This new kindergarten design in Vonsild by the Danish architectural firm CEBRAattempts to provide a learning expience for young children stimulating their curiosity and creativity, the architecture facilitating this throughplay.
"Using the building should be educational and this is why we have deliberately avoided typical building features. The children should learn from this very early stage that a house does not have to look like the typical child drawing with a pitch roof, a door in the middle and a window on each side of it. This building has a jagged roof, it has no corners since everything is rounded and the main volumes have very few right angles. The kindergarten will demonstrate quite effectively that a building can look anyway you want it to." - The Architects
It is the architects' drawings which I find greatly interesting - and shows the rigorous thought process that went into the design. Here is my interpretation of these:
The perceived scale of objects.
The experience or 'journey' through a village - the various 'parts'.
The play of light and shadow.
The different movements through space.
Learning about colour.
Abstract objects versus 'real' objects - for children to interact with.
Surfaces for children to interact with - draw on.
Varying types and sizes of space.
Love the wee detail of Michelangelo's 'Creation' on the ceiling.
Shows a partition opening serving as a link to the second floor and letting light to flood in.
The curving outer wall serves as a roll of paper for children to display their creative works on.
The various 'blobs' serving different activities.
The graduation from interior space to exterior (or landscaped) outdoor space.
Taking the traditional monopitched roof of the house and translating it as a light feature, the jagged form contrasting with the organic and flowing of the outer walls.
Each 'blob' being utilised for a separate activity.
Entrances and exits.
A section showing thermal qualities - light penetration and air flow.
Site plan - shows how the 'blobs' gradually break down and fade into the landscape.
The finished building:
Not quite as successful as I would have hoped. It is a shame that the choice of materials are somewhat bland, sterile and cold. The landscaping is nice, with the grassy mounds and curving paths. Would like to see some photos of the building in use!
Once again the interior's choice of materiality is less than inspiring with the drab vinyl coloured flooring.
The architects here are fairly successful in realising the potentiality for play in kindergarten architecture. However, as it seems with many contemporary examples the architectural environment lacks warmth - a quality that is important for the care and nurturing of young children. The qualities that induce feelings of 'homeliness' and stability.
In the past few weeks, the Buckminster Fuller Institute has been introducing numerous finalist entries for the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge, showcasing the finest examples of socially-responsible design.
Today now, the BFI announced the overall challenge winner: Ecovative, a Green Island, NY-based materials science company that has developed a new class of home-compostable bio-plastics based on living organisms, mushroom mycelia — a high-performing, environmentally responsible alternative to traditional plastic materials.
The 'mushroom material' inventors, Eben Bayer, Gavin McIntyre, and the Ecovative Team, will be awarded the $100,000 cash prize at a ceremony at Cooper Union in New York City on November 18, 2013.
Click above image to view slideshow Examples of Ecovative's engineered 'mushroom material'.
The review team and jury found that the Ecovative initiative best exemplified Buckminster Fuller's famous quote: "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
"We answered the Buckminster Fuller Challenge because we believe in the power of our people to make a real, positive impact. Today, Ecovative looks forward to further answering Bucky's challenge, as we continue to innovate mycological biomaterials and reach an ideal state, with social and environmental considered equally with economics," said Ecovative co-founder and Chief Scientist, Gavin McIntyre.
Click above image to view slideshow Ecovative promo composite
Here's an excerpt from the full statement from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge review team and the 2013 jury:
"Maintaining or restoring the quality of water, air, soils and oceans is a fundamental challenge as human populations and resource appetites crest. Efficient use of resources is vital, but insufficient. Basic needs will continue to require growing volumes of materials -- for everything from tabletops to shoes, baby bottles to Band-Aids. Current production methods, however, have left us with a literal sea of troubles. Both the developed and developing world’s ecosystems and human communities are overwhelmingly feeling the effects of rapid resource extraction and growing waste streams tainted with hazardous and long-lasting pollutants. Current regulatory systems largely ignore the long-term implications of exposure to toxic substances and large flows of plastic and other synthetic waste."
