S K Y L I N E | The Trouble with Housing
With Miguel Robles Durán, David Harvey, Jeanne Gang, Anna Bokov, and more
Issue 112. This evening, we’ll head over to our Long Island City printer to pick up piping hot stacks of our next issue (a double!). Subscribe today and we will send you a copy.
This week brings a pair of New York City recommendations. The Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History has finally opened to the public, though given all the buzz the place has attracted in recent days, you may want to hold off until the preening packs of influencers have moved on. Instead, head downtown, where a controversial exhibition about a revolutionary Soviet design institute closes today at 7 p.m. after a very short stint at the Cooper Union. Scroll down for appraisals of both, plus a dispatch about a leftist summit on housing at the New School, news clippings, and, of course, event listings.
DISPATCHES
5/4: The Housing Question, Revisited
UNION SQUARE — “Everything that you read in the media, in the New York Times, says housing is a problem of supply. It is not a problem of supply.” As architect MIGUEL ROBLES DURÁN and those who joined him at a panel discussion hosted by the New School see it, the problem with housing is capitalism. British Marxist geographer DAVID HARVEY explained how capital’s insatiable need for growth necessitates unproductive forms of capital, in the case of the US first and foremost military spending (said Harvey, “Marx would say military spending is like dumping capital in the ocean”) as well as “stupid urbanization projects” like Hudson Yards. Brazilian architect and urban planner RAQUEL ROLNIK argued that what is needed is “to cut the link between territory and finance” and re-empower labor, per Harvey “the source of all value.” For Durán, who lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Parsons School of Design, “non-speculative, cooperative, communal housing” represents methods of ownership that capital would have a hard time infiltrating. Rolnik pointed to Red Vienna as a historical example, to which the moderator, the Barcelona-based architect JOSEP BOHIGAS, added the exemplary housing programs of present-day Helsinki and Zurich. The challenge, Bohigas noted, is that all these cities are of course also enormously wealthy. But perhaps that is not such a challenge, if we focus on forms of ownership, rather than scarcity, as the problem to be solved. —Nicolas Kemper
4/26: Biomorphique Fantastique
UPPER WEST SIDE — The morning after a pair of rave reviews in the Times and New York magazine brought the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation to the city’s notice, arts and culture journalists crowded on the multimodal stair that backstops the atrium, whose geological appearance has elicited a nauseating number of Flintstones references. By contrast, the mood of the press preview was determinedly edifying. “This is a monument and pillar to science, nature, and human cultures,” said ELLEN V. FUTTER, the AMNH’s former director, of the $465 million addition. As an educational resource for combating the post-truth age, the Gilder Center allows for “a deepening of science” among the public, said architect JEANNE GANG. What this rhetoric, by turns soaring and probing, discounts—the same thing the swoopy atrium groks—is the latent plenitude of surfaces. By now, broadminded readers will have become acquainted with shotcrete and its curious, counterintuitive “materiality,” which elides distinctions between hard and fluid, technical and accidental. As much as critics have swooned over the sculptural quality of the space, they have also drawn attention to the brittle residue of the shotcrete technique—developed in the early 20th century by taxidermist and one-time AMNH employee Carl Akeley—which intimates a kind of aestheticized decay; rub up against a wall or balcony and you’ll dislodge particulates of indeterminate matter. Beyond the frame lies something more mundane: drywall, and lots of it. Piercing the biomorphic veil delivers visitors into anonymous corridors that, at least when emptied of other people as it was on press day, are about as charmless as the dead space of shopping malls, where the retail thins out, save for the odd pretzel kiosk. To be fair, one expects these passageways will be bare only in the off-hours, precisely when the museum is most likely to host society gatherings. As NYRA contributor and sometime SKYLINE guest editor Michael Nicholas has ventured, with the Gilder Center, New York may have gained its premier party venue. —Samuel Medina
4/25: Thought Experiments
ASTOR PLACE — “Red or white?” a sommelier stationed outside the Cooper Union’s Houghton Gallery asked. “Is this a political purity test,” my wisenheimer friend replied, prompting a chuckle from our wine steward. The opening of the exhibition Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930, postponed for several months on account of institutional politics, had drawn avant-garde aficionados such as ourselves to Cooper that Tuesday evening. Many more were excited to gather among familiar faces, while others appeared curious as to how the event would shake out.
In the days leading up to the show’s would-be opening in late January, a certain sensitivity had built up about how best to display works related to a radical school of art and architecture in Soviet Moscow in light of Russia’s barbarous war in Ukraine. (How, in other words, to disentangle the one from the other, the “red” from the “white.”) Curators ANNA BOKOV and STEVEN HILLYER developed additional introductory texts that clarified their intent, while supplementary reflections from Cooper Union president LAURA SPARKS and other academics were added to assuage criticisms originating from within and outside of the school.
