The Wall Street Journal spoke to Tom Angotti about the Bloomberg-era evolution of zoning in New York City, and published a wonderful profile of Michael Arad; Architect talked to Board Member Tami Hausman about how architecture firms can (and should) use social media strategically; Luca Farinelli’s “53 Questions, 265 Answers” in Log 23 features interviews with Patron Steven Holl and Board Member Thom Mayne; the WSJ features Stephan Jaklitsch and Mark Gardner’s renovation of Marc Jacobs’ private Soho showroom; Patricia Lancaster expressed surprise at Related’s decision to hire a California contractor for the massive Hudson Yards project in Manhattan; Gregg Pasquarelli’s Pier 15 opened along Manhattan’s East River Waterfront Esplanade; Linda Pollak’s new Elmhurst Branch of the Queens Library, which is wrapping up construction, was featured on NY1; and Rosemary Wakeman was quoted in a Corpus Christi Caller-Times article about the relationship between streetscapes and civic pride.
Quoth the Fellows: Angotti, Brunzema, & Sassen
Friday, January 27th, 2012
In a Crain’s New York article about growth patterns in Brooklyn over the past decade, Tom Angotti did not mince words, stating that “The development has been very uneven and unequal. Instead of the vibrant city that was more diverse, it’s becoming a city of separate enclaves.” Speaking in her official capacity as the chair of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association’s planning committee, Meta Brunzema cheered Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to tear down the Javits Center: “I hate to say it, but [Hudson River Park's] really inadequate around here and everyone knows it. The Javits Center is an obstacle to it really becoming a great park.” And Saskia Sassen, in an Artforum piece on the sociopolitical conditions that led up to OWS (pictured at left), writes that “The Occupy movements are emergent assemblages of fragments of various national (and global) territories. Their reclamation of public space is also a response to the increasingly palpable insufficiency of the logic of the nation-state.”
Fellows in the News: Arad, Berke, Fisher, Flint, Greenberg, Haley, Kazi, Libeskind, Palmieri, Scott Brown, Stern, Venturi, & Walker
Friday, January 20th, 2012
Since it opened this past September, more than one million visitors have passed through Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero; a Wall Street Journal article on regional minimalism noted Deborah Berke’s influential residential work in New England; on the latest episode of Citywide, Ken Fisher interviews Manhattan Media CEO and first-in-the-ring NYC mayoral candidate Tom Allon; Anthony Flint appeared on the Callie Crosby Show to discuss the redevelopment of the former Filene’s Basement site in Boston; Beth Greenberg, who leads the Dattner Architects team working on Manhattan’s 7-train extension, spoke to ENR New York [PDF] about the project (which, Inhabitat reports, is ahead of schedule and under budget); Gothamist got a peek inside the construction site for the new Fulton Street Transit Center, which is managed by Gregory Haley; Next American City Editor-in-Chief Diana Lind cited Olympia Kazi’s success in establishing the Van Alen Bookstore as a social anchor for New York’s urban design community as a chief inspiration for NAC’s new Storefront for Urban Innovation in Philadelphia; Hugh Pearman raved about Daniel Libeskind’s expansion of the Military History Museum in Dresden (pictured at left) in Architectural Record; John Palmieri’s CRDA launched the website Revitalize Atlantic City to encourage public participation in the Tourism District Master Plan process; Artforum reviewed the V&A’s Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, which features the work of Robert A.M. Stern and Patrons Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown; and new renderings were released of the 8 Washington development on the San Francisco waterfront, featuring landscapes by Peter Walker.
IfUD Launches New Website & Open Call for Entries for US Pavilion at the Venice Beinnale
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
We have just launched a new website for the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, devoted to the theme Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good. The website will continue to grow over the next nine months, expanding to include a news column, curators’ blog, links to related articles and resources, and list of participants and projects. When the Biennale opens in September, the site will include a participants’ blog, a searchable database of projects, and guide to programs in Venice and the United States during the Biennale.
Currently, we are encouraging architects and designers who have realized a tactical urbanism intervention in a U.S. city to submit their projects by February 6 in order to be reviewed during the next curators’ meeting.
Quoth the Fellows: Balsley, Greenberg, & Sennett
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
One of the most prolific designers of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS), Thomas Balsley (pictured at left), came out in support of these small-scale but recently-high-profile places in the New York Observer, voicing a hope that POPS will not be the ’scapegoat’ of the reaction to the Occupy movement: “The fact that a tiny POPS park was made to act in lieu of a dedicated civic forum for popular protest should serve to remind all of us of NYC’s greater obligation to create a new and more innovative kind of public space to do what POPS can’t.” At the Downtown X-posed symposium in Edmonton, Ken Greenberg made a case for universities as anchor institutions in urban revitalization efforts in his keynote address, stating plainly that “Educational institutions are key city builders.” And in a BBC Radio segment with artist Andrew Gormley on public space and public art, Richard Sennett argued that “The really exciting things that we can do with public art are not monumental…There are lots of small-scale places that need our attention. Grandeur is not what we want in our cities today.” (See also: SFGate has an excerpt from Richard’s forthcoming book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Collaboration).
