S K Y L I N E | 14 | Cooperatization
The Week Ahead for April 12
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Late last year, The New York Times published a fascinating piece about worker-owned cooperatives in Spain’s Basque region. These cooperatives—primarily based in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors—offer their members a chance to shape the economic and social policies that drive those businesses, while allowing for more flexible and humane conditions that can support workers through economic crises. In other words, is the co-op the alternative economic model that can sustain community and act as an antidote against the worst elements of capitalism?
To kick off this week’s round of dispatches, Nicolas Kemper reports back from a workshop on cooperatives as alternative frameworks for architectural practice hosted by the Architecture Lobby. Read on for more Skyline coverage from Harish Krishnamoorthy, Nicholas Raap, and Abubakr Ali.
Here’s some upcoming event highlights:
Monday, 4/12 Justin Garrett Moore, 6:30pm, Yale; Tuesday, 4/13 Adrienne Brown, 5:30pm, Yale Architecture Forum; Wednesday, 4/14 A Conversation On Housing With Candidates For Manhattan Borough President, 5:30pm, AIA New York & NYSAFAH; Friday, 4/16 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium: Acts Of Repair, 9:30 AM, Cornell AAP; Saturday, 4/17 someparts x a83 Opening Reception at a83.
The Van Alen Institute has partnered with Dark Matter University (DMU) to launch the Neighborhood Design Fellowship: Gowanus, a six-month program for twelve Gowanus residents to “work toward the future they imagine for their community.” The fellowships are paid; you can find more information here.
And in this week’s Letter to the Editor, we have an open call for the architectural profession to organize against inequitable development in NYC.
Wishing you a good week ahead,
—Carolyn Bailey
DISPATCHES
4/9—Cooperatization
"Cooperatizing is key to ending the race to the bottom" said PEGGY DEAMER at Alternative Frameworks for Architectural Practice: The Cooperative Network, a three hour workshop organized by the Architecture Lobby. While cooperatives do not "mean all are paid equally, it means how people are paid is decided by all." The Lobby has turned to cooperatives as a deep structural solution that can shift the very parameters of the conversation in architecture on topics ranging from work conditions to political engagement - said DEAMER, “The true goal of cooperatizing is not just the empowerment of architects, but the empowerment of communities." Members of the Lobby's Cooperative Network group - Gabriel Cira, Martha Kriley, Chase Robinson, Quilian Riano, Shawhin Roudbari, Ashton Hamm, Matthew Okazaki and Christian Rutherford - delivered a set of presentations diving into the principles of cooperatives, their history, and - most strikingly - how ubiquitous they are abroad. In Spain, something like two thirds of the population are members in a cooperative. NYRA featured in moderator PALMYRA GERAKI's presentation, as we are organizing as a cooperative. It is not easy! Much of the workshop focused on the mechanics of becoming a cooperative - for instance, only a few states even offer it as an option at all, but there is a workaround whereby an organization can become a corporation and then enact a set of by-laws that make it a cooperative. The Lobby (and NYRA!) is ready to do the hard work, because, as as DEAMER said, "Cooperatization is not just a pleasant option, it is a necessary one."
To find resources and take the Lobby's cooperative survey, click here. Nicolas Kemper
3/30—Carving Space
LESLEY LOKKO and SUMAYYA VALLY spoke on pedagogy, architecture, and autonomy for COOPER UNION’s annual Eleanore Pettersen Lecture, presenting their work via a performance of four acts: Talking, Teaching, Testing, and Telling. Working in tandem, these “counterparts'' detailed their attempts to transform pedagogy, mirror politics, and carve out the space required to “live out your imagination and not [just] your history.” When asked about framing spaces for learning, LOKKO stated that she “aims to provide a Smorgasbord of positions, moving away from a single doctrine, to a space of multiple voices.” Her words were bolstered by VALLY, who responded to questions regarding structure and imagination in pedagogy by saying: “Imagination is super political. We need imagination from places of difference rather than just a developmental and problem solving approach.” Abubakr Ali
4/6—Voices From the Archives
“It struck us as surprising that nothing has ever been published on the political and institutional background of this Nordic collaboration,” said MARI LENDING this Tuesday at PRINCETON’s MEDIA + MODERNITY Program. She was referring to the subject of her new book, authored with fellow speaker ERIK LANGDALEN, entitled Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice: Voices from the Archives. Avoiding the tendency to be yet-another-interpreter of Fehn’s work, LENDING said she and LANGDALEN “use[d] the archives as [their] voluntary straight jacket by sticking to the facts, undisturbed by poetry and myth, including those produced by the architect himself.” This proved to be challenging; Fehn wasn’t personally concerned with archiving his work, and the internationally collaborative nature of the project made the search daunting. At first, LANGDALEN recounted, the only extant drawings of the pavilion were Fehn’s original competition drawings. However, after contacting the son of the Danish architect who had supervised the construction, “miraculously we found all the structural and all the construction drawings, in this humid damp cellar, and we were able to scan them.”