Described by Kenneth Frampton as the Soviet Union’s Bauhaus, Vkhutemas was an incubator for spatial forms and ideas that would be appropriated for decades following its forced closure in 1930. Students and faculty were persecuted or made to undergo re-training; some were even killed for their artistic associations. Few physical relics from the school’s brief decade of activity survived, though photography from the era attests to the mindboggling experimentation that informed projects such as Ivan Leonidov’s graduation project for a Lenin Institute and Lydia Komarova’s proposed headquarters for the Communist International. Bokov and Hillyer, both Cooper fixtures (the former is a professor, the latter is a school administrator), worked with students to bring this optimistic and perilous epoch to life. Models, diagrams, and full-scale technical implements give the gallery the frenzied feeling of a workshop. “It feels like the students are in dialogue with one another,” a CUNY art history major who attended the opening remarked. “Yes! That was the idea,” Bokov replied, smiling. —Dan Jonas-Roche
NEW YORK REVIEWS ARCHITECTURE
Come celebrate the launch of our new issue! RVSP here.
EYES ON SKYLINE
Readers of SKYLINE 111 were intrigued by a rebrand of Deborah Berke Partners.
SPONSORED: M.Arch Merch.
High-quality prints and products of seminal buildings from all over the world with specific collections for Brutalism, Postmodernism, New York, London, LA, Chicago, and insalubrious slogans.
IN THE NEWS
On Brand?
Converse convinced the Guggenheim to open its rotunda for a promotional shoot. (New Yorker)
Merch Alert
Bernard Tschumi can now add “T-shirt designer” to his résumé.
Not Cooking with Gas
New York State passes law banning gas stoves in most new buildings. (NPR)
King of the Trads
Charles III comes under fire for his links to reactionary currents of architectural discourse. (Dezeen)
Lost, but Now Found
Penn stages an exhibition about the first American woman with an architectural practice. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
Boo!
Despite pressure from protestors, the Rent Guidelines Board signaled its support for proposed rent increases at its annual meeting. (New York Times)
Go off
Members of the Bernheimer Architecture Union discuss the ins and outs of the bargaining process. (Urban Omnibus)
Say It Ain’t So
The future of the Bronx’s famed Amalgamated Housing Cooperative looks gloomy. (Jacobin)
DATELINE
Friday, 5/5
Material Worlds: Designing the Forest with Lindsey Wikstrom & Carson Chan
6:00 PM EDT
AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Harvard Loeb Fellowship Class of 2023 Final Presentations with Dario Calmese, Pamela Conrad, Claudia Dobles Camargo, Natalia Dopazo, Badruun Gardi, Shamichael Hallman, Alberto Kritzler, Rebecca McMackin, & Derwin Sisnett
6:30 PM EDT
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Saturday, 5/6
New York Architecture + Design Book Club: Touch Wood: Material, Architecture, Future with Thomas Hildebrand, Carla Ferrer, Celina Martinez-Cañavate, & Neil Pederson Saturday
3:00 PM EDT
Head Hi & Untapped Journal
Sunday, 5/7
FRUITS with Canal Street Research Association, Sebastijan Jemec, Emmy Catedral, Paolo Javier, Frances Chung, John Yau, Ryan Foerster, & RJ Gitter
3:00 PM EDT
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Tuesday, 5/9
Art Omi: Open Works and Architectural Installations with Julia van den Hout, Nina Cooke John, Hana Kassem, Suchi Reddy, & Spencer Topel
6:30 PM EDT
AIA New York | Center for Architecture
Thursday, 5/11
The Restorative City: Designing New York City with Health at the Center with Michelle Morse, Betsy MacLean, Jen Hughes, John Douglas, Matthew Clarke, Theo Oshiro, Yin Kong, Alexandra Shoneyin, Eran Chen, Kim Kessler, Kizzy Charles-Guzmán, & Daragh Byrne
9:00 AM EDT
Design Trust for Public Space
At the Parsons Table with Paul Goldberger & Laurie Beckelman
6:30 PM EDT
Parsons School of Design
Film Premiere: Climate Futures, Cities Past with Hajar alRifai, Maria Gabriela Carucci, Yasmine El Alaoui, Laura-India Garinois, Mahwish Khalil, and Sarine Vosgueritchia
4:00 PM EDT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events here.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Want to chat? Write us a letter! Simply reply to this e-mail. We will reply.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. It is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, 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.