I live in a 120-year-old, 8-floor, 25-unit, brick-and-wood-framed apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. The first thing that crossed my mind circa 2018 was that the building will be hit by the new Local Law 97 passed in by City Council in 2015 as part of the ambitious Climate Mobilization Act. Beyond the intent of the […]
Category: Architecture
The longer I practice architecture, the more I learn about what I do not know. Particularly stinging are the “unknown unknowns” as a U.S. Secretary of Defense might call them. For architects, “known unknowns” might include specialized knowledge within categories that we were introduced to in school but never had time to dig into. For […]
Below is an excerpt from the introductory section of a white paper I am developing. Human society in the 21st century will be impacted by global forces such as pandemics, climate change-driven weather events, and geopolitical conflict. As witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, governments could improve their “disaster preparedness” particularly by assessing and utilizing existing […]
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Pieces of Lexington
Architecture is a slow profession. Fundamentally, since shelter for human life is best built to last, even the simplest single-family dwelling is complex enough to require the coordinated effort of multiple people, resources from far and wide, and months of planning and building. Any attempt to hasten this inevitably compromises some step in the process: […]
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Making cities by people
Inspired by a prompt from the Jan Gehl Institute, Charlotte asked me about cities on one of our morning walks. This is what I had to say. CG: How do you make cities for people? IH: Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s enough to say ‘make cities for people.’ You have to make […]
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Time Management
My mother forwarded me this Dezeen article from a week ago. It was oddly coincidental, because at an office happy hour just a week before we had talked about the tricky balance, which all architects strive to find, between being productive and being creative. In fact, it is famously sensitive and controversial, especially when discussed […]
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Living facades
I. Proximity On a hot Friday afternoon, I was walking downhill toward the Hudson River through the Upper West Side with Alba and Josep, my friends from Barcelona. I was describing the peculiar kind of density found there: the neighborhood is a great example of how even 100 years ago Americans were able to build […]
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The Ghost of Ebenezer Howard
My gut feeling is that, like me, when you first learned about Ebenezer Howard and The Garden City, you fell in love. England at the turn of the 20th century was living a double life. For centuries it had been defined by the characteristic rolling green hills and the shepherds and farmers who populated it. […]
I was overcome with the quiet pride of a writer finishing her first novel when I packaged my thoughts on propriosteption. And then, in the kickoff session to our Robotic City seminar at IAAC, the concept reappeared before me, and I felt like the same writer learning that her novel got greenlit for a movie […]
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La Sagrada Grúa
Every time we pass Spain’s most famous building, we have something to say. “La Sagrada Familia. More like La Sacada Familia. La Chingada Familia. La Putada Familia.” “It looks like someone bought one of those nozzle attachments for cake icing and decided to just try all the settings.” “There was a time when you had […]