S K Y L I N E | Would Your Firm Benefit From Unionization?
Scroll down to find out. Also: An architectural Valentine, a section deep-dive, and the better CLT
Issue 100. A minor milestone in the life of New York Review of Architecture. Help us celebrate by coming to our party tonight.
You read that correctly: this week marks issue #100 of SKYLINE. When NYRA started the newsletter two years ago, we knew it would take a lot of work to cover all the goings-on in architecture week over week. We threw ourselves into the venture with abandon, forgetting, for instance, that a Monday morning release date would consign our Sundays to social and restful oblivion or that Substack suggests email limits for a reason. Issues, as you’re well aware, now go out on Friday mornings and generally hew to a manageable length of 2,000 words or so, plus pictures. (You may also have noticed that we’ve dialed down our use of Zoom screenshots. The end of an era.)
More than a weekly diary of notes and quotes and an events log, SKYLINE has become a full-fledged editorial program for architects interested in writing and writers interested in architecture. Every issue is conceived of and by a different editor/writer; themes and assignments are their own to make, and though they receive guidance from NYRA editors Samuel Medina and Marianela D’Aprile, they are free to curate opinions they find to be urgent and of the moment. Editors, and Dispatch writers, are paid for their work. Many contributors have become regulars, and for that we’re grateful. If you’d like to try your hand at editing SKYLINE, please get in touch at editor@nyra.nyc.
Here’s to one hundred more!
DISPATCHES
2/1: Have a Heart
TIMES SQUARE — Typically the preserve of TikTok dance troupes, Duffy Square, an islet of Times Square recognizable for its red bleacherlike seating, is temporarily home to a Valentines’ Day–themed artificial garden. The heartfelt—and shaped—gesture, said ANTHONY GAGLIARDI of Almost Studio, “is meant to be a jolt from our routines.” Open through the end of the month, Loves h|Edge takes its place alongside the fourteen previous winners of the Times Square Art’s annual Love & Design Competition. Gagliardi and his partner DORIAN BOOTH were classmates of mine in architecture school, so I wanted to show my support in person, as did their former landscape instructor BRYAN FUERMANN, who was pleased as punch to see so many garden design tropes at play in such an improbable setting. After the team (see all their names here) had spent frantic hours applying zip ties over the weekend, the mood felt downright romantic: the season’s first (and possibly last) snow had even left a light dusting on the artificial box hedge.
—Nicolas Kemper
1/31: Design by Committee
“Decisions can be made if no one is in charge,” said MARY ANDERSON, as she and her colleague OWEN LACEY presented the work of the British collective Assemble inside the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Though the talk progressed through highlights from more than a decade of work, the evening’s focus was on the horizontal decision-making process that has become Assemble’s signature. Anderson and Lacey narrativized the life of the design office as a rhythm of meetings: the staff has a daily morning “go-around” and, later, lunch (prepared by a rotating team member); a weekly PAN, in which everyone can comment on one another’s work; a monthly “management hour”; a quarterly budget management meeting; and an annual weekend retreat, which they call the Summit. “I’m outing your hierarchy,” said moderator JEROME HAFERD, pointing out the presence of designated managers in the company’s structure. But they answer to the partners, came the response, and everyone is offered partnership after two years. The borglike result, where each person is the collective, and the collective is each person, became more evident when it emerged that though the two designers had just made their presentation in the first person, many of the projects they had presented predated them: Lacey has been with the firm for four years, and Anderson for just under two.
Eight years after winning the Turner Prize, the collective—and collectives in general—are again having a moment. Anderson, Lacey, and other Assemblers were in town for the opening of Shared Space—Collective Practices, an exhibit at Art Omi in upstate New York also featuring WIP, FUNdaMENTAL Design Build Initiative, and Colloqate Design. The Architectural League and Art Omi director JULIA VAN DEN HOUT gathered representatives of these practices and others (including NYRA) for a sprawling thirty-person lunchtime conversation the day prior. The conversation pivoted around the question as to whether these efforts will survive once initial enthusiasm dissipates. EMMA OSORE cited the Combahee River Collective, which her organization BLACKSPACE looks to as a precedent: “It ended, and that’s okay—maybe this is futile, and that is okay—which is a hard position to hold in the architecture world, where everyone wants forever institutions.” Then again, Assemble’s ability to regenerate should give us all hope.
