Metropolis Spring 2024

Testingthe Limits

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Contents Frontiers ofTechnology

65 Frontiers of Technology

66 How AI Is Supercharging Design Software Start-ups

Architecture and design’s early forays into artificial intelligence (AI) were mostly confined to image generation and visualization, but in the past couple of years A&D tech insiders have blown the lid off.

70 The Landscape Architecture–AI Bu er Zone

How long can the idiosyncrasies of landscape architecture keep the promise and peril of artificial intelligence at bay?

74 Four Pieces of Software by Architects, for Architects

These free, open-source technologies were developed by architecture teams to fill gaps in today’s software offerings.

74

Cloud-based AEC data studio Ellipse by Thornton Tomasetti brings together data, models, and drawings in a digital twin.

Search and sample in seconds.

Contents

116

Part of the redevelopment of a former post office, The Meadow is a 3.5-acre rooftop garden in Chicago.

ON THE COVER:

MODU’s Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem with a model from their Flexing Structures project.

76 Architects of the Threshold

New York-based MODU straddles the boundaries of buildings and sites to deliver new results on heat, shade, and microclimates.

84 Passive House Is Now a Platform for More

For years the German sustainability standard had a singular focus on energy efficiency.

98 Facing History through Landscapes

How Walter Hood proves the power of green space to tell new stories, communicate culture, and confront hard truths.

108 Put a Park on It

The adaptive reuse of an expansive Postal Service facility in midtown Manhattan includes a rooftop garden bigger than many of the city’s more famous parks.

118 From the Ground Up

Designer and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko is rethinking the fabric of the built environment by connecting the dots between agriculture, construction, and social equity.

126 Sources

128 Index

Photo by Seth Caplan.

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EDITORIAL

EDITOR IN CHIEF Avinash Rajagopal

DESIGN DIRECTOR Tr avis M. Ward

SENIOR EDITOR AND PROJECT MANAGER Laur en Volker

SENIOR EDITOR AND ENGAGEMENT MANAGER Fr ancisco Brown

ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND RESEARCHER J axson Stone

DESIGNER Rober t Pracek

COPY EDITOR Benjamin Spier

FACT CHECKER Anna Zappia

EDITORS AT LARGE Ver da Alexander, Sam Lubell

PUBLISHING

VICE PRESIDENT, SALES John Cr osby

VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING & EVENTS Tina Brennan

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR

Tamara Stout tstout@sando wdesign.com 917.449 .2845

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Laury Kissane 770.791.1976

MANAGER, PRINT OPERATIONS Olivia Padilla

SENIOR MANAGER, MARKETING + EVENTS

Kelly Allen kkriwko@sando wdesign.com

SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Zoya Naqvi

GRAPHIC DESIGNER, CREATIVE SERVICES Paige Miller

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SANDOW was founded by visionary entrepreneur Adam I. Sandow in 2003, with the goal of reinventing the traditional publishing model. Today, SANDOW powers the design, materials, and luxury industries through innovative content, tools, and integrated solutions. Its diverse portfolio of assets includes LUXE INTERIORS + DESIGN, INTERIOR DESIGN, METROPOLIS, and DESIGNTV by SANDOW; ThinkLab, a research and strategy firm; and content services brands, including The Agency by SANDOW, a full-scale digital marketing agency, The Studio by SANDOW, a video production studio, and SURROUND, a podcast network and production studio. SANDOW is a key supporter and strategic partner to NYCxDESIGN, a not-for-profit organization committed to empowering and promoting the city’s diverse creative community. In 2019, Adam Sandow launched Material Bank, the world’s largest marketplace for searching, sampling, and specifying architecture, design, and construction materials.

Troupe

FRANCISCO BROWN

Francisco “Pancho” Brown is an architectural designer, researcher, and communication strategist. He is METROPOLIS's senior editor and engagement manager and cofounder of Micropolitan Studio, a multidisciplinary art and design collective. He is also a correspondent for Mexico's Arquine magazine and serves on the Steering Committee for US Architects Declare and the Harvard Graduate School of Design Alumni Council. In this issue Brown spotlights free, open-source technologies making an impact in “Four Pieces of Software by Architects, for Architects” (p. 74).

DIANA BUDDS

Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn. Her areas of interest are public art and infrastructure, and her writing has appeared in Curbed, Dwell, Fast Company, and Wallpaper*, among other publications. For this issue Budds covered Bruce Willen’s public art installation Ghost Rivers in Baltimore (p. 42).

MALAIKA BYNG

Malaika Byng is a London-based writer, editor, and creative consultant who specializes in the arts and sustainability. After a long stint at Wallpaper*, she set up design and property publication The Spaces in 2015, then went on to edit Crafts magazine for several years before going solo in 2022. Byng now writes for the Financial Times, Wallpaper*, Kinfolk, and The Plant, among other titles. Byng penned this issue’s profile of designer and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko (p. 118).

SETH CAPLAN

Seth Caplan is a New York–based photographer, artist, and arts educator. His photography has been published in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and New York Magazine. His personal work often revolves around identity, queer community, and home. Caplan also teaches art to groups of all ages in museum galleries and studios. Caplan’s photographs of design firm MODU are featured in “Architects of the Threshold” (p. 76) and on this issue's cover.

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The Cutting Edge Is Closer than Ever

INNOVATION IN ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN can happen in many ways. Sometimes change comes through optimizing forms, spaces, materials, and workflows till every project achieves the biggest impact with just the right and sufficient inputs. But once in a while we see ideas with transformative potential for the built environment—new ways of working with people, money, ideas, and tools that, once discovered, cannot be denied their importance.

MODU’s research into the nebulous zone between inside and outside is one such perspective (“Architects of the Threshold,” p. 76). That singular focus has led the Brooklyn-based firm to a number of fruitful experiments with microclimates, biophilia, structures, and climate-adaptive building elements—many of which the architects have been able to implement and test in real-world projects.

Similarly, a shift in thinking about passive house from a goal to a means has transformed the potential for sustainable living (“Passive House Is Now a Platform for More,” p. 84). With energy efficiency as a stepping-stone rather than the prize, firms around the world are reaching for much more ambitious goals with multiple benefits in historic preservation, affordable housing, public health, and local economic growth.

You will see this kind of potential run through the stories in this issue. Mae-ling Lokko is reimagining the built environment as a grown environment, derived from cultivation and agriculture rather than extraction and manufacturing (“From the Ground Up,” p. 118). Landscape architect Walter Hood weaves his magic at the International African American Museum in

Charleston, South Carolina, to prompt conversations about a painful past (“Facing History through Landscapes,” p. 98). And in “Frontiers of Technology” (p. 65) we look at the digital tools that are changing how we conceive and realize the built environment—some of them powered by artificial intelligence, others motivated by needs and perspectives that have simply never been considered before in architecture and design practice.

As you read these and other stories, I’d like to call your attention to a detail that we’ve added to the pages of METROPOLIS. Each story is now tagged with a few topics, reflecting themes that we’ll be tracking throughout this year. On the very last page of this issue, these topics are gathered in a new “Index” (p. 128) so you can explore the ideas that METROPOLIS covers in every story through the lenses that interest you the most. —Avinash Rajagopal, editor in chief

In "Facing History through Landscapes" (p. 98) celebrated landscape architect Walter Hood explains the thinking behind his work at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Matte Black

How Designers and Architects Can Push for Better Outdoor Amenities

The

METROPOLIS Outdoor Amenities

Resource features tools and guides to help landscape architects, architects, and interior designers leverage the holistic benefits of outdoor amenities.

By Avinash Rajagopal

OUTDOOR AMENITY SPACES

offer many benefits: They give people the space to interact with nature, they extend the use of buildings, and they can contribute to broader planetary goals, addressing climate change by sequestering carbon, managing and replenishing our water systems, building and supporting biodiversity, and reconnecting humans to nature through biophilia.

To help designers and architects leverage all these benefits when designing amenity spaces, METROPOLIS has gathered more than 25 existing tools, guides, manuals, and certifications, all available across five sections in our online Outdoor Amenities Resource.

The resource was created through a virtual hackathon, with the input of many landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, sustainability, and manufacturing leaders. The hackathon was organized in partnership with Expormim, KFI Studios, Landscape Forms, and Tuuci, which not only produce materials, furnishings, and fixtures but also provide expertise on the application, performance, maintenance, and benefits of their offerings.

This living resource will be updated with additional tools and manuals as they become available. We hope you will find it a useful source of support as you bring harmony to the built environment with the natural environment. M

OUTDOOR AMENITIES HACKATHON PARTICIPANTS

• Eustacia Brossart, Climate Positive Design

• Maria Gil, Expormim

• Chris Smith, KFI Studios

• Jeff Theesfeld, KFI Studios

• Amy Syverson-Shaffer, Landscape Forms

• Ana Cubillos, Marvel

• Jeremy Ianucci, Marvel

• Emily Gordon, Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects (MNLA)

• Johanna Phelps, MNLA

• Devika Tandon, Perkins&Will

• Jason Shinoda, RIOS

• Abby Stone, RIOS

• Dan Affleck, SWA Group

• Bill Hynes, SWA Group

• Kristin Adams, Tuuci

• Tammy Bonner, Tuuci

• Mausi McDaniel, Tuuci

• David Schutte, Tuuci

Explore the METROPOLIS Outdoor Amenities Resource

3 Sustainability News Updates for Q1 2024

These three developments from the past few months are critical knowledge for anyone interested in sustainable architecture and interior design.

By Avinash Rajagopal

01 Embodied Carbon

New Code Says Buildings in California Must Reduce Embodied Carbon Emissions

LAST AUGUST, as a direct result of advocacy efforts by architects and building industry experts, California became the first state in the United States to mandate reductions in embodied carbon emissions as part of its building code. The updates to the California Green Building Standards Code (CALGreen) Part 11, Title 24 will be effective July 1, 2024. Any commercial building projects over 100,000 square feet and any school projects over 50,000 square feet that fall under the purview of the Division of the State Architect (DSA) that apply for building permits after July 1 will have to demonstrate reductions in embodied carbon in one of three ways:

01 Reuse at least 45 percent of an existing building’s structure and exterior. Any new construction cannot be more than double the area of the existing structure.

02 Demonstrate 10 percent reduction in embodied carbon emissions compared with a baseline design project, using a Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment.

03 Use steel, glass, mineral wool, or concrete that has 175 percent lower global warming potential than the industry average for those materials, as shown on documented EPDs.

A NUMBER OF A&D INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS WERE INVOLVED IN ADVOCATING FOR THIS LANDMARK DECARBONIZATION POLICY, INCLUDING:

MICHAEL MALINOWSKI, Applied Architecture Inc.

• IDA ANTONIOLLI CLAIR, California Department of General Services

• SIMONE BARTH, Mithun

• SUYAMA BODHINAYAKE, BAUER Architects

• WEBLY BOWLES, New Buildings Institute

• HAFSA BURT, hb+a Architects

NICKI DENNIS STEPHENS and SARAH VASQUEZ, AIA California

• RACHELLE HABCHI, Glotman Simpson Consulting Engineers

• AVIDEH HAGHIGHI, ZGF

• MEGHAN LEWIS, Carbon Leadership Forum

• MARTIN HAMMER, Martin Hammer Architect

• BRUCE KING, BuildWell Media

• MIYA KITAHARA, StopWaste

• WILLIAM LEDDY, Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects

• LUKE LOMBARDI, Buro Happold

• AURI BUKAUSKAS and ANISH TILAK, Rocky Mountain Institute

• SCOT T MORRIS, Marisol Malibu

• SCOT T SHELL, ClimateWorks Foundation

• LARRY STRAIN, Siegel & Strain Architects

• WES SULLENS, USGBC

• TED TIFFANY, Building Decarbonization Coalition

• CHRISTOPHER URAINE, Energy Solutions AND OTHERS

02 Scope

3 Emissions

Manufacturers Doing Business with Large Clients in California, Start Working on Your Carbon Emissions

A NEW BILL SIGNED INTO LAW

by California governor Gavin Newsom in October 2023 requires all large public and private companies doing business in the state to disclose Scope 1 and 2 emissions starting in 2026, and Scope 3 emissions starting in 2027. The bill, authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and known as SB 253 or the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, applies to all companies with a total revenue of $1 billion in the prior fiscal year.

This is the first legislation to require complete reporting on Scope 3 emissions—which are a company’s “indirect emissions” and include any greenhouse gas emissions associated with the extraction and production of any purchased materials, like office furniture or building materials for their properties.

SB 253 will therefore be hugely significant for the architecture and interior design industry, since it will apply to a good portion of the Fortune 500, including coveted clients like Google, Meta, Apple, Disney, and Kaiser Permanente (many of which supported the bill). When those clients start to look at their Scope 3 emissions, they may in turn require carbon reporting from all their suppliers and vendors—which would include A&D firms as well as product manufacturers—for any products and services supplied.

In January 2024, Governor Newsom’s budget proposal for 2024–25 paused funding for SB 253, casting some uncertainty on the bill’s timeline. But the cat is out of the bag on Scope 3 emissions, and anyone with big clients in California would do well to start preparing.

03 Specification

Gensler Announces Its Product Sustainability Standards

RELEASED IN AUGUST 2023 and effective from January 2024, Gensler Product Sustainability (GPS) Standards are the firm’s first public effort to create alignment on sustainable product specification across its projects.

Applicable to projects in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Europe, the GPS defines two levels—Gensler Standard and Market Differentiator—for transparency and certification in 12 product categories. All products specified by Gensler in those categories must meet the Gensler Standard level, with products that reach the Market Differentiator level being recognized for sustainability-focused projects.

David Briefel, sustainability director, climate action and sustainability leader, and principal, and Mallory Taub, sustainability director and senior associate, were part of the team that authored the GPS after intensive internal consultation as well as conversations with manufacturers across the product categories. “We needed to work very closely at that point with our technical experts to make sure that they were comfortable with every last part of it,” Taub says, “and we needed to know that at least three manufacturers could meet our Gensler standard so as not to prevent competitive bidding.”

SOME OF THE STANDOUT REQUIREMENTS WITHIN THE GPS:

• Global warming potential limits for batt insulation, board insulation, carpet tile, gypsum board, and luxury vinyl tile

• Manufacturer take-back programs are required for acoustic ceiling tiles and panels, carpet tile, and resilient flooring and bases.

• Ingredient disclosure is required in 11 out of the 12 product categories.

• The aluminum components of glass demountable partitions must have 50 percent or more preor postconsumer recycled content, while nonstructural metal framing must have 25 percent or more pre- or postconsumer recycled content.

