Joan Krevlin's work as an architect demonstrates what integrity can bring to a career. Deploying form and function with integrity is key to design. Krevlin manages to do so in her projects while maintaining environmental sustainability and social accessibility.
This interview is part of the Council's second annual SEPTEMBER SUSTAINABILITY
MONTH, which kicks off a year of events and resources on sustainability. Generous
funding of the Carnegie Council's 2010-2011 sustainability programming has been
provided by Hewlett-Packard and by Booz & Company.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Welcome to Global Ethics Forum. I'm Julia Taylor Kennedy,
here with Joan Krevlin to discuss the architect's role in creating sustainable
communities.Krevlin's work as an architect demonstrates what integrity can bring to a
career. Deploying form and function with integrity is key to design, and Krevlin
manages to do so while maintaining environmental sustainability and social accessibility
in her projects.The American Institute of Architects has recognized the quality of Krevlin's
work. The Institute honored her design of the Queens
Botanical Garden Visitor Center in 2008 with multiple awards. This year,
the Institute bestowed on Krevlin the rare title of Fellow of the American Institute
of Architects.It is my pleasure to welcome Joan Krevlin to Global Ethics Forum.Let's start our conversation with sustainability.How and when did you begin
to bring environmentally conscious elements into your designs?
JOAN KREVLIN: It's actually an interesting question because it goes back
to when I studied architecture.I studied architecture in the late 1970s, so that was another time in the ebb
and flow of thinking about sustainability; one was not thinking with the word
"sustainability," but rather about how we used energy. It was a time
of another gas crisis. Gas prices were very high. We spent a lot of time in
architecture school looking at passive solar use and how we could design architecture
to be more responsive to energy needs.That, of course, was a brief moment in time that then passed and got buried
for many years.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: I just want to go back to one term. What is passive solar
use?JOAN KREVLIN: It's when you collect solar energy in a way that doesn't
involve energy. It's having something that can receive heat. Passive means you
are not using a whole lot of technology to make it happen.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: So as you were saying, it kind of got buried over the
years.JOAN KREVLIN: It got buried because we all got busy—not everybody,
but many of us got busy doing other things. It was also a a political time at architecture school—I was at Washington University in St. Louis doing community design workshops.I personally had a predisposition to architecture that saw it as a social
act, unlike a lot of other ways of looking at architecture, which is as a more formal
enterprise. I always had a very strong connection to architecture as a social
activity.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: How is it a social activity?
JOAN KREVLIN: When I mean social, I don't mean social as in hanging around
with your friends. It is social in that one can interact and affect how people
live, how people build communities, how we engage with the built environment, and
to see how we choose and are able to live our lives. Buildings become
enablers to a kind of engagement with everyday life in a way that can facilitate
things, as opposed to simply existing unto themselves as objects.All good architects will understand that successful buildings are inhabited
in ways that enhance the grace of life in many ways. You can take that further
and realize that they can affect how we make decisions about how we choose to
live and how we engage in communities.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Let's go down this social path that you've opened up
here. Give me some examples of how you can design a building to be more or less facilitating those social engagements.JOAN KREVLIN: Any building is often designed for a particular group of
people. There are big issues, like affordable housing, that really are integrated with
issues of our times in many ways.Even in the everyday architecture that we do—I will give you an example. Recently we completed a community center for the Sephardic Jewish community
in Brooklyn. We were hired in part because they are a very active community
that had a very engaged building that was overtaxed for all the uses they had
in it, in terms of preschoolers, grandparents and teens all using one building.
We were hired to expand the building and make it bigger so it could facilitate
all the spaces that they needed.In reality, when we got started with the project, we realized it was a very
unique community that had very strong ties to the neighborhood, to each other,
to being a unique, in this case a Syrian community who inhabited a very specific
location in Brooklyn. In working with that community to design and expand their
building, we went fairly deep into understanding how they used their building
and how they could both look back at their past as a community that was so ingrained
together, and also how they could build an ongoing community together through
the spaces in the building.Rather than just look at individual spaces, we really looked at the in-between
spaces that promoted the sense of community of which they were so proud.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: If you're using these in-between spaces, how do you as
an architect build in elements that build community?JOAN KREVLIN: There's almost an essence or a soul to a building that
gets inhabited in ways that you didn't expect, by making ways that people can
adapt the space to their own use or find ways to spend time doing things that
were unanticipated or unexpected, unplanned.In that example, we had a very oversized lobby corridor in between spaces that
extended through the entire building, so that any moment when you left what
you were doing, there was this place to just hang out and spend time and look
up or down and see other people in the building. So it promoted almost a town hall, town square garden space within the building so that there could
be an informal interchange of groups meeting and spending time.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: You could congregate, in a way.
