S K Y L I N E | 46 | Blame enough to go around
S K Y L I N E | 46 | Blame enough to go around
What do we hope to accomplish by pointing fingers?
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Greetings, Readers.
Last week, I asked our writers to consider questions of responsibility, obligation, and sacrifice within the practice of architecture, specifically what the architect’s role is in navigating these themes. Ironically, the theme for this week’s slate of dispatches bore out to be “How is everyone else messing up, and what can architects do about it?”
Of course, architecture has been an experiment in visionary solution-making since time immemorial. Need shelter from a storm? Behold, the post and lintel. Over time, the problems have only seemed to get more complex and architecture has swerved wildly from one extreme to another to address them. Today, we need solutions faster than ever, and yet the answers don’t seem to be any closer to realization. There are Big Ideas, manifestos, conferences, signed commitments, but where are the results? The wait can feel maddening at times.
Still, we cannot fully give into pedantry or nihilism. We need vision, if only to sustain the project of realizing a future.
—Anna Gibertini
BUILDING KILLS BOOK
In a debate Wednesday night between the architecture critic (and sometimes NYRA editor) MARIANELA D’APRILE and the architect MARK FOSTER GAGE over the resolution THE BOOK WILL KILL THE BUILDING (cribbed from Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) the building survived, as, after 90 minutes of vigorous discussion, an overwhelming plurality of the participants voted the resolution down. NOAH MAMIS, policy director for the New York state senate Democrats, moderated.
Marianela D’Aprile, who championed the building, did not exactly extend her advocacy of its continued narrative relevance to architects. Architects, she argued, are powerless - buildings are conduits for capital, the sheer expense of erecting one demands nothing less. The building, therefore, will express what the capital behind it wishes it to express. In the case of one of her main examples, the newly opened observatory on One Vanderbilt, capital is creating a fuzzy shiny shareable experience to glam up corporate capitalism. Architects are incidental to the whole process. Should we despair? Nay, we just need to get capital into the hands of the people.
Mark Foster Gage, who championed the book, really found his stride defending architects and Architecture (which he distinguished from mere buildings, as one would, he said, distinguish Cuisine from food, or Film from cinema, or Art from whatever it is they put up in the bedrooms in the Marriott). Is the architect incidental? The example of the Seattle Library, he argued, would suggest otherwise. Given a typical budget ($300 a square foot) budget, OMA produced a library with twice the foot traffic of its typical peer. The difference? The architect!
“But what about the books?” interjected JAFFER KOLB, an architect and principle of the practice New Affiliates. Bah humbug. No one comes to an architecture event to discuss books. “Could a book,” asked D’Aprile, “ever show you how to worship a deity?” “You mean, the Bible?” shot back Gage.
Kolb was however keeping his cards close, having in fact with ANDREW HOLDER (also an architect, and program director for the M.Arch program at the Harvard GSD) written about the renewed importance of meaning in contemporary architecture for New York Review of Architecture’s November issue, #24… consider securing a copy with a subscription.
Speaking of which, at the beginning of the debate, attendee JACOB FULK, of Brooklyn, became NYRA’s 500th subscriber. As he received his prize - a thick book - someone shouted, “There it is, the culprit, the one that killed the building!”
DISPATCHES
11/10 - Materialities of Architectural Discourse
At an open classroom event hosted by California College of the Arts’ History and Theory Experiments platform, podcaster JESS MEYERS, architects CRUZ GARCIA and NATALIE FRANKOWSKI of WAI, and journalist KATE WAGNER discussed the critical project of media production. Sobering discussions of capitalist interference in critical discourse, settler colonialism, and survivalist projects were the main thrust of the lecture.
“Institutions are very easily scammed,” said Meyers. “There is so little concern with actually generating the capacity to create new knowledge…[but] you can scoop some of [their] resources out and…operationalize them with people who are interested in critical survival.” The project of critical survival is based on dissolving systems that are unsustainable and preparing frameworks for their aftermath. For Garcia, this involves “grabbing whatever weapon is near you and using it to smash the system”; defining your work less by the medium you use, and more by its relationship to the institutions that are failing architects, students, and citizens. —Vivian Schwab
11/11 – Confronting Carbon Form 3: The Suburb
The suburbs sat in the crosshairs of MATTHEW SOULES (whose book, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, I reviewed in Issue #23) and KEITH KRUMWIEDE (Dean of Architecture at California College of the Arts) as part of the third session of Confronting Carbon Form, organized by STANLEY CHO, ELISA ITURBE, and ALICAN TAYLAN and hosted by the journal LOG. In introducing the evening, Iturbe identified “three ingredients of the formative conditions of the suburbs”: ideologies/imaginaries, finance, and energy.
