SKYLINE | Bringing It All Back Home
The Black in Design conference looks at the Black home. Plus: Reinhold Martin takes the measure of value, and Thom Mayne talks Thom Mayne.
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Welcome back to NYRA’s regular helping of news and views bubbling up from the city’s architecture scene and beyond. New York readers: Come down and hang out with the NYRA team at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, October 1. We’ll probably be wearing yellow.
NOTES & QUOTES
Bringing It All Back Home
CAMBRIDGE — From the start of the Black in Design (BID) 2023 conference, it was clear that Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union had put a great amount of care into the planning of the weekend. The attention to detail extended to the brand-new bottles of Nivea lotion in the bathrooms—a must on these dry and cold New England days.
After a reception on Friday evening, things got going the following morning with a keynote panel moderated by Harvard professor Toni L. Griffin. Architects, designers, and writers unpacked the complexities of the Black home—the theme of this year’s proceedings—furnishing material that would be explored in greater detail throughout the weekend. Black domesticity was re-framed through the lenses of feminism, queerness, care, land use, even sustainability. (There was a workshop for imagining “sustainable soul spaces.”)
Unlike typical academic conferences, BID ’23 aimed to be approachable. In a gesture welcomed by presenters on stage, elderly community members interjected and rebutted from the stands, offering their own accounts of historical events and movements of Black representation and political thought. This dynamic produced rich conversations and helped to bridge some of the more abstract moments in the programming—perhaps best summed up by the title of the Sunday workshop, “Remembering Home_Critical Fabulation and Imaginations of __.” Designer/educator Nekita Thomas asked those in attendance to reconsider Afrofuturism as a more immediate process. She identified ways designers can imagine better futures—inside the domus and beyond—on a much shorter timeline.
In between presentations, attendees engaged in intense talk and excited laughter, reminding many of us of the importance of in-person gathering and, naturally, of home. —Jabari Canada
What Was the Question?
LOS ANGELES — Thom Mayne’s life appeared to be flashing before his eyes as he presented the work of his firm, Morphosis Architects, in slow, disconnected fragments. The fragmentation was all too literal: addressing a packed audience at SCI-Arc, an institute he co-founded under the banner of iconoclasm over a half-century ago, Mayne relied on four video projectors to plaster the walls with images of his designs and muses, past and present. (He seems to admire Elon Musk.) Mayne proffered a few overambitious themes—“making/material,” “nature/ground,” “context/connection,” and “organization/form”—for connecting the disparate stimuli. The talk was meant to convey the depth of his architectural thinking; perhaps knowingly, it was called, “That’s an Interesting Question.”
But Mayne was less knowing when griping about detractors who evidently reduce his work to flash. “We’re not cake decorators,” he intoned from his seated position while showcasing his Orange County Museum of Art, a swoopy concoction with half-baked detailing that opened last October—mostly to negative reviews. “The critics just want to talk about what the building looks like, but it’s really about city building,” Mayne retorted before abruptly changing topic. The audience may have witnessed the swan song of a formalism of a certain age; a plea for looking beyond the exuberance that propelled a consequential career. —Shane Reiner-Roth
The Lower Depths
CLINTON HILL — Utilitas, rather than firmitas and venustas, is the real basis of architecture’s social status within capitalist society. But what exactly is utility? In a lecture at e-flux’s Brooklyn campus, the historian Reinhold Martin attempted to furnish the beginnings of an answer. After a dense summary of competing systems of value and price—specifically, those of Marx and marginal utility theorists—Martin narrowed his focus to industrial capitalism’s prime mover: oil.
