UACDC and the UA Office for Sustainability/UA Resiliency Center are pleased to announce that the Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan: A Reconciliation Landscape for Conway, Arkansas has won a LafargeHolcim Award for North America. According to the Switzerland-based LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, the biennial international awards “recognizes innovative projects and future-oriented concepts—and is the most significant global competition for sustainable design. The Awards encourages architects, planners, engineers and project owners to go beyond conventional notions of sustainable construction in their work and to harmonize economic, ecological and social concerns.” 

The Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan: A Reconciliation Landscape was sponsored by US EPA Region 6 and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission under their 319 NPS program with the City of Conway. The Framework Plan mitigates severe water management problems in the sub-watershed encompassing the urbanized area of Conway. The Plan employs green infrastructure to deliver ecosystem services. The approach provides a novel set of transferable planning tools for urban watersheds that combine a Sponge City Gradient, a Water Treatment Technologies Spectrum, the 17 Ecosystem Services, and Six Adaptive Infrastructure Types.

The project will published as a book by ORO Editions/San Francisco in October, 2017.

The LafargeHolcim  Foundation has asked that the selection remain confidential among team members until October when prizes will be conferred at a private event to be held in Chicago on Thursday, October 12, 2017. Here, we we will learn of the ranking among the eight or so North American prizes and the project’s eligibility to advance to the global prize selection program. This is the second LafargeHolcim Prize won by the project team in the program’s 14-year history. 

https://www.lafargeholcim-foundation.org/Awards

from: http://spacing.ca/national/2017/08/01/book-review-binning-house/

Author: Matthew Soules (ORO Editions, 2017)

Spending time in the Binning House is like being enveloped in a gentle super-reality, not a parallel reality, but a simple amplification or re-positioning of specific characteristics that are always, already present. This Binning House reality pivots around the concept and experience of dynamism in its multiple guises. Are the walls at an angle or not? Did one move from the inside to the outside or the reverse? What is this mural? These experiential provocations generate a deep oscillation that has the effect of emphasizing how everything is always in motion. Somehow this has a tendency to render the rustling of the Japanese maple in the garden and the shimmering of the ocean as more intense, more real: a super-reality.

• Matthew Soules

In this fourth book in the West Coast Modern House Series from UBC SALA, architect and author Matthew Soules takes a phenomenological tack in his narrative on the famed BC artistand his house. Again along with Leslie Van Duzer, Sherry McKay, Christopher Macdonald, book design by Pablo Mandel and photography by Michael Perlmutter, Binning House is a wonder as a revelation of both Binning the artist as well as the archetypal house he built in 1938. With a balance of erudite text and impeccable photography—along with the sumptuous colour palette selected for the book covers—the book is also complimented this time around by a series of meticulous section drawings done by recent UBC SALA graduate Lorinc Vass.

Having had the opportunity to live in the house for five years, Soules provides a unique perspective, having grown accustomed now to all its subtleties. This includes being confronted on a daily basis with the tilting walls in plan, such that no room is completely orthogonal—one wall always angled at 5 degrees to the others. It is an optical refinement akin to the entasis the ancient Greeks used in their temple architecture. And as a modern painter, Binning would’ve treated the six surfaces in each room as six canvases, allowing day-to-day life to play out on most of them. The great mural in the entry hall of the house is perhaps the cipher, the one wall he did treat as a canvas, allowing the others to angle away in their multitudes of perspectives.

Matthew also points out Binning’s decision to use semi-translucent glass in the interior walls of the house, separating the front hall from the living room and thereby creating a sense of transparency while simultaneously providing privacy throughout the modest 1500 square foot house. Furthermore, the glass doors opening into the backyard blur the sense of inside with the outside, another hallmark of West Coast houses. In 1938, these were all new idea to Vancouver architects and, visiting his house, Binning’s students would’ve been strongly influenced by these notions.

And if those walls could talk, there would be the tales of past architects and artists meeting within and without their confines to converse—gathered for their famous parties that collected the likes of Richard Neutra, who first arrived in Vancouver at the invitation of Binning in 1949. B.C. Binning is one of our region’s local treasures, as well as one of its best kept secrets—and for two decades, architecture students at UBC would’ve taken his drawing class, such that Binning influenced several generations of architects in the Lower Mainland.

With several pieces by him in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection, his artwork also surrounds us in the built environment, such as the blue and green mosaic work of the then BC Electric Building (now Electra) next door to its neighbour the Del Grauer substation, also clothed in the same exquisite mosaic. Sadly, one sculpture is all that remains of the work he did for what was then the main branch of the Public Library downtown Vancouver, which at the very least provides us with a memory of his massive influence on our West Coast culture.

