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

College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 129 Sibley Dome Ithaca, NY 14853-6701 (607) 254-6292 aapcommunications@cornell.edu aap.cornell.edu/social-media

 Rebecca Bowes, Elise Gold Dan Aloi, Rebecca Bowes, Matthew Farrell (M.B.A./ M.P.S. RE ’18), Dee Klees, Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16), Sherrie Negrea, Mia Niazi, Shining Sun (B.Arch. ’18), Jay Wrolstad DESIGN Studio Kudos COPY EDITOR Laura Glenn PHOTOGRAPHY William Staffeld (unless otherwise noted) DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Sheri D’Elia EDITORS

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Luke Erickson (M.Arch. ’16) presents his thesis titled “Anachronous Trajectories” during fall review.

COVER

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

“Disruptive innovation is a competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.” —Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, March 23, 2014 For decades, the Department of Architecture at AAP was synonymous with undergraduate professional architecture education. So when AAP launched a professional graduate program, a domain where Cornell architecture had been conspicuously absent, many were skeptical. Could the B.Arch. pedagogy, rooted in studio culture and committed to a deep, disciplinary immersion in architecture and urban history, serve as a foundation for graduate studies in architecture? The department faculty assembled an innovative graduate curriculum, including a mandatory semester in New York City, traveling studios, and a deep dive into the expanded practice of architecture globally. To help recruit top graduate students, AAP alumni generously contributed to scholarship funds, and our extensive professional network rallied to provide internships and career opportunities to augment the formal curriculum. Now, six years after its accreditation, the M.Arch. is recognized as one of the nation’s best professional graduate programs, virtually on par with our 140-year undergraduate legacy (see architecture rankings story on page 3).

AAP is not quick to launch new degrees or programs. When we choose to expand we want to be confident that we do not trade quality for quantity, and when we take risks with new endeavors we do so with a multiyear horizon. This disposition regarding the appropriate rate of change is decisively out of step with certain strains of the contemporary Geist, which is typically described as restless, anxious; fascinated with disruption, innovation, and speed; dismissive of patience, continuity, and a sense of the durable; and motivated, as historian Jill Lapore writes, by a sense of disaster avoided only by moving very fast.

There is, of course, a good deal of terrain between conservative lethargy and headlong disruption. The college subscribes to a middle ground of contemplative impatience and radical incrementalism. In this spirit, a number of fascinating academic propositions are currently under review and development. The faculty is exploring new approaches for coteaching architectural history, historic preservation, and cultural landscape studies; and reshaping our postprofessional foci to reflect our current research and expertise. The planners are ready to launch a new graduate concentration titled the Design of Cities: History, Context, Form, taking advantage of faculty strength in urban morphology, urban landscape analysis, real estate development, and historic preservation. New faculty appointments, revised coursework, and a number of faculty-led, multidisciplinary design and development competitions are already evidence of the Baker Program in Real Estate’s impact on AAP. Thoughtful change is underway, but neither as a competitive strategy nor fueled by anxiety about a world rapidly hurtling toward doom. Rather, we approach change with timely, incremental steps toward enhancing the intensity, creativity, rigor, relevance, impact, and yes, durability, of an AAP education.

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

From left: Jacob Gensler (B.Arch. ’20) and Samuel Gomez (B.Arch. ’20) work on a collaborative instrument drawing for the midterm of the first-year studio, Design I.

Spring 2016 2 News&Events

2 Rome Palazzo 3 Shloss Studio; Architecture Rankings; Portfolio Development Day; CCA Grants 4 Fall 2015 Lectures and Exhibitions 6 Kay WalkingStick 8 Symposium on the Colombian City

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9 Faculty: Michael Manville, CRP 10 Alumni: Kimberly Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06) 11 Student: Mariko Azis (B.A./B.F.A. ’16)

13 Folio

13 Unpacking a Museum for Architectural Drawings

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14 CRP Summer Internships 15 Architectural Film Award; Real Estate Challenge; Presidential Research Scholars 16 Planners Focus on Gender Issues; Student Work in Berlin; Kauffman Dissertation Fellow 17 Student Voices: A Semester at OMA; A “Free” Summer

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19 Faculty Books 20 Schmidt Tanzania Workshop; Simitch and Warke’s Baer Residency; CRP Grant 21 Built project by Hascup and Mergold; Carnicero at Venice Biennale; O’Donnell in Architectural Review; Sabin Wins Ivy Award

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22 John Ahearn (B.F.A. ’73) 23 Gaber Named President of University of Toledo; Architecture Alum Contributes to LaGuardia Redesign; Rizzo Joins Veteran’s Affairs 24 Chicago Biennial

photo / Liana Miuccio, visiting critic, Cornell in Rome

A New (Old) Home for Cornell in Rome

On January 25, students moved in to Cornell in Rome’s new home base in the Palazzo Santacroce. Located in the historic center of Rome just minutes from the Pantheon and Piazza Navona, this 17th-century building was originally constructed for the Santacroce family who held various titles of nobility and produced four cardinals. The newly renovated space encompasses half of the second floor, with large windows and balconies overlooking a 19th century urban park. Two of the three large salons have high vaults with central panels of fresco paintings surrounded by gilded stucco frames. The vault fresco pictured above, by Ruggeri, is an allegory celebrating the Santacroce family. Also visible in this photo are the cardinalate coats of arms of the family, installed in the cornice separating the walls from the vault.

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Portfolio Development Day Gives B.Arch.

Students an Edge On October 17, 18 fourth- and fifth-year B.Arch. students studying at AAP NYC had an opportunity to get some one-on-one feedback on their portfolios from practicing architects.

Organized by AAP Connect and hosted by AAP Advisory Council member Doug Hocking (B.Arch. ’89) at his firm Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), Portfolio Development Day combined presentations, networking, and individual portfolio reviews to help the students prepare for their upcoming job search.

The day started with a talk titled “Portfolio Best Practices” by KPF’s Jerri Smith (M.Arch. ’81), followed by a Q&A session, lunch and networking time, and then individual one-on-one critiques with a group of AAP alumni who are currently practicing architects in New York City.

“This event was unique because usually these professionals would only look at my portfolio in the context of a job application or interview,” says Allie Wills (B.Arch. ’16). “I was able to have a very open discussion about how my portfolio was a good tool— or could become a better one—to showcase my work, demonstrate my passions, and spur a conversation in an interview.”

Professionals who participated in the portfolio critique included Kumar Atre (B.Arch. ’12), Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Mia Kang (M.Arch. ’14), Snøhetta; Terri Lee (B.Arch. ’04), KPF; Ana Leshchinsky (B.Arch. ’08, M.Arch. ’09), KPF; Joe Pikiewicz, FXFOWLE; Janice Rim (B.Arch. ’14), Bjarke Ingels Group; and Hugh Trumbull (B.Arch. ’88, M.Arch. ’93), KPF.AAP

AAP Connect held several career workshops during the fall semester. In September, Lynn Gray ’75, founder and CEO of Campus Scout, LLC, hosted a workshop titled “Effective Networking Skills: How to Work a Room.”

Students learned how to maximize networking events, how to organize their network, and how to engage effectively with those already in their network over the long term. Campus Scout is a provider of campus recruiting services for corporations, and transition and career coaching for millennials.

A November event with Amie Cunat (M.F.A. ’12) included an in-depth discussion that examined the life of a professional artist. Students got answers to significant career-related questions and learned about Cunat’s career path. Cunat is a painter who lives and works in New York City.

In October, the Frances Shloss Studio on the third floor of East Sibley Hall was awarded a 2015 American Architecture Award. The studio was one of 60 projects to receive the award, which are organized by the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The awards are now in their 21st year, and are given to the best new buildings designed and constructed by American architects

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From left, Won Ryu (B.Arch. ’17) and Yen Hua Debra Chan (B.Arch. ’16) discuss their portfolios with Doug Hocking (B.Arch. ’89).

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Review for the option studio Enjoy! An Appetite for Ecology, Infrastructure, and Everyday Practices of Inhabitation, in the Frances Shloss Studio.

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Luca Spano’s (M.F.A. ’16) exhibition A Ploughman and Some Stones, on display in the Experimental Gallery in November, was funded with a CCA grant.

Cornell Council for the Arts Awards 33 Project Grants

B.Arch. and M.Arch. Rank One and Two in 2016 AAP’s Master of Architecture program moved up to number two, its highest rank yet, in the “America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools” survey. The Bachelor of Architecture program retained its number-one ranking among undergraduate programs. The 2016 rankings, published in Architectural Record, are conducted annually

by DesignIntelligence on behalf of the Design Futures Council.AAP

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in the U.S. and abroad, or by international architects for buildings designed and built in the U.S. Designed by New York City–based architecture firm LEVENBETTS, the Frances Shloss Studio also won three other awards in 2015, including an AIA New York Chapter Design Merit Award, the Architecture Podium International 2nd Award, and the Society of American Registered Architects–New York Design Award Silver Award of Honor.AAP

photo / Luca Spano

Other AAP Connect Highlights from the Fall Semester

Accolades for Frances Shloss Studio

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Connect with AAP on Social Media aap.cornell.edu/social-media 

In October, the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) awarded grants to support 33 art projects being presented on campus in the 2015–16 academic year.

Selected from a large group of applications from Cornell artists, the projects—in visual arts, performing arts, media and literary arts, and architecture—represent a range of creative disciplines across campus. The CCA gave 12 grants of $2,500 each to Cornell faculty, departments, and programs, and awarded 21 grants of $1,000 each to undergraduate and graduate students and to student organizations.

Funding decisions were based on the artistic merit of the proposal, the degree to which the project expands the boundaries of a particular discipline, and the potential impact of the project on the community at large.

AAP students and student organizations receiving grants include Nils Axen (B.Arch. ’16), Jared Curtis (B.Arch. ’16), Kevin Jin He (B.Arch. ’16), Sung Eun Kim (B.F.A. ’18), Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16), Luca Spano (M.F.A. ’16), Maggie Zou (M.Arch. ’16); AAP Association; and the 2016 M.F.A. exhibition in New York City.

