AAP News 16

News16 Cloud Stage r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 1

8/28/14 8:25 AM

Dean’s Message 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 aapcommunications@cornell.edu Aaron Goldweber Rebecca Bowes contributing writers Daniel Aloi, Kenny Berkowitz, Rebecca Bowes, Aaron Goldweber, Sherrie Negrea, Stacey Shackford design Studio Kudos copy editor Laura Glenn photography William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) distribution coordinator Sheri D’Elia editor

assistant editor

Berndnaut Smilde (back cover) combines an intricate set of fog machines with photography to create a temporary cloud in Milstein Hall. cover

© September 2014 Cornell University Printed on Rolland Enviro 100 Satin, a Forestry Stewardship Council stock.

Printed by Brodock Press, Utica, New York. Brodock Press is a member of the Forest Stewardship Council and the EPA’s Green Suppliers Network.

This fall we mark two important facilities upgrades to better support our academic programs. We cut the ribbon on a remodeling of the third floor of East Sibley Hall into studio space and faculty offices. This project is a careful, tactical treatment of an extraordinary space of historic importance in the life of AAP, and represents a design philosophy where the patina and material integrity of the 1887 structure is retained where possible, reinforced where needed, and replaced only where necessary.

We are adopting a similar approach as we initiate the design for the new Fine Arts Library on the top floors of Rand Hall, a 1911 structure with sturdy bones, utilitarian dignity, a certainly weathered exterior, and a remarkable survival instinct. You would be right if you discerned a leitmotif in these two projects: Rather than gutting or building anew, we are appropriating, tweaking, tuning, re-visioning, and working creatively with the fabric of the past to recalibrate our resources to best serve our future endeavors.

A similar trend, what might be termed a critical recycling of received materials, can be detected in some of the recent scholarly work of our faculty. Associate Professor Jeffrey Chusid’s recent award-winning publication Saving Wright focuses on the reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House. How, asks Chusid, does one theorize and then practice preservation when working with a landmark whose principle innovation is also a fatal structural flaw? The forthcoming edited volume by Associate Professor Medina Lasansky—previewed in this issue—revisits the Renaissance canon by placing it in dialogue with contemporary modes of consumption and appropriation, revealing the intellectual blind spots of Renaissance studies while casting new light on popular culture. In a forthcoming publication, Designing the American Century, Associate Professor Thomas J. Campanella promises to upend the “demolition artist” paradigm embodied so infamously by the figure of Robert Moses by foregrounding the role of two urbanists—whose names, Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano, will be familiar to Cornellians—in shaping major aspects of mid-century New York City during the Moses regime. Campanella’s research examines now-familiar facets of the city—the London Plane trees that populate many parks; the hexagonal pavers so common on the ground plane; the cantilevering Brooklyn Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights—to show the durability, intelligence, and beauty of the Clarke/Rapuano contributions during the 1930s.

It is surely not coincidental that designers and scholars are finding intellectual and creative value in what were previously considered throwaway materials and marginal ideas. There is a new interest in the flip side of grand narratives, in looking more closely at the trimmings left behind in the fashioning of high culture, and appreciating the patina that comes with recycled goods. This is not the heroism of high Modernism nor the cynicism of post-modernity, but a creative and critical response to an era characterized by broad access to information, increasingly leveled hierarchies, competing authorities, global consciousness, and a willingness to embrace the complexity and messiness of everyday life.

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

6

4

1 Rand Hall under construction, as published in Cornell Alumni News on November 1, 1911.

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 2

9/4/14 1:06 PM

Fall 2014 2 News&Events

2 R enovated Third Floor of East Sibley; Chusid Book Wins Award 3 Grants Further Environmental Policy Research; AAP Connect Architecture Career Forum; Akcan Joins HAUD; Inaugural Mellon Seminar 4 Cloud Artist 6 Spring 2014 Lectures and Exhibitions 7 Cornell 2014 Biennial Preview

8 Profiles

8 F aculty: Thomas J. Campanella, CRP 9 Alumni: Wolfgang Tschapeller (M.Arch. ’87) 10 Student: Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15)

13 Folio

13 Book Preview: The Renaissance

14 Students 6

14 Schoolhouse Haiti; Association, Volume 6; Eidlitz Winners 15 Cornell Team Wins 2014 Ed Bacon Competition; Conference Looks at Fiscal Stress in Upstate Cities; Thumbnail 16 Students at APA Conference; 2013–14 Student Awards

2

20 Faculty&Staff 4

15

20 Ostendarp Murals in London; Hookway, Simitch/Warke Publish Books 21 Dustin Jones Joins CRP; Perlus Wins Einaudi Seed Grant; Christopherson Becomes First Woman to Chair CRP

11

22 Alumni

14 r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 1

20

21

22

22 Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80) 23 URS Grad Takes On Collective Farming Project in Tanzania; Alumni and Students Tour NYC Galleries; Khan at Skowhegan Residency 24 Building on Opportunity: The Cassell Family of Architects

8/28/14 2:19 AM

photo / University Photography

G E P

Tw fro tu Ag Co

photo / Naho Kubota

Renovated Third Floor of East Sibley Opens

East Sibley’s third floor has gone through several iterations over recent decades. When the College of Engineering moved out of Sibley Hall in the late 1950s, the College of Architecture used the space initially to house architecture design studios, and then the Fine Arts Library. The library was moved to Rand Hall in 2012.

“The library needed to move for several reasons,” says Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP. “It was one piece of the master plan for Milstein, Rand, and East Sibley halls that we have been executing since Milstein Hall opened in 2011.” That master plan has involved moving faculty offices, architecture student studio space, and the Fine Arts Library into various temporary homes in Rand and Sibley. With the completion of this renovation, all architecture students will have studio space in either Sibley or Milstein hall.

“You can understand why we call our master plan a dance chart,” says Kleinman.

Sibley’s designation as a historic building played heavily into the approach to the project. “Adaptive reuse is a large part of our urban future and what

photo / University Photography r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 2

we teach at AAP,” says Kleinman. “We took the time to consider preservation versus reconstruction versus new construction, and whether architectural authenticity resides in the material itself or in the design and specifications. We asked questions such as, ‘If you replace a piece of damaged wood with the same species of new wood, has architectural authenticity been respected?’ and ‘Is the patina of age and use part of the historic condition? Glass slumps over time; should replacement glazing artificially replicate the slump to feign an appearance of old glazing?’ These are conceptually interesting and aesthetically stimulating questions.”

The exterior restoration work, especially the replacement of the original windows, demanded particular care. All 39 double-hung windows were replaced with materially and operationally precise replicas that were custom-crafted by a master carpenter, but with energy-efficient, insulated glass.

Other pieces of the space were renovated instead of replaced. The original pine floor, marked by decades of use, was retained with visible patching and minimal

Book on Frank Lloyd Wright House Wins International Award A book chronicling the history of a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles, and the struggle to preserve it has won a prestigious award from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH).

Saving Wright: The Freeman House and the Preservation of Meaning, Materials, and Modernity (W. W. Norton), written by Jeffrey Chusid, an associate professor in CRP, received the SAH’s 2014 Antoinette Forrester Downing Award for an outstanding publication devoted to historical issues in the preservation field. “[Chusid’s book] is a landmark study in the field of architectural history and historic preservation,” says the committee commendation. “Framed within a rich and vibrant historic context, Chusid’s work explores the genesis of the house’s design, its setting, the interactions between clients and architect, and how the unusual structure . . . was assembled.”

Built in 1925, the Freeman House was an experiment by Wright to design a new type of architecture for the middle class, for modern America, and

resurfacing. The original wood attic structure remains legible, but new structural interventions were added to address a critical thrust problem at the walls where the roof joists had been severed in the past.

One marked change to the space is the removal of two shear walls that divided the otherwise open space into three cells. A passageway was cut into one wall, and the second wall was completely removed and replaced with a cable-braced, steel moment frame. “[The frame] allows for an uninterrupted flood of daylight, and a generosity of space,” says Kleinman.

“The architects have placed these bold interventions in dialogue with the historic material and scale of Sibley, investing the space with a temporal dimension and offering students a pedagogical experience as they live and work in the studios.”

Creative use of space permeates the new design.

The walls of the bathroom pod and emergency stair exit are clad with recycled plastic and can be used as pinup space, and a 15-foot-wide corridor-cumcollaborative zone between the faculty offices provides an area for interaction and socialization between students and faculty.

“The third floor is moving back to a much-loved use,” says Kleinman, “while simultaneously paying homage to an original historic structure, and providing a contrast to the distinct vocabulary of Milstein Hall.” AAP

photo / provided

The third floor of East Sibley Hall has a new look that will serve an old purpose. Funded through a gift from Frances Shloss (B.Arch. ’45) and designed by New York City–based architects LEVENBETTS, the renovated space that opened at the beginning of the fall semester features 11 faculty offices, crit and pinup space, and studio desks for 60 architecture students.

wi Co Ins Un Ho Int

for the Los Angeles foothills. The “textile-block” construction of the home used 16-by-16-by-3-1/2-inch-thick concrete tiles reinforced by steel bars weaving in between the blocks.

Wright designed three textile-block houses in Los Angeles in the 1920s, which marked a transition from the Prairie School style to “a more modernist language,” says Chusid, who once lived in the Freeman House and was its director and restoration architect.

The 2,500-square-foot house was built for Harriet and Sam Freeman, an avant-garde couple who lived in the home for 60 years. The University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, which had previously been given the house

by Harriet, took control of the property following her death in 1986. Chusid opened the structure to the public shortly thereafter, as well as using it as a venue for classes and student research.

In addition to structural problems stemming from deterioration of the handmade blocks over the years, the house was extensively damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. A $2.4 million stabilization project was completed in 2001, but the house is still undergoing restoration.

“Receiving this recognition from SAH was immensely gratifying; especially coming at the annual meeting held in Austin, where I taught for many years, in front of so many colleagues and friends,” says Chusid.

The SAH award committee was chaired by Kim Hoagland and included Christopher Long and Mark Reinberger.

Last year, Saving Wright won the Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation’s 2102 Historic Preservation Book Prize and received an honorable mention for the 2012 Lee Nelson Book Award from the Association for Preservation Technology, International. AAP

8/28/14 2:19 AM

From studie studie Foun and M durin

photo / Naho Kubota

Two grants totaling almost $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture were recently awarded to Cornell faculty members.

Mildred Warner, CRP professor, will partner with colleagues in the Community and Regional Development Institute (CaRDI); Binghamton University assistant professor George Homsy (M.R.P. ’04, Ph.D. ’13); the International City/County Management

photo / provided

Esra Akcan joined the Department of Architecture’s History of Architecture and Urban Development program as an associate professor on July 1. Akcan’s research on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture and the urban environment foregrounds the intersections between Europe and West Asia.

Most recently, Akcan was an associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Illinois–Chicago. She is the author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012) and Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2012, coauthored with Sibel Bozdoğan). She received her Ph.D. in architectural history, theory, and criticism from Columbia University, and has received grants from the Mellon and Graham foundations, the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Institute, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She earned her professional undergraduate and master’s degree in architecture at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.AAP

Inaugural Mellon Collaborative Studies Seminar Focuses on Harlem and the South Bronx

n

ned

AAP Connect Hosts Architecture Career Forum

Akcan Joins HAUD

h ,”

From left, Travis Gosa, Africana studies; Noliwe Rooks, Africana studies; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation President Earl Lewis; and Mary Woods, architecture, during Lewis’s visit to campus.

01,

on

An interdisciplinary group of students, faculty, and campuswide experts came together in the spring semester to study two neighborhoods in New York City.

Home and the World: Urban Representations of Harlem and the South Bronx, taught by Noliwe Rooks, Africana studies, and Mary Woods, the Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, was the first in a three-year series of seminars funded by a gift from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As part of the Urban Representation Labs (which take place in the spring), the course focused on various methods of making, collecting, exhibiting, and studying urban representations in Harlem and the South Bronx, and brought in experts from architecture, Africana studies, American studies, art, and film, in addition to staff from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and the Catherwood Library Kheel Center.

Final projects from the seminar took a variety of forms, including Precarious Living, a documentary film that explores the personal histories of homeless residents of the South Bronx; There Goes the ’Hood, a website that highlights the voices and tactics of grassroots organizers from across the country in their

News&Events

photo / University Photography

Grants Further Environmental Policy Research

3

Association (ICMA); and the American Planning Association to explore how rural communities balance economic development and environmental protection as part of a $495,168 grant.

“Climate change is a contentious area of public policy that pits the drive for economic development against the global imperative of environmental protection. Thrust into the middle are rural governments which struggle, often on their own, to protect both local jobs and the environment—a challenge made worse since the recession,” Warner said.

Absent national leadership on climate change, local governments have recognized many ways they can promote sustainability—through building codes, zoning rules, government purchasing, and service provisions such as transit and home weatherization, Warner said. Her preliminary research—presented in a briefing paper from the ICMA Center for Sustainable Communities—identified rural munici-palities that are unlikely pioneers in their responses to climate change.

“The majority of Americans live in smaller communities under 25,000 [in] population. The national surveys conducted under this project will explore the factors that lead these communities to act and the constraints they face, and provide guidance for local, state, regional, and national policy,” she added.

The second grant, in the amount of $499,998, was awarded to Harry de Gorter, a professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and will allow researchers to delve deeper into the intricate interactions between crops and biofuel policies at home and abroad, and their implications for the international competitiveness of U.S. agriculture.AAP

In mid-April, the newly launched AAP Connect hosted an on-campus architecture career forum featuring a panel discussion including (from left) Angela Wong (B.Arch. ’04), SOM-NYC; Nikki Hartle (B.Arch. ’03), Robert A.M. Stern; Eric Keune (B.S. URS ’92), SOM-Chicago; Alfred Ling (B.Arch. ’82), Perkins Eastman; Christina Ladd (B.Arch. ’10), KPF-NYC; James Mallory, HOK; and Gustavo Rodriguez, FXFowle. Panelists not shown include Susan Eschweiler (B.Arch. ’79), DES Architects + Engineers; and Alison Spear (B.Arch. ’82), Arquitectonica.

The two-day event also included interview sessions for more than 50 students, and a discussion on portfolios led by Paul Soulellis (B.Arch. ’91) and Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), assistant professor of architecture.

A AP Connect—charged with supporting student and recent graduates’ career aspirations through networking, internship placement, and job-search help—also placed 48 M.R.P. students in 2014 summer internships, and hosted a reception for M.F.A. alumni in Manhattan during the 2014 M.F.A. student exhibition.

To get in touch with AAP Connect, email aapconnect@cornell.edu. Alumni can receive invites to upcoming events and opportunities by confirming and updating contact information at cornellconnect.cornell.edu.AAP

struggle against gentrification; and Urban Migrations, a project that uses QR codes in key sites of Harlem to access a website including an interactive map, videos, and photographs from three different lenses that reflect various moments in the neighborhood’s history.

Earl Lewis, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, attended presentations of the student projects in April. “The projects that I saw demonstrate the importance of fusing theory and applied knowledge,” says Lewis. “The students, during their presentations, carefully illustrated the ways in which scholarship, when done at the highest levels, produces new insights, discoveries, and questions.

New questions are essential, and through them new knowledge is the product.”

Students apply for admission to the seminars, and those accepted become Mellon Fellows, each receiving a $1,000 grant. In addition to coursework, the fellows participate in a series of workshops customized to each semester’s theme. Workshops for the spring semester included Researching Digital Collections; Analyzing Digital Collections and Text Corpora; and Methods, Challenges, and Rewards of Oral History, among others. Led by a variety of specialists from the Cornell University Library and other relevant areas, the workshops explored a wide range of tools and methodologies pertinent to the seminar.

“The discussions and workshops with Olin Library were invaluable and made me think a lot more critically about knowledge production, access, and digital activism,” says Diane Wong, a Ph.D. candidate in government.

“There was some concern that the workshops could be distracting; digital tools are great, but can be overwhelming,” says Woods. “Luckily, this group of students didn’t get too distracted by the bells and whistles; instead, they immediately started problematizing the tools, and using them as new avenues of inquiry into the assumed knowledge of these two neighborhoods.”

