Issue 55. If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up here to receive it weekly.
For all those living under a rock, on Wednesday evening employees at the New York firm SHoP architects decided to withdraw their bid to unionize. The decision came two days before a planned election (was originally to happen on February–today) and a month after Architectural Workers United went public with the union drive.
According to inside reports, the organizing unit lost majority approval from staffers. The effort nevertheless put labor issues at the front of architecture’s agenda. Can we use this as a moment to to take a step back, reflect, and learn from to plot the road ahead? Expect more coverage from us in the coming days.
—NYRA
Dear Readers,
With colleges and institutions kicking back into gear, there are a load of events next week. The through-line for many of them is Black History Month. Tomorrow, Dr. Destiny Thomas of Thrivance Group discusses reparations in the city transportation sector. Tuesday sees The Honorable Marcia L. Fudge, 18th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, speaking on fair housing policy. On Thursday, Spitzer is hosting a panel conversation on Black land consortium as part of their series “Radical Black Space.” Also on Thursday, historian Amber N. Wiley will be giving her lecture, “Preserving Black Revolutionaries: Carter G. Woodson and the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation.”
In other events, if you’re still iced in and looking for something to do on Saturday, The World Around summit is taking place at the Guggenheim. It’s sold-out in person, but you can register to stream the event online for free. Ana María León is having a busy week, giving two different lectures on opposite coasts: she’s at Yale on Monday speaking about labor and leisure in Punta Ballena and at SCI-Arch on Wednesday discussing historic preservation and settler colonialism. Thursday, AIA New York is hosting a conversation with Esra Akcan, Barry Bergdoll, Mohamed Elshahed, Gabrielle Esperdy on the theme of “Global Modernism Today.”
That’s just a taster. There are a slew of other events this week– scroll down to find the full list, and be in touch if you want to cover one for us.
—Anna Talley
DISPATCHES
1/26: Remembering Ricardo Bofill at La Fábrica
Two weeks after Spanish architect RICARDO BOFILL passed away, La Fábrica, Bofill’s home and studio headquarters, opened its doors for an uninterrupted 33 hours. In this special gathering, alongside his family, friends and neighbors, visitors were able to share a homage to the architect who created projects in over 40 countries. Black attire was predominant. Not because of tradition around the deceased, but because of the density of architects per square meter in every room.
Built in 1973 from the remains of a cement factory in the outskirts of Barcelona, La Fábrica houses Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), Bofill’s interdisciplinary studio. RBTA merged sociologists, filmmakers, musicians, philosophers and designers to shape the urban landscape of Barcelona while helping to establish post-modernism across the globe. During the remembrance, Bofills’s Fábrica was filled with building models on display, mixed with intimate and spontaneous images of Bofill at different stages of life. Live music by Tuareg artist Atri N’Assouf and video installations of Bofill’s interviews and 1965 film ‘Hot Milk’ were found in unexpected corners. Everything served as a reminder that Bofill’s legacy is very present, both in Catalonia and beyond.
— Tomás Romero Talley
1/29: How To Not Become a “Developer”
“The architect as developer is sort of encouraged to hide,” commented the Belgo-Nigerian architect EWA EFFIOM at a panel presenting the results of the latest Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) How to residencies. “[Being a hyphenated architect-developer] tends to signify complicity with the realities of our financial system; it goes against this idea of the architect as a messianic creature that helps the world and makes it a better place.”
Led by CCA Curator LEV BRATISHENKO and Sound Advice co-founder JOSEPH ZEAL-HENRY, the team, with residency participants HARRIET POWELL, MINGJIA CHEN, REBEKKA HIRSCHBERG, DUNCAN STEELE, THEA RENYONG, COCO TIN, MELANIJA GROZDANOSKA, and Effiom, confronted difficult and oft-avoided questions about the relationship of architecture (and the architect) to money. Rather than be resigned to inaction, panelists critically tackled the issues head on, presenting a series of tools and interventions.
