Environmental Justice, Energy Infrastructure, Migration and War: What Role Does Design Play in Mitigating a Crisis?

At their speculative edge, the design professions flourish in envisioning future scenarios, and we usually imagine these to be positive additions to a well-ordered world. A true crisis throws fundamental assumptions into disarray, requiring designers to rethink the way they operate as the ground shifts beneath their feet. The old rules of geopolitics suddenly don’t lead the imagination anywhere predictable. What’s left is a feeling that the game itself is being reinvented.

In the past two years, the theme of crisis has been studied across the GSD at the annual Practice Plenary, and lessons learned by investigating responses to pandemics and hurricanes can help us look at responses to crises happening now across the globe. I spoke with three professors teaching practice courses and plotting new modes of practice in architecture and urban planning. All three encouraged humility, and they spoke of the central place for self-reflection in designing a profession better able to address injustices and inequalities. Asked about the ongoing war in Ukraine, Elizabeth Christoforetti, a founding principal at Supernormal and an assistant professor in practice of architecture, urged caution: “It’s a response time question. We’re just not built to respond quickly as a profession. It can feel frustrating, not being able to confront the crisis, but our impact happens in different ways.” Jacob Reidel, also an assistant professor in practice of architecture and a senior director at Saltmine, a technology startup, suggested that designers “focus on what our responsibility is as engaged citizens,” noting that “there’s a tendency to try to make everything a design problem—but there are other ways one can and should be active in the world.”  Matthijs Bouw, founder of One Architecture and Urbanism, saw a parallel between his work on climate adaptation and the exodus from Ukraine (there are more than 5 million refugees so far): “One of the things I worry about is how our cultural fabric will be able to cope with the climate crisis and the associated migration. It’s going to change our cities in drastic ways.” The war also exposes problems with the global energy infrastructure: “We should have been investing much more in renewables and decentralized systems,” Bouw says. “This is an issue of environmental justice. Who gets to own the energy infrastructure? Many communities have really suffered in the past from energy infrastructures.”

Bouw’s work and teaching at the GSD has placed designers at the edge of several unfolding crises. Among his best-known projects at One Architecture and Urbanism is the Big U—a proposal for a protective system that encircles Manhattan to mitigate the effects of rising sea level—which was originally developed with a multidisciplinary team including BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). The associated research and design continues in ONE’s work on the Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan, among other projects. This semester at the GSD, Bouw is teaching “Houston: Extreme Weather, Environmental Justice, and the Energy Transition.” The course begins with the premise that crises have a tendency to build on one another. Bouw says it’s important to distinguish between two types of crisis: “There are slow-running crises that are eating away at people’s health and livelihoods, or coastal areas, or ecosystems, and then there are catastrophic crises that are—in the language of resilience—low probability and high impact.”

As Bouw explains, “During COVID, we have seen how public health is related more than ever to issues of structural racism, to our fossil fuel economy (because of pollution and respiratory issues), and so on.” This logic applies to other crises as well: “The climate crisis is intimately connected to the biodiversity crisis.” The complexity inherent to interrelated systems is the first problem found in crisis situations, he says. “There is a lot that we don’t know about these relationships, but we do know that many of these relationships play out on a systemic scale and bring with them a high level of uncertainty.”

Bouw advises that we should approach crisis through careful research and as part of a team. “Projects you do as a practitioner cannot stand on their own,” he says. “Any project is part of something much bigger.” This can be an uncomfortable situation for designers: “I was trained as a designer to stand in front of an audience and say, ‘This is the big idea,’ and then try to sell the idea,” Bouw says. “That’s an ethic of the past. You need to start thinking about yourself more as a participant in a much more complex process.” Design in face of crisis requires “the right mix of willfulness and humility.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning the tried-and-true techniques of design. Bouw emphasizes the importance of “tools for communication—creating the material to make conversations easier—and the tools of research through design exploration.” He says that design professionals play an important role as mediators: “Balancing the systemic dimension with the hyperlocal or the hyperprecise is what we do.” This is particularly important in large-scale crises, which are also largely invisible. Take the climate crisis, for example. “Given the magnitude of changes that we need to make in our Earth system,” Bouw says, “we need to develop quick ways of learning and protocols that can be scaled and replicated, and which don’t get in the way of the nuance that’s needed in some situations.” He cautions that there is no single framework for understanding something so complex. “The Earth system as a whole cannot be captured in an algorithm,” he observes. “You need to understand the limits of the algorithms you develop because otherwise you start to reduce reality to the algorithms.”

