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Spring 2018 Rand Hall Transformation 2 New B.F.A. Curriculum 4 Design Connect Success 10 Upson Hall Renovation 24

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) 254-6292 aapcommunications@cornell.edu aap.cornell.edu

Rebecca Bowes, Elise Gold EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Patti Witten CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Dan Aloi, Rebecca Bowes, Edith Fikes, Blaine Friedlander, Patti Witten, Jennifer Wholey, Jay Wrolstad COPY EDITOR Laura Glenn DESIGN KUDOS Design Collaboratory PHOTOGRAPHY William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Sheri D’Elia EDITORS

Sophia Starling (M.F.A. ’19) utilized the empty third floor of Rand Hall for her installation Continuous Painting in the fall semester.

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© April 2018 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.

“Through the Arts at Cornell initiative, Kent brought together faculty across all disciplines—from engineering to soil sciences—to begin a conversation about the way art is practiced at Cornell.”

—Serena Savino ’02, AAP’s assistant dean of alumni affairs and development

Editors’ Message When Kent Kleinman graciously agreed to give up his usual dean’s message to allow us this space for a farewell message, we wrestled with the best way to say goodbye.

We knew we had to describe the challenging environment that faced Kent when he arrived at AAP 10 years ago.

We had to honor the myriad accomplishments and the indelible mark he has made on the college—both on the people, including the transformation of the faculty as retirements required a new vanguard; and on the physical footprint, as facilities in Ithaca, New York City, and Rome were upgraded and updated under his supervision.

And, not to be overlooked, we had to celebrate Kent’s unwavering dedication to arts and design education.

The images and captions on this page expand on many of those themes.

But that wouldn’t be enough. We needed to include sentiment in our farewell.

For the past decade, we—the editors of AAP News and the staff of the college—have had the opportunity to work with a steadfast leader, and a dedicated and approachable colleague.

We walked around the college asking people to describe Kent. Some variation of the words warm, engaging, kind, funny, and “endlessly curious” was universally echoed.

Many mentioned the energy that Kent brings to all of his interactions, as well as his “understated brilliance.”

“His excitement is contagious and sets the tone for everyone who works with him.”

Kent’s vision for AAP was focused but open to refinement and input. It was noted that he was willing to listen to any idea from any source, weigh them equally, and chose what was best for the college, amending his vision as needed.

“Unflappable” was also used frequently. The best example we heard was from Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), who recounted a trip to India with Kent to visit Ratan Tata’s Nano facility. “As the first Nano rolled off the line, a rogue storm struck, toppling streetlights and ripping off roofs,” said Mergold.

“But Kent was somehow smiling through the whole mess, offering a model of behavior.”

Most of all, people talked about how Kent was not a “typical dean,” admiring his awareness of details and quick, thoughtful responses to even the smallest requests.

He listened and gave practical, compassionate, and actionable advice to any who sought his counsel.

“Kent once told me that ‘when you’re dealing with other people, always assume they are coming at things with the best intentions,’” says Melanie Holland Bell ’95, senior director of admissions and academic services. “I’ve used that lesson countless times.”

During the annual holiday staff lunch, Kent was asked about his plans for the future. “I’m going on sabbatical, and I’m not very good at that,” he responded. “I’ve only taken one semester off since I entered academia and I’m somewhat concerned about it. And my wife [Lisa Pincus] is VERY concerned about it!”

But he has earned his leave.

What he is leaving behind is a college that is markedly stronger and positioned to build on that strength into the future. “Kent’s impact as dean will be felt well into the decades to come,” says Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06).

“AAP is in a strong position to remain at the cutting edge of design education because of his leadership. His commitment to diversity and inclusion is admirable, and he is to be commended for his visionary leadership as well as his sincere passion for the well-being of AAP students.”

In Kent’s yearbook message to the graduating class of 2016, he said: “You have excelled at some of the most demanding programs at this university, and you have done so with a seriousness of purpose graced by humor, integrity, wit, and just the right amount of rebellion.”

That description could just as aptly be applied to him.

Kent, it has been our sincere privilege.

1 1 “Kent has been instrumental in developing a relationship between AAP and the university. He became a very well-respected dean involved in many important universitywide committees, and his opinion was highly regarded.”

—Dalia Stiller (B.Arch. ’84), member of the Cornell Board of Trustees, seen above, second from right 2

Milstein Hall’s designer Rem Koolhaas, right, speaks with Kleinman at the building’s opening celebration in 2012.

Milstein Hall was just the first of the many facility improvements Kleinman oversaw during his tenure. A renovation of East Sibley Hall’s third floor into the Frances Shloss Studios, new facilities in Rome and New York City, and the just-begun Mui Ho Fine Arts Library have made the physical footprint of the college match its world-class academic reputation.

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The 2012 performance by choreographer William Forsythe was one of many important and provocative exhibitions Kleinman brought to campus.

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A third of all tenured and tenure-track faculty in the college were appointed during Kleinman’s deanship including Jenny Sabin (right), seen here at the celebration of her project, Lumen, at MoMA PS1 last summer. photo / Jesse Winter

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Kleinman helps wrangle a three-story yellow balloon installed over the sculpture court at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. The balloon was part of a 2010 exhibition focusing on Tata Motors’ Nano automobile.

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Rebecca Bowes and Elise Gold Editors, AAP News

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Rand Hall Transformation Fine Arts Library, Revamped Stein Institute Returns Foundations in Architecture Launches in Rome, Vadera Joins Art Faculty, New B.F.A. Curriculum New Architecture Events Series, Mike Lydon Visits Ithaca Fall 2017 Lectures and Exhibitions

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Student Profile: Hallie Black (B.Arch. ’19) 10 Design Connect Projects Will Come to Fruition, Foo Wins Steel Design Competition 11 CRP Summer Internships, Ghana Girls’ Academy, Students Win Game Award 14 “Clay Non-Wovens” Appears at ACADIA, Student Work in Italy and Upstate New York, Student Notes

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Faculty Profile: Bill Gaskins, Art Bonnie MacDougall Passes Away, Faculty Books Faculty Team Wins City of Dreams, Faculty Notes

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Alumni Profile: Trudi Sandmeier (M.A. HPP ’00) Actor and URS Alum Partnership, Philip Rickey’s Notre Dame Installation, Sustainability Podcast CFAA Expansion, Cornell Tech Opens Renovated Upson Hall Opens

Spring 2018 Rand Hall Transformation 2 New B.F.A. Curriculum 4 Design Connect Success 10

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Upson Hall Renovation 24

News&Events

Waste, Models, and Dance Find a Unique Window of Opportunity 1

Rand Hall officially closed in mid-May 2017, and was emptied over the spring and summer in preparation for the construction of the new Mui Ho Fine Arts Library (FAL) (see next page).

But, rather than simply sitting idle during the fall semester, the vacant building provided a unique opportunity for a wide range of ad hoc uses by faculty and students.

Lit from both north and south by its distinctive arched windows, the empty Rand Hall was used by admissions for open houses, by students for large- and small-scale installations, and by all of the departments for exhibitions and crits.

“Vacant spaces are irresistible to our faculty and students,” said Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP Kent Kleinman, reflecting on the provisional uses of the space that took place throughout the semester.

“A spontaneous succession of spectacular, inventive, typically huge, and always amazing installations popped up in the light-filled spaces of Rand Hall, like honorific tributes to this beloved, weatherworn, resilient building.”

Built by the architects Gibb and Waltz in 1911 in a Neoclassical style, the structure originally housed machine and pattern shops, and an electrical laboratory as part of the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering.

It later became the home for studios, classrooms, the Fine Arts Library, and the fabrication shops. It is the traditional starting point of the annual Dragon Day parade held in March, and many dragons have been fabricated inside the ground-floor workshop and assembled outside of the building just before the parade.

Rand Hall occupies a special place in the hearts of many alumni, but after more than a hundred years of heavy use, the building is in desperate need of revitalization. Virtually every part of Rand Hall will be positively affected by the FAL project and the extensive planned maintenance work to the first-floor workshop.

Deferred maintenance will be addressed, particularly to the 115 windows made of shallow rolled-steel sections holding single panes of glass. The thermal performance for the entire building will be improved as well.

“Adaptive reuse is a likely paradigm for work on campus in the foreseeable future,” Kleinman said.

“Repurposing existing buildings for new programs involves respecting the past and the present. I hope the Rand Hall project will serve as an example of a lively dialogue with history.”AAP

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A workshop and performance titled Bodies Intersect Buildings, hosted by architecture’s Visiting Critic Danica Selem, invited participants to respond to a series of prompts and sounds that exposed the ways in which Rand Hall provided the groundwork for certain kinds of thought patterns, behaviors, and experiences. photo / Danica Selem

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A weekend for families of first-year students included an exhibition of models held on Rand Hall’s third floor. photo / Kent Kleinman

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Final reviews for the option studio Cyclo: Architectures of Waste took place on the second floor of Rand Hall.

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Workers in the first floor of Rand Hall began construction in December.

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Clarence S. Stein. Clarence Stein Papers / Cornell University Library Digital Collections

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Construction Begins on Mui Ho Fine Arts Library The end of the fall semester saw the beginning of the transformation of Rand Hall into the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library (FAL), a state-of-the-art facility with massed stacks of books as its centerpiece, digital resources, and voluminous reading and study space. Boasting one of the best circulating collections of fine arts materials in the country, the library will accommodate 125,000 volumes, in a configuration forming an inverted ziggurat of books two stories high with stacks accessible by stairs and walkways.

“It’s a really stunning commitment to the book in the 21st century,” said Gerald Beasley, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. “The space is very theatrical. It’s going to be a great place—even for people who never use the library, it will have a strong and interesting presence on that part of the campus.”

Along with 8,000 square feet of shop space for AAP occupying the first floor, the 107-year-old industrial building is being entirely rehabilitated. According to Kent Kleinman, the college’s Gale and Ira Drukier Dean, it will visibly display two essential activities of the AAP community.

“You’ll see people working with material and tools on the ground floor and working with texts and images on the upper floors—the building becomes an embodiment of those two ways of knowing the world,” Kleinman said.

Mui Ho ’62 (B.Arch. ’66), an architect and educator retired from the University of California–Berkeley, committed $6 million to the library in 2013. The $21.6 million project received its final approval from the Cornell University Board of Trustees on December 7, and contractors from Welliver began interior demolition work in Rand Hall on December 19. Construction is expected to be completed in June 2019, and the library will open for the subsequent fall semester.

Wolfgang Tschapeller (M.Arch. ’87) is the design architect, and New York City–based STV is the architectural firm of record, with a team led by Harris Feinn (B.Arch. ’69, M.Arch. ’71).

“The design,” Tschapeller said, “is an immediate and quite physical invitation to discover an extraordinary collection, which appears as one big volume, visible in its entirety upon entering. [Interconnecting] staircases are the keys to enter this volume of knowledge, [to] browse, read, and wonder.”

One new feature will be a 1,500-square-foot structural deck on Rand Hall’s roof, outfitted with base plates for temporary structures as well as power, water, and digital connections.

“It will be a site for experimental pavilions built by faculty and students on a recurring basis, every year or every two years,” said Kleinman. “These full-scale constructions will be a testimony to ongoing research in building design and construction at Cornell and a crown for this utilitarian but noble building.”AAP

City and Regional Planning’s Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies Back Online for 2018 The Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) has revamped its programs honoring the legacy of progressive planning icon Clarence S. Stein, with updates to the institute that bears his name and increased visibility for the research it supports.

Department chair Jeffrey Chusid explains that a recent departmental review of the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies resulted in some organizational changes that will better define how the institute funds research and shares the trove of documents contained in the Clarence Stein Papers, a collection within the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University.

The Stein Institute, created in 1994 with an endowment provided by Stein’s widow, Aline MacMahon Stein, has proven to be a successful and much-valued financial supporter of research in urban planning and landscape issues, not just for scholars at Cornell, but worldwide, Chusid says. Institute grant recipients represent the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban history, historic preservation, and city and regional planning.

“During the past year, we have reevaluated the institute and its impacts to see if it was as effective as possible,” he says.

After exploring a wide range of possible directions and organizational structures, as well as reviewing the long legacy of successful grants, some modest tweaking was proposed.

Previously, there were three content-based grant categories— research, teaching, and community service. Now there are three classifications based on the nature of the applicant, plus a fellowship and lecture. “We found that grant categories often blurred when based on content, and that we could better serve our mission by distinguishing the different types of applicants,” says Chusid.

Grants are awarded to support research and community outreach projects by undergraduate and graduate students, to support research by advanced scholars (doctoral students, faculty members, and independent scholars), and for conservation and training at Stein-designed sites. The fellowship goes to a student in the Master of Regional Planning program, who will serve as the program administrator. Finally, the Stein Institute will fund an annual lecture in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Damon Rich, a partner at Hector, delivered the inaugural Clarence Stein Lecture on campus in March.

The new Clarence S. Stein Institute website is designed as a resource for anyone studying the architect and planner’s work, as well as the research findings emerging from prior grants.

For example, there are links to the Stein papers housed in the

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Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell. Those papers document the work of a man who was among the first to employ progressive, experimental architecture and planning practices in creating communities focused on social and environmental concerns.

