Hildebrand’s research he applies to architecture the familiar landscape concepts of “refuge and prospect”; it spells out how our search for both is a response to shifting intensity among contending predilections. The basic impulse is evident early in the hide-a-ways and forts built throughout childhood. And gender, age, resources, time-of-day or season, strength or vulnerability, or urgent motivations of a “personal project” clearly can have widely differing influences on the way each of us will seek out a secure place. But he backs up a convincing case that designers can produce more welcoming, satisfying, human environments by recognizing that their publics will in fact experience them in these deep-seated, survival-based terms.
Sanctuary
Hildebrand takes the next step, too, defining and illustrating the architectural qualities that underlie protection and a release from fear or out-of-control nature in a “refuge”. Most important is the low height and enfolding form of a “ceiling” plane or overhanging trees. Light levels lower than in surrounding spaces, protected openings plus mostly solid-seeming walls – often the reality of, or echoes of earth forms, color, and materials – all naturally reinforce the feeling. Then horizontal dimensions significantly smaller than those of surrounding spaces – the “cozy” inglenook, “den,” or walled gardens – and an entrance that is a succession of vestibules or buffers, elevate the retreat into a “sanctuary”. As a prime example of combined refuge and prospect he again uses the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright with their focus on cave-like hearths and long, sheltering overhangs, combined with broad windows and projecting decks – warmth, protection, and openings out to freedom.
“Hearth and ‘prospect’ at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water”
He could have cited, too, the secure “shells” of more popular, conventional houses with their courtyard or backyards and outlooks into the neighborhood. And there are other dimensions of “refuge” as well.
350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
It’s the New Year, but here in San Francisco (to quote that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra) it’s déjà vu all over again. After a year of growing optimism about the economy, I feel a dot-com fever coming on. Apartments and even condos are rising all around South of Market (SoMa), the hub of the city’s tech industry—and we’re following new commercial leases like celebrity marriages. Did you hear? Salesforce just signed an agreement for all 27 floors of 350 Mission, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed tower now in construction. This topped off a year of big moves in SoMa by Twitter, Square, Zynga, Yammer, Airbnb and other tech darlings. According to reports, the demand is driving some owners of Class A office buildings to strip vacant floors back to the structure in hopes of boosting their “creative space” appeal.
350 Mission, courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Like their dot-com predecessors, this new cast of entrepreneurs prizes SoMa’s stock of historic mid-rise, light-industrial buildings. Those around Third and Brannan Streets are considered some of the hottest properties in the city (or so I’m told by friends fretting over looming lease renewals). In the gnarlier corner of SoMa where I share an office space, itself a dot-com relic, anticipation is running high. Even a nearby church, vacant since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, is up for grabs.
Landmark 120, church, photo by Yosh Asato
I am a climate refugee, or at least, I was for nearly 2 weeks after Superstorm Sandy hit the NYC metro area. What is a climate refugee? It’s someone who’s been displaced due to the effects of climate change. Millions of people throughout NY, NJ and CT are now official members of this latest category of citizens. Climate change has been called a moral issue because impoverished nations are supposed to be the first impacted. Sandy illustrated that rich localities can easily become the Third World when the web of infrastructure we depend on collapses. It’s a good bet another Sandy will hit the region within five to ten years. It was the second hurricane to ransack the northeast in two years. Let’s hope the next downpour isn’t a category 3 or 4.
Climate Refugees Map by UNEP
The aftermath has brought about two major ways of looking at our future. One is to explore how the region can become more resilient and adaptive to climate change. The other calls for “rebuilding stronger than ever” and implementing sea walls to protect the Big Apple from surging water. Both paths are extremely challenging, because we are facing three-front fight. We have to adapt to how our footprint has already altered weather patterns. We have to muster the willingness to continue eliminating further damage to the climate, and we must unlearn what we think modern society is. Lastly, we have to do this as budgets and debt make it impossible for expensive solutions.
My Experience
At around 7p.m. on the night before Sandy made landfall, the lights in my house flickered and then went black. It would be nearly 14 days before they came back on. My house was built in the 1960’s – it is a beautiful vintage, mid-century style ranch home. When first built, it was a model for the future. Everything in the house is electric from the hot water heater to the space heating to the air conditioning. Three decades ago, electricity was cheap. Now, homes with electric-centric mode of operation are a financial burden.
What’s driving the $60 billion dollar interior design industry?
In September, I posed this question at ASID’s first annual State of the Industry Address, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This was an exciting day for the interior design community as we looked back on a year of gained momentum. We can now confidently look forward to a continued industry growth, new opportunities to elevate interior design, and new ways to demonstrate the profession’s role as well as its importance to the economy.
At the American Society of Interior Designers we have kept a watchful eye on how our industry has been performing in the post-recession economy. After a gloomy 2010 and an erratic 2011 affected by concerns about the Eurozone economy, stalemates in Congress over our national budget, and a rash of natural disasters that deflated client confidence, our industry has sustained positive, although modest, growth over the past ten months. A growth that’s trending above the major building and architecture indexes. Current forecasts indicate that growth will continue into the first half of next year.
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Ben Katchor Has a New Book
Before his graphic commentary on the urban environment and its quirky denizens began to occupy the last page of Metropolis in 1998, we asked Ben Katchor to contribute to the magazine. His provocative visual-verbal narratives on urban manufacturing and sustainability grounded our preoccupation with these topics, still in the headlines. (Note President Obama’s second-term inauguration speech, in which the economy and climate change play important roles.)
On our May 1995 cover, Ben brought to life our story, Made in New York: The Art of Urban Manufacturing. He envisioned the look and feel of a many-layered city occupied by ordinary people, who are never quite so ordinary, making everything from Chinese food products to plywood shiva benches. When, in September 1996, we took a deep deep-dive into the subject of sustainability and the built environment, Ben showed what the city might look and feel like in 2030, if sustainable practices prevailed or if they didn’t. He saw a lively green city with bustling street life versus an abandoned pile of skyscrapers seen in the distance, “From her concrete porch in her [subterranean] suburban home, Mrs. Levitt [wearing a gas mask] watches the sun set over a forsaken city.”
Each month for 15 years now, I look forward to reading Ben’s column as the magazine is being produced. And each month I chuckle at the foibles of teeming humanity negotiating the complex, friendly, awful, graceful urban environment where the new dukes it out with remnants of an ever-present past. This is where we meet the architect who over-designs a light switch only to have a contractor install a cheap, noisy mechanism behind it, scaring the kids; or a man inside a Miesian skyscraper desperately trying to meet up with a woman on the windswept plaza below but she will have none of it. Modern architecture, it seems, can stifle romance.
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