S K Y L I N E | Closure
At least until January
Critics Mark Lamster, Alexandra Lange and Carolina A. Miranda recently bequeathed upon us the “Gold Megaphone” reward, with the citation “pass the mic to the millennials”, which we can only assume is very prestigious. But do not take their word for it, subscribe to find out for yourself.
Today is our forty fourth and last issue of SKYLINE in 2022 and lo and behold we have a little bit of closure.
AT THE NEW SCHOOL, on Saturday at 10pm the adjuncts emerged (tentatively) victorious from their twenty five day strike, the longest adjunct strike in US history. Word is, however, that the action may not stop here. With trust between the faculty and the administration at a pretty low point, some members of the faculty have told me they are exploring ways to sack their board of trustees and convert the school from a non-profit to a cooperative, placing the faculty firmly in charge. Is that even possible? Probably not… but maybe. See, the New School has just about no endowment and very little fundraising, taking in most of its $426.4 million (as of 2020) in annual revenue in tuition payments from students. The lack of donors could possibly allow the school to forgo the donor-friendly nonprofit tax treatment, and be run as a viable cooperative. The Architecture Lobby, which made the case for cooperatives way back in Skyline 14, would be pleased. That modest endowment, by the way, I am told is intentional: the idea is that a school supported by its students will put its students, not its donors, first. Maybe it will help them put their faculty first, too.
AT CORNELL, where a letter writing campaign on behalf of DR. SAMIA HENNI prompted Dank Lloyd Wright to call a zoom protest at an event this week, the protesters were apparently closed out, or rather rendered unable to protest, when Cornell turned the event into a panel format where you could not see or talk to any of the other participants. We had a correspondent there, who brought back notes from the conversation, below.
AT SO – IL, their principal FLORIAN IDENBURG tells us that the blowback from the internet and some conversations with their associates has led them to overhaul their salary structure and benefits. SO – IL has also, apparently, deleted the comment laden instagram post that became a lightning tried to explain the first post, which was also deleted.
And with that, no one please say or post or really do anything of note until Friday January 6, when Skyline returns.
DISPATCHES
12/2: Architecture Responds
LOWER EAST SIDE — Those of us in attendance at this self-styled debate hosted by the Center for Architecture (CFA) were confronted with two big-block words: “ARCHITECTURE RESPONDS.” To what architecture responds or doesn’t respond became a little clearer as moderators VIOLETTE DE LA SELLE and ALICE TAI read aloud the well-crafted statements they had prepared for the evening. Both are members of citygroup, a curatorial collective that was named to the CFA’s 2022 class of New Practices; until Covid, they often hosted these sorts of debates at their small Chinatown gallery. In that sense, the event felt like a return to old social rhythms. De La Selle and Tai hoped that participants would consider the “material that has been swept along by the tide of capital—that we as architects are best equipped to contend with.” We were also asked—dared?—to entertain “a bit of a retrograde argument for historic preservation,” which they said could be recast as a site of resistance for obstructing capital flows. As the conversation got going, other questions surfaced. For instance, when does architecture happen? In the drawing that presages and alleges to coordinate construction, in the completed building, or in a future beyond? Underscoring the wider issue of temporality served to unsettle conceptions of architecture’s timeliness, or untimeliness, and thus its capacity, or incapacity, to respond to events in the world. And at what point does reactivity slide into reactionaryism, exemplified by the field’s gendered outlook? Perhaps architecture cannot respond without first reckoning with its own inheritance.
— Emily Conklin
12/5: Automating urban design?
ZOOM — As part of a series of lectures at MIT titled “What does urban science have to say about urban design?” MIKE BATTY presented a quantitative approach to person-to-person interactions in the pursuit of consensus about spatial planning, research that he believes can be used to optimize the (re)design of cities. By breaking down the design process into three parts—first the group dynamics, second the site(s), and third, the process of reaching consensus—he creates a neural net-like structure that correlates the opinions of the actors/stakeholders (residents, developers, corporations, etc) with the sites/buildings/locations under consideration (banks, housing, historic buildings, etc) to produce a series of optimized maps. Batty stated that: “The process of transmission between the actors can be changed quite dramatically so for example you might find that in certain iterations some actors don’t compromise etc, so there might be a situation where the network changes … that was the implication of the neural nets - the network might change over time so the network”.
Urban planners, watch out.
— Ronak Gandhi
12/6: Setting the table
ZOOM — From a laptop in my brother’s Brooklyn kitchen I listened to JOE PETERANGELO talk about over a decade of research on housing in and around Milwaukee. The work, an output of the Wisconsin Policy Forum (founded 1913), was centered on the city as a national outlier of rental burden and racial housing disparities, and which got a lot of attention eight years ago as a result of the publishing of Evicted by Matthew Desmond. The throughline of Peterangelo’s talk was to unravel a “highly fragmented system of services,” characterized by lack of inter-agency communication or collaboration—over two dozen agencies “oftentimes were not aware of each other’s work,” as he put it—and to highlight the recent push from non-profit research & advocacy groups to set the table (and often provide the menu, the venue, the seating). The three reports presented—one on evictions, another on a block revitalization program, and a third on scattered housing resources—prompted thoughtful questions by the audience about lack of investor property management, community trust, and density respectively. The host, CAROLYN ESSEWEIN of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Peterangelo enjoyably moderated the jargon-light but policy forward conversation—ending with links, further reading, a survey on the event itself, and tempered optimism.
