AN July/August 2021 by The Architect's Newspaper

The Architect's Newspaper July/August 2021

New Tools for Development page 8

www.archpaper.com

Tribute to Paulo Mendes da Rocha page 14

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Learning from Margaritaville Times Square page 16

An ambitious new development in central St. Louis hopes it can build communitarian values through design. But will it push out an existing community along the way? Read on page 24.

The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky?

COURTESY OWEN DEVELOPMENT/ TATIANA BILBAO ESTUDIO

Tankhouse, a design-forward Brooklyn-based developer, is cut from a different cloth. Read on page 26.

Do Tank

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The origins of public space page 58

6 ICYMI 7 Eavesdrop 54 Marketplace 56 Highlights

Fall Guy

Who was William Friedman, the mystery man who designed Champlain Towers South?

The collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, leaves questions that will take years to answer: What caused the structural failure? What parties bear responsibility? What can be done for the survivors? And perhaps most critically: What other local buildings may also be at risk, requiring measures to prevent similar incidents, from urgent repairs to preventive evacuation and demolition? Curiously missing from the extensive media coverage to date is any detailed characterization of the collapsed building’s architect. Whether his design, its realization, deferred maintenance, or other factors caused the structure to fail will remain uncertain, at least until investigations are complete; still, documented professional lapses on his part predated the construction of Champlain South by over a decade and caused the Florida State Board of Architecture to suspend his license for six months in 1967. His legal dispute with

the board over the decision in 1966 created a public legal record, and the board’s more extensive files contain substantial adverse information that bears consideration as the wider architectural community grapples with the challenges of protecting public safety. Champlain South was not the first structural failure associated with him. The name of William M. Friedman (1930–2018) surfaced in the 2018 engineering report by Morabito Consultants warning the Champlain Towers South condominium association about the building’s condition. A key passage in structural engineer Frank Morabito’s document describes the flat, nonsloping pool slab of reinforced concrete, prone to accumulating rainwater rather than draining properly, as “a major error in the development of the original contract documents prepared by William M. Friedman & Associates Architects, Inc., and Breiterman Jurado & Associates, Consulting Engineers.” continued on page 12

Renaissance City Redux

Detroit’s Prince Concepts rejuvenates the business of development, while transforming communities in the process. Read on page 22.

COURTESY TANKHOUSE/SO-IL

JASON KEEN

Glass Read on page 28.

Read on page 26.

ALBERT VECERK A /ESTO

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Editor’s Note

Look Away

Collapse can be compelling. It can draw you in without you yourself becoming aware of it.

Masthead

Info

President and Publisher Diana Darling

East Editorial Advisory Board Paola Antonelli / M. Christine Boyer / Peter Cook / Whitney Cox / Odile Decq / Tom Hanrahan / Craig Konyk / Reed Kroloff / Peter Lang / Jayne Merkel / Signe Nielsen / Joan Ockman / Chee Pearlman / Anne Rieselbach / Terence Riley / Ken Saylor / Fred Scharmen / Jimmy Stamp / Mark Strauss / Claire Weisz

Editor in Chief Aaron Seward Vice President of Brand Partnership Dionne Darling Director of Operations Matthew Hoffman Executive Editor Samuel Medina Art Director Ian Thomas Web Editor Jonathan Hilburg Products Editor Adrian Madlener Associate Editor Matt Hickman Program Manager Katie Angen Contributing Editor Matt Shaw Events Marketing Manager Karen Diaz Graphics Manager Sarah Hughes

PUBLIC DOMAIN/MIAMI-DADE FIRE RESCUE DEPARTMENT

The scene from Surfside, Florida, after the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers in late June

We often shy away from acknowledging this fact, afraid that in doing so we disclose some part of our internal wiring to others (or to ourselves). Something untoward or unkind, maybe just immature. Because it can be quite difficult tearing our eyes away from destructive scenes. It may even be that we have little choice in the matter; these scenes, photogenic as they are, are constantly being flung in our faces, every time we open a landing page or turn on cable TV. Such was the case with the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, last month. The images circulating online depicted what appeared to be the aftermath of an earthquake or missile attack, the southward tower reduced to a dusty, fractal heap of cable wires, twisted rebar, and flattened concrete. After authorities undertook the controlled demolition of the northward tower—out of concern for its stability—the heap grew to consume the entire block. The death toll continues to climb, having passed the 100 mark at the time of writing. The precise cause remains unknown, and there are so many competing theories, originating from multiple camps—from journalists and zoning departments to engineers and web sleuths—that it’s hard to keep track. Some searched for a connection to the destabilizing effects of climate change, while others pointed to inspection rules (relatively stringent in Surfside). The New York Times reported that the condominium board had trouble raising money for necessary structural repairs; because condo associations rely on buy-in from individual homeowners, as well as the financial aptitude of board members (something that should never be assumed), they often defer maintenance for years. We might expect that all these factors played a part in the collapse. While journalists have raised questions about the design of Champlain Towers, none have dug into the career of its architect: one William Friedman. This is understandable, as more pressing dynamics were at play. Moreover, it would be overly simplis-

tic, and possibly spurious, to lay this disaster at the feet of one actor—a deceased one, no less. (Friedman died in 2018.) But as Bill Millard points out in “Fall Guy” (page 12), which reveals not only Friedman’s identity and less-than-impeccable professional reputation, it certainly would be a tidy solution. Allyn Kilsheimer, whom Millard interviewed, is a structural engineer contracted by Surfside to investigate the collapse site. He is uncomfortable singling out the architect for blame. (Not that he’s opposed to the practice, he says, tongue in cheek.) This issue of AN is about development. It’s an intentionally baggy framing. There are stories that give voice to individual developers (“Prince Concepts,” page 22, and “The Do Tank,” page 26) and others that portray development as a diverse practice comprising many actors (“New Tools for Development,” page 8). There are challenges leveled at this class for its handiwork (“The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky,” page 24, and “Against the Smart Worldview,” page 61), and there is also earnest affection for the very same (“Learning from Margaritaville,” page 16). The aim is not simply to contrast the figure of the developer with that of the architect, but to see how the work of both is intertwined and coextensive. Both may share in the rewards and the blame for any given project. But there are limits, perhaps, to that formulation. Almost immediately following the Champlain Towers South disaster, The Washington Post uncovered the identity of the towers’ developers, who allegedly bribed officials to acquire the site permits in 1981. Surely, they are “better” fall guys than Bill Friedman? It can’t be said one way or the other, at least not yet. And in any event, no individual, good or bad, acts entirely alone. There is a vast social mechanism at work that compels them forward, if not tips their hand. Maybe if we turned away from the spectacle, we might be able to grasp that. Samuel Medina

Graphic Designer and Frontend Developer Kailee McDade Audience Development Manager Ankit Rauniyar Brand Partnerships East, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Asia Tara Newton Midwest Account Executive Neill Phelps Ad Sales and Asset Management Assistant Heather Peters Media Marketing Assistant Shabnam Zia Special Projects Assistant MaHong Bloom

Midwest Editorial Advisory Board Aaron Betsky / Robert Bruegmann / Sarah Dunn / Zurich Esposito / Martin Felsen / Sarah Herda / Reed Kroloff / Edward Lifson / Robert MacAnulty / Ben Nicholson / Donna Robertson / Raymond Ryan / Zoe Ryan / Elizabeth Smith / Julie Snow / Michael Speaks / Martha Thorne / Andrew Zago Southwest Editorial Advisory Board Anthony Alofsin / Marlon Blackwell / Nate Eudaly / Carlos Jiménez / Sheryl Kolasinski / Tracy Zeeck West Editorial Advisory Board Frances Anderton / Steve Castellanos / Teddy Cruz / Erin Cullerton / Mike Davis / Neil Denari / Priscilla Lovat Fraser / Devin Gharakhanian / Jia Gu / Betti Sue Hertz / Brooke Hodges / Craig Hodgetts / Walter Hood / Jimenez Lai / David Meckel / Kimberli Meyers / Anna Neimark / John Parman / Simon Sadler / Roger Sherman / William Stout / Warren Techentin General Information: info@archpaper.com Editorial: editors@archpaper.com Advertising: ddarling@archpaper.com Subscription: subscribe@archpaper.com Reprints: reprints@parsintl.com Vol. 19, Issue 8 | July/August 2021 The Architect’s Newspaper (ISSN 1552-8081) is published 8 times per year by The Architect’s Newspaper, LLC, 21 Murray St., 5th Fl., New York, NY 10007. Presort-standard postage paid in New York, NY. Postmaster, send address change to: 21 Murray St., 5th Fl., New York, NY 10007. For subscriber service: Call 212-966-0630 or fax 212-966-0633. $3.95/copy, $39.00/year; international $160.00/year; institutional $149.00/year. Entire contents copyright 2021 by The Architect’s Newspaper, LLC. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you are receiving duplicate copies. The views of our reviewers and columnists do not necessarily reflect those of the staff or advisers of The Architect’s Newspaper.

5 Open

July/August 2021

West

Southwest

Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs

RICHARD BARNES

At their best, college art museums serve multiple functions. First and foremost, they are teaching facilities where students learn art history and museum curating skills. But often they are also local and regional cultural resources. The new Benton Art Museum at Pomona College in Claremont, California, is such a place. Though completed in 2020, the museum had to delay its opening by nearly a year, owing to California’s COVID-19 protocols. It’s now in the midst of what director Victoria Sancho Lobis called a “soft opening” in anticipation of a full opening upon Pomona

students’ return in late August. The Benton Art Museum was designed by Boston-based Machado Silvetti with the Los Angeles office of Gensler serving as the architect of record. The visually porous building allows patrons to glimpse activity taking place within as well as enjoy the Southern California weather. James McCown 211 North College Avenue Claremont, CA 909-621-3200

East

JAMES O’REAR /COURTESY DS+R

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s (DS+R) United States Olympic & Paralympic Museum officially began welcoming the fully masked-up and socially distanced public last July in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It wasn’t until this month, however, that the larger project made its full formal debut with the opening of a 250-foot-long pedestrian bridge connecting the spiraling, 60,000-square-foot museum to the adjacent America the Beautiful Park. Also designed by DS+R, the $20 million, 550-ton Park Union Bridge, which was care-

fully hoisted into place last October above an active rail yard bisecting the museum campus and the park, comprises two interlocked, oculus-forming loops. According to DS+R, the bridge’s sculptural form was inspired by the “gravity-defying motion of athletes.” Matt Hickman 200 South Sierra Madre Street Colorado Springs, CO 719-497-1234

Southeast

Amant Foundation

Baker Museum

ALBERT VEČERK A /ESTO

NINA WESTERVELT

In early June, the Amant Foundation opened a multibuilding art campus in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will serve as the nonprofit art group’s headquarters. Designed by the architecture firm SO-IL, the 21,000-square-foot project is spread across four buildings—315 Maujer Street and 932 Grand Street, with two at 306 Maujer—and will house exhibitions, public events, archival projects, performances, and a residency program. Despite the overlapping programs, the four buildings announce their individuality through uniquely configured

cladding materials, such as clay and cement brick, that reference the surrounding industrial context. Industrial grating, metals, and concrete add to the overall effect. “Together, the environment they create will hopefully trigger curiosity,” said SO-IL cofounder and partner Florian Idenburg. Katie Angen 315 Maujer Street Brooklyn, NY 212-918-1077

The pandemic didn’t give the Baker Museum, a Southwest Florida modern art space that opened in December 2019, much time to shine. Just a few short months after its launch, the institution was closed for months on end, before fully reopening to the public in November 2020. But it’s only now that the museum’s designer WEISS/MANFREDI has shared details of the project, which also included the rehabilitation—and partial demolition—of existing campus buildings damaged by Hurricane Irma. Guests given the chance to visit the campus will find the overhauled and expanded Baker Museum

is organized around the redesigned Norris Courtyard, a lushly landscaped social space. The new lobby, larger and more dynamic than its predecessor, includes relocated ticketing and info desks, a museum store, and a variety of works on display from the museum’s permanent collection, including a large-scale hanging Dale Chihuly piece. Matt Hickman 5833 Pelican Bay Boulevard Naples, FL 239-597-1111

6 In Case You Missed It...

The Architect’s Newspaper

We corralled the top architecture and design stories buzzing about the internet.

Lumber prices plummet after reaching all-time high in May

Luma Arles opens in Provence with all eyes on Frank Gehry’s polarizing centerpiece

After peaking at the all-time high of $1,711 per thousand board feet in early May, the cost of wood is now experiencing a rapid descent. Lumber futures for July ended at $1,009.90, a figure that represents a downward shift of 41 percent. The record-setting run during the pandemic was fueled in large part by housebound DIYers.

The 27-acre multidisciplinary art and cultural campus Luma Arles made its public debut in late June at Parc des Ateliers in Arles, a city in the South of France. Just ahead of the hotly anticipated launch, new images of the complex’s craggy pièce de résistance, a twisting Frank Gehry–designed tower, began making the rounds.

Preservation efforts kick into high gear as demolition of Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower looms

Ennead Architects’ Shanghai Astronomy Museum opens as the largest in the world

As word of renewed threats of demolition swirled in May, it became resoundingly clear that iconic 13-story Nakagin Capsule Tower had reached the last of its nine lives. On July 1, English-language Japanese news source SoraNews24 reported that the building is officially scheduled to be razed in March 2022 to make way for new development.

Ennead Architects has unveiled its completed Shanghai Astronomy Museum, the new branch of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in the Pudong district. The 420,000-square-foot facility opened to the public on July 18 as the largest astronomy museum in the world. The design features nary a straight line or right angle.

San Jose’s beloved Berryessa Flea Market will be replaced by a mixed-use development

AECOM and Paul Goldberger tapped to help realize the Fallen Journalists Memorial

Sean Anderson will head Cornell’s BArch program as a slew of big names join the Cornell AAP faculty

PAU unveils a sweeping redesign of Downtown Niagara Falls

Following heated protests and a short-lived hunger strike, the San Jose City Council approved the rezoning of the area around the beloved Berryessa Flea Market to make way for a sprawling mixed-use development. The new complex will hold 3,450 residential units and retail and commercial space.

The Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation has announced it will work with engineering giant AECOM and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger to select a site and designer for a planned memorial in Washington, D.C., that will pay tribute to the reporters, photojournalists, and their colleagues around the world who lost their lives on the job.

Sean Anderson, associate curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, is leaving the museum to head Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) BArch program. This comes after the AAP announced that Florian Idenburg, Sara Bronin, and many more big names would be joining the school starting in July.

A sweeping master plan proposed by the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, in partnership with the state of New York, promises a wholesale revamp of Downtown Niagara Falls. The principal recommendation is the creation of a 1.5-mile “Heritage Path” weaving the city’s historical landmarks with the adjacent state park.

ADRIAN DEWEERD/COURTESY LUMA ARLES

Foster + Partners unveils the tallest tower in Greece

Antepavilion designers arrested as police raid East London site

Ellinikon International Airport in Athens has stood vacant for nearly two decades, since the construction of Athens International Airport, and now Foster + Partners is master planning the conversion of the approximately 32-million-square-foot site into public parkland. To that end, the firm revealed plans for the Marina Tower, to be the tallest building in Greece.

Police in London raided the Antepavilion, a site at the Columbia and Brunswick Wharf in East London where experimental structures are erected on a yearly basis. They made several arrests at the end of June. The raid was apparently triggered by similarities between this year’s folly and installations affiliated with climate protest group Extinction Rebellion.

Biden signs bill designating Pulse nightclub in Orlando a national memorial

Theme park inspired by Mesoamerican empires revealed for Coachella Valley

President Joe Biden signed H.R. 49 into law at the end of June, establishing the Pulse site in Orlando, Florida, as a national memorial. This paves the way for a planned memorial and museum led by the onePULSE Foundation that will commemorate the 49 who lost their lives during a mass shooting at the gay nightclub and LGBTQ+ community hub on June 12, 2016.

Aztlán Development has unveiled plans for a new theme park inspired by the Aztec and Toltec Empires between the city of Indio and Coachella Valley, in California. Named Return to Aztlán, the 48-acre theme park will include a concert plaza with a 10,000-person capacity, a beach amphitheater, and a 16-screen movie theater in the shape of a Mayan temple.

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7 ICYMI...

Eavesdrop

Adjaye Associates and Studio Zewde will overhaul the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in Brooklyn

Prefab start-up wunderkind Katerra shuts down

Quentin Tarantino buys L.A.’s historic Vista Theatre

New York governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the winning proposal for the 7.2-acre redevelopment of an underutilized portion of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center campus in East Flatbush. Adjaye Associates and Studio Zewde are helming the design of the $400 million affordable housing complex that will replace it.

Katerra, the modular prefabrication start-up and timber innovator that acquired Michael Green Architecture and Lord Aeck Sargent in 2018, went bankrupt and was forced to shut down. According to internal communications released on June 1, the company had to let its thousands of employees go and drop its construction projects.

The newest Commission of Fine Arts is sworn in, with Billie Tsien as its chair

Donald Judd’s Architecture Office in Marfa severely damaged by fire

For the first time in its 111-year history, the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., has a female chair. The commission voted at its monthly meeting on June 17 to make architect Billie Tsien its new chair and Howard University educator Hazel Ruth Edwards vicechair, effective immediately.

A two-story commercial building at 102 North Highland Avenue in Marfa, Texas, best known as the Architecture Office of Donald Judd, caught fire on June 4. The interior of the building, which was empty at the time and is currently undergoing an extensive renovation led by SCHAUM/SHIEH, was damaged.

OMA will build out the first American Pompidou Center in Jersey City

Counterspace’s Serpentine Pavilion opens at Kensington Gardens (and elsewhere across London)

Three years after OMA was selected by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency to design a new museum in Journal Square, it was revealed that the building would be home to none other than the Pompidou Center’s first North American satellite: the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City. The museum will be housed inside the redeveloped 1912 Pathside Building.

Designed by Johannesburg, South Africa–based collaborative architectural studio Counterspace, the 20th Serpentine Pavilion is currently on view at its customary location: an expanse of lawn at the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, London. Fragments of the main structure can be found elsewhere across the city.

The world’s deepest pool opens in Dubai, complete with subaquatic ruins

Police precinct at the center of 1967 Newark Rebellion will be converted into a social justice museum

Dubai is now home to the world’s deepest swimming pool, with a depth of 197 feet. Dubbed Deep Dive Dubai, it’s the world’s deepest pool for diving and features the ruins of a graffiti-covered forsaken city so massive that it can be fully explored only over the course of several dives.

