In this issue:
·The Rise of Starchitecture: Who to Blame (or Credit)
·Infernal Affairs Bind Architecture, Cinema
·Architects Say, “I’ll Do It My Way”
·Power House Greens Way for New Housing in NY
·Tsao & McKown Weave Designer Threads
·TEVERETERNO Builds Bridge Between Rome, New York
·Al Gore to Media: You’re Not Welcome; Media (somewhat) Amused

Event: 2007 Temko Critics Panel: A Critical Situation: What to Make of Starchitecture, And Who To Blame For It
Location: Baruch College, 03.28.07
Speakers: Karrie Jacobs and Philip Nobel — Contributing Editors, Metropolis; Jeremy Melvin — Architectural Review, consultant to Royal Academy of Arts Architecture Program, London; Rowan Moore — Director, The Architecture Foundation, and critic for Evening Standard, London; Moderator: Joseph Grima — Director, Storefront For Art and Architecture
Sponsors: Forum for Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; hosted by the Newman Institute for Real Estate Studies, Baruch College

Temko Critics Panel (l-r): Jeremy Melvin, Philip Nobel, Rowan Moore, Joseph Grima, and Karrie Jacobs.

Kristen Richards

“I’ll jump into the deep end: starchitecture isn’t such a bad thing,” moderator Joseph Grima posited to the panel of design journalists and critics. “It’s good for your profession — it gives you something to write about.” Using Frank Gehry, FAIA, as an example of a global brand, he asked, “Are journalists to be blamed or credited?”

Jeremy Melvin, author of Isms: Understanding Architectural Styles (Universe 2006), commented that the conversation has been the same for the last 100 years, and will be the same for the next 100. The problem, as he sees it, is that in the last 15 to 20 years, there’s been more money to spend on architecture, causing “brand inflation.” He cited the Gazprom Tower competition as a “significant” example: “Invite all the same architects, and the winner is RMJM, a firm not that well known outside of the U.K. The design was not very good, but not worse than the others.” But it was a competition where “the quality of design dissolved.”

Philip Nobel asked if there is a connection between celebrity and quality. Melvin responded, wryly, that “celebrity can be achieved without doing anything,” yet there’s also the “irony” of those who reach “hyper-celebrity” because they have huge organizations behind them (he finds Norman Foster looking to sell his firm for £500 million “absurd”). Nobel pointed out that Zaha Hadid came to celebrity through her art and media buzz — which “is problematic — does that mean it’s good or just photogenic?”

Grima wondered if there’s complicity between architects and the press. Rowan Moore sees a “major shift in the scale of the phenomenon of starchitecture” where “clients and architects are controlling access to those they know will be positive; the balance of power has changed.” He said it boils down to “persuasion and charm, similar to the games fashion houses play.” Karrie Jacobs agreed, saying developers are buying into starchitecture in a big way, with “Broadway-style lists of credits in real estate ads. As architecture is recognized by popular culture, it becomes less the domain of a small group of experts and opinion makers.” She suggested someone should draw up a chart of how much a starchitect’s name adds to the square-foot value of a project.

To Grima’s question, “Has any building been killed by the press?” With a devilish grin, Melvin answered, “I’ve done quite a bit of slaughtering. Critics should be in the business of criticizing. Otherwise, what’s the point?” He later said that if the art world has experts who authenticate artworks, “why not have critics to authenticate good design?”

Grima then asked the panel if starchitecture has replaced what used to be “movements” or “isms.” Moore said, “I’d rather have starchitecture than isms or ideologies as style. Maybe it is progress. Or maybe I’m being too optimistic.” Nobel countered that in architectural education, “what might be good about isms is you’d have something to teach — not graphic chicanery. There are victims here — us — when these juniors start building.”

Audience Q&A: Is starchitecture a good thing? Moore: “I don’t think it’s fantastic; it’s open to abuse, but it doesn’t kill people.” Melvin: “You’re being too kind. It can hurt people.” Jacobs: “Ostentatious, over-the-top buildings used to show off nationalism. It beats the hell out of an arms race.”

