Generally speaking, architects are notorious for a bewildering list of shortcomings. One of our favorite complaints involves the exasperating, browser-crashing websites that represent these alleged forerunners of design. But perhaps the more pertinent shortfall of the industry is the inability of many architects to articulate their ideas in writing. This was a topic taken up by Knute Berger, a columnist for Crosscut and a Seattle native who had some pointed remarks about the recent proposals for the redesign of Seattle’s waterfront.

The op-ed—entitled ‘Why don’t architects speak English?’—criticizes the plans, all of which were submitted for the The Howard S. Wright Design Ideas Competition for Public Space. The most notable of the finalists, a project by PRAUD called the Seattle Jelly Bean, proposes a zeppelin-like float that would hover over the waterfront and control the local climate below it. Berger was not amused.

“There’s a whole lot of visioning, revisioning, and re-revisioning going on,” he says. Interestingly, Berger blames the very devices used by architects to woo the public—the farfetched, computer-generated rendering: “Architects are now fond of using computer images that often turn schemes into abstractions that fail to give any feel for what’s going to be on the ground. There are often too many cubes, domes, blocks, trapezoids, and lozenges…And creative shapes often get lost in translation.” Aside from being too abstract, the designs mask their illegibility with “happy images of computer-generated Seattleites, frolicking in new waterfront public spaces…the sky is too blue, the vegetation isn’t right…and what are people doing when it rains, or during the work day?”

And this is when Berger begins to pick apart the text supporting the designs, block-quoting entire paragraphs from the proposals and adding acerbic commentary like a teacher reading a blatantly apathetic final paper, itching to cover it in red ink. The roundabout phrasing, the strings of buzz words (catalyzing, dematerializing, creating dialogues, etc.), are met with Berger’s unending supply of rhetorical questions.

True, architects have a tendency to pepper their sentences with theoretical jargon, but that’s just one aspect of the problem. The written “gobbledygook,” or “academia-infested code,” that architects often use to explain their designs are reflective of a larger issue that Berger touches upon earlier in his article: “the waterfront re-do suffers from goals that are far too general to mean much, and details that are far too small or undetermined to give us lay people specifics.” In other words, many proposals today fail to express an idea that can be scaled up to the big picture and back down to the small details. Instead, the ideas hover safely in the realm of the abstract, unable to truly engage with site and context, which is the real challenge of architecture. How can that be fixed? To start, Berger has a suggestion for a better Seattle Jelly Bean: a giant floating coffee bean.

[All images courtesy the architects]

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Pruitt-Igoe falls.

Architecture has been getting a bit of a bad rap in the media as of late, with its questionable culture of artistic martyrdom beginning in architecture school and continuing into a notoriously insular and hierarchical professional world plagued by an almost 14% unemployment rate. Scott Timberg’s resounding thoughts on “The Architecture Meltdown” became one of the more poignant summations of this moment in architecture, lamenting the demise of the lofty practice.

There have been different takes on this grim revelation; some have proclaimed the very death of the architectural profession, and some see the hard-hitting recession as part of a boom and bust cycle, comparing it to recessions of yore, when talented architects had to essentially lay low, cull the herd, and then come back with a vengeance, marked by the recent waxing and waning of ‘starchitecture.’ Writer John Cary revealed a more optimistic response, proposing that now is the time when architects can rethink the profession and reorient it away from its preoccupation with private interests and towards its original notion of public service. Read on.

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Photo: The New York Times

Last Friday, New York Times architectural critic Michael Kimmelman laid down some frightening statistics about American parking lots: not only are there possibly as many as 2 billion parking spaces from sea to shining sea, but the parking lot, that paved desert for inert cars, has become what M.I.T. urban planning professor Eran Ben-Joseph calls “the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment,” occupying over 3,500 square miles of land within the country and providing an estimated eight parking spots for every car.

America, how did we let ourselves go like this? How did Lewis Mumford’s premonitions go completely unheeded, and how can we put an end to these asphalt facilitators of urban blight? Unwilling to despair, Kimmelman asks us to contemplate new ways of imagining the parking lot, including ways to consider the parking lot as a serious architectural entity. His heroes: Brooklyn firm Interboro Partners.

Read on.

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Der Spiegel’s newly built HQ in HafenCity, built by Danish office Henning Larsen, where the interview took place.

Rem Koolhaas gives interviews like a star quarterback: flippantly and often, breathless even in print. These interviews must be an unremarkable part the Dutch architect’s daily life, necessitated by the ever-churning production machine of his multi-office firm, and the endless stream of books, exhibitions, and talks. Koolaas’ newest book, a tome written with Hans Ulrich Obrist on the Metabolists, was the pretext to an unusually candid interview published yesterday in Der Spiegel.

Continue.

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Edushi interactive city map.

The TED Prize is a yearly award that honors individuals from TED’s universe of visionaries, challenging them to use a $100,000 honorarium to develop a “single wish to change the world.”  In past years, those honorees have included Cameron Sinclair and Bill Clinton, who wished for “a community that actively embraces open-source design to generate innovative and sustainable living” and “a better future for Rwanda by assisting my foundation,” respectively.

Yet after seven years and seventeen honorees, the TED Foundation is taking the prize in a different direction. This year, a single idea will be pursued by a group of experts, ultimately resulting in an collaborative initiative. That single idea, for 2012, will be The City 2.0, a loosely defined concept dealing with “the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.” TED’s team of experts will spend the next twelve months developing a compelling “one wish,” and they’re petitioning for perspective and opinions from all over the globe. The Prize, then,  will function as “seed money” for the resulting global initiative, rather that a no-strings-attached prize to fund a single individual’s effort.

It’s a compelling move, one that indicates the increasing frequency with which popular urbanism is addressed in the broader cultural conversation. What remains to be seen, of course, is how the as-of-yet-unannounced ”panel of experts” chooses to define a wish for the global city – and how to spend the money. Here’s to hoping that the foremost technicians of urban policy and design will avoid a “design by committee”-style camel.

Bonnie Bassler speaks in 2009. Via.

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Hadid’s Performing Arts Center on Saadiyat Island; Detail from Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s Landform Building. Via Design Observer.

Go check out David Heymann’s piece on Design Observer today. It’s a fantastic critique of landscape-as-architecture, a trope that’s been employed as a rationalization tool by architects ranging from Zaha Hadid to Glenn Murcutt.

Heymann says the logic that informs many of these beautiful buildings (“landscape is good, buildings are landscape, so buildings are good”) is ultimately farcical: all buildings that impose on the earth are implicitly aggressive. We only invoke poeticisms like “phenomenology” and “regionalism” to deal with the cognitive dissonance between the architect’s job (building things) and the architect’s will to do good by the natural world. ”Landscape is our sex,” says Heymann, and architects use it as a crutch in the same way advertisers depend on sex to sell. Read on.

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