We’ll always need buildings, so long as the wind blows and the temperature drops, but the virtual reality of contemporary life has changed our relationship to physical space. Buildings, particularly in the public realm, aren’t as essential as they used to be.
How important is a convention center in the age of webinars? Schools, libraries and workplaces when information is so easy to share digitally? Airports and hotels when friends connect via Facebook and FaceTime?
Architects have felt the pressure and sweated the possibility that their once-enviable profession is headed toward irrelevancy. We’ll always need them, too, but how much depends on what they can bring to the table beyond four sturdy walls and a roof.
The good news is that the profession is changing. Slowly, and with some good ideas leading the way, architects, planners and designers have begun moving from defense to offense, creating spaces that do more than protect us from the elements. The best new buildings actually make us healthier by encouraging exercise and better diet. They improve our energy levels and attitudes by balancing our exposure to light and sound. Well-designed public places strengthen communities by drawing users from across social and economic divides to shared experiences.
Architecture’s next step is to build on the green movement that has made structures more energy-efficient and earth-friendly and to develop spaces that work as doctors, coaches and counselors for 21st-century life.
Mariposa, a Denver Housing Authority development that has been opening in phases, combines several of these ideas into one residential mini-city. Planners are designing the block apartment buildings with ample community garden spaces where residents can grow their own food, and integrating colorful playgrounds into the front yards. The units go for varying rents — from highly subsidized to market rate — so every building and floor has a mix of occupants. Located near an affordable commuter rail line in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, the development makes walking a few blocks to the train each morning more attractive than walking a few steps to the car.
Mariposa’s biggest contribution to the movement may be the Mariposa Stair, a brilliant multimedia art installation that inspires residents in one new building to skip the elevators altogether. As the stair rises four floors, a Mayan folktale called “The Chocolate Tree” unfolds in chapters. Climbers can read about the plants and animals in the story’s jungle setting and push buttons to hear bird calls and thunderstorms. A chandelier — it’s not lavish, just plastic panels and LED lights strung together with cables — hangs down the center, illuminating the space in gentle red, blue and green hues.
The stair, designed by Rezan Prananta and a team from the Denver architecture firm Shears Adkins Rockmore, has a pleasant vibe and, so far, people are using it.
This holistic attitude is architecture’s greatest promise and seems to be steering trends. More and more, landscape architects — a subset of the profession that used to enter building ventures late in the planning to finish parking lots and lawns — are emerging as project leaders, devising how sites will be organized, used and maintained. These days, they might be the ones to hire building architects to complete their vision.
Washington D.C.’s new Canal Park is an example. Designed by landscape architect David Rubin while an equity partner at Olin, the three-block-long park is organized around a democratic principle of flexibility that allows visitors to customize its use as needs change. Instead of overloading its open spaces with prescribed picnic areas, for example, the park rents chairs at a dollar a piece, allowing it to accommodate everything from individual book readers to multigenerational family reunions to film screenings. One area converts from a walk-through fountain in the summer to an ice skating rink in the winter.
Everything about the space signals its openness to all, including its innovative benches, which wave up and down like a ribbon, with comfortable seating heights for adults, children, seniors and the disabled. Planned as a neighborhood amenity for incoming residential development, the park, complete with a restaurant, has become an urban destination, drawing users from across the city.
Rubin’s current firm, Land Collective, is partnering on another mixed-use park in St. Louis, a parcel that has the city’s swank orchestra hall on one side and a subsidized housing development on the other. Performance Green, with tree plantings extending into the surrounding neighborhoods as welcome mats, is meant to bridge historic social divides in a city where tensions have run high lately.
It’s personal
The biggest benefits of future buildings are likely to be personal. Architects can now design health-enhancing features into homes and offices, such as countertops that kill germs and heating and cooling systems that block allergens. They can install shower heads with vitamin C filters that neutralize chlorine and moisturize the skin.
In the 2000s, eco-friendly designers eagerly sought LEED certification, a designation from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council that acknowledged their use of recycled construction materials, reduced energy needs and ability to cut waste products.
The new goal could become WELL certification from the International WELL Building Institute, located in Washington, D.C., which in October issued the first-ever healthy-building standards. The institute will recognize pro-human building performance in seven categories: Air, water, nourishment, light, fitness, comfort and mind.
Nourishment covers everything from refrigerators that keep vegetables at nutrient-preserving temperatures to snack areas where employees can practice “mindful eating” instead of bingeing at their desks. Comfort guides things like sound and odor control and ergonomics. Mind relates to attractive design and such amenities as couches for napping and libraries with “at least one book title and one magazine subscription for every 20 occupants,” according to the WELL checklist.
Already, architects are adopting the main principles. The new underground Union Station Bus Concourse in downtown Denver, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, has a sophisticated ventilation system that pumps in fresh air to displace the noxious fumes generated by idling coaches. Hotels are providing treadmills and yoga mats in rooms, allowing guests to work out privately and more conveniently than they can in tiny fitness centers.
The Denver Art Museum’s new Administration Building, designed by Roth Sheppard Architects, features a lighting system that adjusts automatically to assist workers in maintaining the natural circadian rhythms that help humans distinguish day from night, cueing them when to sleep and wake. Scientists believe the patterns control alertness and productivity.
A new way of thinking
A lot of the trends have to do with technology, but they’re really guided by a new kind of thinking, one that employs design in revolutionary ways and elevates the role of buildings far beyond their primary purpose as shelter.
That’s not entirely new, of course. Buildings have often been created for their symbolic power.
Big houses defined what it meant to succeed at the American dream. Skyscrapers gave us office space but also showed our capitalist might. Those huge apartment blocks that went up in big cities across the U.S. and Europe after World War II were meant to equalize the social structure, to make sure everyone had the same size piece of whatever pie was being served.
This latest chapter of history is different because it’s not about emblems or ideology. It’s about architecture making itself useful, saving lives, alleviating stress, easing class tensions. Architects spent the last century profiting from the proliferation of spaces that pollute, segregate, encourage us to overspend and exercise less. Green and healthy buildings undo the damage.
They help architects as well, at least those who recognize that a decrease in public space makes the remaining sites that provide it more precious, not less so. Dreaming up compelling ways to shape them offers building and landscape architects an opportunity to remain vital — and brings them closer to the people they serve, grounding them in a world that rises increasingly into clouds.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
