Underdome stages debates between contending theories of energy efficiency to assess their design potentials for public life. During their residency, Carver and Kim focused on the initial research phases of the project, interviewing journalists, economists, advocates, ecologists, policy wonks, and engineers to map a spectrum of contrasting strategies for energy efficiency. Beyond the scope of the fellowship term, their work will lead to a series of debates and the publication of a guide to energy efficiency in the fall of 2010. Written for designers, this print and online manual will emulate a voter’s guide by evaluating competing models of efficiency and their implications.

Underdome assembles an expanded range of energy efficiency metrics – watts, profit, votes, ownership, leisure, health, and land use, to name a few – to generate a diverse set of criteria by which critical questions of energy policy might be evaluated. In a climate crisis, ask Carver and Kim, shouldn’t every option be on the table? In an emergency, shouldn’t we be ready to overhaul laws, economies and the built environment? Underdome speculates on the political ecology of energy in order to rethink familiar networks and spaces of the city.

The project is inspired by two proposals that redesigned relationships between buildings and power: Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 Dome Over Midtown Manhattan and the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Fuller and Sadao envisioned an infrastructure that would abandon existing development patterns for a radically new and efficient shared space, expanding climate control to the scale of the city, and redistributing the costs and benefits of architectural enclosure to a broader population. Today, the ARRA is allocating $20 billion for energy projects nationwide on the premise that collective public spending will lead to new efficiencies.

As New York City faces dramatic shifts in modes of investment and development, the Underdome guide will be a call to action, inviting designers to interpret and expand the reach of energy scenarios by re-imaging the logic of efficiency written into urban life.

The Public School (for Architecture) is a self-organizing educational program for which the curriculum and schedule are proposed by the general public. Administered by common room and the Telic Arts Exchange in collaboration with Performa, the courses of The Public School (for Architecture) will be taught throughout New York City as itinerant installations during Fall 2009. The curriculum for The Public School will be developed through public access to its web site, and the development of course topics and class participation will be open to non-architects and architects alike. The school’s mission is to create a public for architecture while opening up architecture for the public.

The Public School (for Architecture) New York grows out of common room and Telic’s combined interests in the social, political, and economic aspects of architecture and awareness that the process of working to-scale in the built environment is a productive form of negotiation. Expanding The Public School beyond its existing posts in Los Angeles and Chicago, common room’s Maria Ibañez, Lars Fischer, and Todd Rouhe and Telic’s Sean Dockray seek to operate within and between those spaces in New York that have been opened up by current economic crises. While the Los Angeles Public School operates from a permanent location, and the network of users is established in reference to a single art space, the New York-based Public School will be more transient. Through open-ended discourse and alternative approaches to practice, common room and Telic propose to reactivate dismantled professional networks of the New York architecture community into a productive force that – while unable to repair the economic situation – can collectively begin to make sense of it and explore techniques for adaptation. The Public School (for Architecture) locates areas where new ideas are possible, suggests ways that architecture can be engaged even while financial support is diminishing, and seeks to identify and activate a community of users beyond affiliations to a single organization or discipline. During their Van Alen Institute fellowship residency, common room and Telic Arts Exchange will administer all courses in The Public School (for Architecture) New York through nyc.thepublicschool.org. Over the course of three academic terms, they plan to install classrooms in semi-public transitional spaces within institutions throughout the city—waiting rooms, lobbies, and large corridors—and will publish a corresponding course reader.

Fall Schedule:

September 30: Open House
October 13-25: Class Session I
November 1-22: Class Session II (in collaboration with Performa, as part of Performa09, the third visual art performance biennal)
December 1-11: Class Session III

Visit http://nyc.thepublicschool.org to propose classes, comment on or register in a class, offer to teach a class, and find out when and where classes will take place.

Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta and Manhattan envisions the long-term future of Manhattan as an ecosystem in the context of its rich ecological and social history. Four hundred years ago, the island called Mannahatta was powered entirely by renewable energy. All foods on Mannahatta were locally obtained. Transportation on Mannahatta was driven by muscle, wind, and water. Materials moved through the island in self-perpetuating cycles. The shape of the island was determined by the height of the land and the level of the sea, as controlled by the climate. Mannahatta constituted habitat for a diverse flora and fauna, including people, for more than 150 generations before Henry Hudson discovered the area for Europeans. The ecological facts of life still apply on Manhattan today – Manhattan’s inhabitants require food, water, shelter, and the resources to raise our children. Ecologically speaking, cities are constructed habitat for people. One hopes that they will last for 150 generations to come.

