Announcing Issue #25
Our December Edition
A reader recently told NYRA that a charm of the publication is you never are quite sure what is going to arrive in the mail. This issue may prove that thesis particularly true. It contains a holiday gift: a rediscovered set of drawings by Alvar Aalto for a church in Brooklyn, published for the first time here. We worked with our printer to figure out how to reproduce them to match the original blueprints. Along with an essay framing the story and significance of the drawings, we invited writers to share perspectives on ecclesiastical and Nordic architecture in New York. They add up to a close look at the easily overlooked: Amanda Iglesias writes about legendary churches hidden in midblock sites, Caitlin Watson reviews a sculpture made of discarded packing crates, and Eva Hagberg shares how the work of a dead husband consumed the life of Aline Saarinen.
This year our monthly began to shed its own niche trappings. Many of the players we once covered from a distance are now paying subscribers. As we make plans for next year to invite a still broader public to hold the built environment to account, we also plan not to forget that many of the most important stories are not necessarily in the glossy photographs that tend to dominate design media, but are to be found on quiet streets and in the everyday experience of buildings.
Join our readers, and subscribe to receive Issue #25 here.
Like all of our issues, #24 is a limited edition Risograph print by the team at a83. In fact, given the challenges of printing white on blue (much sleep was lost this week), our printers have assured us this will be the last time we ever have a white ink issue. 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 #25 in the mail for you. Read on below for some excerpts!
In the Issue…
THE SACRED, THE PROFANE, AND AALTO IN BROOKLYN: SOFIA SINGLER AND KIRK GASTINGER REDISCOVER A LOST DESIGN
Rather than fortify his faith in standardization, Aalto’s time at MIT pushed him to question its assumed prominence for postwar architecture. Scholars credit his MIT years as a brief but intense—and intensely meaningful—period that fueled his ambitions to “humanize” the techno-scientific disposition of mainstream modernism. According to studio lore, he encouraged students to defend their work along intuitive, rather than rationalist, lines.
I WANT TO CATCH THE EXCITEMENT OF A LIFE: EVA HAGBERG ON THE TWA TERMINAL
I had spent so much time thinking about how Aline Saarinen had made this project legible to the many, many people who wanted to write about the building, describing it as “a bird in flight.” Eero didn’t love the bird idea but understood that it would play well with the press. That’s ultimately what the TWA building became—a moment in the press, a moment of opportunity, the chance for Eero to really, truly make his mark, opening an airport terminal at the dawn of the jet age.
YOUR HIGHNESS: LEIJIA HANRAHAN VISITS NEW YORK’S NEW SKYDECKS
If the theorist Guy Debord is to be believed, Karl Marx once said, at some totally unspecified moment, “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” Either way, it’s a good line—and one that happens to double as a critique of New York City’s newest observation decks, Edge at 30 Hudson Yards and SUMMIT at One Vanderbilt.
DROP ANCHOR: AMANDA IGLESIAS ON THE MIDBLOCK CHURCHES OF HARLEM
In New York, corner lots connote status. While the city is full of churches clad in European garb, there are few piazzas, squares, and plazas to frame them, as there would be in, say, Rome or Amsterdam. Instead, New York offers parishes and congregations the corner lot… For newer congregations and those with limited resources—often serving minority or immigrant communities—the corner lot, however, is not an option.
IN-BETWEEN PLACES: CAITLIN WATSON ON NEVELSON CHAPEL
Chaos defines New York. Artist Louise Nevelson described it as a “city of collage”—a mess of moving bodies and flowing capital layered over a tangle of streets and jagged buildings. To retain some semblance of humanity here, one must find pockets of silence, or what Nevelson called in-between places– “the dawns and the dusks…the places between land and sea.” These are spaces to pause, re-center, and feel whole, providing refuge from the frenzy of urban life without requiring any capital transaction in return.
BUILDING KILLS BOOK: NICOLAS KEMPER RECOUNTS A DEBATE
D’Aprile, who championed the building, did not exactly extend her advocacy of its continued narrative relevance to architects… Mark Foster Gage, who championed the book, really found his stride defending architects and capital-A architecture…
LESS THAN HEROIC: DAN ROCHE EXAMINES THE LEGACY OF THE ARCHITECTS COLLABORATIVE
TAC was novel for their time in a few ways… already in 1945, two of the eight founding partners were women. The office was cooperatively run, and several partners were a part of the antiwar movement, contributing to TASK, an anti-fascist magazine. Their early engagement with public schools is also worth noting; they viewed public education as a cornerstone of a democratic society…
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POSTMODERN: JACK MURPHY REVIEWS WES ANDERSON’S MOVIE, THE FRENCH DISPATCH
Anderson is from Houston, a place where postmodernism ran wild: the same year he graduated from high school, a Hard Rock Café designed by Stanley Tigerman opened in town. At the opening of Bar Luce, the 2017 café he designed for the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Anderson revealed his childhood dream of becoming an architect. But he knows there’s more to the job than theatricality. As he said of the café, “there is no ideal perspective for this space. It is for real life, and ought to have numerous good spots for eating, drinking, talking, reading, etc.”
Seeing the city (or history) as a staged tableau reduces our chances of understanding it as a set of power relations—politics—that establish the conditions of appearance within…
SKYLINE!
12/7: At a lecture sponsored by The Architectural League, architect YASMEEN LARI asked: “Why is it that architects think they don’t have something to offer to the marginalized?”
And come by the launch event!
We will have an issue #25 launch event, over zoom tomorrow at 1pm EST, in which Sofia Singler and Kirk Gastinger will present and discuss the Aalto drawings with Eva Hagberg and Trey Trahan. Rsvp here.
To support our contributors and receive #25 by post, subscribe here.
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.
To support our contributors and receive the Review by post, subscribe here.