Asked about specific participatory design practices, Bouw notes that they vary around the world: “In planning in the Netherlands, we are employing design in a more integrated way to engage complex processes. Planning in the United States is relatively disassociated from design—the tools of planning are predominately things like texts and spreadsheets and PowerPoints. It doesn’t tend to test things and try to see how things come together on the ground.” For Bouw, this tendency avoids the crucial questions of practical engagement: “What would it take to implement this? Where could it get funding from? How do we engage the powers that be in the set processes of delivering projects?” Without practical, on-the-ground participation, Bouw says, “the end is often either paralysis or business as usual, and we can’t do either.”

Crisis frequently spurs invention. In her class this semester, Elizabeth Christoforetti focuses a historical lens on a range of design practices to ask when and why they were first formulated. “Products of Practice” begins by showing students that “the profession of architecture is actually relatively new,” she says. “It came out of a number of radical social and economic changes—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, for instance.” The course builds on Christoforetti’s class last semester, “Elements of the Urban Stack,” which delaminated the built environment from its most expansive social fabric to its smallest detail. Across both classes, Christoforetti asks students to “look back at historical hinge points to see, for instance, how architectural specifications changed over time and how those changes impact the architect’s agency or relationship with society.”

This approach gives students a perspective on the possibilities of design practice. “The best thing we can do is to understand the limits of the structural framework of practice now,” Christoforetti says, “and where we can or must push boundaries if we want to change things.” Critical reflection plays an important role in formulating new directions. “We can identify what the value systems out there are—in the discipline, in practice, and in society at large,” she says. “Then if architects want to impact the future of housing, for example, maybe the thing to do isn’t to design a single-family home. Maybe it would be better to go work for Fannie Mae and design mortgages, because they shape housing at scale. Or maybe it’s okay to just design a really remarkable single-family home. But it’s a choice about impact and agency.”

This wider view of practice suggests an expanded notion of professional ethics. Christoforetti asks, “Do we need a redefinition of design in an era when we are accountable to the major crises of the moment, whether it’s climate change, war, systemic racism, or computer surveillance? Is form enough?” This can appear sometimes as a drastic decision to be made—a fork in the road. “Maybe we’re thinking about how to fundamentally redefine our practice, and maybe the profession as we know it dies as a result,” Christoforetti speculates. This sort of wholesale redefinition has happened before, and like previous hinge points, she says, “We live today in an unprecedented moment for the role and agency of the designer.”

When it comes to dealing with the compounding crises of the contemporary world, Christoforetti is particularly interested in the problems and potentials of computation. She cites Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson which mentions that, in the world of technology, the verb “to architect” refers to the design of information systems. “The people she writes about are not thinking about buildings per se,” Christoforetti says, “they’re thinking about something much bigger. They’re thinking about an operative process for creation.” She pinpoints the central conundrum of contemporary professional practice in a way that parallels Bouw’s observations: “The crisis that we look at in “Products of Practice” is one of scalable systems and late capitalism.”

 The professional practice course taught by Jacob Reidel last semester also took a historical perspective. He notes that “the profession of architecture as we currently understand it is not nearly as old or straightforward as is often assumed.” On this basis of historical contingency, “Frameworks of Practice” is designed to get students “to look critically at what they’ve been told it means to be an architect, and to see both the profession and their own careers as designed things,” Reidel says. Opportunities provided by unexpected circumstances offer a good starting point for this investigation. “Crises, even if only temporarily, tend to throw the old way of doing things out the window,” says Reidel, and he has numerous examples.

“One of the few built responses to the crisis of COVID,” he points out, was the “thousands of structures built in the street, practically overnight, in one of the most heavily regulated built environments in the world, New York City. All the rules had to be rewritten, and myriad public and private entities had to come together to figure out how to make it possible for the restaurant industry to continue operating. Suddenly the Department of Transportation was regulating building because the shacks were in the street.” The result was the Open Restaurants and Open Streets programs, the latter of which set itself the task of “transforming streets into public space open to all,” according to their website. This made for an apt case study in the relationship between crisis and design—and it became the subject of the second Practice Plenary.

