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Oct

2008

Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York

Andrew Blum's article describes Cellophane House, a 5-storey prefab going up in Manhattan at the corner of 53rd and Sixth.

www.wired.com/...st_prefab

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prefab wired_magazine andrew_blum architecture nyc

Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
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- But the strange subdivision next door to the museum suggests that prefab's time has finally come. The difference now is bits, not bolts. "Digital fabrication has become one of the key flash points for architects thinking about the way things are made," Bergdoll says as we tour the houses. On an upper floor of Cellophane, two riggers saw a crossbeam amid a flurry of sparks. (It was fabricated too long.) Nearby, a team of MIT students hammer at a cottage made of computer-cut plywood with grooves and joints ready to be fit together like puzzle pieces.

May

2008

Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast

Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of "90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres." The key aspect? They're all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.

If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.

www.wired.com/...pl_home

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andrew_blum wired_magazine prefab green_buildings green_technologies oxley_woods affordable_housing

northwest of London, British developers are pulling one off on a scale that Americans are still only mocking up in Photoshop. The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab's promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.
But the biggest advantage is improved build quality. The same precision manufacturing that makes an Ikea bookshelf easy to assemble makes the Oxley Woods homes nearly airtight. But that doesn't mean they aren't well-ventilated. Each abode has an environmentally responsible cherry on top: A self-contained unit called an EcoHat controls circulation with a tiny 10-watt fan, pushing out stale air and drawing in fresh stuff, which is then solar-heated to warm the house.

Mar

2008

"Saint Brad" by Andrew Blum (Metropolis Magazine)

As I don't follow celebrity news, I had no idea that Brad Pitt is a "design junkie" or a pivotal mover-and-shaker in the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. (I barely know that Pitt and another actress -- Angelina Jolie? -- are linked/married/ or something... d'oh... )

Andrew Blum's article shines a good light (good as in "kind" and "illuminating") on Pitt's efforts, as embodied in the non-profit he started called "Make It Right" (MIR). And it does an excellent job educating me on the bizarre, yet potentially wonderful, nexus of pop culture/ money/ starchitecture momentum that Pitt has engineered.

The list of star architects makes my jaw drop; Blum discusses their efforts, and doesn't hesitate to poiint out where some of them go wrong (and others get it right). As Blum puts it, "If Pitt can pull this off, he will have transformed a swath of the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood symbolic of everything rotten in America, into one of the world’s most design-intensive sustainable communities."

The article is well-illustrated (Blum's blog doesn't have the illustrations, but this link to Metropolis Magazine does).

www.metropolismag.com/...story.php

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andrew_blum architecture brad_pitt make_it_right_project metropolis_magazine new_orleans rebuilding urbanplanning

Pitt’s new nonprofit, Make It Right, wants to help them “get a house” by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. The catch was that they had to choose one of the sustainable designs by 13 different architects—an amazing list that included Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban, and Kieran Timberlake.
Are you bringing these architects here, I asked, because you enjoy working with them? “That’s one of the benefits certainly, but it’s not the driving factor.” So why do it? Why bring not just architects here but some of the world’s best? “I’ll tell you why,” Pitt said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. “Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice.


