AAP News 13

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News13 Full House

Message from the Dean AAP News is published twice yearly by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University, through the Office of the Dean.

College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853-6701 (607) 255-5317 aap_newsletter@cornell.edu Aaron Goldweber Rebecca Bowes contributing writers Daniel Aloi, Kenny Berkowitz, Rebecca Bowes, Vineet John (M.R.P. ’13), Aaron Goldweber, Karen Chi-Chi Lin (B.Arch.

'13), Haylee Madfis (M.R.P. ’14), Sherrie Negrea, Dana Yates design Studio Kudos copy editor Laura Glenn photography William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) distribution coordinator Sheri D’Elia cover Richard Meier's lecture brings a full house to Milstein Hall auditorium.

Robert Barker / University Photography editor

assistant editor

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© April 2013 Cornell University Printed on Lynx Opaque, a Forestry Stewardship Council stock. Printed

by Monroe Litho, Rochester, New York. Monroe Litho is certified by the Sustainable Green Printing Partnership and is an EPA Green Power Partner operating on 100 percent wind power.

I write these lines with a heavy heart. Within the span of just a few short days in February, we lost two members of the AAP community. Kevin Pratt, a much beloved and influential architecture assistant professor, died on February 19. A week later, we received the tragic news of the passing of URS student Joseph Quandt, class of 2015. As the AAP community came together to mourn these losses, the true bricks and mortar of the college became vividly clear: we are, first and last, a community of compassionate individuals. We hold strong positions, we work hard, and we are not immune from raising our voices at one another for values we hold dear. But you would have been very moved, as was I, to see AAP react as one unified body during this difficult time.

The focus of this newsletter is, in fact, our people. Although we experienced a lull in faculty recruitment during the economic downturn, I can now report spectacular faculty appointments in all three departments during the past year. In the last issue of AAP News we told you about Jeremy Foster joining the Department of Architecture, and Jeffrey Chusid joining CRP. To that list we now add Associate Professor Victoria Beard, who joined CRP with tenure; and Carl Ostendarp, a longtime visiting faculty member who is now on a tenure track as an assistant professor of art. Adding to the ranks of the tenured faculty via internal promotions are associate professors Michael Ashkin (Art) and Stephan Schmidt (CRP), whose profile we feature in this issue. These many appointments at various ranks address not only the need to ensure excellent future faculty, but provide an important demographic overlap with senior faculty members. Continuity and institutional legacy should not be overlooked, even as we evolve and shift our scholarly foci.

Our students continue to display extraordinary levels of accomplishment measured on an international scale, with intellectual ambitions that stretch the boundaries of the college disciplines. An inspiring example of this is Emily Greenberg, a stellar B.F.A. junior and Rawlings Presidential Scholar, who is pursuing a dual degree in English. Emily demonstrates the wealth of opportunity that Cornell offers an ambitious and expansive mind, and embodies the special type of self-aware, intellectually grounded, and creatively gifted artist that we believe represents the future of studio art.

This notion of creative scholars stretching the conventional limits of their field is, of course, nothing new to AAP, and so we augment this issue with the work of architecture alumnus Matthew Bannister, founder of the award-winning firm dbox, and current faculty member in our New York City program, where he teaches a seminar on visual representation.

Finally, the arc is complete when our distinguished alumni return to campus—as Richard Meier did this fall—to meet with students and faculty, discuss their own creative legacy, and prod the next generation of AAP students to go out and make their mark.

So while we are exceptionally saddened by the recent losses our community has suffered, I know that the people of AAP will continue the promise of those who came before.

Kent Kleinman Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning

Art department chair Iftikhar Dadi during fall semester’s M.F.A. crit in Tjaden Hall.

Spring 2013 2 News&Events

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2 Richard Meier Visit; James Siena/Chuck Close 3 Mellon Grant; Pratt In Memoriam; Faculty Hires 4 Milstein Hall Awards; Walker Library; Architecture Accolades 5 Textile Pavilion 6 Fall 2012 Speakers and Lecturers

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8 Profiles

8 Student Profile: Emily Greenberg (B.F.A./B.A. ’14) 9 Alumni Profile: Matthew Bannister (B.Arch. ’92) 10 Faculty Profile: Stephan Schmidt, CRP

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14 Student News

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14 HAUD Exhibition; CRP Interns 15 CUSD Bus Tour; AIANYS Awards 16 Studios: Rural America; NYC Waterfront

20 Faculty News

20 Digitized Planning Docs; Czamanski Death; Architecture and Petroleum

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23 Alumni

23 Dowdell; Fox; Hirsch; Katzen; Ragonetti

Artists Siena and Close Discuss the Craft of Image-Building

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Richard Meier Visits AAP In a whirlwind afternoon that included a gallery talk, a studio class visit, a building tour, and a public lecture, Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’56) returned to Cornell in October to reflect on a halfcentury career that catapulted him to the pinnacle of his profession.

Meier, whose iconic building designs include the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is the only Cornellian awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Since receiving the prize in 1984, Meier has been recognized with the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and awards from the Japanese and French governments, as well as the Royal Institute of British Architects.

“He’s a giant. We are all basking in the glow of his legacy,” said Dean Kent Kleinman. “For him to come back and share his life as an architect with the next generation of architects is really an incredible privilege.”

Meier’s visit began with a discussion of a facet of his creativity never before seen in public: his work in the medium of collage. At the exhibition titled Richard Meier: Artistic Conscience, in John Hartell Gallery, he discussed a displayed series of collages of ticket stubs, decals, and newspaper clippings produced in sketchbooks during his world travels.

“It’s a pleasure for me to share these collages with you. I usually don’t,” Meier told a group of 100 students and faculty at his gallery talk. “It’s a private thing that I do. My architecture is public. This is private.”

The colorful, spontaneous collages represent a sharp contrast with the ordered, geometrical consistency and stark whiteness of Meier’s architecture. Students repeatedly asked him about his trademark color choice throughout the day.

During a visit to an M.Arch.1 graduate studio class in Milstein Hall, Meier explained his insistence on a monochromatic style. “Architecture is about light. The whiteness reflects and

refracts the light,” he said. “Look outside at the beautiful autumn trees. There’s nothing architecture could do to be as beautiful as that.”

The studio Meier visited is cotaught by Assistant Professor Caroline O’Donnell, who was appointed the first Richard Meier Professor of Architecture in 2011.

O’Donnell had asked her students to produce two drawings of a building Meier had designed. They presented their drawings to Meier, and he offered feedback on their interpretations.

“It was daunting both for myself and the students, but Richard really liked the drawings and some of the ways the students had interpreted his process,” O’Donnell said.

Whitney Liang (M.Arch. ’15) presented two drawings of Meier’s design for Weill Hall, Cornell’s four-year-old building for the life sciences. Hong-Yeol In (M.Arch. ’15) said that having Meier visit the class helped him understand how the architect felt about his projects.

“Having a conversation with an architect for about five minutes is better than spending a semester reading about him,” In said.

During a tour of AAP with Kleinman, Meier said that Milstein Hall has “the kind of openness that fosters interchange among the students and faculty, so I’m very impressed. Other schools [of architecture] don’t really have the kind of openness and transparency that you have here.” Meier also visited the revamped traditional and digital shop facilities in Rand Hall.

Later in the day, Meier lectured to a capacity audience in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium. Augmented by dramatic photographs and renderings highlighting his firm’s work, Meier shared insights into decisions on the placement of buildings and the complicated interplay between the built form and the existing conditions of a site.AAP Sherrie Negrea

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“Nothing brings me more pleasure than looking at your work,” Chuck Close said to James Siena (B.F.A. ’79) during the Eli Broad Lecture, held December 5 at the Morgan Library in Manhattan. The remark came nearly an hour into the conversation between the two painters, who are longtime friends.

The evening’s conceit was unique: Each master artist selected works by the other, projected them on a screen, and offered a critique of the paintings. The conversation was hosted by Dean Kent Kleinman, and attended by a capacity crowd of 250 alumni and friends, and seen by dozens more on the Web. Kleinman said that structuring the event as a critique and exploration of image-making highlights the pedagogical approach central to arts education and practice.

“I like to think that by foregrounding the arts at Cornell, we are not just ‘updating’ our institutional profile, but tapping into a profound philosophy that understands the search for knowledge can be embodied equally in formulating an equation, designing a plan, or building an image,” he said.

Siena began by presenting three dozen Close paintings, etchings, and prints. The subject of each work was a human face executed in grid patterns of layers of ink or paint. For decades, Close has painted portraits and self-portraits in an era when contemporary art often dismisses the subject matter completely.

“This resolute devotion to process, to hand, mind, body, machine . . . is mapped onto portraiture, which is not the coolest thing in the art world,” Siena said, “. . . and somehow Chuck has made it his own and quite remarkable.”

The idea of process and craft, often shunned in modern art culture, was on full display by both artists throughout the evening. They revealed and discussed how a piece was made, with little concern that their openness reduced the power of the work. “[Art] is not demystified by showing how it’s done,” Close said. “Even the most abstract of art had a human being behind it.” By talking about how it’s made, he said, “it shows how human art-making is.”

Close presented a selection of about a dozen of Siena’s abstract paintings, all of which used color combinations and a systematic logic to generate them.

The system in place wasn’t always apparent.

“You know there’s a system, but it’s hard to find,” Close said. “It’s organic but there are surprises.”

3 3 1 Richard Meier: Artistic Conscience exhibit in John Hartell Gallery. Robert Barker / University Photography 2 Richard Meier (at left) and Kent Kleinman during Meier's artist talk in Hartell Gallery.