• Both acoustic ceiling suspension systems and non-structural metal framing must be fully recyclable.

Navigating the Sustainability Surge

New ThinkLab research suggests sustainable design is hitting its stride.

By Erica Waayenberg

More than ever, clients seek designs that prioritize health and sustainability. This growing demand is not just a trend; it’s a paradigm shift that reflects broader societal awareness of how our surroundings affect our well-being and the planet. A recent study by McKinsey & Company and NielsenIQ highlights this shift, revealing that 78 percent of U.S. consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them.

While sustainability has gradually risen in importance over the past decade, ThinkLab’s research into five specifier personas for the design industry and the ThinkLab U.S. Design Industry Benchmark Report for 2024 also suggests sustainable design is gaining momentum:

• 84 percent of contract architects and designers see the demand for healthy spaces and sustainable products significantly increasing in the next two years.

• The “sustainability-first specifier persona” has doubled since 2022.

• 17 percent of architects and designers say sustainability is a top three deciding factor for product selections, up from 8 percent in 2020.

BENEFITS OF DESIGNING FOR HOLISTIC WELL-BEING

Holistic well-being encompasses four perspectives: physical, psychological, behavioral, and intellectual. In the context of architecture and design, this means creating spaces that address all aspects of the self (physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual) and recognizing their interconnectedness and the impact of the built environment on each of these elements.

A recent study conducted by the McKinsey Health Institute, spanning 30 nations and surveying 30,000 workers, highlights the crucial link between employee job satisfaction and performance, and overall well-being. The research underscores the need for companies to rethink work environments and create spaces that foster the holistic health of their workforce.

To that end, architectural and design firms are increasingly incorporating elements to address mental well-being, such as meditation spaces and quiet zones, mothers’ and wellness rooms, biophilic design, water features, access to outdoor spaces, and ample opportunities for movement from gyms to yoga studios and corridors that double as walking tracks.

A&D’S POWERFUL INFLUENCE

In the built environment, the adoption of sustainable product selection practices is widespread, and with more than 40 times greater purchasing power than the average consumer (as shown by ThinkLab’s Benchmark Report), the architectural and design community has tremendous influence on the demand for ecofriendly building products. And while a smaller portion of the overall design community, the number of “sustainability-first specifiers” has doubled in the past two years, and more broadly, more specifiers consider sustainability a top product selection criterion (17 percent, up from 8 percent in 2020).

Designers are navigating this landscape with innovative materials, energy-efficient systems, and a commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of their projects. The mutual benefit and connected nature of sustainable and human-centered design support an integrated, holistic approach.

CATALYSTS FOR POSITIVE CHANGE

As the threads of health, wellness, and sustainability weave together, the tapestry of the future of design unfolds. While the design considerations are many, addressing physical, mental, and environmental health, the industry is up to the challenge, shaping environments that contribute to the well-being of both people and planet. M

Erica Waayenberg, LEED AP, is head of research and content at ThinkLab, the research division of SANDOW. View the ThinkLab U.S. Design Industry Benchmark Report for 2024 and ThinkLab’s 5 Specifier Personas for the Interior Design Industry research at thinklab.design, and join in to explore what’s next at thinklab.design/join-in.

84% of non-residentially focused professionals believe that the demand for healthy spaces and sustainable products is set to increase significantly over the next two years.

Home Technologies with Promise and Peril

There are three areas where rapid new developments could not only transform how we live today but also help us contribute to a regenerative future.

By Laurence Carr

Aseismic shift in architecture and interior design is underway, propelled by cutting-edge technological innovations and sophisticated analytical tools that evaluate and address a structure’s environmental impact, energy efficiency, and carbon footprint.

As a passionate advocate for regenerative interior design, I’m continually exploring groundbreaking technologies that can redefine how we craft sustainable and

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Wild Dyer e xplores

Wild Dyer

stunning homes with my design studio team. Today I want to highlight three innovations poised to revolutionize residential design:

MICROGRIDS are a game changer, offering homeowners the autonomy to produce and store renewable energy, liberating them from conventional grids and fossil fuels. Rooftop solar panels aren’t the only way to generate clean energy that powers entire lifestyles while reducing carbon footprints— some parts of the United States now offer community solar projects, and in a few years we might even see windows that can turn sunshine into electricity. This self-sufficiency could redefine how we perceive energy consumption in our homes, fostering resilience and sustainability.

BIOTECH , another frontier in design, promises transformative materials with unparalleled sustainability benefits. Picture walls constructed from mycelium, a fast-growing fungus with exceptional

carbon absorption and insulation properties. Furniture crafted from bioplastics derived from agricultural waste offers durability without environmental harm. These innovations have the potential to dramatically diminish the environmental impact of interior design materials.

SMART HOME TECHNOLOGIES

, such as those offered by industry leaders like Lutron and Savant, mark the dawn of intelligent spaces—and this intelligence can be used for purposes beyond convenience. Smart homes can optimize lighting, climate control, audio, and shades, enhancing energy efficiency and even offering backup during grid failures. Designers can seamlessly incorporate these fixtures within their platforms, creating a harmonious fusion of sustainability and cutting-edge technology.

However, while these technologies hold immense promise, they do come with challenges. Microgrid installations, for

instance, require significant up-front investment (although tax incentives and subsidies can help with that in some locations). Biomaterials are still evolving, and questions regarding their long-term durability and safety haven't been resolved. Smart home technologies raise valid data privacy and security concerns, necessitating robust safeguards for user trust.

As designers committed to sustainability, it’s our duty to embrace these innovations while acknowledging their complexities. Engaging in collaborative research, partnering with scientists, engineers, and manufacturers, and advocating for supportive policies are crucial steps. By doing so, we can pave the way for homes that not only captivate aesthetically but also contribute to a healthier planet for generations ahead. M

Laurence Carr is the founder and CEO of Laurence Carr Inc., a regenerative, multifaceted interior design firm, and the founder of Studio Laurence, a sustainable luxury home goods brand that specializes in zero-waste product design.

01 U.S. STEEL AND DUPONT COASTALUME ROOFING

U.S. Steel’s Galvalume material and DuPont’s Tedlar PVF film barrier come together in Coastalume, a maintenancefree roofing solution that is strong and self-healing, and can withstand saltwater corrosion, UV damage, cracking, and impact. Ideal for coastal buildings, it meets the most stringent code requirements and comes in a wide variety of color and finish options. ussteel.com | dupont.com

02 PELLA

IMPERVIA DURACAST WINDOWS

Launched last fall, the windows feature strong fiberglass frames tested to withstand extreme heat, subzero cold, high UV ray exposure, and coastal environments. In addition, all vent sizes and glass types are certified for wind zone 2 and large missile rating C, making the Impervia Duracast windows ideal for commercial and residential buildings where weather resistance is a priority. pella.com

03 CONSTRUCTION SPECIALTIES

STORM-RESISTANT AND EXTREME WEATHER LOUVERS

The RS-5215 and RS-5225 louvers from Construction Specialties are engineered to provide storm resistance despite having horizontal blades so that architects need not sacrifice continuous sight lines for performance. The former is suited to lower-level applications, while the latter is best for higher-level applications. For areas prone to hurricanes or typhoons, the DC-5804 Extreme Weather Louvers are Miami-Dade County–certified. c-sgroup.com

Three Building Products that Balance

Resilience and Responsibility

An estimated 40 percent of all Americans live in coastal counties today—and they are already facing increased risks, as reported by the Fifth National Climate Assessment published last November. Architects, engineers, and builders need to prioritize climate adaptation but needn’t make the false trade-off between durability and resilience on one hand and sustainable materials on the other. Here are three options to help. —METROPOLIS Editors

Pairing elegance with a pop of color

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Design & Pre-Construction Service

WholeTrees Brings Structural Round Timber to the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire

The Madison, Wisconsin–based, women-owned enterprise and B Corp aims to provide a restorative model for the commercial construction industry.

By James McCown

Designed by architects Steinberg Hart, the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire makes use of a new carbon-smart structural round timber (SRT) by Madison, Wisconsin–based timber products company WholeTrees Structures. The 24,000-square-foot museum consists of responsibly sourced mass timber with round-timber columns, joist trusses, and girder trusses used in place of conventional steel and concrete.

MASS AND CROSS-LAMINATED TIMBER

are all the rage in sustainable architecture. But generally wood building products are milled into precise blanks for use in construction. Amelia Baxter, CEO and cofounder of WholeTrees Structures, has a better idea.

“When you leave a tree unmilled and with the outer fibers intact, it is 50 percent stronger than sawed timber with the same cross-sectional properties,” says Baxter, who majored in environmental studies at the University of Chicago and founded

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GIULIA FLOU SOTTILE ELEGANZA

WholeTrees with partner architect Roald Gundersen. After initially culling trees in Gundersen’s home state of Wisconsin, they have expanded their efforts to use forests nationwide. Baxter’s overall goal is “to create prosperity between humans and forests.”

But this is not Abe Lincoln log cabin technology. “We have a sophisticated process of working with foresters on what kind of tree we will buy,” she says. “We use a center line and gauge how much fiber is around that. We don’t buy trees whose wobble is too great.”

So far, WholeTrees has focused on commercial and institutional projects instead of residential ones. There are two examples they are especially proud of: the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, by Steinberg Hart; and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Peacemaking Center in Dowagiac, Michigan, by Seven Generations Architecture and Engineering. In addition to having large trunk members for the main building support, the Eau Claire building has an elaborate system of whole tree trusses engineered in collaboration with WholeTrees.

Digital software is critical to the WholeTrees method. “We begin using 3D scans and can provide those to architects in a variety of programs, from Revit to Rhino and SketchUp,” Baxter says.

The museum is the first two-story SRT building and contains 230 Douglas-fir logs from Port Blakeley’s Carbon Forest Project, a family-owned renewable forest products company. “Working with WholeTrees and their partners is helping us deliver on a key goal of this project, to reduce the carbon footprint for construction,” says Michael McHorney, the museum's executive director. “As a result, the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire has sequestered more than 350,000 pounds of CO2 equivalent in the timber structural system.”

“Wood has the lowest carbon emissions of any material,” she continues. “That’s not to say we use only wood. We use a lot of custom steel connections. Steel is very good in compression, whole trees in tension. We combine the two to utilize the best strengths of each.” The use of whole trees earned up to nine credits in LEED v4, she adds.

Baxter is bullish on WholeTrees’ future. Having spent time in Latin America, she envisions that harvesting whole trees there could be a boon to both architecture and the local and regional economies. Her horizon is vast.

She concludes, “In addition to believing in the WholeTrees cause, I love the sensual form of trees.” M

SPACE works everywhere. And for every student. SPACE cuts clutter. Extends resources. Enhances student agency. Invites collaboration. And stores 40% more than casework. What you need. Where and when you need it. See it in motion at vsamerica.com/space

When We Design for Autism, We Design for Everyone

Magda Mostafa, autism design consultant and architecture professor at the American University in Cairo, discusses neuro-inclusive design and her installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

By Jaxson Stone

WHEN WE DESIGN FOR AUTISM, we design for everyone. For design consultant and educator Magda Mostafa, this sentiment has been at the heart of her research for over 20 years. “Architecture is such a practice of the multisensory,” she says. “But when I was working on my doctoral dissertation completely unrelated [to autism], there was absolutely nothing. There were barely enough people that you could talk to who understood what autism was.”

It was then that she decided to shift focus and dedicate her life to understanding the relationship between autism and the built environment. “I changed my focus and

The collage is a digital compilation of visual contributions to The Sensory Atlas—a global call for visual representations of autistic sensory experiences in our cities as part of A Case for Sensory Decolonisation: Autistic Escape, curated by Magda Mostafa, showcasing work with autistic voices and experiences from around the globe.

A video photocomposite capturing the sensory experiences along a path out of the Dublin City University campus in Cork, Ireland, by Stuart Neilson. The images represent the autistic perspective related to the built space, a pathway, as an overstimulated busy pathway (top) and as a quiet, less busy sensory pathway (bottom).

my research to create these experimental classrooms,” Mostafa explains, noting that it “all came together” when she published The Autism ASPECTSS Design Index in 2014 (autism.archi/aspectss).

“People have called the index ‘guidelines.’ I don’t like to call it that because I feel ‘guidelines’ is too prescriptive and I don’t think that designing for autism can ever be a guideline or a code because there is no one strategy or solution that will work for everyone,” Mostafa notes. Rather, ASPECTSS is an evidencebased framework of issues or lenses through which one can consider the built environment for both autistic and non-autistic individuals.

Mostafa considers a spectrum of flexible spaces that allow for sensory seeking, avoiding, and regulation. ASPECTSS is composed of seven criteria, or architectural notions: acoustics, spatial sequencing, escape, compartmentalization, transitions, sensory zoning, and safety. Mostafa’s team has then expanded the criteria into 18 factors, including color, lighting, furniture, materiality, wayfinding, and technology.

Since its conception, Mostafa has taken ASPECTSS into various education and workplace projects as well as exhibitions at the 2021 and 2023 Venice Biennales. In the latest iteration, A Case for Sensory

Decolonisation: Autistic Escape, Mostafa presents autism as a lens through which to think about our environments in a way that is more equitable and accessible to a larger number of people. “We use the autistic experience as expertise as opposed to problematizing autistic experience and thinking.” She says, “I don’t want quiet cities, I don’t want empty cities, but I think we just need to be more mindful about how we curate the sensory environment of our cities with the autistic experience or neurodiverse experience in mind, because it’s not just individuals on the spectrum that struggle with this.” M

A ‘Ghost River’ Flows Through Baltimore

The public art installation tells the story of 100 years of urban development—and invites us to imagine what the next century should look like.

By Diana Budds

A THIN SKY-BLUE LINE meanders

across the streets and sidewalks in Remington, a neighborhood in central Baltimore. While it looks peculiar against a backdrop of brick row houses, industrial buildings, and grassy parks, it actually traces part of the landscape that was there long before urbanization: Sumwalt Run. This creek was entombed in 40-foot-deep culverts and storm sewers over a century ago.

The blue squiggle is part of Ghost Rivers, a public art and history installation developed by the interdisciplinary designer Bruce Willen and his studio Public Mechanics. A couple of years ago, Willen, who has lived in Baltimore for over two decades, was on a walk around Remington when he heard the rushing flow of Sumwalt Run emanating from manhole covers and sewer grates. He was reminded of the city’s many underground waterways and thought the lost creek deserved to be memorialized—so after incorporating community feedback, he created a walking tour that traces a mile-and-a-half-long portion of Sumwalt Run. He etched the creek’s path on the public-right-of-way pavement directly above it and installed 12 plaques that describe its natural ecology and how it shifted from a vital resource into a nuisance that was engineered away.

