S K Y L I N E | 48 | Authoring Architecture
“Who are the authors of our urban spaces?”
Welcome! If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up here to receive it weekly.
“Who,” asked Dan Roche in last week’s SKYLINE, “are the authors of our urban spaces?”
Communities of empowered citizens?
Ideally.
Architects and city planners?
To some extent.
Real estate moguls? Gerrymandering politicians?
More likely.
Let’s think beyond the human authors. What about history as an author of urban space? Last week, Jack Murphy described how “historic trajectories of racial thought” shape our world — take, for example, Robert Moses’ discriminatory city planning, which led to flattened Black and Latino neighborhoods with highways running through and the infamous too-low parkway bridges keeping city buses from Long Island beaches.
But, scaling back from a particular historical ideology with specific consequences, let’s consider how the idea of historical memory more broadly shapes modern architecture and urban space. If architecture can transmit memory, as the French architect and theorist Claude Parent has claimed, then we must examine what sort of history that memory is being drawn from and how we might critically interact with that history moving forward.
Reflexive work that reassesses history in relation to the present, one which embraces the juxtapositions, the broken hierarchies, and the simultaneity of relationships between people and places, is the path to designing in a way that addresses the needs of a modern city. In the process, architecture can respond to history, rather than allowing history to author architecture.
Our dispatches this week reveal how such work can be done. Charles Weak covers Tsutoshi Tone’s lecture, describing how Tone begins by “digging up” the histories of place to create a context through which architectural forms can emerge. Nicholas Raap reports from a launch for the new book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects looks at how questioning architecture’s material culture can lead to new potentials, and in his coverage of the Carbon Form series, Raap examines the relationship between different architectural typologies and energy use. Finally, Poun Laura Kim explores how studying buildings in transition can inform how we decide their futures.
This coming week, there are two important openings, on Friday and Saturday. On Friday, the gallery pinkcomma in Boston opens an exhibit on the Architects Collaborative, responsible locally for the MetLife building astride Grand Central. On Saturday, The Great Ruins of Saturn opens at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, speculating on the fate of the New York State Pavilion, sitting leftover in Flushing Meadows from the 1964 World’s Fair. Then on Tuesday, architect Yasmeen Lari will give a talk on “barefoot social architecture,” a design philosophy that uses traditional techniques and materials to design a carbon-neutral future for Pakistan, and on Wednesday, Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor of Architectural and Urban History at California College of the Arts, will discuss his new book, Hella Town, which examines the history and consequences of urban development in Oakland.
Demonstrating how history can be used to critically engage with the present, I hope readers might adopt some of these methods into their own practices, actively wrestling with the past to author more equitable architectural futures.
— Anna Talley
The In-Between-ness of the Present
Armed with a small flashlight, last week I made my way down a flight of musty stairs, passing into an abandoned dressing room. Our guide directed her flashlight to different corners of the room, an invitation to explore the space, strewn with disconnected cords, moldy drywall, and a calendar page stopped April 2013. This immersive, “Sleep No More”-inspired “stroll play,” organized by South Korea’s Architecture and Urban Research Institute in the Gunsan Community Culture Hall, ended with the audience on a dusty stage, watching and listening to a lone singer in the seats: “After the crowd has left, there’s only silence that flows.”
Empty buildings are void of people, and as the emptiness gathers dust, the past’s sense of place fades. Buildings become spaces to be cleaned and reimagined. But memories and remnants of a lively past remain, and the rare look into a building in transition, stuck in time, got me wondering: If we treat buildings as an archive and at the same time as a fluid work in progress, can they tell a more accurate story of the production of a sense of place? Rather than just telling the story of a shift from A to B, can examining a building’s transitional moment be helpful in revealing the past and/or future? Andrés Jaque’s “PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society,” displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago, answers yes. It shows the context behind the renovation of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion through an assortment of objects that were left in the basement. What looks like a random collection, together “reveal the Barcelona Pavilion as a social construction resulting from specific technological moments and civic initiatives,” as the exhibition website states.
A work in progress, at times, can tell stories that a finished piece cannot, I thought, as I walked through the soon-to-be renovated building in Gunsan, with its lingering past and hope for the future coexisting. As the end of the year approaches, and we think about our progress shedding the past towards a “new normal” future, perhaps looking into the in-between-ness of the present can offer a different perspective.
— Poun Laura Kim
DISPATCHES
11/30 A Compendium of Obsolete Objects
“[T]o enter the world of extinct objects is to enter the world of the undead” said BARBARA PENNER, Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett UCL, introducing the newly published book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects to the virtual audience Tuesday at PRINCETON MEDIA + MODERNITY’s final event of the year. Together with her co-editors ADRIAN FORTY, Professor Emeritus of the Bartlett UCL, and OLIVIA HORSFALL TURNER, Senior Curator of Architecture & Design at the V&A Museum, and volume contributors ZEYNEP ÇELIK ALEXANDER, Associate Professor of Art History and Archeology at Columbia, HARRIET HARRISS, Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture, and CHARLES RICE, Professor of Architecture at UT Sydney, they resurrected six of these undead objects, tracing the active afterlives of these now largely forgotten, once-familiar facets of everyday life.
Coming from a larger research project asking how the material culture of architecture produces pasts, presents, and futures, the collection of objects gathered in the book work as an “alternative to a futurist manifesto,” as Horsfall Turner said, showing how “failures disrupt the narratives of constant progress.” These failures are loosely categorized into six types—failed, enforced, defunct, superseded, aestivated, visionary—which were explored through the discussion of six objects: the memo by Forty (superseded), the vertical filing cabinet by Çelik Alexander (superseded), the cyclegraph by Penner (defunct), the flashcube by Harriss (superseded), the paper dress by Horsfall Turner (defunct), and the Clapper by Rice (defunct).
