Matthew Gandy, Stephen Graham, Simon Marvin, Erik Swyngedouw, and Nigel Thrift, among others) took up earlier accounts of infrastructural development by historians of public works and technology. Reading those determinist histories through postmodern social theory placed infrastructure within an emerging narrative of global urban flows.

Infrastructure and the Future

Graham and Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism (2001) is an impressive example of this approach, synthesizing a broad range of research to explain in detail the rise of the modern networked city and the subsequent unbundling of traditional public monopoly networks into privatized ones.2 Selective global infrastructures support “archipelago economies,” bringing Wall Street and the City of London into ever closer contact while bypassing the Lower East Side and Tower Hamlets.

This splintering was inherent in colonial cities like Algiers and Singapore, where European powers built modern sanitary systems to separate the rulers from the ruled. Today, water mains serving Brazilian industrial agriculture and Indian hightech office parks are illegally tapped by residents of the deprived areas through which they run but do not serve.

Unequal provision is hardly limited to the developing world. A New York Times investigation published a month after this conference found that sixty-two million Americans’ public-water supplies fell short of government health guidelines. The article highlighted the tiny city of Maywood, near downtown Los Angeles, where private utilities deliver water that is brown with particulates and has toxic levels of mercury and lead.

The tricky negotiation between public-sphere health and private wealth can also have good outcomes. In 2003, Cheonggyecheon Park “daylighted” a long-covered and polluted river in Seoul, removing the roadway and elevated highway running above it at a cost of nearly three-hundred million dollars. The new park justified its price by becoming an economic catalyst, drawing citizens to a formerly nondescript patch of the city.

New York’s High Line could also be a case study, one stretched over seven decades.

Created in the 1930s as part of a larger joint venture between the city and the New York Central Railroad, it supplied much of the city’s meat, poultry, and dairy. After

Cheonggyecheon Park, Seoul, Korea

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decades of abandonment and life as a stoic industrial remnant, it opened in 2009 as a planted promenade that reflects (sometimes self-consciously) how the city 12

itself has become an object of consumption.

Surpassing its Paris inspiration, the Promenade Plantée, the repurposed High Line has become implicitly tied to the upscaling of the adjacent Meatpacking District and West Chelsea. The park’s planting strategy, termed “agri-tecture” by lead designers Field Operations, references the line’s fragmented past but takes an unsentimental stance toward its new life as a post-industrial instrument of leisure.

The breakdown and obsolescence of aging postwar systems, combined with a growing population and new imperatives to efficiently manage our spatial resources, calls for the reworking and rethinking of infrastructural remnants everywhere. But there can only be so many High Lines.

Infrastructure always belongs to larger systems, not least the financial, political, and social structures needed to summon the physical installations. The singularity and scale of a power plant or a reservoir is the result of enormous capital value; the network it feeds suggests a civic entrenchment transcending an immediate place and time.

Like tax codes, centralized infrastructures are intricate products of bureaucratic organizations resistant to change. Both evolved to successfully meet specific and complex challenges and will not be easily replaced. Legacy networks must become both more efficient and more flexible—the aim of the vague but alluring phrase “smart grid”—but this is too important to be left to policymakers and engineers.

Panelist Kazys Varnelis, editor of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, has explored the networks of one region, wrangling southern California’s pipes and wires, its asphalt freeways and concrete riverbeds, into a set of codepen-

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dent “networked ecologies.�3 Varnelis and his coauthors, as well as panelist Marcel Smets in The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, have plotted out an immediate response for architects, designers, and urbanists: to locate, map, and uncover the urban-ecological functions of seemingly impenetrable systems.4 This refreshing approach scrutinizes the physical network itself (traditionally the purview of the engineer) in light of metropolitan and regional priorities (traditionally the purview of the planner), interpreting infrastructural morphologies via the architectural reportage of multiscalar visual documentation. Studies such as these can, and should, elicit both awe at the scale and reach of infrastructure and shock at its inherent fragilities.

Interlinking and overlapping, for example, creates both widespread efficiencies and potential cascading failures. In the 2003 Northeast Blackout, the electricity grid’s crash played havoc with dependent communication, sewage-treatment, transport, and water systems. Only six weeks later, all of Italy lost power for twelve hours due to the same cause: tree branches touching faraway transmission lines.

Peering deep inside systems to understand their flaws and potentials is not glamorous but it is the first step toward the future of the city, which is supported and defined by accumulated infrastructure. Its deployment is a prime expression of spatial and social life, and reveals how a culture regards the public sphere.

It will not, then, come as a shock that the United States collectively spends twice as much on streets and highways as on all other types of networked infrastructure combined. According to Federal Reserve economist Andrew Haughwout, the practice of funding uncoordinated local projects with state and federal dollars creates incentives to overinvest, while state-funded projects often create the illusion of growth by simply encouraging economic activities to move from one place to another.

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never mind the buildings

Even before the “Obama Stimulus,” the United States was spending more than it ever had on infrastructure. Much of it goes to maintain existing systems that, 14

according to the oft-quoted American Society of Civil Engineers report card, rate from D- to C+. But given the environmental unpredictability brought on by global warming, how much of our infrastructure should be civil-engineered? The Indus river floods in Pakistan show how dams, embankments, and levees used to irrigate cropland and stop seasonal floods can make major flooding far worse. Before more resources go to patching up unsustainable systems, we need a fundamental rethinking of where, why, and how we use infrastructure.

This exercise might not only serve the nation but strengthen it. As Charles Waldheim pointed out during the Green Infrastructure panel, infrastructure is “the last thing that we’ve agreed to pay for collectively” and therefore the redoubt of civic vision. Farsighted projects like the Jubilee Line underground extension in London have made architectural talent central to the experience, but architects practice within infrastructure projects of all ambitions, working out nuts and bolts as well as larger strategies. (Panelist Hubert Murray was chief architect of the Big Dig).

Along with analytical investigation, assuming roles of responsibility will be critical to articulating an infrastructural vision. If we truly believe infrastructure exists not to mindlessly replace culverts and cell masts and overpasses but to enhance private lives and the public sphere, then we must become intimately involved in its analysis, strategizing, and execution. The skills of the designer in resolving material, programmatic, and spatial challenges are exactly what the moment calls for.

Westminster Station, Jubilee Tube, London, England

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NOTES 1. E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,� Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909).

2. Steven Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (New York: Routledge, 2001).

3. Kazys Varnelis, The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (New York: Actar, 2008).

4. Marcel Smets and Kelly Shannon, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (NAI Publishers, 2010).

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Moderator Sarah Williams Goldhagen Architecture Critic, The New Republic

Panelists robert culver President and CEO, Mass-Development

guido hartray Associate, Rogers Marvel Architects

HUBERT MURRAY

civic Infrastructure

Panel 1

Architect, Boston; Former Chief Architect of Boston’s Central Artery Project

marcel smets Professor of Urban Design/State Architect to the Flemish Government

byron stigge Buro Happold

marilyn taylor Dean, University of Pennsylvania School of Design

Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

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PANEL ONE: CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE In this initial conversation, the panel outlined the parameters of a ‘civic’ infrastructure in an effort to narrow the focus of the discussion to a set of goals for the future role of architects in the design and renovation of American infrastructure. The panelists generally agreed on the reality of current political inefficiencies and the need to take a serious look at the state of the profession, particularly with an eye toward political reform and a long term commitment to a holistic vision of civic environments. Goals for future practice included putting greater focus on regional and local space in America as the most effective places for infrastructural success and the reconceptualization of the architect as a steward of the public environment.

Sarah Williams Goldhagan I wrote an article in the New Republic two or three years ago on infrastructure, which I presume is why you invited me. Since then, I’ve tried to read every article I could find that has the word ‘infrastructure’ in it, and have begun to despair because it’s such a big and amorphous and ill-defined term. When my article in the New Republic came out, the tagline that the editors came up with and put on the cover was “Making Infrastructure Sexy.” At that point, not very many people were thinking about infrastructure and I looked at it, and I thought “Oh, my God, I hope everybody knows I don’t have anything to do with these titles.” But since then, it’s become sexy. Harvard is having a lecture series this fall, MIT is having a lecture series this fall, here we have Northeastern, it goes on and on and on…

I think one of the things that we can begin to do today with our enormously esteemed panelists on all three panels, is to begin to break the concept of infrastructure down into definable terms, because it’s too big to talk about just as infrastructure. The organization of these three panels—civic infrastructure, green infrastructure, and systems infrastructure—begins to do that. As I was thinking about this yesterday, I was increasingly relieved to think, well, you know, civic infrastructure is probably the easiest to understand.

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Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

I want to talk about civic infrastructure, what it is, and how we can move it forward.

I don’t think that we should spend our time today talking about maintenance, but 20

rather about how to use infrastructure in the United States and Europe and Asia to move societies forward in interesting ways. So, that’s just one framing issue. I would like each of you to begin by telling me what you think civic infrastructure is.

Guido Hartray All infrastructure is civic infrastructure. We could think of infrastructure as the thing that functionally connects the different kind of uses, the different people that occupy the city, and the different neighborhoods of a city.

Civic space has always had the role of creating this kind of functional, experiential tie between the individual citizens of a city and the city as a whole. When we think of how a typical neighborhood operates, it’s very evident that you share a street with other people and that the street has multiple uses. So it’s very clear how that is both infrastructure and civic space. As we get into pieces of infrastructure that we might be tempted to think of as having a single role that idea breaks down.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen I think that one of the things that Amanda Lawrence and George Thrush and I were discussing in preparation for the conference was that maybe you can think about infrastructure you can see and infrastructure you can’t see. I do think that’s actually a useful beginning, even if it’s kind of a dumb beginning.

Hubert Murray Whether it’s visible or invisible, I’m thinking of it in terms of the hard and the soft. As a foreigner in this country, what strikes me as the most fundamental infrastructure that holds this country together is the Constitution. And I would call that, on the soft side, a really fundamental piece of infrastructure.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen What do you mean?

Infrastructure and the Future

Hubert Murray Well, in the sense that you can think on the hard side, there are things that connect one thing to another. The primary elements, such as buildings, schools, what-have-you, are connected by secondary elements, such as sewers, electricity, and so on.

Questions of necessity and sufficiency then come in, as a sort of dialogue between those two. It’s the soft side that has to be the sort of kicker in this conversation.

For instance, for the last few months we’ve been talking about health care. I would regard universal health care as a fundamental piece of infrastructure for our imagined community of the United States of America.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Even though we are going to focus on the built environment today, underneath the built environment is a vision of what civic life is and what social life is and what goals are that we want to promote, which is what you’re talking about. This is really essential in thinking about how we want to conceptualize and more forward with infrastructure. So there is an inevitable inter-meshing between the social, the political, and inevitably the economic… and actual, physical design in this sense.

Robert Culver The thing that has not been dealt with in this commonwealth— and I would suggest in most states in the United States, and certainly in Europe in something like three hundred years—is the geopolitical infrastructure. For architects to be successful, we must start to bring into focus the dysfunction, the disruptive, slow geopolitical process that allows us to make decisions about where we’re going to build, what we’re going to build, and how we’re going to build it.

We are, in fact, going to be in very, very deep trouble relative to the future built environment because things are just moving too quickly—as relates to the energy front, as relates to issues of sustainability or non sustainability, as relates to the way in which populations are growing and expanding, as relates to the question of how cities are going to be used versus how the suburban environment is either going to be destroyed or built up.

Orange County Great Park, TEN Arquitectos and DTAH, Irvine, CA

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Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

Sarah Williams Goldhagen That’s right, because when you’re dealing with a topic or a subject as big as infrastructure, politics and political expediency is critical. We 22

all know this, right? So, what is it about your city? Is it because you’re the emperor?

And I don’t say that facetiously…

Robert Culver Benign dictator… The Base Reallocations Closure Act came along. It happens to a lot of large spaces of land here, and in Europe, where all of a sudden, the Department of Defense, the largest employer in the whole world, says, “We’re shutting down hundreds of acres in the middle of some place.” Scared the living daylights out of the body politic, the body politic then said, “Here, we want this agency to run this because we are scared now that we’ve lost twenty-five hundred, three thousand jobs, that we don’t know what to do with this, and in addition to that, we’re going to give you two hundred million dollars for infrastructure development.”

Sarah Williams Goldhagen The body politic meaning the local…

Robert Culver The regional—the state legislature. Fear and greed.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Ok. All right, we have people who have worked a lot in Europe, maybe you can talk about fear and greed… Byron, tell me your thoughts.

Byron Stigge I’m going to talk about my work in the developing countries, because I think that really puts a focal point on how much civic infrastructure we have here in the US. Civic infrastructure is all the things that the private sector won’t do on their own. And the reason they won’t do them is because there are market gaps. Low, below market-rate housing, is a clear market-gap, or drinking water supply, where there’s a market-gap because there’s no economic justification to supply drinking water.

Lightrail Station Shelter, Phoenix, AZ

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Secondly, there are inherent monopolies in a lot of the things that we call civic infrastructure. We shouldn’t let the private sector develop electricity, for example.

Deregulation was a good example of why that’s a civic infrastructure.

Thirdly, what I’m seeing a lot of in developing countries is that infrastructure has a return on investment over a private sector horizon. There’s just no electricity and water and sanitation in Africa and India. If you want to develop a world-class development, you have to build your own roads, and your own water, your own electricity. They build it so poorly because their return on investment is only five years. It’s clearly not a civic infrastructure when the private sector does it.

