S K Y L I N E | The Shock of the Old
Berenice Abbott, Paul R. Williams, SOM, Garrett Ricciardi, and more
Issue 120. Enjoy SKYLINE? Subscribe to our print edition.
Rat’s out of the bag: in January, NYRA will launch the first iteration of our Visiting Cities series. Guest-edited by critic Mimi Zeiger, Los Angeles Review of Architecture will review architecture in Los Angeles. We’d like to thank the Graham Foundation for their support for this project. Lots to look forward to, but for the time being, we offer the following dispatches, whose themes range from cosplaying vintage New York to world socialist utopia. —The Editors
DISPATCHES
07/10: To Where Form Follows
LOS ANGELES — What should aspiring architects take away from a lecture on fetishistic sand piles? Speaking to students in UCLA Architecture and Urban Design’s JumpStart summer intensive program, GARRETT RICCIARDI, a professor at the school and co-founder of Formlessfinder, expounded on his first big break—a folly designed with collaborator JULIAN ROSE for Design/Miami that featured a lightweight aluminum roof stabilized by a heap of sand (a material that is ordinarily “a complete nuisance in Miami and in the construction industry in general”)—and delved into more recent interventions in land art and Kuwaiti archaeology. Ricciardi couched his eruditions on territory, extraction, and infrastructure with the cold, hard truths of maintaining a research practice in a competitive job market. “You take every bathroom and renovation job you can get,” he said in response to a question about financial sustainability raised by an anxious audience member. His suggestions for how to “avoid the depletion and exhaustion” of building materials appeared to doubly serve as personal advice to the students themselves, brimming with questions and energy.
— Shane Reiner-Roth
07/12: Period-Correct Details
ZOOM — “You have to have a photographer’s eye to see the things that will kill ‘a historic’ shot,” said MATT LAMB, a location manager for television shows such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Godfather of Harlem at a talk hosted by the Historical Districts Council. An errant a/c unit here or an LED sign there can undo all the hard work of his colleagues in the props and wardrobe departments. Lamb and his interlocutor, LORNA NOWVÉ, an industry veteran who recently worked on Only Murders in the Building, discussed the difficulties of recreating vintage New York even as they acknowledged the disruptions entailed by their work. Trailers and street closures interrupt the flow of life and commerce; communities that are location hotspots often work with the city to ban trailer parking. Lamb stressed ways for lowering the temperature—quite literally so: a big budget production that he worked on paid businesses for days lost and then bought ice cream from a local merchant for the whole street. Poignantly, he and Nowvé spoke about film and TV’s ability to memorialize overlooked parts of the city. For instance, turn-of-century beach bungalows in Staten Island, destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, are now preserved in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, in which the borough’s coastline doubles as the Jersey Shore. Even when New York is playing someplace else, its inner character shines through, Lamb concluded. “NYC is not LA, it is not Atlanta. It is always New York and what I’m proud of.”
— Malaika Kim
Scrap Heap
UPPER EAST SIDE — At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator MIA FINEMAN led visitors on a tour of the exhibition Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 (reviewed in NYRA #36). Abbott was a self-identified lesbian and “new woman” who was seeking a voice and found it behind a camera. Her titular photo album arrived at an electric—and volatile—moment in New York’s history, when innovations in building technology suddenly ratcheted the city, then beset by economic hardship, skyward. At the time, cameras were primarily reserved for portraiture and indeed, Abbot’s early beginnings with Man Ray in Paris were not architectural in nature. That changed when she returned to New York and began making a “scrapbook” of small prints to market her first attempts at urban photography. It’s an insight into her artistic method and the business of being an artist—one so revealing that Fineman believes “she would probably be very unhappy that we put this on the wall.” Vertiginous images of skyscrapers and steel bridges—often crammed onto a single page—betray the modernist perspective Abbott acquired while in Paris and that, as Fineman put it, capture “feeling alienated yet part of a thing much larger than yourself.” The album eventually culminated in a photo book funded by the WPA, Changing New York. Abbott was one of the first to take the camera to the street, and seeing her view of New York reveals in stark clarity what has changed and what hasn’t.
— Kale Seikkula
Optimism of the Will
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — Over a hundred architecture students packed into a Columbia auditorium to listen to DREW PENDERGRASS, a PhD student in environmental engineering at Harvard, and TROY VETTESE, an environmental historian at the European University Institute, elaborate their proposal for a “half-earth socialism.” The duo’s talking points—mostly drawn from their book of the same name, published by Verso in 2022—recast the environmental crisis in the terms of political economy. Along the way, they invoked studies into the material constraints of a market economy, urban experiments in China, even board games by Marxist philosophers. Denouncing capitalism for its inability “to achieve a real democracy,” they called for worldwide socialist planning, a rewilding of half the earth, and a rapid transition to renewable energy. Pendergrass and Vettese didn’t shy away from crucial questions having to do with nonmarket economies and the global dimension of exploitation; instead, they elevated these problems to the scale of human governance. For this cohort of architecture students, who will be asked to design with and against climate change, the talk made that paralyzing and seemingly insurmountable task slightly less foreboding.
— Layna Chen
07/13: An Intimate Eye
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “I am an architect,” begins a wall text at the Center for Architecture’s new exhibition, JANNA IRELAND on the Architectural Legacy of Paul R. Williams in Nevada. The block-quote, excerpted from a 1937 article written by the Los Angeles architect, ends on an expression of affirmation: “I am a Negro.”
