Nancy Levinson - Blogger on Fire

Last week over at the Arts Journal, Nancy Levinson wrote a humbling piece on the current state of architectural criticism. She riffed on November’s Architect’s Newspaper, several Big newspaper critics’ “Year in Review” articles, and many other sources. It proves worth the read for a sober appraisal of the several unexpected focal points. There is an interesting thesis tying the decline of the newspaper critic’s power to the slipping away of their sharply corralled audience, and a warning that new critics inherit a new unimaginable, unmanagable landscape of subjects. She compellingly presented the problems facing today’s critics, the rise of the starchitect, and also convincingly traced many of these developements to the new influence of the world wide web. From her post…

“The outlines of a multi-media, print-and-web architecture culture are still emerging, but it's not too soon to discern one of the big challenges for criticism: the Web has made the culture unprecedentedly—amazingly and impossibly—global. Architecture has been international in outlook for years, but until lately this was mainly a matter of keeping up with the foreign journals and new monographs, attending lectures and exhibits, (sometimes even) traveling. Today this manageable world-view has exploded into a superabundance of instant-access globalism at once exhilarating and exhausting. It's not that more architecture is being made around the world, it's that we are more aware of the architecture being made around the world.”

People Talking About Architecture – 02.01.2006

Ohio State University:
Cecil Balmond - Lecture
5:30 PM - Knowlton Hall Auditorium
The deputy chairman of Arup is a structural engineer, teacher, lecturer, and writer. He is the Crét professor in practice at the Architectural School of the University of Pennsylvania, an external examiner at the Architectural Association in London, and a Senior Design Fellow at the London School of Economics. Mr. Balmond is the author of several books including Number 9, a story about the hidden world of numbers, and Informal which explores structure as catalyst in architecture.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:
James Bradburn - Architecture and Technology – A Volatile Mix
6:00 PM - Greene Gallery
This might be him.

Columbia University:
Elizabeth Diller - What They Forgot To Teach You In Architecture School
6:30 PM - Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
Elizabeth Diller is on the Princeton Architecture School faculty, is principal in the collaborative inter-disciplinary studio, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and recipient of a 1999 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Cornell University:
Christian de Portzamparc - Pluriel et Singulier
6:30 PM -Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, 6:30pm
Listen to the 1994 Pritzker Prize Laureate give a somewhat rare stateside lecture.

University of Minnesota:
Symposium - Building Information Modeling
1:30-5:30 PM, CALA Auditorium
Lachmi Khemlani, founder of AECBytes will be the keynote speaker of the symposium whose full title is Building Information Modeling: Impacting the Profession and Architectural Education. Other participants include Marilia Rodrigues (KieranTimberlake Associates LLP), Daniel Ayers (NBBJ), and Jim Yowen (Mortenson Construction).

People Talking About Architecture – 01.31.2006

Architectural Association:
Cynthia Davidson - An Introduction to Log
2:00 PM – Front Member’s Room (36 Bedford Square)
Log is a New York based journal that serves as an open forum for the critical discussion of contemporary issues of architecture, the city, and the cultural issues that architecture and cities engage with. During this open seminar event Cynthia Davidson, Editor of Log, will make a brief presentation of its ‘project’ and the ways in which the articles in the journal’ first half-dozen issues have engaged architecture and urbanism.

Jeff Kipnis & Robert Somol - On Koolhaas & Eisenman: Two Views
7:00 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
Jeffrey Kipnis and Robert Somol offer their own perspectives on the previous evening’s events, each giving a lecture about the critical practices of Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas, presented in their own terms. Following the presentations, AA Head of History and Theory Studies Mark Cousins will moderate a conversation between Kipnis and Somol on the issues they have raised, including the relationship between critical and theoretical practice in architecture today.

McGill University:
Patricia Patkau - (Untitled Lecture)
6:00 PM - Room 201 Macdonald-Harrington Building (815 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal)
McGill offers no description of what she will say. Remember when visiting lecturers where required to submit a paper on the subject of their lecture before getting the green light to speak? Those days are gone.

New Haven:
Keller Easterling - Enduring Innocence
6:00 PM - Labyrinth Books (290 York Street)
Reception & discussion to celebrate the release of Ms. Easterling's new book, Enduring Innocence. NYC fans can catch her at the end of the week at a Columbia symposium, if they want to save train fare and still get their book signed.

University of Toronto:
Renée Daoust - From the City to the Object

People Talking About Architecture – 01.30.2006

[Editors Note: The announcements below constitute's DYWSC?'s 100th post, wOOt!!!]

Architectural Association:
Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas - Discussion
6:30 PM - Lecture Hall (36 Bedford Square, London)
After opening statements by each architect, a conversation will follow, moderated by AA Director Brett Steele (editor of Resarch.net). The event will be broadcast live throughout the AA and a transcript of the dialogue will form the basis of the first volume of AA Words.

Washington University:
Lise Anne Couture - (Untitled Lecture)
7:00 PM - Steinberg Auditorium
The co-founder of Asymptote and Professor in the Department of Architecture at Parsons School of Design will lecture on current work.

University of Minnesota:
Steven Tupu - From Gardens to Urban Parks: Crafting the Scale
5:45pm, CALA Auditorium

New York:
Aron Losonczi - Architecture with LiTraCon
6:00 PM - Hungarian Cultural Center (fifth floor of 447 Broadway)
Probably a revist of this exhibit, and first reported by the Gutter.

Design Challenge in Philly

BLDGBLOG reports today about contributor Nicola Twilley’s project at the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, the Ben Franklin Coffeehouse Challenge. If you live or study in the greater Philly area, you can recommend a cool little civic improvement project, and winners get a little grant from the Starbucks corporation to help make it happen. Ms. Twilley appears to be serving on the jury, and BLDGBLOG describes the project in part as designed to “get more people thinking about urban design, sustainability, quality of life, public transport, pedestrianization...” and so on. Sounds like a great idea.

It is a shame the deliberations for the grant(s) aren’t televised. DYWSC? was speaking with a friend recently whom felt pity for the contestants for the Bravo show “Project Runway.” – a show where up-and-coming fashion designers charette for a jury of models and magazine editors. It was too raw a reminder of the humiliation prone to school juries.