Click above image to view slideshow Custom molded protective packaging made from Ecovative's 'mushroom material'
"Current regulatory systems ignore the long-term implications of exposure to toxicity, unpredictable waste streams, environmental degradation and natural resource depletion that these materials cause, and while life-cycle and ecosystem services analyses are gaining traction, for the most part, the negative impact of these products is not given the attention it deserves.
Finding new models for manufacturing that don't diminish, and can actually restore, Earth's natural resources is an urgent priority. Ecovative, a six-year-old socially responsible materials business and initiative, has disrupted the materials industry with an innovative and cost-competitive natural alternative to petrochemical based plastics and other hazardous materials widely used daily across the world.
Their ‘mushroom material’, grown from living organisms, can be used in everything from protective packaging and furniture to insulation, footwear, even surfboards (and soon some electric car components). Ecovative’s vision is to become the first industrial age company with a net positive impact on the planet’s ecosystem, and they are well on their way. This means eliminating the negative environmental impacts of production associated with the plastics industry, producing a material that sequesters carbon, and delivers nutrients back to Earth."
Ecovative's Mushroom Tiny House
"Their approach, from inception to production, is an extraordinary example of the core tenets of The Buckminster Fuller Challenge’s entry criteria, which require the winning solution to be comprehensive, anticipatory, ecologically responsible, feasible, replicable, and verifiable.
From the materials science underpinning their work to the commitment to rewrite the rules regarding the structure and financing of a startup company, Ecovative is a ground-breaking enterprise."
Click above image to view slideshow Wall insulation made from Ecovative's 'mushroom material'
"Highlights of the comprehensive approach:
A closed loop production system using nature’s principles: The supply chain for the mushroom material was developed from the ground up, providing an alternative income source to farmers and other industries through the purchase of organic “waste” materials used as feedstock to grow fungal mycelia into any desired shape. Waste streams utilized for this have included, but are not limited to, agricultural waste, cellulose sludge from paper waste, lobster shells and even textile waste—all sourced within 500 miles of manufacturing. The end product is entirely natural, renewable, home compostable, having a net-positive impact while being high performing and highly cost-competitive.
A model for the 21st century social enterprise: Ecovative has used creative methods to ensure long-term success. [By patenting their technology, they allow access to ideas and technology while avoiding technological compromise and market ‘greenwashing’. With their creative commons licensing, the technology is accessible to everyone, not just in an industrial facility but also in a home kitchen or field. Adhering to strict principles about how they raise their capital, they are avoiding the speculation and short-term gain interests common among “exit strategy” oriented investors, instead attracting long-term and ‘patient capital’ investors. Ecovative has pursued a “mycelial” strategy of partnering with—rather than attempting to compete with—packaging industry giants, becoming an influential force on a new era of green materials."
Click above image to view slideshow Wall panels made from Ecovative's 'mushroom material'
"This is not just a Styrofoam substitute: Ecovative is already directing resources to research and development, and through scholarships, supports the next generation of socially responsible designers. They continue to develop new uses, such as growing materials to use in inexpensive housing. In one initiative, in Bolivia, the organization is developing ways to use domestic waste streams as a feedstock -- with significant implications for the developing world.
An entrepreneurial success that springs from education innovation: Founders Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre developed the core ideas underpinning their products and production methods while studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where teacher and mentor Burt Swersey challenged his students to develop marketable, innovative and profitable products that could at the same time improve the world.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute’s review team together with the 2013 jury are very pleased to award the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge $100,000 prize to Ecovative. This breakthrough solution now joins a stellar group of previous Challenge winners—truly exceptional strategies making the world work for 100% of humanity!"
To learn more about Ecovative and its innovative products and applications, click here. All images and videos courtesy of Ecovative.
조우성 변호사 1991 서울대학교 법과대학 졸업 2000~2003 서울중앙지방법원 분쟁조정위원회 위원 2000~2003 ㈜로앤비 마케팅 이사 역임 1997~2013 법무법인(유) 태평양 기업소송부 파트너 변호사 2009~현재 ㈜e4B연구소 대표전문가 2013~현재 기업분쟁연구소(CDRI) 소장
※ 스타트업이나 1인 창업가의 경우 자신만의 아이디어(Idea)가 유일한 무기일 수 있다. 그런데 이러한 Idea를 갑(甲)에게 공개(프레젠테이션)하는 경우 나중에 甲이 그 아이디어만 날름 가져가 버리는 경우가 있는데 이런 불상사를 막기 위해서 을(乙)이 알아두어야 할 내용을 정리해 봅니다.
