I am privileged to serve on the National Advisory Council at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Cranbrook is truly a place like no other—a stimulating, open environment where art, architecture, and design are taught and explored without boundaries. There’s a rich dialogue and a consciousness about design that doesn’t exist elsewhere.

Reed Kroloff, the school’s director, does an incredible job of bringing us together to discuss issues and what they might mean to Cranbrook. This month, our interdisciplinary group looked at social media.

Through a series of extraordinary speakers—Randy Ortiz from Chrysler Corporation, Ben Watson of Herman Miller, Inc., and Nike’s Tesa Arragones—we learned big business is using social media in very sophisticated and effective ways. For these companies, social media is a means of letting the world communicate their messages. But rather than controlling the content, they let the culture adopt and extend their ideas. Potent stuff!

Gathering public input about architecture

We have been experimenting a bit in our own practice, using social media to harvest public values and perceptions. We did a project recently with the help of Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop where we publicized an event on Facebook and then re-capped and talked about it afterward—again all on Facebook. I was moved by both the breadth and depth of input we got, and it was a lot more fun than stuffy public input sessions in fluorescent-lit community centers with the same old city hall groupies.

I am all over Facebook. I use it as a forum for dialogue in my classes, and people are always sending me cool videos, interesting links, and articles I would never find on my own.

At Cranbrook, someone asked me why I have 1500 Facebook “friends.” Of course I don’t have intimate personal dialogue with all of these people, but I have had some significant contact with them, and I really like the ability to easily reconnect. I believe social media ties into the psychology of creativity; creative people often have more loose ties than strong ones. They need input and stimulation from a lot of different people. Social media is a way of keeping that stimulus going.

Finding new ways to engage

I am looking for more ways to use social media to generate a professional dialogue about architecture and as a tool for helping us engage a broad slice of the public more readily in what we do. If businesses like Chrysler, Nike and Herman Miller have found creative ways to use it, why shouldn’t we?

Reflecting on the past two winners of the AIA Twenty-five Year Award, I am moved to ask what this award says about our values as architects. This is supposed to be the quintessential award that says a building is cool and has stood the test of time as an embodiment of architectural excellence. The winner must demonstrate excellence “in function, in execution of original program, and in creativity of statement by today’s standards.”

Frank Gehry Residence

If we look at the Frank Gehry Residence, the 2012 award winner, I’d say what we really value as architects is novelty, weirdness, and idiosyncrasy. Gehry’s house is amazing when it comes to these values. But is this the core heart and soul of what we’re about? It is also a single-family home for the architect himself? Is this what is really valuable about architecture—our own self-indulgence? This is not a house that even 1 percent of the populace would relate to or understand.

John Hancock Tower

The John Hancock Tower, the 2011 winner, is a beautiful building. But this is also the building where all the glass fell out. Excavation problems undermined the foundation of neighboring Trinity Church, requiring a huge restoration. The John Hancock Building, in its totality, does not demonstrate excellence. It had some real problems! Furthermore, the resolution was sealed by the courts; as a profession we are left with major questions and bad memories.

I’m a real architecture junkie; I travel a lot to see buildings. I am constantly dismayed by disappointing failures of buildings that the media has hyped. It crushes me–hurts me to the core of my being–to find that what has been called great architecture has feet of clay.

Other buildings I visit and find amazing! They’re supporting a beautiful life, are beloved in their communities, and are making a palpable contribution to the world. I recently talked with a woman who had visited the Kimbell Art Museum with a fellow she had just begun to date. The experience of being at the Kimbell bumped their romance to another level. It illuminated a connection of their souls! This building got the Twenty-five Year Award, and it deserved it.

I believe submissions to this program need to articulate the contribution the building has made over 25 years. How has it enhanced the community, or become a beloved icon? How has it provoked a redevelopment in its neighborhood? How is it sustainable? We profess these as values and say that the 25-year Award must live up to “today’s standards.” Are these really standards we believe in?

There is a difference between a building that makes a huge contribution and one that’s interesting to the architectural subculture. We, as architects, need to talk about this.

The incredible scale of the Forbidden City is daunting.  The central spine contains vast open spaces defined by grand halls and endless arcades.  But the Eastern Palaces and Western Palaces on either side are a world apart.  There are intimate courtyards and lovely rooms where most of the court actually lived.

It is impressive that this has been the center of power in China more than 500 years.  Each successive generation of rulers kept it as an emblem of control rather than destroying what might have been viewed as a symbol of the prior regime.  There are amazing pictures of common people viewing the inner sanctum for the first time after the Communists took over in 1949.

Most of the public parts of the vast complex is in perfectly restored condition, though it is nice to stumble on some areas at the fringes with some patina of time.

Designed by the Italian architect, Mario Cucinella, SIEEB is supposed to be one of the “greenest” buildings in China.  It incorporates extensive sunshading, natural ventilation, generous daylighting, solar power, rainwater harvesting, wastewater recycling, ecological materials and intelligent controls.  The energy saving is supposed to be 30% compared to similar buildings.

This is massive–supposed to be the largest airport in the world.  Oddly, however, it is not monumental, just big.  It is relatively easy to navigate given its size, but architecturally it is disappointing.  There is not the variation in spaces that is so memorable at Kansai Airport in a facility of similarly program.  This is just one big statement that keeps going on and on and on.  The skylights, which are proclaimed as a powerful feature, are actually quite subtle.

This is a whole chunk of the city housing 2500 people in over 700 apartments.  It is incredibly ambitious in its notions about public space in residential environments.  The complex is essentially a gated community with its back to the surrounding city and its focus on a central garden.  Though there are “public” venues in the central space, they are oriented to the same exclusive crowd as the apartments.  The “links” up above house more locally oriented service like dry cleaners and small cafes.  The jury is out on whether this will actually work.

The skin of the residential buildings is remarkably similar to what Holl did at Simmons Dorm at M.I.T.–thin aluminum panels on the outside with embrasures in bright colors.

A stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square, this huge abstract intervention seems to have landed awkwardly in the middle of a bustling city. It defies interaction either with neighboring buildings or pedestrians passing by.  The building sets the arts housed inside clearly apart from the life of the city.  Though bold and striking in form from the exterior, it is cold and vacuous in much of the interior.

The bright green exterior of Opposite House actually seems right at home in the tree-lined Beijing neighborhood where it is located.  The jaw-dropping part of the building is the interior which has dramatic spaces, dazzling light and rich, tactile materials.

CCTV’s daring shape definitely grabs attention from anywhere nearby.  But the best quality of its shape is the way it morphs and changes as you move around it in the city.  In that regard, it reminds me of the Pennzoil Building in Houston by Philip Johnson when it was first completed in the mid-1970s.  It, too, was minimalist urban sculpture that employed simple geometries to create dynamic interactions of the forms from different angles.  Koolhaas outdid Johnson, but he is playing the same game.

Beijing’s Olympic Green was an amazing accomplishment for which the people of the city still feel a great deal of pride.  Especially at night in the summer, the place is mobbed with locals just walking around with their families, taking photos, flying kites and watching little demonstrations.  For western eyes it is very strange to just have these two big objects set in a sea of undifferentiated concrete plaza.  But in such a dense city it seems to provide a welcome relief.

The two objects are really dazzling.  Both buildings are dead simple, but also intricate and complex.  They fascinate from a distance and then, once again in a completely different way close up.  they are also best at night.