ADRIAN FORTY remarked on the uniqueness of the geopolitical collaboration, saying “there’s no other pavilion in the biennale like this and, actually, there are very few buildings in the world, I think, which are owned by several nations,” and wondered “to what extent this is a building that has attracted myths, myths just stick to it.” LENDING may have preemptively answered, concluding her presentation by saying: “We have written a nerdy archival account on a canonical building designed by a famous architect. Looking only at the building and the archival documents pertaining to it, somehow I believe allowed us to undermine the obvious and I hope new views are emerging.” Nicholas Raap
4/7—Universal Ornament
“Ornament is a system of figuration that must embody and become inhabited by the thing being ornamented” was the first in a series of statements laid out by KENT BLOOMER in sketching a seemingly comprehensive theory of ornament on Wednesday for the ORNAMENT’S REFRACTED COSMOLOGIES colloquium series at YALE. “You can’t have autonomous ornament.” “Like an alphabet, ornament consists of a finite or limit of figures.” “A figure of ornament must visually adopt principles of constructions and work without discarding its own identity.” “There is no new ornament.” Examples ranging from 6500-year-old pottery to Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott Building to BLOOMER’s own contemporary work for the Reagan Airport in Washington DC were shown. It wasn’t just said what ornament is, however, but what ornament isn’t. Ornament isn’t a sign, symbol, or “mere” decoration. When asked on the difference between ornament and pattern, he said, “the difference...is that ornament has a content—cosmos, and pattern does not. Pattern is the generality...once you grant ornament its cosmos, then it becomes more specific.” That connection to cosmos isn’t a causal, one. For BLOOMER, “what is more important is that ornament is perhaps timeless and transcends specific culture.” Universal, indeed. Nicholas Raap
4/8—Climate Comforts
“I’m merely the messenger...I am offering how to draw attention to a different timeline, a different series of events with a different resonance, at the nexus of architecture and climate,” said DANIEL A. BARBER at U. PENN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE on Thursday. Beginning in 1940s Brazil, BARBER quickly jumped temporally and geographically to follow performative façades and brise-soleil around the globe, including France, Spain, Algeria, Sweden, Bahrain, Nigeria, Congo, the Philippines, and the United States. Really, it all comes down to desire and comfort, wherein the politically transformative locus of BARBER’s work lies: “A big struggle we face collectively is not simply that it’s about refining an approach to energy efficiency but it’s about affecting new desires...On the one hand we look to architecture to solve the problem of energy efficiency, but what we don’t look to architecture enough for it to inspire a culture that lives differently.” Don’t take this for utopianism, for BARBER is more than the messenger proclaiming a new world needs to be born: “How do we see this as a legislative policy based to open up on what architects become expert in...If an architect is building a building from the ground up in 2060, they’re either going to be really rich or super stupid.” Nicholas Raap
4/10—Vital Dialogues On Race
MABEL O. WILSON and IRENE CHENG jumped straight to the point in their introduction: as other academic fields such as history, sociology, art history, and psychology have adopted critical race theory, with more and more scholars advancing necessary conversations about race in these spheres, why is race so conspicuously absent from conversations about architecture? This workshop served as, if not a remedy to this, a much-needed step towards bringing race and architecture to the forefront of discourse. Framed as a participatory “teach-in,” the workshop had several prominent academics and architects including QUILIAN RIANO, CHARLES L. DAVIS, JUSTIN GARRETT MOORE, and JEROME W. HAFERD join WILSON and CHENG in giving short presentations about racialized spaces and identities, examples of both in history, and the role of the architect today. In CHENG’s words, racism “serves material purposes . . . it’s not just about attitudes and beliefs”—to pretend otherwise would be callous and dangerous.
Yet the most rewarding moments arguably did not come from the speakers, but from the 75 or so other participants who, in a series of breakout rooms, shared stories of their own experiences with reading race in the built environment, their own perceptions of the field, their own ambitions and hopes of making more equitable architecture. Led by the speakers and a series of volunteers from DARK MATTER UNIVERSITY, the breakout rooms were intimate and personal, with a sense of enthusiastic urgency from everyone. In these groups, radical conversations around reforming architecture bounced around, touching on everything from dismantling white architectural aesthetics to questions of whether the “architect” should even exist, and how exclusive the label is. As WILSON concluded, “To talk about race can be difficult, but it can be edifying and liberating.” As I felt the electric atmosphere of the conversations and saw how passionate the participants were, her words could not have rung more true. Harish Krishnamoorthy
4/10—Mischievous Lines
"It looks like it should be a cake!" remarked THOMAS DE MONCHAUX of the intricate model, sitting squarely in the middle of a wine and water laden table double parked on the street outside the basement architecture gallery citygroup at 104b Forsyth, for the opening of Linee Occulte: Drawing Architecture, by DAISY AMES of STUDIO AMES. Yes, dear reader, you heard it right - a table! A model! Wine! While distancing was observed and admittance to the space itself was limited to scheduled entries of four at a time, this was an in person event, the first citygroup has held since last year, and AMES celebrated by creating an illusion for our eyes. Using the tricks of perspective, AMES dissolved the walls of the narrow gallery to take on the appearance of a much larger space, as though citygroup had knocked down its walls to eat up its subterranean neighbors. Invited exhibitors (Lindsay Harkema, Melissa Shin, Stephanie Lin, Lindsey Wikstrom, Kevin Hirth, Mersiha Veldar, Iman Fayyad & Alfie Koetter) made drawings that either jumped back into thorny realities, such as the carbon extraction involved in an 8 story building (Wikstrom) or breast feeding while on zoom (Harkema), or jumped even deeper into perspectival geometry wormholes (Fayyad & Koetter). In her own drawing—"Mischievous Lines"—AMES made an overlay focusing on a single block in Bed Stuy, including elements ranging from the buildings to air quality, tax incentives, gentrification and air pollution. As the tool of drawing uniquely allows, the piece combines and renders legible both the concrete and the abstract. Nicolas Kemper
(Gallery open by appointment, contact citygroup here.)
