Michael Maltzan - Metropolis Magazine

Michael Maltzan
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METROPOLISMAG.COM
His work for the homeless in Los Angeles
is a new paradigm for social housing.
Portrait by Dave Lauridsen
12/19/11 8:07 AM
OCCUPATION: Architect, landscape designer
AFFILIATION: Michael Maltzan Architecture
LOCATION: Los Angeles
by
Jade
Chang
“It drives me nuts when people say, ‘It’s great, you’re
doing socially conscious projects.’ As if all my other projects
are socially unconscious,” says Michael Maltzan, the
52-year-old Los Angeles architect. “It’s all of a piece for me.
The only way culture survives is if it is elastic.” Elasticity—
of form, idea, and intent—is what Maltzan strives for, but
“socially conscious” is what gets all of the attention.
We’re standing in the courtyard of his first solo project,
the still-evolving Inner City Arts (ICA) campus, a bright
spot on the gritty edge of downtown Los Angeles, where a
dedicated staff provides innovative arts education to public
school students. ICA is still a touchstone for Maltzan—
its easy grouping of skylighted stucco and concrete studios
a testament to the soundness of his design, its continued
cultural influence a testament to his ability to create
a building with “ambitions at the scale of the city.”
“ICA is really a kind of miniaturized urbanism,” says
Qingyun Ma, the dean of USC’s School of Architecture,
where Maltzan recently taught a studio class on the challenges and opportunities of designing within the urban
context of Los Angeles. “Michael has a very urban mind.”
A popular Maltzan mythology hasn’t taken shape quite
yet, but it’s easy to piece one together: A Long Island boy
born and raised in Levittown, New York, the classic postwar
suburb, hightails it out to L.A. and lands a job working for
Frank Gehry. He crosses paths with a local businessman
who happens to be the cofounder of the ICA—that leads to
a commission. And then things start to snowball. A Ph.D.
student who teaches at one of L.A.’s most exclusive private
schools, Harvard-Westlake, writes his dissertation on ICA,
which results in a project for the school. Around the same
time, a prominent art-collecting couple commissions a home,
the Hergott Shepard Residence, which ends up in MoMA’s
seminal The Un-Private House show in 1999. And then,
“ICA is a kind of miniaturized urbanism,” says
Qingyun Ma, the dean of USC’s School of
Architecture.“Michael has a very urban mind.”
Michael Maltzan stands in his office in Los Angeles’s
Silver Lake neighborhood. Behind him are models of his
three Skid Row Housing Trust projects; in front of him,
an experiment with air succulents.
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A mixed-use, single-occupancy prefab, the Star Apartments represent a step
forward for homeless housing in Los Angeles. Amenities will include a walking
track, a basketball court, and a yoga area. Counseling and support services
will all be in-house.
“Michael is of a generation that understands
architecture in strategic terms,”
Thom Mayne says.
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just five years after leaving Gehry, at the tender age of 39,
our architect lands the MoMA QNS commission.
In the decade since that heady rush, Maltzan has judiciously managed a career that meets the classic Hollywood
“one for me, one for you” formula, but instead of alternating
indies and blockbusters, the architect switches between
multimillion-dollar homes for high profile clients, institutional projects, and housing for the homeless. All of
Maltzan’s work, whether it’s intended for a mogul like
Michael Ovitz or a denizen of L.A.’s Skid Row, is marked
by an attention to fluidity, to the ways that people move
in and out of spaces.
The ICA campus is set so that there are diagonal views
throughout, and pathways offering significant views of
the street. “The corners are always cracked open,” Maltzan
says. That becomes even more significant with a development like the Carver Apartments, one of two homeless
housing projects that he has completed with the Skid Row
Housing Trust (SRHT). A third, the mixed-use, singleoccupancy STAR building, just began construction, and will
be completed this fall. With the Carver Apartments, Maltzan
has created a bold, elegant whorl of public and private
spaces that include 97 single-occupant units, a communal
kitchen, social services, and offices. Unexpected sightlines
slice through the building, which is very freeway-adjacent.
Instead of hiding the rushing cars, Maltzan makes them
a part of the Carver’s views by precisely framing the ribbon
of freeway with a long, horizontal window in the laundry
room—a move that allows drivers an equally clear view of
the inside. And that’s the intent. “Depending on where you
place things,” he says, “you can create social dynamics.”
Rather than hiding the homeless housing, Maltzan’s design
turns it into a beacon.
