Issue 98. The number 33 is significant in religion and mythology, and it’s the name of a favorite West African lager. It’s also the number of our next print issue, which you can receive by subscribing here.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was an invitation to honor and also, inevitably, to reassess the significance of his contributions. I listened to a few of his speeches on Spotify, including a series from 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here,” in which he closely connects the struggles for racial and economic justice. His critique of capitalism was loud and clear as he argued for “restructuring American society” with a universal basic income and other egalitarian reforms. Not content with Communist theory, however, King said that Marx had erred in tossing out Hegel’s spiritual idealism, and that knowledge was meaningless without love. King spoke of a radical synthesis of love and power to overcome the status quo of “immoral power” on the one hand and “powerless morality” on the other. These passages were challenging and provocative in ways that don’t tend to come across in whitewashed versions of MLK. He was at once a creative, critical, and communal force.
While reflecting on King’s ringing indictment of the reigning social order, I heard news of the unveiling of a new MLK sculpture on Boston Common, followed by shouts and murmurs over the design by artist HANK WILLIS THOMAS. And while this memorial was notably quick to spark controversy, public memory and representation are always contested. Reinterpretation and reassessment are vital to our work as critics, and also to the work of creative design. There’s little to do or say if you have no qualms with the status quo. We have lots of qualms with the status quo, so we have lots to work on. And, judging by the cross-section of events that our correspondents reviewed this week, so, too, do designers and theorists across the architecture world.
— Gideon Fink Shapiro
DISPATCHES
1/12: Digging Deep
“Can we forget? A Memorial to Enslaved Laborers” with Mabel O. Wilson
NEW HAVEN (LIVESTREAM) — MABEL O. WILSON, the Columbia professor who’s teaching at Yale this year, received her undergraduate architecture degree at the University of Virginia, where she returned, with Höweler + Yoon Architecture, to help design the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, completed in 2020. At a talk in Hastings Hall, Wilson discussed how “white Americans have deployed monuments to territorialize white supremacy,” and how, by contrast, the memorial unearths the buried history of four thousand enslaved men, women, and children who built and maintained UVA. Student protestors laid the ground for this memorial—whose diameter resembles that of the famous Rotunda—by demanding the university acknowledge the enslaved community that “lived under the constant threat of violence at any time from any white person,” Wilson said. It’s a memorial that “came into fruition through a collective desire to face the past,” she concluded, allowing audience members to wonder how other buried histories might be faced through community action and design.
— Brandon Koots
1/12: Design-a-Thon
New Practices in Conversation: BRANDT : HAFERD
GREENWICH VILLAGE — “What might an imaginary of another public space be?” BRANDT KNAPP and JEROME HAFERD ask—and look to the audience for responses. After a January cloudburst and abbreviated run-through of the projects that garnered them a 2020 AIANY New Practices New York award, the duo shepherded attendees into a back room at the Center for Architecture for a design charrette. Working with a limited set of materials (discarded studio books, Lego pieces), the group answered Knapp and Haferd’s prompt by building conceptual objects, then describing their high-minded intentions, putting everyone in a gleeful mood. The participatory event echoed the ethos that runs through the office’s larger body of work: design can happen anywhere, with whatever (and whomever) is at hand.
— Patrick Rutan
1/13: Model House
Found in Translation — with Ken Tadashi Oshima, Momoyo Kaijima, and Sunil Bald
NEW HAVEN (LIVESTREAM) — What is the difference between a house built for public exhibition and one for everyday living? It depends on one’s framing, said KEN TADASHI OSHIMA in his Yale lecture on Junzo Yoshimura’s Shofuso Exhibition House, a replica seventeenth century–style shoin-zukuri dwelling built in Japan in 1953, exhibited at MoMA in 1954, and installed in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park ever since. Of course, frames can be rearranged, slotted out. Yoshimura designed his would-be domicile as a showcase of Japanese customs for an American audience. But for a historian like Oshima, the structure also reflected the “constellation of people that were associated with Junzo Yoshimura: his mentor Antonin Raymond, colleague George Nakashima, who we see through his furnishings, and Noemi Raymond, [Antonin’s] partner.”
The post-lecture discussion identified the imprint of Yoshimura’s coterie on Atelier Bow-Wow’s transnational practice. Cofounder MOMOYO KAIJIMA, who teaches at Yale, stressed the continued importance of traditional ways of making in Japanese architecture. If, as she suggested, “craft [is] the starting point of industry,” then the process of architectural translation—between cultures and economies, private and public realms—has been unfolding for far longer than we might appreciate.
— Emerson Goo
1/17: Smuggling the Familiar
Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow
HOUSTON — “We almost called this lecture ‘Enjoy Architecture,’” LAP CHI KWONG remarked, as he and ALISON VON GLINOW—co-principals of Chicago design office Kwong Von Glinow—introduced their presentation at the Rice Design Alliance, on occasion of their receiving the 2023 Spotlight Award. They eventually settled on “Some of This, Some of That,” a phrase Kwong said reflects their freewheeling approach to design. Sprinting through slides of their work, the pair dropped buzzwords like “accessible,” “legible,” and “understandable.” Highlights included the Ardmore House and Swiss Consulate; both are in Chicago and feature loving, intelligently resolved details. But these largely private spaces, with trendy contemporary materials and finishes, felt almost too familiar.
