Stunning new buildings are popping up all around the Bowery. First there was SANAA’s tower for the New Museum, which was followed by Morphosis’ building at 41 Cooper Square for Cooper Union. Now, on the Bowery just south of Houston Street, they’re joined by a building for Sperone Westwater Gallery designed by the great English architect Norman Foster.
     The slender, eight-story building is incredibly elegant. It’s a simple, stepped volume with a poured concrete frame, a front facade of laminated glass, and side and back facades of corrugated metal panels. The whole building feels dressed up. Even the metal panels, which are standard industrial panels painted matte black, have a refined look. This formality is striking amid the surrounding rough-and-tumble Bowery storefronts, but it also muffles some of the building’s power.
     The most anticipated feature of the new building is the Moving Gallery, a room at the front clad in bright red panels that slides up and down from floor to floor just behind the glass facade. It’s an interesting gimmick and, when lit up at night, a striking effect.
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The image we have of the modern American architect is of a charismatic conjurer like Frank Lloyd Wright, wandering about with his cape and cane, or a narcissistic obsessive like Howard Rourke in The Fountainhead, deeply immersed in the details of his work. So the late Samuel Mockbee, the well-regarded architect and professor at Auburn University, cut a welcome figure. Stout, bearded, wily, and garrulous, he seemed more like Santa Claus than an architect.
     That comparison might not be so ridiculous. Mockbee’s greatest accomplishment was to establish the university’s Rural Studio, a program that instructs students by leading them to design and then literally construct buildings for the needy in Hale County, Alabama. Sam Mainwright Douglas’ new documentary, Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio, which premieres nationwide on PBS Monday, August 23 and will be released for rental afterward, is an excellent introduction to the Studio and its work.
     Since its inception in 1993, the Rural Studio has completed several small houses and public buildings each year. In Citizen Architect we see a class of sophomores working together to build a house for a local man who had been living in a rusting trailer. We also see some of the handsome buildings that the Studio has already completed, including an animal shelter, a fire station, and a church. And we hear interviews with architects throughout the country who are carrying on Mockbee’s vision by practicing “social architecture,” doing work that’s pragmatic and community-centered.
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Architectural photographer Julius Shulman documented so many truly great buildings — canonical works by Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler, and Charles and Rae Eames — that it’s easy to take his skills for granted. We see the technical assurance in his pictures but credit much of their beauty to the architecture itself. A new book, Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism, which documents houses by lesser known architects, puts that notion to rest. These more modest houses are burnished by Schulman’s lens so that they too emerge as masterpieces.
     This entire generation of Chicago architects was working under the immense shadows of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, modern masters who had built in and around the city. They all adapted common building technologies, like brick walls and wood framing, to achieve the deep cantilevers, full-height windows, and open plans of a modernist vocabulary. And they all adapted the long, low, interlocking volumes of Wright’s prairie style to suit simpler, smaller houses.
     The houses documented in the book are warmer and more welcoming than the Case Study Houses that Shulman shot in the 1950s, whose pristine geometries exuded high style. For one thing the Chicago houses were photographed decades after their completion, after they’d been lived in and roughed up a bit. And the houses possess a richer, darker palette. They’re finished with oak panels, rough stone facing, and colored ceramic tiles, and filled with shaggy rugs and hand-thrown pottery.
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The vibrant collection of objects on display now through January 10 at Why Design Now?, the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial, answers that question quite simply. Design matters because absolutely everything in our environment, from our eating utensils to the cities we live in, is designed, and the materials and methods with which they’re produced have a powerful impact on our culture and the environment.
     Appropriately, the curators have included objects of every scale. The show includes drinking glasses with grip-like profiles to aid those with limited manual abilities, and renderings for Masdar, a new remote desert city in Abu Dhabi that will be the world’s first isolated, self-sustaining, zero-energy community.
     The exhibit projects a curious ambivalence about technology. Some of the high-tech artifacts included, like the iPod, the Kindle, and twitter, have already become seemlessly embedded in our lives. They’re advanced, but commonplace. Other high-tech objects seem to belong to a distant, Jetsons-like future. There’s a giant, rotating dish-shaped solar collector with gleaming mirrored facets, and plans for a communal electric car system that would allow city-dwellers to borrow and deposit vehicles at designated stops.
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Short of building nothing new at all, the most environmentally-conscious strategy toward construction is to build with what materials are at hand. This reduces the extent of mining and foresting, the energy required for fabrication, and the emissions associated with shipping.
     One powerful and increasingly popular approach is to build with waste materials. This can be implemented at different scales, by powdering demolished concrete blocks to use in a new mix, building a house on an old foundation, or reinvigorating an abandoned site like Governor’s Island. Alejandro Bahamon and Maria Camila Sanjines have compiled some of the more promising waste-capturing projects in an inspiring new book, Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture.
     The projects have a distinct aesthetic, one that values the patina of weathered and marred materials over refined geometries and gleaming surfaces.  A small library in Spain, whose walls are constructed from stacked railroad ties, has a rough, mottled appearance. A house addition in The Hague, with a facade of tread-worn tires, has a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max look.