While we’re visiting the Carver apartments, one of the
residents, a tall man around Maltzan’s age, bounds up to him
Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture
STAR APARTMENTS
2012, Los Angeles
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Iwan Baan
“Depending on where you place things,” says
Maltzan,“you can create social dynamics.”
with his hand extended. “Hey man, hey! You’re the architect,
right? I just wanted to thank you, it’s a beautiful place,” he
says. Maltzan shakes his hand warmly, chats for a minute
or two—it’s a comfortable encounter. He’s the same with
the staff of ICA and his own office of 30 employees. In a
profession full of outsize characters, Maltzan seems almost
daringly even-keeled. When I mention this to his fellow
Angeleno, Thom Mayne, the famously combative architect
hoots, “That’s the worst thing you can say about someone!”
But then Mayne allows that Maltzan’s temperament might
turn out to the key to his success. “He’s of a generation that
understands architecture in strategic terms. When we were
young we were part of the resistance, we were interested in
autonomy. He’s much more aware of the political, cultural,
economic glue.”
It’s that awareness that has made Maltzan such an effective
force in getting projects like the Carver Apartments off the
ground. As part of his push to keep homeless housing projects visible, Maltzan and the SRHT found a site outside
of downtown’s traditional Skid Row, convinced the city to
give its blessing to L.A.’s first multifamily prefab building—
cutting the construction time and the carrying costs in
half—and then devised a construction plan that would
allow existing retail to stay open.
Maltzan’s office is working on other city-scale projects
that aim to be “socially conscious,” even without the involvement of a nonprofit organization. A mixed-use development
adjacent to SCI-Arc will be close to the MTA’s planned Red
Line station. Housing in this building ranges from starter
studios to lofts. Further afield is the Central Park at Playa
Vista, completed in mid-2010, part of a giant development
that encompasses an entire community—housing, offices,
and recreational areas—built from the ground up. Maltzan
worked on the semi-public park, which is bordered by
Hughes Aircraft and will be open continued on page 51
INNER CITY ARTS
1989, Los Angeles
Maltzan turned a former auto-body shop into an arts institution for public school
students—over 150,000 kids have learned ceramics, animation, dance, and more,
sometimes from “teaching artists” like luminaries Yo-Yo Ma and Peter Sellars.
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PLAYA VISTA PARK AND BANDSHELL
2010, Playa Vista, Los Angeles
Landscape architecture represents a new
challenge and a new playground for Maltzan’s firm.
The Playa Vista park is built on a former airfield—
the landscaping works as a “kidney” for the park,
as part of a system that filters groundwater.
SFSU MASHOUF
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
2013, San Francisco
Maltzan’s design for the university’s new performing
arts center turns the flow of patrons and performers
into a form of theater by wrapping the structure with
a glass walkway visible from the street.
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Photos, Iwan Baan; renderings,
courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture
“I love the institutional scale,” Maltzan
says.“The chance to make something
of great presence and clarity out of
extremely complex dynamics.”
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CARVER APARTMENTS
2009, Los Angeles
Designed to encourage social interaction while
still providing spaces for refuge, this 97-unit building
is part of the Skid Row Housing Trust’s effort to
make homeless housing a visible and vibrant part
of the community.
continued from page 49 primarily to residents and people
who work in the neighboring offices. “I want it to have
different uses throughout the day,” he says of the nineacre park where everything, from a bandstand to a beach
volleyball court, is surrounded by landscaped groupings
of native flora and crisscrossed with pedestrian bridges
that encourage wandering.
At the moment, Maltzan is most excited by the San Francisco State University Mashouf Performing Arts Center,
a 1,200-seat theatre that eschews traditional opera-style
seating in favor of a more democratic scheme. Set to begin
construction at the end of the year, the $146 million building
will be Maltzan’s largest to date. “I love the institutional
scale,” he says. “The chance to make something of great
presence and clarity out of extremely complex dynamics—
I’d like to continue to deal with that at a large scale.”
As he enters his fifties—the age at which architects
generally hit their stride, uniting ambition, skill, and actual
commissions—Maltzan is increasingly being given the
opportunity to do so. He doesn’t take the responsibility
lightly. “Architecture has, as a fundamental element, an
ambition to say something about culture, about the time
we live in, and about the future. It has the ability to speak
very loudly about what our responsibilities are.”
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Tim Duggan
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METROPOLISMAG.COM/POV Read Q & As with Tim Duggan and Tom Darden.
He is helping revive New Orleans through
ambitious experiments in landscape design.
