S K Y L I N E | Labor and Love
On the SCI-Arc alumni petition, Beaux-Arts and Amazon, Fuensanta Nieto's thoughts on respect, and a new Atlas of Queer Places.
Issue 64. NYRA will always love you, dear reader, but you should still subscribe.
Architecture, Labor of Love or: Love is a One-Way Street
“Creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.”—Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back.
You have probably heard about what is going on at SCI-Arc in the wake of the school’s “Base Camp: How to be in an Office” roundtable on March 25, what it might mean for long-entrenched mythologies of architectural labor and, more generally, what is at stake beyond the school itself.
But also circulating is a SCI-Arc alumni petition that is scheduled to be sent to the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees by next week. The petition, drafted after actions taken by the administration in response to a previous letter were seen as insufficient, calls for an independent investigation of the school’s leadership and a restructuring of all administrative positions. It also asks for the development of a system of checks and balances that oversees labor structures within the school, and a “commitment to more equitable wages, more reasonable student work hours, more career development resources for current students and alumni, and greater diversity in its representatives.”
As of April 6, the petition had amassed over 600 signatures from current students, faculty, staff, and alumni in support. “This petition is a love letter to SCI-Arc,” alum Zaid Kashef Alghata (BArch '16) told NYRA last Wednesday, “tough love that is needed to get to a more just future.”
In internal discussions with alumni this week, faculty described SCI-Arc as a place that has its own complex internal ecologies, making it difficult for people outside of it to understand what is going on. They intimated that alumni should give the school space to deal with what is happening internally. But for alumni, SCI-Arc already engages with the public through lectures, exhibitions and more, and thus has a responsibility to openly confront the realities the current scandal has laid bare. “For its complicity in gaslighting the next generation of architects into believing that the work conditions they are experiencing are acceptable,'' said Kashef Alghata, “the school owes a public apology.” At SCI-Arc, as with many schools, there is an implicit expectation that students must put in long hours to prove themselves, and pay their dues. Yet behind the deficient operation of this mythological construct lies the reality that architecture is an industry built on exploitative precarious labor.
The involvement of alumni through the petition extends a system of support to current students who cannot always defend themselves within their institutional walls while they operate within, and rely on, those very institutions. “We need to come together as a collective in order to address labor concerns within and outside of the university,” stressed Kashef Alghata. That this conversation is being framed as a labor dispute indicates that architecture students and architectural workers are familiar with, and willing to use, the tools and vocabulary needed to identify precarious conditions, and organize around principles of reform.
“Radical practice means different things in different contexts,” alum Connor Gravelle (BArch '17) told NYRA last Monday. “We have clearly arrived at a generational turning point which demands that we critique and reevaluate the mythologies of architectural work.”
Regardless of what kind of radicalism you practice—whether in an atelier, an office, or the academy—one thing is certain: The work won’t love you back.
—Sebastián López Cardozo
Bad Education
Architecture education relies on a body of people who are willing to be malleable, generous, and open to a state of uncertainty. It can be hard to sustain a state of practice and unknowing—one churns out numerous iterations without definitive end, suspends suspicion about what exactly it is that makes so-and-so theorist command so much respect, and attempts to remember legal contract terms well before the consequences and use of such terms are relevant in one’s career—all while worrying about debt and finances. However, it also relies on a group of educators who hold the same qualities. Teachers should be malleable, generous, and willing to think beyond their own personal narratives to reach a diversity of students. Social climates shift student bodies, tuition rises, and culture changes, as it should.
Part of what we witnessed at last week’s infamous roundtable seemed to be the tip of a widespread failure of this kind of mutual generosity. A mentor figure, when faced with a student explaining how she and other international students were struggling to make a living, and were ineligible for second jobs due to visa status, shrugged: “I can’t speak to whatever it is that you’re talking about.” The I-struggled-and-made-it-so-everyone-else-should-too message is simply irresponsible, unimaginative, and a sign of resignation. Architecture culture is what we make it. This isn’t how it needs to be.
The past week has been a sensitive one to navigate—thank you to those who made efforts to share and put together thoughts. We have a set of dispatches from Kavya Cherala on what it means to build Beaux-Arts today, Lindsey Chambers on Fuensanta Nieto’s sense of reverence, and Ekam Singh on the new Atlas of Queer Places by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell. A full week of events is coming up. Scroll on for a full list.
