Jacinta McCann, global lead for ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice and president of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, kicked off the discussion by showing the experience of different cities – Sydney and its Opera House (a single object); Doha’s Marina Bay (a cacophony of objects where ArchTam is now designing a public realm to stich it all together); and New York’s Rockefeller Center with the art of Jeff Koons. Iconography can come in many different shapes and sizes, Jacinta said.

Ross Wimer, Americas lead for ArchTam’s Architecture practice (pictured above), explored the idea that a building could be iconic not just on the outside but on the inside. Drawing on the example of a tower project he has worked on in China, Ross showed how internal workings and innovations in sustainability and structure can speak just as powerfully about a city’s aspirations –  if not more so, in fact – than its striking profile in the skyline. Ross talked more about this in a recent podcast.

Stephen Engblom, Americas lead for ArchTam’s Design + Planning practice, took a historical view of iconography. From the Victorian train stations of the industrial era, to the towers of the roaring twenties in America and today’s Gulf States and China, iconography follows the money so to speak. We can trace a direct correlation between waves of economic progress and architectural expression. The latest evidence of this, Stephen noted, is the recent trend of tech companies commissioning grand headquarters projects by starchitects, a phenomenon best reported by architecture critic Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair. There’s Apple and Foster, Facebook and Gehry. Twitter’s headquarters remains one of the last holdouts of urban grit in San Francisco.

Bill Hanway, global lead for ArchTam’s Architecture practice, conjectured that perhaps what’s most important to a city is not an iconic building or even an iconic skyline, but great systems underpinning it all. Bill cited the example of our work as masterplanners since 2005 for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. There, striking structures such as Zaha Hadid’s Swimming Pool, Anish Kapoor’s Orbit, or Hopkins’ Velodrome are carefully knit together into a cohesive park with new transport interchanges: the centerpiece of a powerful legacy plan that emulates London’s traditional village patchwork pattern, far more iconic overall than any of the individual buildings.

Susan Szenasy, publisher of Metropolis, agreed with Bill’s assertion, noting that many cities suffer too many little silos. Paula Deitz, editor of the Hudson Review and landscape architecture critic, asked if this question is something more and more cities around the globe are asking themselves as big challenges like climate change would seem to dwarf any particular iconic building. Other attendees included writers and editors from The Architects’ Newspaper and Architect Magazine, as well as representatives from the Van Alen Institute, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Institute for Public Architecture, the New York Mayor’s office, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

Balancing the need for iconic architecture with the bigger picture of urban systems and challenges is an issue that ArchTam grapples with in its work with cities around the world. There’s probably no more striking example of architectural firepower than Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. There a cultural district is under construction that will feature a particular intensity of iconography: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Norman Foster’s Sheikh Zayed Museum, Zaha Hadid’s Opera House, Tadao Ando’s Maritime Museum, and Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi. ArchTam has carefully masterplanned Saadiyat so that these jewel-like icons can shine, but are firmly embedded into the urban fabric of Abu Dhabi. It’s a ‘master-architect’ role that requires flexibility grounded in respect for the power of striking architecture while with an eye to the whole urban puzzle. Abu Dhabi is a forward-thinking emirate trying to make a statement about the power of culture in a region fraught with conflict: a line-up of beautiful temples to knowledge and expression by architects who are diverse in both architectural style and cultural origin. Criticised by some as extravagant, it might just be an iconography that its time and place needs, considering the regional context.

Saadiyat Island Cultural District.

In Cambridge, UK, we are undertaking a similar role as our masterplan for the University of Cambridge’s Northwest extension enters its first development phase. We have helped to assemble a cracker-jack team of some of the UK’s and Europe’s most interesting architects to design new residential and academic clusters in what will be the largest extension for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities. The project, for which ArchTam has been shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival Future Projects award (winner to be announced this week in Singapore), brings together a coalition of architects: Alison Brooks, The AOC, Cottrell Vermeulen, Maccreanor Lavington, Marks Barfield, Mecanno, Mole Architects, MUMA, Pollard Thomas Edwards, RH Partnership, Stanton Williams, Wilkinson Eyre, and Witherford Watson Mann, with ArchTam as landscape architects as well. The architecture will be refined, a touch eclectic but very much in the spirit of European city-making that makes places like Cambridge so special.

New residential courtyard in Cambridge University’s northwest extension.

In contrast to Saadiyat, it is a subtler iconography, but iconic nonetheless. Given Cambridge’s centuries of heritage and status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, new architectural interventions must be deftly handled and delicately conducted to respect what is a memorable place. Each architect will have her or his own distinct expression, and the result will be contemporary. Centuries from now, it will be the early 21^st century layer in the rich Cambridge texture that includes the Victorian, Georgian, Elizabethan and Medieval. Taken together, these make one iconic place, especially when one takes the long view of history.

