S K Y L I N E | 15 | Sanchez on Platform Realism, AD-WO at Rice, Cajete on Cosmic Resonance
The Week Ahead for April 19
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Issue #19 hits the mail today! While we have a stacked line-up of essays and reviews, we’re also very excited about the visuals—especially the insert poster, a gorgeous Risograph print of Michael Sorkin’s collage Sheep (Out West) with a caption by Phillip Denny. See below for a photo and a brief excerpt. If you still need to get ahold of #19, you can subscribe here to receive your copy.
We have some fantastic dispatches for you in this week’s SKYLINE. Tiffany Xu covers AD—WO’s Rice Design Alliance Spotlight Award, Natalie Dubois reports back from Dr. Gregory Cajete’s lecture at Yale, and Nicholas Raap outlines the recent BLOW-UP: ARCHITECTURE IN PRINT symposium, along with Jose Sanchez’s presentation of his research at UT Austin.
News and full event listings follow. Here’s some highlights you won’t want to miss:
Monday, 4/19 Following the Dirt: Troubling Architecture, 7:00pm; Wednesday, 4/21 Black Feminisms and Black Geographies, 12:30 pm; Thursday, 4/22 Future Heritage with Azra Akšamija, 6 pm; Lecture with Sarah Lewis, 6:30 pm; Friday, 4/23 American Roundtable: In the Mahoning Valley, 12 pm.
If you would like to write up one of these events—or any others of interest—please get in touch at editor@nyra.nyc. In the meantime, have a lovely week!
—Carolyn Bailey
Phillip Denny, “A Joyful Practice” (on Michael Sorkin)
Solidarity was a lodestar of Sorkin’s architecture—his design and his writing, coequal branches of a critical practice. He was devoted to his communities. Community, first, in the broad sense of one’s city and its many characters, its lively polis.
DISPATCHES
4/10—“Books as well as buildings.”
PRATT SoA hosted the symposium BLOW-UP: ARCHITECTURE IN PRINT, convened by ASHLEY SIMONE and ADAM ELSTEIN, featuring six presentations with topics ranging from the historical and theoretical implications of representing architecture in print, to the real production processes necessary to do so.
DIANA MURPHY, Publisher at the GUGGENHEIM and formerly of METROPOLIS BOOKS, kicked off the symposium by presenting books she had produced while at the imprint. These are all well known titles like Thank you for the View, Mr. Mies, Cape Cod Modern, and both Never Built Los Angeles and New York. “As a publisher you have your eye on various issues” MURPHY said, but, more than just the production, also “how the book fits into a larger…conversation both present and past.”
RETO GEISER showed the complicated process of adapting Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Dwelling), one of only three books by Sigfreid Giedion that has remained available exclusively in German, into an English edition. The process was complicated by the book’s reliance on dense collages, made by Giedion himself, that present a visual argument of equal important to the textual one. To preserve this element, the decision was to produce two books—a facsimile of the original and an accompanying volume with the English translation to be used in tandem. “We should be more specific on a particular type of publication dependent on what we want to convey,” GEISER said after looking at the possibilities and hindrances afforded by scrolls, codices and various digital platforms, but affirmed that “in a moment of plurality of media the printed book still has its well deserved place in the context of publishing.”
JAMES GRAHAM presented “the friction of making discourse material” as he moved through the history of printing technologies and their applications and consequences for architecture. His thesis was a compelling one: “The horizons of what we know about architecture…are to a really important extent defined by the tools to put it all down on paper…You can triangulate between the emergence of new printing techniques, new perspectives on architectural representation and new building practices. The mechanics of print can literally be traced in the built objects themselves.” Of course, he began with Vitruvius, but moved quickly towards the present through moveable type, woodcutting, and intaglio to offset printing, Risograph, and Xerox.
Picking up the discussion of printing technologies, GLEN CUMMINGS, creative director at MTWTF, considered the seemingly benign Thumbnail, a hallmark of any contemporary digital publication software. “Publication designers shift between different tools of scale to access the book differently,” said CUMMINGS, “most of the time we don’t consider this view in discourse.” Presenting three books he’d designed with an architectural focus, CUMMINGS continuously jumped across these scales, and showed how “processes shape what you do.” He was keen to point out how “Thumbnails line [a book] up like a storyboard or a film, which isn’t how you experience [it physically].”