The most incisive question came from Krumwiede, who looked to the historical origins of suburban standardization in architectural pattern books of the 17th century, to find where “the ideal of the free-standing country home” was born. He asked: “How do we begin to produce forms, environments that don’t seem to be antithetical to peoples’ ideas of how they might live as they’ve been constructed for the last 500 years?” In thinking about how to successfully address necessary changes in our built environment, this question of meeting people where they’re at, and moving forward from there, will be a crucial one. —Nicholas Raap
11/13 - A Section of the Newly Opened Exhibit A Section of Now
The first themed gallery of A Section of Now, which opened last Saturday at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, considers the spaces and dynamics of family. As part of the CCA's larger Catching Up with Life initiative, the show examines how people use architecture to adapt to contemporary living. Photographs from the Living Room series by the British photographer NICK WAPLINGTON are on the wall to the right, while images from Cuddle Party and Skin Hunger by the American visual artist JAMIE DIAMOND are on the left. A triangular bed, a piece from 2014 by the architects JOHANNA MEYER-GROHBRÜGGE and SAM CHERMAYEFF as June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff is freestanding on the carpet. Per the firm’s description, it was "designed for the nuclear family and its opposite, together." (Chermayeff, with curator and Syracuse instructor BETSY CLIFTON, did the exhibition design for the show). In front is the SNOO Smart Sleeper Bassinet ($1,595) (thought its name may suggest otherwise, SNOO is not a brand, not an architecture firm), which soothes a baby through automated rocking and white noise, programmable from one's iPhone. "When your baby is sleeping, everybody's sleeping," its ad proclaims. Additional thoughts forthcoming elsewhere. —Jack Murphy
11/15 – The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Stories on Dismantling and Reuse
On Monday, architect AUDE-LINE DULIERE presented “The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Stories on Dismantling and Reuse” as the 2021 Wheelwright Prize Lecture at the Harvard GSD. Duliere presented six projects related to her research on material lifecycles in the movie industry, tying each to a particular narrative of construction, deconstruction, and storage. The six stories—Wood, Polystyrene, Plaster, Fiberglass, Paint, and Steel—summarized findings on production methods for each material, the material’s lifecycle, whether the material was a good candidate for reuse, and methods of reuse standardization. Duliere’s six stories are dramas; the building materials are resistant to being recycled and belie their carbon footprints, but creative systems of material storage and reuse reliably arrive to save the day.
Near the end of her lecture, Duliere presented conceptual diagrams for a more sustainable movie industry. She used diagrams that imagine different lifecycles for materials, and different construction and deconstruction timeframes that might find their way into both the film and AEC industries. —Charles Weak
11/16 – Infrastructure (Social And Physical) Green New Deal
On Tuesday, the New York Institute of Technology convened a panel to discuss the role that architecture should play in the ongoing debate about social and physical infrastructure, particularly within the context of the Green New Deal. The panel included: Yale Architecture professor and Architecture Lobby founding member PEGGY DEAMER; economist and former Greek Minister of Finance YANIS VAROUFAKIS. Moderating the panel were the two NYIT professors (both, coincidentally, with doctorates from Columbia GSAPP), NADER VOSSOUGHIAN, a specialist, in part, in standardization in 20th century architecture; and HYUN-TAE JUNG, one of the leading experts on the early history of SOM’s architecture.
“The decoupling [of social infrastructure from physical infrastructure] has ideological consequences that are deeply problematic,” said Deamer. “It indicates that things that are more ephemeral, less visible, are the things that we cannot deal with…It threw out childcare, eldercare, and housing.” As Democrats celebrate the passing of a watered-down infrastructure bill, added Varoufakis, G7 central banks continue to print COVID-19 relief money for their friends in the financial sector—a total of 10 trillion dollars since March 2020. In the U.S., the impact of Federal Reserve policy is crucial when it comes to what gets built and who builds it. “If [the corporate COVID-19 relief] wealth has nowhere to be invested, it’s going to go into brick and mortar—it’s swelling the housing and property markets.” Thus, the influx of the Fed’s money into corporations decouples the stock market and the property market from reality. —Sebastián López Cardozo
EYES ON SKYLINE
(the most-clicked link from Skyline 45)
Last week, readers were curious—distraught maybe?—to find out that the Standard Hotel may be in foreclosure. We have a follow up to that story below.
IN THE NEWS
...the people of Paris are trés énervé about this Herzog & de Meuron triangle tower, slated for completion in 2026...
...The Standard Hotel is definitely foreclosing, if Wells Fargo gets its way...
...Escape from New York? Not quite—turns out more people are moving into the city than out of it and in numbers higher than pre-pandemic times...
...Perhaps in preparation for these new arrivals, artist Nick Relph has been digitally scanning and collecting construction site renderings of up-and-coming projects, compiling them into a new book...
…Jeremy White wrote an excellent piece for PLATFORM providing needed context to the discussion around the notorious dorm at UCSB, dubbing it the S.S. Munger: “as a real estate practice maximizing density over livability, it will fit right in”…
…Marianela D’Aprile wrote about prison architecture for the Jacobin, kicking up a twitter fight with brutalist defenders, specifically docomomo…
…D’Aprile also expanded on the importance of capital in architecture - her debate position - in Architect’s Newspaper…
...Finally, the Farnsworth House is dead, long live the Edith Farnsworth House...
DATELINE
*Due to the upcoming holiday, events are limited to today…
Friday, 11/19
Design and Practice Exchange: Navigating the (Post) Pandemic Terrain
8:00 am | AIANY Women in Architecture Committee
SYMPOSIA: Designing Equity with Jerrod Delaine
9:00 am | Pratt Institute School of Architecture
STUDENT LECTURE SERIES | JOYCE HWANG: ARCHITECTURE FOR THE COLLECTIVE with Joyce Hwang
6:30 pm | The Cooper Union
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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