AAP News 03

AAP CORNELL ARCHITE—— CTURE—ART —PLANNING NEWS03 FALL2007

20 Years in Rome

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10/24/07

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DEAR FRIENDS, The fall semester has already begun and we are looking forward to a diverse and exciting lineup of visitors and events. In November the

College of Architecture, Art, and Planning will host another conference in the series on contemporary architecture and urbanism around the world. As part of that series, the event titled Portugal Now: Country Positions in Architecture and Urbanism will assemble a group of renowned and emerging architects, with events both in Ithaca on November 1 and at our space in New York City on November 2. The College will also host a number of other distinguished lecturers including the internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell, who will deliver the first Cooper Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecture. Another endowed annual event, the Edgar Tafel lecture, named in honor of the celebrated architect and author, will this year be delivered by the critic and theorist K. Michael Hays. Other lectures include talks by Simon Allford, Beatriz Colomina, Okwui Enwezor, Toshiko Mori, Saskia Sassen, and Thomas Sugrue.

In May we were delighted to honor Paul and Irma Milstein and their family with a naming ceremony for our future building, Paul Milstein Hall. (See the article on page 3.) Plans for the building continue to progress, as we refine the design and work through the municipal approvals process. The latest images of the project are available on the college’s website.

In preparation for the construction period, slated to begin in 2008, the college has acquired two floors of a building on Esty Street in downtown Ithaca. This space will accommodate studios and offices during the inevitable disruptions as portions of Rand and Sibley Halls are renovated in conjunction with the building of Paul Milstein Hall.

This ambitious project will bring much-needed collaborative spaces for our architects, artists, and planners, including studio spaces, meeting rooms, a large auditorium, and exhibition spaces. Its estimated cost of more than $40 million is one of our current challenges. Through the university’s Campaign for Cornell and AAP’s individual efforts, we are reaching out to alumni and friends to help make this transformative structure a reality. The capital campaign for the college of Architecture, Art, and Planning, which includes scholarships, endowed professorships, and facilities support has reached nearly $25 million to date—close to 40 percent of our $65 million goal.

Meanwhile, the most important work of this college— teaching—will be enhanced by the arrival this semester of several new faculty members, whose interests and accomplishments you will read about in this issue. Here I would just like to note in particular our new chair for the Department of Art, Patricia Phillips. An outstanding critic, editor, and curator, she previously chaired the art department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

On a personal note, I would also like to thank Gale and Ira Drukier for their friendship and for their incredible support of the college by endowing my deanship.

Finally, as you may already have heard, I have accepted the deanship of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. I look forward to this challenge but will never forget the incredible support and friendship of the Cornell community.

During the past few years we have together realized remarkable success in creating many positive initiatives for the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. With our wonderful students and dedicated faculty and staff, as well as supportive alumni and friends, I am confident that AAP will continue to achieve even greater things.

I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to work with all of you.

COVER

At a public lecture on March 26, sponsored by Cornell in Rome at the University at Rome’s Ospizio di San Michele, 2004 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid discussed her latest work: a modern art and architecture museum. The day before the lecture, at the building’s construction site, Dean Mohsen Mostafavi discussed the evolution of the architect’s style, noting the changes in her use of concrete and the flow of movement in the design of her Rome museum project and a science center in Wolfsburg, Germany.

“There is this shift from the calligraphic to the fluid,” said Mostafavi. More than 400 people attended Hadid’s lecture the next evening, including the Italian minister of culture Francesco Rutelli, who introduced Hadid.AAP

AAP NEWS

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

College of Architecture, Art, & Planning Cornell University 129 East Sibley Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853 T 607 254.8863 aap_newsletter@cornell.edu Editor Liz Holmes (M.F.A. ’87) Associate Editor Sharon Tregaskis (B.S. ’95) Design Paul Soulellis (B.Arch. ’90), Soulellis Studio Copyeditor Laura Glenn © October 2007 Cornell University.

F W F S F R A B

Mohsen Mostafavi Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning

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AAP CORNELL ARCHITE—— CTURE—ART —PLANNING NEWS03 FALL2007 AAPnews 2 FOLIO—5 WORK—10 FALL07calendar—14 STUDENTnews—19 FACULTY++STAFFnews—20 REVIEW—22 ALUMNInews—24 BACKPAGE 29

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10/24/07

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2—AAPNEWS ROME/CHINA /PHILLIPS/GOLDSMITH/ MILSTEIN/ESTY STREET/ SOCIAL JUSTICE/URBAN MENTORS/TAFT 02

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ART CRITIC, EDITOR, AND CURATOR PATRICIA PHILLIPS TO CHAIR DEPARTMENT OF ART Patri-

AAP@ESTYSTREET

In anticipation of the changes and temporary closures required for construction of Milstein Hall and the associated work in Sibley and Rand Halls, AAP has leased 8,000-plus square feet on two floors of a historic warehouse building in downtown Ithaca. Recently renovated, 531 Esty Street has open and bright loftlike interiors that have been finished to suit the needs of the architecture and other studios.

“Certainly it is a building with very good quality studio space, something not easily found in Ithaca,” noted Mark Cruvellier, interim chair of architecture.

Wireless web access is available throughout, along with a limited number of computer terminals, plotters and printers. Shuttle bus service has been arranged to operate between Esty Street and Sibley/Rand, and parking is available on site for Esty Street students, faculty, and staff.

Cruvellier expects that over the next three or four years roughly 60–75 students will occupy the Esty Street studios each semester. Most B.Arch. and M.Arch. I students will be cycled through a semester at Esty Street at one time or another, likely toward the end of their degree program.

AAP

NEW SOCIAL JUSURBAN MENTORS PROGRAM LINKS UNDERGRADS WITH BROOKLYN MIDDLE TICE CONCENTRAOFFERED Cornell SCHOOLERS This fall some 30 Cornell students are inaugurating a new program TION University has adopted a new campus-wide that aims to teach them about urban education while helping urban middle schoolers set their sights on college and careers. The Cornell Urban Mentors Program, the brainchild of student Nessia Sloane, arranges for undergraduates to serve as mentors for middle school students attending the Urban Assembly for the Environment, a theme-based public school in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

Making Sloane’s idea a reality is the accomplishment of Richard Kiely, faculty director of the Cornell Urban Scholars Program (CUSP), and Professor Maria Davidis, assistant dean of admissions for the College of Arts and Sciences. The program is funded by the Heckscher Foundation for Children, a longtime sponsor of CUSP. While serving as mentors, Cornell students in the program take a fall-semester course, Progressive Urban Education, offered by the Department of City and Regional Planning. A follow-up course is required in the spring. The undergraduates are expected to communicate with their mentees several times a week via web-based technology, and in October they will visit the Brooklyn school. The middle schoolers and their parents will be invited to visit Cornell in the spring.

But the program does more than create one-to-one relationships. A close connection between Cornell and the middle school is planned, including inviting parents and teachers to Cornell for specific kinds of training, developing methods of teaching note-taking strategy to middle schoolers, and working with Cornell’s Knight Writing Institute to assess the school’s writing curriculum.

“This goes beyond pedagogy,” says Kiely. “It’s about creating institutional change through service learning.”AAP 01 02 03 04 05 06

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The studios at Esty Street. Credit: William Staffeld.

Art department chair Patricia Phillips. Credit: William Staffeld.

W. Stanley Taft, associate professor of art and associate dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

The Milstein family: Barbara, Irma, Paul, and Howard with President David Skorton. Credit: William Staffeld.

An OMA rendering of the Milstein Hall design. Provided.

Critical Art catalog, cover design by Soulellis Studio.

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concentration in Social Justice Studies and Public Scholarship, crafted by faculty in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professors John Forester and Richard Booth, Associate Professor Kenneth Reardon, and Richard Kiely, faculty director of the Cornell Urban Scholars Program, developed the new course of study.

It is distinguished from other concentrations at Cornell by its focus on policy and its strong component of field-based service learning. The concentration consists of 18 credits—six courses including three core courses, two service-learning courses, and a senior policy seminar. Ideally, students enrolling in the Social Justice and Public Scholarship concentration will take an introductory course (i.e., CRP 457) that prepares them for engaging in field-based service-learning and explores the structural causes of social problems, a second class examining alternative approaches to poverty elimination, and a final course on participatory action research techniques. Following this initial course sequence, students will complete two in-depth service-learning experiences. They will complete the concentration by participating in a senior seminar in which they will produce written essays and policy papers addressing critical social problems.

The new concentration is open to all undergraduates regardless of their majors. Cornell will be one of the few schools offering an interdisciplinary service-learning minor designed to prepare students to lead major social reform movements aimed at reducing poverty at home and abroad.AAP

cia Phillips has been appointed chair of Cornell’s Department of Art, Dean Mohsen Mostafavi has announced.

She succeeds Franklin (Buzz) Spector, who will continue teaching at Cornell following a sabbatical.

Phillips was most recently professor and chair of the Department of Art at the State University of New York (SUNY)New Paltz, where she served as dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts from 1997 to 2002.

Phillips’s research and critical writing involve contemporary and public art, design, architecture, sculpture, landscape, and the intersections of those areas.

Since 1980, her essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Sculpture, and Public Art Review. Her books and collected essays include It Is Difficult (1998), a survey of the work of Alfredo Jaar. She was the editor of City Speculations (1996), published in conjunction with a major exhibition she curated at the Queens Museum of Art in 1996. In 2002 she was appointed editor-in-chief of Art Journal, a quarterly published by the College Art Association.

Her curatorial and design projects include “Disney Animators and Animation” (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981), “The POP Project” (Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S. 1, 1988), and “Making Sense: Five Installations on Sensation” (Katonah Museum of Art, 1996).

Phillips, who has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, earned a B.A. in art from Muhlenberg College and did graduate studies in landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1984 to 1991, she was on the faculty of Parsons School of Design and served as associate chair of the Department of Environmental Design and Architecture. She joined SUNY-New Paltz as art department chair in 1991. In 2002 she was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Research Recognition Award.

Phillips’s Cornell appointment was the result of a yearlong national search.AAP

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

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MILSTEIN FAMILY HONORED AT BUILDING-NAMING CEREMONY Cornell University and the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning formally recognized major donors Paul and Irma Milstein and their family at a May 24 naming ceremony for Paul Milstein Hall, the planned new building for AAP. The ceremony, in the John Hartell Gallery in Sibley Hall and outdoors on the Arts Quad, included a tribute by trustee emeritus Howard Milstein ’73 to his father, and comments by President David Skorton, Presidents Emeriti Hunter R. Rawlings and Frank H. T. Rhodes, and AAP Dean Mohsen Mostafavi.

“The construction of Paul Milstein Hall marks a new era for Cornell, one in which architects, artists, and planners will collaborate in exciting new ways, and in which the arts and humanities will move to a new level of excellence within our university,” Skorton said. “With this building, we celebrate the Milstein family’s vision and the profound impact their support will have on the academic and cultural life of the campus for generations to come.”

Paul Milstein Hall is being designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), a firm whose partners include Pritzker Prize winner Rem Koolhaas, who studied architecture at Cornell.

The $40 million project is expected to break ground early in 2008, although construction is subject to municipal approvals.

Milstein Hall will help the college encourage interdisciplinary collaboration by providing 43,000 square feet of additional space, including an auditorium, a college forum, galleries, and studios. A green roof and many other sustainable features are planned, and the project is striving for LEED certification.

“The gift in honor of Paul Milstein is undoubtedly a transformative gift for our college, because of the way our students will be able to collaborate in the future,” Mostafavi said.

Irma Milstein, a Cornell parent, committed $10 million to Cornell in 1999 for a building creating a distinctive gateway to the campus. At the time, Irma and Paul’s son Howard was active on the Cornell Board of Trustees. Howard is chairman, president, and CEO of New York Private Bank and Trust. He studied economics in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, served as a trustee from 1995 to 2003, and currently is a Presidential Councillor at Cornell and sits on the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College.

The Milstein family’s fortune comes in large part from banking and real estate ventures in New York City. The family’s holdings include Emigrant Savings Bank, New York’s fourth-largest savings bank.

As partners in Milstein Properties, Paul Milstein and sons Howard and Edward brought new development, including hotels and luxury housing, to once-underappreciated areas of the city, such as Battery Park, Murray Hill, the Lincoln Center area, Hell’s Kitchen, and East 96th Street.

“It’s been inspiring to witness the way in which Howard Milstein has been so keenly committed to the quality and the caliber of the architecture of the building that will honor his father,” Mostafavi said.

“His enthusiasm for the architecture of OMA and his desire to have a building of international note on campus has also set a standard—it’s given us a very clear goal in terms of the conditions and qualities the building has to achieve.”

“It’s also fitting that a family that both believed and invested so much in architecture as an indispensable part of urban development should be associated with the college,” Mostafavi said. “Their vision in identifying opportunities in New York City, and the extraordinary commitment that was necessary to make such large-scale projects a reality, is in itself a strong argument for the need for collaboration between real estate development, urban planning, and architecture.”

The Milsteins are among Cornell’s major benefactors. Over the years, they have made gifts for facilities at Weill Cornell, faculty fellowships for strategic hires, and scholarships in the College of Arts and Sciences. The family’s philanthropic activities also have benefited the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and the New York Public Library.

Three of Paul and Irma Milstein’s four children attended Cornell—Roslyn Milstein Meyer ’71, Howard ’73, and Barbara Milstein Zalaznick ’76—as did son-in-law David Zalaznick ’76, the current vice chairman of the Cornell Board of Trustees; and grandchildren Jeffrey Zalaznick ’05, Samantha Zalaznick, and Amy Zalaznick and Michael Milstein who entered Cornell in the fall.

“The Milstein family has shown their deep commitment to Cornell University over many years, not only with their generous gifts, but also with their vision for the university and their service to it,” said Provost Biddy Martin. “Milstein Hall, which is named in Paul’s honor, will help enhance collaboration in the arts and architecture and provide the campus with a signature building for those collaborations.”AAP

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TAFT NAMED INTERIM DEAN OF AAP W. Stanley Taft, associate professor of art and associate dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, will serve as interim dean of the college when current dean Mohsen Mostafavi leaves at the end of the fall 2007 semester.

“Having already served as an exemplary associate dean, Stan Taft is universally respected for his experience, thoughtfulness, and good judgment,” said Cornell Provost Biddy Martin. “We are delighted and very grateful that he has agreed to act as interim dean while we complete the search for the next dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.”

Mostafavi has accepted a position at Harvard University as dean of the Graduate School of Design, starting January 2008. A search committee will be convened soon to begin the search for a new dean.

Taft came to Cornell in 1985 and was appointed associate dean of AAP in 2003. He teaches studio courses in painting and drawing and interdisciplinary courses on digital media and on the intersection of art and science. He has exhibited his work nationally and has collaborated with associate professor of architecture John Zissovici on installation, video and photography projects using digital technologies.

Taft is the principal author (with James W. Mayer) of The Science of Paintings, published in 2000. He has conducted research into the physical properties of artist materials, utilizing analytical facilities in materials science and engineering and nuclear science at Cornell.

He earned an M.F.A. in painting from Fort Wright College, Spokane, Wash.; and a B.F.A. in painting from California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, Calif.AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online, and used with permission.

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ART FACULTY EXHIBIT WORKS IN GOLDSMITH CHINA On the far side of the world, works by faculty members of the Depart- APPOINTED CHAIR ment of Art are finding a new audience as part of an exchange between AAP and a Chinese OF CRP Professor William Golduniversity. smith was appointed interim chair of the DepartThe exhibition “Critical Art: Faculty of the Cornell University Department of Art” opened at the School of Art at Hangzhou Normal University in Hangzhou (one hour from Shanghai) on June 1, 2007. After just over a week, it traveled to the Academy of Art and Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where it was on view from June 11 to June 23.

Consisting of works on paper and in projective media, the exhibition was accompanied by a striking full-color catalog (largely bilingual), which showed works by the faculty in other media as well. The catalog can be viewed on the AAP website at www.aap.cornell.edu under “people & work”/“publications.”