But Ghost Rivers isn’t just a monument to the past: It’s also a provocation for the future. As aging sewer systems fail, cities are exploring how green infrastructure can become a more sustainable alternative. This includes decades-long projects to bring buried streams back into the open. The concept is known as daylighting, and Ghost Rivers does this metaphorically. It surfaces Sumwalt Run in the public’s mind and imagination and, crucially, brings it into the present-day context of climate change.

“That really is the first step toward thinking about what the landscape looks like in 100 years and what the next evolution of these waterways is,” Willen says. “It’s only a recent phenomenon where we humans see ourselves as separate from nature.” M

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December 2023

Zach Riddley, Global Creative Strategy Executive, Zach Disney Imagineering

Walt Disney Imagineering embodies innovation, storytelling and technical expertise to bring Disney stories, characters and worlds to life. Zach Riddley shares his unique perspectives into Imagineers’ to creative process and how they infuse innovative and immersive creative storytelling into every Disney experience.

January 2024

Lauryn Menard, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Prowl Studio

The Bay Area is a hive of innovation once again—this time to help us act on the climate crisis, repair the damage to our ecosystems, and allow nature to thrive again. Hear from Lauryn Menard of industrial allow design and research studio PROWL about the most exciting breakthroughs in materials and technologies for regenerative design.

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February 2024

Adipat Virdi, Global Immersive Specialist; Former Global Creative Product Lead, VR at Facebook (Meta)

What are the new frontiers of immersive experiences that span physical and virtual spaces? Join immersive technologies pioneer Adipat Virdi on how he is helping some of the biggest brands think about space and experience differently and touch the minds and hearts of millions worldwide.

These workshops feature notable speakers on a wide range of These topics that are sure to influence your work. They are designed for active participation from the audience, so your questions and comments are encouraged. and comments

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Finding Beauty in Climate Futures

Five recent exhibitions, books, and initiatives highlight utopian visions of design that leaves a positive impact on the environment.

By Jaxson Stone

“WHAT IF CLIMATE ADAPTATION IS BEAUTIFUL?

What if we act as if we love the future? What if we look to nature for solutions?” These are just some of the questions ecologist and climate policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson posed in her latest exhibition, Climate Futurism, hosted at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works last December. In anticipation of her forthcoming book, What if We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures (Random House, 2024), Dr. Johnson commissioned three artists to fill the galleries of the Gowanus, Brooklyn–based arts institution with optimistic visions for the future. The artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous created works inspired by Dr. Johnson’s book, exploring topics such as decolonization, Jamaican and Puerto Rican diasporas, and the potential for regenerative food systems in a utopian vision of Brooklyn.

The show hoped to bypass the gloom and doom that often accompanies visions of Earth’s future. Dr. Johnson said in a recent panel discussion at Pioneer Works: “If we can’t imagine possible climate futures, we can’t create them. This is design’s time to shine.” The following exhibitions, initiatives, and books do just that.

For the exhibition, Olalekan Jeyifous expanded on his Frozen Neighborhoods series (2020–present), in which he imagines a utopian, sustainable community in Brooklyn.

Climate Futurism marks poet Denice Frohman’s breakthrough into visual art. New neon sculptures serve as a prologue to a series of works that protest the colonialist policies that define the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

In

Our Bones (2022–23), artist Erica Deeman envisions a decolonized future that returns to Black and Indigenous belief systems and practices of tending and care for the land and sea.

TRANSFORM! DESIGNING THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

An upcoming Vitra Design Museum exhibition curated by Jochen Eisenbrand, Transform! Designing the Future of Energy explores how design can assist us in our transition to renewable energy sources while reducing our energy consumption. The show will highlight innovative products, graphic and speculative design, as well as architectural prototypes, scale models, and films made especially for the exhibition, from Bell Labs’ first photovoltaic cell to advances in turbine technology.

Spanning four thematic galleries, the themes of the show include the individual’s role within the political

tapestry of energy, the devices that shape our interactions with power, and design solutions for sustainable buildings and transportation. One gallery, titled “Future Energyscapes,” presents visionary designs from Carlo Ratti’s Hot Heart concept for Helsinki to Honglin Li and XTU Architects’ X Land proposal for turning offshore oil platforms into holiday resorts or ocean plastic waste incineration plants. Overall, the exhibition aims to challenge perceptions of what a just energy transition might look like, inviting visitors to ponder solar artist Marjan van Aubel’s query, “Why can’t energy be beautiful too?“

This rendering from 2020 shows Honglin Li and XTU Architects’ X_Land, a proposal for turning offshore oil platforms into holiday resorts or ocean plastic waste incineration plants.

CLIMATE INHERITANCE

Research practice DESIGN EARTH’s recent book Climate Inheritance (Actar, 2023) opens with a quote from Superstudio: “To salvage in order to destroy; to destroy in order to save yourself—in times of apocalypse, extremes meet, and opposites equalize.” Alongside a photomontage of a flooded Florence Duomo, DESIGN EARTH founders Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy familiarize the reader with Superstudio’s 1972 “Salvages of Italian Historic Centers,” in which the Italian radical design collective proposed a “strategic sabotage” of six iconic Italian cities, mining disaster and destruction to access other architectural possibilities. It is within this context that Ghosn and Jazairy’s book analyzes various climate risks—from rising sea levels to community displacement—by visualizing how each would affect World Heritage Sites.

Climate Inheritance is filled with evocative collages that illustrate how “paper architecture can draw out the speculative opportunities of heritage as an architectural figure of recursive thinking.” The volume also features thought-provoking essays by scholars David Gissen, Lucia Allais, Colin Sterling, and Rodney Harrison. By considering heritage sites as narratives of collective memory, Ghosn proposes, “A World Heritage site could, for the time of a story, stand for the world, which itself stands for all that is being destroyed by the changes in the climate.”

Through speculative design research, DESIGN EARTH’s recent publication Climate Inheritance portrays the vulnerabilities of World Heritage sites, weaving together compelling narratives of climate crises, extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism, with the hope to shift attention to our shared future.

FUTURE STATION PROJECT

As of 2020, there were 4,848 gas stations in New York State. The state also has a goal to reach 850,000 zero-emission vehicles by 2025. What will happen to gas stations once the state successfully transitions to all-electric cars? Architect and filmmaker Michael Glen Woods is set to find out. Funded by a grant from the Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts, Woods just completed the Future Station Project. This yearlong speculative design project reimagines urban, suburban, and rural gas stations in New York. Woods illustrates his research through a website, a short film, and nine innovative station prototypes that function as “mobility hubs, resilience hubs, and micro freight hubs” around the state while maintaining applications beyond New York. For Woods, the project not only informs the public about a just energy transition but also demonstrates the value of adaptive reuse and promotes equitable landscapes.

“Reimagining gas stations offers a unique opportunity to address long-standing inequities,” Woods says. “Individuals with limited financial resources face far greater challenges in replacing their cars with EVs and often rely heavily on public transportation or ride-sharing services. It is critical that social justice be at the center of this ongoing transformation.”

ENERGETIC: THE BOARD GAME

Developed by design nonprofit City Atlas, Energetic is a collaborative game in which four to six players work as a team to decarbonize New York City while, according to the instructions, “managing the region’s public opinion, grid stability, and money.” In the original version, the goal was to build 16 gigawatts of carbon-neutral energy by 2050. In the Green New Deal version, that goal is set for 2035. Action Cards familiarize users with the types of infrastructure, policies, research, and campaigns that can help one build a new energy system in NYC. Each player chooses a role: Activist,

Politician, Entrepreneur, Engineer, Regulator, or Journalist, with each role having a Special Ability, Superpower, and Constraint that affects play.

“Many of us are concerned about the climate crisis but don’t yet have a clear picture of what concrete options are available to meaningfully address it,” the creators write in their Educator’s Guide. “Our objective is to give players a quick grounding in what solving climate change actually means, in a physical and social sense, based on the demand for energy that can supply 8 million New Yorkers.” M

Energetic: The Board Game is a simple and fun way to illustrate and help people understand the complex intersecting issues surrounding climate change. The game is now part of class curricula at Bronx Science, Hunter College High School, and ten other high schools in New York City. It has also been used in classes at Yale, Brown, and Harvard. Here’s to playing our cards right.

Behind the Evolution of L.A.’s Mobility Landscape

A new book examines how the notoriously car-centric city is reinventing itself.

By Sam Lubell

THE NOTION THAT LOS ANGELES is slowly but surely transforming from a sprawling, car-centric city into a denser, transit-supplemented one with a far-reaching expansion of transit offerings is no longer a secret. But such increased awareness hasn’t stopped architect and editor James Sanders and global architecture firm Woods Bagot from pursuing a comprehensive examination of this new reality in Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles (Rizzoli Electa, 2023).

In the book’s introduction, Sanders and, later, journalist and curator Frances Anderton pinpoint how the region’s staples like single-family houses, unchecked growth,

and the primacy of the car have sullied the California dream with crushing congestion, acute housing crises, and waves of environmental catastrophes. Urbanist Greg Lindsay weighs in on the technological avalanche that has set the stage for a much more comprehensive paradigm than the (albeit effective) established trifecta of transit, density, and walkable streets. He is referring to an expanded paradigm that includes new mobility apps, app-based delivery, ride-sharing, bike-sharing, dockless scooters and bikes, autonomous vehicles, telecommuting, aerial flyways, smartphone-enhanced transit, etc.

But perhaps the book’s most revelatory element is Woods Bagot’s research finding

that there are 25.4 square miles of surface parking lots in the core of the L.A. metropolitan area, and that converting even a small percentage of these for much-needed uses like housing and park space would have a remarkably positive impact with little effect on the neighborhoods’ character. Another study imagines a future for gas stations after gasoline, determining that the region’s 550 gas station sites could be transformed into 20,000 new dwellings, create 43,000 new jobs, and provide 300,000 square feet of green space. Sanders himself reimagines many of the city’s beloved prewar courtyard projects—from the likes of Irving Gill, Gregory Ain, Richard Neutra, and more— for today’s age. M

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The Healthy Transformation of a Los Angeles Warehouse

Architecture firm Patterns turns a 1940s building into a senior care facility, resisting the carcentricity of the area.

By Sam Lubell

While L.A.’s San Fernando Valley contains many lovely peoplecentered residential streets, most of its commercial thoroughfares are anything but. Lined by row after row of standoffish horizontal sprawl, they’ve been designed (if you can call it that) with practicality in mind: to be seen from cars, parked in, and populated with little connection to community, humanity, or nature.

Los Angeles architects Patterns, helmed by Georgina Huljich and Marcelo Spina, set out to challenge this condition when they designed a multilevel medical and wellness facility along Victory Boulevard.

The project centers on the adaptive reuse of a 1940s bowstring-truss supermarket warehouse into two floors of space for WelbeHealth, a full-service senior care facility, along with forthcoming upper-floor wellness facilities for yoga, Pilates, physical therapy, and psychotherapy.

Despite increasing the building’s usable square footage significantly, the firm’s most important moves involved taking pieces away, or “liberating” the boxy, sealed-off design, as Spina puts it, and creating a sense of connection and community.

“We managed to do things that are more human,” adds Spina. “We kept the spirit of the original building but made it

Situated in North Hollywood, the adaptive reuse project establishes a seamless connection between the front and rear of the site by strategically slicing the existing building diagonally. This approach created a newly landscaped open-air public

plaza connecting the parking lot with public access on Victory Boulevard. The plaza greets visitors with amenities such as outdoor seating, grassy areas, bicycle parking, and an outdoor staircase suitable for seating and lunch.

Visitors enter the building at ground level through a transparent storefront, blending indoor and outdoor spaces. The mezzanine level features new medical offices with terrace access, offering a view of the open plaza. The refurbished existing sign adds a commanding vertical element to the project, imbuing it with newfound iconicity that is both integrated with and distinct from its surroundings.

better with meaningful interventions. Light comes in in surprising directions. You’re surrounded by existing things in new ways.”

The first interventions you notice are the unification of the campus via a palette of dark gray paint, the retrofit of the old facility’s signage with a more subtle corrugated tower, and an expanded outdoor plaza filled with fixed and movable seating, grassy areas, and steps for seating and events. Beyond that, the firm carved out four vertical courtyards—one on each side of the building, and all but one dug into the ground—pulling natural light into all levels and creating unique public sites lined with furnishings, concrete planters, and layers of lush greenery, all of which can be enjoyed in person or simply via views from the inside.

Inspired by (among other things) the sharp angles of the beams making up the building’s central truss, the firm “played with the mass,” slicing diagonal cuts into exterior brick walls that bring still more light and air into the building while creating a unique sense of visual tension. (An

Four interior courtyards provide doctors and patients with ample natural light and fresh air. Additionally, they offer the convenience of direct access to the open plaza from both the main street and the basement.

uneven rhythm of windows along the edge adds to this sense of off-kilter visual variety.) Above the base of the bowstring truss, the firm installed a level of podlike volumes that break down the complex’s overall scale, creating a village-like feeling that subtly alludes to the Valley’s singlefamily residential tradition. Clad in dark gray corrugated metal walls (matching the standing seam roofs here), this upper zone provides large windows and balconies, enhancing the connection to the street. These spaces hadn’t yet been leased at the time of writing, but a tour through them revealed spacious, light-filled rooms shaped by the original bow truss’s arches and energized by forests of exposed wood and steel columns and beams.

Patterns did not design WelbeHealth’s interiors, but the company, which has

facilities around California, has fit nicely into the architects’ core and shell with modern, light-filled interiors that take advantage of the project’s natural light, spacious interiors, and lovely courtyards. One hopes the firm gets a chance to redevelop the client’s adjacent building, a 1970s “Valley Brutalist” structure that thus far has only been repainted. And that local taggers stop using the building as their dramatic new palette.

Indeed, hope springs eternal in the effort to bring the midcentury Valley into the 21st century.

“It still feels familiar, but it’s not what you expect,” notes Spina. And that’s exactly the kind of approach that this dated urban/ suburban realm needs. M

Most spaces are bathed in natural light, thanks to their openings onto interior courtyards and balconies. These areas are furnished to enable visitors and staff to enjoy both the outdoor surroundings and the glazed interiors.

See page 126 for product sources and project credits

Take a Step toward Circularity with These Products

To get to a circular economy, we need to embrace incremental progress with the same enthusiasm as quantum leaps.

