Hurricane Sandy has brought home the responsibility that we share to make our region more resilient in the face of severe weather and more responsive to the threats posed by climate change.
What is certain is that we will need new policies, and new investments, to reduce our susceptibility to environmental disasters. Sandy led to the death of more than 70 people in the region and caused more than $50 billion in damage and economic losses. The storm also disrupted the daily lives and commutes of nearly all of the region’s 23 million residents. Whether or not these events are the result of human-caused global warming, it is clear that we need to do much more to lessen their toll.
Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have awakened us to an uncomfortable reality: The country’s most populated area and its largest economic engine sits on a vulnerable coastline. Yet there are many measures that would help ease the impact of storm surges.
Hurricane Sandy has brought home the responsibility that we share to make our region more resilient in the face of severe weather and more responsive to the threats posed by climate change.
What is certain is that we will need new policies, and new investments, to reduce our susceptibility to environmental disasters. Sandy led to the death of more than 70 people in the region and caused more than $50 billion in damage and economic losses. The storm also disrupted the daily lives and commutes of nearly all of the region’s 23 million residents. Whether or not these events are the result of human-caused global warming, it is clear that we need to do much more to lessen their toll.
Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have awakened us to an uncomfortable reality: The country’s most populated area and its largest economic engine sits on a vulnerable coastline. Yet there are many measures that would help ease the impact of storm surges.
Our last post, “Stakeholder Equilibrium,” identified the historic preservation community as a critical voice in the debate about whether and how to reuse mid-twentieth century modern buildings. But today we face the challenge of a divided voice among preservationists: There are those who have a long-held reverence of original materials and those who recognize this way of thinking as unrealistic for many modern buildings.
The preservation ethic that has guided American and European architects regarding the repair, restoration, and adaptive reuse of historic buildings was originally derived from principles of fine arts conservators. William Morris, the English artist and textile designer, was an originator of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). The society was formed in the Victorian period as a reaction to the demolition of Gothic church interiors to make way for the new. Morris his fellow Arts and Crafts advocates wanted to protect and conserve authentic, original, historic material with all of its inherent craftsmanship and association with lives past intact. Their fundamental credo was to “repair rather than replace.” The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, established in the wake of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, is a direct product of this Victorian preservation ethic, almost universally applied to craft-laden masonry and wooden structures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Single-glazed curtain wall, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall (John Andrews, completed 1969). Photo by Bruner/Cott.
The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) annually presents its MASterworks Awards to recognize outstanding works of architecture or urban design completed in the prior year. The jury for the 2012 awards is a notable list in its own right: it included architects Brandon Haw of Foster + Partners, Claire Weisz of WXY Architecture + Urban Design, and Adam Yarinsky from the Architecture Research Office; journalist Suzanne Stephens from Architectural Record; and the president of MAS, Vin Cipolla. This refreshingly diverse list of winners—a carousel pavilion by Jean Nouvel shares honors with a children’s library in Queens—looks back at an exciting post-recession year for architecture in New York.
Best New Building: New York by Gehry, Gehry & Partners
Courtesy Forest City Ratner.
The highest honor went to Gehry’s shimmering new residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in downtown Manhattan. The jury calls it “a striking symbol of Lower Manhattan’s resurgence,” and its undulating silver façade, standing out among its mid-rise neighbors, certainly makes a dramatic addition to the skyline. Karrie Jacobs wrote about the building in our June 2011 issue.
The small heart of oyster-tecture is already beating along the coast of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Though embryonic, it could become a full-fledged infrastructure in a matter of years. For that to happen, practical aspects of current oyster restoration methods need to integrate a larger view for its future.
The majority of oyster projects are quite tiny, measuring in the single digits of acres – and even that’s a stretch. Most reefs are no more than a few feet wide by a few feet long. That doesn’t reduce their positive impact. Little is the new big when it comes to oyster-tecture. Larger projects do exist in places like the Chesapeake Bay and off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. However, they are still a fraction of the size of historic oyster range in the same locations. In fact, if you combine all the projects throughout the eastern coastal states, you don’t have the biological framework necessary for natural restoration. That means that without people actively restoring wild populations, only farmed oysters would endure.
For nature to take over, we have to rebuild the metapopulation of the Crassostrea Virginica – something the current culture of oyster-tecture does not structurally support. Metapopulations (essentially, a population of populations) are a critical mechanism for the evolutionary and genetic survival of any species. Such a population of populations allows both individuals and groups of an organism to be healthy and thrive. Before oysters were overharvested, over-polluted, and their habitats over-developed there was a universe of separate areas that contained millions of individual oysters that interacted along a marine highway of oysteranic (not sure if that’s a word) reproductive interdependence.
Oysters in the warm waters of Winyah and Long Bay (in South Carolina) interacted with those in the expansive marshlands of eastern North Carolina, and in turn, they mingled with those in the rushing tidal rivers of the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland estuaries, and so on into the bays of the south shore of Long Island and the tidal basin forming Long Island Sound, through the coastal plains of Connecticut, and then those Yankee sliders frolicked (in an oyster kind of way) with the populations in Cape Cod and so on and so further into Maine, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia until their habitat dissolved into the icy ocean of northern Canada. This web of invertebrates celebrated each spring with a continental-scale orgy making the Atlantic a soup of oyster-ganismic juice full of the spat formulating the next generation of shellfish.
David O’Donnell is a local, historic preservationist hero in my book. He was head of a fledgling neighborhood preservation group I joined years ago. It seemed he was running six different committees at the time, a kind of start-up, serial entrepreneur …
Since its establishment in 1996, Design Workshop at Parsons The New School of Design has been providing pro bono architectural and construction services to nonprofit organizations, allowing their graduate architecture students to design and meet commun…
