Terrorism, subway safety, national identity cards, cataclysmic storms, survivalism and other subjects that are no longer design-school conjecture, but the very real terrain of designers and their work.
COULD more have been done?" asked Jan Egeland, a United Nations emergency
relief co-ordinator, speaking last Friday of the lack of preparedness for the
descent of Hurricane Katrina. "I would say every society in the world is
not preparing adequately for catastrophic events."
As the country looks back at the devastation of the last two weeks and forward to another anxiety-provoking anniversary on Sunday - and as the terror attacks in London remain fresh in people's minds - preparedness has become the topic for blogs and backyards.
Beginning Oct. 16, the Museum of Modern Art will examine issues of safety, including emergency preparedness, with its first major design show in its new home. "Safe: Design Takes On Risk," will display products, prototypes and proposals by designers from around the world.
"Safe," conceived in 2001 by Paola Antonelli, a curator at the museum, was delayed because of the Sept. 11 attacks. Now in addition to marking, with an uneasy relevance, the fourth anniversary of those events, the exhibition will address what design can do - or might already be doing or failing to do - to make the world safer. If designers traditionally construct solutions to the problems of everyday life, how have they raised a wall against danger?
In a panel discussion on Aug. 31, William L. Hamilton, a reporter for House & Home, and Tom de Kay, the deputy editor of the section, spoke with Ms. Antonelli and seven designers, five of whom are included in "Safe," about terrorism, subway safety, national identity cards, cataclysmic storms, survivalism and other subjects that are no longer design-school conjecture, but the very real terrain of designers and their work.
Q: A newspaper article noted that a man in New Orleans had to hack a hole in his roof to get up onto it, to wait for help. How do we find ourselves in a situation where houses in a flood zone don't even give you access to your own roof?
Rob Rogers, partner, Rogers Marvel Architects: When we started dealing with security architecture, we met with this very interesting guy from FEMA who comes in and does analysis after hurricanes, after earthquakes. And he talks about an awareness window of about three years, where, after a catastrophic event, new buildings will respond to whatever the last disaster was, whether it was a hurricane or an earthquake or a terrorist event. And then it just begins to kind of drift because it's nobody's favorite topic. And it begins to slip away.
So it's very episodic and really based on what happened last time, not necessarily what is the most likely event to take place.
Masamichi Udagawa, partner, Antenna Design: In the 50's, I think Japan, Tokyo included, got hit by a few really big typhoons and the city got flooded. I remember seeing a picture from back then, a little boat hanging from the bottom of the roof, preparing for yet another typhoon hitting Tokyo. But nowadays nobody thinks about a typhoon in Tokyo. They all think about earthquakes; just like you mentioned, people respond to what happened last time.
Stefan Sagmeister, principal, Sagmeister Inc., graphic designers: Preparedness is a cultural issue. All of Europe kind of makes fun of Switzerland because they have these fallout shelters and their little chambers in the bridges to explode the bridges in case of an invasion.
Q: After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about the responsibility of designers to push these types of awareness forward. Is it a responsibility of designers to be thinking about these issues if, say, city governments aren't adequately thinking about them?
Michael Rakowitz, artist: I think that sometimes it takes a kind of visibility to make things part of a step forward in the way that design starts to take into consideration safety. In Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World," there's a great anecdote about car safety in the 1970's, which was totally ignored by Detroit-based companies for a while. In order to raise visibility of the fact that bumper design was not going to cause an increase of, like, $500 per car if they went ahead and did a better bumper, he sandwiched together beer cans and two shelves and drove it into the Senate building to show that you can make this bumper out of makeshift materials. And that raised a kind of public discussion about design.
Sulan Kolatan, principal, Kolatan/MacDonald Studio: I am not sure if it's possible to be 100 percent safe with every potential catastrophe. But, for example, there are arguments that part of the reason why we have these huge hurricanes now has to do with the global warming. If we are contributing to the climate worsening, then we can think about different ways of addressing that. And I think politically, we can think about cause and effect and the larger implications of terrorism and why terrorism is happening and so on and so forth, and try to address those potential catastrophic events within a bigger framework.
Q: If we can't be 100 percent safe, then as designers, to paraphrase Ed Koch, how are we doing?
