The prefab 100K House designed by Interface Studio: Principal Brian Phillips says. "Just a small piece of construction is about construction. The other pieces are about politics and labor and money and environmental concerns."

Inga Saffron profiles four groundbreaking Philly architecture firms, showing a common thread shared by KieranTimberlake, Erdy McHenry, Onion Flats, and Interface Studio Architects:  “architects who do not blush in saying that what they’re doing is socially important work.”

“They’re not the sort of architects you go to when you want just another pretty building… instead they dream of making buildings that can go up in weeks instead of months, that are manufactured rather than constructed, that penny-pinch on energy, and can be tossed into the recycling bin when the world grows tired of them.”

The 4^th Annual Ed Bacon Foundation Student Design Competition turned its focus to urban brownfields in 2009 with Brown to Green, challenging participants to create designs for transforming the Grays Ferry Crescent at the elbow of the Schuykill River in South Philadelphia, opposite UPenn’s campus.  The winning submission, by a team of six Cornell University students, would turn the area into a new sustainable neighborhood.

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Professional schools are increasingly emphasizing pro bono work, according to a report recently released by the Taproot Foundation.  Students in architecture, design, business and law are pushing for socially conscious careers, fed by baby boomer teachers and practitioners who are promoting the educational importance of volunteer work, which has created more opportunities for pro bono work for students in professional programs.

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People call it “the Miracle on Seventh Street.” Between a brownstone church, a superblock apartment house, and a scattering of rowhomes, two North Philadelphia pastors built a 56-unit  green-roofed, 55,000 square-foot “cyber village” that offers low and moderate-income seniors an affordable and engaging place to live.

Rev. Martha Lang and Rev Mary Lou Moore, pastors of Mt. Tabor AME Church and leaders of Mt. Tabor Community Education and Economic Development Corporation, were the driving force behind the creation of the Cyber Village.

Rev. Mary Lou Moore, PhD, and Rev. Martha Lang

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Leap Night was a one-night winter festival on a vacant site in Cleveland. Photo courtesy of CUDC.

Terry Schwarz wants to save our cities– and she is prepared to do it in a bear suit.

Schwarz, a senior planner at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) and adjunct professor at Kent State University, has been coordinating creative temporary uses of vacant land through Pop Up City, an initiative of the Shrinking Cities Institute at the CUDC.  Events have included the February 29^th Leap Night, a one-night winter festival on a vacant lot complete with a snowboard ramp, bonfire, music performances and, yes, bear suits.   Schwarz’s work has centered on developing more sustainable models of development and addressing Cleveland’s vacancy problems through art, creativity and community engagement.

Terry sat down to talk with me before her presentation, Ad Hoc Urbanism: Adventures in Temporary Use, sponsored by the Community Design Collaborative as part of DesignPhiladelphia. Read Full Story

The Roll-Out House

Deborah Gans is Principal of Deborah Gans Studio and a professor at Pratt Institute and Yale University.  She’s best known for her “extreme housing”, design prototypes for people displaced by homelessness, natural disaster, or war.  Gans Studio’s Roll-Out House was recently featured in Into the Open, the 2008 Venice Biennale exhibition that explores the ways architects are collaborating to foster civic engagement and build better communities.

When Into the Open came to Philadelphia this summer, the Collaborative spoke with Gans about her work, building a practice, and her role in planning the exhibition. Read Full Story

Last Friday was the culmination of a home-building project that has taken five years. Three families from West Philadelphia receive the keys to their new LEED-certified houses, built by Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia. The Wright, Wanamaker and Seawright families each dedicated 350 hours of sweat equity to building their homes.

These homes are part of a seven-unit affordable housing development designed to have low energy costs. In 2005 The firm of WRT and the Energy Coordinating Agency donated pro bono design services worth over $21,000 to perform a feasibility study for the project and develop a sustainable design that would be consistent with the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. The Collaborative is proud to have contributed to the design of this groundbreaking project.

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