Por José Genao, desde Jarabacoa, República Dominicana. Temas de medioambiente, planeamiento, paisajismo, arquitectura y energía
Aimee Mullins
Por FRANCIS PISANI (SOITU.ES)
Comienzo a escribir este post desde el aeropuerto de Long Beach emprendiendo el camino de vuelta tras cuatro días en la conferencia TED, la más fascinante de todas aquellas a las que he tenido ocasión de asistir. Aún tengo muchas cosas que contar sobre diversos aspectos concretos, pero éste es el momento preciso de pararme a analizar qué me ha aportado en el fondo esta experiencia, qué es lo que me parece que vale la pena comprender.
Por FRANCIS PISANI (SOITU.ES)
Averiguar si existen los extraterrestres, interrumpir la destrucción de los océanos y salvar a los jóvenes venezolanos de la prostitución, la violencia y la droga son los desafíos a los que trata de enfrentarse este año la conferencia TED que está teniendo lugar en estos momentos en la ciudad californiana de Long Beach (podéis leer sobre ello en el post anterior).
La jornada ha estado marcada entre otras cosas por la presentación de robots cirujanos desarrollados por Catherine Mohr y su equipo en la Universidad de Stanford. Introduciendo por un único agujero un brazo ultra fino pero dotado de una cámara y de otras tres extremidades provistas de bisturís y pinzas, estos robots pueden paliar los daños que sufre el cuerpo con la cirugía convencional, y, bajo la dirección de un humano, operar incluso en el interior del corazón mismo.
También me impactó la sociedad proyectada por Shai Agassi, que pretende implantar el uso de vehículos eléctricos poniendo la infraestructura antes de lanzarlos al mercado. Separa la propiedad del vehículo de la de las baterías que necesita para circular y nos garantiza que las podremos cargar o reponer en estaciones de servicio capacitadas para ello en menos de lo que tardaríamos en llenar el depósito.
Pero todas las miradas de la jornada estaban puestas sobre todo sobre los tres galardonados del Premio TED del año. Se les ha invitado a a presentar sus proyectos y a formular en voz alta un deseo en el que poder implicar a los participantes para ayudarles a hacerlo realidad.
Jill Tatler, director del SETI Institute, se devana los sesos para descifrar los enigmas del espacio sideral y determinar si, de entre todos los sonidos inteligibles por el oído humano, algunos están lo suficientemente estructurados como para contener un mensaje.
Sylvia Earle, por su parte, ha consagrado su vida a salvaguardar los océanos e implora que la ayudemos a multiplicar las reservas marítimas. La destrucción que sufren avanza a un ritmo tan vertiginoso que teme que los próximos diez años sean tan determinantes como los 10.000 que ya han transcurrido. Nos pone sobre aviso: sin agua no hay vida; sin azul, tampoco verde.
El Sistema, la organización creada por José Antonio Abreu tiene como objetivo evitar que la juventud venezolana con escasos recursos caiga en la prostitución y la droga o incurra en la violencia valiéndose de la enseñanza de música clásica. 700.000 niños se han beneficiado ya de este aprendizaje y uno de sus protegidos acaba de ser nombrado jefe de orquesta en la filarmónica de Los Ángeles. Pide nuestro apoyo para lograr extender el modelo a Estados Unidos y el resto del mundo.
He aquí una conferencia a la que asiste gente de posición económica acomodada (6.000 dólares la acreditación) que se propone nada más y menos que cambiar el mundo y que recompensa a quienes se mueven para lograrlo.
Este talante tan a la «West Coast» me ha traído a la memoria a Shelby Coffey, jefe del Newseum de Washington. La gente de la Costa Este es más escéptica. Nos encontramos cerca de Silicon Valley «y de aquéllos que han demostrado que eran capaces de inventar lo imposible, lo que tan siquiera podíamos imaginar».
Su espíritu empresarial impregna todo. Se limitan a tocar temas que no se prestan a la polémica, desde el calentamiento global hasta la necesidad de cambiar los sistemas educativos de arriba abajo. Y esta gente que tiende a creer que la tecnología es capaz de resolver la mayor parte de los problemas de la humanidad actúa y anda en muchas cosas.
¿Os sorprende acaso?
P. S.: Podéis seguir la conferencia en directo o en YouTube y leer los artículos de Boing Boing.
FUENTE: SOITU.ES
Brasil está repleto de toda clase de plantas, flores y árboles exóticos. Pero hasta la irrupción del paisajista brasileño Roberto Burle Marx, sus compatriotas menospreciaban en gran medida las riquezas naturales que florecían en torno a sus casas. Ahora, el gigante sudamericano, con una retrospectiva en el museo Paço Imperial de Río de Janeiro, honra a un visionario que veía arte en los paisajes.
Por: Larry Rohter. Para The New York Times y Clarín
COPACABANA. La estética de la playa más famosa de Río, fruto de la planificación de Marx.
«Burle Marx ha inventado el paisajismo tropical tal como lo conocemos hoy en día pero, al hacerlo, también ha hecho algo más importante», puntualiza Lauro Cavalcanti, director de una exposición dedicada a la obra de Burle Marx que se exhibirá en marzo en el museo Paço Imperial, aquí en Río.
«Al organizar las plantas nativas según los principios estéticos de la vanguardia artística, especialmente el cubismo y el arte abstracto, ha creado una nueva gramática moderna para el diseño de paisajes internacional».
