AAP News 02

AAP CORNELL ARCHITE CTURE/ART /PLANNING NEWS02 /SPRING2007

DEAR FRIENDS— Welcome to the second edition of AAPNews. Our college enters the spring 2007 semester with great momentum, thanks to an array of activities and events in the fall semenster, and with new goals before us that are both exciting and challenging.

The first public showings of the Milstein Hall design were held in September, with over 1,000 people attending the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) presentation in Ithaca, and a more intimate event in our New York City Center. The excitement generated by these presentations inspired all of those working on this pivotal project to finalize the schematic stage plans and to focus on funding for this much-needed building. The development of the design is moving forward speedily, and we are on track for an early 2008 groundbreaking.

Many other AAP initiatives of the fall—including lectures, exhibitions, conferences such as Japan Now: Country Positions in Architecture and Urbanism with keynote speaker Toyo Ito, and the redesigned AAP News and website www.aap.cornell.edu, as well as our venture into book publishing (see page 2) with Cornell AAP Publications— have also helped to introduce our intellectual and pedagogic agenda to a wider community.

During the current spring semester we are searching for several new faculty members. We expect to hire new chairs in art, where Buzz Spector is completing his term, and in architecture, where Mark Cruvellier has been serving as interim chair. I am grateful for the energetic leadership Buzz has brought to Cornell, and for Mark’s judicious and experienced service to the Department of Architecture. Also, the Department of Architecture is seeking to fill additional positions in environmental systems and in design within the area of digital and emerging technologies. The Department of City and Regional Planning, which has recently hired several new faculty members, is seeking to fill a tenure-track position jointly with the Latino Studies Program.

At the university level, the Campaign for Cornell with a goal of $4 billion was initiated on October 27 in both New York City and Ithaca.

The launch has galvanized our efforts within AAP and has brought the prospect of attaining our goals much closer to reality. It is clear, however, that the next few years will be critical. With an ambitious target of $65 million (including Milstein Hall), we will need to reach out not only to our alumni and friends, but to others who have a strong interest in the fields represented in our college.

I am pleased to say that we have already had some success in this regard. During the fall we celebrated major gifts to each department: the Edgar A. Tafel Professorship in Architecture and the Tafel Architecture Lecture Series, both endowed by a $3.2 million gift from Mr. Tafel, a close collaborator of Frank Lloyd Wright; the Cooper Visiting Artist Series, funded by the Cooper family; and the Barclay Jones Urban Design Lab, made possible by the Jones family. I am deeply grateful to Dalia (B.Arch. ’84) and Duane Stiller (B.Eng. ’84) for their generous lead gift of $2.5 million to Milstein Hall, and their loyal support of AAP. The success of the campaign will ensure that this college can deliver a world-class education rooted in explorations in art, design, theory, practice, and technology, as well as our ongoing commitment to playing a constructive role in the larger society.

YOKO INOUE

Mohsen Mostafavi

UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHY

MILSTEIN HALL— BUILDING ON A VISION FOR ARCHITECTURE, ART, AND PLANNING Milstein Hall, future center of the AAP campus, has recently passed

major milestones on its way to becoming a reality. The schematic design phase is complete and design development has begun, with the approval of two major university committees that oversee building projects. Howard Milstein, whose family provided the major gift for the building, attended the Buildings and Properties Committee meeting and expressed strong support for the design created by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

University and college representatives met with the city of Ithaca planning board for a sketch plan review in late January and received feedback on specific aspects. Further presentations are planned, not only to the planning and development board but also to the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“We’re very pleased with the approvals and the enthusiastic support this plan has received,” said Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, who noted that Cornell has undertaken a full environmental impact review, something that is not required.

Sustainable building practices are central to the Milstein plans.

The AAP community’s new facility, which will increase workspace and accessibility, will join its definitively contemporary architecture to the college’s historic buildings, creating a dynamic landscape and a vibrant central meeting place.

The current plan adds 43,000 square feet of enclosed space to AAP’s facilities, providing studios, crit rooms, exhibition and public spaces, and more. Milstein Hall not only will meet the college’s programmatic needs, but also will be a necessary component of ongoing accreditation procedures with the National Architectural Accrediting Board.

The flat-roofed, two-story structure is designed to connect the pedagogy of AAP’s three departments, as well as to connect physically with Sibley and Rand halls. It will serve as a central space with working environments developed for the kind of creative collaboration that results in new forms of work and research. Covered outdoor areas will provide virtually boundless studio space for construction of large-scale prototypes, models, and sculptures.

Every semester AAP bustles with countless lectures and events, and Milstein will provide space to accommodate them. Set off by glass walls and silk curtains, the 280-seat auditorium will be as versatile as it is inviting—the curtains can subdivide the room to create spaces appropriate for board meetings and smaller events.

Milstein Hall marks the first phase of a longterm vision for AAP and its campus. Renovations to Rand, Sibley, and the Foundry will repurpose the college’s current facilities. In a final phase, the Fine Arts Library, now under Sibley’s dome, may move to Milstein.

With groundbreaking expected in early 2008 and completion in 18–20 months, OMA and AAP are working on the myriad tasks that a major building project entails. And in these days of rapidly rising construction costs, the college is seeking the level of funding necessary to preserve valuable features of the design. The total cost for Milstein Hall and related renovations to Sibley Hall will be in excess of $40 million.AAP

If you would like to give to Milstein Hall, please contact: Carol O’Brien Cooke Director of Alumni Affairs and Development College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 T (607) 255.1501 coc3@cornell.edu

AAP NEWS is published twice yearly by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University, through the office of Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean.

Cover image—Office for Metropolitan Architecture

College of Architecture, Art, & Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 T (607) 254.8863 aap_newsletter@cornell.edu Editor Liz Holmes (M.F.A. ’87) Design Paul Soulellis (B.Arch. ’90), Soulellis Studio Copy Editor Laura Glenn Printed with soy-based inks.

AAP CORNELL ARCHITE CTURE/ART /PLANNING NEWS02 /SPRING2007 AAPnews2

VOICESfromROME4 FOLIO5 WORK11 SPRING07calendar16 90PICS18 REVIEW20 STUDENTnews21 FACULTY+STAFFnews24 ALUMNInews28 BACKPAGE33

2/AAPNEWS/ARCH is1+6/ NYC EXPANSION/CHINA/KENYA /ITALY NOW/BARCLAYJONES/ NEWORLEANS/O.M.UNGERS /aap.cornell.edu CRP MAKES NEWS WITH 9th WARD RECOVERY PLAN Cornell planners made headlines in January 2007 with

their groundbreaking report on conditions in New Orleans’s 9th Ward, asserting that most structures are in adequate condition for rebuilding without the need for widespread razing. Only about 20 percent of residents have returned home, the report found, largely because of bureaucratic and financial obstacles. The Associated Press story was picked up by the New York Times and many other newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, as well as over 200 news outlets online.

Those important points were only part of a much more significant document, however. Students and faculty from the Department of City and Regional Planning, along with partners from Columbia University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, actually presented a comprehensive recovery plan for the 9th Ward. Their plan looked at the neighborhood as a whole, covering such areas as housing, the economy, health, toxic waste sites, education, security, and industry.

It’s a plan based on in-depth study of the 9th Ward, an area where CRP, through its New Orleans Planning Initiative, started working not long after Hurricane Katrina made its devastating strike in 2005. Students and faculty have traveled many times to the region, for data gathering and handson work such as gutting houses, and several service-learning courses have focused intensively on New Orleans.

The latest large-scale trip occurred last October, when 66 Cornell students, plus a few students and faculty members from other schools, spent four days in the 9th Ward, interviewing residents, surveying businesses, and inspecting

Students (from left) Marcel Ionescu-Heroiu, Dong Yoon, and Emma Ossore confer while surveying residents of New Orleans’s 9th Ward.

properties. (In all, Cornell planners and their allies have inspected more than 5,000 properties in the area.)

According to CRP chair Kenneth Reardon, one resident told the students, “You’re the only van people who have ever taken time to get out of the car and talk to us.”

The long days of interviewing and surveying, and the encounter with so much devastation, added up to “almost a religious experience,” said student Marcel Ionescu-Heroiu. “People that would not be caught dead together at Cornell joined forces and went out in the neighborhood, talking to people, gathering data, and assessing future development opportunities. I have never seen such an eclectic group of people come together like that.”

“Students were transformed,” agreed visiting lecturer Michelle Thompson. While some

students may have begun the semester thinking only of their grade, she said, after the trip, New Orleans “became everyone’s passion.”

“It still looks like a war zone,” she added.

“There are still children’s shoes in the street.”

Back in Ithaca, students in classes taught by Reardon, Thompson, and new faculty member Richard Kiely entered and analyzed the data.

Over winter break, a small group of professors and students finalized the plan in time for a January 6 presentation—more than a week ahead of the deadline for the various official recovery planners to present their visions for specific districts.

The city of New Orleans is now considering the plan by CRP and its collaborators alongside other recovery plans. The City’s Department of Geographic Information Systems has adopted the survey tools and will incorporate the mapping resources from the field study as part of their ongoing data resources.

While the city deliberates, CRP involvement with the 9th Ward continues. The New Orleans situation will figure in several courses in spring 2007 and later, and specific hands-on projects are under consideration. Summer internships for students are a possibility, if funding can be located.

Meanwhile, the vast amounts of data the planners have generated won’t simply be filed away, Thompson noted. The City of New Orleans GIS has agreed to share data that will be available to other planners and scholars through a web-based database using the Cornell Restricted Access Data Center.

CRP is also keeping in touch with others at Cornell and elsewhere who are interested in New Orleans. “We’re looking for partners to get work done,” said Thompson. “Students want to be involved.”AAP

NEW BOOK FROM AAP EXPLORES ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE Cornell AAP Publications has recently issued its first book, a beautifully illus-

trated work on contemporary Italian architecture.

Italy Now? Country Positions in Architecture, edited by Alberto Alessi with a foreword by Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, presents interviews with 20 Italian architects in parallel with images of their design work.

To order Italy Now? please visit Princeton Architectural Press (www.papress.com).

Other books to be published by Cornell AAP Publications in the near future will focus on the work of Cornell’s advanced architecture studios and on the Japan Now conference on contemporary Japanese architecture.AAP

ART DEPARTMENT ENVISIONS CENTER IN CHINA “A viable center where our faculty can engage the largest, most important

STAN TAFT

An exhibit of graduate student work at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing

emerging nation in the world”—that’s how Buzz Spector describes the vision for a proposed contemporary art center linking Cornell University with Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Spector, chair of the Department of Art, along with art faculty members Xiaowen Chen and Associate Dean Stan Taft, has been engaged for some time in discussions with art faculty at Tsinghua, and there is agreement in principle to organize a Cornell/Tsinghua Center for the Study of Contemporary Art. Located in the Academy of Art and Design at Tsinghua, the center would promote exchanges between the two universities, with the primary participants being professional artists, art faculty, and scholars.

“Tsinghua is very interested in our pedagogy—the way we teach contemporary art,” Spector said, explaining that in China art is taught in two separate tracks, contemporary and traditional, and that contemporary art tends to be marginalized.

By May 2007, officials at Tsinghua and Cornell hope to determine more precisely the nature and purpose of the proposed center, and to confirm financial support from both universities.

In addition to dedicated administrative and studio space for four to six visitors, the center is expected to have the resources to support exhibits, conferences, and publications.

Work by Cornell art faculty will be exhibited at Tsinghua in May, and Tsinghua faculty will send their work to Cornell next year. Hang Jian, an art historian/theorist at Tsinghua, will spend the spring semester at Cornell as a scholar-in-residence and will participate in discussions about the proposed center.

Meanwhile, contact between artists in Ithaca and Beijing is flourishing. An exchange of exhibitions of graduate student work is planned for Cornell and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Last November, Spector and Chen attended an international symposium at Tsinghua on the subject of Art and Science. The symposium featured an exhibition that included work by Associate Professor Barry Perlus, a joint project

by Taft and architecture faculty member John Zissovici, and work by Rama Hoetzlein (A.B./ B.F.A. ’01), who also attended the symposium.AAP

BERLIN CELEBRATES O.M. UNGERS Two exhibitions and a symposium in Berlin last fall honored architect

O. M. Ungers, who turned 80 in July. Rem Koolhaas, a student during Ungers’s tenure as chair of AAP’s Department of Architecture (1969–1974), inaugurated the larger exhibition, which was displayed at the Neue National Galerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Titled “O. M. Ungers, Kosmos der Architectur” and curated by Andres Lepik, the exhibit featured 36 beechwood models of the architect’s major works and six unrealized skyscrapers. Also on display were a collection of objects from Ungers’s personal library that influenced his thinking: writings by Alberti, Dürer, and Le Corbusier; alabaster models of the Parthenon, Pantheon, and Bramante’s Tempietto; and paintings by Merz, Mondrian, and Richter.

A second exhibition, “Learning from O. M. Ungers,” began in late October with a symposium of the same name, which featured personal recollections by the architect’s collaborators and former students. Participants included Michael Wegener, a visiting critic at Cornell in 1968; Jürgen Sawade, also a visiting critic throughout the early ’80s; former graduate student Hans Kollhoff; and Werner Goehner (M.Arch. ’73), a former student of Ungers’s and a member of AAP’s faculty since 1975.

The exhibition itself, curated by Erika Mühltaler, was displayed at the Technical University of Berlin, where Ungers was professor and dean from 1963 to 1969. Combined, the exhibitions afforded a comprehensive view of the development, influences, and consequences of Ungers’s ideas, research, and teaching.AAP

NEW COLLEGE WEBSITE OPENS AAP TO THE WORLD AAP launched a dynamic new website in October, presenting comprehensive

information about the college and a showcase of striking work by AAP students, faculty, and alumni. The new site, aap.cornell.edu, is the place to turn for the latest college news, information about coming events, program descriptions, applications, and a wealth of vivid images.

“We’re very pleased with the graphic impact of the site,” said Associate Dean Stan Taft, a professor of art and chair of the website committee. “Its effective use of visual materials gives us a much stronger presence online.”

The primary goal of the redesign project was unification. Previously, the college had maintained seven separate sites—one for each department, plus sites for Career Services, the Fine Arts Library, Knight Visual Resources Facility, and Cornell in Rome—each with its own look, its own navigation, its own priorities.

The new site unifies the online presence of all departments with consistent design elements, does a better job of promoting and marketing the college to prospective students, offers an intuitive site map and easier navigation, and facilitates information sharing both within AAP and with outside visitors.

“The launch of this site is a huge step forward in our efforts to effectively present the best this college has to offer,” said Dean Mohsen Mostafavi. “We are continuing to refine the site and welcome feedback from anyone who uses it.”

The site was designed by New York Citybased Soulellis Studio (Paul Soulellis, B.Arch. ’90) in a thorough creative process involving input from and collaboration with members of the AAP community. Krate of Long Island City built the site and developed its robust content management system.

On board since September, and handling the many issues and refinements necessary in such a complex undertaking, is AAP’s new websites and content manager, Jennifer Savran.

An experienced site manager and editor—as well as a filmmaker and bookbinder—Savran is teaching staff how to update online information, identifying necessary adjustments to design and content, managing a database of imagery, and exploring new ways of using the web’s communications capabilities.

Take a look at aap.cornell.edu, and let us know what you think! Your comments can be sent to aapwebcm@cornell.edu.AAP

BARCLAY JONES LAB DEDICATED Barclay Jones was “the ideal planning professor,” a man

with degrees in fine arts, architecture, planning, and economics. He pioneered the field of disaster planning. He reinvigorated Cornell’s planning program and was a key figure in it for over 30 years. And besides all that, he was “a true eccentric” and a man for whom “being a father to his students was a serious occupation.”

These were some of the comments made on December 1 as dozens of faculty, alumni, and others (many sporting imitations of Jones’s trademark bow ties) gathered to dedicate the city and regional planning department’s new Barclay G. Jones Urban Design Laboratory.

Jones taught in CRP from 1961 until his untimely death in 1997, and is credited with infusing advanced social science theory and methods into the department’s professional degree programs and significantly enhancing the quality and international reputation of the doctoral program.

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1992.

Honored guests at the dedication included Jones’s son and daughter, Barclay Gibbs Jones III

3/AAPNEWS and Louise Tompkins Jones ’87. Among the speakers was visiting lecturer Robert Schwarting ’69, who described Professor Jones as “one of the most important people in my life” and delivered a series of affectionate, often humorous anecdotes about him.

Also speaking in honor of Barclay Jones were Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, CRP chair Kenneth Reardon (Ph.D. ’90), and CRP professors Susan Christopherson and William Goldsmith (Ph.D. ’68).

Louise Jones cut the ribbon at the door of the lab, which is located in West Sibley Hall and contains state-of-the-art computers with imaging software, architectural drafting tables, and a printing and scanning facility. Already in use, the lab is a key part of CRP’s renewed commitment to physical planning.

Center stage in the lab was a clay model for a bust of Barclay Jones created by associate professor of art Roberto Bertoia. When completed, the bust will be cast in bronze and placed permanently in the lab.AAP RIGHT A projected photograph of Barclay Jones forms the backdrop for speakers at the dedication of the urban design lab named for him.

NYC CENTER EXPANDS OFFERINGS

From brief museum excursions to semester-long urban experiences, AAP’s New York City Center is extending the college’s curriculum into new territory. The center, located at 50 West 17th Street, hosted the first group of resident architecture students in the fall, and recently held its first winter session classes, giving students two urban educational options to fill the January break. With the start of the spring semester, the center became headquarters for a second group of architecture students, with students in other programs making shorter visits. Next fall may see the launch of an integrated program in both architecture and planning.

The winter session courses made the most of New York’s wealth of museums—both the architecture and art departments offered courses involving visits to as many as eight different major sites.

In architecture, Professor Christian Otto led “Museum, Architecture, and the Urban Face.” Meeting with museum and gallery professionals during extensive site visits, students analyzed museum form, content, and use in a historical and theoretical context.

The art department offered a hybrid course combining studio work with excursions, lectures, and discussions. Leading the course were art department chair Buzz Spector, Associate Professor Todd McGrain, and Assistant Professor Maria Park. (See the article on book installations by Spector and students, page 12.)

“A big part of this course for me is the fact that it’s actually in New York City,” art and physics major Madeleine Corbett told the Cornell Chronicle. “Being exposed to galleries and the role of curators, getting a bearing on what is going on in the art world right now and being involved in that experience, I think is very meaningful in my development as an artist.”