There are pedagogical reasons that juries are held in a public forum though… Too bad “Project Runway” only exposes a debate about nice clothing and beauty. Televising Ms. Twilley’s debates as “Project Sidewalk,” has the ability to deliver discussions about livable cities, responsible urbanism, the expanded role of 21st Century public space, you name it. Is it too much of a pipe dream to hope that edutainment could bring such concern to the masses?

People Talking About Architecture – 01.27.2006

University of Virgina:
Sunil Bald & Yolande Davis - Lecture
5:00 PM - Campbell Hall
The founders of studioSUMO in New York discuss recent work. It is likely to be a repeat of the lecture delivered at Yale two weeks ago. Mr. Bald had an article of the same title printed in the Journal of Architecture, back in Autumn 2004 (Vol. 9, Number 3)

Princeton:
Fall '05 Thesis Final Public Review
10:00 AM - Main Gallery (Princeton University School of Architecture)

"Why Don’t You Move Your Chair?"

Why are architects responsible if their buildings leak?

In this forum, the heart of this question is not the legal issue. Legally, the profession exists to protect the general public from unsafe building designs and conditions. By law, an architect exists to advocate for his clients on the organization, allocation, and disposition of building materials or elements. We charge for services on the basis of being able to deliver a design whose construction the government will approve, and whose contractor will be able to fabricate for a loosely predictable price. All those Professional Practice lecturers out there will point out that we derive an authority on the supposition that professional designs work, and work better.

This all implicitly means the buildings don’t leak.

The problem is that it is hard to find a leak in Wal*Mart. Nor does rainwater drip on patrons of the local McDonalds. Name a building that is antithetical to the purposes of Architecture, and chances are it does not leak either. The Farnsworth House and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House on the other hand – they’re all leaky glass. They lose heat in their northern climates like few other private residences. They probably don’t even satisfy their local building code anymore. These are great, important, influential buildings.

The correlation between well functioning buildings and great works of Architecture is a loose one. Yes, some buildings function exquisitely, and that is a source of their beauty – but that is not an exclusive source for Architecture. Arguably, it is not even a primary source.

Here are three points to support the thrust -- that leaks do not reduce a building’s architectural merit. The first is a commonly told fable about Frank Lloyd Wright, a man whose buildings infamously and notoriously leaked. The story is told in studios and bars all over the land, anytime an architecture studio head feels comfortable with his students. It points out that in 1937 Mr. Wright designed a house for the industrialist Hibbard Johnson. One rainy evening Johnson was entertaining distinguished guests for dinner when the roof began to leak. The water seeped through directly above Johnson himself, dripping steadily onto his bald head. Johnson was incensed and he called Wright immediately. “Frank,” he said, “you built this beautiful house for me and we enjoy it very much. But I have told you the roof leaks, and right now I am with some friends and distinguished guests and it is leaking right on top of my head.” Wright’s reply was heard by all of the guests. “Well, Hib, why don’t you move your chair?”

Why would that story be repeated so often? Because Mr. Wright and these teachers knew that necessarily, architects must remain innovators. The labor of innovation is experimentation. Custom designed homes are the product and instance of that experimentation. We all know some experiments work better than others. This is hard to accept because another, more glamorous yet contradictory view of architecture is prevalent. Important buildings in Western civilization are considered permanent; their institutionalization has also implied durability. Good buildings “Stand the test of time,” and that inherent durability overrides the fact that they too were once great risks; they were someone’s experiment. Experimentation and permanence are contradictory.

The second point is a quote from Peter Eisenman to a class of brand new architecture students. This class was taught in Paul Rudolph's Art + Architecture building. The text is a common statement he makes in all his classes, when he meets students for the first time…

" [...] You are learning to see, like hearing, and to read architecture. That is what all that analytic work is out there. Without that, you might as well be a plumber. Anyone can solve the problem of function of a house, or the problem of an apartment[-ed]. All you have to do is have lived in one. That does not mean you can do architecture. Doing architecture and solving the problem of the house or this auditorium -- because look, this auditorium has nothing to do with the quality of hearing, of sight, of your comfort of how I feel in relation to you. No. It is about something else. And what makes this building a great building is, that despite the fact that it does not solve functions, despite the fact that it does not solve problems but creates problems, it is considered a great work of architecture. So you here have an artifact. If this is not the most God-awful space you can think of, but clearly you feel compression. You feel some activity upon your corpus – this object is acting upon you. You feel compressed, oppressed, etc. I am not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is clearly what Rudolf had in mind. We are not here to judge Mr. Rudolf’s work or the work of any architect. We are here to understand how architecture can create effects, and this is what Argan talked about. He said that Brunelleschi, for the first time, created spatial effects, not merely the results of structure as in the Gothic cathedral. He uses Gothic structure because he does not know how to do anything else to create spatial effects. "

Emphasis was added. At stake for Eisenman is the affect of Architecture. His buildings leaked too, but in this quote he is developing an argument for where Architecture lies. Focusing away from the banality of everyday life, Eisenman needs buildings to create crisis and he tracks the medium of that crisis for a definition of Architectural moments. For him compression, tension, problem and predicament all are signs that a building is doing the work of Architecture. If the building isn’t provocative, or challenging in some small way, than it is merely a building, and one is bored enough to care where the rain is going.

The third point is very similar to the last, but drawn from an unexpected source. When Tado Ando said the following, he too was staking a claim for where Architecture is found. Like Eisenman, Mr Ando was legitimating his work by explaining a theoretical source from which the purpose of Architecture sprang. Who can resist when an contemporary Architect brings up Vitruvius?

“The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear) function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles — characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function. That is to say that he too, posed the fictional dimension of imagination combined with the realistic dimension as that synthesis which deeply effects human spirituality. Since the genesis of architecture, its fate has been that it connot be constituted by functionality alone.”

Indeed! Firmness, Commodity, and Delight. The legal definitions of an Architect seems to rest fully on the “Firmness” part of the Triad. But Architecture must continually experiment, lest it loose the “Delight.” This is a balancing act that can never be balanced.

