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By Nadine M. Post
This article originally appeared in Engineering News-Record

An old Chinese proverb sums up several projects that mark the dawn of seismic-resistant design and construction in earthquake-devastated Haiti: “If you give a person a fish, you feed that person for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you feed that person for a lifetime.”

The aim of the projects—one of which concentrates on training for seismic design of commercial buildings and the other on the manufacture of hurricane- and seismic-resistant manufactured single-story buildings—is to prevent a repeat of the kind of death and destruction that occurred on Jan. 12, 2010, when a magnitude-7 quake killed an estimated 316,000 people and turned most buildings into rubble.

New York state’s University at Buffalo, through its Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, and Shelter2Home LLC (S2H)—a building systems manufacturer—are “teaching people to fish” in very different ways. Since May 2010, UB/MCEER, in partnership with the private, non-profit Université Quisqueya (UniQ) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, has held four of five seminars on the fundamentals of seismic design.

Shelter2Home, a for-profit enterprise, is fabricating hurricane- and seismic-resistant houses and simple, single-story buildings based on its patented light-gauge steel framing system, engineered and constructed for seismic resistance. The firm hires and trains local workers to assemble the units.

Starting From Scratch
The UniQ-UB program has trained more than 500 architects and engineers, which is about 50% of the designer population in Port-au-Prince, a city of three million people. “Earthquake engineering and seismic design were non-existent in Haiti,” says Andre Filiatrault, curriculum coordinator for the UniQ-UB/MCEER seminars and former director of UB/MCEER. “We were starting from scratch.”

“Rebuilding in Haiti is a difficult, painful process,” adds Filiatrault, who is also a UB professor of engineering. “The infrastructure is not there, and there’s lots of inertia and corruption. … People don’t always want to hear about earthquake engineering.”

“One has to have a thick skin and a durable stomach to be in business in Haiti,” says Donald A. Stevens, president of Shelter2Home, Winchester, Va. “It’s a challenging environment.”

UniQ-UB seminar attendee Yves Osias agrees that the environment is challenging. Materials are expensive and often substandard, and there is no enforcement of quality, says Osias, a Haitian structural engineer with the non-governmental organization Compassion International, Port-au-Prince. Reinforcing steel does not meet international standards, and workers are not qualified because there is not enough training in seismic construction.

Haitian native Gael Lamothe, a junior in civil engineering at UB, knows about materials firsthand. He recently completed a research project that compared 15 concrete masonry units (CMUs) produced by several suppliers in Haiti to six made in the U.S. Only one sample from Haiti met the U.S. standard. The other 14 had much lower compressive strengths.

“Engineers, architects and contractors are aware of the importance of seismic designs throughout Haiti,” says Evenson Calixte, dean of UniQ’s school of sciences, engineering and architecture. “However, the government has not yet shown any public policy toward the enforcement of seismic design in new construction.”

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By Fred Bernstein

Henry Urbach
Photo © Winni Wintermeyer

Henry Urbach, a one-time gallery owner who most recently was curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will be moving to New Canaan, Connecticut. He has just been named director of the Glass House, the Philip Johnson estate now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. (He succeeds the interim director, Rena Zurofsky, and founding director, Chisty MacLear.)

Fred Bernstein: Did you visit the Glass House while Philip was alive?

Henry Urbach: In 2001, when I was running the gallery in New York [Henry Urbach Architecture], I was invited on a Saturday morning. It felt like I was being summoned, which I was. I brought a portfolio of work from the gallery, to present to Philip. He was extremely interested in the work, especially that of LOT-EK and some of the younger architects. And then we walked down to the lake pavilion. I had of course known it from photographs. But nothing had prepared me for the impact.

FB: And did you return?

HU: Last year, I began research on the Glass House as a curatorial project. Johnson, of course, was the founding architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art. But the Glass House, too, can be understood as a curatorial space, where art, architecture, landscape and people were brought together, recombined and displayed in ways that were influential. So I made a visit to explore that aspect of it, and one of the staff members, who was kind enough to take me around, mentioned that there was a director’s search.

FB: With the new job, will you have time to complete your book Installation Architecture: A Primer?

