CONTEXT: Regionalism

regional reflections

FALL/WINTER 2012

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contents regional reflections In this issue of CONTEXT, we tackle the difficult concept of regionalism.

Conjuring up thoughts of wellimplemented development, wise transportation choices, and sound policy, what, really, is regionalism?

Is there a way to implement regional governance here?

5 EL editors’ letter

8 A Regional Leadership Vision for Philadelphia David Thornburgh envisions possibilities for regional governance in the Greater Philadelphia area while facing the challenges presented by a flat, shrinking, 24/7 world.

12 Portland: A Model City Carl Abbott takes us on a tour of Portland, which boasts the nation’s first and only directly elected regional government for a metropolitan area.

14 Reimagining the Future of Urban Expressways Chrissy Lee and Kaitlin Dastugue examine the historical impact of highways in cities and the present challenge facing removal efforts in six North American cities.

18 EX Expression

32 NB NOTEBOOK

An exploration of ruin at the Navy Yard.

6 UC up close Robert Yaro sees efforts Like high speed rail as key to keeping America at the forefront of a competitive world.

22 DP design profiles

The Barnes Foundation. Lantern House. Restoration and Renovation of the Jayne House. Seidenberg House.

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Alyssa grenning context | FA/WI2012 | 3

CONTEXT The Journal of AIA Philadelphia CONTEXT Staff Managing Editor Dominic Mercier Circulation Gary Yetter Art Director Dominic Mercier Layout and Design Dominic Mercier Publisher AIA Philadelphia CONTEXT Editorial Board Harris M. Steinberg, FAIA – Chair Penn Praxis David Brownlee, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania Steven Conn, Ph.D. Ohio State University

Peter C. Archer, AIA Director Nicole Morris Dress, AIA, LEED AP Director Antonio Fiol-Silva, FAIA, LEED AP Director John C. Gerbner, AIA, LEED AP Director Carol A. Hermann, AIA Director Joseph H. Powell, AIA Director Denise E. Thompson, AIA, LEED AP Director Todd K. Woodward, AIA, LEED AP Director Jules Dingle, AIA AIA Pennsylvania Director Robert C. Kelly, AIA AIA Pennsylvania Director

Susan Miller Davis, AIA

Elizabeth C. Masters, AIA AIA Pennsylvania Director

Sally Harrison, AIA Temple University

Michael Skolnick, AIA AIA Pennsylvania Director

Hilary Jay Stephen P. Mullin Econsult Corporation Michael Nairn University of Pennsylvania Rachel Simmons Schade, AIA Schade and Bolender Architects Anthony P. Sorrentino University of Pennsylvania Todd Woodward, AIA SMP Architects AIA Philadelphia Board of Directors Keith C.H. Mock, AIA President Robert T. Hsu, AIA President-Elect Jim Rowe, AIA Treasurer Julie Hoffman, AIA Past President

Paul Avazier, Assoc. AIA Associate Director Alan Urek Public Member John Claypool Executive Director Editorial and Project Submissions Editorial and project submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.

Contact the editor at dominic@ aiaphila.org. For advertising and subscription information call AIA Philadelphia at 215.569.3186.

The opinions expressed in this journal or the representations made by advertisers, including copyrights and warranties, are not those of the editorial staff, publisher, AIA Philadelphia, or AIA Philadelphia’s Board of Directors.

Copyright 2012 AIA Philadelphia.

All rights are reserved. Reproduction in part or whole without written permission is strictly prohibited.

Postmaster: send change of address to AIA Philadelphia, 1218 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107.

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From the President On October 29, 2012, the eye of Hurricane Sandy tracked over the City of Philadelphia.

Measuring as much as 1,000 miles in diameter, Sandy left behind staggering statistics of devastation to homes, businesses and infrastructure in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and numerous states and countries along the Atlantic seaboard. For an extended period of time, 10 million plus households were without power from South Carolina to Maine, hospitals evacuated severely ill patients due to failed emergency power systems, and subway and rail systems were shut down. Worse, more than 100 lives were lost due to Sandy’s destruction of storm surge, wind and fire.

Cities, suburban and rural communities all rely on a capable infrastructure. When the infrastructure is lost for extended periods of time, human life is disrupted and altered. Today, months into the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, continued disruptions and life-long impacts are clearly evident.

One impact of Hurricane Sandy has been a renewed discussion about the effects of global warming caused by escalating greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific evidence has warned us for decades that global warming will escalate the threat of super storms and will elevate sea levels. During this period, the continued disconnect between scientific evidence, political action and human will has been wide and slow. However, with each passing super storm, the gaps narrow and human interest is elevated.

On November 14 and 15 at the AIA Philadelphia Chapter Design on the Delaware Conference, four keynote speakers representing housing development, academic research, landscape architecture and city planning, emphasized the need for private owners and government to develop strategies to manage greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea waters. The message from each of these respected industry leaders was that owners, government, planners, architects, landscape architects and engineers have a responsibility to proactively define solutions that will alleviate long term disruptions to our natural and man-made infrastructure.

Over the past year, the AIA Philadelphia Chapter has emphasized the need for AIA members to proactively support measures that seek to protect our infrastructure. Support of the AIA 2030 Initiative, the recently released International Green Construction Code (IgCC) and the new Philadelphia Zoning Code are excellent examples where a collective voice is louder than the voice of a few. Your proactive engagement in each of these initiatives and support to inform your clients, peers and friends of their attributes is essential for the long term health of our cities and communities.

Keith C. H. Mock, AIA 2012 AIA Philadelphia Chapter President

editor’s letter

EL

The Sirens are Singing REGIONALISM - IT’S A WORD ON EVERY PLANNER’S LIPS. It conjures up images of wellmanaged development; of rational transportation and land-use policy; of ecological infrastructure designed for regional resiliency. And yet, like the age-old tension built into our democracy between states rights and federalism and between the individual and the state, regionalism remains an elusive siren song to many.

Natural systems and transportation know no geopolitical boundaries. Land use patterns crisscross a region, water flows across county lines and highways cut across farmland and urban geography. However, our legacy geopolitical constructs of independent townships and counties with individual control over land-use and transportation policy makes sensible choicemaking in the built and natural environments next to impossible.

Hurricane Sandy may have upended all of that. Her wrath was non-discriminatory as she mowed over shore and city creating more than $70 billion in New York and New Jersey alone.

Will we finally listen to the song that nature is singing? We’ve been told that the water will always win in the end.

Regionalism doesn’t mean giving up our independence. Rather it means thinking about organizing ourselves politically, economically, socially and environmentally in smart ways for the 21st century. It means leveraging our communal strengths and assets and acting collectively to address the compelling issues of our time like providing affordable housing, conserving open space, responding clear-eyed to the end of the age of peak oil, and, importantly, facing head on to the reality of climate change and sea level rise.