The world is grappling with multiple concerns like “social justice, climate justice, and the retreat of democracy”, said Zeal-Henry. “There are critical tensions between the different hats people want to wear [when it comes to responding to these issues].” Until we are honest about the pervasiveness of money, there will remain significant gaps in our collective understanding of how the discipline operates.
— Sebastián López Cardozo\
1/31 Gateways and Digital Flâneurs
A dizzying array of projects imagining things like digital oases for walking through technicolor cityscapes to meet colleagues, physically modeled exhibits with AR easter eggs, and the fabric of meta spaces as actual fabric were discussed by LARA LESME & FREDERIK HELLBERG, founders of the practice SPACE POPULAR, during Monday’s lecture hosted by UCLA. Wandering between these digital spaces elicits images of the flâneur roaming the streets of 19th-century Paris. Vaguely familiar architectural forms pepper pastel landscapes with help from shape-y figures like rectilinear avatars who dance and pout. When you’re ready to move on, you must simply lift up the fabric of the room itself to transition to the next space.
An hour and a half may not have been enough time to understand all the mechanisms at play in Space Popular’s virtual landscapes, but it is enough to get a sense for the atmospheres around the worlds that the studio is trying to populate.
— Charles Weak
2/2: Towards Cellulose Facades
Professor of biological architecture at Newcastle University, Ruth Morrow tackled the age-old question of how architects can be better collaborators in order to achieve a more sustainable future. Her early research in textile exploration evokes the potential of cellulose fibers to redevelop the harder surfaces in our environment. Material collaborations of beaded crystal, linen, or velvet with concrete were compared to vinegar and chips: “two substances rather odd that come together quite naturally.” As an architect herself, Morrow’s research demands a vision of an adaptive and highly contextual architecture engaging with surprising collaborators in order to produce not only the material bio-adaptability necessary to create plastic building blocks or cellulose facades, but an entirely new architecture. The lecture was hosted by the Farrell Centre, an exciting new public center for architectural thought in the UK.
—Katie Angen
2/2 Skin Games
Taking real phenomena and feeding it through the logic of digital systems often leads to something uncanny in the work of the LA-based studio SPINAGU. As part of the Goldsmith Lecture at UCLA, MAXI SPINA, one of the founders of SPINAGU (their all caps, not ours), presented six projects that poked at the connections between architectural drawing, construction materials, and systems deployed as part of architectural practice. For example, SPINAGU’s Northstar Dermatology campus project in Texas deconstructs the façade of an existing campus facility and then plays games by rewrapping the buildings with wall shadows, brick veneer patterns, and other graphics that misalign (most of the time) with the existing façade elements. Northstar defies attention as your eye bounces around the misalignments of the façade, searching for idiosyncrasies.
It seems that playing games with tropes from architectural drawings and faux materials on the façade of buildings that house dermatological practices is also part of the fun, and indicative of the levity SPINAGU wants to evoke in their work.
— C.W.
Viewing Accidents at Friedman Benda (Closes February 12)
As the chronology of the title highlights, the work in FRIEDMAN BENDA’s latest exhibition Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage, 1981–1991 coincides with the rise of neoliberalism. If made today, the productions of the Creative Salvage group would likely be termed salvagepunk, an aesthetic genre that, like other punk-suffixed aesthetics, presents visions of alternate temporalities, whether dystopic (like cyberpunk) or utopic (like solarpunk). In salvagepunk, you “attempt to survive by picking through the waste of the Earth, combining and repurposing objects and ideas from the past based on their value within hostile environments.” Think Mad Max: Fury Road and you’re there.
To the young punks of 80s London, neoliberalism was a hostile environment, and their attempt to survive led them to weld scrap metal into ad-hoc furniture during illegal raves thrown for their punk bands. The nebulous network of TOM DIXON, RON ARAD, MARK BRAZIER-JONES, ANDRÉ DUBREUIL, DANNY LANE, DEBORAH THOMAS, NICK JONES, JOE RUSH, and JON MILL all contributed in various ways to this scene. Dixon’s Monopod Chair (1985), a tetanus-inducing loose assemblage of rough-cut rusted scrap, is emblematic of the anarchic energy of the movement.
