49 Caroline says, including the Atlantic Ocean straight ahead. Ryall adds that the design team further stabilized the landscape with indigenous dune grasses and other native plants. The house, according to the architects, is net zero: it generates all its own power, using electricity as the sole energy source for heating, cooling, hot water, and cooking. Ryall says his office follows Passive House methods of design and construction in most of their projects, as markedly demonstrated here by roof-mounted solar panels and lack of dependence on fossil fuels. “This house is probably one of the most energy-efficient buildings on A covered porch on the longer wing leads to the main entrance (top). Precisely detailed pine walls and ceilings, and oak floors, unify the family room (above, left). A library abuts the living room on the south (above, right).
50 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 HOUSEof the Month Red paint, like that used by Le Corbusier, highlights the steel framing at the kitchen (above). the East End of Long Island,” he states. Despite sitting on an exposed dune, with all that glass, the year-around retreat has a snug, solid feel inside. The coziness comes from the prevalence of wood paneling and an eclectic assortment of furnishings: 19th-century American antiques and pottery; iridescent, golden Pewabic tiles on the fireplaces; and classic pieces of modern furniture are surrounded by horizontal-plank pine walls, wide-board oak floors, and jolts of color from Le Corbusier’s original palette (the paint is produced in Zurich) for the red beams, and yellow and burnt umber walls. Ryall designed the hardware to reflect the colonial revival period and picked some bathroom tiles from Springfield Pottery in England, as well as others he had admired in Italy. “The house has a real Arts and Crafts feel to it,” he notes. “I wanted it to reflect the history of the East End. The design fits the site. It is really one of a kind. That’s what you want.” Adds Caroline: “Bill really listened to us.” n
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55 LANDSCAPE SPANNING THE L.A. RIVER, AN EYE-CATCHING PEDESTRIAN AND BIKE BRIDGE LINKS TWO SEVERED COMMUNITIES. BY ILANA HERZIG PHOTOGRAPHY: © MIKE KELLEY Native plantings soften the edges of the famously gritty waterway (top). Viewing platforms cantilever over the concrete-lined riverbed (above). FRAMED BY an outsize safety-orange box truss, a new bridge in Los Angeles connects two neighborhoods while offering cyclists and pedestrians an immersion in the riparian landscape below. Designed by L.A.-based SPF:architects (SPF:a), the 400-foot-long steel-and-concrete Taylor Yard Bridge is one small component of the vast, ongoing effort to revitalize the Los Angeles River (which was lined with concrete in the 1930s to help prevent flooding). Close to downtown L.A. and commissioned by the city, the bridge, which opened in March, links the long-severed neighborhoods of Elysian Heights (or Frogtown), a progressive residential neighborhood, and Cypress Park, a densely populated gentrifying district. On either side of the span, Oakland-based landscape architects Hood Design Studio enhanced this segment of the river with a naturalistic scheme, infusing it with native and drought-tolerant plantings. The bridge, on which the architects collaborated with Arup, civil engineer Tetra Tech, and Ortiz Construction, spans a 10-foot difference in elevation between the two riverbanks; while its deck slopes across the water, the enormous box truss—the structure’s unapologetic calling card—remains level. This strategy has a surprising effect. “From both sides,
LANDSCAPE you see either the bridge getting bigger and bigger, or getting smaller and smaller,” says Zoltan Pali, founding principal of SPF:a. “We thought that was very cinematic.” Composed of 14-inch square tube steel, the truss is braced by stainless-steel tension rods. For seismic reasons, the team employed a redundancy system that repeats critical components in case of failure. And, to limit disruption of the river’s ecosystem, the team built during the dry season and did much of the assembly off-site. Two viewing platforms within the structure, suspended over one of the most lush sections of the riverbed, afford visitors views of the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance. SPF:a staggered these cantilevered outlooks to follow the curve of the snaking water below. The overall strategy speaks to both the city’s industrial and cultural history. The bridge’s form and hue respond to the site, once a bustling railroad yard, until it was largely abandoned in the 1980s. Additionally, the project nods to the history of violence inflicted by the rival gangs that once populated the area. “The bridge is akin to a handshake,” says Pali, referring to the way it joins the two sides of the river. For its approach to the landscape, Hood Design Studio also looked for inspiration in its surroundings, creating a scheme to stand up to L.A.’s harsh natural landscape and climate by incorporating climate-sensitive species, gravel, and rock for the bridge’s southern edges. For phase one of their plan, says Hood principal and studio director Alma du Solier, the team designed zigzagging planters that are evocative of the ebb and flow of rippling water and capture stormwater runoff from the adjacent bike path. Native species such as California goldenrod and mugwort abound, as well as other plantings— Toyon trees, Chaparral yucca, strains of prickly pear, Catalina mahogany, golden currant, and purple sage (with cacti to deter people from stepping into the plant beds). In the face of criticism about the continued lack of adequate pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in L.A. (case in point: the bike path that crosses Taylor Yard Bridge ends abruptly on its northern side), the city has promised that improvements are on the horizon. Still, Pali sees this project as a move in the right direction, through its remediation of part of the river and its linking of the neighborhoods that abut it. “This bridge, in a little way, adds to the betterment of the communities,” says Pali, and “to the ease of people being able to connect and interact with each other.” n Illuminated at night, the bridge stands out against its urban backdrop. Bizbee ™ PANEL ©2015 modularArts, Inc. Topaz ™ PANEL ©2021 modularArts, Inc. U.S. modulararts.com 206.788.4210 Made in the U.S.A. Greta ™ PANEL ©2021 modularArts, Inc. Stella ™ PANEL ©2014 modularArts, Inc. Tucker™ PANEL @2010 modularArts, Inc. Hive ™ BLOCK ©2012 modularArts, Inc. U.S. Patent 8,375,665 Photo by Eymeric Widling
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61 THE ARCHITECT FOR THIS POLITICAL CLUB BASED HIS DESIGN ON THE PALAZZO FARNESE IN R0ME (1541). THROUGH HIS DESIGNS FOR COUNTRY AND CITY HOUSES, CLUBS, AND PUBLIC BUILDINGS, HE HELPED POPULARIZE A SIMPLE, ELEGANT, AND MODERN INTERPRETATION OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE VOCABULARY IN HIS HOMELAND. PHOTOGRAPHY: © KATHERINE LEEDALE (TOP); COURTESY ESTHER WESTERVELD/CREATIVE COMMONS (BOTTOM) By entering, you have a chance to win an iPad mini. See the complete rules and entry form online at architecturalrecord.com/guessthearchitect. The architect for the Chilehaus in Hamburg is Fritz Högar. Completed in 1924, the 10-story office building was designed to accommodate workspace for shipping clerks. Högar gave the building a prowlike corner and bowed shape as an homage to ships anchored nearby, while the building got its name because the owner imported saltpeter from Chile. The reinforcedconcrete structure, clad in a local brick distinctive in its texture and color, is referred to as an example of Brick Expressionism, an architectural style seen often in Germany at this time. Guess the Architect Contest A monthly contest from the editors of RecoRd asks you to guess ENTER NOW! the architect for a work of historical importance.