With the beginning of the spring 2007 semester, the New York City Center welcomed its second group of resident architecture students. Like the fall group, these students, most in their fourth or fifth year, have an opportunity to intern at such firms as Architecture Research Office, Bernard Tschumi Architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Leslie Gill Architect, N Architects, Richard Meier + Partners, and Weiss/Manfredi.

“Students who participate in the internship program get to sense the life of working in Manhattan, the cultural adaptation from student to professional, and city living,” says fall NYC student Jacob Slevin. “Even for those who don’t participate, the courses plug students into that world.”

The spring design studio, Ecological Urbanism, is taught by Dean Mohsen Mostafavi along with Ben Gilmartin, an architect with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Julian Varas, a visiting faculty member in architecture and city and regional planning. Jill Lerner (B.Arch. ’76) of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates has returned for her second semester of teaching Professional Practice, drawing on her many contacts in the New York architecture community to expose students to real life in the profession. Otto is teaching a field-based course on architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries, and James Siena (B.F.A. ’79) is leading independent studies in art.

The Department of City and Regional Planning is considering its first full-semester experience at the NYC Center next fall. Long active in the city through such programs as Cornell Urban Scholars and a more recent initiative, Growing Up in Cities, CRP has so far used the NYC Center, which opened in spring 2005, for brief visits and for summer seminars for the Urban Scholars program. In the coming fall terms the department hopes to have 8–10 Urban and Regional Studies undergrads in the city.

A key element of the New York program, says administrator Margherita Fabrizio, is the opportunity for all kinds of crossover participation. For example, when an Ithaca-based art class takes a field trip to visit New York galleries, NYC students will be able to join them. Students in that same class might participate in, say, a walking tour with an architectural history course in the NYC curriculum.

“One of our goals,” says Fabrizio, “is to bring some of the students in each department to New York City every semester for a course, lecture, or seminar, and to give as many students as possible a chance to participate.”AAP

OLYMPIC RUNNER KIP KEINO HELPS LAUNCH NEW INITIATIVES IN KENYA Olympic gold medalist Kipchoge “Kip” Keino has

change in their urban environment (see page 14).

Nearly half of the population of Nairobi is under age 25, said David Driskell, the UNESCO chair of Growing Up in Cities and a lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning.

In Nairobi, Cornell students and local young people will identify priorities for change and work with local partners to make those changes. They will get strategic assistance from students in the gone the distance, both on the track and for his spring 2007 joint architecture and planning studio, fellow human beings—and his inspiration and example were strongly felt during a visit to Cornell under the direction of Driskell and Jeremy Foster, a visiting professor of architecture. Areas of December 14.

Having come to Ithaca to establish a satellite study will include building and water management technologies and globalization issues. office for two projects in his native Kenya—the Foster and Driskell recently won a prestigious Kip Keino High Performance Training Centre Rotch Traveling Studio Award, which will provide and the Kip Keino Children’s Home—the famed $20,000 for student travel to Nairobi. distance runner and humanitarian also attended Keino has engaged in several entrepreneura Hartell Gallery reception to lend his support to ial and humanitarian efforts in Kenya, including two AAP initiatives in Kenya—the Growing Up in Nairobi program and a collaborative planning and funding an AIDS program and running an orphanage he founded after he and his wife took in two architecture studio. children in 1983. His High Performance Training Growing Up in Nairobi, a branch of the UNESCO program Growing Up in Cities, began on Centre in Eldoret provides runners from about 30 nations with high-altitude training and feeds January 3 with a group of nine Cornell students them—and many people in the surrounding traveling to Nairobi to help young people affect community—from a 500-acre organic farm.

During his visit Keino also held discussions with AAP Dean Mohsen Mostafavi and Cornell President David Skorton about other possible connections between Cornell and Kenya.

“You have tremendous facilities in this country; you have manpower and technology,” Keino said at the reception. “I and my family, we realize we have a lot to share with others. But we cannot do it without unity, peace, and love.…The world needs you, and we need to learn from you.”

Keino’s visit was facilitated by Assistant Dean Peter Turner, Kevin Thompson (M.S. ’83), and Michelle Thompson (M.R.P. ’84, Ph.D. ’01), a visiting lecturer in city and regional planning.AAP ROBERT BARKER/UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHY

Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

WILLIAM STAFFELD

BArch PROGRAM RANKED #1 IN THE NATION—NEW MArch PROGRAM ENTERS AT #6 Cornell’s B.Arch. program has once again received top

marks in the annual survey conducted by Design Intelligence. Architects at a cross-section of U.S. firms, asked which accredited programs best prepared students for real-world practice, named Cornell more often than any other school. Cornell also placed first in last year’s survey, as it has several times previously.

Cornell was also recognized for strength in graduate design education in 2007. With the addition of the new professional M.Arch. program— which only began in 2004—Cornell appeared in the graduate ranking for the first time, scoring a strong sixth-place tie.

In the same volume, Design Intelligence also published an article by a Tulane architecture student, one of many taken in by Cornell after Hurricane Katrina had devastated their university.

The article praised the speed and efficiency of the Department of Architecture’s response, and the reassuring words and actions of Professor Arthur Ovaska and Dean Mohsen Mostafavi. “The reception we received was overwhelmingly generous, and made us feel like we had been at Cornell for years,” the Tulane student wrote.AAP

UNDERGRADUATE

1 Cornell University

2 3 4 5 6 6 6 9 10 11 12 13 14 14 14 14

Rice University Syracuse University Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Rhode Island School of Design Auburn University CA Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo University of Kansas University of Texas at Austin Carnegie Mellon University University of Notre Dame Kansas State University Illinois Institute of Technology Iowa State University Pratt Institute University of Oregon University of Southern California

GRADUATE 1 2 3 4 5

Harvard University University of Cincinnati Yale University Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Virginia

6 Cornell University

6 6 9 10 11 12 12 12 15 16 17 17 19 19

Rice University Washington University in St. Louis Columbia University Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University University of Pennsylvania Princeton University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Texas at Austin Rhode Island School of Design University of Michigan Southern California Institute of Architecture University of Florida Texas A&M University University of Notre Dame

NEW DIRECTOR FOR URBAN SCHOLARS The Cornell Urban Scholars Program, which connects students with

social-change organizations in New York City, welcomes Richard Kiely as the new faculty director. Kiely came to Cornell in 2006 for a dual appointment as a lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning and as interim director of graduate career development and student life for the university. He was also the academic director of Amizade Global Service Learning and Volunteer Programs, a nonprofit organization that supports university-based community development projects around the world.

In 2004–2005, Kiely gained national recognition when he was named a John Glenn Service-Learning Scholar by Ohio State University’s John Glenn Institute of Public Service and Public Policy.AAP

Kip Keino (left) speaks with students at a reception in Hartell Gallery.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

4/VOICESfromROME— CORNELL IN ROME, AAP’S OLDEST STUDY ABROAD PROGRAM, WILL CELEBRATE ITS 20th ANNIVERSARY IN MARCH, AND MANY ALUMNI WILL RETURN TO RELIVE—OR AT LEAST TO REMINISCE ABOUT— THE ROME EXPERIENCE. For a look at how the program resonates with its most recent participants, AAP News asked members of the fall 2006 group to comment on their experience.

AAP

ANA LESHCHINSKY

The Art Center that I designed [for a studio assignment] is a building that registers the Aurelian wall with its layers and complexities through a game of shadows, and adds a new layer to the experience of the massive wall. The Art Center faces the Aurelian wall; the center and

If anything, Rome’s crowded streets and tightly packed plan served as a wall for me to push against, resulting in a lot of landscapes and nature pieces— fish, kids standing with foxes and rodents at their feet, lobsters, rabbits, etc.

The work did sometimes parallel themes in Rome: I found myself using a

warmer palette than usual to reflect the quality of Mediterranean light; I dove into older subject matter, like classic portraiture. But, most of all, the open curriculum of the Rome studio and the studio’s proximity to Cornell in Rome’s housing allowed me to produce more than usual. I left Rome having completed over 25 paintings and twice as many drawings, sketches, and photographs. BENJAMIN SLOCUM SHATTUCK LEFT Benjamin Slocum Shattuck, Kids (2006), oil on boards, each 24 in. x 60 in.

the wall are looking at each other, challenging each other’s role. Each has a different meaning and identity, but only the dialogue between the two allows an intense and revealing experience. The two “walls” are interacting with each other, registering each other’s shadows on their surface, giving up their personal ego to better reveal the beauty of the other—a lesson the real importance of which I only learned in Rome. ANA LESHCHINSKY

JAVIER GALINDO

The hyper and simultaneous excessiveness of the Eternal City overwhelms the foreigner’s retina. More than in any other place in the world, a continuous struggle of coexistence between gone and present time periods takes hold of the physical setting....The lesson of Rome becomes one

of careful choosing. Either by embracing, ignoring, or rejecting parts of its infinite historical context, we are nevertheless forced to make decisions among a torrential flux of possibilities. In Rome we don’t necessarily learn to better see, make, or transform; but we evaluate, edit, and condense.

We appreciate, we resist, and we verify. JAVIER GALINDO CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

5/FOLIO THE FOLIO SECTION IS THE PROVINCE OF EACH SEMESTER’S GUEST EDITOR, CHOSEN FROM AMONG THE VISITING FACULTY AT AAP TO PROVIDE AN OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE ON THE COLLEGE’S ACTIVITIES AND ALSO TO OFFER A GLIMPSE OF HIS OR HER OWN INTERESTS AND AREAS OF EXPERTISE. FOR THIS ISSUE’S GUEST EDITOR, WE ARE FORTUNATE TO HAVE DORIS VON DRATHEN, WHO STARTED AT CORNELL IN SPRING 2005, RETURNED FOR LECTURING, AND CONTINUED IN FALL 2006—TEACHING IN BOTH THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE DEPARTMENTS.

ETHICALICONOLOGY AN ART THEORY IN THE WAKE OF WARBURG,

HEISENBERG, LEVINAS, AND BEUYS—AND ITS IMPACT FOR WRITING AND TEACHING DORIS VON DRATHEN A VISITOR’S COMMENT The fall 2006 semester was my third visit to Cornell. Every time the farewell is getting more difficult. As I was the first to shuttle between architects and artists and when possible to teach them together, it seemed sometimes to me that my person stood for that often discussed “fusion” of these faculties, to simply be the “bridge” which Rem Koolhaas and OMA will build at AAP in the near future. This consciousness changed my gaze and made me perceive anew the image I have kept on my computer screen for a long time. Cosmic joke or pure coincidence? This image shows a “living bridge”; it is a project generated in the office of Edoardo Badano, an architect from Genoa.

This image could be the emblem of my text, since the most logical use of the Folio seemed to me to leave a kind of bridging love declaration: I’d like to explain to my students and colleagues in architecture and art why the bare contemplation of art can be, for an art historian, a lifelong investiga-

tion, and why and how you might want to teach it.

I’d like this text to be a bridge between the campus and my place of origin (Hamburg), between America and Europe, contemporary art and art history, architects and artists, between the philosophy of doing and the philosophy of commenting, between writing and teaching, theory and life, dream and reality.

As every arc of a bridge is built on an ungraspable secret, the infinite value of pi, this text also is grounded in something that can’t be transmitted in words. The first approach to art is silent. But the process of questioning which follows that first moment can very well be explained. Here, in seven chapters I try to show the most important steps of my method. The Greek word—composed of meta (behind, after, in the middle, in-between, trans-) and hodos (path)—says exactly how I understand my work: one of many possible itineraries on the way to understanding something of the big secret that is the Other. DORIS VON DRATHEN

A Living Bridge Crossing Marina Bay in Singapore, designed by Edoardo Badano and partners: a/ua, Genoa, Italy (submission for International Design Consultancy, May 2004)

© 2004 Edoardo Badano and partners: a/ua action

DORIS VON DRATHEN IS A GERMAN ART HISTORIAN WHO STUDIED IN THE TRADITION OF WARBURG AND PANOFSKY IN HAMBURG. Since 1990 she has lived in Paris, where she teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Since the mid-1980s her monographic studies on contemporary artists—such as Marina Abramovic´, Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn, Agnes Martin, Giuseppe Penone, Gerhard Richter, and Pedro Cabrita Reis—have been published regularly in retrospective catalogs all over the world, in magazines such as Kunstforum International (Cologne), and in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Art, Künstler Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst (Munich). These monographs based on continuous studio visits led her to develop her own method of approaching art, which she termed “ethical iconology” in her book Vortex of Silence: Proposition

for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories (Charta, 2004).

In addition to Cornell, she has taught at such institutions as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Kunsthochschule in Berlin, the Architectural Association in London, and lately at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia University.

Doris von Drathen’s most recent major publication is a monograph on Pat Steir (Charta, 2006). Her catalog contributions in 2006 include monographic texts on the artist of her specialization, Rebecca Horn, and on Kimsooja, Jaume Plensa, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Bernhard Rüdiger, Julião Sarmento, David Tremlett, and Andy Warhol.AAP

0/

1/

6/FOLIODORISvonDRATHEN

Aby Warburg came to Cornell. Exactly 100 The Work of Art as Individual Experience The contemplation of art is subjective science. At the latest, ever since Werner Heisenberg years after setting off from Europe, his discovered the Indeterminacy Principle in physics, we have known that even science, which to spring from unmitigated objectivity, is not free either of the earth-boundedness or the journey too came full circle in Ithaca—in claims psyche of the experimenting subject. However precise the technology of measuring might be, the form of a published book. In 1895 the 30-year-old art the scientist’s acknowledgment that the “measuring subject’s” presence influences the “act of

historian from Hamburg, whose insights drawn from his research on the Italian Renaissance and classical antiquity even today still have pioneering relevance for the renewal of art history, shifted his focus of inquiry from Florence to New Mexico. Although news of his interdisciplinary thinking had come to the ears of his colleagues, they were shocked nonetheless to hear that Warburg was about to make a comparative study of Laocoon, classical antiquity’s icon of suffering, and the snake rituals of the Hopi Indians. Yet since Warburg ascribed the same status to the function of a work of art—its consciousness-transforming impact on the viewer—as he did to formal analysis, he was able to draw comparisons that would have been unthinkable for art historians with a purely aesthetic focus. It was thus with entirely new freedom that he investigated Laocoon’s furious struggle to keep the monster at bay as a chance for every viewer to “relive” his or her own fears and suffering, and thereby transcend them. So, by studying the universal theme embodied by that sculpture, Warburg was able to show that from classical antiquity, through the Renaissance and into modernity, from Rome and Florence to New Mexico, the classical icon of suffering formed part of a relentlessly surging flow of analogue images.

The mass of notes accumulated from this research trip formed a kind of secret reservoir for his later years of research. But it was not until 1923 that Warburg actually dared to summarize all his mental excursions of that period into a single lecture—which he nonetheless shrank from publishing. In it he described his vision of a “space for reflection” (Denkraum),1 where rational abstraction and emotional experience, logos and mythos, intellectual knowledge and instinctive powers could coexist and interact without plunging back into a condition prior to the emancipatory achievements of the Enlightenment. It was not, however, until a full nine years after Warburg’s death, and five years after the internationally renowned library belonging to his Hamburg research center was rescued from Nazi excesses by being transferred to London, that this text was published there in 1938, albeit in English and radically abridged. It took yet another fifty years for the complete German text to be published in Berlin. But, of all places, it was at Cornell that the first full-length English version of this lecture was published, a text that still has the capacity to scandalize anyone who takes a solely aesthetically oriented approach to art history.2 That was in 1995. At almost the same time, the original Warburg Library was reopened in Hamburg—in a ceremony held in front of still-empty shelves.

For someone who grew up in postwar Hamburg, as I did, studying3 in the Warburg tradition during the seventies and eighties, contributing to the restoration of his “space for reflection” in the very city where it had been destroyed, then witnessing Warburg’s almost voguish revival in Paris in the nineties, such cycles of recurrence and parallels of coincidence are especially moving. Warburg’s presence in Ithaca first came to my attention in fall 2005,4 when the performance artist Joan Jonas adapted this Cornell Press text for stage at the New York art foundation Dia: Beacon. In a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, Joan Jonas combined dance, music, dialogue, and a stream of images from video, large watercolors, and drawings in such an enthralling manner that viewers were plunged completely into the wide-ranging vision of Warburg’s “space for reflection,” only, with the final frame, to be disappointedly returned to the confines of rationally ordered everyday life. By contrast, when in the 1980s Marina Abramovic´ sought to reestablish a lost unity with the cosmos in her snake performances,5 she had initially been wholly unaware of Warburg. On learning of his work in the course of our conversations in her studio she found confirmation of her intuition in his world of thinking.

Such moments have enthused me in my yearlong struggle not merely to view Warburg within his own time, but also to grasp his significance in particular for contemporary art.6 However, on learning that it was Cornell that had published Warburg’s most audacious lecture in America, I was moved to set out my own art theory here in AAP News—one that builds on his thinking but also continues its logic, extending it to include the dimension of ethical and political awareness.

When I started here as a visiting professor, the challenge for me was to exchange the solitude of my study for the sociability of the seminar, testing the comprehensibility of my ideas on students not only of art but also of architecture. The fact that they all proved equally capable of working with my methodology, that they suddenly came alive on realizing that art had something to do with them personally, that art can be a vehicle for expanding one’s own consciousness or even reframing identity, all this has inspired me to pursue my quest for a commentary on art that is “meaningful” and relevant to life with even greater commitment than before.

measurement” is mirrored to an astonishing degree by what was probably the most revolutionary idea in art historical discourse in the early twentieth century, as articulated by Aby Warburg.

The art historian defined the act of contemplating art as “oscillation” (Pendelgang). Warburg’s thesis stated that a work of art is an event. This dynamic event takes place in the interval that separates the viewer from the work of art, and it is only in this space of intense experience and contemplation that the living presence of a work of art can arise. His claim triggered a scandal in the world of academic art history at that time. This approach not only knocked the traditionally sacrosanct view of an objectively describable aesthetic entity from its pedestal, but it also meant that passionately emotional experience, on the one hand, and ordering, distancing reflection, on the other, could be set side by side as dimensions of equal importance. For Warburg was not interested in vindicating aesthetic categories but in establishing a new “science” of art—a body of knowledge whose pivotal concern was the function of an artistic object, which resides in its capacity to expand the viewer’s consciousness.

Warburg formulated his notion of “oscillation”7 in 1929, at the same time as Heisenberg’s discovery, and in all likelihood without knowing anything about the Indeterminacy Principle. It was not until the 1970s and ’80s that the painter David Hockney noticed this correspondence8 in long conversations with his colleague R. B. Kitaj and began to reflect the field of tension between viewer and painting through simultaneous, exaggerated shifts of perspective within his own pictorial spaces. Even though Warburg had become veritably voguish in Europe in the early 1990s, hardly anybody explicitly adopted his thinking and approach to formulate a commentary on so-called contemporary art. But to me it was precisely this that pointed the way to step off the market-driven carousel of art.