—Tiffany Xu
DISPATCHES
4/5: The Gilded Age (in print)
An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City at the National Arts Club
NEW YORK (15 Gramercy Park South) — Author and architect PHILLIP JAMES DODD opened last Tuesday’s lecture hosted by The National Arts Club with a comment on the outsized dimensions of his new book, American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts in New York City (Images Publishing Group, 2021): "It's so big! Fourteen by eleven inches! Nine pounds—with great photography!" The event took place at 15 Gramercy Park South, which serves as a member clubhouse to The National Arts Club, and was prominently featured in the book alongside the usual suspects—The Met, the Frick, and Woolworth—buildings financed to rival the cultural capital of London, Paris and Rome.
"Today, we find ourselves living in a time similar to The Gilded Age—we're in the same social and economic situation," Dodd commented, comparing Amazon to Standard Oil. For Dodd, who also heads the Greenwich-based firm PJD, Bespoke Residential Design, and his clients, who are “modern-day magnates,” Beaux-Arts is worth keeping alive because the style "fits with American family values." The event, the book, the author all espoused a prevailing sentiment: "Architecture is a guide to how whole societies think of themselves." It seems we are once again where we stood a century ago. Those with money and power have concentrated a great deal of it and they want that commemorated.
—Kavya Cherala
4/5: Distance of Respect
Variations on the Museum Idea at Rice
HOUSTON (RICE UNIVERSITY) — Students and professionals gathered in Rice University’s Farish Gallery last Tuesday to listen to a lecture by FUENSANTA NIETO, co-founder of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which included an impressive roster of twelve museums. “When we speak about museums, we speak also about public space [...] we have to realize the necessity to create more public space, not only in cities but in buildings,” she noted, a thought particularly suited to an audience in Houston, home to the Museum District and the free and public Menil Collection.
Many of NSA’s museums deal with existing structures. As Nieto walked through each project, context emerged as a guiding force. Each design was informed by a thorough analysis of a site’s history and timeline, its material culture, light, and existing architectural elements. Though the buildings displayed a reverence for history, new constructions were boldy differentiated. Nieto referred to this ethos as a “distance of respect,” formed by interstitial spaces created when additions interacted with existing forms without touching, or contrasting materials that are used to highlight new and old.
— Lindsey Chambers
4/7: Saved by Gay Spaces
Towards Another Architecture at the Farrell Centre
NEWCASTLE (ZOOM) — They are not painted over in “blue or rainbow plaques but hide in plain sight, much like the people who inhabited them; queer spaces are all around us”, said historian JOSHUA MARDELL in his presentation for the lecture series, ‘Towards Another Architecture’ at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle University. The lecture, the last of this series, precedes Mardell’s forthcoming book published by RIBA with architect and designer ADAM NATHANIEL FURMAN, Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories. (Full disclosure: I am a contributor to this book)
In speaking about the book and their research on queer architecture, they touched upon their personal stories growing up in Peckham (for Mardell) and London (for Furman). In answering an audience question about personal identity and subjectivity, Furman talked about how the book “began with their own stories.” He remarked how while academic discourse revolves around narratives and references universally taught in schools, such as Le Corbusier, queer spaces reference queer stories that take a multitude of forms and expression. Furman looked to his own work, which is frequently multi-color and sometimes provocative, and spoke to finding his own identity through his attitudes to color and queerness in spaces and architectural design.
In identifying queer spaces around the world, Mardell and Furman laid out their “atlas” with as they call it “accessible case studies” ranging from Coppelia in Cuba, a Nervi-esque shopping centre that became a cruising destination, to Alan Buchsbaum’s interiors with “blurred boundaries between passion, love, work and play.” Their studies showed how queer architecture is not one of uniform aesthetic or emotion but one of fuzzy lines and cracks and veins.
— Ekam Singh
EYES ON SKYLINE
The most clicked link in SKYLINE 63 was a story about the controversy at SCI-Arc.
IN THE NEWS
This week,
…Louis Sullivan’s 1899 Carson, Pirie, Scott Company Building got dubbed “Goth Target” by TikTok…
…against the wishes of its owner, the “Oxford Shark” has been declared a local landmark three decades after planners fought for its removal…
…Norman Foster—the worlds’ richest architect—has curated a car show at the Guggenheim Bilbao with a number from his own collection…
…the Metaverse is set to get its first hotel, hopefully with pillows as soft as the Cloud…
…almost a decade after its inception, SHoP’s 111 W 57th is “done”, finally.
