S K Y L I N E | Indulgence
With Andrés Jaque, Tor Oiamo, Brigitte Shim, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Joshua Ramus, and more
Issue 116. Indulge a little by subscribing to our print issue here.
As happens every other year in late May, seemingly everyone descended on Venice to celebrate the opening of Biennale Architettura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future, but also to see and be seen. It’s hard to scroll through the endless stream of photos on Instagram without feeling a tinge of FOMO. But at the same time, there is a kind of discomfort at the performance and—dare I say waste?—of architecture’s Burning Man event. Recently, Dank Lloyd Wright threw shade at the carbon footprint of everyone who made the trip and if you’ve ever talked to a Venetian, you might not find the Burning Man comparison all that surprising. While the importance of in-person attendance and interactions cannot be understated, it's not unreasonable to ask who the Biennale is for. Is the bi-annual pilgrimage to Venice a communion with the global architectural scene or an exercise in individual and collective self-indulgence?
On the flipside of this navel-gazing, this year’s Biennale has already offered evidence of the political impact architecture-adjacent work can have. Roughly a week ago news broke that China is reportedly withdrawing from the event over the inclusion of an installation titled Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps. The Chinese embassy in Italy claims that the installation, which is based on a Pulitzer-winning investigation by architect Alison Killing, reporter Megha Rajagopalan, and programmer Christo Buschek into a network of alleged internment camps in Xinjiang, is based on “a large amount of false information.”
This issue of SKYLINE features architects and artists testing the spectrum of indulgence in their professional and artistic practices. Andrés Jaque embraces messiness, a design panel in Toronto literally tunes into the city, Lawrence Abu Hamdan follows the paths of sounds, and another panel of architects in New York wrestle with just how much architecture art and performance really need.
— Palmyra Geraki
DISPATCHES
5/26: A Spanish Inquisition
LOS ANGELES — Speaking to an audience at UCLA, the ever-inquisitive Spanish-born architect ANDRÉS JAQUE positioned the research-inflected work of his practice, the Office for Political Innovation, on the benevolent side of modernist binaries: the opacity of the labor needed to maintain Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion versus the transparency proffered by a display of its cleaning products (see 2012’s Phantom); the shininess of the titanium building facades of Hudson Yards skyscrapers versus the dustiness of the South African mine from which that titanium is extracted (2023’s Xholobeni Yards); the environmental exploitation of a formerly rural patch of southern Spain versus the ecological restoration of an adventurous dwelling (Rambla-Climate House). Audience members were slow to applause. “Who really wins,” asked SYLVIA LAVIN, “in these competitions between one form of life and another?” GREG LYNN questioned “which side of the Whole Earth Catalog”—green capitalism or hippie modernism—Jaque was on. The architect deflected these queries and instead claimed “[the] messiness [that] is a fundamental element of architecture” as his primary inspiration.
— Shane Reiner-Roth
5/28: Close Listening
TORONTO — “I think we could do a lot of good work if we all came together and thought more about [sound] as something that’s on a spectrum,” said geographer TOR OIAMO at a talk convened by the Toronto Society of Architects on the occasion of the 2023 Doors Open festival. With these words, Oiamo underscored the scope of the panel, moderated by Azure senior editor STEFAN NOVAKOVIC and featuring input from researchers, architects, and acousticians.
On one end of Oiamo’s spectrum are the unpleasant effects of sounds like car traffic and on the other end, the pleasant effects of sounds that one experiences in an expertly calibrated concert hall. “Unfortunately for you,” he said, inciting laughter from an audience made up of mostly architects, “I’m going to focus more so on the unpleasant side.” Oiamo’s short presentation delved into the harmful effects of certain kinds of sound and the ways it overlaps with income levels. “You see higher exposures to noise levels at lower-income areas. It’s an environmental justice issue.”
“Our [interest in sound] has been about the inside of buildings,” Shim-Sutcliffe principal BRIGITTE SHIM said in response, “but in a way you’re talking about this kind of auditory sense of a city.” “Cities have a soundscape, and they’re very palpable, and we just don’t think about it in Toronto,” Shim continued. “I feel that we need to start to pay some attention to it. It’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of work from multidisciplinary professionals. No one group has all the answers. And then really working with the city to shape the sound of both our neighborhoods, and collectively the city as a whole.”
— Sebastián López Cardozo
5/30: Wall of Sound
EAST VILLAGE — Friends and familiar faces gathered into an intimate gallery setting to hear the Beirut-based artist LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN and curator RUBA KATRIB discuss the former’s new book, Live Audio Essays (Primary Information). The titular “essays” actually comprise performances, films, or video installations produced between 2014 and 2022. “[They] are different kinds of ways of being attentive to sound,” said Abu Hamdan, whose work focuses on the relational aspects of sound: the way it morphs between the audible and silence, interior and exterior, life and death, walled and unwalled (Walled Unwalled is in fact the title of his ongoing MoMA show. Catch it now before it closes on June 11).
