S K Y L I N E | 7 | Shim-Sutcliffe's New Book, Lateral Office at Cooper, BIPOC in the Built Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
The Week Ahead
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Friends of the Review,
The “BIPOC in the Built Virtual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” kicks off today at 3:00 PM ET with an introduction to the project and training in Wikipedia editing. All this week, February 22–26, MIT, in partnership with Yale University Libraries and the M.E.D. Working Group for Anti-Racism, will host this drive to “build community while creating new, and editing existing Wikipedia pages of BIPOC designers, activists, planners and others whose work is connected to the built environment.” Training sessions are available daily; refer to the schedule for themes and articles to be drafted and edited. No prior experience required. Registration is open.
A full listing of this week’s events follows below. Here are a few highlights you won’t want to miss:
(2/22): Saving Slave Houses: Jobie Hill in Conversation with Gabrielle Esperdy. (2/23): Ash Baccus-Clark speaks at Parsons. (2/23): Poet Natalie Diaz presents on “Origin and Migration / Freedom & Love” at Cooper Union. (2/23): Walter Hood delivers this year’s Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture at the GSD. (2/24): Architect Sean Canty lectures at Cornell. (2/25): The Black Landscape Architect’s Network Black History Month Speaker Series continues with a panel on “Design, Development, & Policy.”
Read on for Louise Harpman’s review of a new book by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, The Architecture of Point William. Out now from ORO Editions, the publication reflects on the firm’s two-decades-long engagement with a waterfront site on Lake Muskoka. Harpman attended the virtual launch event on February 9, which included remarks from architects Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, architect and historian Kenneth Frampton, and photographers Ed Burtynsky and Scott Norsworthy.
This week’s dispatches come from Nicolas Kemper, and Review contributor Edward Palka on Lateral Office’s lecture at Cooper Union on 2/16. If you would like to write up an event for us to include in SKYLINE, get in touch: editor@nyra.nyc.
– Phillip Denny
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TIME IS A MATERIAL
Louise Harpman
Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe celebrated the publication of their new book, The Architecture of Point William: A Laboratory for Living, in a panel discussion hosted by the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, on February 9, 2021. Architects known for their “delight and love of craft,” Shim and Sutcliffe showed more than twenty years of their work transforming a remote waterfront site on Lake Muskoka that they began master-planning in 1997. Many readers will be familiar with their first building on the site, the Boathouse (completed 1999), which garnered one of the fifteen Governor General’s Medals they have won since founding their Toronto-based practice in 1994. The ensemble of buildings now includes the Guest Cottage (2010), Main Cottage, and Garage (2018).
At Point William, Shim and Sutcliffe highlighted certain design strategies that have become hallmarks of their practice, including a deliberate engagement with the earth to create “a landscape rethought through architecture.” They designed and built four separate structures joined by a network of connecting paths using materials selected for what Sutcliffe calls their “organic qualities,” most notably weathering steel, stone, and Douglas fir. The book features an essay by historian and architect Kenneth Frampton, an interview with writer Michael Webb, and stunning exterior and interior photographs by Ed Burtynsky, James Dow and Scott Norsworthy. The architects deliberately included views from every season as a reminder to the international audience that Canadians love winter. The buildings all feature custom fittings, fixtures, and furniture—designs that could easily fill a companion book.
Kenneth Frampton’s interpretive sketches, which appear alongside his introductory essay, function as a visual narrative that creates fascinating pairings with photographs of the buildings in relation to the landscape. Frampton told the audience that he refused to be taken on a tour when he visited the site, because—invoking Walter Benjamin—he wanted to “appreciate the place in a state of distraction.” The results are his evocative sketches or “thinking tools” that serve as visual commentary, even a form of meditation. Frampton seemed delighted that his “weird sketches” were included in the book, revealing that sometimes he can “best understand something by drawing it.” In a conversation following the event, Shim took pleasure in disclosing that Frampton’s sketches of their project were in a book he’d saved from an Alvar Aalto conference.
