We are happy to share with you our November issue, #24. Angela Sun invited New York’s skyline over for Thanksgiving dinner, and—along with the turkey—we are happy to be serving up a feast of essays and reviews for our readers, with contributions by Ian Volner, Tess McCann, Jaffer Kolb, Andrew Holder, Jedy Lau, Nicolas Kemper and Eva Hagberg, dispatches from Gideon Fink Shapiro, Xio Alvarez, Anna Talley, Sofia Gulaid, Michelle Mueller Gamez, and Poun Laura Kim, a centerfold spread of towers drawn by Jedy Lau, and a full print poster from Cairobserver’s Mohamed Elshahed.
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Like all of our issues, #24 is a limited edition Risograph print by the team at a83. If you are a current subscriber, your copy is already in the mail. If you are not a subscriber, subscribe today, and we will put a copy of #24 in the mail for you. Read on below for some excerpts!
In the Issue…
GOTHAM IN ONE BUILDING: IAN VOLNER ON 70 PINE STREET
There’s a well-worn bit of New York architectural lore, which holds that the whole of the 1920s and ’30s—the golden age of Art Deco, and by some lights, of the city’s architecture in general—was the accidental residue of an abstruse change in the local building code. As the story goes, the unglamorous-sounding 1916 Zoning Resolution was the law that launched a thousand jazzy fantasies: by mandating a set of height-to-street-width ratios, and restricting towers to 25 percent of lot size, the ordinance obliged architects to introduce setbacks into their skyscraper designs. Meant to prevent the city from becoming a warren of gloomy canyons, the rule helped give rise to the jagged silhouette that distinguishes all of the most beloved landmarks of the era, from the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building to the towers at Rockefeller Center.
The story is true, for the most part…
TESS MCCANN: TIME TO CARE
Congresspeople demand roads and bridges and flood protection and dams; how do social programs with less tangible results, they ask, count as infrastructure?
The quick answer is that they don’t. Infrastructure, as commonly understood, is the answer given to the problems that arise when humans attempt to dominate land and nature through agriculture, non-nomadic settlement, and capital accumulation…
APRÈS-GARDE: JAFFER KOLB AND ANDREW HOLDER ON EMERGING PRACTICES
I think we can say that about six years ago everyone was talking about how postmodernism was back, or neo-postmodernism, or whatever. Going back to illegibility versus legibility, I think the hope is that we shouldn’t fear the remnants of language. We shouldn’t fear words. We shouldn’t fear meaning. We shouldn’t fear any of these things because the fear of those things is a nihilistic act. The denial of meaning is nihilistic and alienating…
This is a critical difference from the battle that happened before us, where I think everyone was invested in denying interpretation. They wanted to reject meaning. Now we are interested in meaning and how we might produce it such that it represents…
EVA HAGBERG: WHO CAN SEE ANYTHING FOR WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS?
Does it matter what something looks like? I think the better question is, how can we tell what something actually looks like? Maybe this is sort of Philosophy 101—is your red my red?—but I think we often have no idea what something looks like because absolutely everything we see is filtered through some kind of lens…
OF MODULES & PIXELS: JEDY LAU ON NEW YORK’S NEWEST FORMAL FIXATION
Since the late aughts, “pixelated” high-rises have proliferated in cities worldwide, and we have their architects to thank for the metaphor. In Bangkok, Ole Scheeren’s 2018 MahaNakhon tower is marked by its “pixelated and carved presence” against the city’s skyline; in Toronto, BIG’s in-progress King Street condo “rises as sets of pixels extruded upwards”; and in Abu Dhabi, a new cascading mixed-use development by MVRDV simply goes by the name Pixel.
A hallmark among these projects is a new unit of composition. Whereas the floor was once the generative element of the skyscraper, pixel buildings are composed of discrete rooms or units. Against the smooth, unbroken facades of mid-century slabs, pixel buildings are set off by jagged contours, boastful cantilevers, and blocky Minecraft-like massing…
NICOLAS KEMPER: WHEN CAIRO WAS MODERN
Today’s political forces have the upper hand against yesterday’s buildings. Buildings Elshahed came to Cairo to study were “implicated” in the events of 2011, becoming symbols of the revolution, and are now being demolished en masse by the counterrevolution… “in the absence of robust preservation laws and presence of a crippled architecture profession,” buildings are defenseless against the state and predatory investment capital. Elshahed minces no words about today’s ongoing demolitions: “It’s a cultural genocide.”
SKYLINE!
“What does it mean to own your body and what does space have to do with that?” RINALDO WALCOTT and DR. THANDI LOEWENSON explored this question across different scales at “Abolishing Property as Architectural Care,” the second of five conversations in the Praxes of Care lecture series, hosted by the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo… —POUN LAURA KIM
Finally, we collaborated with the Canadian Center for Architecture, Colour Code Print out of Toronto, and our graphic designer Erik Freer to make our first ever print advertisement, a loose leaf three color risograph-printed insert with a photograph by Elena Dorfman for the Canadian Center for Architecture’s just opened exhibit, a Section of Now.
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Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher). They rotate duties each month.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Thomas Phifer, and Stickbulb.
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