S K Y L I N E | 16 | In the Dirt
Frichot excavates dirt's rich potential, Murphy reviews After Form, and Heatherwick gets dragged.
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In this week’s newsletter, Harish Krishnamoorthy covers Hélène Frichot’s lecture at Rice, Palmyra Stefania Geraki reviews Lionel Devlieger’s Architectural League talk, Natalie Dubois recaps US Architects Declare’s Earth Day Assembly, Michelle Deng and Ben Dooley report back from a83’s opening, and Jack Murphy asks: Do You Believe in Architecture After Form?
Keep scrolling for news and full event listings. While the number one event on our radar this week is New York Reviews Architecture with Kate Wagner & Marianela D'Aprile on Thursday 4/29 at 7pm, here are some other recommendations:
Monday 4/26, Making Ornament with Gary Huafan He & Matt McNicholas at 6:30pm; Wednesday 4/28, Ephemeral by Design with Swati Chattopadhyay at 5:15pm; Thursday 4/29, Bookish Art History with Zeynep Çelik Alexander & Carolyn Yerkes at 12pm, and Bridging Boundaries in Native and non-Native Communities with Joseph Kunkel at 6pm; Friday 4/30, Black Reconstructions: In the Kitchen with Germane Barnes, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson & Michael W. Twitty at 6:30pm.
As always, get in touch if you would like to write-up an event: editor@nyra.nyc.
—Carolyn Bailey
Do You Believe in Architecture After Form?
“If education is a liberation project, it can’t be cash contingent,” Dr. HARRIET HARRISS (Pratt) said early in her keynote presentation at AFTER FORM, the 36th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, hosted by the Texas A&M University Department of Architecture. Other truth bombs—desperately needed these days—followed. “Epistemologies, pedagogies, disciplines, and canons are imperial and colonial constructs”; then, an argument that “architecture education is never really radical because it doesn’t have core values,” connecting our wandering disciplinary interests with the origin of radical: radic, or root. HARRISS goes through examples from Architects After Architecture and, after repeating the dismal statistics of how humans are ruining the planet, she notes that there are ways to undo the things we’ve done. “To deconstruct is an architectural project,” she says. If there’s any hope, we must imagine “architectures that are beyond speciesism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, disablism, and regionalism.”
HARRISS’s talk—and the hour of discussion that followed, moderated by JAMES MICHAEL TATE (Texas A&M), one of the organizers—capped three intense days of presentations, each an attempt to dig under the foundations of Form and see what’s there. The conference took place at the beginning of April. Like many events, it was delayed a year from its original date in 2020. The gathering of educators was directed towards issues of how to best begin the education of a designer—and, in this edition, if form remains a suitable starting point.
Additional keynotes were provided by BOUWMAN ZAGO (SCI-Arc) and FRENCH 2D (Harvard GSD), but the real action was in the wide range of presentations by leading (mostly youngish) educators. Various ways of interpreting the topic organized the heavy schedule of panels—there’s the genealogy of form (where does it come from?); George Bataille’s l’informe (the formless and its addictive negation); forms of conduct (ethics!); and formats, which appropriately includes reflections on the hard task of teaching architecture online.
Given the intensity of the schedule, it was inevitable to be overwhelmed with the relentless pacing of these fifteen-minute talks and concluding discussions. CRUZ GARCÍA and NATHALIE FRANKOWSKI (Virginia Tech) took the gendered segregationalist formalism of the Bauhaus to the cleaners, offering instead UNOVIS as a model for their anti-racist model of architecture education. MARCELO LÓPEZ-DINARDI (Texas A&M) used Gordon Matta-Clark’s hair to talk about grids. JESSICA COLANGELO (University of Arkansas) showcased storytelling exercises by her students. FRANCES HSU (University of North Carolina Charlotte) presented the start of urban design. JONATHAN SCELSA (Pratt) appeared thrice, talking through the potential of the GIF, Rorschach-based explorations, and still lifes in high and low resolution (with JOHN PAUL RYSAVY). ADAM MILLER (UT Austin) researched the format of taste, while JOHN STOUGHTON (University of Cincinnati DAAP) with JOSEPH ALTSHULER (SAIC), in a meme-heavy presentation, looked to recipes as a template for making architecture. And on and on and on.