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64 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 BOOKS Against the Grain Blank: Speculations on CLT, edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara. AR+D Publishing/ORO Editions, 240 pages, $49.95. JENNIFER BONNER and Hanif Kara’s new book, Blank: Speculations on CLT, offers a combination of thought-provoking essays and speculative design projects to “reset” the conversation around CLT, or cross-laminated timber. A collaboration between Bonner, an architect, and Kara, an engineer, the book originated in a design studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, called “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect,” that they co-taught in 2020. Much of the current interest in mass timber has to do with its sustainability, as one of the only rapidly renewable materials capable of lowering the building industry’s carbon footprint. But, Bonner and Kara are quick to note, “we believe the CLT ‘blank’ can and must be conceptualized beyond its sustainability.” As a large-scale modular panel, the CLT blank offers structural capacity as well as a “ready-made” finish material, with the potential to affect both the embodied energy of buildings as well as their aesthetics. The book’s contributors see it as a material system with significant expressive potential, akin to the liberatory logics of Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino. Chris Lee’s essay, “Essential Planes,” reads the potential of CLT’s planar logic against the frame logic of an earlier paradigm, as articulated in Colin Rowe’s essay “The Chicago Frame” and witnessed by the overall impact of the Maison Domino. Lee notes the decades-long “gestation” period between the Domino concept and the building industry’s adoption of the concrete frame, and speculates about a similar absorption rate for CLT to become mainstream. In “Blank Shots: Monolithic Desires and Laminar Inevitabilities,” Nader Tehrani notes the fundamental rift between monolithic construction, of a traditional multi-wythe brick wall, and the laminar construction of a contemporary stud wall with sheathing, vapor REVIEWED BY ERIC HÖWELER, FAIA 425-256-2210 | [email protected] Joto-Vent.com The 2” Reveal Soffit Vents unique design hides the ventilation openings from the exterior of the home. Made of galvanized steel, the 2” Reveal Soffit Vent is durable and fits with standard panel material. SV2-0809-WT SV2-1209-BK 2” Reveal Soffit Vent Hidden Ventilation Holes
65 barriers, cladding, and interior finishes. Tehrani sees the current interest in mass timber as a part of what he calls the “ethic of a mono-material” approach, and as a technique of reclaiming aspects of means and methods long ceded to the building industry. Running in parallel to the essays, but rotated 90 degrees in the book layout (like the cross lamination in CLT), is a series of design projects produced by graduate students, beautifully drawn to highlight the modularity of the CLT blank. The 9-foot by 50-foot module appears in both plan and elevation drawings as a fundamental building block, out of which all designs are assembled. The emphasis in the architectural parts corresponds with the principles of aggregation and part-towhole relationships. Many of the designs highlight the unit logic in the lapped corners of the blanks’ staggered edges. Elsewhere, strategies focus on the assembled nature of their construction-driven conception. Returning to the editors’ initial claim to think of CLT’s impact beyond its sustainability, the arguments made in the book point to CLT’s expressive potential, its modular thinking and tendency to drive design decisions from construction-phase issues of sequence and logistics into the early conceptual-design phases of a project. Most mass timber is used to replace steel or concrete elements, substituting planar or axial members with their timber alternatives but not altering their configuration or conception. What is exciting about the essays and projects in this book is their desire to seek out the impacts on architecture beyond replacement. They ask, How could this expanded palette of materials and systems also expand the expressive and organizational logics for architecture? Mies van der Rohe’s 1921 charcoal renderings of the Friedrichstrasse Tower provide a powerful image of a materially driven design for an all-glass tower, decades before such an envelope was technically achievable. Mies’s renderings present an anticipatory vision for a future that was just out of reach. The difference with the CLT projects presented in this book is that they are technically achievable today. The barriers to entry for this masstimber future are not technical—the limits are regulatory, logistical, economic, and, frankly, imaginative. The authors of and contributors to Blank are calling for an acknowledgement of the moment—we are at the precipice of a paradigm shift that will reset the field. In his essay “Chicago Frame,” Rowe reads pairs of projects that employ the structural steel frame. In some he sees practical proposals that are primarily buildings, yet in others he sees a predominant polemic—in his words, “an advertisement for a cause.” Blank: Speculations on CLT is both a critique of business as usual and a rallying cry for a cause. It is a prod and a premonition of an alternative architecture driven by a material imagination, part pragmatism and part polemic. At this moment, we need both. n Eric Höweler, FAIA, is principal of Höweler + Yoon and an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Manufacturing Architectural Metal Products For Over 30 Years Backlit Solutions For Columns • Walls • Ceilings Illuminate Your Environment
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69 BOOKS Architectural Time Travel REVIEWED BY THOMAS FISHER Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture, by Robert A.M. Stern, with Leopoldo Villardi. Monacelli Press, 520 pages,$60. MOST ARCHITECTS now know of Robert A.M. Stern as a successful architect and founder of the firm RAMSA in New York, as well as a former professor at Columbia and dean at Yale. Fewer may know of him as a prolific author who’s written, co written, or edited several dozen books, or as a thorough and accomplished scholar who’s coauthored comprehensive histories of planned suburbs and a multivolume landmark history of New York City’s architecture from the late 19th century to the present. But who knew that Stern is also a terrific storyteller, as evidenced by his new memoir? There may be no American architect who has more thoroughly documented his own work—and his own thinking about it—than Stern. His “journey,” written with the research assistance of Leopoldo Villardi, takes us chronologically through his life and career: his Brooklyn youth (he was born there in 1939); his Yale architectural education from 1960 to 1965, when Paul Rudolph was the chair; his leadership in the New York Architectural League, first in charge of exhibitions and later as president, in two different stints between 1965 and 1977; his early Postmodern phase as a partner in Stern & Hagmann from 1969 to 1976; his subsequent embrace of what he calls “Modern Tradition al ism” as Robert A. M. Stern Architects; his professorship at Columbia University, from 1970 to 1998; and his deanship at Yale University’s School of Architecture, from 1998 to 2016. Throughout the book, Stern tells fascinating and often funny stories of the clients, colleagues, and coconspirators in his many ventures, which have extended beyond the design of hundreds of buildings to include groundbreaking exhibitions, such as the Architectural League’s 40 Under 40 show in 1966; important preservation battles, like the failed effort to save Edward Durell Stone’s 2 Columbus Circle in 2005; and even a television program, the Pride of Place series on PBS in 1986. In recounting the remarkable range of his activities, Stern sometimes seems like a witty Forrest Gump of architecture, having participated in so many of the most important events in our profession over the last 50 years. But he also seems at times like the F. Scott Fitzgerald of our field. Stern often writes with Fitzgerald’s verve, making this memoir a real pleasure to read, and their lives have some striking parallels. Like Fitzgerald, Stern did not come from money and, like Fitzgerald, watched the wealthy from afar. Stern writes of his youthful aspiration to become an architect in Manhat tan, which stood as “a kind of metropolitan Oz to my young eyes.” Stern’s life also brings to mind such Fitzgerald characters as Gatsby, of The Great Gatsby, which Stern admits to “reread(ing) . . . on a pretty frequent basis.” The memoir includes the famous Fitzgerald quote, “the test of a firstrate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” an intelligence that Stern has in spades. Whether hosting his popular postlecture parties at Yale or hobnobbing with his many wealthy clients, Stern can seem as ambitious as Jay Gatsby while at the same time conjuring Gatsby’s opposite, the observant Nick Carraway. The tension between selfindulgence and selfreflection in American culture, found in Fitzgerald’s literature, also characterizes much of what Stern recounts. Now and Then: Robert Stern looks over the Yale Residential Colleges model with George de Brigard and Melissa DelVecchio in 2008 (left). The young Stern (right) presents his Whitney Museum of American Art thesis project at Yale University 1965. PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY RAMSA (LEFT); © JOHN HAGMANN (RIGHT)
BOOKS The field of architecture has few great autobiographies, and those that we do have are either too self-effacing, like Louis Sullivan’s The Autobiography of an Idea, or too self-serving, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s An Autobiography. Stern offers a refreshing alternative here: a highly revealing and surprisingly frank assessment of architecture and TWITTER @HuntcoSupply INSTAGRAM BIKE RACKS, BENCHES, BOLLARDS, RECEPTACLES | LEARN MORE AT HUNTCO.COM @Huntco SITE FURNISHINGS REMOVABLE BOLLARDS PATRICIA RECER CENTER IN BEAVERTON, OREGON architects, including himself. Stern acknowledges the “temerity and embarrassingly massive dose of chutzpah” that Stanley Tigerman recognized in him early on, and Stern admirably admits to his own limitations: “I regret that the buildings could not have been a little better, that the books could not have been a little clearer.” In the second half of the book, Stern recounts the stories behind much of RAMSA’s enormous body of work. While that goes on a bit long, it reveals how much architecture is really a story of architects’ relationships with their clients. Consider Stern’s interaction with the Eisner family. He designed an apartment for Maggie and Lester Eisner in New York in the mid-1970s. During that project, Stern met their young son, Michael, who later in 1984 became the CEO of Disney. In 1986, Michael saw the Pride of Place series, conceived for PBS by Mobil executive Herbert Schmertz, for whom Stern had renovated a house in 1980. Eisner liked the TV series, and was spurred in 1987 to hire RAMSA to design the Walt Disney World Casting Center in Florida. This led to other commissions, including three A group portrait of a post-review dinner at Stern’s loft in New Haven, April 29, 2004 (left), includes Cesar Pelli, Jaquelin Robertson, Stanley Tigerman, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Peggy Deamer, and many others.