By Kenn Busch, Material Intelligence

Circularity is the ultimate goal for sustainable buildings. Ideally, architects should build with materials and components that become part of, or even food for, future buildings.

Major breakthroughs in biobased and biodegradable materials such as mycelium, wood lignin, and cellulose might free us from the challenges of fossil fuel–based plastics and complicated recycling processes.

and complicated processes.

out of projects, but shifting our choices away from products destined for landfills and toward those with components designed for future lives is a great start. For this survey we’ve chosen products that exemplify solid progress toward a circular future—whether that’s making use of recycled, recyclable, or renewable materials or products designed for reuse, disassembly, and repair.

But we’re not quite there there’s no magic bullet for designing

But we’re not there yet. So far, there’s no magic bullet for waste

More demand will drive more innovation. Your suppliers are listening. M

FUNDER AMERICA

KORA

TFL (thermally fused laminate) furniture and millwork panels with printed paper veneer surfaces can be finished just like wood. Unlike wood veneers, KORA offers 100 percent face-grade wood-grain designs with zero waste and still accommodates custom stain colors and finishes. Its engineered wood core utilizes waste from sawmill and other wood processes. funderamerica.com

MASAYA CO.

AP CREDENZA

Handmade in Nicaragua from sustainably harvested hardwoods from the company’s own reforestation projects, Masaya Co.’s AP Credenza is designed for the rigors of hospitality projects. To date Masaya has planted over 1,000,000 trees on over 1,200 acres of previously deforested land in Central America, and those numbers keep rising. masayacompany.com

ANDREU WORLD

IN OUT OFFICE

Designed by Alfredo Häberli, this flexible furniture system is geared toward hybrid uses in work and private spaces. FSC-certified wood worktops at different heights, recycled PET textiles, sound-absorbing geometry, and optional wheels make In Out Office a sustainable and elegantly simple solution for flexible work environments. andreuworld.com

EMECO

BROOM CHAIR IN NEW COLORS

Emeco’s Broom Chair, by Philippe Starck, is made from 75 percent waste polypropylene and 15 percent reclaimed wood that would normally be swept into the trash. Ten colors are now available: Dark Grey, Green, Natural, Orange, White, Yellow, Butter Yellow, Terracotta Orange, Sage Green, and Light Grey.

emeco.net

SIGNIFY

LEDALITE BLOOMBOX

BloomBox uses high-efficiency LED technology to provide more light using fewer fixtures. Low-glare optics and less ceiling clutter make for a more positive occupant experience, the company says, and replaceable components allow for easy repair and reuse, extending BloomBox’s functional life. signify.com

TAFISA CANADA

REWOOD

SHAW CONTRACT

BOTTLEFLOOR

A hybrid floor with a felted appearance blending advantages of both hard and soft surfaces, BottleFloor offers slip resistance and acoustic absorption, and can withstand heavy traffic and rolling loads. Every square yard of BottleFloor contains an average of 62 recycled plastic bottles, and it’s 100 percent recyclable. shawcontract.com

Most engineered wood panels in North America are made with waste from sawmills and furniture operations, but Rewood particleboard from Tafisa takes circularity one step further by incorporating 30 percent postconsumer wood fiber. This advanced wood refining process saves the equivalent of 2 million trees per year. tafisa.ca

LAMITECH

EX2 COMPACT

Compact laminates are thick carbonnegative decorative panels made from layers of kraft paper saturated with resins and pressed under heat, essentially creating wood fiber–based solid surface materials. Widely used for indoor and outdoor tabletops, worktops, and lab tables, variants are also used for exterior building cladding. lamitech.com.co

WALLPAPER FROM THE 70S VERUSO LINO

QWEL QWEL

Form meets function, quietly. Qwel acoustic ceiling and wall tiles raise aesthetics while lowering the din in workplaces and commercial spaces. Formed from PET made with 50 percent recycled water bottles, Qwel panels are 100 percent recyclable, flexible, and Clean Air Gold Certified while weighing half as much as mineral fiber panels. qweltiles.com

Veruso Lino is one of the first fully biodegradable wallpapers, consisting entirely of plant-based raw materials that require only a very limited amount of water to grow. No artificial dyes are used, so it has a warm, neutral natural hue. Partially visible plant fibers create a delicate structure. wallpaperfromthe70s.com

Good Building Blocks for a Luxurious Dark Bathroom

Spa-like restrooms continue to be popular for homes, hotels, and other commercial spaces alike, so it’s no surprise that deep, somber tones with flashes of glamour abound among the new releases at this year’s Kitchen and Bath Industry Show. The products below can help you create the moody retreat your clients want—but with responsible materials and manufacturing processes. —METROPOLIS Editors

01 INFINITY DRAIN

ADHESION

Developed in collaboration with Gensler, this linear drain is inspired by the science of adhesion, or the attraction of dissimilar materials. Pouring water on various surfaces, the design team observed the unique patterns the droplets formed as they moved and gathered, developing a drain design that is at once random and precise. Adhesion is offered as part of Infinity Drain’s patented Site Sizable and Fixed Length linear drain series in ten finishes. infinitydrain.com

02 ASI MATTE BLACK COLLECTION

Chic, versatile, durable. This collection makes a statement while also fitting right into a variety of modern bathrooms. The collection can pair seamlessly with other ASI washroom accessories and toilet partitions, whether combined with Piatto, Velare, Alpaco, or phenolic Z-style lockers. Most ASI products are made of at least 95 percent stainless steel that is fully recyclable and contains 43.5 percent postconsumer recycled content. americanspecialties.com

03 COSENTINO DEKTON ONIRIKA

In 2022, Cosentino expanded its carbon-neutral Dekton line of solid surfaces with the Onirika collection designed by Nina Magon. The eight marble-inspired patterns can be applied to countertops, walls, ceilings, and a host of other building surfaces. Somnia, shown here, is the perfect counterpart to dark woods, frosted glass, and textured metal finishes. cosentino.com

04 SHERWIN-WILLIAMS SUPERPAINT WITH AIR PURIFYING TECHNOLOGY

In addition to having a zero-VOC formula, SuperPaint’s proprietary technology helps neutralize VOC off-gassing from other surfaces like cabinets, carpet, or fabrics. It also breaks down odors, which is especially helpful in the bathroom. SuperPaint is Greenguard Gold certified and comes with an environmental product declaration (EPD). sherwin-williams.com

05 KOHLER NUMI 2.0

This advanced toilet not only boasts exceptional water efficiency, personalized cleansing, and a heated seat but also features ambient colored lighting and a built-in audio speaker system that will transform any bathroom experience. With LED lighting panels controlled by voice through built-in Amazon Alexa, this is a standout offering within Kohler’s smart home collection. kohler.com

06 GROHE SPA ALLURE FAUCET

With an astonishingly slim profile, this faucet from Grohe’s new wellness-focused Grohe Spa brand is a perfect fit for minimalist bathrooms—even in the vibrant Brushed Cool Sunrise finish. The faucet offers a unique haptic feedback, allowing precise control of the three-hole basin mixer. Grohe’s production and logistics facilities in Germany all run entirely on renewable energy, while its Thailand production plant is the most sustainable facility of its kind in Southeast Asia. grohespa.com

02

Invisible Security

Security Design is currently based on restricting access and protecting perimeters. Invisible security in contrast foresees free access.

Invisible security uses data, technology and design to secure places. Everywhere and at any point in time.

While putting security at its core, it respects public acceptance, privacy and convenience, in order to make physical spaces not only safe, but also frictionless, trustworthy, and liveable.

MOBILE SURVEILLANCE

CONSENT-BASED IDENTITY MANAGEMENT

VIRTUAL PERIMETER

BEHAVIORAL ANALYTICS

Frontiers ofTechnology

Arti cial intelligence has changed digital technology in every eld, and the building industry is no exception. On the following pages we dive into AI’s potential to transform interior design work ows, architectural concepts, the design-to-build pipeline, and landscape architecture. Plus, we spotlight four open-source technologies developed by architects, for architects.

How AI Is DesignSupercharging Software Start-ups

Architecture and design’s early forays into arti cial intelligence (AI) were mostly con ned to image generation and visualization, but in the past couple of years A&D tech insiders have blown the lid o . Below, Andrew Lane, cofounder of consultancy Digby (meetdigby.io), which partners with design and creative industry companies on business innovation, takes us behind the scenes at three revolutionary tech platforms that seek to transform design work ows. But he warns rms to stop “looking at AI only in terms of how it can evolve their design work and creative processes.” Instead, rms should also explore tools that will help them “streamline business processes across areas like marketing, operations, HR, and nance. It’s those who are looking at AI holistically as a business co-pilot who will empower their employees to build new skills, automate tedious tasks, liberate their own capacity and, as a result, raise the oor for the entire organization.”

By Andrew Lane

Baya

Data Sharing, from Design to Build

John Derkach turned a walk with a friend into a mission to change the game for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries.

A career architect with a penchant for all things tech, Derkach was frustrated with the challenges his colleagues faced in implementing simple 3D designs. After an inspiring conversation with a friend, that frustration became the catalyst for Baya, an effort to establish a seamless connection between designing and building. Not a small challenge.

Derkach and his team put their early focus on innovating on top of existing tools (Revit and Rhino) and gaining direct access to manufacturers. This connection allowed the product to ensure that users had the most accurate sustainability data, shared in real time a cross various design applications. As Baya evolved, it strategically expanded the product’s reach to include general contractors and subcontractors, aiming to bridge gaps in data sharing among stakeholders to continue to evolve workflows,

fostering the development of more sustainable and creative buildings.

What sets Baya apart is its commitment to reimagining existing processes, not just digitizing bad habits. Currently in its final weeks in beta, Baya is set to formally launch this spring with a mission to continue driving the future of architectural technology practices in the virtual space.

WHERE AI FITS IN:

AI sits within the fabric of the product as Baya leverages intelligence and machine learning to deliver instantaneous, enhanced 3D renderings, advanced search for construction products, and optimization of other labor-intensive processes. This innovative approach and implementation have garnered attention, with Baya becoming an early member of tech giant Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D experiential program.

baya3d.com

John Derkach, founder of Baya3D

Canoa Efficiency through Collaboration

Federico Negro has had a better vantage point than most to see the challenges in the world of design.

He began his career working in a firm but broke away to cofound a design-innovation and technology consultancy that was later acquired by a (then) small, early-stage start-up called WeWork. After leading that company’s global design team as it expanded to more than 1,000 employees and launched in more than 30 countries, Negro, along with some friends he’d met along the way, struck out on his own to try to solve new design challenges, with a continued focus on technology.

Canoa was born to address the biggest problem of the FF&E industry—inefficiency and waste fueled by data silos and workflow discontinuity. The team got to work answering a fundamental question: What if interior designers, furniture dealers, brands, and clients could collaborate seamlessly in one connected process? The result was their first product, Tether, an online collaborative design tool that eliminated disparate workflows and provided real-time cost analysis along with carbon emission insights.

From there Canoa launched a robust cataloging tool in 2022, establishing a data link to over 200 brands, 25,000 furniture SKUs, and hundreds of millions of product combinations. In 2023 it introduced Canvas, a 1:1-scaled second-generation design environment that allows designers to create furniture layouts, product schedules, and presentations.

WHERE AI FITS IN:

Fundamental to its design, Canoa rejects the notion that AI will eliminate designers, and looks to build intelligence as a tool. With that aim in mind, the team created Canvas AI, a “co-pilot” for interior designers that leverages computer vision and machine learning to aid in the discovery of new and novel products. As more product data is added to the platform in the form of mood boards, layouts, and product schedules, billions of product-to-product connections are generated that help the model learn and provide contextual recommendations, replacing a workflow that is currently manual, error-prone, and time-consuming. canoa.supply

Federico Negro, founder of Canoa

Hypar Automation with Intelligence

Ian Keough and Anthony Hauck have been rewriting the rules of design technology since long before the AI revolution.

Keough was the mind behind Dynamo, a wellknown BIM plug-in for Revit, while Hauck held numerous senior product roles, including at Autodesk, where he led the product team for Revit itself. After meeting at Autodesk in 2018, they joined forces to create Hypar, a design automation platform that seeks to transform the way designers and architects approach their work.

Their goal? To liberate designers from the tyranny of the dreaded blank page that’s an all-too-common struggle in existing CAD and BIM software.

Hypar started as a platform that allows for the reuse of design logic across multiple projects, saving time and fostering creativity. Over time, that vision shifted toward creating sector-specific applications for workplace and health-care space planning. By aligning with the natural workflow of design firms, Hypar aims to enhance utility and cater to specific industry needs.

Today the product makes complex, coordinated designs accessible to anyone, while still allowing designers the freedom to explore unique solutions and make efficient decisions throughout the design and construction process.

WHERE AI FITS IN:

Hypar leverages AI across multiple facets of its product. At its core, Hypar’s AI generates quantifiable 3D models that represent building components and systems that can be successfully repeated across multiple projects while still allowing designers the freedom to tailor them to unique solutions. The “text-to-BIM” workflow operates just as it sounds, allowing the creation of fully quantifiable designs in only a few keystrokes. Another tool, the Facade Creator, allows reference photographs to be quickly transformed into fully quantifiable 3D facade models, a time-saving feat currently unmatched in the industry.

hypar.io

Ian Keough, founder of Hypar

Anthony Hauck, founder of Hypar

The Landscape Architecture–AI Buffer Zone

AS PART OF HIS RESEARCH into landscape architecture and digital technology, Aidan Ackerman, landscape architecture professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, has been examining landscape design magazines and periodicals going back to the 1980s to see how they conceptualized and predicted the integration of landscape with information technology. He found that the wish list back then more or less included a system that could understand the interaction of living elements in an ecosystem, visualize and simulate it, then predict future conditions. While this system still hasn’t

How long can the idiosyncrasies of landscape architecture keep the promise and peril of arti cial intelligence at bay?

By Zach Mortice

arrived, it has more than a passing resemblance to landscape technologists’ hopes for the convergence of AI and landscape architecture today.

As such, Ackerman sees the quest to integrate AI into landscape architecture not as a revolutionary break with the past, but as a long and frustrated wrestling match to corral two disparate subjects: computational design and living, biotic matter (the key differentiator of landscape architecture from other design disciplines). Then and now, “the fundamental problem with modeling and visualization when it comes to a landscape is that we’re trying to turn

[landscapes] into objects,” he says, “but in reality, these are living systems.”

And while AI might be able to understand the relationship between a photovoltaic panel and a power grid, unpacking how a tree (responsible for shade, habitats, the nutrient cycle, phytoremediation, evapotranspiration, and more) works within a landscape is beyond its grasp.

