Our April Green Building Salon will focus on several projects that have implemented the NYC Active Design Guidelines (ADG). It should be a great presentation and discussion, featuring several excellent projects and folks from NYC DDC, Bright Power and Perkins + Will.
The ADG are remarkable both for their content and the process that brought them about. They are the result of a unique partnership between several city agencies; the Department of Design and Construction, the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, the Department of Transportation and City Planning. The fact that these agencies worked together to develop this document is a recognition that the solutions for broad public health problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease are not available within the boundaries of a single discipline. It’s wonderful to see city government tackling such complicated issues and delivering eminently sensible solutions in such a clear and engaging format. It’s a beautifully designed book, worthy of the very important subject matter.
And there can be no doubt of the importance of the subject matter. As the ADG states “physical inactivity and unhealthy diet are second only to tobacco as the main causes of premature death in the United States.” It is hugely important to solve these problems from both the humanitarian and financial perspectives- they lead to staggering loss of life and quality of same, and they cost our society untold billions of dollars.
The ADG looks at how environmental design can be a primary weapon in the battle against what for many of us is a sloth-like existence; driving a car to purchase every quart of milk, taking the elevator to the third floor and trolling through two hundred TV channels on a sunny day. The guidelines look at the design of both buildings and streets, and provide myriad case studies of successful implementation. At their heart, many of the solutions are pretty simple stuff. They propose- gasp!- designing streets for people rather than cars and they encourage architects to remember the staircase- that once glorious means of rising through the public space of a building that is now most often relegated to a poorly-lit concrete silo we only use when our lives are in danger. But these common sense solutions are always drawn from empirical research- greatly strengthening their stature in the minds of most readers.
Beyond getting people physically moving, the Active Design Guidelines are “active” in another sense as well. Getting design professionals involved in public health issues is part of larger and very compelling trend toward much greater engagement in social issues. You can see this in the green building and sustainability movements of course, but also in the greater attention paid to social issues previously considered outside the realm of the building industry.
A number of recent books have documented this trend, including:
Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism
And Metropolis is currently featuring an article on the San Francisco firm Leddy Maytum Stacy, whose mission revolves around socially responsible design. They are also, like so many great minds, University of Oregon alums. Go Ducks!
You can download the Active Design Guidelines here. Please join us on the evening of April 14th for a discussion of the their contents and related issues.
