AMOA ( Austin Museum of Art) recently hosted their Art Trek event at the  Edward Durrell Stone house in Dallas. Built in the 50′s and lovingly restored to its full glory by our gracious host. This modernist residence was modeled after the US Embassy in Delhi, India.

It looks like there was an interesting late submission to the Re:Vision Dallas competition by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, which seems to address a lot of the ideas we were hoping to integrate into our own proposal; there’s extensive green space, an attempt to create a diversity of experience and address the issue of verticality, and a decent amount of systems thinking.  They seem to be using fairly well-understood systems (greywater treatment, PV panels, green roofs etc), but it’s at least nice to see more people presenting these elements as a central aspect of a design proposal.

More eye candy after the break

From worldchanging:

Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.

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In his recent Long Now talk (MP3 here), economist Paul Romer tells a story. In the early 1970s, China was stuck in a societal inertia after the death of Mao. However, right next door, Hong Kong (administered by the British) was a thriving city-state based on trade and innovative manufacturing. Chinese leaders decided to see if they could copy Hong Kong’s success on a limited scale, and set up four “Special Economic Zones” where foreign investment was encouraged and capitalism was unconstrained. The experiments were so successful economically that their rules soon more or less became the guiding principles of the Chinese miracle. As Romer says, “Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history.”

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

There’s also an interesting comment from Sean FitzGerald:

And now I realise why I find WorldChanging so frustrating.

The biggest barriers to social innovation are values, belief systems and world views.

Until you have a transformation of consciousness at all levels of society – individual, community, business and government – those institutional, legal and regulatory barriers will stay in place.

WorldChanging keeps pumping out innovative technologies, processes and systems and all I can think is: “Great, but it will never be implemented in time to save civilisation unless *we* change.”

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I keep hearing from the technological optimists “All we need to do is swap out oil-based transport for electrified transport” or “All we need to do is retrofit our urban environments into paragons of sustainability” or now, “All we need to do is change the regulations that are holding innovation back”.

But it’s not “All we need to do.” You skip right over the very important step of having to change people first (or concurrently, at least). Until we change people’s values the latest, greatest sustainability-enhancing widget, technological breakthrough or grand social plan will stay on the drawing board.

To which ‘Brad’ comments:

True, Sean, the institutional, legal and regulatory barriers Alex describes derive from values, belief systems and world views, and it is those that need to change.However, in order to change those, you need to be able to propose a constructive vision based on differing world views by way of example.

Which gets to the heart of why this seems like an interesting idea to me; it allows the development of new models.  I see a lot of potential pitfalls here, most of the ‘restrictive’ building codes cities adopt are responding to catastrophic failures in the past – throwing these out opens the door to all sorts of unanticipated consequences.  The chinese free zones that are mentioned had one enormous benefit; they were duplicating a model which had already been tried and shown to work.

There seems to be a revival of residential developments with a collection of houses with notable designers and architects, some complementary or even intentionally provocative. Starting with the “Commune by the Great Wall” outside beijing in the late 90′s, and the Sagaponac project in the Hamptons. There is currently a supersized version of this concept being realized in Ordos, Mongolia, curated by Ai Wei-Wei and Herzog & De Meuron.

This type of development could probably be traced back to the 21-architect Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart for the Deutsche Werkbund, which Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier both contributed to in 1927.

This is an interesting iteration of that idea on the Northeast coast of Taiwan with 10 international architects and 10 local architects, including Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, Toshiko Mori….etc.

The Urban Reserve project in Dallas is probably the closest thing in Texas which approximate this development typology. Bercy Chen Studio won 1st place in an international open competition for a prototype design at Urban Reserve. The Murphy Residence was a subsequent design for a site at Urban Reserve. There are also other highly refined examples of modern residential architecture currently being realized by Todd Williams & Billie Tsien of New York, and Max Levy of Dallas, just to name a few.

It is interesting to note however that in general at the Urban Reserve there is a preference for restrained, tried and true modernism versus a more thought provoking or exuberant exploration of 21 century modernism. The Sagaponac project turned out to be a very curious mix with established names like Lord Richard Rogers versus younger talents such as Marwan Al Sayed ( with a very poetic proposal, we need more guys like him in America ).

Texas has proven to be a surprising (for people outside of Texas) but consistent incubator for great modern architecture. If one look at some of the most relevant projects in the last quarter century internationally, chances are the architects had at some point earlier in their career practiced and tested their ideas in Texas. Consider I M Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, his activity in Dallas includes the Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas City Hall, & Fountain Place Tower.

There are also tragic losses for Texas, considering Herzog & de Meuron’s failed attempt for the Blanton Art Museum. Even though they went on to complete one of the most notable modern wonder of our time, the Beijing Olympic Bird’s Nest Stadium, and museums for London, San Francisco, Minneapolis & Miami.

Considering Steven Holl’s Eco landmark Linked Hybrid in Beijing, and the new Copenhagen Gateway project in Denmark, one could see the conceptual germination in his proposed Spiroid Sectors for Dallas-Fort Worth from 20 years ago, ( as well as the Spatial Retaining Bar, which still hold great relevance for American cities, and deserve to be re-examined). Holl’s first major residential commission which demonstrated his poetic mastery with space was the Stretto House by Turtle Creek in Dallas.

This brings up the painful realization that Dallas/Fort Worth has left the other Texas cities in the dust in terms of their commitment to great architecture. Take Houston for example, with the exception of the MFA’s recent Rafael Moneo addition, and the current Asia Society building by Yoshio Taniguchi, there is disproportional paucity of quality architecture for America’s 4th largest city. Compare the wealth of today’s Houston to Chicago a century ago, Architecturally Chicago had the accumulation of Louis Sullivan’s oeuvre carried on by Wright’s creative fury, add Burnham & Root’s Columbian Exposition, and the arrival of Mies into this dynamic mix & design legacy.

Rice University seems to have managed to commission a collection of architecture better than its larger municipal or state counterpart in creating a quality urban environment. For example the latest addition of the Thomas Phifer pavilion. The other cultural gem of Houston, the Menil Collection by Renzo Piano was mostly a private initiative courtesy of Schlumberger’s resource.

we remain optimistic that Texas will continue to be a hotbed of architectural experimentation and innovation.