— Catherine Lie
5/31: Class Acts
FIDI — In a lofty room overlooking the luminescent marble facade of the Perelman Performing Arts Center, conversants drafted buildings into the role of performers. All were in agreement about the need for elevating cultural places above the humdrum of city life. “Memory is the success,” said DAVID ROCKWELL, a little gnomically. JOSHUA RAMUS, whose architectural office REX is responsible for the Perelman’s shape-shifting interior configuration, offered the suggestion that “a building with specificity is strangely more flexible.” To this the Guggenheim Foundation’s JAIME KRONE added, “inflexible spaces constantly have the ability to reveal themselves,” while GREGG PASQUARELLI of SHoP Architects stressed that “what is happening in [a] building” should “vibrantly [make] a connection with the city.” Moderator PAUL GOLDBERGER simply added to the chorus, resulting in a congenial event (hosted by the Downtown Alliance) whose most striking feature may have been the views outside, with Perelman Performing Arts Center, scheduled to open in September 2023, as the protagonist.
— Poun Laura Kim
NYRA ON THE TOWN
5/25: Word on the Street
SOHO — If it weren’t for the proliferation of tote bags (I spotted wares from Log, GSD, Arch Lobby, and The Shed), it would’ve been hard to tell who traveled to Crosby Street for the Architecture League’s President’s Medal Block Party and who wandered in from the neighborhood, perhaps after shopping at the Carhartt WIP store nearby.
The climate-themed event functioned as a sendoff for the League’s outgoing president, ROSALIE GENEVRO. A drumline by Fogo Azul added to the festive atmosphere, as did the tamales and churros provided by the Street Vendor Project. (Furniture from Street Lab was a welcome upgrade from the street curb.) The party spirit was only slightly dampened by a didactic art installation by GREG CORBINO, consisting of a tree fashioned from reclaimed cardboard and bearing wishful notes for a sustainable future.
My favorite part of the programming was the Ask a Climate Scientist booth, where I got to chat with KLAUS JACOB, an emeritus professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. With a smile, he dismissed the recent news story about Manhattan sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers as more or less insignificant compared with sea level rise. When I asked about the queries of other attendees, Jacob said that a condo owner voiced concern over the expense of complying with the city’s gas stove ban, which currently applies only to new buildings. Our resident expert sighed, as if to say, What are you gonna do?
— Michael Nicholas
IN THE NEWS
Next time your toddler asks...
New research has found that New York City is sinking (approximately 1-2 millimeters each year on average) under the weight of its built infrastructure. The cumulative weight of the city’s structures is 1.68 trillion pounds (if you have trouble visualizing that, it’s roughly equivalent to the weight of 140 million elephants). (Guardian)
Double jeopardy
Four years after Disability Rights Advocates filed a (still active) class action lawsuit against Queens Borough Public Library, The Board of Trustees of the Queens Borough Public Library, and the City of New York, challenging the inaccessibility of Hunters Point Library, the City is now suing Steven Holl Architects for the 10 million needed to make the necessary changes to the building. (Crain’s New York)
Better late than never
One of the few good things about the pandemic was that the people got their streets back (a little) and outdoor dining became a staple, even in winter. The Permanent-Outdoor-Dining-Shed Bill would “streamline the licensing and revocable consent process [...] and permit year round sidewalk cafe dining and seasonal roadway cafe dining. It would also give restaurants time to transition from the emergency outdoor dining program created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic while petitioning for a sidewalk or roadway cafe license.” (Curbed)
Going, going, gone
Sotheby’s has purchased the Breuer Building from the Whitney Museum for roughly $100 million. The international auction house intends to renovate (respectfully) before making the iconic brutalist building its flagship in 2025. (NYTimes)
A renter’s utopia
It’s not technically news, but public housing actually works. In Vienna, 80 percent of residents qualify for it. Contracts never expire and rent can be as little as 4 percent of pre-tax income. And you don’t even have to give up capitalism. (NYTimes)
Not enough architecture
Again, not technically news, but Patrik Schumacher thinks there is not enough architecture at this year’s Venice Biennale (again). He goes as far as to question whether the important role the event has historically played within the architectural discipline is up for grabs. (Dezeen)
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Monday, 6/5
Architecture for the Future of Public Housing with Nathan Rich, Felicia Gordon, & Karen Kubey
12:00 PM EDT | AIA Right-to-Housing Working Group
Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQ+ Places and Stories
12:00 PM EDT | AIA Right-to-Housing Working Group
Tuesday 6/6
Reimagining Justice: A Conversation with Formerly Incarcerated Artists
6:00 PM EDT | AIA New York Center for Architecture
Trust Land with Keller Easterling
7:00 PM EDT | e-flux
Wednesday 6/7
Classicism in the Sky: The Return of the Elegant Skyscraper with Stephen Wallis, Dan Lobitz, Peter Pennoyer, & Paul Whalen
6:30 PM EDT | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
Ralph Johnson’s Chicago
6:00 PM CDT | Chicago Architecture Center
Thursday 6/8
AIA Conference on Architecture 2023 Day 1 Keynote Lecture with Barbara Bouza
8:30 AM PDT | American Institute of Architects
Gowanus Precinct Study
12:00 PM EDT | Urban Design Forum
Friday 6/9
AIA Conference on Architecture 2023 Day 2 Keynote Lecture: AEC Industry Panel
8:30 AM PDT | American Institute of Architects
Saturday 6/10
AIA Conference on Architecture 2023 Day 3 Keynote Lecture with Jacinda Ardern
8:30 AM PDT | American Institute of Architects
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events through this link.
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New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. It is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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