S K Y L I N E | In Play
Denise Scott Brown, Laura Poitras, Maia Simon, Casey Mack, and Rhomblocks
Issue 101. “James Wines is a God amongst us, mere mortals.” He also drew the centerfold for our new issue. Subscribe, and we will mail you a copy.
“Such a solid concept: play,” said Mary Anderson of the British firm Assemble about how kids knew precisely what to do in a workshop they had just led in upstate New York. I reported on their talk at Cooper Union for last week’s Skyline, but in focusing on their collective practice I left out an important part of their recent work: they have been designing playgrounds. Or rather, they have not been designing playgrounds, but instead designing scenarios in which kids can play—led by trained “Play Workers”—specifically eschewing “fixed play infrastructure” in favor of “loose parts,” a venture so successful that it has become a semi-independent organization, Assemble Play.
Count me in. Probably the least newsy thing that happened last week is that we at New York Review of Architecture declared our love for architecture toys. We have been bringing a growing selection to our launch parties, and ahead of the one last Friday, we asked Twitter for recommendations. There was not enough time to acquire any of the gems people suggested, but we did show up with Rhomblocks, a few Tensegritoys, and, of course, a Jenga set. The Rhomblocks were the greatest hit, yet as one of our party-goers observed, there were not quite enough of them. Sporting 60 and 120 degree angles, each part lends itself to three-part systems, but they came in pairs. Alas, it would appear the Internet, or at least eBay, does not have any additional Rhomblocks to offer.
Then again, this Thursday finds me in Montreal, on a press tour to see the opening of a new film by Joyce Joumaa (more on that next week) that started with a look at the vast library (250,000 books! 65,000 photos!) at the Canadian Center for Architecture (the CCA). Amid the racks and stacks in the carefully climate-controlled basement that holds their collection, much to my surprise, there was a mint-condition set of Rhomblocks. The CCA did not offer to let us check them out for our next party.
The CCA collects toys with an architectural bent in general—including the set of Skyline construction kits pictured above—and rightfully so. Toys can carry a lot of ideological weight. Just look at their role in any kindergarten. Rhomblocks are a critique of the classic wooden blocks. The Tensegritoy was supposed to bring the ideas of Buckminster Fuller to the masses. But all of this doesn’t matter when you go to pick one up. Sometimes play can be an end unto itself.
— Nicolas Kemper
DISPATCHES
2/8: Denise Scott Brown at Yale
RUDOLPH HALL — “It’s like that Surrealist saying, every flea market is always the same, what’s different is you.” said Princeton professor SYLVIA LAVIN, an apt summary of the three different theses that came of the archival work done by herself, Vanderbilt art historian LEE ANN CUSTER and Penn State associate professor DENISE COSTANZO as part of the symposium on DENISE SCOTT BROWN at Yale this week.
Lavin focused on Scott Brown’s time at UCLA, when she was in a tough spot: she had just lost two teaching jobs in quick succession, had no tenure, and had no local professional or familial support. For Lavin, the “novel ecology” of Los Angeles and Scott Brown’s loneliness bred an intensity of spirit and experimentation with new media. Photos taken from a helicopter represent what Lavin called the “middle-distance” between the ground view and emerging satellite technology.
Using Scott Brown’s syllabi from the University of Pennsylvania, Custer traced how Scott Brown’s pedagogy influenced her theory. Teaching in Philadelphia led her to develop the idea that socio-economic forces disrupted the “form follows function” dogma. Leaning on Scott Brown’s 1967 article “The Function of a Table,” which imagines using the table for prayer or as a boat, Costanzo traced Scott Brown’s peculiar functionalism, identifying “form, forces, and function” as a “Neo-Vitruvian triad” that added playfulness to High Modernist practicality.
— Arthur Delot Vilain
2/6: Laura Poitras at Columbia
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — “Films bleed beyond the experience of watching them,” said LAURA POITRAS toward the end of a two-hour conversation with ANDRES JACQUE, Dean of Columbia GSAPP. Through seven clips from throughout her prolific career as a documentary filmmaker, POITRAS and JACQUE discussed 9/11, WikiLeaks, fear, risk, and her most recent film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The film traces photographer NAN GOLDIN’s actions to protest the Sackler family’s presence in major museums, through which Poitras, who was once on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List, addresses issues of power and art’s ability to confront societal wrongs and inspire change. Despite her aversion to “tidy conclusions,” the evening was perfectly wrapped up when a member of the audience asked why she chose to speak to a room full of architects; she responded, “because a good friend invited me.”
— Zachary Torres
2/4: Maia Simon at Citygroup
CHINATOWN — “A place that is constantly under construction is hard to critique,” said MAIA SIMON, a PhD student at MIT, before a packed house at citygroup. The place in question was Astana, formerly Tselinograd and Akmolinsk, established as Kazakhstan’s capital city in 1997. In the past decade, a massive build-out based on plans by the Metabolist architect Kisho Kurokawa has drawn attention from western observers; CNN described the results as “the world’s weirdest capital city,” while the Guardian likened the more futuristic end of Kurokawa’s design to “the space station in the steppes.” But such exoticizing tropes, Simon said, overlook the massive transformations that Astana-Tselinograd-Akmolinsk sustained over the course of the long twentieth century, spanning the implementation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the 1920s, Kazakhstani independence in 1991, and the country’s subsequent turn toward the global market economy. In addition to providing historical context, Simon’s erudite talk bridged the gap between the immediate post-Soviet years and present-day Astana, whose urban form is infinitely richer and more complex than tawdry sci-fi comparisons would suggest. The same goes for the city’s politics. “Early 2019 saw a series of rallies staged across the country to call attention to the lack of state-funded housing and insufficient heating infrastructure, even in the capital,” Simon said. The substance of her presentation was reflected in the myriad materials—colorful gazetteers and maps, trade pamphlets authored by the US Department of Commerce—gathered in citygroup’s current exhibition, Aesthetics at the End of History:Liberalization, Privatization, and Other Ghosts of the ’90s. The show was curated by AJ Artemel and runs through March 4.