JOAN KREVLIN: You could congregate without being told this is a congregation
space.That is a really little example of something, because when one is looking at
educational spaces, it is known that those in-between spaces are
very important.I think about it in two ways. One is always looking at the more intangible goals
of a building project.One always starts an architectural project with a written program: We need X
number of rooms to do X number of things. We also often meet with our clients
and talk about the aspirational goals of the building. What are you trying to
have happen with this building that's not just a programmatic need or a functional
need?With an institutional client, it is often how can we use the architecture
to speak or express your institutional mission.It is asking a lot of probing questions that are often surprising to people,
and then helping our clients understand in some ways who they are and how they
can be even better in that building. Buildings can do a lot of things for groups
of people who inhabit them.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Let's talk about the Queens Botanical Garden, because
this is one example where you were able to integrate so many different priorities
in one project, and it received a lot of acclaim.How did you bring environmental standards and community-engagement elements?
Were those stated priorities from the institution from the beginning, or is
that something you brought to the project?
JOAN KREVLIN: When we started with the Queens botanical project, there
were two goals that the Garden had. At first we thought that they were separate
goals, and then in fact we realized that they were actually one and the same.The Queens Botanical Garden is located on 39 acres in Flushing, Queens, in the
most culturally diverse county in the United States. It has been historically
a somewhat underfunded botanical garden, unlike the botanical gardens in Brooklyn
and in the Bronx.It has always been extremely well-used by its neighborhood residents, who represent
very broad-based Asian communities, Hispanic communities, people from really
all over the place. On any given day you can be in the garden at 8 o'clock in
the morning and there are hundreds of people doing Tai Chi along the
alleys in the Garden. Or on the weekend they have a wedding garden, and it is like looking at a United Nations of how people dress for weddings.It
is a quite extraordinary place.It has always been known as a garden that brought people, plants, and culture
together. That has always been its identity and something that they really
wanted to celebrate.In doing master plan studies, they really understood that to project themselves
forward as a garden and develop a really clear identity that would attract visitors
from all around the city, one way to distinguish themselves was to show themselves
as stewards of the environment. They adopted a very ambitious sustainable mission,
which was again to showcase themselves as stewards of the natural environment.We saw that there were these two different things they were thinking about,
to showcase themselves as stewards of the environment and be a place where people,
plants, and cultures all came together.The Garden had first gotten funded to do a master plan, and then their first
capital funding was for a building which was to be a visitor center.You had a garden that was re-imagining itself, with a building as their first
capital effort. One of the many challenges is how you have a building really
represent a garden and speak to the goals of a garden. We spent a lot of time
with the community and, through their own master plan process, meeting with
residents of the community and doing workshops to understand what was important
to the people who came to the garden.Across cultures, people spoke about water, and we began to realize that there
were certain things in which regardless of where you came from, one could
find commonality. It is in how people connect to daily and seasonal environmental
change, through rituals, holiday celebrations. No matter what culture you were
part of, you connected to seasonal changes as having to do with sun, with longer
and shorter days, and certainly with water.We began to realize that these two distinct goals—to speak to the diverse
cultures and to showcase the environment—were really something where we
could find very strong common ground.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Describe the building to me as you conceived it.JOAN KREVLIN: The programmatic goal of the building is to house the offices,
meeting, gallery, and retail spaces, and a small auditorium. The auditorium
is more of a multipurpose space.It was to replace an existing administration building that had been sort of
front and center when you walked into the garden. The first thing you saw was
a building as opposed to a garden. It had long outlived its function.The building needed to accommodate very specific needs, but it also needed to
be something that could have multiple uses within it in terms of meeting space
and the multipurpose space.
Our intention with the building was to have it become secondary to the experience
of the garden and to have it actually enhance the experience of the garden.
It is integrated into the landscape—it has a green roof that grows out of
the landscape so that you can't quite tell where building starts and landscape
stops. You can rise up on the hill that is the green roof, which actually becomes
the covering of the auditorium below.There is a very large canopy roof that—when I say canopy, it's a covering
of an outdoor terrace space that is quite large, and you see it almost like
the wings of a butterfly from a distance. It folds up and it provides the ability
for people in the garden to sit and be protected from the rain or sun.That roof is also actively a water collector. When it rains, it's a nice day
to be at the garden because you hear the sound of the rain, which then is collected
to a single point and funnels down into essentially a piece of landscape that
collects the water and channels it to a cleansing biotope,
which is a planted area that cleanses the water. That water is then stored and
pumped back to a water stream that runs through the garden and back to the building.There is the green roof which covers the auditorium, the covered terraced area
which is covered by a roof that collects water, and then the offices and meeting
space which are in the bar building.The bar building houses all the offices above and the meeting spaces below.
