S K Y L I N E | 4 | Awards are gimmicks, West Virginia, Miljacki on UVA
Week of February 1
Welcome! If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up at: newyork.substack.com.
_
Upcoming, 2-01-21
Sometimes you just need to take a position, and then act on it, writes Mariana D’Aprile’s rebuttal of Keller Easterling. She foregrounds the necessity of politics today, and the dangerous complacence of regressing into theory when simple action is in order.
Stephanie Jazmines has drawn the preview for this week’s conversations - scroll down to see.
I wore many NYRA hats this January: managed our issue no. 18 - which we send to the printer today - worked on some back of house projects, and edited SKYLINE. For February, Phillip Denny is taking the SKYLINE baton and will be writing next week’s e-mail. Carolyn Bailey and Samuel Medina will be managing the next issue, No. 19, a double redesigned edition due at the end of March. I will have a bit of a break.
For those interested in contributing to No. 19, please submit pitches by this Wednesday - February 3 - link here. For those interested in supporting those contributors - and receiving a beautiful NYRA of your own, subscribe here.
And now, with no further ado, our contributors.
- Nicolas Kemper
Dispatches.
1/30: “To leak confidential information to the media, please press 4,” read one hotline prompt imagined during Canadian Center for Architecture’s How to: reward and punish workshop, which shared its results during a Zoom webinar on Saturday morning. Led by LEV BRANTISHENKO with GEORGE KAFKA, this gathering worked virtually to realize a soft tactical guide to architectural awards systems, which are either private, elite transactions, or reduced to monetized trinkets, driven by a profit motive and the neoliberal need for distinguishing features in the global marketplace. An award is a gimmick, SIANNE NGAI might say.
“The more they proliferate the more meaningless they seem,” was the consensus from the workshop. They analyzed the timeline of Architizer’s prizes (so many categories) and the organizational charts of award-granting entities before presenting new tools—notably the aforementioned hotline for awards participants and a set of Joker cards. The gathering felt intimate—even smaller than the group of people who care about architectural awards are those nerdy enough to want to hear about revising their impact (a NYRA regular asked two questions). The group’s output shows ways to shake things up.
One surprise finding: A secret award—gasp, no dopamine hit of public recognition—that’s given via email whose prize is a recipe that the winner must cook and share at dinner with friends who, while eating, will decide its next recipient. Is it real or is the start of a beautiful rumor? Who cares anymore? Maybe this is the start of a “new typology: cheap, warm, and out its organisers’ [sic] control.” What if awards promoted good actions instead of beautiful photography? What if they had the influence and invisibility of gossip? What if they were the start of greatness, not the deadening finality of its conclusion? If you want to change things, this guide will help you mess with the system. But, as it states, “if you’re out for blood, you already know what to do.” - Jack Murphy
1/28: “There are many examples of houses and housing when you start to look at prefab and modular, but less so of public infrastructure,” observed LAURIE HAWKINSON of Smith-Miller + Hawkinson in the panel, “Prefabrication in the Public Realm.” It’s arguably a more fitting application for the particular efficiencies and benefits of prefabrication, where time and financing are often in short supply. The panelists - RONNIE MARKUSSEN of Human Habitat, BEN BUSCHE of Brut Deluxe, ADA TOLLA of LOT-EK, and CARLO RATTI and RUI GUAN of Carlo Ratti Associati - offered a variety of approaches to the topic: an urban farm, a market kiosk, an adaptable shipping container, and a Covid treatment module, respectively. Perhaps most refreshing, however, was the heavy focus on fabrication as part of the design process. It’s not just developing the idea, but executing it, which Tolla stresses relies on a network, a “very tight connection with fabrication, with who does the work.” - Lane Rick
1/27: "When you are looking at land, it is about ownership - you cannot do something with other people's land" said Pittsburgh landscape-architect NINA CHASE, discussing a report prepared on West Virginia for the Architectural League’s Roundtable Project. "The figures are staggering," Harvard PhD candidate and East Kentucky native CAROLINE FILICE SMITH followed up: 1% of owners hold almost half of the land, most of the landowners are outsiders, and things get worse when you go underground - thousands of small landowners and farmers have their mineral rights - which, with strip mining - can become land rights, owned by just a handful of government and private entities.