The CCA is a university-wide organization that provides a platform for the creation of and public discourse on the contemporary arts on campus. Visiting Assistant Professor Stephanie Owens, art, is the director of the CCA, and Kent Kleinman, Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of AAP, is the lead dean for the organization. Through the annual grant program, exhibitions, public talks, artist residencies, and student awards, the CCA promotes interdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental artistic forms in order to inspire innovative and challenging projects by students, faculty, departments, and programs from all disciplines.AAP

News19 | Spring 2016

Fall 2015 Lectures and Exhibitions aap.cornell.edu/events

LECTURES

EXHIBITIONS

Morgan Ashcom Sierra Bainbridge FXFOWLE Lecture on Sustainability, Urbanism, and Design 10 Gianfranco Baruchello and Carla Subrizi Tatiana Bilbao Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series 9 Jr-Gang Chi and Shingo Masuda Mario Cucinella Amie Cunat (M.F.A. ’12) 8 Jarrett Earnest Jason Fulford Matteo Garrone John Grabowski Lisa Hanley (Ph.D. CRP ’10) Dianne Harris Sharon Hayes Teiger Mentor in the Arts David Humphrey Johanna Hurme Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Robert W. Lake Donatella Landi Anouk Legendre Alyssa Loorya and Christopher Ricciardi Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Ed McMahon (M.Arch. ’88) 7 Studio Nemesi Jorge Otero-Pailos (B.Arch. ’94, M.Arch. ’95) Glanzer-Curtis Family Lecture Series 6 Laura Parnes Rolf Pendall Raynaldo Perugini Samina Raja Bjørn Sletto (Ph.D. CRP ’06) 3 Carissa Slotterback 5 Sergei Tchoban Mette Thomsen Edgar A. Tafel Lecture Series Bernard Tschumi 4,11 Samuel Zimmerman (B.S. URS ’99)

Sanctuary Alan Turner The American Streetcar Suburb Colombia Transformed In the Public Interest: The Life and Work of Regional Planning Pioneer Ladislas Segoe (1894–1983) 1 Chapel of the Mosquitoes 2 José Oubrerie and Steven Holl Structural Systems Class Models, Fall 2015 Treasury, Legacy: A Museum for Architectural Drawing Sergei Tchoban

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Volume 7 of Association, a student-run publication featuring a collection of work produced by AAP students, faculty, and alumni, was released in early September. The release was celebrated with a launch party in Ithaca, and this gathering at the AAP NYC studio space on October 7.AAP

Sharon Hayes, the spring 2015 Teiger Mentor in the Arts, met with M.F.A. students during one of her trips to campus. Hayes delivered a public lecture titled “Women’s Liberation Is a Lesbian Plot and Other Anachronisms” in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium in September. She made several multiday trips to campus where she worked closely with both B.F.A. and M.F.A. students. She is the fifth Teiger Mentor in the Arts, following Leslie Hewitt, Alejandro Cesarco, Shannon Ebner, and Josiah McElheny.AAP

photo / provided

News19 | Spring 2016

Emeritus Art Professor Featured in Exhibition at the Smithsonian A new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, is the first major career retrospective chronicling the artistic journey of emeritus professor of art Kay WalkingStick.

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With more than 65 paintings, drawings, small sculptures, notebooks, and diptychs, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist covers 9,500 square feet and features works from the celebrated Cherokee artist’s collection, the museum, and private lenders.

Born in 1935 in Syracuse, WalkingStick has explored her Indian identity in her art throughout her career. An established artist who first taught at Cornell from 1988–90, she returned in 1992 as a full professor, teaching painting and drawing in the Department of Art and retiring to paint full-time in 2005.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically and thematically in five sections, including Italian Romance, with work inspired by WalkingStick’s time in Italy while teaching at Cornell in Rome; and Landscape: The Power of Native Place, an ongoing source of fascination for the artist.

“It has been a great honor to be chosen for this exhibition,” says WalkingStick.

“This show represents a lifetime of painting and is, in fact, an autobiography of sorts depicting my young womanhood in the ’60s on through my later life painting American landscapes in the 2000s. The exhibit describes my visual life as a painter and my inner life as well.”

Many of her best-known works are in the retrospective, including diptychs pairing abstract and representational painting, the 36-panel Chief Joseph series (1974–76), and landscapes of the American Southwest and ancient Indian sites.

The museum has produced a 208-page exhibition catalog, a short video profile of the artist, and a location-aware app for museum visitors with enhanced audio and visual content.

The exhibition, on display through September 18, opened with a symposium in November, “Seizing the Sky: Redefining American Art.” Public programs included a February 6 conversation on contemporary American art and culture with WalkingStick and Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America. After the exhibition closes in September in Washington, DC, it will travel to the Heard Museum in Phoenix; the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio; the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan; the Gilcrease Art Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Montclair Art Museum, in Montclair, New Jersey.AAP 1

Kay WalkingStick in her Easton, Pennsylvania studio. photo / Julia Verderosa

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WalkingStick’s New Mexico Desert (2011) is among her iconic works on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. photo / National Museum of the American Indian

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In the foreground is WalkingStick’s ACEA V (2003), gouache and gold acrylic on paper, 19" x 38". photo / National Museum of the American Indian From left: Late Summer on the Ramapo (1987–91), acrylic and wax on canvas, 48" x 96" x 3-1/2"; I can’t Make it Without You, II (1989), charcoal on paper, 21-1/2" x 43". photo / National Museum of the American Indian

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From left: Feet Series Arrangement (1972), acrylic on canvas, 60" x 40"; Hudson Reflection VI (1973), acrylic on canvas, 48" x 50". photo / National Museum of the American Indian

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Chief Joseph series (1974–76), acrylic, ink, and wax on canvas, 20" x 15" each (six panels of a 36-panel series). photo / National Museum of the American Indian

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Tears (1990), mixed media sculpture, 18-1/4" x 16-1/2" x 12". photo / National Museum of the American Indian

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News19 | Spring 2016

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Interdisciplinary Symposium Discusses Intervention in the Colombian City A group of professionals from the design, public policy, and city planning arenas convened in October in the Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium to discuss the potential of their professions to empower social change in the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Medellín.

Organized by Julian Palacio, visiting critic in from the Department of Architecture and the Department of Architecture, “Chronicles of Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New the South: Architecture for the City in Colombia” York City; Alejandro Echeverri, current Loeb featured presentations that explored current Fellow at Harvard GSD and former director of projects that have been successful because Urban Projects in Medellín; Orlando García of of their social ambition and interdisciplinary G Ateliers; Juan Pablo Ortíz of Juan Pablo Ortíz approach. The symposium focused primarily Arquitectos; and Ana Elvira Vélez of Ana Elvira on Bogotá and Medellín, which have become Vélez Arquitecta. contemporary references for urban revitalization “The speakers highlighted the dialogue in spite of facing a unique set of challenges, between government and architecture, and how including limited resources and remnants of a it can translate into infrastructure for economic violent past that once defined the country. and social development,” says Daniela Cardenas “Both cities have undergone radical trans(B.S. URS ’16). “Listening to Ana Elvira Vélez talk formations since the ’90s,” says Palacio. “In about how to use architecture to solve inequality both places, politicians with nontraditional was a highlight of the event for me.” backgrounds emerged as leaders, and embraced “Chronicles of the South” was part of the the idea that transforming the city itself—its Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series. buildings and public spaces—can be a way to Colombia Transformed, a companion exhibition bring people back together and to move toward on display in John Hartell Gallery, featured a better future.” recently completed public projects in Colombia by leading architects, including Bonilla, García, Presenters included Bogotá’s Daniel Giancarlo Mazzanti, and Felipe Uribe, among Bonilla of Daniel Bonilla Arquitectos/Taller de others. Projects including day care centers, Arquitectura de Bogotá; Lorenzo Castro, the schools, libraries, and sport complexes were former director of the Professional Workshop for Public Space in Bogotá during Mayor Enrique explored through photographs, slides, drawings, models, and film footage.AAP Peñalosa’s administration; Patricio del Real,

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Daniel Bonilla of Daniel Bonilla Arquitectos/Taller de Arquitectura de Bogotá, at left, and Palacio, far right, answer questions during a Q&A session.

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Ana Elvira Vélez of Ana Elvira Vélez Arquitecta discussed projects that address the design of public spaces and cultural buildings.

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Alejandro Echeverri, current Loeb Fellow at Harvard GSD and former director of Urban Projects in Medellín, gives some history of the development of that city.

4–5 A companion exhibition titled Colombia Transformed was on display in John Hartell Gallery from September 28 to October 23.

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Profiles

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Getting from Here to There How urban dwellers get from point A to point B impacts an array of concerns confronting cities today, ranging from land use and housing to public transit and social justice, says Michael Manville, an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, whose research and instruction focuses on transportation and local public finance.

“Transportation is an interesting way to look at a lot of things that happen in cities,” he says. “It’s a useful window into a lot of bigger, more abstract ideas, because once you start thinking about transportation, and how we should help people get around, invariably you start wrestling with not just efficiency, but also fairness. If we design a transportation system oriented toward automobiles, for example, are we locking out the population that cannot afford them?”

Manville’s interest in urban planning was sparked, in large part, during a stint as a newspaper reporter for the Cape and Islands after he completed his undergraduate degree. He was handed the town, county, and transportation beat in Nantucket and Cape Cod, and covered local transportation issues involving roads, the airport, the ferries, and their associated land-use issues. That led to jobs with the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce and a local economic development agency.

“I helped the county write its comprehensive plan and became even more interested in the government planning process, and decided to pursue a master’s degree,” he recalls. Working with a local government on a popular, attractive island where residents were generally opposed to development introduced Manville to the suspicion toward outsiders that is common in municipal planning.

“I understood where this tendency toward localism came from, but it also concerned me, and later on it became a bigger part of my academic research,” he says. “Planning can be very parochial. Many people get involved in planning because they worry their neighborhoods will change, and they want to stop that from happening. Sometimes that’s good, but that can’t be all that planning is—the process must also consider the well-being of people who live outside the community and may want to live in it.”

Deciding that a change of scenery was in order, Manville enrolled in graduate school on the opposite coast at the University of California– Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned both a master’s degree (2003) and a Ph.D. (2009).

It was during a transportation project with a UCLA professor that Manville’s interest in the subject matter was piqued, and, after earning his Ph.D. in urban planning, Manville took a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies/Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. A fundamental problem in transportation, Manville says, is that cities offer free access to roads and parking. “That’s not the way we deal with most other infrastructure. We don’t say water is free, gas is free, and as a result we don’t run out of those things. But we run out of road every day, twice a day; we run out of parking spaces constantly.”

This, in turn, affects the land-use process, with parking shortages resulting in government regulations that require developers to mitigate traffic, such as by providing parking in their housing projects.

“Over and above that, cities have transportation-demand management plans, which require developers to contribute money to help fund the public transportation system, or widen the street, or put in a left-turn lane,” says Manville. “So we are taking costs that should be borne by drivers and putting them on developers. But the developer passes that cost through, usually by building less housing.

If that happens citywide, you have a lot less housing and the price of housing goes up. Because we don’t charge drivers for the full cost of driving, we end up dumping those costs into the housing market. The story of American cities is cheap driving and expensive housing, which is completely backward.”

Cities should make the cost of driving more transparent—and make drivers pay up, Manville says, by instituting congestion charges that make it more expensive to drive at rush hour and street parking charges that vary with demand during certain times of day. Higher gasoline taxes would help, too, he says, in addressing the artificially low costs of owning a vehicle in the city.

But while the benefits of such strategies are straightforward, the politics of instituting new fees in the populace is quite complicated, he acknowledges. “If you could surmount the political challenges, the nice thing is that these charges generate revenue. Not only could you help reduce traffic congestion and help the environment, but city gov-

ernments would have money and less need for property tax increases,” Manville says.

Manville’s research also shows that the affordability and convenience of driving thwarts the cities’ ability to increase use of public transit. “We could spend more money on transit, but we already spend a lot, and that money has not resulted in more ridership across the country. Spending money on public transportation has in some ways become a way to avoid making driving more expensive,” Manville says. “The way it’s actually playing out for voters and politicians is that if we spend more money to build light rail, for example, that conveys this impression that we are taking bold action against congestion or pollution, and then we sort of let ourselves off the hook when it comes to doing things that might be less popular but would have a bigger impact.

“I am a big supporter of public transportation, but we are going down a disheartening path where we keep spending money on it and not getting the outcome we want, which is more people riding and fewer people driving. That’s because we are ignoring the giant elephant in the room: we can still drive very cheaply,” he adds.

Most recently, Manville has focused his attention on a new urban transportation phenomenon by collaborating on a report for the Transportation Research Board examining the growing popularity of Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand ride-sharing services.

“It will be interesting to see where these services go and what their ultimate effect is. Will they lead to more vehicle travel or less? It could go either way at this point,” he says.

These services are now popular among those who have no access to a vehicle, and Manville suggests that if such services become ubiquitous, even more people would consider giving up their cars, which would have a positive impact on urban centers.