HU: Most of the research is done. There are about 40 featured architects, starting around 1970, with Coop Himmelblau, Ant Farm, Florian St. Florian, and moving on to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Lebbeus Woods, Juergen Mayer H., Alex Schweder, and others.

But it’s not just history. There’s an argument to the book, too, about understanding installation architecture as a way of producing an actual spatial experience at full scale. It’s a response to the problem of showing architecture in a museum or gallery.

FB: Do you think you may bring installation architecture to the Glass House grounds?

HU: Once I get settled in, we will begin a looking at the best ways to bring forward new work on the site—with an eye to what Philip and David [Whitney] did, including commissioning site-specific sculpture.

FB: Will you live in the Glass House?

No, the Glass House will remain a precious historical artifact. But I will be living on the property, in the house known as Colluna Farms. I can’t tell you how exciting it will be to occupy one of modern architecture’s hallowed grounds. 

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By Sarah Amelar

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A 1960s postcard shows a Newport Beach, California, building in its early heyday. Hot-pink letters across the facade spell out “The Stuft Shirt,” the original tenant, in a mod, Summer-of-Love font. But the soundtrack is clearly Sinatra, not rock; and this restaurant’s interior decor is more stuffed-shirt than hip, with Old World drapes and seriously nouveau-riche chandeliers. A succession of restaurants would eventually replace the Stuft Shirt—each more at odds than its predecessor with the structure’s underlying Modernist design.

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By late 2009, when Los Angeles architect Paul Davis began transforming the 8,100-square-foot interior into a new home for A’maree’s—an unusually laid-back high-fashion emporium—he found the once clean-lined spaces masquerading as a neo-Aztec-faux-Casablancan extravaganza. After the last restaurant, the discouraged owner, a wealthy real estate investor, left the place vacant for 13 years; maintaining the exterior, he resisted interested parties, awaiting tenants he trusted to value the original design.

With soaring arches, scalloped eaves, slender cruciform columns, and domed vaults, this 1961 confection by architects Ladd Kelsey is the sort of visually lightweight, exuberant architecture easily lumped together with kitsch Modernism of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the building’s undeniable period style, however, you’d be mistaken to write it off. Davis’s renovation has unmasked its essential grace and integrity of structure and materials—but with the clarity and rough-edged directness of a 20th/21st-century sensibility.

“A light-touch renovation, carried out in an art-space-loft-style-guerilla mode,” was how Davis pitched his approach to A’maree’s’ owners, three sisters whose unconventional style of retailing hip haute couture was pivotal. His idea was to selectively peel away layers and accretions, opening up gallery-like space, accentuating the building’s superb bones, views, and light. “Guerilla” meant retaining gritty vestiges from the building’s past.

Like the sisters, he envisioned creating “the furthest thing from a mall retail store.” Cofounded in 1976 by the owners’ mother, A’maree’s imparts the feeling of being at the home of friends, who share with you fashion, household objects, even cookies fresh from the oven. You’re in the inner sanctum; no space is off-limits. “The opposite of big-box commercialism of a Saks or Barneys,” says Dawn Klohs, one of the sisters. “With the Internet, so much is available to everyone. But this is about one-of-a-kind things, the relationship—and the experience.”

For the retail floor, Davis stripped the dining/bar area of applied ornament, fixtures, furnishings, and carpet, down to the cast-in-place concrete shell, and painted it pristine white. The result is dazzling, with 19-foot ceilings, harbor views through original floor-to-ceiling, arched windows (now with UV-filtering film), and the column-and-vault grid’s hypnotic, mosquelike rhythm.

Heightened transparency is evident even outside the entrance, the only part of the facade Davis altered. Reclaiming (and enhancing) the original spirit, he ditched the opaque, faux-Aztec portal in favor of frameless glass doors, outshining Ladd Kelsey’s utilitarian storefront glazing. Now, on approach, a crisp sequence of interior archways appears straight through to the water. But the building’s concrete floors remain exposed and scarred. Seashells plug larger ruts, and old drain holes are now glazed portholes to the bay below.