Looking specifically at the role of the image, JESÚS VASSALLO presented his latest book Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture, and the Problem of Realism, which questions “the relationship of photography and architecture…it’s not a book about photographs of famous buildings…but about how the consumption of documentary photography is an ongoing influence in the history of modern architecture.” He charted a trajectory of changing relationships amongst architects and photographers and argued that—looking to the Conceptual artists and New Topographics as keys to this shift—there are “many parallels with what happened in art and photography and what happened with a generation of architects.”
MUSTAFA FARUKI picked up on examining an interaction between disciplines by turning towards literature, specifically using magical realism as a method to challenge the stability of an image in depicting reality, as he presented a Governors Island-based intake facility for the “U.S. Bureau of De-Celestialization.” “The touchstones of storytelling…appear in methods of architectural drawing,” FARUKI argued, and the importance here is not on the distinguishing of reality from fiction, but a productive conflation and useful mixing of both.
The sessions were rounded out with some final discussion surrounding scenes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, the inspiration for the title, and speculation as to how the presentations and discussions themselves might find their way into print. Nicholas Raap
4/14—Drawing Immeasurability
“What does it mean to draw immeasurability?” asked EMANUEL ADMASSU and JEN WOOD, founders of AD—WO, in their RICE DESIGN ALLIANCE Spotlight Award lecture on April 14. The duo presented a series of works that ranged from research on market halls in Dar es Salaam, block compounds and multifamily housing in Addis Ababa, and an exhibition at MoMA in New York. Bustling streetscapes with crowds and cars in wobbly lines of traffic, and retail space facades with multinational logos and detailed lattice windows filled their drawings, which privileged scenes and movement rather than static notation. Rendered in bright solid colors, their representations rejected linework and eschewed linear perspective, sometimes forgoing the tableau format completely and finding expression in black sand, tapestries, and trap music. Post-colonial studies were core to AD—WO’s presentation—quotes by Achille Mbembe, Harry Garuba, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi were points of departure. The event closed with a question on advice for students and how to navigate and design spaces to become. “That’s a big one,” ADMASSU said, and recounted the significance in being able “to see myself around me, or see examples of people that had similar experiences.” Tiffany Xu
4/14—Platform Realism
At UT AUSTIN this Wednesday, JOSE SANCHEZ sketched out ideas for his research into PLATFORM REALISM. Opening with works of Diego Rivera and other politically focused artists, SANCHEZ presented four projects and his latest book, Architecture for the Commons. Fundamental to all is a focus on building community through collaboration, whether in physical or digital space. In two installations, Bloom and Folly.Age, SANCHEZ developed what he called “Social Combinatories…open ended tectonic system[s]…that can be altered over time.” Both center on repeatable units, aggregated to produce the installations collectively through playful experimentation. This notion of play is important, and is woven into his larger research project on software platforms—in particular video games—and their use in architecture. His first game, BLOCK’HOOD, is a city building simulator focused on the interdependence of the city’s systems. “You build your own problems” SANCHEZ said, and unlike comparable simulators, “the game doesn’t present a notion of an optimal solution…either a winning or losing state.” SANCHEZ takes this further in his upcoming game, COMMON’HOOD, which focuses on “design mediated by scarcity.” A building simulator, the game radically presents “the communal aspects and production of community as being equal to self-actualization that drives the behaviors of these characters.” Rather than building without concerns for labor or material, the player and their choices are entangled within these systems. This is what SANCHEZ means by Platform Realism, which moves “from autopoiesis to sympoiesis,” meaning “making with…nothing makes itself.” Nicholas Raap
4/15—Cosmic Resonance
“There’s a tendency to fragment knowledge in western thinking: this is science, this is art, this is literature, this is architecture,” said DR. GREGORY CAJETE on Thursday in his lecture at YALE, Native Astronomy and Spatial Resonance: Aligning with the Cosmos. In a step to correct that, the Indigenous Scholars of Architecture, Planning and Design (ISAPD) and the Masters of Environmental Design Working Group for Anti-Racism had invited CAJETE, an educator and ethnobotanist, to speak about the celestial-oriented architectures of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In Native Science, whether architecture, astronomy, or fishing, knowledge is an ecology - integrated across time and space through intimately connected relationships. When asked whether architecture can give back to the cosmos, CAJETE spoke of the Kogi of Colombia, who built structures that not only mimicked each of the biomes they inhabited—from coastline to mountaintop—but actually enhanced their natural, ecological processes. “From my perspective, that was so elegant,” he said. “Architecture needs to take note!” Natalie Dubois
CORRECTION:
In last week's dispatch, 'Vital Dialogues on Race', we neglected to name QUILIAN RIANO as one of the main organizers of the Race and Architecture Teach-In. The complete list of organizers is:
Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Justin Garrett Moore, Jerome W Haferd, Mabel O. Wilson, and Quilian Riano.
