Designing with Hemp + Lime: Open Source Detailing for Architects and Designers

In May, our article about speculative design for parking on Long Island was published in articulo: Journal for Urban Research:

ParkingPLUS: How Design Produces a Future for Long Island’s Suburban Downtowns

Speculative design can be a useful tool in building broad-based support among community members and stakeholders for denser, transit-oriented development, and a greater mix of uses in North American suburbs, particularly in suburban regions characterized by both fractured governance and persistent segregation by race and class such as found in the Long Island suburbs of New York City. Urban design and in particular urban design competitions provide opportunity to initiate public conversations about the potential for retrofitting selected suburban sites to new built configurations that are more socially sustainable and resilient over time. Recent efforts by the Long Island Index, a project of the Rauch Foundation, to leverage research through sponsoring design competitions to generate an informed conversation about land use around transit stations in Long Island’s suburban downtowns serves as an example. We present the 2013-14 Build a Better Burb: ParkingPLUS design challenge and its results as well as local and national reactions to them – including debates in the freewheeling discursive space of online comments to articles. We emphasize the role that speculative design can play in advancing local policies and decision-making processes that support a greater densification and diversification of transit-supported suburban downtowns. See the full article here

Snow again in New York City. Here in anticipation of warmer days to come, watch the video about Hike the Heights featuring our map.
next hike is June 6th, 2015

Join the AIANY Diversity & Inclusion Committee in partnership with the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (nycobaNOMA) and The Institute For Public Architecture (IPA) for “Conversations: Equity Agendas” at the Center For Architecture.  Presented as part of the annual Max Bond Lecture, an annual series of design talks in memory of J. Max Bond, Jr., FAIA, “Conversations: Equity Agendas” will the agendas of affordability, housing, and community. Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised 200,000 units of affordable housing. NYCHA is facing a ballooning deficit and a waiting list of 250,000. How does New York City embark upon a construction boom of affordable housing? The Institute for Public Architecture’s Total Reset program series explores ambitious, achievable ideas for public and below-market housing in New York. The series, featuring the inaugural IPA Fellowship, responds to Mayor de Blasio’s “total reset” for housing. What material forms, spatial politics, health issues and cost structures shape affordable housing in the New York City?

When: Monday, October 27, 6-8pm
Where: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place

Speakers:
Nadine Maleh, Director, Inspiring Places for Community Solutions, IPA Fellow
Kaja Kühl, Columbia University GSAPP 5 Borough Studio, IPA Fellow
Quillian Riano, Principal, DSGNAGNC, Director of Strategy & Research, NYDesigns, IPA Fellow
Sagi Golan, Urban Designer NYC Dept. of City Planning, Columbia Univ. GSAPP, IPA Fellow
Miriam Peterson, Principal & Founder, Peterson Rich Office, IPA Fellow
Nathan Rich, Principal & Founder, Peterson Rich Office, IPA Fellow

There are more than 4,000 acres of surface parking lots in and around Long Island’s downtowns—that’s about 6.5 square miles solely dedicated to parking. In September 2013, the Long Island Index announced the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge to solicit innovative designs for parking structures, freeing up this valuable land for better uses. The design challenge paired four leading architectural firms with four Long Island communities: Utile, Inc. worked with Rockville Centre, LTL Architects worked with Westbury, Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design worked with Ronkonkoma, and dub Studios worked with Patchogue. Although each firm developed their design for a specific community, their ideas can be readily applied to downtowns across the Long Island region and around the nation. The challenge also included analyses of costs to build and maintain each of the parking structures, how to finance them, and economic benefits.The designs were released to the public January 16, 2014.

Image: Utile, Inc for Rockville Centre.

Together with  June Williamson, Associate Professor of Architecture at The City College of New York/CUNY, author of Designing Suburban Futures and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, I had the great pleasure of coordinating this effort for the Long Island Index.

See some press coverage of the Design Challenge in Newsday, Long Island Advance ,CBS News, NBC News. All designs can be viewed in detail at Build ab Better Burb

Finally! Designing Services for Housing is the culmination of 18 months of research, design and discovery with the Public Policy Lab, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and Parsons DESIS Lab. The publication illustrates how our team of fellows developed proposals that support the way in which New Yorkers understand and apply for affordable housing. Among collaborators referred to as the “How-to-guide”, this report will now sit on agency staff’s desk as vital instruction for implementing these ideas as pilots. We will continue to work with HPD throughout 2014 to see, how that worked.

Some images from the Venice Architecture Biennale, where the Field Guide to Phytoremediation is featured in the US Pavilion’s Spontaneous Intervention exhibit.