Take a break from winter’s chill: this month’s 110-mile Historic Highways route runs from north to south along Florida’s east coast. We begin in the resort community of Palm Beach, then visit Delray Beach, Boca Raton, and Fort Lauderdale, once a haven for college students on spring break, and now a yachting center. We continue to Miami Beach, Miami, Key Biscayne, and end in Coral Gables. Dubbed the "Gold Coast," this region was established as a winter playground in the 1920s. Today, the Florida cities attract sun-worshippers from all over the world, as well as those drawn to the vibrant cultural life and restored historical areas. Southern Florida offers the active traveler abundant white sand beaches and water sports, golf, tennis, and natural habitats for bird-watching and canoeing.

PALM BEACH

Palm Beach was named for its palm trees, planted in 1878 when a Spanish cargo ship carrying them ran aground on the beach. The American architect Addison Mizner arrived in 1918. He designed many of the Spanish-Moorish homes along Ocean Boulevard, including Mar-A-Lago, built in 1923 for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. The Norton Museum of Art has extensive holdings of European, American, and Chinese pieces. Take Route 1 south 18 miles to Delray Beach.

The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, (561) 655-2833. The Norton Museum of Art, (561) 832-5196. The Breakers, (561) 655-6611.

DELRAY BEACH

Settlers from Michigan and Japan established Defray Beach in the 1920s. George Morikami, a farmer and one of the earliest settlers, acquired 200 acres of land that he willed to the county to create the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. It includes a theater, galleries, tea house, nature trail, and bonsai garden. Military miniatures covering two thousand years of history are on view at the Cornell Museum of Art and History. The dates for the Delray Beach Community Center Antiques show are February 13 and 14. Continue on Route 1 south eight miles to Boca Raton.

Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, (561) 495-0233. Cornell Museum of Art and History, (561) 243-7922. Antique Show and Sale, (561) 243-2233.

BOCA RATON

Legend has it that this inlet of jagged rocks was named "mouth of the rat" by Spanish pirates. In 1925, Addison Mizner designed the city plan for Boca Raton. Two of his surviving 1920s buildings are the lavish pink Boca Raton Resort Hotel and Club and the city’s administration building. Historic houses open to the public include the 1920 Old Schoolhouse, the 1937 Pioneer House, and the 1923 Historic Butler House, built from plans from Woman’s Home Companion magazine. Visit the International Museum of Cartoon Art, started by Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey. The Old Floresta Historic District along Cardinal Avenue has many small Spanish Colonial-style homes. Spanish River Park and Gumbo Limbo Nature Center are two places to take in native plants and birds. Take Route 1 south 20 miles to Fort Lauderdale.

Boca Raton Resort Hotel and Club, (800) 327-0101. Old Schoolhouse and Pioneer House, (305) 427-1050. Historic Butler House, (305) 429-0378. International Museum of Cartoon Art, (561) 391-2200. Spanish River Park, (561) 393-7815. Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, (561) 338-1473.

FORT LAUDERDALE

Named for several forts that protected settlers from Seminole attacks, Fort Lauderdale became a south Florida resort town in the 1920s. The Museum of Art features North and South American art and Dutch and Flemish paintings. The 1920 Bonnet House is the 35-acre estate of painter and art collector Frederick Clay Bartlett, whose furnishings, studio, and tropical plants are on view. The Fort Lauderdale Historical Society Museum has collections of local artifacts, Seminole and Colonial settlers’ clothing, toys, and a scale model of a fort. Stranahan House, built for trader Frank Stranahan in 1901, is a good example of Florida frontier design. The 1907 King-Cromartie House, a replica of an 1899 schoolhouse, and a Discovery museum complex are all housed in the 1905 New River Inn. Hugh Taylor Birch State Recreation Area is home to such endangered species as the gopher tortoise and golden leather fern. The Riverside Hotel, the oldest in Fort Lauderdale, has large guest rooms with Jacobean-style oak furnishings. Cont inue on Route 1 south to 195 east, about 30 miles to Miami Beach.

Museum of Art, (954) 525-5500. Bonnet House, (954) 563-5393. Fort Lauderdale Historical Society Museum, (954) 463-4431. Stranahan House, (954) 524-4736. King–Cromartie House, (954) 462-4116. Hugh Taylor Birch State Recreation Area, (954) 564-4521. Riverside Hotel, (954) 467-0671.

MIAMI BEACH

In 1920, 1,600 acres of mangrove swamp east of Miami were drained and developed into Miami Beach. During the 1980s, more than 800 pastel-hued structures in the Art Deco district, in the heart of South Beach, were restored and renovated, revitalizing the city. Today, the area boasts art galleries, clubs, and restaurants, along with the Miami City Ballet and the New World Symphony at the Lincoln Theater. The Wolfsonian–FLU Foundation Gallery offers rotating exhibits of American and European art produced between 1885 and 1945. The Holocaust Memorial has five main areas of sculptures and captioned photographs. Simply named The Hotel, a recently restored 1939 structure with 52 rooms, has been decorated by fashion designer Todd Oldbam with inlaid terrazzo floors, lush fabrics, and playful lighting fixtures. Adventurous divers might try the underwater Wreck Trek site in north Miami Beach, with two shipwrecks, the Patricia and Miss Karline.

Continue on Route AlA to 41 to 95 south about seven miles to Miami.

Miami City Ballet, (305) 532-7713. New World Symphony, (305) 673-3331. Wolfsonian-FIU Foundation Gallery, (305) 531-1001. The Holocaust Memorial, (305) 538-1663. The Hotel, (305) 531-2222.

MIAMI

Miami was incorporated in 1896. Today, the city is a melting pot of cultures with ethnically mixed neighborhoods such as Lithe Havana, Little Haiti, and Coconut Grove. The Art Deco Historic District runs from Ocean Drive to Lenox Avenue in nearby Miami Beach. Rare antiquities and decorative arts are on view in more than 70 rooms at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. The Historical Museum of Southern Florida, in the Metro-Dade Cultural Center, interprets 10,000 years of Florida’s history from prehistoric Indian artifacts to 1830s Audubon prints. The Gold Coast Railroad Museum collections include Henry Flagler’s locomotive, a circa 1950 California Zephyr, and a Pullman car. In a 1930 Art Deco building, the Bass Museum of Art exhibits European paintings, and sculpture and decorative arts. From March 3 to 12, Miami celebrates Carnaval in Little Havana with food, concerts, and dancing events. Take Route 95 south to Route 913 southeast ten miles to Key Biscayne.

Vizeaya Museuni and Gardens, (305) 579-2813. Historical Museum of Southern Florida, (305) 375-1492. Gold Coast Railroad Museum, (305) 253-0063. Bass Museum of Art, (305) 673-7530. Carnaval Miami, (305) 644-8888.

KEY BISCAYNE

Linked by the William Powell Bridge, Key Biscayne and Virginia Key are two islands where visitors can catch a great view of downtown Miami. The area is popular with bikers, skaters, and watersports enthusiasts. The Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Recreation Area offers 494 acres to explore. Visitors may climb to the top of the 1845 brick Cape Florida Lighthouse. The 37-acre Miami Seaquarium is home to many rescued manatees, sharks, and sea lions. On the ocean, the Sonesta Beach Resort Key Biscayne offers 300 rooms. Backtrack about eight miles on Route 913 to Route 1 south to Coral Gables, a total of about 13 miles.

The Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Recreation Area, (305) 361-5811. Miami Seaquarium, (305) 361-5705. Sonesta Beach Resort Key Biscayne, (305) 365-2340.

CORAL GABLES

Similar to Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Coral Gables is a planned community of residential and commercial buildings with a Mediterranean flavor. George Merrick established the city from his 3,000 acres of citrus and avocado groves. His boyhood home, Coral Gables Merrick House and Gardens, is open and has been restored with family furnishings and artwork. The Lowe Art Museum displays antiquities and European and American sculpture. Don’t miss the Venetian Pool, a large rock quarry turned into a springfed swimming pool, where Johnny Weismuller and Esther Williams both swam. The Fairchild Tropical Garden is an 83-acre botanical garden with a conservatory, rainforest, and sunken garden. Built in 1926, the historic 279-room Biltmore Hotel is a great place to end a Florida journey.

Coral Gables Merrick House and Gardens, (305) 460-5361. The Lowe Art Museum, (305) 284-3603. Venetian Pool, (305) 460-5356. City Hall, (305) 446-6800. The Fairchild Tropical Garden, (305) 667-1651. Biltmore Hotel, (800) 727-1926.

If you’re planning on going to Disneyland after winning your next Olympic medal, there’ll be no need to encourage your car-mate to pray for parking. While elsewhere in America, white-knuckled drivers are gripping their steering wheels in frustration as they circle the block looking for that elusive space, you’ll be sailing, so to speak, off Interstate 5 right onto the entrance ramp that leads directly into the world’s largest parking structure.

This new parking facility, designed by Harry Wolf, principal of Wolf Architecture, is the keystone in Disney’s efforts to expand their Southern California kingdom. Land previously used for surface parking has now been reclaimed for a new theme park, as well as for the new garage which houses up to 10,500 cars. As drivers enter–at a rate of 60 cars per minute–they line up to one of six booths where they are directed to a specific parking area. “In elephantlike fashion, nose to tail, the cars move up through the building and park in tandem,” quips Wolf. This “conga line” reinforces efficiency as cars empty and visitors make their way to a pedestrian zone at the east end of the building, and then down an escalator that deposits them at the tram pickup. No need to worry if the lemming or elephant in front of you loses their way–plenty of smiling “cast members” are there to keep the show going.

It was no easy task preventing a structure that is as long as the Chrysler Building is high from looking like a behemoth. Wolf didn’t want the relentless appearance of a factory, or the Pentagon. Instead, he likened the design to a ship or an oil refinery: The parts make up the whole but “explicate the intelligence of the building. There is a logic to how it works.” Each facade addresses the site through its tectonics. The mass of the west side, for instance, is broken by precast-concrete planters in deference to the residential neighborhood across the street. The north and south facades comprise a series of seismic sheer walls, each 39 feet wide and 61 feet, 7 inches tall, linked by 51-foot-long post-tensioned beams. Wolf likens them to Roman aqueducts that help make the scale comprehensible. Exit stairs are pulled out to articulate the elevations. Wolf deployed louvers on the east side, where pedestrians walk to escalators, to protect eyes from the sky’s glare as well as to help drivers adjust to the dimme r light as they make their way through the garage.

The massive new parking garage is vital to the daily operation of the Disney Resort, which now includes not only Disneyland, but the new California-themed park, a resort hotel, and a Downtown Disney entertainment center. By strengthening and centralizing parking, Disney hopes to transform frustrated road warriors into worthy citizens of the “happiest place on earth.”

Over the past decade, sustainable, or “green” building design has become quite fashionable, as commercial and institutional clients have grown wise to its broad appeal among their members, or shareholders, and the public. The buzz about sustainable design leaves serious environmentalists both hopeful and worried, because for every earnest client asking for environmentally sensitive design, there is a likely poseur simply trying to impress people with dumb ideas. “Greenwashing,” says Donna McIntire, program manager for the U.S. Green Building Council, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., “is rampant in the industry.”

Few organizations care more sincerely about sustainability than the Chesapeake Bay Foundation: For 35 years, the CBF has led a massive effort to clean up its namesake, the nation’s largest estuary. Over the past two years, as the foundation’s directors prepared to design and build a new 32,000-square-foot headquarters near Annapolis, Maryland, they had to walk their own talk: They needed to create a building their ardent constituency would approve of, and uphold their foundation’s ideals by protecting the Chesapeake Bay, which lies 100 yards from the building, across a small beach with a couple of lonesome old trees and sublime views to the south.

Now that the building is finished, two years later, those directors should be able to sleep at night. Their new compound, designed by the Washington office of SmithGroup and a host of sustainable-design experts, has to be, as they claim, one of the “greenest” buildings of its kind. The final product–a fairly simple shed of galvanized steel, frankly articulated wood members, and three huge cisterns for rainwater–proves once again that architects needn’t sacrifice beauty for sustainability.

The CBF came to the site at the invitation of the neighbors. Before the CBF chose the 30-acre property for its headquarters, formerly the historic Bay Ridge Inn, the site was the target of a plan to build dozens of new houses, which made the relatively few people who live nearby nervous. But when the community learned that the CBF was looking for land for a new headquarters, they invited the foundation to consider the site. The parcel was perfect for the mission of the CBF, which wanted to consolidate 100 of its 200 employees from four locations around the Annapolis area. The previous landowner sold the CBF the land at a price below market value, and, as a nonprofit, the organization secured a low-interest loan and sold the site’s excess development rights to the state of Maryland.

“We didn’t think in our wildest dreams that we would get a deal like this,” says Charles D. Foster, Foundation director.

The foundation had developed a few sustainable buildings in the past–but had completed nothing on such a large scale. The CBF turned for help to Janet Harrison, an Annapolis architect who specializes in sustainable design. Harrison began looking for a suitable rating system by which to measure the project’s sustainability. She settled on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy-Efficient and Environmental Design, or LEED. The LEED system is the “strictest and most rigorous” of the various green benchmarking programs available, Harrison says (see “Degrees of Green”, page 49). “But the CBF really wanted to go up against it and see what they could do.” The CBF studied the LEED criteria, which cover everything from site preparation to indoor air quality, and developed a wish list of sustainable design features.

The budget for the building, of course, would limit the amenities the CBF could afford, so the programming phase began in October 1998 with a two-day peer-review critique led by specialists at what is now known as the Sustainable Building Industries Council (SBIC). “All these projects are individual, and you have to figure out what consultants would make sense,” says Ellen Larson, program and policy manager of the SBIC. “It’s a combination of a charette and a peer review.”

The group, which met at the old Bay Ridge Inn just before it was torn down, included representatives of SmithGroup, the Maryland Energy Administration, the state’s Department of Natural Resources, the World Wildlife Fund, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“A lot of philosophical questions came up,” recalls Harrison, who kept track of the building’s LEED adherence throughout design and construction. “Steel or wood? Do we save the trees? Or do we use the trees to encourage certification of sustainable forests?”

Several major components were removed from the design during the initial review session, such as a radiant heating system considered for the floors. “It had a lot of benefits, but was redundant with the heating system,” Harrison says. And though the building’s south elevation is mostly glazed, the original scheme included much more glazing, which the team replaced with structural insulated panels. “Every time we saved money” during the review, notes Harrison, “we rolled it back into the building.”