Although transportation is the primary focus of Manville’s research, he also studies local public finance, and is particularly interested in the fiscal fortunes of

once-large cities that lose population. In a research paper now under review, he finds that while the tax base shrinks when cities decline, the bigger problem is that the people who are left behind—who often cannot afford to move and may have little access to opportunities elsewhere—are poorer and need more and more costly government services. The city, as a result, has both more demand for services and less money to finance them.

“So what you see happening in a city like Syracuse, for instance, is that while in the middle of the last century it was pretty large and more affluent, it is now much smaller and poorer,” Manville says. “And the more low-income residents you have, not only do you need more redistributive services, which are expensive, but providing other services at an acceptable level also becomes more expensive, because your citizens are less able to help out with their own private effort.”

He cites public schools as an example of how poverty can make it difficult for local governments to meet particular levels of service. “You have children attending school who are not adequately nourished, and whose parents are working multiple jobs or working nights, and can’t make sure homework is being done. It is much harder for a school like that to meet basic test scores than a suburban district where there is more support in the home, ranging from helping with homework to feeding healthy food.”

Manville made his own transition from a large city to a smaller town when he took his current position at Cornell in 2011, after 10 years on the West Coast. And while he loves the diversity and vitality of L.A. (“not to mention the beaches and balmy weather,” he says), he appreciates working in a strong academic department where he can pursue learning what makes our big cities tick, and sharing that knowledge with his students.

“Cornell is a great place and we get excellent students. Often they aren’t too interested in transportation when they arrive, so one thing that’s fun for me is to see some of them come around and appreciate its bigger role in urban planning,” he says.AAP Jay Wrolstad News19 | Spring 2016

Dowdell in the Sugar Hill area of midtown Detroit, which was the site of her B.Arch. thesis. She is currently working on redeveloping the site as a mixed-use area with multifamily housing, retail, and parking. photo / Bryan Mitchell

Bringing New Life to the Neighborhoods of Detroit When she was 11 years old, Kim Dowdell (B.Arch. ’06) decided she wanted to become an architect.

“I was standing in downtown Detroit during the mid-90s, which was copy of the Big Red Book in the mail. “I read that book one of the worst periods for the city,” she says. “Everywhere I looked cover to cover,” she says. She visited campus during the there were boarded-up and abandoned buildings. I thought that if I summer before her senior year and that “sealed the could fix the buildings, I could start to fix the city.” Twenty years later, deal.” She was accepted early decision, and arrived on in the summer of 2015, she returned to her hometown to help tackle campus in the fall of 2001. the daunting task of bringing Detroit back to life.

Once Dowdell reached Cornell, she became In July, Dowdell joined the City of Detroit’s Housing and immersed in the education and studio culture—“there Revitalization Department. Her role as an executive manager of public- were a lot of late nights, and it was very rigorous”—but private partnerships is an amalgamation of her B.Arch. studies, her also took the opportunity to pursue activities outside passion for sustainable urban development, and her master of public of Rand Hall. She was active in the Alpha Kappa Alpha administration focused on urban policy and real estate from Harvard sorority, joined the National Organization of Minority University. She is finally doing the work she has always wanted to do Architects, spent a semester at Cornell in Rome, and in the place she has wanted to do it—and her involvement comes at a was elected to the Sphinx Head Society, Cornell’s oldest pivotal time. senior honor society.

“In Detroit, we’re seeing that long-term residents are tired of She also spent a semester at Cornell in Washington, the conditions and just want to save enough money to leave,” she which eventually led to the creation of the now says. “At the same time, there is an influx of younger people who are thriving organization SEED—Social Economic Environmoving into the city. They are excited about some of the development mental Design. and changes, and recognize that Detroit is much more affordable SEED began at the end of her semester in Washingthan places like New York City, DC, and Chicago—it’s a way for the ton, when Dowdell took an internship at the Office of millennial generation to have their piece of the American Dream.” the Chief Architect at the U.S. General Services AdminThe American Dream was what originally brought Dowdell’s family istration (GSA). There, she was tasked with researching to Detroit. In 1946, her grandparents moved to the city from Georgia in a variety of topics, including sustainability. search of a better life. Dowdell’s early childhood years were spent in the “GSA had just signed a commitment saying that home her grandparents bought on the east side of the city shortly after all of their new federal buildings would be LEED they arrived. By the time she was nine, the area around that home had certified,” she says. “And it struck me that what we deteriorated so much that her family decided to move for safety reasons. needed was a LEED for social issues—something that Dowdell’s original east-side home as well as the house her family moved would be beneficial in places like Detroit—so that to in northwest Detroit have both since been demolished. developers have a responsibility to think about job Shortly after the move to northwest Detroit, during a middle creation and improving the community around the school art class, Dowdell first learned about the field of architecture. area they’re developing.” Dowdell shared that idea with She saw a way to help her city recover. her supervisor, Steve Lewis, who thought it showed With a career path in mind, Dowdell looked for a high school merit and presented the concept at a Harvard Loeb that would help prepare her to become an architect. She received a Fellowship roundtable later that year. Social Economic scholarship to attend Cranbrook Kingswood, a boarding school in Environmental Design (SEED) emerged, and is still neighboring Bloomfield Hills, and during her junior year received a growing in relevance.

After graduation, Dowdell spent a few months working to get SEED up and running, and then went to work first for Ayers Saint Gross in Washington, DC, and then moved to New York to work for HOK, where her path took its first turn away from the traditional architecture route—and into marketing.

“I started blogging for HOK Life, the firm’s blog, and received some attention firmwide with my posts,” Dowdell says. She was invited to join the marketing team. “I was feeling distracted by the traditional CAD work, and since I knew I wanted to eventually do something different, something with innovative design and development, I decided to take the opportunity to learn about marketing.”

Dowdell became a communications manager, and after a year and a half was recruited to do marketing for the real estate project management firm Levien & Company.

“The deal I made with Ken Levien was that I would be the director of marketing, but I also wanted to manage development projects,” Dowdell says. “I needed to really understand how those projects came together, and Ken gave me that opportunity.” Dowdell stayed with Levien & Company for three years, and oversaw the renovation of Military Park in Newark, and a church renovation in Manhattan. But she still felt far away from her original plan of affecting meaningful improvement in Detroit.

“Levien was great, but there I was, super distracted, 20 years after deciding to become an architect so that I could help my city—and I wasn’t doing it,” she says. A friend who was attending the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard recommended the program to her, and she saw a way to learn more about community development and a path toward her goal to help Detroit.

Her experience at Harvard was augmented by her fellowship in the Center for Public Leadership, where she was in the first cohort of Sheila C. Johnson Fellows.

During her final semester at Harvard, through a colleague at Levien, Dowdell was connected with Arthur Jemison, the director of the Housing and Revitalization Department in Detroit. He offered Dowdell a job, and in July 2015, she moved back to her hometown.

The mission assigned to Jemison and Dowdell’s team is formidable but clear. “As a department, we are looking at ways to create housing stock that will bring people not just downtown or midtown, but into the neighborhoods that don’t get as much attention as downtown,” she says.

Dowdell currently oversees eight projects, most of which focus on revitalizing those neighborhoods.

Downtown Detroit has garnered a lot of press in recent years because of Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans, and his efforts to develop and revitalize the core downtown area—“The ‘7.2 miles’ as it’s become known,” says Dowdell. “But Detroit as a city is 139 square miles. What my team is trying to do is give some love to the other 132.”

Working with the city planning director Maurice Cox—who was part of the original group that helped move SEED forward—Arthur Jemison and the Mayor’s Office have identified specific neighborhoods that show promise and the ability to be revitalized. One such neighborhood is Livernois/McNichols, located in northwest Detroit. Dowdell’s team is exploring how they can partner with private and philanthropic organizations to revive the commercial corridor, design and build effective landscape interventions on vacant lots, demolish homes that can’t be salvaged, and renovate the vacant homes that are salvageable, with a goal of getting them back on the city tax rolls as owned or rented residential units.

In the future, Dowdell hopes to develop strategies to revitalize not just areas of Detroit, but other cities around the country. “Urban blight solutions can have a framework that can be replicable. Every site will have a unique feel, but when it comes to working with the multiple disciplines in different sectors and figuring out a viable financial and design strategy, that’s the kind of solution we’re looking to create that we hope other cities will be able to borrow.”

Dowdell is confident that her work with developers in Detroit will be aided by relationships she formed during her undergraduate years and her current position on the AAP Advisory Council. “Former classmates and current council members are working in companies that could really have a positive impact on what we’re trying to do here,” she says. “Having the AAP connection makes it easy to pick up the phone and renew relationships with some of the real estate and architect mentors I met at AAP.”AAP Rebecca Bowes

Profiles

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A Movement in Time Through space and time, the artist Mariko Azis (B.A./B.F.A. ’16) has come full circle. From her childhood in Ithaca and traveling through her family’s homeland of Indonesia, to spending autumns in Japan, a semester in Rome, and doing studio work in Manhattan, she has returned to Cornell with a solo gallery exhibit to round out her studies.

Azis is a fifth-year, dual-degree student, who is adding a bachelor of fine arts degree to her bachelor of arts degree in psychology. With a world of experience to draw on, she chose Cornell as the best place for her studies, and it has changed her course.

Coming to Cornell was a homecoming of sorts, as she spent much of her childhood in Ithaca when her father, Iwan Azis, taught regional planning at AAP during spring semesters, with alternating fall semesters in Japan.

But it wasn’t the study of art that originally drew Azis to Cornell.

“I had no real instinct or inclination to study art,” she says. “Cornell has a fantastic psychology department—that’s what I originally came here to study.”

Her studies in psychology eventually propelled her into art. A first-year psychology course with James E. Cutting, a leading scholar in the field of perception, led her to the unexpected conclusion that the two disciplines aren’t really separate. Her work in psychology drew on interests in art history and film history, and explored the question of why people enjoy art. That line of study, some good friends in the art and architecture departments, and her fortuitous choice of a work-study post with the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) in her sophomore year led her to pursue a B.F.A. as her second degree.

In addition to her time on the Ithaca campus, Azis’s Cornell studies have included a semester at Cornell in Rome and a semester of studio studies at AAP NYC in the spring of 2015.

Her time in New York City was “the best semester I had at Cornell,” she says.

There, students in the small program were able to visit museums and work in the studio first in Chelsea and then in AAP NYC’s new space at 26 Broadway. She attributes some of the success of AAP NYC to its small size and the quality of its educators, including her studio instructor John Jurayj. It’s also the primary center of activity in the art world. “The students can go to so many galleries in New York and see how they change from one day to the next,” she says.

In Ithaca, her work-study post with the CCA makes use of that gallery experience. The council has a dual role as a funding organization that distributes grants to faculty members and students to complete art projects, and as the organization behind a biennial art exhibition inaugurated in 2014 (see story on page 3). Now in her fourth year with CCA, Azis is a veteran on the staff and has responsibility for much of the logistics of the next biennial under the guidance of Stephanie Owens, associate professor of art and director of the CCA. Helping with the review of grants for the council inspired Azis to consider the possibilities of her own potential in art and led to a solo exhibit of her work at Tjaden Hall in October 2015.

Her current work is far from conventional painting or drawing, and pulls from her cultural origins and contemporary interests in time and motion. An early exhibit of her work was stark black-and-white photography, but from that fixed form she has moved on to explorations of more fleeting and temporal work.

“I’ve started to think in time-based work,” she says. Much of that is digital moving-image works, installations, and videos.