<1> 프레젠테이션 출력물 곳곳에 ‘영업비밀’ 표시를 하라.
내가 발표하는 내용이 굳이 비즈니스 모델 특허를 얻지 않았다 하더라도 '영업비밀'로서 보호받을 수 있는 방법이 있습니다. 다만 영업비밀로서 보호받으려면 ①실제 가치 있는 정보여야 하고, ②회사 내부적으로 영업비밀로서 보호조치가 되어 있어야 합니다. 따라서 일단 甲에게 제시하는 프레젠테이션 출력물 곳곳에 “본 제안서 상의 비즈니스 모델은 당사의 영업비밀로서 보호되고 있음을 이 제안서를 받아보는 분들은 충분히 인지합니다.”라는 문구를 삽입할 필요가 있습니다.
甲이 乙의 제안을 받아들이지 않았으면서도 나중에 乙의 제안과 유사한 모델을 런칭할 경우, 乙은 甲에게 내용증명을 보내서 “프레젠테이션 당시 배부했던 자료에 분명히 당사의 영업비밀이라고 표시된 모델을 우리 허락도 없이 사용한 것은 영업비밀침해행위다”라고 공격할 수 있습니다.
<2> 핵심 아이디어는 매뉴얼 형태로 만들어 두고 ‘Trade Secret’이라는 스탬프를 찍은 다음 보관하라.
나의 핵심 아이디어는 내부적으로 매뉴얼로 만든 후 ‘Trade Secret’(영업비밀)이라는 스탬프를 찍은 후 별도로 보관하는 외관을 갖출 필요가 있습니다. 나중에 분쟁이 생겼을 경우 내 아이디어가 영업비밀이라고 아무리 주장해도 내부적으로 제대로 관리되지 못하고 있다면 법원은 영업비밀로 인정해 주지 않습니다. 따라서 적어도 내부적으로는 영업비밀 형태로 ‘객관화’해 두는 것이 절대적으로 필요합니다.
<3> 가능하다면 甲으로부터 NDA를 받고서 PT에 돌입하라.
쉽지 않은 문제이지만, 정말 자신이 보유하고 있는 아이디어가 핵심적이고 유출되는 것에 위험성을 느낀다면 NDA(Non Disclosure Agreement ; 비밀유지약정서)를 제시하고 그 문서에 사인을 받은 다음 자신의 아이디어를 공개하는 것이 필요합니다. 물론 乙이 NDA 작성을 요구할 경우 甲 쪽에선 ‘차라리 듣지 않겠습니다’라고 나올 수도 있을 것입니다. 하지만 乙에게 충분히 매력을 느끼고 있다면 甲으로부터 NDA 사인을 받아낼 수도 있을 것입니다. 甲으로서는 ‘어라? 도대체 뭐길래 이 정도의 배짱을 부리는 거지? 한번 들어보고 싶군.’이라고 생각할 수도 있을 겁니다. 오히려 이런 당당한 태도가 乙에게 또 다른 힘을 부여해 줄 수 있습니다. 이렇게 NDA까지 체결하고 난 뒤에 내 비즈니스 모델을 무단으로 따라 할 경우에는 당연히 법적인 공격을 가할 수 있습니다.
<4> 자신의 아이디어를 비즈니스 모델 특허 출원하라.
