One muggy afternoon this summer, on my way to JFK International Airport at the end of a reporting trip to New York, I stopped off at the campus of PS1 in Queens, a satellite of the Museum of Modern Art, to see an installation by the Brooklyn architects Interboro Partners. “Holding Pattern” was the winning entry in PS1’s 12th annual Young Architects Program (YAP), a competition that gives one firm each year the chance, on a punishingly small budget, to remake the courtyard of the museum for several weeks.
Interboro’s installation was a clear rejection of the bold, often self-congratulatory formalism of some recent YAP winners. It instead offered a wry commentary on wastefulness, ephemerality, and local context, breaking down the proverbial fourth wall that typically keeps the competition tightly sealed against any meaningful interaction with the neighborhood beyond the PS1 courtyard walls. The firm began work on its competition entry by meeting with residents and community organizations in the area immediately around the museum, including schools, a farmer’s market, a YMCA, and a senior center, asking them in particular what kinds of physical resources they most lacked.
The trees, benches, ping-pong tables, and other items those groups requested made up the physical structure for “Holding Pattern” and served as the backdrop for a number of parties and other events at PS1. From that point of view the installation was designed, like many YAP winners before it, to promote social interaction within the space of the museum courtyard. But all the items were also earmarked, at the end of the summer, to be donated to the people who’d asked for them. Each one carried a small sign, about the size of a luggage tag, indicating where it would wind up. The goal was not just to recycle the physical skeleton of the installation but to turn that recycling into a kind of strategic local outreach; the project used social ends as architectural means.
In that sense, “Holding Pattern” was clearly allied with the humanitarian design movement that has leaped to prominence in the architecture profession over the past five years or so. Also known as “the architecture of consequence” or “the architecture of engagement,” humanitarian design is a broad, fluid, catch-all category that includes disaster relief efforts, schools and housing for the poor, certain corners of green architecture, urban agriculture, and community-minded projects like “Holding Pattern.” With extreme weather and economic volatility on the rise, and with terrorism and earthquakes a constant threat, humanitarian design is most clearly of all a response to a world that seems more dangerous and anxiety-filled by the year.
As anyone who follows young architecture firms or spends much time on architecture-school reviews these days can confirm, humanitarian design, in its various guises, has eclipsed neo-modernism, bio-mimicry, and even parametricism (sorry, Patrik Schumacher!) to become the single most visible architectural concern of the moment, at least among designers younger than 40. It has gone from the geographical periphery (Samuel Mockbee’s visionary and hugely influential Rural Studio in Newbern, Ala.) to the cultural center (MoMA’s 2010 exhibition “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement”).
Outside of universities and museums, meanwhile, the spiking number of natural disasters around the world, increasingly linked with climate change, along with the deeply compromised rebuilding efforts following the 9/11 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina, have made it clear that architects need to learn a more nimble, engaged, and politically savvy approach to practice. The ongoing crisis in the American and European economies has reminded them of the essential folly of building yet more condominium towers in places like Las Vegas or Madrid. It has also given architects more time than they ever had in the boom years to think and write about their larger priorities—and to begin aiming their talents where they might have a substantial social impact.
It’s not hard to understand why the rise of humanitarian design has the feel of a sea change for the profession. The moment’s emergence comes on the heels of a half-century in which architecture found a remarkable variety of ways to detach itself from the world’s growing list of social, economic, and—perhaps most of all—environmental problems. First Modernism turned entirely corporatized, abandoning the social conscience that had once driven it. Then architecture drifted into a facile, essentially scenographic kind of Postmodernism. In the 1990s, the profession used a flirtation with deeply opaque Continental philosophy to drag its academic and high-design wings toward almost complete social and political irrelevance. And in the past 10 to 15 years, as everybody knows, it has turned a vanishingly small coterie of high-design architects into global superstars who work mostly for wealthy private and cultural clients—or for autocratic regimes from Dubai to Beijing.
On top of that, in recent years, the one part of architecture that indicated that the profession was paying attention to the rest of the world and to the planet—the ever-growing sustainability movement—hit something of a rough patch. Green architecture has moved toward a small-minded checklist mentality, many of its leaders happier promoting flawed benchmarks like LEED than spurring a larger conversation about how we build our houses and cities. Indeed, the genuinely fascinating and politically potent debates that have emerged over food policy in the past decade, driven by Michael Pollan and others, reveal by stark comparison the way the green-design movement has failed to advance.
Given that backdrop, humanitarian design arrives as a refreshing and overdue corrective. But the truth is that the movement is also floundering a bit, searching for leadership and a sharper sense of definition. Indeed, whether it even ought to be thought of as a movement—as opposed to, say, a measure of the architecture profession’s increasingly insistent conscience—remains an open question. Humanitarian design, which often sends first-world architects into third-world countries, has fought off charges of imperialism connected to work in Africa and elsewhere. Perhaps most challenging of all, humanitarian designers are also finding that their own profession is ill-equipped in many ways to deal with their growing influence.
One obvious problem is that the various figures and institutions that define architecture and make architectural careers—museums, critics, universities, and deep-pocketed clients chiefly among them—continue to see bold, aggressive form-making and innovative architectural practice as synonymous. When a design with patently different priorities comes along, they’re often unprepared to understand or properly frame it. They encounter a series of houses built for a neighborhood flooded by a tsunami, say, and expect them to have a Case Study crispness and polish, or to look as striking in a magazine spread as a London townhouse by David Adjaye.
“Holding Pattern” was a case in point. The project was impressive in the abstract. It was a smart response to the socially disconnected formalism of earlier YAP winners and a cunning concession to current economic conditions, which have left many architecture firms simply trying to survive until a real recovery takes hold.