The panel discussion included remarks from photographers Ed Burtynsky and Scott Norsworthy. Burtynsky appreciated the “dedication to craft, materials, space that the project exudes.” He remembered his first visit to Point William to photograph the Boathouse, recalling that walking through the building was like “being inside a finely crafted piece of furniture.” As a photographer, Burtynsky reveled in the fact that he needed to use Type 55 Polaroid film to proof his photos twenty years ago, while the current images are from a Hasselblad drone. Norsworthy photographed the project on a regular basis over three years, always noticing the varied quality of light at different times of day. He, like the architects, wanted to show how natural light narrates the experience of moving through the buildings. Editor Elsa Lam, concluding the panel with a publishing overview, appreciated that distilling twenty years of work into a book is “crazy and ambitious,” but also expressed optimism about future books that would showcase additional, multi-decade Shim-Sutcliffe projects.
Shim and Sutcliffe recalled that their first response to Point William was to try to create new relationships between “wood, water, and rock.” Working on this book brought another dimension to their understanding of how architecture is experienced. “Time is a material for us,” concluded Brigitte Shim. “It’s another way we think about architecture.”
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BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Several architectural organizations have recently published features in honor of Black History Month. To name four: Pratt ran a series of historical profiles of Black architects, Design as Protest is profiling current advocacy organizations and undertaking a prison letter writing campaign, Kate Reggev wrote a piece on early Black female practitioners for Madame Architect, and the podcast ArchisPolly began a list of Black architects in movies. Last week, the Review shared a profile of Walter Hood by Tess McCann from No. 18, that looks at Hood's concept of history. A landscape architect, Hood won the MacArthur Fellowship for his work in history, but is now warning against a fixation with origins, urging audiences to “start from yesterday and move forward.” That is to say that telling a story - better understanding a story - even correcting a story - is not just about the past, but preparing the way for a better future.
– Nicolas Kemper
2/16
LOLA SHEPPARD & MASON WHITE of Lateral Office presented a lecture titled “Piles, Drifts, Freezers, and Icebreakers” at Cooper Union which focused on the office’s research and work in the often overlooked and amorphously defined “North” of Canada. As a preface, WHITE noted the architectural establishment’s pervasive bias toward urbanism and against the rural, where the urban is framed as the “embodiment of modernity,” and the rural as its antithesis. This disposition has contributed to a condition where, as SHEPPARD observed, “architecture has not been nearly as innovative and adaptable as the people who live there.” Their careful analysis of the region and its “de facto vernaculars,” as documented in their book Many Norths, has provided the firm with insights into the landscape which were subtle, profound, and often invisible to casual viewers. For instance, many of these communities have no road access and deliveries are made by ships only twice a year, which creates unique logistical challenges. Now, the office is wielding this knowledge as they design two projects: “Innusirvik Wellness Hub” and the “Arctic Indigenous Wellness Centre” in Canada’s polar region. Both eschew typological definitions, aiming to combat the common “failure of architecture, socially but also technologically” to address the needs of communities in these northern climes.
– Edward Palka
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EVENTS
Monday, February 22
A Promethean Increment with Albert Pope
1:00pm, RiceSaving Slave Houses: Jobie Hill in Conversation with Gabrielle Esperdy
5:00pm, NJIT
Tuesday, February 23
Maintenance and Preservation Challenges of PoMo Buildings
12:00pm, Beyer Blinder BelleAsh Baccus-Clark
7:00pm, ParsonsNATALIE DIAZ | ORIGIN AND MIGRATION / FREEDOM & LOVE
7:00pm, CooperSenior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood
7:30pm, GSD
Wednesday, February 24
Belgium to Congo: Colonialism Reparation and Truth & Reconciliation Commissions
10:30am, CornellSean Canty: Spin-Offs
5:15pm, Cornell
Thursday, February 25
Alberto Veiga
1:00pm, YaleThe Prison Industrial Complex and Beyond with Liza Peterson, Raphael Sperry, Int. by Elias Beltran
5:30pm, SpitzerBlack Landscape Symposium Speaker Series: Design, Development, and Policy
6:00pm, BLAN, $15
Friday, February 26
Tidal Communities: The Experience of Underserved and Indigenous Rural Communities Along Changing Coastlines
1:30pm, GSAPP
Saturday, February 27
ANTI-RACISM IN THESIS WORKSHOP
10:00am, Cooper
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