She finds a wealth of inspiration in the varied cultures and spirituality of Indonesia. There, spirituality takes many forms, and its emphasis is on the immaterial rather than the material traditions of Western art, she says.

“Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world,” Azis says, which means Islam has tremendous influence there. “It’s also a little misleading because Islam came to Indonesia more recently.” Buddhism, Hinduism, and Animism are more ancient influences there, she says.

“My parents raised me and my brother in Islam but in a modern way,” she explains. “Indonesia is the paradigm of what a modern Islamic country could be. The country’s motto is ‘Unity in Diversity.’ It’s so eclectic, but so grounded in tradition at the same time.”

“Whenever I go back to Indonesia, I spend a lot of time in Bali, which is a very spiritual place where the traditions of Hinduism are obvious,” Azis says. “As you walk around, you will see offerings on the ground that are very delicate, and they are just placed there on the sidewalk where they may be eaten by a dog or run over by a car. The point of the offering is the gesture itself, ephemerally. It does not have to be thought of as having a value as a commodity.”

Some of her work is transformational and influenced by the Hindu concept of reincarnation. Some is influenced by feminist art, video art, and voyeurism.

“I do also appropriate a lot of pornography in my work, even though it’s something I’m opposed to,” she says.

The piece that’s gotten the best response is an installation that was part of her fall solo show at AAP titled Live in Oriental Glory of Grandeur. One part of the exhibit was a loose video on the wall, but it was Encounter on the Three-Horned Mountain, a video installation projected on

the floor in a moving mandala form, that attracted the greatest reaction, she says. The looping video created an image of colors in a circular form in which only human feet were distinguishable, but it was a projection of people having sex.

“What you see is the movement of bodies,” she says, “in an act of creation and destruction.”

That installation drew much positive response and some negative from observers who objected to the subject matter as being too gratuitous, she says. It’s a perception that Azis finds interesting and understandable but rather out of sync with the ideas behind her work, considering how accessible and pervasive thoughtless pornography is in the global online culture.

The concept of temporal art is ancient and has been practiced by Buddhist monks who will create a complex circular mandala out of grains of colored sand only to destroy it once the work is complete. To acknowledge that cultural influence, Azis uses tones from the Balinese color wheel. “The Balinese have their own Hinduism and colors, and it manifests in the mandala eternally and perpetually repeating the full stages of life,” she says. “For me to add color, it has to have some meaning.” For that reason she sometimes chooses to turn over the control of the color projections to an algorithm that will repeat the colors in a semirandom series. “I don’t have specific control, but let the piece have its own integrity in how it turns out,” she says.

Currently Azis is working on a “bunch of different smaller projects. There’s a possibility that they are all just one project.”

She is continuing her work in the spring semester with a $2,000 grant to be a visiting artist at the Southside Community Center in Ithaca, producing video and photography. Among the techniques she’s employing is the use of green paint as a mask with additive and subtractive possibilities to create transparencies in a work.

“It’s really difficult for me not to work with timebased moving images,” she says. “There’s so much of a response when you move, you’re more apt to keep that in mind.” That particularly applies to work created digitally, she notes. “It’s so much a part of the way people of my generation interact.”

Azis’s plans for after Cornell are not yet set. She expects that some time in yoga teacher training in Bali after graduation will help her to decide whether to pursue a M.F.A. or a M.A. in art education or some other field. “I’d like to stay in New York for a while and keep working on art, maybe look for some studio space.” Her hope is that spending time in the place that has given her so much inspiration will help clarify her path forward.AAP Dee Klees News19 | Spring 2016

Ecomimetic Silo

By Daniel Toretsky (B.Arch. ’16), for the class Raw Nature/Cooked Nature taught by Visiting Critic Tao DuFour. Sited in Southern Brazil, on the threshold between the maritime brownfields of Porto Alegre and the Delta do Jacqui, the ecomimetic silo is a proposal to rethink ecological research and education with hyper-local potential. This provocation is manifested in the reuse of an abandoned grain silo adjacent to the Delta do Jacqui, a vast network of rivers and islands that hosts a lush subtropical ecosystem.

Student News In September, two intaglio prints by Vittoria Cutbirth (B.F.A. ’16) were selected for the inaugural National Student Works on Paper Online Biennial 2015, organized by William Paterson University in New Jersey. The contest was juried by Lily Prince, an associate professor of painting and drawing at William Paterson University. The exhibition, which was open to all undergraduate and graduate art majors, aimed to create a national forum for art students and their departments in order to encourage communication between students, an awareness of trends and possibilities, and a dialogue between faculty and art departments. The online exhibition featured works of 20 artists from 15 art departments around the country.

In October, Sarah Dougherty (M.R.P. ’16) received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network. Dougherty plans to use the grant to research and coauthor a paper on the gender dimensions of climate change vulnerability and resilience planning in Indonesia. Dougherty’s project furthers research begun over the summer with John Taylor and his organization, Yayasan Kota Kita (YKK), an Indonesian NGO. Dougherty returned to Indonesia in December to meet with participants from YKK’s workshops to better understand three key areas: what the gender dimensions of climate vulnerability are in coastal Indonesian cities, particularly for the most vulnerable people; data availability, communication, and uses of genderdisaggregated vulnerability metrics in Kupang and Makassar; and the extent to which gender dimensions are included in municipal climate change planning and how responsiveness might be improved.

Fluid Pavilion, a project by B.Arch. students Charisse Foo (B.Arch. ’18) and Hanxi Wang (B.Arch. ’18), was featured in an article titled “The Best Student Work Worldwide: ArchDaily Readers Show Us Their Studio Projects,” which appeared in ArchDaily on August 3. Created for the spring semester class In Construction: From Sheet to Form, taught by visiting critics Martin Miller and Sasa Zivkovic, Fluid Pavilion was an exploration of the ability of the thermoforming process to program memory into sheet plastic, to acquire a new resting state after deformation, and to then flex back to this deformed state. The final installation displayed the ability of plastic to be both rigid and organic while maintaining the lightness of a transparent enclosure.

Work by Andrew Fu (B.Arch. ’15) was recently presented at the Second International Conference on Food Design at The New School in New York City. Fu’s project was titled Castle to Shack: The Hamburger and Its Associated Architecture, and was developed as part of his B.Arch. thesis. In addition, a spring 2015 project by Fu and Michelle Chen (B.F.A. ’13) was featured in Domus magazine in August. For Display Purposes Only is a series of hybrid food objects that “embrace the superficiality and absurdity of contemporary consumption.”

Zeynep Göksel (M.R.P. ’16) was part of a team that received an honorable mention in the Gowanus by Design competition.

The two-part competition asked participants to first map and present conditions relevant to the Gowanus area in a Gowanus “atlas”; and then to use that analysis as the basis for a design of an urban field station that is open to the public.

The atlas, a collective mapping of the watershed surrounding the canal, will be used as a planning tool to facilitate the community’s grassroots collaboration in the continuing evolution of the neighborhood. Göksel’s team entry was titled Who Owns Gowanus?

Students and faculty from CRP’s Historic Preservation Planning program gathered at 421 North Albany Street in Ithaca in September, each holding a “This Place Matters” flag, to show support for the building in the highly competitive National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Treasures program, in which the house is now being considered for inclusion. The building was the original meeting place of the Cornell student study group that eventually became Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African-American, Greek-letter, intercollegiate fraternity in the U.S. The long-vacant, two-story frame house has fallen into disrepair and is condemned by the City of Ithaca.

If 421 North Albany Street is selected, the National Trust could play a significant role in saving the house by providing legal and planning assistance to the property owner.

John Lai (B.Arch. ’17), Cameron Neuhoff (B.Arch. ’16), and Rand Hall Shop Manager Dan Salomon joined together over the summer to form Building Community at Cornell, a new student group that aims to establish relationships beyond the university through a shared interest in making. The group hopes to create interactions between students and local artisans and tradespeople; explore buildings in the region that exemplify exceptional workmanship; and engage

in various building projects outside of the classroom setting that use locally sourced materials in new and creative ways.

During the fall semester the group organized several outings, including a field trip to Trumansburg, where they visited the Hammerstone School of Carpentry for Women, the Carman Road Artist Quarters, and the studio of architect Jonathan Ferrari; a bench-building workshop for young students in Dryden; and a field visit to design a community garden for Cornell professor Jane Marie Law. Students from CRP Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner’s workshop, Sustainable Adaptation of Large Modern Footprints, presented their poster Spirits of Visions Past at the 2015 American Planning Association national conference and won a first-place poster award. Students presenting at the conference include Brian Byrd (M.R.P. ’16), Mike Catsos (M.R.P. ’15), Hector Chang (B.S. URS ’14), Rashmi Gajare (M.A. HPP ’18), Gabriel Halili (M.R.P. ’15), Irene Hung (M.R.P. ’15), Linshuang Ma (M.R.P. ’15), Daniel Mckenna-Foster (M.R.P. ’15), Robert Rivera (M.R.P. ’16), M.R.P. candidate Isaac Robb, Rachel Shindman (M.R.P. ’15), and Taru (M.R.P. ’15).

Aaron Ong (B.S. URS ’17) spent his summer at the Winter Research Scholars Program at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He worked with Associate Professor Winnifred Louis in the School of Psychology, where he studied the impact of unpunished hate crimes on people’s levels of individual and group victim blaming. His resulting research is in a paper that is currently under review for the journal Social Justice Research. Ong received funding for the trip as a Rawlings Cornell Presidential Research Scholar.

A project by Min Keun Park (B.Arch. ’17) titled Wallspace was a finalist in the 2015 Think Public Space competition. This year’s competition focused on a comprehensive revitalization of public spaces in the city of Zagreb, Croatia. Wallspace proposed a series of walls that each occupy a unique program reflecting the culture of Zagreb. Located in the Ban Jelačić Square, the proposal seeks to draw attention to the entire city as an opportunity for architecture to respond to today’s conflicting times. Park also had work included in a publication titled Dear Architecture: Letters on Love, Apologies and Gratuitous Selfies. The book contains select entries to a contest of the same name, conceived of by Blank Space. The Dear Architecture competition challenged designers to “begin an all-encompassing dialogue on architecture” through a written letter.

A publication titled “Do You Wanna Be Happy?” by Michael Raspuzzi (B.Arch. ’16) was published by the Aesir Lab Think Tank in December. Part of the Aesir Center for Civilization, Aesir Lab is a research organization and digital publisher of perspectives aimed at exploring paradigms that can inform current discourse in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Founded by Alberto Embriz-Salgado (B.Arch. ’14), the group’s research addresses a variety of topics that seek to bring awareness to models for a more suitable society, including the formulation of walkable, healthy, and happy cities.

Annie Schentag, a Ph.D. candidate in HAUD, recently completed the National Register nomination for the Elmwood Historic District (East), which represents the largest historic district ever to achieve this status in the city of Buffalo.

Schentag spent the summer working with Buffalo-based Clinton Brown Company Architecture, as head of research and writing for this governmental document. By submitting this nomination to the New York State Office of Historic Preservation, Schentag has successfully listed more than 1,000 individual properties in the city of Buffalo on the National Register of Historic Places. Schentag was also recently hired as the new curatorial assistant for the Buffalo Architecture Center, a new museum opening in September 2016. The museum is located inside the historic Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, a 480,000-square-foot hospital complex designed

by H. H. Richardson in 1880. The building is currently undergoing substantial rehabilitation efforts, and is scheduled to open in September 2016 as home to a boutique hotel with 88 guest rooms, a conference center, and the Buffalo Architecture Center. In what represents the first museum devoted to Buffalo’s architectural history, Schentag is currently designing a 3,000-square-foot permanent exhibition that addresses the city’s unique contributions to architectural and urban design history on a global scale.

