S K Y L I N E | Criticism for the Young
Kate Wagner, Mark Lee, and an old critic’s lament blows up on Twitter.
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On Tuesday, a few moments from a symposium organized by Università di Pisa set architecture Twitter alight after DOUGLAS SPENCER tweeted live from the scene. According to Spencer, fellow presenter BOB SOMOL bemoaned the current state of criticism (the ostensible topic of discussion) while directing a rather boorish insult at critic and McMansion Hell creator KATE WAGNER, who was not in attendance but was evidently on his mind. Days earlier, she had delivered the 2023 Student Choice Lecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where, until last summer, Somol served as director for many years. “It’s nice to hear my millennial charm is still endearing,” Wagner said after receiving a warm greeting from her audience. “It’s more exciting to be still relevant by those just coming up in the field.”
The dispatches that follow—including one of Wagner’s UIC talk—are all preoccupied with questions of relevance. Is architecture out of step with the world, or just itself? Read on to find out.
— Osvaldo Delbrey Ortiz
DISPATCHES
3/31: Bikes and Buildings, Together at Last
CHICAGO — “The bike is not an ideology, it’s a mere tool,” said KATE WAGNER at a lecture ostensibly about architecture. Wagner, speaking to students at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, took the opportunity to draw together her two critical objects of choice—buildings and cycling. Like the bicycle, a building, too, is a tool. As such, it should do what is required of it and not try to solve problems it cannot fix on its own, Wagner said. Rather than narrow design’s horizons, such an imperative opens up space for targeted inquiry and experimentation, whose effects would benefit the built environment. Toward the end of her talk, Wagner elided the distinction between critic and journalist and asserted the idea of the critic as journalist, saying, “A good critic, like a good building, serves their subject.” The commitment to hold architecture accountable is made with love, just as the architect’s desire is to make buildings better.
— Cody Tyler Schueller
4/4: On Point
CAMBRIDGE — For MARK LEE, good things in architecture tend to come in fives: five orders, five points, five years as chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD. On Tuesday night, Lee delivered his last lecture in the role with a talk titled, “Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture.” Over the course of almost two hours, Lee shared a series of precise and personal reflections on subjects that, in his words, “are important and relevant to architecture today.” Like Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction (1966), the talk was styled as a “gentle manifesto.” Also like C&C, the discrete individual chapters (yes, five of them) that comprised the talk began with a history lesson and concluded with relevant projects by Johnston Marklee, the firm Lee co-founded with his partner, SHARON JOHNSTON, in 1998. The resemblance was not lost on members of the audience. Responding to a prompt from EMMETT ZEIFMAN, Lee explained that he does not invoke history to legitimate his work, but rather as an occasion to reflect on the parallels between his observations of the field and his professional output. In his closing remarks, Lee invoked another architect, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus who took up the chair at Harvard in 1938. “He once said, ‘If your contribution has been vital, there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off.’” Lee continued, “I personally feel very satisfied to be the one who helped pick up where others left off.... Why? Because I have a fundamental belief in the discipline of architecture. I believe that we are all destined to play our respective roles and collectively we make our discipline worthy of thought and discernment.”
— Phillip Denny
4/4: Better Late Than Never?
UNION SQUARE — DAVID ADJAYE, the designer of the new Studio Museum in Harlem, and FRIDA ESCOBEDO, the designer of the Met’s reorganization of its modern wing, came together for a discussion moderated by JULIAN ROSE at the New School that turned on the question, “What does it mean for an artist to make architecture?” That was the plan, anyway. Escobedo’s arrival was significantly delayed, however, and Adjaye and Rose were left to parley about the artist Donald Judd, whose architectural projects Rose has previously written about for Gagosian Quarterly. (The gallery sponsored the talk.) For Adjaye, Judd’s designs “resonated [in] that space-making was a fundamental question of architecture” and showed a “new way of making.” The conversation remained at the level of rumination even after Escobedo appeared on stage (forty-five minutes into an hour-long event) and Rose asked for her thoughts on the relationship between the architect and the museum. The former, she underscored, occupies only one slot of time in the life of the latter, which is itself less a permanent object than a congealment of various historical and cultural narratives. “Well, I don’t know if I can talk about time,” she noted the irony.