Portrait by Cedric Angeles
12/19/11 8:05 AM
by
OCCUPATION: Landscape architect
AFFILIATION: Make It Right
LOCATION: New Orleans
issues, and the emphatic personality of the man made
a larger, more expansive role almost preordained. “Tim is
tenacious,” says Duggan’s mentor and former boss, Bob
Berkebile, one of the fathers of the green building movement
and a founding partner of BNIM. “He sees the links and
acts on them. I would clone him if I knew how.”
Duggan’s route to Make It Right ran directly through his
mentor. While working for BNIM in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, he designed an “eco-playground” for the
tornado-stricken town of Greensburg, Kansas. That effort
was featured on a special segment of CBS’s The Early Show;
producers there were so pleased with the resulting story that
they asked about building a similar playground in an urban
setting. Through Berkebile, BNIM was already advising Pitt
in New Orleans, as well as designing one of the first Make It
Right houses. Once he arrived on-site in 2008, Duggan, the
son of a concrete contractor, quickly became indispensible,
especially in the chaotic early weeks of the project. “We built
the first solar-powered eco-playground in North America,
while they were constructing the first six houses,” Duggan
says. “So we’d be building the playground continued on page 67
SUSTAINABLE STORM WATER KIT-OF-PARTS APPROACH
Make It Right
of replicable stategies that are employed alongside conventional methods.
“New Orleans will always continue to require engineered drainage systems
and pumps,” the city planning commission wrote in its master-plan report.
“However, stormwater engineering increasingly is adapting the lessons
of natural systems to controlling and filtering runoff.”
typical roadway
roadwaysurface
surface
Typical
Street-sideraingarden
rain garden
streetside
with curb
with
curbbreak
breakand
&
native plant
native
plantmaterials
materials
10’ 6”
5’
Courtesy Make It Right Foundation
perviousconcrete
concrete
Pervious
sidewalk
sidewalk
In 2010, the Make It Right Foundation produced an important manual for New
Orleans city officials, building professionals, neighborhood groups, and citizens.
It introduced a storm-water management “kit-of-parts” approach that consists
Pervious
perviousconcrete
concrete
sidewalk
sidewalk
Tim Duggan stands in the middle of North Prieur Street,
in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. Although it certainly
doesn’t look like it to the untrained eye, Duggan is here to
demonstrate a Make It Right initiative every bit as radical
as the Brad Pitt–sponsored starchitect houses dotting the
landscape. This experimental street—built in collaboration with the city’s Department of Public Works and the
University of New Orleans—dead-ends at the foot of the
Industrial Canal levee, site of the infamous breach that
inundated the neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina.
Duggan, a bearded landscape architect built like the high
school baseball catcher he once was, uncaps a water bottle,
extends an arm, and pours. “The city spends almost fifty
million dollars a year on electricity to pump excess storm
water over the levees,” he says. “But the pervious concrete
you see here is still forbidden in the city of New Orleans.”
He lets that sink in, literally, as the water quickly becomes
a moist blotch on the pavement. “Everything we’ve done,
we’ve had to get a variance for.”
His official title at Make It Right is “landscape architect,”
but the unique nature of the project, the complicated planning
Street-sideraingarden
rain garden
streetside
with curb
with
curbbreak
breakand
&
native plant
native
plantmaterials
materials
The landscape architect
Tim Duggan, at the Make
It Right eco-playground
that he helped build.
Martin C.
Pedersen
One-Way Local Street
The sustainable landscape features include
pervious concrete sidewalks, native ground cover,
A
and pervious concrete parking shoulders.
5’
10’ 6”
12’
A
44’ 2”
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KIT OF PARTS
Rain Gardens
Bioswales
Rain gardens are depressions constructed within
the landscape that are built to capture and detain
storm-water runoff. These areas are intended
to hold rainwater for no more than 48 hours
after precipitation.
Vegetated swales, or bioswales, are similar to
rain gardens, but they are linear features intended
to convey storm water toward a detention zone,
street, or drain. They encourage infiltration into
the water table.
Native Plantings
Pervious Pavement
Native plant selections are flood and drought tolerant,
require less maintenance once established, and are
naturally resistant to disease and pests. They act as
living cisterns. Mature trees are capable of absorbing
thousand of gallons of storm water after a single
rain event.
Typical concrete or asphalt roadways and driveways
are impervious surfaces that shed storm water as
runoff. Pervious solutions, such as pervious concrete,
nonrigid pavers, and open-cell pavers, help reduce
runoff by allowing storm water to be absorbed into
the ground.