We can continue to pretend that social, economic, and environmental systems start and stop at arbitrary political lines. Or we can begin to gather the political will and start to figure out what it will take to make Greater Philadelphia prepared to meet the challenges of the second half of the 21st century.

The sirens are singing. Whether we heed their call is up to us.

Harris Steinberg, FAIA Guest Editor

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Robert Yaro The President of the Regional Plan ASSOCIATION SEES efforts Like high speed rail as key to keeping America at the forefront of a competitive world

context | FA/WI2012 | 6 PHOTO: DOMINIC MERCIER

up close

By JoAnn Greco Robert Yaro can still remember his epiphany, the one that despite a lengthy career exploring issues surrounding regionalism, really opened his eyes. And, oddly enough, he didn’t even have his glasses on …

There he was, standing with a group of planning students from the University of Pennsylvania, in the company of Sir Peter Hall, the noted town planner.

“We were in a 17th-century house in London, overlooking some very lovely gardens, so maybe that had something to do with it, too,” he recalls with a laugh. “But when Hall started pulling out maps that showed how development had spread in the United States, well, it just looked like an impressionist painting. Everything was a blur, the regions merged into one another.”

As president of the New York-based Regional Plan Association, America’s oldest such organization, Yaro, 62, heads up a national policy initiative, America 2050, dedicated to acknowledging, and profiting, from that blur through efforts such as high-speed rail.

“I ride the Northeast corridor everyday from Connecticut where I live to Manhattan, and I come down to Philly once a week,” he says. “I have a lot of company — there are a quarter of a million people on the corridor with me every day. But we’re not fully taking advantage of the synergies of these interconnected cities.”

Yaro’s belief in the power and necessity of a regional approach goes back to when he held positions in planning and environmental management for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“It was clear that if we wanted to turn around large cities like Boston and to protect large landscapes like Cape Cod and Nantucket, we couldn’t do it at local levels,” he says. “It had to be done on a regional scale.”

While teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Yaro — who holds a masters in city and regional planning from Harvard University — pursued this direction, founding the University’s Center for

Rural Massachusetts. Eventually, the Center would craft what’s been called the nation’s first smart growth plan, “Growing Smart in Massachusetts.”

From there, he says, “it was only natural that I come to the granddaddy of regional organizations,” the RPA. As befits his interests, though, Yaro’s framework has moved way beyond New York’s Tri-State area with America 2050. The program breaks the country into 11 mega-regions —they include our own, the Northeast (Boston to Washington, D.C.); Southern California (from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico); the Great Lakes (Minneapolis to Buffalo and down to Cincinnati); and Florida (Orlando, Tampa, Palm

UC

“Research shows that virtually all cities that have been brought within an hour of London have prospered,” he says. “Rents are higher, so are household incomes— thanks to trains that speed up to 125 miles per hour.

A city like Reading, 37 miles west of London can reach Paddington Station in something like a half hour, instead of 90 minutes.”

Yaro, who regularly teaches a course at Penn on high speed rail, is confident that the results for our own mega-region could be similarly dramatic. Plans proposed by School of Design students would cut travel time between Boston and Washington, D.C. to 90 minutes, while bringing second tier cities like Hartford and Trenton and dozens of others

“We’re not making this stuff up — when you turn on the tap in the morning to brush your teeth and you care about the quality of that water, then you’re a regionalist.”

Beach, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale) — projected to be home to at least 10 million people within the next 40 years.

“These places have linked economic sectors and linked natural resources,” Yaro says.

“We’re not making this stuff up — when you turn on the tap in the morning to brush your teeth and you care about the quality of that water, then you’re a regionalist.”

Thinking this way will keep America in the forefront of an increasingly competitive world, he continues. “If you want to improve things like jobs and housing and the environment, and you want to invest in them, you need to be addressing them at the appropriate scale. We ignore this reality at our peril.”

Which brings him back to high-speed rail. More than a dozen European and Asian countries already have such systems in place, and when it’s complete, China’s will be the world’s largest. Meanwhile, other rapidly developing countries — from Russia and Brazil, to Mexico, India and Indonesia — are at work on theirs. Such networks have tangible benefits, Yaro points out.

still closer to their bigger brethren. And, he says, it’s not just travel time that would be impacted.

“The pricing between cities will also come down, although that can’t happen until we improve the capacity of the corridor,” Yaro says. “We now run only one Acela train an hour, while the rest of the world enjoys 10-minute headways.”

Things can’t get much better until we tackle our over-stressed century-old infrastructure, he adds.

“We have a 140-year-old tunnel in Baltimore and a bridge in Connecticut that’s almost 120-years-old. The stuff is collapsing — the Smithsonian has dibs on it,” he jokes.

“The system’s just not viable anymore.”

Based in Philadelphia, JoAnn Greco is a regular contributor to PlanPhilly.com. Her writing on the built environment has also appeared in The Washington Post, Planning, Metropolis, The Atlantic Cities, ArchitectureBoston, and Urban Land. Contact her at joann@joanngreco.com. context | FA/WI2012 | 7

A REGIONAL LEADERSHIP V

By David Thornburgh

The story of regional planning, thinking and organizing in this country began in the Early Automobile Age of the last century’s teens and twenties, when Americans started to drive in great numbers. Moving from home to job to park to market at 20, 30, 40 miles per hour rather than at the speed of a horse, our horizons expanded more and more as middle class mobility became possible and encouraged for the first time in human history. No longer did we have to live, work, worship, and play in the same urban neighborhood or isolated rural hamlet. Our world expanded in leaps and bounds.

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LEFT: A vision for a regional urban growth boundary

The region - not the city, not the farm, not even the newly minted suburb - came to describe the geography necessary to live the good life, what some have called the geography of opportunity. But all of this moving around brought with it an unprecedented challenge to the way we organized and governed our public lives. As the Early Auto Age of the ‘20s passed into the Middle Auto Age of the 1950s, and into today’s Late Middle Auto Age, it became more and more clear that the political jurisdictions hacked out of the wilderness of the 1600s were not always adequate to tackle our problems. Environmental issues - air and water quality - didn’t care about or respect those boundaries. Neither did transportation, or recreation, or cultural

County into the City and County of Philadelphia). But by and large, the prevailing political wisdom is that the meat cleaver solution of consolidation leaves too many bodies and concentrates too much political power to be considered a viable option.

Where does that leave us and what will the future look like? With a dizzying set of possibilities created here and elsewhere in response to this challenge of regional governance. A 1997 Wharton study of the nation’s 27 largest metropolitan areas revealed that all of them employed some kind of regional problem-solving mechanisms. A more recent study in 2007 by the organization I then led, the Alliance for Regional Stewardship, detailed a rich continuum of regional re-

P VISION FOR PHILADELPHIA experiences. With the takeoff of the airline industry in the 1950s, and then the global explosion of information technologies in the 1990s, we came to learn that economic development and growth had no respect for our quaint and antiquated system of boroughs, townships, cities and counties. A “little box region” like Greater Philadelphia contains almost 400 separate political jurisdictions, in the context of a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that includes almost 3,000 - each of them with their own distinct elected representatives, laws, and basket of services provided to their constituents.