The exhibition is one aspect of an evolving partnership between the Department of Art and Tsinghua University’s Academy of Art and Design. As professor Buzz Spector writes in an introduction to the catalog, “The two universities have agreed in principle to organize a Cornell/Tsinghua Center for the Study of Contemporary Art. Our idea calls for a center that would sponsor exchanges of faculty artists, conferences about important topics in art, art exhibits with exhibit catalogs, and, eventually, student exchanges.”

Spector adds, “The teaching, artmaking, and research pursued in the center will be both critically rigorous and ideologically neutral.”

The exhibition and catalog were organized by visiting associate professor Xiaowen Chen. The catalog’s interior design is by Fei Jun and the cover design by Soulellis Studio.AAP

ment of City and Regional Planning, following the three-year term of Associate Professor Kenneth Reardon. Goldsmith will serve for the 2007–2008 academic year, during which a chair search will be conducted.

Goldsmith’s research and writing have focused on the viability, development, and structure of cities and regions, and on problems of neighborhoods, suburbs, and peripheries. He studies the ethnic/racial segregation and low-density sprawl that afflict most U.S. cities, as well as the poverty and environmental degradation that afflict cities and regions in Latin America. He has published mainly on three subjects: inequality in U.S. cities, regional development and urbanization in Latin America, and planning methods and pedagogy.

He is currently writing the second edition of Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities. The first edition, coauthored with Edward J. Blakely, received the Paul Davidoff (best book) Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

Goldsmith earned a civil engineering degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 and a Ph.D. in regional planning from Cornell in 1968.AAP

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CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS 03—fall 2007

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10/30/07

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4—AAPNEWS CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF CORNELL IN ROME, ALUMNI RETURN TO ETERNAL CITY

They may once have had to say, “Arrivederci, Roma,” but fond memories of study in the Eternal City brought Cornellians back to celebrate 20 years of the Cornell in Rome program.

Walkabout: Art history faculty member Lila Yawn led alumni on a walking tour of Rome’s wonders. Credit: William Staffeld.

“It was the students who made it happen,” said McMinn. The program now boasts about 98 “Various incurable forms of Rome ad- percent participation among architecture students and 75 percent of AAP’s artists and planners.

AAP Dean Mohsen Mostafavi thanked McMinn and Einaudi “for initiating this program and diction” is how academic coordinator for leaving us with an incredible opportunity.” Among other things, “it was a way to convey urbanJeffrey Blanchard, a mainstay of the pro- ism in a way that we can’t in the classroom.”

“The cultural experience is phenomgram for 18 years, described the city’s enal,” said Bryant Lu (B.Arch. ’98), who allure to the Ithaca-based faculty and administrators who joined alumni at the was in Rome in 1995 and flew from Hong with his wife for the reunion. “You get to live reunion. More than 100 guests gathered inKong the city and almost as a citizen. The culinary and weekend travel experiences; the architectural and educational perspective; you make great friends.”

March 24–26 for the events.

“It’s an exceptionally well-run program,” said Jill Lerner (B.Arch. ’76), a Cornell trustee on Cornell in Rome enables 50–60 students each semester, most from AAP, to engage in a rich array of studio work, on-site learning, and field trips.

Two of the program’s founders—William McMinn, former dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, and Cornell-trained Italian architect Roberto Einaudi—recalled in their remarks on March 24 the combination of happenstance and determination that contributed to the program’s start-up in the 1980s. Cornell professor of art Jack Squier had seen Einaudi interviewed on CNN and suggested McMinn meet with Einaudi to discuss the possibilities of study in Rome.

“There were not enough interdisciplinary links at the time,” Einaudi said. “Cornell in Rome was a magnificent opportunity to explore those links. Was Michelangelo an architect or a sculptor? Was Sixtus V a pope or an urban planner?”

Einaudi suggested finding a base for Cornell in the historic center of Rome, at Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, home to one of Italy’s noble families from the 16th century to the present day.

(The Massimi welcomed the large Cornell group into their private residence for an elegant reception on March 25.)

When enrollment declined in the early 1990s due to the Gulf War and still-lingering fears of the disbanded Red Brigades, a group of students who had studied in Rome led a sit-in in McMinn’s office at Cornell. The program not only survived but soon outgrew its space, moving in 1997 to 18 rooms of Palazzo Lazzaroni, its current home.

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the AAP advisory council. “One of the best things about this is it takes [AAP students] and puts them all together, for all that intellectual cross-fertilization to take place.”

The curriculum includes art and architecture studios; core courses in planning, art, and architectural history, theory, and criticism; photography; drawing; Italian language and culture; and cinema. The academic program also includes internships at public agencies and international organizations, day trips, and overnight field trips.

Learning was also a theme throughout the weekend for those attending the reunion, as the group took in both ancient and modern landmarks, from the Pantheon to an auditorium complex

by Renzo Piano to the construction site of a modern art and architecture museum by Zaha Hadid.

Hadid gave a Cornell-sponsored lecture about her work March 26 that was attended by more than 400 people, including the Italian minister of culture Francesco Rutelli, who introduced Hadid.

As alumni shared their memories of cold-water pensiones and other experiences here, Theodore Musho (B.Arch. ’87), an architect in the first small group of Cornell students to enroll in the program in the fall of 1986, reminded the current students to take advantage of the education that Rome has to offer.

“This is just the beginning for you,” Musho said. “I’ve been back three times, and there’s a relationship you develop with the city. I hope you realize how much there is here to learn.”AAP Adapted from articles by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online, and used with permission.

10/24/07

14:53:34

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5/Folio Cornell’s Leadership in Post-Katrina New Orleans Associate Professor Kenneth Reardon In September of 2005, days after Hurricane Katrina forced hundreds of thousands from their homes, we received a call from Wade Rathke, head of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), representing 12,000 residents of New Orleans’s east-side neighborhoods. Would we in CRP and AAP help them create a comprehensive recovery plan to rebuild their flood-ravaged neighborhood? At a meeting to consider the invitation, 100 CRP students, faculty, and staff decided to step up: to offer planning and design assistance to support recovery efforts of residents in the Gentilly, New Orleans East, and 9th Ward neighborhoods.

Getting Started We began with an impromptu course examining the ecological, planning, and disaster mitigation experience of New Orleans. CRP students, led by master’s student Andy Rumbach, raised $15,000 to send 40 students and faculty on two week-long trips to help residents remove debris from their homes, community centers, and churches—the first step toward their subsequent restoration. Working shoulder to shoulder with local residents, ACORN staff, and volunteers from throughout the nation, CRP students and staff began to assess the community’s most critical research, planning, and design needs.

Continued on next page >

The Folio section is the province each semester of a guest editor, chosen from among the visiting and resident faculty at AAP to provide a perspective on the college’s activities and also to offer a glimpse of his or her own interests and areas of expertise. This issue’s guest editor is associate professor of City and Regional Planning Kenneth Reardon, who as department chair when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, coordinated the College’s initial response and long-term engagement in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Reardon earned his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1990, and joined the Cornell faculty after establishing and directing the East St. Louis Action Research Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research engages community-based planning in distressed urban neighborhoods, alternative approaches to community development, urban social movements, and municipal government reform.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS 03—fall 2007

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10/24/07

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6—Folio: AAP inNewOrleans 01 Previous page—Close to home: A furniture store next door to the Elysian Fields headquarters of ACORN, the non-profit with which Cornell students collaborated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was destroyed in the storms.

02 Local perspective: In the Algiers neighborhood, Diedra Whittenberg (M.A. HP ’07), Emily Goldman (M.A. HP ’07) and student Renee Kinchla took a break from deconstruction to visit with a woman whose home was damaged. Credit: Sam Bell.

03 Team effort: Marcel Ionescu-Heroiu, Patrick Yoon, and Emma Osore collected housing data in the Ninth Ward, assessing the condition of the homes on selected blocks. Credit: Joanna Winter.

04 Community action: Local residents attended a design charette at a New Orleans church featuring the work of Cornell students in March 2006. Credit: George Frantz.

05 In full color: Students in Jeremy Foster’s Fall 2006 Urban Design Studio mapped the neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward.

Provided.

Continued from previous page > 02 03

In Spring 2006, with Dean Mostafavi’s support, CRP faculty organized five new workshop courses — Interview more than 250 residents who had to provide those leading the recovery process in these neighborhoods with the research they returned needed. More than 70 undergraduate and graduate students took these AAP courses: — Structurally inspect and evaluate more than 3,000 buildings — Natural Resource Planning: Designing a More Storm Resistant City, Professors George Frantz and Ole Almundsen — Urban Design: Reweaving the Urban Fabric of New Orleans, Professor Sigrun Prahl

— Survey dozens of public playgrounds, parks, and open spaces

— Historic Preservation Studio: Adaptive Re-Use of the St. Roch’s Market, Professor Jeffrey Chusid

— Inspect more than 90 neighborhood businesses

— Neighborhood Preservation Planning: Physical and Social Infrastructure for A Healthy 9th Ward, Professor James Dessauer

— Evaluate miles of local sidewalks, roads, and storm drains

— Optimizing Recovery Worker Output: Manpower Planning for Community Restoration, Professor David Lewis

Our findings were striking. Yes, swaths of land had been devastated, but we now had the data and analysis to show that the overwhelming majority of buildings in storm-affected areas of the 9th Ward were structurally sound and could be cost-effectively rehabilitated. In addition, many more residents than anyone had thought had already returned to restore their homes and rebuild their neighborhoods.

These findings framed the People’s Plan, which we presented to 9th Ward residents and New Orleans leadership on January 6, 2007. Our findings posed a welcome challenge to earlier expert claims that the neighborhood had been damaged beyond repair and that residents were not returning.

In March 2006, 250 New Orleanians crowded into a small east-side church to review poster board displays presenting the work in progress on campus. The community’s response was overwhelmingly positive, prompting ACORN to ask CRP if it could send students to New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, DC, to do further research, planning, and design to move their proposals towards implementation. In summer 2006, nine Cornellians worked as planning/design interns to explore how these spring workshop proposals could be implemented.

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Creating the Comprehensive Recovery Plan Late in the summer of 2006, our students began drafting a proposal to offer comprehensive recovery planning services to the city’s 9th Ward. Facing a nearly impossible deadline, the students outlined—in 160 pages—how they, working collaboratively with ACORN and students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University’s Earth Institute, could prepare a comprehensive redevelopment plan. Weeks later, in a national competition managed by the New Orleans Community Support and Rockefeller foundations, CRP’s proposal emerged as one of 16 chosen from a pool of 64 architecture, planning, and engineering firms. Our team was assigned to work with residents, businesspersons, institutional leaders, and elected officials from the city’s 9th Ward, where more than 65,000 people had lived prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Seen from the outside as poverty-stricken as well as floodravaged, the 9th Ward was a scene, we quickly learned, of courage and determination, rich artistic and cultural history, and strong community loyalty.

In the fall of 2006, more than 80 CRP students—undergraduate and graduate, in an urban studies course, a neighborhood planning workshop, and an urban design studio—began working with professors Ken Reardon, Richard Kiely, Michelle Thompson, and Jeremy Foster to prepare what came to be called The People’s Plan for Overcoming the Hurricane Katrina Blues: A Comprehensive Strategy for Building a More Vibrant, Sustainable, and Equitable 9th Ward. The semester’s highlight was a deeply moving and instructive five-day trip to New Orleans during which our students worked with our colleagues from Illinois and Columbia to:

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Within days, “9th Ward Can Be Rebuilt, Planners Say,” an AP story that summarized the People’s Plan, was picked up by more than 175 news outlets world-wide including, the New York Times, the London Guardian, Forbes magazine, the Miami Herald, and the Kansas City Star. Along with ACORN’s efforts, this international news coverage brought the CRP plan to the attention of the city’s elected officials. In March and April of 2007, CRP faculty and ACORN leadership presented the People’s Plan to the New Orleans City Planning Commission and the New Orleans City Council,

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A Role in Recovery: Reflections on a rocky collaboration Andrew Rumbach MRP ’07 I could not fully grasp the scope of Hurricane Katrina until I stood in New Orleans. It was January 2006, and I was on a two-week service trip to gut flood-ravaged homes with 17 fellow students. Each house took a team of 15 volunteers two to three days to finish; more than 80,000 homes in New Orleans had been flooded. The enormity of the need was overwhelming.

Though we were academically and professionally interested in long-range recovery planning for the 9th Ward, the manual labor was enormously satisfying. At the end of each day, we had accomplished something tangible. Later, during the endless fits and starts of the planning process, I would remember this trip with fondness. Stripped of race, class, gender, and politics, gutting homes was—and still is—the most straightforward work I’ve done in New Orleans.

Disasters Are Messy Disasters are messy, an abrupt realization for many of us who joined the New Orleans Planning Initiative. Historically, “planning” in New Orleans has been a code-word for destructive development projects, neighborhood segregation, and social exclusion. Examples in the Lower 9th Ward abound, from the relocation of the rail yards from the French Quarter, to the gentrification of the Holy Cross and Bywater districts.

After the volunteer trip, many of us enrolled in CRP 679, the New Orleans Neighborhood Planning Workshop. Our community colleagues were both ACORN and a sister organization, ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC). While they searched for the role of planning in their work, the students struggled to feel relevant to longrange recovery efforts. Political interests were constantly butting heads over the control of resources, allocation of funds, and the direction of recovery; each time the reality for planners on the ground changed.

Frustration was palpable; by the end of the semester, CRP 679 students were completing cookie-cutter workshop projects, on the subject of New Orleans but serving no real purpose in recovery. Our feelings were mixed.

Perhaps the saving grace was our contribution to our community associates’ political fight.

We provided maps showing that, contrary to media reports, the Lower 9th Ward was not an extremely low-lying neighborhood prone to flooding. We designed materials for organizers, helping them gain a reputation for effective, professional, public presentations. Like gutting a home, this work built trust, one small step at a time, among students, faculty, organizers, and 9th Ward residents. which voted unanimously to adopt the Plan as an amendment to the city’s comprehensive/ master plan—the first post-disaster plan to be accepted by the city.

An Extraordinary Victory All those involved in AAP’s 9th Ward planning efforts were delighted to read the March 29, 2007, New York Times article “New Orleans Proposes to Invest in 17 Areas,” in which Edward J. Blakely, the city’s recovery chief, announced a $1.1 billion investment plan to accelerate recovery by focusing on 17 specific development hubs. Among the areas to benefit from significant local, state, and federal investment is the 9th Ward—an area once slated by the city for wholesale clearance.

The only citizen organization joining Dr. Blakely and Mayor Nagin at City Hall to announce the investment strategy was our community collaborator, ACORN, whose members and neighbors have been given the chance to rebuild their community as a result of an extraordinary and unprecedented mobilization of planning and design students who participated in this historic community renewal project.

Our students, staff, and faculty have been privileged to work with the residents and leadership of the 9th Ward. We learned far more than we contributed. This project showed that university-community collaboration can really work: students and faculty can learn by doing and communities in need can make substantial progress. This work can transform neighborhoods, and with continued university support, can transform planning and design education as well.

For more information regarding the New Orleans Planning Initiative and the People’s Plan: www.rebuildingtheninth.org

Gaining “Legitimacy”—AHUC and the Unified New Orleans Plan In the summer of 2006, five Cornell students moved to New Orleans to intern with ACORN Housing. As we acquainted ourselves with the latest NOLA planning news, we saw an announcement of a new “Unified New Orleans Plan.” The UNOP was to be a privately funded, city-wide recovery planning effort broadly endorsed by the city council, the mayor, and the governor. It would break the political impasse that had stymied recovery and start the flow of money from the federal government.

Weeks passed. Three days before the deadline, ACORN asked us to submit an application.

Nine months of rocky relations between Cornell and ACORN seemed to vanish and we speedily assembled a proposal, a collaboration of students and faculty from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, to comprise the ACORN Housing Universities Consortium (AHUC).

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ambitious schedule; major deliverables were due every two to four weeks, and the entire process was to finish in less than six months.