아이디어에 대한 독점권을 부여받는 본질적인 방법은 ‘비즈니스 모델 특허’를 받는 방법인데, 현실적으로 비즈니스 모델에 대해 특허까지 받아낸다는 것은 쉽지 않은 일입니다. 특허란 원래 출원을 한 다음 나중에 ‘등록’되어야 완전한 권리로서 효력을 발휘합니다. 따라서 ‘출원만 된 상태’에서는 완전한 권리가 아니다. 단지 ‘나중에 완전한 권리로 발전할 수 있는 기대를 가질 수 있는 미래형 권리’일 뿐입니다. 하지만 실무상 보면, 아직 특허로 등록되지는 않았지만 ‘제 아이디어는 현재 특허 출원 중이구요, 조만간 등록될 것입니다’라고 강조하는 분들을 보게 됩니다. 그 특허가 등록 될지 여부는 알 수 없지만 만에 하나 등록이 된다면 그 비즈니스 모델은 그 사람이 독점할 수밖에 없습니다. 결국 비즈니스 모델에 대해 나중에 궁극적으로 등록을 받지 못하더라도 ‘출원’만 해 놓은 것이 ‘진입장벽’의 역할을 하는 것을 부인할 수 없습니다. 특히 대기업의 경우 작은 기업의 아이디어를 따라 하다가 나중에 그 아이디어가 특허 등록되는 바람에 막대한 손해배상을 부담할 수도 있기 때문에 이를 쉽게 따라하는 것에 부담을 느낍니다.
내 비즈니스 아이디어가 정말 사업 전개에 필수적이라고 생각된다면 비용을 좀 들여서라도 변리사를 만나서 비즈니스 모델 특허를 출원한 후 이를 여기 저기 공개하고 다니는 것이 바람직합니다.
<5> 공개할 수 있는 범위 내에서 사이트에 아이디어 핵심을 기재하고 날짜를 표시하라.
어차피 제휴사를 끌어들이기 위해 내 아이디어를 여기 저기 프레젠테이션 할 수밖에 없는 상황이라면, 자신의 사이트에 아이디어 핵심 내용을 기재하고 그 날짜를 표시해 두라. 일종의 저작권 표시를 해 두는 방법을 고려해 보기 바랍니다. 외부적으로 공개해야 하는데, 비즈니스 모델 특허를 받기도 만만치 않다면 이런 방법을 통해서라도 내가 이 아이디어의 시발점(始發點)이라는 점을 밝히는 것은 의미가 있습니다. 나중에 자신의 아이디어를 따라 하는 업체가 있을 경우, 저작권 침해(보통 아이디어를 따라 하려고 하다보면 그 설명 등에 사용되는 문구, 표현이 비슷할 가능성이 큰데, 이 부분은 저작권 침해로 공격할 여지가 있다)를 문제 삼을 수 있습니다. 특히 내 아이디어를 도용한 업체가 대기업을 상대로 협업을 제안할 경우, 나는 그 대기업에 내 사이트 내용을 보여주면서, 이 아이디어의 원조(元祖)가 나임을 밝히면서 협상에 우위를 점할 수도 있습니다.
"Imagine how the experience of Google Glass might alter your experience of the city as it overlays information onto your view, with the city literally becoming framed by Google."
The real shape of digital culture does not reveal itself to us in plain sight. In designer and urbanist Dan Hill’s recent essay for the Strelka Press, he neatly describes the substance of what he calls strategic design, which - if you’ll excuse my use of a gigantically broad brush - might be thought of as a welfare-tinged European cousin of North American corporate design thinking.
He calls it dark matter: the stuff that you can’t see that has enormous impact on the way things work and how things happen. For Hill, the dark matter of strategic design might be the complex machinations of healthcare, education and the environment, but for the American National Security Agency it's something far more wide-ranging. How much darker is the matter that the Prism surveillance program deals in?
Prism highlights the very real nature of this digital-system dark matter that's usually hidden from us, though we might feel its vague outline bump against us at moments or see its shadow cast fleetingly across our field of view.
It's there, for example, in the way Google Maps redraws the city in relation to its own way of seeing. Maps, as we know, are a form of information that not only shows us the terrain in question but also reveals the concerns of its author. Maps are not neutral windows onto the world: they colour, frame and distort the world they describe.
Think, for example, of the way alternative forms of mapping projection alter the image of the world and how, seeing the size and balance of continents shift, one's own understanding of the world also shifts. Think too of how a map's point of view is itself a cultural expression - literally a world view. Maps describe the culture that creates them as much as they describe their ostensible subject.
As Slate magazine's Evgeny Morozov explains, Google's business model of targeted advertising is soon to merge with its description of the physical fabric of the city. Using the data that Google already knows about you through your email, your searches and so on, it will generate personalised maps of the city. As Morozov writes, "Space, for Google, is just one more type of information that ought to be organised." And monetised too, we can add. The city, through the map, is remade according to the data held by Google, and according to Google's idea of what a city is and what it thinks you will do there.