As one of the smallest, most misunderstood design professions, stuck in the middle of the Venn diagram between much larger and more visible fields, landscape architecture is often isolated (or shielded) from disruptive technological change.

Environmental scientists and ecologists have been using machine learning much longer than landscape architects. But landscape designers can complement this work by contributing AI visualization tools to illustrate projects for broad public audiences and policy forms, says Phil Fernberg, director of digital innovation at OJB. “We are expertise siloed,” he says. “We need to partner with these folks and build something together that would have never otherwise been built.”

“Unlike other tools that are really complex to operate, like BIM software, AI is not hard for the layperson to operate,” says landscape architecture professor Aidan Ackerman. “There is no skill development needed.” Absent this baseline layer of technical skill, and eventually the strata of skills above it, design could become a purely curatorial process, selecting options presented by AI, de-skilling the workforce. Pictured: Midjourney renderings by Jeff Cutler.

Jeff Cutler, founder of Vancouver-based landscape architecture firm space2place design, created this rendering using AI image generator Midjourney.

Landscape architects sit in the midst of ecology, gardening, architecture, botany, planning, and environmental science. They’re a woolly and heterogeneous bunch that might be hyper-focused on planting patterns in neighborhood parks, the biodiversity of thousands of acres, or the stormwater capacity of concrete infrastructure. This diffusion makes them difficult for any single technological change to consume. As such, there have been very few digital tools created specifically for landscape architects.

Instead, landscape architects have been making their own tools and adapting existing ones to their needs. Anya Domlesky is the director of research at SWA Group and runs the XL Lab, where SWA landscape designer Shimin Cao and University of Southern California lecturer Xun Liu trained algorithms on Google Street View images of Houston, so that it can analyze and score streetscapes for walkability, bikeability, tree cover, greenscapes, and more. The eventual goal is for AI to generate streetscape

designs. With SWA associate Liqiu Xu, XL Lab is also using ChatGPT to devise planting pairings, generate site analysis and precedent studies, and create profiles for potential visitors to a real park site. Jeff Cutler, founder of Vancouver landscape architecture firm space2place design, has been using Autodesk Forma, which uses AI to define microclimates on project sites.

Given the complexity and dynamic nature of living matter, Zihao Zhang, landscape architecture professor at City College of New York, advocates for using AI to develop landscape design not as a discrete product but as a process, a “subscription basis” for “continuous engagement with the land,” he says. He’s interested in using AI to “co-produce” outcomes, he explains, and he feels that handing agency over to AI will allow it to solve problems in ways humans never considered. This is, of course, diametrically opposed to how AI is being applied in landscape architecture today. The adoption of image generation platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E

cheaper design, even if it’s available to a wider audience, a good thing?

Because landscape architecture is a service industry subservient to market forces, equitable solutions that prize human well-being over labor and cost expediency will have to come in the form of hard-fought regulatory controls. As such, designers must assert the need to train algorithms on human values. “It’s really up to us to say, ‘What do you optimize when you train this model?’” says Zihao Zhang, landscape architecture professor.

Pictured: Midjourney rendering by Jeff Cutler

threatens a “proliferation of the picturesque” that reinforces a vision of landscape architecture as a predominantly aesthetic practice, Zhang says.

And while these meta-collage images, with their surreal technical facility and stilted recapitulation of popular culture, are nowhere close to explaining themselves as something that could be built or installed, academics say we may be only a few years from being able to plug in material, dimensional, and programmatic constraints in AI and get something back we can actually make. Any delay beyond that will be the likely incursion of landscape architecture’s awkward marriage to digital tools. Likewise, what’s keeping us from Design Skynet is similarly rooted in the biotic world. To create buildable plans, AI will need plan and section drawings to train on, which, as often-proprietary information, exist in hard-copy paper plans, locked up in file cabinets. They’ll have to be hauled out, scanned, and uploaded. “That’s not lowhanging fruit,” says Domlesky.

As the director of digital innovation at OJB, Phil Fernberg is using whole-language text models to develop planting plans, and using parametric design engines to organize them in space. From there, the goal is to connect this design to the material supply chain and vendors. When this process is applied to residential projects, Fernberg foresees a broad consumer push in what is already the largest single segment of the landscape design industry “How do we connect a bunch of readily available data sets to advance design and help it reach more people than it ever could?” he says. “Because there’s way more people that own homes and landscapes than there are landscape architects to help them, or that they can afford.”

Automated landscape design sounds like an unimpeachable deal for small clients. For labor, there’s the eternal question of who collects the surplus that results from these new efficiencies. Is cheaper design, even if it’s available to a wider audience, a good thing?

Probably not, says Neil Leach, architecture professor at Florida International

University, who studies AI in design. “The main driver of change is going to be economics. What’s cheapest?” he says. “The professions are going to be eroded by these new technologies. Because it gets easier to do these things, the temptation is to drop fees. It’s going to reduce the amount of money coming into the profession.”

AI could collapse the landscape architecture labor market, and its system of occupational licensure with it. Of course, Leach reminds us that AI is “a tool. It has no agency. It’s the unscrupulous employers who are looking to cut costs.”

“The elephant in the room is that we live in a capitalist society,” says Zhang.

The best-case scenario for landscape architecture is that its idiosyncrasy and maladjustment give it time to join and build coalitions that can force AI in design to respond to the needs of people, not markets. “The way we receive AI is not going to fit our profession in any way,” says Ackerman. “I think that might be our advantage here.” M

Neil Leach created this rendering (left) using Midjourney V5.2.

Ian Tahmin created this rendering (right) using Midjourney. His prompt? “/ imagine a post-industrial park designed for birds.”

Four Pieces of Software by Architects, for Architects

These free, open-source technologies were developed by architecture teams to ll gaps in today’s software o erings.

By Francisco Brown

ELLIPSE

by Thornton Tomasetti

Ellipse, a cloud-based AEC data studio, facilitates project visualization and interaction. It serves as a centralized platform for all project-related information, ensuring real-time access for design and construction team members. The platform offers 3D model viewers, 2D drawings, charts, filterable images, and other data visualization widgets. Ellipse promotes vertical integration, connecting industry-tailored spaces to a common database that can evolve throughout the project’s life span—bringing together models, drawings, BIM data, and documents.''

ellipse.studio

02

KALEIDOSCOPE

by Payette

Kaleidoscope assesses the embodied carbon emissions of different types of facade assemblies from various perspectives. Architects can evaluate their facade concepts based on environmental impact categories, life span, and biogenic carbon, and receive carbon emissions data per square foot, offering a straightforward metric for facade areas. Kaleidoscope is designed to complement, not substitute, whole-building life cycle assessments (LCA) in early design stages. It serves as a reference for the approximate magnitude of early LCA decisions, allowing designers to quickly compare the embodied carbon impacts of different standard building systems and design options.

payette.com/kaleidoscope

03

LARK

by

ZGF and the University of Washington Applied Research Consortium (ARC) Lark is open-source software designed to assist designers in simulating nonvisual light, which significantly influences the human circadian system. Light exposure, even at wavelengths we cannot see, has a profound impact on sleep-wake cycles, alertness, productivity, and overall health and well-being. Every light source and its interaction with indoor materials can either support or disrupt this rhythm, so being able to quantify and visualize these interactions can help designers enhance well-being. Lark v3.0 allows customization of spectral power distributions for the sky, sun, electric lights, glazing, and finishing materials.

zgf.com

04

VARID

by

Foster + Partners and the University of London

VARID (Virtual and Augmented Reality for Inclusive Design) is a design toolset employing VR/AR technologies to enhance design teams’ awareness of users with visual impairments. Through dynamic real-time image processing, VARID replicates various vision loss symptoms, including blurring, warping, or peripheral vision loss. This game-engine plug-in, compatible with a variety of VR/AR headsets, is data-driven and can generate personalized simulations based on specific clinical test results.

fosterandpartners.com

Architects of the Threshold

New York–based MODU straddles the boundaries of buildings and sites to deliver new results on heat, shade, and microclimates.

By Laura Raskin

Photography by Seth Caplan

MODU’s Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem with a model from their Flexing Structures project, which investigates resilient carbon fiber structures that are ten times stronger and five times lighter than steel.

One of MODU’s Horizontal City maps depicts the shade available at Eastchester Gardens in the Bronx where the owner, the NYC Housing Authority, is contemplating selling the open green area to private developers. Purple lines in the drawing represent shade in the winter, while blue lines represent the same in the summer.

IN RACHELY ROTEM AND PHU HOANG’S FIRST BOOK, Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism (Hatje Cantz, 2023), the architects include a series of what they call weather drawings—seemingly abstract amalgamations of dotted, dashed, or wispy lines, Xs and Os. Each pattern represents shifting temperatures, humidity, or other environmental qualities that the architects mapped for various projects. Since they began their New York–based research and design studio MODU in 2012, Rotem and Hoang have been allowing each project’s atmosphere and ecological context to dictate their design response.

They call this approach “indoor urbanism,” which privileges the blurred boundary between what has traditionally been considered interior space and exterior space. This in-between space–straddling open and closed, artificial and natural–deserves

architects’ keen attention, especially as the planet warms. “Indoor urbanism recognizes that architecture and cities are situated on an environmental continuum, as a matter of degrees rather than absolutes,” write Hoang and Rotem in Field Guide.

How can buildings invite more of the outside in for human comfort as well as energy savings? How can streets, sidewalks,

parks, and ground floor interior spaces—which MODU calls the “public floor” and are often a city’s largest public space (New York City has 12,000 miles of them)—engage civic ownership and participation with more park benches, shade, or comfortable open-air programming?

MODU is trying to project hope through projects such as a nature conservatory in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that is a netzero-energy building that allows for semi-exterior rooms for connections to nature, or a mixed-use office and retail development in Houston with self-cooling walls. “In terms of the environment, there’s the feeling of helplessness,” says Rotem. “It can feel crippling. We are also teachers, and I feel that desperation.” Rotem is on the faculty at Columbia University and is also an associate professor of practice at Ohio State University, where Hoang is head of architecture. “The book proposes optimism that as a community you can design microclimates, with mini projects, and you can affect your 15-minute commute, and it is meaningful.”

One way that Hoang and Rotem are trying to convey this optimism is with their evocative drawings, which transmute data to evoke emotion. “When you have an emotional engagement, you have a reaction,” says Rotem. “That’s the problem with the mega issue of climate change. We’ve been warned for 50 years by scientists who are screaming at us, and we’re not able to understand the abstraction of 1.5 degrees.” Traditional architecture drawings depicting building structures or systems are limiting, adds Hoang.

In one such da ta project, Horizontal City, MODU’s team surveyed 12 neighborhoods across the five boroughs. The

MODU’s design for a nature observatory in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, includes semi-exterior elements like screened-off viewing areas, a covered viewing deck, and a roof terrace, as well as a raised walkway weaving through the tree groves.

architects were inspired by people’s instinctual movements throughout the city—that we cross to the sunny side of the street on a cold winter day or stay in the shadows of tall buildings on a hot one. “How do we draw the experience of the microclimates of the city?” asks Hoang. On Fridays the staff would scout their chosen neighborhoods and then reconvene in Chinatown for dim sum to compare notes.

The resulting maps—of a chunk of blocks in Brooklyn Heights, the Financial District, or Eastchester Gardens in the Bronx, for example—are devoid of buildings’ exterior walls and instead depict the shadows they cast, as well as shade from trees, bus stops, outdoor dining sheds, and ephemeral happenings, such as protests. Parks and open streets were also included. After their analysis, the inequalities became clear: More affluent areas had more shade, creating more physical comfort and better air quality; lower-income neighborhoods can have surface temperatures as much as 30 degrees hotter than higherincome neighborhoods. “Shade should be accessible to everyone as a public right and it often is not,” says Hoang.

Another of MODU’s drawings appears to be a kind of aerial map in which tiny pixels aggregate in both dense and sparse patches. In fact the pixels represent shade cast by recycled plastic balls suspended on the fabric mesh roof of an aluminum pavilion outside the Design Museum Holon, near Tel Aviv. The “Cloud Seeding” pavilion transformed an uninhabitably hot

For Mini Tower One, a Passive House–rated townhouse in Brooklyn, MODU added several “outdoor interior” areas at the rear of the building, such as an indoor terrace and an all-season room, as well as a roof garden. Add a high-performance building envelope and passive cooling through a roof fan, and the building now offers more usable space throughout the year.

Promenade, an office and retail building in Houston, allows people to use recessed nooks, terraces, shaded reas, and gardens as an extension of the indoors despite the hot climate.

public plaza into a site for public programming, rest, and relaxation. Mediterranean breezes kept the balls in perpetual motion, creating shade below; the open-air structure allowed daylight and air to enter freely. “What is important to us is that we are interdisciplinary but we also work within our discipline. Certainly we are always for planting more trees, but buildings need to do more. It’s buildings that contribute 40 percent of the carbon emissions in the world,” says Hoang.

One way that buildings can mediate their impact on the environment is by addressing microclimates, say Rotem and Hoang. “Microclimates are important at the building scale. Can you actually extend the seasons in spring and fall, expand the use, create more tolerance for breeze, for passive movements?” asks Rotem. “It also goes to psychology. Can you change habits, but in a curated way?” For Mini Tower One in Brooklyn, the archit ects experimented with microclimates outdoors, at the domestic scale indoors, and in between spaces.

An addition on the rear of a multifamily residential building

allowed Hoang and Rotem to play with what they call “outdoor interiors.” The terraces and other transitional spaces could be fully enclosed in extreme heat or cold conditions but are meant to extend indoor-outdoor living through more of the year with radiant outdoor heating, drainage, and a roof fan, among other strategies. This interpretation of a passive house—an airtight

envelope that, seemingly in contradiction, includes large openings—also creates a buffer zone where air is cooled or heated before entering the interior, using less energy. In Field Guide , Hoang and Rotem map the lots in Queens and Brooklyn that have additional buildable areas in rear yards with vertical opportunity: Imagine a city of Mini Towers.

The architects embedded their thinking about microclimates in the facade at Promenade, a spec office building in Houston. Along with recessed walls and vertical fins, MODU conceived of corrugated concrete tilt-up walls, testing small slabs in a kitchen oven. The resulting textured surface disperses heat more quickly, creating cooler places where the architects could include pocket gardens and benches, even though Ho uston reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit last summer.

Some of these strategies were further developed during Rotem and Hoang’s time as Rome Prize recipients in 2017; others were refined through conversations they had in 2018— during two record-breaking heat waves—with some of Japan’s most celebrated architects, such as Go Hasegawa and Fumihiko Maki, supported by a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Field Guide is loosely structured by these geographical borders. But the point, say the architects, is that “you can start to migrate solutions from one place to another.” M

Pergolas with angled fins are among Promenade's shading strategies, giving the building its visual identity.