Our faculty firmly believed that the quality of our work had to be heads and shoulders above other districts. Since the city was considering writing off some of the 9th Ward’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, their recovery plans had to stand out. The pressure was enormous; students dubbed the process the “deliverables death march.”

Meanwhile, I was nervous about collaborating with ACORN in this new capacity. Community organizers rely on near complete autonomy of action to preserve their vision. Communitybased planning, in contrast, tends toward inclusion. How would we manage this tension?

The moment we began, our mandate shifted.

Now we seemed responsible both to AHUC and to the larger 9th Ward, committed to a fair process with the inclusion of all residents—low and high income, black and white, ACORN members and not.

An ACORN organizer once confided that, “people’s minds all across New Orleans were being blown” by AHUC’s selection. At the time, I took it as a compliment. I soon learned she had meant that New Orleanians were up in arms, especially because several groups fundamentally distrusted our motives.

Those who had butted heads with ACORN in the past, especially middle- and upperclass neighborhood organizations, viewed them as partisans, unlikely to carry out an inclusive, participatory recovery planning effort.

Other groups, representing real estate and development interests, viewed an organization of working-class people leading the recovery effort as complicating their plans for the “new” 9th Ward. ACORN’s response in the face of this challenge to their traditional dominance in the neighborhood was to actively oppose collaboration with these groups.

Inter- and Intra-organizational Conflict During the fall of 2006, three individuals and groups escalated their public opposition to our status as district planners. For the AHUC, managing criticism seemed relatively straightforward: Make as many friends as possible by reaching out to residents, institutional leaders, organizations, and government officials, to show that the process would be open and transparent, considering the needs of all residents—not just ACORN members or lower income individuals.

As members of our group began talking to these “movers and shakers,” however, ACORN grew suspicious. Feeling their control slipping, organizers expressed frustration both at the university students and faculty and internally.

We came to fear that ACORN members might launch a protest at their own planning meeting, against their collaborators.

This internal conflict undermined our ability to deal with the growing public and The AHUC competed against more than 65 private criticism. In September, the AHUC planning and architecture firms, including some invited a wide range of our critics to sign of the best in the world. Ours was the only non- a memorandum of understanding to guide profit proposal, the only one with a community- future work. Essentially, that agreement would organizing participant, and the only one with have committed signatories to put aside their student and faculty participation. In July grievances for the remainder of the planning 2006, we were hired to oversee the districts process and guaranteed that the AHUC encompassing the Lower and Upper 9th Wards. planning team would give full consideration to each group’s views. Fifteen minutes before the Is the Past Always the Present? meeting began, ACORN leadership pulled the Our rag-tag group had become one of five plug. They refused to negotiate with our critics. district-level planners—a cog in the wheel of city governance. We were responsible That last minute cancellation exposed our for nine neighborhoods with nearly 65,000 internal weakness, and the UNOP promptly residents, including the Lower 9th Ward, the removed us from our position as district most politically explosive neighborhood in planners. In the week that followed, we were at the recovery process and the one most in the a crossroads. Should we sever our relationship media spotlight. We were also assigned two to ACORN and clear the way for a new group? neighborhood-level planning firms.

Or should we continue and finish what we had Within weeks we had hammered out the details started? Ultimately, we chose to stick with ACORN—our best link to families in the 9th of work-flow, setting up a fairly rigid division Ward. of labor, a highly centralized process, and an

It’s the Politics, Stupid Following our dismissal, the AHUC continued work on a comprehensive recovery plan for the 9th Ward. We had invested an enormous amount of work and everyone wanted to finish what we had started.

As time passed, we recognized our dismissal as a mixed blessing. The UNOP process was too deliverables-driven, the planning teams were restricted by the endless requirements of the citywide planning team—the process was driven too narrowly by the physical aspects of planning. In interviews, displaced residents had detailed their concerns about the social aspects of recovery: quality education, healthcare, police and fire protection, access to fresh foods and restaurants. A recovery plan that targeted these vulnerabilities, we saw, would complement the UNOP plan and advance the needs of poor and working-class people.

As a result, though without official sponsorship or funding, we worked furiously through the end of the fall semester and into the holidays to produce The People’s Plan for Overcoming the Hurricane Katrina Blues. The plan was based on the most complete data collection effort in the 9th Ward following hurricane Katrina.

Most important, we found that the damage in the Lower 9th Ward was much less than previously reported, that the vast majority of structures could be rebuilt in a cost-effective and responsible way. These findings directly contradicted the intentions of earlier plans to “shrink” the Lower 9th out of existence.

Learning of our findings, ACORN wanted to publicize them before the barrage of publicity sure to follow the UNOP preliminary plan announcements on January 13, 2007. So a small team of students at Cornell worked ’round the clock over the holidays to present our plan a week earlier.

The day after our presentation of the People’s Plan, an article reporting our findings ran on the front page of the local Times-Picayune; almost 200 news outlets across North America picked up the resulting AP story. In early February, we presented the plan to the New Orleans City Council and the City Planning Commission.

On February 17, 2007, the Council adopted the People’s Plan and mandated that our recommendations be incorporated into the citywide recovery plan. In April, the New Orleans Office of Recovery Management announced 14 citywide “targeted recovery zones.” The Lower 9th Ward was named as one of the sites and allotted more than $145 million in recovery funds.

The most significant lesson of the ACORN Universities Consortium was that of roles best played: planners planned, developers developed, and organizers organized. ACORN saw that their collaborators could produce a plan that reflects the needs of their community, and we saw that ACORN could support our work in the community, in City Hall, and in the broader political process. Problems with communication and trust persist, but each member found a working space that allows it to contribute in a meaningful way. Born of uncertainty, conflict, hard work, a firing, and persistence against long odds, the People’s Plan will substantially influence recovery planning in New Orleans, one of the largest urban recovery efforts in history.

PhD candidate Andrew Rumbach, MRP ’07, launched his participation in AAP’s New Orleans Planning Initiative as a volunteer doing manual labor in the months immediately following Hurricane Katrina, and went on to serve as a research intern to ACORN Housing and as a staff member of AAP’s collaboration with ACORN. His academic interest in planning cuts across fields including international development, security studies, and humanitarian relief operations.

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS 03—fall 2007

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8—Folio: AAP inNewOrleans 01 Master’s student Brian Rosa collected portraits and oral histories for the exhibit Rebuilding the 9th Ward and an accompanying podcast, available online at www.aap.cornell.edu/podcast. Here, Charlie Jackson holds his grandson.

02 Betty Morgan stands on the porch of her her flood-ravaged home holding a poster, the only photo of her deceased mother she was able to salvage from the wreckage, with a poem composed by her daughter, Linda.

Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans Interview and photographs by Brian Rosa MRP student 01

CHARLIE JACKSON: The water got up to that “One-Way” sign out there on the street. I know because they rescued us on a boat out of this attic here, four of us. My son-in-law, my brother-in-law, and another friend from down the street. This place looked like hell. It was really destroyed. But the trailers at your house is the movement now. Right now we’re living up in there, seven of us in that one little trailer. My vision of [living in trailers] is that God has made a way for us to get close as families. It brings a unity that wasn’t there, I know it wasn’t there.

“My room!” Hell, we’re all in the room. We need to fix these houses. You got people just sitting and waiting—like me, really. And then you don’t know the next step. You would think some of these officials—like when we first came in here—would have at least been here to guide us through mold and different stuff that might still be here. I had to borrow from a lady to put my daughter’s trailer next door, because we couldn’t put the trailers in front of the house. Lucky my son had bulldozed this one out while we were in Tennessee. They need to get these houses going, man. It’s sad.

It’s really pitiful. In six months, this should have been done. There’s no doubt in my mind. They can build a whole subdivision in Houston in six months, so what are they waiting on? I heard [Governor Blanco] say last night that there’s a lot she wanted to do, but the Republicans are throwing dirty things in the way. She’s saying they’re doing it to the people, but that’s me! I’m the people. A guy is out there getting greedy with the money, and that’s what politicians are. They don’t care about the little man, and we’re the little man right now. This 9th Ward really little, man. I’ve been in the “pen” four times.

But at a point God gave me enough knowledge to come up and know that a family is more important than the street life I was living. So now I’m trying to get into the system, and the system rejected me. I’m doing all the right things. I found out what it meant to have a home when [Katrina] happened. We came out of the Desire Projects, on welfare and all this stuff, and could buy a home. It was so simple—what could be the problem now that I’m there? I have what y’all say we need! I’m a citizen. I started voting and I’m raising my family. I can’t get the problem in my head with this system, this government. It’s too bad, man. This piece of junk [house]—I’ve been paying these extreme energy bills because I was never able to insulate it right or fix it right. With SSI all I could do was pay my house note. From what I can understand, they’re going to give the people who paid their loan out a chunk of money where they can help themselves. And the ones who are still paying house notes will get bits and pieces. I don’t get it. I’ve been paying it 15 years—we was out there in Tennessee paying it. We refinanced right before the storm. For 15 years we were carrying flood insurance in a place where you don’t need it. When we refinanced, they said we didn’t need it. It’s so deep down here.

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CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS 03—fall 2007

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01 Historic effort: HPP’s work weekend took students and alumni to the Eastern State Penitentiary. Credit: Addison Geary.

02 Nairobi, reconsidered: In a studio co-taught by Jeremy Foster and David Driskell, students crafted ‘The Info Structure,’ a design concept for a new community facility, that includes a new chief’s office, daycare facility, cybercafe and community meeting space in a low-cost, flexible design. (AAP Project Team: Woo-Young Francis Shim, Chulmin Park, Prasad Khanolkar and Akosua Asare) 03 A student lighting exhibit enlivened the East Sibley hallway. Credit: William Staffeld.

04 Knot of relations: Student Kinjal Raval illuminates the invisible structure of an online city/community in the new MArch2 studio. Credit: Paul Soulellis.

05 Art professors Todd McGrain and Buzz Spector. Credit: William Staffeld.

06 Beyond concept: AAP students on the Cornell Solar Decathlon team in front of their entry: Tim Liddell, Chris Werner, Kris Sellman-Johnson, Alana Anderson, Branden Collins, and Sam Reilly. Credit: Lindsay France / University Photography.

07 Light work: A modular canopy encasing the Solar Decathlon house serves as a mounting system for the photovoltaic array. Provided.

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PLANNERS WORK TO PRESERVE HISTORIC PRISON

In April, a group of AAP alumni and students went to prison for a weekend—to help restore a crumbling kitchen building in the Eastern State Penitentiary complex in Philadelphia. The massive prison, the largest building in the United States when it was built in 1829, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and is now an interpretive museum.

Every year, as part of CRP 565: Fieldwork in History and Preservation, city and regional planning and historic preservation planning graduate students organize and conduct a work weekend on a historic site, assisted by architecture students and alumni in the historic preservation planning alumni organization.

Past project sites have included Ellis Island and, in 2006, the St. Roch Market in New Orleans.

“Some years, alumni actually outnumber the students,” says HPP associate professor Jeffrey Chusid, who teaches the fieldwork course and was the prison project’s faculty adviser. “This reflects the important role that the alumni organization has played historically in this event.”

A department field trip to Philadelphia in the fall and meetings with the historic site’s staff preceded the work weekend. “We took a trip down beforehand to take measurements and figure out materials and costs and logistics,” says Diedra Whittenburg (M.A. HPP ’07), who organized the project with student Sara Johnson.

Like many structures in the 11-acre complex, the stone kitchen, built in 1903, had severely deteriorated since the prison was shut down in 1971.

To prevent further damage, the Cornell group restored and replaced windows and built window enclosures, using materials donated by Ithaca businesses. “There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be documented,” says Whittenburg. “You have to do a lot of preparation and make sure you don’t end up destroying the building while trying to preserve it.”

Before they started work, staff and residents of the surrounding Fairmont neighborhood shared their perspective on the site’s history. “There’s really an emphasis on knowing the background of the site before going there,” says Elizabeth Blazevich (M.A. HPP ’05), who works with the nonprofit Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.

“The presiding philosophy at Eastern State is to stabilize it as a ruin,” says Greg Donofrio (M.A. HPP ’00), a doctoral candidate who suggested the site and has helped rebuild a greenhouse and stabilize an industrial building there; in June, he returned with a group from Cornell to finish the window work. “It’s this great laboratory for preservationists and architecture students to get hands-on experience and to do documentation projects,” he says, “and they have the kind of institutional resources you might need to do projects there.”

For alumni, the weekend was a chance to share professional knowledge—and get their hands dirty. “Because I do more policy and community development work, I don’t get to do a lot of the hands-on things,” Blazevich said. “Coming back as an alum […] was a great opportunity to work with students and also revisit things you learned at Cornell, especially things like conservation and building materials.”AAP Adapted from an article on Cornell Chronicle Online and used with permission.

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AAP STUDENTS FACE THE CHALLENGE OF URBAN AFRICA

The self-built settlements of Africa are one of the great challenges of our global urban future.

According to UN projections, cities of the global South will be the locus of nearly all world population growth in the coming 30 years. Pulled and pushed toward city-based economic opportunities, the majority of new arrivals in the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere will make their homes in slums. Nairobi is one such city in the archipelago of Africa’s—and the world’s— urban hope and despair.

In spring 2007, a group of 22 Cornell students from architecture, planning, landscape architecture, environmental engineering, and development sociology confronted the challenge of urban Africa in a joint studio led by visiting faculty members Jeremy Foster (Architecture) and David Driskell (City and Regional Planning).

Informed by three weeks of fieldwork conducted by Driskell and seven Cornell students in January 2007, the studio focused on two self-built settlements in Nairobi: the “villages” of Soweto East in Kibera (often referred to as Africa’s largest slum) and Mukuru kwa Reuben (a more recent and rapidly growing settlement in Nairobi’s industrial estates area).

The students faced a number of conceptual and pragmatic challenges: How to make sense of a place in flux, where nearly all data are circumspect, if available at all. How to position themselves as emerging professionals in a completely unfamiliar and sometimes contentious context. How to design and plan for a place where resources are severely limited and government services and leadership are either absent, intermittent, or patently problematic. How to work together across disciplines in a “real world” scenario, respecting the values, perspectives, and input of community clients while providing new ideas and workable solutions.

The students first delved into the wide range of historic and contemporary factors that have shaped Nairobi and the two settlement areas. Creating a shared database of resources and information, they then regrouped into interdisciplinary teams to develop preliminary design and planning interventions for several resident-defined priority projects: a riverfront reclamation and reuse project; a multi-use community center; a “biogas” latrine and community space; and a waste management collection and processing system. Additionally, two teams were formed to consider the challenge of slum upgrading more broadly, providing potential alternatives to the tower-block designs being proposed by the national slum-upgrading program.

Each team had to consider not only the physical design dimensions of the proposed systems and facilities, but also the practical dimensions of implementation and management. From identifying sustainable local building and environmental systems, and facilitating community buy-in and ownership, to ensuring income generation to support project sustainability, each team faced considerable challenges.

The highlight of the studio was a weeklong visit to Nairobi in March, supported by a Rotch Traveling Studio Grant, to present preliminary ideas and engage in further fieldwork. Working closely with Kenyan counterparts from each settlement area, students spent their days interviewing residents; conducting mini-design charrettes; mapping the complex social functions of the settlements’ alleyways, courtyards, and terrains vagues; and discussing ideas with local officials, residents, faculty at Nairobi University, and representatives from local NGOs, development agencies, and the UN. The visit culminated in presentations by the joint Cornell/Kenyan teams to invited community members, government officials, and UN representatives at the UN-HABITAT headquarters.

