There are two new titles out from Tom Angotti, including Service-Learning in Design and Planning, co-edited with Cheryl Doble and Paula Horrigan, and Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths, Angotti’s first collection of short stories; Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Collaboration was excerpted in Salon, reviewed by the New Scientist, and called “a whirlwind of big ideas” by the Washington Post; Frederick Steiner’s latest, Urban Ecological Design, is now available at a bookstore near you; and Barbara Wilks‘ West Harlem Piers Park is featured in John Hill’s new Guide to Contemporary New York Architecture.
Fellows’ Events & Exhibits: February 1-15, 2012
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at St. Louis’ Washington University announced its spring lecture series, with Craig Dykers set to speak tonight (2/1), and visits from Gregg Pasquarelli and Richard Sennett scheduled for later this semester; Rob Rogers will speak about Rogers Marvel’s recent work (including President’s Park South, pictured at left) at the National Building Museum in Washington on 2/2; Denise Hoffman Brandt and Board Member Toni Griffin have organized a panel, Defining Cultural Landscapes, at CCNY on 2/3 (with opening remarks by Olympia Kazi); the Center for Architecture will host the panel Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today Redux on 2/4, with Thomas Balsley, Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, and Susan Chin all participating (Brown will be back at the Center, with David Dixon, for a discussion about Climate Change on 2/17); Bruce Fowle will speak at the Center’s Active Design 201 on 2/7; Board Member Claire Weisz will speak in New York, also on 2/7, at the Studio-X panel Trash Tubes of the Future; Board Member Enrique Norten will give a talk at the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach on 2/9; that same day, in New York, Ernie Hutton will moderate a discussion on the Miami21 zoning initiative; and a new exhibit at the National Academy, featuring work by Robert A.M. Stern, has just opened and will remain on view in New York through 4/29.
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’ 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.
Quoth the Fellows: Sassen, Sennett, Solomonoff, & Venturi
Friday, August 26th, 2011
In a co-authored NY Times op-ed that cites cuts to government-funded social programs as an underlying cause of the recent UK riots, Board Member Saskia Sassen and Fellow Richard Sennett caution that “Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.” In responding to a young woman’s question about whether or not to take time to work between receiving her undergraduate degree in environmental science and returning to school to pursue a graduate degree in architecture, Galia Solomonoff noted that “One of the benefits of working in between careers is understanding the life applications of a given practice.” And while being interviewed about his role in shaping Postmodernism by filmmaker John Thornton, Patron Robert Venturi (pictured at left) advised that: “Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.”
Fellows in the News: Alschuler, Enquist, Gans, Greenberg, Holl, Libeskind, Norten, Nyman, Rogers, Safdie, Sassen, Sennett, Stastny, & Wilks
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
Over at Fast Co.Design, Karen Alschuler wrote an article comparing buildings to sandwiches, asking: “What makes them tasty?”; Design Intelligence featured the full text of Phil Enquist’s PennDesign commencement address; Deborah Gans reports on her work in New Orleans’ Plum Orchard neighborhood in Places: Design Observer; Ken Greenberg (whom Dow Marmur recently called a Canadian national treasure) is leading the planning process for the redevelopment of Boston’s waterfront; Patron Steven Holl’s Vanke Center in Shenzhen received high praise from Nicolai Ouroussoff, who calls the building “a triumph of sustainable design” in a new piece out this week; Daniel Libeskind released renderings of the design for a new synagogue in Munich; Villahermosa, Mexico, recently celebrated the opening of a new public building by Board Member Enrique Norten set in a new public park by Barbara Wilks; Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute Director Jack S. Nyman commented on his organization’s collaboration with CUNY’s Building Performance Lab in creating the just-launched Building Performance Toolkit; the National Capital Planning Commission released design renderings for DC’s Ellipse by the five firms competing for the job, including Rob Rogers’ firm Rogers Marvel (whose SandRidge Energy complex in Oklahoma City was also recently approved by the city); the New Yorker wrote about Moshe Safdie’s soon-to-open Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas; Rowan Moore reviewed Living in the Endless City, a new book featuring essays by Richard Sennett and Board Member Saskia Sassen; and Don Stastny is leading the visioning process for the redevelopment of Saint Louis’ historic Grand Center entertainment district (pictured at left).