Ms. Kolatan: The whole issue of safety, even in the broader sense that I'm trying to discuss, with the whole eco component, is a relatively young discussion. We just are scratching the surface. I think that only recently has a general consensus emerged in the populace that this is really the issue for our generation and for the ones to follow.
Q: One seemingly unanimous observation is a need for universal devices like cellphones that have emergency capabilities. The big cellphone news this week was the iPod cellphone - a music player, not an emergency device. Should companies and designers be more focused on safety in what they produce?
Mr. Udagawa: Let's say the government put money into an initiative that treated cellphones as a necessity for life-threatening situations. But the cellphone is not just a device, it's an infrastructure. So then you have to put a lot more antennas on the roof of Manhattan's buildings. Just a couple of months ago we had a condo meeting to decide whether we would install a Verizon antenna on the top of our building and the biggest issue was safety, not in a potential blackout, but the safety of radio microwave antennas, which may just be burning out our cells bit by bit. Design has always kind of dealt with contradicting situations.
Tobias Wong, artist: I think it's very frustrating for designers now. The Smart Car, for example, that was supposed to launch last year. They're no longer doing that, and the Smart Car's doing so well in Europe; in Canada they're doing so well they can't keep up with demand. We can't design something great because it's not going to be accepted, and yet we still want to be ethical.
Mr. Udagawa: A designer can take two hats. One as a professional problem solver, but we can step out of our profession and put on another hat, which is concerned citizen, and use our knowledge and skills for whatever the cause. However, the dangerous thing about that approach - the artistic approach, provocation - is that the alarmist voice will fade very quickly. If you just keep saying one thing over and over, then nobody will listen to you. I think the designer's power is through the artifact. We can change - maybe it's subtle change - but we can change people's attitude and we can influence how they conduct their daily lives, maybe bit by bit, without resorting to the alarmist approach.
Q: Let's say that a dirty bomb goes off in Times Square. Are we safer than we were four years ago?
Mr. Rakowitz: No. Isn't Times Square the most surveilled section of the city? It's kind of ridiculous, the Surveillance Camera Players would give tours on Sundays pointing out all the different things, like lamp posts, that are actually surveillance cameras. So you're talking about a breach of a system that was enhanced four years ago, that doesn't function and, you know, isn't going to make people running away from a bomb calmer.
Mr. Wong: How many of us actually have the Go Bag that the city was really trying to promote? I don't have one.
Mr. Rogers: Where's that roll of duct tape?
Mr. Wong: I had it, and I had my supplies. But it's all gone.
Ms. Antonelli: I know a company that has bio and biochemical suits for each employee, $2,000 each.
Q: In New York?
Ms. Antonelli: Yes, I won't name names. But there's a company that has that. But, no, I don't have the Go Bag either.
Gregg Pasquarelli, partner, SHoP Architects: I was sitting in a design meeting one month ago at Tulane, where we're doing a building. And they were arguing with our choice of engineers because they were saying that they couldn't design in this area. And I was like, it's a delta foundation, you can calculate it. They kept saying, no, no, no, it's not the foundations, it's not the soil. It's hurricanes that we're afraid of. They said the first floor has to be 44 inches above the grade because that's the worst water that we've ever had. It's now about six and a half feet.
Mr. Rogers: It's also that safety is an investment. Are you going to purchase these biohazard suits for everybody? We laugh because it's this crazy investment - or is it?
With cars, there's a certain accepted risk that at least 42,000 Americans are going to die every year. That's just what happens, and it's O.K. because that's balanced against the measure of free movement that we have, which is extraordinary. And that seems to have found its balance.
Q: In the case of automobiles, it seems as though somebody somewhere has done a good job of selling safety. Safety is now a sales point. Aren't there other spheres of design in which safety could actually be introduced as value?
Ms. Antonelli: Oh, it already is: children's stuff.
Mr. Rogers: When I was a kid, I don't think I even saw a bicycle helmet, ever. Now, it has become absolute de rigueur. Now they've become as much the attire of biking as they are part of the safety.
Q: There are designs for a national identity card included in the "Safe" show. Are they a good idea? If you had to design one, how you would make it effective?
Mr. Pasquarelli: Anything can be copied, anything can be faked, so what value is it? Again, it's that perception of making people think that they're safer than they really are; it's the industry of fear.
Q: Some of the people here who grew up in Europe grew up in cultures where you were expected to have your papers on you and it wasn't considered a fascistic thing.
