Collaborations Welcome - Avinash Rajagopal

33 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn is the center of a swirling world of innovation:

Avinash Rajagopal via Metropolis Magazine

In 2006, the three architects who founded Interboro Partners were walking around downtown Brooklyn in search of a new office when they happened upon the run-down, beige facade of 33 Flatbush Avenue. “There was a fantastic portrait of Elvis in the window, with a sign that said ‘Available,’ ” says Georgeen Theodore, one of the partners. “We knew we wanted to work there.” At the time, Interboro had been developing a new strategy for adaptive reuse—pushing the idea of making incremental changes to languishing buildings, using available materials. When they met Al Attara, the owner of 33 Flatbush Avenue, it turned out to be a meeting of minds: Attara had a building full of junk and the dream of starting a creative collective; Interboro became his first tenant.

33 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn
Magda Biernat

Over the next five years, the building slowly earned a reputation for being a place where “smart people just like to hang out,” in the words of Mitchell Joachim, whose urban design nonprofit, Terreform ONE, is on the seventh floor. Joachim, a senior TED fellow, is one of four TED fellows who rent work space on that floor. Other tenants of the sixth and seventh floors include award-winning architects, artists, urban planners, biologists, designers, engineers, a physicist, and a geographer—an impressive collection of talented people by any standard. But these individuals don’t just rent space beside each other, they operate as two successful design cooperatives—with the idea that the synergy between accomplished people is bound to produce extraordinary results and establish a new way of running interdisciplinary design practices.

The difference is palpable as soon as you step out of the elevator (which is plastered with signs for architecture lectures and biotechnology workshops being held in the building) and onto the seventh floor. In one wing, facing Flatbush Avenue, clusters of wooden desks and tables of all shapes and sizes are scattered over an open floor that is filled with prototypes and parts. Shelves and storage spaces occasionally rise from this chaos to serve as makeshift partitions. Terreform ONE and its for-profit sibling, Planetary ONE, occupy the far end of this crowded wing. Joachim and the other partners, Maria Aiolova and Nurhan Gokturk, have varied interests—in biology, urban farming, clean technology, and urban industries—which intersect in models like the one hanging on the wall behind them: Urbaneering Brooklyn 2110, an ecological reimagining of the borough that won them the Victor J. Papanek Social Design Award this year. Last December, another partner, Oliver Medvedik, cofounded Genspace along with the biologist Ellen Jorgensen and six other bio enthusiasts; their DIY biology lab takes up most of the other wing. Earlier this year, one could find the design engineer Bill Washabaugh on the same floor, where he teamed up with Andy Cavatorta, a concept-design artist out of MIT Media Lab, and James Patten, an interaction designer and 2011 TED fellow, to create giant robotic pendulum harps for the pop artist Björk.

URBANEERING BROOKLYN 2110
Terreform ONE
The model depicts a future Brooklyn, when all the borough’s needs would be met inside its borders. The model won this year’s Victor J. Papanek Social Design Award.
Magda Biernat

“We all have different skill sets,” Washabaugh says. “A project might start with one person, and a team builds up around it.” The fact that the floor’s tenants each have innumerable areas of expertise increases exponentially the number of possible collaborations. “There are other places like this,” Joachim says, “but this one is kind of unique. There is both horizontal and vertical integration in the building.” Peter Yeadon and Martina Decker, a design duo on the sixth floor, are working with Genspace and other scientists to design bacteria that can detect arsenic levels in water. And everyone works next to each other on the prototyping and model-making equipment in thebasement.

The common thread seems to be TED, which is something like being second cousins, once removed. Go read the whole piece.