That’s why in retrospect, the right question probably isn’t do our cities need more icons. It’s more multifaceted than that. Iconography is about symbolism and aspiration, and these are at the heart of architectural expression and civic building. As urbanists, we should be questioning not whether we need more icons – our cities thrive on them – but how can they be better and more relevant to the people they are intended to inspire? Are we designing the right kinds of icons? Can a city as a whole be an architectural icon?

Daniel Elsea (daniel.elsea@archtam.com) is creative director for ArchTam’s Buildings + Places group.

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In the design world, competitions are a dime a dozen. As Rem Koolhaas has lamented, design is the only profession where so much energy is spent on work that exists only in books or blogs, the fruit of long under- or unpaid hours that may look beautiful and inspire the mind, but usually remains unbuilt.

It’s against this backdrop of misspent though admirable effort that ArchTam organizes the Urban SOS open ideas competition. Urban SOS is probably where we get closest as a company to articulating a point of view about the design profession (and process). We believe passionately that successful design is not the purview of just a single discipline or frame of mind, which is why we use this competition to instill a more broad-minded approach among the emerging generation of design talent. To win, a beautiful design response or a clearly rational plan isn’t enough. Submissions are judged by their creativity and feasibility and crucially, they are evaluated by how cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional they are.

Embracing Rem’s critique of the unrealized competition, we have also now committed ourselves to helping advance the wining scheme, so at least one project isn’t done simply to line one’s portfolio. The 2011 Urban SOS: Water competition’s winning design of waterfront spaces in the slums of the Indonesian city of Banjarmasin (pop. 625,000) has been built with assistance from ArchTam. We’re hoping that this year’s winning project in the Tamil city of Tirupur (pop. 445,000) will soon be as well. Proposed by Michelle Zucker, a landscape architecture student at Penn State and Emily Saunders, an architecture student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Restart Tirupur imagines a semi-formal community independent of globalized industries and cycles of production in previously vacated textile clusters that for several years have lay dormant.

The 2014 Urban SOS brief – Towards a New Industry – asked design students to tackle an economic problem. Student teams were asked to propose design projects that re-animate an abandoned or underutilized industrial space or place of production within a city. Responses could range from macro to micro and had to pair a design response with a commercial awareness. As an interdisciplinary practice engaged with shaping cities around the world, this topic at the intersection of design and economics is of particular interest to us.

Restart Tirupur takes a global problem and gives it a very local response that is easily scale-able.

Michelle and Emily’s vision for restarting Tirupur will provide workers forced to migrate to the city from the nearby countryside with the tools to obtain clean water, self-grown food and native materials for building resilient shelters. It’s a global problem that needs a very local solution. The boom of the textile industry in Tirupur has devastated the environment via discharge of effluents into the city’s Noyyal River. In 2011, due to lobbying from farmers in the area, all 729 textile clusters were closed down and prevented from reopening until sustainable means of processing effluents were implemented. Michelle and Emily’s scheme provides a plan to start reopening them but with a new economic and social function. Their project reorients the textile clusters as water filter systems and start-up community factories. They identified a pilot project, which can be realized in cooperation with the group Potters for Peace.

Michelle and Emily were one of four teams presenting before the jury and a packed hall at the Center for Architecture on September 4, 2014. Three other finalists joined them to battle it out for the top spot:

• Erica Chladová, a landscape architecture postgraduate at TU Delft, who proposed a renewable bio-mass landscape on the site of a Dutch state coal mine that is to be closed in the run-up to the Netherlands’ 2050 transition to a carbon neutral energy system;
• Skye Sun, an architecture MA candidate at the Royal College of Art, who proposed to take a series of now defunct limestone mine tunnels in the English Black Country city of Dudley and turn them into a solemn place of burial as Britain will soon run out of space to lay its dead to rest;
• Chris Dove, an architecture postgraduate at the Glasgow School of Art, who proposed to make right the overzealous slum clearance of previous generations in a post-industrial Copenhagen block with a design that was beautifully and artfully presented.

Three weeks ago in Beijing, one of 30 ArchTam juries.

All four finalist schemes were incredibly strong and their designers should be proud of their achievement in getting to the top four. They emerged from hundreds of projects that were reviewed by multi-disciplinary juries in 30 ArchTam offices/studios around the world, from Abu Dhabi to Pretoria. Over one week in August, the groups met in a unique global ‘super-jury’ consisting of more than 250 ArchTam designers, planners and engineers who whittled the entries down to the final four.

Those four teams were then flown to New York to present in an evening charrette before a finalist jury of my colleagues, architects Bill Hanway and Ross Wimer, landscape architects Joe Brown and Jacinta McCann, urban designer Stephen Engblom and civil engineer Jane Chmielinski, ArchTam’s chief operating officer. They were joined by Jeffrey Johnson, director of the China Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Nellwyn Thomas of Etsy and Alexis Michael of property developer Hines.

Re-inspired as usual by the conclusion of our fifth annual Urban SOS program, we look forward to next year and thank everyone for their involvement.