The cost per square foot of the building alone came out to be about $199, of which $30 to $45 went toward green elements. That figure sounds extravagant, but the foundation’s board fell in love with the LEED system and wanted its highest, or “platinum” rating (see sidebar, at right), and succeeded. As items came out during the peer review, and later, during value engineering ($30,000 was saved by leaving sheet nails exposed, for instance, rather than covering them over), “our board said, ‘Cut what you want, but don’t cut that rating,”‘ says Foster. “The LEED rating became a shield to protect the green-ness of the building.”

As a result of this adherence to the LEED, nearly every facet of the project suggests sustainability. The Merrill Center lies at the end of a two-lane road, newly painted with bicycle lanes, that stops near the water’s edge. It’s quiet out there. The drive curves through a wood to a gravel parking lot, which doubles as a “bioretention” system developed by civil engineer Greenman-Pedersen and site consultant Karene Motivans, an ecologist who works with the National Institutes of Health. The choice of gravel over asphalt paving cuts the amount of land impervious to storm water, which as a result percolates away from the parking area through a natural filter of locally native rushes, asters, irises, and wool grass to a newly built non-tidal wetland. Practically no runoff from the site ever reaches the bay.

The CBF wanted to disturb as little of the land as possible. Eighty-four percent of the site remains open, a ratio achieved by building atop the footprint of the Bay Ridge Inn’s former pool house. Initially, the CBF hoped to reuse the old building, but it was “too far gone” says Foster, so the building was picked apart and its wood recycled.

The new building boils down to two chamfered volumes: a large, rectangular office block and a smaller cube holding a conference annex. Both pieces sit atop 7- to 10-foot-high piers that open the ground beneath for 45 parking spaces (though many CBF employees bicycle or kayak to work). The form is vernacular: “We looked at a lot of fisherman’s shacks and watermen’s buildings, all raised up on piers with simple geometries and shed roofs,” says SmithGroup project architect Gregory A. Mella.

In the office block, structural bays measure 60 feet deep, the critical distance for allowing natural light to filter to the building’s northern edge. Its glassy south facade sits behind a 10-foot-wide porch running the length of the building and is delineated by a frame of engineered-wood members. The porch’s frame holds a series of brisesoleils (which baffle the summer sun) made from recycled pickle-barrel wood obtained from a disused factory nearby. has raised concerns about glare.) Photovoltaic arrays situated at either end of the porch generate only 2 percent of the building’s energy load, but CBF wanted to keep them in the design as teaching tools. At either end of the office portion, cabled X-braces stabilize the long building against high winds.

The building is framed and clad largely in structural insulated panels: Each panel consists of two thick pieces of oriented strand board sandwiching a 6- to 8-inch-thick layer of insulation. “You build the structure just like a barn,” says Mella, first assembling the walls from individual panels joined flat on the ground, then raising the walls upright. The panels remain bare on the interior except for battens covering the joints. A girdle of galvanized steel wraps the exterior “like a blanket,” Mella explains, because it has high R-values for insulation; its content is 75 percent recycled metal. The surface was left unpainted both to avoid volatile organic compounds in paint and to ensure that the steel will recycle readily at the end of the building’s life. A small volume on the building’s north side holds a locker room; it is clad in a ground-faced masonry block containing recycled aggregates and fly ash.

The open-plan interiors are a showcase for green materials. The floor of the lobby is made of 3/4-inch bamboo boards. Office floors are finished with cork beeswax, which absorbs fugitive noise in the large spaces. The bamboo, cork, and engineered wood are among the few exceptions to a design-team rule: building materials may originate no more than 300 miles from the site.

The office ceilings will stay exposed except for suspended trays of gypsum, (74 percent recycled) which hold the light fixtures.

Open offices were the only way to both ventilate and light the building naturally. Light sensors mounted throughout the offices judge when the daylight dims enough to turn up the electric lights. And temperature and humidity monitors outdoors suggest when the air is comfortable enough to activate the “Open Window” signs that hang in each office quadrant: Staff may then crank open the glass panels and let in fresh air. Roof dormers open mechanically to help draw air through the spaces. “This region isn’t the most suitable for natural ventilation,” Mella observes. “It’s a little humid. We estimate [the staff] will be able to use it about 10 percent of the year, based on our idea of thermal comfort. But knowing these people and how hands-on they are, they’ll probably use it a lot more than that.”

Although the building’s vital organs hide behind all the obvious amenities, they offer the most compelling signs of sustainability. Renewable energy sources supply about 34 percent of the building’s total load. The indoor air temperature is regulated by a “geo-exchange closed loop”: The heat pump connects to vertical wells that reach 300 feet into the ground to take advantage of the earth’s natural temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which helps to cool the building in summer and heat it in winter. The roof collects rainwater and directs it to one of the three 12,000-gallon cisterns for storage. From there, the water is filtered of particles, treated with chlorine, filtered again through carbon to remove the chlorine, and used for the sprinkler system as well as for hand washing, mop sinks, and laundry. (Local codes, however, prohibit using rainwater for drinking, cooking, or showering.) And in the restrooms (where occupancy sensors control the lights), the design team specified Clivus Multrum composting t oilets. All waste winds up in a large container beneath the building, where it is turned into fertilizer to be used on the site.

As the CBF staff moved into their offices in early December, Foster began verifying that all the building’s systems perform as designed. The CBF will use the “Bonneville” standards for building performance, set by the city of Bonneville, California, which are among the strictest in the nation. The U.S. Department of Energy, Foster says, has offered to monitor the building systems over the long term, which is fine with him. “We see part of the purpose of the building as providing a [teaching] tool,” Foster explains. “Green buildings as green buildings are not the CBF’s mission. Our mission is to save the bay.” And now the foundation’s staff can turn its full attention back to that majestic body of water, which slowly changes colors throughout the day.

Does the privately owned, for-profit Edison Schools have something to teach the public sector about how to build a classroom?

Not only is the EdLab not your father’s schoolhouse, it’s not one that you–nor most kids today–would recognize, either. There are no blackboards, no bookcases, no cartoon posters, no windows through which to ponder drifting clouds and daydream. This prototype classroom of the future, designed for Edison Schools by New York architect Leslie Gill in collaboration with graphic artists Doyle Partners and lighting designer L’Observatoire, is resolutely focused on technology. “Much of this [concept] stems from the philosophical belief that if you don’t have technology, you won’t be able to function in American society,” says Gill.

Edison Schools, based in New York, is a for-profit corporation (NASDAQ: EDSN) that operates 113 public charter schools around the country in “partnerships” with local school districts. Christopher Whittle, Edison’s controversial founder and CEO, is also known for launching Channel One, an educational cable news system that drew fire in 1989 by streaming advertising into classrooms (see “Balancing Act,” page 42). Edison plans to manufacture an undetermined number of EdLab modules, along with online courses and videos, and will begin introducing them throughout its network of 113 schools by 2003.

Gill took the job skeptically and then visited several Edison schools. “I was absolutely won over,” she says. “There’s a sense of community and a level of responsibility that you rarely see anywhere else. I rarely heard negative criticism. If somebody wants silence, they just raise a finger, and everyone waits for him or her to speak.”

Gill hired a contractor to build full-scale mock-ups of parts of the classroom as she worked on the design. The job progressed with blazing speed–five months from inception to three working prototypes installed in schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Wichita, Kansas; and Lansing, Michigan. “Having these full-scale mock-ups allowed us to be so much more creative,” Gill says. “We started with panels, then a corner mock-up 15 by 20 by 8 feet to test lighting. Our drawings would be taken directly into shop drawings by the general contractor and built in two or three days.”