Burle Marx nació en 1909 y, para celebrar su centenario, el museo se ha propuesto mostrar todo el alcance de su creatividad (la muestra viajará después a San Pablo). Además de presentar modelos a escala y dibujos de sus proyectos de diseño paisajístico más célebres, la exposición incluye cerca de 100 cuadros suyos, así como dibujos, esculturas, tapices, joyas y decorados y trajes que diseñó para producciones teatrales.
«Era un hombre verdaderamente erudito y polifacético», comenta William Howard Adams, el comisario jefe de una exposición sobre Burle Marx que se presentó en el Museo de Arte Moderno en 1991. «Pero lo que llama más la atención en él es que veía el diseño paisajístico como una disciplina de igual relevancia que la arquitectura, no como un telón de fondo o una decoración». Burle Marx siempre se vio a sí mismo, ante todo, como un pintor. El diseño paisajístico, escribía en cierta ocasión, «no es más que el método que he encontrado para organizar y componer mis dibujos y pinturas, utilizando unos materiales menos convencionales».
Fue mientras estudiaba pintura en Alemania durante la República de Weimar cuando Burle Marx, como él mismo contaría más tarde, se dio cuenta de que la vegetación que los brasileños desdeñaban por considerarla matojos y malas hierbas, prefiriendo en cambio pinos y gladiolos importados para sus jardines, era extraordinaria. Mientras visitaba el Jardín Botánico de Berlín, se sorprendió al encontrar muchas plantas brasileñas en su colección, y rápidamente se fijó en las posibilidades artísticas sin explotar que tenían sus variados tamaños, formas y colores.
Burle Marx tenía ascendencia alemana por parte de padre y francesa por la de su madre. Nació en San Pablo, aunque siendo muy joven se trasladó a Río de Janeiro, donde tuvo como vecino al arquitecto modernista Lucio Costa, el futuro diseñador de Brasilia, quien le hizo a Burle Marx sus primeros encargos. Burle Marx es especialmente conocido por sus muchos proyectos ambiciosos aquí en Río.
«El rostro de esta ciudad lleva su huella», comenta Cavalcanti. El parque Aterro do Flamengo, el más grande de Río y que se ubica junto a la bahía, construido sobre un paseo marítimo ganado al mar, es un ejemplo inicial de uno de los proyectos más característicos de Burle Marx. Pero, en lo que a líneas de costas escarpadas se refiere, no hay nada que supere los paseos de Copacabana, con sus coloridos mosaicos abstractos de piedra que se extienden ininterrumpidamente en toda la longitud de la playa. Partiendo de los pisos superiores de los edificios que bordean la Avenida Atlántica, Burle Marx parece haber pintado un único lienzo de casi cinco kilómetros de largo. «Aunque le gustaba diseñar jardines para sus amigos, lo que más le satisfacía era trabajar en espacios públicos», señala Haruyoshi Ono, un arquitecto paisajista brasileño que empezó a trabajar con él en 1965 y actualmente dirige la empresa de diseño paisajístico que Burle Marx fundó en los años cincuenta. «Solía decir que cuanto más grande y abierto era un proyecto, más le gustaba, porque podía disfrutarlo gente de todas las clases sociales».
Durante la década pasada, Burle Marx se ha convertido en «una especie de héroe» para una nueva generación de arquitectos paisajistas estadounidenses, según explica Karen Van Lengen, decana de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Virginia. Dice que se le admira no sólo por sus formidables habilidades técnicas como artista, sino también por centrarse en los aspectos científicos del paisajismo y por la atención que prestaba a las comunidades vegetales y a su relación con el medio ambiente.
Burle Marx tenía casi tanto de botánico como de arquitecto paisajista, por más que fuese autodidacta. Hay más de 50 especies vegetales que llevan su nombre.
«Burle Marx fue profético en su respeto por las plantas y su capacidad para organizar el conjunto, en su habilidad para ver el jardín como un experimento estético a la vez que una parte del ecosistema», dice Van Lengen. «Ése es el reto de los arquitectos paisajistas actuales: reunir esas energías».
A New Look at the Multitalented Man Who Made Tropical Landscaping an Art
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees. But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards.
“Burle Marx created tropical landscaping as we know it today, but in doing so he also did something even greater,” said Lauro Cavalcanti, the curator of an exhibition devoted to the work of Burle Marx that runs through March at the Paço Imperial museum here. “By organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of the artistic vanguard, especially Cubism and abstractionism, he created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.”
Burle Marx was born in 1909, and to mark that centenary the museum set out to show the full extent of his creativity. (The show travels next to São Paulo.) In addition to scale models and drawings of his most celebrated landscape design projects, the exhibition includes nearly 100 of his paintings, as well as drawings, sculptures, tapestries, jewelry, and sets and costumes he designed for theatrical productions. The goal is to show how his work in one field bled into his work in the others.
“He was truly a polymath,” said William Howard Adams, the chief curator of a Burle Marx exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991. “But the thing about him that really stands out is that he regarded landscape design as an equal partner with architecture, not as a backdrop or decoration, and elevated it to that level.”
For his part, Burle Marx always thought of himself first and foremost as a painter, which explains the abundance of canvases in the show. Landscape design, he once wrote, “was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawing and painting, using less conventional materials.”