— Poun Laura Kim
3/23: Old Habits Die Hard
ASTOR PLACE — “There is something so terrifying, but also provocative in Houston as a patchwork,” said BRITTANY UTTING, to a small crowd upstairs at the Cooper Union on a Thursday evening as she and her partner (in life and work) DANIEL JACOBS presented a series of speculative projects inspired in part by their Texan hometown. The two teach at the architecture school at Rice and the University of Houston, respectively, and they co-founded the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. The audience had lots of questions. “There’s a Palladian thing happening…” someone pointed out, possibly in reference to their proposal for 138 different residences, each one designed for an improbably specific purpose. (No. 131: “House for an average sized household.”) “It’s probably because we were indoctrinated by Palladio—our school made us this way,” said Utting, alluding to the one-time dominance of formal analysis at their alma mater, the Yale School of Architecture. (As a former classmate of Utting and Jacobs’s, I can attest to this point.) Yet at the same time, the duo’s work evinced an obsessive attention toward decidedly non-formal elements—for example, the detailing of solar panels. Their host and interlocutor, ELISA ITURBE, asked if they were mindful of “a danger of fetishizing the mechanical.” Replied Utting, “To address the techno-positive element in the room...we want to make sure the systems are visible, because so much architecture hides the vast mobilization of land, resources, tools and technologies that makes it possible.” They have not, however, entirely renounced their roots. “Have you ever felt frustrated working in axonometric?” asked Architectural Lobby cofounder PEGGY DEAMER. “We feel frustrated working in perspective,” answered Jacobs.
— Nicolas Kemper
EYES ON SKYLINE
In SKYLINE 108, readers were drawn to news of the strike at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture.
IN THE NEWS
This week,
…the Architecture Lobby joins the fight at Taubman College…
…the denizens of Burning Man realize they might be on a climate death spiral…
…New York Magazine notices something is amiss with the LED lightbulb…
…Marianela D’Aprile compares the new Perelman Arts Center to Milan’s Duomo—and asks if it may have been wiser to spend the money on housing…
…speaking of which, in a push for more housing near transit, East Bronx readies for rezoning to spur development of 6,000 homes…
…and Kim Kardashian met with Tadao Ando to discuss a “dream project”—probably not public housing.
HOUSE AD
This coming week we are cosponsoring two events, each with a more technical bent: a book talk about increasing access to tools and manufacturing at Citygroup and the launch of a new group, the Alternative Building Industry Collective, at Cooper Union. Come hang out with us.
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Friday 4/7
RECORDAR Exhibition Opening Performance with Debora Garcia
5:30 PM | Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning
Monday 4/10
SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima
6:30 PM | Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Billie Tsien presents UCLA AUD’s 2022-2023 Distinguished Alumni Lecture
6:30 PM PDT | UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Tuesday 4/11
Reconnecting Communities: The Highway to Nowhere with Martin French
4:00 PM | Morgan State University School of Architecture + Planning
How Not to Demolish a Building with Olivier Cavens, Dieter Leyssen, & Elisa Iturbe
7:00 PM | The Architectural League of New York & Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
Wednesday 4/12
Hybrid Factory with Nina Rappaport & Dieter Leyssen
6:30 PM | New York Review of Architecture at Citygroup
Abundant Cities: Inclusive Cities with Adair Mosley
7:00 PM | Walker Art Center & Minneapolis Foundation
Thursday 4/13
Colonial Remnants of the Urban Present with Ross Exo Adams
6:30 PM | Yale University School of Architecture
Building Coalitions for a Just Transition: Introducing the Alternative Building Industry (ABI) Collective
7:00 PM |Alternative Building Industry Collective, The Architecture Lobby, Science for the People, & New York Review of Architecture
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events through this link.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
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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.
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