Ms. Antonelli: I don't feel my rights violated by having an ID card. But I agree that it's probably not useful. You want me to carry an ID card? No problem, if it really helps.
Ms. Kolatan: I think that there's a false focus in the discussion right now that tends to isolate a single issue as a panacea for everything.
Mr. Rakowitz: I'm against it because of the time that it's coming at and also its sort of confluence with the safety advertising that's happening now: "If you see something, say something" - those posters in the subway. I feel like the next show should be called "Trust." Security isn't locks on doors; you can put lots of those on. But it's better to talk to your neighbor eventually.
Q: We have a lot of temporary design solutions in place for spot response to terrorist fear. The police are now searching our bags sporadically in the subways and they've got two officers at a folding table. Should we be accepting reality, and designing these types of new features of our landscape?
Mr. Rogers: Some of it will become permanent because there are some very real, very bona fide threat conditions that exist and need to be addressed. With the accessibility issue in architecture and design, you know, it's taken us 20 years to get curb cuts and do just basically responsible things. Nobody makes a big deal about accessibility any more, you just do it.
Mr. Pasquarelli: The clients are coming around. Now, 80 or 90 percent of our clients come to us and say "We want sustainable solutions. We're willing to spend a little bit of extra money." Some of them are actually rather insistent upon it. Of course, then you get your zoning approval and your plans approved and everything else and then they spin around in their S.U.V. to pick you up. But I think that it's really going to be a reality in most of the buildings over the next decade.
Q: Many people talked after 9/11 about being less cynical, and the importance of thinking positively, in its aftermath. Did anyone here see that mood make its way into design?
Mr. Rogers: The idea that there's a big role for design in city situations is more prominent nationally than any time in my career, for sure.
Ms. Kolatan: Also locally I would say. In the whole rebuilding process and the two design competitions that were held, what struck me was that everybody was talking about urbanism and it was such a great thing, being an architect, where people were interested in discussing urban issues. I really thought it was great that there was such an awareness and interest at such a general level with urban and cultural issues.
Mr. Pasquarelli: And I don't think that's waned. It's something that's palpable; the city is almost in its best building days since the Robert Moses era. There's a belief that you can do things again. There's a belief that the city can change itself and that design and people can come together and we can make the city better. And I really think people believe that.
"Safe: Design Takes On Risk" will open at the Museum of Modern Art on Oct. 16 and runs through Jan. 2.
As the country looks back at the devastation of the last two weeks and forward to another anxiety-provoking anniversary on Sunday - and as the terror attacks in London remain fresh in people's minds - preparedness has become the topic for blogs and backyards.
Beginning Oct. 16, the Museum of Modern Art will examine issues of safety, including emergency preparedness, with its first major design show in its new home. "Safe: Design Takes On Risk," will display products, prototypes and proposals by designers from around the world.
"Safe," conceived in 2001 by Paola Antonelli, a curator at the museum, was delayed because of the Sept. 11 attacks. Now in addition to marking, with an uneasy relevance, the fourth anniversary of those events, the exhibition will address what design can do - or might already be doing or failing to do - to make the world safer. If designers traditionally construct solutions to the problems of everyday life, how have they raised a wall against danger?
In a panel discussion on Aug. 31, William L. Hamilton, a reporter for House & Home, and Tom de Kay, the deputy editor of the section, spoke with Ms. Antonelli and seven designers, five of whom are included in "Safe," about terrorism, subway safety, national identity cards, cataclysmic storms, survivalism and other subjects that are no longer design-school conjecture, but the very real terrain of designers and their work.
Q: A newspaper article noted that a man in New Orleans had to hack a hole in his roof to get up onto it, to wait for help. How do we find ourselves in a situation where houses in a flood zone don't even give you access to your own roof?
Rob Rogers, partner, Rogers Marvel Architects: When we started dealing with security architecture, we met with this very interesting guy from FEMA who comes in and does analysis after hurricanes, after earthquakes. And he talks about an awareness window of about three years, where, after a catastrophic event, new buildings will respond to whatever the last disaster was, whether it was a hurricane or an earthquake or a terrorist event. And then it just begins to kind of drift because it's nobody's favorite topic. And it begins to slip away.
So it's very episodic and really based on what happened last time, not necessarily what is the most likely event to take place.
