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

The Preservation League of New York State announced the 2007 Excellence in Historic Preservation Award Recipients: Tsao & McKown‘s River Lofts condominium project (Excellence in Historic Preservation); Robert A.M. Stern‘s Excellence Charter School (Project Excellence); and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (organizational excellence)…

The fifth annual ARCHI-TECH AV Award winners include the Hearst Tower (architect: Foster + Partners, architect-of-record: Adamson Associates, interior architecture: Gensler) for Best Project Over $1 Million; and the New York City Office of Emergency Management (architect: Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, multimedia, telecommunications, acoustics, data consultant: Shen Milsom & Wilke)… The League of Historic American Theatres presented its 2007 Outstanding Individual Contribution Award to Craig Morrison, AIA…

The Landmarks Preservation Commission announced that the City Council approved the appointment of Roberta Washington, FAIA, as a new Commissioner, and the reappointment of Chair Robert B. Tierney to a second term… Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, will become dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University…

Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners announced that Elizabeth R. Leber, AIA, has been promoted to Partner…WB Engineers | Consultants has appointed Constantine Siversky as a business development associate… Jenine Lepera Izzi has joined Kenneth Park Architects as the Director of Business Development for Corporate Architecture & Interiors… Sarah Natkins has joined Material ConneXion Inc. and Culture and Commerce Inc. as Director of Marketing and Communications…

9.14.07 Submission: OUTRAGE!
NYC streets are littered with poorly maintained and decrepit newsracks. The Municipal Art Society invites you to submit photographs of the dirtiest, most unkempt, most repulsive newsracks in the city to help persuade elected officials to commit to repairing and maintaining them. Multiple photograph entries are welcome (amusing caption optional). Newsracks that are also illegally placed (within 15 feet of a fire-hydrant, in a bus-stop, within 5 feet of a corner area, etc.) will be given special consideration. The winner will be rewarded with a $100 gift certificate for Urban Center Books.

9.14.07 Submission: P/A Awards
The P/A Awards recognizes unbuilt projects demonstrating overall design excellence and innovation. All entries must be commissioned by paying clients for execution. Judging will take place in October 2007. Winners will be notified in November 2007, honored at a celebration in NY in January 2008, and published in the January 2008 issue of ARCHITECT. Architects and other design professionals practicing in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico may enter one or more submissions. Proposals may be for any location, but work must have been directed — and substantially executed — in offices in any one of those three countries.

9.15.07 Submission: Richard Blinder Award
The Richard Blinder Award, an award to honor the life and work of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners founding partner Richard Blinder, FAIA, will be presented bi-annually by the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation. The award will go to the best proposal exploring the preservation of an existing structure, complex of buildings, or genre of building type through addition, renovation, or other means for use for a cultural purpose. The subject of the submission may be a real project or a polemical exercise. The proposal must demonstrate that it fosters architectural preservation in the U.S. The award will not exceed $15,000. It will be granted to an architect holding a professional degree or a valid license to practice architecture. Grants are awarded only to individuals, not organizations or university-sponsored research projects.

9.25.07 Call for Nominations: 2008 YAF Advisory Committee
The National AIA Young Architects Forum (YAF) Advisory Committee (AdCom) is seeking to fill five positions for 2008. The committee provides multiple opportunities for leadership development, networking, funded travel, not to mention a vehicle for supporting and encouraging young architects nationwide. Nominees must be young architects (licensed within the last 10 years) for at least the first year of their term. The committee will make the selection for vice-chair, communications adviser, events adviser, public relations adviser, and regional liaison adviser in early October.

9.30.07 Call for Papers: Preserving New York — Then and Now
The New York Preservation Archive Project is calling for papers for a one-day symposium, titled Preserving New York — Then and Now, to be held on Saturday, February 16, 2008, at the Museum of the City of New York. The symposium will focus on issues that have inspired and shaped the preservation movement in NYC for nearly 100 years. Papers will be presented in panels, followed by a question and answer period. Proposals are encouraged that examine a range of topics, including, but not limited to: the role of the civic sector, individual preservationists, professionalism in preservation, the role of the media, aesthetic regulation vs. historical commemoration, and preservation advocacy and outreach efforts.

