SKYLINE | 50 | Public Space
Where are we now?
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We are nearing the end of 2021 and it has been one amazing year of SKYLINE dispatches, building reviews, and even some in-person debates. This week's contributors aptly reflect on public space, something that we have slowly re-emerged to participate in over the course of the year. In this issue, Charles Weak reports back from Mariana Mogilevich’s book talk on public spheres in Lindsay’s New York, Anna Talley looks at Michael Murphy’s new book on hospitals at a conversation between Murphy and Kimmelman at Cooper Hewitt’s Design and Healing, and Nicolas Kemper shares what is making Chinatown tense. Kevin Ritter relates a conversation between Kengo Kuma and Toshiko Mori, in part about an extremely private space, but that’s cool too.
Having collected and listed 765 events for our readers this year, there is only one left on our docket: our issue #25 launch next Monday, hosted by yours truly.
We have published SKYLINE continuously since January, and are now going to be off for the holiday. See you in the new year!
—Tiffany Xu
DISPATCHES
12/13 - Prospective Publics: Build Your Own Castle
Architectural and urban scholar MARIANA MOGILEVICH and writer KARRIE JACOBS convened at the SVA last Monday for a conversation on Mogilevich’s recent book, The Invention of Public Space on the Lindsay Era in New York. The period around the former mayor’s term (1966-1973) is most commonly associated with a city in crisis, but Mogilevich reasons there might be something to how designers, government administrators, and residents sought to remake New York during this moment that’s worth revisiting.
The discussion ebbed and bobbed around unrealized proposals and partially built measures that tested various urban design strategies: a sanitary facility proposal from Louis Khan, pedestrianization efforts that feel similar to road closure strategies deployed during the pandemic, and an effort to design for multivalent “publics” with park spaces and activities such as “Build Your Own Castle Day” in Central Park. Mogilevich makes clear that while the Lindsay administration believed that public spaces are supposed to be for all, they often ended up working better for some. Yet when looking at present efforts towards a more public New York, Mogilevich laments that programming has regressed—targeting wealthier New Yorkers and selling the city as an experience. "It's impossible not to compare the Lindsay and Bloomberg administrations because of the urban design strategies they deployed. However, if Lindsay's New York was tragedy then Bloomberg's New York was farce," Jacobs agreed. The two contend that designers should continue to strive to make heterogeneous public spaces and for a plurality of publics. If the talk was a reflection of the book’s aspirations and informative content, I’ll have to buy a copy.
— Charles Weak
12/14 – The Design of Health
Architecture critic for the New York Times MICHAEL KIMMELMAN joined MICHAEL MURPHY, founding principal and executive director of the design and research firm MASS Design Group, for a discussion on Murphy’s new book, The Architecture of Health, in a virtual book talk hosted by Cooper Hewitt on Tuesday. Hospitals, Murphy explained, offer unique opportunities for exploring how architecture adapts to the needs of both the individual and the public. The book’s case studies ranged from 19th century Nightingale hospitals in Crimea, the demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg in Chicago, the Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, to MASS’s own work designing cholera treatment centers in Haiti. Murphy described how hospitals address—or fail to address—the tricky balance of maintaining strict and systemic standards of hygiene, while still recognizing a patient’s humanity. The design of plans—labyrinthine, private, panoptic, the inclusion of windows and natural ventilation, and connection to the outside world reveal how “agency and the design of the building is related to peoples’ sense of their own health,” said Murphy.
Murphy and Kimmelman’s discussion coincides with Cooper Hewitt’s new exhibition, Design and Healing, which was organized by MASS and Cooper Hewitt senior curator and co-author of Design Health Thinking ELLEN LUPTON. The exhibition features the work of MASS alongside historical and contemporary examples of the intersection of design and public health, including objects from the current pandemic. Together, the exhibition and Murphy’s new publication demonstrate the significance of a growing discourse on health design that prioritizes humans, personal dignity, and social good.