Isn’t it funny how the water stains on the ceilings of our great buildings get us to renovate and restore them? Some Japanese temples are dismantled by their community and reassemble every twenty years. In these ways every generation is affirming its architectural heritage, and reestablishing the values to be handed to the next. In this way the imperfection built into the system is the element guaranteeing its perpetuation.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.26.2006

Yale University:
Sam Jacob - Everything you Can Eat
6:00 – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
The designer from the London-based design firm Fat will discuss recent work.

Chicago:
James Cuno and Joseph Rosa - New Vision for Architecture and Design
6:00 P.M. - Fullerton Hall (Art Institute of Chicago)
James Cuno (President), Eloise W. Martin (Director), and Joseph Rosa, John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design will discuss the newly renamed Department of Architecture and Design, broadening the collection, and the enhanced presence of the department within the Renzo Piano-designed north wing.

San Diego:
Michael Bell - Lecture
6:30 PM - Woodbury University (1060 Eighth Avenue, suite 200).
Columbia University's Michael Bell, whose firm specializes in housing and urban development, speaks about "Art, Architecture, and Ecology: Reviving Our Social Environment."

Inventioneering Architecture Update

A welcome update about the Inventioneering Architecture exhibit has come in from Sasha over at Dialog. The blogger and Eisenman Architects employee made a trip up to Boston last weekend to snap these cool photos of the exhibit that is standing in Terminal E of Logan International. We had no idea while looking at Arcspace construction photos of the City of Culture of Galicia yesterday, that we were looking at a Biblioteca that a fellow blogger helped design. Sasha recommends visiting (Yale’s) Perspecta 35 --"Building Codes" or looking in Codex for the best explanation for the architectural development of the City of Culture of Galicia.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.25.2006

Chicago:
Waro Kishi - On Recent Work [CANCELED]
6:00 PM - ArchiCenter (224 South Michigan Avenue)
The professor and principal of Waro Kishi + K. Associates will present his most recent work. Primarily constructed of steel and glass, his designs contain a great sense of openness and light as they attempt to reconcile past traditions with new materials and current economic forces.

Illinois Institute of Technology:
Mark Linder - Architecture After Minimalism
6:00 P.M.- Crown Hall (3345 S. State Street)
Lecture by Mark Linder, who teaches theory and design at Syracuse. His book, Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism examines trans-disciplinary exchanges between art and architectural criticism and the resulting confusion of formalist techniques and discourses in the debates surrounding minimal art.

Columbia University:
Zi-Liu-Tian*: a project of re-entry
6:30 PM - Wood auditorium, Avery Hall
We have no idea.

Ohio State University:
Jorge Otero-Pailos – Lecture
5:30 PM - the Knowlton Hall Auditorium
Otero-Pailos is Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University in New York, as well as a practicing architect with Otero-Pailos Architects.

Withing Detroit Mercy School of Architecture:
Evan Douglas - Lecture
6:30 PM -Genevieve Fisk Loranger Architecture Center
The Chair of the Undergraduate Program in Architecture at Pratt is scheduled to speak. Here is a post on We-Make-Money-Not-Art that documents some of his recent generative and rapid-prototyped work. Tropolism recently documented one of is rehtorical statements, "As we enter through this new phase of morphogenetic and technological expansion we unleash a range of material and programmatic opportunity capable of altering the very destiny of architecture." and followed with "How did he come to this conclusion? What facts support this claim? What, exactly, is the programmatic and material opportunity?"

Washington University:
Charles Rose - "Topographical Variations"
7:00 PM - Steinberg Auditorium
Mr. Rose is schedule to speak about some of his projects since since establishing his firm 18 years ago.

Washington DC:
Craig Dykers - Lecture
6:30 PM - The National Building Museum
The designer from Norwegian-based studio Snøhetta will discuss some of the firm’s internationally acclaimed projects including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the Turner Contemporary in England, and the National Opera House in Oslo.

Syracuse University:
Anuradha Mathur - Traversing Landscape
4:30 PM - The Warehouse (Main Auditorium)

London:
Ali Rahim - Catalytic Formations
6:30 PM - Darwin Lecture Theatre (Darwin Building, Gower Street)
Ali Rahim teaches at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and is a director at Contemporary Architecture Practice in New York . He will discuss how digital design techniques have the potential to affect the wider cultural landscape in profound ways. He will focus on how these technologies allow architecture to engage in a feedback loop with its context - to absorb influences and produce concrete effects on its users.

We miss you, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Two articles have been recommended recently that have illustrated the loss that Architecture in America has suffered with the departure of the late Gentleman from New York. While researching for extended posts on the GSA pilot programs for BIM modeling, DYWSC? found this article written for the law community. Reporter Daniel Brook does a top-notch job explaining how the United States federal government has evolved over the last half century as an architectural client, and gives due credit to Mr. Moynihan’s forward-leaning leadership. From the article…

IN 1962, THEN-ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF LABOR Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given the task of writing a memo on the topic of federal office space. Moynihan's boss, Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, was concerned that despite the continuing growth of the federal government, no major public building projects had been undertaken in Washington, D.C., since the 1930s. Not satisfied with the confines of the assignment, the ambitious young staffer appended to his memo a manifesto he called "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture."

[Twenty years later, a new type of design competition was held for the new federal courthouse in Boston, on Fan Peir.] Impressed with the applicants but unsure whom to pick, [now US Supreme Court associate Justice, Stephen] Breyer and [U.S. District Judge Douglas] Woodlock made a road trip. The pair flew to New York City to take in [Cesar] Pelli's World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, then drove a rental car to [Henry] Cobb's Commerce Square office buildings in Philadelphia, with a stop midway down the New Jersey Turnpike at Robert Venturi's Wu Hall on the Princeton University campus. From Philadelphia, the judges flew to Ottawa to tour [Moshe] Safdie's National Gallery of Canada before returning to Boston. "We wanted to kick the tires," Woodlock said. "When the ribbons had been clipped and the party was over, how did the people who actually lived in it feel about living in it?"

Having narrowed the field to seven finalists, the Boston judges asked each to present a half-day seminar on courthouse architecture. Cobb's presentation focused on the Hanover County Courthouse, a one-room colonial courthouse in Virginia. Distinguished by its series of redbrick arches, the modest building manages to declare itself an important public building without using imperious architectural forms like a Pantheon-sized atrium or a Versailles-scale iron gate. Cobb won the commission and became a hands-on leader. "During the construction he was out there laying bricks, practically," Breyer said.

