S K Y L I N E | RETURN TO THE FOLD
James Wines, Peter Zumthor, Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, Germane Barnes
Issue 90. We also feel the deleterious effects of inflation here, so we’ve expanded our print subscription options and introduced a lower rate! Subscribe here.
Architects and designers are in many ways dabblers. Architecture education isn’t about technical mastery or even pragmatic skills — it’s a way of thinking that often allows us to reach into different places, spaces, objects, and stories with lightness. But after so much time adrift, it can be comforting to return to the fold.
The assembled dispatches cover capital-A architects like Peter Zumthor, who is familiar if not exactly approachable, and NYRA sponsors Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The haute couture–like practice of museum design comes into conversation with its inversion—irony and humor—with the nonagenarian artist James Wines. He helps steer the issue ever so slightly into the world of fine art, where we encounter a painter with the inclinations of an architect. We have a bit of everything “at the intersection of art and design” in this week’s dispatches.
— Emily Conklin
P.S. Today is the last day to vote early in NYC! Find your polling place here before early voting closes, or make your plan to vote on Election Day next Tuesday.
DISPATCHES
10/27: Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, and Peter Zumthor in conversation
Across the street from one of Louis Kahn’s first major projects — the Yale University Art Gallery extension — a long queue waited to enter the packed Yale Center for British Art — one of his last — for the latest event in a series dedicated to museum design. This evening’s lecture continued the 1999 conversation published by 2G as “The Tension of Not Being Specific,” with the same renowned protagonists.
TOD WILLIAMS reasserted his preference for unbound spaces, with provocative statements about their categorization: “How do you distinguish a house, let’s say, from a museum?” Despite splitting those two literally, PETER ZUMTHOR connected them metaphorically talking about the use of exposed concrete walls and natural side-lighting to create a non-neutral ambience and perception of the collections; “It’s nice to make a home for certain homeless objects.” BILLIE TSIEN played the lucid and poignant mediator, often with the presence she assigned to a museum’s building: “It needs to be brave enough to be quiet.”
—André Patrão
[Editor’s Note: Williams and Tsien are NYRA sponsors.]
10/31: Building Trust
MIDTOWN — On Halloween night, guests gathered at the Fisher Center to hear architect GERMANE BARNES meditate on Blackness, storytelling, and community building in his growing body of work. Throughout his lecture, Barnes provided candid anecdotes about architecture and space, some of which have been omitted — this was proposed as a “safe space” free from media, but is recollected here with consent.
The projects Barnes presented recalled the time and effort it takes to foster trust. For years, he was the designer-in-residence at the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation in Miami-Dade County. There, Barnes worked with local residents to put together community events and projects, such as a park he designed on an abandoned lot. “Community-oriented work is a slow burn. It takes time, but it’s worth it,” Barnes said. “Everyone understands space, even if they don’t have a degree in architecture.”
— Charles Weak
11/1: “Nature’s Revenge: Trying to Do More with Less”
CAMBRIDGE, MA — “We don’t have a consensus iconography anymore,” lamented JAMES WINES, founder of SITE, at his first-ever lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “What we have instead is a slab of concrete and public fountains.” Wines’s lecture offered a sweeping overview of his career and showcased a vast array of SITE projects from the past several decades. The presentation reflected Wines’s humorous attitude towards architecture and revolved around his long-standing disdain for architectural excess, particularly in the form of high-rises and the sprawling emptiness of public space in US urban centers. He is poking the eye of the architectural establishment that has denied him an audience for far too long.
— Cornelia Smith
11/2: Lewis Mumford: Toward Human Architecture
LOWER EAST SIDE — Lewis Mumford: Toward Human Architecture (1979), screened on 16mm at the SEWARD PARK LIBRARY last Wednesday. It opens seemingly midway, with the titular critic LEWIS MUMFORD describing the Brooklyn Bridge. The camera pans across its entire span as commentary plunges the viewer into the full breadth of his knowledge around the technical, aesthetic, and social considerations of modern architecture and planning.