Davis deftly reinterpreted distinctions of front versus back-of-the-house, developing a striking yet well-edited juxtaposition, instead of overly refining the ex-restaurant-kitchen zone. Dispensing with the plenum, he exposed soaring vaults—a unifying rhythm that echoes the main space in a raw way—and a newly reduced “archaeology” of structural remnants, plumbing lines and ducts. In vault openings where cooking hoods once vented, he installed skylights above dressing rooms and a home-scaled kitchen, where customers can hang out “backstage.” Shoppers are also welcome to lounge on selling-floor sofas or at cashier-desk bar seating. The equally casual merchandising style mixes eclectic vitrines with artful clutter, including faux-worn sneakers ($500) in seemingly random piles on the floor.

Without touching columns or walls, Davis inserted fixed clothes racks, like giant “croquet wickets.” “We tried,” he says, “to introduce new elements, whether vents or lighting, rhythmically, rigorously, and systematically—without impinging on the building’s powerful repetition of pure form.” Modern, minimal, metal halide lamps now hang on center with the column grid. Davis salvaged a previous tenant’s bronze chandeliers, cleverly muting and modernizing them with white paint and exposed, industrial-hip fridge bulbs. The once gaudy “candelabras” suggest a metaphor for the whole transformation—retaining memory’s imprint while distilling latent Modernism to its essence. Most of the ingredients were already present, but now, nimbly extracted, they transcend the original architects’ ambitions and vision.

Sarah Amelar is a contributing editor to Architectural Record.

Architect:
Paul Davis Architects
12906 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90066
t 310.313.3705
f 310.313.0705

Location: Newport Beach, California

Completion Date: November 2010

Gross square footage: 8,100 sq. ft.

Cost: withheld

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The AIA’s Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) has selected seven communities to receive pro bono design and planning services.

By Paula Melton
This aricle originally appeared in GreenSource.com

Image courtesy Ailien Vuong

Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

Students work with the Regional UDAT team members on the Pratt City disaster response project in Alabama after tornadoes devastated the neighborhood.

Thanks to The American Institute of Architects’ Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) program, seven communities will receive pro bono design and planning services to help them in their quest for sustainability. The program has assisted more than 50 communities with development planning since 2005. Cities submit applications outlining the economic, environmental, and social challenges facing their neighborhoods. The SDAT projects on the boards for 2012 are:

• Revitalization of two historic African-American neighborhoods in Augusta, Georgia
• Balancing recreational development and preservation of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas
• Land-use assessment for the Sipaulovi village in the Hopi Nation in Arizona
• Environmental, social, and economic initiatives for the South Hadley Falls neighborhood of South Hadley, Massachusetts
• Economic development opportunities for the historic downtown core of Springfield, Illinois
• Urban and rural connectivity in the Stanwood/Camano Region of the state of Washington
• Community renewal in South Wenatchee, Washington

“We are particularly excited this year,” says Erin Simmons, director of design assistance at AIA, citing the geographical diversity as well as widely varying project types. “We’ve never had such a wide range of applicants. It’s going to be a good year.”

The SDAT program brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts—like urban designers, architects, and economic development specialists—to host intensive charrettes with members of the chosen communities, usually centering around an already-planned development project. Members of the team travel from outside the region—sometimes even from overseas, depending on the expertise needed, Simmons says—and provide their services pro bono. After meeting with the community over the course of several days, the team provides recommendations, framing the project in terms of sustainability and analyzing obstacles and opportunities that are likely to arise.

Recommendations hone in not only on environmental sustainability but also on economic growth and social equity. In the past, SDAT projects have focused on issues like balancing growth with flood mitigation, revitalizing downtown retail centers, and ensuring environmental justice in all neighborhoods.

“This is the public service outreach component of AIA,” Simmons explains. “We recognize that our members have unique abilities and talents” for helping communities become more livable and healthy, she adds. “[The program] ensures that we’re able to make a difference in those communities and help create great places to live.”

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By C. J. Hughes

Image by Guillaume Paturel/Courtesy Studio a+i

“Infinite Forest,” Studio a+i’s winning proposal for an AIDS memorial park in Manhattan’s West Village. Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

Jurors Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Arad. Click the image above to view additional images of the jury.

A design that calls for a grove of trees reflected infinitely by 12-foot-long mirrors was selected today for New York’s first large-scale AIDS memorial.