Having seen that top-notch architects could be wooed to apply for federal commissions, the GSA's Feiner went about ensuring that this type of selection process would be used nationwide. To justify a change of policy within the GSA, he seized on the Moynihan memo. By the early 1990s when [GSA Chief Architect Ed] Feiner was trying to push his changes through, Moynihan was an elder statesman and as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he was responsible for legislative oversight of the GSA. "If you had to find a patron saint," Feiner said, "he was a good one."

Now Metropolis Magazine has run an interview with the late senator’s daughter, who is a senior fellow in charge of running the Friends of Moynihan Station at the Regional Planning Association. This article is a good read for those who are interested in see how the $800 million Mr. Moynihan secured in 1998 will be spent. Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg jointly announced that the name of new Pennsylvania Station at Farley Post Office in New York City will honor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He died on March 26th 2003.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.24.2006

Washington DC:
Áron Losonczi - Heavyweight Transparency: Architecture with LiTraCon
6:00 PM - National Building Museum (401 F Street NW)
Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi, the inventor of LiTraCon, will discuss its evolution and use in various projects, including Europe Gate 2004. This program complements the exhibition Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete, which will be open for viewing, and features a five-foot tall LiTraCon wall. (Of coolness.)

Dallas:
Panel Discussion - Space and Discipline
6:30 PM - Dallas Architecture Forum (918 Dragon St.)
Panelists Steve Nash, Ph.D., Bruce Wood, and Brian Fridge will be moderated by Mark Gunderson, AIA.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.23.2006

University of Pennsylvania:
Panel Discussion - BOOM: New Philadelphia Architecture
6:00 PM - Upper Gallery, Meyerson Hall
Panel Discussion and Opening Reception for an exhibit that documents and examines the last five years of building in the City of Brotherly Love.

Yale University:
Mirka Benes - Meaning through Transposition in Landscape/Architecture
6:00 PM – Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
Mirka Benes, leading historian of landscape architecture, will deliver the lecture whose full title reads, “Meaning through Transposition in Landscape/Architecture: The Case of Baroque Rome.”

University of Minnisota:
Ken Reardon - Promoting Town/Gown Partnerships that Work: Lessons from the Field
6:00 PM - CALA Auditorium
The professor from Cornell University will speak about his recent observations.

Washinton University:
Michael E. Willis, FAIA - Katrina Observations(?)
7:00 PM - Steinberg Auditorium
The principal of Michael Willis Architects will recount how last November he was asked to participate as a speaker in the AIA-organized Louisiana Recovery & Rebuilding Conference in New Orleans. He will reprise his talk there, and offer some observations on the notion of comprehensive rebuilding.

Wasington DC:
J. Max Bond Jr. - Lecture
6:30 pm - The National Building Museum (401 F Street)
The New York architect and partner in Davis Brody Bond will lecture on several projects. Of interest might be how in July 2004, the architecture firm was selected to complete the overall plans for “Reflecting Absence.” This World Trade Center Memorial in New York was designed by Michael Arad, AIA and Peter Walker, FASLA.

Quote Clearhinghouse (1)

Many times during the process of gathering material for a post, DYWSC? transcribes a gem of a quote that just fails to make it onto the blog. These exchanges are worth reading, but not topical enough to justify inclusion on that day’s piece. To remedy the loss, every time and again this blog will feature a ‘Quote Clearinghouse’ post that mashes up many of the recent cut statements. Any parallels or compositional similarities are likely coincidental – like in the example of the following two pieces.

Here is Jacque Herzog speaking about the influence the late Aldo Rossi had on the Herzog and de Muron during their Pritzker Prize acceptance speech. Rossi was a beloved architect, educator, and theorist. Here Mr. Herzog is building an argument for the materiality his firm deploys as being rooted in the intellectual heritage they received under Rossi's tutelage…

[26:30]…And we loved his writing: “Architecture is Architecture,” because it seems so provocatively simple-minded, and pinpoints something that is still vital to us today. Architecture can only survive as Architecture in its physical and central diversity and not as a vehicle for an ideology of some kind.

It is the matter-reality of architecture that paradoxically conveys thoughts and ideas, in other words, its immateriality. That's an old story, but its more relevant today than ever before. Architecture lives and survives because of its beauty, because it seduces, animates, and even inspires people. Because it is matter, and because it can if only sometimes transcends matter.

But this anarchist and poetic side of Rossi (which we loved so much as students) was gradually assimilated into the postmodernist zeitgeist. What remained was an academically rigid ideology of permanence and typology, and the sudden dominance of decorative historical elements of style, a kind of coming-out of the decorative, which had beaten an embarrassed retreat since the rise of modernism.

This second quote is left over from the Jeff Kipnis lecture at Columbia, and occurred during the question-and-answer part of the evening. Mr. Kipnis had presented three interpretations of the Maison Domino diagram, and how those interpretations are still operative today. There are so many striking aspects of the exchange that even having written it, one still needs to go back and re-read it to figure out what’s being said. If he dodges, it is an artful dodge…

Unidentified Student: “I guess I have two questions. (1.)When you have an equivalency between all the planes, what does that do to the political body? And then (2.) is there an implied movement when you have an equivalency between the planes?”

Jeff Kipnis: That’s an important question. The Maison Domino diagram does two things that I think are very important. It makes each plan the same, and it erases the difference between the plan and the ground (lets say in a Corbusian interpretation). What it does however is it produces the collectivity as a priority over the individual, and the change in political thinking from the early part of the 20th Century about democracies to the later part of the 20th Century is about getting away from idealized versions of democracy, and using techniques of disestablishment to remove unwanted authorities. We’ve really shifted from a discourse of democracy to a discourse of freedom, which I think is really important. It’s connected to disestablishment techniques. It turns out that [Maison Domino’s -ed] equal plates are forms of establishment. That’s why all of this work [Jeff’s lecture that night about the Maison Domino as a diagram -ed] came from the fact that you cannot install a politics, but you can remove devices of each field, which arbitrate an unwanted presence of authority.