71 Stern relaxes in his loft in New Haven (left) in front of a vinyl wallcovering by Roy Lichtenstein. PHOTOGRAPHY: © MARK OSTOW (OPPOSITE); PETER AARON/OTTO hotels at Walt Disney World, two at Euro Disney, and one at Tokyo Disneyland, and the Disney-developed town, Celebration, coplanned with Cooper Robertson. Many wonder how architects propel their careers: Stern shows that satisfying residential clients can lead to much larger things. The truly fascinating aspect of this memoir lies in the ringside seat it gives readers to the rise and evolution of Postmod ern architecture and to the architects and critics who played important parts in that story. The book describes the crucial roles that Paul Rudolph performed as an inspirational educator, Vincent Scully as an insightful provocateur, and Philip Johnson as a loyal mentor and eventual promoter of Postmodernism. And it is full of odd occurrences along the way, such as the time that Barbra Streisand and Stern were driving to see a property on which Streisand wanted to build a house. Her interest in having Stern do the design definitely cooled after she found only Bette Midler tapes in Stern’s glove compartment. Hah! Above all, the book makes clear the central role Stern has had in shaping our thinking about architecture and architectural education over the last five decades. He helped redefine Postmodernism, for example, not as a style but as an idea, as “the dialogue between old and new, between what was and what is and what will be.” Memoirs help make the past come alive, and that is certainly true here. Among Stern’s many accomplishments, this book may be one of his greatest yet, inventing a new genre in our field that, as a complement to architectural history, we might call architectural memory. n Thomas Fisher is a professor in the School of Architecture and former dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. He is also the former editorial director of Progressive Architecture magazine. ENGINEERED MASONRY SOLUTIONS Hohmann & Barnard provides quality and innovative engineered masonry solutions including Thermal Brick Support Systems and Concealed Lintels. For more info, visit: www.h-b.com REDUCE THERMAL TRANSFER!
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75 Be Our Guest These materials and furnishings were designed to foster refined yet comfortable settings. BY SHEILA KIM The Walking Bench Architect Lauren Rottet puts a whimsical spin on a traditional marble bench by mingling straight and diagonal legs—one of which appears to pierce the seat—to create the anthropomorphic illusion that the bench is walking. Constructed with Carrara or ebony marble, it comes in two lengths, 6' and 12'. rottetstudio.com MetalWorks CenterCut Ceiling Panels Armstrong Ceilings now offers center-cut panels incorporating square, trimless downlights from USAI Lighting to create cleaner ceiling-planes. This option is available on the company’s MetalWorks Torsion Spring, Clip-on, and Torsion Spring Shapes panels, which range in size from 24" square to 24" x 96". armstrongceilings.com Layer As power and recharging stations continue to be essentials for guests in hospitality venues, this minimalist cylindrical charging tower by Dekko is sure to be in demand for its aesthetically appealing profile. Available in three heights, the tech hub can power up to 10 devices with a combination of standard outlets and USB ports. A resting surface for devices is optional. dekko.com Jewel-Tone Palette Metal-sheet producer Móz Designs is upping the ante on atmospheric interiors with a dramatic new color palette consisting of luminous tones like Peacock Green, Rose Gold, and Night Blue. Applicable to walls and columns, the sheets can be customized with a finish like wood grain as well as with perforated or laser-cut patterns. mozdesigns.com Valmy This elegant armchair from Ligne Roset was designed with hotel guest rooms in mind, but can easily fit into other hospitality zones. Its seat and a fanned back reminiscent of a seashell are offered in 11 textiles or leathers, in a wide range of colorways, while the base comes in varnished or blackstained bent solid beech, as well as black lacquered metal. ligne-roset.com PRODUCTS Hospitality
76 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 PRODUCTS Hospitality Ocean Master MEGA MAX This newly launched umbrella from Tuuci covers a whopping area of 16' square to 24' square (rectangular formats are also available) while engineered to face up to 80mph wind gusts. Its main structural components are marine-grade aluminum in eight powder-coat or three wood-look finishes. tuuci.com Element Atlas Concorde USA has introduced this porcelain-tile collection to replicate the look of stone in five realistic hues, from ivory to carbon. The standard rectangular tiles come in an 11¾" x 235/8" format and a “turtle mosaic” (shown) that mixes irregular pentagrams and hexagrams for a more organic appearance. atlasconcordeusa.com Ajiro Burst of Happiness Conceived by interior designer Jeffrey Beers, this layered Maya Romanoff wallcovering features a top surface of paulownia-wood veneer, laser cut to reveal its metal-foil backing. Available in a choice of 10 colorways, the covering comes in 9'-square rolls and is Class A fire rated. mayaromanoff.com Room & Board + Cambria Vanity The Business Interiors arm of Room & Board now offers seven modern commercial-grade vanities featuring Cambria-brand quartz tops. The quartz is available in six classic-tone looks, while the vanities come in up to six sizes and as many as 11 wood finishes. roomandboard.com Oak Stairs Lockers A classy Scandinavian alternative to conventional metal lockers or open wood cubbies, this Ethnicraft storage-box system creates visual movement through the angular contours cut into its solid oak doors. Architects can customize the number of boxes, each of which measure 19½" x 10½" x 23¼". Ideal for communal wellness and coworking spaces, the boxes can be further customized with locks. ethnicraft.com
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H A N D C A S T B R O N Z E H A R D W A R E | 1 2 FINIS H E S | M A D E T O O R D E R IN T H E U S A | r o c k y m o u n t a i n h a r d w a r e . c o m
Climate Justice While the environmental emergency is endangering the entire planet, its impacts are not equally shared but are far more threatening to poor nations globally and to marginalized communities in the U.S. In the pages ahead, record explores these severe problems —and potential solutions—focusing on inequities in shelter, flood resilience, the peril of extreme heat, and public policy. PHOTOGRAPHY: © IWAN BAAN 81 RWANDA INSTITUTE FOR CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE, BUGESERA, BY MASS DESIGN GROUP.
82 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: CALL TO ACTION Guterres. (Further code red: homo sapiens aren’t looking all that sapient right now.) The failures so far, either to meet greenhouse-gas-reduction targets or to adapt to predicted climate impacts, have left more than 3.3 billion people—that’s about half of the world’s population—“highly vulnerable” to floods, drought, heat, food shortages, wildfires, and associated economic and social strife. And because the climate crisis is a force multiplier that compounds pre-existing vulnerabilities, these impacts are not evenly distributed: as with Covid, the people who are already disadvantaged will continue to be the hardest hit. The link between climate impacts and social inequities is what climate justice is about, and it’s a link that’s especially strong in the built environment. “Almost anywhere we look, the We are not all-in on the climate emergency—and coming together is the only way out. BY KATHARINE LOGAN THE MOST recent report on environmental impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in February, is “a further code red warning for humanity,” according to UN Secretary-General António Crisis of Inequity Flooding overwhelmed Lake Verret in Louisiana in 2017.
