S K Y L I N E | Searching for a Good Crisis
Olmsted, Abolition Geography, Nakagin Capsule Tower, Lincoln Center
Issue 89. Let’s all try to make it to the new year. Find your way by subscribing to NYRA.
How many crises has design media latched onto within the last decade? Occupy!, net neutrality, the Arab Spring, Amazon, Gezi Park, the Amazon, Rana Plaza, Mediterranean migrants, prison reform, DAPL, the US-Mexico border, covid, police brutality, loss of the countryside, school shootings, climate change, Ukraine, the endless varieties of unfreedom. Architects and designers have learned to use crisis well. They convene panels and conferences on urgent issues; they edit publications and curate exhibitions around disaster relief; they issue prototypes for medical gear and humanitarian tents. KATE WAGNER coined the term “coronagrifting” relatively early in the pandemic to describe designers offering “solutions” in a somewhat opportunistic manner. Others might call this ambulance chasing. There are reasons for this behavior beyond careerist ambition: sometimes architects may want to prove their own relevance to reduce doubt about their career choices; some might want to get designers a seat at the decision-making table; and others might want to feel that they are doing good rather than just getting by. But there is something unseemly to our drive for relevance, this need to arrive early at a disaster site. Often, we are party to the theft of attention followed by a lack of follow-through, resulting in lost trust and lost momentum toward actual fixes. In this attention economy, it can result most often in exhaustion such that nothing at all seems worth addressing. This isn’t to say that architects and designers can’t do good: we can. If we work to solve the everyday crises in front of us: construction labor, job security, material extraction, and material waste. Or if we become decision-makers through solidarity: working with others, often locally, and often without a spotlight.
—AJ Artemel
REPORTING FROM THE FRONT
Dated April 22, 2020, a letter written by Office of Metropolitan Architecture partner REINIER DE GRAAF takes the form of a message from the future to the present reflecting on the inadequacies of the healthcare system exposed by COVID-19. “The hospital director became manager. The doctors became staff. The patient became client,” de Graaf writes. He goes on: “Hotels became hospitals. Schools became hospitals. Sports stadia became hospitals. Exhibition and congress centres became hospitals.” In closing, he recounts the perceived failings of governments, entrepreneurs, and vaccine development, concluding that the only possible solution is to redesign the physical form of the hospital.
The future is here, and so is de Graaf’s answer to the failings of medical infrastructure. In April of this year, the firm released a video unveiling a client-commissioned project: the Al Dayaan Health District, a prototype for an autonomous hospital of the future developed for Qatar.
During the intro, a deep-voiced narrator worries that purpose-built hospitals are quickly becoming obsolete. He presents the problem as solvable only by design. The issue with hospitals is not austerity budgets, asymmetrical access to care, or healthcare labor issues: it’s that they’re vertical. The solution? A sprawling low-rise “system” consisting of “modules” that can be restructured based on shifting needs.
Their treatment of Qatar as an architectural playground gives OMA an out: they don’t have to address any of the issues with hospitals people watching from Europe and North America might be familiar with. Hospitals in the US are much more likely to close due to lack of public funding than obsolesce. It also sets up unlikely problems they heroically solve: food and energy supply, proposed to be self-generated in Al Dayaan, would only be an issue for a hospital in the desert or on another planet. This is architectural foresight: not of a possible contribution to social welfare, but of deep-pocketed clients who need stories to tell in times of crisis.
—Michael Nicholas
Repeated crises on the eastern seaboard have necessitated rapid planning and design action. With the aim of building preparedness for coastal Virginia, programs at UVA, W&M, and ODU developed the Resilience Adaptability Feasibility Tool (RAFT). The initiative provides localities a scorecard system to assess political, social, and infrastructure readiness for crisis, as well as aid in developing and implementing new plans. Since the first analyses and implementation in 2017, RAFT has aided resilience planning in twenty-eight localities. The program is funded entirely by grants and donations, and is free to local governments. After a year of aid, however, the localities are on their own. This raises the question of why the program is necessary at all, especially considering that local governments absorb responsibility for continuously enacting and updating plans set by RAFT once the group walks away. And where will responsibility lie if the plans aren’t enough?