The three prototypes are now in their second semester of pilot use. The Colorado EdLab was manufactured in New York and assembled on-site; local contractors built the others. All are modular assemblies consisting of a vertical steel frame, a translucent plastic wall liner, and furniture accommodating up to 60 students. Completely self-contained, they slip into existing building envelopes: The modular pieces of the EdLab are carried into the interior space cleared for them and assembled inside. The size can be juggled to fit the enclosure. (The Colorado box is 38 by 40 by 8 feet.) Inside, student desks lock into modular “pods” of four that form a work group. Every student faces a laptop computer with an online connection, and a big screen for video “distance learning” fronts the room.

So that the lighting can be totally controlled and used to manipulate both perception and mood, there are no windows. The walls, says Gill, “are not perceived as barriers, but as mutable boundaries [where] light, color, and transparency entice students to broaden their horizons.” Light can either illuminate the walls from behind or fall onto them, and the idea is to move the students’ perceptual horizons. “The physical boundaries are constant, but the visual boundaries are playing tricks with you,” Gill explains. “You’re trying to make young children understand a very amorphic sense of the world they live in. On one hand, they are there with their classmates and teacher, and that constitutes their orbit. On the other, the way they’re learning brings a very different sense of boundary. So abstractly, we’re trying to make that concept not frightening, but intriguing.”

Of the several classroom-management lighting schemes that L’Observatoire designed as part of the teacher’s “control center,” one creates a cocoon of light enveloping each pod, isolating it in a darkened classroom to build a sense of highly focused teamwork. Another pours white lighting toward the front of the room, focusing attention on the teacher.

EdLabs won’t replace all the spontaneity, clutter, and sense of individuality of traditional homerooms–nor were they intended to. EdLabs are “the new auditoriums, the special places within the school,” says Gill. In the pilot program, students meet in them for one period a day.

Fifth-grade teacher Tom Schuck uses a prototype EdLab at Roosevelt-Edison Charter School in Colorado Springs for a health-science unit called “The Human System.” He’s become a believer. “I think it’s the wave of the future,” he says. “I’ve never been a teacher who lust gets up in front of the class and talks, and this kind of structure really suits my collaborative style.”

Schuck typically will lecture for two to five minutes, then let the students work with their computers at their own pace as he wanders around and answers questions. The interactive classroom design, he says, frees him to offer much more individualized attention. And the technology-rich environment is exactly what his students need. Roosevelt-Edison is an inner-city school serving a lot of transient and low-income families that don’t have computing power at home.

What amazes Schuck most is the effectiveness of the lighting design. “Comparing it with other classrooms is like night and day,” he says. “I can have discipline problems in math class but when they walk in here, it’s totally different. When they’re working at their pods, it’s so soothing, you can just feel it in the air. They know [that] when that lighting comes on, it’s time to settle down and get the work done. There’s also an ‘enter-exit’ lighting scheme, and you should hear the noise level increase when that comes on.”

Schuck says he would rather not see Edison’s entire teaching strategy go into the EdLab environment. “I think the EdLab is great to have in the mix,” he says, “but to be in it all day would be a mistake.” At this point, EdLab is a petri dish in which to learn just how thoroughly the Edison idea of fully integrated teaching and technology can be realized. Gill sees even more in it, describing its concept in terms that are almost spiritual: The design objective is “to visually suggest worlds other than the world you’re standing in, but at the same time affirm the worth of you as an individual working at your pod or in the classroom.” As subjects in the experiment, Schuck’s Colorado fifth graders don’t exactly think in those terms, but they have an opinion. “The kids have a sense of ownership: ‘It’s ours, so we’d better take care of it’,” he observes. “And they think it’s cool.”

Christopher Whittle, founder, president, and CEO of Edison Schools, has tried to bring private-sector ideas to public education for most of his 30-year career. First, in 1970, he founded Whittle Communications, a Knoxville, Tennessee–based publisher of student magazines. Then, in 1989, he launched Channel One, a company that provided television equipment to public schools in exchange for the broadcast of an in-class television show, complete with paid advertisements. Critics shrieked that students should not be captive to commercials, and Channel One hemorrhaged money.

Whittle sold Channel One in 1994, while raising money for his new venture: Edison Schools, a for profit company which would pilot public schools. Eager to prove his critics wrong after the failure of Channel One, Whittle recruited former Yale University president Benno Schmidt as chairman of the company, and in August, 1995, Edison opened its first four schools.

Local school districts and public charter school boards contract with the company to take over individual schools in return for public per-pupil funding, which on average amounts to a little over $5,000 per student per year. As of November 2000, Edison was in charge of approximately 57,000 students in 113 schools in 27 states across the country.

The company has to balance business with academics. To fulfill its promises to parents and educators, Edison must keep teachers happy, and raise its students’ grades above those of students at other public schools. (Edison claims it has succeeded in this regard, but critics argue that no one outside the company has been allowed to analyze the raw data.) To satisfy its investors, the company must eventually turn a profit.

Edison’s business plan rides on cost savings it claims result from centralization. Because it administrates lesson plans, orders supplies, and pays salaries out of a centralized system, Edison isn’t burdened by the district-by-district costs associated with public schools. “If you have the same program going on in all the schools,” says John Chub, chief educational officer for Edison, “it’s easier to support.”

According to its SEC filings, Edison is desperate to cut costs right now. As of September of last year, Edison Schools had a deficit of at least $196.9 million. For each school it opens, Edison trains teachers, pays their salaries, buys books and materials, upgrades or builds facilities (Edison claims to have built 30 percent of its schools itself), and, after the first year of business, provides computers to each student above the second-grade level.

But while centralized management may help ease debt, it doesn’t necessarily sit well with teachers. At San Francisco’s Edison Academy, promised raises and reduced working hours couldn’t prevent more than 60 percent of the school’s teachers from leaving last summer. Teachers also complain that Edison’s cookie-cutter approach to curriculum defies one prominent contemporary educational theory: that lesson plans must be adapted to the learning patterns of each student, rather than being imposed system-wide.

Still, Edison has managed to infuse badly needed resources and hope into ailing school districts. But as the purse strings are pulled tighter by Edison’s creditors and the company’s critics howl at the windows, it remains to be seen whether the company can maintain its focus, or whether Whittle will retreat yet again.

Aluminum has been fashioned into everything from jewelry to dresses, airships to architecture. Raul A. Barreneche reviews related exhibitions that explore this once precious, now common metal.

Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire made him one of the world’s richest men, and Pittsburgh, his adopted hometown, one of the most polluted cities on the globe. Aluminum production joined steel manufacturing as Pittsburgh’s top industries during World War II, just a decade before the city abdicated industrial brawn for cleaner pursuits, like finance, high-tech, and culture. Fifty years later, the legacy of metal is being remembered–appropriately, by one of the institutions that emerged as a result of local robber barons’ far-reaching philanthropy.

The Carnegie Museum of Art has produced three related exhibitions devoted to objects made from the once precious, now common metal: Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets is a sweeping survey supplemented by Alumi-Nuts: Collectors’ Confessions, which showcases aluminum decorative objects from the private collections of local aficionados. And, the Carnegie Museum’s Heinz Architectural Center has organized Aluminum in Contemporary Architecture, a small exhibit of aluminum’s architectural applications in the last decade.