It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as scrub and brush, preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was truly extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues.
“The way he synthesized art and horticulture in three-dimensional design is really quite exceptional,” said Mirka Benes, a landscape historian who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. “He truly had a painter’s eye, which you could sense in his superb sense of color and form, and he had an understanding of the tenets of Modernism and Dada, having clearly known and studied the work of people like Hans Arp.”
Like Arp, Burle Marx was of German descent on his father’s side and French on his mother’s side. He was born in São Paulo, but moved at a young age to Rio de Janeiro, where one of his neighbors was the Modernist architect Lucio Costa, the future designer of Brasília, who gave Burle Marx his first commissions.
Although Burle Marx had a hand in designing some parts of Brasília, including its hanging gardens, he is especially known among Brazilians for his many ambitious projects here in Rio. “The face of this city bears his imprint,” Mr. Cavalcanti said.
Rio’s largest park, the bayside Aterro do Flamengo, built on reclaimed seafront just southwest of downtown, is an early example of one of Burle Marx’s signature projects. But for sheer sweep, nothing surpasses the sidewalks of Copacabana, with colorful abstract stone mosaics extending unbroken the entire length of that beach. From the upper floors of the buildings that line Avenida Atlantica, Burle Marx appears to have painted a single canvas about three miles long.
“While he enjoyed designing gardens for friends, what gave him the most satisfaction was to work with public spaces,” said Haruyoshi Ono, a Brazilian landscape architect who began working with him in 1965 and today directs the landscaping company that Burle Marx founded in the 1950s. “He used to say the larger and more open a project, the more he liked it, because it could be enjoyed by all social strata.”
Burle Marx’s most elaborate and time-consuming effort, however, may have been an abandoned estate he bought on the outskirts of the city in 1948 and turned into a home, studio and garden complex. Now a national landmark and tourist attraction with more than 3,500 species of plants, it functioned as his workshop, laboratory and office until his death in 1994.
At the peak of his career, Burle Marx was highly esteemed among his peers in the United States. In 1965 the American Institute of Architects awarded him its fine-arts prize, saying that he was “the real creator of the modern garden.”
But unless they traveled to the tropics, American gardeners had little opportunity for direct exposure to his work. Although he designed some gardens in temperate climates, notably for United Nations buildings in France and Austria, “you certainly can’t have a Burle Marx garden in Wisconsin or Vancouver,” Ms. Benes said, “unless you translate his ideas to local plant systems, which looks easy on paper but is not.”
In the United States, Burle Marx’s earliest known project was the Burton Tremaine house in Santa Barbara, Calif., commissioned in 1948. He also designed gardens for the Hilton Hotel in San Juan, P.R., and the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington, and was hired to revamp Biscayne Boulevard in Miami.
Over the last decade he has emerged as “something of a hero” to a new generation of American landscape architects, said Karen Van Lengen, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He is admired not just for his formidable technical skills as an artist, she said, but also for his focus on the scientific side of landscaping and the attention he paid to plant communities and their relationship to the environment.
Burle Marx was almost as much a botanist as a landscape architect, although largely self-taught. More than 50 plant species have been named for him, and he was one of the world’s leading experts on bromeliads, the plant family to which the pineapple belongs. Even in old age he regularly traveled to the Amazon and Southeast Asia to search for unusual and attractive plants that he could cultivate in his home garden and then use in new projects.
“Burle Marx was prescient in his reverence for plants and his stewardship of the whole nursery, for his ability to see the garden both as an aesthetic experiment and also as part of the ecology,” Ms. Van Lengen said. “That’s the challenge for today’s landscape architects, to bring those energies together.
“Burle Marx was already doing that before most people were even thinking about it, so he really stands alone.”
–
By JAMES BROOKE,
Published: June 6, 1994
Roberto Burle Marx, whose mark on Brazil’s landscape ranged from the undulating mosaic sidewalks of Copacabana Beach to the hanging gardens in the new capital of Brasilia, died on Saturday. He was 84 and lived in his lush, botanical retreat, a former coffee farm, 35 miles from here.
He died of congestive heart failure, friends said.
During a 60-year career, Brazil’s most prominent landscape artist brought his nation’s rich flora out from Europe’s shadow and became a tireless champion of Brazil’s orchids, palms, water lilies and bromeliads.
His nearly 3,000 landscape projects in 20 nations ranged from the gardens of the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington to a redesign of Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, from the gardens of the Unesco headquarters in Paris to a tropical garden under glass at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. Designed a Rio Park
In Brazil, he was best known for Rio’s postcard Flamengo Park — 300 acres of lawns, playing fields, artificial beach and automobile parkway that connect the city’s financial center with beachfront residential neighborhoods.
«Unlike any other art form, a garden is designed for the future, and for future generations,» Mr. Burle Marx said in an interview prior to his 1991 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit, «Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden,» was the museum’s first devoted to a landscape architect.
Born in Sao Paulo in 1909 to a Brazilian mother and a German father, Mr. Burle Marx only discovered the power and variety of Brazilian plants when he traveled to Berlin in 1928 to study at the Dahlem Botanical Gardens. Moving to Rio on his return to Brazil, he was experimenting in his backyard with local flora when he caught the eye of a neighbor, Lucio Costa.