“I appreciated the collaborative and interdisciplinary atmosphere of the Mellon seminar because it encouraged us to get out of our methodological comfort zones,” says Anna Mascorella, a Ph.D. candidate in history of architecture and urban development. “As a result, the group projects forced us to think expansively about our tasks at hand in order to find particular themes or emphases that united our interests.”

“Bringing scholars, curators, artists, and collectors together around a common theme created something unique,” says Woods. “Our team of instructors and experts was extraordinary. And, we had an incredible group of students; they were serious, committed, and extremely ambitious in their projects. All the students are continuing to work on their projects, even though the seminar is done.”

The seminar series is continuing this fall with Flux Navigations: Biopolitics and Urban Aesthetics in the Contemporary Southeast Asian City, taught by Jeremy Foster, architecture, and Arnika Fuhrmann, Asian studies. AAP urbanismseminars.cornell.edu

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 3

8/28/14 2:19 AM

Cloud Artist Leaves Lasting Impression of Fleeting Work The works that Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has been creating since 2012 are, by design, gone in an instant. The indoor clouds he makes and photographs for his Nimbus series “exist for very short moments in a specific location,” Smilde said in a campus lecture on April 21. When he began pursuing this form, he said, “I wanted to see if I could exhibit a rain cloud—enter an empty building and have just a cloud freefloating in space.”

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 4

His latest Nimbus work was created at Cornell in the Following the lecture, the “definitive single days preceding the lecture. Smilde spent three days photograph” of the work, Nimbus: Milstein Hall 2014, was working on the project in Milstein Hall with his displayed in the Milstein Dome, the space in which the partner, Annegret Kellner, and university photographer cloud was made. Smilde has presented the photograph— Robert Barker. one of an edition of six—to the college as a gift.

Visiting associate professor of architecture Mark Milstein Hall proved a serendipitous and natural Morris, AAP’s director of exhibitions and events, began setting for Smilde’s work. The floor of the concrete corresponding with Smilde last November. dome reflected electric lights, the cloud itself, the “Clouds represent both representational challenges interaction of the bridge stair and the vertical shaft [for artists] and freedom, and are something of a proof of space to the studio, and diffuse sunlight coming of artistic mastery,” Morris said in his introduction into the space through windows of different shapes of Smilde at the April 21 lecture. “They can be and sizes. interpreted as a sign of loss or becoming.” Smilde’s “It’s really beautiful,” he said of Milstein Dome. work, he said, “questions the nature of inside and “I liked the connection to Rem Koolhaas in this building. outside, temporality, size, the function of materials, In photographs, you can’t tell the proportions of this and architectural elements.” space. I thought it was much bigger—I’m glad it was Morris noted that Smilde’s art relates to Dadaism so compact. It’s really empty, really minimalistic, and and Surrealism. “The temporary aspect of the work is monochromatic.” key; the cloud is only there for a few seconds before it The project and Smilde’s visit were cosponsored by falls apart,” he said. “The physical aspect is important, AAP and the Cornell Council for the Arts 2014 Biennial, but the work exists only as a photograph.”

“Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age Once he finds a suitable space, Smilde runs of Nanotechnology.”AAP elaborate tests using a fog machine and water vapor, and gathers images, adjusting his placement of equipment and lighting.

8/28/14 2:20 AM

News&Events

5

(left to right) Kellner, Smilde, and Barker at work framing the shot for Nimbus: Milstein Hall 2014.

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 5

8/28/14 2:20 AM

Spring 2014 Lectures and Exhibitions aap.cornell.edu/events LECTURES

Kunlé Adeyemi Tom Angotti Thomas J. Berghuis Tania Bruguera J ahi Chappell Thais Corral Nicholas de Monchaux Shannon Ebner Linda Farthing and Tom Perreault Daniele Genadry Hou Hanru Tim Heide and Verena von Beckerath Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon IaN+ Fuad Jamil Elizabeth Fain LaBombard Francisco Mangado Patrick Manning Smiljan Radic Laxmi Ramasubramanian Mithu Sen Beniamino Servino Jason Smith John Taylor Klas Tham Frano Violich Jon Yoder 3

2

5

6

1

EXHIBITIONS

Portraits

Andrew Lucia

Motifs from the Global Backyard 1

Gregory Page

Industrial Spyfrost Habitat

2

David Trautrimas

5

Datascapes

Jenny E. Sabin

Post-Scribing

4

Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon

n’APPARATUS

John Zissovici

Nimbus: Milstein Hall 2014

Berndnaut Smilde

3

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 6

4

6

8/28/14 2:21 AM

News&Events

7

Work by Kimsooja will be a centerpiece of the CCA Biennial. photo / University Photography

Cornell Art Biennial on Campus This Semester From September 15 to December 22, the 2014 Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” will feature several events and principal projects by internationally renowned contemporary artists. The works will be augmented by Cornell arts faculty and student investigators working in collaboration with scientists and researchers across campus.

5

6

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 7

Beginning with an artist talk by Kimsooja The Charles Babbage Memorial Flight and performance by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Payload, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on September 18, the Biennial will feature (Montreal): During this public an all-day symposium on September 19, “sky art” performance, an unmanned with a keynote address by artist Paul aerial vehicle flown by CUAir will Thomas, author of NanoArt: The Immateriality drop millions of nanoscale leaflets of Art. In addition to lectures, workshops, over campus. Each leaflet contains text and panel discussions, September 18 and

by Charles Babbage, a 19th-century 19 will also mark the opening of the four philosopher and developer of the first major Biennial projects: computer, based on the idea that the atmosphere is a form of information A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, space. Location: Arts Quad and Sibley Earth is a Souvenir, Kimsooja, Biennial Dome Artist-in-Residence (New York City): This 44-foot-tall sculptural installation Nanoessence, Paul Thomas and is designed as a translucent pavilion Kevin Raxworthy (Sydney): This built of a nano material that structures multimedia installation allows visitors color to extend the refractive quality of direct experience of the different light. Location: Arts Quad atomic structures and vibrations that are taking place between living Microtonal Wall, Tristan Perich (New and dead skin cells by using the York City): 1,500 speakers are tuned sensing cantilever of an atomic force individually to create an intricately microscope, a type of touch sensor varied continuum of pitch rendering used by nanoscientists to perceive a 25-foot wall a spectrum of sound. phenomena at a scale below visible light.

The various positions of the listener in Location: Human Ecology Building relation to the speakers give this work nearly endless interpretations—yet The Biennial was curated by CCA director imply that there is a vast point far out and visiting assistant professor of art, in space where all tones may be heard Stephanie Owens, along with members at once—and reveals the paradox of of the CCA’s curatorial committee, which objectivity. Location: Herbert F. Johnson includes Kevin Ernste (associate professor, Museum of Art music), Kathleen Gibson (associate professor, design and environmental analysis), Sabine Haenni (associate professor, performing and media arts), Paula Horrigan (associate professor, landscape architecture), Andrea Inselmann (curator of modern and contemporary art and photography, Johnson Museum of Art), and Nato Thompson (chief Full details: curator at Creative Time in New York City). cca.cornell.edu/biennial

8/28/14 2:22 AM

Campanella Finds Lost Histories in the Built Environment “I really have my parents to thank for giving both me and my brother a powerful interest in place,” says Associate Professor Thomas J. Campanella, CRP.

Campanella under the old Culver Line elevated, now the F train, in Brooklyn. The intersection was the center of the old town of Gravesend, c.1645, one of the oldest planned towns in America and the first to be founded by a woman. photo / Nancy Borowick

had written about Marine Park,” he says. “So I decided to pursue not just that project, but a larger project on Michael Rapuano, who designed the park. I had received the Rapuano Medal when I was at Cornell, so this really brought it all together for me.” Knowing that Rapuano A historian of the built environment, Campanella the faculty with him.” had spent time in Rome, Campanella applied for a joined the faculty in 2013, after a journey that took After receiving his M.L.A., Campanella went on to Rome Prize and received a fellowship in 2010–11. He him from Brooklyn to forestry school, Cornell, China, receive a Ph.D. at MIT, where his thesis fused his love spent his time there following Rapuano’s steps and MIT, Rome, Chapel Hill—and back to Cornell again. of nature with what he was learning about the history tracing the influence of his Italian studies on the parks He teaches and writes about planning and landscape of American planning and development. A painting and parkways of New York City. history, seeking to explain the forces that have shaped in the Hall of North American Forests at the Museum Campanella’s time in Rome is feeding one of his urban landscapes around the globe. But his early of Natural History—The Elm in Northeastern United current book projects—a monograph on Rapuano and interests were markedly different, and began with a States—stimulated his interest in a tree that was fast his partner, Gilmore D. Clarke, Designing the American passion for the natural world. vanishing from the landscape in the 1970s, the American Century. Clarke and Rapuano were among the most “I grew up on the very edge of Brooklyn,” says elm. It became the subject of his doctoral dissertation, powerful landscape architects of the 20th century, Campanella. “We were city kids, but we also had nature eventually published as Republic of Shade: New England and working alongside Robert Moses for 40 years. “They were close at hand. Around the corner was Marine Park and the American Elm (Yale University Press, 2003). The book really the brains and visionaries behind some of the just two blocks away was an inlet of Jamaica Bay, a tells of the elm’s transformation from a fast-growing greatest public works projects of the time,” Campanella semiwild place where we would fish for snappers, go weed into a regional and national icon, and shows how says. “They designed nearly all the parks and parkways crabbing . . . it was a forgotten bit of wilderness right “Elm Street” satisfied America’s yearning to reconcile we usually attribute to Moses—the Henry Hudson there off Avenue U. And it only existed in that wild nature and the city since the time of Jefferson. It was Parkway and Riverside Park, the Brooklyn Heights state because plans to develop the area into the largest named a “top ten” nonfiction book of the year by the promenade, Bryant Park, the United Nations complex, formal urban park in America were canceled. It was Boston Globe, and later won the Spiro Kostof Award from both World’s Fair grounds, and Flushing Meadows Park. really my first exposure to a failure of planning, of big the Society of Architectural Historians.

I also think it’s fitting that I’m writing about Clarke visions for a place.”

MIT also led Campanella to China. “I was offered here, as he was the founder of the Department of City Deciding to follow his love of nature and forests, a TA position for a summer urban design studio at and Regional Planning and later dean of AAP. It’s like Campanella did his undergraduate work at SUNY Tsinghua University,” says Campanella. “And I almost I’ve come full circle.”

College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where didn’t take it. I had to prep for my exams. I knew Campanella’s Brooklyn heritage is also the muse he discovered landscape architecture. During summers nothing about China, had no interest in China . . . for another book project, Brooklyn: A Secret History, which he worked as a wildland firefighter in the western U.S. I didn’t even like Chinese food. But I decided to go, and will be published next year by Princeton University and Alaska. it changed my life.”

Press. The book explores the “afterlife of great plans” in “I had a real curiosity about the American West,” China in 1992 was at the outset of the greatest one of America’s most popular but understudied places. says Campanella, “which actually began in the city with building boom in history. On his first day in the border “It explores three centuries of dreams and schemes childhood visits to the American Museum of Natural town of Shenzhen, Campanella’s group was invited by that never came to pass or have long been forgotten,” History. I was thrilled by the museum’s dioramas of local officials to have lunch in a revolving restaurant Campanella says. “Failure is fascinating, and failed plans western landscapes, and knew these were places I had to atop the city’s tallest skyscraper. As far as he could probably reveal more about us as a people than the see. Fighting forest fires was a way to fully experience see in any direction was construction. “It was the like things we actually build. I love searching out traces of that world, in all its wildness.” seeing the building of Chicago before my eyes. And it these failed dreams in the built environment. The book Campanella was with his fire crew, the Midnight Sun was a watershed moment, only months after Deng is an archeology of stillborn ambition, and will really Hotshots, in Fort Yukon, Alaska, when he learned that Xiaoping made a historic trip to the very same restaube a tribute to my hometown.” he had been accepted into Cornell’s master of landscape rant, firing up the economy by telling the people it An interest in the sometimes hidden history of the architecture program. “I still remember receiving the was okay to get rich and build,” he says. Campanella built environment is something Campanella hopes letter,” he recalls. “It was signed by [Associate Professor] spent a total of five years in China, including one as a to provoke in future urbanists as well. As the newly Leonard Mirin. It was all dirty and smudged, handed to Fulbright fellow at the Chinese University of Hong appointed director of undergraduate studies, he is hoping me at mail call one afternoon. I still have it.”

Kong. His work there eventually led to his most recent to impart to the next generation of urbanists some of Campanella’s time in the M.L.A. program at Cornell, book, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and what his parents inspired in him. which he says was “the beginning of my adult life,” What It Means for the World (Princeton Architectural “I want them to really see and experience the things introduced him to the history of built environments and Press, 2008). they’ve been looking at all their lives—malls, bridges, the planning and design of cities. He credits Mirin with But Campanella’s time in China hardly diminished skyscrapers, highways, houses, fences, street trees, the sparking a passion in him to pursue that interest. “He his interest in the built environments of North America: front lawn,” he says. “Endowing these bright young really fired me up,” says Campanella. “He became my “It was always there simmering on a back burner,” he minds with urban spatial literacy, the ability to explain mentor, and helped form me intellectually. He also grew says. After returning from China, Campanella went the city, to understand its formal evolution, to appreciate up in Brooklyn, not far from me, and that gave us a real to visit his parents in Brooklyn and was struck once its extraordinary richness and vitality . . . that is really bond. It means a great deal to me to be back here on again by his childhood haunt, Marine Park. “No one my ultimate goal.” AAP Rebecca Bowes

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 8

8/28/14 2:22 AM

Profiles

9

Wolfgang Tschapeller’s Practice in Variety If there’s one word that describes Wolfgang Tschapeller’s architectural practice, it’s variety. From theory and education to research, speculative design, and pragmatic construction, Tschapeller has long embraced nearly everything that can be considered architecture, and much that pushes the boundaries of standard definitions.

“Besides the fact that architecture has to fulfill needs of function and shelter, it is mainly an independent cultural discourse—often nonverbal—as music, literature, or film can be, and it’s not always about producing buildings,” says Tschapeller.

And when architecture does produce buildings, Tschapeller is seeking the tenuous balance between the “logics of cultural conditions, constructions, spaces, and materials; the environmental and urban context; and the needs of users,” which are often ephemeral: they come and go in relatively short cycles, compared to the lifespan of a building.

It’s with this mind-set that he begins the process of redesigning Cornell’s Fine Arts Library (FAL), which is currently slated to open in fall 2016. The revamped and expanded FAL will occupy the top two floors of Rand Hall and will house printed volumes, digital resources, and study spaces.

Tschapeller, who received his M.Arch. in 1987, credits the learning and research environment provided by Cornell at that time as crucial for cementing his current approach to architecture.

“There was the graduate architectural studio headed by Werner Goehner, on the one hand, and the graduate urban studio headed

by Colin Rowe, on the other hand,” says Tschapeller. “Architecture versus [urbanism] and with urbanism.”

“When I came here, the graduate studio for architectural design consisted of 12 students from very different places—Japan, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Germany, Austria, Argentina, Iran, the U.S., and Australia,” he says. “It was an exciting mixture of knowledge and experience that came together.”

In this environment, says Tschapeller, there was an opportunity for graduate students to teach with Cornell’s faculty in undergraduate studios.

“It was a form of teamwork that challenged graduate students and Cornell’s faculty alike, and very often produced highly explosive experimental setups for the exploration of architecture,” he says.

In his practice, Tschapeller has not shied away from the experimental approaches he began to employ during his studies at Cornell. One example is with his proposal for a new opera house in Linz. He and his team were energized by the uniqueness of the site—“the city, the opera house, music, traffic, the railway line, the Volksgarten park”—and their design sought to build a “new city” as much as it represented a new opera house. To this end, they maximized networked interactions with the surrounding area, sometimes through ground-level interventions, sometimes up in the air.

“While to many it appeared not to fit into the city, we really made it as forward-looking as possible, [toward] future development,” he says. “For this we focused on the impact of the city on the project, and of the project on the city.”