Aluminum by Design traces the soft alloy’s evolution from a decorative precious metal in the mid-1800s to the cheap, recyclable container of soft drinks today. Austrian architect Otto Wagner pioneered aluminum’s architectural use in his gilded fin-de-siecle facades, including the Postal Savings Bank in Vienna (1906), in which bolts capped with aluminum heads were both a constructional device and a decorative motif.

Inexpensive, readily available, easy to manipulate, strong, and lightweight, aluminum was a crucial commodity during World War II. After the war, however, manufacturers had to push designers to find new uses for the metal, to keep their idle plants going. Designers from Isamu Noguchi to Charles and Ray Eames began looking to this polished metal, and along the way, aluminum came to symbolize the very essence of modernity. Aluminum by Design charts its evolution and symbolism up to the present, from Pace Rabanne’s iconic aluminum-disc dress of 1969 to the innovative recent furniture of Ron Arad and Marc Newson.

Aluminum in Contemporary Architecture focuses on nine recent buildings which demonstrate different aspects of the material’s suitability to architecture. For Norman Foster’s Scottish Exhibition and Conference Center in Glasgow (1998), huge rolls of aluminum are draped on an armadillo-like steel structure. Future Systems’ NatWest Media Center at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London (1994) is a semi-monocoque aluminum pod, in which the shell is both skin and structure.

In tracing aluminum’s overlooked history, Carnegie’s three exhibitions demonstrate that its economy, performance, and seemingly limitless aesthetic possibilities still draw designers to this malleable metal, over a hundred years after its discovery.

Intended to foster Scandinavia’s growth as an economic super-region, the new Oresund bridge appears to be a flop. Nicholas Adams jaunts between Sweden and Denmark to find out why.

Last July, the Oresund Fixed Link, or Oresundbron, connecting Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, and Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, opened to much fanfare. Designed to heal the 10-million-year-old rift in the earth’s surface that placed Denmark on one side a five-mile strait of water and Sweden on the other, the bridge has been praised as both visionary and expeditious: The big idea behind the Oresundbron–a $2 billion venture funded by both the Danish and Swedish governments, completed on time and under budget–was to stitch together a new super-region that would be able to compete with Europe’s economic powerhouses. You could almost hear Mother Europe’s corsets pop. Small and Medium had become Large and Xtra-Large almost overnight!

Yet every bridge has its share of potholes. Oresundbron’s became apparent when road traffic plummeted from more than 15,000 a day in its opening months to barely 6,000 this fall. Summer travelers melted away with the colder weather, and as the novelty of the bridge wore off, the hard truth of it high tolls hit the pavement. One-way fares of about $27 have deterred many; even companies with business in both countries have gone so far as to ban employees from using the bridge, instructing them to use the cheaper, if slower, ferries.

The 10-mile link was intended to unify the Scandinavian countries economically–as well as culturally and symbolically. Its planners envisioned Swedes munching pastries in Copenhagen cafes, and Danes taking in art exhibitions across the strait. They also hoped that the “Noridc Chunnel” would boost and spread foreign tourism in the region. But the jaunt is not as easy as it should be. I recently qualified as a perfect candidate for the cultural tourist anticipated by bridge backers: Finding myself free in Lund (north of Malmo), I decided to spend an afternoon sightseeing in Copenhagen. Though admittedly a nervous driver and an English speaker with minimal Swedish, I had difficulty finding the entrance to the bridge! I never saw the word “Oresundbron” or even a bridge symbol. Here I was, eager to experience the new Europe, armed with platinum cards and curiosity, and I couldn’t find the onramp. Eventually I was set right, but the high tolls persuaded me to make the crossing by the much cheaper train on the brid ge’s lower deck.

Access to the bridge seems more an insider’s backway than a transnational junction, perhaps because the management of auto traffic has been a touchy issue since the project began. With Scandinavia’s strong green movement, environmental issues have occupied a significant part of the bridge debate from the outset and played a role in mapping the routes. Environmentalists have acknowledged that engineers did an excellent job of protecting wildlife during the bridge’s construction on land and over water. Still, auto traffic is auto traffic, and it spells pollution. Further, the new access roads and entry exchanges have brought–along with office parks for the relatively eco-friendly high-tech firms that every city seems to want–American-style shopping centers and vast asphalt parking lots.

“It is a catch-22,” says Anders Roth, formerly a traffic analyst for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. “Without more cars, the bridge will not pay for itself and taxes will have to be raised; with more cars they will violate environmental standards and create more pollution.” The Oresundbron authorities know on which side its crisp bread is buttered. With a massive debt and pledges to make the bridge entirely self-sufficient, they are now pushing a discount plan for frequent users (the more you travel, the more you save). What all this means, of course, is more cars and more pollution.

Environmentalists and skeptics challenged the bridge for these very reasons all along. Early on, some advocated a shorter link between the Swedish town of Helsingborg and the Danish burg of Helsingor (north of the current bridge). “It would have been cheaper and more efficient,” says urban historian Thomas Hall of Stockholm University. But local politicians in Malmo and Copenhagen favored the fixed link for obvious reasons–more commercial and cultural opportunities. The current site is also more southerly; in other words, closer to Europe. “The goal is to tie the countries to Europe with a modern road system,” says Copenhagen architect and journalist Allan de Waal. “Their next project is the cross-Zealand motorway and bridge which will make it possible to drive directly from Copenhagen to Hamburg or Berlin.” To American ears it all sounds very familiar. (Is Robert Moses smiling?)

Oresundbron’s achievements, so far, are slight. Newspapers have had their fun with stories of Swedes dashing off to Denmark for cheap beer, and Danes going to Sweden for cheap building materials. “The truth is,” says de Waal, “while Malmo has many appealing things, I have only been there twice in the last 20 years. And even with the bridge, I am probably not going to change my habits. The Oresundbron is a very long-term proposal.” That’s exactly what its builders have banked on.

For his sabbatical from Vassar College, where he has taught architectural history and theory since 1989, Nicholas Adams is studying contemporary Swedish architecture. “The last time America was really interested in Swedish architecture,” Adams says, “was 50 years ago. It’s probably the Scandinavian country whose architecture we know the least about.” Adams recently edited The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Samgallo the Younger and His Circle (MIT Press, 2000). He also coedited the December 1999/January 2000 issue of Casabella. For this issue, Adams writes for our Culture section on the new bridge connecting Copenhagen, Denmark, to Malmo, Sweden

Since the 1970s Vito Acconci’s performance art and installations have actively engaged both people and public places. He tells Cathy Lang Ho why architecture is his focus now.

Vito Acconci crops up in art histories under a range of categories–conceptual, performance, body, and installation art, to name a few. But he remains absent from architectural annals, despite the fact that, for 10 years now, he has not undertaken independent art projects, having founded his own design practice, Acconci Studio, in 1990. Though not trained as an architect, most of his staff of seven are. Out of his Brooklyn studio, they produce a dozen or so design projects a year, mostly commissions for public works.

Your arrival to architecture follows an interesting trajectory–from writing to performance to installations to public art. How do you explain this progression?

When I was writing, I found myself mostly interested in the question of movement–how you move across a page, how you move from left margin to right margin, from page to page. I was using the page as a field for movement. I was interested in parts that existed as a route.