Robert Barker / University Photography 3 From left: Close and Siena. photo / Justin Suazo

While on the surface their work appears dramatically different, the artists avowed their beliefs in self-imposed constraints—a grid, a limited palette, a rigorous process. They said working within such limitations generates an expressive visual language while leaving behind the traces of how the work is made, thereby providing access points for viewers.

“We want to pull the viewers into an image, then we want to overwhelm them, then we want them to go away and come back in a sequence of reactions, not just a single, unitary reaction to it,” Siena said.

Echoing the sentiment, Close said, “Artists are orchestrators of experiences.”

One of the attendees, Shirley Shung-Suazo ’79, a classmate of Siena’s, said the artists “were very in the moment and free. I loved hearing the background of the pieces—that there are humans behind it. Process is unpredictable and it’s all about the possibilities. It inspired everyone in the room.”AAP Aaron Goldweber

Lindsay France / University Photography

$1.4 Million Mellon Grant Will Support Collaborative Studies in Urbanism The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1,462,000 to Cornell for a pilot program offering collaborative studies in architecture, urbanism, and the humanities.

The project’s two concurrent seminar series—Urban Representation Labs, dedicated to research on Cornell collections of urbanthemed materials; and Expanded Practice Seminars, dedicated to research on global urbanism through the study of contemporary cities—will be administered by the colleges of Arts and Sciences and AAP. Each seminar series will enroll graduate and upper-level undergraduate students from design and humanities majors.

Six contiguous terms of seminars from spring 2014 through fall 2016 will be followed by a final colloquium in spring 2017. The program’s oversight committee—AAP Dean Kent Kleinman; Timothy Murray, director of the Society for the Humanities; University Librarian Anne Kenney; and Stephanie Wiles, director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art—will convene planning meetings with faculty this semester.

“This program is intended to bring together design and humanities students and faculty to think deeply about the city and its many representations as a kind of grand text of human desire and aspiration,” said Kleinman, the project’s coprincipal investigator with Murray. “For this multifaceted program to succeed, we will seek the participation of urban scholars from across the humanities and the design arts and sciences.”

The project will leverage Cornell’s strong academic programs in the humanities and in architecture and urban design.

Both seminar series are conceived as “complementary yet distinct approaches to the integration of humanist studies and design methodologies”—a dual track promising “to yield significant lessons and provide important guideposts for future pedagogy,” according to the project proposal.

Initial planning meetings will seek to formalize 2013–14 seminar offerings; establish selection processes and criteria to appoint faculty; develop student selection criteria; scope and secure curatorial and archival support and logistics; coordinate communications and activities with collateral partners; and develop a website and print materials.

A digital tools staff person will work with the planning group to prepare workshop modules on key visualization tools and to support seminar faculty and students who may not be familiar with design methods and tools.

In fall 2013, the inaugural Expanded Practice Seminar theme will be identified by the planning group, the seminars announced, and students and faculty recruited and selected for the following spring’s seminar. Prospective faculty nominations will be solicited among internal and external scholars.

The first Urban Representation Lab theme will be identified by spring 2014, and students and faculty recruited and selected for lab seminars starting that fall. The process would continue for the next two yearly cycles.

Expanded Practice Seminars will be thematically aligned to an Expanded Practice Studio, a hallmark of Cornell’s graduate architecture curriculum that is “explicitly structured to address meta-issues in global urbanism that challenge narrow conceptions of design practice . . . sites are identified that embody a specific material/cultural issue under investigation,” the proposal states.

Student selection will be competitive and modeled on the Society for the Humanities’ selection process for its graduate fellowship program. Students will be expected to submit a brief research proposal for review by an interdisciplinary faculty panel.

“We are very honored by Mellon’s endorsement of this collaboration between the humanities and Architecture, Art, and Planning, which will provide the most innovative faculty and graduate students in the humanities with an opportunity to work in dialogue with their peers in architecture on the general topic of ‘cities,’ on which Society for the Humanities fellows have focused their research,” Murray said.AAP Dan Aloi

Kleinman Reappointed to Second Term as Dean Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, has been appointed to a second five-year term, beginning July 1, 2013. At the request of Provost Kent Fuchs and President David Skorton, the Cornell Board of Trustees Executive Committee voted to approve his reappointment on September 6.

“During his tenure, Dean Kleinman has been the driving force for AAP’s major initiatives, and his steady guidance is widely respected throughout his college and among the university’s senior leadership,” Fuchs said. “He is much valued for his artistic sensibility as well as his focus on the application of research to the solving of real-world problems.”AAP

photo / provided

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Assistant professor of architecture Kevin B. Pratt, noted for his research and expertise in sustainable design and for his enthusiasm and energy as a teacher and colleague, died at home of natural causes on February 19. He was 43.

Pratt joined the AAP faculty in July 2007, after a semester as a visiting lecturer in 2006. He taught courses in architectural design, building technology, environmental systems, and sustainable form.

“We are stricken to the heart by this loss,” said Kent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP. “Kevin was one of a kind, a whirlwind of creative energy and intellectual generosity. It is unfathomable that he should be taken from us at this stage in his life, and the college mourns his absence.”

Pratt had scholarly interests in renewable energy and the application of computational technologies in sustainable design, and was a fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF).

He and Program of Computer Graphics Director Don Greenberg led a multidisciplinary research group, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, devoted to developing new methods in building simulation and energy analysis. The group linked the Departments of Computer Science, Architecture, and Mechanical Engineering.

Pratt graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in architecture and earned an M.A. from the Environment and Energy Programme at the Architectural Association in London.AAP

News&Events

Architecture Professor Kevin Pratt Dies

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Victoria Beard Joins CRP Associate Professor Victoria Beard joined the faculty of CRP in January. Beard, a Fulbright Scholar, began her career in academia at the University of Wisconsin– Madison before moving to the University of California– Irvine, where she has been teaching and doing research for the past eight years.

Beard’s research focuses on the relationship between community-based planning and poverty in the Global South, and explores the intersection of collective action, social movements, transnational processes, and planning. She is teaching a course titled Planning and Poverty in the Global South this semester.AAP

Ostendarp Named Assistant Professor in Art Carl Ostendarp has been hired as an assistant professor on a tenure track in the art department, effective July 1, 2013. Ostendarp, who has been a visiting assistant professor since 2000 and is currently the director of graduate studies for the department, was awarded the position after a national search.

Focused on a painting practice that explores the continuing development of pictorial abstraction, Ostendarp has participated in 33 solo national and international museum and gallery exhibitions, and more than 180 group exhibitions. His work is represented by the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York City; Galerie Schmidt Maczollek, Cologne, Germany; and Carrol and Sons, Boston.AAP

News13 | Spring 2013

Awards for Milstein Hall Milstein Hall continues to garner recognition for its design, engineering, and construction.

In January, the OMA-designed building received an AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture, along with 10 other distinguished buildings. The jury noted that Milstein Hall is “a powerful parti with emphasis on transparency,” and the “exposed systems and relaxed social ambience tolerate and celebrate the creative clutter created by students.”

The systems at work in Milstein Hall contributed to the building being named Outstanding Project by the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations.

Robert Silman Associates—headed by a Cornellian of its namesake—provided the engineers for the building.

In addition, Milstein Hall was awarded LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The building received 40 out of 69 possible LEED points, scoring exceptionally well for its “innovation and design” and “water efficiency.”

Other recognition included being named educational building of the year by Arch Daily and one of the top 10 university buildings that “actually make you want to go to class” by Architzer.AAP

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1 Milstein Hall’s green roof planted in sedum.

2 Windows in Milstein Hall’s Stiller Arcade allow passersby to look into the auditorium. photo / floto+warner 3 The building’s steel structure during construction in spring 2011.

Architecture and Design Programs and Professor Receive Accolades

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AAP NYC Tours Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination On November 10, a group from AAP NYC received a private tour of the Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination, which is housed on the grounds of Jay ’77 and Eileen ’76, ’78 Walker’s home in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

The group, which included students, alumni, and Dean Kent Kleinman, received a personal tour from Jay Walker, who tailored the presentation for architects by bringing out some prized texts, including the original building plan for the Eiffel Tower, and leather-bound blueprints for the Palais Garnier Paris Opera House.

Other items viewed by the group included the Wicked Witch’s crystal ball from the Wizard of Oz, a napkin on which Franklin Delano Roosevelt scrawled his five-point plan for

winning World War II, a page from Gutenberg’s first Bible, a hand-painted print by Raphael of his paintings for the Pope’s personal quarters, fossilized dinosaur eggs, signed memorabilia from Apollos 11 and 13, and the firstever computer motherboard.

After the tour, Walker answered questions and invited the group to explore and handle the materials.

“Mr. Walker is so passionate . . . it was so impressive to see a man with such means and knowledge so dedicated to collecting and preserving moments of inspiration,” said Jason Freedman (M.Arch. ’13). “And the access he gave us to his collection was amazing; he allowed me to flip through a fourhundred-year-old book of hand-colored Egyptian plates as if it was yesterday’s New York Times!”AAP

photo / provided

Four Cornell architecture and design degree programs were ranked in the Top 5 in “America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools 2013,” published by DesignIntelligence (DI) in November 2012.

For the fifth consecutive year, AAP’s undergraduate architecture program was ranked No. 1 in the survey, which was conducted at midyear with the participation of professional practitioners, academic leaders, and students. AAP’s M.Arch.1 professional degree program ranked fifth, marking the first time it has been in the Top 5. Graduate degree programs in landscape architecture (CALS) and interior design (Human Ecology) ranked third and fourth, respectively, in their categories.