83 places architects practice have histories of injustice. We are literally building on these sites,” says Kian Goh, an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a faculty director of the school’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. “A core part of our practice is to be accountable to the fact that these are not neutral places.” In North America, placebased injustices include the dispossession of Indigenous people, exploitative labor practices in the construction of the fabric of our cities, the redlining of Black and immigrant communities (by banks to deny financing based on race), and the siting of toxic facilities next to communities of color, to name just some of the big ones. The legacies of these injustices, as they translate into climate vulnerabilities, are palpable. Even though redlining is now illegal, historically redlined neighborhoods still suffer from disinvestment and have, for example, fewer trees and green spaces than other parts of their cities: a study published in 2021 confirmed that census tracts whose residents are predominantly people of color are hotter in summer heat waves (with higher surface urban heatisland intensity—in some cases by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit) than predominantly white areas in all but six of the 175 largest urbanized areas in the continental U.S. (page 98). Another study, crosschecking demographic information with nighttimelight data from satellites during last year’s winter power outages in Texas (a substantial amount of which were transmission disconnections and emergency loadshedding triggered by ERCOT, the grid operator), found minoritydominated neighborhoods were more than four times as likely to suffer a blackout than predominantly white areas. How does the concept of climate justice connect these dots? According to researchers Sonja Klinsky and Anna Mavrogianni, in a special issue of the journal Buildings & Cities, the first dot is the fact that some countries around the world have contributed to (and benefited from) climatechange factors more than others. Of greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the industrial revolution, the U.S. alone is responsible for 26 percent, with the European Union responsible for another 23 percent; India, by contrast, despite having a much larger population, accounts for 3 percent, and even China has caused only 12 percent. Dots two and three are that climate impacts are unevenly distributed, as is the vulnerability to them. Whether it’s the case of the Marshall Islands sinking into the Pacific or of Indigenous land and culture almost completely eroded, with the rapidly shrinking Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana (page 95), uneven climate impacts often trace preexisting patterns of privilege and marginalization. The fourth dot is that the causes and effects of the climate emergency are often separated by time, space, and social strata, which complicates decisionmaking and accountability. Dot four, in particular, is the one for architects to watch. A critical aspect of how systems of decisionmaking reinforce inequities depends on who is part of the process and whose voices are missing, says Idowu Jola Ajibade, an assistant professor at Portland State University, whose research focuses on climate change, urban sustainability, and societal transformation. Cities—with their factories and warehouses, railroads and ports —were not necessarily built for lowincome groups, she says: “They were built for wealth accumulation.” From that perspective, “you begin to get a sense of why the voices of lowincome groups and people of color—the people who built the essential foundations of the cities of today—have been silenced.” Engaging marginalized communities in decisionmaking about their environment is a critical challenge of climate justice. And yet, “it’s a hurdle for many of us in professional practice and in academia,” says Goh. “These systems are steeped in class difference, and many of us do not come from the groups from which climate justice struggles emerged.” She suggests builtenvironment professionals need to be more attuned to injustices within our own ranks, as well as to the embodied struggles that have given rise to the cliPHOTOGRAPHY: © VIRGINIA HANUSIK (OPPOSITE); AUDIOHIFI VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS The Richmond Chevron refinery in California sits in an area with a legacy of economic and environmental injustice.
CEU 84 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 CALL TO ACTION mate-justice movement. Complicating the challenge is the fact that the localized nature of many community-based climate-justice initiatives is at odds with the scale and speed of change that’s required to mitigate the climate emergency. “So how do we not talk over or otherwise speak for these frontline vulnerable communities?” Goh asks. “And what practices can we embrace that take their claims for justice seriously, at the same time as we need to do big projects fast?” These are questions that Mithun has been grappling with over the course of its five-year engagement with the community of North Richmond, in Contra Costa County, California (population: about 3,000). Bounded on all sides by industrial areas (including the Richmond Chevron Refinery, California’s largest source of industrial emissions), the formerly redlined community with few trees struggles with the heat-island effect, wildfire smoke, and noxious ground-level ozone from industrial pollutants, regular threats of inland flooding and coastal storm surges, and a housing crisis. Mithun first began working with North Richmond as part of the 2018 Resilient By Design (RbD) Bay Area Challenge, and is continuing to support the community in developing strategies for stability, homeownership, and resilience that were initiated during that collaboration. “We need to broaden the definition of “client” beyond real-estate firms or institutions, to include emerging community groups,” says Hilary Noll, an associate principal at Mithun. And the idea of being a “designfirst” firm in this context is just wrong, she says: “We should first be showing up, listening, and accompanying communities as they build capacity.” Pre-development engagement with and support of local nonprofits have provided an essential foundation Wildcat Creek (North Richmond’s only natural area)—and a horizontal levee to rehabilitate a stretch of the San Francisco Bay shoreline while protecting the community from rising sea levels. Along with the RbD design phase, a community land trust called RichmondLAND was created to acquire property and work with nonprofit organizations to develop facilities that the community really needs. As a founding partner, Mithun has mentored the trust’s junior realestate managers as they get up to speed on the fundamentals of running a project, and has helped make connections among community leaders, county and housing authority officials, and industry professionals. As a result, community-land-trust leaders recently advised the county housing authority on priorities—such as anti-displacement strategies—to be included in an RFP to acquire local HUD-owned lands. Backed by a team that includes an affordablehousing finance manager, a land-use attorney, and members of Engineers Without Borders, all of whom work pro bono (as does Mithun), a historically disempowered community is becoming increasingly effective in pursuing its objectives. For firms that worry they don’t have the capacity to foster climate justice for free, Noll says that 1 percent (the portion of revenues that Mithun dedicates to pro bono work) “really is just a drop in the bucket, but when applied carefully and thoughtfully, those resources can have a massive impact.” Another firm that consistently prioritizes climate justice is MASS Design Group. “It’s in places that are poor or historically marginalized, or places that haven’t had as much access to resources, that we have to be aspirational,” says Alan Ricks, a founding principal and chief design officer at MASS. Referring especially to the firm’s work Minority-dominated neighborhoods in Texas were four times more likely to experience blackouts during the 2021 power-grid crisis than predominantly white areas. What practices can we embrace to take claims for justice seriously at the same time as we need to do big projects fast? ÑKian Goh, associate professor of urban planning at UCLA PHOTOGRAPHY: © JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES; IWAN BAAN (OPPOSITE, TOP); COURTESY JUSTIN GARRETT MOORE (OPPOSITE, BOTTOM) for a handful of projects that are now advancing in North Richmond, including an eco-village —with housing, an elementary school, and green space along
85 in Africa, Ricks describes the aspiration as “a relentless pursuit of progress that does not aspire to the same level as the West, but rather to bigger goals about being a model for the future.” The most recent design in the firm’s portfolio exemplifying that theme is the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA), a 3,400- acre project aimed at improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated country (with a population set to double again by 2050) by acknowledging the interdependence of human, animal, and ecological health. With an award-winning master plan, informed by an ecologist-generated map of what once lived and what could live on the site, the energy-independent campus stitches together remnants of savannah woodland and a lake, while at the same time demonstrating how nature and agriculture can coexist, and even become symbiotic. The campus buildings use low-carbon materials—stone foundations, earth walls, wood roof framing, and terra-cotta tiles—and 96 per cent of them (by weight) were sourced within Rwanda. The work to regenerate the campus’s PERSPECTIVE Justin Garrett Moore Adjunct associate professor of architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University In the framing around climate and justice, climate has been in the realm of the scientists and policy makers, and the social-justice and environmentaljustice movements have been coming from other spaces. For example, people in the South have been dealing with industrial agriculture or oil companies, doing this work in direct ways that are not somewhat abstract, unlike global warming or embodied carbon. It’s been clear: our people are dying, our water is poisoned. These two perspectives intersect, of course, but they are coming from different understandings and motivations. In terms of what is called climate justice or the climate-change movement, there’s a lot of frustration. People who have agency and power are in different positions from many of the people who have been part of the environmental-justice movement for a long time. People behind those movements look at the problems very differently and are connected with very different institutions. So it’s really important to acknowledge, within these conversations, that it’s the same goal or the same objectives but that people are coming from different experiences that frame the issues and their urgency in different ways. Obviously, for example, flooding and storm resilience are in a space where communities located in low-lying areas or close to industry have had very direct impacts, and there is a disconnect with the wealth of those communities, where some people have the ability to get mortgages or loans to repair their property after flooding or infrastructure damage, while historically Black communities are continually dealing with these ongoing issues. degraded land is expected to sequester enough carbon in the first 10 years to offset the embodied carbon of the complete development. It’s unusual for an architect to have as thorough an understanding of a project’s entire supply chain as MASS has had by necessity in Rwanda; taking greater responsibility for the climate impacts and social equity of materials and methods is a way Ricks sees that architects can contribute to climate justice. At the same time, he says, it’s unrealistic to put that responsibility on architects alone: “We need regulatory, political, social, and market pressures to demand these things, so that the appropriate amount of research and development can go into figuring out the answers.” But the irrefutable truth is that every project, for better or worse, is a climate-impact project. And architects can take the opportunity—through the processes, as well as the projects they design—to support the people and places most at risk. “We are trained to find ways to build a better world,” says Goh. “If we can use our expertise— with space, with codes, with possibilities for change—to contribute to these movements for climate justice, that’s a really good start.” n The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, by MASS Design Group, regenerates its site’s degraded land.