But while writing, I always thought I wasn’t really a writer. This concern with movement started to become the movement of me: “I do things to myself.” Eventually, [the performance pieces] felt too self-enclosed. I had been treating “self” as something that could be isolated, but by the 1970s, a lot of people, including myself, had very different notions of self–we thought of self as a kind of system of feelers that only existed because of a social, cultural, and political system. I felt I had to do something with other people. I began to think of art as a way an artist or a person in a gallery or room could meet other persons in the room. To me, art was a kind of exchange, a kind of meeting place. I started to do more installations, treating the gallery as a sort of town square.

Your art was transforming space into a public forum.

I had been using exhibition spaces as a place for people to come together anyway, but then I started thinking, Now that they’re here, could some community be formed? They have something to see and to listen to, but there’s nothing they can do. I started thinking more about how people could create and use the spaces they’re in. I always thought of space as a kind of event for people. In the 1980s, the pieces became a sort of “self-erecting architecture.” In one piece, there were four panels on the floor, covered with American flags. There’s a swing hanging above them, and when a person sits in it and swings, the panels rise up around him, making it an instant house. I guess that’s where the pieces started to get more architectural.

Is it worth distinguishing between art that is architectural, and architecture that is artful?

As far as my own work was concerned, I just started to doubt that it had anything to do with art, and felt it had more to do with architecture and landscape architecture. My work always grew out of its immediate context or the landscape. A lot of my 1980s work played with the conventions of house, but I realized that even if they have a function–as a sign–you still can’t live in them. That’s when I began to feel that my work had to be more than just demonstrations. I wanted it to be buildings or spaces that remained. But projects that are permanent and exist in a public space can’t start from one person s work alone. If you start something private, it ends private. That’s why I started Acconci Studio [in 1990].

Was the transition difficult to make?

I did a show at the MoMA in 1988 called Public Places, and after that I thought, I have to take this seriously–I really have to do stuff in public places, which means I have to work the way an architect works. What I like about public spaces is that people walk by or pass through them. What bothers me about a lot of art is that people have to first make the decision that they are going to be an art viewer, and then go to see an artwork or installation. I’m more interested in the passerby than the art viewer. People decide for themselves whether or not the space is useful.

But your designs do straddle the ground between art or folly and architectural or landscape design. For example, for your bicycle parking lot in a park in the Hague, you’ve elevated the lot among trees, which makes its access challenging.

When were doing it, a friend of mine said the same thing: “It’s so difficult for a person to go up a ramp to park a bicycle.” But at the same time, elevating it creates more space below to make something else–a covered garden or something. You also create the opportunity for users to have a more varied experience, different views, and so on.

It’s not that we want to make things hard for people. We want these things to mix with the world around them. We are trying to create a fluid, changing space, where you’re not sure where the boundaries are. Even with my early installations, I never wanted to have a thing within a space, but rather, wanted to have a space become a thing, or a thing become a space. I wanted the landscape to become the architecture, or the architecture to sink back into the landscape, so that you would have fluid, continuous space–so you don’t separate a thing from its surroundings.

Why is this important to me? The absence of any hierarchy means that a user or person can determine what’s more important, at whatever different times. I’m a child of the 1960s, when the thinking was: People are instrumental, they decide how to use something instead of being told how to use it. That is the basis for most of our work.

How did you come to the equation that public art is architecture? It’s important to me that my work is in the public realm, and that it’s useful. What do either of these things mean, anyway? “Art” is just a way of thickening the plot. I don’t know what separates us from practices like Bernard Tschumi’s or Asymptote’s.

You probably face the same dilemma that many experimental architects face: When the work appears to be wild and wiggly, many people have a difficult time relating to them as real, viable design projects.

Sometimes people like wiggles. Builders don’t, but people do. In a lot of our work, we take space and turn it inside out or upside down–and people feel liberated by that. Sometimes wiggles inspire people to feel involved, invigorated. Wiggles can tie people together, just as it ties itself together.

Is buildability important to you?

I do think it’s important to build. Nothing we do is ever purely fantasy. They might be difficult, they might cost more, but none of these things are impossible–in most cases, the technology to realize them does exist. And every project, whether it’s built or unbuilt, is a study, a model. For example, the World Health Organization/UNICEF commissioned us to design a playground that could be produced in numbers and installed in many different countries. We had to have something that would have its own space. We came up with a playground that we’re calling the Klein Bottle, which is a sort of 3-D Mobius strip. The neck of the bottle comes out then goes back inside of itself, so that inside and outside get mixed up. It would be transparent, made of some form of molded polycarbonate. It’s a continuous space, from inside to outside. I don’t know if it’s going to get made, but regardless, it will be a model for other things. The Klein Bottle Playground could be the Klein Bottle House. Or it could be a model for a c ity.

How does your identity as an artist affect your ability to work as a designer?

We are fortunate that we are asked to a lot of different kinds of things–like a skateboard park in Avignon, the design shop for the MAK Center in Vienna, a light installation/phone booths in the new San Francisco Airport terminal, a new city on a garbage dump in Tel Aviv. But we would love to be asked to do a building or a private house.

The prison boom in the U.S. has been good to architects, but how much has it helped reduce crime? New estimates vary, Bradford McKee looks at the numbers.

With the popularity of three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, and truth-in-sentencing rules guiding the courts, architects who design prisons and jails have had their hands full of work over the past several years. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that the nation spends about $25 billion per year building and operating prisons, about $1.3 billion of which goes toward construction and renovation of prison facilities. The federal prison budget rose by 160 percent between 1990 and 1996, and the country now has about 2 million people behind bars–four times the number it did 20 years ago. Crime rates dropped dramatically, by as much as 8 to 10 percent nationwide in 1999. But are the two phenomena linked? Several new studies by justice experts indicate that the effect of rising incarceration rates on falling crime rates may be moderate to negligible.

In September, the nonprofit Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based research group, released the results of a state-by-state survey suggesting that the states with the highest increases in prisoner population saw the lowest reductions in crime. Twenty states where prisoner populations swelled most (an average 72 percent rise) between 1991 and 1998 experienced a 13 percent drop in crime, whereas the remaining 30 states, where inmate populations rose an average 30 percent, saw crime drop by an average of 17 percent. The findings, said Jenni Gainsborough, a coauthor of the study, “shed serious doubt” on the idea that falling crime rates can be attributed to higher incarceration levels.

Texas, for instance, had the highest jump in prisoner population–144 percent–during the seven years the Sentencing Project studied, while crime in Texas dropped by 35 percent. California’s incarceration rate, however, rose by only 52 percent and that state saw a 36 percent drop in crime. Figures from New York show that its prisoner count went up by only 24 percent, yet its crime dropped by 43 percent.

The most influential factors in the 1990s nationwide crime drop, the Sentencing Project contends, were a strong economy (especially low unemployment), shifts in the drug trade (particularly the wane of crack cocaine use), and innovative policing tactics.

But the estimated cost of preventing one murder in the past decade came to $13.4 million per year and, statistically speaking, meant locking up 670 prisoners, says University of Missouri–St. Louis criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld. His latest study, published in a new book titled The Crime Drop in America (Cambridge), suggests that the recent spike in incarceration rates may be responsible for 25 percent of the drop in the homicide rate.

Yet, criminology specialists differ on the degree to which they believe imprisonment has cut crime. In the same book carrying Rosenfeld’s study, a report by William Spelman, a public policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, concluded much the same, that incarceration gets credit for one-quarter of the recent crime-rate drop. Yet another recent analysis by Anne Piehl, a public policy professor at Harvard University, finds that between 1989 and 1999, only 5 percent of crime reduction could be chalked up to incarceration alone.