A survey of the most admired undergraduate programs among 133 architecture deans and department heads also placed Cornell at No. 1 “for its strong curriculum and outstanding students and faculty.” In a comparable survey of 122 interior design deans and department heads, Cornell’s interior design program was cited “for the high quality of research and graduates.”

In addition to the programs receiving top rankings, Caroline O’Donnell, assistant professor of architecture, made the DesignIntelligence list of the 30 Most Admired Educators, compiled by the DI staff with input from thousands of design professionals, academic department heads, and students.

“O’Donnell brings intelligence and is willing to challenge conventions,” the citation states. “She organizes her teaching and studios carefully, guiding students’ individual style and raising the bar of projects. She is a person who demonstrates continuous improvement and daily shows how professionals can grow and have more influence.”

Each year, DesignIntelligence ranks the top 20 architecture, interior design, industrial design, and landscape architecture programs.

“We try not to focus on specific rankings, but it is conspicuous that so many of our design programs are ranked among the very best in the country,” Dean Kent Kleinman said. “Design at Cornell is shaped by being in a research university rather than in an art or design academy. With unparalleled access to worldclass faculty in the design arts and well beyond, Cornell’s design programs are increasingly relevant, as they address the complex cultural, ecological, and technological problems facing global urban societies.” AAP

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Party Wall Wins MoMA/ PS1 Competition A steel and wood pavilion design by assistant professor of architecture Caroline O’Donnell was selected as the winner of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)/PS1’s 14th annual Young Architects Program (YAP). The pavilion, which uses sustainable materials donated by Comet Skateboards in Ithaca, will provide shade for visitors to PS1’s annual outdoor performance series in Long Island City this summer. O’Donnell holds the Richard Meier Professorship of Architecture.AAP

News&Events

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Textile Pavilion Can a building be constructed from thread? Assistant professor of architecture Jenny Sabin demonstrated the potential of soft textile-based architecture with a pavilion she designed using photo-luminescent, solar-active, and reflective threads; it was open to the public in New York City this past fall.

The project was commissioned by Nike, Inc. as part of the release of its Flyknit Collection, based on a new technology that uses machine-knitted fabric and eliminates many of the toxic glues in the manufacturing process. Nike began unveiling its Flyknit athletic shoes in April.

To showcase the new line, Nike launched an initiative called the Flyknit Collective and selected six architects, designers, and artists to create works inspired by the product’s innovative design. Besides New York City, the projects were located in Shanghai, London, Milan, Rio, and Tokyo.

“Even though Nike is working at the scale of a shoe, the same principles apply at the scale of a building, and that’s what I was interested in probing,” Sabin says. “I was interested in how the simplicity of knitting was coupled with the dynamics and complexity of the human body. One of the questions that we had was: Could we knit, braid, and weave buildings?”

Her myThread Pavilion in Manhattan provided an answer. Made from threads that changed color in the sun or glowed at night, the 500- to 600-squarefoot pavilion offered a range of sports activities for the public until it was dismantled in November. The pavilion opened in September at Nike Bowery Stadium, 276 Bowery.

Sabin, whose research investigates the intersection of architecture and science, worked with two AAP graduate students on the project: James Blair (M.Arch. ’13) and Simin Wang (M.Arch. ’13). Over the summer, they developed digital models and drawings for the design at Sabin’s architecture studio in Philadelphia.

Teams working on projects for the other cities developed different interpretations of the Flyknit technology. The architect who designed the project for Shanghai is Cornell alumnus Arthur Huang (B.Arch. ’01), the cofounder and managing director of MINIWIZ, a Taiwanese company that uses recycled material to develop materials that are incorporated into buildings and consumer products.AAP

photos / NIKE

News13 | Spring 2013

Aldo Aymonino Jane Benson

Chris Kraus

Ken Meter

Fall 2012 Lectures Chuck Close & James Siena

B.F.A. ’79

Todd Saunders

IĂąaqui Carnicero

Francesco Garofalo

Moyra Davey

Worrasit Tantinipankul

Andrew Higgott

Fiona Cousins

David Driskell

Donna Fathke

Giancarlo Mazzanti

John Hong & Jinhee Park

Vishaan Chakrabarti

Joel Sanders

Raffaella & Stefano Sciarretta

Leo Villareal

Marlon Blackwell

Mike McCoy

Ben Nicholson

Michael Likosky

Rolf Pendall

Richard Meier

B.Arch. ’56

Rä di Martino

Laura Wolf-Powers

June Yap

Sheila Pepe

Giovanna Rossato Meier photo: Robert Barker / University Photography | Villareal photo: Chris Kitchen Photo and Design

Undergrad Emily Greenberg Finds Satisfaction and Synergy in Pursuit of Dual Degrees On the first sheet of paper, there’s a pencil drawing of an airport lobby. It could be anywhere or nowhere, with a thin scattering of passengers, long rows of plastic seats, and windows that reveal a formless landscape. By the second page, the people have mostly been erased, leaving only their outlines, and by the third, little remains except for the linoleum floor reflecting the ghostliness around it.

Welcome to Emily Greenberg’s world.

“When I was in Rome, I became really interested in memory and erasure,” says Greenberg (B.F.A./B.A. ’14), whose erasure drawings echo an ancient Roman practice called damnatio memoriae, where popes and emperors ordered the faces of traitors removed from coins, paintings, and sculptures. “In my very first class in Rome, we went to a church where all records of one of the antipopes had been erased.

After I chose to pursue that in my final paper, those ideas about memory and erasure kept finding their way into my work.”

That work, now that Greenberg has returned to Ithaca after spending a semester abroad with the Cornell in Rome program, is about finding a middle ground between her two majors—fine arts and English, in the College of Arts and Sciences. In English, she’s been writing short stories that explore the possibilities of interactive, nonlinear narrative; at the same time, she is making art that invites people to create their own experience by interacting with work that’s somehow incomplete, inaccessible, or out of order. With On Sunday, Speaking of War, she erased the speech bubbles from a Calvin and

1 Greenberg’s On Sunday, Speaking of War (2012), screen print with screenprinted stickers, 12" x 17".

2 dbox’s branding for COOKFOX and a rendering of the firm’s design for 510 West 22nd Street in Manhattan.

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Hobbes comic strip, asking participants to substitute comments by public officials about the war in Iraq, such as “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” and “Free people are free to make mistakes.” In House of Cards, viewers relive the housing bubble and burst, as they turn the pages of a pop-up book, erecting and demolishing a series of buildings as Greenberg interweaves public and private narratives, including her own as the child of real estate developers.

“From the time I was a really, really little kid, I’ve been writing and drawing, and I always knew that’s what I wanted to do, even if I didn’t feel sure it was ever going to happen,” says Greenberg who is completing her fourth of an anticipated five years at Cornell. “The fall of my sophomore year . . . things really started to click.”

By then, after she’d been formally accepted into the dual-degree program and begun her first creative writing class, an introductory art seminar helped her bridge those two creative sides of herself.

“That class was really crucial, because for the first time I felt my creative and scholarly interests combine,” says Greenberg. “Class after class was exposing me to contemporary artists whose work was global, theoretical, historical, and conceptual. It was an intellectual approach to making art, rather than just a process of learning techniques, and I finally felt a real convergence in my work.”

In the two years since, her art has gotten bolder, more experimental, more focused on what she calls “the politics of memory.” A Little History of the 2000s, a five-foot-long drawing, juxtaposes pen and ink drawings of Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Kim Jong-il mingling with Mark Zuckerberg and Harry Potter. In Prairie of Prax, a projector casts animated photographic imagery of helicopters and border patrols onto a hand-painted acrylic Seussian landscape.

Coming from Memphis, where she had little exposure to contemporary or conceptual art, Greenberg

wasn’t sure what to expect in Ithaca.

“During my college search, I felt very conflicted,” she says. “On the one hand, I wanted to receive proper fine arts training, but I couldn’t see myself going to an art school. On the other hand, I wanted to pursue my more scholarly interests in literature, philosophy, history, and creative writing. I couldn’t see myself giving up either one, and it felt like anyone could fit in at Cornell.”

It’s turned out well. She’s made friends with students from lots of different majors and colleges, and found mentors in Senior Lecturer Michael Koch, English, and Associate Professor Elisabeth Meyer, art. The two instructors helped Greenberg secure the Pauline and Irving Tanner Dean’s Scholars Summer Project Grant, which funded her study at Wells College’s Book Arts Center; and the Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholarship, which is helping guide her ongoing explorations of new materials and new media.

Greenberg has started shaping a senior English thesis around hypertext, participatory narrative, Twitter fiction, and 19th-century serialized novels. It’s too early to know what she might do after graduation, but she would like to work in publishing or at an arts organization. Eventually, she hopes to continue on to grad school and possibly pursue a career in academia.

Whatever path she takes, what does she expect to remember about her time at Cornell?

“Going to Rome is definitely going to be a big one,” says Greenberg. “Sledding down Libe Slope. Just being in this place where I could fully devote myself to art and writing and studying, surrounded by people who were constantly exposing me to new ideas, and not having to worry about anything else.”AAP Kenny Berkowitz

Profiles

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Matthew Bannister: Leading an Emmy Award–Winning Branding and Creative Agency to New Heights

After earning a master’s degree in architecture from Princeton, Bannister contacted one of his friends from Cornell AAP—James Gibbs (B.Arch. ’95)—with the idea of starting a business. Operating out of a Manhattan design company’s closet, the pair called in another friend from AAP, Charles D’Autremont (B.Arch. ’92), set up two computers in their cramped office on East 7th Street, and created a company they called dbox.

