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—and suddenly it’s March. Or is it “finally?” Somehow the two weeks since the Russian invasion of Ukraine have felt long, and the past two years have flown by in a blur of isolation and loss and “can everyone see my screen”s and “you’re on mute”s. Readers may disagree with this exact assessment; among its other legacies, Covid has profoundly altered how each of us perceive the passing of time. This can be destabilizing: it is time, much more than built form (she posits to a bunch of architects) that structures how we experience the world. I draw here on Kevin Lynch, who argued the same in What Time is this Place? The deep subjectivity of how we experience time, both cyclical patterns and linear progression, shapes the spaces around us. “Past, present, and future are created anew by each individual,” he writes. (119)
Nowhere is the subjectivity of time more visible than in Ukraine. A violent misreading of history and heritage, Putin’s own subjective view of the past, is at the heart of Putin’s invasion. The fungibility of time is why at times like these, I turn to historians, the referees of those who tell stories of how time passes. Lynch is no historian, but it’s a medium he’s concerned with. “Being alive is being awake in the present, secure in our ability to continue to be alert to the new things that come streaming by. We feel our own rhythm, and feel also that it is part of the rhythm of the world. It is when local time, local place, and our own selves are secure that we are ready to face challenge, complexity, vast space, and the enormous future.” (89) May Ukrainians and all others who are facing instability and violence soon be granted the security of local time brought by peace and justice.
— Tess McCann
DISPATCHES
3/3: Presenting possible plans for the future of LA’s urban fabric
LOS ANGELES (ZOOM) — Self-driving cars and NIMBYs were popular targets for scrutiny in Thursday’s Lunchtime talk at UCLA on “Los Angeles Experiments in Mobility and Domesticity.” Architects and professors GREG LYNN and DANA CUFF, with critic CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE presented some of their interests and work on mobility and domesticity in LA, discussing at length the potential that Los Angeles’s urban fabric has to adapt to a less car-centric future. Topics ranged from legislative initiatives already in the works around ADUs, safe parking lots, residential architecture for the public realm, to ruminations on what might come next like removing sections of freeways for public parks or housing.
The conversation dedicated ample time to the workings of policy initiatives, and what those policies are doing or would do for Angelenos. In the spirit of, “The best traffic plan is a land use plan,” as Lynn put it, might a better architectural plan be a legislative plan?
— Charles Weak
3/4: Planning and Designing Equitable Places for All with Mitchell Silver
ITHACA, NY (ZOOM) — “81.5% of New Yorkers live within a walk of a park,” according to a proximity metric cited by award-winning planner MITCHELL SILVER, former New York City Parks Commissioner. What that metric did not show, however, was what percentage of those parks were properly maintained. Lafayette Playground in Brooklyn, for example, is a park that people can walk to. “But look at what it looks like,” he continued, showing a cheerless and barren asphalt landscape. At the beginning of Silver’s tenure, 215 of the city’s 1,700 parks had received capital investment of less than $250,000 over a 20 year period. “This was not fair,” he added, “most of these were in underserved areas.”
During his seven years as Commissioner, Silver oversaw the rebuilding of 60 under-resourced parks through the Community Parks Initiative—a $318 million equitable park improvement program launched by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014. Silver, who had been part of a successful campaign to repeal anti-loitering laws in New York City's public parks, responded to a student's question about the city's loitering policies with a smile. "When you come to New York City," he said, "you can loiter in our parks."
— Sebastián López Cardozo
3/8: 2022 Spotlight Award + Lecture with Nguyen Hai Long and Tran Thi Ngu Ngon
HOUSTON (IRL) — “Imagine this: on a hot summer day, everyone turns on their air conditioners and release an added heatwave into the environment,” said Tropical Space co-founder TRẦN THỊ NGỤ NGÔN at the Rice Design Alliance’s Spotlight Award lecture. The Ho Chi Minh City based studio, co-led by Ngôn and NGUYỄN HẢI LONG, revived (through their work) the humble brick—a material that locally has been associated with “backwardness and poverty”—as a climatic device to adapt to the country’s intense (sub)tropical rainfalls and sun. Beyond its environmental benefits, brick provides a nod to the cultural heritage of Vietnamese folk architecture. “As our fathers and grandfathers have done with bamboo,” added Ngôn in reference to the screens used for sunlight and spatial division, “we do it with brick to reconnect people and nature.” From designing chicken coops, familial housing and showrooms, often with a limited budget, Tropical Space has developed a culturally and climatically sensitive approach to designing with brick and nature.