Rainwater Collection
Naturalized Detention and Retention
Rainwater collection strategies are an imporant part
of storm-water management, as they provide a means
to reduce runoff, allow for potential reuse, and can
take a variety of forms, depending on site-specific
opportunities and constraints.
Detention ponds are large, constructed depressions
intended as catchments for large volumes of stormwater runoff. These ponds have an outlet to permit
water to flow, at a reduced rate, into engineered
storm-water systems. Retention ponds, on the other
hand, are usually disconnected from such systems.
6’
7’
8’
37’ 10”
23’
8’
Pervious concrete sidewalk
Street-side rain garden or
bioswale with curb break and
native plant materials
Typical roadway surface
Typical roadway surface
23’
7’
10’
Top portrait, David Eber/Lower 9th Ward CSED; bottom portrait,
Cedric Angeles; others courtesy Make It Right Foundation
4’
Street-side rain garden or
bioswale with curb break and
native plant materials
Pervious concrete sidewalk
The sustainable landscape features include pervious
concrete sidewalks; street-side rain gardens within
traffic-calming bump-outs; and curb breaks that
facilitate drainage into the rain gardens.
Neutral ground
Duggan’s report on storm-water management—a huge issue for the city,
which gets nearly 70 inches of rain a year—is think-tank worthy in its
breadth, and it makes a compelling economic argument for change.
Major Street With Neutral Ground
136’ 2”
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continued from page 65 with pervious concrete, solar panels,
wetlands, and a rain garden, then I’d hop in the Bobcat and
drive to the other side of the development and help them
grade a house site for landscape installation.” It wasn’t too
long before Berkebile received a call from a Make It Right
official asking, “How would you feel if we borrowed Tim
for a while?”
Duggan’s work—which, he stresses, is “highly collaborative;
I don’t do it alone”—operates on three interconnected scales:
the neighborhood (Make It Right), the community (the Lower
Ninth), and the city. “The first time I attended a community
meeting, someone asked, ‘Tim, how is Make It Right not
colonizing our neighborhood?’” he says. “That was the very
first question I was asked as an employee. It caught me a little
off guard.” That question—and those raw wounds—were the
impetus behind the Community Beyond Housing project,
which pulled together a long and impressive list of collaborators, including the landscape architects Walter Hood and
Elizabeth Mossop, to create a series of community gardens
throughout the Lower Ninth. “Tim really spearheaded that
effort and it’s ongoing,” says Tom Darden, Make It Right’s
executive director. “The gardens we install are fully maintained by the community and the homeowners.”
Duggan realized early on that he would need some buy-in
from the city of New Orleans to accomplish his goals—or,
at the very least, a slew of variances, since continued on page 83
Duggan, a native of
Kansas City, Missouri,
and a graduate of
Kansas State University,
rides his bicycle through
the burgeoning Make It
Right development.
Ward “Mack” His Lower Ninth Ward Village
McClendon is a linchpin of the community.
Ward McClendon’s plan for the building—even before Katrina—involved antique cars. Prior
to the storm, he had owned 14 of them, “and they made me feel good,” he says. But the cars,
like so much else in the Lower Ninth Ward, were gone. “I was just trying to find something
to pick up my spirits,” McClendon says. “I was always fascinated with old cars. It would be
nice to tinker with them again. That was my intention when I got the building.”
The building in question—a big Quonset hut–like structure, located on a largely residential
block—had intrigued him since he was a boy growing up in the neighborhood. At one point,
it was home to a boat-propeller manufacturer; later, it was a beauty school. Pre-Katrina,
McClendon, a former telephone company employee with a bad back and a modest monthly
disability check, looked into buying the building, but couldn’t afford it. Like a lot of the
Lower Ninth, it was abandoned after the hurricane, and suddenly, he could. He bought it
in August 2007.
“It was never my intention to have a community center,” McClendon says. “That was
nowhere on my radar. But I’d been down to town hall meetings and I knew how bad the
community was suffering. So at a meeting I got up and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this building
over here. If you guys want to take a look at it and try to make it a community center, then
we’ll have a place for everyone to gather.’ I didn’t think anyone would come out, and I was
shocked when just about the whole community showed up. But I’m stubborn. I had a little
backup plan. I had some cards made basically asking, ‘Are you willing to donate money?
Are you willing to donate time?’ I figured they wouldn’t bother filling out a card. Almost
every one of them did.”
