Charles Weak

Cooper Square — Abundance was the theme of the night, and being so close to Thanksgiving, it was hard not to read a gustatory dimension into the presentations.

Midtown — “Everyone understands space, even if they don’t have a degree in architecture.”

Astor Place — Elisa Iturbe then moved from precarity to sustainability, sounding an existential note: “The climate crisis makes our work within the building industry untenable.”

Los Angeles (Zoom) — “I don’t think architecture can create queer spaces. People can and spaces can, but not architecture.”

Los Angeles — Bryan Young characterized the arc of the firm’s work as the pursuit of ambiguity—oscillation between part and whole, solid and void, what is and what isn’t.

Zoom — “I pursued this project,” Dolores Hayden continued, “and in the process I came across some articles that [demonstrated that] communitarian socialism could happen in domestic spaces.”

ZOOM — "If John Lindsay's New York was tragedy then Mike Bloomberg's New York was farce"

New York City — It’s hard to square the fuzziness of a term like “enough” in a conversation around a building’s legibility.

Brookings — As a native of the Great Plains, this symposium underscored a growing feeling inside myself: Our region does not need acknowledgment, much less validation, from the coastal institutions. We have everything we need to do great architecture right here.

New York — Liz Gálvez focused on the act of “Making House”, both the gendered labors implied by the term, but also the technical systems that enable inhabitation. Reflecting on spaces of Black domesticity, like porches and stoops, Germane Barnes sees these as narrative spaces, in the sense that stories are told within the space but also by the spatial arrangement itself.