But even as we’ve become more and more aware of the challenge, we’ve struggled to find ways to solve problems and govern regionally, even as we live more and more regional lives. Why is that? My conclusion is that we need to recognize that regions are political orphans - we rarely (only in Portland, OR, in fact) elect people to represent the region. That’s not likely to change, at least in Greater Philadelphia.

In the long view of US history, there have been periods of municipal consolidation in places like New York, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville, Indianapolis and most recently Louisville, KY. (Of course, we did it first in Philadelphia in 1854, when ugly gang-related ethnic crime coupled with a civic desire to keep up with the growing Jones family in New York caused us to consolidate the 26 municipalities in Philadelphia

sponses - from informal service sharing and cooperative agreements to authorities for special purposes like bridges, tunnels, water and sewer, economic development, transportation, and public safety.

Think of this as testament to the American civic spirit noted by DeToqueville in the 1820s, and to the flexibility and adaptability of our complex federal system.

There are certainly lots of promising practices in regions around the country for Philadelphia to learn from. In 2006 and 2007, after serving for about 20 years in the Philadelphia area in leadership roles in business, higher education, and economic development, I accepted a position as President and CEO of the Alliance for Regional Stewardship (ARS). During my tenure at ARS I worked in about 20 leading regions around the country, from the Silicon Valley to Louisville to Ft. Lauderdale, and worked with dozens of business, civic and political leaders in those regions, all engaged in the similar pursuit of making their own region and communities “healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

I learned a great deal on my national tour, both about the challenges of building strong regional communities in a shrinking, flat, 24/7 world--and about my adopted hometown of Philadelphia: • Successful regions recognize that the region - not its constituent pieces - is the product. Our job is to market the product, sell the context | FA/WI2012 | 9

URBANIZED AREA IDEALIZED RIPARIAN CORRIDORS HEADWATER AREAS OF CONFLICT FALL LINE

product, improve the product - and then do it again and again. How do we know the region is the product? Just listen to our customers: tourists, college graduates, families, investors, corporate CEOs. They quickly and easily blur the lines between city and suburb, boroughs and townships, state and state.

• Positive regional change doesn’t happen by accident. Breakthrough civic results occur when big ideas (a Kimmel Center, a 3 Convention 6 12Center,18 Pennsylvania a mi revitalized Delaware waterfront, a Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation) meet a welldesigned blueprint for change. Great ideas are not self-executing: they happen as a result of creative, disciplined process that engages citizens in exciting new possibilities.

• It’s the pickup teams of civic entrepreneurs that make it happen.

If no one is elected to represent the region, it means everyone can play the game: business leaders, foundation executives, community activists, plain folks who want to pursue their passion and improve their communities. Critical to the success of any great regional success is a passionate civic entrepreneur who sees opportunity around every bend, and then works hard to make it happen. Like who? The late Bill Rouse. Entrepreneur and education activist Kenny Gamble.

Mural Arts Program’s Jane Golden. Center City District’s Paul Levy.

GPTMC’s Meryl Levitz.

• It’s all about confidence. Harvard professor Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s great book “Confidence” asks and answers this question context | FA/WI2012 | 10

what builds confidence (a sweet spot between arrogance and despair) in organizations and communities? Kanter’s conclusion is that doing things - doing them differently, together, and over and over - in and of itself creates capacity to get things done.

In the decades to come the political and social and economic currents will only run in one direction: toward more regional problem solving, more regional cooperation, more regional thinking - not at the expense of local initiative and planning, but in concert with it.

The tide will not change; the current will not reverse itself. Given the nature of politics, our federal system, and Greater Philadelphia’s historical resistance to change, it’s unlikely that even 50 years from now the way we make decisions about our regional future will have changed that much.

We won’t be a Portland, OR, with an elected regional government. What we can and probably will look like is a region that is more closely knit together through a series of public and private relationships and agreement—some formal, and some less formal. The ongoing American Experiment rewards and encourages continuous improvement, not radical change, in Philadelphia as well as around the country.

David Thornburgh is the Executive Director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

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US Census, 2000; Wharton Business Analyst, 2008

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PennPraxis/Planning Collective

ABOVE: A dot density map showing regional distribution of population and employment. LEFT: A vision for a regional riparian watershed system.

About the Graphics

The graphics in this article are from the 2009 Philadelphia Regional Infrastructure Charrette which brought together experts and thought-leaders in the fields of economics, transportation, urban design, natural systems, planning and public policy, including public officials from across the region, to develop ideas for a regional infrastructure investment framework that can advance Philadelphia as the center of a prosperous 21st-century metropolitan region. Working in coordination with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, the charrette tested the implications of a regional transportation and natural systems framework on key sites in and around Philadelphia while exploring the relationship between evolving federal policy and regional economic geography.

While Greater Philadelphia has significant assets, its transportation infrastructure and natural systems frameworks struggle to keep pace with the diffused development patterns that characterize the region.

The charrette was held from July 27 through July 29 at the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. The workshop was convened by PennDesign and produced by PennPraxis. The Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted a public event organized in conjunction with the charrette on the evening of July 29, which brought together charrette team leaders and top city officials to discuss new visions for urban infrastructure. The workshop was funded by a grant from the William Penn Foundation and with the support of the Office of the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania. The results of the charrette can be viewed here: http://issuu.com/pennpraxis/docs/ erasetheboundaries.

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PHOTO: JOEL CARILLET

PORTLAND: A MODEL CITY

By Carl Abbott

Portland, OR, is a middle-sized city with an outsized reputation for innovative government, good planning, and a willingness to try regional solutions to community concerns. From beginnings in the ferment of the later 1960s, residents of the city and metropolitan area have crafted an unusual set of institutions for guiding public policy. The result has been to make Portland a model or at least an object lesson - for other cities.

For the past 40 years, Portlanders have tried to redefine and span a fundamental divide in urban and regional planning between the needs of cities and the needs of natural environments. In the Portland case, environmentalism as a planning goal draws explicitly on the thought of Frederick Law Olmsted and Lewis Mumford, with their visions of cities and towns interlacing with the natural and cultivated environments in a democratic regionalism. At the same time, Portland’s eclectic urbanists borrow the insights of Jane Jacobs and William S. Whyte to assert the value of civic interaction in public spaces.

Portland may be one of the few cities that has actively reconciled their context | FA/WI2012 | 12

inherent tension in regional policies and in self-consciously bridgebuilding organizations like the Coalition for a Livable Future.