And so the Lower Ninth Ward Village was born. It is very much an ad hoc organization,
staffed by volunteers and pretty much anyone else who walks in the door. “The building is
like magic,” McClendon says. After buying it, he says, “I was in there gutting it out by myself,
and a busload of volunteers just showed up and asked, could they help.” Indeed, the place
feels special. Under a vaulted ceiling, there’s room enough for a lending library, and a big
expanse of open floor that's perfect for meetings and oversize art projects. Banners from
schools, colleges (architecture schools are well represented), and volunteer organizations
hang from the rafters, as in a high school gym. The building also has a media room stocked
with donated computers, and plans for a small gym. Out back, Tim Duggan and the folks
at Make It Right have installed a community garden and a performance stage.
The Village has become a beacon for both the neighborhood and visitors. “We know
for sure that over 50,000 people have come through here and volunteered throughout
New Orleans,” McClendon says. Last August, around the anniversary of Katrina, he hosted
an emotional reunion for neighborhood residents exiled by the storm. Funded by small
donations, the Village is a challenge for McClendon—“Mack” to just about everybody—
but one he accepts. “You can go through your life and not find your purpose,” he says.
“I’ve been able to find mine by embracing this project.” —M.P.
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cool by
TIM DUGGAN
continued from page 67
de-
much of what he proposed (like pervious concrete) was, strictly speaking,
illegal. There were entrenched cultural biases as well. “When I first got
here, I was fluent in the language of rain gardens and bioswales,” Duggan
says. “I’d walk through the streets and point out natural bioswales, and I
was quickly told that those were in fact ditches, and that ditches were in
neighborhoods for poor folks in New Orleans, whereas curved gutters
were for the affluent.”
“When I first got here, I’d walk through the streets
and point out natural bioswales,” Duggan says. “I was
quickly told that those were ditches, and that ditches
were in neighborhoods for poor folks in New Orleans,
whereas curved gutters were for the affluent.”
But Duggan is nothing if not politically adroit. He has given dozens of
demonstrations to skeptical city officials. In 2010, he collaborated with
design colleagues at Make It Right to create a remarkable document for
the Department of Public Works that laid out a new vision for stormwater management—a huge issue, since the city gets nearly 70 inches of
rain a year and spends millions of dollars pumping it out. “And because
the whole city is impervious, it does not recharge any of its groundwater,” Duggan says (referring to the process whereby surface water filters
down to groundwater). As a result, the city is sinking at a rate of about
an inch a year. The presentation, “Sustainable Stormwater: A Kit of Parts
Approach,” illustrated a set of best practices, with examples from Make
It Right, and then applied them to specific street types common to New
Orleans. Though just 24 pages, the corresponding report is comprehensive and think-tank worthy in its breadth, and it makes a compelling
economic argument for change.
Dealing with city politics, however, can be frustrating. “I call it the
bureaucratic wheel of impediment,” Duggan says. Still, it’s clear he does
have people’s attention; the North Prieur Street experiment is a case
in point. “We did a hydrology model that showed that our street project,
if they let us do it, would capture 375,000 gallons of water every time
in rained, just for that little 400-foot stretch of road,” he says. “The
official from Public Works said, ‘Are you sure about that?’ And I said,
‘Here’s the model, here’s the seal from the engineer.’”
The potential cost savings prompted the city to embark on an ambitious experiment. They divided the street into eight sections, each
with a slightly different mix of pervious concrete and structural reinforcement, and then tested them for durability and water retention.
“Our understanding is that the initial results were strong,” Darden says.
“These could be viable replacement options for other streets.”
These types of experiments have become commonplace at Make
It Right, and they might, in the end, be the project’s most lasting legacy.
“I think the ultimate goal of Make It Right is to complete our initial
commitment and build 150 homes,” says Duggan, who, in addition to
his continuing work in New Orleans, recently started his own firm,
Phronesis Design. “But its secondary goal is using innovation in new
ways that can lead to replication.” /
sign
January 2012
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Courtesy the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
Mirko Zardini
By provoking and critiquing the profession, he sets
a new standard for architectural exhibitions.
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METROPOLISMAG.COM/MULTIMEDIA View a slide show of Mirko Zardini’s exhibitions.
12/20/11 7:50 AM
OCCUPATION: Curator, architect, editor
AFFILIATION: Canadian Centre for Architecture
LOCATION: Montreal, Quebec
Zardini is the director
and chief curator
of the Canadian
Centre for Architecture, in Montreal.