On the 54th anniversary of the July 1967 Newark Rebellion, Mayor Ras J. Baraka unveiled plans for the Newark Community Museum. The new institution, designed by Gensler, will grow from the same building that served as the flash point for those events: the city’s infamous Fourth (now First) Precinct police station.

Quentin Tarantino is best known as the director of Pulp Fiction, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, and other award-winning films. But he’s also a preservationist with a side hustle: buying and operating historic movie theaters. Tarantino is also something of a design critic, with strong opinions about trends in the design and layout of contemporary cinemas, particularly those that feature “LaZ-Boy” seating and keep the lights on during movie showings. In July, he revealed that he had purchased the Vista Theatre, a 1923 single-screen, art deco movie palace at 4473 Sunset Boulevard in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Vista is one of a dwindling number of vintage movie theaters that haven’t been twinned or converted into churches. The theater has been closed since last year owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a “To be continued...” message plastered on its marquee. “I bought the Vista,” Tarantino announced on the July 5 episode of Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast. “We’re going to probably open it up around Christmastime.” Originally known as the Lou Bard Playhouse, the Vista was designed by Lewis A. Smith and initially had 838 seats. The owners later removed every other row to give patrons more legroom, dropping its capacity to 400. It’s a local landmark, and the interior has an Egyptian motif. The theater’s forecourt features the handprints and footprints of celebrities whose films have been shown there over the years, including Spike Jonze, Martin Landau, and Barry Bostwick. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The Vista is the second vintage movie theater Tarantino has purchased. In 2007, he bought the New Beverly Cinema at 7165 Beverly Boulevard, a 300-seat theater in a building that also dates from the 1920s, to save it from redevelopment. The New Beverly is a revival theater where Tarantino mostly shows classic or notable older movies, often from his own collection, on film, not via digital projection. It was also closed during the COVID-19 pandemic but reopened last month. With the Vista, he told Armchair Expert, there will be a slight twist. “Again, only film,” he said. “But it won’t be a revival house. We’ll show new movies that come out, where they give us a film print. We’ll show new stuff. It’s not going to be like

SWA Group’s permanent Sandy Hook memorial in Connecticut, The Clearing, will break ground this August

Richard Meier retires as his eponymous firm changes its name and restructures

The Clearing, a meditative memorial site designed by SWA Group to remember the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School on the morning of December 14, 2012, was recently approved by voters in Newtown, Connecticut. Construction on the $3.75 million landscape, sitting on a donated 5-acre site in Newtown, will begin in August.

Richard Meier & Partners Architects—now known only as Meier Partners—announced that its founder, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier, has retired from the New York firm. Dukho Yeon, a firm veteran of 30 years, is now partner and lead designer, while George H. Miller was named a partner and chief operating officer.

Read more at archpaper.com

July/August 2021

the New Beverly. The New Beverly has its own vibe. The Vista is like a crown jewel kind of thing. And so it’ll be like the best prints. We’ll show older films, but they’ll be older films and you can hold a four-night engagement.” Tarantino also weighed in on theaters that aren’t reopening after the pandemic. “I never like any theater closing,” he said. “But some of these exhibitors who are going, they [effing] deserve to go. They’ve taken all the specialness out of movies anyway, some of these chains, where they’re showing commercials all through it, they don’t turn the lights down, everything is stadium seating, plastic shit. It’s all about popcorn and watching a movie at [effing] Chuck E. Cheese.” Exhibitors who don’t pay attention to presentation may be hurting their own chances of survival, Tarantino warned. “There used to be even a tad of presentation going on,” he said. If “those guys shut down, they’ve been writing their own epitaph for a long time, but they just figured the business would take you along. It’s been crazy during my whole career to see how the film experience is lessened for the viewer. Like every five years, it’s lessened by another big jump.” Tarantino said he believes certain “boutique cinemas” are poised to thrive now that COVID-19 restrictions are being relaxed. But he clarified that “I’m not talking about the La-Z-Boy, order nachos and margaritas.” “Actually, I like the Alamo Drafthouse [a cinema chain that offers in-movie food and drink service] a lot, but I’m not really down with that whole layout. I’ve got a living room. I want to go to a movie theater. I don’t want to re-create my living room.” Tarantino said he has no intention of saving the Cinerama Dome, however, another vintage theater in Los Angeles that closed during the pandemic and faces an uncertain future. Part of the ArcLight Cinemas chain that in April disclosed that it was ceasing operations, the Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 and was designed by Welton Becket & Associates with a curved screen and a geodesic dome for its roof. Some fans have been hoping Tarantino might buy it and preserve it, because he featured it in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, but he said he thinks someone else will come along. “It’s not like they are going to demolish the Cinerama Dome,” he said. “Somebody’s going to buy it. There are so many different options that could work out. I’m not that worried about it, to tell you the truth.” Ed Gunts

8 News

The Architect’s Newspaper

Block Change Developers see new tools as keys to equitable development. Even for multiblock, city-defining developments, blueprints often merely represent best-laid plans. The reams of traditional visuals and data used to describe bold real estate projects—square footage, cost, economic impact, and assorted dimensions and proportions—don’t really communicate the true impact such projects can have on neighborhoods and cities, leaving an incomplete picture when such proposals are evaluated. That’s why a new breed of data-focused tools and tool kits are being used to change how development is measured and reshape what’s ultimately built. With new ways to track and evaluate social and sustainable impacts, designers, planners, and architects can bring more rigor, and ultimately achieve better results, to urban design. “Bringing the qualitative and quantitative together is where a lot of urban design resides,” said Mary Anne Ocampo, a principal and urban designer at Sasaki, the interdisciplinary design and architecture firm. The practice just launched an updated Density Atlas, a collection of diverse urban case studies measuring population density, building size, and floor area ratio, among other characteristics, to help planners, architects, and developers understand how different facets of density affect design and cost. Sasaki inherited the project from famed MIT urbanism professor Tunney Lee, who passed away last year, and relaunched it this past spring. “The intersection of financial investment, climate change responsibility, and equitable and just cities is very key,” Ocampo said. “The Density Atlas provides tools to help quantify these components.” Breaking down preconceptions of what density means into standard measurements at the same scale, the Atlas aims to create a common language around the impact of how buildings are arranged. While planners tend to look at population density to determine the need for certain city services, realtors and developers may focus on dwelling unit density to understand sellable or rentable square feet. This global directory of urban neighborhoods, which covers the block, neighborhood, and city scale, helps practitioners understand how planning and massing can affect a design project. “It doesn’t solve everything, but metrics can be useful to compare different aspects of new communities,” Ocampo said. She added that density lends itself to this kind of tool because without a common understanding of exactly what one is talking about, the term can be misleading. Combining measurement tools such as floor area ratio and neighborhood scale allows for more common denominators, an especially important element when presenting projects to community groups and local leaders, who often prioritize neighborhood character and preservation and fear the impacts of increased capacity and population. Sasaki has just begun to use the tool in its own planning processes and hopes it will help the firm arrive at a shared understanding with stakeholders. Density, for all its different dimensions, is a relatively easy concept to quantify compared with inclusivity. Canadian impact development company DREAM, which has a portfolio of $10 billion spanning Europe and North America, believes it can, in the words of head of real estate finance and de-

COURTESY ZIBI

COURTESY DESIGNING JUSTICE + DESIGNING SPACES

DAVID SCHALLIOL

Top: The Zibi waterfront development in Gatineau, Quebec Middle: Scenes from one of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces’ workshops Bottom: A screengrab from Density Atlas, an online tool partly developed by Sasaki

velopment Tsering Yangki, “make sure measurement and money are married together” and find how to track and increase important social performance metrics. The vehicle for change, the firm’s first annual impact report, seeks to track and improve progress on community, health, and wellness goals within its ongoing 34-acre multiuse ZIBI project, which straddles the Ottawa-Quebec provincial border.

The project has been in the works for years, in part owing to zoning challenges and protests over the land’s sacredness among indigenous communities. As the mini-city grows, DREAM will measure three key metrics: affordability, environmental sustainability, and inclusivity. Per Pino Di Mascio, head of impact strategy and delivery, the latter is the most challenging measure. Creating communities where people

have more social interaction and are happier in their environments can be hard to quantify and measure, said Di Mascio, especially without overstepping privacy boundaries. The report analyzes job creation among different groups, especially women-led firms, and attempts to map social interaction and gauge community happiness. DREAM also hopes to preserve the site’s connection to the Algonquin tribe and provide employment for the Algonquin Anishinaabe nation. Going forward, the development will make sure larger residential buildings, the first of which should open next year, include 30 percent affordable units and explicitly measure—via surveys and staff interviews—how common rooms are booked and utilized and how different social strata are interacting. The goal, according to Di Mascio, is to go beyond property management and focus on community curation, with additional employed positions dedicated to the social well-being of the project. “With impact investing, you should have data-driven answers about where you’re investing so you’re investing money where you can achieve social good,” Di Mascio said. That aspect of feedback is key to the work of Deanna Van Buren, a noted restorative-justice advocate and prison abolitionist who runs her own Oakland, California, design firm, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. The studio’s projects often rely on a series of toolkits originally geared toward incorporating the feedback of prisoners into the design of correctional facilities. (Van Buren once taught a course in a Pennsylvania facility.) The scope of these tool kits, meant to help architects design new community centers and spaces for nonprofits by tapping into the needs and experiences of those whom these spaces serve, has since expanded into different areas, including designing spaces for survivors of violence. There’s even a tool kit meant to help developers learn new ways to finance these unorthodox projects. “We don’t often talk with users, often just the people in charge,” Van Buren said about architects and the design process. “That’s not really visionary.” Van Buren argues that these series of exercises and activities—including creating paper and physical models and collecting images in a collage to communicate the values of a new space—can help close the design literacy gap, a crucial barrier to more community involvement and feedback. “We live and work and play in architecture, and the fact that nobody knows how to use it as a powerful tool to achieve outcome and results is problematic,” she said. “We have to take responsibility for the fact that people don’t understand these things.” For Van Buren, this kind of engagement with those most directly affected by a new project is an example of co-learning within the development process, in which the designers and users educate one another. She advocates these steps for any design project. If it’s impossible to improve what one doesn’t measure, perhaps it’s impossible to design for a community without designing with a community. “Don’t do it to be warm and fuzzy,” said Van Buren. “Do it so you won’t get it wrong.” Patrick Sisson

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10 News

The Architect’s Newspaper

Middle Waters

Exhibit Columbus explores the interconnected ecosystems and built environments of the Mississippi watershed.

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

DAVID SCHALLIOL

Top: The End of the Mississippi River in Port Eads Middle: A community garden in Columbus, Indiana Bottom: A residential area meets industrial agriculture in Minnesota

In the minds of many coast dwellers, the American middle exists only in reference to their own condition: flyovers, breadbaskets. Middleness isn’t a state of being in and of itself but rather an aberrated refraction of the coasts’ sparkling prisms. For those who live in the middle, their existence and identities are fractured between geography, industry, and policy, while being outwardly lumped into regionalisms: the Midwest, the heartland. At this year’s Exhibit Columbus (Indiana, that is), which runs from August 21 to November 28, curators Mimi Zeiger and Iker Gil chose the curatorial theme New Middles to explore the conditions of middle places and middleness itself. Zeiger and Gil define the middle by the Mississippi watershed: the 2,350-mile-long river drained by tributaries that occupy 1.2 million square miles, across 32 states. Though the exhibition will address broader themes within the watershed, like indigenous and Black histories in Columbus’s regional past, several of this year’s participants are addressing the watershed itself as an ecological condition of the middle. By doing so, Exhibit Columbus is positing that the characteristics of middleness describe an interconnectedness of ecosystems controlled by structures, systems, and ideologies that govern the built environment. “We’re thinking of the watershed as both something real and as a metaphor,” said Zeiger. “Columbus is connected to the Flat River, to the Ohio River, then to the Mississippi, so the interconnection to the watershed is literal. And given that what happens upstream is connected to what happens downstream, there's a metaphor of interconnection.” Occupying only a sliver of this region, Columbus’s 30-square mile footprint and its stock of notable modernist architecture become a starting point for dissecting the watershed itself, as well as metaphoric connections between the city and surrounding ecosystems of land and water, and infrastructure to maintain them. The 2021 Exhibit Columbus Photography Fellows, Virginia Hanusik and David Schalliol, work at opposite ends of the watershed—Hanusik in New Orleans and Schalliol in Minneapolis—but both explore how ongoing systems development (infrastructure, flood plains, food systems, etc.) connects middle dwellers across multiple regions. Their work at Exhibit Columbus will be displayed in storefronts, on garage doors, and in alleyways throughout the city. Hanusik’s photographs are striking contrasts between the monumental scale of water management infrastructure on the southern coast of Louisiana and the gentle landscapes in which it sits. An image of weathered wooden needles from the Bonnet Carré Spillway or of an industrial canal levee memorial plaque placed in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina points to the heavily engineered, albeit extremely fragile, objects that regulate environments—and are increasingly failing to do so under climate change. “I’m creating these projects as a means of understanding the landscape and the larger issues around climate change and landscape transformation,” said Hanusik. “I started these projects that focus on the architecture and infrastructure of the region as a way to see them as symbols of our

values and how we organize space.” For the exhibition, Hanusik expanded her body of work beyond the Gulf Coast. She traveled north to photograph Decatur County, Indiana (which abuts Columbus’s Bartholomew County), as a way of pointing toward upstream challenges like farmland runoff contaminating the Mississippi River, which creates “dead zones” for sea life in the Gulf; her photographs of Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers remind viewers of dammed or leveed waterways that protect upriver farmland at the expense of communities near and far. Watershed infrastructure, she posits, dictates what—and who—bears the brunt of worsening flooding, and what (or who) is worth maintaining. “I'm thinking about how these decisions around water management, as they relate to agriculture, infrastructure, and logistics— how those decisions way far upstream have consequences the farther down that you go,” said Hanusik. “The project is about the ways that the Mississippi River has been altered and controlled over time and how we’re feeling those impacts in Louisiana now.” Derek Hoeferlin, architect and Exhibit Columbus University Design Research Fellow, also examines the scale of human impact on the watershed with Tracing Our Mississippi, an interactive installation and public programming series that expands upon his ongoing watershed atlas research project. The atlas displays systems like dams, levees, and transmission lines layered upon other sets of information like forested areas, contested lands, and resource extraction landscapes. “Ultimately, the themes narrate complicated issues across the Mississippi watershed at multiple scales and emphasize one objective: the relentless control of the Mississippi’s landscapes for developmental gain,” said Hoeferlin in his 2020 Exhibit Columbus Design Presentation. “Derek has certain tools to talk about the vastness of the watershed and about infrastructure,” said Gil. “Everything there is now basically an artificial environment. How has that system changed the relationship between the communities and the river—and who has won? Who hasn’t?” Both Hanusik and Hoeferlin are exposing one peculiarity of middleness: While the middle is a place that relies on natural systems, it is constantly at odds with those systems. The result is a heavily controlled environment, perhaps made unnatural by a century of “progress” that has, in turn, shaped future conditions. “I’m looking at the idea that there are no natural disasters anymore,” added Hanusik. “They are human engineered, directly or indirectly—products of policy that we have formulated over time.” Schalliol’s work also addresses those controlled systems but instead focuses on how those systems produce interconnected landscapes and identities among middle inhabitants. His images of a community garden in Columbus show women crouched in the landscape, planting seedlings at dusk. “It was one of these places where people give so much love and care and attention to,” said Schalliol. Yet he doesn’t see this scene simply as a pastoral moment; rather, it is a result of the same controlled waterways and logistics systems expressed in Hanusik’s infrastructure portraits. “The way that the community garden provides access to healthy food—foods

11 News that might not otherwise readily be available—these are all ways that people want to create new possibilities in the context of a world in which food insecurity is a major problem, in part because of the complexities of the supply chains that drive industrial agriculture,” he added. Photographs of massive feedlots in the Texas panhandle juxtaposed against small, community-supported agriculture in Minnesota are, in his lens, products of the same system with vastly different outcomes, speaking

July/August 2021

to the middle’s different yet interwoven relationships with the environment, agriculture, and labor. These projects serve New Middles not only to illustrate the myriad ways the watershed is experienced from its north to south ends, but also to speak to what Zeiger calls the plurality of middle identity. “The many middles that make up the watershed are strong enough in their own right,” said Zeiger, “that sense of multiple selves in solidarity with other cities in the middle, using culture to tell multiple narratives.”

Multiple identities, narratives, and experiences of these development systems that manipulate, enforce, and fail color the middle as a united front. Solidarity, then, becomes a force for the middle’s future, particularly as middle cities turn their energies and investments back toward their waterways. As we see places like Columbus, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Chicago pour enormous development efforts into revitalizing riverfronts within the Mississippi River watershed, Exhibit Columbus presents an opportunity to

root those efforts in a grander context, beyond “amazing real estate opportunities,” postindustrialization, or placemaking. The exhibition is beginning those difficult conversations about considering our neighbors—no matter how far away—in such endeavors. “Exhibitions are almost an excuse for other things to happen,” said Gil. “Exhibit Columbus is that format to have those complicated conversations, but also is beginning to point at the foreseeable future.” Anjulie Rao

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

This page: For her Exhibit Columbus project, photography fellow Virginia Hanusik also traveled to Decatur County, Indiana, northwest of Columbus.