“We had a vague idea that we were going to explore 3D computer graphics somehow in relationship to architecture,” Bannister recalls.

“There was no business plan, we had very little equipment, and we had no money.”

What they did have were drive and determination, and dbox quickly earned a reputation for excellence in architectural visualization. At a time when most architects were rendering their designs in watercolor, dbox became one of the first companies to specialize in photorealistic 3D illustrations and animations of architectural work.

“I had a solid art background, and this technology was essentially a new paintbrush,” Bannister explains. “We pushed each other—and the technology itself—to find more effective and powerful ways to visualize and express unbuilt architecture.”

It wasn’t long before some of the top architectural firms in the country were gravitating to dbox for its rich and bold imagery.

Since the company’s inception, they have produced major works for international architectural emissaries, among them Foster + Partners, Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, OMA, Jean Nouvel, and Richard Meier.

The company’s success in computer-generated imagery led to opportunities in related marketing services and dbox soon evolved into a full-scale branding and marketing agency, focusing on brand strategy, graphic design, film, web and interactive design, social media, and—true to its roots—the design of branded architectural spaces. As the workload and scope of projects increased and its staff grew to 54 employees, dbox moved to a series of larger offices in Manhattan and is now located on Leroy Street in the West Village.

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photo / provided

As a student at Cornell in the 1990s, Matthew Bannister (B.Arch. ’94) became intrigued with the idea of presenting architecture in threedimensional computer images when he and two friends began beta testing a new generation of software. At the time, architecture was just beginning to embrace 3D computer graphics, and Bannister was at the forefront of bringing the field into the digital age.

To better serve its international clients, dbox opened its first office outside the U.S. in Taipei in 2006, followed by another in London in 2010. By this summer, it will have opened its fourth and fifth offices in Buenos Aires and Miami.

As an outgrowth of its work producing animated computer graphics, dbox has recently ventured into new creative outlets that have attracted critical acclaim. Last September, the company received an Emmy Award for its work developing the computer graphics and branding for the six-part miniseries, Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Danny Forster for the Discovery and Science channels.

Sitting at the ceremony at Lincoln Center, Bannister remembers that when dbox was announced as the category winner, he was surprised and overcome with emotion. “Having been nominated, it was not like I didn’t believe we stood a chance,” he says. “I was just honored for dbox to be nominated and to be there on that night with my colleagues.”

The Emmy capped nearly a decade of work by dbox on the World Trade Center site. Since 2002, dbox has been responsible for showing the world what the future of the site will hold. The firm created the visuals for the winning master plan designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, as well as images and animated works at key benchmarks while working with other architects involved in the project.

In the miniseries, which aired in 2011 as part of the tenth anniversary commemorating the events of September 11, 2001, dbox created two types of visual strategies for the documentary: photorealistic representations of the completed buildings and animations that represented a physical architectural model. “A great deal of footage in the program is computer-generated imagery of what the World Trade Center site will be upon completion,” says Bannister.

“Our goal is to give the world a window into the future, to raise optimism about the rebuilding, and in a sense make it a ‘reality’ before it actually is.”

In the past few years, as the direction of work at dbox has shifted to branding and graphic design, dbox has developed a special focus on architects and architectural firms. Among those who have hired dbox to rebrand them are Calatrava and Robert F. Fox Jr. (B.Arch. ’65), a partner in the New York City firm, COOKFOX. Rebranding an architectural firm can involve changes to its logo and visual identity, color and typography choices, print collateral, web and

interactive offerings, copy tone, and, in some cases, the business name itself. For Bannister, architects may need to rebrand themselves for the same reason other businesses often rethink their identity. The rebranding may be necessary due to changing market conditions, a need to differentiate in a crowded market, changing personnel, or simply to more accurately reflect the services it provides.

“The way an architectural practice represents itself to its potential clients is critically linked to the type of work it will attract,” Bannister says. “If a firm doesn’t get this part of the equation right, they will be drawing buildings they don’t want to build instead of building buildings that they do. The very successful architects naturally understand this. There is as much to learn about branding from characters like Mies and Corb as there is design.”

Another recent project dbox has embarked upon is a branding and advertising campaign for the developer Harry Macklowe and California-based CIM. Together they are building a luxury tower on Park Avenue that is projected to be the tallest residential structure in the Western Hemisphere. At 1,395 feet high, the building will be taller than both the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center (not including the spire).

This is not simply a branding project, but a “branded experience,” as Bannister calls it, including a Hollywood-quality film, an app, website, lifestyle magazine, music, and a dbox-designed exhibition gallery to display the project’s intentions. “These homes will be the most expensive real estate in the U.S.,” Bannister says. “The tower won’t be completed until several years from now, so we will be selling these homes from the brand experience we have created.”

Bannister, along with his colleagues at dbox, has taught at AAP NYC, using his office as a classroom.

Whether it’s redesigning a website or producing a computer graphic of a new skyscraper, Bannister thrives on the changing pace of work fueled by his creative energy. “What I loved about my architecture education is how multidisciplinary it was,” he says.

“I’ve created a company where I can be a photographer, a filmmaker, an interface designer, and still be an architectural designer and thinker. That’s refreshing to me. I get to wear many of these hats every day of the week.”AAP Sherrie Negrea

News13 | Spring 2013

Profiles Stephan Schmidt’s Broad-Based Approach to Urban Planning The field of city and regional planning is constantly expanding, both professionally and academically, to address the concerns of a burgeoning global urban population. As new issues, concerns, and values are included in the field, research on urban areas has expanded to explore these issues from an international perspective. Stephan Schmidt, a recently tenured associate professor in CRP, is interested in the many social, economic, and political factors that affect decisions around land use and environmental planning.

Although he started out his career by studying open space preservation in New Jersey for his dissertation, Schmidt has reconfigured his research agenda and now explores planning and policy decisions affecting urban areas under different cultural, political, and geographic contexts around the world. This broad-based approach affords him the opportunity to take on diverse projects that he expects to shift constantly throughout his career.

Schmidt spent the fall 2012 semester on sabbatical in Germany, studying urbanization patterns across Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along with researchers at the University of Stuttgart, Schmidt looked at patterns of urban sprawl in the former East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. The goal of the research: to determine how public policies and investments have affected the urban growth rate and suburbanization of cities in these former Socialist countries.

While urban sprawl is a common phenomenon across North America and even Western Europe, the cities of Central and Eastern Europe have historically been more compact. But due to a number of convergent factors—including demographic shifts, changing socioeconomic conditions, economic globalization, and public policy—the landscape is changing. And as they expand outward and low-density land use becomes more common, these cities must deal with a variety of issues and challenges normally associated with

Western cities, including increased energy and land consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and air and noise pollution.

“The research suggests that post-Socialism countries have had divergent patterns of urban sprawl, and while there have been numerous case studies, these ideas have never really been empirically quantified,” says Schmidt. “For the first time, though, we were able to compare and contrast urbanization patterns across several countries and over time.”

Using geographic digital data sets, Schmidt and his colleagues were able to track urbanization patterns since the fall of the Iron Curtain. For instance, in the years immediately following the German reunification in 1990, eastern Germany experienced rapid suburbanization. This transformation was largely due to government subsidies and a rush of federal investment. In Poland, meanwhile, metropolitan areas suburbanized later, and the growth was mostly fueled by market forces and foreign investment patterns.

Suburban sprawl, however, isn’t the only change that Germany has witnessed in recent decades. In another research project, Schmidt is investigating the development of German bioenergy villages as part of the country’s transition to reduce dependence on nuclear-produced energy and foreign oil. In a bioenergy village, a combined heat and power plant uses locally produced bioenergy, such as manure, wood, and agricultural crops, to generate electricity that is sold to local utility providers. The excess heat is then used to heat the entire village through a heating network.

Schmidt is interested in the interaction between federal policy and subsidies to support the creation of bioenergy villages, and the local-level planning and decision-making needed to implement and manage them. Advocates must deal with several social, economic, and political obstacles, including addressing residents’ concerns over cost, worries about the consistency of heat during cold winters, resistance to switching heating systems and leaving the grid behind, and navigating the minefield of local politics in small rural villages.

Despite these challenges, though, Schmidt says bioenergy villages are part of a larger energy transition in Germany—one that is keenly focused on decentralizing and localizing energy production.

Indeed, well before the national government announced that it would close the country’s nuclear plants by 2022, a move that was prompted by the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, Germans had already begun to rethink all things energyrelated. According to a report published by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, German renewablebased energy capacity accounted for 17% of gross electricity consumption and 9.5% of final heat energy consumption in 2010. The goal is to increase renewable energy production so that it accounts for 35% of the electricity production by 2020.

Finding innovative planning and policy solutions to address the challenges facing urban areas in an

era of climate change is a theme in one of Schmidt’s other research projects: a study of urban farming practices in Tanzania. During the last 20 years, urban agriculture has come to be seen as a viable solution to many challenges in urban Africa. These include, among others, the limited availability of fresh vegetables in urban centers, creating economic opportunities for rural migrants, and residents’ need to supplement their incomes.

“Urban farming plays an integral role in the dietary, economic, and cultural lives of residents in rapidly growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa,” says Schmidt.

Supported in part through a research grant from the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, he is looking at the role of co-operatives and local organizations in addressing the concerns of urban farmers. For example, urban farmers usually don’t own the land they cultivate, and lack access to important resources, including seeds, fertilizer, clean water, and bank loans. Additionally, urban farmers must deal with ongoing marketing, storage, and distribution issues.