— Dan Roche
2/2: Casey Mack at Head Hi
BROOKLYN — Undeterred, or perhaps intrigued, by the lengthy RSVP form, folks gathered for a three-course meal of artificial land, pizza, and wine with CASEY MACK, author of Digesting Metabolism: Artificial Land in Japan 1954-2202, and discussants KEN OSHIMA, DANIEL ABRAMSON, and NADER VOSSOUGHIAN. Mack presented a rigorous body of research and a convincing call to revisit the Metabolist project. Leaning on painstakingly assembled primary documentation, he focused on three projects that were in fact built: Takamasa Yoshizaka’s House, which went through cycles of creative destruction; Otaka Masato’s Motomachi Apartment Complex, which replaced the so-called “atomic slum” in Hiroshima; and Tsunane Cooperative Housing, where a collaborative spirit still prevails in its community. Mack asked the audience to look beyond the movement’s well-known and not necessarily well-loved classics (what’s the deal with the Capsule Towers, anyway?) and walk away with a new appreciation for the B-sides of Metabolism; all built, all occupied, and all adapting to new needs over time.
— Katie Lau
EYES ON SKYLINE
Last week, readers were most interested in a “spirited counter” from the co-editor of the book Inscriptions.
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IN THE NEWS
It is launch season for new (or newish) publications: we covered Disc journal’s launch party last week; our very own Sebastián López Cardozo is on the team that launched the Architecture Writing Workshop in January; last Thursday The Dial threw a party at KGB bar for their inaugural issue (The Dials is a friend of ours: we co-hosted two events in 2020 with their earlier incarnation, The Ballot); and this week Untapped, led by Tiffany Jow, dropped their first issue — to be followed, of course, by a party next Wednesday.
We were happy to see a few NYRA contributors in Untapped, including Ian Volner, who wrote a profile of Peterson Rich Office’s work on public housing, and Kate Wagner, who contributed a piece on a six-hour Autodesk outage titled “The Day Architecture Stopped.”
That was one of two Wagner pieces this week, the other on the umpteen billion dollar Saudi-funded line in the sand and the recent awkward words of its starchitect designer Tom Mayne about architects taking “responsibility for shaping the world.”
Speaking of taking responsibility, the tragedy on everyone’s mind this week is the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey and Syria. For the Guardian, Peter Beaumont goes into the zoning failure that exacerbated it, in particular a 2018 “zoning amnesty” that has led to the current situation in Turkey: “half of all buildings were put up illegally.”
The Army Corps of Engineers is trying to get ahead of New York’s next disaster with a proposal to build a series of bleak six-foot concrete walls to protect its citizens by cutting them off from their recently reclaimed waterfront: “To the extent that anybody is shocked by any of these renderings, we certainly can understand. But this is a starting point that can only get better from here.”
Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of SO – IL are finally getting a handle on the grief they received for posting a job listing with a $55,000–$65,000 salary in December with a long interview with Architect’s Newspaper—and by raising the range to $75,000–$85,000.
And the controversy over the almost-canceled-now-postponed Vkhutemas exhibit at Cooper Union curated by Anna Bokov got the New York Times treatment.
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Friday, 2/10
'Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect' Book Talk with Mary McLeod, Lynn Gilbert, Cathleen McGuigan, Frida Grahn, George Thomas, & Susan Snyder
6:00 PM EST | Center for Architecture
Monday, 2/13
Non-Extractive Practices and Non-Human Species with Ariane Lourie Harrison, Thomas Hauck, Wolfgang Wiesser, Daniel Metcalfe, & Erin Moore
5:00 PM EST | Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture
'Occupation: Boundary – Art, Architecture, and Culture at the Water' Book Launch with Cathy J. Simon, Laurie Olin, & Ashley Simone
6:00 PM EST | Center for Architecture
Correcting Mistaken Ideas: Revisiting the People’s Program at Lincoln Hospital with Walter Bosque & Monxo López
6:00 PM EST | The New School Vera List Center for Art and Politics
A Broken Circle with Ruo Jia & Catherine Ingraham
6:00 PM EST | Syracuse University School of Architecture
Tuesday, 2/14
Narrative Maps: A Design Process with Adèle Naudé Santos
6:30 PM EST | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Wednesday, 2/15
Untapped Design Journal Launch with Michael J. Love
6:00 PM EST | Untapped Journal & Sommwhere
From Field to Form: An Introduction to Building with Plants and Earth with David J. Lewis, Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, Lola Ben-Alon, Mae-ling Lokko, & Jonsara Ruth
7:00 PM EST | The Architectural League of New York
FE_20230215: Circulatory Pathways with Sarah Oppenheimer
9:00 PM EST (6:00 PM PST) | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 2/16
Recognition, Reconciliation, Reparation with Kofi Boone
6:30 PM EST | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
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, good, bad or otherwise? Write us a letter!
NYRA 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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