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Building a Smarter Building

This week the New York Academy of Sciences published a meeting report I wrote and produced covering a recent symposium on "smart" buildings. You can see it here. 

The basic idea behind smart buildings is that sensing devices such as photosensors, thermostats, and other more sophisticated gadgets are converging with increasingly powerful information technology, making it possible to use software to monitor a building's performance in realtime, diagnose problems, and ideally find ways to improve it. The idea is becoming increasingly attractive not just for economic reasons, but also within the context of green building. Because buildings consume a huge amount of the energy we use, finding ways to improve their efficiency is seen as an attractive way to work toward meeting carbon emissions goals.

One big concept that came up repeatedly over the course of the meeting was the importance of thinking about building systems holistically. As automated building management systems improve, they are becoming increasingly able to integrate discreet parts of the building's operation (heating, lighting, security, etc.) into a single comprehensive picture. Such approaches offer potential ways to deal with the proverbial New York City apartment that is so overheated in the wintertime a tenant has to open the windows, to take a crude example. It could also help to identify whether a malfunction in one part of a single system really has any effect on the system as a whole.

I was particularly interested in Gregory Provan's talk. Provan is a mathematician at University College Cork in Ireland, and uses mathematical models and machine learning approaches to glean insight into how well a building is performing. In an approach called "continuous commissioning" he begins modeling the building's performance parameters during its design. Later, as the structure is built, occupied, and renovated, data are recorded on an ongoing basis, and compared with the original projections to see when it isn't meeting those goals. Already machine learning algorithms can identify faults within a building when they spot fluctuations in the data. The future is in using this iterative approach to figure out ways to automate the process of improving how the building performs as a system, such that a computer could recommend solutions to inefficiencies in the way the building as a whole was planned.

There's also a very interesting talk from Stephen Samouhos, a graduate student at MIT. He comes from a family that owns a construction business, and so has an insider's perspective on how building owners, builders, and operators think. His basic message is that the technology is great and will become even better, but it won't become scalable until the folks in these parts of the industry can be convinced of the economic and practical value of more expensive, more-complicated-to-run systems. 

Jane Snowdon of IBM also gave a very nice overview of how some of the world's most powerful computers work, and how they could help managing individual buildings, but whole cities. She also touches on a very interesting point about information technology and its role in climate change. Although most of us don't think about it, computing consumes huge amounts of energy to enable us to do our Christmas shopping online. Finding ways to improve this requirement is something that the machines themselves are helping to do.

The eBriefing includes a more detailed  writeup, as well as multimedia of the speakers' lectures. Check it out.

The Glass Bees Featured in Sheepshead Bay Blog

Thank you to Samantha LoSapio and all of the folks at Sheepshead Bites for this review! This gives me increased confidence that we're onto something here. See the full article.

If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.

Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.

New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn...> Read more.

Also, as a side note, the New York Academy of Sciences has announced that they will be holding an event on December 2 looking at the findings of the New York Panel on Climate Change. Modeled on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NPCC is looking closely at the potential implications of climate change for New York City and the region. The report will also be published as a volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Dub Housing: Joel Sanders's Architecture of Surveillance

Architect Joel Sanders presented his Mix House project at Postopolis (video if you scroll down here), having been invited following this enticing post from Bldg Blog a few weeks ago (Click here first for pictures and additional information.) The Mix House is not just another modernist contortion, but a dwelling as three-channel audio device. Outfitted with architectural features and parabolic microphones oriented to capture sounds from the street, the backyard, and the sky, it gives the homeowner the ability both to listen in on the soundscape surrounding him, and to mix and record the three inputs into a musical composition from a command station in the kitchen. It's a contemporary twist on what Brian Eno in the 1970s described as his "efforts to produce original pieces ... for particular situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres."€ Here the compositions are not composed for specific spaces, however, but by specific places at particular times. These recordings might then be broadcast as audio perfume throughout the neighborhood, or saved and replayed to color the house's interior like a shade of paint, or furnish it like a 21st-century remix of Erik Satie's Musique d'ameublement.

