S K Y L I N E | Pritzker Week
Also Phyllis Week
Issue 105. “The formula is clear: 1) Read NYRA 2) Collect your Pritzker.” Not sure if it actually works, but there is only one way to find out: subscribe and we will mail you your NYRA.
It was a tough week for the old guard. Rafael Vinoly died. Eugene Kohn (the K in KPF) died. And David Chipperfield won the Pritzker, a development he confessed to the author of his New York Times exclusive made him feel “somewhat uncomfortable” — a discomfort shared by Kate Wagner.
It has however been a good week for SKYLINE. A lot of new readers are signing up for our plucky weekly discourse dump, so it seems time for a reminder: everything here was assigned, reported, written, and edited within the last seven days. For this issue, our correspondents filed from Los Angeles, Toronto, Austin and Brooklyn. I even went down to Wall Street. For all that, no one has given us a Pritzker. But we live in hope.
— Nicolas Kemper
DISPATCHES
3/2: Driving Gehry Nuts
LOS ANGELES — Seven professors eulogize “old school socialist” Mike Davis in a daylong symposium held at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. They praise his blunt wit and determinedness to dig beneath the surface of things without ever giving into despair. “Because Mike believed that the world belongs to labor,” U.S. historian ROBIN D. G. KELLEY begins, “he rejected pessimism as political fatalism in favor of the optimism necessary for organization.”
As other speakers attest, it was precisely his activism that allowed Davis to develop far sharper connections between bigotry and the built environment than his peers—particularly architecture critics. UCLA professor Dana Cuff recalls how “Mike drove Frank Gehry nuts with his take on the Goldwyn Library,” a Hollywood repository that Davis reviewed as “undoubtedly the most menacing library ever built,” fortified against the unhoused that no doubt required its facilities in a city that had otherwise abandoned them.
— Shane Reiner-Roth
3/4: Lamp Fever
BROOKLYN NAVY YARD — On Saturday night, the crowd lines Flushing Avenue to check out Head Hi Bookstore’s 4th Annual Lamp Show Opening Celebration, its first in its new location. More than 400 attendees stand shoulder to shoulder to check out the incandescent wares while sipping Madre Mezcal concoctions. The lamps range from Peter Treiber Jr.’s Farm Duck (crafted from corn husks and plywood to resemble a duck hunting decoy) to Sebastian Martinez’s The Ideal Self Lamp (an acrylic and plastic creation featuring a Grecian-ish bust ensconced within a red prism). “This is our first show in the new bigger space,” Head Hi co-founder and owner ALVARO ALCOCER tells me. “There is more room and possibilities for a new type of installation and experience we were thrilled about.”
— Matthew Marani
3/6: Protest at the Ice-Cream Parlor
WALL STREET — It is almost eleven on a Monday morning and I am at a demonstration in a Wall Street lobby. I overhear LIZ WAYTKUS, the executive director of Docomomo US, and a colleague discussing her upcoming remarks:
“I’m going to invent a new word: ‘boringization.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s what’s happening to New York City — everything is becoming boring — dumbing down.”
She turns to me. “Glad you’re early… this might not last long. Ownership is also in attendance,” she says, eyeing the men in suits standing in the opposite corner of the lobby with their arms crossed. As demonstrators set up their sign, two men in yellow security vests walk over to ask, “What’s on our radar?” A PETA demonstration? Occupy Wall Street, Part II? Nope — a lobby renovation.
In the 1980s, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo designed a distinctly postmodern tower for JP Morgan. At its base stood a triple-height, column-studded, publicly owned private space (POPS) wrapped in mirrors and white marble. Paul Goldberger panned it memorably in 1990 as “not so wonderful” and “an ice-cream parlor blown up to monumental scale.” Last year, its new owners asked KPF to cook up a distinctly bland plan to modernize the place. Now a coalition of architects, preservationists, and critics — including Deborah Berke, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Robert A.M. Stern, Alexandra Lange, and Goldberger himself — is asking for a historic designation to prevent that plan from going forward. At the demonstration, CHRISTOPHER MARTE, a New York City council member, captures the argument, pointing out that while the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings may once too have been considered “boring and tacky,” they are now icons.
After the protesters read their statement and take questions, I walk over to the men in suits to see if they wish to comment. They do not. So I make the rounds with a few of the people sitting at the many tables inside the POPS. One woman, sitting in a corner, is a fan: “I love this lobby.” She thinks it would benefit from a yoga studio. Then I walk over to a man speaking industriously into his phone. His position is clear: “I’ve seen the renderings, and it ain’t going to work out. They should hold onto it.” His reasoning, however, has little to do with Roche and Dinkeloo: “This is the only place homeless people — and mind you I’m not homeless — can sleep, and they don’t bother you. There are clean bathrooms. Sit here from 7am to 10pm, and they let you rest.” A security guard walks up to us, so I ask him what he thinks of the lobby. He is actually happy to talk. He has only been working there a few months, but he likes it, too. That said, he is pretty pessimistic on its chances for survival: “Big money is behind this, and you can’t stop big money.”
— Nicolas Kemper
3/7: Something About the Maturation of a Point of View
TORONTO — “How I got started on this project is that I’m an Instagram junkie,” begins PHYLLIS LAMBERT, architect, photographer, and founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. “I approached a talented, young multimedia artist,” she continues, relating how DAVID CYRENNE became the curator of her new book that is also the subject of her lecture, Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approaches (Lars Müller). Cyrenne, Lambert explains further, combed through thousands of photographs that she took over a period spanning six decades and multiple media and instruments. Together, they selected the roughly 300 images that make up the book.