— Sam Naylor
12/12: At the drop of a hat
ZOOM - "If you are working on social justice... or social change you can never take for granted that progress will be permanent - you must have institutions who are durable and ready at the drop of a hat for whatever the challenge may be to join you in that challenge,” said architect ROSS EXO ADAMS, not necessarily aware that with a few tweaks of the zoom settings the institution hosting his event, Cornell, had effectively boxed out an aspiring gaggle of digital protesters seeking some social change, or at least a statement, on behalf of DR. SAMIA HENNI.
The gathering marked the new Master of Science in Advanced urban Design at Cornell, with presenters including JESSE LECAVALIER, LYDIA KALLIPOLITI, PETER DWAYNE ROBINSON, ADAM LUBINSKY, SNOWERIA ZHANG, and SHAWN RICKENBACKER. My favorite may have been Kallipoliti, who in the context of an exhibit about Mars at the London Design Museum, discussed “the politics of shit,” that is the geopolitics of living machines and excremental processes. She said that “understanding how to design such spaces depends largely under regenerative properties of earth-based biology, and our ability to engineer and tinker with resources through the field of synthetic biology.”
— Ronak Gandhi
NYRA ABOVE THE TOWN
OMA’s first New York towers opened for business a week ago Wednesday. Dancing 40 stories above medium-density Little Poland, Eagle + West (Greenpoint Landing Block D) extends the high-rise rhizome from Long Island City south across Newtown Creek with 745 new residential units. In playful contrast to the static tectonics of neighbors across the creek, the towers step and lean into each other across a 60 foot void. From the terraced mass, views of the cantilevers are geometrically thrilling. Views from underneath the gridded cantilevers bottoms frame Brooklyn with Superstudio-esque flair. 8’x8’ windows relentlessly punch through variegated concrete panels up and down each façade.
A very OMA exposed-truss two-story bridge connects the two towers, above exterior cooking stalls and putting green, housing pink terrazzo-clad interior pool deck and fitness gym. Naked poolside, the ungroomed gusset plates add a vintage feel to the Manhattan skyline views. The cantilevered tower’s structural gymnastics create large open lobbies and amenity spaces, styled with window seats, fluted marble panels, and oak-clad elevator banks and stair corridors. Affordable units populate the lower 7-story mass and the eastern 30-story tower in this 421A development. The riverside 40-story tower is 100% market rate, crowned by a delirious bachelor pad and 270-degree terrace.
Two Morris Adjmi towers will join the party to the south, across a trucking lot. But until 421A or another financial incentive is reinstated, new neighborhood development projects are on hold, giving a break to adjust to the influx of new residents.
— Michael Licht
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WRITING at SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS
The MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism at School of Visual Arts has opened its applications for next year.
SVA is a friend of NYRA, many of their graduates write and edit for us, and we share their belief in combining smart criticism with original journalism. We also share office space with their students. So if you are looking for a strong advanced design writing program… and to hang out with us, consider applying.
STAYING UP WITH THE TOOTS
Twitter is becoming a pretty dark place, so we are going to remind our friends there again that we have a Mastodon account, not because we understand the platform, but because moving there seems like the Right Thing to do... and twitter now apparently bans people for mentioning or linking to Mastodon, which honestly makes it kind of cool.
IN THE NEWS
…Jacobin hosts an architecture podcast…
….Dezeen interviewed the executive of a concrete association and discovered that he was pro-concrete: "We are not against any type of materials," he said. "I am definitely not the one that will start to bitch on wood or things like this….
…Michael Kimmelman gave BroSis’s new Harlem headquarters, designed by Union Architectural Initiatives, a rave review…
…Kate Wagner reviews a house in Wake Forest that may or may not actually exist…
A BOOK TALK ON JAN. 11
We have rescheduled our book event! To January. You should come.
DATELINE
There are just two events left in this year, both today, one of which starts in just over an hour. Have events for next year? Go to our events page and submit them.
Friday, 12/16
Designing for Post-Incarceration with Frank Greene, Jeff Mellow, Topeka K. Sam, Hernandez Stroud, Insha Rahman, Rebecca Brown, Zellnor Myrie, Jerrod Delaine, Nadine Maleh, Stanley Richards, & Cynthia Stuart
8:30 AM EST | Center for Architecture
Pure Moods Holiday Party (Bring Friends)
7:00 pm | Citigroup, 104b Forsyth Street
YEAR IN REVIEW
We may spend our first issue of 2023 looking back on 2022. What happened, anyway? Simply reply to this e-mail to tell us what parts of 2022 best merit inclusion in a year end roundup.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our editor is Samuel Medina. 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.
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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