The feeling was not accidental. In their talk, Kwong and Von Glinow also emphasized “the vernacular,” the subject of an exhibition they produced about the morphology of single-family homes. But the vernacular influences also seep in surreptitiously. The Table Top Apartments, a speculative system of housing based on “boring, familiar forms,” as Von Glinow put it, produces a surprisingly complex quilt of a floor plan. Seen charitably, the office’s breezy embrace of the familiar is a quiet means of smuggling radical ideas into standard palettes; more cynically, it could just be an excuse to produce nice-looking, normative buildings.
— Harish Krishnamoorthy
NYRA ON THE TOWN
BROOKLYN NAVY YARD — Friends and readers of Eyesore magazine gathered on Saturday for a quasi-relaunch at Head Hi Cafe. Largely UK-based but run by a globally dispersed editorial collective, Eyesore has published irregularly since 2016. Issue no. 5, “Lost Spaces,” debuts a new format (previously A3 tabloid, now A4 non-glossy) and sports an evocative cover photograph to boot: a man holds a brick from the imperiled council estate he once called home. As night set in, the once-plentiful stacks of copies for sale were already gone. Spotted: NYC-based Eyesore editor CLARA GROSS, So There’s This… podcast-host BROOKE VIEGUT, and many heads buried in fresh issues.
— Nicholas Raap
NYRA ON THE OTHER TOWN
Lebbeus Woods had impossibly high hopes for his 1984 project, Epicyclarium, a speculative pavilion recalling Boullée’s cenotaph to Newton. He imagined that the multi-level, mixed-reality, rich-yet-schematic structure would “correlate and unify diverse fields of study and work,” including “scientists, artists and technicians with the goal of making this project a center of human knowledge and creative capacity.”
Needless to say, the Epicyclarium was unbuildable. Despite, or because of, this fact, Woods elaborated a cosmology around the project that pulled on the past as much as it did from sci-fi futures. Focusing on three projects unburdened by the frictions of reality, Ecologies, 1984–1990 (open through Feb. 4 at West Hollywood’s Friedman Benda gallery) effectively elevates Woods from his obscure posting as high priest paper architecture to the heights of conceptual art. The move, staged by curator JENNIFER OLSHIN, works: it only seems fair to slot Woods alongside contemporaries like H.R. Giger (Alien) and Syd Mead (Blade Runner).
— Shane Reiner-Roth
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 97, readers were most interested in… the launch of the New York Architecture + Design Book Club and a new affordable- and supportive-housing development designed by Alexander Gorlin Architects.
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IN THE NEWS
This week,
…Boston unveiled a twenty-two-foot-tall bronze MLK statue by artist HANK WILLIS THOMAS (with architects MASS Design Group) to mixed reviews…
…AIA New York announced the departure of director BENJAMIN PROSKY…
… after announcing the 2023 AIANY Design Award winners…
…The Times profiled JERALD COOPER, author of the trending IG account @hoodmidcenturymodern, which seeks to recognize and preserve Black modernism…
…a team including our very own SEBASTIÁN LÓPEZ CARDOZO relaunched the Instagram account Artifizi, with its 65,000 followers, as the Architecture Writing Workshop…
…BEN PENTREATH, known for his traditional architectural and urban design projects, was named the 2023 winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize…
…University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) faculty members went on strike to demand higher compensation and better student mental health services…
…KATE WAGNER stared into the flames of the raging debate over gas stoves and observed, “The gas stove debacle of ’23 isn’t even a culture war, which is what makes it so stupid.”
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Friday, 1/20
For More Senses with T. Andrew Stone & Claire Townley
12:00 PM CST | University of Texas Austin School of Architecture
Mr. Pergolesi’s Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain Exhibition Tour with Julia Siemon
1:30 PM EST | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Black and Female with Tsitsi Dangarembga, Margo Jefferson
7:00 PM EST | Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
Disc Issue 2.0 NYC Launch Party with Boneless Pizza & Office Party
7:00 PM EST | Disc Journal and Bungee Space
Saturday, 1/21
3:00 PM EST | Balcony Magazine and Head Hi
Monday, 1/23
Harvard Design Magazine #50 Issue Launch with Julie Cirelli, Sarah Whiting, Rahul Mehrotra, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Christopher Lee, Nicolai Ouroussoff, Anél Du Plessis
12:30 PM | Harvard GSD
Rockefeller Center Tour with Anil Khachane and Austin Gelbard
3:30 PM EST | Urban Design Forum
50 Years after Roe v. Wade: Our Current Situation with Lori Brown and Cynthia Phifer Kracauer
6:00 PM EST | Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation & ArchiteXX
DnA_Design and Architecture with Xu Tiantian
8:00 PM EST | Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture
Wednesday, 1/25
Ambasz Earth Day Lecture with Kunlé Adeyemi
5:00 PM | Museum of Modern Art
Planet Yerke Exhibition Opening with Yerkezhan Abuova
5:00 PM EST | Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
6:00 PM EST | Urban Design Forum, The Architectural League of New York, and Urban Omnibus
Plantation Plots: What Are Our Decolonizing Designs? with K. Wayne Yang
5:30 PM CST | Rice University School of Architecture
VKhuTeMas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920–1930 Exhibition Opening
6:30 PM EST | Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
7:00 PM EST | Japan Society
Thursday, 1/26
Manual of Biogenic House Sections Exhibit Opening and Book Launch with Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David J. Lewis, and LTL Architects
6:00 PM EST | AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Straight Up, with a Twist: Clarity, Intention, Delivery with Ann Beha
6:30 PM EST | Yale University School of Architecture
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
Write us a letter! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
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.
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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