[ SCHEDULE ] Welcome and Introduction
With two destructive tropical storms in two years, New York City—like other global cities— is entering a phase of adaptation to catastrophic climate events which are a result of carbon cycle disruption by human, urban and industrial practices. Superstorm recovery will require more than a simple fix; it will necessitate systemic adaptation to escalating storm surge, precipitation, and wind events through the construction of new urban landscapes that have the capacity to merge social, cultural, and environmental forces.
9:00–9:30
The Landscape Architecture Program of the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture, with support from the Municipal Art Society, American Society of Landscape Architects New York Chapter, and the Institute for Urban Design, will host a conference of municipal leaders, scientists, engineers, and designers to explore the impact of past and future storms on New York City’s infrastructural systems: Water/ Waste, Power/Data, Circulation/ Fuel, Parks/Recreation, and Shelter. The conference will reveal the operating systems of the city to open speculation on Waterproofing New York as an act of coordinated yet opportunistic, pragmatic, and inventive city design. The event is intended to support an emerging skepticism of a big barrier “fix,” and the unplanned, uncoordinated shoring up of individual enterprises and discreet sites that will ensue in the absence of design and civic leadership.
10:10–10:30 Panel
Denise Hoffman Brandt, Associate Professor and Director of the Landscape Architecture Program at The City College of New York and Principal, Hoffman Brandt Projects LLC Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at The City College of New York and Principal, Catherine Seavitt Studio
9:30–10:30
Waste / Water
9:35–9:50 Jeanette
Compton, Director of Green Infrastructure at New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and Adjunct Professor at Fordham University
9:50–10:05
Kate Orff, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and Founder Co-Director of the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University, Principal of SCAPE
10:40–11:40
Questions and Introduction to Power and Data Session
Circulation / Fuel
10:45–11:00 Petra Todorovich
Messick, Senior Officer, Amtrak Outreach and Communications –North, former Director of America 2050
11:00–11:15 Kevin Foster,
Associate Professor of Economics at The City College of New York
11:20–11:40
Panel discussion with Denise Hoffman Brandt
Georgeen Theodore, Interboro Partners, Associate Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, Director of the Infrastructure Planning Program 11:40–11:50
Questions and close of morning session
11:50–12:50
Power / Data
11:55–12:10
12:10–12:25
2:00–3:00
to Parks and Recreation Session
Parks / Recreation Administrative Horticulturist/Forest Restoration Manager of Van Cortlandt Park, Past President of the Society for Ecological Restoration Research Social Scientist, USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station
2:40–3:00
SHELTER
SURGE-PERVIOUS STRUCTURES
ELEVATED INFRASTRUCTURE
Panel discussion with Catherine Seavitt Nordenson
WATER-TIGHT TUBES
Gullivar Shepard, Associate Principle at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates 3:00–3:10
Questions and Introduction to Shelter
3:10–4:10
Shelter
3:20–3:35
WASTE / WATER
Mark Ginsberg, founding partner of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects LLP, New York and National Housing Conference Board of Directors and Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council Board President Brown, ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the City College of New York, Co-Chair, AIANY Committee on Design for Risk and Reconstruction
3:55–4:15
Panel discussion with Deborah Gans, Professor in the Architecture School at Pratt Institute, Principal of Gans Studio Hilary Sample, Associate Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, Principal of MOS
4:15–4:30
NEIGHBORHOOD-SCALE SERVICES
LOW TO NO-POWER PARKS
3:35–3:50 Lance Jay
PARKS / RECREATION
NO-CARBON MOTIVE FORCE NEW INFRASTRUCTURE CORRIDORS
Questions for Shelter sector participants CIRCULATION / FUEL
4:30–5:00 Closing Remarks Michael Sorkin, Principal of Michael Sorkin Studio, Terreform and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York
MARCH 2, 2013 9AM – 5PM
Frank Ruchala, Associate Urban Planner and Designer with the Department of City Planning for the City of New York
City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture
Edgar Westerhof, Senior Planner, ARCADIS US Inc., New York
Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture 141 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031
discussion with Chris Reed, Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Principal of Stoss Landscape Urbanism
Miguel Robles Duran, Assistant Professor of Urbanism, School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, Director, MS Design and Urban Ecologies 12:50–1:00 Questions
and Introduction to Circulation and Fuel Session
Lunch
SHARED BIOTIC TERRITORIES
I ntroduction to Session Thaddeus Pawlowski, Long Term Planning Advisor, Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery
12:30–12:50 Panel
1:00–1:50
HUMAN NETWORKS
2:05–2:20 Dennis Burton,
2:20–2:35 Erika Svendsen,
POWER / DATA
BIGGER BETTER CLOUDS
Paul Mankiewicz, Executive Director, The Gaia Institute discussion with Lydia Kallipoliti, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union and at Columbia University in New York
10:30–10:40
1:50–2:00 Introduction
Ongoing updates and details on the upcoming presentation of ideas generated by the conference available on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/ccny.ssa.landscape.architecture
[ PARTICIPANTS ] Waste / Water
Circulation / Fuel
Power / Data
Parks / Recreation
Shelter
of Green Infrastructure for the New York City’s Parks Department. She was project manager for Parks’ High Performance Landscape Guidelines, and now works with the Department of Environmental Protection on their Green Infrastructure Plan. She has worked on sustainability initiatives with multiple city agencies over the past 5 years. She holds a MS in Urban Ecology from Cornell University and is an adjunct professor at Fordham University.
outreach and communications in the Northeast Corridor Infrastructure Investment Development division at Amtrak, which is their new business line devoted to managing and developing the Northeast Corridor to meet the growing rail transportation needs of the region in the 21st century. Prior to joining Amtrak, Messick was director of America 2050, Regional Plan Association’s national infrastructure planning and policy program, which provides leadership on a broad range of transportation, sustainability, and economic-development issues impacting America’s growth in the 21st century.
and designer for New York’s Department of City Planning where he oversees projects in Midtown Manhattan and Hudson Yards. His ongoing study of Los Angeles’ oil fields was published in Infrastructural City — Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and awarded a Graham Foundation Research Grant. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Urban Design at Columbia University GSAPP and his collaborations with DUB Studios have been exhibited and published internationally, most recently as a winner of Long Island Index’s Build a Better Burb competition.
various northeastern municipal agencies and nonprofits for over 20 years. He initiated the Ecological Restoration Program in Central Park; created and directed environmental programs at the Schuylkill River Nature Center in Philadelphia; founded the Society for Ecological Restoration Mid-Atlantic chapter; collaborated with regional urban Parks and Water Departments to design and manage landscape stabilization; consulted with municipal and private agencies to promote storm water reduction in urban combined overflow systems.
Edgar J. Westerhof ARCADIS U.S., Inc.
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to governance, resilience and human well-being. She is interested in understanding the spatial, temporal and sacred aspects of stewardship systems. Erika is part of the NYC Urban Field Station, both a physical place to conduct research and a network of scientists and practitioners dedicated to improving the quality of life in urban areas by conducting and supporting research about social-ecological systems and natural resource management. http://nrs.fs.fed.us/nyc/
Advisor, Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery. While working as Associate Urban Designer in NYC Department of City Planning Pawlowski was Project manager for “Freeboard: the impact of rising base flood elevations on urban design and zoning in New York City” and Team leader for the “What if New York City... Playbook for Post Disaster Urban Design.” He was also Committee member of BluePRint (Business Process Reform), helping the agency streamline the process by which Land Use applications are prepared and Member for Climate Resilience Committee for Green Code’s Task Force. He received the “Outstanding Service Award” in 2008.