Just how closely Warburg’s notion of “oscillation” is poled to life is shown by the reactions of the young artists and architects at Cornell when their studies bring them face to face with the original works. On a class visit to a museum department of, not just modern art but also, say, Renaissance art, if I suggest that they choose a work of art that personally “grabs” them, in less than 30 minutes each student instinctively knows which one it is, is eager to point it out and explain why, to start working on it, and to learn more about it—or perhaps about him- or herself.

Marina Abramovi c´ Dragon Heads (1992), performance (video-still); photo by Wolfgang Morell; Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany

Agesandros Polydoros and Athenadoros Laocoon (ca. 50 BCE), marble; Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City

2/ 3/

7

There Is No Such Thing as The Matter of Representation Contemporary Art The fact that major artists today are interested in and Evocation Warburg comes as no surprise. It is because his thinking opens up an unusual realm of freedom that they find lacking to an alarming degree in fashionable, normative discourse. It is as if a deep trench divided those who create real presences, works of art in other words, from those who pen commentaries about them in the market-oriented mainstream—this is the impression I have repeatedly gained on the studio visits I started making in the early 1980s. The topics discussed in artists’ studios are not, say, how one might further promote Surrealism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, or Deconstructivism, but the true nature of human existence with all that yearning for love and fear of death, with the down-to-earth gravity and craving to touch the heavens, the dizzying flights at high altitude and sudden plunging descents, always involving the risk of turning from victim into perpetrator within a single moment’s breath.

My experience of artists’ studios is best summarized by a remark made by Agnes Martin in the late 1960s—“There’s no such thing as contemporary art”—with which the painter then turned her back on the New York art world and its absurdities, and withdrew to New Mexico. The quiet revolt manifested by this artist, who saw her painting as a vehicle for working on her own selfawareness, was addressed at an art world brandishing commercial labels and divisive categories that threatened to rob artists of their vital impulse.

My dialogue with artists and their works has engendered in me an urge to contribute to the current history of art from the perspective of the artist, rather than that of a status-seeking art critic. Barely another method has seemed so well suited to my search for a different, emancipated art criticism than Warburg’s “Iconology,” which Panofsky later systematized in the introduction to his study on Raphael’s painting Vision of a Knight. For adopting an iconological procedure means protecting the work of art and its mystery; it means seeing art as a supra-epochal, transcultural continuum; it means drawing comparisons with other artistic media and sciences; it means treating formal analysis not as an end in itself but as a vehicle in the crucial search for the image, for meaning and significance. But above all, working according to an iconological method means acknowledging one’s own, subjective frame of perception as a condition we cannot escape, and thus aligning it as far as possible to cultural, philosophical, and artistic regulatives, thereby extending its scope.

For an art critic currently working with iconology, hence one who acknowledges living artists as a regulative, this not only incurs holding lengthy studio conversations, but also, if need be, repeatedly picking up the phone to raise further issues. Of course it requires a certain degree of experience to critically filter utterances made by an artist. Not every artist is able to speak informatively about his or her work. At the same time, the authenticity of an independent writer naturally calls for a balancing act to be effected between the desired proximity to the artist and the appropriate distance needed for writing. All this takes considerable time—which perhaps explains why this method is so unpopular. On my visits to student artists’ studios, this approach involves communicating my personal response to their work, attempting to initiate a dialogue, trying to feel my way into the world of the respective student, attempting to grope my way forward from the forms I encounter to the inner motives an artist has for grappling with a certain phenomenon, and then to return to these forms, trying to gauge individual literature—always from the perspective of the ancient Chinese proverb: “Water the root, enjoy the fruit.”

Mildred Tolbert Agnes Martin in Her Studio (ca. 1954), photograph, 24 x 16.5 cm; Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico

If art is our foremost vehicle for comprehending the world, why then does the art market feel the need for this surge of normative and formally inclined commentaries, which occlude precisely that which is most important—the image and its emotional power? When Mona Hatoum9 showed her work La Grande Broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x 21) in Tate Britain in 2000, numerous preview guests treated it to smugly highbrow comments. Most Duchamp, some whispered; Very Neo-Pop, others suggested. Mona Hatoum’s huge bronze sculpture is unmistakably based on a kitchen utensil, here 21 times larger than life, a domestic vegetable grater. Oddly, however, the museum visitors had overlooked the most important aspect, namely the object’s function in relation to its enlargement. In these terms, the sculpture with a basin large enough to entrap an entire human body becomes a murderous machine. With this observation in mind, on the opening night I turned to talk to Mona Hatoum. “Well,” she asked with great interest and curiosity, “do you see yourself more as a perpetrator or as a victim?”—for this was precisely the issue her work was concerned with. In the long conversation that ensued, it seemed the most normal thing for us to disregard all aesthetic categorization whatsoever.

Such a mode of observation that begins by examining the actual matter of representation in order to inquire into the evoked image and meaning,10 and in doing so believes what it sees, is on occasions capable of dismantling otherwise widespread misunderstandings: in most textbooks on contemporary art Brancusi’s Colonne sans fin is described as the precursor of Minimalism since, so it is claimed, it consists of layers of identical—in other words, serial—elements. The first of these columns was cut in 1918 from a single oak tree. Only on closer inspection does it become clear why the 150-centimeter-high column is “endless.” The eye involuntarily prolongs the movement of the segments, which has been capped sharply at top and bottom. It is precisely the act of dissecting the topmost and lowest rhomboid lozenges, it is precisely the abrupt limit that opens up a freedom of reflection beyond that boundary. Is it not in fact our capacity to inquire into what lies beyond the boundary that distinguishes our condition as human beings? But precisely this mystery is blanketed over in commentaries that elevate aesthetic categories over our emotional response. The abdication of aesthetic categories in favor of a highly sensitive visual analysis, which understands form as a vehicle for exploring meaning and significance, can stimulate art students to enjoy an unaccustomed freedom of thought, while also challenging them to sharpen their own awareness. Students from other faculties, such as architecture, are astonished not to have to grapple with convolutedly recondite jargon and usually respond with enthusiasm to the chance of enjoying greater space for ethical and political debate. By this token, additional teaching material is also provided by, say, the sculptures made by an architecture student,11 or a text written by a young artist, or the thoughts of a skateboarder in the context of discussing the physical experience of space. Elsewhere, if our inquiry seeks to identify cultural origins, it might prove necessary to undertake a comparative reading of the Bible and the Koran, making particular reference to the Vedic tradition and other ancient texts. Yet for all this open and vivid dialogue with the students, the need to uphold the structure of a seminar and to continuously press for written testimony of individual reflections turns into a constant balancing act, which is precisely why this kind of teaching is so enjoyable and rewarding.

Mona Hatoum La Grande Broyeuse (Mouli Julienne x 21), 2000; courtesy of the artist

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) An Allegory (“Vision of a Knight”) (1504), oil on paper, 17.1 x 17.3 cm; © The National Gallery, London

Constantin Brancusi Endless Column, Version I (1918), oak, 203 x 25 x 24 cm; conserved by Atelier Brancusi, Paris; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

4/ 5/ 6

8/FOLIODORISvonDRATHEN

The Other is not of my own scale When Warburg speaks of the work of art that does not actually occur until it enters the viewer’s

experience, he automatically intends this to include the age-old sense that a work of art is a being looking at me. This subject not only preoccupies poets of antiquity and Romanticism, such as Rainer Maria Rilke in his reflections on the “archaic torso,”12 but also philosophers, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer,13 and, in their wake, art historians like David Freedberg14 and Georges Didi-Huberman.15 But for Warburg the vitality of the work of art is of quite a different order—he is not only concerned with its character as an entity but also with the moment in which it becomes an entity in the magnetically charged intervening space that unfurls between the work of art and the viewer. What is novel here is his notion of an energy field. What is novel is the ungraspable, immediate, staggering moment. The true scandal is his concept of the work of art as a rupture in the familiar present.

For me, the full dimension of this event becomes evident when considered in juxtaposition with the ideas of the Talmud scholar and existential philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose teachers were Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Indeed, concurrent with Warburg’s thesis of “oscillation” and Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle, Levinas was formulating equivalent ideas on a philosophical level. Following protracted discussions with Heidegger in 1928 and 1929, he termed Heidegger’s metaphysics an “ontology of power.”

In response to this, Levinas formulated the first ideas of his own ontology, which states that the grounding of the self can only be effected in the encounter with the Other,16 by being summoned through the Other, and in terms of responsibility for the Other. It was not until 1948, following the “eclipse of God” (as Levinas called the Holocaust), that the first ontologist in history to open up the solitude of the subject-capsule was finally able to publish the first lecture series of his doctrine. Levinas postulated the ethical dimension of his philosophy with the ethical commitment of someone who had participated in the “experience of the century.” Warburg himself died in 1929. Had he lived longer, might he not have explicitly formulated an ethical role for his iconology, to which he repeatedly but indistinctly alludes? No one can know for sure. My thesis, however, is that iconology only makes sense today if it adopts an ethical and political stance.

In other words, if I experience a work of art not only as an ontological event but also as an encounter with a nonusurpable Other, for me this in fact serves as a model for ethical and political behavior.

In Levinas’s terms, the Other is not what we commonly mean by “our fellow man.” The experience of the truly Other unleashes a shock; it is the realization that the Other “is not of my own scale,”17 as Levinas puts it. This is to say, it is only possible for me to perceive or receive the truly Other beyond the horizon of my own I. But it is the very fact that the Other transcends my boundaries, actually rendering me helpless and vulnerable, that opens up a hiatus in the horizon of my I, that opens up a hiatus in the familiar fabric of time and space, that offers the possibility of perceiving the Other.

This is precisely how I would view the staggering encounter with a work of art in all its ungraspable alterity. Whoever skates over this staggering moment with familiar categories, or hurriedly seeks to mask its alienness with the preformulated colonizing concepts of a commercial bourgeois art machine, will lose the grasp of what is essential. Whoever does so will squander the challenging moment of being able to shift one’s own boundaries, will waste the opportunity to experience the momentous encounter with the Other. He misses out on himself and the experience of witnessing himself in the face of the Other as an autonomous I. For it is only inside this energy field that the work of art is able to unfurl the full dimension of its singular distinctiveness.

Examining art in this manner can provide a model for behavior when it comes to respecting the boundaries of the Other. Not as an act of tolerance, which would be presumptuous, but as an act of freedom in Levinas’s sense, when he inverted the ancient precept and claimed that one should give to the Other what the Other needs to live. Levinas was quite aware that his notions of a Weltheimat, a “universal home,” were utopian. What better role can the contemplation of art have in our society than to serve as a protective space for reflection where such a utopia can be kept alive? Which is why I have called my theory of art ethical iconology.

Louise Bourgeois Molotov Cocktail (1968), bronze, 10.4 x 20 x 13.9 cm; photo © Peter Moore; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

Emotional Experience and Fine Visual Analysis

The truly Other, the alien character of a work of art, cannot be transmitted. In the initial emotional encounter and fine reflective analysis it requires silence and patient waiting before first impressions can be shaped into words. “I warn all inquirers into this hard point […] not even to paw the ground with impatience,” Augustine admonishes, teaching that “in a deep stillness only can this truth be apprehended.”18 The most widely read commentaries on the oeuvre of Louise Bourgeois are concerned less with shedding light on her work than with targeting the largest possible audience. For years now, TV films and videos have exploited the artist’s willingness to give extensive interviews and offer biographical information. The fact that the anecdotal accounts of her father, of her role as a girl and humiliated daughter are so very popular proves how easily an art audience already bored with normative commentaries can be seduced by voyeuristic attractions rather than exploring the artist’s sculptures for genuine emotion. Louise Bourgeois has shaped a sensually charged, corporeal geometry, an antiformalistic and rebellious geometry, as it were. In doing so, she does not create bodily elements as visual demonstrations, but aided by the unerring perceptional energy of eros and physis, goes in search of a truth that reason can all too easily distort. She spurns symbols and signs in her quest for images that harbor a corporeal presence and enact a physical event. In the silence surrounding these alien presences, one senses such an intense degree of explosiveness that amid all the vulva- and phalluslike tumescences one is then barely astonished to discover an actual bomb: the works Janus Fleuri and Molotov Cocktail were both produced in 1968. Anyone who disqualifies such sculptural realities as “psycho art” is judging from hearsay alone.

In the consensus to disregard drama and pain, and to override the image with formal concerns, Gerhard Richter is commonly described as a “conceptual artist.” His series 18 October 1977, painted in 1988, so more than ten years after the three German terrorists of the BaaderMeinhof Group were found dead in their cells, is frequently eviscerated as an “attempt to resurrect historical painting in the present.”19 If Richter were such an aloof conceptual artist who paints from photographs, why did it take him ten years to react to these press shots? Warhol painted his portrait of Marilyn on the day after her death; Warhol was painting the death of the image of an image. For Richter, who as a student had fled from the ideologized regime of East Germany to West Germany in 1961, the terrorists’ spree of murders amounted to the collapse of ideology’s credibility a second time over; Richter was painting a drama. The emotional tension engendered through the depth of the gray, unfathomable silence of his painting series can be felt as an immediate and highly concentrated presence by anyone willing to look with their own eyes. Then there is his portrait of Ulrike Meinhof—he painted her three times in a row on canvases measuring 62 by 67, 62 by 62, and 35 by 40 centimeters. The female body is lying flat on the ground, the marks of the rope clearly visible on her neck. Richter hangs his portraits in juxtaposition, so that the interrupted rhythm of the sequence adds up to the expanded length of a stretched-out human body. For me this emphatic horizontal can be equated with Warburg’s “pathos formula.”20 The paradoxical nature of this concept manifests the explosive quality so typical of Warburg’s language: the chaotic realm of emotion merges directly with abstract order, forming a synthesis, which indicates the symbolic composition of a passion, of a drama. In other words, the “pathos formula” acts as a pivotal point between “representational” and “evocative matter,”21 between the visible and the invisible image. The horizontal emphasis and the vast dark space arching up above it provide the iconological freedom to view this portrait series of Ulrike Meinhof in comparison not only with Hans Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521; tempora on lime wood, 30.5 by 200 cm), but also with Richter’s own intensified rendering of a horizontal, namely Stroke (on Red) and Stroke (on Blue), both measuring 190 by 2000 centimeters. Which is not to say I am suggesting that Richter has reduced Holbein’s Christ to a single horizontal line. On the contrary, my thesis proposes that the “pathos formula” of the magnified horizontal plane is indicative of a drama, irrespective of whether the visible image—the “representational matter”—is a dead body or an abstract line. I am proposing that the essential image lies beyond the boundary of what is represented, since form that is artistically intended and artistically meditated creates meaning.

Hans Holbein the Younger Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe (1521), oil on wood, 30.5 x 200 cm; conserved by Kunstmuseum, Basel; © Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

Louise Bourgeois Janus Fleuri (1968), bronze, 25.7 x 31.7 x 21.2 cm; photo by Christopher Burke; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

Joseph Beuys Kreuzigung (Crucifixion) (1962–63), wood, nails, cable, thread, needle, cord, 2 plastic bottles, newspaper, oil (brown cross), and plaster; 42.5 x 19 x 15 cm; conserved by Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris

Gerhard Richter 18 Oktober 1977, series of 15 paintings (conserved by Museum of Modern Art, New York): Festnahme 1 (1988), oil on canvas, 92 x 126 cm; Axel Schneider, Frankfurt

Rebecca Horn Konzert für Buchenwald Part I (1999), permanent installation, Am Kirschberg 4, 99423 Weimar, www.swkk.de; Attilio Maranzano

Gerhard Richter Tote (1988), from the series 18 Oktober 1977, oil on canvas, 62 x 62 cm; Axel Schneider, Frankfurt

Gerhard Richter Strich (auf Rot) (1980), oil on canvas, 190 x 2000 cm; Atelier Gerhard Richter

6/

The Rediscovery of the Function of a Work of Art

7.

9

The Human Rights of the Eye It is precisely this oneness with the self that is capable of releasing an entirely different range

Hardly anyone has incorporated the ungraspable, intangible substance of an invisible image in his work with such vigor and so self-evidently as Joseph Beuys.22 What is there to see? A 50centimeter-high object consisting of wood, nails, cable, thread, needle, string, two plastic bottles, newspaper (on which a cross has been daubed in red antirust paint), and traces of plaster; its title is Kreuzigung (Crucifixion; 1962/63). In West Germany in the early 1960s, this work sparked a scandal of almost hysterical proportions. Beuys was accused of blasphemy, while calls were made for this “garbage sculpture” to be banned. But in fact his work had been entirely misconstrued: the traces of plaster on the wooden blocks show that Beuys clearly did not compose this Crucifixion ensemble from refuse but, on the contrary, had worked with the skeleton of a dismantled plaster sculpture. Just like the object, the title was also a remnant of this plaster-cast Crucifixion group. Seemingly, Beuys had rediscovered this support frame many years later in his studio and wondered how he could resurrect it. The material effort was minimal. At the top of the central vertical axis he fixed a piece of cable, leaving enough room for a thread and needle to hang and spin freely like a plumb line. For Beuys, this little needle that now traced the earth’s rotation in the air to give visible form to the force of gravity is what transforms this skeleton into a “living, pulsating figure.”23 Up in arms, the press dubbed the piece as “garbage art,” thereby minting a concept that stretched beyond Beuys, and launching a misunderstanding that was to influence a whole generation of artists. By contrast, Beuys himself described it as an Erdding—an earth thing—connected via the needle plumb down toward the center of the earth, while at the same time soaring upward through its emphatic verticality. In the mind of anyone who is willing to spend sufficient time contemplating this work, it can be envisaged as a perpetual cycle of energy, into whose pivotal center the viewer will be inscribed as a living needle.

The way the viewer invests this experience with creativity, discerning this work as a cycle of energy and envisaging his or her own centeredness within it, holds greater potency than the object, which interested Beuys less as a work of art than as a vehicle for anchoring his idea. The invisible image is more important than the visible one, the inner eye more important than purely retinal perception. It was with this sculpture that Beuys first coined his notion of an “expanded concept of art.” In the 1970s and 1980s, he broadened this concept to encompass large-scale cycles of energy, such as initiating a curative feedback of all forms of energy plundered from the earth, or changing the direction of money flows. Whether consciously or not, however, the twentieth century’s arguably most revolutionary artist drew direct links to the very same body of thought concerning magnetic fields that Warburg, Heisenberg, and, albeit on a different level, Levinas had been developing before they were interrupted by World War II. With his observation that his works fulfill the function of a platform for thought, Beuys broke with Hegel and his claim that art can no longer be considered the “highest form in which truth finds expression.”24 In clear contrast to Hegel’s assertion that “in terms of its highest qualities art is and remains for us a thing of the past,”25 Beuys shows that art occurs in every single moment and serves the purpose of shaping the viewer’s consciousness. These parallels between Beuys, Warburg, Heisenberg, and, ultimately, also Levinas have hitherto barely been researched.