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California modernism, which gave rise to stunning works by Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Rae Eames, is often overshadowed by its better-celebrated East Coast and European counterparts. So Thomas S. Hines’ new compendium of modern buildings in Los Angeles, Architecture of the Sun, is a welcome corrective.
     Hines is a well-known architectural historian who tracks design developments thoughtfully, but his real achievement here is the astounding collection of photographs and drawings he’s assembled. Unlike in other cities, in Los Angeles many influential modern structures were small houses and stores that were particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the market, and also fires and earthquakes. The book brings some of those long-gone buildings back to life, and brings works by less celebrated architects such as Irving Gill and Raphael Soriano to the forefront.
     In many ways Los Angeles was the perfect ground for modern building. Its open, undeveloped landscape, temperate weather, and dry climate lent itself to a spacious, inside-outside architecture that was less concerned with planning and weatherproofing than with sculptural expression.
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To host this year’s FIFA World Cup, the first ever held on its continent, South Africa spent almost 1.5 billion dollars to build five new stadiums and refurbish five others. In a country where many live without adequate housing, water, and medical care, the decision provoked criticism that the government cared more about its international image than problems in its own backyard. But after looking through photographer Thomas Hoeffgen’s new book African Arenas, which documents soccer fields in South Africa as well as Namibia, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia, and Mali, one can’t help but feel that the expense is commensurate with the country’s deep love for the game.
     There are all sorts of playing fields here, from the immense, ultramodern stadiums built for the World Cup, to shabby schoolyard pitches and sandy lots with goals fashioned from scrap wood. The boys and young men pictured play joyfully, without proper uniforms and often without shirts and shoes. Hoeffgen’s photographs, which are low and flat and have a slightly faded-out finish, capture a broad, dusty, sun-drenched landscape. And in their sparse, uncluttered compositions they suggest that soccer is the most elemental of sports. It can be played anywhere: on concrete, artificial turf, sand, or grass. All that’s needed is a bit of space, a ball, and a way to mark the goals.
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When Michael Jackson died last year, and clips of him dangling a baby over a balcony and dancing the moonwalk played in endless loops on cable television, what the media mourned was not a man but a hyper-celebrity, someone whose personal history touched upon every hot topic in American life: family dysfunction, race, fame, money, and sex. Beginning with bubble-gum pop music and ending in accusations of child molestation, his story became one of a heroic rise and a tragic downfall. What was omitted was a consideration of the man himself, whose friends described him as a gifted dancer and musician, and a thoughtful, if troubled, person.
     A movie documenting rehearsals for Jackson’s planned world tour that hit theaters soon after his death, This Is It, showcased his professionalism. The film revealed a breathtaking performer and an ambitious, intelligent, showman. He held himself to high standards and sought the same from those around him, directing his musicians, backup dancers, and technical crew with authority and tenderness.
     In a similar vein photographer Henry Leutwyler’s beautifully-designed book Neverland Lost, which documents objects from Jackson’s estate, reveals some of the performer’s inner life.
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Just as governments begin to implement policies and practices to slow global climate change, some designers are jumping ship. They fear that our environment is damaged beyond repair and are thinking up ways for us to survive the impending apocalypse. A new show at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Climate Capsules: Means of Surviving Disaster, gives credence to their ideas.
     These artists attack the problem at various scales. Some are creating specialized articles of clothing to protect the human body from increasingly damaging atmospheric conditions. Lucy Orta crafted a tent-like, nylon garment that gives protection from the light, heat, cold, and water. Equipped with its own whistle, lantern, and compass, it’s like a highly-evolved all-weather coat. Performance artist Lawrence Mastaf designed a clear vacuum-sealed plastic trap for himself, in which he lies suspended with only slender tubes to breathe through. It’s a spectacle that’s both eery and peaceful. He’s preserved like a biological specimen, and floating dreamily like an embryo.
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Steel freight containers have become favorite toys for ecocentric architects looking to repurpose existing materials. The crates themselves, which are eight-feet wide, eight or nine-feet high, and twenty or 40-feet long, are ideally proportioned building blocks. Their CORE-TEN steel frames and cladding make them incredibly strong, and resistant to corrosion and puncture. The units are manufactured with integral corner connectors so that they can be stacked vertically, strung horizontally, and stabilized diagonally with simple hardware. And both new and used containers are readily available.  Because of the recent slow-down in international commerce, thousands of containers are lying unused at ports throughout the world.
     Container Atlas: A Practical Guide to Container Architecture showcases some incredible buildings that have been assembled from these containers. The projects cover all styles, scales, and sensibilities, illustrating the broad range of effects that can be achieved.
     Most designs leverage the rugged, industrial aesthetic of the containers, highlighting their corrugated cladding and leaving the scarred surfaces of used containers intact. A group of artists in Vancouver converted two used containers into an event space, where passers-by can stop to check out videos, artwork, or a live DJ. The graffiti-enhanced containers give the venue a gritty authenticity. 
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