How do you teach a client to think differently about architecture, to make better choices? Moore: “Call out bad buildings and bad shortlists.”

Would a global economic downturn affect starchitects? Nobel: “They’re trying to build practices that are recession-proof. You won’t kill starchitecture.”

Kristen Richards is editor-in-chief of OCULUS and ArchNewsNow.com.

Event: 3×3 A Perspective On China, Monthly Lecture Series: Part Eight — Conversation With Yung Ho Chang
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.19.07
Speaker: Yung Ho Chang — Principal Architect, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) & Professor and Head, Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Organizer: People’s Architecture
Sponsor: Center for Architecture

An installation of habitable cameras exemplifies Atelier FCJZ’s interest in creating framed and frameless perceptions of space and landscape.

Atelier FCJZ

Yung Ho Chang has hurdled conventional boundaries of place, culture, and professional specialization. Founder and principal partner of Beijing-based Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ), he has also directed MIT’s architecture program since 2005. His trans-Pacific design career exemplifies an interdisciplinary ambition to complement history with modernity, landscape with buildings, and most recently, architectural rumination with popular film noir.

Chang presented a series of cinematic stills of his firm’s work superimposed with scenes from the Hong Kong film trilogy, Wu Jian Zao (Infernal Affairs, 2002-03), which inspired Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. FCJZ implanted stills from the original film with new objects and characters, such as a bicycle, a Van Gogh painting, or a mysterious hand and body. Simultaneously provocative and absurd, the vignettes mingle fiction with reality. Chang said he chose Infernal Affairs over the visually lush In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar Wai, 2000) because he could tell the story with only a handful of images. He also cited the French New Wave movement and Alfred Hitchcock as cinematic inspirations.

This experiment represents Chang’s latest attempt to study and catalyze the act of perception. Long interested in Chinese scroll landscape painting as well as early Renaissance painting, photography, and film, he has designed exhibitions and buildings that challenge viewers to see their environs anew. For example, a landmark series of projects emerged from an enquiry into peepshow mechanics and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic take on urban voyeurism, Rear Window. In 2003, FCJZ worked with two video artists to create a series of giant, inhabitable sculptures modeled on Leica, Nikon, Polaroid, and Seagull rangefinder cameras.

This “Camera” exhibition helped fuel the design of the dramatic Villa Shizilin, a 45,000-square-foot home located in a rolling persimmon orchard outside Beijing. Chang conceived the house as an interlocking assembly of tapered, wedge-like volumes that function as focused lenses to frame views of the landscape. Drawing the viewer’s eyes horizontally along the landscape, the villa’s distinctly long, low window stripes recall the continuous, kinetic quality of scroll landscape paintings.

The work of Yung Ho Chang and FCJZ is the subject of the current exhibition “DEVELOP” on display at the MIT Wolk Gallery in Cambridge, MA, through 04.13.07.

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

Event: Emerging Voices Lecture Series
Location: Urban Center, 03.22.07
Speakers: An Te Liu — artist, associate professor & director, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto; Jared Della Valle, AIA, Andrew Bernheimer, AIA — Principals, Della Valle Bernheimer
Organizers: The Architectural League of New York

The steel-and-glass cladding of 245 10th Avenue was designed to reflect light in patterns that vary by day and by season.

qubdesign, courtesy Della Valle Bernheimer

“I hate it and I’ve almost rid my life of it,” proclaimed An Te Liu about IKEA furniture. Jared Della Valle, AIA, and Andrew Bernheimer, AIA, have no fondness for the mass-market designs either. For them, buying from IKEA and scavenging from the trash were equally distasteful methods for furnishing their office in their early days.

But Liu confessed to liking the designs better with a few not-so-minor alternations. Ignoring IKEA’s arcane instruction sheets, he assembled the parts for a desk into an angular hanging sculpture; he also reconstituted table panels to form a striped wall mural.

