S K Y L I N E | Bodies and Futures
Something to read when you’re not hitting refresh about Ukraine
Issue 58. If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up here to receive it weekly. Or if you’re looking for a new publication that fits in your back pocket, subscribe to read us in print.
The architecture events of the past week reviewed below share the broad themes of bodies and futures. Some addressed health: a panel in Houston explored our shared air, and an event in Chicago released information about how to combat developments that pollute said air. Others looked forward: an exhibition of ADUs in Berkeley responded to the housing crisis; a salon in Princeton welcomed the merger of academic disciplines; and Craig Wilkins in New York discussed writing in service of Black life.
March is here, and we’re in the thick of the spring lecture season. Notable highlights include today’s June Jordan: Pleasures of Perspectives conference organized by Womxn in Design and Architecture at Princeton, Kieran Long’s two North American lectures on Sigurd Lewerentz (at the CCA and Yale), Lesley Lokko’s Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture at Harvard GSD, and the third installment of Material Worlds at MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute.
Today, though, our minds are on Ukraine. Putin’s invasion is an act of aggression; we condemn this violence. We hope for limited loss of life and the tactic’s quick failure. Consider helping as you can in this moment of crisis. Historian Timothy Snyder has offered some outlets for donations, among other ways of showing solidarity.
—Jack Murphy
DISPATCHES
2/17: Other Architectures… with Craig Wilkins
“As an architect of color, it’s not my desire to work or live in separate worlds: one where architecture has no meaning; the other where people of color have no relevance. So, I write the gap away,” explained CRAIG WILKINS during his lecture at the Spitzer School at the City College of New York as part of its 2022 Spring Sciame Lecture series themed Radical Black Space.
Wilkins spoke poetically about writing as an integral part of artistic production. An original theorist of hip hop architecture, Wilkins explained that this trajectory of reverberating rap music into the built environment began with text. “Writing is a design project. […] We convince people that what we’re saying they should consider,” Wilkins said. His work venerates Black communities and adds to a rich, multigenerational archive of Black thought.
—Sofia Gulaid
2/21: Prepared Air: Rafael Beneytez-Durán, Salmaan Craig, Heather Davis, Joseph Campana, Liz Gálvez
RAFAEL BENEYTEZ-DURÁN, SALMAAN CRAIG, and HEATHER DAVIS gathered in an event moderated by JOSEPH CAMPANA and LIZ GÁLVEZ to discuss the role of air in shaping political and cultural space in and around architecture.
Each panelist spoke about the inherent inequalities of air. Craig discussed fluid mechanics in architecture today and the idea of thermal nesting: that rooms can have thermal variability instead of each being conditioned uniformly. Beneytez-Durán noted that bodies of air and our own bodies are intertwined. Davis pointed out that industrial facilities that pollute the air are regularly located within neighborhoods that house communities of color or underserved communities.
A consensus emerged: air is all around us, but not all air is the same. “We’d love to imagine that everyone gets to breathe healthy clean air all the time, but clean air has more to do with access,” Craig remarked.
At the end of the panel, organized by the Rice Center for Environmental Studies as part of its PlanetNow! Panel: Conversations in Environmental Studies Lecture Series, Q&A exchanges addressed the impossibility of a fully separated interior and exterior; Craig said the dichotomy should be squashed. Soon after, Davis extended the thought: comfort, these days, is a fiction.
—Charles Weak
2/22: Public Newsroom: Will That New Development Benefit Your Community?
In Chicago, we say “every map is the same,” meaning that wealth- and health-building resources in the city are unevenly distributed. So, it’s not surprising that “exciting new developments” on the city’s predominantly Black and Brown South and West sides consist of Amazon distribution warehouses and asphalt plants close to residential areas. How do these facilities, which bring exploitative jobs and increased pollution, get developed?
During their event on Tuesday night, City Bureau, Chicago’s civic journalism lab that trains residents to report on issues in their own neighborhoods, presented a panel event to mark the release of their publication Will That New Development Benefit Your Community? The People’s Guide to Community Benefits Agreements and Alternatives. This zine, created as a part of City Bureau’s Civic Reporting Fellowship by journalists ALBA CAMPOS, PHOEBE MOGHERI, and SARAH CONWAY, provides Chicagoans with information on the complexities of development processes, including agencies responsible for zoning, permitting, and approvals, as well as regulatory and community engagement processes. It also equips readers with tools to advocate for more equitable results of these developments through Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) and aligned policies.