Fellows In the News: Berke, Brown, Dubbeldam, Dykers, Fain, Holl, Katz, Pollak, Portman, Sennett, & Wong
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
The New York Times went shopping for coffee tables with Deborah Berke; AECOM Chief Innovation Officer Joseph Brown commented on his firm’s new partnership with IBM’s Smarter Planet Initiative; the Shanghai flagship of retailer Ports 1961, designed by Board Member Winka Dubbeldam, has just opened; Toronto’s Ryerson University revealed renderings of an eye-catching new building by Craig Dykers‘ Snøhetta (pictured at left); William Fain served on the jury of this year’s AIA Pennsylvania Design Excellence Awards, which were presented this past week; Patron Steven Holl’s athletic center for Columbia in Inwood was recently approved by the city; Apartment Therapy Boston featured Deborah Grossberg Katz’s “A Cabin in a Loft” project; the Lynn University Performing Arts Center, designed by Herbert Newman, is featured in the March 2011 issue of American School & University Magazine [PDF]; Linda Pollak reviewed NYC’s new High Performance Landscape Guidelines in Topos 74 [PDF]; construction has begun on John Portman’s newest hotel in Shenzhen; Richard Sennett was announced as one of the jurors for the Watermill Center’s International Residency Program; and John Wong’s SWA Group will be designing a new park around an historic schoolhouse in Milpitas, CA.
Fellows’ Events & Exhibitions: April 1-14, 2011
Friday, April 1st, 2011
Board Member Byron Stigge will speak at the Out of Water conference in Toronto, from 4/1-2; Denise Hoffman Brandt will speak at the Next Eco-City symposium in Seattle on 4/7-8; Board Member Winka Dubbeldam will speak at the Progressive Architecture Symposium in Mexico City, also on 4/7-8; Deborah Gans will discuss her work on the new stained glass window at Manhattan’s Eldridge Street Synagogue on 4/8; Mark Strauss will participate in a panel on the 3 Rs of the New Economy at the APA National Conference in Boston on 4/10; Richard Sennett (pictured at left) will deliver the 7th Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at CCNY on 4/11; the AIA Design Awards Luncheon, which will honor IfUD Patron Steven Holl, Fellows Bruce Fowle and Claire Weisz, and Board Member Thom Mayne, will take place at Cipriani Wall Street on 4/12; and the new exhibit Façade: Through a Glass Darkly, featuring two buildings by Matthias Sauerbruch, will be on view at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, UK, now through 7/10.
Fellows in the News: Blaik, Gorlin, Libeskind, Palmieri, Safdie, Sennett, Sheffer, Stepner, Walker, & Wong
Monday, March 21st, 2011
Detroit is abuzz with talk about Omar Blaik’s revitalization plan for the historic Midtown neighborhood, which recently got extensive write-ups from the Detroit News and the Free-Press; the latest issue of Dwell features a two-page spread on Alexander Gorlin’s The Brook development in the Bronx; a torquing tower designed by Daniel Libeskind will soon join a new cluster of skyscrapers rising in Jerusalem; John Palmieri recently visited Belfast as a guest lecturer for the city’s State of the City Development Debate; the Architect’s Newspaper recently visited Moshe Safdie’s studio for a look at his current projects, while the Huffington Post featured a slideshow of the architect’s daring Golden Dream Bay Sky Garden Apartments in Qinhuangdao; Richard Sennett wrote an article in the Guardian on the recent funding scandal at the London School of Economics; New York magazine talked to Ethel Sheffer about the uniquely depressing quality of long-vacant storefronts in newer buildings; Michael Stepner spoke to the Voice of San Diego about the challenges presented by “invisible parks”; construction is just getting underway to transform a disused stretch of Sydney’s waterfront into the 15-acre Headlands Park, designed by Peter Walker; and HuffPo visited the serenely swooping gardens (pictured at left), designed by John Wong, at the base of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Fellows’ Events & Exhibitions: February 1-13, 2011
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
Peter Walker will be in Corona Del Mar, CA, on 2/1 to give a public lecture on the landscape elements of plans for the Newport Beach Civic Project; Sheena Wright will be a special guest lecturer at the Town of Hempstead, NYs African American History Month celebration on 2/8; Fellow Jeff Byles will discuss “unbuilding” with IfUD Board President Michael Sorkin in the Woolworth Building (pictured at left) on 2/9 as part of the LMCC’s Access Restricted series; Richard Sennett will give a talk about his new book at Schauspiel Frankfurt on 2/9; and John Hartmann’s “Light Hearted” will be unveiled in Times Square on 2/10.
