Wentworth Institute of Technology | Spring 2018 Faculty Showcase
Watson Hall | March 15, 2018

Wentworth Institute of Technology organizes the annual Faculty Showcase to celebrate and recognize the accomplishments of  faculty. Fifty faculty showcased 34 examples of excellence and creativity with teaching, scholarship, EPIC, grants, sabbaticals, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Organized by the Provost Office and Learning Innovation & Technology, participants hosted information tables to illuminate services and resources.

Dr. Christina Lanzl, Adjunct Professor of the Department of Architecture and Director of the Urban Culture Institute presented Placemaking in Action: EPIC Making in the Classroom. The exhibit offers documentation, outcomes and insights in the power of interdisciplinary, collaborative learning. Surveyed are three seminars from the past two years that focus on placemaking and art-in-architecture, an investigation of urban placemaking within a hands-on learning platform that combines theory with the making of successful places on and off campus. Focus and outcomes are cultural mapping, idea competition and exhibition projects developed by Wentworth senior and graduate students (two funded by EPIC Mini Grants).

Architecture student Shuxin Huang, Dr. Lanzl's spring 2018 co-op student, assisted. Thank you to Don Tracia, Tes Zakrzewski and the entire Provost Office and Learning Innovation & Technology team for incredible support.

Christina Lanzl and Anne-Catrin Schultz presented a faculty lecture on placemaking, which introduced the Placemaking Manifesto, which they co-authored and issued together with Robert Tullis and members of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA Placemaking Network in fall 2017. Lanzl and Schultz highlighted placemaking principles outlined in the Manifesto by discussing a series of case studies from their professional practice.​

The Lunchtime Conversation faculty lecture series is coordinated by Associate Professor Antonio Furgiuele, Department of Architecture within the College of Architecture, Design & Construction Management at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Placemaking is about sense of place. Everybody – people of all backgrounds, ages and abilities – can participate in creating successful public places. Everyone can serve the agenda of excellence in design, healthy communities and thriving neighborhoods. Our built environment is a common good that comes alive through an understanding of how humans instinctively relate to space, design leadership that leverages it, and activity programming that capitalizes on it. The BSA Placemaking Network celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the release of the Placemaking Manifesto. To solicit community input the Manifesto was launched at a public writers' workshop with the co-authors, Christina Lanzl, Robert Tullis and Anne-Catrin Schultz at BSA Space in Boston on October 23, 2017. 

The Placemaking Network explores what it takes to further the creation of high-quality, distinctive public places. Participants of the public Placemaking Manifesto review at BSA Space on October 23, 2017 were Placemaking Manifesto co-authors Christina Lanzl, Robert Tullis and Anne-Catrin Schultz as well as Polly Carpenter/BSA Foundation, A. Vernon Woodworth/AIAMA Board of Directors, Anthony Clayton, Deborah Fennick, Kathryn Firth, Júlia Hilário, Marek Jacisin, Victoria LaGuette, Doris Martinez, Neil McCann, Stephanie Osser, Sergio Arturo Perez, Coco Raynes, Eric Reinhard, Renata von Tscharner, Sara Wermiel, Douglas Wohn and Claudia Zarazua
 
​The Placemaking Manifesto
Placemaking transforms space into place. Our public realm is a common good that comes alive through an understanding of how humans instinctively relate to place, design leadership that leverages it, and active programs for and by communities as a civic benefit for everyone. Placemaking activates our built and lived environment. We acknowledge and actively work towards improving hard as well as soft quality of life factors. 
Placemaking = Quality of Life
 
Placemaking engages the five senses. It is about developing and continuing identity, distinctive, specific and memorable character in our public spaces. It’s about fostering a sense of place: our body-mind’s positive kinesthetic, emotional and cognitive experience in, and in relationship to our public surroundings.  It’s achieved by putting the importance of our shared, exterior spaces between buildings above that of our private, interior spaces within them. We recognize that storytelling gives meaning to our lives and is therefore an important narrative device of human civilization.
Placemaking = A Sense of Place
 
Placemaking is about the benefits that accrue to us, our neighbors, our community, and even our culture when we engage with each other in a high-quality and healthy public realm.  Including public participation in its design and use helps create community identification. Active programming, public events, and public art are powerful tools that help foster community pride.
Placemaking = Caring About the Community
 
Placemaking integrates the individualized focus of disciplines such as architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, public art, and community cultural programming; and supersedes their boundaries by focusing on collaboration, communication and place instead of isolated projects, bringing together individuals of all backgrounds, interests and talents.
Placemaking = Collaboration and Communication
 
