Skyline!

Skyline Dispatches

3/20

Smell a Rat
Chinatown — “Rats—they are builders of the natural environment. They’re architects!”
3/16

Nightclub for Nerds
Prospect Heights — Lecture topics ranged from Palestinian liberation to the ethics of AI; a Marxist theater troupe from Vermont performed twice.
3/13

Portable Landmark
Upper West Side — “Everyone who came to hold the sign and carry it with me through the neighborhoods became part of a collective monument.”
3/12

Off the Rails
Midtown — In place of the transit nerds I had expected to find were aspiring comics and adherents of the funny pages.
3/8

Mind Melting
SOHO — No one I spoke to had heard of him, though googling eventually turned up a website with a Wayback Machine-via-Wix aesthetic that doubles as an archive.
3/4

I’m Readin’ Here
LAGUARDIA PLACE — The Principles of Good Urban Design could become a valuable resource for New Yorkers, if they would take the time to read it.
3/1

Art of Living
LA
Los Angeles — A joyous confluence of art and architecture, activated by a respectful intrusion of movement and sound throughout the (relatively) modest modernist villa.
2/21

Giving Chase
GRAMERCY PARK — The titular chase through the city and the Lincoln Tunnel ends in a New Jersey landfill.
2/16

Meta Comment
Clinton Hill — “We are doubting our own methods; we are doubting our own efficacy; we are engaging in our work because this is what we know how to do.”
2/15

Low-Key Extrovert
LA
Chinatown — “LA has an incredible legacy of design and architecture that’s about its connection to landscape...”
2/14

Root and Branch
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — If, as Walker described, monuments are “furniture” that drift into the civic background of city life, then tributes to the Confederacy are active clarion calls.
2/11

It Follows
FIDI — I had assumed that the hip kids flocking to the slightly dour office building on a Sunday night would all be going to the same destination, but what did I know? “That’s why you shouldn’t just follow people,” my friend said to me.
2/2

Smash The Table
LA
ARTS DISTRICT — “Fuck shit up.”
1/27

Turned Out in Black
COOPER SQUARE — “When we speak of friends we’ve lost, we speak inevitably of ourselves.”
1/26

States of Belonging
Cooper Square — “You can add all the entrance ramps in the world, but I’m not going to come to this museum because the height of the pictures makes it clear you are not thinking of me.”
1/20

Confrontation Is Good
MIDTOWN — “What, if anything, did we do right?”
1/20

Sanctuary Space
KENMARE STREET — “During the day, it is the source of my income. At night, it is my home,” she said in reference to the massage parlor.
1/19

Are We There Yet?
LA
LA BREA — ...a big ask for a crowd who wants to know whether you can park out front after 6 p.m. without getting towed
1/18

Wanted: Good Ideas
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “I like to think of [pools] like the pub, or the park, just a place to meet up,” he said, evoking the kinship of small-town life.
1/16

Cruise Control
RED HOOK — “If we have burning questions that we want to ask, we’re going to put them in the ‘Ideas Bin,’” she said.
1/13

As He Sees It
WEST VILLAGE — Groeneboer said he aimed for the scale of the work to be “the architectural rather than the monumental,” though he might have added infrastructural.
1/11

Intimate as a Freeway
LA
Hollywood — “She had me practice on a chicken breast. I was super nervous.”

2023

12/13

Loaded Language
Zoom — Today, terms like “conflict” are employed by the media to minimize the extreme violence being inflicted on Palestinians by Israeli forces.
12/7

Transference Poetry
East Village — “People don’t tend to think of books as being shapes, but they are shapes...”
12/6

Good Bones
The Seaport — “When you cook, you’re left with scraps that make the perfect beginnings of another meal.”
12/4

Class Dismissed
LA
Westwood — Young attendees seemed put off by the absence of pragmatic concerns...
12/4

Place to Be
Chelsea — Roaming packs of alligators
12/2

Afflicting the Comfortable
CLINTON HILL — We can’t simply say that “we don’t want cooling anymore.”
11/30

Still Gowanus
Gowanus — “It’s up to us to say, ‘This is what a community trying to make a change looks like.’”
11/18

A Crisis of Purpose
LA
Downtown — Is it “the role of artists in weakened democracies” to promote their own memoirs and films?
11/14

Behind Closed Gates
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — Among their chants was an architectural critique, “from Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go.”
11/14

Jousting with Jacobs
Zoom — “She wanted all land-use decisions to include community groups.”
11/13

In-Joke
FIDI — “I just made up a client in my head.”
11/11

Mapping the Myth
Zoom — “Architecture is settler colonialism’s best friend.”
11/10