It is also with energy from fields of magnetic tension that Rebecca Horn works in her spatial compositions, which deploy kinetic sculptures to perform rhythmical sequences of movement similar to ballet. As in all these works, however, it is again and again the presence of the viewer—be it as his or her likeness in a mirror, or in entering an intermediary space, or grasping the conductor’s baton,26 or in the movement of the head tracing an invisible vertical axis between mirrors mounted on the ceiling and on the floor—that represents the crucial element on which the essential and momentary event of the work is predicated. In some of these pieces, such as Concert for Buchenwald, Rebecca Horn projects historical experience into the viewer’s path, turning it into a question whose formulation unfurls both behind and before the viewer, insisting that each person adopt an attitude today. All of these works—whether they passionately lend visual expression to so-called past events, or to current affairs in a manner that alters consciousness, or use light and shadow to trace planetary orbits—focus on an indispensable theme: the need to center on the self and become aware of one’s own identity and ability to act self-responsibly.

This issue, so intimately related to Beuys’s thinking, also defines the work of the California artist Fred Eversley. He builds the sculptural spectrum of the same, ever-recurring form, the parabola, with the precision of someone who studied engineering and in his younger years was involved in the Apollo project. The sculptures have the focusing power of giant lenses, opening up the metaphysics of physics to individual experience. Regardless of their size—some of them extend to the monumental height of 5 meters, others are more manageably sized objects with a diameter of just 50 centimeters—each sculpture is a center of energy in its own right, capable of bundling the visual and acoustic energies within the viewer’s realm of experience and causing its own center to oscillate. But in terms of its function as a catalyst for the surrounding space and its energy, it also harbors a potential for experiencing the most intense presence of mind.

In the encounter with the original work and in conversation with students, this experience of the most intense presence of mind and of the connection to each individual’s innermost center is a constantly recurring theme, even if words barely suffice to describe it. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how this experience always sparks enthusiasm. I believe that whoever has had this experience once before will one day be able to fall back on it as an asset of perception.

of vital powers than those steered by reason that Warburg discovered among the Hopi Indians.

Resonating within his notion of the “fight for the human rights of the eye”27 is the power of a creative contemplation of art that Warburg terms as “the conscious creation of distance between the self and the external world.”28 But to draw this boundary calls for a strong sense of self. The fact that artists treat the experience of being at one with the self as a source of strength to invigorate the autonomous seems altogether plausible. Joan Jonas, the artist quoted at the outset, is not alone in having turned to a culture still shaped by mythical knowledge in search of an intensity which, since the Enlightenment, seems to have disappeared from Western civilization. This same urge has also driven Alighieri Boëtti to Pakistan, Rebecca Horn to Uzbekistan, David Tremlett to India and Africa, and Marina Abramovic´ to Australia. In Indian monasteries Abramovic´ learned to control her consciousness to such a degree that she was even able to transfer her sense of balance and calm onto Andalusian racehorses, allowing her in her performance El Héroe (The Hero) in 2001 to remain seated motionlessly on a white horse for long stretches of time, like a Jeanne d’Arc offering peace.

When Agnes Martin went to New Mexico she built herself a studio in Galisteo near Albuquerque made entirely of clay, exactly as the Pueblo Indians constructed their adobe houses.

Her studio became the meeting place for anyone looking for something in art that lay beyond art. The painter Pat Steir,29 who gave a lecture to our students in 2005 in the Johnson Museum, was friends with Agnes Martin. Sometimes art critics see a similar kind of emotional abstraction in her work. For me, their proximity is explicable less on a formal level, than because Pat Steir also considers her works as a vehicle for developing her personal sense of awareness. For the viewer willing to spend enough time looking at her paintings, inside her pictorial spaces it actually becomes possible to comprehend the primordial experience of stepping out of time and space.

The Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi has undertaken a journey in the other direction. During his current research visit to Cornell he has been writing down his life’s experience in English and Arabic, bearing witness to a culture in which it was wholly natural to constantly set the narrow confines of the intellectual horizon in relation to the sheer ungraspable extent of the universe.

This fluid communication between the visible and the invisible world is a perennial theme in his pictures. But among a younger generation of artists there is hardly anyone who dares to make this step quite so radically as Shirazeh Houshiary,30 whose most recent works are so subtle as even to defy reproduction. On visiting her studio in London, one needs time to achieve sufficient silence and absorption to experience a trembling presence coming to life with ever-emphatic force. One automatically begins to tune into the breathing of these presences and draw stimulation from them. Breath is the title of one of these works from 1997, which like all her others, is based on the incessant, contemplative writing of psalms by the Persian poet Rumi. As Shirazeh Houshiary quietly sings these verses over and over again while she is writing, her painting evolves from within her own breathing; thus the artist regards her pictures as mirrors in which she can gage the progress of her innermost work.

It is precisely this approach that Beuys was describing with his phrase “Everyone is an artist,” not the erroneous, bland notion that everything is art. Why do we need it then? “Everyone is an artist” uttered an entirely different challenge, requiring us to shape life as a work of art and live it with the individual autonomy of an artist. It was to safeguard this autonomy, not only of the artist but also of the work of art itself, that Warburg spoke out with his iconology. His vehement criticism of the “aestheticism of art history,” which filled him with “honest disgust,”31 should be seen in the context of the aestheticizing politics of the then burgeoning Fascist movement. It is with similar suspicion that I today fear the aesthetic labels, segregating categorizations and restrictively anti-individual alliances of our market-oriented consensus. For, whoever as a child in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s was confronted with getting over a history, which there was no getting over, learned a lesson that caused a lifelong allergy against all forms of regimentation and all forms of disrespect for the Other. Art that is controlled by the market abdicates its most precious good: to serve as a sanctuary for autonomous reflection. To be a “Warburgian” today and to extend his “space for reflection” through thinking and writing into the present to me means speaking out for a kind of contemplation of art that acts as a model for an ethical stance, namely one that gives to the Other what the Other needs to live. My personal enthusiasm at being a visiting “Cornellian” lies in having experienced that here such spaces for reflection are inscribed into tradition. Translated from the German by Matthew Partridge

Pat Steir Moons and a River, series of six paintings: Summer Moon (2005), oil on canvas, 278 x 248 cm; courtesy of the artist Rebecca Horn Moonmirror (detail: 2.mirror with light-vortex under the cupola); courtesy of the artist

Shirazeh Houshiary Breath (1997), graphite and black aquacryl on canvas, 190 x 190 cm; courtesy of the artist Ibrahim El-Salahi untitled (1999), aquarell on paper, 25 x 25 cm; courtesy of the artist

Fred Eversley Heart of Darkness (1976), polyester, 50.8 x 50.8 x 15.2 cm; © Fred Eversley Rebecca Horn Buchenwald Part II Schloß Ettersburg (1999); Attilio Maranzano

Rebecca Horn Buchenwald Part II, Schloß Ettersburg (detail); photo by Attilio Maranzano

Marina Abramovi c´ El Héroe (2001), video performance and photograph, NMAC (Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo), Andalucía, Spain, www. fundacionnmac.com; courtesy of the artist

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

10/FOLIOFOOTNOTES 1

Warburg first coined the concept of “Denkraum” in 1917, in his lectures on Luther. Gesammelte Schriften II, pp. 487–558, LeipzigBerlin, 1932, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970, p. 208. Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (translated, introduced, and edited by Michael P. Steinberg), Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995. Predominantly under Horst Bredekamp and Martin Warnke, who in 1994 finally succeeded in reopening the original Hamburg Warburg Institute in the Heilwigstrasse, of which he was appointed the first director. Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, first performed in October 2005, at Dia:Beacon; repeated in October 2006. Cf. my essay in the catalogue of the Berlin Nationalgalerie, 1993, and my publication Vortex of Silence, Proposition for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories, Milan/New York, 2004. Of the 23 monographic texts in this book, the following artists are also mentioned in the present essay: Marina Abramovic´, Agnes Martin, Mona Hatoum, Louise Bourgeois, Gerhard Richter, Rebecca Horn, Pat Steir, and Shirazeh Houshiary.

Cf. Vortex of Silence, loc. cit. Aby Warburg, Journal, VII, 1929, p. 267, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, op. cit., p. 253: “Iconology of the Interval: Art Historical Material Towards an Evolutionist Psychology of the Oscillation Between the Positing of Causes as Images and as Signs.” Cf. also: Aby Warburg, Handelskammer, Notebook, 1928, p. 44, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, ibid.: “The creation and the enjoyment of art demand the viable fusion between two psychological attitudes which are normally mutually exclusive. A passionate surrender of the self leading to a complete identification with the present—and a cool and detached serenity which belongs to the categorizing contemplation of things. The destiny of the artist can really be found at an equal distance between the chaos of suffering excitement and the balancing evaluation of aesthetic attitude.” Cf. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds.), Aby Warburg, Akten des internationalen Symposiums, Hamburg, 1990, p.

250; also: Werner Hofmann, Die Kunst des Verlernens, in Die Zeit, 10 February 1989, pp. 53–54. Mona Hatoum will be a guest lecturer at Cornell in fall 2007; cf. my studies in Vortex of Silence, loc. cit.

Max Raphael, Wie will ein Kunstwerk gesehen sein (The Demands of Art). Frankfurt am Main, 1984, p. 18.

Like those of Spencer Lapp, an architect who presented free-form sculptures in response to questions of identity raised in the discussions in our seminar Functions of Images with his exhibition “Unresolved Perception: The Eye of the Stranger.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, Leipzig, 1953, vol. 2, p. 189: “Archaischer Torso Apollos” (in English translated as “Archaic Torso of Apollo”), in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (ed. & transl. S. Mitchell), New York, 1982, p. 60.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, vol. 1, Tübingen, 1990, pp. 107ff.

David Freedberg, The Power of Images, Chicago, 1989.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Paris, 1992.

Levinas always wrote l’Autre (the Other) with a capital A. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et l’Infini, Paris, 1971, p. 43: “Le visage d’Autrui détruit à tout moment, et déborde…l’idée de ma mesure… Aborder Autrui…—c’est donc recevoir d’Autrui au-delà de la capacité du Moi; ce qui signifie exactement: avoir l’idée de l’infini.”

Augustine (as transcribed by Boehme and by Coleridge), quoted in George Steiner, Real Presences, Chicago, 1990, p. 224.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Eine Bemerkung zu Gerhard Richters 18.

Oktober 1977, in catalogue Krefeld, Museum Haus Esters, 1989, p. 49.

“Pathosformel”: first coined by Aby Warburg in “Festwesen,” p. 79, quoted in: E. H. Gombrich, op. cit., p. 179.

Cf. Max Raphael, loc. cit.

In the 1980s I had the opportunity in several interviews to discuss this personally with him.

Joseph Beuys, quoted in: Johannes Stüttgen, Zeitstau. Im erweiterten Kunstbegriff von Joseph Beuys, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 21; on the sculpture’s context see pp. 7–21.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I,” in: Eva Moldenhauer & Karl Markus Michel (eds.), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 13, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, p. 141.

Ibid., p. 25.

As in the installation Concert for Buchenwald II, 1999: in a room in Goethe’s summer residence Schloss Ettersburg outside the town of Weimar, the viewer finds himself beside a freestanding conductor’s baton mounted at shoulder-height and pointing toward the hills of the former Buchenwald concentration camp.

Aby Warburg, Manet, 1–2, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, op. cit., p. 274.

Ibid., p. 288.

Cf. my monograph, Pat Steir Installations, Edizioni Charta, Milan, 2006.

Cornell guest lecturer in spring 2007; cf. my monographic essay on Shirazeh Houshiary in Vortex of Silence, op. cit., pp. 159–170.

Salvatore Setti, “Pathos und Ethos,” in: Wolfgang Kemp, Gert Mattenklott, Monika Wagner, Martin Warnke (eds.), Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, vol. I, Berlin, 1997, p. 50; on this see also Michel P. Steinberg’s essay in Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, loc. cit., p. 105.

2

3

4

6

5

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

17

18 19

20

21 23

25

30 31

16

22

24

26

28

29

27

11/WORK ARCHITECTURE is a DISCOURSE—THOUGHTS on the FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE

Work by first-year architecture students (clockwise from left) Heera Gangaramani, Christopher Parschalk, Darius Woo, Cristina Villa, Jeremy Burke

It’s intense—

everyone seems to use that word about architecture at Cornell, and especially about the first year. But what are professors trying to get across in that first semester, and how does it feel to be a new student? AAP News asked faculty members PAUL ANDERSEN and ANDREA SIMITCH, who led the first-year studios this past fall, to talk about how they introduce students to the study of design. From first-year student ANN LUI, we solicited a student’s perspective on taking the plunge into architecture at Cornell.

AAP

PROFESSORS PAUL ANDERSEN AND ANDREA SIMITCH

Our approach in the first-year studio is based on a belief that novelty in design develops out of a particular kind of repetition, one that catalyzes diversity rather than refinement. Each project begins with a provided model, or primitive, that students are asked to alter in order to meet demands outside its usual scope.

For example, one exercise required students to construct custom-fit prosthetic devices entirely out of safety pins. While mass-produced safety pins are not meant to work as splints, cushions, or fabrics, one can engineer different material performances (rigid, springy, loose) by accumulating pins with a variety of connections. Each of the studio’s primitives (in this case, the safety pin) is diagrammatic in the sense that it anticipates a number of possible designs that have not yet been actualized, but could be through a series of measured transformations.

Exercises in the fall also reprogrammed an athletic shoe, cable ties, gaskets, and a standard accessible bathroom, wrapping up the semester with a design for a contemporary drive-in movie theater. We will work with a single primitive during the spring—Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Students will analyze the house through a number of diagrams that will in turn be modified as a first step toward generating alternative versions. As a studio, we will propose nearly 200 different house variations, speculating about what could be designed based on what was.

STUDENT ANN LUI

In the beginning of the semester I was told that architecture is a discourse. It has taken all semester to wrap my head around this idea considering that, coming into college, architecture was a practice, an occupation, buildings, how to build buildings—or any number of other very solid things. However, I learned that at Cornell architecture is considered to be something abstract— a discourse—the current state of thoughts and ideas and discussion about not just buildings and urbanism but so much more.

In this discourse, one of the words that my professors kept using was “rigor.” It was about rigorous work—how I stayed up late nights and worked all through weekends to put out as many ideas as I could and found which ones would stand and which wouldn’t—many didn’t, but the few that did meant that much more. It was about rigorous investigation, the fact that nothing could be left as it seemed and everything had to be torn apart, conceptually, analytically, physically—cutting through an old shoe with an X-acto knife at 1:00 in the morning. Lastly, it was about the rigorous critique that formed part of the discourse— putting up my work and finding that from it could stem all sorts of ideas and talk.

Before coming to Cornell, I was used to the sort of fear that artists might get looking at a blank canvas; you know that whatever you put down is you, just you, and there is nowhere to hide because your work is your own. What I learned through my first semester was how to taper that fear through rigor.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

12/WORK solarDECATHLON /TRAVEL/URBAN SCHOLARS/ CONZETT/BUZZinNYC /TUG HILL/DRESDEN

Architecture studios travel abroad Buenos Aires, Madrid, Nairobi, Lisbon, México City—these are among the destinations of this

semester’s architecture students. The department’s global perspective and interests are growing, and increasingly, faculty members focus on sites far from Ithaca and find ways to take students there for brief explorations.

The “complex, surreal, and extra-small city-state” of Gibraltar is a key site for visiting critics Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda, whose studio will visit Madrid, Córdoba, and Granada, as well as Gibraltar, all in one week. Partners in AMID, formerly known as cero9, they have taught at architecture schools around the world. In 2006 they won first place in a competition to design a contemporary art center in Madrid. Here is how they describe their 500-level spring studio: “DO GIB is an active studio in which students are invited to work as a team as well as individuals, exploring how to expand urban, landscape, and geographic possibilities of architecture. If reality is too opaque for us to understand and handle, then we need to design tools that enable us to work with it. What would happen if we were to revive the discipline as a body of practical know-how, never again centered on resolving problems through inherited doctrines, but rather on the constant redefinition of specific techniques? For that the classroom is transformed into an observatory of urban phenomena to test the architectural capacity to transform both the landscape and the territory. The semester dynamic is developed through a series of exercises that should react to different targets and scenarios, developed in a complex, surreal, and extra-small city-state: Gibraltar. An old English colony with only 6 km2; a political, fiscal, and cultural limbo with an extremely high future potential; a geographic and artificial ‘other nature’ where everything is necessary, even the apparently impossible or the utopian, in order to redefine its future.”

LEFT Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda (AMID [cero9]), TRP, Forms of Energy, Venize Lagoon, 2002

Planning students produce designs for Ithaca’s proposed urban village For their final assignment in Roger Trancik’s course Principles of Spatial

Design, CRP students got to advise the City of Ithaca. Students took on the city’s vision and brief for a 60-acre urban village in the southwest and produced their own designs. Requirements included 600 housing units, ample open space, sustainable elements, and access to roads and public transport. Scale models and design proposals were presented to Common Council members at City Hall in December.

Matthys Van Cort, Ithaca’s director of planning and development, and his staff participated in the learning process, briefing students and taking them on a tour of the site. The students’ proposals “were all well thought out … and some were absolutely excellent,” said Van Cort. “They came up with seven different schemes, all of which met the programmatic requirements, and all of which made sense on their own terms.”

As a planner and consultant, Trancik has worked on several projects for the city. He said he would like to see “a collaborative Cornell–City of Ithaca conduit,” adding, “Cornell has a lot to offer that the city can benefit from, and vice versa.”

Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

Model by Kimberly Lewis, Stephen Miller, and Zac Sivertsen

Solar decathlon team gears up for competition “Flexible” is a key word for students on the Cornell University Solar

Decathlon team, a word that encapsulates their approach to crafting a winner for the Department of Energy’s biannual solar home competition in October. “We’re really trying to change the way we think about a sustainable approach,” team leader Siobhan Rockcastle, a fourth-year architecture student, says. “We’re not just designing a house with solar panels, but designing a flexible canopy that can hold a variety of components—food production, shading, rainwater collection, bike racks.”