Work has already begun toward implementation of several projects, spurred by volunteers from Engineers for a Sustainable World and Kenyan team members. The ongoing work is part of the Growing Up in Nairobi project, a joint initiative of the UNESCO Chair for Growing Up in Cities in AAP, the Kenya National Commission of UNESCO, and UN-HABITAT.AAP

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11—WORK NAIROBI/HISTORIC PRISON/SOLAR DECATHLON 03

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STUDENTS BUILD SOLAR HOME FOR INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION As global leaders grapple with national and international energy policies to slow climate change, a team of more than 100 Cornellians from across campus set its sights on crafting a high-performance, energy-efficient model home for mass production. Their design was one of 20 entries in the biennial Solar Decathlon, a 10-event contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Each entry was judged in a weeklong public competition, staged October 12–20 on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The idea behind the solar village: “To show the world that anyone, anywhere can start living a sustainable lifestyle,” says M.Arch. student Chris Werner, one of 24 architecture students on the Cornell team.

“To make our house as energy-efficient and thermally optimal as possible, every component was meticulously researched and analyzed,” says Werner. “We considered properties such as recyclability, pollution potential, production waste, and efficiency, and we used advanced energy modeling techniques to make decisions ranging from the size of the heat pump to the placement of windows.”

The 600-square-foot home’s most innovative feature is a freestanding “light canopy.” A sort of exoskeleton made from industrial scaffolding, the canopy can support such functional components as photovoltaic panels, rainwater collectors, evacuated solar hot water tubes, or bike racks. It could also be installed to convert an existing home to energy independence or as a temporary power and water station for disaster relief. Says Werner: “It’s light, cheap, easy to put up, endlessly adaptable, and can be mass produced.”

In Washington, the light canopy supports a set of photovoltaics; “green” screens suspended from the sides and supporting webs of plants will add beauty and provide portable shade.

The Cornell design also features an eight-foot-long solarium with two parallel glass walls that can open or close like an accordion, creating an instant patio or sun-warmed room; locally harvested white cedar siding; concrete-insulated, raised “Tate” floors made from squares resembling inverted muffin tins that conceal plumbing, wiring, and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) ducts; modular metal furniture; and touch-screen control of all systems.

The team presold the house this spring at auction, based both on the strength of the preliminary design and construction and its second-place finish in the 2005 Solar Decathlon. Additional funding for design and construction materials came from sponsors including the U.S. Department of Energy, General Electric’s Sun division, and the University.

Cornell’s 2005 finish also inspired Werner’s M.Arch. application to the college. “I was so impressed I decided this would be the school for me,” he says. He hasn’t been disappointed. “I love the school and the program.”

But balancing work on the 2007 house with academic responsibilities was challenging. “All students took a full course load and volunteered at least four hours a week on construction shifts and subteam meetings in addition to weekly overall progress meetings,” Werner says. Last spring, some third-year architects earned credits for their work in a design studio with a sustainability focus. Other students earned credits through an architecture seminar for nonmajors and similar courses in engineering and landscape architecture.

In early October the team loaded the house—constructed on a site close to campus—onto a flatbed truck for transport to Washington. Judges evaluated the house on such metrics as architecture and engineering, market viability, lighting, and whether the house generates enough excess electricity to power a small electric vehicle. Throughout the week, the students gave tours to thousands of visitors from across the country, checked out the competition, and kept their fingers crossed for scores to beat their showing in the 2005 contest.

For more information, see cusd.cornell.edu and www.eere.energy.gov/solar_decathlon/.AAP

By Linda Myers

CORNELL architecture/art/planning NEWS 03—fall 2007

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Jacqueline Stluka (B.Arch. ’07)

In September, the Cornell Council for the Arts honored with its 2007 Cornell University Undergraduate Artist Award. The award was slated to be presented on October 1, in the Tjaden Hall Experimental Gallery, at the opening for Stluka’s exhibition “Metropolis Geologies and Postscript,” a catalog of sample maps, footnotes, and blind reliefs completed as part of Stluka’s undergraduate thesis. In 2004, Stluka was honored with the Seipp Prize, and, in 2002, she recieved a Golden Key Award in Painting.

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FALL—2007

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16—O. M. Ungers Remembered

UNGERS, REMEMBERED. Oswald Mathias Ungers died on September 30, 2007. He was 81.

His passing brought to a close the career of one of Germany’s most influential postwar architects. A native of Cologne, Ungers served as a visiting critic at Cornell from 1965–67 and as Chairman of the Department of Architecture from 1969–1975. His best known built works include the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt, libraries in Karlsruhe and Cologne, the Family Court in Berlin, and the Frankfurt Exposition buildings.

His only built work in the United States is the residence of the German ambassador (1994), at 1800 Foxhall Road, NW, Washington, DC. Ungers was perhaps more widely and internationally known in academic circles for his theoretical projects and work, much of which was exhibited at the New National Gallery in Berlin in the exhibition “Cosmos of Architecture,” held last year on the occassion of his 80th birthday. “Ungers’ contributions to Cornell, and to the world of architecture while at Cornell, were heroic and inspirational,” says associate professor of architecture Arthur Ovaska, “and he will be fondly remembered as a leader, as a colleague, and as a mentor of exceptionally dynamic nature.” Both Ovaska and professor of architecture Werner Goehner attended the early October funeral in Cologne.

In February, faculty and students of the department of Architecture gathered at Sibley Hall for a symposium “O. M. Ungers at Cornell, 1969–1983.” The event featured presentations by Goehner, Ovaska, and visiting architecture critic André Bideau.

At the symposium, Goehner presented an extensive listing of Ungers’s work during his years at Cornell, including multiple academic publications and entries in architectural design competitions that became internationally known. Ungers also attracted a globally diverse mix of master’s students and visiting faculty. These international guests have had a lasting influence on the college, Goehner said.

Ovaska, who worked with Ungers in Ithaca and in Cologne, admitted to being partial in describing his mentor. “I have a hard time being critical,” he said, “because it’s kind of like talking about your father.”

Ungers stressed the importance of the concept of each project as “part of a larger cosmos, a larger order of form,” said Ovaska, who showed works exemplifying Ungers’s themes of transformation, interpretation, typology, and metamorphosis.

Bideau placed Ungers in a period when architecture was being reinstituted as high art in America, returning to a classical form of modernism. The Cornell years, Bideau said, were transformative for Ungers’s career and for his identification with the international postmodern community. Bideau contended that German influences remained with Ungers, shaping his work at Cornell.

Well known for his often controversial designs, Ungers won a competition in 2000 to redesign the Pergamon, the largest of five museums in Berlin’s Museum Island, significantly renovating buildings which had been untouched since the 1930s. The project is expected to be completed in 2010.

He is survived by his wife Liselotte Ungers and his daughters Sybille and Sophia, both graduates of Cornell’s Department of Fine Arts. AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi on Cornell Chronicle Online; used with permission.

Photo left to right: Werner Seligmann, unidentified, Fred Koetter, O. M. Ungers, Jerry Wells

BILL STAFFELD

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NEWS In April, urban and regional studies senior Edward Anthes-Washburn was selected as one of 10 recipients of the universitywide Cornell Tradition Senior Recognition Award.

The award included a $500 honorarium to be used as a donation to a nonprofit agency of his choice, and a one-year $4,000 Cornell Tradition Fellowship to be bestowed on another student in his honor during the next academic year.

In December 2006, Asmita Bhardwaj, a Ph.D. candidate in city and regional planning, presented “From the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution in India: 1965–2007” at the 9th Biennial International Conference on Ecological Economics held at Delhi (India).

Jessica Daniels, a graduate student in city and regional planning, received a fellowship for summer 2007 from Solimar Research Group, Inc., to be a research associate. Solimar provides information and analysis on land use policy.

The winter 2007 issue of Progressive Planning magazine includes four articles written by CRP students in a 2005 class taught by Professor Pierre Clavel. The articles are part of a special section dedicated to the “Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning” Collection at Cornell, and were created through archival research and an effort to build on the collection.

The articles include “Walter Thabit: A Planner for Cooper Square,” by Colin Dentel-Post; “Expanding Public Spaces in Burlington, Vermont, 1981–2006” by Crystal Lackey; “North Brooklyn: Industrial Jobs Zoned Out,” by Daniel Pearlstein; and “Progressive Innovation in the 1970s: Madison, Wisconsin, and the Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies,” by Jonathan Thompson.

Gregory A. Donofrio, a Ph.D. candidate in historic preservation planning and visiting lecturer in CRP, is one of nine winners of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. Donofrio will receive $1,500 and the opportunity to research for four weeks in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His work is titled “The Container and the Contained: Preserving the Traditional Uses of Historic Food Markets.”

A video installation entitled “Levers Project: Operation Roma,” by architecture student Billy Erhard, was presented in April by blueroom and Open Video Projects, at the Rialto Sant’Ambrogio in Rome.

The work of M.F.A. student Shea Hembrey was on view at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in summer 2007, in an installation/walk of “mirror nests.” Hembrey has created replicas of birds’ nests with fine strips of embossed aluminum woven together using real nests as models.

Hembrey’s recent work is being featured in New American Paintings volume 70, edited by Charlotta Kotik, contemporary art curator at the Brooklyn Museum. In the fall, Hembrey will begin an artist residency at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain.

As part of an internship with New York City Economic Development Corporation, M.R.P. student Jason Kaye conducted an urban retail study of the Melrose section of the South Bronx.

The study was part of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s South Bronx Initiative, which seeks to articulate a vision for the future of the South Bronx and to make plans to realize that vision. The Melrose area was selected for its high number of new construction and rehabilitation projects underway and because it is scheduled for completion by 2010. For more information about the study, see www.nycedc.com/melrose.

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Morgan Ng (B.Arch. ’07) was the head organizer of the Environmental Colloquium, held at Cornell’s Telluride House in April. The goal of the colloquium was to assemble an interdisciplinary group of scholars to critically analyze and adequately address environmental issues. The event was cosponsored by the Department of Architecture and included faculty members Dana Cupkova and Kevin Pratt.

Meredith Nickie, a graduate student in fine arts, is one of four Cornell students spending the 2007–2008 academic year studying in Germany on a prestigious DAAD fellowship (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch-Dienst, or German Academic Exchange Service). Nickie will study in Berlin at the invitation of Rebecca Horn, a noted artist and professor of multimedia at the Berlin University of Arts, to explore “identity and its visual representations.”

Adriana Rodriguez Pliego, an undergraduate in the Department of Architecture, has been awarded this year’s AIA/TRKL Travel Fellowship.

Each year, one student from a North American university receives the $2,500 prize, intended to “encourage and support foreign travel undertaken to further education toward a professional degree.” Rodriguez Pliego will travel to the Netherlands next summer to conduct a morphological study focusing on architecture that is adaptable to the effects of long-term climate change, specifically variant water levels.AAP 01 Architecture that cooks: For his senior thesis, Hugh Hayden designed a new headquarters for the James Beard Foundation in Manhattan, incorporating multiple cooking and food-derived architectures.

02 Gary He, Artist Lofts, Ithaca, New York.

03 Detail of Project by Javier Galindo.

04 An outreach effort takes art majors to a local detention center. Credit: Martha O’Connell.

SPRING 2007 STUDENT PRIZES AND AWARDS DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE American Institute of Architects Awards went to Patricia Brizzio, AIA Medal and Certificate; and Jason Teck Chye Lim, AIA Certificate.

Alpha Rho Chi Medal, awarded to a graduating student who has shown ability for leadership, performed willing service for the school and shows promise of professional merit through his or her attitude and personality, went to Jonathan Moody, undergraduate; and Namita Dharia, graduate.

Clifton Beckwith Brown Medal, awarded to the graduating student with the highest cumulative average in architectural design, went to Hyuck Jin Yoon.

Kazuaki Terry Yoneda received the William Downing Prize, recognizing outstanding achievement in architectural design.

Patricia Brizzio received a Merrill Presidential Scholarship.

Brett Edward Desmarais received the Michael Rapuano Award for excellence in design.

Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal: silver: Jennifer Chuong; bronze: Hugh Elliott Hayden, Jacqueline Stluka, Asami Takahashi.

DEPARTMENT OF ART Ana Sousa received the John Hartell Graduate Award.

Kathleen Hawkes received the Faculty Medal of Art and a Merrill Presidential Scholarship.

Nora Hardwick Chase and Hannah Naomi Kim received the Department of Art Distinguished Achievement Award.

The Charles Baskerville Painting Award went to Nora Hardwick Chase and Shea Hembrey.

The Elsie Dinsmore Popkin Painting Award went to Alexa Dawn Rose and Jillian Beth Salik.

DEPARTMENT OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING The Thomas W. Mackesey Prize, awarded in memory of the former dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, was given to Shigeru Tanaka.

The American Institute of Certified Planners’ Outstanding Student Award went to Ann Fisher Dillemuth.

The Peter B. Andrews Memorial Thesis Prize went to Lesli Hoey for the best Master of Regional Planning thesis.

Emily Alice Goldman received the John W. Reps Award for a graduate student in Historic Preservation Planning who has demonstrated superior academic excellence.

The Department of City and Regional Planning Graduate Student Community Service Award, given to socially conscious and active students who, through exemplary community service within and outside of the university, significantly contributed to the department, went to Diedra Schenelle Whittenburg.

The Urban and Regional Studies Academic Achievement Award, given for outstanding academic achievement in the URS program, went to Todd Thomas Henry and Daniele Petrone.

The Kermit C. Parsons and Janice I. Parsons Scholarship went to Emma Catherine Hamme, Mark Vorreuter, and Andrew Rumbach for their promising work in the department.

The Robert P. Liversidge III Memorial Book Award recipient was Daniel Pearlstein.AAP

PLANNING STUDENTS WIN BUSINESS ETHICS GRANT The Planning Students of Color applied for and received a $1,000 Hatfield Grant on Business Ethics last spring. The group used the funds for a day trip to Rochester on April 21, where they met with representatives of various local groups to discuss race and class issues in the city. Student leaders of the group were Sukjong Hong and Aatisha Singh.AAP

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ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS SCORE NATIONAL AWARDS This year, students in the Department of Architecture received an unusually high number of prestigious national awards, walking away with scholarships, travel funds, and design commendations.

Hugh Hayden (B.Arch. ’07) has been awarded a Skidmore Owings & Merrill Foundation Travel Fellowship, a $20,000 prize, to pursue his research. The fellowship enables an outstanding graduate to travel and pursue independent study after commencement.

Hayden plans to document the formal and functional relationships between food, architecture, and design in the United States, Japan, France, and Spain, with the goal of creating a collection of “food and architecture pairings.” Hayden’s research will involve interviewing the world’s top chefs, experiencing their cuisines, and analyzing the spaces in which they occur, as well as surveying local and regional purveyors, foodstuffs, and culinary practices.

Yueh-Nan Lu, a graduate student in architecture, has been selected for Perkins Eastman’s Shanghai Scholarship Program. Lu, one of only two students selected—based on their design strength, academic merit, and achievement—will spend eight weeks working in Perkins Eastman’s Shanghai office on projects located mainly in China.

Lu is in his third year of the M.Arch. I program, and expects to receive his degree in late 2007. A native of Taiwan, Lu looks forward to experiencing Shanghai through a Western lens and transforming Western ideas to fit the Chinese milieu in terms of architecture and design.

M.Arch. student Javier Galindo has been awarded one of three $10,000 travel fellowships from international architects Kohn Pedersen Fox. For the second year running KPF has invited submissions from the universities attended by their partners. Galindo’s portfolio was selected from among 43 entries. He traveled to capital cities in Latin America during summer 2007, studying rapid globalization.

In July 2007, Jennifer Chuong, an undergraduate in architecture, won a Storefront/Control Group Student Award for her project Household Dwellings on the Surface. This was the first in a series of competitions that leverage technology in an attempt to bring a broader understanding of architectural thinking to the public.

Third-year architecture student Gary He received one of four awards for design made by the Boston Society of Architects’ Pursuit of Housing awards program. His project—Artist Lofts, Ithaca, New York—was designed in the second-year studio The Sectional City, taught by Associate Professor Milton Curry.