And fourthly, civic infrastructure is clearly just for public benefit. Sanitation is a public benefit, and that’s why it’s a civic infrastructure.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Adam Smith actually wrote in the Wealth of Nations that the one thing that governments have a responsibility to provide is civic infrastructure and public good because it will never be profitable for private corporations. Societies and economies can’t function without them, which is more or less what you’re saying.

Marilyn Taylor I thought I’d twist it around just a little bit. Instead of saying “what are civic infrastructures,” say “what makes infrastructure civic.” For me there’s sort of a conflation—and I agree with it—between public and civic. I tend to think of infrastructure that is civic as an outcome, and not just an objective.

That is, there is a true public benefit in a very broad way. It represents society; it promotes the goals such as environmental sustainability, opportunities for individuals, or competitive advantage. If we want to address it successfully, we have to think of it not as just a label that is easily generalized to include everything.

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For me, it does mean public investment in accordance with public will. Public will comes in different forms in Europe and in Asia than in our very democratic place.

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Nonetheless, I think one of the things we’ve been failing to do over the consumer decade is to figure out what that public will is that leads us to strategies and the accomplishment of larger goals.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Is public will the same thing as public good?

Marilyn Taylor Public will, in my mind, is that which endorses leaders in the public sector to make their investment. I have come to realize that we, as architects and urbanists, can have great dreams for infrastructure, but unless there’s public leadership to make public investments supported by public will, they simply don’t happen. I don’t mean to say that infrastructure that is civic is exclusively public, but without that clarity of vision—which, at least in the United States, we have to broadly embrace and focus on in the long term—then we won’t get to what I call civic infrastructure.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen There have been attempts to privatize certain elements of the infrastructure in the United States, the most famous of which I know is on a certain section of the highway right outside of Chicago. It was sold off to a private company because they didn’t have the funds—or didn’t want to come up with the funds publicly to fund it—and then the company immediately slapped on a toll of about eight or nine dollars, making it impossible for the lower income classes to use the highway. Ultimately it failed and reverted back to public ownership. It’s enormously problematic.

Marcel, this is one of the things I’m very interested in getting from you, because I know in Europe you’ve done a lot of public-private partnerships. Could you tell us more about that? In the United States, most would agree that we haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet, and we need to.

Infrastructure and the Future

Marcel Smets Maybe I’ll just first try to say what in my mind would be civic. It’s a question of where you put your energy, what is your real language. Because the question of visible and invisible is important, but as you want to stress the architects, let’s go to the built environment. Public, in my opinion, would be the lowest grade of necessity.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Do you mean public, like publicly owned?

Marcel Smets Like public investments and public space… only what is basically required. You know, you need drinking water in order not to get illnesses, ok?

Civic, in my opinion, goes back to a nineteenth or early twentieth century idea— look at the City Beautiful Movement where they were making city buildings. The civic society was something other than the real society.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen How? Marcel Smets Well, in the New Deal there is awareness that the state should do enough for all citizens. But there is also, in my mind, something in civic that is related to a symbolic meaning, to a meaning of a state valuing its citizens. And for that reason, it is trying to make the best possible thing, not the minimal thing— the best possible thing because it’s a public and civic value. The level of development of a nation is the level of value that a society attributes to its civic infrastructure.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Ok, so let’s focus in. I think we would all agree that there is public, which simply means publicly owned and politically connected built environment—or initiatives in the built environment—and then there’s civic, which is a set of goals about the body politic and about society. What are our goals with civic infrastructure?

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Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

Guido Hartray The challenge, as we start to have more concerns with sustainability and systems of infrastructure that we think are invisible, is to recognize that 26

they’re all actually visible in some form. Part of the challenge in making them civic is to make that connection, right? If it’s invisible, then it’s very easy for the infrastructure to be out of sight, out of mind, and without a relationship to the public will. It just happens.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Ok, so one of the goals then, is to take the parts of infrastructure that are invisible, but are critical to the long-term health of the society, and to somehow concretize them in ways that make people aware of the interconnectedness of this kind of thing.

Robert Culver The design firms have to be able to get back to being thought leaders about where we are going with the planning, with the development of sustainable infrastructure.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Ok, what would that entail?

Robert Culver Back to Adam Smith… the economics now are such that everybody in this room that’s involved with an architectural firm is feeling the heat. It’s a problem that we’re losing the thought leaders. We need to ask whether architectural firms should become more public and should be seen in terms of national policy, as having some sort of vehicle for subsidizing thinking about the future.

This is a radical idea, but we are missing out on more thoughts, and the architectural industry is not able—except through really well-defined jobs—to challenge us on what the future ought to look like. It’s a huge issue.

Marilyn Taylor I completely agree, and I spend a lot of time at school talking about that. I believe that the world most immediately around us—that is the availability of public funds, the availability of private funds, the real estate industry, and

CityGarden, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, St. Louis, MO

Infrastructure and the Future

all those kinds of other things—that has directed decision making about infrastructure and the land use that relates to it is fundamentally changing and will be reconfigured. There is a tremendous opportunity right now for designers to step forward.

Because I’m at Penn Design, I have so many different kinds of designers—and I use the word ‘designers’ even to include the artists. It’s a wonderful time to be situated in that kind of challenging interface between disciplines, when we are becoming more familiar with each other’s way of thinking. I firmly believe that everyone who is going to our school needs to be charged to stand up to a leadership responsibility. Now, whether that is your school board, your synagogue, your city, or the universe somewhere in between, you need to find a place. Because when we don’t speak up, there are many people that will speak up for us. It is a time to find every opportunity we can to hit the cracks in the political establishment. I’m sure, Robert, when you get down to Washington and you hear what I hear, which is that the Administration is saying, “Please get to the Congress and get the message to them of what we can do.” We, those who actually can form a public will— Sarah Williams Goldhagen Right.

Marilyn Taylor And I think there’s a wonderful theme coming here, that Byron and Marcel started: This is not basics versus amenities; this is making sure we are at the minimum and then aspiring to much more.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen One of the things that distinguishes every person on this panel is that the public role of the architect is clearly in sight and has been throughout all of your careers. And that is unfortunately not typical in practice.

Hubert, how much have you struggled with this?

Hubert Murray Ehm, a lot.

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Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

Sarah Williams Goldhagen I know. That’s why I asked.

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Hubert Murray My feeling is that, as an architect, I can really affect some change in an institution. The hospital for which I work is forty million square feet and seemed like a good field in which to develop a public will about going sustainable and making the hospital green. In contrast to the universities, it’s actually a lot harder to develop a public will about a sustainability program, because what we don’t have in the hospitals is a constantly refreshed body politic of idealistic students. That population has proved to be a tremendous boost to the universities as they take the lead in sustainability programs and show municipalities and states where they need to go—not only in what is being built on the ground in the institutions, but what people are being taught to go out and do from the universities.

In a hospital you’ve got a lot of sick people who have other things on their mind, so the strategy has to be different and the tactics have to be different.

Marcel Smets I am relatively close to politics of the last four years because I live in this mandate, and what I constantly see is that our policies all over the world are organized in sectorial manner—we have ministers of environment, and there are different communities of public works, and there are different communities of naturalist preservation… Basically, what we are dealing with today in our crowded societies is space. Space is not sectorial. Space involves all these things at the same time. What we need is not a policy, what we need is a project.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen What do you mean a project?

Marcel Smets A project is something that involves all the sectors of policy making and starts out from the organization of space and from designing the details.

This is where we need designers. Because social scientists have never been able to properly fill that need. We are the only profession that tries to resolve complex problems by operating in a designerly way.

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen Europeans tend to have much longer time-horizons, so how are you doing this?

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Marcel Smets The basic aim would be is to say, ‘What is the basic obligation of the public government?’ It is not just designing and building; it is also setting the rules for what should be done in a public-private situation to work with the private sector.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Can you give a concrete example? I think it would help people to conceptualize.

Marcel Smets Twelve years or so ago I organized a university-based design group, which helped design road networks, parking, railway stations, and so forth. The group also designed the urbanistic plans in order to develop the massing of the volumes, which basically was the price of the land, and so forth and so on. It worked because we were able to do these two things at the same time. Public investment in the infrastructure gives plus value to the land. If you don’t control the plus value that you create by your own means, you don’t create the civic environment.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Shaun Donovan, who’s now the secretary of HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development), spoke at the Graduate School of Design a few weeks ago. He said something that really struck me, which is that we can no longer talk about HUD as being the store of low cost-housing, because we can’t talk about low-income housing at all. It no longer works to take one typology for one social group, to isolate it, and to focus the government agency only on this typology and this social group. He said that we now talk about neighborhood development, which includes all aspects of the development as well as what is now called ‘affordable housing.’ I thought that was a useful analogy for how architects need to reconceptualize their role in society moving forward. It’s no longer just a building. You are the stewards of public environment.

Panel 1: Civic Infrastructure

He made a completely novel innovation at HUD when he picked up the phone and starting talking to people like he department of public transportation—they 30

had lunch every couple of weeks—and the environmental protection agency.

There is this kind of interconnectedness that is both necessary and can also get out of control politically, I think particularly in this country. Now in the United States, I still can’t figure out why it’s so difficult to do what you, Marcel, have done as the czar of the built environment in the Flemish region.

Guido Hartray Just as an example, we did some work with the Metropolitan Transportation Association (MTA), which has a goal in New York state that something like fifty percent of new development would happen within the radius of a transit stop to promote transit-oriented development. The MTA is great in that respect, but then when they go to implementation, they have to look at implementation from the point of view of ‘these are the parts of the city we control.’ And so, you have something that’s incredibly ambitious, but obviously the parcels they control are never going to result in that kind of ambitious goal that they set for themselves.

It relates exactly to the questions of sectorial division. Because once the problem has been put in the field of a specific agency and they have drafted an RFP that you have responded to, the design problem is probably already gone. The question is how you get into this position where you are the steward that has to bridge between these agencies. That gets messy for the person who ends up being your client because here they’ve gone through the whole process to neatly define a problem, and hand it to you, the architect, to solve. But, in fact, that whole process of neatly defining the problem was really excluding most of the really interesting and innovative solutions to that problem.

Byron Stigge The question to us right now is, ‘What is the role of the architect?’

And, ‘Why is it so hard in the US, and why are we struggling so much?’ The best architects structure a compelling argument that develops a good civic infrastruc-

Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain, Chicago, IL

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ture project, and the worst architects simply draw something or render something, and they say “doesn’t it look beautiful?” Everyone says, “Not so much, how can we make it cheaper?” The best architects start with a logical process. I’m actually thinking of European architects. I’m totally stereotyping here, but American architects render the bird’s eye view, right?

Sarah Williams Goldhagen In the abstract it’s difficult to discuss, but what constitutes a compelling argument?

Byron Stigge I want to get back to your question on goals, because when I worked in Europe there was always a stepping back. ‘What are our goals, what are we really trying to achieve here?’

Sarah Williams Goldhagen What do you mean by “achieve”? Achieve socially?

Achieve aesthetically?

Byron Stigge I mean all of those things. Very few projects really stop at the beginning and define goals, and even fewer return to them throughout the project.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen In the United States?

Byron Stigge Well, yeah.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen So we can bash Americans, that’s ok…

Byron Stigge As a sustainability practitioner I’ve really tried to define goals for a project. You know, ‘What are we really trying to do here?’ And then, reminding ourselves, ‘What are we really trying to do here?’ We must be constantly structuring arguments on why the handrails need to be beautiful, why we need to spend extra money on the paving, why we actually need to do the things we do.

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen Ok, let’s break this down, because in America the people who tend to go into the built environment tend to believe in the built envi32

ronment, and tend to believe that they can make a contribution. Why is it difficult to establish a set of goals and then push them through?

Marilyn Taylor If you look at what America is and can be, we have a remarkable quality of inventiveness. This is where there’s a line of logic that can change the way we have been thinking about the issue. When we are most successful as Americans in this industry, we research and arrive at a moment of intuition that sparks an idea. And then you’re off and running. But that research is always there to remind you what goals you set out for yourself, what you were trying to prove.

In this rush to spend as much money as we possibly can for our private clients, and to get things done in a hurry for our public clients, that time to stop and think about what it is we’re trying to achieve is getting squeezed and lost. And frankly, we haven’t helped it by saying ‘We have two weeks. We’ll write the algorithms, we’ll generate the scheme, it’ll look beautiful and everybody will love it.’

Robert Culver There are a lot of what I what I refer to as “Gucci architects” who are being hired by wealthy people to create these sustainable, beautiful, wealthy environments for them in the Hamptons. They drive their own jets to get to places and they have their own little driven cart. The issue is one of the wealth.

For those of you who have not been to the home of Franklin D. Eleanor Roosevelt that sits on the Hudson River in the little town of Hyde Park, New York, you should do that. You will get a sense of the man, who was a man of wealth, prestige, and power. The way in which he lived allowed him to say, ‘It’s not about me.’ He was a rather humble man in his environment. He was a man who understood that it was his role to serve and protect the entirety of the Untied States. We have been lacking that for at least the last 20, if not 30, years.

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen I would object to that. Look at the Millennium Park in Chicago which was a public-private thing and in which there were millions and millions of dollars poured into the civic realm.