Decades later, the two worked together on the daring design for Brasilia, the new capital in the central high plains. Mr. Costa designed Le Corbusier-style buildings and Mr. Burle Marx designed landscapes, which ranged from monumental parks to the hanging gardens of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
«He was the creator of Brazilian gardens,» Mr. Costa said on Saturday. «He was an innovator because he associated abstract art with landscaping. Before him, our gardens were planned following French and English models.»
A self-taught botanist, this bear of a man with an unruly shock of white hair came to have 13 plant species named after him. Mr. Burle Marx also became a pioneering critic of Brazil’s treatment of its historic and biological heritage.
Although he escaped a kidnap attempt last year, apparently in an effort to get ransom, he criticized Rio’s steady retreat behind walls, saying that a move last year to enclose city parks behind cast iron fences amounted to «Rio in a cage.» On one occasion, he stalked out of a Brazilian Embassy in Greece when he encountered, in a waiting room, a plastic plant.
Raising alarms about Amazon destruction decades before it became fashionable to do so, Mr. Burle Marx warned in 1971: «I fear that by the time people become enlightened, there won’t be any more forests in this country.»
–
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: July 29, 2001
EVEN in a city as spectacular as Rio, a time comes when you feel you just have to get away from it all, if only for a few hours. So early one recent Sunday morning my wife, Clotilde, and I got into our car and headed west along the coast from our apartment in Ipanema, past the Sun Belt-inspired suburban sprawl and clutter of the Barra da Tijuca until we reached a tranquil green refuge known as the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx.
Roberto Burle Marx was Brazil’s most celebrated modern landscape designer, often working in tandem with the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and in 1949 he was looking for a secluded place to live and store his growing collection of rare plants. About an hour’s drive from Rio, near a fishing village called Barra de Guaratiba, he found what he was looking for: an abandoned banana plantation with a small country house, a 17th-century chapel and 90 acres of grounds.
Today the Burle Marx museum and home contains one of the most important collections of tropical plants in the world, some 3,500 species that Burle Marx gathered from all over Brazil as well as from places as far away as Indonesia and Hawaii. It is open to the public six days a week, and strolling the estate amid towering palm trees while listening to songbirds and cicadas and observing the rock gardens and waterfalls that Burle Marx created for his own amusement proved to have a wonderfully calming and restorative effect.
Burle Marx also collected paintings, jewelry, glasswork, pottery, wind chimes, shells and Baroque religious images, which he arranged skillfully in his home, which only began receiving visitors in 1999, and in the two large open-air ateliers built to his specifications. »He liked to mix styles,» our guide, Ana Paula Costa, told us dryly, and the objects displayed in and around the house reflect that eclecticism — or promiscuity, if you prefer.
At the rear, for instance, is a series of stone structures and bubbling fountains, recalling both Frank Lloyd Wright and a Japanese monastery, that Burle Marx used for parties, judging by the barbecue that still functions. Even more striking was the second of the studios, a huge, austere structure that was finished only after his death in 1994 at the age of 85. Burle Marx’s own paintings are on view here, as are his library, a tapestry and several sculptures.
It was getting on toward lunch by the time we finished our visit, and we could easily have stopped at any of several nearby excellent fish restaurants.
We already knew Tia Palmira, the most celebrated of the group, with its simple wooden tables on a promonotory overlooking the beach, and had several times enjoyed spicy fish stews there. But we were in a mood for something new, and so drove a few miles farther west to Quatro Sete Meia.
To our delight, we found ourselves in a postcard-fantasy setting of what Brazil should be. Our table, at an open window in what once was a fisherman’s house, overlooked the sea, and in the shallows just a few yards away, white egrets hunted for fish or glided in graceful flight just above the waterline. Behind them, simple fishing boats painted in pastels stood at anchor, framed against a placid azure sea that stretched away to a distant mountain range.
In those surroundings, the meal itself could easily have been eclipsed. But it wasn’t. After a tasty appetizer of fresh sirí, or spiced and breaded crab, we opted for one of the moquecas, or stews, for two that are the specialty of the house. We had our choice of shrimp, fish, squid, octopus or mixed crustaceans, but went with the shrimp, at $15, which was more than enough for the two of us; we accompanied it with a pair of $2 batidas, a favorite Brazilian cocktail that mixes sugar cane liquor with fruit juices like lemon, coconut or pineapple.
After a stop along the road to buy fresh shellfish from the fishermen whose stalls line the highway, our next and final stop, heading back to the city, was the Casa do Pontal, at Estrada do Pontal 3295 in the Recreio dos Bandeirantes neighborhood. Finding the place was a bit of a challenge, since the numbering system is not sequential, the building is set back from the road in a country house with little identification, and parking is somewhat haphazard.
We were immediately disarmed, how ever, once we crossed the threshold and read the idealistic declaration of purpose of this singular museum devoted exclusively to Brazilian naïve and folk art. »In a corrupt world, full of violence and hatred, it is a great comfort to be able to enter a universe created by the skilled hands of humble and honest artists,» the statement proclaims.
Like the Burle Marx museum, the Casa do Pontal is the result of one man’s vision and persistence — in this case a French intellectual named Jacques van de Beuque, who arrived in Brazil in 1946 and began collecting Brazilian popular art. In those days, most educated Brazilians scorned the humble creations of illiterate artisans from the interior of their country, but Mr. van de Beuque knew better, and eventually amassed 5,000 works by more than 200 artists.