Regardless of whether more prisons mean less crime, Rosenfeld maintains, if crime rates continue to fall, architects who design prisons may find themselves with fewer projects. Politicians have had an easy time scaring the public into building more prisons while crime rates were rising. Not only does less crime translate to fewer inmates overtime, but as crimes rates drop, the public may start to look at those expenditures more skeptically, knowing that, ultimately, they bear the costs of building and operating new facilities.

The television ad aired recently in northern Virginia looks predictable enough: It shows traffic-choked roads and earth movers making way for new suburban settlements. A voice warns of the destruction of the region’s idyllic horse country by “runaway” population growth. But it’s not an environmental group making this doomsday appeal–it’s an anti-immigrant outfit called the Coalition for the Future of the American Worker, which is backed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. But neo-nationalists are not the only ones who have decided that a fear of foreigners feeds handily into antisprawl rhetoric: A faction within the Sierra Club that calls itself Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization is pushing a referendum within the conservation group to make tighter immigration controls an official policy goal.

“Mass immigration is the engine driving the U.S. to double its population next century,” says the maverick Sierrans’ Web site, “and thus needs to be discussed as an active component of Sierra Club population policy.” The conflict has presented a vulnerability on which, with the mother club’s bete noire, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), has pounced. “The vote is being pushed by rank-and-file Sierra Club activists,” not renegades, insists Gary Hambly, president and CEO of the Home Builders Association of Northern California in San Ramon, accusing the Sierra Club of being “connected with anti-immigration groups.”

Last spring, the NAHB estimated that the country will need 15 million new homes over the next decade to meet the demand of new households, and attributed part of the demand to immigrants. Slightly fewer than 1 million people immigrate to the U.S. legally each year. The anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington jumped on NAHB’s statistics nonetheless, claiming that, yes, indeed, mass immigration is one of sprawl’s “root causes.” This may surprise some recent immigrants to suburbia who arrived to find it pretty well established–by all those immigrants who preceded them. B.M.

On an island of the Danube in the new district of Donau City, where Vienna’s United Nations complex is located, a neighborhood of social housing towers has recently sprung up, and all but one march to the same drummer. Built with similar massing and height, they differ mostly in exterior styling. In Vienna, as everywhere else in a globalized economy of Manhattanized skylines, high-rise buildings have proved resistant to experimentation and change, constrained by precedent, engineering, codes, real-estate formulas, conservative financing, and the simple physics of the elevator.

Avowed enemies of the box, Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky, the two principals of Coop Himmelblau, have long believed that varied rather than uniform spaces enrich lives. With the SEG building, a project like any other in the city of Vienna’s workaday “social housing” program, they designed a concrete-frame apartment tower that is conventional in its structure and morphology, but they reconceived the facade, public spaces, and air handling systems in ways that cumulatively radicalize the whole, and create the city’s most significant “green” building. Each of the innovations is simple and relatively inexpensive, but their sum total proves that in architecture, as in chaos theory, simple systems can breed complexity. The architects paid for their innovations by using industrial materials: Galvanized-metal railings, subway grate fences, and other standardized off-the-shelf parts replaced the one-of-a-kind details and elegant materials that the architects usually try to design into their structures.

It is the SEG’s Tower of Pisa profile that first lures people off their usual paths, inviting Viennese to be unexpected tourists in their own town. First, the architects cantilevered each of the 25 floors on the northwest face ever so slightly, so that the entire wall inclines at a 3-degree angle. The coordinated cantilever creates a line of apartments that grows wider on higher floors, so that the top apartments are noticeably bigger than the lower ones, and differently configured: This changing geometry allows different views, and the 3-degree slope of the wall makes the interiors intriguingly, but not uncomfortably, strange.

On the southwest facade, a building-wide glass loggia with operable floor-to-ceiling louvers acts as a protected balcony that extends Vienna’s outdoor season into the winter for all apartments. On the adjacent south-facing side of the building, the architects cantilever generous balconies of differing sizes within a leaning, all-glass, 14-story “climate lobby” fitted with computer-controlled louvers. This vertical winter garden is housed in a corner chamfered to catch breezes and maximize southern light, and residents now water their hydrangeas and geraniums all year long in the company of neighbors above, below, and to the side, as if on the terraced hillsides of Positano, Italy.

Internally the structure behaves like a lung. The climate lobby, an air exchange box on the roof, and an elevator shaft all work together to circulate warm and cool air in summer and winter. Computers control the louvers on the chamfered and inclined glass wall. Here the louvered glass is independent of each terrace, bypassing the balconies and allowing air to circulate so freely that the louvered wall effectively forms a chimney that exhausts up through a vent at the top of the space. The rising hot air draws cool air through a vent off an elevator shaft. The fronts of each balcony are fitted with vents that flap shut in the event of a fire in the atrium. As on the southwest facade, the louvered wall acts to condition the air that forms a protective environmental blanket around the main structure.

There are 10 two-level apartments with double-height terraces within the climate lobby, as well as flats ranging in size from studios to three-bedrooms. The terraces and balconies on the south and southwest faces provide much-appreciated outdoor space. Enclosed in glass, these exterior zones act as greenhouses, buffering the interiors with a protective layer of air. “The content is more important than the form,” observes Prix.

Architects nurtured in the demonstrations of the ’60s are especially conscious about how space helps shape a sense of community, and Prix and Swiczinsky created the open balconies in the climate lobby in what Prix calls a social experiment to warm up the frosty social life which is characteristic of most high-rises. Stacking floors in the usual pancake tends to isolate residents by cutting off any communication between stories, leaving only the lobby, elevator, and landings–venues for passing conversations at best.

In addition to their Positano-like terraces, the architects have placed a clamorous, glass-enclosed bicycle garage next to a generous lobby to encourage community: On the ninth floor, they introduced a “sky lobby” made of several communicating rooms and a sundeck, for formal and informal meetings. The architects earned the space within unforgiving economics by shaving off several inches from the standard thickness of each floor slab; over the height of the building, the inches added up to an extra floor.

The autobiography as a living building can be read on the balcony facades, where cacti, ficus, and philodendra commingle with jeans and T-shirts hanging out to dry. Books sit on balcony ledges next to TV reception dishes. Walter Czerny, on the 20th floor, has become a zealot of his apartment. He likes to lunch in a corner where the balcony juts beyond a concrete structural wall. The small, angular, breathtaking perch, a little like a trapeeze, gives him a vertiginous view of the sailboats and kayaks plying a back canal of the Danube, “This is the spot where I can catch that Himmelblau moment,” says Mr. Czerny. “This is where I fly.”

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan said that a tower should soar, but Emily Dickenson advised, in another context, “Make it slant”–that is, cultivate the unexpected. Coop Himmelblau’s housing is one of the few buildings anywhere that both soars and slants, while performing the social roles of precipitating a sense of community among its occupants and protecting the environment. Within the tradition of social housing in Vienna, the architects have shifted the paradigm from the old socialist model, where the uniformity of the units emphasized the collective identity of the proletariat. The SEG tower instead is all about the individuality of a different era: the variety of the units, plans tailored to each occupant, the uniqueness rather than conformity of the part within a whole, which itself is deliberately and philosophically eccentric. Rare is the high-rise typology rethought–from its skin to its core.