MODU’s research into self-cooling walls found that as wind passes over walls, corrugated concrete surfaces release heat faster than flat ones, dropping the temperature by as much as 50 degrees over two hours.

PASSIVE HOUSE IS NOW A PLATFORM FOR MORE

For years the German sustainability standard had a singular focus on energy efficiency. But today architects around the world are using it as a jumping-off point to make an even bigger impact through well-being, comfort, material innovation, and social equity. Here are three projects that represent a Passive House renaissance.

Theresa Passive House in Austin, Texas

Chestnut Commons in Brooklyn, New York

Paseo Mallorca 15 in Palma, Spain

Net Zero Passive House + Net Zero

A Southern Bungalow That’s Hyper–Energy Efficient

• Forge Craft Architecture + Design

• Austin, Texas

By Lauren Jones

How do you walk the line between respecting history and renovating for modern efficiency standards?

That was the challenge Trey Farmer, an architect, and his wife, Adrienne, a designer with Studio Ferme, faced when they moved into their 1914 craftsman-style home in Austin, Texas, in 2011. “It was charming on the outside, but there was no insulation, it had single-pane windows, no subfloors, and was rattly” owing to its location near the highway, Trey Farmer says.

Their goal was a complete overhaul that would make the small, century-old home more functional and highly energy efficient in line with the Passive House standard. For help with the renovation, Farmer, an architect with Forge Craft Architecture + Design, turned to someone with experience blending old and ne w seamlessly: his former boss Hugh Jefferson Randolph. Randolph, also based in Austin, brought extensive experience designing renovations to historic homes in the Farmers’ neighborhood, the Clarksville District—the oldest surviving freedmen’s town west of the Mississippi—to bear on the project and was invaluable in striking a balance between modernization and preservation. Their finished project, dubbed Theresa Passive House, has helped set the bar for energy efficiency in the southern United States.

The plan was to take the 1,400-square-foot, single-story home and make space for three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, plus flexible loft space, which the family now uses as an office and for storage. The back screened porch, which provided a fresh-air space to escape to during the pandemic, i s “meant to be contemporary and spacious and opens to the landscape and views of downtown,” says Randolph.

When it came to the construction and design, the interconnectedness of “sustainability, resiliency, and well-being” was explored, notes Adrienne Farmer. The home’s rectangular volume, which takes its shape from the existing lot and site setbacks, has a compact floor plan that prioritizes energy efficiency, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, and responsible materials. In fact, the Farmers’ average monthly energy bill averages just $10. Theresa Passive House is only the third such home in the state and the only Phius-certified project in the South that produces more energy than it consumes.

To make the home blend in with its 100-year-old neighborhood, the look of the original large front porch was emulated, while the once-choppy layout was reworked for a new entry corridor with concealed storage, open kitchen, living, and dining room with abundant natural light. The kitchen, which takes inspiration from highly functional commercial kitchens, features an 11-foot engineered quartz island, a dramatic overhead light well, and a built-in tea bar, while the couple’s primary suite utilizes natural, nontoxic materials. Its Moroccan Tadelakt walls, Zellige tiles, and oversize soaking tub evoke a sense of tranquillity and calm.

As one of the few passive homes in the South, Theresa Passive House serves as a great example of sustainable design in a hot, humid climate. “Having lived in a Passive House now through the heat of Texas summer and several cold snaps, we’ve been impressed with how it’s performed, but the reality is that we’re still learning how to maximize its utility as these edge-case scenarios occur,” says Trey Farmer. “We wholeheartedly believe that designing to this standard should be the way forward— there are just too many health and environmental benefits not to.”

Located in Austin’s Clarksville neighborhood, Theresa Passive House blends history with modern efficiency to meet Passive House standards.

Passive House + Net Zero

Utilizing a system that stores cool energy to reduce reliance on the grid, Theresa Passive House acts as its own energy hub. Even during power outages, it generates its own electricity using photovoltaic panels from SunPower and a Tesla Powerwall.

The architects selected healthy materials and finishes throughout the project, including Benjamin Moore's ecofriendly and zero-VOC Natura paint in the living areas, Caesarstone countertops and surfaces in the kitchen, and Moroccan Tadelakt Lime Plaster from Terra Pura in the bathroom.

While the house incorporates contemporary elements and cutting-edge sustainable design, it maintains its 1914 Craftsman bungalow charm. The generous windows from Marvin open the house up to its surroundings.

Passive House + Equity

A Multifamily Community That’s Sustainable—and Affordable

• Chestnut Commons

• Brooklyn, New York

By Sam Lubell

While Passive House standards have proved effective for single-family homes, their impact can be even more pronounced in multifamily developments, providing increased health, comfort, and affordability to far more people.

Dattner Architects’ Chestnut Commons is an excellent case study. The 14-story brick and EIFS–clad building wrapped around a planted second-story terrace provides 275 deeply affordable units for formerly homeless people and low-income households in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills neighborhood. Developed and operated by the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, MHANY Management, and the Urban Builders Collaborative, it also houses a two-story community center containing a satellite community college campus, a food manufacturing incubator providing job training, a café, and a credit union.

The building’s Passive House elements, which help it substantially lower emissions and surpass NYC Energy Code requirements, include solar shading via deeply recessed windows and projecting fins, a super-insulated building envelope (incorporating foam plastic and woven insulation), high-performance windows, advanced air sealing, energy recovery ventilators (which provide fresh filtered air to apartments and common areas), and space conditioning via all-electric variable refrigerant flow units.

But beyond energy savings, these measures significantly improve air quality, alleviate noise pollution, enhance thermal comfort, and reduce tenants’ energy bills by roughly half, note the architects. While up-front costs are higher, the savings should help the developers gain a return on investment in an estimated 10 to 15 years, says John Woelfling, principal at Dattner Architects.

Woelfling adds that multifamily buildings can multiply Passive House standards’ efficiency via their inherent form factors. “You have more people per square foot than a singlefamily home, and a lot less exterior envelope,” he says. He sees affordable multifamily housing as a logical partner with Passive House strategies: “I see what we do here at Dattner as a solution

to solve or address twin problems of [the] affordable housing crisis and climate crisis.”

The firm has worked on a number of mixed-use, affordable Passive House projects, including 425 Grand Concourse and Santaella Gardens, both in the Bronx. Chestnut Commons’ particular innovation is its community center, which welcomes visitors with a double-height lobby, a central skylight, and bleacher seating. The center was not built to Passive H ouse standards, owing to cost limitations, but rests within the Passive House building’s envelope.

“It’s not just a housing project or community center or teaching kitchen or a bank. It’s got all these rolled into one,” adds associate principal and project manager Keith Engel, who points out that the program also helps activate the building’s exterior, along with its glass-dominated, porous street frontage. He adds that between this building, a new school, and Dattner’s under-construction Atlantic Chestnut affordable mixed-use project (which features 1,200 affordable units, substantial retail, and a rooftop park), the building’s immediate vicinity, which had badly deteriorated, is improving significantly. Chestnut Commons, approved in 2017, was the first to move forward under the East New York Neighborhood Plan, passed in 2016, which focuses on affordable housing preservation and development, economic development, pedestrianfriendly streets, and community resources.

One of the project’s major challenges, adds Woelfling, was the need to closely monitor construction because of the novelty of its Passive House techniques. That meant, for instance, ensuring thermal breaks in the foundation, facade, and roof, to prevent thermal transfer.

“There were times we had to make sure a very experienced contractor understood this is different than what they’ve been used to doing for the earlier part of their career,” he says. But any extra effort, he adds, has been well worth the payoff on so many levels.

“This is a design measure that I think is about equity,” he says. “We should be building these high-quality buildings for everybody.”

Located in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, the Chestnut Commons Passive House development provides 275 affordable housing units to formerly homeless and low-income households.

Equity Passive House + Equity

The 14-story mixed-use building combines residential, community, and retail facilities, creating a self-sustaining neighborhood (opposite).

A two-story community center anchors the project. Welcoming the community with its large, flexible, double-height lobby, the center boasts ample amenity spaces and work zones (this page).

Passive House + Materials

Celebrating Local Culture in a High-Performance Island Residence

• Paseo Mallorca 15

• Palma, Spain

By Matthew Marani

Palma, the capital of the Spanish island of Mallorca, has long drawn on several architectural influences, from the fine-tuned tracery and Islamic precedents of its Moorish rulers in the early medieval era to the soaring Gothic and Baroque forms of the Spanish Empire. While of disparate lineages, all of the inhabitants that call this island home have to accommodate its often-bristling heat and unrelenting sun. The Paseo Mallorca 15, designed by local architecture firm OHLAB, is located within the heart of Palma and builds on lessons new and old to deliver a project that embraces the local vernacular while meeting rigorous Passive House standards.

The nine-story residential building sits on an irregular corner site, and its construction entailed the demolition of an existing six-story building. That demolition revealed that the existing structure lacked a dividing wall with the adjacent building, which required the design team to build out a temporary external support system of two counterbalanced vertical towers and horizontal metal structures. The temporary system allowed for excavation of the foundation, which, once complete, made room for the micropiles that support the concrete slaband-beam structure above.

For the primary enclosure, the design team opted for glass fiber reinforced concrete panels that have been treated with a bush-hammered finish and are largely located in both sleeping and private areas as measures to increase privacy and reduce noise. “The panels covering this part of the facade, including the ground floor, come in three different types, which provide an even greater richness and diversity to the composition of the facade,” notes Paloma Hernaiz, OHLAB cofounder and director.

“With these panels, we were able to achieve different textures and rhythms that create a sense of unity and equilibrium between negative and positive, while also providing a changing landscape of textures throughout the day.”

Shading that enclosure, and spaces within, is a slatted secondary facade of thermally treated wood beams sourced from Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification–certified forests in northern Spain. The shading elements are located toward more public-facing elements of the interior program, such as living and dining rooms. “The carved s lats are joined together using stainless steel rods and spacers, and are finished with wax-based hydrophobic cream,” states Jaime Oliver, another OHLAB cofounder and director. “The modules are secured to approximately half-inch-thick CNC-milled aluminum plates and fastened with anchors to the perimeter of the balcony cantilevers.” The use of natural materials extends to the interior of the building, where solid sinks are made of Mallorca’s Binissalem, a type of marbled limestone, and walls and portions are composed of locally sourced ceramic bricks layered with Mallorcan lime finishes.

The project’s Passive House credentials are supported through the use of thermal insulation across the building envelope and the careful sealing of thermal bridges, as well as mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, among other me asures. Hernaiz concludes, “As a result, the client resides in a healthy environment, in a highly energy-efficient dwelling.” M

The nine-story residential building Paseo Mallorca 15 sits on a corner site in resort city and Mallorcan capital Palma.

Passive House + Materials

Shading the primary enclosure is a slatted secondary facade of thermally treated wood beams (left).

In addition to the facade, the shading elements are used as part of the interior program in living and dining rooms (opposite, top).

Natural materials like Mallorca’s Binissalem, a type of marbled limestone, and locally sourced ceramic bricks layered with Mallorcan lime finishes are used throughout the building (opposite, bottom).

Facing History Through La ndscapes

How Walter Hood proves the power of green space to tell new stories, communicate culture, and confront hard truths

By Sam Lubell

Walter Hood was the visionary behind the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, the landscape concept for the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, which opened in June 2023.

Just a few months after landscape architect Walter Hood was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, METROPOLIS editor at large Sam Lubell talked with him about his African Ancestors Memorial Garden at the new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The project, which is deeply layered with stories and history, sits on the site of Gadsden’s Wharf, the port of arrival for hundreds of thousands of enslaved A fricans.

Sam Lubell: I remember the last time we chatted you were on the tail end of winning a bunch of awards. Now you’re winning more. It’s exciting to see the chances you’ve been taking pay off. Because you never know while you’re going through the process, I’m sure.

Walter Hood: Oh, yeah, it’s like, “God, is this the right thing?” It’s nice to get to a point where we don’t worry about that anymore, right? And it takes decades to get there. But with experience and time, it comes. It comes with a little reverence, but also a little courage, you know, to just stay with your convictions.

SL: That’s a nice, nice place to be, I would imagine. Although I wo uld imagine, not less challenging, just different.

WH: More challenging, actually, because of the expectations.

SL: Let’s talk about your work at the International African American Museum. I’m particularly struck by how you’ve been able to tell a story with landscape architecture. And the fact that you’re broadening the scope to incorporate art and other innovative elements.

WH: Landscape architecture has employed narrative for a long time, but generally it’s the normative stories that get told.

The building, which hovers 13 feet above the historic site of Gadsden’s Wharf, is surrounded by low country native plants including a sweetgrass field and a curving brick wall that defines the edge.

“In design, you’re...part of this culture that is tied to a professional set of principles. And for me, that’s always been a straitjacket.”

Historically it’s been this allegorical or metaphorical aspect; it’s nature into civilization. It’s been the same age-old story, whether you’re looking at French gardens, Italian gardens, or English gardens. They [the stories] are coming from one side—the side where the privileged are actually setting these narratives out in the landscape, and then everyone becomes almost subservient to those narratives.

The thing that I’ve thought for a long time is “How do you bring in other stories?” I like using the term “storytelling” because storytelling is as old as human occupation. It doesn’t mean everything has to be true. It’s coming out of a cultural setting and of ways in which people experience each other and the environment. And that was a linchpin that gave me a kind of freedom that echoed back to my own Southern roots, which I had kind of forgotten about. People tell tales, and sometimes they’re heroic, and sometimes they’re not. In design, you’re almost taught to weed those things out and become part of this culture that is tied to a professional set of principles. And for me, that’s always been a straitjacket. How do you get out of that thing?

SL: I really like that because, yeah, any profession can make its own bubbles and make its own expectations, and it takes some guts and some skill to get out of those. Let’s talk about this particular project. Can you tell me how you were able to weave that freedom, that narrative?

WH: I was asked to lead the design process for the museum’s Ancestors Garden, which i s under the plane of the museum. My first thought was “Okay, I want to take people on a tour of the low country.” We put together a committee of about 25 or 30 people, from politicians to academics, architects, local historians—everyone who was involved in the project. And for two days, we visited different places. We went to Middleton Plantation; we went to Gullah Geechee communities in North Charleston; we went out to Sullivan’s Island; we went to Mother Emanuel Church, where the [2015] massacre had happened. It was not about design; we just went and had conversations.