Looking even further into human networks, his Viennabased practice has been pushing on the foundational notions of habitation through the exploration of human-digital interactions.

This was the theme of his team’s project—Hands have no tears to flow—for the Austrian pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennial.

He says the project was the beginning of a much larger investigation into how much the “conception of a building as a shelter, container, or ground—which allows for the performance of certain rituals—is still relevant.”

“The Venice project was surprising for architects, because it was not concerned with buildings, cities, or landscapes,” he says.

“The background is, we should perhaps say, an automatism that produces contemporary buildings as technically updated versions of the ancient models of houses, and I have a suspicion that there are very good alternatives to that,” he says. “For Venice, we started to focus on those that are usually sheltered—humans—and we looked at them as constructions: the construction of the body, of

d

ived lly o

ks

d

were

la ys

, rk.

y

ich

in es.

ans

f ok

e

ping

ngs

e

in iate y

identities, and gender, and the migration of all those sciences as a regional asset, the international design constructions from physical architectural spaces to competition saw 300 entries. Tschapeller’s winning digital spaces, and back to physical space.” design calls for a 225-foot-square footprint with the To accomplish this in the Biennial exhibition, main structure standing on four diagonal legs and Tschapeller and his team created projections of elevated 65 feet above the ground. The ground level animated figures that were responsive in part to the maintains a public openness and integration into movements of visitors in the pavilion, thereby creating the surrounding city. During the postcompetition an environment of interaction between physical design phases and the development of the construction and digital space. Tschapeller has continued the documents, Tschapeller has been trying to hew as Biennial project in a research project called intraspace. much as possible to the original proposal.

The creation of experiential virtual spaces is a “With [the Promotion of Science] project, we far cry from Tschapeller’s earliest experiences with really wanted to try to follow what was done in the building. A native of Tyrol in the Austrian Alps, he competition. And we’ve succeeded,” he says. “The feel grew up in his family’s custom furniture shop. After of it has been 100 percent maintained . . . and in some formally studying and passing exams as a cabinetways it has become more elegant. The vision we had is maker, he decided to pursue studies in architecture being realized.” as a way of “knowing more about making things.”

As construction begins in Belgrade, so does the “I went into architecture from the perspective of design phase for Cornell’s new Fine Arts Library in making things, rather than the perspective of planning Rand Hall. Tschapeller is eager to get started, as the things,” he says. “I brought to my architectural work is exactly the type that his firm focuses on. studies the experience of cabinetmaking, joinery, and “Cornell’s Fine Arts Library is not the type of furniture making.” project you find every day,” he says. “Libraries are a He earned his undergraduate and first graduate special subject—and fine arts libraries are even more degree in architecture at the University of Applied Arts special projects. We are at an interesting point in in Vienna. Then, wanting to further his studies, he time, where the transfer of knowledge relies on analog says he came to Cornell “by chance.” But what he found as well as digital media—knowledge is still stored in by chance became enormously formative. books and, simultaneously, there is a large potential After his time at Cornell, Tschapeller spent only a in digital media. We will very likely observe the brief time working for others. “Since I had professional convergence of the two in the spaces of Cornell’s new experience as a furniture maker, I wanted to start right Fine Arts Library.” away in my own practice,” he says.

And, as an alumnus, Tschapeller feels a special From the beginning, he and his team sought out connection to Cornell’s Fine Arts Library. large- or small-scale projects that would allow them “At Cornell, when I was studying there, Rand to put an experimental approach into practice. “We Hall was always a very important central point for always looked very selectively for projects that were students. A place where we came together,” he says. of interest to us and that brought us that sort of “I experienced the first floor of Rand Hall when [experimental freedom],” he says. it was still offices and the shop was a very small One example, a major public project, is the space. [During a visit in the spring] I was surprised 320,000-square-foot Serbian Center for the Promotion by how large and well developed the [fabrication] of Science in Belgrade, scheduled to break ground shops are. And the future mix of the shops and the in 2016. Sponsored by the Serbian government and library in one building will be very exciting.” AAP spurred by their interest in foregrounding the Aaron Goldweber

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 9

8/28/14 2:22 AM

Profiles Jenn Houle and the Art of Biophilia For years, Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15) has been painting wildlife, especially bears and wolves, among the predators that sit at the top of their food chains. But during her first year Cornell, her work has taken on a new look, one that’s both more dire and more comic.

“My approach used to be to make beautiful represenabout themselves. About their humanness. About tations of nature, with poetic, romanticized images being alive.” to share the concerns I had about the environment,” Growing up in New Hampshire, Houle and her says Houle in her studio in The Foundry. “I thought siblings liked to play pioneer in the woods behind it was enough that people would see the beauty, and her house, go hiking through the White Mountains, that’s what I wanted the viewer to leave with. But or build tree forts in their backyard. For pets, they I’m reaching beyond that now, using more humor had a half–Labrador retriever and a couple of outside and irony, letting the work be darker, and coming up cats, and from a young age, Houle kept them at the with ways I can make people think without hitting center of her imagination. them over the head. I’m figuring out where I want my “I was in awe of their existence,” she says. “They work to lie on the spectrum between art and activism, were a big part of my family life, as important as any and I feel like I’m at a turning point, that I’m onto other individual. We talked to them and for them, something good.” and having them as a central part of my childhood Her studio is crowded from floor to ceiling with was the genesis for my love of animals as a whole.” work she’s done over the past few months. In one oil As a high school senior, she decided to apply to study, a deer licks himself while staring into a vista art school, and after graduating from Massachusetts that evokes the Hudson River School; in another, a wolf College of Art, Houle taught in working-class mounts a statue of the she-wolf that suckled Romulus Charlestown, the oldest neighborhood in Boston, and Remus, with what Houle calls a “cheesy cosmic covering the range from kindergarten to eighth starscape” overhead. On top of her workbench, there grade, rainbows to self-portraits. She loved the are watercolors of dead-fox heads, and underneath is a challenge of making lessons simple and compelling, cardboard box filled with faux bear claws. Balancing but by the end of four years, she was ready to focus atop a partition wall, there’s a gray squirrel pelt made on art full-time. She found herself drawn to Cornell from plastic bags; a papier-mâché bear skull; and the as a place where she could combine her passions for metal frame of a larger-than-life “pup tent”—a wolf art and ecology. that’s lit from inside with red light, and is big enough In her first semester, Houle took her sketch pad for viewers to enter through its mouth, pass through to the Lab of Ornithology, poring through a library its body, and exit out its backside. of mammal skins and skulls, and taking time to “I want people to experience that sense of wildness, experience the feel of a bear’s paw, a fox’s fur, a of what it feels like to be in the wild,” says Houle. “So wolf’s mouth. That became the inspiration for the images could be humorous, or perverted, or . . .

Biophilia, her first exhibition at Olive Tjaden Gallery, maybe just nice. It’s a fact of life that people have sex, held last February. Named after the term coined animals have sex, and I think you can use that to make by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who described it as the work more real, to get people to realize things “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life,” Houle’s

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 10

show featured plastic-bag pelts of animals hunted for ceremony and for sport.

Now beginning her second and final year in the M.F.A. program, she’s moved back to oils, including the painting that sits on her easel, showing two pairs of wolf eyes staring out of the darkness. After graduation, she hopes her Cornell degree will help take her to an artist residency in some faraway, ecologically unique place, and dreams of one day settling down in the woods of New England.

But with these last two semesters, she’s focusing all her energy on her thesis and studio work. Over the summer, she developed plans for an upcoming installation at Ithaca Falls, just below the site of the old Ithaca Gun factory; with colored lights and plasticbag sculptures of birds affected by lead poisoning, she’ll cast moving shadows onto the waterfall and the walls of the gorge.

Also this summer, she returned to her series of black-and-white drawings based on motion-sensing wildlife cameras. That’s how she found the image of a deer licking himself, which will ultimately become part of a much larger oil painting, and some others­— a deer with a bucket caught in his antlers, a deer with his mouth wide open in surprise—that haven’t yet found their way off the drawing paper.

“These are my entry points,” says Houle, looking over the deer drawings. “They’re all images I collected online, and I’ve been thinking about how absurd, or awkward, or uncomfortable these poses are. Most of the depictions of animals that you see are majestic, and these definitely aren’t. They’re weird. It’s crazy to see the things people catch with a camera mounted on a tree stand, but it’s a great way to satisfy that curiosity, that drive to collect animals, without hurting anyone.

“I’m excited about using new ways and different languages to talk about the environment,” she continues. “It’s getting more and more critical to be aware of the natural world, to think about conserving it, and to understand our place. Because we can all see these crises coming, both within my lifetime and within the lifetime of the generation coming behind me. This is the best way I know to marry my concerns for the environment with my desire to make things.” AAP Kenny Berkowitz

8/28/14 2:22 AM

or

the

ion, n e

g

tic-

he

f me — th

ed

t ic,

ed

ng

Fear Bear Jenn Houle (M.F.A. ’15), Fear Bear from Biophilia installation in Olive Tjaden Gallery (2014), plastic bags, steel, papier-mâché, colored lights, dimensions variable.

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 11

8/28/14 2:22 AM

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 12

8/28/14 2:23 AM

Book Preview

The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated This Folio features a preview of Associate Professor D. Medina Lasansky’s book, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated from Periscope Publishing. The edited volume examines the Italian Renaissance through a new lens, a contemporary twist through research-based essays (by Lasansky and others) with surprising, fresh illustrations created over the last five centuries. We’re proud to share this special section with the readers of AAP News.

Aaron Goldweber, editor, AAP News

Folio | News16 | Fall 2014

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 1

8/28/14 9:41 PM

There has always been a peculiar obsession with Italy and its Renaissance.

PEOPLE—FROM NAPOLEON, whose troops snagged a Veronese painting, to Frances Mayes, author of bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun— have become so wedded to Italy that they have regularly attempted to bring a part of its allure back to their homes. Such transportation has fueled obsessive interest over the years that continues to this day.

Indeed, each year, thousands of U.S. college students spend a semester in Italy to study and experience its culture. So, why has Italian art and architecture continued to resonate throughout the centuries? What are tourists and students really looking at when they go to the Vatican?

I attempt to answer these questions and more in my book, The Renaissance: Revised, Expanded, Unexpurgated, edited in collaboration with Periscope Publishing’s Gloria Kury. And, here, in this issue of AAP News, I’m presenting you with excerpts.

The Renaissance is an edited volume on the Italian Renaissance that introduces cultural phenomena through modern rhetoric. This anthology constitutes a series of studies that are simultaneously historiographical and populist in approach. It brings together new research from experts in art, architecture, history, and literature, and in so doing underscores my belief that there is no radical difference between these disciplines.

Graphic work becomes three-dimensional when you consider how something is experienced. Architecture, in turn, becomes twodimensional when you see how it is mediated through representation.

The book rejects orthodox notions of high culture and classical revival. In contradistinction, it explores the rich, vibrant material that most academics disparage: The Da Vinci Code, the Las Vegas Venetian, graffiti, pornography, overtly expressed racism during the Renaissance, and other components of the period that are alive and well and being sold in popular culture and mass tourism. This other Renaissance is of great significance whether viewed on its own or alongside the Renaissance of Burckhardt. From the Andy Warhol image on the book’s cover to the many images inside, the volume draws heavily upon the work of contemporary artists, including Peter Greenaway, Ruth Orkin, and Brian Duffy.

And, the book has deep Cornell roots. It grew out of a graduate seminar in which one of the students in the class encouraged me to write a book that addressed the contemporary life of the Renaissance.

That graduate student—Yael Manes (Ph.D. ’09)—is now a professor and the author of one of the book’s essays (“The Power of Mother’s Milk”).

Another Cornell alumna, Sarah Benson (Ph.D. ’01), wrote “A Semester in Rome,” as well as “Looking at Sex.” To that end, it has been a labor of love as much as its been a scholarly effort. I’m thankful for the inspiration given to me by my former students who are now valued colleagues.

In this reprint we’ve chosen essays and images that will give readers a sense of the book’s nine sections. I hope you find the material as engaging and as inspiring as I have.

D. Medina Lasansky Associate Professor Department of Architecture

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 2

— Emma deBurgh’s elaborately tattooed back, on which Leonardo’s Last Supper appears as a motif, c.1880.

Woodcut

8/28/14 9:41 PM

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 3

8/28/14 9:41 PM

From C ON S P ICU O U S C O NSU M PTIO N

B ET T ER T H A N V E NI C E D. Medina Lasansky

— La dolce vita, The Venetian, Las Vegas

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 4

AKING A PROFIT FROM THE ITALIAN Renaissance has become a fine art. Replicas of Renaissance monuments are now deployed throughout the United States.

Lucrative if fantastic, the adaptations range from Renaissance fairs with paid admission, where the audience can witness jousting knights and buy chain mail bikinis, to luxury resorts, most famously in Las Vegas, where visitors can gamble and enjoy copies of the art and architecture of V enice. The Renaissance has also been introduced into urban renewal projects from Portland, Oregon, to Providence, Rhode Island. Mayors almost always cite the “R” word to celebrate—and market—the physical and economic rebirth of their cities. In one bid to build civic pride the infamous Vincent “Buddy” Cianci of Providence imported gondolas from Venice. As the gondolas ferried passengers up and down the Providence River, they provided a perfect floating stage from which to view urban renovations, one of which was rerouting the river itself.

In each of these cases “the Renaissance” forms the mise-en-scène for narratives that have little or no connection to the “actual” Renaissance in Italy c.1500. How else could gondolas be in Rhode Island, a Rialto Bridge in Las Vegas? Such “Renaissance” borrowings convert history into what Michael Eisner would term “edu-tainment.” By conflating education with entertainment they encourage a taste for history, albeit reductive and uncomplicated history, a history without bloodshed and suffering, a pleasing history. Novelist and scholar Umberto Eco has noted that the past is recreated at sites such as Las Vegas, not because the historical parallels have substantive meaning, but because they lend themselves to the display of particular subject matter. In this essay I will go beyond Eco to contend that “the Renaissance” has been singled out from all other periods in history to display pricey commodities. It is the standard, indeed the expected vehicle for bourgeois consumption of an elevated sort—fine dining, luxury accommodation, and well-crafted objects. In turn the ease with which Renaissance motifs are recognized guarantees the success of Renaissance environments—be they restaurants, hotels, or shops. Such sites confirm expectations of the Renaissance, and with a familiar as well as pleasing history on offer, visitors’ disregard for the realities of a long gone era is understandable.

What is less understandable is the reach of the Renaissance syndrome. It’s everywhere and not to be dismissed as low brow. For analysis of the Venetian, a “casino-resort-hotel” in Las Vegas, the scholarly version of the Italian Renaissance is on a par with its popular counterpart. They draw on similar themes, motifs, narrative strategies, and staging devices; and they are alike in fragmenting and fetishizing the past. A tourist destination such as the Las Vegas Venetian therefore presents a unique opportunity to think critically about the practice and presentation of history, to ascertain the extent to which our own histories are based upon, or influenced by, popular conceptions and misconceptions of the past.

To paraphrase the 1972 text of architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, we can still learn from Las Vegas.

The Venetian was built in 1999 for $2.8 billion on the site of the imploded Sands casino. It was the first of its kind in Las Vegas, a place where business travelers would intermingle with honeymooning couples, high rollers, and affluent shoppers. The theme of the Renaissance is central to the cohesion of the conglomerate. A promotional brochure explains that, by the late fifteenth century Venice was the “leading power in the world” and also the world’s greatest commercial city possessing “palaces and public buildings adorned by works of famous artists.” No other city could rival it, until the twentieth century. An advertisement for the Venetian claims, “the . . . architects of V enice could never imagine that their astounding city would one day rise from the sands of Vegas.”

