Author: Kristen Richards, Hon. AIA, Hon. ASLA

After 13 years and almost 60 issues, I am stepping down as editor of Oculus. AIANY is bringing its publications program in-house, and now seems a good time to spread my wings and explore new horizons. Continue reading “Last Letter from the Editor”

It was a splendid September day for the 15th annual Architects’ Regatta that set sail from its new mooring at Hudson River Community Sailing on Pier 66 in Hudson River Park at 26th Street. There was a slight problem: strong tides and practically no wind. The 20 lovely sailboats looked so small just bobbing around in the middle of the great Hudson River. A light breeze finally kicked up, and things got (slowly) underway – and a good time was had by (almost) all!

This year, the New York Architects’ Regatta Foundation raised $125,000+ for five river-based charities: SoundWaters; Sailing Foundation of New York; Hudson River Community Sailing; Rocking the Boat; and Riverkeeper. Continue reading “2016 New York Architects’ Regatta Challenge: More Wind, Please”

It was a perfect September afternoon for the 14th annual Architects’ Regatta to set sail from its new mooring at Hudson River Community Sailing on Pier 66 in Hudson River Park. We Regatta groupies watched the race from the end of Pier 66 Maritime (this writer’s favorite new find!). It was a very different kind of Regatta than previous races at the Manhattan Yacht Club in Lower Manhattan (which, sadly, lost its lease). The Hudson is very wide at West 26th Street, and the 18 sailboats with their fearless crews looked very small in the middle of that big, big river. There were a few gasps from spectators as we watched the tiny boats maneuvering around the Manhattan on an AIANY Around Manhattan Boat Tour, several water taxis, and a lumbering garbage barge that barged right into their midst. Continue reading “All Aboard, Hoist the Sails: 2015 New York Architects’ Regatta Challenge”

As an author, critic, and curator, London-based Lucy Bullivant, Hon. FRIBA, makes no small plans. So it was no surprise when she told the audience at the Center for Architecture on 02.14.13 that her latest book, Masterplanning Futures was four years in the making. She said she saw it as “a necessary project” because there are so few books on master planning that go much beyond descriptive analysis to offer comparative analysis. Continue reading “Masterplanning Futures: Adaptive Planning in the 21st Century”

Event: Annual Arthur M. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture – Being Alone Together: Managing the Museum as Mausoleum Syndrome
Location: Center for Architecture, 10.17.12
Speaker: Craig Dykers, AIA, Senior Partner, Snøhetta
Organizer: AIANY Cultural Facilities Committee

Noting that he is not a historian, Snøhetta Senior Partner Craig Dykers, AIA, proceeded to deliver an engaging, thoughtful, and often amusing description of “a somewhat hypothetical history of the museum” as the 6th Annual Arthur M. Rosenblatt Memorial Lecture. He speculated, using a sometimes ironic, sometimes humorous slide show, that “museums began not so long ago with the opening of the salons of the wealthy” to show off their collections of “exceptional objects.” As these patrons died, they were interred in “lavish and well-appointed” mausoleums. Subsequently, museums began to resemble the mausoleums, as if the artworks and artifacts were “mummified or embalmed” like their benefactors. Museums were “freezers for art” and status symbols for the well-to-do.

As the population grew in the industrial era, Dykers said, “people sought substitutes for museums in sideshows and travelling exhibitions, and themed museums became increasingly popular.” Spotlighting everything from science to dollhouses, they “could become a form of propaganda.” Not only that, “things could actually be sold in museums to all these people now visiting them”; museums themselves started to look like big-box retail stores and shopping malls, or “windowless, consumer-friendly art closets” in Dykers’ words.

The underground art movement begat experimental museums, where “social places and places for art were intertwined,” Dykers continued, which pressured traditional museums into becoming “after-hours party houses.” On the upside, the trend also saw the “simultaneous growth of the museum as an educational institution.” Added to the mix now is digital technology, and the idea of museum-as-spectacle. The “spectacular museum is among the most recent incarnations of the fetishistic container for art.” Even without art, Dykers posited, “they can change their urban conditions simply by virtue of their shape or color.”

In Dyker’s view, the definition of a museum “remains in a state of revision and redefinition” and that it’s time to “return power to the art rather than to its container.” He considers that, first and foremost, “a museum should not control the activities of those within,” but rather be a place for “unique thoughts shared at the same time – a place to be alone together.” As for his own definition for “museum”: “A place for art with people in it. A place for people with art in it.”

This was clearly evident in his whirlwind presentation of several of Snøhetta’s museum projects, from Norway and Denmark to Guadalajara and San Francisco, and, of course, the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at Ground Zero.

Kristen Richards, Hon. AIA, Hon. ASLA, is editor-in-chief of Oculus and ArchNewsNow.com.