— Cécile Ngọc Sương Perdu
CAMBRIDGE, MA (ZOOM) — “Initially I thought he was confused about who I was and what I do,” photographer MIKE BELLEME said of CHRIS REED, the design director of Stoss Landscape Urbanism and a GSD faculty member. Belleme shoots in a documentary style with an eye to the awkwardness of “raw reality.” Bored with landscape glamour shots, Reed asked Belleme to interpret the sites of Stoss projects in his own way, embracing the contradictions of urbanization. The result is Mise-en-Scène: The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes, a book that explores the social and physical textures of seven places across the U.S. Belleme’s photos are quiet but restless, full of lingering questions and juxtapositions. Praised by moderator SARA ZEWDE for eschewing the traditional monograph structure, the book also includes essays, maps, drawings, and interviews with residents. In foregrounding “messiness and richness,” Reed says, the book reaffirms that “Our work is often just a prompt to people acting out their lives.”
— Gideon Fink Shapiro
3/9: Rethinking Urban Materiality: Time as a Resource with Anupama Kundoo
LOS ANGELES (ZOOM) — After a rather strange but very on-Sci-Arc-brand opening that featured the animated head of a female humanoid speaking in a calm a flight-attendant voice, theorist and architect ANUPAMA KUNDOO presented twelve points for how to reconsider a staid approach to materiality, in which “we think of a material as separate from humans, as itself good or bad.” Rather, she argued, material is deeply intertwined with the humans who source it, build with it, design with it, and live with it. She suggested that a scarcity mentality has overcome both use of materials and use of time, and that “it is the misguided use of our time that leads to the mismanagement of natural resources.” There is a high environmental price, she suggests, to the misuse not only of materials, but of the time we spend with them.
Kundoo mourns the loss of craft, but this does not suggest a nostalgic embrace of the vernacular or of preindustrial architectures. Rather, it is a grounded celebration of the time—the resource—that we spend to make things, and the fact that, when we consider what we can create when “our time is not an expense to be minimized.”
— Tess McCann
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 59, readers loved Owen Hatherley’s appeal to the Left, Justin Davidson on cruise ships, and the “Gaudi of Ukraine.”
NYRA ON THE TOWN
Exhibitions, parties, and other IRL delights
2022 Beaux Arts Ball: CHILL
One night only
We answered the clarion call of convivium and busted a gut to get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard this past Friday night for the Architectural League's annual bunfight, the Beaux Arts Ball. We thrilled to an evening of CHILL with all our architectural nearest and dearest in the drafty hangar known as Building 269, the Agger Fish Warehouse. Greeted by trays of cleverly-named specialty beverages (key descriptors: warm, alcoholic), we relieved one carrier of at least two small mugs while steeling ourselves for the night's main challenge: remembering how to make small talk.
One conversational gambit gone bad—”Was your hair always that gray?”—was mercifully cut short by oysters ex machina as a team of two charming, apron-wearing, bucket-carrying, bivalve-boosting persons emerged from the dark to offer our choice of wellfleet or kumamoto. Thus fortified, we strode resolutely into that dark night to see who we could see. A bit anxious if we would remember people's names, we were also worried about whether or not we would recognize people IRL without their Zoom filters. We are pleased to report that some people look only two years older than when we last saw them.
All partygoers received multiple alerts advising us to wear warm clothing. The temperature would be no more than 41°F. Suffice it to say, our sartorial expectations were very well managed. People were mostly bundled up. That one graphic-patterned, silver smoking jacket among a sea of black wraps was a welcome visual treat.
League President, PAUL LEWIS, welcomed the early-arrivers and expressed appreciation for the enormous efforts of the caterer Mary Cleaver, the lighting designer Joel Fitzpatrick, and musicians Ayana Heaven and modrums. He made special mention of the precarious ice installation designed by 2020 League Prize Winners, IVI DIAMANTOUPOLOU and JAFFER KOLB and their practice, New Affiliates. What we did not hear was some acknowledgment of the shared disconnect that we felt enjoying each other's company while the horrors were worsening in Ukraine. We would have welcomed that. After dinner, we made a few more rounds of table-talking, then danced with the second wave of ballers. Some hours later, we admitted we were old and cold. Time to thaw at home.
— NYRA
MORE ABOUT THAT ICE
The dominant installation at the Beaux Arts Ball was a series of angled panels held in place (and sometimes together) by a series of ice joints, per Diamantoupolou, a “zero-waste-spectacle effort.” Yes, that is right, these were load bearing connections made of water. NYRA asked the designers, New Affiliates, for the backstory on how one designs a joint that, as nature takes its course, will disappear. While there were some precautions taken, such as adding insulating pads underneath each piece to protect them from the thermal mass of the concrete, they told us that, given the building was open to the air, and the weather forecast was a question mark, the key was building in a large margin of error and having a backup plan. That, and finding the right ice-man. After a search that included someone who did ice party installations in LA (Diamantoupolou: “if these could withstand an outdoor party in the sun, being in an unheated/uninsulated factory off the river felt like a real possibility”), they received valuable counsel from JOHN MELTON of ice miracles.
Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China at MoMA
Thru 4 July
The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China, curated by MARTINO STIERLI and EVANGELOS KOTSIORIS of the Department of Architecture and Design exhibits representational materials of eight projects by seven practices in MoMA’s first floor ‘storefront’ gallery near the new entrance, a placement which semi-directly connects to the street and effectively signals the contemporary concerns of its contents.
Of the materials included, the six models are certainly the most compelling; beautifully crafted, and done so with surprising and inventive material choices. ATELIER DESHAUS’ Long Museum West Bund model gleams in a radiant bronze, sharply contrasting the refined concrete of the finished building, while STUDIO ZHU PEI’S multi-textured brick Kiln Museum is brilliantly presented in smooth, pure white porcelain. ARCHI-UNION ARCHITECTS’ wooden model for the Chi She artist space displays jumps in scale and resolution—the model’s pedestal being constructed in the same method as the buildings facade—while VECTOR ARCHITECTS renders its Alila Yanshuo Hotel in the same unifying pigment as the mountain that dwarfs it. Numerous photographic prints do much of the work to convey the built conditions of the projects. One, of the Bamboo Theater, stands apart however, as it is printed at such a scale as to bend off the wall onto the ceiling, reproducing both the image and the spatial experience of its subject. The drawn material is unfortunately lacking— excepting the striking large-scale paint pen drawing of AMATEUR ARCHITECTURE STUDIO’s Regeneration of Wencun Village—with any orthographics being displayed digitally on screens, and some sketches laying in low vitrines.
The exhibit is commendable for accessioning many new non-western works into MoMA’s collection, and for its engaging presentation to the specialist engaged in these discourses. It troubles me, however, that much of the informative discussion of contemporary issues facing the emerging preservation movement in China are reserved for the (virtual) lecture hall. This took the form of a two day symposium—the 2022 Fitch Colloquium: Preservation in China’s Future, organized by professor JORGE OTERO-PAILOS and the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP—which might be thought of as a quasi-exhibition catalog at which two-thirds of the exhibited practices and both curators spoke. While compelling discussions abounded, this left out productively engaging the larger public who happen upon the MoMA show. It should be the task of architects, perhaps with the help of curators, to envision and realize new ways of representing the complex changes and challenges the built environment faces today. When the beautiful presentation model or idealized photography becomes the primary way to engage with the built environment, we’ve lost our way.
— Nicholas Raap
IN THE NEWS
In Moscow, the Strelka Institute, the very-hip center for design and research, hits pause on all operations, citing the war in Ukraine…
…the Zaha Hadid Foundation, with a new director at the helm, moves forward with a dual-location museum at Shad Thames and Clerkenwell…
…in a deeply unsurprising move in every possible way, BIG designs Vice’s virtual office in the metaverse and causes the entire world to simultaneously eye-roll…
…the American Academy of Arts and Letters nominated new members, including Mabel O. Wilson, Deborah Berke, Thomas Phifer, and Michael Van Valkenburgh…
… the idea to convert underused Midtown office buildings to residential gets indirect mayoral and gubernatorial support while the all-office Penn District vision forges ahead with new renderings of PENN15…
…after seven years in operation, Amazon closes all of its creepy, algorithm-driven, nearly Barnes-and-Noble-killing, profoundly baffling brick-and-mortar 4-star bookstores…
…the Port Authority is exploring alternatives to Cuomo’s LaGuardia AirTrain project…
…new renderings show SOM’s tower at Atlanta’s Centennial Yards, the development’s first…
…the Barbican celebrates its 40th birthday…
…the Smithsonian plans to return some of its Benin bronzes to Nigeria as part of a museum-wide restitution policy…
…renowned graphic designer Cheryl D. Miller made a gift to the Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Center of Design and Typography to establish a collection dedicated to preserving and celebrating the work of Black graphic designers.
OPPORTUNITIES
NEW CITY CRITICS. 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.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Tuesday, 3/15
!! Pritzker Prize Announcement !!
Towards Another Architecture with Adam Nathaniel Furman, Joshua Mardel
12:30 PM, The Farrell Centre
Thursday, 3/17
Breaking Ground(s): Formwork with Nina Cooke John, Arthur Huang, Lori Brown, Marta H. Wisniewska, Lily Chi
5:15 PM, Cornell AAP
Radical Black Space. "Melting into Air." with Iman Ansari
6:00 PM, Spitzer School of Architecture
One Vanderbilt with James von Klemperer
6:00 PM, The National Arts Club
The Changing Focus of Architectural Photography with Emily Bills, Sahar Coston-Hardy, Alan Karchmer, Erica Stoller
6:30 PM, National Building Museum
Emerging Voices: JA Architecture Studio and Tsz Yan Ng Design with Behnaz Assadi, Nima Javidi, Tsz Yan Ng
6:30 PM, The Architectural League of New York
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date information and submit events through this link.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher).
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