Parum faccabo. Nis autatecti quatem et aut aperuptasit elessim excessed. 86 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: HOUSING cade, climate-fueled catastrophes have forced some 20 million people a year from their homes, becoming the primary driver of in-country migration. Lowincome households are especially vulnerable, with a disproportionate number poorly housed in areas prone to storms, flooding, pollution, heatwaves, and drought. As record goes to press, disastrous floods in South Africa have destroyed or damaged thousands of homes—many in informal settlements built in low-lying river valleys or on steep, unstable slopes—killing some 500 people and displacing thousands more. These calamities increase the burden on those least able to cope, making access to affordable, resilient housing an essential aspect of climate justice. Fulfilling the human right to decent housing globally will take some innovation. The need for new housing around the world by Design firms and builders are fostering equity through innovation in affordable, climate-smart housing. BY KATHARINE LOGAN A HOME is the basis of stability and security, the center of most people’s social, emotional, and even economic lives—a place where residents can live in peace, security, and dignity, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to adequate housing. Yet over the past deShelter from the Storm Recent flooding in South Africa damaged informal settlements the most.
87 the end of this century is predicted at 2 billion, but 2 billion times even modest carbon emissions from each home would amount to a giant step in the wrong direction. Tom Woodward, former climate lead in global policy and influence at Reall, an international housing development nonprofit, points to the link between the climate emergency and social justice in housing. “We cannot afford to address only one of these while making the other worse,” he says. But solutions are emerging, combining materials innovation, offsite fabrication, and lowcarbon design to advance equity in housing. In the Global South, where 90 percent of the world’s urban population growth is occurring, an increase of 2.5 billion is expected by 2050. Reall is backing climatesmart, affordable housing projects such as a masstimber initiative in East Africa, zeroenergy homes for disadvantaged families in Pakistan, and utilityscale solar with integrated housing in India and the Philippines, which exemplify key themes of climate justice. And in the Global North, where retrofitting is an imperative, both to increase livability and to reduce emissions, the affordablehousing sector is pioneering low and highrise solutions with transformative potential. To address housing demand from rapid urbanization without escalating embodied carbon, an initiative aimed at mitigating Kenya’s 2 millionhome deficit (with a predicted need for 27 million units of new housing by 2050) is tackling the challenge at industrial scale. Leapfrogging lessons from the Global North, Nairobibased designbuild firm BuildX Studio and its partners are working to establish a sustainable, regional, masstimber industry. With the goal of offering a zerocarbon, prefabricated housing option by 2030, the concept addresses the full value chain: coordinating a sustainable wood supply from neighboring Uganda; establishing the first crosslaminated timber (CLT) processing facility in Kenya; designing a flatpack urbanhousing system aimed at lowand middleincome brackets; prototyping; working with government to write new regulations; and building public awareness and acceptance of CLT as a replacement for steel and concrete. In addition to providing dignified, lowcost housing, the program has the potential both to transform Kenya’s construction industry and to create a new, highvalue market for investments in carbonsequestering forestry and its products. “BuildX is making a very long play,” says Woodward. “They’re not just thinking about buildings; they’re establishing a nationallevel supply chain for an affordable, zerocarbon solution that could actually work across the whole country.” At the scale of lowincome households needing secure shelter now, Karachibased Open Door Design Studio, in collaboration with fabricator and sustainability consultant Modulus Tech, has designed factorymade, BuildX Studio is developing zero-carbon, prefabricated housing in Kenya (above). The Ken Soble Tower in Canada (left) has been retrofitted to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions. IMAGES: COURTESY BORJA SANTURINO/BUILDX STUDIO (TOP); © CODRIN TALABA (CENTER); PHIL MAGAKOE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES (OPPOSITE)
CEU 88 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 HOUSING zero-energy homes that can be built for $10 per square foot, flat-packed 11 to a truck, and assembled without heavy equipment. Using a light-gauge steel structure, with insulated panel walls and a couple of cladding options, the 664-square-foot, two-bedroom homes (each with 256 square feet of courtyard and landscaped entry) achieve a carbon-footprint reduction of 90 percent, compared to a benchmark building. With average temperatures in the region predicted to exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, and air-conditioning both expensive and unreliable, “designing an elegant, climateresilient home for people on a low income required a return to the basics,” says Currim Suteria, project architect at Open Door. “Building using passive techniques is the only way forward.” The project’s vernacular-derived cooling strategies, including courtyards and wind catchers (designed in collaboration with a doctoral student in wind engineering, Kimberley Adamek, at Western University in London, Ontario), can reduce interior temperatures by as much as 35 degrees Fahrenheit without air-conditioning. In addition to their cooling function, the courtyards admit indirect light, provide spaces for gathering, and offer views to greenery. The development team prioritized ownership by women and by people with disabilities (with mortgages costing about the same as they’d pay in rent in an informal settlement), significantly improving their security and that of their children. Where BuildX is tackling the issue of affordable, climate-smart housing through the supply chain, and Modulus is working at the building scale, Singapore-based climate tech venture Billion Bricks is tackling the problem with an ingenious paradigm flip. “They’re not building a house and putting a solar panel on the roof,” says Woodward. “They’re building a business plan for a solar farm in a place that has very high solar yield, and they’re integrating housing underneath it.” The housing enables the solar farm to provide a quicker return (from the sale of the homes) and the solar makes the 485- to 880-squarefoot homes more affordable by providing an income stream to the homeowner. For example, a 10-kilowatt solar roof can generate as much as four times the energy that the home underneath it needs, a surplus that the homeowner can sell back to the grid or to a local factory. Billion Bricks has completed prototype homes in India and the Philippines, and is now looking to jump to the community scale. “They’ve looked at the problem and said, ‘There’s no way we can make a $10,000 house and yield a profit if we just follow conventional forms of building,’” says Wood ward. “To address these problems, architects’ expertise needs to go beyond the conventional boundaries of what architecture is.” In the Global North, meeting the need for affordable, climateresilient housing also requires innovation in new construction, but even more crucial is retrofitting. With 80 percent of 2050’s housing stock already standing, decarbonizing it will have a greater impact than low-carbon new builds. What’s more, much of the social housing that was built in the mid-to-late 20th century—now a scarce resource —is starting to fail. Saving and upgrading it can be done for a much lower cost, both in terms of money and embodied carbon, than tearing it down and building new. In addition to improving the climate security and quality of life of low-income residents, retrofitting preserves the valuable social infrastructure that residents have built through their connections to their community. An innovative, net zero–energy retrofitting strategy now being introduced in North America combines prefabrication and standardization to upgrade building envelopes and systems while allowing the homes to remain in use. Based on the Dutchdeveloped Energiesprong system, the strategy involves wrapping an existing building in a prefabricated high-performance envelope, and often integrates heating, cooling, ventilation, dehumidifiIn Pakistan, Open Door Design Studio and Modulus Tech have designed factory-made, zero-energy homes. You don’t want to make a building more energy-efficient in a way that’s punitive for residents. —Graeme Stewart, principal at ERA Architects, about housing retrofits. IMAGES: COURTESY OPEN DOOR DESIGN STUDIO AND MODULUS TECH; © PHOTOGRAPHIX/BILLION BRICKS (OPPOSITE 2)