Sanders explained that the Mix House is the first project he has developed to deal explicitly with the sonic possibilities of architecture. It's an inspiring thought experiment, since it provides a fresh reconfiguring of the ordinarily visual and tactile preoccupations that determine so much of what we experience in our built environments. As Sanders pointed out, citing historical work by Emily Thompson, except for concert hall architecture "we're typically indifferent to acoustics, unless something is wrong."€ The goal of sound design is often to craft space in ways that prevent us from even noticing its sonic character. Though often outfitted with a/v systems these days, it is still unusual that a piece of architecture could be constructed specifically to emphasize and utilize these characteristics. As Bldg Blog points out, the Mix House is a live-in musical instrument, offering its inhabitants an array of opportunities to create art from the ambient environment, and to customize the sound of their own space.

Such an innovative, interactive design is fascinating, but several conceptually unsettling leitmotifs also emerged over the course of Sanders's presentation. Tellingly, the architect placed his project in the context of both the early warning listening systems that England began constructing prior to World War II, and modernism's iconic floor-to-ceiling glass window, which offered the owner the unimpeded ability to monitor and blend into the landscape surrounding him. In this sense the Mix House is also a tool of surveillance, a topic Sanders has also explored in projects like his House for a Bachelor. Here, he sank the front lawn below ground level to give the owner the ability to remain unseen in the dwelling's core while simultaneously experiencing the environment around him. He can walk into the external environment, yet he is simultaneously protected and detached from it. The Mix House incorporates a similar visual sense of what Sanders characterized as "vulnerability,"€ but gives it a sonic turn.

Sound theorist Douglas Kahn is among those who have found a critical importance in the difference between vision and sound. In Noise, Water, Meat, his study of sound in the arts, he observes,

Although light traverses the space between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a constancy of action, as the result of a state ... Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences...

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.

For Kahn, whereas vision is an act of one body perceiving another discrete body in a subjective relationship, hearing is an act of mingling between bodies. Italian Futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla sensed this possibility in paintings like The Street Enters the House and Speeding Automobile representing the turbulence of modern life as an amorphous interweaving and interpenetration of lines of force. Musician and critic David Toop also heard this in his landmark book Ocean of Sound when he described ambient music as an art of "openness,"€ in which the composer recognizes the importance of the sonic dimensions of life and the connections that tie its various elements together. The ambient attitude is not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Whereas the eye has been conceived in modernity as a tool of subjective perception and interpretation of a world that is "out there,"€ the ear is omnidirectional, permeable, and impressionable, surrendering to the influence of the wider world, while seeking to incorporate it into one's own being. If the eye is an organ of division, the ear is one of community. "There are ear plugs,"€ Toop writes, "but then I just hear the sound of my own shell."

The Mix House's openness, as a machine for listening, is a profoundly wary one, however. One might argue (and Sanders indicated that others have suggested when reviewing his project) that the house could very well achieve the same goal merely by opening conventional windows. However, by adding extra steps of mediation in the form of overengineered prosthetic ears, the architect is exploring a queasy tension between private and public spaces. The Mix House incorporates sounds of the neighborhood within itself, but only if the windows can be shut tight and the sounds can be personalized through manipulation. The inhabitant wants a connection to public space, but interacts with it at arm's length, and only insofar as he can get what he needs from it as wallpaper for his cocoon.

Seen in this light, Sanders's constructions might be providing apt metaphors for certain facets of the way we live now. At the same time that the Mix House offers new artistic opportunities, it achieves them at the expense of the owner's participation in a public space. It is a suitable solution for an age when social interactions and politics are no longer practiced in the streets but on the Web, when friendships happen via corporate-backed networking sites, or when sprawling, gated suburban communities are planned in ways that minimize interaction between families. This is suburban architecture for the age of terror, the age of illegal wiretaps, the age of Megan's Law, when any neighbor could be a threat, or where everyone has something to hide.

Upcoming: Postopolis!

At the end of May, the architecture and design blogging masses will be converging on New York City for a five-day conference titled Postopolis!, hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. The event promises nonstop discussions "themed around landscape and the built environment." Organized by the excellent Bldg Blog, City of Sound, Subtopia, and Inhabitat, the event makes for a timely parallel to the recent Storefront exhibit Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x - 197x. That show celebrated the age of small independent publications of the print age, photocopied and disseminated in limited editions, offering a crudely compelling package for considering issues of architecture and design. Architecture has several "established" magazines and journals today that travel some similar terrain, but there is something refreshing about the architectural blogging community, armed with digital cameras and defamiliarizing the spaces they pass through in impromptu (and not so impromptu) missives. Check out these posts on pedestrian nostalgia, architecture and soccer, and urbanization of panic.

