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PERMIT NO. 54016

DATEBOOKSUMMER 2011

THROUGH JULY 29The Lobby 7 Design Competition. The results of SA+P’s campus-wide challenge to students to propose ideas for filling the four Lobby 7 plinths, featuring 15 finalists chosen from a field of 54 entries; the contest was sponsored by the Class of 1954. Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM. Wolk Gallery, 7-338.

JUNE 6-JULY 27Professional Development Institute. A series of 14 short courses for real estate professionals that explore the art and science of the profession, using expert knowl-edge drawn from MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning, School of Economics and Sloan School of Management, as well as CRE’s own top-ranked research program. MIT Center for Real Estate, W-31.

THROUGH JULY 10Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect. The first US museum survey of the work of Chilean-born artist Juan Downey (1940-1993), featuring key works by this under-recognized pioneer of video art; Downey was a fellow at SA+P’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1973 and 1975, and played a significant role in the New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. 12-2PM, E15, List Visual Arts Center.

THROUGH DECEMBER 31The MIT 150 Exhibition. A year-long exhibit highlighting 150 years of MIT history and featuring an impressive array of important milestones from SA+P; the most comprehensive exhibit ever devel-oped by the museum, the show is made up of stories and objects that members of the MIT community helped to select, collect and display to the public, many for the first time. 10AM-5PM. MIT Museum, N51.

Stories in PLAN can usually be found in greater detail online at sap.mit.edu/plan, along with archives of previous issues.

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(Cover)A detail from Overliner by Joel Lamere and Cynthia Gunadi, one of more than 20 installations from SA+P that transformed MIT’s campus this spring as part of the MIT150 Festival of Art, Science + Technology. (Photo: © Andy Ryan)

N E W S D I G E S T O F T H E M I T S C H O O L O F A R C H I T E C T U R E + P L A N N I N G

With this issue, I am pleased to announce the creation of an

important new entity in the School of Architecture + Planning—

the Center for Advanced Urbanism, a research-based think tank

designed to address the critical issues facing urbanization today,

world-wide.

With whole new cities rapidly emerging in China and India

using drastically outdated templates—and with urban settle-

ments developing in Latin America—we desperately need to

develop new urban forms to deal with issues of energy use, sus-

tainability, resilience, digital infrastructure and density and

mobility patterns, to name just a few concerns.

We believe our school is uniquely positioned to assume a

leadership role in meeting that challenge. We have been

engaged in city building for well over a century and the tradition

is carried forward today in our architecture and planning

departments, at our Center for Real Estate, in our Media Lab

and in an array of individual research labs.

We have conducted joint international workshops on urban

design for decades; we have undertaken major initiatives in sus-

tainable community design, smart cities, bus rapid transit and

urban mobility, to name just a few; in 2006 we established the

ongoing Urbanization Lab to invent new models of city form;

and this issue of PLAN includes a report on the development of

a new set of tools for designing clean energy cities.

In creating the Center for Advanced Urbanism, we are com-

mitting ourselves to building more capacity in this critical area.

By facilitating collaborative research with other scholars and

practitioners from around the world, we hope to make signifi-

cant advances in our understanding of the future of urbanity and

how best to realize it.

A MAJOR EXHIBIT EXPLORING

In January, as part of the Institute’s sesquicen-tennial celebration, the MIT Museum inaugu-rated a new gallery with a year-long exhibit highlighting 150 years of MIT history and featuring an impressive array of important milestones from the School of Architecture + Planning. The most comprehensive exhibit ever devel-oped by the museum, The MIT 150 Exhibition is made up of stories and objects that members of the MIT community helped to select, col-lect and display to the public, many for the first time. Given the fact that SA+P traces it origins back to the earliest days of the Institute, it’s not surprising to find the school so well rep-resented in the exhibit. What is perhaps sur-prising is that, as the smallest of MIT’s five schools, it figures so prominently. Ascending the museum’s stairs, for exam-ple, the very first thing you encounter is an art installation by SA+P alumnus Christopher Jan-ney (SM’78), a series of melodic sounds trig-gered by your footfalls. Arriving at the exhibit’s entrance on the second floor, one of the first things you see is a prototype for the CityCar from the Media Lab. Moving into the main body of the exhib-it, you come upon the first of the show’s ten themes—Artistic MIT—featuring twenty items, fully half of which are from SA+P. And continuing on, you find Mitch Resnick’s Scratch

in the Academic section; Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child in the Entrepeneurial section; the SENSEable City Lab’s Copenha-gen Wheel in the Problem-Solving section; and, in the Bionic section, Marvin Minsky’s Minsky Arm, Hugh Herr’s PowerFoot One Prosthetic Foot and Saul Griffiths’ Prescription Eyeglass Lens Fabricator. The Boston Chinatown Master Plan (2010) is featured in a section devoted to MIT’s involvement with Boston, as are maps for the Perceptual Form of the City, part of the research that led to Kevin Lynch’s seminal book The Image of the City. And the section entitled Pioneering MIT features Désiré Despradelle’s Beacon of Prog-ress, SA+P’s Monsanto House of the Future and the Visible Language Workshop, directed by visionary Muriel Cooper, recognized in com-puter and graphic design circles as one of the greatest designers of the 20th century. To explore the exhibit online, and to browse all the objects on display, visit museum.mit.edu/150. You can also view all the objects that were nominated for the exhibit by the MIT community and leave your comments. If you’d like to see the show in person, the MIT Museum is open daily from 10AM—5PM, closed major holidays; the exhibit runs through December 31. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

(A)A prototype of the City Car from the Smart Cities Group at the Media Lab—a lightweight, intelligent, electric vehicle designed to reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprints of cities.

(B)A view of the section on MIT’s Boston, including the Boston Chinatown Master Plan (2010) and maps for the Perceptual Form of the City, two important contribu-tions from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

(C)Marvin Minsky’s Minsky Arm (1967-1973), the principal inspiration and source of ideas for Minsky’s landmark book on the workings of the human mind, The Society of Mind (1986).

