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Greetings from the other side of Memorial Day, and happy summer! Just a short introductory note for this short week. First, we launched issue #20 over the weekend. We’re very proud of the issue, which was edited by Alex Klimoski and designed by Freer Studio; it also features art by Drew Litowitz and Andi Schmied. Subscribe and we will mail you a copy.
We’d also like to highlight several great event write-ups by Lane Rick, Nicholas Raap, and Abubakr Ali that help us close the door on the spring semester. Read them below, where you’ll also find news items and events. A sampling of the latter below:
Tuesday, 6/1 Virtual launch – What Black Is This, You Say? with Amanda Williams and Cauleen Smith at 6:00pm; Wednesday, 6/2 What, If Not the Family? with Miranda July, Frida Escobedo, Rafi Segal, and more at 7:00pm; Thursday, 6/3 Launch – Architectural Drawing: Not for Construction with a83 at 7:00pm; Friday, 6/4 The Venice Biennale with Louise Braverman and Martha Thorne at 1:00pm
DISPATCHES
5/27 – Find Your Footing
In a virtual discussion hosted by firm management start-up Monograph, SNOW KREILICH ARCHITECTS’ Senior Associate TREVOR BULLEN and Director of Finance and Operations SARAH HUGHES offered strategies for navigating the challenges of mid-size architecture firms like theirs. Laying out their division of labor within their Minneapolis office, Bullen stressed the need for a work culture where people, and their time, are valued, while Hughes linked the day-to-day operations to the overall financial picture. Before Hughes joined the Snow Kreilich team full-time, Bullen recalled, the firm lacked the operational guidelines that would ensure tracking of operations (i.e., staffing, budgeting, invoicing) kept pace with project commissions and completions (and the lulls that occur in between). For her part, Hughes argued that having a dedicated staff member collecting and monitoring “the data that no one [else] is looking at” could set a firm on a better financial footing, even as she acknowledged that small- and mid-size offices may have trouble justifying the expense, particularly in periods of downtime. The conversation also foregrounded the numerous career paths that exist within the discipline, whose profile is overly caught up with the work of design. When asked what it was like to transition out of architecture, Hughes, who worked as an architectural designer before starting her own consultancy, politely objected. “I never left. I just found a niche.” Lane Rick
5/24 – The Architecture of Fieldwork
Speaking to architecture students at UCLA, ERIC HÖWELER likened his and partner MEEJIN YOON’s approach to that of Charles and Ray Eames, two designers who saw “problem solving in a very expansive way,” he said. Likewise, interplays of materials and ecosystems, global and local, institutions and change recur in Höweler + Yoon’s projects, which also betray a commitment to architecture’s empathetic dimension and the precise technical coordination required to build spaces and places that meet design intentions. Mock-ups featured prominently in Höweler’s project imagery—on rooftops, in fields, in empty rooms—a tacit suggestion that the real work of architecture does not occur late at night at a desk, but rather in the field, during hands-on visits to fabrication shops or to construction sites.
It is fitting, then, that Höweler concluded his lecture with a presentation on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, which gradually emerged after six years of research to identify the 4,000 people men and women whose labor helped realize Thomas Jefferson’s canonical design for the school. The project team dedicated another six months to interviewing descendants of these men and women, as well as current university students, and to understanding what they wanted from the memorial, before landing on a proposal guided by the phrase “let freedom ring.” Here, again, design was out in the field, where it is most able to effect change, Höweler suggested. “Site becomes a collected assertion of values, to history and to a commitment to making change in the present.” LR
5/22 – Rewrites Requested
Yesterday, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America ended its run at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The previous week, co-curator MABEL O. WILSON and BLACK LUNCH TABLE (BLT) presided over a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon that sought to extend the project of Reconstructions beyond the confines of MoMA. After a few initial words from Wilson, who laid out her aims for the exhibition and highlighted the efforts of the BLACK RECONSTRUCTION COLLECTIVE, the workshop was turned over to BLT organizers ELIZA MYRIE, HEATHER HART, and KEARRA AMAYA GOPEE. In her own framing remarks, Myrie underscored Wikipedia’s role as an online repository of information on art history but also pointed to the gaping holes in content pertaining to artists from the African diaspora—a fact she attributes to the overwhelmingly white, male demographic of Wikipedia editors. The tech-savvy BLT team encouraged attendees to edit and update entries on Black artists and helped them to navigate the platform’s spartan interface and convoluted editing standards. (Organizers also offered helpful tips for digging up sources when they proved harder to come by.) The aim, as Myrie put it, was to “mobilize a democratic rewriting of history,” a sentiment on par with Wilson’s earlier words about the Black Reconstruction Collective. “Instead of [offering up] a manifesto, they are manifesting, becoming,” Wilson had said. The work continues. Abubakr Ali
5/20 – A House Can Be a Home
“There is very little that is architecturally distinct about boarding houses,” said WENDY GAMBER, Professor of History at Indiana University, in a talk convened by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Gamber, who is not an architectural historian, noted that while the boarding house was “absolutely essential to urban expansion,” it never constituted a distinct architectural form. Setting aside the spatial question, however, allows for a more interesting, complex sociological picture to emerge. In the 19th century, upwards of half of all Americans either took in boarders or were boarders themselves, and they lived mostly in the spare rooms of typical houses. Boarders not only rented out a room—or part of a room or, in some cases, part of a bed— but also the domestic labor provided by the owner of the boarding house. It was this arrangement, as well as the facile sociality of boarding houses, that was held up for suspicion by the boosters of suburbs. Whereas the former was portrayed as slovenly and diverse, the latter was rendered pure and free of the influences of urban life. More to the point: if in the nuclear household, maternal toil was performed out of love for or duty to the family, in the boarding house, domestic toil was performed for money. In other words, the family unit was itself at stake when “the corruption of the marketplace invaded the home,” Gamber summarized.