Out of those experiences and conversations I was then able to create these stories. Some of them were about

Moments like the Tide Tribute (opposite), a grid of relief figures that fill with water and empty as the tide changes, and details like the screens made from local wood pieces (this page) that reference badges worn by enslaved people in Charleston, allow stories to unfold through the landscape.

“We created this kind of capacity of experience as well as a set of scattered moments in which different stories could unfold through a landscape.”

bricks; some were about this bell on the plantation that would ring every day; some were about water; some were about bodies. Just these kinds of stories based on these scenarios and concepts we discussed as a group. I would present narratives in these stories: “We saw this and we’re going to do this. We’re going to flood the entire underneath of the building. We’re going to have bodies that are going to just rise up.” What was beautiful about the process was that it was a chance to be speculative without having to decide on a design.

Some people would say, “Oh, that’s too much.” They would say, “Ah, that’s interesting.” It wasn’t “I like this scheme versus tha t.” In the final design, you actually see pieces of this narrative. We created a capacity of experience, as well as a set of scattered moments in which different stories could unfold through a landscape. They’re not directly pedagogical but they come out of an interest in the medium—one of landscape, but also of conversation.

SL: So, each one of these elements is its own story. You’re putting this palette together with your experience, but you’re also doing it with history and what the museum is trying to do in general, I would imagine.

WH: Yes. For the serpentine wall, we decided to do abstract figures coming out of this kind of block. That came out of conversations with historians who t alked about when Africans came to Gadsden’s Wharf. They were no longer African because they had landed in the Americas and were beginning this process of transformation. I didn’t want that figure of the chain—slaves and chains—which you see in a lot of places. I wanted to get people thinking about the metamorphosis that we’re still in: this metamorphosis to become Americans.

The Tide Tribute is an abstract version of the “Brookes Map” [a diagram of the Brookes slave ship’s inhumane conditions], [inspired by] a cartoon that I saw at Sullivan’s Island in this meager display about the enslaved in the back of the Civil War Museum. I took a picture of it and later I started to see the figures. We decided that the insides of the figures should be the shells that came out of the Atlantic Ocean, which [references] tabby, which is this concretized material utilized by the enslaved that you see all over [the Southeast]. There are all these layers just in the paving itself, and even in the figures. You get a dialectical reading of the landscape, and of the materials that are also part of that journey.

SL: And then there are those geometric wooden screens.

WH: Those are the badges. Charleston has a very strange history; you could actually rent out your slaves. [Editor’s Note: Metal badges were used to identify people hired out as part-time laborers by their enslavers.] Our original idea for the badges [in which metal badges representing museumgoers would be suspended from the museum’s soffit, chronicling the progress of the African diaspora today] didn’t work, so we then took the same idea and made them out of local wood pieces. The wood pieces are

COURTESY FERNANDO GUERRA

A wooden walkway leads visitors through the landscape including the Palm Grove dotted with Canary Island palms.

“My career has gone from a small stream to now a river where some of these ideas can actually permeate the public realm.”

riffing on the badges. It’s not hitting you over the head in the same way, but I wanted there to be this relationship so that people would ask, “This is interesting. What is this about?” It also goes back to African-American cultural arts, this idea of improvisation, taking something old and reshaping it into something new and modern.

SL: You’re embedding meaning and testing boundaries.

WH: If you look at a lot of African-American institutions across the United States, I think at the time, the equal justice movement was just coming on board. The most audacious thing I’ve seen is at the Lynching Memorial [The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama], where you see these things [ steel blocks memorializing lynchings] hanging, it’s very austere. That was a new

threshold for me: “Okay, it’s possible. How can I create this process to begin to push and see how far we could actually go in the imagination to tell these narratives that before, I don’t think a lot of people were comfortable with?”

We’re still uncomfortable. My career has gone from a small stream to now a river where some of these ideas can actually permeate the public realm. But for a long time, a lot of these things could not. There are projects that I’ve tried and failed. I’ve been told over and over, “Walter, we‘re not ready for that yet.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. I don’t know how many times I’ve lost projects or clients have moved on because we’re not ready for this. And even still today, there are projects where people tell me, “We’re not ready for this.” And so, the river is not rushing. The river is still trying to get around the bend. M

A presentation of the “Brookes Map” slave ship diagram, the Tide Tribute’s figures represent the men, women, and children who endured deeply inhumane transport conditions as part of the transatlantic slave trade.

Put a Park on It

The adaptive reuse of these expansive Postal Service facilities in Manhattan and Chicago includes rooftop gardens bigger than many of these cities’ more famous parks.

By Anthony Paletta

The reimagined Morgan North building has a two-acre rooftop park, the largest intensive green roof atop a commercial building in New York City.

The Rooftop Park is meticulously designed to enrich the cityscape, showcasing a winding landscape adorned with a planting scheme that mirrors the distinctive vegetation regions of New York State.

Rooftop gardens are a familiar amenity—but it’s rare to find one that’s two acres large, especially in the center of Manhattan. The largest occupiable rooftop garden in Manhattan—one the size of Gramercy Park—can now be found in Chelsea at James Wetmore’s 1933 Morgan USPS Processing and Distribution Center. The garden occupies most of the seventh-floor level in Tishman Speyer’s Morgan North, an office conversion of the USPS facility occupying the entirety of the building’s fourth and fifth floors, from the seventh to the tenth floors, and a two-story pavilion that also landed on the roof. The project was a collaboration between Shimoda Design Group and HMWhite Landscape Architects and Urban Designers.

This garden in the sky is no humble cluster of shrubs but a proper park complete with red maples, London plane, and tulip trees that are expected to reach heights and widths of 40 to 50 feet. It’s enough to make the adjacent High Line look rather squat.

How do you do that?

Structural realities shaped the plotting of this expanse. Joey Shimoda, cofounder of Shimoda Design Group, notes, “There were lots of envelopes we had to stay within as well as mechanical and pragmatic elements.” Three existing elevator bulkheads dot the roof, which could not be removed as the building was in 24-hour use by the USPS. Their plan created additional complications. Three skylights were carved through the roof to admit light to the immense floor plates below, and three new stairways and two new elevators were added (bringing the roof’s capacity to

around 500 occupants). A 22,000-squarefoot, two-story pavilion was added to house additional office space. Subtracting all this still left 68 percent of the roof as open space, more than triple the LEED requirements for a building of this size. Then the gardening could begin.

Guidance on plotting the remainder of the roof derived from what was there, what was below, and what was beyond.

In working around existing and added structures, a logical location for a piazza appeared in the center of the roof in a space now dubbed the Town Square, a large hardscape expanse ringed by two existing elevator bulkheads and three new skylights.

Morgan North’s surroundings provided vital guidance to the remainder of the site planning: The roof offers a view of different sides of Manhattan. Shimoda explains, “To the north it’s very, very tall and glassy and to the south it’s expansive and wide, and so we had an opportunity to take those design ideas and create a hierarchy of landscape going from north to south that sort of responded to the context around us.”

Stronger views come with stronger winds, however, another factor that influenced the overall plotting of the roof. HMWhite founding principal Hank White comments: “At a seventh-floor elevated rooftop, there are some pretty severe environmental conditions. You’ve got prevailing winds, particularly in winter seasons, and they are being literally funneled through 60- and 70-story Hudson Yards towers; when things get squeezed, there’s velocity. On the other end, there’s immense exposure to the sun during warm months, so what we did is create this landscape framework that was specifically designed to mitigate those extreme weather and seasonal conditions.”

Three planting typologies shift roughly along this orientation, designed to provide protection and shade at the site’s north end and then dissipate. The planting scheme shifted from an upland forest to the north (containing red cedars, junipers, and Japanese cypress and maples) to a midslope shrubland (featuring deciduous trees, understory flowering trees, and a somewhat different mix of shrubs) and ultimately

Landscape architects have crafted and organized a variety of spaces tailored for collaborative work, recreation, and quiet reflection.

to a view-preserving lowland meadow (consisting of a variety of sturdy grasses with perennial accents). The plantings were also plotted with an eye to reducing irrigation requirements, with subsurface elements for collecting rainwater.

Soil depth varies from 6 to 36 inches across the roof, with the deepest areas supporting shade and conifer trees. Those areas cluster within the interior of the site, ensuring that the parapet remains at least four feet tall and maximizing views from interior heights. The perimeter offers relaxation with a variety of fixed and movable seating areas of various sizes. These tend to be sheltered to the north and open to the south, offering useful rest for varying seasons.

The plan eschewed rigid geometries, White says: “We weren’t looking for straight lines and crispness—all of that was just the opposite—to create this loose and wild landscape character.”

The circulation system is variable, with wider primary paths of porcelain tile, other path surfaces of fieldstone pavers, and still narrower other ones of soil and decomposed granite. A number meander up and down mild slopes.

Several loosely programmatic zones have been created around the roof’s interior, with a large event lawn and smaller yoga and sunset terraces. There’s a vegetable and herb garden and a series of circular trellises to provide eventual shelter.

At the ground level, even more planning goes into the design. Wind tunnel tests were conducted for the materials used, and porcelain pavers and chairs were anchored to the ground. White says: “It does reflect the complexity of these landscape constructions that you just don’t deal with at ground level. We work with plants that we know will be, if you will, bulletproof over the course of the year.”

There’s more green yet to come, with additional terraces around the pavilion to be designed by eventual tenants.

Biophilia was the designers’ credo, with paths winding wherever possible and plantings surrounding circulation on slopes, vine-threaded green walls, and much else. White concludes, “The landscape just wraps every aspect.”

The interconnected pathways and the diverse mosaic of plant species create an oasis-like atmosphere aboveground.

to transform the lobby into a vibrant social hub

Above, left: The lobby area establishes a visual connection with the adjacent High Line spur, paying homage to its history with four large openings once used for train access.

Left: Within this expansive space, two hospitality areas take center stage: a versatile work/lounge space and an intimate lounge room reminiscent of a vintage railroad café car.

Above, right: The café car room features a captivating light installation offering color therapy, complemented by soothing music sequences playing throughout the day. Ample banquette seating and a fire pit further enhance the space, fostering conversations and connections. These elements seamlessly introduce hospitality concepts into the commercial workplace environment, aiming

The Old Chicago Post Office Meadow has wrought a remarkable transformation, converting an unused space into the largest private rooftop garden in the nation, situated atop a modern office building.

A Meadow in the Sky

Roofs on grand old buildings are going green across the country, with the Telos Group’s redevelopment of Chicago’s enormous 1921 Graham, Anderson, Probst and White Old Post Office into offices also sprouting The Meadow, designed by Hoerr Schaudt. This 3.5-acre rooftop garden, the largest in Chicago, features space for leisure as well as two pickleball courts and a basketball court.

This was another barren expanse dotted only by mechanical penthouses now turned green, in a planting scheme emphasizing diagonals. Hoerr Schaudt principal Rob Gray explains, “The grasses and the formal design of the rooftop are inspired by the deco motifs on the tall buildings surrounding the site with geometric abstractions of wheat and other grasses.”

The designers also dealt with load-bearing constraints, reinforcing the roof in a few locations to support the sporting courts and large gathering areas. This enabled a harmonious separation of types of activity, as Gray details, “organizing the space in a fashion that created separation between more active uses (areas with a higher concentration of activity and occupants) and passive uses (quieter, more nature-focused spaces).”

They were working with a relatively shallow draft, with a maximum depth of six inches of soil, limiting their plant palette to grasses, perennials, and bulbs. This might sound like a substantial constraint, yet the garden is anything but limited, with the roof featuring 41,000 plants of over 50 species. M

A vibrant tapestry of garden rooms embraces over 40,000 plants, representing more than 50 unique species. Enhancing the landscape are a year-round heated pavilion, a bar, and a quarter-mile walking path. The park also features amenities like a basketball court, pickleball courts, and designated resting areas.

the From

Mae-ling Lokko, an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, is an assistant professor at Yale’s School of Architecture and the founder of Willow Technologies, a Ghana-based company that transforms agro-waste into sustainable building materials. By carefully evaluating material life cycle design and deconstructing historical narratives and practices of extraction, Lokko’s work explores themes of “generative justice.”

Emerging in the past two decades, fungal technologies offer modern eco-manufacturing for sustainable construction. Mycelium, the root structure of fungi, can transform organic matter into resilient green building materials. Designed by Mae-ling Lokko, Gustavo Crembil, and RPI Rotch Architecture Studio, this dome is made of mycelium cylinders grown in everyday buckets.

Up Ground

Designed in collaboration between Mae-ling Lokko, Josh Draper, Demetrios Comodromos, Anna Dyson, and CASE-RPI, this wall was made with coconut, soy, corn, and mycelium panels.

Designer and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko is rethinking the fabric of the built environment by connecting the dots between agriculture, construction, and social equity.

By Malaika Byng

Mae-ling Lokko’s introduction to the potential of agro-waste came at an early age—and through a process of failure. The Ghanaian-Filipina designer and architectural scientist went to boarding school as a teenager in Ghana, where she found herself yearning for lush green gardens as a respite from the intensity of student life. But the landscape design project she initiated as part of the school’s community service program repeatedly faltered, owing to the soil quality of the reclaimed marshland.

This failure continued to gnaw at her while she was doing her BA in architectural studies at Tufts University in Boston a few years later. She got a grant to return to Ghana to rehabilitate the project, and when that failed too, the school’s vice principal suggested adding cocoa bean husks as a soil additive.

“Ghana produces tons of chocolate, and the husk is the by-product, which is typically used for soaps,” the New Haven, Connecticut–based designer explains. “So we got a truckload delivered.”

Green shoots slowly began to emerge. “It got me thinking, how can something this valuable be free?” she says.

Since then, this question and Lokko’s refusal to fear failure have seen her take on some of Ghana’s major agricultural industries—from coconut water production to moringa and rice farming—to find sustainable design solutions. “The problems of one industry can usually

only be solved when you connect them to the material lif e cycle of another sector,” says the designer, who holds a PhD and master of science in architectural science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Lokko launched Willow Technologies in 2017 to advance the research and development of agricultural by-products and biomaterials into building technologies. Its creations include insulation panels made from coconut husks—a by-product of coconut water production and the cosmetics industry in Ghana—and wall panels made with mycelium, hemp, and kenaf fibers. “I started Willow Technologies to give myself the nimbleness to work with a range of international organizations,” she says.