Like Andy Warhol, Liu, an artist and director of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, is known for using mundane objects as building blocks for new, unexpected forms. Drawn to the cheery colors of 3M sponges, he used them to create walls and pillars in his Soft series. In another project, he constructed totemic pillars out of air purifiers. He appropriated a photo of Levittown as source material for endlessly repeating ornamental wallpaper — an ironic critique of the myth of individual autonomy within a vast built network of sameness, he explained.

Bernheimer and Della Valle, principals of Della Valle Bernheimer, also delight in reinventing familiar forms, but with a highly utilitarian bent. When their firm needed new office furniture, they decided to sidestep stores like IKEA and buy a CNC milling machine to make their own ultra-customizable modular table. The duo’s love of individual variation characterizes their condominium at 245 10th Avenue, whose textured, reflective façade resembles an ever-shifting steam cloud, and a residence in Connecticut that appears to float in the treetops that surround it.

Perhaps the perfect complement to Liu’s Levittown wallpaper was Della Valle Bernheimer’s recent affordable housing project in East New York. The firm strove to break the mold of cookie-cutter design in the collaborative project, built for a mere $108 per square foot but offering a high level of architectural variation. Instead of “I live in the third house down the block on the left,” the owner can say, “I live there,” Bernheimer said.

Though a cynical police officer once challenged him, claiming the houses were “too nice for this neighborhood,” he holds on to the hope that the development may have a regenerative effect on the area. Certainly it’s been a positive step for the first-time homeowners who are beginning to move in, a group of people whose houses are as diverse as they are.

Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.

Event: Power House, New Housing New York Exhibition Opening
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.12.07
Curator: Abby Bussel
Exhibition and Graphic Design: Casey Maher
Organizers: AIA New York Chapter; New Housing New York Steering Committee; City of New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development; with additional support from AIANY Housing Committee
Exhibition Underwriters: National Endowment for the Arts; Duggal Visual Solutions
Exhibition Patron: Enterprise

The New Housing New York winning proposal.

Phipps Rose Dattner Grimshaw, courtesy AIANY

“The New Housing New York exhibition showcases the future of affordable housing in NYC: green, mixed-use, near transit, and on a remediated brownfield site. The designs presented make living look easy, and housing eminently buildable. Production is brought into historical context by a must-see timeline billboard and hands-on wheatboard library,” said Rick Bell, FAIA, Executive Director of AIANY, about the winning entry at the Power House exhibition opening.

The winning proposal for the New Housing New York Legacy Project (NHNY) — NYC’s first juried design competition for affordable, sustainable housing in the Bronx — organizes residential and retail spaces around a multi-functional garden at street level that spirals upward through a series of programmed roof gardens to a sky terrace. The gardens will be used for fruit and vegetable cultivation, passive recreation, and will provide storm water control and enhanced insulation. Design team, Phipps Rose Dattner Grimshaw (Dattner Architects/Grimshaw Architects) refer to their project as “Green Way” or “Via Verde,” and the estimated value, at $4.3million, will be donated by the City of NY.

The NHNY competition evolved from Mayor Bloomberg’s 10-year New Housing Market Place Plan with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development calling for a 150-unit, environmentally sustainable development with open community space. A jury of architects, city commissioners, community representatives, and developers judged submissions using criteria that emphasize sustainable and healthy design principles.

An exhibition that highlights the future of housing featuring submissions to the New Housing New York Legacy Project (NHNY) can now be seen at the Center for Architecture through 06.09.07. Power House exhibits the winners as well as four finalists: Legacy Collaborative, comprised of The Dermot Company/Nos Quedamos/Melrose Associates (Architects: Magnusson Architecture and Planning (MAP)/Kiss + Cathcart (K+C); Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo)/Durst Sunset (Architects: Cook+Fox Architects); BRP Development Corporation (Architects: Rogers Marvel Architects); and SEG + BEHNISCH + MDA (Architects: Behnisch Architekten/studioMDA). The Center is also hosting a number of panel discussions and events surrounding the exhibition. See On View at the Center for Architecture for more information.

Murrye Bernard, Assoc. AIA, is a designer with TEK Architects and Director of Forward, a publication of AIA’s National Associates Committee.

