News – What’s New at AIANY and the Center for Architecture.

Damage to the north façade of the Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital Ruin.

Judith Berdy

The north façade of the landmarked Smallpox Hospital ruin designed by James Renwick Jr. on Roosevelt Island collapsed last week. Although pieces of the cornice have been crumbling for years (the call to stabilize the ruin is not new), the fall of this much larger portion of the building won’t surprise those who have been fighting for its preservation. “This is a real failure of stewardship,” stated Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Situated just north of the proposed Louis Kahn Monument to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the focus of the 2006 Emerging NY Architects Committee’s competition, Southpoint: from Ruin to Rejuvenation, urgent calls are being placed to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC) to firm up the rest of the building. In response to the disaster, RIOC is working with the Trust for Public Land to do emergency stabilization.

The Atheneum, in New Harmony, IN, designed by Richard Meier, FAIA, received the 2008 AIA 25 Year Award for architectural design that has stood the test of time for 25 years… Norma Sklarek, FAIA, has been named the 2008 recipient of the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award…Thomas L. McKittrick, FAIA Member Emeritus, has been honored with the 2008 AIA Edward C. Kemper Award for Service to the Profession…

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg named Robert C. Lieber, a key lieutenant of Daniel L. Doctoroff, to succeed Doctoroff as deputy mayor for economic development; Edward Skyler, deputy mayor of administration, will be the new deputy mayor of operations…

Paola Antonelli has been promoted to senior curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design…

01.15.08 Call for Entries: ICFF Exhibitors
During the International Contemporary Furniture Fair’s four days, 145,000 net square feet of the Javits Center will contain more than 25,000 interior designers, architects, retailers, designers, manufacturers, representatives, distributors, and developers. ICFF Studio invites submissions from designers working on any and all the product categories exhibited at the ICFF: furniture, seating, carpet and flooring, lighting, outdoor furniture, materials, wall coverings, accessories, textiles, and kitchen and bath. Selected designers win a spot to display their prototypes at a group area with individual booths on the exhibition floor.

02.01.08 Call for Nominations: Jane Jacobs Medal
The Rockefeller Foundation is accepting nominations to recognize two living individuals whose creative vision for the urban environment has significantly contributed to the vibrancy and variety of NYC. In addition to the medal, prizes totaling $200,000 will be awarded. Winners will be announced in May of this year.

02.01.08 Call for Entries: Back-of-the-Envelope Bush Library Design Contest
The Chronicle of Higher Education hosts a just-for-fun architecture contest to design the George W. Bush Library on the back of an envelope. The publication is seeking designs that are serious, humorous, adventurous, or all of the above. Readers will vote on the best design, and the designer will win an iPod Touch.

02.01.08 Call for Entries: 2008 Student Design Review
I.D. Magazine is searching for the best work from international design schools in four categories: industrial design, graphic design, interactive design, and miscellaneous. One Best of Show winner will get $1,000 in cash. All winning projects may be posted on the I.D. website with links to winners’ online portfolios, and will be featured in the I.D. September/October 2008 issue. The competition is open to any student enrolled in a collegiate-level design program (undergraduate or graduate), anywhere in the world. All projects entered must be the result of a classroom/academic assignment, and must have been designed/completed during the 2006-2007 academic year.

02.01.08 Call for Papers: CSAAR 2008 Conference
The theme for the Center for the Study of Architecture in the Arab Region’s (CSAAR) annual conference will be “Responsibilities and Opportunities in Architectural Conservation: Theory, Education, and Practice.” Architectural practitioners, educators, researchers, and their counterparts in the environmental design fields are invited to develop a paper in any of the topics listed under the following theme tracks: the heritage idea and the conservation response; conservation in the design realm; conservation context and geography; or conservation education, information, and technologies.

02.07.08 Call for Entries: EDRA Places Awards 2008
Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm and the Environmental Design Research Association announce the 11th annual awards for place design, planning and research, this year in cooperation with Metropolis magazine. The competition seeks exemplary work from a range of design and research disciplines, whose significance extends beyond any one profession or field. Projects should emphasize a link between research and practice, demonstrating how an understanding of human interaction with place can inspire design.

