I recently spoke to Ken Greenberg, architect and urban designer at Greenberg Associates about his work on large-scale urban design projects with a sustainability bent. His most recent project is the Lower Don Lands in Toronto that’s working to reclaim wetlands into a vibrant shoreside community in the Toronto Harbour. He did a nice job of articulating his current multidisciplinary practice:
“Because the issues are so complex and so layered, we tend to work in a very iterative way with a lot of different people with different kinds of expertise. If you remember the days of what used to be called “systems analysis,” where people thought they would describe all the variables and play them out. It’s just too complicated for that, at least in my world. It involves people coming at it from all these different standpoints, layering the information in different layers on drawings or comparatively, and then really searching for understanding of the interactions. At that point, this is not just taking two or three variables, it’s taking a ton of variables all at once and trying to understand where optimum solutions lie.”
Read the full interview online here.