Known as the Light Canopy, CUSD’s adaptable innovation will be constructed from off-theshelf steel components connected by universal fastening devices, making the structure affordable, easy to erect, and simple to modify. Completion of the canopy remains far-off, but by the time most students returned to campus in January, CUSD had already begun construction of the house’s substructure and completed the specially insulated panels that comprise the building’s ground floor.

Cornell took second place the last time the competition was held, in the fall of 2005. This October the new team, like the previous one, will transport its house to the National Mall in Washington, DC, where it will be judged against 19 other university teams from the U.S. and abroad.

This year’s 90-member team includes students from each of Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges. Visiting lecturers in architecture Martha Bohm and Marnie Bettridge serve as team advisers with faculty from mechanical and aerospace engineering, and M.Arch. students Kristen DiStefano and David Bosworth round out the college’s representation on the student leadership team.

For more on the project, see the team website at www.cusd.cornell.edu.AAP ABOVE Design for the 2007 Cornell solar home

Studio designs Dresden arts center

“Creativity does not stop when the plans are done,” says visiting critic Michelle Howard. “The building process is also creative, and the knowledge of construction processes is part of the conceptual process.”

Such ideas were the foundation for Concept Construct, the fourth- and fifth-year architecture studio she is teaching in fall 2006 with assistance from Shadi Rahbaran, her partner in the Berlin firm Construct Concept. The partners met several years ago while both were working at OMA. Studio participants were asked to design a new contemporary culture center in Dresden—a real project with a real client, the curator of Dresden’s Center for Contemporary Art. The new center is to be created through renovation and expansion of a 1968 building, and it will house not only a contemporary art center but also a library and theater, dance, and film groups. One of the challenges is to design spaces flexible enough that groups can occupy a small area for most of the year but use a much greater area during special events such as a film festival.

“It’s important for students to be confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem,” says Howard. “This is a big challenge, but they’ve risen to it.”

The highlight of the studio was a seven-day visit to Germany in October. Students met with the project’s curator as well as the director of Dresden’s archives, took a walking tour of the city, and visited the building to be renovated. About half of the trip was devoted to exploring the architecture of Berlin and Wolfsburg as well.

AAP

JESSE WINTER

CRP outreach to Tug Spector creates book Hill, New York In 2006 both the installation in NYC federal government and New York State expanded center More than 800 works of literature tax relief programs encouraging donation of conand arts and humanities scholarship at Cornell add servation easements to land trusts. The result: local

land conservation groups—spread over vast areas and limited by small staffs—have been deluged.

As part of CRP’s community outreach efforts, this past fall, visiting lecturer Ole Amundsen and 13 graduate students developed a set of tools for use by the 2,100-square-mile Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust (THTLT), based in Watertown, NY, to evaluate projects quickly and focus on those most important to their mission.

The students’ Strategic Conservation Plan includes a series of resource inventories based on GIS mapping technology and a map-based suitability model that weighs and ranks resources of importance to the land trust. THTLT staff will use the map to evaluate properties and locate lands of high conservation value; they can then more effectively cultivate long-term relationships with key landowners.

The project was funded in part by the Land Trust Alliance’s New York State Conservation Partnership’s Grant Program and the Snow Foundation. For more information contact Ole Amundsen, oma4@cornell.edu.AAP ABOVE Suitability analysis map by CRP graduate students

Jürg Conzett leads students in bridge design project The well-known Swiss engineer Jürg Conzett visited Cornell in

October, delivering a lecture on his work and also taking time for a weekend charette with secondyear architecture students.

The charette, led by Conzett and architecture department chair Mark Cruvellier, required students to design a pedestrian bridge to span Fall Creek Gorge. It was a rare opportunity for students, since Conzett frequently collaborates with such leading architects as Peter Zumthor and Meili & Peter, and has designed many innovative bridges, including the granite stress-ribbon Suransuns Bridge in Viamala, Switzerland.

Trained as an engineer, Conzett worked for Peter Zumthor before launching his career as an independent consultant in structural engineering. Today he leads an engineering office of 19 people together with his partners, Gianfranco Bronzini and Patrick Gartmann, in Chur. His work is the subject of a new book edited by AAP dean Mohsen Mostafavi titled Structure as Space: Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jürg Conzett and His Partners.AAP RIGHT Jürg Conzett at Cornell ROBERT STUART

up to a single letter in a new installation by book artist and Department of Art chair Buzz Spector.

The structure, Big Red C, is Spector’s first major book installation in New York City. On display January 11–19 in AAP’s New York City Center on West 17th Street, it will be reconstructed on the Ithaca campus in April in Olin Library.

Spector assembled the installation with the help of students in his winter session class at the center, and he also borrowed 2,000 books slated to be sold or discarded by the New York Public Library so that students could create their own book installations. The opening of the exhibit on January 11 drew more than 200 visitors.

More than mere building blocks, books offer countless opportunities for commentary and subtext when used in sculpture, says Spector. “It’s a sea of language.”AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

ABOVE Professor Buzz Spector and students arrange a book installation

TARA COOPER M.F.A. ’07 Oh, You Pretty Texas Boy consisted of 180 hand-printed lunch bags (one

bag for each day of the school year). Each bag, individually altered either by cutting, sewing, or additional drawing, was then sewn shut, and all were placed together in a forgotten location—beneath the old stairway of Tjaden Hall. Three single bulbs illuminated the darkened space, while a seven-second audio component replayed the sound of the electric heater charging up, again and again. The piece investigates the silent carrying of a disturbing experience. It is reminiscent of the internal voice that plagues us each day, reminding us that something is not right. Notions of accumulation, repetition, and time are expressed within the work, in an effort to underscore the relentless character of guilt, as well as the banality and disposable nature of a painful event shrouded by disappointment and loss.

13/WORK

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

14/NAIROBI

PRASAD KHANOLKAR

“GROWING UP IN NAIROBI” AND URBAN AFRICA January 2007 marked STUDIO the first steps in the “Growing Up in

Nairobi” initiative, a new project of the UNESCO Chair for Growing Up in Cities, led by David Driskell of city and regional planning.

During the winter session, Driskell and seven students joined over 20 Kenyan youth to explore and document two selfbuilt settlements in Nairobi, one of which is the largest “slum” in sub-Saharan Africa.

The students and their Kenyan partners used interviews, drawings, walking tours, and photography to engage people of all ages and positions in documenting their daily lives, analyzing community strengths and weaknesses, and defining priorities for change.

January’s fieldwork provided the starting point for a spring semester collaborative planning and architecture studio on urban Africa cotaught by Driskell and visiting critic Jeremy Foster. In the studio, 20 students from architecture, planning, and related disciplines are exploring the context of self-built settlements in Nairobi and developing meaningful design interventions. Community-defined projects include community toilet complexes, a youth resource center, solid waste management and recycling, and a river restoration effort.

Driskell, Foster, and the students will travel to Nairobi in March (funded in part by a Rotch Traveling Studio grant) to work further with residents on project design and planning strategies. The work in Nairobi is in collaboration with UN-HABITAT, UNESCO-Kenya, University of Nairobi, and local youth organizations.AAP

90PICS

Image credits appear on page 32.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

20/REVIEW CONFERENCES LECTURES EXHIBITS

AI WEIWEI RECENT WORK: ART AND ARCHITECTURE As one of China’s leading contemporary artists, Ai Wei-

wei has challenged his country’s political authority and literally destroyed its cultural traditions. As an architect, he has had a key role in designing one of the most strikingly visible symbols of contemporary China—the stadium now rising for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The iconoclastic conceptual artist and architect talked about his work on November 6 in Cornell’s Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium.

“In China, the art world was quite depressed after Tiananmen Square,” he said. His works from 1993 to 1997 indicate his reaction.

Photographs depict the artist smashing a 2,000year-old Han Dynasty urn on the pavement and decorating another urn with a hand-painted CocaCola logo. He took apart and reconstructed at odd angles several examples of 14th-century furniture of the Ming and Qu dynasties, and dipped dozens of Neolithic vases into buckets of brightly colored paint.

Weiwei’s career as an architect began in 1999, when he built his combination studio, home, and exhibition space in Beijing. Since then he has designed several buildings, interiors, and public installations— notably, the geometric masonry landscaping of the Jinhua Riverbank Park and the Jinhua Architecture Park.

Weiwei was hired by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to consult on the firm’s proposal for Beijing’s National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.

His bird’s-nest shape won the design competition in 2003.

“To design a stadium requires as much passion as to design a toilet seat,” said Weiwei, who also is a curator, publisher, and art critic, and whose Fake Design studio welcomes students from all over the world.AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

FALL2006

Jürg Conzett Kenneth Frampton Hal Foster Michelle Howard Peter Carl Mark Lee Carla Leitao Bjarke Ingels Natalie Jeremijenko Edgar Tafel Marcel Meili Graciela Silvestri Claire Andrade-Watkins Robert Olshansky Michael Woo Ron Thomas Richard Hayes William Fulton Stephen Black Kalima Rose Shannon Christian Julia Christensen Rachel Weber Don Edwards Jessica Rowcroft Sarah Rosen Wartell Manuel Pastor Louis Grachos Ai Weiwei Francesco Garofalo Paolo Desideri Nicola Di Battista Luca Galofaro Lorenzo Pignatti Efisio Pitzalis Edoardo Albinati Daniel Modigliani Carme Pinos Avish Khebrehzadeh Italo Rota Franco Farinelli Jacopo Benci Mario Campi Gabriele Basilico

ITHACA/NYC CONFERENCE SPOTLIGHTS CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ARCHIThe celebrated Toyo Ito TECTURE and other well-known Japanese architects came to

Ithaca and New York City this fall for a double conference sponsored by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. “Japan Now: Country Positions in Architecture and Urbanism” considered ways in which the newest generation of Japanese architects must address global issues and opportunities while finding answers to topics unique to each locality.

Ito, who received the 2006 Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, delivered the keynote address at the conferences. He is best known for the influential Sendai Mediatheque, built in 2001 in Sendai, Japan; the building uses a unique structure to compose fluid spaces with hardly any walls.

“Japan Now” is the second in a series of conferences and exhibitions curated by AAP, designed to reveal some of the most intriguing currents in contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism in different parts of the globe.

The first, in 2005, was on contemporary Italian architecture.

The “Japan Now” exhibition, held in AAP’s Hartell Gallery from October 29 to November 11, included work from each of the participants: Hiromi Hosoya (Hosoya Schaefer Architects), Momoyo Kaijima (Atelier Bow-Wow), Mitsuhiro Kanada (ARUP), Taira Nishizawa (Taira Nishizawa Architects), and Toyo Ito (Toyo Ito & Associates Architects). The exhibition was organized by Yasufumi Nakamori in cooperation with a group of Cornell architecture students.

The conferences were funded in part by the Preston Thomas Memorial Lecture Series.

The fund was established by Leonard B. and Ruth Thomas in memory of their son, Preston H. Thomas, who was a member of the Cornell class of 1974. The New York City conference was produced in collaboration with the Japan Society.AAP

CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT Kenneth Frampton [photo by Robert Stuart], Claire Andrade-Watkins [photo provided], Ai Weiwei [photo by Xiaowen Chen], Toyo Ito [photo by Robert Barker/University Photography], students and participants in “Japan Now” [photo by Robert Stuart]

THINKING THE SURFACE—A Workshop on Screens, Mobilities, Environments in the Global Age At the two-day conference “Thinking the Sur-

face,” scholars contemplated both the architectural façade and the cinematic screen as surfaces that contribute to the evolving contexts of global networks, political frontiers, architectonic environments, and cinematic visions.

The free public event, held in late October, was convened by AAP dean Mohsen Mostafavi with professor of English Timothy Murray and professor of art history Maria Fernándéz, and cosponsored by the college. Chair of the department of art Buzz Spector moderated a session on architectural surfaces during which Dean Mostafavi presented “Structuring the Veil,” and visiting architects Paul Andersen and David Salomon presented “The New Architecture of Patterns.” Renate Ferro, visiting assistant professor of art, moderated a session on the personal and the political in art, and visiting architect Branden Hookway presented “Cockpit Console Cubicle” as part of the session on responsive architecture.

Two excerpts from conference lectures are presented here, one from Dean Mostafavi and one from the plenary lecture by Brian Massumi, professor of communication at the University of Montreal.AAP MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI An excerpt from Structuring the Veil

Gilles Deleuze wrote a really wonderful book about the painter Francis Bacon—Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation—which I recommend to you. Deleuze goes through a very thorough analysis of the work of Bacon, but instead of working as a philosopher, applying certain modes of philosophical thinking, he is actually trying to see what kinds of conceptions of philosophy can be constructed through the paintings of Francis Bacon.

The painter produces a body of work that is not just focused on the question of concepts, but which itself produces new formations, new ideas, new possibilities. This is very interesting, because in architectural theory we have gone through a long period where philosophical concepts and theories have been applied to architecture and on architecture. As a result, the architectural project has become in many respects an illustration of these conditions.

However, the issue for Deleuze—and the question that interests a number of contemporary architectural historians and theorists, including myself—is this: What can be gauged from the work itself? What can the work do?

By means of Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze looks at the role of the figure, the role of the background field, and the role of the contours that mediate between figure and field. The field surrounds the figure in a dynamic way and, at the same time, the figure reaches out to the field. You begin to have an interaction between these three elements: figure, field, and contour. The conditions for this interaction are achieved through Bacon’s use of color, of the tonalities of color.

To build a parallel between art and architecture: instead of being interested in issues of representation, we might now begin to delve much more systematically into the conditions of representation. As architects, we could be thinking less about what the building looks like, and more about the conditions of the “looking.” Rather than discussing appearance, we could be discussing conditions of appearance—the conditions, that is, under which something comes to be.AAP

BRIAN MASSUMI An excerpt from The Ideal Streak: Why Visual Representation Always Fails

Toward the end of his life the poet Paul Valéry dedicated a short essay to what he called “imitative” drawing, referring in particular to the pencil sketches of Edgar Dégas (“Voir et tracer,” Dégas Danse Dessin, Gallimard, 1938). By the end of the essay, it is clear that he is not referring to what we mean when we call a drawing “representational.” He ends with what he calls a “sort of paradox”: that the worst imitative drawing is the one that best conforms to its model. In other words, the least successful imitation is the most faithful representationally … He explains that the representational drawing assumes that in everyday vision to see is to draw. The eye moves along the contours of the object like a long-distance hand. Following “the borders of diversely colored regions, it draws them exactly and involuntarily.” Its remote caress is simply and “mechanically” a visual pre-touch. What the eye now sees the hand could as easily touch were the model closer … The eye is a vanguard hand. It anticipates at a distance what in proximity could as well be felt by touch. It is a commonplace since McLuhan to say that vision is “the distance sense” and that functionally it is a prosthetic extension of the hand …

Implicit in this approach is the unacknowledged presupposition that the domination of hand by eye is integral to the very machinery of our perceptual processes … Valéry’s account could not be more different … The more precise the representation, he says, the greater the betrayal of the aesthetic. There can be no “mechanical” equivalence between vision’s “drawing” the outlines of objects at a distance and the hand-drawing the eyes seem distantly tooled to command.AAP

KENNETH FRAMPTON ARCHITECTURE AND COMMODIFIGlobalization and the worldwide CATION triumph of the market have led to a situation in which

culture is increasingly commodified, argued renowned architectural historian and theorist Kenneth Frampton during his October 5 visit to Cornell. His lecture, “Architecture and Commodification,” was based on a new chapter he is writing for the fourth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History, covering the period 1985–2005. In architecture, he said, the process of commodification has been accompanied by an enormous, worldwide escalation in production. In order to discuss the architecture of this period Frampton identified six themes: topography, morphology, sustainability, material, habitat, and civic form. In contrast to the more dramatic and attention-seeking architecture of the last two decades, his lecture highlighted some of the smaller-scale, less flashy projects that he admires.

Following the lecture, visiting critic David Salomon facilitated a seminar with Frampton that was open to all architecture students. Salomon’s work and teaching, including his recent course “Architecture + Capitalism,” explore themes related to Frampton’s ideas. In the seminar the discussion circled around the “trap of publicity” present for historians and architects alike. Students asked Frampton about the effect of critical acclaim on architecture’s performance, and what the different criteria might be for inclusion in a work of history, as opposed to being featured in a venue like the New York Times.

Frampton is Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University. He has worked as an architect in England, Israel, and the United States and has taught in numerous schools of architecture worldwide. Among his many awards are the AIA National Honors Award, Academie d’Architecture Gold Medal, AIA New York Chapter Award of Merit, and ASCA Topaz Award.AAP

CLAIRE ANDRADE– WATKINS URBAN MASSACRE, HEALING, AND The November 16 lecture RENEWAL by historian and filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins,

“Urban Massacre, Healing, and Renewal: The Untold Story of the Cape Verdean Community in the Fox Point Section of Providence, RI,” was based on her extensive study of the Fox Point community.

Three generations of Cape Verdeans were born and raised in this tight-knit neighborhood that stretched along the waterfront. Most of the men “worked the boats” as longshoremen at the Port of Providence. Uprooted by urban renewal in the 1970s, the disbanded Cape Verdeans scattered to other parts of Rhode Island.

Following the lecture was a screening of Andrade-Watkins’s 2006 documentary Some Kind of Funny ‘Porto Rican’? The film chronicles this community’s history, music, ties to the old country, and maritime/seafaring traditions.

Andrade-Watkins also conducted a master class, “The Use of Film as an Advocacy Tool,” during her Cornell visit.

An associate professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College, Andrade-Watkins has published extensively on French- and Portuguese-speaking African cinema. In 1986 she produced The Spirit of Cape Verde, a half-hour documentary celebrating the bonds between New England and Cape Verde, and President Aristides Pereira’s historic first visit to the United States in 1983. She has worked on Odyssey, a national PBS anthropology and archaeology documentary series, and on feature films, most notably Sankofa, an internationally acclaimed film on slavery,

by Haile Gerima.AAP

NEWS Edson Cabalfin, a Ph.D. student in the History of Architecture and Urbanism

Program, presented his paper “The Other’s Other: Self-Exoticism and National Identity in Postcolonial Philippine Architectures, 1946–1998” at the Ninth International DOCOMOMO Conference at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, in September 2006. The conference was sponsored by the International Working Party on the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement. The A. Henry Detweiler Fund awarded Cabalfin a generous travel grant to support the trip. Cabalfin also contributed an essay to the exhibition “Building Modernity: A Century of Architecture and Allied Design in the Philippines,” which opened in February 2007 at the National Museum in Manila.

