Skyline!
Skyline Dispatches
2022
LAGUARDIA PLACE —
Much of the abolitionist agenda lies in the hands of policy-makers. Still, is there really nothing architects can do?
12/16
NYRA Above the Town
Greenpoint —
A very OMA exposed-truss two-story bridge connects the two towers, above exterior cooking stalls and putting green, housing pink terrazzo-clad interior pool deck and fitness gym.
12/12
At the Drop of a Hat
Zoom —
In the context of an exhibit about Mars at the London Design Museum, Kallipoliti discussed “the politics of shit.”
12/6
Setting the Table
Zoom —
A jargon-light but policy-forward conversation on housing ended with suggestions for further reading and tempered optimism.
Greenwich Village —
The project incorporated wayfinding strategies and citrus-tinged moiré to create variable conditions for privacy and sociality.
Zoom —
Urban planners, watch out.
12/5
Toward a New School
ZOOM —
“The university believes it will be fine without faculty, so maybe faculty [should] ask ourselves if we can be fine without the university.”
Lower East Side —
And at what point does reactivity slide into reactionaryism, exemplified by the field’s gendered outlook?
12/1
Star Turns
Hamilton Heights —
In a bottom drawer, she found an unfinished novel (“kinda trashy”) Berman had penned in the mid-1960s, involving romantic love and the Weather Underground.
11/29
Food for Thought
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.
11/18
Blasting Photons
Midtown —
Monet glowed and Klimt glistened, while Maxfield Parrish resembled a ’70s blacklight poster.
11/17
Against Greenhouses
Cambridge, MA —
“Enclosures are an emblem of a broken world.”
11/17
All Over the Map
West Harlem —
Ortiz Struck tries to connect the tactile qualities of sometimes abstract sites and situations with the fine grain of personal experience.
Toronto —
"It hasn’t really been about writing about precarious people, precarious lives.”
11/15
Building Community
Soho —
"Community engagement has to be led by the community and then you have to figure out if there’s a part for the designer.”
Astor Place —
“The Bauhaus aimed to develop an individual, whereas the Moscow workshops focused on the masses.”
11/14
Urban Entourage
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS —
The couple’s approach aims to expose the entanglements and dependencies that dominant architectural discourse would rather leave unquestioned.
11/8
Broken Models
Cooper Square —
"Blow up your pipeline, blow up your pedagogy... give up your tenure."
Zoom —
"We do alternatives."
11/7
The Look of Science
Cambridge, MA —
Andrews, an architect deeply concerned with the performance of his buildings, was reluctant to elaborate on their designs, insisting they were just “common sense.”
11/5
A Forever Home
Ridgewood —
The event began with what a queer and trans–led process might look like at a particular site and ended with how this same community might exert influence citywide.
11/4
Not Empty
Morningside Heights —
Henni voiced her hope that the texts in this collection “might speak to everyone, not only to our discipline.”
11/4
NYRA at the Museum
Chelsea —
Spend enough time looking and you begin to see Hopper’s vision for “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”
LAGUARDIA PLACE —
"...as though architecture qua architecture can do anything about any of that.”
Lower East Side —
The librarian just wanted to see what it was about.
11/1
Nature’s Revenge
Cambridge, MA —
“We don’t have a consensus iconography anymore. What we have instead is a slab of concrete and public fountains.”
10/31
Building Trust
Midtown —
“Everyone understands space, even if they don’t have a degree in architecture.”
10/28
Reporting From the Front
The issue with hospitals is not austerity budgets, asymmetrical access to care, or healthcare labor issues: it’s that they’re vertical.
10/28
Reporting From the Front
Eastern Seaboard —
Why is the RAFT program necessary at all?
10/28
Towards Liberation
Cooper Square —
On “the conscious faculty of really looking to see all the patterns”
10/27
Non-Neutral Ambience
New Haven —
“How do you distinguish a house, let’s say, from a museum?”
Houston —
The lessons taken from the infill projects are particularly relevant to American and Canadian cities trying to re-densify their urban centers.
10/26
Port City Primal Scream
New York Harbor —
“It is so easy to forget that New York is a port city.”
10/26
Stunning!
Lincoln Center —
$550 million later, the building’s interior retains none of the sepulchral mood that previously reigned: it is intimate, warm, and inviting.
10/25
Once Alive
Zoom —
Can a building survive its own death?
Chelsea —
New York Review of Sex, New York Review of Sex and Politics, and The New York Review of Sex, Politics, and Aeronautics...