I do think that one of the focal points is that the Federal Government is doing good things but there has to be some way of getting it down to a regional level and a regional vision. Politically, that is a very difficult thing to do.

Picking up on the constitution, which Hubert was exactly right bring to the forefront, I’m not interested in the American bashing, as in ‘Americans are bad people and selfish.’ I don’t think they are and I think that’s wrong. What I’m trying to get at and figure out—and I think we are getting somewhere—is what are the structural issues that make it so difficult for long-term visions about civic good to be implemented through infrastructural initiatives in the United States, and to some extent in Western Europe? I don’t think it’s necessarily a lack of will on the individual basis, but there is something there, whether it’s a political structure or the training of architects. Somehow it needs to be addressed and reconceptualized in useful ways.

Marcel Smets FDR generated the community of this country and he did it politically. He did it through the WPA with photographers and artists and writers, so that the entire country felt that they were engaged in rebuilding the common infrastructure. Why aren’t we engaging in the public purpose?

Sarah Williams Goldhagen That’s a pivotal question. Why aren’t we?

Marilyn Taylor I have one theory. Having watched Europe, where there is European Union investment bank, having watched China, where there is the government, having watched Singapore, where there is a government that is so wise in its investments and its structure of the related development that is also in the network

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of control, I think it’s a fundamental problem in the US that there is no regenerated public funding that is aimed at competitive economic advantage. We have 34

to find a way that there is not surplus transportation being reauthorized every six years, becoming victim to great ideas every single time it gets reauthorized. We need to secure it and understand that it’s a multi-decade assault.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Let’s focus on that for a minute because that’s something that public-private collaboration could do well. The question is who is going to take on the blame? I mean Felix Rohatyn is trying to do this with this National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) thing, which I don’t think is going anywhere, but…

Marilyn Taylor We need to reorient our thinking to mayors who are true leaders and can actually collaborate with the other elective leaders in the regions to make this work.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen The commitment now is going to come from mayors, who have a long-term tradition in pushing the development in their particular cities and regions.

Guido Hartray Millennium Park, though it’s an interesting and problematic example in terms of how it was done, has actually created a public space in Chicago, a city where very little space is shared by the city as a whole. Now that’s something that is sort of a rediscovery in Chicago, but I think it wouldn’t be a new discovery to a European city. In a European public-private partnership the public has a much stronger hand and I think therefore they can get the public partnership to work for the private but also for the fundamental common good as well.

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It’s been driven by the private sector in this country and you have the mayor who has to kind of follow along, who doesn’t have any money. Then the partnership is unbalanced on the other side. One thing you didn’t have in Chicago is a Mayor with a strong vision…

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Do you think that it’s an issue of education or an issue of leadership?

Marcel Smets We have formed our architects to become members of the star system, as you call it, and not to become civic people. We are forming our youngsters toward an ambition which is not the ambition of becoming civic leaders or inventors of a new system.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen I do think its beginning to change— Marcel Smets Absolutely.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen But that has been the case for the last hundreds of years and it’s an enormous problem.

Marcel Smets I absolutely agree. I know education is changing and it’s absolutely an important element that architects need to be working towards.

Then going back to the local basis… The fact is that the mayors are the only power structure today that is not sectorial. The mayor, or let’s say the local basis, has to think in different ways because they are completely confronted with the result of what they are doing professionally. We have to be more hopeful in a way. It’s a fantastic dawn that is coming in the long-term.

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen But until then, we understand what the structural indicators are to move forward to create this ambition.

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Marilyn Taylor Infrastructure is not the next faction. It should not be something that designers flock to because it’s a good place to hide. Infrastructure is a commitment to seriously hard work. It is for the serious of heart. It is extraordinary but it is not for everybody. Don’t do it because it sounds intriguing, do it because you find it unbelievable.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Infrastructure demands civic and public engagement all the time, over and over and over again.

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Moderator Tom Keane Executive Director, Boston Society of Architects

Panelists Michael Jones Partner, Foster and Partners

Will Lark Designer, MIT Media Lab SmartCitites

Beto Lopez Senior Designer, IDEO

Clare Lyster Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago

Jason SChreiber Principal, Nelson\Nygaard

Kazys Varnelis Director, Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University

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Panel 2

Panel 2: Systems Infrastructure

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PANEL TWO: SYSTEMS INFRASTRUCTURE Moderated by Tom Keane, the second panel began and ended with a discussion of the potential of communication systems as catalysts for greater user awareness, systemic efficiency, and a connection to larger cultural values. Sustainability was a deeply interwoven thread throughout the conversation, and the panelists found the balance of resource conservation with a pleasurable user experience as essential to the success of the contemporary infrastructural system. Speculation on the role of the designer in the development and evolution of systems infrastructure included architect as visionary, cultural interpreter, interface designer, local activist, and map maker.

Tom Keane I got up this morning and turned on the lights. They went on. I don’t pay a lot for power, quite frankly. I turned on the faucet, clean water came out and I brushed my teeth—so I got power, water, and sewer. And then I took a walk, got on the Orange Line and there was a little bit of delay, but I got here with no problem. I came down here, turned on my computer, and I was able to get onto the internet—so I got all of the four things that I really needed. I had power, water, and sewer, and I had communications and transportation. They all worked pretty well. What’s the problem with that? Do we need to fix it? What needs to be fixed?

Beto Lopez Invariably we’re solving for needs and those needs must be facilitated by features, whether it’s that prompt that you get at the beginning of the screen when you’re logging on or the way you connect to something else. In order for us to inherently begin to change behaviors—if that’s what we’re going after with a different way of doing things—we need to connect to values.

Michael Jones The interesting thing about your experience this morning was you were an end user. The big unknown for me is how those things were delivered to you. What were the systems and the regime that went together to deliver those things to you? How do we get the energy for entire cities and communities in a way that’s responsible? That can only be done within the context of the big picture.

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Clare Lyster In actual fact, the delivery of a lot of those eighteenth and nineteenth century systems has been known about for quite a long time, so it might be 42

interesting to think about the new systems of the city—the ones that have an unclear system of delivery and impact. It may also be interesting to use the ambiguity of this category as a way to think about new systems, their delivery, and how they make space in the world—or how they change how architects make space in the city. A lot of contemporary systems are not very tangible. How do we interface with these new contemporary networks? How do we represent them? How do we draw them? How do we deliver them? And how do we then take their intelligence and use that intelligence to reimagine the city?

Jason Schreiber Some of those systems are completely unseen, and that may be good; and some of those systems are overwhelmingly seen and take up too much space. As we look at sustainability and as we look to the future, if we don’t make people more aware of how we use energy or transit or water by bringing them into the public eye, we keep investing in coal power and roads.

Will Lark When you turned on the water or flipped the switch, you had no direct feedback about how much energy that was consuming or where it came from.

Some of the projects we look at are trying to bring to life some of those ideas— just a little bit of that feedback, but in real time so the end user can then decide how she or he is going to behave. If we can tap into the communication systems or other intelligence systems to let people know how their behavior is actually affecting things, we can have more influence. Bringing all those different bits of information together and illustrating them in a way that people can understand can help change some behaviors.

Tom Keane The criticism of me was that I was just oblivious. I very much enjoy being able to get clean water, transportation, electricity. But the problem was that everything I was getting was simply not sustainable. It actually goes back to a point that Clare made, which was that at least three of those things—the power, and the

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water, and transportation—are essentially based on an eighteenth and nineteenth century model. Communications is arguably a very different kind of model. The question is that if the eighteenth and nineteenth century model doesn’t work, what is the model for the future and how do architects play a role in guiding the development of that model?

Beto Lopez All these infrastructural systems have been developed at different times, and the rate at which they’re being redeveloped or renewed is happening at different scales. Our tendency is to expect them to all be integrated. This seems natural as users, but there’s huge inertia happening at very large scales. It’s not just the fact that layers interact—everything from nature to governance to infrastructure to fashion—but that under eventual circumstances everything will fail because they’re happening at different rates.

What we have happening right now is a layer that’s failing. We’re trying to reconcile that with how to improve it or how to connect it in better ways, to deliver the forms of infrastructure, whether it’s power, water, communication. But from a sustainability point of view—which to me is the continuous tradeoff of quality of life versus how many resources we’re using to meet that quality of life—it’s not just about reducing resources, right?

I think all too often we forget that it’s that balance of quality of life and resource use. It’s not always about using less. It’s about what that quality of life is that you’re seeking. What is one’s level of expectation in terms of the integrations of all these systems? Is it fair to think that a utopic society where everything is aligned can be possible? I think it’s not practical.

Tom Keane Do architects have a role in that?

Beto Lopez Yes, of course, by all means they have a role in it. Civic spaces are an extension—even an improvement—on my quality of life. If I think of the Highline

Bit Car concept for a stackable city car, Franco Vairani and Smart Cities, MIT Media Lab

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in New York City or some of the recreation parks in Austin, Texas, where I grew up, those extend the quality of life that I have. If I think about the things that are 44

available to me, it’s not just the dwelling that I keep and the transportation that I use to get to and from work, it’s those civic outlets. If we don’t actually consider them as this extension of this quality of life then we’re missing the boat with the kind of work we can do as an aggregate.

Tom Keane Will, I’m going to make you answer this question specifically with respect to transportation, since that’s been your focus. You’re not an architect. You may have taken a few architecture classes, but you’re not an architect. Do architects really have a role in creating the transportation system in the future? You can say “no.”

Will Lark I don’t think the architect is going to define it, but I think there has to be some consideration for other systems. One example we have on campus is a new building—the Stata Center, which Frank Gehry just designed. I’m sure he looked at every nook and cranny of the details in the building itself, but the stuff that matters to me as a vehicle designer is in the basement. Are those power transformers just stuck in a cemented area without any connection to the outer grid? They have four different transformers and less than half of them are used at a time.

One of the big issues we have with electric vehicles is being able to rapidly charge them. Transformers are the perfect thing to piggy back off of, but obviously there was no foresight or thought about how these things could work with other systems.

Tom Keane But isn’t that more a failure of architecture rather than saying that an architect doesn’t matter?

Will Lark Yes.

Flight Patterns, Diagram by Aaron Koblin

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Beto Lopez The position of creating architecture as a single entity that’s going to solve this is kind of asinine. This is a multidisciplinary challenge. If I look at the work that IDEO does and how project teams are sourced, it’s not just industrial designers solving problems with a customer for a potential user’s needs. It’s taking sociologists, anthropologists, and people of varied backgrounds to understand the problem and to give perspective.

I think giving one discipline the task of solving this alone is misguided. What are the kinds of perspectives we need to actually address this issue? We’re talking about very large scales and layers of systems, right? One person, one individual, and one disciplinary background looking at space isn’t the only way to look at the problem or the opportunities that that problem might have for us.

Clare Lyster There was an overtone in the first section that suddenly the whole infrastructure movement is going to reduce the discipline of architecture to problem solving—to solving problems that we inherently cannot solve. We can address certain climatic and environment issues, but I think we have to prohibit ourselves from becoming infrastructural activists.

Yes, the project is a multidisciplinary one, but the title of this conference is “the architect’s role.” So let me be the selfish architect for the moment. How does the discipline of architecture use the interest in infrastructure as a way to recuperate the architect’s role in design, and do it in a way that’s not a form of activism?

It’s an opportunity for the discipline to readdress how it actually enters urban projects, whether it’s at the scale of designing a new car prototype or designing a whole new transportation infrastructure. If we find new models for thinking about the architect, then we can go back out and deploy those models in the urban, regional, and global sectors. But we can’t reduce ourselves to problem solvers, because there are a lot of people out there who can solve problems better than we can. For us, it’s about design, it’s about leadership, it’s about recuperating a kind of confidence in the discipline.

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Michael Jones One of the things that distinguished your journey this morning was the fact that—and this is where an architect can really have a bearing—you 46

are living in an urban model that enabled you to travel on a transit system that was enjoyable, on time…

Tom Keane …kind of enjoyable…

Michael Jones …quasi-reliable, whatever you want to say. But you are living in a setting that is enjoyable; it’s a great city to be in, and it’s got a certain critical mass and density. Those things were made enjoyable and agreeable for you by the creation of the environment in which everyone is living. Now that is something that an architect really can play a huge part in. Making cities by designing out the need for infrastructure is part of how we can minimize the amount of infrastructure that we actually physically need, yet still make an environment that’s incredibly livable and enjoyable. I think that’s a challenge that we can all rise to meet. So let’s try and remove the need to design a new car by creating other ways of living that don’t need a car. Maybe communication technology will evolve so far that we can communicate without having to travel. It’s a multifaceted thing, but let’s try to remove some of the need—this would be a good start for architects.

Kazys Varnelis There is a role for architects in politics. It could be a good thing if more people who are trained as architects go out and engage in politics. Why shouldn’t there be a policy of architects going out there? That’s where we need to seize the prey, first of all. And, secondly, because I think that sitting by ourselves in this room we have a very limited audience. I don’t know if any of you in the audience are perhaps major owners of private types of infrastructural systems or run major government infrastructure systems beyond those already invited to the symposium, but those people are out there and it’s important to talk to them.

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The next point is, let’s say, the prosaic. As Dean Taylor said on the previous panel, infrastructure is trendy but it’s really very boring. It requires a lot of diligence and lot of effort, so get some expertise. If you’re interested in data centers, great; get some expertise in data centers and maybe instead of studying data centers while really building single family homes, you end up working in a data center as an architect. You become known for that. So get expertise.