—N.K.
1/30: Shop Talk
GREENWICH VILLAGE — A rainy Monday night might seem like an odd time to find a sold-out crowd in the basement of the Center for Architecture. But this was an evening for the implausible: an AIA chapter had projected the words “Unionization and Architecture” on its walls in two-foot type. A firm owner and union bargaining committee member were cheerfully passing the mic back and forth. A conversation that has been building in whispers and Instagram comments for thirteen months was finally being held out in the open.
“The process of unionization has helped us create a framework for a democratic system,” said KOLBY FORBES, a bargaining committee member at BA Union, which recently won voluntary recognition from Bernheimer Architecture. “We’re no longer in competition with each other. We don’t have to think of our place at the firm as something tenuous. I think it can be scary coming out of school, especially now, with the pandemic. You’re almost disposable in a lot of firms. With the protections of a union, you’re no longer disposable.”
The exchange got off to a cautious start, with ANDREW DALEY of the Machinists Union’s Architectural Workers United (AWU) campaign and two other labor movement contributors fielding questions on the basics of unionization from outgoing AIANY president and partner at Rafael Viñoly Architects ANDREA LAMBERTI:
How does one go about forming a union?
“Six easy steps! Call tomorrow!”Can you describe the type of firm that would benefit from unionization?
“All of them.”
Lamberti waited nearly an hour to direct a question to ANDREW BERNHEIMER, who had spent the intervening period nodding along gamely as the panel covered the basics of unionization, the impact of the pandemic, and the historic uptick in organizing among white-collar workers. When he got a chance to speak, Bernheimer told the crowd that his employees’ organizing had sparked an ongoing process of reflection on his own role as an employer.
“Why would you need a union when you have a healthy practice? Well, the fact is that any place can improve and just having a healthy practice doesn’t mean that there can’t be things that are better,” he said. “I’ve been an owner for twenty-five years, which means that I haven’t been an architectural worker in twenty-five years. I’ve forgotten a lot of things that I was made to do. I don’t remember a lot of things that I didn’t get.”
As the floor opened to audience questions, junior designers asked about the finer points of enforcing a contract and principals asked just where exactly all the money for higher salaries would come from. Interest seemed to come from every level of the profession. JACOB REIDEL, co-chair of AIANY’s Future of Practice Committee, conducted a show-of-hands poll revealing that nearly half the assembled were either firm owners or managers.
To the older crowd, Bernheimer advised patience.
“This is about a reciprocal benefit,” he said. “Just learn, read, ask questions, find out what it really means. Find out what you get out of it as an owner.”
Back above ground, BA Union and AWU members decamped to GMT Tavern to celebrate and talk shop. The mood among the younger crowd milling toward the exits was giddy, if a bit sheepish, as though they might have dreamt the whole experience. “I didn’t expect to run into one of our partners here,” said one worker, with a grin.
—Leo Shaw
1/27: Racket and Sickle
FORT GREENE — On its Twitter account and Substack newsletter, Club Leftist Tennis writes critically about the racquet sport while spitting invective at would-be challengers like pickleball. Last Friday, founders CHARLIE DULIK and MICHAEL NICHOLAS hosted a fundraiser at NYRA’s favorite Brooklyn beer hall, DSK. By the end of the night, they had raised $1,600 for Kings County Tennis League, an organization “serving children living in and around Brooklyn public housing, using tennis and off-court educational activities as instruments for youth development.” The activist, decent person, and tennis partisan in me wants to forget that tennis requires more architectural and social infrastructure than almost all other urban sports and that one of the partygoers said her mother suggested she take up tennis to find a husband, implying that tennis players are wealthy, you know, “like golfers.” But if a progressive figurehead like Barack Obama can recommend bad books and lousy movies and justify war crimes, why can’t two seemingly well-meaning Brooklynites (Dulik is a tenant organizer and Nicholas is an urban planner; both are NYRA contributors) galvanize their social networks and employ droll humor to help develop strong backhands in public housing projects? When one male attendee was persuaded to join the Democratic Socialists of America, as if having just come across the idea, it was hard not to see the moment, and the party as a whole, for what it was: a good start.