Portland’s good press is deserved. It does have a strong and vibrant downtown. It has preserved its older neighborhoods and commercial districts without suffering a zone of abandonment. It is growing compactly within a carefully monitored Urban Growth Boundary. It is investing in public transportation to keep the center and edges tied closely together. The result, in simplest formulation, is a metropolis that is stronger at its center than its edges, whether we measure that strength in political clout or the allocation of investment.

Portland is able to offer up these accomplishments because its citizens have been working hard and self-consciously at the job of citymaking for more than four decades years. Like Moliere’s character who is delighted to discover that he has been speaking prose for years without knowing it, Portlanders have discovered that they were conserving downtown and neighborhoods and open space long before they realized what they were doing is “smart growth.”

One of the reasons for Portland’s regional awareness is its setting in a recognizable and physically bounded region.

Through the center of the city and metropolitan region flows the Willamette River, a substantial stream very comparable to the Susquehanna in length and volume of water. The Willamette is Portland’s visual and functional heart. It knits together two sides of the City of Portland and ties the city to upstream suburbs to the south. It serves fishermen, recreationists, and tens of thousands of workers at riverside factories. Its banks are lined with highrise condos, wildlife

L CARILLET

refuges, railyards, and marine terminals. Scale up Portland by an order of magnitude - 20 million rather than 2 million - and an apt analogy would be London and the Thames.

At the same time, the Willamette drains a relatively narrow valley. Stand on the crest of the 1,000-foot hills that rise just west of downtown to see the unmistakable boundaries of the Portland region. Look one direction and the Coast Range rises just 25 miles west of the city center. Look east to see Mount Hood, the Cascade range, and the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge at the same distance.

Metropolitan Portland, in short, sits in a landscape that is both fertile and finite.

The reality and perception of physical limits is the central reason why Oregon adopted its innovative and still vital system of state guided land use planning in 1973-74. The motivation was (and is) to protect the rich agriculture of the Willamette Valley - all of 50 miles wide and 150 miles long - from California style sprawl. The requirement that every city or metropolitan area define an Urban Growth Boundary was a way to preserve the productive farm and forest land that Oregonians could see was a limited resources. That the Oregon planning system has also facilitated compact, transit-oriented urban development is a happy consequence but not the most important original goal.

Regional planning and management also has institutional support.

In 1978, voters in the three core countries of the metropolitan area merged small planning agencies into Metro, the nation’s first and only directly elected regional government for a metropolitan area. It is not quite certain that all the voters knew what they were doing (the ballot language was ambiguous) but the result has been a regional government that administers the UGB, acquires and manages open space and natural area, and adopts regional transportation and land use plans that constrain the region’s various cities and counties. The result has been a feedback loop in which regional awareness and sense of place has provided support for Metro, whose plans and actions and enhance the sense of region.

It was a farm-city coalition that passed state planning in the early 1970s, and it has been carefully nurtured political coalitions that have continued to support regional approaches to metropolitan problems.

• Since the 1970s, downtown business interests have seen benefits from strengthening older neighborhoods, and neighborhoods have benefitted from the continued importance of central districts for employment and area-wide cultural and recreational facilities.

• A second coalition has linked Portland and major suburbs around the development of a radial light rail system. The growing system increases accessibility of downtown, but it also gives the outlying cities of Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, and Milwaukie the opportunity to develop as important centers in their own right–as anchors on rail lines rather than beads on a beltway. This coalition was expressed in the 2040 Growth Concept Plan, adopted by Metro in the 1990s as a guide to future growth and it has guided rail transit planning.

• A third coalition revolves around the UGB. Farmers and advocates of urban living have been able to perceive a common interest

PHOTO: DANIEL DEITSCHEL

ABOVE: Portland remains the only city with an elected regional government.

LEFT: Two bicyclists ride across the Steel Bridge in downtown Portland along with a car and TriMet MAX train.

in developing a compact metropolitan footprint. Compact growth makes for efficient public services and makes it unlikely that Portlanders will discard their old neighborhoods. It also helps to keep development pressure off farm land, forest land, and sensitive natural systems. If you are a connoisseur of Oregon pinot noir, thank Oregon Senate Bill 100 and the UGB. At the same time, the regional consensus requires careful maintenance. Clark County, Washington, north of the Columbia River, is economically integrated but politically separate from the Oregon side.

Business interests in the city of Vancouver, just across the I-5 bridge, see the value of cooperation, but not residents in more distant Clark County suburbs. Clackamas County, Oregon, south and southeast of Portland, spans upper middle class suburbia and semi-rural fringe communities. Its big political question in 2012 is whether to resist “Portland creep” (meaning light rail extension and denser development) or to continue participate in regional initiatives (as by contributing to a current light rail project). The May 2012 primary election postponed the issue to November.

What makes Portland stand out has been the reinforcing effect of unusual political institutions, commonly shared goals, and a civic culture that believes in the possibility of good government. The city has not done anything that has not also been tried elsewhere, but here we put them together as a package, and early success stories have built a constituency and a value bias toward further action. The region’s challenge is not to come up with innovative planning ideas. It is to maintain the political capacity and desire to follow through with the good ideas we already have.

Carl Abbott is Professor of Urban Studies at Portland State University. He is author of “The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West,” “The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities,” and “Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis.” context | FA/WI2012 | 13

REIMAGINING THE FUTURE O

By Chrissy Lee and Kaitlin Dastugue In 2012, students in the Master of City Planning Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design took on the issue of highway removal, examining the historical impact of highways in cities, precedents for removal, and the present challenge facing removal efforts in six North American cities.

The semester-long studio, entitled “Reimagining the Future of Urban Expressways,” was led by instructors Harris Steinberg, FAIA (Executive director, PennPraxis) and Nando Micale, FAIA, AICP (Principal, Wallace, Roberts, and Todd).

We have reached a critical moment in the life of our urban expressways: the interstate system will have to be rebuilt in the next five decades at an estimated cost of $2.5 trillion. Conventional wisdom suggests that these expressways will be reconstructed in place, and current transportation policy supports this belief. Many of these interstates are vital to the economic health of our cities and to the everyday convenience of drivers. However, not all highways are created equal - that is, equally beneficial for communities or critical to the functioning of the interstate system. Before reinvesting in our highways, we should consider more socially, economically, and environmentally productive ways to enhance our transportation systems and our cities as a whole.

There is a choice to be made between rebuilding our existing highways and replacing them with more context-appropriate transportation solutions.

The Rise and Fall of Highways in Cities The U.S. interstate highway system took nearly a half-century to context | FA/WI2012 | 14

complete and was the largest public works project in the nation’s history. The rise of the interstate system had a significant impact on the development of U.S. cities and towns, allowing some residents to escape the confines of the industrial city for suburban living.

Rather than enticing people back to the urban core, urban freeways have had the opposite effect: exporting business activity, residents, and land value to the suburbs, rupturing the social and physical fabric of city neighborhoods, and forcing city dwellers to bear a disproportionate share of the negative health and social impacts of highways without a commensurate benefit.