CORRECTION:
Another dispatch from last week, 'Mischievous Lines', omitted MELISSA SHIN from the list of exhibitors at citygroup's exhibit curated by Daisy Ames, Linee Occulte: Drawing Architecture. The complete list of exhibitors is:
Daisy Ames, Iman Fayyad, Lindsay Harkema, Kevin Hirth, Alfie Koetter, Stephanie Lin, Melissa Shin, Lindsey Wikstrom, and Mersiha Veledar.
IN THE NEWS
… in Trad Dystopia
ABOUT THAT WHITE-TRADITIONS CAUCUS — Framing their new organization around Trump, MTG and Gosar plan to call their group the “America First Caucus.” Documents first reported on by Punchbowl News show that the caucus would prioritize a return to an architectural style that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”
… in Organizing
OPEN LETTER ON NYC’S INEQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT—During the one and a half weeks that the letter has been public, it has garnered 140 signatures from 62 Architects/Designers, 29 Artists, 23 Transdisciplinary Workers, 11 Writers, 6 Environmentalists, 3 Urban Planners, 3 Landscape designers, 2 Construction Workers, and 1 Structural Engineer. Here are the links to read <tinyurl.com/archletter> or sign <tinyurl.com/signarchletter>.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, April 19
Good, Well, and Better with Piergianna Mazzocca 1:30 PM / University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Following the Dirt: Troubling Architecture with Hélène Frichot 7:00 PM / Rice Architecture
Tuesday, April 20
Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium: Acts of Repair, Pt. II with Chris Cornelius, Ekene Ijeoma, Mpho Matsipa, Christopher Roberts, Candice Hopkins, Mabel O. Wilson 9:30 AM / Cornell AAP
CURRENT WORK: ROTOR - REVERSE ARCHITECTURE with Lionel Devlieger 1:00 PM / Cooper Union, The Architectural League of New York
(Some) Characters in Search of an Author with Cecilia Puga, Paula Velasco 7:30 PM / Harvard GSD
Wednesday, April 21
Black Feminisms and Black Geographies: The Possibilities for Disaster and Climate Change Research with Fayola Jacobs 12:30 PM / The Carolina Climate Equity Commons at UNC-Chapel Hill
Worlds Less Traveled with Liam Young 5:15 PM / Cornell AAP
Power! Who Decides Houston's Resiliency? with Civic Forum 2021 7:00 PM / Rice Design Alliance
Thursday, April 22
Resilience Untangled: Challenges and Opportunities in Latin America 12:00 PM / Harvard University GSD, MIT DUSP, Columbia GSAPP, UPenn Weitzman School
US ARCHITECTS DECLARE EARTH DAY ASSEMBLY 2021: PATHS TO TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE with Michael Pawlyn, Sarah Ichioka 3:00 PM / Architects Declare
Future Heritage with Azra Akšamija 6:00 PM / MIT
Lecture with Sarah Lewis 6:30 PM / Yale School of Architecture
Friday, April 23
DESEGREGATE HOUSING: A STRATEGIC WORKSHOP with Pratt Desegregation Think Tank 9:00 AM / Pratt Institute School of Architecture
American Roundtable: In the Mahoning Valley, Ohio with Quilian Riano, Kristen Zeiber, Helen Liggett, Gary Honeywood, Matt Martin 12:00 PM / The Architectural League
Lecture with Christine Binswanger 12:00 PM / MIT
Historic Preservation: Reckoning with Racism: Side B of Historic Preservation 6:00 PM / Pratt Institute School of Architecture
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 Issue Editor is Alex Klimoski.
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