“His building and landscape features were influenced by modernism and addressed the needs of a rapidly changing society,” Chusid says, noting that Stein cofounded the Regional Planning Association of America in 1923, and helped design community building experiments featuring affordable housing, such as Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside Gardens, New York.

A look at some of the 14 grants awarded in 2015, the institute’s last funding cycle, shows the geographical and thematic variety of projects supported by the funding. Research subjects included “Adapting the City: Ethnic and Immigrant Integration in Buffalo’s Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood,” “Reimagining Detroit: City Planning and the Practice of Futurity,” “The Salt Exchange: Excavating Intersections of Industry and Community in Salt Mines of New York,” “Fecal Environments and Toxic Urbanisms: Application of Computation for Design in Complex Urban Systems,” and “First Step in the Implementation of the National Park Service’s HALS, HABS, and GIS/GPS Programs for the Stein National Historic Landmark Garden Cities.”

Roughly $100,000 is available each year to fund between 10 and 20 scholars. A faculty committee in CRP oversees management of the institute, with grant proposals reviewed by the committee and invited jurors. Since 1994, more than 200 grants have been given for research, community outreach, lectures, colloquia, and training workshops.

“The Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell is very fortunate to have in the institute such a powerful vehicle for funding research and community outreach, and honored that it serves to connect us directly to the professional legacy and progressive ideals of Clarence Stein and Aline MacMahon Stein,” Chusid says. “Their gift will continue to provide extraordinary opportunities to students and scholars for decades to come.”AAP

Thank you for participating in the AAP News readership survey in the fall.

Following this issue, there will be a brief pause in the publishing schedule as we determine the best way to meet our readers’ needs.

Happening on Instagram @cornellaap News23 | Spring 2018 | 3

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URS Students at AAP NYC For the first time, undergraduate urban and regional studies (URS) students spent the fall semester studying at AAP NYC. Seen here are Raphael Laude (B.S. URS ’18) (at right) and Jabari Jordan-Walker (M.R.P. ’18) during a review for the studio titled Integrated Urbanism as a Platform for Engagement. During the semester, URS, M.R.P., and M.L.A. students collaborated on projects for the studio, which examines the complex balance between architecture and urbanism, as well as policy and public housing, focusing in particular on the campus of the New York City Housing Authority property. URS students will have the opportunity to study again at AAP NYC in the fall.AAP

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Foundations in Architecture Option Launches at Cornell in Rome Last fall, Cornell in Rome welcomed the first group of students enrolled in the new Foundations in Architecture program, a study option open to undergraduates from any discipline at any university.

The program encourages interdisciplinary study across architectural design and the many interests that students bring with them as they attend classes, travel, and live alongside AAP students in Rome. Many students who express an interest in Foundations in Architecture aim to add an immersive study-abroad semester to their college experience and do so with future opportunities in mind, such as competitive internship placements or graduate-level degree programs in architecture or urban design.

“I consider this program a transition point that will balance the social concerns I’ve explored for the past two years at Brown with the aesthetic principles taught at Cornell,” says Isabella Teran, a foundations student pursuing a B.A. in architecture from Brown University.

“When I return to Brown I plan to study architecture in a way that makes me happy—where I can focus on design aesthetics when necessary and continue to keep social issues and my community as priorities.”

At the core of the program is the design studio—through a graduated series of exercises, students are introduced to methods of analysis, representation, and abstraction as they study concepts of urban and architectural space and form. The studio is complemented by electives and approximately 18 days of travel through cities and regions within Italy, exposing students to important historical and contemporary sites and buildings. The field trips and elective classes are taken with AAP students in architecture, while the studio and Architectural Field Studies and Architectural Portfolio Development classes are only available to the visiting students.

At the end of the semester, foundations students leave Rome with a portfolio that demonstrates the guided research, design work, and other creative projects they produce while in the program.

“Any student with a passion for architecture can do no better than spend a semester at Cornell in Rome,” said Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP. “I am delighted that we can open our program to select students from both within Cornell and beyond who wish to join us to experience firsthand the intensity of our studiobased pedagogy, with Rome as our classroom.”AAP

Vadera Joins Art Faculty Jaret Vadera has been hired by the Department of Art as an associate professor of the practice in new media for a two-year position effective January 1. Vadera is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores how various social, technological, and cognitive processes shape and control the perceptions of the world around and within us. His practice is influenced by cognitive science, post-deco2 lonial theory, science fiction, and Buddhist philosophy.

Vadera’s paintings, prints, photographs, videos, and installations have been exhibited and screened internationally at venues such as the Queens Museum, MoMA, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asia Society, Aga Khan Museum, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, and the Maraya Art Centre. In parallel, Vadera has worked as a curator, programmer, and writer on projects that focus on art as a catalyst for social change. Vadera studied in the fine arts mobility program at The Cooper Union, received his undergraduate degree in fine art from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and his M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University.AAP

New B.F.A. Curriculum Develops Artistic and Intellectual Leaders

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Beginning in the fall of 2018, a new bachelor of fine arts (B.F.A.) curriculum for undergraduate students in the Department of Art will combine the intensive studio culture of the department with enhanced access to electives across Cornell.

The curriculum change reflects interdisciplinary changes in the art world, creating the opportunity for undergraduate art students to develop a mature artistic practice and, ultimately, to produce a community of artists who participate in the world as artistic and intellectual leaders. While retaining introductory and advanced studios and seminars, students are given primary responsibility for selecting their classes in the new program.

“Instead of a prescribed list of rigid, distributed out-of-college electives, students will choose strategic academic classes that complement and incorporate knowledge into advanced art classes and individual practice-based research studios,” says Visiting Associate Professor Renate Ferro, director of undergraduate studies.

Students will also benefit from advising that balances both the surprise of discovery and the rigors of immersion.

The curriculum was developed over a three-year period with input from students and a committee of art faculty. The committee’s working description of an “Artist/ Scholar Program” remains the driving idea, says associate professor and department chair Michael Ashkin.

“The educational philosophy is that art is a holistic practice,” Ashkin says.

“It is impossible to separate material studio practice from the surrounding world.

We trust our students to take agency in designing a well-rounded education that is meaningful to them.”

More information on the new curriculum can be found at aap.cornell.edu/bfa.AAP

New Events Series Take Architecture Out of the Classroom The Living Room and On the Steps, two new series initiated in the fall semester, expanded on concepts in architecture and professional development with guest speakers and lively debate.

The Living Room, an AAP student-led organization, hosted three separate sessions intended to prompt critical discussion about architecture today. During each of the informal sessions, invited guests and a member of the Cornell community discussed the state of the discipline, offering counterperspectives on a particular subject.

The three sessions featured Jimenez Lai of Bureau Spectacular and Visiting Critic Leslie Lok, who discussed the design of architecture, computational technology, digital fabrication, and data visualization; Clark Thenhaus, founding director of the design and research office Endemic, and Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic, who discussed the difference between disciplinary “obsessions” and material, as well as technological experimentation in 3D printing; and Peggy Deamer of Deamer Architects, with Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold, who debated what it means to be a “professional” architect today. The events were held on the L. P. Kwee Studios’ wood floor, which was set up as a “living room” where the guests had their discussion and mingled with students afterward.

In the new series On the Steps, the Department of Architecture and AAP Connect hosted four separate events on the topics The Making of Practice and The Making of Discourse. The events were held in the Stepped Auditorium in the L. P. Kwee Studios.

The Making of Practice events featured Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic and Visiting Associate Professor Saša Begović, founding partner and principal architect of 3LHD architects; Assistant Professor Luben Dimcheff and Fernando Tabuenca, cofounder of Tabuenca & Leache, Arquitectos of Pamplona, Spain; and Associate Professor Val Warke with Chad Oppenheim (B.Arch. ’94), founder of Oppenheim Architecture + Design.

The talks focused on going beyond finding jobs and internships to building a practice.

The Making of Discourse session featured Ph.D. student in history of architecture and urban development Athanasiou Geolas, who spoke about his reinterpretation of Robin Evans’s essay, “Translations from Drawing to Building.”

Both The Living Room and On the Steps series will continue in the spring. Planned guests for On the Steps include Débora Mesa of Ensamble Studio with Edgar A. Tafel Associate Professor Caroline O’Donnell, architecture; Toshiko Mori of Toshiko Mori Architect and Dasha Khapalova, visiting critic in architecture; and Amanda Williams (B.Arch. ’97) of aw|studio with Andrea Simitch, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and chair of the Department of Architecture.AAP

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Urban Planner Brings Tactical Urbanism to Ithaca

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Foundations in Architecture students join Lecturer Jeffrey Blanchard and AAP students on a visit to Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore during a fall 2017 tour of the work of Michelangelo. photo / Oonagh Davis (B.Arch. ’20)

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Jaret Vadera.

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Saiyara Fahmi (B.F.A. ’17) works on her thesis installation titled Gausia Market, crafted from fabric, acetone, fabric dye, and Styrofoam. Fahmi’s thesis advisors were Michael Ashkin, associate professor and department chair; Renate Ferro, visiting associate professor and director of undergraduate studies; and Associate Professor Greg Page.

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Associate Professor Val Warke, left, speaks with Chad Oppenheim (B.Arch. ’94) during an On the Steps event in September.

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The Living Room brings attendees to the wood floor in L. P. Kwee Studios to hear guests and faculty discuss the state of architecture.

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Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic, far left, and Clark Thenhaus, in orange, converse during “Darlings in the Living Room.”

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Mike Lydon meets with students for a “talk back” session following his lecture on campus.

During a September visit to Ithaca, urban planner Mike Lydon delivered a lecture on tactical urbanism and met with students, local planners, and government officials. Lydon is a principal of Street Plans Collaborative, an international planning, design, and research-advocacy firm based in Miami, New York City, and San Francisco.

Lydon’s on-campus talk, titled “Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change,” featured an overview of the global tactical urbanism movement, which is defined by short-term, community-based projects such as pop-up parks and open streets initiatives, which are often quick and cost-effective tools of urban activists, planners, and policy makers. Lydon showed how cities worldwide are using these tools to respond to growing and diverse populations, shifting economic conditions, new technologies, and a changing climate.

“Lydon and his firm are designing thoughtful and strategic interventions that use clever tactics to advance the conversation around planning and improve streets and other public spaces in communities across the U.S.,” said Jeff Chusid, chair of city and regional planning. “It was especially gratifying that he was selected as a speaker in concert with planning professionals in Ithaca, and the local planning community was able to program additional interactions with him during his visit to Cornell.”

On the evening before his talk in Milstein Hall, Lydon gave a lively talk in downtown Ithaca. The event

was attended by CRP students, local transportation advocates, planners, investor representatives, and city officials and council representatives.

The downtown meeting was organized by Thomas Knipe (M.R.P. ’11), principal planner for the Tompkins County Department of Planning and Sustainability, to kick off a semester-long project Knipe is working on with Design Connect, the multidisciplinary, studentrun, community design organization housed in CRP. “Mike’s talk downtown really inspired folks working on the ground in Ithaca to consider using the tactical urbanism approach here,” said Knipe. “What is part of a rich educational experience on campus can also provide inspiration to those of us working to make communities around Ithaca more vibrant, sustainable, and equitable.”

“Mike’s visit was an exciting experience to have at the beginning of our own tactical urbanism project,” said planning student Alec Martinez (B.S. URS ’18), who leads the Design Connect project that is working with Knipe and the Tompkins County Beautification Committee to create a tactical placemaking guide for Tompkins County. The guide will explain what tactical urbanism is and how county residents can use it to make their neighborhoods better places to live, work, and play.

“Cities are built for people, and tactical urbanism is a common language between the two,” said Martinez. “We’re excited to see what this project might lead to.”AAP

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News&Events

Fall 2017 Lectures and Exhibitions aap.cornell.edu/events

LECTURES

EXHIBITIONS

Alessandro Aronadio Saša Begović11 Beatriz Colomina9 Conference on State Austerity and Local Fiscal Stress: Evidence from Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York Ben Davis Ricardo Dominguez4 Jade Doskow Ingrid Gould Ellen Fish Plane, Heart Clock Screening Andrew Groarke Dirk Hebel Felix Heisel Dana Hoey Maria Hupfield Naohiro Kitano Lisa Knoll5 Anna Kubelík Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos, Madrid Mike Lydon Saloni Mathur and Avinoam Shalem Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Moor Mother 2 Chad Oppenheim (B.Arch. ’94) Ruth Oppenheim (M.F.A. ’11)10 Erkin Özay Marianthi PapalexandriAlexandri William Pedersen12 Nadine Pequeneza Andrea Roberts8 Bryony Roberts The Rome Workshop: Building Child and Age Friendly Communities: Lessons from Rome . . . for New York City Jonathan F. P. Rose3 Maurizio Savini Erica Schoenberger Michael J. Shiffer Ian Svenonius7 Fernando Tabuenca Clark Thenhaus Thumbnail: FAKE Marco Tonelli Brian Ulrich Scarlett Yiou Zuo (Ph.D. RS ’14)

Inhabiting the World We Made1 Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Convergence6 Rebecca Rutstein Borderline Encounters: The AmericanCanadian Railway Joseph Kennedy (B.Arch. ’15) and Sonny (Eric) Xu (B.Arch. ’13)

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THE LIVING ROOM (see page 5)

Jimenez Lai and Leslie Lok Peggy Deamer and Aleksandr Mergold Clark Thenhaus and Sasa Zivkovic

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ON THE STEPS (see page 5)

Chad Oppenheim (B.Arch. ’94) and Val Warke Saša Begović and Sasa Zivkovic Fernando Tabuenca and Luben Dimcheff Athanasiou Geolas, Ph.D. HAUD student CRITICALLY NOW

US and Them: American Embassies and the Architecture of Diplomacy Will This Robot Take My Job? Esra Akcan: Homo oeconomicus of the ‘New Turkey’: Urban Development of Istanbul in the 2000s Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi: Migration and Discrimination

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Teiger Mentor in the Arts Dana Hoey, left, the fall 2017 Teiger Mentor in the Arts, talks with Pauline Shongov (B.F.A. ’18) in Shongov’s studio. Hoey is a New York City–based photographer working in the terrain of feminism since 1996. She visited campus multiple times during the fall semester where she met and worked with students in the Department of Art, and gave a participatory lecture titled “‘Can’t Wait to Hit You in the Face’: Violence, Victimhood, and Pictures.” Hoey was the ninth Teiger Mentor.AAP 10

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Students scale, which we’ve had to do for the past few semesters, I think is one of the trickiest problems in architecture.”