02.25.08 Call for Entries: BSA Future of Design Competition
The Boston Society of Architects invites young designers to submit a slide show or video clip of work that is 30 seconds or less for a traveling exhibition. Selected works will be displayed as a continuous digital slide and video show during the BSA’s Residential Design and Construction convention and tradeshow in April, the AIA National Convention in May, and the BSA’s Build Boston convention and tradeshow in November. Jurors will select up to 100 projects for inclusion in this program.

03.01.08 Call for Entries: 2008 AIANY Building Type Design Awards
The AIANY Biennial Building Type Awards program was established to recognize excellence and innovation in specialized design fields. The 2008 design categories will be: educational facility design, sustainable design, and urban design. Beginning this year, the program will be co-sponsored with the BSA. Entries are welcomed and encouraged regardless of project size, budget, or style, from both established and new practitioners. The winning designs will be exhibited at the Center for Architecture in May 2008.

(continued from above)

Other panelists voiced the development, environmentalist, public health, and labor perspectives on the proposed changes. Ashok Gupta, director of the Air and Energy Program at USGBC-NY, pushed for less friction in the array of incentives that developers and builders face; Nancy Clark, assistant commissioner for environmental disease prevention at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, warned against unintended consequences like the “tight building syndrome” of poor ventilation and increased respiratory disorders that marked the energy-policy choices of the 1970s. William Rudin, president of Rudin Management, offered 3 Times Square as an example of design that commits to options despite a bleak economy. His firm decided the current payback on installing photovoltaics was insufficient, but prewired the building to allow such features later if the numbers change.

The evolving code will need a full range of stakeholders’ input. Edward Ott, executive director of the Central Labor Council, stressed that negotiations about standards should include workers and their communities. Resistance to new practices in the building trades, he said, was not automatic — “retrofitting, frankly, for us,” he noted, “is 100 years of good work” — and the early perception that green building was “a red flag” for labor, in his view, was fading with the recognition that high-performance building and post-petroleum-dependence technologies jibe with workers’ values. “Working-class people tend to resist change because of a history of it being done at their expense,” Ott maintained, adding that just treatment of workers’ interests includes the siting of NIMBY-provoking infrastructure (power plants, e.g.) so that poorer neighborhoods don’t always end up with the most noxious burdens. As NYC edges toward sustainability — and figures out just whose interests its physical environment is designed to sustain — this reminder of the city’s intertwined layers of class was both timely and refreshingly urgent.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

12.18.07

This is the last issue of 2007. As always, I am grateful to all of you architecture/design/planning enthusiasts for reading, contributing, and suggesting improvements for the publication. I look forward to hearing more from you in 2008. Happy New Year, and e-O will return January 8.

– Jessica Sheridan, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP

Event: Hudson Yards Designers Forum
Location: Cooper Union Great Hall, 12.03.07
Speakers: Rosalie Genevro (introduction) — Architectural League of New York
Representing Extell Development: Steven Holl, AIA, and Chris McVoy — Steven Holl Architects
Representing Related Companies/Goldman Sachs: Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA — Dean, Yale School of Architecture; Bernardo Fort-Brescia, FAIA — Arquitectonica; A. Eugene Kohn, FAIA, RIBA, JIA — Kohn Pedersen Fox; and Claire Weisz, AIA — weisz + yoes architecture
Representing Durst Organization/Vornado Realty: Daniel Kaplan, AIA — FXFowle Architects; Margie Ruddick, ASLA — Wallace Roberts & Todd
Representing Brookfield Properties: James Corner, ASLA — Field Operations; Gary Haney, AIA — Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Representing Tishman Speyer: Francisco González Pulido — Murphy/Jahn Architects
Moderator: Rick Bell, FAIA — AIANY Executive Director
Organizers: AIANY; American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA); Architectural League of New York; Design Trust for Public Space; Fine Arts Federation; Friends of the High Line; Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance; Municipal Art Society; New York New Visions; Regional Plan Association

West Side Rail Yards.