When first built the complex boasted over 3,000 rooms (another 1,000 have since been added); according to the Guinness Book of World Records it is the largest “standard” hotel in the world. Travel and Leisure magazine names the Venetian “one of the top hotels”; Meetings and Conventions magazine describes the adjoining convention center as one of the best places to stage a conference or trade show. In 2000, soon after it opened, the center received the magazine’s Gold Key Award. […]

Star architects have played an important role in branding the Venetian.Thom Mayne of the cutting-edge Los Angeles firm Morphosis (and the recipient of the prestigious 2005 Pritzker Prize) designed two restaurants for the complex, Lutèce and the colorful postmodern Tsunami Bar and Grill. To convey the sophistication of the Tsunami the reviewer for the New York Times said it has that “disorienting made-in-cyberspace feel.” And there are more stellar additions. The Manhattan-based Meyer Davis Studio designed the V Bar, the Venetian’s hippest night club, “the most New Yorky of the New York style lounges” on the Strip. It features the opposite of V egas glitz—“black Eames chairs and rice paper light sculptures.” And the biggest starchitect of them all, the 2000 Pritzker Prize winner Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam’s OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) was brought in to design two museums: a 63,700-square-foot exhibition space for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation of New York; and a smaller museum conceived by Thomas Krens and Mikhail Piotrovsky to bring together the Guggenheim and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The larger museum opened with Art of the Motorcycle, which had been a blockbuster at the Bilbao and New York Guggenheims. Another starchitect, Frank Gehry, drew on his experience in designing the Bilbao Guggenheim to install the motorcycles in a fluid matrix of platforms with stainless steel and chain link walls. The smaller Guggenheim Hermitage Museum was a sedate Cor-Ten steel box; a press release extolled the rust-colored steel surfaces as “evocative of velvet-covered walls.”

With loans from its two mother museums it has hosted exhibitions aimed at a broad audience. “Art through the Ages” presented the work of thirty-eight modernist artists; most like Picasso, Rothko, Manet, and de Kooning with instant name recognition.

Sasha Jakowich, former director of communications at the Guggenheim Las Vegas, claimed that the museums became extremely popular. And records do indicate

8/28/14 9:41 PM

the o be an, a sion pular naralike estisents pracnt to nced past. turi, still

n on first elers high naiste. A enth ” and “palmous entiaims, that ands

— The Venetian, Las Vegas, exterior view with the Doge’s Palace visible in the left foreground.

The Rialto Bridge connects the palace to the campanile

,000 ordrgest magels”; the laces soon Gold

e in edge the rants dern n of said And ased ian’s New osite light , the tterwas foot ound by ther n St. the lbao rank lbao atrix The date colalls.” osted h the artning

ions useicate

the views imposed on consumers. This is evident in the dramatic arrival into St. Mark’s Square, the complex’s main shopping and eating destination. It happens by means of an escalator that lifts visitors from the mundane convention center into another world, a piazza covered by a three-story, 70-foot-high ceiling painted to simulate sky. It darkens at dinnertime to create a romantic setting for the restaurants and “outdoor” cafes that front the piazza.

The piazza exists in a permanent state of perfection.

Every day is sunny and clear. T here are no pesky pigeons, no acqua alta impedes foot traffic, no foul odors assault noses. The paving stones are antiqued yet not dirty. And most remarkable of all is the Grand Canal. A quarter of a mile long and fifteen feet wide, it demarcates the far edge of the piazza and leads to a series of Grand Canal Shoppes. It is the color not of a canal but a swimming that they had on average 1,500 visitors a day, 100 more pool—sparkling blue. than the Guggenheim in New York City. Never mind […] that most of the art on exhibit was second-rate even if ascribed to well-known artists, or that the exhibitions The acclaimed geographer and writer J. B. Jackson proffered familiar ideas, or that the art was yet another argued that reconstructed historical environments thing to be consumed, in this case for $15. Both museums represent a new type of monument and a new way of are long gone. The Guggenheim Big Box was shuttered interpreting history. No matter Jackson’s wide influon January 5, 2003, the Guggenheim Hermitage on May ence, historians continue to belittle these monuments.

11, 2008.

In a discussion of the “American” construction of the Today’s tourist market caters to specialty groups: Renaissance, Anthony Molho fumed that ex-novo ecotourism, architourism, adventure tourism, edutour- Renaissance environments are “exotic, contrived, and ism, and so on. The Venetian was ahead of this curve in historically improbable recreations of imaginary events associating itself with contemporary art and architecture and rituals which are placed nonchalantly under a that proved to be a commercial and critical success. The Renaissance label.” They cater to a public curious about New York Times has recently reported that Las Vegas, and the celebrities of the period—Leonardo and other artthe Venetian in particular, should be recognized as cen- ists, the Medici, and Christopher Columbus—and ters of new design. eager to imbibe something of the “proverbial spirit of This does not interfere with the Venetian’s appro- the Renaissance.” All this is too simple to win Molho’s priation of the Renaissance. On the contrary, the respect. Umberto Eco was equally patronizing in Travels concern for aesthetic quality in the contemporary arena in Hyperreality, as was the scholar Paul F. Grendler in The enhances the meaning of a turn back to presumably European Renaissance in American Life. Both worried that parallel achievement. But the goal was not a compar- Renaissance simulacra were eroding understanding of ison between the present and the past. The goal was a the “real Renaissance.” comparison between the present and a past doctored to To my own way of thinking, it is a mistake to deny appear present. Sheldon Adelson, the owner of the Vene- meaning to neo-Renaissance environments, with their tian’s casino—the only privately owned, nonunion casino thick physical engagement with monuments of the past. in Vegas—directed designers to “strip a couple hundred Arguably they are not very different either from the years off the face of Venice.” At the resort, in replica, the “authentic” Venice of tourists, or from the supposedly city should “feel old but not shabby.” It should also be also “authentic” Venice of scholars. The two groups focus cleaner and more comfortable than the real thing. upon the Grand Canal and the Piazza San Marco at the The improvements were not hard to accomplish. expense of the urban matrix. Art historians are no less After all the real Venice often disappoints visitors who narrow in their approach. Masterpieces, their makers and arrive with romantic images of a sea-born city of unsur- patrons, are the principal topics of research and discuspassed splendor. The UNESCO Courier, for example, sion. And historians have long celebrated the city’s trade claimed that “the centre is so crowded one can hardly with the East in luxury goods, above all, spices, perfumes, move [and] shops offer low quality at high prices.” and silks. Even though there have been some studies of In 1999 Venice’s mayor Massimo Cacciari decided to social issues such as poverty, prostitution, and disease, it exploit the city’s seedy underside to deter the seven mil- is still disquieting to realize how little attention has been lion day-trippers who visit annually, create congestion, accorded slaves or artisans or food purveyors or working and cause sanitation problems. Cacciari hired Oliviero women other than prostitutes. Their places of abode and Toscani, the photographer of Benetton’s controversial work do not figure in the topography of the Venice of advertisements, to prepare a negative publicity cam- scholars, tourists, and Vegas entrepreneurs. paign that would feature authentic Venice: “drowned rats, Rather than berating the V enetian and similar sites dead pigeons, pickpockets, and rubbish-strewn canals.” of historical recreation for being “hyperreal,” and/or Cacciari asserted: “contrived,” and/or “improbable,” we should ask why a large public is “obsessed” with a Renaissance of canonical We need visitors who are not seeing the masterpieces of art and architecture, enlightened merpicture-postcard image of Venice, but who realize chant princes, and sensual pleasures. Could it not be that what problems the city faces. Basta with the this “theme park” is the very past historians have themgondolas and the Bridge of Sighs. selves constructed and empowered? Baudrillard taught The ironies are inescapable. Just as the real Venice was that themed environments depend for success upon a trying to explode tourists’ illusions, Adelson’s designers prior reality of common perceptions. Pace Molho, Grenwere completing a version of Venice that perfected an dler, et al., commercial simulacra of the Renaissance are already romanticized image of the city. not alone in being problematic. Academic simulacra have The Adelson plan guaranteed that the architecture the same shortcomings. The Venetian is a good place for of the Venetian would surround visitors with a kind scholarly self-reflection. of film set in which everything is designed to be photographed. The real city’s many blemishes have been erased. A computer system controls lighting, temperature, and humidity. There are no random or unexpected vistas. As visitors follow their designated route, they see buildings and canals framed as if they were pictures. If Italian Renaissance architects reinvented urban space, the architects of the Venetian “perfected” it at least in Folio | News16 | Fall 2014

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 5

8/28/14 9:41 PM

— Michelozzo (and Brunelleschi?), Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence, begun 1445, seen from the via Cavour

Both the McMansion and the Medici Palace signal a transfer of vast private wealth into housing. In both buildings the ostentatious display is combined with a system of defense. The rusticated masonry of the Palace was designed to be riot-resistant.

An electronic security will protect the McMansion.

Impressing the hoi polloi has long been a risky business for the wealthy and powerful.

From

TH

D. M

toria year prep men have

— McMansion under construction, 2013, Westchester County, NY

in cu ing almo form ciofi to m disea tion simp the 12% Ord Wor mar do t

— Brian Duffy, Model near the cathedral, Florence, 1962.

Black-andwhite photograph for British Vogue The model’s pose is funny and meaningful. As she reads the soccer news, she aligns her hat with a landmark of Florence— the cathedral S. Maria del Fiore with Brunelleschi’s dome. Built in the 15th century, the dome is considered a work of genius because of the way it combines beauty with structural innovation. Soccer ball, dome of the cathedral, a dome-shaped hat, each of these depends on precise calculations of shape, weight, and the properties of

nom cent slum garli igno

materials. Brunelleschi’s dome is an early product of this skill set, which would later be attributed to an analytic turn of mind said to be inborn among Florentine men. Michelangelo claimed he had measures in his hands. Others would speak of “the art of design.” Whether or not unique to Florence, it was crucial to Leonardo’s work in art and science. Over the centuries it has defined Italian goods from cars to hats.

— Mario Merz, Che fare?

1968-73 aluminum, wax, and neon lights, 4-9/10" x 26" x 7-1/2" Tate Modern, London

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 6

boo Itali and arch the boo Han “all Fran mad auth plain com vice duri food into

8/28/14 9:41 PM

From F O O D DRA M A

TH E ART OF EAT IN G D. Medina Lasansky trip to Italy without gastronomic pleasure is a cruel contradiction. Great food is as intertwined with Italy as its Renaissance art and architecture. The acclaimed Renaissance historian and food writer Leonard Barkan’s account of a year in Rome gives equal attention to shopping for food, preparing food, and eating food as to trips to monuments and time spent studying. His experiences would have come as a surprise to earlier visitors.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century guidebooks and travel accounts make little if any reference to Italian food. Susan and Joanna Horner, Mrs. Oliphant, and Janet Ross provide detailed information about art, architecture, and important historical figures. They skip the topic of food. When food is mentioned in guidebooks, it is usually disparaged. John Murray’s 1861 Handbook of Florence warns that the city’s restaurants are “all indifferent.” A few decades later guidebook writer Francis Wey would lament Italy’s “bad…stale…carelessly made” food of “poor flavor.” Mrs. Colquhoun Grant, author of a 1912 guidebook Through Dante’s Land, complains that waiters use flowers and other decorations to compensate for the poor quality of the food. Inept service of the cream at breakfast irritates Dan Fellows Platt during a stay at a Lucca hotel. Cream at breakfast? Before food preferences can be satisfied, they must be integrated into local cuisines.

The publication of Pellegrino Artusi’s La Scienza in cucina e l’Arte di mangiar bene in 1891 marks a turning point in the history of Italy. Now a classic reprinted almost yearly, it brought regional traditions together to form a national cuisine. But recipes for dishes like carciofi alla giudia, gnocchi, and minestrone were of no use to most Italians of Artusi’s era. Poverty, malnutrition, and disease were national scandals and caused mass migration. Good food, let alone trying out new recipes, was simply not possible. As late as the 1930s only 66% of the country’s residents had running water, and a mere 12% had bathrooms. Only a handful had a refrigerator.

Ordinary Italians did not eat decently until well after World War II. The audience for Artusi’s book was primarily the bourgeoisie who preferred to have servants do the cooking.

Anglo-American fondness for Italian food is a phenomenon of the last half century. In the early twentieth century when Italian immigrants crowded into city slums, they and their food were pilloried. Pasta, pizza, garlic, and oil were the smelly food of the poor and ignorant. It was not until the 1960s that attitudes began

to change. The endless stream of cookbooks, food memoirs, and gastronomic guides now available are products of a revolution. Anthony Capella captures the new status of Italian cuisine in his romantic comedy The Food of Love. During her first trip to Italy a twentysomething American girl falls in love with the art, beauty, food, and men of the country. Tomasso tells Laura he’s a chef at a famous Roman restaurant and starts to woo her with spectacular dishes he pretends to cook.

As the romance unfolds among the primi and secondi piatti, the American embarks on a process of self-discovery punctuated by comic observations of Italian daily life. The way food is prepared and eaten eventually wins the heart of the young foreigner. Recipes invite readers to share her experience.

Carol Helstosky points to the 1980s as the era when American restaurant, cookbook, and tourist industries combined forces to reinvent “a tradition of Italian cooking for non-Italian consumers.” The popular press has made a major contribution to the endeavor. An issue of Bon Appétit was dedicated to Tuscany. Twenty-five “traditional” dishes (some familiar only after Artusi) were photographed in front of the region’s most scenic (read late medieval and Renaissance) spots: ribollita against the backdrop of Siena’s Campo, and porchetta staged at Arezzo’s Piazza Grande. The text tries to convince readers of the existence “of a magical region” where Michelangelo is an ingredient in the soup or vice versa.

This is the Italy of our dreams—the magical region we have read about, seen in paintings, and fantasized about—with medieval villages, walled towns, and Renaissance cities. It is the land of Florence, Siena, and Lucca, of the Uffizi and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and more Duomos than we can count. It is the home of Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

Frances Mayes and Lorenza de’Medici serve up the same Tuscan dishes to mostly American consumers.

De’Medici is founding director of a cooking school, the Villa Table, at the Badia a Coltibuono in Chianti and the author or co-author of books with titles like The Renaissance of Italian Cooking and The Villa Table.

She’s never appeared on Italian TV but was featured in a PBS series.

Under the Tuscan Sun secured Frances Mayes a niche she exploited in a number of sequels. Readers need not think about working the land under the blazing hot Tuscan sun. They instead follow Mayes as she entered the “wondrous new world” included in the purchase price of a villa with “unexpected treasures” at every turn.

There are frescoes in the dining room. The nearby hill towns have “vibrant markets and delightful people.” T o lend the fairytale a semblance of reality, Mama Rita, her neighbor Lucio, a pasta maker named Dino, and a gardener named Giotto are all quoted.

Renaissance art and architecture are never omitted from the mixture of travel tips, recipes, domestic makeovers, and romance in this genre of Italo-fiction. That the fit seems natural is part of the fiction hyped since the 1980s. In Florence in 1869 Mark Twain reported that his experiences “were chiefly unpleasant.” “This meat has surely been used for soup,” said Miss Bartlett as she put down her fork. A few sentences later in the opening scene of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, after being told how “to get rid of beggars,” Miss Bartlett and her companion learn that there are things, not-to-be-namedin-polite-company, worse than fleas in the beds of Italian hotels, that the rooms at the rear of their Florentine pensione “smell,” and that “sweetly squalid” Prato should not be missed. Florence—all of Italy—has changed since 1908 when Forster’s comic novel was published, but so too have the stereotypes and narratives travelers bring with them on trips to a land where porchetta, gelato, and Raphael are now on the same menu.

— Workers in a rice field, 1948, Po Valley, Italy

Folio | News16 | Fall 2014

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 7

8/28/14 9:42 PM

From OR IG IN ALS, C O PIES, M U TANTS

A V EN ET I A N W E D D I N G Barbara Penner

— A visitor observes scans of Mona Lisa, “Leonardo’s Passion, to Understand Create,” 2007.

Refectory of the Cordeliers, Paris

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 8

n 2006 Peter Greenaway, the acclaimed director, librettist, curator, VJ, and now vision-maker, embarked upon a series “Nine Classic Paintings Revisited.” The aim of this series is direct dialogue with great paintings from the Renaissance on. First up was Rembrandt’s Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum in 2006, and second was Leonardo’s The Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in 2008. The third revisiting, of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (1563), took place during the 2009 Venice Biennale at the Palladio-designed refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore monastery. Greenaway hopes to conclude the series with Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Vatican.