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12 News

The Architect’s Newspaper

Fall Guy

Who was William Friedman, the mystery man who designed Champlain Towers South? continued from front page Both Friedman’s

firm and Breiterman Jurado are out of business, the former inactive since before Friedman’s death despite listings in several unofficial business directories, the latter involuntarily dissolved in 1988. Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) lists Friedman’s license as “null and void,” expiring in 2005. Messages left at a number listed for Friedman & Associates were not returned. Defunct firms can be easy scapegoats, and deceased architects are not in a position to defend themselves. The scarcity of public information about Friedman, moreover, leaves him exposed to the kinds of conjectures that inevitably follow major disasters. His obituary in the Miami Herald emphasizes his hobbies and sociability as much as his work; he graduated from a major university’s architecture program (BArch, University of Florida, 1953) but kept a relatively low professional profile. “We have no record of William Friedman as a member and haven’t heard anything anecdotally from members with reference to him,” reported Vicki L. Long, CAE, Hon. AIA, executive vice president and CEO of AIA Florida. He was also unknown to the national organization. “Mr. Friedman was never an AIA National member,” said Matt Tinder, AIA’s senior manager for media relations. “AIA National does not have any records or information about him.” Emporis lists five buildings designed by Friedman: three in the Champlain Towers complex (the now-demolished South, 1981; North, 1981; and East, 1994); Mirage on the Ocean (1995) in Surfside; and James Central Towers (1968) in Miami Beach. Representatives of these buildings’ real estate offices did not reply to inquiries about Friedman by press time. One of the rare references to Friedman in public documents is a cryptic decision from October 25, 1966, in which Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal denied his petition to overturn the Board of Architecture’s six-month suspension of his registration, for causes not specified. The court found that one of two counts against him was “properly and sufficiently proven,” rejected the other count, and imposed a “new and proper suspension order in accordance with his conviction under Count One.” DBPR has located an 86-page file on this case, reported deputy communications director Patrick R. Fargason, representing the Board of Architecture. DBPR’s policy for release of such records includes internal review and redaction of nonpublic information, completed shortly before press time; the department accordingly provided the file to this reporter. The file on Friedman comprises correspondence and legal documents pertaining to his suspension, reinstatement, initial licensing, and related matters. The charge against him that stuck concerned a commercial building at 2625 Southwest 22nd Street in Miami whose sign pylons did not meet Dade County code and collapsed during a hurricane in September 1965, as did components of two other Friedman buildings, one commercial sign pylon and one residential roof. A board hearing on May 20, 1966, with legal counsel present, unanimously found Friedman guilty of “gross incompetency,” dismissing five

PUBLIC DOMAIN/MIAMI-DADE FIRE RESCUE DEPARTMENT

The aftermath of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida, in late June

other counts in nonunanimous decisions, including the one invalidated by the District Court of Appeal, and suspended his license. He appealed for reinstatement to the Florida Supreme Court, which dismissed his appeal on April 6, 1967. After a final appeal failed, he was suspended from June 1 to December 1, 1967. A vaguer but potentially more troubling item is an anonymous whistleblower letter to the board dated November 1, 1967, and retyped in the board’s office. Authored by “a graduate architect working in a local office,” this letter assails 12 local architects as “persons whose only interest is to make a fast buck and who do not care about the dignity of their profession. It has come to my attention, and I understand it is common knowledge between builders and ‘professional designers,’ that the following persons will seal any set of plans that you bring them,” writes the correspondent, before offering a nonalphabetized list of names. William Friedman’s appears at the top. The whistleblower also charges two of them (not including Friedman) with advertising, a practice banned at the time by the AIA. An April 8, 1963, letter from board executive secretary W. Richard Glavin regarding a Friedman employee’s intent to sit for the state exam notes that “Friedman was at one time called before the Board for possible plan stamping.” Glavin’s file memo of March 28, 1963, describes informal inquiries about Friedman among Miami architects; he found no information but noted that he would keep checking. An April 11, 1955, letter to Friedman from another board official (secretary-treasurer Mellen C. Greeley) regarding his certificate of registration, shortly after he passed the junior exam in January of that year (having failed on his first attempt in June 1954), includes this admonition: “Your attention is directed to the rules regarding use of a seal. This information has been sent

you previously but we will be glad to answer any questions you may care to ask.” The portrait that emerges from these documents suggests that the board had Friedman on its radar over these offenses for several years before taking action against him. Structural engineer Allyn Kilsheimer, based in Washington, D.C., and contracted by the city of Surfside to investigate the collapse site and the sister tower Champlain Towers North, has examined the Champlain South construction documents (available in public records) and is reluctant to single out Friedman for culpability. “I know nothing about him, and I’ve learned nothing about him at all, and I’ve never heard of him before,” Kilsheimer said. “All I have are the drawings he prepared.” Having worked in building design, construction, and collapse forensics for five decades, Kilsheimer recalls “the kind of drawings we would get from architects” in the era when Champlain South and North were built. “The drawings that I saw from him, if I compare them to what I remember we were seeing 40 years ago, it’s pretty much the level of drawings that we would see at that point in time.... Back then a lot was left up to the contractor to make decisions on, but that’s how it was done at the time.” Champlain South was “a conventional mild-steel-reinforced flat-plate concrete building ... and our office probably did a hundred of them back in that era,” Kilsheimer said. In that setting, “you have to meet the 1979 Southern Building Code, which is what this building was designed under, and it is not nearly as specific about many, many things as today’s codes are.... I remember seeing some drawings back then where you’d see an elevation of the building, and it would say, ‘facade by contractor.’ That isn’t what this guy said. He gave a lot more information than that.” Responses to building collapses (partic-

ularly by lawyers), Kilsheimer observed, if not attributable to “a God-driven structural failure,” often target an architect because the structural engineer was the architect’s consultant. “I’d love to blame architects for as many things as I possibly can,” Kilsheimer said, “but I don’t see how you would blame the architect if his structural engineer made a mistake.” At the Champlain South site, as investigations continue and commentators direct spotlights toward the developers, the condo association, former Surfside building inspector Rosendo Prieto, and even a U.S. Navy offshore test explosion 250 miles north, near Daytona Beach, conjectures about responsibility remain premature. Kilsheimer refrained from blaming members of either profession. South Florida’s long-standing reputation for regulatory capture during its 1980s building boom, locals note, was not built solely on detective novels or episodes of Miami Vice. This is a region where developers and civic officials are chummy enough that a well-connected construction firm (Munilla Construction Management) implicated in the multifatality collapse of a pedestrian bridge near Florida International University in 2018, and subsequently bankrupted, can then be awarded a major airport contract as if nothing went wrong. Surfside is not Miami, however. The small North Beach city (population 5,725) has been described as wealthy and sleepy. Whether its scale and profile are conducive to narratives of malfeasance will remain unknown for some time, though this may not forestall attempts to connect the dots. Efforts either to connect Friedman substantively to the tragedy or to ascertain whether he is being inaccurately censured for it will be hampered by the shortage of dots he left to connect. Bill Millard

14 Obit

The Architect’s Newspaper

That Man from São Paulo Historian Jean-Louis Cohen remembers Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the legendary Brazilian architect, who died in May at 92. Out of 681 projects submitted in 1971 to the competition for Paris’s Centre Beaubourg, 10 received a prize from the jury, with a single 1 coming from the Southern Hemisphere. The proposal, for a striking concrete volume hovering over the ground, belonged to a young Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who had built Brazil’s pavilion at the Osaka world expo the year before. Conceived as a monumental frame in the historic center of the French capital, the Beaubourg scheme also channeled the ideals of São Paulo’s modernists, as perhaps best embodied by João Batista Vilanova Artigas’s Faculty of Architecture, completed in 1969. Banned from teaching at that school by the military regime after the 1964 coup, Mendes da Rocha developed in his practice a close relationship with Brazil’s largest metropolis that lasted until his death in May of this year. So strong was his connection to the city and its culture that I often referred to him as “that man from São Paulo,” a nod to the Technicolor film That Man from Rio, in which Jean-Paul Belmondo walks on a tightrope high above the construction site of Brasília. Operating in an inconspicuous office located a stone’s throw from Oscar Niemeyer’s lyrical and majestic Copan building, Paulinho—as he was affectionately called— had an intimate knowledge of the city, as I experienced on multiple occasions, walking in his company in the streets of the center, or driving in the sprawling neighborhoods in search of his early buildings, which literally dot the landscapes of the metropolis. On these trajectories, he shared not only his subtle readings of São Paulo’s geographic features but also his views on the buildings of his colleagues, from Vilanova Artigas to Fábio Penteado. Born in 1928 on the coast, north of Rio de Janeiro, in Vitória, the capital of the small state of Espírito Santo, to a father who was a distinguished civil engineer, Mendes da Rocha studied at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo. There he rapidly established a reputation on the strength of his 1958 arena for the Clube Atlético, a disk of concrete carrying a light metal roof set on top of a layer of training facilities. From that project on, he explored at every scale the spatial and lyrical potential of this ubiquitous material of modernity, for which he imagined an alternative strategy using vertical elements, from pillars to walls—breaking from both the obsession with the skeleton frame deriving from Auguste Perret and the fixation on thin shells typical of Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, and other architects of the Carioca School. In the domestic realm, the house Mendes da Rocha built for himself in 1967 in the Butantã district of São Paulo, today absorbed in a dense jungle, was a manifesto pleading for the versatility of concrete; in addition to playing a load-bearing role, the material is imaginatively applied in the suspended sliding doors and central hearth. No other architect has been more inspired by Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette, which was designed top down, from the roof to the ground. Beginning with his Brazilian Sculpture Museum—or MuBE—completed in 1995, Mendes da Rocha’s buildings were most often conceived as overwhelming frames, under which the main spaces are

REUTERS / AL AMY STOCK PHOTO

Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2006, was among the finest architects of his generation.

deployed. Other projects such as the Quay of Arts in Vitória (2007) appear to levitate, generating generous open areas at grade. The exploration of what large containers can host in the metropolis is also the theme of his SESC—or Social Service of Commerce—24 de Maio in São Paulo, a powerful work of urban infrastructure completed in 2017. Responding to a program that had seen its best interpretation 30 years earlier in Lina Bo Bardi’s Pompéia scheme, he imagined an extraordinary mille-feuille of uses in what is probably his most refined

sectional parti, culminating in a rooftop swimming pool in which the users become the masters of the skyline. An unrepentant leftist, Mendes da Rocha was committed to the idea of architecture understood as a public service. The most ambitious among Mendes da Rocha’s designs saw him observing and strategizing the transformation of vast areas, from the valleys surrounding São Paulo to even larger territories. This facet of his practice was anchored in an acute perception of the New World’s relationship to history

and nature, he wrote in a 2000 article: “In the Americas, our eyes turn toward the notion of building cities in nature, establishing new rationales about the state of the waters, plains and mountains, the spatiality of a continent, new horizons for our imagination with respect to the shape and ingenuity of the things we are destined to build.” In 2023 the Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos, Portugal, to which Mendes da Rocha gifted his archive, will host a retrospective exhibition dedicated to his entire oeuvre. Jean-Louis Cohen

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16 Crit

The Architect’s Newspaper

Learning from Margaritaville What the themed resort chain’s brand-new Times Square location tells us about ourselves. It is a truth known to all architecture and design critics that there are some buildings and projects so complex, so richly textured, so incomprehensibly layered, that they require more than one visit to be fully absorbed, understood, described. It is a truth known to me—and now to you—that Margaritaville Resort Times Square, which officially started taking reservations on July 12, is one such project. When I got this assignment, I pictured Margaritaville as having its own valence, its own gravity. But the first time I walked by, I was on my way from somewhere in Times Square to somewhere south of Times Square, heading down 7th Avenue, when my eye caught a particularly bland stretch of building, all gray panels, a tiny set of doors. I thought about how much New York has changed—how you can’t tell what anything is anymore, how it’s all flat frontage and nothing to see here. It wasn’t until I saw a sandwich sign advertising Volcano Nachos that I looked up, saw a much bigger sign, and realized that despite absolutely no visual street-level indication whatsoever, this was in fact Margaritaville, a 32-story tower complete with 234 guest rooms and a two-story restaurant. It wasn’t clear how to get in; it wasn’t clear if anyone ever got out. The first time I actually went in, which was my second time going by, I convinced my friend S, a design editor and writer, to meet me there. It was she who was able to talk us into the lobby by telling the very confused door person that we were definitely meeting a friend upstairs and could we just go in—yes?—even though the friend could technically come out to meet us and also that we’d forgotten our room keys, because, really, we were staying here. It’s been about 14 years since I’ve talked my way into anywhere, and there was no way I could have gotten in without her. Security at Margaritaville is tight, apparently (though not that tight). The doorman sent us up to the seventh floor, which we accessed through a tiny ground-floor labyrinthine hallway featuring some vaguely nautical-themed decor, like a big chain (from a boat?) resting on a pale wood table against a navy (get it?) blue background. The (small) elevator opened onto a hotel lobby furnished with cabana-style seating with pictures of parrots on the wall. When I tell someone from Ohio (apparently Jimmy Buffett central) that I’m writing about Margaritaville, he says that Jimmy Buffett fans are really into parrots— so much so that, he tells me, they’re called Parrotheads. The more you know, etc. There is also a (empty) bar called Euphoria, and a coffee stand that the apologetic concierge says is the only thing open. We got our iced coffees and drank them overlooking the rooftop pool complete with beach chairs that line a stretch of terrace just above the atriumlike restaurant and overlooking 41st Street. It, too, was empty, but it looked like a lovely place to have a midtown swim. The second time I went was by myself. I walked into the second of the two ground-level entrances and up a very long escalator. I think there was a sign that said, “Welcome to Margaritaville.” Either way, a lot of people said it. The host stand, which takes up about 89 percent of the visual space, was also vaguely nautical; there were ropes and wood and something that looked sort of like a sail. The seven people working

behind the stand were all very excited that I was there for a table for one. I ordered a taco salad and started thinking about why someone would operate such a resort. Not being a businessperson by nature, I don’t really understand how it cost $400 million to build what feels pretty anodyne: the floor was engineered wood, the chair I sat on wasn’t particularly comfortable, and the tiki bar definitely had fake straw. A lot of the money had to have gone into the real estate, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 7th Avenue and 41st Street, and maybe to the Statue of Liberty, which, my host told me, “does a show” every hour. I did not stay long enough to see the show, but I’m sure it’s tremendous. Many years ago, I taught an undergraduate American studies lecture class on themescapes. The idea, so far as I can recall, was that themed environments do something very specific for us as a North American culture. They sort of concentrate and articulate shared fears and desires. Maybe there’s something about the simulacrum in there. Themed environments, like the Rainforest Café, or now Margaritaville, offer a concentrated vision of an idealized otherness—a way for visitors to travel somewhere without ever having to go anywhere, a way for U.S. citizens to imagine, and have imagined for us, a life that is not like ours, all while, of course, it is exactly like ours. (Vegas Paris is as Paris as Paris, maybe even more so.) As I sit here in the middle of the restaurant and finish this draft, I wonder what shared fears and desires might be articulated here, in the dummy parrot perched above the tiki bar sign, in the long sweeping teal banquette, in the six-tops, each of which displays the phrase “I just had to go back to the island.” I wonder how many people here are Jimmy Buffett fans and how many of them came for the Statue of Liberty show. I wonder what the guy with the fashy haircut is doing here. My server, Craig, is really nice, and concerned about how little of the taco salad I’ve eaten. It feels like everyone else here, drinking daiquiris at the bar and, of course, margaritas at the tables at 12:30 p.m., is definitely not from New York but also could only be from New York. I guess that’s the thing about New York: its division into fiefdoms, the way in which we culturally communicate with each other. Why is it so weird that I had lunch at Margaritaville, when I like nachos and taco salads and spend a lot of time in Midtown? What if it weren’t? I still don’t know where the $400 million went, not really, but I’m glad that a place like this exists. The restaurant is big, and not that noisy and the ceilings are high and the windows are huge and it’s fun to watch the people outside walk past Yankee Doodle Dandy’s and Smoke City (“We sell the best hookahs in town”) and come out of and go into the 42nd Street subway station. I guess the thing about Margaritaville that I’ve learned after two very careful and very observant visits is that we never really know why anyone does anything, but we might as well try to enjoy it. Eva Hagberg

EVA HAGBERG

Top: The restaurant at Margaritaville Resort Times Square features a copy of the Statue of Liberty. Above: The tiki bar is replete with exotic plants and a dummy parrot.

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18 Op-ed

The Architect’s Newspaper

Treasure Island

The Governors Island rezoning is Bill de Blasio’s good-bye gift to real estate.

COURTESY W X Y ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN/BLOOMIMAGES

New York City Council approved the rezoning of Governors Island in May. The plan includes a “climate solutions center,” whose exact purpose is unclear. Pictured: An early sketch of the center by WXY

