S K Y L I N E | Engaging Brokenness
War, identity, home, reconstruction
Issue 83. All the cool people (really, all of them!) are joining us for our issue #31 launch party in a beer garden tonight. We’d love for you to be there, too. nyra.nyc/rsvp
Pandemic restrictions are easing across North America, yet promises of Covid’s transition to a less harmful, endemic form offer little in the way of closure. We remain in a state of perpetual brokenness, but acknowledging this fact might actually do us some good. After all, it would be illusory to think that in the face of mounting global crises we will ever reach any kind of “fixed” state. For this reason, we might consider brokenness to be an opportunity for engaging with fully. The events covered in this week’s Skyline do exactly this, even while dealing with contexts as varied as wartime reconstruction and exhibition-making. They look forward to rebuilding, to inventing, to reimagining our futures.
—Sebastián López Cardozo
Looking to Tallinn: An Interview with Assistant Curator Sonia Sobrino Ralston
Last week, after lengthy pandemic-related delays, the sixth edition of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) opened at the Estonian Museum of Architecture in the country’s capital. The event theme, “Edible; Or the Architecture of Metabolism,” was developed by curators LYDIA KALLIPOLITI and ARETI MARKOPOULOU with assistant curator SONIA SOBRINO RALSTON. I spoke with Sobrino Ralston about the urgency of the theme, supply-chain disruptions, and more.
Sebastián López Cardozo: How did the theme come about? Metabolism has a particular history and baggage within architecture. At TAB, the term seems to be deployed in a more precise, literal way.
Sonia Sobrino Ralston: Head curators Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou developed the theme together and won the curatorship as part of an international call. Both Lydia and Areti’s research focuses on the ways in which metabolic processes and circular economic thinking have or could be integrated into architectural theory and practice, from closed loop systems in spaceships to circular economic thinking and innovation in cities. And by “metabolic processes,” I mean literal processes of ingestion, digestion, and decomposition as they relate to matter and energy. Food in this case is broadly understood as inputs that contribute to systems of energy production, waste management, and—of course—literal food systems. So perhaps in contrast to capital-M Metabolism of Japan in the 1960s, this biennale was focused not on emulating the systems of nature through form, but rather to embody natural systems of growth and decay into its ethos.
SLC: How did the pandemic crisis figure in the preparatory conversations about the theme?
SSR: The biennale itself was also a casualty of being put on pandemic standby, and was also the product of many people incubating it largely online. I think, however, the pandemic only strengthened our relationship to the theme. As some of us huddled indoors mediating our responsibilities and relationships through a Zoom screen, two things occurred. For one, global supply chains were entirely disrupted, including food production and distribution, though their functions continued to be carried out by frontline and essential workers. And beyond this, lockdown reframed many of our experiences of home and cities as ones that collapsed into very small, localized centers; people rarely ventured beyond the confines of the neighborhoods. As a result, the reality of the pandemic ended up reflecting the urgency of the theme in the first place, that is, to develop a localized and circular economic built environment. Beyond the pressures of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine exerted a pressure on the biennale planning, through supply-chain disruptions that we felt in our installation design.
SLC: How does Estonia’s history (and geopolitical context) enter into dialogue with the central exhibition? Does it explicitly engage past and present?
SSR: In looking to Estonia’s architectural past and present, there are so many fantastic experiments that make it an exciting place to think about the themes of circular economy and metabolism. Estonians historically rejected and engaged in dissident practices against the Soviet occupation and have since the regaining of independence in the 1990s developed work that has its own idiosyncratic relationship to architecture, and by extension, metabolisms of production and consumption. From presentations at the symposium by historian Epp Lankots on leisure cultures and food during the Soviet occupation, to an installation integrating subsistence gardens into the facades of buildings in Tallinn by Sille Pihlak and Siim Tuksam, the work from Estonia offers a uniquely deft and clever set of methods to push at the boundaries of policy and standards to imagine fiercely independent and sustainable near futures.
DISPATCHES
9/10: Rebuilding Ukraine
LIVESTREAM—As the war in Ukraine rages on, academics and design practitioners from around the world came together in a virtual three-day symposium hosted by the Lviv Center for Urban History to discuss the topic of reconstruction. (Recordings of all the talks are available for free online.) At the Saturday session I attended, discussants SOFIA DYAK, MAYHILL FOWLER, KIMBERLY ST. JULIAN VARNON, MICHAŁ MURAWSKI, and YULIYA YURCHUK spoke about the conflict’s relationship to the history of the Soviet Union. St. Julian Varnon admitted to becoming “angry that so much of our narratives of Soviet histories were defined by the state, by state archival documents written by people who were carrying out a veritable genocide against Ukraine peasants [during the Holodomor War].”