For example in the Cardiff Opera House I showed [a slide of earlier in the lecture -ed], just the fact that you’re in a lobby, and you have to go through a curtain to get into the theater. When Rem removes that; that’s a disestablishing of a hierarchical relationship. It has nothing to do with saying “I believe in this politics” or “that politics;” it’s a device in architecture in which a cliché of hierarchical relationship was removed. It’s funny about that project – it has this gigantic wall that goes up and down – as soon as a fire martial on a jury saw it that project was gone.

Strong Words for Zaha's Ordrupgaard Addition

New links brought a late reading of some strong criticism in Metropolis Magazine this month. Philip Nobel recounts the first Hadid-designed building he visited (an addition to the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen). While very personal, the article is unexpectedly scathing in tone and content. Here a critic is disconnecting a building from the designer's persona and mystique. Readers have to cut through a little drama, as the first third of the article is just as much about the writer as the subject. From December's Metropolis...

"What I was reacting to was a failure right up in the heart of the Zaha myth. The problem with the building was its form. Form! I hadn't been prepared to find that Zaha was, on her own terms, an inept form-maker. But there it was. The turns and wraps of the concrete slabs didn't match; where the different geometries met it was a travesty, and where straight lines intervened, as they always do, it was appalling. Her forms were simply not speaking the same language; they were not derived from the same topological genus. There was nothing coherent about it. And I doubt she was going for collage."

That first sentence catches lovers of the English language off guard too. Coming off the recent adoption of 'truthiness' by the the American Dialect Society, one gets the impression that the publisher have begun a lobby for 'architecturedom' in next years ADS announcements.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.20.2006

New York:
Michael Smith - Elements of Style
6:30 PM - The Armory (643 Park Ave)
Rizzoli is putting on the event to promote Mr. Smith’s new book. Going to this thing is certainly a risk because the talk and signing is part of the larger "Designer’s Night" event hosted by Elle Décor. Since no one else is talking about architecture in the city, maybe someone will go an ask a serious question.

Boston:
Exhibit Opening - Inventioneering Architecture
6:30 PM - Logan International Airport, (Terminal E, Arrivals)
Alright, so the Swiss House for Advanced Research and Education in Boston (SHARE - Boston) will showcase Swiss Higher Education with a focus on architecture and design in this exhibit. The broader stated goal is to open an international discussion on different approaches in teaching architecture. Student models, drafts, and further information about teaching and researching will be presented.

Surveillance, Hierarchy and Democracy

When we think of big brother's surveillance, we usually imagine it from a specific point-of-view. It is a inspection from high-up. Architecture has long communicated a hierarchically important position by lifting it. Thrones, alters, and corner offices are all usually elevated so that the subjects can see their rulers. The reverse is also handy; to keep power, the rulers must gaze upon their subjects.

It is 2006, and that relationship is accelerated. Unlike Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (The Inspection House - 1791), we gaze from a tele-presence that Mr. Bentham nary could have imagined. Today's utensils of the totalitarian society Bentham first sketched would include closed-circuit television, military satellites, and that crazy strong antenna array the NSA has in Sugar Grove, West Virginia. (Jacque Attali reminds us in Noise that it’s not just the ability to gaze that constitutes power, but also the ability to listen, record, and silence.)

A lot of the information the government used to monopolize twenty years ago has become available on the internet. Google Earth (and it’s browser-based sibling Google Maps), TerraServer, and even interfaces like HousingMaps are democratizing that rarified point of view. Heavy users are becoming very comfortable with seeing the world from above, adjusting their eyes to decipher the oblique axonometrics that satellites often return, and using the information to make more informed decisions. Now we are seeing the first indications that our cities are conscious of being seen from above. They’re posing for touched up pictures. Posing, up.

Two new sites change that stereotyped thought. Microsoft’s “Birds Eye View” on Local Live offers disorientation to those who try to navigate with its interface, and most strikingly, Amazon’s A9 documents the city from the pedestrian’s point-of-view. Browsing our nations big cities by looking at all their buildings' bottom two floors provides just as incomplete a picture as browsing every tar roof, but it’s a start. Both are still just models of the city in browsable photograph form, but it will be exciting to see how advertisers subvert this new medium, and pose for such models too. (Whenever possible links on this post have been focused to present the building that houses both Richard Meier's and Charles Gwathmey's offices at 475 Tenth Avenue, in New York -- Hey guys!)

People Talking About Architecture – 01.19.2006

University of Pennsylvania:
Ben Van Berkel - Recent Works
6:30 PM - Meyerson Hall (210 South 34th Street)
The Professor of Conceptual Design at the Staedelschule, and partner at UN Studio presents recent work.

Yale School of Architecture:
Sunil Bald - Fold, Crease, and Tear along Perforation
6:00 PM - Hastings Hall (180 York Street)
Yale's visiting Assistant Professor, teacher at Parson' s, and partner at studioSUMO presents recent work. Mr. Bald had an article of the same title printed in the Journal of Architecture, back in Autumn 2004 (Vol. 9, Number 3)

Chicago:
Forrest E. Russell - Big Box Retail - It isn't just for the Suburbs Anymore
7:45 AM - The Mid-Day Club (10 S. Dearborn, 56th Floor)
The Senior Development Manager of the Target Corporation will explore the recent move of big box retailers into urban settings, including why this has occurred, how these decisions are made and the nuts and bolts of getting a transaction completed.

Jacques Herzog Five Years Before Famous

DYWSC? has already mentioned next month’s Perspecta 37 – Famous. Invariably, after a post is done, that’s when one stumbles on all the good stuff. This is the case with the reactionto this Archinect thread about the editors’ research poll, with this link that illustrates just how little data is necessary to publish the issue (16 lines down), and with this partially transcribed ending to Jacques Herzog’s acceptance speech for the 2001 Pritzker Prize…

[35:45] …The rise of the global star system in recent years is indicative of a colossal battle of displacement in the world of architecture. A narrow elite of author-architects stands opposite an over-powering ninety-percent majority assimilation architecture, an architecture essentially without an "Appellation Controlee" as it is called in the world of wine. There is hardly anything left in between – only the few young people desperately seeking salvation in the few remaining niches and the largely hopeless prospects of design competitions. Rampantly spreading simulation architecture is no longer projected on the world by an author, but instead simulates, reproduces, manipulates, and consumes existing imagery.