Tragic Threads
HELL’S KITCHEN — “How do we honor our dead?”
11/9

Butt-Kicking Work
LAGUARDIA PLACE — No one seemed to be getting much sleep.
11/9

Forged Designs
Chelsea — “Money is a design object.”
11/2

All The Above
LA
Westwood — “We landed a man on the moon. We can solve class A office conversions.”
11/2

So Many Dicks
LA
Mid-City — Mugs adorned with phalluses “danced” to lustful sounds.
10/27

Out of Touch
LA
Silver Lake — I tried to imagine what a Soviet citizen, especially one familiar with such spaces, would think of the assembled crowd.
10/25

A Thriving Culture
East Village — “The process of healing is already underway.”
10/25

Disclaimer Needed
Brooklyn Navy Yard — The non-catalog was a “repositioning,” a “field guide” and a “critical tool to catalyze the future.”
10/23

Glamorous Pairings
MEATPACKING DISTRICT — ...absent of jargon, though not light on substance.
10/17

Centennial Man
NOMAD — “I was sitting in Crown Hall with a friend, and Judy walked by.”
10/15

Flow Control
LA
Lincoln Heights — What collective bending must we all engage in to keep more of LA’s water local, saturating our own parched neighborhoods?
10/13

Airless Atmosphere
Clinton Hill — “I think we all need a drink after this.”
10/12

Lie of the Land
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — “How might this regime called land be made different (speaking in passive voice) and in active voice, how to can we name the makers and hold them to account in the remaking?”
10/10

Deco Devotee
Chelsea — “This is all I do,” she told me after the tour. “I have no husband, I have no cat, I have posters.”
10/2

Meme Studies
UNION, NJ — “Rather than having [students] look at some building in France they could never go to, I [had] them draw the buildings they are constantly running through in video games.”
9/30

Time, Colonial Construct
AMES, IA — Ten years ago, the phrase land back wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the average architecture professor or student.
9/30

Unstable Ground
Gowanus — “The weight of these buildings is on unstable ground,” cautioned one participant.
9/27

East Side Story
Sutton Place — Sporting tan tennis shoes, the architecture critic shared more neighborhood lore, pointing out I.M. Pei’s former residence, as well as Andrew Bolton and Thom Browne’s manse.
9/24

Bringing It All Back Home
Cambridge, MA — In a gesture welcomed by presenters on stage, elderly community members interjected and rebutted from the stands, offering their own accounts of historical events and movements of Black representation and political thought.
9/22

Heart to Heart
Zoom — Architectural workers can be product-oriented to a fault, even (especially?) within a grassroots organization advocating for just labor practices and an equitable build environment.
9/21

Future Perfect
Garment District — The group grappled with the work it will take to implement a Green New Deal for New York—not just retrofitting buildings and protecting against sea level rise, but building an organized design industry capable of advocating and delivering these projects.
9/21

The Lower Depths
CLINTON HILL — Martin explained that the purpose of his recent work is to reintroduce labor to much-disputed questions about capital and value within architecture. “[It’s about] going to the basement, taking people down to the furnace, to the sites of actual production.”
9/18

Enriching the Conversation
Laguardia Place — “We are no longer designers, we have to [also] be activists, engineers, and advocates, [to] play a bigger role, to use what we have and collaborate with others.”
9/14

Green Thumb (or Toe?)
Cambridge, MA — These may seem like odd ingredients for an ecological utopia, but they suit Yu, who has distinguished himself by making unexpected connections between culture, land use, and public policy.
9/10

What Was the Question?
Los Angeles — “We’re not cake decorators,” he intoned from his seated position while showcasing his Orange County Museum of Art, a swoopy concoction with half-baked detailing that opened last October—mostly to negative reviews.
9/9

Cut to the Choir
KENMARE STREET — His backing choir belted out verses like “a tree is the opposite of a cop!” and “I am a snake, I am a lake.”
9/8

The Water Isn’t Fine
East Williamsburg — Days after attending the rehearsal, I felt similarly marked by the opera’s thickly sedimented opening refrains: “Don’t be scared / Don’t touch the water / Don’t get in the water / Don’t drink the water.”
9/7

Dog Days of Summer
Hell’s Kitchen — Lost in a champagne sea of figurative flotsam and abstract jetsam, I finally stumbled upon art that affirmed my own taste, which we’ll call a mix of Adbusters and “institutional critique.”
9/6