The winning proposal, from Studio a+i, a Brooklyn, N.Y. architecture firm, beat out 474 other entries in the AIDS Memorial Park competition. Hosted by Architectural Record, Architizer, and the AIDS Memorial Park organization, the competition challenged designers and non-designers to create a park for an unused triangular lot in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood.

The fenced-in site, which is next to the former St. Vincent’s Hospital—one of the first in the nation to offer HIV treatment—has 17,000 square feet on the street level, as well as 10,000 square feet below-grade, which the winning plan proposes to use as exhibition space. Connected by tunnels to St. Vincent’s, the site had been used as a loading dock as well as for storage of liquid oxygen tanks, until the hospital closed in 2010.

Unlike some other designs, which envisioned a sunken park there, Studio a+i’s design, titled “Infinite Forest,” treats the site as two distinct pieces.

The main piece is an above-ground park, which is ringed by 12-foot walls on all three sides with entrances at each corner. The sides that face inward, toward benches and a grove of 20 white birch trees, are reflective—an effect that could be achieved with highly-polished stainless steel, Studio a+i principals say. The mirrored walls are designed to create the appearance of boundless space inside the park.

The design has Chalkboard-like slate lining the sides of the walls facing Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and West 12th Streets. Visitors would be invited to write messages on them with chalk, for impromptu tributes. Notably absent are any statues, signs, or plaques commemorating AIDS victims.

“AIDS is not a war, nor a disease conquered,” the firm wrote in its proposal. “There are no definite dates or victims.”

For the chalkboard idea, Mateo Paiva, a firm principal, took inspiration from a fence around a lot across the street, which was adorned with makeshift memorials after September 11, and which today has rows of similarly decorated tiles. “People want a place to express their loss, their emotions, and feelings,” said Paiva, who founded Studio a+i with Lily Lim in 2004. The firm will receive $5,000 for the win.

The design includes some AIDS-related programming at the site. A lower level, reached by ramps and stairs in two of the walls, has an exhibition space, though details will be hammered out later. (Entrants merely had to submit a single 11-inch-by-17-inch presentation with 500 words of description for the competition.) An interior space tucked inside the Seventh Avenue wall houses a bookstore and a café. “We wanted to create a space for school kids to stumble upon, or somebody trying to take a break from work,” said Lim. “It has to be for everybody.”

The 13-member jury included Museum of Modern Art chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll, Diller Scofidio + Renfro partner Elizabeth Diller, and actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg. It was headed by Michael Arad, designer of the National September 11 Memorial.

The group also selected three runners up: “Forest of Memories” by Ooi Yin Mau of Malaysia, “Not Yet” by Rodrigo Zamora and Mike Robitz of Manhattan, and “The Village Red” by Jonathan Kurtz, Christopher Diehl, Katherine Ritzmann, Brant Miller, Mykie Hrusovski, and David Berlekamp of Cleveland.

For his part, Arad, who saw his own memorial design beset by criticism in the years after it was selected, said Studio a+i must be open to “conversation and collaboration” going forward, adding, “I have made it clear to them that I am happy to assist them.”

The park, which is slated to open in 2014, is to be paid for with donations as well as $10 million from the Rudin Organization, a developer, which is seeking to build a 450-unit condo complex across the street, at the former hospital.

That $800 million project, which has been dogged by controversy because it includes new towers inside an historic district, awaits final approval from the city, though it is expected to be granted in March.

Besides the park, the plan will refurbish the O’Toole Building, a 1963 Modernist edifice by Albert C. Ledner; it will become a 24-hour community health center.

Currently, there is only one AIDS memorial in the city, a 42-foot engraved stone bench in Hudson River Park completed in 2008. Yet Christopher Tepper, a co-founder of the AIDS Memorial Park Coalition, which organized the competition, said something high-profile was needed, as 100,000 New Yorkers have died from the disease in the past 30 years.

For Tepper, an urban planner, the best feature of the winning design is its mirrors, which will make a powerful point about the AIDS epidemic. “The reason it became a crisis is the real lack of acknowledgment of the problem,” he said. Reflecting the faces of people passing through the park could make them realize that “they are part of the problem, which is how real social change happens.”

