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Monthly Archives: December 2008

Defacing public monuments—different spirits different times

December 30, 2008
Detroit, urban
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fist-viAt the symbolic center of Detroit, near its origins along the Detroit River, are three figurative sculptures in a relatively tight triangulated cluster and visible to and from each other.

They are The Spirit of Detroit (Marshall Fredericks, 1958), Passo di Danza (Giacomo Manzu, 1961), and Monument to Joe Louis (Robert Graham, 1987). The death yesterday of Robert Graham made me go back to a couple of stories about these monuments.

spirit_of_detroit_150px2726433729_3e288de3ce_150joe-louis-fist_150

joe-louis_2196_150Graham’s (gloveless) sculpture has been controversial. Commemorating Joe Louis, it is culturally celebratory. Placed at the symbolic center of the city, it has been culturally divisive. From its origins, funded principally by Sports Illustrated, it evoked challenges about racial messaging that have been at the core of the city’s collapse for the past generation or more.

I cannot remember where, in what privileged context, I had a view of a maquette, Graham’s small scale study model, of  the monument. I was struck by the positioning of the fist. The finished sculpture is a powerful punch, and a horizontal leveling of a salute. The maquette had the fist vertical, rotated 90 degrees, akin to a typical fighter’s stance and evocative of the classic Joe Louis photos.

I found that slight rotation—from the vertical fist to the horizontal fist—to be surprisingly powerful in its evocation of emotion and message, and perhaps at the heart of what others felt. I’d be interested to know if Graham spoke of this difference, and if others, with access to the studies, commented on it.

Graham’s sculpture came late in the reign of Coleman Young, mayor of the city from 1974 to 1993.  His election message referencing the 8 Mile Road northern border of the city seemed to be a catalyst for the miserable 20-year history of progressive segregation of the city. In this regard, the fist seemed also to represent the combative nature of the mayor.

More recently, and I suppose inevitably, a couple of vandals white-washed the black-bronze fist, bringing forward inappropriately derived but, in places, apparently perceived as authentic resentments.

This legacy, standing at the point of welcome to the city, was in contrast to the representation, individually and collectively, of the other two figures in the composition.

The Spirit of Detroit stood at the entrance to the city hall, or what had initially been built as the City-County Building. The name represented a more regional approach to governance in its day, not to be revived, and then only feebly, until Dennis Archer succeeded Coleman Young.

The Passo di Danza stands at the entrance to a building designed by Minoru Yamasaki, initially for the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company. Its a representation of a step in a basllerina’s dance, an elegant, almost classic, study of form and subject.

I remember the surprise, and delight, of the city on an early Spring morning, maybe April Fool’s Day. Someone had expressed what we all might have suppressed. Using paint to simulate the probable marks of an animated bronze figure, he stenciled green footprints in the street from the male Spirit of Detroit across Woodward Avenue to the female Passo di Danza and back again!

Imagine that midnight tryst!

Two marks, two generations, two spirits.

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Recession Could Bring Big Change in What Consumers Demand in New Homes

December 28, 2008
architecture, Design strategy
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manor_house_betliarSo, this is really a very relevant and fascinating topic—the change in choice of house typology as a result of the change in the economy.

But…

“There is actually a pattern of building out there that is called manor houses,” she said. From the front, they look like traditional houses, with a single entry. But the structure may incorporate two to five homes within, with separate entries tucked away on the sides of the building. “It’s been found to be a way of putting affordable housing into an area,” McAlester said.

But wait a minute—”manor houses” as a new typology? Please give me specific examples.

Language as architecture

December 28, 2008
architecture
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41wmdtm5ydl_sl500_aa240_In today’s NYT Book Review, Justin Davidson writes that Huxtable “demonstrates that she has always pursued her mission with reason, elegance and wisdom. Huxtable’s work remains the gold standard of criticism — and not just the architectural variety — because she brings to the job a rare combination of aesthetic certitude and roving curiosity.”

In an earlier post, I was struck by the power, now so rarely experienced, of the language of Ada Louise Huxtable.



GM’s iPhone?

December 28, 2008
Design strategy, Strategy design
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skateboard_00034fe5-ba99-1d80-90fb809ec5880000_1Finding a discussion today between Steve Portigal and Chirag Mehta around the subject of designing to requirements or not, I was impressed with Chirag’s framework suggestion to “Look beyond the problem space and preserve ambiguity.”