The aim of the series is at once simple and complex.

It is simple in that one can easily identify what motivates Greenaway: he believes that society has become “visually illiterate.” But his definition of visual illiteracy is less easy to grasp. On the most basic level it concerns what art historians refer to as “visual de-skilling,” that is, a lack of knowledge of the techniques that have structured painting since the Renaissance. But, equally, it refers to an inability to read multiple narratives into a single image, a situation Greenaway considers the result of the dominance of text even in image-based media like cinema. Through engagement with great paintings, Greenaway seeks to give audiences a renewed appetite for visual complexity, layered narratives, and metaphor. Over thirty-two feet wide (“wide screen” says Greenaway) and packed with figures, The Wedding at Cana suits his purposes.

Given the painting’s monastic setting and religious theme, it is apt that visitors have an experience that unfolds much like a pilgrimage. They arrive at Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore by boat on the sparkling green waters of the Venetian Lagoon. After disembarking, they gain entrance to the monastery complex, itself a notable piece of late Renaissance architecture (1540 to 1563; Palladio’s adjoining Church of San Giorgio Maggiore was finished much later). After traversing two interconnected cloisters, visitors ascend a grand stairway, pass through a massive entranceway and into a vestibule. Two beautiful wall fountains flank the door leading to the refectory. They hear the sounds of running water; lights play across the walls apparently reflected in the water’s surface. But look again. The fountains are dry, the trickling water an illusion of light and sound. It is a clue that unlocks the meaning of the whole. Visitors are entering into an arena where carefully manufactured artifice will reign.

They next enter the refectory, a spare if grand salone, with windows on the side walls, a heavy cornice at the far end, and a cross-vaulted ceiling. There, in front, is the greatest of all the manufactured effects, although some viewers may leave without being aware of the artifice. The Wedding at Cana in the refectory is actually a “clone,” a 1:1 reproduction of such high resolution that it captures

details like Veronese’s brush-strokes. The “real” Wedding is hundreds of miles away, in the Louvre where Napoleon’s troops took it as war booty in 1797. Thus, before Greenaway’s piece begins, visitors are rewarded. They see The Wedding at Cana in situ, an experience that has not been available for over two hundred years but is essential to understanding this painting. It becomes a mural again.

Veronese’s work makes several respectful nods to its original setting, such as the Doric columns in the foreground that complement the Doric pilasters of the refectory windows. But heavy Doric gives way to exuberant Corinthian further back in Veronese’s pictorial space. The scene is set for an altogether more splendid feast than was typically held in the refectory.

As the lights dim and the show begins, people take seats. They move their heads constantly in order to take in the “main screen,” as well as the two side walls with three projections each, sometimes synchronized and sometimes not. What unfolds next is hard to characterize within such genres as art, music, cinema, and theatre.

Possibly it is best thought of as a sophisticated son et lumière that is bringing together dialogue, music, animation, diagrams, sound, atmospheric lighting, and other special effects. The show lasts fifty minutes and consists of two sequences—one in Italian with subtitles, one in English—that have three intertwining phases or modes.

The first phase is character driven. Christ’s first miracle, the transformation of water into wine at a wedding in Galilee—is the central story. But there are over onehundred-twenty additional figures in Veronese’s work (numbered from 001 to 126 at one point, with Christ at 75), ranging from the Virgin Mary and the apostles to wedding guests to servants to musicians to spectators to dogs and a cat. The scene teems with life: characters hang from balconies, poke through porticos, and lean over balustrades. Dozens of potential stories are suggested in this painting, and Greenaway scripts a good number of them. He picks out a figure or a group in a square of light, then summons them up in projections on the sidewalls of the refectory. Viewers seem to become privy to fragments of their conversation. The first hint of what will become the miracle appears in a mounting domestic crisis: household staff, who have spent days preparing for the feast, fret about not having enough wine for all the guests. The dialogue stays at the level of the quotidian, but these conversations pull the audience deeper into the scene. They begin to discern individuals among the crowd and to wonder at particular details. Curiosity about the story and the painting awakes.

In the second phase Greenaway dissects the painting’s underlying structure and composition. Light boxes

8/28/14 9:42 PM

high are light shad plan imag plan and web draw the mad T but illusi With ishes of s the or e And beco The in th sky jabs ures like tune delin of a only roll.

G and ever like to d Fred initi mass so c the costu whic ious abou wou away the “No

dding apoefore y see not ntial gain. origound winhian s set cally

take take with and cteratre. n et anither nsists e in des. mirding onework hrist es to rs to hang over d in er of e of idey to what mesring or all quoeper mong osity

aintoxes

highlight various scenes or groupings. All the figures are outlined in red on a black background. He sends light dancing among them, illuminating some faces as shadows cast others into relief or darkness. The picture plane is shown with all the figures outlined. Then the image tilts upwards ninety degrees so that the ground plane appears with these same figures now fleshed out and occupying precise locations in space. Soon after, the webs of geometric lines that organize the painting are drawn out sharply in red. Christ’s face is the anchor at the center. The complex architecture of the painting is made understandable.

The last phase is much like the second in purpose but is decidedly more spectacular. It demonstrates the illusionistic powers of contemporary image makers.

With almost godlike authority (and it is evident he relishes this) Greenaway subjects The Wedding to a series of special effects. The image is wiped and dissolved; the painting fades in and out; lights like search beams or elsewhere like television fuzz move across its surface.

And, as the show reaches its climax, Greenaway’s gestures become biblical not only in theme but in scale. He sets The Wedding on fire—a cracking fire that burns fiercely in the background, flames licking upwards, turning the sky black. The flames recede to be replaced by bright jabs of lightning. Thunder roars. Rain engulfs the figures. Lights begin to dart across the painting’s surface, like comets trailing phosphorus dust. And, as a martial tune rings out, figures and objects begin to lose their delineation like a sweater being pulled apart by means of a thread. The painting is undone, line-by-line, until only the face of Christ remains. He sits alone. Drums roll. Fade to black.

Greenaway is sometimes accused of going too far, and this spectacle may leave some more convinced than ever of his pretensions. But this pyrotechnic display, like the analytic exercises that precede it, actually helps to draw out meaning, no easy feat. The art historian Frederick Hartt comments that The Wedding at Cana initially presents viewers with an almost overwhelming mass of detail. “Christ can be found, if one looks, and so can Mary,” he adds, “but one hardly notices them in the midst of so much architecture, so many brocaded costumes, and all the good things to eat and drink with which the table is loaded.” After a survey of the various incidents, he concludes,“If anybody is concerned about the miracle that has just taken place, the spectator would never know it.” In his scripted dialogue Greenaway also plays on the guests’ underwhelmed response to the miracle in their businesslike appraisals of the wine.

“No cloudiness,” says one of the miraculous stuff. “Tastes

like a south-facing mountain grape,” says another.

But Greenaway does something else that Veronese could not do in his vast canvas. Rather than having the events all play out simultaneously, Greenaway introduces a cinematic element: time. Through his sequencing of episodes, Greenaway gives shape to the story, a sense of crescendo and of mounting drama. Formally, too, he uses the analytic exercises to tame the painting’s great mass of figures, showing their arrangement in space and making it evident how Christ’s figure is the lynchpin to the whole composition. Indeed, quite unlike Veronese, Greenaway does not permit beholders to lose sight of Christ who remains a fixed focal point throughout. Light shines upon him. Light emanates from him. Face iconic in a sort of light box, he remains pristine as dialogue, action, and an arsenal of special effects are unleashed around him. The miracle is simply but beautifully portrayed: with a great swelling of music the image gives way to rippling water on which Christ’s face floats. As the sound of trickling water fills the space, closeups of wine pouring out of the amphoras are projected onto the side walls. In the “main screen” of the painting, the water fades and the image goes dark except for Christ’s face in its light box, and the wine in the foreground, glowing red like blood.

The quotidian and the profane slip away as the wonder of the miracle emerges from The Wedding at Cana.

The audience cannot help but acquire a fuller understanding of the painting, or at least, Greenaway’s version of it. For make no mistake, this is not a revisiting in the strict sense of the word. During the video the light and brilliant hues of Veronese’s painting are stripped away, and a shadowy, nocturnal world, more like that depicted

by Veronese’s contemporary, Tintoretto, appears. Hartt remarks that Veronese’s painting makes the beholder think of “bright brass music.” But this is not the music that Greenaway evokes.

His vision of The Wedding at Cana manages to be both more somber and more sublime than Veronese’s painting, especially once material splendor gives way to the spiritual symbolism of water, wine, blood, fire, thunder, rain, light, and shadow. Transformation. Renewal.

Redemption. Greenaway’s vision is for some a postmodern exploration of religious feeling and faith. Although it can be read in this way, to my mind, Greenaway’s treatment of The Wedding at Cana is best understood as a demonstration of the miraculous power of images. It is a gauntlet thrown down to contemporary artists and audiences that reminds them of the legacy of V eronese (or of Rembrandt, Leonardo, and Michelangelo) and reminds them also of the possibility of its resurrection.

— Peter Greenaway, A Vision.

Paolo Veronese’s ‘The Wedding at Cana’, 6 June to 13 September 2009.

Video installation.

San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Folio | News16 | Fall 2014

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 9

8/28/14 9:42 PM

— Othello Montage.

Center, Othello and Desdemona, with Iago in shadows at right, Modesto Junior College, 2012.

Left, Othello and curtained bed, The Old Globe, 2006

From BLI N D S P OT S

THE RENAISSANCE

LORERNAM, SI DEL IPSAE EXPLIQUI NOSTIB us qui doluptatat quundi beribusamus, con rehent, consequ idendis verum eos modipsam fugiat.

At assim quos aut et earum simentis nam earum hil mil ex et quibea num harumet aruptae perum anienis doloribuscia nonsed qui nonsequat. Axime plabo. Cae omnimaio ducimusant litatur? Illuptam autas voluptate aut ressit eos eari nimodit atiorru ptation nobit as eatis et, sequodipsam dunt maxim que as si volore simolorem explibus pratur, estem consed qui ditiur.

Everiti onsendu ntotaspit quam verferia quiscium re escid exersped ut offic te re nonseniminto consed quatur acimi, tenihillam apisti cuptas simagnim quae landistem et reperunti ut re, ute perum etur as dolecto molestem audanis poreium quid que sitior sum quame sit acerunto essimus.

Henihitam expernam, nonsequ aspicatiusa num licae.

Itaque cor aut voloriaectis di tem fugit et harum quis dolorrum labo. Et millitas moluptaquis pro to volor rempers pelecta aut pel eturibust, esto cus aborpor itatisquo ipsa nonsed quiam qui derum eosandis ne porita am atures adi cumthe quam dolorem assum has la sum earum harShakespeare adapted toporempor Shakespeare often umquias sumbut exceste ctumquid Venice-Cyprus setting of ium qui core beenvoluptam, discussed, it should eiumquas molupta as nis sit necto excestiaOthello, its main characters and also bemagnatiur? regardedNon as strong tur, vent as dolorro quuntus. Ullaccumquo et que possimus plot, from an Italian novella, evidence that representation reicit, offici re placeribus Un capitano moro, published in of racial difference and racial 1565. Black African or possibly conflict reached a new stage Arab, these “Moors” were of development in Renaissance conceived as outsiders, marked Italy. There, a citizen of Venice, nonwhite, non-European, nonthe first Desdemona, has the Christian, who jeopardized the gift and curse of prophecy. “I white- European-Christian will be an example teaching order. The novella’s importance young people that they should

THE RENAISSANCE

REVISED EXPANDED UNEXPURGATED

not marry against the wishes of their families; from me Italian women will learn to shun relationships with men whom nature, Heaven, and social custom have separated from us.”

Her statement introduces another birth ofD. Venus.

In thisLASANSKY MEDINA one Venus is white and EDITOR Italian, properties that take on greatly increased clarity and significance when “us” opposes “them.”

TH E GH ET TO Denise Costanzo he “ghetto,” or minority-dominated neighborhood, is a term commonly associated with two distinct realities: first, the centuries of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, when the enforced isolation of all-Jewish neighborhoods (the earliest ghettos) furthered the Nazis’ genocidal aims; second, the impoverished areas of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century cities in which ethnically distinct and economically disadvantaged populations have been segregated into districts typically marked by derelict, often public housing.

Less well-known is that the ghetto, as both a reality and a label, is a Renaissance invention—the dark, obverse side of the rational approach to urban structure adopted by Italian architects and rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Idealized images of cities with vast piazzas surrounded by harmonious classical architecture were eventually realized in real projects for straight streets, new façades, and designed open spaces in the peninsula’s major capitals.This new notion of an aesthetically ordered, visually controlled urban environment coincided with less celebrated Renaissance attempts to “ethnically cleanse” Italian cities, not through warfare, but through the legislative and architectural containment of Jews.

Jewish communities had formed in the ancient imperial capitals of Rome and Milan. Other cities in Italy had occasionally welcomed displaced Jewish populations when, for instance, Jewish bankers were invited to settle in Florence in 1397. But tolerance could quickly turn to restriction and expulsion. Italian cities were typically segregated into neighborhoods dominated by an interest group, and Jews tended to cluster together much like communities unified by family loyalty or trade.

But the Renaissance era witnessed the significant change from voluntary to enforced segregation. In 1516 the Jewish population of Venice was forced to leave their original district for one known as the “Ghetto Nuovo,”

where they were required to remain behind locked, guarded gates between sundown and sunset. Established on a small, formerly industrial island, its name derived from the term for an iron foundry (“getto”).

A trend to restrict Jews to walled or otherwise confined neighborhoods spread throughout Italy. Rome’s ghetto (designed by papal architects) was in place by 1555; that in Florence was established in 1571. Others would follow: Padua (1603), Mantua (1612), and Ferrara (1627).The strategy reveals Italian cities’ ambivalence towards the Jewish presence: they were happy to benefit from Jewish trade and taxes but feared and resisted social contact or integration with Jews.

The association between substandard housing and ethnic segregation typical of the modern ghetto came about gradually. Though forbidden to own property, inhabitants of Jewish districts were not necessarily impoverished; however, restrictions on the size of ghettos, despite population growth, frequently created overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.

Similarly the public housing projects built in many postwar U.S. cities often provided undersized and illequipped apartments for residents, largely because of political pressure from developers opposed to competition from the state. Uncomfortable living conditions were alleged to encourage inhabitants to earn enough money to move into the for-profit housing market. This logic collided with other realities, such as pervasive racial restrictions in private neighborhoods and mortgage lending, and little commercial or political support for affordable and private housing.

Public housing policies have generally excluded all but the neediest and most troubled residents, who were least integrated into the workforce and society. Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to end such discrimination in the U.S., modern ghettos remain a pervasive legacy from Renaissance Italy to the contemporary city.

N A

A w le ac ed pi

W do

W lo w po be R

H si S B M th si al m B in 50 (to th

C co ex Ty ill R pa

Fo to th th N P co

In de ar ac ab m a

— J.H. Aronson, aerial view, Piazza del Popolo, Rome, c.1975.

Sixtus V’s avenues dignified Rome with splendid roadways rarely seen since antiquity, but his project was newly focused on circulation and movement throughout the city. His streets laid out long perspectival views to the public squares and buildings where they began and ended, giving them a new status as monuments in a continuous urban narrative.

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 10

8/28/14 9:43 PM

CON T EN TS Excerpted contents are in white.

THE RENAISSANCE

AISSANCE

VISED NDED URGATED

I Revise, Expand, Unexpurgate

D. Medina Lasansky with Gloria Kury

es of an

m

m us.” s hisLASANSKY A an, TOR atly ance

d ays but ed nt eets ews

n ew

.

REVISED E X PA N D E D U N E X P U RG AT E D

Notes on the Book Design Adam Michaels, Project Projects A primary interest at Project Projects since the studio’s beginning has been working on design (sometimes editing, as well) for books featuring highlevel research and thinking. While this work frequently originates from the academic realm, we’re most enthusiastic to collaborate with authors and editors that share an interest in shaping material into a form capable of both piquing and sustaining the interest of non-academic audiences.