(D)The Cophenhagen Wheel, suspended on the wall, transforms an existing bicycle into a hybrid that can store energy every time the rider puts on the brakes, then gives that power back to provide a boost when going uphill.

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15 DECADES OF MIT HISTORYINCLUDING A HOST OF ACHIEVEMENTS FROM SA+P

Toward a Global Consensus on ClimateA Winning Proposal to Restructure Emission Reduction Efforts

MCP candidates Christophe Chung and Shoko Takemoto have won the Popular Choice Award in a contest to create new international climate agreement proposals for the world community. The contest was sponsored by the Climate CoLab, a project of the MIT Center for Collec-tive Intelligence that uses crowdsourcing to harness the collective intelligence of people around the world to help find solutions to global climate issues. The winning proposal, ‘Overcoming the North-South Divide’, called for emission reduc-tion efforts to be based not on global or nation-al targets, but rather on reducing emissions in four regional clusters, each of which combines countries from the global North and South. The approach was designed to increase trust between the developed and developing world by encouraging cooperation among wealthy and emerging economies in the same geographic region. The proposal sets forth three actions related to mitigation, adaptation and negotiation which could help bring about agreement on three spe-cific goals by 2050. The approach also proposes that rather than attempt to reach agreement on all issues at once, reaching consensus first on the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of climate change adap-tation, as a stepping stone towards reaching consensus on climate change mitigation, will lead to greater chances of reaching an overall agreement. Since winning the contest, Chung and Take-moto have developed their ideas further to include thinking of clusters beyond geographic regions and considering clustering countries around collective interests. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

Researchers at SA+P, in collaboration with colleagues at China’s Tsinghua University, have created a new set of tools that can evaluate the energy performance of real estate projects while they are still in the process of design. The tools are intended to help shape the process of urbanization at the scale at which cities are actually built—one neighborhood at a time—producing cleaner energy patterns than would otherwise be possible. Led at MIT by Dennis Frenchman and Christopher Zegras, the research is a response to the breakneck economic growth in China over the last thirty years, growth that has dramatically changed the Chinese urban land-scape through rapid urban expansion, housing development and massive new infrastructure projects, leading their cities to consume ever more energy. (More than 46% of China’s total energy consumption can be attributed to the built environment and the life of people within it, a proportion that continues to increase.)

MAKING CLEAN ENERGY CITIESA NEW SET OF TOOLS FOR DESIGNERS AND DEVELOPERS

While previous research has illustrated the problem, this research seeks to help develop-ers choose among a vast array of variables to design more efficient scenarios in particular circumstances; to help them assess the energy consumption for a specific project while in the process of design; and to do this in a way that is easily compared to other projects, to provide a basis for energy policy about the built environment. In a survey of efforts worldwide, the research identified six examples of clean energy urban form and distilled the prototypes into a pattern book that provides examples for designers, and a database for comparing the energy performance of different design approaches. The intention is that these proto-types, along with new ones, will replace exist-ing typologies that evolved with no consider-ation of energy consumption. The other main product of the research is the Energy Proforma, similar to the financial pro forma commonly used in real estate devel-opment. The financial pro forma collapses a wide array of factors such as market demand, construction systems, costs and effects over time into a single number that represents the rate of return on a project. Likewise, the Ener-gy Proforma collapses the transport, opera-tional and embodied energy use of a neighbor-hood form—along with its potential for energy production over time—into a single number representing its net present energy value. The tools were put to use for the first time this past summer in the MIT-Tsinghua Joint Urban Design studio in Jinan, led by French-man and Jan Wampler. Five teams of graduate students from MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing used the tools to develop proposals for new Clean Energy Neighborhoods in a town being planned on the new high-speed rail line from Beijing to Shanghai. The results were successful not only in terms of energy efficien-cy—surpassing some of the international mod-els—but also in terms of urban design quality and livability, indicating that these two goals are mutually reinforcing: good urban design equates to lower energy consumption. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

Studies of neighborhood forms assessed energy consumption in three key areas—transportation and mobility, operational energy and embedded energy. A key finding is that the type of urban form does significantly affect energy consumption.

The winning proposal aims to achieve a 50% reduction of 1990 levels of carbon emissions; to limit CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm; and to limit average global temperature increase to 2ºC, all by 2050.

SA+P was well represented at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. Sandy Pentland played a pivotal role in five sepa-rate sessions during the five-day meeting and Amy Glasmeier led a high-profile IdeasLab with MIT session with Jim Wescoat, address-ing risks and opportunities associated with the nexus of energy, food and water. Introduced by MIT President Susan Hock-field, Glasmeier and Wescoat led group discus-sions on issues surrounding energy consump-tion and production, mobility, food and fuel and the constant conflict between them. Mean-while, a separate Smart Mobility session led by Pentland explored how the integration of infor-mation, telecommunication and transportation technology is changing the future of mobility. Pentland also presented, along with Didier Lombard, Chairman of France Telecom, in a session addressing the dramatic change in the Internet from a medium for connectivity to a network of human activity sensors. And he took part in a session to discuss how to use the Internet effectively and in a way that cannot be exploited for corrupt purposes. In private WEF sessions with government leaders and industry CEOs, Pentland is work-ing to create consensus around a reference architecture for mobile information systems including mHealth, digital money and civic gov-ernance; and rethinking personal data, part of a multi-year program to create a new regula-tory and IT infrastructure that updates global privacy and transaction standards. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

SA+P at the World Economic ForumSix Sessions Addressing the Future

In their session on energy, food and water, Amy Glasmeier (above left) and Jim Wescoat (above right) introduced four sets of ideas in a ‘pecha kucha’ style presentation—15 slides, 20 seconds for each—after which they posed questions for consideration in workshop-style groups.