The Berlin trip taken with her option studio and Mellon seminar led Black to further investigate the human aspects of influence that make a city what it is.

“You have a group of gentrifiers moving into the same neighborhoods in which immigrants have been living for a few generations, or just moved into.

It becomes these two competing factors, not to say in opposition, not to say that one is above the other.

I think they both deserve equal attention because they affect the city in such a monumental way,” Black says.

Prior to the Mellon Fellowship, Black was awarded a Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholarship (RCPRS) based on an essay about arrival cities and arrival architecture, which have the potential to aid assimilation by offering a supportive enclave, she says.

“I gained a lot more focus since the Mellon seminar on what I want to look at. I felt that I was too vague and giving off an ‘architecture knows and cures all’ kind of vibe,” Black says of her original RCPRS paper.

“My research is currently narrowing to focus on housing in the U.S. and Germany but will of course benefit from understanding border control and the idea of the noncitizen to paint a broader picture of housing migrant populations.”

Black hopes to use her RCPRS research stipend for another trip to Germany for site visits, to continue researching Germany as an arrival country, and to further her research on New York City as a microcosm of global trends and political climates.

“Right now I’m trying to triangulate what I’ve learned in my Berlin option studio with what I’ve been doing in the Mellon seminar, and building on this research independently,” she says of her RCPRS work, which may also lead to her B.Arch. thesis.

Outside of the classroom, Black is the treasurer for Hallie Black presents during the review for the fall option studio titled Berlin—City Between Immigration and Gentrification, taught by Professor Werner Goehner. the student club Building Community at Cornell. The club encourages students to complete hands-on Profile projects, and share their skills both on and off campus.

In 2016, the club created a traveling tool library, from which members of the Cornell community and Ithaca at large can rent out tools and return them, for example, after they’ve refinished a bathroom or hung a picture frame. And in the fall of 2017, the club collaborated with Cornell Hillel to construct a 30' by 10' sukkah, an outdoor structure for celebrating the Jewish holiday Sukkot.

Black’s role in the club over the last two years has been organizing projects in the community. Her favorite part, she says, is using skills learned through metal and wood shop in a real-world setting within Designing on such a scale, Black says, is the biggest When she first started studying German, Black Ithaca as a whole. The tools library is housed at Ithaca challenge she’s encountered at Cornell. It involves not couldn’t imagine checking out library books in the Generator, a makerspace near the Ithaca Commons. only critical problems within the urban realm, but new language she was learning. In fact, at the begin“Our tools and library space now reach a greater also grappling with global migrations. ning of her studies, she had no intention of pursuing audience,” Black says. “As for our club, we also carry Understanding how to incorporate refugee housing a German minor at all. But in the summer of 2016, out smaller projects such as hosting our own workand the constructs of moving people are crucial to the Black was able to live with her cousin in Berlin shops on slip casting or designing/building shelving for design process. “Integrating people into a neighborand take a German intensive class for beginners at Significant Elements, a local consignment shop [and hood,” she says, “would allow for healthy interactions, Freie Universität. architectural salvage warehouse]. To fund-raise, we host healthy additions to a city that would promote better “I really wanted to experience a new place and community supper clubs to gather Cornell students living for citizens and noncitizens.” language, and learn something new that was not under one roof to celebrate community investment.”

Born and raised in Boston, Black was a “lifer” at offered in my rigid degree process,” Black says. “More Going forward, Black is excited to continue studying Brimmer and May School, attending the same instituimportantly than learning a new skill and living on German, and conduct research independently as well as tion from Pre-K through high school. my own in a new environment, I began to investigate, for the RCPRS program. In spring 2018, she will partici“You’d imagine that I’d go and do something oppoperhaps subconsciously, the interactions of neighbors pate in another traveling option studio, Fly on the Wall. site to that, but instead I ended up doing something and people within the variations of housing typologies The studio aims to examine the U.S.–Mexico border and even more specified in a tight-knit community,” says of Berlin.” its spatial implications; students will travel from San Black, referring to AAP’s architecture program.

She became interested in studying the architecture Diego to Tijuana to investigate the busiest land-border She was drawn to architecture by the time she of a city of contradictions that she would later revisit: crossing, and then on to Mexico City to explore how entered high school, in part because of the way it the quintessential Berliner/perimeter block, the incorporated what she describes as her “logic-based Hansaviertel neighborhood of Bauhaus exceptionalism, border territories affect neighbor relationships, from person to person and country to country. thinking” with a creative method of problem solving. and the IBA Neubau housing of the 1970s.

Black remains driven as ever, and reluctant to Prior to college, Black participated in peer tutoring, The decision to pursue a foreign language has been narrow her options in a forecast of her future. She an opportunity that helped solidify some core skills creatively rewarding and eminently practical for Black. doesn’t rule out continuing in a graduate degree she would later use at Cornell. Breaking down algebra She returned to Germany in the fall of 2017 on a 10-day program, following in the footsteps of her mother, for one’s peers necessitates working through someone field trip that combined her choice of option studio and who recently completed her Ph.D. in social policy at else’s logic, she explained. It involves clarifying how to her Mellon Fellowship, both exploring migrant and Brandeis University, where she did research on income move through a problem in a way that others will refugee settlements in Berlin. Each class focused on inequality throughout much of Black’s life. understand through their own lens, as simply as issues of immigration: the studio, led by Professor “I’m just really proud of her; that’s influenced me in possible but without oversimplifying.

Werner Goehner, explored immigration and gentrificaterms of thinking of architecture as a social practice. It Outside of architecture but in parallel, Black is tion, while the Mellon seminar, led by associate profesmeans to work in part with policy and other factors that pursuing a German minor. She enjoys both the sors Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi, homed in on shape a city, before it can even shape itself,” Black said. logical element of the language itself, as well as the migration and discrimination.

Black can also envision herself working for a opportunity to take classes in German cinema— The experience, Black says, opened her eyes to small architecture firm in the long term. “Coming for instance, one in which she does scene analyses intersectional work among artists, architects, urban from Cornell, I think you want to continue the rigorabout expressionism. planning, and policy. ous small community space,” Black says. “There’s “I’ve been taking books out from the library and trying “I’m really interested in refugee housing,” Black says, always . . . dreams of starting my own firm. Maybe to translate them, and it has been really rewarding, noting a passion for housing in general. “A home is so when I’m 45.”AAP Jennifer Wholey really frustrating, taking it word by word,” Black says. important, and to create homes on a megastructure

Student Investigates Implications and Intricacies of Public Housing

For the past three semesters, Hallie Black (B.Arch. ’19) has tackled the concept of housing on a large urban scale, from idea to execution.

Fall Semester Field Trips CRP students explored downtown Rochester, New York, during a field trip led by Thomas J. Campanella, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies for CRP. The students were members of the Organization of Urban and Regional Studies, and the outing was part of an annual series of field trips that takes undergraduate students from a variety of fields to a different northeast city each year.

Other fall field trip destinations included the Hudson Valley, New York, and Washington, DC (CRP); Trinidad and Tobago; Zagreb, Croatia; Pamplona, Spain; and Havana and Berlin (architecture and Mellon Expanded Practice Seminar); and New York City (art).

Students

Design Connect Projects Will Come to Fruition in Two Upstate Towns The Town of Urbana and the Town of Brutus have received separate grants from New York State Department of State’s (NYS DOS) Regional Economic Development Councils Consolidated Funding Application (CFA). The grants will allow them to continue work on projects that were developed in partnership with Design Connect, AAP’s multidisciplinary, student-run design and planning organization.

Each semester, Design Connect participants form small groups that collaborate with stakeholders in Upstate New York towns to provide design and planning resources where they might not be readily available. Grants that support project implementation are largely the result of Design Connect’s contribution of site research, analysis, and feasible design plans as well as strong efforts by administrators and community members to identify funding resources such as the CFA. Design Connect began collaborative research with the Town of Urbana in 2015 to work on a portion of the town’s masterplan that would improve public access to Keuka Lake’s Champlin Beach. In fall 2016, a new group of students, led by Tess Ruswick ’18, returned to the project to continue site research, analysis, and develop the plans for an old railway conversion—or “rails-to-trails” project—that would connect two public lakefront parks with a bridge and footpath.

The 2016 team worked with the municipality, local residents, and the nonprofit organization Friends of the Hammondsport Area Trails and Parks, to draft a site plan that was used in part toward the town’s CFA proposal to the NYS DOS. Urbana’s administration and the Friends group were notified in fall 2017 that they would receive $683,603 as part of NYS DOS’s Local Waterfront Revitalization Program. The funds will cover 75 percent of the budget for the creation of the new connective pathway, making the grant what one resident referred to as, “the linchpin that holds everything together.”

“I’m really happy that the Town of Urbana received the funding to continue the work that has been started,” commented Ruswick. “The community is very invested in creating a network of open spaces and trails along the area’s waterfront, and it was amazing to listen to their thoughtful ideas and incorporate them into a vision that I’m very excited to see come into fruition.”

Students who participated in the Urbana Design Connect project include Angela Agustin ’17, Raquel Blandon (B.S. URS ’18), Alastair Chang (B.S. URS ’18), Luwei Chen (M.R.P. ’18), Gabe Curran (M.R.P. ’18), Elizabeth Fabis ’19, Natalia Gulick (B.Arch. ’21), Richa Gupta (M.R.P. ’18), Ruswick, Yu Shao (B.S. URS ’19), and Sara Vanderbroek ’18.

Also in fall 2016, the Town of Brutus Design Connect group, led by Kelly Farrell ’18, worked with local administrators and residents to create a site plan and cost analysis for the town’s Centreport Aqueduct Park expansion. The project’s initiation followed the gift of an adjacent 3.85-acre parcel that nearly doubles the area of the existing park. The Centreport Aqueduct is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the surrounding park is part of the Erie Canal Trail that extends from Albany to Buffalo. The town was in need of guidance regarding how best to make improvements to the existing infrastructure while integrating elements of the additional acreage, including a substantial pond, open and shaded areas, and a new point of public access to the park.

“The Design Connect opportunity was introduced at a unique time, as the town had recently been given an additional parcel of land with a swampy pond on it,” commented Town of Brutus Clerk Angela Skellington. “The task given to the team was to include that parcel in the whole park and offer suggestions on the best way to do it. The team worked professionally, asked questions, studied the area and its history, held public meetings, and presented a final product with some wonderful and attainable goals. Design Connect’s report gave the town a very vivid picture of what our park could become.”

The town of Brutus’s administration used the report to submit a CFA for the fall 2017 cycle and was granted $352,000 from the NYS DOS’s Environmental Protection Fund Grant Program for Parks, Preservation, and Heritage. The funds will support several specific elements included in the Design Connect plan, among them the repair and stabilization of the historic aqueduct, the addition of pull-off parking along the public roadway, and the implementation of a trail, boardwalk,

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Urbana Town Supervisor Dave Oliver leads the way through recently acquired and restored Curtiss Park.

The grant funds a possible pedestrian bridge that crosses the inlet to connect Curtiss Park with Champlin Beach. photo / Tess Ruswick ’18

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Overview of Design Connect’s recommendations for the Town of Brutus’s Centreport Aqueduct Park expansion. diagram / Kelly Farrell ’18

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Foo’s scale model for the Museum of the 20th Century. photo / Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18)

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A screenshot of Magic Moving Mansion Mania.

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and sitting dock around the pond to ensure safe and open access to the water and park as a whole.

Students who participated in the Town of Brutus Design Connect project include Jacob Dilson ’18, Farrell, Katharine Guan ’19, Alfie Rayner (B.S. URS ’19), Andrew Roblee (M.A. HPP ’17), Victor Tran (B.S. URS ’18), Andrew Varuzzo (M.R.P. ’18), and William Wong (B.S. URS ’17).

“I would highly recommend this experience for any other community,” added Skellington. “I think it is a win-win for us as well as for the Design Connect team.”