Imagine how the experience of Google Glass might alter your experience of the city as it overlays information onto your view, with the city literally becoming framed by Google. This Googleopic way of seeing transforms space and the urban environment through how and what it reveals and excludes. Its ways of seeing, as John Berger’s 1970s book of that title explored, contain hidden ideologies in its visual depiction of landscape. What's relevant here is the way an ideology is made invisible through the manufacturing of images. Increasingly, this frame is used not only to show the world, but to make the world. The map and the territory, in other words, converge.
Over the last year or so, many of the key digital behemoths have unveiled plans for new headquarters: the grand edifices that they choose to erect for themselves. These are the physical ecosystems inhabited by our digital ecosystems, and in these habitats we can read technology companies' own ambitions and their own self images, and perhaps glimpse something of the distortions that digital culture brings to the world around us.
Apple, for example, has long been arrayed in a set of buildings arranged around a road called Infinite Loop. Even here an idea is embedded of how the physical world might be spatially distorted by digital culture: the suburban cul de sac re-read as an endlessly looping piece of computer code.
But having peaked - for the moment at least - as the worlds most valuable company, something more fitting is in store: the Norman Foster-designedApple City, Cupertino. Arranged as a giant circular plan, the project's renders read like a non-slip, smooth Pentagon, set both in and around a forest. Just like digital space, it’s a form that has no front or back and whose interior is the same as its exterior, resisting traditional urban hierarchies.
Its plan reads as symbolically as anything by nineteenth-century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Its expression is one long zero as though it imagined, despite its 260,100 square metres, that it almost wasn’t there. Apple workers stroll dappled by endless autumn sunlight. This is a particular version of a digital community, accelerated into a perfect hallucinatory cocktail of hyper-tech building and idealised nature.
Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, designed by Frank Gehry, suggests a different relationship to nature. Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying: "From the outside it will appear as if you're looking at a hill in nature," but what the hill will actually contain is the largest open-plan office space in the world.
"The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together," Zuckerberg said. Perhaps, just like the image of the cloud, the intention is for Facebook to disappear into the landscape, to become invisible and indistinguishable from things as natural as trees, grass and hills.
In designs for both the Apple and Facebook headquarters, the idea of nature is at once highly present and highly synthetic. It's a level constructed above vast parking garages, quoted as experience and presented as mission statement. In both, there are echoes of the hippy pastoral techno-utopias of the 1960s, washed together with management theory and marketing. These are ideologies made glass and grass.
Google’s Bay View campus for California, designed by NBBJ, will be its first North American new-build. Though its appearance is closer to an average business park, it too has its roofs littered with green stuff.
The generic building forms, though, are distorted by what Google knows about: the acquisition of data about human behavior. The buildings are thus twisted and bent by patterns of work, desires and adjacencies, as though the data harvesting of Google Maps were able to warp the world into other organisations. They claim that employees across the 102,200 square-metre development will never be more than two-and-a-half-minutes from one another, creating a kind of hyperlinked organisation.
Proximity and loss of hierarchy are, in this headquarters, core issues. These reflect both the nature of digital work culture and the nature of the digital too. The absence of distance and constant adjacency is at once both the liberation that digital culture brings and the springboard for loss of liberty that Prism suggests. In architectural terms, we might understand this problem in terms of openness: the open plan and the curtain wall are simultaneously things that give us spatial transparency and a condition of panoptic surveillance.
Amazon's proposed Seattle headquarters by NBBJ
Plans have just been unveiled for Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters, also by NBBJ, that includes a trio of 6039 square-metre biospeheres. Each sphere is conceived as "a plant-rich environment that has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting." Within these bubble micro-climates will be floors of offices, shops, lounges and canteens - essentially total environments.
Of course Amazon itself is named for an environment, a habitat with geographic scale and significance in arguments of climate change. That the company should actually become a habitat itself, a technologically induced artificial ecosystem, is perhaps a fulfillment of this baby boom radical-to-corporate digital trajectory.
We might trace the roots of these places just as we might trace the origins of the Californian ideology. In part, they are university campuses, the sites of innovation research out of which some of these corporations and their culture spring. In part, too, they emerge out of the hybrid offshoot of architectural design that spliced management consultancy with spatial design.