In 2009, New York City will celebrate its 400th birthday. On this historic occasion, Sanderson plans to use his extensive research and documentation of the diverse ecological landscapes of Mannahatta to reflect on where New York has come from and speculate on how sustainability can be built into the structure and practice of New York over the next 400 years. During his fellowship term at Van Alen Institute, Sanderson will pursue the research and writing of a brief for a design competition on the future sustainability in New York City in stages approximately 50, 150 and 400 years from now, prompted by sustainable characteristics of Mannahatta. As part of this work, Sanderson will share the data resources and ecological concepts of the Mannahatta Project with the design community at large, and he will organize a public roundtable with leading thinkers in urban sustainability and ecology to discuss and debate the ecological themes that Mannahatta raises in contrast to the city today.

Natalie Jeremijenko’s OOZing asks what forms animal-human interactions might otherwise take in a truly operative urban landscape. A continuation of her ongoing efforts toward realizing OOZ, a series of animal-human interfaces which up-end the traditional zoo with their architectures of reciprocity, OOZing challenges designers, planners, and policy-makers to more radically incorporate and reimagine the role of nonhuman organisms in the design and management of cities: What does biodiversity look like in New York City? Who wants to share the urban context with nonhumans and why? What are the present and possible roles for animals in urban infrastructure? Can human/nonhuman interactions be productive, fun, and improve the environmental performance of human habitats?

While urban migration once described the movements of rural poor human populations into cities, the term can now describe the movement of animals, formally known as wild, into urban centers. Geese, pigeons, coyote, rhinoceros beetles, luna moths, raccoons, bats, and wild turkey have increasingly accepted invitations for cohabitation that every street tree and greenspace arguably extend — colonizing diverse urban habitats, forcing us to account for the environmental services they provide, and provoking us to re-imagine our relationship to natural systems in an increasingly urban world.

During her fellowship at Van Alen Institute, Jeremijenko will organize a public workshop to demonstrate productive cohabitation with urban nonhumans through a series of human-animal interfaces proposed specifically for the Bronx.

During their fellowship term, Levi and Schachter will launch a large-scale on-site workshop bringing university students and professionals in architecture, urban planning and ecology together with local middle school students and residents to envision and realize physical interventions along the waterway. Based on the educational activities they have previously realized in Spain, the workshop will take place at several encampments along the Bronx River over the course of one week. In conjunction with their community-based work, Levi and Schachter will pursue research into incidental urban spaces throughout the five boroughs—at elevated subway stops crossing over avenues, along parkway embankments, and behind commercial and industrial strips—as models for thinking about ways that natural features along the Bronx River waterway might be rewoven into the city fabric.

The Arctic sea ice is melting and the facts are hard to ignore. In 2007 historic Arctic sea ice minima were observed: an area of approximately the combined size of Texas and California melted while the extent of the ice shelf deteriorated by 41%. NASA scientists determined that the shrinkage was the result of “…unusual atmospheric conditions.” They concluded that “…a reduction of the Arctic winter ice cover would be a clear indicator of the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

How do we begin to comprehend such staggering processes that will impact every aspect of our planet? How can we effectively measure, model and analyze these dynamic transformations? For many in New York City, where the bustle and insular quality of urban life masks a broader ecological system in distress, the receding arctic ice shelf and its attendant consequences are incomprehensible. As designers, how can we translate, render and reconstruct this information into a catalyst for action?

During their fellowship term, Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno (Future Cities Lab) will design and fabricate a large-scale interactive installation entitled Aurora. The installation will superimpose the ephemeral qualities of the Arctic ice field with the dynamic behavior of visitors in the Institute’s Manhattan gallery. Connected to real time data parsed from Arctic sensor buoys, the shifting dimensions of the ice shelf will be translated into immersive LED auroras and responsive skins. Feedback loops between remote and locally sensed data will intensify the interplay between these connected, yet physically separated conditions. Aurora will function both as index of an emerging global condition, and as indicator of our impact on conditions beyond our limited field of perception. It will suggest a new approach to design that is simultaneously globally informed and locally responsive.