So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.”
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- Since when do movie stars have a better sense of architecture’s possibility than most architects? Post-Katrina New Orleans—like post-9/11 Ground Zero—was supposed to be a moment when architecture would prove its relevance. Instead, architects and planners came in like the cavalry, full of expert opinions about what New Orleans should look like and where it should (or more to the point, shouldn’t) be rebuilt. The result was that rather than providing houses, they seemed—in the name of good planning—to be taking them away.
- Architecture has always had trouble connecting with the masses. There’s that famous, perhaps apocryphal, statistic—architects design two percent of American homes—and the bald fact of the contemporary American landscape, with its big-box stores, chain restaurants, and bland condominiums.
- With Make It Right, Pitt—founding a new organization this time, not just being a spokesperson—has massively multiplied Global Green’s effort, setting an initial goal of building 150 houses. Architecturally, it’s equally ambitious, with 13 different designs offered for each homeowner to choose from. All were encourged to include sustainable features like solar panels and rainwater collectors, and they’ll be safe from future flooding—raised up off the ground, with escape hatches to the roof and waterproof safes for valuables. Whenever possible, they’ll use Cradle to Cradle–certified materials (although early talk of the houses themselves being certified hasn’t worked out).
- If Pitt can pull this off, he will have transformed a swath of the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood symbolic of everything rotten in America, into one of the world’s most design-intensive sustainable communities. Modeling it after the Case Study Houses, Pitt wants Make It Right’s architecture program to raise the bar for “answering a new set of challenges,” as he puts it. “It can be such a proving ground for so many things. It’s ready for the next evolution. We can actually advance the discussion and practice of intelligent design—and I’m not talking about creationism.”
- The list of 13 had been assembled by William McDonough + Partners and Graft, the L.A.-based firm that serves as something like Pitt’s in-house architecture wing.
- “We didn’t want somebody who said, ‘I understand that the means of the homeowners are so modest that the design has to be modest,’” McDonough said. “We didn’t want modest designs—we didn’t ask for immodesty either.”
- On the set of the new David Fincher movie in New Orleans last winter, Pitt found himself standing in front of a bright-pink canvas house, meant to be digitally replaced in postproduction with computer-generated images. He called Graft’s L.A. office with an idea: What if we filled a few blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward with these houses as a symbol of what’s still missing? They could pick up the roofs and scatter them around, as if by the storm, then reassemble them as donations for each house arrived. In the meantime, no one could look at these houses and think life here had returned to normal. McDonough, no stranger to big ideas himself, is in awe of Pitt’s sense of possibility: “Who thinks like that?”
- Yet there’s the paradox: this isn’t only about the Lower Ninth. The media circus was the point. Make It Right may be about helping a handful of families get a house, but it’s also about calling attention to the Gulf Coast.
- These 13 houses are meant not only to shelter but to communicate.
- There were cringe-worthy moments when one architect or another slipped into the incomprehensible lingua franca of high design. Shigeru Ban—famed designer of elegant disaster shelters—sent a young guy from his New York office who gave a presentation so tone-deaf it would have embarrassed a first-year architecture student. Ban’s rendering, on display later in a shipping container turned into a gallery, didn’t help: on the house’s front porch was a white man in khakis.
- “I don’t want any of the national people to leave here without learning at least one word of the local language,” Concordia’s Bingler said in his light Louisiana drawl during the press conference. “It’s called ‘Lagniappe.’ It means ‘a little something extra.’” (“For free!” the woman behind me shouted.) “The citizens of the Lower Ninth Ward have been accustomed to getting less than regular, so this is an opportunity to go beyond the normal. Not just the regular stuff—something a little bit extra on top of the regular stuff.”
- The pitch was right on, but it highlighted the challenge of the situation: the people in the Lower Ninth Ward need perfect houses to come home to, but the ambition is also for these homes to be prototypes for the near future—and look good on the Today Show. “We’ve got the devil on one side and the deep blue sea on the other,” Bingler said later. “If we design for the community, we’re going to be in jeopardy of not pleasing our peers, but if we design for the architectural press, we’re going to be in jeopardy of not reaching the community.”
- People found the design by MVRDV, from Rotterdam, offensive. It takes a shotgun house and breaks it in the middle, sending the ends up into the air to form a V. (The floors stay level.) It’s startling and original: “They really put forth an idea to think bold, to be grand in our ideas, not to be caged-in in any way,” Pitt said. But with a car parked underneath, the design looks like the aftermath of the storm, with houses tossed on top of cars. Winy Maas, principal at MVRDV, made no apologies. “People said, ‘Is this a joke?’ And we said, ‘No, it’s serious.’ Because it takes Katrina even more seriously and monumentalizes itself, and it shows that it was there.” No doubt, MVRDV knows how to design functional housing. They just didn’t think that was the point here. “People say, ‘Why would Brad want to do this?’” Maas said just before catching his flight back to the Netherlands. “It’s to address a wider perspective, isn’t it? And then maybe our design embodies that. Provocation is good because it pushes people. We need architectural Michael Moores.”
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-03-23
    ...well, I don't think Maas is doing himself any favours by coming across as what looks like an arrogant design god. Why Katrina should be "monumentalized" in domestic architecture is beyond me.
  Add Sticky Note
- It’s hard to imagine that any of the residents will choose to build MVRDV’s house as their own. And if nobody chooses it, has it failed? At what? “If somebody designs a building that people don’t want to live in, then I would argue that it’s sculpture,” Bingler said. “And maybe that gets to the point about architecture’s role in the twenty-first century: Are we going to continue to create monuments to ourselves, or are we going to start listening? Are we going to develop a different kind of respect?”