Much of the work, however, possesses qualities I hadn’t expected, like the softness of the smoothed edges of Lane’s stacked glass-slab furniture, or the neo-baroque motifs in the work of Dubreuil. I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of the overture to aristocratic and bourgeois taste in designs emanating from punk raves, but maybe that’s exactly the point. It’s a show worth seeing before it closes next Saturday, even if only for working out ideas for your next trip to Burning Man.
—Nicholas Raap
SHOP (no, not that SHoP, this one supports our writers)
Our sensually nerdy architecture valentine cards from last year are back! Make a triple order for our discounted two pack special and then send every single card to Peter Eisenman.
As we wrap up the next issue, tomorrow is the last day to subscribe if you would like to receive Issue #25 as part of your new subscription, with its gorgeous full-spread-never-before-published prints of drawings by Alvar Aalto.
MOST CLICKED
In Skyline 54, readers were most eager to click through to read about the imminent destruction of a Breuer house.
IN THE NEWS
…the Standard Hotel is falling apart.
…Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer not only judges the Constitution, but also buildings.
…a 200 acre abandoned zoo in the Hudson Valley could become housing.
CALL FOR DESIGNS
The February 12 deadline approaches for our call for designs for a 100% affordable 5WTC with citygroup and Coalition for a 100% Affordable 5 WTC.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Friday, 2/4
FF – Distance Edition: Studio Roberto Rovira with Roberto Rovira
12:00 PM | The Architectural League of New York
City Forum with Destiny Thomas
1:00 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Attention no.6 Launch, "Community is a Practice" with Anna Goodman, Molly Esteve, Curt Gambetta, Joseph Bedford
7:00 PM | Portland State University
Saturday, 2/5
The World Around Summit 2022
12:00 PM | The World Around, The Guggenheim Museum
Monday, 2/7
Disruptive Ecologies with Susan Jones
1:30 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Modern Settlers: Labor and Leisure in Punta Ballena with Ana María León
6:00 PM | Yale University SoA
Generic Specificities with Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas
6:30 PM |GSAPP
Tuesday, 2/8
John T. Dunlop Lecture: The Honorable Marcia L. Fudge with Marcia L. Fudge
6:30 PM | Harvard Graduate School of Design
Wednesday, 2/9
Research, Advocacy, Design: It's All Architecture with Henry Siegel, Larry Strain
1:00 PM | University of California Berkeley
Igor Marjanović | Dean - Rice Architecture with Igor Marjanović
1:30 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Baumer Lecture, The Possibilities of Infrastructure with Dana Cuff
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Destroying Big Mound: Historic Preservation and Settler Colonialism, 1869, 1929, 2014 with Ana María León
6:00 PM | Southern California Institute of Architecture
The Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture: Sara Bronin with Sara Bronin
6:30 PM | Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Thursday, 2/10
Towards Another Architecture with Paradigma Ariadné
12:30 PM | The Farrell Centre
Spring 2022 Sciame Lecture Series with Jerome Haferd, Emanual Admassu, Curry Hackett, Jennifer Newsom
6:00 PM | Spitzer School of Architecture
Global Modernism Today with Esra Akcan, Barry Bergdoll, Mohamed Elshahed, Gabrielle Esperdy
6:00 PM | Center for Architecture
Crystal Palaces: The London, New York, and Paris World's Fairs, 1851–55 with Francis Morrone
6:00 PM | The National Arts Club
Preserving Black Revolutionaries: Carter G. Woodson and the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation with Amber Wiley
6:30 PM | Yale University
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Would you like to share your thoughts? Send them on over! 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).
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 and Thomas Phifer.
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