Second-year B.Arch. students Nicholette Chan, Andrew Kim, and Jean You won first place in the fourth annual AIAS/ICPF Chair Affair Student Design Competition, in which students design chairs utilizing corrugated board and glue. Selected from 176 entries, six finalists’ chairs were displayed in the AIAS Student Lounge and Gallery in San Antonio. They received a prize of $2,500.AAP 04

ART STUDENTS REACH OUT TO GIRLS IN DETENTION CENTER For an hour and half on Friday afternoons the members of Art Beyond Cornell exchange the walls of Tjaden Hall for those of a medium-security juvenile detention center about 15 miles outside Ithaca. At Lansing Residential Center about 20 female art majors have been offering weekly art classes to the young women who live and attend school there.

The project began in 2005, when one particularly talented resident requested an art mentor. A group of students responded and now regularly prepare and give instruction each week.

“We are not really trying to teach technique,” says Hannah Mattheus-Kairys, one of the founding members of Art Beyond Cornell, “so much as to encourage self-expression.” A number of the Lansing girls are not especially interested in art, but they value the time they spend with the Cornell students for other reasons. “Some of them are cut off and unresponsive, while others are very responsive. Our goal is to interact with them, have 04 fun, and talk,” says Mattheus-Kairys.

“Participating in the process of art creates a place for people to communicate, relax, care, escape, and find out,” says Martha O’Connell, another Cornell participant. “We can never be sure what the girls take from the Friday afternoons, but they teach us so much, and hopefully they see how much we believe in art and in them.”

Last year Cornell and Lansing students worked together to design and execute two murals at the facility, which is otherwise stark and institutional. In February of this year, for the first time, Art Beyond Cornell mounted an exhibit called “Voice” in Tjaden Hall, to bring the work of the Lansing residents to its first public audience.

In recognition of their work and the exhibition, Art Beyond Cornell was honored with an Outstanding Activist Award by Cornell’s Student Activities Office.AAP

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—Halpern—Harabasz—Lewis——McDougal—McGrain——Tabbitas——Mo Ochshorn—Ostendarp——Pendall—Phillips—Pratt—Reardon—Roig—Sanc Silver—Spector——Trancik—Varas——Warner——Woods————————— —————————— 01

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NEWS CRP visiting lecturer Ole PENDALL NAMED TO MACARTHUR Amundsen III has been touring the country FOUNDATION NETWORK Rolf Pendall, associate professor of conducting training sessions in planning for land city and regional planning, has been named to a new research network sponsored by the John D. and trusts, based on his book Strategic Conservation Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Called the Network on Building Resilient Regions, the 13-member group consists of experts in the fields of planning, economics, political science, and sociology as well as practitioners from local government.

The network was formed in recognition of the fact that different regions may respond in very different ways to large-scale economic and demographic shifts.

The network, according to official statements, “seeks to expand our knowledge base about how regions shape the response to major national economic and demographic challenges. At the same time, it aims to provide new evidence about how regions can cultivate resilience in the face of major economic and social challenges. By comparing how diverse regions have responded to challenges, the Network will show how various elements can work together to help build and sustain regional resilience.”

In January the network published a working paper, with Pendall as lead author, titled “Resilience and Regions: Building Understanding of the Metaphor.” The paper reviews the meaning of resilience across such fields as ecology, psychology, economics, disaster studies, geography, political science, and archeology.AAP 03

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Planning, published by the Land Trust Alliance.

Amundsen has updated the land conservation plan of the Otsego Land Trust (Cooperstown, NY), originally produced in 2004 by the CRP 558 workshop class and winner of the National APA award for outstanding student project. This fall, Amundsen will present a case study at the New York Land Use Roundtable, convened by the Great Lakes Commission on land conservation and brownfield redevelopment of the Niagara Escarpment in Lockport.

CRP professor Iwan Azis addressed the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Group in April to mark the 10th anniversary of the Asian financial crisis, with special emphasis on Asia’s new economic giants, China and India. His paper “Managing Global Imbalances: The Role and Dynamic Effect of U.S. Interest Rate Policy” appears in Current Topics in Management (vol. 12, 2007). He has also completed a study on domestic debt, coordinated by Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz under the sponsorship of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University.

CRP professor Lourdes Benería has been involved in a study of policies to balance family and labor market work in the European Union, particularly in Spain and in Latin America. The study examines the adequacy of evolving European policies for the labor market conditions prevailing in developing countries. Beneria has been collaborating with a UNFPA project dealing with these issues in the Latin American region, and participated in the virtual International Symposium on Gender and Social Cohesion in May 2007. The conference was organized by UNFPA and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. The initial phase of this work has been published in Cohesión social, politicas conciliatorias y presupuesto público, UNFPA/GTZ, Mexico City, 2006.

Beneria has been appointed a member of the Scientific Committee for the Congress on International Migration and Co-Development, to be held

at the University of Alicante, Spain, in November 2007.

A work by art professor and sculptor Robert Bertoia installed on the Ithaca Commons in August 2007 commemorates the life of Erin Schlather, who grew up in Ithaca and died in 2004 at the age of 26. The life-size bronze casting depicts Schlather seated at a café table, with a cup of coffee and two books. The table’s edge bears the words “Child of Ithaca, Citizen of the World.” Says Bertoia: “It’s meant to be a celebration of youth and the children of Ithaca.” Over time, the statue will acquire a bluish-green tint.

Visiting associate professor and digital artist Xiaowen Chen staged a performance in Bailey Hall with the Cornell University Wind Ensemble in March 2007. Entitled “Que Sera, Seurat,” the event was a fusion of French Impressionist painting and song. The 50-member wind ensemble performed a modern suite by composer Aldo Forte entitled “Impressionist Prints,” inspired by the paintings of Monet, Degas, Renoir, ToulouseLautrec, van Gogh, and Seurat. Chen projected images of the 19th-century paintings along with his own 21st-century interpretations and translations.

City and regional planning professor Susan Christopherson was a visiting scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, for the month of March 2007. Following her stay in Cambridge, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Newcastle in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies. In the spring she gave presentations at Cambridge and Newcastle as well as at Leicester University and the London School of Economics.

Professor of city and regional planning Pierre Clavel authored “Papers from the ‘Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning’ Collection at Cornell: A Collection and a Class,” in the winter 2007 issue of Progressive Planning magazine.

The article appears in a special section of the magazine dedicated to the collection. Clavel’s article chronicles the creation of the “Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning” collection and serves as a foreword to articles by four Cornell students (see Student News).

Brian Cornell, a computer operator in AAP, was elected to a one-year term as chair of the university’s Employee Assembly in June 2007.

The organization encourages a higher visibility for employees as community members, more equal participation in the policy-making process, and an increased sense of community among all constituencies through shared responsibilities.

In late August, the exhibition “Out of the Past” in the Sibley Hall Hartell Gallery merged images captured by Cornell in Rome director Margherita Fabrizio with those of her father, a professional photographer. Using digital manipulation and printing techniques, Fabrizio created what she calls timescapes: triptychs juxtaposing her work with that of her father’s. The project was funded through a grant from the Cornell Council of the Arts. The exhibit also included photos of painted wall signs, another conversation with the past Fabrizio has engaged over the past eight years.

Visiting assistant professor of art Renate Ferro premiered her new installation Panic Hits Home in March for the 2007 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. In this project Ferro questions what happens when the federal political bureaucracy maps out messages of panic via the media in a way that disrupts the boundaries between interior/exterior, psychic/social, and private/public. Additionally, -Empyre-, an international, online discussion of media arts and culture that Ferro comoderates, was selected for featured presentation as an online journal at Documenta 12, in Kassel, Germany, through September 23, 2007. The list serve focuses on critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices, and events in networked media through monthly discussions with invited artists and critics on emergent themes.

Visiting assistant professor of art Greg Halpern exhibited a series entitled I’m Afraid I Love You. Venues included the Andersen Gallery in Buffalo, NY; SF CameraWork in San Francisco; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

The work will also appear at CCA: 100 Years in the Making, Oakland Museum of California.

The striking modern “icons” of Ewa Harabasz, a visiting assistant professor in art, were shown at the Luxe Gallery in New York City and at the Real Art Ways Center in Hartford, CT. She will present her work early next year in solo exhibitions at galleries in Poland: Le Guern Gallery in Warsaw, Galeria Miejska in Poznan, and Galeria Bielska BWA in Bielsko-Biala. For more information on Harabasz’s work, see page 18.

CRP professor Neema Kudva continues her work on small cities and urban transformations with a project in south-west India funded by the President’s Council of Cornell Women (PCCW) and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. She is also involved in a collaboration with Mercy Corps, an international NGO, in understanding selected aspects of urban livelihoods in Uganda, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Kosovo. The project includes one year of course work and intensive 10-week summer research-internships for five graduate students. Her forthcoming articles include “Conceptualizing NGO-State Relations in Karnataka, Conflict and Collaboration Amidst

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——Azis/Beneria— —Ferro—Forsyth Moore——— nchez——Salinas— ————————— Organizational Diversity.” At Cornell, she continues to serve as a Faculty Fellow for Carl Becker House, and is affiliated with various academic programs including the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. She is centrally involved in the redesign and implementation of a learning play environment at her daughter’s elementary school and along with many others in the community, seeks to change the school district’s inequitable allocation of resources for play environments across Ithaca’s elementary schools.

In April, CRP professor David Lewis traveled to Kazakhstan at the invitation of the prime minister. He spoke on strategic planning at a workshop for the cabinet ministers.

Graham McDougal’s Insert–Folder project was a component of Iter-iter-ation (Literature Rack), a show of artists’ books and multiples curated by Natalie Campbell at Nurtureart in Brooklyn, NY. On view from February through April, 2007, the show included artists and publishers who rework existing print media. McDougal, a lecturer in the Department of Art, has also produced and distributed Insert –Folder P, a continuation of the project and the fourth in this ongoing series based around printed media, design, and ephemera.

In December 2006, associate professor of art and sculptor Todd McGrain traveled to sacred Buddhist sites in India and Nepal. His memorial design for the Rochester, NY, Zen Center in memory of the center’s founder, Roshi Philip Kapleau, led to an invitation to accompany a center member on a trip to the ancient pilgrimage sites.

Says McGrain: “I was encouraged to investigate the physical history of Buddhism before taking on other, similar memorial projects.”

The watercolors of Julie Tabbitas Moore, archivist/special projects coordinator for the Department of Architecture, appeared in the exhibit “Color Streams: Watercolor Paintings by Finger Lakes’ Regional Artists.” The show appeared over the summer at the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca.

An article about a stainless steel stair truss that associate professor of architecture Jonathan Ochshorn designed for an addition to his own house appears in the June 2007 issue of Stainless Steel World News. The addition, which was designed, engineered, and mostly constructed

by Ochshorn, includes a double-height studio space with mezzanine, a library/family room, an entry/mudroom, and a bathroom. The stainless steel stair truss was used for an external staircase, which connects to a roof deck. According to Stainless Steel World News, “The light-weight stainless steel truss, cantilevered out from the addition, was designed to act as structural support for the wooden stair treads, while simultaneously serving as guard and hand rail (the inner stringer is fastened directly to the wood-framed addition).

Using steel only where absolutely necessary facilitated installation and kept costs low.”

The latest work of visiting assistant professor of art Carl Ostendarp is a mural installation entitled All Tomorrow’s Parties at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. In the installation, Ostendarps’s mural defines a hanging space for some of the most important Pop Art works in the museum. Also part of the installation is the music from which the installation takes its title, a song

by Velvet Underground and Nico.

Associate professor of city and regional planning Kenneth Reardon authored “The People’s Plan: A Cautionary Tale of Equity Planning in New Orleans’ 9th Ward,” in the spring 2007 issue of Progressive Planning magazine. The article chronicles the experience of Cornell’s planning department working in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. For more information, see page 5.

Work by visiting assistant professor Wilka Roig (in collaboration with Tarrah Krajnak) was featured in “The Spitting Image,” curated by Terri Whitlock, curatorial associate of SFMOMA, at SF Camerawork in San Francisco this summer. Roig’s work has also been selected for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery biennial Beyond/In Western New York 2007 in Buffalo, NY, opening in September. Roig’s work will be exhibited at CEPA Gallery, one of the largest and oldest galleries in the U.S. dedicated to the photo-related arts.

Visiting critic Jose Salinas, founder of the New York practice KNOBSDesign, completed construction of an art gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in February 2007. The Onishi Gallery/Gallery Memoria was conceived as a mediating space between the art gallery and the showroom. The space is designed to enhance the moment for contemplation, differentiated for contemplation of art and contemplation of traditionally crafted altars from Japan. KNOBS (Knowledge Based System) focuses on architectural design at all scales—furniture, interior, building, and urban design—and extends to digital interactive environments and installations.

Fresh from its exhibition at AAP’s NYC Center, the Humanities Book Art Project was reinstalled on campus at the Hirshland Gallery, Kroch Library, for most of April 2007. Titled Big Red C, the sculpture of the letter “C” is composed entirely of Cornell-authored books in humanities fields.

Professor of art Buzz Spector and 15 students in his “From Inspiration to Exhibition” class first built the “C” in January at the AAP NYC Center.

AAP CREW PADDLES DRAGON BOAT TO SECONDPLACE FINISH A motley crew of AAP faculty, staff, students, and friends took second place in their division at the Fingerlakes International Dragonboat Festival held July 13–15 on Cayuga Lake Inlet. The annual festival features teams of 22 people racing 42-foot canoes. AAP’s Paddlistas, with most participants coming from city and regional planning, came in second to the Ithaca City Police Department in the local/recreational division.AAP 04

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WATTS WINNER NAMED Sculptor Michael Ashkin has been awarded the second annual Watts Prize for Faculty Excellence in recognition of his distinguished achievement in undergraduate teaching and honors dedication, concern for education, and demonstrated technical expertise in artistic practice offered in curriculum of the Department of Art. Mindy Watts (B.F.A. ’03) established the prize for Cornell faculty in gratitude for her education in Fine Arts. This year’s award is $5,000 to support individual creative research.

Ashkin joined the Department of Art in 2006 as an assistant professor of sculpture. He received the highest cumulative score among undergraduate course evaluations and several colleagues have expressed their admiration of his efforts in expanding the scope and criticality of the sculpture studios.

Ashkin was born in Morristown, NJ, in 1955, and earned an M.A. in Middle East languages and cultures from Columbia University and an M.F.A in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before becoming an artist, he worked in computer programming and investment banking.

Ashkin’s sculptures and photographs have been exhibited extensively, in museums and private galleries. His work was included in “Documenta 11,” Kassel, Germany, in 2002, and in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. His work was also included in such distinguished alternative exhibit spaces as the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Exit Art, White Columns, P.S.1, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

Ashkin received a 2000 Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship at Marfa, TX, and has also been awarded grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.AAP 05

Visiting critic Julian Varas’s essay “Pampean Differentiations: Integration and Discontinuity in Peripheral Buenos Aires” was slated for publication this summer in States of Change, edited

by Rosalea Monacella at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The text discusses the production of a peripheral urban condition in the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires, in connection with the development of global city functions.

Another essay, “Topographic Heterogenesis,” was published in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition “hEX Arquitectura” held at the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. The exhibition showcases the work of emergent architecture practices from Argentina.

CRP professor Roger Trancik’s awardwinning textbook Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design (originally published by Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1986 and acquired by John Wiley & Sons in the ’90s) will be republished in two Chinese translations—an “orthodox” version and a “simplified” version.

Associate professor of city and regional planning Mildred Warner is a coauthor of “Putting Child Care in the Picture,” the cover story in Planning magazine’s June 2007 issue. The article explains why child care is a critical part of community infrastructure. She has also published articles on the topic in Applied Developmental Science, Growth and Change and Practicing Planner and is a coauthor of several articles concerning privatization in Public Administration, Local Government Studies, Public Administration Review, and Administration and Society. In March 2007, Warner co-presented “Social Inclusion or Exclusion? A Comparison of EU and US Rural Development Policies” at the QUCAN Rural Policy Network conference in Inverness, Scotland. In April she was keynote speaker on “Reframing Childcare as Economic Development” in Manitoba, Canada.

