S03 Design and Research: A Conversation with Adam Yarinsky

SNACK 02 RESEARCH AND PRACTICE: A CONVERSATION WITH ADAM YARINSKY AFTER THE STORM

HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE

FORM AND PROCESS

THE ROLE OF THE PROFESSION

LUNCH 8: FUTURES FOR SITES UNKNOWN

journal: date: feature: description:

LUNCH 8 Futures for Sites Unknown 11.12.12 SNACK 01 Research and Practice: A Conversation with Adam Yarinsky This pamphlet highlights the work of Adam Yarinsky, co-leader of Architecture Research Office, through a student-run interview and essays by Professor Peter Waldman and Schaeffer Somers. Yarinsky graduated from the University of Virginia in 1984 with a Bachelor in Architecture. ARO’s work addresses a range of scales while maintaining that architecture should be done in service to the profession, and in service to people.

work:

Rising Currents exhibit at MoMA, R-House, etc.

conditions: editors:

Danielle Alexander, Nick Knodt, Jack Cochran

contributors:

Sarah Brummett, Grey Elam, Alan Ford, Sarah Beth McKay, Schaeffer Somers, Peter Waldman, Clayton Williams

There’s really nothing there that’s left from [New York’s] predevelopment past. It is completely constructed and dredged. Any natural edge you see there is just a ruin of something that was built before.

Adam Yarinsky

After the Storm Jack Cochran: It’s obviously very fitting that you’re here right after Hurricane Sandy. We understand that your team’s work was crucial in inspiring the Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA. I was wondering if you could talk about how you started looking at the idea of mitigating storm surges and sea level rises in the first place?

Adam Yarinsky: Our involvement with this issue started with a competition that we won in the fall of 2006 that was sponsored by the History Channel called “City of the Future.” There were nine or ten teams that were invited to do a one-week charrette where you could envision anything you wanted that was about a Manhattan 100 years in the future. We were the only team that chose to look at the impact of rising sea levels on the developed portions of Manhattan. Our design proposition was a series of horizontal skyscrapers — pier-like buildings — that we thought of as a way of building within the road rightof-way in a flooded area. This would be a reinforced concrete infrastructure that could then be fit out with a variety of uses over time. It would be elevated above the flooded area and perpetuate habitation or occupation of the water’s edge.

We based our study on two things. The first was Egbert Vielé’s 1865 Water Map of New York that shows the wetlands and low-lying areas of Manhattan. Even back then these areas had already begun to be covered over or eradicated by development or landfill.

We paired that with thinking on a conceptual level about the street grid of Manhattan and how it became a matrix that promoted development. This led us to imagine the physical street as a solid rather than a void that would then be built out.

Meanwhile, Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer, asked us to be on his Latrobe prize team, which was a diverse group of climate scientists, a GIS mapping person, and Catherine Seavitt. Together we were looking at the upper harbor of New York and New Jersey in the context of climate change and adaptation, specifically driven by two things: Guy’s prior involvement in a broadcast tower, post-9/11 that he had hoped to site in Bayonne, New Jersey as a new landmark that would denote the harbor as a new regional center. But also our approach was driven by the recognition, post-Katrina, that we could propose something that was in contrast to a hard infrastructure. It could be a soft infrastructure; something that would have resiliency.

Interestingly, I think of our trajectory as being from ‘toward the water,’ which represents our History Channel project, to ‘on the water,’ which was what we did with the Latrobe team, and then ‘in the water’ which is how I think of our Rising Currents project, New Urban Ground, with Susannah Drake. In this way we are thinking about the whole watershed rather than simply the edge inward from the waterside.

Hybrid Infrastructure Jack Cochran: The concept of constructed and engineered ecologies is a really crucial issue because we’ve come to the point that to go back to the way that natural systems used to be is probably not realistic and in some cases it’s not necessarily constructive, and so we as designers are responsible for coming up with new ecologies. This seems to me to be exactly what you are all doing.

Adam Yarinsky: It’s especially relevant in the context of the harbor of New York — there’s really nothing there that’s left from its predevelopment past. I mean it’s completely constructed and dredged. Any natural edge you see there is just a ruin of something that was built before.

Grey Elam: There’ve been number of articles citing your project in an ongoing discussion of hybridizing the soft and hard infrastructural approach, such as Jack Feuer’s “On the Waterfront, Rise of the Machines” in the New York Times. How do you see your work engaging with alternative approaches?