Through a series of talking heads, the 90 minute made-for-TV movie covered a short history of American architecture familiar to any 70s introductory history survey, highlighting Mumford’s originating influence. So when I asked the librarian why they chose to screen this film now, I was expecting some argument on its relevance today, like when Nathaniel Owings speculated how his recently completed Sears Tower would still fare when humanity depletes our non-renewable energies. But the answer I got was much better: it is but one of many obscure films sitting in the library archives — the librarian just wanted to see what it was about.
— Nicholas Raap
10/26: Nueva Vivienda Book Launch
HOUSTON — Presenting their new book Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico at Rice University, JESÚS VASSALLO and (NYRA’s own) SEBASTIÁN LOPEZ CARDOZO discussed “multiples against monoliths” as a way to “produce housing that is more empathetic to the city around it.” What started off as a symposium in 2020 turned into a writing project with the ambition to “showcase a contemporary body of work happening in Mexico, with the aim to center it as exemplary.”
Nueva Vivienda spans three scales: single-family homes, urban infill developments, and high rise mega-blocks. At the launch, the editor-duo argued that the lessons taken from the infill projects are particularly relevant to American and Canadian cities trying to re-densify their urban centers. During the Q&A, audience members also discussed insights into preserving cultural understandings of property and underlying complicity between architects and capital.
— Randa Omar
NYRA at the Museum
Hopper’s New York
Whitney Museum of American Art
Approaching a City (1946) is the first painting you see when you enter Edward Hopper’s New York at The Whitney. Curator’s notes reveal that Hopper, who originally hailed from Nyack and as a boy made trips to the city by train, took inspiration from a similar point of entry he was undoubtedly familiar with. Yet the canvas eliminates any identifying details. Spend enough time looking and you begin to see Hopper’s vision for “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”
Hopper lived and worked in New York for nearly his whole life (1908–1967) and his paintings and sketches don’t shy away from the city’s landmarks. But with a similar frequency his work invoked “a city” — an unlabeled stand-in that communicated the sort of metropolitan anonymity Hopper observed and enjoyed in Manhattan. Many of the works throughout the exhibition bear this moniker. And of course, this choice plays well with his literal anonymizing via abstraction of facial features found in later scenes. (Nighthawks, though, where are you?)
Solitary figures or nondescript groups are set in generic urban spaces. Yet, even if this description does not do the work total justice, it nonetheless captures so many particularities of the city’s built environment — whether a brownstone facade or a neighbor’s window seen through one’s own.
— Tiam Schaper
IN MEMORIAM
NYRA is saddened to share news of the death of dear friend and regular contributor LEIJIA HANRAHAN. Donations and remembrances can be shared here. There will be a memorial service on Saturday at Gottcher Hall, Ridgewood.
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 89, readers were interested in a dean’s dismissal from Princeton and his response (of sorts) in The Princetonian.
IN THE NEWS
Architect of the Capitol accused of rampant ethical abuses in bombshell report…
Another fight over Penn Station…
Chicago is hopping on the office-to-residential conversion train…
IN NYRA NEWS
We have an office space…
We learned that scotch and mezcal pairs best with Issue #31…
McNally Jackson did not have a drink suggestion, but did say some nice things about the new issue…
DATELINE
Our new-and-improved Events guide logs all the architecture and design events you want and need. Here are a few selects for the upcoming week:
Friday 11/4:
Deserts Are Not Empty with Samia Henni, Reinhold Martin, Felicity D. Scott, Isabelle Kirham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, Laura Coombs
1:00 PM EDT | Columbia GSAPP
Saturday 11/5:
Density of Lives Book Launch and Signing with Ingrid Taillandier, ITAR Architectures
3:00 PM EDT | Galerie Perrotin
Monday 11/7:
The Embodied Cognition of Hand Drawing Workshop
5:00 PM EDT | Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture
Tuesday 11/8:
Pier 58l0 Exhibition Opening with Atelier 58l0
6:00 PM EDT | AIA New York
Thursday 11/10
Carefree, Not Careless with Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Elisa Iturbe
6:30 PM EST | Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
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.
To support our contributors and receive NYRA by post, subscribe here.