—Philip Edmonston
DISPATCHES
10/14: Landscape Pasts
GUND HALL — At the Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives conference, organized by the GSD and the Arnold Arboretum, many presenters prefaced their comments with the same disclaimer: “I am not an Olmsted scholar.” In other circumstances, this might have been an alarming admission, but it turned out that the presence of nonexperts at the conference was by design. The event challenged entrenched views of landscape architecture’s putative founder, a man who, after 200 years, is still a field of study all his own. Olmsted’s multifaceted output—not just as a designer, but also as a journalist, editor, farmer, and environmentalist—as well as his personal and professional relationships were explored in depth. Among the presentations, YVONNE ELET described the quadrangle of Vassar College as “another element in the so-called hot fight between the formal and natural garden,” which Olmsted’s firm adjudicated through its work as consulting landscape architect. CHRISTINE EDSTROM O’HARA looked to Olmsted’s built and unbuilt projects in the Bay Area of California as an example of “regionalism as ecological design, pre-dating the 20th-century awakening of natural resource protection” in the arid West. And ALEXANDER MANEVITZ used court depositions, government reports, and newspaper articles to uncover how the destruction of Seneca Village, which paved the way for Olmsted’s arguably greatest design, Central Park, was legitimized in the public imagination. Though Olmsted was not directly involved in this process of dispossession, Manevitz clued the audience to subtextual descriptors of race and class in “the language of urban reformers and park proponents [which] relied on assumptions that privileged relatively new forms of urban real estate capital.”
—Emerson Goo
10/20: Towards Liberation
COOPER SQUARE — At the 7 p.m. start time, a line of people still wound around the block, waiting to pack into Cooper Union’s Great Hall. RUTH WILSON GILMORE, professor of earth and environmental science at CUNY, drew a massive crowd with three of her highly erudite colleagues (NIKHIL PAL SINGH, SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ, and LISA LOWE); they spoke, first individually and then as a panel, about her recent collection of essays entitled Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022). Although the audience was left a little hungry for Gilmore’s more known repertoire of geographic dangers and usual radicalization of capitalist vocabulary, the event still brought out a well-rounded summary of her life’s work on “race and racism as infrastructure”; “prison building as a means of coercive control”; “how to organize abandonment”; the strange paradox that of a “unionized nurse sleeping next to a dirty cop”; a reminder to turn “the green climate crisis red”; and “the conscious faculty of really looking to see all the patterns.”
—Zazu Swistel
10/25: Once Alive
ZOOM — For the past twelve years, NORITAKA MINAMI has been documenting the slow decline of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, KISHO KUROKAWA’s 1972 Metabolist wonderwork. The resultant body of photographs observes capsules in medias res, during the long move-out, in total disrepair and, finally, as they were demolished (most of the original 140) or entering preservation (about 33). Now on view as 1972/Accumulations at the MAS Context Reading Room in Chicago, they were the subject of a poignant Zoom conversation on Tuesday evening. Can a building survive its own death? Minami, historian KEN TADASHI OSHIMA, curator JENNIFER DUNLOP FLETCHER, and MAS Context’s IKER GIL circled this question with generosity and vigor, even suggesting that preserved capsules flourishing in new contexts may be a proof of concept of the Metabolist project. But for this listener, their expansive thinking could not dislodge the quiet reminder of Minami’s pictures: once this place was alive.
—Clare Fentress
10/25: That Other New York Review
CHELSEA — "Being Jewish, I thought it was good to work with the Jewish mafia," said designer STEVE HELLER, at a launch event with MOLLY HEINTZ at the School of Visual Arts (sponsors of NYRA), for his new book, Growing Up Underground. Heller is a longtime art director for the New York Times and the editor/author/coauthor of something like 200 books ("I used to imagine what it would be like not to work 8 days a week, and then in the pandemic it happened, and it was not all it was cracked up to be"). This particular book, a memoir, focuses on his early days and early publications (he started making drawings and then art directing for the New York Free Press he was just 15). My favorite, of course, was NEW YORK REVIEW OF SEX, which then became the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SEX and POLITICS, and finally, for its last issue, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SEX, POLITICS and AERONAUTICS. His mafia distributors became upset with the diminishing amount of sex content in each issue, and responded by dropping the publication.
—Nicolas Kemper
10/26: Stunning!