More information: aidsmemorialpark.org

AIDS Memorial Park Competition Jury
Michael Arad, Designer of The National September 11 Memorial
Kurt Andersen, Novelist and Journalist
Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the MOMA
Kenneth Cole, Fashion Designer and Activist
Elizabeth Diller, Founding Partner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Whoopi Goldberg, Actress and Comedian
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem
Robert Hammond, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Friends of the High Line
Regan Hofmann, Editor in Chief of POZ.com
Brad Hoylman, Chair of Manhattan Community Board #2
Amy Sadao, Executive Director, Visual AIDS
Ken Smith, Landscape Architect
Suzanne Stephens, Deputy Editor, Architectural Record

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By Dante A. Ciampaglia

Photo © Valentin Alvarez

The new documentary is a “love letter” to one of the world’s best-known architects.

Foster designed the Millau Viaduct, a cable-stayed vehicular bridge, in southern France.

Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas’ documentary How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, currently playing in New York City, is a starry-eyed, unabashed love letter to one of the world’s leading starchitects. It’s also soulless hagiography.

With cold efficiency, the directors spend nearly 80 minutes sketching Lord Norman Foster’s life: his Manchester childhood, self-made-architect origins, and a few hardships (the death of his first wife, his firm’s near collapse after the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank project). But Foster’s successes are the primary concern of the film, which was produced by Elena Ochoa, the architect’s wife, for the Art Commissioners (U.K.) in association with Aiete Ariane Films (Spain). We’re zipped through nearly 30 Foster projects around the world and overwhelmed by the filmmakers’ awe of the aesthetic and functional wonder of his work, which often makes the film feel like architecture porn. We move in, out, and around facades and interiors of many of his projects. We see them from above and below. We scale wires and beams in extreme close-up, then linger just a little too long on recessed design features. It would be lewd if it weren’t so beautiful. Director of Photography Velentín Álvarez brilliantly captures these projects and how they work with and are independent of their environments, especially when exploring the Millau Viaduct, the Hearst Tower, and the Reichstag. Whatever emotion this film claims is wrenched from Álvarez’s cinematography.

But if you scratch the film’s surface, that’s all you find — surface. There’s virtually no objective criticism of Foster or his work in How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? Instead, we get unchecked adulation in the form of Deyan Sudjic’s narration (he’s the director of London’s Design Museum and the film’s writer), colleagues like Carl Abbott and Alain de Botton, artists like Anish Kapoor and Richard Serra, and Bono (because why not?). There’s never a hint that Foster’s work is anything but genius. This reaches its nadir when the film turns to his Masdar City project in Abu Dhabi, a zero-waste, carbon-neutral template for future cities. We only hear Foster extolling the plan’s virtues. A hint of skepticism cracks through the narration, but is quickly paved over with fawning. “Will Masdar City be the first carbon-neutral city in the world? We don’t know yet. If it works, it’s a huge achievement. If it fails, it’s a heroic failure.” This propagandistic attitude permeates the film, quashing all dissention and for debate about this or any other Foster project or, indeed, Foster himself.

Still, as primers go, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? is effective. The architecturally savvy likely won’t find many new insights. But, like a textbook, the film engages with Foster’s life and work just enough to encourage the curious newcomer to seek out more about his life and projects — especially the criticism.

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By David Sokol

Photo courtesy Spillis Candela DMJM

Miami Marine Stadium, an abandoned Modernist landmark designed in 1963 by then 27-year-old Cuban-American architect Hilario Candela.

In a video shot in 2010, Marine Stadium architect Hilario Candela and Miami historian and architect Allan Shulman discuss the structure.

Today, the Miami City Commission is expected to give a nonprofit group the green light to rehabilitate Miami Marine Stadium, an abandoned Modernist landmark designed in 1963 by then 27-year-old Cuban-American architect Hilario Candela. The city, which has owned and operated the stadium since it opened, shuttered the facility in 1992 due to damage from Hurricane Andrew.

The nonprofit group Friends of Miami Marine Stadium (FMMS) has been working for years to revive the building. In addition to getting approval from city commissioners to renovate the structure, the group has secured The Heat Group to run the 6,566-seat stadium once it’s restored—the result of a quiet outreach effort. The Heat Group operates the American Airlines Arena, where the Miami Heat play; company owner Micky Arison is managing general partner of the basketball team.

