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It’s been a busy week for Andrew Brown and Shiloh Iacolli. The Van Allen Institute’s programming and communications staff were pleased to host an esteemed crowd on Saturday afternoon to launch the GLOwanus Art Project. The atmosphere was much more subdued than at the previous event that week in Van Allen, when a group of 30 to 40 aggrieved residents threatened to occupy an unusually raucous Brooklyn Community Board Sixth meeting, their The opposition is outspoken and frankly biased. to the proposed shelter.
Despite the demagogues, “hosting those [community board] “Meetings are the cornerstone of how we see ourselves as an institution,” Executive Director Deborah Marton told me over coffee a few days later. It’s just one of the things the organization has been spearheading since taking over in 2019 One aspect of a massive “mission shift.”
After the institute sold its longtime home at 30 West 22nd Street, the ideology pivoted and relocated to Brooklyn, where Van Allen occupied part of the office space and street storefront but leased the rest. “The board decided we should really focus on the mission and not focus on being a landlord,” Marton said. The $30 million sale easily financed a ground-level lease for a former garage at 303 Bond Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn, but more importantly, it provided an opportunity for the organization on the occasion of the institution’s 130th anniversary Engaging in strategic repositioning provides ample runway.
Marton has found a new home in fast-changing Gowanus, which underwent a controversial upzoning after a major Superfund cleanup, and Marton admits she’s mindful of the look of the move: “In addition to being open and learning from the community, We have no agenda other than this,” she said. “We found that all anyone needed was a place to gather and some resources to support what they wanted to do – no one needed us to tell them what to do.”
mission change
While the Van Allen Club was a members-only club focused on professional architects for much of its first 130 years, what has changed since Marton took over in 2020 is a renewed focus on community partnerships, with architects playing a supporting role. “Instead of teaching people about Beaux Arts architecture or something, we’re saying, ‘Let’s make this community work for design justice — and real justice,'” Marton said.
Before the mission shift, programs typically came from city and municipal agencies, which turned to Van Allen for “community engagement” — which, according to program director Andrew Brown, often meant they “just got the community involved.” Print a idea. An example of how this approach backfired was in 2017, when the Van Allen Institute organized the Chinatown Gateway Design Competition to create a public landmark for the Department of Transportation on an odd triangular parcel of land on Canal Street. “Despite the clear effort to avoid community backlash, I think the way the competition was structured—bringing in artists who were not from the community and then throwing those ideas at the community—created a lot of frustration and anger,” Brown said. “It felt like you were doing it. It’s one thing that something is wrong, but how do you figure out what the next step is?”
The financial stability of the Chelsea sale has us rethinking not just our mission, but how to reimagine an organization that dates back to 1894. “How do we work with the community in a more organic way to understand their vision for the community?” Brown asked. “What is their definition of success? So how do we build a plan to achieve that vision?”
community now
One answer is the Neighborhoods Now initiative launched in partnership with the Urban Design Forum. The program was launched in May 2020 in response to the pandemic, bringing hard-hit areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Kingsbridge and Jackson Heights to The community’s Community Organization (CBO) connects designers such as Jaklitsch/Gardner, COOKFOX and Jaklitsch/Gardner. SO – IL, provides pro bono design services for outdoor dining structures, pop-up markets, and other projects. One key takeaway? Project documents are critical: “We hear consistently from every partner that the most valuable outcomes of anything we do are the assets of film, storytelling and data collection,” says Marton. “They use it to fund themselves.”
After the Chinatown Gate incident, “Neighborhoods Now” also became an opportunity for Van Allen to redeem himself. “At the time, I was just a nerdy urbanist neighbor who felt that the design process was not aligned with the needs of the community,” said Yin Kong, now executive director of Think! Chinatown, one of the project’s partner organizations. community now. Years later, when they reconnected through the Chinatown Night Market Project, she was understandably “cautious” about working with Van Allen. However, like Brown, she praised Marton for bringing “a completely different approach and a better understanding of how to work within the community.”
from 60 to 100
Of course, task shifting is intended to be an iterative learning process for everyone involved. Program associate Shiloah Coley understands why one CBO’s initial response to her outreach was “We don’t work with architects,” because architects have historically been vehicles for gentrification. However, Corley eventually formed a partnership with the Congressional Budget Office to further advance an ongoing project that was well conceived but in need of funding. Brown told me, “The impact is huge: [Van Alen] Organizations don’t go from 0 to 60, they go from 60 to 100. Kong agrees: “Van Alen found something really valuable in Neighborhoods Now: giving community organizations a lead role in designing a plan or project while providing them with technical assistance from designers and, of course, some funding to make that happen. It’s a really great model for groups that know what they want.”
Although the Van Allen Institute’s mission has come into the spotlight, it still means a lot to many people. For some, it’s a place; for some, it’s a place. For others, it’s a great experiment in building trust; for others, it’s a new model for community-based design education or technical assistance. For Gowanus residents, it’s the site of a vibrant annual block party or just another neighbor with nerdy urbanism. Nonetheless, it is still a multimodal network and is still a work in progress.
Ray Hu is a Brooklyn-based design writer and researcher.
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