Imminently Practical
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “NY kinda sucks these days” was the subtext of AIANY’s 2023 Recipe for a Room, a competition to sketch out spaces that could theoretically alleviate contemporary problems.
9/5

Raw But Precise
ZOOM — Tall, phallic buildings fronted by empty plazas and larger-than-life Calder sculptures are back! Or so a viewing of Barbie would suggest.
8/29

Back to Front
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK — Taking apart these infrastructures at both the diagrammatic and syntactical level is, of course, a very Easterling move, despite the scholar adding little to the discussion.
8/24

High House
EAST HAMPTONS — “It’s like a prison,” Renfro said. “A really pretty prison.”
8/15

Rock Solid
ZOOM — “I wouldn’t care to live on the top of such a fragile flagpole.”
8/13

Open Houses
EAST HAMPTONS — This is the problem with taking things from the past and trying to live seamlessly in them: many people simply don’t want to. Instead, they jam together a renovation of ideas you theoretically agree with but practically reject.
8/12

Drop-Ins
Chinatown — What are “poots?”
8/12

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity
Kenmare Street — Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo arrived at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in the late afternoon and wordlessly took their positions on a makeshift stage.
8/10

Extremely Online
FiDi — Joshua Citarella, an artist and connoisseur of the esoteric corners of the internet, had convened a young and engaged crowd at Fulton Street project space Dunkunsthalle.
8/10

In Plane View
East River — Here we were, two strangers standing a few feet apart on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, taking in a classic New York moment.
8/10

What’s the Damage?
ZOOM — The mission of Tokyo’s Window Research Institute is almost breathtakingly prosaic.
8/4

Flatiron on Flatbush
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — An unusual union of a high-rise residential tower and a mid-rise school rises over Flatbush Avenue.
7/29

Baby, Why Don’t We Go?
West Village — D. Smith’s admission that she cut the film using iMovie elicited a ripple of sympathetic laughter inside the IFC Center.
7/29

Of Seismic Importance
LaGuardia Place — At a continent-straddling symposium, architects and planners shared their experiences with post-disaster responses.
7/26

Accessible for Whom?
LaGuardia Place — As troubling as the continued aversion of some starchitects toward ADA is, money presents the greatest obstacle to realizing affordable and accessible housing.
7/26

Toward a Minor Architecture
Morningside Heights — The Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Arguments lecture series ended its summer run on a gentle note.
7/19

Goodbye to All That
Morningside Heights — “I was born in a year no cars were produced in America,” the artist Chip Lord said in a talk at Columbia GSAPP.
7/18

The Shock of the Old
Zoom — “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” might have been a more fitting title for the Skyscraper Museum’s public lecture, “The Future of the Past on Park Avenue: Lever House and the Waldorf Astoria,” held online this Tuesday.
7/13

An Intimate Eye
LaGuardia Place — “I am an architect,” begins a wall text at the Center for Architecture’s new exhibition, Janna Ireland on the Architectural Legacy of Paul R. Williams in Nevada.
7/12

Optimism of the Will
Morningside Heights — Denouncing capitalism for its inability “to achieve a real democracy,” they called for worldwide socialist planning, a rewilding of half the earth, and a rapid transition to renewable energy.
7/12

Period-Correct Details
Zoom — “You have to have a photographer’s eye to see the things that will kill ‘a historic’ shot”
7/12

Scrap Heap
Upper East Side — Abbott was a self-identified lesbian and “new woman” who was seeking a voice and found it behind a camera.
7/10

Get the Money
LaGuardia Place — Do clients and the public understand an architect’s value? Do architects understand it?
7/10

The Kids Are Alright
Zoom — In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the nature of the workplace has become a focal point of debate and transformation.
7/10

To Where Form Follows
Los Angeles — What should aspiring architects take away from a lecture on fetishistic sand piles?
7/6

Let It Flood
Montreal — How do we, as architects and planners, make space for water?
6/30

Blur Tool
Coney Island — At this year’s Mermaid Parade, homespun fashion transformed hopeful fictions into galvanizing community.
6/30

It’s Gonna Be Cool
Long Island City — Plus Pool, an imaginary bobbing lido in the East River, is a project for people who want to live somewhere else entirely.
6/29

Comfort Levels
Zoom — The final pair of presentations from the Architecture League Prize’s Uncomfortable series treated the audience to a playful, animate vision of architecture as facilitator of empathy, love, and “second lives.”
6/29

Garden Variety?
LaGuardia Place — “If we allow ourselves to believe that places have a soul,” said Raunaud, “we are more inclined to respect them, to preserve them.”
6/29