Adam Yarinsky: I think there’s engagement between hard and soft infrastructure even within the approach we put forth. For example, we had a burmed edge to keep out incremental sea level rise for a high value area that was densely populated with infrastructure and people. I think there have to be different approaches. This wasn’t hard. It was concealed within a gradient landscape edge. I don’t see hard and soft as necessarily being mutually exclusive. There may be a temporal dimension to it, where there’s a certain strategy that is put in place while other strategies are developed.

Our main focus was public space, so we didn’t look at how private buildings would be hardened or protected from the threat. But we assumed that would happened in concert with what we were doing. The thing that I’m cautious about is when I see the discussion shaping up as this kind of ‘either-or’ — one of the things that disturbs me in some of the characterizations from civil engineers about this is, ‘Well, people want to keep the water out, so building a water-tight wall is the only way to do it.’ That whole mentality has to be changed.

Also, to us, the other driving thing behind the Rising Currents project was that, if you’re going to spend billions of dollars, why not get more benefits from it than simply a very distant wall element? I think there are a lot of really great implications if you come out of this and don’t think about it as being ‘the one big move.’ It seems to be intrinsically more democratic in the sense of how these things get negotiated. Its messy, too, and problematic in that there are a lot of jurisdictional issues. In a way, I think the administrative issues we need to deal with are actually more complex than the technical issues by far. In the stretch between the navigable waterway and the street are at least five different agencies or bodies that all have jurisdiction — federal, state, city — and so some thinking about how to break through all that needs to be done. Also, it requires being responsive to the people who live in the communities that are affected. I worry about just saying ‘Well, we’re going to have a giant multinational corporation build a huge intervention that’s five miles offshore,” and somehow expecting that that’s going to work. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that model anymore.

Jack Cochran: How do you think we can start to get people to see things differently and to be accepting of the soft infrastructure?

Adam Yarinsky: This is where I think building a public appetite can put the demands on leaders who may not know or care about these issues. One of the things that was really exciting about the MoMA show was that the visualizations that were done in the show were very helpful for people. I went numerous times and would hear and talk to people randomly and get feedback. I think that showing people a positive vision of what the future can look like is important.

I think that MoMA as imprimatur was incredibly important because it gave the show a cultural dimension, not simply a technical dimension. Our interest was about the connection between infrastructure and public space. The venue at MoMA and the process they set up with workshops and public presentations in addition to the exhibition and related programming was really, really good. Curator Barry Bergdoll, who did an amazing job, has this tremendous credibility because he comes with a really strong background as a historian, so he is very well-informed but is also a very good critic. We also presented to the city planning commission. It’s getting out there and having higher-level opportunities through connections to specific people in the city government, the general public, and then institutionally through MoMA.

Research and Process Jack Cochran: Could you speak to how research informs your architectural practice as well?

Adam Yarinsky: It’s the ethos of the firm. We like to think that we don’t enter into projects with a kind of a priori conceptual or formal framework, or at least an overarching one. I think we have ideas that we’re interested in exploring and we try to choreograph the design process so that we can focus on them to the extent that it’s possible. We dovetail those, of course, intrinsically with the clients’ goals.

I think there is an overall ethos which looks at the process as being one of gathering information first, informing yourself, questioning that information through analysis, beginning to utilize that for developing strategies or ideas about a project, and then being as rigorous as we can about testing those ideas visually and formally against the actual circumstances in which the project exists.

The product of the research for us, ultimately, is informed intuition about what is appropriate for a given project. There’s a focus on specifics, guided by an overall framework of how we look at things, and then the realization that as a designer — and I think this happens in science as well — there’s a kind of intuitive leap that you take through the process. The hope is that it’s informed in a way that the final result has a layering of ideas and is successful on many levels, not simply on one or two. That is how we approach it, but it varies. There are some smaller projects where we kind of say, “Hey let’s look at this, it’s a kind of interesting thing, let’s try that.” Then there are larger projects where we genuinely don’t know what we should be doing.

A lot of the approach to me came out of starting our firm in New York City, where you are always dealing with existing contexts, usually the interior of a building where you can’t change anything. Your boundaries are defined. You can’t even, sometimes, move a pipe. Things like that. You have to figure out how to elegantly integrate them into your thinking — though that’s sort of a backwards way of thinking about it. Then building off of that, thinking about design as this process of responsiveness to the conditions in which it is situated.