The panelists reflected on the need for a paradigm shift in how one thinks about the war. They raised questions about the widespread hesitation to use terms like “empire” and “colony” when it comes to talking about Russia and Ukraine. With reconstruction in mind, they talked about the need to make space for personal narratives in historical archives to tell the story of the Ukrainian people. “What’s missing in the state archive is the emotional experience,” noted Fowler. “No one talks about trauma, about the emotional experience of going through war.”
—Randa Omar
9/13: Queering Design
MIDTOWN—When staffers at Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) established an LGBTQ group (RAMSA Q+), they had difficulty finalizing their logo design. “Do we preserve the original sketch, or hardline it?” recounted partner (and tower whisperer) MICHAEL JONES. Being RAMSA, they started doing precedent research, looking for guidance from the history of the gay rights movement, which led them to the book Queer X Design, and an invitation to its author, ANDY CAMPBELL, who presented the book at their office Tuesday afternoon. “What are the symbols that actually oppress, and how are they turned around… or not,” posed Campbell, as he identified three points of tension running through queer design: 1) Assimilation vs. Differentiation, 2) Addressability vs. Coding and 3) Struggle vs. Celebration. One symbol that traveled particularly far is the pink triangle, from its origins as a symbol placed on gay men’s uniforms in Nazi concentration camps to the adopted symbol of the gay rights movement in the early ’70s. The symbol that overtook it may be the most ubiquitous of all—the rainbow flag. “I pushed back against putting the rainbow flag on the front cover,” Campbell shared, but then he learned the story of its origins, beginning in 1978, when the flag was unveiled at San Francisco’s city hall. There were, in fact, two of them, they were gigantic, and their creators tie dyed each by hand, creating all sorts of irregularities (such as a star that wandered into one of the blue stripes). While Campbell bemoaned today’s “rainbow washing,” the flag’s first brush with mass production would turn out to be very potent: after the assassination of Harvey Milk later in 1978, the city commissioned thousands of them to festoon streets and intersections.
—Nicolas Kemper
9/14: An Inaugural Evening
UPPER WEST SIDE—On Wednesday, Columbia GSAPP’s newest program, the Master of Science in Computational Design Practices (M.S.CDP), kicked off the fall semester with a lecture by EYAL WEIZMAN, founder of the London-based research group, Forensic Architecture (FA). Weizman, who was denied entry to the United States just two years ago, recently received a new visa and is on a weeklong speaking tour to discuss FA’s latest “investigations” into cases of state violence and violations of human rights. “Happy to be here [at GSAPP], though I’m ambivalent about being back in the US,” he said. The title of his lecture, “Cloud Studies,” referred to a 2021 investigation into Israeli attacks on Gaza, where researchers used the smoky airborne residue of missiles to situate the strikes in space and time. “His work sets the tone for what we’re aiming for with the program,” M.S.CDP assistant director ADAM VOSBURGH had told me before the event, which closed with responses from program director LAURA KURGAN and dean ANDRÉS JAQUE. It was a celebratory evening for GSAPP, which, in seamless fashion, inaugurated a new dean, program, and academic year.
—Osvaldo Delbrey Ortiz
9/14: The Time for Questions
ITHACA—This was not a lecture, though of course it was. ANA PAULA RUIZ GALINDO and MECKY REUSS, founders of the Mexico City studio Pedro&Juana, addressed students at Cornell with the same playfulness that infused their submission statement for the 2019 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (“Acknowledgment: This is not a proposal!”) that resulted in the installation, Hórama Ráma.
In speaking about their recent work, the designers largely danced around didactic certainty in favor of digressive interrogation. For example, their presentation began with a reflection on the way time around us is collapsing—“no longer read in a linear way, understanding both time and history to be in constant movement,” said Ruiz Galindo—and developed into the idea of otherness as a force of creative disturbance.
The most salient point of the night, however, came when Ruiz Galindo read from the PS1 statement, written in anticipation of the built pavilion. “Maybe we will produce something with the capacity to be politically and socially disruptive, something that allows itself to be foreign, and can be recognized as such. It is time to make space for the outsider. It is time to tear down the walls, to allow in that which we don’t recognize and allow it to create a dialogue. A dialogue that starts with that architecture object (whatever it may be). This is the time for the questions; the answers come through the design. Through the making of the object.”
