S K Y L I N E | 24 | Intellectual Machetes, an ASMR Fan, Virtual Water
…and more! The Week Ahead for June 21.
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Good morning! My name’s Nicholas Raap, and I’m writing to you as guest editor for this week’s Skyline.
If last week marked the end of spring for Tiffany in California, this week summer is certainly upon us here in New York (as yesterday, the summer solstice coincided with Father’s Day). This summer seems poised to mean many things to many people. Takes abound on social media, hyping this as the beginning of our Roaring ‘20s. Calls to go back to normal or to go forward and make a better future echo simultaneously inside our devices (though I hope they resonate at different intensities). As Nicolas wrote two weeks ago, Skyline is facing a bit of a shift as events start going back to occurring in person. While all the dispatches this week come from virtual events, the focus of the discussions was squarely on how entangled our discipline, and ourselves as humans, are with the world around us.
Kicking off the dispatches this week, Charles Weak attended the first presentations of the 2021 League Prize by Liz Gálvez and Germane Barnes, and brought back questions of how houses and homes are made and maintained; Abubakr Ali virtually travelled to the Italian Virtual Pavilion for a conversation on expanding architectural thinking into the ecosphere with Log 51 contributors Alesksandra Jaeschke, Bruce Mau, and Sanford Kwinter; and Anna Gibertini listened to Toyo Ito forge aqueous connections through his architecture.
A few personal highlights of this coming week’s events:
6/21: Mimi Zieger: New Middles @ 5:00pm; 6/22: League Prize 2021: Night 2 with Tei Carpenter, Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman, Ricardo Roxo Matias and Cyrus Peñarroyo @ 6:00pm; 6/23: Danielle Wood: Sustainability in Space and on Earth @11:30am; 6/24: Sou Fujimoto: Between Nature and Architecture @ 7:00pm; 6/26: Human Considerations: Speculations on Lunar Habitation @ 11:00am and Where are the Black Designers? 2021 Conference @ 12:00pm.
If you would like to write up one of these events—or any others of interest—please get in touch at editor@nyra.nyc.
- Nicholas Raap
DISPATCHES
6/15 - Housekeeping
At the Architectural League this Tuesday, LIZ GÁLVEZ of Office e.g. and GERMANE BARNES of Studio Barnes each presented on distinct notions of “Housekeeping”, as two of six winners of the 2021 League Prize. Gálvez focused on the act of “Making House”, both the gendered labors implied by the term, but also the technical systems that enable inhabitation. Her presentation video showed “recipes of air and water,” plumbing fixtures, mechanical penetrations, and ventilations systems, backed by the ASMR ambiance of a low fan hum. Though mechanical, all these systems are environmentally entangled, or to Gálvez, “immaterial matters”, which question the typical notion of buildings as autonomous, tightly sealed containers.
Barnes also thinks of architecture as more than a container. He used the figure of the griot—someone who conveys traditions of their community through song and storytelling—to look at housekeeping as a kind of ritual, rather than a chore. Reflecting on spaces of Black domesticity, like porches and stoops, Barnes sees these as narrative spaces, in the sense that stories are told within the space but also by the spatial arrangement itself. These rituals of storytelling are reflected in his film/visual poem You Can Always Come Home (which debuted during the event), and in his work at large, examining the possibilities that emerge from Black spatial practices, long unconsidered by the discipline.
— Charles Weak
6/16 - “Pick up [your] intellectual machetes”
“The ground line is an abstraction that should not be confused with the reality of soil” said ALEKSANDRA JAESCHKE, speaking Thursday morning at Log’rithims: Excursions in the Ecosphere, an event convened and moderated by CYNTHIA DAVIDSON, editor of the architecture journal Log, in her role as one of the Italian Virtual Pavilion’s ten creative directors. Jaeschke’s declaration was only the first of the morning, as she was joined by BRUCE MAU and SANFORD KWINTER to elaborate on ideas developed in a special section of Log’s latest issue. The event is the first of six “exponential conversations” focused on “how we will live together, not simply human with human, but…with all of the teeming populations of the earth.”
Looking to recent studies on the interconnectedness of plants, Jaeschke lamented the harm caused by architects’ struggle to acknowledge “the disturbed or extended self that we call nature.” The ground line drawn in section acts to blind architects to networks of mycelium found beneath the soil which facilitate communication—or thought—between plants. Other studies point to how our minds are “integrated with the environment and with other individual brains in many unexpected ways,” arguing that “instead of a post-human turn, perhaps we need creative humans capable of complete attention towards the extended self”, or, nature.
One of Jaeschke’s “creative humans” may well be Bruce Mau, who began on an optimistic note: “in times like these, we can’t afford the luxury of cynicism…we have to believe in the possibility of change.” Change was the silver lining of the pandemic for him, and, echoing Jaeschke, argued for a life-centered design approach (focused equally on all forms of life), a movement Mau for which sees architects to be the “ideal leaders.”
Sanford Kwinter extolled Jaeschke and Mau as examples of designers moving the discourse in the “right direction.” He decried the “false barrier” between humans and the environment, and finished calling for a fundamental change in the canons and systems used by designers: “Drop [your] computer mouses and pick up intellectual machetes and bushwhack [your] way into the difficult-to-penetrate forest of the ecosphere.”
