In celebrating the renovation of a derelict church in inner city Chicago, Nike’s recent advert “The Church” unapologetically elevates the brand to God-like status.

Earlier this year sports brand Nike released an advert documenting the transformation of a derelict church in inner city Chicago into a basketball court. While it’s no doubt a valuable refurbishment and clearly useful to the local community, the advert betrays several underlying problems with the adaptive reuse project.

The advert begins with a young teenager explaining that “Chicago is my home, where I grew up all my life. There’s a lot of gun violence and stuff, it’s not really safe to play basketball outside.” His account is then supported by clips from various local news reports describing the epidemic of gun violence in inner city Chicago. As another teenager explains, people get killed playing basketball outside, “I don’t want to be one of those people” he says.

With the scene set, text appears over shots of dilapidated buildings (presumably those in the surrounding neighbourhood): “In inner city Chicago, a condemned church was given new life, a place for Chicago’s youth to restore their faith in community”. The advert treats inner city decline and gun violence as a given, spending no time dwelling on their causes. Instead, it jumps right into introducing the project that will, in its own small way, help solve the problem.

Outsourcing as a Cause of Inner City Decline

And yet, it is not a stretch to say that brands like Nike have had a hand in such inner-city decline. Prior to the 1970s most US garment companies had their manufacturing operations located in industrial cities like Chicago. Whole communities were built around such industries and whole communities were destroyed when they left to set up shop in other parts of the world where workers were cheaper and less organised.

Nike was one of the early adopters of this practice of outsourcing. Its success led other companies to follow suit. Now, like many other American brands, Nike’s US-based factories account for a fraction of its global workforce (in Nike’s case less than 1%). Aside from its devastating impact on formerly industrial cities in the US, outsourcing has also had the effect of separating people’s consumption habits from the underlying production process, thus enabling the miserable sweatshop working conditions in factories elsewhere in the world to go mostly unnoticed.

Take me to Church

Throughout the advert, “Take me to Church” plays on the soundtrack, beginning with its composer, Hozier, singing gospel-style the words “Amen! Amen! Amen!”. As the advert cuts to scenes of the renovated church, the song reaches its euphoric chorus:

Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

If this song and the name of the project hadn’t already convinced you of the sacred connotations this advert is attempting to impose upon the project, we later hear from local Reverend Ricardo Bailey, who explains that the church may have been made into a basketball gymnasium but it’s still a church building: “It’s a place where people gather together and share their hopes and dreams. And who knows, what kind of seeds are going to be planted in the lives of those young people when they leave from that place.”

Nike as God

But if this court is the church then surely our God is Nike. Like a God, Nike’s presence in the advert is distant, although there are three subtle clues of their benevolence. Firstly, the advert talks to Heter Myers from Nike Communications, who says that the Church is intended to inspire the next generation “to go after their crazy dreams”. Secondly, all the kits and equipment are produced by Nike. And thirdly, a Nike swoosh merged with “The Church” briefly appears at the beginning and end of the advert. None of these clues, however, tell us definitively that Nike is responsible for the refurbishment.

However, unlike the Christian God who first taketh and then giveth away, Nike taketh and then giveth away. Which is to say, it’s only after its economic practices have ravaged inner city America that the brand has deigned to give a small thing in return. The Church is a good renovation, but it pales in comparison to the damage the company has caused over the past several decades.

Bigger, more beautiful, more expensive: The Museum of Modern Art in New York was reopened after four months of renovation work and featuring the new “David Geffen Wing” worth 450 million.

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The wing is named after the Californian music billionaire, who donated 100 million dollars for the reconstruction (David Rockefeller, whose mother Abby Aldrich founded the museum 90 years ago, contributed 200 million dollars). Constructed on the western side of the building on West 53rd Street, the wing extends to the basements of a high-rise apartment building by Jean Nouvel that was built at the same time. The site of the American Folk Art Museum had to give way to it – very much to the annoyance of the preservationists. This is no surprise for a museum connected to the Who’s Who of New York’s real-estate industry (the American Folk Art Museum itself is nowadays located at Columbus Circle).

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The reconstruction increases the exhibition surface of one of the world’s biggest art museums by one third, about 5,000 square kilometres. The MoMA now comprises more than 60 galleries on six floors, a continuous sequence of rooms. The architects are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, known for the “Highline” and the Lincoln Center renovation, along with global design and architecture firm Gensler.

Almost like an Apple store?

Not everyone is completely thrilled. Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, described the construction as intelligent and precise, almost like an Apple store, yet “slightly soulless”. The MoMA would have turned the block into a canyon of steel and glass, bringing to mind the “headquarters of Darth Vader’s hedge fund”. Only the façade is dark, though. On the inside, the new construction is flooded with light; the galleries, a series of bright rooms grouped around the lobby, provide views of the sculpture garden. The lobby has been expanded as well; visitors no longer enter the museum through a dark corridor, but through a bright hall. Moreover, a display window has been fitted, allowing passers-by to catch a glimpse of the exhibits. There’s also a terrace restaurant on the sixth floor.