“My first use of the camera was around 1954 when the Seagram Building was being thought of,” says Lambert, recounting the way in which the photographic camera became her preferred tool for observation. “That same year, while spending time [...] in Rome, I began to use the camera to observe, to see how a building sits on the land, how it relates to the land around it, to other buildings.” She soon became a gearhead: “At one point, I was carrying around two cameras, one in B/W and one in color — I was even recording sound.” Her photographic missions took her around the world. “The images in [the] volume,” Lambert concludes, “also recount something about the maturation of a point of view.”
— Sebastián López Cardozo
3/8: Architecture, Elevated
AUSTIN — “Architecture is about engaging everything and using those parameters to produce,” says LORCAN O’HERLIHY, in his lecture at the University of Texas Austin School of Architecture. Presenting three recent neighborhood studies in Detroit, where he emphasizes the opportunities for urban renewal, and residential and cultural projects in LA, where the imperative is urban infill, O’Herlihy, principal of the firm LOHA (and father of the artist and influencer ALANA O’HERLIHY), makes the case that design should “elevate the human experience.”
— Maya Shamir
NYRA ON THE (NORTHERN) TOWN
TORONTO — “How do you feel about traversing the city today?” My phone lights up with the message. I look out at the remnants of the overnight snowstorm — the sun peeks through a thick cloud cover. “Yes, I’ll be there,” I text back. Slogging through the drifts, I arrive at the front of the building in time to help the artists NICOLE CHARLES and JUSTIN PAPE push a car stuck in the snow outside Project 107, a gallery they run together.
“When we first moved into this space three years ago,” Pape explains, “a brick building right across the street was in the process of being demolished.... We had been thinking of working with debris for some time, and now we were in a space that we were told was temporary — that maybe we’d be here for three months.” The pile of debris across the street marked a starting point for the duo for what would become a multi-year project, culminating in the current exhibition, Notice: A change is proposed. “We’re salvaging material and we’re making these new things,” says Pape.
In the show, sixteen plywood plinths made from a mixture of off-cuts and wood recycled from previous projects and laid out on a four-by-four grid elevate sixteen sculptures cast with a mix of construction debris, primarily brick, giving the sculptures their orange tint. Off to the side stands a semi-enclosed booth containing a small archive. “We slowly gathered information and bits and pieces of the building’s history by talking to tenants and finding things in the archives,” says Charles.
Notice is the Project 107’s fifth, and potentially last, outing. The building is (still) slated for demolition, though Charles and Pape’s landlord continues to extend the lease. In the meantime, the artists go on staging exhibition after exhibition on the lifecycle of buildings, on impermanence, and more. Says Pape: “You’re put in this weird place where you don’t know when the ending is.”
— SLC
EYES ON SKYLINE
IN THE NEWS
The Architectural Review profiled Phyllis Lambert, Hulu has given up on its Devil in the White City series, the New Yorker suddenly discovered that Madison Square Garden’s continued existence may stand in the way of a better Penn Station, and the Harvard GSD appointed Grace La to chair of its Department of Architecture.
In new buildings, China has plans to expand its space station, and archaeologists discovered a new passageway in the Great Pyramid of Giza. In old buildings, Alexandra Lange writes about Black interiors — “spaces designed for and by Black homeowners.”
And apparently Donald Trump has opinions on urban planning.
IN RAT NEWS
The Guardian has a deep dive on Scabby the Rat: “Peggy recalled that Mike had come up with a design and Lambert had given feedback; he wanted it ‘meaner looking,’ with big claws and ‘festering nipples.’”
DATELINE
The week ahead… beware daylights savings!
Friday, 3/10
Exploring the Virtual in Architecture: From Historic Replicas to Augmented Reality with Francesca Torello & Joshua Bard
1:30 PM ET | Columbia GSAPP
Monday, 3/13
Material Ecologies with Dana Cupkova, Daragh Byrne, Joshua Bard, & Sinan Goral
5:00 PM ET | Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday, 3/15
From Field to Form: Stone with Nat Oppenheimer, Pierre Bidaud, Steve Webb, & Jonah Wurzer-Kinsler
6:00 PM ET | The Architectural League of New York
Thursday, 3/16
Design Anthropology: Critical Speculations with Alison J. Clarke, Shannon Mattern, Gerald Bast, Salome Asega, Bodhi Chattopadhyay, Elizabeth Chin, & Jonathan M. Square
12:00 PM ET | The New School, University of Applied Arts Vienna, & Papanek Foundation
Emerging Voices 2023: Dream The Combine and LANZA Atelier with Jennifer Newsom, Tom Carruthers, Isabel Abascal, Alessandro Arienzo, & Mario Gooden
6:30 PM ET | The Architectural League of New York
COMUNAL: Taller de Arquitectura with Jesica Amescua Carrera & Mariana Ordóñez Grajales
5:00 PM PT | California College of the Arts Architecture Division
Friday, 3/17
Design Anthropology: Critical Speculations with Alison J. Clarke, Shannon Mattern, Victor Buchli, David Jeevendrampillai, Nicole Cristi, Elaine Gan, & Brandi T. Summers
12:00 PM ET | The New School, University of Applied Arts Vienna, & Papanek Foundation
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page for up-to-date listings and to submit events.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
We would like to know what is on your mind. Simply reply to this e-mail, and we will say hi.
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.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
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