89 cation, hot-water heating, and solar panels, to drastically reduce energy consumption. Using fullstory prefabricated wall panels, retrofits can be completed in a week or two, or sometimes as little as a day, with no need for residents to move out. “Energiesprong is leapfrogging the incremental approach to energy efficiency that has been the norm and taking existing buildings all the way to fully decarbonized operation,” says Martha Campbell, a principal in the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI’s) Carbon-Free Buildings program. “Their approach is ‘Let’s actually transform the construction sector,’ with business-model innovation to improve sector productivity and economies of scale to bring the cost of these high-performance systems down.” RMI’s REALIZE program has completed over-cladding pilot projects in Massachusetts and California, and a number of examples have also been built under the auspices of New York State’s Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Another over-cladding retrofit (this one not relying on prefabricated panels) is Ken Soble Tower, an 18-story, 146-unit seniors’ housing tower originally built in 1967 in Hamilton, Ontario. The tower is the first residential high-rise in North America to achieve the EnerPHit Certificate (the Passive House standard for retrofits). As a replicable proof of concept, the project serves as a major milestone in the work of saving and upgrading the period’s critical stock of purposebuilt rental towers. Achieving a 94 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions on an extremely tight budget, the holistic rehabilitation of the vacant, semi-derelict building included an EIFS (exterior insulation and finish system) rainscreen overcoat and triple-glazed windows, a new HVAC system, and quality-of-life upgrades such as interior refits, improved accessibility, and new indoor and outdoor common areas. The design adopted a comfort-first framework, prioritizing residents’ well-being, safety, and climate resilience, followed by having it require extremely low energy. “You don’t want to make a building more energy-efficient in a way that’s punitive for residents,” says Graeme Stewart, principal at ERA Architects, a firm that specializes in multiunit residential retrofits. (Stewart also heads the Toronto-based Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal, a research nonprofit that recently published A Field Guide to Retrofits in Occupied Buildings.) “The pandemic certainly validated the decision to provide direct fresh air,” he says, “and it also raised awareness of the inequality of conditions under which people had to shelter in place.” Completed in 2021, the project is now the focus of a long-term post-occupancy study by the University of Toronto, to measure multiple indicators of health, safety, housing quality, affordability, operational and economic factors, and environmental impacts. The next challenge facing the developers of replicable prototypes—in North America and in rapidly urbanizing countries globally—is scaling up. Whether retrofitting or building new, the biggest issue, as usual, is funding. “If we’re going to address such a complex and fragmented system, we need more patient capital,” says Woodward, referring to investments that can wait longer than usual for a return. “We need time to accept risks and work through them.” Ultimately, climate-resilient housing for vulnerable people is a larger imperative, says RMI’s Campbell, and governments need to commit to it globally: “When you talk to people in defense and national security, climate risk is at the top of the list. With the level of geopolitical instability that it will spark, the volume of climate refugees that we’ll see, we need to stop nickling and diming this.” It’s time to start treating quality, climate-resilient housing as a necessity of life. n Billion Bricks, a climate-tech venture, is building solar homes in India (above and right) that provide income for their residents.
CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: HOUSING 90 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 REBUS Henning Larsen Architects’ REBUS is a facade retrofit concept devised specifically for Danish social housing constructed in the 1960s and ’70s. There are nearly 134 million square feet of these aging buildings across Denmark. The reclad panels, which can be made either from steel or wood components, are designed to be fabricated off-site and installed over the existing facade while the apartments are still occupied, improving energy performance by at least 50 percent. Since almost all Danish social housing of this era was based on the same 300 millimeter (0.98 feet) spatial increment, the system can be easily adapted for use across the entire typology. Henning Larsen estimates that 56 REBUS renovations can be completed for the carbon price of one new building. Joann Gonchar, FAIA
IMAGES: © MICHAEL MANTESE/ESKEW DUMEZ RIPPLE (TOP); NIGHTNURSE IMAGES/MAGNUSSON ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING (BOTTOM); AGNETE SCHLICHTKRULL (OPPOSITE TOP); HENNING LARSEN (OPPOSITE, BOTTOM) 91 ST. PETER RESIDENTIAL The first multi-family affordable housing project in Louisiana to target net-zero energy operations, the Eskew Dumez Ripple-designed project contains 50 one- and two-bedroom apartments for lower-income residents, with half reserved for veterans. A combination of active and passive strategies should help St. Peter reach its net-zero goal, including a very low energy-use intensity, the 450 solar panels on the roof, and a battery system adjacent to the parking lot. The battery lends the project added resilience by lessening dependence on the grid—when Hurricane Zeta swept through New Orleans in October 2020, causing widespread power outages throughout the city, St. Peter’s lights stayed on. Pansy Schulman DEKALB COMMONS The 85-unit affordable housing complex, Dekalb Commons, consists of a pair of mid-rise buildings across the street from one another in BedfordStuyvesant, Brooklyn. Designed by Magnusson Architecture and Planning (MAP) and slated for completion in 2024, the allelectric complex of studio to three-bedroom apartments is targeting Passive House and Enterprise Green Communities certifications. It incorporates strategies for near net-zero operations, on-site renewable energy, and embodied carbon reduction. MAP is specifying “asthmagen-free” interior finishes, which means finding alternatives to materials commonplace in affordable housing, such as composite wood products that emit formaldehyde, PVC, and vinyl. J.G.
CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: RESILIENCE 92 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 implemented impressive largescale and community-enhancing flood-management projects—yet they are not enough, and too often continue to fail the most vulnerable. At the coastal edge of New York, on the other hand, Arverne East has broken ground on a $1 billion mixed-use development that makes transformative leaps in sustainability and resiliency, while enhancing the economic and social viability of a struggling neighborhood. Houston was particularly susceptible to the torrents that came with Hurricane Harvey— the worst downpour in Texas history, with 60 inches of rain in parts of the state. The city is nearly flat, heavily paved, and has soils that drain poorly: the storm left behind more than 150,000 flooded homes, including 25 percent of the city’s affordable stock, and caused $125 billion in damages. The area famously lacks land-use controls, and, so, over the years unfettered building had occurred in high-risk areas, many of which are low-income enclaves where people have fewer resources to deal with greater damage. In Houston and New York, a range of strategies to address climate change is improving the urban realm and the quality of life for communities of different income levels. BY JAMES S. RUSSELL, FAIA WITH DISRUPTIONS and disasters supercharged by climate change now happening more frequently, resiliency—the business of protecting communities from threats, or adapting to them—becomes more urgent. After thousands of square miles of metro Houston were inundated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the city and Harris County Equity Meets Resiliency Rising waters flooded Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: RESILIENCE
93 The Houston metro area has relied on an extensive bayou network that drains stormwater into Galveston Bay, but the system is no longer up to the task. Houstonians have also recognized the value of enhancing bayou habitats for recreation, along with flood management. After Harvey, the city, working with its nonprofit Parks Board and the Harris County Flood Control District, rushed to complete a Bayou Greenways 2020 initiative—to construct 150 miles of trails and 3,000 acres of parks, habitats, and flood-control enhancements across seven bayous and the West Fork of the San Jacinto River. Though the plan was still 50 miles short of its goal last year, it will eventually put 1.5 million Houstonians within 1.5 miles of a greenway. Does the initiative equitably serve all neighborhoods? “These types of projects are often deployed opportunistically, connecting to existing trails, open space —or leveraging adjacent infrastructure projects,” explains Scott McCready, principal at landscape architecture firm SWA Group’s Houston office, who worked on the widely admired Buffalo Bayou Park in 2015 and on flood-resiliency for Harris County. That approach can result in already well-served areas’ seeing greater investment, but leaving needier neighborhoods behind, which McCready says “is an ongoing challenge to all involved.” The Flood Control District has used government funding to buy private houses that have been repeatedly inundated, and demolish them. The program also has obtained large tracts (such as a golf course and industrial land) and excavated them to form waterways lined with pollutantfiltering plantings that have the capacity to store large water volumes during storms. Several are as big as or bigger than a 291-acre network of storm detention lakes designed by SWA. Called Willow Waterhole, the lakes are wrapped in habitat and threaded through with trails and bridges. Not incidentally, these add badly needed park acreage accessible to a wide variety of income groups. The scale of such efforts is impressive, but so is the need within the 10,000 square miles of the metro area, as Houston spends less per capita on parks than almost any large city. McCready hopes a new parkboard plan called Beyond the Bayous, which explicitly identifies equity as a goal, can connect the bayou landscapes to upland neighborhoods lacking green space, through “gateway” infiltration parks and bioswale-lined pedestrian and bike corridors. The innovative and comprehensive approaches advocated by McCready confront an aversion in Texas to planning on a watershed or regional scale. Greater flood-protection investments are being delayed, for example, thanks to a controversy over the state’s distribution of $2 billion in federal dollars spread among outlying communities while none of the money was allocated to hard-hit and populous Houston and Harris County. A HUD probe showed the state’s actions “substantially and predictably disadvantaged minority residents, with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents,” as reported by The Texas Tribune. Given the urgency and extent of Houston’s problems, it could be easy to default to such known