Prefab polemics

Having so enjoyed the article by John Pavlus at Co.Design on the Sikorsky prize, I sampled a little bit more of their current offering.  It is so refreshing to read a zine with issues based long form writing instead of snappy, poorly edited infomercial blogs.

Where the article on the Sikorsky prize discusses profound principles of design process, This Prefab Building Is A First For New York goes out of its way to rehearse the history of prefabricated residential construction. Nodding to its nascent context in early modernism, author Sammy Medina and architect Peter Gluck explain the relative paucity of projects actually executed in terms of the flight from the centres of American cities in the 1960s.

“The world at the time was suburbanized and suburbanizing, and no suburban communities wanted low-cost housing," Gluck tells Co.Design. "So the means were there to build, but the desire was not." He pauses to rephrase the distinction: "The desire was there on a political level, but not on the market level.”

The Stack, a seven-story, mid-cost apartment complex in upper Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, is the first prefabricated residential project ever undertaken in the city.  Put together in four weeks from 4m wide modules prefabricated in a Pennsylvania factory, the design is said to offer a considerable internal flexibility of space.  But the architects have gone out of their way to emphasize the pixelation of the dominant facade that results from the form of construction.

A little of the technical detail of the construction is most easily obtained from the video on the architects' web site, but the main emphasis of both the article and the longer video on Co.Design is actually on the impact on possible redevelopment in cities like New York.  It could be suggested that the assumptions on which this rationale are built are, as usual, a bit USA centric, but it isn't hard to extrapolate or translate the points made to other places.  So, once again, I take the liberty of allowing the authors to make the point in their own words:

This approach......can open up huge swaths of the urban landscape that had previously been barred from improvement. Peter Gluck points out that real estate developers have the resources and government support to amass and build out large sites, but development on such frontiers is often unwanted or impossible.

“What’s interesting about this method," the senior Gluck says, "is that we can go into mid-blocks anywhere in the city, and with minimum effort we can build.” This is exactly what New York needs, he says, citing all of the “substandard’ housing wasting away in the middle of blocks. Modular and prefabricated building--the precedent of The Stack--creates opportunities where there existed none. “It allows the flexibility with sites that normally resist that smaller, but necessary, development.”

Read more at This Prefab Building Is A First For New York.

Herzog & de Meuron's tower under way

In a current architectural zeitgest where it is much more likely that a skyscraper will look like a single monolithic polished shard, smooth skinned twisted stalagmite, or up-scaled zucchini, it is confronting to consider the virtues of the opposite: a tower of bits, apparently with lives of their own. 

Back in 2006, we were treated to images of Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard Street in New York, a proposed 57-story residential in the Tribeca area, designed to house 145 residences, each one with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space.  The marketing blurb described the $3.5 million to $33million apartments as “houses stacked in the sky.”  Then the GFC hit, and we heard no more.

But now, 56 Leonard Street is definitely under construction, the site bought by that perennially cashed up Australian construction giant, Lend Lease.  Predictably, progress is taking some time. Lower levels are typically the most complicated, but 56 Leonard has significant variations between each floor, complicating the structure and sure to lengthen the construction process. Completion is currently slated for 2015.

Philosophically, I am genuinely pleased to see such a building being realized.  A capacity to accommodate variation and identity was there in Corbusier's project for Algiers, surfaced often after and was given theoretical backbone by Habraaken's Supports. But those approaches envisaged the variation within a bounded structure. And they never really happened, except as squatter settlements in abandoned shells, such as the “Tower of David,” a 45-story uncompleted skyscraper, and the Confinanza Tower, both in downtown Caracas, Venezuela.

Herzog & de Meuron's building makes a virtue of almost removing organising boundaries, celebrating the irregular silhouette and bold cantilevers.  By exaggerating the transparency of the floor to ceiling glass, the tower becomes even less reassuringly solid.

That is where I find myself surprisingly ambivalent.  Feeling comfortable with the horizontality of Corbusier's vision, and the modest heights of Habraaken's Dutch models, I am actually quite viscerally uncomfortable about the dissolution of the high-rise form.  Mind you, the night rendering shows an exceptional, scintillating vision that is easy to be thrilled about.  In my terms, I guess light fills out the missing voids, and adds an illusion of bulk, even while the whole sparkles.

Finally, I find the only test I can think of is to mentally multiply Herzog & de Meuron's tower and compare it with a vision of many singular forms.  The former ends up a texture, a grain almost of organically adjusted adjacencies, a 3D textured background against which a few landmark buildings would stand out.  The latter will inevitably be a cacaphony of competing 'me, me, me' object buildings.  I prefer the prospect of the former.  Pity it's unlikely to happen.

Keep up with construction updates from NY on New York YIMBY.
For lots of images, and to register to buy, go to the project web site here.

Surprise. Surprise. Mandatory disclosure in New York

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with something quite important.  And to be completely truthful, I wouldn't have caught up with this one, but for an item in GreenBuildingsAlive, a fine, 'long-form writing' blog I don't read nearly as much as it deserves.

Late last year, the New York Times carried an article on the results of the first mandatory disclosure of energy efficiency scores for commercial buildings.  It had a few surprises.  Chief amongst them were the unflattering comparisons between some newer buildings that have trumpeted high LEED ratings, and older buildings.

"In courting tenants over the last six years, 7 World Trade Center has trumpeted its gold LEED rating, an emblem of sound environmental citizenship.  But when it comes to energy efficiency, the young 52-story tower . . . had a score of 74 — just below the minimum of 75 set for high-efficiency buildings by the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.

On the other hand, two venerated show horses from the 1930s, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, sailed to an 84 and an 80 as a result of extensive upgrades of their insulation and mechanical systems."

Of course, the situation overall is much more complex, and the article makes a remarkably good job of explaining this complexity.  Reporting the more obvious explanations, like:

"Older buildings tend to have higher Energy Star scores because they have thicker walls, fewer windows and less ventilation — superior “thermal envelopes,” as a report on the early results puts it. They are also less suited to energy-gobbling activities like computer data crunching, the downfall of some youthful but middling performers."

the discussion moves on to the more subtle policy purpose of identifying buildings with the most opportunity to improve.  As the article points out:

"The stakes are considerable. Unlike cities that depend heavily on automobiles, New York racks up most of its carbon dioxide emissions — nearly 80 percent — in heating and cooling buildings. Tracking this energy use is deemed crucial to meeting the city goal of cutting overall emissions by about a third by 2030, to slash costs and fight climate change. "

 And there lies one of the less well exposed, or perhaps poorly cross-referenced details in an otherwise well informed commentary.  However admirable a 2009 law requiring progressive adoption of mandatory disclosure, however sound the approach to market transformation, cutting emissions by 30%  is actually a bit of a cop-out.  I say this not as some sort of intemperate judgmental rant, but simply to point out that the 2030 Challenge to which so many city mayors in the US have subscribed, sets far more ambitious goals.  Still, you have to begin somewhere, and proper, public disclosure, with a suitably reported detailed analysis which does not allow simplistic interpretation, is definitely a good place.

To me as an architect of a certain generation, there are other perhaps predictable, but still shocking factoids, mentioned in passing.  My favourite?  On a scale topping out at 100, "the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s bronze-toned 1958 masterpiece on Park Avenue, posted a 3."  I shouldn't be surprised.

Read the NY Times article here.
And if you are up to it,download the whole 36 page NEW YORK CITY LOCAL LAW 84 BENCHMARKING REPORT in PDF format here.