Design Connect was originally formed in 2008 and officially became a Cornell University Student Organization in 2010 and is advised by CRP professor and director of the Historic Preservation Planning program, Michael Tomlan, who remarked, “We mark our 10th anniversary this spring proudly knowing that Design Connect has provided at least four field teams every semester, assisting more than 80 projects throughout the region.”

Design Connect draws student participation from across the university and provides opportunities for group members to gain direct experience working with communities and municipalities on planning and design possibilities. Project plans are informed by democratic decision-making processes and sensibilities that reflect concern for public space and the natural environment. Spring 2018 Design Connect groups will work on four projects, including one at a local site in Ithaca’s Collegetown, as well as sites located in Penn Yan, Hamilton, and Utica.AAP

B.Arch. Wins First Place in Steel Design Competition

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Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) was awarded first place, museum category, in the 2017 Steel Design Student Competition. Foo’s proposal, titled Museum of the 20th Century: Programmatic Folds, is for the Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin.

The American Institute of Steel Construction and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture sponsor the competition, which recognizes nine exceptional projects in two categories (museum and open) that explore a variety of design issues related to the use of steel in design and construction.

The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron was selected in 2016 to design the €200-million Berlin museum. Foo’s student proposal contrasts with their brick, warehouse-inspired design, but “the projects utilize similar architectural strategies,” says Foo.

“They include the maintenance of visual axis, the integration of public space inside the museum, techniques of daylighting, and the fold as a mediator between canonical architectures.” As a device and operative strategy that incorporates light control, structure, landscape, circulation, roofing, and more, the fold “collects” the surrounding city architecture while the crowning roof structure allows the artwork to be illuminated by soft, northern light, resulting in a unique museum experience.

Foo’s project was created for a third-year B.Arch. design studio taught by Andrea Simitch, associate professor and chair of the Department of Architecture.

His design and the other winning projects were featured at the 2018 NASCC: The Steel Conference, April 11–13 in Baltimore, Maryland.AAP

Architecture Students Help Design a Girls’ School in Ghana About 5,287 miles from Ithaca, near the banks of Ghana’s Volta River, a primary and junior high school for girls is rising from the collective imagination and intellect of the Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD) team, under the university’s Systems Engineering program.

With a thoughtful blueprint and an allegiance to sustainability, the Voices of African Mothers Girls’ Academy will educate, nurture, and inspire about 500 girls annually, beginning in 2018. On a 200-acre tract in Sogakope, Ghana, the group sought collaboration to design a school that could allow children to advance economically.

Through the networking of Sam Ritholtz ’14, who led Big Red Relief as an undergraduate, CUSD connected to Nana-Fosu Randall, president and founder of Voices of African Mothers. In the summer of 2015, Claudia Nielsen ’18, Arielle Tannin ’18, and Daniel Preston (B.Arch. ’17) traveled to Ghana, funded by an Engaged Opportunity Grant from Engaged Cornell.

Team members conducted in-depth interviews with students and stakeholders to tailor the school to their needs. More than two years later, with blueprints in

Happening on YouTube / Cornell AAP

hand, local contractors are building the academy, which is expected to be finished in phases and occupied in 2018.

In addition to Preston, fellow architecture students, Anamika Goyal (M.Arch. ’17) and Isabella Hübsch (B.Arch. ’19) helped develop the plans, and student engineers conducted analyses, calculating truss and beam loads and assessing structural integrity, all while meeting frequently with architects and engineers from Tetra Tech of Ithaca.

The academy’s importance cannot be understated.

Goyal spoke about the Ghana school project last spring at the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women gathering in New York City. Goyal considered a crucial detail when designing the school’s bathrooms. “So many girls in developing countries drop out of school around age 10 to 12, when they begin menstruation,” she said. “Providing a safe, clean, adequately private bathroom facility that can help girls stay in school will have a tremendously positive ripple effect at a national level.”AAP cusd.cornell.edu/projects/seg/

Summer Internships Take CRP Graduate Students from the Midwest to India Sena Kayasu (M.A. HPP ’18), Melanie Colter (M.A. HPP ’18), and Dominic Mathew (M.R.P. ’18), graduate students in the Department of City and Regional Planning, spent a few weeks of their summers as interns with organizations in Cleveland, Ohio; Ithaca, New York; and New Delhi, India, respectively. The internships were secured through AAP Connect, the college’s career services office.

Kayasu interned at the Cleveland Restoration Society via the Keithley Professional Bridging Internship, an organization focused on protecting older buildings and neighborhoods in Cleveland and turning them into opportunities for the city’s residents. Kayasu worked on projects that addressed a trend of city homeowners moving to the suburbs despite their homes being in good condition.

Colter was the Stuart Stein Heritage Tourism intern at the History Center in Tompkins County. Named for a professor and chair of Cornell’s Department of Urban Planning and Development in the 1970s, the internship is part of a heritage tourism plan by the Tompkins County Legislature to establish the Tompkins Center for History and Culture in a historic building in downtown Ithaca, among other initiatives.

Secured via the Cooperative Summer Internship Program, Mathew’s internship was at the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) in New Delhi, India, a nonprofit that provides technical expertise to design and implement high-quality transport systems and urban policy solutions in seven countries, including the U.S. and India. Mathew helped compare estimates of the cost of physical infrastructure in a business-asusual scenario to a transit-oriented development.

Together, the Cooperative Summer Internship Program, the Keithley Professional Bridging Internships, and the Stuart Stein Heritage Tourism Planning Internship are the three main internship programs overseen

by AAP Connect for master’s degree candidates in regional planning and historic preservation planning.

“Internships are passports to lifelong mentors and critical skills students can use after graduation, as well as real-world work experience with a source of funding,” says AAP Connect Internship Programs Coordinator Marjorie Mosereiff.AAP

Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate Students Experience Dubai In December, 32 second-year graduate students from the Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate took a six-day field trip to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, led by Baker Program Director Dustin Jones. The annual field trip is a requirement of the two-year curriculum. In Dubai the group met with Salman Jaffery ’01, chief business development officer of Dubai International Finance Center and a graduate of the Johnson Graduate School of Management; and Tom Arnold, deputy global head and head of Americas real estate at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, who was the keynote speaker at the 2017 Cornell Real Estate Conference. The group also met with Paul Macpherson, executive vice president of global business and real estate development for the international resort and luxury hotel brand Kerzner International, who is a regular guest speaker at the Baker Program’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

Highlights of the trip included site visits of the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi; a tour of the luxury Royal Bridge Suite at the Kerzner-owned hotel, Atlantis, the Palm; and standing at the top of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.AAP photo / Gaurav Bambral Photography

Multidisciplinary Student Team Wins Game Award A character named Anastasia finds herself lost in her grandmother’s mysterious moving mansion in a mobile game for iOS and Android created by a team that included Charisse Foo (B.Arch. ’18) and Yichen Jia (B.Arch. ’18). Magic Moving Mansion Mania won Best Student Game at the 2017 Boston Festival of Indie Games, held at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September.

Foo and Jia were part of a Cornell computing and information science student team that developed the game last semester for the class CS/INFO 4152: Advanced Projects in Computer Game Development.

For the festival’s digital showcase the team created a trailer for their contest entry, and updates on the team’s Facebook page displayed screenshots and playful text, including, “Anastasia discovers that the rooms are a little strange . . . they seem to move while she’s not looking!” and “Help guide her to safety, but don’t let her fall into nothingness!”

The Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) offers project-oriented classes specifically dedicated to game design, where students work in interdisciplinary teams of four to six to develop a game. At the close of the semester, the students present their projects at the GDIAC Showcase. Magic Moving Mansion Mania won Most Polished Game, as well as Second Place Audience Choice, at the 2017 GDIAC Showcase held in the spring of 2017.

The game is available from the App Store and Google Play.AAP

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News23 | Spring 2018 | 11

Students

Hikihouse: Toward Reclusive Architecture The thesis of Wachira Leangtanom (M.Arch. ’17) proposed a new typology of domestic architecture generated through the behaviors of hikikomori, individuals in Japan who self-isolate in their houses.

Leangtanom’s thesis advisors were Associate Professor Val Warke and Visiting Critic Lior Galili.

Students

M.R.P. Student Presents Research on Fiscal Stress 1

“Clay Non-Wovens” Blends Robotic and Digital Fabrication with Arts and Crafts Emerging research in robotic and digital fabrication and computational design was explored in a paper presented by David Rosenwasser (B.Arch. ’18) at the 2017 conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), held at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in November. “Clay NonWovens” was coauthored with Sonya Mantell (B.Arch. ’18), and Jenny Sabin, the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Associate Professor of Architecture, and was based on work developed for the option studio Digital Ceramics: Clay Tectonics.

The work was part of ongoing research conducted by the Sabin Design Lab at AAP. Including new explorations in robotic fabrication, additive manufacturing, complex patterning, and techniques bound in the arts and crafts, the Sabin Design Lab team has been developing a system of porous cladding panels that explores natural daylighting through textile patterning and line typologies. “Our nonwoven panels share a similar strategy and narrative, as our continuous extruded clay lines build layer upon layer with a single thread,” explains Rosenwasser. “The application of this process to a facade panel and light filtering screen was ideal.” ACADIA was formed to facilitate communication and critical thinking regarding the use of computers in architecture, planning, and building science.AAP

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A rendering of a structure crafted from “Clay NonWovens,” a system of porous cladding panels proposed

by David Rosenwasser (B.Arch. ’18) and Sonya Mantell (B.Arch. ’18).

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Eduardo Carmelo Danobeytia, (B.S. URS ’18), at right, with his parents during a reception in the Milstein Hall dome following “The Rome Workshop” in September.

Austin Aldag (M.R.P. ’18) recently presented research and solutions on fiscal stress and local governments with the support of Engaged Cornell grants. An ongoing project undertaken with CRP Professor Mildred E. Warner and recent graduate Yunji Kim (CRP Ph.D. ’17) was the subject of talks Aldag gave at the Albany Law School conference titled “Community Renewal and Its Discontents” and elsewhere in New York state, as well as at the annual conference of the International City/County Management Association in San Antonio, Texas, and the annual meeting of the National League of Cities in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In addition to his work on the joint project with Warner and Kim, Aldag led a team of five CRP students that created a local government toolbox to mitigate fiscal stress while addressing social equity; other students who were part of the team also attended the Albany conference. “We aim to take the research on a ‘road show’ throughout the state to educate local leaders, residents, and state policy makers regarding the challenging realities local leaders must face,” says Aldag. Events have been planned in Buffalo, New York City, and Albany for the spring semester.AAP photo / Albany Law School

Student Work in Italy and Upstate New York Informs Intergenerational Communities

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CRP students presented community-engaged research and case studies from Rome, Italy, and Sullivan County, New York, at a workshop on campus focused on the factors that make communities hospitable to children and the elderly. “The Rome Workshop: Building Child and Age Friendly Communities: Lessons from Rome . . . for New York,” a half-day event organized by CRP Professor Mildred E. Warner included a research poster session, a panel of regional planners and community leaders, and a presentation by Warner and doctoral student Xue Zhang (M.S. RS ’17) of national survey data on multigenerational planning. Additionally, students who attended the spring 2017 Cornell in Rome program’s urban studies workshop presented research supported by an Engaged Opportunity Grant, as did students who interned last year in Sullivan County.

From the Cornell in Rome program, Adam Bronfin (B.S. URS ’18), Eduardo Carmelo Danobeytia (B.S. URS ’19), Madeleine Galvin (B.S. URS ’18), Shareef Hussam (B.S. URS ’18), Graham Murphy (B.S. URS ’18),

Tishya Rao (B.S. URS ’18), Amelia Visnauskas (B.S. URS ’18), and Kai Walcott (B.S. URS ’18) presented papers written in teams. Erin Tou (B.S. URS ’18) and Rachel Stein (B.S. URS ’18) presented their research from rural Upstate New York’s Sullivan County, with help from Cooperative Extension Student Project funding. The Rome and Sullivan County work was profiled in webinars sponsored by the American Planning Association and World Town Planning Day. A special issue of the Italian planning journal, Urbanistica Tre, titled “Planning for All Generations,” featured articles by the Cornell in Rome URS students, as well as by Warner; Gregory Smith, visiting critic for CRP in Rome; and several noted Italian planning academics. The student contributors were Gray Brakke, Bronfin, Carmelo Danobeytia, Ehab Ebeid (B.S. URS ’18), Galvin, Joshua Glasser (B.S. URS ’18), Hussam, Raphael Laude (B.S. URS ’18), Rachel Liu (B.S. URS ’18), Lan Luo (B.S. URS ’18), Murphy, Rao, Edna Samron (B.S. URS ’18), Visnauskas, and Walcott.AAP

Student Notes Bushra Aumir (B.Arch. ’22) won an individual award in the 2017 Ryerson Invitational Thrill Design Competition, a creative design challenge – based competition sponsored by Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Winning students and teams from eight universities from the U.S. and Canada traveled to Universal Studios to accept their awards. The competition focused on finding design solutions within the themed entertainment industry.

A video by first-year art student Emery Bergmann (B.F.A. ’21) went viral after it was shared in a web story by The Today Show.

Bergmann’s topic for My College

Transition, a project she created for the art class Introduction to Digital Media, was “transformation,” and highlighted the role of social media, connection, and the personal challenges Bergmann faced during her first few months at Cornell.