1/26: “Buildings die faster and sooner” as technology advances, said JOSÉ IBARRA, at the “Projecting Fellows” a series convened by KATIE MACDONALD and KYLE SCHUMANN of the University of Virginia. At “Landscapes and Infrastructure,” a discussion moderated by architect NEERAJ BHATIA and FELIPE CORREA, chair of architecture at UVA, presenters ruminated on the compounding crises of our time. Ibarra continued,“We need not fear the end of the world, for the end has already happened.” - Phillip Denny
In the Review.
I have walked around it in my mind, touched it, seen it cry. Like you perhaps, I saw images of the University of Virginia Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on social media, in major news outlets online, images of it enabling important gatherings just within a few weeks of its opening. It was designed by Höweler+Yoon Architecture (Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon) and Mabel O. Wilson with help of their collaborator at UVA Frank Dukes and Charlottesville landscape architect Gregg Bleam.
It offers a necessary and hopeful lesson on the agency of architecture in our times, but it also presents a vital challenge to culture and life in the US more generally. On UVA’s campus, and upon the valiant insistence of its students, this memorial’s architecture, and the listening, deliberating and translating (which I think of as architecture as well), have begun the local process of what W.E.B. Du Bois once described as “pulling back the veil.” The University of Virginia was built and maintained by over four thousand enslaved laborers in its first half century of existence. On its own, the gesture of pulling back the veil is in no way commensurate with the catastrophe of enslavement and its survival, but without it nothing further is possible. - ANA MILJACKI, from no. 17
Events!
2/01 | MONDAY
FRANCIS KÉRÉ
6:00pm | GSAPP
Marlon Blackwell
6:30pm | Yale
2/02 | TUESDAY
Biomimicry: Nature as the Unmitigated Master Mentor with Cynthia Fishman
12:00am | Rice
The relationship between criminal justice involvement and housing with MARY PATTILLO
1:15pm | GSAPP
Guiyang WTC Landmark Tower: “Precious Sun,” A Story of Trade Routes and Supertalls
6:00pm | Skyscraper Museum
f-architecture with Virginia Black, Rosana Elkhatib, and Gabrielle Printz
6:00pm | Taubman
FARIBA TEHRANI LECTURE | BEATRIZ COLOMINA: SICK ARCHITECTURE
6:30pm | Cooper
A. NAOMI PAIK | BANS, WALLS, RAIDS, SANCTUARY: U.S. IMMIGRATION “CRISES” AND ABOLITIONIST FUTURES
7:00pm | Cooper
2/03 | WEDNESDAY
KARENNA GORE
5:00pm | GSAPP
Community organizing to create inclusive urban policy with MATTHEW GONZALES
5:00pm | GSAPP
Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski
10:00pm (7pm PST) | Sci-Arc
2/04 | THURSDAY
SCIAME Lecture Series, &/Or with Mel Chin & Ronald Rael
5:30pm | Spitzer
Black Landscape Symposium 2021: Decentering from F.L.O. with Sara Zewde, Doug Williams
6:00pm | BLAN
FF – Distance Edition: 5468796
6:00pm | Arch. League
Reproduction Now with CARLOS BAYOD AND BIKA SIBILA REBEK
7:00pm | GSAPP
2/05 | FRIDAY
BUILDING COLLABORATION: ON THE QUESTION OF REPAIR with Malo Hutson
1:00pm | GSAPP
Made it to the end bonus!
—
If you would would like to write up an event for us - do it! See an example writeup here. Or above, in the ‘dispatches’ section. Ask to cover an event: editor@nyra.nyc.
—
Welcome! If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up at: newyork.substack.com.
If you want to support our contributors and receive the Review by post, subscribe here.
If you want to pitch us an article, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc