Diana Lind

Life at the Speed of Rail seeks the visions of the architectural design community, planners, graphic designers, artists—anyone who wants to contribute to the discussion surrounding high-speed rail.

At a time when politicians are debating billion-dollar transportation projects, Van Alen Institute is taking the conversation to the public. American culture is driven by colorful narratives and imagery, yet the story of high-speed rail has been told in black and white, with facts and figures (or drab maps and speeding bullet trains). It’s clear a broader vision is needed to add complexity and depth to this national discussion, and Life at the Speed of Rail is designed to offer just that.

Above all, high-speed rail poses an urgent design challenge—one calling for creative solutions at every scale, from the café car to the megaregion. In this Call for Design Ideas, entrants are asked to produce projects and narratives picturing the wide-ranging impacts that a new transportation network will have on the nation’s communities, whether urban or rural, rail-riding or car-centric, heartland or borderland. By collecting these ideas and images of a transformed America—be they specific, pragmatic, or speculative—we’ll better understand the hopes and fears of our current moment and be better equipped to decide whether and how we build this new infrastructure.

EVEN in Philadelphia, with its 40,000 vacant properties and a quarter of its population living below the poverty line, the Kensington neighborhood still shocks. On a frigid afternoon, a prostitute lingers in the shadow of the elevated train tracks, waiting restlessly for customers. Husks of long-closed factories stand amid thigh-high winter wheat. Streams of garbage flow down the streets, as if both the people and the city government had agreed to forsake the effort of propriety.

In recent months, this neighborhood has also been terrorized by a killer who choked and raped his victims in the area’s ubiquitous abandoned houses and vacant lots. If only these deserted places could be charged as accomplices to the so-called Kensington Strangler’s three murders and two sexual assaults, and for aiding and abetting the drug use and prostitution that have caused so many of the neighborhood’s problems. But the empty lots with their discarded furniture and ghetto kudzu and the weather-beaten houses with boarded-up windows won’t be going anywhere soon.

It’s been nearly 30 years since James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published their broken windows theory, positing that the torn social fabric that allows for vandalism also encourages other kinds of crime and disinvestment in a neighborhood. The theory validated the inclination to improve the built environment first, in the hopes that once a sense of confidence has been restored other aspects of an engaged community will follow. And in places on the cusp of gentrification or economic recovery, like certain New York areas in the ’90s, quality-of-life campaigns have been proven to clean up the streets and reduce crime.

Indeed, as gentrification has slowly crept northward in Philadelphia, Kensington residents have gained some hope from a newly branded arts corridor, a few rejuvenated parks and street improvements, all thanks to the efforts of an invaluable local community development corporation. But this scattershot approach has failed to create the kind of holistic change needed in this neighborhood — or its counterparts in St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore.

Many cities have also sought to transform undeveloped lots into green space and urban agriculture. It’s a natural fit and, again, in Kensington a full city block has been converted from an industrial brownfield to an admirably active farm. But land-based strategies that try to reinvent this vacant lot or that blighted ground do little to stem the larger social trends that created the spatial problem in the first place.

Philadelphia, like many Rust Belt cities, was so deeply hurt by the loss of manufacturing that began in the 1950s that it has yet to recover. Gone were the jobs that even high-school dropouts could leverage to achieve stable lives, and with them went the housing stock. Today, we are left with a city where the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education has grown, while more than 60 percent of Philadelphia’s adults read at a sixth grade level or below, creating a miserable mismatch that leaves both employers and the unemployed in need.

That’s why any plan to mitigate the vacant property crisis must not only include innovative urban planning, but also try to restore employment opportunities. We need to literally build jobs on neglected and undeveloped land.

There are a number of organizations in Philadelphia that provide models for dealing with vacancy and joblessness as intertwined problems. For example, the Job Opportunity Investment Network, a public-private partnership, supports workforce training programs that have a hyperlocal impact.

One such program is the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, which provides low-skill residents with intensive education and then matches graduates with jobs at the prestigious universities and medical centers within walking distance of their homes. While the jobs help people leave poverty behind, they ensure that the new wealth created remains in their neighborhoods, helping stabilize these downtrodden communities.

Roots to Re-Entry enrolls convicts in a horticulture vocational and life-skills training program that, upon their release, leads to landscaping jobs. Part of the training includes growing organic food that is donated to Philadelphia’s neediest, showing how this work can nourish impoverished neighborhoods.

Such programs can teach residents the skills they need to reimagine the urban voids they encounter every day. Cities, in turn, should partner with neighborhood groups to determine the most suitable abandoned buildings and lots for development, luring companies and projects that would employ newly retrained residents.

Strategies that deal with vacant spaces by generating new paths to employment aim to do more than fixing broken windows ever could. They seek to change the dynamics of the local economy by creating better communities, not just prettier ones, where abandoned properties are viewed as job sites rather than crime scenes waiting to happen.

