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In Debt and in the Dark
What is the student-debt crisis doing to the field of architecture?
by Anjulie Rao
Klaire Viduya graduated in May from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a bachelor’s and a master’s of architecture. Since then, she’s been settling into a job working on education design projects and studying to obtain her license. A first-generation college student and child of working-class immigrants, Viduya found paying for her education challenging. Even though she opted for public school, she was still surprised when she got her first tuition bills.
“One thing that I didn’t factor, when I actually declared my major, is that our school charges variable fees as part of tuition. So the regular fee of $200 per credit can have another $150 to $250 on top of it, depending on the class,” she said.
Viduya finished her four-plus-two with $55,000 in student loans.
With the end of the Covid-19 student loan payment pause on the horizon, Viduya, like many designers, is preparing to begin or resume student-loan payments. It’s a good time, therefore, with all the anxiety in the air, to reflect on how student loan debt affects designers and the field at large: from placing limitations on who makes it through design school to determining how and when an architect or design professional might leave the field to influencing the profession’s intellectual endeavors. Debt is a cloud hovering over the design field: ominous, dark—and not fully graspable.
Read more about architecture’s “debt-scape” here.
Sunnyside Up
Megaprojects like Sunnyside Yard are a New York staple. That doesn’t mean their track record is clean.
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
“We don’t trust this process!” chanted dozens of protesters as they interrupted a September 16, 2019, community meeting at Aviation High School in Queens. The subject of this public meeting was the potential decking over and development of Sunnyside Yard, a 180-acre rail yard in Queens that is roughly six times larger than Hudson Yards. Previous development proposals for the site, in the 1960s and 1980s, stalled. But the site, relatively close to Manhattan, continues to fuel development dreams. In 2018, the New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) commissioned a master plan from New York firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), led by Vishaan Chakrabarti. Responding to public feedback, PAU has refined the plan, allowing the MTA and Amtrak to continue using the yard, while better integrating the potential development with the surrounding neighborhoods.
PAU’s plan envisions a megadevelopment organized around the needs and desires of ordinary people, not corporations and tourists. Attendees ambled by dozens of easel-mounted boards, which showed ideas for transit improvements, public spaces, housing, pedestrian-friendly streets, varying densities, social infrastructure, and respect for existing communities. In the center of the room there was an impressive scale model, plus boxes of free pupusas from a local Salvadoran restaurant.
Read more about Sunnyside Yard’s credibility problem here.
Astral Pains
A speculative tale about a city’s relationship with ghosts
by Paula Vilaplana de Miguel
I first read saw Samuel Ralph Harlow’s name in the Butler Library stacks, in a book titled Margery, Harvard Veritas. A Study in Psychics (1925). Harlow participated in the Scientific American investigation that took place at Harvard University when one of Emerson Hall’s laboratories mutated into a séance room to test whether the psychic Mina “Margery” Crandon could genuinely communicate with the dead. Under test conditions, Margery, with her hands and ankles fastened and her tongue pressing a controlling device, produced raps, made a fluorescent doughnut levitate, and channeled her deceased brother Walter. The Harvard investigation gave no unanimous results but motivated the production of highly sophisticated devices to conduct such tests. I often think of the Scientific American committee as the first ghostbusters.
Read the rest of this Ghostbusters-inspired yarn here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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