During her fellowship term, Hoffman Brandt will develop and publicly disseminate a plan for the dispersal, deployment, and design of urban carbon sinks in New York City. She will locate opportunities in the city’s macro-scale infrastructural systems to infiltrate sinks throughout the metropolitan area, and she will use case studies of projects to generate sink typologies and local-scale tactics that work within the urban substrate to intensify carbon sequestration.

During her fellowship term, Schillig will implement a series of textile urban interventions in New York City. Experimenting with various materials, from fabric to felt and other textiles, she will create structures that can be folded and transformed from two-dimensional elements into three-dimensional modules, incorporating a range of functions including clothing, urban furniture, and shelter. To accompany her interventions, she will organize a workshop at Van Alen Institute wherein participants will design their own wearable devices that critically engage and activate existing public spaces in the city. Over the course of her residency, Schillig will also pursue her ongoing research into the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.

John Stuart’s TimeZone proposes a series of interactive building blocks that provide real-time video communication between people of socio-economically diverse backgrounds whose daily routines are aligned along a single time zone. TimeZone addresses the potential for public spaces to stimulate group dialogue and revitalize public activities across cultures and languages. Designed for maximum durability and accessibility, the TimeZone pods employ wireless sensor technologies to facilitate interaction between users. They may be suspended or stacked, used individually or composed into multiple configurations.

During his fellowship term, Stuart has assembled an international team of collaborators to conceptualize, fabricate, and implement two prototypical TimeZone pods in New York City and in Lima, Peru, at the southernmost end of the Eastern Time Zone. Through a series of educational workshops incorporated into the course curricula for the Museum of Modern Art’s “In the Making” program and the Center for Architecture Foundation’s “Public Art/Public Spaces” studio, they plan to analyze the interactions between junior high and high school students in New York with high school students at the Colegio Santa Maria Marianistas in Lima, Peru, and to draw upon these workshops to further develop TimeZone for future implementation in other forms and places. For the duration of the educational workshops in July, one pod will be installed in New York at Van Alen Institute and then at MoMA, and the other will be installed on the campus of the Colegio Santa Maria Marianistas. Both TimeZone pods will return to the Institute at the end of the fellowship term, where John and his collaborators will conduct a demonstration and discussion to explore a range of technical and conceptual questions provoked by the project — about past, present and potential future relationships between information and materiality; and about virtual communications, privatization, and the public realm.

TimeZone is being developed in collaboration with Phillip Anzalone, Associate Director, Building Technologies, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University; Cory Clarke, partner in the New York-based design firm, Tender; Cyril Manyara, London-based designer, Future-Systems; Eto Otigibe, artist and director of esORO Polymedia Projects, Jersey City, New Jersey; Christopher Whitelaw, architect, Evans & Paul; Jen Song, coordinator of school visit programs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Lauren Adelman, educator, and Ariel Canegone, assistant educator, MoMA “In the Making” summer program; Grace Hwang, program coordinator and educator, Center for Architecture Foundation; Francisco Waltersdorfer, intern architect, Spillis Candela DMJM; Daniel Yep, architect, 51-1 Arquitectos, Lima, Peru; Gali Orbegoso, professor and academic director, Colegio Santa Maria Mariantistas; Jelena Zoranovic, professor and coordinator of the English Department, Colegio Santa Maria Marianistas, Lima, Peru; Michelle Chang, Steven Garcia, Daniel Kidd, Jon Turkula, Mathew Staudt, graduate architecture students at Columbia GSAPP; and recent Columbia GSAPP graduates Jennifer Flemming and Ashley Hanrahan. TimeZone is made possible by the additional support of: Colegio Santa Maria Marianistas in Lima, Peru; the School of Architecture, Florida International University in Miami; The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and with material and fabrication support from DuPont™ Corian® and Evans & Paul.

For more information about Stuart and his collaborators’ work in process, visit www.johnstuartarchitecture.com/Blog/Blog.html.

