News Roundup

New York's Lovely Abandoned Subway Station (The Atlantic Cities)
In his new book, Straphanger, Taras Grescoe writes of an abandoned "ghost station" beneath City Hall in New York. Grescoe gets a privileged tour of the station on a promise not to reveal which train still passes along its tracks to this day.

The Bronx Wants a 200,000 Square Foot Rooftop Farm (Treehugger)
If the City gets its way, the Bronx will soon be home to one of the biggest rooftop farms in the world: It will cover an astounding 200,000 square feet. That's 4.6 acres. The spot is an active warehouse in Hunts Point, an enormous food distribution center where 115 private wholesalers sell food that reaches 23 million people in the metropolitan area.

San Francisco’s Parklets Transform Parking Spaces Into Urban Oases (Inhabitat)
With streets and other paved surfaces making up a full quarter of San Francisco’s land area, reclaiming wide zones of wasted space at curbsides, intersections, alleys, and other spots is a key motivation behind the growing parklet program.

Bike Shares: A Global Trend (Sustainable Cities Collective)
In cities across the United States, bicycles are becoming an increasingly popular form of urban transportation. A survey of 55 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. found that bicycle commuting rates increased, on average, 70 percent between 2000 and 2009.

A Mobile Library for Artists (The Atlantic Cities)
Books are difficult objects. They are heavy, awkward, difficult to move, easily damaged (by light, water, the human touch), and yet easy to steal. All of these make the task of distributing and sharing books more difficult, but the challenges grow exponentially when there is no building to facilitate this. One solution is the A47 Mobile Library.

Are Smarter Cities the Key to Social Mobility? (Sustainable Cities Collective)
An interview with Chris Cooper, IBM UK Architect for Smarter Cities

The Case for Public Transportation, in Infographic Form (The Atlantic Cities)

Architects Battle to Rule the Roost in "Raise the Roost" Design Competition

The Rainier Beach Urban Farm really went to the birds this weekend, and some lucky chickens will be getting fancy new digs.

It was Seattle's very first chicken coop design and build competition. Seattle Tilth, Architecture for Humanity and Architects Without Borders teamed up for this event, aimed at inspiring people interested in raising urban chickens. All the proceeds went to Seattle Youth Garden Works, who help introduce homeless and under served youth to urban agriculture.

VIA took part in the event; to see how we did, read the full article here.

Capturing More Value In Office Design Through Co-Working Strategies

By Kristin Jensen, Interior Designer
VIA Architecture 


The transition from closed-door offices and cubicles to shared or flex office space is a well-established trend. Even now, scooters and skateboards demonstrate the radical change in how people move within office spaces.  Today’s office space is embracing individual identities and social communication as a means to enhance worker productivity and satisfaction. Regardless of the change, space planning remains conscious of capital and operational costs.  So, where do we look for the next trends in space planning that will continuously improve returns per square foot and retain a quality workforce.

Appricot Headquarters, photo credit: Igor

As businesses drew a deep breath and plunged into the economic downturn, the balance of operational costs and key employee retention took on a new level of importance.  As reductions in headcount continued, many quality people started over, started lower, or stayed home, and every home felt at risk across the board.  Whether an employee made the cut or not, we have all had an opportunity to assess our work/life balance and the value of time at home and at the office.  It is here in this collective experience that we should look for the next trends in office space.

LOOP Creative Agency, photo credit: Michael

With the promises of rewards for tireless hours in the office no longer abundant, trend makers amongst their working peers have rediscovered the value of managing their home life during business hours, and dismissing the value of endless meetings.  In short, the next trend is to make the office environment an extension of home life- and the home an extension of the workplace.  These extensions will be non-intrusive and individually managed, and both the definitions of home and office environments include activities in and out of the individual’s immediate work area.