The film The Music Box, by second-year architecture student Savinien Caracostea, featuring architecture professor John Zissovici, screened at Cornell Cinema on December 10 as part of “Student Films II.” Caracostea was also designer of the winning logo for Slope Day 2006. See http://www.arts.cornell.edu/film/ 01studentwork/studentfilm.htm.

A video installation piece by M.F.A. student Tara Cooper was selected for “Cultivating Creativity: In Residence at Kala,” an exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

The show runs from January 12 to April 1, 2007.

Third-year doctoral student Anne Marie Hallal’s article “Barcelona’s Fossar de les Moreres: Disinterring the Heterotopic,” was published in the winter 2006 issue of the Journal of Landscape Architecture. The History of Architecture and Urbanism student also presented the paper “El Valle de los Caídos; or, the Elephant in Spain’s Backyard” at the History of Art and Archaeology graduate student symposium at Cornell in late January.

The Edwin A. Seipp Memorial Prize, a third-year studio design competition with a cash award, was presented to Michael Hughes, Larysa Konowka, Asdren Matoshi, Lester Perez, Damon Wake, and Lester Yu. Last summer, Marcel Ionescu-Heroiu, a Ph.D. candidate in regional planning, published Information Technology Districts and Underdeveloped Regions, a study of Cluj-Napoca, an emerging software region in Romania, following the dot-com bust of the late 1990s. IonescuHeriou, a native of Romania, argues that the software industry in emerging economies displays developmental traits of industrial districts, and that these traits become stronger as the industry and the region mature.

Danielle Pensley received honorable mention in the 23rd Smith-Babcock-Williams student writing competition, sponsored by the American Planning Association’s Planning and Law Division, for her article “The Legalities of Stream Interventions: Accretive Changes to New York State’s Riparian Doctrine Ahead?” The article will be published in the Albany Environmental Outlook Journal, a publication of Albany Law School.

Pensley is enrolled both in the law school and in CRP, as a master’s student in historic planning.

Architecture student Aaron Sherbany was one of nine Cornell students honored for excellence in leadership by the Meinig Family Cornell National Scholars. Sherbany was recognized for his work on the student publication Association and its website, www.aap.cornell.edu/association.

Jeremy Zaborowski has been awarded the first-ever Spaulding Trust Scholarship from the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Planning Association for achievement in planning studies and commitment to planning in Pennsylvania.

Zaborowski is a Clarence S. Stein Fellow and the Atkinson-Tetreault Fellow in the CRP master’s program. His studies explore economic development and land use.AAP

AAP STUDENTS WIN MINORITY ARCHITECTS COMPETITION A group of AAP undergraduates earned the 2006 Student

Competition Design Award at the annual conference of the National Organization of Minority Architects in October. Their project was titled “Skin Deep: Projecting Inner Identity and Cultural History Through the Use of an Architectural Skin.”

Participating students included two majoring in urban and regional studies, Marvin Chaney and Emma Osore, as well as B.Arch. students Henryck Hernandez, Oscar Hernandez-Gomez, Taylor Le Melle, Diana Lin, Maketa Mabane, Jonathan Moody, John Ruiz, Patrice Strahan, Portia Strahan, and Andreka Watlington.AAP

DIANA LIN

From left, Asdren Matoshi, Jon Moody, Emma Osore, Maketa Mabane, Diana Lin, and Oscar Hernandez

21/STUDENT NEWS LANDSCAPE STUDENTS HONORED FOR SOLAR HOUSE PROJECT A group of students in Cornell’s landscape architecture program have

been honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects for their design for the grounds surrounding a solar house. The students received a 2006 ASLA Award of Honor in the residential design category for the project, which was part of Cornell’s entry in the nationwide Solar Decathlon competition in 2005. The student-designed, student-built solar home took second place, and a new group of students from several Cornell departments are at work on an entry for the 2007 competition.

Students receiving the ASLA award were Natalie Bower, Linda Ciesielski, Alison Endl, Ted Haffner, Marc Miller, Jessy Schultz, and Carrie Van Valkenberg. Landscape faculty advisers were Peter Trowbridge and Adit Pal.AAP

ASSOCIATION EXPLORES INTERDEPARTMENTAL LINKS Volume 2 of the annual

student publication Association has just been released, with an intriguing fold-out map format. As in the first volume, Association features the interconnectivities of concepts explored by students, faculty, and alumni from all three departments. Those involved in the production of volume 2 are Glenn NP Nowak (M.Arch. ’06) and architecture students Aaron Sherbany, Adam Vana, Irina Igolnikov, Justin Hui, and Michael Lee. Association is currently accepting submissions for volume 3; see www.aap.cornell.edu/association for guidelines. To join the Association staff, send an e-mail to association@cornell.edu.AAP

CABALFIN CARACOSTEA COOPER HALLAL HUGHES KONOWKA MATOSHI PEREZ WAKE YU IONESCU-HEROIU PENSLEY SHERBANY ZABOROWSKI NOWAK SHERBANY VANA IGOLNIKOV HUI LEE BOWER CIESIELSKI ENDL HAFFNER MILLER SCHULTZ vanVALKENBERG TROWBRIDGE PAL CHANEY OSORE HERNANDEZ HERNANDEZ-GOMEZ LE MELLE LIN MABANE MOODY RUIZ STRAHAN WATLINGTON

ABOVE Association cover design by Aaron Sherbany and Adam Vana BELOW Student William Patera sets up for a review in his 4th–5th-year architecture studio.

LEYRE ASENSIO VILLORIA

Professor John Zissovici appears in a film by student Savinien Caracostea.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

OMA presentation of Milstein Hall, September 19, 2006 UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHY

WILLIAM STAFFELD

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

24/FACUL TY+STAFF NEWS

NEWS Ole Amundsen III has completed Strategic Conservation Planning, to be

SIMITCH ANDERSEN AMUNDSEN ASHKIN AZIS CHRISTOPHERSON DAVIS ADAMS RHODEN FUNK GOEHNER HOLMES LASANSKY McGRAIN McDOUGAL MIKUS MOSTAFAVI REARDON REPS SAVRAN TOMLAN VARAS BENERIA OSTENDARP KUDVA CUPKOVA-MYERS WOODS MATTA-CLARK HUBBELL ZISSOVICI TAFT

Carl Ostendarp, Ring (2006), gouache on paper, 58 x 76 cm

WILFRIED DECHAU

Illustration from Structure as Space, by Mohsen Mostafavi: Jürg Conzett, Traversina Bridge, Graubünden, 1999–2005

PAUL ANDERSEN/ “PRACTICE” “Along with several detailed fabrication drawings, the show included 18 CNC-milled studies of three materials—thermoformed PETG, plywood, and rigid foam—all painted in opalescent and fluorescent colors.

“While practice is typically geared toward refinement by reducing difference and risk, for contemporary architects its inherent repetition is equally capable of generating diversity and novelty. The material studies included in the RISD exhibit survey 18 months of practice and three projects, but are presented collectively as a coherent body of work in themselves. Each series, repetitive and variable, deploys patterns to link a particular visual sensibility to a formal organization, and in doing so, integrates

“Practice,” exhibition by Paul Andersen at Rhode Island School of Design

typically unrelated domains such as graphics and structure, production efficiency and material opulence, and distributions of color and insulation.

“It is the elasticity and redundancy of contemporary patterns which enables such unexpected combinations. While the use of formal, graphic, and material patterns has a long history in architecture, recent advances in digital and materials technology allow for new varieties of patterns to be imbued with properties of flexibility, aperiodicity, opulence, variegated detail, multivalent extension, and even idiosyncrasy.”

Paul Andersen is a visiting faculty member and founder of !ndie architecture.“Practice” was his solo exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) this past fall.

AAP

published this spring by the Land Trust Alliance.

The work focuses on providing land trust decision-makers with basic planning principals, creating more proactive organizations. Amundsen serves on the steering committee to guide the planning of the Great Lakes Commission’s New York Land Use Policy Roundtable, helping the team of Governor Eliot Spitzer get oriented to land conservation and redevelopment options for the Great Lakes Region.

In February and March, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is featuring the work of art professor Michael Ashkin in a joint show with Anthony Huberman and Peter Coffman entitled “Grown Our Own,” on micro-nations. Ashkin also co-organized “Weak Foundations,” at Momenta Art in Brooklyn. The exhibition, which ran throughout December and January, focused on “architectural photography that pushes our faith in the solidity of the human, built environment by finding shifting and unstable subtexts.”

Economist and CRP professor Iwan J. Azis was honored with a Distinguished Scholar Award at the Thirteenth Annual International Conference on Advances in Management for his contributions to regional science, financial economics, and economic modeling. Azis also gave a keynote lecture, “Managing Global Imbalances,” at the Lisbon conference. In the talk, he explained the origin and the nature of the unprecedented global imbalances, and elaborated the role of the U.S. and countries in Europe and Asia in the attempt to reduce the imbalances. In May, Azis traveled to Beijing for the Cornell-Beida Conference on the WTO System, at the invitation of the Clarke Center for International and Comparative Legal Studies at the Cornell Law School. He also visited Peking University to lecture on “Modeling Financial Liberalization and Its Impact on Urban-Rural Disparity: The Case of China.” See www.iwanazis.net.

In the fall, CRP professor Susan Christopherson received a grant to study the groups of young professionals and entrepreneurs that have organized in Upstate New York and what they have to say about keeping young people in the state. She also received funding to study advanced manufacturing in the Southern Tier counties, exploring the implications of growth in the electronics industry for economic development. In January, Christopherson supervised a student analysis of the economic impact of Light in Winter, a late-January festival of Art and Science which features Ithaca residents and visiting luminaries, as well as many members of the Cornell faculty. Students—supervised by grad student Jessica Daniels—conducted surveys of the audience.

Assistant Professor Felecia Davis, team leader and principal of Colab Architecture, was selected as one of five finalists in the Charm Bracelet international competition to develop an urban plan for the North side neighborhood in Pittsburgh. The proposal, “The Rectangle: Urban Feedback Loop” is based on catalytic artistic installations. The plan will be exhibited at the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh and opens in mid-February. Davis also curated “Drawn In” for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh. Alumni selected to participate in the show include Deontaye Adams ’04 and Zena Rhoden ’04, Sekou Cooke (B.Arch. ’00), Olalekan Jeyifous (B.Arch. ’01), Emmanuel Pratt (B.Arch. ’02), and Amanda Williams (B.Arch. ’97).

David Funk, director of the Program in Real Estate, is one of five faculty members to receive a Zalaznick teaching assistantship. The awards are administered by Entrepreneurship@Cornell, a body that connects Cornell students to university-wide entrepreneurial resources. Funk plans to use his $3,000 award to pay for a teaching assistant for his seminar on the real estate industry.

Professor Werner Goehner participated in the symposium “Learning from O. M. Ungers” on October 27, 2006. The event was held at the Technical University of Berlin and organized by Ing Fritz Neumeyer, chair of the Theory of Architecture Program, to celebrate the work and teaching of Ungers, who turned 80 in 2006. In his presentation, Goehner put the time Ungers spent at Cornell’s Department of Architecture as chair and faculty member (1968–83) into critical perspective, in relation to his academic and professional life before and after Cornell.

AAP publications editor Elizabeth Holmes has two new books this spring. Her second book of poetry, The Playhouse Near Dark, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her first middle-grades novel, Pretty Is, will be issued in May by Dutton Children’s Books, which has also bought her second novel for this age group, for publication in 2008.

Neema Kudva, assistant professor in CRP, spent the winter break in India on her West Coast Urbanism Project. Research assistants Prajna Rao and Prasad Khanolkar accompanied her to help document and map the small towns Kudva is studying in Karnataka. Kudva is also working collaboratively with Mercy Corps, an international NGO, on a year-long project to understand urban livelihoods in small towns and cities in Africa. This initiative involves a selected group of graduate students in coursework and an eight-week intensive internship in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Kudva’s small-city work is funded by an Einaudi Center Faculty Research Grant and a

Public Service Center Faculty Fellows in Service Grant. In addition to presenting her work at conferences and to citizen groups in Mangalore, India, she continues to publish on local-level organizations in India. Rethinking Informalization, her book coedited with colleague Lourdes Beneria, is available at http://hdl.handle.net/1813/3716.

A Spanish edition of architecture professor D. Medina Lasansky’s coedited book Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place has been published by G. Gili in Barcelona.

While on sabbatical in Italy in the fall of 2006, Lasansky gave a lecture on the Fascist-period renovations of Tuscan towns at the Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florence. She also contributed an essay, “The Architecture of Spectacle: The Partita a Scacchi in Marostica, Italy,” in Travel Reports from the Deborah J. Norden Fund published by the Architectural League of New York, 2006.

“Proof,” the work of Graham McDougal, a lecturer in the art department and specialist in printmaking and electronic imaging, was exhibited in Tjaden Hall in December. “Proof” documents his project for the Cornell Council for the Arts entitled Insert–Paisdoni, which was the first in a series of projects based around selfpublication and ephemera. The multiple image is a custom paisley pattern laser cut from vellum, designed to overlay magazine pages. Approximately 200 individual pages have been mailed to curators, critics, and art professionals beyond Cornell. Each mailing contains a vellum paisley pattern and a torn magazine page.

Associate professor of art Todd McGrain was commissioned by the Zen Center in Rochester, NY, to create the sculpture for the centerpiece of its newly completed Founder’s Garden.

The garden is dedicated to the memory of Roshi Philip Kapleau, founder of the Zen Center. The sculpture, 42 inches in diameter and 24 inches tall, is an octagonal column of Columbia River basalt. Because of the unusually large size of this single crystal, it took a Washington quarry a year to find it. McGrain’s design, a perfect, polished circle, gives the hard stone the quality of a reflective pool.

From November through early February, the Drawing Center in Manhattan exhibited “From Shell to Skin,” an overview of the work of art professor emerita Eleanore Mikus, curated by artist Luis Camnitzer. Says the announcement: “Seemingly minimalist and reductive in style, Mikus’s paintings and folded paper works result from experimentation with and refinement of additive processes, as she continues to work and rework her pieces for many years, often returning to them after long periods of time.”

Dean Mohsen Mostafavi’s most recent book, Structure as Space: Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jürg Conzett and His Partners, was published in 2006 by the Architectural Association. The book explores the relationship between architecture and engineering, and includes structural diagrams and drawings as well as photographs of finished works. Both Conzett and theorist Bruno Reichlin contributed chapters to the book. In October Conzett visited Cornell and worked with students (see article, page 12).

In another recent publication from the Architectural Association, Dean Mostafavi contributed an essay to Mathematical Form: John Pickering and the Architecture of the Inversion Principle.

Carl Ostendarp, visiting assistant professor of art, recently had a solo exhibit, “Works on Paper,” at Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne.

The show ran from January 13 to February 17, 2007. Last summer his work appeared in “Two Friends and So On” at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, and he has two exhibits opening in April. One is “Paper Ball,” a drawing exhibit and benefit at the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase. The other is a mural project at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, which will include works from the museum’s pop collection.

In November, CRP professor Kenneth Reardon participated in a symposium at Oregon State University that explored the relationships between universities and small towns in developing sustainable rural communities. Reardon gave two lectures: “Rebuilding the Big Easy: The Challenge of Multi-University Partnerships in Post-Disaster New Orleans” and “Making Waves Along the Mississippi: Lessons from an East St. Louis Community-University Partnership.”

John Reps, professor emeritus in city and regional planning, gave a lecture in Savannah, GA, in September on the newest theory of the origins of Savannah’s city plan. While searching for something in his basement 18 months earlier, Reps made an accidental discovery of the similarity between Savannah’s 1734 plan, by Sir John E. Oglethorpe, and the plan of the Piazza Carlina in Turin.

In October, the movie Invisible Ink debuted in Ithaca. The locally produced feature-length film was written by Christopher Julian and Jennifer Savran, AAP’s websites and content manager.

The film tells the stories of a young advice columnist, an aging novelist, and an obsessive young woman with a deep-seated faith in the wisdom of fortune cookies.

CRP professor Michael Tomlan presented two lectures in early December. The first, “The Living and the Dead: Vijaganara Protected and Transformed,” was part of the fifth annual Kannada Vrinda at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and described his work related to the World

John Zissovici and Stan Taft, image from “For Bright Field Observation: Robotic Photography”

Julian Varas, competition entry for Bicentenary Cultural Center, Buenos Aires

Heritage Site at Hampi, the last capital of the last great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in southern India. “A Sense of Identity” was the Gordon Cherry Memorial Lecture at the International Planning History Society, sponsored by IIT and the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, India. Tomlan will present lectures on preservation at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Florida in February and March.

Julian Varas, a visiting critic in architecture, obtained an honorable mention for the project he submitted, with Alberto Varas, to the International Competition for the Bicentenary Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. The competition team included Cornell architecture students Andrew Smith, Katharine Meagher, and Patricia Brizzio.

Varas led the workshop “Reforming Modularity” with fellow visiting architecture critic Dana Cupkova-Myers at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (AFAD) in Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

The workshop was attended by students from the AFAD and from Cornell.

Architecture professor Mary Woods has published “Women on Top: Gender and Photographing New York City Skyscrapers” in a special edition of the Journal of Architecture, curated

by Alan Marcus of the University of Aberdeen.

Woods also gave a paper on Bollywood cinema and Mumbai’s Art Deco picture palaces at the International DOCOMOMO conference in Ankara, Turkey, in September. Locally, Woods is organizing a conference on Gordon Matta-Clark (B.Arch. ’68) to occur in late March in conjunction with her spring 2007 graduate seminar on Matta-Clark and friends. Invited speakers are Jane Crawford, documentary filmmaker and Matta-Clark’s collaborator and widow; Gwendolyn Owen, curator of the Matta-Clark Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; Teresa Hubbard, video artist and University of Texas, Austin, professor; and Kent Hubbell (B.Arch. ’69), Cornell’s dean of students and a classmate of Matta-Clark’s. Seminar students are curating a study exhibition on the 1969 Earth Art exhibit at Cornell (where Matta-Clark worked with such artists as Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim) from the collections of the Johnson Museum.

Collaborative work by associate professor of architecture John Zissovici and professor of art and associate dean Stan Taft was exhibited in China last November as part of the second Art and Science International Exhibition and Symposium at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Taft attended the event. The images in “For Bright Field Observation: Robotic Photography,” the artists wrote, “are the record of the interaction between an infra-red video camera mounted on a robotic linear-motion device, a video printer linked to the video camera, and the gallery visitors who might be trying to have their picture taken. The instrumentality of the technologies appropriated from medicine (video printer), art conservation (infra-red video), and high precision manufacturing (robotic device) is as much the implicit subject of the images as the red field, or the fragmented bodies.” Some of the images were also shown in the Hartell Gallery November 15–29.AAP

ANDREA SIMITCH/DAÑO’S RESTAURANT “Daño’s is a 3,500-square-foot restaurant overlooking the vineyards on the east side of

Seneca Lake. The project is informed by the Austrian Heuriger—the name given to many Austrian wine-drinking locales where patrons can experience Gemütlichkeit (as defined

by Wikipedia, the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the spending of quality time in a place).