During her fellowship at Van Alen Institute, Grimes is planning the physical infrastructure that will bring advanced ecological inquiry into the public realm at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. In partnership with the USFS and CRUE, Grimes’s role is to physically lay out Midewin’s ecological experiments and to create a dynamic public interface with those experiments — thereby enabling unique alliances between scientific researchers and the general public, and producing shared understandings of the role that prairie ecosystems play in human culture and metropolitan life. Practically speaking, this involves the planning and development of infrastructure for scientists and visitors, including fencing, pathways, roads, storage, laboratories, classrooms and viewing areas. More broadly, Grimes’s efforts to make ecological inquiry public raise a series of important questions about our understandings of nature, science, design, and metropolitan experience: How can new models of nature that embrace risk and indeterminacy change the design of public infrastructure? What roles should design play in the planning and management of public lands and ecosystems? If ecosystems are a design problem, how does the work of designers change? What past, present, and future styles of life, forms of experience, and material realities are enabled by ecosystem infrastructures? How do these experiences and sensibilities shape our understanding of public life?

To explore these questions, Grimes is organizing and presenting a two-part series of public conversations as part of her fellowship work in residence at Van Alen Institute. As a form of active research in Grimes’s development of a proposal for Midewin’s experimental infrastructure, the unscripted dialogues will bring together architects, historians, urbanists, and ecologists for discussion and debate on the relationships between design and land use planning, ecological theory and the public realm. The conversations will take place around a topographic model of the site, and will be supplemented by extensive documentation and analyses of the site’s geographic, socio-economic and historical contexts and precedents.

Home to between 700,000 and 1,000,000 residents, Kibera is the largest informal settlement in Sub-Saharan Africa yet it occupies a space just two-thirds the size of New York City’s Central Park. In 2006, KDI conducted a series of community workshops in Kibera that foregrounded the region’s critical need for youth employment opportunities, trash collection, improvements to water quality, and flood prevention. Through these workshops, Odbert and Toy identified an opportunity for intervention in the wide, trash-covered banks of the polluted rivers that cut through the settlement. According to Odbert and Toy, the riverbanks are technically commonly owned space, and if free of trash, are large enough to house community amenities such as composting toilets, a community garden and a children’s playground. 80% compostable and 15% recyclable, the trash represents an untapped revenue stream that can potentially generate sufficient income to cover operation and maintenance costs for the site’s amenities. In the Summer of 2007, KDI installed their first “activity node” in Kibera as a demonstration of the viability of productive public space, and they are currently undertaking subsequent phases of the project.

During their fellowship term, Odbert and Toy have used their work in Kibera as a platform for further developing and expanding their concept of productive public space. Odbert and Toy organized a series of roundtables with a wide range of professionals—architects, planners, economists, environmental experts, funders, public health practitioners and policy makers—to critically explore the significance of public space in informal settlements. Among the institutions represented at the discussions were Acumen Fund, the Blacksmith Institute, Buro Happold, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Design Trust for Public Space, Great Eastern Ecology, Malkenson Foundation, Metropolis, Peter L. Gluck & Partners, Project for Public Spaces, Sustainable South Bronx, Urban Think Tank, TILL Design, WRT Design and more. The roundtable conversations served to generate a collective definition of ‘productive public space’ and a working model of its forms, uses and applicable contexts both nationally and internationally.

As a culmination of these conversations, and as a public statement about KDI’s community-driven processes of definition and design, Odbert and Toy additionally commissioned a select group of artists and graphic designers to create poster series that illustrate and advance new ways of thinking about public space in informal settlements and low-income areas. Contributing artists include Jenny Beorkrem of Ork Posters (Chicago, IL), Prem Krishnamurthy and Adam Michaels of Project Projects (New York, NY), Leah Murphy (Philadelphia, PA) and Mindy Watts (Philadelphia, PA). The posters will be reproduced and distributed throughout Nairobi, New York and other major cities as part of an awareness campaign this summer; the originals, which range in media from woodcut to newsprint to silkscreen, will be on view at Van Alen Institute from Thursday, April 10 to Friday, April 25, 2008.

For more information about Kounkey Design Initiative, visit www.kounkuey.org.