Curated architectural exhibitions are typically
monograph-based shows, highlighting the work of a star
architect with framed sketches and drawings that are hung
like works of art. For the past seven years, Mirko Zardini,
the director and chief curator of Montreal’s Canadian Centre
for Architecture (CCA), has been quietly and methodically
subverting that staid and formulaic tradition. “I feel there
is a moment in which you need to redefine the discourse,
because the old paradigm and ideas are vanishing, especially in the context of how we live,” says Zardini, a trained
architect who came to the CCA in 2005, after stints as an
editor at Casabella and Lotus magazines during the 1980s
and ’90s. “We try to incorporate a thematic or general
problem, which is a way to speak about architecture without
having to do a glorified monograph.”
For the CCA’s 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas exhibition (2007–08),
the curators looked at innovations that were spurred by
the 1973 oil crisis: investigations into wind and solar technologies; research initiatives, such as the University of
Minnesota’s Underground Space Center; alternative modes
of urban life; and pioneering in the field of sustainability.
But the exhibit’s underlying theme contained a critique of the
current green movement, which Zardini feels is needed
today: “Architects are telling you their buildings are sustainable, even though the environments they place the
buildings in are not. The idea of sustainability, in reality,
is not a technical problem but it’s more a political, social,
and economic issue.”
by
K
T
a
Paul
Makovsky
Exhibitions under Zardini’s direction often have an
underlying moral argument. Sense of the City (2005–06) called
for an architecture that is more than just pretty pictures.
Actions: What You Can Do With The City (2008) demonstrated
that you can produce change in a city from the bottom up,
a message that seems especially relevant in today’s Occupy
Wall Street world.
“All of our exhibitions are an effort to investigate the gray
zone of our society, trying to make architects more conscious
of the complexity of the problem that they’re part of, instead
of pretending, every time, to be the solution, while reducing
complex social and political problems to simplicities,” Zardini
says. The CCA’s current exhibition, Imperfect Health: The
Medicalization of Architecture, explores the field’s approach
to wellness. “Architecture has never really produced a real
solution to medical issues,” Zardini notes. “It could contribute
to producing a less polluted environment but perhaps it’s an
even larger task to take care of people.” /
“We try to incorporate a thematic or general
problem, which is a way to speak about
architecture without having to do a glorified
monograph,” says the CCA’s Zardini.
SENSE OF THE CITY
2005–2006
Dedicated to the theme of urban phenomena
and human perception, this exhibition
challenged the idea of evaluating architecture and urban design based solely on
aesthetics. Instead, it encouraged a sensory
approach, through touch, smell, sound, and
sight. “It was against the last twenty years
of architecture,” Zardini says. “The point
was to not to think of architecture as a
beautiful image in a glossy publication,
but to rethink it in different ways—and
through a sensory approach, criticize this
obsession with iconic, formalist building.”
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ACTIONS: WHAT YOU CAN DO
WITH THE CITY
2008–2009
Here, the CCA presented 99 actions that
would instigate positive change in cities
around the world, using suggestions from
international architects, artists, and collectives. Examples included offering rent-free
space for short periods of time to Brussels
nonprofits; creating an online database of
edible fruit and vegetable plants in Bristol,
England; and setting up beehives on a
Toronto hotel rooftop to produce neighborhood honey. The exhibition design concept
was by Andrea Sala, with typography and
display brochures by Project Projects.
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ENVIRONMENT: APPROACHES FOR TOMORROW
2006–2007
The exhibition brought together the French landscape architect
Gilles Clemént and the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm. Clemént
raised the issue of the destruction of our environment and suggested
different ways to reintroduce biodiversity into leftover and abandoned spaces. Rahm’s Interior Weather installation (above) explored
the notion that form and function follow climate—in an enclosed,
brightly lit room, the temperature, humidity, and light conditions
were measured by sensors.
Courtesy the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
“All of our exhibitions are an effort to
investigate the gray zone of our society,
trying to make architects more conscious
of the complexity of the problem that
they’re part of, instead of pretending, every
time, to be the solution,” Zardini says.
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IMPERFECT HEALTH:
THE MEDICALIZATION OF ARCHITECTURE
2011
The show looked at the often conflicted
relationship between health and architecture.
Zardini uses the case of the Bloomberg
administration’s Active Design Guidelines
for New York City as an example. “The
guidelines promote movement, so you need
more stairs, and that’s fine.” Zardini says.
“You’ve clearly reduced the problem of
obesity to find a solution, but you didn’t
take into consideration the care of the
elderly.” He says that architects tend to
look for the perfect solution, which can
be hazardous: “Asbestos was considered
the best solution for architects to use
everywhere until it was discovered that
it was highly dangerous to our health.”
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