In a number of sessions, Sandy Pentland (above center) addressed issues related to personal data and privacy on the Internet, seeking a ‘new deal on data’ to balance the public good against private protection while helping guide the Internet from a passive communication network to a world-wide ‘nervous system’.

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Image: Courtesy of Shoko Takemoto and Christophe Chung

Photos: (Left and Right) Courtesy of the World Economic Forum and (Center) Robert Scoble

Professor of the Practice Sheila Kennedy and her partner Frano Violich—principals of Bos-ton’s Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA MATx)—are part of a team that has recently won the Minneapolis Riverfront Design Com-petition, the largest design competition in the city’s history. Working with KVA is the Tom Leader Studio of Berkeley CA; the team was selected out of a pool of submissions from 14 countries on five continents. The Riverfront Design Competition was created to imagine a better ecological future for the upper river shoreline, which is largely obscured by factories, scrap yards and indus-trial loading docks. A guiding principle in the TLS/KVA proposal is to leverage parkland, public education and public space to improve the health of the river, and the health of the city and its neighborhoods, and to act as a cata-lyst for the transition from smokestack indus-try to a green economy. The topography of the design is guided by the dynamics of the river—where water scours and erodes, carving design principles are used to create ravines and terrace overlooks; where the river deposits new material, accretive prin-ciples of design are used to mold and shape land berms for new parkland. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

Design for the 21st Century Minneapolis RiverfrontA Winning Competition Entry from Sheila Kennedy and Colleagues

Associate Professor Meejin Yoon and her partner Eric Höweler have won an open com-petition to design a new headquarters for the Boston Society of Architects on Boston’s waterfront. The new home at Atlantic Wharf will include more than 15,000 square feet of office, exhibition and meeting spaces, nearly triple the institution’s current location, creating sig-nificant opportunities for the BSA to expand its reach and find new ways to engage the pub-lic. To that end, one of the primary challenges for the competition entrants was to establish a strong public interface with passers-by along Congress Street. Höweler + Yoon’s proposal, Slipstream Pub-lic Exchange, responds to that challenge with a ‘cloud’ ceiling on the second floor of the building that is easily seen from the sidewalk, creating a highly visible signature feature that doubles as gallery ceiling and supergraphic signage. Information technologies embedded in the ‘cloud’ will allow its edge to broadcast messages through an LED sign band, while projectors display digital wayfinding and wire-less transmitters stream video feeds. ‘Public Exchange’ consoles will be located throughout the space, using wireless tech-nologies to deliver site-specific content to visitors, while also creating a BSA applica-tion for smart phones and location-aware hand held devices. Through these information interfaces, the public will be able to access curated information about the built environ-ment, construction, billings, index figures and databases of designers, products and services. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

Slipstream Public ExchangeHöweler + Yoon to Design BSA Headquarters

Among the proposal’s significant features are tree-lined paths on the river’s edge; commercial and mixed-use clusters at bridgeheads; conversion of some industrial buildings to live- work quarters; extensive urban agriculture including fields, orchards and a farmers’ market; and transformation of the current port into a green port specializing in eco-friendly products such as sustainable road salts and fertilizers.

From the street level, a grand stair draws the public up to the second floor, where a contoured media surface wraps around the perimeter of the space; a continuous gallery circuit along the outer edge of the building presents the contents of exhibitions in the foreground with the city in the background, consistent with the BSA’s mission to support active engagement between the process of design and the resulting product of the built environment.

Image: Courtesy of MR/DC and KVA MATx

Photos: Courtesy of Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP

Death and the Powers, a new opera by Tod Machover, head of the Media Lab’s Opera of the Future Group, made its US premiere in March as part of MIT’s Festival of Art, Sci-ence and Technology. Hailed as ‘a grand, rich, deeply serious new opera’ (Opera Magazine), the one-act, full evening work introduces specially designed technology that includes a musical chande-lier, a chorus of robots and an animated set that becomes an actual character in the story, launching a new era in opera production and expression. The libretto, written by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky with playwright Ran-dy Weiner, tells the story of Simon Powers, an eccentric billionaire who seeks to defy his mor-tality by projecting himself into the future. To accomplish that he constructs The System, an invention that allows him to download his mem-ories and personality into the physical environ-ment. When he enters The System at the end of the first scene, the singer James Maddalena literally vanishes from the performance space, requiring the stage set to become the physical and emotional expression of his performance. By capturing the essence of a performer whom the audience can’t see, Death and the Powers creates what Machover calls a ‘disem-bodied performance’, using software developed by PhD students Peter Torpey and Elly Jessop to measure such facets of the singer’s performance as volume, pitch, muscle tension and breathing patterns, elements that then become part of the look and feel of the animated stage set. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN (INCLUDING LINKS TO SOUND AND VIDEO SAMPLES)

Death and the Powers Makes US Premiere Tod Machover’s Latest Groundbreaking Opera

Visiting Professor Walter J. Hood, Jr., has been appointed the first Robert R. Taylor (1892) Fellow in the School of Architecture + Plan-ning. The fellowship was established to honor MIT’s first African American graduate, also the first African American in the US to earn an architecture degree; Taylor went on to become a distinguished architect and designed most of the buildings at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. Hood is an award-winning landscape archi-tect and urban designer with an international reputation for his pioneering work in environ-mental design, particularly in the integration of history, race and urban design. His teaching record and professional projects stand out for their sustained engagement with diverse local communities, for their fusion of design excel-lence with community-based planning and for the close links between his studio teaching and his urban design practice. ‘Walter has an unusual background,’ says Dean Adèle Naudé Santos. ‘He is a talented and prominent landscape architect with many important built works, such as the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and he recently got an MFA from the Chicago Art Institute. His work has evolved into an exciting fusion of landscape and art and he is also an exception-ally talented, creative teacher. Appointing him to be our first Robert Taylor Fellow is a won-derful tribute to our history at 150 years and he is a prominent practitioner to celebrate.’ Hood’s research interests include the exam-ination and development of specific urban land-scape typologies for the American city. Through his teaching, writing and practice, he advocates the art of ‘improvisation’ as a design process for making urban landscapes and architecture. MUCH MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

Walter J. Hood Jr. Appointed First Taylor FellowAward-Winning Landscape Architect and Urban Designer

(Left)Hood founded Hood Design in Oakland CA in 1993. In 2009 he received the National Design Award, which honors the best in American design, for his body of work to date in research, publication and practice. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

(Right)Hood Design’s proposal ‘Macon’s Yards’ was awarded 1st prize in a national invited competition for the improvement of a 180-foot wide boulevard in the heart of downtown Macon, Georgia.