At the end of May the New York City Council approved the rezoning of Governors Island to permit additional development, up to 3.77 million square feet of building on 34 acres of land. With the majority of that land currently devoted to parks and public recreation, Governors Island is one of the last undeveloped places in New York, but not for long. The matter of rezoning has been hotly contested by public groups ever since Mayor Bill de Blasio floated the idea a year ago. Roger Manning, cofounder of the Metro Area Governors Island Coalition (known as MAGIC), which has fought the rezoning plan, was dispirited by the council’s decision. In his eyes, “the Mayor, the Trust for Governors Island, and the City Council have sold out an irreplaceable one-of-a-kind public space … in exchange for another high-rise, high-density, privately occupied urban district with value-added landscaping.” Manning also called into question the notion that Governors Island rezoning is tied to a grander vision for fighting climate change, as de Blasio now suggests. He isn’t wrong to be skeptical: The recent rezonings of the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn and Soho/Noho in Manhattan were likewise pitched by the mayor as progressive measures—in those cases, to stake out affordable housing in exclusive white enclaves. Instead, the policy has spurred more luxury housing, with only a limited number of below-market units. The city’s next mayor (in all probability, Democrat Eric Adams) will almost certainly capitalize on the rezonings to kickstart a stalled real estate machine. But Governors Island is not Soho, nor is it Gowanus. Located in the East River near Brooklyn and the southern tip of Manhattan, it is untethered from both. New York City’s European settlers first seized it for use as an army redoubt, a function it would retain until the end of the millennium, at which point

the federal government designated much of the surrounds as parkland. New York City took control of the island in 2003, and later, in 2010, it created the nonprofit Trust for Governors Island to manage its operations. Regular ferry service from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn exposed New Yorkers to the island’s charms, and it quickly became a site for environmental and artistic innovation. Yet even before the city assumed possession of the island, a succession of mayors flirted with grand real estate dreams that could have turned it into an extension of Wall Street. They struggled to justify the huge public subsidies that would be required to build the requisite urban infrastructure, however. City Hall and investors were ultimately more interested in the hot (and also subsidized) deals available in Manhattan, like the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s trophy development at Hudson Yards. Then came Bill de Blasio. In two terms in office, he was bruised by rezoning battles in places like East New York and East Harlem, where his proposed upzonings faced stiff opposition; he pushed them through, but at the expense of his progressive credibility. Yet City Hall could see that Governors Island had no housing or residents to protest and lots of land that could be opened up to profitable development. De Blasio’s deputy mayor Alicia Glen called it “a nice piece of real estate,” and her successor Vicky Been anointed it a part of the mayor’s “economic recovery plan.” First introduced in 2018 and refloated during the height of the pandemic, the Governors Island rezoning plan passed just as the city began lifting restrictions on public gatherings in restaurants and businesses but not public hearings. (Attendance for the decisive May 2021 hearing was limited.) The City Council passed it over opposition from Community Board 1 in Manhattan (the island

is under the board’s jurisdiction) and civic groups like MAGIC that instead argued for expanding activities related to environmental improvement. With characteristic high-handedness, the City Planning Commission gave a token nod to the opposition by approving a slight reduction in the maximum floor area allowed, just enough to draw some praise from retiring City Council member Margaret Chin but strong criticism from her replacement, City Council member–elect Christopher Marte, who altogether opposed the rezoning. Even with this reduction, the rezoning opens the door to almost 4 million square feet of new building, not quite on par with earlier real estate dreams but still plenty. This buildable area would be concentrated on the southern end of the island in what is supposed to become a Climate Solutions Center. In late June, de Blasio and the Trust for Governors Island issued a request for expressions of interest, inviting universities and research institutions to establish an anchor institution at the center. De Blasio framed the competition in the language of land-use optimization: “Governors Island is a crown jewel of this city—a place where families, workers and students have come to enjoy a beautiful landscape with spectacular views of the greatest city in the world. But we can get more out of this unique space.” Manning, of MAGIC, points out how less than one-third of the 3.77 million square feet will be allotted to the construction of a climate research hub, which isn’t legally required in any event. Moreover, de Blasio will have left office by the time the request for expressions of interest is followed up by a request for proposals; his successor could broadly redefine “climate solutions” to mean “green buildings.” The approved zoning use is already designated as commercial, and that could cover a wide range of for-profit activities only tangentially related to climate solu-

tions or entirely unrelated. Future developers could always go back to the city and request a variance or zoning change to suit their needs, falling back on the time-tested argument that the existing zoning is valid but too limiting to spur private investment. Governors Island may be heading in the direction of Roosevelt Island, another unique New York site reclaimed for the benefit of developers, but we shouldn’t lose track of the city’s record of neglect toward its smaller islands, including Hart and Rikers. There is also its centuries-long legacy of industrial contamination, toxic landfilling, and pollution of natural in-water habitats. The city should not be proud that it took federal intervention to stop ocean dumping and build 12 wastewater treatment plants. Nor can it forget that its combined sewer system still discharges directly into the waterways. Governors Island could help reset our relationship with both land and water, but its rezoning will make that much more difficult. Despite all that, Governors Island could still be the site of an expanded composting effort, engaging community and environmental justice groups and developing educational and pilot programs that bring greater awareness and resources to the task of combating climate change and healing the earth. This could integrate research and action in a way that seriously confronts the challenges of sea level rise and repairs the fraught relationships between land, water, and human activity. Only the status quo stands in the way. It would be a tragic irony if sea level rise and storm surges were to be the final arbiter that annuls all development on Governors Island for good. Tom Angotti is professor emeritus of urban policy and planning, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and coeditor of Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City (UR Books, 2017).

AUGUST 25-28, 2021

REFORM İZMİR / TURKEY

20 In Construction

The Architect’s Newspaper

Mies, Again

Thomas Phifer and Partners revives an unbuilt Mies van der Rohe project in Indiana.

Architect: Thomas Phifer and Partners Location: Bloomington, Indiana Structural Engineer: SOM MEP Engineer: Cosentini Associates General Contractor: CDI Glazing: Viracon Structural Steel: MAK Steel Windows: Waltek Limestone: Indiana Limestone Fabricators Terrazzo: Santarossa Mosaic and Tile Co. Indiana University (IU) is something of an architectural menagerie. The past century brought considerable change to its Romanesque-inflected Bloomington campus through the incursion of numerous modernist or Brutalist buildings by the likes of I. M. Pei and Alvin M. Strauss. Now the campus is about to wrap up a Mies van der Rohe–designed, but Thomas Phifer and Partners–executed, academic hall built in accordance with recently discovered drawings dating from 1952. The 10,000-square-foot project will house offices for the nearby Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design and anchor the northeast corner of the campus. For Thomas Phifer and Partners, a New York firm whose early work was done in a modernist register, keeping faithful to Mies’s design was paramount. “We did not want to change the proportions of anything: the structural steel, glass, or the floor system depth,” said founding principal Thomas Phifer. “We had the drawings, but also undertook an incredible amount of research into other Mies projects”—like the Farnsworth House and Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, as well as the Bacardi Building in Mexico City—“and assembled a catalogue of their materials and how they were detailed.” The IU project is an outlier in the modernist doyen’s extraordinary stateside career. Mies conceived of the design alongside that of the canonical Farnsworth House, located outside Chicago. It’s not surprising, then, that the two projects have a few similarities. For example, both use white-painted structural steel to support two seemingly floating horizontal planes and both deploy an ultra-transparent window wall system. But there are also differences, mostly having to do with size, with the IU pavilion originally intended to house a university fraternity chapter rather than a single nephrologist. While Farnsworth went on to worldwide acclaim, the frat house was ultimately shelved (for reasons that are unclear) and the drawings and plans presumed lost. That is, until IU alumnus and former fraternity member Sidney Eskenazi notified university president Michael A. McRobbie of their existence. With Eskenazi’s $20 million commitment to build the project in hand, the university set to work finding the original drawings, which were hidden deep in the archival stacks of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Phifer was already working on an IU campus building project, the Ferguson International Center, when his firm was approached about reviving the Mies design. (Van der Rohe’s grandson Dirk Lohan, also an architect, gave his blessing.) Unsurprisingly, given the project’s provenance, structure is placed front and center here. So it is perhaps fitting that SOM’s Chicago office—which adopted the Miesian idiom even while the master was still alive— was brought on to the team as structural

COURTESY INDIANA UNIVERSIT Y CAPITAL PL ANNING & FACILITIES

Top: Indiana University’s architecture department will soon be housed in a building designed by Mies van der Rohe but posthumously realized. Above: The project, which is located on the northwest corner of IU’s Bloomington campus, was originally intended for a fraternity.

21 In Construction engineer. The 60-foot-wide by 140-foot-long project rises just over 8 feet from a grid of slender pilotis embedded within a concrete mat foundation. The “ground” floor is largely open to the elements but includes an enclosed circulation space servicing the primary volume above, and it will ultimately be paved with limestone flooring. Each structural bay is 20 feet by 30 feet, and the rectangular volume cantilevers 10 feet at either end. Construction has proceeded at a rapid clip since the project was first announced at the tail end of 2019, largely owing to the degree of planning behind the fabrication and erection of the steel structure and window system. “Given the close relationship between structure and window frame, the steel frame had to be fabricated and erected to extremely tight tolerances as glazing went into production without benefit of field dimensions,” said Thomas Phifer and Partners director Stephen Dayton. “In adapting the structure to current seismic code, our structural engineers at SOM devised shop-fabricated connection details that allowed the building to be erected as a kit-of-parts with very little field welding. After a fairly quick erection, the structure had to be adjusted to establish a square and plumb frame for the window system.” The International Style, with its prolific use of single-pane glass, is not well regarded for energy performance. To this end, the design team adapted a steel bar-stock window detailing for the 1-inch-thick and 10-squarefoot insulated glass panels through a slight increase in the mullion stop size. The larger glazing pockets were accommodated by reducing tolerances across the facade. Insulation was added to the 15-inch spandrel channel at the soffit and roof to further boost enclosure performance. The incorporation of thermal breaks was initially considered for the window wall system, but energy modeling by MEP engineering firm Cosentini Associates demonstrated that the unbroken window system complied with Indiana State energy codes. The interior fit-out is no less complex, considering Mies’s predilection for tight infrastructural chases. The building is equipped with a fan-coil heating and cooling system, radiant floor heating, and a central fresh-air ventilation system. “A great challenge for our team was to incorporate modern infrastructure without increasing the 15-inch floor system depth. In fact, we reduced the floor ‘sandwich’ by one inch,” said SOM associate director Ronald Johnson. “The HVAC required a considerable amount of coordination to eliminate infrastructural crossovers and to locate openings within the beams where structurally acceptable.” The building was dedicated in June and is scheduled to be ready by the start of the fall semester. It may be 70 years late, but, hey, it’s a lot of work translating the will of an epoch into built space. Matthew Marani

July/August 2021

COURTESY INDIANA UNIVERSIT Y CAPITAL PL ANNING & FACILITIES

Above: The structural frame rises 8 feet above the semi-exposed ground floor. Left: The rectangular volume cantilevers 10 feet at either end. Below, left: To boost performance, the window wall system includes insulated glass units and insulation at the spandrel channel. Below, right: Each of the insulated glass units measures 10 square feet, and tolerances were reduced across the facade system to maintain Mies’s original proportions.

COURTESY INDIANA UNIVERSIT Y CAPITAL PL ANNING & FACILITIES

Read more at archpaper.com

COURTESY INDIANA UNIVERSIT Y CAPITAL PL ANNING & FACILITIES

22 Studio Visit Renaissance City Redux

The Architect’s Newspaper

Detroit’s Prince Concepts rejuvenates the business of development, while transforming communities in the process.

For nearly every decision that a typical developer might make, Philip Kafka has done the opposite. While many pursued their MBAs at university, Kafka studied philosophy; while others actively minimize risk by investing in areas with high projected turnarounds, Kafka actively courts it, preferring to work in overlooked urban contexts. But Kafka really breaks with his métier on the matter of architectural design, which conventional developers treat as either a flabby indulgence or a branding tool. “Being a developer without believing in architecture and its fundamental principles is like

being religious without believing in God,” Kafka told AN. “It’s taking a site and considering its transformation with a simple, deft hand.” Kafka has the passion of a convert, which makes sense: He is one. Having sold off his first business—a media enterprise—to the Lamar billboard company in 2012, Kafka became intrigued by development and moved to Detroit (he is originally from Texas and worked for years in New York), where, given the city’s low land values, he had the space to find his footing. Focusing his ambitions on Core City, he started Prince Concepts, whose aim, he says, is rehabilitating

overlooked land for the benefit of future buyers and the wider neighborhood alike. Kafka always knew he wanted to work with architects and, acting in the mold of a creative director, seeks out the right partner for each job. Within Detroit, he has called on the talents of architects Edwin Chan and Ish Rafiuddin and landscape architect Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, among others. “Most developers think they are in the business of picking colors, materials, and other minutiae,” Kafka said. “I am in the business of making space.” And business appears to be good: Prince

Concepts has developed over 62,000 square feet of property, the bulk of it vacant, former industrial sites. Capitalizing on his success in the Motor City, Kafka has begun adapting his unique development model to other parts of the country, including north central Texas, where he has engaged Marlon Blackwell Architects on a mixed-use project. But Kafka is careful not to expand too quickly, lest priorities get lost. “We invest in a market instead of creating one,” he said. “We always want to create a good return while also bettering communities.” Shane Reiner-Roth

CHRIS MIELE

23 Studio Visit 1 Core City Park Detroit, 2019

July/August 2021

Designed by landscape architecture firm D.I.R.T Studio, Core City Park transformed a one-time parking lot into a compact “urban woodland” comprising nearly 100 trees and several repurposed elements found within the neighborhood. Its benches, for instance, were sculpted from the concrete walls of a former bank vault in the adjacent Pie Building (another Prince Concepts project), while the remnants of a 19th-century firehouse that once stood on the site form the “islands” on which those benches were placed.

2 The Caterpillar Detroit, 2021

Completed in March with Ish Rafiuddin acting as design architect, the Caterpillar residential development is notable for its use of the Quonset hut, originally conceived in 1941 for the American war effort. For Kafka, the Quonset hut, with its characteristic semi-cylindrical cross section, is a kind of architectural readymade—“a tool”— and its first appearance in the Prince Concepts portfolio dates back to 2016. But with the Caterpillar, Rafiuddin and architect of record Studio Detroit introduced significant refinements to the model, such as skylights and intriguing sectional cuts. Though the structure (which holds six residences and two live/work spaces) is visually unlike anything in its vicinity, Kafka explains that it’s “contextualized by street-facing porches, a common residential feature throughout Detroit, and over 150 trees that will gradually transform the site into a shaded park”—all designed by D.I.R.T. Studio.

JASON KEEN

3 PS1200 Fort Worth, Texas 2022

Prince Concepts’s trademark Quonset huts will soon make their debut in Fort Worth, Texas. Kafka collaborated with the Fayetteville, Arkansas–based firm Marlon Blackwell Architects on the mixed-use PS1200 development, where the huts have been extruded upward, granting each residential unit 20-foot-high ceilings and expansive park views. A series of offices and retail spaces form a buffer between the homes and a vehicular road, but Kafka calls attention to a new public park designed, of course, by D.I.R.T. Studio. “We deliberately underdeveloped the site,” he said, “in order to make public space for the Fort Worth community to live, work, and enjoy the outdoors.”

JASON KEEN

COURTESY PRINCE CONCEPTS

24 Feature

The Architect’s Newspaper

COURTESY TATIANA BILBAO ESTUDIO

The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky? An ambitious new development in central St. Louis hopes it can build communitarian values through design—no cookie-cutter, white-picket fences here. But will it push out an existing community along the way?

25 Feature

July/August 2021

STEVE TR AMPE

Facing page: Tatiana Bilbao Estudio developed the master plan for the On Olive 3.3-acre residential development. The plan, for 27 houses (based on a handful of types) and condos—all market-rate—favors stolid massing. Bilbao recruited many of the participating architects herself. Above: The task of designing the house types was given to internationally recognized firms like PRODUCTORA, which has offices in Mexico City and New York. The developer also brought on two local offices for the job. Right: Construction on On Olive, as the development is known, is well underway. Display homes by PRODUCTORA (pictured), Bilbao, MOS, and Mascias Peredo are nearly complete. Program-rich landscapes will weave between the homes.

COURTESY OWEN DEVELOPMENT/PRODUCTOR A

Audrey Ellermann has lived in St. Louis’s Covenant Blu Grand Center neighborhood for two decades and seen the area’s fortunes wax and wane. With a history of abandonment and decay, Grand Center is now part of a growing arts district backed by the city’s wealthiest. As president of the local neighborhood association, Ellermann welcomes investment, but on her community’s own terms. She wants to see “homes on all the vacant lots,” as well as businesses that “beautify the environment and take ownership in the community.” Nearby, on once-vacant land, rises a beachhead of high design that ticks some of those boxes. There local firm Owen Development is building what it calls a “unique urban community” made up of infill housing designed by internationally acclaimed architects. At the level of branding alone, the complex is unprecedented in St. Louis’s history, said Owen president Steve Trampe. “There’s nothing else like this.” On Olive, so named for its siting along Olive Street, between Spring and Vandeventer, began as a passion project of the philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer, founder of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, whose Tadao Ando–designed headquarters is a block away. The 27 houses and additional condos are designed by MOS, PRODUCTORA, Estudio Macías Peredo, Michael Maltzan Architecture, and Höweler + Yoon, while Tatiana Bilbao Estudio is responsible for the site’s master plan. Additionally, the developer held a design competition for a local architect and a Black architect (the neighborhood is predominantly African American)—roles that Constance Vale and Cory Henry, respectively, were selected to fill. But there is reason to believe the development will contribute to Grand Center’s patchy, uneven character. In the span of a few blocks, large vacant residential lots abruptly give way to galleries and amenities, from the Pulitzer and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis to the historic Fox Theatre. To the west is the much more affluent Central West End, which Trampe calls his “comparable market.” He expects to spend $50 million on the entire endeavor, with condos priced near $300,000 and houses ranging from $450,000 to more than $1 million. But Trampe doesn’t

expect to make any money, and pitches On Olive largely as an act of urban stewardship. “This is not a for-profit project,” he said. “When the Broadway lights are out in the theaters, you don’t want this district [to be] dark with no activity. To support the restaurants and small businesses, you need more than Fox Theatre patrons.” Pulitzer and Trampe tried developing this block of Olive Street over a decade ago to capitalize on the former’s institutional investments, but their efforts were undone by the Great Recession. “She’s always wanted to see this realized, partially to support other institutions she’s a part of, but also just to support the district and the community,” Trampe said. There’s a problem, however: the new homes aren’t being marketed to the current residents of Covenant Blu Grand Center, where the average home price is $104,000 and nearly a third of residents live in poverty. Trampe says buyers will come from across the St. Louis region and beyond, and Bilbao’s website beckons “new arrivals” like “millennials and empty-nesters.” This focus on newcomers might explain why Trampe didn’t ask neighborhood advocates like Ellermann what they thought the impact of On Olive might be. She’s never heard from him or his architects. “Should we have been in the conversation? It would have been nice,” she said. Asked if he reached out to local neighborhood associations and leaders, Trampe responded: “I’m not sure why we would have done that.” A missed opportunity, perhaps, but the time for debating the wisdom of air-dropping market-rate homes into an area with 26 percent of its land lying vacant is past. Construction is well underway, with several houses already sold and nearly complete; the first residents arrive in August. Each of the designs will be first built as a model home, and an existing historic library (which will contain a neighborhood clubhouse, a gym, and two condos all designed by Axi:Ome) is already complete. Bilbao’s master-plan guidelines call for stolid, boxy volumes clad in St. Louis brick. (The architect, who is based in Mexico City, is also contributing a two-story house with a

second-floor cantilever.) Though minimal, the architecture surprises in places. PRODUCTORA’s entry, for instance, is a low-slung brick house inspired by the “leftover brick volumes” of small factories and auto-repair shops that stand out amid the neighborhood’s vacancy, said partner Wonne Ickx. A clerestory window volume on top of the one-story house lights up a free-flowing interior. The most experimental element of On Olive will be the spaces in between houses, as conceived by Bilbao with the assistance of local landscape architects Loomis Associates. Tightly programmed landscapes will offer passive and active amenities: a meditation garden, an edible garden, a pocket park, a conversation pit, a boccie court, a pool, and a BBQ area. “They’re not houses on a block with a little fence around [them],” said Ickx. “They really invade each other’s spaces.” As a result of this blurring, Bilbao hopes this cohesive family of homes can “create an identity that could be communitarian, but still accept the possibility of everyone’s ideas.” The project is part of a search for a “more socially sustainable way of living than what we’re doing now,” said Bilbao, who is excited over the development’s future prospects. “I would love to see more grades in the scale. I would love to see more reintegrated units, shared spaces, that are even more focused on sharing domestic labor, communal areas that serve for creating a community of care.” As Bilbao sees it, these outdoor amenities are for the entire neighborhood, but Owen Development would prefer to keep them more private to the block itself. Constance Vale, the local architect who was selected by Owen Development to join its high-profile team of architects, believes the outcome will resonate in urban communities throughout the country. She notes the enlarged role design has played on Olive Street, even drawing a comparison with the Los Angeles Case Study Houses, commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine in the 1950s. “This operates as a great case study in that the problems—and opportunities—we see in St. Louis are shared with so much of America,” she said.

