Two Professionals For Our Times

I ran across two individuals during readings this weekend.  Both are engaged in activities and have responsibilities that I think will be seen as increasingly important this century.

The first is an engineer.  Daniel Zarrilli, who heads New York mayor Bill de Blasio's new office of recovery and resiliency (from the Saturday edition of the Financial Times by Shannon Bond - Ready for heavy weather).  Zarrilli's job is to produce a plan to rebuild the city after Sandy.  Projects include restoring 26,000 linear feet of dunes on Staten Island, updating building codes, moving electrical systems to higher floors, and repairing subway tunnels corroded by saltwater.  Link to an interview with Zarrilli.  Additional information on his office and background.

The second is an architect.  Esther Charlesworth is an Australian Architect and co-founder of Architects Without Frontiers (from the current issue of FP by Nate Berg - Diplomacy By Design: Why Post-Conflict Cities Are Architecture's Next Battleground).  Our current conflict culture and global drift into complexity and chaos needs a new breed of architect, engineer, and urban planner. New thinking - as cities and regions build walls to separate hostile populations, as refugees spill across borders, and as informal shantytowns rise in the shadow of bombed-out neighborhoods, architects, engineers, and planners are slowly approaching the legacies of conflict as urban problems demanding design solutions.

From deeper and clearer thinking about climate change and what it means to design and build resilient communities to architecture and engineering playing a focal role in the post-traumatic triage of reconstruction - - will require professional skills geared toward designing for resiliency, sustainability, and peace.  We need professionals comfortable with the political process that relies on far more than clever design solutions.  We need professionals that understand the complex relationship between human culture and space.