Lily-Love Toppar (M.Arch. ’15) was named a finalist for the Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation’s 2015 Travel Fellowship for Kimbilio, her thesis project. Toppar’s thesis advisors were Professor Henry Richardson and Associate Professor Esra Akcan from architecture. The SOM Foundation received submissions from students representing 38 U.S. schools.

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CRP Summer Internships: From Mexico to Cleveland “My internship with the Thriving Communities Institute gave me an opportunity to interact with municipal and nonprofit organizations that are all committed to a successful rejuvenation of the city,” says M.R.P. candidate Isaac Robb.

Robb was one of 35 students to participate in the M.R.P./M.A. Cooperative Internship Program during the summer of 2015. Arranged with assistance from AAP Connect, the internship program provides CRP students with an opportunity to gain valuable professional experience while working in their specific fields of interest.

This year’s internships included placements across the country and around the globe.

For his internship with the Thriving Communities Institute, Robb focused on providing support for the City of Cleveland Property Survey project, which began in spring 2015. He also worked on a statewide research project that attempted to quantify the number of vacant and distressed properties throughout Ohio.

Chiapas, Mexico, was the placement site for three other students: Alia Fierro (M.R.P. ’16), Maria Jeldes (M.R.P. ’16), and Melissa Strelec (M.R.P. ’16). The trio worked for Foro Para el Desarrollo Sustentable (Forum for Sustainable Development), an organization that has been collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme since 2005, in response to Hurricane Stan, with the goal of helping disadvantaged communities prepare for and weather future natural disasters.

“Being in Mexico was an extraordinary opportunity for me to learn not only about the organization’s projects—which I feel have broadened my horizons in international planning—but also about the larger social context in Chiapas and Mexico,” says Jeldes. “Issues like forced displacement and land grabbing have become more common in the region . . . so it’s essential for groups like Foro to be involved to help reduce vulnerabilities in households and communities in the long term.”

The summer internships can also lead to career opportunities for students. Robb’s internship led to a second placement—in September, he began a one-year fellowship with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, the parent organization of the Thriving Communities Institute.AAP

Students

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Skaggs Wins Architectural Film Award for 78 Hours In August, Cole Skaggs (B.Arch. ’16) was named the winner of the 2015 Henning Larsen Foundation film competition. The competition aimed to “revitalize the use of architecture on film and foster new inspiration to architects and film professionals.”

Skaggs’s film, titled 78 Hours, was shot in Milstein Hall, and shows the various building spaces both empty and in use, accompanied by Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz No. 7 in C-sharp Minor, op. 64, no. 2.

The competition entries were evaluated on their artistic quality and ability to inspire a new approach to architecture and the medium of film. The theme of the competition was the experience of architectural space over time.

Jette Lehmann, a member of the judging committee, said of 78 Hours, “It’s a love-struck dance through a building, which we sense the filmmaker knows very well. The dual look, partially at the spaces’ architectural qualities, partly at the users of the building, expresses a respectful fascination with the architecture students’ gestalt in their own intense, creative space. The student who works all night does not perceive anything other than the space he/she is creating on paper.”

Skaggs received a prize of €9,000, and his film, along with the second- and third-place films, was shown during the Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York City in October.AAP

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Maria Jeldes (M.R.P. ’16) (left, green shirt) works with residents during a workshop on disaster risk management in Mexico. photo / provided

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Still shots from 78 Hours.

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University of Austin staff join Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate students (third from left) Farrell, Woodworth, Henderson, Lookman, Trussell, and Chao as they receive their second place award. photo / provided

vimeo.com/136814744

Cornell Takes Second in UT Austin National Real Estate Challenge

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AAP Students Named Rawlings Cornell Presidential Research Scholars photo / provided

Three students from art and CRP are among the 23 rising juniors who were named Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholars (RCPRS) starting in the fall of 2015.

Laureen Andalib (B.F.A./B.S. URS ’18), Hanna Reichel (B.S. URS ’17), and Ivy Wong (B.S./B.S. URS ’17) will all receive funding and faculty support to pursue individual research projects for the duration of their undergraduate tenure at Cornell.

Each year, the RCPRS program supports a select group of undergraduate students by providing funding and promoting sustained engagement in research across all colleges. Scholars collaborate with faculty mentors of their choosing in designing and carrying out an individualized research project.

RCPRS participants are selected either before their first year at Cornell, or as rising juniors. The program provides each scholar with a research support account—$8,000 for scholars admitted as first-years, $5,000 for those admitted as juniors—and an annual need-based loan replacement of up to $4,000.

In addition, three first-year students were named RCPRS scholars. Lucas Bulger (B.S. URS ’19), Nadezhda Chernova (B.S. URS ’19), and Alice Rayner (B.S. URS ’19) are among the incoming first-years who were selected for the RCPRS program during the Cornell admissions process.AAP

In late November, students from the top real estate and M.B.A. programs in the country gathered at the University of Texas at Austin for the 13th annual National Real Estate Challenge.

Hosted by the McCombs School of Business, the competition puts teams head to head in a case-based real estate challenge presented in front of accredited professionals from leading real estate firms.

The Cornell team, comprised of students from the Cornell Baker Program in Real Estate and Johnson, beat out 18 other schools to place second. This is the best finish the Cornell team has achieved at the UT Austin competition—Cornell placed fourth in 2013 and third in 2014.

The team was led by cocaptains Annamaria Lookman (M.P.S. RE ’16) and Will Woodworth ’16. Team members included Ryan Chao (M.P.S. RE ’16), Matt Farrell (M.B.A./M.P.S. RE ’18), Jason Henderson (M.P.S. RE ’16), and Ben Trussell (M.P.S. RE/M.R.P. ’16). The team was coached by advisors Michael Tomlan, professor of city and regional planning; Brad Olson, senior lecturer emeritus in CRP; and Jon Minikes ’60, J.D. ’62. Additionally, John Strosser (M.B.A./M.P.S. RE ’17) served as a team understudy, and will partner with Farrell as cocaptain for next year’s competition.

The case for this year’s competition was prepared by investment managers at Invesco and involved the repositioning of two underperforming office assets. Cornell’s response to the case centered on the potential of creative office conversions as a means of achieving opportunistic returns in the latter stages of the real estate cycle.

The team received the case a week prior to the competition and had 72 hours to prepare and submit a response, including a finished slide presentation.

The University of Texas won the competition, with the University of Chicago placing third, and the University of Wisconsin placing fourth.AAP

Work by Frances Gallardo (M.F.A. ’16) was included in the 4th Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean, an international cultural event sponsored by the government of Puerto Rico, and organized by the Fine Arts Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. Unicorn in the Island (2015) is comprised of an installation—3-1/2' x 32', cut paper, collage, ink, and graphite on wall—and a sculpture of marble, designed by Gallardo and sculpted by Ramón Berríos, dimensions variable. The work was on display from October to February.AAP

News19 | Spring 2016

From left: photo / provided, photo / Alex Jopek (M.Arch. ’16), photo / Phil Wilde

During the fall semester, architecture studios traveled to Poland, Colombia, and China. Students developed and redefined a museum in the transitional city of Shenzen (above); investigated principles and experiments in open architecture and adaptability to propose strategies for growing Bogotá (center); and developed plans for the adaptive reuse of an abandoned farm in southern Poland (right).

photo / Till Hoffmann

Architecture Studio Work On Display in Berlin Work from a spring 2014 option studio was on display in November and December, in an exhibition titled The Berlin Project—Dragonerareal at the Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin (Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Berlin). The Berlin Project studio, led by visiting critics Verena von Beckerath and Tim Heide with assistance from Till Hoffmann, challenged students to address Berlin’s urgent demand for affordable housing by

proposing a sustainable reuse for the Dragonerareal, a 47,500-square-meter former Prussian military site in Berlin Kreuzberg. The projects combine affordable housing, cultural facilities, and local business, and address societal concerns, including social justice, cultural diversity, and public accessibility.AAP

Planners Focus on Gender Issues Does gender matter? This is a question that the CRP Women’s Planning Forum (WPF) has been exploring with the American Planning Association’s (APA) Planning and Women Division under the direction of CRP’s Professor Mildred Warner and Ph.D. candidate Amanda Micklow.

Beginning in 2013, the WPF wrote and won an APA Divisions Council Grant to look at planning for women and aging. This led to a workshop and a series of focus groups at the APA national conference in 2014, and a national survey that began in October 2014. Warner and Micklow presented preliminary results from the survey at the APA national conference in Seattle in 2015, and at a national webinar in November.

The survey found that planners are less likely to plan for women than they are for aging, but attention to aging can increase sensitivity to gender concerns.

The survey also revealed that many planners do not know what it means to plan for women. Thus, planning for aging provides planners with an agenda to move toward more gender-sensitive planning.

As a result of Warner and Micklow’s work, membership in the Planning and Women Division of the APA has more than doubled. The sessions at the Seattle APA conference were full, and more sessions are planned for future APA conferences.

“I know that Amanda [Micklow] is excited that her dissertation work is contributing to a national movement to insert gender back into planning,” says Warner.

Micklow is expected to finish her dissertation in 2017.AAP

Cho Named Kauffman Dissertation Fellow In early October, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation named Jae Beum Cho (Ph.D. CRP ’19) a recipient of a 2016 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship (KDF). He will receive $20,000 toward completion of his dissertation.

Titled “Social Capital, the Missing Link: Three Essays on the Importance of Social Processes in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems,” Cho’s work will explore what comprises an entrepreneurial ecosystem with a focus on social dimensions. According to Cho, “By integrating new developments in complexity science and network analysis, this dissertation aims to shed light on how the social capital of entrepreneurs and their ecosystems play a role in bringing together different dimensions of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Cho’s proposal was selected by a panel of reviewers as one of the 15 best submissions from among a pool of the 127 proposals submitted. KDF is an annual competitive program that awards up to 20 grants to Ph.D., D.B.A., or other doctoral students at accredited U.S. universities to support dissertations in the area of entrepreneurship.AAP The student-led Organization of Cornell Planners (OCP) organized an alumni gathering as part of the Open House New York (OHNY) Weekend in New York City in October. Each year, OHNY grants access to hundreds of New York City’s most important buildings, offering participants the opportunity to experience the city and meet the people who design, build, and preserve it. More than 75 CRP alumni, students, and faculty gathered at the AAP NYC studio on Saturday, October 17, to network and celebrate the weekend.AAP

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A Semester at OMA During my spring semester at Cornell in Rome, a family friend recommended me for an internship at OMA. I was officially hired during the summer, and arrived in Rotterdam in July.

After hearing how intense internships at OMA could be, I was at first intimidated.

However, working in the Rotterdam office turned out to be an unforgettable experience.

During my six months, I worked on various phases of five very different projects ranging from a mixed-use building in Rotterdam to a competition for a mall in Dubai. The OMA office has three floors, each one with a different feel and atmosphere. People constantly move from one floor to another for different projects, and interns are given the opportunity to participate fully in the process, from design to production.

The first thing I worked on was Coolsingel, a mixed-use project in the urban center of Rotterdam. After many years of construction delay due to the economic crisis, Coolsingel’s initial cube scheme had been completely redesigned.

I joined the project during the schematic phase where I worked on the façade design and adaptations according to the client’s needs.

A month later, I joined the Dubai Creek Harbour Mall Competition at the start of the conceptual design phase. The size of the project makes the mall almost like a city. Though the developer asked for a mall, we realized that the concept of “mall” is becoming obsolete—today, people go shopping for the experience rather than getting the products. As a result, the project started with research and analysis on the future trends of shopping and proposed many options before arriving at the final design, which uses city fabrics and the Piranesi map as a way to create different worlds and experiences within the mall.

