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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In post-industrial cities, many sites that were once centers of production are now dead zones in the urban fabric. In its fifth year, the Urban SOS competition invited students worldwide to imagine these spaces reinvigorated by new forms of industry appropriate to their modern contexts. The competition calls for cross-disciplinary design responses.

In 30 offices around the world, ArchTam teams have sifted through hundreds of entries representing 123 colleges and universities and selected four finalist teams:

The Echoes of a Lost Landscape, Dudley, UK: Skye Sun, MA Architecture, Royal College of Art, UK

Limburg Dross, Geleen, Netherlands: Erica Chladová, MA Landscape Architecture, TU Delft, Netherlands

Restart Tirupur, India: Michelle Zucker, BA Landscape Architecture, Penn State, USA; Emily Saunders, BA Architecture, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, USA

Teskstiler Kvartal, Copenhagen, Denmark: Chris Dove, PGDip Architecture, Glasgow School of Art, UK

The finalists will present at the Center for Architecture in New York on Thursday, September 4 in a public charrette. A jury of design leaders from ArchTam, Etsy, and Hines will select a winner. Doors open at 5pm and the charrette begins at 6. To attend, please RSVP here.

An exhibition designed by ArchTam’s Los Angeles and New York studios in collaboration with students from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, exploring the themes of this year’s competition will open following the charrette.

Return to Connected Cities in a few weeks for an update on the winner and exploration of the finalist teams’ proposals.

Learn more about Urban SOS here.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is a senior writer and managing editor for the Connected Cities blog.

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It has been about a year now since a new public space called Firm Foundation opened in Banjarmasin – a delta city on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan. Like all of the housing nearby, Firm Foundation is built on stilts over river water. It was a welcome addition to the neighborhood, which, like many other dense riverfront areas of the city, lacks any public space.

Just this past month, our team had a chance to check in on the new space as well as the residents who collaborated on its design. The 100-square-meter space provides a gateway to the area from the water and is intended to bring neighborhood activities to the river. The design takes cues from Indonesian architecture – which uses subtle shifts in floor levels to differentiate space – as well as the small platforms and landings residents construct themselves to access river water. Given the lack of public realm in the area, Firm Foundation is full of children at nearly all hours when school is not in session.

Firm Foundation place-making concept.

Firm Foundation site plan.

We were excited to see that the new public space has also catalyzed investment in the area. Shortly after Firm Foundation opened, the family next door decided to convert half of their house into what is now a thriving food stall. The income from the new enterprise supports the family of five. The idea for the project began with ArchTam’s Urban SOS student design competition. The winning entry in 2011 came from a group of students volunteering with Yayasan Kota Kita (“Our City Foundation”), an Indonesia-based urban development organization. After the team won the competition, ArchTam offered to help sponsor Yayasan Kota Kita to implement their concept.

Firm Foundation waterfront public space. Photo by Bima Pramata.

Now honored with the SEED Excellence in Public Interest Design Award and a Social Impact Design Special Recognition from AIA San Francisco, the project has also resulted in a Social Design Field Guide, which tells the story of how residents participated in the creation of the new space.

The project has become a model for local government in Banjarmasin, showing that even modest investments in the public realm, constructed with the methods and materials residents utilize to build their own neighborhoods, can help to address pervasive and entrenched issues related to livelihoods and water.

On this return visit, the team’s agenda had a new focus. During our past work with the community, we learned that waste management is a top issue for residents. In this area with no road access for trucks, waste typically goes into the river or is burned. While throwing waste in the river is the easiest and most convenient response to the situation, it is destructive for both residents and the environment. It will be a major undertaking to change this behavior and introduce new services, and so the team sought to lay the groundwork by shifting perceptions about waste and the community.

In a series of activities with residents, the team put forward a basic message, which should sound familiar to any designer with an interest in sustainability: “Waste is an asset.” The principle aim was to connect residents to a local “recycling bank.” Through this program, residents earn income in an account in exchange for collecting materials such as plastic bags and cups, cardboard, and bottles. The team organized a training for a group of women from the neighborhood, who then signed up for the bank and made their first deposits.

Recycling bank educational activity. Photo by Daniel Feldman.

Recycling bank deposits book. Photo by Daniel Feldman.

In a separate activity, we worked alongside the area’s children to build two new football goals from salvaged wood, bamboo, and tin as well as plastic bags. While the group found all of the materials lying on the ground and in the water, a local blacksmith lent his shop and tools for the task. Again, the objective was to start to change how residents perceive the waste around them, which has become the status quo of their surroundings.

Children working on football goals constructed of recycled materials. Photos by Daniel Feldman.

Our partners in the local government have an interest in developing a comprehensive strategy for improving this riverfront neighborhood. The challenge of doing so concerns how to introduce services and infrastructure to make living over the water both healthy and dignified. With the support of ArchTam and Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, our team has been working to show how residents might themselves lead this important effort to transform urban systems.

Michael Haggerty is an urban planner and currently a student in the Master in Architecture program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

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