FMMS cofounder Don Worth says enlisting The Heat Group was a major coup. “We couldn’t pretend our little volunteer group would run it,” he explains. “We had a common vision for the stadium, and this is a perfect fit. They’re a homegrown company with international reach and with all the infrastructure in place.”

The stadium—originally built for powerboat racing—is located on the shore of the 860-acre barrier island Virginia Key in Biscayne Bay. The structure is made entirely of poured concrete and features a hyperbolic parabaloid roof that cantilevers dramatically toward the bay from eight columns. In June 2007, a master plan for Virginia Key recommended demolition of the stadium, spurring local preservationists to establish FMMS in February 2008. The following year the National Trust for Historic Places included the arena in its annual list of the “11 Most Endangered Places,” and in 2010, the World Monuments Fund selected the building for its biyearly “Watch List.”

The preservation efforts have paid off. In July 2010, Miami’s city commissioners approved a new master plan for the island conceived by Candela and FMMS cofounder Jorge Hernandez, with help from students at the University of Miami School of Architecture. The stadium is the centerpiece of the redevelopment scheme. The movement to restore the venue got another boost last year when a local architecture competition organizer, Dawntown, unveiled the winners of an ideas competition to design a new floating stage for the arena.

FMMS has taken full responsibility for the building’s resurrection. Today’s decision by the commission would give the group two years to develop a renovation plan, line up financing, and implement the plan. If successful, the group will then negotiate a long-term lease with municipal authorities. If unsuccessful, the city could decide not to grant the lease. Thanks to a county grant and tax credits for historic buildings, FMMS has already raised $12 million for the approximately $30 million project.

Worth believes the organization’s passion helped get The Heat Group to sign on as its operating partner. “We’ve tried to position Marine Stadium as a Sydney Opera House type of property, something that symbolizes a city,” he says. “The Heat understands the cachet.”

Update 1/26/12: The Miami City Commission did not vote as planned on the Miami Marine Stadium during today’s meeting. The issue was deferred to the commission’s February 9 meeting.

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Ellsworth Kelly has been collaborating with architects since the 1950s. His latest project with Peter Zellner turns an L.A. gallery into public art.

By Laura Raskin

Photo © Joshua White / courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

The Los Angeles Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood is a case study in minimalism, with an Ellsworth Kelly metal sculpture on the facade its only exterior detail.

A detail of Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall, originally installed in Philadelphia’s Penn Center Transportation Building, made the May 1957 cover of RECORD.

Photo © Jack Shear / courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

The artist at work.

When architect Peter Zellner first unveiled his design for the new Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, it was met with enthusiasm from the planning department and the mayor. But the city has strict design guidelines on the books: New buildings must have windows and architectural detail. The gallery was, well, an “ice cube,” says Zellner, and Marks was in uncharted territory, choosing to make his West Coast debut in the scruffy neighborhood between La Brea and Fairfax Avenues rather than the established art scene in Culver City.

But Zellner was able to skirt the guidelines with the addition of Ellsworth Kelly’s 40-foot-long, 5,000-pound, rectangular, black metal minimalist sculpture to the gallery’s facade; now the entire building is considered a treasured piece of public art. “When the Kelly went on, it really felt like it was complete,” said Zellner, founder of the Los Angeles–based firm ZELLNERPLUS. “Last week the building seemed naked to me.” Far from feeling protective of his ego or output, the architect describes his afternoon discussing the design with Kelly, “the last standing modern master in the United States,” as “one of the best moments of my life.” Matthew Marks represents Kelly, 88, and he asked the artist for a contribution to his new outpost.

Kelly is no stranger to collaborations or contributing site-specific works to important buildings. His painted aluminum wall sculpture for Renzo Piano’s 2009 addition to the Art Institute of Chicago and a wall sculpture in the lobby of Tadao Ando’s 2001 Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts building in St. Louis are just two of many such commissions. In fact, his very first public commission and architectural collaboration, Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957), made the May 1957 cover of Architectural Record. This project originated when lighting designer Richard Kelly (no relation) commissioned Kelly to create a sculpture for the restaurant in Philadelphia’s then-new Penn Center Transportation Building, but when the building’s architect Vincent Kling saw the design, he requested the sculpture for the lobby instead. Sculpture for a Large Wall was the result. RECORD wrote about the building and chose a detail of the 64-foot-long artwork made of anodized aluminum panels for the cover.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s: Kelly learned that the Transportation Building had been sold. On a visit, he was alarmed at the condition of the building and his creation. “I said, ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to try and get this back. They’re going to destroy it,’” says Kelly. He arranged for its removal, and Marks displayed it in his New York gallery in 1998. That same year, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder purchased Sculpture for a Large Wall and gave it to the Museum of Modern Art.

