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

Oculus 2007 Editorial Calendar
if you have ideas, projects, opinions – or perhaps a burning desire to write about a topic below – we’d like to hear from you! Deadlines for submitting suggestions are indicated; projects/topics may be anywhere, but architects must be New York-based. Send suggestions to Kristen Richards.
06.01.07 Fall 2007: Collaboration
09.07.07 Winter 2007-08: Power & Patronage

03.21.07 Submission: Teetonic’s Six Cities Design Festival T-shirt Design Competition
Six cities in Scotland – Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, and Stirling – will host the country’s first nationwide international design festival 05.17-06.03.07 to promote and celebrate Scottish design. Designers Wayne Hemingway, Stefan Sagmeister, Timorous Beasties, Zandra Rhodes, and D8 are designing t-shirts for the festival. The competition, hosted by Teetonic, seeks a sixth design encompassing the festival’s theme: Design is Everywhere. The public will vote for its favorite and the winner will receive a “goodie bag” containing, among other prizes, two tickets for the opening of the Scottish Show in May 2007 at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s national center for architecture and design.

03.30.07 Call for Presentations: 2007 AIA NYS Convention
Inspired by the 150th Anniversary of the AIA, the theme of the 2007 AIA New York State Convention (10.04.07 – 10.06.07) will be The Past as Prologue. Proposals are being accepted for seminar topics that address this theme – or better yet, take it to the next level – to educate design professionals.

04.01.07 and 04.15.07 Submission: The Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship
Administered by Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing non-profit, and directed by former Rose Fellow Katie Swenson, the Rose Fellowship seeks to increase the quality and quantity of affordable housing and improve the quality of life within communities. Fellows live where they work forging community ties, developing leadership skills, and expanding the capacity of their local host organization helping local leaders plan, finance, design, and manage major construction projects. The 2007 Rose Fellowships will take place in Bronx, NY; New Orleans, LA; Woodburn, OR; and Southwestern Minnesota.

Event: Robert Caro: Reflections on Robert Moses
Location: The Museum of the City of New York, 02.11.07
Speaker: Robert Caro – author, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Organizers: The Museum of the City of New York

“Rome was power, Greece was glory, New York is home.”
– Robert Caro

Published in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York took seven years for Robert Caro to write. It grew from a straightforward biography into an investigation of urban political power and its function in cities. Though Robert Moses was arguably the most powerful figure in mid-century New York, he was essentially impervious to politics. Holding a litany of appointed titles during his career, he set the city’s priorities from 1945 forward, skewing spending away from social welfare programs and towards public works. He continually diverted funds from Mayor LaGuardia’s pet project – pre-natal care for poor families – towards development.

In a democracy, it is generally believed that power comes from being elected. Moses, one of New York’s most influential and controversial figures in the 20th Century, never held an elected office; but, in many ways he exercised more power over a 40-year span than the six governors and five mayors he served while working for New York. Caro became fascinated by this while writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, Power Broker.

At least 500,000 people lost their homes to his projects, and 21 communities were affected – the famous dark side to Moses’s genius, discussed by Caro. After interviewing inhabitants displaced by the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Caro revealed the widespread blight of which Moses’s heavy-handed public works projects were capable. Ultimately, Caro left the audience with this query: How do we achieve a vision for the city’s future without disturbing the integrity of its past?

Robert Moses and the Modern City is a three-part exhibition currently on view at the Museum of the City of New York, Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

Kate Soto is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor.

Event: People and Buildings: Thinking Inside the Box
Location: Housing Works Bookstore Café, 01.30.07
Speakers: Giuseppe Lignano & Ada Tolla – Principals, LOT-EK; Marc Levinson, author, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Organizers: The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP); New York Council for the Humanities

Mobile Dwelling Units (MDU) travel as standard-size containers, expand to reveal furnished interiors, and could be plugged into “vertical harbors” in any city.

Courtesy LOT-EK

Home, gallery, train station, vertical village, museum, portable retail hut, mega-billboard, recycling plant: these are among the novel alternative uses that Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla, founding principals of LOT-EK, have conceived for the thousands of surplus 20- and 40-foot-long standard shipping containers that accumulate like empty shoeboxes in U.S. port cities. Interpreting the containers as adaptable architectural shells rather than inherently defined freight boxes, the partners envision a radically modular landscape as liquid as capital itself.

Their January 30th presentation – part of CUP’s People and Buildings event series – complemented a lecture delivered by the economist Marc Levinson recounting the evolution of the modern shipping container. According to Levinson, a former editor of The Economist and author of a new book on shipping container history, the adoption of standard shipping containers in the 1950s-70s fueled the industrial decline of formerly bustling ports such as Brooklyn. LOT-EK’s designs creatively invert this relationship; in its hands the very same shipping containers become post-industrial building blocks to revitalize the city. The firm is on a mission to discover how many different types of program can be dynamically planted in, around, and between the containers.

One case study is the Mobile Dwelling Unit (MDU), which not only functions as an independent, fully furnished home, but hypothetically plugs in to a vast “vertical harbor,” or high-rise steel rack, in any metropolis. Said Lignano, “Like pixels in a digital image, temporary patterns are generated by the presence or absence of MDUs in different locations along the rack, reflecting the ever-changing composition of these colonies scattered around the globe.” The completed Bohen Foundation gallery and offices on West 13th St. shows how shipping containers can be adapted to create flexible interior volumes. Accommodating an entirely different program, the train station and tower they have proposed for Turin, Italy, is a 1,800-foot-long “programmable billboard” animated by the constant movement of trains, cars, passengers, and shoppers, as well as a giant stream of travel information and advertisements.