The pivot made sense in the context of the presentation. Like architecture, oil is both a commodity and needed for commodity production. But as Martin argued, oil more readily exemplifies the problem of utility. Neoclassical (and later, neoliberal) economists ascribed the boom in petroleum production at the turn of the century purely to the will of sovereign consumers but failed to account for the sluggish pace with which oil actually overtook coal. The half-century that was required for oil’s conquest can’t be chalked up to managerial optimization, either. Instead, interrelated social processes involving “blood, sweat, tears, and labor” were responsible for establishing oil’s “usefulness.” Martin, who teaches at Columbia GSAPP, explained that the purpose of his recent work is to reintroduce labor to much-disputed questions about capital and value within architecture. “[It’s about] going to the basement, taking people down to the furnace, to the sites of actual production,” he said. Just don’t be surprised if you find Marx while you’re down there. —Alex Bronzini-Vender
Future Perfect
GARMENT DISTRICT—It’s still early days for unionization in architecture, but organizers with the Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group and Science for the People are thinking ahead. Meeting at the People’s Forum under the banner of the “Alternative Building Industry (ABI) Collective,” members reflected on the recent March Against Fossil Fuels and the role of organized labor in winning a just transition. Brian Kamanzi, a researcher with CUNY’s Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) network, relayed conversations among unions in Africa, Europe, and South America working to safeguard their jobs by building public sector renewable energy. Joshua Barnett, a longtime NYCHA architect and public employees’ union member, stressed the need for architectural workers to organize similarly around their role in delivering public solutions to the climate crisis. The group grappled with the work it will take to implement a Green New Deal for New York—not just retrofitting buildings and protecting against sea level rise, but building an organized design industry capable of advocating and delivering these projects. The discussion wrapped on a more achievable next step: ABI Collective members will be turning out for an October 24 public meeting to defend Local Law 97, the landmark building decarbonization law that the Adams administration is determined to defang. —Leo Shaw
Heart to Heart
ZOOM — Earlier this month, the Architecture Lobby’s (TAL) Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School kicked off its third year with a diverse array of sessions led by members and friends. So far, the lecture format has predominated (the last session is tomorrow), but the school’s organizers have been mindful to include freer-flowing conversations in the program, such as last Friday’s “low-key check-in” for “independent architectural workers.” Participants in different time zones huddled in the Zoom room to share their experiences as freelance designers, writers, and scholars. With guidance from facilitators Tessa Forde and Marisa Cortright, the group navigated a wide-ranging set of issues: the pressure to make the most of every opportunity to the point of self-exploitation, feelings of disempowerment and how they can be overcome, and the potential creative power embedded in writing freely. Architectural workers can be product-oriented to a fault, even (especially?) within a grassroots organization advocating for just labor practices and an equitable build environment like TAL—which makes spaces like these, where we can set down what we’re carrying and speak openly, so important. —Kaede Polkinghorne
Gender Effects
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “As architects we set a vision for how we can live,” said Ilana Judah from the Center for Architecture stage. For Judah, a sustainability officer at KPF, and her co-panelists, the climate crisis is poised to transform expectations of designers—ours and their own. Or, as Yasemin Kologlu, a principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, observed, “We are no longer designers, we have to [also] be activists, engineers, and advocates, [to] play a bigger role, to use what we have and collaborate with others.” Christina X. Brown affirmed the architect’s ability to “understand different perspectives with one common goal across stakeholders.” She offered a biographical note about her diverse experiences as a child growing up in Tianjin, Bangalore, and North Carolina and pondered how practitioners like herself (she is an environmental performance specialist at KPF) might “bridge better connections” across communities and nature. Gensler’s Mallory Taub expanded on the importance of “bringing people together.… Inclusive perspectives are important and enrich these conversations.” Alice Mears and Jonsara Ruth, co-founders of the Parsons Material Lab, noted the gendered dimension of sustainability work, which skews toward women. “Does gender have an effect on your work?” asked Ruth. In response, the panelists recognized the women mentors and educators who had inspired them. Kologlu, mother to a young child, said she felt driven by parental instinct—not necessarily by gender—to leave a better world for the next generations. —Malaika Kim
Green Thumb (or Toe?)
CAMBRIDGE — “Think like a king, act like a peasant,” said Kongjian Yu toward the end of his talk at Harvard GSD. The strange-sounding comment seemed to sum up the mindset of China’s leading landscape architect, a rare global figure who maintains roots in his country of origin. Yu’s knack for minting phrases to illustrate his ideas undoubtedly helped his rise. At the GSD, he discussed urban projects that illustrate, for instance, the success of the “Bigfoot revolution” over the “little foot” syndrome that characterizes old forms of city making in China. (The nomenclature references the historical practice of foot binding and the warped, insalubrious aesthetics it ostensibly promoted. Such attitudes, Yu noted, live on in our consumerist present and should be stamped out by—what else?—the planner’s proverbial big foot.) Of much wider appeal is his “sponge city” concept, with its prescriptions for replacing grey infrastructure with “green” infrastructure—parks, green belts, reservoirs—to manage stormwater and flooding. These may seem like odd ingredients for an ecological utopia, but they suit Yu, who has distinguished himself by making unexpected connections between culture, land use, and public policy. —Cindy He
FAST & LOOSE
Game Theory
Mélanie van der Hoorn’s new title delivers on its promise to provide a seriously fun presentation and analysis of architectural games, games designed by architects, games rooted in architectural ideas, and games that offer new platforms for architectural speculation. But books, like games, are also interactive interfaces, and while Serious Fun won me over with its vibrant color palette and elegant graphic design, I was surprised by the difficulty of physically handling it. It’s more an oversized collector’s item than a back-pocket card game. Still, Serious Fun’s comprehensive survey suggests that structured escapism—increasingly, video games—can help architects reach new audiences, no small feat for a profession that tends to take itself too seriously. —Joseph Altshuler
Saltier than the Sea
In August, for one night only, Brooklyn Academy of Music screened a new 4K restoration of Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg’s 1980 documentary Brighton Beach. The film, shot over the course of four years when Stein and Wittenberg were, in their words, “young and cute and fun to hang out with,” is a vérité portrait of the cohabitation of Puerto Ricans and Soviet Jews in the beachfront Brooklyn neighborhood. Don’t get it twisted: this was no melting pot. Jews gathered in pool halls; Puerto Ricans danced on the boardwalk. The mixed-race couple whose life provides one of the few narrative through lines in the film is on the verge of divorce. Even the Polar Bear Club was exclusive (still is). Today, the streets of Brighton look shockingly the same as they do in Stein and Wittenberg’s intimate, generous shots. Does everything else? —Marianela D’Aprile
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NEWSWORTHY
Nonstop Gaffes
Your frequent if not regular What Is Eric Adams Up To update currently includes two boneheaded attempts of very different flavors: one to sell New Yorkers on living in dormlike rooms in exchange for cheaper rent, and another to make a heart sign with an armless robot cop. Laugh at the gaffes, weep at what they spell for life in this city, where the income gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is only widening.
