Dear readers,
We’d like to first welcome our new readers that opted to join our list while registering for last week’s discussion. Editors at the Review take turns assembling this weekly email to point our readers to important developments and events and give our writers potential ideas, pitches, for pieces. Send pitches and any suggestions for this email to editor@nyra.nyc. We are currently in the process of building Issue 14, due out in early September. To receive your copy in the mail, subscribe now at NYRA.nyc.
As New York’s street life continues to slowly gain momentum, the city still evades normality. Pedestrians equidistantly negotiate one another on sidewalks lined with open-air diners and door-service businesses. There is no settled meniscus against which to measure oneself except in terms of our collective responsibilities to care for each other, and as designers it is hard not to fill our time taking stock of how our spaces are reacting.
All of this adds up to a strange contradiction: appreciating the light and air of the broad-ways and the city’s effort to open certain streets to pedestrian traffic, (should any of these streets ever be reopened to car traffic?) while contemplating their Haussmanian association to barricades and police control as Black Lives Matter demonstrations continue. We stand together while standing apart.
The New York activist-architect dons their mask simultaneously for protection and anonymity, and perhaps this should be adopted as an important piece of the professional identity. As Keller Easterling has suggested, the mask is part of the operation of infiltrating organizations that in turn wear their own, that architects should be better rehearsed at “getting under the hood of an organization and tinkering with the activity that is discrepant from the label.” This stasis has afforded some of us the momentary hesitation in our careers to dig a little deeper into the profession, dissect long-held biases, and find ways to negotiate new agency as the compartmentalized rediscovery of phased-in architecture continues.
As part of that phasing, the city confronts the impending re-opening of its public schools with what can be considered a varied and staggered approach, differing by district, that will introduce an entirely new set of behavioral and spatial dilemmas. With each new phase comes a new set of short- and long-term complications that may have lasting consequences, requiring design to be more responsive and fluid. Universities are also struggling with the reopening, and some have adopted strict behavioral guidelines for their students and faculty while others have announced significant budget cuts in order to maintain financial feasibility throughout the fall semester.
On Thursday, July 30th, The New York Review of Architecture with The Architectural League of New York hosted the online event New Grounds for Design Education, a conversation with thirty-one participants representing fifteen architecture programs from around the country, brought together to discuss the recent wave of letters addressed to their respective administrations regarding fair representation of BIPOC communities in architectural academia. The discussion was moderated by Sanjive Vaidya and was instigated by a collective analysis by Dr. Sharon Sutton of student letters. Before nearly 400 viewers, participants shared experiences, values, and coordinated actionable goals in an effort to solidify the movement and expand its reach. The recorded event will be made available on The New York Review of Architecture’s YouTube page for those who were unable to attend or would like to share the conversation.
It seems there are several efforts underway to build an inter-school movement for reform. Design As Protest is recruiting local student representatives, a group from last Thursday's discussion are creating an organization by the same name as the discussion, New Grounds for Education, and an illustrious coalition of faculty have recently announced the creation of Dark Matter University. We are looking for someone to write about these efforts.
Additional pitch ideas:
Students at Yale School of Architecture have developed The Visibility Project, which links data on ethnicity and gender with anecdotal experiences from surveyed students to provide a picture of the school’s handling of academic opportunities.
We continue our interest in the development of the Borough-Based Jail System, and are curious to know how the project has developed to meet the new challenges established by the pandemic and protests.
We are always interested in the consequences of the pandemic on your personal and professional experiences, and how working from home has changed your work-life balance.
As always, we are also looking for writers to provide coverage of current architectural events and discussions. (Yes, even digital ones.) Here is a short list of some events we are interested in that are happening this month:
On Tuesday, August 4th, AIANY will host The Future of Museums: Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Cooper Hewitt as part of its Future of Museums Dialogue Series. (Zoom Webinar)
On Sunday, August 9th, Foil Architecture Chats will present James Leng and Jennifer Ly of Figure Office. (Link)
On Monday, August 17th, Dumbarton Oaks will host a talk called Segregation and Resistance in America’s Urban Landscapes. (Zoom Webinar)
And finally, Archtober is soon approaching, but will surely manifest differently than years past. We’d like to hear from you if you or your office is engaged with any event-planning.
Until next week,
James