Masamichi Udagawa, partner, Antenna Design: In the 50's, I think Japan, Tokyo included, got hit by a few really big typhoons and the city got flooded. I remember seeing a picture from back then, a little boat hanging from the bottom of the roof, preparing for yet another typhoon hitting Tokyo. But nowadays nobody thinks about a typhoon in Tokyo. They all think about earthquakes; just like you mentioned, people respond to what happened last time.
Stefan Sagmeister, principal, Sagmeister Inc., graphic designers: Preparedness is a cultural issue. All of Europe kind of makes fun of Switzerland because they have these fallout shelters and their little chambers in the bridges to explode the bridges in case of an invasion.
Q: After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about the responsibility of designers to push these types of awareness forward. Is it a responsibility of designers to be thinking about these issues if, say, city governments aren't adequately thinking about them?
Michael Rakowitz, artist: I think that sometimes it takes a kind of visibility to make things part of a step forward in the way that design starts to take into consideration safety. In Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World," there's a great anecdote about car safety in the 1970's, which was totally ignored by Detroit-based companies for a while. In order to raise visibility of the fact that bumper design was not going to cause an increase of, like, $500 per car if they went ahead and did a better bumper, he sandwiched together beer cans and two shelves and drove it into the Senate building to show that you can make this bumper out of makeshift materials. And that raised a kind of public discussion about design.
Sulan Kolatan, principal, Kolatan/MacDonald Studio: I am not sure if it's possible to be 100 percent safe with every potential catastrophe. But, for example, there are arguments that part of the reason why we have these huge hurricanes now has to do with the global warming. If we are contributing to the climate worsening, then we can think about different ways of addressing that. And I think politically, we can think about cause and effect and the larger implications of terrorism and why terrorism is happening and so on and so forth, and try to address those potential catastrophic events within a bigger framework.
Q: If we can't be 100 percent safe, then as designers, to paraphrase Ed Koch, how are we doing?
Ms. Kolatan: The whole issue of safety, even in the broader sense that I'm trying to discuss, with the whole eco component, is a relatively young discussion. We just are scratching the surface. I think that only recently has a general consensus emerged in the populace that this is really the issue for our generation and for the ones to follow.
Q: One seemingly unanimous observation is a need for universal devices like cellphones that have emergency capabilities. The big cellphone news this week was the iPod cellphone - a music player, not an emergency device. Should companies and designers be more focused on safety in what they produce?
Mr. Udagawa: Let's say the government put money into an initiative that treated cellphones as a necessity for life-threatening situations. But the cellphone is not just a device, it's an infrastructure. So then you have to put a lot more antennas on the roof of Manhattan's buildings. Just a couple of months ago we had a condo meeting to decide whether we would install a Verizon antenna on the top of our building and the biggest issue was safety, not in a potential blackout, but the safety of radio microwave antennas, which may just be burning out our cells bit by bit. Design has always kind of dealt with contradicting situations.
Tobias Wong, artist: I think it's very frustrating for designers now. The Smart Car, for example, that was supposed to launch last year. They're no longer doing that, and the Smart Car's doing so well in Europe; in Canada they're doing so well they can't keep up with demand. We can't design something great because it's not going to be accepted, and yet we still want to be ethical.
Mr. Udagawa: A designer can take two hats. One as a professional problem solver, but we can step out of our profession and put on another hat, which is concerned citizen, and use our knowledge and skills for whatever the cause. However, the dangerous thing about that approach - the artistic approach, provocation - is that the alarmist voice will fade very quickly. If you just keep saying one thing over and over, then nobody will listen to you. I think the designer's power is through the artifact. We can change - maybe it's subtle change - but we can change people's attitude and we can influence how they conduct their daily lives, maybe bit by bit, without resorting to the alarmist approach.
Q: Let's say that a dirty bomb goes off in Times Square. Are we safer than we were four years ago?
Mr. Rakowitz: No. Isn't Times Square the most surveilled section of the city? It's kind of ridiculous, the Surveillance Camera Players would give tours on Sundays pointing out all the different things, like lamp posts, that are actually surveillance cameras. So you're talking about a breach of a system that was enhanced four years ago, that doesn't function and, you know, isn't going to make people running away from a bomb calmer.
Mr. Wong: How many of us actually have the Go Bag that the city was really trying to promote? I don't have one.
Mr. Rogers: Where's that roll of duct tape?
Mr. Wong: I had it, and I had my supplies. But it's all gone.