Through his research, Schmidt hopes to identify some of the gaps that exist between public policy toward urban agriculture and cooperatives in creating a more stabilized and supportive environment for urban farmers.

Like many of his colleagues in CRP, Stephan Schmidt, with a wide-ranging research agenda, hasn’t shied away from embracing the discipline of planning in its broadest sense. And the flexibility that the field supports will lead him to dramatically different projects in the years to come.AAP Dana Yates

Fiction Image from a poster promoting Brian Dunn’s (M.F.A. ’13) recent exhibit Fiction.

Crowd Gaby Wolodarski (M.F.A. ’13), Mingle Monster/ Dark Side of the Room (2012), acrylic on cardboard with steel weights, dimensions vary.

Student Notes An exhibit by Elizabeth Corkery (M.F.A. ’13) appeared recently in New York City. Galerie, a storefront installation of five works that each consisted of multiple, modular, handprinted panels, appeared at 303 10th Avenue in New York City in late October. Corkery also received a grant from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust to spend a month in the United Kingdom this past summer. As a dual U.S./Australian citizen, Corkery was eligible to apply to the Australian-based organization, which offers grants to “assist early career artists of exceptional talent to undertake professional development, usually overseas.”

An exhibit titled Exploring Fall Creek and Cascadilla Glen Trails and Gorges featured work by students in associate professor of art Greg Page’s Introduction to Print Media class. The exhibit was on display at the Cornell Plantations’ Nevin Welcome Center during November and December. The students created photographs, photo-positive lithographic plates, and combinations of a traditional lithographic stone and woodcut relief prints as a way of comparing today’s gorges to what they looked like 100 years ago.

As part of an independent study during the fall semester, Christian Higgins (B.S. URS ’14) worked with Chemung County Transit in Elmira to produce a transit corridor study on a bus route that runs from downtown Elmira to Arnot Mall

in Horseheads, New York. The study, which included a survey conducted by Higgins, analyzed ways to increase ridership along the route.

Quinn Kelly (B.S. URS ’14) spent the summer as an intern for the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he focused on bicycle transportation planning. He moved an on-street bicycle infrastructure plan from the public input stage through approval by the city council and into the creation of final design.

Katie MacDonald (B.Arch. ’13) and Kyle Schumann (B.Arch. ’13) recently received a Cornell Council for the Arts grant to rework their furniture collaboration, Wavepier, and build it on the Cornell campus this spring. Wavepier originally won an honorable mention in the Hernesaari Urban Furniture Competition in Helsinki, Finland, last spring, and appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of AAP News.

Fifth-year CRP Ph.D. student Scarlett Zuo presented “Vehicle Lifetime Trends and Scrappage Behavior in the U.S. Used Car Market” at the Third International Conference of Regional Science Association International (RSAI) in Beijing, China, and the Ninth World Congress of the RSAI in Timisoara, Romania. She also attended the Association of Environmental Resource Economists’ Second Annual Summer Conference in Asheville, NC. AAP

CRP Interns: Summer 2012 “Professionally focused summer internships are an integral piece of our programs. Dozens of placements are made each year, and are often supported through a matching grant program.

The internships provide opportunities for our students to explore their fields of interest, and learn from the unpredictability of “real world” or non-academic planning. West coast or east coast, in the U.S. or abroad, our students return to campus with eye-opening experiences, ideas for projects and new directions of study, and a firmer sense of what their career options really involve.

See below for several examples of last summer’s projects.”

Professor John Forester, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of City and Regional Planning

HAUD Exhibition Work from the fall 2012 History of Architecture and Urban Development (HAUD) Graduate Practicum taught by Mary Woods, the Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architecture, was on display at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art this winter. The seminar and exhibit, both titled Mirror of the City: Imagery from Rome to Detroit, 1450–2012, explored how imagery shapes, brands, and archives cities,

including Rome, Paris, Havana, New Orleans, New York, Delhi, Detroit, and others, from the 1450s to the present day. Inspired by Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940, another exhibit on display at the museum at the same time, the seminar looked at how repeatable images have shaped urban aspirations and nightmares, as well as realities. AAP

Student Awards

CRP Graduate Student Receives USDA Fellowship

Pamela Mikus Graduate Fellowship Rafia Usmani (M.R.P. ’12) Gibian-Rosewater Award Xin (Scarlet) Meng (B.F.A. ’13) Earl R. Flansburgh Merit Award Seijin Na (M.Arch. ’14) Granted for the 2011–12 academic year

Ph.D. candidate Becca Jablonski, CRP, has been awarded a $75,000 fellowship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create a methodology for assessing the economic impact of local food systems on rural communities. Granted by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the two-year fellowship is designed to develop the next generation of scientists who will lead agriculture into the future.

Jablonski is testing the methodology with several case studies of local food system initiatives in New York state.

The results of her research, which is part of her dissertation, could help state, local, and federal policy makers craft an agenda for rural economic development.AAP

Birk, Ellington, and Springer. photo / provided

Three students spent the summer in Palestine. Eva Birk (M.R.P. ’13) interned with the Barrier Monitoring Unit (BMU) of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which documents the impacts of the West Bank Barrier wall. Birk’s work is helping to form a learning alliance between BMU and Cornell, and also implement action research tools for their projects. Amy Ellingson (M.R.P. ’13) worked with the Riwaq Center, a Palestinian architectural conservation organization in Ramallah. As part of a protection plan that Riwaq is drafting, Ellingson’s work included survey studies of the historic center of Ramallah’s old city. Haden Springer (M.R.P. ’13) worked for Bayti Real Estate Investment Company, the developer of the first planned city in Palestine, called Rawabi, located about 10 kilometers north of Ramallah.

As a planning intern under a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant at the Piedmont Triad Regional Council (PTRC) based in Winston-

Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina, Desmond Corley (M.R.P. ’13) did research to create and implement a selfassessment for sustainable practices for each member jurisdiction in a 12-county region. Corley’s work also included scenario testing using CommunityViz and Envision Tomorrow, and creating a regional retail food environment index.

Three URS students— Christian Higgins (B.S. URS ’14), Jack Newton (B.S. ’13), and A. J. Velarde (B.S. URS ’14)— interned with Metro North in New York City.

Higgins’s internship focused on collecting head counts and data on multiple positions, and working on budgets.

Newton worked for the long-range planning department on a number of projects, including conducting an economic impact analysis study on the capitalization effects of the Second Avenue Subway Line on surrounding real estate prices. Velarde headed her own project, planning bike racks at

Metro North stations.

Catherine Jung (B.S. URS/B.A. History of Art ’13) interned with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, managing collections in the Asian Arts department. There, she photographed 300 ceramic artifacts for the museum’s website, contributed notable acquisition descriptions to the museum’s biannual newsletter, and led tours for visitors. On her tours, she often chose to focus on animals in art, which mostly consisted of sculptures, as well as the representations of women in art, which

covered a wider variety of mediums.

Catalina Marshall (M.R.P. ’13) worked at the Capital Projects and Planning Office of Cornell University.

Marshall worked with a team to put together a complete street proposal for the Cornell campus.

The project involved multimodal integration catering to vehicles, transit, pedestrians, and bikes, and addressed current issues in campus transportation, landscape, and public spaces.

Jennifer Pierce (M.R.P. ’13) worked for the International Council for Local Environmental

Initiatives (ICLEI), an association of local governments for sustainability, at their Biodiversity Center in Cape Town. She prepared a toolkit for mainstreaming biodiversity plans across local governments and an analysis of 12 local biodiversity strategy and action plans. Pierce also gave a presentation at ICLEI’s Urban Nature Conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and served as a representative for ICLEI at “Rio+20: United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.”AAP

Students

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CRP Ph.D. Grads Land University Positions CRP Ph.D. candidate Lesli Hoey (M.R.P. ’06) has taken a job as an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Hoey’s research and teaching interests focus on food systems; in particular, ways in which policy planning, implementation, and evaluation strategies facilitate or limit the development of equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems.

Also recently hired is Ph.D. candidate George Homsey, who will start this fall as an assistant professor, tenure-track, in the Department of Public Administration at Binghamton University. Homsey will lead the newly formed sustainable communities master’s degree, and initiate a series of case studies examining the policy-making processes and best practices of the most sustainable places. AAP

CUSD Gets on the Bus

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A group of M.R.P. students and Bob Balder (B.S. URS ’89, M.R.P. ’93), executive director of AAP NYC, visit the Astoria Houses in Long Island City as part of the 2012 CRP New York City Workshop.

The annual workshop is designed around real-world planning problems and involves a mix of classes, city tours, client meetings, and fieldwork.

This year’s workshop projects included a 10-year master plan for the Harbor School on Governor’s Island, an economic development piece for an arts district in Long Island City, an urban design project for the Design Trust for Public Space, a community development project in Brownsville for the Department of Health, and an energy piece for the Expotential District One Lab in downtown Manhattan.AAP

1 From Tran’s Augmented Shores: 135th St. West Harlem Artificial Shores and Community Gardens.

2 photo / provided rom left: Fanfan Zhao 3 F (M.R.P. ’13); Tomas Moller Holtkamp (M.R.P. ’13); Steven Wang (M.R.P. ’13); Sungyon Kim (M.R.P. ’13); Hunter Zupnik (M.R.P. /M.L.A. ’14); Inna Kitaychik (M.R.P. ’13); Catalina Marshall (M.R.P. ’13); Tim McManus, Senior Urban Planner at New York City Housing Authority; and Bob Balder. photo / Vineet John (M.R.P. ’13)

For two weeks in November, a group of eight Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD) leaders traveled across the country on a bus; not a Greyhound or Volkswagen, but a custom-wrapped, 100 percent carbon offset vehicle promoting student involvement with Greenbuild 2012, the world’s largest sustainable design expo and conference.