Instead of passively letting ourselves be sucked into the maelstrom of this simulation architecture, which not only absorbs all the imagery, but also any and all innovation in order to survive, we can actively deploy simulation as a possible strategy in our own architecture, in a kind of subversive reversal as in biotechnology. And that may well be the most exciting prospect in architecture today. And indeed in human society. This incredible latitude, that leaves room for the most extraordinary achievement, and the ghastly ones as well. Thank you.

The online description of Perspecta 37 focuses on the promoting of the “mystique of the designer genius.” Hopefully, there is room in the issue to address Mr. Herzog’s concerns about the starchitecture absorbing “any and all innovation in order to survive.” Of course, a blog can always offer one more post; 37's editors only get one print date.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.18.2006

Boston:
Bradley Shanks - The Architectural Grand Tour
7:00 PM - Boston Society of Architects/AIA (52 Broad Street)
The recipient of the 2003 Rotch Traveling Scholarship design competition, which included a $35,000 grant enabling him to travel the world for a year, shares his observations and his visual images of the communities and impressive vernacular architecture encountered in cultures such as Brazil, Morocco, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Columbia:
Richard Rogers - Lecture
6:30 PM - Wood auditorium, Avery Hall
The head of Richard Rogers Partnership presents recent work. We’re a little confused, because notice of this is on Columbia’s website, however, at the Richard Roger’s Website this lecture may have happened three months ago.

People Talking About Architecture – 01.17.2006

(Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. There's nothing on the calendars for Monday the 16th.)

University of Toronto:
Pier Vittorio Aureli - Architecture Confronts the City
6:30 PM - Room 103 (230 College Street)
Aureli coordinates the second-year research program at the Berlage, and is currently working on a study on the representation of the city through architectural form, from Bramante to Koolhaas. Last October he gave a lecture at the AA: After the Diagram. The lecture's description ended, "...My argument is that diagrams are not just a camouflage of reality or, as Wittgenstein would argue, a social constructed reality, but also (and especially) a form of nihilism.’ Please comment here if you see him Tuesday.

San Francisco:
Seminar: Architects and Design-Build: Opportunity or Threat?
5:30 PM - AIA San Francisco (130 Sutter Street, Suite 600)
Dana Buntrock moderates Stanley Saitowitz, Steve Wiesenthal, Shepherd Heery and Jeff Gee as they speak about the following observation: “Through out history, master-builders provided a single source of responsibility for both design and construction of buildings. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the designers and the builders separated into different professions. The advent of the design-build process is once again offering a single source of responsibility for owners.”

How blogging can help architecture: edit.

[Editors Note: DYWSC? is blog is about Architecture. This post was back-dated [From Jan 30th] to keep it off the top of the page, but still keep it in the discussion.]

The act of editing adds intellectual input. Editing is the contribution bloggers can make to the online architectural community. Sure, this means presenting biased information. We need it.

The problem is that the current state of architectural blogging mirrors the state of the internet today.

Data on the web is hosted at unrelated but interconnected servers all over the world. The address of the data is dependant on who pays for space and hosting rights on the servers, not on the topic or subject of the data. Behemoth search engines like Yahoo and Google comb the hyperlinks that connect the data in an effort to build giant models of the continually evolving web on their own servers, and to present indexed views of these models to people who visit these search engines.

Mostly, an individual’s navagation of the web falls in two categories. Individuals follow particular hyperlinks because they valued a past experience at that site or they use hyperlinks for the first time on the recommendation of others. Search engines results fall into this second “recommended” category, even though such recommendations are automated.

Some of the best blogs act the same way search engines do. By compiling topic-specific hyperlinks, they act as clearinghouses for the new, interesting, and inspiring content that makes its unorganized way onto the web everyday. In this first function, bloggers act as a highly attenuated web portals, using their online persona, personal taste, or stated aims to dictate whether or not they should post links to found material.

By just pointing attention to other content creators one could argue that bloggers are simply reinforcing the power structures that they inherit. Blogs contribute nothing and reinforce the establishment by not creating content and merely pointing to other content-creators. Blogging could do so much more, and many in the community are keenly aware. By adding comment and spin when delivering these links, blogging has assumed a second role: as tastemaking historians.

Tastemaking has long been the appointed task of print and televised media. While bound by advertising needs and regulation, traditional media’s tastemakers were trusted to television and print’s huge audiences because they had editors. This source of discipline and restraint enriches traditional media by pushing writers, but editors are a luxury that today's bloggers can rarely afford.

Historians, with the benefit of hindsight, have the ability and authority to tell us what influences are most important. The daily orgy of new content on the web is the draw that perpetuates blogging audience, but this constant demand to post about “the new” is a chimera for most blogging efforts. There becomes a problem when demand to report on “the new” overshadows many blogger’s purpose; the agenda (merely) becomes to reflect what is new. Paradoxically, this drive is antithetical to the role of historian. Sadly, “the new” replaces “the important” on many blogs.

Editing blogs to respect a stated mission statement or written series of goals can help prevent this paradox. By doing this, all architectural bloggers can raise the standard of written word in our medium, and focus our energies on the passions that drive these efforts. From the focus, blogging can even transcend the role of the tastemaking historian. New content, provided exclusively on architectural blogging web pages, legitimates this genre of word and image. Many of the architectural blogs out there are the product of aspiring writers. Congratulations to these writers and continued success.

Charlie Rose at Google Video

Not all of us are able to attend the lectures and talks scattered across the land. A tech-friendly substitute has appeared with The Charlie Rose Show selling his interviews on Google Video. It is still a bit difficult to navigate the search results for "Charlie Rose Architect," but the interviews sometimes prove worth the time and $0.99 expense. From the June 25th, 1993 talk with Philip Johnson (a flash-back presented in the interview labeled "Charlie Rose July 08 1996")...

Johnson: "Do you know what architects are? They're worse than divas. They believe that they're the last of the breed -- each one of them. Frank Lloyd Wright knew perfectly well that was all there was to architecture, and when he died there would be no more architecture."

Augustus Pugin's Legacy.