Simon Powers (baritone James Maddalena) and his adopted son and research assistant Nicholas (tenor Hal Cazalet), just before Powers downloads himself into The System.

Photos: Courtesy of Hood Design

Photo: Jonathan Williams

In addition to SA+P’s two symposia, an opera premiere and more than 20 architectural instal-lations situated around the campus, this spring’s Festival of Art, Science and Technology fea-tured a pair of exhibits at the List Visual Arts Center exploring the work of two artists who were fellows at SA+P’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a precursor to the current pro-gram in Art, Culture and Technology. On display from February 4 to April 3, The Culture Intercom exhibited work by media art pioneer Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), a research fellow at the Center from 1969—1971. A central figure in American avant-garde cinema, VanDerBeek readily embraced computer graphics, image-processing systems and various new technological forms through the late 1960s and early 1970s. While at MIT, he began to develop new forms of interdisciplinary work and integrated forms of visual information that now stand as significant experiments in early new media art. Much of his work presages today’s Internet and communications technology. The exhibit at MIT, the first museum survey of his work, examined the artist’s remarkable output in collage, experimental film, perfor-mance, participatory and computer-generated

TWO EXHIBITS HIGHLIGHT SA+P’S ARTISTIC LEGACYPIONEERING VIDEO FROM THE 1960s AND ’70s

art over several decades, highlighting his pivotal contribution to today’s media-based artistic practices. A second solo exhibit, on display at the List from May 5 to July 10, features Chilean-born video artist Juan Downey (1940-1993), a research fellow at the Center in 1973 and 1975. A pioneer of video art, Downey played a significant role in the New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Ranging thematically over several decades, and featuring a selection of key works, Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect is the first US museum survey of his work and includes early experiments with art and technology that marked a shift from object-based artistic practice to an experiential approach combin-ing interactive performance with sculpture and video. Along with this foundational early work, the exhibit also features Downey’s video installa-tions of the 1970s and 1980s, combining an autobiographical approach with the style of anthropological documentary—one of his most important contributions to the medium. Established as an artists’ fellowship pro-gram in 1967 by MIT Institute Professor György Kepes, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies was designed to encourage social, political and environmental art through the use of new technology as an artistic medium and to facilitate the interaction of artists with scientists, engineers and industry. The Center merged with SA+P’s visual arts program in 2010 to form the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

(Left)Juan Downey: America Is Back Together, 1972; colored pencil, graphite, on Bainbridge board. Photo by Harry Shunk, courtesy of Marilys Belt Downey.

(Right)Juan Downey: Off air photograph from the video tape More Than Two, 1978.

(Left)Stan VanDerBeek in front of the Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NewYork, 1965.

(Right)Movie Mural, 1968/2011Approximate restaging of VanDerBeek’s multimediainstallation Movie Mural (1968) at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

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Photos: (Left) Lenny Lipton, courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek (Right) courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

SA+P INSTALLATIONS ANIMATE MIT CAMPUS

IN HONOR OF MIT’S 150TH ANNIVERSARY

Designed to celebrate the Institute’s culture of creativity and invention at the intersection of art, science and technology, the installations demonstrated how technology and fantasy can transform the physical environment in thought-provoking, breathtaking ways. As people traveled the campus this spring, they came upon a large-scale, diaphanous origami lining the underside of a stairway; a vaulted passageway evoking Escher, Gaudi and Gothic cathedrals; a field of white plas-ter mounds running alongside Walker Memo-rial and a shimmering curtain of light in the archway below the Green Building, harvesting energy from the wind. Several of the installations aided visitors in pathfinding. A cloud of vellum butterflies printed with text from books, sheet music and pages of MIT theses was suspended in the cor-ridor near the Hayden Library; when people approached, one of several pathways of butter-flies lit in sequence ahead of them, creating a path through the cloud. An installation of illuminated lanterns was hung from trees near Main and Ames Street to lead people toward the main campus; when they approached, sound and color was passed from one lantern to another, increasing in intensity along the way and lighting the path forward. Nearby, a diaphanous tunnel created from nylon threads extended the Infinite Cor-ridor from the Dreyfus Building bridge.

Some of the installations invited people to play. One allowed them to ‘paint’ with a mag-netic field, creating patterns in light. Another lit the facades of buildings with numbers that hold special significance at MIT while phrases projected around the plaza hinted at the mean-ing of the numbers, creating a visual puzzle. And a video installation nested layers of the past into an image of the present so that when people stepped in front of the screen(s) they saw themselves descending into the past, join-ing previous viewers who had passed by. The festival also featured a stairwell trans-formed by a shimmering vortex of thin alumi-num components; a Mood Meter that assessed and displayed the overall mood on campus by gathering and aggregating the presence of smiles on people’s faces; and a wall of stacked blocks of ice, each block with flower seeds fro-zen inside so that as the wall melted, the seeds were left behind to germinate and bloom. The series of installations was curated by a team from the School of Architecture + Plan-ning—including Dean Adèle Naudé Santos and Professors Meejin Yoon and Tod Machover—working with Leila Kinney, MIT’s Director of Arts Initiatives and producer Meg Rotzel from the Office of the Arts. Under the overall direction of Tod Macho-ver, the Festival of Art, Science + Technology culminated on May 7 and 8 with evening cele-brations featuring an extravaganza of still more installations that illuminated the MIT campus and the riverfront, a fitting finale to MIT’s 150 days of celebration.