—Kavyashri Cherala
1/26: Section Gang
GREENWICH VILLAGE — You’d be correct if you were passing by the windows of the Center for Architecture last Thursday night and thought you saw a reunion of old friends. Wine drinking, cheese eating, hug giving, and animated conversations filled the street-level galleries as Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David Lewis, founding principals of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL), welcomed over a hundred well-wishers for the launch of their new book, Manual of Biogenic House Sections (ORO Editions, 2022), and its accompanying exhibition.
Amid loud chatter, David Lewis gave an impromptu tour of the displays and told one visitor, “the future of modern architecture is thick.” The thin sections of steel and glass buildings, he continued, have had their moment. Of the five speculative houses that LTL designed as part of the exhibition, it’s the straw house—with nearly 24"-thick sections—that David hopes they’ll build next.
LTL has a longstanding love of the architectural section, both aesthetically and pedagogically. Biogenic House Sections showcases fifty-five houses from twenty-five different countries and presents these as case studies for a climate-positive architecture. The LTL team redrew each house to make precise Rhino 3D models, whose sections and exploded axonometrics populate most every page of the lavishly illustrated book. Classifying each house in relation to its primary low-carbon or carbon-sequestering material, the appendix offers a chocolate box of colorful section axonometrics.
In their previous book, Manual of Section (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), the authors claim the section as the most productive starting point for their sustained investigations as architects and educators. “As a cut into that which cannot be seen,” they assert, “the section embodies and reveals territories for architectural experimentation and exploration.” In this new manual, a “sequel to and critique of” the previous one, the authors focus on building assemblies that feature plant-based or biogenic construction materials. For those of us who have spent many happy hours nerding out with Frank Ching’s comprehensive Building Construction Illustrated, LTL’s most recent manual will be a welcome companion.
After a four-day pop up at the Center for Architecture, the exhibit is now en route to its next venue at the University of Virginia. If you saw David Lewis and Marc Tsurumaki with their U-Haul trucks at a Waffle House on I-95 over the weekend, that’s where they were headed.
—Louise Harpman
We’re having a party! Help us launch issue #33 at Fort Greene haunt DSK. Details here.
EYES ON SKYLINE
Last week, readers were most interested in the rerelease of some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s more ergonomically challenged furniture.
IN THE NEWS
This week,
...architect Mario Gooden reviewed the New Museum’s Theaster Gates retrospective in The Architect’s Newspaper...
...Curbed investigated the state of Oculus’s checkered white-stone flooring…
…ARTnews dug into the controversy surrounding the Cooper Union’s postponement of an exhibition devoted to the revolutionary Soviet architecture school Vkhutemas…
...in Architectural Digest, architect Felicia Davis’s Hair Salon project examined issues of systemic racism...
…with unacknowledged irony, Thom Mayne, one of the architects behind the Line in Saudia Arabia, said the profession needs to “take responsibility for shaping the world”…
...and Andrew Holder belatedly responded to a blistering review of Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, a book he co-edited. The “symbology” of pyramids is discussed.
DATELINE
In the week ahead…
Monday, 2/6
Laura Poitras in conversation with Andrés Jaque
6:30 p.m. EST | Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Tuesday, 2/7
Situated Objects with Stan Allen
6:30 p.m. EST | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Wednesday, 2/8
Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium with Deborah Berke, Denise Costanzo, Lee Ann Custer, Valéry Didelon, Frida Grahn, Izzy Kornblatt, Sylvia Lavin, Craig Lee, Mary McLeod, Sarah Moses, Joan Ockman, Elihu Rubin, Denise Scott Brown, Surry Schlabs, & Katherine Smith
1:30 p.m. EST | Yale School of Architecture
My House Has Feathers with Chris T. Cornelius
6:00 p.m. PST | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 2/9
The Deep History of Amazonian Agroecological Urban Forests: Why Do They Matter Today? with Ana María Durán Calisto
6:30 p.m. EST | Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Friday, 2/9
Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect Book Talk with Mary McLeod, Lynn Gilbert, Cathleen McGuigan, & Frida Grahn
6:00 p.m. EST | AIANY 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
Have a take, good, bad or otherwise? Write us a letter!
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our editor is Samuel Medina. Our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our editors-at-large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski, 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.
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