Fellows in the News

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Weighing in on the Loci Architecture blog about the contentious debate regarding NYU’s expansion in Greenwich Village, David Briggs questions if new buildings could strike a balance with the existing community; in the latest issue of The Architect’s Newspaper, Jeff Byles profiles Meta Brunzema’s “Building Exhibition Hudson Valley/Erie Canal” project; Susan Chin wrote an op-ed for the New York Observer about the Design Trust for Public Space’s collaboration on the “Taxi of Tomorrow”; also in Design Trust news, the organization’s “Made in Midtown” project is featured in the newly released book, Designing for Social Change; an HOK team led by Ken Drucker is a finalist to design the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at SUNY-Buffalo; work done for Marc Jacobs by Mark Gardner and Stephan Jaklitsch’s firm is profiled in Interior Design (pictured above); Laurie Kerr discussed cutting building energy use for an article by the Urban Land Institute; Lebbeus Woods published an extensive transcript of his conversation with Board Member Thom Mayne; Mercedes House, a new residential building by Board Member Enrique Norten, was profiled in The Real Deal; Grahame Shane wrote an article in Bauwelt magazine about restoring the urban dream through affordable housing; Don Stastny oversaw a competition to redesign Austin’s downtown Waller Creek, with Robert Rogers’ firm coming in as a finalist.

Fellows’ Awards & Competitions: Arad, Dykers, Pasquarelli, Rogers, Schmidt, & Stastny

Friday, February 24th, 2012

The jury for Manhattan’s AIDS Memorial Park design competition, led by Michael Arad, announced its winner; Craig Dykers’ Snøhetta and Gregg Pasquarelli’s SHoP Architects are both finalists in a competition to design a major light rail transfer hub in downtown Houston; Paul Schmidt, who recently retired from his post as Executive Director of Sacramento’s Capitol Area Development Authority after 36 years of service to the State of California and the Capitol Area Plan, was elected to the board of the California Housing Partnership Corporation; and Rob Rogers‘ firm Rogers Marvel is one of nine finalists in the competition, managed by Donald Stastny, to redesign Austin’s Waller Creek area.

Fellows’ Awards & Competitions: Bell, Crispino, Holl, Enquist, Jahn, Norten, Portman, Sassen, & Steiner

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

The AIA’s New York chapter, led by Rick Bell, has just put out the call for entries for the 2012 AIANY Design Awards (deadline: 2/3/12); Francis Cauffman, led by James Crispino, has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing A/E/C industry firms on ZweigWhite’s annual Hot Firms List; Patron Steven Holl was named as the winner of the prestigious 2012 AIA Gold Medal; SOM’s Chicago Office, where Philip Enquist is the Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning, received AIA Chicago’s Firm of the Year award; Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin included the opening of Helmut Jahn’s Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago (pictured at left) in his round-up of the best architecture of 2011; Board Member Enrique Norten will serve as a juror for this year’s Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award, which will focus on Cape Town, South Africa (deadline: 2/24/12); AmericasMart founder John Portman will receive a special honor, the “Legend for Life” award, in recognition of his five decades of entrepreneurship and service to the home decor industry; Board Member Saskia Sassen made Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for her “passionate advocacy of an urban-based society”; and the undergraduate program at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture, led by Frederick Steiner, was ranked second in the nation by DesignIntelligence.

Fellows’ Awards & Competitions: Arad, Balsley, Haley, Safdie, Stastny, & Whalley

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Deadlines are fast approaching for two competitions involving Fellows: there are still two and a half weeks to enter the Waller Creek design competition in Austin, managed by Donald Stastny (Deadline: 12/16/11), and Michael Arad will head up the jury for a competition to design an AIDS Memorial Park in Manhattan (Deadline: 1/21/12). Gregory J. Haley and Andrew Whalley are on one of the six teams selected as finalists in the competition to revamp Los Angeles’ Union Station, while Thomas Balsley’s Hixon Waterfront Park in Tampa (pictured at left) was named one of the best new urban parks in America by The Atlantic CITIES. Meanwhile, Moshe Safdie is in a competition of a different sort: his iconic Habitat 67 is currently in the lead in a public online poll to see which building will be the next reproduced in Lego’s architecture series. There’s still time to cast votes for your favorites…

Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: December 1-15, 2011

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

MAXXI’s exhibit RE-CYCLE, which features work by Elisabetta Terragni and Patrons Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, opens today (12/1); Frederick Steiner will speak at the University of Texas at Austin’s fall convocation ceremonies on 12/3; Rick Bell will deliver the closing remarks at AIANY’s 2012 Board Inaugural at the Center for Architecture on 12/6; and the show STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward, co-curated by Larry Wayne Richards, will be on view in Toronto through 2/18/12.

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: Balsley, Berman, Cathcart, Dubbeldam, Harwick, Holl, Kelley, Norten, Stastny, & Stepner

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Thomas Balsley will design the landscapes for the new Gotham West development in Hell’s Kitchen; Houzz visited a stunning Nantucket cottage designed by Matthew Berman; The Lee, a green supportive housing center designed by Colin Cathcart, opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; Elle Decor chatted with Board Member Winka Dubbeldam about her 12 “must-haves”; Ron Harwick’s JHP participated in the Edgewood/Candler Park MARTA charrette in Atlanta, re-imagining the area around a subway station in the southern metropolis as a Transit Oriented Development; Green Source featured a case study of Patron Steven Holl’s Vanke Center (aka the Horizontal Skyscraper) in Shenzhen; William Kelley introduced his agenda as the new Director of the Village Alliance BID in New York with an article in The Villager; Board Member Enrique Norten (whose Guggenheim Guadalajara—pictured at left—was recently called one of the best museums never built) unveiled designs for not one, but two sleek new buildings in DC’s West End; Donald Stastny was selected to lead a design competition re-imagining Waller Creek area in Austin; and Michael Stepner cheered the development of a long-term regional plan for San Diego in the Union-Tribune.