In Metro Vancouver, we can truly say that we are all still able to feel his influence around us, but not as personally as it must’ve been for Soules. At the book launch, he admitted feeling somewhat intimidated to have to convey his experience of living in this house. But he need not worry, as his is a respectful contribution to Binning’s legacy, a reminder that he was the progenitor of many of the tenets of modern architecture in our region, and his house is the physical manifestation of not just him, but that spirit of his time. The Binning House is zeitgeist.

And so in this latest edition of the SALA book series—and with only three more left—Binning House is among the best yet. From the insight into the life and times of Bert and Jessie, to Matthew’s appreciation of the first-hand experience of the house, the reader is given a rare glimpse of this architectural treasure. One can also appreciate through this book why there has been such a concerted effort to preserve the house, to ensure it does not fall victim to the ruthless Vancouver housing market (and goodbye Electric House). Such crusaders for the house as Adele Weder, Leslie Van Duzer, Sherry McKay and Chris Macdonald at SALA—along with Matthew, himself—should be acknowledged for the fine work they’ve done to preserve the home, as it is now named a National Historic Site of Canada.

Likewise, this book is now a part of the story to preserve this and other important West Coast modern houses, with many more stories still needing to be told, much like the Binning House here.

***

For more information on Binning House, visit the ORO Editions website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect and writer.

From: https://issuu.com/constructionbusinessmedia/docs/1707_archprod

Friday, July 28 at 6pm
Unfolded: How Architecture Saved my Life with Bart Voorsanger

The unusual format by Alastair Gordon’s Unfolded of architectural monograph AND memoir reveals real insight into the design process and its public impact. As in the monograph, Bart Voorsanger’s discussion will offer an exceptionally candid discussion of architecture and its life impact.
Bart Voorsanger has exhibited in individual and group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Architecture, Helsinki; the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Columbia, New York and Rice Universities; Rhode Island School of Design; the Architectural Association of London; The Brooklyn Museum; the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt and the Hudson River Museum. New York. He has served on many national and international juries for design awards, and became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He is the former Chair of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, the Architectural Review Panel for the Port Authority or New York and New Jersey and the Architectural Foundation in New York.
Open to the public.

Suggested donation $5.

La Grua Center
32 Water Street, Stonington, CT 06378
860.535.2300

www.LaGruaCenter.org

Free parking for La Grua Center is located in the lot at Stonington Commons, 32 Water Street.  We're the little stone building on the green in the center of the Commons.

from: https://placesjournal.org/article/hong-kong-grounded/

Hong Kong is relentlessly vertical, a city of towers and skyways, elevators and ladder streets, built on a mountainside — a city without ground, according to the architects Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong. In their guidebook to the three-dimensional circulatory networks of downtown Hong Kong, they draw a city that has radically abrogated its relationship with the ground plane. ¹

It’s a beautiful, insightful book, but its sense of gravity is all wrong. For no matter how deeply you lose yourself in the aerial labyrinth, how many escalators you ascend from sea level, how many building portals you pass through, inevitably the mountainous terrain of Hong Kong Island rises up at a faster rate. The levitating pedestrian bumps into the hillside and is brought back to earth. In Hong Kong, the ground is everywhere.

The photographs in this slideshow examine zones of contact between the multilevel metropolis and the mountain. Rocks and soils that in other cities would be buried or obscured are here integral to the setting. The terrain that weaves between streets, through public spaces, and beneath buildings reminds observers of the tenuous relation between the city and its geology. To guard against landslides, the most precipitous grades are stabilized by engineers and classified within a government database that contains 60,000 registered slopes. This is a serious enterprise, with official plates identifying the geotechnical compliance of each slope. Engineering solutions vary from simple block retaining walls to more elaborate structures with anchors, scaffoldings, high tensile wires, and ferro-cement. They constitute a topographic image of the island.

These slopes are frequently put to civic use. Usable land is so scarce that community functions are shoehorned into the engineered hillsides: miniature pocket parks, vertical gardens, seating nooks, bus stops, even ultra-compact municipal storage depots. For flatlanders who are accustomed to cities built on floodplains, this is a novel arrangement. When analyzed in the traditional plan view, Hong Kong’s pocket spaces do not fit conventional templates for good urban legibility, accessibility, repetition, structure, or form. Often, you cannot see from one element to the next, nestled above or below. And yet, the assemblage works. It meets the higher goals of urban design: distinctiveness, variation, and responsiveness to place.

With infrastructure now stretched in urbanist discourse to refer to benches, cell towers, and almost anything multiplied across the city, the term has lost some of its potency. We ought to consider the root of the word — infra meaning below — and look carefully at the structures of the city that are underfoot. Hong Kong’s system of 60,000 registered slopes is a genuine landscape infrastructure that underlies the city, and that grounds the social and physical experiences we have there.

From: http://spacing.ca/national/2017/07/18/book-review-los-angeles-boulevard-eight-x-rays-body-public/

Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public

As an urban design instructor, practitioner and bibliophile, it is a rare pleasure to discover lesser known, critical and insightful books on urban structure. More so on Los Angeles, a city well endowed with iconic texts—from Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies to Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. This being the case, one can only imagine my delight when I stumbled upon Doug Suisman’s Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public.