The Students@Greenbuild tour was the culmination of months of work that began last April, when Rick Fedrizzi, president and founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, spoke at Cornell about the importance of sustainability in the built environment. After spending some time with a group of CUSD students, Fedrizzi extended an invitation to attend Greenbuild 2012, scheduled for November in San Francisco. Several weeks later, Fedrizzi contacted CUSD again; this time with the idea of participating in a cross-country bus tour with the goal of creating healthier, more sustainable schools and campuses.

“Fedrizzi was really impressed with our enthusiasm and unique interdisciplinary approach,” says Karen Chi-Chi Lin (B.Arch. ’13), one of the leaders of the Greenbuild team. “He thought we were the ideal group to tackle this type of project.”

The CUSD team, partnering with the Center for Green Schools, the U.S. Green Building Council, as well as several other colleges and universities across the country, was involved in all aspects of planning and executing the tour. Lin and Kai Keane ’14 designed the Students@Greenbuild logo; Lin and Jesse

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McElwain ’13 drafted press releases; and Keane created the bus wrapper and a series of videos documenting the trip.

The tour kicked off in Ithaca on November 5, with activities organized by CUSD, including tours of the university’s lake source cooling plant for students from Lansing High School, and remarks from Fedrizzi.

The group then traveled across the country picking up students from other participating universities, and hosting educational outreach events at elementary, middle, and high schools about all aspects of sustainable design, including water conservation, jobs in the “green” industry, and resource management.

“Students are working on one of the most visible youth-driven projects to promote healthy, sustainable schools our nation has ever seen,” says Fedrizzi.

Once at the conference, a video of the tour produced

by Keane was presented at the opening session.

“The video was shown immediately after Edwin M. Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, spoke,” says Lin. “Forty thousand people saw it!”

CUSD students who participated in the bus tour project include Jeremy Blum ’13, Aylin Gucalp ’14, Keane, Jared Landsman ’14, Tim Lenardo ’14, Sarah Levine ’14, Lin, Katie Mayer ’14, McElwain, Rachel Silverman ’14, and Princess Swan ’15. They were joined by students from Penn State, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champagne, Kirkwood Community College, Colorado State University, University of Utah, and Weber State University.AAP

Architecture Students Receive AIANYS Awards

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Natalie Kwee (B.Arch. ’13) and Anh Tran (M.Arch.’14) are recipients of 2012 Student Awards from the American Institute of Architects New York State (AIANYS).

Their work, along with nine other winners, was displayed at the AIANYS convention in September, in Saratoga Springs.

Kwee’s winning project, Stockholm Library Extension, is a “study in combining complex forms with architectural intent, working mainly with 3D digital modeling programs and digital fabrication.” Tran’s Augmented Shores: 135th St. West Harlem Artificial Shores and Community Gardens “attempts to address the two principle characteristics of the waterfront at the . . . former waste transfer station in New York City: site inaccessibility and water contamination.” Each received $500 in prize money.

According to the AIANYS, the Student Awards were “established in 2007 in order to enrich and reinforce design exploration among students; to establish a stronger relationship between the profession and the academy; and to celebrate, nurture, and recognize the future leadership of our profession and society.”

The other 2012 recipients hail from Columbia University, The Cooper Union, New York Institute of Technology, Parsons The New School for Design, Rochester Institute’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.AAP News13 | Spring 2013

Rural Pockets

Vernacular architecture, rural America, and ornithology were at the heart of two architecture option studios held in the fall semester.

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Nicholson/Lowe Avian life was a focal point for Antediluvian Architecture, led by Visiting Critic Ben Nicholson and Visiting Lecturer Taylor Lowe. In that studio, students first dissected and analyzed an autonomous form of architecture: a bird’s nest. The exercise gave students experience in structure, mechanics, morphology, ecology, and aesthetics. Phase two of the studio involved a trip to New Harmony, Indiana, where the same skills were applied; a trip that engaged high and low culture, and further examined the microcosm of design.AAP

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Studios

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Blackwell/Hascup Spiritform Revival studio, taught by Marlon Blackwell, Baird Visiting Professor, and Professor George Hascup, centered on a piece of the Arkansas Delta, home to the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, thought to be extinct. Using the area as an example of a site rich in ecological and cultural history, despite the present-day economic depression and inequity, students created a constructed terrain for a nondenominational chapel and ecological retreat set along the bayou—a fitting place for those searching for the often called Lord God bird. The semester began with a presentation by Tim Gallagher, editor-in-chief of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, about the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and was punctuated by a trip to Arkansas so students could engage the site themselves. AAP 1, 2 Renderings of Mauricio Vieto’s (B.Arch. ’13) Arkansas Delta chapel.

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Vieto’s wing study that inspired the skin of his final chapel design.

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Erin Pellegrino’s (B.Arch. ’14) multipurpose hunter's blind for the Nicholson/Lowe studio.

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Alison Nash (M.Arch. ’14) in review for the Newtown Creek studio. photo / Nancy Borowick

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Water, Water Two AAP NYC M.Arch.1 architecture studios focused on rapidly changing conditions on the water’s edge in New York City. Designing in the face of climate change and sea-level rise added another layer of challenge for the students—particularly underscored by the arrival of Hurricane Sandy in October when students saw that the work they were doing had an immediate significance, and concepts that had been theoretical became concrete.

Dilip da Cunha + Anuradha Mathur

Harbors x Beaches Studio

Birds of a Feather Intricate drawings of a chapel that also serves as a bird-watching venue are on display at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology this spring. The exhibit, titled Birds of a Feather, will feature work from Spiritform Revival studio (see above), and is cocurated by Mark Morris, visiting associate professor of architecture.

Says Lab Director John Fitzpatrick, “The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a center for interdisciplinary science and training, but also emphasizes communicating about nature to the world at large. For centuries the natural associations between art and ornithology have fertilized creativity in both arenas. The Cornell Lab is proud to host this exhibit as an exceptional example of creative interplay between aesthetics and science.”AAP

The water’s edge in the east Bronx was the focus of the Harbors x Beaches expanded practice architecture studio, led by visiting critics Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha in the fall. Informed and inspired by a mid-semester trip to Mumbai, students were charged with identifying a territory and conceiving a program in the Pelham Bay area of the New York City borough.

Students began the semester with individual investigations of the Pelham Bay area through field documentation and archival research.

They constructed “photoworks” and “plots” to develop a reading of site as well as a relational ground between places, practices, and ecologies in Pelham Bay and Mumbai. After an initial pinup, the group traveled to Mumbai for a week of fieldwork that was designed to experience a range of ecologies, economies, and occupancies along Mumbai’s waterfront.

According to da Cunha and Mathur, the trip to India exposed students to a radically different approach to waterfront land use—one filled with improvisation, complexity, and diversity—that quickly informed their studio work back in New York City.

“A lot of the assumptions that we take for granted in the U.S.—land-use typologies, standards, regulations—they all get shaken when you’re in a place like Mumbai,” says Mathur, professor of landscape architecture at PennDesign. “We weren’t trying to shock them, but we wanted them to rethink their initial approach in light of the trip.”

“Hurricane Sandy played into the process,” says da Cunha, who is an adjunct professor in landscape architecture at PennDesign. “In the face of devastation and rising waters, it was doubly important that the students build a sense of resilience into their projects.”

Da Cunha and Mathur contend that the studio’s open-ended site and program selection gave students the flexibility to find avenues for this resiliency that were at times inspired by what they saw in Mumbai.

“The students really took the lessons of Sandy, combined with what they experienced in Mumbai, and were able to absorb them into what they were doing. We didn’t want them pressured by sea-level rise as a problem—we wanted them to be able to design an infrastructure that accommodated its complexity,” says Mathur.AAP

Timothy Bade, Martin Cox, Jane Stageberg

Fluid Urbanism

Newtown Creek—the often crossed but often neglected Superfund waterway in Brooklyn—was the site for the Fluid Urbanism studio taught by visiting critics Timothy Bade, Martin Cox, Jane Stageberg “We’ve been interested in New York City’s industrial waterfront and the future role within the city for some time,” says Cox. “It gets at many current urban issues: infrastructure, transportation, sustainability, the future of industry. The kind of architecture that happens as a result of these forces is often overlooked; we wanted to give the students an experience that was out of the ordinary.”

Manhattan has long been dependent on the industry near Newtown Creek, says Stageberg.

And with the city’s Vision 2020 plan calling for public access to waterways and the preservation of industrial land use, there are new mixed-use relationships to be explored.

Students were assigned a precisely defined program—a 92,000-square-foot industrial incubator combined with community space—sited on one of six preselected locations along the creek. Students worked to find a way of marrying public access and industrial uses while ensuring inclusion of amenities for both populations as a way of thinking

about a new model for including industry in the heart of the city.

“We recognized that what we were asking them to consider is incredibly complex,” says Bade. “So we gave them something hard to work against in order to jumpstart their projects. Then we gave them the ability to challenge the program so we could relax the criteria at times.”

Stageberg says students successfully explored the nature of land and how it’s often constructed.

“Students looked at boundaries, sculpted the line between land and water, and thought about the process of change over time and how the building sits on the land—especially now that water levels are rising,” she says.

The relevance of their design challenge was also seen during the studio’s trip to The Netherlands, where they saw firsthand a society, culture, and pattern of urban development along a water-based landscape.