Placemaking embraces inclusivity by offering a universal platform for discourse. Everyone is a maker of place. Everyone can serve the agenda of excellence in design, supportive environments, healthy communities, and thriving neighborhoods. In a high-quality public realm, we shed our individual bubbles and participate in a life of greater civic engagement.
Placemaking = Active Participation
 
Placemaking combines an awareness of tradition with an embracing of new and emerging technologies. It respects time-tested rules of form and space, but also employs the research, development and innovation along with contemporary digital and social media tools to further community building.
Placemaking = Tradition and Innovation


Download the Placemaking Manifesto
Download the Oct. 23, 2017 Writers' Workshop Notes
Download the Authors' Biographies
See the Jan. 2, 2018 article on ArchDaily
Download the Letter to the Editor of ArchDaily

The World Metrorail Congress Americas took place at The Inn at Penn Station in Philadelphia on June 28 and 28, 2017. The conference surveyed strategic discussions related to light rail planning and management in metropolitan areas. Sandra Bloodworth, Director, MTA Arts & Design, Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City chaired the roundtable, Ridership Engagement: The essential role of art and design in engaging your ridership and communities. Presenters included Katherine Dirga, Program Manager Arts Administration of MARTA in Atlanta GA, Elizabeth Mintz, SEPTA Director of Communications, Philadelphia artist Ray King as well as Caitlin Martin, Media Communications Manager of the Association for Public Art in the conference city. Christina Lanzl of the Urban Culture Institute’s contribution to the conversation focused on questions related to placemaking in transportation planning:

• How can public transportation agencies work towards better services and policies in the U.S. that support placemaking and a high quality public transportation environment?
• What is the future of digital applications in public transportation art and placemaking projects? Can an overload of visual and sound/noise stimulation deteriorate the ridership experience?

Lanzl laid out the benefits of an integral, holistic perspective and multi-disciplinary approach that leverages placemaking, the arts and culture to enhance abutting communities through collaboration. The goal is to improve quality of life and to create opportunities for neighborhoods, businesses, organizations and individuals/residents.

​The author presents a useful, interdisciplinary discourse on architecture understood as a continuous process based on the concept of layers. Clear definitions of layering in several scientific fields examining the physical environment are introduced and serve as structure of the entire book with chapters on:
• Temporal layering: sedimentation, additive or subtractive process over time;
• Spatial Layering: simultaneous perception of spaces; and
• Material Layering: additive configuration of planes.
More recently, Schultz has expanded her scientific scope to include cultural placemaking, thus adding the dynamics of the immaterial, i.e. human memory and narrative, which inform the meaning of place.
 
Laid out are layering processes in geology, archaeology, engineering, graphic design and the visual arts. The key to Schultz’s approach is an examination of sections beyond a structural or stylistic understanding, ultimately aimed at dissecting, analyzing, and folding a period, a city, or a structure into a system of data. In the literature the ‘monolith’ dominates up to the 18th century. A layered approach enters the conversation beginning in the 19th century.
 
A thoughtful connection is made to visual artists intense experimentation with layering starting with modernism. Prominent examples showcased are early 20th century Cubism, developed by George Braque (and Pablo Picasso, though not mentioned) with collages of single objects that are defined through simultaneous, coexisting planar layers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Smithson’s minimalist geometric forms introduce repetitive layering and serialization in this minimalist vocabulary, further developed by Gordon Matta Clark in his ‘building cuts’. The link to contemporary art is established by the large-scale installations of Japanese artist Nabuko Nakanishi, comprised of hundreds of successive images in his Layer Drawings. Also mentioned might be the infinite mirrored assemblages of Josiah McElheny.
 
The phenomenon of layering in architecture is painted in broad strokes beginning with a review of Vitruvius, followed by insights on the temporal layering of important historic buildings through the centuries with their evolving architectural styles. A subchapter is dedicated to the important discovery of polychromy and its connection to textile design in Greek temples beginning around 1800.
 
Outstanding recent, featured examples of layering include the Santa Catarina Market in Barcelona and the transformation of this former convent to a covered market by architects Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue who collaborated with artist Toni Comella on a dramatic colorful roof mosaic.
 
A comparison of fifteen case studies in contemporary architecture that measure both the effective depth and the chronology of layering in building envelopes reveals surprising insights. The exteriors of notable designs by Foster + Partners, Morphosis, Sauerbruch Hutton and Peter Zumthor range in depth from over four up to eight feet. Others, such as Duiker, SANAA and SOM, designed walls of less than one foot in depth. Interestingly, it is revealed, intense layering clearly is a preferred architectural practice rather than an evolving trend.