Michael Singer at BIF-2

By working in the fields of art and architecture, artist Michael Singer has opened new possibilities for joining large-scale public works projects to aesthetic concerns in order to meet the needs of the communities they serve. His pieces have become models for successful urban and ecological renewal.

Singer shared his story at last year's BIF-1 summit. His unconventional and innovative point-of-view was so well received, we just had to invite him back for an update on his latest projects.

Throughout his career, Singer has doggedly challenged prevailing assumptions of ‘place' in the public realm. "What is a building? What is a sculpture?" Such questions and other, equally basic ones—"What is a shopping center? What is a housing development? What is an airport?"—led him to radically re-evaluate the way we look at the components of our built environment.

"I'm pushing on many levels outside what an artist commonly does," says Singer, who works out of a converted cow barn on a 100-acre farm in Vermont, and is also an Eminent Scholar in the Arts with an office at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. "I like to see myself as a problem-solver, someone who raises questions about commonly held assumptions on anything, literally anything."

How can something as seemingly mundane as a parking lot affect the health of a community? With organic grocer Whole Foods, Singer had the opportunity to question the aesthetic layout of a 28-acre site in Orlando, FL.

"When you develop a shopping mall, the developer's interests lie in parking, circulation, access," Singer explains. "We started by saying that the land is more important than asphalt. So what if we moved the cars underground, or on the roof? In the Orlando shopping center, with the land we gained, we created community gardens." Now Whole Foods Market has Singer designing seven of their new stores in Florida.

Singer's work is poetry in motion. "Poetry," he says, "is the opportunity to make something that evolves over time. When I plan, design or make a piece of art, I want it to have the ability to regenerate on many levels—it shouldn't meet just one function. But it is specific to one type of place."

Every community, even the smallest, is unique. One project at a time, Singer is trying to change our ‘one-size fits all' mentality. "We can respond individually to specific places while still taking into consideration the needs of community developers."

"Let's face it," he says, "a long time ago, someone told corporations, like Walmart and Home Depot, that the way you brand yourself is to look the same wherever you go—same building, same signage, same parking lot. We helped Whole Foods Market realize it's the exact opposite for the design of their stores. Their distinction is to be a different and vital part of each community they serve. Why would you want a one-size fits all operation?"

Singer believes that necessary infrastructure and facilities can have a positive impact on the community. Take for example, the gas and electric power plant he was asked to design along the East River in Brooklyn. Though New York City sorely needed the extra power generation, residents were wary of the potential impact on their neighborhood. It was a classic case of NIMBY, or "not in my backyard," says Singer.

As he does for most projects, Singer assembled a multi-disciplinary team of innovators and began asking his fundamental question—what, really, is a power plant? New opportunities for the project began to emerge—for instance, using the roof and vertical space outside the plant for urban agriculture.

Singer had learned that local environmental organizations were eager for indigenous plant material to regenerate ecosystems that had been destroyed. By allowing the non-profit organizations to care for the vegetation, the power plant's owners were able to claim significant tax breaks.

Soon Singer had taken a project that neighbors feared would be a blight and designed an energy-efficient plant that doubled as a greenhouse, provided a resting spot for migrating birds in an urban area—and still had an acre of land left over for public use.

"It was a complete reversal from something you wanted to be out of sight and out of mind," Singer says. The power plant "is using all of its resources, and there's no waste. It has affected the way people think about these places and what they can do."

That's Singer's goal in all his projects, whether he's designing a private home, a river floodwall, an airport garden or a shopping mall supermarket. "I've always been fascinated by asking why things are the way they are," Singer says. "It's about how you take a questioning mind into the world around you and go somewhere else with it, into something unknown."