But the city’s relatively low economic barriers to entry and median middle American context sit alongside a legacy of widespread disinvestment and vacancy. (There were 25,000 abandoned buildings and lots in St. Louis as of 2018.) Gentrification and displacement remain persistent concerns, particularly in Grand Center. According to Zillow, home values have increased nearly 20 percent in the past year, and Ellermann said that she has seen houses swept up for as little as $50,000 skyrocket in value by a factor of six after renovations. “It’s crucial that we have a seat at the table to talk to the developers, to let them know we want affordable housing, we want mixed-income housing. We are not looking to displace people from their homes,” she said. “If people want to leave, it has to be on their terms.” Bilbao herself concedes that the Olive Street project participates in accelerating gentrification in the area. “[It] is in place, and, yes, this project is a part of it, to be honest,” she said. “What can I say?” For all its idealism and ambition, On Olive’s influence will likely be limited. Or so hope civic leaders and their constituents. Ellermann is a cochair of the steering committee for the North Central Plan, a neighborhood revitalization strategy for Covenant Blu Grand Center and the neighboring enclave of Vandeventer. The plan places a strong emphasis on maintaining affordable housing through developing a variety of types to counter gentrification trends. It includes a section on how denser dwelling typologies can aid affordability. With this plan, which gained Mayor Tishaura Jones’s support in May, “I don’t feel threatened by what’s going on on Olive [Street],” said Ellermann. “I don’t see it as taking away from the North Central Plan and our goals and aspirations. Olive is just one block.” What is important is her and her neighbors’ ability to organize and use this plan in guiding development to their own ends. “I don’t see another Olive happening,” she said, “without Covenant Blu having discussions.” Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focusing on architecture and landscape architecture.

26 Feature

The Architect’s Newspaper

Tankhouse, a design-forward Brooklyn-based developer, is cut from a different cloth than its peers.

Do Tank Tankhouse’s 219 Jay residential tower development in Brooklyn broke ground in June. The design, by frequent Tankhouse collaborator SO-IL, maximizes views and outdoor terrace spaces for apartment units on all sides of the building. It’s an uncommon strategy for New York.

COURTESY TANKHOUSE/SO-IL

27 Feature Long before a certain U.S. president recast it in his own slimy image, the stereotype of the New York real-estate developer was fairly well established in the public mind. Figures like 19th-century magnate John Jacob Astor and postwar tycoon William Zeckendorf set the pattern of the ravenous megalomaniac, their reach somewhat beyond their grasp, bulldozing whoever and whatever stood in their way. The presumption, fair or not, is that builder-financiers do not much concern themselves with such unremunerative niceties as the beauty of the landscape or the quality of design and construction or humanity in general. Admittedly, that’s a low bar. But by any standard, Sam Alison-Mayne is not your typical developer. The cofounder, with partner Sebastian Mendez, of Brooklyn-based real estate bureau Tankhouse, Alison-Mayne “grew up around architecture and building,” as he puts it: born and raised in Los Angeles, he spent his early years poring over renderings and touring construction sites with his celebrated architect father, Morphosis hetman Thom Mayne. Heading north for college, the future builder majored in philosophy at Berkeley; even when he did shift toward real estate, following his move to New York in 2007, Alison-Mayne opted for the most nuts-and-boltsy corner of the field, spending five years at construction giant Sciame managing projects around the city. It was there that he first encountered Mendez—Argentinian by birth, but also lately transplanted from L.A.—who was

July/August 2021 then a designer at Norman Foster Partners, working alongside Sciame on the Sperone Westwater Gallery in Manhattan. “By the end of it,” says Alison-Mayne, “we felt like we had what it takes to design and build projects of our own.” After a quick spin through business school (Alison-Mayne at Columbia, Mendez at NYU) the two hung out a shingle as Tankhouse in 2013. “New York needed a company that was willing to revisit housing in a meaningful way," said Mendez. Today, the company has four projects in various stages of completion, including one— designed by Brooklyn-based architecture firm SO-IL—set to debut later this year. It’s an impressive opening lineup for a relative newcomer, though the wheels of progress have been slow to turn: the Tankhouse team acquired the parcel for their soon-to-open property in 2019, and they’ve spent the ensuing years securing financing and acquiring permits, tiding themselves over with smaller design-build commissions in the meantime. Throughout the vexing development process, the Tankhousers have demonstrated what SO-IL principal Florian Idenburg describes as “extraordinary resourcefulness” in bringing their architects’ vision to life: at one point, Idenburg relates, the firm’s proposal met resistance from would-be investors owing to a supposedly unfavorable facade-to-interior ratio; rather than ask the designers to amend their scheme, Alison-Mayne cut the wary investors loose, and

instead sought out others who would take on the project as originally conceived. As Idenburg descries, Mendez and Alison-Mayne’s approach is “holistic, philosophical, yet also very pragmatic and hands on,” and driven by an authentic commitment to architecture. Evidence of that commitment is borne out in Tankhouse’s nearly complete first project, 450 Warren in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building, an 18-unit condominium residence on a row house–lined side street, is less remarkable for its exterior appearance than for its plan and program. A self-effacing envelope of ridged, almost corduroylike custom masonry block, the building’s irregular, jagged silhouette lets it pop a little above the adjacent rooflines without appearing to loom over neighbors; but where the design attempts to break the mold is in its unusual emphasis on shared and outdoor space, with three large courtyards, generously scaled interior circulation, and a minimum of two terraces per unit, including one apartment with no fewer than four balconies. “We’re in a battle against the double-loaded corridor,” said Idenburg—and although grim, windowless, hotel-like hallways are certainly more economical, Alison-Mayne proved to be a staunch ally in SO-IL’s struggle, creating a building where good design is not confined to what’s visible from the street or what’s happening in the apartments. “In five years my hope is that we take on

the challenge of other project typologies," said Mendez, pointing especially to "affordable housing and projects with larger civic components." For now, the team is sticking to what they know, with two more condo projects in the pipeline from SO-IL and a fourth residential development currently entering the design phase, all being done under a specific self-imposed constraint: all the company’s projects are located within what Alison-Mayne calls a “doughnut” centered on downtown Brooklyn, where both partners also happen to live. Alison-Mayne is in fact in the midst of protracted negotiations with local officials and community members over a proposed row house for himself, designed by his architect father. While the future of that project remains uncertain, it at least serves further proof of Alison-Mayne’s adventurous aesthetic tastes, as well as a modicum of patience with the bureaucratic complexity of building culture in New York. Tankhouse (the name refers to the preferred Angeleno word for water tower, a nod to the founders’ shared West Coast background) may not topple the age-old rap on development companies in New York. But its modest size, its determined localism, and the experimental and sensitive attitude of its leadership certainly make for an interesting change of pace. “From the beginning, the question for us has been, what can we do to contribute?” says Alison-Mayne. “We’re trying to answer that with every project.” Ian Volner

COURTESY SAM ALISON-MAYNE/ THOM MAYNE OF MORPHOSIS

COURTESY TANKHOUSE/SO-IL

Clockwise, from top left: Sam Alison-Mayne, one of Tankhouse’s cofounders, with Sebastian Mendez, grew up with architecture, being the son of Morphosis founder Thom Mayne. The latter has designed a home for the former in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood; Tankhouse’s first project, designed by SO-IL, is set to debut later this year; the project spurns the double-loaded corridor and, in doing so, creates a clear connection to the street and outdoors; the exterior of the complex is clad in green custom cast masonry block.

Glass

Case Study Special Section

The Architect’s Newspaper July/August 2021

Alchemic Glass JARED CHULSKI

Air, fire, sand. These elements are brought together in precise ways to create a clear, translucent solid we call glass. This everyday magical material, a human production since ancient times, is so ubiquitous in contemporary life as to be nearly invisible—until it performs in a way we don’t expect. At the cutting edge of the AEC design community, glass is now being used to accomplish unforeseen structural feats, attain the most rigorous energy consumption standards, and even provide fire protection. Our annual glass supplement peers into the latest innovations in glass architecture through case studies from across the globe. From a Yale University incubator and a renovated office block in Paris that masterfully incorporate structural curved glass walls, to a transportation waystation in New York's Hudson valley sheltered by new glass roof tiles, it's clear that this material is capable of so much more than looking through. Our survey of new and improved products available to the North American market includes everything from highly engineered insulated units to haptic decorative elements and hyperfunctional sealants. By Adrian Madlener

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Glass

Feature

The Architect’s Newspaper

Curved reflections

Advances in the manufacturing and treatment of float glass are enabling ever more flexible, ethereal facade expressions. Matthew Marani

Up until the mid-20th century, the incorporation of glazing into any project was an exorbitantly expensive decision and potentially fraught with error due to the irregularity of manufacturing processes. The development of float glass through the Pilkington process, which can be roughly described as rolling

molten glass over a tin bath, has enabled continually growing limits in glass sheet dimensions. Advances in the manufacturing process have occurred in conjunction with developments in treatments—such as annealing, lamination, fritting, and employing interlayers—that promise greater geometrical flexibility

Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale Weiss/Manfredi

and aesthetic customization. The growth in capabilities of both manufacturing and treatment is now coming to fruition globally and across building scales in the form of ever more ambitious curved glass facades.

Denver Art Museum Welcome Center Machado Silvetti & Fentress Architects

ERIC STEPHENSON/COURTESY THE DENVER ART MUSEUM

ALBERT VECERK A /ESTO

The Tsai CITY at Yale features 22-foot-tall mullionless structural glass panels. Weiss/Manfredi’s Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) is one such project currently pushing the boundaries of largescale curved structural glass. The cross-disciplinary hub is located on a formerly forlorn concrete courtyard sandwiched between Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center and the Neo-Tudor dean’s office. To magnify the context and conform to a narrow site, the architects opted for an elliptical plan enclosed with 72 convex-and-concave structural glass panels. The geometry of the curved panels was developed in collaboration with facade consultant Front, which helped create a Grasshopper script capable of toggling radii of the panels at different positions along the ellipse, and Weiss/Manfredi further utilized the script to generate digital models for curvature analysis. “The elliptical geometry posed a challenge; a circular geometry is easy to divide into equal panels because the radius is consistent but the curvature of an ellipse changes continuously, so it needed to be simplified into a series of four different arcs,” said Weiss/Manfredi cofounders Marion Weiss and Michael

Manfredi. “The four arcs allowed the ellipse to be divided into consistent panels that are approximately 5 feet wide, which minimized the variation in panel sizes.” Each of the panels is also approximately 22 feet tall and has an 8-foot radius; those at the ends of the ellipse were adjusted by several feet to maintain a constant sinusoidal wave. Chinese manufacturer NorthGlass, which has developed global expertise in this area, produced the glass for the project, and Weiss/ Manfredi and Front visited its Tianjin facility to verify tolerances and edge flatness, among other characteristics, prior to shipment to the United States. Connecticut-based facade contractor Fabbrica fabricated the facade system and produced 4-foot-tall mock-ups for review by the design team. Notably, the curvature of the individual panels provides sufficient lateral stability to avoid the use of mullions or girts. Each panel weighs several hundred pounds, and they were craned over the tops of surrounding buildings to be dead loaded onto curtain wall anchors and a curved metal channel; a similar channel ring is deployed at the roofline.

JAMES FLORIO PHOTOGR APHY/COURTESY THE DENVER ART MUSEUM

At the Denver Art Museum Welcome Center (top, above), Machado Silvetti and Fentress Architects deployed scalloped structural glass panels vertically supported by triple-laminated low-iron glass. In 2016, Machado Silvetti and Fentress Architects were selected to lead the renovation of Gio Ponti’s iconic North Building at the Denver Art Museum, as well as the construction of an entirely new welcome center to bridge museum’s campus (it also includes a Daniel Libeskind addition next door) and the surrounding Civic Center area. That brief informed the design concept for the welcome center: an elliptical pavilion enclosed with a scalloped structural glass curtain wall. Multiple rounds of conversation with fabricators and installers ultimately proved the feasibility of the design concept, and Sentech Architectural Systems along with Harmon were brought onto the project to put all the pieces together. Prior to construction, Sentech Architectural Systems produced full-scale mock-ups of the panels to test the plan prior to installation. Additionally, the mock-ups were subjected to

strenuous weather testing, as well as exposed to vertical and lateral structural loads. Both informed revisions of the finalized design. The panels measure 8 feet wide and 25 feet tall and have a curve radius of 10 feet. Most of the panels weigh approximately 3,200 pounds, and they were craned into position by a custom-designed suction cup lifter and mounted on the facade system of stainless-steel angles. In lieu of view-hampering mullions, the curved panels are vertically supported by triple-laminated low-iron glass fins and are tied back to the primary steel through custom stainless-steel fittings. The bottom pins of the fins support the entire dead load of the glass, while the connection at the roof provides lateral support and permits the roof to deflect up to one and a half inches under snow loads and to drift from side to side by up to two inches to accommodate wind loads.

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Glass

Feature

The Architect’s Newspaper

Curved reflections continued Pendry Manhattan West SOM

La Samaritaine, Paris SANAA

JARED CHULSKI

In Paris, SANAA developed a wavy glass screen wall that is suspended off the primary structure.

LUCAS BL AIR SIMPSON/COURTESY SOM

The Pendry’s unitized curtain wall system incorporates curved glass and black granite spandrels. In New York, a similar trend is underway, albeit jostling upwards to greater heights. SOM’s Pendry Manhattan West is one of the many towers rising within the Hudson Yards megadevelopment, and in contrast to its surrounding rectilinear peers, it is clad with a unitized curtain wall system of curved glass framed by ribbons of black granite spandrels. A principal goal of the project’s facade design was the elimination of unnecessary variables to establish both a streamlined design and a relatively straightforward installation process. In collaboration with Front, the design team opted for just three radius types around which the glass is bent. The tight radius for the curved glass, which is just under 5 feet, presented a challenge from a visual perspective due to distortion; highly transparent glass with shadow boxes at the spandrels, or a reflective glass coating, would have disrupted the intended uniformity of the facade. Ultimately, SOM selected a 5/16-inch tinted outer glass substrate that lessens the visual jump between

concave and convex surfaces. A greater performative challenge was found in the fabrication of the facade system’s aluminum extrusions, where minor tolerance issues could cause significant weatherproofing problems. “To avoid those issues, a specialized curving process was utilized,” explained SOM associate director Christopher Timm. “First, the straight aluminum extrusions were encapsulated in oversized aluminum sacrificial tubes, and the remaining voids were filled with a low-temperature-melting metal alloy. After the standard three-roller bending process, the assemblies were submerged in near-boiling water and the low-temperature infill metal was melted away. The outer sacrificial tubes were then discarded, and the curved aluminum extrusions were finally sanded down and coated.” The black granite stone was quarried in Quebec by A. Lacroix Granit, and it was structurally tested to determine how thin each panel could be cut prior to being directly framed into each curtain wall unit.

The use of curved glass is not particular to the United States; if anything, experimentation abroad plays a crucial role in the growing adoption of the material here. Over the past decade, Japanese firm SANAA has led the way in this regard with high-profile projects such as the Rolex Learning Centre, Louvre-Lens, and Grace Farms. More recently, the firm wrapped up a comprehensive overhaul of La Samaritaine department store in Paris for luxury goods company LVMH, and the project includes an entirely new structure enshrouded in a curtain of undulating and fritted glazing. The project is located on Paris’s Rue de Rivoli, a storied commercial stretch largely composed of arcaded masonry buildings and symmetrical glazing bays. “The curves themselves were defined by analyzing the fenestration along the Rue de Rivoli: we assessed the patterns of neighboring fenestration and translated those rhythms into curves,” noted SANAA partner Lucy Styles. “We then developed 23 different curved panels along the length of the wave facade, and our intention was to create the impression of a continuous free-curve, all the while optimizing the number of variations in geometry.” Spanish manufacturer Cricursa produced

the undulating glass panels, which are of two sizes: approximately 11 feet or 14 feet tall, both nearly 8 feet wide. The curved panels form the outermost layer of the enclosure system, designed by German fabricator Frener & Reifer, and they are held at four points by stainless-steel brackets. Backing the curved glass is a secondary skin of flat glass heavily fritted with a white dot matrix screen print that can pivot to provide cleaning access. The innermost layer is composed of triple-glazed panels that bring the building up to the area’s stringent fire rating standards. “The facade design was driven by a synthesis of various parameters: we addressed environmental demands through the layered use of serigraphy; visual demands by means of introducing a gradient to this serigraphy; fire regulations by separating the facade into a series of layers, the innermost layer being firebreak and alleviating the demands on the wave facade itself,” Styles said. “The greatest challenge was finding a balance between these many forces while maintaining the impression of an ethereal veil.”

Glass

Case Study

The Architect’s Newspaper

Columbia Business School

Architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with FXCollaborative Construction Manager: Turner Construction Exterior Enclosure Contractor: W&W Glass Curtain Wall: AZA-INT Corporation Glass: Sedak Glass, AGC Interpane Glass Germany, Cricursa Spain, Pilkington Glass GFRG: IDA Exterior Systems and DKI/David Kucera Inc.–GFRG Doors: Ellison doors and Crane revolving doors Facade Consultant: Arup

TIMOTHY SCHENCK

Top: Columbia Business School’s new Manhattanville digs span approximately 490,000 square feet across two buildings, Henry R. Kravis Hall (pictured) and the East Building.

Left: Construction is underway at Kravis Hall. The design of the facade highlights the intewoven program and exploded structural core.

TIMOTHY SCHENCK

Right: Alternating bands of transparent glass and fritted glass correspond to the building’s various academic and social zones.