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Open Letter on New York City’s Inequitable Development—click here to read.
Have a hot take? Write a letter to the editor with this link. Letters run weekly in Skyline.
IN THE NEWS
… in Awards
MARLON BLACKWELL, JAMES CORNER, KATHRYN GUSTAFSON, WALTER HOOD, NADER TEHRANI and J. MEEJIN YOON were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor of their outstanding contributions to the field of architecture.
The Wheelwright Prize finalists were announced last week. They are GERMANE BARNES, LUIS BERRÍOS-NEGRÓN, IULIA STATICA, and CATTY DAN ZHANG.
Congratulations!
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, April 12
HETEROGENEOUS CONSTRUCTIONS WITH MARLON DE AZAMBUJA, JESÚS VASSALLO 11:30 AM / RISD
WHERE THE INVISIBLE BECOMES VISIBLE WITH H ARQUITECTES 12:00 PM / Harvard GSD
SITE, MATTER, GESTURE WITH ANNE HOLTROP 3:00 PM / UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
LECTURE WITH JUSTIN GARRETT MOORE 6:30 PM / Yale School of Architecture
Tuesday, April 13
THE RESIDENTIAL FORM OF RACE WITH ADRIENNE BROWN 5:30 PM / Yale Architecture Forum
ORDINARY ENERGY WITH KEMI ADEYEMI 7:30 PM / Cooper Union
Wednesday, April 14
IMMEASURABILITY WITH JEN WOOD, EMANUEL ADMASSU 1:00 PM / Rice Design Alliance
PLATFORM REALISM WITH JOSE SANCHEZ 1:30 PM / University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
LECTURE WITH HASSAN ALLY, ELI B. GOTTLIEB 4:00 PM / UC Berkeley Environmental Design
A CONVERSATION ON HOUSING WITH CANDIDATES FOR MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT 5:30 PM / AIA New York, NYSAFAH
RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES: CREATING EQUITY THROUGH POLICY AND POLITICS WITH INDIA WALTON 6:00 PM / University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning
ORNAMENT AND NEUROSCIENCE WITH NIKOS SALINGAROS AND RICHARD TAYLOR 6:30 PM / Yale School of Architecture
Thursday, April 15
SHAPING COMPLETE NEIGHBORHOODS: A SEATTLE CASE STUDY WITH SAM ASSEFA 12:00 PM / Urban Design Forum
A RESEARCH STUDIO CONVERSATION WITH CATIE NEWELL, VIRGINIA SAN FRATELLO, BRANDON CLIFFORD, ZAIN KARSAN 6:00 PM / MIT
NATIVE ASTRONOMY AND SPATIAL RESONANCE: ALIGNING WITH THE COSMOS WITH DR. GREGORY CAJETE 6:30 PM / Yale School of Architecture
CONCRETE HERITAGE: BELEAGUERED, BESIEGED, BELOVED, CONSERVED WITH SUSAN MACDONALD 6:30 PM / Columbia University GSAPP
FROM “UPSCALING” TO UHAULING: PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK/QUEER GENTRIFICATION IN CONVERSATION WITH JEN JACK GIESEKING, BRANDI T. SUMMERS, DESIREE FIELDS 7:00 PM / The Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY
Friday, April 16
PRESTON THOMAS MEMORIAL SYMPOSIUM: ACTS OF REPAIR WITH BLACK RECONSTRUCTION COLLECTIVE, VIVIEN SANSOUR, ILZE WOLFF, SUMMER SUTTON, URSULA BIEMANN 9:30 AM / Cornell AAP
Saturday, April 17
someparts x a83 Opening Reception 4:00 PM / a83
Please contact us if you would like to write up any of the above events for Skyline: editor@nyra.nyc.
Five desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey, Samuel Medina & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the Publisher). They rotate duties each month — the current SKYLINE editor is Carolyn Bailey, and the Managing Editor is Alex Klimoski.
If you want to pitch us an article or ask us a question, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc
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