Every Monday morning, team members in the Philadelphia and Princeton offices gather together via video-conference to discuss firm news and upcoming events and projects. Since 2003, founding partner Allan Kehrt, FAIA, has delivered his Monday Morning Musings, weekly slices of personal insight into the design profession, to the firm. To comment on any of his posts, send an email to us. We look forward to hearing from you. |
| June 23, 2006 Mags Right now there are only two American architectural magazines; Architectural Record and Architecture. One keeps getting fatter and the other thinner; perhaps soon there will be only one. Not too long ago there were a few more, and I think the profession has suffered since the demise of magazines like Progressive Architecture and even the old AIA Journal. It's was always helpful to encounter each month a number of differing points of view on the profession and to review what was happening in construction and design, and it was good to see editors bring dissimilar views on the same building or architectural issue. So the lack of a diverse source of opinions has left a void in our professional dialogue. The gap is being filled to a small degree by architectural publications such as The Architect's Newspaper and Metropolis, and by specialty magazines like EcoStructure, but the loss is still felt by those who have watched the decline. Additionally, the fall of New Jersey Architecture, (KSS' first cover) has added to the problem locally as the absence of knowledge of what our most immediate colleagues are doing creates an even more personal disconnect. |
| June 19, 2006 CO2 The stakes of global warming are so high that they can't be ignored. The carbon dioxide we humans are adding to the atmosphere is slowly but unquestionably accumulating. As it continues to build up, the universal scientific view is that it blocks the release of infrared radiation back into space and thus causes the Earth to slowly heat up. This Greenhouse Effect has been going on for billions of years, and as a natural process is responsible for allowing life to develop on Earth. But we seem to be tipping the balance in a direction that may prove irreversible and catastrophic. The consequences of this temperature rise occurring are unthinkable, yet most of our leaders seem to be proceeding with "business as usual", which is very scary. We architects have the ability to control the amount of energy expended by the buildings we design and as a result, we have an effect on the demand for electricity whose generation produces much of this CO2. We have a professional obligation to understand the energy performance of the buildings we design, and perhaps a moral one to be sure they are efficient as can be. The new Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth deals calmly with the facts associated with this issue and should be required viewing. |
| June 12, 2006 Modernists The New Urbanist community was remarkably responsive to the tragedy of New Orleans and the city's need for massive planning and rebuilding. But as outlined in Michael Sorkin's Critique in Architectural Record recently, they brought only their standard approach and traditional design to this very complex problem, and the results were less than satisfactory. While those involved should be commended for their responsiveness to an unprecedented national disaster, it was disappointing and troubling that their design work was so predictable. Cities are complex entities; rebuilding them from the ground up is both a responsibility and opportunity that shouldn't be formulaic. A note of hope for the New Urbanist's future came at their recent Congress where discussions of their seeming rejection of modernism were very much on the mind of many of the participants. A sampling: a standing room only panel discussion of modernism's place in New Urbanism made people realize there are a great many architects that buy into the principles defined by the movement, but are still staunch defenders of the Modern Movement; a heated debate between Robert Bruegmann, author of, Sprawl: A Compact History, (an academic treatise on the subject with extensive facts and figures), and Anthony Flint, formerly of the Boston Globe, defending his book: This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America, (a defense of New Urbanism). Bruegmann won easily with his command of the facts; and finally an exceptional talk entitled Whatever Happened to Modernism by Daniel Solomon, a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable look at the state of architecture in the United States today and how it should address urban design. |
| June 5, 2006 Our Core Values
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