A continuous rotation

The extension was vital, since the museum has been overcrowded with three million visitors a year. Moreover, it enables a new way of presenting the art exhibits. From now on, the galleries are going to be mixed up every six months and supplemented by existing properties as well as new acquisitions; a continuous rotation. The MoMA incorporates an enormous collection of 140,000 art objects, most of which have been tucked away in the archive so far. The rotation will involve a great deal of work by the curators, in addition to good orientation skills by the visitors.

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Strengthen the presence of artists

As in the past, architecture continues to be one of MoMA’s key areas. It is present through all forms of media and expression, from paintings to drawings, sculptures, installations, infinite video loops, film excerpts and sound elements. The exhibits include pieces from the Frank Lloyd Wright collection, for instance, such as a model of the Guggenheim Museum, situated at Central Park. Another gallery showcases Marcel Duchamp. One room is dedicated to the 1930s modernism, with posters from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, film excerpts from “Berlin – Symphony of a Metropolis”, the outline of Mies van der Rohe’s envisaged tower at the Berlin Friedrichstraße, as well as drawings by El Lissitzky and city models by Le Corbusier. Moreover, it includes an exemplar of the Frankfurt kitchen by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. The museum aims to strengthen the presence of artists. While the larger part of the new MoMA consists of existing properties, it also features some new acquisitions, such as a room-high sculpture by artist Sheila Hicks.

The museum now also merges art across time periods and continents. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was placed in contrast to the writhing clay pots by George Ohr from Mississippi, the “Mad Potter of Biloxi”. And Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is now positioned next to a painting of the American artist Faith Ringgold, depicting the race riots in New York’s Harlem district in the 1960s.

Not the last one

Originally, Elizabeth Diller was supposed to build the new MoMA, but the museum did not favour her large-size concept. The extension by Diller Scofidio + Renfro hasn’t been the first one since its foundation in 1939, when the building was only six storeys tall and clad in marble. Through several phases, the museum has taken up almost the entire block in Manhattan, including a residential tower for affluent New Yorkers. Philip Johnson built here in the sixties, then Cesar Pelli. The last rebuilding was carried out in 2004 by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Presumably, this reconstruction won’t be the last one either.

The roof of Di Tella University’s main building, located in a residential area of the City of Buenos Aires, is a particular case of green roof. Extending across 1,600 square meters and built on the rooftop of an existing five-story building, the new recreational area is only partly implemented as a technical green roof: 700 square meters meet the general technical requirements of a green roof and 900 square meters offer diverse open spaces with no growing medium or plant cover.

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Here, the key objective was that of providing more available open public spaces for the students and the university’s staff, with the bonus of a breathtaking 360 degree view of the city.
Opened in 2013 as a new “campus”, the site didn’t offer large green spaces or open areas for gathering because its central space was occupied by parking lots. In the process of changing this situation and given the urgent need for green areas, some professors of the Architecture and Landscape Architecture’s faculties suggested to use the rooftop instead.

Preserving the good

The building was originally erected in the early 1940s and was renovated after an almost 50-year period of stagnation. The completion and opening of the campus took place in 2013 and the new roof became accessible in 2017.  The project for the roof is related to the construction of new master classrooms, administration offices and a restaurant on the fifth floor, which used to be the rooftop in the past, only used for mechanical equipment. This meant that the existing drainage system would be “moved up” one floor, responding to the designer’s main concern of preserving this existing system as far as possible.

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The area, which is a rectangle of 90 x 25 meters, was differentiated into spaces that respond to diverse possible uses: relaxing, gathering and an open-air amphitheater. The planting plan is related to this differentiation; the non-accessible areas are covered with a combination of sedum species which have minimum maintenance requirements and provide colors and textures and, conversely, some lawn patches that provide areas to sit and lay down. These lawn pieces are built on the slopes of the gable roof that covers the new master classrooms.

The connector

However, anticipating the need for walking spaces, the architects reduced the area of the gable roof by leaving available areas along three sides of the rooftop and resulting in a U-shaped esplanade. When extending along the full breadth of the larger side of the roof, this esplanade turns into a generous three meters-wide promenade. Finished with concrete tiles and bordered by a tall transparent curtain-wall, this walkway becomes the main connector between the different spots: a continuous balcony opening towards the city, the large old trees and, looking northeast, the splendid Plate River.

Pleasant views

At the eastern side of the roof, responding to the need of concentrating higher loads at the edges of the slab and reducing them in the center, a row of trees blooms in the summer. Wooden benches offer a variety of situations and the open-air amphitheater creates the perfect ambience to rest and watch. Placed in three rows of seven 4.50 meters-long benches, this arrangement produces a great spot to enjoy the views and the breeze along the roof, far away from classes and lessons, at least for a while.
Reaching the highest level of the building, a lookout allows watching the far-away crowns of the urban woods and the river.

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Location: City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Area of the rooftop: 1,600 m2
Date of Completion: 2017
Client: University Torcuato Di Tella
Landscape Architecture Plan: Grupo Landscape-Cora Burgin
Architectural Project: RDR Arquitectos (Richter, Dahl Rocha, Emmer and Morando)
Photography: Javier Agustín Rojas, Cora Burgin, Bruno Emmer