10/17
High Stakes
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.”
10/14
Gaining Leverage
Zoom —
“The building trades have leverage. Construction firms have leverage. The only people in the building industry that don’t have leverage are the ones who design the buildings,” David DiMaria said. “If architects don’t set those standards, there won’t be a floor. There has to be a cost for your work.”
10/14
Landscape Pasts
Cambridge, MA —
"I am not an Olmsted scholar."
10/11
Citizen Architect
Massachusetts —
Milton S.F. Curry argued that race and Blackness are necessary “theoretical vehicles” for training “citizen architects.” More adequate frameworks for learning—for instance, a race-integrated course track and an expanded canon—are needed at the university level, but also earlier than that.
10/6
What’s Next?
Tbilisi —
Taken as a whole, the biennial had the feeling of a big festival, exuding both urgency and ambition.
9/15
Endlessly Congenial
Laguardia Place —
“I came more from conceptual art, and the thing lived and died on its own merits. Before you theorized it, it had to be done first.”
Soho —
The paintings “are a way to try and do architecture even when I don’t have ‘work.’”
New York City —
“Where is the dynamite?”
New York City —
The conversation became cacophony in the echoes and sonorously of the empty space.
New York City —
In the context of Dimes Square, with its wealthy influencer set stomping up and down Canal Street, these ceramics preserve at a small, domestic scale what is being lost as rents are raised and residents displaced.
Brooklyn —
Figures of Speech represents a diversity of work that’s unique within the design industry, and its radical inclusion of Social Sculpture not only redefines architecture, but expresses Virgil Abloh’s commitment to creating spaces for Black artists.
HUDSON YARDS —
“Well, it moved.”
CHINATOWN —
What if you were passed the pamphlet over the cubicle wall? What if it made its way into your pencil case? What would you as a worker need to know?
ZOOM (New Orleans/New York) —
"...no one has to do a lot.”
6/23
Hating on Hallways?
Gowanus —
"This crowd wants to celebrate the corridor, not cancel it."
6/11
All That’s Solid
Rotterdam (Livestream) —
“There is a stupid equation that if a crime is very heavy, the architecture to commemorate it must also be very heavy,” rendered in grim, gray concrete.
6/10
Pass the Popcorn
Los Angeles (Zoom) —
“I don’t think architecture can create queer spaces. People can and spaces can, but not architecture.”
6/10
Take It Easy?
Ithaca (Zoom) —
The future of pedagogy in an era of "pending climate catastrophe while society is driven by the growth that capitalism demands”
Lower Manhattan —
We need to stop trying to do more with less and simply do a whole lot less.
LAGUARDIA PLACE —
“We have a lot to learn from each other if we stop exoticizing each other’s approaches.”
LAGUARDIA PLACE —
“First and foremost, people want to breathe safe air.”
6/4
Making Cüirtopia
SAN JUAN —
Summer calls for beaches and island getaways, but last Saturday in San Juan, Puerto Rico, there were islands in the making.
DUMBO —
“The portraits are just trying to create a third space—another point of access to what the candidate told me about their memory and what I pulled from it.”
6/2
Style As Form
CHELSEA —
The term “thingness” is radically appropriate for the work on display; Kahn assembles *things* until their sum *thingness* overwhelms the constituent parts to become one *thing*, gooping and flopping and mashing together.
East Village —
The artists spoke fondly of seeing visitors engaging freely with the pieces—not only seeing the sculptures, but also touching them.
PITTSBURGH (ZOOM) —
The benevolent return of stolen artifacts may operate in place of human rights discussions that align with their paths.
5/24
Why Build a Fence?
ASTOR PLACE —
This next generation has rejected the model handed down by predecessors, making work that makes a case for a genuinely radical practice.
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.
MIDTOWN —
“It’s about you speaking to the residents,” Karen Blondel told the architects in the audience. "You really have to do your work and talk to the residents.”
Chelsea —
While impressive in its breadth and ambition, the show is not as immersive or architectural as what has come before.
Zoom —
“For design to play any meaningful part in challenging this state of affairs and its consequences,” Douglas Spencer concluded, “this would mean shifting from its long-standing naturalization of the social to working with and for the socialization of nature. It would mean burning down its own house.”
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 —
The presentations at the two-day symposium showcased the power of using seemingly incidental material components as tools in the deconstruction of often implicitly imperialistic written histories.
Zoom —
“Our call is for thinking seriously about working philosophies rather than hard methods.”
