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: Angotti, Dykers, & Sauerbruch
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
In criticizing the methodology behind the Bloomberg administration’s PlaNYC sustainability plan, Tom Angotti explained his chief concern thusly: “It’s an accountants’ approach to the city, not a planners’ approach.” At the public debut of Snøhetta’s re-design of Times Square (pictured at left), Craig Dykers stated that his much-anticipated plan was “not taking its cues from some pretty little things in Europe or something. Our design has a film noir feel to it; it’s more muscular.” Speaking to the Globe and Mail in advance of his keynote address at IIDEX/NeoCon event in Toronto last week, ‘crusader for color’ Matthias Sauerbruch noted that color “is slowly, slowly coming back, as a way of tuning buildings, almost like you would tune an instrument–slightly shifting their appearance, their identity, their atmospheric quality.”
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Bell, Berman, Blaik, Ferebee, Flint, Hartmann, Holl, Pasquarelli, Rogers, & Safdie
Thursday, August 4th, 2011
Tom Angotti criticized Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC for not focusing enough on providing affordable housing in the Gotham Gazette; The Epoch Times interviewed Rick Bell about how the economic recovery will affect the architectural profession; Inhabitat interviewed Matt Berman about workshop/apd’s GreeNOLA project; land-use advocacy organization The Fayette Alliance has launched a campaign to bring Omar Blaik to Lexington to help develop a plan for enhancing the relationship between that city and its anchor institutions; the New York Times plugged IfUD Founder Ann Ferebee’s new book, A History of Design form the Victorian Era to the Present; Anthony Flint wrote for The Angle about how bike-sharing could improve traffic in Boston; John Hartmann spoke to Brian Lehrer about his map for WNYC’s “New Littles” feature (pictured at left), popped up in an Architect profile of the non-profit SUPERFRONT, and launched a new Kickstarter fundraising initiative for his +FARM project; a+t released a new book on mixed use hybrid buildings with a preface written by Patron Steven Holl; Gregg Pasquarelli talked to Architect about the launch of SHoP Construction, while Paul Goldberger reviewed the firm’s newly-opened East River Esplanade in the New Yorker; Christopher Hawthorne reviewed Rob Rogers’ firm Rogers Marvel’s winning proposal for the redesign of Washington DC’s Ellipse; and Moshe Safdie was announced as the architect for Bishan Central, a planned 540-unit residential skyscraper in Singapore.
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.”
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.
Fellows in the News: Angotti, Baldwin, Berman, Fisher, Flint, Greenberg, Jahn, Kelley, Libeskind, & Stepner
Monday, June 6th, 2011
Civic watchdog Tom Angotti reviews the latest changes to the Bloomberg administration’s PlaNYC 2030 in the Gotham Gazette; Greg Baldwin sat on the jury for the Urban Land Institute’s 2011 Amanda Burden Urban Open Space Award; DesignShuffle visited a “whimsical” Nantucket home designed by Matt Berman; you can watch Ken Fisher interview Junior Achievement of New York director Joseph Peri on the latest episode of CUNY-TV’s Citywide; Anthony Flint argued for a re-write of Massachusetts’ state zoning law on Boston.com; the initial reviews of Ken Greenberg’s book Walking Home could generally be described as “glowing,” with the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and Treehugger all sounding off; the Tribune’s Blair Kamin reviews Helmut Jahn’s just-opened Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago (pictured at left); NYC’s Village Alliance, led by Fellow William Kelley, is undertaking a detailed survey of local residents and merchants to revive West 8th Street; Daniel Libeskind just finished an addition to his first completed project, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Austria; and Michael Stepner spoke to the Voice of San Diego about the streamlining of that city’s charter.
New York For Sale…Goes On Sale
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
Fellow Tom Angotti’s new book New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, will be published by the MIT Press in April 2011. Angotti’s 323-page tome can be pre-ordered now online. Says Harvard’s Susan Fainstein: “[Angotti's] acute observations of the threat to community residents underlying the drive for ‘global competitiveness’ and his analysis of the tactics available to progressive community planners constitute essential reading for everyone concerned with using planning as a means to obtaining a more just and democratic city.”
Fellows in the News: Alschuler, Angotti, Balsley, Dykers, Fain, Fisher, Orff, Pasquarelli, Stepner, & Williamson
Friday, February 4th, 2011
San Mateo’s Station Park Green development (pictured at left), designed by Karen Alschuler, received an enthusiastic thumbs-up from that city’s Council; Tom Angotti’s column in the Gotham Gazette looks at NYC’s new comprehensive waterfront plan, Vision 2020; the Epoch Times profiled a Thomas Balsley-designed rooftop forest in Lower Manhattan; Metropolis visited the Manhattan office of Craig Dykers’ firm Snøhetta; San Antonio’s KSAT-12 spoke with William Fain about the redesign of HemisFair Park; Kenneth K. Fisher interviewed Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer for CUNY-TV; Kate Orff’s work on “oyster-tecture” was featured in Harvard Design Magazine; in the lead-up to Gregg Pasquarelli’s Architectural League-organized lecture last Wednesday, the League published an extensive interview with the architect; Michael Stepner co-authored a call for planners to articulate a long-term vision for downtown San Diego; and NorthJersey.com talked to June Williamson about how suburbs can be retrofitted to create walkable, urban communities.
Fellows’ Events & Exhibitions: January 1-15
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
Cynthia Barton and Lance Jay Brown will participate on a panel in New York on 1/8 as part of the AIANY’s Haiti-Habitat competition; Joe Brown will speak at the 2011 VantageForum in Los Angeles on 1/11; Tom Angotti will speak at a special City Council meeting to discuss the potential impacts of allowing Wal-Mart to open stores in New York on 1/12; Claire Weisz will take part in a discussion about the 1999 Van Alen Institute competition TKTS2K on 1/12; and Manhattan’s PS/IS 276 (pictured at left), designed by Richard Dattner’s Dattner Architects, is featured in the AIANY’s Design for Decades exhibit, on view at the Center for Architecture now through 1/22.
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.