Columbia University’s Manhattanville Campus expansion has ushered in a crystalline district of glass-clad buildings amid the masonry vernacular architecture of Harlem. The latest additions to the 17-acre, $6.3 billion campus, which was master planned by SOM, are two buildings designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in collaboration with FXCollaborative that provide a new home for the Columbia Business School. Set to open in early 2022, Henry R. Kravis Hall and the East Building rise 11 and 8 stories respectively and provide 492,000 square feet of classrooms, public space, and faculty offices. The buildings, which are connected by a public plaza designed by James Corner Field Operations, are more fraternal twins than mirror images. The Kravis facade translates the alternating stack of program by denoting faculty offices with frosted frit glass and student space with clear glass walls that are inset from the edge of the floor plate. The glass envelope of the East Building, on the other hand, is treated with a gradient from opaque to transparent—each panel having a bespoke and carefully calculated frit pattern. In both buildings, GFRG slabs slice through the mineral textures of the frit, breaking up the massing. By making the circulation visible from the outside, the architects play on notions of openness in answer to many local residents’ expressed views that the new campus is an unwelcome encroachment on their neighborhood. “We were tasked very clearly from the start to make sure that everyone felt like they owned both buildings, that it wasn’t the ivory tower model,” said Miles Nelligan, associate principal, DS+R. This idea carries through to the relatively column-free interiors of the student spaces in Kravis Hall, which are supported by box trusses that comprise the faculty offices and by 28-foot-tall glass panels that span three levels at a stretch, allowing deep views into the heart of the structure. This model of weaving transparent and translucent elements evolved directly from the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, which DS+R completed for Columbia’s medical campus in 2016. The business school, however, showcases an advance in glass technology. The 28-foot panels were achieved through close collaboration with Arup. Chimeric mock-ups were made, re-creating many of the conditions of the design— edge masking, frit, gaskets, and broken trusses—to not only perfect the movement of the glass but also coordinate with Turner Construction and the many international manufacturers involved. The success of these buildings will ultimately be seen in the collaborative pedagogy and high-tech innovation that is expected to arise from the school. In the meantime, they will likely inform further experiments in translucency/transparency as phase 2 of the Manhattanville expansion commences. Katie Angen

Glass

Case Study

July/August 2021

COURTESY DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO/F XCOLL ABOR ATIVE

Above: The Kravis Hall facade comprises uniquely sized glass fiber reinforced gypsum, or GFRG, panels, whose tops slope back for internal drainage.

Right: Located directly opposite Kravis Hall, the East Building presents a more transparent front to Manhattanville.

COURTESY COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y

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Glass

Insulated Glass

Products

The Architect’s Newspaper

Increasing the thermal performance of a window or complete curtain wall system, insulated glass units (IGUs) reduce heat gain in warmer seasons while retaining more during colder periods. The following offerings improve on the standard to meet today’s increasingly strict requirements. By Adrian Madlener

Heat Mirror IG Eastman

Iplus 3C AGC Interpane

By securing a uniquely engineered film between two panes of glass, the Heat Mirror IG insulates as a solid wall does. Eastman’s patented Heat Mirror technology can have an R-value of up to 20, making it suitable for use across a wide range of projects.

Comprising three panes of thermal insulation glass, the Iplus 3C easily outperforms older, uncoated alternatives and Ug-values down to 0.5 W/(m²K), which helps minimize heat loss. This low–E glass product hits the mark in terms of both performance and aesthetics.

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interpane.com

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Insulated Glass GGI

XL Edge Glass Cardinal

Insulpour Thermal Entrances Kawneer

In line with the latest trends, GGI’s Insulated Glass comes in double- and triple-glazing variants. A dual-sealed version—ideal for commercial use—features Super Spacer T-Spacer warm edge technology as well as air- and argon gas–filled options to ensure greater indoor comfort.

These durable Cardinal IGUs meet the most exacting industry demands by incorporating two seals and a thin stainless steel desiccant gauge spacer. Filled with argon gas, the IGU leaves absolutely no way for heat to escape. Additionally, it greatly reduces unsightly condensation beading.

Fitted out in 250T narrow, 350T medium, and 500T wide stile variants, Kawneer’s Insulpour Thermal Entrances achieve an optimal thermal break. The robust door-and-frame system features a new three-pane composition and can accommodate a wide variety of hardware.

generalglass.com

cardinalcorp.com

kawneer.com

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Glass

Case Study

The Architect’s Newspaper

Architect: Machado Silvetti Facade Consultant: Eckersley O’Callaghan Preservation Consultant: John Fidler Preservation Technology General Contractor: Consigli Construction Archaeology: DATA Investigations Client: The Menokin House Foundation

The Boston firm Machado Silvetti is overseeing the project, which will partially enclose the dilapidated Menokin House in structural glass. “The 500-acre plantation is surrounded by notable other estates in North Neck that have been fully restored,” said Machado Silvetti principal Stephanie Randazzo Dwyer. While those projects followed traditional restoration methods, Dwyer noted that her client, the Menokin Foundation, “went for this innovative approach that uses contemporary materials like glass and steel to represent parts of the ruin that could not be recovered.” Menokin was the ancestral home of Francis Lightfoot Lee, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Lee died heirless in 1797 and the property—a handsome piece of Georgian architecture—passed through the hands of

multiple generations of tenant farmers, who left the original details largely intact, though poorly maintained. Still, the house stood tall until the 1960s, when it was severely damaged by a falling tree. The Menokin Foundation, established for the express purpose of restoring the erstwhile home, acquired the site in 1995 and began the arduous process of ruin stabilization. Intending to reopen the grounds as an exhibition center, the group had the idea of rebuilding with glass and brought Machado Silvetti onboard in 2010. The $7 million project has unfolded slowly, with the stabilization—carried out in collaboration with John Fidler Preservation Technology—ongoing. The work consists of strengthening existing elements, which were analyzed through point cloud scanning, by repairing

masonry and shoring up the structure with steel columns. Further segments of the facade are composed of reconstructed stone and rubble found on the site. The remaining void is decked over with a system of structural steel armatures, aluminum extrusions, and cables that mimic the original post-and-beam construction, to which the structural glass will later be fastened. Although a decision on the contractor and glass manufacturer has yet to be finalized, the present plan developed by facade consultant Eckersley O’Callaghan calls for the use of SGP-laminated single-glazed panels measuring approximately 4 feet-1inch by 19 feet-6 inches and weighing 1,050 pounds each. (The width of the units aligns with those of the panels in the glass roof.) The glass walls will

The Menokin Exhibition and Conservation Center Historic preservation in the United States has often been cast in absolute terms: Structures and monuments are either subject to campaigns of complete restoration (which may entail partial reconstruction) or maintained as sublime ruins stabilized to withstand the ravages of time. A novel conservation scheme for an 18th-century plantation house on Virginia’s Northern Neck peninsula threads the needle between these approaches.

MACHADO SILVET TI

Glass

Case Study

be backed by a fabric scrim layer chosen to approximate the original plaster surfaces and the thickness of the masonry construction. “This transparent layer is a flame retardant woven fabric that is installed in tension within a custom stainless-steel track at the top and bottom of each floor level,” said Dwyer. “The scrim’s transparent finish not only offers effective glare and sun protection with optimized exterior views but, where it meets up with the original stone walls, its transparency allows one to see the many layers of the rubble wall construction.” Above the cornice line, the design team intends to rebuild a section of the former hipped roof with wood framing, truss, and shingles and will fill out the remainder with low-E coated double-glazed units that will likely include an

embedded honeycomb interlayer as a further shading measure. “In general, the main challenge in the design of the glass systems on this project was to ensure that they were visually as minimal as possible so that they do not compete visually with the restored ruin,” said Eckersley O’Callaghan associate Karine Charlebois. “For this reason, at the lower level, no structural members are provided along the vertical edges of the glass. At the upper level, some laminated glass fins help control the deflection under wind loads and keep the glass panels as thin as possible.” If all goes well, the Menokin Exhibition and Conservation Center will open in 2023. Matthew Marani

July/August 2021

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THE MENOKIN FOUNDATION

Facing page, bottom left: The Menokin House was badly damaged by a falling tree in the 1960s. Using structural glass and steel, the architects plan to make the house whole. Facing page, bottom right: Apart from stabilizing the existing masonry (currently underway), the restoration strategy hinges on a new steel armature capable of supporting a glass roof, enclosure, and even floors.

Top: The Menokin House was still in good condition a century ago.

Photo: Nick Merrick ©Hendrich Blessing

Facing page, top: The Boston-based architecture firm Machado Silvetti has been working since 2010 to restore an 18th-century Georgian-style plantation home on Virginia’s Northern Neck peninsula.

Above: Although the damage to the house was extensive, the situation was not as grave as it would seem. Restorers were able to recover 80 percent of the original building materials.

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Glass

Decorative Glass

Products

The Architect’s Newspaper

Function isn’t all there is to glass. Used to make a statement, express a mood, or match an aesthetic, these customized or serial-produced glass components add depth, detail, and texture to otherwise bland expanses or backdrops. By Adrian Madlener

Josiah J Nathan Allan Glass Studios

Textured Glass Bendheim

Creanza Cristacurva

Crafted by Nathan Allan artists and suitable for multiple applications, the Josiah J collection offers deeply textured cast architectural glass patterns with evocative names (Molten, Thick, Iceberg) to match. In addition to texture, the series offers boldly rendered colors, including the iridescent hues of the Fusion series.

Bendheim’s Textured Glass collection of partition and wall surfaces allows designers to mix and match textures or customize material attributes (like adding a mirror interlayer or back-painting). In addition, the product can be mounted using the manufacturer’s proprietary TurnKey, Wall-LH, and Wall-F systems.

Pitched at the high-end interior market, Cristacurva’s Creanza family of decorative glass products offers endless opportunity for customization. Users can realize their designs in glass by means of printing, silk-screening, interlaying, etching, and more.

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Textures Walker Glass The Textures collection relies on acid-etched glass to withstand years of use and exposure. The durable material comes in four different opacities, including translucent satin, and as many tints, including an elegant bronze. walkerglass.com

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

DermaGlass Pulp Studio

Tapestry Lasvit

With a thickness comparable to that of a dime, products in the new DermaGlass range from Pulp Studio are more durable than they look. The malleable heat-treated glass can be used to cover and even wrap various architectural elements and is available in a wide variety of finishes and colorways.

The new Tapestry art wall connection draws on the rich tradition and craftsmanship of Czech glassblowing. The modular striped, draped, and grid components can be fastened together with flexible metal anchoring solutions.

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Pulp Studio’s Precision Edge®

Other Manufacturer’s

The exposed edges on glass handrails are an aesthetic detail you don’t want to overlook. Codes only require that handrail glass be laminated, but high-quality edgework is imperative for the integrity of the design. Never feel pressured to accept a pre-polished laminate product when you have better options. Precision Edge ® complements the design by providing a high-quality, zero-tolerance finish, with perfect alignment for both tempered and annealed laminated glass.

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Glass

Case Study

Case Studies in Brief

The Architect’s Newspaper

Hurricane Maria Memorial New York, New York

Architect: Segundo Cardona Artist: Antonio Martorell Designer: Pulp Studio Product: Pulp Studio Custom Printed Glass My Cry into the World, a new art installation at the Hurricane Maria Memorial in Battery Park City, honors the victims of the Category 5 hurricane that struck Puerto Rico in 2017. Designed by Pulp Studio, the memorial features monumental glass walls ascending to 16 feet, their curvilinear shape echoing the whipping winds of a tropical storm. The glass was manufactured through

Pulp Studio’s D2G process for ceramic application, where high-resolution images are fired onto each pane of glass using brightly colored ceramic inks. The glass is then bent, laminated, and tempered before being installed on-site. When exposed to sunlight, the glass casts vivid blue, orange, and red beams onto the site. Colors seem to flow from the sculpture like streams of fire, rain, and tears. Text by Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos is superimposed on the imagery, adding to the overall effect: The organic shape of the calligraphy nods to the island’s rolling hills and natural landscape.

KEVIN P. COUGHLIN/COURTESY STATE OF NEW YORK

Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement St. Petersburg, Florida

Architect: Alfonso Architects Contractor: Gilbane Building Company Fabricators: Cristacurva Glaziers: AMG and MG McGrath Manufacturer: Guardian Glass Products: Guardian SunGuard SNX 51/23 Coated UltraClear Glass The new Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement mingles textures and hues in a way that draws on the stylings of the eclectic collection it holds. The five-story building, by Alfonso Architects, employs a mixed material palette, including bronze

accents and coated glass, to celebrate the historic era in a contemporary way. Alfonso Architects specified SunGuard SNX 51/23 coated glass, which offers benefits of solar control. Its high light transmission enhances interior daylighting and reduces air conditioning demands, while also imparting a subtle blue hue to the facade. MG McGrath’s glass and glazing team helped install the glass systems for the museum, including the curtain wall and skylights on the exterior and storefront systems on the interior. BRENNAN PHOTO + VIDEO

McMaster University, Peter George Centre for Living and Learning Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Architect: Diamond Schmitt Engineer: Buro Happold Fabricator: Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope Glass (Acid-Etched): Walker Glass Glass (Solar Control): Vitro Architectural Glass Products: Vitro Solarban 67 Glass, Vitro Solarban 70 Glass Uniting classrooms, food, and housing under one roof, the 335,000-square-foot Peter George Centre for Living and Learning at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, functions as a microcosm of campus life.

Designed by Diamond Schmitt, the multifaceted student hub includes a 650-seat auditorium, a skylit atrium, and a U-shaped block of daylit residential and study spaces. The architects used high-performance glass from Vitro Architectural Glass throughout the building, including Solarban 70 for the atrium skylight, which offers protection against glare, and Solarban 67 on the facade, which helps to reduce cooling and heating loads. Acid-etched glass from Walker Glass was added to the curtain wall as decoration, bringing motion and variety to the large panes by imposing a subtle pattern on them.

DIAMOND SCHMIT T

Santa Monica City Hall East Santa Monica, California

Architect: Frederick Fisher and Partners Civil Engineer: KPFF Structural Engineer: JAMA Contractor: Hathaway Dinwiddie Curtain Wall: Walters and Wolf Facade Engineer: Buro Happold Manufacturer: Viracon Product: Viracon VNE-53 Triple-Coated Performance Glass Designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners, the new Santa Monica City Hall East merges multiple civic departments, which for years had been scattered across Los Angeles, into a central location that borders the historic 1939 City Hall. The resulting addition is beauti-

ful, efficient, and functional, as well as discreet enough to not clash with the existing architecture. Motivated to meet the Living Building Challenge, the highest green-building standard in the country, the design team elected to use high-performance triple-coated glass from Viracon on the facades. The silver-blue glazing has an impressive balance of visible light transmission and solar heat gain coefficient, without sacrificing aesthetics. The glass reflects its richly landscaped surroundings, and a ceramic frit behind the glass lightens the building so that it matches the stucco of City Hall. Operable windows that allow cross ventilation add a dynamic quality to the building design.

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Glass

Case Study

Le Monde Headquarters

The Architect’s Newspaper

JARED CHULSKI

Left:: Snøhetta’s design for the Le Monde headquarters presents an interesting massing to Paris’s 13th Arrondissement. Top: A wide concrete arch, engineered like a bridge, supports a vitreous multistory volume.

JARED CHULSKI

Above: The intricate, paper-thin facade assembly comprises 20,000 variegated glass elements connected by individually bent clips.

Glass

Architect: Snøhetta Associate Architect: SRA Architects Facade Engineer: Arcora Structural Engineer: Khephren Ingeniérie Environmental Consultant: Green Affair

opacity, two methods of positioning, four distinct textures, and varying degrees of reflectiveness,” explained Frank Denis Foray, an architect at Snøhetta’s Oslo, Norway, office. Given the sheer number of possible combinations, the design team relied on Dynamo, an open-source visual programming language developed for Revit, to generate a legible configuration. Design goals, such as controlling daylighting intake and enabling views of Paris from select points, helped set parameters for the algorithm to run its course. Foray said the architects later made their own manual adjustments in places, giving the final iteration a more ethereal quality. This remarkable attention to detail is also evident in the clips that tie each glass element to its neighbor, whose connection is nearly undetectable from the street. “They are bended one by one, giving them small variations,” Foray explained. “A protection rubber was threaded onto the clips to protect the glass, while the clips within the vertical structure were developed to be as invisible as possible from both the outside and within.” These and other minute gestures across the facade open the interior offices to copious natural light while rendering the outlines of the glass panels nearly imperceptible, allowing the fast-paced news cycle to hold center stage. Shane Reiner-Roth

The first thing to notice about the new Le Monde headquarters in Paris’s 13th Arrondissement is what it does. Designed by Snøhetta, the building straddles a former rail yard along the Seine, not unlike the nearby Pont d’Austerlitz. In doing so, it hoists up enough office space for all the French news conglomerate’s 1,600 employees while creating a sheltered plaza at grade for pedestrians. But the project is also notable for its variegated glass envelope, a paper-thin assembly that strikingly contrasts with the bulk of the concrete underbelly. The facade system comprises more than 20,000 glass elements, whose appearance changes throughout the day and under varying weather conditions, yielding compelling, often contradictory effects. (In certain places and moments, the building shimmers, while in others it seems to glow.) Snøhetta conceived of the small vitreous panels, which together have a surface area of 100,000 square feet, as pixels in a nod to the print media produced inside the building. “The facade is a complex overlap of four different layers of information: four levels of

Case Study

July/August 2021

UNIQUE. DISTINCT. FACADES.

Williston Basin International Airport Location: Williston, ND

Architect: Alliiance

Dri-Design Metal Wall Panels are available in a nearly unlimited palette of colors, materials, finishes and textures, making them a unique offering among other facades. However, what makes Dri-Design distinct, is that it provides this unique range of design options, in a system that installs and performs even better than it looks. A combination of form and function that is truly distinct.

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The architects conceived the small glass tiles as pixels, in a nod to the publishing processes that occur inside the news conglomerate’s new headquarters.

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Glass

Products

High-Performance Glass

The Architect’s Newspaper

Thanks to smart thinking and surface treatments, the latest innovative glazing and glass products are helping to transform the inside and outside of buildings. These solutions can make all the difference when it comes to meeting new energy efficiency standards or controlling the amount of natural light that a space takes in. Some combat the threat of fire or even bird impact with style and grace. By Adrian Madlener

Bird1st Etch Guardian Glass

SuperLite II-XL 60 SaftiFirst

Hoping to prevent the all-too-common and tragic reality of bird collisions with glass buildings, the new Bird1st Etch product by Guardian Glass sports nuanced yet highly visible acid-etched motifs. Available in four variations, the glass offers flexibility for curtain walls and other facade applications.

The SuperLite II-XL 60 transparent wall solution by SaftiFirst is fire resistant for up to 60 minutes. The customizable glass product—available in different glazing and opening applications and in the industry’s largest dimensions—can withstand impact, radiant heat, hose streams, thermal shock, and pressure.