By spending a little extra time on Kevin Lippert's archlog DYWSC? finally stumbled on Olll's "Architecture photographs section" today. One could loose a half hour touring Tadao Ando's Water Temple. It is refreshing how the slideshows of 25 pictures can give an immersive experience of a building, in substitute for personally visiting. (Congrats to Olll for hitting the 1000-photo benchmark!) From the section's description...

"We want to present a different point of view, unlike the highly controlled and choreographed images from architecture journals, here we want to look at buildings more like how they look in real life, noticing all those little details that are never shown in other publications."

Why did this come as such a surprise? The quote gives a great first reason. Periodicals are forced to use an economy of images. Perhaps precedent unnecessarily limits lectures and slide-presentations too. Perhaps we have Agustus Pugin to blame.

Architectural presentations for consumption en mass began in book form; before there were lecture tours theorists did their convincing by text and illustration. Arguably the first true master of the method was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. His seminal book Contrasts (Full Title: A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste) showed images of gothic English hamlets against industrial revolution era images of the same places. Some quotes from the man who would start the march towards the International Style...

'1st, that there should be no features about a building, which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building.'

'A man who remains any length of time in a modern Gothic room, and escapes without being wounded by some minutiae, may consider himself extremely fortunate'

'Architectural features are continually tacked on buildings which they have no connection, merely for the sake of what is termed effect; and ornaments are actually constructed, instead of forming the decoration of construction, to which in good taste they should always be subservient.'

...This post is meant to ask, "Why are many presentations still reliant on the two-slide method of presentation?" When the price of slides was a consequence, right up to the mid-nineties, it made sense that the double-carouseled talk ruled. How long until touring lectures are dominated by animations and models are presented with Google Earth?

People Talking About Architecture - 01.13.2006

New York:
Lucy Bullivant - British Built: UK Architecture’s Rising Generation
06:30 PM - The Urban Center (457 Madison Avenue)
Author Lucy Bullivant discusses her new book, then a panel discussion will follow with British architects Simon Allford and Paul Monaghan of AHMM, William Menking, Editor, The Architect’s Newspaper and Paola Antonelli, Design Curator, MoMA. In her new book, author Lucy Bullivant evaluates the local and international contributions made to architecture and urban design by the UK’s younger generation of practitioners over the last 10-15 years. Coincidentally, James Stamp over at Life without Buildings has a nice post on the book today.

Steven Holl weighs in

Dezain.net brings a link to a promotional video for Steven Holl’s new Beijing housing complex, “Linked Hybrid”. The quicktime movie runs about ten minutes and features the architect giving tours of past projects and in interviews. In this transcribed segment, Mr. Holl presents his definition of architecture…

Holl: For me, architecture is chiefly an experiential condition. The real measure if it’s success is its experience. The phenomena of walking through the spaces, the phenomena of seeing the views out of the apartments, the phenomena of watching the reflections in the water from the cinema, the phenomena of feeling the wind blow through the windows as you open them. The most important part about architecture is when you go inside of it, and how you live in it, and how you experience it everyday. So this is going to be the great joy, the realization of this project. And the joy of the people who are fortunate enough to purchase and live in this ‘city within a city.’

If you take the time to watch the promo, it is interesting to trace Mr. Holl’s urban models. Each facet of his project is compared to a different part of New York. He compares the publicly accessible storefronts in his project to Greenwich Village. The site, and views from the site into the Forbidden City are, “analogous to being on 5th Avenue and 60th Street,” looking across Central Park. The roof gardens in his complex's intermeditary levels are modeled after the roof gardens at Rockefeller Center. Is this a savvy marketer pushing a western designed apartment complex, a symptom of an increasingly Gotham-centered media, or a failure of architectural education to present a variety of urban models?

People Talking About Architecture - 01.12.2006

San Francisco:
Brigitte Shim - Lecture
6:30 PM - SFMOMA's Phyllis Wattis Theater (151 Third Street)
The principal of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects will presumably speak about her firm's “thoughtful questioning of the fundamental relationships between object and ground, building and landscape, & man and nature.”

Cynthia Davidson on Famous Architects

No, 2 self brings us an insightful quote from the Log website this month. The quote is from the editor, Cynthia Davidson and comes a month (and issue of Log) before Perspecta 37 is released...

"[talking with a deputy commissioner of New York’s Economic Development Commission about Ground Zero] He said there is enormous political will, but for him, political will meant tax incentives and reduced rents for businesses. He did not mention any political will for good architecture. Perhaps there is a reason for this. In the public eye, architecture has become media stars parading their newest fashions, which verges on entertainment. Yet when architecture is truly political, it has a social purpose and a transformative potential. If architects have abandoned these purposes, it is little wonder that politicians have as well."

Digital Design Tools

Two great links come from the world of the AIA today. This first link is to an article on the National AIA's website. The subject is about a new programming tool for architects -- the blog. It documents a successful use of the digital tool to wrangle various client-side opinions into the same forum as a way to get an accurate picture of client needs. Very cool.

This second link is a series of articles from this month's _line magazine . The San Francisco AIA's publication is doing a full-issue look at the BIM modeling and how it may change things. The article on the GSA's first efforts in the area is especially telling. The government organization responsible for building all the new federal buildings in the land has stated it would like all new construction BIMed (Is that a word yet?) by 2007, and luckily it has grant money to trouble-shoot the initiative.

People Talking About Architecture - 01.11.2006

New York:
Gallery opening reception - The Fashion of Architecture Constructing the Architecture of Fashion
6:00 PM - Center for Architecture. (536 LaGuardia Place)
The exhibition features projects from architects Toshiko Mori, Zaha Hadid, Winka Dubbeldam, Shigeru Ban, Kivi Sotamaa, Lars Spuybroek, and Meejin Yoon while showcasing architectonic apparel from fashion designers Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan, Yoshiki Hishinuma, Yeohlee Teng, Patrick Cox, Pia Myrvold, Kei Kegami, Michiko Koshino, and Nicola de Main.

San Francisco:
Seminar: BIM in the Real World
5:30 PM AIA San Francisco (130 Sutter Street, Suite 600)
This seminar presents the issues surrounding BIM modeling and trends in architectural design software with Mr. Robert Anderson, a registered architect who is Vice President of Integrated Products at Nemetschek North America (makers of VectorWorks). If you miss the presentation, this month’s issue of _line (AIA-SF) spotlights the same topics -- it is discussed in the next post.