After the Dubai competition, I joined the Paris Pershing Competition in its second phase.

Pershing is a mixed-use project that sits on the Boulevard Peripherique in Paris, an area that has been left vacant for years until recent development. I worked mainly on representation, producing diagrams, renderings, and collages to better deliver the initial concept of the project.

In addition to working on the diverse projects, a highlight of my internship was a one-week trip to China with Alain Fouraux, director of the Rotterdam office, for the 2015 International Architectural and Decoration Design Summit in Shenzhen. The two-day event included panel discussions and lectures by speakers, such as Wolf D. Prix, Stefano Boeri, Roberto Bannura, and Wu Gang.

Working at OMA was transformational. I learned not only about the technical aspects of the later phases of design that are not usually emphasized in school, but also how to quickly generate ideas using models and art references to facilitate the creative design process. The projects at OMA are truly fast-paced, but the B.Arch. program prepared me for that pace—I was able to quickly conceptualize and produce different design options with confidence. AAP also gave me the necessary skill set for both the graphic software skills needed at OMA, and the fabrication skills, thanks to the comprehensive training by the staff in the Rand Hall Fabrication Shops.

Another valuable takeaway was the importance of experimentation and trying different options during the design process. I have adopted this approach into my own work, because most of the time we don’t know which option is best until we have tried several.

But the most important thing I learned is to be proactive. It’s important to be a leader— even as an intern—and seek ways to make the project better instead of just waiting for work to be assigned.

Finally, I embraced the importance of working as a team. At school, projects are often done individually. But at a firm like OMA, people work together. That carried over to life outside of work as well. There was a nice balance, with workdays often ending with a beer at the Biergarten.

I was very lucky to experience the many aspects of the design process and work with some very incredible people. To me, OMA is not just a firm, but a school that inspires.AAP Shining

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Kreuzer identified trees in both Prospect Park and Central Park in which to sleep during the summer. photo / Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16)

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Dumpster diving for Kreuzer didn’t involve actual dumpsters—just trash cans outside of restaurants and grocery stores. Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16)

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From left: Alain Fouraux, director of OMA’s Rotterdam office; Sun; Selma Maaroufi, associate; Yushang Zhang, junior architect; Claudia Costa, junior architect; and Rem Koolhaas meet in OMA’s office to discuss the configurations of the internal spaces of the Beijing Cifco project. photo / Dongmei Yao, Beijing office director

Student Voices

A “Free” Summer

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When I was an undergrad living in New York City, before I understood the extent of the safety net provided by my middle-class family, I thought a lot about what I would do after finishing my education. As an artist who wants to continue making art, I decided I wouldn’t take risks. I wouldn’t invest in a studio or expensive materials. I would pare down my lifestyle to necessities. I wouldn’t go clothes shopping, eat at expensive restaurants, or spend money on entertainment.

During the same time period a friend introduced me to dumpster diving. Thousands of grocery stores and restaurants throw away food every day. To dumpster dive, show up after a store has closed, untie the knots on the heaviest trash bags, and look for perfectly good food. I dumpster dived during my undergraduate years, and netted enough extra food to throw dinner parties.

Last year, midway through the first year of my M.F.A., I wondered if I could expand the dumpster diving way of existing in the city to include all life essentials for an entire summer. To live off the abundance and inefficiency of the New York City machine seemed like a way to step outside of a consumer culture that makes me uncomfortable; it’s impossible to participate in contemporary life without contributing to a system that has oppressed someone.

Maybe the answer is simply to opt out.

I decided to try.

In June, I made a hammock from material discarded by Cornell art students. I found two trees in city parks to sleep in, mailed my credit and bank cards to my parents’ house, and spent the summer living my plan—for two months, I lived “for free” in New York City.

I dumpster dived for food, biked for transportation, showered in the locker room at the public pool, and slept in a tree. I lived in the city without sacrificing the things I loved about it—the vitality and culture manifest in museums and galleries, and conversations with strangers.

When I started out, this project sounded like a blueprint that anyone could follow. Over the course of the summer, it became clear that it couldn’t be that. A person who is not young, male, ablebodied, educated, or white would have a vastly different experience than I did. In fact, someone coming from a less comfortable background might have no interest in this experience at all.

As a college-educated person with a supportive family, eating food out of the garbage is a choice, and therefore an extension of my education and comfort. Living in trees is an adventure. And living without money is a project. If eating out of the garbage is a necessity, it isn’t action born from enlightenment, and it isn’t something you want to do. Dumpster diving is something I’m proud of, because it attests to my ability to deconstruct societal norms for myself. That ability is a symptom of education, and acting on it is a symptom of my comfortable life.

After two months, I biked to my parents’ house, where I slept and ate at their expense. I used my credit card to buy a bus ticket, and resumed graduate school at Cornell.

During the summer I used a video camera to document my experience. I’m currently assembling a movie of that footage, which I hope will begin to address some of the ambiguities and the problematic nature of this project. The movie, titled A “Free” Summer, will be screened on campus during the spring semester.

It’s now cold enough outside that I’m uncomfortable walking between buildings. It took me years after leaving my parents’ house to realize that the reason I don’t have to go clothes shopping is because my mother still buys my clothes.AAP Jesse Kreuzer (M.F.A. ’16) Movie trailer: vimeo.com/152938451

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Sun (B.Arch. ’17)

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Sun, left, with Alain Fouraux, director of OMA’s Rotterdam office, at the 2015 International Architectural and Decoration Design Summit in Shenzhen. photo / Roy Hu

News19 | Spring 2016

Integrated Urbanism Ryosuke Takahashi (M.L.A. '16) at work in the AAP NYC studio for the fall 2015 M.R.P. urban design studio. Taught by Claire Weisz and Adam Lubinsky of WXY, Integrated Urbanism as a Platform for Engagement explored the complex balance between architecture and urbanism, and policy and public housing. The studio was sited on the Baruch Houses and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Articles by Associate Professor Esra Akcan, architecture, were published in art and architectural journals Perspecta 48 and Art Papers, as well as in the anthologies Global Notes on Critical Architecture: Praxis Reloaded and The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art. Akcan gave the keynote lecture at the “Human Migrations and Border” symposium, organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at SUNY–Binghamton in November. She also lectured at Princeton University, University of Sydney, University of Rochester, and in Turkey at TED University and SALT. She organized the panel “Writing the Architecture of/in Latin America in a Global Context” at AAP NYC in July, and co-organized the lecture series “New Approaches to Scholarship and Pedagogy of Ottoman and Turkish Architecture” at Cornell with a Central New York Humanities Corridor Grant.

The Scaffold House, a project by visiting critics Bet Capdeferro and Ramón Bosch, shared a first place win in the 57th Fostering Art and Design (FAD) Architecture Awards. The single-family home located on the Sa Riera cove in Begur, Spain, was originally constructed in various phases starting in the 1950s.

In addition to repairing several structural defects caused by poor initial construction and exposure to the saltwater climate, Capdeferro and Bosch’s rehabilitation of the home “proposed to vitalize the relationship between the house and its environment.”

One of the project’s most distinctive features is a new wall made out of rope, which acts as a base for native climbing plants that create a green wall. The FAD Awards jury praised the way “the limits between construction and nature are blurred by lightweight, plant-supporting elements which . . . provide solar protection and improve the relationship between interior and exterior space.” The Scaffold House was completed in 2014.

In late October, Associate Professor Thomas J. Campanella, CRP, led urban and regional studies students on a visit to Albany, New York, where they toured the Empire State Plaza with David Hochfelder of SUNY–Albany; visited the Albany Barn community initiative; met with Capitalize Albany, an economic development group; and also met with Albany politico and columnist Paul Bray. In addition, Campanella wrote an introduction titled “The Spatial Ecology of the New York Elevated” for the book Under the Elevated: Reclaiming Space, Connecting Communities (New York: Design Trust for Public Space and NYC DOT, 2015); and traveled to Beijing, where he was invited to speak at the Beijing Forum 2015, on a panel titled “New Urbanization in China.”

In September, Nina Freedman, visiting critic at AAP NYC, launched a new company called Dreamland Creative Projects, an architectural design practice. The practice bridges academia and professional practice with a goal of “serving mindful clients in a conscious process that is impactful to all,” and “working with clients to tell their stories through rejuvenating and accessible design solutions.”

Architecture’s Professor Werner Goehner was the invited keynote speaker for the Schools of Architecture and Urbanism in the Mediterranean and Middle East conference, held at Bahçesehir University in Istanbul.

This year’s conference theme was “State of Practice and Education in the Mediterranean and Middle East,” and Goehner’s keynote presentation was titled “Opportunities and Difficulties to Combine Practice and Teaching.” The conference was on October 22 and 23.

Aleksandr Mergold, assistant professor of architecture, was named a fellow at the Cornell Engaged Learning + Research Institute for 2015–16. The fellowship program is a yearlong faculty cohort program designed to enhance the capacity of Cornell faculty to conduct courses and develop research projects that directly engage the university with the community. Mergold also presented “Of Both Processes and Forces: Spolia” at “Between the Autonomous and Contingent Object,” the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s fall conference at Syracuse University. Mergold published an introduction in the third edition of Brodsky & Utkin (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015); and, along with Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00), published “Of the Sacred and the Divine: Subway Sukkah” in Thresholds 43

Faculty&Staff

Faculty News

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(MIT Press, 2015). The pair’s firm, Austin+Mergold, had work in two exhibitions in the fall: The Primitive Hut at Philadelphia Art Alliance’s invited group exhibition titled Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat; and The Wall Inside, which appeared with Circus for Construction in the Ideas City exhibition at the New Museum in New York City. Finally, Austin+Mergold was interviewed by Ann Lui (B.Arch. ’11) and Craig Reschke in the July issue of their magazine, Rx. “Recoding Embedded Assumptions: Adaptation of an Open Source Tool to Support Sustainability, Transparency and Participatory Governance,” a chapter

by CRP’s Assistant Professor Jennifer Minner, was published in Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities (Springer, 2015). Minner also received funding from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for a research proposal titled “Scenario Tools for Equitable Corridor Reinvestment and Affordable Housing Preservation.”

Minner is a co-PI on the project with Elizabeth Mueller of the University of Texas at Austin. Recent presentations by Minner include “Rural Communities to GrowNYC’s Greenmarkets: Spatial Analysis to Understand Urban-Rural Linkages” at the Association for Collegiate Schools of Planning in Houston, Texas, with Becca Jablonski ’03 (Ph.D. CRP ’14) of Colorado State University; and “3D GIS and Modeling the Past and Future of Historic Districts and Cultural Landscapes” at the Association for Preservation conference in Kansas City, Missouri, with Associate Professor Jeffrey Chusid.

Work from CODA, the firm of Caroline O’Donnell, Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor and director of the M.Arch. program, was included in the group show Los Angeles or BUST, a fall exhibition that brought together 11 architects and firms to reconsider the relevance of a seemingly anachronous means of evaluation for a work of architecture: the façade. CODA’s piece, Combust, was constructed of paper, red matchsticks, white cigar matches, resin, and a fire sensor. Combust was created by a team including Hong Ji Chen (B.Arch. ’16), John Lai (B.Arch. ’17), Min Keun Park (B.Arch. ’17), and Hana Svatoš-Ražnjevic´ (B.Arch. ’15).