Zoom —
Archives often repeat seemingly liberal promises of transparency, democratic accessibility, and justice—yet Jarrett Martin Drake stressed that systems of documentation are deficient and action is needed.
Zoom —
In the context of planetary urbanism, the revelatory can turn reparative: Designers can redirect vast questions of resilience onto the micro-territories of urban seedlings and aging pipes.
Zoom —
“It’s not that people cannot afford a housing unit; it’s that they cannot afford a housing unit where they need it.”
Ithaca —
As time has gone by, Angela Ferguson explained, the goal for the Onondaga Nation Farm has become maximizing the amount of nutritional sustenance that can be extracted from the smallest amount of land.
Zoom —
Unlike, say, films or books, people have very little choice about which architecture they consume.
Zoom —
“In order to thrive, a community can't keep facing destruction.”
3/10
Playing against Type
Zoom —
“Perhaps moving away from type can be quite radical.”
3/10
Streets Ahead
Zoom —
On “connecting the work around streetscape design to gender”
2/25
Recite and Rewrite
PRINCETON —
What would an education that produces architects along the lines of June Jordan look like?
Zoom —
All in all, the big issues were raised, a cause was championed, and solutions were proposed… but the elephant remained in the room.
Zoom —
“Buildings are more like meals than monuments,” said Heinrich Wolff, in urging designers to embrace the inevitable modification of their work by owners and users.
Yen Ha offered that the link between these practices(architecture and visual arts) is her desire to forge connections with people she will likely never meet.
1/19
Solar Intelligence
Zoom —
REAr(Rational Energy ARchitects) projects explore the possibility of a decentralized energy system.
1/19
Off the Grid
Zoom —
“We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously.”
1/17
You had to be there
Zoom —
In the talk, Keller Easterling urged architects to move away from “geometric shapes and outlines” and look instead “at the rules and relationships that shape our space.” Easterling can be oblique in her methods—she cites rumors as an effective tool.
Zoom —
The discursive ghosts of well-worn debates occasionally lingered
2021
12/15
Modern Traditions
Zoom —
“The building becomes landscape.”
12/15
Tense Times in Chinatown
Chinatown —
As artists, architects, and passerbys filled the sidewalk and the gallery in Chinatown, the air was abuzz with calls to sign petitions, analysis of competing opinion pieces, and artists weighing how far to push the very system upon which they depend for a living.
12/14
The Design of Health
ZOOM —
Hospitals, Michael Murphy explained, offer unique opportunities for exploring how architecture adapts to the needs of both the individual and the public.
ZOOM —
"If John Lindsay's New York was tragedy then Mike Bloomberg's New York was farce"
Zoom —
Through a series of anecdotes, Mitchell Schwarzer highlighted the short-sighted and self-interested decisions that facilitated a transition from de jure to de facto racism, a reliance on the automobile, and a scarcity of public spaces and public housing.
Zoom —
“Why is it that architects think they don’t have something to offer to the marginalized?”
New York City —
“The spectacle of ‘man’s achievements ...progress, optimism, power.’”
Basel —
I don’t think it matters what anything looks like because nothing looks like anything because who can see anything for what it actually is?
Zoom —
The introduction of the public library's equivalent in 2021, Eric Klinenberg argued, would be seen as a revolutionary (and hardly fundable) proposition. This alone should make us realize that the notion that we need to invest in each other already exists.
11/3
Grounds for Play
Brooklyn —
The villains of the night weren’t risk-averse designers, but the reality of what it takes to maintain and care for exciting spaces for kids in a changing world.
New York City —
It’s hard to square the fuzziness of a term like “enough” in a conversation around a building’s legibility.
Waterloo —
Using examples of changes in design in parks, bus shelters, and bank machines, Rinaldo Walcott illustrated how urban form creates systemic fear towards “people who are deemed to be outside of the norm.”
10/28
Confronting Cities
Zoom —
“How do we situate the problem of the modern?” asked Elisa Iturbe.
Zoom —
“Mobility is in the service of creating a fully sedentary domesticity.”
Zoom —
Emanuel Christ emphasized the importance of a final, built design, stating, “it’s not so much about the process it’s about the result,” which he said derives from an ideal image of “an almost perfect architecture.”
New York, NY —
Asked about the changing functions of museum spaces, David Chipperfield declared that he rejects form-follows-function because “it’s hard to say what function is.” Just as a bathroom is more than a toilet stall, a museum is more than a display system.