— Nicholas Raap
DATELINE
In the week ahead, AIA New York highlights good architecture in two exhibits opening Thursday night. Jonathan Oschshorn might disagree, arguing we’re afflicted by a host of disciplinary ills in the launch of his new book Building Bad at Cornell Thursday afternoon. Four symposia on Objects (Yale), the Home (Columbia), Civic Space (Cooper Union), and Time (Cambridge) take up this weekend, and many other talks fill out the week. See them all below, and at nyra.nyc/events
Friday, 4/8
Object Lessons with Anthony Acciavatti, Adedoyin Teriba, Amie Siegel, Anthony Titus, D. Graham Burnett, Danielle Choi, Gökçe Günel, Kajri Jain, Lan Li, Nicholas de Monchaux, Rahul Mehrotra, Sylvia Lavin
10:00 AM | Yale School of Architecture
'The Absolute Restoration of All Things' Exhibition Opening with Miguel Fernández de Castro, Natalia Mendoza
6:30 PM | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Saturday, 4/9
Object Lessons with Anthony Acciavatti, Adedoyin Teriba, Amie Siegel, Anthony Titus, D. Graham Burnett, Danielle Choi, Gökçe Günel, Kajri Jain, Lan Li, Nicholas de Monchaux, Rahul Mehrotra, Sylvia Lavin
10:00 AM | Yale School of Architecture
HOME: GSAAP Black Student Alliance Symposium with Emmanuel Olunkwa, dee(dee) c. ardan, Dalima Kapten, Samantha Pavic, Sydney Maubert, Cory Archie, Teron Bowman II, Teonna Cooksey, Alicia Ajayi, Elleza Kelley, Emanuel Admassu
10:00 AM | Columbia GSAPP Black Student Alliance
Monday, 4/11
A Journey through Landscape: From Theory to Practice with Joan Nogué
12:30 PM | Harvard GSD
Baumer Lecture, The Possibilities of Infrastructure with Sylvia Lavin
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Taking the Time with Rick Joy
6:00 PM | Princeton School of Architecture
Lecture with Olalekan Jeyifous
6:30 PM | Columbia University GSAPP
Tuesday, 4/12
Thoughts on Housing with Jonathan Tate
4/12 Tue, 12:00 PM
Cooper Union
The Topography of Wellness with Sara Jensen Carr
1:15 PM | Columbia GSAPP
The Endless Marvels of Everyday Living with Angeliki Sioli
4:00 PM | Morgan State School of Architecture + Planning
When is a Palimpsest? with Finbarr Barry Flood
7:00 PM | Cooper Union
Wednesday, 4/13
No more silent architecture and design objects with Gaetano Pesce
1:00 PM | Yale Architecture Gallery
The Ridge with Emanuel Admassu
5:15 PM | Cornell AAP
Lecture with Shigeru Ban
9:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Equity in the Built Environment: Black Women Build - Baltimore with Shelley Halstead, Chanelle Austin
6:30 PM | National Building Museum
Thursday, 4/14
Building Bad: How Architectural Utility is Constrained by Politics and Damaged by Expression with Jonathan Ochshorn
4:00 PM | Cornell AAP, Cornell University Library
On Equity with Lakisha A. Woods
6:00 PM | Princeton School of Architecture
Abstract Unions with Marlon Blackwell
6:00 PM | MIT School of Architecture + Planning
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, presented by The Red Nation with Justine Teba, Kiley Guy
6:30 PM | Cooper Union
Reframing Power: Exploring the Politics and Legacy of Malcolm X as a Social Justice Framework in Preservation and Beyond with Najha Zigbi-Johnson
6:30 PM | Columbia GSAPP
Indigenous Planning: Futurity and Life Force with Laura Harjo
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
'Reset: Towards a New Commons' and 'Design Awards 2022' Exhibition Openings with Barry Bergdoll, Juliana Barton
8:00 PM | AIA New York
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events through this link.
NYRA is a team effort. Our Deputy Editor is Marianela D'Aprile, our Editors at Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny and Alex Klimoski, and our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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