Fellows in the News: Berke, Bernheimer, Blesso, Cathcart, Dykers, Ferrandino, Gardner, Jones, Portman, & Wong
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
Bentonville’s 21c Museum Hotel, designed by Deborah Berke, broke ground last month; Urban Omnibus visited Matthew Berman’s BLDG 92 museum and visitors center at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Andrew Bernheimer and his sister Kate, an award-winning fairy tale author, collaborated on a three-part series of posts at Places Journal that gives architectural form to famous fairy tale houses; Matt Blesso and Mark Gardner were both interviewed as part of openhousenewyork’s “I Am OHNY” series; NYC Media released a video extolling the virtues of Colin Cathcart’s Greenhouse Project at Manhattan’s P.S. 333; the first renderings of a curvaceous new Maggie’s Centre in Aberdeen, Scotland, designed by Craig Dykers, made a splash; Vince Ferrandino is leading the effort to build a solid transition team for Mount Vernon, New York’s mayor-elect Ernie Davis; Mary Margaret Jones led a public forum on Hargreaves Associates’ new plan for Richmond’s James Riverfront; John Portman has opened a new office in Hong Kong–his fourth in Asia, after Shanghai, Seoul, and Mumbai; and it’s not every day that you can see a Fellow’s work in a big-screen blockbuster, but the ASLA’s The Dirt recently pointed out that John Wong’s Burj Khalifa Park has something of a “starring role” in the new Mission Impossible movie!
Quoth the Fellows: Dykers & Lancaster
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Dwell sat down with Craig Dykers to talk about Snøhetta’s design process for the expansion of SFMOMA. On the relationship of the new wing to the museum’s iconic Mario Botta-designed home, he explained that “I think the best way to say it is that we’re working with a dancing partner, and you have to be sure not to step on your partner’s feet.” And back in New York, Patricia Lancaster spoke to the Observer about the recently-announced plans for modular towers (pictured at left, and designed by Gregg Pasquarelli) to rise at Atlantic Yards, stating that “I think prefab is the wave of the future, and I think it will come to New York. The only question is when, and how much power the unions have to do something about it.”
Two New Fellows
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
We’re pleased to announce that two new Fellows have joined the Institute: Mark Gardner and Stephan Jaklitsch, partners at Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects in New York City. We’re very excited to have Mark and Stephan involved. And don’t forget–we’re always looking to add to the IfUD’s community of urbanists, so if there is someone who you think would make a great Fellow, please don’t hesitate to let us know!
Fellows in the News: Dubbeldam, Griffin, Jones, Kelley, Libeskind, Locke, Manfredi, Safdie, Sollohub, & Stern
Monday, December 19th, 2011
Curbed included Board Member Winka Dubbeldam’s 597 Greenwich Street on their list of Innovative Residences You Need to Know Right Now; Mayor Dave Bing announced the re-launch of the Detroit Works program, with Board Member Toni Griffin heading up the development of a long-range development plan for the troubled Rust Belt city; Mary Margaret Jones (whose Olympic Park in London, pictured at left, was just completed) has been selected to design a new public entertainment waterfront attraction in Corpus Christi, Texas; Bill Kelley is leading the charge to add more sidewalk cafe space to Greenwich Village’s West 8th Street; good news came for two skyscrapers designed by Daniel Libeskind: the developers of his Zlota 44 building in Warsaw secured financing to complete construction, while his Eden Center in Jerusalem received official approval to move forward; Anne Locke spoke to WestfairOnline about the recent boom in medical facilities construction; “The Mobius,” Michael Manfredi’s entry to the Portal to the Point ideas competition in Pittsburgh, was featured on ArchDaily; Moshe Safdie released renderings for a massive $3.1 billion, six-tower, 10 million-square-foot mixed-use complex planned for Chongqing, China; a course designed by NJIT’s Darius Sollohub in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity was featured in a round-up of innovative and unconventional college courses around New Jersey; and Robert A.M. Stern was interviewed about his skyscraping One Horizon Center project in Gurgaon, India.
Quoth the Fellows: Bell, Hardwicke, & Stern
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
Speaking to the New York Observer about the AIA’s growing role in New York City politics, Rick Bell noted that “It used to be we were more reactive, waiting for the forum to air our views, and by then it was usually too late. Now we want to be there for the start of the discussion, or even initiating the discussion ourselves.” Chris Hardwicke explained the 220-page report that he just completed on downtown Saskatoon as an innovative effort to gather hard data on day-to-day use of the city by its citizens: “It’s an atlas of public life. It’s unique to study people spending time in space…I think most people assume planning is for people, but because you don’t measure it, you can’t actually plan for it.” At the Zoning the City symposium earlier this month, Robert A.M. Stern responded to Mary Ann Tighe’s lament about Asia’s nascent preeminence in the great skyscraper race (and the related falling-behind of New York’s “romantic” skyline) with a cutting quip: “Let’s be real. There’s a lot of crap out there. I’m happy to come home.” (Video of all of the panels from that event, by the way, are now available online).