And get into the prosaic business of the mix, which can be messy, dirty, and boring, but it can also be really profitable. I think many architects aren’t willing to do this. And then, finally, it is worthwhile to pursue the visionary. Architects have a capacity to envision alternate worlds, to envision other than our own, and there’s something really useful about that. We might at least inspire people to change…

But get involved in politics, get involved in the prosaic. You probably can’t do all three, but maybe one of those is worthwhile for a specific purpose.

Tom Keane I love this notion of architects as envisioning other worlds. It’s as though they are science fiction writers.

Clare Lyster Yes, architects fashion the big idea. Architects are very good at proposing the big idea because they can synthesize multiple perspectives into a singular vision. That’s one role for the architect. I think the second one is in exposing or documenting or mapping—in drawing or communicating some of these new infrastructural systems.

That croissant you ate this morning when you got up… If you mapped all the ingredients and where and how it was produced… I think that architects can communicate the flows of a lot of contemporary products and systems. That communicative role not only exposes them to the general public but also uses them as a way to find opportunities.

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The way forward is in the big idea and it’s also in drawing these networks—architects are good at making maps because they have this skill in their training for the 48

synthesis of many, many different layers of information. We draw buildings from different perspectives; it’s within our disciplinary expertise.

Tom Keane Do architects need to become more involved? How do architects become the people to integrate sustainable thinking and do they necessarily have to become politically involved in order to do so?

Michael Jones You can do that from two perspectives: by legislation or by conscience. More and more I’m finding—and not just in Europe—that people who are becoming involved and integrating thinking see it as the right thing to do. They feel more inclined to at least try to step up to a mandate which is not just about their own individual culture. I’m quite reassured by these more recent changes in thinking. This is very high on people’s agenda.

Jason Schreiber How do we as professionals start trying to enlighten when even the federal government says global services amping your roadways is good? We still go about doing it the way we’ve always done it, which is affecting the supply of buildings and the built infrastructure—but we don’t really affect the demand.

There’s self-selection to ride the train, and that may be a growing trend. But, really, most people are still driving.

So how do we pay them to live in the right places and ride the right infrastructure?

You make them do the things that people want to do. I mean, in London, for example, driving is extremely undesirable. You are penalized for driving, you are financially penalized to get in the car.

Michael Jones Perfect example. Money that really hits them does change the equation, which is great.

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Will Lark Take vehicle designers, for instance. They are just working on the vehicles themselves, and because of that we make SUVs. They do everything—they get you everywhere you need to go, they go three hundred miles, they go over one hundred miles an hour, they have all these performance specs that are just unnecessary for a city. If we think about piggy backing off a city’s infrastructure, we can design vehicles that are very efficient for their services there.

But that requires the bigger vision of working with city planners or utility companies to provide energy on demand. Until someone takes a look at the larger vision—whether it’s an architect or someone else that can say, okay, these three systems of buildings, subways, and cars have to work together—we’re not going to get there. We’re going to have all these incremental things, and we’re going to have this situation like you’re describing. We’re going to get to the point where there is no more oil and we’re not going to have any choice in the matter.

Kazys Varnelis A lot of people are commuting long distances in order to be able to find an affordable place to live. If you were to look at immigration in this country in the last decade, much of it has been into the outlying regions. Little of it has been to the traditional urban core. This is reshaping American cities.

We need to think of the big picture. Where is the affordable housing going? Are we building any of it at all? Or are we just building these developer-driven projects way out in the boonies so that people then have nightmarish commutes, clog up the roads, and pollute the air. Unfortunately, instead of thinking about these questions, apparently the administration just decided to bail out home builders, which was just unconscionable. That was just in the news this week. We need to reframe politics and the big picture in terms of how we think about infrastructure.

Beto Lopez One of the things that struck me was this question around commerce and what drives it. Of the products that we’ve been asked to design in the

Cell Phone Tower

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last five years, one of the major trends that we’re reacting to—at least as a whole and as an industry designing products—is the rise of the baby boomers. That’s go50

ing to drive changes across all products, and I venture to say that includes infrastructure.

Tom Keane Let’s switch gears for a moment to talk about 18th century and 19th century models of infrastructure versus 21st century infrastructure. At the risk of over simplification, the old model of systems infrastructure was one huge system— big technology put together. Water and sewer may be deemed a classic kind of model. Today it seems there’s some change in that there’s a disaggregation that’s going on, and it’s potentially happening with power. I’d like comments from all of you on what that means in terms of how we think about designing these systems, and if in fact they are now becoming very dispersed.

Clare Lyster The eighteenth and nineteenth century infrastructural model was a very centralized one, usually publicly controlled or at least controlled, designed and maintained by a small group in one or two places. But the systems of the twenty-first century city are highly distributed; they are very global and they have a huge scale or impact such that when something happens in one part of the world, it has incredible impact somewhere else. That produces a distributed society, so we can bring it back to what sort of urban organizations come out of that?

On the other hand, if you read some global theory that the distributed systems are still accumulating in critical places in the world, so that you have incredible distribution but also incredible conglomeration (to use the Saskia Sassen term) in certain spaces. This is particularly true in the financial markets in Paris and New York and the super financial cities. It’s hard say how we design for that. I think we just have to make ourselves aware of how network thinking and contemporary systems are impacting patterns of globalization across the world.

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Jason Schreiber If you look at the history of civilization, all cities were completely self sufficient. Villages and caves were all self-sufficient initially. And then the systems became more interconnected because it was more efficient. That continues today, but as we look to the future—and I think lots of us recognize this for many systems—it would make more sense to be able to bring all that self-sufficiency back into more individualized units. Package sewer treatment, which many people argue is a part of sprawl, may be appropriate if done differently. We could look at localized energy production or the distributed energy systems that are starting to develop here and there in cities. Transportation, in particular, has a little bit more of a hurdle.

Obviously a part of what makes a lot of those systems work well is that we can move the freight on trucks long distances and we can interconnect commerce, but then we have an issue with fossil fuels. For instance, the airline industry is going to be gone. There’s just not going to be enough fuel, so there will have to be a high speed rail network.

Many people argue that if you live in a mixed-use community with fields around you, you’ll be more self sufficient in the future when we can no longer truck food into major cities. So are we going full circle? And what does that imply for our infrastructure systems? I think the only infrastructure that really will not be impacted much by distance is information.

Kazys Varnelis There’s a great fascination right now with distributed systems.

Distributed is now valorized as an inherently more democratic system, and there are problems with it. One is that some distributed systems—like let’s say the idea of everyone producing their own electricity again—don’t always take into account issues like the fact that the grid is in horrible shape. Many of these network technologies that we have may be distributed, but they’re based on increasingly centralized systems. Let’s take the internet and telecoms, where we’re having these companies like Google getting bigger and bigger and bigger…

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Panel 2: Systems Infrastructure

Clare Lyster On one hand, you’re dealing with these global networks­—very complex. On the other, there’s a kind of removed interest in local and what you 52

do at the scale of your own community in your own city. For example, there is a lot of discussion about food networks, trying to localize them. Not only for health reasons, but for economic reasons, sustainable reasons, whatever name you want to put on them. As designers, what are the spaces that then emerge from this new emphasis on local networking?

The word icon came up before. We have to bring back a kind of identity to infrastructure in the city because if we’re just going to design on the basis on efficiency, we’re never going to change the way people think about how they live in the given urban environment. We have to bring the icon back to infrastructure—not as a way to show off, but as a way to use infrastructure as a means to re-identify the city.

Beto Lopez I value people like Dean Kamen and anyone who wants to bring new ideas to create a divergent conversation around what ails our world today. Let’s look at the issue of clean water. From a systems thinking perspective, half the problem with water sanitation is the transportation from the clean source and back to people’s homes. There is then the use of that water in people’s homes. What clean water means to people is very culturally specific and very important to understand.

Technology has a role to play. Understanding it from both a cultural and contextual point of view has a lot of merit, and architects can do something with that. It’s not just solving for needs, it is understanding the system’s success.

Will Lark It’s important for us to divide up the sums of the systems and discover which ones actually make sense to stay centralized and where it is that we have a lot of opportunity to distribute. There is an opportunity for decentralized energy generation, but we really need to think about our infrastructure as far as how we’re going to move that energy around. We really need to think about our energy

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grid and our communications grid. I really believe that transportation is something that can start to be even more decentralized. There’s a big opportunity—not necessarily in pushing more public transportation or pushing the better vehicle, but in pushing the better service model for transportation and providing efficient vehicles for people when they need them.

Tom Keane When I started off, I talked about four things, including transportation, water, and sewer. I talked about communications and energy as if they were all distinct but, arguably, communications is an overlay to all of them now. Communications can make everything else significantly more efficient, definitely in terms of feedback and information, which is really what we’re talking about.

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Moderator tim love Northeastern University

Panelists daniel barber Oberlin College, Ph.D. Candidate Columbia University

martin felsen UrbanLab/IIT/Archeworks

david fletcher Fletcher Studio

cliff mcmillan Principal, Ove Arup and Partners, New York

charles waldheim Chair of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

green Infrastructure

Panel 3

Panel 3: Green Infrastructure

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PANEL THREE: GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE Speaking to specific imagery projected onto a screen above the panel, Tim Love moderated this final panel through the use of project images as catalysts for conversation. Discussion traced the recent rise and success of landscape architecture given the discipline’s synthetic view of design as both a cultural and social project and its focus on the unification of form and performance. The panel generally agreed that hope for the contemporary designer lies in agency rather than advocacy, finding the realities of the public process as sources of opportunity; the architect must learn to communicate effectively and work from within institutions toward highly networked and ecologically minded urban space.

Tim Love Because there’s been so much conversation already, I sought some counsel from Charles Waldheim about how to make this panel a little bit different, to tease out some themes that we haven’t talked about already. I think we all agree that we need to be better public advocates as architects or landscape architects.

That was well established by the first two panels.

I’d like to drill down to the question about what the roles are of designers, and specifically landscape architects and architects, in terms of how projects get done as projects among policy. David, would you want to talk about the Dallas competition a little bit or mention the motivations behind it?

David Fletcher By way of defining green infrastructure as well, it’s basically a master plan for downtown Dallas that takes advantage of the aggregation of existing open spaces and what you might call a living infrastructure spine that moves through the city, takes urban runoff, and cleanses it before it reaches the Trinity River. It takes advantage of the existing farmers market and empty fields for making productive landscapes and urban farming. It spans over the freeway to create new water quality, multi-objective, multi-benefit parks, but also recreation areas, and serves as the conduit for potentially merging alternative transportation networks. So that perhaps sums up the goals of the project.

Urban Re:Vision Competition, Fletcher Studio and David Baker + Partners Architects, Dallas, TX

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In my experience, a project of this scale could be led by an architect or a landscape architect but once you jump up to the larger scale of the master plan… You 58

know I worked on the Los Angeles River master plan for two years and it was led by an engineering firm, which was absolutely the right thing, partially because they stood out of the way in terms of the design issues, the urban design, and open space master planning. They’re facile at doing EIRs and navigating the gauntlet of public policy needed to achieve consensus. The third thing is that they often hire people from the Army Corps of Engineers or people who have previously worked in the public sector that can help gain consensus among many competing constituents for projects.

Tim Love For projects like this, the linking engineering theme seems to be water management or the logic of the idea that a larger, linear system like this might be driven by hydrology and the logics of earth and water flows. This is tied to policy surrounding the Clean Water Act and all of the other policy apparatus that might make it a priority or would fund a project of that scale. Maybe there’s another way into the definition of green infrastructure.

Charles Waldheim I’m in favor of it. Over the course of the last ten or fifteen years it’s become clear to many that landscape architects have emerged as the urbanists of our day. Now, what does that mean? It means that, for a whole host of reasons, the traditional disciplines of urban design and planning were seen or perceived by many to be incapable of responding to the challenges of contemporary built environments—specifically urban environments in North America, where the challenges of the city rarely respect traditional or disciplinary boundaries.

Having said that, whereas landscape architecture twenty-five years ago was in a period that’s been described as moribund, in the last ten or twelve years it has emerged kind of improbably as the center, the venue in which discussions of urbanism have taken root. Now this is in part a result of urban design having bet on the wrong horse, betting on the horse of density, that somehow we’re all going to

Queens Quay Waterfront, West 8 and DTAH, Toronto, Ontario

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get out of our car and move back into the old city. And that’s great if you’re in our class, if you can afford to do that as a lifestyle choice, but the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t live in cities for economic reasons.

I’m going to respond to “eco” questions that came up in the first panel, and questions about the economic underpinnings of our disciplinary arrangements in the second panel. In many contexts, Bloomberg’s New York and David Miller’s Toronto—the two biggest cities in their two North American countries—are the best experiments we have in landscape urbanism. Particularly as contexts in which landscape architects are perceived to have a mix of disciplinary expertise, these cities are dealing with environmental and structural issues across a range of scales that allow them to be uniquely suited to addressing urban form today. Most recently, I and many of my colleagues have been arguing that this occurs in many jurisdictions as the combination of private philanthropy, private real estate development, and landscape urbanism led work.

Tim Love I have an example on the board up there.