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SkyFloor Walkable Skylights Series 2000 Glass Flooring Systems The SkyFloor Walkable Skylights Series 2000 breaks new ground, being the first of its kind to receive an ICC certification. The flagship of Glass Flooring Systems, it is perfect for small spaces or structures that require additional exposure without giving up on the overall area. glassflooringsystems.com

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Crystal Clear PVB Saflex

AviProtek Walker Glass

Harmony SageGlass

If the aim of architectural glass is hyper clarity, then Saflex’s new Crystal Clear PVB laminated glass succeeds. Perfect for premium applications and designs requiring low-iron glass, this aesthetic solution renders the glass necessary for insulation nearly invisible.

As the name implies, Walker Glass’s AviProtek is designed to protect our feathered friends. Etched patterns on the outer layer of the glass ensures a better rate of detection and collision avoidance. Considering the facade in all its nuance, the product can be used in guardrails, rainscreens, or insulated units and comes with a ten-year warranty.

SageGlass’s Harmony glazing solution affords large and small projects glare protection and daylight controls. Notably, the product incorporates a gradual in-pane tint transition system capable of producing stunning visual effects without obstructing views.

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Ballistic & Bullet Glass

The Architect’s Newspaper

Comprising different soft and hard layers, ballistic and bulletproof glass is engineered to withstand the impact of one or more bullets or other projectiles. The following products ensure the safety of individuals inside a building or an enclosed room, or behind a barrier, even as they achieve a seemingly vulnerable transparency. By Adrian Madlener

BULLETBLOCK Insulgard Robust yet versatile, Insulgard’s BULLETBLOCK can be used in the framing systems for doors, windows, and storefront systems. Meeting the highest UL 752 requirements, this material can withstand multiple assaults. insulgard.com

Forced Entry/Ballistic Resistant (FE/BR) Viracon Intended for interior use, Viracon’s FE/BR line meets the highest Resistant Test Method standards. What’s more, the triple-insulated, glass–clad, polycarbonate laminate can be integrated into several Viracon glazing systems. viracon.com

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Bullet Resistant, ArmorResist Oldcastle BE

Ballistic Security Glass TSS Bulletproof

Oldcastle BE’s Bullet Resistant, ArmorResist product is a multi-ply laminated glass that is PVB bonded into a single component. Available in different colors, this economical product can be customized with various glass classifications in mind, including low-E, clear, low-iron, tinted, reflective, patterned, and wired.

Available in a range of acrylic, laminated polycarbonate, glass, and insulated glass variants, TSS Bulletproof’s Ballistic Security Glass product line meets every need and protection level. Depending on the UL rating, the glass can be used in retail contexts or, at the highest rating of 8, federal and military buildings.

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DESIGNED AROUND SUSTAINABILITY, BUILT AROUND EVERY ABILITY

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Advancing learning has always been the cornerstone of our business. Kawneer’s innovative solutions offer the perfect balance of natural heat and light, durability and uninterrupted views, with many K-12 facilities enjoying the benefits our market-leading products bring. Few other materials deliver the same flexibility or recyclability as aluminum. Engineered with environmental design to supplement HVAC and artificial lighting, our framing systems, entrances, curtain walls, interior light shelves and sunshades are proven to reduce energy costs and optimize efficiency. From thermal performance to acoustics, Kawneer is committed to inspiring architects, ESCOs and schools to build a more sustainable future.

Glass

Products

The Architect’s Newspaper

Barriers, Coatings & Sealants

Want a seamless fit for your glass enclosure? Then you need sealants and barriers. Not only do they secure panels, windows, and doors in place, but they also help buildings control temperature and keep them energy efficient. Coatings and sprays offer even more protection. By Adrian Madlener

Great Stuff Pro Window & Door DuPont A cornerstone of DuPont’s wide range of building products, Great Stuff Pro Window & Door is a super-strong spray-foam agent that works to bond construction materials like glass to encasements and other framing solutions. Filling in any gap, this adhesive provides a fast-grab tack and guarantees a longterm bond.

TremGlaze S500+ Tremco

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WindowSeal Poly Wall

Tremco’s TremGlaze S500+ is a heavy-duty sealant engineered for a wide range of glazing solutions. Perfect for tough jobs, it also comes in numerous colors that match almost every standard building material. tremcosealants.com

Used to strip in or flash rectilinear window frames, Poly Wall WindowSeal self-adhering tape comprises waterproofed rubberized asphalt and laminated polyethylene film. It’s a combination that provides excellent elasticity during installation while also creating a powerful bond. poly-wall.com

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Fast Tack Firestop Spray STI Firestop

FOAMGLAS Owens Corning

G3 Seal Glasswerks

Specifically engineered for curtain wall systems, STI Firestop’s Fast Tack Firestop Spray can withstand all types of weather, including below-freezing temperatures. It is notable for its auto-bonding feature and is very quick to dry.

Thanks to its unique material composition, FOAMGLAS by Owens Corning is lightweight yet durable. Made of sealed glass cells, the insulation is noncombustible and offers exceptional compressive strength, not to mention moisture resistance.

Available with a 20-year warranty, Glasswerks’ G3 Seal is a flexible silicone foam warm-edge spacer developed for the most demanding glazing applications. It’s far more effective at creating secure connections than traditional aluminum fixtures.

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SGX™ Designed for multiple ply glass constructions. Available up to 330 cm

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Daltile daltile.com

ASSA ABLOY assaabloy.com

Galaxy Glass & Stone galaxycustom.com

Global Security Glazing security-glazing.com

Glas Italia glasitalia.com

Insulgard insulgard.com

Glass + Mirror Craft glassandmetalcraft.com

Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope obe.com

Goldray Glass goldrayglass.com

SAFTI FIRST safti.com

Lasvit lasvit.com

School Guard Glass schoolguardglass.com

Lunada Bay Tile lunadabaytile.com

Technical Glass Products (TGP) fireglass.com

Marazzi marazziusa.com

Total Security Solutions tssbulletproof.com

Nathan Allan Glass Studios nathanallan.com

Tubelite tubeliteinc.com

Pulp Studio pulpstudio.com

Viracon viracon.com

SCHOTT North America us.schott.com

Resources

Barriers, Coatings, & Sealants DuPont dupont.com Glasswerks glasswerks.com Owens Corning owenscorning.com Pella pella.com Poly Wall poly-wall.com Saint-Gobain saint-gobain.com STI Firestop stifirestop.com Tremco tremcosealants.com Vitro Architectural Glass vitroglazings.com

Decorative Glass 3form 3-form.com Bendheim bendheim.com CARVART carvart.com Consolidated Glass Corporation cgcglass.com Cristacurva cristacurva.com

Walker Glass Company walkerglass.com

Performance & Insulated Glass AGC Glass North America agcglass.com AZA-INT aza-int.com Cardinal Glass Industries cardinalcorp.com Eastman eastman.com Faour Glass Technologies faourglass.com

Resources

Tecnoglass tecnoglass.com TGP Fireglass fireglass.com Thermalsun Glass Products thermalsun.com YKK AP America ykkap.com

Smart & Specialty Glass AGNORA agnora.com Aluflam aluflam-usa.com Alumil alumil.com Arnold Glas ornilux.com Cricursa Spain cricursa.com C.R. Laurence crlaurence.com Dlubak Specialty Glass dlubakglass.com GlasPro glas-pro.com Glass Flooring Systems glassflooringsystems.com Guardian Glass guardianglass.com Saflex saflex.com SageGlass sageglass.com Skyline Design skydesign.com

July/August 2021

EXTECH/Exterior Technologies extechinc.com Faour Glass Technologies faourglass.com HIRT USA hirtusa.com Jada Windows jadawindows.com JELD-WEN jeld-wen.com Kalwall kalwall.com Kolbe Windows & Doors kolbewindows.com LaCantina Doors lacantinadoors.com Marvin marvin.com Milgard milgard.com MI Windows and Doors miwindows.com Ply Gem plygem.com Reveal Windows & Doors revealwd.com Reynaers Aluminum reynaers.com Sapa sapabuildingsystem.com Schüco schueco.com Sierra Pacific Windows sierrapacificwindows.com Vitrocsa USA vitrocsausa.com Wausau Window and Wall Systems wausauwindow.com

GAMCO gamcocorp.com

Standard Bent Glass standardbent.com

Weather Shield weathershield.com

GGI generalglass.com

Vitro vitro.com

Western Window Systems westernwindowsystems.com

Innovative Glass innovativeglasscorp.com Kawneer kawneer.com Kinestral Technologies kinestral.com Kuraray kuraray.com Northwestern Industries-Arizona nwiglass.com Pilkington pilkington.com sedak sedak.com Technoform technoform.com

Windows & Daylighting Accoya accoya.com

Andersen andersenwindows.com Arcadia Custom arcadiacustom.com Crystal Window & Door Systems crystalwindows.com dormakaba dormakaba.com Duo-Gard duo-gard.com ESWindows eswindows.com

54 Marketplace Photography of the Built Environment

The Architect’s Newspaper

COMPANY

esto.com

PAGE

Aluflam aluflam-usa.com ............................................................................................ 39 Archatrac archatrak.com ........................................................................................... 54 Cersaie cersaie.it/en/ ..................................................................................................... 11 CR Laurence crl-arch.com ......................................................................................... 33 Dri-Design dri-design.com ....................................................................................... 45 Glass Flooring Systems glassflooringsystems.com ....................................... 51 Hanover Architectural hanoverpavers.com ......................................................... 2 Huntsman Building Solutions huntsmanbuildingsolutions.com ............... 15 IZFAS Fair marble.izfas.com/tr ................................................................................... 19 Kalwall kalwall.com ....................................................................................................... 54 Kawneer kawneer.com ............................................................................................... 49 Landscape Forms landscapeforms.com .............................................................. 3 LG HVAC lghvac.com ..................................................................................................... 17 Modular Arts modulararts.com ................................................................................. 13 NanaWall nanawall.com ................................................................................................ 9 Pilkington pilkington.com/en/us ............................................................................. 35 Pulp Studio pulpstudio.com ...................................................................................... 41 Safti First safti.com ..................................................................................................... 43 Sage Glass sageglass.com ...................................................................................... 47 Sherwin Williams coil.sherwin.com .................................................... Back Cover Viracon viracon.com .................................................................................................... 37 Vitro Architectural Glass vitrosolarvolt.com ...................................................... 31 Vitrocsa goldbrecht.com .......................................................................................... 45 YKK AP ykkap.com ....................................................................................................... 29

envelop yourself in daylight...

FACADES | SKYROOFS | SKYLIGHTS | CANOPIES

photo by Marc Sourbron

Library

HEXAGONAL PORCELAIN PAVERS

55 Marketplace

June 2021

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS Our CE|Strong workshops are curated according to region within the Continental United States. On-hand instructors will respond to the application of their materials and software tools to local conditions: such as proper insulation to avoid thermal bridging in regions prone to harsh winters and efficient UV protection for glazed facades. Attendees will leave with a greater understanding of efficient material uses which blend with overall design approaches.

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56 Highlights East

Southwest

Richard Haas: Circles in Space Hudson River Museum 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10701

The Architect’s Newspaper

Open through January 9, 2022

2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape/ A Possible Horizon Various sites in San Antonio and Houston

September 1, 2021–January 31, 2022

RICHARD HA AS/COURTESY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIET Y, NY

The thematic material mined by Circles in Space is vast, spanning patternly abstraction and scholarly color theory to the esoteric geometric structure of the cosmos. Haas, who turns 85 in August, is best known for his larger-than-life realist murals, which make much of classical architectural motifs. But his latest work, small studies amassed in isolation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, betrays a more elemental impetus. The leitmotif is the circle, which Haas traces to the “hundreds of circular irrigation wells” glimpsed on cross-country flights that “[cause] one to view

Earth as an endless sea of circular patterns as far as the eye can see,” he writes. The exhibit’s organizers draw comparisons to the late work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who prized concentric geometries in his final years and for whom Haas worked as a teenager; Wassily Kandinsky and Robert and Sonia Delaunay also get mentions. Ultimately, it is to the cosmic dimension that the show turns, and not for nothing: it prefigured the reopening of the Hudson River Museum’s beloved planetarium in mid-July, after having been closed to the public for more than a year. Keren Dillard

West

On September 1, Texas nonprofit Big Medium will launch the seventh edition of the Texas Biennial under the curatorial guidance of Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza. But rather than concentrating the exhibition within a single location or even city, the organizers have opted for a more diffuse approach, fanning out the programming across five museums in San Antonio and Houston (including the David Adjaye–designed Ruby City). Boasting the participation of 51 artists,

A New Landscape/A Possible Horizon will showcase an eclectic mix of work, ranging from objects and performance to activism, inspired by Texas’s history and future. The project’s ample, regional scope, Garza and Dennis explained, is partially a response to the experience of the pandemic, which forced them to coordinate the event and its participants “via Zoom, FaceTime, email, phone, and text.” Keren Dillard

West

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Architecture from the Outside In SFMOMA 151 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

TE X AS BIENNIAL

Open through February 21, 2022

Veil Craft Craft Contemporary 5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Open through September 12, 2021

K ATHERINE DU TIEL /COURTESY TATIANA BILBAO ESTUDIO

The central peg of Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Architecture from the Outside In at the San Francisco Museum of Art is a master plan for the city’s Hunters Point neighborhood. The proposal is premised on rehabilitating an erstwhile power station—the last of a complex that closed in 2007, in response to pressure from activists—and incorporating it into the surrounding community. In the whimsical but demonstrative concept drawings, a riotous

mix of housing, gardens, and public spaces for gathering struggle to congeal into a vision of community empowerment. This is the cityas-a-process, a theme that runs throughout the work of Bilbao’s Mexico City–based architecture office. It also informs the titular “outside in” design methodology, whose precise meaning is elusive, but which suggests a reflexive understanding of site, context, and the density of urban life. Keren Dillard

COURTESY FIGURE

Veil Craft, the latest offering from Materials & Applications (M&A), picks up more or less where the Los Angeles gallery left off. After pausing its in-person programming for more than a year, M&A partnered with neighboring institution Craft Contemporary for this breezy summer installation. Nestled within the Craft’s courtyard, Veil Craft repurposes so-called construction textiles—multicolored

tarps and netting used to mark off building works—as a way of marking space (and scrambling perceptions of the architectural object in the process). The result is dynamic and welcoming, offering a shady respite from the hot summer sun where people—Angelenos—might gather “in conversation about Los Angeles’s material culture.” Keren Dillard

July/August 2021

NYC Comes back to the city on October 1st techplus.co

Firms are hiring. Reach real architects with the AN Job Board.

Connecting AEC firms with job seekers. archpaper.com/jobs

58 Review

The Architect’s Newspaper

The Invention of Public Space Mariana Mogilevich | University of Minnesota Press | $30 Current debates around public spaces in New York—the future of pandemic-born streeteries, say, or police-enforced curfews in Washington Square Park—assume that these spaces should be for everyone. Within this discourse, public space is seen as inherently democratic and the place where we celebrate the city’s diversity, among other things. But Mariana Mogilevich’s new book upends this wisdom. The Invention of Public Space challenges the notion that the city’s open or free spaces amount to an “unalloyed, universal good” whose civic underpinnings can be traced to the ancient Athenian agora. It emends and dramatically condenses the historical trajectory of the titular spatial invention, dating it to the 1960s and 1970s, during the John Lindsay mayoral administration. Mogilevich insists on the point. “New York City in the early 1960s did not have ‘public space’ as such,” she writes. “No one referred to it that way,” here or in any other city. It was only through experiments in inclusive space-making and public participation that the constellation of spaces that are now commonly understood as making up “public space”—parks, plazas, vacant lots, sidewalks, waterfronts, streets—came to be identified by that name. These efforts took on outsize meaning against a backdrop of urban crisis, where design proposals, big and small, could open a door to utopia. “Each space,” Mogilevich writes, “was conceived not as a part of the city or as a space apart from the city but as a metaphor for the city as a whole.” Through careful presentation of spatial and political experiments that continue to shape the fields of architecture and planning to this day, Mogilevich shows what was and is at stake in urban life. The Invention of Public Space invites the reader to see the city not as a static object, but as the product of ongoing negotiations among people. Indeed, the book’s great strength is the compelling portraits it renders of city officials, residents, designers, and advocates, all with their own assumptions and ideas about what a city should be and how it might be used (and by whom). Throughout, Mogilevich’s precise, engaging writing delivers complex concepts and histories in a tangible way, giving the reader the chance to inhabit the perspectives of this diverse set of actors. Rather than analyzing shades of publicness—who owns these spaces, really?— Mogilevich foregrounds the processes behind the designs and depicts these places as “physical, lived space.” Introducing the fertile urban design currents that came out of the immediate postwar period, she shows how these reference points guided planners and urbanists inside the Lindsay administration to develop “experiments in open space.” The book drills down into these experiments, with each chapter devoted to a different spatial type, ranging from residential plazas and vest-pocket parks to pedestrian streets and waterfront landscapes. Examining three threads—psychology, participation, and urban scale—through a series of dramatic episodes, Mogilevich shows how ambitious ideals met urban realities to produce results both concrete and ideological.

in overlooked areas and marginalized communities, would blossom into an ideological program grounded in “learning and self-actualization rather than standardization and conformity,” Mogilevich writes. Under Hoving, the city hosted Central Park “happenings”—participatory events like costume parties and dance contests—and built adventure playgrounds by architects like Richard Dattner. As Hoving was busy remaking the city’s playscapes, others in the administration made headway on early sidewalk cafe regulations and experiments in pedestrianization. Lindsay appointed a Sidewalk Cafe Study Committee, which suggested allowing cold-weather enclosures to “bring people back to the streets, thereby reducing the likelihood of crime,” and the Urban Design Group even developed a study of design standards for outdoor eating on Second Avenue. Gay Talese satirically commented at the time that New Yorkers could finally live the cafe life as they would abroad, as long as they were “not allergic to bus fumes and … not poor.” In 2020, streeteries reappeared on Second Avenue, though their future is uncertain. In another foreshadowing, the first Earth Day celebration, on April 22, 1970, triggered temporary street closings across the city. Designed to reduce air pollution and promote public transport, these closings resembled the Open Streets program Bill de Blasio introduced during the COVID-19 lockdown and were as energizing and politically fraught as their counterparts are now. The near disappearance of manufacturing space, particularly in Manhattan, can also be linked to design and policy decisions of the Lindsay era. Shared spaces in housing developments were contested then as they are now, ranging from super-public plazas to areas minimized in the name of “defensible space.”