The 21st century has brought a renewed interest in cities, urban policy, and urban development. Facing concerns over climate change, rising oil prices, and economic instability, policy makers, planners, and developers are beginning to acknowledge the potential for cities to help the country realize equity and sustainability goals. Urban highways have emerged as one thread in this discussion, suggesting the need for better alignment between transportation investment priorities and broader urban revitalization goals.

Cities around the world have demonstrated how highways can become vibrant public spaces. The lessons learned from past highway removal projects demonstrate that there is not a “one size fits all” strategy for highway removal. In every case where an urban highway has been removed, the removal strategy was shaped by the constraints and opportunities specific to that site.

Freeways without Futures Applying principles learned from past highway removal projects, the Penn studio explored highway removal scenarios in six North

LEFT: In Washington, D.C., replacing the Southeast Freeway with an at-grade avenue connects Garfield Park to the surrounding neighborhood.

E OF URBAN EXPRESSWAYS American cities. The resulting design recommendations present possible futures for these urban highways that respond to constraint of limited federal funding resources and the objective to create more livable and sustainable cities. D.C.: Preparing for future growth by restoring an 18th Century Avenue The studio consulted with the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, D.C., in looking at the potential removal of an interstate segment that connects Northern Virginia and downtown Washington. The Southeast/Southwest Freeway was originally built to revitalize Washington’s historic core, but over time became a social, visual, and physical barrier between Southwest DC and downtown. Today, Washington’s sustained population and job growth has resulted in tremendous development pressure on the downtown. This same growth has likewise put pressure on the existing road network and helped drive a demand for alternative modes of transportation.

With these trends in mind, the studio proposed removing the Southeast/Southwest Freeway as a way to ease development pressure (by utilizing air rights), to reconnect downtown neighborhoods with the more underdeveloped Southwest area of the city and the Navy Yard, and to introduce new transit modes. Other recommendations included a public awareness campaign aimed at educating the public on the benefits of a car-free lifestyle, and a financing scheme that included the use of congestion pricing.

Toronto: Reconnecting Toronto to its waterfront In Toronto, the studio worked with the region’s waterfront redevelopment authority to study the elevated portion of the Gardiner Expressway, which currently separates the newly thriving waterfront

district from the rest of the city. By converting the elevated portion of the expressway into an on-grade boulevard, the proposed design builds on waterfront revitalization already underway, and creates opportunity for the creation of more pedestrian-friendly public spaces.

In addition to the highway’s ultimate removal, the studio recommended that the city expand its existing mass transit system to help replace the lost automobile capacity- and recommended that a TIF (Tax Increment Financing) district be put in place that, channeling increased property tax revenues generated from the project to pay for both removal and new infrastructure investments.

NYC: Building on community led revitalization and open space assets to make quality of life improvements The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, NY presents a complex case for removal, with various stakeholders at odds in the discussion. Proponents of removing the seemingly redundant expressway point to the adverse health effects of highways on the low-income communities in the South Bronx, as well as the blighting and divisive influence of the elevated and below grade structures. Opponents of its removal see the Sheridan as a critical link to the Hunts Point food distribution center, which is a major economic driver for the city. The studio proposed a design and implementation strategy that would remove the highway and replace it with an at-grade boulevard, allowing for continued access to Hunt’s Point on local roads in the short term and long-term access by alternative highway routes. Land freed up by the removal of the Sheridan would be reprogrammed to create new park space, improved connections to existing parks, and development parcels that could be managed by local community development organicontext | FA/WI2012 | 15

six cities

Average Daily Traffic:

washington d.c. | sOUTHWEST/ sOUTHEAST expressway 1957

Study Area

5.6 miles toronto | gardiner expressway 1966

Study Area

4.6 miles new york city | sheridan expressway 1964

Study Area

1.25 miles new orleans | claiborne expressway 1968

Study Area

4 miles new haven | oak street connector 1959

Study Area

1.9 miles montreal | autoroute bonaventure 1966

Study Area

.62 miles = 10,000 trips

ABOVE: For highways in the six North American cities in question, the varying length, level of usage, condition, and context for each highway will inform the ultimate decision to remove the roadway, as well as the strategy for replacement and redevelopment. Past removal projects have demonstrated that removal is a viable strategy not only for under-utilized, defunct, or truncated stub highways, but also for well-travelled thoroughfares. Coordinated investments in public transit and transit-demand management strategies (such as congestion-pricing or parking fees) have been shown to help offset lost highway capacity - and in many cases, the local road network can absorb additional traffic with minimal impact to levels of service for drivers. While transportation modeling can help to forecast future impacts on transportation, the outcomes of past removals demonstrate that with careful planning, the removal of a large section of highway will not have devastating impacts on traffic. context | FA/WI2012 | 16

“Highway removal studies must weigh the potential benefits and detriments of a highway teardown against the option to reconstruct, and the public must be brought into this discussion more fully.” zations for the creation for much-needed affordable housing.

New Orleans: Reclaiming infrastructure as a tool for neighborhood-based social and economic development The Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans, which runs through the heart of Treme and several other centrally located neighborhoods, was the site of a once thriving commercial corridor and a center of cultural life. The building of the expressway in the 1960s accelerated the decline of the district, severing neighborhoods in two. The elevated expressway runs above a functioning boulevard, and its apparent redundancy in addition to heightened interest in post-Hurricane Katrina revitalization efforts have helped generate discussions around its removal. The studio took a nuanced approach redesigning the Claiborne corridor. Rather than proposing one solution for the entire 3.5mile stretch, the proposed design separated the corridor into 10 segments with context -appropriate design recommendations for each section. In some areas, the elevated infrastructure was recommended for full removal, and in order, repurposed for non-transportation uses such as public space or shade for activities occurring beneath.

New Haven: Moving beyond the right of way to repair a city The Oak Street connector in New Haven, CT, is a limited access, “stub” highway that links the downtown at its west end. The studio approached the potential removal of the Oak Street Connector as a launching point to reimagining the redevelopment of entire areas adjacent to the highway.

The class examined what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the city to create a strategic framework that will reknit the fractured urban fabric and guide the development of the city for decades to come. The team devised a phased, strategic plan for the area which included a new street car line and various mixes of residential, office, and retail development. A noteworthy recommendation is the strategy for funding the project by tolling a portion of I-95. Currently, states my not toll interstate highways; however, municipalities can toll bridge (or elevated) structures that are part of the highway system. Montreal: Building New Connections to a Strong Development Market In Montreal, the city has already decided to remove the last kilometer of the elevated Autoroute Bonaventure south of downtown.

The studio was charged with envisioning what context-appropriate design interventions could go in its place. The studio seeks to reinstate the historic street network, increase the area’s development potential, protect the neighborhood from high-volume public transportation traffic, and scale the entire development to pedestrian-friendly proportions. The plan also introduces a new pair of bus rapid transit lines and a bus terminal. The studio team concluded that removal

presents an opportunity for Montreal to extend its downtown to the South and channel the city’s development pressures to an area with great potential.