It has a skin, the building enclosure, that is both glass that has sliding doors
so that people inside the building can open it, and then a wood brise-soleil.
A brise-soleil is, imagine wood venetian blinds that are permanently open, so
they filter the south and western sun. They don't close up and down but they
act in many ways like an open screen. The skin of the building allows the light
to be both filtered into the building and stay somewhat protected.All of the surfaces of the building are doing work to make the building more
environmentally sound and to use fewer resources. Also, because of the explicit
nature of what they do, when you're in the building you become more aware of
the environment that surrounds you.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: And now, of course, this building is LEED-certified [Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design]
and has, as I mentioned, received accolades for environmental sustainability.This is a case study of a way to integrate community
and sustainability. Stepping back from that, do you think that this is a model that can and should be used? Do you see it being used in other
places as a way to try to bring these two ideas together?
JOAN KREVLIN: Where this was successful, was that it did receive a LEED Platinum
rating, which is the highest rating in the LEED system. That is very ambitious
in terms of the checklists of things it does for energy use, water savings,
and the way it uses its landscape. There is a long checklist of things that
a building has to achieve in order to achieve LEED Platinum certification. Where
this building is more successful is it took those things and almost became a
teaching tool.One of the bigger things that we understand is that in order for people to care
about the environment, to want to be more resource-wise, both in terms of how
we live and certainly how we build, we have to first encourage people to care
about the environment and to notice the things that we impact when we build
buildings.For many years we saw buildings as sealed containers, and we didn't think about
their siting, what their exposures were, whether the windows were operable or
not, because they were so well air-conditioned and we were comfortable when
we were inside. In a way it is stepping back and rethinking what it needs to
be comfortable.There is a wonderful book called Thermal
Delight in Architecture. It reminds us historically of how people used
to think of shelter as gathering towards a hearth, sitting on a veranda, sitting
in a cooled courtyard, as ways to both celebrate and acknowledge the climactic
sort of environment that we are in.The Queens Botanical Garden building connects us back to those thermal elements,
whether it's natural breezes or sun or rain, so that we're aware of their presence,
we can delight in them, and we think about them in a way that reminds us that
we don't need to necessarily seal ourselves off from them.Being in the building
on a hot summer day is very different than being there on a winter day. Early-morning
winter is different than late-afternoon summer because of the way the light
moves through the water. The water course, which we've collected the water from
the roof, bisects the building and runs as a water canal essentially through
the building, and you are aware of how plentiful or not plentiful water is.All of those things connect the visitors to the natural environment and make
all this talk about sustainability tangible, so that it became something that
is understandable.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: You also sit on the New
York City Green Codes Task Force. Do you see these lessons that you learned
and implemented in the design of the botanical garden catching on?
JOAN KREVLIN: There has been a sea change. When we first
started the project in 2000, LEED was new. The city had instituted in a very ambitious way, sustainable
guidelines to promote high-performance buildings. In some ways they were very
ahead of the time in thinking about guiding public projects to be more sustainable.But at that time, specifying materials, finding builders and consultants who
understood these ambitious goals—our landscape consultants were from the
Midwest, our water consultants were from Germany. There was local interest and
talent, but there wasn't deep experience to understand what was going to work.
We put together a team that drew from far-reaching places in order to have the
expertise.There was often a concern that many of the things that are not very
complicated would be more expensive because there wasn't a familiarity with
them.All of that in those ten years has totally changed. There are certainly very
few public buildings that are being built that aren't looking very closely at
how they are performing. New York City is certainly, through the Green Code
Task Force, really revamping their building codes so these things become less
optional and become more instituted in how we build.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: You started a firm with people, from
what I understand, that you went to architecture school with.JOAN KREVLIN: Three of my partners all went to Columbia together. They
started the firm and I joined five years later.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: I see.JOAN KREVLIN: We like to say we all went to school together, but we didn't.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: I am curious how you all work together, being such
close colleagues for such a long time—these ideas of sustainability, is
that something that is really across the firm? Is that something you feel like
you bring and are bringing people along with?
