Hasta La Ideas

In the spring of last year, you might recall that Frank Gehry decided to remove himself from the long controversial Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. This turned out to be something of a very fortunate move for the architect in terms of publicity, as shortly after he’d left, the building project began fighting through another issue: what to do with the ancient Muslim cemetery it was being built upon. While that story has gradually moved away from receiving international press, it appears that the project has hit yet another wall. Haaretz is reporting that the firm hired to replace Gehry, Israel-based Chyutin Architects, are now threatening to walk away from the project. This, the paper reports, comes just one month after the company running the construction effort also decided to quit. Both have cited issues with the organization behind the project, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with the architects reportedly finally fed up with interactions with the group, as it “asked for daily briefings and nagged them to death.” However, according to the LA Times, things might not necessarily be so dire (though certainly still not the most positive). That paper also reports that Chyutin has not resigned just yet, but is threatening to do so, not from being “nagged to death” but rather over a contract issue and a withheld payment, which the Center says was due to “the architect’s failure to meet certain contractual obligations.” However it all pans out, this is yet another blow to a project that’s already seen its fair share of them.

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One of the highlights of A Better World By Design 2011 was the fantastic panel on Young Entrepreneurship Networks on the morning of day two. The panel included Mathias Holzmann of Palomar5; Adriana Pentz of Starting Bloc; Fabian Pfortmuller of Sandbox; and Dylan Reid of The Kairos Society.

Pfortmuller characterized Sandbox as a network for “identifying young people who are too young to be doing what they are doing.” Members must be under 30-years-old and referred by one of members of the closed community. “Age,” said Pfortmuller, “is more important than what they happen to be doing.”

Pentz described Starting Bloc as a “global fellowship program of entrepreneurs” and “bridge builders.” The network looks for members from all backgrounds to great bridges across different sectors of business. Starting Bloc runs a 5-day program called the Institute for Social Innovation, which teaches new members about the design thinking and innovation process.

Holzmann recalled how Palomar5 grew out of the fact that TED conferences most often include only established innovators. Instead, Holzmann wanted to “get people in their 20’s while they’re doing these [TED-worthy] things,” as well as to “help out young entrepreneurs so they don’t have to take another job.” Holzmann described Palomar5 as an “incubator for people.”

The Kairos Society, said CEO Dylan Reid, came from a bunch of UPenn students wondering “what would the world look like if all the world leaders… were best friends 20 years ago.” The Society seeks to build trusting relationships between it’s members, as “entrepreneurs take a sizable risk and can only do that with people they trust.”

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Speaking of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as we were in that last post, but departing in this having absolutely nothing to do with fashion, an ongoing, vicious battle continues to rage just outside the museum’s front steps. You might recall that said war rose to more recent public prominence two years back, when the Met started asking the city to remove hot dog vendors and/or given them $1000 tickets for not being in their sanctioned spaces. At the time, the museum argued that the food carts were blocking visitors from entering, though most everyone (including us) translated that into the museum wanting less traffic for the vendors and more traffic buying food in their cafes. Those various pushes made way for Cake & Shake, a multi-cart operation run by chefs Gina Ojile and Derek Hunt, to slide in last summer, paying somewhere in the $100,000+ range per year for the prime real estate. Somehow, despite all that turmoil over the past couple of years, things seemed relatively calm…until recently. The NY Times has filed this great report on the moving in of carts run by military veterans, three new ones at the time of the story’s publication. The rub is that, due to a NY law, veterans don’t have to pay the city’s high fees to act as street vendors. This seemed to work fine for one of long-serving carts, but now others have swept in, with dubious uses of the vets, one of whom the paper observed taking a nap while someone else manned the cart. Dubbed “rent-a-vet” by the other, established vendors, it’s supposed that cart owners are hiring veterans to simply sit alongside the stands, thus technically fulfilling the legal requirement, saving the owners a bundle in fees, and being able to move in on choice plots of land. It’s a great story and we’re sure, like before, that this will all get mildly ugly for a while, all the while providing even more great reading.

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Leading a green, healthy lifestyle can be an expensive proposition, as the attendant products always seem to cost more than their less healthful counterparts. Plus there’s always that fear that a manufacturer is slapping “green” on the label of a product unworthy of the title. So before we can see mass uptake, we’ll need to see innovation not only in the design of those products, but innovative business services from companies that will get them into your house.

Blissmo is one such service, acting like something of a Groupon-meets-Netflix for green products. The idea is that the company digs through the glut of organic and eco-friendly products on the market, peels back the layer of “green washing” to find out which have legit credentials, then ships a selection of them to you each month in a Blissmobox. Because they negotiate bulk discounts with the suppliers, Blissmo can knock about 33% of the cost off, meaning your $19 monthly fee nets you roughly $30 worth of product.

Does it work well? Too early to tell, as the Blissmobox service just launched a few months ago. But we like the imaginative approach, and hope it either succeeds on its own merits or helps to spark other creative business models that enable consumers—and suppliers—to see a little green.

Here’s an interview with Blissmo founder Sundeep Ahuja on the company’s approach:

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After a near-constant drubbing over the last four months, there’s finally been a break from the bad news, with the American Institute of Architects just having released their latest Architecture Billings Index. Instead of yet another slide back into financial uncertainty, the numbers not only went up, but did so to a dramatic degree. Last month the Index had landed at 45.1 (anything above 50 indicates growth across the industry, and anything below means, well, the exact opposite). Now it’s skyrocketed back up to 51.4, a level it hasn’t been at since the start of the year, when optimism was, in hindsight, at far too early high. However, while it’s nice to see a bump, given the rocky ups and downs the industry has weathered for the past few years, this per usual shouldn’t be taken as the end-all-be-all sign that things have completely turned around. Still, it’s nice to hear the AIA’s numbers guru sounding upbeat again:

“Based on the poor economic conditions over the last several months, this turnaround in demand for design services is a surprise,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA. “Many firms are still struggling, and continue to report that clients are having difficulty getting financing for viable projects, but it’s possible we’ve reached the bottom of the down cycle.”

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