New Books From Architecture Faculty Cover Cultural, Social, Tech Influences
Three faculty members from NJIT's Hillier College of Architecture and Design (HCAD) published new books this year, covering the intersection of public spaces and technology, millenials in architecture, and the impact of automobiles on American city design.
The books are Urban Machines: Public Space in a Digital Culture, published in February by Gernot Riether and New York Institute of Technology's Marcella Del Signore; Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession, published in June by Darius Sollohub; and American Autopia: An Intellectual History of the American Roadside at Midcentury, being published this month by Gabrielle Esperdy.
"The books address different cultural, social and technological influences on how we think about space. They highlight important shifts in disciplinary attitudes," said Branko Kolarevic, dean of HCAD.
Urban Machines "is about how can we use information technology to bring people into the physical public spaces of cities in the context of having Amazon and big public corporations allowing us to live our life in pajamas," Riether said.
The world's urban centers will double in population by 2050 and are currently growing by 140 people per minute, he said. Public spaces are shrinking relative to that rate. "The question then is how does information technology contribute to such developments and how can we use information technology to improve public space," he suggested, "and we know that there's a relationship between the quality of physical public urban environments and the health of citizens."
Riether observed that before newspapers, radio, and television, people had to enter public spaces to hear news, and that until recently people still had to enter public spaces to make purchases. Now, the web and social media are making both factors obsolete. Many people already work online, so the joy of physical spaces and the outdoors may someday be the only reasons left to go there.
But the public space discussion isn't just about whether to go there, it's about what to do there and how to organize it. Technology in general, and social media in particular, changed how people plan everything in public spaces from picnics to flash mobs to protests. Related technologies such as Wi-Fi in coffee shops and location sharing on Google Maps also changed how we use public spaces for communication, both online and off.
The book has three parts. Parts one and two cover recent technology history and interesting examples of information technology in public spaces. Part three consists of interviews with architects, artists, and planners.
Riether said he feels NJIT's best public spaces are in the Central King Building, which was a former Newark public high school renovated by NJIT and reopened in spring 2017. "I love how the stairs create the possibility to enter the building on two levels and at the same time create a space that invite people to occupy. Double height spaces in the interior of the building are spatially connecting these two floors, creating a diagonal and vertical transparency that invites you in. There is a great dialogue between the old and the new that articulates through material choices," he said.
Sollohub, in Millennials, said he found inspiration to write a book while serving on a pedagogy committee in 2011 and hearing the late Richard Sweeney, an NJIT librarian, speak to the group. He realized there was a cottage industry of writing social criticism about millennials and applied that to his expertise in architecture.
What remains to be seen is how millennial-designed smart buildings will evolve, Sollohub noted. "We can have a society of incredibly sophisticated building types," he said. "Architectects in my generation learned to design a building and then move on," while new tech-centric buildings may keep the architect involved indefinitely and could even start coming with warranties.
"There's so much bad commentary about millennials being narcissistic, entitled, lazy, which I don't take to be true," he explained. Instead he sees the generation as being collaborative and practical, while focusing on civic needs and being unafraid of using new technology. They also prefer working at an accelerated pace and they're impatient with old protocols, both of which are attributes that could kickstart architectural fields, he said. Gamification, social networking, and online learning are other differences in how millennial architects can go about mastering their craft.
Building designers will use different tools than their predecessors. Sollohub said research predicts that by 2030 half of the world's draftspeople, currently working with CAD tools, will be replaced entirely by software. He cited a Bay Area startup called Modumate that's run by a millennial CEO working on software that automates CAD drawings based on designs, just as existing software already does for web designers, for example. An official of the San Francisco start-up said their software uses AI technology derived from videogames to adjust building styles on-the-fly based on a designer's preferences.
Sollohub said he wonders if the trend will come full-circle and there will someday be homes planned by artificial intelligence software which in turn influence design styles. The future role of the architect in this transformation is tantalizing for some, he said, yet unnerving to others.
How we all planned our buildings around car life, and its consequences for our way of life, are Esperdy's focus in American Autopia.
When considering how the impact of cars on buildings and infrastructure is reflected in architectural and urban discourse, "In architecture and urban discourse, it's as if it just happened, and then suddenly in the mid-1960s everyone started complaining about it," said Esperday, who lives in New York and gets around sometimes on mass transit and other times in her Mini Cooper. "I was particularly interested in what happened between the Model T rolling off the assembly line and that moment in the 1960s."
Rather than being a conventional history book, Esperdy looks at the ideas that surrounded American car culture and critically examines the notion of Utopia, or striving for perfection in places shaped by the automobile. She started working on the book with the belief that this period was over, but then realized we're in a transition to the next stage as society focuses on autonomous vehicles, electric power, and ridesharing. "We are in essence opening up the next chapter of that Utopian pursuit," she said. "I don't think we will ever get there, not while we prioritize what is in essence a privately held means of transportation."
If her car was a time machine, then Esperdy would like to travel back to the start of the interstate highway system and advocate for public transit lanes along the same corridors, paid for by gasoline taxes used to find all forms of transportation, not just the car. She's also like to avoid institutionalized racism that led to highway locations. If that could all have happened, "We would live in an entirely different country," she noted.
The concerns of architects and planners at the time were largely ignored, she said. "There was a perception that the places we were building outside of cities only needed to be responsive to the automobile, and that's really problematic."