Nick Knodt: How is your work on the City of the Future/Rising Currents/On the Bay projects coming back into your architecture and your design work now, either in New York City or outside of New York City? Is there a distinct overlap?

Adam Yarinsky: I think we have a recognition of a light touch in respect to how architectural forms should integrate into its contexts. I suppose on some levels that manifests itself in a kind of formal minimalism in what we do, but I’ve always felt that in order to integrate forms successfully, you have to thoroughly master what you’re doing — the formal and practical problems of a project — in order to have it come across as if it’s effortless and well-integrated into a campus or an urban area.

I think that the recognition of this idea of architecture and design being intrinsically relational is something that we’ve always felt really strongly about. As much as we focus on the object and the thing that we are designing, which we are getting compensated to do, we have to be relational. Clients expect to receive a useable, practical thing. We think its relational capacity, in terms of what it does and how it transforms or modifies the conditions in which it is located, is the ultimate thing we are designing.

One thing I had learned prior to doing the climate adaptation work is this idea of a temporal dimension, of how a design works over time. I got interested in it while I was in grad school, because I had the SOM Fellowship and I traveled around for a year.

I was looking at specific urban buildings in nine locations, examining how they were presently being used versus how they were initially designed — I called it “the single building as urban intervention.” Maybe that’s a mid-1980s nomenclature, but it was basically thinking about a building as a living part of its context, socially as well as physically. That relational and temporal dimension to building was something that I would say informed how we approached Rising Currents and is reinforced by the work that we do.

I think that showing people a positive vision of what the future can look like is important.

Adam Yarinsky

Role of the Profession

Nick Knodt: I’m wondering if you could talk about the changing role of the profession. There’s a lot of talk that architecture is becoming more specialized and moving away from a generalist role. I’m thrilled to see that your team at ARO is still really generalist and seeing opportunities in involvement in research. I’m wondering, though, if you could talk about if there is resistance in the professional realm to this.

Adam Yarinsky: I think what we’ve tried to do is dig deeply into certain bodies of knowledge — we’ve tried to be generalists, but when we’re on a specific project we try to really understand and deeply engage with it. I think that’s different than just being a generalist who happens to work with anything.

I’m not totally convinced that specialization is the way to go. I think the jury’s still out as to whether, as an economic model, that’s a good thing for the profession. Given the size of our office, and right now we’re around 24 people — we’re larger than most firms, though we’re still a small firm in my mind — we realize that we have to be nimble and collaborate and partner with others to leverage that intellectual capital that we have toward greater ends. Collaborations we’ve done are designed to reframe projects in a way that is not just about the service aspect of architecture, but is on a deeper level that has value for a client.

I think the administrative issues we need to deal with are actually more complex than the technical issues by far.

Adam Yarinsky

The other thing that I’ve become acutely aware of through doing work with other top-notch firms like Happold and ARUP, or other engineers, is that they’ve become hyper-specialized and someone is needed break down the silos and because they’re not going to ask the questions. It takes a very, very rare engineer to do that. Guy Nordenson is a tremendously enlightened engineer and one of the few who does think outside the box and is aware of larger implications. The extreme specialization that has happened at ARUP and in the field of engineering is such that people can’t really operate beyond their purview. Someone has to be there to help open up connections, pull people together, and ask questions, and I think that’s what we do.

The challenge is how to communicate to people: what that means, and how that has value for clients. There are definitely several different kinds of clients out there; there are clients who just want to know have you done 5 of these projects, 10 of these, or 20 of these before. And so for them, the specialist is the right one.

We found a nice loop that started to happen is that clients now come to us because they understand the rigor and depth we can bring to a project but they didn’t have an a priori sense of what their project should be. They want us to be a part of helping them understand how, at a pivotal point when they’re doing a building, their mission can be evaluated more critically. I mean, it’s not front and center; they don’t tell us, “Come work with us so you can critique who we are,” but it comes out in the process.

That, to me, makes it fun and exciting even though there is tremendous bureaucratic stuff you have to deal with and the usual hassles and budgets and things. It’s that excitement about being part of that social aspect, that moment of a building project, that is exciting.

Nick Knodt: Yeah, being able to frame that question is just as important as solving it.

