5/7
MOS gave a Zoom-based lecture on their work titled “Images of Things” as their video cut in and out. Discussing “low-resolution houses” on a low-resolution platform kind of worked. Is this the beginning of the “Zoomcore” aesthetic?
5/7
SLAB hosted ANDREW KOVACS, OANA STANESCU, and JIMENEZ LAI for the Review’s No. 11 distribution event, “REAL TIME,” a live collaborative drawing, jury critique, and three-way interview all rolled into one.
5/14
Lecturing by Zoom, MARK FOSTER GAGE presented “Architecture and the Aesthetics of Reality” to a digitally-connected crowd of 160, many sporting virtual backgrounds of spaces designed by the architect. As he noted in his talk: “architects are responsible for designing the backdrop of reality.”
5/21
The REVIEW joined the BALLOT, also on Zoom, to host J.G. MOORE, HYUNGMIN PAI and MYUNGGU KANG for a comparative discussion on city planning in the age of COVID in New York and Seoul. Conclusion? Pandemics might be manageable, even in dense cities, if you are ready to forfeit privacy.
5/23
Architecture students at Princeton presented their theses to a virtual - probably zoom - jury that included SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU, ANA MILJAČKI, SEAN ANDERSON, and KELLER EASTERLING, who declared that the pandemic has revealed “normal is the most dangerous proposition.”
5/30
Proceeding on 125th Street as part of non-violent action that began in response to George Floyd’s murder by the police, protesters filed past a barricade of silent officers at NYPD’s 28th Precinct and Columbia’s eerily empty glassine Manhattanville campus, then paused in the shade beneath the West Side Highway overpass before marching up the southbound onramp. Traffic slowed to a standstill as thousands of bodies wove between the cars. Drivers—while surprised—offered little resistance, instead honking, making a fist, or cheering from within their cars: the chants co-mingled with the smell of burning sage and hot sun on asphalt.
5/31
Dressed in black, protesters in Brooklyn banged pots screaming, “Black Lives Matter! No Justice, No Peace!” They have said these words already through the streets of New York—in 2014, in 2015 and in 2016—for Eric Garner and the countless Black and Brown lives lost to police murders. But now, for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, they halted traffic on Flatbush Avenue and Tillary Street. The protesters stood among the cars as their leader mounted a barricade bellowed, “We head to the [Manhattan] Bridge. Let us keep walking! Do not get distracted! Do not give them any excuse to stop us! Do not engage them!” But the cops did not let protesters cross the bridge. They threatened with their Corrections Truck and shoved first. Protesters had to engage. Per columnist ZAZU SWISTEL: “Without a doubt, this is the most important movement of the 21st century.”
6/3
“Our job is to disrupt not just the policies but the physical spaces that are representative of injustice,” said architect BRIAN LEE, JR. leading a #DESIGNASPROTEST webinar along with “HIP-HOP ARCHITECT” MICHAEL FORD and LOEB Fellow DE NICHOLS. The event called architects and designers to participate in weekly Friday actions in support of the Movement for Black Lives, leading up to Juneteenth.
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CORRESPONDENTS
Phillip Denny, Alissa Lopez Serfozo, Charles Weak, Nicolas Kemper (Ed.), Amanda Iglesias, Zazu Swistel, Dante Furioso