We’re excited to introduce three new Fellows to the IfUD community: New York-based architect Audrey Matlock; NYC Dept. of City Planning senior urban designer Justin Garrett Moore; & Ted Shelton, an Assistant Professor at UT Knoxville and Partner at curb. It’s great to have them on-board!
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.”
Since it opened this past September, more than one million visitors have passed through Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero; a Wall Street Journal article on regional minimalism noted Deborah Berke’s influential residential work in New England; on the latest episode of Citywide, Ken Fisher interviews Manhattan Media CEO and first-in-the-ring NYC mayoral candidate Tom Allon; Anthony Flint appeared on the Callie Crosby Show to discuss the redevelopment of the former Filene’s Basement site in Boston; Beth Greenberg, who leads the Dattner Architects team working on Manhattan’s 7-train extension, spoke to ENR New York [PDF] about the project (which, Inhabitat reports, is ahead of schedule and under budget); Gothamist got a peek inside the construction site for the new Fulton Street Transit Center, which is managed by Gregory Haley; Next American City Editor-in-Chief Diana Lind cited Olympia Kazi’s success in establishing the Van Alen Bookstore as a social anchor for New York’s urban design community as a chief inspiration for NAC‘s new Storefront for Urban Innovation in Philadelphia; Hugh Pearman raved about Daniel Libeskind’s expansion of the Military History Museum in Dresden (pictured at left) in Architectural Record; John Palmieri’s CRDA launched the website Revitalize Atlantic City to encourage public participation in the Tourism District Master Plan process; Artforum reviewed the V&A’s Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, which features the work of Robert A.M. Stern and Patrons Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown; and new renderings were released of the 8 Washington development on the San Francisco waterfront, featuring landscapes by Peter Walker.
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).
The AIA’s New York chapter, led by Rick Bell, has just put out the call for entries for the 2012 AIANY Design Awards (deadline: 2/3/12); Francis Cauffman, led by James Crispino, has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing A/E/C industry firms on ZweigWhite’s annual Hot Firms List; Patron Steven Holl was named as the winner of the prestigious 2012 AIA Gold Medal; SOM’s Chicago Office, where Philip Enquist is the Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning, received AIA Chicago’s Firm of the Year award; Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin included the opening of Helmut Jahn’s Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago (pictured at left) in his round-up of the best architecture of 2011; Board Member Enrique Norten will serve as a juror for this year’s Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award, which will focus on Cape Town, South Africa (deadline: 2/24/12); AmericasMart founder John Portman will receive a special honor, the “Legend for Life” award, in recognition of his five decades of entrepreneurship and service to the home decor industry; Board Member Saskia Sassen made Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for her “passionate advocacy of an urban-based society”; and the undergraduate program at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture, led by Frederick Steiner, was ranked second in the nation by DesignIntelligence.
A video by Philip Enquist’s Great Lakes Project (which, we recently discovered, has a great new blog) lays out a broad vision for the Great Lakes region; Ken Greenberg stopped by Global Toronto‘s Morning Show to discuss his international slate of urban design projects; David Manfredi spoke about his design for the Edgewater Hotel in a video clip about the Madison project; NJBIZ spoke to John Palmieri about his plans for New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority; and Elisabetta Terragni’s Trento Tunnels project (image at left) was featured in a video about Future Mind Award winners.
On 11/17, D. Grahame Shane will lead the League-hosted panel Urban Design Since 1945 – A Global Perspective in New York; also on 11/17, Donald Stastny will lead a public forum on the master plan that he has been developing for St. Louis’ Grand Center arts and entertainment district; and Bruce Fowle will join the panel discussion Benchmarking in Action: Retrofitting New York at the Center for Architecture on 11/30.
Use this weekend wisely — entries to the By the City / For the City design competition are due by midnight a week from today on Thursday, July 14. If you still haven’t had time to select a site from the 550 ideas New Yorkers shared during our crowdsourcing phase this spring, we’d recommend checking out our blog, which features posts that take a deeper look into some specific ideas. You can register here; we look forward to seeing what you come up with for New York City’s future!
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).
We’d like to welcome our newest Fellow, Greg Haley, AIA AICP LEED AP, a Senior Architect at Grimshaw’s NYC office, where he is currently helping to oversee the construction of the MTA’s Fulton Street Transit Center. Greg received his Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.
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