“Seeing the working waterfront . . . it really changed their way of thinking,” says Cox. “The whole country is a work of design and engineering.

We wanted to look at not just architecture but infrastructure and urban development.”AAP

News13 | Spring 2013

Bend Sameera Razak (B.Arch. ’14)

Faculty Notes GARDEN CITIES OF THE PANAMA CANAL

Iftikhar Dadi, associate professor and department chair, art, was part of a panel at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, titled “Talking Art,” in September. The sessions were focused on a specific set of questions examining the geographic, historic, and conceptual frameworks that might be applied to building a collection of art from the Middle East as a distinctive focus of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

An article titled “Spectral denivelations: la mémoire du rail and topographical excess at the Jardins d’Éole,” by Assistant Professor Jeremy Foster, architecture, was published in the spring 2012 issue of the Journal of Landscape Architecture. Foster also recently delivered two lectures: “‘Gardens on the Edge of the Wild’: Landscape Aesthetics, Garden Making, and the Cultivation of Indigeneity in Early 20th Century South Africa,” an invited lecture at the Ithaca Garden Club in October; and “Archaeology, Aviation, and the Topographical Projection of Architectural Modernism in 1940s South Africa,” at the “Theoretical Currents II: Architecture and Its Geographic Horizons” conference, at Lincoln University in the U.K. in April.

George Frantz, visiting faculty in CRP, recently won an American Planning Association New York Upstate Award for his Agriculture and Farmland Protection Plan for the town of Nichols, New York. The plan includes ways to safeguard existing farmland, and also encourages the economic development of upstate farms to make them more competitive on a regional and international scale.

The plan is now being promoted by the New York State Department of Agriculture as a model for similar communities.

An article by Taylor Lowe, visiting lecturer in architecture, was published in Harvard University’s Sensate Journal. “The Story of The Story of Tongdaeng: A Tale of Unspeakability and Thai Politics” appeared in the December issue. Lowe also had a project completed and deployed in Bangkok: Modern (C)art is a noodle street-food cart that expands into a 10-person stadium seating theater with a 16-person restaurant adjacent to it. In addition, Wetropolis, a project Lowe managed for S+PBA in Bangkok, was nominated as a finalist for the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity.

The project is a prototype community that presents a possible response to the problem of the rising sea levels and the rapid sinking of the capital city of Bangkok.

Visiting Assistant Professor Stephanie Owens, art, had a paper accepted at the MutaMorphosis 2012 conference held in Prague in December. The paper, titled “Certain Uncertainty: Clouds, Cosmologies and the Scale of Transformation,” which will be published with the conference proceedings, was written in conjunction with Owens’s postdoctoral research on network subjectivity and

postrepresentational art as part of the University of Plymouth’s Centre for Media, Art, and Design Research in the U.K. Two panoramic photographs by Barry Perlus, associate professor of art, were selected for inclusion in Stone Canoe (Vol. 7), a journal of arts and ideas from upstate New York that is published annually

by University College of Syracuse University. The photos were also featured in an exhibition at the Community Folk Art Center in Syracuse in January and February 2013. Perlus was also a runner up in Creative Quarterly’s professional photography category for Volume 29; his work appeared in the winter issue of the magazine, as well as on the journal’s website.

This past year, Professor Emeritus Roger Trancik, CRP, lectured on urban design at four schools of architecture and planning in China (Wuhan, Tongji, Tsinghua, and Chang’an). He also gave the 2012 Mary Kim McKeown Memorial Lecture in Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon.

Professor Mildred Warner, CRP, was an invited panelist at the “Smart Cities World Expo” in Barcelona in November. The Expo is a new initiative of cities from both developed and developing countries aimed at creating new, integrated infrastructure systems that use GIS, social networking, and other technologies to reduce greenhouse gases and promote efficiencies. Warner spoke on a panel addressing the challenges of system governance. Warner was also invited to China in October, where she met with CRP grads Zhao-Jing Huang (M.R.P. ’08), who is working on environmental planning, urban redevelopment, and the arts in Beijing; Zhilin Liu (Ph.D. CRP ’07), now a professor at Tsinghua University; and Dehui Wei (Ph.D. CRP ’11), the lead planner on a new eco-city being built on the coast. While there, Warner gave guest lectures at Tsinghua University’s third annual international conference on public policy and management, and at Tongji University in Shanghai. AAP

Newly Digitized Documents Shed Light on Activists’ Planning Efforts in the 1970s Through a major digitization effort from Emeritus Professor Pierre Clavel, CRP, and Cornell University Library, a snapshot of dozens of progressive cities at a crucial moment in American history is online for the world to see. The new digital collection, which includes materials from the “Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies,” provides a glimpse into the minds of progressive advocates at a seminal moment in the mid-1970s.

“The conference represented an outpouring of energies, ideas, and projects from activists who sought redistributive policies and more open government, to be achieved through practical measures that could get majority support,” Clavel says.

The newly digitized material is comprised of “readers,” bound packets of documents ranging from scholarly journal articles and government documents to newspaper stories and even private letters, created for national and regional meetings. Volumes from conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1975, and Austin, Texas, in 1976, are available online as a digital collection.

“So many different topics, like energy, health, jobs, and economies are compiled into a single, coherent source with these readers,” says Evan Earle, collections specialist in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, who spearheaded the project at the library.

Clavel, who retired from Cornell in 2010, digitized the papers himself. The library then split the articles into separate files and converted them to text files so that they would be searchable via Google and the library’s website.

“The readers contain the potential for a lot of research and historical background that links closely to major movements happening today,” Clavel says. Two of his own books are based in part on research from these conference proceedings, and he noted that the readers serve as a kind of “prequel” to his own scholarship.

Physical materials from additional cities, among them, Berkeley, Boston, Burlington, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Madison, and Santa Monica, are included in the library’s larger archival collection, Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning, which is available in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. AAP

LA CIUDAD JARDIN Y EL CANAL DE PANAMA

Garden Cities Together with Kurt Dillon (M.R.P. ’06) and photographer Sam Sweezy, Roger Trancik, emeritus professor of city and regional planning, published the exhibit book Garden Cities of the Panama Canal in November. The project was sponsored by AAP’s Clarence S. Stein Institute.

The book, which includes a forward by Professor Robert Fishman, University of Michigan, features a collection of photographs and narratives that examines the presence of the Garden City/New Town movement in Panama, and explains how these Canal Zone garden cities were also pioneering attempts to adapt the garden city idea to tropical conditions.

Photographs in the book originally appeared in an exhibit in John Hartell Gallery in March 2007. To receive a complimentary copy of Garden Cities, contact aapalumni@cornell.edu.AAP

Professor Emeritus Stanislaw Czamanski Dies at 94 Stanislaw Czamanski, professor emeritus of city and regional planning, died in August at age 94, in Israel.

Czamanski was a professor at Cornell from 1966 until his retirement in 1988.

A world expert on economic and industrial development, Czamanski led the preparation of and participated in a multitude of urban and regional development plans. He was the first to formulate the concept of competitive industrial complexes. His book, Regional Science Techniques in Practice, is considered a classic in the field. He served as deputy director of the United Nations Development Programme for Asia, and as adviser to a variety of governments, including Iran, Brazil, and Canada.

In 1972, Czamanski—along with professors Walter Isard, Barclay Jones, and Sidney Saltzman—organized the graduate regional science program under the administrative auspices of the city and regional planning department.

The Stanislaw Czamanski Papers, 1942–1990 are held by the Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.AAP

The Petropolis of Tomorrow: Architecture at the Center of the Petroleum Industry The intersection of urbanism, infrastructure, design, and the petroleum industry is the focus of work being done

by Visiting Critic Neeraj Bhatia, architecture.

Bhatia’s fall option studio, Oil Endpires, was the second phase of an ongoing project that examines cities enabled by the resource extraction industry. These continually emerging cities, which Bhatia terms Petropolises, have rarely been designed using any long-term planning or design. Bhatia hopes to change that.

Phase one of the Petropolis project, titled Floating Frontiers, took place at Rice University during the spring of 2012. The project aimed to develop a new type of water-based urbanism focused on the floating cities that emerge during offshore oil extraction. Work from the project won first prize in the Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development, selected from 422 registered students representing 173 universities across the country.

Oil Endpires, phase two of the project, focused on a megaport being designed and developed by the petroleum industry on the coast of Brazil. The studio took on the rethinking and designing of a “company town” for five to ten thousand oil workers. The group examined how the postoil city or, oil endpire, should be conceived and investigated, and how this city should be designed to account for a symbiosis between politics, economies, ecologies, and the postoil globe.

“Because we are working on projects that are led by the petroleum industry, we are often perceived as being ‘pro-oil,’” says Bhatia. “But what I want students to think about is how to design for the postoil era that is an eventuality. Architecture may not be able to change all of the negative impacts of current methods, but I believe we can have a role that ameliorates and improves the end result.”

As part of the studio, Bhatia arranged a three-part lecture series on the topics of infrastructure and urbanism. The lectures, given by Luis Callejas from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Martin Haettasch from Syracuse University, and Mason White from the University of Toronto, were position pieces designed to address the work of the presenters within a larger disciplinary pursuit.