Courtesy Design Trust for Public Space

The stakes are high and the pressure is considerable. So said Architectural League of New York Executive Director Rosalie Genevro put the West Side Rail Yards in context: at 26 acres, it’s bigger than Ground Zero or Rockefeller Plaza. If one of the five teams can meet the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) straightforward but difficult conditions — maximize revenue and minimize interference with train service — the rail yard will become the fulcrum of a Hudson Yards district spanning 30th to 42nd Streets west of 10th Avenue, Manhattan’s largest new neighborhood since Battery Park City.

A six-block area from 30th to 33rd Streets between 10th and 12th Avenues, the rail yard requires a massive platform above the train storage area. All five plans include park space, a cultural center, a school, some 80/20 affordable rentals, and assorted sustainability features, but only one appeared to dramatically yet economically acknowledge the scope of the structural challenge.

Steven Holl, AIA, defended a departure from the Hudson Yards Development Corporation’s guidelines: his platform will hold substantial green space (19.5 acres to the guidelines’ 12), and a cable suspension system resembling bridge technology will support the platform, obviating disruptive column construction. Holl’s towers, all positioned on terra firma outside the platform, would include a triple skyscraper connected both at ground level and at a high-level “sky lobby,” plus six “sun slice” residential buildings whose profiles maximize daylight year-round; he would also limit a major 33rd Street building to 10 stories, providing an open plain for his sculpture garden. His proposal has the advantages of clear differentiation from the others and an efficient construction plan, but two potential disadvantages: the developer Extell is the consensus dark-horse candidate, and Holl improvises furthest beyond the guidelines. Whether the MTA will view that independence as a recommendation, as other clients have done, is a wild card.

The Brookfield Properties team combines an array of talent — Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Thomas Phifer & Partners, SHoP, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SANAA, Handel Architects, and Field Operations — with different grounds for departing from the RFP. Fields Ops’ James Corner, ASLA, advocated a four-park plan that preserves the local street grid rather than creating an enclave around a central linear park. It would also overcome the platform’s formidable 26-foot height differential by setting back the SHoP residential towers to allow for a sloping southwestern park (Hudson Green) beginning at grade, connected to a promenade extending along 30th Street beneath the High Line.

If proposals that have already secured a major corporate tenant have a head start, the selection may boil down to which quality deserves strongest emphasis: glamour vs. sustainability vs. restraint. The Kohn Pedersen Fox/Arquitectonica/Robert A.M. Stern Architects/Elkus Manfredi/West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture/weisz + yoes architecture plan for Related and Goldman Sachs includes NewsCorp as the anchor of divergent designs well-suited to high-profile media events. Durst/Vornado’s plan by FXFowle Architects and Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects goes all-out on green technologies and brings in another media tenant already associated with green construction, Condé Nast. This plan clips off the High Line’s eastern spur but adds another aerial walkway, the “Skyline,” wending through ample parkland, plus a subterranean “people-mover” (think mini AirTrain, not conveyor-belt walkways) connecting to the Penn/Moynihan Station rail hub. Tishman Speyer’s relatively classicist plan by Helmut Jahn, FAIA, (major tenant, Morgan Stanley) with PWP Landscape Architecture and master planners Cooper, Robertson & Partners emphasizes a terraced outdoor amphitheater, the “Forum,” over specific building features. Murphy/Jahn Architects’ Francisco González Pulido described the four towers’ relative formlessness: “By the time these buildings are designed, who knows what they’re going to look like?”

The MTA invited public input online and plans to make a choice in early 2008. The media is already picking favorites, estimating the volatile balance among the developers’ financial projections (top-secret), the community’s most pressing needs (particularly affordable housing, addressed here dutifully but not energetically), the political variables, and the business imperatives that one hopes will not preclude the risk-taking ideas that the overflow crowd came to see such renowned talents deliver.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.