Charles Waldheim This is Adrian Geuze’s West 8. It’s an example where the traditional planning mechanism, and the discipline planning in particular, were perceived to be primarily responsible for protecting communities from change as opposed to managing that change. In that context, the government officials, the development community, and private philanthropy chose to use design through the celebrity landscape architect to go around planning. That condition is one that I see increasingly in Western Europe and in Asia. Landscape urbanism, for better or for worse, is attempting to describe and to theorize that condition.

Tim Love Master plans led by landscape architects are inherently better from a public relations standpoint than master plans led by architects, because the focus of the planning is the open space network first, which is good for communities and not the buildings. The buildings fade into the background. Architect-led mas-

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ter plans begin with the buildings and the real estate deal. This is not to suggest that this is a linear process, but the ideologies of interest in the city work at cross 60

purposes when the architect leads the master plan because it’s deemed to be pro development.

Charles Waldheim I would say “maybe” but there’s this unique hybrid practice now between landscape architects who enjoy a visibility as design figures in their own right, and who have a moral high ground as a result of their green credentials. They have a moral standing combined with private development capital markets… until eighteen months ago, at least, and certainly with private philanthropy.

If you look at the most recent kind of boutique urbanism of the High Line in New York, or Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden in Chicago, these are great examples of cultural extortion where a local community group uses its economic force to persuade a mayor who is likely to be persuaded that this is the good thing to do.

At the larger scale, whether it’s Waterfront Toronto or the Downsview Park in Toronto or Fresh Kills, we see another great irony invoked in the panel this morning about the presidential election and the ways in which the Obama administration might be able to deliver on our great hope of public infrastructure. Of course it was in the high water mark of the New Deal era… I mean, we have to recall that the last moment when we had the national consensus on the left to enact public policy around infrastructure, we produced a set of planning and infrastructural precepts that we’ve now abandoned as a disappointment.

Now that’s both ironic, but also maybe telling. I’m both happy and proud that we’ve elected a government which is empirical, at least. But, having said that, I share the previous panels’ anxiety over how little we’re doing. In a culture where we don’t even agree to pay for health care and education collectively, my argument is that one of the reasons that infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years is that it’s our last gasp, it’s the last thing that we’ve agreed to pay for collec-

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tively. We’re placing all of our collective hopes, all of our architectural aspirations, all of our desires for civil urban society, and now all of our desires for a sustainable and an environmentally just world onto it because it’s the only thing we’ve agreed to pay for.

Tim Love Let’s save that for a second… I’m not going to take the notion that landscape architects are now better equipped than architects to deal with the city as a foregone conclusion. I want Daniel, who wasn’t there but is researching the birth of environmentalism as an interest to designers, to describe for us where the landscape architects and the architects were back in 1957.

Daniel Barber A lot of the issues that are on the table today we have quite literally seen before. That’s what historians are required to say in this sort of context.

Relative to the specific question of landscape architects and architects at Berkeley in the 1960s (the cause of environmental design was formed officially in 1962 but not really until 1966) the landscape architects and the urban planners were both legitimated by various quasi-scientific or scientific disciplines. Landscape actually came out of the biological sciences. It had been housed there institutionally.

Urban planning had been a political science and architecture was an art which, of course, had some scientific basis, or at least this was the conceit. So how to scientificate the architectural disciplines on the table… This is where the notion of environmentalism as a sort of mechanism of behavioral modification— Tim Love And the thematic glue between the disciplines, too.

Daniel Barber The college of environmental design has now regressed or returned to a moment. In fact, there was a moment when Lou Kahn came to Berkeley in 1969 and gave a lecture. All the students are coalesced around him, “We want to be like him,” you know, “We don’t care about social and cultural factors.”

“We want to be like Lou Kahn and be a designer” and champion these things.

Eco-Boulevards Proposal, UrbanLab, Chicago, Illinois

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Tim Love There is a reemergence of science as a justification for design decisions, you know, within all the disciplines in the schools that I’m aware of, because 62

data is so easy to get now and the visual display of data is its own art form, whether through mapping or displaying of data in all its glory. I suppose that this issue of green infrastructure that is on the table now has to do with that balance between the science involved in the performance of water runoff and its visual expression, which might be seen as a kind of cultural act. This is still being played out in a lot of projects and a lot of programs. Its about the balance between those two things.

If you’ve been on any review at all lately in any school, the first half of the review is a PowerPoint show with Edward Tufte quality graphics and the second half of the show is a fully designed object. I wonder if the ideology of leadership in urbanism—whether it’s the architects or the landscape architects—is tied to that idea of legitimacy: “Who’s got the best numbers?” as an issue.

Tim Love Martin, we have your Eco-Boulevards project up to propel that idea forward a little bit. Is this more data or is this more design?

Martin Felsen There should definitely be a health warning on data that’s discovered in most of these reviews, especially in the schools these days. Most times scientific performance criteria are based upon efficiencies or efficiencies of scales and I don’t think that those capture any actual rationale for doing anything. We could make our buildings, or even our infrastructure, as ecological as possible and we’d still have enormous problems that are unsolvable—land use, transportation problems, and so forth.

So much has been said today about policy and about these top-down decision-making processes that get things done but often times they develop from the bottom first. I was just trying to think of a couple of examples. Maybe there’s the High Line on one side, starting out as this bottom-up procedure then developing into a

SW 12th Avenue Green Street, Portland, OR

Infrastructure and the Future

set of ideas that really captures a lot of people’s imagination, then there’s the Big Dig on the other side. If even .05% of that budget was spent on some ideas about community or ecological benefit, it would be a totally different project.

So to the Eco-Boulevard idea… You know in the Eco-Boulevard, Eco stands for economic first of all. We were most interested in trying to leverage money that’s wasted or money that could be created based upon landscape ideas. This is functioning at the scale of the entire city, because it turns out that Chicago is the only city in the Great Lakes that takes water out of the Great Lakes and doesn’t put it back. That’s really an enormous amount of natural capital that’s being wasted. We propose something that reverses, captures, sequesters, and returns water to the Great Lakes system, and at the same time creates this new park system that would increase the value of a lot of communities’ land. In a way, this would allow them to figure out ways of funding other priorities in the communities.

The bottom-up process of trying to get cities to essentially reorient their priorities to the communities and allow what amounts to NGO’s in communities, community development.

Tim Love This is a kind of a pragmatic utopian vision which allows the citizens to reimagine the city in a way that they haven’t before, in a way that is probably not actually going to happen. There’s probably a lot of private property in the way for this to be achieved.

Daniel Barber It’s all public property—streets and sidewalks. It’s the reimagining of the public way, which is a sixty-six foot wide zone between private properties.

Tim Love But the metropolitan utopian vision is a different kind of bottom-up thinking than volunteering at the community garden on Saturday.

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Cliff McMillan I certainly think the bottom-up prototype is critical. But I want to come back to some things that were mentioned. Most issues, transportation, 64

sustainability, water obviously, energy, and waste as an opportunity for reuse in terms of energy. If we’re serious about this and not simply whimsical, that’s where science comes in.

The public process needs to be informed by the facts of life. Achieving certain goals from the point of view of water, or any of those, needs to be put on the table with a factual basis. I’m trying to encourage the leadership to imagine design solutions, but in the context of honesty and truth relative to scientific engagement.

There is a true value in achieving sustainability in terms of demonstrating five projects that will have a multiplier… Because this whole thing is moving quite fast, and the faster we can demonstrate good examples, the more others will pick them up.

Tim Love I have an example, which is this fairly humble storm water demonstration project in Portland that redirects storm water from storm drains into main gardens to irrigate the city trees. I want to raise the issue of scale and to place this project as the bookend to Martin’s project, which is at the fine grain public works scale. Maybe in the gap between those two there is some kind of action plan.

Martin Felsen We’re currently working with the Department of Transportation in Chicago to create a toolbox of best practices, to essentially institutionalize the idea of dealing with water. By institutionalize, I mean to essentially take the same budget that already gets spent on upgrading roadways and reworking how they get upgraded to automatically include ideas similar to this Portland idea, which is water sequestration and garden sequestration.

I think that in terms of autonomy, there are economic regimes that maybe we could all tap into as well. Without basically saying, “Well, the city should pay for it,” when the city doesn’t really have that much money… The Feds should pay. In fact, what I think is going on federally is that Obama is really not giving anything. He’s

Diagram from Douglas Farr’s Sustainable Urbanism

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just setting up a system where different departments are meant to leverage the opportunities each has in a more interdisciplinary way. It’s not really setting up any kind of new funded system beyond the stimulus packages and things like that.

Tim Love Now this is a different idea of advocacy than just going to the community meeting at night as an architect and making your voice heard. This side of advocacy involves understanding the potential funding mechanisms of projects after you’re already on board, and leveraging those so that things are actualized.

Understanding, for example, that there is a revenue stream attached to the water supply that usually pays for storm drains and other things that could be tapped into is one of the takeaways for this conference. Understanding how the world works might be an important thing for architects or landscape architects to do.

Charles Waldheim Among the ironies of our contemporary situation, I can’t remember a more compelling time for students in architecture and urbanism. We have this slightly unprecedented situation in which for thirty-five or forty years, both landscape architects and urban planners were radicalized. Many of them left design schools to pick up on Daniel’s point about 1957 and the ascendance of landscape architecture and urban planning as autonomous fields with their empirical social science or natural science base.

That project had as its aspiration ecological knowledge and organizing it spatially so as to make better decisions about the shapes of cities. It’s floundered not because we don’t have the ecological knowledge, not because we don’t have the academy, not because we’re not advocates; it’s floundered because we’ve decided not to plan our cities. Our cities are the result of economic processes as much as anything else. So, ironically, in that context I and others have argued that in fact it’s design agency that gives the architect or the urbanist or the landscape architect a place at the table, and so that’s when you hear us saying, “Well, hold on. We’re in a post-advocacy age, it’s not that we’re simply jaded or have lost the good fight, it’s that we’ve fought the good fight for 40 years. It didn’t work.”

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Tim Love Agency, not advocacy is the take away today…

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Charles Waldheim You could immediately draw a line generationally and half of the people in this room will identify themselves as agents as opposed to advocates.

The idea of inter-departmental agency at the federal, municipal, and state levels— or even working with community and grassroots groups to go around the powers that be—all of those are available. I think “agency” more fully describes that practice than “advocacy.”

Daniel Barber One of the themes that’s been very compelling throughout the day is the question of policy and something we’ve posed as its flipside, which is the people. How does the architect develop the tools through an interdisciplinary education to approach social problems, thinking spatially but thinking on a much larger scale as well and thinking across disciplines? It’s important to differentiate the policy side of sustainability, which has a certain normative connotation as the people side, if you will, which I would argue is environmentalism. I think what is potentially lost in the distinction between agency and advocacy that we want to lose is the need for a resistant practice. Who is the agent operating for?

Tim Love We’re trying to sum up thirty years of design pedagogy in a couple of minutes, but I do think that there are a couple of points that I want to bounce off of the panel. One is that what was happening at Berkeley and MIT in the 1960s and 1970s was as much the result of pressure from within the academy that architects and landscape architects better become like social scientists and get grant funding. A lot of the pressure was not for the good of the people but to snuggle into the provost’s office to be a legitimate discipline, right?

Charles Waldheim I was on the Berkeley campus in 1968, but I don’t imagine the landscape architects wanting to snuggle with the provost. I think they were rejecting design culture. The other dynamic here is that landscape and planning were rejecting architects as handmaidens to fascism…

Eco-Boulevards Proposal, UrbanLab, Chicago, IL

Infrastructure and the Future

Daniel Barber So were architects…

Tim Love I want to get back to the idea of water management and the way it touches two disciplines. Water is the one flow that connects architecture to landscape architecture as a quantifiable thing, as the idea that surfaces at one level and has to be conceived of in both disciplines at the same time.

I raise that point only because there is a disciplinary battle still going on between landscape architects and architects about who will control the future vision of the city, which is being played out very differently at different institutions, so I want to bring pedagogy back into it because we have a dean and a chair here, and we are in a school of architecture. We should think about this issue of green infrastructure and the roles we all play.

David Fletcher One of the things that is unsaid, and that is fundamental to landscape architecture, is a fundamental idealism, or what you might call a utopianism.

We’ve been beaten up for a long time by architects. Concerns about ecology and concerns about process have not been taken seriously or have been seen as ancillary to the larger goals.

I was in a panel recently at SCI-Arc that was dealing with these issues. Sylvia Lavin was the moderator and she was basically asking how we as architects can reclaim our position in the larger urban discourse. I taught at SCI-Arc and I was thinking, “You mean to tell me that you guys have been spending the last five or six years learning to play, turning Maya into these blobby buildings, and you do exactly what you describe, which are these magnificent, very substantial analyses, for half a semester. But they are completely disconnected from your projects.” Landscape architecture of the last ten years really prioritizes performance. Our heroes are dealing with both of those issues and creating projects that are like this performalist standard that are evaluated both on formal resolution but also on all these other…

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Tim Love Where process and the outcome are the same, where there isn’t a schizophrenia between the two…

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David Fletcher At best…

Charles Waldheim I can tell you that across the river we’re interested very much in alternative and better futures. We’re very conscious of the fact that our students arrive with a self-determined interest in the social, but don’t necessarily see it in the same generational terms that we do. That is, they don’t necessarily see the idea of being culturally relevant as in opposition to being socially relevant. For too long in these fields there has been this false choice between being critically engaged or culturally relevant—as if we have to choose sides.

