Skyline!

Skyline

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.
2/1

Have a Heart
TIMES SQUARE — The mood felt downright romantic
1/26

Section Gang
GREENWICH VILLAGE — “The future of modern architecture is thick.”
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.”

2022

12/16

Designing for Post-Incarceration
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.
12/6

The Politics of Embodiment
Greenwich Village — The project incorporated wayfinding strategies and citrus-tinged moiré to create variable conditions for privacy and sociality.
12/5

Automating Urban Design?
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.”
12/2

Architecture Responds
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.
11/17

Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration
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.”
11/14

Revolutionary Pedagogy for the Masses
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."
11/8

Building Community Infrastructure
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.”
11/3

On Architecture’s Limits
LAGUARDIA PLACE — "...as though architecture qua architecture can do anything about any of that.”
11/2

Toward Human Architecture
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?”
10/26

"Nueva Vivienda" Book Launch
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?
10/25

That Other New York Review
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.”
7/15

Anthony Ames: Fifty Paintings
Soho — The paintings “are a way to try and do architecture even when I don’t have ‘work.’”
7/15

Poetry in the Courtyard
New York City — “Where is the dynamite?”
7/15

Richard Serra, David Zwirner, Chelsea
New York City — The conversation became cacophony in the echoes and sonorously of the empty space.
7/15

Stephanie H. Shih: Open Sundays
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.
7/15

Virgil Abloh, Figures of Speech
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.
6/30

“It’s about a seven-minute process”
HUDSON YARDS — “Well, it moved.”
6/27

Transition Is Inevitable
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?
6/25

“If everyone does a little…”
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”
6/9

Sufficient, Not Efficient
Lower Manhattan — We need to stop trying to do more with less and simply do a whole lot less.
6/7

Aging, Independently
LAGUARDIA PLACE — “We have a lot to learn from each other if we stop exoticizing each other’s approaches.”
6/6

The Cross-Bronx Expressway: Back at the (round)table
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.
6/2

In a Vulgar Language: When Your Childhood Wasn’t Invited
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.
6/2

The Black Atlantic
East Village — The artists spoke fondly of seeing visitors engaging freely with the pieces—not only seeing the sculptures, but also touching them.
5/25

Unfolding an Exquisite Corpse
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.
5/16

In Pursuit of Ambiguity
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.
5/13

Talk to the Residents
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.”
5/6

Bringing LA to NY
Chelsea — While impressive in its breadth and ambition, the show is not as immersive or architectural as what has come before.
4/30

Burning Down the House
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.”
4/27

Building a Political Architectural History
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.”
4/22

Rewriting Colonial Narratives
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.
4/22

Writing as a Collective Practice
Zoom — “Our call is for thinking seriously about working philosophies rather than hard methods.”
4/21

Not Editing but Rewriting
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.
3/16

Through the Eyes of Creatures and Specters
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.
3/11

Myths and Lessons from the Global South
Zoom — “It’s not that people cannot afford a housing unit; it’s that they cannot afford a housing unit where they need it.”
3/11

You Never Know What a Single Seed Can Turn Into
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.
3/10

Escaping Judgment Mode
Zoom — Unlike, say, films or books, people have very little choice about which architecture they consume.
3/10

Networks That Bind Us
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?
2/18

Continuing the SHoP Discourse…
Zoom — All in all, the big issues were raised, a cause was championed, and solutions were proposed… but the elephant remained in the room.
2/16

Current Work with Wolff Architects
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.
2/16

For The Many
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 — Easterling urged architects to move away from “geometric shapes and outlines” and look instead “at the rules and relationships that shape our space.”
1/15

At Home in Confrontation
Zoom — The discursive ghosts of well-worn debates occasionally lingered
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