Reidel brings the questions raised by Open Restaurants and Open Streets to bear on a wider investigation of design. “What did it reveal about how the design professions can and cannot effectively engage in moments of crisis?” he asks. One lesson involves seizing opportunity. Reidel tells the story of the creation of the re-ply program: “During the first COVID summer of 2020, many businesses in New York City temporarily covered their storefronts in plywood. Seeing that a ton of valuable plywood was headed to the dump, members of the small New York studio of the international Australian practice BVN began collecting plywood from businesses and landlords, some as big as Rockefeller Center’s Tishman Speyer, and started a pro bono effort to repurpose it into affordable outdoor seating for local restaurants that couldn’t serve food indoors because of COVID. What started as plywood furniture eventually became a kit-of-parts streetery building system named re-ply that’s now operating almost like a small independent product business within the larger BVN design practice.” It’s an example, Reidel says, of how a crisis can spur “new approaches to operating as an architect.” The example suggests the importance not only of having a good eye for opportunity, but also of being prepared. This is the practical, on-the-ground knowledge that Bouw also emphasized.

Although the place of design may be far from the battlefield, it can help to think about crisis situations in terms of wartime mobilization. “What we are trying to do as a practice is to have the boots on the ground and to change the practices of implementation,” Bouw says. “It is difficult to build coastal adaptation projects or integrated stormwater projects that also improve the urban environment as a whole and deal with other systemic issues. We have to create the conditions necessary to capitalize on those opportunities.” A lot of the work involved in addressing crises comes beforehand, in the form of research and planning—and this requires being out there, on the ground, embedded in the complex systems in which we may have to intervene. So whether it’s destabilized ecosystems, new technologies, or something else driving change, Bouw’s advice applies: “A shock is also often an opportunity, but we need to have equitable plans ready before the event occurs.”

Inclusive, Accessible, Subversive: Jenny French on a New Model for Cohousing

Bay State Cohousing, a 30-unit cohousing community, is neatly woven into the low-density neighborhood fabric of Malden, Massachusetts. Slated to open this summer, the award-winning project from Jenny French and her practice, French 2D , is redefining what high-quality and community-oriented housing can look like in Greater Boston, especially in the face of growing unaffordability and displacement. It is spearheaded by an intergenerational group of residents seeking support, friendship, and collectivity through housing, and is one of just 200 official cohousing projects in the United States. French2D—with their predilection for “strange housing, ” and focus on matching familiar ideas of home with more radical typologies—was the right practice to bring this cohousing dream to life.  

As one half of French 2D and an assistant professor in practice at the GSD, French is deeply engaged with local issues of collectivity, housing, public space, history, and identity. From Bay State Cohousing to her 2022 core studio, “Kinship and Crises of a Near Future,” French is re-centering who collective housing can be for, what it can do for a neighborhood, and how municipalities can be more amenable to its development. In a recent conversation over Zoom, French spoke about the process behind designing the Bay State Cohousing project, the importance of relationship-building as a designer, and why she is optimistic about the future of cohousing.
 
Bay State Cohousing was recently named winner of Architect Magazine’s 67th Annual Progressive Architecture Award. Let’s start there: tell me about this exciting project.  

Bay State is a 30-unit cohousing community just north of downtown Boston and well connected by the MBTA’s Orange Line. The project is an intentional community following the North American cohousing model, and is comprised of individual living units, which are connected to the larger framework of a “common house,” including terraces, yards, a dining room for 100, music room, living room, community pantry, and more—all designed to support a set of shared experiences and resources. Allowing for mutual aid, friendships, and families of choice, and the pooling of certain resources while maintaining individual household ownership and separation of finances is in many ways a subtly subversive counter to normative multifamily housing.  

Though often conflated with other forms of collective living like cooperative housing and co-living, cohousing follows a fairly narrow definition and is modeled after quite specific Danish precedents from the latter half of the 20th century. The model’s success is well documented, but it does run the risk of falling into the “box” of pro-progressive housing models that end up being unintentionally inaccessible. At French 2D we are particularly interested in finding new avenues for cohousing as a more inclusive and accessible model.  

What’s the origin story of this project?  

The community began with two demographic blocks: people who, at the beginning of the process, were not yet 30 and others who were in late-middle age. Throughout the design process, the community has grown. The soon-to-be residents represent a range of family types and life stages, including multigenerational families, singles, single parents, and retirees, who together form a network of ready and willing friends, caregivers, surrogate grandparents, and more. The shaping of the community is defined not just by the current situation of each resident, but through envisioning shifting relationships, changing and aging bodies, and future members. This has become an essential frame of reference for the whole group—making all decisions with accountability to the collective community.   