JOAN KREVLIN: The entire firm is interested in the issues of sustainability but it often depends on the project. How much can we really bring the client
along? How much they are interested themselves?Across the projects within the
office, there is a greater commitment and sometimes a lesser commitment because
we don't have the luxury of picking our clients by how committed they are to
these issues. But we have tried through the office ethos to imbue that in terms of how we
practice.There are a lot of things that you don't even have to highlight as issues, you
just need to meet with clients and say, "Do you want to do a sustainable
building?"It means just making smart choices. Then there are certain things where there
are certainly cost implications that are choices, and the client is very much
a part of making those decisions.But as a base line of how we work, we look to be resource-wise and energy-smart.
It goes to really wanting to be technically smart and be good architects. A
lot of the issues really have to do with things that make good architecture:
siting well, using natural light well, thinking about orientation, and the materials
that you use.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Do you find that clients are starting to come to you with
a certain expectation of the types of sustainability sensitivity that you have?
JOAN KREVLIN: Our clients are very broad-based, and they come to it from
a variety of reasons. When we are working with residential developers who are
building new buildings, it is often from a marketing perspective. From a marketing
point of view, is it important for them to have a building that is sustainable?We do a lot of work with young children, and there it often has to do with healthy
indoor air environments. That's another aspect that is very important to sustainable
building, and there is often that kind of emphasis.We are working with a synagogue right now for whom it is faith-based. We are
also working with a group of nuns building a convent, and for them they think
the environment is part of their moral responsibility, and it is extremely important
for them that they have their own vegetable garden on the roof.Clients bring very different perspectives in terms of what is important. Again,
we try to both understand and make sure that we meet those needs. They are also then interested in the other things that come along with that.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: We started our conversation talking about how you saw
an ebb and flow in sustainability when you were first in grad school. Do you
fear or feel that you'll see another ebb and flow now?JOAN KREVLIN: If you had asked me that question a couple of years ago,
I would have said I worried that sustainability had become the new fad and that it was really
a lot about things that you could buy. Architecture was
looking at a lot of high-tech add-ons, and we were all told that we should buy
clothes and objects that were green. Instead of using less stuff, we were being
encouraged to buy green things.That has changed to a certain extent. People are concerned about the
operating and life-cycle costs of building, owning, and managing a building,
and it is taking hold in a seemingly real way. This thinking is here
to stay. I don't feel that sense of faddishness that I worried about a few years
ago.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: What should people be thinking about as they think about
creating a sustainable community? If we are moving beyond just consumerism,
what else should people be thinking about?JOAN KREVLIN: The way you're phrasing it is the right way to phrase it.
The building is one piece of it, and then it extends to how we choose to live.
The generation in their 20s seems to be concerned about local food. That
is thinking about how we choose to live and how we engage the environment.There are larger issues about how and where we choose to build. I
hope that it might make for a rethinking of how we use urban environments
as denser environments that are less dependent on the car.Certainly for those
of us who grew up in the suburbs, small rural towns, or even small cities that
are somewhat underused if not abandoned, we bemoan what happened to those places. There may be an understanding that a more dense area has both social value
because it brings communities and diverse groups of people together, and it
has multi-kinds of uses, whether it's retail, schools, and residences
all being in one place.
We're now looking less at our buildings as objects and much more at how they fit
into an ecosystem of a neighborhood and a larger environment.
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Has the ability to bring
some of these ideas, values and ways of thinking about sustainability in daily work been something that you've
really had to cultivate? Or, has it been an organic process where you
develop them in response to work that you're doing and it just becomes an integrated
part of your life?
JOAN KREVLIN: In terms of how we work, it becomes integrated, but one
is always growing as an architect in terms of what is important to you. For
me it has always been important to connect the people who are using the buildings
that we make to the buildings that we make. I am not interested in architecture
as objects.For me, this is a continuum about thinking how users affect buildings,
how buildings affect users, and then also how that extends to place-making in
the larger scale. I find it interesting that it sort of hearkens back to things
that were so important to me when I first decided to study architecture and
I worried I would never really be able to engage with in a real way, which is
how architecture can affect everyday life in such a real way.Certainly, as an architect, every project you do is engaging with a whole new
set of issues. We are always feeling like we are dilettantes because every project
challenges us in a different way.What is evolutionary is that we are always dealing with a new set of issues,
a new set of criteria, and trying to keep up with the abundant knowledge and
changing technology that's out there and to stay smart with it all.We learn from our clients, we learn from the research that is out there, we
learn from our colleagues in terms of trying to figure out how to do what we
do in better ways. It is very much of an evolving process.JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Great.Well, Joan, thank you so much for joining me here for Global Ethics Forum.
JOAN KREVLIN: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.