Speaking from his studio in Spencertown, New York, Kelly recalled looking intently at the model of Zellner’s Los Angeles gallery design and then having a “flash” of inspiration: “In my work I wait for these flashes.” He calls black and white the two “non-colors,” but guesses that of the 1,000 or so paintings he’s completed since 1949, a quarter of them have been black and white (about 50 were recently on display at the Haus der Kunst in Munich; the show will move to the Museum Wiesbaden in March). “It’s always been very important for me, black. It’s fundamental. It’s like the opposite of a shadow,” says Kelly. “If it was color [on the gallery] it would be too decorative for me.” Zellner likes that the black bar can be misinterpreted as signage.

The gallery facade evokes two of Kelly’s early works—a 1954 collage, Study for Black and White Panels, and a 1966 painting, Black Over White. “I’ve always wanted to design a building that doesn’t have a use,” says Kelly. “That’s probably a definition of sculpture.”

The Los Angeles Matthew Marks Gallery opened on January 19. Its inaugural show, Ellsworth Kelly: Los Angeles, runs through April 7, 2012, and includes six new two-panel paintings by the artist.

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A new documentary attempts to alter how we look at St. Louis’s infamous public housing project.

By Dante A. Ciampaglia

Photo courtesy State Historic Society of Missouri

The first Pruitt-Igoe building to be demolished was imploded in 1972. Click on the slide show button to view additional images.

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project seen before its demolition.

Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing development was destined for failure. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its Modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition—in a spectacular series of implosions—less than two decades later. In the popular narrative, bad public policy, bad architecture, and bad people doomed Pruitt-Igoe, and it became an emblem of failed social welfare projects across the country. But director Chad Freidrichs challenges that convenient and oversimplified assessment in his documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, opening in limited release January 20.

He makes a compelling case. Drawing heavily on archival footage, raw data, and historical reanalysis, the film reorients Pruitt-Igoe as the victim of institutional racism and post-war population changes in industrial cities, among other issues far more complex than poor people not appreciating nice things. But while Freidrichs opens a new vein for discussing Pruitt-Igoe, he doesn’t totally dispel the titular myth about it. There’s a passing mention of the project’s failure being one of Modernist planning, that such developments “created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime.” And of course there’s an invocation of Charles Jencks’ famous declaration that the death of Pruitt-Igoe was “the death of Modernism.” But Freidrichs never adequately addresses Pruitt-Igoe’s place in the history of urban design.

But even if The Pruitt-Igoe Myth falls short of its stated goal, it’s nevertheless exceptional. In an important act of preservation, Freidrichs captures the voices and memories of five former Pruitt-Igoe residents. They tell stories of jubilation when they’re assigned an 11th floor apartment (their “poorman’s penthouse”) and when they see rows upon rows of windows bejeweled with Christmas lights. They share horrific tales of siblings murdered and living in constant fear of who lurks in the shadows. They remember how the welfare office told them they couldn’t have a phone or a television, and how their husbands and fathers weren’t allowed to live with them.

Nearly 40 years after its destruction, the people interviewed for the film continue to wrestle with Pruitt-Igoe’s legacy and its place in their lives. They love it and hate it, but don’t resent it. Despite the piles of trash, mountains of drugs, and preponderance of crime, this was their home. For some, it was their first proper dwelling. They cared deeply about Pruitt-Igoe and still do, even in its current form—a largely overgrown lot roved by feral dogs. Pruitt-Igoe is fundamentally a part of them, and by sharing their memories they obliterate the part of the myth that says it was undone by its people.