Moving from Vision to Reality The growing movement to rethink the presence of highways in cities faces a number of major challenges: Significant political and funding hurdles, entrenched bureaucratic behaviors and biases towards freeway construction, as well as commuters, residents, and businesses who see highways as an indispensable condition of cities.

In order to significantly move the needle on this issue, there must be changes in the way we think about transportation planning and how major projects are implemented.

Specific recommendations to achieve the above goals include: Expanded regional coordination and implementation authority for transportation-related projects Requirement to include removal and modification as alternatives in the assessment of a highway rebuild More stringent baseline requirements for approval of highway projects, including considerations of environmental, public health, economic, and social impacts along with transportation-related analyses More robust process for stakeholder engagement Public education campaign to publicize the cost and impacts of maintaining various infrastructure investments Exploration of alternative user fees for all transportation systems (e.g. congestion pricing, tolls, etc.) as well as an increase in the fuel tax to ensure that drivers are paying the true cost of maintaining our road and highways Equitable funding allocations for non-car modes of transportation The crux of this debate lies in a still pervasive cultural dependency on the automobile, outmoded policy and planning frameworks, and lack of information of the true costs of maintaining our urban highways. Highway removal studies must weigh the potential benefits and detriments of a highway teardown against the option to reconstruct, and the public must be brought into this discussion more fully. Without such consideration and the policy mechanisms to fund and encourage alternative uses, cities are set on a path to reinvest in inequitable, inefficient, and unsustainable systems.

Today’s public leaders must not repeat the mistakes of past city builders, so eager to join in the highway construction game. Instead, they must chart a new course, one that benefits people of all background and conserves resources. That course will also help cities do what they have historically done best: bring people together, provide ladders of opportunity, and foment the cultural and economic activity that drives our society forward. context | FA/WI2012 | 17

context | FA/WI2012 | 18

expression

EX

Things Fall Apart

Photographs and text by Dominic Mercier

As a photographer, I’ve always been particularly fond of urban exploration (or, as it is sometimes snidely referred to in some photographic circles, ruin porn), but having a very young child at home makes it hard to justify the risk, both from legal and health and safety viewpoints. In the interest of keeping things on the up and up, I was recently granted access to two empty buildings at the Philadelphia Navy Yard that have remained since the yard was decommissioned in the mid 1990s. Those buildings, 18 and 104, were a boiler and blacksmith shop and eight-floor office building in their previous lives.

context | FA/WI2012 | 19

With legal access for this excursion, I will admit to missing that little tingle of excitement that comes from being somewhere you’re not supposed to be, but the overwhelming curiosity and sense of preservation that comes with this style of photography quickly settled in.

The Navy Yard is an interesting study. As the country’s first naval shipyard, its origins can be traced back all the way to 1776. It became an official part of the U.S. Navy in 1801, and moved to it’s current location at the south end of Broad Street in the late 1800s. The Navy officially closed the yard in 1995, and it has since seen significant transformation (its campus environment now serves as the home of companies like Urban Outfitters and Tasty Baking Co. and outfits like EEB Hub), though quite a bit of its earlier infrastructure remains. One could hazard a guess that given the rapid development there, these old buildings won’t remain much longer … at least in their current state. I’m particularly fascinated by the closing year of 1995, the year in which I was a junior in high school. Given the condition of the buildings, it’s amazing to me how quickly things can fall apart. Guess the same can be said of people, too.

context | FA/WI2012 | 20

context | FA/WI2012 | 21

The Barnes Foundation:

Tod Williams & Billie Tsien Architects

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design profile

DP

The Barnes Foundation’s new 93,000-square-foot building in downtown Philadelphia, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, provides significant new facilities for the Foundation’s core programs in art education, as well as for temporary exhibitions and visitor amenities.

At the same time, the legendary Barnes art collection is presented within a 12,000-square-foot gallery that replicates the dimensions and shapes of the original Merion spaces, as well as the founder’s conception of a visual interplay between art and nature. The building is the first major addition to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in more than 60 years.

The original design concept of the “Gallery in a Garden, Garden in a Gallery” was predicated on an important observation made by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien when they were first studying the plans of the existing Merion Gallery during the process of consideration by the Barnes Foundation. They noted that the walls that separated the smaller end galleries from the rest of the larger galleries on the first and second floors were aligned with one another and could be significantly wider with-

out compromising the Foundation’s mandate that any new design respect the arrangement of the rooms within the Gallery. This enabled the scheme to widen the previously 10-foot walls to 24-feet-thick walls that would accept the insertion of a Gallery Garden and a pair of Gallery Classrooms on each floor.

This early observation established a structure that would guide many other decisions made resulting in the creation of the Light Court to provide natural light through the windows of the Collection Gallery. Maintaining the solar orientation of the rooms in the Gallery required that they be entered from the north and face south toward the magnificent allée of London plane trees along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Within the Collection Gallery the architects have simplified and intensified the design of

the floors, walls and ceilings to brighten and clarify the viewing of the Collection while respecting the importance of the relationship of the architectural detailing to the ensemble compositions. After exhaustive study, measurement and research of the details within the Merion Gallery, the architects erected a full-scale mock-up in northern Philadelphia to test different material and finish concepts. Because of the dense, salon hang of the ensembles within each room, the size and proportion of the trim, base and picture rails needed to remain at or close to the original details.

However, by simplifying and intensifying the details - lightening the finish on the wood, utilizing simple floor patterns and re-shaping the ceilings to distribute new artificial lighting and mechanical air from the picture rails - the Gallery has been given a new luminosity.

context | FA/WI2012 | 23

“The original design concept of the ‘Gallery in a Garden, Garden in a Gallery’ was predicated on an important observation made by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien when they were first studying the plans of the existing Merion Gallery.”

context | FA/WI2012 | 24

The building is currently slated to achieve LEED Platinum certification from the United States Green Building Council. In addition to specifying and installing no- or low-VOC products, FSC certified woods, recycled products (tiles, gypsum wall board and many others) and employing building practices that emphasized life and health safety, the project offers the following highlights: • Demolition recycling: The site the Barnes Foundation now occupies was previously the home of the Youth Study Center that was demolished in 2008. The contractor, LF Driscoll, was able to recycle and thus divert from landfill 90 percent of the available materials.

• Energy savings: The Barnes Foundation design process employed an integrated building environment and exterior wall, window and roof design process that resulted in the building’s Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing systems using 40 percent less energy than the mandated Energy Code. This iterative process quantified design concepts using computer models that tested the surface area of glass in relation to more thermally efficient solid wall and roof surfaces

to ensure the design of the “skin” of the building, where energy is frequently wasted through loss, was as thermally robust as possible.

• Photovoltaic Panels: The roof of the Light Canopy is covered in 12,000 square feet of photovoltaic panels that provide 8 percent of the building’s electrical load.