The principal charm of the collection lies in the beauty of its portrayal of traditional rural Brazilian life, especially that of the poor, arid Northeast.
Moving from room to room, we encountered eye-catching clay sculptures, wood carvings and cloth and metal tableaus that faithfully depicted religious and music festivals and farm and family routines. The entire cycle of life was portrayed here with a charming guilelessness, from birth and schooldays through courtship and marriage, all the way up to death, burial and mourning.
We were so enchanted by what we saw that we had to be gently ushered out the door at closing time. A few days later a Rio newspaper published an interview with the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, in which he confessed that he had been so moved by a visit to the museum that it ended up inspiring his latest novel, »The Cavern.»
»Brazil should consider this place a national treasure, more important than . . . Corcovado» — the 125-foot statue of Christ that is the emblem of Rio — Mr. Saramago declared. After a few hours spent contemplating the works of gifted but obscure artists with names like Zé Caboclo, or Joe Hillbilly, we found it hard to disagree.
Exotic plants, exotic food
Museums
To visit the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Estrada da Barra de Guaratiba 2019, telephone and fax (55-21) 2410-1412, one must make reservations well in advance, since all tours are guided and there are only two daily, at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $1.70 a person, and there is no snack bar or restaurant, so be sure to bring provisions. Open daily except Monday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Casa do Pontal, Estrada do Pontal 3295, telephone (55-21) 2490-3278, because of the energy crisis, is open only Thursday and Friday from noon to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m., admission fee $3.35
Restaurants
Tia Palmira, Rua Caminho de Souza 18, Barra de Guaritiba, (55-21) 2410-8169 serves 10 main dishes, including bobó de camarão, a typical Bahia shrimp stew. Dinner for two without wine, $32.
Quatro Sete Meia, Rua Barros de Alarcão 476, Pedra de Guaratiba, (55-21) 2417-1716. Shrimp moqueca for two is $15. We each had a $2
batida, a cocktail of sugar cane liquor and fruit juice.
LARRY ROHTER
Fuente: NYT
John Peterson and John Cary Join Luminaries In the Field
John Peterson and John Cary of Public Architecture, a nonprofit which mobilizes architects and designers to address larger social issues through design, were jointly honored as 2009 Designers of the Year by Contract magazine. Peterson and Cary announced a new venture which recruits manufacturers and vendors to support high quality pro bono design projects.
San Francisco, Calif. (PRWEB) February 4, 2009—This past week, during the 30th Annual Interior Awards in New York, Public Architecture leaders John Peterson and John Cary were jointly recognized with the prestigious ”Designers of the Year Award,” presented by Contract magazine.
Conferred each year since 1979, past recipients of the award include the likes of designers Ralph Appelbaum, Shigeru Ban, Shashi Caan, Michael Graves, William McDonough, and David Rockwell.
“We are deeply honored to be receiving this award. This award is much bigger than John Cary or I or even Public Architecture as an organization. This award is about the potential of the design community to be a force for positive change in the civic sphere,” says co-recipient John Peterson, AIA, Founder & President of Public Architecture.
Unlike other design awards based solely on aesthetic accomplishment, the primary mission of the Designer of the Year Award is to recognize individuals who contribute to the design industry in positive ways that benefit the entire profession as well as society at-large.
“In an age where the desire to ‘give back’ seems to be a growing response to the weariness of excess, John Peterson and John Cary have emerged as leaders in the field. They have put socially-responsible design on the map, inspired a greater sense of purpose among those interested in practicing it, and—most importantly—offer a practical, organized approach to executing it,” notes Jennifer Busch, editor-in-chief of Contract magazine.
Peterson founded Public Architecture in 2002 and joined its staff as President this past fall. Cary has served as Executive Director of Public Architecture since 2004. Together with a dedicated staff and board as well as a massive network of over 450 architecture and design firms, Public Architecture is at the forefront of the pro bono design movement. In 2008 alone, more than 200,000 hours and an estimated $20 million in pro bono services were pledged through The 1% program of Public Architecture.
Public Architecture also undertakes a series of public-interest design initiatives, which address issues of broad social relevance and bring design to underserved communities. Noted initiatives include a design response to the plight of day laborers across the country as well as innovative research, which sheds new light on social, environmental, and ecological aspects of building material reuse.
Following the award ceremony, Humanscale hosted a special reception and silent auction to benefit Public Architecture. The event took place in Humanscale’s flagship showroom adjacent to Madison Square Park, attracting hundreds of designers and design enthusiasts as well as others to celebrate Public Architecture and pro bono design.
Public Architecture plans to use the award to evolve The 1% program to welcome manufacturers and vendors. Looking ahead, co-recipient Cary adds, “In honor of this award, we are developing a platform for furnishing manufacturers to support the incredible design work of our program participants.”
In an effort to mobilize the manufacturers in attendance at the award ceremony and also to jumpstart the effort, Public Architecture secured hearty endorsements from CEOs of multiple major design firms, such as Gensler, HKS, HOK, and Perkins+Will.
Among the most ringing endorsements was that of design legend and business leader Art Gensler, who said, “I am asking you and your company to make a real commitment to Public Architecture’s innovative program. You can expect a big return on the investment and it is the right thing to do.”