Click here for a TedxPhilly talk on dismantling urban highways, November 2011.

Click here for an interview on Wejetset.com, May 2009.

Architectural Record, October 2010

Varied Responses to Vague Theme at the Venice Biennale

By Diana Lind

12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2010
Curated by Kazuyo Sejima | Through November 21, 2010

The international architecture exhibition produced every two years in Venice is a sprawling, humid, one-stop shopping experience. When done right, it’s also exhilarating. Though the strategy of showcasing architecture’s freshest ideas through national pavilions and exhibition galleries has had its drawbacks in the Architecture Biennale’s 30-year history, high-quality submissions help make this year’s show feel curated. The recurring threads of sustainability, adaptive reuse, and traditional building methods — while planning for an uncertain future — give the show an underlying coherence.
This year’s director, Kazuyo Sejima of the Japanese firm SANAA, chose a remarkably enigmatic theme for the Biennale — People Meet in Architecture — which may alienate the audience and architects, but by virtue of its vagueness makes almost every project feel tangentially related to it. Is Sejima celebrating the way architecture provides the place for human exchange, or is she urging architects to refocus their energies on people, rather than architecture’s competing priorities of economic development, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation?

This year’s pavilions and exhibitions address these questions with varying directness. Most of the exhibitions in the voluminous, brick-walled rooms of the Arsenale take a loose interpretation. Olafur Eliasson’s Your Split Second House, a pitch-black room with pulsing stroboscopic lights that illuminate wildly lashing water hoses making violent noise, seems to have no agenda other than to intrigue and delight visitors. Nearby, the German climate-engineering practice Transsolar offers Cloudscapes, where condensed air forms clouds one can walk into by ascending curving ramps.

Other responses to Sejima’s mandate encourage visitors to rethink their experience of architecture and how they see themselves within it. One playful look into this topic can be found in the Romanian Pavilion. With a population density in urban Bucharest of one person per 1,000 square feet, the Romanian team, led by Tudor Vlasceanu, created an all-white rectangle, positioned on a bias within the gallery, which represents the dimensions of this space. Small circles in the sides of the construction give visitors a view inside the box, while a door allows one visitor at a time to experience the interior. Bluntly demonstrated is the voyeuristic nature of architecture and the way in which buildings without people feel meaningless. When no one stands inside the ark, the space looks like a sterile void; with a person within it, the space is suddenly like a highbrow peep show, dramatized by the simple, brightly lit, white aesthetic.

It seemed that Sejima’s firm, SANAA, hoped to elicit similar reflection on how buildings are enlivened by people and vice versa with the 13-minute film, If Buildings Could Talk…. But whereas the Romanian Pavilion achieves this goal with its understatement, the 3D treatment by celebrated director Wim Wenders feels a little overwrought, its interpretation of Sejima’s theme a little too explicit. The film’s voice-over explains how SANAA’S Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the people within it are nourished by each other’s presence, while accompanying footage shows close-ups of people breathing deeply, eyes closed. Buildings should be left to do the talking.

The display at the Kingdom of Bahrain’s debut pavilion, which won the Golden Lion Award, is far more effective at capturing the interchange between people and architecture. Reclaim examines the consequences of rapid urban development on a tiny country that has long lived off fishing and pearling in the sea. Installed in the space are three small wood shacks that once served as fishermen’s shelters. Flat screens within the shacks show footage of fishermen lamenting their loss of connection not only to the sea but to these structures.

Numerous pavilions reassure visitors that architecture is still the best tool for ensuring a more sustainable future, primarily through better, denser urban communities. The U.S. Pavilion, Workshopping, takes a modest look at architecture’s problem-solving capacity. Practices such as Archeworks, which exhibits a mobile agricultural project, and cityLAB, which cleverly shows how to make Los Angeles denser by adding small houses to backyards, points out that entrepreneurialism and experimentation is critical to the sustainability not only of our cities but of the architecture profession. Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, an organizer of the U.S. Pavilion (with 306090, Inc.), chose to also bring in a display of John Portman & Associates’ 40-year-long development of the Peachtree Center in Atlanta. But despite their individual merits, the seven exhibits within the pavilion do not feel conceptually linked.

Vacant NL, the Dutch Pavilion, curated by Rietveld Landscape, includes a picturesque urban blue-foam model balanced on wires strung from the pavilion’s mezzanine level. The exhibition highlights the problem of vacant public buildings in the Netherlands, noting that the Dutch Pavilion is used only three months a year. With regard to the intentions, Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which organized the show, writes, “A good building makes something happen beyond the building itself.” That goes for the Biennales. This Biennale will undoubtedly extend its influence beyond the exhibition itself with the humble reminder that architecture is only as relevant or meaningful as the people and their activities within it.