The American Institute of Architects Committee on Design: A Global Context for Local Architecture [Forum]
Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: Forum Mark Hoistad, AIA The American Institute of Architects Committee on Design A Global Context for Local Architecture These forum pages are produced under an agree- ment between Places/Design History Foundation and the American Institute of Architects. This article reports on the AIA Committee on Design’s visit to Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, October 11-14, 2001. The conference chairs were Lowell Berg, AIA, and Patrick Leahy, AIA, and this year’s committee chair was Wendy Evans Joseph, AIA. For information about AIA membership and upcoming programs, call 800-242-3837 or visit www.aia.org/pia/gateways Historically, “context” has been understood as a local cultural and physical condition. Today, with the collapse of time and space facilitated by the media and the Internet, the very notion of “local” has become ambiguous. The strongest sense of distance contemporary society might feel is from the traditional notion of the local and the particular. Design is not immune to this circumstance in its affair with occupying the foreground at the expense or ignorance of the background. In 2001, the American Institute of Architects Committee on Design (COD) focused on the relationship of design to context. At its fall confer- ence, “Nebraska: Architecture in the Heartland,” participants considered the notion that in architecture, the global foreground is supplanting the local background as the context for design. Paradoxically, Nebraska’s location in the heartland of America has long filtered out many of the influ- ences arriving on our shores. This change in the notion of con- text was particularly evident at the meeting because it took place shortly after September 11. The Oklahoma City tragedy in 1997 certainly shook the foundations of our sense of social connection, but last year’s attacks left many at the conference wondering about not only the future of the civic realm but also the vulnerability that the changing circumstance of context has created. The conference began with a visual survey of Omaha by Marty Schukart, AICP, a former planner for the city. The slide show featured significant churches (Westminster Presbyterian, Our Lady of Lords), the Horace Cleveland-designed park system (Hanscom Park) and local neighbor- hoods (Happy Hollow, Dundee, Martin Meadows); considered the influence of topography and the trace Places 15.1 of an old Indian trail (Vinton Street); and identified various ethnic restau- rants along the way to connect the group to the culture and rituals of the local ethnic communities. The first site visit was to the new addition to the Joselyn Art Museum (Sir Norman Foster), an excellent example of the back-and-forth influ- ence of the global and the local. The addition—a simple block that matches the scale and height of the original building and is clad in stone from the original quarry—is highly restrained and not at all the imported firecracker it could be. Foster chose to defer to the original building at the large scale, leaving the precision of its execution and detail to be the imported lessons for the local professional community. Foster’s restraint provided an interest- ing point of departure for examining the notion of how context is influenc- ing the architecture of the heartland and vice versa. The next day the group visited St. Cecilia’s Cathedral, a recently restored landmark (Bahr Vermeer Haecker), and the new Hruska Fed- eral Courthouse (James Ingo Freed, DLR), one of the first projects of the U.S. General Services Administra- tion’s Design Excellence program. Both projects represent investment in the local community and aspire to be monuments in the urban landscape. The cathedral, with its imported Spanish revival design, will continue to serve in that capacity given the level of care and energy being spent on its restoration and its longstanding pres- ence in the urban fabric. On the other hand, only time will tell if the bol- larded distance between the court- house and the city will be spanned, and whether the stripped-down ver- sion of the original courthouse design (the aftermath of a forty percent budget cut) will spark a connection with the local community.
Author: Mark Hoistad
Language: English
Subfield: Architecture
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W242545918