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.”

Fellows in the News: Balsley, Berke, Blaik, Cooper, Dubbeldam, Dykers, Fisher, Gans, Pasquarelli, Schrag, Schmidt, Solomonoff, & Wilks

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Cleveland’s ParkWorks cut the ribbon on Perk Park, a new green space designed by Thomas Balsley; in a post reflecting on what Jeanne Gang’s recent MacArthur win means for women in architecture, Flavorpill noted the accomplishments of  Deborah Berke, Board Member Winka Dubbeldam, and Galia Solomonoff in this historically-male-dominated field; Omar Blaik has been hired by the University of Kentucky to help better integrate several universities into downtown Lexington; the New York Times interviewed David Cooper as he celebrated his 30th year with WSP Flack + Kurtz; Craig Dykers had a big November: the Wolfe Center for the Arts at Bowling Green State University became Snøhetta’s first building completed in the US, while the firm also unveiled new, detailed renderings of the SFMOMA expansion and won a competition to design the subway entrances for the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastián (pictured at left); Kenneth K. Fisher interviewed former NYC Public Advocate Mark Green for this month’s episode of Citywide; Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman’s latest column, on re-thinking housing for contemporary New York, included a nod to Deborah Gans‘ work for the Architectural League’s recent Making Room symposium; Gregg Pasquarelli’s SHoP (which was recently profiled in New York Magazine) released much-anticipated renderings of the modular residential towers planned for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards site; the Hartford Business Journal talked to Jonathan Schrag about the effectiveness of Cap & Trade programs; Paul Schmidt reaffirmed CADA’s committment to the organization’s R Street warehouse project in the Sacramento Bee; and Barbara Wilks‘ new The Edge Park along the Williamsburg’s rapidly-changing waterfront was a featured project on Landezine.

Quoth the Fellows: Angotti, Brown, & Jambhekar

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Speaking at a meeting about the UNITY 4 plan concerning Forest City Ratner’s development of the Atlantic Yards site in central Brooklyn, Tom Angotti did not mince words, stating that “If they are going to call it transit-oriented development, then there has to be a plan to improve transit.” Down in New Zealand, AECOM CIO Joseph Brown explained his Global Cities Institute’s selection of Auckland as the subject of a planned study on livability, noting that the city’s “scale and impressive assets and ambitions provide a useful case study for many other cities hoping to combine growth with improved livability.” And Sudhir Jambhekar offered an intriguing description of the facade on FXFOWLE’s Museum of the Built Environment in Riyadh (pictured at left), explaining that a series of prisms will “create an amazing textural quality that resembles fish scales.”

Quoth the Fellows: Pasquarelli, Sorkin, & Stastny

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

In a recent piece about the Barclays Center arena (pictured at left) in the NY Daily News, Gregg Pasquarelli explained that “We wanted it to be something very different from [Madison Square] Garden…[which is] a giant, impenetrable box.” Speaking of the Cooper Union, Board Chair Michael Sorkin enthused: “These are students who unreservedly pursue what I call the ‘Poetics of Architecture,’ which is a rare thing nowadays. The combination of beauty and weirdness that’s produced at Cooper is like no place else on earth.” And at a community meeting about the Waller Creek design competition in Austin, competition manager Don Stastny noted that “It’s rare that you have an opportunity to basically change the face of the city through one of these processes.”

Fellows in the News: Durst, Holl, Jahn, Manfredi, Orff, Pasquarelli, Sassen, & Weisz

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Developer Douglas Durst revealed the hotly-anticipated renderings of his W57 development (pictured at left), which is being designed by Danish rising star Bjarke Ingels; Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a rave review in the Times for Patron Steven Holl’s design for a new Long Island City library; Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin spoke with Helmut Jahn about the unique pleasures and perils of airport terminal design; the University of Pennsylvania recently broke ground on the Michael Manfredi-designed Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology; Kate Orff’s “oyster-tecture” project has been popping up everywhere recently: in Grist, the Guardian, Metropolis, the PSFK blog, and on TED.com; Gregg Pasquarelli’s SHoP Architects was named as the architect of the first residential tower at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards megadevelopment; Board Member Saskia Sassen made a splash with the cheekily-titled (and highly-enjoyable) article “Talking back to your intelligent city”; and the Architect’s Newspaper took a virtual walk through Claire Weisz’s plans for the revamp of NYC’s Cooper Square/Astor Place, while the Times announced Weisz as the architect for an expansion of Soho’s Drawing Center.

9th Breakfast Club

Friday, June 25th, 2010

On June 24, IfUD Fellows gathered at the Architectural League of New York’s The City We Imagined, The City We Made exhibition in Lower Manhattan for our 9th Breakfast Club to discuss the subject of the show, development in New York City over the past decade, with its curators, Rosalie Genevro and Gregory Wessner. We were also joined by Columbia University’s Vishaan Chakrabarti, whom many of you may know through his participation in last fall’s Arrested Development symposium, Gregg Pasquerelli of SHoP Architects, who spoke about his work on the Atlantic Yards project, and Emiliano Espasandin, a member of the team that imagined the transportation future of Buenos Aires for the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy’s Our Cities Ourselves exhibit, which opened last night at the Center for Architecture. Thanks to everyone who made it to the Club; a photo album is up on our Facebook page, so take a look!