To attempt to see all of these efforts together—research, projects, exercises, experiments, diatribes, and explorations—is to be encouraged by the deep ranks of architectural instructors with good ideas and bountiful enthusiasm, even as the precarity of this work increases. If only the institution of architectural education itself could be as nimble as these educators. In so many ways, the presenters demonstrated that the HOW of architecture thankfully outranks the WHAT of architecture. In some sense, the WHAT—form itself—remains eternally unchanged, while everything surrounding it must be remade. Inside the relevant regions of the discipline, the days of “form for form’s sake” are long gone, replaced by the very real crises of contemporary living and the reconstruction of our systems of knowledge, right down to their grounded roots (that is the meaning of radical, after all). To dwell on the surface of capital-F Form is no good—appearances hide things. AFTER FORM offers no answer as to what comes next; instead, a constellation of architects figuring it out.
The pandemic first delayed and then shaped AFTER FORM, down to the coordinated virtual backgrounds and awkward Zoom moments. The benefit is that the talks now exist in the cloud, able to be shared, a pixelated but convenient substitute for the reality of an in-person conference. AFTER FORM’s traditional proceedings, in the form of text and images organized on pages, are forthcoming. Jack Murphy
DISPATCHES
4/17—Assembling someparts
“Go ahead, sit!” a83 co-founder PHILLIP DENNY assured us at the opening of the new exhibition someparts x a83 last Saturday night, immersed in warm neon lights as sensuous sounds reverberated from a so-called Hi-Fi cabinet titled “I like this song.” So we sat on “Cheeky,” a wide chair made of one-inch perforated aluminum tubes fixed together by zinc-plated nuts and bolts with two pieces of black foam for the seat cushions strapped down by nylon clips – and looked at a print by artist JAMES DEWOODY.
Established last August by Denny, CLARA SYME, and OWEN NICHOLS, a83 is committed to printmaking, archiving, and exhibiting architecture, art, and design. Their most recent collaboration with LAIDA AGUIRRE, founder of stock-a-studio, is no exception, pairing someparts with full-body music by experimental music artist ASH FURE and archival prints from architects DILLER + SCOFIDIO and THOM MAYNE, and artists including CHARLES ROSS and ALLAN D’ARCANGELO. Described by the organizers as partially unscripted, the show features an array of pieces from a reusable kit of parts, a system of materials that are continuously rebuilt and recirculated in new contexts, indefinitely.
The inclusion of these prints with the absence of any produced by Aguirre themselves was striking, raising questions of design labor: Did Aguirre produce drawings for these objects, or did they simply provide the materials and a general instruction set for their assembly? What kind of drawings would Aguirre produce for the kit in the first place? Unlike designers who have created readymade DIY furniture such as ENZO MARI, Aguirre emphasizes the ability to disassemble and reconfigure. With such generic parts, the devil is in their joinery. A system of connection details, although seemingly ad hoc, begins to develop a tectonic language of impermanence and an aesthetic of material logic set within global supply chain networks: pragmatic, flexible, easily transportable, and systematic. Still, the exhibition coalesces into a more relaxed experience, a refreshing departure from the typically aloof, “do not touch” approach of exhibiting, especially as galleries in New York City begin to reopen in person. Open until May 12. Michelle Deng and Ben Dooley
4/19—Hands in the Dirt
Working with dirt, explained HÉLÈNE FRICHOT at Rice, is not an easily defined notion, but is more than necessary given the ongoing crises we face (summarized as “the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, etc.”) With no hesitation, she began unpacking the various dimensions of her dirty theory; to work with dirt is to draw attention to our material impact on the environment, and to understand the implications of how we design; to work with dirt is to work against the flow, to “cross boundaries, challenge decorum, contravene norms”; to work with dirt is to touch on the entanglements of humans and non-humans and rethink collective bodies; to work with dirt is to tap into a rich lineage of thinkers both historic and contemporary—particularly the writings of DONNA HARAWAY, and those involved in ecological and critical feminist theories; to work with dirt implies a slower mode of thinking, clogging up our design process as we reckon with interdisciplinary considerations; to work with dirt sometimes means doing nothing, an act that actually requires “a well-trained, highly attuned approach to architecture”; to work with dirt is to bring in new pedagogical experiments and rethink the design project.