Professor Mary N. Woods has received a senior research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for her 2007–2008 sabbatical project, a book on women architects in India and Sri Lanka. Her forthcoming book, Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Other Photographs of American Tradition and Modernity (University of Pennsylvania Press), has won one of only two publishing grants awarded annually by the Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art. In February 2007, Woods co-chaired a session on “The Miniaturized Metropolis” at the annual meeting of the College Art Association; in April she presented “Lewis Hine’s Lacemakers: How the Other Half Lives,” at New York City Homes, a conference organized by the Museum of the City of New York.

Woods also gave two presentations at Cornell: the first on Gordon Matta-Clark, and the second on Bollywood cinema and Art Deco picture palaces in Bombay for a conference on film, dance, architecture, and modernity. Wood’s review of “Picturing a Metropolis: Unseen Cinema” appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.AAP

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NEW FACULTY JOIN AAP In August, AAP welcomed a half-dozen new faculty members, with expertise in sustainable design, computational tools for design and planning, art criticism and art history, Latin American diaspora issues, and urban planning.

Patricia Phillips joins the Department of Art as its new chair, succeeding Buzz Spector. For more information on her work, see the article on page 3.

The Department of Architecture has added two new faculty members.

Kevin Pratt’s interests include the development of sustainable housing systems and technologies, the use of computational simulation in sustainable design processes, and the design of dynamic enclosure and control systems. As director of research at KieranTimberlake Associates in Philadelphia, he has developed daylighting, shading, and thermal simulation analysis for the Sidwell Friends Middle School (a LEED Platinum building and winner of an AIA COTE top ten green buildings award). He is a contributing writer for Artforum.

A former director of digital media at the Yale School of Architecture, Mike Silver explores digital mapping, advanced composite manufacturing, and software development. He has written extensively on the relationship between technology and design, authoring Reading Drawing Building in the Pamphlet Architecture series and Programming Cultures. Silver’s New York–based design laboratory draws on the expertise of mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers to design furnishings, consumer products, websites, and buildings. Silver’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in Manhattan; the IDC in Nagoya, Japan; and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The Department of City and Regional Planning welcomes three new faculty members. Nancy Brooks, who earned her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania, investigates policy-oriented theoretical and empirical microeconomics with a focus on environmental and urban/regional economics. Her multidisciplinary approach integrates elements of geography, regional science, and sociology. Brooks’s work on the economics of pollution and social behavior has been published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and the Journal of Economic Education.

Urban planning and Latin American history scholar Arturo Sanchez studies comparative Latin American–Caribbean transmigration, urban economic spatial restructuring, and comparative urban and regional planning and public policy. He has taught at New York University, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia. He has also served as a policy analyst for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Education Services. In recent years, Sanchez has served as an expert witness in political asylum cases of Colombians living near New York.

Ann Forsyth (Ph.D. ’93) works at the intersection of health, environmental sustainability, and urban planning, exploring what constitutes good urban form. She has analyzed the success of planned alternatives to sprawl, investigated the tensions between social and ecological values in urban design, examined urban intensification in terms of walkability and affordability, and developed systematic methods for analyzing the built environment. Forsyth’s books include Constructing Suburbs, Reforming Suburbia, and Designing Small Parks.AAP 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

Photo courtesy of the MMK. Moving Toward Eternity by Margherita Fabrizio.

Onishi Gallery by Jose Salinas.

The Paddlistas. Provided.

From I’m Afraid I Love You by Greg Halpern.

Work by sculptor Michael Ashkin. Provided.

Kevin Pratt. Provided.

Mike Silver. Provided.

Nancy Brooks. Provided.

Arturo Sanchez. Credit: William Staffeld.

Ann Forsyth. Credit: William Staffeld.

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22—REVIEW Conferences—— Lectures—Exhibits— ———Spring2007 ——BILLIE TSIEN—SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY——BERNARD TSCHUMI—CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN—EVAN DOUGLIS— —ESSE REISER——JEFF KIPNIS—FOUAD MAKKI——MARY ROLDAN—JEFF CHUSID—— JEREMY FOSTER—NEEMA KUDVA—CUI ZHINYUAN—— SUMILA GULYANI—ALAN ELADIO GÓMEZ——PETER KWONG—JOHN LOOMIS—— EDER MUNIZ—DENIS SENA— —MARTIM SMOLKA—FERNANDO CARRION——JON PUGH——XOLELA MANGÇU— KAREN B. GRAUBART—— KANISHKA GOONEWARDENA—GERMA BEL——JOHN FRIEDMANN—LEONIE SANDERCOCK——SHARON LOCKHART———WENDY JACOB— FRANCISCO SANIN——GIORGIO CIUCCI— MAURO PARRAVICINI—— LIVIO SACCHI—ZAHA HADID ——DANILO ECCHER—PAOLO CANEVARI——PATRIZIA SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO— ———MARIO SPADA—MAURO SALVEMINI——MARCO MARGASSI—MATTEO ROBIGLIO——BELINDA TATO—— JOSE LUIS VALLEJO————

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Bernard Tschumi. Credit: Bob Stuart.

Billie Tsien. Credit: Bob Stuart.

Madonna and Child by Ewa Harabasz. Provided.

Shirazeh Houshiary. Credit: Bob Stuart.

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BILLIE TSIEN: “THING, ANTITHING” Noted architect Billie Tsien spoke at Cornell on February 27 as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series. Titled “Thing, Anti-Thing,” her talk focused on recent projects by her New York firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

Tsien, who has an interest in work that bridges art and architecture, shares the Louis I. Kahn chair at Yale University with Tod Williams. She has worked with Williams since 1977 and has been in partnership with him since 1986.

Their firm has received eight National AIA Awards for their works, including the Williams Natatorium at the Cranbrook School; the Rifkind residence; the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California; and American Folk Art Museum in New York City.AAP

THAMES GATEWAY IS FOCUS OF CASE BERNARD TSCHUMI STUDIES CONFERENCE The second annual Case Studies in Urban Development, a two-day conference in early March, opened with sweeping vistas of the River Thames. LECTURES ON RE“London: The Thames Gateway Initiative: Promoting Sustainable Development at the Water’s Edge” CENT WORKS Architect Berwas sponsored by Matthew L. Witte (B.Arch. ’79), a graduate of the Program in Real Estate. He connard Tschumi gave the talk “Concept-Form and ceived of the interdisciplinary forum as an incubator for collaboration among urban planners, architects, and real estate developers.

This year’s program featured key practitioners and advisers involved in the planning of London’s newest potential growth spurt. With the prospect of the 2012 Olympic Games and the arrival of the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link at Stratford in East London, new development in the 280-square mile Thames Gateway is rampant. But how to plan for this explosion? How to preserve public access to the river frontage? How to achieve sufficient density for sustainable development?

Speakers included Ricky Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics and principal design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority; Frank Duffy, founder of DEGW, a leading international strategic design consultancy; Susan Fainstein, professor of urban planning at Harvard and author of The City Builders: Property, Politics, and Planning in London and New York; Fred Koetter, founding partner of Koetter Kim & Associates, urban planners and architects of the Canary Wharf riverside development; Marvin Suomi, CEO of KUD International and master developer for Silvertown Quays; and André Bideau, a visiting critic in the Department of Architecture.

On day one, Burdett and Duffy deployed their combined expertise in the history of London, its socioeconomic development, and current planning issues. Each made a strong case for what they described as the “mess” of London. Unlike many other major cities, London has never responded to master planning. Its growth has been piecemeal and organic, dependent on the economic, political, and social pressures of the day—which, argued Burdett, has made for more resilient and sustainable growth.

Day two focused on specific elements of the Thames Gateway Initiative. The area along the Thames estuary is home to 1.6 million people. Postindustrial decline has made this area Europe’s largest regeneration project, with projections of 120,000 new homes and 180,000 new jobs by 2016.

Fainstein reflected on the implications of development on this scale. Bideau appraised the role played by London’s lively mayor, and Suomi discussed plans for Silvertown Quays. Koetter considered Canary Wharf, Burdett detailed the 2012 Olympics, and Duffy discussed Stratford.AAP

LEONIE SANDERCOCK ON MULTICULTURALISM IN CANADA On April 7, Leonie Sandercock, a film director and professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia, spoke on the topic “Where Strangers Become Neighbours: A Canadian Defense of Multiculturalism.”

The talk was part of the CRP Distinguished Visitors Lecture Series and included a showing of Sandercock’s film “Where Strangers Become Neighbours: The Story of the Collingwood Neighbourhood House and the Integration of Immigrants in Vancouver.”

The author of Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities, Sandercock discussed the potential social and political virtues of multiculturalism as exemplified in the Collingwood area of Vancouver, which in the mid-1980s began to experience significant immigration from countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, and India. Multiculturalism—both as political philosophy and as public policy—has long garnered critics in the U.S. and has become increasingly embattled in Europe, too. Yet, Sandercock argued, the term has different meanings in different places and political cultures.AAP

Topo-Types” in April as part of the AAP Dean’s Lecture Series.

Tschumi discussed a series of “doubles,” similar design solutions for different projects, each using site-specific materials and forms. “If that concept is the same two times,” he asked, “is the building the same both times?”

Tschumi made it clear he was less interested in form than in finding creative solutions—“to do things that do not belong to the realm of clichés of architecture.”

When he was asked to design a 10-millionsquare-foot housing project in Beijing, Tschumi was concerned about a recent wave of high-rise construction destroying the social fabric of many areas of the city. His solution was to build the housing project on pillars, to preserve the existing neighborhood.

Tschumi also discussed his current project, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, built just 800 feet from the Parthenon. The triangular building displays artifacts from the Acropolis, visible from the glass-enclosed third floor. Glass floors set on pillars over a working archaeological site—which Tschumi said was the best location for the museum—let visitors peer into the excavation, making the building “as much about the history of the site as the artifacts inside.”

Said Tschumi: “There is nothing arbitrary.

Everything is highly intentional.”AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online, and used with permission.

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Exhibit Reveals ARTIST SHIRAZEH “ICON STATION,” Urban Design of HOUSHIARY VISITS EXHIBIT BY EWA Panama Canal Area AAP Shirazeh Houshiary, an Iranian artist An exhibit of spectacular photos and a standingHARABASZ Gold leaf and halos room-only lecture introduced a Cornell audience formalize the beauty and suffering in news photos currently based in London, spoke at Cornell on to the urbanization of the Panama Canal Zone, which event organizers called “one of the largest publicly administered experiments in urban and regional planning in U.S. history.”

Titled “Tropical Garden Cities: The Influence of Clarence Stein on Urbanization at the Panama Canal,” the exhibition, curated by planning and landscape architecture professor Roger Trancik, consisted of photos by Sam Sweezy of the area, a 500-square-mile network of company towns, military bases, forest reserves, and industrial infrastructures. An explanatory narrative by alumnus Kurt Dillon (M.R.P. ’05) was also on display.

Visitors to the March 5–10 exhibit in Hartell Gallery were drawn to the lush tropical vegetation in the striking photos as well as to the examples of urban design and architecture.

A crowd packed the gallery on March 6 to hear “Global Garden Cities,” a talk by Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Fishman, a professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan, discussed the Panama Canal’s urban system in the context of planning history and such influential planners as Clarence Stein, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jacob Crane. A roundtable discussion with Fishman, faculty, and students took place in the gallery the following morning.

The events were organized by Trancik and funded through AAP’S Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, and the Department of City and Regional Planning.AAP

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from around the world in Ewa Harabasz’s exhibition “Icon Station,” on view in Hartell Gallery during March 12–23, 2007.

The central images, which Harabasz obtained from newspapers and enlarged, then treated as icons, are photographs from such scenes of death and misery as Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in 2004, which left 344 people dead, 186 of them children.

The figures, usually isolated from any background and approximately life-size, engage the viewer on a human level; their saintly treatment is both moving and ironic.

“These images are not religious,” Harabasz says, even though several depict a Madonna and Child. “These are false icons.” Unlike the church’s saints, she points out, these people had no choice in their suffering.

Born to a Catholic family in Poland, Harabasz grew up in Czestochowa, known for its “Black Madonna,” which she often painted because she worked for a painter who made copies. Her work also included conserving or creating new stained glass, frescoes, and icon paintings. Later she restored mosaics and icons in Italy as well.

Harabasz is a visiting faculty member in the Department of Art.AAP

March 6 as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series.

Her work is distinguished by its infusion of her Persian background with Western art forms, deriving inspiration from Sufi doctrine, ancient Persian writings, mathematics, philosophy, religion, art, and astronomy. Throughout her work is a desire to symbolize the universal quest for spiritual union.

Houshiary left Iran in 1974, studying at the Chelsea School of Art from 1976 to 1979 and then holding a junior fellowship at Cardiff College of Art from 1979 to 1980. During the 1980s, she quickly established herself as one of the leading artists of her generation working in Britain. Initially known for her sculpture, she widened her work to include painting and drawing.

Houshiary has exhibited around the world, at the XXIII Bienal de São Paulo and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1996; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, in 1998; Basel in 2000; Rooseum Malmo, Sweden, in 2002; Sculpture Biennial Münsterland and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, in 2003, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in 1994, and was named a professor at the London Institute in 1997.AAP

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MARCH 16, 2007—AN INNOVATIVE DRAGON OF BAMBOO AND STEEL BRAVES THE SNOW BUT FAILS TO BURN From Rand Hall it came, formed of imagination, steel, rope and a truckload of

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bamboo from Florida.

While a heavy snow fell on campus March 16, the guest of honor at Cornell’s 106th annual Dragon Day was paraded through campus before coming to its traditional fiery end on the Arts Quad—although much of it survived the blaze this year.

The chimes in McGraw Tower played Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” while about 2,000 people encircled the resting dragon, chanting “Burn it! Burn it!” as Cornell police and other officials kept the crowd at a safe distance.

A rite of passage and extracurricular team-building for first-year architecture students who design and construct the dragon each year, Dragon Day is traditionally held on the Friday before spring break and accompanied by loud cheering, creative costumes, and pranks around campus.

First-year architects taunted AAP facilities manager Charlie Pomada with color cutouts of his face, one hanging from the dragon’s neck. Second-years joined the parade with an 8-foot-tall papier-mâché and chicken wire head, complete with a smoke machine and a huge Marlboro jutting from its lips—a likeness of Professor Arthur Ovaska.

“The structure was very innovative this year—it was intended to incorporate the structural elements into the design,” said student Eric Suntup, one of the builders who wore white jumpsuits and took victory laps around the dragon on the lawn, after removing the creature’s head for safekeeping—another Dragon Day tradition.

The flames burned through the added hay and cardboard elements, then the ropes holding some of the structure together, causing the wing section to collapse and leaving a pile of blackened bamboo poles. The rest of the dragon—poles and steel A-frames—was untouched by fire.AAP Adapted from an article by Daniel Aloi, Cornell Chronicle Online, and used with permission.

CREDIT: WILLIAM STAFFELD

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20 YEARS IN ROME—

Today, as in the late Eighties (above) when the program was in its infancy, Cornell in Rome takes students to the streets, analyzing and observing contemporary and ancient architecture. (For more on the Rome program anniversary celebration, see the story on page 4) 01 Venus de Milo by Erik den Breejen.

02 Tucson’s Curtis Park sculptures by Rebecca Thompson.

03 Cooper Hewitt showed “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” by Eric Howeler and J. Meejin Yoon.

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show for eCommerce marketers in March 2007.

She is principal of her online marketing company, next STEPH. Cockerl is also featured in Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs by Kristen Fischer. The book reveals what life is really like for people who take the plunge into creative self-employment.

Allan R. Cooper (M.Arch. ’71), professor of Walter G. Armstrong (M.R.P. architecture in the College of Architecture and ’77) spoke at a Career Conversation hosted by the Environmental Design at California Polytechnic Career Services office of the College of ArchitecState University at San Luis Obispo, has received ture, Art, and Planning in May 2007. Armstrong the 2006 Octavius Morgan Distinguished Sermet with students and offered insight about how vice Award. Each year, the California Architects his planning education informed his career path.