Daniel Elsea (daniel.elsea@archtam.com) is creative director for ArchTam’s Buildings + Places group.

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The birthplace of Taiwan, Tainan has long been the island’s historic heart, bringing together together aboriginal Taiwanese, Chinese, Dutch and Japanese cultural influences, rich in the spiritual traditions of Chinese folk religion, Confucianism and Buddhism. Established as a trading port in the early 1600s with Chinese and Dutch colonial settlement and later an important centre in the Japanese era, Tainan today bears many of the marks of these centuries of influence. It is a centre of spirituality and scholarship with an urban core that is home to more than 50 temples, including the oldest continuously existing Confucian Temple in the world, making the city virtually unique in the Chinese-speaking world in terms of built heritage and religious architecture. Tainan is the seat of the elite National Cheng Kung University with a beautiful urban campus of colonial colonnades and striking playing fields under the protective shade of ancient banyan trees. Its handsome colonial-era city hall is now home to the Taiwanese National Museum of Literature. There is a rich food culture here and a tradition of artisanal agriculture that are intimately tied to the land in and around the city.

This is a place ready for people to come home to, but it is a relatively low-profile place despite being blessed with so many treasures; and as with many cities around the world, it is facing challenges of how to stay relevant and resilient. How can Tainan leverage Taiwan’s re-orientation towards a knowledge economy? How can it attract and retain the talent needed to start new businesses and create new industries? As a low-lying seaside city in a sub-tropical climate, how will Tainan adapt to climate change impacts and do its part to mitigate global warming? How can Tainan capitalise on the rich cultural texture that makes it so special, yet is largely unknown to the outside world, and do so without harming what makes it so beautiful in the first place? Tainan faces a critical window of time to get right the answers to these challenges, but we are seeing firsthand a myriad of opportunities for this hidden gem to shine. We believe a bright future is Tainan’s for the taking. We’ll be posting some more updates on the progress here on this blog and the results of our final study here.

Daniel Elsea (daniel.elsea@archtam.com) is creative director for ArchTam’s Buildings + Places group, is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Jigsaw City: ArchTam and the Asian New Town Now,” and is currently a post-graduate in sustainable urban development at the University of Oxford.

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In Hong Kong, largely by accident, urban planning policy has created a low CO₂e model. This is a dense place. According to the Hong Kong government, there are 6,620 persons per km², with density reaching up to 56,200/km² in one district. Hong Kong’s seven million plus people are packed into just 25% of its land area (1,104 km²) with 40% of land remaining protected green space. Hong Kong achieves this by being highly vertical (thanks to more than 7,400 skyscrapers), and the average Hongkonger lives small: the average size of a new home there is 484 ft². Compare that with the US, where the average size of a new home is nearly four times larger: 2,164 ft²

Hongkongers may live small, but they are also comparatively wealthy and live longer. GDP per capita is roughly the same between Hong Kong and the US, and a Hongkonger manages to live more than four years longer. The table below illustrates that you can be affluent and live on a lot less. There is a very strong correlation between new home size and carbon emissions.

Despite being at a similar economic level to a typical American, a typical Hongkonger’s carbon footprint is 68% less than that American’s. When one assesses home size, the percentage disparity is even more pronounced – the size of a new home in Hong Kong is 78% smaller than an American one.

New York, one of the densest places in America, is a domestic outlier in terms of CO₂e per capita, average new single family home size, and proportion of the population that uses public transport. A New Yorker’s carbon footprint is 59% less than an average American’s; his home is on average 40% smaller; and the share of New Yorkers using public transport to get to work is more than 13 times the average for the wider country – all this despite the fact that a New Yorker is on average much wealthier than the typical American and lives longer.

The lesson here is that this model of urbanization—based on a smaller home size that consumes less energy and can accommodate a population much closer together and to their places of employment and leisure—significantly lowers individual carbon footprint without burdening individual economic level and quality of life (in fact quite the opposite).

The Hong Kong pattern of urbanization is further underpinned by significant investment in a connected public transport system that is based on the idea of overlapping uses spatially. The expansion of Hong Kong’s urban footprint in the last several decades has been intimately tied to transit-oriented development. As its population expanded from the original urban core of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, new urbanization in outlying areas of the territory has followed a linear pattern that is set by the rail tracks laid down by Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation, the primary rail provider. Each of these new towns is very efficiently tied to the rest of the city through a system that results in more than 90% of the population using public transport every day. Admittedly, the character of Hong Kong’s urban form – something that looks a bit like a messier version of the Corbusian ideal – is not to everyone’s taste, but it no doubt is a pretty efficient way of ensuring that wealthy, urbanizing societies keep their carbon emissions down.

Daniel Elsea is creative director for ArchTam’s Buildings + Places group, is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Jigsaw City: ArchTam and the Asian New Town Now,” and is currently a post-graduate in sustainable urban development at the University of Oxford.

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