Oxigen, designer: Oxigen with Woods Bagot, photo credit: David Sievers

By way of example, let’s look at the successful trend of “Hoteling” office space for mobile workers.  Hoteling (the practice of providing office space to employees on an as-needed basis,  reducing the amount of physical space that a business needs, lowering overhead cost while ensuring every worker access to office resources when necessary) has met the need of both efficient space planning and a mobile workforce within the footprint of an office tenant.  Hoteling incorporates various strategies in wiring, storage, and location to create “lite,” unassigned desks in a constrained and secure office area.  At its core, hoteling gets more out of the tenant’s secured area. 


In the age of the mobile internet, developers should look to what mobile employees do when they leave the secured office environment, while continuing to work collaboratively.  Outside of the office, the next drop down space is generally uncontrolled and unsupervised by the employer. Where do they go? Are they in cafés, at kitchen tables, at parks, on couches, or in airport lounges?  Mobile workers can surprise us with how they stay connected and productive.  Ubiquitous Internet and cloud storage allow mobile workers to personalize their most productive work-life space during all hours of the day.

The next evolution of hoteling may look more like “co-working” spaces that incorporate common areas and retail spaces within a development.   This evolution is the idea that “semi-secure” tenant space, common areas, retail, and amenity spaces can, within a development, be opened to multiple tenants and visitors.   Food service space in commercial districts is already a mobile worker offload to office square footage.  The opportunity is to satisfy tenants' needs and reduce operational costs within their primary footprint. Developers can design retail and common areas that offer productive co-working space.  The financial opportunity for developers is to use interior design investment to compete for today’s bottom-line conscious tenants, while appealing to a balanced lifestyle.  Like co-working spaces, developers may also be able to sell memberships to multiple tenants into co-working square footage, even to their authorized vendors and guests.  A fully integrated design may encourage a café tenant to have its service counter open to an airport lounge style work area that is accessible to member tenants.

Makers, a co-working space in Seattle; design + photo credit: Caitlin Agnew & Lana Morisoli

Unlike supervised office environments, co-working spaces also give mobile workers a sense of permission to access virtual services and cloud computing to stay connected to both work and home life throughout the day.   The reality is that mobile workers have moved beyond costly wires and security measures; embracing their reality is an opportunity to bring them back into leased spaced.  For example, the advent of “print to cloud” means that IP addresses to printers and their placement become as accessible as Wi-Fi hot spots; copier/printers with scan and send functions nearly eliminate mailing interoffice documents; IP connected televisions eliminate paper flyer announcements; online shopping, online banking, and web managed home delivery services like Amazon Fresh allow spouses to contribute to home management from anywhere; and downtown lunch rush restaurants now use phone and web apps to take orders for instant pick-up of food.   While buzzwords like “collaboration,” “social communication,” and “mobile worker” have pushed the concept of open office environments, the next trend is allowing workers and mobile workers to clear their mind of personal agendas while at work or on the road within office buildings, without having to leave the immediate area.

Google UK Campus, designer: Jump Studios

I want to know from readers: how do you envision integrating home and work into an office environment in order to allow individuals to personalize their space while managing their life balance?  For developers, the net result is a benefit to tenants who can capture more of their employee behaviors related to home and co-working within the total building footprint and immediate surrounding areas.  Developers don’t need to invest in services that are capital intensive when they stop to consider the walkability of nearby amenities that aid in the promotion of a healthy urban environment.

Monday News Roundup

Happy sunny summer Monday! Here's a quick roundup of a couple of last week's highlights:


Crochet Playgrounds by Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam (Colossal)
In the mid 1990s Japanese artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam was showing a large scale crochet artwork at an art gallery when two rambunctious children approached her and asked if the sculpture, resembling a colorful hammock, could be climbed on.

eVolo Announces Their 2013 Skyscraper Competition (Inhabitat)
The 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition is now open for business and looking for the most outrageous, exceptional, unusual, and forward-thinking designs out there.

Meet Seattle's 'Baby London Eye' (The Atlantic Cities)
Seattle's newest attraction, a Ferris wheel known as the "Great Wheel," officially debuted last month.