I’ve been thinking lately about new concepts for retail design, and specifically  in the automotive domain. Chirag’s admonition had aligned with some coincidental wandering around the Apple App Store as a model. I was imagining a place where the conventions of brand (GM, but also Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, etc.) and predefined models and packages disappeared, and customization to “my brand” was the norm.

The concept seemed so attractive, and could affect not only the vehicle design space, but the retail space as well. It seems a concept that could provide new brand image and vitality, and also energize the customer base.

Then I recalled that it’d all been done before. Well, in the vehicle space, at least. Somewhere between concept and execution—that typical source of disappointment in this industry—was a future lost by GM but an exploding market found by Apple.

In 2002, GM took a concept, affectionately and compellingly known as the “skateboard,” to the North American International Auto Show and other places. The concept involved a thin 20-year chassis with all the propulsion technology embedded in it, and a fully customizable style frame including interior and exterior features and appearance.

Imagine this platform as an iPhone, and an extraordinarily robust industry seems to unfold. The automotive App Store—imagine even the tonal difference from “car dealership”—becomes a place of innovation where suppliers, using the parameters of the core skateboard platform, design, deliver and install innovative components pitched to the different needs, and styles, of a diverse constituency.

Five years after GM introduced the skateboard concept, Apple introduced the iPhone and, about a year later, the App Store. GM wanted the profits from SUV’s and as a result needs a bailout from the government. Apple got the profits from thin, lean, customizable, open systems, and everybody involved seems to be doing fine.

If Apple were to ask people what they would want in their phones people might have said they want a smart phone with a better stylus and they do not expect their phone to tell them where they should eat their dinner tonight. We wouldn’t have had a multimodal interface on iPhone that could run Urbanspoon.

Embracing and preserving the ambiguity as long as you can during the design process would help unearth some of the behaviors that could lead to great design. Ambiguity does make people uncomfortable but recognizing that fact that “making stuff” is fundamentally a generative process allows people to diverge and preserve ambiguity before they converge. (Chirag Mehta)

Cartable culture

December 27, 2008
architecture, Design strategy, Detroit, Strategy design
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As New York real estate dynamics create new social dynamics in neighborhoods, Glenn Collins, writing in the NYT today, asks, “Is charisma cartable?“

Bar 6, Buenos Aires

Bar 6, Buenos Aires

from Argentina's Travel Guide

from Argentina's Travel Guide

“But if drinking and dining have always been a movable feast in New York, is charisma cartable? Can the character of everything from venerable pubs to palatial eateries migrate with their names and owners? This portability issue has gained new urgency in a season of economic disarray, when property owners are less willing to extend the leases of even the most beloved old-timers.”


Favorite neighborhood bars, losing leases, relocate and hope that the vestiges of place, transported and reinstalled, will draw familiar customers and the character and culture of their original locations. He writes that, “Loyalists can be fickle, and geography perilous.”

He references a consultant who says, “you want to transfer a core set of values, so people will make an emotional connection and keep coming. But there’s a need for reinvention as well — new people must sense that this is the place to be.”

In the more barren urban landscape of Detroit, I often wonder if culture is cartable. Or maybe my question and challenge is, can form create culture?

In a recent trip to Argentina, we found a host of great places in Buenos Aires. Bar 6 was one of them.

The interior was a delight. Under an arching wooden canopy with an angular slice of sunlight  were a variety of settings supporting a variety of social opportunities. Much more than a bar, Bar 6 seemed to embody the dynamics of the entire neighborhood.

At mid-day, it was lunch that brought the people. In the early afternoon, the place seemed to catch a diverse clientele, both local and global, enjoying a break from the shopping in the Palermo neighborhood, or just stopping by because it was the local place to be. In the late afternoon, the moms took over the place, strollering in the infants, meeting the schoolkids, chatting with the current generation of young mothers.  By early evening, the commuting dads seemed to arrive to join their wives and kids for a cocktail to end the day and set a stage for dinner. Late in the evening, the hipsters arrived, and the place took on an extraordinarily different dynamic. Throughout it all there was a great sound track, and each of the formal settings–bar stool, couch, club chair, cafe table–supported each constituency.

Was this urban culture at work? Or was this form at work?

I yearn for the replication of this form in Detroit. I yearn for the places and spaces that support a diversity of generations, lifestyles, purposes and activities. I live, instead, in a place of social zoning—coffee places, family places, dinner places, places to explicitly articulate membership in a specific economic class/strata, cruising places, etc.