Ms. Antonelli: I know a company that has bio and biochemical suits for each employee, $2,000 each.
Q: In New York?
Ms. Antonelli: Yes, I won't name names. But there's a company that has that. But, no, I don't have the Go Bag either.
Gregg Pasquarelli, partner, SHoP Architects: I was sitting in a design meeting one month ago at Tulane, where we're doing a building. And they were arguing with our choice of engineers because they were saying that they couldn't design in this area. And I was like, it's a delta foundation, you can calculate it. They kept saying, no, no, no, it's not the foundations, it's not the soil. It's hurricanes that we're afraid of. They said the first floor has to be 44 inches above the grade because that's the worst water that we've ever had. It's now about six and a half feet.
Mr. Rogers: It's also that safety is an investment. Are you going to purchase these biohazard suits for everybody? We laugh because it's this crazy investment - or is it?
With cars, there's a certain accepted risk that at least 42,000 Americans are going to die every year. That's just what happens, and it's O.K. because that's balanced against the measure of free movement that we have, which is extraordinary. And that seems to have found its balance.
Q: In the case of automobiles, it seems as though somebody somewhere has done a good job of selling safety. Safety is now a sales point. Aren't there other spheres of design in which safety could actually be introduced as value?
Ms. Antonelli: Oh, it already is: children's stuff.
Mr. Rogers: When I was a kid, I don't think I even saw a bicycle helmet, ever. Now, it has become absolute de rigueur. Now they've become as much the attire of biking as they are part of the safety.
Q: There are designs for a national identity card included in the "Safe" show. Are they a good idea? If you had to design one, how you would make it effective?
Mr. Pasquarelli: Anything can be copied, anything can be faked, so what value is it? Again, it's that perception of making people think that they're safer than they really are; it's the industry of fear.
Q: Some of the people here who grew up in Europe grew up in cultures where you were expected to have your papers on you and it wasn't considered a fascistic thing.
Ms. Antonelli: I don't feel my rights violated by having an ID card. But I agree that it's probably not useful. You want me to carry an ID card? No problem, if it really helps.
Ms. Kolatan: I think that there's a false focus in the discussion right now that tends to isolate a single issue as a panacea for everything.
Mr. Rakowitz: I'm against it because of the time that it's coming at and also its sort of confluence with the safety advertising that's happening now: "If you see something, say something" - those posters in the subway. I feel like the next show should be called "Trust." Security isn't locks on doors; you can put lots of those on. But it's better to talk to your neighbor eventually.
Q: We have a lot of temporary design solutions in place for spot response to terrorist fear. The police are now searching our bags sporadically in the subways and they've got two officers at a folding table. Should we be accepting reality, and designing these types of new features of our landscape?
Mr. Rogers: Some of it will become permanent because there are some very real, very bona fide threat conditions that exist and need to be addressed. With the accessibility issue in architecture and design, you know, it's taken us 20 years to get curb cuts and do just basically responsible things. Nobody makes a big deal about accessibility any more, you just do it.
Mr. Pasquarelli: The clients are coming around. Now, 80 or 90 percent of our clients come to us and say "We want sustainable solutions. We're willing to spend a little bit of extra money." Some of them are actually rather insistent upon it. Of course, then you get your zoning approval and your plans approved and everything else and then they spin around in their S.U.V. to pick you up. But I think that it's really going to be a reality in most of the buildings over the next decade.
Q: Many people talked after 9/11 about being less cynical, and the importance of thinking positively, in its aftermath. Did anyone here see that mood make its way into design?
Mr. Rogers: The idea that there's a big role for design in city situations is more prominent nationally than any time in my career, for sure.
Ms. Kolatan: Also locally I would say. In the whole rebuilding process and the two design competitions that were held, what struck me was that everybody was talking about urbanism and it was such a great thing, being an architect, where people were interested in discussing urban issues. I really thought it was great that there was such an awareness and interest at such a general level with urban and cultural issues.
Mr. Pasquarelli: And I don't think that's waned. It's something that's palpable; the city is almost in its best building days since the Robert Moses era. There's a belief that you can do things again. There's a belief that the city can change itself and that design and people can come together and we can make the city better. And I really think people believe that.
"Safe: Design Takes On Risk" will open at the Museum of Modern Art on Oct. 16 and runs through Jan. 2.