The Storefront's current exhibit of photos by Frederic Chaubin of 1970s-1980s experimental architecture in the Soviet territories also looks fantastic. (For more pictures and an inverview, you can also visit PingMag.)

For the Birds

I’m a little late on this, but an article on bird flight in Nature magazine arrived a couple of weeks ago in step with the change in season. The focus of the article was a study of how swifts adjust their wing configuration depending on the particular task facing them. (See some free coverage, including the spectacular cover image, at ScienceDaily) “Wing morphing” optimizes swifts to be able to make the sharp turns needed to chase insects or to glide while sleeping in the air. Engineering has always looked to birds for inspiration for flight, and projects are already underway to use this understanding of avian design for next-generation aircraft. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has apparently already been working on morphing wing designs for fighter planes.

More birds: Herzog and DeMeuron’s bird’s nest brutalism in renderings for their 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium | Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH station | birdsong as a model for human language acquisition | vintage automata that replicate the sound of singing birds | Wikipedia’s list of fictional birds | turning bird song into musical notation and modern composition.

21st-Century Cold War

Nature magazine reported Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has agreed to donate $37.5 million to a project undertaken by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the United Nations Foundation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is planned as a central repository to preserve the genetic diversity of 21 essential food crops needed to sustain humanity. In the event of catastrophic natural disaster, nuclear war, or plant epidemic, the vault, dug into the side of a mountain in the far north of Norway, would serve as a “last-resort depository of agricultural diversity,” a “doomsday” seed bank including a database of genetic information and a library of seed samples preserved at low temperatures.

One can only applaud the foresight of those responsible for such an undertaking, although in the light of recent forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and this UN Foundation scientific panel, not to mention the continuing proliferation of nuclear technology, it’s chilling to consider the need for it. Architectural renderings (here and here) on the GCDT website depict a facility bearing a startling resemblance to the North American Aerospace Defense Command headquarters in the hills above Colorado Springs. NORAD was a colossal undertaking built in a remote location to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and Canada. The BBC has reported that the security needs of the Global Seed Vault have also been taken into consideration. One shudders to speculate about what the vault might need to defend itself against.

Crushed by Big Blue

I got the news yesterday that the much-loved Tonic is closing its doors for the last time because there’s no room for it anymore in Bernard Tschumi’s Lower East Side. I know many in New York City will miss the club as a homegrown, relaxing venue run by true supporters of great music. It filled a critical niche when the Knitting Factory abandoned its role as the home of the Downtown music scene, and built its daring schedule with the help of musicians who were invited to curate its programming. I will carry with me memories of many challenging and moving performances by artists like Sir Richard Bishop, John Fahey, Carsten Nicolai, Thomas Fehlmann, Akron/Family, Arto Lindsay/John Zorn/Anton Fier, Masada, Fennesz, Derek Bailey, Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio, Voice Crack, Ikue Mori, Jim O'Rourke/Pita, and Slavic Soul Party, among many others I am surely forgetting. Tonic’s closing doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise; they’ve been struggling for years. It is a depressing turn of events, though, to see something so optimistic, innovative, and culturally important be driven from a city whose fame relies in no small part on its being a bellwether of edgy cultural trends. Apparently the future is luxury condos for all. Hurrah.

Scylla and Charybdis on the Morris Canal

I’ve probably driven past New Jersey’s Liberty State Park more than a hundred times on the way to the Holland Tunnel and Manhattan, but until this past weekend had never bothered to stop and linger. I’m sorry I waited so long, because I discovered that the promenade and the panoramic view of New York Harbor it offers make not only for exhilarating exercise, but also a window into some dynamics of a changing Hudson County waterfront.

The park is an ongoing project, reputedly begun at the instigation of Morris Pesin, a Jersey City activist and later politician, who in 1958 paddled a canoe from the city’s derelict post-industrial waterfront to Liberty Island to argue the need for a Jersey-side access to the statue. The beginning of construction would have to wait until the 1970s, with Pesin advocating for and successfully ensuring the development of uncommercialized, non-residential open space. Development of the park continues, burying land formerly claimed for a busy rail and shipping terminal under kite flyers, sunbathers, and pickup soccer matches.