Adam Yarinsky: The other thing that’s kind of weird is, as you’ve probably seen, everyone’s talking about design now. Business schools want to have design, and as architects we’ve already always had this grounding in problem solving, critical thinking, and in collaborating. Those are all legitimate skills that we have. It’s a part of our education, which I think is good.

Jack Cochran: How did your time at UVa structure your thinking?

Adam Yarinsky: I think things have changed dramatically in architectural education since 1980 to ‘84 when I was an undergraduate student here, for the better I would argue. Although, what I gained from my education here was a real formal rigor and a sense that there was a way of communicating ideas through form. At the time, the formal mode of doing that was Corbusier, Oppositions magazine; the kind of dense articles they would have about the shifted column grid and what that meant. That was what we would pore over like ancient texts, even though they were only a few years old at that point. There was this desire for communicating through that; a strong belief that it was possible to, and that one could communicate through design.

The standards we were held up to were high. I would joke that you wouldn’t want to raise kids this way, in the certain ways that architects were educated, with such extreme negativity. You were broken down, but at its best, you felt that you were being held to a high standard. At its worst, it seemed cruel and unfair.

The other thing that I really took away from here was the value of architectural history, partly just because I’m generally interested in history. I took architectural history classes every semester for the four years I was here because I chose to.

Particularly, I remember Dora Weavenson, who was a professor here at the time and taught a history of modern architecture class. It was amazing to me that she started that history with the Enlightenment and with one of my favorite buildings of all time, Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve. It was mind blowing to see this building built in the 1840s presented as a modern building and to think about all the parallels; the notion of how iron was handled as a material and the way in which that was integrated into culture at that time. I remember very much and still have a strong interest in, and enthusiasm and excitement for, architectural history, as well as learning about buildings more specifically and deeply as they relate to other aspects of history.

At the time, landscape wasn’t really tied too closely to the work that we were doing, and as an undergrad we didn’t really have interdisciplinary studios or anything, but I remember that it was one of the legs of the school. I think I took away the sense that even if it wasn’t something we practiced regularly, there was an interdisciplinary dimension to our work that made architecture a part of that, which really had some depth to it and was interesting and exciting.

A Firm for the End of the World

by Professor Schaeffer Somers

The Winter Solstice has come and gone as well as the purported end of the Mayan calendar, so the countdown to doom has reset once again. I read recently about our society’s predilection for apocalyptic beliefs — psychologists and neuroscientists point to our fear system hard-wired in our psyche. While “Preppers” may see therapeutic results in preparing for Armageddon, our cultural dystopia is also playing out in real acts of violence, and the aggregation of global climate models points to the worst of the worst-case scenarios, so maybe we are not out of the woods just yet. Our species seems to be at a crossroads where we can choose to yield to our worst fears, or we can embrace positive, preemptive action.

In his November 2012 lecture at the University of Virginia, Adam Yarinsky included a series of projects that imagines how New York City of the late twenty-first century has responded to sea level rise. The vanes of the original City of the Future project integrate infrastructure, public space, building, and landscape as an adaptive response to the emerging coastal environment. As a counter proposal to a sea wall that will be breached by future storms, a constructed archipelago landscape of coastal marshes, public parks, reefs, shoals, and islands contributes towards a strategy of resilience to disruptive storm events. Adam reminds his audience that there is a position rooted

in both the optimism of the modernist project, as well as the can-do attitude of the engineer. The positivity of the ARO vision is an antidote to the depression of current and future dystopia.

Working in parallel to the design team, a member of the ARO staff wrote a rich narrative from the perspective of future inhabitants of the vanes of New York. “On springtime evening, at an affluent friend’s Gansevoort Vane terrace, you drank sake, ate a meal, and watched in silence from your chair as the moon spread its reflection across the waters.” I find the image beautiful, but I wonder about the demographic of the residents of the vanes. Who are the residents that get to enjoy the springtime evening, and who do not? In the wake of hurricane Sandy, it is remarkable how fast the key infrastructure of the city was restored to functional operation, while acknowledging that there are neighborhoods and vulnerable populations that continue to suffer the effects of the storm event. Stresses like global climate change will exacerbate the contrast between rich and poor. Sustainability will have to be redefined to address unmet human needs and social justice, which is acknowledged in the article, “On The Water: The New York—New Jersey Upper Bay”, describing the comprehensive dimensions of the City of the Future project.