— Abubakr Ali
6/16 - Connecting with Physical and Virtual Waters
“There are two types of water that connect people to the world,” explained Pritzker Prize-winning architect TOYO ITO (aided by translator-journalist Noriko TAKIGUCHI) to a global Zoom crowd attending the Architectural League’s final installment of its Current Work lecture series. Ito was joined by fellow Japanese architect and Harvard GSD professor TOSHIKO MORI, who introduced her colleague and moderated the Q&A session after the lecture.
“There is physical water, like that which has made up our bodies and the natural world forever,” continued Ito. “Today, we have a second, virtual water—we seek out rivers of data, information and experience, and flow with them wherever they may lead us.” Ito’s work could be described as a mediation between these two waters—conceptual yet comfortable; urban, yet organic in form. However, in the wake of the development that is literally skyrocketing around Tokyo in the lead up to the now-delayed 2020 Olympics, Ito questioned whether this second aqueous predisposition is good for humanity. In building taller and more comprehensive structures that, on a surface level, are meant to provide convenient avenues to virtual water, Japanese city dwellers have become "less expressive, detached, and live homogenized lives."
In the years following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Ito, in his development of the Homes-for-All initiative, was reminded of the "indivisible connection the Japanese people have with wood." He has been integrating this material (particularly CLT) in several of his recent projects (he discussed the New National Stadium Japan Proposal, Mito Civic Center, Academic Building South in Nanyang Technological University, Minna no Mori Gifu Media Cosmos, and the National Taichung Theater), in an attempt to strike a graceful balance of physical and virtual waters in urban environments. "The nature of architecture is outmoded in today's world; it tries to connect the physical water within human beings to the physical water surrounding them. But trying to forge this connection, this is my continued purpose in being an architect."
— Anna Gibertini
IN THE NEWS
…speaking of entangled architecture,
An MTA bus crashed into a Brooklyn brownstone. Yikes!
…AIA National announced the 2021 conference speakers,
Including tennis-superstar Venus Williams!
…missed seeing Countryside at the Guggenheim?
Now see it at the UN! Or…outside the UN.
…need some summer reading?
Subscribe to NYRA! Also, The Funambulist is making all its sold-out issues open-access.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Have a hot take? Write a letter to the editor! Link here.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, 6/21: Head to head pool events!
New Middles with Mimi Zeiger, Jasmine Benyamin
5:00 PM | SCI-Arc
The Floating Pool Lady: A Quest to Bring a Public Pool to New York City’s Waterfront with Ann L. Buttenwieser
6:00 PM | The Skyscraper Museum
The Summer of Pools - The WPA Pools of Aymar Embury II with John Kriskiewicz
6:00 PM | AIA New York
Tuesday, 6/22
Equity in the Built Environment: Beauty of Impact, Design & Social Justice with Nina Briggs, Erin Christensen Ishizaki, Angelita Scott
2:00 PM | National Building Museum
Supporting Emerging Architects: What Hiring Manager Look for in 2021 with Gaylin Bowie, Islay Burgess, Michael Ermann, Kirk Narburgh, Shannon Rodriguez
5:00 PM | AIA New York
League Prize 2021: Night 2 with Tei Carpenter, Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman, Ricardo Roxo Matias
6:00 PM | Architectural League of New York
Wednesday, 6/23
Danielle Wood: Sustainability in Space and on Earth with Danielle Wood, Ashraf Abdalla, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
11:30 AM | Columbia GSAPP
Artificial Intelligence: Urbanism, Ethics and Design with Maria Perbellini, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Tom Verebes, Alicia Imperiale, José Pinto Duarte, Sandra Manninger, Roberto Bottazzi
12:00 PM | New York Institute of Technology
Balancing Teaching & Practice with David Fortin
5:00 PM | Office Hours
AIA New York 154th Annual Meeting with Benjamin Prosky
6:00 PM | AIA New York
Cairo: Architecture and Artists with Caroline Williams
8:00 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
Thursday, 6/24
Book Talk - 50 Lessons to Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright with Aaron Betsky, Gideon Fink Shapiro, Andrew Pielage
12:00 PM | AIA New York
Sou Fujimoto: Between Nature and Architecture with Sou Fujimoto
7:00 PM | Japan Society
Saturday, 6/26
Human Considerations: Speculations on Lunar Habitation with Fred Scharmen, Felicity D. Scott, De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Tamara Alvarez, Sitraka Rakotoniaina
11:00 AM | Italian Virtual Pavilion, New School
Where are the Black Designers? 2021 Conference: Designing and Organizing for Black Liberation with Cheryl D. Holmes Miller, Maurice Cherry, Raja Schaar, Forest Young, Naj Austin, Timothy Bardlavens, Mac Collins, Aaron Draplin, Omari Souza
12:00 PM | Where are the Black Designers?
Sunday, 6/27
Book Talk: Paris Without Skyscrapers with Mary Campbell Gallagher
3:00 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
Email us if you would like to write up any of the above events for SKYLINE: editor@nyra.nyc.
Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & 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
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