About Public Architecture
Established in 2002, Public Architecture is a national nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. Public Architecture acts as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy, and the design of public spaces and amenities. “The 1%” is a national program launched by Public Architecture in 2005 that challenges architecture firms to pledge 1% of their billable hours to pro bono work. If every architecture professional in the U.S. dedicated just 20 hours annually, it would add up to 5,000,000 hours each year—the equivalent of 2,500-person firm working fulltime for the public good. Public Architecture is presently engaged in major partnerships with entities as diverse as the Taproot Foundation, United States Green Building Council, and United Way of the Bay Area. The 1% program is presently supported by a range of sponsors and partnerships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Pro Bono Action Tank, Taproot Foundation; leading firms such as HKS, HOK, McCall Design Group, and Perkins+Will; and major manufacturers such as Herman Miller and Humanscale.
About Contract Magazine
Contract magazine covers the commercial design industry, with a special focus on how interior design and architecture can positively impact the corporate, retail, educational, hospitality, health care, entertainment, government, institutional, and performing arts markets. Through in-depth reports, special features, and news and views, Contract magazine examines how the strategic goals of commercial clients can be supported and advanced through design, as well as how trends in the various industries covered shape and influence the current and future practice of commercial interior design. Contract magazine is a Nielsen Business Publications and a Nielsen Media production, published by John M. Rouse and edited by Jennifer Thiele Busch. Now in its 30th year, the Designer of the Year Award conferred by Contract magazine has long been considered the commercial design industry’s most prestigious honor.
BY TEDDY CRUZ
The international border between the United States and Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately 60 million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. Zooming into the particularities of this volatile territory, traveling back and forth between these two border cities, we can expose landscapes of contradiction where conditions of difference and sameness collide and overlap.
It’s an urban juncture like no other in the world, where some of the wealthiest real estate in suburban San Diego lies barely twenty minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America, on Tijuana’s southern fringes. A series of off-the-radar, two-way crossings–north-south and south-north–suggests that no matter how high and long the post-9/11 border wall becomes, it will never stop the migrating populations and the relentless flows of goods and services back and forth across the formidable barrier that seeks to exclude them.
These illegal flows are physically manifested, in one direction, by the informal land use patterns and economies produced by migrant workers flowing from Tijuana into San Diego, lured by the strong economy of Southern California. But while human flow mobilizes northbound in search of dollars, the urban waste of San Diego moves in the opposite direction, where it is used to construct emergency housing in the shantytowns of Tijuana.
As the Latin American diaspora travels north, it inevitably alters and transforms the fabric of San Diego’s subdivisions. In these neighborhoods, multigenerational households of extended families shape their own programs of use, taking charge of their own micro-economies in order to maintain a standard for the household. The result: nonconforming uses and high densities that reshape the fabric of the residential neighborhoods where they settle. Alternative social spaces spring up in large parking lots; informal economies such as flea markets and street vendors appear on vacant properties. Housing additions in the shape of illegal companion units are plugged in to existing suburban dwellings to provide affordable living.
The areas of San Diego that have been most impacted by this nonconforming urbanism are concentrated in its first ring of suburbanization. The mutation of these older bedroom communities–from rigid, monocultural and one-dimensional environments to informal, multicultural and cross-programmed communities–opens the question: how do we anticipate density? It may be that the future of Southern California urbanism will be determined by tactics of retrofit and adaptation, making the large small.
In addition to immigrants retrofitting a large section of San Diego’s older mid-city neighborhoods (the typical post-war Levittowns) with alternative nonconforming structures, other parts of this first ring of suburbanization have been replaced by larger versions of themselves. As new McMansion subdivisions update these older suburbs in San Diego, the first ring of suburbanization is being dismantled, piece by piece. Small bungalows are dismembered and their pieces given away to Mexican speculators. Thus the debris of Southern California’s middle-class suburbs is recycled to build the new periphery of Tijuana.
The leftover parts of San Diego’s older subdivisions–standard framing, joists, connectors, plywood, aluminum windows, garage doors–are being disassembled and recombined just across the border. A few miles south, in Tijuana, new informal suburbs–some call them slums–spring up from one day to another. This river of urban waste flows across the Tijuana-San Diego to make something dramatically new.
On the edges of Tijuana, rife with poverty, social upheaval and a severe housing shortage, the detritus of San Diego’s suburbs is reassembled into a fresh milieu, a city made of waste. But not only small, scattered debris is imported and recycled into makeshift housing in Tijuana. Entire pieces of one city travel southward as residential ready-made houses are directly plugged in to the other city’s fabric. This process begins when a Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up the little post-World War II bungalows that have been slated for demolition. The little houses are loaded onto trailers to travel to Tijuana, where they clear customs before making their journey south. On some days here, one can see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to cross the border.
Finally, the houses enter Tijuana and are mounted on one-story metal frames, leaving an empty space at the street level to accommodate future uses. These floating houses define a space of opportunity beneath them, one that will be filled over time with additions like a taco stand, a car repair shop, a garden.
One city profits from the dwellings that the other one discards–recycling the «leftovers» of the other into a sort of second-hand urbanism, creating countless new possibilities. This is how the border cities enact a strange mirroring effect. While the seemingly permanent housing stock in San Diego becomes disposable overnight, the ephemeral dwellings in Tijuana yearn to become permanent.