Jeanette Compton, RLA, ASLA, is the Director
Dr. Paul S. Mankiewicz, Director of the Gaia
Institute, received his Ph.D. from the CUNY/NYBG Program in Plant Sciences. He holds patents on a modular, invessel composting system, an ultralightweight green roof plant growth medium, and a biogeochemical reactor to breakdown dioxins and PCBs. Past member of the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board and chair of the Bronx Solid Waste Advisory Board, incorporating the waste stream, he designed and built the first green roof in the Bronx, the first industrial-scale stormwater treatment meadow and green wall on a six acre truck-to-barge material handling site on the Bronx River, and a 12,000, sf green roof on the Linda Tool Corporation in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the first fifteen of the Mayor’s PlaNYC 2030 enhanced tree pits and parking lots modified for high volume storm water capture.
Kate Orff is the founding principal of SCAPE, an award
winning landscape architecture and urban design office based in lower Manhattan, and an Assistant Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she teaches graduate design studios and interdisciplinary seminars focused on sustainable development, biodiversity, and communitybased change. She is also an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Kate was named a USA Artist Fellow in 2012. SCAPE’s project “Oyster-tecture” was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s Rising Currents show.
Lydia Kallipoliti is a practicing architect, engineer
and author, currently an Assistant Professor Adjunct at the Cooper Union and at Columbia University in New York. She holds architecture degrees from A.U.Th in Greece, MIT and a PhD from Princeton University. Kallipoliti is the editor of “EcoRedux: Design Remedies for a Dying Planet,” a special issue of Architectural Design (AD) magazine and the founder of EcoRedux, an innovative online non-profit educational resource for ecological experiments in the postwar period. Her design and theoretical work has been published widely including Log, Domus, Praxis, Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Historians, Thresholds, Pidgin, 306090 and other publications.
Petra Todorovich Messick is senior officer of
Kevin R. Foster is Associate Professor and Chair
of the department of Economics and Business at The City College of New York. His recent research assesses the relevance of Japanese monetary and fiscal policies to American experiences in the Financial Crisis. With faculty in economics and earth sciences, he led an interdisciplinary research team in environmental entrepreneurship. Dr. Foster has served as an advisor to start-ups and private equity investment companies. He received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998.
Georgeen Theodore is an architect, urban
designer, and Associate Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design, where she is the Director of the Infrastructure Planning program. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she graduated with distinction. Theodore is founding partner and principal of Interboro, a New York City-based architecture and planning research office.
Denise Hoffman Brandt is principal of
Hoffman Brandt Projects, LLC and Director of Landscape Architecture in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Her work focuses on landscape as ecological infrastructure — the social, cultural and environmental systems that sustain urban life and generate urban form. Her New York Prize Fellowship project, titled “City Sink,” which investigated urban plant-soil systems for carbon sequestration, was recognized by the Environmental Design Research Association with a Great Places research award, and her book by that title will soon be published by Oscar Riera Ojeda Press.
Frank Ruchala Jr. is an associate urban planner
Mr. Westerhof is a Senior Planner and Water Consultant with a vast amount of experience in water management, waterfront development and civil engineering. Westerhof’s expertise is in the identification of projects and studies that support long-term and sustainable urban development goals, related to water management and urban planning. Mr. Westerhof is involved in several projects related to flood proofing of buildings and facilities.
Chris Reed is Principal of Stoss Landscape
Urbanism and Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Stoss is the most recent recipient of the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award in Landscape Architecture. Reed’s work speaks to the ways in which landscape can better inform infrastructural and urban solutions that respond to environmental change. His studio teaching at Harvard specifically focuses on urban development that accommodates sea level rise and storm surge along New York’s Flushing and Jamaica Bays.
Miguel Robles-Duran — Urbanist, Director of
the Urban Ecologies graduate program at the New School/ Parsons in New York, Senior fellow at “Civic City”, a postgraduate design/research program based in HEAD Geneva, Switzerland and cofounder of “Cohabitation Strategies”, an international non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial development based in New York and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He recently co-edited/authored the book Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization that reviews the dire consequences that neoliberal urban policies have had upon the city and discusses possible alternatives to market-driven development. Robles-Duran’s areas of specialization are design/research interventions and strategies in uneven urbanization and areas of social urban conflict, urban political-economy and urban theory.