No place (I know of)  in Detroit is lit except from the narrow, frontal dimension. No place in Detroit offers anything than dark. No place in Detroit offers a diversity of settings. No place in Detroit offers appropriateness for every time of day and every generation. No place in Detroit accommodates more than one race, one generation, one lifestyle, one class, one. Nothing about Detroit is about community, only about conflict.

Does the embedded culture support the design of the place? Can design of place transform a culture? Can design, regardless of place, support community? Who designs Detoit, anyway? Who pays them, and for what? (Sorry!)

Thoroughly modern

December 27, 2008
Detroit, Strategy design
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From the Detroit Free Press

From the Detroit Free Press

In an excellent post on his blog, Landscape + Urbanism, Jason King recalls his work with an AIA SDAT recently addressing this recurring theme in these posts on the “Detroit dilemma.”

The initial report of the team, continuing themes from the 1994 Mayor’s Land Use Task Force, is worth a review. It’s available on the AIA web site.

"We hope for better things...it will arise from the ashes"

Detroit's motto: "We hope for better things...it will arise from the ashes"

A pothole in Obama’s stimulus plan?

December 26, 2008
Detroit, Strategy design
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mser

I have a feeling that this type of post is emerging in many places across the country—expressions of deep concern over the “use it or lose it” provision of Obama’s economic stimulus plan that seems to take out all of the greening of America vision and potential for change that seemed to be at the core of the plan as it was initially discussed.

Mayors and governors have brought forth lists of projects seeking funding under the plan announced by Obama in early December. My understanding of the plan, and my hope for all of us, was what seemed to be the broadening of the term, infrastructure, with a list of focus areas including energy efficient public buildings, renovated and connected schools, broadband extensions and a major thrust in medical technology development.

Mr. Obama’s remarks showcased his ambition to expand the definition of traditional work programs for the middle class, like infrastructure projects to repair roads and bridges, to include new-era jobs in technology and so-called green jobs that reduce energy use and global warming emissions. “We need action — and action now,” Mr. Obama said in an address broadcast Saturday morning on radio and YouTube. (NYT)

Indeed, beyond his outline in his address, the program known as the Obama-Biden Plan for economic recovery, there is much that speaks to a future of, and derived from, a focus on sustainable approaches to development.

However, in a provision of the plan meant to encourage speed of response and of recovery, the President-Elect proposed a use-it-or-lose-it condition. States and cities, now scrambling to develop “shovel-ready” projects, are demonstrating that there has been no vision in their thinking and no green in their planning.

The Unites States Conference of Mayors has proposed a “Main Street Economic Recovery Plan” plan that pushes the stimulus to $180 billion. In its top-ten list of priorities, their stimulus for green jobs amounts to little more than 5% and schools modernization little more than 8% of the total. Most of the rest can be considered to be buried in concrete (road construction) or going down the sewer (water and wastewater projects).

My own state and city, the home of the collapsing auto company, where we’ve wished for a leadership to a transformed economy for decades, seems still unable to get it. Detroit’s long list in the Conference of Mayor’s recommendations totals almost a billion dollars (a desperate city and less than one-half of one percent of the country’s urban vision???).

Almost every project on the list supports streets and bridges, places where graft seems to find a home and certainly places where no vestige of a new-era economy, a knowledge economy, or a future can be found. I can’t find a mention of “green,” or “sustainable,” or “environment,” and under “energy” I find things like remote meter reading. The contempt heaped on the automobile industry (Tom Friedman calls it a “giant wealth-destruction machine”) in Congress seems extensible to the political and civic leadership as well.

I deeply hope that “use-it-or-lose-it” will have added filters of vision, responsibility, and sustainability. I find myself in the same anxiety as Tom Friedman. “If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.”

Cerberus, Not Chrysler, Owns Firm’s Headquarters

December 23, 2008
Design strategy, Strategy design
1 Comment
Photo from WSJ.com

Photo from WSJ.com

For about a decade, I was the principal programmer and lead designer of the Chrysler Technology Center in Auburn Hills, a building that is now a factor in the sale of the corporation as the American car industry bailout take place.

As programmer, I lead a team of architects and engineers in the identification and definition of the technical—space and systems—requirements for the organization to do its job in its rejuvenation. As designer, I coordinated with a team of more than 100 architects and engineers to give shape to the places and spaces in which Chrysler’s designers, engineers and technicians would transform their company, and the industry, at the end of the century.

There are so many interesting stories about that heady time, when Chrysler was emerging from bankruptcy with a big government guaranteed loan, and leaving the dregs of older industry in Highland Park, emerging as a powerhouse of innovation and productivity in the American industry.