11.01.07 Call for Proposals: Milka Bliznakov Prize
Virginia Tech’s International Archive for Women in Architecture (IAWA), a departmental research and outreach center in the School of Architecture + Design, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, invites architects, scholars, and researchers to honor IAWA founder Milka Bliznakov through their research on women in architecture and related design fields. This annual prize of $1,000 is awarded following a two-stage process. The prize will be awarded to the completed project that best demonstrates an important advancement to the recognition of women’s contributions to architecture and the related design fields while encouraging the use and growth of the IAWA.

11.09.07 Competition: 2008 Pillars of the Industry Awards
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Multifamily is now accepting entries for the 2008 Pillars of the Industry Awards for multifamily housing. The annual awards honor recipients in more than 30 categories representing all facets of the multifamily housing industry. Since 1990 the awards have honored superior achievement in apartment and condominium design, development, marketing, and management. Winners will be recognized at an awards gala held in conjunction with NAHB’s Pillars of the Industry Conference, held on April 2, 2008, at The Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, CO. Applications will be accepted until Nov. 9; entry binders are due Dec. 7.

08.07.07

Welcome to August, the month that New Yorkers tend to flee the city’s heat and humidity. If you are sticking around, take advantage of the lighter crowds to explore some of those places you normally avoid. You may be surprised at how much they have changed. Some ideas: Bryant Park, Hudson River Park, West 23rd St at Chelsea Piers…

– Jessica Sheridan, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP

Event: SKETCH120
Location: American Can Factory, Gowanus, Brooklyn, 07.28.07
Speakers/Jury Members: James Biber, FAIA — Partner, Pentagram; Andrew Blum — Contributing Editor, Metropolis, Wired; Lauren Crahan — Partner, Freecell; Alexandros Washburn, AIA — Chief Urban Designer, NYC Department of City Planning
Hosts: XO Projects, Inc.
Organizer: Design in 5, Architectural League of New York

Emerging architects sketch at the inaugural Design in 5 event, SKETCH120.

Jonathan Lee

Most every New Yorker walks daily under scaffolds. The unsightly byproduct of a citywide building boom, they are also bottleneck-inducing, shirt-snagging nuisances for pedestrians on crowded streets. And in their current quasi-standardized form, at least in the U.S., they can be seen as irredeemably ugly. As required by law, they have one essential purpose: protecting pedestrians from falling debris during construction or repairs. But for all their squalor, scaffolds are also a liminal condition between private property and public space, and they could potentially serve many other purposes besides trapping projectiles. What if the codes changed and the humble scaffold assumed new forms?

Design in 5, a new group comprising architects, designers, and artists within five years of school graduation, took on the challenge of re-imagining scaffolding in its launch event, a juried charrette. Entrants spent two hours brainstorming the relation between permanent and transient structures, followed by critiques and discussion. Some of the sketches upgraded scaffold pipes with landscaping elements, stands for small businesses, or simple flyers giving historical information and construction timelines about the building within. Others provided access to second-story space for temporary homeless shelters (giving the occupant a retractable ladder for privacy and safety), recreational areas networked among multiple buildings, or out-of-the-way bike storage. One two-level system included fast and slow lanes, with ramps to the upper level for speedier walkers while vendors and other obstacles remain at ground level.

A dilemma raised by Andrew Blum, juror and contributing editor for Metropolis and Wired, involved the role of advertising. Should new designs incorporate ads to generate income or resist the growing encroachment of commerce into every imaginable space? Some felt scaffolds blur the boundary between the private and public realms: building owners are responsible for renting and maintaining them, but they extend private property building into the public right-of-way. More useful purposes for scaffolds — aesthetic upgrades, greening, marginal improvements in urban problems like homelessness, and transportation — thus depend on the financial incentives in the private sector.