“The challenge here, in upstate New York, was to transform the typology of the Heuriger onto the unique topography of the Seneca Lake vineyards. The result is a structure that on one hand appears diminutive, local, a utilitarian farm building, with the kitchen and its garden welcoming the visitors, yet on the other has the capacity to introduce and frame the landscape in which it is sited. As one moves into and down through its stepping interior and finally out onto its terrace, one experiences a series of canvasses, where the landscape is selectively reintroduced and collapsed into the spatial experience. It is a window to the landscape.”

Andrea Simitch is an associate professor of architecture; her firm is Simitch & Warke Architects.

AAP

ABOVE Simitch and Warke, Daño’s Heuriger on Seneca. Working drawings by Steven Fong. BOTTOM LEFT Todd McGrain, Philip Kapleau Memorial, Rochester Zen Center, Columbia River basalt, 24 in. high x 42 in. wide x 42 in. deep BOTTOM RIGHT Eleanore Mikus, untitled (1966), photocopied paper collage, 11 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Drawing Center.

CATHY CARVER

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

WILLIAM STAFFELD

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

28/ALUMNI NEWS BIBLIOWICZ IU FOX SYKES BARRAZA PIERMARINI BUCHOLZ BUNNAG CRONIN HESS HECKMAN HARRIS HANDEL GRZELKOWSKI GINNEVER GIBIAN EISENMAN GERAKARIS HEWITT JACKSON KELLER ENGEL KIM LAWLER LEVASSEUR LIM LIPSCHUTZ MARINO WOODBRIDGE MARSHALL MATAR MATTA-CLARK MEIER MOOR OPPENHEIM QUINTERO RABEL RAGATZ RESCALVO RODWIN RODRIGUEZ ROSS RUFF SCHULTE SCHWARTING SCOTT SPARBER TATA TOUNTAS GELABERT-NAVIA TRIGG VARNELIS WATSON FRIDSTEIN

ALUMNI EVENTS

JANUARY 2007 5 AAP Women’s Alumnae/Student Dinner, hosted by Cheryl Pelavin (B.F.A. ’66)—NYC 11 Reception for Humanities Book Art Project by Prof. Buzz Spector—NYC 24 President’s Circle Dinner—NYC FEBRUARY 2 CEN/CSV/AAP Event featuring Glen Rescalvo (M.Arch. ’88) and Dean Mostafavi—San Francisco 4 CEN/CSV/AAP Event featuring Matt Witte (B.Arch. ’79) and Dean Mostafavi—Laguna Beach, CA 14–17 College Art Association Annual Conference, NY Hilton & Towers and NY Sheraton Hotel; alumni reception, February 15—NYC MARCH 7 Lecture by Prof. Buzz Spector, Cornell Alumni Association—Atlanta 8 Lecture by Prof. Buzz Spector, Cornell Alumni Association of Southwest Florida—Naples 9 Lecture by Prof. Buzz Spector, Cornell Alumni Association of Southeast Florida—Palm Beach 9–10 “Case Studies in Urban Design: London” Symposium—Ithaca 24–26 Cornell in Rome’s 20th Anniversary Celebration—Rome 27 AAP Advisory Council meeting—Rome TBD Presentation by Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’57)—NYC APRIL 11 CEN Event featuring Robert Toll ’63 and Cornell architects, real estate developers, and planners— NYC 14–18 APA National Planning Conference, Pennsylvania Convention Center; alumni reception— Philadelphia TBD Dean Mostafavi visits alumni—Miami TBD AAP reception hosted by Earl Flansburgh (B.Arch. ’54) and Polly Flansburgh ’54—Boston MAY 3 Cornell Campaign celebration— NYC 3–5 AIA National Convention and Design Exposition; alumni reception—San Antonio JUNE 7–10 Cornell Reunion; AAP Dean’s breakfast and college events— Ithaca

* *

*

*

CEN: Cornell Entrepreneur Network; CSV: Cornell Silicon Valley

UPDATES AT aap.cornell.edu

AAP ALUMNA ELECTED TO CONGRESS Gabrielle Giffords (M.R.P. ’97) was elected to the U.S. House of

Representatives in November, defeating Republican Randy Graf to represent Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, covering the Greater Tucson area. The 35-year-old Tucson native is the first Democrat to win this district in more than 20 years, as well as the first woman to represent Arizona in Congress in more than a decade.

Despite attempts by her opponent to make immigration the only issue in the election, Giffords turned the focus onto other issues such as health and education. “This race wasn’t won on one issue alone,” she said. “There are so many issues that are important to voters. Immigration is one of those issues. The war in Iraq is another. So is the 50 million Americans without health insurance.”

Giffords is a graduate of Scripps College in California, where she was awarded a William Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year in Chihuahua, Mexico. She then worked as a researcher in San Diego studying immigration, before being accepted to the M.R.P. program.

After graduating from Cornell, Giffords returned to Tucson to run her family’s tire business, and launched her career in politics. The youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona State Senate, she represented Tucson in the Arizona Legislature from 2000 to 2005. During her service in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Giffords worked on legislation to expand health care coverage for Arizona families, to create and attract high-wage jobs, and to protect the state’s environment and open spaces. Gannett News Service recently named her one of America’s eight young leaders worth watching.AAP

ART THESIS PRIZE HONORS ELSIE POPKIN Generous donors have recently created an endowment

for an annual prize honoring Elsie Dinsmore Popkin (B.F.A. ’58), an artist and devoted friend of AAP who died in January 2005. Known for her pastels of gardens and landscapes, she often depicted locales in Ithaca and on the Cornell campus.

The prize, to be awarded annually to a graduating senior with the best thesis in fine arts, will be given for the first time in May 2007. Initial funding for the endowment came from a gift by Mila and John McDermott in honor of Harriet Peters ’58, a longtime employee of the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Peters was a friend of Elsie Popkin since their freshman days at Cornell, and chose to use the gift to honor her friend’s memory.

Donations to increase the endowment may be made by contacting Carol Cooke, director of alumni affairs and development for AAP, at coc3@cornell.edu or (607) 255-1501.AAP

SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE ON ALUMNI NETWORK School to work is a big leap—help students make it! Share your experience with them by joining the online AAP/Cornell Career Contact & Alumni Network.

If you’re already on the network, please update your entry.

You may also register to browse the network.

This is an advisory network only—a place for students to seek information, further contacts, and a greater perspective. You specify how and how often students may contact you. At www. aapcareer.cornell.edu, click Alumni and follow the instructions.

Interested in hiring Cornell architects, artists, and planners? At our website, click Employers for instructions on listing jobs and internships at no charge. Also find information on our recruiting programs—or just phone or e-mail us.

Let us hear from you! If you’re on campus, please visit us in our new space at 240 East Sibley, in the Fine Arts Library.AAP

Provided

Architecture, Art and Planning Career Services M. Susan Lewis, Director Gail Willm-Ingalls, Associate Director Dureatha Oliver, Administrative Assistant 240 East Sibley Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255.7696 aapcareer@cornell.edu www.aapcareer.cornell.edu

IN MEMORIAM Ruth Shellhorn (B.Arch. ’33, B.L.A. ’33)

Los Angeles; November 3, 2006; landscape architect for Disneyland.

Kiyoshi Matsuo (B.Arch. ’54) April 25, 2006 Joseph C. Kay Jr. (B.Arch. ’55) October 6, 2006 Sandra G. McCullough (M.R.P. ’74) Winnetka, IL; January 4, 2007.

Robert Richenburg East Hampton, NY; October 10, 2006; abstract expressionist painter who taught at Cornell in the 1960s.

WILLIAM STAFFELD

TOP Representative Gabrielle Giffords BOTTOM Albert “Ace” Bean ’43 chats with recent Bean Prize winners Kathleen Hawkes and Akinfolara Akinola.

BEAN PRIZE DONOR HONORED Albert “Ace” C. Bean Jr. ’43, donor of the

Bean Prize in Fine Arts, visited Cornell in October 2006 to receive a Frank H. T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award. A third-generation Cornellian, Bean was one of seven distinguished alumni honored for their outstanding service to the university.

During his visit, AAP welcomed Ace Bean and his family to a luncheon in the Hartell Gallery, in recognition of their contributions to the college.

The Bean family’s special connection with AAP began in 1971, when they established the David R. Bean Scholarship Fund in memory of their son. David Bean graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1970, and during his time at Cornell he pursued his love of art with a passion. When he died of diabetes in 1971, his family established a fund to assist students in the art department. In 1996 the fund became known as the David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts. It is considered the foremost award given by the Department of Art. An exhibition of work by former winners of the award was presented at the luncheon, and recipients of the prize were introduced to the Bean family.AAP

SIMON UNGERS 1957–2006 Simon Ungers (B.Arch. ’80) is best remembered for his design

of a series of elegant, austere homes such as the critically acclaimed “T-House” in Wilton, NY. Designed with Tom Kinslow (from 1988 to 1992), it was later included in MoMA’s 1999 exhibition “The Un-Private House.” According to architect and urbanist Kazys Varnelis (Ph.D. ’94), Ungers was “important as one of the first ‘shapers,’ architects who, influenced by Minimalism, turned to strong forms that avoided either the flaccidity of blobs or the reductiveness of the box.”

Ungers, who died last year after a long illness, was born in Cologne, Germany, and moved to Ithaca in 1969 when his father, O. M. Ungers, accepted the post of chair at Cornell’s Department of Architecture. Simon Ungers attended Ithaca High School and graduated from Cornell with a B.Arch. in 1980. He gained early recognition for his work, in particular for the widely acclaimed Knee Residence in Caldwell, NJ (1984).

Internationally known not only as an architect but also as an installation artist and sculptor, Ungers spent his last few years working primarily in Cologne, focusing increasingly on his art.

He taught at a number of architecture schools, including Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, and Cornell. His work is best represented in the 1998 monograph Simon Ungers, by Henry Ubach and Gustau G. Galfetti.AAP OPPOSITE Simon Ungers and Tom Kinslow, T-House, Wilton, NY, 1992 [Eduard Hueber/Archphoto]

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

30/ALUMNI NEWS

NEWS South Boston–based Studio Luz Architects principals Hansy Better Barraza

CAREER FORUM PRESENTS CHERYL PELAVIN The Art Alumni Ca-

C. CARVER

Mark Gibian, Cable Crossing (1993–97), detail of skylight unit, steel frames with stretched cable. Permanent commission

by M.T.A. at Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall Subway Station, NYC. Site architect: William Conklin of Conklin Rossant.

reer Forum in October presented Cheryl Pelavin (B.F.A. ’66), who told students and faculty assembled in Tjaden Gallery how she came to be running Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts, a New York gallery, and Pelavin Editions, a print atelier that is attached to the gallery.

After graduating from Cornell as the first student to major in printmaking, Pelavin worked in art publishing before becoming a successful author and illustrator of children’s books. From here she tried her hand in animation, then spent eight years in London managing print shops and exhibiting and selling her own etchings. Back in New York, in 1981 she founded Pelavin Editions to print the work of emerging artists. The idea for a gallery was realized in 1997.

Pelavin showed slides of some of the artists whose work she exhibits. These include the work of young, mid-career, and mature artists. But she tends to feature the work of less experienced artists (many of them women) who have not been given a fair chance, or who do not know how to work with gallery owners. “They tend to gravitate to me,” Pelavin commented.

AAP

Weiss/Manfredi Architects, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle. Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80) is a principal of the firm, whose design transformed an eight-and-a-half-acre brownfield in downtown Seattle into a terraced green space with views of the city and Puget Sound. The park opened in January.

BEING GREEN ARCHITECT BOB FOX LEADS BY EXAMPLE Recycled blue jeans for insulation. Water-

© DBOX FOR COOK+FOX ARCHITECTS

Cook + Fox Architects, One Bryant Park, New York City

less urinals. Recycled paper furniture. When Cook + Fox renovated the eighth floor of a historic Sixth Avenue department store as the firm’s new Manhattan office, they incorporated these products from the leading edge of green building design and construction.

Principals Robert Fox (B.Arch. ’65) and Richard Cook made the project a showcase for ecological responsibility, with optimal natural light, a green roof, and nontoxic materials. In January the renovation was certified platinum, the top designation from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

If all goes according to plan, the firm will claim another LEED platinum award in 2008, when the 2-million-square-foot Bank of America headquarters opens at One Bryant Park in Manhattan. “The industry needs to be looking at buildings that, instead of taking away from nature, actually serve to restore nature,” says Fox, a recipient of the 2006 Leadership Award from the USGBC and the Big Green Apple Award for Environmental Leadership from the New York City Council. “We need to look at buildings that create no new CO2, that are using materials that are renewable resources.” The $1 billion skyscraper will be the nation’s largest as well as greenest office building, incorporating such features as rainwater and wastewater capture and reuse, recycled materials sourced from within 500 miles, and “floating” floors to promote air flow and more efficient heating and cooling.

“The biggest question we get asked is about cost,” says Fox. Industry experts estimate that platinum-level construction averages a 6.5 percent premium. Yet the Bank of America project will have a less than 1 percent premium, says the architect, and the firm’s office renovation cost nothing extra. In fact, with health benefits and energy efficiency, it’s already saving money in lower absenteeism and slashed utility bills.

Yet Fox sees more than money in the balance. “What does it cost not to build green?

Why would one want to build a building that consumes more electricity and water than it should, that includes materials that are harmful to people’s health? Why would you want to do it?”

AAP

(B.Arch. ’98) and Anthony Piermarini (B.Arch. ’97) report that their firm was selected in December 2006 as one of ten Design Vanguards

by Architectural Record magazine. The magazine credited the “under-the-radar architects” with changing the ways people interact with their environments and each other. Studio Luz designed the Diva Lounge, winner of an Interior Architecture Award from the Boston Society of Architects. Earlier works include the exhibition installations Terrain: Vulnerable Architecture, at Drake University in Iowa, and If…Then, as part of the Architectural League’s 2004 Young Architects Forum. Current work includes Boston’s Union Square Performance Area and the Hope for the Children of Haiti campus in Port-au-Prince. See www.studioluz.net.

Merritt Bucholz (B.Arch. ’93) is head of a new architecture school at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The school opened in fall 2006.

Bucholz and his partner, Karen McEvoy, moved to Ireland a decade ago and operate the firm of Bucholz McEvoy in Dublin.

Yarinda “Nina” Bunnag (B.Arch. ’04) has released a new CD, “Try to Be Nice,” with the independent label Smallroom. Bunnag wrote and produced all 12 tracks on the album. The 26year-old had already launched her music career with a self-titled album when she enrolled at Cornell. Visit the band’s myspace profile for concert dates: www.myspace.com/yarinda.

Robert Cronin (M.F.A. ’62) has recently shown paintings in a group exhibition entitled “The Figurative Show” at Lascano Gallery in Great Barrington, MA. His current solo show, “The Movie Paintings,” is on view at the Moviehouse Studio Gallery in Millerton, NY, from December 1, 2006, to March 1, 2007. Cronin lives in Falls Village, CT. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; National Academy Museum, New York; and many other institutions.

Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55) has joined the Yale School of Architecture as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor. The appointment lasts six years. Popular Science recently named him one of the top innovators of 2006; the award was based on his design for the Cardinals stadium in Glendale, AZ, which features a retractable grass field as well as a retractable roof.

Several new works on paper by Peter D. Gerakaris (B.F.A. ’03) were exhibited in the Art 212 Contemporary Art Fair in New York City in September. Other fall events featuring Gerakaris’s work included “Scope Art London” with the Moti Hasson Gallery; the RxArt Ball Benefit in New York City; “Mélange” at Gavlak in West Palm Beach, FL; and “Salon eo Ipso” at Match Artspace in Brooklyn, NY. He contributed a painting to this year’s ARTWALK NY, a charity event held in New York City in November. More than 140 works of contemporary art were auctioned to support the work of the Coalition for the Homeless. Images of new work and projects by Gerakaris can be found at www.petergerakaris.com.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn–based sculptor Mark Gibian (B.F.A., B.A. ’79) recently received two large public commissions. He will create a trio of galvanized steel structures for the Hudson River Park in Tribeca and a large, stainless steel piece for RD Management. The latter will be installed on a new pier in the East River as part of a waterfront esplanade slated for the Parks Department.

Gibian’s work came to national prominence with his lacy, undulating stretched cable installation in the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway station.

One of his smaller pieces, steel ribbing wrapped with slumped glass, appears in the Miami Beach Sagamore Hotel art collection. Gibian was honored with a Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant/Award in 2004.

Sculptor Charles A. Ginnever Jr. (M.F.A. ’59) gave a talk and slide presentation in November 2006, entitled “Overview of Fifty Years of Work,” as part of series of lectures hosted by the public library in Putney, VT, entitled “Words and Images: Artists Talk About Their Work.” Ginnever is known for his large-scale, abstract steel sculptures. One such work, Hangover II, a 37-foot, 25,000-pound sculpture composed of two open parallelograms connected by a top flange, is now on loan to Julliard Park in Santa Rosa, CA. The sculpture will become part of the City of Santa Rosa Recreation and Parks’ Civic Artwalk.

The Board of Directors of The Arc of the Virginia Peninsula Inc. has appointed Kathryn J. Grzelkowski (B.A. ’87, M.R.P. ’94) as president and CEO. Prior to joining The Arc, Grzelkowski served as vice president of community building at United Way of the Virginia Peninsula.

Two projects by Handel Architects whose president is Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’79,) entered the construction phase in October 2006: the 21-story residential tower at 631 Folsom Street in San Francisco is under way, as is North Point Station on Boston’s Green Line. The new station, which will replace Lechmere T Station, is due to open in 2010.

The work of Rebecca B. Harris (B.S./B.F.A. ’04) was displayed in December at the PooL Art Fair in Miami Beach. PooL is produced by Frère Independent, a not-for-profit art organization that provides new avenues of dissemination and widespread visibility to international emerging

Louise Lawler, Bulbs (2005–2006), Fugi-Flex (museum box), 39 3/4 x 39 3/4 in. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery.