Event: The Gil Oberfield Memorial Lecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.15.07
Speakers: Calvin Tsao, FAIA, Zack McKown, FAIA — partners,Tsao & McKown Architects
Organizer: AIA NY Interiors Committee

Tsao & McKown Architects relies on pragmatic solutions to guide each project’s style. With a portfolio of work ranging from custom furniture and retail installations to architecture and urban design, designs may seem theoretically and geographically scattered, but they ultimately find common ground. So with the ambitious opening “We want to dare to traverse…where we find the thread of connection to link all of our endeavors together,” co-founders Zack McKown and Calvin Tsao, FAIA, began a dizzying retrospective of their partnership. Though the duo identified upwards of a dozen concepts that influence their projects, the ideas that resonated most were the firm’s attention to interconnectivity and spirituality.

The firm is constantly investigating “the soul behind the style,” according to Tsao. For the master plan of Suntec City on the outskirts of Singapore, Tsao & McKown used the mandala as an organizing principle. While the circular form of the mandala has cosmological significance specific to Hindu and Buddhist religions, it also speaks to harmony among scales. In Suntec City, a central water element focuses and links five new buildings with interstitial commercial spaces tying together large and small elements into one system. At the River Lofts Condominium complex in Tribeca, the designers were challenged to provide a different type of linkage — tying together a new residential building with a renovated warehouse. The project provided deep windowsills to give residents “a sense of dimension beyond their domain” said Tsao.

Images of their interiors projects reveal a modern vocabulary tinged with Victorian extravagance. In one project, a series of fabric-draped chandeliers perch above a sculptural atomic sunburst. Another residence features a fluttering of appliquéd butterflies springing from a bedroom headboard to “help the client dream better.” Tsao & McKown has the insight to divine what is human and universal about the design experience, while elevating it to a higher level.

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

Event: The Tiber Project: Rome; Rivers and Art as Catalysts for Urbanism: A Dialogue with New York
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.29.07
Speakers: Kristin Jones — President, Tevereterno; Gennaro Farina — Director of Historic Center, Department of City Planning, Rome; Patricia C. Philips — public art critic, Interim Director, Minetta Brooks; Meredith Johnson — Assistant Director, Minetta Brooks; Michael Fishman — advisory board member, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance; Leni Schwendinger — Leni Schwendinger Light Projects; Moderator Ernest Hutton, AICP, Assoc. AIA — Hutton Associates & New York New Visions
Sponsors: AIA NY Planning and Urban Design Committee; AIA NY International Committee

TEVERETERNO exists between two parallel bridges along the Tiber River in Rome.

Google Earth

The Italian Cultural Institute described TEVERETERNO in the following terms. “Motivated by the conviction that art is a powerful catalyst for environmental awareness and urban renewal, TEVERETERNO is a unique multi-disciplinary project that aims to contribute to the revitalization of Rome’s Tiber River by establishing a lively public gathering place — the Piazza Tevere — on a central section of the Tiber between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini.”

Each year international artists are invited to create innovative, site-specific art installations to stimulate a dialogue between nature and the city, between history and present day. It is with these environmental works that TEVERETERNO aspires to contribute to the revival of rivers worldwide, according to its website. Currently, the project is a cornerstone to the new city plan developed by Rome’s Department of City Planning.

Continuing to engage with architectural initiatives abroad, the AIA New York Chapter organized a dialogue as a follow-up to the initial presentation at the Italian Cultural Institute, on March 26. Kristin Jones, President of TEVERETERNO, and Gennaro Farina, Director of the Historic Center in Rome’s City Planning Office, presented the project and a summary of current planning efforts along the Tiber River. Indeed, this sequence settling development on the heels of temporary installations symbolized the aspirations of TEVERETERNO itself.

