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. |
| March 29, 2010 Firehouse Most of you know I have a daughter who is an officer in the United States Coast Guard. They are a very impressive organization and, having spent five years in the Navy, that's a serious compliment from me. The entire U.S. Coast Guard is smaller than the New York City Police Department and they are always underfunded for the work they are asked to do. In virtually everything they undertake, however, they seem to do more with less than almost any other governmental organization. During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, while our entire government was virtually flailing around trying to get organized and deal with the crisis, the Coast Guard rescued more than 30,000 people. When asked how they did it, the Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard Air Station said, "We have a firehouse mentality; when something has to be done, we simply go out and do it." That's a simple but extraordinary attitude and one that is very useful...and very applicable to many organizations beyond the Coast Guard. The people who consistently succeed in any organization are the ones who get things done. When someone grabs hold of a task and doesn't let go until it is successfully completed, it distinguishes them from others who do not. It is an attitude of urgency, of grabbing responsibility because someone has to, and it is an invaluable asset to the organization who has found such a person. |
| March 22, 2010 K-12 There is a movement in the K-12 arena that may finally have a positive effect on the education of American youth. It is primarily the result of the new Administration's push to find a way past the politics and policies that have led to failure and frustration for decades and decades. The program is based on a belief that the most important issue on which to focus to improve education is excellence in teachers and teaching: It is going to upset teachers unions all over the country. Through a new program entitled "The Race to the Top," states have begun to compete for federal funds to support innovative education betterment programs. The early results have been outstanding. In many cases they have been following the examples of charter schools, a number of whom are our clients. The introduction of longer school hours, incentive pay for teachers, elimination or modification of tenure agreements and teacher evaluations based on well-considered criteria including, but not limited, to student test scores, is a program that may actually move the U.S. to a higher rank among developed countries. We currently rank 18th out of 36. That's pretty bad. Hope is on the way. |
| March 15, 2010 Inclusions When we are involved in the design of public buildings there is often a requirement to reserve a certain percentage of the construction budget to include works of art within the building. This usually calls for about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of the cost of the building to be set aside for art. Thus a $20 million building would spin off an arts inclusion budget for that building of $200,000 or so. In New Jersey it has spawned a mini-industry of artists whose primary work seems to be supported by the building of public architecture and this associated requirement. While I am a supporter of the arts in general, there at times seems to be a disconnect between the architecture, as an intention of the architect, and the inclusion of works of art, where the intention of the artist may be totally independent or, at times, in opposition to that of the architect. It seems therefore that the introduction of major works of art into a work of architecture should be so thoroughly planned, integrated and executed that the existence of the two as a single composition must be the irrefutable and central goal for both parties. Any other outcome will be a compromise or worse: the proverbial "busted play" we all dread. |
| March 8, 2010 Brutality The term "brutalism" was originally coined by the British architects Peter and Allison Smithson from the word Le Corbusier used to describe the board-formed concrete he employed in much of his work. The term is a French phrase, "Beton brut," which simply means raw concrete. The movement that eventually bore this name was characterized by the angular, blocky forms that expressed program and seemed to continually be associated with the architectural belief that social change was or would be reflected in its sophisticated vocabulary. From the seemingly largest poured-in-place structure of Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon University, with which I am intimately familiar, to the Boston City Hall, recently once again voted the ugliest building in Boston, Brutalism has had its ardent proponents and vicious critics. As is true in many of the stylistics diversions architects occasionally wander down, there are masters of the style who bring it to new heights with extraordinary grace and skill, and there are the copycats who adopt a style without really comprehending its complexity or its demand for rigorous disciplined craft. We occasionally encounter such failures in our higher education work; there seems to have been no shortage of architectural brutality introduced into American campus architecture. |
| March 1, 2010 Wood (encore) The bond between man and wood must be a remnant of some primal link between animals and plants. It is a strong and enduring connection, reflected again and again in the care and the attention that we lavish on this wonderful stuff. While we architects build with a variety of materials--metals, stone and manmade--we somehow all consider one our first love. It is the most flexible and workable of all those we use. We cut it, we carve it, we shape it, and we bend it. We smooth it out and we color it, and we polish it, and we invent ways to join it elegantly to other pieces. We use it exposed for structure and the structure seems so abundantly clear and understandable and the connections so easy to make. We use it to adorn our work and it adds richness and warmth and we understand that, perhaps because it was once alive, of all the materials we employ it is the one to which our fellows humans will react most favorably. It is warm. It is soft. It is beautiful and it is real and we never seem to tire of it. Best of all, in an emerging era of scarcity, we can make more of by simply planting a seed. |