Board presents the award to volunteers for their He is senior vice president of CDM, an internacontribution to the profession and the people of tional consulting, engineering, and construction California. Cooper was honored in early February firm headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Armstrong at a ceremony in San Francisco for his years of has also been involved in court-ordered cleanservice to the board and its committees. ups of the Ohio River in greater Cincinnati and Robert Cronin (M.F.A. ’62) had an exhibition the Connecticut River in Hartford, as well as the of his work entitled “Small Paintings” at the Lifemaster planning effort for the New York City water Long Learning Center in Salisbury, CT, on view supply system. from April 20 to May 28, 2007.

This spring Erik den Breejen (M.F.A. ’06) Emily Dawson (B.Arch. ’03) has been hired had a solo exhibition of his work entitled “Ruined as an intern architect by SRG Partnership, Inc.,

by Love Songs” in the project space at Freight + a firm that specializes in architecture, planning, Volume on West 24th Street in New York City. The and interiors. With SRG, Dawson is working on show incorporated song lyrics from rock anthems Portland State University’s Shattuck Hall and a and indy hits with his colorful acrylic canvases. In replacement hospital in Honolulu. his work, the songs are truncated to display witty David Alberto Diaz (M.R.P. ’01) became catch phrases such as, “in this horrible age of president and chief executive of the Downtown abuse and decay, it’s good to know somebody’s Raleigh Alliance in Raleigh, NC, in June 2007. lookin’ OK.” The canvases function as a selfHe previously headed a similar organization in explorative diary that traces fleeting sentiments Roanoke, VA. brought forth from the lyrics. Den Breejen lives The University of Phoenix Stadium designed and works in Brooklyn, NY. When not making art,

by Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55) is the subhe focuses his efforts on his band, Acid Canyon. ject of a new book available in October 2007 FORMA Design (principal Andreas Charafrom Princeton Architectural Press. Eisenman lambous, B.Arch. ’85) has an updated website Architects: Home Field Advantage: University of detailing the firm’s latest projects and news, as Phoenix Stadium presents a comprehensive look well as a section introducing Cha-Cha, FORMA’s at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark new line of furniture and custom rugs. Several of excellence in civic and sports architecture. The of the firm’s works have received publication rebook is the eighth volume in the Source Books in cently, including Jill Bruno Orthodontics, featured Architecture series. in the January issue of the Greek-language design New York design team sand_box, founded magazine Syntheseis. In addition, Park Triangle

by Bruce Engel (B.Arch. ’01), Damen Hamilton Apartments in the Columbia Heights area of (B.Arch. ’01), Samuel Keller (B.Arch. ’00), and Washington, DC, received an International Interior partners, was named one of 10 international “best Design Association Award in the residential catbreakthrough designers” by Wallpaper* magazine egory. See www.formaonline.com. in their 2007 awards issue. For more informaPeter Christensen (B.Arch. ’05) was one tion about sand_box, visit their website at www. of 11 recipients of this year’s Lee Tenenbaum sndbx.com. awards, given by the administration of the MuDouglas R. Foster (M.R.P. ’91) joined Hudseum of Modern Art to its outstanding employees. son River Housing Inc. as director of housing and Christensen is a curatorial assistant in the Depart- community development in March 2007. Hudson ment of Architecture and Design at MoMA. River Housing is a nonprofit organization based in The artwork of Hansen Clarke (B.F.A. ’84) Poughkeepsie, NY, that provides housing for lowwas showcased at the Detroit Institute of Art’s income and homeless people in Dutchess County.

44th annual Bal Africain, the museum’s major Previously, Foster worked for NeighborWorks fundraiser for African and African-American Art. America on the Campaign for Home Ownership The fundraiser was attended by Ghanaian King team.

Nene Sakite II. Clarke, a Michigan state senator, The work of Peter D. Gerakaris (B.F.A. also donated one of his pieces, Orange Woman, ’03) was shown at an experimental solo installato the event’s silent auction. tion titled “Spectrumorphosis,” at the Wave Hill Stephanie Cockerl (B.Arch. ’96) was a Glyndor Gallery Project Space in Riverdale, NY featured presenter at eComXpo, the virtual trade- (March 3–April 15). Gerakaris also exhibited a new

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show of paintings and works on paper, entitled “Natural Selection,” at the Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts Project Room in New York City, in June 2007.

For information about the Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts Project Room exhibit, visit www.kathleencullenfinearts.com.

In May, historic preservationist James Glass (Ph.D. ’87) became director in the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Glass is a three-term member of the Board of Advisors for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

As director and founder of Ball State University’s Center for Historic Preservation and director of its graduate program in the field, Glass served on the national Preservation Infrastructure Panel, which recommended improvements to the delivery of services under the National Historic Preservation Act. He helped present the panel’s recommendations in October 2006 at the Preserve America Summit, co-chaired by First Lady Laura Bush.

Salt Lake City-based VCBO Architecture announced the promotion of Pablo Gotay (B.Arch. ’01) to associate. Gotay has been with the firm for the past five years and specializes in educational facilities.

Richard J. S. Gutman (B.Arch. ’71) is curator of the exhibit “Diners: Still Cookin’ in the 21st Century” at the Culinary Archives and Museum on the Harborside, RI, campus of Johnson & Wales University. The exhibit focuses on the history of the American diner, and includes a collection of diner memorabilia, much of which is on loan from Gutman. Gutman is the leading authority on the history of diners, a passion that began with his B.Arch. thesis on the evolution of diner architecture as an example of industrialized building. The exhibit will remain on view until June 2008.

In April, Handel Architects LLP, whose partners include Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’79), Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), and Glenn Rescalvo (M.Arch. ’88), received the 2007 Pillars of the Industry Award for Best Mid-Rise Condominium Community from the National Association of Home Builders for a six-story residential building in Washington, D.C.’s historic Georgetown. In June, the Millennium Tower Residences at Battery Park City, also designed by Handel Architects, was ranked number 13 of New York Construction magazine’s Top Completed Projects of 2006– 2007. The 35-story tower, which was completed in January 2007, uses 25% less energy and 33% less water than standard buildings, and was constructed to meet U.S. Green Building Council standards for LEED Gold certification. In addition, a video interview with Gary Handel is part of the Architectural League of New York’s exhibit New New York: Fast Forward, the fifth in an ongoing series that highlights new architecture in the city, presenting a snapshot of a metropolis in change.

In May 2007, Richard Harkrader (B.Arch. ’68) and his wife, Lonna Harkrader, sold their 37 energy-efficient rental units to the Durham Community Land Trustees to pursue other interests.

Their houses were among the very first solar

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ALUMNI EVENTS FALL 2007— 7/25 New York, NY. Cornell

Urban Scholars reception; host Dean Mostafavi—NYC. 8/3 KPF alumni luncheon for Dean Mostafavi; host Jill Lerner ’75—NYC. 9/16– 18 AAP Advisory Council meeting—ITH. 9/16–22 William Lim ’80 art exhibit, Hartell Gallery—ITH. 9/17 William Lim ’80 art opening and reception, Hartell Gallery—ITH. 9/17 Chad Oppenheim ’94, AAP Dean’s Lecture—ITH. 9/28 Mosaic alumni event; host, Dean of Students Kent Hubbell ’67 and Prof. James Turner.— Atlanta, GA 10/2 Edgar A. Tafel Architecture Lecture: K. Michael Hays “A Desire Called Architecture,” Lewis Auditorium—ITH. 10/4 AAP alumni reception, featuring planning and historic preservation faculty and students, Sasaki Associates; host Peter Hedlund ’93—BOSTON, MA. 10/10 Alumni event.

(CEN) “Creating Sustainable Workplaces,” Bishop Ranch; Hosts: Masud ’46 and Alex Mehran, CEO of Sunset Development, with panelists Art Gensler, Jr. ’57, Ken Derr ’59, Julia Maser ’55—SAN RAMON, CA. 10/13 Solar Decathlon event: Tour of Cornell solar house and alumni reception at Ronald Reagan Building—WASHINGTON DC. 10/18 Celebration dinner with Ace ’43 and Molly Bean; Host: art chair Patti Phillips—ITH. 10/19–20 Cornell Trustee/Council weekend—ITH. 10/18–21 ACSP event, Hilton Milwaukee City Center—MILWAUKEE, WI. 10/19 TCAM. Trustee Council lunch with Dean Mostafavi and Frank Robinson, director of the Johnson Museum of Art—ITH. October Dedication and celebration of the New AAP Deanship—ITH. 11/2 “Portugal Now” Symposium, followed by AAP alumni reception at AAP Center—NYC. 11/12 Artist James Turrell: Inagural Cooper Visiting Artists Series—ITH. UPDATES AT aap.cornell.edu

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26/Alumni News ———————————Armstrong——B Cockerl—Cooper——Cronin—Dawson—Diaz—Eisenman——Engel—Foster

Gutman—Hamilton—Handel——Harkrader——Howeler—Ivanova—Johnson —Lipsky—Lowe——Lynn—Manfredi—Marino—Martin—McLeod———Mee Omansky———Pérez-Roselló—Reed—Sandgren—Sbrissa—Strauss—Stron —Yang—Yoon—York—Yrizarry———Zane—Zver—————————————

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CRP FORUM SHOWCASES PLANNING AND PRESERVATION CAREERS “One of the liberating things about this department,” Michael Powell told a group of planning students, “is that you can select what you think is most important and go after it.” Powell, M.R.P. ’07, was one of five alumni of the Department of City and Regional Planning who returned to campus on March 30 for the annual Planning Alumni Career Forum.

The alumni made brief presentations, with Professor John Forester as moderator, and then rotated among groups of students for roundtable conversations.

In addition to Powell, who works for the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, the other alumni were Cattyann Campbell (M.R.P. ’97), GIS project leader for Tompkins County’s Department of Information Technology, Ithaca; Leslie Chatterton, a graduate student in historic preservation planning at Cornell in the late 1980s, now a historic preservation and neighborhood planner with the City of Ithaca; Celeste Frye (M.R.P. ’01), economic development planner and partner/consultant with The Public Good, a consulting firm to nonprofit and public organizations; and Nina Peek (B.S. ’91), associate vice president at Saccardi & Schiff Inc., planning development consultants in White Plains, NY. AAP The forum was sponsored by Architecture, Art, and Planning Career Services and the Department of City and Regional Planning.

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professional achievements or acts of courage, selflessness, integrity, or perseverance serve as an example to all New Yorkers. Johnson-Schmidt joined honorees from across New York at a tribute on June 5, 2007.

Naomi Klein (M.R.P. ’83) was a speaker at the Intelligent Transportation Society of New York’s 14th annual conference entitled “Integration—Pulling It All Together.” The conference, which took place on June 7–8, 2007, discussed the overall theme of integration as a way to improve service levels and raise the efficiency of the transportation system. Klein spoke on a panel about bus rapid transit.

Urban planner Norman Krumholz (M.R.P. ’65) received a lifetime achievement award at the Cleveland Arts Prize Ceremony on June 28, 2007.

The award was created to honor an artist who has worked in Northeast Ohio over several decades and whose career and achievements have brought great distinction to himself or herself and to the region. Krumholz is a professor of urban planning at Cleveland State University. His books include Re-Inventing Cities: Equity Planners Tell Their Stories (coauthor), and Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods (coeditor). A former president of the American Planning Association, he has served on the AAP Advisory Council and has frequently lectured at the college.

The firm of David J. Lewis (M.A. ’92) has a book forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press entitled Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis: Opportunisresidences in the Durham community. The latest tic Architecture. The book introduces the idea of sale by the Harkraders’ company, New Morning, closed the housing chapter in their career. Richard opportunistic architecture as a design philosophy, Harkrader now works on energy issues for the En- a way to transform the typically restrictive condivironmental Defense Fund and the North Carolina tions of architectural practice into generators of architectural innovation. Lewis presents a diverse Sustainable Energy Association. He and his wife run the Sister Communities project from their eco- selection of built and speculative projects ranging from small installations to large, institutional buildtourism, organic coffee, and butterfly farm at an ings. The book will be available in October 2007. elevation of 4,000 feet in Nicaragua.

An exhibition of conceptual art forms entitled Howeler+Yoon Architecture/MY Studio, the “Crossings” by William Lim (B.Arch. ’80, M.Arch. firm of Eric Howeler (B.Arch. ’94, M.Arch. ’96) ’81), was shown at two galleries in Hong Kong. and J. Meejin Yoon (B.Arch. ’95), was selected The exhibition opened at Grotto Fine Art Limited for Emerging Voices 2007 by the Architecture League of New York. Work by the firm appeared in on April 17 and at the Hong Kong Arts Center on April 19. William Lim is a Hong Kong-based archi“Design Life Now” at the National Design Trientect and artist renowned for his rendering of obnial at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, ject and space. Manipulating exterior and interior, and “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion mixing unconventional materials and objects, and and Architecture” at the Los Angeles Museum of merging spiritual and functional worlds are part of Contemporary Art. Howeler+Yoon Architecture Lim’s effort to create an “art-chitectural” enviplaced third in the Chicago Prize “Crossing the ronment. With precision and vision, Lim creates Drive” competition. conceptual art forms that embody the essence of Illiana Ivanova (B.Arch. ’04) and husband David Toal participated in the 2007 Mongolia Ral- two different yet inseparable disciplines.

The work of artist Pat Lipsky (B.F.A. ’63) ly, a journey which began in London and ended in was reviewed in the March issue of Art in America Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia, in what they describe as a “junk car” with a one-liter engine. They planned and in the New York Times, following her 2006 to cover some 10,000 miles across mountains and show at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York City. “Lipsky’s most recent paintings are notable deserts, covering a quarter of the earth’s surface not only for the excitement she elicits from small over some of the worst roads imaginable. Their distinctions … but also for her uncanny ability to goal was to raise $2,000 to benefit Mercy Corps Mongolia and Christina Noble Children’s Founda- conjure up diverse moods, even places, through tion. For details, see their website: www.windmill- color,” writes Karen Wilkin in Art in America.

Lipsky’s work was also part of a group exhibit, giants.com.

Elise J. Johnson-Schmidt (B.Arch. ’82) was “Paintings of Color,” at the Tribes Gallery in New York City in March 2007. honored by Senator George H. Winner Jr. (R-C, Elizabeth M. Lowe (M.R.P. ’80) has been Elmira) as part of the New York State Senate’s appointed director for Region 5 of the New York “Women of Distinction” program. The program State Department of Environmental Conservation was created in 1998 to honor New York women (DEC). Lowe currently serves as managing direcwho exemplify personal excellence, or whose

tor and vice president of the board of directors for the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, also known as “The Wild Center,” in Tupper Lake, NY. She received the “Adirondack Communicator of the Year” award from the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board. See www. wildcenter.org/.

ING Clarion Partners LLC has named David J. Lynn (M.R.P. ’88) head of U.S. Research & Strategy. At the firm’s New York City office, Lynn will be responsible for strategy and research support for ING Clarion Partners and ING Clarion Capital Investment activities. Lynn has served most recently as global head of research and investment strategy with AIG Global real estate.

Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80) and partner Marion Weiss have a book forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press entitled Surface/ Subsurface. The publication presents nine major projects that have been completed since publication of their first monograph, Site Specific, in 2000. Surface/Subsurface reveals potential in subsurface conditions with the goal of generating an entirely new language for the surface. The book will be available in December 2007.

The firm of Peter Marino (B.Arch. ’70) was honored at the 2007 MIPIM Architectural Review Future Project Awards in Cannes, France, for its design of a high-concept residential tower on W. 57th Street in New York. The project was recognized as both the “Tall Buildings” category winner and the ”Overall Winner” selected from all categories. Peter Marino Architect also received a 2007 Honor Award for Interior Architecture from the American Institute of Architects, for its design of the Louis Vuitton boutique in Hong Kong. Marino’s firm has announced its first line of furniture for commercial distribution: Linea A, designed in partnership with Italian luxury home furnishings company Poltrona Frau. The collection was launched at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan (April 18–23, 2007).