Maria del Pilar Delpino Marimon (M.R.P. ’18) taught a Foreign Language across the Curriculum (FLAC) discussion group in Spanish—the first FLAC discussion group in AAP—as part of CRP Professor Mildred E. Warner’s class Devolution, Privatization, and the New Public Management. The class examined how local governments across the world address

the twin challenges of devolution and privatization. Formally launched by Cornell’s Language Resource Center in 2015 –16, FLAC offers optional 1- credit foreign language classes that are connected to a variety of existing academic classes in colleges across the university.

Warner’s class used the discussion group to look at the influence of Latin American literature on local government and planning.

Alexandra Donovan (B.Arch. ’18) was awarded the Susan Tarrow Summer Research Fellowship from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell, to conduct

an investigation on innovative playscape design in Europe.

During the summer, Donovan traveled to Berlin and Paris, with stops in Amsterdam and Lyon, to study historic and contemporary trends in playscape design and cultural attitudes. Donovan’s research from the summer was central to her project revolving around play for the architecture option studio Croatia: From Inside: Interior Urbanism and Adaptive Reuse, taught by Visiting Critic Saša Begović and Visiting Associate Professor Danica Selem.

A profile of first-generation architecture student Wendolin Gonzalez (B.Arch. ’21) was

featured in the Student and Campus Life section of the Cornell University website. In the profile, Gonzalez spoke about her journey to Cornell and of being the first in her family to attend college.

The Original Cornell Syncopators, a band led by Colin Hancock (B.S. URS ’19), released an album of early jazz titled Wild Jazz on the student-run label Electric Buffalo Records. It was recorded entirely on the Cornell campus, with a cover photo taken in the documentation space located in the basement of Sibley Hall. The album is available on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Spotify.

Kaleb Hunkele (M.F.A. ’18) conducted research into experimental printmaking techniques in lithography and screen printing at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle over the summer, with the support of a Research Travel Grant from Cornell’s Graduate School.

Hunkele’s fall solo exhibition, Complete Repeat, featured new work resulting from the travel and research.

During a summer internship with Stephen Moser Architect, the firm of Stephen Moser (B.Arch. ’81), Isabel Brañas Jarque (M.Arch. ’19) was part of a team project that included Helene Lee (M.Arch. ’17) and Moser,

titled Un Oasis de Los Dos (An Oasis of the Two of Us).

The project received an honorable mention in the Unbuild the Wall competition hosted by Archstorming.

Allison Tse (M.R.P. ’18) and Professor Mildred E. Warner, CRP, coauthored an article titled “The Razor’s Edge: Social Impact Bonds and the Financialization of Early Childhood Services.”

Tse and Warner presented their work at the 2017 fall research conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Chicago.

Cornell Council for the Arts Grants Grants from the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) will support 35 projects presented on campus during the 2017–18 academic year. Individual grants for AAP students were awarded to Charisse Foo (B.Arch. ’17); Jingyang Liu (M.Arch.II ’15, M.S. ’19); Bradley Nathanson (B.Arch. ’18), Sasha Phyars-Burgess (M.F.A. ’18); Gabriel Ramos (M.F.A. ’18), pictured here with his CCA-funded exhibition Tendederos; and Richard Zimmerman (M.F.A. ’18). Faculty, departments, and programs also seek CCA funds to further their work. The 2017 master of fine arts group show, Odd Year, received CCA funding, as did AAP faculty Michael Ashkin, associate professor and chair of the Department of Art; and Mary Woods, professor of architecture.

Faculty&Staff

Bill Gaskins in his home studio.

Profile

photographs through mobile phones; and Photography and the American Dream, an American studies class in the College of Arts and Sciences. The latter examines the ways poverty is represented and engages students in the history of photography, and in art, journalism, American and African American studies, rhetoric, editorial writing, and oratory. It questions how constructions of race-based inequalities are both structural and psychic, and for many of the students the class is the first time they have been assigned research-based nonfiction texts written by African American scholars.

For the past two years Gaskins has also taught the first-year art studio research seminar, whose purpose is to introduce B.F.A. candidates to the field, the department, and the university. For this class, Gaskins decided rather than work from a textbook, the students would research and write their own textbook or reader, comprised of essays they have written about contemporary artists they have been assigned.

“These students are serious about transforming themselves,” says Gaskins, “and challenging the psychic inequalities that lead to institutional barriers to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in American life.”

They are starting to ask the two fundamental human questions for themselves—who am I, and why am I here?

Beginning in the fall of 2018, the Department of Art initiates a new B.F.A. curriculum (see page 4) that distributes credits almost equally between traditional in-department studios and seminars, and electives across Cornell. Gaskins was on the faculty committee that developed the curriculum, and he sees it as offering those pursuing fine arts degrees at Cornell a rare level of freedom and responsibility to evolve as human beings within a curricular and academic path that fits the questions the students are exploring through elective classes beyond AAP, and minor class offerings in architecture and CRP. At times Gaskins has been critical of the pursuit of credentials over the pursuit of quality content in undergraduate education, but now, he says, “as a result of the new curriculum we will be in a leadership position among university-based B.F.A. programs, and as a department on campus. Students are going to be able to make decisions in close counsel with advisors around how to maximize the benefit of pursuing a B.F.A. within a major research university, and deeply engage science, social science, and the humanities—without the additional coursework and year of tuition the concurrent degree option requires.”

“As I tell my students who are coming to Cornell to get a job,” Gaskins says, “you can get a job right now.

But if you want to evolve and develop through the contemplative space of a university like Cornell in the company of people pursuing the same objective, it’s not about the credentials—it’s about the content.”

Along these lines, Gaskins is among invited faculty His answers to these questions form the basis of his participants in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum’s between race and intelligence because either no practice, teaching, and engagement with graduate and “Crossing the Photographic Divide: Mining and Making one had challenged them or did so successfully in undergraduate students. “These are questions that Meaning” project, an initiative funded by a $500,000 the classroom.” influence, guide, and govern the decisions I make to grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Along with the urgings of some students, this this day, and they inform my pedagogy as a professor,” experience helped Gaskins to see that he needed to objective is to mine the photographic holdings of the he says. “My work meets at the intersection of the Cornell libraries to develop new platforms for student become “both artist and scholar” in the academy. It visual and the liberal arts. Photography is a fundamen- was the beginning of a journey that he says has given and faculty engagement with the photograph at the tally interdisciplinary medium. How I’m informed curricular level. Additionally, this semester, in his role him the opportunity to train future artists, collaboraas a person, both through scholarship and experience, tors, arts administrators, arts journalists, photo editors, as Faculty Fellow-in-Residence in the Cornell informs the ideas, form, and content of my work.”

Townhouse Community, Gaskins has partnered with and patrons, and to not only help them develop Working in photography, cinema, and nonfiction natural resources professor and Alice Cook House answers to the citizenship, relevance, and sustainabilwriting, Gaskins is an artist and essayist whose sensiDean Shorna Allred to teach a new seven-week ity questions as artists on their own terms, but to also bilities were shaped during the Black Arts Movement Learning Where You Live class titled Where Do We Go develop what he identifies as 21st-century literacies of the mid-1960s and 70s. His interests are broad, but from Here? “Each semester, we want to connect the around the intersection of race, class, gender, and Gaskins believes photography is what enables him to first-year and upper-level students seeking an intimate structural inequality. be in places and with people that he otherwise would place to unpack the difficult topic of race-based “Too many students earn B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees not be, creating work that brings people together who inequality, by engaging the research-based nonfiction without a scholarly and social comprehension of the would not otherwise share the same space. writing of scholars like Toni Morrison, who experience intersectionality of race, class, gender, and segregation Gaskins earned his B.F.A. from the Tyler School of and comprehend these inequalities with grace and in the art world and the world-at-large,” Gaskins says.

Art, an M.A. from The Ohio State University (OSU), and intellectual gravitas on a daily basis,” says Gaskins.

“These are essential literacies in a world that is neither his M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art Even as he returns to the fundamental questions postracial, postpatriarchal, postclass, nor postqueer. I (MICA). While an undergraduate, he first recognized concerning citizenship, relevance, and sustainability, want to know that students will have these literacies photography as an art form in Volume One of The Black Gaskins looks further ahead into the 21st century. to do with what they want and hopefully transform Photographers Annual, produced by a group of African “We cannot continue to have separate, unequal, the world through them.”

American photographers in New York City in 1973. It and unjust public and private policies in a country As an M.F.A. candidate at MICA, Gaskins began to was also the first time he had seen photographs of we consider to be the greatest on earth,” he says. see digital photography as a path to digital literacy.

African Americans who were not portrayed as athletes, He predicted that there would be thousands of faculty “The future is in understanding that inequalities are entertainers, or criminals. structural. If we don’t understand the role of visual, teaching how to use software and digital photo equipTwo years later Gaskins was teaching and earning material, and media culture in helping people either ment but only a handful teaching students how to his master’s degree from OSU, when an undergraduate see or blinding them to those structures, I’m not doing think with—and through—these tools. Gaskins senior sought him out for a debate about race in the U.S. decided he wanted to be among those teaching people my job as an artist at Cornell University.” that she proposed to film for her thesis project. She “I’ve come to see pedagogy in the same way I see to make and think—“to make students smarter than believed there were few tenured African American photography, cinema, and nonfiction writing—I see the technology they were using.” faculty at OSU because there were more white people in teaching as a medium,” he says. “I believe the third He has continued to focus his teachings on the the national population. As they talked, he said, “I decade of the 21st century is going to be about teachthought behind the technology and race-based inequalirealized this student was, in the last decade of the 20th ing and learning in ways that our new curriculum is ties in classes like The Eye Phone, an undergraduate century, about to leave an undergraduate education going to be a wonderful platform for.”AAP Patti Witten advanced topics studio exploring the principles of with 15th-century ideas about the correspondence conceiving, producing, editing, and managing digital

The Pursuit of Citizenship, Relevance, and Sustainability

When making the commitment to become an artist, Bill Gaskins, visiting associate professor of art and American studies, asked himself three fundamental questions having to do with citizenship, relevance, and economic sustainability: “How was I going to make money? How was I going to make sense? And how was I going to make a difference through deciding to become an artist?”

Transparency and the Construct of Perception Associate Professor Lily Chi, foreground, interacts with the thesis presentation of Brian Havener (M.Arch. ’17). Havener’s work explored transparency, reflection, and projection. His thesis advisors were Visiting Critic Ryan Ludwig and Andrea Simitch, associate professor and chair of the Department of Architecture.

Faculty&Staff

Books

Architectural Historian Bonnie MacDougall Dies Bonnie Graham MacDougall ’62, M.A. ’65, Ph.D. ’73, professor emerita of architecture, died on November 26. She was 76.

A graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences, MacDougall joined the architecture faculty in AAP as a visiting assistant professor in 1979, and was associate professor of architecture and Asian studies from 1988 until her retirement in 2014.

She made numerous contributions to AAP, the South Asia Program, and to the study of Sri Lanka and greater South Asia, and taught graduate and undergraduate classes on architecture, culture, and society, and specialized classes on the architectures of South Asia.

“Bonnie was interested in bringing an understanding of architecture to the rest of the university, having taught the Introduction to Architecture course for up to 1,000 nonmajors, and in bringing an understanding of international cultures to architecture students,” said close friend D. Medina Lasansky, the Michael A. McCarthy Associate Professor of Architectural Theory.

“According to many students, she was the best teacher they ever had. She designed several innovative courses and had ideas for many more.”

As director of the South Asia Program (1983–88), MacDougall was instrumental in the establishment of the Cornell/Syracuse University South Asia Center, a U.S. Department of Education national resource center. She was its first director from 1985–88.

Her Cornell honors included an Excellence in Teaching Award and AAP Teacher of the Year in 1998, the college’s Martín Domínguez Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1999, and a Faculty Innovation in Teaching Award in 2006.

Her scholarly legacy includes Beyond the Taj, a Cornell University Library digital collection launched in 2006 (also available to scholars on artstor.org), produced in collaboration with Margaret Webster, director emerita of AAP’s Knight Visual Resources Facility.

Containing written work, photography, and other materials on architectural and cultural traditions in South Asia, the project draws in part from an unfinished study

by MacDougall’s late husband, anthropologist and architect Robert (Scotty) MacDougall ’62 (B.Arch. ’63), Ph.D. ’71, who died in 1987; as well as a joint ethnographic study by the MacDougalls and approximately 7,000 photographs, many by Robert, of architecture, rituals, pilgrimage locales, and domestic life in India and Sri Lanka.

Her works on Sri Lankan architecture include Sinhalese Domestic Life in Space and Time (coauthored with Robert) and Text into Form: Dwelling, Cosmos and Design Theory in Traditional South Asia.

“She had an innate ability to understand people from all walks of life,” Lasansky said. “Her observations were often pointed and on the mark, her sage counsel was appreciated by many, and on top of everything else she was a proud mother and grandmother.”

Survivors include daughters Margaret ’96 and Carlin MacDougall ’94 (B.Arch. ’99, M.Arch. ’00).