Associate professor Carl Ostendarp, art, had work in several group shows during the fall, including: Paul Klee at Underdonk in Brooklyn, from October 10 to November, curated by JJ Manford (B.F.A. ’06) and Ashley Garrett; Abstract Index at Galerie Ruth Leuchter in Düsseldorf from September 5 to October 31, curated by Paul Morrison; I Like America at Schauwerk Sindelfingen in Sindelfingen, Germany, from September 27 to September 4, 2016; and Exposition 10ème Anniversaire Partie 1 at Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal, from October to November 21. Also, a 1991 work by Ostendarp titled Constancy to an Ideal Object was featured in a group show at the Collezione Maramotti, a private contemporary art collection located in the historical headquarters of Max Mara company, in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

A Needle Woman: Galaxy Was a Memory, Earth Is a Souvenir, the central project of the fall 2014 Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) Biennial, was featured in a December episode of the documentary series Art21. Stephanie Owens, visiting assistant professor of art and the director of the CCA, organized the biennial. A Needle Woman was a collaborative effort between artist Kimsooja and Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering, and a team in his materials science lab in the College of Engineering. Art21 chronicles contemporary art and artists through its Peabody Award–winning, PBSbroadcast television series.

Barry Perlus, associate professor and associate dean, was named the Webster Lecturer in Archaeoastronomy for 2015–16 by the Archaeological Institute of America.

As a Webster Lecturer, he delivers two public lectures: the first took place on October 18 at Wagner College in Staten Island; and the second, for the Archaeological Society of Chicago at the Adler Planetarium, on February 23. The Webster Lecturer activities are an extension of the project for which Perlus received the Einaudi Seed Grant in April 2014. (continued on page 20)

Forester and Reardon Publish Book Chronicling Rebuilding Efforts in Post-Katrina New Orleans Rebuilding Community after Katrina: Transformative Education in the New Orleans Planning Initiative (Temple University Press, 2015), edited by CRP Professor John Forester and former Assistant Professor Ken Reardon (Ph.D. CRP ’90), details the lessons learned from the partnership that emerged between CRP and ACORN Housing after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.

The editors weave together participants’ voices to show how the partnership combined careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. Examining the promises and pitfalls of ambitious community-university partnerships, Rebuilding Community after Katrina also presents insights that reveal the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans’s devastated Ninth Ward.

Forester also published Conflict, Improvisation and Governance: Street Level Practices for Urban Democracy (Routledge, 2105), coauthored with David Laws, in the spring.AAP

Second, Expanded Edition of Ochshorn’s Structural Elements for Architects and Builders Published The revised and expanded second edition of architecture Professor Jonathan Ochshorn’s Structural Elements for Architects and Builders (Common Ground Publishing, 2015) explains how to design and analyze columns, beams, tension members, and their connections. The new information includes all necessary data for the preliminary design and analysis of these structural elements in wood, steel, and reinforced concrete.

The second edition includes an introduction to statics and strength of materials, an examination of loads, and new sections on material properties and construction systems. In addition, the revised text reorganizes the chapters according to structural material rather than structural action (i.e., tension, compression, and bending).

The first edition of Structural Elements was published by Butterworth-Heinemann in 2009.AAP News19 | Spring 2016

Faculty News

Schmidt Organizes Data Collection Training Workshop in Tanzania

(continued from page 19)

The work of Professor Emeritus John Reps, CRP, has recently received recognition. In November, a panel at the 16th National Conference on Planning History, titled “The Making of Urban America: Reflections on John Reps’s Legacy,” focused on Reps’s book, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1965). Specific topics investigated by the panel included how the book helped to frame and define the emerging subfield of planning history; how it helped to shape subsequent works by Reps and others; how planning history has evolved since the book’s 1965 release; and what aspects of the volume can frame ongoing explorations of planning history. Also in November, Reps was featured as a “Distinguished Educator” in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. The article, written by CRP’s Thomas J. Campanella, details some of the many contributions to the field Reps has made, as well as some of his most notable accomplishments. This is the second time Reps was recognized as a “Distinguished Educator”—the first was in 1984.

CRP Professor Michael Tomlan (Ph.D. ’83) presented a lecture on the rehabilitation of Public School 186 at the annual conference of the New York State American Institute of Architects in Saratoga Springs, New York, on October 23. Joining him was Joseph Coppola, principal, Dattner Architects, demonstrating the manner in which the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem will retain the school’s use alongside the low- and moderate-income residents, and bring life to a longabandoned property. Along with Yanan Sun (Ph.D. CRP ’15), Tomlan also contributed two chapters to A Future for Our Past: The 40th Anniversary of the European Architectural Heritage Year (1975–2015), edited by Michael Falser and Wilfried Lipp. The chapters are titled “The 1970s: A Decade of Pivotal Change in Preservation.

European Architectural Heritage Year and Heritage Politics in the United States”; and “The Diffusion of the Ideas of the European Architectural Heritage Year in China.” The book was released in late October by ICOMOS/Austria.

In March, Roger Trancik, professor emeritus of CRP, spoke at the book release symposium hosted by Ciudad del Saber in Panama City, Panama, for Garden Cities of the Panama Canal. Trancik, along with Kurt Dillon (M.R.P. ’05) and photographer Sam Sweezy, produced this book with Clarence S. Stein Institute funding. Complimentary copies are available at the CRP main office in West Sibley Hall. And, in September, Trancik received the 2015 Landscape Architecture Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Planning, Design, and Construction at Michigan State University, his undergraduate alma mater. One such award is given each year. During the weekend event, Trancik gave a public lecture on his urban design work and conducted a studio seminar with current students.

Professor Mildred Warner continues her research to understand the impacts of the Great Recession on local government. She and Ph.D. CRP candidate Yuanshuo Xu (M.R.P. ’13) published an article titled “Understanding Employment Growth in the Recession: The Geographic Diversity of State Rescaling” in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 2 (July 2015). The piece explored differences in recessionary impacts across the country. Warner also published comparative research on inter-municipal cooperation in an article titled “Inter-Municipal Cooperation and Costs: Expectations and Evidence,” which appeared in Public Administration 93, no. 1 (June 2015). The research was conducted with Germà Bel, who was a visiting scholar at AAP in 2013. In addition, Warner had three chapters published: “Collaboration: The Key to Building Communities for All Generations,” coauthored with Min Koung Choi (M.R.P. ’16), in The Municipal Yearbook 2015; “Multi-Generational Planning: Integrating the Needs of Elders and Children,” coauthored with George Homsy (Ph.D. CRP ’13) in International Perspectives on Age-Friendly Cities; and “Profiting from Public Values: The Case of Social Impact Bonds,” in Creating Public Value in Practice.

Stephan Schmidt, at right, and workshop attendees in Tanzania. photo / Jeremy Swanson, Honeyguide Foundation

In July, CRP’s Associate Professor Stephan Schmidt, along with the Honeyguide Foundation and ESRI Eastern Africa, organized a two-week data collection training workshop at Kilimanjaro Medical Christian College in Moshi, Tanzania. The workshop aimed to improve the capability of partner institutions to gather data, conduct spatial analysis, monitor and evaluate programs and projects, and ultimately improve decision making in three fields: public health, wildlife conservation, and land tenure.

The village of Mweka, located on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania, was selected for the field training exercise. Students participated in an information-gathering session with Mweka community leaders, and then divided into teams and utilized mobile data collection tools, such as Open Data Kit, on their smartphones to gather and aggregate georeferenced information.

“We were very pleased with the outcome of the workshop: we were able to develop new partnerships, strengthen existing ones, and meet a growing demand for quality data collection training,” says Schmidt.

For the next phase of the project, Schmidt plans on organizing a “training of trainers” workshop and developing curriculum for the participating universities and organizations.

Schmidt received a grant from the Cornell Institute for African Development to sponsor the workshop.AAP

Simitch and Warke: Work from the Baer Art Center Residency

CRP Receives Engaged Cornell Advancement Grant A group of six CRP faculty received one of the inaugural Engaged Curriculum Grants from Engaged Cornell. Awarded to 18 projects across campus, the Engaged Curriculum Grants total $930,299, and support work that places community-engaged learning at the heart of the Cornell student experience. The CRP team received a $60,000 Advancement Grant, awarded to faculty working to advance “existing community-engaged courses that articulate a clear goal for further development of their program.”

The CRP team includes faculty members Jeffrey Chusid, John Forester, George Frantz, Neema Kudva, Jennifer Minner, and Stephan Schmidt; Victoria Beard was also instrumental in drafting the grant application. The project brings together faculty to share experiences and best practices, improve educational outcomes, and publish results with a goal of “improving the department’s practice of engaged pedagogy and research.” The core team of faculty members will share their work both within the department, and with the larger campus community as well.

Formed in 2014, Engaged Cornell aims to support the work of faculty who directly integrate community engagement in the curriculum. Through its grants, Engaged Cornell supports the creation of new community-engaged courses, research, and internship opportunities, as well as the further development and curricular integration of current community-engaged teaching and research initiatives.AAP

Work produced during the summer by associate professors Andrea Simitch and Val Warke, architecture, was displayed in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery in Milstein Hall in January.

The work on display was created during a residency at the Baer Art Center in northern Iceland. Acceptance into the residency program is based on portfolios; once at Baer, residents select a project that is generated from the site.

Shared Spaces, by Simitch, is a collection of primarily monochromatic charcoal drawings. Through blurring the boundaries between constructed and found, between near and far, the drawings locate the modest industrial and domestic buildings of Baer and nearby Hofsós within the panoramas of distant fjords and nearby farmlands.

Warke’s project, The Berserker’s Tale, explores the work of noted archaeologist Stenhammar and his most famous research, titled “A Berserkrstead in Skagafjörður.” Warke explores a reinterpretation of Stenhammar’s work by another archaeologist, Dagligen, and the conflicting interpretations of evidence presented by both.AAP

photo / Lorena del Río

Carnicero to Cocurate Spanish Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale

photo / Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

O’Donnell’s CODA Named Emerging Firm in Architectural Review

Visiting Assistant Professor Iñaqui Carnicero, architecture, has been selected along with Carlos Quintáns to cocurate the Spanish Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The Spanish Pavilion is one of the permanent pavilions of the biennale, and is sited in the central entrance area. Carnicero and Quintáns aim to “design an attractive proposition that represents a country with an enormous influence on the international architecture scene.” To start the process, Carnicero and Quintáns created a list of more than 500 Spanish architects, from which they will chose a select group

This fall, CODA, the firm of Caroline O’Donnell, the Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor and director of the M.Arch. program, was named by Architectural Review as one of 2015’s Emerging Architecture firms in the U.S. Each year, the London-based magazine selects a group of firms that represent “fresh and stimulating projects” and “global new talent.” Winners from different regions of the world are published in an annual feature, with each firm presenting answers to questions including, “What is it like being an architect where you are?,” “What inspires you these days?,” “What project are you most proud of and why?,” and

Faculty&Staff

photo / provided

photo / Bilyana Dimitrova

The Corning Tennis Court and Guest House, a collaboration between Professor George Hascup (at right, above) and Austin+Mergold, the architecture, landscape, and design practice of Jason Austin (B.Arch. ’00) and Assistant Professor Aleksandr Mergold (B.Arch. ’00), (at right, below), was completed in July. The four buildings in this complex explore a local typology of an agrarian shed. The tennis court is housed in a repurposed, prefabricated steel building with a custom façade of cedar panels and garage door assemblies. The design for the complex is a balanced response to strict local ordinances that prohibited free-standing sports facilities, as well as a formal and material dialogue with the existing main house designed by Hascup in 2004. A mid-construction program change in the complex yielded structural steel elements that were incorporated both as framing materials for an additional storage tower and garage, and as structural interior elements in the guesthouse.AAP

to develop projects for the Spanish pavilion.