Originally published in 1989 as a ‘pamphlet’—interestingly, just a year prior to City of Quartz—this most recent 2014 edition was produced in celebration of its 25-year-anniversary. As one would expect, the original introduction and eight “x-rays”—chapters—are included. Additionally, however, it comes in a new beautifully-designed hardcover frame with refreshed graphics, opening with an excellent new foreword by L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who describes the significance of the work in the wake of his incredible year-long series Reading LA. Most significantly, an entire new section—Twenty Five Years Later: Boulevards in Practice—is included: effectively doubling the size of the original pamphlet to a charmingly compact 144 pages, and covering 10 interesting projects done by Suisman’s firm, after the initial publication.

The eight “x-rays” themselves—idiosyncratically named, peppered with beautiful diagrams and maps, and roughly ten pages each—are concise, intelligent, analytical pieces that ultimately argue against treating boulevards of Los Angeles as mere embodiments of technical specifications and economic considerations. Instead, to use the eloquent words of Christopher Hawthorne, they are  “a great reservoir of public space waiting to be redefined and activated.” Such sentiments fall on deaf ears even today—a fact that makes the book all the more relevant now—so one can imagine that, in the late 80s, Suisman was talking to a brick wall.

This being the case, he had to be strategic about how he constructed his narrative, wisely choosing to delve into the rich history, evolution and significance of the boulevards of Los Angeles over time. This journey begins with the Suture x-ray, that describes how the broad structure of the boulevards are a consequence of historical circumstances and boundaries of early settlement patterns, such as the original pueblos and common lands. This is followed by two chapters—Umbilical and Spine—outlining the interesting histories of Sunset and Wilshire Boulevards, respectively.

Girdle and Phosphor dig into effects of early Hollywood and film culture on the city and boulevards. The first focuses on the complex relationship between early introverted movie studios and the major boulevards, while the second drills into their extroverted counter parts—movie theatres—and the resulting transformation of these corridors between day and night.

Things switch gears, literally and figuratively, in Torrent where Suisman focuses on the transformation of the physical structure of the boulevard in response to changes in transportation technologies, from footpath to streetcar to automobile. Building from this, Pathogen, looks at new forms of communication in light of the higher speeds of travel. Speaking to signs and symbols in space, Suisman goes beyond focusing on the increase in size and quantity of advertisements in the typical sense, to speak to the evolution of building types towards acting like billboards in the landscape.

The last of the x-rays, Fuselage, offers the punchline. In keeping with the title of the chapter, it compares the boulevard to the fuselage of an airplane: an element that requires coordination with its surrounding elements in order to work properly. As such, Suisman highlights the importance of boulevards as transitional spaces of arrival and entry for people coming from surrounding areas. In light of this, he calls for an integrated approach to their treatment, moving beyond considerations of its surface rights-of-way to include “all underground development, rear and side elevations, alleys, parking areas, and adjacent neighbourhoods”. A wonderful set of annotated diagrams explicitly outlining boulevard design considerations marks the end of the original pamphlet.

This transitions well into the newly added Twenty Five Years Later: Boulevards in Practice—consisting of 10 chapters outlining 10 projects from around the world, done between 1991 and 2012, that demonstrate how Suisman’s initial research informed his practice. The projects include completed and unbuilt works, and counter to what one may expect, not all proposal focus the design of singular boulevards. Instead, they focus how of a “boulevard frame of mind” was used towards different urban design problems. This makes them all the more instructive, as the selected works show how the ‘x-ray’ method used in Los Angeles Boulevards—one that biased a ‘close reading’ and first hand experience of place—is universally applicable to a diversity of urban design issues.

This being the case, the power of this newly packaged, expanded Los Angeles Boulevards lies in its ability to emphasize that, beyond simply being a critical book on a singular aspect of LA’s urban environment, it offers a valuable way of thinking about and approaching urban design problems, more generally. To my mind, this rightfully places Suisman’s contributions beside the various great minds, such as Banham and Davis, that have dissected Los Angeles towards speaking to broadly relevant issues. I don’t hesitate to say, then, that Los Angeles Boulevards is a must-read for architects, planners, designers and urbanists who not only care about improving the urban landscape, but also want to get a glimpse into how a forcefully analytical mind attacks the problem of the city.

***

For more information on the Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, visit the ORO Editions website.

**

Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with personal and professional interests in the urban landscapes. His private practice – Metis Design|Build – is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places. You can see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York cordially hosted an event on July 8th, to celebrate the recent publication of: UNFOLDED: How Architecture Saved My Life. This book marvelously captures the extraordinary life and work of Batholomew Voorsanger, and is inclusive of photography and written documentation by acclaimed author, Alastair Gordon.