—Lauren Phillips
9/14: Transitions
EAST VILLAGE—MCKENZIE WARK, professor of media and cultural studies at The New School, introduced Cooper Union faculty and students to a new term: “kainotecture.” Wark, who first developed the idea in a 2017 essay for e-flux, explained that as a practice of preparing for the unknowable, kainotecture emerges in transitional tectonics. Illustrative projects include Archigram’s walking cities, Virilio’s brutal bunkers, and Isozaki’s metabolist clusters. Wark went on to describe how gender dysphoria, or a signaling of a body that needs to transition, could be mapped onto global environmental indicators ranging from soil samples and power outages, saying “the whole planet is transgender, the planet is trans, but is ignoring that it needs to transition.”
The audience seemed ready to rechristen the building, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Kainotecture. Attendees shared their own states of dysphoria and thirst for disciplinary change, with one asking Wark how architects could model new forms of desire away from a “straight” desire for perpetuity and fixity. She suggested that “need” might be a better word than “desire” (one does not always need to summon Freud!), before going on to clarify her position as a materialist—the need to transition being based in, well, necessity.
—Angie Door
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 82, readers were interested to learn about the decision by several schools to opt out of the DesignIntelligence ranking for 2022.
IN THE NEWS
This week,
…James Stewart Polshek, an advocate for social value in architecture, died last week at 92…
…in The Architect’s Newspaper, critic Kate Wagner questions the ethics of carceral design…
…The New York Times muses about architecture’s capacity to “build values”...
…five anonymous architects have proposals in the running for Jeff Bezos’s $130 million DC learning center…
…the Chicago Architecture Biennale announced Floating Museum as the lead artistic team for the 2023 biennale, the fifth edition of the annual art and design exhibition…
…newly crowned King Charles III has some peculiar ideas about urban design, as evidenced by his forays into Transylvania…
…a familiar story: architects at London studio Atomik Architecture strike for better pay and working conditions…
…critic Aaron Betsky tours the charmingly colorful PoMo village of Portmeirion in Wales…
…the greatest shitposters and memers in architecture discourse finally get their due in Dwell…
…museums remain coy about questions related to the (dubious) origins of many acquisitions...
…modernist poet Laura Riding abandoned the work she loved—poetry—and moved to Florida to grow oranges. Should you do it too?...
…Jean-Luc Godard, a French film director who sought a culture of his own, died on Tuesday…
—Alissa Serfozo and Anna Gibertini
BOOK TALK
We are having a book talk! Next Wednesday. You can attend in person or by Zoom: nyra.nyc/book
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Friday, 9/16
New York Reviews Architecture: Issue #31 Launch
7:00 PM | New York Review of Architecture
Saturday, 9/17
Walking Tour: Modern Architecture in the West Village and Meatpacking District with Kyle Johnson
1:00 PM | AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Stony Creek Quarry and the Granite that Built New York with Darrell Petit
2:00 PM | Untapped New York
Public Space In A Private Time: Building Storefront for Art and Architecture
4:00 PM | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Monday, 9/19
Forget What You’ve Been Sold: A Few Points about an Antifascist Architecture, with Andrew Santa Lucia
7:00 PM | University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
Tuesday, 9/20
Domestic Imaginaries: Platforms for Social Change with Tatiana Bilbao and Elisa Iturbe
6:30 PM | Cooper Union
Walter Hood
7:00 PM | School of Art Institute Chicago
The Power of Transformative Design with Kevin Bethune
8:30 PM | California College of the Arts Architecture Division
Wednesday, 9/21
Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, Unknown Fields with Liam Young
6:00 PM | UT Austin School of Architecture
Segregation by Design with Adam Paul Susaneck
6:00 PM | The National Arts Club
Fall 2022 Sciame Lecture Series with Claudio Lomnitz
6:00 PM | City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture
Green Reconstruction with Reinhold Martin, Weiping Wu, Mario Gooden, and Quilian Riano
6:30 PM | GSAPP
If Walls Could Speak with Moshe Safdie and Sam Lubell
6:30 PM | Cooper Union
When Eero Met His Match with Eva Hagberg and Marianna Janowicz
7:00 PM | Head Hi, New York Review of Architecture
Thursday, 9/22
The Passage of Time with Brigitte Shim
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
Unprecedented Realism: Selections from the Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti Collection
6:30 PM | Harvard Graduate School of Design
We Gathered: 130 Years of Asian American Activism in New York City with Wajahat Ali, Gina Apostol, and Shekar Krishnan
7:00 PM | Cooper Union
Orit Halpern
9:00 PM | California College of the Arts Architecture Division
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
Have a take of global importance to share with NYRA? Write us a letter!
NYRA is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. 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.
To support our contributors and receive the Review by post, subscribe here.