A memorial service was held in 1 Ithaca in December.AAP

100 Buildings Profiles the Top Architectural Projects of the 20th Century 100 Buildings: 1900–2000 (Rizzoli, 2017), a new book with text by architecture’s Associate Professor Val Warke, profiles the top 100 buildings of the 20th century as identified by leading architects and teachers of the discipline.

More than 40 internationally renowned architects and educators were asked to list the top 100 20th-century architectural projects they would teach to students. The book was conceived

by Thom Mayne, who also provides the introduction. Contributors include Richard Meier (B.Arch. ’56), Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55), Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook, Harry Cobb, and others.

Each was asked to “select built projects where formal, spatial, technological, and organizational concepts responded to dynamic historical, cultural, social, and political circumstances,” according to the publisher’s website.

Warke wrote the text with contributions from Eric Keune (B.Arch. ’92) and Associate Professor Andrea Simitch. The tabulations and drawings for the book were supervised by Eu-Sung Yi (B.Arch. ’92), director of the Now Institute at UCLA. Yi also wrote the book’s preface, titled “A Note from the NOW Institute.”

Confluence Details Recent Bertoia Exhibition

Collaborative Exhibition Examines Control An exhibition of collaborative work by Maria Park, associate professor of art and director of AAP Exhibitions and Events, and Branden Hookway, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Information Science, investigated social and control protocols using a diagrammatic language of flight cockpits and table settings. Through a series of paintings, sculptures, and drawings that included 136—a wall-mounted sculpture based on an exterior view of the Enola Gay’s windscreen—the exhibition explored a “hybrid state of training” that aimed to bring a heightened awareness of controlled environments and mediate the tension between structured information and intuitive decisions. Work from the exhibition traveled to San Francisco for a solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art in the spring.AAP

A recent exhibition of work by Associate Professor Roberto Bertoia, art, is the subject of Confluence, a catalog published in fall 2017.

Held at RIT’s University Gallery in November and December, Confluence featured more than 20 of Bertoia’s sculptures and was curated by Josh Owen (B.A./B.F.A. ’94), a professor and chair of the industrial design program at RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences and a former student of Bertoia’s. The catalog also features an introduction written by architecture’s Andrea Simitch and Val Warke.

Confluence featured both large- and smallscale sculptures crafted mostly of wood, including some measuring more than eight feet tall.

The show was described by RIT University News as, “A captivating exhibit exploring site, context, material, and craft as it relates to an artist’s investigation into isolation, absence, and presence—all at the intersection of sculpture, landscape, architecture, and design.”

Bertoia has taught sculpture and drawing for three decades and has exhibited in national and international juried and invitational exhibitions.

Sabin and Jones Coauthor LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture and Biology LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture and Biology, by Jenny E. Sabin, architecture, and scientist Peter Lloyd Jones of Jefferson University, introduces the concept of a laboratory within a studio in which funded research and transdisciplinary participants achieve radical advances in science, design, medicine, and applied architectural practice.

Named for the research unit that Sabin and Jones founded more than 10 years ago, LabStudio is about the generation of methods, tools, materials, prototypes, and scaled applications in the coproduction of a new model for collaborative research. Through a series of case studies by contributors including Antoine Picon, Detlef Mertins, Erica S. Savig, Andrew Lucia, Keith Neeves, Mario Carpo, Sanford Kwinter, and Mark L. Tykocinski, LabStudio demonstrates new approaches for modeling complexity, visualizing large data sets, and teaching across disciplines that are subsequently applied to both architectural and scientific research.

Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Associate Professor of Architecture and the director of graduate studies at AAP.

New Book by O’Donnell Highlights Diverse Contributions to Party Wall This Is Not a Wall: Collected Short Stories on CODA’s Party Wall at MoMA PS1, edited by Caroline O’Donnell and Steven Chodoriwsky, is a collection of essays and reflections on the 2013 winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, designed by CODA, O’Donnell’s design firm.

The book recounts Party Wall’s nine-month lifespan, from its initial nomination and designbuild process, to its dismantling in September 2013. According to the press release, “the book is equal parts an analytical handbook of the competition and design process, an account of its evolving construction, and a poignant description of its lived experience.”

In contrast to most scholarly monographs on architecture, This Is Not a Wall intertwines personal accounts from a range of perspectives with critical texts in order to consider a work of architecture as “a performative endeavor built upon a full chorus of disparate voices.”

O’Donnell is the Edgar A. Tafel Associate Professor of Architecture and director of the M.Arch. program.AAP

Interdisciplinary Faculty Team Wins City of Dreams Competition A collaborative exhibition project created by four Cornell faculty members will be installed on Governors Island in New York City this summer after winning the 2018 City of Dreams design competition.

Oculi, a pavilion crafted from reused grain silos, was created by assistant professor of architecture Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), and his design practice with Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00), Austin+Mergold (A+M); along with associate professor of art Maria Park, civil and environmental engineering professor Chris Earls, and Scott Hughes, principal at Silman Structural Engineers and a visiting lecturer at AAP NYC. City of Dreams focuses on the future of a world facing depleted economic and natural resources and promotes architecture and design with sustainability in mind. The competition requires entrants to consider the environmental impact of a design from construction to demolition.

Named for the shape of its dominant material, Oculi will repurpose several circular metal grain bins, remnants of the American agroindustrial age. The bins will be procured from rural areas of New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio, and brought to the city, establishing a visual connection between urban and rural modes of living. A field of elevated “oculi” will frame unobstructed views of the sky and track the path of the sun.

Mergold said the project was ideal for A+M, a landscape and design practice that makes an effort to work with existing materials and knowledge from the 20th-century heyday of American manufacturing; and stresses using what is widely available but often in disuse, rather than new, virgin materials and resources.

“We had been thinking about these grain bins for some time now,” he said. “It is probably one of the only successful American building systems designed for disassembly, first patented at the turn of the 20th century and now very much underutilized. Some time ago we designed a housing unit (House-in-a-Can) that would use a standard grain bin. Oculi also will inform the continuing work on that housing unit,” he said.

Hughes was enlisted for his practical experience. “I reached out to him, knowing that this could be an interesting and highly unusual project from the standpoint of construction and implementation,” Mergold said. They have previously teamed on projects for the 2016 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial.

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Since Oculi would be highly experimental as a structure, Mergold sought a collaborator in the College of Engineering. A friend in the college recommended Earls, who said his work will focus on “suitable forms that at once respect the architectural intent and function favorably at the site of installation on Governors Island.”

The project was also an ideal fit for Park, whose art practice includes serial paintings and site-specific installations. She recently completed Sight Plan, a 150-foot mural in San Francisco created for the construction fence at the new Chinatown Central Subway Station.

“I had seen some of her work and knew she did murals,” Mergold said. “And there I was with nine ‘rooms’ on my hands, and I knew that I couldn’t just paint them different colors. I needed an idea, and I needed an artist.”

Park proposed covering the inside of the silos with subtle variations of the daytime sky color, so that visitors might move from one to the next in anticipation of finding themselves under one that matched a particular day or time. “As the de/reconstructed grain bins mark awareness of a different time and place, the viewer’s involvement with [the bins] also indicates a different kind of purpose or sense in movement,” Park said.

Following the deinstallation of Oculi in late 2018, A+M is hoping to partner with a housing organization to reconstruct the bins as an experimental housing cluster in Central New York.AAP 1

Bonnie MacDougall in January 2017, in the illuminated walkway between the East and West wings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. photo / Carlin MacDougall (B.Arch. ’99, M.Arch. ’00)

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An aerial view shows the proposed layout of the “oculi.” image / Austin+Mergold in collaboration with Maria Park, and consulting engineers Chris Earls and Scott Hughes

Happening on Instagram @cornellaap

Faculty Notes Associate Professor Esra Akcan, architecture, assumed a lead role in two events series, gave lectures, organized panels, and presented research papers during the fall semester. Within her new position as director of the Institute for European Studies at the Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Akcan launched an event series on migration that included three events on academic freedom and exile, migration of images, and the relation between automation and employment.

Akcan continued to be involved in AAP’s Critically Now event series (see page 6), colaunched by her in spring 2017, working with others to organize the panel “Migration of Images” and the Istanbul-Lahore workshop for the Mellon Expanded Practices Seminar Migration and Discrimination. She also presented a lecture on contemporary Istanbul at Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, and coorganized and comoderated the panel “Work of Architects and Scholars in Times of Turmoil: Urban Renewal of Istanbul” with a Central New York Humanities Corridor Grant. Akcan presented her research on West Asian and European modernisms, in general, and Berlin and Istanbul, in particular, as well as her methodological pursuits on the global history of architecture, at the University of Basel, Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey, Binghamton University, and Cornell. Additionally, several of Akcan’s scholarly articles and reviews were published.

Saša Begović, visiting associate professor in architecture, was elected as one of five members of the jury for the 2018 International VELUX Award, a competition designed to inspire architecture students to work and experiment with daylight.

The winners will be chosen in June from hundreds of projects from North and South America, Africa, Asia/Oceania, Eastern Europe/Middle East, and

Western Europe. Begović will participate in a critique session for winners in the fall.

The citizen advocacy group Protect the Adirondacks! Inc. honored Professor Richard Booth, CRP, with the Howard Zahniser Adirondack Award in recognition of Booth’s service on the New York State Adirondack Park Agency (APA) board and his defense of the “forever wild” forest preserve and classified wilderness lands in the Adirondack Park. Booth served on the APA from November 2007 through June 2016, where he worked to uphold a decisionmaking process based on compliance with existing laws and regulations, scientific review and analysis, and public input.

The award is named for renowned environmental activist and wilderness advocate Howard Zahniser, who wrote the National Wilderness Act of 1964 and investigated the “forever wild” protections in the New York State Constitution for the forest preserve.

Visiting Assistant Professor Tao DuFour, architecture, gave a lecture at The Cooper Union School of Art, part of the Robert Lehman Foundation IntraDisciplinary Seminar, a public lecture series that invites visiting artists to The Cooper Union.

In this presentation, DuFour discussed a phenomenological and ethnographic account of corporeity and the experience of spatiality and ethnography as a method for describing spatial experience.

Associate Professor of the Practice George R. Frantz, CRP, gave a presentation titled “A District Approach to Storm Water Management,” to the New York Upstate Chapter of the American Planning Association. The paper was based on his research in China on the integration of large-scale wetlands for the treatment of urban storm water pollution into public park facilities, as part of a district approach to

storm water management. The approach contrasts with practices in the U.S., where emphasis is on small-scale, privately owned and maintained storm water facilities. In the presentation, Frantz utilized examples of the concept from China, as well as a district storm water management system and wetland preserve he has proposed in Geneva, New York.

An article coauthored by Assistant Professor Nicholas Klein, CRP, appeared in Housing Policy Debate in October.

“Complicating the Story of Location Affordability,” written

by Klein and Michael J. Smart, takes a critical look at the notion of “location affordability”—the idea that people living in transitfriendlier, walkable neighborhoods spend less on transportation overall than people who live in more sprawling places.

Architecture faculty members Visiting Critic Leslie Lok and Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic gave a lecture at the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress in Seoul, South Korea.

Lok and Zivkovic participated in the Student and Young Architects Platform in a forum titled “Digital Vernacular.” The UIA is an international nongovernmental organization that represents more than one million architects in 124 countries. Zivkovic also gave a paper coauthored with Christopher A. Battaglia (M.Arch. ’17), titled “Open Source Factory: Democratizing LargeScale Fabrication Systems,” at the 2017 conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA).

The paper examined how the open source factory radically reorganizes economic research frameworks in the area of robotic building construction by enabling access to large-scale fabrication machinery.

Joanna Malinowska, assistant professor of the practice in sculpture and drawing, had work

in three group shows. She and her partner, C. T. Jasper, installed The Emperor’s Canary, two gramophones inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, at The Mutations exhibition at the High Line in New York City.

The first gramophone plays a recording of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the second plays a recording of a person with black lung disease—two sounds that, for the artists, represent crises in our relationship to the environment.

A second installation by Malinowska and Jasper titled Halka/Haiti 18 48´05´´N 72 23´01´´W, featuring the staging of a full-length Polish dramatic opera in a rural Haitian village, appeared in both The Message: New Media Works at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; and in The Travellers, a group show at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.

Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold, architecture, received a faculty seed grant of $10,000 from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The Einaudi Center’s faculty seed grant program is designed to advance international interdisciplinary research and education at Cornell. Additionally, Mergold gave a number of lectures, presentations, guest workshops, and studios, including a Ph.D. colloquium at the Universität Innsbruck IARC Symposium, the University of Iowa Museum of Art symposium, Brown University, and the International Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi, Russia.

Primitive Hut, a pavilion designed to simultaneously decompose and grow over the next two years, was installed at Art Omi in Ghent, New York, in October.

The project was created by OMG!, a collaboration between Visiting Critic Martin Miller’s firm Antistatics and Edgar A. Tafel Associate Professor Caroline O’Donnell’s firm CODA. The 160-square-foot pavilion

consists of three parts: a structural lattice made from interlocking components carved from standard plywood; a secondary decomposing lattice constructed from a composite of sawdust (waste from the plywood components), bioresin, and hemp; and an infill of manure cylinders. As it decomposes, the sawdust lattice serves as a growth medium and nutritional source for four red maple saplings that will eventually grow up to provide the primary support for the pavilion. Utilizing robotic technologies, the organically shaped pieces were produced through the use of a computer numerical control (CNC) machine and designed to interlock with one another without the need for glue or mechanical fasteners.

