New Fellows

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Please join us in welcoming five new additions to our urbanist community: Mark Fiedler, co-founder of New York’s Fiedler Marciano Architecture; Kaja Kühl, founder of youarethecity, a research, design, and planning practice in Brooklyn; Yale-based architecture critic Nina Rappaport (image from her book Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation pictured at right); Glenn Smith, a principal at Smith + Murray Studios in Washington, DC; and Suzanne Stephens, Deputy Editor at Architectural Record.

Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: March 1-15, 2012

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Meta Brunzema will discuss her contribution to the new book “Feminist Practices” at Van Alen Books tonight (3/1) and at Bluestockings Bookstore tomorrow (3/2); also this evening, Tom Angotti will give a lecture at Parsons, as part of the new “In the Urban Crisis” series; Theo David will lecture at Pratt tonight, in advance of the opening of his exhibit, “Built Ideas: A Life of Teaching, Learning, and Action,” at the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery in Brooklyn; Olympia Kazi’s Van Alen Institute will hold its next Open House Brunch and Design Speed Dating event on 3/3; on the same day, “Los Límites de la Forma”, a new exhibit of work by Board Member Enrique Norten, will open at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico; on 3/8, Board Member Claire Weisz will be at the National Building Museum in D.C. to participate in a panel entitled “Architecture and the Great Recession” organized by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (lead by Wanda Bubriski); the next day on 3/9, Weisz will be at The Cooper Union in New York to introduce the latest “Emerging Voices” lecture; an exhibit of work by Craig Dykers‘ Snøhetta is currently on display at the Reykjavík Art Museum and will close on 4/3; and back at the National Building Museum, the exhibit “Unbuilt Washington” features work by Board Member Thom Mayne (picture at left) and is on view through 5/28.

Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: February 16-29, 2012

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

An Architect Drawing, the first of two exhibits of Theo. David’s work to be staged at the Pratt Institute this spring, opens on 2/17; that same day, Lance Jay Brown will moderate, and David Dixon will participate in, the Center for Architecture panel Climate Change: Inevitable Challenges and Potential Opportunities; there are just a few days left to see Toronto’s STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward exhibit (pictured at left), curated by Larry Wayne Richards, before it closes on 2/18; the documentary John Portman: A Life of Building will be shown on 2/22 as part of the Palm Springs Modernism Week festival; Laurie Kerr will moderate the opening panel at the second annual Conference on Sustainable Real Estate, hosted by NYU’s Schack Institute, on 2/23; and also in New York on  the 23rd, Executive Director Anne Guiney will moderate a panel at Megacities and Meta-Cities, a day-long symposium at Studio-X organized by David Grahame Shane. Also, looking forward to two events in April: early-bird registration for the 2012 Banff Session in Alberta, featuring a keynote by Craig Dykers, ends tomorrow; and tickets for AIANY’s 2012 Honors & Awards Luncheon, which will take place at Cipriani Wall Street, have just gone on sale–Rick Bell and David Ziskind are both on the planning committee for this year’s ceremony.

Fellows’ Awards & Competitions: Chin, Cooper, Durst, Holl, & Rogers

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

The AIANY chapter selected the winners of its 2012 Institute Honor Awards, with Susan Chin taking home a Matthew W. Del Gaudio Service Award, and Rob Rogers‘ firm Rogers Marvel (which recently unveiled plans for Brooklyn’s new Columbia Street Waterfront Park) being named Firm of the Year; the Architect’s Newspaper’s annual Inner Circle round-up of the ‘best of the East Coast’ includes David Cooper’s WSP Flack + Kurtz as one of the best MEP firms; REBNY announced Douglas Durst as the recipient of this year’s Bernard H. Mendik Lifetime Leadership in Real Estate award; and Patron Steven Holl is on the jury for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s design competition for a temporary pavilion on the grounds near Holl’s Bloch Building addition (pictured at left)

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: 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.”

Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: December 15-31, 2011

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Today (12/15), Ken Greenberg will be in Edmonton (pictured at left) to speak about urban design at the Downtown X-posed symposium; Lance Jay Brown will introduce, and Rick Bell & Board President Michael Sorkin will speak at, the Center for Architecture’s Freedom of Assembly panel on 12/17; Michael Arad will go gastronomical to serve as a juror for Edible Brooklyn’s 3rd Annual Latke Festival on 12/19; and the work of Robert A.M. Stern and Patrons Steven Holl and Denise Scott Brown is on view at the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture through 2/18/12.

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.

Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: October 15-31, 2011

Saturday, October 15th, 2011

Board Member Saskia Sassen will participate in the Columbia GSAPP’s Injured Cities Conference on 10/14-15; Barbara Wilks will give a talk at the New York Botanical Garden’s Midtown Education Center on 10/24; Board Member Enrique Norten will speak at the Pratt Institute on 10/24 in conjunction with the new exhibit Breaking Borders: New Latin American Architecture; Richard Sennett will join the Institute for Public Knowledge’s discussion of the new publication Living in the Endless City in New York on 10/25; Jack Nyman’s Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute will host the symposium The Waterfront: A Brooklyn Model for Preservation and Change on 10/26; Deborah Berke will talk about Development, Design and Financing Strategies for Urban Revitalization Using Hospitality and the Arts at the ULI Fall Conference on 10/26; Board Member Toni Griffin will visit Notre Dame University on 10/26 to deliver the lecture Can Planning Save the City: Facing the Challenges of Urban America; Olympia Kazi will host Board Member Thom Mayne at Van Alen Books on 10/28 for a presentation on his new book, Combinatory Urbanism; Board Member Winka Dubbeldam is on the Host Committee for the Storefront for Art & Architecture’s Critical Halloween party on 10/29; and Tom Angotti will participate in the panel Where is New York? Apparitions at Willets Point at the Columbia GSAPP on 10/31.