Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, Vivian Loftness & Louise Harpman

Wednesday, 7:00pm, Zoom

One of the areas of biophilia research that has advanced the fastest is the critical need for visual connections to life, to the dynamics of climate, to visual signs of not just greenery and growth and seasons, but also to community. We need to visually connect to nature and community.

We need to see greenery, and we need to see people. And we need to know that it is winter, spring, summer, fall. Research is showing the importance of views to health outcomes in hospitals, the importance of views to students’ ability to concentrate in classrooms, and the importance of views for office productivity. The research around the importance of views of the “ground plane,” for simplicity’s sake, is strong. I might argue that this need for visual connection to the ground suggests that we need to stop designing high-rises.

Some designers may say: “I can bring biophilic content up to the 50th floor. I can design continuous green space climbing the façade of the buildings, connected in planters and terraces, so you have a garden on the 50th floor.” Well yes, that is better than not having a garden on the 50th floor, but I think there is a huge need for humans to connect visually to the ground and to the greenery and to the humanity that occurs on the ground.

My feeling is that we probably have an obligation that we make cities more like Paris, and less like Shanghai. Paris has as much urban density as Shanghai with a 7-story height limitation.

(Vivian Loftness, from a 2018 interview I conducted with her)

This Wednesday at 7:00pm Vivian Loftness, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien will be discussing, with Louise Harpman, the ascendance of the street in New York, and whether we may be a better city if we let its changed character change the way we build. Is the future flat?

Some of our readers may remember we had Tod & Billie scheduled to review buildings in June. We postponed that event out of respect for the protests and George Floyd’s memorial service, which was scheduled for the same day. When we discussed rescheduling, instead of a deep dive into New York’s past, they then asked for a chance to address our present, specifically how the city has become, at least for a moment, fundamentally more horizontal.

We then approached Vivian Loftness, a Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon, the Head of Architecture there for a decade, and an expert in biophilia. She has been thinking for a long time - as you can see from the above - about the importance of the ground plane.

We are looking forward to bringing them together, and if you have not already, we would encourage you to join us: nyra.nyc/rsvp.

Sincerely,
Nicolas Kemper

ps
You will see in the rsvp that, along with questions for the discussion, we are inviting readers to submit images documenting the city’s streets, some of which we will incorporate into the discussion, some of which we may post onto our instagram.

pps
Our poster was designed by Jacqueline Hall & Matthew Wagstaffe