The tension between ideal programs and feasible zoning and code changes prompted juror Alexandros Washburn, AIA, chief urban designer at the NYC Department of City Planning, to remind the crowd that regulatory and economic pressures lead owners and developers to maximize their returns on every square millimeter of space within the allowable FAR. Advertising creates incentives to leave temporary structures up indefinitely. That’s what happened in Washburn’s own building, which bore a scaffold for two years because “it was cheaper for the landlord to rent the scaffold than actually fix the façade problem.” Only deliberate policy changes, he believes, can reverse interests that now intrude into public space and give something back by shouldering the costs of more civic-minded scaffolding programs.

One group took an evolutionary angle, calling today’s standardized scaffold the result of centuries of Darwinian processes; in many respects it’s “not broken,” but it might eventually give way to an entirely different system. The model is a 900-year-old mosque in Mali made of mud, requiring recurrent repair in the rainy season and thus incorporating wooden structural elements that serve as scaffolding when needed. Permanent “self-integrated” scaffolds, these designers contended, represent a deeper level of sustainability. The idea of harmonizing permanent and recurrent structures led to James Biber, FAIA, juror and partner at Pentagram, to refer to Venetian practices — buildings under repair are reproduced in decorative prints outside their scaffolds, giving observers at least an image of the concealed structure. Thus viewing upkeep as an organic aspect of a building, not an awkward extraneous element, might improve the cityscape.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Oculus, Icon, Content, and other publications.

Event: John Margolies in conversation with Michael Bierut and Phil Patton
Location: The Urban Center, 07.25.07
Speakers: Michael Bierut — Partner, Pentagram; Phil Patton — Contributing Editor, Wired, Esquire, ID, and writer, The New York Times
Moderator: John Margolies — author, photographer, lecturer on American commercial architecture and design
Organizer: The Architectural League of New York

National Freshwater Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin.

John Margolies, courtesy Architectural League of New York

Clicking through slides, John Margolies provides a quick glimpse into his story of American roadside architecture — a landscape of wigwam-shaped motels, folk art mini-golf, and statuesque gas pumps that, as he says, almost seem like people. Rattling off names, dates, and locations, his mental map reads like an illustrated autobiography, complete with anecdotes for each stop along his journey. Always captured with brilliant blue skies and free of cars and trash, Margolies’s photographs preserve vivid moments from an American landscape that is quickly disappearing.

Within this vanishing landscape, Margolies’s images carry the burden of a nostalgic pretense. Appealing to consumers’ memories of a time gone by, modern businesses mimic the 1950s aesthetic that invigorates his photographs in their logotypes and interior decoration, bypassing the need for real substance. The true strength of his work, though, lies in the authentic and individualized American spirit it captures, not in a shallow discussion of composition and styling.

The once eccentric and democratic landscape has morphed into one of corporate predictability with decorated sheds replacing the now obsolete ducks. Yet despite this increasing homogenization, one could argue that Americans still long for a personal touch. At least one major coffee shop chain has tried to capitalize on the hand crafted, as one audience member pointed out, with its phony handwritten posters meant to inspire visions of silk-screening rather than digital press.

Amidst half-hearted corporate attempts to appeal to Americans’ sense of individuality, we can look back at roadside architecture today and lament the disappearance of the genuine spirit they convey. But we must also remember that, in its day, this same architecture was considered cheap and tawdry, dismissed as too commercial to be taken seriously. Margolies’s photographs, then, provoke an important question: if architecture in the American landscape is a personification of those who live there, what will the endless stream of big boxes and glass façades say about the state of our spirit to those in the future? One can hope that someone with the same love and vision for the vernacular landscape as Margolies will be there to tell part of the story.

Rachel Schauer is concentrating her studies on architecture and communications at New York University Gallatin School. She also is e-Oculus‘ graphic designer.