While SYLVIA LAVIN, co-director of the Program in Media + Modernity questioned the biological metaphor being applied, HAL FOSTER, Professor of Art & Archaeology at Princeton, invoked Walter Benjamin’s notion of the outmoded to wonder what potential remained in these extinct objects. Arguing for a pseudo-necromancy, Horsfall Turner remarked that “there is an aspirational quality in a lot of these objects... [that] is quite tangible, the ideas of the future are still accessible to us. Certain ones are ripe for resurrection.”
— Nicholas Raap
11/30 The Building Takes a Beating
The building took a beating Wednesday at the fourth session of Confronting Carbon Form, a series organized by STANLEY CHO, ELISA ITURBE, and ALICAN TAYLAN, hosted by the journal LOG. The insightful presentations from LOUISE MOZINGO, Chair of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley, BRITTANY UTTING, Assistant Professor at Rice, and FRANCESCO MARULLO, Assistant Professor at the UIC School of Architecture, each focused on a typology—the corporate campus/office park, the hospital, and the factory respectively—and its attendant forms, of course with an eye to energy.
Mozingo recounted how the migration of corporate office work outside of the city post-WW2 produced a pastoral capitalist architecture, a “separatist geography” where “collective responsibility...is obviated because it’s not obvious.” Utting followed with a report on the Texas Medical Center (building on an e-flux article she wrote on the TMC), a vast complex that operates like a satellite city outside Houston, with “climatic autonomy [that] underscores the desire to produce a smooth space for the efficient movement not only of patients but of capital.” But while the sprawling medical center obscures its inner logics, Marullo argued that factories, like the many Albert Kahn designed for Henry Ford, can be understood more as “systems or diagrams of organization” than buildings, shaping and being shaped directly by the need to optimally control flows of labor and of materials through the production process.
Questions arose around concepts of efficiency, scalability, standardization and replicability, all inherent to the architectural type that often, as Mozingo noted, are “tools of political hegemony.” However, in recognizing that the damnation of intensive energy use is troubled when thinking about hospitals, where “the buildings themselves and their energy networks fundamentally operate as life support systems,” Utting critically reminded us that “The emancipatory potential of form is if it reflects a different form of life, not just a different physical manifestation.”
— Nicholas Raap
12/1 Archaeology of the future
When Japanese architect TSUYOSHI TANE digs up the past to imagine new buildings, history and ground itself become the context from which ideas emerge. In a lecture at SCI-ARC, Tane presented five projects from his studio ATTA. Each engaged with the history of a place through research and documentation of a historical narrative (often done through extensive photo collage) tied to a site or surrounding urban condition. The idea of connecting architecture to the land is central to the work of Tane, a choice he makes in his projects that speaks to both his desire to dig up the history and culture of a place and as a reaction against the detachment of Modern Architecture from both ground and history. “Archaeology of the future is about digging up the memories, to give form to the architecture,” said Tane. “These memories can generate and transform the idea for something that’s site-specific. The concept comes from an archaeology of discovery, radically different, but responsible to its context.”
— Charles Weak
IN THE NEWS
…Designer Virgil Abloh has passed away at the age of 41. Renowned for his impact on the fashion world, Abloh initially studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a master’s in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. You can learn more about Abloh’s work by watching his 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design or reading this 2018 interview with Rem Koolhaas. An online archive of his architectural projects is also available to view here.
…Gowanus is changing. This is what we’re looking at.
…Michael Kimmelman asks why is it so hard for us to build big projects? Specifically, why, nine years after Sandy, has it taken so long to build the BIG U?
…Fosters’ “Malibu beach house” on the roof of a neo-Renaissance, Upper West Side apartment building might look a little out of place.
…Zoe Adams has an excellent piece in Urban Omnibus on the fraught politics of methadone clinics in New York City…
…Our very own Jack Murphy reviews the CCA’s new show, “A section of now”…
WHAT DID PEOPLE CLICK ON IN SKYLINE 47?
Last week’s readers discovered the more **artistic** side of Le Corbusier—our most-clicked link was to the MoMA record of his Still Life, mentioned in Chris Cornelius’ essay which explored the Thanksgiving table as colonialist propaganda.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Friday, 12/3
Exhibition Opening: The Architects Collaborative, 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship with Gabriel Cira, James Heard, Emma Pfeiffer
6:00 PM | pinkcomma
Designing for A Future of Care
6:30 PM | The Canadian Centre for Architecture
Saturday, 12/4
Exhibition Opening: “The Great Ruins of Saturn” with Alvaro Urbano
5:00 PM | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Tuesday, 12/7
Yasmeen Lari: Barefoot Social Architecture Benefitting People and the Planet with Yasmeen Lari, Cassim Shepard
11:30 AM | The Architectural League of New York, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Wednesday, 12/8
The Architecture of Place: In Conversation with Galina Tachieva
12:00 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture and Art
Models Talk: A CCA c/o Tokyo Video Series
8:00 PM | The Canadian Centre for Architecture
HELLA TOWN : OAKLAND'S HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISRUPTION with Mitchell Schwarzer
8:30 PM | California College of Art
NYRA Holiday Cards!
The ultimate mailbox stuffer. And we still have some left! Secure your set 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.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to 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, Thomas Phifer, and Stickbulb.
To support our contributors and receive the Review by post, subscribe here.