The panel included organizers from successful or ongoing campaigns for CBA agreements (such as one for the Obama Presidential Center) as well as legal and nonprofit advocates. The discussion clarified how developers and city officials rely on opaque processes, devalued land resulting from segregation, and negligent data collection to further new developments that produce real benefits for white, wealthy North-side communities at the expense of those communities in Chicago’s South and West regions.
The zine itself, available as a PDF online or as a free printed document, is an indispensable resource for those who are curious about how to fight developments that can worsen the health and stability of a neighborhood.
—Anjulie Rao
2/23: Salon Series #07: Methods of Scholarship
In a pin-up space lit by four rolling TVs, students of Princeton’s School of Architecture sat in concentric circles of chairs. This gathering, the seventh in an ongoing salon series, brought IVAN LOPEZ MUNUERA, RACHEL PRICE, and MEREDITH TENHOOR together with students for an evening of conversation about methods of scholarship.
The group discussed recent expansions of academic conversations into more broadly accessible forms of media, and how newer and larger audiences might influence disciplinary thought. Despite recognizing that some entrenched forces work to uphold the status quo, those present focused on what seems to be the most promising direction for academic disciplines to move toward each other. Overlapping boundaries and disciplines which lean on each other for support were discussed with excitement; the word unruliness was used, in a decidedly positive light.
Toward the end, the subject of working joyfully came up, as both a mode of operating and a possible alternative to blind optimism. The topic also captured the feeling in the room. The event felt generative and, hopefully, indicative of coming change.
—Cassandra Rota
2/23: Small Infrastructures
At a virtual gallery talk for Small Infrastructures, an exhibition of nine designs for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) which opened this week in the Bauer Wurster Gallery at UC Berkeley, many of the participating architects—MARK ANDERSON, ANDREW ATWOOD, SEAN CANTY, NEYRAN TURAN, and YASMIN VOBIS—presented their designs and joined in conversation with curators MICHELLE CHANG and RUDABEH PAKRAVAN. The show assembles models, drawings, and texts from coastal architects and educators between the sponsoring academic institutions of UC Berkeley and Harvard GSD. (Notably, LYNDON NERI and ROSSANA HU, currently John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture at Harvard GSD, are included; their practice Neri&Hu is based in Shanghai.)
Chang situates the show as a response to Biden’s American Jobs Plan and the new opportunities provided by a shifting climate of policy and public opinion. (While this plan earmarked $213 billion for housing, a White House fact sheet on the subsequent Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress doesn’t mention housing at all.) With home prices up 19% in just this past year, the housing crisis is not abstract: it’s here. The show, Chang explained, “was imagined as a way for architecture to serve as a bridge [...] between policy and what is manifested in the real [constructed] environment.”
For Turan, beyond questions of zoning, form, and materiality, it was imperative to think about land ownership. “[If you look] at the politics of ADUs,” Turan said, “rents are mostly unregulated; it’s impossible to think of the question of housing cost and budget without thinking about property and land.”
Seen in models built and photographed uniformly, these projects showcase calm, cool expertise in the midst of systemic inequities. The show runs through March 16.
—Sebastián López Cardozo
OPPORTUNITIES
The collaborators behind the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kiev, whose competition we announced here last week, released a statement on the invasion in Ukraine:
As architects, artists, designers, academics, and historians from the international community, we are appalled by the egregious acts of war recently undertaken by the Russian Federation, under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, against the sovereign nation and people of Ukraine. As individuals working with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center to memorialize the tragic events that unfolded 80 years ago in Kyiv during the Nazi Holocaust by Bullets, we are profoundly saddened and distraught to see Ukraine again being invaded and its people again being attacked for who they are, and what they believe in. During World War II, the Ukrainian and Russian peoples—Christians, atheists, Jews, Muslims, and others—fought together against the Nazi menace. This solidarity helped to save the world at that time. The current invasion throws a terrible shadow on this history. We condemn these violent acts and the 8-year war that preceded them, and refuse to allow them to impede or prevent our work of memorialization. It is clear that there are still lessons to be learned from the past. We support the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in its work to uncover and preserve the brutal history of Babyn Yar which was buried and obfuscated by the Soviet Union for decades. There were, and still are powerful forces who want to forget the past, to ignore historical facts, and use that blindness as a tool of discrimination, domination, disenfranchisement, and oppression. The story of Babyn Yar is essential to the history of Ukraine, and the people of the world. We will do whatever is in our power to preserve the memory not only of what may seem to be a distant past, but also the history that is made in the present. To our friends and colleagues in Ukraine: we stand with you in this dire time, and care deeply for your safety and wellbeing.
