S K Y L I N E | 42 | Next Week is Infrastructure (and Landscape) Week
S K Y L I N E | 42 | Next Week is Infrastructure (and Landscape) Week
Plus: Bergdoll & Chipperfield & Christ & Gantenbein (and OFFICE)
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Good morning readers,
Yesterday, I was in the library reading an article by the cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey about the past, present, and future of the Mullion Cove harbor walls. Encircling a small cove in Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula in the UK (where this ex-Brooklynite is currently based), the two stone arms were built in the 1890s to create a safe mooring for the town’s fleet of fishing boats, and in effect, protected the seaside village from storm surges. Moving back and forth through time, DeSilvey tells the walls’ history through self-ethnographic anecdotes, black and white photographs, interviews, and quotes from nineteenth-century journals and letters, simultaneously recounting the walls’ construction and slow, inevitable collapse. Fundamentally, DeSilvey’s chronicle of the Mullion Cove walls “attempts to unsettle the narrative foundations that stabilize landscape and block reflection on future change.” Opening up conversations about “future change” to the built environment in relation to the natural landscape is at the core of many of this week’s upcoming events, and with the COP26 conference in Glasgow on tap for next month, makes these conversations all the more pertinent.
The World Around’s Land program will explore infrastructure and landscapes in America through architectural projects, current research, and artworks, centering activist stories of environmental and spatial justice. Building on environmental design practices, the Landscape Architecture Foundation will be reflecting on submissions to their year-long open call, the Green New Deal Studio, while Daniela Bleichmar, in her discussion of natural dyes in Mexico, will reflect on the production and possession of indigenous environmental knowledge.
Closer to home, tomorrow NYRA is co-sponsoring Pratt’s Aqua-Infrastructure symposium, and our very own A.L. Hu and Nicolas Kemper will be speaking about their piece in issue #21 on private pools. Working from the outside in, Liz Gálvez and Estefanía Barajas, winners of the Rice Design Alliance Houston Design Research Grant, will discuss their projects that investigate the domestic kitchen in relation to informal food supply chains and how urban agriculture can help alleviate food insecurity.
There are plenty of other events, too, on Texas’ freedom colonies, defining architectures of care, the life of young urbanites in São Paulo, and a celebration of the Yale School of Architecture Graduate Women Alums. If you decide to attend (which I hope you will) and want to write one up for next week’s Skyline (which I hope you do) send us an email.
And with that, bon weekend!
— Anna Talley
DISPATCHES
10/16: Bergdoll & Chipperfield on Museums
BARRY BERGDOLL opened his one-on-one conversation with DAVID CHIPPERFIELD with the observation that both have grappled, through their respective writing and building projects, with museum architecture in Berlin. Fittingly, historian and architect spoke from the former Goethe-Institut New York, a 1907 townhouse facing the Met, that Chipperfield’s firm recently won a competition to renovate as a new cultural space (disclosure: I curated a small exhibition about the history and future of the building on behalf of the nonprofit group 1014).
Chipperfield recalled encountering public resistance to his design for the bombed-out Neues Museum—originally completed in 1859 to designs by Friedrich August Stüler, restored 1997–2009 by David Chipperfield Architects—which leaves evidence of the “trauma” of the Second World War. It was “intellectually correct” to preserve the building’s scars, Chipperfield said, but many people asked, “Why can’t we just have the building back as it was?”
Bergdoll then quizzed Sir David about his recently completed restoration of Mies’s glass temple of a museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie, built in 1968. “It’s a very flawed museum,” Chipperfield said, alluding not only to the difficulties of exhibiting art behind transparent walls, but also to the discovery that portions of the museum were “poorly built,” which he blamed on Berlin’s postwar economic struggles. He described a fascinating problem in the restoration of 20th-century modernist buildings: you can’t “solve all the technical issues without destroying the architecture.” Chipperfield opted to preserve the essential minimalism of the curtain wall, settling for improved but not fully resolved thermal and moisture issues. Rather than simply replace aging window frames and stone pavers with seemingly identical new ones, the Chipperfield firm oversaw the comparatively difficult and expensive repair and restoration of 35,000 original components.
Not everyone agreed with the need to conserve the physical fabric of a 1960s building, Chipperfield said, but he thought, “in an animistic way,” reminiscent of Ruskin, that the spirit of the building resides in such materials.
Asked about the changing functions of museum spaces, Chipperfield declared that he rejects form-follows-function because “it’s hard to say what function is.” Just as a bathroom is more than a toilet stall, a museum is more than a display system. Bergdoll recalled Schinkel’s distinction between the “trivial function” and “higher function” of a museum, but Chipperfield said even mundane functions should be accommodated in flexible ways that allow for change over time. The solution? “Good rooms,” by which he seemed to mean well-proportioned, well-lit, well-finished spaces that can serve whatever purpose their occupants might need. It sounds like Mies’s “universal space,” but Chipperfield pointed to Georgian-era houses whose ample rooms have been reconfigured for different uses over the generations. And don’t forget that buildings should outlast their clients, Chipperfield said. “Museum directors have strong ideas, but they’re not there forever. A loose fit works better.”