— Anna Talley
12/15 –
Ok. Times are tense in Chinatown: a city councilperson brokered a deal with the city, whereby she agreed to a 29 story new jail tower (to replace and expand an existing jail, part of the city’s plan to close Rikers), in exchange for $50 million in community aid, $35 million of which is going to MOCA (Museum of Chinese in America), a struggling museum with a pre-pandemic attendance of 50,000 a year that saw 85% of its collection compromised in a 2020 fire. The chair of MOCA’s board, JONATHAN CHU, has also recently terminated the lease of Jing Fong, a vast banqueting restaurant that fed 10,000 diners a week and employed over 100 unionized employees, before revenue plunged 80% during the pandemic. A collection of artists, architects, and unionized restaurant workers see clear connections between these events, and are not taking them sitting down. They would like to stop the jail, re-open the restaurant, and redirect the aid away from MOCA and to small businesses. The laid off restaurant workers are leading a daily picket line in front of MOCA, complete with drums. Art Against Displacement and citygroup opened an exhibit on Monday celebrating the community’s ongoing organizing effort against racism and displacement. As artists, architects, and passerbys filled the sidewalk and the gallery, the air was abuzz with calls to sign petitions, analysis of competing opinion pieces, and artists weighing how far to push the very system upon which they depend for a living.
— Nicolas Kemper
12/15 – Modern Traditions
During Wednesday evening’s livestream hosted by the Japan Society, architects KENGO KUMA and TOSHIKO MORI explored the boundary between traditional and modern Japanese architecture, and how they have navigated these terms in their careers. The conversation was moderated by Japanese architectural scholars BOTOND BOGNAR, of University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne and KEN TADASHI OSHIMA, of University of Washington.
The specter of Frank Lloyd Wright hovered over the dialogue. Kuma recalled engaging with Wright’s architecture while studying in New York City in the 1980s. Wright’s work troubled his understanding of a binary between traditional and modern Japanese architecture—a distinction maintained by the profession at the time. Mori noted that while Wright was working on the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo—for which she designed a well-scaled glass-paned visitor center—he was traveling between the States and Japan, learning about Japanese architecture and building a collection of woodblock prints. Wright would draw upon traditional Japanese architecture, especially its craftsmanship, to create modern American architecture.
Mori and Kuma, both known for designs that engage modernist tenets such as expression of structure, blurring interior and exterior, delicate relationships with ground, have explored the relationship between American modernism and traditional Japanese architecture throughout their careers. The architects have each contributed to the modernist John Black Lee House in New Canaan, Connecticut—Mori in the form of a renovation in 1994 and Kuma with an addition in 2011. The three architects’ designs integrate the natural surrounding environment and are both modern and traditional. Bognar commented, “The building becomes landscape.”
— Kevin Ritter
EYES ON SKYLINE
(The most-clicked links from Skyline 49)
Readers most wanted to know about Oliver Wainwright’s affordable housing for artists in East London.
IN THE NEWS
Construction begins on Coop Himmelb(l)au’s constructivist stadium for 23,000 in St Petersburg
Crystal Williams appointed first Black President of the Rhode Island School of Design
In Memoriam: British architect Chris Wilkinson, known most for his Stirling Prize-awarded Gateshead Millennium Bridge dies at 76
Leslie Lokko announced as curator of 2023 Venice Biennale
NYRA Holiday Cards!
The ultimate mailbox stuffer. And we still have some left! Secure your set here.
DATELINE
The week ahead... and the only event is our issue #25 launch, hosted by NYRA!
Monday, 12/20
The Sacred, the Profane, and Aalto in Brooklyn with Sofia Singler, Kirk Gastinger, Trey Trahan, Eva Hagberg
1:00 PM EST | Zoom | New York Review of Architecture
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Would you like to share your thoughts? Please write to us. Simply reply to this e-mail or write to us at editor@nyra.nyc.
Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher). They rotate duties each month.
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.
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