We have a general inclination towards the unconventional over the doctrinaire—happily, the Renaissance book ably covers this base.

When I began to design this book, I spent a considerable amount of time looking closely at the design of Renaissance books—most particularly the work of Aldus Manutius’s publishing house in Venice. Hypnerotomachia poliphili (1499) is a particularly sophisticated case of text and illustrations being presented in an integrated, layout-conscious flow (something the Renaissance book picks up on).

However, the details of more common texts were of at least as much significance to the new book’s design. For these details I looked to Type Spaces: In-house norms in the typography of Aldus Manutius, by Peter Burnhill, a book with a close focus on issues of spacing within the books of Manutius. For The Renaissance’s format, I chose 5-3/8" x 8", based upon the Seneca (one of a series of affordable, accessible books); so the page size, proportion, margins, running header location and scale, and so on were all a quite direct application of Burnhill’s analysis of the Manutius source material. Body text is set in a relatively recent redrawing of Bembo (Bembo Book MT Pro), which itself is derived from a type commissioned by Manutius in 1495. While these details are all remarkably close to that of typical books 500 years(!) later, there’s enough idiosyncrasy in micro-typographic details (to the contemporary eye) to convey an overall anachronistic character to these historical books, and in turn, to the new design of The Renaissance.

Compounding this sense of anachronism, the book incorporates a range of contemporary approaches on top of the foundation described above. For example, captions are set in a contemporary monospace typeface (Atlas Typewriter); interstitial texts are in a contemporary sans serif (Atlas Grotesk); illustrations are full-color and occasionally full-bleed, and range from Renaissance engravings to computer game screenshots, video stills, and a paparazzi photograph of Lady Gaga.

For initial caps starting each essay, we introduce a graphic language related to Pop Art, in the form of sans serif letters treated with half-tone dot screens; this derived from a particular photo-lettering font, as prominently featured on the cover of the seminal Brian Eno–produced No Wave compilation LP No New York. The reference to this typographic language directly relates to the Pop Art trope of blown-up mass-reproduced imagery—found in the book’s cover image, the Warhol version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

In short, these working methods (close attention to historical typographic detail towards non-replicative ends; juxtaposition of disjunctive modes) are ones that we employ in a good deal of our work; these are a means of actively developing books that reflect our current conditions of informational abundance and digital production tools. This, then, as a means of creating memorable and informational experiences of a text, and ultimately a book as a specific object.

SE X M AT T E R S

The Da Vinci Code II The Sex of Artists in Renaissance Italy Patricia Simons III Inventing Michelangelo James M. Saslow OR IGI NA L S, COPI ES, M U TA N TS

A Venetian Wedding IV Raphael Redux Anne Higonnet V The Sopranos, Mannerist Painting, and Postmodern Television Cristelle Baskins W H E N A RT SPE A KS

A Visit to the Sistine Chapel VI Pasquino, Blogging in the Streets of Rome Brian A. Curran and Andrea Vera Raymond VII Sacred Graffiti D. Medina Lasansky L A BE L L A FIGU R A

Renaissance Plastic Surgery VIII The Way You Wear Your Hat Ian Frederick Moulton IX The Case of the Errant Art Historian Gloria Kury CONSPICUOUS CONSU M P T ION

Renaissance Imports X The Medici McMansion?

Denise R. Costanzo XI The Golden Girl Carole Collier Frick XII Better Than Venice D. Medina Lasansky FOOD DR A M A

The Art of Eating

D. Medina Lasansky XIII The Power of Mother’s Milk Yael Manes XIV Mattia Giegher Living

Evelyn Lincoln FOL L OW T H E I T I N E R A RY

Hitler, Consummate Tourist XV A Semester in Rome Sarah Benson XVI Mother Road Catherine Wilkinson Zerner

front cover — Andy Warhol, Detail of a Renaissance Painting (1984), The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. photo / ARS/The Andy Warhol Foundation

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 11

back cover — The Birth of Venus (c.1485), tempera on canvas (detail of 412), Botticelli, Sandro (1444/5-1510), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy Bridgeman Images

A MOR A L COM PASS

The Bonfire of the Vanities XVII Looking at Sex, I Modi to Cosmo Sarah Benson XVIII Lovely and Lethal Gloria Kury BL I N D SPOTS

The Ghetto XIX Forgetting the Mediterranean Maria Galli Stampino

Portraits of the Invisible

8/28/14 9:43 PM

r2_140498folio_CC.indd 12

8/28/14 9:44 PM

Solid First Year During the spring semester, first-year B.Arch. students worked on designs for preschools in a variety of climatological and environmental situations. Shown here is Justin Foo’s (B.Arch. ’18) model for Adalaj, India, which is known for its underground, stepped wells.

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 13

8/28/14 2:23 AM

Student News

Co Ed

A tea ture Urba Inde

During the fall and spring semesters, Jordan Berta (M.Arch. ’15) collaborated with AguaClara, a multidisciplinary program that designs sustainable water treatment facilities around the world, to create a 3D model of one of their designs to display at conventions. Berta worked with Senior Lecturer Monroe Weber-Shirk in Cornell’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to develop and produce a miniature 3D model of the internal structure of the tank, and assembled and enclosed it within a Plexiglas container.

Phil 2014 auto brie side and pede the

A paper titled “How Can We Actually Encourage People to Walk? A Response to Misapplications of New Urbanism,” was presented by Patrick Braga (B.S. URS ’16) at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Buffalo in June. The paper was published as part of a section of the conference called “Bolstering Transportation Reform with Transformational Research.” Braga was also recently appointed by Ithaca’s mayor Svante Myrick as a voting member of the City of Ithaca’s Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Council.

1

Schoolhouse Haiti The spring studio course Schoolhouse Haiti challenged second-year B.Arch. students to produce designs for a fully accessible, earthquake- and hurricane-resistant primary school for 200 pupils of all abilities in Petit Goave, Haiti. The studio was part of Centre d’Éducation Inclusif, a cross-campus initiative led by College of Human Ecology student Alexon Grochowski ’15, whose goal is to design, fund, build, and establish curricula for a school that will allow Haitian children with disabilities to learn alongside their able-bodied classmates. The project has garnered support and participation from groups across the campus, including graduate students in the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA), education students in a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences course, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Engaged Learning + Research, and the student-run Cornell University Sustainable Design.

The best of the designs from the studio were presented to a group of community leaders in Petit Goave over the summer, and CIPA students are beginning to pursue funding opportunities with the goal of having the school open in 2016.AAP

photo / provided

Elvan Cobb, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program, was accepted as a junior fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) affiliated with Koç University in Istanbul. RCAC fellowships, which include accommodations, travel, and a stipend, are awarded to approximately 10 Ph.D. candidates and 10 scholars with Ph.D.s.

Cobb will spend the academic year at Koç University, where she will conduct research for her dissertation, tentatively titled “Railway Crossings: Encounters in Ottoman Lands,” which focuses on the everyday practices and perceptions engendered by the advent of the first railroads in Ottoman Anatolia, and aims to explicate the transformative impact of railways on the Ottoman Empire. Cobb’s research will include an examination of 19th-century documents located in the Ottoman State Archives, which are typically written in an archaic form of Turkish using the Arabic script. Previously, Cobb attended an intensive summer school to learn Ottoman Turkish with the support of an A. Henry Detweiler Scholarship and a partial fellowship from the Ottoman Studies Foundation.

1 Aashti Miller (B.Arch. ’17) and Professor Werner Goehner during the Schoolhouse Haiti review in Milstein Hall.

2 Opening reception for the annual M.F.A. exhibition in New York City. This year’s show, Can’t Cant, was on view at Site/109 in June.

The recently published Association, volume 6, is a collection of work produced by AAP students, faculty, and alumni. Unbound with no prescribed order or hierarchy, the project plates are housed in an archival box that serves as an indexing tool. The index uses a nine-square grid for the organization of each plate based on the project title and text adhering to the matrix of columns (Student, Faculty, Alumni) and the rows (Architecture, Art, Planning). In addition to the project plates, the publication has nine plates for components of the culture of AAP. These range from annual traditions such as Dragon Day and the Beaux Arts Ball, to more omnipresent pieces of the college such as Milstein Hall and the Green Dragon Cafe.AAP

Calvin Kim (B.A./B.F.A. ’15) received an Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to study in the art division of the 2014 Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut.

In January, Zuhal Kol’s (M.Arch. ’13) project titled Activating the Void was awarded first place in M.ART 2013, an international competition that challenged entrants to redefine the concept of the traditional arts and crafts marketplace, and to propose spaces that promote direct contact between the artist/craftsperson and the customer.

Kol’s project, originally created for Visiting Assistant Professor Iñaqui Carnicero’s spring 2013 Madrid Re-Use option studio, proposed a reconstitution of the abandoned La Cebada market in a historical neighborhood in Madrid.

Activating the Void featured a steel truss structure positioned above the original six domes that constitute the roof of the market, and removal of the walls that create a barrier between the indoor and outdoor spaces. Kol received a €2,000 prize.

2014–15 Eidlit z Fellowship Recipients Announced In May, the Eidlitz selection committee announced the recipients of the 2014–15 Robert James Eidlitz Travel Fellowship. Of the 43 proposals submitted by architecture students and alumni, six projects were chosen to receive travel funding: • Juan

Carlos Artolozaga (M.Arch. ’14), Palladio & Scarpa: An Architectural Reading of Veneto

• Amanda

Huang (B.Arch. ’09), Mapping Matatus: The Informal Shaping the Formal

• Michael

Hughes (B.Arch. ’09), Tokyo Shift: Negotiating the Low-City and Super-Levee in an Impermanent Context

The annual competition is open to fifth-year seniors and graduate students in history of architecture and urbanism, architecture, and landscape architecture, as well as alumni of these programs who graduated within the last five years. Proposals may be submitted by individuals or teams and are accepted each spring.

Sadie Boulton Eidlitz established the fellowship in 1938 as a memorial to her late husband. Both Robert Eidlitz and Sadie are Cornell alumni, graduating in 1885 and 1884, respectively. Sadie Eidlitz designed the fellowship to supplement professional education through travel-based study.AAP

• Ann

Lui (B.Arch. ’10), Grafted Fields: Wrestling Dirt and Data from the Combine CommandCenter

• Ashley

Reed (M.Arch. ’11), SkinNY

• Johann

Schweig (B.Arch. ’10), Theodor Cron: Peruvian Architecture by a Swiss Architect

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 14

Scot Filip Pell a sp into

and dire cont the

Association, Volume 6

Carly Dean’s (B.Arch. ’14) article titled “+ | −” appeared in San Rocco 8, What’s Wrong with the Primitive Hut? The magazine’s editor, Ludovico Centis, came to Cornell in March to present the issue and participate in a panel discussion that included Dean, Visiting Assistant Professor Iñaqui Carnicero, and Assistant Professor Caroline O’Donnell. Dean also had an exhibit appear in the East Sibley Hallway in March titled Architects and Portraiture, which was a culmination of a yearlong research project.

The exhibit was displayed again at the Hunter Rawlings Presidential Research Senior Expo.

with City devi on d a sea vehi “ city “We on v mor car t that “[the tech job o tech how

8/28/14 2:24 AM

nnual rk t 09

Students

and r iti

15

Cornell Team Wins 2014 Ed Bacon Competition A team of five Cornell CRP and landscape architecture students won the 2014 Ed Bacon Student Urban Design Competition, with their project titled IndePENNdense 2076.

Each year, the competition poses a different Philadelphia-centric urban challenge to entrants. The 2014 contest asked teams to imagine how a driverless automobile would impact the region. The competition brief required competitors to envision “How roadways, sidewalks, intersections, signage, traffic signals, and the relationship between buildings, roadways, pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles will change” with the major advances in driverless technology.

IndePENNdense 2076 responded to the challenge with a redesign of the Vine Street corridor in Center City. The project proposed that passengers use mobile devices to summon various types of transportation on demand, designated pick-up and drop-off areas, and a seamless communication system between passengers, vehicles, and the city transportation department.

“Our overall project philosophy was people and city first,” says Ruslan Filipau (M.L.A./M.R.P. ’14).

“We wanted to shift the paradigm from an emphasis on vehicles dictating urban form to planning what a more perfect city would look like, and how driverless car technology could make that happen.” The jury said that IndePENNdense was chosen for first prize because “[the proposal] did the best job of integrating a new technology into an existing urban fabric. It did the best job of getting at how people might interact with the technology, not just the technology in a vacuum, but at how it relates to both people and the city that exists.”

Members of the winning Cornell team include Scott Baker (M.L.A. ’14), Kate Benisek (M.L.A. ’14), Filipau, Andrea Haynes (M.L.A. ’14), and Ashley Pelletier (M.L.A. ’14). A second Cornell team received a special jury prize for the integration of vehicles into their plan, which was titled Walking the Fast Lane.

The annual competition is dedicated to the vision and legacy of Philadelphia’s former city planning director, Edmund N. Bacon (B.Arch. ’32). This year’s contest drew entries from 15 teams from around the world.AAP

2

Conference Looks at Fiscal Stress in Upstate Cities

y,

val

e

o r m x

P

Thumbnail Explores the “Invisible”

s d e,

A group including (from left) Andrew Herington (B.Arch. ’14), Peter Gudonis (B.Arch. ’14), Shuping Liu (B.Arch. ’14), and Tyler Barker (B.Arch. ’14) presents during “Invisible,” the spring semester event hosted by the student group Thumbnail, which took place on April 18 in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium. Thumbnail aims to encourage the Cornell community to incite, enliven, and share ideas from many disciplines through a visually based platform designed around a single topic. Using the PechaKucha format of 20 slides in 20 seconds, presenters including Kent Goetz, Department of Performing and Media Arts; Andrew Hart (M.Arch. ’13); Mark Morris, visiting associate professor of architecture; Bonnie Sanborn, Department of Design and Environmental Analysis; Gensler Visiting Critic Frano Violich, architecture; John Zissovici, associate professor of architecture; and the group mentioned above, shared their work around this semester’s topic, “invisible.”

Each semester, Thumbnail hosts a PechaKucha night for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. “Invisible” was the fifth Thumbnail event.AAP

ed ng. p bert

d n

“State of New York Cities: Creative Responses to Fiscal Stress,” a March conference held at Cornell, brought together representatives from a group of Upstate New York cities and Cornell researchers to discuss how to improve quality of life for residents in the face of economic and population decline.

Representatives from Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica, and a team including CRP and Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) graduate students, discussed the challenges and shared strategies at the conference hosted by CRP, the Community and Regional Development Institute (CaRDI), and the Department of Development Sociology.

The students delivered an overview of economic challenges and individual city case studies. Common approaches to solutions included regional collaboration, green job creation, service sharing, conservative fiscal management, development of city centers, and neighborhood revitalization.

The conference also featured New York Conference of Mayors executive director Peter Baynes, and a panel of Cornell researchers with data on such critical issues as economic development, revenue and funding, public-sector pensions, and demographic trends. Conference attendees included officials from Hornell, Owego, Amsterdam, Cortland, and other cities; Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) educators; and representatives from state government organizations.

CRP students participating in the conference included Yunji Kim, Ph.D. candidate in CRP; Paul Leonhardt (M.R.P. ’14); Clint McManus (M.R.P. ’15); Katelin Olson (M.A. HPP ’09, Ph.D. candidate in CRP); Andrea Restrepo-Mieth, Ph.D. candidate in CRP; Abigail Rivin (M.R.P. ’14); Elliot Sperling (B.S. URS ’14); Nidhi Subramanyam (M.R.P. ’14); and Nancy Westgren (B.S. URS ’14).AAP

bit.ly/thumbnail2014

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 15

8/28/14 2:24 AM

photo / Saskia Reynolds

Students

2013–14 Student Academic Awards Architecture Awards & Prizes A. Henry Detweiler Fund Annie Schentag (M.A. HAUD ’12, Ph.D. HAUD ’18) Josi Ward (Ph.D. HAUD ’15) AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate of Merit B.Arch.