Frichot paused towards the end, her list of dirt-working implications swelling in our heads. Working with dirt is complex and messy, but also rich with potential for architects, she asserted, for “there is knowledge to be found amidst the waste and the ruin.” If nothing else, to work with dirt is simply to “take the time to care more,” adding that this is something desperately needed in our current “crisis of care.” Harish Krishnamoorthy
4/20—Reverse Terrain
At an event aptly titled “Rotor: Reverse Architecture” and co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and The Architectural League of New York, co-founder of Brussels-based Rotor LIONEL DEVLIEGER spoke of producing an architecture that is “in some way in reverse in comparison to what is usually practiced.” He opened his lecture by recounting his circuitous personal journey from a PhD on Benedetto Varchi and Late-Renaissance Florence to apprenticing in a terrazzo workshop in Venice before co-founding Rotor with two other collaborators in 2006, a research and design practice and consultancy that “investigates the organization of the material environment.” The group was originally interested in repurposing waste materials from industrial production but quickly shifted their attention to the more familiar terrain of construction waste, a byproduct of the phenomenon of architectural obsolescence and the rapid turnover of building interiors. In 2016, Rotor launched Rotor Deconstruction, a cooperative that dismantles, processes, restores, and trades salvaged building components. While Rotor has taken on a handful of interior design projects to date, Devlieger was quick to point out that Rotor is not registered as an architectural office in Belgium and has always sought to collaborate, rather than compete, with other architects. Despite Rotor’s success both as a business and as an advocate for the circular economy with evidence of administrative support at the regional, national, and European level, Devlieger believes that the reality on the ground is still disheartening as only 1% of building elements are being recirculated beyond their first use. Palmyra Stefania Geraki
4/22—US Architects Declare
To mark Earth Day 2021, the US Architects Declare network hosted an Assembly with updates from its working groups and a talk by MICHAEL PAWLYN, an initiator of the original UK-based Architects Declare movement. The event ranged from pragmatic to lofty: the working groups gave somewhat dry summaries of the past year’s efforts (focused on the creation of resources, tools, metrics, and guides) while Pawlyn’s talk offered ideas to shift the paradigm towards regenerative design and “the flourishing of all life for all time.”
Things got interesting when Pawlyn spoke more candidly at the end of his presentation. At the outset, Architects Declare decided not to charge a joining fee in order to maximize the number of signatories, creating collective power in petitioning for change. It’s an easy PR move for firms to sign on; 379 firms have joined the network in the US and over 6,500 firms have joined globally. But as the kerfuffle with Zaha Hadid Architects and Foster + Partners illustrates – both founding signatories of the network who withdrew a year later following criticism of their work on aviation projects – not all who pledged are on the same page about how to address climate change within the profession. And despite many signatories, Architects Declare has thus far been unable to obtain a desired meeting with the British government, Pawlyn reported. He said they’d been advised to knock gently on the government’s door but had gotten nowhere. Pawlyn observed that Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg had achieved more by calling the government criminals, in essence smashing the door down. The message: take whatever steps you can, think big, and know that more drastic action may be necessary. Natalie Dubois
IN THE NEWS
… in Art
Day’s End, the new public art project by David Hammons—a sculptural reprise of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 work of the same title—is currently being installed on the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park and will be completed sometime in mid-May. You can read more about the project’s background here.
… in Discourse
The Guardian published two pieces on architecture over the weekend—a profile on Thomas Heatherwick, which includes the quote “there’s a diagram with a heart, the place that brings people together,” and a throw down between brutalism and model villages—that elicited some strong responses on Twitter.
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THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, April 26
Five on Five No. 17 with Thomas Padmanabhan, Sean Canty
12:30pm, Harvard GSDMaking Ornament with Gary Huafan He, Matt McNicholas
6:30pm, Yale University
Tuesday, April 27
Thom Mayne
9:00pm, Cornell AAPThe Future of Cultural Centers: Gabriel Kogan on SESC Pompéia with David van der Leer
6:00pm, AIA New York
Wednesday, April 28
Reflections On The Predicament Of Architecture: 7 Points In Retrospect with Kenneth Frampton
4:00pm, UC Berkeley College of Environmental DesignEphemeral by Design with Swati Chattopadhyay
5:15pm, Cornell AAP
Thursday, April 29
Bookish Art History, with Zeynep Çelik Alexander and Carolyn Yerkes
12:00pm, Art Books, Book Art, ArtAn Extended Family: Jamie Jacobs invents the “family room”
4:00pm, Canadian Centre for ArchitectureCurrent Work: [Re]Constructing Public Trust - Reframing Past, Present, and Future with Emmanuel Pratt
6:00pm, The Architectural League of New York & Cooper UnionNew York Reviews Architecture with Kate Wagner, Marianela D'Aprile
7:00pm, New York Review of Architecture
Friday, April 30
GSAPP AUD: The Climate Crisis Studio Exhibition
9:30am, Columbia GSAPP Urban DesignAn Equitable Recovery Agenda for New York: Decolonizing the Planning and Development Sector with Ron Shiffman, Edward Bautista
5:30pm, Pratt Institute School of ArchitectureBlack Reconstructions: In the Kitchen with Germane Barnes, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, Michael W. Twitty
6:30pm, Museum of Modern Art
Email 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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