civil-engineering solutions as concrete-lined channels and enormous underground storage tanks. To expand this limited palette and develop benefits for more diverse communities, “we try to demonstrate with our work that people will get something new that they didn’t expect,” says McCready. Buffalo Bayou Park showed that a neglected, polluted waterway, winding among freeway overpasses, could become an urban amenity that draws visitors across the city to its paths, bikeways and attractions. The park, at the edge of downtown, has spurred adjacent development and solidified a consensus to create parklike amenities as flood protections are enhanced. In the southeastern corner of Queens in New York, grass and shrub-covered dunes established themselves over decades on 116 neglected acres along the densely built-up ocean beaches of the Rockaway peninsula. The tract had once been bulldozed for an urban-renewal project that went nowhere. But now a real-estate team— L+M Development Partners, the Bluestone Organization, and Triangle Equities—led by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development has broken ground on Arverne East, a mixed-use, ocean-facing community that is deploying a comprehensive sustainability and climate-resiliency agenda, while bringing sorely needed affordable housing and economic development opportunities to a diverse low-income neighborhood vulnerable to storm surges and rising seas. The $1 billion project will SWA Group helped the Harris County Flood Control District create a series of interconnected man-made lakes in southwest Houston. Known as Willow Waterhole, they reduce flooding by storing excess stormwater. PHOTOGRAPHY: © JONNU SINGLETON; COURTESY U.S. AIR NATIONAL GUARD WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (OPPOSITE)
94 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 RESILIENCE achieve net zero operating carbon. The mixed-use master plan, by Local Office Landscape and Urban Design (LOLA), Bernheimer Architecture, and landscape architects Starr Whitehouse, places the highest-density housing farthest from the ocean and adjacent to an arterial road and an elevated subway stop. The baseline of the development has been raised 16 feet higher than a mapped but obsolete flood-elevation standard, and the scale of the development steps down to townhouses and then tiny attached houses, as small as 400 square feet, that emulate the little beach bungalows with front porches characteristic of the neighborhood. Of the 1,650 total units planned, all but 300 will be offered below market rate to buyers and renters ranging from the formerly homeless to those of low, moderate, and middle income. The tiny cottages—unique in new construction—add affordable ownership to the mix, an effort to “hack the market,” says Walter Meyer, principal of LOLA. The development will achieve its zero-carbon goals with tactics that adhere to the Passive House standard and include a geothermal heating and cooling system, and photovoltaic solar panels. Meyer’s LOLA has designed enhancements to the natural PERSPECTIVE Smith Mordak Director of Sustainability and Physics at Buro Happold in London I was part of a group, with the UK Green Building Council, developing the shared language and shared framework for “social value.” Social value has become really buzzwordy, but what is it? It’s just not clear. Over the course of doing the project, we saw that it was actually not as much about the definition but more about the process you need to go through to ensure that the value that you create is of value to society. That means identifying, at the beginning of a project, who is most impacted by it—and don’t ever make any assumptions as to who might be most impacted, because it’s not necessarily only the people who are eventually going to live in this housing, for example. It could be the people who live in the community within a mile of a concrete plant, or on the other side of the world who are creating the product. So it’s really important to do that— mapping and understanding who is actually impacted by a project. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused extensive damage in the Rockaways in New York (above, left), helping to spur new approaches to resilient development, including projects like Arverne East, which will provide 1,350 below-market-rate homes and achieve net zero operating carbon (above, right). dune system to protect the development. The scheme deploys interlocking rows of sand ridges to minimize storm surges and dissipate wave energy, alternating with swales that store and infiltrate flood waters and that host trees and shrubs to help anchor the beach and slow high winds. Since heavy rainfalls usually coincide with tropical storms, bioretention networks threaded through the development will harvest the runoff from adjacent and internal streets, storing excess water and infiltrating it when existing underground storm drainpipes are likely to be inundated. These nature-based tactics will manage rainfall from a 100-year storm, 10 times the current standard. In a consultation process, residents of the community sought economic development and entrepreneurship opportunities, and the development plan has brought local players and social services groups into the project. The Rockaway Brewing Company, a beloved gathering place, will relocate to Arverne East and expand to host an incubator for aspiring cooks, who will make use of fresh produce grown on urban farms nearby. On-site, a farm plot will be set up by the Campaign for Hunger, an organization that helps communities secure healthy food options. Another nonprofit, RISE, will expand its youth-development activities and environmentaleducation programs at the project. The development team proved the financial efficacy of its resiliency and sustainability concepts by deploying them in a threebuilding development on an adjacent site called Beach Green Dune. With the success of this pilot project, says Meyer, “the developers and lenders gained faith that they could be scaled up in Arverne East.” And self-seeding nature lives on too, with 35 acres of the site dedicated as an enhanced public preserve. n IIMAGES: © ANDREA WATERS (TOP, LEFT); LOCAL OFFICE LANDSCAPE & URBAN DESIGN/BERNHEIMER ARCHITECTURE (TOP, RIGHT); ANDREW UNWIN (BOTTOM)
95 the state government to buy out and demolish their houses, using money from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and within three years almost the whole community had signed on—around 180 homeowners in all. A decade after the storm, the land has begun to revert to nature, transforming back into the untrammeled wetland it once was. By the time the next storm comes, there will be no homes left to destroy. As climate disasters grow more severe with each passing year, and as the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars to help adapt to these disasters, some communities in the United States have begun to consider the notion of “managed retreat,” or the coordinated movement away from the most vulnerable areas. Instead of armoring themselves against storms and fires, these communities are choosing to get out of the way altogether, surrendering their old homes to nature and relocating elsewhere. This movement is still in its infancy, confined to small communities on the fringes of the natural environment, but soon many more towns and cities in After disaster strikes, communities must grapple with the question of rebuilding or relocating. BY JAKE BITTLE IN THE aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the residents of Oakwood Beach, on the south shore of Staten Island, made a momentous decision. The neighborhood, in New York’s least dense borough, had experienced flooding before, but this hurricane had all but wiped it off the map, and many residents weren’t sure they wanted to risk rebuilding. A group of locals petitioned Fight or Flight? Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, shown in 2016, has lost 90 percent of its landmass due to sea-level rise, CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: MANAGED RETREAT PHOTOGRAPHY: © JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
96 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 the United States will be forced to confront the same decision as the residents of Oakwood Beach, and, for many communities, these decisions will be agonizing. Managed retreat can save lives and money and can help undo the past mistakes of planners and developers, but it also raises deep questions about people’s autonomy, sense of community, and environmental justice. If not every neighborhood or town can stay put, who decides which must leave? “Everyone agrees that they want [relocation] to be fair, and they want it to be just, but no one agrees on what that means,” says A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware who has studied managed retreat and its implications for environmental justice. “How do you define a community? And how do you handle dissent within a community? We’re very good at pointing out the injustices after they happen, but we really struggle with getting good guidance on doing this.” The first managedretreat efforts in the United States came about almost by accident, as the result of a shift in disaster policy. Faced with the mounting costs of severe flooding along rivers like the Mississippi, Congress in the 1990s authorized FEMA to buy and demolish properties that had been inundated rather than paying their owners to rebuild them. The agency has bought out more than 40,000 properties after disasters—like a 2014 mud slide in Washington state and 2017’s Hurricane Harvey in Houston— since then. Several cities, including Charlotte and Nashville, have developed their own local buyout programs as well. While the federal buyout program was designed to save FEMA from paying to rebuild the same places over and over again, it now has come to alter built environments around the country, erasing whole communities and allowing nature to return. Because the program is voluntary, and localities can’t force residents to leave unless their officials pursue eminent domain, buyouts look very different in different parts of the country. In New Jersey, for instance, the state’s Blue Acres buyout program uses FEMA money to buy out population pockets where residents already have decided to leave after repeated flooding. In other communities, such as the northwest suburbs of Houston, near the White Oak Bayou, the county government bought out properties with FEMA money and now pays to maintain the empty lots, mowing the grass at regular intervals for the sake of the handful of homeowners who chose to stay behind. Nevertheless, not every buyout has achieved community support. In the city of Kinston, North Carolina, the FEMA program led to the destruction of a historic Black neighborhood called Lincoln City with decades of history; the community was flooded by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, after which the city decided to buy it out rather than rebuild. Once a vibrant workingclass community, the abandoned tracts of the neighborhood have disintegrated, returning to forests and swamps. “It was community, it was family, it was love—everybody knew everybody, everybody stood in the gap for everybody,” says Eartha Mumford, a former resident of the neighborhood. After the storm, she said, Lincoln City residents “wanted to keep a hold on their property and go back in there, hoping we could do someNature is reasserting itself at Oakwood Beach on Staten Island (left) after many houses were flooded out (below, 2014). MANAGED RETREAT
