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.

Quoth the Fellows: Flint, Fowle, & Weisz

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Writing for The Atlantic CITIES blog, Anthony Flint comments on the recent surge in freeway demolition projects, remarking that “We’ve reached a unique point in city-building when the destruction of a public works project has all the glamor and buzz of breaking ground on a new one.” With FXFOWLE leading design work on the ongoing renovation of New York’s Javits Center, Bruce Fowle provides a counterpoint to Meta Brunzema’s favorable remarks in our last Update: “The waste of creative energy, money, and material that would result in its being torn down is painful to think about. When you’re worrying about every detail–trying to do the best you can to make something that represents the city–it’s like having the rug pulled out from under you.” And in a Globe and Mail profile of Edmonton-born Claire Weisz (pictured at left), the IfUD Board Member explained her focus on the public space design projects that have defined her career by explaining that she moved to New York “not to make stuff, but to make stuff happen.”

Fellows in the News: Angotti, Berman, Enquist, Fain, Flint, Griffin, Holl, Machado, Mayne, Pollak, Stastny, & Wakeman

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

In his latest Gotham Gazette column, Tom Angotti looks into NYC’s plans for its new bikeshare program; Matt Berman and his partner Andrew Kotchen launched SpruceBox, a new web platform to help homeowners visualize renovation projects; Phil Enquist won two competitions to develop master plans for a 2-kilometer stretch of the Yangtze Riverfront in downtown Nanjing and a new urban center at Duqm City in Oman; William Fain’s firm recently completed master plans for the Chinese cities of Chengdu and XiCheng; Anthony Flint argued for concentrating early development of a high-speed rail system in the US in megaregions like the Northeast Corridor; Board Member Toni Griffin joined in on the New York Times‘ most recent Room For Debate feature on the demolition of foreclosed housing; construction work has begun on Patron Steven Holl’s athletic complex for Columbia at the northern tip of Manhattan (pictured at left); Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art, designed by Rodolfo Machado’s firm, has just opened; the National Mall Design Competition, led by Don Stastny, announced its jury, which will include Board Member Thom Mayne; Linda Pollak will serve as the Lead Juror for AIA Pittsburgh’s Design Pittsburgh awards; and Rosemary Wakeman spoke to the Baltimore Sun about gentrification in that city’s Union Square neighborhood.

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.”

9th Breakfast Club

Friday, June 25th, 2010

On June 24, IfUD Fellows gathered at the Architectural League of New York’s The City We Imagined, The City We Made exhibition in Lower Manhattan for our 9th Breakfast Club to discuss the subject of the show, development in New York City over the past decade, with its curators, Rosalie Genevro and Gregory Wessner. We were also joined by Columbia University’s Vishaan Chakrabarti, whom many of you may know through his participation in last fall’s Arrested Development symposium, Gregg Pasquerelli of SHoP Architects, who spoke about his work on the Atlantic Yards project, and Emiliano Espasandin, a member of the team that imagined the transportation future of Buenos Aires for the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy’s Our Cities Ourselves exhibit, which opened last night at the Center for Architecture. Thanks to everyone who made it to the Club; a photo album is up on our Facebook page, so take a look!

Our Cities Ourselves Opens This Thursday

Monday, June 21st, 2010

The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy’s Our Cities Ourselves exhibit, which features the work of IfUD Board Chair Michael Sorkin’s firm Terreform, will open this Thursday, June 24. The exhibit asks 10 leading architects to imagine 10 cities in the year 2030, especially the ways in which walking, biking, and public transit figure into the mix. To kick things off, ITDP will host a media roundtable on the morning of the 24th, from 10:00 AM to 10:45 AM, at the Center for Architecture, at 536 LaGuardia Place in New York. For more information, check out the program website, or follow it on Twitter @ourcities.