A Very Architizer-Canada Day (Architizer)
Last week, we wished a Happy Canada Day to our neighbors to the north! To celebrate, Architizer compiled the top ten projects to have come out of the Canadian architectural world in the last few years.

Green-Roofed Shelter is Urban Curbside Lounge for Paris (Web Urbanist)
JCDecaux, the North American company that invented the ‘street furniture’ concept of outdoor advertising, collaborated with designer Mathieu Lehanneur to create a cool green-roofed rest stop for pedestrians in Paris.

Monday News Roundup

Happy Canada Day!

Below, you'll find a list of some of the more interesting bits and pieces of news, art, and architecture from the last couple weeks:


How the Feds Are Building More Sustainable Cities (The Atlantic Cities)
In recognition of the three-year anniversary of the federal partnership’s formation, the three agencies have released a progress report, Three Years of Helping Communities Achieve Their Visions for Growth and Prosperity. The facts they have assembled are very, very impressive.

Human Nature: Jason deCaires Taylor’s Submerged Figurative Sculptures Form Thriving Artificial Reefs (Colossal)
Artist Jason deCaires Taylor has become famous for his immense underwater installations in locations off the coast of Mexico, the Bahamas, and the West Indies where he uses eco-friendly concrete sculptures specifically designed to harbor life. The artificial reefs are photographed and filmed in numerous stages from the moment they are first submerged to months and years later after thriving ecosystems form within his artwork.

5th Annual Creative Spaces Event (Arch Daily)
The fifth anniversary of Montreal's Creative Spaces summer event highlights the creation of a pedestrian mall on St. Catherine, between St-Hubert and Papineau streets.

What if bus stops were designed as if bus stops really mattered? (Switchboard)
There are still bus stops that are no more than a sign on a pole, although many now have some form of shelter from wind and rain, and some have sophisticated service information posted, the most advanced ones with real-time updates.  But there is still a sense of functionality about most bus stops, whose design and amenities tend to lack imagination. That is now changing in Paris, where the RATP (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), the city’s dominant transit agency, is piloting “l'arrêt de bus du future” -- or bus stop of the future -- for five months at a stop outside the Gare de Lyon.

Sydney Builds Separate Bike Lanes, Ridership Skyrockets 82% (Treehugger)
New research on cycling habits is in from Sydney, and it turns out that city dwellers are less likely to start biking if they're afraid a lumbering SUV might crush their back tire or that errant car doors will send them over their handlebars. Who knew?

Three Great Stop Motion Shorts Not to be Missed (Colossal)

Company peddles bike helmet vending machines in Vancouver (The Vancouver Courier)
The company negotiating with the city to implement a massive public rental bicycle system next spring plans to sell helmets in vending machines to accommodate the province's mandatory helmet laws.

Milestone for 4 World Trade (Arch Daily)
Last week, the final steel beam rose 977 feet into the air and was placed atop 4 World Trade Center – the 72-story tower designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.

Imagine: A pedestrian mall down the middle of the eight-lane Granville Bridge? (The Vancouver Sun)
It may never come to pass, but an artist’s concept of a wide tree-lined pedestrian mall down the middle of the eight-lane Granville Bridge has become the signature idea for how Vancouver wants to modernize its transportation system.

Rebuilding downtown from scratch: striking images and a video from Christchurch (Switchboard)
Christchurch, a city of about 367,000 people (460,000 including the near surrounding area) and New Zealand’s second largest, has been forced to reconceive its downtown and many neighborhoods following a disastrous series of serious earthquakes beginning in 2010.

A New York Loft That Prizes LEGOs As Much As Mies’s Barcelona Chair (Architizer)
If there’s anything to be learned from May's record-breaking 105 feet-tall LEGO tower in Seoul, it’s that LEGOs can, in fact, be used to build. Case in point, the  Marks/Caride Residence, a recently renovated Chelsea loft that features a staircase with railing made from nearly 20,000 LEGO blocks.