Tijuana’s informal settlements are shaped by these cross-border recycling dynamics and by organizational tactics of invasion, allowing settlers to claim underutilized territory. While San Diego’s vast sprawl is incrementally made of gigantic infrastructure (freeways and gated communities) to support loosely scattered units of housing, on Tijuana’s edges dense habitation happens first so that incremental small infrastructure can follow. Ultimately, this intensive, recycled urbanism is emblematic of how Tijuana’s informal communities are growing faster than the urban cores they surround, creating a different set of rules for development, and blurring the distinctions between the urban, the suburban and the rural.
While the site of our intervention in Tijuana is the informal urbanism of the favela-like settlements that dot its periphery, our process begins by engaging the conflict between emergency housing, labor and maquiladora factories. We have observed that as NAFTA maquiladoras position themselves strategically adjacent to Tijuana’s slums in order to have access to cheap labor, they do not give anything to these fragile communities in return. So our first site of intervention is the factory itself, utilizing its own systems of material production and prefabrication to produce surplus micro-infrastructure for housing.
We are currently negotiating a maquiladora-made prefabricated frame that can act as a hinge mechanism to coordinate the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and reassembled in Tijuana. This small piece is also the first step in the construction of a larger, interwoven and open-ended scaffold that helps strengthen an otherwise precarious terrain, without compromising the improvisational dynamics of these self-made environments. Conditions of social emergency demand the reorganization of resources and the triangulation of prefabrication industry, government subsidies and social organization.
What can we learn from these informal settlements? At a moment when the top-down forces of privatization unleashed in recent years because of our blind belief in the power of «free market economies» have failed, it is more pressing than ever to rethink our institutions of urban and economic development.
Can the lessons hidden beneath these unofficial and precarious settlements be translated into alternative urban policies to redefine the conventional recipes of development in the official city? Producing more inclusive and sustainable land uses, new markets and economies from the ground up and within communities? I believe it is time for our institutions of representation, government and development to critically observe and translate the meaning of these invisible forces that are incrementally shaping the contemporary city.
It may be that the informal sector will become the basis for a new paradigm of environmental, social and economic sustainability.
Por MIGUEL TORÁN | IRIS MIR (SOITU.ES)
SEÚL (COREA DEL SUR).- Las ciudades asiáticas crecen a un ritmo diferente que las grandes urbes europeas o americanas. Si hay que desalojar a un millón de personas para construir una sede olímpica, que se busquen otro hogar. Si hay que crear una isla artificial para ampliar un aeropuerto, se ganan hectáreas al mar. Si hay que desafiar a la gravedad y construir rascacielos más altos, se corre el riesgo. Se consigue así grandes urbes, modernas y punteras, pero que han perdido el encanto de antaño. Aunque otras veces, este urbanismo arriesgado tiene resultados que estimulan la vida de una ciudad.
Fuente: SOITU.ES
Britain has bestowed its ultimate architectural honour on Alvaro Siza – even though he hasn’t built a thing in this country.
Jonathan Glancey travels to Portugal to meet a master
There are far too many buildings today’ …
Siza Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
‘When I was a little boy, I fell ill,» says Alvaro Siza, lighting up his sixth Camel cigarette. «My parents took me to a house high on a hill so I could breathe good air. I was allowed out on to a veranda. Here, I could look at a perfect view of a beautiful valley spread out below me. By the third week, I hated that view. I never wanted to see it again.»
From the moment he began building, in the early 1950s, Portugal’s most celebrated architect sought to frame views, to reveal landscapes, cityscapes, interiors and the ways through them. His aim was to delight the eye, and to make each creation a place of subtle revelation. Siza, now 75, has never been an architect of big statements and bigger pictures. He is, however, a designer and craftsman of some of the most considered of all modern buildings.
Siza is, quite simply, one of the world’s finest architects – which is why he is coming to Britain next month to receive the 2009 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, an award as highly regarded today as it was back in 1848, when the first was hung around the neck of Charles Cockerell, architect of Oxford’s Ashmolean Library. The award, for a lifetime’s achievement, is a gift from the Queen made on her behalf by Riba, the Royal Institute of British Architects. In all these years, Siza is the first Portuguese architect to be so honoured, though, apart from a 2005 collaboration with Eduardo Souto de Moura and Cecil Balmond on a summer pavilion for London’s Serpentine Gallery, he has never built in Britain.
«It’s a great honour, of course,» says Siza. «My own city, Porto, is home to many British-influenced buildings; and this is where you founded your long-lived port industry. Perhaps it seems odd to have this medal [without having] built in England, but I think an architect should make the best work he can wherever his star takes him. I have chosen to work mostly at home – but yes, how nice that the work is recognised by our oldest allies.»
Although he finds categories uninteresting and any attempt to list the influence of one architect on another little more than an academic game, Siza brings together more than something of the concerns of Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, refracted through the defining lens of Porto, the northern Portuguese city where he was born, lives, works and evidently loves. The window of his low-key office frames a melancholy view of the architect’s home town. Terraces of shoulder-to-shoulder, sash-windowed buildings crafted in dark granite gleam in the light of the dazzling winter sun rising over the River Douro, all punctuated by narrow alleys, winding stone stairs and the red-tiled roofs of long, thin houses. No single building predominates. «Architecture,» says Siza, as if in explanation, «should never be an arrogant transformation of landscape or space. My wish has long been that the buildings I design have somehow always been there. I want them to be necessary, never forced.»