Recycling is one of LOT-EK’s goals, but not only in the material sense. Responding to Levinson’s account of endless negotiations over the exact specifications of standard containers, Lignano said he and Tolla would like to “recycle the intelligence and all the effort” spent developing the 8.5-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide steel and aluminum boxes. They also see latent pop-art value in the multi-colored containers. Shipping containers could one day become as ubiquitous in the built environment as they are on the seas and highways.

Gideon Fink Shapiro is a writer and researcher at Gabellini Sheppard Associates, and contributes to several design publications.

Event: A New Architecture for a New Education symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition “School Buildings – The State of Affairs: A New Architecture for a New Education”
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.03.07
Speakers: Bruce Barrett – Vice President of Architecture & Engineering, NYC School Construction Authority; Barbara Custer – Principal, Nordstrasse Elementary School, Zürich; Richard Dattner, FAIA – Dattner Architects; Manuela Keller-Scheider – Zürich University of Teacher Education; Daniel Kurz – architectural historian, Zürich Building & Zoning Department; Kelvin Shawn Sealey, EdD – founder, Design Lab for Learning Organizations at Columbia Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Tony Vinzenz – Director, Department of Schools and Sport, City of Zürich; Markus Ziegler – Immobilien-Bewirtschaftung, City of Zürich.
Moderator: David M. Steiner – Dean, Hunter College School of Education
Organizer: AIA New York Chapter Committee on Architecture for Education and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich/ Wohnforum
Sponsors: Holcim, Think Swiss, The Consulate General of Switzerland in New York

Falletsche School, Zurich-Leimback, Switzerland.

Gempeler

American architects and educators might benefit from looking at recent European models and rethinking the fundamentals of educational building design. In Zürich, the educational structure is departing from the traditional “banking” model, where information is “deposited” into students by teachers. According to Tony Vinzenz, Director of the Department of Schools and Sport in Zürich, teaching is evolving into a team effort intended to “tap the individual potential of each child,” a change that demands more flexibility and connection among classrooms. Extended school hours also increases demands on space, and integration of technology challenges the rigid classroom layout of traditional school buildings.

Even though Zürich faces similar problems to NYC, NYC must address the issues on a larger scale. According to Markus Ziegler, of Zürich’s public real estate department Immobilien-Bewirtschaftung, the amount of school space available in Zürich has doubled since 1940, while the number of school children has decreased by 21%. In NYC, the School Construction Authority houses over 1 million children and plans to add 63,000 seats to the city’s schools within the next five years to keep pace with demand. So while clustering classrooms and providing flex space is desirable in new schools, the question remains how New York’s 1,300 existing facilities can adapt to house new teaching models. “Schools change constantly, while the school buildings stay built,” said Ziegler, an idea that architects should seriously consider when designing tomorrow’s schools.

Carolyn Sponza, AIA, is an architect with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners and is the AIANY Chapter Vice President of Professional Development.

Exhibition: Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation
Location: Yale University Art Gallery, on view through 07.08.07
Curators: Timothy Applebee – M.Arch. candidate, Yale University; Sonali Chakravarti – Political Science Ph.D. candidate, Yale University; Shannon N. Foshe – History of Art B.A. 2006, Yale University; Kate Howe – Graphic Design M.F.A. candidate, Yale University; Harriet Salmon – Sculpture M.F.A. 2006, Yale University; Catherine Sellers – Education Intern, Yale University Art Gallery; Sydney Skelton – History of Art 2007, Yale University; under the direction of Pamela Franks – Curator of Academic Initiatives, Yale University Art Gallery

Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn building, first floor; interior view of Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation exhibition, 2006. (c) 2006 Yale University Art Gallery.

Elizabeth Felicella

Bricks the size of his hands make up the walls. Concrete columns bearing the scars of their creation hold up the suspended ceiling of tetrahedrons. A circular stairwell capped by a dark floating triangle completes the geometry of the space. These are cues we, as student curators, took from the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) building for the Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation exhibition. Connections are made between Louis Kahn’s history and the building while providing a space for conversation between architecture and art.

In representing Kahn’s architecture in the form of a sculpture exhibition, we focused on bringing the visitor to the architect through art. Specifically positioned lights cast the triangular shadows of an Alexander Calder mobile onto the broad cylindrical stairwell behind it. The artwork moves gently with the movement of the building – from door drafts, air conditioning, or passing visitors – connecting elements of Kahn’s vision: the city, the building, and the viewer. Christian Boltanski’s three towers of La fete de Pourim are constructed of biscuit tins that visually mimic the intimately measured bricks of Kahn’s walls.

The concrete columns in the gallery express their construction with imprints of the wood framework – which we saw as translations of Kahn’s physical scars (caused by a fire from his childhood). Likewise, Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled bears the rawness of its creation in her plaster casting, and Lynda Benglis’ Hitch glass sculpture clutches the sand in which it was formed.

Maintaining the life of a building and rejuvenating the spirit of its architect, especially an icon like Kahn, is a challenge. After the recent renovations by Polshek Partnership Architects (see Un-cluttering a Kahn Classic, by Kristen Richards, eOCULUS 07.25.06), the life of YUAG continues, and hopefully we, as curators, have heightened its spirit as well.

Shannon N. Foshe is the Development Associate at the Center for Architecture, and a member of the curatorial team for the Responding to Kahn exhibition.