In fact, there’s an opportunity on the table—certainly at places like the University of Pennsylvania, certainly at the GSD—because of disciplinary histories in which questions of urbanism, questions of landscape, questions of ecology are out there.

The deck is being reshuffled and we have a generation of students who are grappling with these issues just now in ways that I think are well out ahead of our ability to keep track of them.

Tim Love I agree with you. It’s back to what Daniel said a couple of minutes ago, which is that the opposition back when I was at the Graduate School of Design was that you either were co-opted by the man and you went to work for SOM, or you had a critical practice and you had transparent plumbing so you could see the waste water coming out of the toilet. Those were the only two choices. You were either co-opted or every step of the day you were in a resistant mode, and I think the idea of agency as a post-ideological view means that you can be both part of the system and do better. Does that simplify the issue a little bit?

Charles Waldheim The project of autonomy—the idea of being relevant as a cultural producer—is now ironically central to agency in delivering better envi-

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ronmental and social conditions. That’s the condition that we’re in and it’s hard to wrap my head around it, but I certainly think it does a better job of describing where we’re going than where we’re coming from.

Daniel Barber One way to begin wrapping our heads around this issue of agency is to think through exactly how there can be practices that are resistant without being revolutionary. This is where we can think about politics and this question of operating according to a critical perspective on power conditions that has not tried to coalesce, but to develop tactical potential. One of the potential parallels to infrastructure is this food movement that’s been happening in this country around local food—at least in the attention to the production of food that Michael Pollan is spokesperson for. There’s resistance in those practices. It is imbedded and explicit in those practices that are not counter and are not necessarily offensive or aggressive or violent…

Tim Love Post avant-garde architects say they’re being resistant but their agenda is actually different, isn’t it?

Daniel Barber You take architects at their word then…

Cliff McMillan I feel a little like the visitor that is coming in to a dinner party in the midst of a family squabble. I mean, it’s really important what you’re talking about and I believe in it. But guys, the project of saving the planet is bigger than this squabble—get out there and do it together.

Tim Love Sure. Yeah. Here, here. I think we’re all for that, by the way. This is one of the perspectives from Martin and Sarah Dunne’s proposal for EcoBoulevards. It’s very interesting to me that the city has recessed so far back that it’s almost disappeared. I think that the driver for reenvisioning what our urban environment is does require a balance, that’s all. The dial can’t be too far turned to the ecological and it can’t be turned too far to the idea that metropolitan cul-

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ture is outside of nature. This is a discussion that’s more within the academy just because of the people that are on the panel here.

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Charles Waldheim Do we honestly think that Masdar is the solution? I mean, do we honestly believe that it’s gulf state urbanism in which we’re all off the grid with oil money? Is that our future? I mean really, come on. The tipping point of ecology is that in architectural culture—especially at leading design schools in North America and Western Europe—we have an interest in models coming from science.

And you characterized it fairly, but I thought, on the other hand, I would say there’s an interesting confluence in leading design schools. In many schools, both design culture, and also history and theory, is being dominated by reading science, and so there’s a strange confluence where the landscape architects are reading models for ecology as an applied natural science and the architects are reading the same text at the level of model or metaphor.

Whether it’s MIT or elsewhere, computation is producing an environment in which we can simulate models of complexity that aspire to nature in terms of orders of complexity. I’m not proposing a grand synthesis, but if you look at leading design schools or design culture in North America, there’s a renewed interest in models from nature. Both at the cultural projects level of model or metaphor, but also at the level of applied natural science.

Tim Love And performance versus the symbolic interest in it.

Charles Waldheim Sure. Landscape culture has been characterized in the last decade as a shift in concern from appearance toward a concern for performance, as Julia Czerniak attempted. One of the reasons that you see the city receding in Martin and Sarah’s drawing—and you see it in so many projects—is that this is the form of the American urban condition. One of the reasons that landscape urban-

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ism has emerged as a critique and a response to urbanism is that cities are decentralizing. In spite of all of our best attempts to keep people in the cities, most of us don’t live in the city. Most metro areas in North America are spreading horizontally. There’s an organic economic condition underneath this image, which is the way in which we develop our cities. This is something that is not under the control of planning or the centralized control of mayors or even architects. It is driven by economics and we are spreading horizontally faster than we are producing density.

Tim Love Whether intended or not, I would say that it has to do with disciplinary interest. With a drawing like this, the design proposal is most important in the middle and then it becomes vaguer at the edges where it hits another discipline, let’s say. The point where this landscape hits the buildings is the most impactful thing in the drawings. It’s an issue of representation, but also emphasis I think.

Martin Felsen What this image was trying to get at was not some kind of a return to nature. Even to me it seems like it’s a towers in the park type image—that’s very utopian, dystopian potentially. We’re trying to bring nature into a very urban condition, but we’re trying to create an artificially complex environment that mimics nature in a variety of ways. The problem with this image is that it looks as though we’re trying to replace a grey infrastructure with green and blue infrastructures. In a way that would be totally impossible. There’s no way that that can happen in an existing condition.

Cliff McMillan But on the green infrastructure side, the issue still comes down to the question on the table: what is the role of the architect in relation to it?

Tim Love How does the architect as a professional have agency in those four spheres of power, water, transportation, and communications?

Charles Waldheim Earlier in the second panel, Tom Keane put on the table the four systems and I think you took one of them off as an overlay. You said commu-

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nications is another thing, right? It’s privately funded and privately developed, and on the one hand decentralized, but also centralized. Really, we’re talking about 72

three infrastructural systems that can be characterized as nineteenth century systems, one of which is electricity. I don’t hear any great calls for bond issues to publicly fund electricity grids or the building of new power plants. Collectively there’s an exhaustion over this topic.

So we’re down to water infrastructure, both supply and waste, and also transportation. In both of those projects we have great examples of the European welfare state taxing their populations and collectively agreeing to be taxed to deliver, not only those infrastructures, but also public realm improvements. We have a great canon of the last fifteen or twenty years, whether it’s the French or the Dutch or the Germans, and one of the reasons landscape has emerged in this context is that architects and landscape architects imagine that these publicly funded infrastructures can be drivers or carriers of these other goals for the reduction of carbon, the mitigation of sea level rise…

The examples we all cite are Bloomberg’s New York or Mayor Miller’s Toronto. In Toronto we now have landscape architects, about a half of dozen of the leading landscape architects in the world, leading projects to decide where major infrastructural improvements will go. But I do think it’s significant that it would be the landscape architect, and not the architect, that would lead that team.

Tim Love Though certainly when the architect leads the project for a building, they have to assemble a huge team of specialists to sort out all the parts of the building. In the context of this conference, when you talk about building the infrastructure that we’ve been looking at today—not communications, not the electrical grid probably, but transportation systems, the street, or the urban park— the question is what roles the different players play as designers, and not just as the managers of inputs.

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This doesn’t discount the importance of collaboration, high performance design methodology, getting the engineers at the table at the first meeting and all of these things. There is something at stake here about visioning the city. In terms of the historical moment, it is true that the landscape architects are in control of the vision of the city now, which is very interesting, and I think has mostly positive implications.

David Fletcher To pick up on the issue of communication and representation…

That person who leads that team—whether it’s architect, engineer, or landscape architect—they need to be able to persuade the hardcore native plant Nazis, and engineers, and everybody else of the value of the project. I don’t know that there’s necessarily Charles’ kind of ascendency of landscape architecture.

One of the things that hasn’t been discussed today is this issue of money and where it’s coming from. One of the things I’ve talked with Kazys about is this issue of the D-minus that the American Society of Civil Engineers has graded the entire United States in terms of roads, water, infrastructure, and levies. Over the next five years they’re saying that you need to spend about 2.2 trillion dollars on infrastructure. If we look at the stimulus package for infrastructure, of the 787 billion dollars, there are about 120 billion that are going to be spent on infrastructure in general. Of that, just 1.2 billion is going to be spent on what’s called “green infrastructure.”

The issue of the role of the architect or the landscape architect… I don’t know that it’s so much about making things iconic, having this goal of this heroic bridge and other icons of infrastructure, or making them more aesthetic, but rather reconfiguring infrastructure and making it work better, making systematic and network based solutions.

Tim Love At the level of consensus-building that a design team would have to do around major projects like the Los Angeles River… this is part of the story too.

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Norwalk, Connecticut is building a new waste water treatment plant right on the Norwalk River. It costs a gazillion dollars to do this and I think it serves the whole 74

Fairfield County area or something. To get the project approved, it came bundled with an enormous landscape project. There are questions about whether Norwalk needs another park there when it already has a fairly large park system on the other side of the river, but that’s the price of doing business today.

For major infrastructure projects today, you have to do a large open spaced project at the same time. You would not have to do that in 1963. You would just build the waste treatment plant and move on. Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? It probably is a good thing, but it is the context in which these most noxious infrastructure projects are being built. They are packaged within the mitigation pillow that makes it all possible.

Daniel Barber This question of the architect’s role is a squabble to some extent. Obviously I’m not a practitioner so it’s easy for me to say these things, but this distinction between sustainability and environmentalism is very important to us because environmentalism is about conflicts and lack of a possible resolution. Whether they are ecological or human or political, there’s usually a cost to be paid. The notion that we’re somehow resolving problems through multidisciplinary collaboration doesn’t sit well with me in the context of the history of environmental time.

Martin Felsen My experience working with cities or municipalities is that the decision maker at the municipal level would assume that all of us designers would take a leadership role in a very fluid way over the lifespan of the project. I’m a little uncomfortable with this “Who’s in charge? thing because the people that are really in charge don’t necessarily want us to choose or make that decision. They want us to work very tightly in a very integrated team.

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The second thing is that things are just getting built all the time, and that’s simply because some people lobby a lot better than other people. As designers we are not good communicators to the outside world. We’re pretty good with each other—I can split hairs with the best of them, I suppose—but our challenge is to figure out how we can really do the special interest type lobbying that the big corporations do.

Other people are very comfortable with their legitimacy as a special interest group.

They just go in and talk people into things, and those things are not good for any of us. Forget the whole environmental thing; it’s only good for them in the immediate, within this very tight time frame. I have never been able to convince any politician that my design is better than anybody else’s. They don’t necessarily care about the design. They care about all sorts of other performance criteria that we all know about, but that’s the least of our problems.

Cliff McMillan That’s not my experience, happily. I think there are many politicians who really value good architecture and good landscape architecture.

Martin Felsen I just meant the aesthetics of it, not the design…

Tim Love I have more faith in good ideas prevailing in the public realm.

Martin Felsen What percentage of Google Earth is well designed?

Charles Waldheim Kenneth Frampton used a figure about ten years ago in which four percent of the building stock in North America was designed by an architect.

About a decade ago, the American Institute of Architects—in terms of money spent on lobbying congress—was just behind the American Dog Groomers Society.

There are more elected members of Congress who are morticians than designers.

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Since I went to graduate school, I’ve heard the constant and regular drum beat that architects need to be more publicly engaged. And every architect I know spends 76

four out of five evenings a week in a public meeting, publicly engaged. I don’t know how much more you can expect a small, fairly marginal culture-producing discipline to be doing. On the other hand, it’s actually through design as innovation that architects have found their perches—it’s celebrity culture, the fact that Frank Gehry can tell the mayor of Chicago what he will and will not do matters. Frank Gehry can pick up the phone and get media attention. The idea that we’ll be grass roots organizers, I respect, but I don’t think it has the same traction.

Tim Love But that suggests an either/or. We’ve found a third way through this lens of agency, which is neither advocacy nor being a celebrity with the power of personality. Agency means being proactive within the terms of a project and not by railing in the public media.

I think that Frank Gehry is one kind of power, Arup is another. Gehry has the ability to imagine the Chunnel and call some important people and get it on the agenda.

Arup doesn’t, so the context within which they work as the Google of engineering gives them power to be more proactive than other kinds of professionals.

Cliff McMillan That’s the politics. But in terms of marketing, building that consensus is terribly important.

Tim Love As a last pass for the panelists, I have a drawing done by R. Crumb in 1988 that points to three possible outcomes of our environmental disaster. The top one is the doomsday scenario in which is there is no hope. The second one is analogous to the horse/car story of New York City—that somehow technology will get us out of the mess that we’re in. And the last one is that if we just go back to a pre-industrial society and eat wild berries and honey and live in the commune, somehow our carbon footprint will come down to levels that will save us all. I want each of the panelists to vote for one.

The Future According to Robert Crumb

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Daniel Barber I would say I’m between the bottom two.

Martin Felsen I think any architect would choose the middle because that gives us the most to do.

David Fletcher One. Cliff McMillen I’ll pick between two and three.

Tim Love Ok. I’m very interested in what Charles is going to choose. You can’t pass, by the way.

Charles Waldheim One of the beauties of being in the design disciplines is that no one is going to ask our opinions. I’m trying to recall the Woody Allen line that “Life is just pain and loss and misery and it’s just far too short,” so I sort of like the way that we have it right now. My carbon-minded architect friends tell me that peak oil happened about eight years ago, depending on what model you look at.

At the same moment, my ecological friends tell me that at about one house per acre, natural systems reconnect. So I’m mindful and cautious about the Manhattan centrism in our fields.