At the north end of the park, situated in Communipaw Cove on the banks of the now obsolete Morris Canal, stands one of the last visible memorials of the area’s past life as a hub of industry and transportation. The Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal was designed by the Boston architectural firm Peabody & Stearns and opened in 1889, becoming a critical interchange for ferry passengers from Manhattan and Ellis Island bound for points west. It fell into disuse and disrepair as traffic through Ellis Island slowed and the state's highway systems grew, but some estimate that between 9 and 12 million new immigrants departed for the interior of the country from the terminal in its heyday. The canal was also a key link for supplying coal from the Pennsylvania mines to a growing New York City.

After passing beneath the graceful clock tower, one enters the terminal’s waiting area. It is open to visitors and in fine repair, and one is struck by the spectacularly light and delicately ornamented steelwork supporting a gracefully pitched, windowed roof. The secondary structures surrounding the showpiece terminal, however, show their age terribly, with the train platforms behind the station suffering from decades of neglect and the old wooden ferry gangplanks crumbling. Development of the park, including acres of parking lot, has obliterated nearly all traces of the miles of rail that once traced lines across the terrain, leaving the terminal itself incapable of evoking much sense of how dockworkers, railroad employees, and immigrants formerly experienced this site.

Planted immediately on the other side of the Morris Canal, and in jarring juxtaposition to this symbol of the industrial age is Cesar Pelli’s imposing 42-story glass tower at 30 Hudson Street. The tallest building in New Jersey, it was built on the site of a former Colgate factory, and became the home of Goldman Sachs following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center just across the river. If the CRRNJ was a stage for the hopes of millions of immigrants, 30 Hudson became a sign of the nation’s determination following a shocking and traumatic event. It was also hailed as a strong statement for the rebirth of a struggling city, and is indicative of the fever pitch of waterside construction that has happened not just in that town but also upstream in places like Hoboken, Weehawken, and Edgewater.

Despite these hopes, construction of a new Goldman Sachs headquarters is underway back in Manhattan, while planning continues for three additional office skyscrapers to rise above Ground Zero. Once the tide shifts eastward across the Hudson, one wonders if the Gold Coast market will be able to support so much luxury office space, and what consequence this could have for the waterfront and the livelihood of the towns that own it. One hopes that 30 Hudson will continue to lead the way in a permanent and sustainable revitalization of a landscape that for years suffered from obsolescence. But the CRRNJ terminal stands protected as a reminder of the kinds of social, economic, and technological forces that continually evolve and with which any development must contend.

Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney

A current exhibition on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a fascinating tour through the visionary work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an absolute original in the 1970s New York art scene who died tragically young of cancer in 1978. Famed for his deconstructions of condemned or abandoned buildings, Matta-Clark was also a systematic documentarian of his work, and the show consists of films, photographs, sketches, and artifacts from several of his most significant projects.

Walking through the exhibit, it quickly becomes clear that even if Matta-Clark was no major artist, he was much more than a mere vandal or a prankster. His works are subtle, abstract compositions of a raw craft, carved in three dimensions with the help of Sawzalls, blowtorches, sledgehammers, winches, and some good old elbow grease. Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” takes on playful but savagely disorienting forms one might expect from a demolition crew consisting of a crack team of Russian constructivists. Both meticulously composed and wildly improvised, his works transformed condemned spaces into a radical architecture of openness, breaking apart compartments, and permitting a flow between spaces normally divided from one another.

Like his contemporaries Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Matta-Clark was a member of a heroic generation of artists whose works exploded out of the gallery and into the landscape, or at least in Matta-Clark’s case, the built landscape. The violence he did to the buildings appears to be a comment on the disposability of structures built for specific purposes, inhabited by human experience, and subsequently rendered obsolete. Through methods requiring intense, and often dangerous, physical labor, he literally shone light on the ordinarily unseen or neglected, with all the metaphorical resonance that implies. His cuts had the effect of reclaiming and redeeming abandoned structures in a temporary détournement, and exposing secrets hidden in the walls and underneath the floorboards. They created a new sense of wonder and possibility in cold and forgotten objects that had clearly lost their function.

Pieces such as Matta-Clark’s Splitting also resonate with Smithson’s writings, including his fascinating essay, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey." Both sense something significant in the dross that covers so much of the landscape in and around New York City, and reflect a certain time and place in which the city appeared to be dying. Today, in an age when real estate markets devour urban landscapes for luxury condos, upscale restaurants, and art galleries, that period of languishment seems to have passed. And yet in much of the country the response to the junk architecture that covers so much of the landscape is to build more junk architecture. Where is the Matta-Clark of 2007?