But in built form the project, which scattered benches, daybeds, a foosball table, a bike-repair station, and other items across PS1’s spacious concrete courtyard, was both skimpy and desultory. On the day I visited, the canopy flapping overhead, described in the press materials as “elegant and taut,” was neither. The space below was almost entirely empty, making even people-watching, usually the best part of any YAP design, impossible. Frankly, as an example of built architecture—as a series of spaces to navigate and objects to sit on or touch—it was all a bit sad.
Figuring out where the project went wrong—or if it went wrong at all—strikes me as the distillation of a key dilemma now facing humanitarian design. What happens when a building or an installation is more sophisticated in social than formal terms, or works well when seen up close but looks terrible in renderings and photographs? Such projects tend to falter in an architecture culture ill-equipped to make sense of them or show them to their best advantage.
Architects trying to work at the broader scale of the city—particularly in helping to shape post-disaster rebuilding plans—find an even more daunting series of obstacles. The most obvious and difficult issue to grapple with is the way that truly civic-minded urban planning—as a profession, and as a social good that government is willing to pay for—has withered almost completely in the United States.
It would be a mistake to see the rebuilding fiascos at Ground Zero and in New Orleans as identical, or to try to understand them solely in terms of humanitarian design. But taken together they offer a painfully clear portrait of a nation that has either rejected the need for or decided it can’t afford real planning—and therefore has made the job of socially committed architects drawn to the urban scale remarkably tough. In Lower Manhattan, the bureaucrats overseeing the rebuilding process lurched from one planning extreme to the other: First they trotted out six reserved and unimaginative design studies by the New York firm Beyer Blinder Belle, only to reverse course and hastily throw together an international competition to pick a lead master planner for the site. That competition’s list of finalists was made up almost entirely of architects—and world-famous ones at that—rather than planners.
At no point did the site’s overseers manage to use the planning process to clarify the key issues and questions at the site, which would seem to be the point of the whole exercise. To begin with, was it wise to pack 10 million square feet of office space into a part of Manhattan where there was little demand for it, essentially repeating the mistakes the builders of the original World Trade Center made 40 years ago? Did it make sense to allow the site’s highly leveraged leaseholder, developer Larry Silverstein, to treat the rebuilding effort as just another deal in Manhattan, finding angles wherever he could, even as New Yorkers and the nation at large saw the site as anything but a typical patch of real estate?
As important as these questions were, they were repeatedly pushed aside during the rebuilding process, first by the dutiful blandness of the Beyer Blinder Belle approach and then by the powerful but manipulative metaphors of the master plan by Daniel Libeskind, AIA. Is it any wonder that what’s actually being built has so little to do with either of those blueprints? Or that it fails to follow either planning or architectural logic?
In New Orleans, architects couldn’t even manage, as Libeskind did, a Pyrrhic victory. The problem from the start with post-Katrina rebuilding was the absence of any larger planning framework with the muscle of public policy and government will behind it. Scores of talented architects—some funded by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, others working with foundation grants, and still others operating as free agents—poured into the city in the months following the hurricane. What they found was a city planning agency, and a regional planning apparatus, so shell-shocked by the disaster and gutted by budget cuts as to be nearly impotent.
When I traveled to Louisiana a few months after Katrina and heard that the most sophisticated planning efforts were being funded and overseen by private philanthropies, rather than in any coordinated public way, it was easy to predict where things were headed. A number of prototypes for green, flood-proof housing followed. In a few cases architects and planners tried to address similar issues at the scale of a park or a stretch of waterfront. But all these efforts ended up floating in a larger sea of indifference—in an unplanned urban matrix—severely limiting their impact and meaning.
When it comes to disasters of Katrina’s magnitude, in literal as well as symbolic terms, architecture can do only so much. No shiny rendering can make up for a flimsy or non-existent planning strategy in areas undone by a hurricane, a terror attack, or decades of poverty. There is no such thing as a Bilbao Effect for disaster relief. (And remember, in any event, that the Bilbao renaissance itself was driven by smart planning and infrastructural investment.) No single building, no matter how brilliant, can overcome a lack of coordination between architectural goals on the one hand and economic and political ones on the other.
Architects can certainly take it upon themselves to sharpen their skills in community organizing and lobbying. But to really galvanize humanitarian design will require changes outside its ranks. Architecture schools will need to do a far better job at teaching students to navigate political and fundraising mazes, and to think strategically about the connections between design and social policy. Planners will have to either reinvent their own profession or begin to cede some of their responsibilities to others, including architects. Journalists and bloggers will have to think of better ways to describe and judge projects that are more concerned with community development than pure aesthetics.
These issues are made all the more complex because humanitarian design is by definition wildly diverse. It will never be a singular movement organized around formal priorities. A young architect coordinating housing plans for tsunami victims certainly has something in common with one building schools for the poor in Texas or a green high-rise in Rio de Janeiro. But not nearly as much as Gordon Bunshaft had with Walter Gropius.
Modernism remade the world, for better and worse, with an architectural philosophy that was like a blade: very simple, very sharp, and ultimately very detached from the sites of its surgical mastery. Humanitarian designers are trying to remake it by rolling up their sleeves and digging directly into the literal and symbolic dirt—or, more often, the muck of a flooded or disaster-strewn site. The results are bound to be messier and harder to measure. At the same time, as we move inexorably into an age of disaster, the stakes are higher this time around—for architects, maybe, but without a doubt for the parts of the planet they’ll be rushing to heal and repair.