James R. Martin (B.Arch. ’80), an architect with more than 27 years of experience in the design of educational, cultural, commercial, and research facilities, has joined daSilva Architects, P.C., as a principal. Located in New York City, DaSilva is a full-service architectural planning and consulting firm whose credits include educational, institutional, laboratory, and residential projects.

Martin will focus on the higher education market on the East Coast.

Jamie E. McLeod (M.R.P ’95) is serving as vice mayor for Santa Clara County, CA. Her term (the first of a two-term limit) expires in 2008.

McLeod is also a planner for the city of Sunnyvale, CA. A one-woman exhibition by Madeleine Leston Meehan (B.F.A. ’63) entitled “MostlyMusicArt,” opened at the Maufé Gallery in Christiansted, St. Croix, VI, in February. Meehan’s work specializes in art with music. Her oil on canvas and acrylic aquarelle paintings on paper feature the Caribbean Dance Company, blues, and jazz.

An exhibition of photographs by Elidor Mehilli (B.S. ’05) entitled “After Utopia” was shown at Robertson Hall’s Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University, from March 11 to April 27, 2007. The exhibition explored the architectural legacy of the innumerable prefabricated concrete buildings that sprang up behind the Iron Curtain and still provide homes and workplaces for many millions of Eastern Europeans today. A panel discussion was held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to coincide with the opening of the exhibition. Mehilli is focusing on this period of architectural history as part of his Ph.D. research.

Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), a partner at Handel Architects since 1997, has been elected to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows. Election to the fellowship not only recognizes the achievements of architects as individuals, but also their significant contribution to architecture and to society.

Kevin G. Montgomery (B.Arch. ’76) has been elected to the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows. Montgomery is principal and director of architecture at the North Carolina design practice OBrienAtkins. As the first AfricanAmerican president of the North Carolina Board of Architecture, Montgomery has championed collaboration among educators, practitioners, and the profession’s governing bodies.

Vela Systems, Inc., based in Somerville, MA, and co-founded by Adam Omansky (B.Arch. ’97), has created a mobile tablet PC-based software meant to replace the paper and clipboard

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carried by construction managers and other on-site personnel in the field. Inspiration for the new technology came during Omansky’s work on the design and construction of the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace in Budapest. The software has already been used on a handful of Bostonarea projects, including the new WGBH headquarters, the Liberty Hotel, and the Trilogy housing project near Fenway Park.

Ivan Pérez-Roselló (B.Arch. ’02) was one of three finalists in the AIA Puerto Rico Chapter Chair Design Competition sponsored by Makro, a Puerto Rican furniture manufacturer and distributor. Pérez-Roselló’s design is intended as a “lounge” chair for hospitality or residential use, both exterior and interior. The design allows for luxury or economy models, using a wide range of fabrication materials—from a powder-coated metal frame and canvas fabric, to a stainless steel frame with leather seat.

The firm of John Reed (B.Arch. ’85), in collaboration with Koetter Kim and Associates, Field Operations, and Yooshin Engineers, won first prize in an international competition for the redevelopment of Chuncheon, South Korea. The proposal, covering 500 acres, reuses an abandoned American Air Force base, reconnects the existing city with its waterfront, and transforms an existing island into a botanical garden. The design will create a mixed-use, environmentally appropriate expansion of the city that maximizes the potential of the lake and island to create a cultural, ecological, tourist, and leisure complex. Reed’s firm also received an honorable mention in the 2007 international competition for the National Library of the Czech Republic.

The work of Erik N. Sandgren (M.F.A. ’77) was shown at an exhibit entitled “Mostly Coastal: Paintings” at the Capps Art Gallery at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, WA, from January through April 2007. The show included paintings of the Pacific Ocean and rivers and mountains in the Northwest. Sandgren teaches art and humanities at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, WA. “My subjects are so deeply familiar that they seem to allow me a unique kind of shorthand,” says Sandgren of his work, intended to evoke respect for nature without making a political statement.

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Claudia Sbrissa (M.F.A. ’02) curated a spring 2007 exhibition at the Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY, entitled “From the Inside Out: Feminist Art Then and Now.” Sbrissa is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at St. John’s University.

Jessica Pnina Strauss (B.Arch. ’99), a senior sustainability consultant with Arup in New York City, presented at the AIA National Convention in San Antonio on May 3. She discussed “Drivers of Change” and the effects on design and construction in the built environment as part of the “Growing beyond Green” AIA 150 lecture series.

She addressed a crowd of over 200 architects, engineers, developers, and urban planners.

Artist Andrea Strongwater (B.F.A. ’70) is currently working on the decoration of the interior of a new synagogue in Atlanta. The synagogue will use three of the 12 images that Strongwater created for a Jewish calendar. Ark/Synagogue and Hanukah Menorah will be printed on canvasses to hang on either side of the ark (the cabinet that holds the Torah scrolls). A third image, Rosh Hashanah, which represents the tree of life, will hang in the back facing the ark. In addition, all 12 images that were created for the calendar have been printed on ceramic tiles and will be used in another part of the building. continues on page 28

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STUDENTS MEET Gensler Honored ALUMNI AT ARCHI- at Reunion 2007 TECTURE CAREER Cornell’s 2007 reunion, held FORUM More than two dozen archi- on June 7–9, brought crowds tecture alumni traveled to Ithaca on April 14 to share career advice and insights with students and recruit new employees at the annual Architecture Alumni Career Forum. Sixteen architecture organizations were represented, from small startups to large firms. Participating firms included Datum Dezign (new firm of Michell Cardona ’04), Kushner Studios, Perkins Eastman, Raphael Vinoly, McCall Design Group, Haskell Company, Thomas Group, Robert A. M. Stern, Handel Architects, Hunt, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Ballinger, Cannon Design, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. The event also marked its firstever international element, with Murray O’Laoire, headquartered in Dublin, recruiting the day before the forum.

Professor Arthur Ovaska welcomed alumni and moderated the two panel discussions. Panelists were Tomas Alvarez (B.Arch. ’84), Heejoon Jo ’04, Yunhee Jeong (B.Arch. ’05), Justin Doro (B.Arch. ’05), David Tasman (B.Arch. ’04), Marissa Iamello (B.Arch. ’06), Adam Kushner (M.Arch. ’94), Kathryn Cogan (B.Arch. ’01), Lawrence Ng (B.Arch. ’78), Portia Elmer (B.Arch. ’04), David Hodge (B.Arch. ’01), Sargent Gardiner ’91, Dan Germain ’05, and Don Semler (B.Arch. ’80). Informal conversations and portfolio critiques bookended the panels, and 12 sets of recruiter interviews filled the second half of the afternoon and into the evening.AAP

01 AAP faculty members Pierre Clavel, John Forester, and Ken Reardon congratulate Norman Krumholz on his honor from the Cleveland Arts Prize Ceremony.

02 Sage advice: Leslie Chatterton met with students at the CRP Forum. Credit: William Staffeld.

03 Chuncheon, South Korea redevelopment design by John Reed.

04 57th Street Tower design by Peter Marino Architect.

05 Art Gensler.

of nostalgic alumni to every corner of the campus, and AAP was no exception.

M. Arthur Gensler (B.Arch. ’58) was the featured guest at AAP’s reunion activities. An exhibit in Hartell Gallery displayed images of selected architecture projects from the eponymous design firm he founded. Gensler is one of the largest, most successful design firms in the world, with 2,500 employees and offices in 28 cities around the globe. Winner of the American Institute of Architects’ Architecture Firm Award, America’s highest award to a collaborative design practice, Gensler also has won three Business Week Design Awards since 1998.

Alumni joined Dean Mohsen Mostafavi for the Dean’s Breakfast, also held in Hartell Gallery, on Saturday, June 9. The dean reported on new initiatives in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, and after his remarks, Arthur Gensler gave an informal gallery talk on selected projects of his firm.

Later that day, Mostafavi gave a presentation on AAP’s new building project, Paul Milstein Hall, designed by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture team. Alumni had ample opportunities to example the OMA model for the building, which is on exhibit in the Fine Arts Library in Sibley Hall.

Professor emeritus of art Jack Squier was honored at another AAP event, which took place in the Statler Hotel Amphitheater. Phil Handler (B.Arch. ’64, M.Arch. ’65) and Maddy Handler ’65 presented their video Simply Squier, a 45-minute documentary on the professor and sculptor.

AAP

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The work of Sarah Sutro (B.F.A. ’72) was featured in an exhibition of drawings and paintings entitled “Sunlight and Rain.” The exhibition ran in March 2007 at the District Gallery/Museum of Applied Arts in Belgrade, Serbia.

Ratan N. Tata (B.Arch. ’62) is a recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, on behalf of the Tata family. The medal is awarded every two years to families and individuals worldwide who have dedicated their private wealth to the public good, and who have sustained impressive careers in philanthropy. The Tata family donates between 8 and 14 percent of the annual net profits from its holding company, Tata Sons Ltd., of which Tata is CEO, to a variety of causes. In February, Ratan N. Tata was appointed to Alcoa’s board of directors, and in March, he was recognized by Barron’s magazine as one of the world’s 30 most respected CEOs. Rebecca Thompson (M.F.A. ’03) completed La Puerta, a rammed earth and bronze sculpture, in 2006. Commissioned by the city of Tucson, the piece represents a door of hopes and dreams, created to “embrace the fact that each person is a key to his or her community, and everyone’s dreams make a difference.” Two hundred individual keys, made by members of the community and cast on two bronze plates, were included in the sculpture. Each of these keys represents a unique personal story, captured in La Puerta: Community Art, a book that includes a description of the process. The book is available at Blurb.com.

Thompson is currently working on the tallest-ever rammed earth and bronze monolithic feature for a downtown project in Phoenix.

Sarah Trigg (B.F.A. ’95) showed a solo exhibit entitled “Daily Markings on the Face of the Earth” at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, NY, this spring. “Trigg’s paintings are inspired by the events and media stories of a particular time frame—a day, for instance—from which she draws information she then considers as raw material for her art,” writes Dede Young in the May issue of Hamptons Cottages and Gardens. For details, see www.sarahtrigg.com.

Jonathan D. Witten (M.R.P. ’81) has been elected to the Board of Selectmen in the town of Duxbury, MA. Witten serves as a lawyer with Daley & Witten law firm in Duxbury and teaches at Tufts University and Boston College Law School.

David Yang (B.Arch. ’06) received an honorable mention for his project DMZOO, in the competition for Pamphlet Architecture 29, Small Books with Big Ideas. The Pamphlet Architecture Series is published by Princeton University Press.

In May 2007 the Austin chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded Citations of Honor to four projects designed by McKinney Architects. Al York (M.Arch. ’92) is among the Austin firm’s principals.

Verizon Communications, employer of Magda N. Yrizarry (B.Arch. ’84, M.R.P. ’03), has been named one of Working Mother magazine’s Best Companies for Multicultural Women for the second year in a row. The article features Yrizarry, Verizon’s vice president of workplace culture, diversity, and compliance. She is responsible for strategic human-resource policies relating to the company’s diversity, ethics, and workplace programs.

Joe Zane (M.F.A. ’03) is the curator of a new show entitled “Pull My Finger” at the Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston. The summer 2007 show included work from Carl Ostendarp, a visiting professor of art at Cornell.

A wood sculpture entitled Semi-detached #15 by James Zver (M.F.A. ’69) was shown at the 2007 Juried All-Media Exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center in California this summer.AAP

KALAHER LEADS CREATION OF SIOUX CITY DESIGN PROGRAM The fall semester will mark the

opening of Design West, a new satellite program of Iowa State University’s College of Design in Sioux City. Nathan Kalaher (M.Arch. ’06), a designer with the Sioux City firm M+ Architects, spearheaded the effort to create the new design school.

Each semester 20–40 undergraduate and graduate students from ISU’s College of Design will live and study in Sioux City. One of the key aspects of the program as it evolves is the potential for interdisciplinary design-build projects. “Inserting design projects in the landscape of the city will be the gift that keeps on giving for both the community and the students,” Kalaher says.

Kalaher thinks that the region is a perfect learning environment for the students.

“When most people drive through Iowa, they think it’s all countryside, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he told Metropolis magazine. “Nearly all of the land has been designed by humans for agriculture. No other place offers such a saturation of design intervention on the landscape. If you rethink Iowa, it becomes a playground for design research.”

The new design school will be housed in an abandoned boiler plant that has remained largely vacant for over 70 years. The 7,800-square-foot building, which was built in 1890, will house studio space, a lecture hall, an exhibition hall, and offices. In renovating the plant, Kalaher wanted to balance the historic features of the building with contemporary touches. The original brickwork was left intact, but an elevator and a concrete staircase were added. Also, part of the first floor was removed to create an atrium near the windows, allowing sunshine to stream through the entire building.

“Throughout history the Sioux City community has been supportive of unique architecture and other urban infrastructures,” says Kalaher. “The Sioux City Great Places committee developed a vision for the future that was driven not only by a desire to reconnect segments of the city, but also to reconnect with the city’s design legacy.”

Kalaher co-chaired the local Great Places Committee, which received a $530,000 grant from Iowa’s Great Places program to help defray the costs of renovating the boiler plant.AAP 01

JOIN THE CAREER CONTACT & ALUMNI NETWORK School to work is a big leap— give students a hand! Share your experience with them by joining the online AAP/Cornell Career Contact & Alumni 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.

Visit www.aapcareer.cornell.edu, click Alumni, and follow the instructions. If you’re already on the network, please update your entry. You may also register to browse the network.

Interested in hiring Cornell architects, artists, and planners? At our website, click Employers for instructions on listing jobs and internships online through CornellTRAK. Our recruiting programs are also described there. E-mail your job descriptions to us, and we will forward them to students and recent graduates. Or just give us a call.

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

Let us hear from you!

Architecture, Art, & Planning Career Services M. Susan Lewis, Director Gail Babcock, 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 John Sullivan Jr. (B.Arch. ’36) —Dayton, OH; December 18, 2005 John H. Christiana Jr. (B.Arch. ’38) —Jamesville, NY; December 10, 2006 Nancy Blanche (B.Arch. ’47) —Rochester, NY; September 26, 2003 David F. Potter (B.Arch. ’48) —Boulder, CO; June 25, 2006 Eleanor Shane Goldfarb (B.F.A. ’54) —February 19, 2007; founder and president of the Shane Group Dorothy F. Meese (B.F.A. ’57) —Buffalo, NY; August 9, 2005 David M. Stainton (B.Arch. ’57) —Cranberry Isles, ME; July 31, 2006; architect; owner, Cranberry Island Boatyard Kenneth R. Millard (M.R.P. ’60) —February 20, 2007 Charles Rogers (B.Arch. ’60, M.Arch. ’62) —Gloucester, MA; August 12, 2007; designer of numerous college and university facilities as well as the U.S. embassy in Amman Donald D. Duncan (M.Arch. ’68) —Sedona, AZ; July 3, 2007; instrumental in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor renewal Paul C. Irwin (B.Arch. ’69) —Groton, MA; September 8, 2006 Dennis A. Rondinelli (Ph.D. ’69) —Hillsborough, NC; March 7, 2007 Nadim Hyppolite William (B.Arch. ’88) —Pétion-City, Haiti; April 24, 2007

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01 Design West, the satellite program of the Iowa State University’s College of Design. Renovation by Nathan Kalaher.

02 Waco Residence. Design by Al York.

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WILL PATERA B.Arch. ’08 Growdesic [Projection 008:016]——Growdesic is a variation of the octet-truss geodesic system developed by Buckminster Fuller for the atrium/exhibition space of the Ford Motor Company in 1953, in the attempt to maximize the latent but unexplored potentials of the integration of envelope and structure and their multiplication through outwards and inwards spherical projections. Its variegated surface topology and sectional variation enable a locally diversified performance of the surface-structure as a system of environmental control. Water is collected, stored, and redistributed through the structure, regulating the temperature and sun incidence into the large interior space.

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CORNELLUNIVERSITY COLLEGEof—ARCHITECTURE—— ART—PLANNING 129 SIBLEY DOME ITHACA, NY 14853–6701 aap.cornell.edu

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