JEFF GOLDBERG/ESTO

Todd Schliemann (B.Arch. ’79) of Polshek Partnership, Weill Greenberg Center of Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City, to be completed in 2007. According to the firm’s website, “Conceived as a diaphanous skin, the white ceramic fritted glass curtainwall is cut into long vertical facets. These gently sloped vertical surfaces reflect the gothic motif of the original New York Hospital campus across York Avenue.”

and independent artists working in nontraditional media who do not currently have gallery representation. The event was timed to coincide with Miami Basel, a huge international art fair.

Ari Heckman (B.S. ’05) is now a key player in revitalizing Downcity, a historic arts community in Providence, RI. After graduating from Cornell, Heckman returned to his hometown to work with city planners Cornish Associates in Providence.

The firm converts historic structures to mixed-use retail and residential lofts, and has created 200 living units and more than 60,000 square feet of retail space in a three-block area.

W. Timothy Hess (B.Arch. ’93), design director of Pratt Builders of Groton, MA, was the lead designer on an award-winning addition to a 200-year-old farmhouse in Acton, MA. The project received the Gold Award at the 2006 Eastern Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry Contractor of the Year Awards in November 2006.

In September, the First Street Gallery in New York City presented work by David Hewitt (M.F.A. program ’79) in an exhibition entitled “The Middle East Landscapes.” Hewitt is currently living in the United Arab Emirates, where he teaches design at the American University of Sharjah, north of Dubai.

Jed Jackson (M.F.A. ’80) recently had a Tennessee Arts Commission fellowship exhibit at the commission’s galleries in Nashville, November 20, 2006, to January 5, 2007. Jackson also had a solo exhibit at the Institut Franco-Americain in Rennes, France, December 4–22, 2006.

Sand_box, the architecture firm founded by Samuel F. Keller (B.Arch. ’00), Bruce Engel (B.Arch. ’01), Damien Hamilton (B.Arch. ’01), and partners, took part in an exhibition at the Morsel Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Their installation, Defibrillator, was a finalist in the 2006 issue of I.D. Magazine’s Annual Design Review in the “Environments” category. Sand_box is based in New York and Chicago.

A short film by Elizabeth Kim (B.F.A. ’83) titled Yasin was shown at Cornell Cinema on February 8, 2007, along with live music by violinist Ritsu Katsumata, a former employee of the Department of Architecture. Also in February, the film had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. It was shown at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival in August 2006 and had its broadcast premiere on KCET (Los Angeles) in October. Kim is a former editor of AAP News.

The Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, presented the first U.S. museum survey of Louise Lawler’s (B.F.A. ’69) influential work in the exhibition “Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back),” on view September 16–December 31, 2006. A conceptual photographer, Lawler produced several of the pieces in this exhibition while at the Wexner Center, during the 2005 installation and run of “Part Object, Part Sculpture.” Besides photographs, “Twice Untitled” includes such objects as paperweights, postcards, and etched glasses.

Alison Diamond Levasseur (B.F.A. ’88) hosted a gathering of prominent and promising young alumni at her New York City home on December 12. Dean Mohsen Mostafavi spoke to the group, updating them on developments at AAP and asking for their involvement in the life and growth of the college.

William Lim (M.Arch. ’82) of CL3, Hong Kong, announced that his practice has received the Award of Merit from the Northwest and Pacific Region of the American Institute of Architects’ 2006 Region Design Awards. The winning project was entitled Adrenaline. The award ceremony was held on October 17, 2006, in Hong Kong. Lim also participated in the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, with a structure that consisted of 500 bamboo ladders.

ALUMNI ARCHITECTS GUIDE TOUR OF ALVIN AILEY STUDIOS Dancers soared across the stage, with

New York City itself providing the backdrop through the studio’s glass walls. But the dramatic venue was the real focus of this December 12 event, as guests were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the new Joan Weill Center for Dance designed by architects Natan Bibliowicz (B.Arch. ’81) and Carolyn Iu ’75.

The Joan Weill Center is the new home of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation and Ailey Studios, an eight-floor facility at 405 W. 55th St. at 9th Avenue. The event was hosted by the Cornell Entrepreneur Network (CEN) and the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

The center is named for the wife of Sanford “Sandy” I. Weill ’55, chairman of the Weill Cornell Medical College’s Board of Overseers and retired chair and CEO of Citigroup.

Cornell’s medical school was named in honor of the Weills in 1998.

Bibliowicz and Iu discussed their concept, design, and development of the facility— which includes glass exterior walls and 12 studios, all with viewing windows.

“There is no greater representation of entrepreneurship than architecture,” noted Justine Schaffner, director of CEN. “In both processes you must start with nothing and create a reality.”

The work of freelance photographer Rania Ratta Matar (B.Arch. ’87) was featured in “History Recalls,” a four-artist exhibition at Northeastern University’s Curry Student Art Center Gallery in January. The show grappled with the effects of war, as experienced by two Australians and two Americans, and depicted in drawings, murals, paintings, and photographs. Matar, who trained at the New England School of Photography and in Oaxaca, Mexico—with Magnum photographer Constantine Manos—has devoted much of her career to the Middle East, documenting the experience of Palestinian women and children living in refugee camps. See www.raniamatar.com.

The Whitney Museum of American Art launched a full-scale retrospective of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark (B.Arch. ’68) in February.

“You Are the Measure” will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in June.

Matta-Clark worked barely a decade before his death in 1978, yet his artistry spanned sculptural objects, drawings, films, photographs, and notebooks, and its influence has grown dramatically in the intervening years. Matta-Clark’s work also appears at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist is credited with pioneering the transformation of SoHo and the creation of unforgettable spatial experiences around the world and closer to home, including the Hudson Piers, suburban New Jersey, and even the tenements and bridges of New York City.

In October 2006, Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’57) addressed members of the Cornell Club of Greater Hartford, CT, on the subject of his recent work, and in particular the new Life Sciences Technology Building currently under construction on the Cornell campus.

Malcolm Moor (M.Arch. ’73) is coauthor of the recently published Urban Design Futures. The book examines the rise of urban design in the last decade and the central role it plays in new

AAP

Adapted from an article by Brenda Tobias, Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

David Hewitt, The Cloud (2005), oil on linen, 49" x 69" (detail)

William S. Lipschutz (B.F.A. ’76, M.B.A. ’83), once considered one of the world’s top five FX traders, is principal and director of portfolio management for the New York–based currency hedge fund company Hathersage. He was featured in the August 2006 issue of Euromoney magazine, speaking about the changing shape of foreign exchange markets and the future of his eight-person company.

The work of Peter P. Marino (B.Arch. ’70) was profiled in the September 2006 issue of Display & Design Ideas. One of his most recent projects, the Staatliche Kunstsammunglen, a new museum in Dresden, was dedicated in October.

Peter Marino Architect PLLC has branch offices in Paris, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara, and East Hampton, NY; clients include such high-end fashion houses as Giorgio Armani, Dior, Barneys New York, and Louis Vuitton.

Jeffrey Marshall (B.F.A. ’91), assistant professor in graphic design and drawing at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, MA, returned to his former home of New Orleans to draw among the debris of Hurricane Katrina. Marshall spent two weeks in the Lower Ninth Ward working on a series of 30 x 44 inch drawings. Some of these were featured in the New York Times in August 2006, along with the work of other artists, to mark the anniversary of Katrina. Marshall’s drawings were also exhibited in the Krause Gallery in Providence, RI. RIGHT William Lim (CL3), bamboo installation, Venice Biennale 2006

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS02/spring2007

32/ALUMNI NEWS

Peter Sparber, Homage to Max Beckmann, oil on canvas, 56" x 73"

Glenn Rescalvo, Handel Architects, Millennium Tower, 301 Mission Street, San Francisco

agendas for urban regeneration and renaissance.

Moor is head of Malcolm Moor Urban Design, working on large-scale master plans in the UK, Asia, and the Middle East. He is a visiting tutor in urban design at Westminster University in London.

Oppenheim Architecture + Design (principal Chad Oppenheim, B.Arch. ’93) was featured in the New York Times on August 13 for its design of the first sustainable, mixed-use condominium in Miami. The firm describes the project as representing a dynamic synergy among architecture, structural engineering, and ecology.

Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, in which Eduardo Quintero (M.Arch. ’02) is an architect and field representative, celebrated the opening of Miami’s Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in August 2006. The center includes a 2,400-seat ballet/opera house, a 2,200-seat concert hall, and a 200-seat theater.

A series of 18 drawings that convey the spirit and power of African dance and drumming by Eduardo Alexander Rabel (B.F.A. ’93) was featured this fall in the group exhibition “Unbridled.”

The exhibition was on view at Inspiration Fine Art in Harlem from September 22 to October 29.

Richard Ragatz (Ph.D. ’69) will participate in the 2007 Ragatz Associates’ Fractional Interest Conference to be held March 5–7 at The Fairmont San Francisco. A veteran of the resort real estate industry, Ragatz and other experts will report on the latest trends, news, and research findings about the state of fractional real estate, including private residence clubs and destination clubs.

The tallest building approved in San Francisco in 30 years, the $400 million Millennium Tower at 301 Mission Street is a current project of Handel Architects principal Glenn G. Rescalvo (M.Arch. ’88). Rescalvo sees the 58-story structure, due for completion in 2008, as a chance to prove that his hometown will embrace the kind of aggressive glass high-rise he has spent much of

his career building in New York, Miami, Hamburg, London, Mexico City, and elsewhere. In February, Rescalvo addressed AAP alumni at a San Francisco gathering with Dean Mohsen Mostafavi.

Carlos M. Rodriguez Infanzon (B.Arch. ’99), of Rodriguez Studio Architecture in New York City, was profiled in New York Spaces in a feature called “10 Designers Under 40 to Watch.”

He has joined the adjunct faculty of New York Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture.

See www.rodriguezstudio.net/.

In October 2006, Scott Rodwin (B.Arch. ’91), president of Rodwin Architecture, received the American Institute of Architects Young Architect of the Year Award for the Western Mountain Region of the United States. Rodwin Architecture, a seven-person firm founded in 1999, is located in downtown Boulder. It is known for its expertise in green design in both residential and commercial projects. The Young Architect award is given annually to an architect who has made extraordinary contributions in design, service, and/or research and has been licensed for less than 10 years.

Santa Cruz–based architect Deepika S. Ross (B.Arch. ’84) is coauthor of a new book, with Gary Griggs, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Then and Now: Santa Cruz Coast (Arcadia Publishing, 2006) juxtaposes historic photographs with recent ones taken from the same locations, showing how the coastline has evolved and changed, sometimes dramatically, over the past century.

In October and November, the Community Folk Art Center in Genesee, NY, presented the exhibition “African-American Constructs: Designs by Scott Ruff.” Scott L. Ruff (B.Arch. ’92, M.Arch. ’95) is professor of architecture at Syracuse University and principal of Ruff Works Studio, which specializes in the cultivation of African-American aesthetics in spatial design.

Cathleen Chua Schulte (B.Arch. ’90) of cc3Design, which creates children’s wear and accessories, is one of nine women entrepreneurs featured in the March 2007 issue of Country Living.

Architect, urban designer, and professor Michael Schwarting (B.Arch. ’66, M.Arch. ’68) gave a lecture in AAP’s Hartell Gallery in September 2006. An exhibition of his work from 1970 to the present was on display in the gallery to coincide with the event. He is currently a partner of Campani and Schwarting Architects and teaches at New York Institute of Technology.

In December, Robert Scott (M.R.P. ’75) was named executive vice president and general counsel for Tyco Electronics, a spin-off of Tyco International Ltd. Scott previously served as senior vice president of corporate planning for Tyco International, managing the company’s separation into three independent, publicly traded companies in 2007.

Peter Sparber (M.F.A. ’80) has started painting again after years of focusing on the business world. After graduating from Cornell, Sparber worked as an artist in New York City, but soon found that his skill in business took over.

Today he is global head of compensation and benefits for Invista, a Koch Industries subsidiary.

In 2006 Sparber returned to art, and in October three of his large abstract paintings were exhibited at Fisch Haus Studios in Wichita, KS. Ratan Tata (B.Arch. ’62) was named Businessman of the Year by CNN-IBN television in India. His conglomerate, the Tata Group, recently won the bidding for the steel company the Corus Group with an offer of $11.3 billion, the largest acquisition ever by an Indian company.

The work of Greek architect Nicholas C. Tountas (B.Arch. ’75) was the subject of an

Site plan for Olmsted Green, a project of Kirk Sykes’s Urban Strategy America Fund

exhibition at the University of Miami School of Architecture in October 2006, where Tountas also gave a lecture. Until recently Tountas’s work was little known outside Greece, or even the tiny Cycladic Island of Kea. It was brought to a wider audience by Jose Gelabert-Navia (B.Arch. ’75, M.F.A. ’78), managing director of the Miami office of Perkins & Will and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture.

Gelabert-Navia renewed his friendship with Tountas, who had been his Cornell roommate, when he guided a group of students on a trip to Greece.

The work of Sarah Trigg (B.F.A. ’95) was included in “Art on Paper 2006,” a biennial exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Shown from November 12, 2006 to January 21, 2007, “Art on Paper” is the latest exhibition in a 40-year partnership between the Weatherspoon Museum and xpedx (formerly Dillard Paper Company). See www.sarahtrigg.com.

Kazys Varnelis (Ph.D. ’94) has been appointed director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The NetLab is an experimental unit exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production, and environment design.

In 2005–2006 Varnelis was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication’s “Networked Publics” program. He is also a member of the founding faculty at the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Together with Robert Sumrell, he runs the nonprofit architectural collective AUDC, which is to publish Blue Monday, a set of investigations into architecture’s role in contemporary urbanism, this spring. See his website at www.varnelis.net.

Halle Watson (B.S. ’02) was recently promoted to senior manager of corporate merchandise planning at Coach Inc. in New York City. In addition to the management of corporate merchandise planning for handbags and factory, she has assumed the management of planning for men’s categories.

Wilson J. Woodridge Jr. (B.Arch. ’75), former president of Wilson Woodridge Architects, has joined Hillier Architecture of Princeton, NJ. As senior project manager at Hillier, Woodridge strengthens the firm’s presence in Newark, where Hillier is involved in the renovation of the Newark Public Library and the design of a new Museum of African American Music. Hillier’s CEO is Thomas K. Fridstein (B.Arch. ’74), FAIA.AAP

CREATIVE GIVING FOR AAP Electronics

Upgrades throughout the college: > Laptops for presentations (4–5 needed at $2,500 each) > Projectors ($3,000) > Digital cameras ($1,000) > 3-D printers (3–4 needed at $30,000 each) International study trips Sponsor a student for short trips to such locations as Nairobi, Santiago, and Lisbon, or for the Brazilian Cities summer program ($2,000–7,000) Internships Sponsor a student for a professional internship in New Orleans to support local recovery efforts ($6,500) Student publications For all college departments, $10,000–15,000 each To donate, please contact Carol Cooke, coc3@cornell.edu, (607) 255.1501.

URBAN CATALYST SYKES’S FUND MAKES REVITALIZATION HAPPEN When Boston’s first black-owned hotel opened in

2004, developer Kirk Sykes (B.Arch. ’80) cut the ribbon. The Roxbury Hampton Inn & Suites was the first phase of the $140 million Boston Crosstown Center project, an effort to revitalize a long-neglected minority neighborhood in South Boston. In 2005 Sykes’s role in the project garnered him a lifetime achievement award from 21st Century Black Massachusetts.

In the almost 30 years since he settled in Boston, Sykes’s commitment to urban vitality has shaped a career spanning architecture, real estate development, and most recently, venture capital. He now heads the Urban Strategy America Fund, L.P., a private fund that promises competitive returns on investment while stimulating urban growth, economic development, and green initiatives. “The thread is a focus on transforming emerging domestic markets—transitional neighborhoods,” says Sykes. “I tried to do it through design, then through development, and finally realized the key is capital allocation.”

The fund’s flagship effort is Olmsted Green, a mixed-use community on the 42-acre site of the former Boston State Hospital that includes a research and development facility for the University of Massachusetts, a skilled nursing facility, and a job-training center for health care professionals. With green buildings, walking trails, integrated mass transit, and affordable mid-market housing, Sykes and his collaborators hope to establish an integrated community that fosters healthy living. “There’s a market for mixed-income, mixed-ethnicity neighborhoods at the center of Boston,” says Sykes.

Sykes got his start in development in the late ’80s, often accepting a financial stake in a project in lieu of a fee. In 1997 the PBS documentary Holding Ground highlighted the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, where Sykes formed a private-public partnership to develop townhouses. “We uncover opportunities that have been overlooked and there’s a ripple effect,” he says. “We’re part of the puzzle—not necessarily the answer but the catalyst, bringing together partners who maybe didn’t see the opportunity or needed our resources.”

AAP

IMAGE CREDITS FOR PAGES 18–19

Paul Andersen, Leyre Asensio Villoria, Alexandra Boissonneault, Jessica Brown, Natalie Brown, Erica Bush, Alison Cheng, Tara Cooper, Cornell University Solar Decathlon, CRP 558 Workshop, dbox for Cook + Fox Architects, Javier Galindo, Mark Gibian, Rebekah Groehn, Angela Gutierrez, Liz Holmes, Nam In Kim, Yoko Inoue, Prasad Khanolkar, Seojin Kim, Louise Lawler, Ana Leshchinsky, William Lim, Andy Linn, Kendall Lowe, Hannah Mattheus-Kairys, Eleanore Mikus, New Orleans Planning Initiative, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Meghan O’Halloran, Arthur Ovaska, Jessica Qualls, Sand_box Architecture, Simitch & Warke, Carol Slawson, Benjamin Slocum Shattuck, Craig Sobeski, Ana Sousa, Peter Sparber, William Staffeld, Portia Strahan, Dakota Stranik/Felipe Romero/Eddie Kim, Robert Stuart, Kirk Sykes/Olmsted Green, Stan Taft, Brenda Tobias, University Photography, Cristina Villa, Jillian Weiss

33/BACKPAGE

ERIC BERNSTEIN+ISAAC SHARKAN B.Arch. ’11 Our assignment first called for the analysis of the physical, material, and inherent properties of a safety pin—how it func-

tions, how it connects, how it responds. Under the title “Prosthetics,” the project was directed toward creating an extension or amplification of a specific aspect of the human body. After several studies on the possible connection strategies of the safety pin, we found three successful methods that facilitated the compression and expansion of the space between the arm and body. The wing was composed of a series of arched ribs following the swing of the arm. The series of ribs were connected by perpendicular rows that were able to contract and extend with the rise and fall of the arm. A final layer of mesh was added to unify the systems and their individual movements. The resulting prosthetic exaggerates the unseen deformations of space as the body functions.