Training Mode
Zoom — “If you don’t own the means of production,” he said, “you are not the author. We have to access the processes. Otherwise we become the product.”
6/28

Critical Cuts
Lower East Side — “We live in a culture of marketing and things for sale. Critics are on the periphery of that culture,” Hawthorne said.
6/28

Duet with the Machine
Meatpacking District — “The things that excite me the most are the same things that scare me the most.”
6/22

Faith in the Profession
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “It takes six hours to fly from Mexico City to NYC but twelve hours to Buenos Aires,” Enrique Norten stated at the start of a conference about Latin American architecture.
6/22

Northern Exposure
Clinton Hill — In which a plucky group of students surveys Greenland’s energy and water intake systems and extractive infrastructure—and gets stranded in the process
6/22

There Is Refuge in Geometry
ZOOM — For these two architects, Euclidean geometry and personal narrative go hand in hand.
6/21

Live-Tree Format
Morningside Heights — The “wood wide web” remains a “sapling of an idea” in architectural discourse.
6/18

Taking Back Design
New Orleans — How many spatial designers does it take to create a protest mural?
6/17

Political Theater
Kenmare Street — Dressed in brightly colored outfits, the chorale belted out beguiling lyrics that entwined such ills as toxic consumerism, climate change, and police brutality.
6/16

Air Can Break Your Heart
Morningside Heights — “Aeropolis is a queering territory,” she said, before inviting everyone to become “Aeropolians.”
6/15

Gesture and Response
Gramercy — An authority on skyscraper design spoke to a crowd at the National Arts Club about the ins-and-outs of this “fundamental building block of the modern city.”
6/13

Social Streets
Upper East Side — At the 49th Museum Mile Festival, all I could think about was how I've never noticed how nice this part of town looks.
6/6

Read the Room
Clinton Hill — Keller Easterling shares her reading habits of late.
6/5

Public Futures
Lower East Side — Housing is a fundamental right. Can architecture accept this?
6/5

Table Talk
London — A modern, timber roundhouse invites people to find common ground in a rarefied setting.
6/1

Ethics Over Aesthetics
Los Angeles — At an LA book launch, taco-wielding attendees mingled against a backdrop of protest banners and DIY “Catholic prayer candles for architecture.”
6/1

Leave It at the Gate
San Francisco — The Disneyfication of the AIA national’s annual conference
6/1

Not a Dumb Law
Clinton Hill — “Did we pass a dumb law? No. We are not stupid hippies,” said an activist from the New York Communities for Change.
6/1

Recovered Ground
Chelsea — “What we think produces what we make and do.... We are less comfortable thinking about our thoughts and the forms and shapes they take.”
6/1

Wrap It Up
Morningside Heights — “I would wrap everything in fabric if I could.”
5/31

Class Acts
FiDi — “A building with specificity is strangely more flexible,” Ramus said.
5/31

In Top Form
Laguardia Place — “The rock tries to fall; it can’t fall because there’s other rocks holding it together.”
5/26

A Spanish Inquisition
Los Angeles — Which side of the Whole Earth Catalog—green capitalism or hippie modernism—was Jaque on?
5/25

Words on the Street
SoHo — The party spirit that animated this “block party” was only slightly dampened by a didactic art installation.
5/18

Eventful Beginnings
Venice — After a long flight and a series of late trains, I arrived in Venice a little worse for the wear.
5/12

The Ties of Labor
Brooklyn Navy Yard — A new documentary short tells the stories of migrant women organizers in New York City.
5/12

Timber!
LAGUARDIA PLACE — Contemplating mass timber futures with Lindsey Wikstrom and Carson Chan
5/11

Birds in Flight, Dim the Lights!
City Hall — A few dozen birders, ornithologists, environmentalists, and elected officials rallied outside City Hall on behalf of their feathered friends.
5/11

Climate Is a Mother
Cambridge — If a school of architecture seems an odd venue for a climate-themed film festival, it is.
5/11

Filmmaking from Below
London — Another movie night—this time, featuring a powerful depiction of life in New York’s underbelly.
5/5

Biomorphique Fantastique
UPPER WEST SIDE — Beyond the frame lies something more mundane: drywall, and lots of it.
4/25

Red or White?
Astor Place — The long-postponed opening of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 drew out avant-garde aficionados like myself.
4/20

The Politics of Stone
Morningside Heights — “The past cannot change, [people’s] trauma cannot change, but seeing monuments [come] alive helps them move on.”
4/18

“More Than a Wall of Steel”
Union Square — A cinematic version of New York should consider the unremarkable sides of urban life, says this filmmaker.
4/18