Here are a couple stories, roughly recalled. There is much more to each of these stories, in the sense of how architecture and planning enables the work of the organization, but I offer these short versions in context.

Build it and they will come

When you consider the early days of this project—designing and constructing the largest building in the world—you might also consider the technology of the time, or its absence. I think we may have just then been beginning, in darkened rooms, using the earliest generations of CAD programs. There was no such thing as a laptop or notebook computer. If there were mobile phones, we may have called them car phones, and they were, effectively, a briefcase with a conventional full-size hand set and a big and heavy battery…but these were extremely rare. The fax machine was the instrument of “instant” communications.

I began my days heading into the office to check the faxes that morning. The CM, on behalf of Chrysler, published a list of scheduled meetings by fax to all the firms involved in the project. What a marvelous communications and management device! I’d check the subjects of meetings to determine those that I or others who worked with me might contribute to, and then made the mad dash about 20 miles away to the construction building to meet, present designs, debate values, plan strategies, etc. Back in my office at noon, I’d check the fax again to determine which meetings I’d have to head out to again in the afternoon.

In those days, a meeting was attended by at least 30 people from different design and consulting organizations, all attempting to catch up on the subject, the ongoing construction, the financial status, the latest concepts for engineering and production.

I remember the delight of the optimism of those days. The building concept—a cross of four wings of engineering offices and labs—allowed a construction strategy of phased development. Each meeting involved some element of challenge to the construction of the next wing —why should this be built? Each meeting, however, had a Chrysler executive proclaiming that if they built it, they would find a use for it. So design and construction moved progressively from 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 million square feet.

At one point we did a short study to answer the question of “how big is too big?” We had planned fo about 5,000 people on site, but imagined, if I recall correctly, the potential of 10,000.

What do we do with it if they don’t come?

At the core of the WSJ article is the potential reuse of the facility if Chrysler is sold or folds. Early in the project, we helped prepare data for scenarios for the potential re-use of the facility of Chrysler were to go under at that time, the late 80′s.

One key meeting took place down in Boca Raton where Chrysler execs, including Lee Iacocca, met to plan for the sustainability of the company, and to consider alternatives for the ongoing plans.

In the brainstorming that took place before, and during, the event, were considerations of its use as a shopping mall, community college, and other uses. I recall that this may have fed considerations by Deutsche Bank at the time for their potential  role as principal financier/owner of the facility. I wonder of these are now part of the considerations for the future of the facility in the bailout, or the once-rumored merge with GM?

Decision making on the tower

The WSJ article incorrectly describes the complex as two towers. It is actually composed of more than 3.5 million square feet of a low-rise, four story building, and a connected 13-story headquarters tower with a low-rise amenities wing. This differential typology was a significant factor in the evolution of the master plan for the site.

The headquarters was a late addition to the program. Chrysler had bought 500 acres for the main complex. They had at one time had an option for 500 acres more, across Galloway Creek, on otherwise adjacent property. We had begun to imagine headquarters there, remembering Chrysler as a more diverse company (finance, missiles, mass transit, etc.) and more than just an auto company, and therefore with a headquarters appropriately separate from the automotive technology center.

When this was not to be, we began to study alternative planning. We were influenced by two key ideas from two key corporate leaders. Bob Eaton, then CEO, wanted a headquarters undifferentiated from the technology center, reflecting a belief that corporate leadership was just another member of the team. Bob Lutz,  the legendary product leader and with a tenure at Chrysler before his move to GM,, argued for a change in the “topography” of the site, and for a headquarters that had a form different than the “plant” typology then under construction.

I designed a 20-story cylindrical headquarters for Lutz. I designed an SOM-inspired, low-rise, courtyard-studded complex for Eaton.

The facilities leadership was concerned. “How tall was GM headquarters?” they asked. Thirteen stories. “How tall was Ford headquarters?” they asked. Thirteen stories. “Design a thirteen-story headquarters!” they demanded.

I presented the options to the Chrysler Executive Committee on a huge model of the 500-acre complex. After my presentation, Bob Eaton picked up the 4-story insert and placed it on the model and explained his concept of team. Then Bob Lutz placed his 20-story insert on the model and talked about the future of the company and the importance of landmark. After some back and forth between them, Eaton pulled up the 13-story insert, placed in on the model, and said, “Then that’s it!” and everybody immediately turned and left the room.

That generated the picture that leads off the WSJ article.

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