• Landscape irrigation cistern: Rainwater from the green roof is collected in a 40,000-gallon cistern buried along the east side of the building. The cistern is used to irrigate all the plants, ground cover and trees on the 4.5-acre site. In the event that reduced rainwater is available, a secondary system draws ground water from around foundation drains that line the basement.

• Reclaimed/Ipe floor: The Light Court, a room designed as the living room of the building, is a vibrant space during the day and an events space at night. In order to facilitate the diverse activities, the space needed a durable floor that was also warm and inviting. The nearly 200-foot-long ipe wood “rug” is laid in a herringbone pattern from reclaimed boards taken from the renovation of Coney Island Boardwalks in Brooklyn, NY.

LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA ARCHITECTURE: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Associate architect: Ballinger Lighting consultant: Fisher Marantz Stone project managers: Aegis Property Group Contractor: L.F. Driscoll MEP Engineer: Altieri Sebor and Weiber structural engineer: Severud Associates CIVIL ENGINEER: Hunt Engineering Code Consultant: Hughes Associates Acoustic Consultant: Acoustic Consultant Exterior wall consultant: Axis Group Conservation consultant ARCHITECT: Samuel Anderson Architects Theater Consultant: Schuler Shook Concrete Consultant: Reginald Hough Graphics and wayfinding: Pentagram geotechnical consultant: Earth Engineering Inc. Food service: Post & Grossbard Photography: Tom Crane

context | FA/WI2012 | 25

profile DP design

Lantern House:

RKM Architects

Lantern house is a modestly priced adaptive reuse of a single story brick stable in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia. The project’s program includes a single family residence, home office/studio, in-law apartment and two garden spaces.

Design of the house is conceived as two masses, floating above the open floor plan of the first floor, flanking the central shade garden. Intervention at the ground plane is deliberately minimal, allowing the historic texture to remain, while the upper masses are conceived as simply constructed, modestly appointed volumes.

In constructing the new house, the existing wood beams that made up the original roof of the stable were reclaimed for use in wall cladding, interior woodwork and stairs, and select furniture pieces.

The existing brick walls were stabilized, repointed, and repurposed as both interior walls of the house, as well as garden walls at the exterior.

The original structure was built to the property lines. As a result, the outdoor spaces were delineated within the perimeter of the existing brick walls in the form of the sun garden at the southwest side, and the shade garden; forming a central courtyard. The context | FA/WI2012 | 26

gardens are a critical part of the daylighting strategy, as well as the strategy to provide passive ventilation to the structure. By opening sliding doors at the first floor, cool air is drawn in, and the chimney effect draws warm air up and out the third floor clerestory windows and doors.

The passive ventilation strategy has worked quite well, despite the hot and humid nature of Philadelphia summers. In milder temperatures, it is possible to leave the windows and doors of the ground and third floor open, and the combination of cross-ventilation and chimney effect are quite effective. In more extreme temperatures, exceeding 90 degrees, we have found that a “night flush” strategy can help miti-

gate the temperature extremes. By opening the house at night, cooling the house down, and then closing the house when the morning heat begins to rise, the time in which we can go without air conditioning is greatly extended.

The project’s green features include: reclaimed yellow pine from original structure for rainscreen exterior cladding, interior woodwork and furniture; reuse of the existing brick structure; reuse of salvaged brick, building stone and coping tiles; passive ventilation using central shade garden for evaporative and passive cooling; white TPO roofs to minimize solar gain; daylighting/passive solar; LED & high efficiency lighting; radiant hydronic heating in polished concrete floors.

LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA ARCHITECTURE: RKM Architects: Richard A. Miller, AIA; Kimberly I. Miller, AIA Structural DESIGN: Macintosh Engineering Mechanical Engineer: Urban Technology, Inc. reclaimed wood: Paul’s Woodshop Geotechnical Engineer: TRC Metal work: The Iron Studio Photography: Matt Wargo

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profile DP design

Restoration and Renovation of the Jayne House:

John Milner Architects

The historic Jayne House is located at the prominent corner of 19th and Delancey Streets in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. The stately residence was designed in 1895 by the celebrated architect Frank Furness as the home of his niece Caroline Furness Jayne and her husband, eminent zoologist Dr. Horace Jayne and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The historic Jayne House is located at the prominent corner of 19th and Delancey Streets in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. The stately residence was designed in 1895 by the celebrated architect Frank Furness as the home of his niece Caroline Furness Jayne and her husband, eminent zoologist Dr. Horace Jayne and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1920’s the home was sold to the Jacob Lit family and the new owners made significant interior alterations. In the 1940’s, the building served as a synagogue during which time the congregation gutted the entire north side of the first floor for use as a one large worship space. The building continued to house various institutions until the current owners purchased the property in 2007 with ambitious plans to restore the building to its original grandeur and its original use as a single family residence.

Despite the years of modifications, many original features survived including the twoand-a-half-story oak paneled central hall crowned by a leaded-glass skylight designed

by Furness. After removing a maze of 1980’s office partitions, the architects reinterpreted new floor plans based on the original configuration. New second floor bathrooms, bedrooms and closets were created utilizing original wall, door and window locations wherever possible. A small, residential elevator was added in the former location of an original dumbwaiter in a service area of the house. New mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems were discreetly installed to maximize open space.

In adapting the 19th century residence to a 21st century family, the designers introduced a first floor kitchen into the location context | FA/WI2012 | 28

of an original rear parlor that was gutted in the 1940’s. The intent was to minimize the effect on the existing building fabric. New cabinetry, appliances and coffered ceiling were installed. Original windows, and their casing, were carefully restored. The new kitchen conveniently serves the adjacent dining room. Moving eastward through a new, large pair of pocket doors, a small library was formed on axis with the original curved bay window at the location of an original ante room. Next, a formal parlor was restored to the northeast corner of the building anchored by a restored and reinterpreted fireplace. Because no original building fabric remained in this area, the architects used other mantels in the home for inspiration. Between the parlor and library a new,

transparent “partition” was created featuring tall Corinthian columns sitting atop low bookcases with leaded glass doors. This creates an interpretive break between the two rooms, while keeping the spaces open and light-filled.

The comprehensive restoration of the exterior included a new terracotta tile roof, full masonry restoration, conservation of Karl Bitter designed sculptural elements, a new roof deck, new bluestone parking courtyard with a custom engineered drop-down garage door, and ironwork restoration throughout.

After this complex three-year project this landmark residence once again houses an active, modern family and is now ready for its next 115 years.