LINCOLN CENTER — David Geffen Hall (formerly known as Avery Fisher Hall) celebrated its latest revamp with a gala concert on Wednesday night. Seven years and $550 million later, the building’s interior retains none of the sepulchral mood that previously reigned: it is intimate, warm, and inviting. Even better, the auditorium’s cursed acoustics have finally been remedied. There was much to celebrate. Before the concert, SENATOR CHUCK SCHUMER reminded the attendees gathered on the grand promenade that he had secured funding for the arts throughout the pandemic. MAYOR ERIC ADAMS followed, delivering a freewheeling stump speech about the greatness of New York—slight on details, heavy on pathos, seemingly extemporaneous. (A woman next to me whispered, “Well, he’s running for something.”) TOD WILLIAMS and BILLIE TSIEN, architects of the renovation (and sponsors of NYRA) alongside Toronto-based Diamond Schmitt Architects, were on hand, receiving toasts from well-wishers on a job well done. Patrons, board members, and performers toasted the renovation one-by-one but persistently stopped short of mentioning the words “architecture” or “architects.” It wasn’t until Late Show host STEPHEN COLBERT took the stage, at around 8 p.m., that someone finally noted the obvious: “Stunning architecture!”
—Phillip Denny
10/26: Port City Primal Scream
NEW YORK HARBOR — "This is the hippest party I have been to for a long time," said Deputy Secretary for Transportation POLLY TROTTENBERG at the Institute for Public Architecture’s 9th Annual Fall Fête, where she was honored along with ADAM PAUL SUSANECK, the creator of Segregation by Design. And it was hip indeed. Guests checked in at the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry before taking a ferry to Governors Island. A fellow attendee, surveying the glittering towers and the Statue of Liberty in the dusk light, noted that “it is so easy to forget that New York is a port city.” Oysters were served, before the short remarks somebody led everyone in a primal scream, and the whole group walked deep into the island interior for an after party at the Institute's building, The Block House, where there was a DJ, drinks, and a table full of cookies.
—Nicolas Kemper
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 88, readers wanted to catch a peek of Selldorf Architects’ plans for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery.
IN THE NEWS
This week…
…The Watcher is probably a trad-arch guy…
…NYC streeteries to weather another winter…
…Ralph Fiennes will play Robert Moses…
…the AZP vs. Princeton case ambles ever onward…
…Curbed is eavesdropping in public spaces…
…Witold Rybczynski read Marianna Janowicz’s piece in NYRA #31…
…Billy Fleming read Signe’s Greenland travelog, and thinks you should, too…
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Friday 10/28
Building of the Day: Queens Museum Panorama
1:00 PM EDT | Archtober, AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Reveling in Architecture's Entanglements with Mason White
3:00 PM PDT | California College of the Arts Architecture Division
From the Gilded Age to Art Deco: Architectural Jewels of New York City with Levi Higgs, Keith Taillon
8:00 PM EDT | National Arts Club
Saturday 10/29
Building of the Day: Mandala Lab at the Rubin Museum of Art with Peterson Rich Office
3:00 PM EDT | Archtober, AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Sunday 10/30
Building of the Day: Hudson Commons with KPF
12:00 PM EDT | Archtober, AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Brooklyn Navy Yard: Architecture & Infrastructure
1:00 PM EDT | Archtober, AIA New York | Center for Architecture, Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92
Monday 10/31
Building of the Day: David Geffen Hall with Diamond Schmitt, Tod Williams & Billie Tsien
12:00 PM EDT | Archtober, AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Architecture and The Real-Estate-Media Complex with Marija Marić
12:30 PM EDT | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
What Does Urban Science Have to Say About Urban Design? with Arthur Jemison
12:30 PM EDT | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Débora Mesa Molina Lecture with Débora Mesa Molina
5:00 PM EDT | Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture
Trust Issues with Germane Barnes
6:30 PM EDT | Syracuse University School of Architecture
Tuesday 11/1
LiPS with Isabelle Angueloski
2:30 PM EDT | Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts with James Wines
6:30 PM EDT | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Modernizing Baku: The Difference That Oil Makes with Eve Blau, Elisa Iturbe
6:30 PM EDT | Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
Wednesday 11/2
Housing as Healthcare with Robert E. Fullilove, Leora Jontef, Wendi Shafran
6:00 PM EDT | Urban Design Forum
The New Zeke Endowment Discussion & Fundraiser with Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, Jeffrey Kipnis, Daniel Girma, Cameron Holman
7:00 PM EDT | a83
Thursday 11/3
Constructing Architectural Ecologies with Margaret Ikeda, Adam Marcus, Evan Jones
3:00 PM PDT | California College of the Arts Architecture Division
Rural Moves with Xu Tiantian
6:30 PM EDT | Yale University School of Architecture
Wet + Dry: Landscapes of Resilience and Material Exploration with James A. Lord, Roderick Wyllie
6:30 PM EDT | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Have a take of global importance to share with NYRA? Write us a letter!
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.
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