IfUD Founder Ann Ferebee and Jeff Byles will speak about their new book, A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present, at the Skyscraper Museum on 8/2; AIANY is organizing a tour of Michael Manfredi’s Diana Center at Barnard (pictured at left) on 8/4; and Board Member Saskia Sassen will speak on the notions of comfort and “cityness” at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York on 8/12.
Quoth the Fellows: Holl, Sassen, & Williamson
Monday, July 25th, 2011
In a Time magazine article about the advent bookless libraries, Patron Steven Holl noted that “Acknowledging the digital and its speed and putting it in relation to the history and physical presence of the books makes it an exciting space. A book represents knowledge, and striking a balance in a library is a good thing.” Asked what makes a city successful, Board Member Saskia Sassen (pictured at left) argued that it is cities’ “incompleteness that gifts them their longevity. A city does not become obsolete.” (Sassen also sat down with Nicolas Nova for a great interview in advance of Lift Lab earlier this month.) And June Williamson spoke about the future of suburbia in one of Record‘s “What’s Next” features, explaining that “We spent 50 to 60 years building it up, so we’re going to have to spend an equivalent period of time restructuring, infilling, and remaking it.”
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’ Events & Exhibitions: July 1-14, 2011
Friday, July 1st, 2011
Board Member Saskia Sassen will deliver the keynote address at Lift France 11 in Marseille on 7/7; Board Member Tami Hausman will participate in the Center for Architecture panel discussion The Pitch: A Hands-On Workshop on Attracting a Client in Two Minutes or Less on 7/11; Board Member Thom Mayne will participate in the Van Alen Institute’s Los Angeles panel [PDF] for their Life at the Speed of Rail program on 7/12; and you can see BOB, a public art installation (pictured at left) designed by a team led by Galia Solomonoff, at Columbia University in Manhattan through 7/25.
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Balsley, Dart, Drucker, Dykers, Greenberg, Holl, Mayne, Sassen, Sauerbruch, Sollohub, & Weisz
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
The Vanishing City, a new film on the gentrification of Manhattan, featuring interviews with Tom Angotti and Board Member Saskia Sassen, opened the Staten Island Film Festival; Angotti also spoke to the NY Daily News about his new research project at Hunter College trying to repurpose vacant residential units to shrink rates of homelessness; Mimi Zeiger profiled Thomas Balsley in the latest Landscape Architecture Magazine [PDF]; Jim Dart wrote briefly about progress on the Great Falls Arts + Revitalization Initiative at the Great Falls National Park in Paterson, NJ, a project that also involves Darius Sollohub and Claire Weisz; in nearby Nutley, NJ, Ken Drucker is designing a new pedestrian bridge at the Hoffman La Roche corporate campus; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston announced a shortlist of three firms for its planned expansion: Craig Dykers’ Snøhetta, Patron Steven Holl’s eponymous firm, and Board Member Thom Mayne’s Morphosis; hot off an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Ken Greenberg penned a requiem for a pedestrian bridge proposed in Toronto; Matthias Sauerbruch’s design for an office building on London’s Old Bailey (pictured at left) has been approved; and the Drawing Center has just launched a capital plan for their Claire Weisz-designed expansion.
Quoth the Fellows: Kazi, Sassen, & Safdie
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
In a chat with the Wall Street Journal about the Van Alen Institute’s new bookstore on 22nd Street, Olympia Kazi said of architects: “They’re books junkies, no matter how many Nooks and iPads. They still love their print, the hard copy.” In an article in the latest Americas Quarterly, Board Member Saskia Sassen detailed the ways that networked cities and citizens are changing the way business is done, stating in no uncertain terms that “There is no such entity as the global economy.” Moshe Safdie, meanwhile, reflected on the international atmosphere at the construction site for his Marina Bay Sands project in Singapore (pictured at left) at a press conference, noting that “One tower was built by Chinese workers, and another tower was built by a Bangladeshi team. It looked like the Tower of Babel.”
Fellows’ Events & Exhibitions: March 1-15, 2011
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
On 3/2, Patron Steven Holl will deliver the First Annual Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture in Los Angeles; Board Member Winka Dubbeldam will celebrate the completion of her new book Archi-Tectonics (pictured at left) with a launch party in NYC on 3/4; that same day, Anthony Flint will speak at Connecticut College’s Smart Growth Conference; also on 3/4, Board Member Saskia Sassen will participate in Housing Conference 2011 in Istanbul; the exhibit Nordic Models + Common Ground, curated by Craig Dykers’ Snøhetta at New York’s Scandanavia House, will close on 3/9; Michael Manfredi will deliver the lecture Surface/Subsurface at URI Kingston on 3/10; Dykers will speak at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts on 3/14; Jack Nyman will host the conference Banking on the Future: A New Paradigm for Rebuilding Our Nation’s Infrastructure in New York on 3/14; and a new exhibit of work by Daniel Libeskind, Architecture as a Language, has just opened at the Wroclaw Museum of Architecture in Poland, and will be on view through 5/16.
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.
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Brown, Holl, Mayne, Portman, Safdie, Sassen, Weisz
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Tom Angotti recently took a peek behind the curtain at NYC’s powerful Economic Development Corp. in the Gotham Gazette; Hillary Brown explored the future of post-industrial public infrastructure projects in a recent Design Observer piece; green megablog Inhabitat interviewed Patron Steven Holl about sustainable architecture; Board Member Thom Mayne’s 41 Cooper Square (pictured at left) was recently awarded LEED Platinum certification; John Portman’s firm was announced by the Georgia DOT as one of five finalists competing to develop a new transit hub in downtown Atlanta; Tablet Magazine profiled Moshe Safdie, dubbing the architect a Master Builder; Board Member Saskia Sassen responded to the Foreign Policy’s 2010 Global Cities Index with some hard-hitting questions; and Claire Weisz’s firm WXY Architecture was profiled [pdf] in the Architect’s Newspaper.
Sassen Organizes “Cities and Eco-Crises” Conference
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Next Friday, October 1st, the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and IfUD Board Member Saskia Sassen will present Cities and Eco-Crises, a conference that will bring together a diverse group of scholars — urbanists, biologists, nanotechnologists, and sustainable cities activists — to address the relationship between cities and the environment. The event will take place in Avery Hall’s Wood Auditorium on the Columbia campus in New York from 10:00 AM-6:00 PM. Registration is encouraged.