The project is now nearing completion; our involvement began in 2016, but the group formed several years before that over a mutual longing for collective living and social connection.  

Do you think the pace of the project was essential to its success?  

Time is a vital resource in this type of work. Other such communities have taken a decade or more to materialize, and though the time investment and journey enrich the project, we are keenly aware that expanded equity and access to alternative housing models calls for routes to get to similar results more quickly. I don’t think a “slow” process is the only way, but I think this project’s success, particularly in navigating the uncertainty of the past two years, relies on a strong tenure of relationships.  

We were certainly met with challenges in local zoning. Shortly after the design phase began, the municipality announced a building moratorium followed by selective downzoning—on the project site in particular. To make a long story short, a series of setbacks for the project led to one of its brightest spots: the creation of a new cohousing zoning ordinance allowing (modestly) higher residential density tied to shared spaces and self-governance.  

Looking at the project plans, it fits quite seamlessly into the majority single-family neighborhood. How is this context reflected in the architectural and spatial design?    

After years of searching for a site, this was the most urban, closest to public transportation, and largest site that was economically feasible for our clients. It’s a ¾-acre site, but the anticipated program could easily fill 1½ to 2 acres. The project is in many ways a giant house in which individual units are analogous to private bedrooms connected by the communal spaces. 

We took advantage of stacking and interlocking units, interior common spaces, and exterior common spaces, because we could not reproduce the horizontal spatial arrangement typical of North American cohousing. The constraints on the size of the site and desired program also created an ethos of abundance despite limited space. Specifically, in the private units, we shaved off bits of square footage to consolidate and give back to common spaces. Stacking and interlocking allowed us to embed social, visual, and visceral affordances into the body of the building.   

The courtyard and balcony arrangement offers collective space where residents can connect in a supportive way. How can designers introduce this concept on a smaller scale to bolster the everyday experience of children and families in existing built space?    

We looked for natural points of intersection in the spaces where adults could be needed and easily invited to participate in childcare. Specifically, the interior courtyard and lawn are overlooked by half of the units and all of the common spaces, each of which have exterior access at every level. Rather than being about surveillance, these connections create reciprocity across multiple places for gardening, chatting, playing, reading, or lounging. Many of the community’s older residents and those with children chose these courtyard-facing units to be near to one another, to the garden in the terraced beds at the rear of the site, and to the informal playspace on the patio.  

As a baseline of multifamily housing, it’s important to include kids in the spaces of everyday life. I like the saying “Feminism is the radical idea that women are people,” and I think the acknowledgment that kids are people and members of society is an important one. This then translates to creating boundaries in design that produce both freedom and autonomy and a set of fail-safes to connect children to life within the community.  

Based on this experience do you feel optimistic about the future of cohousing?    

Absolutely! It’s important to recognize the need for a continuum of collective housing models to address challenges of affordability and density. If we think about Cambridge, there are many instances of single-family homes next to duplexes or larger multiunit apartments, a condition that American suburbia is certainly allergic to. How can we create more instances of 5, 10, even 20 to 30 unit buildings next to single-, two-, and three-family homes to allow that kind of variation while also improving the fabric of neighborhoods? That is the question that cohousing can begin to address.   

Looking more broadly at your work, “care” and “collectivity” are consistent themes, yet in architectural practice both seem to be teetering on the edge of being buzzwords. How is French 2D working to ensure practice in this space remains intentional and critical?   

This is a timely and hard question. I want to caution against rendering words useless and empty through overuse, and in doing so dismissing gigantic and critical areas where there’s work to be done. Since our start, French2D has centered on relationship-building, trying to think about how we go from being strangers to roommates, to friends, or to colleagues. We ask these questions not just of housing, but of a host of design elements, down to materials and small objects. To that effect, discussion around domestic space and mutual support within it, is inevitable and overdue.  

I’m interested in the ways that a reemerging focus on feminist narratives from individuals like Silvia Federici or bell hooks or Dolores Hayden can expose the things that all of us share. For example, how do you look after an aging parent? Or how do you nurture a child who is not necessarily your own? These narratives posit that these are not individual challenges, but are shared necessities. I am interested in how the built environment is implicated in this essential work.