Their stories are the kind being lost in the current incarnation of urban revival. As projects like Pruitt-Igoe—including Chicago’s recently demolished Cabrini-Green—are torn down and developers lust over the land under the rubble, the lives of displaced residents are ignored and forgotten. Indeed, with gentrification has come a whitewashing of a critical chapter of 20th-century American history. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is an attempt to reverse that. It correctly finds value in preserving this disappearing American experience on film and should serve as a prototype for similar efforts of cultural preservation.

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By Jenna M. McKnight and Tamar Wilner

Photo courtesy Brian Snelson/Wikipedia

In February, architects from around the globe will meet in Havana to discuss a master plan that aims to preserve the city’s rich cultural heritage.

For decades, Havana has charmed foreigners who visited the Caribbean city well-known for its sultry music, world-class cigars, and cacharros, the vintage American automobiles imported to the country prior to the 1959 revolution. The urban landscape is like few others: Located on Cuba’s northern coast, this city of 2.1 million people is endowed with a range of architectural styles, from Renaissance, Moorish, and Baroque to Neoclassical and Mid-Century modern. In 1982, UNESCO named Old Havana a World Heritage Site.

“Havana was not ruined by overdevelopment or the urban renewal programs of the 1960s,” says Julio César Pérez, a 54-year-old practicing architect in Havana who travels internationally to speak about Cuba. “We are proud of our city, our culture, our architectural heritage. We love our country, and we want the best for it.”

This devotion is what led Pérez to start developing a master plan for Havana a decade ago while a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Fearing a future building frenzy that could erode the city’s soul, Pérez conceived a multifaceted scheme that calls for historic preservation combined with sensitive new development. His plan emphasizes the retention of Havana’s polycentric layout, derived from a pedestrian system of interconnected squares. Water-front redevelopment would take its cue from local traditions and European cities, with low-rise buildings containing housing and ground-level cafés, galleries, and shops; meanwhile, the port zone would be transformed into a modern commercial and sports center. His plan also includes a new public transportation system, infrastructure upgrades, and an increase in public space. “It’s aimed at preserving our heritage while also creating new urban and economic opportunities,” says Pérez.

In 2006, Pérez completed his plan and registered it with the U.S. Copyright Office. The following year, with the help of colleagues and two organizations—the Council for European Urbanism and the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture Urbanism—he began hosting annual design charrettes in Havana, inviting architects and planners from around the globe, from Australia to Norway, to visit his beloved city and help him evolve the plan. Local architects also participate. “We don’t exclude anyone, even if they disagree with our ideas,” Pérez says. This year’s event takes place February 19–25.

John Pilling, a Boston architect and professor who has attended the charrettes since their inception, says he first visited Havana in 2001 and was immediately hooked. “It’s one of the most memorable cities in the world,” he explains, noting that beyond its historical buildings, Havana boasts remarkable works of modern architecture. Given recent changes in government policies, he says, “I have an abiding fear that, all of a sudden, Havana will get overwhelmed by oppressive high-rises.”

Indeed, the city seems poised for new construction. Since Raúl Castro (Fidel’s 80-year-old brother) became Cuba’s president in 2008, he has cautiously initiated economic reforms and private enterprise. Recently, Cuban citizens have gained the right to buy and sell houses and own certain types of businesses. There are talks of loosening travel restrictions for Cubans, too. Some foresee the country eventually following in the footsteps of nations like China, with its state-sponsored capitalism.

Havana’s harbor would be particularly attractive to foreign investors, says Jeffrey Heller, principal at San Francisco–based Heller Manus Architects. He has traveled to Cuba on four occasions and, in 2010, attended one of Pérez’s charrettes. “Everyone knows the day will come when the doors will open, and it’s going to be a land rush,” Heller says. His perception is partly based on his experience working in other communist nations. In China, for instance, he currently has 11 projects totaling 71 million square feet. A development boom in Cuba is imminent, he says: “The question is when and how fast, and how do you protect Havana in the process.” 

Only time will determine if the ideas of Pérez and others to protect Havana’s unique character will hold under inevitable development pressures. Pérez is sanguine about the prospects. “I’ve done what I considered was my duty,” he says of his master plan. “It is a work of love for my city.”

Laura Raskin contributed additional reporting to this story.

This story appears in the February 2012 issue of Architectural Record.

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