Urban Omnibus / The Architectural League of New York and Urban Design Forum are starting a fellowship program to empower new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and develop our cities. Fellows will be awarded a stipend of $15,000 for participation in the 18-month fellowship. In addition, they will be provided a travel or research stipend of $2,000 and an allowance of up to $2,500 for project expenses. Deadline is March 23, information session is February 28. Information here.
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 57, people were pumped to read Dan Roche’s article about organizing at SHoP.
IN THE NEWS
In the United States, Bitcoin miners and energy producers in Texas are collaborating to use flaring from natural gas production as a power source for cryptocurrency…
…in the Democratic Republic of Congo, efforts are underway to preserve its peatlands at risk of deforestation; peat is, apparently, the unsung hero of carbon capture…
… in Brazil, landslides intensified by climate change wreak havoc on hillside neighborhoods…
… in Saudi Arabia, Neom, a $500 billion-dollar development, which includes a proposal for a linear city over 100 miles in length and an eight-sided floating city, comes under scrutiny…
… and in North Korea, work begins on a large residential district in the Pyongyang neighborhood of Hwasong slated to have 10,000 units, in an effort to address the country’s housing shortage.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Friday, 2/25
June Jordan: Pleasures of Perspectives | 2022 Womxn in Design and Architecture Conference with Rebecca Choi, Nijah Cunningham, Charles L. Davis II, Erica R. Edwards, Cheryl J. Fish, Sophie Hochhäusl, Davy Knittle, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, V. Mitch McEwen, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Brandi Thompson Summers, Ife Vanable
10:00 AM | Princeton University School of Architecture
Spring Lecture Series: Michael Maltzan with Michael Maltzan
6:30 PM | Rice University
Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life with Kieran Long
8:00 PM | Canadian Centre for Architecture
Saturday, 2/26
Head Hi 2022 Third Annual Lamp Show
6:00 PM | Head Hi
Monday, 2/28
Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life with Kieran Long
6:30 PM | Yale University
An Evening with Photographer Sylvia Plachy with Sylvia Plachy
6:30 PM | Pratt
Tuesday, 3/1
Design and Technology Cloud Salon: Ani Liu with Ani Lui
3:00 PM | The New School, Parsons
Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Lesley Lokko with Lesley Lokko
6:30 PM | Harvard GSD
Material Worlds: Carbon with Holly Jean Buck, Robert Niven, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Lindsey Wikstrom
6:30 PM | MoMA Emilio Ambasz Institute
Visiting Artists Lecture Series: Edgar Heap of Birds with Edgar Heap of Birds
9:00 PM | Pratt
Wednesday, 3/2
Baumer Lecture, The Possibilities of Infrastructure with Taiwo Jaiyeoba
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
21st Annual McKim Lecture with James Strickland and Andrew Cogar with James Strickland, Andrew Cogar
6:15 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
A Companion to Architecture with Erin Besler
9:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Stories of Queer Future Ecologies with Salar Mameni, Nicolas Baird, Chandra Laborde
9:30 PM | UC Berkeley
Thursday, 3/3
Lunchtime Talks: Dana Cuff, Christopher Hawthorne, and Greg Lynn: "Los Angeles Experiments in Mobility and Domesticity with Greg Lynn, Dana Cuff
3:00 PM | UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
A Quest for a Continuing Revolution: Black Heritage and the 1976 Bicentennial with Amber Wiley
6:00 PM | Spitzer School of Architecture
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