1. Medal and Certificate: Sean Wen (B.Arch. ’14) 2. Certificate: Lillian Simon (B.Arch. ’14) M.Arch.

1. Medal and Certificate: Youngjin Yi (M.Arch. ’14) 2. Certificate: Alison Nash (M.Arch. ’14) Alpha Rho Chi Carly Dean (B.Arch. ’14) Aaron Hudson Gensler (M.Arch. ’14) Baird Prize First Prize: Takuma Johnson (B.Arch. ’17) Vinayak Portonovo (B.Arch. ’17)

As part of an ongoing collaboration between Cornell in Rome and the American Academy in Rome (AAR), Julie Zhu (B.F.A. ’16) worked as an intern for Reynold Reynolds, a Los Angeles–based artist and the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize winner at the AAR in the spring. In addition to internships, the two institutions regularly exchange invitations to public events—exhibitions, open studios, performances, and lectures—and AAR fellows are also invited guests at critiques, studio visits, and the Cornell in Rome lecture series.AAP

Second Prize: Jessica Jiang (B.Arch. ’17) Honorable Mention: Helena Rong (B.Arch. ’17) Shining Sun (B.Arch. ’17) Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award ARCH (silver): Nicholas Cassab-Gheta (B.Arch. ’14) ARCH (bronze): Stephanie Gitto (B.Arch. ’14)

photo / provided

ARCH (silver): Erin Pellegrino (B.Arch. ’14) ARCH (bronze): Daniel Torres (B.Arch. ’14) Clifton Beckwith Brown Memorial Medal Sean Wen (B.Arch. ’14) Edward Palmer York Memorial Prize First Prize: Piotr Nowakowski (B.Arch. ’18) Second Prize: Charisse Foo (B.Arch. ’18) Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) Laura Kimmel (B.Arch. ’17) Hanuel Oh (B.Arch. ’18)

Students Discuss Planning with “Gender Lens” at APA Conference

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 16

Eschweiler Prize for Merit and Distinction in M.Arch.

Design Studio James Blair (M.Arch. ’14) Mia Miyoung Kang (M.Arch. ’14) XiaoXiao Li (M.Arch. ’14) Elizabeth Saleh (M.Arch. ’14) Anh Tran (M.Arch. ’14)

Robert D. MacDougall Memorial Scholarship Fall 2013: Elvan Cobb (Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A. HAUD ’10, Ph.D. HAUD ’16) Anna Mascorella (M.S. ’16, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Spring 2014: Gokhan Kodalak (M.A. HAUD ’16, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Margot Lystra (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’17) Whitten Overby (M.A. HAUD ’13, Ph.D. HAUD ’19) Annie Schentag (M.A. HAUD ’12, Ph.D. HAUD ’18)

American Institute of Certified Planners Outstanding Student Award Xiaomeng (Sylvia) Li (M.R.P. ’14) Department of City and Regional Planning Graduate Community Service Award Tillie Baker (M.R.P. ’15) Helen Schnoes (M.R.P. ’14) Barbara Summers (M.R.P. ’14) John W. Reps Award Swapna Kothari (M.A. HPP ’14)

New York Upstate American Planning Association Award for Outstanding Student Project: George Frantz’s 3072/5072 Land Use and Environmental Ruth Bentley and Richmond Planning Field Workshop Harold Shreve Award Nicolas Azel (M.L.A./M.R.P. ’16) Juan Carlos Artolozaga (M.Arch. ’14) Jessica Breslau ’15 Danny Salamoun (M.Arch. ’14) Peter Duba (B.S. URS ’16) Elizabeth Saleh (M.Arch. ’14) Kailey Eldredge ’14 Stephen W. Jacobs Fund Melissa Fickel ’14 Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A. HAUD ’10, Xinlei Hu (B.S. URS ’16) Ph.D. HAUD ’16) Kathleen Jenkins (B.S. URS ’15) Annie Schentag (M.A. HAUD ’12, Daniel Kuhlmann (M.R.P. ’14) Ph.D. HAUD ’18) Lindsay Levine (B.S. URS ’15) Josi Ward (Ph.D. HAUD ’15) Harrison Lewis (B.S. URS ’14) Stefan Lutter (M.R.P. ’14) William S. Downing Prize Petra Marar (M.L.A./M.R.P. ’15) Loren Rapport (B.Arch. ’14) Jesse McElwain (B.S. URS ’14) Nicholas Parisi ’14 Jennifer Rowe (M.R.P. ’15) Ivana Sirovica (B.S. URS ’14) Charles Baskerville Malia Teske (B.S. URS ’15) Painting Award Asea Thompson (M.R.P. ’14) Sophia Balagamwala (M.F.A. ’14) Sreya Vempatti (M.R.P. ’14) Nicholas Foster (M.F.A. ’14) Yujiao Wen ’15 Yilin Zhang ’15 Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Award Pamela Mikus Graduate Natani Notah (B.F.A. ’14) Fellowship

Art Awards & Prizes

David R. Bean Prize in Fine Arts Valerie Kwee (B.F.A. ’16) Pablo Maggi (B.F.A. ’16) Rachel Margolis (B.F.A. ’16) Melody Stein (B.F.A. ’16) James Walwer (B.F.A. ’16) Department of Art Distinguished Achievement Award Emily Greenberg (A.B./B.F.A. ’14)

Elizabeth Agyeman-Budu (M.R.P. ’15) Peter B. Andrews Memorial Thesis Fund Nora Wright (M.R.P. ’14) Portman Family Graduate Award Fund Paul Moberly (M.R.P. ’14) Travis North ’13 (M.L.A./ M.R.P. ’14)

Elsie Dinsmore Popkin ’58 Art Award Jihyun (Joy) Jeong (B.F.A. ’14)

Robert P. Liversidge III Memorial Book Award Heath Green (M.R.P. ’14) Max Taffet (M.R.P. ’14)

Faculty Medal of Art Jon Atkinson (B.F.A. ’15)

Thomas W. Mackesey Prize Daniel Kuhlmann (M.R.P. ’14)

Gibian Rosewater Traveling Research Award Melody Stein (B.F.A. ’16)

Urban and Regional Studies Academic Achievement Award Wanpaga (Julie) Chutatape (A.B./B.S. URS ’14) Andrew Jung-Kuntz (B.S. URS ’14) Quinn Kelly (B.S. URS ’14)

John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture Jerry Birchfield (M.F.A. ’14) Francesca Lohmann (M.F.A. ’14) Merrill Presidential Scholar Xu Yang (A.B./B.F.A. ’14)

Urban and Regional Studies Community Service Award Hannah Brockhaus (B.S. URS ’14) Kenneth Kalynchuk (B.S. URS ’14) Ulysses Smith (B.S. URS ’14)

Oppenheim Family Travel Fellowship Anamika Goyal (M.Arch. ’17) Paul Dickinson Prize Evan Rawn (B.Arch. ’17)

photo / University Photography

In April, members of the Cornell Women’s Planning Forum (WPF) led a series of facilitated discussions at the American Planning Association’s (APA) national conference in Atlanta.

Led by Professor Mildred Warner, CRP, students explored the place of gender and aging in planning. Small focus groups representing a wide spectrum of age, background, gender, and race, examined questions such as “What is a gender lens?” “How do we apply it in practice?” and “How do we measure and celebrate success?” The discussions illustrated how representation and perception of different genders significantly shape the workplace environments that planners face, and that communities and planners alike view one another based on gender.

The findings from the sessions will be used to refine a survey created by the WPF with the goal of launching a national survey with the APA’s Women and Planning division in the fall.

Students participating in the conference included (above, from left) Shannon Bush (M.R.P. ’15), Anni Zhu (M.R.P. ’15), Collenne Wider (M.R.P. ’15), Tillie Baker (M.R.P. ’14), Rachel Shindman (M.R.P. ’15), Miran Jang (M.R.P. ’15), Taru (M.R.P. ’15), and Emily Hackerson (M.R.P. ’15). Not pictured but also attending the conference were Haylee Madfis (M.R.P. ’14), Amanda Micklow (Ph.D. CRP ’19), Dan Schulman (M.R.P. ’15), and Helen Schnoes (M.R.P. ’14).AAP

Edwin A. Seipp Prize Hong Chen (B.Arch. ’16) Hyemin Jang (B.Arch. ’16) Daye Lee (B.Arch. ’16) Isabel Oyuela-Bonzani (B.Arch. ’16) Sejung Song (B.Arch. ’16) Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16)

CRP Awards & Prizes

8/28/14 2:25 AM

ed nt

4)

)

for :

)

5)

)

rd

’14)

’14) ’14)

photo / University Photography

Hidden Dragon From left, first-year B.Arch. students Anna Kuchera, Ben Jones, and Sonya Mantell embrace the spirit of Dragon Day 2014. After a long winter, many were surprised that no snowflakes fell from the sky; instead, spray foam ruled the day as a warmer precipitation of choice.

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 17

8/28/14 2:25 AM

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 18

8/28/14 2:26 AM

View to a Kill “n’Apparatus is a large-scale photographic installation, an apparatus for examining the space of interaction between man and animal at the former slaughterhouses of Rome. The project transforms the overhead tracks for transporting animals through the complex into both the subject and mechanism for documentation.

The view of the floor recorded by a camera mounted on the tracks, and the view of the tracks themselves from the floor, more than 400 images in total, are assembled into two superimposed planimetric views.

The tracks were installed to increase the efficiency with which the carcasses moved through the stages of their ‘transformation’ from animal to meat. The track choreographs alternative sequences of movement through the building to which both man and animal (and now camera) must submit. The mechanization of slaughter casts a long shadow on our definition of ‘human.’”

Associate Professor John Zissovici Department of Architecture

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 19

8/28/14 2:27 AM

Colum(n)ba, a project by architecture teaching associate Caio Barboza (B.Arch. ’13) and Natalie Kwee (B.Arch. ’13), has been selected for publication by both the University of Michigan’s Ampersand and the University of Virginia’s Lunch 9. Colum(n)ba revisits the traditional columbarium, utilizing new technologies and abandoned urban infrastructure to create a place of solitude and contemplation within the busy urban metropolis. The pair was also awarded third place in the Radical Innovation Awards for a new hotel concept, S_LOT, which was featured at the annual Hospitality Design Expo in Las Vegas in May. They received a $1,500 prize.

Associate Professor Thomas J. Campanella, CRP, was quoted in a February New York Times article about elm trees in Central Park titled “In the Treetops, a Winter Gift.” He also authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal that reviewed the history of New York’s World’s Fair sites on the 75th anniversary of the 1939 event.

Iñaqui Carnicero, visiting assistant professor of architecture, was an invited speaker at the Days of Oris conference, held in Zagreb, Croatia. His presentation, titled “Second Hand Spaces,” used Rome as an example of achieving sustainable building through the reuse of space, materials, and structures.

Carnicero also presented a talk in late March at a conference titled “The Evolution of Pedagogy: Architecture in Spain,” held at the School of Architecture at San Juan University in Puerto Rico; and was a panelist at an AIA New York event titled Social Housing in Spain in May.

featured in the journal CLOG: Prisons; another project titled Courting Miami was the runner up in the DawnTown Miami Design/Build 2 competition; and Hearth won the Judge’s Award for Architectural Poetry in Community Forests International Cabin Design Competition.

Du

Dust and Dep the

Law & Le corp land and for c coun emp

Assistant Professor Michael Manville, CRP, coauthored an article that appeared in the Washington Post in March, which looks at the cost of driving and how it effects public transportation. He was also quoted in an Associated Press article about the increased use of mass transit in the U.S., and wrote an article titled “Want Cheaper Housing?

Stop Requiring Parking,” that appeared in the Seattle Times.

Aleksandr Mergold, assistant professor of architecture, presented his paper titled “Ensemble Kohinor: A 40-Year Search for Architecture in the Late Soviet Period” at Princeton University’s “Symposium on Romantic Subversion of Soviet Enlightenment” on May 9. Another venture by Mergold titled H-I-A-C (House-in-a-Can), is now available for adaptation and construction. H-I-A-C is an adaptive reuse project that utilizes agrarian objects (a grain bin) and an entire system of design, fabrication, and delivery. H-I-A-C (and accompanying P-I-A-C, or Park-in-a-Can) has been in development since 2009, and was completed in October 2013.

on t of R also Nap

Ariz and Ariz Phoe Roca was relat

Ostendarp Murals on Display in London Site-specific, wall-to-ceiling drip murals by Carl Ostendarp were part of a group show titled Everything Falls Faster than an Anvil, on view at Pace Gallery in London, in May and June. Ostendarp is an assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Art. Ostendarp’s murals enveloped the gallery spaces and provided the context in which other artists’ works were displayed.

Curated by CHEWDAY’S, the exhibition explored the influence of the cartoon on contemporary art, and featured work by emerging artists in dialogue with established contemporary art figures, including Ostendarp.

Other exhibitors in the show included Catharine Ahearn, Alistair Frost, Philip Guston, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Tala Madani, Yoan Mudry, Marlie Mul, Yoshitomo Nara, Claes Oldenburg, Oliver Osborne, Tørbjørn Rødland, Paul Thek, Peter Wächtler, and John Wesley.

Ostendarp also had a solo exhibition titled Blanks at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York City, from July 24 to September 6; and had work included in group exhibitions at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver, and the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.AAP

Simitch and Warke Publish The Language of Architecture The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know, by associate professors of architecture Andrea Simitch and Val Warke, was published in June by Rockport Publishers.

According to the publisher, the book is intended to provide “students and professional architects with the basic elements . . . [and] includes an introduction to architecture design, an historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines.” The 226-page volume includes contributions by current AAP faculty Iñaqui Carnicero, Jenny Sabin, and Jim Williamson; alumni Steven Fong (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’82) and David Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92); along with K. Michael Hays and Richard Rosa.AAP

Hookway Publishes Interface The exploration of the human relationship with technology is the focus of Branden Hookway’s new book, Interface (MIT Press, 2014). In the book, Hookway, who is a visiting assistant professor of architecture, offers a theory of the interface that draws on cultural theory, political theory, philosophy, art, architecture, new media, and the history of science and technology. He finds the origin of the term interface in 19th-century fluid dynamics and traces its migration to thermodynamics, information theory, and cybernetics; he also discusses issues of subject formation, agency, power, and control, within contexts that include technology, politics, and the social role of games.AAP

8/28/14 2:27 AM

photo / provided

CRP’s Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner presented “Is Historic Preservation Elitist?” during the Fast, Funny, Passionate session of the American Planning Association’s 2014 national conference; and “Building on the Dynamic, Iconic, and Everyday” and In a recently published policy brief titled “Multivocality in Tours of Texas Modernism “Are We Unprepared for ‘Pipelines on Rails’? and Urban Renewal Sites” at the 67th Annual Transport Risks and Policy Challenges,” Conference of the Society of Architectural Susan Christopherson, professor in CRP, Historians. Minner also collaborated with discusses the controversy around shipping Boris Michev, Cornell’s maps and geospatial crude oil from North Dakota and Alberta, information librarian, on the exhibition Canada, to the Port of Albany via rail. She was Land Use, Transit, and Urban Redevelopment also quoted on the topic in a New York Times Illustrated (1933–72), and cocurated an article titled “Bakken Crude, Rolling Through exhibit titled Prescriptions for Urban Albany”; in an article in the Journal News, Ailments: Planning Solutions of the 1920s– “Cuomo Urges Better Oil Train Oversight 40s with Liz Muller, assistant director and from Feds after 2 Derailments”; and she curator of media and digital collections in appeared on WCNY’s Capitol Pressroom after Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare the April derailment of a train carrying and Manuscript Collections. crude oil in Virginia.

Jenny Sabin, assistant professor of architecPrivate Secrets Public Lies, a project by visiting ture, won a 2014 Architectural League Prize assistant professor of art Renate Ferro, for Young Architects and Designers, an was featured at the 2014 Humanities, Arts, annual portfolio competition organized by Science, and Technology Alliance and the Architectural League under the direction Collaboratory conference (HASTAC) held in of the league’s program director Anne Lima, Peru, in April. Inspired by international Rieselbach and the Young Architects and news reports whose origins were in the Designers Committee. Open to designers realm of the personal, but ended in national out of school for 10 years or less, the or international scandal, the project was competition draws entrants from around previously presented at the Herbert F. North America. Winners lectured in June Johnson Museum of Art in 2012, and at a and displayed their work in an exhibition conference sponsored by the Hemispheric on view through the summer. Sabin’s lecture Institute of Performance and Politics and was on June 26 in Manhattan.