Williams’s immense oeuvre—comprising dozens of houses and churches and a smattering of public buildings—is often overshadowed by his status as the AIA’s first Black member. In her brief remarks at last week’s opening event, Ireland, an LA photographer who first learned of Williams in 2016 and published a book on his work in 2020, said she celebrates his achievements as a person of color. Yet her approach clearly aims for something beyond identity. The meticulous greyscale photographs of staircases, ceiling soffits, and ornate ironwork read like Rorschach tests from afar but reveal an aptitude for detailing up close. Images depicting building exteriors are informative without being rote. What shines through is a deep appreciation for Williams’s smaller architectural victories, which made countless houses homes.
— Michael Donovan
07/18: The Shock of the Old
ZOOM — “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” might have been a more fitting title for the Skyscraper Museum’s public lecture, “The Future of the Past on Park Avenue: Lever House and the Waldorf Astoria,” held online this Tuesday. In a carousel of then-and-now visuals, I frowned as the ornate plaster ceiling of the Waldorf’s main lobby darkened with the addition of chintzy wall paneling and elegant, free-standing lights devolved into stubby desk lamps. Years of “not so sympathetic” renovations had wiped the Art Deco hotel and the modernist landmark office complex three blocks away clean of their more endearing details, explained architect FRANK MAHAN, something dual renovations by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill hope to remedy. Mahan was joined on screen by his colleague AMY GARLOCK, who offered that “everything that’s old will become new in the future.” Wiping away the old-new to reveal the new-old, longtime tenants of the Lever House will be happy to hear that SOM intends on returning shuffleboard courts to the terrace.
—Angelina Torre
In June, a group of activists, artists, and educators launched a new initiative called the Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI). Describing themselves as “a New York City based co-learning and strategizing platform for urban activism that brings together experienced and powerful movement builders from many different worlds to shape equitable, compassionate and just cities,” SCCI invites New Yorkers rooted in local movements to apply to their inaugural “STUDY.PLAY.ACT” program, in which a group of peers will be given the time, space, and resources to engage in collective study and group project development. Applications are open until July 24 and info sessions are open to anyone who’s interested. Learn more and apply now at www.shapeofcitiestocome.org.
IN THE NEWS
Gruesome news: the FBI apprehended architect Rex Heuermann outside his midtown office, charging him in the Gilgo Beach serial murders. Curbed delved into Heuermann’s somewhat slim design portfolio (the bulk of his business was in consulting) and found a pair of renovations to be “unfussy, crisp, minimal, maybe a little bland but not offensively so.” The Real Deal soon followed suit with its own appraisal. In another lurid display, gawkers gathered outside the Heuermann household in Massapequa Park, Long Island, reported the Times. “I couldn’t wait to see it. I’m so into this thing,” a teacher who had driven thirty miles to see the rundown red house was quoted as saying.
He takes it back: in a column about the regrettable proliferation of the “grand civic staircase” trope in public architectural projects, New York magazine’s Justin Davidson critically re-examined his positive 2019 review of Steven Holl Architects’ Hunters Point Library, whose own grand civic staircase is inaccessible to many patrons. In fact, this is the second time Davidson has attempted to correct the record: weeks after publishing his initial assessment of the building, he filed a mea culpa entitled “The Important Thing I Didn’t See at the New Hunters Point Library.” In recent months, the city sued Holl and his associates for their design. Davidson suggests, perhaps this is an opportunity to call a moratorium on big, clumsy staircases.
Disaster planning: the Times profiled several homeowners cum preppers and their zany homes, many of which are variations on a Bucky dome. The adherence to that model may be explained through its enduring iconography—DIY domes were flogged in the Whole Earth Catalog—as much as structural sturdiness. An interesting tidbit concerned the vendors of such domes, including the Minnesota company Natural Spaces Domes that claims its wares are a considerably cheaper investment than a wood-frame house.
Design spotting: Los Angeles Times columnist Carolina A. Miranda revealed her fondness for the anti-capitalist slant of Boots Riley’s new Prime Video series I’m a Virgo and its “sublimely surreal” architecture. Of the villain’s lugubriously sleek lair, she offers, “Lydia Tár would love it.”
Penn again: Though it counts urbane critics among its admirers, Penn Station is widely considered to be an assault on good civic taste. According to a new report prepared by the Independent Budget Office, the reviled complex is also an assault on taxpayers’ wallets. The city has lost out on nearly $1 billion since Madison Square Garden’s permanent tax break went into effect more than forty years ago.
An old friend: after disappearing from its perch in Astor Place in May, sculptor Tony Rosenthal’s spinning Cube is back where it belongs.
DATELINE
The week ahead…
Friday, 7/21
Summer Lecture Series: Nabi Boyd with Sean Boyd & Mora Nabi
12:30 PM PDT | University of California Los Angeles Architecture and Urban Design
Monday, 7/24
Summer Lecture Series with Katarina Richter-Lunn & Joel Kerner
12:30 PM PDT | University of California Los Angeles Architecture and Urban Design
Make the Road NY Tour
4:00 PM EDT | Urban Design Forum
Tuesday, 7/25
Stories from Neighborhoods Now Film Screening with Kate Levy
7:00 PM EDT | Van Alen Institute
Wednesday, 7/26
Arguments Lecture Series: Habitability with Urban Soil with Mio Tsuneyama & Fuminori Nousaku
11:30 AM EDT | Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Beyond ADA: Social Connections in Aging Communities with Matthew Bremer, Elissa Winzelberg, Darin Reynolds, Jenna Breines, & Mohini Mishra
6:00 PM EDT | AIA New York | Center for 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
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New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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