Dirk Hebel and Jorg Stollmann’s United Bottle proposes a new form of plastic bottle designed to function as instant building material. The project’s working hypothesis is that design should think beyond the product, and consider the waste the product will turn into—in order to open up possibilities for prospective secondary uses. Over fifty billion PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and PP (polypropylene) bottles are currently circulating in Europe alone. Since the obligatory bottle deposit was introduced, the return quota has exceeded 90 percent. PET/PP bottles can be used as returnable bottles, recycled, and transformed into a variety of products—from all forms of vessels to fabrics. This process called “Up-cycling” mostly occurs in China, while the final products are sold again on the global market. The intersection of local and global circuits forms the basis of United_Bottle. Taking into consideration the increasing scarcity of resources, United_Bottle explores the possibility of additional recycling circuits. The form of newly designed PET/PP bottles can be easily integrated into existing PET/PP bottle production processes and can efficiently fit into standardized shipping boxes. Once ‘used’, the bottles can be filled with found materials and reused as prefabricated building units for the construction of both temporary or permanent structures.

For Dirk Hebel and Jorg Stollmann, a design concept based on secondary use requires full-scale testing and the participatory involvement of prospective users in design development. As primary use is guided by the production, distribution and marketing logistics of the industry, parameters that allow for secondary use and appropriation have to be defined right from the beginning. During their fellowship term at Van Alen Institute, Hebel and Stollmann launched the “United_Bottle Participate!” campaign, soliciting designers, architects, critics and prospective users to imagine potential implementation concepts and design proposals for United_Bottle. This ongoing process, in combination with research into bottle production technologies in Europe, Asia, and the United States, will define the bottle’s shape as well as its future circuit system. Additionally, Hebel and Stollmann collaborated with the Institute to organize a discussion between Michael Bell, Giuseppe Lignano, Alessandra Ponte and Mark Wasiuta on secondary use strategies in architectural education and practice. The exhibition at Van Alen Institute includes a full-scale bottle shelter that tests a range of building materials and construction methods, accompanied by excerpts from the discussion on secondary use, and all submissions to the “Participate!” campaign received to date. For more information about United Bottle, please visit www.united-bottle.org.

In the future, walls will breathe and buildings will talk to one another. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real-time to the dynamic conditions of their surrounding environments and to a larger network of data. Architecture will come to life and will create a Living City.

Living City is a full-scale prototype building skin designed to breathe in response to air quality. During their fellowship term, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang developed one of the first architecture prototypes to link local responses in a building to a distributed network of sensors throughout the city. They created software to collect and share data from wireless sensor networks, allowing any participant building to talk to others and take action in response. The first conversation took place between the Empire State Building and Van Alen Institute. The prototype was exhibited at the Institute’s public gallery and, through an air quality sensor network on the facade of Van Alen Institute’s building, communicated wirelessly with a sensor network deployed on the facade of the Empire State Building, opening and closing its gills in response to information the sensors collected.

With Living City, Benjamin and Yang confront the air as the most public and politicized of spaces in the city—shared by all but invisible, often divisible, and intensely debated and controlled. Using New York City as a research lab, they propose an architecture that functions as a public interface to air quality, creating a platform for an ecology of building skins where individual buildings receive, share and respond to data as part of a collective network. In early 2008, Benjamin and Yang will publish their software so that others can build off of it to create new networked response systems.

For more information about Living City, visit www.thelivingcity.net.

Since the early 1990’s, Hans Ulrich Obrist has conducted 1400 hours of interviews with over 400 artists, scientists, architects, writers, composers and other influential figures in contemporary arts and culture. A central component of his curatorial practice, Obrist’s interviews are both rigorously interdisciplinary and publicly engaged. In substance, they seek a deep understanding of the social architecture of the city and its incredibly diverse and overlapping domains of cultural production. In practice – as his conversations perform various and multiple future functions in books, exhibitions, marathons, and other projects – they make public this knowledge, collecting and sharing an ongoing oral history of art and culture bridging the 20th and 21st centuries.

During his tenure as Senior Fellow, Hans Ulrich Obrist will further his lifelong Interviews project with a particular focus on New York—revisiting past New York interviews conducted over the last fifteen years and initiating a new series of interviews with New York figures who have played critical roles in shaping the cityscape.