FOMMA in Chiapas, Mexico, in 2010.

An article by Professor Mildred Warner, In March, (No) Stop Marconi, a project by CRP, titled “State Imposes a Fiscal Burden visiting critics Nahyun Hwang and on Communities,” appeared in the Times David Eugin Moon’s firm N H D M, received Union in March. Warner was also a guest, the 2014 AIANY Design Honor Award in along with Katelin Olson (M.A. HPP ’09, the Projects category. Designed to acknowPh.D. candidate in CRP), on WCNY’s Capitol ledge and discuss the significance of Pressroom radio show, where she discussed underused space in the city, the project how the new state budget will effect cities in proposed new scenarios for the soon-to-be Upstate New York. vacant Europoint Towers in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The project was exhibited John Zissovici, associate professor, architecat the Fifth International Architecture ture, presented Under Your Skin, a paper Biennale in Rotterdam in 2012. and film presentation at the “Mediated City” conference at Ravensbourne University After Architecture, the firm of Katie in London in April. Zissovici’s work also MacDonald (B.Arch. ’13) and Kyle appeared in the Infinite Conversation, a Schumann (B.Arch. ’13), teaching associate group show at the Castle Fitzjohns Gallery in architecture, has had several recent in New York City that opened in March. successes. “Architecture, Villainized” was

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 20

photo / Damian Griffiths and Pace London

Faculty News

on

Faculty&Staff

Dustin Jones has been hired as a senior lecturer and associate director of external relations in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Baker Program in Real Estate.

Jones was previously the chairman at Livability Law Group; and an attorney at Ridenour, Hienton & Lewis, PLC, a Phoenix-based law firm focused on corporate and government affairs with an emphasis on land-use regulation and policy, zoning and planning, and developing and implementing land-use visions for clients. Jones has also served as general corporate counsel, overseeing business, intellectual property, and employment matters.

In February of 2014, Jones was appointed to serve on the advisory board of the Arizona Department of Real Estate by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. He also served two terms on Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano’s African American Advisory Council.

Jones received his J.D. from the University of Arizona College of Law, and a B.A. in political science and Latin American studies from the University of Arizona. He was previously a partner at Snell & Wilmer, Phoenix’s largest law firm; an associate at Lewis and Roca; and a shareholder at Tiffany & Bosco, where he was chair of its real estate, land use, and government relations practice.AAP

photo / Austin + Mergold

Dustin Jones Joins CRP

21

This spring, SuralArk, an “American vernacular interpretation of Noah’s Ark,” was on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. Designed by Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00) and Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00) of Austin+Mergold, SuralArk was chosen from more than 170 entries to Socrates’s annual Folly competition. Made of reclaimed 2-by-6 lumber and vinyl siding, SuralArk has its material origins in American suburbia and its formal roots as a (discarded) upturned ship cast ashore.AAP

n

p

tler,

ry

Christopherson Becomes First Woman to Chair CRP Early in the spring semester, Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, announced that Professor Susan Christopherson would assume the chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning for a three-year term. She became the first woman chair in the department’s 77-year history, and succeeds Kieran Donaghy, who had been chair for five years. “Susan will bring her formidable research and scholarship experience to the position,” says Kleinman.

“She is an ideal candidate to lead the department.”

Mark Cruvellier was reappointed for a second consecutive three-year term as chair of the Department of Architecture, and Associate Professor Michael Ashkin will take the helm as chair of the Department of Art for one year, after which previous chair, Associate Professor Iftikhar Dadi, will return to the position.

All three chair appointments commenced on July 1.AAP

ce photo / provided

e f id

y,

Shannon Ebner, seated on the right side of the table, meets with M.F.A. students in The Foundry during a visit to campus this spring. Ebner was the spring-semester Teiger Mentor in the Arts; in addition to making several trips to campus to meet with students, she delivered a public lecture titled “Shannon Ebner and the Photographic Sentence” in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium, in February. Ebner is an associate professor of fine arts at University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts. Alejandro Cesarco is the Teiger Mentor for the fall 2014 semester.AAP

Perlus Wins Einaudi Seed Grant Barry Perlus, associate professor of art, is the recipient of a $9,000 seed grant from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Perlus will use the funding to work on a project titled The Astronomical Observatories of Jai Singh.

Between 1727 and 1734, Maharajah Jai Singh II of Jaipur constructed five astronomical observatories in west-central India. Commonly known as “Jantar Mantar,” the observatories incorporate multiple buildings of unique form, each with a specialized function for astronomical measurement. According to Perlus’s grant proposal, “These structures with their striking combinations of geometric forms at large scale, have captivated the attention of architects, artists, and art historians worldwide, yet remain

largely unknown to the general public. The objective of this project is to bring the story of sky observation, and an awareness of this extraordinary cultural heritage site, to an international audience.”

Perlus will use the Einaudi grant to support the completion of an interactive book and linked website, and a prototype show for use by planetariums and fulldome theaters (immersive, domebased video projection environments). “This project will initiate an international, interdisciplinary collaboration between Cornell, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi, India, to produce an immersive show for planetariums and fulldome theaters worldwide,” he says.AAP

Perlus, at right, inside the 200-seat dome theater at the Adler Planetarium. Several panoramas of the Jantar Mantar are included in the current show Cosmic Wonder at the planetarium.

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 21

8/28/14 2:27 AM

photo / Heather Zises

’80

Michael Manfredi The galleria in the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology, a new building for the University of Pennsylvania that was designed by Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80) and his firm Weiss/Manfredi.

The building opened last fall.

1

photo / provided

photo / Albert Vecˇerka / Esto

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 22

8/28/14 2:28 AM

Alumni

photo / provided

photo / Heather Zises

23

2

1 From left: Alumni Artwalk participants Gisue Hariri, Karen Ruenitz, Heather Zises, Precious Alike, and Kea Gordon reflected on the side of an exhibit in Lehmann Maupin gallery.

2 From left: Dominianni with a member of the farmers’ cooperative, Mamtoi, and her son, Stefano.

1

’77–’13

Alumni and Students Tour Lower East Side Galleries On May 17, more than 30 AAP alumni and students joined hosts Peter D. Gerakaris (B.F.A. ’03) and Mark Gibian ’79 (B.F.A. ’77) for a day-long walking tour of galleries on the lower east side of Manhattan. This year’s Alumni Artwalk & Tertulia took the group on a tour of Cornell-affiliated galleries ranging from large, established venues to startup spaces.

The tour visited eight galleries, including Storefront for Art and Architecture, where Irina Chernyakova (B.Arch. ’10) and Piotr Chizinski (M.F.A. ’13) work; Novella Gallery; Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space, where work by John Ahearn (B.F.A. ’73) was on display; Invisible Exports; and William Holman, where artist Farideh Sakhaeifar (M.F.A. ’11) presented her piece that is included in a current group exhibit. The day ended with a reception at Central Booking, owned and founded

by Maddy Rosenberg (B.F.A. ’77).

“It was a great day, and enjoyable to connect with a diverse group of people who share the same experiences

at Cornell and in Ithaca, in addition to design and art making,” says Dianne Matyas (B.F.A. ’84, M.F.A. ’89), who is the vice president of exhibitions and programs at the Staten Island Museum of Art. Rosenberg adds, “I’m eager to help build a local community of people who are interested in art and have Cornell as a common experience, and was very happy to provide a venue for this event.

I am just glad to have all this space, and it’s my pleasure to share it.”

This was the largest group yet for Gerakaris and Gibian whose previous alumni outings featured visits to alumni studios instead of galleries. “We couldn’t have been more pleased with the quality and quantity of our group,” said Gerakaris. Gibian added, “The diversity of creative Cornellians spanned generations of artists, architects, and planners to gallerists, curators, and writers—it’s the kind of exciting, creative melange entirely unique to Cornell AAP.” Gerakaris and Gibian both serve on the AAP Alumni Advisory Council.AAP

photo / provided

’12

’12

URS Grad Takes On Collective Farming Project in Tanzania After graduation, Marc Dominianni (B.S. URS ’12) knew he wanted to go abroad. His time at Cornell in Rome as a junior as well as a stint in Patagonia made him love “the real, raw experiences of the world.” He ended up in Tanzania with 2Seeds Network, a non-profit group that serves as an umbrella organization incubating small human capital development projects in Africa.

As a project coordinator in Lutindi, an isolated mountain village, he spent July 2012 through July 2013 working with community members to create a self-sustaining, synchronized production system for a group of farmers to help stabilize incomes. The project also focused on increasing food and income security by planning, harvesting, and selling the projects collectively, which gave the group of farmers access to markets that individual farmers would not have had on their own.

After a year in Lutindi, Dominianni stayed on with 2Seeds for a second year as a senior project coordinator. In that role he managed four teams living in both rural sites and Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, and coordinated several projects including working with the nation’s largest wholesale agricultural product market to add transparency to the value chain with mobile phone solutions.

“It was a great experience,” says Dominianni, “And I now have good organization management, team dynamic, and project management experience.”

After finishing his work with 2Seeds in July, Dominianni spent the summer using a $1,000 Huckberry Explorer Grant to travel through Tanzania on a motorcycle. He is continuing his global travels this fall in his next position, that of marketing manager at a boutique hospitality chain, Áni Villas, located in Anguilla.AAP

Correction from AAP News 15 In the story titled “Carreiro’s Fierce Bliss on Display in Manhattan,” Yeon Jim Kim’s exhibition at the Hunterdon Museum is incorrectly listed as one of Joel Carreiro’s curatorial projects. Jonathan Greene curated the show; Carreiro wrote the catalog essay for the exhibition.

Khan Spends Summer at Skowhegan Residency

photo / Albert Vecˇerka / Esto

The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, was Baseera Khan’s (M.F.A. ’12) home for the summer. Khan was chosen as one of 65 residents for the prestigious annual summer residency program, and spent her time there creating an experimental play titled Relief.

“Relief is a production exploring issues of extended personal psychologies during the end of World War II, and contemporary personal struggles within political occupations,” says Khan. “It’s a collection of film transcriptions, song lyrics, and theoretical texts which talk of ruins and geography and how people manage to dwell within these spaces.”

Khan started by transcribing scripts from films, music, and recorded interviews conducted over the past three years with family members and friends whose direct experiences came from geographic displacement due to war and political occupation. She also worked on the production of mini-screenplays, scripts that were performed by fellow residents from the Skowhegan School who read specific roles, and were audio recorded into the manufactured scripts. Some of the transcriptions came from films such as Kazuo Hara’s 1987 The Naked Army Marches On, and song lyrics from The Smiths.

Khan hopes to debut the production in 2016.

The Skowhegan residency program for emerging visual artists was established in 1946 with the goal of creating an enduring community of artistic practice, learning, and innovation governed by artists. Each summer, the program aims to “create the most stimulating and rigorous environment possible for a concentrated period of artistic creation, interaction, and growth.”

“The artists I met are incredible, and I was constantly shocked at how talented and generous everyone was,” says Khan. “The program is truly life changing and I cannot wait to continue the project that I started there.”AAP

News16 | Fall 2014

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 23

8/28/14 2:28 AM

photo / provided

Alumni 1

Building on Opportunity: The Cassell Family of Architects

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 24

Albert’s brother, Oliver B. Cassell ’29 (1903–79), a civil engineer, built bridges for New York state, and worked with Albert on several projects in Washington, DC, before joining the city’s Department of General Services.

Charles’s younger sisters—Martha Cassell Thompson (B.Arch. ’48) (1925–68) and Alberta (B.Arch. ’49) (1926–2007)—“were the first AfricanAmerican women to finish the school of architecture at Cornell,” he says.

After Cornell, Martha practiced in Missouri, and then worked on architect Philip Frohman’s Washington National Cathedral for several years.

Alberta shared in an award for a redesign of the city of Ithaca in her senior year, and later designed ships’ quarters for the Navy in Washington.

Albert’s daughter Paula ’76, born in 1954, also studied architecture at his alma mater.

Charles also left Cornell to go to war, in 1944, training as a Tuskegee Airman. After World War II he earned a degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1951, and designed Navy and Veterans Administration hospitals and other buildings in the 1950s.

“After that, I became active in civil rights,” Charles says. He won a seat in the District of Columbia’s first school board election and founded the Washington, DC Council of Black Architects to address a lack of equity in building projects funded by (mostly black) district taxpayers. “[We] put pressure on the government . . . and we were successful,” he says. “And things got better and better. One thing those of us involved in civil rights are proud of is the fact that we eliminated a lot of the discrimination in that city.”

Charles also chaired the Washington, DC Historic Preservation Review Board and supervised design and construction of six University of the District of Columbia buildings before retiring in 1988. Now 90, and a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he consults on architecture, urban planning, and historic preservation. AAP Daniel Aloi

photo / provided

Albert I. Cassell (B.Arch. ’19) (1895–1969), the university’s second black architecture graduate, found opportunity at Cornell and encouraged his family to seek the same. Five Cassells made a lasting mark on their professions, their communities, and AfricanAmerican history.

“My father decided that all four of his children were going to be architects, and would go to his alma mater—three of us did,” Charles Cassell ’46 said in a 2012 interview.

“He was a remarkably driven individual and came from a very modest background. As an African American in 1915 [a rarity in the study of architecture then], there were numerous obstacles,” says Christine O’Malley, former assistant director of the Carol Tatkon Center, who is organizing a fall exhibition on the Cassell family with her husband, landscape architecture lecturer Marc Miller.

“His [high school] counselors advised him to change his plans” to attend Cornell, Charles says.

“His mother encouraged him to follow his desire.

He borrowed money from [her] meager savings—she took in washing—moved to Ithaca, and spent a year there repeating his high school work. There was no question of his qualifying to be admitted.”

Albert’s mentor, professor George Young Jr., would later remember his photographic memory and “his focus on nothing but his studies,” Charles says.

Albert left Cornell after two years to serve in World War I, and received a war-awarded B.Arch. degree from Cornell in 1921. He designed five Tuskegee Institute buildings with landscape architect William T. Hazel, then joined Howard University’s faculty, became its architecture school’s first dean, and, as university architect, supervised design and construction of 11 Howard buildings.

One of the District of Columbia’s first licensed African-American architects, Albert fought against discrimination throughout his career. He purchased 500 acres on the Chesapeake Bay in the 1930s and set out to build “a new city where African Americans had no prejudice, where they could succeed based on their talents,” Charles says.

After political opposition in Congress derailed that project, a success followed in 1942–46: the 569unit Mayfair Mansions in Washington, DC, one of the country’s first federally subsidized housing projects for African Americans, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

2 1 Howard University Founders Library, designed by Albert Cassell 2 Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, Baltimore, Maryland; designed by Charles Cassell ’46 3 Albert I. Cassell (B.Arch. ’19) 4 Martha Cassell (B.Arch. ’48) 5 Alberta Cassell (B.Arch. ’49)

’19 3

Bo

This story originally appeared in the fall 2014 issue of Ezra.

Building a Legacy: The Cassell Family and Cornell will be displayed from November 10 to 14, in Tjaden Hall’s Experimental Gallery, with additional images projected onto White Hall, the original home of the Cornell College of Architecture.

Mod

4

’48

5

“[Thi of fi fore prod

’49

8/28/14 2:28 AM

photo / provided

1

photo / provided

s

of e, rles

9)

)

)

Bolex Redux Model from Daniel Torres’s (B.Arch. ’14) thesis, “Burn After Viewing.” “[This thesis] explores space and materiality through the medium of film. It props up an old, leaning, wooden structure against a foreigner’s nostalgic memories so that these two fading things produce something living and present, even if only for a moment.”

r1_140498cornell_CC.indd 25

8/28/14 2:28 AM

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

r2_140498cornell_CC.indd 4

9/9/14 4:35 PM