The work of ARO is inspiring for both education and practice. The “On the Water” essay demonstrates a creative writing technique students can use to change perspective and hemispheres of the brain, enabling them to write about experience and more phenomenal atmospheres in a productive way. This might become a daily exercise for students to keep track of their design thinking.

ARO’s practice, further, is deeply embedded in the city and actively engaged in research and collaborative work. Although design competitions and pro-bono initiatives require a huge outlay of energy and resources, it is clearly part of the ARO DNA to commit time

outside of normal billable services to work that contributes to their local community and a culture of design. The firm is also engaged in programming and planning at multiple scales, from space planning for existing institutions to entire urban neighborhoods like Greenwich South. These collaborative projects utilize rapid, iterative research and analysis leading to visioning and publication of findings and guidelines with a focus on the design of the presentation of information. Having mastered the process of design and rapid prototyping of material, light, and form, ARO is transcending the limitations of a leading architectural firm and expanding the scope of practice in both pro-bono and fee-for-service categories. Adam Yarinsky presents the image of a modern firm that is as resilient and adaptive as the urban landscapes that it designs, which should be a source of inspiration to both students and practitioners alike.

On the Lessons of ARO

by Professor Peter Waldman

Eschatology is defined as a doctrine projected optimistically for a new life after the death of The World, as we know it. Matthew Jull, our new colleague with extreme geological frames of reference has offered a studio this Fall Semester to jolt the conventions of Context in the light of the Mayan Prediction of the End of the World, coinciding in a matter of weeks around the Winter Solstice. In this time frame, Adam Yarinsky’s presentation on recent work in response to global warming and the change in the hydrological conditions surrounding New York City has offered a compelling in-house narrative describing the scenographic settings of generations of inhabitants who now navigate ARO’s system of vanes across vast terrains accounting for diurnal/ nocturnal and seasonal conditions.

The narrative flows like other surreal voyages to renewed lands such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Perhaps, to the narrator’s credit, they share the currencies of Amnesia and Blur of incomplete systems, under construction, and anticipating more future than past. This Spatial Tale of Origin shares more the pedigree of the theatrical scenario, and the specification of a set design at the urban scale. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo specifies the construction sequences of Noah’s Ark: the timbering of Forests to yield materials to bind Keel to the Ribs of a Vessel; the assemblage of Masts and Yardarms,

and the final cladding of pitch and the stitching of sails. The builders are also identified with the diverse strengths of Noah’s sons and the occupants are identified two by two.

Another more humble format would be to recount specifications for construction that strategize the building process and name collaborating construction crews who follow the first responders in every case of natural disasters.

Serlio’s stage sets for Tragedy and Comedy parallel ARO’s efforts at projecting inhabitable worlds of Reason and Circumstance, but only Serlio’s often overlooked third stage setting for the Satyric indicates that specifications for the construction of the renewed city must be grounded in the Quarry and the Forest. Even in Thomas Cole’s Course of the Empire visions articulating the Savage State, the Pastoral Setting, the Consummation of the City, followed by self and/or natural Destruction, comes to a pregnant pause in Desolation. Is Nature finally consuming the ruins with moss covered limestone columns or awaiting an eschatological projection to be imagined?

The Cooper Hewitt Museum who commissioned this new urban challenge in 2009, also commissioned, in 1979, a number of young architects to come up with visions for The City in Schemes & Dreams. Peter Waldman, then a young Princeton faculty member and his thesis student John Marusczak came up with relocating the Statue of Liberty on higher ground in Central Park, in a site set awash by streets which returned to the canals of the once New Amsterdam, a return to the pre-conditions of the site.

Thanks again to Noah ‘s example, Adam Yarinsky’s ARO efforts have shared brilliant visions of an architecture of resistance as well as eyewitness accounts of the citizens of this New World City. What we can also ruminate on after this visionary banquet in this school, on this day after the end of This World, is the opportunity to name those who build, to inventory the resources with which we build, to specify the instruments we call into action, as we appreciate the temporal agenda of Building as a Verb, worthy of incremental visions and sequential texts.

We have ideas that we’re interested in exploring, and we try to choreograph the design process so that we can focus on them to the extent that it’s possible, and dovetail those, of course, intrinsically with the clients’ goals.

Adam Yarinsky