She punctuated her lecture, one of several in the CCA’s ongoing An Extended Family series, with vignettes illustrating the diversity of boarders and their different attitudes toward boarding. Contrary to the opinions of commentators at the time, boarding houses challenged normative notions of family while remaining “functioning communities [that] sustained moral standards,” Gamber said. “Nineteenth-century living arrangements were no less varied than our own. What is stubbornly persistent is this notion of the ideal family that we cling to, even though we know it doesn’t exist.” Nicholas Raap
5/18 – Faulty Towers
“How did an English literature PhD come to write about architecture and race?” Writer ADRIENNE BROWN posed the question at a recent virtual launch for her book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, hosted by the Skyscraper Museum. Brown, whose academic focus is on twentieth-century literature, explained that she had arrived at the skyscraper while examining the ways writers of all strokes attempted to narrate urban life amid rapid social, cultural, and economic transformations. For Brown, the early skyscraper played “a catalytic role” in shaping perceptions of urban environments that were increasingly cosmopolitan and heterogenous, indeed, “interracial.” This was reflected not only in the peacocking, syncretic forms of turn-of-the-century skyscrapers, but also in the critical discourse that surrounded them. For instance, Louis Sullivan, the leader of the Chicago School, characterized such eclecticism as “miscegenation,” a newfangled term in Sullivan’s day coined by proponents of racial purity. In calling forth the anecdote, Brown sought to better establish the skyscraper’s historical context—i.e., the period of Reconstruction, of Jim Crow and the Great Migration, when legal and colloquial categories of race were taking shape. The primacy of visual perception continues unchallenged today, Brown suggested, and knowing that should cause us to “pay more attention to the ways architecture more generally shapes and affects how we see and read and race.” As she concluded, “the built environment is always shaping the material conditions through which racial perception happens.” NR
IN THE NEWS
in Defenestrations...
PRESIDENT BIDEN named four new appointments to the Commission on Fine Arts: PETER COOK, Principal at HGA Architects; HAZEL RUTH EDWARDS, Chair of Howard University's architecture department; JUSTIN GARRETT MOORE, Program Officer of the Humanities in Place initiative at the Andrew Mellon Foundation and former Chair of New York’s Public Design Commission; and BILLIE TSIEN, Partner at Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
They replace four TRUMP appointees. On May 24, Biden asked four of the seven members on the Commission on Fine Arts (CFA), including its chair, JUSTIN SHUBOW, for their immediate resignation. It was the first time in the CFA’s 111-year history that a president had effectively fired a commissioner, much less four. Under Trump, the commission came to comprise all white men and had turned the body into an improbable partisan lightning rod with their involvement in the Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again executive order. Moreover, all of its members were open advocates of traditional architecture, or “trads,” as meme parlance goes. While the National Civics Arts Society (of which Shubow is the president) was believed to have drafted the order, the dominant trad organization, the Institute of Classical Art & Architecture, almost immediately condemned it. As one classicist educator, CHRISTINE G.H. FRANCK, told Architectural Digest last year, “I don’t want students suddenly running to the hills because they think classicism is about white supremacy.”
While the four new appointees do not come with a set agenda, two of them—Tsien and Moore—have been longtime NYRA subscribers.
in Advocacy...
There are two major letters making the rounds among architects and the architectural community expressing solidarity with the Palestine and Palestinians towards liberation: Architecture and Urban Planning Organizations Stand in Solidarity for Palestine and Against Apartheid. The first letter counts as an early advocate the Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art ADRIAN LAHOUD. The second was anonymously written by a group of Palestinian artists.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Have a hot take? Write a letter to the editor! Link here. Letters run weekly.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Tuesday, 6/1
Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City with Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
6:00pm, The Skyscraper MuseumVirtual launch – What Black Is This, You Say? with Amanda Williams and Cauleen Smith
6:00pm, Storefront for Art and Architecture
Wednesday, 6/2
Design for a Post-Pandemic World: Innovation for Healthcare and Well-Being with Mirelle Phillips, Christian Benimana, and Kara Hanson
11:00am, London Design Biennale
What, If Not the Family? with Miranda July, Frida Escobedo, Grace Morlock, David Neustein, Elena Schuetz, Julian Schubert, Leonard Streich, Edit Collective, Marisa Morán Jahn, Rafi Segal, and Nahira Gerster-Sim
7:00pm, Canadian Centre for Architecture
Thursday, 6/3
FF – Distance Edition: Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura with Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura
6:00pm, The Architectural League
Launch – Architectural Drawing: Not for Construction
7:00pm, a83
Friday, 6/4
Cocktails & Conversation: The Venice Biennale with Louise Braverman and Martha Thorne
1:00pm, AIA New York
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.
If you want to pitch us an article or ask us a question, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc
For their support we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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