Primitive Hut will remain in place for two years and is part of the curated exhibition Shelters.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner, CRP, was featured in an interview on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning website, in which she noted her teaching, scholarly influences, and goals, as well as a childhood admiration for Carl Sagan and a wish to design space habitats. Additionally, Minner secured two research grants during the semester. Engaged Cornell awarded a $5,000 grant to Minner, Zachary Small (M.R.P. ’18), and Ashley Pryce (M.R.P. ’18) for the project Equity Preservation: Sharing and Deepening Connections. In addition to the Engaged Cornell grant, Minner was awarded a $5,000 grant from the President’s Council of Cornell Women, a group of accomplished alumnae advancing the involvement and leadership of women students, faculty, staff, and alumnae. The grant will be used for megaevent research and publication concerning ongoing research on change and adaptation, redevelopment, and preservation.

Coauthored with AAP alumna Akshali Gandhi (M.R.P. ’15), Minner’s article titled “Economic

Development Challenges for Immigrant Retail Corridors: Observations from Chicago’s Devon Avenue” was published in Economic Development Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2017), 342–359. She was also coauthor of the article “Rural wealth creation of intellectual capital from urban local food system initiatives: Developing indicators to assess change,” published in the journal Community Development 8, no. 5 (2017), 639–656.

Associate Professor Carl Ostendarp, art, had a solo exhibition titled Greatest Hits (On Paper) at Kunstverein Heilbronn in Heilbronn, Germany, from September 23 to November 26. The exhibition included works on paper from the past 27 years and a mural painting titled Moonshine, which Ostendarp made on site.

Visiting Critic Erin Pellegrino (B.Arch. ’14), architecture, is renovating two structures designed by Chester Wisniewski, a former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice and professor at The Cooper Union. The first is a renovation of “The Glasshouse,” located on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. In the second project, Pellegrino is transforming a former woodshop into a two-bedroom residence.

Included in the work is restoration of a series of midcentury modern furniture pieces that were in both of the homes.

As part of her research on fiscal stress, Professor Mildred E. Warner, CRP, conducted focus groups at the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, and the International City/County Management Association; and published “Geographies of Local Government Stress after the Great Recession,” in Social Policy and Administration (2017) with Yunji Kim (Ph.D. CRP ’17).

Internationally, Warner participated in a webinar on agefriendly cities for World Planning

Day, and she gave an interview about high-speed rail on China Global TV Network. Additionally, Warner appeared in a documentary about social impact bonds, titled The Invisible Heart, by filmmaker Nadine Pequeneza of HitPlay Productions. The filmmaker joined CRP students to prescreen the documentary at AAP as part of a workshop on social impact bonds that was funded in part by a Luigi Einaudi Faculty Innovation Grant from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Associate Professor John Zissovici, architecture, continued his involvement in Assembly House 150 during the fall semester with founder and director Dennis Maher (B.Arch. ’99). Assembly House 150 is an experimental collective and museum founded by Mahar that occupies a former church in Buffalo, New York. Projects involve an extensive volunteer base and partnerships with the Albright-Knox Gallery’s Innovation Lab in Buffalo, the Society for the Advancement of the Construction-Related Arts, and the Erie County Department of Social Services. Together, these organizations form a training program for students in basic carpentry and woodworking. Daniel Salomon (B.Arch. ’12), who worked in AAP’s Fabrication Shops, is the lead instructor. The exhibition, Reformation, was a collaboration between Zissovici and Maher, with Ethan Davis (M.Arch. ’17) and Alex Jopek (M.Arch. ’17). Other AAP students and alumni involved in Assembly House 150 included Zahid Alibhai (M.Arch. ’17), Nils Axen (B.Arch. ’16), Cameron Neuhoff (B.Arch. ’16), Nice Sudswong (M.Arch. ’17), Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16), and Luba Valkova (B.Arch. ’17).

News23 | Spring 2018 | 19

Alumni

Trudi Sandmeier delivers a lecture titled “Conservation Planning on the Edge: A ‘Left’ist Perspective” at AAP in 2016.

Profile

Places that Tell Stories “In many ways, the story of Los Angeles is the story of mid-century architecture,” states Trudi Sandmeier (M.A. HPP ’00), a graduate of the Department of City and Regional Planning’s (CRP) master’s program in historic preservation planning (HPP).

“The city boomed in the postwar years and a huge amount of the built environment we know today evolved from the creative energy, innovation, and economic strength of Southern California during that time. You cannot practice conservation in the area without thinking about and understanding this legacy.”

Sandmeier’s respect for the city of Los Angeles’s (L.A.) recent history is not strictly a sensibility acquired from graduate study, her 11 years of professional experience in conservation advocacy, or her relatively new academic career path as professor of practice and director of graduate programs in heritage conservation at the University of Southern California (USC). Rather, Sandmeier’s extensive knowledge begins with her personal history and some of the earliest memories she has of family members and the homes they built for themselves.

“All four of my grandparents moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s. My mother’s parents were Dust Bowl refugees who found work in the area’s growing aviation industry. My father’s parents emigrated from Switzerland and worked in household service for prominent families in the area. One of their posts was with Will Rogers on his ranch in Pacific Palisades.

After Rogers passed away and the ranch became a California State Park to honor his memory, my grandfather stayed involved as a volunteer and docent for the rest of his life,” recounts Sandmeier. “I now live in the house my grandparents built in 1933, when they worked for the Rogers family. These stories connect me to place—and I know that many people share the need to connect to sites and places, sometimes through stories like mine, and sometimes through the lens of history.”

Sandmeier also holds a bachelor of arts in history from the University of California–Los Angeles, which, along with her family’s strong relationship to their home in Southern California, led her to the HPP graduate program at CRP where she could combine

her personal values with professional aspiration.

“My early concerns were mainly with integrating historic places with the contemporary city, reactivating them, and making them once again part of the functional urban fabric—so I was in search of a preservation program that I could combine with planning,” she explained.

Upon arrival at AAP, Sandmeier recalls the distinct impression that graduate study would not only provide an opportunity to strengthen her principles with rigorous research, but also to translate the lessons of the classroom to practices that could be used in the joint fields of historic preservation and urban planning. According to Sandmeier, this was enhanced by the abundance of historic sites in Ithaca and on campus, as well as the supportive and passionate community of peers she found in CRP. “I think one of the most important takeaways from my time there was the network I developed with my classmates—we were a close group and still are in many ways,” reflected Sandmeier. “I feel lucky to have built such strong bonds, and so I now work to foster that same type of community among my own graduate students—although it is admittedly different in a place as large as Los Angeles.”

As Sandmeier completed her degree, she considered job opportunities in East Coast cities such as Washington, DC, and Boston. But when she was offered an advocacy position at the Los Angeles Conservancy in 2000, the prospect of returning to Southern California to work at the largest preservation organization in the U.S. was simply too perfect to resist.

“Working in advocacy and the nonprofit side of conservation was important to me. I wanted to be a fighter for historic places and the people and stories that connect to them. I had those ties myself—the reason I gravitated to the field in the first place—and I wanted to connect my interest in public service with my interest in history. Conservation was a way for me to do that.”

Sandmeier remained at the L.A. Conservancy for 11 years, where she worked in both advocacy and education. Over the course of her tenure, Sandmeier continued to learn more about L.A. and its relatively young history. The fact that so much of the city’s building stock is only 50–60 years old makes protection efforts particularly challenging. Sandmeier, however, remains undaunted and instead embraces the range of strategies afforded her by her field, which she considers to be deeply interdisciplinary and resilient.

Beginning in 2004, Sandmeier began teaching classes for the USC Summer Program in Historic

Preservation. More recently, she has had the opportunity to carry much of her experience in both education and advocacy with her as a full-time faculty member at USC, where she also directs a graduate program for conservation that makes student engagement with real dilemmas and opportunities in the L.A. area one of its primary goals.

“We want our students to really understand the impact of their work and the roles that they might play in our community,” explains Sandmeier. “For example, our recent survey class did work that led directly to a significant African American neighborhood in L.A. being included on the National Register of Historic Places. Our historic site stewardship class meets in the Gamble House, and their class projects help to move some aspect of the site management or interpretation of the house forward. This semester, my students are partnering with the planning department of the City of Long Beach to envision the future of their oldest historic district.”

Sandmeier’s own role and impact in the community is palpable. Within a few years following her return to the area and working with the conservancy’s resources to build a constituency around L.A.’s mid-century legacy, she helped establish a Southern California chapter of Docomomo to strengthen those efforts.

She also cofounded the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation with Rogers’s great-granddaughter. Sandmeier now serves as president of the foundation and sees protecting the park from the threat of defunding and facilitating appropriate rehabilitation of the site as central to the foundation’s mission.

In addition to public advocacy, academic leadership, and teaching roles, Sandmeier is also currently at work on her first academic publication, the forthcoming Routledge Companion on Global Heritage Conservation, which she is coediting with a colleague at USC. While much of her professional path is, on the one hand, cohered by a series of opportunities and projects, her personal values form a foundation for her work that balances stories that are very much tied to place, and a look to the future of cities that stand to remain acquainted with their past as they continue to grow and change. According to Sandmeier, the main principle that guides her practice is simply put: “We need the old and the new together—we need to protect places that help to tell our stories, both good and bad, particularly because we are simply not always there to tell them ourselves.”AAP Edith Fikes

Bumper Crop of Seley Sculptures The Jason and Clara Seley Sculpture Court, completed in December, features works bequeathed to the university by former Cornell art professor and administrator Jason Seley (B.F.A. ’40) in 1983—Bookstack, Tsura, and My Square. The pieces are now interspersed among the seating on the plaza near Franny’s food truck. Seley began working with found objects in the 50s, creating armature frameworks for plaster sculptures out of automobile bumpers, his eventual trademark. Seley’s other sculpture on campus is the wellknown Herakles in Ithaka I that sits between the Statler Hotel and Uris Hall.

The sculpture court was made possible by a gift from the estate of Clara Seley.

Philip Rickey’s “Slow Sculpture” Fills a Sacred Space

Alumni

’00

Actor and URS Alum Partner to Develop without Displacing

One of several developments resulting from a partnership between Ernst Valery ’01 (B.S. URS ’00) and actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Selma, Treme) will open in the early months of 2018 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Nelson Kohl Apartments in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District has been in the works since Valery won approval for the plans in 2015.

The development will sit on land that was a parking lot at 20 East Lanvale Street, near Baltimore’s Penn Station. The project will provide a “neighborhood experience,” with a Milk & Honey Market, a rowing gym that will serve to expose kids in the community to the sport, an art gallery, and—mindful of rising rents in emerging urban, transit-oriented locations— 103 rental apartment units.

Valery is the managing partner of SAA|EVI Development. After receiving his undergraduate degree in urban and regional studies at AAP, Valery completed an M.P.A. at Cornell in 2001, and an M.S. at Columbia University before joining SAA|EVI. Pierce, who built homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, invested with SAA|EVI in 2016 to build the Nelson Kohl Apartments, and the two men found that they shared similar philosophies about development and social justice.

Valery says that he and Pierce are working on “a new real estate development paradigm that has urban planner values. Our work is really about changing the development and planning paradigm—how to improve communities and develop without displacement.”

While he has respect for developers building apartments in high-rent districts, Valery prefers to build in lesser-known neighborhoods that attract millennials who want to live and work in the city.

According to Valery, “to build a healthy community, you have to do it all.”

The mixed-use Nelson Kohl Apartment building is named in part for Benjamin Kohl (1954–2013), who earned a Ph.D. from the Department of City and Regional Planning in 1999. Valery was a student of Kohl’s during his time at Cornell.

Valery and Pierce are also working on a larger and more comprehensive mixed-use development project in Richmond, California, that is still in the planning stages. With the goal of promoting inclusion and investment into the city, the project will create a destination that serves to promote urban community, social engagement, building density in the downtown Richmond corridor, and commerce on a long-vacant lot adjacent to the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts.

“I find it hard to ignore my planner training when making developer decisions,” says Valery, “which is a good thing!”

In March, Valery returned to AAP to give a lecture titled “Development without Displacement.”AAP

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Life of Christ/Cycle of Life, a permanent public art commission by Philip Rickey (B.F.A. ’83) ), is part of the redesigned Charles B. Hayes Family Sculpture Park at the University of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled Reclaiming Our Nature for the park’s summer reopening and unveiling of Rickey’s and the 11 other sculptures by national and international artists.

Rickey’s work consists of 70 basalt columns and one red granite slab arrayed in seven episodes over a 430-foot-long pathway within the center of the eight-acre park. According to Rickey, the episodes “utilize an abstract visual language” to suggest the life and legacy of Christ, culminating in a natural outdoor chapel meant to suggest the founding of the church.

Rickey’s practice with naturally shaped stone is an example of “slow sculpture,” a method and concept practiced by his father, kinetic sculptor George Rickey (1907–2002). Hand authenticity is important to the artist, and it took five and a half months alone to polish the carefully chosen stones for Life of Christ, and a year and a quarter to fabricate and install— three years from concept to completion. Rickey collaborated with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73, the park’s designer. Each stone represents a character in the narrative, and the experience of viewing the completed monoliths along the pathway is similarly slow, as the narrative unfolds gradually.