From his first well-known work, the Boa Nova teahouse and restaurant, completed in 1963 at the coastal edge of Porto, to the serene Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (1997) in the same city, Siza’s buildings are as gently inspiring as they are sotto voce; his intelligent, low-cost, terraced housing, found in swathes across Portugal, could be similarly described. The Boa Nova rises from rocks bashed by Atlantic rollers, like a natural extension of the landscape. Its great roof hugs the concrete building, keeping it cool in summer and safe from storms. It offers places to stand outside, sheltered from the winds, and a restaurant with a great window that slides down in the summer, letting diners enjoy an uninhibited experience of the restless ocean. Never has a cup of tea been so exhilarating.The Serralves Museum, meanwhile, is a low-lying sequence of galleries in a handsome park, offering visitors a gentle amble through contemporary art. What’s special about the building is that, though clearly very modern, it is crafted like a traditional 1930s gallery. Every detail, even when playful, is reassuringly solid, a thing of rich marble or well-turned timber.
«At first, I wanted to be an opera singer,» says Siza, a quietly spoken, warm and well-mannered man. «Then it had to be sculpture. My father was against this. He was an engineer, born in Brazil, who wanted his children to have proper jobs. When I was 14, he took us to Barcelona. I saw Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia for the first time and that was that.»
Becoming Alvaro Siza, the famous architect, was part of a long, slow journey from the polite house by the ocean where he was born in 1933, the same year that Antonio Salazar, the newly elected Portuguese prime minister, forced through a constitution granting him and his antiparliamentarian government authoritarian powers that would endure until the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Siza was brought up in a big Catholic family. One of his sisters is a nun. He rode by tram each day from the ocean to the city centre, to school and later to the University of Porto’s school of architecture, eventually becoming the revered professor he remains today.
«There was an opening for original work in Portugal just after the second world war,» says Siza. «We pored over Casabella, the Italian magazine, which showed us how an architect could design anything from a spoon to a skyscraper on the same day. My teacher and, later, colleague Fernando Távora was a member of CIAM [the International Congress of Modern Architecture] and attended the Festival of Britain in 1951. We made furniture and went to visit Aalto in Finland. All this was liberating, but by the time I began to build, the Salazar regime was working to establish a national style, to curb adventures in modernism.
«But Porto and Lisbon universities produced a wonderful book, Vernacular Architecture in Portugal. It demonstrated that there were many traditional styles. Portuguese architecture had been fashioned by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Arabs and the English. So, as long as we were careful not to make too much noise, we could build in new ways despite the regime.» The Boa Nova teahouse was a case in point. Neither iconoclastically modern nor nostalgically vernacular, this haunting building is built of concrete, timber, brick tiles and bronze – and made by local craftsmen.
Ever since, Siza has trodden a line between modernity and tradition, machine-age technology and age-old craftsmanship. «I like every building to be a calm house,» he says. «I like the way the patios and rooms of the Alhambra go from bright sun to shadows, from warmth to coolness, from wide to intimate focus. I like to dream about my buildings before I set them down in any detail. Architecture requires patience. How do you enter a building? How does it touch the ground?»
Siza toys with a packet of cigarettes, an ashtray and a lighter to show me how he imagines a building. When he has «established a proper relationship» with the structure that is taking shape in his mind, he draws many versions of what it might be, then begins toying with cardboard models. «I like to be involved, to design every detail, so the office should ideally be 15 people, although we are 25 today. Perhaps we have too much work. Architects find it hard to say no to commissions.»
He has, though, said a clear no to working in Dubai and anywhere else where he feels buildings are being rushed up without patience, pleasure or love. «Architecture without love,» he says, «is annoying. There are far too many buildings today. Architecture has become a business. Increasingly, there are people making a career from telling architects what they can and can’t do. It’s very rare for me now to be able to talk to craftsmen face-to-face. Buildings have to be specified down to the last cent, so you can no longer tailor them on site. This is sad. My last experience of real pleasure was in Brazil – I was very happy making the Iberê Camargo museum.»
It shows. This just-completed museum, dedicated to the Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo and sited in the lakeside city of Porto Alegre, is a magnificent mixture of sensual curves and glorious swoops, of galleries that samba out of the main building and then samba back in again. It is an alluring architectural carnival – yet austerely dressed, realised throughout in a smooth concrete. For all this dancing, it could never be called ostentatious. Just special.
Equally arresting is the winery Siza completed in Portugal’s Campo Maior two years ago, sited on what had been a rubbish tip. A lithe-limbed and smooth-skinned white building, it pulls the gently rolling landscape together as if its siting and construction were the most obvious things in the world. «I am grateful for this opportunity,» says Siza. «I hope the wine tastes good.»
Siza makes architecture seem all but effortless. This, however, is because he has worked hard and long at making his buildings as subtle as they are special. Since his wife, the painter Maria Antónia Marinho Leite, died tragically young in 1973, Siza, a devoted father, has concentrated on shaping buildings as a gifted medieval monk must have done illuminating manuscripts. He draws beautifully and writes well, too. A Modern of sorts, yet one who belongs to a tradition of age-old art and craftsmanship, Siza doesn’t see himself as a great artist, which he is, but as just another journeyman who has tried to add something worthwhile to the country he loves, whether that be dazzling galleries or smart social housing – all woven into that landscape beyond his window, seen through wreaths of curling cigarette smoke.
Fuente: The Guardian
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