Brooklyn —
The Aamnt Foundation‘s new arts campus may be large on paper, but in person the campus still feels contained and private, almost mysterious in how unobtrusive it is.
10/6
Form Versus Flow
New York City —
“What if architects dealt primarily not with form but with flow—material flow, energy flow, human flow?”
10/4
Skyrise for Harlem
New York City —
“Architecture is the European art of building...it projects the future, it claims the future...it does not do well with the present at all...June Jordan, by contrast, is about the now and how to build the future in relationship to it.”
Brooklyn —
The Van Alen Block Party hosts a long delayed opening party.
New York City —
The party eventually spilled onto the street, with guests exchanging thoughts, stories, and occasionally business cards. Professional society is healing.
9/30
Membrane Mechanics
Cambridge —
“We are really going to need [these interventions] because we are facing huge challenges; we need more floor space, we have much bigger loadings, and we don't want to create any waste when we are building,” says Sigrid Adriaenssens. Simply put: “We need to change.”
9/22
Mapping Atrocity
Zoom —
“I think what’s powerful about what we were able to do is that we have provided rigorous evidence of the scale of this detention program, showing where it is, doing this work to calculate the capacity [of the camps]…but also tell the human stories that show what the impact of this is on a human level. I think that is a very powerful way of telling people what is happening and why it is important.”
New York, NY —
“What I wanted do to”, said Justin Beal, “was to write about architecture in a way that felt closer to my own experience of it, which is quite personal…and most architectural writing isn’t terribly personal.”
9/21
Rise Up, Fly-Over
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.
9/13
Reviving the Sublime
Boston —
For the architect, Robin Winogrond, enchantment speaks to the emotional, even metaphysical sensation of encountering a natural space for the first time.
New York City —
Drawing inspiration from Sesame Street creator Jim Henson, the sculptor Alexander Calder, writer Italo Calvino, and singer-songwriter Donna Summer, Alex Da Corte’s floating bird conjures feelings of nostalgia, innocence, and curiosity
Zoom —
Through testimonials from domestic caregivers and floor plans of the Roma house, Frida Escobedo questioned the invisibility of reproductive labor—most frequently performed by women—and their mirrored hiddenness in residential design.
Zoom —
The conversation between content creators showcased how sharing architecture can create community and sharpen our collective attention, even when it’s hosted on platforms that are doing their best to steal it away.
Zoom —
Working to address planetary challenges like the climate crisis, these architect-researchers are designing at new scales and reevaluating the fundamental stuff of building.
Zoom —
The talk amounted to long-winded pap, detailing the marriages, land acquisitions, and leisure activities of yesteryear’s super wealthy. Thrilling stuff.
Zoom —
Compared to the saccharine green-washing that has run rampant within architectural discourse, Barry Wark’s celebration of decay is a breath of fresh air.
Zoom —
“The nature of architecture is outmoded in today's world; it tries to connect the physical water within human beings to the physical water surrounding them. But trying to forge this connection, this is my continued purpose in being an architect.”
New York —
“Drop [your] computer mouses and pick up intellectual machetes and bushwhack [your] way into the difficult-to-penetrate forest of the ecosphere.”
6/15
Housekeeping
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.
5/17
Keep off the Grass
New York City —
The contradictions of privately owned public space are irreconcilable. So long as powerful institutions can say “keep off the grass,” then it isn’t truly public, is it?
4/10
Mischievous Lines
New York City —
Using the tricks of perspective, Ames dissolved the walls of the narrow gallery to take on the appearance of a much larger space.
Zoom —
The breakout rooms were intimate and personal, with a sense of enthusiastic urgency from everyone. In these groups, radical conversations around reforming architecture bounced around, touching on everything from dismantling white architectural aesthetics to questions of whether the “architect” should even exist, and how exclusive the label is.
4/9
Cooperatization
Zoom —
“The true goal of cooperatizing is not just the empowerment of architects, but the empowerment of communities.”
4/8
Climate Comforts
Zoom —
“If an architect is building a building from the ground up in 2060, they’re either going to be really rich or super stupid.”
Zoom —
“What is more important is that ornament is perhaps timeless and transcends specific culture.”
Zoom —
We have written a nerdy archival account on a canonical building designed by a famous architect. Looking only at the building and the archival documents pertaining to it, somehow I believe allowed us to undermine the obvious and I hope new views are emerging.
3/30
Carving Space
Zoom —
“Imagination is super political. We need imagination from places of difference rather than just a developmental and problem solving approach.”