Los Angeles:
Vito Acconci of Acconci Studio & Thom Mayne of Morphosis in Conversation
7:30 PM - Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) (6522 Hollywood Boulevard)
Artist and architect, Vito Acconci, converses with the 2005 Pritzker Prize winner. More info at http://www.artleak.org

The "Mozart of modernism." (2) – Understanding Diagrams.

The reason for the January 5th post was a bit theatrical. At the end of the referenced lecture, Jeff Kipnis added the following advice. He rushed to mention it after the usual question-and-answer session…

[Kipnis as the crowded stirred to stand] Please! Please, please. Quickly. Do not think every tenant-occupied high-rise building with an elevator and unfinished floor plates – that’s not a modern diagram. Ok? Every carport with pipe-poles and a concrete-flat roof, that’s not a version of the Domino diagram. I mean you really must start to discriminate from the generic, accidental instances of the work, and when they start to do the work of what I was trying to discuss tonight. That is to start to do the intellectual, cultural, political, affect-based work that a field can do – because that’s what your job is. Ok?

In these terms, it is hard to describe Lord Norman Foster’s Hearst tower participating in a modernist agenda, as Mr. Goldberger suggested. Almost seventy-five years after the International Style exhibit, maybe it is a little unfair. It’s also hard to defend the Hearst tower as the perfect piece of architecture the article implies. It is not a complete list, but here are some reasons why we’re still confused…

1. The decision to incorporate structure and skin in the same plane. The diagonal structure appears to create an efficiency of transferring diagonal loads, but the glazing grid trips over those larger members. Unlike the Swiss Re Headquarters, the glazing mullions on the Hearst tower are necessarily vertical to conceal interior partition walls that meet the glazing. This clash of grids means approximately one third of every installed glazing panel has specially cut shape. The result is a harmony that trips over itself and is constantly being interrupted.

2. A suppressed relationship to the city. First, this building doesn’t really touch the ground, rather, it seems to float above the city. The original art deco Hearst building still mediates between the tower and the north, east, and south sidewalks that surround the site. Cleverly the old five-story building is kept as a skirt or pedestal for the new tower to hover on. This solution removes the need to resolve the crisscrossing geometry’s intersection with the ground, with people, and with the city. But it also removes any haptic exterior interface with that showcased geometry. Like television images or photographs of lost loved ones, you can see, but not understand by touching, leaning, pushing, or climbing. It sounds like an odd statement at first, but consider the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Twin Towers, the Washington Monument, or Rome’s Pantheon with a fifty-foot skirt at their bases.

Second, the “diagrid” does not reveal anything, as one gets closer. Unlike medieval cathedrals, which reward approaching pilgrims with finer and richer details as they draw near, the Hearst tower can be well understood from six blocks away. No fasteners, resolved details, or rich textures reward walking closer. In a sense, the building spends most of it’s capital speaking at the scale of the city, and almost none at the scale of the block. As a counter-example, consider the Seagram building’s attached steel columns or plane of overhead lights -- which are important to the ephemera of floating floor planes. No such detail is presented at Hearst.

Finally, like a geode, the inside of the Hearst tower is unexpectedly different from the smooth, evenhanded exterior. After entering through the (restored) coffer-arched east entrance, one moves into the heart of the building and faces a ramped wall blocking flow from the doors. A visitor is also greeted with ¾ view of an escalator, which in plan reaches diagonally down slashing across the column grid. The escalator takes visitors to the northwest corner of the building, delivering to a second level atrium, which also pushed off the grid. What these circulatory exceptions signify remains to be seen.

It’s regrettable that such a playful architect’s work should be the battleground for this complaint about journalism. An admirable quality of the building is how this triangulation is used as more than just an iconic shorthand. It is splendid how the global geometric pattern allows the façade to act topologically like a cylinder, replacing all the corners for a tessellated solution. (Corners are where many buildings are resolved or are most expressive.) This is a familiar theme in architecture, and one Mr. Foster is cleverly exploring. It is pleasant to see this high performance skin while others obfuscate the “surface” discussion to justify complicated folds and irregular blobs. If a “modern” diagram must be applied to this building, perhaps it was meant in the Maison Domino mode -- the one that Kipnis’s quote cautions us about. Upon reflection, it is proposed in this forum that the building is discussed in the league of many recent surface discussions instead.

There is irony that the battle is started and the building isn’t even finished yet. However, at issue here are two ideas almost unrelated to the Hearst tower.

First, if architectural journalism strives to present the ideas, events, and issues similar to other forms of journalism, then it must present the good with the bad. This post is an attempt to take a competing view of Mr. Goldberger’s to illustrate that missed opportunity. Readers deserve balanced and competing views of what such buildings mean. Initial reactions about Mr. Goldberger’s article may have been automatic responses to this imbalance.

More importantly, “modern” is a dangerous, unwieldy label. Mr. Kipnis’s insistent scolding is welcomed, and happily repeated. When writing for the general public, or for the architectural community, it is best to explain what one means with this oft-misused word. Building off the last paragraph, there is wisdom in describing what specific idea one is referencing with “modern.” This adds specificity and set an ideological playing field on which to discuss the work.

People Talking About Architecture - 01.10.2006

Boston:
Brian Healy AIA - “Conversations on Architecture” Series
7:00 PM - Boston Society of Architects/AIA (52 Broad Street)
Healy will begin this month's conversation with an informal presentation of his design for the international competition-winning Mill Center for the Arts, a mixed-use cultural center astride a city block in Hendersonville NC. Architect/critic Robert Campbell FAIA is the guest host for this conversation.

New York:
Gallery opening reception: Anarchy to Affluence, Design in New York, 1974 -1984
6:00 PM – Parsons (66 Fifth Avenue)
This exhibition examines interiors, furniture, graphics, fashion & illustration produced in NYC between 1974 –1984.

New York:
Cristiano Ceccato - ‘On Generative Form-Finding and Parametric Rationalization for Constructability'
6:00 PM - Center for Architecture. (536 LaGuardia Place)
Listen to the Director of Research and Consulting for Gehry Technologies explore the application of computational form-generation and parametric rationalization methods in the practice of architecture.