Along the way she has coauthored “Building Materials and the Climate: Constructing a New Future” for the 2023 United Nations Environment Program global report on how to decarbonize the built environment; used indigenous rice plants and coconut pith in a bioswale to

address flooding in an Accra, Ghana, park; and seen her material innovations exhibited around the world, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Sweden’s Nobel Prize Museum. Visitors to MoMA’s exhibition Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design (on view through July 7), for example, will encounter a wall of her geometric mycelium panels, their rhythmic pattern and texture recalling woven textiles.

MoMA senior curator Paola Antonelli had been following Lokko’s work for years before she asked her to create the only specially commissioned piece for the

This page: At Atelier Luma in Arles, France, Lokko, in collaboration with Fanny Guiol and Gustavo Crembil, exhibited mycelium cylinder blocks in a grow chamber, covered by a jute canopy.

Facing page: At New York's Museum of Modern Art, Lokko was commissioned to create Handprints, a wall made of hemp mycelium panels, kenaf mycelium panels, cotton, and wool.

“It got me thinking, how can something this valuable be free?”

“How do we design infrastructures that can allow agro-waste to be collected and processed close to where it’s produced?”

show. “Mae-ling has devised many effective and elegant ways to transform agro-waste into building materials that continue the cycle of life as opposed to interrupting it—and redistribute value,” she says. “I like her pragmatism—the fact that she is not only making compelling objects and testing new processes but also demonstrating the viability of a new model of entrepreneurship through Willow Technologies.”

One of Lokko’s goals is to drive “generative justice” through her work by developing fresh models for distributed production and collaboration. “At Willow

Technologies we ask ourselves, how do we design infrastructures that can allow agro-waste to be collected and processed close to where it’s produced?” she says. “And ho w do we bring in stakeholders who have been left out of the ecomanufacturing framework?”

Such questions were at the heart of her investigation into Ghana’s booming coconut industry. Discarded husks pile high in neighborhoods across Accra—a problem for traders and the city’s residents alike. “They can’t dump the husks in municipal waste systems because they’re too heavy, so I followed the coconut traders at night to see how they get rid of them,” she explains. She discovered that once a week they pile the husks in empty lots and burn them quickly to ensure they don’t get caught.

“I thought to myself, if we can give them the infrastructure to shred the husks each day and they can be remunerated for preprocessing them, then we could solve a huge burden for them, get a

higher-quality material [that hasn’t been contaminated on the streets], and create allies in transforming the waste in our cities,” she adds.

Lokko spent a year mapping coconut traders across Accra and prototyping a milling machine while designing new applications for the husks as high-value building materials. But she soon hit obstacles. “There are barriers to where you can place them, because you’re dealing with private land,” she says. “So I went back to the drawing board.”

The designer is now working to encourage both top-down and bottom-up collaboration in Ghana. “From a policy perspective, I’m trying to figure out how we can start integrating these machines into markets where there’s already food production, and close to businesses that have a waste problem,” she explains. Designing the technology isn’t hard, Lokko adds; the challenge is deducing “where to put the infrastructure, who owns it, and how do you ensure it will be maintained.”

Lokko’s undulating panels of thermally pressed coconut husks were exhibited as part of Grounds for Return , her first solo show at Brussels’s Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design, and Architecture in 2022.

Grounds for Return explored the cycle in which crops and dwellings sprout from the earth and can restore life to the land and its people through their growth and

multi-step process—from growing and forming the materials to drying and assembling the structure on-site (facing page). In 2016 Lokko also developed a Generative Justice Framework for Upcycling (this page). COURTESY MAE-LING LOKKO

eventual decay. The visitor’s journey began with a threshold framed by the panels that took cues from the “doors of no return” found in castles along the West African coastline, an enduring symbol of the forced transportation of enslaved people.

“My installations often reference architecture associated with extraction,” Lokko explains. In this case she means human labor. “It’s important to connect the material economy with the decolonial project because materials and the aesthetics around them are caught up in so much politics.” Elsewhere tunnels of mycelium panels recalled mines and the exploitation of the earth.

In the States, Lokko sources agrowaste and mycelium from New York–based materials company Ecovative to create architectural forms. Her wall panels for MoMA were made by milling hemp and kenaf fibers, then injecting them with mycelium to form a substrate that is packed by hand into customdesigned grow trays. It takes an average of five days for the mycelium to digest all the sugars to create a low-density but compact, off-white micro composite, which can be dried in the sun or an oven to prevent fruiting mushroom bodies. These components can then be assembled into a structure.

Lokko will be taking this work in a fresh direction this spring, developing a cotton-fed mycelium installation for

the Dakar Biennale, opening in May. But as demand for biomaterials grows, Lokko acknowledges tha t we need to tread carefully.

“If we’re reliant on one mycelium strain and the by-products of agricultural monocultures, then the paradigm hasn’t shifted in terms of production,” the architectural scientist explains. “We need to pay attention to seasonality and a range of crops, exploring ways to mix and match.” If we don’t, she adds, we risk exacerbating biodiversity loss.

These are issues she debates with her students at Yale, where she teaches topics including environmental design and material design for soil health. In late 2024, however, she is taking a sabbatical from teaching to write a book. “I’ve been trying to reconcile my work with biobased materials with my interest in the history of the t ransatlantic slave trade,” she says.

The book will connect the dots between the big super crops—sugar, rice,

corn, and wheat—and the labor systems that have surrounded them throughout history, while also exploring today’s agricultural giant, the soybean. “These are our only models for scaling biomaterials, and they offer cautionary tales,” she says. “We need to look to history to avoid the unanticipated consequences of environmental and social inequity.”

Lokko’s work lays bare both the potential and challenges of using biomaterials in the built environment. As populations swell and the construction world grows ever hungrier, we’d be wise to take heed. M

and ecological justice. The exhibition emphasizes material life cycles and how crops can sustain land and community before biodegrading and returning nutrients to the soil.

“It’s important to connect the material economy with the decolonial project because materials and the aesthetics around them are caught up in so much politics.”

Sources

Discover the people, manufacturers, and suppliers behind the projects featured in the Spring 2024 issue of METROPOLIS.

VICTORY WELLNESS CENTER

(“The Healthy Transformation of a Los Angeles Warehouse,” p. 52)

Design architect: Patterns, Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich

• Architect of record: Mutuo, Jose Herrasti

• Developer: Victory LLC

• Consultants: Nous Engineering (structural), Abrari & Associates (electrical), CDME Inc. (mechanical and plumbing), Richard Prutz (civil)

Landscaping: Tina Chee

Landscape Studio

• General contractor: Ed Roane

Construction

• Photographer: HANA Agency, Paul Vu

• Videography: HANA Agency, SCI-Arc

EXTERIORS

Cladding /facade systems: Custom

• Doors: Fleetwood

• Glazing: Fleetwood

Windows: Fleetwood

THERESA

PASSIVE HOUSE

(“Passive House Is Now a Platform for More,” p. 86)

• Design architect: Forge Craft Architecture + Design, Hugh Jefferson Randolph Architects

• Interiors: Studio Ferme

• Engineering: Positive Energy (MEP), Lester Germanio Engineers (structural)

• Graphics: Forge Craft Architecture + Design

• Landscaping: Austin Outdoor Design

• Other: Level on the Level (builder)

INTERIORS

• Accessories: Emtek (door and cabinet pulls)

• Appliances: Dacor

• Bath fittings: Studio Ore, California Faucets

• Bath surfaces: Victoria + Albert, Studio Ore, Kohler, Tadelakt

• Cabinets: Arrex Le Cucine

• Flooring: Ingrained by Nature

Kitchen surfaces: Caesarstone

• Lighting: Muuto, Cedar and Moss, Schoolhouse

• Paint: Benjamin Moore

• Ranges: Dacor, Broan

• Wall finishes: Clé Tile, Ann Sacks Tile

EXTERIORS

Cladding /facade systems: Huber, Hardie Artisan Siding

• Doors: Presidio, ProVia, Marvin, Masonite

• Insulation: Rockwool

• Lighting: Halo, Muuto, Schoolhouse

• Windows: Marvin

OUTDOORS

• Lighting: Texas Outdoor Lighting

BUILDING SYSTEMS

HVAC: Positive Energy (design/ engineering), Mitsubishi (heat pump), Panasonic (ERV), Santa Fe (dehumidifier), IQAir (filter)

• Other: Rheem (heat pump water heater), SunPower PV System, Tesla Powerwall, ChargePoint (car charger), Curb (energy monitoring), Airthings (indoor air quality monitoring), Caseta by Lutron (outlets/ smart home), AeroBarrier (air sealing)

CHESTNUT COMMONS

PASSIVE HOUSE DEVELOPMENT (“Passive House Is Now a Platform for More,” p. 90)

• Design architect: Dattner Architects

• Interiors: Dattner Architects

• Developer: MHANY Management, Urban Builders Collaborative, Cypress Hills Local Development Corp.

• Consultants: Hicks Design Group (kitchen), Bright Power (sustainability), Center for Zero Waste Design (waste management)

• Engineering: Skyline Engineering (MEPFP), Ysrael A. Seinuk (structural)

• Landscaping: Weintraub Diaz

Landscape Architecture

• Lighting: Goldstick Lighting Design

• Other: Lettire Construction (contractor)

INTERIORS

• Bath fittings: American Standard, Symmons, Moen

• Bath surfaces: HanStone

• Ceilings: Rulon, Armstrong, Acoufelt

• Flooring: Mondo, Zandur, Shaw Contract, Atlas Concorde, HF Design, AnchorFlex Furniture: Herman Miller, Bernhardt, Arper, Davis, Andreu World, Allermuir, Leland, Smith Systems

• Kitchen products: GE, Summit

• Kitchen surfaces: HanStone, Roca

• Lighting: Finelite, Pinnacle

• Paint: Benjamin Moore

• Textiles: BuzziSpace, Carnegie Wall finishes: 3Form

EXTERIORS

• Cladding /facade systems: Acme Brick, Belden Brick, Sto Corp.

• Doors: Kawneer

• Glazing: Kawneer, Velux

• Lighting: Pinnacle, WAC Lighting

• Windows: Intus

• Other: Fortina, AGS

OUTDOORS

• Furniture: Goric

• Lighting: Erco, Tegan Lighting, Sistemalux

• Other: Rainwater Hog, Streetlife

BUILDING SYSTEMS

• Conveyance: Schindler

HVAC: Mitsubishi, Swegon, Energy Wall, VTS

• Security: Avigilon

PASEO MALLORCA 15

(“Passive House Is Now a Platform for More,” p. 94)

• Design architect: OHLAB / oliver hernaiz architecture lab Interiors: OHLAB / oliver hernaiz architecture lab

• Developer: Ramis Promociones

• Consultants: Grupo Gubia (timber facade); José Manuel Busquets, Anne Vogt (energy efficiency); HIMA Estructuras (structural engineering)

• Engineering: Bartolomeu Tous

• Landscaping: Jonathan Bell

• OHLAB team: Paloma Hernaiz, Jaime Oliver, Rebeca Lavín, Robin Harloff, Loreto Angulo, Pedro Rodríguez, Silvia Morais, Mercé Solar, M. Bruna Pisciotta, Tomislav Konjevod, José Allona, Claudio Tagarelli, Eleni Oikonomaki, Agustín Verdejo y Luis Quiles

INTERIORS

• Bath fittings: Dornbracht

Bath surfaces: Contract Stone

• Bathtub: Inbani

• Ceramics: Jaume Roig

• Flooring: CONTRACT STONE (stone), New Yam Design (timber)

• Furniture: La Pecera (living room chairs), Cassina (entrance chairs), Il Giardino di Legno (entrance table), Zeitraum (kitchen stools), Odeón by Blasco (sofa), De La Espada (dining room table), Sollos (dining room chairs)

• Home appliances: Miele

• Lighting: Contain, Gordiola

• Lighting controls: Font Barcelona

• Wall finishes: UNICMALL (lime mortar)

EXTERIORS

• Cladding /facade systems: Grupo Gubia, Prehorquisa

Doors: Nord I Sapi S.L.

• Windows: Nord I Sapi S.L./Carinbisa, HALFEN

• Other: HALFEN (thermal insulation pieces)

OUTDOORS

• Furniture: Paola Lenti, Tribu

BUILDING SYSTEMS

• Elevators: Malift S.L.

Make an Impact When You Take Design Outside!

In the ever-evolving landscape of commercial design, the integration of outdoor spaces has transitioned from a luxury to an absolute necessity. Have you ever wondered how embracing outdoor environments can revolutionize your design approach? Dive into the Outdoor Amenities Resource, your go-to guide that consolidates all the essential resources. Discover how it can steer the industry towards sustainability, wellness, and equity in outdoor spaces.

Index

Learn more about the topics you’re interested in as you explore the Spring 2024 issue of METROPOLIS.

ADAPTIVE REUSE

52 The Healthy Transformation of a Los Angeles Warehouse

108 Put a Park on It

AFFORDABILITY

84 Passive House Is Now a Platform for More

AIR QUALITY

62 Good Building Blocks for a Luxurious Dark Bathroom

84 Passive House Is Now a Platform for More

BIODIVERSITY

24 How Designers and Architects Can Push for Better Outdoor Amenities

BIOPHILIA

24 How Designers and Architects Can Push for Better Outdoor Amenities

108 Put a Park on It

CIRCULARITY IN PRODUCTS

58 Take a Step toward Circularity with These Products

CLIMATE ADAPTATION AND PREPARATION

24 How Designers and Architects Can Push for Better Outdoor Amenities

34 Three Building Products that Balance Resilience and Responsibility

44 Finding Beauty in Climate Futures

72 Architects of the Threshold

EMBODIED CARBON

26 3 Sustainability News Updates for Q1 2024

28 Navigating the Sustainability Surge

ESG

28 Navigating the Sustainability Surge

HEALTHY MATERIALS

26 3 Sustainability News Updates for Q1 2024

28 Navigating the Sustainability Surge

58 Take a Step toward Circularity with These Products

62 Good Building Blocks for a Luxurious Dark Bathroom

NET ZERO AND NET POSITIVE

84 Passive House Is Now

40

30

84

30

42

62

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

66 How AI Is Supercharging Design Software Start-ups

70 The Landscape Architecture–AI Buffer Zone

BIOBASED MATERIALS

30 Home Technologies with Promise and Peril

36 WholeTrees Brings Structural Round Timber to the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire

118 From the Ground Up

CALCULATORS, SOFTWARE, AND PLUG-INS

66 How AI Is Supercharging Design Software Start-ups

74 Four Pieces of Software by Architects, for Architects

CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS

34 Three Building Products that Balance Resilience and Responsibility

36 WholeTrees Brings Structural Round Timber to the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire

DIGITAL TWINS

74 Four Pieces of Software by Architects, for

44

Design Takes Shape