AS PART OF MIT’S FESTIVAL OF ART, SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY (FAST)—

A PROMINENT FEATURE OF THE INSTITUTE’S SESQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION—

A SERIES OF ARCHITECTURAL INSTALLATIONS BY FACULTY AND STUDENTS

IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE + PLANNING CROPPED UP HERE AND THERE

AROUND CAMPUS THROUGHOUT THE SPRING SEMESTER.

Those evening events featured an immense inflatable star soaring over Killian Court; a 10,000 pixel display on the Mass Ave bridge that responded to the movement of viewers in the area; ninety brightly glowing orbs in the river, changing color in reaction to the people along the shore; and a pool of flickering lights on the marble platform of the MIT Chapel. The events also featured a dodecahedron made of silver balloons suspended in the lobby of the William Barton Rogers Building, undu-lating and shimmering in response to air cur-rents, heat and the motion of passersby; smart, clean energy charging stations disguised as outdoor lounge furniture; an inflatable floating screen for projecting images of environmental artworks; and a freestanding outdoor pavilion created by flexing two dimensions into three—an open pattern cut into flat plywood stock was transformed into 3D architectural features as flat sheets were bent and unfurled into sky-lights, columns, buttresses, windows and vents.

For more information about the festival, visit the FAST website: arts.mit.edu/fast

(A)Joel Lamere and Cynthia Gunadi transformed a busy stairway with a diaphanous spatial origami created through a complex technique of folding flat sheets of plastic.(Photo: © Andy Ryan)

(B)Sheila Kennedy’s SOFT Rockers in-vited visitors to recharge themselves and their electronic gadgets while relaxing outdoors on rocking lounge chairs equipped with solar panels.(Image: KVA MATx)

(C)Yushiro Okamoto’s and Kian Yam’s IceWall had flower seeds frozen inside each block of ice so that as the wall melted, the seeds were left behind to germinate and bloom.(Photo: George Lin)

(D)Elena Jessop and Peter Torpey created Bibliodoptera, a cloud of vellum butterflies floating in the corridor between the Hayden Library and the Lewis Music Li-brary, printed with text from library books and music manuscripts.(Photo: © Andy Ryan)

(E)For his voltaDom, Skylar Tibbits used an innovative fabrication technique to transform a narrow passageway with hundreds of small domes or vaults, each with its own oculus. (Photo: Skylar Tibbits)

(F)Meejin Yoon’s Wind Screen pre-sented a shimmering curtain of light fashioned from micro-turbines that harvested energy from the wind.(Image: Courtesy of Meejin Yoon)

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On view at the Wolk Gallery this spring from February 9-April 8, The Learning Machine is a new work by The Urbonas Studio, a joint effort of Gediminas Urbonas, Associate Professor in SA+P’s Art, Culture + Technology Program, and his partner Nomeda, with whom he has worked in joint artistic practice since 1997.

Together, the artists have established an international reputation for their investiga-tions into how a society adapts to the sudden change from one governmental system to another. The Learning Machine combines two previous works, Transaction (2000-2005) and Ruta Remake (2002-2005), that explore the roles of women in Lithuania, a society making the transition from Soviet control to post- Soviet liberalism.

On view in the exhibition: archival footage from Lithuanian films from 1947-1997, featuring stereotypical women’s roles in Soviet-era cinema (mother, innocent girl, siren, witch) recordings of prominent Lithuanian psychiatrists discussing Lithuanian cinematic portraits of women in the context of transactional analysis an interactive musical instrument, the Theremidi: by moving their hands over the Theremidi table and creating shadows that pass over sensors embedded in it, visitors create a soundscape in the gallery from an archive of women’s voices sampled from Lithuanian media

The structure of the interactive voice archive is ‘woven’ in the pattern of the ruta (rue) plant. The pattern appears in a woven curtain that blocks ambient light in the gallery to create stronger shadows for playing the Theremidi, and it appears in a line of unisex clothing also on view.

Written by Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum

Documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, a driving force behind the film program at SA+P, died on March 23 at his home in Paris. He was 89. Leacock joined MIT in 1968 at the invita-tion of then-provost Jerome Wiesner (later the Institute’s president) in the Documentary Film Section—a part of the School of Architecture + Planning founded one year earlier by film-maker Ed Pincus—and stayed until 1989 when he retired and moved to Paris. He was best known for expanding the pos-sibilities of documentary film through the use of small, mobile, hand-held cameras that provided documentaries with greater immediacy and opened up the range of subjects and scenes that could be filmed. He also helped devise some of the technical innovations necessary to provide high-quality sound for hand-held cameras. His first well-known film was Toby and the Tall Corn (1954), about a traveling theater troupe in Missouri. In the 1950s, he started col-laborating with another innovator in documen-taries, Robert Drew, with whom he developed a light camera with tape recorder that would record sound simultaneously. Leacock and Drew called the style deriving from this method Living Camera, but it became better known as cinéma vérité or, sometimes, ‘direct cinema’. Leacock served as cinematographer for Drew’s milestone documentary, Primary, about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, and formed a working partnership with D. A. Pennebaker, for whom he served as cinematog-rapher on Monterey Pop, from 1967, about the celebrated music festival. Leacock, Drew and others went onto apply the cinéma vérité style to a wide range of subjects. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

The Learning MachineAn Exhibit from the Urbonas Studio

Richard Leacock, 1921-2011Pioneer in Cinéma Vérité and Professor at SA+P

(Left)At the exhibit’s opening, Native American artist Amanda Moore, a graduate student in the Art, Culture + Technology Program, performed with the Theremidi, an interactive musical instrument played by passing shadows over sensors embedded in a table, activating a soundscape of women’s voices sampled from Lithuanian media.