Those of us who are engaged in producing urban culture in the design disciplines live on these little islands of Chevy Chase, Maryland or Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Berkeley, California and that’s great, but we have to constantly remind ourselves of our class embeddedness. In fact, we’re representatives of a class interest. It strikes me that the future of sustainability or post-carbon cities won’t look like Manhattan and it certainly don’t look very much like the woods of R. Crumb here. My guess is we don’t yet know what they’re going to look like.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

concluding remarks

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Concluding Remarks In this wrap-up discussion, moderated by Tim Love, all of the conference panelists return to the conversation, giving general comments and critical reflections on the overall scope of the conference as well as specific points of discussion.

George Thrush Terms that end up having very different meanings for future cities are “biomimetics” on the one hand and “biomorphism” on the other hand.

Some of the earlier questions in today’s discussion might have been an attempt to tease that out. For example, we’ve seen some very interesting building proposals for dense sites here in the Boston area that are trying to deal with both terms.

They’re systems for dealing with rainwater management and things like that, but then there’s a separate question, which has more to do with public relations and image, and maybe a vision of the city. Must they approximate a vision of the bottom panel as green?

Tim Love Charles made the same point, which is that architects have been trafficking in ecological models for expressive and symbolic reasons. Let’s say you’re talking about the patterns and flocks of birds being co-opted into parametric modeling as kind of a formal strategy, versus strategies that look at conformative aspects of nature.

Charles Waldheim There are others that can respond to this so I’ll be quite brief.

We’re talking about two things here that are both operational. One is architectural culture being formed by models from nature, by biomimiry (we’re all reading D’Arcy Thompson but for different reasons). By definition architects mistake form for content all the time. What does it mean to have an architect looking at this ecological model and misunderstanding it as a formal proposition? I think that’s what architects do. It’s a part of what the production of culture means. It relates in a way to the idea of the waste flow treatment plant that has a park as a green bill to make it palatable. They both operate in culture today and they’re not unrelated entirely.

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George Thrush It’s fine when that confusion doesn’t have any negative consequences. Let’s imagine a site that is in the street grid of the downtown area. It’s 82

not just a question of the decorative pattern on the skin of the building mimicking a flock of birds, but when the footprint of the project is now deforming not according to the logic of urbanism…

Charles Waldheim I would say urbanism defined as the building up as blocks of building, that’s where landscape urbanism hits the ground, right? If we believe that the good city, the just city, is built up of a street wall of cornice, maybe brick, and a solid sidewalk, then we’re going to disagree at that point because I think the spatial implications of what you’re getting at are the social and environmental qualities of the nineteenth century city. There’s a great anxiety over the loss of that street wall because that was the fight of post-modernism. And, in fact, a part of what makes landscape urbanism threatening is the idea that these larger systems will take that urban fabric and render it in ways that you don’t find intelligible or legible.

George Thrush The context here is everything. What strikes me as so excellent about landscape urbanism as a strategy, and the reason I advocate it so much, is that for cities that are not going to grow their way out of their circumstances… of course Detroit is the easiest one to talk about, but there are many, many others.

Landscape Urbanism doesn’t have to have the same urban strategy as the nineteenth century city, but it has an aggregate way of working.

The reason I focused on this downtown Boston type of site is precisely because there the conversation is more nuanced and more complicated, not all one system or all the other. This is where the distinction between biomimesis and biomorphism is for me. Biomimesis is an idea that can be executed in a number of forms; biomorphism is a way of transforming the image of the city.

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Tim Love This is precisely the architect’s problem today. Many have backed themselves into the corner as shape makers.

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David Fletcher But a lot of that is changing. In architecture there’s a devastating preoccupation with parametric modeling that has just taken over, and it was great when it was just isolated on the west coast and it was at two schools—UCLA and SCI-Arc—and it was just a few of the students, but it’s just gone viral.

Meanwhile, in landscape you have this threshold moment of Downsview Park, where we started to look at performance. We had really intelligent people starting to express these things, backed up by ecologists, and a similar fascination took over—but it was in a different direction. It was starting to use the tools of GIS and starting to use the modeling tools that were available online.

Tim Love I want to add that the preoccupations of landscape architects over the last six or seven years have been relevant to people outside of the discipline, while form-making in architecture is only feeding a subculture of a very limited audience that is interested in those things themselves. So it opened up design again.

David Fletcher We had our own preoccupation, and it was all of the stripes and bagels, so it’s nice to see it come back around. The reason I like number one in the R. Crumb drawing the most is because it’s the most honest. I don’t like number three because it’s expressing a very nostalgic eighteenth century notion of landscape that we know is completely unsustainable.

Clare Lyster While we can communicate a sustainability-motivated agenda for infrastructure, I don’t think we have to create a new image for the city. And I don’t think sustainability is giving us that new image.

Tim Love Right, is that aspirational—

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Clare Lyster You’ve just given us three images. One is depressing. Two is the technophobe that we’ve had with Archigram in the 1950s and 1960s. And three is 84

maybe what sustainability is trying to give us now—and it’s not working.

My comment with the icon earlier might have been misconstrued. I’m not suggesting that we have to reinvent a formalist agenda through our infrastructural agenda. But how can infrastructure give us the image that we can then communicate, whether we’re an architect or a landscape architect?

Tim Love It’s interesting. The High Line in New York has cropped up in a lot of student projects as a new symbol of infrastructure as a vision for the city. Just an observation.

David Fletcher But I think you touched on one critical issue, which is this idea that architecture students and landscape architecture students should be rigorous and should develop critical thinking skills and independent thinking skills and that will allow them to create visions and to persuade people that those are the correct visions. I feel as though what we’re trafficking is not images of sustainability but unsustainable images…

Tim Love Futures…

David Fletcher Yeah, right, futures. We’re actually perpetuating a demand for things that we cannot afford in the future. We need to be the leaders in shaping how people perceive and value cities and landscapes.

Sarah Goldhagen I found this discussion very interesting. “What is the role of the architect?” is exactly the wrong question. The question should be, “What is the vision of landscape architects, architects, engineers, and urbanists?” Let’s identify what the goals are and then the architects can figure out what their role is going to be. That should be their problem. It’s much more important to actually identify

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goals. We’re not going to have a large scale impact on the public process unless we have a very, very, very clear sense of what our goals are so that they can be explained to the public policymakers.

Tim Love But that suggests that we all share the same vision.

Sarah Goldhagen I just think we need to talk about it.

Charles Waldheim On the one hand, we have so many of these conferences that focus on the best practice, right? There’s a lot of bandwidth, a lot of attention being spent across a lot of disciplines—both in research and practice on these very questions. As I took the framing of this event, it was to take a step back from the breech and to say, “Ok, how does the architect fit into this?”

Eight or nine months ago, there was a conference called Ecological Urbanism across the river. At the end of three days, there was this one MArch candidate, a lovely guy, completely earnest. He raised his hand he said, “Well, what is it for the architect to do?” Because you had three days of ecologists, fluvial geomorphologists, instructional engineers, and mayors—literally all disciplines arrayed—and the architects, this one student representing the field, felt lost. And so, I took the premise of this conference to be, “Well, let’s take a step back and let’s take a look at architecture.” That’s why we had so much pedagogical discussion.

Let’s start with one very modest thing. We could agree pretty quickly by a show of hands… How many of you would like to see gas taxed to a level that begins to more closely approximate its actual cost? We’re not going to talk about wars and the Gulf States, we’re not going to talk about actually raising the…

Tim Love On issues of transportation, I vote where Jason votes.

Charles Waldheim By acclamation, we agree as a subculture that we want to

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increase the tax on petroleum to the point where it begins to approximate what its actual costs are. In the Clinton administration they were able to pass some86

thing like a five cent per gallon increase. In every other jurisdiction that I’ve seen, including California—although California is a bit of an exception and I think they got closer to twenty cents a gallon—it’s a third rail politically to increase the tax on gasoline. I’ve yet to see the Obama administration make much headway on it, either.

If we want to talk about the real issues, if we want to talk about policy and advocacy, I’m with you. But to do so as architects strikes me as the least effective way.

You know the Italian theorist Tafuri made a distinction when he argued that we are much more effective actors and agents and advocates as citizens. As long as we occupy a culture in which we’ve collectively not decided to fund the public realm, to expect that architecture as one little sub-discipline, or one little profession, is somehow going to bear the weight of that responsibility…

Tim Love The other way to frame that is, ‘What can architects or landscape architects do that an ordinary engaged citizen can’t do? What special skills do we have beyond being good citizens?”

Bob Culver There is a real lack of what people in my job believe it is your job to produce—that is visions, ideas, and challenges about the things we’ve been talking about today. It’s not as if you even have to have a coherent single answer, but it’s that there has to be some profession—and I would hope it would be yours—that we could come to and say, “Help me think about this.”

Marilyn Taylor I can weigh in on liking the subject of today’s conversation. I like the original structure you gave to it and we did slide away from it a little bit. I’d just like to offer an observation about why it was exciting to me and why it’s on the wrong track.

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I love the title, and if it had said “assessing the designer’s role” so we didn’t argue about landscape architecture and architecture, but rather the thought of it as a common cause, that would have been a little more helpful to me. Let’s review the last six years, because what’s happened is that we’ve learned the hard way that all of our building forms and all of the other things that we have been entranced by in our various professions haven’t gotten us there.

Planning and redevelopment have proven to be completely ineffective. The market, which we all just turned our fascination toward, has proven to be very inequitable unless we adjusted it. The environmental scoring systems also leave us cold. For me what makes this new discussion on infrastructure so fascinating is that we’re finally forced to accept that the systems for infrastructure are the best shot we have at shaping urban form in a different way.

Do we know what that form is? Not completely. Do we know that the New Urbanists have a good thing going but in no way deal with the scale of the issue we’re talking about? I think so. So what have we got? We’ve got typology and hydrology.

Super-systems. So many of our urban places have been laid against them, rather than with them. Is that restorable? What does that do for us?

Our city planning commissioners and directors are trying to figure out what to do with post-industrial land. Philadelphia has nine thousand acres in Fairmount Park.

The city has twenty-two thousand acres of unutilized, underutilized, brown field, or soon to be not utilized industrial land, and we can’t possibly use it. How do we use it?

Getting back to the idea that transportation and land use are related to each other, I would personally recommend that today’s moderators chase back through the conversation and find things that we’ve said to each other that promote the discussion and debate of that relationship between land use and transportation, which is the infrastructural systems to which the design profession are relevant. How and

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in what ways, through what education, through what collaboration, through what questions we ask, do they promote more successful urban form? I’ll walk out of the 88

room thinking about that.

Another interesting question is, “How do design practices fund and invest in research?” We cease being effective experts when we become lobbyists and interests come into play. There’s that magic line, and I think we ought to understand where it is in terms of knowledge, best practice, and goals we want to discuss.

Tom Keane I can’t disagree with anything you said. I just want to add a few things. One of the things that comes through to me is the degree to which all of us would acknowledge that infrastructure fundamentally shapes who we are as people. When we are putting in place systems that allow instantaneous wireless communication, they are going to have a fundamental effect in terms of how we live. Whether you call them the architect or the designer, someone has to think about consequences. It’s not just building the building or street or plan, but what are the consequences of these big decisions we make, particularly when it comes to infrastructure?

At the risk of having people walk out the room, I really do believe that there has to be a higher degree of political engagement on the part of those designers.

I’ve heard the comment about, “Well architects are always doing public advocacy because we’re public figures.” That’s not public advocacy, that’s marketing. You’re defending the project. That is not advocacy. Advocacy means putting yourself out here. Maybe it means running for office. Lord knows every lawyer runs for office.

Business people run for office. But architects don’t run for office. It really means that this profession needs to develop the ability to communicate to the public about design. And I don’t think this has happened.

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I’ve listened a lot to the panel and it’s very inward-seeking. It is one of the flaws of the profession, and it needs to be able to develop a language to talk to the public at large. It needs to develop an ethos that encourages architects to become engaged in those very public issues.

George Thrush For any of you who know about this school, you know that we are more engaged than most in public issues. We’ll certainly continue to be, but one of the things that I take away from this conference is the call for vision. Who’s going to produce these visions? Well, in the absence of senators who are architects, presidents who are architects, etc., I think universities are extremely well suited to do that.

Tim Love That’s related to Marilyn’s comment, which is that I’m not sure if practice itself—as the very large practice—is the place where that kind of thoughtful research can happen, outside of a particular client and a particular revenue stream based on a fee.

George Thrush What’s very interesting, and some of you may not know this, but Tom Fisher, the former editor of Progressive Architecture Magazine and the current dean at the University of Minnesota, has been working very hard with lots of people to create this National Academy of Environmental Design. This is finally a tiny stepchild of the big institutes for health and science and so forth. This is the first step in the direction of having a depository for ideas.

In other words, when the National Institute for Health chimes in on how to treat a disease, people listen because it is speaking for a large body of professionals. Because we speak largely through firms, it is harder for us to do that. This National Academy of Environmental Design is also trying to find a way to fund research and work with universities. So I think there are some positive signs.

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Martin Felsen What I’ve noticed a lot in cities these days is that some of the deputy commissioners or department heads are architects. And those are some90

times the people that are hiring us—all the big us in this room basically—because they’re able, from the inside, to convince the powers that be. There is importance in thinking long term, holistically, environmentally, ecologically, in really centering design thinking into the development process of the city.