Public Participation JOHN VLIET LINDSAY PAPERS, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, YALE UNIVERSIT Y

Produced for his 1965 mayoral campaign, this comic depicts John Lindsay as an advocate of public parks.

Urban Design as Public Policy Reading Mogilevich’s study, architects will likely salivate over how much power and influence designers had in the Lindsay administration. Elected in 1965 as a liberal Republican and reelected in 1969 as an independent, Lindsay understood that space is political and politics is spatial. He was adapting to the times: Amid mass migration and suburbanization—one million Black and Puerto Rican residents moved to New York between 1960 and 1970, while a similar number of non-Hispanic whites moved out—the city saw an increase in economic inequality and calls for racial justice. The urban crisis followed top-down urban transformations and renewal schemes implemented by Robert Moses during his decades-long rule. Lindsay countered the status quo with

a unique formula equating urban design with public policy. In a white paper on the city’s housing crisis, he promised “to make this city—its housing, its parks, its community facilities—for its people.” Mogilevich describes the approach as a “model of fun, freedom, and diversity, enlisting designers and planners in concerted municipal experimentation to create the spaces that would prove it was so.” In a first, Lindsay established the Urban Design Group within the Department of City Planning as a “design experiment laboratory.” Staffed by 15 architects, the group led design and planning studies, conducted design reviews, and coordinated private development. This was a time for creative bureaucrats such as Thomas Hoving. While in his mid30s, Hoving made the now-unthinkable career jump from art historian working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval wing to city parks commissioner on the strength of a single white paper. That sketch, for the construction of playgrounds

If Mogilevich’s book turns on singular visionary bureaucrats, it also pays mind to evolving modes of public participation in the creation and maintenance of open spaces. These passages are among the most exciting and tragic in the entire volume, revealing how grand ambitions and good intentions can easily falter—especially when sufficient planning and resources for maintenance are lacking. The city’s “vest-pocket” parks program is a paradigmatic example of this denouement. Named for their small size, vest-pocket parks attempted to turn vacant lots from “eyesores into amenities,” Mogilevich writes. The result of disinvestment, white flight, and landlord neglect, empty lots in poorer neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx were “visible signs of political disenfranchisement.” Already, public space designs of the time moved to privilege user experience over aesthetics; for instance, at Jacob Riis Plaza, fences protecting pristine New York City Housing Authority lawns were torn down and inhabitable, actively programmed play- and landscapes installed in their place. Public participation in design was the logical next step. The first vest-pocket park opened in Bed-

59 Review

July/August 2021

Stuy in 1966. A collaboration between the city with the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and the Pratt Center for Community Development, funded by two private foundations, the park was greeted warmly by the architectural press, which labeled it a “neighborhood venture.” The characterization was not unearned. Community members participated in design meetings; local children helped with small construction tasks and served as play equipment design “consultants”; and unemployed men from the neighborhood were hired to build the park. Designed by Pratt Institute professor M. Paul Friedberg, the park also featured murals by Pratt art students. Local activists hoped parks like this one would serve as catalysts for further community-led development. But the new parks quickly fell into disrepair, as the city expected low-income residents to handle facility maintenance. Mogilevich quotes Pratt Center founder and community planner Ronald Shiffman’s damning 1969 evaluation of three years of vest-pocket park experiments: “If it is the intention of any municipality, or community development corporation, to buy time or create a highly visible, but one-shot palliative by undertaking a beautification program, they are in for a rude and well deserved awakening.”

Learning from “Failures” Many of the spaces profiled in The Invention of Public Space were ultimately perceived as failures, even by their designers. Following Nixon’s cuts in federal funding for cities and the 1975 New York City financial crisis, they were fenced off, neglected, graffitied, and sometimes demolished. What few were deemed successful, such as South Street Seaport and Battery Park City, were and continue to be “spaces for a circumscribed, generally white and middle- to upper-class public,” Mogilevich pointedly observes. Time and again, she questions for whom these emergent public spaces were designed and for whom they were not. Despite the utopian streak evident in the work of the Lindsay administration, old prejudices persisted. Portions of this review were written in a COVID sidewalk cafe enclosure and a Bloomberg-era pedestrian plaza maintained by a business improvement district—examples of newer forms of New York public space that are rightly criticized for their commercialization, inequitable distribution across the city, and limited access. Mogilevich acknowledges the validity of these concerns and decries the move from ambitious experiments in democratic space-making to today’s focus on “innovation,” data collection, and an “almost mystical belief in the agency of movable chairs.” But she also invites those who might reject any compromised public space to ask, “Did a noncommercial, geographically distributed, ecumenical urban space ever exist, or had it just briefly appeared possible?” Mogilevich’s portraits are wonderfully nuanced. Her outlook is ultimately hopeful. Every public space is compromised in some way, and none are as inclusive as we would hope. But that is not a reason to give up. She might agree with architect and theorist

COURTESY UNIVERSIT Y OF MINNESOTA PRESS

This 1972 study, prepared for the Gateway National Recreation Area, highlights public transit routes to and from marginalized neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey.

Craig L. Wilkins, who writes, “Space is life.” Mogilevich calls contemporary fights for the “commoning” of urban space potentially “revolutionary” and celebrates recent public space designs that welcome diverse gender identities, respond to the concerns of recent immigrants, and support human and non-

human species. Architects looking to join in the fray must accept that transformations in urban space will not “leave a physical legacy so much as an ideological one.” This timely book squashes naïveté and inspires, leaving the reader energized and better prepared to pursue spatial justice anew.

Karen Kubey is an urbanist specializing in housing and health.

60 Review

The Architect’s Newspaper

Over the Moon

A biennale encompassing everything from ecology to platform capitalism romance makes a radical—and radically tender—case for life on “Planet Love.”

SUPERFLUX

Design-research studio Superflux created an indoor forest—complete with 400 blackened pine trees—for the 2021 Vienna Biennale for Change.

About halfway through the 2021 Vienna Biennale for Change—somewhere between a striking indoor forest by Anglo-Indian design-research firm Superflux and a cartoon film about political optimism by illustrator Molly Crabapple and featuring the voices of Gael García Bernal and Emma Thompson—viewers may suddenly stop and ask themselves: What the hell is all this doing in Austria? Well might they wonder. The show, open through October 3 and subtitled “Planet Love,” takes as its particular subject the problem of climate change, tackling the issue from every imaginable angle, including but not limited to abstract sculpture, visionary schemes for urban transformation, imaginary space-travel tourism posters, and at least one portrait of activist Greta Thunberg rendered as a series of blood cells. It is, in other words, a lot to take in, and its presence in Austria makes it all the more confounding, given the country’s overall reputation as a place of considerable charm and character, but with little in the way of hip, politically conscious culture-making. And yet a certain strident, even hectoring progressivism is fast becoming a favorite na-

tional export. The Vienna Biennale opened in June almost simultaneously with the debut, just a few hours’ drive to the south, of the Austria Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; the installation there riffs on related themes in a similar tone, and indeed it appears in a miniature satellite form back in the Vienna show, occupying a downstairs room of the main exhibition space at the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK). Considered together, these Siamese-twin initiatives seem to suggest something is very riled up in the state of Österreich. Upstairs, the agita at the Biennale for Change expresses itself through an incredible density and diversity of climate-related material occupying every inch of available space. Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the director of the show, commends the exhibition to its audience with a stirring invocation: “May this Biennale be successful in not only turning us into PLANET LOVERS but also into committed CLIMATE CARERS!” The all-caps attitude carries over into much that follows: in Julia Schwarz’s Unseen Edibles, a piece examining lichen as a potential food source, with real-life specimens presented in gourmetish array; in

Thomas Romm’s “Urban Mining,” a proposal for ecological use of former built sites (complete with an exemplary patch of gravel); and in local team Architekturzentrum Wien’s “Land for Us All,” a fairly conventional exploration of urban land use presented in alluringly trippy, Milton Glaser– style display. The show truly appears to have everything, except perhaps subtlety. It even has the bite-size version of the Venice show, compressing the pavilion-scale edition into a small annex space but conveying more or less the same idea. In both locales, curators Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer take a searing look at what they refer to as “Platform Austria,” using video, supersize wall text, and infographics to illustrate how online media have succeeded in privatizing—in the name of the “frictionless,” consumer-friendly urban experience—so much of city life, heedless of the costs to the environment or social equity. The Vienna iteration conveys most of its critique in two serried rows of video monitors, though it hardly seems less bombastic than its southern counterpart, with its cheeky banners dangling from the pavilion skylight declaring, “Access Is

the New Capital” and “The Platform Is My Boyfriend.” In a Venice Biennale marked by pervasive, ho-hum earnestness, Mörtenböck and Mooshammer’s installation stands out for its spiky oppositionalism. So what has gotten under the Austrians’ skin? In the accompanying catalogue for the Biennale for Change, a forward from the country’s secretary of state for arts and culture hails the government’s Ecolabel project—an environmental certification rating that MAK itself was recently awarded— as part of a “European showpiece project” being guided by the state. Perhaps the Venice and Vienna shows are part of the same drive: Austria—and with it its grand old capital, long overshadowed by other European cities as a destination for culture—could be setting itself up as a new center for activist-oriented art and design. It’s an unlikely development, but not bad as rebranding efforts go, especially for a city and country (“at the very center of Europe,” as the writer Robert Musil once wrote, “where the world’s old axes crossed”) looking to find a new place in a changing world. Ian Volner’s most recent book is Philip Johnson: A Visual Biography (Phaidon, 2020).

61 Comment

July/August 2021

Against the Smart Worldview Smartness already defines our cities, just not in the way Sidewalk Labs and others like it would have you think.

COURTESY SIDEWALK L ABS

In 2020, Sidewalk Labs canceled its much-hyped “smart city” for Toronto. Earlier this year, the company squashed a similar project for Portland.

In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-owned company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been routed. When Sidewalk formally discontinued its parallel Portland, Oregon, project earlier this year, the response was similarly jubilant, if more subdued. In the aftermath, Sidewalk itself appears to have gone to ground, quietly patenting out some of its bespoke technologies and setting up others, like population modeler Replica, as sister companies. Likewise, the smart city dream it piloted looks to be dead as a doornail, now that Waterfront Toronto (Sidewalk’s erstwhile governmental collaborator for Quayside) is actively shopping around for a new development partner. Hopefuls will jostle in an international competition that compels proposals to take “into consideration the experiences of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic, growing social inequality, economic insecurity and mounting climate crisis.” It’s easy to read the new Quayside competition criteria as a direct rebuke of the virtues espoused by Sidewalk Labs’ bid. Nearly all mentions of smart technologies have been scrubbed, replaced by an ethos of community, inclusivity, and resilience. The vestiges that do remain, such as an interest in mass timber construction and, funnily enough, Sidewalk’s own dynamic storefront proposal called Stoa, have been pressed into the service of a “people-centered vision,” as The Guardian put it. (That the news outlet could make such a value judgment in the absence of any definitive project materials is telling.)

Yet in celebrating the demise of Sidewalk Toronto and its replacement by Waterfront Toronto, activists and journalists alike have misread the situation. The former Quayside project, imagined as a timber arcadia designed by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio, was never the official avatar of the smart city but a relative outlier. Its aims were unlike those of the real smart city, which, far from being defeated, remains in its infancy. All along, Sidewalk Labs presented its project as an urban innovation beginning and ending in space, but this is a fundamental misdirection. The spatial component of any given smart city—Quayside or otherwise—is only the visible eye of a vast leviathan; were one to manage to blind it, it would continue unabated in its grim work. Still, this beast is boring. All the flashy renderings, scintillating buzzwords, and exhibition-ready prototypes are there to obscure the smart city’s true function as a bog-standard development guide. As a 2017 Bloomberg Smart Cities panel asserted, the overarching goal of smart city projects is not one of techno-imbued construction but of “leveraging creative models of financing and public-private partnerships to navigate financial barriers and help achieve infrastructure improvement goals.” This is a far cry from the heroic vision peddled by Sidewalk. Consider that the bulk of the company’s research and proposals entailed radical re-imaginings of existing urban infrastructure, from roads to buildings; consider also the promises of urban dashboards and responsive environments pitched to prospective residents. Altogether, Quayside was an attempt to position the smart city as a gussied-up lifestyle product on offer to the striver class. Meanwhile, in the hushed back rooms of the public-private urban regime, the smart city evokes any number of interrelated optimization or austerity projects.

That is to say, the real power and money to be made in the smart city market lies not with the relatively local and easily lambasted technological futurity of Sidewalk Labs or, more recently, Toyota’s flamboyant Woven City in Japan, but in think tanks, trade publications, mayors’ consortia, university programs, and post-Covid reset conferences. Realizing a fully furnished “test bed” urbanism along the lines of the BIG-designed Woven City (construction on which is said to have broken ground this past winter) pales in comparison with the prospect of universalization—i.e., the reduction of existing cities to pure quantification up until the point any may be assessed alongside any other. The goal, then, is to reconceive cities and “cityness” as an economistic array of parseable criteria, development targets, and smartness rankings that ultimately determine the availability of funding and willingness of potential investors. The Eden Strategy Institute and other industry watchers indicates as much when it asserts that smart cities have entered a new phase, dubbed Cities 4.0, thereby heralding a shift in focus from technology qua technology to people. The 20-odd locales that have earned the designation thus far all pursue a myriad of smart city projects (an average of 14!), invest in better infrastructure, have incorporated insights from the pandemic into planning models, and hew closely to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The “Resident 4.0” percolating within the City 4.0’s sensible and ecofriendly transit hubs, parks, co-working spaces, and so on is likewise a model employee equipped with “smart skills” who takes advantage of talent-learning opportunities and an appropriate amount of cosmopolitan life (work schedule permitting). Outside this retinue of smart city proj-

ects, nearly all of them in the Global North, smartness is deployed everywhere else according to long-standing developmentalist lines. For all their popularity among policy wonks, SDGs reenact the same classic play of dangling the developmental carrot on the end of the political-economic stick. (The UN and World Bank continue to act out their classic parts, no less.) However, the shrinking of scale from developed/undeveloped nation to developed/undeveloped city deepens uneven patterns of development. Take, for example, Medellín, Colombia, which publications such as Newsweek and Foreign Policy and countless white papers have celebrated as a “city of innovation.” Foreign Policy points to the Metrocable gondola as a sign of the times, claiming that Medellín, a place hobbled by a century of civil war and drug trading, now radiates the glow of smart, innovative policy. Which raises the question, does all contemporary urban development equal “smartness”? And should an improvement in a city’s fortunes automatically bestow upon its mayor or municipal cabal the status of genius, as happened in Medellín? But never mind the geniuses—the heroic age of the smart city ended with the death of Sidewalk Toronto. This in itself means little, least of all a victory. The smart city has never been “object-oriented,” so to speak, but an ethos founded in the idea that politics itself behaves according to scientific principles of development (or technology). Even as smart city principles take root everywhere—not just in Toronto or Tallinn but in Columbus, Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania— they amount to little more than standard environmental improvement programs, such as the installation of traffic cameras or roadwork. The charismatic selling points of smartness—autonomous cars being the paradigmatic example—are nearly always either a fool’s errand or, as in the case of Columbus, the first element of a smart city project to be discarded. And yet smartness already defines the world: in it is a new watchword for governance, for policy, for austerity, and most of all for economic growth. It has, perhaps most insidiously, been bolstered by its capture of a coterie of self-styled progressives (YIMBYs, eco-urban types, 15-minute-city acolytes, etc.) who believe the invasion of capital into urban space is the only way to build a more “inclusive” city. All are united under the banner of development as capital prosecutes yet another back-to-the-city movement in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those of us seeking actual, substantive change—activists, radicals, and, yes, even critics—must change tactics, lest we be labeled incurable naysayers. Our critique must first and foremost contend with smartness as a new phase of capitalist development. Because there are no isolated smart projects. It is useless to discuss them as such, or as the actions of particularly aberrant bad actors applying this or that bad technology or policy. Combating the smart worldview first requires the development of an equally holistic view of the world or else resigning ourselves to, at best, win certain battles while having already lost the war. Kevin Rogan is a writer, designer, student, and dilettante who lives in New York.

62 Pictorial

The Architect’s Newspaper

Rooms with a View Andi Schmied is a Hungarian photographer living primarily in Budapest. But while in New York for a short-term artist residency in 2016, she began to go by her middle name, Gabriella. For snatches of time, she would slip into another identity—that of a billionaire Hungarian, newly arrived in town—to gain access to the heady world of Manhattan’s elite. Not to mingle with any of her would-be peerage, mind you, but to get a better look at their homes. Almost immediately after landing in New York, Andi-as-Andi did the “biggest cliché thing” one could do as a first-time visitor: go to the top of the Empire State Building. From those heights, she noticed even taller buildings, nearly all of them made of plate glass and sharp-edged and lined up in a row

along Central Park. At the uppermost registers of these supertall luxury residential towers, she realized, were even better viewing points. “But none of them were public,” she said. “I wanted to figure out a way to get in and document them.” Hence the prénom. Andi-as-Gabriella was a mother and an architect (albeit one with a lot of time on her hands) charged by her husband, Zoltan, with scoping out a Manhattan aerie for parents and toddler son (nameless). She drew up a list of addresses and scheduled viewings. She carried her vintage film camera, ready to snap photos of these mysterious spaces. But beyond the initial gambit, she discovered that her wile was superfluous. The only people she might have needed to convince or im-

press—real estate agents—were disinterested, distracted or hesitant to break with their own character roles. “Some of them were very good actors,” Schmied recalled. As for the architecture, which generally conformed to the same formula of monstrous living rooms and tucked-away living spaces, she was relatively unimpressed. The views were soon drained of their stimulus. Agents would drop the names of architects, sometimes to pit one of their creations against another: “432 Park is great, but here [at 277 Fifth Avenue], there are no columns blocking your view,” one said to Schmied, referring to two Rafael Viñoly buildings. After briefly resuming her alter ego, on a whirlwind visit to New York in February 2020, Schmied returned to Budapest with

hundreds of photographs “and two kilos’ worth of promotional materials, mostly hardcover books with really expensive paper,” she said. In its design, Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan (VI PER Gallery, 2021) mimics this literature, but its contents (including critical essays from the likes of geographer Samuel Stein and the late critic Michael Sorkin) depart from the format. The pictures themselves are matterof-fact, not touched up. In a fitting end to the project, Schmied said her gallery has reported sales from some of the 25 luxury buildings included in the book: “I like to imagine my book on a coffee table in one of those penthouses.”

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ANDI SCHMIED

VI PER GALLERY, PR AGUE

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