For Rickey, the sculpture park is both a public space for contemplating art and nature and a sacred space that informed the work. Once a landfill, the site has been reclaimed and planted with native grasses. When complete, it will include a storm water drainage pond, a great lawn, additional lighted and paved pathways, new trees, and other native plantings.

The sculpture park will be dedicated in the fall of 2018.AAP

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A rendering of the Nelson Kohl Apartments in Baltimore. image / provided

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Rickey’s Crucifixion and thieves, with Mary in the foreground. photo / Philip Rickey

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Jay Siegel (left) and Scott Breen are the founders of the SustainabilityDefined podcast.

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People gather outside the Tata Innovation Center during the opening of Cornell Tech in August. Lindsay France / Cornell University Marketing Group

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CFAA recipient Alexis Torres works on a project during the 2017 Introduction to Architecture Summer Program program in L. P. Kwee Studios.

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’83

King, Chung, and Petersen Lead Design of the Tallest Building on the West Coast Christopher King (B.Arch. ’99), design principal, along with designers Lily Chung (M.Arch. ’15) and Ryan Petersen (B.Arch. ’15) of Los Angeles–based AC Martin, were part of the team that helped design the Wilshire Grand, the tallest building on the West Coast. Opened in 2016, the 1,100-foot skyscraper is located between Seventh Street and Wilshire Boulevard at Figueroa Street in L.A.’s Financial District.

By overturning an antiquated ordinance requiring helipads on all tall buildings in exchange for more effective firefighting and rescue features throughout, the tower’s distinctive curvilinear “sail” also made it the first tall building in L.A. without a flat top.

New Podcast Examines Sustainability Armed with a tongue-in-cheek slogan and a shared passion for the environment, Joseph (Jay) Siegel (M.R.P. ’14) and cohost Scott Breen produce SustainabilityDefined, an informational and interview-based podcast that aims to push sustainability forward and help listeners define it “one topic (and one bad joke) at a time.”

Siegel, a real estate investment advisor at JLL in San Francisco, and Breen, a senior coordinator in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Sustainability and Circular Economy Program in Washington, DC, met in early 2016 at a Net Impact networking event. In a follow-up conversation, Siegel suggested that they work together to create a podcast focused on sustainability. Breen’s dual graduate degrees in law and public affairs and Siegel’s master’s in planning and background in real estate and environmental studies were a perfect fit.

The pair came up with a spreadsheet of “personal sustainability contacts” that would be invited to participate as experts on topics in various sectors—energy, cities, natural environment, transportation, business, policy, and social. Their first episode was released on Arbor Day 2016, and featured an interview with the cofounder of Riide, an electric bike company based in DC. In more than two dozen subsequent episodes, topics have included water infrastructure (cities),

circular economy (business), agroecology (natural environment), and conservatism and climate change (policy). Combined, the topics fill out an organizational “tree” that helps to define sustainability and foster action toward a more resilient future.

3 “Overall, the podcast ’14 aims to publish content that leaders in the sustainability field respect while still being easily accessible to those less familiar with the subject,” Siegel says.

The podcast has been downloaded more than 25,000 times, with approximately 15 percent of listeners based outside the U.S. GreenBiz featured it as one of “Seven Exceptional Sustainability Podcasts You Should Listen To,” and the website 1 Million Women named it one of “Five Great Sustainability Podcasts to Play Now.” SustainabilityDefined is available on Apple iTunes and Google Play.AAP

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’62–’99

Cornell Tech Campus Opens

Happening on Instagram @cornellaap

’79–’16

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Alumni Participation Is Key to Cornell Future Architect Award Program Thanks to an increase in alumni support, student participation in the Cornell Future Architect Award (CFAA) more than doubled for the summer of 2017. The program is a merit-based award for high school students from historically underrepresented backgrounds across the U.S., that enables them to attend the Introduction to Architecture Summer Program at AAP with no cost. Designed to address diversity and the barriers to attracting underrepresented students to the college and, in particular, to architecture, the CFAA was established in 2016 with seed funding from Bill ’69 and Catherine Perez.

The program’s inaugural year saw three students in attendance; in 2017, that number grew to seven. Along with the increase in the number of award recipients, additional alumni support for the program now provides additional individual award designations and a new mentorship opportunity.

As of February 1, Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) has funded the KPF Cornell Future Architect Award, to be given to two students annually through 2020, and Perkins+Will, whose founders include Lawrence Perkins (B.Arch. ’30) and Philip Will Jr. (B.Arch. ’28) (see page 24), is funding two CFAA scholarships each summer for three years. Additionally, the Winston Perez Ventura Cornell Future Architect Award is a gift from Matthew (B.Arch. ’79) and Lizanne Witte to support one student annually. It is named for incoming first-year architecture student Winston Perez Ventura, who died unexpectedly in August 2017 after completing the Prefreshman Summer Program shortly before beginning his studies at Cornell. Born in the Dominican Republic, Perez Ventura became a member of the first freshman class at the new Democracy Prep Harlem High School in 2013, and in December 2016, surrounded by his classmates, teachers, and mother, his early decision acceptance into AAP was captured on a video that went viral.

The new mentorship opportunity gives CFAA recipients access to an individual mentor before, during, and after the summer program. The mentors will assist the students with preparing applications to architecture schools, help them prepare for interviews, and hone their portfolios. The CFAA mentors include Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06) of the Detroit Housing and Revitalization Department; Mark Hill (B.Arch. ’84), founding partner of Studio H Architecture Planning Environments, and a graduate of the summer program; Michael Neumann (B.Arch. ’81), principal at Michael Neumann Architecture of New York City; Nick Savvides (B.Arch. ’14), a recent graduate of AAP; Stephanie Ulrich (B.Arch. ’08), landscape and architectural designer at James Corner Field Operations; Lisa Zhu (B.Arch. ’16), who works at SOM in Chicago; and Ricardo Zurita (B.Arch. ’84), principal of Ricardo Zurita Architecture and Planning, P.C. “As both a past architecture student at Cornell and now an interviewer for applicants to the B.Arch. program, it is great to see the CFAA students’ enthusiasm and confidence develop as they progress through the program,” says Neumann, who is both a mentor and program donor whose support covers the cost of the students’ supply kits and provides a stipend for materials.

Three of the 2017 CFAA recipients were accepted as early decision incoming first-year architecture undergraduates: Nadiya Farrington (mentor: Hill); Juan Lopez (mentor: Zurita); and Alexis Torres (mentor: Saviddes).AAP

The Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City officially opened to graduate students in August, with a dedication event attended by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Cornell University President Martha Pollack, among others.

Kate Bicknell (B.S. URS ’99), senior vice president of Forest City Ratner (FCR), played an integral role in the development of the 12-acre campus. FCR is one of the nation’s leading mixed-use development firms, and as the development manager for the overall campus, FCR was involved in each of the design elements incorporated into the campus.

Additionally, FCR was responsible for building one of the key buildings on the tech campus. The Bridge, which was renamed the Tata Innovation Center in December, is designed to promote collaborative research on next-generation digital technologies and to spur innovation and the commercialization of new products and technologies. The building was renamed in recognition of a $50 million investment in the engineering campus by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting, and business solutions organization. Industrialist and philanthropist Ratan Tata ’59 (B.Arch. ’62) is chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group.

Other alumni involvement at Cornell Tech includes the architecture and landscape firm of Weiss/Manfredi, whose cofounder and principal Michael Manfredi (M.Arch. ’80) designed the Tata Innovation Center; and Handel Architects of New York City, the firm of Gary Handel (B.Arch. ’78) and Blake Middleton (B.Arch. ’78, M.Arch. ’81), who were the principal architects for The House, a 26-story residential tower for students and faculty on the Cornell Tech campus.AAP

Prickly Sculpture Wins Awards Mark Parsons (M.F.A. ’98), pictured above, received two awards for Big Burr, a large environmental sculpture made of bamboo. Parsons was part of the project team for the 65-acre Little Bennett Regional Park Day Use Area in Clarksburg, Maryland, whose design received the President’s Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Maryland Chapter. Big Burr also took the top award for the Montgomery County, Maryland Planning Department’s Design Excellence Award program in the Landscapes and Open Spaces category. “A single bamboo sphere might make you think of tumbleweed. I imagine several,” Parsons says.

“I think about how they would poke into each other and lock together. Like burrs in a wool shirt in the fall.”

News23 | Spring 2018 | 23

Alumni

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AAP Alumni Lead Upson Hall Transformation After a multiyear renovation project, Upson Hall—located on the Engineering Quad of Cornell’s Ithaca campus—was opened and formally dedicated during the fall semester. The renovation’s interdisciplinary design team was led by two AAP alumni—Robert Goodwin (B.Arch. ’84), of Perkins+Will’s New York City studio; and David J. Lewis (M.A. HAUD ’92), principal at Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL) Architects, based in New York City—in collaboration with the engineering firms Thornton Tomasetti and ME Engineers.

Upson Hall houses facilities, labs, and classrooms for the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Renovations to the 60-year-old building create state-of-the-art research labs and flexible, technology-enhanced classrooms; achieve significant energy performance; and establish a distinctive new identity for MAE and engineering.

According to Lewis, “In repurposing a post–World War II building, the Upson Hall project transforms a work of international modernism into a highly tuned, site-specific building. The result exemplifies the creative synthesis of the disciplines of architecture and engineering, setting a precedent for the future of the Engineering Quad.”

The original 160,000-square-foot structure was designed by Perkins+Will founders Lawrence Perkins (B.Arch. ’30) and Philip Will Jr. (B.Arch. ’28), who met at Cornell while studying architecture. The first of a complex of seven buildings that eventually formed the Engineering Quad, Upson Hall was the result of a postwar building boom intended to accommodate the rapid growth of education and research on American campuses.

In the redesign, the modernist “ribbon-window” facade now has three different terra-cotta profiles that highlight shadow patterns and reflect the stratified rock of the local geology. New cantilevered public spaces at the corners have large expanses of glass, inviting the campus into the interior. The original

facade color is subtly referenced in yellow vertical panels, while contrasting jambs and sills set at angles maximize daylight reflection into the interior.

Sophisticated mechanical, lighting, and control systems boost the building’s energy performance levels and create a highly responsive environment that enables students to work, learn, and study in a technologically advanced facility. The project is currently tracking LEED Platinum, a significant achievement for research lab buildings, and, along with landscape architect Trowbridge Wolf Michaels Landscape Architects, LTL and Perkins+Will received a Merit Award in architecture from the AIA New York 2018 Design Awards.

For Goodwin, the Upson Hall project is not just a renovation. “It’s really the complete transformation of a 20th-century engineering building to express 21stcentury aspirations for learning, research, and energy performance,” Goodwin says. “Everyone dreams of making a building where they went to architecture school, and it’s been a true privilege to work with my alma mater to add to the Cornell campus and give new life to a legacy Perkins+Will building.”

The design team also included Craig Sobeski (M.Arch. ’07). Another principal of LTL is Marc Tsurumaki, visiting critic in architecture at Cornell AAP NYC. The renovation project was completed in August at a cost of $74.5 million, and is part of an overall Engineering Quad makeover.AAP

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The renovated Upson Hall opened in the fall semester. photo / Michael Moran Photography

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Upson Hall when it opened in 1958. photo / Cornell University Library Rare and Manuscript Collections

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Upson Hall’s renovated interior features contrasting jambs and sills set at angles that maximize daylight reflection. photo / Michael Moran Photography

Guns: Myth and Manufacture The design of firearms, their culture, and the impact on society was the focus of the fall semester seminar titled Guns: Myth & Manufacture, taught by Baird Visiting Critic Ben Nicholson and Teaching Associate Danny Salamoun (M.Arch. ’14).

The seminar took multiple routes of investigation to critically appraise the use of firearms in military and law enforcement, hunting, and recreation. According to Nicholson, they studied the pivotal role that firearm manufacture has played in the American manufacturing system of interchangeable parts, whereby formerly handmade objects could be mechanically reproduced, resulting in every component being identical. The reliance upon self-similar components has been at the heart of architectural production.

Each student researched one of 17 revolvers manufactured between 1818 and 2009, examining how a firearm is designed, patented, machined, marketed, and its civilian or military use—a methodology of production equally applicable to architecture, “but on steroids,” according to Nicholson. The class constructed meticulous cardboard models of a revolver’s moving parts and Cornell University Police officers consulted on the models’ legality as well as providing thorough—and sobering— overviews of gun safety and active-shooter scenarios.

The class applied an intentional absence of bias on how firearms are perceived in both rural and suburban “red state” communities and urban and suburban “blue state” communities, and, at the end of the semester, created YouTube videos about the revolver they had carefully researched, with the intention of contributing unbiased perspectives to the knowledge base available to gun enthusiasts and skeptics alike.

Pictured is a model by Po-Yen Hsieh (B.Arch. ’19) of a Smith & Wesson model 29 .44 magnum revolver, the same gun used by actor Clint Eastwood’s character in the 1970s Dirty Harry film series.

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

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

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