David Fletcher The architects and planners, especially in Latin America and South America, that have given us a lot of precedents have greater latitude and much less robust bureaucracies to contend with. Architecture in a sense suffers from a misperception, but also isolation and elitism.

Of this four percent of US building stock that is designed by architects that Charles mentioned, there’s a tiny, tiny percent of Zaha Hadid work and a tiny, tiny percent of Frank Gehry work. According to Nicolai Ouroussoff’s recent articles, we’re seeing a soft transition from this orgasmic formal cheerleading to social relevance. You see that trend symbolized at Central Park in the rejection of Zaha Hadid’s pavilion. Within the context of Central Park—which is always thought of as an infrastructure in itself, as the lungs of the city and a rock water reservoir system—it’s seminal. There’s a sense of transition towards relevance.

George Thrush On that note, we should call the formal program to an end.

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Afterword: Growing Middle Space Elizabeth Christoforetti 91

A good deal of the conversation within the preceding pages is in reference to the perceived mandate to move away from inherited twentieth century land use patterns and resource consumption. While much can and has been said of the deleterious effects of early twentieth century planning on the American city, the precedent for bold infrastructural intervention and clear vision should be unquestionably retained in the midst of unparalleled urban proliferation and ongoing environmental challenges.1 In the process of pulling key points from the conference dialog, it’s worthwhile to cast a critical eye on the recent infrastructural past with an eye toward the future.

Le Corbusier and his contemporaries envisioned freeways as green arteries whisking busy urban workers from the city to the country with ease, allowing every citizen to enjoy the glories of nature with just a few gallons of gas.2 This grand twentieth century hope for a facile connection between the polarized worlds of the urban and the rural evolved into the highly engineered world of the suburbs and exurbs with the help of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, ultimately catalyzing our contemporary interstate lifestyle and its associated land use practices and energy needs.

As we are well aware, this lifestyle is enabled by the massive proliferation of invisible utility networks winding along the expanding trails of suburban and exurban interstate development. Given the extraordinary economic costs associated with urban living, continued horizontal expansion seems more likely than not. While exurban commutes and long haul trucking from the hazily defined “countryside� may have defined the infrastructural and commercial experience of the late twentieth century, the twenty-first century must effectively fuse ideas of country and city in terms of both goods and leisure space.

US Interstate Highway Diagram, 1955

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We are no longer working in an era of mediation between the natural and the artificial, between country and city, but rather one in which habitable land is con92

ceived as engineered ground. This synthetic space is the vastly interconnected and rapidly changing landscape of our post-industrial environment, a highly developed and layered space in which urban, infrastructure and landscape are increasingly unified as a result of the constant push of development away from the urban interior and into our sub- and ex-urban in-betweens.

Yet the conference is evidence that our hopes for infrastructure remain now as they were for Corbusier: as the vehicle for a pleasurable civic environment and individual convenience. With relatively similar cultural desires for leisure as our twentieth century counterparts, the larger contextual questions posed by the conference are clear: how do we shift our perspective on infrastructure and the city, reorienting our urban and suburban services from systems of effective exploitation to systems of efficient mobility and conservation? How can we mend the split seam between our cultural desires, lifestyle expectations, and a lower carbon footprint?

No longer a question of simply providing basic public necessities, infrastructure has become a locus for the rethinking of a future urban model and the heart of a growing hope for the unification of resource efficiency and a pleasurable user experience. Acknowledging these trends and questions, the vision emerging from the preceding pages may be characterized as less universal/utopian and more regional/pragmatic, set within a far less polarized world.

Within this emerging binary quest for leisure and efficiency, multiple narratives have become a given for contemporary design practice: we are cultural producers that have no choice but to recognize a moral imperative in the face of finite resources, an environment at risk, and continued horizontal urbanization. Moving beyond preconceptions of the past generation, the Green Infrastructure panel engages and analyzes this contemporary design environment in which social and

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cultural relevance are no longer at odds. Charles Waldheim lays out our current age as one of post-advocacy practice in which we are moving beyond the unsuccessful fight of resistant practice over the past forty years into a moment of agency in which “the project of autonomy, the idea of being relevant as a cultural producer, is now ironically central to agency in delivering better environmental and social conditions.”

If cultural relevance is now essential to meet the larger goals of sustainability in the sense that the successfully efficient urban environment must be designed for the pleasure of the user, the mandate for the designer is clear: engage the previously disparate poles of institutional involvement and cultural production. Within this mandate, there is little question that a vision for the future of our expanding built environment needs to be both institutionally engaged and multidisciplinary in nature, to be shared among landscape architects, planners, architects, and other stewards of the public realm. As Sarah Goldhagen suggests in the wrap-up discussion, the generation of an overall infrastructural plan for action and a set of clearly defined goals is absolutely essential before actively parsing out roles within the disciplines: “We’re not going to have a large scale impact on the public process unless we have a very, very, very clear sense of what our goals are so that they can be explained to the public policymakers.”

In this sense, it is a strategic rather than aesthetic collective vision that is proposed among the panels of Infrastructure and the Future, requiring a determination of the specific civic values and outcomes that we, as a larger design community, want to promote. At a basic level, if infrastructure is civic and an excellent chance to rethink our current urban habits and patterns, we need to learn to communicate with the government in charge of building and maintaining infrastructure, as well as the people who use the infrastructure and are the measure of its success or failure. This requires engagement at local and regional levels and communication with specific institutions and communities.

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There has been a call for “vision,� but it is not outside of the realm of possibility that this vision may in fact be a set of local action plans, each with the intended 94

goal of urban efficiency and connectivity, but each specific to the local user and local environment. In this sense, cultural specificity coupled with global connectivity is essential. From a theoretical perspective, thinkers such as Doreen Massey, Ulrich Beck, and Anthony Appiah recognize local space as a constantly evolving identity in a reciprocal relationship with broader, global space. This local is not one of late twentieth century anti-globalization, but rather one that recognizes and responds to a relationship of mutualism between local identity and global culture, which is locally produced in as much as local culture is affected by the limitless reach of global development. Protecting local space as a victim of global change is not effective; what is needed for invention is constant local engagement with the global in order to challenge the nature of local and constantly redefine identity as a specific construct of both place and the wider world.3 From a pragmatic perspective, the constant becoming of local place within global communications networks reveals an opportunity and mandate for the designer to understand and strategically engage the local power structures and funding sources, to take advantage of local opportunities for new infrastructural development, and to rethink current infrastructural maintenance regimens with an eye toward leveraging developing systems of communication for local efficiency.

Martin Felsen’s Eco-Boulevards project is highlighted by Tim Love in the Green Infrastructure panel as a projective example of how such engagement might take place in terms of leveraging public funding already allocated toward maintenance to work more effectively for both the environment and the community, based upon a mash-up of local knowledge and landscape-oriented thinking. In this case, UrbanLab worked with the city of Chicago to institutionalize mechanisms for dealing with water sequestration and conservation by strategically rethinking and redirecting a city revenue stream linked to roadway development and water supply.

The Future Asian City, SPUR, 1969

Infrastructure and the Future

If leveraging the local and regional is primary in a shared infrastructural plan of action, then a secondary, aesthetically agnostic prospect for vision lies in the exploration of evolving typologies. It is here that the role of the architect rises out of the multidisciplinary design milieu as discrete from the urban designer and landscape architect. Marilyn Taylor proposes that relevance for the designer in the future of infrastructure lies at the intersection of land use and transportation, the infrastructural systems that relate most directly to the design professions. Building upon this proposition, there is opportunity at an under-engaged middle scale of urban space, where landscape, infrastructure, and built space meet, for the reengagement of type in the radical embrace of contemporary global systems of communication and local interaction.

The trend of projects in current practice is toward scalar extremes. On one hand there is the design of tabula rasa urban fabric (pick any ecocity); on the other, there is the design of the independent and efficient, or self-sufficient, buildings (choose from the growing array of LEED Platinum projects). Few critically address the scale of civic interaction, the space where the built environment grows from the meeting up of landscape and infrastructure. Such design does not occur in the aerial view, the plan for the autonomous project, or the ecologically ideal detail.

The drawing convention of choice may be the systemically conjoined building section as housed within the infrastructural layering of urban space.

This middle scale is essential to a high quality of civic life as well as efficient infrastructural systems; it is the collective human interface with the systems that enables our contemporary lifestyle, bears out our cultural desires, and will ultimately determine the success of future multi-disciplinary research and action. Designing the experience between surfaces and systems requires the growth of inhabitable spaces to support the connective tissue of infrastructure, and the determination of how and where we plug into these systems. It is this locally specific moment of encounter that must be impeccably designed for maximum efficiency and a culture of user pleasure.

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afterword

In an attempt to draw out this participatory opportunity for an enduring architectural practice from within the current infrastructural frenzy, the tone of the 96

conference dialog was one of introspection and reflection; a critical rehearsal of the past as it relates to our current role within the design disciplines; and a weighing of infrastructure as it holds value for innovation in our rapidly urbanizing built environment. There is agreement that research, process and outcome must be synthetic rather than disconnected or at odds, must be connected to the new modes of using and shaping our urban spaces. This reflective set of conversations projects forward a decidedly non-aesthetic and strategic future. Formal metaphor is eschewed within the panels as an operation that fails to synthesize form and performance, space and the human use of that space.

The reality is that our new generation of architects will continue to leverage disciplinary interest in new communications and modeling technologies such as parametrics for formal purposes, but also toward efficient construction techniques, environmental responsiveness, and highly attuned typological manipulation, ultimately striving for both social relevance and new cultural horizons. Given this expectation and the great effort of the conference participants and others within the discipline and public practice, there is reason to hope that productive formal architectural agendas will grow from the increasing unification of research, process, and outcome; from the strategic overlap of leisure and efficiency; and from focused attention to the civic realm where inhabitable space both generates and rises from the locally-specific meeting up of landscape and infrastructure. By attending to the middle scale within our expanding urban networks and actively engaging infrastructure on the local and regional levels, the role of the architect in the future of infrastructural development remains as cultural interlocutor.

Infrastructure and the Future

NOTES 1. Though the expectations of many for an infrastructural overhaul have not yet been met within the current administration, at the very least there appears to be a sympathetic and proactive desire for real action. The remarks of Barack Obama at the U.S. Conference of Mayors (June 21, 2008) tap Daniel Burnham in rhetorical tone: “Let’s re-commit federal dollars to strengthen mass transit and reform our tax code to give folks a reason to take the bus instead of driving to work—because investing in mass transit helps make metro areas more livable and can help our regional economies grow. And while we’re at it, we’ll partner with our mayors to invest in green energy technology and ensure that your buses and buildings are efficient. And we’ll also invest in our ports, roads, and highspeed rails… Now is not the time for small plans. Now is the time for bold action to rebuild and renew America. We’ve done this before. Two hundred years ago, in 1808, Thomas Jefferson oversaw an infrastructure plan that envisioned the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroads, and the Erie Canal. One hundred years later, in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt called together leaders from business and government to develop a plan for a 20th century infrastructure. Today, in 2008, it falls on us to take up this call again—to re-imagine America’s land and remake America’s future.” http://www.usmayors.org/pressreleases/uploads/Remarksbyobama.pdf 2. “The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work… enough for all.” Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (NYC: Orion Press, 1967), 74.

3. Doreen B. Massey, World City (Cambridge, England and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), 22-23.

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Image Credits Cover

Sutton Place, 2003 Photo: Vincent LaForet/The New York Times/Redux

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Cheonggyecheon, 2008 Photo: stari4ek (a flickr user) Seoul, South Korea

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The Jubilee Line Platform of Westminster Tube Station, 2005 Photo: Adrian Pingstone London, England

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Orange County Great Park, 2006 Image and project: TEN Arquitectos Irvine, CA

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Pheonix, AZ Lightrail Station Photo: Donald Peterson

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CityGarden, 2009 Project credit: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects Photo: Fleishman-Hilliard, Inc. public relations St. Louis, MO

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Crown Fountain at Millennium Park, 2000 Project: Jaume Plensa Photo credit: Patrick Pyszka Chicago, IL

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Bit Car, Concept for a stackable city car, 2003-2010 Image and project: Franco Vairani in collaboration with Smart Cities, MIT Media Lab

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Flight Patterns (published in ArchitectureBoston, Vol 12, No. 4, 2009) Image: Aaron Koblin

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Cell Phone Tower Photo: W.P. Armstrong, 2004

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Urban Re:Vision Competition, 2009 Image and project: Fletcher Studio and David Baker + Partners Architects Dallas, TX

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Queens Quay Waterfront, 2010 Image: West 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture Project: West 8 and DTAH Toronto, Ontario

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Eco Boulevards Image and project: UrbanLab (Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn) Chicago, IL

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SW 12th Avenue Green Street Image: Kevin Robert Perry, Sustainable Stormwater Management Program, City of Portland

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Diagram from Sustainable Urbanism Image: Farr, Douglas. Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature.

Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

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The Future According to Robert Crumb (published in Whole Earth Review, Winter 1988) Image: R. Crumb

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Interstate Highway Diagram, September 1955 Image: US Federal Government

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The Future Asian City (published in a Singapore Urban Research Group (SPUR) publication, 1969) Image: SPUR