A highly-sensitive site-specific intervention, TEVERETERNO could not be simply transported to New York, panelists noted. Rather, the Tiber River project has pedagogic value for New York City designers in its attention to undervalued and discarded waterfront properties, stated Michael Fishman of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. One would need completely new artistic and formal concepts to develop projects along these lines in any of the five boroughs, responded Leni Schwendinger, partner of Leni Schwendinger Light Projects. In any case, Farina stressed that the main objective in such development remains a desire to bring the city to the river, and the river to the city. Participants of the question and answer period noted that the combination of the arts with public/government development in so called discarded spaces serve to greatly enliven cityscapes.

Earlier in the day, Jones, Farina, Fishman, and Anna Maria Rosati, TEVERETERNO’s Executive Director, met with the AIANY Emerging NY Architects Committee to begin a dialogue about creating a bi-continental international competition. Finally, a conference is being planned for this fall to pursue opportunities further.

James Karl Fischer, AIA, RIBA, Ph.D, co-chairs the AIA NY International Committee with John Steigerwald, AIA, and Jonathan Wimpenny, AIA, RIBA.

E-mail exchange between this writer and AIA press office 03.23.07:

To: AIA National press office
Subject: Gore/AIA San Antonio

Hi AIA… I couldn’t find Gore keynote on schedule (or too bleary-eyed after pages of registration forms)…would you let me know when it is?

Fr: AIA National press office
RE: Gore/AIA San Antonio

He is speaking on May 5th at 3:30. But here’s the part that you’re not going to like. The agreement and contract…states that no members of the media will be admitted into the hall for Mr. Gore’s speech. I am not sure how His [sic] people or the management here at the AIA came to that agreement or more importantly WHY, but that’s what I have been told.

Apparently, the media is not allowed to attend any of Gore’s lectures. But that seemed beside the point, so I shared the above exchange with a number of design journalists across the U.S. Some of their responses are rather amusing (attribution has been omitted to protect both the innocent and not-so-innocent):

“Remember this the next time the AIA courts you for coverage!”

“Maybe he’s afraid of being Gored by the media???”

“Odd. What do you think he was going to talk about — state secrets revealed to the design profession? I personally think they should say no way, it’s open. His closing it does not reflect well on him, raises all sorts of issues.”

“Your e-mail has created a bit of a fuss around here. Either that or we’re all just really bored and want to go home! There’s also a huge, self-serving assumption here on the part of Gore’s people that the press would actually WANT to report anything he had to say. Kind of unintentionally hilarious, really.”

“I can’t believe that!! There’s a real lost opportunity on both sides.”

“A little birdy has told me that it’s Gore’s standard operating procedure these days. Don’t know if it’s because the content of his speeches are part and parcel of “An Inconvenient Truth” or not. Seems like a great way to annoy reporters, though, eh? You’d think that an old hand like Gore wouldn’t be afraid of the media at this point, wouldn’t you? I mean, he’s been through the most contentious election debacle in history, 8 years in the White House, etc. Strangeness.”

“He must be getting sensitive about his weight!”

“FYI this is standard @#$%-up practice by some at conventions. The directive to keep out the press would definitely come from Gore. Just goes to show you — he’s still a politician.”

“Why can’t they just show the movie?”

“I have no idea what’s up with Al, except he needs to go on a diet!”

“Keystroke slip — “His” with a cap letter might explain it all. The man IS surely running for president; he’s just waiting for Hillary and Obama to bore everyone to death. Having pesky press would destroy the neutral statesman/guru aura they’re working hard to inculcate.”

“Very strange. How enforceable is this?”

“This IS pretty strange. I guess the question is — are Gore’s comments off the record and cannot be reported? What in God’s name is he going to say that we haven’t heard already?????”

“Very strange indeed. A public and well-reported meeting between Gore and AIA members would have been terrific. I wonder whether the handlers around Gore are way too aggressive for his own good. I’m not close enough to the process to know whose interests are served by non-public events like these, but it looks too close to paranoia from here.”

“Interesting to compare this news with the big reach-out the AIA is doing to news media by conducting a Roper Poll on what we/media think of them.”

Kristen Richards is editor-in-chief of Oculus and ArchNewsNow.com.