97 thing with it. Then the city jumped in and they just took over.” Mumford, who now lives a few towns over, drives to the old neighborhood every so often to say hello to the few families who still live on the outskirts. Lincoln City’s fate matches the trends that Siders identified in her study of climate adaptation in North Carolina as a whole. Siders found that wealthy white communities tend to receive more money for sea walls and other flood protections, while low-income communities of color were more likely to see buyouts and managed retreat. In other cases, communities have relocated in their entirety to land on higher ground, rather than scattering to wherever they can find available housing. The most famous instance is Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, an island village long inhabited by BiloxiChitimacha-Choctaw Indigenous Americans, which has lost more than 90 percent of its landmass to sea-level rise, shrinking from 22,000 acres down to a few hundred. Most of the southeast Louisiana coastline now sits inside a levee system built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that protects it from storm surge, but the federal government did not extend the levee around Isle de Jean Charles. Instead, it paid the state to build a new village 20 miles inland and relocate the island’s residents. But, from the very beginning, this program was controversial: while the new community offers bigger houses and more protection from storms, it’s almost an hour from the Gulf of Mexico, depriving the island’s former residents of their livelihoods and traditions as shrimpers and crabbers. When completed, the new district will comprise about 500 houses, plus a community center. Other examples of wholecommunity retreat include a riverside town in Wisconsin that reinvented itself as a “solar village,” with buildings’ incorporating passive solar strategies; the relocation was a success, but it only involved a few dozen structures. A series of Indigenous communities in Alaska have sought money to move away from eroding shorelines, but their relocation projects have been hampered by funding delays and prolonged negotiations among residents. Even in places where everyone wants to move, it’s difficult to achieve these relocations on a large scale: moving a whole town is far more expensive than buying out individual homeowners, and it requires long-term commitment from an entire community. In Isle de Jean Charles, no less than on Staten Island, managed retreat provides one permanent solution to a perennial problem— needing to move people out of harm’s way—thus saving the gov ernment hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. But that doesn’t always make it just. The residents of Oakwood Beach wanted to leave, but many longtime denizens of Isle de Jean Charles wanted to stay on their ancestral island, no matter the cost, and viewed the government’s decision not to extend the levee around them as a manifest injustice. “You solve part of it by increasing the pot of available money,” says Siders, adding that the government must spend far more on climate adaptation than it currently does. In addition, though, she says the federal government needs to take “a more holistic approach, and increase coordination” between agencies and local community leaders. The decision not to put a wall around Isle de Jean Charles didn’t happen at the same time as the solution to relocate the tribe —but it should have. For communities on the front lines of climate change, the dilemma of deciding between staying or leaving raises wrenching questions. Who should have the ultimate say about the fate of these places—the federal or local government or those actually under siege by rising waters? What if the residents don’t agree among themselves? Who gets to decide which communities will try to stay? Or disperse? Or move in their entirety? The answers to these questions are still far from clear, but the questions themselves are not going away. n Jake Bittle is a reporter based in Brooklyn. His book on climate migration will be published by Simon & Schuster in early 2023. In the wake of flooding that repeatedly overwhelmed Isle de Jean Charles, as it did after Hurricane Gustav in 2008 (above), the state decided to build a new village (left) 20 miles inland. PHOTOGRAPHY: © KAEL ALFORD (TOP); ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES RESETTLEMENT PROGRAM, LOUISIANA OFFICE OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT (BOTTOM); ROBIN MICHALS (OPPOSITE, TOP AND BOTTOM)
98 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD JUNE 2022 CEU CLIMATE JUSTICE: EXTREME HEAT regions, such as the Pacific Northwest, experience searing summer heat waves. In Portland, Oregon, for example, temperatures reached nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit last summer, resulting in a spike in deaths and the failure of infrastructure. Such issues are further compounded by the continued legacies of urban disinvestment, where certain communities, often poor and of color, are subject to higher sustained temperatures due to the urban heat-island effect—in short, an abundance of heatretaining surfaces and a dearth of vegetation. The threat is growing in real time, and cities like Boston, where the number of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit is expected to grow from an average of 10 days per year to nearly 50 by 2070, are grappling with those life-threatening conditions. But now, under the recently inaugurated administration of mayor Michelle Wu, Boston has started rolling out a new framework. Its Heat Resilience Solutions for Boston, more commonly known as the Heat Plan, is the collaborative product of a team of consultants led by Boston-based Sasaki. The plan presents 26 strategies to ameliorate heat conditions, and focuses on five of the city’s hottest neighborhoods: Chinatown, Dorchester, East Boston, Mattapan, and Roxbury. These predominantly low-income and majority-minority communities have long suffered from the ill effects of redlining and urban renewal, and, on average, are 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer during the day than Boston’s more affluent and tree-canopied neighborhoods. The Heat Plan follows a nearly decade-long collaboration between Sasaki and the City of Boston and is a new and critical component of the Climate Ready Boston initiative, which seeks to address the short- and long-term effects of climate change, such as sea-level rise and extreme precipitation. “This is the first time that Boston has done a citywide heat-resilience plan, and it is taking that same focus as our earlier work trying to understand how investments in climate resilience can help create a more equitable urban environment,” says Sasaki associate principal Jill Allen Dixon. “A big focus has been how to approach heat resilience from the angle of social equity and racial justice, acknowledging the harms of the past while also being better planners as we move forward.” What does the plan look like on the ground? The 26 strategies outlined in the report are broken down into two categories: relief during heat waves and longerterm cooling of communities. The development of the strategies depended on a series of neighborhood workshops, often conducted with the help of interpreters. “We really approached this from listening to people’s stories and reaching out to people where they are,” says Sasaki director of sustainability and resilience Tamar Warburg. That deliberative process was supported by heat, land-use, and demographic analyses, which informed recommendations specific to individual neighborhoods. In the short term, the Heat Plan calls for several policy and physical interventions. The administration will first create the Boston Extreme Temperatures Response Task Force, an interdepartmental group that will coordinate with a wide range of Heat waves are a serious urban killer. Boston’s new plan tackles the problem while addressing inequity. BY MATTHEW MARANI EXTREME heat is an evergrowing threat to human health and well-being, one that has been exacerbated by global warming. Those soaring highs, associated with the greenhouse-gas emissions generated by our industrialized world, have increased the earth’s average temperature by 1.2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century. However, the specter of rising temperatures is not evenly distributed geographically and disproportionately affects the Global South—the very regions that were exploited to fuel the industrial economies of the West. It is now estimated that nearly 40 percent of deaths resulting from heat exposure over the last three decades derive from human-made global warming, with much of that suffering inflicted on Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, and the Mediterranean Rim. North America is also grappling with extreme heat conditions, as even formerly moderate The Human Cost A “cool spot” pop-up offered shade outside an East Boston library branch in 2021.