LOCATION: Philadelphia ARCHITECTURE: John Milner Architects: John D. Milner, FAIA, Principal; Christina H. Carter, AIA, Principal in Charge; Justin Detwiler, Designer Interior Designer: Eberlein Design Consultants, Ltd. BUILDER: Cherokee Construction Landscape architect: Charles Hess Landscape Architects Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti Lighting Designer: Grenald Waldron Associates Conservators: Milner + Carr Conservation Photography: Tom Crane Photography

context | FA/WI2012 | 29

DP

design profile

Seidenberg House:

Metcalfe Architecture & Design Metcalfe Architecture & Design completed the renovation of a mid-century modern kit house in Conshohocken, which included the design of a new master suite and renovation of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, family and living room.

The original building is one of a suite of three kit houses (by TechBuilt) constructed in 1955 by architect William Hough, Jr., and did not take full advantage of its location in the trees. A sky-lit, vaulted ceiling and kitchen were added in 1970.

Special considerations included the site location - a sloped site with dense woods which often resulted in flooding, water, and humidity damage; outdated building codes which permitted the original house to use thin walls and roof profiles; and drainage concerns from the 1970s addition, which dictated that it be separated from the existing building along a narrow dividing hallway. The bedrooms were sheltered under a pitched roofline and the kitchen addition was enclosed by cabinets.

The design pushed the upper level of the house into the treetops, transforming it into a home in the sky, with an expanded second-floor living space and entry; and renovated kitchen, living areas, and bathrooms.

The firm reconfigured the small, existing entrance into a sky-lit two story entry hall paved in slate, crossed above by a steel-andglass footbridge. This hallway now leads a visitor into progressively more open kitchen, dining, and living spaces. In the kitchen area we minimized overhead cabinets which allowed for a band of windows that provide panoramic views of the outdoors.

The second-story master suite became a spacious, light-filled oasis with clerestory context | FA/WI2012 | 30

windows and eight-foot-tall glass doors that open onto the suite’s cantilevered balcony.

The steel and tempered glass footbridge, fabricated by a local artisan, links the master bedroom and bath to the rest of the house.

And, in-keeping with the house’s mid-century modern origins, horizontally-battened Hardie Board panels on the exterior work in concert with existing vertical battens, providing protection from the elements.

The Seidenberg House reflects MA&D’s focus on integrating play and romance into our designs - a master bedroom nestled in the treetops, evokes feelings of peace and solitude; while the house, surrounded by towering trees, solicits memories of childhood escape.

LOCATION: Conshohocken, PA CLIENT: Barbara and David Seidenberg ARCHITECTURE: Metcalfe Architecture & Design: Alan Metcalfe, AIA, Principal; Jason Manning, Architectural Designer; Matthew Pickering, Architectural Designer; Teresa Maida, Interior Designer CONTRACTOR: Gervasi, Robert & Son General Contracting Metal fabricator: Bill Curran Design Custom Door fabricator: Doyle Design PhOTOGRAPHY: Halkin Photography LLC

context | FA/WI2012 | 31

NB

note book

calendar INDUCTION

Jan. 17

ANNUAL MEETING

April 24

GOLF OUTING

April 29

KAHN MEMORIAL LECTure

May 9

SUBURBAN PRO CON

May TBD

design exhibits for NIST’s facilities in Gaithersburg, MD, and Boulder, CO. Voith & Mactavish Architects announced the addition of Anamika Goyal as the new Marketing Coordinator.

Affiliate News photo: Dominic Mercier

MEMBER NEWS Archer & Buchanan Architecture, Ltd., completed the Christian Activities Building at Grove City College in Mercer County, PA.

J.C. Castner was named an Executive Associate and Health Care Design Manager at Heery International.

Bernardon Haber Holloway Architects’ Second and State Office Building project in Harrisburg received Special Recognition in the category of LEED Project of the Year as part of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Central Pennsylvania Chapter’s 2012 ForeverGreen Gala.

Leila Hamroun, principal at Heritage Design Collaborative, presented a paper at The Association for Preservation Technology International 44th Annual Conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Victor Hugo De Souza Azevedo from the University of Virginia was named the winner of the BLT Architects’ 2012 Student Design Sketch Competition.

Construction was recently completed on the new Drexel University Market 16 & Noodle Bar, designed by Charles Matsinger Associates.

EwingCole announced that two of the firm’s healthcare projects have won awards in ENR’s Best Projects of the Mid-Atlantic program.

Francis Cauffman appointed Steven Stainbrook, AICP, as its new Director of Higher Education.

H2L2 Architects / Planners successfully completed the design of the new Global Commons at The Hun School of Princeton.

Heckendorn Shiles Architects announced the grand reopening of Tarken Ice Rink. context | FA/WI2012 | 32

Eric Gianelle and Michael Kelly were elevated to principals at KCBA Architects.

George C. Skarmeas, the Planning + Design Director at Preservation Design Partnership, LLC, was consulted for the article “The Preservationist’s New Superpowers” in Preservation Magazine.

SaylorGregg Architects announced that projects it has designed for the University of Pennsylvania, Wilkes University, Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts are currently under construction.

Schradergroup was named to the Top 50 in Sustainability by ARCHITECT magazine.

TranSystems announced the merger of its two Philadelphia offices into a new space at 1717 Arch Street, 7th floor.

UJMN Architects + Designers announced that NIST has commissioned the firm to

Acentech Inc. announced that Perry J. Artese joined Acentech’s Trevose office as a senior consultant in the audiovisual systems design group.

Constructure was been retained by Victory Brewing Company as general contractor for an expansion project near Parkesburg.

C. Raymond Davis & Sons completed a project for the Christina Seix Academy located in Lawrenceville, NJ. The General Building Contractors Association named Steven S. Lakin as its Executive Managing Director.

Michael McTamney joined Hunt Engineering Company in October as Business Development Director.

Microsol Resources Corporation announced the addition of PointKnown to its growing association of Technology Partners.

Skanska USA was awarded a contract from Temple University to renovate 30,000 square feet of the school’s College of Engineering building.

Urban Engineers welcomed David Price as Deputy Practice Leader of its Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, and Fire Protection Department.

Wohlsen Construction Company was named an Award of Excellence winner by the Delaware Contractors Association.

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St. Peter’s Church

Faith in Action for 250 Years Cordelia FranCes Biddle, elizaBeth s. Browne, alan J. heavens, and Charles Peitz Opening a window onto Philadelphia’s—and the nation’s—history, St. Peter’s Church is a glorious testament to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, a National Historic Landmark. In addition to the stories and a hundred plus black-and-white and color photographs, this handsome volume provides a history of the grounds, the churchyard, and the church itself—a classic example of eighteenth-century Philadelphia design that later incorporated the work of renowned architects William Strickland, Thomas U. Walter, and Frank Furness.

Available at all local and online booksellers

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Structural Engineers Analysis & Design :: Evaluation of Existing Structures Historic Preservation :: Due Diligence Studies Facade Investigations :: Expert Testimony

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Rodin Museum Exterior Restoration and Garden Rejuvination The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

Parrish Hall Mechanical Upgrades Swarthmore College

Pearson McGonigle Hall Temple University

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