They also owe much to those intentional communities that bloomed in the 1960s and 1970s: the communes pioneered by hippy culture. Places like Drop City struck out as techno-rural settlements, abandoning the city in favour of Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic inhabitation of the wilderness. They were ideologically driven as spaces apart from the rest of society where alternatives for ownership, family, energy use, materials and so on could be explored.
They created their own ecosystems, if you will: self-sufficient as sci-fi space ships, supplied by the Whole Earth Catalogue, the hippy version of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue that architectural critic Reyner Banham argued had made the west habitable through mail-order delivery of gadgets and devices in his 1965 essay The Great Gizmo. It’s worth bearing Banham's thesis in mind: if, as he argued, the colonisation of the West was made possible by the gadget, then maybe the gadgets the West now produces are not only a product of some kind of fatalism written into its own origin myths, but the gadgets they now produce are devices of colonisation themselves.
Biosphere 2 was perhaps the largest and most ambitious offshoots of these colonies. Conceived as an ecological experiment, it was a closed system housed in a giant pyramidal greenhouse. Its mission was in part determined by a hippy-science group called the Institute of Ecotechnics, whose mission remains "to establish and develop the new discipline of Ecotechnics, which deals with the relationships between ethnosphere, technosphere and the biosphere" and "which intends to harmonise ecology and technology." It was named Biosphere 2, of course, because Earth is conceived in this way of thinking as Biosphere 1.
The gigantic corporatised versions of these idealised hippy communities also separate themselves from society. These too are idealised spaces, techno-utopias that turn their back on the world that surrounds them in order to manufacture spaces that can sustain their own ideologies. Just as the biosphere is an introverted ecosystem, we see a similar kind of disconnection, a resistance to the idea of the urban. Each becomes its own world, a place that operates according to its own set of rules and ideas, each wrapped up in its own vision of nature.
These are the citadels of the Californian ideology, places where the digital distortions of traditional urban, architectural and environmental space are manifested, places manufactured by processes of design thinking, holistic and totalised within their own limits.
Perfected and protected as these digital epicentres are, it is the rest of the world that feels the effects of the digital reorganisation of space far more profoundly. Outside the limits of these palaces is where the darkest machinations of digitality really work. Even nature itself, its clouds, hills, forests and rivers, traditionally figured as a place of escape and solitude, has long colonised by the digital. To escape its presence might now be almost impossible and might involve the most extreme schemes.
Think, for example, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London, or of Edward Snowden, the Prism whistleblower currently in his Hong Kong hotel. Both are now in exceptional spaces, holes in the continuum of globalised digital space. These strange anomalies are perhaps the only escapes from the ever-present digital backdoor, the only respite from the colonisation of earth by digital culture.
In his previous column, Jacob argued that the American National Security Agency's Prism surveillance program was something born not only out of the networked world we now inhabit, not only out of our reliance on a small group of Californian companies who may well have cooperated with the intelligence services, but out of a way of thinking that characterises those very same companies: design thinking
Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, Rockland County, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared toBaron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and was arguably one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation. One of his major contributions to urban planning was New York's large parkway network. Although Moses was never elected to any public office (his only attempt at public office is when he ran for governor of New York as a Republican in 1934 and lost badly), he was responsible for the creation and leadership of numerous public authorities which gave him autonomy from the general public and elected officials. It is due to Moses that New York State has a greater proportion of public benefit corporations than any other US state, making them the prime mode of infrastructure building and maintenance in New York, accounting for 90% of the state's debt.[3] As head of various authorities, he controlled millions in income from his projects' revenue generation, such as tolls, and he had the power to issue bonds to borrow vast sums, allowing him to initiate new ventures with little or no input from legislative bodies. This allowed him to circumvent the power of the purse as it normally functioned in the United States, and the process of citizen comment on major public works. Moses's projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region's development after being hit hard by the Great Depression. During the height of his powers, New York City participated in the construction of two World's Fairs: one in 1939and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations' decision to headquarter in Manhattan, as opposed to Philadelphia, by helping the state secure the money and land needed for the project.[4]