For more information, visit petropia.org.AAP

Faculty&Staff

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8,000 Square Feet of Possibilities The AAP Shops have expanded to include the entire first floor of Rand Hall—encompassing 8,000 square feet of analog and digital fabrication equipment and a generous annex space for hand tool use and project glue ups. The space-use planning was led by Frank Parrish, senior manager, in collaboration with Chris Oliver, metal and wood tech assistant; Danny Salomon (B.Arch. ’11), digital fabrication assistant; Rich Jaenson ’88 (M.L.A. ’90), facilities director; Steve Yaros, facilities assistant; and Peter Turner, assistant dean.AAP

’03

Banana Joe Zane (M.F.A. ’03) has exhibited his work in Houston, Boston, San Francisco, New York City, and Ontario, Canada. He has an upcoming show of drawings at Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston.

Put a Banana in Your Ear, epoxy resin, glass eyes, faux fur, silk, felt, metal, 24" x 22" x 14".

From left: Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, Ragonetti, and Denver City Councilman Chris Herndon. photo / provided

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’04

Katzen Overseeing Major DC Infill Development Brook Katzen ’02 (M.P.S. Real Estate ’04) is the development manager for JBG’s newest project in Washington, DC’s NoMA district. The development and investment management firm plans a phased build-out of 2 million-square-feet of new construction, which will include office, residential, and retail space, along with a hotel already under construction. Katzen anticipates that construction on one of the residential buildings will be underway by the beginning of 2014.

According to Katzen, the project– dubbed Capitol Point—embodies many aspects that drive JBG’s development strategy, including diverse product types with a focus on urban infill and transit-oriented development.

“JBG is market-focused in the DC metro area, which is seeing an increase in population and density with 1,000 people moving in every month,” says Katzen. “Most of my projects are in NoMA, which is the fastest growing submarket in the city, and is ideal for JBG since it’s right on a Metro subway line and offers zoning that allows for a mix of uses.”

Katzen says that Washington, DC has the second busiest transit system in the country, and that its use and growth is influencing decisions at JBG. “The Metro system has changed the city for the better,” says Katzen. “It’s guiding some of our investment decisions—we like to invest and develop in close proximity to existing and proposed Metro stations. Understanding the influence of transportation infrastructure on the market is important to our success.”

Katzen is staying connected with Cornell and the Baker Program in Real Estate.

He and JBG recently hosted 40 Cornell real estate graduate students as part of their capstone project focused on the Capitol Point site.

He also sees the wisdom of the Baker Program being co-administered by AAP and the School of Hotel Administration.

“Professionally, I draw as much from my experience in CRP as I do from my time in the Hotel School,” says Katzen. “Versatility is critical to success in this industry. It’s not just finance skills that are important—it’s equally important to understand planning, design, engineering, law, and how cities generally function.

I spend as much time thinking about placemaking as I do about cash flows and capitalization rates.”AAP

Reconfiguring Denver’s Landscape Thomas Ragonetti ’71 (M.R.P. ’73) is currently working on a number of high-profile projects central to Denver’s public/private infrastructure. The sites, which include the city’s baseball stadium district (Coors Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies), football stadium district (Sports Authority Field, home of the National Football League’s Denver Broncos), and the 107-year-old National Western Stock Show which is the largest in the U.S. and so-called Olympics of stock shows, all involve condemnations of significant portions of the respective properties for the city’s ever-expanding light rail system. In each case the condemnations are not merely the opportunity for a monetary reward, but rather call into question facilities planning, long-term use, and site configuration, as well as complicated intergovernmental planning and finance arrangements.AAP

photo / provided

photo / provided

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Alumni

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Dowdell Recognized as Leader in Service and Design Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06) was named to the inaugural Public Interest Design 100 list published by the well-respected blog, PublicInterestDesign.org, founded by John Cary. The list “seeks to honor many of the diverse, passionate people at [the] intersection of design and service.”

Dowdell is the founder of NOMAtters, the annual service project of the National Organization of Minority Architects, and principal cofounder of the Social/Economic/Environmental Design (SEED) network. SEED, with its belief that design plays a vital role in critical community issues, provides tools—the SEED Network, SEED Evaluator, and SEED Certification—that guide design professionals toward community-based engagement with design practice.

According to the SEED website, “These tools support a public-interest methodology that is increasingly recognized as an effective way to sustain the health and longevity of a place or a community as it develops over time.”

The concepts of SEED will soon be put to use by Dowdell’s own firm, Levien & Company, which has just been awarded the Military Park Revitalization project in downtown Newark, New Jersey. Dowdell will be serving as the project manager for this transformative development.

Dowdell also serves on the AAP Advisory Council.AAP

News13 | Spring 2013

image / COOKFOX

Alumni ’65

Bob Fox and COOKFOX Look to Harness the Power of Difference

photo / provided

“Our goal is to make a difference.”

That’s the most succinct way Bob Fox (B.Arch. ’65) states the mission of his firm, COOKFOX. Known internationally for their design of the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park in Manhattan—the first LEED Platinum certified commercial skyscraper— COOKFOX takes on a range of projects with only one requirement in mind: They must be able to fit into the firm’s green ethos.

“We’re focused on how people and buildings use energy, and how we can design our buildings to use less energy and encourage people to do the same,” says Fox. For one current project, Fox has gone right to the (energy) source: the privately funded repurposing of a decommissioned coal-burning station, the Footprint Power cogeneration energy plant, in Salem, Massachusetts. The plant design is currently in schematics and working its way through the public approval process. The new, natural-gas-fired,

630-megawatt plant will serve as a backup to offshore wind farms and use a rapid-start system to reach 80 percent of its effective power within 10 minutes; it’s expected to run 60 percent of the time. The cogeneration technology employed by Footprint Power addresses one of the fundamental concerns about energy creation: it’s usually only 30 percent efficient— meaning 70 percent of the energy put into it is wasted.

“Our plant will be much more efficient and much less polluting—by many orders of magnitude.”

Fox also sees a social benefit to Footprint Power.

“Often, underprivileged neighborhoods get stuck with the sewage treatment plants, waste facilities, and polluting power stations,” he says. In Salem, the 62-acre coal plant will be replaced with the cleaner and safer 22-acre plant—and 40 acres of remaining land will return to public use.

Reflecting on the simple mission of COOKFOX, Fox says, “Certainly with the power plant in Salem we’re going to make a difference.”AAP

A few weeks after his graduation, Oren Hirsch (B.S. URS ’09) headed to Jerusalem for a “gap year.” Little did he know that three-and-a-half years later he would still be living and working in the city as a GIS analyst for the Jerusalem Transportation Management Team (JTMT), developing and implementing transportation initiatives within the city and the surrounding metropolitan area.

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Hirsch Works on Jerusalem Transit Planning

His “gap year” gave him time to study Jewish religious texts, take Hebrew classes, and intern with Jerusalem Municipality’s Planning Policy Unit, working on a project to predict and analyze the potential growth of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods through 2030. Near the end of his planned time there, the JTMT position presented itself, and he applied. He was so doubtful that he would get the position that he moved back to the U.S. before JTMT even had a chance to offer him the job. But by the fall of 2010, he was back in Jerusalem as a GIS analyst.

Funded by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Ministry of Transport, JTMT is involved with the planning and construction of the Jerusalem light rail system (which opened its first line in August 2011), a network of bike lanes and bike paths throughout Jerusalem, and a ring highway around the city.

This steady stream of projects has kept Hirsch quite busy. The new light rail line has dramatically affected the bus network in the city, resulting in constant updates in GIS. He is also responsible for the development and installation of new signage at each of the affected bus stops, and the creation of Jerusalem’s first new official bus map issued in over 15 years.

Most recently, he has been working with the longterm planning unit, using GIS to analyze who could be served by light rail and bus rapid transit lines that are currently in the development phase.

“This can greatly influence the character of the city. I am curious to see what impact my analyses of the future line proposals have on the direction those projects take,” says Hirsch.

All of these projects require an in-depth understanding of the neighborhoods, something that Hirsch has worked hard to accomplish quickly. “Work has taken me to every Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem,” he says. “And I’ve been to some of the Arab neighborhoods on other occasions, so I feel that I now know the city in a way that even some longtime residents do not.”

Hirsch says that his daily interactions in the city have been greatly facilitated by the knowledge he gained in Professor John Forester’s course, CRP 2010, People, Planning, and Politics in the City. He says, “Professor Forester’s class made me more aware of how listening to others is a critical part not only of the overall planning process, but also it is simply a valuable life skill. . . . because of the political situation here, every project that we work on and every decision we make has political undertones, even if that isn’t the intention. For example, my boss and I had a fairly long discussion once about whether to use the Arabic or Hebrew name of a neighborhood on the new bus stop signage.”

Even with his busy work schedule, Hirsch still finds time to pursue his personal interests. An avid cyclist, he has participated in three, 300-mile rides through the region to raise funds for the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which brings Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, and North American students together to study environmental challenges facing that area of the world, under the premise that nature knows no boundaries.AAP

image / COOKFOX

drawing / Vinayak Portonovo (B.Arch. ’17) and Kevin Mah (B.Arch. ’17)

First-Year Studio:

Site [Body]/[Armor] Architecture At the start of their initial design studio, first-year architecture students engaged the interplay between analysis and synthesis as a creative process by taking objects designed to protect various body parts, measuring and transcribing data based on their own bodies, and then drawing the objects based on this data. Through this exercise, their bodies performed as the site, as the armor performed as the architecture.

Instructors: Associate Professor Val Warke and Visiting Associate Professor Jim Williamson Teaching Associates: Stephen Clipp (B.Arch. ’09), Michael Jefferson (B.Arch. ’11), Suzanne Lettieri (B.Arch. ’11), Yeung Shin (B.Arch. ’12), and Jessica Tranquada (B.Arch. ’12)

Cornell University 129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853-6701 aap.cornell.edu