The Tree Is the Generator
Clinton Hill — Sylvia Lavin talks trees and Cedric Price at e-flux.
4/16

Bruised Egos
Midtown — A real-life New York archidrama crosses the footlights.
4/11

Instructions on Tearing Down a Building
Astor Place — “We see the [imperiled] building as a mine.”
4/4

Better Late Than Never
Union Square — The relationship between the architect and the museum is one of scales of time.
3/31

Two Loves
Chicago — Like the bicycle, a building is a tool.
3/25

Meta Commentaries
Pittsburgh — “We didn’t hear so much about the impact of that kind of thinking on architecture in the conventional sense.”
3/24

Tempting Tools of the Trade
Austin — “All tools contain inherent biases,” said Tyler Swingle, just as “influences come in the form of standards.”
3/23

Old Habits Die Hard
Astor Place — “Have you ever felt frustrated working in axonometric?”
3/23

A Tribute to a Micro-Historian
Princeton — “Architecture requires a multi-contextual approach.” Got it?
3/21

Carbon Form and Content
ASTOR PLACE — A sprawling timeline alleged to tell the energetic history of the world; the entirety of the Detrital Fossil Carbon era was crammed into about two inches.
3/17

Theory in the Round
Chicago — “This Is Not Contemporary” put the keyword through the paces.
3/16

A Moveable Feast
Chinatown — Design-types flocked to Citygroup for the opening of The Great Outdoors, a taxonomy of New York’s dining sheds.
3/16

Back to the Future(s)
Zoom — A slipperiness of simultaneity accompanies any attempt to limn a futurity from fragmented histories.
3/7

Something About the Maturation of a Point of View
Toronto — “How I got started on this project is that I’m an Instagram junkie,” said Phyllis Lambert, incongruously.
3/6

Boringization
Wall Street — “I’ve seen the renderings, and it ain’t going to work out.”
3/2

Driving Gehry Nuts
Los Angeles — “Mike rejected pessimism as political fatalism in favor of the optimism necessary for organization.”
3/2

Screen Presence
PRINCETON — Kats’s presentation diverged from the standard monographic treatment by fastening onto a wider perspective.
2/27

Fully Operational
World Trade Center — “The problem with ‘genericism’ is it costs so much operating budget to change the space, it may as well be a strait-jacket.”
2/25

Bodies as Houses
Morningside Heights — The housing system is one of alienation and abstractions. Are there alternatives?
2/23

The Inner Life of Buildings
Chelsea — I stumbled across a poignant juxtaposition.
2/15

Clacks and Claps
Ludlow Street — On Wednesday, Untapped, a new online publication, tap-danced its way onto New York’s design scene.
2/13

Be Like Water
LaGuardia Place — Water attracts and repels, offers sites of leisure and submerges fraught histories.
2/13

Detoxing the Demos
Zoom — The 1970 takeover of a New York City hospital by the Young Lords was not simply an occupation but a liberation of city space.
2/8

Full Circle
New Haven — “Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium” was a Festschrift in spirit, if not quite in name.
1/20

A Chance at Intimacy
Lower East Side — A DJ was stationed at the back of the shop; readers were hunched over stacks of the spiral-bound publication, while others were carefully assembling BDSM rope flowers.
1/20

NYRA on the Other Town
West Hollywood — Three projects unburdened by the frictions of reality...
1/19

My Kid Can’t Do That
SoHo — At the closing event of “Parallel Rules,” the audience couldn’t help but dazzle at the technical virtuosity on display.
1/17

Smuggling the Familiar
Houston — ...an excuse to produce nice-looking, normative buildings.
1/17

Under the Influence
Houston — “We almost called this lecture ‘Enjoy Architecture.’”
1/14

The Opposite of an Eyesore
Brooklyn Navy Yard — ...many heads buried in fresh issues.
1/13

Model House
New Haven — The process of architectural translation—between cultures and economies, private and public realms—has been unfolding for far longer than we might appreciate.
1/12

Design-a-Thon
LAGUARDIA PLACE — Design can happen anywhere, with whatever (and whomever) is at hand.
1/12

Digging Deep
New Haven — “[The monument] came into fruition through a collective desire to face the past.”
1/11

Promo Talk
Brooklyn Navy Yard — “The scandal isn’t the sex.”
1/6

Live On Air
Toronto — A panel about practice offered a sobering, yet inclusive, riposte to architectural gatekeeping.
1/5

Deferred Demolition
Toronto — “There are corners, areas where you have to go in and discover new images.”
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