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies opened MLC’s new highrise headquarters in Miller Street, North Sydney, in August 1957, nearly all the faces in the crowd were sombre suited men. MLC was then the largest office building in Australia. Inside were gleaming interiors and marching rows of desks, all sporting the latest look in corporate efficiency. Outside, Bates Smart & McCutcheon’s glazed curtain wall was a triumph of engineering. Today, the building looks just as fresh. The facade has been restored by Bates Smart’s Sydney office following a conservation management plan prepared by Peter McKenzie for Jackson Teece Chesterman Willis. The result is an exemplary piece of sustainability. To restore a 1950s skyscraper takes some courage. Not every corporation chooses to revive a potential dinosaur. Restoration is not necessarily a cheap solution or a sensible investment. To their credit MLC chose to stay and they did so throughout the refurbishment process, Inside, the changes wrought were dramatic. The new interio r that is “Campus MLC” represents one of the most profound shifts in the history of postwar Australian office design.

The driving force in the process of creating Campus MLC was Rosemary Kirkby, MLC’s general manager of people. In 1985 Lend Lease had bought an ailing MLC and immediately set about turning its fortunes around. By the mid-i 990s, MLC had moved from its pyramidshaped hierarchy that oversaw the selling of life insurance to a “flat” structure of teams of people or business units who invented new products in the financial market. MLC, for example, was the first with internet on-line trading. The firm soon became hugely profitable and it’s no surprise that their new logo is “The Golden Egg”. Kirkby was acutely aware that the firm’s success was due to this new structure, which radically changed how people work, and also how they valued where they work. New spaces for Campus MLC were to be equally exciting, innovative, and different.

For the intensive consultative process that involved all MLC employees, Kirkby gathered together a team of design experts, including Debbie Berkhout, the Lend Lease Projects design manager, architects DEGW (Sydney), who provided programming data and coordinated the spatial integration of the various organisational units within MLC, and architect James Grose, of Bligh Voller Nield, who gave form to the resulting multitude of design ideas. Kirkby believed Grose’s expertise in residential design would bring an alternative way of thinking to the corporate interior. A one-week whirlwind tour of the “world’s best practice” in office design saw the team visit offices for Chiat Day in Los Angeles, Andersen Consulting in Chicago, Shell in The Hague, 3M in Paris, and, importantly, British Airways at Waterside near Heathrow (designed in 1989 by Norwegian architect Niels Torp and built 1995-97). This last complex sits on a 240 acre landscaped site and has as its major focus The Street, a 175 metre long glazed atrium that connects a series of low rise office slabs.

The message brought home was that for a totally new office landscape to succeed there needed to be a management commitment from top to bottom, and passionate engagement with the place and with people at all levels. There was also another factor to be considered. Kirkby explains it as follows: “Approximately seventy percent of MLC’s workforce are Generation X (i.e. those aged thirty-seven or less), who have entered the workforce during a period of unparalleled merger and acquisition activity. They understand the terms ‘downsizing’ and ‘right sizing’ and don’t expect, or seek, a ‘job for life’ as their grandfathers did in 1957…. They do not expect their careers to be linear; they may well change employer up to ten times, and may have several changes of career. For this generation, there is no stigma attached to being out of work for periods of time. Indeed work is increasingly seen as part of ‘lifestyle’.”

At Campus MLC, being at work might be preferable to going home! As Grose says, the task was to design “a place to meet” instead of “a place to work”. The commission was exactly the sort predicted by English office design guru and founder of DEGW, Francis Duffy. His books The Changing Workplace (1992) and The New Office (1997) speak of embracing new digital technologies and potentially rethinking the office analogically as hives, dens, cells, and clubs.

Under Grose’s direction, the first architectural response was to slice an open stair volume through eleven existing floors. This simple gesture was the most revolutionary — the creation of a vertical pedestrian street within a building type borne from the technology of the elevator. It was also an expensive slice, but one that would contribute to an “effective” not just “efficient” place/space. Each floor was then given a different name and themed accordingly, each having different furniture and different finishes. Level 3, for example, is the Zen Den. At one end of the lift lobby, with its Richard Goodwin sculpture, is a series of three dishes filled with stones to relieve stress, and, nearby, there are giant amoebic seat-forms. At the other end is a tropical fish tank. Behind the tank is a table that one has to climb up into to sit down — rather like eating at a Japanese restaurant. To use the white board you have to walk on the table. There is also no head of table. Another floor, with blue and yellow st riped carpet and industrial/warehouse type finishes, is called The Beach. There is also The Table level, which has a kitchen and a massive table where one can eat, meet, or have a board meeting. If it all sounds gimmicky or embarrassingly twee it’s not. When I visited, people were in fact earnestly having meetings over cafe latte on Cafe Level 6. Others were using the shrouded hospital curtain” meeting room, while a graffiti wall in one elevator lobby was clearly in use with Melbourne Cup sweep draws complementing business plans.

Grose freely admits that the life of the fitout probably coincides with a ten year cycle of office culture. This fashion for corporate renewal might have the same short life that open classrooms had in the 1970s. But the environment has a real sense of energy and activity. There is a sense too that the environment could change and adjust itself according to shifts in office culture. The original MLC floor plan, a central core flanked by two open floor plates forming an irregular H, is robust and ideally suited to such a radical rethinking of the generic office landscape.

There is also a practical side to all this. All computer services drop from the ceiling via simple galvanised steel service “posts”. There are fully adjustable work stations from Milan Unifor and no dedicated private offices throughout the entire eleven floors. Even the CEO, Peter Scott, doesn’t have an office. It is also an organisation that doesn’t require, for example, each employee to be surrounded by a library of books, or specialised equipment as required by doctors or radiologists. As an academic, I would be a certain pariah in such a place. There are hot-desks for interstate and visiting staff, numbers of four-person meeting rooms, and curved booths housing plotters and printers. All corners of the buildings are taken up not by offices but project rooms. No-one owns a window. There are green pods for quiet moments and quiet rooms for private phone conferences. The ends of each lift core all have small meeting rooms each with a different decor.

Outside, Bligh Voller Nield provided one element - a glass and steel-framed canopy that alludes to the steel-framing of the original building behind. The canopy’s glass roof makes one fully aware of the expanse of curtain wall above, and of the first floor level opening where originally a stair marked the entry to the building with a line of shops at ground level.

In such a complex collaborative weave of clients and architectural experts, the role of the solo architect has been jettisoned. There is no one author. Grose says this is not a traditional piece of architecture. That is true. While the architectural gestures are stylish, assured, and deliberate fun, what is innovative here is the entire package of program, architecture and the passion for change embraced by the organisation. Campus MLC has partial echoes in the 1989 decision to by ICI (now Orica) to retain ICI House in Melbourne (1955-58), and also the controversial baffle in the late 1990s to refurbish Howlett and Bailey’s Council House (1961) in Perth. Where MLC is different, though, is the revolution that has happened within the organisation itself. As Grose observes, such a commission could only be achieved with a receptive client, an egalitarian approach achieved through a consultative process (a process that is not necessarily architect-led), and, importantly, a brief to create an environment rather tha n an interior.

For architects trained in strategic thinking, here is a perfect model for change. Architects must understand the dramatic and profound shifts taking place in the workplace, and they must ensure that they too have the ability to change. It is not just the architect’s role which may change, but also perhaps the way architects work themselves, the way they work with others, and the way that client expectations may liberate architects’ own practices.