The Bright Side
It’s not all bad, though: Juilliard announced that, starting next year, its graduate acting program will be tuition-free. And in other gestures toward justice, more people have come forward alleging abuse from David Adjaye, and artist Xaviera Simmons successfully pressured the Queens Museum to take down a site-specific that it had repurposed without her permission.
In Memoriam
Debora Reiser, architect, teacher, and mother of RUR Architecture co-founder Jesse Reiser, died at the age of 96 on September 19. Reiser was one of only a few women who led architecture firms in the 1970s and advocated for women in the field her whole life. She was born in Dobbs Ferry and practiced in New York City all her life. She will be remembered and missed.
Promotional Blurb
The American Institute of Architects New York and the Center for Architecture appointed Jesse Lazar as the new executive director of both organizations. Lazar had been serving as interim director since February of this year.
DATELINE
The fortnight ahead…
Friday, 9/29
Beaux Arts Ball 2023: Sea Change
9:00 p.m. ET | Brooklyn Navy Yard
Standing on the Corner: Bembé Secreto
7 p.m. ET | MoMA PS1
Saturday, 9/30
Van Alen Block Party
1 p.m. ET | Bond Street between Union & Sackett, Brooklyn
Sunday, 10/1
Can the Future Be Saved? A Conversation Between Astra Taylor and Anand Giridharadas
2 p.m. ET | Brooklyn Book Festival
Late Capitalism and the Digital Age with Jonathan Crary
5 p.m. ET | Woodbine
Monday, 10/2
Making Materials Matter with Suzanne Tick
4 p.m. ET | Cooper Hewitt
Affirmation 3: Design Policy with Vicki Been, Christopher Hawthorne, Adam Lubinsky, and Weiping Wu
6:30 p.m. ET | Columbia GSAPP
Tuesday, 10/3
Nonhuman Futures with Suzanne Kite
1 p.m. | AIANY Center for Architecture and Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design
Architecture After God with Kyle Dugdale
6:30 p.m. ET | Yale School of Architecture
Wednesday, 10/4
Material Culture and the Blockchain with Charlotte Kent and Michael Assis
6 p.m. ET | Bard Graduate Center
Staging Future Worlds: The Architectural Visions of László Rajk Opening Reception
6:00 p.m. ET | Valerie Goodman Gallery
Friday, 10/6
“Architecture After the Green New Deal” Workshop with Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz
12:30 p.m. PT | UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Patterns of Change Exhibition Opening
6 p.m. ET | Citygroup
The Matter of Memory: A Monument to Memory-Making Opening with Richard Yoo and Eric Moed
6:30 p.m. ET | Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Saturday, 10/7
Under My Feet Exhibition Opening
4 p.m. ET | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Monday, 10/9
Affirmation 4: Indigenous Worldings with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Paulo Tavares, & Emanuel Admassu
6:30 p.m. ET | Columbia GSAPP
Screening Fears: On Protective Media Francesco Casetti
6:30 p.m. ET | Yale School of Architecture
Tuesday, 10/10
The 2023 Cooper Union Augusta Savage Colloquium
5:30 p.m. ET | The Cooper Union
Art Deco: Commercializing the Avant-Garde
6 p.m. ET | Art Deco Society of New York
Arboreal Media with Shannon Mattern
6:30 p.m. ET | The Cooper Union
Wednesday, 10/11
Drawing into Architecture with Stan Allen, Olalekan Jeyifous, Hilary Sample, & Billie Tsien
6:30 p.m. ET | The Architectural League and the National Academy of Design
Monumental Luxuries with Victoria Camblin
6 p.m. PT | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 10/12
Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas: Made Land with Reinhold Martin, Deepa Ramaswamy, & Amiel Bizé
12 p.m. ET | Buell Center
Architecture & Design Film Festival: New York
6:15 p.m. ET | Architecture & Design Film Festival
Parc de La Villette at 40: An Anniversary Party with Bernard Tschumi
6:30 p.m. ET | Columbia GSAP
Friday, 10/13
Carceral Landscapes with Lisa Haber-Thomson, Sarah Lopez, Melanie Newport, Andrew Manuel Crespo, Ana María León, & Dana McKinney White
1 p.m. ET | Harvard GSD
Best in the World Screening
6:15 p.m. ET | Architecture & Design Film Festival
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New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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