(Right)Rolls of fabric woven in the pattern of the ruta (rue) plant; the pattern also appeared in a woven curtain that blocked out ambient light in the gallery to create stronger shadows for playing the Theremidi.

Leacock’s memoir, Richard Leacock: The Feeling of Being There, will be released this summer, along with a compilation of his more than 40 documenta-ries and short films.

(Left) Videostill: Judith M. Daniels/SA+P (Right) Photo: Judith M. Daniels/courtesy of the MIT Museum

Photo: G

. Andrew

Boyd

AR—Artistic Research, a yearlong collabora-tion between the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and the Siemens Stif-tung of Munich, focused attention this academ-ic year on artistic research, how it intersects with science and the differences between the two methodologies. The collaboration featured an exhibit of works by artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology, and a lecture series that brought artists together with scien-tists to discuss their different forms of inquiry. Co-curated by ACT director Ute Meta Bau-er with Thomas D. Trummer, Curator of Visual Arts at the Siemens Stiftung, the exhibit was installed in the ground floor gallery of SA+P’s new Media Lab Complex, home to ACT, begin-ning with work by a single artist then evolving over several weeks to include a second, a third and finally a fourth. The first chapter in the exhibit featured a selection of photos and videos by the Hungari-an artist Attila Csörgö, whose work applies the language of geometry and physics to tradition-al, pre-digital-age materials, carefully engi-neered and meticulously invented to describe and reconfigure spatial relationships between objects. The second installment was a collection of photograms and Polaroids by György Kepes,

from his family’s archives, rarely exhibited before. The display included a selection of ten photograms from the 1970s and two large-for-mat color Polaroids done in collaboration with the Polaroid Corporation in the 1980s. The third installment featured a project by Argentinean artists Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg, concerned with research-ing the cultural impact of a meteorite shower that took place in Argentina 4000 years ago by studying, reconstructing and reinterpreting their visual, oral and written history. The exhibit also presented The Infinity Burial Project, a long-term project by ACT fellow Jae Rhim Lee that proposes alterna-tives for the post-mortem body and features the training of a unique strain of mushroom to decompose human tissue and support new plant growth. The artists exhibited in the show also spoke in ACT’s Monday night lecture series, paired with MIT respondents from a range of disci-plines including planetary science, anthropol-ogy, chemistry and law. The series also included lectures by Florian Dombois, Laurent Grasso and Ricardo Dominguez. The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Tech-nology operates as a critical studies and pro-duction based laboratory, connecting the arts with an advanced technological community. Siemens Stiftung develops exhibitions in the field of contemporary art with a strong the-matic focus on emerging issues of societies today. The collaboration reflects ACT’s mission as an academic and research unit emphasizing artistic practice as knowledge production and dissemination. MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

ARTISTIC RESEARCH/SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHA YEAR-LONG COLLABORATION WITH SIEMENS STIFTUNG, MUNICH

(Top)A replica of a mycology lab for the production of mushrooms to be used in Jae Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Project. (Photo: John Kennard, 2011)

(Bottom)Spherical Vortex by Attila Csörgö. Photo impression of the path of a flashlight bulb made by connecting three separate whirling movements of different velocity. Courtesy of the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin—Ljubljana.

(Right)Photographic documentation of Attila Csörgö’s Untitled (Dodecahedron = Icosahedron). Courtesy of the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin—Ljubljana.

(Lower right)Documentation of the artistic research methods of Faivovich and Goldberg, which include bibliographical inquiry, archival research, oral history and scientific investigations.

Photo: John Kennard, 2011

Two teams of students from SA+P have won first and second place in the New Orleans Chase Competition, an annual contest showcas-ing the talents of college students nationwide in supporting and furthering redevelopment of New Orleans communities. Every year, teams of six to eight students partner with New Orleans-based nonprofits to create feasible, sustainable development pro-posals for local community efforts. Winning proposals garner awards of $25K, $15K or $10K grants to the nonprofit partner from JP Morgan Chase Bank NA, sponsor of the compe-tition. This year’s first place team won a $25K grant for the Mary Queen of Vietnam Commu-nity Development Center to expand healthcare in New Orleans East by building a preventative care clinic on Chef Menteur Highway. The sec-ond place team won a $15K grant for Broad Community Connections to rehabilitate an abandoned school building into a construction and design center. In partnership with Tulane University, Mary Queen of Vietnam CDC is already in the process of constructing a health care facility on Chef Menteur Highway that will meet the needs of the underserved populations of New Orleans East. The first-place proposal in this year’s Chase competition calls for a second phase of that development, a 10,000 square foot new construction project called BRIDGE—a health care facility that would provide preventative care and mental health services to low-income and underserved residents of New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish. The facility would also aim to break down language barriers that

SA+P STUDENTS WIN FIRST AND SECOND PLACE IN CHASE COMPETITIONTHIRD YEAR IN A ROW IN THE WINNERS’ CIRCLE

With the help of its generous alumni, the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Master of Sci-ence in Real Estate Program (MSRED) are poised to move to a new location overlooking Mass Ave in the heart of the School of Archi-tecture + Planning. The new facilities will offer significant advantages for growth of the Center’s work, including further integration of the MSRED program with graduate education in architec-ture, city and regional planning, engineering, transportation and logistics, and the Sloan School of Management. The proposed plan includes a new 66-seat state-of-the-art class-room, office and conference spaces for faculty and staff, a lounge for MSRED students and meeting rooms with flat screen displays and video conferencing technology. ‘The prospect of moving the CRE into a new home at MIT is enormously exciting,’ says Center Chairman Tony Ciochetti. ‘The new space will give the Center room to breathe and expand in the years to come as we build upon the progress we’ve made over the past quarter century.’ To help fund the relocation, the Center was offered a cornerstone pledge from a generous alumnus who wished to remain anonymous. Many more alums from around the world have stepped forward with pledges to match those funds, for which we are deeply grateful. If you would also care to contribute to this impor-tant move, please contact Marion Cunningham at marionoc@mit.edu or Barbara Feldman at btf@mit.edu. Your consideration is much appreciated.