3/26
On Strike
Zoom —
The 3,000+ strikers had five primary demands…
Zoom —
“While everyone says vernacular architecture is declining, vernacular urbanism is growing immensely.”
Zoom —
As we begin our steps towards a new post-pandemic world, we must resist trends of detachment and embrace the “dirtier, fuzzier reality” of unregulated environments. What this would look like remains to be seen, but the underlying call is clear: “In this new world, we are in dire need of a new form of criticism.”
3/19
Future Fiction
Zoom —
The subjects of Liam Young’s investigations—networks of extraction, exploitation, and information circulation—are hardly new to film or academic criticism, though their quality of production, and Young’s specific approach to speculation, takes the imagination on a trip that Hollywood and J-Stor just can’t muster.
3/19
In the Zone?
Zoom —
But the reality is that Soho has become a squeezed carnival of tourists, shopping and more shopping, and high-end pop art that can only be purchased with a bag of cocaine. Within its cast iron buildings, residents sleep in million dollar shoe boxes.
Zoom —
For Patrik Schumacher, cyberspace is another infrastructure—like architecture—which sustains societal order and communicative systems, and so its design should be the purview of the architect
Zoom —
Pratt’s Karen Kubey, explaining that “housing justice is racial justice,” highlighted that the project— Christmas tree farm and all—is a highly replicable one
3/18
Timber!
Zoom —
With the upcoming version of the International Building Code expanding to include three new timber construction types, as well as broader changes to allow for high-rise mass construction, timber appears to be on a solid trajectory to the mainstream of building practice.
3/17
Digital Resurrection
Zoom —
Melissa DelVecchio emphasized how tradition can be combined with invention to rediscover lost classical heritage, and hopes that Project Soane, which she described as a “continued, ongoing, evolving piece of scholarship,” will serve as a model for future initiatives.
Zoom —
For an audience reckoning with finding better, more just ways of living and practicing—the horrors of yet another act of racial violence fresh on their minds—Huang Sheng Yuan’s pure and defiant approach of “standing by the weak, fighting against the forceful” was a much needed palliative.
3/16
Punching the Cracks
London —
“Critique means that you are transforming the framework, exploring its contradictions…and every crack you see, you punch it.”
Ithaca —
The brick buildings that emerge from this sensitivity are soft, breathing, flexible structures that respond and listen to their occupants and surroundings.
3/15
Contagious Divides
Zoom —
According to Nayan Shah, racial and class differences have been woven into policies and perspectives about health security.
Zoom —
Urban planners gather to espouse humane urbanism and radical care as an antidote to today's winner takes all dynamics.
Zoom —
“Cultivation is often an expression of power.”
New York —
What was it about Streeteries—those outdoor dining structures variously known as Corona Shacks, COVID Shanties, or Pandemitecture—that gave rise to dozens of Instagram accounts and Twitter threads documenting them?
2/11
Leading the Charge
Zoom —
The excitement Christine Williamson generates in explaining such topics as water management in wall assemblies demonstrates how far architecture still has to go in pulling back the veil of egoism that limits the advancement of women and others who don’t feel comfortable faking it until they make it.
2/11
The Big Picture
New York —
Why the focus on space at a design school? To quote the about page of Dr. Thomas Moynihan's host, the ‘New School Policy and Design for Outer Space’ (NS-PDOS), “because it’s fucking cool.”
New York —
Francis Morrone neglected to acknowledge the colonial violence that procured much of the wares for the host countries’ displays. Still, his stimulating presentation revealed how the zeitgeist of this innovative age manifested in the then-unprecedented technological feat of constructing grand glass buildings in record time.
New York City —
What was made clear throughout the all-day symposium on January 30 is that twenty-first century civic space is not centered around institutions, but is instead being shaped by architects, urban planners, and activists across the globe.
New York City —
If you ride Amtrak and are seated in the back of the train, which is usually reserved for Business Class and the Quiet Car, you will exit into the new Moynihan Hall. But if you ride in the front or middle of the train, you will exit into the old Penn Station, which ultimately will drop you closer to the subway.
Zoom —
“If you’re out for blood, you already know what to do.”
Zoom —
It’s not just developing the idea, but executing it, which Ada Tolla stresses relies on a network, a “very tight connection with fabrication, with who does the work.
1/27
The Landowning 1%
Zoom —
One percent of owners hold almost half of the land in West Virginia, most of the landowners are outsiders, and things get worse when you go underground