At the first annual Real Estate Weekly Women’s Forum, Patricia Lancaster spoke on a panel about infrastructure and public policy. She warned that, “In order for the U.S. to stay competitive, we have to deal with our infrastructure. It has to get sexier because it needs to get funded.” In an interview about multiculturalism and community with The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, Richard Sennett (pictured at left) argued that “Workplace communities are getting weaker and weaker. Modern capitalism doesn’t encourage much interaction because it’s highly stratifying.” Speaking about the massive ‘Barangaroo’ park in Sydney, Peter Walker said ”We tried to make the landscape itself a playground.”
Quoth the Fellows: Gans, Strauss, & Wakeman
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
In a fascinating reflection of the concept of hospitality inspired by a trip to Jerusalem’s In-House Festival last summer, Deborah Gans (pictured at left) posits that “Beyond the intractable divisions of Jerusalem, perhaps hospitality offers us language with which to describe our emerging geo-political spaces and the aspirations we have for them.” Speaking to the New York Times about the increasing focus on transit-oriented development in suburban areas, Mark Strauss explained that “In Westchester [New York] and other places, the mindset of many residents is that they moved to the suburbs to get away from an urban environment, and they want their towns to remain as much as possible like life was on the TV show Leave it to Beaver.” And Rosemary Wakeman was quoted in an article on neighborhood re-brandings in Philadelphia’s City Paper, noting the association of such efforts with gentrification and cautioning that “People coming in want to protect their investment…[Sometimes it works], but sometimes it’s quite a different thing for the people who live there, who understand their neighborhood in a certain way.”
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Berke, Bell, Fisher, Floyd, Griffin, Holl, Mayne, Norten, Pasquarelli, Sauerbruch, & Stein
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
A study by Tom Angotti and Picture the Homeless revealed that New York City is home to enough vacant lots and buildings to house its entire homeless population–with room to spare; Deborah Berke’s Yale architecture students are designing an urban bourbon distillery in downtown Louisville; Rick Bell was profiled by the Epoch Times; the latest episode of CUNY-TV’s Citywide program features Ken Fisher interviewing Working Families Party leader Camille Rivera; Chadwick Floyd is designing the expansion of Waterford, Connecticut’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Center; MLive.com interviewed Board Member Toni Griffin about the long-term strategic planning initiative she’s leading for the Detroit Works Program; Patron Steven Holl was selected to design the expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Morning News walked through Board Member Thom Mayne’s almost-complete Perot Museum of Nature & Science with the architect; Board Member Enrique Norten gave a presentation on how sustainable architecture can catalyze community development at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos; Gregg Pasquarelli’s firm has just released its first monograph, SHoP: Out of Practice; Matthias Sauerbruch’s Low2No complex in Helsinki’s former docklands (pictured at left) is cited as an exemplary mixed use project in a Telegraph piece on the greening of residential architecture; and Achva Benzinberg Stein’s dazzling new Moroccan Courtyard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is featured in this month’s Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Quoth the Fellows: Flint, Fowle, & Weisz
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Writing for The Atlantic CITIES blog, Anthony Flint comments on the recent surge in freeway demolition projects, remarking that “We’ve reached a unique point in city-building when the destruction of a public works project has all the glamor and buzz of breaking ground on a new one.” With FXFOWLE leading design work on the ongoing renovation of New York’s Javits Center, Bruce Fowle provides a counterpoint to Meta Brunzema’s favorable remarks in our last Update: “The waste of creative energy, money, and material that would result in its being torn down is painful to think about. When you’re worrying about every detail–trying to do the best you can to make something that represents the city–it’s like having the rug pulled out from under you.” And in a Globe and Mail profile of Edmonton-born Claire Weisz (pictured at left), the IfUD Board Member explained her focus on the public space design projects that have defined her career by explaining that she moved to New York “not to make stuff, but to make stuff happen.”
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Arad, Gardner, Hausman, Holl, Jaklitsch, Lancaster, Mayne, Pasquarelli, Pollak, & Wakeman
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
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!