Dennis Burton has worked and consulted for
Gullivar Shepard is a Principal at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associate’s New York office, steering the direction of many of the firm’s largest projects. His undergraduate and graduate training as an architect, brings a distinct and technical design perspective to his work contribution to firm’s urban park projects such as Brooklyn Bridge Park in NYC, Lower Don Lands in Toronto, ON, the redesign of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial landscape in St. Louis, MO, and most recently the Waller Creek Chain of Parks in Austin, TX. Catherine Seavitt Nordenson is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York and principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio. Her research interests include design adaptation to sea level rise in urban coastal environments. She co-authored the book On the Water: Palisade Bay, an infrastructural and ecological climate adaptation proposal for New York Harbor; this study was the foundation for the exhibition Rising Currents at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010.
Thaddeus Pawlowski, Long Term Planning
Mark Ginsberg, FAIA LEED ap, partner of Curtis +
Ginsberg Architects LLP, whose practice includes award winning architecture and urban design projects, many of which have a sustainable focus. His firm received the Andrew J. Thomas Pioneer in Housing Award from the AIA New York Chapter 2007. Mark was the 2004 President of the AIA New York Chapter. He sits on the Board of Directors of NYSAFAH and the New York Housing Conference, a Trustee of the National Housing Conference, a Vice President of The Catskill Center of Conservation and Development, and is President of Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council. He is co-chair of the Housing Working Group of the AIA New York Chapter post Sandy Task Force.
Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, DPACSA is principal of Lance Jay Brown Architecture + Urban Design in NYC and ACSA Distinguished Professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY. He is the founding co-chair of the AIANY Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee and the 2014 President-Elect of the AIANY Chapter. He is coauthor of Urban Design for an Urban Century (2010) and the Planning an Design Workbook for Community Participation (1970), and editor and author of the 2012 compendium Beyond Zuccotti Park. In 2007 Brown was awarded the prestigious AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. Deborah Gans is principal of Gans studio and professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. As part of an interdisciplinary team that included James Dart, Darius Sollohub, Ronald Shiffman and Denise Hoffman Brandt, she worked for several post-Katrina years in the coastal suburbs of New Orleans East under a HUD grant. She drafted the guidelines for community based involvement in post-disaster rebuilding for the New York City Office of Emergency Management. Her current work on alternative modes of housing is in the exhibit, Making Room at The Museum of the City of New York until September 2013. Hilary Sample is an Associate Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and Principal of MOS Architects based in New York City. She teaches design studios and research seminars about health and architecture. Her projects and writings on health have been published in the MoMA exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream; the Canadian Center for Architecture Imperfect Health, The Medicalization of Architecture; and Verb Crisis.
CLOSING REMARKS
Michael Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin
Studio in New York City, a design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city and in green architecture. The Sorkin Studio has been the recipient of numerous awards from, among others, Progressive Architecture, ID, and the AIA. Sorkin is also founding President of Terreform, a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and intervention in issues of urban morphology, sustainability, equity, and community planning. Current research includes a multiyear project to examine the limits of self-sufficiency within New York City, a study of sustainable transport systems in Lower Manhattan, and an alternative master plan for Manhattanville. In addition, Sorkin is President of the Institute for Urban Design, a New York-based educational and advocacy organization. He is Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York where he has taught since 2000. Previously, he has been professor at numerous schools of architecture. Sorkin lectures around the world, is the author of several hundred articles in a wide range of both professional and general publications, and is currently contributing editor at Architectural Record for which he writes a regular column. For ten years, he was the architecture critic of The Village Voice and has authored numerous books. Michael Sorkin was born in Washington, D.C. and received his architectural training at Harvard and MIT. He also holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia.