Common Edge

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Common Edge is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design with the public that it’s meant to serve. To get there we will need more authentic public engagement and the rediscovery of some timeless design resources. Our mission is to advocate and report on public engagement in the planning and design of the built environment, with an emphasis on some important questions that some younger designers and architects are asking, like: How can planning and design better express the wants and needs of everyday people? How can we make the process of creating and designing more democratic? How can we tell the public’s stories in more meaningful ways? How do we accomplish all that in the context of climate change, the most profound challenge facing us? Source

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The Dutch Canal House: Six Feet Below Sea Level

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By Stefan Al
| Common Edge
In the heart of northwestern Europe, an unlikely swamp became an ingenious experiment in domestic architecture. The Netherlands occupied a precarious position in a delta where three of Europe’s major rivers met the temperamental North Sea. This low-lying region, with its ever-shifting boundaries between water and land battered by relentless North Sea storms, remained sparsely populated for centuries.
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What Mandami’s Knicks Speech Teaches Us About Civic Engagement

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By Martin C. Pedersen
| Common Edge
Why do some of us love sports? Why do we invest far too much emotional energy into an activity that is essentially, regardless of how loud we cheer, a passive one?
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Blair Kamin on the Obama Presidential Center: “A Huge Improvement to the Public Realm”

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By Martin C. Pedersen
| Common Edge
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen BK: Blair Kamin MCP: You were still architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune when this was initially rolled out in 2017. What was your reaction to those early renderings? BK: My initial reaction was summarized in the Tribune’s print-edition headline: “Promising, Populist, Not Yet Persuasive.” I applauded the center’s campus arrangement, the idea of breaking it into human-scaled pieces rather than it consisting of a single, overwhelming structure.
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The Obama Presidential Center: “It’s a Canvas. People Are Leaving Their Imprint on It”

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By Martin C. Pedersen
| Common Edge
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen LB: Lee Bey MCP: I’ve read at least a dozen reviews of the Obama Center and they’ve all been mixed or negative, except yours and Ed Keegan’s, two local critics. I know you have a history with this building and, as a South Side resident, probably knew Obama as a community organizer. You’ve watched this project through all of its gestations. What do you make of the critical reaction?
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The Seeds of Our Housing Crisis Were Planted in the Reagan Era

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By Mark Alan Hewitt
| Common Edge
Though economists and historians will study the decline of the American economy and the rise of oligarchic capitalism for decades, those who lament the resulting loss of affordable housing and infrastructure must also understand how politics affected the building sector. For most of the 20th century the nation had banking, education, and labor policies that spurred the construction and design industries, but after 1980 things changed dramatically.
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UVA’s Dean Search: A Chance to Restore a Lost Education

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By Grey Edens
| Common Edge
In the summer before my senior year of high school, I walked the Lawn at the University of Virginia (UVA) for the first time. Like tens of thousands of students before me, I was captivated by the Rotunda. More than two centuries after its construction, the Lawn continues to inspire and uplift the spirits of students, attract international visitors, and serve as the symbol of the university.
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Build Neighborhoods Around People Instead of Cars

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By Maria Bogatinovska
| Common Edge
I grew up in a small town in Macedonia where nobody calculated how long it would take to get somewhere. You walked to school without your parents, went to the store on foot, stopped to talk to your neighbors on the way back. The distances were short enough that daily life just happened: spontaneously, continuously, without a plan. People were close to each other because the place was built in a way that made closeness inevitable.
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In Architecture, What’s Old Is New Again

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By Michael Mehaffy
| Common Edge
In 1997, architecture critic and theorist Charles Jencks published a short but influential book titled New Science = New Architecture? His premise was that new developments in complexity science signaled a profound shift in humanity’s understanding of the structure of nature. If the scientific picture of reality was changing at a fundamental level, he asked, shouldn’t architecture change with it, as it had throughout history? For Jencks, the answer was yes.
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When AI Makes Design Look Easier Than It Is

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By Chad D. Reineke
| Common Edge
One of the most useful responses I received to my previous Common Edge essay, which focused on how artificial intelligence could impact the pricing of architectural services—was also one of the hardest to answer simply: If AI makes production faster, and if designers need to shift their value from production toward professional judgment, how do we actually do that?
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What I Learn From Teaching Architecture

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By Duo Dickinson
| Common Edge
I have been asked to teach architecture several times over the past 40 years. I can do this without academic credentials, other than the enhanced bachelor’s degree of a BArch, because I’m fully enmeshed in doing the very things students are learning: I am an architect. In recent years I’ve taught at the University of Hartford as an adjunct professor, one course a year. It’s been immensely rewarding, especially now as I’m older than during my previous educational forays.
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Common Edge Journalists

Dickinson, Duo
Hall Kaplan, Sam
Pedersen, Martin C.