“We hope to highlight this magnificent Spanish heritage, to value the work of these professionals— their preparation, creativity, and reliability—as well as their contributions to so many universities and schools around the globe,” says Carnicero.

The 2016 Venice Biennale is under the direction of Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, and will be open from May 28 to November 27, 2016.AAP

“What would be your ideal project?” O’Donnell answered “pigeon spikes” to a question about her favorite building materials, and described why she became an architect through her childhood play habits: “I grew up on a street that was constantly under construction and played in excavations, foundations, and half-built houses. I saw the world as being always in flux through architecture.”

Other firms included in the Architectural Review list are Los Angeles firms Johnston Marklee and wHY; Brillhart Architecture, Miami; and De Leon & Primmer from Louisville, Kentucky.AAP

photo / Getty Images

Sabin Wins Ivy Innovator Award In December, architecture’s Jenny Sabin was awarded the 2015 Ivy Innovator Award for Design. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Assistant Professor, and the director of graduate studies.

The Ivy Innovator Awards recognize the “next generation of leading minds” in the fields of technology, film, and design. From thousands of applicants, 18 finalists were selected and the three winners were announced at individual category events, beginning with film, announced in August, and culminating with the announcement of Sabin’s win.

Finalists in the design category came from a variety of fields, including art and apparel and jewelry design.

American fashion designer Christian Siriano presented Sabin with the award.

Sabin’s work investigates the intersections of architecture and science, and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures.

“This award means a great deal to me, as it’s about connecting people and embracing collaboration across interdisciplinary boundaries in the spirit of innovation,” Sabin said during her acceptance speech.

The awards ceremony was held at Affirmation Arts in New York City.AAP

News19 | Spring 2016

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photo / MoMA PS1

’73

John Ahearn Maria and Her Mother, a statue by John Ahearn (B.F.A. ’73), was part of MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition, which was on display from October 11 to March 7. Greater New York is held every five years; the 2015–16 exhibition focused on artists who deal with the historic and current reshaping of New York City. Maria and Her Mother (1988), oil on fiberglass, 178 cm x 90 cm x 90 cm.

’93

In July, Sharon L. Gaber (Ph.D. CRP ’93) was named the 17th president of the University of Toledo. Gaber is the first female president of the university, which was founded in 1872, and has pledged to raise the institution’s graduation rate, citing enrollment and increasing research funding and fundraising among her new initiatives.

Gaber has a long history within academia. Previously, she served as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas, and has also held roles including department chair in community and regional planning at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Auburn University’s interim provost, senior

associate provost, associate provost, and associate dean for the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction. In 2009, she was named Auburn University’s Academic Woman of the Year.

Gaber is also active in the community.

She is a board member of the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Regional Growth Partnership, and currently holds memberships in the American Planning Association, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.

Gaber is the author of 40 peer-reviewed papers on urban planning, public policy, and communities.AAP

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Gaber Named First Female President of University of Toledo

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The current terminal layout at LaGuardia has buildings in several locations (terminals A, B, C, and D).

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A rendering of the proposed unified terminal structure.

photo / John Edward Linden

Originally developed and operated by private promoters, the Pacific Amphitheatre, located on the Orange Country Fairgrounds, was brought under fair management in 2003. As the amphitheatre’s popularity grew, a closer physical connection between the venue and the rest of the fairground’s property was needed. MAKE ARCHITECTURE, the firm of Jess Mullen-Carey (B.Arch. ’95), was hired to create that connection. The three-year redesign project replaced three acres of lawn seating, which previously separated the two discrete properties, with a 32,500-square-foot entrance plaza. The new plaza opened in July and includes ticket kiosks, restroom facilities, and a new point of entry to the amphitheatre. This 3,000-square-foot lobby with a sound absorbing ceiling and visually permeable glass walls allows for greater connectivity to the adjacent fairgrounds.AAP

photo / provided

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Rizzo at the construction site of a $25 million project underway at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. The project includes the construction of a new cemetery administration building; 12,500 columbarium niches for interment of cremains; and a memorial wall that will bear the names of veterans whose remains have not been recovered.

Alumni

photo / provided

photo / Heather Zises

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Cornellians Help Shape Governor’s Master Plan for a New LaGuardia Airport The firm of Andre Guimond (B.Arch. ’03) and Evan Erlebacher ’02, PRESENT Architecture, was one of three firms selected to contribute to the $4 billion redesign of LaGuardia Airport.

PRESENT Architecture was chosen from New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Master Plan Design Competition, which gave participants only 60 days to complete their submissions. The three selected contributors, who also included SHoP Architects and Dattner Architects, were announced in July.

Construction on the new terminal, which includes design elements from all three firms, is scheduled to begin during the first quarter of 2016 and continue for five years. Included in the plans is a unified terminal that will be located closer to the Grand Central Parkway.

This new, single structure will feature significantly increased taxiway space which will reduce taxi-in and -out times and carbon emissions; and address the issues of maintaining normal operations during flood conditions, avoiding a shut down and the loss of revenue similar to what occurred after Hurricane Sandy. Travelers will be able to access the new terminal by ferry, roads, and an AirTrain that directly connects LaGuardia to the New York City subway and Long Island Rail Road.

“Governor Cuomo’s initiative to transform LaGuardia Airport into a unique and accessible transportation hub is key for the future of the New York metropolitan area,” says Guimond. “Our firm is proud to be selected as a contributor to the architecture, master plan, and transportation vision to rethink and modernize [one of] New York City’s airports.”

The redesign will also generate almost 20,000 new direct and indirect employment opportunities, and benefit nearby Queens communities, whose roadways are directly affected by LaGuardia commuters.AAP

Rizzo Joins Veterans Affairs In supporting building projects for an expansive health care system and the nation’s largest cemetery network, Peter C. Rizzo (M.R.P. ’09) focuses on quality assurance and consensusbuilding among the parties involved in taking projects from the drawing board to completion. It’s a job in which skills learned at Cornell often come into play, he says.

In August, Rizzo joined the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as a program manager in the Office of Construction and Facilities Management, where his many responsibilities include administration of the VA Construction Peer Review Program.

He brings small teams of the nation’s leading private sector design and construction executives (“peers”) to VA construction sites where they volunteer their services and expertise to perform qualitative reviews of project teams.

“We’ve found that the earliest indicator of major cost overruns and schedule delays in

construction is often the health of the project their varying perspectives before facilitating team,” Rizzo explains, noting that the VA has a group process that allows parties to develop some $11.4 billion in construction and renotheir own solutions.” vation projects underway across its inventory The biggest reward, Rizzo says, is knowof 150 medical centers and 134 national cem- ing that his work is strengthening the VA. eteries. “When reviewing a project team “Every issue we help to resolve or prevent —which for us includes VA staff, the general avoids costs—be it one dollar or hundreds of contractor, and the design firm—we explore millions—that might otherwise impact our the blend of skills, personalities, and motivaability to provide services to America’s militions, and the level of trust shared among all tary veterans.”

Rizzo entered federal service as a U.S. members,” he explains.

Presidential Management Fellow and previRizzo cites lessons learned from CRP Professor John Forester, an authority on conflict ously worked as a senior urban planner for resolution, as particularly valuable in his new the U.S. General Services Administration. He role. “As a practitioner, I’ve had much success has also worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. using consensus-based mediation to resolve Economic Development Administration. complex public disputes regarding land use In addition to his M.R.P., Rizzo holds a and environmental justice,” he says. “For B.A. from the University at Buffalo, and is certhis program, however, I apply those same tified by the American Institute of Certified principles to address challenges internal to project teams. We hold separate, confidential Planners. He and his wife, Allison A. Lack (M.R.P. ’06), live in Washington, DC.AAP discussions with each party to understand News19 | Spring 2016

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Four Alumni Collaborate in Inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial Four AAP architecture alumni joined more than 100 other artists and architects in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. Held from October to early January, the biennial was installed in locations throughout Chicago, and featured work from local, national, and international practitioners.

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Installation view of Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re) Generation. photo / Rob Karlic

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Williams and Fazlalizadeh’s installation, Harriet’s Refuge. photo / Rob Karlic

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Cabrini-Green and Other Urban Legends, a performance installation project by Andre Hernandez. photo / Rob Karlic

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For Ecology of Absence?, Pratt crafted discarded wooden palettes into “living” furniture. photo / Rob Karlic

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The exhibition was held in the Glass Curtain Gallery, one of more than 85 satellite sites for the Chicago Biennial. photo / Philip Dembinski

Andres L. Hernandez (B.Arch. ’97), Emmanuel Pratt (B.Arch. ’99), and Amanda Williams (B.Arch. ’97)— who overlapped at AAP in the ’90s—were recruited independently by curator Neysa Page-Lieberman to create an exhibition for the biennial. Page-Lieberman was interested in highlighting non-traditional approaches to contemporary architectural issues. The theme of vacancy and disinvestment in urban sectors emerged after she began talking to the trio about their work.

“Andres, Emmanuel, and I have all been practicing in different capacities on the south side of Chicago for quite some time and are friends,” says Williams. “It was an exciting confluence of events when Neysa approached us—without knowing about the AAP connection—about doing something together for the biennial.”

The group exhibition that emerged was titled Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)Generation, held at the Glass Curtain Gallery in the historic Ludington building. The exhibition included individual installations by Williams, Hernandez, and Pratt, and Mimi Zeiger (B.Arch. ’94) was recruited to write the essay for the show’s catalog.

In his practice, Pratt, who defines vacancy as a “constructed absence,” works to strengthen community bonds by creating urban gardens that bring people together. His installation, Ecology of Absence?, featured

discarded wooden palettes that were reclaimed to create “living” furniture, a metaphor for community growth. Cabrini-Green and Other Urban Legends, a performance installation project by Hernandez, focused on the Chicago Public Housing Project by the same name. Hernandez combined the expectation of public and private spaces with contemporary media coverage, asking viewers to consider how much of what we know about this housing typology is fantasy, and how much is fact. Williams partnered with artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh to consider how women are treated in public spaces and who has a right to claim or own vacant space. Their installation, Harriet’s Refuge, referred to Harriet Tubman and her legendary work creating safe passage through unknown territory.

For Williams, the resulting exhibition was a successful balance of individuality and cohesion.

“There is a trust that comes from working with people who’ve known your process for so long,” she says. “We were able to offer criticism and feedback to make everyone’s individual projects thrive.”

In addition to Vacancy, the collaborators had other involvement with the biennial. Williams’s Color(ed) Theory series was featured in the main exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, Pratt was part of the School of the Art Institute’s Outside Design exhibition (which also featured Joyce Hwang [B.Arch. ’97]), and Hernandez,

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Pratt, and Williams were all featured participants in the biennial’s Architects on Film speaker series.

The biennial’s main exhibition was held in multiple sites across the city, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Millennium Park, City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, Expo 72, and the Stony Island Arts Bank.

Glass Curtain Gallery was one of more than 85 satellite exhibition sites and coprogrammed events installed across the city in conjunction with the main exhibition.

By spreading out into various venues, the curators of the biennial hoped to challenge how space, regardless of its location or the time, is perceived. The biennial attracted more than half a million visitors.AAP

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Plastic Loop Column

By Justin Foo (B.Arch. ’18) and Xinyu Yi (M.Arch.II ’16) for Special Topics in Construction: Methods of Digital Fabrication, taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Sasa Zivkovic.

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