Deborah Gans In the third installment of our “Three Questions” series, we catch up with architect and Pratt Institute professor Deborah Gans, whose work at her eponymous Gans Studio has long addressed issues of social responsibility and environmental stewardship. RECORD spoke to Gans about various topics, including a recent event that got her thinking more about designing for social impact right at home. AS: How did you get involved in humanitarian work? Deborah Gans: I’ve always been interested in emerging social conditions and how architecture engages them. The work I do is generally more a search for new ideas of
Honest Buildings is a new social media platform that connects people to the buildings they live, work, and spend time in. The Honest Buildings website profiles more than 50,000 buildings (and counting). The founders hope that transparency and competition will accelerate demand for high-performance buildings. Imagine an online social network that’s all about buildings. Architects, contractors, and engineers can connect with future clients and subcontractors, give and receive referrals, and even get RFPs and submit bids right in the same platform. Property managers and building owners can show off their retrofit projects and rental spaces. At the same time, prospective
Image courtesy Jack DeBartolo 3 Click to view additional images. Related Links: Humanitarian Design: The New Frontier in Education Special Coverage: Building for Social Change Resources for Socially Conscious Designers Prayer Pavilion by DeBartolo Architects Every April, faculty members at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts meet with graduate architecture students to present options for a half-dozen or so international studio courses. It’s a chance for professors to “sell” their programs, but adjunct professor Jack DeBartolo 3 takes a somewhat different approach. “I spend most of my presentation trying to discourage students from coming,” says the
Five public districts get useful advice through a workshop presented by the USGBC and American Architectural Foundation in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy AAF Joanne R. Milner, the Education Partnership Coordinator and a senior advisor to Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker, works with architect Ryan Freeland of Cuningham Group. Related Links: Special Coverage: Schools of the 21st Century Sustainable Solutions: Green Schools Movement Gains Steam Robert Redford Teams Up With USGBC for Green Schools Summit SOM, Haworth Among Honorees at AAF Gala In November 2010, ten city mayors and nine school superintendants met with sustainability experts, architects, and educators at
Cynthia E. Smith Social-impact design isn't just about buildings or objects, as Cynthia E. Smith attests. Since 2009, Smith has served as the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's Curator for Socially Responsible Design, organizing exhibitions that address the burgeoning environmental, architectural, and sociological challenges brought on by earth's increasing population. RECORD caught up with Smith to find out what she thinks are the urgent issues and exciting developments in the field. AS: How did you get involved in humanitarian work? Cynthia Smith: Because I’ve been working on civil and human rights issues most of my adult life and was trained
In placing an emphasis on socially and environmentally conscious subjects, two New York museums must address the challenges of presentation. Architectural exhibitions aimed at a general audience are hard to pull off. Small-scale representations'photographs, models, drawings, and, increasingly, video'can only approximate the sense of the full-size work. Like art objects, they need to captivate the museum visitor while acknowledging the thicket of constraints'program, site, budget'that shape the form. If the projects have a socially or environmentally conscious dimension, the challenge is tougher: The display may lack the wow factor'the visual panache of extravagantly innovative or elegant architectural works and objects
Program: Currently in the proposal stage, this project was the first-prize winner of the 2011 ThyssenKrupp Elevator Architecture Award. The proposal calls for a single-story, 65,660-square-foot training facility for Istanbul's disaster responders. The plan—which is configured like a large, collapsed donut that encircles an approximately 93,600-square-foot interior park—includes spaces for fire-prevention training, earthquake exercises, nuclear disaster simulation, and first-aid training, along with a 4-D video display room and a smoke maze room. Part technical school and part museum, the center will also offer educational programs to teach students and the public about disaster preparation. A library, an exhibition hall, a
After several weeks of intensive negotiations, a deal has been reached to create the first-ever large-scale AIDS memorial in New York City, though it will be much smaller than its supporters had initially hoped.
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