Chipperfield’s hope for the future of architecture? Architects need to find a way to “get farther upstream” in planning and politics, he said, if they want to make an impact on the urgent crises of social inequality and climate change. “We’re all trying our hardest, but [so far] it’s not good enough.” —Gideon Fink Shapiro
10/20: Diptych Dialogue with OFFICE and Christ & Gantenbein
Debating process, materiality, concepts, and pedagogy, EMANUEL CHRIST and CHRISTOPH GANTENBEIN spoke with KERSTEN GEERS and DAVID VAN SEVEREN of OFFICE for this year’s Harvard Graduate School of Architecture’s Kenzo Tange Lecture, moderated by JEANETTE KUO. Using a diptych presentation to put their projects into dialogue, Kuo prompted a lively discussion, which often highlighted the different approaches to architectural practice taken by each firm. In one example, Christ emphasized the importance of a final, built design, stating, “it’s not so much about the process it’s about the result,” which he said derives from an ideal image of “an almost perfect architecture.” In contrast, Geers and Van Severen approach materializing a project by “sampling practices” and are interested in the “confrontation” between the model and the final, built design. After an hour and a half of discussion, what both firms could agree on is the difficulty in talking about the process of architecture at all. “It’s always to be explained, but the explanation changes,” said Christ. “We try to explain what is inexplicable.” Emphasizing that architecture is not their interest in of itself, Van Severen framed the issue more broadly: “We’re interested in life, but it’s very difficult to talk about life.”—Anna Talley
10/22: A very short dispatch from Overcoming Carbon Form
ELISA ITURBE continued, in coordination with Log, the set of conversations about carbon form, this time focusing on circulation and movement. ROSS EXO ADAMS, JESSE LECAVALIER, and MIMI SHELLER all gave great presentations, spanning everything from the difference between Walmart’s headquarters and an Amazon warehouse to the agricultural revolution, but one observation, by Iturbe, stood out - how our desire to stay put in fact accelerates the world: "We set everything into motion, in order to stay in place" and "Mobility is in the service of creating a fully sedentary domesticity." - Nicolas Kemper
OUR FIRST ESSAY CONTEST!
What should the public demand from the built environment? Submissions due November 14. Click here for details:
EYES ON SKYLINE
(most clicked links from skyline 41)
Last week, readers were most interested in Defector’s commentary on the fall of former Princeton architecture professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo.
IN THE NEWS…
…Adjaye Associates released plans for a supertall skyscraper—which would be realized by a team of Black developers, investors, and designers—in Hudson Yards. Twitter weighed in:
…SOM finished the UAE’s HQ in NYC.
…in-person or online, there is one week left to revel in New York architecture’s annual smorgasbord: Archtober…
…Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara) completed the architectural EGOT, bagging the 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize for their Town House at Kingston University…
…while Peter Barber Architects’ McGrath Road, a brick fortress-cum-Victorian row house estate in East London, won the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing.
…Franco-Colombian professor Carlos Moreno’s ’15 minute city’ concept has won the 2021 Obel Award.
Tomorrow: NYRA is a co-sponsor with Pratt of the symposium, Aquainfrastructure!
Link here with details. And cool gif below.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Friday, 10/22
The World Around in Focus: Land with Holly Jean Buck, Carolina Caycedo, Elizabeth Hoover, Renee Kemp-Rotan, Joseph Kunkel, Simon Denny, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Dani Admiss, The Unknown Fields Division, Jaida Grey Eagle, Elsa Hoover
8:00 AM | Guggenheim, The World Around
Houston Design Research Grant Lectures with Liz Gálvez, Estefanía Barajas
2:00 PM | Rice Architecture
Saturday, 10/23
Aqua Infrastructure
11:00 AM | Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Monday, 10/25
Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture: The Community Core: Making and Keeping Place Heritage in Texas’s Freedom Colonies with Andrea Roberts
12:00 PM | Harvard GSD
Youth, Gender, and New Formations of Collective Life in São Paulo’s Peripheries with Teresa Cadeira, Weiping Wu
6:00 PM | GSAPP
Lecture with Caroline Bos
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
Tuesday, 10/26
Lecture with Daniela Bleichmar
Tue, 6:30 PM| Harvard GSD
Wednesday, 10/27
Between Fact & Fiction with Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert
4:00 PM | UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
Baumer Series with Florian Idenburg
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Legible to Whom? with Emanuel Admassu, Marlon Davis
6:00 PM | Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Thursday, 10/28
Green New Deal Superstudio Showcase: Reflections from a Year-Long Open Call with Barbara Deutsch, Kate Orff, Kofi Boone, Kristina Hill, Michael Johnson, Roberto Rovira
12:00 PM | Landscape Architecture Foundation
Harvard Design Magazine #49: “Publics” Issue Launch and Conversation with Anita Berrizbeitia, Diane Davis, Assemble, Elijah Anderson, Tali Hatuka, A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
12:00 PM | Harvard GSD
A Decolonial Architecture? America’s Gift of “Freedom” to the Philippines with Diana Martinez
6:00 PM | MIT
Abolishing property as architectural care with Rinaldo Walcott, Thandi Loewenson
6:00 PM | Waterloo Architecture
Lecture with Jessica Varner
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
For the complete list and future weeks, visit: nyra.nyc/events
Have an event we missed? Submit the details here.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Would you like to share your thoughts? Please write to us. Simply reply to this e-mail or write to us at 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.
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