The School of Architecture + Planning has named landscape architect/sociologist Ran-dolph Hester the winner of the 2011 Kevin Lynch Award. The award is presented biannu-ally for outstanding scholarship and/or practice in urban design, planning and landscape design. Hester is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design at UC Berkeley. Dean Adèle Naudé Santos, herself a member of the UC Berkeley architecture faculty before coming to MIT, recalls that ‘Professor Hester’s vivid teaching and community-based professional practice has enabled and inspired Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students for thirty years’. The Lynch award was established in 1988 to honor the memory of Kevin Lynch, an MIT alumnus, urban designer, author and 30-year faculty member in SA+P’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Conferred to individuals or organizations whose work embodies and advances Kevin Lynch’s research as developed in his seminal books, nominees are selected for their plans, books, research, designed projects, media productions, public processes or similar contributions. Hester is a founder of the research move-ment to apply sociology to the design of neigh-borhoods, cities and landscapes. His work extends Lynch’s legacy by focusing on the role of citizens in community design and ecological planning. Professor Hester is a strong advo-cate for community participation in the devel-opment of what he calls ecological democra-cies and sacred landscapes—spaces that grow from true understanding of a local community’s needs and the potential of its resources. According to Amy Glasmeier, head of SA+P’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, ‘The receipt of the Lynch award recognizes Randy Hester’s contribution to the valuation of the citizen’s view of his or her community and how this perspective is a vital component to urban design.’ The award was presented to Hester on April 8, followed by a reception to celebrate MIT’s 150th birthday and the open-ing of the American Planning Association National Conference, taking place in Boston from April 9-11.

With a Little Help From Our Friends…MIT Center for Real Estate Aiming to Move to Central Campus

Kevin Lynch Award Presented to Randolph HesterLandscape Architect/Sociologist Extends Lynch’s Legacy

sometimes prohibit the area’s large Vietnam-ese and Hispanic populations from attaining medical assistance. The idea of linking was a signature theme in the second place group’s proposal to rede-velop the Israel Meyer Augustine school site on South Broad Street as the home of The Priest-ley School of Architecture and Construction, a charter school that serves at-risk students. A permanent home for the Priestley School—on its fourth location in four years—will allow the school to focus on providing a quality educa-tion. The building will also feature a Fabrica-tion Laboratory, or Fab Lab, for high-tech digi-tal fabrication. This is the third year in a row that SA+P team members have been among the compe-tition’s winners. Last year’s second place pro-posal was a plan to transform an abandoned building in the Lower 9th Ward into the neigh-borhood’s sole grocery store. In its previous year, the competition awarded $25K to a pro-posal to begin renovation of the Franz Building to be used as a business incubator and retail shop; that project is now under construction. This year’s first place team included M. Dang, K. Feeney, L. Manville, E. Scanlon, B. Valle, Y-P. Wang and R. Maliszewski; the sec-ond place team included T. Bates, A. Bowman, C. Edwards, A. Emig, A. Martin, A. Xypolia, S. Suri and A. Woods; the executive director of their non-profit partner is alumnus Jeffrey Schwartz (MCP’08). Project advisor for both teams was Karl Seidman.

Landscape architect/sociologist Randolph Hester has authored ten books and numerous articles on citizen participation and socially democratic planning, including Neighborhood Space (1975), Planning Neighborhood Space with People (1982), Community Design Primer (1990) and most recently Design for Ecological Democracy (2006).

‘This is a great way to carry the positive energy from our 25th anniversary celebration forward into the future,’ says Center Chairman Tony Ciochetti.

(Left)Architectural sustainability axon for the proposed preventative care clinic on Chef Menteur Highway, winner of a $25K grant for the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Center.

(Right)Short section of the proposed rehabilitation of an abandoned school building into a con- struction and design center, winner of $15K grant for Broad Community Connections.

Photo: Marcia McNally

Image: Utile (Left) Image: Yan-Ping Wang, (Right) Image: Ann Woods and Sagarika Suri

On the silver and gold anniversaries of their graduation from MIT, we asked our alums from 1986 and 1961 to weigh in. See some of their comments below; much more detail online at SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN.

What are you doing now?

Sara Kontoff Baker (SMVisS’86): Since grad-uation—worked with neon, holographic and plexiglas fountain sculpture as well as 2-D light imaging works, which I’m still exploring. Richard Berg (MArch’86): I have a small architecture firm in Port Townsend WA. Libby Blank (MCP’61): Retired. I was an environmental planner and worked for public agencies. John R. Dale, FAIA (SMArchS’86): I am a Principal, Board Member and National Direc-tor of the K-12 Studio of Harley Ellis Devereaux Architects and Engineers. Jonathan Michael Feldman (MCP’86): I am an Associate Professor at Stockholm Uni-versity. Mark D. Gross (BSAD’78, PhD’86): Profes-sor of Computational Design at Carnegie Mel-lon University. Gamal M. Hamid (SMArchS’86): I head the Faculty of Architecture at Khartoum Uni-versity, Sudan. Ariel Krasnow (MArch’86): Current posi-tion is Director of Green Housing Initiatives for the Supportive Housing Network of New York. Carol Lurie (MCP’86): I am a Senior Envi-ronmental Planner at Vanasse Hangen Brust-lin, working on airport sustainability projects. Jesse Kadekawa Miguel, AIA, NCARB (MArch’86): Currently a Senior Bridge Archi-tect for HNTB Corporation in Kansas City MO. Ahmad Sharatoghlie (MS/MCP/PhD’86): Faculty member, Graduate School of Manage-ment and Economics, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran. Gail Sullivan (MArch’86): I am a founding principal of Studio G Architects in Boston. Dr. Joyce C. Wang (MCP’61): I am an art-ist now after retiring from practicing as an urban and regional planner and an information system analyst.

What is most memorable about your experience at SA+P?

Richard Berg (MArch’86): Taking Maurice Smith’s ‘Small Built Collage’ class and learning about architectural form and field organiza-tion. Jonathan Michael Feldman (MCP’86): When we had a student project which rallied against ‘Condos for the Rich, Low Income Proj-ects for the Poor’ as part of a group student project. Jean Carol MacCarthy Marshall (MCP’61): Opportunities to meet with fellow students from so many varied parts of the world and with such fascinating backgrounds, both aca-demically and socially. Kelly Quinn (MCP’86): Learning how to manage the cold and snow. Getting to know the Boston area, which would become my home of 15 years and is where my children were born. Gail Sullivan (MArch’86): My favorite memories—there are many—are of time in the architecture studios humming with activity in the middle of the night and the breaks we took to dance away the stress with the Talking Heads blaring from a boom box.

Words of wisdom for the Class of 2011?

Mark D. Gross (BSAD’78, PhD’86): Success is when you love your work and have fun doing it. Ignore naysayers. Gamal M. Hamid (SMArchS’86): Let your visions and dreams be as wide as the horizon. Carol Lurie (MCP’86): Success is never being bored at your job. Always try new things. Kelly Quinn (MCP’86): Success is person-al. It encompasses all aspects of your life and depends on what you set as goals. Success can only be defined by you. Dr. Joyce C. Wang (MCP’61): My definition of success is to do your best and not to pay too much attention to the end result because the former is more under your control. MUCH MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

WORD FROM OUR ALUMNION THEIR PAST AND PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE

(Top)Rendering of Portland’s Willamette River Transit Bridge by Jesse Kadekawa Miguel, AIA, NCARB (MArch ’86), currently a Senior Bridge Architect for HNTB Corporation in their headquarters at Kansas City MO.

(Bottom)Dr. Joyce C. Wang (MCP’61) with her family. L to R: Dr. Mark, Dr. Joyce, Dr. Leon, Dr. Cindy and Dr. Frank Wang. Between them, the three children hold six MIT degrees—bachelors, masters and doctorates.

Peter Samton and Jordan Gruzen—partners in the award-winning Gruzen Samton Architects LLP—have been loyal donors to SA+P for over 30 years. Recently, Stephanie Hatch spoke with the two of them about their history, their work, their advice for this year’s graduates and their generosity. Below, some excerpts from that conversation:

Stephanie Hatch: How did the two of you meet, originally?

Peter Sampton: We met at MIT in 1952. We were both in the same freshman class and fraternity and started in the School of Archi-tecture + Planning.

Jordan Gruzen: Like many students in those days, we would spend the whole night in the architecture department. Marvin Goody [MArch’51] would be up at night playing the kazoo. Ralph Dopmeyer [BArch’59] practically lived in the drafting room. Peter was the local disc jockey.

PS: I had a program called Intermezzo and I’d be on late in the evening. We did have long charrettes working through the night.

SH: What was SA+P like in those days?

PS: It was a very international class. One of them was Kyu Lee [BArch’57], pretender to the throne of Korea. Another classmate was from Tehran. When we did work for the Shah we visited him. The internationality of our class opened our eyes to the larger world.

JG: Early on I got that this wasn’t a vocational school, but a school to develop the complete person. I took as many courses in planning as I did in architecture.

PETER SAMTON (BARCH’57) AND JORDAN GRUZEN (BARCH’57) LOYAL PARTNERS, LOYAL DONORS

SH: How did you come to work together?

PS: After MIT we both had Fulbrights; Jordan to Italy and I to France. Afterward we worked in several offices in Boston and New York. I worked for Hugh Stubbins in Boston, Marcel Breuer in New York, and on my own in various competitions. Jordan joined Kelly and Gruzen with his father [B. Sumner Gruzen, BArch’26, MArch’28]. Later I joined the firm as well. We changed our name to Gruzen and Part-ners, then The Gruzen Partnership. In 1986 it became Gruzen Samton, as it is known today.

SH: What’s the basic philosophy of your firm?

JG: It has never been just one or two of us, but a group of partners that work together. We have always felt that this was a collaboration of equals working well together with a com-mon trait of working for excellent design.

SH: You’ve been very generous to SA+P over the years. What motivates you in that?

PS: We have a lot to thank MIT for. Other schools had a set way of looking at the world of architecture, but MIT was interested in bet-tering the world and not necessarily for doing houses for the rich, but to help. MIT is where my professional history began, and those early classes have guided me ever since.

SH: Any advice for new graduates?

JG: Don’t get pigeon-holed and don’t become a narrow technocrat. Take a wide variety of subject matter. Become a very broadly inter-ested human being. If your professional life is to become anything like ours, you will be on community boards, involved in sales, a creative person, involved in social issues.

PS: Getting other people’s thoughts and ideas is important. You don’t design a building in iso-lation. You want to know the thinking of other people and incorporate it in your design work.MUCH MORE: SAP.MIT.EDU/PLAN

(Right)Peter Samton (L) and Jordan Gruzen (R), 2009.

(Below, Top)The Port Imperial Ferry Terminal, a new link for commuters to Manhattan.

(Below, Bottom)MIT, 1957. Clockwise: Art Student Ginger Hoyt; Peter Samton ’57; Richard Langendorf ’57; Kyu Lee ’57; Jordan Gruzen ’57.

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